Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Pinktoes’s plot, meanwhile, gets about on as many confusing legs as does its commercial history. Himes’s most atypical novel, it is yet a part of his broken-field run toward what Lundquist calls an “extension of humanity,” an opening outward on its author’s part, an embrasure of compassion.18 Pinktoes’s characters may exist to be targets of satire and of the choreographed pratfalls their author prepares for them (which, indeed, none escape), but they are, for all that, for all the funny hats they must wear and all the contrived mugging, people linked inextricably and intimately to others, people forever struggling to be better, to be more, than they are, people who need and who feel with an intensity almost childlike.

  Himes here takes up again his old jeremiad against the middle-class Negro, satirizes the pretensions of all liberals, white or black, parodies his own obsession with interracial sex. But he fires in passing and scattershot at many other targets as well: the New York publishing scene (the authors of Dreamland, a book on drug addiction, have cribbed it from a forgotten WPA project); charitable foundations (the “Rosenberg,” under direction of Dr. Oliver Wendell Garrett); fringe groups (D. Stetson Kissock and his Southern Committee for the Preservation of Justice); and the arts in general (white producer Will Robbins’s latest film Read and Run Nigger has the subtitle If You Can’t Read Run Anyhow).

  The plot gathers, inasmuch as it coheres at all, chiefly about two figures. Wallace Wright is a much-acclaimed race leader and Executive Chairman of the National Negro Political Society (NNPS), one-sixty-fourth Negro, who looks “so much like a white man that his white friends found it extremely difficult, in fact downright irritating, to have to remember he was colored.”19 Art Wills is an editor, soon to take up those duties for a new Negro picture magazine, himself white, a philanderer, and generally so drunk that people have trouble getting his attention.

  Harlem hostess Mamie Mason, angry at Wright for attending her parties without his wife, trumpets word of Wright’s affair with a white woman. This leads to the rumor that he has left his wife of twenty years for a white woman half his age, and soon there’s a run on hair straightener and bleaching cream, while black women’s organizations champion slogans such as Be Happy That You Are Nappy and poets write poems with titles like “The Whiter the Face the Blacker the Disgrace.”

  Mamie is also angry at Wills because he won’t agree to feature her in the first issue of his magazine—and because, too drunk to take notice, he wouldn’t be party to her subversion of Wright. When she informs Wills’s wife, Debbie, that he has proposed to a young black woman named Brown Sugar he met at a drunken party, Debbie goes home to her mother. This leads to the rumor that white liberals all over are abandoning their wives for young black women, and there’s a run on suntan lotions, ultraviolet lamps, and cosmetics as white women rush to kink their hair, dye their gums blue, redden their eyes. The cosmetic firm making “Black No More” now brings out a companion product, “Blackamoor,” for whites.

  The transformed white ladies quickly discover the advantages of being black, among them that sharks, not liking dark meat, will not eat them; that they needn’t bathe, since dirt doesn’t show on their skin; that they can now do the housework and pocket the maid’s money; that they are able to wear all the loud colors they wish without friends laughing behind their back; that now they can forget the Negro problem and hate all the Negroes they wish without feeling guilty.

  There is, too, a profusion of side stories. Panama Paul dreams of being in a heaven filled with white angels, unable to fly because his testicles are weighed down by anvils. Moe Miller in his Brooklyn home carries on a battle to the death with the rat who has taken it over. The nymphomaniacal Merto knits replicas of the genitals of all the black men she sleeps with, taking care to get size and color just right, and has to relate the story of each conquest, in precise detail, to gay husband Maurice; she turns up at the concluding costume ball as Eve, wearing a fig leaf and a necklace made of her knittings. Then there is Reverend Reddick, sent to Peggy, Wright’s white mistress, by Mamie. He spends three days and nights there buck naked, wrestling with the demons inside Peggy, until the two of them, the Reverend and Peggy, decide to get married.

  News of Peggy and the Reverend’s marriage not only sends Art Wills over to Hoboken to fetch his wife home, it serves also to reunite Wallace Wright and wife Juanita.

  And all along, you see, what Mamie Mason has really been worried about is her big masked ball at the Savoy Ballroom. Worrying about who would and who wouldn’t come. About looking good for it. About having enough food. And “if no white people were there? There was no telling what might happen to the Negro Problem.”20 But the ball comes off magnificently, all the novel’s characters reemerging for one final turn about the floor as a chorus line of Lots, Jobs, Sojourner Truths, Circes, Missing Links, Neros, Nanas, Toms and Topsys, Buddhas, Lucretia Borgias, Catherine the Greats, Simon Legrees, Moseses, and Aunt Jemimas—one “Rosenberg” applicant even comes as White Man’s Burden, “no doubt intended as a gentle hint.”21

  From Himes’s ten-page introduction to Pinktoes, “Excursion in Paradox”:

  The inhabitants of Harlem have faith. They believe in the Lord and they believe in the Jew and they believe in the dollar. The Lord and the Jews they have, but the dollar they have not.22

  Faith is a word upon which Himes rings changes throughout the novel, his code here for a peculiarly black version of the American dream, really a kind of structured hopelessness. The black American cannot afford to acknowledge futility, Himes suggests, for that is all he has. So, instead, he laughs at it. And that’s what white visitors to Harlem see, all these black fellow citizens standing about, “not only laughing at what is considered funny, but laughing at all the things considered unfunny, laughing at the white people and laughing at themselves, laughing at the strange forms injustice takes and at the ofttimes ridiculousness of righteousness.”23

  Never has anyone been promised so much and given so little as the American black, Milliken remarks, providing in his general remarks a virtual gloss on Himes’s Harlem novels:

  Citizen of a nation that offered unprecedentedly rich ideological and material opportunities, the black American found himself, at the same time, confronted by impassable barriers that existed for him alone, barriers maintained by violence, and by law … The black man’s greatest pride is in what he believes to be his total freedom from comforting illusions, the special toughness he possesses that enables him to gaze without flinching on the grim realities of his life.24

  It is just this commingling of horror and sorrow in black humor that makes it, for some at least, difficult, even deeply offensive.

  Certainly critics have never been quite sure what to do with Pinktoes. Well, it’s not quite what we’d call serious literature, after all—is it? And written for money, no doubt about that. Very popular in its time, I hear. What ever became of that fine, talented, serious young black man who wrote If He Hollers Let Him Go?

  Some, both reviewers at the time of publication and later critics alike, have found Pinktoes prurient, disrespectful, silly, sophomoric, even insulting. Others find fault with its overabundance of characters, complain that transitions are too abrupt, that the author throws in far too many asides and secondary episodes.

  One fair criticism concerns the ambiguity of its period. Certain of the book’s references, such as allusions to war and “our fighting men,” or the fact that books are being publicized on radio rather than on TV, suggest that the story is set in the forties, while references to reformed Communists and to the WPA as being “twenty years previous” imply the fifties. Perhaps the novel does lose some measure of potential authority or immediacy to this ambivalence, but the story is, after all, a farce, a type of folk tale, neither of which genre has any call to conform to novelistic standards.

  Even Stephen Milliken, generally so clear-sighted, takes the novel to task for failing to give fair representation or assessment of the civil-rights movement, an intent clearly outside th
e book’s purview. “It is,” Milliken writes, “a cry of rage and disgust, the cry of a disillusioned zealot, an outraged and intransigent purist…”25 It’s none of those. It’s a sport, a frolic, a rollicking, extraliterary raspberry. It’s the sound of Chester Himes, that sound all those who knew him well heard often and talk about still, Chester Himes laughing at what fools we all, himself included, oh yes, are.

  We are all guilty, it ends.

  A Case of Rape, Himes’s only novel set in Europe, with that concluding echo of Dostoyevsky ringing in our ears long after we have put the book down, stands among the strongest indictments ever penned of the racism endemic to Western civilization. Yet it was never intended, at least in its current form, for publication. Written in 1956–57, the book waited until 1963 for its initial publication in French, until 1980 for its first English-language edition (in a special edition of 350 copies by Bill Targ), until 1984 for general publication (by Howard University Press), and appeared in a trade edition only with Carroll & Graf’s 1994 reissue. As early as December of 1957, Himes mentioned the book in a letter to Van Vechten.

  A couple of years back I was still trying to write some good things, but the New American Library headed me off at every turn. The hard-cover publishers wanted NAL’s approval before signing me to a contract, and NAL rejected all the ideas and manuscripts I submitted. I had (still have) a 72-page synopsis of a book in which I had great hopes. It was to be called A Case of Rape. It was a story about six U.S. Negroes in Paris and a U.S. white woman of good family. One of the Negroes had had an affair with this woman.26

  Himes goes on to summarize the plot, remarking in conclusion that “The story is essentially the biographies of these people and the inner compulsions that have brought all their varying lives to this common focal point.” If Himes ever wrote beyond those seventy-two pages, there’s no evidence of it. Some years later, however, he made a decision to publish the synopsis itself.

  Originally it had been intended as a synopsis of sections of the “great novel” I was working on in 1956 when I first returned to Paris. But I got sidetracked by Mamie Mason. I dug up the manuscript and had it published by a little publisher who sympathized with the Algerians, in his collection Editions Les Yeux Ouverts. It was translated by André Mathieu, whom I had known at the Café Tournon, and a postface had been written by Christiane Rochfort, who was famous as a writer for women’s lib, and also was the secretary for the Cannes Film Festival.27

  Himes would always claim with typical hyperbole that his “little book” made quite an impression; it did receive some attention from the radical press, but this was occasioned more by the Algerian question (Les Yeux Ouverts being active in this debate) and by Rochfort’s afterword, by the book’s associations, that is, than by its intrinsic appeal.28

  A Case of Rape offers, in its tale of young black expatriate writer Scott Hamilton and American-born neo-European Elizabeth Hancock, an analog of the Himes-Willa affair, one complementing intriguingly that offered years later in the memoirs. Scott’s and Elizabeth’s international interracial love affair, their collaboration on a novel, and their forcible separation from the United States all come directly from life, as does much of the couple’s background: his white ancestry, her nervous breakdown, her abortive refuge among family in Boston. Central to the story, too, are recognizable portraits of Ollie Harrington, William Gardner Smith, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. It is, then, another of those hybrid romans à clef Himes originated in The Third Generation and The Primitive. In these novels, Michel Fabre observes, the reader, attempting to construe what he is reading as autobiographical, repeatedly gets shunted back from actual events into the world of fiction.29

  Structured around a series of documents suggestive both in form and language of legal depositions, the novel reflects Gertrude Stein’s observation that participation in the present is forever diluted by memory (the past) and anticipation (the future).

  In April 1953 Scott Hamilton met the aristocratic Elizabeth Hancock, who subsequently left her sadistic European husband and their daughter to live with Scott in the south of France, London, and Majorca. Elizabeth’s marriage had damaged her emotionally; Scott set himself “to cure her sick mind, heal her hurt soul.”30 Financial insecurity, however, destroys their relationship. Scott scrapes together enough money to send Elizabeth back to the United States, where eventually he follows, their affair starting up again only to collapse for good in America’s racially charged atmosphere. Scott returns to Paris. A novel about their affair is accepted under Elizabeth’s name, but the publisher, acting on an anonymous tip from someone in Paris that the novel was in fact ghosted by a black man, threatens to suspend publication. Elizabeth comes to Scott asking that he authenticate her sole authorship of the novel; she also suspects he may be the source of the rumor.

  This is the back story.

  Because of the retrospective form in which Himes casts the narrative, the actual plot, though in a sense the “present” of that narrative, also occurs in the past, recounted only in summary, in brief sections given over to précis of the events of the case and biographical sketches of the principals. This perspective, in concert with the flattened language, serves to give the narrative always a curious remove and impersonality, as though its events transpire not within individual lives and a circumscriptive society, but directly beneath history’s indifferent gaze. As in Rashomon, we look back on the story from varying viewpoints, part of its message clearly that we can never know the truth of our past, never understand the full consequence of our actions.

  The events around which the book accrues take place in 1956, three years after Scott’s and Elizabeth’s meeting. She comes to accuse him of the rumor that has given her publisher second thoughts and he, denying this, asks her to join an impromptu party of friends, who will vouch for him, in his room. The friends are all, like himself, expatriate black Americans: Caesar Gee, Theodore Elkins, and Sheldon Russell, modeled in turn after Ollie Harrington, William Gardner Smith, and James Baldwin. Elkins, feeling slighted because Elizabeth hasn’t engaged him in conversation, hands her a bottle of sherry he knows to be spiked with Spanish fly, whereupon she convulses and dies. Across the courtyard a neighbor sees the men standing over Elizabeth trying to help, and calls the police. All four are arrested on charges of rape and murder, tried for same, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Only Scott knows that Elizabeth’s death resulted not from the drug but from her husband’s sadistic attentions the night before; Scott’s sense of honor and of racial pride forbids his disclosing this knowledge.

  Into this melee, after the fact, comes riding Himes’s Richard Wright figure, famous expatriate writer Roger Garrison. Roger—who, we learn, is himself responsible for the letter to Elizabeth’s publisher—sees the case as another platform from which to denounce racism. Blinded by his assumption that the verdict (like his own recent literary setbacks) must have had racist and conspiratorial origins, he goes about collecting evidence to reverse the conviction. Garrison has grown so accustomed to condemning the dominant white group for crimes committed by oppressed black minorities, Himes writes, that he is able blithely to ignore “the fundamental principle in the moral fabric of a democratic society, the assumption of innocence,” and his pitiable efforts come to nothing.31

  A Case of Rape is a powerful little book. The issues it raises are complex ones, issues that for the most part (perhaps because this was a synopsis) Himes remains content to put out on the table and leave there; never, unlike Garrison, does he insist upon the easy explanation, cleave to the foregone conclusion. His themes are as complicated, self-contradictory, and in the end as deeply mysterious, as his characters.

  For all the diversity of their backgrounds, their differences in motivations and their complex, individual psychologies, all five black expatriate writers are fugitives of a sort, self-exiled and dragging along as baggage not only those guilts and confusions that were their birthrights but also the guilt and confusion of having fled the field of strug
gle—artists who, with their portable, recreative worlds are engaged in the continuous attempt to understand, exorcise, or at least gain some control over those guilts and confusions. Finally they prove incapable of defending themselves on the charges brought against them, believing from the first that, whatever they do, they are certain to be found guilty.

  Nor are they blameless, for, marked by hate, they have learned to hate in return. It is “just pure, spontaneous, unpremeditated, racially-inspired spite”32 that causes Elkins to hand Elizabeth the sherry he knows to be spiked with cantharides. Garrison’s reverse racism emerges in his insulting, dismissive attitude toward Elizabeth, exactly paralleling Wright’s treatment of Willa:

  He had assumed from his brutal attitude toward such cases that Mrs. Hancock was like all other American white women lusting after Negro men. That she, like the others, had come to Paris to be loved by them. That she had deserted her husband and children for the sole purpose of sharing Scott Hamilton’s bed.33

  Himes, who always insisted upon the identification of black men and all women as fellow outcasts, barred from participation in society and crippled from the first by frustration, denial, perhaps most of all by the ever-widening gap between what they are told and what they perceive, here offers a profoundly sympathetic portrait of a woman.