ENG - Himes's underlying inspiration: The Trees, by Percival Everett

This novel by Percival Everett, published in 2022 in the United States (and covered with awards) has just been translated into French, under the title Châtiment.

The French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné devotes a warm review to it (March 13, 2024), as a counterpoint to the review of a novel by Richard Wright, without ever, however, mentioning what jumped out at me: the link with Himes.

 

Indeed, in chapter 8 of the novel, a couple of black inspectors from the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) appear. Jim Davis and Ed Morgan remind us of Gravedigger and Ed Coffin: same friendship between the two men, same relaxation, same distance from their theoretical mission. The fundamental difference is that they are police officers in Mississippi and that they are confronted with local police officers (sheriffs) whose racism is consubstantial. We can even notice the resemblance with the late appearance of the two police officers, in A Rage in Harlem / For Love of Imabelle. We will measure the distance traveled since Himes's story and his improbable invention of two black police officers, powerful and resolute, in the Harlem of the 1950s. Alongside Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, we also find a black FBI agent and Asian police officers from California, all aware of their origin and their identity.

 

The evocation of Himes can also be read in the plot. Like Plan B, the last, unfinished novel in the Harlem cycle, The Trees recounts a scheme conceived by a mind of exceptional foresight and resolution, which exceeds its author's intention and degenerates into an uncontrollable war between races. Next to all the white victims, murdered and castrated, is the body of a young black man, lynched a few decades earlier, probably Emmet Tyll, lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1955.

 

A must read!

Himes sous-jacent : Châtiment (The Trees) par Percival Everett

Ce roman de Percival Everett, paru en 2022 aux Etats-Unis (et couvert de prix) vient d'être traduit en français, sous le titre de Châtiment.

Le Canard Enchaîné lui consacre une critique chaleureuse (13 mars 2024), en contrepoint de la critique d'un roman de Richard Wright, sans jamais, cependant, mentionner ce qui m'a sauté aux yeux : le lien avec Himes.

En effet, au chapitre 8 du roman, apparaît un couple d'inspecteurs noirs du MBI (Mississipi Bureau of Investigation). Jim Davis et Ed Morgan évoquent Fossoyeur et Ed Cercueil : même amitié entre les deux hommes, même décontraction, même distance vis à vis de leur mission théorique. La différence fondamentale est qu'ils sont policiers dans le Mississipi et qu'ils y sont confrontés à des policiers locaux (shérifs) pour qui le racisme est consubstantiel. On pourra même remarquer la ressemblance avec l'apparition tardive des deux policiers, dans La reine des pommes. On mesurera le chemin parcouru depuis l'uchronie de Himes et son invention improbable de deux policiers noirs, puissants et résolus, dans le Harlem des années 1950. A côté de Jim et Ed, on trouve aussi une agente noire du FBI et des policiers asiatiques de Californie, tous conscients de leur origine et de leur identité.

L'évocation de Himes se lit aussi dans l'intrigue. Comme Plan B, le dernier roman, inachevé, du cycle de Harlem, Châtiment raconte une machination conçue par un esprit d'une clairvoyance et d'une résolution exceptionnelles, qui dépasse l'intention de son auteur et dégénère en une guerre incontrôlable entre races. A coté de toutes les victimes blanches, assassinées et châtrées, se trouve le corps d'un jeune homme noir, lynché quelques dizaines d'années auparavant, probablement Emmet Tyll, lynché par le Ku Klux Klan en 1955.

A lire absolument !

ENG - African or Harlemite scams?

In the 1990s, the Cameroonian feyman Donatien Koagne made himself famous for his scams, in particular the multiplication of banknotes. It consisted "of making rich suckers believe that they had a top secret way to turn white paper into dollars. […] The prey [is] invited [to] a private session intended to convince him/her of the efficiency of the process."1 The scam is simple and clever, and works better when the greedy customers are gullible. Even if the terms differ2, one inevitably thinks of the banknote scam in the first chapter of For Love of Imabelle. The date, however, prevents seeing the Cameroonian feyman as the inspiration for Himes. Indeed, the latter wrote For Love of Imabelle more than 30 years before his exploits. Conversely, could Himes have inspired Koagne? In other words, did the scam the naive Jackson fell victim to existed or was it invented by Himes? It will undoubtedly be difficult to answer this question. As for Donatien Koagne, did he invent the banknote multiplication scam or did he simply dramatically develop an existing practice? 

On the other hand, the connection with Cameroonian scams is interesting for two reasons. "Faced with the model of the ‘opponent’, ideal of the youth of the years 1991 to 1994, the feymen embodied, in collusion with the ruling class or manipulated by it, that of corruption, illegality, and easy money."3 Let us remember the hatred that Grave Digger and Ed Coffin feel for crooks, while they do not bother, for example, "the owners of serious brothels, the managers of serious gambling houses, those in charge of underground lotteries and prostitutes who stay in their neighborhood"4, considering them as necessary for the needs of the inhabitants and the cohesion of Harlem. 

Moreover, for Himes, the scam often has an African origin: thus Dr. Mobuta (Mobutu?) and his remedies against infertility (Blind Man with a Pistol), as well as the fake African doctor in rags that Sugar embodies in The Crazy Kill. The description of Sugar, dressed in a nightgown and a towel tied in a turban, and his words denote a vision of Africa as a land of superstitions and crude magic, a repulsive image of black origin. "This oil," Sugar continued, "is made with the fat of male kangaroo claws mixed with the essence of the productive organs of lions. It will make you jump like a kangaroo and roar like a lion."5 Besides petty scams (the rise in the value of banknotes or the title deeds of lost mines), the scam can take on a whole new dimension. "The religious crooks (For Love of Imabelle, The Big Gold Dream, The Crazy Kill) exploit the fervor of the Blacks, transmitted by their ancestors, to enrich themselves and perpetuate the existing order. The political crooks, whether they advocate the return to Africa, black power, the black Jesus or interracial fraternity deceive the messianic hope for the liberation of Blacks. Himes twice discredits the return to Africa, always marked since Marcus Garvey with the seal of the swindle (The Heat’s On, Return to Africa)."

Africa as the cradle and essence of the scam? 

 

1 Dominique Malaquais, "Arts de feyre au Cameroun", in Politique africaine, 2001/2 (N ° 82), p. 101 to 118, https://www.cairn.info/revue-politique-africaine-2001-2-page-101.htm. Alain Mabanckou and Abdourahman Waberi, Dictionnaire enjoué des cultures africaines, also devote an article to feymania, Paris, Fayard, 2019, p. 154 and following. 

2 In For Love of Imabelle, the crook doubles the value of each note; Koagne multiplied the number of notes. 

3 Dominique Malaquais, "Arts de feyre au Cameroun", op. cit. 

4 Chester Himes, The Big Gold Dream, chap. 10.

5 Ibid., chap. 11. 

6 Sylvie Escande, Chester Himes, l'unique, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2013, p.167.

 

Arnaques africaines ou harlemites ?

Dans les années 1990, le feyman camerounais Donatien Koagne s'est rendu célèbre par ses escroqueries, notamment la multiplication des billets de banque. Elle consistait "à faire croire à de riches pigeons qu’il disposait d’un moyen ultra secret pour transformer le papier blanc en dollars.[…] La proie [est] convi[ée] à une séance privée destinée à la convaincre de l’efficacité du procédé."1 L'arnaque est simple et astucieuse et marche d'autant mieux que les clients appâtés par le gain sont crédules. 

Même si les modalités diffèrent 2, on pense inévitablement à l'arnaque aux billets de banque dans le premier chapitre de La reine des pommes. La date, cependant, empêche de voir dans le feyman camerounais l'inspirateur de Himes. En effet, ce dernier écrit La reine des pommes plus de 30 ans avant ses exploits. À l'inverse, Himes aurait-il inspiré Koagne ? En d'autres termes, l'escroquerie dont est victime le naïf Jackson existait-elle ou a-t-elle été inventée par Himes ? Il sera sans doute difficile de répondre à cette question. Quant à Donatien Koagne, a-t-il inventé l'arnaque à la multiplication des billets de banque ou a-t-il simplement développé de façon spectaculaire une pratique existante ?

En revanche, le rapprochement avec les escroqueries camerounaises est intéressant à un double titre. "Face au modèle de l’« opposant », idéal de la jeunesse des années 1991 à 1994, les feymen incarnaient, en collusion avec la gent dirigeante ou manipulés par elle, celui de la corruption, de l’illégalité, de l’argent facile."3 Rappelons-nous la haine que Fossoyeur et Ed Cercueil vouent aux escrocs, alors qu'ils n'inquiètent pas, par exemple, "les tenancières de maisons de prostitution sérieuses, les gérants de maisons de jeux sérieuses, les responsables des loteries clandestines et les prostituées qui restent dans leur quartier"4, les considérant comme nécessaires aux besoins des habitants et à la cohésion de Harlem. 

D'autre part, pour Himes, l'arnaque a souvent une origine africaine : "ainsi le Dr Mobuta (Mobutu ?) et ses remèdes contre l’infertilité (L’aveugle au pistolet), ainsi le faux médecin africain en haillons qu’incarne Sugar dans Tout pour plaire". La description de Sugar, vêtu d'une chemise de nuit et d'une serviette nouée en turban, et ses propos dénotent une vision de l'Afrique comme terre de superstitions et de magie grossière, image repoussante de l'origine des Noirs. "Cette huile, continua Sugar, est faite avec le gras des griffes de kangourou mâle mélangé à l'essence des organes productifs des lions. Elle vous fera sauter comme un kangourou et rugir comme un lion."5 

À côté des petites arnaques (l'élévation de valeur des billets de banque ou les titres de propriété de mines perdues), l'escroquerie peut prendre une toute autre envergure. "Les escrocs religieux (La reine des pommes, Couché dans le pain, Tout pour plaire) exploitent la ferveur des Noirs, transmise par leurs ancêtres, pour s’enrichir et perpétuer l’ordre existant. Les escrocs politiques, qu'ils prônent le retour en Afrique, le pouvoir noir, le Jésus noir ou la fraternité interraciale trompent l’espoir messianique de libération des Noirs. Himes déconsidère à deux reprises le retour en Afrique, toujours marqué depuis Marcus Garvey du sceau de l’escroquerie (Ne nous énervons pas, Retour en Afrique)."6 

L'Afrique comme berceau et essence de l'arnaque ?

1 Dominique Malaquais, "Arts de feyre au Cameroun", dans Politique africaine, 2001/2 (N° 82), p. 101 à 118, https://www.cairn.info/revue-politique-africaine-2001-2-page-101.htm. Le Dictionnaire enjoué des cultures africaines d'Alain Mabanckou et Abdourahman Waberi consacre également un article à la feymania. Paris, Fayard, 2019, p. 154 et suiv.

2 Dans La reine des pommes, l'escroc multiplie par deux la valeur de chaque billet ; Koagne, lui, multipliait le nombre de billets.

3 Dominique Malaquais, "Arts de feyre au Cameroun", op. cit.

4 Chester Himes, Tout pour plaire, chap. 10.

5 Ibid., chap. 11.

6 Sylvie Escande, Chester Himes, l'unique, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2013, p.167.

ENG - In Harlem nobody knows Chester Himes

The 110th street that borders Central Park on the north is now called Central Park North. This is where the Democratic politician Casper Holmes lived in All Shot Up. From his window, he could see the children of the black bourgeoisie of Harlem ice-skating in the park. I interview passersby. They are interested when I tell them about Himes but have never heard of him.

I continue towards the north of Manhattan. In Washington Heights, Edgecombe Drive (now Edgecombe Avenue) overlooks the Harlem River and the Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to the east. This is where two historic buildings of Harlem - the 409 and the 555 - are located, the latter also known as Roger Morris.

These two buildings are quite present in several novels of Himes: in The Crazy Kill, "[Johnny Perry] and Dulcy, along with other well-heeled Harlem pimps, madams and numbers bankers, lived on the sixth floor of the flashy Roger Morris apartment house”. In The Big Gold Dream: "Without hesitation, Dummy entered the ornate lobby of the Roger Morris Apartment House, better known as 555. In its day, it had been a very pretentious apartment dwelling for upper income whites, but now it was occupied for the most part by successful colored racketeers, jazz musicians, madams and current prize fighters."

Today, like the 409, the Roger Morris has lost much of its grandeur. The building has become middle class. The beautiful, somewhat weathered lobby remains. I speak with a resident: he does not know Himes.

Melvin Van Peebles wrote in 1993: “Despite the fact that Chester, this literary giant, had been publishing essays, short stories, and novels for over a quarter of a century, I, a black American, had grown up, gone to college and never once heard his name mentioned in the myriad literature courses I had taken. This spoke volumes about the walls of prejudice and the barriers of racism.” (Preface to Yesterday will make you cry).

New York, November 2011

ENG - Ataúd Ed Johnson y Sepulturero Jones

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Ataúd Ed Johnson (Ataúd = coffin) and Sepulturero Jones (Sepulturero = grave digger) are the names of the two inspectors in the Spanish translations of Himes’ crime novels or his Harlem domestic novels as he used to call them.

If we look at the Spanish titles of these novels, we can see they have been translated very faithfully from the titles in the American editions. They therefore do not take up the puns of the original French editions in the Série noire collection.

Original Himes' title	Title in the Série noire	Title of the subsequent American edition	Title of the Spanish edition
The Five Cornered Square	La reine des pommes	1. For Love of Imabelle (1957).  2. A Rage in Harlem (1965)	Por amor a Imabelle
If Trouble Was Money	Il pleut des coups durs	The Real Cool Killers	La banda de los musulmanes
A Jealous Man Can’t Win	Couché dans le pain	The Crazy Kill	El loco asesinato
The Big Gold Dream	Tout pour plaire	The Big Gold Dream	El gran sueño de oro
Don’t Play With Death	Imbroglio négro	All Shot up	Todos muertos
Be Calm	Ne nous énervons pas	The Heat’s On	Empieza el calor
Back to Africa	Retour en Afrique	Cotton Comes to Harlem	Algodón en Harlem

Translating Himes is never easy. For the blog Mis detectives favoritos, "it is a

challenge to translate the language of Harlem into Spanish. Some translators keep the original nicknames of the inspectors, others translate them. The translation of Bruguera (Por Amor a Imabelle, 1980) has not aged very well because it used the slang of the time (and slang, which evolves more quickly than the common language, always ages worse) ".

The blog Cuaderno de trabajo presents Himes as follows: "Chester Himes is a North American writer who was very well known in his time and who is now a bit out of fashion and little present in journalistic references." We can but subscribe to this comment.

We saw in the article Cidade escaldante; What can be learned from a Portuguese edition of Himes’ The Heat’s On? that Himes, in his position of author working on commission for the Série noire collection (with a 220 page imposed format, for example) had also accepted – or anticipated – the formulation of titles conforming to the line or the style of the collection: the example of Ne nous fâchons pas (Be Calm), later renamed The Heat's On, is the most striking. Between the French title and the title of the subsequent American edition, we are dealing with two types of puns and humor (traditional French vs hardboiled American). The difference also tells us about the distance between the language of Himes and that of his translations.

 Unlike the titles of the Série noire, the titles of the Spanish editions do not take the risk of the pun: a pity because The Five-Cornered Square – the  title given by Himes to the manuscript of the novel later titled For Love of Imabelle or A Rage in Harlem – with its pun on “square” (naïve), had given in French a very good La reine des pommes.

See the blogs

El blogo de Juan Carlos

Cuaderno de trabajo

Mis detectives favoritos 

ENG - Cotton Comes To Harlem: the peak of MacGuffin

The MacGuffin was not invented nor coined by Hitchcock [1] but he undoubtedly theorized it in a humorous way: "A MacGuffin – you see it in most films about spies – is the thing the spies are after. […]. It is always called the thing the characters on the screen worry about, but the audience don't care." It is found in a number of other novels and films, for example, in the excellent Kiss Me Deadly, by Robert Aldrich, adapted very freely (fortunately!) from the novel by Mickey Spillane, A MacGuffin is an element, often material, which is supposed to be an issue in the story and, more often than not, a pretext for its development. One inevitably thinks of the Maltese falcon in the novel of the same name. Himes could not do without having recourse to it: it is, for example, the false mining title in A Rage In Harlem, Val’s secret in The Crazy Kill, Alberta’s money in The Big Gold Dream… 

It is however in Cotton Comes To Harlem that it is used in the most accomplished way. In this novel, one MacGuffin contains another: in the cotton ball is hidden the money that the Harlemites gave, in all gullibility, to the false Reverend O'Malley to organize their release and their return to Africa, the land of their ancestors.

The henchmen of Colonel Calhoun, leader of the Back To the Southland Movement steal the cotton ball. It then passes into the hands of an old black ragpicker, Uncle Bud, the only one who realizes the dream of returning to Africa where he will buy "a hundred women of average quality" with the money hidden there. Dancer Billy buys the cotton for her cotton dance at the Cotton Club (!). The two inspectors finally seize it, after a chase punctuated by an impressive number of corpses. They will discretely compensate the inhabitants of Harlem, robbed by black scammers and white racists.

It is partly for the magnificent use of the MacGuffin that Cotton Comes to Harlem is the culmination of the detective form in Himes, while constituting a significant step in the creation of a new genre, more political and fantastic.

Himes had a clear insight: "It is a good novel, probably the best of my detective novels". "My last book on the Cops and the Cotton is entirely devoted to the racial problem and the living conditions in Harlem and I make my inspectors express what they – and the other blacks – feel in Harlem" [2]. On the one hand, there is "a mastery of the storytelling which joins the classic tradition of the black novel, on the other, an intrigue whose historical and political issues are clearly mentioned. Finally, a writing more brilliant than ever, but now more subject to the necessities of storytelling. The complexity of the organization is particularly evident in the careful watchmaking of cotton. A cotton ball is lost by a truck; this cotton ball is found by an old black man by the name of Cotton Bud; simultaneously, an advertisement is posted in Colonel Calhoun's room "looking for cotton ball"; Cotton Bud sells the cotton bale to a ragpicker; an employee of the latter, Josh, offers Colonel Calhoun to sell him the cotton ball; the ragman's warehouse watchdog is poisoned and then Josh is murdered: the cotton is gone ... "[3]

[1] The term "MacGuffin" was coined by a screenwriter Hitchcock worked with named Angus MacPhail, according to Donald Spoto in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock : Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures.
See Hitchcock and MacGuffin

[2] These two references are found in the second volume of Himes' autobiography, My Life of Absurdity, New York, Doubleday, 1976, p. 277 and p. 279.

[3] Sylvie Escande, Chester Himes, l'unique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2013, p. 142.