From Dopefiend to Kenyatta's Last Hit: The Angry Black Crime Novels of Donald Goines
Author(s): Greg Goode
Source: MELUS, Vol. 11, No. 3, Ethnic Images in Popular Genres and Media (Autumn, 1984), pp.
41-48
Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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From Dopefiend to Kenyatta's Last Hit:
The Angry Black Crime Novels of Donald
Goines
Greg Goode
Donald Goines is the foremost example of a cultural phenomenon
possible no earlier than the 1970s - a successful Black author of mass
market fiction written by and about Blacks. Unlike the mass market
fiction of Black authors such as Samuel R. Delany and FrankYerby, the
majority of whose readers are white and are intended to be white, the
books of Donald Goines are devoured by legions of Black Americans
everywhere, from the inner city to American military bases abroad.
Goines's books, all paperback originals, have never been out of print
since their original publication; they have sold more than five million
copies and have been on option to several movie studios and independents. They are recommended reading at some urban high schools. In
1974 Goines was so prolific that his publisher asked him to adopt a
pseudonym, which he did, taking the name of a friend, Al C. Clark.
Primarily through Goines, his Los Angeles-based publisher Holloway
House has made a name for itself in mass market publishing and has
even invented a new literary genre, the "Black experience novel," of
which Goines is termed the master. In spite of all this, Goines's books
are largely unknown to white readers.
Goines's sixteen books, all slice-of-ghetto-life crime novels with Black
characters, have ostentatious, lurid, concrete titles such as SwampMan,
StreetPlayers, Death List and WhiteMan's Justice,BlackMan's Grief.The
characters, and very often the protagonists, are whores, pimps, thieves,
pushers, card sharps, gangsters, bootleggers, numbers operators, hit
men and dope addicts. With the exception of SwampMan, the books are
all set in the inner city ghettos of Goines's home city Detroit, or Watts,
Harlem, or the Southwest.
Goines himself loved the ghetto street life and pursued most of these
professions and activities at one time or another until his murder on
October 21, 1974, and so was well qualified to write authoritatively
about them. In his short 37-year life Goines was addicted to heroin off
MELUS, Volume 11, No. 3, Fall 1984.
41
42
GREGGOODE
and on for over twenty years. He was arrested fifteen times, jailed seven
times, spent a total of six and a half years incarcerated, but nevertheless
published sixteen books in his last five years. Like Chester Himes,
Goines wrote his first novel in jail, and later wrote a prison novel.
Future popular literary sociologists will find a goldmine of material in
Goines. His characters exhibit patriarchal, male chauvinist values. Men
are to lead, women are to follow, obey, and speak only when spoken to.
The dark is the good. With a very few exceptions, the white men who
appear are short, fat, ruddy-faced, middle aged, balding, tastelessly
dressed and poorly endowed sexually. White women are prizes for
Blackconquest. Blackmen are tall, strong, handsome, well dressed even
if poor, and are well-equipped sexual gladiators. Blackwomen are beautiful, especially if dark, but are subservient to the men.
The 1960s provided a fertile and formative literary climate for Black
experience writers such as Goines, and his early books are fictionalized
vest pocket versions of earlier well known Black memoirs and autobiographies such as TheAutobiographyof MalcolmX (1964), Claude Brown's
Manchildin the PromisedLand(1965), Melvin Van Peebles' A Bearfor the
FBI(1968), and George Jackson's SoledadBrother(1970). While in Jackson
State Prison in 1965, Goines, who had for a long time wanted to be a
writer, tried to write Westerns and, according to his friends, failed
miserably. But in the same prison again five years later, he was introduced to the work of the founding father of the Black experience novel,
Iceberg Slim (the pseudonym of Robert Beck), who had gained notoriety
earlier from his memoirs and novels about pimps. Within just four
weeks of his reading Slim's books and seeing that his own sorts of life
experiences were publishable, Goines had finished Whoreson,theStoryof
a GhettoPimp (1972), a tribute to Slim's book TrickBaby(1967). Goines
handed his Whoresonmanuscript around to his fellow inmates for criticism; they suggested that he send it off to Iceberg Slim's publisher,
Holloway House. In two weeks Goines had from the publisher an offer
to publish and a cry for more. Four weeks later he sent them Dopefiend,
the Storyof a BlackJunkie(1971), his second book.' From then on Goines
was off and running, having decided to become a professional writer.
With respect to the standards of literature, the books of Donald
Goines are not considered subliterary, for they are not even considered.
They are offensive to many because of the obscenity, sex, and violence,
all well before their time in graphic explicitness. The titles, and, in early
printings, the naive bullet-and-blood style cover art, make the books
appear to be utter trash. They are poorly written for the most part, in an
uneasy mix of Black English and misspelled, ungrammatical Standard
English. The descriptions, transitions, plots, and narrative voice are
CRIME NOVELS OF DONALD GOINES
43
sandpaper rough. Nevertheless the Goines corpusis important because
it is perhaps the most sustained, realistic, multifaceted, widespread
fictional picture ever created by one author of the lives, activities, and
frustrations of poor urban Blacks. Goines's eye for interracial social
subtleties is acute. And although he describes characters as briefly as
possible, his descriptions go to the heart of the matter, so we learn a
character's greatest hopes, assets, and fears, even if Goines has not told
us so much as what the characteris wearing. Some of Goines's passages
are touching, such as the occasional portrayal he gives of family devotion, or of lovers enjoying a moment of serenity in the eye of the ghetto
storm. Such scenes are well and seriously done for a writer of Goines's
caliber, and demonstrate that his books are neither purely cynical stories
of hate for the world of the ghetto nor action/exploitation potboilers.
Because Goines's ghettos are like zero-sum-game societies in which
one man's gain must be another's loss, his characters cannot thrive or
even survive without breaking the law. His books are automatically
crime novels similar to the way in which CalebWilliamsis a crime novel.
The law broken is sometimes the white man's legal code, and sometimes
the Ghetto Golden Rule, "what goes around comes around." Often,
therefore, the sadistic pimp loses his best woman, the murderer dies,
the hustler gets sent to jail, and a sort of automatic inner city justice is
maintained. In other books, all the major characters die. In these books
Goines seems to be expressing the hopelessness of life in the ghetto.
Goines's first several books were the most roughly written and unsentimental, but among them are his best books and those for which he will
be remembered the longest. Whoreson, The Story of a Ghetto Pimp,
Goines's first, is the first-person story of Whoreson Jones, the child of a
Blackprostitute and white john. Abandoned by his father, having at age
thirteen lost his mother to heroin addiction, Whoreson had to "come
up" alone in the ghetto. The story tells of his early rise at age sixteen to a
fulltime pimp, and demonstrates the ruthlessness, the abuse of friends
and associates that are necessary for his survival. The book ends with
Whoreson in jail, vowing to go straight and give up street life. The best
example of the cold harshness of Goines's world is Whoreson's reaction
to the misfortune suffered by one of his prostitutes who had gotten
pregnant. When he is told by a doctor that she has had a miscarriage and
is in danger of dying, Whoreson, cooler than ice, thinks,
The last thing I wanted to do was lose a good whore. After waiting all this
time for her to get streamlined, I didn't want to lose her now that she was
ready for the track.2
But later Whoreson gains insight into the sort of person he has become
44
GREGGOODE
and realizes that the conditions of his immediate surroundings cause
people striving for success to become brutal animals who, "faced with
poverty on one side, ignorance on the other ... exploit those who are
nearest" (p. 176).
The book which Goines's publishers call his best is Dopefiend, The Story
of a Black Junkie (1971), his second. It is the graphically vivid story of a
young Black couple who sink from the respectability of the Black middle
class deeper and deeper into the muck and degradation of heroin addiction. Dopefiend contains some of Goines's most repulsively memorable
settings and characters. Besides recounting the insane desperation and
labyrinthine rationalizations of the frantic junkie who will do anything
to cop a hit to ward off the sickness, Goines describes in close-up technicolor detail the gruesome horrors of the dope house and its owner.
The dope house, a 1970s version of Sax Rohmer's turn-of-the-century
opium dens, is where the heroin addict buys dope, shoots up, and nods
off. To read Goines's description is to imagine a bloody, pustulant cross
between a pharmacy, an operating room and a torture chamber, where
sick junkies frantically stab themselves with rusty, clogged needles
trying to hit a track. Goines's personal ruler over this hell is Porky the
dealer, to whom every possible vice and degradation is attributed.
Porky, also Black, is a blubbery 380 pound bestial exploiter of female
addicts, a cowardly, greedy, pitiless, perverted sadistic overseer of this
vicious chamber of horrors. About the only vice not attributed to Porky
is dope, for he does not use.
Other books of Goines's early period are Black Gangster (1972), Street
Players (1973), and White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief (1973). Black
Gangster is the cynical account of Prince, a hustler who struggles from a
young age to become number one in the ghetto. Prince exploits the rise
in Black consciousness to serve his own ends by organizing a criminal
gang under the guise of a revolutionary group, most of whose members
are utterly fooled. While well intentioned Blacks cry "Black is Beautiful," Prince lines his pockets with money. He feels justified, for the
Blacks will revolt anyway, white man's justice is biased and means JUST
US, so Prince might as well use these social phenomena to his own
advantage. In Street Players (1973), Goines tells the depressing story of
Earl the Black Pearl, a wealthy pimp and pusher whose world finally
crashes down around him: his woman and best friend are maimed and
murdered, and he loses his wealth and finally his life.
White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief (1973) is perhaps a tribute to
Chester Himes's prison novel Cast the First Stone, published twenty
years earlier. Goines even gave his protagonist a name similar to that of
CRIME NOVELS OF DONALD GOINES
45
Himes, that is Chester Hines. Goines's book is an indictment of the
American criminal justice system and contains an angry preface which
argues that the combination of false arrests and bail bonding is disproportionately harmful to Blacks. Chester Hines is sentenced to county
jail, then to four years of prison for carrying a concealed weapon. In
addition to containing sadistic, closely described scenes of jailhouse sex
and violence, the book contains a final irony. Hines, still in jail, is tried
for a murder committed 400 miles away on the outside by a former
cellmate. The man had bungled a robbery, shot a guard, and had accused Hines of planning the job. Hines is convicted and sentenced to life
imprisonment.
Such were Goines's early books, brutal, harsh, realistic and often
chillingly cold. In what could be a period of development, Goines infused the next several books (with one exception) with a slight sense of
freshness and hope. His writing was also improving from book to book.
The one exception is SwampMan (1974), Goines's worst book. It is set in
the swamps of an unnamed southern state and is notable only for its
inconsistent, muddled character motivations, and overlong scenes of
sadistic sex and violence which carry no message and are not even
redeemed through revenge. Other than SwampMan, subsequent books
were probably influenced by positive events in Goines's life, such as the
birth of a baby girl, his only legitimate child, and his move to Los
Angeles from Detroit, both of which occurred in 1972. Goines felt very
tender about his baby girl and quite hopeful about his move, for he
wanted to settle down into a respectable family life, kick his heroin
habit, and perhaps even break into movies as a writer. His books began
to display some of this tenderness, such as BlackGirl Lost (1973), the
relatively touching story of a girl growing up virtually alone in the ghetto
from age eight, and DaddyCool(1974), which tells of a successful hit man
who is enriched but finally defeated by the strong love he feels for his
daughter.
The most interesting and ambitious project of the later Goines is his
creation of a Black revolutionary series hero, probably the only such
hero in fiction. Just as the literary and cultural climate of the 1970s
fostered Black memoirs and autobiographies, that of the early 1970s was
suitable for a new breed of violent Black heroes who worked outside the
law, and often, against it. For unlike earlier Black heroes such as Ed
Lacy's Lee Hayes, Chester Himes's Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger
Jones, John Ball's Virgil Tibbs, and Ernest Tidyman's John Shaft, all of
whom were professional detectives fighting on the side of the law, the
new breed of Black heroes fought against the law most of the time.
Outlaw cinema heroes such as Sweet Sweetback, Slaughter, Trouble
46
GREGGOODE
Man, The Mack, Willie Dynamite, Black Gunn, Black Caesar, the Black
Godfather, BlackSamson, and BlackbeltJones included pimps, hustlers,
gangsters, outlaw private detectives, and even a revolutionary. Black
pulp-fiction heroes such as B. B. Johnson's Superspade, Joseph Nazel's
Black and Iceman characters, Roosevelt Mallory's Radcliffe and Joseph
Rosenberger's Murder Master included renegades, vigilantes, and political fixers, but were primarily hit men working against organized
crime and other corruption of inner city conditions.
Donald Goines took this extralegal trend several steps further and
created a Black militant hero with an African name, Kenyatta, and a
pseudonym under which he wrote Kenyatta's saga.3 Kenyatta's goals
are to rid all American ghettos of drugs and prostitution, and to kill all
white policemen, beginning in Detroit. His organization of Black militants starts with 40 members and ends up with over 2000; it branches
from Detroit to Watts, as Kenyatta becomes a recognized leader. Murders, slayings, and executions in the series abound, and there is even
one massacre of Blacksby police. With true collective revolutionary zeal,
Kenyatta's organization kills anyone who might possibly hinder them,
and will even kill Blacks, if by doing so they can kill significantly more
whites.
In the four book Kenyatta series, Crime Partners (1974), Death List
(1974), Kenyatta'sEscape(1974), and Kenyatta'sLastHit (1975), all written
under Goines's "Al C. Clark" pseudonym, Kenyatta establishes his
goals, plans the robbery of a food stamp agency, buys a list of top Detroit
drug dealers, and starts killing them and policemen one by one. Kenyatta keeps a training camp on the outskirts of Detroit where he trains
his members in martial arts and Marxist-Muslimphilosophy. When the
police catch on to their Detroit activities, Kenyatta and several trusted
aides hijack a plane to Algiers but crash-land in Nevada. From there
Kenyatta migrates to Watts and sets up his largerorganization. When he
learns the identity of the Las Vegas finance tycoon who is responsible for
the flow of narcotics into Watts, Kenyatta goes after him with a small
army. A bloody battle ensues, the tycoon escapes in a helicopter, and
Kenyatta dies, as do most of Goines's heroes.
This seems the stuff of pulps, a leap into urban fantasy fiction. In fact,
however serious and ambitious Goines may have been in creating a hero
to clean up the ghettos, something his hero does through organized
violence because no one else does it by any means, the style of his books
places them in literary limbo. They are more violent and more poorly
plotted than other Black hero fiction, yet there is not enough serious or
substantial philosophical treatment in them to be instructive or to warrant the action. It is even possible that Goines had mixed motives in
CRIME NOVELS OF DONALD GOINES
47
writing this series - though Goines may have been in favor of Kenyatta's intentions, the fact that Kenyatta had to do battle in the streets
against police and gangsters, and the fact that Goines killed him off
might indicate that Goines thought that even organized violent means
would ultimately fail.
Shortly before writing Kenyatta'sLastHit, Goines became discouraged
with his Los Angeles lifestyle. He did not like the sprawling, spread-out
geography of Los Angeles, which seemed to him to lack a center of
action. He had not kicked his hundred dollar-a-day heroin habit. He was
being bothered and harassed too much by the police. And he had not
succeeded in breaking into the Hollywood film industry - in spite of
some mild interest shown by a few studios, he had received no offers to
write for the movies. So in autumn of 1974, Goines decided to take his
common-law wife Shirley and his two young daughters (one his, one
hers) and drive back to Detroit. After leaving the Southern California
area, Goines stopped in Las Vegas to rest and indulge in some recreational gambling. But in Vegas he lost his entire fund of cash, some $1500,
and had to call Holloway House in Los Angeles to send him money, an
advance on his next book. Holloway House complied, through a contact
of theirs in Vegas. But the episode was shattering to Goines, and served
only to further sour his opinion of the West coast. Perhaps this helps
explain why a bit later, in Kenyatta'sLastHit, Goines has Watts's main
drug supplier living in Las Vegas, and why Goines set the final confrontation there, in which his series characterperishes. In any case, after his
gambling losses Goines finished his trip to Detroit and set up housekeeping there.
On October 21, 1974, at his Detroit home, Goines received two white
"visitors" who were known to his wife Shirley, who answered their
knock at the front door. According to police reports, presumably based
in part on the eyewitness testimony of Goines's daughters, the two men
came into the kitchen, where Shirley was popping popcorn, and shot
her several times. Next they came into Goines's study and shot him over
his typewriter. To this day, the crime remains unsolved. The Detroit
police department does not even know the motive for the crime, though
there are several theories, such as that Goines had sold some bad dope
and was being "punished" for it, or that Goines, like Superfly, was
planning one last score, one last caper, and was found out by his
potential victims.
Goines's last book, Inner City Hoodlum(1975), was found sitting in
manuscript form on a shelf in his study after his death. It is a story of
vengeance wrought by a pair of teenage hoodlums on Watts's premier
hustler. It represents a return of Goines's relatively more subdued sto-
GREGGOODE
48
ries, and lacks even the inflated, improbable sense of hope exhibited in
the Kenyatta series. It is interesting to speculate on the direction
Goines's writing would have taken had he lived, since he was the most
prolific, popular writer of a quickly growing publisher, but unfortunately this question cannot be answered. Subsequently there have been
imitators, almost all better writers than Goines. But no writer, before or
since, can be compared to Goines in the breadth of criminal experience,
and the prolific intensity with which he put his experience to paper.4
Universityof Rochester
Notes
1. Although Dopefiendwas written after Whoreson,it was published first.
2. Donald Goines, Whoreson,The Story of a GhettoPimp (Los Angeles: Holloway
House, 1972), p. 123.
3. The name belonged, perhaps not so coincidentally, to Jomo Kenyatta, then president of Kenya and the subject of a documentary film made in 1973, a year before
Goines's hero appeared.
My specialthanksto JohnApostalou,whoseresearchassistanceenabledmeto writethispaperwhile
in Germany.
CHRONOLOGICAL CHECKLIST OF THE NOVELS OF DONALD
GOINES
Dopefiend, The Story of a BlackJunkie. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1971.
Whoreson, The Story of a Ghetto Pimp. Los Angeles: Holloway House,
1972.
Black Gangster. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1972.
Street Players. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1972.
White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief. Los Angeles: Holloway House,
1973.
Black Girl Lost. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1973.
Eldorado Red. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974.
Swamp Man. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974.
Never Die Alone. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974.
Crime Partners. (As Al C. Clark) Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974.
Death List. (As Al C. Clark) Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974.
Daddy Cool. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974.
Cry Revenge! (As Al C. Clark) Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974.
Kenyatta's Escape. (As Al C. Clark) Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1974.
Kenyatta's Last Hit. (As Al C. Clark) Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1975.
Inner City Hoodlum. (As Al C. Clark) Los Angeles: Holloway House,
1975.