WaPo | Sam Greenlee was underappreciated, disgruntled, professionally disemboweled and perpetually agitated.
His sudden death at the age of 83
offers opportunity for reflection on a man trapped in the suspended
animation of one great work that briefly elevated, then haunted, him
into his last days. An apprehensive and highly educated foreign service
officer who abruptly quit the business of American global dominance in
anguished pursuit of a lifetime in written word, Greenlee spawned like a
lost child of Ralph Ellison.
He will not be forgotten, but he will also be remembered in the
starting lineup of a tortured lineage of creative black literary minds
way ahead of their time. From George Schulyer (Black Empire) to Ellison (Invisible Man) to Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go), hard shift to Greenlee and then John Edgar Wideman (Philadelphia Fire), to Brent Wade (the Company Man genius who just … went missing) and now Todd Craig (Tor’cha),
they and others are temporary flashes of a fire of brilliant black
men’s acrimony shared through risky, genre-bending books.
For Greenlee, risky was an understatement. To write, screenplay and
release a film adaptation of a novel deconstructing the global white
supremacy pyramid scheme was dangerous at that time, and he invited his
own ostracism from the social grid. Few in this day and age of grainy,
elevator-security-camera fight videos, overpriced designer headphones
and LeBron James Android apps will celebrate the name, much less recall
it. But Greenlee was the godfather of black rage long before The Boondocks’ creator, Aaron McGruder, became his stylish stepson—merely channeling select nuggets of Greenlee’s seminal The Spook Who Sat by the Door because, against the visceral boom bap and fading Africa emblems of Generation X, it was cool like that.
There were those of us who spoke of Spook as if speaking in a
special, uniquely branded tongue of black revolutionary cryptography.
You did not understand the rugged totality of modern black existence
unless you were schooled in it, and suddenly we were all aspiring Dan
Freemans in training. Greenlee’s semiautobiographical tour de force
managed to tap into dark, revenge-filled fantasies of bold, brainy
brothers outwitting The Man.
Mr. Greenlee joined the U.S. Information Agency in 1957 and was among
the its first black officials to serve overseas. He was stationed in
Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia and Greece before quitting in 1965 to focus on
writing.
In his novel, Mr. Greenlee drew on his work with USIA
but transformed the central character in “The Spook Who Sat by the
Door,” Dan Freeman, into a black CIA officer who quits the spy agency in
disgust. Freeman returns to his native Chicago, where he puts his CIA
training to use by organizing street gangs into a paramilitary black
revolutionary movement that spreads nationwide.
“My experiences
were identical to those of Freeman in the CIA,” Mr. Greenlee told The
Washington Post in 1973. “Everything in that book is an actual quote. If
it wasn’t said to me, I overheard it.”
Mr. Greenlee’s novel was
first published in England in 1969, after, he said, it was rejected by
dozens of mainstream publishers in the United States.
