Mythic or not, Mothersill and the Foxes … is yet another chapter in the long history of the Black man as lover, as phallic symbol…. Long live the myth! Long live copulation! Long live foxes (slang for fine chicks)! the author seems to be shouting at us in ear-shattering decibels….

Though the locale changes—hotel rooms, his apartment, the women's apartments, three continents—the setting is always the same, a bed. Professionally, Odell Mothersill is a social worker, but his talents lie in the direction of the "lay."… Williams manages a skillful blending of the two consuming interests in the life of his main character with a deft manipulation of the plot culminating in a surprising denoument. He emerges as an arresting storyteller. (p. 89)

Odell Mothersill is a middle-class Black, escaping a prior generation of Pullman Car porters and maids, and ostensibly this raises the level of respectability of his amorous forays. He is college trained, professional, Ph.D., top management. He has fought his way to the top of the heap and is respected by Blacks and whites alike as a giant in his field. And with good cause, for he knows what he is doing and, despite his pleasurable sexual encounters, he comes through as a man of warmth and concern….

John A. Williams is never as effective when he is nice, gentle, soft as he is when he is brutal, intense, basic. His The Man Who Cried I Am, with the protagonist suffering from cancer of the rectum, is far more lucid than his Sissie, which deals with an indomitable matriarch and her two surviving children. Experience shapes the writer, and Williams has drained from his experiences every drop and distilled it into words for readers. In short, Mothersill and the Foxes is pure Williams—Williams doing the kind of writing he does with lusty aplomb.

The novel is in no way profound. It is gallantly entertaining. (p. 90)

That Williams is a gifted writer there can be no doubt…. That he is a prolific writer, there is hardly room for argument. There is no Black writer around who can match him for sheer quantitative output. There are few who can match him in ability.

What happens to myths? Some of them live on, and on in fictional characters like John Henry, like Joe the Grinder, like Odell Mothersill. (p. 91)