by James Sallis
Should the writer through pain and perseverance manage to get his book written and into print, new struggles await him, perhaps the most disheartening and bitter of all. For he cannot expect the patronage and support of the Negro middle class. Rather must he be prepared for displays of hatred and antagonism from black leaders, black clergy, and the black press, from all those who wish in shame to hide their own battered, scarred souls. They do not want it known that they have been so badly injured for fear they will be taken out of the game.
To white America those same scars are not only reminders, but affronts as well. It is his guilt that keeps the oppressor outraged and unrelenting; he will go to any length to keep from confronting that guilt and the contradictions within himself.
Of course American Negroes hate American whites, Himes said that warm day in Chicago; hating white people is one of the first reflexes black Americans develop as they begin to learn their place in American society. They would not be human if they did not despise their oppressors.
It could not, he said, be otherwise. But the real question lies in asking how much a man must sacrifice of himself to this necessity of hate. The American Negro experiences hate doubly: he hates first his oppressor, and then, because he lives in constant fear of this hatred being discovered, hates himself because of this fear.
There can be no understanding of Negro experience, of Negro behavior or compulsion, of Negro sexual impulses, of Negro marital relations, of Negro crimes or Negro thought, until the impact of this fear upon the Negro personality is understood.
And if one divines in that personality elements of homicidal mania, lust for whites, paradoxical anti-Semitism, a pathetic sense of inferiority, arrogance, Uncle Tomism, hatred and fear and self-contempt, then these are the effects of oppression on the human spirit, the daily horrors and daily realities of the American Negro.
Yet, Himes said in conclusion, there is an indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed; a quality, a force, impregnable to all assault. Prejudice, oppression, even three hundred years of submission, cannot corrode or destroy it. Were it not for this quality the whole fiber and personality of Negroes would have been utterly destroyed, their white oppressors become drooling idiots, savage maniacs, raving beasts. It is the quality within all humans that cries out “I will live!”
By mid-June Himes was back in New York, living in a furnished room in the Bronx belonging to a black orchestra leader named Bonelli and borrowing money from Van Vechten and his old friend Dan Levin, for whose magazine Crossroads he’d written back in his WPA days. He was still trying to hum the song from “Da-Da-Dee,” and remembered Jean going with him to low-end bars and dives and taking him home when he became too drunk to make it on his own: “I suppose that was all anyone could have done.”12 Then Jean’s job, upon which they were wholly dependent, was eliminated.
A rare glimmer of good news came through from France, where a translation of If He Hollers Let Him Go was to come out in October. Himes himself during this period recast Hollers as a two-act play, sending it to Van Vechten for comment.
In October, having advertised himself in newspapers as an experienced caretaker, Himes took on duties as overseer at a dormant lakefront resort in Newton, New Jersey. He and Jean occupied a three-room apartment over a tavern; Chester was to look after the cottages, grounds, and the owner’s three dogs while attending to such repairs as were needed. Otherwise he spent his time writing, drafting the dramatic version of Hollers, and possibly beginning The Third Generation. The resort’s owners, Frank and Elinor Bucino, visited on weekends. Frank, “a small dark Italian with a bad eye,”13 Himes characterized as a Little Caesar type. Supposedly Frank Sinatra’s godfather, he was accompanied everywhere by a tall, blond Swede who, Chester said, “looked almost exactly like a fictional bodyguard and killer called Sure in one of my Esquire short stories, ’Strictly Business.’”14 Bucino had bought the resort, previously used as a training camp and parade ground for the German-American Bund, at government auction. Jean and Chester remained throughout the winter, until the resort crew arrived that spring, receiving a hundred and fifty dollars a month plus expenses. They took long walks in the snow, gathered watercress for salads from the woods by the lake, drove the ancient Mack firetruck that was their emergency transportation about the countryside as though it were a modern Jaguar sports car. That December, Horace and Ruby Cayton came for a weeklong visit.
From The Primitive:
It had been pleasant there among the empty houses, far from the hurts of modern city life. No condescensions and denunciations, no venomous intrigues and shattering infidelities, no Negro problem and bright shining world of race relations with all its attendant excitement and despair …
His duties had been light, raking leaves, a few minor repairs, and nothing after the snow came in late November … He and Becky had a car to use, a lovely cottage with central heating, a fireplace and plenty of wood. And there had been a little terrier, owned by one of the proprietors, that had stayed with them; and in the cellar a hogshead of homemade wine that tasted a little like muscatel but was dry and very strong, which they had drunk all winter. It was full of dead gnats and had to be strained, but on occasion, to show off his ruggedness, he drank it with the dead gnats floating about in the glass. “Ah laks marinated gnats,” he would say.15
While at the resort, Chester turned away from race literature in favor of books such as Butterfield 8, What Makes Sammy Run?, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? He was pleased to have uninterrupted, undistracted time to write and seemed on the way to recovering his spirits. But the new year brought new disappointments. He learned that he’d been passed over for a Guggenheim. Van Vechten didn’t like his play. Blanche Knopf turned down the latest rewrite of Black Sheep. Chester’s writing, and Chester with it, foundered anew.
By March Chester and Jean were back in their furnished room in the Bronx. That summer Chester worked briefly as a bellhop at the New Prospects Hotel in the Catskills, leaving after a bout with ptomaine poisoning. He next found employment as warehouseman at the New York Museum of Science and Industry, and in October turned caretaker again at a summer camp in Ware, Massachusetts. He remained in Ware until February before returning to New York, where he stayed with friends in Brooklyn before signing on as caretaker again, this time at the Stamford, Connecticut, farm of a New York theatrical lawyer named Halperin.
The farm, once used to breed and train horses, was extraordinarily beautiful, with acres of rolling lawns and vivid green grass, well-appointed stables, and a huge red barn. Chester and Jean lived in the servant’s house. They had a jeep at their disposal and often fished in the well-stocked lake. There were, again, dogs to care for—a pair of shepherds and their three offspring—as well as poultry. Chester’s duties were minimal: mowing and minor repairs, and helping Jean serve dinner on weekends when the family came to the farm.
Chester’s relation of one incident at the farm appears in The Quality of Hurt after earlier being appropriated for The Primitive. Halperin liked to sit around and talk over farm affairs—about which, Chester notes, neither of them knew anything. Halperin had recently installed two dozen pullets, whose eggs (because, as it turned out, the hens were being fed pig mash) came out soft-shelled and deformed.
When this attorney came back the following weekend he examined the soft-shelled eggs and stated authoritatively their deformity was due to the rooster fertilizing them. [They] sat around for two hours, drinking Canadian Club whiskey highballs, trying to decide what to do with the rooster … Jesse couldn’t understand how the rooster who lived in the pigpen a half mile distant from the chicken coop could have fertilized the eggs, but of course he didn’t say so, seeing as how he was drinking this attorney’s good whiskey. Finally the solution burst on this attorney like a brain storm. He banged dramatically on the table with his open palm and said in the voice of a general giving an order to charge: “Jesse! Kill the rooster!”16
The Halperins met his departure
with some bitterness, though Chester from the first had made it clear that his fealty was to his writing. Joe, now a sociology professor at the state Negro college in North Carolina, had arranged for Chester to give a seminar there in creative writing, and in June, Jean and Chester left for two weeks in Durham.
Chester had some concern over being back in the South, as well as over differences the brothers had in the past, but all went well. The couple stayed with Joe and wife Estelle in their pleasant, six-room house. Chester found himself a celebrity on campus; his seminar was well attended and written up in the Durham papers. (The newspapers’ interest may have resulted in part, Chester held, from a wish to avoid the issues of the Korean War and a suit brought against the city by the NAACP demanding equal school facilities for blacks. Himes attended one of the hearings, at which future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall dropped by to advise the young Negro attorneys.) The brothers toured Duke University and local tobacco farms, visited North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company and other black-owned businesses in the area. Chester was impressed at the professional and personal courtesy extended Joe by librarians and researchers at the all-white University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Joe and he got on well but never again became intimate.
The latest version of Black Sheep had gone from Blanche Knopf to Rinehart, whose editor, Bill Smith, Himes met at a party given by Van Vechten’s niece, and from there to Henry Holt when Smith moved on. While in Durham, Himes received a telegram leading him to believe the novel had been accepted. He returned to New York, however, only to find the novel neatly wrapped in brown paper and waiting for him: Smith, his sole supporter at Holt, had backed down. On arrival Chester and Jean had thrown a party at the Theresa Hotel for everyone they knew; they were left with twelve dollars.
It’s one of the recurring scenes, one of the touchstones, in Himes’s life, this squandering. Years later Jean recalled how, again and again, sums of money came to Chester only to be burned away, in a matter of days, on alcohol, women, and parties. And if there was no money, then expectation of money might be good enough.17
Loosely modeled on that visit to Holt, Himes’s portrait of a publisher’s visit in The Primitive amounts to an illustrated version of his Chicago speech.
Pope’s face resumed its customary expression of shame and guilt, like that of a man who’s murdered his mother and thrown her body in the well, to be forever afterwards haunted by her sweet smiling face.
“I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”
Jesse just looked at him, thinking, “Whatever bad news you got for me—as if I didn’t know—you’re going to have to say it without me helping you. I’m one of those ungracious niggers.”
“We’ve given your book six readings and Mr. Hobson has decided to drop the option.”
Jesse had been prepared for this from the moment he’d read Pope’s letter and now, before the reaction had set in, he just felt argumentative. “I thought you were going to cut it.”
Pope reddened slightly. “That was my opinion. I like the book. I fought for it all the way. I think all it needs is cutting. But Hobson thinks it reads like fictional autobiography. And he doesn’t like the title.”
“I Was Looking for a Street,” Jesse quoted, turning it over in his mind. “I was looking for a street that I could understand,” he thought, and for a moment he was lost in memory of the search.
“He said it sounds like a visiting fireman looking for a prostitute’s address,” Pope said with his apologetic smile.
Jesse laughed. “That ought to make it sell.”
Pope again assumed his look of guilt and shame. “The truth is, fiction is doing very poorly. We’re having our worst year for fiction.”
“Why not publish it as an autobiography then?”
“It would be the same. Hobson thinks the public is fed up with protest novels. And I must say, on consideration, I agree with him.”
“What’s protest about this book?” Jesse argued. “If anything, it’s tragedy. But no protest.”
“The consensus of the readers was that it’s too sordid. It’s pretty strong—almost vulgar, some of it.”
“Then what about Rabelais? The education of Gargantua? What’s more vulgar than that?”
Pope blinked at him in disbelief. “But surely you realize that was satire? Rabelais was satirizing the humanist Renaissance—and certainly some of the best satire ever written … This”—tapping the manuscript neatly wrapped in brown paper on his desk—“is protest. It’s vivid enough, but it’s humorless. And there is too much bitterness and not enough just plain animal fun—”
“I wasn’t writing about animals …”
“The reader is gripped in a vise of despair and bitterness from start to finish …”
“I thought some of it was funny.”
“Funny!” Pope stared at him incredulously.
“That part where the parents wear evening clothes to the older son’s funeral,” Jesse said, watching Pope’s expression and thinking, “What could be more funny than some niggers in evening clothes? I bet you laugh like hell at Amos and Andy on television.”
Pope looked as if he had suddenly been confronted by a snake, but was too much of a gentleman to enquire of the snake if it were poisonous.
“All right, maybe you don’t think that’s funny…”
“That made me cry,” Pope accused solemnly.
“I suppose you think I didn’t cry when I wrote it,” Jesse thought, but aloud he continued, “But how do you make out it’s protest?”
Looking suddenly lost, Pope said, “You killed one son and destroyed the other, killed the father and ruined the mother …” and Jesse thought, “So you find some streets too that you don’t understand,” and then, “Yes, that makes it protest, all right. Negroes must always live happily and never die.”
Aloud he argued, “What about Hamlet? Shakespeare destroyed everybody and killed everybody in that one.”
Pope shrugged, “Shakespeare.”
Jesse shrugged. “Jesus Christ. It’s a good thing he isn’t living now. His friends would never get a book published about him.”
Pope laughed. “You’re a hell of a good writer, Jesse. Why don’t you write a Negro success novel? An inspirational story? The public is tired of the plight of the poor downtrodden Negro.”
“I don’t have that much imagination.”18
Jesse departs with his manuscript, singing his private dirge, da-da-dee:19
Later, waking in his room at the tail end of a full-tilt binge, Jesse stands staring at the manuscript for several minutes before taking out his clasp knife and “with a cry of stricken rage, an animal sound, half howl, half scream,”20 plunging it into the manuscript with all his force.
It’s here, then, that the ever discontinuous life becomes ever more so. Outside, the world speeds by: traffic becomes a blur, trees bloom, grow tall, and expire in a single day, the sun sweeps across the sky in a sudden arc and is gone. Tuesday’s TV show turns into Thursday’s rerun. What of all this is real? imagined? dreamed? remembered?
After that everything was a hodgepodge. I am not certain of the truth of what I do remember. What I think are memories of actual events might in reality be memories of bad dreams and nightmares. All the time following, until I went to Europe, seems like a period of recurring blackouts. I wonder what you call that? Shock, perhaps.
We roomed somewhere in Harlem, but I don’t remember where. We lived, but I don’t remember how; I don’t remember working, except for a week or so as doorman for an expensive Jewish hotel in Long Beach when the Jewish high holy days were being celebrated. But that wouldn’t have kept us alive for a week.21
Chester and Jean again took refuge for a time with the Smiths in Vermont, and that fall Jean found work as recreational director at the State Women’s Reformatory at Mount Kisco, New York. Required to live on the grounds, she was able to see Chester only on the two days a week she had off, spending a single night with him. Chester, after applying for editorial
work with Reader’s Digest and being turned down, worked a single day cutting stencils for the addressograph in its Pleasantville, New York, mailroom: “I must confess I ruined more of the metal plates than I got right and after I worked overtime on my first day the supervisor felt they could save money by keeping me away.”22 Chester used his day’s earnings to buy Jean a cheap Christmas gift. He’d taken a room in the house of an elderly spinster in a black, staunchly middle-class neighborhood on the edge of White Plains. Following the Reader’s Digest fiasco, he worked for three months as porter and janitor at the White Plains YMCA.
During this period, too, he bellhopped again in the Catskills’ “borscht belt.” He scratched away halfheartedly at his latest version of Black Sheep, at drafts of stories and the aborted Immortal Mammy, began working with autobiographical materials that would coalesce into The Third Generation, wrote to Van Vechten that he was contemplating (in the manner of “Da-Da-Dee”?) a first-person account of his stay at Yaddo, which he would call (and did, years later, in a much-transformed work) “The End of a Primitive.” He and Jean spoke of returning to California, instead moved as caretakers to a luxurious country club on Lake Copake where in January a hurricane hit, then to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where each morning Chester drove to a park by the Sound and sat with the typewriter on his knees, “at peace with his work”23 in the sound of lapping waves and the cry of gulls. But within months their money ran out and Chester was forced to sell the Plymouth he’d recently bought. On the day of sale he was involved in a minor traffic accident with the wife of a prominent white doctor and jailed overnight, with Jean out of touch in New York City looking for work and quarters. Absurdities proliferated: Jean returned from New York to find Chester gone and the buyer come to claim the car; the doctor’s wife “had suffered from such severe shock”24 that she was unable to appear at next morning’s hearing; because he’d not made bail Chester was carted off to the county prison; bail money wired by Jean’s brother was returned to the telegraph office, where Jean was unable to retrieve it.
