Black in Time

John Jakes Black in Time (1970)
I was a bit underwhelmed by Jakes' Mask of Chaos from the same year, but the promise of the cover - not to mention the creaking and possibly just a little bit crass pun of the title - made this one impossible to resist. It's the American future - meaning 1977 in this case - and we have time travel as an educational resource. Unfortunately though, one of those black militants has gone back in time to change the past so as to get rid of all white people and make Earth a black planet - just like one of those evil liberals behind the new Star Wars movies would probably appreciate; and worse, some right wing televangelist nutjob has also gone back in time hoping to change history and make it a white Christian planet; and thus does chaos ensue.

It probably doesn't need stating that this could quite easily have gone horribly wrong, and yet Jakes just about gets away with it, albeit at the expense of a coherent story. Online dunderheads have dismissed the novel as racist seemingly by application of the same logic which prompted my fifteen-year old overly literal stepson to announce that the television show Black-ish is racist, apparently because the word black appears in the title. Black in Time deals with race, obviously, and while it's certainly guilty of stereotyping, the stereotyping is consistent with the sort of broad brushstrokes you should probably expect from this kind of novel - basically a Richard Allen style pulp thriller with time travel.

Harold felt unwashed, hot around the eyeballs, queasy in the stomach. The buckets of Smackin-Good Chikkin from the Robt. E. Lee Chik-ateria eventually fetched in by Little Che did nothing to soothe his condition. In fact they worsened it. The stink of the greasy batter raped his sensibilities. The notion of eating fried chicken—or peanut butter, vichysoisse, anything—just prior to maybe toppling civilisation as they knew it struck him as perverse and frightful.

Aside from having been written by a white dude, Black in Time is a blaxploitation novel, more or less, at least by virtue of Jomo, our time travelling black power activist loosely based on Huey Newton and pals. Jomo isn't so much a bad guy as someone who needs to step back and think about what he's doing, and while he's a composite of numerous easily identified cliches, Jakes takes great care to account for why he's angry, and why he has every right to be angry, so he's never an entirely unsympathetic character; and for the record, he doesn't refer to anyone as jive turkey anywhere in the book. Jomo's white supremacist nemesis is, on the other hand, shown to be an unreasonable character, a believable evil presence without the need for either cackling or twirling of moustaches. These extremes are balanced out by Harold, our main character, whom it should be noted is 1) the lead in a mainstream seventies science-fiction novel published a mere six years since the abolition of segregation in America, and 2) a black man written without any of the stereotyping to which Jomo is subject.

Jakes eventually made his reputation with historical novels set during the American civil war, so his attention to detail is impressive and convincing despite the demands of the form. On the other hand, the time travel aspect is a bit of a mess and makes for an occasionally bewildering and even silly progression of narrative elements, but not so much as to muddy the message or the impact of the message. Black in Time may be hokey and dated, but I don't see the alleged racism, casual or otherwise. It's far from being a classic, but considering what it tried to say and when it tried to say it, it's anything but run of the mill.