Limited Options: Strategic Maneuverings in Hime's Harlem
1994; Saint Louis University; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1945-6182
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoChester Himes, an American author who in his lifetime never found a place in American literary scene, set his novels written during French expatriation in nostalgic milieu of a Harlem he half-created in his imagination. In fiction he was able to exercise a control over U.S. racial politics which he (like most people) could never exercise in life. Himes explained pleasure of his nostalgic literary act to John A. Williams: I was very happy writing these detective stories, especially first one, when I began it. I wrote those stories with more pleasure than I wrote any of other stories. And then when I got to end and started my detectives shooting at some white people, I was happiest. (qtd. in Williams 3l5) Himes's detective novels allow him to control site of nostalgia, briefly to imagine refashioning U.S. race relations and law enforcement practices. His own experiences as a black convict in Ohio State Prison inform his authorial imagination in these novels.(1) An emphasis present in detective fiction, and Himes's other writings as well, is necessity of physical safety for African Americans. Himes's two detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, emerge as the cops who should have been, cops who could offer protection to African American urban community. By analyzing two of Himes's detective novels, published in 1959 and 1969, we can chart progress of these proposed heroes. In 1959 in The Real Cool Killers Himes constructs Coffin Ed and Grave Digger as viable folk heroes for urban community.(2) But by Blind Man with a Pistol (1969) their effectiveness as heroes is undercut by altered socio-political landscape of U.S. race relations. The Real Cool Killers: Coffin Ed and Grave Digger as Folk Heroes Himes's second detective novel, The Real Cool Killers, opens with blues lines I'm gwine down to de river, / Set down on de ground. / If de blues overtake me, / I'll jump overboard and drown (5). As a vernacular inscription, this epigram is well-suited to themes of Himes's novel, which can be read as ghetto's answer to white power. But words of blues lines imply a different and more pessimistic response to life in a racist society than response suggested by novel. My contention is that characters in The Real Cool Killers employ specifically community-based, folk-heroic strategies of self-defense and solidarity in face of intrusive, dominating power structures embodied by white cops. In all of his detective novels, Himes sets up Harlem as particularly unreadable and mystifying, not only to white visitors and cops, but also to his two heroes, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, and even local inhabitants. What varies is degree to which Harlem mystifies various characters, and it is community insiders' special skill both in reading Harlem and in manipulating its unreadability which allows for their self-protecting solidarity. Most governmental systems of ordering and labeling urban reality are not applicable in Himes's Harlem. When Grave Digger questions a suspect to find out an address, evasive response he gets is, 'You don't never think 'bout where a gal lives in Harlem, 'les you goin' home with her. What do anybody's address mean up here?' (115). The breakdown of ability to rely on official locating practices functions in several ways in novel. First, it completely baffles white cops (especially chiefs and lieutenants) and renders them ineffectual. It allows Himes to project Coffin Ed and Grave Digger as powerful inside readers of an otherwise inscrutable milieu. And it enables residents of Harlem to manipulate particular codes which confound white cops, in interest of self-protection. In The Real Cod Killers white cops continually express their frustration in being unable to pin down a systematic way to decipher their surroundings. Their inability to make sense of their environment is directly linked to their preconceived racist stereotypes, as is seen in exasperated statement of one white cop to another: 'What's a name to these coons? …
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