A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich

views updated

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Ihe Harlem section of New York City in the early 1970s; published 1973.

SYNOPSIS

An African American teenager is drawn to use heroin because of the pressures of being black and living in poverty in urban United States.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Noxel in Focus

For More Information

Alice Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but grew up in the racially segregated Harlem district of New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. By the early 1970s, when Childress’s novel takes place, the civil rights movement had improved the political situation of African Americans. Living conditions, however, remained just as squalid in Harlem and other urban areas of the United States as they had been before the movement. Furthermore, opportunities for African Americans were still severely limited by racism. Some of the era’s young people, as shown in A Hero Ain’t Nothin but a Sandwich, escaped from its harsh pressures by turning to heroin.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Urban blacks in the early 1970s

The gains made by African Americans as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s lay mostly in the realm of their status as citizens. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 legally abolished segregation and discrimination, but “legal equality in principle did not make for justice in practice” (Pinkney, p. 62). Despite the victories of the civil rights movement, many blacks still resided in segregated areas with a far lower standard of living and more limited life options than whites.

Urban blacks felt this especially keenly. In the early 1970s, nearly half of black America lived in segregated city ghettos in dangerous, rundown buildings with constantly interrupted water and heating services. Schools had few materials, including textbooks, and often there was not even enough room for students to sit. Throughout black urban areas the infant mortality rate was twice as high as for white infants. Jobs were scarce and often menial, a situation that, combined with the substandard housing, contributed to the breakup of the black family unit. However, this type of breakup was far from always the case. In fact, the majority of black families in the 1970s included both a husband and a wife.

The civil rights movement and Black Power

The civil rights movement awakened the political consciousness of urban blacks. “It’s nation time!” Nigeria Greene, the novel’s schoolteacher, says repeatedly to anyone who will listen. In real life, the idea of black nationhood took many forms and meant many different things to urban blacks of the early 1970s. One aspect of “nation” was the concept of Black Power, that is, self-empowerment achieved by blacks taking control of civil rights organizations as well as other elements in their lives. Some Black Power advocates demanded a separate nation within the United States, while others encouraged blacks to keep their money within their own community by shopping only at black-owned businesses. Still other Black Power champions attempted socialistic collectives, whose black resident members would pool both their resources and their wealth.

In keeping with the concept of Black Power, black communities began to demand more control over their institutions, such as local schools and police departments. Their efforts were often met with great resistance. One Harlem teacher wrote in his diary of a rift that developed between black parents and the Board of Education in the selection of a new principal for a predominantly black school:

The parents are preparing for a long fight to get the [black] acting principal appointed principal … the Board will react in its customary manner. It will sit on this problem, wait until the parents grow weary, and then act against them. The Board can wait. It is never in a hurry to do anything in this area.
(Raskins, pp. 25, 28)

THE CONCEPT OF BLACK POWER

Civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael, who is credited with coining the term “Black Power” at a rally in Mississippi, explained the rationale behind the slogan: “The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks” (Carmichael in Pinkney, p. 64).

Another reason for the growth of the Black Power movement was a suspicion that the civil rights movement, which called for integration with whites, was increasingly shutting out working-class blacks. Middle-class blacks were accused of not caring about the liberation of all African Americans, but only about liberation insofar as it affected their status and acceptance by whites. In the novel, Nigeria Greene, a middle-class black, feels torn between the urge to make a better life for himself by integrating into white culture, and the temptation to join the Black Power call for separating from white culture and any “help” it offers. He attends a benefit sponsored by middle-class blacks and whites:

We so-called “high achievers”—doctors, lawyers, teachers … most of us now makin a buck offa either “puttin down the nigga” or “upliftin the nigga” on some specially “funded” gigs … we’re the upper strata welfare recipients, dig? … drinkin our mash outta long-stem champagne glasses… we have turned into the most insensitive bunch you’ll find anywhere west of hell.
(Childress, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p. 98)

Nigeria’s dilemma of feeling as if he must abandon his black roots to reap the rewards of integration into a higher economic strata pricked the conscience of many upwardly mobile blacks.

Conspiracy to quell Black Power with heroin?

Charles Rangel, a Harlem congressman in the early 1970s, said of his district, “Walk along any street uptown and you’ll see Harlem’s great addict army—slumped over in doorways, stumbling along in a trance, nodding in front of bars, standing in the cold without enough clothes on” (Rangel in Kunnes, p. 83). Officials and residents of Harlem and other slum areas across the country sought to combat heroin use by trying to identify the source of it. Did the problem lie in the individual weakness of every user? Was society’s racism causing users to quit on life and nod away until they died? Or did the trouble start with the drug dealers, the ones who, as Ben-jie’s stepfather says, “livin offa Benjie’s veins, while they ride round in limousines” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p. 126)? Many believed that poverty, racism, and the sense of alienation they produced made people likely addicts. Some suggested a more sinister cause of the heroin epidemic, which by the early 1970s was claiming one out of every six Harlemites. Social scientist Michael Rossman spoke of a white conspiracy to put blacks into an eternal daze. “Before each ’long hot summer’ and in each period of ghetto political tension, heroin becomes increasingly available to the ghettoes” (Rossman in Kunnes, p. 87). He contended that the black urban uprisings of the late 1960s frightened white officials, who reacted by up-ping the flow of heroin into ghettoes. He was not alone in this suspicion. A New York Times article in 1971 quoted a police informer as saying that “the police had allowed and encouraged narcotics to be sold in black … communities to create a dependency on heroin and undercut political movement” (Kunnes, p. 88).

African and American roots

In an effort to redefine themselves as something other than second-class citizens, American blacks began to investigate the history of their African ancestors. They also studied modern African culture in search of a unifying and positive identity that the experience of slavery in America had acted to erase. In the novel, teacher Nigeria Greene takes this idea to heart as he fights for a class at his school in an African language, Swahili. Real-life blacks similarly attempted to develop a stronger sense of self by rejecting white standards of beauty, such as straight hair. There was an effort to express a sense of “blackness” by wearing Afro hairstyles and adopting African-style dress to show pride in the ancestry of American blacks.

Speaking Black English was another way of expressing blackness and declaring allegiance to the group in the 1970s. The “street culture” language, which developed in insular communities, helped blacks distinguish themselves from others. When Benjie uses phrases in the novel like “Then I decide to sound on him” rather than “I told him what I think,” he’s subscribing to a dialect of Black English; speaking the dialect knits him to his community and his history (A Hero Ain’t Nothiri but a Sandwich, p. 13).

Though dialects of Black English have consistent rules and grammar of their own, the language has not been readily accepted as an alternative to standard English. In the 1970s tension mounted between blacks promoting solidarity through language and others demanding conformity to standard English. Teachers were alarmed by the use of Black English and the seeming disregard for standard English: “They attribute mistakes [in standard English] to laziness, sloppiness or the child’s natural disposition to be wrong” wrote researchers (Labov, p. 4). Educators questioned how students would ever learn to communicate past the ghetto. Some recommended that they be forced to abandon their dialects of English, while others urged teachers to accept and learn them, so that the students would be encouraged to regard standard English as a possible form of expression as well.

The black family

The breakup of the traditional black nuclear family has its roots in the forced separation of families during slave days, when members were sold to different slaveowners. But, as social scientists have pointed out, “family destruction and dispersal did not erode family and kinship ties” (Mintz and Kellogg, p. 69). Instead, African Americans developed extended networks between more distant relatives and other community members as they cooperated to improve their living conditions.

In black ghettos of the 1970s a redefinition of “the family” became necessary as a growing number of fathers, under the strain of unemployment or underemployment, left the family unit. Often such a man’s sense of self as one who should provide for his family was undercut by his lack of access to jobs with reasonable pay, and this burden on his pride was sometimes too much to bear. In the novel, after his father leaves, we see Benjie’s family reconfigured to form a unit that is “a source of mutual assistance and support … sharing resources and responsibilities” (Mintz and Kellogg, p. 79). Ranson Bell, Benjie’s grandmother, lives with the family, taking care of Benjie when his mother is working. Then the family structure shifts again when Benjie’s stepfather joins the household. The final unit, a single mother living with a man who is not the father of her children, was not uncommon for families in urban areas affected by racism, poverty, and unemployment.

The Noxel in Focus

The plot

Thirteen-year-old Benjie Johnson lives with his mother, grandmother, and stepfather in a rundown tenement building in New York City’s Harlem. Benjie tells the reader right off that, “My block ain’t no place to be a chile in peace … you on your own and [adults] got they things to do, like workin, or goin to court, or seein after they gas and letrit bills” (A Hero Ain’t Nothiri but a Sandwich, p. 9). He describes his apartment building as a place where men sexually assault children in the unlit hallway. Benjie’s real father left the family when Benjie was a baby—Benjie struggles to shake off the feeling of abandonment that plagues him. He also feels replaced by his stepfather, Butler, in being a companion to his mother. “I’m wonderin in my mind, what they need with me?” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p. 70).

Benjie senses hypocrisy and desperation all around him in the black community. He likes his stepfather but when Butler starts talking about how things are going to get better for African Americans, and how there will be more opportunities, Benjie thinks he’s all talk. “I don’t see him doin nothin but bein a janitor in one of the whitey’s downtown buildins. Hear him tell it … he A maintenance man … ain’t nothin but a jive-ass name for janitor” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p. 13). Benjie is also confused by all the talk he hears at school from a teacher, Nigeria Greene, who claims to be a black nationalist. He thinks Greene is a hypocrite who talks about black people uniting and working together yet buys his clothes not from blacks but from British tailors in London. Although Benjie hasn’t given up on the world yet and wants to concentrate on his education, he cannot see a day in the future when blacks will be free.

Benjie first tries heroin on a dare at the apartment of a fifteen-year-old drug dealer. Soon he’s shooting it into his veins every other day but denying to himself that he’s on his way to being hooked—he claims he just wants something for his nerves. He begins to steal to get money for another fix and lies for the first time in his life when he takes $3 from his grandmother. His teachers, Greene and Cohen, notice Benjie is falling asleep in class all the time, and the teachers, although they don’t trust each other, unite to bring Benjie’s addiction to the attention of his mother and stepfather.

Benjie recovers from his addiction in the hospital, but falls back into the habit within a week, paying for his fix by stealing Butler’s clothes. This is the final straw for Butler, who goes to live in another apartment. Finally, Benjie and Butler are forced to reckon with each other when Butler chases Benjie onto the roof after Benjie steals a toaster from Butler’s new apartment. Benjie slips on ice and Butler grabs him in time to save him from falling off the roof into an airshaft—Benjie begs Butler to let him go, “Let me be dead” (A Hero Aint Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p. 110). Butler is struck with the truth as he’s holding on to Benjie: “His eyes locked on mine, we lookin right at each other … Then I know I was runnin from him … I went off cause he wasn’t mine.” Butler proceeds to pull Benjie up with all his strength as he echoes Nigeria Greene’s battle cry, “Come on, goddamit! It’s nation time!” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, pp. 110, 111).

Searching for a strong adult, not a “hero.”

Feeling abandoned by his real father, imagining he’s a fifth wheel at home, and getting the message at school and from society at large that “Nobody digs niggas, not even other niggas” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p. 88), Benjie yearns for an adult male with enough pride to instill some pride in him. When Benjie recovers from his addiction in the hospital and is sent home, he senses and resents the discomfort of his mother and stepfather, who don’t know how to approach him. Benjie baits Butler to see if he will go away when the talk gets tough: “Relax pal, you just a maintenance man—so don’t strain yourself tryin to prove nothin” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p. 76). After Butler storms out of the apartment, Benjie prays on the bathroom floor, “Please God … send me a friend, someone to be crazy bout me” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p. 76). When he gets no response, he steals Butler’s suit to sell for more heroin and justifies the act to himself: The man is taking his mama, he thinks, so hell take the man’s clothes. Benjie’s theft of Butler’s suit for a fix finally sends Butler away to live in another apartment in the same building.

While he’s recovering from his addiction in the hospital for the second time, Benjie is counseled by a white social worker, but the boy seems to know he needs something different, not such a distant adviser. Benjie wants a real person, someone who is living in the ghetto—and surviving—to believe in him. When he finally steals the toaster to sell for heroin right in front of Butler, Benjie takes his last shot at getting Butler’s undivided attention. Butler reacts by using his final ounce of strength to keep Benjie from falling down the airshaft on the roof of the building, at which point Benjie begins to accept that Butler, although not his real father, is someone who will make a fine substitute:

I’m lookin up into Butler’s face, veins in his face all swole out. I tried to think of my real father’s face … Butler’s face kept wipin out the real father.... Voice inside my head say,’Butler you are my father.’ Thassa weird trip, Jack.
(A Hero Ain’t Nothin but a Sandwich, p. 113)

Butler insists that although Benjie wants someone to believe in him, “you gotta do it even if nobody believe in you, gotta be your own man, the supervisor of your own veins, he night watchman and day shift foreman in charge-a your own affairs” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sand-wich, p. 120). For his part Butler realizes he’s been running from taking on the full responsibility of treating Benjie like a real son. He also realizes that when igeria Greene says “It’s nation time!” he means that fighting for civil rights isn’t something you only do in court or inmarches. Mutual support among blacks needs to be expressed everywhere, in the workplace, in the street, and at home, whether you’re living with your birth family or your family by choice. With this new attitude, he tells Benjie’s social worker, who is counseling Butler to take Benjie to movies and ball games so he can see more he-roes, “Yall gotta learn to identify with me … I’m supportin three adults, one chile and the United States government on my salary.... and can’t claim any of em for tax exemptions. So explain me no heroes” (A Hero Aint Nothin’ but a Sand-wich, p.126).

Schoolroom controversy

The beliefs of teachers Nigeria Greene and Bernard Cohen collide when considering what should be taught to students about the history of African Americans and racism. Cohen, a white teacher, faults Greene for filling students with so much rage about “their”history that they resent Cohen. “Was I ever a slave master? Did I bring slaves over here? Am I the one?” (A Hero Aint Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p.35). He says that black students should know some of “their” history, but doesn’t understand why Greene wants to teach black children about their African heritage: “At the moment [Greene’s] in a big hassle to get a Swahili class started. What in the hell do they need with Swahili? Well, maybe they can use it to ask for a welfare check in two languages” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin but a Sand-wich, p. 37). Also, Cohen is afraid that if the schools hire more and more African Americans to teach their students, white teachers will be run out of the system.

Nigeria Greene is angered by Cohen’s views and amused by Cohen’s own frustration with him,

It shakes Cohen to his boots when he hears me ask, ’What time is it?’ and the class hollersout, ‘It’s nation time!’ I’m teachin that it’s high time to straighten up and hold hands because my inner clock is tellin me that now is only half past slavery.
(A Hero Ain’t Nothiri but a Sandwich, p. 46)

Nigeria Greene has resolved to teach what could not yet be found in books. When he came to teach in Harlem he was horrified to find a picture on the wall of George Washington. He found it impossible to see a picture of Washington, who was a slaveholder, hanging over his blackboard and not discuss this.

Benjie, it turns out, has ambivalent feelings toward both teachers. He feels that Greene’s talk inspires pride in him, but he questions Greene’s emphasis on ancient black cultures. Greene, muses Benjie, speaks of the queens and kings in Africa as being the forefathers and foremothers of American blacks, but as the father of his friend Jimmy Lee says, blacks have no kings and queens now and they haven’t yet figured out how to deal with this.

Benjie recognizes that the other teacher Bernard Cohen’s emphasis on skills have helped Benjie become a better reader. But Benjie takes issue with Cohen’s views and with his ability as a communicator. “He say, ’You can be somebody if you want.’ How the shit he don’t know I’m somebody right now? He think he somebody and I’m not” (A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, p. 90).

Sources

A playwright by trade, Alice Chidress came to write A Hero Ain’t Nothiri but a Sandwich when a book editor suggested she had something to say to young people about drugs and Harlem. Childress may have been moved to write about the infiltration of heroin into the Harlem community as she compared the Harlem of her childhood and the Harlem of the 1970s: “[In the past] a boy would not dream of killing his grandmother or hurting his mamma or her friends in order to pour cooked opium dust through a hole in his arm” (Childress in Commire, p. 52).

The characters in the novel are likely composites of the scores of people Childress knew growing up on 118th Street, and as an adult. She gives most of the credit to these people for writing themselves into her work, using her as a conduit:

[M]en in love with ’nothing to offer’ … women who … wouldn’t hold back their emotions for the ’sake of the race’ … the poor genteel and sensitive people who are seamstresses, coal-carriers, vegetable peelers, who are somehow able to sustain themselves within the poet’s heart sensitivity and appreciation of pure emotion … they tap at the brain and move a pen to action in the middle of the night.
(Childress in Commire, p. 52)

Reviews

According to one reviewer A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich conveys “a grim picture that holds little or no promise for the children’s future,” (Rogers in Bryfonski, p. 106). But others have argued that the novel ends on an upbeat note with “a suggestion of hope” and have praised the story for its fearless look at, as one reviewer writes, “a segment of society seldom spoken of above a whisper” (Bullins in Bryfonski, p. 106).

Many reviewers comment that Childress does a brilliant job in avoiding the portrayal of any character as evil, not even the pusher, Walter. Nor, say the reviewers, is the Benjie character treated like a complete victim just because he is a child; Childress empowers the character by recognizing the thirteen-year-old’s own responsibility for his descent into drugs.

In 1973, however, the novel was the first book banned in the Savannah, Georgia, school system since Catcher in the Rye (also covered in Literature and Its Times) in the 1950s. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich was also one of only nine books that has ever been taken to the Supreme Court for the question of whether to allow a community to banish it from school. Despite the controversy, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich won many awards; it was, for example, named one of the Outstanding Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review in 1973.