A Rage in Harlem (Harlem Detectives Book 1)

by Chester Himes

As soon as colored folks got on the side of the law, they lost all Christian charity, he was thinking.

The famous Harlem detective-team of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones had been assigned to keep order.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed weren’t crooked detectives, but they were tough. They had to be tough to work in Harlem. Colored folks didn’t respect colored cops. But they respected big shiny pistols and sudden death. It was said in Harlem that Coffin Ed’s pistol would kill a rock and that Grave Digger’s would bury it.

It was the code of Harlem for one brother to help another lie to white cops.

Colored folks and trouble, Jackson thought, like two mules hitched to the same wagon.

Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of gray rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of a sea. Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub. That is Harlem.

Goldy’s scream mingled with the scream of the locomotive as the train thundered past overhead, shaking the entire tenement city. Shaking the sleeping black people in their lice-ridden beds. Shaking the ancient bones and the aching muscles and the t.b. lungs and the uneasy foetuses of unwed girls.