Who Walk In Darkness

Here’s a selection of books that looked at the status of race as the marker of outsider status. This is merely scratching the surface of this genre, these were chosen because they come from the shelves of my library, next to the writings of Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and the bizarre and grotesque slavery exploitation fictions that the New English Library in the 1970s churned out alongside their more popular skinhead and biker pulps. (Interestingly amongst this slew of sex and slavery plantation porn appeared books by the mixed race Guyanese writer Edgar Mittelholzer, one of the first professional novelists from the English-speaking Caribbean.  Mittelholzer went on to commit suicide by dousing himself with petrol and immolating himself in a field in Surrey when his writing career went into decline.)

The Outsider by Richard Wright – Panther (UK, 1960) (First published in the US in 1954)

The first is “The Outsider” by Richard Wright (Author of Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, Black Boy among others) is a darkly pessimistic existentialist novel whose protagonist Cross Damon is an intellectual Black man alienated by racist America and drawn inexorably into a violent spiral of self-destruction.

Richard Wright, born in Mississippi, was only too well aware of America’s racism, so perhaps unsurprisingly in 1947 he left to live in Paris where he became acquainted with Camus and Sartre (the latter publishing sections of Wright’s Black Boy in Les Temps Modernes), writing “The Outsider” there in 1954.

In 1959, unhappy with his life in Paris which he felt separated him from “the rhythms of his life”; disillusioned with French politics and exhausted by literary infighting and attacks on ex-pat Black writers he first tried to move to England. However, there he felt hounded by the immigration authorities and after “four hassles in twelve days” he decided not to settle.

Wright had been a member of the Communist Party in America, although his membership was a rocky one – threatened at knifepoint, denounced as a Trotskyite in the street by strikers and beaten up by former comrades on the 1936 May Day March, he finally left the Party in 1942 and in 1949 contributed to The God that Failed, an anthology of anti-communist essays by former Party members (including Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender). None of this convinced the CIA, whose surveillance of him began in 1943 and who have subsequently been accused of his murder. He died, ostensibly of heart failure, on November 28, 1960, he was fifty-two and broke.

At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes mixed with the ashes of a copy of his autobiography “Black Boy”. His remains were interred in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

“Do you understand what I mean, Damon?” Houston asked softly. “I’m talking about you, your life. How was it with you, Damon?”

His eyes stared bleakly. His effort was supreme; his lips parted; his tongue moved; he cursed that damned ball of seething fire that raged in his chest and managed to get his reluctant breath past it to make words:

“It… it was… horrible…”

Who Walk In Darkness by Chandler Brossard – Harrow (US, 1972) (First published in the US in 1952)

The second choice is “Who Walk In Darkness” by the white American writer Chandler Brossard. This novel is considered by some to be the first Beat novel, writing in the Village Voice, Richard Nason called the book “a handy index to the argot and obsessions of the early ’50s, with its concern with pot, sexual and political identity, and the emergence of racial polarity.” Brossard himself rejected literary kinship to the Beats, although he remained a very close friend of Jack Kerouac.

The central character of “Who Walk In Darkness” is a Black man, the opportunistic hustler Henry Porter, who ‘passes’ as a white man as he moves through the ‘existential hell’ of the hip scene in late-1940s Greenwich Village. Porter is thought to be based on the mixed-race American writer Anatole Broyard, who was sufficiently incensed that his threats of legal action made Brossard tone down the similarities. (Interestingly Broyard never publicly revealed his Louisiana Creole roots during his lifetime, apparently his application for a social security number made in 1938 shows that he initially marked his racial origin as “Negro”, then crossed it out and ticked “White”.) In 1971 he gained some satisfaction in revenge when he reviewed Brossard’s “ Wake Up. We’re Almost There”:

“Here’s a book so transcendently bad it makes us fear not only for the condition of the novel in this country, but for the country itself.”

Indeed some think that his influential position as literary critic for the New York Times gave him the chance to derail Brossard’s literary career. Certainly his later work could not get published by mainstream publishers and only saw the light of day through small presses in Britain and America.

Brossard was once memorably described by Norman Mailer as “a mean and pricky guy who’s been around” and he himself described “Who Walk In Darkness”  as a “savage book”, but he thought it misunderstood: “[they] totally missed getting the book. They thought it was a realistic novel, which of course it wasn’t. The French critics knew better. They perceived it as the first ‘new wave’ novel, a nightmare presented as flat documentary.”

In The Castle of my Skin by George Lamming Ace (UK, 1960) (First published in the US in 1953)

“In The Castle Of My Skin” was the debut novel by Barbadian novelist George Lamming , published in 1953 with an introduction by Richard Wright. He wrote it while living in England and working in a factory – he also hosted a book program for the BBC West Indian Service at this time. It has been hailed as the first major fictional work in English emanating from the Caribbean. Like many first novels this is strongly autobiographical, set in Barbados and Trinidad this bildungsroman charts not only the coming-of-age of the protagonist G, but of Barbados itself as it neared independence, a cause for which Lamming “acted as witness and conscience”.  Another work about the estrangement of the individual from his roots as he reaches an understanding of himself, this is rightly considered a masterpiece of Caribbean literature.

Next up is the challengingly-titled “Never Say Nigger”, written by another white author, Robert Kendall. The original title was considered to incendiary for America, but was used for the UK publication – it appeared in the States as “White Teacher in a Black School”.

“Publishers Refuse Book With ‘Nigger’ In Title

The controversy over a title for the forthcoming novel by Robert Kendall on his experiences as a white teacher in a predominantly Negro schools in Los Angeles has been settled and the name White Teacher in a Black School decided upon. Kendall wanted to title the book Never Say Nigger, which a poll revealed was not objectionable to Negroes, but the publishers objected, saying it is not in context with the seriousness of the work and refused to handle it. The book will be released in September”

Jet – 30^th July 1964

Never Say Nigger by Robert Kendall - Tandem (UK) - p/b - 1966 (First published in 1964 in the US as White Teacher In A Black School)

This is a is a thinly disguised fictional account of his time in the Los Angeles educational system, working in mainly black schools, “set against a background of recurrent violence, prostitution, sex and dope orgies among 15 year olds, the common use of knives, chains, foul words and deeds. He exposes the double standards that exist between white and black students, the latter having to accept mea ningless diplomas and leaving school still illiterate. It is a raw, blunt story and has the impact of a sledgehammer.”

It became a best-seller after the Watts Riots of 1965 and is credited with instigating reforms of the education system.

Kendall turned to teaching while struggling to find work as an actor – he was apparently nearly cast as John “Plato” Crawford in “Rebel Witho ut A Cause”, a job that went instead to Sal Mineo. The rest of his acting credits were generic dark-skinned bit parts: “Island Boy” in “The Women of Pitcairn Island”, “Juan” in an episode of The 20th Century-Fox Hour, “Slave Boy with Pigeons” in The Ten Commandments, “Ahmed” in Casbah and “Hassan” in Song of Scheherazade.

A former student reviewing the book on Amazon stated:

“I was one of this fellow’s students at a Pacoima, California junior high school in the early sixties. He was a poor teacher who was completely out of his depth, then went on to write this pathetic fabrication by way of revenge. I can’t believe this trash is still around. It’s not an indictment of the L.A. school system so much as of the African-American race, which is depicted as hopelessly uneducable.  Give this bit of trash the burial in obscurity it deserves.”

(As a side-note this reminds me of Minor Threat’s controversial song “Guilty of Being White” in which Ian MacKaye sings of his experiences at Wilson High School in Washington DC, which had a 70% black student population. In this, MacKaye sees himself as the victim)

Manchild In The Promised Land – Penguin (UK, 1969) (First published in the US in 1965)

The final book we’ll be looking at here is Claude Brown’s “Manchild In The Promised Land”, published in 1965, the year of the Watts Riots when Black America began to demand change with direct action. It is an autobiographical account of growing up in Harlem in the 1950’s:

“a prison-ghetto of gang fights, prostitution, down-south superstitions and whisky-religion; a society of outcasts terrorized by ‘grey-boy’ police who take Negro junkies for target practice.”

Claude Brown lived this life from the age of six, a life of gangs, shootings, dope-smoking and jazz, pimping and Black Power. Gangs he claimed membership of included The Forty Thieves, a crew so violent they were feared by the normally dismissive white mobsters, who wouldn’t dare encroach on their territory. He was in and out of reform school from the age of eleven but he was a man strong enough to make it – he put himself through nightschool, went to University (where he was taught by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison) and eventually trained as a lawyer at Stanford.

“There was a tremendous difference in the way life was lived up North. There were too many people full of hate and bitterness crowded into a dirty, stinky, uncared-for, closet-sized section of a great city. The children of these disillusioned colored pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents – the disappointments, the anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?” – Manchild In The Promised Land