Kinohi Nishikawa’s Street Players has helped me understand the purpose of Black Sleaze and Black Pulp Fiction, and the ways in which white authors and white audiences interact with the Black novel.
In Never Die Alone, we learn about King David’s story through the lens of a white man, Paul, as he reads David’s personal journal. Here, we take the perspective of the white audience—we become Paul, reading through David’s background. We learn about the infamous Black drug dealer through the voice of a white author. This made me reflect on how the white voice interacts with, encourages, and alters the Black narrative.
“The work I have for you won’t have to be fiction. There’s enough rape going on in Harlem so that you don’t have to make up a f-ing thing, Paul. All you have to do is spread the truth a little. You know, dig the dirt up, that’s what sells,” editor Mr. Billings tells the struggling author. “There’s money in this kind of crap.”
“This kind of crap” includes rape, grotesque murders, misogyny, drugs, and revenge. But what makes it so much harder for me to digest is that all of this is supposedly true.
As we entered into the darker material of our semester, the descriptions of graphic topics became even more explicit, perhaps because they were rooted in some level of truth. It is one thing to tell these stories for the sake of having them remembered or written, like King David wrote in his journal. However, when these stories are exposed publicly, like Paul reading David’s novel, and even created and sold for a profit, I think that they lose some of their credibility and their true meaning.
I like how Donald Gaines acknowledges that much of the popular stories sold at his time are “crap.” However, he also acknowledges that they are “true.” Paul writes about a terrible crime—the rape of three women—for sake of creating a story. But Mr. Billings sees this story as a source of profit—something that his southern white authors will “eat up.”
Thus is the continued cycle of Black stories being told to entertain white audiences. Black stereotypes are constantly reinforced through white authorship.
Nishikowa argues that “the idea of black authorship was set up to reinforce [the] expectation [that]…white men [could] encounter the obscene in black social life,” meaning that black authorship originally began to feed white readers what they were already proven to enjoy: the lewd, dangerous part of the black narrative they didn’t engage with in their everyday lives (103). Nishikowa takes a pessimistic view of Holloway House and other editors and publishers, arguing that their novels “were projections of the white imagination” (103).
While I think that Holloway House began as a way for white people to indulge in their dark fantasies from their homes, it paved the way for legitimate black authorship written to tell stories and truths. Iceberg Slim himself has a begrudging admiration for the Black Pimp, who he says “ain’t shit,” and yet “neither are we without you” (107). Slim knows that the Black Pimp is exploitative and stereotypical, and yet he also knows that “we,” the “black men of the streets,” need the Black Pimp (108).
While I think that Holloway House and white authors have taken advantage of the Black narrative, I think this exploitation was necessary in order for authors like Slim and Goines to come and direct Holloway House “away from sleaze interacialism and toward the interest of black readers” (109). Ideally, the Black narrative would’ve always been told by Black authors for Black audiences.
I like how Goines recognizes that while some people will read his novel as a bunch of “crap,” he believes there is some sort of truth to it. After finishing Never Die Alone and returning to Street Players, I think it makes this section of our semester more easy to digest and to understand.
Black Sleaze and Black Pulp Fiction are full of terrible, graphic topics. And while I still believe that not all of these excerpts were necessary, they are a part of a larger truth that many black people have experienced. Furthermore, the books we have read and Sweet Sweetback have all been told by black voices, so it is unfair to discount them just as “crap,” because on a certain level, they are just spreading “truth” like Goines argues.
I am glad that we have now gotten to the portion of the semester where we read black stories for black audiences by black authors. And while these stories are gruesome, they retain a greater sense of legitimacy than some of our earlier texts. However, I like how we discussed in class that these earlier texts were necessary to pave the way. Since racism ran rampant in the 20th century and still persists today, I believe a white voice was necessary to start telling the black narrative. If it had originally come from black mouths using black voices, I’m sure that no one would’ve listened, especially not those with white ears.
There’s one part of your response that stuck out to me:
“While I think that Holloway House and white authors have taken advantage of the Black narrative, I think this exploitation was necessary in order for authors like Slim and Goines to come and direct Holloway House ‘away from sleaze interacialism and toward the interest of black readers’ (109). Ideally, the Black narrative would’ve always been told by Black authors for Black audiences.”
I may be misunderstanding this part of your analysis or I’m taking it out of context, but I think it’s important to remember that just because one thing subsequently happened, that doesn’t mean that the first thing was necessary. I also wonder how intentionally these authors redirected the aims of the publisher; was there much agency there?
I enjoyed reading your interpretation of Nishikawa’s argument in his book about how Holloway House’s exploitation of black authors being the stepping stone on which we were able to thankfully come to the point where black authors were able to freely write for black audiences. As it seems you believe too, this idea appears plausible to me, especially given the fact that we know Goines was directly inspired by Slim. The only piece of your post that I would push back on is the challenging of the legitimacy of the earlier stories written by black authors based on a suspicion of the publishers they were writing for. While I think that taking Nishikawa’s text on board is helpful, I also think that we can grant stories like Himes’s just as much legitimacy as any story while understanding the back drop in which he wrote it. I also think that someone like Dorothy B. Hughes should not be dismissed out of hand since she is a white woman writing about a black man’s experience. Absolutely it should be noted that she is not a black man, so she may not be able to portray the experience exactly accurately, but the stories are still legitimate in some sense, even if they are not the best for understanding the real black experience. In the end, though, as you argue, we got to the point where black writers are able to write for black audiences, and that is certainly something to celebrate as progress.