Background of the Study
Chester Bomar Himes was born July 29, 1909, into a middle class, well-educated family in Jefferson City, Missouri. He died Nov. 12, 1984 in Moraira, Spain. In general, Himes could be called an African American writer whose novels reflect encounters with racism while describing truths his readers were unready to hear. Himes’ literary genius went relatively unnoticed within
the U.S. As an expatriate in Paris, he published a series of black detective novels. A contemporary of Richard Wright – the NEGRO WRITER of the times – and of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes was known for more angry fire than his celebrated colleagues and he wrote about black protagonists doomed by white racism and self-hate.
Born to teacher (Lincoln Institute) Joseph Sandy Himes and Estelle Bomar Himes, Chester was born in a family no stranger to books and writing. Yet the domination of his dark-skinned father by his light-skinned mother was a source of deep resentment that shaped Himes’s racial outlook. His father also taught at Alcorn State (Mississippi) and Branch Normal Institute (Arkansas). The family’s frequent relocations, as well as the accidental blinding of his brother, further disrupted his childhood.
After falling down an elevator shaft, on the job, Himes hields and attends Ohio State University on disability income. At Ohio State Himes is forced to view racism in a way he can no longer deny, as a result he is expelled over a “prank” and begins a path down into the underworld. From 1929, when he was 19, to 1936 he was jailed at the Ohio State Penitentiary for a 25 year sentence of armed robbery, and while there a prison fire killed 300 inmates. In the smoldering ashes, Himes, inspired by the Black Mask writings of Dashiell Hammett and by the grim events he’d witnessed, bought himself a Remington typewriter and began hammering out stories of his own. His work was published in the Pittsburgh Courier, Bronzeman, Atlanta Daily World, Abbott’s Monthly Magazine, Esquire. A number of his stories appeared in Esquire and other American magazines. He is parolled after 8 years and upon his release from prison, he worked at numerous odd jobs and joined the Works Progress Administration, eventually serving as a writer with the Ohio Writers’ Project.
His first novel, If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945), details the fear, anger, and humiliation of a black employee of a racist defense plant during World War II. Cast the First Stone (1952) portrays prison life, and The Third Generation (1954) examines family life. The Third Generation and Cast the First Stone, had been rejected out-of-hand by his publisher. In the US, Himes was largely ignored.
Unlike Richard Wright, Himes was never caught in the Communist Party. His Lonely Crusade (1947) is a comprehensive fiction treatment of the conflict among blacks, the labor movement, and the Communist Party but it received scathing reviews from the American left though its French version was called one of the 5 best novels published in France during the 1940’s. In general, he was well-thought of overseas so during the mid-1950s Chester Himes moved to Europe for good, first Paris where his serious literary novels left him quite poor.
Himes, as an exile, had considerable company in Paris. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright were just the most notable of the presences. Whether in private flats or the pre-tourist Café Tournon some of the meetings amongst the expatriats are lengendary.
From Himes’ first detective novel (1957), For Love of Imabelle = A Rage in Harlem (which one the Grand Prix for the best detective novel of the year): “As far back as Lieutenant Anderson could remember, bot of them, his two ace detectives with their identical big hard-shooting, head-whipping pistols, had always looked like two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town.” Grave Digger has a lumpy face, reddish brown eyes that always seem to smolder, and a big and rugged frame. He is more articulate than Coffin Ed who has one distinct feature – his face, which has been badly scarred by a thrown glass of acid. Their nicknames indicate the respect they receive in Harlem. They drive the streets in a nondescript battered super-charged Plymouth and work mainly through sheer presence and chance.
For their time, the Coffin & Grave Digger were excessively violent, and it was directed only at blacks, typical of the time but paradoxical given the social consciences of the detectives. For example, the type crime that outrages the two detectives most is the kind that occurs in most popular (and eventually made into a 1970 film) Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) – a hypocritical preacher extracting an enormous sum of money for a fake back-to-Africa movement.
Along with Run Man, Run (1966), another Harlem thriller; the novels, discussed on the Coffin and Grave Digger page, also include The Real Cool Killers, The Crazy Kill, All Shot Up, and The Big Gold Dream, The Heat’s On, and Blind Man with a Pistol.
Literature Review
Chapter 1. Coffin & Grave Digger
Into this stewpot of pimps, prostitutes, weed heads, junkies, con men, gangsters, numbers bankers, thieves, muggers, and killers, author Chester Himes created two police detectives to keep law and order. The citizens of Harlem nicknamed them Coffin Ed and Grave Digger. They were there to protect the common people, the working stiff, the unwary, the naive square. Yet most times, Ed and Digger found it was all they could do to keep the lid on the city’s garbage can.
The case here – involving the theft of money which was itself conned from people, and the bizarre but seemingly related hunt for a bale of cotton – is a wild one.) And with the two detectives come a compelling set of perspectives, one filled with equal parts love and frustration for their community, awareness of their own power and acknowledgment of the racist attitudes of the men around them, affection for the colorful characters and fury for the victimizers, and overriding all of that, a desire to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Cotton is the most unflinching of any of the books so far, with journeys into shooting dens and strip clubs falling alongside church services and police interrogation rooms, but it all feels vibrant and alive and wholly immersive in a way that sucks you into the book and brings 1960s Harlem to vivid life.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are tough cops on the Harlem beat assigned the case of the violent heist. The two cops are riddled with scar tissue and healed bullet holes from previous adventures. They have good reason to be skeptical of the grifter reverend and his Back-to-Africa scheme, but they also have deep compassion for the poor blacks so disillusioned with American life that they’d be willing to spend their last dime to leave the nation behind and start a new life in Africa.
1.2 Cotton Comes to Harlem
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) is the eighth of ten “Harlem Domestic” detective novels that Himes wrote, and it follows the formula of its predecessors. An outrageous crime causes a chain-reaction of violence in “lawless” Harlem. Black detectives “Coffin” Ed Jones and “Gravedigger” Johnson are called in to restore order. The initial event in this novel involves the Rev. Deke O’Malley and his phony back-to-Africa scheme, as Himes dares to parody the Black Muslims and black nationalists, such as Marcus Garvey. The $87,000 O’Malley collects from would-be pilgrims is stolen by white supremacists and stuffed into a cotton bale that falls from their truck, to be found by an itinerant black peddler, Uncle Bud. The investigation by Coffin Ed and Gravedigger is presented almost cinematically, with cross-cutting to other scenes. While they investigate, sneak thieves Loboy and Early Riser practice the “holy dream,” a con, on a church-woman inside a black church. The detectives work their stoolies in Harlem bars, but meanwhile O’Malley is fleeing. A lead takes them to Sarah’s brothel, where they find Loboy, but the white supremacists are attempting to recover the cotton bale by opening a Harlem office for an outrageous Back-to-the-South movement. Uncle Bud sells the cotton bale, apparently unwittingly, to Jewish scrap-dealer Abraham Goodman, whose helper Josh attempts to sell it to the supremacists. Rev. O’Malley learns of this, but when his old girlfriend Iris finds him with new girlfriend Mabel and kills her, he is, well, distracted. He knocks her out and flees, leaving Iris to be captured by police.
Iris, however, seduces the officer assigned to guard her, and locates O’Malley through his assistant Barry – who plans to sell a phony list of the names of the movement’s supporters to the white supremacists. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger shadow Barry to a rendezvous, where he is killed and O’Malley captured. Between trips to Mama Louise’s soul food restaurant, they return to their stoolies for signs of the lost cotton bale, which they now suspect may contain the $87,000.
A break-in at the junkyard confirms this; Mr. Goodman’s assistant Joshua is dead, and Goodman says that the cotton is gone. When the white supremacists and Black Muslims organize marches heading for each other, the detectives step in and re-route them with bullets. Then they find that O’Malley’s church flock have rushed the station house, allowing the reverend to be sprung by gunmen. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger now proceed by illegal means. They disguise Iris as another prisoner and let her loose, tailing her to a secret hideout under O’Malley’s church where the preacher’s two gunmen, who have turned on him, are holding him and hoping she will arrive with the $87,000. When she doesn’t have it, she is bound to O’Malley, and the gunmen engage in a losing shoot-out with the detectives. They locate the bale at the Cotton Club, where an exotic dancer uses it in her number. At the end she auctions it – to Colonel Calhoun of the white supremacists. But the bale turns out to be empty, and the detectives extort $87,000 from the Colonel in return for letting him return to the South and avoid charges in Joshua’s death. In the denouement, sitting at Mama Louise’s, they deduce that Uncle Bud took the money. Indeed, when they check with Air France, they learn that he has gone to Senegal, where he bought hundreds of head of cattle to exchange for the wives he plans to marry.
Himes’ detective novels began appearing in 1957 and, while written in English, were translated to and published in French for Marcel Duhamel’s Serie Noir before appearing in English, usually a year later. Himes was living in France then with little idea of what was happening in New York, which was both liberating and limiting.
Coffin Ed and Gravedigger live on the same street in quiet Queens, share a common-looking but souped-up car, feast on soul food, and prefer to drink double scotches. They carry customized weapons: Grave Digger’s fires tracer bullets that set people and objects on fire. Harlem residents believe that the pair will “shoot a man stone cold dead for crossing an imaginary line.”
1 The plot uses a motif from Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, for the object of everyone’s search, the cotton bale, turns out to be worthless; and, as in Red Harvest, violent mayhem and scene-by-scene plotting dominate the book. The escape of Uncle Bud, on the other hand, draws on African-American folk motifs (Brer Rabbit and other tricksters), as do Iris’s seduction of the policeman and Col. Calhoun’s return of the Back-to-Africa money. Most of the minor characters are one-dimensional grotesques reminiscent of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, which seems to anticipate the cartoon-like treatment of his characters that Himes delighted in. He also used the brilliant repartee and description that had made Chandler celebrated: “He looked like the born victim of a cheating wife” (18), “If the syndicate had wanted to kill him, he’d be decomposed by now” (15). At a bar called Big Wilt’s Small Paradise Inn, the detectives hear jazz so affecting that Grave Digger feels the instruments are “talking under their clothes” (33). This approach to hard-boiled fiction shows the influence of television, cartoons, and comics at a time when white authors, such as Macdonald, were trying to make the genre more literary.
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The plot starts with conman Reverend Deke O’Malley scamming eighty-seven black families in a sham Back-To-Africa movement. O’Malley is then robbed by the goons of white Southern Colonel Robert L. Calhoun, who stashes the money in a bale of cotton. However, as the Colonel’s goons are escaping, they lose the cotton, causing both O’Malley and Calhoun to hunt down the money. Detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are also looking for the money, as they wish to return it to each of the conned families. Throughout the novel, there is an abundance of violence, which is necessary for Himes’ largely political message as it is a representation of the “pervasive criminal violence that distorts black lives in Harlem” (Messent 174). While it may be an elementary observation, it’s important to state that a detective story is the perfect opportunity to investigate this violence that Himes is interested in, and by making his stories excessively gruesome, he has taken the detective genre and added an unparalleled, darker twist to it. As Rosanna Cavallaro states: Himes is able to realize both a literary and an ideological agenda through the manipulation of well-settled expectations with which the reader approaches the detective novel. By the novel’s end, Himes has redefined the detectives, the setting, the crime, and its resolution, locating them in a political and artistic context that is alternatingly a nostalgic throwback to the classic detective novel and a radical extension of deep noir values. (108) Himes takes this established genre and permeates it with overarching racial themes so that a clearer message can be seen. Cotton Comes to Harlem contains many of the conventional tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction while simultaneously harboring its own identity to propel Himes’ quest to understand black history and African American identity. T he violence is a critical way in which Himes explores the black experience in America. It is one way that Cotton Comes to Harlem becomes a mimetic novel that mirrors the reality of many African Americans. Mimetic representation is perhaps one of the most effective ways to convey an underlying message as Himes does. In the words of the renowned author Henry James, “As people feel life, so they will [feel] the art that is more closely related to it. This closeness of relation is what we should never forget in talking of the effort of the novel” (731). Mimesis, then, is much more than just an aesthetic quality, but rather an experience in and of itself. The novel becomes a living, breathing work that evokes a deeper connection with the audience due to the emotional responses