Black Noir

The books we read before our fall break all felt like they were missing something crucial to our reality and understanding of what life was like during the 20th century. The Noir content that we have consumed after Fall Break was our glimpse at the cultural revolution in the time of the 20th century which made the puzzles connect with each other. Black men have started to become the main characters in the books that we have read post-cultural revolution and these characters’ conflicts have been with other black men – and the white woman act as their prizes to be won. The cause of all of this is the scarcity effect, wanting something that you can not have. However, the question to all of this is where do black women fall into this weird forbidden marriage of a black man and a white woman? I have some theories about what’s going to happen to our future black female main characters. I would like to argue in this post that I think that black women are going to become our new noir characters that fall into the margins and descend into darkness and that they are going to be our new Femme Fatales

My reasoning for this is how we started our noir journey. Our Femme Fatales started off as an Irish woman, to a woman who climbs up the ranks in Farewell my Lovely, to pass and survive, to the grotesque Madge who flaunts what little power she has, to a white woman who haunts a black man from beyond the grave in Expendable Man. After the cultural revolution, things started becoming more complex and as can be seen in Never Die Alone our Femme Fatales evolved into a 15 year old who is used by black men to get what they want. I think it is about time that black women take the spotlight but there is still a sense of irony that black women were marginal characters to then being demonized. I would like to explore that progression in my next blog post.

Throughout this semester, we have been asked to form our own definition of noir. Now, as we near about two-thirds of the semester, we have come a long way since the once-empty information bank on the noir genre. However, I personally still feel as though I struggle to be able to actually define noir. I could list numerous characteristics and themes commonly found in noir, but I believe these fall short of establishing a full, all-encompassing definition. I feel as though I am failing to identify a foundational aspect of the genre that would bring all of these themes together into one distinguished category.

The theme that is most often referred to and seems to get closest to defining the genre is the descent into darkness. In every book we have read thus far, a character is pushed to the margins and forced to exist in the darkness of a marginalized society. We read about all different character experiences with the same dark outlook. In If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Bob begins in the darkness and experiences a deeper descent into the depths when he struggles with the paranoia of finding his manhood as a black man. He has a bleak outlook on life and falls victim to the gaslighting of society causing him to lose his ability to distinguish what is reality and what is just the chaos of his mind. Bob wants to be a man more than anything, but never finds the light because of his conviction that black men cannot escape their own doom. Similarly, Hugh, in The Expendable Man, comes to terms with his own racial limitations when he accused of murder and/or an illegal abortion because he was seen with a young white girl. Hugh’s descent into darkness was slightly different because he came from a higher class family and was privileged to receive more societal respect. However, his darkness prevailed when his class was trumped by race. Both of these experiences and those of all the other characters we have read about brought me as a reader into a darkness of topics that are rarely discussed. These ideas on the margins are largely what I think makes noir, noir.

While the descent into darkness and the play between the light and dark is a dominating feature of noir, to say that it defines the genre, I believe, would be too limiting. Themes like masculinity versus femininity, nostalgia, foreigners, time and space, construction and fetishizing of the other, and many more all major contributors to the books we have read and the construction of the plot. I could also be misunderstanding noir. It is possible that noir is defined by the interaction of light and dark and all the other themes I listed are just the implication of the interaction. This could be supported by Bob’s story because his struggle to find his masculinity does come from his insecurity about race. Bob believes that he will never be a man the way a white man is. However, I see Sam Spade’s masculinity in The Maltese Falcon as a more prominent theme above his descent into darkness. Regardless, I just feel like I am missing or not fully understanding some piece of noir that would be the clarification I need to confidently define what noir is.

After finishing “Never Die Alone” this week, it has become my favorite book we have read this semester. Maybe it is the story telling aspect, or the way it reads like a movie progresses, but this short novel drops you right into the heart of the action from the very beginning. One interesting aspect that I wanted to explore in my blog this week was the implications of King David switching out cocaine and heroin throughout the novel, and fooling his various customers with the false coke. I did not even realize a potential connection to the hiding in plain sight theme we have explored in other stories until we talked about it in class. 

The high from the drugs is equally addictive, but the only indicator for the dope heads is the white color that cocaine generally has. We see David get around this issue by adding white powder to the heroin or grinding it into an even finer powder. Regardless of his methods of whitening the product, this necessity for whiteness is reminiscent of different characters we have encountered throughout the course. Alice from “If He Hollers” is a perfect example of this facade because she emphasizes her light skin in order to mask the fact that she is a black woman. She is hiding in plain sight, but also using her color to her advantage in the same way David uses the colors of his heroin for his own advantage. 

Both drugs in this story are highly addictive, but cocaine is perceived as a better alternative to being a heroin junkie. This is an interesting comparison to the perceived differences of the black and white races even though they are the same at the core. What looks different on the surface still creates a high, just like the people who look different can still be both equally good or bad. The whitening of the heroin acts as a bandaid for the people addicted because it makes them feel better about their problem, in the same way the lighter skinned characters must use that to their advantage to rise above their societal fates and escape the systemic racism and prejudice their darker counterparts are. This blending of colors and mixing of people complicates the black and white world society tries to portray in when, in reality, things are much more gray than we like to admit. I think this is a core component of the noir genre because it seeks to emphasize the grayness without any clear hero or villain, but simply people trying to survive in the gray areas.

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.

            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 20^th 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.

White fascination at catching a glimpse of the exoticism of the black underworld shot Iceberg Slim’s Pimp to stardom in 1967. Voyeurism–the love of looking–plays a significant role in the pimp figure transforming from an enemy to the black liberation movement to an icon of cultural fashion (Nishikawa 136). Yet Donald Goines animates the depravity that black sleaze gestures to in his novel Never Die Alone. In fact, Goines establishes a new genre called ghetto realism that rejects the whie voyeurism that black sleaze depends on; he evokes an insider’s sensation of despair–fueled by poverty and racism–instead of appealing to an outsider’s view of the black underworld.  

Goines introduces Paul Pawlowski at the beginning of the plot. Down of his luck, Paul is a Jewish writer in New York City who is struggling to make ends meet. Yet Paul vehemently turns down a publisher’s offer to write a by-line that espouses de facto racism for its primarily Southern white audience; he explains that the novel he submitted as a sample featured a black man as a serial rapist because it made it more realistic, not to stoke long-held racist fears (Goines 26). In this way Goines reveals the subconscious perception of black men that exists in Paul’s mind. He draws from the fear of black men raping white women and, consequently, cuckolding the white men who own them. Goines criticizes white liberals who love to gaze at the black underworld but continue to reinforce the negative stereotypes and perceptions that have caused the inhabitants of the ghetto to invent their own moral code.

After King David’s diary comes into Paul’s possession, he becomes fascinated by the black gangster’s larger-than-life stories of conning innocent people out of their money to rise out of his own social station. The cunning that King David employs keeps Paul reading late into the hours of the early morning. Not only that, but Paul feels a sense of pride in recognizing that King David was making an amateur effort to write a novel. The black underworld is exotic to Paul; he is tempted to rework King David’s stories and sell it off as his own because he knows that the white-dominated publishing market will devour them. Yet Paul’s fascination turns to disgust as he reads about how King David raped and murdered a woman who had insulted his masculinity, lacing cocaine with battery acid for revenge. The separate system of justice that King David swears by now holds no appeal to Paul; in fact, Paul donates all of King David’s money to a drug center. In looking at the black underworld, Paul discovers that an insider’s sensation of despair provides a stark contrast to an outsider’s view of the seemingly-exotic cityscape.

       In chapter three of Street Players by Kinohi Nishikawa, the genre of “Black Sleaze” is introduced as a genre of popular pulp fiction in the 1960s: fiction with a mass market appeal, enticing white readers for its voyeuristic appeal and Black readers with fewer books to choose from. It’s this perspective on the publication and popularization of Black Sleaze that I found of particular interest this week; the motivation for publishing some texts over others due to various concerns (financial, cultural, and political), which in turn has the power to shape popular culture.

       On page 76, Nishikawa quotes New York Times Book Review writer Mike Watkins, who in 1968 explored a growing divide in taste among older and younger Black readers in New York City’s “‘Black ghettos.'” Nishikawa quotes Watkins and unpacks his analysis on the cause behind this trend, noting “‘a lack of book outlets within the ghetto which provide a wide variety of titles’ to readers. It was, then, a matter of class, geography, and tacitly racist distribution practices.” Nishikawa goes on to explain then that “Black readers seemed to lurch between extremes – radical literature to trash fiction – only because that is what distributors (and the publishers that used their services) sent to their communities” (76).

       What I find so interesting is the power that publishers and distributors have in shaping the popular image and understanding of an entire group of people/way of life; specifically, the Black community living in urban spaces. Trick Baby, for all its inventiveness and authority as a piece of creative nonfiction, seems still to have been published for spectacle and profit, rather than the lifting Black voices, which is the narrative once forwarded by the Holloway House themselves.

       In the publishing world of 2022, I wonder how much progress has been made in presenting a diversity of voices and experiences, regardless of mainstream appeal and profit. Now more than ever, independent presses (and filmmakers, for that matter) have resources at their disposal to produce media that goes against the standard practices of larger, more profit-conscious publishers and studios. However, debates on artistic merit and value continue to plague certain works seen as depicting particular identities and groups in a negative or morally ambiguous light. For example, Luster by Raven Lelani. The novel follows a young Black woman living on New York and unapologetically depicts her casual approach to sex and alternative relationships. While seeing the value in Lelani’s prose and social commentary, some have questioned the aims of her publisher and the nature of publishing such a novel over others. Alternatively, some of the harsher criticism to the work can be traced to racism and a strict adherence to white, Christian morality. Considering Nishikawa and the nature of publishing in 1968 may provide insight into publishing practices today.

Trick Baby felt different than the other noir texts we have read this semester, primarily, as we discussed, due to the fact that the darkness was completely in our face. We did not need to go looking for it, and there was no way to avoid it. The whole book dripped with the darkness of Chicago, leaving your hands dirty after you set it down. You could not avoid it, and reading it felt voyeuristic. However, I did enjoy it. Our texts frequently watch the decent into darkness and stop right when they get there, but I want to see what it is like in this darkness. What happens to a character completely born and raised in this darkness? What do they look like compared to one that stumbled into this world?

White Folks was not what I expected of a man born in the darkness. He loved his mom, adored his grandma, looked up to Blue and refused to leave him behind even after learning the real reasons Blue took him on as an apprentice. He was not quite innocent, but not cynical like I expected. He still had compassion for people, trying to protect Midge even though he views her as a freak. There was a comment in class about how someone started with a list of what they thought noir was and the list keeps getting shorter, and I feel the exact same way. I crossed cynical off the list because White Folks has a plan for escape and cares about his people. He does not sacrifice bodies for his gain. I am not sure what is left on my list besides a vague “darkness” at this point. Without the decent, mystery, and cynicism, I am left confused on how to think about this genre. What connects these characters and how do I view them in light of each other?

 The readings from “Street Players” this week were helpful in my understanding of how the publishing industry works, but have made me question how I view literature and wonder if I may be looking at it all wrong. The story Nishikawa tells about the Holloway House has provided me with an insight into how readership influences how we look at a story. What struck me was that Holloway House is a white publishing house, and used the black readership they gleaned from Pimp to profit, flooding the literary marketplace that were set in or starred protagonists from black ghettos. It brings into consideration the theoretical framework behind cultural appropriation. The pulp fiction genre lies in an interesting space where it allows a white readership to get a “taste of the exotic.. A bit of the other”, as Bell Hooks lays it out; but it also has a cultural significance to black readers as it validates their experiences and promotes their representation in this literary space. So, in examining the works of Iceberg Slim, it is important to acknowledge its initial readership. This insight made me problematize the pulp genre as possibly just a way for white readers to consume this underground aspect of black culture as black culture in its entirety – leading to prejudices and stereotypes. But this may be the same reason I have looked down on the genre. 

The last two summers, I worked as a summer receptionist at my old middle school. In the slow days I passed my time reading books like East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. One of the janitors that I chatted with regularly was named Tee. She is an older black woman and when we spent lunches together, getting to know each other. I learned that she had a kid and had to drop out of high school, and now that she is at retirement age, she has to work as a janitor to take care of her elderly father. I would look over my volume at the books she read, which she called her “Gangsta books”, small mass market paperbacks with scandalous covers with black characters. What she was reading was black noir, I just didn’t know it at the time. 

As an English major who is not well-read in black literature, but is trying to be, I realize now that I thought I was better than Miss Tee because I was reading classic literature. In our class conversations, I think we all have felt out of our element in reading from the noir genre, to the point where our conversations have left much to be desired. But to connect this to my personal experience, reading Trick Baby, I feel guilty that I have not exposed myself to this literature in the past. I think I have valued authors like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison as what black literature I should be reading, instead of looking at books like Trick Baby as another aspect of black representation in literature. So, I guess I am a voyeur into this pulp space, and I have to accept that as a learning opportunity. 

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is nothing like any movie I have ever watched. If I had not been required to watch this movie for class, I would have turned it off within the first five minutes. However, it was required, and I did finish it. But the exposure to new topics that I received while watching this movie was well worth watching the movie for. One thing in particular I did think about is how the noir theme of nostalgia applied to this movie. In the unforgettable first scene, where Sweet Sweetback receives his nickname, he is raped at a very young age by a prostitute. After this traumatic event, he continues to be adopted and raised by the prostitutes. In his adult life, Sweet Sweetback is a sex worker. As messed up as it sounds, I wondered if there was any nostalgia that Sweetback has from being raped that he indulges in by being a sex worker. For most, such an event would be so traumatic that they would never want to engage in any activity that could be reminiscent of it. However, Sweet Sweetback fully immerses himself in the world of sexuality, a world that could easily trigger memories of the trauma of his childhood. So, even though it sounds disturbed, I do not believe it is entirely out-of-pocket to say that he is somewhat nostalgic about the event. Similar If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Madge practically begs Bob to rape her. In class, we discussed rape fantasies and how we could not believe this to be real. I, personally, cannot fathom that there is a desire to connect with such traumatic things. However, this sentimental longing for something so dark fits exactly in the noir genre. It is a darkness that goes beyond any of my experiences which is what makes it so uncomfortable to discuss. The noir genre takes full advantage of this feeling of discomfort and pushes readers to dive deeper into its meaning. As a class, if we can push past the discomfort, we can move into some interesting conversations about the topics that hide in the darkest corners of society.