SOMEBODY’S CHILD, by Dennis A. Williams; Simon & Schuster, New York; 285 pages, $22.00 cloth.

SAFARI WEST, by John A. Williams; Hochelaga Press, Montreal; 78 pages, $10.95 paper.

A new novel that hasn’t been featured on the “Oprah Winfrey Show,” but should be, is “Somebody’s Child” by Dennis A. Williams. Here is a fine study of Black American manhood by an intelligent, perceptive insider who has something to say about the race cancer that continues to plague our society from “white bread” Maine to the Boston ghettos and beyond.

Thoughtful, concerned Americans should know about this book and its complicated truths about what it means to be a black man — a father, a son, a brother, a husband, a lover, an athlete, an intellectual — at the end of the 20th century in the United States.

In a recent phone conversation with Dennis Williams, the current director of Minority Affairs at Georgetown University, we talked about black American men, “different types of whites,” the reasons he wrote his book, and even the slogan “Maine — the Way Life Should Be,” which not only could be interpreted as an insult to the hard-working folk Down East still struggling to make a decent living but as racist, appealing to those who want to believe life should be largely free of black, Hispanic, and Asian-Americans, as Maine is.

Dennis Williams said, “When I first visited Maine and got to know some of the people, I saw Maine as a different kind of white than the `suburban whites’ of Washington, D.C. Maine is a down-home kind of place connected on the level of my people who worked in other people’s houses.

“Among the white suburban middle class, there is what I call `invisible inferiority’; but in Maine the inferiority is more visible. The gap between rich and poor is clear. When I first came to Maine it was called `Vacationland,’ and it reminded me of the old TV commercials for Jamaica where the locals know their place and stay out of the way.”

With close friends in the Mount Desert Island area, Williams and his father, John A. Williams, also a distinguished author, and their wives have visited Maine many times. In the spring of 1988, John A. Williams lectured and read from his work at the University of Maine where his then latest work, “!Click Song,” was taught in literature courses.

The good news, 10 years later, about that book, which concerns a black writer’s dramatic and frustrating odyssey through the jungle of the New York publishing scene, is that it is now being made into a film.

About “Somebody’s Child,” Dennis Williams said, “I think of very much a family values story. It’s very conservative; it’s the kind of thing that helps people get beyond the stereotypes. It’s about black young men concerned about family and fatherhood. It tries to build some bridges. The original conception was of this as a `brother book.’ It wasn’t until I started writing it that it became more of a `father book.’

“My concern in writing the novel was in understanding men’s roles, fathers and sons, and notions of family responsibility. I was trying to examine why it is people choose to become fathers or choose NOT to be fathers. Unlike women becoming mothers, men have a choice.”

The two brothers, and main characters, in “Somebody’s Child” are Quincy “Crawdaddy” Crawford, an English teacher and writer in New York City, and Elliott “Bubba” Davis, a college basketball player at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The difference in surnames is due to Elliott’s agreement to adoption by his stepfather, Derek Davis, and Quincy’s refusal to be adopted. The brothers’ real father, Clarence Crawford, was killed in action in the Korean War in 1952.

The brothers have a stepsister, Delphine, who goes to high school in Boston, where the boys also grew up. It’s 1976, America’s bicentennial year, and the racial strife over busing in South Boston is going on. Delphine, who has a close white friend named Beth, is a student leader at her racially troubled school, trying to organize a two-stage prom dance whereby the whites would have their dance first followed by the black version. Delphine, with a black boyfriend and white friends, finds herself caught in a difficult and ultimately frightening situation the night of the prom.

The bulk of the book is concerned with the uneasy and complex relationship between the two brothers, Quincy the intellectual and Elliott the jock; and their tough-minded stepfather Davis. Also, there are several subplots involving all the women in the men’s lives. Beyond the brothers’ mother, Dee Dee, and sister Delphine, there are girlfriends, most notably Maxine Love and Fontelle, Quincy’s women, and Glenda, Elliott’s girl. Both brothers have fathered children out of wedlock and are confused about their responsibilities and relations.

The novel begins with a short story, “De Voodoo Spell,” written by Quincy Crawford, and there are other stories within the main tale like the one about how Derek Davis left his life in Barbadoes to come to Boston and the one about how Clarence Crawford had befriended hungry Korean children against military orders during the war.

Williams has created very believable characters of both sexes and he writes very well about sex and sexual relationships. The novel is rich with memorable scenes. Maxine at an abortion clinic in New York, a racial fight at an ice cream stand, black males talking about Malcolm X while checking out the “white chicks” in Harvard Square, Elliott’s trying to play in a basketball game with a bum ankle, Quincy’s teaching tough city kids and advising an after-school lit club meeting, Maxine dealing with life in a New York TV studio, a teen-age rape scene, and a scary confrontation between blacks and whites in a redneck Boston bar.

Whites are often referred to as “pink-faced people” or “gray people” who look foolish at a dance trying to act like blacks. The Boston Garden “smelled like beer and cigars filtered through stupid white people who he [Derek Davis] always said would rather watch a bunch of foreigners sliding into one another on the ice with sticks, even when they were losing, than watch black men winning.”

Derek Davis, who also turns out to be a thoughtful and wise father, says, “A man must always remember where his home is, and he must always know his own people … he who forgets this is a dead man, like these colored American zombies.” Davis is a social worker with no illusions about the American dream; and through him, Williams not only shows how a good, responsible father acts, but describes the day-to-day living conditions of blacks in the Boston ghettos.

Cynical Quincy, who has a hard time accepting Davis, tells his brother, “Believing in fathers is like believing in magic anyway — it’s a leap of faith. You always know who your mother is. You came out of her, there is no question. You’re connected from birth. But fathers are different.”

Dennis Williams knows whereof he writes. Besides having both a father and stepfather himself, he has a brother, Greg, and a half brother, Adam, and is the father of two children. He grew up in Syracuse, graduated from Cornell, worked for Newsweek in both Boston and New York, and received his MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

In light of the Million Man March in Washington and President Clinton’s Dialogue on Race, a fine, serious novel like “Somebody’s Child” is full of what poet Seamus Heaney calls “the inner complications,” is not only good news but a great gift for all of us. While offering no easy solutions to the racism underlying our society, it is full or penetrating and insightful observations about blacks and whites, males and females, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters. This is a good book that demands the reader’s strict attention. It must be read as carefully as it was written.

“Somebody’s Child” is Dennis Williams’ third novel. His first, “Them That’s Not,” about a high school race riot in Syracuse, was co-authored with his good white friend, Spero Pines, now a New York judge. His second novel was “Crossover,” about race relations in the late 1960s and early 1970s at an Ivy League college like Cornell. There is also a biography titled “If I Stop I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor,” co-authored with his father, John A. Williams, who is best known for his novels “The Man Who Cried I Am” (1967), “Sissie” (1969), “Captain Blackman” (1972) and “!Click Song” (1987).

In 1963, Holiday magazine commissioned John Williams to travel about the country, a trip about which he wrote in “This Is My Country, Too” (1965). I remember feeling relieved upon reading the Maine section to learn how Williams didn’t experience any avert redneck racism Down East; in fact, he wrote mostly about the food.

“I did not find New Englanders crusty,” he wrote, “merely reserved and a little curious. I enjoyed a fine fish chowder in Skowhegan, a lusty clam chowder in Bangor. Near Ellsworth, overlooking Union River Bay, I tackled a Maine lobster that, every time I think of it, brings water to my mouth.”

In 1998, after a 40-year career as a writer, John A. Williams now finds he has to share the spotlight with his son Dennis. The senior Williams has published 12 novels, seven books of non-fiction, edited numerous others, and even written the libretto for an opera, “Vanqui.” At 73, he is now retired from his post as Paul Robeson Professor of English at Rutgers University. But he hasn’t retired from writing. Two new novels, “Clifford’s Blues” and “Colleagues,” are scheduled for publication, and his first book of poetry, “Safari West,” has just appeared.

The book opens with a short poem, “Genesis,” about the beginning of the human race. The title poem, “Safari West,” is about imagining what it must have been like to have come to America on the slave ships. There are 45 poems in all written from 1953 (“The Cool One” and “The Age of Bop”) to 1997.

The subject matter ranges from Africa and slavery days to today’s suburban home security systems (“Teaneck, N.J.”), about which Williams writes: “Yet once I slept with opened doors and windows wide, summers, even on a first-floor porch. That was before the war. But when did it start, when will it end and who will win it?”

In “Boy in the South Pacific,” he writes about his own experience as a soldier in World War II when he served in a segregated unit; and in “Journey Without Name” he writes about his parents moving from Mississippi to Syracuse, N.Y., where Williams and his son Dennis grew up. He writes about John Brown and Malcolm X; and in a poem called “Nat Turner’s Profession,” he writes: “Freedom’s no gift; it’s seized by might … to make some words realities, that all the world must one day heed.”

Certainly, the talented and formidable team of John A. and Dennis A. Williams, father and son, have made some words realities; and one hopes that a growing audience will heed them.