Word: horned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...HORN by D. Keith Mano. 337 pages. Houghfon Mifflin...
...Inferno. Inhabiting this new pit of horror would be the warring Negro leaders of Harlem and the meddling white man who tries to understand them. It is just such a journey into hell that D. Keith Mano, a white author, describes with Dantesque fervor in his second novel, Horn...
Mano's narrator is Calvin Beecher Pratt, a timid, fat, white Episcopal priest who leaves a cloistered, scholarly life to take over a crumbling empty church in the imagined Harlem of the 1970s. There Pratt becomes inextricably involved with an anti-white Negro organization called the Horn Power Movement and its dynamic but tormented leader, George Horn Smith. Middleweight champion of the world, orator, professed illiterate and economic genius, Smith is a man possessed of a freakish protuberance-an eleven-inch horn jutting from his forehead...
Despite his improbable appendage and his charismatic leadership-he combines traces of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver-Smith as a character is most extraordinary for his recognizable human qualities and frailties. Behind Horn Smith's power and hatred there is a person who desperately needs the recognition and sympathy even of a self-consciously inadequate white priest. Yet the fact that Pratt and Smith somehow strike up something that can be construed as friendship is remarkable. The unusual results of their mutual "needs" raise the novel above the level of an otherwise purely allegorical tale...
Pratt is subjected to all sorts of torments. He is psychologically humiliated at an anti-white Horn Power demonstration and is badly beaten up by a deranged Episcopal priest, whose own congregation, at Horn's command, has deserted him for Pratt's church. At a floor-by-floor, six-story orgy staged by Horn, Pratt is exposed to blatant homosexuals, naked prostitutes, hallucinatory drugs. Then one of Horn's co-workers and antagonists threatens to blind and castrate him. Finally, the cowering priest is coated with pitch and thrown naked out into the streets. There at last...