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"

Pulp Novels and Ernest Gaines?

When reading African American pulp novelists such as Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines of the late 1960s and 1970s, one would be hard pressed to find any similarities between their novels of urban life and the works of Ernest J. Gaines. However, upon digging deeper into these authors' oueveres, one finds that they both mined the South for part for their work. Iceberg Slim does this in Mama Black Widow (1969), a novel that traces Otis Tilson's life in Chicago. Before arriving in Chicago, Tilson's family worked as sharecroppers in the South. For Donald Goines, one of his final novels, Swamp Man (1975), takes place entirely in the South. It tells the story of George Jackson, an African American youth who lives in the backwater swamps with his grandfather. At the beginning of the novel, George's sister Henrietta returns home from college to visit. Henrietta's return, however, is not a joyful occasion because on her way home from the bus station in town the Jones brothers stop her and brutally rape her, turning her into a child in a woman's body. George sees this act of violence and vows to kill all four of the Jones brothers. Two years later, after the Jones brothers keep victimizing Henrietta, George enacts his revenge and ultimately dies in the process. Looking past the graphic description of Henrietta's rape, which takes place over two chapters, and the over-the-top stereotypes of both whites and blacks in the South, Swamp Man contains similarities to the Southern fiction that Gaines has produced throughout his career.

One of the main similarities can be seen in Henrietta's trajectory. She has been to college in Atlanta and returns home, albeit just to visit. For Henrietta, education provides an escape from the life that she experiences in the Deep South. She hopes, eventually, that George will follow in her footsteps and leave as well. She sends him books and problems to solve and is always amazed that he solves them without any formal education. Zeke, one of the Jones brothers, even comments that "George speaks like he's a Yankee or somethin'" because he reads books all of the time (36). The brothers also point out that they think Henrietta views herself as better than them. Sonny-Boy says, "[T]hat fuckin' bitch is still stuck-up as hell! Gets off the bus like she owns this here town, sees us sittin' here, then got the uppity not to speak" (25-26). In many ways, both George and Henrietta resemble the educated African American who returns in Gaines' work such as Jackson and Grant. While this type of character is not unique to Gaines (Toomer, DuBois, and others have the same trope), it is interesting that an author who consistently writes about the urban chooses the returning, educated African American as a character type when writing about the South.

Another similarity occurs near the beginning of the novel. When George realizes that his sister may be attacked on her way home from the bus station in town, he approaches his grandfather and says that he needs to take the shotgun with him in case he has to fight off her attackers. After asking for the shotgun, the narrator states that "[George] didn't want to look into those eyes because the boy was ashamed of his grandfather. Ashamed of the way his grandfather cringed when the whites were around. The old man couldn't help himself. He just shook. But the old man didn't tremble from fear. Instead, he shook from inner rage, a feeling of frustration because he knew he was helpless" (20).  Jefferson, the man who tries to keep Henrietta from walking home, mirrors the grandfather in his fears and rage. While talking to Henrietta, he tells her that he can't walk her home because the Jones brothers would kill him and rape her: "Ain't nothing I can do but die, and I just ain't ready to die" (31). After the rape, both men regret not acting, but it is too late. Psychologically beaten down George's grandfather and Jefferson are not anomalies in Southern literature or African American literature. Looking at them, though, in relation to Gaines, one can see similarities to the characters in A Gathering of Old Men.

Gaines has stated that while authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and others wrote about the urban environment, he wanted to focus on the rural South to provide a voice for those who did not appear in the texts about the urban. In 1972, Gaines said, "Since Wright's Native Son came out the books about the cities, the big city ghettoes, have sold. I would say most of your publishers are interested in that kind of book by a Black more than he is interested in a book by a Black about any other subject. Wright established almost a blueprint and it has been the most popular seller to a white audience" (Beauford 23). I guess that is partly why I find Goines' turn to the South so interesting. You have to remember that Swamp Man appeared in 1975, that's four years after the book publication and one year after the film version of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a novel that takes place entirely in the South and works to correct the stereotypes of African Americans in Southern fiction. You must also keep in mind that Goines, and Slim, wrote for money, aesthetic, and political reasons. Gaines' and Goines' reasons for writing, while possibly overlapping, were/are disparate. I'm not sure what to make of all of this so far, but I find it fascinating that urban, pulp novelists turned to the South for some of their writing. What other pulp novels by writers who tend to focus on the urban North focus on the South either in part of the novel or in the whole thing? Let us know in the comments below.

For more information on African American pulp novelists, see Justin Gifford's Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing (2013).    

Beauford, Fred. "A Conversation with Ernest J. Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 16-24. Print. 

Goines, Donald. Swamp Man. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 2005. Print.