Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Though he found temporary part-time work as a waiter and bellhop, this did little to improve his finances in any substantial way. He turned again to fiction, trying unsuccessfully to write for the slick magazines. He did manage to sell again to Esquire, stories that Fabre and Margolies characterize as expressing “a mix of melancholy and unrelenting fury.”13 “The Visiting Hour” appeared in September 1936, “The Night’s For Cryin’” the following January. “Headwaiter,” also from this period and first published in the National Urban League’s Opportunity as “Salute to the Passing,” memorializes Himes’s boss at his first job out of prison, when uncle Andrew arranged for Chester to wait tables part-time at Wade Park Manor Hotel, the very place Chester had met his accident in the elevator.

  Himes continued to work at his writing, squeezing out stories and recasting several as plays, among them a homoerotic tale of two prisoners titled “Idle Hours.” During this period he also continued writing and rewriting his prison novel. At least three distinct drafts of it exist, along with fragments. And if writing never quite turned the corner from avocation, nor seemed likely to do so anytime soon, Himes did begin to find supporters and sponsors. One was his cousin Henry Lee Moon, then working as a federal housing official in Washington and later to become publicity director for the NAACP, who read Chester’s work, told him what he thought, even suggested possible venues for publication. Through Joe he met editors and writers for magazines like Opportunity and The Crisis, for which he himself began writing stories and strident editorials. Sidney Williams, director of the Cleveland Urban League, and politician-minister Grant Reynolds also offered Himes advice and support.

  Editor N. R. Howard of the Cleveland Daily News, who had read Chester’s work in Esquire, supposedly took him under wing as well; they’d sit talking for hours about writing and books, Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children among others. While local newspapers at the time didn’t employ blacks (one editor telling Chester that he couldn’t hire him if he was Jesus Christ reincarnated), Himes always maintained that he wrote fifty pieces titled “This Cleveland” for Howard, who paid him out of pocket, a dollar apiece. A typically hyperbolic 1946 letter to Carl Van Vechten ups the ante on all this: “I wrote by-line articles for the CIO weekly organ, the Union Leader, and then the daily vignettes for the editorial page of the Cleveland News which were very popular (one or two were reprinted in the New Yorker). I wrote for two or three Cleveland magazines.”14 No such columns or evidence of same exist in the newspaper’s files; a single draft for what may have been intended as such a piece is among Himes’s papers at Yale.

  Sometime in August Himes made his most important new contact. When Oberlin graduates Russell and Rowena Jelliffe opened the Karamu House as a neighborhood arts center in 1927, one of their most faithful patrons was high-school student Langston Hughes. Now Hughes had become well known, and Karamu House stood alone in regularly producing plays written and performed by Negroes; they remained loosely associated. Hughes was impressed enough by two plays Himes submitted, reworkings of “To What Red Hell?” and “Day After Day,” that, while the plays were passed over, the two became friends of a sort. Hughes would later champion Himes’s first novel, recommending it to his own publisher, Blanche Knopf. He would also provide introductions for Himes in New York and Los Angeles.

  The year before, Karamu House had staged Hughes’s Little Ham, a slapstick comedy set in the Harlem of the twenties, whose lead character, shoeshine boy and ladies’ man Hamlet Hitchcock Jones, seems in direct contradiction to its author’s manifestoes for a new Negro literature.

  The movement in which Hughes had become a major figure, the Harlem Renaissance, reflecting monumental changes in American society and within the Negro intelligentsia, attained its zenith about the time Himes entered prison.

  In the period from 1890 to 1920 with the breakneck transition of their social base from peasantry to urban proletariat, blacks suffered a dislocation second only to slavery. Doubling its population, Harlem became a discrete metropolis within the greater metropolis of New York City; it became, also, a kind of racial capital. The times were a rare cocktail of postwar catharsis, Jazz Age liberties, defiance of authority, sexual revolution, and spiritual alienation. White society romanced the Negro, setting him up as a symbol of freedom from restraint—the innocent at his pleasure, unbound by strictures of civilization: the primitive. Blacks themselves, reversing assimilationist trends, entered into a period of self-discovery, searching for alternative values within their own tradition. In part this was fueled by waves of black nationalism taking forms as diverse as Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement and alignment with the Communist Party whose official gloss held that Negroes comprised an internal oppressed nation. Black self-realization had worked its way from the Niagara Movement, through Negro defense groups such as the NAACP and National Urban League, particularly by way of their house organs The Crisis and Opportunity, to this New Negro movement of the twenties.

  As LeRoi Jones pointed out in Blues People, the earliest black art ignored African-American culture, striving instead to join the mainstream. Only with the Harlem Renaissance’s New Negro did black writers and artists embrace their folk culture. The shift was from social mimicry to individuality, from a sense of the marginal (marginal both, as Negroes, to that mainstream culture and, as a cultured elite, to their own) to a sense of their own centrality. Not until the militant spirit of the sixties will we see again such concerted motive. The Harlem Renaissance dead-ended in the economic crash; reflecting the cynicism, disillusion, and dashed hopes of the time, that later movement shattered into pieces.

  Whatever was distinctly Negro, by Harlem School creed, was of folk or slave origin. Its practitioners recognized that Negro literature came of different roots than those of the dominant, white literature, roots based in the folktale, in exaggeration and in specific language arts. Such a distinctive literature required distinctive language; it would co-opt rhythms of jazz, inflections of the street, jive. And it would be more interested in interpreting Negro culture than in pleading the cause of racial justice. With Santayana, members of the Harlem School might have said that a culture could be judged only by the excellence, or example, of the individual life.

  Writing in The Nation in 1926, Langston Hughes proclaimed: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter … If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.”15

  The Depression broke the back of the Harlem Renaissance movement as it broke so many others. Primacies of survival reasserted themselves. Any black culture apart from the mainstream American culture seemed sheerest fantasy now. James Weldon Johnson had been correct: separate black institutions were contingent. Increasingly the black intelligentsia turned toward leftist movements, curling and tucking and holding their breaths to fit into the Procrustean bed of identification with the masses, with workers black and white alike moving together toward Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s “serene white light of a reasonable world.”

  Hughes’s sponsorship of Himes was not unreserved. In one 1946 essay, citing If He Hollers Let Him Go and Richard Wright’s Black Boy and sounding a bit Old Guard, Hughes called for “a good novel about good Negroes who do not come to a bad end,” pointing out that there were millions of Negroes “who never murder anyone, or rape or get raped or want to rape, who never lust after white bodies, or cringe before white stupidity, or Uncle Tom, or go crazy with race, or off-balance with frustration.”16 Asked to provide a blurb for Lonely Crusade, Hughes declined, writing to Blanche Knopf that “Most of the people in it just do not seem to me to have good sense or be in their right minds, they behave so badly, which makes it difficult to care very much what happens to any of them.”17

  With his first published novels, Himes had tried his level best to go with the times, writing stories of educated Negroes (so
ns of the rising black middle class, like those of the Harlem Renaissance) who (like the adaptive intellectuals they were) now pledged their talents to the great work of unionism. Himes never had much luck fitting his work to others’ standards, though. He’d aim his ship for India and hit America every time. He’d start out with this simple enough notion, a story for the slicks, a proletariat novel, a detective story, then intuition and improvisation would take over and the notion started squirming and changing and whipping about in his hand. As often as not, he wouldn’t even notice how it had changed fundamentally: that it had become something else. That he’d created, yet again, something profoundly against the tide and profoundly (the very word) unfashionable. In work as in life, for all his efforts and resolve, somehow Chester generally wound up going about things the hard way, standing ashore looking at the wreckage in the water about him, thinking Hell of a swim!

  The same month he met Hughes, on August 13, Himes made another important move: with the consent of his parole officer, he married Jean Johnson. Immediately the couple went off “to live by ourselves in a series of shabby rented rooms” and begin “slowly starving together.”18 Thin ice everywhere, the situation further complicated by Chester’s not wanting Jean to work. He felt it incumbent upon him to be provider, even if providings were slim. “She didn’t seem to mind too much, she was loyal and loving and she believed in me. But I began to feel cornered in a black world.”19 Uncle Roddy and Aunt Leah had the newlyweds over for dinner whenever they could, and sent them home with extra food. The marriage was strong in the face of all adversity. Jean and Chester loved one another deeply. She knew his background, had been with or beside him for years, knew at first hand his moodiness and explosive temper. Chester found new identity in the role of married man and provider, new sources of strength in his wife’s steady initiative. He was no longer alone.

  Several descriptions exist of the young couple during this period. Pearl Moody, Chester’s supervisor at the Cleveland Public Library, where he soon found work, spoke of him as a remarkably attractive, capable young man, but “nervous, restless, not at all settled in his ways.”20 Co-worker Ruth Seid (who then had published a couple of stories and later wrote novels under the name Jo Sinclair) talked endlessly about books with Chester and often joined the couple for cheap evenings out. Chester was a charmer, she said, handsome and articulate.21 Jean was his perfect counterpart: every bit as intelligent and articulate as Chester, every bit as attractive, and crazy about him into the bargain.

  Dan Levin got to know them when he put word out for writers for his new magazine Crossroad. He’d later serve as model for Lonely Crusade’s Abe Rosenberg. Chester struck him from the first as “hurt, high strung and brilliant,”22 Jean as rather reserved but possessed of great dignity and poise. Levin described standing at the window watching Himes stride away forcefully from their initial meeting with Jean walking “calmly beside him as if steadying him to keep him from blazing away like an angry comet.”23

  A brief stint as WPA laborer precipitated a flurry of letters to local and state officials pointing out his status as a writer, whereupon Chester was reassigned to the library. He began as a research assistant writing vocational bulletins and earning ninety-five dollars a month; within the year, promoted to writer, he was engaged in writing a 75,000-word history of Ohio and, by 1940, a Cleveland Guide. Neither saw print.

  Quite aside from providing employment to hundreds of writers during the Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project became important on other counts. Within its closed society, Negroes were accepted on a basis of social equality—this in a period when black and white musicians could record together only surreptitiously. Through the government workers’ union the Project also brought writers into position with the American labor movement, an association that was to have far-reaching effect. This would also provide settings for Himes’s first published novels.

  Here, too, Himes managed to make a bed he had trouble lying in. Demoted to research assistant for an irreverent piece he wrote concerning struggles between nineteenth-century Shakers and Mennonites, he was restored only after another burst of letters to state and national directors and, finally, FDR himself. Possibly his cousin Henry Lee Moon intervened as well.

  The stories published during this period are odd ones. As in Himes’s early stories, race recedes in order to foreground other concerns, there prison experience, here abject need. Humiliation and despair are everywhere in these stories. “A Modern Fable” deals with the shooting of Harold A. McDull, who “oozes” Americanism and wants to end the WPA because it costs too much, by citizen and onetime “true believer” Henry Slaughter. “Looking Down the Street” finds a man in utter extremis, starved and freezing, hoping for “the biggest Goddam war that was ever fought” to save him. “With Malice Toward None” ends with a passage previously quoted: “All that day … 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.”24 Interestingly, Himes’s characters now have acquired wives whom they cannot support.

  Himes himself, meanwhile, was well on his way to being unmanned as never before, not even by prison, by his failure to provide for Jean.

  His parents’ troubled marriage still much in his mind, Himes must have equated his father’s failures to provide with his own failure, and remembered Joseph’s crumbling manhood. Often he would react to inner turmoil with promiscuous behavior and with drinking, both of which served only to compound his self-contempt, then turn his bloated fury against Jean. Later he would put names to the serpents uncoiling then in his chest. He would come to understand poverty as the source of despair, a kind of bottomless well. He would perceive poverty as both origin and reflection of the racism he saw all about him, in every aspect and mien of American life. And he would wonder again and again at poverty’s social, psychological, and sexual consequences.

  Of that time he wrote: “While on the Writers’ Project I did not feel the racial hurt so much … My domestic life was happy and we were all, black and white alike, bound together into the human family by our desperate struggle for bread.”25

  Years later, long after Jean had disappeared from his life, he would write of the marriage’s decline: “… I had convinced myself I was a failure as a writer, and poverty and loneliness and our enforced separation had convinced me I was a failure as a husband. After fourteen years of love and marriage we had lost each other.”26

  4

  The Things a Writing Man Will Do

  Particulars of a life accumulate, thickets of incident and action we look back on later, try to see through.

  In fall of 1941, Jean and Chester Himes joined the waves of hopefuls breaking on California’s beach: poor whites trying to get out from under Depression hard times, blacks fleeing Jim Crow laws to seek work in shipyards and munitions plants, soldiers and sailors gearing up for the gathering war. Chester came hoping for work in the studios, the dream of living by his writing reborn. He carried his Esquire stories and a draft of Black Sheep from studio to studio but was turned down everywhere. Later he claimed that he stalked out of one story conference because of the racial attitudes of other writers. This may be true but sounds suspiciously like Himes self-reinvention. It’s far more likely from what we know that he would have been on his best behavior as he made the rounds and that whatever stalking out there was took place afterward, verbally, before Jean. Jack Warner’s simple interdiction “I don’t want no niggers on this lot,” Himes said, reversed his employment as a script reader. He was also considered, but finally passed over, as publicity writer for Cabin in the Sky starring Ethel Waters, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Lena Home, none of whom, he liked to point out, could be served in the MGM commissary.

  Mounting a Greyhound in Columbus, Chester and Jean rode it to the continent’s edge in Los Angeles, half expecting (as one perennially does with each relocation, each new quest, ea
ch rebirth or reinvention of self) to disembark in a different world. Back in heartland Ohio, Chester had joined the queues of the bedraggled seeking work at Cuyahoga Valley’s thriving private industries, American Wire & Steel, Warner & Swasey, the Aluminum Company of America, only to be turned down day after day, week after week. Helplessness, frustration, and rage rose in him like sap. He thought his subsequent withdrawal to Malabar Farm might assuage these feelings but finally decided that he was only hiding out there.

  Himes’s citizenship had been fully restored the previous March when he petitioned the governor for termination of parole. In July that year, Chester and Jean visited cousin Henry Lee Moon in New York. Moon, now working as a writer and editor for the NAACP, had married Molly Lewis, herself a well-known intellectual, who became Chester’s model for Pinktoes’ Harlem hostess Mamie Mason. The trip didn’t pan out as Himes had intended, many of the people he had wanted to meet proving unavailable, though he enjoyed the time spent with Moon, toward whom he was surprisingly deferential. The trip also provided Himes with his first glimpse of the city that would prove so important to his work—a city he always loved, widow Lesley Himes says, even after he’d grown to feel that he could no longer possibly live there.

  Early that year also, Himes became involved with the Council of Industrial Organizations, purportedly writing articles on CIO history for the Cleveland Industrial Council’s yearbook and the Cleveland Union Leader. With many others, Himes believed that the fledgling organization, which unlike the American Federation of Labor neither catered to skilled laborers nor excluded Negroes, offered blacks a rare chance for advancement. Experiences here, his early enthusiasm and eventual disillusion, his belief that organized labor never understood Negro psychology and Negro needs but instead merely exploited them to its own ends, would become central to If He Hollers and Lonely Crusade.