SOURCE: Gair, Christopher. “Theory Comes to Harlem: The New York Novels of Chester Himes.” 49^th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies, no. 6 (autumn 2000).

In the following essay, Gair uses references to the idiom of jazz in Cotton Comes to Harlem to point to the multitude of cultural meanings in the novel.

There are two instances in Chester Himes's Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) when the detective protagonists, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, momentarily interrupt their investigations of a tangled case involving fraud, murder, robbery and a host of other standards of the thriller genre, in order to debate the meaning of jazz. In each example, the music assumes a racial significance, conveying—or attempting to convey—a message that cannot be spoken in English. Thus, in the first:

The horns were talking and the saxes talking back.

“Listen to that,” Grave Digger said when the...