"Blind Man with a Pistol” by Chester Himes (published by Penguin Books)

Black man with a grievance

Each of the eight book covers in Chester Himes’ Harlem Detectives series is a jumble of chopped-up images that perfectly represent the African-American author’s haunt, the hotspot black neighbourhood of New York City where whiteys fear to tread. "Blind Man with a Pistol” is his final deep delve into a crime-ridden world that is equally jumbled up, jumping about from incident to incident.
18. January 2025 5:40

Himes really lets it all hang out this time, probably more so than in the seven previous episodes. We know he can write straight – the debut novel “If He Hollers Let Him Go” from 1949, for example – so this must be just the way he wanted it, disjointed and difficult to follow at times. Who or what is behind the riots and looting, murders and other crazy stuff?

The confusing plot shifts between a few side-by-side stories not fully explained even at the end. All of which naturally doesn’t make things easy for the reader. If it was a muddle in 1969 when first published, it still is with this 2024 reissue. Himes (1909-1984) was a black man – a nigger, a coon – who left the United States in 1953 to escape the white-ruled world’s racism, and settled in Paris. From there he looked back in anger, sometimes in an absurdist way.

There is, though, a terrifically promising opening to “Blind Man with a Pistol”. Two white cops in a cruiser are intrigued by a card requesting “Fertile womens, lovin God, inquire within” in the window of an old dilapidated three-storey brick house. Going in, they meet a  man who calls himself Reverend Sam, a Mormon, and 11 black nuns, all his wives, plus 50 little pickaninnies, all naked, sleeping in the same room on loose dirty cotton and eating stewed pigsfeet and chitterlings on hands and knees from troughs.

Reverend Sam says he is about 100 years old to the best of his knowledge and the children are all from the seeds of his loins. The sign in the window is to attract a twelfth wife because one died and must be replaced. Yes, his nuns respect vows of chastity but they are virgins when they arise in the morning and it is only at night, in the dark, that they perform the functions for which God had made their bodies. The nuns beg alms to support everyone.

The cops find three suspicious-looking mounds in the dirt cellar. When examined, they contain the remains of three female bodies.

Next up, Himes switches to a white man – a sissie, a pansy; don’t expect political correctness – plucking up his courage at night to go into a lunch counter frequented by blacks of the same leaning. When he finally enters and is picked up, the two of them leave for some quiet sexual action. It’s a fatal move. The whitey should have known better.

In another change of direction we meet Marcus Mackenzie, an idealistic young black man who wants to save the world and solve the Negro Problem by leading a march of 48 blacks and whites across the heart of Harlem. This, he reckons, will spark an outpouring of brotherly love. He wants negroes to arise, to lead them out of the abyss into the promised land.

Enter Himes’ black New York Police Department detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, cruising the unlit side streets in their old dark Plymouth sedan at 3am to surprise anyone in the act of maiming, mugging, rolling drunks or committing homicide. They see a black man running off with a pair of trousers, then a white man, trouserless, with a cut jugular who dies at their feet. They don’t know it yet but we do: it’s the sissy fellow.

While readers may have managed to keep up so far, a complication arises when Doctor Mubuta, Mrs Dawson, Mister Sam, Dick, Anny, Viola, Sugartit, Van Raff and Johnson X are all introduced in short order. Who? Whoever, Doctor Mubuta has his own solution for the Negro Problem. “We’re gonna outlive the white folks. While they has been concentrating on ways of death, I has been concentrating on how to extend life. While they’ll be dying, we’ll be living forever, and Mister Sam here, the oldest of us all, will be alive to see the day when the black man is the majority on this earth, and the white man his slave.”

Another puzzle may be the seemingly disconnected italicised “Interludes” that punctuate the story, short pieces peppered throughout as asides. One is about stomach juices and dandruff, said to be the result of corn in the brain heating, popping and coming through the skull.

It becomes clear that Himes is not about to offer a typical mystery novel with police procedure resulting in a neat Agatha Christie-like solution. He’s writing about racism, violence and inequality, the reality of Harlem in the 1960s, a string of stabbing, beating and riots, of prostitutes, pimps, pederasts, pickpockets, sneak thieves, con men and steerers (a person who coaxes potential customers to a gambling game, brothel, drug dealer, et cetera).

It’s familiar ground for anyone who’s read the seven earlier Coffin Ed and Grave Digger misadventures but probably even wilder this time around. There was to have been a ninth Harlem Detectives book, “Plan B”,  which Himes started writing in the late 1960s but had left unfinished when he died in Moraira, Spain, in 1984. It was finally published in French in France in 1983 and not in English in the United States until 1993 after being completed from his notes by writers Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner. It seems Himes wrote around 155 pages and Fabre and Skinner added just a few.

Himes offers a Preface in “Blind Man with a Pistol”: ”A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on a subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.”

A second Preface: “Blink once, you’re robbed,” Coffin Ed advises the white man slumming in Harlem.  ”Blink twice, you’re dead,” Grave Digger adds dryly. Later, “What the hell’s got into these people all of a sudden?” Coffin Ed asks. “It ain’t been sudden,” Lomax replies, “They been feeling a long time. Like all the rest of us. Now they making their statement.” “Statement? Statement saying what?” “Each of them got a different statement.”

Or: “They believed in Black Power. They’d give it a trial anyway. Everything else had failed. What did they have to lose? And they might win. Who knew? The whale swallowed Jonah. Moses split the Red Sea. Christ rose from the dead. Lincoln freed the slaves. Hitler killed six million Jews. The Africans had got to rule – in some parts of Africa, anyway. The Americans and the Russians have shot the moon. Some joker has made a plastic heart. Anything is possible.” A common theme: “It was Harlem, where anything might happen.”

The point seems to be that most violence is like a blind man with a pistol but no aim or strategy or point. Tragedies happen because people keep butting into each other. It’s the way of the world. When a blind man just points and fires, whoever gets hit goes down.

There are those aficionados who place Chester Himes in the same elevated company as crime writers Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) and Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). At The Budapest Times we’ve started to think of Himes as a precursor to the “Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction”, James Ellroy himself (1948–). Discuss.

And those eight strikingly colourful covers are by Romare Bearden, an American artist, author and songwriter (1911-1998).

 

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