Dedication
My father passed away without leaving a dedication for this novel. On his behalf, I am including the following dedication that I think my father would be pleased with:
To Georgia Killens, my great-great-grandmother Granny (seven years old when freedom was declared). She would say to my father, “Ah lord honey, the half ain’t never been told.” With that challenge he would tell part of that other half.
—Barbara Killens Rivera
Brooklyn, New York
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword: John Oliver Killens: The Real and The Fake
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
John Oliver Killens: The Real and The Fake
One of the memorable moments from the Watergate hearings occurred when Georgia’s then-senator Herman Talmadge, an old-time primitive Southern demagogue and segregationist, said, “In Georgia a man’s home is his castle.”1 Contrast this with one of the most powerful, ghastly, and shocking scenes in American literature. It occurs in John O. Killens’s first novel, Youngblood. Joe Youngblood is one of the passengers on a train that is taking Black southerners to the North. Armed White men board the train and kidnap the Black passengers. When a young Black man objects on the grounds that the passengers are American citizens, he is brutalized:
The rifle went off. The explosion temporarily deafened Joe. The Young Negro slumped down in the aisle, his right arm a shattered, bloody mass at the elbow. Joe jumped from his seat. The cracker with the mustache looked up at him. “See what I mean,” he said to Joe, motioning with his rifle towards the young Negro. “Had to shoot one of the youngest and strongest bucks in the group. Won’ no needer that neither—” He turned to a couple of his men. “Git him offa here fore he bleed up the train. Won’t no call for that at all and Mr. Buck ain’t gon like it. See how bad education is for niggers?”
The Black passengers who were en route to the North are put to work on the Buck plantation, where a defiant Black man like Youngblood is repeatedly beaten for his impudence. With this scene, Killens demonstrates the power that Black writers of his generation possessed. With his depiction of a South as hell for Blacks, a sentiment echoed by the poet Sterling Brown, where mobs could drag any Black person from his home and lynch him, and rape his female relatives, Talmadge’s remark demonstrated the different worlds in which southern Blacks and southern Whites resided. In those days, a writer could contradict a White man, no matter how powerful, and be provided with space to do it. This was a time before Black Power became safe enough to appear on the cover of fashion magazines with models drawn from the “Generation Hamilton.”
The novel was one of the weapons, not only to be used to reveal truths that mainstream audiences found uncomfortable. Killens and his contemporaries and friends John A. Williams, William Demby, William Gardner Smith, and Charles Harris, all World War II veterans, also annoyed the New York literary establishment by exposing the racism that existed in the armed forces, which contradicted the propaganda line coming from above that the war had been fought to end fascism, when racism is one of the most important components of fascism. In Killens’s classic And Then We Heard the Thunder, a Black soldier becomes so fed up with the racist treatment that he receives from White soldiers and officers that he welcomes a Japanese attack on his encampment.
The character’s name is Geoffrey Grant. A self-proclaimed Black Nationalist from New York City, he’s given the standard Black Nationalist speeches:
“You goddamn ignorant bawstards! The Japanese are fighting for your freedom and your dignity. The white man is the most deceitful, the most two-faced human being in all the world. But if he pissed in your face and told you it was raining outdoors; you damn fools would purchase umbrellas.”
In another scene, he runs from his tent and shouts:
“Gwan, Tojo! Gwan Tojo! Fly, black man! Show these white bawstards how you can fly!” He shook his fist at the planes ducking in and out of the flak and diving and laying eggs and climbing straight up again at ninety-degree angles. “Gwan, Tojo! Go on, mawn! Show these bawstards how to do it!”
There was pro-Japanese sentiment among Blacks during World War II. The historian Gerald Horne reminds us that there were more Black members of pro-Japanese organizations than Communist ones.2 Such a scene would not suit those who directed trends in literature. For them, World War II was a holy crusade.
Both Youngblood and And Then We Heard the Thunder show the evolution of Killens from a writer whose favorite scenes are inhabited by good, God-fearing people whom Killens portrays as “the salt of the earth.” In Youngblood, a lengthy passage is devoted to slaughtering and dressing a chicken. But by the time of The Minister Primarily, written in the eighties, Killens had become a global novelist, drawing scenes from London and Africa as well as the United States.
The key to understanding both of John Oliver Killens’s satirical novels, The Cotillion and The Minister Primarily, can be found in the reaction of Will Branson, a character in The Cotillion, to the Neo-African style of his niece, Yoruba: “You ain’t no African! You’re an American! Git yourself a mini skirt.” Killens describes “Uncle Wild Will” as “a plain speaking unpretentious Black man . . . possessed of, and by no bourgeois affectations.” For Killens, those who were continuing African traditions resided in the South. Contemplating a visit to Mississippi, Jimmy muses:
His brothers and sisters in the delta were more African than any others in the country, closer to their African culture, their African humanity. They were the honest-to-goodness diasporated Africans. With their mojo and their voodoo and their belief in “haints” and roots and their music and their churches and their shouting and their dancing.
Again, when Jimmy Johnson, who pretends to be Jaja Okwu Olivamaki of Guanaya, addresses a crowd in Lolliloppi, ’Sippi, Near-the-Gulf, he says:
“I want all of you to know that I feel a deep sense of homecoming here in this place that reminds me so much of Mother Africa, the sun, the earth, the sky, the bright green of your rain forest, the overall fertility, all this reminds me of Africa. Your struggle, your hardships, your determination to be free, through struggle.”
An Irish writer says that when the Irish left Chicago, they left Ireland. Killens is saying that when Blacks left the South, they left Africa.
Though these speeches are uttered by characters, they cohere with the views of Killens, whose targets were the impersonators, whether they be strivers like Lady Daphne of The Cotillion, “a pitiful imitation,” or Madame Marie Antoinette Robinson, a character in The Minister Primarily. Lady Daphne is a striver. When learning that her Neo-African daughter Yoruba has been invited to dinner by a power couple, she says:
“This is what I wanted for you. Make friends with people li
ke Brenda Brasswork and you’ll be getting up in society. You’ll go places. You’ll be recognized.” She threw her arms around Yoruba and kissed her roughly, clumsily—“The Brassworks is somebody, child! The Brassworks is somebody.”
In The Minister Primarily, Madame Marie Antoinette Robinson is described as “a society lady of the middle ages growing slimmingly and inevitably toward a very slight obesity, due quite obviously to overindulgence in exotic culinary pursuits and alcoholic imbibition.”
In the book, Killens describes “a gathering of the elite among Franklin Frazier’s fashionable bourgeoisie of color, with a fair sprinkling of the paler people of the upper middle classes. State Department types and all. Truly high society.” Commenting on the gathering is a young Black bourgeois lawyer who shares Frazier’s and Killens’s attitude toward this class: “The young lawyer seated too near Her Excellency said, ‘That’s the way it is with most of these bourgeois Negroes. You start a serious conversation and they come up with a headache. They avoid a political or intellectual dialogue as if it were a communicable disease.” One member of this clique is mocked relentlessly by the author for wearing a red wig.
Killens relishes in the art of irony. Once in a while the imitators are confronted by the real thing. From The Cotillion:
One of the Americans with a bad bush atop said, “Dig. How come you cats don’t wear Afros like us? I mean you cats are from where it’s really at. Y’all from the heritage and shit. Ain’t y’all got no Negritude? Don’t y’all know that Black is beautiful?”
The African brother smiled deprecatingly. “Certainly, we knowing that Black is beautiful. And we in Africa are having plenty of Negritude and so on. But we don’t wear our hair like you are wearing it, because in the tropical climate lice will have a feast in your head if you wear it so. There will be wild beasts romping in your rain forests.”
And so, while Black Americans are ridiculed for imitating Africans, Whites are derided for imitating Black Americans imitating Africans:
White girls with Afro wigs made some of them bashes in the Heights, posing as light-skinned soul sisters, spanking the plank and talking that talk, doing varied imitations of the near-white Black bourgeois.
A Cotillion character named Brassy Brenda points them out:
“That one over there in dungarees with the earrings through her nose is passing for colored,” and “That one over there grinning in my boyfriend’s face, that one with the brown powder pack on her face and the African robe, she’s passing for a nigger!”
In The Cotillion, Killens could be hard on Black Nationalists, such as the comical Harlem street orator Bad Mouth, or
Jomo Mamadou Zero the Third, in his boss dashiki with large black glasses covering the upper regions of his face, [who] glared out from behind his bad black beard at the ocean of pink-white faces in the TV audience. He spat across the footlights at them. And they applauded. He growled, “I wished all of you pale-faced pigs a bad damn evening, you swinish cannibalistic motherfuckas! And after a few kind words of salutation, I’m going to say mean things to you.” The audience exploded with applause.
These militant threats were entertainment for White audiences in the sixties, fully aware that the militants didn’t have the military power to back up their threats.
When Killens entertains such characters, it’s not just an exercise in ridicule or poking fun, or hurling barbs from the Left Bank in exile, but because these characters built no institutions. He paid dearly for his efforts. Keith Gilyard’s brilliant biography, John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism, documents a life of travel, organizing Black writers’ conferences, teaching engagements, and founding the Harlem Writers Guild, which helped advance the careers of Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Walter Dean Myers, Louise Meriwether, Sarah E. Wright, Audrey Lorde, Paule Marshall, Julian Mayfield, Terry McMillan, Loften Mitchell, Wesley Brown, Rosemary Bray, Alice Childress, Lonne Elder III, and Robert Hooks. Members of the guild produced more than three hundred published works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, and screenplays.
While others peddled eloquence and glittering hot air, Killens was hounded by the state. The FBI kept tabs on his travels, appearances, and residences, which included stints at Fisk and Columbia University. They tried to tie him to Communist fronts, which seems quaint nowadays given the fact that the ex-president Donald Trump, an authentic fellow traveler, took the word of Communist dictators over that of his intelligence agencies.
How many of today’s writers could withstand the FBI getting into their business? The FBI spied on John Oliver Killens from November 15, 1941, when he was twenty-five years old, to September 6, 1973,3 though a letter dated June 27, 1956, seemed to lessen the pressure. Killens and his wife, Grace, had their mail opened and were subjected to other forms of persecution.
In his introduction to And Then We Heard the Thunder, Mel Watkins writes about the hopes for African independence held by Black Nationalists in 1962: “Blacks looked at Africa and other Third World countries as models for the newly emerging Afro-American nation.”
In The Minister Primarily, Killens writes about those heady times of an Africanesque revival in the United States when Blacks were proud of their “nappy-heads,” and “Black was beautiful.” They “talked everywhere about their heritage, the Blacks they did, of Gao and old Ghana and Egypt and Songhai and Mali and ancient Timbuktu and Kush. Organized Yoruba Temples and Mosques and committees by the hundreds.” Since many Africans do not accept Black Americans as Africans and some hold them as their inferiors, was the African revival in the United States a sad masquerade, becoming another opportunity for capitalist exploitation, like department stores co-opting some of the African customs created by Black Americans during this period? This was Amiri Baraka’s criticism when he switched from Black Nationalism to Communism. He dismissed Black Nationalism as an excuse for marketing products like Afro Sheen. Both men would be appalled that the Black movement has become so safe that Black members of the “Generation Hamilton” are using the death of George Floyd to market products.
Moreover, the hopes of Black Nationalists for an independent, possibly socialist Africa were dashed. None of the Black Nationalists of the sixties who I knew would have predicted that in 2020, the French would still be practicing a policy of Françafrique, a term denoting the extent of France’s neocolonial involvement with its former empire in Africa. Yet French and British troops are still intervening in the affairs of their former colonies, in Mali, in Kenya, and elsewhere. Both Russia and China are sponsoring infrastructure projects in Africa, for which China has the edge, since members of its political elite are engineers. Given this, a term like “postcolonial” doesn’t make sense.
Black intellectuals claim that without the cooperation of corrupt Black leaders, the occupation of Africa by external powers would have ended. I interviewed the late Hugh Masekela for my book The Complete Muhammad Ali. He told me the Western powers learned that you could continue doing business in Africa if you just freed the president or gave an African leader a billion dollars. Though Jaja Okwu Olivamaki, for whom an American folk singer, James Jay Leander Johnson, becomes a stand-in, poses as a socialist, he’s willing to do business with capitalists. Even a socialist like Stokely Carmichael accompanied his mentor Sékou Touré to the United States for the purpose of seeking investments. Masekela’s comments were echoed by the Malian writer Manthia Diawara (We Won’t Budge). He said that he had difficulty convincing a Black American that Whites still run Africa, a fact that would have astonished Black Nationalists of the sixties. To many Africans, Black Americans are Europeans. Linda Okwuchuku tells James Jay Leander Johnson, the double of Prime Minister Jaja Okwu Olivamaki, “Black or white—you Europeans are all alike. Of all the colossal arrogance!” Some Africans view Black Americans and White Americans culturally instead of racially, so thrown together abroad, Blacks and Whites bond in sometimes embarrassing ways.
Whitey laughed happily, knowingly, ecstatically, “You’re an American.
I knew it as soon as I saw you. You’re an American. There’s something about you that gives you away.”
Probably my Brooks Brothers Ivy League suit, Jimmy thought. I’ll do something about that also tout-damn-suite. “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m an African!” the reluctant American shouted.
Whitey looked around him surreptitiously and back to Jimmy. He whispered softly into Jimmy’s ear, almost nibbling it. “Come on now. I won’t tell anybody. You might as well admit it. You’re an—” He leaned heavily on Jimmy.
John O. Killens had already proved that his satirical pen could cut individuals and institutions to ribbons with his novel The Cotillion. The Minister Primarily is a novel replete with brilliant parodies like Killens’s deconstruction of the stock Black Queen poem of the sixties:
“Dear African princess, you are the River Nile, in its passionate and compassionate journey from Lake Victoria down north past Khartoum past the ruins of ancient Thebes past Cairo all the way to the Mediterranean. You are the Niger making its way back from deep in the delta at Bonny on the Gulf of Guinea past the mangroves making its torturous way back up past Onitsha past Bamako and Segu all the way to the nearby south of Timbuktu and beyond. You are the loveless Transvaal of South Africa. You are the subtle sleepy Congo. Your deep dark sultry eyes have known the loneliness of the Bedouin in his desert tent.”
These Black queens would join the seventies feminist movement and charge some of the authors of the Black Queen poems with misogyny, in a literature in which the Black Queen bards were scalded.
Like all great satirists, Killens doesn’t play favorites, which is a requirement made of Black novelists by literary special interests. Feminism is the latest constituency. The writer bell hooks says that White feminists told her that in order to succeed, she had to write for them. Without consulting with Black poets or Black members of her husband’s entourage or even Joy Harjo, the great Native American poet and three-term US poet laureate, Jill Biden chose her husband’s inaugural poet, passing over elders like Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. Similar demands have been made by constituencies of the past, those who have a pipeline to consumers. The people who represent my side, these interests have demanded, must appear saintly, or at least “likable,” while their antagonists must look evil. Because of these restrictions, many current Black novels backed by hefty budgets and publicity harken back to Mystery Plays, where the characters who represent their values are named Virtue. Some of Killens’s White characters can be pat like Carlton Carson, the Secret Service man assigned to the bogus PM, who has a face like “Porky Pig.” Addressing Jimmy, he says:
The Minister Primarily Page 1