Urban Renewal and the Reinvention of American Detective Literature in Chester Himes’S Run Man Run Justin Gifford

“There was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street”: Urban Renewal and the Reinvention of American Detective Literature in Chester Himes’s Run Man Run Justin Gifford

Abstract. In examining Chester Himes’s long-ignored Run Man Run (1959), the author argues for a re-evaluation of Himes as an innovator of the detective novel. Exploring how Run Man Run engages postwar urban planning policies, the author shows how Himes was the ﬁrst of many twentieth-century black novelists who mobilized the crime novel to expose the racial ideologies under- writing “urban renewal.”

At the height of his fame in France as America’s first popular novelist of black detective fiction, Chester Himes published Run Man Run (1959), his only Harlem Domestic novel that did not feature his black detectives Coffin Ed Jones and Grave Digger Johnson.1 A dra- matic departure from Himes’s more famous farcical novels, Run Man Run is the grim story of white detective Matt Walker, who hunts down a black porter named Jimmy Johnson, after Jimmy has witnessed Walker’s murder of two fellow porters. Mostly ignored by the public at the time of its 1966 U.S. publication and by critics in the years since then, Run Man Run is generally passed over as the anomaly of Himes’s otherwise successful career as a detective novelist, with the exceptions of analyses by Abbott (155–90) and Craven (37–55). Michael Denning is representative of critics who dismiss the novel when he writes: “This is not in the least comic and is very different from the Grave Digger/Coffin Ed series. It

Justin Gifford is assistant professor of English at University of Nevada–Reno, where he specializes in American and African American literature and culture, crime ﬁction, critical theory, popular culture, and cultural studies.

38 CLUES • Volume 28, Number 1 becomes a sort of belated version of [Richard Wright’s] Native Son and, without the natu- ralistic detail, is largely unsuccessful” (165). Going against the grain of contemporary scholarship, this essay argues for Run Man Run’s significance for comprehending Himes’s complex relationship to the popular literary form that made him famous. It is precisely because Run Man Run is such a profoundly different enterprise than Himes’s satirical Coffin Ed and Grave Digger novels that it invites our scrutiny. The only Himes novel to feature a white detective, Run Man Run provides a fuller picture of Himes’s consequence as an innovator of American literary forms and as a social commentator of his moment. In fact, renewed attention to the novel reveals its unsuspected importance for rethinking crime literature’s relationship to the intersecting issues of race, urban renewal, and violence in America. The story of a white detective who relentlessly chases his black suspect across Man- hattan, Run Man Run showcases how racist violence and the containment of urban minorities underwrite the apparently disinterested art of detection and city planning. A seemingly minor moment in the middle of Run Man Run exemplifies the exact relationship among these issues. In a scene typical from the American hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the white detective surveys the urban streets before him, reporting what he sees with tough-guy disinterest. In Himes’s version, as Walker cruises Harlem searching for Jimmy, he reflects upon the changing racial character of the city: When he came out he noticed how the neighborhood had changed since his school days at City College. Colored people were moving in and it was getting noisy. Already Harlem had taken over the other side of the street. This side, toward the river was still white, but there was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street.... South of 145th street the Puerto Ricans were taking over, crowding out the Germans and the French, who’d gotten there first. It was like a dark cloud moving over Manhattan, he thought. But it wasn’t his problem; he’d leave it to the city planners, to Commissioner Moses and his men. (111). This moment reveals how Himes draws upon detective fiction tropes to engage the social crisis of racial succession that was brewing in 1950s America. Looking out at a Harlem in racial transition, Walker notes that African Americans and Puerto Ricans have replaced French and German immigrants, a compact narrative of urban America’s transforming racial composition in the twentieth century. Although Walker worries that the last few decades of the Great Migration are like a “dark cloud moving over Manhattan,” he is relieved when he remembers that Robert Moses will contain the menace through city planning. The narrative of the white detective policing black bodies is a familiar one in American literature from the original detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the race-baiting novels of Mickey Spillane (see Bailey; Nelson; Smith; Sundquist; Kennedy and Weissberg). What is striking here is the way that the detective emotionlessly passes the buck to Moses, a real historical figure who infamously destroyed the fabric of many neighborhoods with his urban renewal programs and highway construction projects. Casting Moses as the figure who will pick up where the detective leaves off, Himes makes an explicit connection between detective literature’s insistent violence against black characters and Moses’s management of urban populations. Positing that the secret agenda of Moses and the detective is actually to “stop the colored people from walking across the street,” Run Man Run unmasks the figures of ostensible rationalism as agents of Jim Crow modernity. To understand the full significance of this connection between urban renewal and detective literature, it is necessary first to recognize Moses’s central role in making modern America’s racially divided landscape. Before he was ousted from his position as chair-

“There was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street” 39 man of the mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance for New York in 1960, Moses led the nation’s largest slum clearance program. A proponent of the super-block solution, he viewed slums as a spreading cancer that needed to be flattened and replaced by homogenous high- rise housing projects. In the decades following World War II, these Le Corbusier-inspired facilities were constructed in New York Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, and in many other U.S. cities during Moses’s influential reign. However, “the projects,” as they are widely known, have become virtual prisons for poor African Americans and other minorities almost since the moment of their construction. Moses further promoted white flight and black ghettoization with the construction of the modern expressway system. For instance, dynamiting his way through the Bronx to make room for the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Moses displaced some 60,000 working-class New Yorkers and transformed that borough into an international symbol of urban blight (see Berman 290–92). Robert Caro estimates that over the course of his career, the “power broker” evicted somewhere around a half a million people from their homes, a disproportionate number of them black and Puerto Rican (20). Although Moses’s policies represent a watershed moment in the management of racial and ethnic populations in the postwar city, he formalized a process of ghettoization that had begun many decades earlier. As African Americans migrated to cities in large numbers during World War I, there emerged a growing perception among working-class whites that their neighborhoods were being “invaded.” A sociopolitical ideology that linked black neighborhoods to vice, crime, and moral darkness soon materialized, and in cities all over Amer- ica, whites employed various methods of intimidation, including block restrictions, neighborhood associations, and even bombings to force African Americans into the city’s worst housing stock (see Drake and Cayton; Bauman; Hirsch; Osofsky; Sugrue). Follow- ing World War II, nonwhite racial identity and declining property values were conjoined in the minds of many as a kind of discursive and symbolic unity (see Beauregard; Harvey). As a result, between 1940 and 1970, an estimated 7 million whites fled American cities, while at the same time 5 million African Americans came to occupy those abandoned spaces (see Mollenkopf). This American apartheid, the divide between white suburbs and the black inner city, became one of the defining characteristics of racial identity throughout the course of the twentieth century (see Massey and Denton). However, it was the creation of black ghettos in America that set the stage for the emergence of black-authored crime and detective literature, of which Himes is the primary antecedent. In the late 1960s, as insurrections swept across the country, black pulp paperbacks were sold to black audiences for the first time on a mass scale with the publication of Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, and many others.2 Although initially sold at liquor stores, newsstands, and other off-the-wall venues, black-authored crime paperbacks are now avail- able from outlets ranging from Barnes and Noble bookstores to street-corner tables in Harlem. Currently composed of about half of all titles sold by African American authors, self-published street literature is in many ways the literature of our time. The controver- sies that surround street fiction’s popularity, literary quality, and politics are all issues that Himes faced when creating his Harlem Domestic novels. As a digression from his more mar- ketable Coffin Ed and Grave Digger stories, Run Man Run registers Himes’s dissatisfaction with publishing genre fiction in an industry that consistently cheated him out of his roy- alties and marketed his books as tawdry sensationalism. It is telling that although Himes’s other detective novels were published as paperback originals in America by companies such as Avon and Berkley soon after their French release, it took seven years before Run Man Run was published in English. As the dissenting novel of Himes’s Harlem Domestic series,

40 CLUES • Volume 28, Number 1 a novel that has been subsumable by neither commercial nor critical interests, Run Man Run provides a prescient perspective on the commodification of black literary identity. This essay is divided into three parts. In the first part, the racial underpinnings of the hard-boiled novel are examined through a close analysis of Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely. A recognized classic of American literature and a literary model for Run Man Run, Farewell, My Lovely provides a clear picture of detective fiction’s collusive relationship with discourses that equate black migration to urban decline. The second part of the essay reads Run Man Run as an unstable revision of this traditional detective story. It is unstable because, unlike Chandler’s novel, which features the white detective as the mediator of knowledge, Run Man Run employs a narrator who reports on the perspective of the detective and his victim. This double-voicedness not only undermines the hege- monic authority of the white detective but also reimagines the black criminal as a compet- ing hero in the novel. In the third section, the conclusion of Run Man Run is examined as Himes’s celebration of the black vernacular against the unified vision of modernity repre- sented by Moses. Jimmy’s Harlem shopping trip at the conclusion of the novel can be read as an endorsement of black working-class culture. Ultimately, Himes employed the popular form of the detective story as a defense of popular life. But to understand the import of Himes’s revision of the hard-boiled detective story in Run Man Run, it is necessary to first consider the source of his creative critique, Farewell, My Lovely.

“I HAD THE PLACE TO MYSELF”: RAYMOND CHANDLER AND THE FICTIONS OF URBAN DECLINE

In a 1970 interview with John A. Williams, Himes reflected upon his prolific writing career that had yielded short stories, “protest” fiction, detective novels, and social satires. In a moment that has gone mostly unnoticed by critics, Himes explained to Williams how Chandler’s classic Farewell, My Lovely promotes an ideology of racial segregation and class stratification.3 Commenting on the opening of the book, in which Marlowe explores a black-owned bar in what is now Watts, Himes remarked that the novel’s representations of black Los Angeles betray Chandler’s prejudiced perspective:

HIMES:You know, they didn’t open those nightclubs and restaurants on Central Avenue until Thursday. WILLIAMS:Maid’s day off. HIMES:Yeah, they were closed. Because you know, some of Raymond Chandler’s crap out there, he writes in Farewell, My Lovely, he has this joker ride about in the Central Avenue section. Some of that’s very authentic—it was like that. A black man in Los Angeles, he was a servant. (Williams 54–55) Himes’s colloquial statement to Williams reveals the extent to which detective novels like Farewell, My Lovely depend on and produce an ideology of racial servitude. Showing off his own skills as a detective, Himes read the opening of Chandler’s novel as an emblem of white presumptions about the endless availability of black labor. While granting that some of Chandler’s depictions of Central Avenue are indeed “authentic,” his larger point is that the portrayal of black Los Angeles in the novel is “crap” and that Marlowe is a “joker,” a tourist of Watts. For Himes, Marlowe’s expedition to Los Angeles’s dark underworld does not so much reveal something about the black neighborhood, as it exposes the detective ﬁgure’s dependence on such constructions for the constitution of his own identity.

“There was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street” 41 According to Chandler, the detective was a man defined by his ability to retain his honor in the face of a threatening urban landscape. As he famously wrote in “The Simple Art of Murder,” his seminal essay on hard-boiled fiction, “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man” (20). Although Chandler uses the phrase “neither tarnished nor afraid” to describe the detective’s moral decency, Himes’s comments about the opening of Farewell, My Lovely indicate that there is a racial valence to this description as well. To borrow from Toni Morrison’s influential formulation in Playing in the Dark, in which she reads seemingly minor African American characters as centrally important “serviceable” figures in the white literary imagination, the black neighborhood in Chandler’s novel operates as the “mean streets” set piece against which the detective defines himself as not “tarnished.” In Morrison’s analysis, apparently marginal black characters from the fiction of Poe to Ernest Hemingway serve the interests of white authors by offering themselves up as scapegoats and victims to be variously captured, castrated, and killed. Although these characters appear to be insignificant to the story as a whole, according to Morrison, they lubricate the plot and aid in the architecture of the new white man by operating as sites of projection and intense self-reflection. As Chandler’s novel uses the black neighborhood as symbolic shorthand for the dark city, South Central becomes a “serviceable” literary device in the construction of the white detective. It is no wonder, then, that Himes concluded his reading of Chandler’s novel with the statement, “A black man in Los Angeles, he was a servant.” A closer examination of the opening of Farewell, My Lovely reveals how the novel promotes ideologies of white privilege and racial containment. In the first lines of the book, private eye Philip Marlowe reports on his trip to Los Angeles’s heart of darkness: It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro. I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home. I never found him, but Mrs. Aleidis never paid me any money either. (5) Much like the moment discussed earlier in Run Man Run where Walker reads the cityscape before him, the opening of Farewell, My Lovely features a white detective protagonist encountering a city in racial transition and reporting it to the reader in economical prose. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the Central Avenue corridor had been Los Angeles’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood, composed of blacks, Italians, Asians, Latinos, whites, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who had all come to find work in L.A.’s burgeoning industrial economy. As the African American population increased during the 1920s and 1930s, however, whites employed formal and informal methods of intimidation, including violence, block restrictions, and neighborhood associations to create a racially divided city. According to Los Angeles historian Mike Davis, “95 percent of the city’s housing stock in the 1920s was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians,” creating a “white wall” around Central Avenue (161). Marlowe’s opening vignette provides a narrative microcosm of this historic transformation. While partially hidden behind his swift, deliberate prose, his self-deflating humor, and his assurance that “[i]t was a small matter,” the detective’s story about a vanishing barber hints at deeper anxieties about the changing racial character of the city. The disappearance of the marginally white (presumably Greek) Dimitrios Aleidis from one of the racially “mixed blocks” in South Cen- tral Los Angeles is a parable for urban succession as a whole. Ethnic whiteness is giving way to blackness, and although the block is “not yet all Negro” in this increasingly African

42 CLUES • Volume 28, Number 1 American neighborhood, Marlowe tells us, it will be soon. It is Marlowe’s use of the word yet that signals his larger unease over the changing composition of the urban neighborhood. Although Marlowe does not explicitly state it, there is, in his estimation, something inex- plicably threatening in the neighborhood inevitably turning “all Negro.” In fact, Chandler’s novel raises the specter of the black neighborhood to create a white fantasy of halting the Great Migration over twenty years after it began. Immediately after Marlowe gives up on the Aleidis case, he spots Moose Malloy, another white ethnic and former resident of the neighborhood who has just been released from prison. Returning to Central Avenue to ﬁnd his old ﬂame, a former nightclub singer named Velma Valento, Malloy becomes enraged when he discovers Florian’s, the bar where she had worked, has transformed into a “dinge joint.” Malloy goes on a violent rampage inside the bar, mur- dering and maiming the black residents of Central Avenue, while Marlowe looks on with apparent neutrality:

Something sailed across the sidewalk and landed in the gutter between two parked cars. It landed on its hands and knees and made a high keening noise like a cornered rat. It got up slowly, retrieved a hat and stepped back onto the sidewalk. It was a thin narrow- shouldered brown youth in a lilac colored suit and a carnation. It had slick black hair. It kept its mouth open and whined for a moment. People stared at it vaguely. Then it settled its hat jauntily, sidled over to the wall and walked silently splay-footed off along the block. (4–5)

As a number of critics have already noted, such a representation reflects the racism that pervades much of Chandler’s work (Knight 155; Marling 98; Bailey 48; McCann 162). Although it is Malloy who physically polices the “brown youth,” it is Marlowe who excuses and repeats the violence through his dehumanizing representation of the victim. By call- ing the youth “it” seven times in as many sentences and comparing him to “a cornered rat,” Marlowe embodies the dominant racial attitudes of many whites during Jim Crow Amer- ica. The more important point to be made here, however, is that Chandler erects this elaborate scene of racial confrontation to provide an imaginary resolution to the crisis of the black “invasion.” Dragging Marlowe into Florian’s, Malloy terrorizes the patrons of the black bar in search of Valento. When Malloy cannot find her, he charges into the owner’s office, murders him, and flees the scene. After relating this incident with detachment, Mar- lowe finishes the story with a witty, but curious remark: “When the prowl car boys stamped up the stairs, the bouncer and the barman had disappeared and I had the place to myself” (15). This wisecrack is meant as a dry denouement, a disavowal of the violence Marlowe has just witnessed. But given the novel’s preoccupation with issues of racial and urban succession outlined earlier, Marlowe’s statement “I had the place to myself” also reads like a smug reclamation of rightfully white territory. Eerily anticipating the so-called Zoot-Suit Riots of 1943, in which police officers and servicemen roamed Los Angeles streets assault- ing any black and Mexican youths caught wearing the stylish sharkskin garments, the opening of Chandler’s novel targets black working-class culture as a scapegoat for the larger societal anxieties connected to urbanization, industrialization, and racial mixing. With Malloy providing the cathartic expulsion of the black people who have taken over Florian’s, Marlowe is free to claim the emptied black business without being directly implicated in the violence to which he has been party. The next section of this essay discusses how Himes significantly revises this scene from Farewell, My Lovely, shifting responsibility for racial- ized violence from the criminals surrounding the detective to the detective himself.

“There was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street” 43 CHESTER HIMES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION

In Run Man Run, Himes restages this primal scene of conflict between the white detective and serviceable black characters to expose the racial chauvinism that bankrolls detective fiction. At the opening of the novel, Detective Walker stumbles drunkenly through midtown Manhattan searching for his missing car. Like Hammett’s Continental Op or Chandler’s Marlowe, Himes’s Walker gazes upon the city before him, although he is unable to read its meaning clearly: When he came to 37th Street he sensed that something had changed since he’d passed before. How long before he couldn’t remember. He glanced at his watch to see if the time would give him a clue. The time was 4:38 A.M.No wonder the street was deserted, he thought. Every one with any sense was home in bed, snuggled up to some fine hot woman. (7) Walker’s inexplicable anxiety that “something had changed since he’d passed before” trans- mogrifies into the standard narrative of black criminality when he spots Luke, a black porter, taking out the trash at a fast-food restaurant. Although Walker has only forgotten where he has parked his car, the porter provides a site/sight on which he can project his fantasy that a black man has made off with his ride: “He knew immediately that the Negro was a porter. But the sight of a Negro made him think that his car had been stolen instead of lost. He couldn’t have said why, but he was suddenly sure of it” (9). Following this hunch, Walker questions Luke and then heads to the kitchen to interrogate the mopping porter named Fat Sam. As he questions Fat Sam, Walker’s general feelings of racist unease coa- lesce into a reconstruction of events in which the porter becomes part of an elaborate car- jacking racket: “I’ll tell you how you did it,” the detective said in a blurred uncertain voice. “You came back here from out front and used that telephone by the street door. Your buddy was working and he didn’t notice.” By now the detective had got his eyes focused on Fat Sam’s face and they looked dangerous. “You telephoned up to Harlem to a car thief and told him to come down and lift. That’s right, ain’t it, wise guy?” (13) Here Himes reveals how the detective’s solution to the crime is actually a form of discourse production about racial criminality. At one level, this is clearly a lampoon of Farewell, My Lovely. While Marlowe’s authoritative understanding of black neighborhoods apparently allows him to negotiate the terrain of the dark city, Walker’s racial presuppositions actually keeps him from solving any crimes, as his knowledge amounts to little more than a racist fantasy. As a black author writing in a long tradition of white-authored detective narratives, Himes’s story of a white detective who murders black workers deflates white authority in the crime fiction genre by unveiling it as too often the fabrication of a consciousness driven by racist motivations. What further distinguishes Run Man Run from a traditional detective novel is that Himes provides the perspectives of both the detective and his usually silenced black victims. When Walker accuses Fat Sam of stealing his car, Sam does not cower before these accusations. Much like Himes in his interview with Williams, Sam mocks the detective’s conflation of blackness and criminality as an anachronistic device, dating back to an earlier age of detective fiction. After listening to Walker’s wild allegations, Fat Sam replies: Here you is, a detective like Sherlock Holmes, pride of the New York City police force, and you’ve gone and got so full of holiday cheer you’ve let some punk steal your car.

44 CLUES • Volume 28, Number 1 Haw-haw-haw! So you set out and light on the first colored man you see. Haw-haw-haw! Now, chief, that crap’s gone out of style with the flapper girl. (15) Fat Sam first openly ridicules Walker’s powers of deductive reasoning by ironically comparing him to Arthur Conan Doyle’s genteel detective Sherlock Holmes, the popular suc- cessor to Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. Acting as a mouthpiece for Himes, Fat Sam then states that the detective’s projection of criminality onto black bodies is a tired rhetorical con- trivance, invented in the pages of the pulp magazine Black Mask during the age of “the flapper girl.” Infuriated by Fat Sam’s irreverence and still half-believing his own story, Walker murders Fat Sam and Luke, and hides their bodies in the company refrigerator. Himes does not conceal Walker’s murder of the two porters behind the clipped, hard-boiled prose employed by Chandler, but instead forces the reader to confront the grotesque spec- tacle. Describing Fat Sam’s death, the narrator says: “He fell forward, pulling the tray from the rack along with him. Thick, cold, three-day-old turkey gravy poured over his kinky head as he landed, curled up like a fetus, between a five-gallon can of whipping cream and three wooden crates of iceberg lettuce” (17). While the terse style of white detective fiction authors often serves to cover over racial violence, Himes’s writing refuses any such sani- tation by placing the denigrated black body in full view of the reading audience. Reducing the restaurant porters to the food over which they labor each day, Walker emerges, not as a detective hero, but as a butcher whose position as an officer of the law sanctions disturb- ing acts of racial violence. “Poor bastard,” Walker thinks after he has killed Fat Sam. “Dead in the gravy he loved so well” (18). Importantly, Himes’s novel shifts the opening scene of violence from the “dinge joint” on Central Avenue to Schmidt and Schindler’s, a fictional chain restaurant based on Horn and Hardart. The Horn and Hardart automat was one of the main precursors to fast-food restaurants such as Burger King and McDonalds, dispensing coffee, buns, and sandwiches through tiny glass-door compartments. First started around the turn of the century, Horn and Hardart reached the height of its popularity in the 1950s, with about a hundred loca- tions throughout New York and Philadelphia serving over a quarter of a million people a day (Langdon 16–25).Before Himes moved permanently to Europe in 1955, he worked at Horn and Hardart as a stainless steel polisher, an experience that would help inspire Run Man Run. As Himes tells it in his autobiography: While we were eating in the basement, a drunken white detective staggered down the stairs and accused us of stealing his car and waved his pistol around. This incident became the basis of my novel Run Man Run. But I showed him my passport, which I had taken to be renewed and that sobered him somewhat. He must have thought a nig- ger with a passport was connected with the government. (Absurdity 29–30) But more than just providing the kernel for the story of Run Man Run, the corporate restaurant, with its emphasis on sterilized, rationalized order, operates as Himes’s metonym for the postwar city as a whole. After Walker has gotten away with murder, the superintend- ents restore order to Schmidt and Schindler’s by removing all traces of the bodies. “The wooden, ribbed floor where the bodies had lain were scraped, scrubbed, and washed down with scalding water spurting from a plastic hose. It was as though they were trying to wash away the deed itself.... By eleven a.m. the murder had been expertized, efficiently, unemo- tionally, thoroughly, and as far as was discernable, the slight pinprick on the city had closed and congealed” (55). Here Himes’s narrator uses the wonderfully expressive word expertized to describe the process of removing, not only the murdered black bodies but all evi- dence of “the deed itself.” Mimicking the process of urban renewal, in which entire

“There was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street” 45 neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for expressways and housing projects, the murder and elimination of Luke and Fat Sam’s bodies from Schmidt and Schindler’s functions as Himes’s metaphor for the violence visited on populations of urban minorities in postwar America.

“I JUST WANTED TO TAKE IT AWAY FROM THE WHITE MAN IF ONLY IN MY BOOKS”: CHESTER HIMES AND THE REBIRTH OF BLACK CRIME FICTION

As much as any Himes novel can have a “hero,” the sympathetic protagonist of Run Man Run is not the detective at all, but the porter he chases, Jimmy Johnson. Modeled partly on Himes himself, Jimmy embodies Himes’s qualified celebration of black vernacular culture over and against the totalized, homogenized America symbolized by fast food restaurants, expressways, and public housing projects. After Jimmy fails to convince any- one that Walker murdered Luke and Sam, he goes to Harlem in search of a gun to defend himself. Much like the scenes where the detective encounters the city in racial transition, Jimmy observes the changing character of the black neighborhood, although his reaction to the transformation is decidedly different. In Himes’s story, it is the corporate restaurant, rather than the “dinge joint,” that serves as the barometer of decline in the black neighborhood for the black protagonist: He’d always heard that one could find anything and everything in Harlem, from purple Cadillacs to underwear made of unbleached flour sacks. But he hadn’t found anything good to eat. The big chain cafeterias had come in and put the little restaurants out of business. All you could get in one of them was grilled chops and French fried potatoes.... He was tired of eating Schmidt and Schindler food, luncheonette-style food, no matter how good it was supposed to be. (155–56) Reversing the dynamic of Chandler’s novel, in which the “dinge joint” signifies the death of the formerly white neighborhood, Himes’s text postulates that it is in fact the fast-food restaurant with its white-bread tastes and colonization of black businesses that is a harbin- ger for decline in Harlem. At the conclusion of the Run Man Run, Himes uncouples the symbolic conflation of black neighborhoods and dark cities by recasting Harlem and its locally owned businesses as Jimmy’s only protection in a dangerous white world. In fact, Himes remakes a “dingy” restaurant the site of temporary rescue for Jimmy. After passing up a fast-food cafeteria, Jimmy stumbles on a soul food restaurant sitting inconspicuously on the same block:

He came to a dingy plate-glass, curtained-off storefront which held a sign reading: HOME COOKING. It looked like a letter from home. He went inside and sat at one of the ﬁve empty tables covered with blue-and-white checked oilcloth. To one side a coal ﬁre burned in a potbellied stove. It was hot enough in there to give a white man a suntan. (156) A stark contrast to the luncheonette, the soul food restaurant is “a letter from home” for Jimmy and a place humorously inhospitable to whites. It is in this environment that Jimmy experiences a moment of bravery by feasting on home cooking: He chose hog maws and turnip greens with a side dish of speckled peas. He splashed it with a hot sauce made from the seeds of chili peppers. The hot dish with the hot sauce

46 CLUES • Volume 28, Number 1 scorched the inside of his mouth and burned his gullet as it went down. Sweat ran down his face and dripped from his chin. But after he’d finished, he felt a hundred percent better. He felt mean and dangerous and unafraid; he felt as if he could take the killer by his head and twist it off. (156) Rather than a figuration of blight, the “dinge joint” here offers Jimmy a reprieve from the pursuing Walker. By making the “dingy” storefront the site where Jimmy’s courage momen- tarily erupts, Himes provides his readers with one of his understated expressions of how black cultural institutions provide a bulwark against a violent white world. For Chandler, the black neighborhood is an imaginary staging ground where Marlowe can make a brief journey into the urban exotic; for Himes, the black community provides his black protagonist a space of at least temporary security in the form of local cultural identity. As Jimmy passes a black-owned bookstore on his shopping spree that includes a home-cooked meal, a shoeshine, a haircut, and a handgun, Himes provides one of the most heartfelt defenses of the black neighborhood that can be found in his literature: Suddenly he felt safe. There, in the heart of the Negro community, he was lulled into a sense of absolute security. He was surrounded by black people who talked his language and thought his thoughts; he was served by black people in businesses catering to black people; he was presented with the literature of black people. Black was a big word in Harlem. No wonder so many people desired their own neighborhoods, he thought. They felt safe; there was safety in numbers. (152; emphasis in original) As this quote reveals, the purpose of Himes’s novel was not just to show readers the black neighborhood that Chandler cannot or does not represent but also to make the case for the importance of racial identity in creating such representations. In an act that mirrored the very process of racial succession that Himes was attempting to capture in his novel, he occupied a literary form that had been all but abandoned by 1959 to stage a narrative vin- dication of black neighborhoods. Turning the popular form of the hard-boiled detective story into a mode of racial critique, Himes became the first of many black crime writers to marshal popular fiction to represent the social conditions of black urban life. Although he would not live long enough to see the major inroads into the crime fiction industry by black writers in the past decade, Himes accomplished precisely what he set out to do, taking symbolic ownership over popular literary representations of black life. “The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real,” Himes once famously wrote. “I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books” (Absurdity 126). But even as Himes spends the penultimate pages of the novel showcasing Harlem’s bookstores, soul food restaurants, theaters, and barbershops, in the end he wants to reveal how these institutions are ultimately unequal to the task of protecting black citizens against urban renewal. As Himes’s narrator writes, Jimmy is “lulled into a sense of absolute security” (emphasis added) by coming to Harlem. In the novel’s pages, Jimmy heads into the Harlem streets to confront Walker in a final duel. However, the expected showdown between the two characters does not materialize, as Jimmy’s act of masculine courage proves inef- fectual in the face of Walker’s panoptic foresight: He couldn’t hear the shots and didn’t know what direction they were coming from. He felt the tearing of the bullet’s trajectory inside him. He tried to call for help but didn’t have the breath. Nothing came from his mouth but blood. With one last desperate effort he jerked his pistol free and fired it at the pavement. (177) Although Jimmy survives the shooting and Walker dies at the hands of the police, Jimmy’s desperate final clash with the detective provides a more apt expression of the novel’s mean-

“There was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street” 47 ing than the tacked-on happy ending would imply. Although Himes was able to escape from the United States in 1955, the image of Jimmy gunned down in the streets without seeing or hearing his attacker operates as a powerful symbol for the containment that the majority of urban blacks faced in postwar America. Jimmy’s final desperate act of firing his gun at the pavement dramatizes that individual armed resistance to the systematic violence that Walker represents is about as effective as shooting the street itself. In addition, the dead Walker is revenged by other white authorities, who bring “urban renewal” to urban minorities in the form of slum clearance policies, high-rise housing projects, and low-wage service-sector employment in the postwar decades. In the final analysis, Himes’s novel mobilizes the popular form of the detective novel to engage the issues of racial succession, urbanization, and population management in mid- century America. Privileging the vernacular over the official narratives of history, Run Man Run joins Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities as an important postwar text that challenged the hegemony of urban renewal. But whereas Jacobs’s book meets Moses on the sanctioned terrain of sociology, history, and public policy, Himes’s novel hijacks the popular form of the detective novel to narrate his critique. In this way, Himes operates as the predecessor for street literature authors who have emerged in the past few decades. On 125th Street in Harlem, dozens of tables are set up every day, overflowing with the latest titles by black crime fiction novelists. Often self-published, the books by Nikki Turner, Shannon Holmes, K’Wan, Vicki Stringer, and many lesser known local writers represent in part the present and future of black publishing. Written in the vernacular of the streets and featuring narratives of pimps, hustlers, and drug dealers that appeal to a black working-class readership, street literature (aka urban fiction, hip-hop fiction, or gangster literature) represents a vital expression of a segment of black popular culture that is not found in mainstream discourse. Much like gangsta rap, to which street literature is often compared, this brand of fiction provides an alternative to authorized sociological and historical accounts of black reality by narrating insider stories of criminal life in the ghetto. Although it is now a common-sense assumption in both hip-hop and street literature “you got to go there to know there,” this is, with respect to representing the black urban experience, a relatively recent cultural shift, one that started with the crime novels of Himes, Iceberg Slim, and Donald Goines. Although street literature is usually understood to be an outgrowth of hip hop culture, the gangsta rap of innovators like Ice-T, Ice-Cube, Tupac Shakur, Nas, Jay-Z, and many others was in fact inspired by the early street novels of Slim and Goines. As the first black-authored crime novels to hit the paperback market in the late 1950s, Himes’s Harlem novels are clear forerunners to the literary phenomenon of black-authored pulp fiction. But whereas the novels of Slim, Goines, and subsequent authors were written for and marketed to blacks living in American ghettos, Himes’s novels were part of an earlier moment in which publishing companies still assumed a white readership. As Himes was writing in the midst of this transition, his novel Run Man Run offers insight on the ideological and artistic limitations of hard-boiled American detective story. By push- ing the narrative of the white detective chasing a black criminal to its logical conclusion, Himes’s novel implicitly makes a case for new modes of African American crime literature to be written. With the materialization of self-publishing as a viable commercial and literary enterprise, black crime and detective fiction is now not only possible but also has emerged as a literary tradition of its own.

Keywords: detective ﬁction; Himes, Chester; street literature; urban renewal

48 CLUES • Volume 28, Number 1 NOTES

1. The people who have contributed to the critical assessment of Himes’s literature are too numer- ous to list. Some of the best early essays and reviews on Himes are collected in Silet. Other important contributors to scholarship on Himes include Abbott, Franklin, Margolies, McCann, Skinner, and Soitos. 2. Publishing their pimp autobiographies and ghetto crime novels as paperback originals in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines helped establish a new industry of black- authored crime ﬁction. 3. Abbott (168) notes that Himes was aware of Chandler’s text, although she argues that Himes’s creative revision of Farewell, My Lovely takes place in Himes’s The Real Cool Killers.

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“There was nothing to stop the colored people from walking across the street” 49 Mollenkopf, John. The Contested City. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992. Nelson, Dana. The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature 1638–1867. New York : Oxford UP, 1992. Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930. 1963. Chicago: Elephant, 1996. Silet, Charles L.P. The Critical Response to Chester Himes. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Skinner, Robert E. Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes. Bowling Green, OH: Popular P, 1989. Smith, Erin. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000. Soitos, Stephen. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: U of Mass- achusetts P, 1996. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race and the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1993. Williams, John A. “My Man Himes: An Interview with Chester Himes.” 1970. Conversations with Chester Himes. Ed. Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. 29–82.

50 CLUES • Volume 28, Number 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.