Paperback 1019: The Primitive / Chester Himes (Signet 1264)

Paperback 1019: Signet 1264 (PBO, 1956)

Title: The Primitive
Author: Chester Himes
Cover artist: [Tony Kokinos] (signature top left)

Condition: 6.5/10
Estimated value: $30

Best things about this cover:

• White lady trying hard not to think about centuries of brutal racism and her own complicity therein ... I assume.
• There's drunk, there's very drunk, and then there's "I only made it half way through taking my shoes off" drunk
• The red of the red shoes is very red against the non-color of everything else. Echoes the title font color. I like.
• This novel was heavily cut for the US audience, which, like, couldn't deal, I guess. It was published right before Himes made the turn into hardboiled crime fiction with his Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones series (so great)

Best things about this back cover:

• The End of a Primitive was the original title of the book (the title used when the book was finally published in unexpurgated versions, 40+ years later)
• So the white woman is just white but the "Negro man" is "embittered"? Normally I don't beg for more adjectives, but come on.
• Van Vechten tryna get cute with that "white heat" shit, I bet. He's a white dude who wrote a book called Ni**er Heaven. A key figure in white people's "discovering" Harlem. I highly recommend Mat Johnson's current comic, Incognegro: Renaissance, which is set in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance and features a Van Vechten-like figure in the first issue. Good stuff.

Page 123~

"Oh, sure," he said, thinking, "I like de big gut, do you like de big gut?"

~RP

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