Carceral Landscapes in Chester Himes’s Harlem Detectives

Over the last few years I’ve thought more and more seriously of returning to graduate school to pursue an MA in English. I’ve been lucky enough to teach a few classes in the English department and to spend time with English undergraduates and graduate students working on the literary journal NDQ. These experiences have refired my excitement for reading fiction, but I often find myself simply at the edge of my interpretative capacities and lacking the theoretical, conceptual, historical, and critical tools to make read texts in ways that unlock what I imagine to be their full potential. I’m sure some of it also has to do with patience, with discipline, and with practice.

In any event, as I mull over this option in the future, I’ve started to consider possible thesis topics (or even just papers) that might leverage my interest in archaeology and my interest in American literature. This past weekend, I spent a few hours (largely on flights) re-reading some Chester Himes’s Harlem Detective novels. Not only are these books recognized as classic examples of hardboiled detective fiction, but they also provided a reader with a stylized (if not always stylish) view of post-war Harlem and Black urbanism more broadly.

Reading these works, I couldn’t help but thing of the recent work of Christopher Matthews’s work on the archaeology of carceral cities in his recent volume co-edited with Bradley D. Phillippi, Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege (New Mexico 2020). As I’ve blogged about before Matthews explores how late-20th century urban planning, racial discrimination, and policing practices create carceral cities in which violence (often executed through the deployment of infrastructure) combine to limit the movement and opportunities for urban Black communities. 

In Himes’s novels, the carceral character of post-war Harlem is reinforced through his main character’s, “Coffin” Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, practice of calling out “Straighten up!” and “Count off!” when first engaging with suspects and witnesses at a crime scene. These catch phrases evoked not only the military experience of World War II veterans, but also the prison. The carceral character of Harlem is further reinforced through the firmness of its boundaries in Himes’s novels. Coffin Ed Johnson and Digger Jones become anxious when a case forces them to go beyond the limits of Harlem and heading south of 96th street into downtown Manhattan. In Harlem, the two detectives had nearly unlimited access to the private spaces of their suspects and witnesses, regularly invading apartments and businesses, disregarded private property, and threatened violence in efforts to solve a crime. These features of Harlem life likewise find parallels with prison life characterized by the absence of personal space and private property and the constant threat of violence.

Needless to say, I am not original in making these observations and Himes’s fiction has recently received some renewed attention (including the republication of Chester Himes’s 1967 essays “On the Use of Force” in the PMLA in 2020 where it is joined by Sarah Wasserman’s article “Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and the Persistence of Urban Forms.”). I’m likewise interested in exploring her new book, The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel (2020). At the same time, I’d like to understand the larger context for Himes’s work in mid-century Black publishing and fiction. During college and graduate school, I often enjoyed the works of Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim and I am intrigued by Justin Gifford’s Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing (2013) which was not only blurbed by Ice-T (!!), but also draws upon early-21st century works that look to Black crime novels and detective and police fiction as a way to unpack the complex relationship between race and violence in America. 

It has also made me think about (re?)reading works like Richard R. Nelson’s The Moon and the Ghetto (1977) which has come back into focus as scholars have once again sought to evoke the concept of “wicked problems” to describe the intersection of race, violence, and urban life.

Finally, I can’t help wonder about the relationship between Chester Himes and the Black Arts Movement including my interest in the mid-century New York jazz scene. I can’t imagine Amiri Baraka and Himes sitting down together for a polite chat about race and the city, but the gritty, if dramatic, morality tales that feature so prominently in Himes work must have at least been understood as a kind of populist effort to formate the problems associated with race in post-war cities. And Himes drawing of the carceral landscape of Harlem would have almost certainly resonated with BAM writers who sought to trace trajectories that transgressed the economic, social, and political segregation that persisted in cities. Sun Ra’s exploration of “Afrofuturism” and “Afrocentrism” embodied an awareness that the city as a backdrop for solving racial problems would produce recursive and recurring encounters with violence.

Again, I lack the confidence to consider Himes’s work fully in a Black urban landscape informed by racially inflected consumer culture, materiality, politics, and violence. That said, it feels like there must be something going on between the radical rhetoric of Baraka, Sun Ra’s “Astro Black” philosophy and cosmology, the speculative fiction of Samuel Delany and the gritty world of Himes, Goines, Iceberg Slim, Jerome Dyson Wright, Clarence Cooper Jr., and other mid-century Black “pulp” novelists. Hopefully at some point in my life, I have the time to explore this in a more thoughtful and maybe even more archaeologically minded way.