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c h a p t e r 8 A “Toast” Novel Pimps, Hoodlums, and Hit Men THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE “HIP” AND THE “LAME” In the late sixties and early seventies, a cohort of black novelists seems to have deliberately set out to write the “toast” into a new form of ¤ction. It was a genre not destined for either mainstream popularity or critical acclaim. But it took on the world of the street player with gusto. The novels that make up this genre are virtually long prose toasts, with literary and thematic ties to the old badman ballad as well. They cross the ghetto of Chester Himes with that of Toledo Slim and Broadway Sam, depicting an inner city in which crime is everyday business and the most violent men are the most effective at carrying out business. They fuse the middleclass literate tradition and the oral folk tradition, mixing the two sets of values, simultaneously romanticizing and criticizing the man of violence. He is sometimes a tragic ¤gure, stoically resigned to his fall, other times an instrument of protest, insisting that his violent behavior is caused by the unfairness of an oppressive system. The characters in this genre struggle not for mental growth or identity but for power and status, simpli¤ed primitive versions of the values by which respectable society lives. In this world those values are not softened by the courtesies of business protocol or social civility that keep mainstream strivers from doing overt physical harm to their competitors. The toast novel characters never pretend that humanity is more important than power. Yet their struggles are set against a backdrop of mainstream morality. They are aware that their violent ac- 120 | “BORN IN A MIGHTY BAD LAND” tivities, like those of the old ballad badmen, lead either to jail or to death, and that those activities mark them as pariahs in the larger society outside the ghetto. These are the people who stay in the ghetto and take up its ways rather than try to get out. They take us into the folkways of the system that mainstream culture regards with distaste and alarm. Nathan C. Heard’s Howard Street (1968) is essentially the ¤rst such novel. In fact, Heard demonstrates his closeness to the toast genre with his epigraph: A man can’t fool with the golden rule in a game that don’t play fair. The phrase occurs in a toast called “The Tropics.”1 Heard avoids the “toast” label , preferring to call it “a doggerel hip poem.” Heard had himself been a street player of sorts, spending time in the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton, and he brings the toast explicitly into his last novel, House of Slammers (1983), in which an inmate recites “Honky Tonk Bud” to an appreciative prison audience and promises to give them “Mexicali Rose” later.2 In Howard Street, Heard fashions Lonnie “Hip” Ritchwood as a kind of Honky Tonk Bud small-time hustler, a violent junkie, but with a cool style. It is less his badness at issue, though, than a con¶ict involving the code of the ghetto and the possibility of escaping to the suburbs and law-abiding respectability. Like some of the bildungsroman writers, Heard can envision a character who prefers the player’s life of the ghetto to the uneventful life of the respectable suburbs, in which case the ghetto can be the honorable choice. Heard views the violence of the ghetto, not necessarily as a symptom of decay and degeneracy, but as a means of survival and success , legitimated by the conditions of The Life. Not that, as a novelist, he condones violence. He simply projects it as his characters see it, dispassionately, amorally. He gives us glimpses of that other life, where families reside securely in nonviolent neighborhoods, pursuing attainable goals, their minds undistorted by fear, their bodies unscarred by drugs or physical abuse, moving freely in their world without harassment by police. Hints of resentment that the ghetto dweller is denied such a life show through. And there is always the background dream that some day the street player will hit it big and forever insulate himself from the street’s hazards. But staying can also mean holding on to an honor and beauty that one abandons when leaving to abide by the straight conventions of the middle class. Heard compresses the essence of the black ghetto into two blocks of Howard Street in Newark, New Jersey. There the...

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