Blackness, Labor and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction
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Revised Pages Dreams for Dead Bodies Revised Pages CLASS : CULTURE series editors Amy Schrager Lang, Syracuse University, and Bill V. Mullen, Purdue University Recent titles in the series: Marcial González, Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class, and Reification Fran Leeper Buss, Editor, Moisture of the Earth: Mary Robinson, Civil Rights and Textile Union Activist Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music Carole Srole, Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Courts and Offices Lorraine M. López, Editor, An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots Matthew H. Bernstein, Editor, Michael Moore: Filmmaker, Newsmaker, Cultural Icon John Marsh, Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry Mark W. Van Wienen, American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, Editors, The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre Andreá N. Williams, Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction Clarence Lang, Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties: Notes on the Civil Rights Movement, Neoliberalism, and Politics Benjamin Balthaser, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War M. Michelle Robinson, Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction Revised Pages Dreams for Dead Bodies Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction M. Michelle Robinson University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © 2016 by M. Michelle Robinson All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2019 2018 2017 2016 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Robinson, Michelle, 1979–author. Title: Dreams for dead bodies : blackness, labor, and the corpus of American detective fiction / Miriam Michelle Robinson. Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2016] | Series: Class : culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015041733 | ISBN 9780472119813 (hardback : acid-free paper) Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery stories, American—History and criticism. | African Americans in literature. | Working class in literature. | Slavery in literature. | Work in literature. Classification: LCC PS374.D4 R625 2016 | DDC 813/.087209—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041733 Revised Pages Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: The Original Plotmaker 1 Chapter 1: Reverse Type 28 Chapter 2: The Art of Framing Lies 62 Chapter 3: To Have Been Possessed 95 Chapter 4: The Great Work Remaining before Us 131 Chapter 5: Prescription: Homicide? 163 Conclusion: Dream within a Dream 201 Notes 215 Bibliography 233 Index 251 Revised Pages Revised Pages Acknowledgments A number of people have been important in the writing of this book. It is a great pleasure to express my gratitude to John T. Matthews and Charles Rzepka as well as Marilyn Halter, Nina Silber, and Roy Grundmann for their guidance. I am much indebted to the Institute of Arts and Humani- ties at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a Mellon Book Manuscript Workshop, and to Sean McCann and Robert Reid-P harr, who graciously and generously participated. Eliza Richards, Sharon Holland, Priscilla Wald, John McGowan, and Ian Baucomb also provided words of encouragement and much- appreciated feedback that guided my revisions. Librarians at the John Hay Library at Brown University helped me navigate the Rudolph Fisher Papers. Sohini Sengupta at the Center for Faculty Ex- cellence and Jennifer Ho offered a lift when the challenges of writing a book proposal seemed insurmountable. I am also indebted to the two anonymous readers for the University of Michigan Press who provided extensive and valuable comments on the manuscript. And I am so appreciative of LeAnn Fields and Christopher Dreyer at the University of Michigan Press for their enthusiasm and for their dedication to publishing this book. This work would not have been possible without the support of Joy Kasson, Bernie Herman, and a long roster of my magnificent colleagues in American Studies and elsewhere at UNC– Chapel Hill. I am truly grate- ful to Tim Marr and Rachel Willis for their emboldening intellectual and moral support. Jenny Tone-P ah- Hote, Ben Frey, Laura Halperin, Heidi Kim, Pat Parker, Angeline Shaka, Heidi Kim, Ariana Vigil, Nadia Yaqub, Morgan Pitelka, and Rachel Pollock were great friends and sometimes disciplinarians- by- proxy during this process, as were the optimists Joe Cam- pana, Chris Holmlund, and Michael Mallory. My thanks go to Deedie Matthews, Ian Morse, Mariah Voutilainen, and the rest of my close and extended family for their unwavering support. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my parents, Brooks Robinson and Wylma Samaranayake- Robinson. I am lucky to be their daughter. Revised Pages Introduction The Original Plotmaker She was sitting on the terrace with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past open in her lap, but instead of reading she was looking across her sunny acres with a dreamy expression. “If I may be so bold as to ask, what are you thinking, madame?” I asked. “About sausage.” “What about sausage, madame?” “About how good it is.” It made me happy to see her happy, and the hogs were happy to see us both happy. —Chester Himes, The End of a Primitive In Chester Himes’s book The End of a Primitive, an African American au- thor named Jesse Robinson dreams of reading a book titled Hog Will Eat Hog, “a soft sweet lyrical and gently humorous account” of a cook who dis- covers one need not slaughter hogs to make sausage (193). Instead, he makes an arrangement with his pigs: each day they will volunteer some quantity of sausage “neatly stuffed in their intestines,” which the man has merely to collect and turn over to his customers. This mutually agreeable bargain is botched, however, when a single hog among them claims he is all out of sausage and refuses to turn over his daily portion. “I knew by his hang- hog expression and the guilty manner in which he avoided my eyes,” the narrator explains, “that the sausage manufacturers had bribed him”: “But it is true,” he contended. “Besides which I have no more guts.” “Would you rather be slaughtered and butchered by the sausage man- ufacturers, or give us, your friends, a little bit of sausage each day?” I asked bluntly. “I don’t know why I hate you so when you’ve been so good to me,” he squealed pathetically, lard drops streaming from his little hog eyes. (194) Revised Pages 2 dreams for dead bodies It is a curious pact, to be sure, between a high-s trung hog, some sort of sausage broker or cook, and a Jimmy Dean–l oving aesthete, which turns sour when the pig “cries lard.” But it is also a heavy- handed fable in a novel about a bitter African American novelist. A writer is expected to generate a sort of formula fiction— agglutinate, mass produced, serialized, even pulp— to suit the public, we are led to believe; he is supposed to make hash of his work to fit specs negotiated by a publisher with an axe, so to speak, up against the author’s neck. Or perhaps the livestock and, in particular, that pathetic pig, is meant to recall the transformation of the body into a com- modity, the extraction of a black man’s blood and guts for another’s profit— slavery redacted, an all- American edition of Remembrance of Things Past. Or it is some combination of the two. Long before Himes became celebrated as an author of hard-b oiled detec- tive fiction, his first, gorgeous, semibiographical novel,Yesterday Will Make Yo u Cr y , was thoroughly bowdlerized: third-p erson narration was swapped for first; its sober prison story was sanctified with slang (the 1972 Signet Edition called its protagonist, James Monroe, “a cool cat,” and described the book as “a ruthlessly honest novel of a young black’s agonizing discovery of his own emotions, his own identity”— never mind that the main character was white); and it was rechristened as the more lurid Cast the First Stone (qtd. in Van Peebles 19). This was “swinging of the pendulum towards pulp,” laments Melvin Van Peebles, who writes, “What stomach- turning irony, forced to mutilate your work and then, adding insult to injury, having that mutilation become the map to greater fame and fortune” (19–20). Whether the subject of Jesse Robinson’s dream is a précis of Himes’s scuffles with the literary establishment or a cartoon adaptation ofDialectic of Enlightenment is of less consequence, however, than that the subject of the dream is the subject of a book. And a most unusual one since, if we take its allegorical freight seriously, Jesse dreams of a book that capitulates the conditions of its own production, and of its failure to “give the goods.” It is a book that is, quite literally, full of itself (and of its failure to be itself )— and therefore quite appropriately titled Hog Will Eat Hog— and it is something like the subject of Russell’s paradox, a “self- including statement” in which “one confronts a mirror image of the self, a figure of an individual conscious- ness that is constituted precisely by its mutually reflective relationship to a self-i ncluded (mental) representation of its own representational (sym- bolic/linguistic) status” (Irwin, Mystery to a Solution 23).