John Sanford's The People From Heaven, by Louis Proyect

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John Sanford's "The People From Heaven"
A Book Review by Louis Proyect
June 9, 2003


John Sanford, The People From Heaven, U. of Illinois Press, Urbana
and Chicago, 1995; ISBN: 0-252-06491-7. 232 pages.


When I discovered the bitterly sardonic novels of Nathaniel West in
the early 1960s, I never would have suspected that he was a
Communist. Like most people coming of age during the waning days
of the witch-hunt, I assumed that Communism and experimental
literature were mutually exclusive. The general perception was that
people like Mike Gold issued marching orders to the party's writers
through the pages of The Daily Worker in the 1930s and 40s and that
if you were not prepared to crank out one-dimensional "proletarian
novels," you would get drummed out of the party.

Largely through the efforts of Alan Wald, this view -- like many others
about the CPUSA framed within the cold war paradigm -- is being
challenged today. Under the auspices of the Radical Novel
Reconsidered (RNR) series edited by Wald and published by the U.
of Illinois, we have a chance to examine the works of a number of
authors who defy easy stereotypes.

Released in 1995 as part of the RNR series, John Sanford's The
People From Heaven incorporates the same kind of restless
experimentalism found in the novels of his close friend and fellow Jew
Nathaniel West, to whom the novel is dedicated. Sanford, who was
born Julian Shapiro, died in March 2003 at the age of 99. In an
obituary that appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Wald commented
that as a writer, "the important thing about John was that he was
extraordinarily original. The stylistic freshness of certain of his projects
is simply exceptional. The way in which he treated the interplay of
historical and personal events in his work is unparalleled and utterly
unique."

The People From Heaven gets its title from the novel's epigraph in
which Sanford makes ironic use of Christopher Columbus's words to
Luis de Santangel, a forcibly converted Jew who financed his
expedition:

"...And the others went running from house to house and to the
neighboring villages, with loud cries of 'Come! come to see the people
from Heaven!'"

Although Columbus's "discovery" has been thoroughly debunked by
radical scholars inspired by indigenous struggles, Sanford was way
ahead of his time with respect to the victims of European colonization.
Written in 1942 at the height of the popular front, The People From
Heaven views American civilization in far less benign terms than one
might expect from a Communist Party (CP) writer, whose party was
doing everything it could at the time to blur the lines between
Communism and Jeffersonian democracy. Written from the
perspective of an American Indian father and son and a black woman
defending themselves from racist whites in a Adirondack village, the
novel evokes Malcolm X's bitter observation: "We did not land on the
Plymouth Rock. The Plymouth Rock landed on us."

Just after arriving in Warrensburg, New York, America Smith tries to
take shelter against a cold spring rain in a general store, whose
proprietor greets her with "You want anything, nigger?" Denied a
room in a local boarding house, she eventually ends up at the home of
the local preacher Dan Hunter who takes her in as an act of Christian
charity. In a dramatic dialog between the two, she explains why she
has little use for his religion despite his kindness.

"Is praying begging?" Hunter said.

"It's not even as good. I've seen beggars get a handout."

"But never a prayer answered?"

"My people were praying before yours ever showed them how, but
God's deaf. He's blind too, or He wouldn't need me to tell Him we're
sick of eating dirt. And He's got no hands, or He'd touch me like He
touches you. But worse than all that, when you see pictures of Him,
you realize He's white! No wonder He can't hear the black race. He
can smell it, but He can't hear it!"

"Sometimes He can't hear the white, either."

"What's the good of Him, then? He's busted. Your Indians would beat
Him, and if He still didn't work, they'd throw Him away. Not the
white man, though: he's like a cow; he never spits anything out."

The Indians in The People From Heaven certainly would beat the
white man's god if given the chance. At the local schoolhouse, a young
Abenaki Indian named Aben Vroom is called upon to identify the
cause of the civil war. In the course of replying correctly to the
teacher that it was caused by a States Rights challenge to the Union,
he is taunted mercilessly by fellow students. They call out, "Dopey
Apekaki," "Aben, the dog-eater," Aben, the half-breed," "Aben is a
red-skin son-of-an-Indian-bitch."

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