“White
Knight,” by
Henry Hitz, 2015
This is
an unpredictable left-wing novel about San Francisco
and environs, the high-profile assassinations carried out by Dan White and the
tragedy of the People’s Temple
mass suicides in November, 1978. It
centers on community organizer Barney Blatz, who is deeply involved with all these people, and
through a few careless comments, thinks he encouraged these two disasters.
A member
of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PL), Barney and his wife Linda Jean
quit the Party after the local leadership is expelled for going against a
national Party edict. What happened is
the national Party demanded the local start a rent strike at a public housing
project, Geneva Towers, after serious fire threats. This even though most of the rent is provided
by Section 8 vouchers and non-payment would endanger the resident’s right to live
in the Towers.
Then Proposition
13 passes in California
in June of 1978. This results in an
additional burden on the Towers. It leads to the defunding of the local kindergarten
facility in the Towers by the School Board.
A group of residents, including Barney who is a teacher there, object
and organize to keep the school open. They are successful for a time, running the
school on their own. Their fight to keep the school open involves getting money
- appealing to the somewhat suspect People’s Temple and the charismatic Jim
Jones, the vagaries of councilperson Dan White, the capitalist Bank of America,
friendly Mayor Moscone and others. For
Barney and Linda Jean it is a far cry from their prior work with PL. But after some victories, they lose and the
school is forced to shutdown due to lack of funds.
The
WHITE KNIGHTS
Barney
is the only ‘whitish’ person in the Towers and this is a sub-theme. Linda Jean, his wife, is darker. For this he gets baited and this is part of
why the book is called White Knight – although there are other reasons. He’s a bit of a white knight trying to organize a poverty-stricken community. Dan
White, the future killer of Mayor Moscone and Councilperson Milk, actually
saves a family from a Tower fire. His
last name is White, another so-called ‘white knight.' ‘White nights’ was the name given by the
People’s Temple for their suicide practices. And the ‘White
Knights’ are a rumored group of People’s Temple
vigilantes that probably don’t exist.
The book illustrates the somewhat unstable personality of Barney, who zig-zags
through infidelity, gay sex, paranoia, macho, belligerence, carelessness and drugs,
all the while trying to ‘do the right thing.’
It almost makes you wish he was still in PL. He and his wife buy a muddy patch of rural
land as an escape. His idealist ideas
about education conflict with the harsher circumstances some children grow up
in. He’s mad at his wife for not
standing up to him. Barney’s family
celebrates black nationalist Ron Karenga’s Juneteenth after an argument. He says stupid
things sometimes, especially one remark he makes to Dan White and one to a
tough guy named Mike, who ends up in Guyana
with the People’s Temple.
But at the same time, his heart seems to
be in the right place. The book uses a font change to show Barney’s internal thoughts.
 |
| Dan White Gets Off Easy |
COMMUNITY
Part of
the book is drawn from Hitz’ personal experiences at a very trying time in San Francisco for someone
politically active. Hitz himself was a
grade-school teacher for 35 years and probably a member of PLP for awhile, as
was I. It is a good picture of community
organizing – its pitfalls and strengths, dealing with flawed humans and a
political system that gives no quarter. The
People’s Temple
was popular in the Towers, so not being friendly to them would be a problem. Bourgeois black people show up from the
School Board, as do petty criminals just trying to get by.
When all
is said and done, the Geneva
Towers were a community. Each
month for years the capitalist owners pocketed $200K from the U.S. government
while letting the Towers fall apart. At
the end, what happened? The cover of the
book shows the 1998 demolition of the Towers in Visitacion
Valley, San Francisco after the residents were thrown
out. White got an ‘involuntary
manslaughter’ jury decision based on his Twinkie defense, even though he
planned the murders. A large number of
proletarian black people paid with their lives for being part of a religious
cult, no matter how ‘communistic.’ Now
gentrification in San Francisco
is rampant. And people like Barney were
damaged in the process.
Ultimately a dark
story, but worth reading.
Prior
blog reviews on San Francisco
fiction, city issues and activism, use blog search box, upper left: So You Say You Want a Revolution?
(Levin/Silbar); Last Man in the Tower (Adiga); The Daminificados, (Wilson);
Rebel Cities (Harvey); Cade’s Rebellion (Sheehy); How to Kill a City
(Moskowitz); Capital City (Stein); Passage of Rebellion; Revolution in the Air
(Elbaum); Darlingtonia; There, There; Clandestine Occupations.
Thanks
to John Levin for the gift of this book!
The
Kulture Kommissar
January 22,
2021
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