You’re thinking to yourself right now, “No they didn’t.” Well, yes, we did. We bought this copy of Clint Rockman’s 1971 slavesploitation novel Black Queen because sometimes you have to give a book a chance. Especially when they come cheap, and feature startling Richard Clifton-Dey cover art. Also, you may remember we were skeptical about H.B. Drake’s 1936 novel Slave Ship, yet it turned out to be a decent piece of serious literature that just happened to have a sleazy cover thanks to a 1952 re-issue by Uni Books. We wondered if Black Queen was likewise more serious than it looked, and we’re glad to report that it’s a thoughtful, well researched, and ambitious effort.
Hah! Just kidding—it’s racist as hell! It’s a total disgrace!
In the plot, a beautiful slave named Vuva, who was a warrior in her African homeland, suffers at the hands of Jamie and Frances Moray, husband and wife, who run their West Indies slave plantation Halstead with cruel hearts and singing whips. Vuva is a member of the fictional Zinka tribe, daughter of the queen. When twenty more Zinka warriors the Morays have unwittingly purchased are brought to the slave plantation, Vuva learns that her mother has died back in Africa, and she is by accession now queen of the tribe. Alongside her loyal subjects she escapes the slave camp, steals a Spanish ship, and hatches a plan to sail them all back to Africa. Seagoing violence and piracy against Spanish shipping ensue, but even though the evil Morays remain safely aground at Halstead you can bet your last peso duro that they somehow feature in the climax.
Clint Rockman, who was in reality Kenneth Bulmer, was a stalwart slavesploitation author. He wrote Black Ivory, Black Slaver, Sable Mistress, Sable Diana, and others. It’s possible the seeds of this genre were sown by the runaway success of the 1957 Kyle Onstott novel Mandingo, but however it began, by the 1970s numerous authors were churning these out. The books were largely the same: slave-on-white-mistress sex, lots of rape, regular whippings, and baroque bloodletting.
While Black Queen is competently written—if only at the level of the average fantasy novel—Rockman has problems depicting his fictional slaves, apart from the titular Vuva. He inhabits them poorly, and doesn’t realistically capture what we suspect would be their thoughts. This is fiction, of course, so it’s always up to the author to determine what’s in characters’ minds, but he didn’t stretch himself toward any special insight. There’s too much “distressed keening” and “terrified caterwauling” from his enslaved masses. Ignoring the opportunity to humanize them is forgivable in a book like Slave Ship that isn’t really about slaves anyway, but is a bit of an airball in a tale where a rebel slave is the title character.
In the Western cultural psyche, the basic narrative of this period is that men went to Africa and kidnapped slaves. But in reality, men went to Africa, kidnapped farmers, fisherman, doctors, jewelry makers, storytellers, builders, soldiers, husbands, and wives, and turned them into slaves. This is obvious, but somehow obscure for most people. Rockman would have done better if he’d approached the story with that on his vision board. While Black Queen brings with it the low expectations attached to an exploitation novel, its historical context nonetheless asks for a more delicate understanding than he provided. But for us this book was something different, and for the price we couldn’t pass it up.
