[Reviewer Bachtell on this "multi-layered working-class suspense
thriller," the second novel by this widely respected working class
movement leader, activist, and thinker. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘THE MAN WHO CHANGED COLORS’  
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John Bachtell
August 29, 2023
People's World
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_ Reviewer Bachtell on this "multi-layered working-class suspense
thriller," the second novel by this widely respected working class
movement leader, activist, and thinker. _

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_The Man Who Changed Colors_
Bill Fletcher Jr.
Hardball and Little Heroes Press, 2022
ISBN 9798985097962

In _The Man Who Changed Colors_, storyteller Bill Fletcher Jr. offers
readers a many-layered political suspense thriller that had me
enthralled from cover to cover. The story, told through the eyes of
David Gomes, an undaunted reporter for the _Cape and Islands Gazette_,
is set in Cape Cod, Mass., in the late 1970s and unfolds amid the
dynamics and tensions of the Portuguese and Cape Verdean communities,
the latter of which Gomes is a part.

This is Fletcher’s second novel featuring Gomes as the central
character. Gomes is reminiscent of “Easy” Rawlins, Walter
Mosley’s private investigator, only with a reporter’s notebook.
_The Man Who Changed Colors_ carries on from Fletcher’s first novel,
The Man Who Fell from the Sky,
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a murder mystery. Both explore race, class and Black identity,
including conflicts between the Cape Verdean and African-American
communities, and structural and daily slights and more blatant forms
of racism they experience from the white community on the Cape and the
greater Boston area.

The novel opens with the mysterious death of a worker in the historic
Quincy Shipyard, which in real life closed in 1984 and employed over
4000 workers at its height. A physician with the Massachusetts
Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health prods Gomes to expose the
dangerous workplace conditions at the shipyard after a series of
fatalities. Gomes quickly comes to suspect the latest death is no
accident.

The plot is full of surprises, twists, and turns as Gomes descends
deeper, endangering his life, into the political intrigue between
groups in the Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrant communities. He
finds himself amid the ongoing hostilities between supporters of the
Portuguese fascist regime headed by dictator António de Oliveira
Salazar (1889-1970), whose successor was overthrown in 1974 during the
Carnation Revolution, and the revolutionary national liberation
movement of Cape Verdeans who suffered under Portuguese colonialism
beginning in the 1400s.

Portuguese fascists, with the assistance of the CIA, resettled in New
Bedford and comprised a criminal gang. There they confronted Cape
Verdean immigrants, some of whom were incarcerated and tortured in the
notorious Tarrafal Concentration Cam
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on the Cape Verde island of Santiago, and who never forgot.

Fletcher does a great job of developing characters, especially Gomes,
who comes to life as a resourceful, incorruptible, and courageous
journalist who risks his life in pursuit of the truth. Fletcher
expertly brings others into Gomes’s life and work, including his
wife, parents, aunt, and uncle, who supported the Cape Verdean
liberation struggle; his ex-girlfriend, who is also his boss,
co-workers, and extended community of friends, whom he enlists in the
investigation.

Among the many strands Fletcher weaves into the story are Gomes’s
employment at the small Cape Cod newspaper, which his boss is selling
to a larger entity and its corporate-style management with little
interest in his investigative journalism, as well as the dynamics
between him, his wife and ex-girlfriend, and the seasonal ebbs and
flows of the tourism industry on the Cape.

Fletcher vividly depicts working-class life in New Bedford, the string
of other working-class communities along the Massachusetts coast, and
the dangerous work conditions in the shipyard. The author himself was
intimately familiar with the Quincy Shipyard, where he worked as a
welder and experienced a co-worker’s death just weeks prior to his
own injury in a workplace fall.

Fletcher also describes dynamics in the local union and organizing by
a reform caucus to oust the corrupt, pro-company leadership. While
working there, Fletcher was also involved in a reform rank-and-file
group.

These experiences, his lifetime of activism in organized labor, racial
and social justice, peace and international solidarity, his
scholarship, and journalism, allow Fletcher to develop an informed
context for the story and its diverse characters. Fletcher made a turn
to writing fiction with his first novel at the encouragement of his
friend, the actor Danny Glover. Fletcher’s skillful storytelling
allows him to reach a broader audience with his ideas.

Fortunately, the book found a publisher in Hardball and Little Heroes
Press [[link removed]], led by the
indomitable Tim Sheard, a great storyteller in his own right. Hardball
Press is “dedicated to mentoring working-class writers and putting
their stories into print”—stories from authors wanting to change
the world that might not otherwise find an outlet.

John Bachtell is president of Long View Publishing Co., the publisher
of _People's World_. He is active in electoral, labor, environmental,
and social justice struggles. He grew up in Ohio, where he attended
Antioch College in Yellow Springs. He currently lives in Chicago.

* the novel
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* U.S. Fiction
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* suspense novels
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* African American literature
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* working class literature
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