Blood Typing: Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies

CLA JOURNAL 165 Blood Typing: Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies Rachel Watson Witchcraft has no moving parts of its own, and it needs none. The real action creates evidence for the imagined thing. By that route, belief of that sort constantly dumps evidence for itself into the real world. […] There was vast and varied evidence, but of what? Of products of imagining, ‘realised’ in everyday practice. […] Those present do not query assumptions, the nature of available evidence, or the coherence of their reasoning from that evidence. What they know, they know intimately, but not well. Such is the stuff that racecraft is made of. It occupies a middle ground between science and superstition, an invisible realm of collective understandings, a half-lit zone of the mind’s eye.1 The number of instances is of course too small for statistical deductions, but they served to make it clear that no very marked characteristic distinguished the races. The impressions from Negroes betray the general clumsiness of their fingers, but their patterns are not, so far as I can find, different from those of others, they are not simpler as judged either by their contours or by the number of origins, embranchments, islands, and enclosures contained in them. Still, whether it be from pure fancy on my part, or from the way in which they were printed, or from some real peculiarity, the general aspect of the Negro print strikes me as characteristic. […] In short, they give an idea of greater simplicity, due to causes that I have not yet succeeded in submitting to the test of measurement.2 “Some day I’m going to write a murder mystery,” mused Dr. Archer, “that will baffle and astound the world. The murderer will turn out to be the most likely suspect.” “You’d never write another,” said the medical examiner.3 In November of 1927,The Pittsburgh Courier reported two key facts regarding the young Dr. Rudolph Fisher: he had just completed his first novel (The Walls of Jericho, for which he was considering offers from publishers) and that “Dr. Fisher will soon open an office in Harlem and will be the first colored doctor to 1 Barbara and Karen Fields, 21-22. 2 Francis Galton, 195-96. 3 Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies, 155. Noted parenthetically hereafter. 166 CLA JOURNAL Rachel Watson practice the use of radium.”4 In the month prior, The Chicago Defender reported that the well-known writer would open a “well-equipped X-ray laboratory at 2350 Seventh Avenue” in Harlem, New York.5 Soon after, the International Hospital opened,providingstate-of-the-artmedicalfacilitiesforHarlemresidents,including the X-ray lab of Dr. Rudolph Fisher.6 Thus, while imagining and writing the first African American detective novel, Rudolph Fisher also became the preeminent black American with the capacity and wherewithal to see, quite literally, beneath the skin. In a sociopolitical climate still firmly in thrall with nineteenth century ideologies of the human body, in which one profoundly was what one looked like, and in which social and legal rank was explicitly determined by the visible color of one’s skin, the scientific collapsing of such distances between the eye and the body could not help but animate the way Fisher wrote and talked about race ideology in America. Originally published in 1932 by the New York firm of Pascal Covici and Donald Friede—whose roster included John Steinbeck, Wyndham Lewis, Clifford Odets, and Nathaniel West—The Conjure-Man Dies broke new literary ground by featuring an African American police officer working with an African American doctor to solve a pair of murders in 1920s Harlem. While one could argue whether The Conjure-Man Dies was the first African American detective story, it was unarguably the first of its kind to feature an all-black cast.7 For Fisher, the detection story formula itself, and its insistence on engaging readers’“rational”intellect,hadmoretosayaboutracialideologiesandtheirundoing than what may at first meet the eye.8 In his decision to make use of both forensics and contemporaneous hematology as critical evidence in the identification of the murderer and the victim, Fisher used the technical language and cultural power of an emerging medico...