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6 / The Women of Street Literature: Contemporary Black Crime Fiction and the Rise of the Self-Publishing Marketplace In Vickie Stringer’s third novel, Dirty Red (2006), eighteen-year-old Raven “Red” Gomez uses her charm and sexual magnetism to con various men into giving her gifts of clothes, cars, and cash. Reversing the usual gender dynamics of pimp literature invented by Iceberg Slim, Red uses cunning and deceit to exploit male rivals in an attempt to escape the confines of the Detroit ghetto. Even Oprah said it so it had to be true: Detroit was the poorest big city in the country. Littered with abandoned buildings, trashy casinos and with a sky-high unemployment rate, you’d never believe it was once called the “Paris of the Midwest.” After the closing of many of the automobile factories that gave Detroit its livelihood and the subsequent rise of drug and gang activity, the gap between the “haves” of the suburbs and the “have nots” of the city was gaping. Red despised Detroit and everything in it. In Red’s crazy-ass mind, she planned to make the city her bitch and strike it rich by exploiting as many residents as she could reach.1 Reflecting the ongoing problem of racial and spatial divides between the suburbs and the inner city in Detroit in twenty-first-century America, Dirty Red updates the story of the black criminal in spaces of urban containment for a female audience. As the antihero of the novel, Red adapts the cool poses and manipulative ethos of the pimp to con and steal from men and to achieve financial independence. Once the object of sexual the women of street literature / 153 exploitation in the narratives of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, the urban female is now the organizing figure of contemporary street literature who uses her sexuality as a form of mobility. Red, like other female protagonists of the genre, gains power by adopting a number of tactics to subvert the aims of would-be pimps, hustlers, and gangsters and reverse the power dynamics in those misogynist relationships. As Red writes in a letter to one of the victims of her deceit, “The pimp game got flipped on your ass.”2 Like the earlier black experience novels of Donald Goines, Dirty Red also self-consciously draws a symbolic parallel between these dramas of the black criminal and the dilemmas of the writer in the black literary marketplace. At one point midway through the novel, Red publishes her ex-boyfriend Bacon’s novel titled Bitch Nigga, Snitch Nigga while he is still in prison and pockets the twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance and royalties for it best-selling sales. After Bacon is released from prison and learns of Red’s betrayal and that the publisher has no record of him as the legitimate author of the manuscript, he goes to the Triple Crown Publications office and burns the company to the ground. As the building is reduced to ashes, a reporter arrives on the scene to interview the owner of the company: “Tears streaming down her face, the owner, Jennifer Nicholas, stood in front of the camera near the rubble. The reporter wondered who would do such a horrible thing to such a fantastic urban publishing house, and why. Ms. Nicholas shook her head. ‘I have no idea. If anyone has any information, please call the police department.’ Bacon stared at the TV screen, thinking, They know why.”3 As in Goines’s Never Die Alone, Stringer’s Dirty Red uses the black crime novel as theater to reflect on the racial and gender politics of black popular publishing. In this version of the story, the criminal/author Bacon, perceiving that he has been exploited by the publishing industry, takes his revenge by actually destroying the organization itself. In line with the utopian impulses of the genre, Dirty Red on the surface stages a revenge fantasy in which the criminal/writer dismantles the symbols of ideological and economic containment. But the racial politics of publishing are not so straightforward in this novel. Triple Crown Publications is actually the most successful blackowned independent imprint of street literature today. Furthermore, the publishing company is the creation of Dirty Red’s author, Vickie Stringer. Stringer is just one of many entrepreneurial African American writers who has in the past ten years built independent publishing companies supported by the growing popularity of black crime literature. [3.143.9.115] Project MUSE (2024...

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