Captain Blackman

by John A. Williams, Alexs Pate (Introduction)

Vividly brings to life the history of African Americans in the military.

Genres: Fiction, African American

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

John Alfred Williams was an African-American author, journalist, and academic. His novel The Man Who Cried I Am was a bestseller in 1967.

His novels are mainly about the black experience in white America. The Man Who Cried I Am, a fictionalized account of the life and death of Richard Wright, introduced the King Alfred Plan, a fictional CIA-led scheme supporting an international effort to eliminate people of African descent. This "plan" has since been cited as fact by some members of the Black community and conspiracy theorists.

In the early 1980s, Williams, and the composer and flautist Leslie Burrs, with the agreement of Mercer Ellington, began collaborating on the completion of Queenie Pie, an opera by Duke Ellington that had been left unfinished at Ellington's death. The project fell through, and the opera was eventually completed by other hands.

In 2003, Williams performed a spoken-word piece on Transform, an album by rock band Powerman 5000. At the time, his son Adam Williams was the band's guitarist.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

John A.^^^Williams

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s just the wildest thing to me that Williams isn’t mentioned in the same breath as his peers (translation: Black dudes around the middle of the 20th-c.) It fits my theory that there can only ever be one ‘negro du jour’ that the publishing and literary criticism industries will allow to operate at the apex level historically reserved for white guys. So, briefly and likely chronologically wonky: Wright, Ellison, Wright (comes back by default of Ralph’s unbreakable post-Invisible stasis), and, the golden boy, Baldwin. Don’t look at me; it’s not my doing. Them’s appears to be the facts, and once Jimmy was weaponized as a critical hitman almost explicitly against Black authors for the honky syndicate, the consubstantiation calcified. It has since been pared into a tidy, tiny curriculum of books that the well-intentioned reader can tick off in a short month, enabling them to strikethrough the “Read Black” to-do line of their super-journal. Meanwhile, Henderson the fucking Rain King was being heralded as the Newer Testament (that aged well, eh?)

Captain Blackman hits so many of the hallmarks of the ‘postmodern’ novel that it should, by rights, be in the same conversation with its ballyhooed peers; those thicket-dense multi-platform, poly-temporal, syncretic-collisional motherfuckers that gather dust on shelves in first editions that nerds touch themselves over. It is absolutely fucking wild in its scope—the history of Black soldiering in these United States during the Revolutionary, 1812, Civil, Spanish-American, Indian, WWI, Internationales, WWII, Korean, Vietnam, and whatever I’m forgetting Wars—and told, if not simultaneously, with enough time leaps that the best way to identify where the fuck you are is by the weaponry. Williams doesn’t broadcast his larger point, namely because he should not have to: the verifiable and historically factual participation and sacrifices of Black persons in each and every goddamn station of nation building the US has undertaken is woefully unknown. My hand is raised/this isn’t an indictment of you, sweet undifferentiated masses. I didn’t know a hell of a lot of it either, and I see this less as a fault of my own cloistered understanding of American history than as the intentional EXCLUSION of Black participation by the educational apparatus of my formative years. I’m damning the historicity of the history that this country continues to inculcate its young in, and I’m fucked if I can find a single reason for its perpetuation.

Lovers of (relative to the norm) complex plotlines, polyvalent criticisms of systems and institutional norms so common as to appear autonomic, and buffalo soldiers, read up: if this history is forgotten by omission, imagine what’s kept under suppression.

And then go smash your head in with a rock, or, better, annihilate your prefrontal cortex with any number of readily available narcotics-cum-pacifiers; either will accomplish the undoing of something so ineffably fucked for a half-millennium or so. Bear in mind that the geological record is less muddied than the analgesic. Better: read John Williams, non-Stoner variety, and pass after puffing.


*


(Yes, I'm done with this soapbox. I sometimes get seduced by the view.)

[John Casserly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying again to expand my horizons, and boy, this one did. a 1972 novel about wartime race relations during U.S. history from the perspective of a hallucinating or time-traveling wounded Vietnam Soldier. Kind of hard to follow until I caught on, about half way through, but the anger and reasons for it were unambiguous.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"John A. Williams’ spins a fever dream of an injured black Vietnam War soldier hurled via hallucinatory time-travel into all of America’s conflicts. While hospitalized, Abraham Blackman, who teaches a military seminar to his troops, plays the archetypal role of black soldier from the Revolutionary War to a near-future Cold War conflict. In each conflict, white men preach the promise of [...]"

[David Garza · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. The premise drew me to it. But it just didn't work for me. Sure, there were parts that had things going for it, but they were far too fleeting. The good parts never went anywhere or petered out too soon. It really seemed like Williams had the concept, but was trying to do too much with it and ended up doing so little. It just seemed to lack focus. I'm thinking each era that Captain Blackman "re-lived" would have been more impactful if they were separate short stories or novellas.

There were also a lot of times in which the action didn't feel like the Blackman was living through them. Instead, it felt like Williams was recapping a television show he was watching, letting you know he researched some history. I don't know, maybe Williams was trying too hard with this one.

I wasn't to give this three stars just for the premise, but that probably wouldn't be honest. Two stars is fair.

[Evan]

Ugh. one of Williams' misses -- and it misses hard. An attempt to celebrate the african american contribution to military experience turns into a repetative, shallow novel that has a few good moments overshadowed by a lack of real exploration. perhaps it was too ambitious to try and cover every war in US history? Perhaps, also, it fails to do some basic work in developing the characters (who change slightly in every war that the main character appears in). Williams seems uninterested in clearly informing the reader whether the main character simply appears in each conflict or if he lives through the times of peace in between. no one seems to notice/care that a modern man keeps showing up from nowhere.

In the end, it seems to all be a mortal-injury related dream. but by then it doesn't matter.

[Eric Byrd]

A black, military Orlando. I'm all about that. What a bummer if it's no good!

[Mills College Library]

Fiction W724c 2000

[Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Functional

Its just like reading a physical book. The quick menu options make chapter surfing easy. But what the program lacks is PAGE NUMBERS. For a program that seeks to make reading efficient on a tablet, its completely COUNTERINTUITIVE to not have page numbers!! This makes quoting impossible for academic purposes. Overall its a working product though.