Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 42

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Popular Culture Review

original $87,000 had been discovered by a pushcart junk man. Uncle
Bud, who absconds to Senegal, West Africa, where he marries
numerous wives in the ironic close to the novel.
Himes's two detectives, G)ffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones,
are not private detectives but are members of the New York City
Police Department in Harlem. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger's vision of
Harlem has been conditioned by a realism of brutality. Gilbert
Muller, in his critical study of Himes's fiction, described the pair in
terms of an existential reality. More like bedraggled wild men than
rational detectives, enraged exiles within their own community.
Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson seek meaning in a strictly
absurd and ludicrously disruptive community (Muller 84).
The notion of the "absurd" can be found in Himes's second volume
of his autobiography. My Life of Absurdity (1976), in which Himes
maintained that "racism introduces absurdity into the human
condition" (1). Although this may be true of Himes's philosophy, it
is questionable whether an existential vision is transferred to Grave
Digger and Coffin Ed. Rather than exhibiting an existentialist
perspective in Cotton Comes to Harlem, they often reflect a
pragmatic and forceful assault on the forces which have contributed
to the imbalance in social justice in Harlem, whether those forces are
the "Back-to-Africa" Movement or the "Back-to-the-Southland"
organization.
Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson can be seen as employing
their own brand of rationalism which allows them to manipulate the
complexities of crime solving within a context of brutality mitigated
with moments of compassion and empathy. As Robert Skinner in Two
Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes (1989) has
remarked, "Their role has been significantly expanded to allow them
to act not only as a righter of wrongs, but also as social critics"
(Skinner 163). They are aware of the contradictions within Harlem
and the multiplicity of adaptations to survival by its black residents.
Jones and Johnson's striving for meaning in Cotton Comes to Harlem is
based on their mission to restore balance to the Harlem community
represented in the swindled members of O'Malley's "Back-to-Africa"
Movement. Early in the novel, Himes's narrator makes the strongest
social and political statement of the work.