ENG - Cotton Comes To Harlem: the peak of MacGuffin

The MacGuffin was not invented nor coined by Hitchcock [1] but he undoubtedly theorized it in a humorous way: "A MacGuffin – you see it in most films about spies – is the thing the spies are after. […]. It is always called the thing the characters on the screen worry about, but the audience don't care." It is found in a number of other novels and films, for example, in the excellent Kiss Me Deadly, by Robert Aldrich, adapted very freely (fortunately!) from the novel by Mickey Spillane, A MacGuffin is an element, often material, which is supposed to be an issue in the story and, more often than not, a pretext for its development. One inevitably thinks of the Maltese falcon in the novel of the same name. Himes could not do without having recourse to it: it is, for example, the false mining title in A Rage In Harlem, Val’s secret in The Crazy Kill, Alberta’s money in The Big Gold Dream… 

It is however in Cotton Comes To Harlem that it is used in the most accomplished way. In this novel, one MacGuffin contains another: in the cotton ball is hidden the money that the Harlemites gave, in all gullibility, to the false Reverend O'Malley to organize their release and their return to Africa, the land of their ancestors.

The henchmen of Colonel Calhoun, leader of the Back To the Southland Movement steal the cotton ball. It then passes into the hands of an old black ragpicker, Uncle Bud, the only one who realizes the dream of returning to Africa where he will buy "a hundred women of average quality" with the money hidden there. Dancer Billy buys the cotton for her cotton dance at the Cotton Club (!). The two inspectors finally seize it, after a chase punctuated by an impressive number of corpses. They will discretely compensate the inhabitants of Harlem, robbed by black scammers and white racists.

It is partly for the magnificent use of the MacGuffin that Cotton Comes to Harlem is the culmination of the detective form in Himes, while constituting a significant step in the creation of a new genre, more political and fantastic.

Himes had a clear insight: "It is a good novel, probably the best of my detective novels". "My last book on the Cops and the Cotton is entirely devoted to the racial problem and the living conditions in Harlem and I make my inspectors express what they – and the other blacks – feel in Harlem" [2]. On the one hand, there is "a mastery of the storytelling which joins the classic tradition of the black novel, on the other, an intrigue whose historical and political issues are clearly mentioned. Finally, a writing more brilliant than ever, but now more subject to the necessities of storytelling. The complexity of the organization is particularly evident in the careful watchmaking of cotton. A cotton ball is lost by a truck; this cotton ball is found by an old black man by the name of Cotton Bud; simultaneously, an advertisement is posted in Colonel Calhoun's room "looking for cotton ball"; Cotton Bud sells the cotton bale to a ragpicker; an employee of the latter, Josh, offers Colonel Calhoun to sell him the cotton ball; the ragman's warehouse watchdog is poisoned and then Josh is murdered: the cotton is gone ... "[3]

[1] The term "MacGuffin" was coined by a screenwriter Hitchcock worked with named Angus MacPhail, according to Donald Spoto in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock : Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures.
See Hitchcock and MacGuffin

[2] These two references are found in the second volume of Himes' autobiography, My Life of Absurdity, New York, Doubleday, 1976, p. 277 and p. 279.

[3] Sylvie Escande, Chester Himes, l'unique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2013, p. 142.