Jarrett Neal's Reviews > The Spook Who Sat by the Door

This book has been in my periphery for years now but I never took the time to read it. Now I'm kicking myself for letting it gather dust on my bookcase. The Spook Who Sat by the Door should be part of the African American literary canon but it's seldom talked about, perhaps because of decades of respectability politics that restricted so many texts. I'm not sure. But reading this book just a few years after the uprising of 2020, in the midst of our culture's reckoning with systemic racism, propels it off the sidelines and into the center of these debates. This book is a rousing, pro-Black polemic that smolders with late 1960s Black glamour while making in-your-face comments on the Black Power movement, white supremacy, tokenism, guerilla warfare, organized rebellion, and a host of other powerful issues.

I don't want to be reductive and call this a novelized Blaxploitation film, even though it was adapted into a film in 1973, but it definitely contains the seeds for that film genre. The novel's combustible militancy, propagated by its main character, captures the rebellion of the late 1960s and early 1970s that thrummed in Chicago and many other cities. Freeman, the main character, plays his role to perfection, managing to surreptitiously organize Chicago's Black gangs without the CIA knowing anything about his double life. Sam Greenlee's writing is taut yet quite detailed, especially his descriptions of the city and its weather, which plays a critical role in the book. If ever a book could serve as a blueprint for ways to take down the system it's this one.