Cotton Comes To Harlem

Coffin Ed is Grave Digger’s partner and the second black detective on the force. Like Grave Digger, Coffin Ed has a reputation for being “quick on the trigger,” but he reasons that it’s “better to be quick than dead” (8). Coffin Ed had acid thrown in his face four years earlier by a hoodlum, making him extra tough on criminals, and he cannot abide liars or cheats. He and Grave Digger are assigned to the Back-to-Africa hijacking case and pursue various leads to find Deke and the missing $87,000.

Along with being partners, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are best friends, spending even their days off together. Though Grave Digger also has issues with violence, he often acts as a calming influence on Coffin Ed, making sure he doesn’t lose too much control, such as when Coffin Ed nearly chokes Iris to death. Like Grave Digger, Coffin Ed hates criminals but has devoted his life to protecting the innocent, downtrodden people of Harlem.

Reverend Deke O’Malley, formerly Deke O’Hara, used to belong to the crime syndicate but ratted them out for reward money. Under his new name, he hides “behind the Bible” (10) as a preacher. At the beginning of the novel, he holds a Back-to-Africa rally where he tries to persuade his followers to pay $1,000 per family to travel to Africa, where he falsely promises they will be free from white oppression.

Deke is a conman and takes pride in manipulating people to get his own way. Though at different points in the text he has sexual relationships with Iris and Mabel Hill, Deke proves that he ultimately cares about nobody but himself, seen in his lack of remorse over Mabel’s death and his impulse to kill Iris to save his own skin. Between this, taking “Judas money” for ratting out the crime syndicate, and scamming innocent families out of their life savings, Deke proves to be a despicable, unredeemable character, one who seemingly merits the less-than-legal methods Grave Digger and Coffin Ed use to track him.

Described as a “yellow woman”—half black, half white—Iris begins the novel as Deke’s lover. She is highly eroticized and uses sex to get what she wants, such as when she seduces the white cop guarding her to escape the police. Iris is a femme fatale character, and once Deke scorns her, she stops at nothing to bring about his downfall. She even accuses him of murdering Mabel Hill, an act she committed in a jealous rage. Iris temporarily teams up with Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, then Deke again, when she believes she can profit from it, but her real loyalty remains to herself alone.

Mabel Hill is a Back-to-Africa follower and Deke’s most ardent supporter. At the beginning of the novel, John Hill—one of Deke’s recruiting agents and Mabel’s husband—is killed during the hijacking. Mabel allows Deke to hide out at her home, welcoming him into her bed the same night John is killed. When Iris learns about their affair, she comes to Mabel’s apartment. The two women fight, and Iris shoots and kills Mabel. Mabel provides one representation of religious hypocrisy. While she claims to be a good Christian woman, she encourages Deke’s sexual advances but claims it is “God’s will” to avoid seeming sinful. Like many of Deke’s followers, she is easily duped and unshakably loyal, even in the face of obvious evidence that Deke is not the holy man he claims to be.

Uncle Bud is a junkman who collects and sells trash that he finds on the streets. After the hijacking, Uncle Bud finds the bale of cotton that falls out of the back of the white men’s truck. Though Uncle Bud appears only sporadically throughout the text, he plays an important role to the plot, moving the cotton (and the money) around as Grave Digger, Coffin Ed, and Colonel Calhoun search for it. He displays great cunning in first selling the cotton to Mr. Goodman for $25, then stealing the cotton back and reselling it to Billie Belle for $50. Unbeknownst to anyone, Uncle Bud took the $87,000 hidden in the cotton and headed to Africa, where he buys up cattle and other goods to trade for wives. Uncle Bud also represents the resourcefulness of the people of Harlem, outwitting everybody and ending up with all the money by keeping his head down and flying under the radar.

Billie Belle is an exotic dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, as well as Iris’s secret lover. Billie’s role in the text mostly helps to move along the plot, as Iris uses Billie’s apartment to plan her next move, and Uncle Bud sells Billie the bale of cotton for $50, for use in her act onstage. However, Billie also provides an example of one of the text’s hypersexualized women. Along with the erotic dance she performs, which is described in graphic detail, Billie’s other defining moment in the text is when she watches Iris’s “nude body lustfully” as she changes (97).

Colonel Calhoun is the leader of the Back-to-Southland movement that establishes headquarters in Harlem. Calhoun orchestrated the hijacking at the beginning of the novel so that black families would want to return to the American South instead of Africa. Calhoun is a white Southern racist who wants to return the South to its glory days by recruiting back black families to pick cotton. He believes black people need guidance and a firm hand from whites, and he resents their freedom in Harlem. Calhoun is the novel’s antagonist, working against Grave Digger and Coffin Ed to try to oppress the desperate, hardworking black families in Harlem and convince them to give up their freedom.

Joshua is one of the workers in Mr. Goodman’s junkyard. He watches on as Uncle Bud and Mr. Goodman haggle over the price on the bale of cotton. Joshua later sees the advertisement for the bale of cotton in the Back-to-Southland headquarters and makes a deal with Colonel Calhoun to sell it to him for $100. Calhoun murders Joshua and leaves his body at the junkyard, though Grave Digger and Coffin Ed later discover that somebody else took the cotton before Calhoun could get his hands on it. Joshua plays a small but important role in the novel, since his actions help Grave Digger and Coffin Ed discover the bale of cotton and its involvement in the case.

Mr. Abraham Goodman is the junkyard owner who initially buys the bale of cotton from Uncle Bud for $25. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed call Mr. Goodman in as a witness when one of his workers, Joshua, is found murdered in the junkyard. Mr. Goodman initially resists coming in since it’s late at night and he believes the case can wait until Monday morning, but he does eventually offer helpful information to the investigation, informing the detectives that the bale of cotton has gone missing. Mr. Goodman is of Jewish descent and represents some of the common stereotypes of his people, such as being money-conscious, seen when he haggles with Uncle Bud over the price of the cotton: “What am I, your father, to give you money for nothing?” (46). Though Goodman drags his feet about helping the investigation, he expresses remorse when Joshua is killed: “What is this world coming to nobody knows, when people are killed about some junk—not to speak of a poor innocent dog” (79). Though a relatively minor character, Mr. Goodman is important to the text because he demonstrates the variety of people coexisting in Harlem, not just whites or blacks, cops or criminals.