Abstract
In chapter 1, I demonstrate how an ethnic subject solves the problem of physiological nonwhiteness through an auspicious negotiation of space. In a desperate attempt for social belonging, Sara Smolinsky, flees her New York City ghetto for a suburban college, a place she fancies as “a dream mounting on a dream … [a] New America of culture education.”3 During her sojourn there she develops the performative reflexes and culture capital sufficient to induce in herself and others the illusion of her own whiteness. Sara’s new comportment, manufactured in white space, however, proves to be tenuously fashioned by the novel’s conclusion. She secures a public school teaching position that ironically transports her back to the ghetto from which she earlier escaped. Moreover, filial obligation compels her to become the primary caretaker of her widowed father. This seeming regression into the role of ghetto daughter works against the cultural accoutrement of Sara’s reracialization, among them the teaching job, the cosmetic facelift that a new wardrobe provides, the confidence accurate racial mimicry engenders, a private apartment (peculiar for a single ghettoized woman of that era), and a betrothal to an Americanized, professionally successful Jewish suitor. The novel goes as far as to cast Sara’s ironic existential reversal as a form of patriarchally induced incarceration.
Suddenly the brandy took hold and I began feeling melancholy.
—Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go, 19451
[I]t is the detective who has usurped the place not only of God but of Being too as the abiding presence and, therefore, has first to be confronted.
—William Spanos, The Detective and the Boundary, 19722
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Notes
Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 2002), 74. All further references will be featured as page numbers within the essay.
William Spanos, “The Detective and the Boundary,” in boundary 2 1, no. 1 (Fall 1972): 150.
Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New with an introduction by Alice Kessler Harris (New York: Persea Books, 1925).
Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, The Several Lives of Chester Himes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 126.
Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, eds., Conversations with Chester Himes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 25
Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, Volume II (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 126.
Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 112.
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 244.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 111.
See Charles S. Johnson, “A Phenomenology of the Black Body,” in I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and about Charles Johnson, ed. Rudolph Byrd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 109–22. Rinehart’s transgressive shape-shifting resonates with Johnson’s sardonically bold declaration about black being: “[N]ot being recognized as a subject is my strength, my chance for cunning and masquerade, for guerrilla warfare” (117).
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 7.
Loïc Wacquant, “Ghetto,” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (London: Pergamon, 2004), 3.
See also Eva Tettenborn, “Melancholia as Resistance in Contemporary African American Literature,” MELUS 31, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 101–21.
Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 40.
Lynn M. Itagaki, “Transgressing Race and Community in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go,” African American Review 37, no. 1 (Spring, 2003): 65–80. Itagaki reads this moment as a sign of what Sean McCann calls Himes’s “anti-racialist populism.” She calls this conversation between Jones and the two draftees an “upbeat interchange” that “provides an opening for a future based on interracial community” (Itagaki 76). Though there is much evidence to suggest Jones’s (Himes’s) support of multiracial, class-based politics, I argue here that we must recognize the refreshing racial ecumenism that Jones embraces here as an expression of his insistent disidentifica- tion with blackness. In other words, Jones’s political open-mindedness is a symptom of his racial melancholia.
Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2000). Instructive to this point is Seshadri-Crooks’s work on race and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She argues that the part of the subject that exceeds the symbolic register is sexual identity; racial identity offers the subject a way to ameliorate this undefinability. As Seshadri-Crooks states it, “[t]he signifier Whiteness tries to fill the constitutive lack of the sexed subject” (7).
Chester Himes, “Negro Martyrs are Needed,” Crisis 51, no. 5 (May 1944), 159.
In his study of Himes as a hard-boiled writer, Christopher Breu praises the moral restraint of the dream sequences in If He Hollers. See Breu, “Freudian Knot or Gordian Knot?: The Contradictions of Racialized Masculinity in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go,” Callaloo 26, no 3 (Summer 2003): 766–95. Unlike most hard-boiled heroes, Jones symbolizes rather than enacts his violent desires, a preference that engenders an ethical subjectivity uncommon to the genre. Yet whereas Himes’s later crime writing would instrumentalize fiction as the fantasy-space of its violent desires—indeed, ifwe take seriously the murderous plot of Himes’s last novel, Plan B, we then see an author working his way up to imagining the mass killing of white people—If He Hollers reveals more clearly Himes’s own ideas about subjectivity.
See John L. Jackson, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008) in which he questions whether political correctness has so fatefully sanitized public discourse about race that blacks and whites remain suspicious that their counterparts harbor negative intents towards them.
Chester Himes, Conversations with Chester Himes, ed. Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 89.
This is my interpretation of Doreen Massey’s claim that “non- essentialist identities require spatiality.” Racial heterogeneity needs a preserve in order to thrive. Please see Doreen Massey, “Spaces of Politics,” in Human Geography Today (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 288.
Loïc Wacquant, “Ghetto,” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelserand Paul B. Baltes (London: Pergamon, 2004), 1–10.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 326.
Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 18.
Joan Ramon Resina and Dieter Ingenschay, After-Images of the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 20.
Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol (New York: Vintage, 1969), 187. All further references will be indicated by page number in the text.
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), sees in the ghetto the panoptic principle at work: The space separates groups from the mainstream spaces of whiteness for the purposes of observation (37). Her insight implies of course, that society’s officials—the cop, the welfare office, the demographer, the journalist—will conduct this observation. Seldom does the average white citizen encounter the spaces of the second ghetto. Thus it might be more accurate to say that postmodern black neighborhoods are simultaneously visible (because of the official discourse that mediates them to the mainstream) and invisible (because metropolitan structures seek to disappear these enclaves from the general view).
Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 181.
James V. Werner, “The Detective Gaze: Edgar Allan Poe, the Flaneur, and the Physiognomy of Crime,” American Transcendental Quarterly 15, no. 1 (March 2001), 5–21.
Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 25.
Ben Highmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings of the Material and Symbolic City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 113.
Stephen F. Soitos, The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 143.
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990), 114. In “The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris: Chester Himes, Surrealism, and the Serie Noire” critic Jonathan Eburne makes the case that Himes’s anti-detective fiction was one artistic example of the “political legacy of the [Surrealists] in the post-war public domain” (819). Surrealism’s “broad rejection ofmoral constraints,” its “exploring the forces—good and evil and often painful and unconscious—that structure lived experience” and “its resistance to cognitive uncertainty” certainly registers in the absurdist fiction that Himes produces in the 1960s (818). My reflection does not aim to take issue with Eburne’s innovative and cogent thesis, rather it strives to highlight Himes’s work as a postmodern phenomenon in order to underscore how race- based black protest shaped his aesthetic—an issue that surrealist aesthetics did not necessarily embrace as a political priority. Eburne’s essay can be found in PMLA, 120, no. 3 (2005): 806–21.
Nikil Pal Singh, “The Black Panthers and The ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1978), 83.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Rebel Press, 2002), 15.
Justus Nieland, “Enough to Make a Body Riot: Pansies and Protesters in Himes’ Harlem,” Arizona Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 108.
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© 2012 Tyrone R. Simpson II
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Simpson, T.R. (2012). Enough to Make a Body Riot. In: Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature. The Future of Minority Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014894_5
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