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Donald Goines (1937-74) - pseudonym: Al C. Clark |
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American writer, a career criminal and addict who wrote his first two novels in prison. Donald Goines's books have inspired a number of lyricists from Tupac to Noreaga. They have sold over 5 million copies – according to rumors the figure has reached 10 million. His series about Kenyatta (under the name Al C. Clark) describes a black revolutionary, who campaigns against exploitation and evils of inner city life. Goines published all his works in the period of four years. "Dig this! All I'm goin' do is rest and dress, buy gasoline and lean. I'm goin' buy diamond rings and have the best of everything. I'm goin' pimp whores!" (in Whoreson, 1972) Donald Goines was born in Detroit to a relatively comfortable
family. His parents, Joseph who had Native American heritage, and
Myrtle whose father had led a jazz band in Little Rock, ran a dry
cleaning business. In their neighborhood the Goineses were the first to
have a television in their living room. At the time of his birth,
Myrtle was twenty-seven and Joseph was fifty. Donald, nicknamed Donnie,
had light skin and blue-green eyes. His ghetto friends called him "red
dog," "yellow dog" and "albino." As a child, Goines was enrolled in Catholic schools. He was a
bright student, whose favorite pastime was playing baseball. He was
considered to be a skilled pitcher. With his sister Mariehe
occasionally helped at his parents' shop. Goines was expected to continue the laundry business that
supported the family. Except that he already struggled with the
temptations of the street: barely fourteen, he was making money by
selling marijuana, playing cards and rolling dice. At the crossroads of
his life, Goines dropped out of Pershing High School, where he was
admitted in 1951, and enlisted in the US Air Force. To get in he had to
lie his age. From 1952 to 1955 he served in the army. In Korea his duty
as driver was to carry the wounded and dead. He never saw action, he
only saw the results of the war. During this period Goines got hooked on heroin. When he returned to Detroit from Japan, he was a heroin addict. Physically, with a 5-foot-8-inch frame, he made no impression on anyone, but he was well-mannered, good-looking, and determined to become criminal kingpin of the ghetto. The next 15 years from 1955 Goines spent pimping, robbing, stealing, bootlegging, and running numbers, or doing time. His seven prison sentences totaled 6,5 years. While in jail in the 1960s he first attempted to write Westerns without much success – he loved cowboy movies. A few years later, serving a different sentence at a different prison, he was introduced to the work of Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck). Before his release, Goines finished two books, Dopefiend (1971) and the semi-autobiographical Whoreson (1972). The latter novel was a story about the son of a prostitute who becomes a Detroit ghetto pimp. Also Beck's first book, Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967), was autobiographical. Goines was released in 1970, after which he wrote 16 novels with Holloway House, Iceberg Slim's publisher. Hoping to get rid of surroundings – he was back on smack – he moved with his family to the Los Angeles ghetto of Watts. "Donald Goines wrote fiction the way other people package meat. There is little point in picking any of his titles as outstanding, since they are all formulaic. Equally, however, they are outstanding in that they are street-real and avoid the romanticism of many of the films and books about black life in America." (Andrew Calcutt & Richard Shepard in Cult Fiction, 1998) All of Goines's books were paperback originals. His publisher called them "black experience novels." They sold well but did not receive much critical attention. After two years, he decided to return to Detroit. Goines's death was as harsh as his novels: he and his common-law wife Shirley Sailor were killed on the night of October 21, 1974, in their Detroit home. Goines had no time to fire his .38 pistol which he kept in the drawer of his desk. Most of the bullets hit his body, one entered the head. According to some sources, his death had something to do with a failed drugs deal. As usual in drug hits, handguns were left at the scene. There were no fingerprints on the weapons. Because Shirley Sailor was shot in the head and three times in the face, it has been speculated that she was the primary target; it was a crime of passion. The identity of the killers remained unknown, but there were reports of "two white men" – the killers had supposedly visited the house sometime in the past. Before his death, Goines finished manuscript of Inner City Hoodlum (1975), which was published posthumously. The story, set in Los Angeles, was about smack, money, and murder. The first film version of Goines's books, Crime Partners (2001), was directed by J. Jesses Smith. Never Die Alone (1974), about the life of a drung dealer, was filmed by Ernest R. Dickerson, starring DMX. The violent gangsta movie was labelled as "junk masquerading as art." During his career as a writer, Goines worked to a strict timetable, writing in the morning, devoting the rest of the day to heroin. His pace was furious, sometimes he produced a book in a month. The stories were usually set in the black inner city, in Los Angeles, New York or Detroit. In Black Gangster (1972) the title character builds a "liberation" movement to cover his planned criminal activities. After this work Goines started to view the social and political turmoil of the ghetto as a battlefield between races. Under the pseudonym Al C. Clark, Goines created a serial hero, Kenyatta, who was named after the "father of Kenya", Jomo Kenyatta. The four-book series, beginning with Crime Partners (1974), was published by Holloway House. Kenyatta is the leader of a militant organization which aims at cleaning American ghettos of drugs and prostitution. All white policemen, who patrol the black neighborhoods, also are his enemies. Cry Revenge! (1974) tells of Curtis Carson, who is tall, black, and used to giving orders. He becomes the nightmare of the Chicanos, who have crushed his brother. Death List (1974) brings together Kenyatta, the powerful ganglord, Edward Benson, an intelligent black detective, and Ryan, his chisel-faced white partner, in a war against a secret list of drug pushers. In the fourth book, Kenyatta's Last Hit (1975), the hero is killed in a shootout. "We going' take this whole fuckin' jiveass town by the fuckin' throat and make it ours! Ain' no doubt in my mind 'bout that, Johnny! No doubt!" (Inner City Hoodlum, 1975) Goines's books are fast-paced and feature a lot of colloquial
dialogue. In this he shares
a similarity with one of the most famous Detroit crime writers, Elmore
Leonard, but it is unlikely that they ever met. The rough and effective
prose is a combination of street
language and straight American Standard English. Likewise, his
characters
are unpolished – pimps, prostitutes, thieves, hit men, dope
addicts. They are people whose survival struggle in ghettos the author
knew best. Thus it has been easy for his readers, who have seen drug
addicts
and violence on the streets, to relate and identify with the stories.
Of the style Goines's fans have said, "it is so clear, its like you are
apart
of the story," "you can almost see the characters as you read the
book." The dominant mood of Goines's protagonists is anger. Although his world is violent, there is love as in his novel Daddy Cool (1974). In the story a black hit man, Larry Jackson, has become known as "Daddy Cool" – he shows no emotions in his work. "Taking his time, Daddy Cool removed a cigarette pack and lit up a Pall Mall. He wasn't in a hurry. He knew the the frightened man in front of him was as good as dead." The center of Larry's life is Janet, his teenage daughter, not his wife, whom he had married because of the way she was built. Finally Larry reveals his feelings after a pimp named Ronald has lured astray his beloved daughter. In the eighties and nineties, a new generation of African-Americans adopted Goines as part of their cultural heritage. Goines himself had conveyed through his Kenyatta series the ideas of the Black Panther Party, but also anticipated some of the rhetoric of the Black Muslims, especially Louis Farrakhan. In France the author gained a cult status and he was compared to Chester Himes. His works can be seen as a reflection of the anger and frustration of black people, and rejection of the values of the white society. But they also continue the tradition of ethnic crime fiction, in which the writer celebrates his or her own cultural heritage, practices linguistic innovations, and identifies with other minorities. Robert Beck or Iceberg Slim (1918-1992), whose works Goines found in the prison, gained fame with his vivid stories about prostitutes, pimps, gangsters, interracial sex, homosexuals, and transvestites. Before becoming a writer, perhaps also "America's Most Popular Black Author", as his publisher claimed, Beck had been a successful pimp. Himes's Harlem series depicted tricksters, jive artists, hoodoo gurus, stoolies, junk men and hustlers. He started to write in the 1940's as a protege of Richard Wright, whose Native Son (1940) can be read as a crime novel, like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. When Himes's famous heroes, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, are police officers, working for the community, but always within their own code of justice, Goines did not compromise: his characters are criminals. But they have nothing in common with such white artificial elite villains, such as The Saint, or Jim Thompson's murdering sociopaths, or even with Ernest Tidyman's Shaft, "the black Mike Hammer." On the other hand, Walter Mosley has combined in the character of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, conventions of mystery novels with insights of the social psychology of American ethnicity. For further reading: Donald Writes No More: a Biography of Donald Goines by Eddie Stone (1988); St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. Jay P. Pederson (1996); The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman by Peter Freese (1992); 'Goines, Donald (1937-1974),' in Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers by Lee Server (2002); Low Road: the Life and Legacy of Donald Goines by Eddie B. Allen, Jr. (2004); 100 Most Popular African American Authors: Biographical Sketches and Bibliographies by Bernard A. Drew (2006); Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing by Justin Gifford (2013); Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape, edited by Keenan Norris; foreword by Omar Tyree (2014); Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden by Anna Clark (2015). Jomo Kenyatta (assumed name of Kamau Ngengi, c. 1894-1978). The first president of Kenya from 1964 until his death. Kenyatta was a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group. He was devoted to recovery of Kikuyu lands from white settlers. In 1953 he was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for his management of the guerrilla organization Mau Mau, though some doubt has been cast on his complicity. Kenyatta's slogans were 'Uhuru na moja' (Freedom and unity) and 'Harambee' (Let's get going). Selected works:
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