After viewing Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall stylized western, I got to thinking about when I was a kid watching Have Gun, Will Travel with my dad. This was in the days of a few local channels on television and three network ones. The weekly half hour show was on CBS and in black and white. I really only remember from then the show’s opening sequence. It’s a sideview shot of a black-clad thigh, a silver bishop’s chess head, also called a paladin, on the holster of the Shakespeare quoting gunman who goes by Paladin. He would draw the gun and aim it toward the audience. You’d also hear his voice over, a snippet of tense dialogue from the upcoming episode. 

Having years later seen those episodes on the likes of Starz Encore Westers you can’t ignore the racist stereotypes of Hey Boy and later Hey Girl, the immigrant Chinese bellhops working at the Carlton Hotel in San Francisco where Paladin lived. Though to some extent theshow’s creative forces, including the star Richard Boone who had script approval and directed several episodes, were seemingly aware of the cultural landmine they treaded. There was a Paladin outing where he helps Hey Boy avenge his brother who was killed by a racist. While in another episode a character notes, “I have no contempt for the Army, exterminating the Indian nation is a dirty job, and they do it as well as the next.”

There was even an episode with a black outlaw hunted by Paladin, a wanted man with a $5,000 bounty on his head. This Rufus Buck/Deadwood Dick stand-in, played by Ivan Dixon,was called Isham Spruce in the “Long Way Home.” Like several real-world black cowboys including first Black deputy marshal Bass Reeves, Spruce is an ex-slave. He turned to outlawing as his perspective was that was the only viable means of making a living, a way of being free it might be interpreted these days. Initially he tells Paladin he’s no better than a slave catcher. The two develop a rapport even as four other greedy white bounty hunters dog them. But this was early sixties network TV. There was to be no team up of the two, no images of a defiant black man taking up arms against his would-be jailers. Essentially the milk toast ending has Ishamsacrificing his life to save a rattlesnake bitten Paladin. Good grief.

It would be in the late sixties ABC show The Outcasts, premiering in the fall of 1968, where a fully dimensional Black cowboy would finally ride across the small screen. A character owing more to the socio-political climate of the time than Sidney Portier’s well-dressed gunfighter in the 1965 film, Duel at Diablo or jazz singer Herb Jeffries’ Bob Blake, the Bronze Buckaroo in several “B” films made in the late 1930s.  

At any rate, the following description from the getTV blog best describes The Outcasts:“Don Murray stars as Earl Corey, a former Confederate soldier – and slave owner – from a once-wealthy, now-destitute Virginia family. Otis Young is his reluctant partner Jemal David, an educated former slave [and ex-Union soldier]. Together, the two men navigate the West, and their own prejudices, as bounty hunters.”

The “My Name is Jemal” episode opens on a familiar scene, men drinking booze and playing poker, one of them sassing a good-looking saloon gal. Only the trope is subverted, the guys playing poker are mostly black, some in their Army uniforms, and the woman is black as well. In the “Night Riders,” the partners’ trust is tested when Corey is recruited to lead a Klan-like group out to terrorize and murder people of color and those who support them. 

Otis Young was an unknown actor at the time who brought a freshness to the role. His Jemal David was a man with an edge for good reasons. Yet the relationship between his character and Murray’s deepens over the ensuing episodes. The show only lasted the one season. The claim was the program was canceled for being too violent. Don Murray quoted on the getTV site differed. “Murray told the L.A. Times that the political climate of the times hurt the show. “[A] lot of the audience felt very uncomfortable turning it on and seeing these two guys so hostile to each other,” he said, “even when saving each other’s lives.” 

The Outcasts gave way to 1972’s The Legend of Nigger Charley on the big screen. As I noted in a previous piece this film stars ex-pro football player turned grindhouse auteur Fred Williamson. The movie was about escaped slaves becoming gunfighters, spawning the sequels the Soul of Nigger Charley and Boss Nigger. In several ways the Django Unchained of its day.Samuel’s effort is not only in a lineage with these aforementioned films, but also nods to Leone’s and Carbucci’s spaghetti westerns as well as Mario Van Peeble’s revisionist Posse of nearly three decades ago. In that film another western trope is sent sideways when a group of black soldiers, led by Van Peeble’s Jesse Lee, tired of being shot at during the so-called Spanish-American war in Cuba, steal a trove of gold. Pursued, they escape to New Orleans, trying to make it to a place called Freemanville, an all-black enclave started by Jesse Lee’s dad who was murdered by the Klan.

Another pro football player turned actor, Woody Strode is telling us the audience the story in the beginning of the film. Van Peeble’s understood his status in his reconstruction of the West from a Black perspective. In 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Strode had the ignominious role of Pompey, manservant to John Wayne’s gunslinger turned rancher. But he would go on to play better roles such as a bow-and-arrow toting bounty hunter in The Professionals, and an outlaw in the spaghetti western, The Unholy Four.

Yet as The Harder They Fall indicated, Black women such as Mary Fields, known as Stagecoach Mary, were not exactly shrinking violets in those times. No knock on how Mary was depicted in Fall, but the real woman’s story was so much more. Six foot and able with a rifle, she hauled freight for nuns, faced down bad hombres in shootouts and was the first Black woman to have a mail route in rugged Montana terrain in her sixties. Her life and times is a miniseries waiting to happen. The expansion of the Wild West mythos is long overdue, from John Horse and the Black Seminoles to Chinese and Japanese settlers have yet to be reframed on screens big and small.

…

Mostly a crime fiction writer, nonetheless Gary Phillips has written several western short stories including one in the Bass Reeves: Frontier Marshal anthology.

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