Black Empire.

Ed. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. 348 pp. $24.95 hardcover; $14.95 paperback.

I knew it was hokum. I knew Binks had rigged up this robot and I knew approximately just how it worked, and yet for the life of me I could not but enter into the spirit of the thing and obey the commands of the voice. (Black Empire 61)

The 1991 publication of Black Empire may very well have the effect of rescuing George S. Schuyler from unwarranted obscurity and forcing critics to come to grips with this complex writer whose career stretched from the 1920s to the 1970s. The book comprises two novels by Schuyler (using the pseudonym Samuel I. Brooks) that originally appeared serially in the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938.(1) Part of Northeastern University Press's Library of Black Literature series, Black Empire makes available to scholars and the general public two virtually unknown literary works about a successful African American-led conspiracy to liberate Africa from the European colonial powers and establish a black empire that will unify the continent. Moreover, it contains a sixty-five-page afterword on Schuyler and the significance of the novels written by the volume's editors, Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen, as well as an annotated bibliography of Schuyler's fiction written for the Courier between 1933 and 1939 under a variety of pen names. This combination of previously unavailable texts and new information, coupled with a recent New York Times Book Review essay about the writer and the Black Empire novels by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., almost guarantees an imminent critical rediscovery of the author.

Gates's |A Fragmented Man: George Schuyler and the Claims of Race' offers an insightful and largely persuasive reading of the author and his work that will certainly be the jumping off point for future interpretations of Schuyler's corpus. However, while I believe that Gates has correctly recognized and ingeniously accounted for Schuyler's complexity, his reading of the writer as a literary schizophrenic who created a conservative public persona for himself while expressing extreme leftist views through the pseudonymous Samuel I. Brooks does not completely mesh with the facts. I would like to review the major critical responses to Schuyler, make some observations about the writer's career and the Black Empire novels that problematize Gates's reading, and in closing offer a new interpretation of Schuyler and his work, one that compares him to his most famous character, Max Disher, the chameleon-like protagonist of Black No More. Instead of a schizophrenic, I view Schuyler as a skillful role player, who, early in his career at least, was able successfully to negotiate the daunting social, political, and psychic pressures facing an independent black writer by creating an array of masks for himself.

Before the publication of Black Empire, critical attention devoted to Schuyler consisted of brief discussions of the author in critical surveys of African American literature, a handful of articles on and interviews with the writer, and a Twayne series book by Michael Peplow. Given not only the popularity Schuyler enjoyed in his four decades as an outspoken journalist, critic, and editorial writer for the largest black weekly newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, but also his unprecedented access to mainstream publications, such as H. L. Mencken's American Mercury, the dearth of critical interest in Schuyler prior to 1991 is striking, though not wholly inexplicable. It may result in part from the fact that he published only three literary works in book form during his lifetime: His best known creation, the hilarious and trenchant satire of white and black race chauvinism Black No More (1931); an early African American fictional depiction of Africa based on his own newspaper articles about slavery in contemporary Liberia, Slaves Today (1931); and his staunchly anti-communist autobiography Black and Conservative (1966). Moreover, Schuyler's frequent role as a gadfly within the African American intellectual community has probably contributed to his relative obscurity today. He has been rather simplistically labeled an "assimilationist" by critics who have seized upon his assertion that "the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon" in perhaps his best known essay, "The Negro-Art Hokum" (662).(2) Others may have deliberately ignored Schuyler because of his politically incorrect criticism of the Civil Rights Movement.

The major debate in Schuyler criticism has focused less on the substance than on the consistency or inconsistency of the writer's published works. In Black and Conservative, Schuyler himself was among the first to assert a single theme underlying all his writings: His exposure of the Communist conspiracy and the threat it posed to Americans in general and African Americans in particular. Although few accept this reductive view of Schuyler's oeuvre, it has certainly influenced critics because the autobiography is such a valuable source of information about the author. In 1974 Arthur Davis argued for a different thread connecting Schuyler's works: "The assumption of the Negro's essential American-ness undergirds all his published works" (104). Michael Peplow likewise finds Schuyler consistent, however not as an "assimilationist" but as a lonely iconoclast who once declared, "I have always said and written just what I thought without apologies to anyone, and I intend to continue doing so.... I have always been more concerned with being true to myself than to any group or groups" (qtd. in Black and Conservative 223).

James Young, on the other hand, finds it impossible to reconcile Schuyler's various positions in his writings during the 1930s, and Ann Rayson wryly but seriously terms Schuyler "consistent in his inconsistency" (105). Rayson focuses primarily on illustrating the extent to which Schuyler's newspaper writings, particularly from early in his career, conflict with the claims he makes about himself and his beliefs in Black and Convervative. Her concluding remarks about Schuyler, in fact, contain the kernel of Gates's reading of the writer in "A Fragmented Man." Speaking of Schuyler's pose in his autobiography, Rayson claims that" ... beneath this objective, unemotional, and unreasonably extroverted self-portrayal certainly exists a divided self" (106).

In responding to the debate over consistency, Gates appropriately begins his essay with a reference to W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of double-consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk,(3) probably the most famous description of the unique situation in which African Americans find themselves, and a perfect means by which to frame the divided-self argument that Gates will make about Schuyler.(4) After recounting the highlights of Schuyler's life, Gates accurately states that"... his career was not a simple drift from left to right but a complicated, painful journey filled with the sort of |double-consciousness' that continues to raise disturbing questions about what racism does to people in America" (31). According to Gates, the Black Empire novels reveal that Schuyler's fragmented self reached schizophrenic proportions:

We now know that Schuyler had already

begun to crete powerful fictions

more compelling in their nationalist

mythologies than anything Marcus

Garvey or Elijah Mohammed ever

dreamed of. For Schuyler had matched

his growing conservative and anti-nationalist

public persona with an underground

alter ego ... Samuel I.

Brooks. (42) As neat as Gates's argument for schizophrenia is, however, a close analysis of Schuyler's newspaper writings from the 1930s, his other fiction written for the Courier, and the Black Empire serials themselves produces a much murkier picture. Gates wants to claim that, in the Black Empire novels, "Schuyler would play out his ambivalent feelings about responsible politics for black America by liberalizing Du Bois' famous metaphor of black double-consciousness and dividing himself into two: conservative, colored G. S. Schuyler and militant, black Samuel I. Brooks" (42). Yet this claim is weakened by his acknowledgment that the writer used the Brooks pen name as early as 1928 and that many of the same anti-colonial sentiments that characterize the Black Empire novels appear in columns bearing Schuyler's name from the period when the novels were running in the Courier.

Setting aside the psychoanalytic reading of Schuyler for a moment, I would like to point out that both the serials and many of the writer's contributions to the Courier can profitably be read within the context of the African American response to the Italo-Ethiopian War and its aftermath. The conflict completely dominated the pages of Courier, in some issues more than ten articles were devoted to the war. The paper commissioned Schuyler's friend J. A. Rogers, whom it described as "the best-informed man in the world on Africa," to report firsthand on the battles. Week after week the Psalms verse "Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands to God" ran in big letters at the top of the Courier's Church section. Moreover, the Courier originally advertised a column by W. E. B. Du Bois, which began on February 8, 1936, by claiming that each week it would provide background on the Italo-Ethiopian War. During the conflict, Schuyler wrote one or more editorials in support of Ethiopia almost every week. In addition, he often discussed the war in his "Views and Reviews' column, encouraging readers to contribute to Willis N. Huggins's defense fund for the besieged nation. Most notable of all of Schuyler's nonfiction from this period is his 1938 Crisis essay "The Rise of the Black Internationale," included as an appendix to Black Empire, which not only recalls the title of the first Black Empire serial ("The Black Internationale") but also declares that "to combat the White Internationale of oppression [i.e. colonialism] a Black Internationale of liberation is necessary" (336).(5)

A careful look at Schuyler's other fiction written for the Courier during the 1930s further undermines Gates's assertions about the writer's split personality. The record shows that Schuyler not only became increasingly militant in his journalism from the middle to late 1930s but also, using his own name, wrote action-packed science fiction fantasies about conspiracies to take over Africa that closely resemble the Black Empire novels attributed to Samuel I. Brooks. Schuyler's "Strange Valley: A Novel of Black and White Americans Marooned in the African Jungle," a thirteen-installment serial that ran in the Courier from August 18 to November 10, 1934, reads like a trial run for the Black Empire novels. It features a black American doctor, Augustus Cranfield, who in a remote section of the West African rain forest slowly amasses the wealth, soldiers, and arms necessary to fight a war designed to liberate Africa from the colonial powers.(6)

With their often stirring black nationalist rhetoric, the Black Empire serials almost beg to be read straight--that is, as expressing how Schuyler (or, as Gates would have it, Schuyler as Brooks) believed blacks should respond to colonialism and white oppression in America in the wake of the subjugation of the oldest independent African state by a minor European power. Like Gates, Hill and Rasmussen in their afterword read the novels this way. To do so, however, one must disregard Schuyler's repeated references to the cold-blooded brutality and regimentation of Dr. Henry Belsidus's Black Internationale and the ambivalence of the serials' narrator, Carl Slater, to the organization he finds himself forced to join at gunpoint.(7)

Patricia Givens, head of the Black Internationale's air force, who eventually marries Slater, matter-of-factly outlines Belsidus's program and its cynical attitude towards those he is supposedly liberating:

"The masses always believe what they

are told often enough and loud

enough. We will recondition the

Negro masses in accordance with the

most approved behavioristic 

methods. The [Black Internationale's

newly created] church will hold them

spiritually. Our economic organizations

will keep control of those who

shape their views. Our secret service

will take care of dissenters. Our

propaganda bureau will tell them what

to think and believe. That's the way

to build revolutions...." (Black Empire

47)(8)

In contrast to Gates, John A. Williams, in his foreword to Black Empire, is troubled by the fascism inherent in Belsidus's organization(9); nevertheless, he also reads the serials straight, believing Schuyler to be advocating the Black Internationale's take-no-prisoners approach, which Williams finds consistent with the writer"s later extreme-right-wing views and what he regards as Schuyler's elitism. That Williams, on the one hand, can marshall evidence from Black Empire to argue that it dovetails with Schuyler's subsequent ultra-conservatism and Gates, on the other, can find support in the serials for his assertion that they reveal Schuyler to have been a closet leftist and black nationalist in the middle to late 1930s indicates the complexity of the Black Empire novels and their often elusive creator.

Moreover, I do not believe it prudent to dismiss as easily as Gates does Schuyler's lone statement about the serials and their popularity--"I have been greatly amused by the public enthusiasm for |The Black Internationale,' which is hokum and hack work in the purest vein. I deliberately set out to crowd as much race chauvinism and sheer improbability into it as my fertile imagination could conjure. The result vindicates my low opinion of the human race" (qtd. in Hill and Rasmussen, Afterword" 260). Even though the comment was made in a private letter to a fellow staff member of the Courier, Gates reads it as the public George Schuyler running down the work of his "other self," Samuel Brooks. In contrast to Gates's reading of the comment, I suspect that Schuyler associated himself as the author of the serials with the mastermind Belsidus and the young narrator Carl Slater, whom Belsidus manipulates easily, with what Schuyler seems to have regarded as his naive Courier reader. This interpretation brings new meaning to certain passages in the serials, such as the epigraph to this review, in which Slater, who wants to resist the Reverend Binks's Church of Love ceremony, which he knows to be phony, nevertheless succumbs to "the spirit of the thing" and "the commands of the voice." .

Although I am well aware of the perils of generalizing about Schuyler's opinions, it is worth noting that particularly during the 1930s he often decried political systems that deny people personal freedoms, Communist and fascist alike. For instance, on December 3,1937, while the second Black Empire serial was running in the Courier, Schuyler wrote:

What seems to have escaped the

generality of writers and commentators

is that [Communism, fascism,

and Nazism] are identical in having

regimented life from top to bottom,

in having ruthlessly suppressed

freedom of speech, assembly, press

and thought, and in being controlled

by politicians.... What is new about

these three forms of government is

that all are controlled by politicians

with a reformer complex; ex-revolutionaries

who have gained

power and have nobody to curb their

excesses. (Qtd. in Black and Conservative

240) This passage accurately describes Belsidus's organization in the United States and the kind of government he establishes in Africa. Thus, what I am suggesting is the possibility that Schuyler, instead of creating a utopia in the Black Empire serials, wrote an anti-Utopia reminiscent of Black No More to once again expose the dangers of race chauvinism.(10) If this is the case, then for Schuyler the irony of the Black Empire novels and the public response to them may have been that the empire Belsidus creates is just as fascistic and repressive as the colonial governments he ousts.

I am in complete agreement with Gates's statement that the Black Empire novels 'are particularly important for what they teach us about Schuyler's complicated responses to the pressure of ideological conformity among blacks--and the failure of received ideological stances or political programs to account for this complexity" (43). However, in contrast to Gates's reading of the author as a schizophrenic, I view Schuyler as a black writer who responded to white racism and the pressure to toe the line within the black community by creating a variety of personae for himself (Samuel I. Brooks being just one of these). According to Hill and Rasmussen, Schuyler told a collegue that he donned and doffed these masks to "avoid monotony" (qtd. in 'Editorial Statement" xviii). Such role playing also enabled him, like the protean narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, to create space for himself in which to address the complex issues facing black Americans.

Along these lines I would argue that Schuyler's best known novel, Black No More, which is devoted to the phenomena of role playing, masquerading, whiting and blacking up in response to America's racial phobias, may be more autobiographical than critics have realized. The similarities between the main character, Max Disher, and his creator are numerous and notable. Both are natural orators, writers, and travelers who settle in Harlem after stints in the military. Both are clever, likeable, and funny men who utilize pseudonyms and marry white women. One of the first to undergo the Black No More whitening process, Max changes his name to Matthew Fisher, infiltrates and later runs the Klan-like Knights of Nordica, garners wealth and power, and weds the daughter of the man who leads the Knights. Schuyler likewise went through several transformations. After serving in the army, he held various menial jobs, became part of the Harlem intellectual community, and turned his talents to journalism, writing for "an ideologically disparate array of publications in both black and white presses" that was unparalleled (Gates 31).

The mutable Schuyler has always defied the labels critics have assigned to him. Although he certainly was aware, as he wrote later, that "The Negro-Art Hokum" "was treason at a time when there was so much talk about African heritage' (Black and Conservative 157), Schuyler wrote it to force the African American intelligentsia to consider the consequences of pursuing a specifically black aesthetic in white racist America. He was also accused of betraying the race for his series of articles about slavery in Liberia commissioned by a white publisher and printed in a number of mainstream newspapers. However, the foreword to his subsequent novel about Americo-Liberian rapacity and its ironies puts an entirely different slant on Schuyler's loyalties: "If this novel can help arouse enlightened world opinion against the brutalizing of the native population in a Negro republic, perhaps the conscience of civilized people will stop similar atrocities in native lands ruled by proud white nations that boast of their superior culture" (Slaves Today 6).(11)

In the Black Empire serials, as in Black No More, race chauvinism and its consequences are major themes, as Schuyler himself remarked. Belsidus and the Black Internationale create chaos throughout the United States and trigger World War II in Europe by using terrorism and playing upon white people's religious and ethnic prejudices, not to liberate black people in America, Africa, and elsewhere but rather to revenge themselves on the white world and establish their own repressive regime. In Black No More, Max Disher becomes the perfect white supremacist because he has experienced racial intolerance firsthand. As he tells his friend Bunny,

"I've learned something on this job,

and that is that hatred and prejudice

always go over big. These people have

been raised on the Negro problem,

they're used to it, they're trained to

react to it. Why should I rack my brain

to hunt up something else when I can

use a dodge that's always delivered

the goods?" (147) Immediately following this comment, Max indicates that, despite his present position and white skin, he has not forgotten that he is playing a role, telling Bunny," |I know I'm a darky and I'm always on the alert' " (147). This ability to remember who he really is underneath the mask is the key to Max's survival in race-crazy America, an ability that Schuyler himself possessed during the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1950s, however, he apparently had forgotten Max's important insight. Unable or unwilling to stop playing his longest and last role--George Schuyler the anti-Communist--he became, as Gates aptly describes him, 'a gadfly trapped in amber" (43).

Notes

(1.) "The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World" ran in the Pittsburgh Courier from November 21, 1936 to July 3, 1937. "Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modem Africa" ran in the Courier from October 2, 1937 to April 16, 1938. (2.) "The Negro-Art Hokum" prompted Langston Hughes's even more famous response, "The Negro Writer and the Racial Mountain." Ann Rayson, Michael Peplow, and James A. Miller have disputed Robert Bone's and Arthur Davis's description of Schuyler as an "assimilationist." (3.) "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's s through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it f rom being tom asunder" (Du Bois 45). (4.) Although Gates does not mention it, The Souls of Black Folk is also a particularly appropriate place to begin because Schuyler concludes his attempt to read his own life with a revealing predicti that on one hand echoes Du Bois's diction and his prophecy that the problem of the twentieth century will be the color line, while on the other hand it implicitly denies Du Bois's assertion of American double-consciousness: " Relegating spurious racism to limbo, in our future America we need to stress the importance of the individual of whatever color. At best, race is a superstition. There will be no color war here if we will and work not to have one, although some kind of color lin there may always be, as there is elsewhere in the world. We do not need to share the wealth as much as we need to share our heritage so that all may proudly claim ownership in it. We need to strive to become one people in our resolution, determination, and achievement instead of two peoples, colored and whits" (Black and Conservative 352). (5.) Almost thirty years later and by then a confirmed red-baiter, Schuyler would nevertheless say the following about this militant essay: "In view of what has happened in the world since World War II, I think the most significant article I wrote during the entire period was in The Crisis for Augu 1938, on |The Rise of the Black Internationale.' It was the leading article in that issue and a leng one, which predicted much that has happened in the developing color conflict, including the worldwide liberation of the colored peoples from white rule, which I referred to as the White Intern This was exactly a year before the Nazi invasion of Poland. It was a factual summary and an analysis which led logically to to inevitability of World War II and the awakening of the nonwhite people everywhere" (Black and Conservative 248). Schuyler's emphasis in |The Rise of the Black internationale" on the role science and technology have played in Europe's domination of people of color and the role they can play in the liberation of these oppressed people also links the essay to the Black Empire novels, which are replete with descriptions of futuristic gadgets and new approache to farming, diet, and health care. (6.) The similarities between Cranfield in "Strange Valley" and Dr. Henry Belsidus in the Black Empi novels are striking, but the differences between them are notable, too. Although Cranfield demands strict discipline from his men, he is a much more attractive and less ruthless mastermind than Belsidus. (7.) The following are just two of many statements Slater makes expressing his ambivalence. Of his participation in the activities of Belsidus's organization, Slater says: "I confess that I was a lit taken aback. I had not bargained for anything like this. To be associated with cold-blooded murder was bad enough; to commit it was worse" (68). At the start of the second serial, Slater describes th Black Internationale as "an organization which in its rise to power had known no law save that of ex no mercy except to people of color, an organization so ruthless in attaining its object that ... sometimes even I shivered at the memories of the past" (145). (8.) Early in the first serial, Belsidus tells Slater, " "I have dedicated my life ... to destroying supremacy. My ideal and objective is very frankly to cast down the Caucasians and elevate the colored people in their places. I plan to do this by every means within my power. I intend to stop a nothing, .. whether right or wrong. Right is success. Wrong is failure. I will not fail because I am ruthless' " (10). Belsidus's iron resolve and inhuman methods later cause Slater to describe him as "a cold, cruel, fanatically determined machine" (39). (9.) Although Gates describes Belsidus as a "fascist superman," he makes no further comment about the methods the Black Internationale uses to achieve its goals--e.g., mass hypnosis through drugs and staged spectacles, germ warfare, euthanasia--or their implications. In contrast, Williams discusses the "grimmer side" of the serials, declaring that "Dr. Belsidus, in the final analysis, is a fascist"; however, in the rest of his statement (which he does not substantiate), Williams goes on to assert that the goals of the leader of the Black internationale "are established as moral ones" (xiv). Hill and Rasmussen view Belsidus's methods as consistent with those of other successful schemers in Schuyler's Courier fiction and with the revenge fantasies against white oppression that Schuyler occasionally included in his Courier editorials and columns. The editors' analysis of what might be called to Black Internationale's crimes against humanity at times evinces a rather startling detachment. For example, of Belsidus's successful effort to cripple Great Britain's infras by luring 15,000 civilian "Master Technicians" to a London production of the Congo Ballet and gassing them to death, Hill and Rasmussen remark, "What exquisite irony that a product of superior black chemistry should be used to wipe out England's finest technicians as they savor a tranquil African ballet!" ("Afterword" 304). (10.) John Reilly reads Schuyler's Black No More as a "black and-utopia" that anticipates William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer. (11.) What seems implicit in this passage is that Schuyler was aware that George Putnam would never have sent him to a European colony to report on the treatment of the indigenous people there, nor presumably would Schuyler as a black journalist have been granted entry into, much less mobility within, one of these colonies.

Works Cited

Bone, Roberta. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1958. Cited Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower. Washington: Howard UP, 1974. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Signet, 1969. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "A Fragmented Man: George Schuyler and the Claims of Race." New York Times Book Review 20 Sept. 1992: 31+. Hill, Robert A., and R. Kent Rasmussen. "Afterword. " Black Empire 259-323. --. "Editorial Statement." Black Empire xvii-xx. Miller, James A. "Foreword." Schuyler, Black 1-12. Peplow, Michael W. George S. Schuyler. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Rayson, Ann. "George Schuyler: Paradox Among |Assimilationist' Writers." Black American Literature Forum 12 (1978):102-06. Reilly, John M. |The Black Anti-Utopia." Black American Literature Forum 12 (1978):107-09. Schuyler, George S. Black and Conservative. New Rochelle: Arlington, 1966. --. Black Empire. Ed. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. --. Black No More. 1931. College Park: McGrath, 1969. --. The Negro-Art Hokum." Nation 6 June 1926: 662-63. --. The Rise of the Black Internationale." Black Empire 328-36. --. Slaves Today. 1931. College Park: McGrath, 1969. --. "Strange Valley." Pittsburgh Courier 18 Aug.-10 Nov. 1934. Williams, John A. "Foreword." Black Empire ix-xv. Young, James O. Black Writers of the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1973.

George S. Schuyler Black Empire. Ed. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. 348 pp. $24.95 hardcover; $14.95 paperback. Reviewed by John C. Gruesser Kean College