Literary Genealogy Part II

If Paul Laurence Dunbar is the essential great grandfather of hip hop literature with his novel The Sport of the Gods, then Chester Himes and his gritty street and detective fiction is the Grandfather. His novels are often categorized as crime or detective fiction but a closer look reveals a very close bloodline to the very fiction many of us are rolling our eyes and sucking our teeth about today.

If we look at Himes’ body of work it is clear that he had an affinity for the street. He understood the people as more than just hoodlums and criminals and undesirables, primarily because for a time he was one of them. They were real to him. They had voices and stories and it was obvious he felt the desire to tell those stories. Most people familiar with Himes know that he went to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio for robber and, in fact, began his writing career there. Prior to his turn in prison, he was known as Little Katzi (after the Katzenjammer kids comic strip) and could often be found in gambling joints and whorehouses throughout the Cleveland area.

Himes’ biography reads like well written street lit. And his fiction is no different. Drawing from his personal experiences in Cleveland and New York, Himes crafts a lifetime of stories about characters who are the victims of racism and capitalism and how those concepts shaped their opportunities.

He was highly intelligent. According to his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt, he was informed after his entrance exams to Ohio State University that he had the fourth highest IQ of freshmen entering that fall. He stayed there two quarters but was so distraught at the overt racism both on and off campus that he dreaded the idea of going back. Drawn by the street life since a crippling accident left his family in a shambles and him unable to work in order to collect his disability, he thought it would be fun to take a group of coeds to a Columbus whorehouse he’d discovered. When word got back to the Dean, his already failing grades and poor attitude made the decision to dismiss him easy.

From there his descent into the dark world of the gambler and overall thug is rather quick. To avoid his bickering parents he takes to the streets and is quickly “adopted” by the local gangsters. They give him responsibilities around their clubs and he takes to the life rather nicely. The violence and immediacy of the streets suits his quick temper and need to respond to the racism both toward and among African Americans he sees daily.

His gangster journey culminates with a seven year stint at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio. He is arrested in Chicago as he tried to fence jewelry stolen from a house in Cleveland. When the Chicago police can’t pin a local robbery on him they handcuff him, hang him upside down and beat him until he confesses to the crime he did commit. In prison he finds that he is unique among his colleagues in that he can read and write and here he begins to tell stories.
Himes’ novels take us through the streets of Harlem, through bus stations, whore houses, and down back alleys and through respectable neighborhoods to show the irony and contradictions of black life in America. For his trouble Himes received little to no acclaim in the United States. He had to move to Paris for that. His most famous characters, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, two black Harlem detectives, were vastly complex characters often overlooked because of their inclusion in a pulp style novel.

Like Dunbar, Himes understood his characters’ disenfranchisment and the elements of society which caused it. Dunbar believed that the Hamilton’s were at the mercy of the gods, that elements of their fate were out of their control. Himes portrayed the same lack of control in his characters, only what Dunbar called the gods, Himes called American society.

From Himes comes many other writers like Donald Goines and Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck, to name the most popular. The W.W. Norton company has published what they call “old school” books/authors which include many more street novels than a lot people probably even knew existed.

The point of this entry is to reiterate the fact that the literature is not new. It’s not even unique. It has a history because the people who write it have a history in this country. The only real claim that this genre can make for itself in terms of groundbreaking achievement is its current public popularity. Himes and his colleagues never got the attention they felt they deserved for telling the stories of people whose voices generally go unheeded.