African American Crime and Detective Fiction Syllabus

Donald Goines

About a month ago I wrote a post entitled "The Short Story and Ernest Gaines Syllabus." Today, I would like to do something similar. However, instead of having the syllabus center around Gaines and his relation to the short story genre, I want to share with you a syllabus I constructed entitled "African American Crime and Detective Fiction." The syllabus below does not contain an exhaustive list of texts that could be included in this course. With that said, in the comments below, tell me what suggestions do you have for texts, critical or otherwise, that could be added to this course.

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African American Crime and Detective Fiction

Course Description:

This course will cover African American crime and detective novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, we will trace a path from Rudolph Fisher to more recent authors such as Walter Mosley and Attica Locke. Primarily focusing on the urban landscape, we will examine how these authors navigate the constricted spaces of the urban environment and how they work to control that environment through various means. As Otto Penzler states in the introduction to Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction by African American Writers, African American crime literature shows “the detective in a reasonably insular community, trying to solve crimes with black victims and committed, in all likelihood, by black villains.” This course will provide students with the opportunity to explore Penzler’s assertion and to see how that statement has either changed or remained the same throughout the years.  Beginning with Fisher, the course will trace the proliferation of African American crime and detective literature that saw an upsurge in the 1960s and 1970s through the first part of the twenty-first century.

Readings:

• Rudolph Fisher The Conjure Man Dies (1932)
• Chester Himes Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965)
• Iceberg Slim Trick Baby (1967)
• Donald Goines Dopefiend (1971)
• Ishmael Reed Mumbo Jumbo (1972)
• Vern E. Smith The Jones Men (1975)
• Roland S. Jefferson The School on 103rd Street (1976)
• Ernest J. Gaines A Gathering of Old Men (1983)
• Walter Mosley Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)
• Sista Souljah The Coldest Winter Ever (1999)
• Percivel Everret Erasure (2001)
• Attica Locke The Cutting Season (2011)

Secondary Texts:

• Stephen F. Saitos The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (1996)
• Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction by African American Writers. ed. Otto Penzler (2009)
• Justin Gifford Pimping Fictions: African American Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing (2013)

Assignments: 

• Response papers: These will be in the form of blog posts. I will set up a blog for the class, and you will post your responses there. Each post will require you to provide an answer to my prompt and to respond to other students' responses as well. We will discuss how to do this in a proefssional manner during class. (Teachers, see Shannon Baldino's "The Classroom Blog: Enhancing Critical Thinking, Substantive Discussion, and Appropriate Online Interaction" for a discussion of blogs in the high school classroom.)
• Wiki: Students will be placed into groups of four. Each group will be required to construct a collaborative wiki with ________ components on an author and text that we read in class. 
• Each student must write a paragraph describing the class discussion for that author. For example, if the class discusses narrative voice in Donald Goines, the response should talk about narrative voice and what the class said about it. 
• The group must come up with five questions to think about based off of the class discussion or research. 
• The group must construct an annotated bibliography of six sources. The annotations must be 250-500 words and contain a section stating the source's credibility, a summary of the source, a way to use that source in a research project. 
• The group must construct a list of symbols/allusions/or other references in the stories. The number here will vary, but each entry must provide information about where it comes from (especially for an allusion) and what purpose it serves in the context of the story. 
• The group must construct a review of the short story. The review must be between 500-1000 words. Remember, a review is not a summary. Some summary is necessary, but the thrust of the review should be about the story's meaning and importance. 
• The group must construct a creative page. This page can be anything that you desire. For example, it could be a hand drawn map of the setting. It could be sketch of one of the scenes. It could be a Prezi talking about the author and the themes of the story. It could be a video discussion. This page is open to whatever you want to do.   

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As stated at the beginning of this post, the readings above are not an exhaustive list of texts that could be used for this class. The ones that I chose provide an overview of African American crime and detective fiction drawing from both canonical and popular texts. I chose to do this because, as Justin Gifford says, "If we are truly invested in American and African American literary traditions and their larger relationships to cultural politics, popular movements, and social change, then black crime fiction presents us with a unique opportunity to redraw the very boundaries of what counts as the American canon and even cultural knowledge" (7). Considering canon formation, providing students with a wide swath of texts will give them insight, and allow them to challenge, the idea of canon formation in literature. Essentially, students could ask whether or not texts buy authors such as Goines, Jefferson, and Slim should be included alongside those by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin. 

Along with questioning canon formation, two of the texts above (Gaines and Locke) do not center on the urban environment. What do texts like these do to the assumption that crime and detective novels typically take place in urban settings? How does the rural setting disrupt that assumption? With this in mind, I could have added Goines' Swamp Man to the list above. What other African American crime and detective novels take place outside of the urban environment? Could there be an entire course focused on that strand of crime and detective fiction? 

List of previous blog posts that may be of help with the readings in this course:

• Pulp Novels and Ernest Gaines? 
• Attica Locke's "The Cutting Season"
• "No, I won't let them harm my people." 
• Chandler's "The Big Sleep" and the Issue of Class
• In the Background of Chandler's "The Big Sleep"

Attica Locke's "The Cutting Season"

Attica Locke's The Cutting Season (2012) won the 2013 Ernest J. Gaines  Award for Literary Excellence. Locke's novel is a mystery that takes place on the Belle Vie (Beautiful Life) Plantation in Ascension Parish. Before going further, I would like to say that upon first reading Locke's book and seeing Belle Vie I immediately thought about Blanche and Stella's Belle Reve (Beautiful Dream) in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Locke has spoken about the inspiration for this novel on numerous occasions. After attending a wedding at Oak Alley Plantation, Locke wondered why no one in the wedding party or attending the wedding questioned the fact that the  wedding they were attending was taking place on the grounds of a once working plantation where enslaved African Americans toiled. The plantation even has a plaque that states the names of each slave and their purchase price. Locke says that her head hurt so much trying to grasp what she was experiencing. In the video below, Locke talks about the experience and reads from the novel.

Locke's novel tackles the living  historical museum  aspect of plantations like Oak Alley. While an important topic, this is not what I wish to discuss for this blog post.  Instead, as I read the book, I noticed that Locke's novel, in some ways, can be seen as a continuation of Gaines' work. The present day mystery in the novel centers around the death of a migrant farm worker named Inés Avalo. Inés works for the Groveland Corporation, a company that plants and harvests sugar cane on the outskirts of the eighteen acre Belle Vie Plantation. The cane fields used to be owned by the Clancys, but over time the ownership has changed. Even Belle Vie itself, a place that Leland Clancy wanted to keep intact as a historical artifact, is in its last days because Raymond Clancy, Leland's son, plans to sell it to Groveland since sugar is king and will bring in money for the family and the state. While the Clancys and those like Ed Renfrew used to hire African Americans and poor whites from the area to farm the land, the Groveland Corporation relies on migrant workers, "pulling in laborers from out of state, as far west as Beaumont, Texas, and even some coming all the way from Georgia and Alabama; they were Mexicans mostly, and some Guatemalans, plucked out of rice fields and fruit groves for a few months of working Louisiana sugarcane" (18).

Oak Alley Plantation

Inés was one of these migrant workers, leaving behind a husband and two children, who traveled to the United States to work and send money back to her family. Just as Gaines' parents left for California during the early part of the twentieth century, Inés left for better opportunities to support her own family. Thinking about the theme of migration in Gaines' work, where people leave then return (think Jackson, Grant, Lillian), in relation to the migration of workers in Locke's text would be an interesting exercise. Locke's novel even has the migration and return of an African American character, Caren. Even though Caren doesn't go far, to New Olreans, she leaves and attends Tulane, a world far away from the rural life at Belle Vie. Back to Inés  though. Gaines focuses on a specific time period, of course, the mid-twentieth century when African   American and Cajun sharecroppers farmed the land. Locke focuses on the twenty first century where African Americans can no longer get hired to work the fields because corporations choose cheaper, migrant labor. While whites in Gaines' work chose Cajuns to work the land over African Americans because "white sticks to white," the corporations choose immigrant workers because of the cheaper labor in Locke's.

The narrator talks about how many of the African Americans in the community "could trace their people back before the war, when slaves had built the state's sugar industry with their bare hands" (35). Each could tell a story about their distance relatives. Caren's mother, Helen, "loved the whole of this land, and she wanted Caren to love it, too, to know where she came from" (36). While the African  Americans have an attachment to the land that runs deep, a resentment occurred between them and the migrant workers because "these new people coming here, making themselves at home" (35). Examined in conjunction with Gaines, the immigrant farm workers play the same role as the Cajuns in Gaines' work. However, there is a difference. Whereas Gaines' prominent African American characters in the community are either preachers or teachers, the ones in Locke's novel have a greater opportunity for social mobility. Eric, the father of Caren's daughter, is a lawyer and works in the Obama administration, and Caren herself attended Tulane Law School. The majority of the community, though, is not like these two. The community in the novel is the workers that maintain the history of the plantation. Looked at in another way, the immigrant workers take on the role of the African Americans in Gaines' works because they are the lowest on the social ladder, with no real ability to climb any higher. No matter how you look at the invisible workers in the cane fields of Groveland, they are there and exist.

What are your thoughts? I just finished the novel, so mine are not fully formed yet. I do think that tracing the links between writers like Gaines and Locke in this way is fruitful and leads us to a better understanding of both writers. Remember to leave your comments below.

Locke, Attica. The Cutting Season: A Novel. New York: Harper Collins, 2012. Print.