Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

Introduction

Introduction Late in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 classic of African American literature, Invisible Man, there is a scene that illustrates the contentious relationship between hip urban styles and black cultural politics that emerged in conversations about racial uplift in the twentieth century. After Invisible Man (IM) witnesses race leader turned sidewalk salesman of Sambo puppets Tod Clifton gunned down by a police officer, he wanders to a subway platform, where he contemplates the meaning of Clifton’s death. Because IM is still committed to the communist organization known as the Brotherhood, he cannot comprehend Clifton’s seeming betrayal of the party—his decision, as IM puts it, “to plunge into nothingness, into the void of faceless faces, of soundless voices, lying outside history.”1 It is at this moment that IM spots three young men wearing zoot suits entering the subway platform. Sporting conked hair, identical felt hats, ballooning trousers, and “too-hot-for-summer suits,” these hipsters display a “severe formality,” which reminds IM of an African statue, “distorted in the interest of a design.”2 Fascinated by these codes he cannot quite decipher, IM follows the zoot suiters onto the subway, where he watches them read comic books. Here IM has a realization about the limits of the Brotherhood’s model for comprehending the complexities of black urban culture in relationship to political organization: “Then I saw the cover of the comic book and thought, Clifton would have known them better than I. He knew them all the time. I studied them closely until they left the train, their shoulders rocking, their heavy heel plates, 2 / introduction clicking remote cryptic messages in the brief silence of the train’s stop.”3 Both figuratively and literally transmitting secret codes known only to the hip with their chic outfits, the zoot suiters cause IM to reflect on his own political arrogance of assuming the role of race leader. Although this moment only takes up a few pages in Ellison’s lengthy novel, it is a powerful illustration of one of the unresolved problems posed by African American literature in the twentieth century, namely, the relationships among postures of cool, black culture politics, and the literary marketplace. As consumers of mass-market fiction as well as bearers of edgy popular style, the zoot suiters highlight the cultural and class divides among urban African Americans in mid-twentieth-century America. Furthermore, the scene calls into question the black middle class’s presumption of race leadership, given that the culture of the black urban working class remains illegible to them. Although IM starts off the novel thinking of himself as an exemplar of black leadership, a Booker T. Washington–type of figure responsible for the uplift of the black masses, this confrontation with the hipsters leads him to wonder if there might be something politically valuable hidden in the folds of the zoot suit. “But who knew,” he asks himself, “who knew but that they were the saviors , the true leaders, the bearers of something precious?”4 Even as this nagging question remains unanswered throughout the novel, it provides a useful starting point for the following examination of the most popular black literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: African American crime fiction. As a genre and culture industry that dramatizes the contradictory relationship between stylish urban outlaws and black struggles for social and political freedom, African American crime literature stages a charged dialogue about the historical significance of black popular fiction in American political and social life. Pimping Fictions investigates the black crime fiction tradition and marketplace that has grown over the past fifty years. I use black crime fiction here as an umbrella term that encompasses the paperback novels written by African American criminals and prisoners in the years after World War II. This study examines the work of pioneering prison author Chester Himes, the so-called “black experience” novelists published by Holloway House Publishing Company in the 1960s and 1970s, and the popular “street literature” writers that have invented a new African American literary scene in the past decade. As the title of the book indicates, Pimping Fictions focuses on the quasi-autobiographical tales of pimps, players, and sex workers, as well as the fictionalized exploits of street hustlers, drug dealers, and political revolutionaries. It traces introduction / 3 the development of a black literary tradition that includes some of the most widely read black American authors in...