Donald Goines in 2022

Reading the selections from Kinohi Nishikawa’s Street Players along with our last two novels has been an interesting supplement as it has given us a non-fiction context in which these (at least somewhat) fictional books were published. Although I have not read the entire book, it seems to me that Nishikawa felt that it was not until Goines that black authors were able to truly thrive as they were. Iceberg Slim, Nishikawa argues, was limited by his white-owned publishing company that only allowed him to get out stories that they felt like would sell to a white audience. As a result, Slim was not freely writing, and instead looked mostly to please editors that were white (and, importantly, only interested in selling to a white audience). Using Slim as inspiration, however, other educated black writers were able to eventually liberate their writing so that it could be by black people, for black people, and about black people instead of by black people but for white people. As Nishikawa says, Donald Goines was one of the first authors to achieve this jump from black sleaze to black pulp fiction.

What I would like to argue in this post is that while the sort of story that came from this movement may have its roots in the late 1960s, the same sort of stories can be written today with similar themes, motives, and plots. Never Die Alone draws a lot on what we know to be the typical male motivations within noir. That is, King David, Moon, and Mike – like most other male main characters in other books we have read – are motivated by the attainment of money, power, and respect. The pursuit of these things drives the novel and its plot forward from start to finish. It is money that pulls King David to California and money that has Moon send for King David (ultimately resulting in his death). It is the desire for power (and money) that causes King David to manipulate women into becoming hopelessly addicted to heroin, and it is the desire for power that causes the extremely sad string of shootings leading to at least six deaths. As for respect, we see King David treat his second California lover much more harshly than his first because of her lack of respect – he cites her spitting in his face when he offered to have her live with him as his motive for killing her. While these examples are complicated and money, power, and respect do not fully explain anything, it seems clear to me that these three elements are always in play in the novel. In class, it seemed that we were undecided whether or not such motives were still omnipresent within men, or if we have moved beyond the typical gender stereotypes allowing men to no longer have to display such characteristics as those that led to the violence in Never Die Alone (I am not sure if this is exactly the opposite position as the one I am taking, but it seems to me that it is something like that).

Personally, I believe that the former is true – the motives of money, power, and respect are still the principal driving factors among men, and I think that this is especially true in a place like New York City. Although we are 50 years removed from the social environment in which Goines wrote Never Die Alone, it takes a hardly thorough Google search to discover instances of recent shootouts in New York City just like the one described in his book. Moreover, if the motives get uncovered, it is so often related to the pursuit of money, power, respect, or a combination of the three. While this rings true in so many neighborhoods of New York City, it is even more prevalent in the areas full of projects similar to the one described in Never Die Alone where Paul lives (which in many areas are still predominately African-American, as the building was in the book). It is abundantly clear to me that impoverished communities are more susceptible to this sort of violence, and I believe that it has a lot to do with the men in those communities lacking the three things that I discussed before: they have no money, no power (often because of their lack of money), and no respect from anyone. These men, then, direct their efforts towards obtaining all three, and what often results is tragic violence. As someone that lived in Brooklyn myself, I cannot remember a time in my life where I was not acutely aware of this dynamic. Although I was fortunate enough not to live in the projects, I lived in an area that very much operated in a “if you’re from here, stay here; if you’re not from here, don’t come here” attitude, as much of New York City does. Again going back to the three motivating factors I have argued for, it is so often perceived as somehow disrespectful if you go into someone else’s neighborhood and try to do something as simple as play in a park there. While perhaps this analysis is not so much literary or statistical as it is anecdotal, I am certain that numbers would support what I am saying if such numbers existed. For this reason, I think that Never Die Alone is as much a tale for 2022 as it was for 1970 whether it was written by a black man from Manhattan, a Latino man from the Bronx, or a white man from Brooklyn. The story unfortunately remains the same in many parts of New York for many people of all races and religions.