Chester Himes
Page 6
The squad were startled, then displeased, when Himes confessed to a burglary in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, instead of the hotel robbery, but there was little they could do. Accompanied by an insurance agent to identify the jewelry, a detective came out from Cleveland to retrieve Himes.
Estelle visited him at Cuyahoga County jail, crying “My poor boy, you were so brilliant”—already speaking in the past tense, Himes notes. His father secured a lawyer for him and on one visit, touchingly, brought along the back brace Chester had stopped wearing long ago. On December 18, 1928, Judge Walter McMahon handed down the sentence: twenty to twenty-five years of hard labor. Himes was remanded to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus nine days after sentencing, on December 27, and remained there until September 21, 1934. At that time he was transferred to the London Prison Farm before being paroled to his mother’s custody on April 1st, 1936. Chester would later say that he grew to manhood in prison.
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One year before the gates clanged shut behind Himes, in 1927, Al Jolson peered out from blackface and the screen of the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, to tell the audience “You ain’t heard nothing yet.”
The twenties were an economic house of cards, borne up by hopefulness at the end of the war and about to collapse into the Great Depression. Fitzgerald gave us, in Gatsby, the era’s representative character. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis pilloried middle-class complacency and the oxymoron of received wisdom. Dos Passos and Hemingway wrote of the great dislocations and disillusionments of wartime. W. E. B. Du Bois had his say about Negroes and the war in 1919:
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.1
Meanwhile America managed to scare itself half to death over the boogeyman of Communism, paving the way for demagogues like J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. With mainstream society pitched full tilt against foreign influences, perhaps also as aftermath to the race riots that occurred in many major American cities in 1917–19, the Ku Klux Klan revived, claiming five million members by 1924.
Unemployment reached 50 percent, turning the highways and ditches, as John Steinbeck wrote, into swarms of migrants looking for work. Henry Ford remarked what a great education those young folks were going to get from all this traveling about.
FDR jacked up the wreck our economy had become and started hammering out dents, establishing the relief programs and federal projects his predecessor the ever-patrician Herbert Hoover categorically rejected. FDR also took himself directly to the American people with his fireside chats. In conservative, well-to-do households he became reviled as “that man.” In poorer ones he was the closest thing they’d seen to a savior outside church. Blacks in vast numbers deserted the Republican Party, their home since Reconstruction, for FDR’s Democrats.
“I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary,”2 Himes wrote. He was nineteen when he went through the gate, twenty-six when he came back out. He learned what he had to do to survive, he said, or he wouldn’t have, even if at the time he didn’t realize he was learning. “On occasion, it must have seemed to others that I was bent on self-destruction.”3
Here we come to a major enigma of Himes’s memoirs. In two books totalling 743 pages, only six pages are devoted to Himes’s years in prison. Of these almost a full page is given to disclaimers of homosexuality, most of another to gambling, two to his writing. If prison was the chief turning point of his life, and it must have been, why then do we have so little information here about it? This, again, is the overarching problem with the memoirs: throughout, Himes skips lightly over central issues, barely touching down, while lingering on peripheral matters. Little is shown of the inner life and a great deal of the outer: clothing, pets, cars, visitors, apartments, quarrels. It’s a curious lens through which to watch. Rarely have candor and reticence so cohabited. Himes makes a very odd kind of hero of himself, picking open wounds one moment, telling us nothing can touch him the next.
There’s little doubt that prison was the first major pivot point of Himes’s life. H. Bruce Franklin writes in Prison Literature in America:
Himes’s achievement as a writer of fiction, indeed his very existence as an author, came directly from his experience in prison, which shaped his creative imagination and determined much of his outlook on American society.4
Franklin goes on to say that looking back at those early stories of the 1930s one finds, along with overwhelming evidence both of his power and internal contradictions, the very matrix of Himes’s vision: the stamp of characteristic images and symbols that would occupy him for his forty years as a writer.
Himes’s voiced feelings about prison remained deeply ambivalent. “Nothing happened in prison that I had not already encountered in outside life,”5 he wrote at one point. At another: “It is nonsense, even falsehood, to say that serving seven and a half years in one of the most violent prisons on earth will have no effect on a human being. But as far as I could determine at the time, and for a long time afterwards, the only effect it had on me was to convince me that people will do anything—white people, black people, all people. Why should I be surprised when white men cut out some poor black man’s nuts, or when black men eat the tasty palms of white explorers?”6 Beginning the memoirs by speaking of his reasons for moving to Europe, Himes wrote:
I don’t remember them clearly. It was like the many impressions my seven and a half prison years had made on me: I knew that my long prison term had left its scars, I knew that many aspects of prison life had made deep impressions on my subconscious, but now I cannot distinctly recall what they are or should have been. I find it necessary to read what I have written in the past about my prison experiences to recall any part of them … And I think it has partly convinced me … that I can never again be hurt as much as I have already been hurt, even though I should live one hundred thousand years.7
In addition, imprisonment largely severed any remaining intimate connections with his family (a fact that Himes, subconsciously at least, may have welcomed), so that we have no secondary sources concerning this period. Eddie had vanished. Joseph Sandy was working at menial jobs when he could find them, living in a squalid apartment. Joe concentrated on school work while Estelle kept house for him. Only future wife Jean Johnson could have told us; sadly, she never did.
Because Himes wrote so little about the experience in his memoirs, then, and given this utter lack of alternative sources, most of our information (as in the passage above he said of his own) must come obliquely from reading what he wrote elsewhere. We proceed, wobbling and trying to make them ours, on legs of conjecture and extrapolation. The short stories are of some use in catching up the moods of prison life, more so in documenting Himes’s development as a writer. And whatever land mines it may contain, the best plot of ground we have on which to build remains his prison novel, first published as Cast the First Stone. (A recent restoration of the original version, published as Yesterday Will Make You Cry, will be discussed in Chapter 10.)
At the end of that book’s first chapter, new inmate Jimmy Monroe lies abed at night recalling his disgrace at the Chicago police station, thinking how strange everything is, and remembering his fear upon arrival. The fear has not vanished; it’s still there, will always be there in the background; but now a kind of acceptance builds as well.
I turned my head and looked out the window that was just a little above the level of my eyes. I saw the moon in a deep blue sky and a guard-turret with spotlights down the walls. I saw the guard silhouetted against the sky, a rifle cradled in his arm, the intermittent glow of the cigarette in his mouth. I saw the long black sweep of the walls … When you looked at the walls your vision stopped. Everything stopped at the walls. The walls were about fifty feet from the dormitory building. Just fifty feet away was freedom, I thought. Fifty feet—and twenty years.8
No one who has forfeited freedom for whatever reason, even briefly, ever forgets what it was like the moment those doors swung shut
behind. Absolutely no part of your life belongs to you anymore; you’re utterly at the mercy of others. The very thought of prison was terrible, of course, to Himes as to character Jimmy Monroe. There were strange, wholly irrational rules at work here. Yet prison life was unspeakably mundane. “It was all anticlimax,” Himes wrote. “All seven and a half years of it.”9
Time no longer exists. There is only the monotonous procession of days, each of them as featureless as every other, until finally you find yourself longing for eruptions of violence, an attempted escape, rioting—anything that will break the dull chain, make you feel alive again, even if only for a moment. Each identical morning you get up and put on your gray stained underwear and sweat-stiffened socks and the bagged stinking trousers you wear week after week and stand in line to wash your face in water so cold that the rock-hard lye soap won’t lather, then try to dry your face on a greasy towel that only smears the water and dirt around. You stand up on command from your breakfast of bread, watery oatmeal with powdered milk and sausages cold-welded to aluminum plates by congealed grease, go across one or another of crisscrossing brick sidewalks to the tin shop, or the mill, or back to the dormitory with its rows of double-decked bunks.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are barbershop days. Friday everyone gets a three-minute bath. There’s sick call Monday, Wednesday, and Friday but you learn that if you complain of cramps they’ll take you to the hospital right away. At night the bugs swarm. They fall onto your pillow and face, drop to the floor too bloated with blood to move. Once, trying to smoke them out, you set your mattress afire and your bunkmate puts it out with the bucket of stale urine you both use as a toilet.
Joseph Sandy visited Chester only once in those years. Chester claimed that it wasn’t so much visit as forage; that his father came to him for money and walked off with most of Chester’s earnings from gambling. Estelle visited regularly at first, but in 1932 moved with Joe Jr. to Arkansas, where he had a teaching position. When Joe returned to Columbus and graduate school at Ohio State two years later, Estelle resumed regular visits. Jean Johnson was a stalwart visitor.
Just as he mines The Third Generation for information about Himes’s early life with caution, the critic approaches Cast the First Stone as documentation of Himes’s prison experience at his own peril—and if the critic is at peril, the biographer is doubly so. Multiple problems present themselves.
First, of course, there’s the general question as to what proportion and portions of the novel are directly autobiographical, what reconstructed or reimagined autobiography, and what fully fictive. This is a difficult enough question in its pure form, but to complicate things still further, the novel existed in several avatars as Himes rewrote it over the decade it took to get published. Its black protagonist somewhere along the way became white; Himes’s original title was Black Sheep. Also, in the published version, probably at the behest of Himes’s editor, the story gets updated to the years just after World War II, the occasional anachronism flashing like a Victorian ankle from beneath the skirt of this transformation.
In The Quality of Hurt Himes wrote: “I had made the protagonist of my prison story a Mississippi white boy; that ought to tell me something but I don’t know what—but obviously it was the story of my own prison experiences.”10 By 1976 and the second volume of the memoirs, however, he’d changed his mind: “My publishers wished to imply that the story in Cast the First Stone was the story of my life and problems and I wanted to state outright that it had nothing to do with me.”11 Much quite patently is from Himes’s own experience: the background on “all that stuff that happened in Chicago,”12 the general outline of the prison term, Jimmy’s awakening interest in writing, the pervasive sense of fear wrapped in deadly tedium.
Writing of prison creates, of course, a society in microcosm, abstracting social forms and strains to bold strokes, throwing them into high relief. The novel’s prison yard is described as though it were, say, a frontier town, workshop here, barber there, sidewalks, bath house, dining hall; Cast the First Stone easily might be read as an account of Jimmy Monroe’s socialization. On the one hand, deleting racial considerations falsifies the field. On the other—perhaps this is what Himes or his editor had in mind; we are, after all, by definition dealing with an artificial society—considerations of racism might draw attention away from other, primary issues.
A third major question here is that of homosexuality. The Quality of Hurt contains a 245-word disquisition on “wolves,” “wolverines,” “boy-girls,” “pussy without bone,” and Chester’s exemption from rape by dint of intimidating intelligence and an air of violence. In All Shot Up, Caspar Holmes’s closet homosexuality serves as symbol of the evil nature concealed beneath his outward goodness. John Babson in Blind Man with a Pistol, cooperating with Grave Digger and Coffin Ed because he is attracted to them, is treated by them with contempt and needless cruelty. The Primitive likewise voices disdain and disgust in such portrayals. Homosexuals in Himes, if they are not killers, are effeminate and ineffectual, moral weaklings, prostitutes—people to be used. Yet Cast the First Stone, particularly in its second half, is beyond question a love story, and while in prison Himes had relationships with at least two fellow convicts. Of course, it’s not at all unusual that men finding themselves in prison adapt to same-sex practices and continue so for years without ever considering themselves other than heterosexual.
Critic Stephen Milliken sums up the basic problem here vis-à-vis the memoirs, novels, and life lived.
Unfortunately, Himes did not choose, in his autobiography The Quality of Hurt (1972), to clarify in any detail the exact relation of fiction to fact in his three autobiographical novels of the early 1950s—Cast the First Stone (1952), The Third Generation (1954), and The Primitive (1955). The sections of his life that he explored so exhaustively in the novels are hastily sketched in The Quality of Hurt … The love affair that furnished the central theme for The Primitive is given only three pages. It is firmly established that almost all of the basic events that make up the plot structures of the three novels are factual, but no light at all is shed on the validity of the characterizations and patterns of motivation developed in the novels.13
As it turned out, Himes arrived at prison with survival kit well packed. Gambling was a major occupation in the closed prison society, and Himes soon discovered that his years hanging around Bunch Boy’s had prepared him well: “I survived, I suppose, because I knew how to gamble.”14 Soon he was gambling boss among black convicts. He kept it clean, headed off fights, stopped the cheating, did what he could to protect the chumps. His pension made him a rich man among poor. All in all, though, it was intelligence that proved his greatest advantage. His education and ability to negotiate payments with guards and disputes among prisoners became invaluable. Most fellow inmates were dull-witted, practically illiterate, and Himes found that he could talk them into almost anything.
Despite a relatively small stature at 5 feet 9 inches and 165 pounds, his violent air also gave him some measure of protection. He broke into such explosive rage that men twice his size would back away: “In my fits of insensate fury I would have smashed the world, crushed it in my hands, kicked down the universe.”15 But that violent air could just as easily back up on him. He wrote that he lost his temper constantly while gambling, and that it was a wonder he was still alive. Explosive episodes, along with his refusal of work assignments and disobedience of orders, led again and again to beatings, reduced rations, even solitary confinement. Once he was on starvation wages so long that his hair began falling out. He bore all his life the scars of head whippings.
They punished me in many more subtle ways which I have discovered to be peculiar to the white race. During my last year, when I was at the farm, the deputy warden, a sick man with a paralyzed arm, used to stand beside the dining-room door when we went to meals and wait for me so he could lean forward and grit his teeth at me.16
Intelligence and gambling acumen were two reasons Himes survived. He also
survived, not only in prison, but ultimately, for another reason: he became a writer. Prison would turn Chester Himes into a writer and simultaneously deliver to him a lifetime of subject matter.
Writing, Stephen Milliken suggests, gave Himes a foothold on treacherous ground, offering him some degree of mastery over the most painful, even all but unendurable, experiences. Certainly it helped him, if not to control, then at least to channel, his rage. We don’t really know what triggered this transformation. In the story “Prison Mass” Brightlights muses on his need for adulation, vowing no longer to seek that adulation as gambler, but as writer.
“I shall pass beneath this earth no common shade.” That was his motto now—I shall be no forgotten man. What was important in life? From his burning thoughts came the answer—ambition, achievement, fame.17
Himes himself gave several reasons for taking up writing. Not the least was the protection it afforded him. Fellow prisoners respected and superstitiously feared those who wrote. Guards thought twice before killing or too severely beating a prisoner known outside the walls, “or else convicts like Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver would never have gotten out of prison alive.”18 Filling the train of endless empty days and years doubtless played some part as well. In Cast the First Stone a murderer who’s befriended him tells Jimmy Monroe about a writing course he’s taking. When Jimmy questions this, saying that he understood writing to require talent, the man responds: “Oh, I don’t ever expect to really write any stories … I’m just studying this for something to do. You know a fellow has to do something.”19 When in the sixties Melvin Van Peebles, interviewing Himes in Paris, asked how it was that he became a writer, Chester responded: “I had a lot of free time.”20