"My father was made to pick cotton at the age of 8," she adds. "My grandmother was born in the 1800s. I am like this far away from injustice. I'm not going to let it go. You made my father pick cotton, man. You had all my aunts and uncles out there picking fucking cotton. It needs to be aired out."
Not every book within the street fiction genre is powered by a feeling of racial anger, but most share "Dutch's" basic hook: A hero or heroine somehow escapes, redefines, finds refuge within, or manages to control, his or her challenging inner-city circumstances.
Escapism is the rule here. Rather than using the street setting as a heart-rending diorama of misery and poverty, urban fiction tends to use it as a starting point for adventure. Sure, the system is rigged, the man is on your case, and the game is deadly. But there are ways out. Grab a gun, pull your friends together, and make something of yourself. Overthrow and supplant the local drug kingpin. Hack your way into the business world where the deck is stacked against you. (Alternately, partake in a crazy threesome with two bootylicious sisters.)
Violence is the flip side to the sexual themes that underpin many street fiction novels. Some books are defined by the romantic trials and tribulations of young black characters. Darren Coleman, a Washington street fiction author who's crossed to the mainstream, has made headway by putting a male perspective on a style of storytelling that has largely been owned by female writers. Others mix the romance with the drugs and guns that mark the roughest edges of street life. And some, such as "Bloody Money" by Leondrei Prince, live entirely within the world of stash houses, "packages" and gats in order to attract and sustain their readers:
"Pretty E and Dog went over the plans one more time from the top. The plan was to stick Malik and Shawn up for everything at their stash house on the North Side. Over the past couple of months, Malik and Shawn came from outta nowhere, splurging on to the drug scene causing a shortage to their money being made, and that was no good. Dog, Pretty E, and Hit Man laid low and watched their every move. That was their thing!
Watching and waiting for new dealers to make a move in the game, so they could knock them off. It was called capitalism. An idea they thought of long ago. 'Why should we risk going to jail for pumping hand to hand on some street corner, when we can let the next muthafucka get da gravy, and we take it! Feel me?' Hit Man said, during one of their many get togethers, and it stuck, and they lived by it."
But Teri Woods isn't impressed by the likes of Prince and other rough-hewed street fiction authors. Her style is hard to push into a box, and calculated to be equal parts outrageous and smoothly entertaining, and she doesn't see peers among the authors whose work crops up next to her own on the tables. When I asked Woods who among them had influenced her writing, she had a categorically negative answer.
"Nobody," she says. "I mean, don't get me wrong. There are some really good stories. But they're really full of shit. A lot of those books that you see on that stand, they have no plot. All they are is just sex, drugs ... 'Gonna go kill somebody ...' There's nothing there. No substance. Just a Puerto Rican chick on the back of a lowrider on the cover -- nothing in the pages that's ever going to make a difference."
Halfway through her tirade, she brightens.
"What I like, though, is that they're flippin' the dollars," she says. "I don't give a fuck what they sell. You got a way to make some money in a society where you're not supposed to have any? Oh my God! Then fucking get some more Puerto Rican bitches on the backs of lowriders and put some more books out there! If you can flip your dollar, I don't have nothing to say about that."
Woods herself is a one-woman publishing phenomenon. Teri Woods Publishing claims to have done roughly $10 million in business since 2000. This year, Woods signed a deal with Borders to put books from her publishing house into the heart of the nationwide chain -- a major coup. She's also in the process of starting a film company in order to turn her first book, "True to the Game," into a movie. In the process, she's attracted interest from high-profile actors including Hassan Johnson and Michael K. Williams (who respectively portrayed "Wee-Bey" and Omar Little on HBO's groundbreaking urban crime series "The Wire").
She's also on the radar of mainstream publishers. Rockelle Henderson, associate publisher of the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, which handles books about the African Diaspora, has been following her career for the past three to four years. "Right before you called," said Henderson, "one of my sales reps called, to say: 'Do you know the author Teri Woods?' And I said yes, and I don't think she wants to go to a major house yet. And he's like: 'OK, because her numbers are amazing at Borders.'"
The boom in sales isn't restricted to Woods alone, according to Henderson.
"Street fiction authors are selling 20,000 copies in a matter of two or three months. These are numbers you even can't ignore in a major, non-African-American author! The numbers speak for themselves. And guess what? Big publishers want those numbers, too."
Next page: Do black men read fiction?