Marjorie Williams On White America's Racial Rorschach

A 30 year-old Colin Powell profile bobs to the surface in a much-touted first novel.

My late missus Marjorie Williams, photographed in 2001.

I received a lovely Father’s Day gift today concerning my late first wife, the writer Marjorie Williams. The gift came wrapped in a Washington Post review of a highly-touted first novel, Great Black Hope, by a young Black writer named Rob Franklin.

I’m a faithful reader of (and occasional contributor to) the Post’s book section, but I somehow missed this piece by Charles Arrowsmith; thanks to my friend Debra Bruno for flagging it. Arrowsmith’s review mentions Marjorie in its final paragraph:

[Franklin has] said that the book’s title was inspired by a 1995 Vanity Fair article [titled “The Great Black Hope”] about Colin Powell. Powell’s political stock was then at its height but only, argued Marjorie Williams, because his ideological opacity allowed White politicians and commentators to project onto this successful Black general whatever they wanted to see….

Marjorie’s Powell profile, written during a very brief period when he considered letting himself be drafted into a presidential run, was one of her best. Its most arresting passage still has the capacity to shock:

No one embraces this attitude more openly than Powell's number-one white booster, Charles J. Kelly Jr., who is the self-appointed force behind what he calls Citizens for Powell…. He belongs to Washington's most establishmentarian group, the Metropolitan Club, and he and his wife rent a wing of Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn's enormous house in Georgetown.

Sitting on Bradlee's spacious grounds on a warm July morning, Kelly explains that America is more than ready to elect its first black president. "If I talk to rednecks, and cabdrivers, and so on, they don't see him as the black problem, which is associated with irresponsible behavior."

Kelly and I have stumbled almost accidentally onto this line of conversation, but he is suddenly deeply engaged…. Powell helps the problem, Kelly says, "just by standing there. His presence says, 'Kwitcherbitchin. If I can do it, you can do it. Don't run around talking about how the world owes you a living. Just don't whine about it. Get on with your lives.' "

There was some loose talk along these lines again in 2008, three years after Marjorie died, when Barack Obama ran for president. So I ended the second of two posthumous Marjorie anthologies, Reputation, with the Powell piece, and flagged the parallel in the introduction.

Franklin is wonderfully generous to credit Marjorie, even though (apart from the title, a play on The Great White Hope that she was neither the first nor the last before Franklin to apply) Marjorie’s influence on his novel appears to be tangential. Mostly, it seems, Franklin talks up Marjorie’s profile because he liked it. In a “debut author to watch” interview last February with Kirkus Review, Franklin said:

I found this old Vanity Fair profile of Colin Powell from when he was leaving the military and going into politics in the ’90s. People didn’t know which party he was aligned with and would hold up his background as a cipher to figure out where his loyalties lay. That profile is a piece of writing that I really love. It depicts him as playing the game of the “respectable Negro” very well, very strategically.

Franklin was maybe 2 or 3 years old when this magazine article was published; 12 or 13 when Marjorie died; and 15 or 16 when the piece was republished in Reputation. I can’t fathom how he came across it, but I’m very grateful that he’s remembering Marjorie, and that she remains, at least a little bit, inside America’s eternally vexed conversation about race.