I just wanted to make a post commenting on some random thoughts I have on Cotton Comes to Harlem.
First off, holy Hard-boiled! I mean if a crutch of noir is to have a hard-boiled protagonist, then this novel is the epitome. Here, we have two huge, hardy men who kick ass and take names. One of them even has vicious acid-burns on his face, so you know not to mess with him. There names are even Gravedigger and Coffin Ed, can you get more intense than that?! However, these two characters lack that inner struggle that we saw in our other works. Mentally, they really seem stable to me, besides their violent outbursts. Unlike Dix, I believe these men and their violent tendencies come from their environment, not their personal struggles. They aren't affected by any femme fatale character, they aren't stuck in the past or anything; they are just two cops in a rough area, much different from the other works.
I also wanted to make a comment on that small scene that has jazz. It's a short little bit, but an intriguing one. In it, both Gravedigger and Coffin Ed try to interpret jazz, but they can't. To me, that speaks a lot about Himes's view of Harlem and the black culture there. To me, he seems rather negative toward it. He shows this by having a novel filled with unlikable, immoral, conniving people and depicting the environment in a harsh light. In that scene, the jazz is indescribable and all over the place, the two men can't decide why they like it or even how to take it. I sort of think this is Himes making a comment of the black culture of american at the time and how unstable it is. Anyone think so?
I agree that he was commenting on the instability of black culture at the time. Black people were seen as a monolithic culture by whites prior to the Harlem Renaissance but after it, the culture diversified. He was writing in a time when a new black, African-American identity was being defined and formed. While other writers wrote about black role models, he showed the other, dark side of life for African-Americans apart from being victimized. The class differentiation among urban African-Americans seems to be present in this novel.
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