e.
Blind Man With a Pistol incorporates the ideas of naturalism and the complexity of earlier writers like Chestnutt in its perception of the distortion caused by racism and violence on black American life.
Chester Himes' Blind Man with a Pistol
In the preface to Blind Man, Himes relates a story of a blind man with a pistol that reminded him of "some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers onto getting themselves killed." He adds further "that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol." The operative word is unorganized. At the end of Blind Man, a blind black man argues with a gardener who thinks the blind man is staring at him, a truck driver, and a black preacher who intervenes to preach against violence. The blind man shoots the preacher. James Sallis argues this episode demonstrates that just as Himes discovered in his mythical Harlem a correlative for the absurdity of the urban black's life, so he found a final metaphor for the mindless ubiquity of violence against and within those same people (Sallis 197).
Thus, Edward Margolies argues the one central fact Chester Himes seems to draw from his American background is that the black man's life in America is violence (2). He states that Himes's black police detectives, Grave Digger Jones and Coff
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