Second, the criterion completely ignores the element of craft. Hardly any would contend that a well-executed work that proposed spurious or anti-human ideas should be hailed as great art. Conversely, few critics would argue that a vapid, crudely written book adhering to current estimates of the proper religious, political, or racial attitudes is anything more than well-intentioned.
Killens’s novel, however, is texturally enriched by thematic threads that are developed simultaneously with Solly’s struggle for racial identity and unity. The most significant is the anti-war aspect of the novel.
At the beginning of the novel, nearly all the attitudes expressed about the war by black men are linked to the characters’ sense of racial injustice. The questions of whether they should fight and of who is their real enemy are voiced repeatedly in barracks banter. Killens misses little of the subtle irony of the black soldiers’ predicament. “What you reckon I read in your paper last night?” Book-worm asks Solly as they march toward the ship to be dispatched to the South Pacific. “Some of your folks’ leaders called on the President down in Washington and demanded that colored soldiers be allowed to die with dignity at the front rather than serve in the Quartermaster. Now ain’t that a mother fer ya?” After the white regiments have boarded the ship to the tune of “God Bless America,” the band begins playing “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” as black regiments go aboard. “I guess Charlie wants us to jitterbug onto his pretty white boat,” Bookworm says, “we ain’t no soldiers. We ain’t nothing but a bunch of goddam clowns.” The black soldiers’ alienation from the army and their skepticism about the righteousness of the American cause is a constant theme in Parts I and II.
In Part III, after Solly’s regiment has stormed the beach of a South Pacific island, Killens begins to express doubts about the justification of war in general. Through Solly’s meditations on his circumstance and graphic descriptions of the carnage and mutilation, Killens paints a grim picture of the lunacy and brutality of the fighting. He suggests that the underlying motives for the war effort are reprehensible.
“Does the damn war make any sense?” Solly asks himself. And later he provides his own answer. “I know one thing—when I get back home I don’t want to see another uniform or another parade the longest day I live . . . . What are we doing in these people’s country? No-damn-body sent for us. I mean the United States and Japanese Empire didn’t ask these people, ‘May we use your country for our little old battleground?’ We rain down bombs on their cities and their homes and rice paddies, and we kill thousands of innocent people . . . . I want to know who really gets anything out of all this shooting and maiming and killing, all this so-called civilized madness?”
This idea parallels and complements Killens’s major concern with black unity and the plight of the black soldiers. The sections of the novel dealing with combat contain some of the best writing in the book. In the depiction of Solly’s encounter with a Japanese Kamikaze squad which attacked an American-held airstrip in the Philippines, Killens evokes the sense of a near-fatal battle and the soldiers’ cold terror. Throughout the descriptions of the American Army’s occupation of the Pacific islands, Killens vividly conveys the initial horror of massive bombardment by heavy artillery, the fitful, sudden violence of surprise attacks, and the harsh reality of the steamy, insect-infested encampments. The narrative style is straightforward, nearly journalistic, and has the impact of some of the best of James Jones’s writing about the same war.
In addition to the expanded setting, the more complex and subtle treatment of the racial issue, and the amplified thematic content, And Then We Heard the Thunder has another significant element that was generally absent in Killens’s first novel. Although Killens is occasionally a ponderous writer, he has a formidable knowledge of black folk humor and a finely tuned sense of black dialect. In Youngblood these attributes were successfully employed in the novel’s dialogue, but the narrator’s voice lacked the irony that humor can provide. In his second novel, Killens made more frequent use of humor as a foil for the weighty issues that were his real concern: segregation, emasculation, and black awareness. In his next three novels, Killens continued to refine his work; as his writing developed, humor assumed even more import. But this lighter touch had already begun to emerge in his work.
In fact, there are two important comic characters in And Then We Heard the Thunder who are essential to the story’s development. Both are black soldiers and both are introduced early in the novel. The way they are used to further the plot demonstrates some of the weaknesses and the strengths of Killens’s work.
William Thomas Rogers is the company buffoon, an unconscionable sycophant who is ridiculed as an “Uncle Thomas” and “handkerchief-head” by the other men. It is Rogers’s exorbitant eagerness, his insistent bucking for promotion and status, that provides context for most of the humorous repartee in the early sections of the novel. (“My man here been brown’nosing ever since he got inside the gate,” Bookworm says of Rogers. “That’s how come his breath smells so bad. I don’t know what he’s bucking for, but he’s the original sepia Buck-damn-Rogers.”) Structurally, Rogers’s presence allows a more balanced view of Solly’s ambivalence about opting for promotion and advancement or supporting the other black soldiers. Compared with Rogers’s behavior, Solly’s compromised leanings toward the military hierarchy seem insignificant. The difficulty is that the portrayal of Rogers is grossly exaggerated and one-dimensional. Rogers is a kind of vaudeville figure, a type of Kingfish against whose outlandish behavior the comportment of any other character would seem more humane and perceptive. In certain types of fiction, a burlesque character of Rogers’s ilk is perfectly acceptable, but in a naturalistic novel such as this one, the presence is grating.
On the other hand, Jerry Scott, the company cook who habitually went AWOL, is a superb comic creation. Scotty, like Rogers, functions in the novel as a prod to Solly’s eventual commitment to the other black soldiers. His comic demeanor is derived not from exaggeration but from the consistency of behavior within the novel’s setting as well as from the validity of his reactions and observations. When first introduced, Scotty has been arrested for going AWOL; Solly has been charged with watching him. “Remember, you’re responsible for him,” a topkick has told Solly. “If the prisoner gets away, you do his time in the stockade.” When the officer leaves, Scotty, as if he were Solly’s alter ego, immediately zeroes in on the absurdity of the situation.
“‘You look like a nice guy,’ Scotty said. ‘What you got against me?’
“‘Nothing at all.’ Where did that question come from?
“Scotty laughed. ‘See what I mean? I ain’t never done you nothing and you ain’t never done nothing to me, but here I sit and I’m your prisoner and you got to hold me till they get ready to lock me up in the stock-damn-kade . . . . And look at you, a smart intelligent fellow. Should be using your own head about things and stuff, but look atcher. I’m under arrest in your charge. I get away, you have to do my time, and they didn’t even give you a little biddy cap pistol to guard me with. Suppose I wanted to get away, what could you do to stop me? I could pick up something and knock you into the middle of next week. Now don’t that make you feel like a fool? It sure do make you look like one.’”
On each of his infrequent appearances in the novel, Scotty brings the feel of ironic truth. He is perhaps the most memorable character in the book because his bizarre behavior is valid given the madness of the black soldiers’ situation. Moreover, he is an example of the kind of ironically conceived and authentically rendered characters that would appear more and more frequently in Killens’s work. This development would lead, eight years and three novels later, to publication of Killens’s finest book, The Cotillion (1970). Killens is at his outrageous best in that novel. He has forsaken the blunt, occasionally melodramatic detailed presentation of racial injustice for an oblique, witty and more cutting and effective portrayal of the consequences of American racism.
In r
etrospect, it is difficult to deny that John Killens permitted his creativity and imagination to be too tightly reined in his earlier works. It is almost as if his passion to convey the literal horror of racism and of the resultant human condition overwhelmed his creative fictional instinct. As a result, those novels lacked the imaginative fullness and authorial risk-taking of some of his later work, despite their power and sincerity. (It is not incidental that The Cotillion begins with a foreword in which Killens states: “I’m first, second and third person my own damn self. And I will intrude, protrude or exclude my point of view any time it suits my disposition. Dig that.”)
Although he is not the most subtle contemporary black novelist and has generally eschewed experimentation in technique, John Killens has provided readers with novels that stand as chronicles, detailed documents of what Granville Hicks has called the “spectacular incidents of cruelty” that issue from “petty, mean-spirited, wanton discrimination.” His novels provide an invaluable addendum to American social history. They dramatize and record the lives and experience of people too often ignored by historians. Moreover, he has peopled his fiction with characters who, in their refusal to capitulate to racist oppression, positively reflect the resiliency, integrity, and indomitability of the human spirit. John Killens’s body of fictional work is as straightforward as an extended hand. It is as deeply felt as the work of any writer passionately concerned with man’s inhumane treatment of his fellow man.
Mel Watkins
1983
PART I—THE PLANTING SEASON
CHAPTER I
“UNCLE SAM AIN’T NO WOMAN
BUT HE SURE CAN TAKE YOUR MAN—“
That was the very very funny song some guitar-playing joker sang like Ledbelly at Solly’s wedding reception just a few days ago when he was a newlywed civilian.
And then it was their honeymoon in the four-room apartment in Manhattan which one of their liberal white friends had loaned to them, and three whole days and nights of loving and sleeping and eating and talking and two Broadway plays and back to the loving and the naked mutual admiration and planning for after-the-war-is-over when Solly returned, and he would go back and finish law school, with this beautiful ambitious woman pushing him and shoving him onward and ever upward. They made love like desperadoes, as if there would be nothing left after the honeymoon was over. It frightened him. His married life and his honeymoon were too much the self-same thing.
Their last night together they lay in bed in their birthday suits, taking a breather from the love they had been making. They talked about the job he was leaving in the City government. His eyes half closed, his nostrils sucked deep into his stomach the sharp sweet salty odor of the love already made. He told her he was the only one in his section of the Agency and things had gone nicely for him so far. He tried to disguise the pride in his voice because he was the modest type.
She played with the wild black grass on his chest. Her large light-brown eyes forever wide and knowing, and glowing now with obvious pride in him, her handsome brand-new husband. “Swell . . . Let’s hope it stays that way when you get back,” she said. “If too many of them get into your section, they’ll make it hard for you. The way it is now, the white people treat you fine. Right? You get your promotions like you’re supposed to. That’s because you’re the only one and you’re handsome and agreeable. If you were black and ugly like some of them and talked like Amos and Andy, you wouldn’t have it so good.”
Millie moved her cool naked body close to him and kissed him behind his ear and he grew large and warm all over, and the him of him was quivering. “Slim and handsome and teasing-brown,” she said, “and sensitive and intelligent and educated and ambitious.” Like she was singing a love song to him. “You’re lucky, darling. You’re going to get ahead in this world. Nothing can ever stop you. You have all the equipment necessary.”
It felt good to his happy ears and still it irritated him some-how. There was truth in what she said, he knew there was, and yet sometimes her brand of honesty rubbed against the grain like emery cloth. He hated to spoil this last night with her with a stupid argument which at the very most would be a desperate exercise in semantics, because Solly dreamed the same dream she dreamed for him. The great American story. An elegant woman at his side—opportunity—success—prominence—acceptance—affluence—home ownership—automobile—position. In one word, Status. But he wanted to write his own story in his own words with his own kind of sensitivity. He lived uneasily with an image of himself which evoked terms like “charlatan” and “rank opportunist.” His dialogue would always be much subtler. In lieu of “success” his goal was “achievement.” He was “militant” instead of “overly ambitious.” He had spent two years in law school and also aspired to be a writer. Quiet-spoken in the main, he loved the play of words and the taste of metaphor. Words were the brick and cement, he liked to tell himself, for laying the foundation of his life’s philosophy, and they must be used with exact precision. But this night he would ignore the subtleties. What difference did it really make? A rose was a rose was a rose, and a chicken was nothing but a bird. So drop the subject. God only knew when he would be with this gorgeous wonderful woman again. So speak to her of love, you fool. And love her, and to hell with rhetoric and all the phony subtleties.
Yet against his will he heard himself say, “But, Millie, I am black. What is this business? There’s no possibility of me passing for anything else, unless I buy myself a turban. Face it—both of us are black. This surely isn’t an interracial marriage.” He tried to lighten things with: “If it is, I’ve got grounds for an annulment.” He laughed and tried to kiss her.
She pulled slightly away from him and smiled her dimpled smile at him and she got out of bed and stood before him, proud in all her deliberately gleaming honey-colored nakedness. Like Esquire magazine for men. So lovely it was shameful. “Look at me, darling. Am I black?” She walked before him back and forth as if she were fully dressed and modeling for him.
He knew what she was saying to him. Ever since he graduated from the sullen slums of high school and went up the hill to the gleaming full-of-promise world of City College, things were suddenly different for him: the feminine glances of approval when he walked into a classroom and the masculine glares of white hostility. All at once he was handsome and articulate and his opinions oftentimes sought after and sometimes valued even, and in his senior year he was captain of the basket-ball team. And yet each evening, he remembered, after the shouting died away after the masquerade was over, he always went back home to Harlem, which was still home and always had been home since his mother brought him as a little boy all the way from Dry Creek, Georgia.
I’m a young deserving man, he thought, and I will one day do my dancing in the Empire Room at the Waldorf but at the same time keep in touch with my folks who will still be stomping at the Savoy.
She stood over him waiting now. Belligerent. “Well, am I black? Answer me.” Her breasts stood firm and ripe and plump and autumn-colored and almond-nippled, her stomach smooth and roundish flat, and the slope of dark short hair curling sleepily between her thighs. “I didn’t make myself the color I am, but I certainly don’t wish I were different. If I were, I wouldn’t be a secretary in a Wall Street law firm. I’m the only one down there, you know. And you’re not black either and you know you’re not. You’re dark brown, and you have soft sensitive features, you’re extremely handsome, and that makes a difference with white folks and you know it does. And it makes it much easier for us to be accepted in their world.”
All right—all right! So he got ahead and they liked him at his office, because he was personable, and he was educated and he’d read all of the books they’d read, and he talked their language and laughed the way they laughed. In many ways he aped their style. So what? Sometimes Millie woke up all the contradictions sleeping lightly in the depths of him, and they pained him like a nerve in a tooth that was suddenly exposed.
And he shouted angrily, “Who
in the hell wants to be accepted in their world?”
She came and sat on the side of the bed and took his face in her hands. “We do, darling. I love you so much! All of us educated Negroes do. That’s why we go to college, isn’t it?”
She was telling seventy-five per cent of the truth, maybe eighty-five or ninety, he knew it, and yet he shouted, “Hell no!” And then he said, “Forget it.” She always pretended to be nakedly honest. And realistic. No one was completely honest. He knew that much about himself.
She said, “All right, darling,” and lay beside him. And then they talked about the war. And she said, “I know you’re not going into the Army with a chip on your shoulder. Forget about the race problem at least for the duration. Be an American instead of a Negro, and concentrate on winning the war, and while you’re in the Army work for those promotions just like in civilian life.”
He laughed and took her in his arms and kissed her eyes and kissed her nose and kissed her soft and eager mouth. “You don’t have to worry about me, baby. I know the score. I know where and why I’m going, and I know what I’m going after.”
Not even fools were completely honest. And Millie was nobody’s fool. The thing was, she had always lived a taken-for-granted, sheltered, bourgeois colored life, while struggle struggle struggle had always been the blood of his existence. He took nothing for granted and he wanted everything.
When they fell asleep he dreamed about their conversation, and the dream was all mixed up and it seemed that the white couple whose apartment they were using came suddenly through the wall and the youngish crew-cut blond-haired man said. “Millie is absolutely right. Americans have to forget their differences now and stand together against the common enemy. A house divided—”
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 2