Cotton Comes to Harlem

2 ideas

1. The $87,000 hidden in a cotton bale

   Ex-convict preacher Deke O'Hara stages a Back-to-Africa rally in Harlem and collects $1,000 each from 87 poor families, only for armed men to hijack the money mid-rally. The cash ends up hidden in a bale of cotton that falls off a truck and is picked up by an old junkman, which sets gangsters, a white Southern colonel and detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones after the same bale. In the end the detectives can't recover the original cash through legal means, so they force the colonel to pay the families back.

2. Hope of homeland as a commodity

   The novel sets a Black con man's Back-to-Africa hustle beside a white colonel's Back-to-the-Southland scheme, and both are sold to the same Black Harlem residents as a promised return to an idealized origin. Read this way, a political dream becomes something that can be bought and sold, and it draws buyers who want to get out of where they are.

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