by Herb Boyd
In a forthcoming book on Malcolm X and the CIA, an epigram reads “You know they call CIA agents spooks? First time we’ll ever get paid for that title,” wrote author Sam Greenlee in his seminal work, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door.” For many activists, as well general readers interested in the intrigue of the CIA through the lens of an African-American agent, Greenlee’s book, like John A. Williams’s “The Man Who Cried I Am,” was an essential part of their arsenal as they studied ways to end an oppressive racist society. By the time you read this, Greenlee, who died in 2014, would have been celebrating his 94th birthday.
Born on July 13, 1930, in St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, Greenlee was the son of a railroad union activist and a singer and dancer. He grew up in West Woodlawn and attended Englewood High School. A track scholarship from the University of Wisconsin gave him a beginning in higher education and while we have no record of his athletic experience, he did very well academically, earning a B.S. degree in political science in 1952. He was a member of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity (Beta Omicron 1950). From 1952 to 1954, Sam served in the U.S. Army with the final rank of first lieutenant.
It was perhaps during his stint as a foreign service officer with the United States Information Agency (USIA) in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece, where he studied at one of the universities, that he acquired an understanding of how various state department agencies functioned.
He was one of the first African Americans to work in this capacity. Upon mustering out of the service, for the next three years, he enrolled in graduate studies in international relations at the University of Chicago.
“The Spook Who Sat by the Door” (1969), Greenlee’s most lauded work, received the book of the year award from the London Sunday Times and the Meritorious Service Award from the USIA. Wanda Macon in “The Oxford Companion to African American Literature,”wrote that the satirical novel “criticizes the racist atmosphere of the United States by examining the life of a fictional Black CIA agent, Dan Freeman. It is evident that Greenlee creates his images from his experience in the military and the United States Information Agency.”
Macon goes on to explain Greenlee’s use of the term “spook” both in the title and the novel “possess a sense of duality or ‘double consciousness.’” In effect, it can be viewed as the racial pejorative and the slang term for CIA spies. Greenlee’s “multifaceted character,” she added, “begins to examine the mask that has been worn by African Americans for generations to hide their true feelings.” Greenlee lived on the Greek island of Mykonos for three years with his Dutch-born first wife, Nienke de Jonge.
The film version of the book, directed by Ivan Dixon and starring Lawrence Cook, is included in the National Film Registry’s catalog of American movies. Jazz great Herbie Hancock wrote the film score. While the novel is considered his most significant publication, Greenlee was a prolific short story writer, and many of his pieces are featured in Negro Digest and its successor Black World. A remastered version of the film by Tim and Daphne Reid was released in 2004 and will be screened here in Harlem at the Maysles Theater on Sunday, August 25.
Among his other publications are “Blues for an African Princess” (1971) and “Baghdad Blues” (1976). He was named Illinois Poet Laureate in 1990, which is just one of several awards bestowed on him, along with the distinction of being inducted into Chicago State University’s Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Greenlee was working on “Djakarta Blues,” an unfinished memoir at the time of his death on May 19, 2014, on Malcolm X’s birthdate.
In his magnum opus, Greenlee posited this tactic. “Freeman had had years of practice at the game before adopting the cover he had assumed at the CIA and the present cover as a playboy of the midwestern world. That might save him, but it was important nevertheless that he establish an organization that would survive him. Once they discovered him, he would disappear. There would be no martyr making trials and no more public assassinations as with Malcolm X. He would just disappear and the white man, confident in the eternal passivity and stupidity of the Negro, except for rare individual exceptions, would assume that the organization would die with Freeman. It must not be so.”
As esteemed poet Haki Madhubuti noted, “he was a good man and a fine poet.”