For much of the 1950s and ’60s Donald Goines prowled the streets of Detroit as just another lowlife. He had seven children but never married. He used heroin, stole, gambled, pimped, and made bootleg whiskey. But his game wasn’t smooth enough, and he served several prison terms. Then, inspired by a novel by a Chicago hustler, Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck, Goines began writing fiction.
According to a 1975 Detroit Free Press article, while serving in Japan and Korea in the early 50s, Goines acquired what eventually became a $100-a-day heroin habit. The only time he would ever break it was when he was in prison. He urged others to avoid drugs and once shot up in front of his 12-year-old sister to scare her away from using. A friend recalled him yelling at kids who went near drug houses.
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According to the Free Press article, Myrtle Goines took a typewriter to the prison, and her son taught himself to type, did writing exercises, and read Trick Baby, Iceberg Slim’s 1967 novel about a biracial grifter in Bronzeville. Then he started spinning his own tale, using his own knowledge of the streets, about a light-skinned pimp’s rise and fall. Another inmate read the manuscript and told him to send it to Iceberg Slim’s publisher, Holloway House. Goines shipped Whoreson off in August 1970, and one month later the editors accepted it and asked for more of his work. That October he sent them Dopefiend, about the misadventures of several drug addicts.
In a phone interview last year Donald Goines Jr., a 38-year-old aspiring writer in the Motor City, told me, “I hear some people tell their kids they should not read this garbage. That’s when I know they are misinterpreting. It’s very educational for teenagers. Before they get started doing anything in the streets they’ll see what the consequences will be in the end. The reality is, no matter how good it looks, in the end it’s tragedy.”
Kenyatta leads a paramilitary band that operates in Detroit and later branches out into Watts. The members, men and women, hunt white cops–Kenyatta calls them “nigger-haters”–and drug lords who operate in the black community. The first novel in the series, Crime Partners, displays Goines’s usual cynical outlook. Two stickup men, Billy Good and Jackie Walker, sit in a car outside the house of a junkie and his common-law wife, planning to relieve the couple of their cash. Inside the junkie is beating the woman’s six-year-old daughter to death for accidentally knocking his heroin on the floor. Good and Walker walk into the house just after the murder, and Good decides street justice is called for. He guns down the couple while Walker grabs the money. They later meet Kenyatta to buy guns and end up hunting cops. By the end of the novel they get their comeuppance when a drug kingpin has them gunned down.
After reading King David’s diary and finding $50,000 in the car, Pawlowski decides the gangster doesn’t deserve a coffin. He has him cremated, then donates the money to a drug treatment center. In effect, it’s Goines’s harsh judgment upon his own life.
