Celebrating Black History Month 2025
'Blueschild Baby' by George Cain
Here at the PorPor Books Blog we like to celebrate Black History Month by reading and reviewing a book, fiction or nonfiction, that illuminates the Black Experience. For February 2025, we are reviewing 'Blueschild Baby' by George Cain.
'Blueschild Baby' first was published in hardback by McGraw-Hill in 1970. In January, 1972, Dell books issued a mass market paperback edition, copies of which can be rather pricey. This trade paperback edition (210 pp.) was issued by Ecco / Harper Collins in 2019 and is considerably more affordable.
It features an Introduction by Leslie Jamison, an essayist who has written books about addiction. Jamison is a white liberal, and while her Introduction features insights into Cain garnered from his wife Jo Lynne Pool, Jamison steeps the Introduction in identity politics and grievance politics (it is structural racism fomented by the white power structure that drives People of Color to take up clandestine drug use, etc., etc.).
'Blueschild' is the first and only novel by Cain, and is autobiographical in nature. Born in 1943 with the name George Maurice Hopkins, he later converted to Islam and changed his surname to Cain. During the writing of the novel in the 1960s he would head into the ghetto with notebooks tucked under his arm, taking notes of the landscape from which he was scoring dope. While 'Blueschild' made him a rising star in the literary scene, he struggled with heroin addiction all his life, and despite assistance and encouragement from his editor, he never was able to write another book. Cain died in 2010 at age 66.
'Blueschild' is set in Harlem in the summer of 1967. The first-person narrator (also named George Cain) is only 23 years old, but a stone-cold junkie who must get a fix every day. In the opening chapters we are introduced to the lifestyle of the junkie, the process of scoring dope and shooting up, hustling for the next hit, staying one step ahead of the Man, and evading injury or death at the hands of Harlem's criminal element.
The first half of the novel chronicles Cain's misadventures in the back alleys and tenements of Harlem, and his fraught relationship with his family, who lecture him - to no avail - about the need to get cleaned up, if not for himself, then for his daughter Sabrina.
The crux of the narrative occurs about halfway through the book, when Cain decides to quit, cold-turkey, with the aid of his long-suffering girlfriend. The narrative then goes into flashbacks of his upbringing, and his efforts, often tortuous, to straddle the world of the streets and the world of upper-class society.
'Blueschild' uses a jive-influenced, clipped prose style, mingling stream-of-consciousness with introspection:
Take the bus downtown to Washington Square. Walking across the park see strange signs and omens. Young white beggars fill the streets, pawing and panhandling. Dirty and drugged. Everywhere gross acts and running obscenities. Bold, they exhibit their infirmities for sympathy and inspection, dead souls and lost minds. The cancer has found a fatter host, it began somewhere deep in my bowels and now consumes America. Tourists roam the place. Laughing and giving freely for what they think funny, not knowing it is their own death they're watching.
Coming onto Thompson Street, go into my bag. I swagger and sneer at them. Italian women dressed in dumpy-black, hanging from the windows and stoops, cursing me in their foul tongue while counting beads and blessings.
George Cain is not a likeable character. He is self-centered, consumed with self-pity, often violent and abusive towards women, racist towards whites, and sometimes hateful towards other black people. He will betray anyone, if it gets him another fix and another day lost in euphoria.
Along with its stark portrayal of the self-degradation of addiction, 'Blueschild' also is an observation of the conversion of John Lindsay's New York City into the hellhole it would be in the 1970s. The exploding numbers of addicts in Harlem are a foreshadowing of the spread of social disorder into the other boroughs of the city, and the advent of the pervasive decay to come.
Where 'Blueschild' falters is in its closing chapter, which, without disclosing spoilers, ends on an ambiguous note. It's something of a cop-out on the author's part.
Summing up, 'Blueschild Baby' succeeds as an insightful treatment of black life and times in the sixties, and is deserving of a Four Star Rating.
No comments:
Post a Comment