"The Big Gold Dream" by Chester Himes (published by Penguin Books)
Crime with humour, humour with crime
And Lieutenant Anderson is well aware they have their own personal interpretation of law enforcement. He knows his two coloured cops well and he depends on them. Some people they never touch, such as madames of orderly brothels, operators of peaceful gambling games, people in the numbers racket and streetwalkers who keep to their own patch.
But they are rough on violent criminals and confidence tricksters, and Anderson figures they don’t have any tolerance for dope peddlers and pimps either. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are going to need all their street smarts in “The Big Gold Dream”, the fourth of Chester Himes’ “Harlem Detectives” series of eight novels, this one first published in 1960, now reissued.
Coffin Ed in particular is liable to go over the top in the brutality stakes and needs to be restrained by Grave Digger. Perhaps he has cause, because a hoodlum threw acid in his face during a ruckus one night in a shanty on the Harlem River, leaving him badly scarred. He looks like the mask of an African witch doctor, Himes writes. “Occupational hazard,” Coffin Ed commented. “I’m a cop. I take my chances.” He’ll have skin grafted from his thigh but it’ll take about a year to do. In the meantime, coming face to face with him intimidates any crim.
Will he ever get over the memory, Grave Digger wonders. “It had left him trigger-happy, and a trigger-happy detective was as dangerous as a blind rattlesnake.”
Reading this and the other seven books is rather like taking a plunge into a murky pool where you can’t see the bottom. They’re full of murder, greed, double-crosses, hypocrisy and other mayhem. Stiffs pop up regularly as Himes dreams up the weird action and strange characters.
“The Big Gold Dream” certainly gets under way with a memorable opening, as Sweet Prophet Brown, a preacher who possesses “the nimble wits of a confidence man and the nerve of a bank robber”, and is an obvious trickster, conducts a mass street baptism. Gullible black, brown and yellow Harlemites flock to be converted by the expedient of listening to Sweet Prophet Brown spout a load of pseudo-religious claptrap.
“Faith is a rock! It’s like a solid gold dream!” he exclaims, half-drowning the multitude by showering them from two fire hoses, one at each end of the gathering. “Out of this water will come miracles,” he intones, and most believe him, in his bright purple robe lined with yellow silk and trimmed with mink. His fingernails are more than three inches long, uncut since he first claimed to have spoken with God.
It’s a wonderfully comical beginning. But then Alberta Wright, a kitchen slave, goes into some sort of holy ecstacy and starts testifying about her wonderful dream in which three apple pies burst open to fill the kitchen with hundred-dollar bills. Then she sips from a bottle of drinking water blessed by Sweet Prophet and collapses, to all appearances plumb dead.
Poisoned water? The charlatan is desperate to hide her demise from the crowd, which is already starting to get whipped up by Alberta’s mention of seemingly easily obtained money. In Harlem most people don’t enough, far from it. Now the mob are running and screaming. Sweet Prophet starts to fear for his long and chequered career as a revivalist heading the Church of Wonderful Prayer. It’s taken him 20 years to build up and he is a millionaire, perhaps multi-millionaire, with a Rolls-Royce and the trimmings.
The followers are not entirely blind to his scam but “Religious people love a winner, he had learned”. However, terror, fear of death, spreads through the crowd and it’s time for him to split. In fact, Alberta had actually won 36,000 dollars by playing the numbers racket, and so even as she lays in the morgue the search is on by the local hoodlums to find her cash.
The frenzy prompts killings, thefts and betrayals as multiple miscreants run around trying to rip each other off and come out on top. “People will recrucify Jesus Christ for thirty-six grand,” Coffin Ed remarks. Just to confuse things further, in fact Alberta had simply been slipped a Mickey Finn, and makes a startling comeback to life.
African-American author Chester Bomar Himes (1909-1984) left American racism behind in 1953 by moving to Paris, France. The eight novels in his Harlem Detectives series began with “A Rage in Harlem” in 1957 and concluded with “Blind Man With a Pistol” in 1969. A ninth was unfinished when Himes died aged 75 on November 12, 1984 in Moravia, Spain.
The books depict the black experience in the uptown New York neighbourhood at a time of poverty and lack of opportunity. Characterisation and plot aren’t Himes’ main concerns. Social conditions are.
There’s been improvement but not enough. “Back during the depression of the 1930s, everyone who had a house threw these parties to pay their rent. However, most had quit the practice as industrial jobs opened to colored people and the pay for domestic work increased.”
One meal is recounted as three pork chops, two eggs, a saucepan half-filled with cold hominy grits and a serving dish containing dandelion greens and okra that had been boiled with pigs feet. The pigs feet had already been eaten. The lard is half-rancid. Chitterlings, of course. Alligator tails.
Abie the Jew and some fleeting white policemen are basically the only non-African-Americans in “The Big Gold Dream”. There are corpses, matter-of-fact violence, knives, prostitutes, pansies, muggers, various illegal drugs, easy sex, slums, bums, greasy spoons, flea-bag hotels, shoe-shine parlours, blackjack, rats, hunting cats, mojos and bad grammar.
Sweet Prophet Brown’s exploitation of religion is a fine joke by Himes. He does like to amuse his readers: “Sugar’s feet started moving him in the direction of home. It was empty; the furniture was gone; the door was locked; his woman was in jail; and what was more the home didn’t belong to him and he didn’t have the key. But it was home, the only one he had.” And “The mattress – colored people’s strongbox, ha, ha.”
Our two deadbeat cops, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, are virtually inseparable as they try to figure out who killed whom. Their modus operandi comprises cruising around in their wrinkled suits and beat-up japopy, talking to stool pigeons, heavying suspects and banging in doors.
The humour is black (“Never look a stool pigeon in the mouth”), the humanity is flawed. Himes eventually made his mark and he lives on.