by James Sallis
Cast the First Stone is structured around four relationships, each marking a period of Jimmy’s development. Mal shows up early in the book to appoint himself Jimmy’s tutor-protector. Adamantly against “degeneracy,” he steers Jimmy clear of those “filthy sons of bitches” and instructs him in the small ways a man can maintain dignity in prison surroundings. The friendship comes to an end with the fire, when Jimmy, at the edge of hysteria, tells Mal “I want you for my woman.” Next is Blocker, after Jimmy gets transferred into the cripple company. Presented in more or less idealistic terms, this is the most uncomplicated relationship, as Jimmy learns to fit in; he and Blocker become central to prison society, buddies who might easily stride off together into the film’s closing moments. With Blocker’s parole Jimmy befriends Metz, who offers something new: “His conversation was a relief from the stale, monotonous babble of the prison. I’d get away from that when we talked … Metz was the first really decent fellow whom I had met in prison, although Blocker was my only true friend.”38
The final, all-important relationship, coming after Jimmy drifts to the very rim of madness then solidly back, is with Duke Dido. They’re of an age, and Jimmy must see in Dido something of himself as newcomer five years before. Jimmy’s commitment is instant, total. The two become inseparable, denounced, and persecuted by other convicts for whom same-sex acts are the norm but who can’t accept such passionate engagement. When Dido is transferred to the girl-boy company, Jimmy insists upon going along, but the warden transfers him to the prison farm instead. Dido, a naif who unlike Jimmy never was able to adapt to prison life, hangs himself.
I knew, beyond all doubt, that he had done it for me. He had done it to give me a perfect ending. It was so much like him to do this one irrevocable thing to let me know for always that I was the only one. Along with the terrible hurt I could not help but feel a great gladness and exaltation.39
Letters, drafts, and anecdotal evidence validate the Dido story in both broad outline and detail. Duke Dido was in real life Prince Rico. Whereas Himes’s previous relationship, with a Catholic called Lively in one early draft of Cast the First Stone, was never consummated (despite Himes’s devotion being such that he enrolled in catechism classes and probably converted), Rico and Himes quickly became lovers. They read to one another, wrote plays and an opera called Bars and Stripes Forever together, talked endlessly about movies they’d seen, called one another by pet names. Early drafts of the novel contain letters and instances of more frank romance between the lovers. Upon publication of Cast the First Stone in 1952, Himes wrote to Carl Van Vechten that the most fulfilling relationship he had ever had was with the character he’d called Dido in that novel.
One bond between Himes and Prince Rico was their strong need for fantasy. Like Luis and Valentin in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, they talked endlessly of movies and their stars, pored over movie magazines. Himes felt a similar draw to stories in the slick popular magazines, experiencing as he read them “all the soft, mushy emotions”40 forbidden him by the prison experience and by his own obdurate nature. Subsequent shame over his sentimentality, he wrote, would lead him to become “invariably more vulgar, obscene, callous,”41 as though two men coexisted (and in many ways they did) inside Chester’s skull. Himes’s early plots, too, careen from familiar hard-boiled attitudes to frank sentimentality.
That same double consciousness emerged in somewhat different form in correspondence with Van Vechten:
As I look back now I feel that much of my retardation as a writer has been due to a subconscious (and conscious and deliberate) desire to escape my past. All mixed up no doubt with the Negro’s desire for respectability and such. It brought a lot of confusion to my own mind, added to which was a great deal of pressure of a thousand kinds being exerted by friends and relatives and loved ones who were half ashamed of what I wrote, forgetting that it was what I wrote that made me what I was, until I was caught in a bag which I didn’t begin to break out of until I wrote If He Hollers. I wrote that defiantly, more or less, at the time without thought of it being published.42
Indeed, Stephen Milliken finds in this biform nature, this constant tug to discrete ends, the central critical problem presented by Himes’s work. The work has obvious power, he asserts. It rarely fails to claim and move the reader.
Yet at all points in every part of Himes’s work weaknesses of the most obvious kind are evident. The author seems continually to be choosing, for example, the more striking effect for its impact value alone, or to be choosing the most tired cliché available in full and triumphant knowledge of its falsity and tawdriness. He can in fact be embarrassingly bad, and yet the apparent weaknesses in Himes’s work seem somehow to be essential to the strengths.43
Cast the First Stone ends with Jimmy looking back at the prison on his way to the farm: “You big tough son of a bitch, you tried to kill me but I’ve got you beat now, I thought.”44 So does Himes’s first-written novel become, finally, a story of redemption, for its author as much as its protagonist. In prison, in his stories, and especially in this novel, Chester Himes learned how our lives can be ransomed, if forever imperfectly, by the relationships we manage and by literature. Chester Himes, always “the hardbitten old pro”45 Life magazine made him out to be, never one to take advice, never one to do things the right or expected or easy way. He’d create his books the same way he steered his life, by impulse and instinct, and if the life boiled over into chaos, then it would be a very personal kind of chaos, and the work that lanced out from it, those messages and novels, would be just as personal—like no light ever seen before.
In that idiosyncrasy, Himes’s work seems peculiarly, unmistakably American. As a nation, as individuals, our strengths often rise directly from our weaknesses. We’ve a particular genius for quirkiness, for getting the job done despite ourselves. As has been suggested already, Himes’s greatest strength as a writer lay precisely in his ability to confront the unresolvable tensions and contradictions within himself, to draw them out in all their untowardness and give them temporizing shape.
In the wake of the Easter morning fire and subsequent disclosure of prison conditions—beginning with 4,000 inmates housed in a facility built for 1,800—special review boards had been set up and many prisoners’ sentences commuted to the statutory minimum. Following six months at the prison farm, having now served seven and a half years of his twenty to twenty-five-year sentence, on April 1,1936, Himes was paroled to his mother’s custody. He stepped back out from that small world whose hard rules he had learned into a confusing, larger, somehow forever soft world, a world you could never quite get a hold on—and into the arms of the Depression.
3
“One Way to Be a Nigger”
In his story “On Dreams and Reality” Himes tells of a young man returning home from prison with high hopes of a new life, only to find his family living in one squalid room, hanging on by the barest of threads. The story is a miniature, perfect tragedy, paralleling the failures of the prisoner unable to make his way in the outside world with the general failures of the Depression.
“In the stagnant isolation of prison, dreams grow as tall as redwood trees,”1 that story begins as James “Happy” Trent awaits release. Reentry with all its joys and terrors must have been much on Himes’s mind, before and after his own. “Every Opportunity” presents another ex-con’s inability to break old habits despite best intentions, and, in the kind of abrupt, revelatory ending Himes favored for a time (a kind of shattering of the text), his return to prison. Other stories deal with memory and dreams that let prisoners go on—to them, there is little difference between memory and dream—and with irruptions of reality. Nailed awake by his sense of loss in “Face in the Moonlight,” a prisoner half dreams, half remembers the life that brought him here. “I Don’t Want to Die” gives us the reveries of a prisoner with a terminal disease, “His Last Day” the experience of a man pacing down his final hours to execution. Both these last stories evidence the evocat
ion of physical detail and the sensual surface, simultaneously lush and spare, that become a Himes trademark.
“The Meanest Cop in the World” drops us with great immediacy into a poor college student’s wondrous fortune at meeting the beautiful Violet, then tears us from the dream, as he himself is torn from it, when for absolutely no reason a policeman shows up in the dream to attack him.
And then suddenly Jack realized that he wasn’t a freshman in a nice old college, and he wasn’t in love with a pretty girl called Violet, that he didn’t even know such a girl, that he was just convict number 10012 in a dark, chilly cell, and he had eaten too many beans at supper. But for hours afterward he lay there silently cursing the huge policeman who had made him realize this.2
Again and again, rents are torn in the sky, in walls thought solid, and unwanted truths push their way into his characters’ worlds.
Amorphous fear, occult oppression, were by then signature Himes. Yet another story ends: “All that day, copying records down at the city hall, half blind with a hangover and trembling visibly, he kept cursing something. He didn’t know exactly what it was and he thought it was a hell of a thing when a man had to curse something without knowing what it was.”3
Whereas the stories of the thirties deal mostly with prison and criminals, in the forties Himes began to extend his reach. He had become, inasmuch as he would ever align himself with any movement, a social activist, publishing fiction and articles in the National Urban League’s Opportunity and the NAACP’s Crisis. In part this was typical Himes role-playing, in part the usual writerly trying on of new masks, in part simply the result of new opportunities for publication. But stories such as “Black Laughter” and “All He Needs Is Feet” reflect Himes’s deeper awareness of the great American inequation; many of them edge toward attitudes and preoccupations we closely associate with the mature writer.
And although he tried to get outside this teaching of America, it was inside of him, making him scared … Not of being lynched; this was Cleveland, Ohio. They don’t hang Negroes in the north; they have other and more subtle ways of killing them.4
Or this from the same story, “All God’s Chillun Got Pride,” published nine years before Himes’s expatriation:
Having been educated in America, he had learned of course that living and breathing unaccompanied by certain other inalienable rights, such as liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were of small consequence; but he had learned, also, that this ideology did not apply to him. He never really sat down and thought about it for any length of time; because he knew that if he ever did, living in America would become impossible.5
Subsequently incorporated in Lonely Crusade, this story seems a landmark on several fronts. It offers what amounts to a prototype of the emerging Himes protagonist: a well-educated, articulate personality disintegrating under pressures of circumstance, pervasive fear, and his own self-destructive patterns. Compulsively he analyzes himself, picking at the scab, but he can never get at the wound. The story exhibits, moreover, an adroit use of reimagined autobiography prefiguring Himes’s first novels and, most importantly, The Primitive.
In much the same way that the free-floating fear of “All God’s Chillun Got Pride” transports us to If He Hollers territory (“I felt torn all loose inside, shrivelled, paralyzed, as if after a while I’d have to get up and die”6), stories like “A Night of New Roses” underline Himes’s castings-about with hypotheses on their way to becoming axioms, here an equation of racial pain with personal. By the time we reach “Daydream,” we’re deep into Himesland. A wild and woolly tale of wreaking vengeance on white Southern peckerwoods fades to a black man sitting alone in his New York hotel room: “‘You are sick, son,’ I said to my smiling reflection. After a moment I added, ‘But that isn’t anything to worry about. We are all sick. Sicker than we know.’”7
In these stories Himes, as always, worked by instinct, blindly feeling his way through rooms of unaccustomed furniture, eccentric doorways, sudden walls. From all accounts he wrote in a state of fervid excitement, flailing away at the material with both hands. Chips of logic and emotion fell where they might. Yet his face begins recognizably to emerge.
Reimagined autobiography, along with a new sense of structure and with an intensity deriving more from that structure, from interiority and from the language itself than from incident, all come together in “Da-Da-Dee,” a remarkably mature story from 1948 whose protagonist shares his author’s alcoholic blackouts, dalliance with radicalism in L.A., and residence at an artist’s colony (here called Skiddoo). Written in the wake of hostile criticism for his early novels and amidst the wreckage of his marriage to Jean, the story is a virtual sketch for The Primitive; its protagonist even plans a story titled I Was Looking for a Street, a title Himes will attribute to alter ego Jesse in that novel. Here Jethro Adams, genius kid turned writer turned drunk, lies abed thinking over the course of his life. When they started talking about how things could be you believed them, didn’t you? he tells himself.
He felt as if nothing would ever matter again one way or another. He thought it was something Congress Street did to him … It was like going back to Central Avenue, a street of dives and whores of which he had been a part at seventeen and nothing mattered but the night. It was like putting behind him everything that he had learned and experienced since and going back to that year of vice and indifference. He was never meant to be anything but a cheap, smiling gambler with a flashy front, he told himself. He was a simple man.8
The Chester Himes who stepped to freedom from the Ohio State Penitentiary on April 1, 1936, was anything but a simple man. He had survived. Learned what he had to, done what he had to, to survive. He had seen the worst in man and, in rare instances, as when inmates labored to save others during the Easter fire, he had seen the best as well. He had found friendship and, briefly, love. And if he had been to some degree unmanned (as he must have been) by the prison experience, as by racism and by his own self-destructive urges, prison had also given him, in his writing, a means of redirecting pain and anger, a field phone he had only to crank and spark to discharge those emotions, to use them.
The state of Ohio ended Himes’s disability payments just weeks prior to his release. What money he’d had in prison was gone, some of it put toward Joe’s college expenses. “Broke and without income for the first time in my adult life,”9 Himes must have felt himself shipwrecked on the Depression’s shores. Back in Columbus Joe was completing his doctorate in sociology; soon he’d begin working as an administrator for the Columbus Urban League. Estelle kept house for Joe, and herself would soon return to South Carolina. Theirs was an orderly, directed life. They must have awaited Chester’s return with profoundly mixed feelings.
Chester, of course, had profoundly mixed feelings of his own. He emerged into a changed world. Now twenty-six years old, having survived and come to his manhood in one of the toughest prisons in America, suddenly, from lack of money and from parole stipulations, he found himself in a state of almost childlike dependency. Still, he resolved that, despite the marks against him, despite the Depression, he would make his way by sheer force of will and innate talent. He would be, was, a writer.
First, though, he’d take time out: after all those years locked away, he deserved the chance to savor his freedom. One wonders, too, if rebelliousness against his dependency on Estelle and Joe may have been as much a factor in his behavior as simple recidivism. At any rate, soon he was back among whores in the city’s black slums. He was also back among gamblers, pimps, and other ex-convicts. This, we assume, he kept from Estelle, as he had earlier kept secret his work at Bunch Boy’s. But she smelled the women on him when he came home in the early hours, leading to “such dreadful rows that Joe had to intervene.”10
Characteristically, Himes boasted in his memoirs that the Columbus whores serviced him free, presumably for his general attractiveness, charm, and educated manner as much as for his prodigious sexual appetite.
I didn’t ha
ve any money so I had to look for whores I could have for free. There were numerous white whores in the black ghettos of Columbus at the time, and I had success because I took them out, so long as they paid. Of course I had to keep out of the way of their pimps. Several times landlords had to intervene to keep me from being shot.11
He also tells of being persuaded by a group of ex-cons to go along with them to “Georgia,” a teenage black whore, that is, to use her then not pay her, and, touched by her tears as she realized what was going on, of refusing to take part. That split-hair moral stance within what was from any perspective a contemptible situation seems typically Himes, as does his derisory final word on the matter: “I learned afterwards that all the others had caught gonorrhea from her.”12
Another instance of easy acquiescence finally pushed Estelle to action. One Sunday, telling Estelle he had to go see about a job, Chester instead joined a young man he knew slightly to smoke marijuana and returned to the house so high that he thought he was having a heart attack. (His description of his response to the drug takes up two full pages and recalls more than anything else “psychedelic” sequences from sixties movies.) Chester admitted marijuana use to the doctor, who passed the admission on to his mother, who immediately dressed and left for a long tête-à-tête with Chester’s parole officer. The following week, parole was reassigned to his father.
Chester arrived in Cleveland in July. Joseph at that time was working for the WPA as a mechanics teacher. He lived in a two-room flat off Cedar Avenue on Ninety-third Street and spent much of his free time with a woman friend. Mostly he left Chester alone and to his own devices, as he’d always done. So while Chester’s economic prospects remained grim, at least he had escaped his mother’s oppressive witness and the resentment he felt at forced dependence on her. He no longer like a bad conjurer had to obscure his every move with misdirection and quick patter. Any man that long shut away under the supervision of others must hunger to be his own man. Add in Chester’s age and obstinacy, and the hunger becomes volatile.
