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3 / The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Donald Goines, Holloway House Publishing Company, and the Radicalization of Black Crime Literature Toward the conclusion of Donald Goines’s first novel, a fictionalized pimp autobiography titled Whoreson: The Story of a Ghetto Pimp, there is a moment that reveals the literary influence of Robert Beck’s Pimp: The Story of My Life.1 Having mastered the street arts of “Trickology” from an early age and having risen through the ranks to become one of Detroit’s most ruthless pimps, the novel’s title character, Whoreson Jones, cons a suburban white woman named Stella into giving him twenty thousand dollars. As they drive out to her suburban home together, Whoreson realizes that his verbal virtuosity gained through pimping and conning skills have bought him passage out of the Detroit ghetto: “When we got to the suburbs, it was like another world to me. No broken-down houses staring you in the face. Everything neat and clean, the streets unlittered with tricks accosting every woman that walked past. Yes, Stella, you’re going to pave the way so that I’ll never have to live in another slum again.”2 Recalling the “Melody Off Key” chapter of Iceberg Slim’s narrative , this moment crystallizes the way in which pimping is imagined in “black experience” fiction as a potential escape from forms of white containment . In this version of the story, too, the title character discovers that the con is an inadequate strategy to contend with systems of white power. Although Whoreson successfully bilks Stella out of her twenty thousand dollars, only a few pages later, he is betrayed by one of his former prostitutes and sent back to prison. As he sits behind bars in the final scene of the book, he reflects, “Mockery was the answer to my stupidity , for what else could I call it? Not cleverness. What could be clever the revolution will not be televised / 69 about a man who wasted over ten years of his life behind prison walls? By the time I got out, I’d have over ten years in, and for what? Twenty thousand dollars. A man working at a carwash would make more than that over a ten-year span.”3 As in Iceberg Slim’s story, the verbal prowess associated with pimping provides Whoreson temporary transcendence over the spatial containments of the urban ghetto. Yet such mobility is short-lived. In the end, Whoreson merely trades the confined space of the Detroit ghetto for the confined space of the prison cell. Written by Donald Goines while he was behind bars at Jackson State Penitentiary in 1970 after reading Pimp: The Story of My Life, Whoreson exemplifies the growth of black crime fiction produced by Holloway House Publishing Company following the commercial success of Robert Beck’s works. Although lacking the extensive specialized vernacular that constitutes Beck’s pioneering story, Whoreson nevertheless marks a significant development of black crime literature. The story dramatizes how the figure of the pimp, the setting of white spatial confinement, and the narrative of frustrated mobility are flexible literary devices that can represent a range of black urban landscapes. For despite the individual differences between American cities with sizable black populations—cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland , St. Louis, and Philadelphia—all experienced similar patterns of deindustrialization, white flight, and the concentration of black innercity poverty in the post–World War II years. Shifting the geography of the pimp autobiography from Chicago to Detroit, Goines illustrates that the black crime genre can be employed to express a national consciousness of black populations contending with forces of white urban containment , the prison-industrial complex, and low-wage service-economy jobs in a number of American places. As Thomas Sugrue argues in his important study of Goines’s hometown of Detroit, for example, the city once known as the “arsenal of democracy” had, in the decades following World War II, become a symbol of America’s urban crisis. Enacting similar strategies of containment that were prevalent in other major American cities, white Detroiters constructed vast expressways to encourage white flight, formed hundreds of homeowners associations in order to combat the perceived “Negro invasion,” performed individual acts of violence against blacks who tried to move out of the narrowly defined geographical boundaries of the ghetto, and concentrated the construction of public housing in black inner-city neighborhoods. According to Sugrue, “White Detroiters invented communities of race in the...

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