Low Road

by Eddie B. Allen, Jr.

  Talking about Mr. Goines’s death took him back to that day just weeks before the murders. There seemed to be no doubt in Walter’s mind that he had been in the presence of the men who fired the bullets. All three were uncommonly tall, at least six feet five inches, he thought. They were Caucasians with stringy hair and rotting teeth. They wore jeans, and by Walter’s assessment, they were probably addicts like Mr. Goines. The men didn’t necessarily give Walter the impression that they were directly affected by the dirty trick Mr. Goines said he had pulled, whatever it was. They seemed like men who came in from out of town to do a job, and who were vicious enough in their motivation to see it through. There was dope involved with their reason for coming to 232 Cortland on that day. Mr. Goines had acknowledged he “put shit on” someone. Walter speculated that Mr. Goines might have been given access to heroin on consignment before he left L.A. and failed to settle his debt. Out of fear, Walter had deliberately remained silent when he got the opportunity to speak to police about what he remembered. He couldn’t be certain that the men he thought to be his friend’s killers were not still in town. It wasn’t until later, he told me, when he described them to a person who was working on another project about Mr. Goines. But Walter wasn’t clear on how much time had passed since the killings and when he received this telephone call.

  One or two who were less connected to Mr. Goines’s personal life, however, thought the drug connection to Mr. Goines’s murder was a shaky one. The field trip I thought it was absolutely necessary that I take was to Los Angeles. Although his experiences in the city comprised a relatively small and mostly unpleasant chapter in his own life, aside from Detroit, L.A. was the primary setting for Mr. Goines’s novels. It was also the place where I could have a face-to-face interview with Bentley Morriss, the man largely responsible for bringing Donald Goines’s books, along with the first biography about his life, to the world’s attention. Originally printed the same year of its subject’s murder, Donald Writes No More was written by Eddie Stone. I didn’t miss the coincidence that I was the second person of the same first name to examine Mr. Goines’s life. I remember flipping through Donald Writes No More once or twice at the bookstore and thinking it was rather flat but forming no real conclusion otherwise. I only questioned how thorough the research could have been, given that there were only weeks between the time of Mr. Goines’s and Shirley Sailor’s deaths and the publication’s date of copyright. (In what I thought a frightening peculiarity, my sister later read to me, from its third or fourth page, the most peculiar disclaimer for a so-called biography that I had ever heard and eventually saw for myself: “Some characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”) On the other hand, while I considered that I was at the disadvantage of working on a book close to three decades later, I waited for some of the personal records I requested for months at a time. In fact, I was finished with all my writing for the manuscript, when, after nearly a year, I still hadn’t received the DD 214 Air Force file of Mr. Goines’s military history.

  I had heard stories about Bentley Morriss and his handling of business related to the Goines estate. A few family members felt that, with all their loved one had contributed—and was still contributing—to the success of Holloway House, they deserved more than the periodic royalty payments they were given. Whether this was true or false, I wanted to get his perspectives and check out the headquarters of the place that now billed itself “World’s Largest Publisher of Black Experience Paperback Books,” due, of course in large part, to Mr. Goines’s body of work. I first talked with Mr. Morriss on the telephone. He seemed a friendly man with the speaking voice of a radio announcer. In June 2001, he wrote to me and was nice enough to send along a press kit and a copy of Street Players. I had heard about one or two film projects that were to be based on Goines books. One had even been pitched on a cable television channel. It aired a commercial for the soundtrack to Black Gangster, a movie that would be based on the novel. But it turned out there were seven more books, for which there were movie options, at least one that was reportedly in the postproduction, or final, stages of actual filming. Companies in New York and California had expressed interest in bringing Never Die Alone, Daddy Cool, Crime Partners, Black Girl Lost, Death List, Kenyatta’s Revenge and Kenyatta’s Last Hit to the big screen, Morriss informed me.

  “Practically all his books have been translated into French,” he also wrote. “His books are sold throughout the globe, and in the past twenty-five years have never been out of print. The hip-hop and rap generation [of] artists have embraced his works, and sales increase each year with a whole new generation of readers.” It was just a little less than a year from the day I received his letter when I got out of bed at 5:00 A.M. with plans to meet him in the afternoon. Including plenty of layover time, it was a long trip to L.A. From our two or three telephone conversations, I envisioned a stocky, energetic man with white hair that contrasted deeply tanned skin. A prototypical, semiretired, California-beach type is what I expected, but all I was right about was the white hair. After catching a private taxi to Holloway House, I went into the lobby and took the elevator up to its editorial section. I waited with a receptionist until I was called back into his office. Morriss, seated at a large, wood-finish desk, was not outwardly the California-slick businessman at all. If he spent significant time in the sun, his complexion gave no indication. His attire was a simple department-store dress shirt and buttoned casual sweater with slacks.

  Following a handshake, I sat in one of the comfortable chairs of his spacious office. I thanked him for taking the time to talk with me and started my micro cassette recorder. Within the first fifteen minutes of the interview, Morriss offered an anecdote. He recalled an encounter at a gathering of a professional organization about ten, maybe fifteen, years ago. A black woman of about sixty approached him at the Holloway House exhibit during the conference.

  “We were exhibiting at the American Library Association,” he said, “and these were all people of ‘very high intellectual capability,’ and here we are with Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines and the rest of them, and, you know, some hard-rock literature, and a lovely looking lady, small, diminutive, very well-dressed came up and said—and we had, also the other series, we had the Mankind books, which are autobiographies of African Americans that have made grade achievement. We have about sixty of those that we’ve done. And she looked at them and she said, ‘This is lovely, but how can you publish material like this?’ And I said, ‘Ma’am, have you read Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim?’ She says, ‘Absolutely. Every single one of them.’ So that kind of gave me an indication, or should give you an indication, that there may be a group or a class within the community that says this is ‘street stuff’ but privately appreciates it, nonetheless.”

  Morriss and his staff came up with in-house theories about who killed Mr. Goines and Shirley Sailor that resembled the speculation shared by friends and relatives: “We couldn’t believe it. We got a call, I think from one of the sisters, who then sent us tearsheets from the Detroit Free Press. We called everybody we knew in Detroit. Could they verify it? Did this really happen, and was there any lead as to who did it? But there was no additional information. There were two theories—and they were strictly theories. One, he wrote about the life that he knew. He wrote about the people he knew, people that had crossed his path, and one theory is that if he continued writing about these people, they could be identified. And if they could be identified, they might expose themselves to arrest. The other theory, which doesn’t make any sense to me, is that he had built up such a big tag with his supplier that they were angry, but that’s ridiculous. I mean you can break his leg or poke an eye out, but you don’t kill your source. You know then you’re not gonna get paid. He’s gone.”

  Mr. Goines’s goal of taking his stories to a film studio appeared to be materializing at t
he time I spoke with Morriss. Crime Partners, which starred rap recording artists including Snoop Dogg and Ja Rule, was distributed in home-film release. “The other books are in option, film option,” Morriss said, “and if you know anything about film option—in this town, there’s about maybe 30,000 film options a year, and less than one-tenth of one percent ultimately become a film.”

  “Oh, so that’s not such a big deal, in other words?” I asked him.

  “Well it is to us because they pay option money,” he explained. “They protect it [for their use]. They give you X amount of money. You sign a contract. Then if they need an extension, they pay additional money and so on. So no, it’s pretty good for us.”

  The following summer of 2003, Morriss would tell me he planned to attend a “rough cut” screening of the Never Die Alone film adaptation starring rapper DMX.

  Of any suggestions that Mr. Goines was unhappy with his publishing agreements Morriss said he was not aware. “He never said to us that if you don’t give me more money, or if you don’t promote it more, then I’m gonna go elsewhere. We never had that kind of a conversation.” Yet, while he said the writer never complained to him about finances, it struck Morriss as interesting that he was later contacted by Mr. Goines’s old friend, Al Clark, who reportedly sought more compensation than what the author left for him in the will. “He even, at one time, contended that he wrote the books,” added Morriss. “It wasn’t true. It just wasn’t true. I got a call from him one day, and I said, ‘Mr. Clark, whatever you feel is right, put it in a letter to me. Send it to me, and we’ll investigate the best we can.’ Never heard from him.” By 2002, Holloway House had sold an estimated 5 million books written by Donald Goines.

  One of the things that troubled me the entire time I was writing and researching this man’s life was the way he left home as a boy. There seemed no rational motivation for his wanting to go through the trouble of faking his age, joining the air force, and serving for the time that he did, apparently without ever revealing the truth. Particularly considering that it was wartime, a boy his age should have preferred to be nearly anyplace else but in a uniform. Being flown to Korea was a tremendous leap from watching old combat movies and playing with toy guns. I thought the question of why a kid who got into card gambling and thievery would be willing to adjust to military discipline was also worth contemplating. I’ve been a peer as well as a mentor to adolescent boys who showed behavioral problems, and not one of them ever expressed a desire to join the armed services. Not one. It stands to reason that Mr. Goines was, at least, somewhat familiar with the rigidity of military culture before he decided to join up. At least one of his acquaintances, Walter, had gone to Korea before he was sent there. Any impressions he received about survival in the air force had to indicate the required adjustment to regulations and restrictions, and it’s hard to imagine that he would have found this appealing. So whatever it was that possessed him to leave behind the material comforts and security of a middle-class childhood must have been excruciatingly stressful. Marie Richardson, the only living witness to what took place inside the Goines home during that period, told me repeatedly that she just didn’t know. Maybe her brother was just “bad,” she said at one point. But, considering that he returned from Asia a heroin addict, as far as I was concerned, there had to be a more revealing explanation of what had driven him there. When I spoke to historian Paul Lee about this, he cautioned me not to “look for easy answers.” In the research seminars he presents through his independent company, Best Efforts, Inc., he repeats a basic rule: Avoid assumptions; the truth is often hidden behind them. So if I couldn’t assume that anything in his personal life had been the cause of his running far away, what else did I have? I contacted Dr. Kenneth Cole to try and get some professional feedback.

  Cole is a Los Angeles–based psychologist and author of the children’s book Good News. His work has brought him into contact with youth who are the products of urban environments that were even less conducive to their maturity and healthy development than the immediate surroundings in Mr. Goines’s childhood. A native of Flint, Michigan, one of Mr. Goines’s various stomping grounds, Cole was immediately struck by the color issues Mr. Goines experienced as a boy.

  “One thing that did come out, initially, was his whole perception of himself as a black man,” Cole said. “If someone is insecure about himself as a black man, one of the things he may do is embrace things that he perceives as representing black culture.” It had struck me as fairly obvious that Mr. Goines fell in with the wrong crowd as part of a childish reach toward social acceptance. Plenty of young people still make that mistake. What I hadn’t considered was that self-consciousness about his physical appearance and related insecurity may have been at the very core of his emotional issues. Both of Mr. Goines’s sisters had suggested this once or twice, but it struck me as an oversimplified explanation. I knew that, tragically, teenagers had killed themselves and, in more recent years, others as a result of feeling socially outcast. Yet, according to Dr. Cole’s insights, Mr. Goines may have made the majority of his unfortunate choices based on the perceptions he developed as an adolescent. I thought the attention he later received from women must have remedied the early discomfort about his looks. In fact, Ms. Coney told me about memories of her brother in moments of vanity, when he would stand in front of a mirror and pinch his own behind. But I’m aware that we don’t always see in ourselves what others see in us. Underneath it all, Mr. Goines was both sensitive and human, so he was not an exception to this truth. His immersion in crime and drug abuse, Dr. Cole explained, could have been an early response to his misinterpretation of how black men should think and act. Harder to determine was the reason he left home as a teenager. Whether or not he experienced some form of abuse, as I’d heard, Cole noted a behavior pattern that seemed to follow Mr. Goines into his adult years: “It seemed that much of what he was doing was far extreme. His books are extreme extreme, and that’s good.”

  Mr. Goines’s sense of displacement may have begun in his family, Dr. Cole added. “He really was the odd man out, from the get-go. He just never really seemed to fit in.” The psychologist pointed out that, notwithstanding the provisions of his childhood, Mr. Goines may have seen his family’s social status and his role as the only son as a source of pressure, rather than privilege. He surely was not the first child who chose a different direction, despite a parent’s desire to share an inheritance.

  “You could almost wonder, given that he was able to write a bunch of books in a short time—and high on heroin while he did it—there was a possibility that he could have been a pretty gifted kid,” Cole said. He suggested to me the possibility that Mr. Goines’s poor grades and apparent disinterest in school was related to a learning disorder, such as dyslexia, a point Marie Richardson once raised in reference to her brother. The psychologist dismissed the idea Mr. Goines expressed in his “Private Thoughts” letter that he couldn’t write without heroin as “junkie logic,” no more than the typical indication of drug dependency. This would have suggested that Mr. Goines was genetically predisposed to becoming a heroin addict.

  With a little more guidance, if not from his parents, maybe from a neighbor, priest, or counselor, Cole said, Mr. Goines may have committed himself to another course. But Cole sees the novelist’s achievements as remarkable, nonetheless: “What does it say that in the midst of heroin addiction, and a lifestyle in which he sort of compromised his soul, that he was able to find some sense of purpose?”

  The psychologist’s assessment of Mr. Goines’s writing reflected his view that all presentations of American culture are relevant. Dr. Cole’s comment resembled a quote from the European publication La Liberte’ de l’Est: “What is great about Goines is that you feel you’ve become more intelligent once you have read his stories of pain and grief. His stories almost have an ethnographic value.”

  The more painful and violent elements of the Donald Goines legacy struck on the morning of March 28, 1992. Mr. Goines�
��s namesake, a grandchild by his son, was one of three people to be murdered in nearly a week filled with Detroit tragedies. A Detroit News story bearing the headline “Another child, 2 adults killed” appeared on the front page of the paper with a photograph of the three-year-old beneath the words. “Donald Goines III became the sixth Detroit child slain in six days when someone opened fire about 3:30 A.M. on the 9200 block of Grandville, police said,” the story detailed. “Also killed were Donald’s godmother, Tanya Smith, 24, and an unidentified 26-year-old man. Smith’s boyfriend, Earl Sheppard, 26, and an unidentified 24-year-old woman, were wounded. Witnesses and relatives said the boy and four adults were in a car in the driveway of a home owned by Smith and Sheppard when someone opened fire. The car lurched forward, breaking through the driveway gate and coming to rest in the backyard.” Police had no immediate suspects or motive in the shootings. The child’s parents, Donald II and Latonya Williams, were at home when the incident took place. It wasn’t long, however, before the horrible news reached his father, and Donald II informed his mother, who carried a photo of her grandbaby in her purse. “My son called,” Thelma Powell (formerly Thelma Howard) told the paper. “He said, The baby is dead.’ I don’t think I can remember another thing he told me.” As in the Goines and Sailor killings, according to Detroit police, no one was ever arrested for these crimes.

  In an unrelated episode, one of Mr. Goines’s younger relatives was shot several times as he traveled a low road to fame and financial comfort reminiscent of one Mr. Goines had once tested. Apparently, he was attacked as a result of his affiliation with a flamboyant Detroit drug dealer called “White Boy Rick,” who gained a considerable profile in the 1990s. The young man later relocated and began following in the footsteps of the author and a few other Goines men who had begun careers in the media.