[Soul on Ice] is one of the discoveries of the 1960s. In a literary epoch marked by a prevailing mediocrity of expression, a lack of substantial new talent, a kind of spiritual slough after the great wave of American writing from the 1920s to the 1940s, Eldridge Cleaver's is one of the distinctive new literary voices to be heard. It reminds me of the great days of the past. It has echoes of Richard Wright's Native Son, just as its true moral affinity is with one of the few other fine books of our period, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and as it represents in American terms the only comparable approach to the writings of Frantz Fanon.

In a curious way Cleaver's book has definite parallels with Fanon's Black Skin White Masks. In both books the central problem is of identification as a black soul which has been "colonized"—more subtly perhaps in the United States for some three hundred years, but perhaps even more pervasively—by an oppressive white society that projects its brief, narrow vision of life as eternal truth. (p. xi)

Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing, and I include in this statement both the formal sociologists and those contemporary fictionists who have mainly abandoned this province of literature for the cultivation of the cult of sensibility. (I am aware also of what may be considered excessive praise in this introduction; in that case I can only beg the reader to stop reading me and start directly with Cleaver.) As in Malcolm X's case, here is an "outside" critic who takes pleasure in dissecting the deepest and most cherished notions of our personal and social behavior; and it takes a certain amount of courage and a "willed objectivity" to read him. He rakes our favorite prejudices with the savage claws of his prose until our wounds are bare, our psyche is exposed, and we must either fight back or laugh with him for the service he has done us. For the "souls of black folk," in W.E.B. Du Bois' phrase, are the best mirror in which to see the white American self in mid-twentieth century.

It takes a certain boldness on Cleaver's part, also, to open this collection of essays with the section not merely on rape but on the whole profound relationship of black men and white women. There is a secret kind of sexual mysticism in this writer which adds depth and tone to his social commentary; this is a highly literary and imaginative mind surveying the salient aspects of our common life. There follow the Four Vignettes—on Watts, on the Muslims, on Catholicism and Thomas Merton, and on the heroic prison teacher called [Chris] Lovdjieff. Here we begin to feel the reach and depth of Eldridge Cleaver's mind on emotional and philosophical issues as well as historical and social ones—and yes, "heroic," a note barely sounded in contemporary fiction, is not inappropriate for certain parts of this deeply revolutionary collection of essays. (pp. xii-xiii)

But it is the part of the book called "Blood of the Beast," and such pieces as "The White Race and Its Heroes," that I find of primary importance, and of the greatest literary value. Describing himself as an"Ofay Watcher," Cleaver describes this historical period and this American culture in terms of the most astringent accuracy, the most ruthless irony, and the most insistent truthfulness. He reminds us of all the simple verities that decades of Cold War distortion and hypocrisy have almost wiped from our historical record—our historical consciousness.

The book is a handsome account of those years in the early sixties when the Civil Rights campaign stirred up a national psyche that had been unnaturally comatose, slothful, and evasive since the McCarthyite trauma. There is an atmosphere of turbulence in these essays, moving from the advent of the Beats and Jack Kerouac's On The Road to LeRoi Jones' revolutionary verses and then back to the Abolitionists (so scorned and despised by the Southern revisionist historians of the modern epoch), to Harriet Beecher Stowe and to that famous Fourth of July peroration for the slave race by Frederick Douglass in 1852.

In the concluding part of this book it seems that Eldridge Cleaver has reached his own spiritual convalescence, his healed spirit (no longer racist or narrowly nationalist), and his mature power as a writer—and how those pages do sparkle!… "Notes on a Native Son" is the best analysis of James Baldwin's literary career I have read; and while Cleaver calmly says things that no white critic could really dare to say, there is not a trace of petty artistic jealousy or self-vanity in his discussion—such as that, for example, which marked Baldwin's own repudiation of his former mentor, Richard Wright. The essay called "Rallying Round the Flag" gives us the plain, hard, truthful Afro-American view of the Vietnam war which Martin Luther King, just lately, has corroborated—it is in fact the world view of our aberrant national behavior in southeast Asia. But just as this volume opens on the theme of love, just as Eldridge Cleaver never misses the sexual core of every social (or racial) phenomenon, so it closes on it. (pp. xiii-xv)

I had forgotten to mention the wonderfully ironic descriptions of the Twist as the social symptom of the new age of dawning racial equality. Here, as with the Beatles and Rock n' Roll, when Eldridge Cleaver moves into the area of mass entertainment in the United States, he is as close as he ever comes to an open laughter at the white man's antics; just as in the concluding apostrophe from the Black Eunuch to the Black Queen—to the fertile black womb of all history—he reminds us how civilization has always mocked human gaiety. (p. xv)