ALL YOUR RACIAL PROBLEMS WILL SOON END

A portrait of the novelist as a young artist.

Before he became an award-winning fiction writer, Johnson was a professional gag cartoonist and was so well respected at the trade that he hosted a how-to-draw TV series for a PBS station. This anthology is a compilation of both previously anthologized drawings and some never before included in book form. It doubles as both gallery and memoir, as the chronologically arranged drawings (beginning with a 1965 “pictorial resume” from his senior year at Evanston High School in Illinois) are interspersed with passages by the author describing his growth from a childhood so obsessed with drawing pictures on a home blackboard that “my knees and the kitchen floor were covered with layers of chalk” to contributing cartoons first to his college newspaper at Southern Illinois University and eventually to the Chicago Tribune and to gaining the attention of John H. Johnson, legendary publisher of such Black-oriented magazines as Ebony, Jet, and Negro Digest (later Black World). The cartoons are blunt, in-your-face, and, often, still funny-and-fresh lampoons of racial mores and manners. The earlier ones from the late 1960s through early ’70s reflect the post–civil rights era militancy and conflicts with the police. In one, one Black man says to another, “You’d be surprised how many people mistake me for [Black Power advocate] H. Rap Brown” as they’re walking down a city street while, just behind them, a cordon of armed-and-uniformed Whites make their way toward them. In another, two Black men are in a car pulled over by a White motorcycle cop as one says to the other, “Look moderate.” In another, one freshly minted Black college graduate says to another, “Well, I guess now I’ll see if Standard Oil or the Bank of America needs a consultant with a degree in Black History.” For those with knowledge or memories of that latter topic, these crafty single-panel drawings resonate with rueful nostalgia, roughhousing wit, and, as noted earlier, some eerie convergences with present-day turmoil. Now, as then, Johnson’s efforts here are intended to soothe with drollness as much as sting with recognition. “Like the best haiku,” he writes, “where a thought or feeling is perfectly expressed in just a few lines and is instantly understood, a well-done cartoon can often lead to an epiphany or ‘Aha!’ moment of laughter and sudden insight.”

An illuminating, warmhearted souvenir of a tumultuous era.