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  Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

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  Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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  AND THEN WE HEARD THE THUNDER

  BY

  JOHN OLIVER KILLENS

  “AND THEN WE SAW THE LIGHTNING, and that was the guns. And then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns. And then we heard the rain falling and that was the drops of blood falling. And when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”—HARRIET TUBMAN, ex-slave, abolitionist, Union Scout, and Freedom Fighter (describing a battle of the Civil War which she witnessed)

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Contents

  TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

  DEDICATION 6

  INTRODUCTION 7

  PART I—THE PLANTING SEASON 15

  CHAPTER I 15

  CHAPTER 2 18

  CHAPTER 3 33

  CHAPTER 4 44

  CHAPTER 5 56

  CHAPTER 6 60

  CHAPTER 7 71

  CHAPTER 8 76

  CHAPTER 9 89

  CHAPTER 10 101

  CHAPTER 11 113

  CHAPTER 12 121

  CHAPTER 13 128

  CHAPTER 14 140

  CHAPTER 15 144

  CHAPTER 16 152

  CHAPTER 17 162

  CHAPTER 18 165

  PART II—CULTIVATION 170

  CHAPTER 1 170

  CHAPTER 2 183

  PART III—LIGHTNING—THUNDER—RAINFALL 204

  CHAPTER 1 204

  CHAPTER 2 206

  CHAPTER 3 226

  CHAPTER 4 236

  CHAPTER 5 252

  CHAPTER 6 266

  PART IV—THE CROP 277

  CHAPTER I 277

  CHAPTER 2 300

  CHAPTER 3 327

  CHAPTER 4 333

  CHAPTER 5 347

  CHAPTER 6 360

  APPENDIX—SELECTED REVIEWS 383

  REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 392

  DEDICATION

  TO MY MOTHER

  AND TO

  HARRIET TUBMAN, who stands head

  and shoulders above most Americans

  in my private Hall of Fame,

  and to

  MY BUDDIES, fallen and standing,

  and to

  CHUCK AND BARBARA and to all

  young people everywhere.

  May they never hear the man-made thunder,

  nor see the terrible lightning

  INTRODUCTION

  “How do you live in a white man’s world? Do you live on your knees—do you live with your shoulders bent and your hat in your hand? Or do you live like a man is supposed to live—with your head straight up?” Joe Youngblood poses these questions in John Oliver Killens’s first novel Youngblood (1954). In a review of that novel (The New York Herald Tribune, July 11, 1954), novelist Ann Petry quoted those lines and drew a perceptive conclusion: “This thematic question pervades the thinking, controls the action, dominates the conversation of all the characters—whether they be black or white.”

  The theme of the black man’s struggle for dignity within a racist society is one that has, at the very least, influenced the work of black novelists from the time of William Welles Brown—author of the first novel published by an Afro-American, Clotel, or The President’s Daughter, which was printed initially in London in 1853. Few novelists, however, have pursued the issue throughout their careers with as much determination and passion as John Killens. Therefore, Miss Petry’s comments about Youngblood have proven not only accurate but prophetic.

  Youngblood is a graphic, almost documentary tale of a black family struggling to survive in a racist, backwoods Georgia town. The story records the experiences of two generations of the Youngblood family. The author vividly portrays the grim reality of Jim Crow in the South. The brutal victimization of the Youngbloods and other blacks is counterpointed by the more optimistic portrayal of blacks’ emerging awareness that resistance and confrontation are necessary despite the mortal risks involved. Still, Killens tended, as do many first novelists, to rely too heavily on the Manichaean principle of tension between good and evil for dramatic effect. From a structural standpoint, Killens diminished the oversimplified portraits of villainous whites and virtuous blacks by including the more subtly drawn character of Oscar Jefferson, a poor white farmer who gradually aligns himself with the Youngbloods. It is through Jefferson’s agonizing psychic transformation that the novel achieves its greatest sense of moral depth and complexity.

  Eight years after his first novel, John Killens published And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962). During the interim, he occupied himself with various pursuits, including writing for television and the movies. (Among his credits was the script for the highly praised 1959 film, Odds Against Tomorrow.) This hiatus from the rigors of fiction writing seemed to have worked to Killens’s advantage. His second novel reflected a ripening of his talent and an expanded concept of the novel form. Although only slightly less insistently focused on the tragedy and irony of America’s racial predicament, his second book displayed a breadth of thematic complexity and of setting that made Youngblood appear provincial.

  Soon after the publication of Youngblood, Killens’s work attracted criticism as “race” fiction that advocated a “separatist” ideology. When his second novel appeared, those judgments grew more insistent. But a close reading of Youngblood makes such reactions seem misdirected, even paranoiac. The novel has its faults, but these are weaknesses arising from the basic nature of its form. If published today, it would likely be categorized as a family saga—a naturalistic tale of one family’s struggle to escape societal oppression. It is no more a race novel than Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) or any of the numerous fictional sagas that document the horrors of the Holocaust. Like most of these novels, it suffers from excessive detail, repetition, stereotypical characters, and occasional sentimentality—weaknesses that generally result from an authors’ glove-tight identification with the predicament of the group portrayed. Still, novels like Youngblood provide a passionately felt and literally detailed picture of a specific place and time. And in his first novel Killens created an indelible montage of the cruelty and injustice of black life in the Jim Crow South.

  Because And Then We Heard the Thunder is also a long, sprawling, copiously peopled novel, it is not surprising that it has some of the same weaknesses as its predecessor. Set during World War II and focused on life in a black military company in basic training and on the battlefields of the South Pacific, it is full of gritty but extravagant detail and dialogue from barracks and foxholes. Thinly drawn characters abound and the repetitive manner Killens uses to drive home his anti-segregationist, anti-war theme is often distracting.

  Nonetheless, the book exhibits a marked extension of Killens’s conc
eption of the novel form. It shows the beginning of a stylistic stretching-out that would continue throughout his writing career. The story’s setting also shows a fundamental conceptual enlargement. Instead of the rural southern background that had become commonplace for black fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, Killens chose a much larger canvas. The story begins in New York City, moves to a basic training camp in Georgia, and then on to the South Pacific campaign. It ends in Australia at the close of the war. This variegated background provides opportunity for wider narrative sweep and for comparisons of regional attitudes that bear on the novel’s basic themes. Killens makes excellent use of this opportunity in his depiction of both the Filipinos’ and Australians’ reactions to black soldiers before and after they were exposed to the racist propaganda of white American soldiers.

  Although the novel’s hero, Solly Saunders, must contend with the same problem that plagued the Youngbloods (“Do you live like a man is supposed to live—with your head straight up?”), Killens has greatly extended the arena in which the protagonist grapples with his dilemma. In one sense, the Youngbloods’ predicament was starkly simple: The issue was survival, attempting to salvage some scrap of dignity from an overtly brutal and hostile environment in which their adversaries were dead set on either destroying them or keeping them in their place. Solly Saunders’s conundrum springs from the same racist societal distortions but is of an entirely different order.

  Solly is an exceptionally talented and intelligent black man—an employee of the New York City government with two years of law school. He is “handsome” and “articulate,” which according to his bride Millie, “makes it much easier for him to be accepted in their world.” Solly’s problem emerges as one of the central themes in the novel: Does the spiritual cost of being accepted in their world outweigh the material benefits? Solly’s ambivalence propels the narrative direction and plot in this story. “He wanted to be accepted in the world of white folks,” Killens writes of Solly, “but wanted nobody to catch him working at it.”

  This shift in the fundamental predicament of Killens’s protagonist is due, in part, to the eight-year gap between the publication of the two novels. When Killens’s first novel was published in 1954 (the year the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision and ignited the Civil Rights movement), the proscriptions of Jim Crow America were not being opposed on a mass level. Despite black America’s growing disenchantment, resistance to segregation was piecemeal. Attempts to alter the status quo were largely fought on an individual basis or through legal maneuvers directed by organizations like the NAACP. White America seemed deaf to complaints about the oppression of blacks, and social reform movements of any kind were rare. Indeed, there was sufficient reason for social critics to label this the “Silent Generation.” But the seeds for the more volatile sixties were being planted. Shortly after the publication of Youngblood, Rosa Parks’ confrontation with a Montgomery, Alabama, bus driver over the segregated seating policy of the bus company triggered a boycott that would transform black disenchantment into a mass protest movement. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s emergence as a national leader during the boycott and the continued push for school desegregation set in motion a series of events that made the sixties one of the most turbulent decades in American history.

  By the time And Then We Heard the Thunder was published in 1962, America’s black consciousness had been raised to a level that had been unimaginable a decade earlier. One result of that heightened awareness was the serious consideration of whether being completely integrated into the fabric of American society was the appropriate goal for blacks. Many leaders questioned the wisdom of joining a “sinking ship.” Black nationalism was becoming a significant force. Blacks looked at Africa and other Third World countries as models for the newly emerging Afro-American nation.

  The influence of this radical alteration of the main current of Afro-American thinking is clearly seen in the different attitudinal frameworks from which the protagonists of Killens’s two early novels regard their environments. Although And Then We Heard the Thunder is set in the forties, its hero Solly Saunders is undoubtedly a character who functions with the awareness of a black consciousness that emerged in the sixties. It is an odd but intriguing combination of historical setting and an advanced sentient perspective—less extreme, certainly, but akin to placing a character with the racial perspective of Malcolm X in the fictional landscape of the antebellum South. This synthesis yields a novel that is far more advanced and complex than its predecessor.

  Solly has moved beyond the fundamental consideration of racial injustice that preoccupied the Youngbloods. He is not merely concerned with whether one can “live with his head straight up”—that is an established priority. Solly must decide how to stand up, live with dignity, and avoid becoming a pawn used by whites to manipulate and control other blacks. He has moved from the preoccupation with individual survival that characterized the Youngbloods’ struggle to a racial consciousness that is marked by an overriding concern for black unity.

  Solly ponders the conflict between his sense of being an American (with its attendant emphasis on personal gain) and his awareness that such gain may well place him in direct opposition to the men in his all-black company. When he first enters the army, although he resents having been pulled away from his wife and what appears to be a promising career, he argues with fellow recruits who feel that the black man’s fight is with white America, not with the Germans or the Japanese. Solly insists that the fight against Hitler is a “Democratic War.” Early in the novel he says:

  “This is our country as much as anybody else’s. You want the same rights and privileges of every other American, don’t you? All right then. When these rights are jeopardized, you have to fight just like everybody else.”

  Solly’s insistent patriotism and idealism are eroded. He is forced into a situation where he must decide between allegiance to the army or his friends. He is hand-picked to be the company clerk after being praised for his “unusual qualifications for a Negro” and subsequently is used to convince other black soldiers to accept inferior treatment. When his closest friend, Bookworm, is beaten viciously by an MP, Solly persuades him not to go after the white soldier with a gun. Later he doubts both his good sense and the rightness of his position. (“You,” he thinks to himself, “are the new-styled, slicked-up Uncle Tom.”) When he is severely beaten and humiliated by local police and a high-ranking army officer outside the Georgia basic training camp, Solly’s transformation is nearly completed. It is only the intrusion of orders for his company to be shipped to the South Pacific that forestalls his complete revolt against the army hierarchy.

  Solly’s internal struggle with the conflict between his perception of himself as a black man and as an American is the major theme of the novel. Killens clearly expresses his sentiments about this central issue in the final episode where black soldiers take up arms and engage in a bloody battle with white soldiers. Critic Addison Gayle, Jr., who has written perceptively about Killens’s work, presents a lucid analysis of this point in The Way of the New World—The Black Novel in America (1975):

  “Whatever happened to Saunders happened to him because he was black: position as Company Clerk, condescending respect from fellow officers, promotion to sergeant, exclusion from canteens and dance halls, and assaults upon his person by whites. Worse things did not happen to him as they did to others, only because of circumstances. Therefore, the war in which he enlists at the end of the novel, both metaphorically and actually, is not a personal but a collective one, and what is demanded of each warrior is not only valor and courage, but love and respect for one another. These are the qualities demanded by Killens of one black man for another, and the primary characteristic of comrades-in-arms is love for each other. It is a first principle for the author. Men may be designated by race, by the uniforms they wear, by their status in a platoon, company or battalion. Black men may even be designated by the color of their skin; yet, to be a blac
k man means to be cognizant of one’s past, to opt for the collective ‘we’ over the individual ‘I’ and to love each black man as one loves himself.”

  Killens’s feelings about the issue of black unity is indicated by his handling of the major theme in And Then We Heard the Thunder and in essays collected in Black Man’s Burden (1965). His stand made his work central to the early seventies debate over a “Black Aesthetic.” The proponents of this new aesthetic—most notably the late Hoyt Fuller (formerly editor of the Johnson Publications’ Black World), poet Don L. Lee, Amiri Baraka and Addison Gayle, reacted to the weight given to form and technique as opposed to content in the evaluation of art. A reaction against art for art’s sake and the ivory tower aesthetics of the literacy establishment, the movement proposed that since, as Baraka wrote, “All art is politics,” black art, to be useful and viable, should reflect the positive black images growing out of the new black awareness. In an afterword to his The Way of the New World, Gayle suggested a criterion for assaying black art, and for that matter, any art: “How much better has the work of art made the life of a single human being upon this planet, and how functional has been the work of art in moving us toward the moment when an ars poetica is possible for all.”

  Few would argue the merits of this criterion as it relates to the spirit and intent of a work of art. But a problem arises when one tries to apply this idea as an aesthetic principle for literature. First, the judgment of whether a book has improved anyone’s life is both subjective and temporal. It is a critical appraisal that must emanate from the personal experiences and biases that color a particular critic’s perception. Moreover, any such appraisal is made from the limited perspective of a particular historical era and specific social context. It is open to the counter-criticism of subsequent generations. To regard any judgment of the relevancy of the spirit of a work of art as objective and timeless would, besides suggesting some belief in soothsaying, assume a kind of homogenized critical faculty or tyranny of ideas which the proponents of the new aesthetic would surely reject if applied to their own work.