SOURCE: Crooks, Robert. “From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley.” College Literature 22, no. 3 (October 1995): 68-90.

[In the following essay, Crooks examines the crime fiction of Mosley and Chester Himes, applying ideas about the American frontier myth to each author's representations of race.]

WESTERN FRONTIER AND URBAN FRONTIER

They draw a line and say for you to stay on your side of the line. They don't care if there's no bread over on your side. They don't care if you die. And … when you try to come from behind your line they kill you.

(Wright 407)

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” marked a watershed for the European-American version of the history of North America.¹ By 1890 the western frontier as a geographical space had disappeared, and “the frontier” as signifier was now cut adrift, its attachment to past, present, and future conceptual spaces a matter of debate. Indeed, for Turner himself the signifier slides significantly, sometimes figuring as a place where European-American settlement or colonization of North America ends, but also as a conceptual space, a shifting no-man's-land between European- and Native-American cultures, and finally, ideologically, as a “meeting point between savagery and civilization” (“Significance” 3).²

Other conceptual and spatial divides along ethnic and racial lines emerged almost simultaneously with the western frontier, however, and were available to absorb and transform its conceptual significance. The most obvious was that between European and African Americans embodied in the codes, economy, and practices of slavery and subsequent segregation. Such lines of segregation became particularly sharp and contested in urban settings, thanks to the close proximity of sizable communities formed along racial lines, often subject to differential treatment in terms of urban development, availability of credit, school funding, policing, and so forth. It is this urban manifestation of frontier ideology, and particularly the textual space opened up by crime fiction for an articulation of that frontier from its “other” side, that will concern me here.

Turner suggests, in an inchoate way, the need for and function of the particular ideological formation that drew a line between “white” civilization and “Indian” savagery, a term for which “black” criminal chaos could easily be substituted. Noting that there was not one frontier, but rather a trading frontier, a farming frontier, a military frontier, a railroad frontier, and so forth, he also notes that the various frontiers did not coincide geographically, nor in the economic interests that constructed them (“Significance” 10-15). In an attempt to account for the assumed ideological unity of the (European-American) United States, Turner maps these differences onto a progressive cultural history stretching from the savage prehistory of Indian lands in a linear development to the industrial metropolitan centers of the east. Ignoring the lack of fit between this mapping and the uneven developments of various frontiers, Turner identifies the Indians as the unifying factor that transformed the various frontiers, their regulation, and their histories into a unity by posing a “common danger” of absolute otherness (“Significance” 15).

It is difficult to reconcile this distinctive unity produced by common danger with Turner's invocation of the western frontier as the factor that transformed the European colonists into Americans: “The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land” (“Significance” 3).³ On the one hand, Turner conceives of the frontier as the near edge of a wilderness of free resources, providing what he would later call a “safety valve” inhibiting the reproduction of the European class tensions between owners of the means of production and labor (“Pioneer Ideals” 279-80; “Social Forces” 320). In this sense the ideological work of the frontier was the production of individualism—meaning both individual liberty and individualized entrepreneurial competition—as an alternative to class politics (“Significance” 30). On the other hand, the frontier as a producer of unity is precisely a “fortified boundary” dividing “civilization” from “savage” others, a consolidating interpretation that rescues a racialized sense of national identity from the threat of anarchic individualism.

The role of individualism in this racializing and naturalizing of the frontier, translating it from a site of cultural contestation and ideological struggle into an expanding boundary of civilization, is overdetermined. First, the ideology of individualism romanticizes capitalist competition, displacing collective machinations with an image of a “fair fight” between free individuals. Second, as Richard Slotkin points out, early frontier narratives depicted figures like Benjamin Church and Daniel Boone as “the lone white man among tribes of Indians” even though “both men dealt with the Indians as agents for large land companies” (Fatal Environment 65). Produced by a familiar trope of individualizing the European-American self against collectivized others, the “long white man” would be a recurring image suggesting that the struggle of European Americans against the wilderness was not even a “fair fight,” but rather a heroic battle against the odds. Third, in conjunction with the representation of the far side of the frontier as vacant wilderness, capitalist competition (including that with Native Americans for land and resources) could be concealed behind images of individual entrepreneurs—whether farmers, traders, trappers, or prospectors—taming a “nature” divested even of collectivized Native American subjects, bringing it within the pale of culture. Finally, the ideology of individualism could mediate between the narratives of men against the wilderness and the experiences of the European-American colonists of the frontier as a site of ideological struggle between different cultures. A continuous stream of diatribes against “Indianization” and the motif of the “good Indian,” prominent in frontier narratives from Cooper through Zane Grey to the Daniel Boone television series, has helped in a variety of ways to reconcile a racially defined oppression with ideologies of egalitarianism and tolerance by posing frontiersmen and Indians as individuals free to choose European-American civilization over Indian savagery.

These various meanings and functions of individualism are not mutually compatible or equally operative in every moment of discourse. Such disjunctions are a consequence of contradictions that emerge in the ideological negotiation of material encounters between cultures or emergent micro-cultures.⁴ The ability of Turner to move discursively back and forth between “Indian lands” and “free lands,” or to rewrite complex modalities of capitalist competition as a progressive history inscribed seamlessly across the continent, demonstrates the possibility and necessity of evading such contradictions through the ideological isolation of discourses.⁵ In geographical terms, the western frontier was a battlefront in a territorial war that was articulated within various struggles over issues including race, the structuring of the State, and the proper use of land and resources. Because such war could not be justified according to prevailing ethics or law, it was necessary to isolate discursively the colonization of territory from the battle between civilization and savagery by converting “the idea of racial propensities into a rationale for wars of extermination” (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 54).

From the European-American perspective, then, the frontier wars were not wars of conquest, for the assertion of authority by the U.S. government to make legal claim to land occupied by Native Americans was tantamount to redefining Native Americans themselves as foreign intruders to be eradicated. Through this redefinition, the “Indian Question” was discursively linked to the “Slavery Question.” At the same time that the European-American frontier was being pushed westward, a new and distinctively American “science” of craniometry was developing an “objective” method for differentiating among races (see Jeffries 156).

Such work in racial “science” not only helped to justify the continuation of slavery and the war on Native Americans, but also helped determine the shape of the eventual “solutions” to those problems. Though the complete extermination of Native Americans and the mass transportation of black Americans “back” to Africa had many proponents, the compromise solution was collective oppression and exploitation facilitated by racial segregation, the containment of Native Americans and Native-American culture on Reservations, and the similar containment of African Americans through various forms of segregation.

This partitioning refocused the frontier ideology, which continued to map cultural and racial divisions, but in geographical terms now denoted relatively fixed lines of defense for the purity and order of European-American culture. Such lines became particularly charged in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where population densities and the size of minoritized communities threaten individualist ideologies, since the collective experience of exploitation lends itself to collective resistance or rebellion. Thus the meaning of the other side of the frontier, in the shift of focus from its western to its urban manifestation, has been partly transformed: no longer enemy territory to be attacked and conquered or vacant land to be cultivated, it now constitutes in mainstream European-American ideologies pockets of racial intrusion, hence corruption and social disease to be policed and contained—insofar as the “others” threaten to cross the line.

Like the association of individualism with European-American manifest destiny, the association of black urban communities in particular with the criminal side of the urban frontier has historically been overdetermined. Many of the African Americans migrating to the cities were forced to seek housing and then to remain in the poorest areas of the cities by discriminatory practices in housing, as well as in the workplace and schools (see, for instance, Glasgow, ch. 4 and 5). Furthermore, as Homer Hawkins and Richard Thomas point out:

Most northern white policemen not only believed in the inferiority of blacks but also held the most popular belief that blacks were more criminally inclined by nature than whites. … For decades, white officials in northern cities allowed vice and crime to go unpoliced in black neighborhoods. This non-protection policy had the effect of controlling the development of black community by undermining the stability of black family and community life.

(75-76)

Police indifference to black-on-black crime has been frequently noted in all regions of the U.S.⁶ and persists to such an extent that Rita Williams exaggerates little, if at all, when she says that “African Americans know they can murder each other with impunity and absolutely no one will care” (115).

Inadequate policing of intra-community crime, the saturation of black communities with liquor and gun stores, and gentrification supplement strategies of containment with strategies of eradication and displacement (on gentrification see Smith 108-14). If the war of extermination and deterritorialization goes largely unrecognized, it is because the urban frontier works more through hegemony⁷ than openly repressive force. All Americans can watch the physical and economic “self-destruction” of black communities on the nightly news, and conservative African-American intellectuals can be co-opted into chastising blacks for failing to take responsibility for “their own” problems and the disintegration of their communities.⁸ Meanwhile the urban frontier serves the same purpose for capitalism as did the western frontier and the European colonial frontiers in general: the production of relatively cheap resources, including labor.

Though specific techniques of oppression and exploitation have changed, then, the frontier ideology remains largely intact, though displaced. Individualism in particular remains crucial in disguising a site of ideological struggle as a line of defense against crime and chaos or the boundary of advancing modernization or “urban renewal” or “revitalization,” and for disarming collective resistance. Hegemony works through negotiation, though, and resistance does exist, in however fragmented forms. In the remainder of this essay I will consider one mode of resistance from the far side of the frontier, the emergence of African-American detective fiction, a popular form that has the capacity both to represent and enact resistance in social and literary terms.

CRIME FICTION AND THE RACIAL FRONTIER

And it wasn't just this city. It was any city where they set up a line and say black folks stay on this side and white folks on this side, so that the black folks were crammed on top of each other—jammed and packed and forced into the smallest possible space until they were completely cut off from light and air.

(Petry 206)

Cultural historians like Slotkin and Alexander Saxton have argued persuasively that the hard-boiled American detective is a direct descendant of nineteenth-century frontier heroes like Natty Bumppo, liminal figures who crisscross the frontier, loyal to European-American society but isolated from it through their intimate involvement with Native American others.⁹ Indeed, Saxton sees the rapid emergence of the dime-novel detective in the late 1880s partly as a consequence of the closing of the frontier and a corresponding “credibility gap … between the occupational activities of [real contemporary miners and cowboys] and the tasks that western heroes were expected to perform” (336). Critics of detective fiction—Cynthia Hamilton's recent Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America is the most elaborate and thorough account—have likewise traced the lineage of the American adventure hero through the hard-boiled detectives of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and beyond, without, however, paying much attention to the fate of the “frontier” in that passage.

The importance of that genealogy is indisputable, I think, particularly for considering the ideological and cultural work of hard-boiled crime fiction. The emphasis on the figure of the adventure hero, largely apart from the rest of the hard-boiled urban world, has on the other hand been something of a critical red herring encouraged by the rhetoric of the fiction itself. Hard-boiled fiction, possibly more than any popular formula, has been overwhelmingly dominated by the individualism that is crucial to frontier ideology, in that it allows recuperation of the outlaw frontier hero who, in Slotkin's suggestive reading, is represented as renewing European-American civilization through acts of violence that at once transgress and defend its symbolic and geographical boundaries (81-106 and passim). Though particular discourses do, of course, construct particular subject positions, their most important ideological work lies not in the construction of individual subjects but rather in matrices of subject relations within a conceptual space. For that reason, we need to look beyond particular characters in adventure fiction to the dynamic spaces, the intersubjective matrices, constructed by those fictions.

Given the overdetermined association of African Americans and crime in everyday life and the representations of that association as a natural result of essential racial characteristics, one might expect black crime and racial conflict to play a more central role in hard-boiled detective fiction, which more often deals with white law and white deviance.¹⁰ That this is not the case seems partly a consequence of the transformation of the frontier from a movable western boundary into a relatively fixed partitioning of urban space. An overt war of extermination requires that the other side be represented, if in distorted or fantasmatic form. Sustained oppression, which is a covert war of extermination largely by ideological remote control, benefits more from sanctioned ignorance. Nevertheless there are occasionally references to a racial frontier at the extreme edge of society that marks the ultimate frontier, the absolute boundary of the “order” of the familiar, as in this passage from Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night:

Here was the edge of Harlem, that strange no-man's-land where the white mixed with the black and the languages overflowed into each other like that of the horde around the Tower of Babel. There were strange, foreign smells of cooking and too many people in too few rooms. There were the hostile eyes of children who became suddenly silent as you passed.

(134)

This frontier dividing Harlem from the rest of Manhattan is represented from its far side in Chester Himes's novel of the same period, A Rage in Harlem (also known as For Love of Imabelle), as Jackson, the central character, on the verge of escape after a harrowing flight from the police, suddenly realizes that he has left Harlem and is “down in the white world with no place to go … no place to hide himself” (137). He turns back to face certain capture rather than go on. Himes does more than simply affirm the existence of the border, however: he explores its meaning as an ideological concept marking the exercise of white hegemony. In doing so he offers a conception of crime never more than tentatively articulated in European-American detective novels by acknowledging an “underworld” that is “catering to the essential needs of the people” (49; my emphasis), perhaps not in ideal fashion but in a manner necessitated by the character of the socioeconomic system. A good deal of criminal activity in this fiction is a result of the U.S. economy's partitioning through segregation. Crime itself, then, is a potentially resistant practice.

Viewing crime as part, rather than the breakdown, of a cultural system, Himes and, more recently, Walter Mosley construct a complex picture of crime and detection as a negotiation of cultural needs and values, operating within the black American subculture as a critique of white racial ideologies. Referring repeatedly and explicitly to the complex politics of race and class in the U.S., they seek to disentangle justice and morality from white hegemony, fighting exploitation and violence within black communities while also attacking a social system that engenders crime. In short, they resist the assimilation of the far side of the frontier as “chaos” and “evil,” favoring a conception of the frontier as a site of ideological struggle for rights and privileges between two American microcultures.¹¹

The general grounds for such struggle are perhaps best summed up by Himes, commenting on “The Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in the U.S.A.”: “Of course, Negroes hate white people, far more actively than white people hate Negroes. … Can you abuse, enslave, persecute, segregate and generally oppress a people, and have them love you for it? Are white people expected not to hate their oppressors?” (398-99). Whatever differences there might be on specific details, Himes and Mosley agree in affirming the need for African-American opposition to oppression and in rejecting the privilege of white supremacist ideology to diagnose and prescribe remedies for the situation of African Americans.

Self-policing of a community, even an oppressed one, is not necessarily complicitous with the oppressive order, of course, or at least not completely so. As I indicated earlier, crime within an oppressed community may be a form of resistance, but it is also a part of the larger, macrocultural economic and social structure. In the U.S. that means crime is exploitative, for it acts out the imperatives of capitalist competition in a particularly unfettered manner. Therefore, as Manning Marable has pointed out, in relatively poor African-American communities, like those of the Himes and Mosley novels, “the general philosophy of the typical ghetto hustler is not collective, but profoundly individualistic … The goal of illegal work is to ‘make it for oneself,’ not for others. The means for making it comes at the expense of elderly Blacks, young black women with children, youths and lower-income families who live at the bottom of the working class hierarchy” (Marable 64). It is because of their need to resist the manifestations of individualist competition as criminal entrepreneurship that Himes's police detectives and Mosley's private investigator work in their own communities.

Aside from that common ground, however, the novels of the two series differ considerably, and these differences intersect in complicated ways with the construction of the urban/racial frontier in the two series. These constructions in turn reflect the contradictions produced by ideological struggle between differing American microcultures. A dominant ideology tends to be self-sustaining, thanks to its greater access to means of reproduction like educational systems and mass communication media. Nevertheless dominance and its reproduction can never be complete, never attend adequately to every extra-cultural force operating through travel, migration and immigration, international economic transactions, and so forth, or to every gap that develops in the intra-cultural social formation through uneven development. On the other hand, the pervasiveness of dominant ideologies tends to fragment and disperse the force of other microcultural modes of ideological resistance. Resistance is therefore always under pressure, faced with an incessant need to escape from or relocate itself within a space defined by the dominant microculture.

Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life still offers perhaps the most exhaustive attempt to theorize this locating of resistance, by positing two logical possibilities. Strategic resistance finds its space outside the domain of the dominant by attaching itself to an alternative, fully constituted ideology that exists elsewhere. Tactical resistance, on the other hand, works within the space of the dominant, exploiting the contradictions within that space as opportunities arise, but unable to hold on to what is gained in the tactical moment (34-39). The novels of Mosley and Himes can be usefully read as narratives representing, respectively, strategic and tactical resistance. To read the novels this way, however, also raises questions about the dichotomy de Certeau constructs, suggesting a more complicated relation between strategies and tactics.

Resistance in representational practices, of course, cannot operate in a straightforward manner. Fictional narratives in particular raise the question of the use of representation for resistance, since the diegetic world constructed by a narrative has an ambiguous, if necessary, relation to the world of everyday practice. Furthermore, representation of resistance need not itself be a resistant practice (mainstream media coverage of the Los Angeles uprising in 1992 offers the most blatant recent demonstration). Therefore, in what follows I will separate questions of representing resistance from the manner of representation, in this case narration.

REPRESENTING RESISTANCE

“Detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson reporting for duty, General,” Pigmeat muttered.

“Jesus Christ!” Chink fumed. “Now we've got those damned Wild West gunmen here to mess up everything.”

(Himes, Real Cool Killers 28)

Representation and enactment of resistance to white hegemony is central to detective fiction of both Himes and Mosley. In discussing these issues, I will consider the two writers in reverse chronological order for two reasons. In terms of representation, Himes's police detectives occupy a more complex and ambiguous ideological space. In terms of enactment, Himes's formal experimentation, especially in Blind Man with a Pistol, possesses a more radical potential than anything in Mosley's writing to date, though the latter also suggests directions for resistance unexplored by his precursor.

Unlike detective characters ranging from Mike Hammer or Kinsey Millhone, who despite many differences all bend the law only to better uphold it, Mosley's Easy Rawlins readily and unrepentantly acknowledges having been on the “wrong” side of the law himself. His detective work is described as being for the community and outside the white system of law, often performed on a barter basis and for people who “had serious trouble but couldn't go to the police” (Red Death 5) because they themselves are already of material necessity living on the fringes, if not outside, of the law: “In my time I had done work for the numbers runners, church-goers, businessmen, and even the police. Somewhere along the line I had slipped into the role of a confidential agent who represented people when the law broke down” (White Butterfly 17). This strategic position of “confidential agent” is justified partly on the grounds that an African American could not both work for the police and remain part of the community. Speaking of Quinten Naylor, a black cop who figures in the second and third novels, Rawlins says that he “got his promotion because the cops thought that he had his thumb on the pulse of the black community. But all he really had was me. … Even though Quinten Naylor was black he didn't have sympathy among the rough crowd in the Watts community” (White Butterfly 18-19).¹²

Within the narratives as a whole, the division between a communal African-American order and white law proves tenuous. Mosley's first three novels turn on problematic intersections of the white and black communities of Los Angeles, focusing on figures who traverse the unstable interstice between: Daphne Monet/Ruby Hanks, an African-European-American (“passing” for a “white” woman) who likes the Central Avenue jazz clubs and black lovers; Chaim Wenzler, a Jewish member of the American Communist Party who works in and for the black community; Robin Garnett, a rich young white woman who has rebelled against her family and upbringing by becoming a stripper and prostitute in Watts under the name of Cyndi Starr. And in each case, Easy Rawlins is pressed into detective work by forces from the white world as well: racketeer DeWitt Albright, who plays on Easy's need for quick mortgage money after losing a job (Devil in a Blue Dress); the IRS and FBI, who threaten to prosecute him for tax evasion (Red Death); the L.A. police, who threaten to pin a series of murders on his friend Mouse (White Butterfly). More important than these connections with the white community, however, is Easy Rawlins' discovery that there is no simple way to work for order and justice in his African-American community when what counts as “order” and “justice” is defined, at least in part, by a dominant white supremacist ideology. Rawlins does not share the common illusion of the privileged, that such terms can be defined outside of ideology. He observes frequently that all people act according to what they perceive to be their own best interests. That leaves open, however, the question of whether a community that is systematically disempowered by a dominant ideology can produce a coherent strategic resistance.

Mosley's second novel, A Red Death, addresses the question most directly. At the beginning of the story Rawlins is summoned by an IRS investigator for tax evasion. Technically the charge is valid, because Easy failed to report as income ＄10,000 that he acquired illegally, though in his own view legitimately in Devil in a Blue Dress. FBI Agent Craxton then offers to help Rawlins cut a deal with the IRS, provided that he helps them get damaging information about Chaim Wenzler, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and is a member of the Communist Party in the U.S. Craxton appeals to Easy's patriotism, positing an alliance between them through an explicit statement of urban frontier logic: “the Bureau is a last line of defense. There are all sorts of enemies we have these days. … But the real enemies, the ones we have to watch out for, are people right here at home. People who aren't Americans on the inside” (50). Easy doesn't trust Craxton, insists that he will do the job only because he has no choice, and tells us that his own feelings about communism are “complex” because of the alliance between the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the war and Paul Robeson's professionally disastrous connections with Russia (47). However, he doesn't actually challenge Craxton's construction of the frontier between real Americans and un-Americans. Instead he dismisses the idea of communist activity in the African-American community and insists that he will help the FBI get Wenzler but won't work against his “own people” (53).

The rest of the narrative shows that any attempt to define such an internal frontier that aligns black and white interests against a common un-American enemy leads to unresolvable contradictions. Wenzler himself proves to be a sympathetic figure who works in the black community because of the links he sees between his own experience as Jew in Poland and that of African Americans (91).¹³ His main activities involve charitable work that Rawlins supports and aids. Furthermore, Wenzler's connections within the black community make any attempt to isolate him as an object of investigation impossible. Partly as a result of Rawlins' work, two black women and a black minister get murdered in addition to Wenzler, and Rawlins finds himself having to investigate the Garveyite African Migration group.

In short, Easy finds no reason to aid the FBI's investigation except his own economic interests, and he feels increasingly guilty about that. What is most interesting about the novel in ideological terms, however, is the response he works out to that guilt. One might expect that, seeing the impossibility of sharing the collective interests of the white-dominated U.S. government, Rawlins would decide between the two models for African-American opposition offered by Wenzler's Communist Party and the African Migration group. Both, after all, draw upon oppositional ideological formations, one drawn along class lines, the other along racial and cultural ones. Mosley uses an appeal to individualism to validate Easy's rejection of both collective positions. In each case Easy appeals to Jackson Blue, who might be described as the paradigmatic organic intellectual of Mosley's mid-twentieth century Watts. Jackson expresses his own rejection of the Migration agenda in terms of the cultural gap between Africa and African Americans: “We been away too long, man” (184). Shortly thereafter Easy echoes Jackson's rejection of the Migration movement himself, but with a crucial difference: “I got me a home already. It might be in enemy lands, but it's mine still and all” (190). Unlike Jackson's argument on grounds of collective, microcultural differences, Easy appeals to the imperative of individual property interests.

Jackson rejects communism on similar grounds of an unbridgeable difference of collective interests. While admitting that the communist economic agenda coincides with the interests of African Americans, he reduces the question of the Communist Party in America to the blacklist, and says that whites will eventually get off the list, but the situation of blacks will remain the same (197-98). Again Easy's rejection of collective action soon follows, based again on individual interests rather than microcultural ones: “It wasn't political ideas I didn't care about or understand that made me mad. It was the idea that I wasn't, and hadn't been, my own man. … Like most men, I wanted a war I could go down shooting in. Not this useless confusion of blood and innocence.” (203)

The position reflected here aligns Easy with the individualist ideology that has crucially underpinned conservative frontier American politics, which helps explain why he is unable to reject the FBI's new frontier account of real and unreal Americans even though he distrusts Craxton. The positing of “American” as a collective cultural and ideological identity stands in direct contradiction with the notion that what makes one American is precisely radical “individuality.” That contradiction has enabled the frontier ideology, in both its western and urban manifestations, to link an egalitarian political rhetoric with systematic aggression against Native Americans on the one hand, and the systematic underdevelopment of Black America meticulously documented by Marable on the other. Given the demand of political expediency, frontier ideology sometimes serves the establishment of national boundaries or internal partitions on the basis of an essentialist racial ideology that hierarchizes individuals by group identifications. At other times, however, and in other geographical or cultural terms, the idea that all people are free individuals is used to argue that they fall on either side of the frontier lines through their own bad choices or personal failings. The logic of individualism coupled with that of nationalism and patriotism thus permits systematic and collective cultural aggression and oppression to be passed off as a policing action against one bad Indian like Cochise or Crazy Horse or Geronimo, or as the legitimate surveillance of a dangerous black leader like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X—or a communist like Wenzler. That Easy Rawlins falls into line with the ideology that claims that he can be his own man seems to confirm the accusation made by his friend Mouse: “You learn stuff and you be thinking' like white men be thinkin'. You be thinkin' that what's right fo' them is right fo' you” (Devil in a Blue Dress 205). Thus it is on very shaky ground indeed that Easy chides the black police officer Quinten Naylor: “You one's them. You dress like them and you talk like them too” (Red Death 154).

The trajectory of Easy's particular negotiation of the contradictions of American culture can be traced, I think, to a lesson he learns from DeWitt Albright in the first novel of the series: “You take my money and you belong to me. … We all owe out something, Easy. When you owe out then you're in debt and when you're in debt then you can't be your own man. That's capitalism” (Devil in a Blue Dress 101). There is no necessary linkage between capitalism and white supremacist ideology, but just as racism can serve the interests of capitalism by ideologically fragmenting classes, so too can a capitalistic individualism undermine collective resistance to racism. Various sympathies notwithstanding, Easy's actions are structured by the drive to accumulate wealth, which drives wedges between him and the South Central community. At the end of White Butterfly, Easy announces his move to a section of West Los Angeles that “[m]iddle-class black families had started colonizing” (271). Significantly absent from the text is the recognition of the way this geographical sectoring of classes in the capitalist metropolis splits the interests of African Americans as a minoritized community—a phenomenon well understood by Bob Jones in Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go: “When you asked a Negro where he lived, and he said on the West Side, that was supposed to mean he was better than the Negroes who lived on the South Side; it was like the white folks giving a Beverly Hills address” (48). Instead, Easy's casual use of the “colonizing” metaphor suggests the subordination of collective interests to the exigencies of white capitalism, which undermines strategic resistance organized around either class or community.

As police detectives, on the other hand, Chester Himes's Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson align themselves explicitly with the existing power structure, while nevertheless enacting a tactical resistance within that system. Although they ostensibly solve crimes, the solutions often turn out to be plausible but false ones. These solutions satisfy the white legal establishment, but also work to rid Harlem of committed criminals while sparing others, often “squares” who have gotten involved in crime through a desperate need for money, and offering them incentives to avoid further crime. Usually these fortunate survivors, like Jackson and Imabelle in A Rage in Harlem or Sissie and Sonny in The Real Cool Killers, marry at the end of the novels. In addition, Jones and Johnson's position within the law enforcement structure allows them to critique it directly, which they do most frequently by pointing out the roots of black crime in economic exploitation by whites.

Nevertheless they take their orders and carry them out. As insiders, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed cannot mount any consistent resistance to white oppression. Rather, in the way that de Certeau cogently recognizes, they seize opportunities where they arise, never working directly against the interests of the police department, but twisting situations and police procedures in such a way as to subvert them and turn them to the use of the Harlem community.

Such tactical resistance proves as difficult to define and sustain as the strategic resistance attempted by Easy Rawlins, however, and that difficulty seems implicitly addressed by a trajectory that can be traced through the Grave Digger/Coffin Ed series. The pattern involves the way in which crime and policing, the relation between the two, and between the two and the Harlem community, are conceived.

As I pointed out earlier, a passage in the first novel of the series radically defines crime not as a deviation from, but rather an integral part of the U.S. economy, catering to “essential needs” of people that are not satisfied through “legitimate” business, or at least not satisfied uniformly, given the various kinds of inequalities that are also integral to the U.S. economy and culture. And far from standing in simple opposition to one another, the police and the organized crime system are also bound by economic relations. Himes's detectives are said to take “their tribute, like all real cops” (Rage 49), and as Coffin Ed succinctly puts it, “Crime is what pays us” (Cotton 100). Nonetheless, the novels insist on an order, a standard of tolerable or legitimate action, and that requires drawing a line, constructing a frontier. The passage on crime and the police in A Rage in Harlem reveals some of the contradictions that ordering raises, even within Himes's radical redefinitions:

[Grave Digger and Coffin Ed] took their tribute, like all real cops, from the established underworld catering to the essential needs of the people—gamekeepers, madams, streetwalkers, numbers writers, numbers bankers. But they rough on purse snatchers, muggers, burglars, con men, and all strangers working any racket. And they didn't like rough stuff from anybody else but themselves.

(49)

Aside from the complicated question of what constitutes “essential needs” or legitimate access to “rough stuff,” the inclusion of “strangers” in the list of those who cross the line of legitimacy is a particularly troubling one given the line drawn by whites that establishes all blacks as strangers outside Harlem. Jones and Johnson themselves, by working for the white police, make themselves strangers both in and outside Harlem. The novels themselves acknowledge this tenuous position. Early in The Heat's On, Coffin Ed notices residents of a white-occupied apartment building watching them, and remarks, “They think we're burglars,” to which Grave Digger replies, “Hell, what else are they going to think about two spooks like us prowling about in a white neighborhood in the middle of the night?” (16). In Blind Man with a Pistol a black woman appeals to the two for help when white policemen try to arrest her unjustly, and Grave Digger is forced to respond: “Don't look at me … I'm the law too” (59).

Theoretically, the problem is one that de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life manages consistently to evade or finesse: since even dominant cultures are riven by ambiguities and contradictions emerging in the gap between ideologies and practices, how exactly is tactical resistance to be distinguished from complicity, or to put in terms that Himes might more likely use, how is justice to be distinguished from injustice?

Himes's novels themselves seem aware of this problem and try to address it by gradually shifting the position of Jones and Johnson from one of tactical to one of strategic resistance. The claim that the two take their tribute from the underworld like all the rest of the cops is reversed in later novels, and in Blind Man with a Pistol they are described as martyrs for the cause of honesty:

Now after twelve years as first-grade precinct detectives they hadn't been promoted. Their raises in salaries hadn't kept up with the rise of the cost of living. They hadn't finished paying off their houses. Their private cars had been bought on credit. And yet they hadn't taken a dime in bribes.

(97)

It is from this position of unshakable honesty that Coffin Ed can ask, in The Heat's On, “Is everybody crooked on this mother-raping earth?” (146). The immediate point of such passages seems to be the moral superiority of the two over the rest of the police force, yet the passages also work to legitimate Jones and Johnson's access to acceptable violence in Harlem on the same moral grounds. Thus Himes emphasizes the distance Grave Digger and Coffin Ed place between themselves and the Harlem community, a distance he otherwise tries to mitigate through occasional encounters between the detectives and acquaintances from their childhood. In effect, then, the resistant position of the detectives is established in terms of the individualist ideology that Mosley resorts to, because the legitimacy of Jones and Johnson's liberties with the law rests entirely on their individual moral quality, and has nothing to do with the inadequacy of the law itself. Collective resistance to a system of law and order based on collective oppression is therefore undermined altogether and the black detective located on what has been the good white side of the frontier all along. The project of collective opposition to a white supremacist culture succumbs to the fantasy of being one's own man.

Yet neither Himes nor Mosley embraces individualism unambiguously. Blind Man with a Pistol maps the end of multiple trajectories of the Harlem detective series, and where the career of Jones and Johnson leads to an ideological cul de sac, the narrative turns instead back to the Harlem community itself for a model of effective resistance. Indeed, the story is one of continual frustration for Grave Digger and Coffin Ed. They are forbidden by their superiors to use their prized pistols, forbidden to solve the murders that occur, and instead ordered to determine who's responsible for a series of riots in Harlem. The detectives offer one culprit themselves—Lincoln, who “hadn't ought to have freed us if he didn't want to make provisions to feed us” (135)—and they receive another answer from Michael X, a Black Muslim leader—“Ask your boss, if you really want to know … he knows” (174). Other culprits are produced by the narrative as a whole: an earnest but stupid integrationist organizer named Marcus Mackenzie; the leader of a Black Jesus movement named Prophet Ham, whose motives seem dubious; Dr. Moore, a racketeer who uses a Black Power movement as a front; and finally, a blind man with a pistol.

This multiplication of suspects, and the failure of the detectives to narrow the list to one guilty party, as the detective formula demands, suggests that the individualist question posed is the wrong one altogether. Instead the novel suggests that riots are caused by a conjuncture of various personal interests with a general atmosphere of frustration, resentment, and hatred. The parable of the blind man with a pistol that forms the narrative's conclusion, displacing the conventional tying up of loose ends in the District Attorney's office, is important in this regard. Superficially the tale suggests that riots are caused by blind anger lashing out randomly. There is a crucial, though implicit, connection between this episode and the rest of the novel, however. Though the blind man starts shooting his pistol because of a complex misunderstanding and hits all the wrong targets, the one certain condition of possibility for the even is his fear and hatred of white people that is produced by the dominant racial ideology of the U.S. It is the same ideology that creates the crowds necessary to turn an individual cause or scam into a riot, that allows Michael X to say with confidence, “Ask your boss, he knows” who's starting the riots, and impels Grave Digger to respond, “You keep on talking like that you won't live long” (175).

The turn away from individualist ideology, which permits right and wrong to be sorted out in terms of intrinsically good and bad guys, is manifested in other ways as well. For the first time in the series, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed have serious and repeated disagreements, not about facts or procedures in a specific case, but about their own role in general. Here's a representative passage, from a scene in which the detectives question a witness, a white woman named Anny:

“You changed your race?” Coffin Ed interrupted.

“Leave her be,” Grave Digger cautioned.

But she wasn't to be daunted. “Yes, but not to your race, to the human race.”

“That'll hold him.”

“Naw, it won't. I got no reverence for these white women going ‘round joining the human race. It ain't that easy for us colored folks.”

“Later, man, later,” Grave Digger said. “Let's stick to our business.”

“That is our business.”

(68)

In this reconsideration of their business, the detectives and the narrative itself suggest that the answer to the linked problems of racism and crime may not lie with them at all, but rather in collective resistance within the black community. In the earlier Cotton Comes to Harlem, a back-to-Africa movement is dismissed as a scam through which hustlers con the squares of Harlem, much in the same way that the Brotherhood, Black Jesus, and Black Power movements are dismissed in Blind Man with a Pistol. The Black Muslims also figure briefly in Cotton Comes to Harlem (114-16) and are not subject to the same satirical treatment, but neither are they dealt with in more than a passing way. However, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed's ultimate engagement with the Black Muslims in Blind Man with a Pistol, an alternative ending that immediately precedes the concluding parable, is marked by startling departures from character on the part of the detectives. For the first time in the series, their engagement with another character is free of both irony and paternalistic condescension. Having chafed at orders not to use their pistols throughout the novel, here they volunteer to surrender them as a gesture of their good will toward Michael X. And when Michael X does agree to talk to them, they listen with astonishing seriousness and humility to the man described unequivocally as “the master of the situation” (174).

I take the gesture of offering to hand over their pistols to be particularly significant because of the way it alters the position of the detectives constructed in A Rage in Harlem through the words “they didn't like rough stuff from anybody else but themselves” (49). This early position reproduces a dominant definition of legitimate access to violence. The gesture of laying down arms, while not reversing that definition, at least marks a refusal on the part of Jones and Johnson to uphold it actively.

The novel doesn't explicitly endorse the Black Muslims or lay out in any detail an effective oppositional strategy. Indeed, as I noted above, Grave Digger's last words to Michael X are a grim prediction of an imminent and violent death. In addition, sexual integration is tentatively held up earlier in the novel as the ultimate solution to racial inequality (64-65). I will not pretend to resolve the question of whether the proper form of black American resistance is tactical or strategic, terms that in this case coincide roughly with integrationist/assimilationist and black nationalist agendas. The merits and weaknesses of each of these projects have been widely debated, and the problems are perhaps best summed up by Michele Wallace (citing Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual) in “Doing the Right Thing”:

black political philosophy has always seesawed between an integrationist/assimilationist agenda and a cultural nationalist agenda. … Integrationist always ends up being an embarrassment to its black supporters because of the almost inevitable racism and bad faith of its white supporters; they are willing to “integrate” with a small portion of upper-class blacks only if the masses of poor blacks are willing to remain invisible and powerless. Cultural nationalism, on the other hand, has conventionally taken refuge in a fantasy of economic and political autonomy that far too often compounds its sins by falling into precisely the trap of bigotry and racism (against gays, women, Jews, “honkies,” and others) it was designed to escape.

(110)

Aside from the problems, though, integrationism and separatism need to be seen not in simple opposition to one another, but rather in triangulation with the ideology they resist, that of old or new frontier capitalist individualism. Thus far Mosley's series, at the level of representation, has examined that triangulation and opted for individualism, viewing the collective possibilities of integration or separatism as they inevitably look from the individualist position: as individual choices amounting to something like voluntary club membership. Himes's series, on the other hand, finally leaves the triangulation as exactly that, an unresolved tension pulling the community of Harlem in different directions.

Mosley gestures toward a critique of individualism in a different way, by elaborating Easy's place within a community. His relationships with other characters like Jackson Blue, Mouse, and Etta Mae are not merely glyphs that naturalize the authority of the central figure, as in most detective series, but rather change in significant connection to events of the narratives—Easy makes friends, loses them, feels the conflicts among his own various interests and ties acutely enough not to set himself on a moral pedestal. As a result those other characters attain a complex subjectivity that allows us to measure Easy's own limitations, making room for ironies at the level of textual narration if not at that of the first person narrator.

Himes's critique of individualism depends also on redefining crime again in Blind Man with a Pistol. Michael X implies that Harlem's crime is not a self-sustaining economy, as was suggested in A Rage in Harlem, and that the ultimate profit goes to the white community outside. In those terms, the irreducibly collective form of “crime,” rioting, that preoccupies the novel also invalidates the individualist premises of American justice and law enforcement systems. Walter Mosley's series seems headed toward similar ends, since the historical trajectory of his series so far suggests that Easy Rawlins will eventually confront the Watts riots of 1965, just as Blind Man with a Pistol obviously alludes to the Harlem riots of 1964. The difference between the two series in their relation to the individualism central to frontier ideology extends beyond representations of crime and detection or policing, however. The Harlem series and Mosley's three novels employ quite different strategies of narrational enunciation that have implications as well for their relation to the urban frontier.

ENACTING RESISTANCE: HIMES, MOSLEY, AND NARRATION

It was a Black-Art bookstore on Seventh Avenue dedicated to the writing of black people of all times and from all places. …

“If I had read all these books I wouldn't be a cop,” Coffin Ed said.

(Blind Man 171)

Like most kinds of fiction aimed at a mass market, detective fiction generally has been fairly conventional in most formal terms. Although the detective story trades heavily on enigmas, withheld information, misdirection, and confusion, readers can generally depend on the detective to finally put all the scattered pieces in place to construct a single, accurate account of events. Walter Mosley's novels are no exception, assuming perhaps the most common form for hard-boiled detective novels since Raymond Chandler began the Philip Marlowe series: a first-person narrative told by the detective. Though any narrative form can be manipulated to various ideological ends, this form lends itself to an individualist stance, especially in a formula where the central question might be articulated as “who has the one true version of the story?” The ideological frontiers that the detective novel generally constructs, between good and evil or justice and injustice, tend to get drawn around the figure of the narrating detective trying to negotiate a path of honesty in a corrupt world. Easy Rawlins agonizes over his own shortcomings and ethical blind spots—letting himself be manipulated into betraying his friends and community in A Red Death, forcing his wife to have sex against her will in White Butterfly, and so forth. He still seems to emerge, in his own accounts, as the most scrupulous and decent of the erring humans mired in the blindness of their cultural situations. In this respect Rawlins is hardly distinguishable from Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, or Kinsey Millhone, though as I suggested above, his meticulous placing within a community works against the monological form of the detective's narration, and perhaps will undermine it altogether as the series continues.

Chester Himes offers no such vision of community micro-politics, but on the other hand, he established himself as a formal innovator in the field of popular crime fiction from the beginning. In what seems an ingenious tactical response to the problem of writing novels set on the far side of the urban frontier, he rejected the convention of centering the novel in the perspective of the detectives, instead combining the narrational forms of the hard-boiled detective novel with that of criminal adventure narratives like James M. Cain's Double Indemnity or, to stretch definitions a bit, his own If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade. All the novels begin with so-called crimes and criminals, and the detectives often aren't introduced until several chapters into the narrative. Subsequently the point of view tends to shift back and forth, with some additional shifting on both sides of the law/crime divide. The limitations of each perspective are emphasized through a sprinkling of observations like “[Coffin Ed] hadn't discovered any lead to Uncle Saint, so he didn't know there were already three others dead from the caper” (The Heat's On 127). No single character ever acquires complete knowledge of the events of the novels. The conventional aim of the detective novel, to restore or uphold an order we are asked to accept as legitimate, and that of the conventional aim of the criminal adventure thriller, to test the order but finally to succumb or be reconciled to it, are displaced by a negotiation that never leaves an established order entirely dominant or unquestioned.

This mixing of genres tends to subvert the adamant insistence of crime fiction on the accessibility of “truth” to an individual perspective and its containment within a single coherent narrative. Such resistance to a dominant fictional mode is still limited, nonetheless, by established conventions of reading. Setting the detective story against the criminal adventure story does not simply consign meaning and truth to a site of contestation. Rather, both narrative points of view are subordinated to that of the overarching narration that assures readers of getting a true account, even if it is denied to any diegetic subject. Blind Man with a Pistol carries narrational innovation further, however, in a way that undermines the assurance of single, stable meaning.

As narratologists such as Seymour Chatman have argued, narrative discourse as such depends upon a double time-scheme, in which we can distinguish an order of diegetic events from the order in which those events are narrated (62-63). We need not have a complete account of the events told, but conventional narrative depends upon a stable narrational time to assure that a such a complete account is available in principle. Cutting between different scenes of action, different sets of characters, different points of view, and so forth, is acceptable even without explicit transitions, so long as we have the impression that a unique spatial and temporal relation between all the events could at least possibly be reconstructed.

Blind Man with a Pistol flouts these conventions. It is impossible to tell how many riots occur, or when they occur in relation to other events of the novel. There are repetitions of names and features of characters without a clear indication in some cases of whether the same character is reappearing or whether another happens to have the same feature. There are italicized interludes whose relation to the rest of the story seems to vary considerably. For the most part events seem organized according to a clear temporal order only within specific episodes.

This narrative disorder threatens the possibility of conventional narrative closure (aside from the fact that no closure is offered even nominally within some of the particular subplot sequences). If we nevertheless finish the novel and try to make sense of it, we are forced to seek some other principle of unity than temporal sequence of events connected through a limited set of characters. What offers itself instead, I think, is a thematic coherence linking various episodes. And the point of that alternative mode of coherence, I think, is that the problems of racism and oppression cannot be thought through in the personal, individualistic terms that conventional narrative offers, but rather in terms of collective practices that invisibly link disparate individual stories. In other words, a novel like Blind Man with a Pistol reproduces ideological linkages as rhetorical ones, and therefore renders at least potentially visible in fiction what is generally concealed in the practices of everyday life in the United States.

This is only textual play, perhaps. But the Frontier remains powerful as the text of American destiny, fixing it in a genre of expansionist adventure and natural cultural dominance. The erosion of generic boundaries may then be crucial to eroding the urban frontier. From frontier adventure tales to Proposition 187, the text of the frontier has been most effective in its capacity to construct a single cultural enemy on which to build a fantasy of a unified American people pursuing a linear national narrative. The disruption of narrative exemplified in Himes's Blind Man with a Pistol may offer one effective strategy for disrupting the frontier narrative itself in a way that lays bare its ideological underpinnings and internal contradictions. Mosley's digressions into the micropolitics of community and between communities pull at the seams of the detective narrative in another way, undermining the traditional generic reassurance that the good guys and bad guys can be sorted out, and disrupted order reestablished. Pursuing this trajectory, investigating the genre as much as the crimes, may lead toward and beyond the achievement of Blind Man with a Pistol, toward multiple stories that produce irreducibly multiple culprits. A radical rewriting of the frontier might thus be an overdue rewriting of Turner's thesis, insistently restoring the frontier's fragmentation that he was at pains to conceal.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Bob Winston, Mike Frank, and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, as well as four anonymous readers for College Literature, for valuable critical comments on earlier versions of this essay. I should also note a general indebtedness to the work of Marxist and postmodern geographers such as Neil Smith, Derek Gregory, David Harvey, and Edward Soja, whose works inform my theoretical framework.

2. The civilization/savagery opposition and the racial characterization of the frontier was, of course, partly an inheritance from and parallel development to ideologies of European colonialism. A detailed discussion of the relation between the development of the European-American ideology of racial and cultural difference I am discussing here and its European colonialist counterparts is beyond the scope of this essay. For a useful psychological analysis of self/other oppositions in colonialist ideology, see the introduction and conclusion in JanMohamed (1-13, 263-83). For an acute description of spatial partitioning of colonialist settlements that closely parallels that of U.S. cities, see Fanon 38-39.

3. Part of the confusion of Turner's essay results from his avoidance of the obvious comparison of the western frontier to European colonialist frontiers, which results, I think, from his determination to affirm a clear economic and ideological break between Europe and the United States. In later essays he approaches, without quite reaching, a recognition that “frontier conditions” had been but a localized sector of European colonialist capitalism.

4. For a difficult but useful analysis in discursive terms of such ideological negotiations, see the work of Homi Bhabha (esp. “Signs Taken for Wonders” and “Articulating the Archaic”) on ambivalent signification in the interstices between cultures.

5. I am using the term “isolation” in roughly Freud's sense, as a mechanism through which two ideas, acceptable in themselves but not in combination, remain accessible to consciousness but isolated from one another by repression or absence of any associative paths of connection (see Freud 45-48, 89-90). For a more elaborate discussion of ideological mechanisms of isolation, see Crooks.

6. See, for example, Marable 113. The phenomenon has been so widespread as to be obvious even to a demonstrably racist novelist like Raymond Chandler (Farewell 11).

7. Throughout this essay I use the term “hegemony” in Gramsci's sense of domination that works by eliciting the consent to be dominated from subordinate groups (210 and passim).

8. Judith Butler, in an essay on the first Rodney King trial, acutely analyzes a particular instance of white racist interpretive strategies that transform violence against African Americans as self-inflicted (20).

9. See Saxton 331-38 and Slotkin, “The Hard-Boiled Detective Story.” Bethany Ogdon critiques the focus on the descent of hard-boiled fiction from frontier adventure narratives on the grounds that it tends to obscure specificities of the later genre (72-73). Ogdon's objections are aimed at a critical methodology focusing on motifs or archetypes, rather than questions of genealogy, however. Her own provocative reading of relations between hard-boiled fiction and fascist ideology is compatible with the present essay, if one acknowledges homologous relations between fascist and frontier ideologies.

10. There is considerable ethnic coding of law and crime, but mostly involving the stereotypically more and less “civilized” European immigrants. Orientalism of the sort found in Hammett's Maltese Falcon and Chandler's Big Sleep is not uncommon also.

11. While dealing here with issues of race and, to a lesser extent, of class, I have paid little attention to those of gender. That would require a much longer essay, which I hope to undertake in the future. I would, however, point out that Himes's novels seem to me blatantly misogynist and Mosley's at least highly problematic in the way they construct gender roles and relations. Interestingly, Mosley's Easy Rawlins becomes increasingly self-conscious about gender relations in White Butterfly, and it is the novel's attention to conflicts between Easy's relation to his wife and the conventional masculinist trajectory of his detective work that offers the strongest challenge in Mosley's work to the identity of the detective fiction genre, which I will discuss in the final section of this essay.

12. Ellis Cashmore, in “Black Cops Inc.,” points out that such assumptions of natural microcultural affinities were commonly made in the early assigning of African-American police officers.

13. Easy Rawlins himself makes the same connection in Devil in a Blue Dress: “many Jews … understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years” (138).

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