up to see,” Nelson wrote. “Now came months that caught Cass up on a dark human tide. Whole families piled into cattle-cars, women rode in reefers; old men rode the brakebeams, holding steel rods above the wheels with fingers palsied by age.”
Chicago, Nelson said, is “trying with noise and flags to hide the corruption that private ownership had brought it.” “It’s the big trouble everywhere,” he proclaimed, and then he warned—“Get all you can while yet you may. For the red day will come for your kind, be assured.”
When Nelson finished writing he submitted his manuscript to The Vanguard Press with the title Native Son, but they changed it to Somebody in Boots. It was a demand, not a request. More followed.
Vanguard felt the novel was not marketable and they used that argument like a cudgel against Nelson—he needed the book to sell, and they knew he did. Over the next few months, he removed some of the political content at their request, and transformed an interracial marriage into a union between a white man and a white woman. He cut some violent material as well. And then he resubmitted his book and waited.
It took Vanguard four months to print Nelson’s novel—not much time, but enough for his dreams to develop outsized proportions. He began telling people he had written a sensation—a singular account of poverty, a piece of gospel truth bound to become a best seller. He was right, in part.
Somebody in Boots was released in March, 1935, to good reviews but tepid public reaction. It had no natural constituency. Some readers thought it was too violent, others too sexual. The revolutionary politics scared away the mainstream, but revolutionaries thought Nelson hadn’t gone far enough. He introduced Cass McKay to the Communist Party in the text, but never allowed him to commit to the cause. For true believers, that felt like betrayal.
Three hundred people bought Boots, four, five, six, seven—then, nothing. It didn’t even earn back its meager advance.
A few weeks after the book’s release, Nelson’s girlfriend returned to her apartment late at night and found him unconscious on the floor with a gas line shoved down his throat. She thought he was dead.
Nelson survived his suicide attempt, of course, but he was a phantom for several years afterward. He licked his wounds and fell in love and found a job; he killed one year working with the Communist Party, and another carousing. He carried a notepad everywhere he went but he never seemed to do anything with his material. Five years passed, six. Friends began teasing him. They said he would never publish again. An acquaintance mocked him. You’re a “flash in the pan,” the man wrote, a “mediocrity,” “the almost-but-not-quite Algren.”
Nelson shut them all up in 1942. Never Come Morning, his second novel, was released that year and struck his doubters like a well-executed hook—they didn’t see it coming and after it found purchase they never felt quite so sure of themselves again. Critics adored Morning, and eventually it sold a million copies.
Thus began the second phase of Nelson’s career—a period when he wrote books distinct from the text you’re holding in almost every way. They saunter where this one stomps, and their characters dream and laugh. The worlds contained between their covers are alive with music, and thick with ideas. Even their titles set them apart. Somebody in Boots is a blunt declaration, but Never Come Morning and The Neon Wilderness and The Man with the Golden Arm and Chicago: City on the Make and A Walk on the Wild Side move with the tempo of a good bar of blues when you say them fast.
After Morning was published, Nelson’s books began selling by the hundreds of thousands instead of the hundreds. Fame replaced poverty. Somebody in Boots was forgotten, and Nelson was grateful that it was—of the eleven books he wrote this one “betrayed” him the most. So long as it survives so does an account of the worst years of his life.
Somebody in Boots slipped out of print for twenty-two years after its release, and returned then only because Nelson needed the money a paperback publisher promised him for a reissue. His agreement came reluctantly though, and he never got behind the second edition. Before the book went to press he cut the text to hell, and allowed the publisher to give it a new title. This book was called The Jungle in its second life, and it was available at newsstands for thirty five cents. The tagline on the cover read: “A Great Novel of Lawless Youth.”
A complete version of Boots was released a few years later, but Nelson sabotaged that as well. He wrote an introduction that lacked even a word’s worth of praise, and called it “an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.”
Other editions appeared after Nelson’s death in 1981, but they didn’t fare well either. The eighties were the wrong decade for this book; so were the nineties. And fans and critics interested in tidying Nelson’s literary reputation—I count myself among their number—never took it seriously. They accepted Nelson’s comments on their face, and interpreted them as permission to read this book quickly and criticize it freely. And more nails went in its coffin.
But now the edition you’re holding has resurrected Boots just as the world contained in its pages has begun to sound familiar again—a time when the man who feels “he had been cheated with every breath he had ever drawn,” can be found walking the sidewalks, ranting. The voice of the bigot who proclaims, “Yep, niggers got all the jobs, every-where, an’ that’s why you’n me is on the road,” echoes through the political system. And most of us—whether through hardship, disappointment or shrewd calculation—have developed an intimate relationship to the sentiment Nelson revealed when he wrote: “He could not trouble himself, one way or the other, about any better or happier world.”
The country feels like it has come full circle since 1935, and maybe now, eighty-two years and eight editions into this book’s long life, it will finally receive the honest chance it always deserved.
Here’s to hoping.
Colin Asher
I WONDER WHETHER there stands yet, above an abandoned filling station a mile this side of the border, a wooden legend once lettered in red—
Se Habla Espanol
—that must now have been long washed to rose.
It hung between an autumn-colored tangle of mesquite and a grapefruit grove gone to weed on a stretch of highway where nobody drove. I’d lettered it myself.
And sat in its narrow shade shelling black-eyed peas below a broken sun.
Once in the dead of day a field of white butterflies came out of that sun, fluttered at rest like a single creature: then fled like a dream of white butterflies.
I shelled on.
The Sinclair Company owned the station. A Florida cracker wearing a straw kelly the color of an old dog’s teeth was my partner. He called himself “Luther” and the one thing I knew about him for sure was that his name couldn’t be Luther.
I’d met him working a small-time door-to-door fraud in New Orleans and he’d let me have a few doors. In no time at all we had had to leave town.
Luther owned a grapefruit-packing shed in the Rio Grande Valley, he had assured me—if I’d meet him in McAllen he’d make me a partner. In McAllen it had turned out all he’d meant was that he had a buddy who bossed
