First published in 1973 by The Third Press
Reviewed by Tom Short
review published in Midnight Mind Number Seven
This book is becoming less and less of a secret thanks to the post-George Floyd effort to raise awareness of voices that hadn’t been amplified in the past. Adam Langer’s New York Times essay of July 2020 titled, “These Radical Black Thrillers Fantasized About Dismantling the Police.” focused on Operation Burning Candle. When read post-summer 2020, this book means even more and acts as a kind of “we told you how we felt but you didn’t listen”.
The book follows a group of Black “dead” Vietnam vets as they come back home to work behind the scenes to “put it on the individual level where every whitey sees in every one of us a person who is dangerous… That way, each of us and therefore the group itself will present a totally different image in the white man’s eyes and hence our own… Can you dig it?” I use the quotes around “dead” because, plot twist — they aren’t dead!
The book has two really important pieces that set it apart from some scribbled off thinly veiled exploitation novel of violence.
The first thing is that the plot in crafty. One gets the feeling that Jackson and his friends (Jackson was a Marine drill instructor) sat around figuring out just how someone would need to spark this national revolution without interference from law enforcement, informants, etc. And the plan — the plot of the novel — Jackson comes up with works — as wild as the idea is.
The second thing is Blyden Jackson is smart. He hides his bigger theory of a national re-balancing within the context of the storyline. He could have written his theory of group trauma — that Blacks had their identity “driven deep beneath the surface as an urgent, but undefined hope, rather than a recognizable reality” — in a non-fiction book, but then who would have paid attention to that? Instead, he wrote a fictional gameplan for revenge and equalization that, while violent, certainly helps to express the frustration of generations of Black Americans
