Street Fiction author Jihad, in an essay called “The Resurrection of Street Fiction” put it bluntly: “Saying street fiction is dead is like saying poverty is non-existent. [Contemporary] Street fiction is the re-emergence of the Harlem renaissance era.” (par. 2) If that’s the case–and there’d be a case for it if anyone were taking any of the stuff now relegated to the “Urban Fiction” section seriously–then the mid-point between the Street Fiction Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance would be Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. And though Goines’ biggest, maybe only influence is Slim, Goines’ work most closely resembles Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay, specifically McKay’s Home to Harlem.
Home to Harlem tells the story of Jake Brown, a black soldier, who returns from WWI to Harlem, takes up with a prostitute and spends the rest of the novel trying to find her once again–the search sends him on a trip through Harlem’s working-class and criminal underbelly. Though much is made of the interaction between McKay’s text and white Harlem Renaissance patron Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven–a book that despite its title, was appreciated at the time by Renaissance gatekeepers and was certainly not intended as racist–there are a few more notable texts McKay is messing around with in Home to Harlem: Homer’s The Odyssey and W.E.B DuBois’ article “The Talented Tenth”.
Back to er, Nigger Heaven for a moment. Due to its unfortunate title and an increased sensitivity to whites writing about the black experience, McKay’s book is often seen as a “corrective” to Van Vechten’s view of Harlem. And that’s not far off. But it isn’t the big political corrective it’s often presented as and more the publication of a sentiment whispered amongst black writers of the time, about one of their most notable patrons: “Man, he got it wrong!”. That’s to say, the corrective is subtler, more mired in details and specificities. McKay doesn’t avoid the chaotic side of Harlem that Van Vechten portrayed, but he does it with little of the weird, kinda racist interest of Van Vechten, but the same contrarian love of working-class wildness.
This is where Goines’ similarities to McKay begin. This outsider (McKay was born in Jamaica, he was also Communist and homosexual) who’s also an insider portraying a maligned aspect of reality with a sensitivity to detail and character and none of the two problems that usually characterize this kind of work: the condescension or self-justification of the lower-class. Most notably, there’s the strange, tangential chapter in Home to Harlem, “He Also Loved”, Chapter XVII. In short, it tells the tragic story of a pimp named Jerco, and the overwhelming sadness he felt when one of his whores dies. The theme of the chapter and in a way, the book, is summarized by Ray–the other main character of Home to Harlem–when he tells Jake, “And I have been forced down to the level of pimps and found some of them more human” (244).
It’s worth pointing out that none of this stuff I’m discussing is revolutionary, it’s recounted in a ton of scholarly texts, but McKay’s ability to touch on a sentiment–a sympathy, even empathy with the criminal element, the under privileged and under-discussed–that would define Depression-era Hollywood cinema, the crime genre as a whole to this day, Goines and Slim’s work (in a sense, Goines’ Street Players is “He Also Loved” stretched to an entire book), all subsequent Street Fiction, and even most hip-hop is fascinating. You see why rappers reference Goines so much. They should probably read McKay just as well.
Unlike Goines though, McKay had a literary movement backing his aggressively trashy, literary bestseller (though it was still maligned by many) and a conscious sense of literary tradition/literary tradition-bucking in there too. Home to Harlem is essentially a parody of Homer’s The Odyssey. An ugly, perverse re-telling of the soldier, back from war, trying to find his love, only this time, it’s WWI and the soldier returns from fighting for his country to being another “nigger” and his “love” is a whore he shacked-up with his first night back. McKay plays the white literary establishment game–he’s interacting with “the canon”–and totally destroying it by flipping all its ideas around.
McKay’s use of the canon though, is also in response to W.E.B DuBois’ “The Talented Tenth” essay and the assertions that go along with it: That a black elite must form, put its best face forward, that “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” (par. 1). This meant a refusal to celebrate or even really, properly consider works that may encourage or verify stereotypes. Langston Hughes’ response to DuBois was an essay called “The Negro Artist & the Racial Mountain” which politely eschewed DuBois’ assertions: “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.” (par. 14) This debate continues to this day–Tyler Perry, anybody?
In “Donald Goines as an Allegorical Figure”, C. Liegh McInnis uses Eddie Allen’s Low Road as a kind of jumping-off point for an analysis of Goines’ worldview. McInnis interestingly, aligns Goines with McKay, though not entirely:
“Goines never completely rejects Du Bois but moreso embraces the notion of Claude McKay in his Home to Harlem that the truth of humanity is found in how people react to and endure the worst of times and themselves. Neither Goines nor Allen suggests that we must celebrate nihilism, but it must be addressed if we are to ever conquer it.” (par. 1)
It’s important to stress that Home to Harlem stands on its own, free of all this “Talented Tenth” context, the same way the appended context to Goines’ work isn’t important to reading, but McKay was indeed, consciously and aggressively confounding the things DuBois was talking about.
Goines, as McInnis suggests, is doing something similar but different. There’s always some hope or escape in Goines’ work. You will always find characters who, in one way or another, could be part of DuBois’ “Talented Tenth” and they are often used as really obvious contrasts to the criminal main characters. This I think, has a lot to do with Goines’ explicit “choosing” of a life of crime. That’s to say, every criminal at one point or another “chooses” that life, but that it becomes more hulking, less like a choice, when not a whole lot of other options surround you. Goines to some extent, had other options.
That said, “the life” pulled Goines in really early and affected him deeply and those characters, events, and experience were all turned into his books. Though there’s very little humor or joy in Goines’ work, the hope comes through in the obvious moralizing, but also in his sensitivity to the psychology of his characters. What lots of critics think of as inconsistencies in the book–shifting motivations, sudden kindness, etc.–is just reality. Harlem, the working-class, and the underworld, in one way or another, remain symbols in McKay’s book. Goines wasn’t interested in this kind of thing, presumably not even aware of this rarefied but consequential variation on white supremacy that is “the canon”, but it was McKay’s rigorous intellectual approach to something anti-intellectual that laid the groundwork for Goines and others’ similar works.
SOURCES:
-DuBois, W.E.B. “The Talented Tenth”.
-Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist & the Racial Mountain”.
-Jihad. “The Resurrection of Street Fiction”. The Urban Book Source. January 2009.
-McInnis, C. Liegh. “Donald Goines as an Allegorical Figure”. Mississippi Political.
-McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. Northeastern University Press: Boston. 1987.
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This was good stuff, thanks. I've heard about 'Home to Harlem' for years but never read it. I should check it out,it sounds good. I'm guessing that McKay is considered more canon-worthy because of his literary pretensions (Goines would never base a story on Homer). So, McKay, in spite of shunning DuBois' talented-tenth elitism, offered enough literary context to satisfy the cognoscenti. Like you said, people could read and enjoy McKay without comprehending those elements that impress the pointy heads.
brad
12 Feb 10 at 11:07 pm
Brad-
Glad you're reading. Do check out "Home to Harlem". It's a great book and there's a lot to get out of it. I think you're onto something for sure, with McKay satisfies the literary types enough.
McKay was also Jamaican and this country has a long tradition of embracing non-American "blackness" over American blackness.
As I said in the essay, it's fun though to see how McKay really was harshly and aggressively dismissed.
In a way, what differs then from now is that there was probably less groupthink and more discussion when it came to black expression and what was of value or not. That's to say, it wasn't relegated to hip-hop forums.
brandon
16 Feb 10 at 12:07 am
"Street Fiction is the re-emergence of the Harlem renaissance era." OK . . .. silent pause, next. I don't know about that because street fiction is far from a cultural movement, let alone a movement that will be revered in the future. I think he's reaching a little bit hard.
——
I'll probably check out McKay's Home to Harlem & Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven in the not-so-near future.
Vee (Scratch)
16 Feb 10 at 7:30 am
Vee-
Ha, I think there's a certain degree of hyperbole there, but I do think he's onto something. As I said, no one's reading this stuff seriously. Who knows where to start? Who's finding the stand-outs? I tend to want to dismiss it all as well, but I don't want to be an old man.
Do check out McKay. I can take or leave Van Vechten's.
brandon
16 Feb 10 at 3:12 pm