THE MINISTER PRIMARILY

This previously unpublished novel by a late, venerated Black novelist is a free-wheeling satire of late-20th-century racial politics in both post-colonial Africa and post–civil rights America.

Killens (1916-1987) was in his crowded lifetime a World War II soldier, activist, mentor, teacher, screenwriter, polemicist, and novelist. One of his most notorious works was The Cotillion (1971), which trenchantly lampooned the upper reaches of the African American middle class, and that side of Killens comes through even more boisterously in this posthumous novel. Its protagonist is James Jay Leander Johnson, an itinerant musician from the Deep South whose restless wanderings have led him to the mythical African country of Guanaya, where he seeks cultural communion with “the Motherland.” Meanwhile, Guanaya’s stature as “the most insignificant of nations” is stunningly transformed by its discovery of cobanium, “a radioactive metallic element five hundred times more powerful and effective than uranium.” The country’s charismatic prime minister, Jaja Olivamaki, is being supplicated by the American government to negotiate an alliance over this earth-shaking discovery. But neither he nor his cabinet trust the U.S. to have their country’s best interests at heart. Which is where Jimmy Jay Johnson, performing folk music throughout Guanaya, comes in. Tall-and-handsome Jimmy Jay looks so much like the tall-and-handsome P.M. that he is recruited to put on a false beard and pretend to be Olivamaki on a high-profile diplomatic visit to America. Though set sometime in the 1980s, Killens’ novel comes across as a compendium of social and political phenomena in American race relations, whether it’s Pan-Africanism, the Ku Klux Klan, or, of course, the Black upper middle class. Most if not all are treated with scathing irreverence and acerbic wit. At times, the shakiest element in Killens’ situation comedy is the extent to which Johnson’s masquerade holds up as his iteration of the African leader becomes something of a folk hero among Black Americans and a target for White racists. And there are times when the plot gallops ahead of Killens’ ability to control it. But even at its most unruly, the go-for-broke narrative style grows on you, and the author himself occasionally materializes in a walk-on role, lending the book a metafictional feel.

An audacious final testament of an underappreciated craftsman.