In his contemporary review of John A. Williams’ 1972 novel Captain Blackman, George Davis wrote that “One of the major burdens for the black novelist is that he has to correct so much accepted history.” This is the quest of both Williams and Captain Abraham Blackman: to correct so much accepted history; specifically, to correct the accepted and misinformed mainstream history of Black soldiers in America.
And the novel succeeds. Captain Blackman is an astounding, imaginative, and appropriately angry synthesis of Black military history in the United States. It blends genre elements from war novels, science fiction, Westerns, political and economic theory, and even romance novels, and cites heavily from a range of historical documents. It’s very smart and often very funny, at times quite horny, and even surreal. It’s baggy and ambitious and rich and encyclopedic. I loved it.
Our titular hero is Abraham Blackman. If the name strikes a reader as overly allegorical, let it go; get used to it. Williams has larded his novel with names that are clearly analogs or allegories of historical figures and contemporary writers (including not-so-sly references to Chester Himes, E.L. Doctorow, and others). Blackman’s nemesis is one Ishmael Whittman. Make of that what you will.
Blackman is an Army Captain serving in the Vietnam War at the novel’s outset. He’s extraordinarily popular with the soldiers under his command, who religiously attend his seminars on Black military history (much to the chagrin of Major Whittman). Blackman also inspires his soldiers with his enormous size, physical strength, and bravery — he’s almost a superhero. In the novel’s opening pages, Blackman is terribly wounded while drawing enemy fire away from his squad and loses consciousness.
What happens next is a matter of interpretation. The most surface -level interpretation might be something like this: The rest of the novel takes place as a series of dream episodes, in which Blackman experiences a metaphorical eternal return, soldiering throughout earlier American wars. These episodes are anchored by periodic returns to the contemporary Vietnam War setting, in which Blackman’s charges (and his love interest) worry about his future. A second interpretation might go something like this: Abraham Blackman is unstuck in time. He is a mythical figure experiencing a literal eternal return; he is on a mission to not only correct the accepted history of Black Americans that has been so heavily-inked by white supremacy, but to actually thwart that white supremacy.
In any case, iterations of Blackman move through American history: the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Plains Wars, the Spanish American War, and so on. In each new war an old pattern repeats: Black soldiers serve bravely but are denied trust, recognition, and justice. Blackman sees Black Americans sent into battle under degrading conditions, watches atrocities committed against Black troops, and encounters moments when official history conceals or distorts what happened.
The racist, imperialist mentality Williams critiques finds its anchor in Blackman’s enemy, Major Ishmael Whittman, who appears in multiple historical settings, making him less an ordinary rival than a continuing force of oppression that Blackman cannot escape (and will eventually have to defeat). Other figures sharpen the conflict reverberating through time, like Blackman’s love interest, Mimosa Rogers, who appears across periods as a strong, self-protective woman who urges him to endure and resist. Lieutenant Luther Woodcock is a younger Black soldier shaped by Blackman’s teaching, while Robert Doctorow is one of the men Blackman tries to educate about racism. Blackman is not just a fighter, but also as a mentor and interpreter of history, a sort of warrior monk who protects, reveals, and shares a marginalized tradition. He sees himself as “a black man barreling through centuries of monumental and ritualized taboo to revenge himself.”
The novel’s trajectory reveals a paradox that Blackman comes to realize passing through war after war: Black military service has been essential to the nation and yet repeatedly erased or exploited. Blackman recognizes the inertia of this paradox, but anticipates its ultimate reversal: “We’re all trapped by our history; playing games, doing the easiest and the most obvious, but one day that’ll change and it’ll be terrible to see.”
Playing games — yes, for Blackman, here is another paradox: war is serious, deadly, but ultimately a game with no real winner. He meets a child soldier in the Spanish Civil War:
Jesus, Blackman thought. What was he thinking, how awful that the kid was here? Still thinking of noble, right-aged soldiers who never got killed messily? Still thinking of right making might? Since when did old men fight wars? And hadn’t it happened before, at Marathon, in Zululand? Wherever men fought, there you found the boys also. War was the big game humans played, and when one was over, the corpses buried, the hardware of murder sold to lesser countries for lesser wars, they began still another game.
The chapters of Captain Blackman concerning the Spanish Civil War are particularly interesting; it’s the only war that Blackman fights in in which he is not a U.S. soldier. He chooses to go to the war, with his friend Doctorow, out of the hope that
there in the land of Cervantes could flourish, if not murdered, the kind of life they believed America should’ve been able to offer its citizens. There was where fascism, racism and economic inequality could be beaten back; there the people could beat the big money. …They reinforced one another, finally, with Blackman concluding that he could fight American lynch law by fighting Spanish fascism; Doctorow concluding that he could fight international anti-Semitism by volunteering for the Republic, one which surely would, after five hundred years, renounce its official anti-Semitism.
Williams’ novel underscores the cyclical nature of war even as it highlights values that are worth fighting for — and values that merit violent resistance. It’s been over a half-century since Captain Blackman’s publication, and we see full-throated fascism not just “on the rise,” but practiced by our government.
Indeed, while reading Captain Blackman I found myself repeatedly jotting down notes on page after page that amounted to, No different today. The book’s last chapter features a particularly remarkable section, “Blackman’s Cadence”; these lines struck me hard in the face:
What nation today could afford to take on the problems of a vassal state won by conquest, when it’s so goddamn clear that no state that now exists is even close to solving its own internal problems? And we’d have to teach this: If America could make military power relevant to political bargaining with other superpowers, couldn’t we, once that military power was in our hands, or short-circuited by us, bargain politically for all we never got? Wasn’t America more vulnerable now than at any other time in history, man, since all aspects of its society were gathered at the toe-jam-smelling feet of its military monuments? Neutralize that power and what have you? The world’s strong boy unmasked as an impotent masturbator.
“The world’s strongest boy unmasked as an impotent masturbator” is a deadly zinger. But it’s the opening sentiment of the paragraph that’s so plainly horrific. The warmakers — not the children who fight the wars or die in them, but the warmakers — have no interest in resolving anyone’s problems. We know that Power will not resolve the problems of a conquered vassal state because Power will not resolve its own problems.
Blackman’s solution to all of this — well, look, I won’t spoil it — I loved the end of the novel. Williams could have done anything there but what he did was extraordinary, especially given the ambiguous, paradoxical interpretations that the novel presents? Was it all a dream — or a nightmare rather?
I read Captain Blackman immediately after finishing The Man Who Cried I Am, the 1967 novel Williams is most famous for. Both are excellent, and The Man Who Cried I Am is probably a better novel, more intimate and frankly somber, but I enjoyed Captain Blackman more — it’s the riskier book: uneven at moments, perhaps, but powerful because its mix of genres mirrors the scale and instability of the history it is trying to tell.
It’s worth noting that Captain Blackman was published the same year as Ishmael Reed’s classic Mumbo Jumbo, and while it doesn’t telegraph the same slapstick energy, it nevertheless reverberates with a similar surreal edge. Leon Forrest would publish There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, just the next year, another experimental novel concerning eternal return, memory, and history. Williams’ novel also strongly recalled Thomas Pynchon’s treatment of both race and war, particularly in Gravity’s Rainbow and V.
Captain Blackman deserves to be read not as a historical curiosity but as one of the great American war novels of the postwar period: formally restless, intellectually combative, and still electrifying in its anger. Williams turns historical fiction into a struggle over memory itself, insisting that Black military service cannot be separated from the long history of American betrayal. If the novel is uneven, that unevenness is bound up with its ambition. Williams’ novel breaks open “official” accepted history and forces something truer out of it. Very highly recommended.
Biblioklept 