Another knockout book from Joe Nazel. Black Uprising is a sort of sequel to 1975's Death for Hire, in that it brings back Spider Armstrong. A character who was clearly close to Nazel's heart, and of all of his protagonists is the one that likely offers the greatest insight into Nazel himself. Spider being an overworked, underappreciated black journalist, who driven by a sense of racial injustice, sleeps little and survives on an almost superhuman amount of coffee, cigarettes and alcohol. Mirroring Nazel's own workaholic lifestyle, and relationship with 'black experience' publishers Holloway House.
Whereas Death for Hire was set in the LA ghetto and concerned street level, black criminality, Black Uprising drops Spider into a small, white dominated Alabama town. There relations between blacks and whites reach boiling point when Spider attempts to bring to justice the three white men who murdered his black activist buddy Eddie Myers. Meanwhile two of the killers try to divert attention from themselves by framing a black farmhand for the rape and murder of his employer's wife, who was in fact blackmailing the farmhand into sex by threatening to cry rape.
Where Black Uprising differs from its predecessor is that Spider is front and centre of the action, and placed in jeopardy throughout, as opposed to Death for Hire where he was kept at arm's length from the drama until the very end. Spider is an unusual hero, an introvert, socially awkward, a man of few words, who says little but thinks allot. That's not to say that Spider doesn't have an eye for the ladies, getting inappropriately lustful over Eddie's sister Lula Mae, at Eddie's rain drenched funeral "Spider could not help but stare open mouthed at the protruding nipples of her ample breasts that stained against the wet cotton". The titillation aspects of Black Uprising being otherwise provided by the mixed combo action between the farmhand and the white wife, who gets her kicks thinking of her husband's reaction to the infidelity and the race angle "that's what made each moment she spent with the black brute all the more pleasant". I'd previously thought that female characters were Nazel's weak spot, but Lula Mae is the most notably emancipated woman I've encountered in his work so far. Lula Mae defying expectations, and the older generation, by announcing her attention to take over her brother's newspaper business. Ignoring her relative's complaint "You bes' to be thinking 'bout getting you a husband and havin' you some chillun".
Black Uprising is a book with so much to say about masculine pride, the consequences of heroism, the pros and cons of turning the other cheek, the pros and cons of resorting to violence, the North's meddling in Southern Affairs, the South's hostility towards outsiders. Nazel's writing gets in every character's face, and into their heads. No two characters think alike when it comes to race in this book. In Black Uprising you'll encounter blacks who hate whites, whites who hate blacks. Blacks who disliked 1960s liberals for antagonising southern crackers by bringing an end to segregation. Whites who are irredeemably racist, whites who are fundamentally decent but are afraid to stand up to the rabble-rousers. No voice goes unheard here, Black Uprising offers up an entire smorgasbord of how America felt about race following the civil rights era.
At the risk of exposing my own ignorance, I'd never considered that there were African-Americans who weren't on board with equal rights and integration back in the 1960s. In Black Uprising though, we hear from black characters who resented northern do-gooders coming in and telling them they needed equal rights and racially mixed schools. Then once the civil rights people got there way, irresponsibly left poor southern blacks to face the wrath and retaliation of racist whites. When films and books depict racial integration in southern schools, it's usually the white students who are depicted as the obstructive or resentful ones. Whereas Black Uprising flips that idea on its head, and we learn the initial protagonist Eddie Myers was against attending a mixed school due to his hatred of the white boys and girls he suddenly had to share school space with. "He didn't care about voting rights. He did not care about integration. He was happy in his 'colored' school" reflects Myers.
In a book filled with many important issues, there could have been a tendency to just stand around and soapbox here, but Nazel never lets his foot off the pedal. Black Uprising is fast-paced and tense, a pulpy cocktail of rape, bloodshed and race hate where the violence escalates and truth and justice threatens to be swept aside. Black Uprising has no easy answers to America's racial problems, but it is an incredible book.
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