Souljah On

MIDNIGHT

A Gangster Love Story

By Sister Souljah

Atria. 498 pp. $26.95

Sister Souljah's 1999 novel, "The Coldest Winter Ever," chronicled the wicked misadventures of a spoiled drug-land princess who'd do anything -- and I mean anything -- for a killer pair of Gucci shoes. A delightful tale with a noble message, it quickly became the biggest selling work of street lit ever: There are more than a million copies in print. Now, with that sex- and drug-infused cocktail behind her, Souljah upends her fans' expectations and pens a homage to a right-living boy.

We already know how this prequel will end. Midnight appeared in "The Coldest Winter Ever" as a drug lord's soldier who falls in love with the character "Sister Souljah" and then leaves his bloody deeds to set up a nice little legal business in Maryland. Now we get to learn about his pre-gangland life, when he was just a fierce, hardworking Muslim.

The plot kicks into gear with Midnight's arrival in New York from the Sudan on Halloween 1979. He is 7, and his pregnant mother, Umma, is 26, though both are wise beyond their years. The customs officers insult them by ordering Umma to remove her veil and head scarf, making crude comments about her beauty. Thus begins the duo's long struggle to cope with a brutish, immoral American culture while preserving their honorable Islamic traditions.

Tricked by a Jewish real estate broker into renting an apartment in the Brooklyn projects -- "a hell reserved for poor Blacks" -- the family prospers nonetheless. They launch a business based on Umma's extraordinary textile skills and save $80,000 to buy a house. (No subprime mortgage for them!) Meanwhile, Midnight becomes a ninja, hustles for his mother, falls in love and proves himself to be, at 14, more man than any of the lazy, browbeaten men around him. In short, Souljah gives us a character totally different from the morally handicapped heroine of "The Coldest Winter Ever."

Or does she? Our first hint that something might be off with this golden exemplar of manhood comes on Page 3, when Midnight -- who narrates the novel -- announces that there are times when the appropriate punishment for a woman who "suddenly behaves whorish" is murder. The next clue appears in Chapter 9, when he stakes out and shoots a womanizer who wants to woo his mother. The idea that assassination might have been avoided by a simple phone call from Umma telling the would-be stud to kiss off never crosses his mind. Perhaps that's because Umma is not allowed to speak to men outside her family.

Normally, such veins of darkness in a moral hero would be occasion for rollicking fun. Great fiction, after all, thrives on complex characters, and first-person stories are notoriously good vehicles for exposing ethical blind spots. The problem is that, in the past, Souljah has explicitly presented herself as a kind of moral teacher, and there's no reason to believe she's about to stop. In the reader's guide to the 2006 edition of "The Coldest Winter Ever," she writes of Midnight:

"Through him is delivered the strongest and most relevant message to black men ever delivered in the form of literature. . . . For men he is a goal and a standard. For women he is a dream and destination. . . . Without a man like him in each and every home, there is an absence so deep it stains the face of our women, steals the chastity of our daughters, and ensures an early burial for our sons."

While setting him up as this dreamy ideal, "Midnight" persistently denigrates not just women who sass or have sex before marriage but also black American men. "I wouldn't trade places with an American-born man for any amount of cash," Midnight declares in this new novel's opening chapter. With the exception of one pastor, all the black American guys in these pages are either dumb, criminal, cowardly, cuckolded or womanizing. What they really need, apparently, is for a 14-year-old Sudanese immigrant to come teach them how to be real men.

"Midnight" is a vibrant, engaging novel, and it's already followed "The Coldest Winter Ever" up the bestseller charts. But my enjoyment was soured by the undercurrent of condescension and hypocrisy. (A longtime activist whose Web site advertises her availability to lecture on 23 topics, Souljah hardly follows the model of silent, obedient womanhood she portrays in this story.)

I'd like to be able to dismiss my objections as over-analyzing a fairy tale of power, masculinity and dominance -- a fantasy that may be rapidly supplanted by the model of nonviolent success presented by President-elect Barack Obama. But I suspect that the next time she's hired to give talk No. 5, "From Boys to Men: Manhood," Souljah will reprise many of these "Midnight" themes.