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 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Coffin Ed and Grave Digger question a “blind man” who tells them about the five white hijackers, but they are interrupted over the radio by Anderson, who tells them Barry is holed up at a pool hall. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed arrive and send the policeman who’s been trailing Barry to cover the back while they wait in a car out front. Barry exits a short time later, checking to make sure he hasn’t been followed, so Coffin Ed and Grave Digger look away to avoid suspicion. Barry hurries into a stolen armored car, and Deke emerges from the pool hall, jumping into the car as well. They take off. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger give chase but lose them. The detectives put together that it was a stolen car and realize Deke must be planning a deal, so they decide to check out under the bridge. Deke, Barry, and two armed men show up under the bridge where Calhoun and his men wait. Barry goes to make the deal. Calhoun asks where the cotton is. Barry remembers the advertisement in the window for the bale of cotton and, realizing he’s in danger, lies and says Deke has the cotton. Calhoun’s men grab Barry and try to stab him. Barry manages to get free and tries to run. Deke’s hired guns shoot the white men but accidentally hit Barry too. Deke and his guards take off in the car. Deke tries to stop for Barry, but Barry is stuck underneath the dying white men and dies after telling Deke, “Cotton” (69). Deke and his men try to make a getaway, but Coffin Ed and Grave Digger catch them. Deke asks for his lawyer, and they tell him he’ll get to talk to him “in good time” (70).
Chapter 14 Summary
At the station Deke again asks for his lawyer. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed joke the lawyer’s most likely sleeping and that “he’d be mad if we woke him” (70). The detectives ask Deke about the money, reminding him he’s now connected to a homicide and facing major time. Deke insists he wasn’t swindling anybody: “It was all legitimate” (71). Coffin Ed and Grave Digger slap him around but don’t leave any bruises. Grave Digger warns Deke they’ll kill him and take the charge, but Deke continues to protest his innocence. Lieutenant Anderson brings in Iris, who claims that Deke killed Mabel Hill when she found out he was swindling people out of their money. Iris tried to stop Deke but couldn’t, and he beat her up and escaped. Deke knows people will believe Iris over him since she doesn’t have a criminal record. Iris tells the police where to find the papers proving Deke was faking the Back-to-Africa movement. Anderson and the white cops take her away. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed try to keep questioning Deke, but he refuses to speak.
The detectives confer with Anderson outside and think maybe Iris pushed him too far. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger realize they’re missing something, since neither Deke nor the white gunmen have the missing money, so they decide to think while they get some food at Mammy Louise’s. Mammy’s husband recently passed, and she’s taken up with a new young man who tries to get too familiar with Coffin Ed and Grave Digger. The detectives put him in his place and order an enormous amount of food. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed eat and chat with Mammy Louise about her love life.
Chapter 15 Summary
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed learn there’s been a murder at the junkyard. They go down to investigate and find the junkyard worker, Joshua, dead, along with the junkyard’s guard dog. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed learn that Josh had some poisoned meat in his pocket intended for the dog, which suggests someone poisoned the dog before Josh got there. The detectives notice a space in the yard where something is missing. They call the owner of the yard, Mr. Goldman, who laments that Joshua was killed but refuses to come down so late at night since anything he can contribute can wait until Monday. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed go to Brooklyn to pick Goldman up and persuade him to help them. Goldman protests that he only has junk but agrees to come down. Goldman notices the missing bale of cotton and tells the detectives he bought it from Uncle Bud. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed realize this might be the missing piece. As the detectives leave the junkyard, a car without its lights on drives past, and someone shoots at them. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed get away unharmed and head back to the station, where they learn that Uncle Bud’s cart was found but the man himself is missing. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed hypothesize his body is probably in a river somewhere. Grave Digger speculates that cotton might be connected to the Back-to-the-Southland movement, but Anderson thinks it’s a coincidence.
Chapter 16 Summary
Reverend T. Booker Washington—“no relation to the great Negro educator” (82)—takes over Deke’s services on Sunday. Washington preaches that white men are spreading lies and wrongfully imprisoning Deke because the devil is working hard against him, just like Job. The congregation rallies behind this idea and raises money for Deke’s defense. Grave Digger wakes up to find his wife out and about and his daughters away at camp. He and Coffin Ed take the day off and agree to meet up to do something unrelated to the crime. On the streets of Harlem, the detectives notice that Calhoun has put together a Back-to-the-Southland march that will head into the territory of Black Muslim protestors, which will likely mean a riot. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed head off the Back-to-the-Southland marchers by firing some warning shots to keep them from advancing. The black people in the crowd know Grave Digger and Coffin Ed’s reputations and stop in their tracks, but Calhoun keeps walking. Grave Digger shoots off Calhoun’s hat and keeps shooting it away from his hands every time he tries to pick it up. At last Calhoun concedes defeat and leaves. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed call in to the station to let Lieutenant Bailey know they’ve managed to thwart the riot. The two detectives plan to do something mildly illegal, like pick up their wives and go to an unlicensed bar and drink stolen whiskey.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed vacillate between being sympathetic or dirty cops. Multiple times throughout the novel, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed show they care about the poor people who’ve lost their money, indicating that their sympathies lie with the innocent and downtrodden: “they thought about the eighty-seven thousand dollars taken from those people who were already so poor they dreamed hungry” (66). However, in Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 Grave Digger and Coffin Ed withhold Deke’s legal right to a lawyer and beat him in an attempt to make him confess: “Grave Digger slapped him so hard his body bent one-sided like a rubber man, and Coffin Ed slapped him back” (71). Grave Digger seems to have slightly more self-control, reminding Coffin Ed that they’re cops—“not judges”—so he doesn’t get too out of hand. Coffin Ed restrains himself but argues that “the law was made to protect the innocent,” indicating that once people commit crime, they no longer deserve the protection of the police.
This dark portrayal of policemen contributes to the overall tone of cynicism in Himes’s writing. In Chapter 14 Iris betrays Deke to save her own skin (71-72). In Chapter 15 Goldman doesn’t want to interrupt his weekend just because one of his workmen was killed: “You just put Josh in the morgue and I will come Monday morning and identify his body” (77). Though they verge on being criminals themselves, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed tap into this bleak worldview to solve crimes and to survive. In some ways Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are the only ones who can see the truth of things as they really are, instead of what they pretend to be: “They looked as these young people, thinking they didn’t know what it was all about yet” (74). Himes continues this idea when the very people whose money Deke has been swindling are once again conned into raising money for his defense. Yet Himes, like Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, also sympathizes with these innocents, noting that, yes, they believed, but, “they didn’t have any other choice” (83). Their lives are so bleak, their situations so desperate, that it’s better to hold onto hope than give into the same cynicism that made Grave Digger and Coffin Ed into such tough and hardened men.
