Eye for an Eye

SONS OF DARKNESS, SONS OF LIGHT by John A. Williams. 279 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

Black writers telling it like it is have found no substitute for straight-out autobiography. No novel by James Baldwin can match the fervid personal essays in his The Fire Next Time. What black fiction can begin to compare with The Autobiography of Malcolm X or even Claude Brown's somewhat overrated Manchild in the Promised Land? The fire a black autobiographer kindles burns the reader. The fire a black novelist sets has a way of burning himself --blowing his cool, singeing his prose style and casting clouds of smoke over his intentions.

Among the black novelists now writing, though, John A. Williams has come as close as any to putting into fictional terms the experience of being black in America. Williams' secret: his characters are human first, black second. In The Man Who Cried I Am, for instance, the problem of surviving as an artist was treated as carefully as the problem of surviving as a black. Williams' protagonist was a writer who happened to be a black as much as he was a black who happened to be a writer.

Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is less clearly conceived, but it is free of reverse stereotypes. It vibrates to the grievances of a man rather than a people. Eugene Browning, Columbia graduate, ex-political-science professor and middle-class black, has put in half a lifetime being reasonable. As the story opens in 1973, he is No. 2 man in a moderate civil rights organization named the Institute for Racial Justice. But when a New York policeman shoots an unarmed 16-year-old black boy, all the reasonableness runs out of Browning, not so much in anger as in a final weariness.

With resignation rather than fury, he decides to try "a wee bit of Mao" and hires a professional killer to assassinate the killer-policeman. It is as if nothing less than a brutal act of violence will keep him awake--as if, in fact, all Americans, both black and white, are frozen in various sleepwalking postures from which only further atrocity can hope to rouse them.

Williams is as devastating on hypocritical blacks as on complacent whites. While Browning tours the country fund raising for his organization, Williams acid-etches his caricatures: the moneyed Ebony set, keeping up with the black Joneses; solemn costume wearers, going "the African route"; showbiz swingers, balling their way to integration-by-orgy; militants with the Che Guevara slogans and a handy barracks in the California hills.

By Williams' account, all suffer from role fatigue--the sort of exhaustion afflicting actors in a play that has run too long. One of the whites says: "I think I am very tired of being a Jew." Williams, clearly, is very tired of being a black. He seems to assume that his characters, whether they know it or not, are stifled as much by the kind of ennui that immobilizes men trapped in situations they cannot control as by the terror of their predicament.

Attended by various double-dealing ironies. Browning's subsidized assassination does get things moving. Its culmination: a reparations ultimatum from blacks, whose demands include, for the head of every black family in America, ten acres of land, a car and $5,000. But neither an eye for an eye nor chattels for those who have been chattels can restore the kind of draining loss Williams has in mind. He knows and shows that nothing can replace the sheer waste of human spirit squandered in inventing, then half resolving, life's most superfluous problem: race. This knowledge, atoning for a clumsy and rather tentative plot, sets him apart from most other black novelists. He has a feel not merely for polemics but for tragedy.

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