Trust No One

So I’ve been playing with the 70s "american paranoid" idea we talked about at one of our Dark Forces meetings. Leaving aside the paranoid aspects of mainstream film of the period (The Parallax View, The Conversation, etc), I also started thinking about a sub-stream that existed in African-American fiction at the same time. There were quite a few books and at least two films that fit.

Sam Greenlee/The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1969)

"You'd be dangerous in an alley, thought Freeman, but you hung yourself up with judo. Karate or jujitsu, maybe, to slow me down with the chops and kicks. But there is just no way you can throw me in judo, white boy. He wondered whether to fight, or to continue on the defense. He looked at Calhoun, squatting Japanese-style on the other side of the mat, the hatred and contempt naked on his face. No, he thought, even if I blow my scene, I got to kick this ofay's ass. When you grab me again, whitey, you are going to have two handfuls of 168 pounds of pure black hell . . . . "

The Spook Who Sat By The Door is a great conspiracy fantasy novel. Pretty much the entire thing is written in the style above. It's a rare one because for once, the conspiracy is one that we (and by “we” I mean Negroes) put over on The Man.

See, Dan Freeman (get it?) is a righteous brother who worms his way into the CIA's affirmative action program, learns every trick in Mr. Charlie's bag and then takes it back to the streets. Under the guise of working for a lib'ral welfare agency, he recruits street gangs to form an army, first in Chicago, then the rest of the ghettos. . . ready to light the dynamite that'll bring this whole rotting mess down. Ivan Dixon made it into a low-budget but faithful movie back in 1973.

Chester Himes/Plan B

The only other black folks' conspiracy novel I've found is Chester Himes' similar Plan B, which has a cool beginning. A mysterious stranger brings a package to a Harlem apartment. The man who opens it discovers an M-16 with the message: "Warning! Do not inform police! Learn your weapon and wait for instructions! Freedom is coming!!"

Unfortunately, Himes died before he could finish it and what was published by the University Press of Mississippi was a complete mess---full of interracial sex (which he had previously explored in the novel Pinktoes) and long, useless diversions. Anyway, towards the end, more and more rifles are delivered to the ghetto and people take to the rooftops. The cops go bonkers, driving tanks into the heart of Harlem, killing indiscriminately and the brothers head underground, systematically destroying Wall Street's lines of communication and generally giving whitey hell. And that's as far as Himes got. Himes no doubt would have cleaned this book up before publication but he died of "natural" causes in '84.

Most of these types of novels focus on a plot against black people. No doubt the authors and everyone reading were familiar with the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which the federal health department failed to treat a group of men who had the disease to study its effects. With that, combined with other Church Commission Classics like the MK Ultra CIA experiments, pretty much any plot element you could think of was believable back in the 70s. So . . .

The School on 103rd Street/ Roland S. Jefferson (1976)

The peckerwoods build giant facilities underneath ghetto schools capable of performing mass lobotomies on the black population. . . . just in case. One of the books W.W. Norton published under its late, lamented Old School Books imprint.

The Man Who Cried I Am/ John A. Williams (1967)

An expatriate writer stumbles on the "King Alfred" plan, a detailed manuscript setting out how the US government can initiate a final solution for the Negro problem in America in 72 hours. . . just in case.

At the end of the novel, our hero receives a nickel-plated gift to the back of the head from the CIA for his stellar detective work. This is probably the most literary of these novels, really a meditation on a man's life (the protagonist is dying of cancer) with the apocalyptic reveal done almost as an anticlimax.

As an aside, I remember hearing something like the King Alfred plan discussed as absolute fact a long time ago at my barbershop while I was waiting to get a haircut.

Three The Hard Way (1974)

Gordon Parks’ film features more ofay trickification as a right wing group develops a serum designed to wipe out black folks. Jim Brown, Jim (Black Belt Jones) Kelly and Fred (The Hammer) Williamson handle their bidness. . . . .