Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  H. Bruce Franklin first pointed out that Himes’s novels form a concise social history of the United States from World War II through the black urban rebellions of the 1960s.5 Cotton Comes to Harlem was published on the eve of those rebellions, in 1964.

  Five years would pass before the appearance of the next and the final complete novel in the Harlem detective series, Blind Man with a Pistol. Himes published no novel at all during this period of the rebellions, as though waiting to see how they would turn out. In 1965 Himes met another convict, Malcolm X, and found that he thoroughly agreed with all his politics (but not with his religion). Two weeks later, Malcolm X was assassinated. Then in 1965–66, an America in upheaval began to discover Chester Himes. In 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated. The following year appeared Blind Man with a Pistol, whose subject is explicitly the black rebellions, the political and religious leadership of the black community, the disintegration of the power Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are supposed to enforce, and the beginnings of an apocalypse.6

  In a 1964 interview, recalling cousin Henry Moon’s contention upon reading If He Hollers that “these aren’t things that white people want to hear about,” things that should be kept quiet, between colored people, Himes remarked:

  My novel, which Malcolm X read when he was twenty, is a violent, angry story. I meant for it to be a shock treatment, the same kind of treatment that Malcolm X wanted to inflict on the American public. If He Hollers Let Him Go expressed feelings that black people had always known, things that were always kept quiet, but are today exploding into the American consciousness. My novel is being reprinted, in some measure because of today’s racial climate. But when it was written, even black people were shocked by what I wrote.7

  Violent and angry it is indeed. Bob Jones lives at the very border of double consciousness, out there on the edge of violence, one moment conforming, the next poised for open rebellion, “battered from emotional pillar to post by external pressures which he can’t control.”8 Anger flares at the slightest provocation: the borrowing of a tool, the impossible position he’s been put in as leaderman whose crew will not take his orders, his girlfriend’s accommodationist parents and good advice. Meeting the trampy, white Madge, he recognizes that she will prove the instrument of his destruction yet cannot stay away from her. For all his anger, all his fear, for all the times he goes out into the world with gun or club, Bob Jones will destroy himself before he destroys anyone else. This is the most pervasive criticism Himes makes of American society, Lundquist writes: that the black’s anger is turned back on himself, that his life is “wired for destruction.”9

  Halfway through the novel, Wednesday in a narrative running from Monday through Friday of a single week, Bob Jones admits that “I never knew before how good a job the white folks had done on me”10 and, earlier, that

  I was even scared to tell anybody. If I’d gone to a psychiatrist he’d have had me put away. Living everyday scared, walled in, locked up, I didn’t feel like fighting any more … I had to fight hard enough each day just to keep on living.11

  But of course Bob Jones has been put away—defined, reduced, and shelved, rendered ineffective—his life whittled down to mere existence: “I’m still here,” as he says at the end of a narrative in which he loses everything.

  Calling the former “a vicious and bitter commentary on American involvement in World War II,” Lundquist approaches both If He Hollers and Lonely Crusade as war novels. If He Hollers, he says, is “a nightmarish vision of American society as an enormous war factory” within which is going on a racial war not unlike those being waged without in the Pacific or at Auschwitz, one “fueled by racial hatred as much as it is by love of freedom or a commitment to the preservation of democracy.”12

  Propaganda said: America’s war against Hitler was in large part a war against Hitler’s racism, therefore by extension against the entire notion of white supremacy. Propaganda said: Surely this was the theater in which mankind’s new conscience would be forged. Surely, inevitably, a new era in race relations was now at hand.

  Truth, as so often, was something apart.

  “Every time a colored man gets in the Army he’s fighting against himself. Of course there’s nothing else he can do. If he refuses to go they send him to the pen. But if he does go and take what they put on him, and then fight so he can keep on taking it, he’s a cowardly son of a bitch.”

  Smitty had stopped his work to listen. “I wouldn’t say that,” he argued. “You can’t call colored soldiers cowards, man. They can’t keep the Army from being like what it is, but hell, they ain’t no cowards.”

  “Any man’s a coward who won’t die for what he believes … As long as the Army is Jim Crowed a Negro who fights in it is fighting against himself … You’ll never get anything from these goddamn white people unless you fight them … Isn’t that right, Bob?”

  “That’s right,” I said.13

  Early in the novel, trying to recall just when he became so terrified, Bob Jones thinks of his arrival in Los Angeles and his first applications for jobs. It wasn’t being refused employment that bothered him so much as the attitude. They wouldn’t tell him outright they wouldn’t hire him, but instead looked startled that he’d even ask—as though some friendly dog had come through the door and said “I can talk.”

  Maybe it had started then, I’m not sure, or maybe it wasn’t until I’d seen them send the Japanese away that I’d noticed it. Little Riki Oyana singing “God Bless America” and going to Santa Anita with his parents next day. It was taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance. Without a trial. Without a charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word. It was thinking about if they ever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones’s dark son, that started me to getting scared.

  After that it was everything. It was the look in the white people’s faces when I walked down the streets. It was that crazy, wild-eyed, unleashed hatred that the first Jap bomb on Pearl Harbor let loose in a flood. All that tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes. Every time I stepped outside I saw a challenge I had to accept or ignore. Every day I had to make one decision a thousand times: Is it now? Is now the time?14

  For Bob Jones carries in his heart like a serpent, and cannot set it loose, those very ideals America so constantly espouses. Steadfastly, for reasons he himself but partly understands, he refuses to acknowledge the tacit agreements of discrimination. He is the most intransigent of idealists, saying no to the folded lies, vocably preferring not to, insisting that the world be as it seems. And consuming himself in the process.

  In one key scene, giving Bob an ultimatum, accede to his inferior station with grace or she will end their engagement, fiancée Alice offers one reading of the book’s title. Blacks exist in the white world only by dint of sufferance, she says, ever dependent on the support and shelter of white patrons. They must never disturb those patrons, never trouble the waters. For if they do so, if they break the code—if they holler—they’ll be let go, to fall back into nothingness.

  On the textual level, If He Hollers demonstrates that jacking up of reality we’ve seen already in the stories, “magnifying normal emotions to pathological intensity,”15 in critic Robert Bone’s words. Every gleam of light on a surface is a blade, every glancing regard a blow, each rejection a measured apocalypse. Gilbert Muller adds:

  Filtered through Jones’s hard-boiled comic imagination, all people seem to be portrayed in absurd one-dimensional postures. This is not a naturalistic or realistic style but rather the style of the grotesque.16

  The narrative proceeds in the foreground by thematic repetition of key words and phrases—“beyond my control,” “I didn’t have a chance,” “I don’t have anything at all to say about what’s happening to me,” “the white folks sitting on my brain, controlling my every day and night,” various forms of to die as metaphor—and overall, similarly, by accrual of incidents which are basically variations on a theme. Though marvelous sce
nes abound, there’s little true narrative thrust, and the novel comes to a stop finally as much from the exhaustion of its effort—as though worn down, like Bob Jones, by the sheer weight of events—as from dramatic necessity.

  The whole of the story is a chain of ironies. In one incarnation of a principal Himes theme, that of demanding from a man what he is simultaneously barred from doing (remember the man with no feet, think of the detectives in Blind Man with a Pistol), Bob Jones is made leaderman with full knowledge that no one will follow his lead. In the course of the book Bob discovers that he cannot kill a white man and cannot rape a white woman, yet at book’s end he is jailed for attempted murder and rape. On the book’s last night Bob dreams of a sergeant who brags “I done killed all kinda sonabitches, raped all kinda women” and has been highly decorated for it, while Bob is about to be lynched for crimes which he did not commit.

  Its surface narrative a series of confrontations, understory a series of dreams, If He Hollers is, with The Primitive, Himes’s best structured work. Each morning of the book’s five days, Bob Jones wakes from dreaming. Not only do these dreams give local habitation and name to Bob’s fears of death, powerlessness, injury, and rejection, they also, like The Primitive’s newscasts, foreshadow actual events.

  * * *

  On Monday, Bob dreams that someone gives him a sad-eyed black dog on a wire leash that no one wants. He is interrogated about the killing of a white man and humiliated when, upon asking two other white men for work, they begin to laugh because he doesn’t have tools for the job.

  Late for work, Bob experiences even the drive there in his ’42 Buick Roadster as an exercise in survival. He and his all-black crew need help and since none of the white tackers will work with his crew, Bob is forced to keep asking. Finally a woman, Madge, is assigned but refuses to work for a nigger. Bob calls her a cracker bitch and winds up in the superintendent’s office, where he is lectured to by his boss and told that as of next week he’ll be demoted back to mechanic, losing his deferment. He finds a crap game to ease his mind and gets knocked out by Johnny Stoddart in a dispute. Bob grabs a knife and goes after Stoddart but at the last moment backs off, deciding he’ll wait for a better time.

  I wanted to kill him so he’d know I was killing him and in such a way that he’d know he didn’t have a chance. I wanted him to feel as scared and powerless and unprotected as I felt every goddamned morning I woke up. I wanted him to know how it felt to die without a chance; how it felt to look death in the face and know it was coming and know there wasn’t anything he could do but sit there and take it like I had to take it from Kelly and Hank and Mac and the cracker bitch because nobody was going to help him or stop it or do anything about it at all.17

  That afternoon he threatens Stoddart with a gun but again pulls back. Just knowing that someday he will kill Stoddart somehow makes everything all right.

  I was going to kill him if they hung me for it, I thought pleasantly. A white man, a supreme being. Just the thought of it did something for me; just contemplating it. All the tightness that had been in my body … left me and I felt relaxed, confident, strong. I felt just like I thought a white boy oughta feel; I had never felt so strong in all my life.18

  Bob reserves a table that night at the best hotel in town for himself and Alice. When the check comes, a note clipped to it reads: We served you this time but we do not want your patronage in the future. As they leave, Alice, embarrassed by the scene at the hotel restaurant and furious with Bob, takes the wheel. They’re stopped for speeding by two motorcycle cops and have to post cash as bail. Alice then drives them to a house of homosexuals. Bob gets drunk, slaps Alice, hits one of the homosexuals, barely avoids wrecking his car on the way home.

  On Tuesday, Bob dreams that he is being beaten by two white peckerwoods while the shipyard president stands by, dressed as an army general, supervising. Bob struggles to wake up but can’t. Two older black couples come by and agree that, yes, some boys do get “out of their place” and into trouble.

  Hungover, Bob skips work, has a few drinks at a bar in Little Tokyo where a young white girl comes in with two soldiers and starts eyeballing the bar’s black patrons. Bob thinks how Madge is just like her, and about heroes from the movies sinking German ships single-handed, going out in glory.

  Just a simple nigger bastard, that was me. Never would be a hero. Had a thousand chances every day; a thousand coming up tomorrow. If I could just hang on to one and say, “This is it!” And go out blowing up the white folks like that cat did the Nazis.19

  Bob decides to go see Alice, with whom he had words earlier. Several of her friends are there and ask Bob what’s to be done about conditions in Little Tokyo. He answers in three stages. Initially he suggests that they should simply kill the colored residents of Little Tokyo and eat them, thereby not only solving the race problem but alleviating the meat shortage as well. Next he admits that if he knew any solution for the race problem he’d use it on himself first of all. Finally he claims that “the only solution to the Negro problem is a revolution.” Once they’re alone, Alice lectures to Bob, then gives her ultimatum.20

  On Wednesday, Bob dreams that Alice is menaced by a herd of wild pigs in the city park and that he rushes to her aid, pistol in hand. Killed by the pigs, Alice shrinks to doll size as Bob looks on, watched over, himself, by “millions of white women.”

  I woke up overcome with a feeling of absolute impotence; I laid there remembering the dream in every detail. Memory of my fight with Alice came back, and then I saw Madge’s kidney-shaped mouth, brutal at the edges, spitting out the word “nigger”; and something took a heavy hammer and nailed me to the bed.21

  Bob returns to work, where he finds little support among fellow blacks, much celebration among whites at his failure. Foreman Kelly, against Bob all along, tells a baldly racist joke in his presence. Bob tries to confront Madge but winds up withdrawing, tongue-tied. To compensate, he terrifies Johnny Stoddart again.

  The white boy came out of it and color came back into his face and it got beet-red. White came back into his soul; I could see it coming back, rage at seeing a nigger threatening him. Now he was ready to die for his race like a patriot, a true believer … And then he lost his nerve.

  I smiled at him. “I don’t want to fight you,” I told him. “I want to kill you. But right now I’m saving you up.”22

  That night, in a scene parodying Native Son and involving the racial taboo that so intrigued Himes in work and in life, Bob goes to Madge’s hotel room and pushes her down on the bed but, as she chatters on about this getting him lynched in Texas and begs him to rape her, he loses nerve and flees. Madge runs after him and tries to get in his car. He speeds away.

  On Thursday, Bob dreams that a young white man and a young black man are fighting. The black has a long knife. At first the white seems to be empty-handed, but then Bob sees that he has a penknife. With it he is slashing at the black, opening wound after wound, laughing.

  Bob wakes again to a sense of hopelessness, telling himself: Bob, there never was a nigger who could beat it.

  Negro people had always lived on sufferance, ever since Lincoln gave them their freedom without any bread. I thought of a line I’d read in one of Tolstoy’s stories once—“There never had been enough bread and freedom to go around.” When it came to us, we didn’t get either one of them. Although Negro people such as Alice and her class had got enough bread—they’d prospered from it. No matter what had happened to them inside, they hadn’t allowed it to destroy them outwardly … They hadn’t stopped trying, I gave them that much; they’d kept on trying, always would; but they had recognized their limit—a nigger limit.23

  He thinks how he learned the same stuff whites learned, all that stuff about liberty, equality, justice, how he’d heard that all his life. “That was the hell of it: the white folks had drummed more into me than they’d been able to scare out.”24

  He decides that Alice is right: hers is the only way. He sets a marriage date with he
r, vows to return to school, become a lawyer. Back at the plant, he finds himself alone with Madge, who first tries to seduce him, then, hearing others approach, screams that she is being raped. Bob is beaten, hit in the head with a ball-peen hammer, and wakes in the shipyard infirmary to learn that the police are coming for him. He flees in his car but there’s no way out. He decides now is the time to kill Stoddart and give them something to hang him for. When he stops at a red light in a white neighborhood, police pull alongside. Finding the pistol in his glove compartment, they arrest him.

  On Friday, Bob dreams that he kills Johnny Stoddart but that a Marine sergeant then chases him, bragging how many people he’s killed, how many women he’s raped, and saying that all his life he’s wanted, more than anything else, to kill a black man.

  Waking, Bob is taken to judge’s chambers where he is lectured to by the shipyard president, then offered a break by the judge: if he joins the armed services and promises to stay away from white women and out of trouble, charges will be dropped. Two Mexicans waiting with him at the police desk asks how he’s doing. “I’m still here,” Bob responds. The three of them go up the hill toward the induction center together.

  Contemporary reviews of the novel that Himes later said brought him his “only honest audience reactions”25 were largely complimentary, most of them praising the vividness of Himes’s style, many directly addressing the book’s strengths and shortcomings.

  Herbert Kupferberg in the New York Herald Tribune took exception to what he considered Bob Jones’s (and, he assumed, the author’s) pugnacious racial attitudes while admitting that

  Nevertheless, Chester Himes gets across his main point, which is that in a different sort of world the Bob Joneses would be able to lead wholesome and happy lives.26