Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Unfortunately, Himes’s handling of Lee Gordon’s deep-seated conviction of the basic inferiority of black people and the abrupt, spiritual transformation that results in his redemptive heroic death for the cause of unionism at the end of the novel violate the formal integrity of the narrative, and are more melodramatic than naturalistic.7

  Gilbert Muller takes exception to this reading, insisting that, while some critics find Lee’s shift from reaction to action too sudden,

  It is more appropriate to assert that Gordon, as a thinking being, has been attempting to comprehend his behavior through the fifty days of narrative constituting Lonely Crusade and that, with Abe Rosenberg’s help (and also Smitty’s allegiance), he is now prepared to act. The conversion of Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger to a posture of existential rebellion is also abrupt but based on an unfolding recognition of the oppressive essence of his condition. Like Meursault, Lee Gordon seizes his existence and embraces the gestures and actions of rebellion on the day of the union rally.8

  James Lundquist in turn calls attention to several structural problems. Lester McKinley’s elaborate plot to murder Foster, so carefully set up, simply evaporates. Ruth, though given such seeming importance, never comes fully to life. There are too many characters and too many points of view to develop any of them fully. This is nonetheless a powerful novel, Lundquist concludes, reminding us that sudden turns of plot and character, as well as melodramatic developments, are signature Himes. Other of Himes’s strengths, among them his realistic reproduction of speech patterns and creation of intensely physical settings, redeem the flow of ideas and keep them from becoming mere abstract chatter, Lundquist feels. The novel has, too, rare value as social history, shot through with images of a city in transition, evoking the physical presence and atmosphere of the war plants, documenting the mood of workers making good wages for the first time in their lives and worrying what will become of them at war’s end, offering insights into the relationship between unionization and communist activities: all stations in that peculiar mix of purpose and apocalypse in the air at the time.

  The Avalon streetcar was crowded with servicemen and workers, all in the uniform of their participation—the navy’s blue woolen and the workers’ blue denim, the army’s khaki and the workers’ tan.

  Soldiers for democracy, for an eighty-dollar check or death on some distant isle; the home front and the battle-front; relief clients of yesterday and of tomorrow too—who knows? Lee Gordon asked himself as he shouldered down the aisle. But soldiers today—important, necessary, expendable.9

  Protagonist Lee Gordon is as deeply conflicted, as cloven, as Bob Jones. Both fill “Negro first” jobs in wartime industry, Bob as leadman worker, Lee as union organizer. Both are educated, racially preoccupied, inhabited at one and the same time by deep feelings of inferiority and a profound sense of outrage. Where Bob simply reacts, responding emotionally to slights and demeaning situations, Lee has learned (at least on one level, the outward) to distance himself from his instincts, to stand apart from them by means of intellectualization, rationalization, analysis. Like Bob, Lee in the course of the novel is manipulated and used by everyone: white union officials, Communists, white women, workers with their own agendas, his bosses, what Pynchon called the whole sick crew. Bob is a victim; Lee begins as “the happiest man in the world”10 and, after spending most of the novel learning to be a victim, chooses to become a special kind of victim, a martyr. Until this moment of existential choice, Lee’s character remains labile, tenuous, transitional. By turns he appears passive, fearful, insecure, headstrong, honest with others, deeply dishonest with self and wife, his insubstantiality perhaps best symbolized in the habitual response he makes to challenge or revelation: “Well—yes.” “No one man could be as contradictory as Lee Gordon seems,” Smitty thinks at one point.11

  The story surrounding Lee Gordon is altogether a grim one. Lee, presumably, is destroyed, as are six others with whom he crosses paths. Yet Lonely Crusade, dark as it is, “ends on a high note of pure affirmation—without parallel in the rest of Himes’s fiction.”12 As in Wallace Stevens:

  After the final no there comes a yes

  And on that yes the future world depends.13

  In the Harlem novels soon to come, Himes largely rejected plot, adopting the simplest gimmicks (what mystery folk call a MacGuffin)—cotton bales stuffed with money, mysterious packages passing from hand to hand, a man in a red fez moving through Harlem—as frameworks upon which to hang vivid scenes and confrontations among outlandish characters. Similarly, what plot there is to Lonely Crusade you could put (as guitarist Eddie Lang did the cues for the entire Whiteman Orchestra repertoire) on the back of a business card.

  Lee Gordon, a college-educated Negro who has always felt himself to be special and who has consistently refused to accept the low-end work available to him, lands a “Negro first” job as union organizer in wartime industry. His once deeply romantic marriage to Ruth is failing, reeling beneath the blows of social sanction, personal failure, and Lee’s ever-increasing insecurity. Going about his work, Lee becomes involved with various others: Smitty, the union secretary, and, though white, Lee’s staunchest supporter; battle-scarred organizer Joe Ptak from national headquarters; the monstrous Luther McGregor, who “knows how to be a nigger and make it pay”14; soft-spoken former Latin professor Lester McKinley with his white wife and lifelong compulsion to kill white men; Jackie Fork, who becomes Lee’s lover, like himself used by others to their own ends; black Communist leader Bart whose puritanical rearing clashes with Party ruthlessness; Abe Rosenberg, the Communist whose pragmatic progressive philosophy provokes Lee’s spiritual rebirth.

  Confronted by these factions and forced to face similar divisions within himself, Lee takes up with Jackie, leaves Ruth, is swept up in Machiavellian industrialist Louis Foster’s maneuverings, becomes in the company of Luther party to bribery then murder, seems defeated both personally and professionally at every turn, a scooped-out, hollowed man, then in a fleabag hotel of a Damascus undergoes conversion. Next morning he attends the union demonstration toward which the novel has been unwinding. Deputy sheriffs block the street and drive back union marchers. All but Joe Ptak are repulsed, and when Joe, carrying the union banner, himself falls, in a perfect existential moment Lee rushes in to take up the banner and advance toward the deputies.

  That’s about it. Though Himes provides many dramatic and melodramatic flourishes to keep us moving through the story, it’s from the rich interplay of characters, the play of conflicting ideas, and the manner in which Lee’s personal deficits, fears, and failures unfold into the overall concerns of the narrative, that the novel’s power comes. As Gilbert Muller points out:

  Lee Gordon’s quest for an authentic identity is cast in several dimensions—economic, racial, sexual, existential—but it is ultimately his political identity that gives him unique substance as a character and Lonely Crusade its special force as a novel of ideas.15

  Central to that play of ideas is an ongoing dialogue, both express and implicit, concerning Communism. In the thirties and forties the Communist Party actively courted and seemed to offer rare hope of true equality to Negroes. The Party had helped in defending the Scottsboro boys; through agencies such as the American Writers’ Congress and the League of American Writers, through journals such as New Masses, it spread its influence. Richard Wright, longtime stalwart worker for the Party, explained its attraction in providing him with an intellectual framework for understanding his life as a Negro. He felt the Party’s message was not that you must be one of us, and like us, but, instead, that “If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.”16 By the early forties, however, the Party’s failure to stand against fascism and its wartime suspension of support of civil rights in favor of national unity disillusioned many Negroes, who felt themselves betrayed. Communists in turn felt threatened by the unions they ostensibly supported, the two of them vying for power even
as the bosses and owners worked to play one off against the other, just as they conspired to set black against white. Against this background Lonely Crusade unfurls. Unionism, Communism, morality, race relations—these and other such topics are explored in set-piece, debatelike dialogues between Lee and fellow travelers: Smitty, Joe Ptak, Luther, Jackie, Foster, Abe Rosenberg.

  The central character conflict, meanwhile, is that between Lee and wife Ruth, whose marriage, like all else in Lee’s life, has gone from bright promise to despair.

  His love for her was so intense he could feel it like a separate life throughout his body.17

  Before had been nothing but a bewildering sense of deficiency and a vague fear of momentarily being overtaken by disaster.18

  He thought that with Ruth he would never be afraid again. But it merely changed the pattern of his fear. Now it was the fear of being unable to support and protect his wife.19

  Despair, like all else in the dialectics of this book, has two sides. Battered and bruised, Lee takes “the hurt of all these things”20 home to Ruth, finding release into her through “sex and censure and rage.”21He has debased his marriage, his wife, and his own best feelings. And yet he has never told her how afraid he is of going out into the white world in search of what he feels is rightly his—“sowing in the fields where the harvest was nothing but hurt.”22 Here is Ruth’s despair:

  She had been absorbing Lee’s brutality for six long years. At first, she had been convinced of his essential need for it. Hers had been a confidence in his ability to eventually come through and in some way find the verification of manhood he seemed eternally to be seeking…

  But now her faith in him was gone. Now she did not believe that anything would ever help Lee Gordon. And she herself was through trying.23

  She sees her husband as a man who “failed, as if failure was his destiny,”24 yet when Lee leaves her, Ruth’s world dissolves. In a striking scene, she stands at the mirror painting her face sickly white.

  Lee’s despair is just as palpable:

  She did not reply, and in the silence his loneliness returned. Eight years before, when they had been married, he had thought that she would be the answer to his loneliness … It had seemed like something burnished—almost silver, almost gold. Really, it had been tin foil.

  . . .

  Well—yes, Lee Gordon thought. When you were a Negro, so many things could happen to keep you from fulfilling the promise of yourself. No doubt he had been some sort of promise to her that he too had never fulfilled.

  Yet now he was of a mind to blame her for all of it. He had acquired the habit of blaming her for most of the things that happened to him, knowing as he did that she was not to blame.

  Because he knew what was wrong with them was only what was wrong with himself.25

  Fulcrum for Lee’s mountebank efforts both to understand his world and to lay blame, the Ruth-Lee relationship in its mirroring of Chester’s and Jean’s own dissolving marriage adds considerable autobiographical tension. Reading Lonely Crusade with knowledge of Himes’s biography, one finds it extremely difficult to refrain from wondering to what degree in this novel, consciously or unconsciously, Chester might be preparing his farewell to Jean. Other, frank use of autobiographical elements gives some weight to such reading. Lee’s remembered drunken, libertine flight to New York is Chester’s own; the cabin occupied briefly by Lee and Ruth as newlyweds, with its lizards, rats gnawing away in the walls and snake beneath the porch, is clearly the desert cabin they borrowed from Hugo, to whom the novel is dedicated.

  Lee’s affair with Jackie Forks, on the surface as simple as the relationship with Ruth is complicated, proves, beneath that, every bit as fraught. Blatant and unguarded in her sexuality, Jackie is a naif, undeveloped mentally and emotionally, a slate others write on. Lee, who with her rediscovers his capacity for tenderness, who becomes able again to live briefly on “the ladder to the way it might have been,” is only one among many exploiting the young woman’s artless good feelings: “He pitied her, and to be able to pity this white girl gave him equality in this white world.”26 Circumstances of the novel grind away at all the best that is in Jackie until finally, emptied by the needs of others, she becomes filled instead with the same pain, fear, and impotent rage as Lee, another example of Himes’s identification of the Negro’s and woman’s plight.

  In its Bildungsroman aspect, the novel depicts Lee’s learning (even as the gulf between him and Ruth widens) to leave aside his apartness and join himself to others: to others of his race, to other workers, finally to all mankind. He has always sensed his apartness, we are told. That sense of being special, so like Chester’s own by way of mother Estelle, has kept him from accepting work as a domestic following his college graduation even when nothing else was available. He is reserving himself for better things—and simultaneously excepting himself from the hell that is other people.

  He did not like people that much, anyway—neither Negro people nor any people. He did not feel that much involved in humanity or in the struggle of humanity.

  And to try to convince against their wills a bunch of ignorant Negro migrants of the value of a union, which he doubted as much as they, was a task he found personally repellent. He was no medicine man, no Marcus Garvey, no Black Messiah. Let people go to hell in their own particular way was one thing America had taught him.27

  He is embarrassed by Negroes who attend the first union meeting (“Lee felt a shame for them, ashamed of being one of them”28), and at one point proclaims: “I’m not trying to solve the Negro problem, Jackie. I’m trying to solve my own problem.”29

  Fear becomes the mind’s native land. Fear comes up as it does in Himes’s memory of the break with Jean (I had become afraid), as it does in Bob Jones’s dreams, Kriss Cummings’s despair, Jesse Robinson’s damn-the-torpedos self-destruction: images swim into being in a developing tray, step into frame in the mirror. For try as Lee might to disallow the knowledge, those other faces return a vision of his own. Words like terror, danger, hazard and disaster leave their spore across pages describing Lee’s childhood.

  And what Lee learned … was disheartening, discouraging, and depressing. First of all, he learned that not only did he know very little concerning the Negroes of America, but that he knew very few of them. As he gained in knowledge concerning them he also gained in fear. For the knowledge of them was like looking into a mirror and seeing his own fear, suspicion, resentments, frustrations, inadequacies, and the insidious anguish of his days reflected on the faces of other Negroes … What life held for them, it also held for him—there was no escaping.30

  As Milliken points out, Lee has been unable to discriminate between his rejection of the penalties imposed upon blackness and rejection of blackness itself. So thoroughly indoctrinated that “he accepted implicitly the defamation of his own character and was more firmly convinced of his own inferiority than were those who had charged him thus,”31 the American Negro is an absence, a wanting, a lack. Lee himself has come “to believe that something was lacking in Negroes that made them less than other people.”32

  Nor does alienation from fellow Negroes bring in abreaction any identification with the white world; here, Lee is even more fully, and forever, excluded. He is a man without country, a man without brief, people, or prospect, with only the sigh of history’s unbearable weight settling on him.

  He could not understand what he had done that called for so great a penalty … He came to feel that the guilt or innocence of anything he might do would be subject wholly to the whim of white people. It stained his whole existence with a sense of sudden disaster hanging just above his head, and never afterwards could he feel at ease in the company of white people.33

  Even his speech changes in the presence of whites, as in his first meeting with Smitty: “Now, addressing a white person, there was a difference in his speech, something of a falter, a brief, open-mouthed hesitancy before sound, the painful groping, not quite a stammer, for the exact word.”34


  One extended passage early in the novel (while also prefiguring The Primitive) pulls together many of Lee’s confounded thoughts and feelings. He’s been out celebrating his new job and returns to the stone steps outside his home.

  He sat brooding over that crazy, depressed period he had spent in New York trying to escape from himself. In the dull, aching reality of his beginning hangover, it seemed dreamlike.

  Nights end to end there of whoring around. Up and down St. Nicholas Avenue. In and out the joints of Harlem. Drunk every night. Never seeing the light of day. Unable to remember any morning the name of the one who had been his bedmate the night before.

  There had been that deep fascination, that tongueless call of suicide, offering not the anodyne of death, but the decadent, rotten sense of freedom that comes from being absolved of the responsibility of trying any longer to be a man in a world that will not accept you as such.

  You could not be a man in a war plant, so you were a man in a bed. Everything you could not be in a war plant you were in a bed. So to the women in the war plant where you could not work you became the promise of what you were in bed. But always you had the depressing knowledge that it was not so much your masculine superiority as your enthusiasm to prove you were that which in the war plant they said you were not, that fed the legend of what you were in bed. The difference between you the denied and those who denied you lay in the objective—theirs being to re-create themselves, and yours being to find creation of yourself. And when you had learned hurtingly and sufficiently that it never would, you came home to where at least it might have been.

  “Well—yes,” Lee Gordon thought. He stood up and went into the house and went to bed, where he was nothing.35