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

4. Black in a White Paradise: Utopias and Imagined Solutions in Black Crime Literature

4 / Black in a White Paradise: Utopias and Imagined Solutions in Black Crime Literature In 1976, Roland Jefferson published The School on 103rd Street, a novel that extended the black crime fiction genre established by Chester Himes, Robert Beck, and Donald Goines in important ways. As we have seen in the previous three chapters, Himes, Beck, and Goines each illustrated in their novels implicit connections between the carceral space of the prison and the confined space of the black neighborhood. Jefferson, however , makes this relationship explicit by representing the black city as a dystopian space of captivity. After the main protagonist, a black forensic psychiatrist named Elwin Carter, accidently stumbles across an underground prison built beneath an elementary school in the black neighborhood of Watts, he assembles his own militant organization to search for any other prisons hidden in other American cities. They discover that, following the urban insurrections that swept across the country during the 1960s, the government has built underground concentration camps in nearly every American city that has a sizable black population: We have uncovered the presence of underground prison compounds in the following cities: Detroit, underneath a health clinic on the edge of the ghetto; in Chicago on the West Side beneath a Baptist church. . . . Oh yes, in Bedford-Sty underneath a tenement house; in Harlem, dig this! Underneath the new wing of Harlem Hospital, which by the way, is the biggest we found, and it’s natural , you know why? Wheel niggers into the hospital, they just don’t come out! Folks just figured they died. . . . Newark, New Jersey, 98 / black in a white paradise under a school; Washington, D.C., below a junior high school; Philadelphia, under a church on Girard Street, south side of the city; Baltimore, under a library adjacent to a police precinct; New Orleans, under a medical clinic; and in Atlanta, under a recently constructed day care center for children of working mothers, not far from Morehouse College.1 By suggesting that health clinics, hospitals, tenement buildings, churches, libraries, schools, and day care centers are literal covers for the prison facilities built beneath them, The School on 103rd Street illustrates Michel Foucault ’s point that modern institutions are at their cores also mechanisms of surveillance and discipline. Furthermore, Jefferson’s novel suggests that the establishments that house the black middle class are not supportive of the black masses but are themselves bankrupt and corrupted institutions . By placing prisons underneath cities with large black populations— Detroit, Chicago, Brooklyn, Harlem, Newark, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia , Baltimore, New Orleans, and Atlanta—Jefferson’s novel makes the statement that black American neighborhoods have become spaces of incarceration for many of their black citizens, and it illustrates black crime literature’s continued suspicion of the social and political impact of the black bourgeoisie. The School on 103rd Street dramatizes the effects of spatial and racial containment created by decades of urban segregation in the mid-to-late twentieth century. The mechanisms that had been developed by whites in the decades following World War II to constrain black populations had by the 1970s produced a racially divided America. The suburbanization of white communities and the segregation of black citizens in inner cities had calcified by the early 1970s, and in all of America’s largest cities , African Americans were isolated in centralized urban ghettos. Some black suburbanization mitigated these divisions during this decade; however, the completion of public housing high-rises in the inner city and the construction of vast highway systems facilitating white flight, coupled with deindustrialization and continued racial discrimination in housing and the job market, meant that the black ghetto had become a permanent fixture of the American landscape by the early 1970s.2 As the black ghetto solidified as a reality of American life during this decade, Holloway House also emerged as a center of black literary production. The company had established itself as the niche publisher of black crime novels with the publication of Robert Beck and Donald Goines. But it became a cultural institution of black pulp publishing black in a white paradise / 99 with the addition of writers such as Joseph Nazel, Odie Hawkins, Charlie Avery Harris, Omar Fletcher, James Howard-Readus, Randolph Harris, Andrew Stonewall Jackson, Amos Brooke, Roosevelt Malloy, and others in the mid-1970s. Holloway House’s catalogue of novels that developed throughout the decade consists of hundreds of books by dozens of authors...