A fellow inmate loaned him Robert Beck’s Pimp,
the Story of My Life (1967), whose protagonist
details his life from childhood to his days as the
notorious pimp, ICEBERG SLIM. Soon after, Goines
penned Whoreson (1972), which also examines the
life of a black pimp in America. His protagonist,
however, is the son of a prostitute, who educates
her son on various aspects of the black underworld
and fosters a sense of destiny in his becoming a
successful pimp. He submitted the manuscript to
Robert Beck’s publisher, Holloway House Publish-
ing Company; they enthusiastically accepted. He
followed with Dopefiend (1971), which publishers
found so compelling and sincere that it preceded
Whoreson in publication. Goines finally realized
that he could utilize his knowledge of and lessons
learned on the streets as material for his writing.
He only veered away from this subject matter in
Swamp Man (1974), the story of a southern black
man’s revenge on the white men who rape his sis-
ter and the least successful of his novels.
As Goines became more successful, he became
more socially conscious about the power he held
as a writer and conveyer of the urban, underworld
black experience. His third novel, White Man’s
Justice, Black Man’s Grief (1973) examines the eco-
nomic and racial inequities of the criminal justice
system. Goines, then, provides a voice for not only
the black underworld but also the black masses of
the urban ghettos. While he continues to focus on
various aspects of the black underworld and the
myriad issues facing blacks in a larger context,
perhaps the most impressive works of his canon
are the four novels originally published under the
pseudonym Al C. Clark, which he used to avoid
overexposure. This series, often referred to as the
Kenyatta novels, consists of Crime Partners (1974),
Death List (1974), Kenyatta’s Escape (1974), and
Kenyatta’s Last Hit (1975) and revolves around
Kenyatta’s plan for the political and social libera-
tion of the black community from an oppressive
American status quo. These novels examine black
militancy and racism and even propose theories
about a government-sanctioned genocide of blacks
through the international drug trade.
Depicting the lives of pimps, prostitutes, street
hustlers, and drug addicts in their impoverished
milieu is a fundamental aspect of Goines’s work.
He eradicates the intangible but distinct bound-
aries between the black and white communities
by holding a mirror to both communities, dem-
onstrating that no difference exists between the
hierarchies of the underworld and of mainstream
society. His work departs from the hackneyed
trope of American racism and social protest to
focus on the real, tangible underbelly of Ameri-
can society and the black community. What is
immediately noticeable about Goines’s work is
its self-sufficiency; it is not a constant lament of
social and political inequity but rather the mani-
festation of these inequities and the claiming of
personal agency.
Goines, then, becoming a griot of the under-
world, acknowledges the force and function of
his work to give his readers agency, understand-
ing, and voice. Through his characters and plot
development, he allows readers to face their own
immediate realities but also forces them to face
the projected results of their realities. Goines does
not just construct characters of an experience but
rather collects these characters for the page. In
essence, they are not the products of his literary
imagination but its inspiration. Though he some-
times depicts gratuitous violence and masochistic
characters, Goines still grasps the ultimate nuances
of the black underworld and inner-city communi-
ties in America through the verisimilitude of his
stories, which enables him, as a writer, to examine,
insightfully and from within, the social tribula-
tions of these communities.
The condemnations Goines makes are intro-
spective, focusing on black autonomy and the
sometimes destructive choices blacks make about
their lives. Other authors have portrayed the im-
poverished conditions of the ghetto and its crimi-
nality as embattled against the white community.
Goines’s work is the result of his experiences in the
ghetto and as a criminal, and his novels are pri-
marily told from the vantage point of a criminal.
Other authors deconstruct the black experience
in America and focus overwhelmingly on pov-
erty and racism; if criminality does surface, the
black criminal is posited as the greater victim of
economic and social inequities. In Goines’s work,Goines, Donald 205