December 31, 2001
A Griot Says I am: Interview with John A. Williams
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"John A. Williams is probably the best African-American writer of the century," says author Ishmael Reed, "but will never be recognized as such by the white establishment. They consider him to be 'impudent.'"
Regardless of what record the powers that be in publishing write of John A. Williams, we know the author of books like The Man Who Cried I am and !Click Song, is one of our most cherished griots. Born December 5, 1925, in Jackson, Mississippi, Williams began writing seriously while in the navy and later in college at Syracuse University.
Many of Williams' books explore what it means to be a black in America. His first three novels - The Angry Ones, Night Song, and Sissie - echoed our fierce struggle for racial justice during the sixties. Like so many other writers of the Black Arts Movement, Williams' fiction reflected the cruel contradictions of our society.
His 1976 book The Junior Bachelor Society was adapted in 1981 as an NBC-TV mini-series called "The Sophisticated Gents." He was professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Rutgers University for 15 years, where in 1990 he was named the Paul Robeson Professor of English. Williams is the recipient of two American Book Awards, the author of twelve published novels, eight nonfiction books, a book of poetry, and numerous articles and essays.
At 76, Williams seems to be working harder than ever and writes everyday at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. I spoke with him December 20, 2001.
Q. Who were your early inspirations?
A. I remember as a kid, my mother had brought home from work, she was a domestic, this novel, Native Son by Richard Wright. That would have been in 1939 or1940 or something like that. I had always enjoyed reading. You would give me a medium-sized book and I'd gobble that sucker up overnight. Even when I was much younger and our class would go to the public library, I was usually the only one the librarians would let take out four books a week. I've escaped through reading, I've been informed through reading, I've had my world shaped for better or worse by reading. I deplore the fact that everything is taking us away from reading these days, even publishing. I mean, you know what's out there. It doesn't relate to real situations.
Q. When did you know that you were a writer?
A. While I was going to college on the GI bill. I had a teacher named Leonard Brown. He was supposed to have been a character in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which I found, as young and as dumb as I was, to be a very astounding novel. I've always been influenced by that novel in terms of how you handle time and differences in time and how eliminate barriers in time and bring everything together in one hour or one minute. That was when I began to think about more than just telling the story. It was how to tell a story well. The mechanics.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. I'm working on a memoir and a novel and a couple of smaller projects. The novel is called Birdland and it has to do with two sisters who arrive in the west behind Columbus' ship. Actually, they try to detract him from landing anywhere in the west. You know how stubborn those Italians can be. They are sort of the custodians of history, in that they maintain from Columbus' time to the present. One of the things I'm trying to deal with is the miscegenation factor that occurred throughout history, to the point that a lot of white folks don't know that they're black.
Q. You've spoken about the overt racism you experienced while in the navy and how it informed your early contributions to the Black Arts Movement.
A. I never considered myself a part of the Black Arts Movement. I think this was started by younger people than I, such as Ish (Ishmael Reed), Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson and I know they've even thrown Romare Bearden into this. I've seen pictures of Bearden with people from the Black Arts Movement. And I'm saying some of these lousy, lazy critics of black literature don't have their stuff together. I think I was sort of in the middle of a lot of things. Actually Baldwin and I were contemporaries, he was just three of four years older than I was. These other people were much younger, they didn't have the WWII experience.
Q. You were thirty-five when you published your first novel, The Angry Ones. What was that experience like?
A. That was not my title. I wrote that book and of course I had a lot of difficulty finding a publisher and finally in desperation my agent sent it to a paperback publisher, Ace Books. My title was, One for New York. They changed the title to The Angry Ones. After that, every time I looked up, it' "John A. Williams is angry, he's pissed off." Well of course I am but that's not the whole damn story. But that title sort of pegged me. The first chance I got I did a collection and called it Beyond the Angry Black, because I really didn't want that to stick but it was too late, its there. It's still there.
Q. I was at the National Black Writer's Conference at Medgar Evers' one year and saw you stand up in the audience and pay tribute to John O. Killens. How influential was he in your writing career?
A. John was influential in terms of his support. People climbed all over me when I did the book on King. I could list about half a dozen female writers. John Killens backed me up and he admired King and he understood what I was doing and he gave me a lot of support. I was very grateful for our relationship. And he criticized some of my work and I criticized some of his but it was not with the viciousness or the underhandedness that you see these days. I really miss him. I saw him in the hospital several times when he was sick and every time I went he would introduce me to another nurse and say, "This is my good friend John A. Williams, he is the best writer in this country."
Q. The main character in your 1972 novel Captain Blackman, traveled through time to fight in every major American war. I wonder if he was around now to fight in America's so-called "War on Terrorism" how he would urge us to rethink our definitions of patriotism and personal freedom?
A. Well, I can hear Captain Blackman saying, "Shit these people don't nothing about terrorism because we've had 500 years of it." And it's as unremitting [as what's going on now]. We're not talking about bombs and planes and troops. We're talking about little cadres of people, whether they own factories where they won't let you work or cops or shopkeepers, just anything. It has always been terror, to a degree. But the whole system is set up so that it just absorbs your anger and you're just left out there with it, if you want to hold on to it. But you just can't be pissed all the time.
Q. I guess that's why the reactions to the terrorist events of 9/11 (like everything else) have skewed along racial lines. Where were you when it happened?
A. I was in New York. We were sitting in the kitchen having breakfast and my wife was going into the sitting room and then she said something about an explosion at the World Trade Center. I see the first building already on fire and a see plane coming around slowly and I say to myself "this guy is on his way to LaGuardia or Kennedy" and then I see him sort of dip away and make a circle and head for that second tower. POW! He slices right through it. And I said, goddamn! I mean I feel sorry for those people…it's a hell of a way to die…Later some guy called and asked me if I would do a piece to go into a collection on 9/11. I opened my piece with "I saw the second plane…" And then I went on to talk about how essentially this was apart of the Race War. Its been going on for a long time and nobody is doing a great deal. And then I went into how Colin Powell was supposed to go to Durban for the World Conference Against Racism and they wouldn't let him go. And I said that Bush spit in his face.
Q. Your latest novel, Clifford's Blues, presents the fictionalized narrative of a black jazz musician imprisoned in Dachau who keeps himself alive by working as the jazz band leader of a group of prisoners. To me, the book evokes Anne Frank but with kind of a Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative spin, in terms of its sensibility. I say Jacobs because Clifford is gay and becomes the houseservant to an SS officer to survive. Tell me about your research process for that book.
A. The first time we were living in Europe in 1965 we drove through Germany and stopped at the camps there, and they were just opening it up as a museum. That's when I saw photos of these two brothers and I said, "Damn, what did these cats do to be caught up in this shit?" And it just never left me. Over the years I began to test sources and write to places for information. And I had two chances to go back to Dachau. I found one very good book that was done by a cook who was an inmate there, which I used for research. And I used the data that they had there at the camp that you could purchase. I did a lot of work on that one.
Q. In your novel The Man Who Cried I am the main character Max Reddick, uncovers a plot by western nations to stop the unification of black Africa and an even more sinister plot code-named "King Alfred," a genocidal plan to end the race problem similar to Hitler's "Final Solution." If 'ole Max were still around to see what progress the "revolution" has wrought and the current unshifting permanence of "race" in this country, how would he react?
A.I think he'd go to a faraway lodge and load it up with whiskey and a record player and maybe a small TV set and a lot of books and his wife if he had one or maybe a girlfriend and just say, "fuck it all."
Q. What do you think of some of writers of the hip hop generation?
A. I've read Paul Beatty and two or three other people. I think as with most young writers the material is pretty close to "self" and I think it's going to grow outward. That's what it must do, that's the nature of all good writing. If it doesn't grow, what is it? It's got to anticipate, it's got to recover its got to show new pathways. I think those are the responsibilities of writers who are still growing. You know, we tend to be too impatient too. If a guy doesn't get on the best-seller list with his first three or four books, he's a has-been. That's not fair. My big fear though, is that I don't think we have the black reading audience that we had a few years ago. I think it has declined.
Q. It's pretty clear that the media puts up smoke screens to represent a fairytale reality in America. You see it along economic and racial lines in everything from network news to beer commercials to "Touched by an Angel." What bugs you about the media today?
A. Is it a media or a series of catalogues that sell products. I get this on TV, I get this during the news hour, I look at the New York Times and I don't know if I'm looking at a catalogue from a classy, high-priced place or a newsmagazine. I'm not kidding. Were not educating people. We're manipulating people with journalism today. I think we've lost it.
Q. You've said you don't think much has changed in the publishing game in the past 40 years. Is it still hard for you to get published these days?
A. Oh it's very difficult to get published. I know my agent is getting a little tired, I know that because I rarely hear from her. I find that editors want you to write "their" book. Its not your book they want to handle, they want you to do "their" book and since I'm not into that I guess I'm in a little trouble.
Q. You've created a solid body of work over forty years despite obvious obstacles. What has kept you going?
A. What I want to do is bring my family with me. There is so much material that you get from family and you can tell the relatives that, hey thanks a bunch, I got you, you'll always be remembered in this book. I find that to be very helpful.
Q. If you had to choose just one of your works to be placed on your tombstone, your most cherished work, what would it be?
A. Oh, I don't know. I think at the moment it would be Click Song but I have to wait to see what I'm going to do with Birdland.
Q. If you could pen your afterlife, where would it be set and what would the plot be?
A. Oh boy…hmm…well, I'd like for it to be on a planet with access to earth because there are a lot of people down here that I think I can still help and I'd like to be able to get away from some of it too. Look at the rest of the universe and see what's out there.
Copyright © 2001 Article by Cheo Taylor Tyehimba. All Rights Reserved.
[NOTE: This article is not to be reproduced, forwarded, or distributed in any form without *explicit* permission from the author.]
Posted at December 31, 2001 10:32 AM