45 pages • 1 hour read
Chester HimesCotton Comes To Harlem
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
A crowd of poor, religious black people in Harlem attend a Back-to-Africa rally, where Reverend Deke O’Malley promises to take them away from poverty and back to their homeland. For the price of $1,000, he will return them to Africa, where they will be given five acres, a mule, and a plow, and “all the seeds you need” (2). The congregation compares themselves to the Jews escaping Egypt and marvel at how much better life will be when they no longer have to serve white folks. Eighty-seven people pay the $1,000 fee. Two white cops watch on suspiciously, though they’ve been instructed to leave the gathering alone. Two colored detectives have been instructed to bring Reverend O’Malley to the DA after he finishes his sermon.
A meat delivery truck approaches, filled with masked white men with Mississippi accents and machine guns. The white men steal all the money that has been raised. One of Reverend O’Malley’s recruiting agents reaches for a gun and gets his head blown off. Panic ensues as the white men escape in the meat truck. The white policemen let the meat truck pass by, assuming all the commotion must be caused by black criminals: “The two white men looked back, exchanging white looks. The cops went ahead, looking for colored criminals” (6). The two black detectives and Deke get into an armored truck, following the hijackers on a high-speed chase through the city. The meat truck briefly stops when a bale of cotton falls out, but speeds off as the armored truck approaches. The hijackers open fire on the armored truck and kill one of the black detectives.
Chapter 2 Summary
Lieutenant Anderson welcomes back Grave Digger Jones from his six-month interim after being shot during a heroin bust. Anderson worries he’ll be quick on the trigger now, like his partner Coffin Ed, who had acid thrown in his face four years before. Anderson instructs the two black detectives to stop killing so many people; newspapers have been reporting on police brutality. Coffin Ed insists it’s the white men on the force who are pointlessly brutal; he shoots only when necessary. Anderson warns that as two black detectives, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed will end up being scapegoats if they aren’t careful: “[T]hey’re going to drop it on you two—if they can. You know that as well as I do” (8). Grave Digger grouses about the state of Harlem:
“We got the highest crime rate on earth among the colored people in Harlem. And there ain’t but three things to do about it: Make criminals pay for it—you don’t want to do that; pay the people enough to live decently—you ain’t going to do that; so all that’s left is let ’em eat one another up” (8-9).
Anderson orders Grave Digger and Coffin Ed to cover Deke O’Hara, an ex-con posing as the Reverend Deke O’Malley, leader of the Back-to-Africa movement. O’Malley ratted out his crime bosses and they want him dead, so he needs protection. Grave Digger thinks that’s bogus; if the crime syndicate wanted him dead, he’d be dead. Anderson receives a phone call informing him of the attack on the Back-to-Africa rally.
Chapter 3 Summary
In a Baptist Church, a conman tells a holier-than-thou church woman about a dream he had about Jesus. The conman lays it on thick, telling how Jesus counseled him about his cheating wife and told him he could commit as much adultery as he wants. The church lady flirts with the conman, suggesting Jesus would forgive them for “just one time” (12). As the conman distracts the church lady with this sinful tale, his partner cuts through the back of her skirt to retrieve a purse she’s hiding tied around her waist. The church lady catches the thief in the act and chases him onto the street, where he gets hit by the meat truck as it hurries away from the hijacking. The church lady snatches her purse “still clutched in the dead man’s hand” (13) and nearly gets hit by the armored truck with Deke and his men. Ignoring the chaos around her, the church lady marches home, with her ass hanging out of her open skirt. She passes by the man who was shot at the Back-to-Africa rally without pausing. A junkman asks for her help in putting a bale of cotton into his cart. The church lady assumes he must be trying to scam her: “Cotton! […] you ought to be ashamed of yourself tryna trick me out my money with what you calls a bale of cotton. Does I look like that kinda fool?” (14). She threatens to beat the junkman, and he warns he’ll “mark” her if she tries. The church lady hurries home. A police car on its way to the crime scene stops at the unfamiliar sight of a bale of cotton on the streets of Harlem. The policeman tells the junkman to turn it in, and the junkman pretends to head toward the station.
Chapter 4 Summary
Coffin Ed and Gravedigger go to the scene of the crime and become enraged at what these poor black people have gone through: “At that moment they felt the same as all the other helpless black people standing in the rain” (15). The detectives question one of the recruiting agents, Bill Davis, who tells them about Deke’s Back-to-Africa organization. The name of the murdered recruiting agent was John Hill. Grave Digger suspects Deke staged the two colored detectives who showed up to take him to the DA’s office to sneak off with the money, but Bill continues to have blind hope: “How could you think that, sir? Reverend O’Malley is absolutely honest. He is very dedicated, sir” (16). Grave Digger and Coffin Ed question the chef to find out who supplied the meat for the barbecue, and he tells them there were five white men in the meat truck, not four. One stayed behind a barricade the whole time.
Deke has been hiding out since the hijacking. He watches his apartment closely to make sure no one has traced him back there. From a payphone, Deke calls his girl, Iris, but she warns him Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are there. Grave Digger knocks Iris down. In retaliation, Iris hits Coffin Ed, who grabs her by the throat and nearly kills her. Iris threatens to report them and get them fired. Grave Digger offers her a portion of the money once it’s been collected, but she loves Deke too much. Anderson sends over a white cop to watch Iris so Grave Digger and Coffin Ed can investigate the remnants of the car chase.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Using a third-person, omniscient point of view, Himes creates a cynical portrait of race, crime, religion, and poverty in the United States in the 1960s. Reverend Deke O’Malley’s Back-to-Africa con plays on the desperation of oppressed black people who long to return to a place where everyone looks like them. Himes references real-life Back-to-Africa movements to illustrate this is not a made-up concept but one motivated by real-life pressures and concerns. Race informs the way the characters interact with one another and how Harlem functions. When black detectives come to the rally, members of the crowd mutter, “Now they’re using our brothers against us” (4). Though these detectives ultimately prove to be part of Deke’s con, this moment lays the groundwork for how the two real black detectives of the story, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed, interact with the citizens of Harlem. Even among their own people, the two remain outsiders. Also on the outside are “yellow” women like Iris, who are viewed as “half-white bitches” (20). Some white people seem to be on relatively friendly terms with blacks, like Lieutenant Anderson, who Grave Digger teases might be mistaken “for a ghost” (7). However, overall Grave Digger categorizes Harlem as a place “where all black folks were against the whites” (18).
Himes also writes about the hypocrisy of religion. A criminal and a snitch, Deke hides “behind the Bible” (10) and uses his position as a religious leader to manipulate the masses for profit. In Chapter 2 this idea repeats with the conman John, who tells his dream about Jesus to distract the church lady as his partner steals her purse. The church lady proves to be an unsympathetic victim, since she puts on religious airs but passes by two dead bodies on her way home without batting an eye, only concerned about how the rain will affect her hair. However, Himes shows more sympathy toward those churchgoers conned by Deke, as do Coffin Ed and Grave Digger: “They didn't consider these victims as squares or suckers. They understood them. These people were seeking a home—just the same as the Pilgrim Fathers” (17). Religion gives these people a sense of hope, but that hope is instilled in the wrong places.
Himes reiterates themes of religion by referencing the Bible throughout. In Chapter 1 the hopeful 87 families who invest their money compare themselves to the Israelites leaving Egypt. The Israelites were enslaved to the Egyptians, but God intervened to lead them to their promised land, and the churchgoers see this as a favorable comparison. In Chapter 2 Grave Digger references the parable of the prodigal son from the book of Luke. Other literary allusions include Anderson’s reference to a line from “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson: “Ours is not to reason why, ours but to do or die” (11). Often used as a patriotic call to action, the poem draws cynicism from Grave Digger, who replies, “Wait until the next war and tell somebody that” (11). With both the Bible stories and the Tennyson poem, Grave Digger remains suspicious of anything intended to persuade him to behave a certain way.
The narration weaves through multiple characters, some who remain nameless, others who only briefly participate in the story. Through these varied characters Himes illustrates that poverty, crime, and race affect everyone in the community, not a select group of people. The book positions Grave Digger and Coffin Ed as the hero figures—the black cops tough on crime who have a soft spot for the people duped by Deke’s con—but they are also part of the problem. In Chapter 2 Lieutenant Anderson has to warn the detectives away from killing too many “hoodlums” (8). In Chapter 4 Grave Digger hits Iris, Coffin Ed nearly chokes her to death, and Grave Digger offers her a bribe to keep from reporting them. Though Grave Digger and Coffin Ed uphold the law, they also undermine it. They have been just as shaped by the corruption around them as the criminals they pursue.
Himes establishes another important narrative technique early in the novel by giving readers information that the protagonists Grave Digger and Coffin Ed don’t yet have. Himes opens with the crime in Chapter 1 before introducing the two detectives, providing the pivotal detail of the bale of cotton that falls out of the meat truck. Himes returns to this bale of cotton in Chapter 3, foreshadowing its future importance to the plot, though Grave Digger and Coffin Ed remain unaware of its existence.
