by James Sallis
From Holland during that 1968 sojourn Himes had sent Bill Targ an early version of the autobiography. Targ divined in this early sample many of the project’s ongoing problems. The whole thing was strangely off center, oddly displaced. There was far too much of Himes’s emotional and romantic life, and far too little, finally, of the man himself, to engage the reader’s sympathy. Page after page rushed past his writing, his first marriage, his literary friendships, the expatriate community, the development of his books, only to eulogize the white women he loved and expatiate yet again at the social taboos set against them.
From Holland also, Himes sent Roslyn Targ, on November 11, the manuscript of Blind Man with a Pistol.
18
Black Ruins of My Life
In the summer of 1901, Harvard’s Charles Peabody arrived in the Mississippi Delta to excavate Indian mounds near the Stovall and Carson plantations. In time-honored safari tradition he stopped at the nearest civilized outpost, Clarksdale, to stock up on provisions and equipment, and to hire a band of local workmen. As they struck out together for the site, Peabody was astonished to hear the band break into song. A leader would holler out a line, improvising, Peabody slowly realized, on the life about him—scenes they passed, women or other community members everyone knew, the proclivities of certain men in the crew—and others would respond. Shortly, as work at the site began, Peabody found himself incorporated into the songs. “Mighty long half-day Captain,” the crew sang at one point, on a Saturday when work failed to break off at noon as promised. On another, as Peabody and a white associate sat idly by, tossing a knife into the ground while workers labored deep in the excavation: “I’m so tired I’m most dead/Sittin’ up there playin’ mumbley-peg.” It was all remarkably impure: the workers sang (to Peabody’s ear) badly out of tune, from time to time breaking into wild whooping sounds or contorting their voices as they commented on their surroundings, swapped insults, passed tall tales back and forth, or quoted from the Bible. But they were, Peabody perceived, and in ways he had never before encountered, all the while imaginatively, fluidly, vividly re-creating their world, even as it flowed about them.
Despite the excellence of much other work and The End of a Primitives deserved recognition as a classic, it is almost certainly for his Harlem detective novels that Chester Himes will be remembered. Even throughout Europe and in France, where Lonely Crusade upon publication was named one of the five best new novels from America, Himes’s greatest fame derived from the detective novels. These are the books that have kept him (if generally far back from the footlights) before the American public, attracting new generations of readers and conducting the more serious of them to earlier work. Much Himes criticism, circumventing or summarizing the rest of his output, goes directly to the detective novels; these, at least, have come to be regarded as extraordinary achievements, unique contributions in extending the reach of both the detective novel and the American social novel. Lundquist, Milliken, and Muller all devote fully a fifth of their studies to the Harlem novels. Dozens of scholarly and more general articles have addressed such aspects as the place of these novels in the history of the urban detective story or of protest literature, their affinities with the work of Hemingway and Faulkner and Black Mask writers, their satire or use of religious figures, relation to African-American storytelling traditions, possible origins in Himes’s own background. Robert Skinner has written a fine, full-length study of the detective novels, Two Guns from Harlem. What Himes described almost thirty years ago in these novels and what people at the time thought flights of bitter fantasy, Skinner holds, has become routine front-page news:
Himes chronicled a bitter decade during which Blacks stopped allowing whites to ignore their world and forced Black concerns and Black problems into the light… Like Raymond Chandler and a few others, he has written, in fictional blood and crime, a social history of a time and place … the mean streets of Black America at mid-century.1
Stephen Soitos in The Blues Detective considers at length Himes’s central position in transforming the black mystery from such early work as Rudolph Fisher’s to the metacultural investigations of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major. Soitos tracks four tropes through the work of all these. The black detective persona, in contrast to that of the typical lone-wolf white detective, Soitos finds uniquely representative of a community with its own intrinsic values. “Double-consciousness detection” discovers its image in these works as an emphasis on masks, disguises, and false identities, embodying the figure of the trickster from African and African-American folklore. Black vernaculars, not only those of speech but also of cuisine, music, dance, and dress, are embraced. Finally, in what may be the most potent expression of alternative African-American worldviews, hoodoo traditions assert their presence. Hoodoo is itself a type of black vernacular, one with tacit, deep-rooted assumptions about the true (as opposed to visible) nature of the world.
“While the Negro lives and moves in the midst of white civilization, everything that he touches is re-interpreted for his own use,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote.2 Just as the black had initially to reinvent his life in this new land so utterly alien to him, so must he go on, in a land no longer new but one that still denies him much and remains in many ways alien, reimagining again and again a place for himself, a history and community, an identity, life. Himes in the Harlem novels directly occupied himself with depicting these reimaginings, those documented by the blues and by Professor Peabody on his expedition into deepest Mississippi as much as those signaled by Hurston and by Soitos’s discussion of hoodoo. Himes’s stories present themselves to us masked, borne up on floes of language, braggadocio, artful insult, irony, and circumlocution, spinning out tall and wild even as the tale-teller assures us all the while they are true—telling truths unavailable to mimetic European models. These stories document realities of African-American life as nothing before had done, give us 72-point headlines from a world that never existed: real toads in the most unrelenting imaginary gardens.
Until well into his forties, Chester Himes struggled to fit his individualist vision into accepted modes of the time. For all his brilliance and for all the force, sometimes raw, other times carefully marshaled, of his writing, his work was not all that different from contemporaries like Richard Wright. Whatever else he might be, though, he was a serious writer; his transition to writing detective novels, at least initially, surprised himself as much as it did his critics. Surprise may be the key word. Himes, like a jazzman taking up some old sow’s ear of a song, looking to see what’s in there, found a great deal in there, turning it to silk-purse music never heard before.
His remarkable combinations of humor, pathos, sex, horror, and just plain home truths are very similar to those of the bitter and beautiful blues lyrics and to the traditional black humor that is essentially laughter at black degradation, laughter curiously close to tears or to howling rage. He kept intact all the paraphernalia of the detective subgenre—complicated intrigues, heroes and villains, shaggy monsters and interesting victims, horrendous acts of violence. He managed at the same time, with the sense of lived reality he infuses throughout these novels, to suggest very clearly what the quality of life must be in a huge black urban ghetto, a vast area within a modern city that is literally a jungle filled with rapacious animals, thanks to the impenetrable indifference of established authority to everything that goes on there.3
The form of the detective novel freed Himes from autobiography and, one assumes, because of its presumed lack of seriousness, from inhibitions. Perhaps in giving him license to depict no-holds-barred his vision of our society as fundamentally racist and profoundly corrupt, the form also gave some release from his sense of the injustices America had done him. Certainly he discovered that the form’s emphasis on suspicion, violence, and fear could prove a perfect vehicle for conveying his view of blacks in American society. And while their thrust was no longer autobiographical, Himes peopled the novels with intimates from his Ohio days and with protagonists modeled in part on h
imself. Sheik in The Real Cool Killers closely resembles Himes in appearance and mien;4 Johnny Perry in The Crazy Kill seems almost an idealized self-portrait. With these books, Lundquist says, Himes reached “an objectified vision in which the pain he has known as a black man becomes externalized and even universalized,”5 his detectives at once personifications of the racial problem in the United States and an inquiry into both its absurdities and possible outcomes. Most importantly, with creation of his larger-than-life detectives and overblown, hyperbolic style, Himes claimed for his work something of the power and authority of myth.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed weren’t crooked detectives, but they were tough. They had to be tough to work in Harlem. Colored folks didn’t respect colored cops. But they respected big shiny pistols and sudden death. It was said in Harlem that Coffin Ed’s pistol would kill a rock and that Grave Digger’s would bury it.
They took their tribute, like all real cops, from the established underworld catering to the essential needs of the people—gamekeepers, madams, street-walkers, numbers writers, numbers bankers. But they were rough on purse snatchers, muggers, burglars, con men, and all strangers working any racket. And they didn’t like rough stuff from anybody else but themselves. “Keep it cool,” they warned. “Don’t make graves.”6
Himes intended Grave Digger and Coffin Ed from the first to be heroes. They are, Milliken says, “just possibly the two toughest men alive.”7 Born around 1922, homeboys raised in Harlem and veterans of World War 2, probably as M.P.’s, they were promoted to the rank of detective in the early fifties, and are still awaiting, over a decade later, when the books end, any further promotion, steadily losing ground to inflation, ever-higher costs of living, debts they’ve contracted for cars and neighboring homes on Long Island. They are, and are increasingly aware of being, mediators, go-betweens, ambassadors between parallel cultures—interlocutors. But on the streets of Harlem they rule, as in their unforgettable first appearance.
Grave Digger stood on the right side of the front end of the line, at the entrance to the Savoy. Coffin Ed stood on the left side of the line, at the rear end. Grave Digger had his pistol aimed south, in a straight line down the sidewalk. On the other side, Coffin Ed had his pistol aimed north, in a straight line. There was space enough between the two imaginary lines for two persons to stand side by side. Whenever anyone moved out of line, Grave Digger would shout, “Straighten up!” and Coffin Ed would echo, “Count off!” If the offender didn’t straighten up the line immediately, one of the detectives would shoot into the air. The couples in the queue would close together as though pressed between two concrete walls. Folks in Harlem believed that Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson would shoot a man stone dead for not standing straight in a line.8
Physical descriptions of the detectives verge on the formulaic, “tall, loose-jointed, sloppily dressed, ordinary-looking dark-brown colored men”9 in that first appearance, subsequent descriptions echoing it while adding lanky, big-shouldered, flat-footed, big, rugged, rough, and dangerous to the catalog of adjectives. At various times the pair is said to resemble “plowhands in Sunday suits at a Saturday night jamboree” and “two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town.”10 They are “dressed in black mohair suits that looked as though they’d been slept in” “wearing dark battered felt hats and wrinkled black alpaca suits.”11 As though to emphasize the universality of his detectives, Himes rarely carries descriptions of them much further than this, demonstrating that particular genius informing the Harlem novels: his ability simultaneously to locate his narrative in a realistic, seemingly “ordinary” world, and in one timeless, dreamlike, metaphorical. For this very reason, Milliken notes, despite over half a million words devoted to them, “the two detectives remain to the end, in many ways, shadowy and elusive figures, more adumbrated than defined.”12
Repeatedly, as with the hog farmer and plowhand similes, Himes stresses—quite in contrast to their fierce reputation throughout Harlem—the unremarkable appearance of his pair, adding again and again, still further to emphasize this, that they are virtually indistinguishable one from another. Ed’s face, scarred by acid thrown at him in A Rage in Harlem, represents the chief difference. For this, Ed has gained comparisons to and the occasional nickname Frankenstein. The grafted skin is a shade or so lighter than the old; in addition, a tic develops when he is tense and helps transform his face to a devil mask. Ed is ever the more pragmatic and quicker to act, and often must be restrained by Digger, who is himself more given, if but slightly more, to thoughtfulness, even to brooding. The two, however, are remarkably in accord, machines that, set in motion, continue on course, rolling through or over every obstacle, until the job gets done. This heroic stance makes all the more vivid their growing impotence, so that when in Blind Man with a Pistol we see them standing forlornly by, their car having been torched and themselves beaten, or told by young Black Muslim minister Michael X that the two of them “don’t really count in the overall pattern,”13 these are terrible moments.
Robert Skinner has suggested that Himes was taken by the romanticism of the heroic myth.14 Not only Johnson and Jones but also characters such as Casper Holmes and Johnny Perry reflect this. Himes’s heroes, though, are not the saintly heroes of Christian myth but ambiguous, deeply flawed ones common to such as Greek or Norse mythology, who use otherworldly strength and power to satisfy quite worldly instincts. Skinner points to the pistols, always lovingly described and brandished about like the magical weapons of sword-and-sorcery heroes—even, in the tracer bullets favored by the detectives in Cotton Comes to Harlem, taking on the gods’ own element, fire.
Near the end of Blind Man with a Pistol, in pages riddled with the words think, believe, know, ask, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed look about them in the African-American bookstore where they meet Michael X. Stripped of their powers and of understanding, the detectives find that “In that room it was easy to believe in a Black World.”15 But outside, the streets of Harlem are boiling over, and one of the store’s back rooms is filled with relics of the slave trade. Michael intimates that he knows who Mister Big is but won’t say, telling the detectives repeatedly to ask their boss. We all know by this time who “Mister Big” is, of course: the whole corrupt society.
“You keep on talking like that you won’t live long,” Grave Digger said.
Michael X put on his polished spectacles and looked at the detectives with a sharp-eyed sardonicism. “You think someone is going to kill me?”
“People been killed for less,” Grave Digger said.16
Except for the fact of his black characters and Harlem setting, Himes began the series in A Rage in Harlem as more or less standard crime fare. The plot hinges on a scam, a machine that supposedly turns small-denomination bills to larger ones. There is an ongoing parade of Harlem lowlife, a treasure (in this case a trunk of “gold ore”) that keeps changing hands, a good-hearted innocent suffering at the hand of sharpies, the ever-present imprint of religion (Jackson repeatedly prays for strength during his ordeals and twice visits a minister for counsel, half-brother Goldy works the streets disguised as a nun), and comedy of every mettle: slapstick, cartoonlike, bitter. Much of the text expounds Himes’s own brand of outrageous street-level realism; the canvas is large.
The Harlem of Chester Himes’s detective stories is seen almost exclusively through the distorting lens of crime, but the spectrum of characters included is astonishingly full and varied. Almost all of these characters are representative types… but they are all vigorously alive. They function as caricatures and symbols but also as viable literary characters. The axis about which they orient themselves is crime, either adherence to crime as a way of life or a passionate (though not exactly uncompromising) rejection of crime in all its forms. They are either innocent or guilty, in the terms of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, but, more fundamentally, they are either “squares” or “sharpies,” an equally absolute distinction.17
Skinner points out that Himes’s work resembles not so mu
ch Hammett’s or Chandler’s as it does that of James M. Cain or W. R. Burnett, writers who dealt with life at the bottom, often writing from the transgressor’s point of view. For Himes’s detectives violence, greed, treachery, and deception of every sort are simple coin of the realm; they expect little else. The pair maintain a network of snitches among Harlem’s petty thieves and hustlers, routinely use their influence to shield some wrongdoers in exchange for information on others, even keep a pusher on tap to supply drugs to their stoolies. In The Real Cool Killers Grave Digger slaps a barkeep after pulling him halfway across the bar; in The Crazy Kill the detectives torture young gambler Chink Charlie for information; in A Rage in Harlem Digger tells Imabelle “I’ll pistol-whip your face until no man ever looks at you again”; in The Heat’s On Ed strips a witness and cuts her, then, when she faints, slaps her back to consciousness.
Johnson and Jones take their attitude from the American national philosophy, pragmatism: damn the explanations and full speed ahead, go with what works. Their judgments are simplistic, rigid, self-righteous, authoritarian. Yet, as if from the first they recognize some deep divide in their souls, they spend considerable time rationalizing their actions to others and to themselves. They know that in their own manner they are as morally wrong, as misdirected in their efforts and as predatory, as are those they come up against. They belong to a simpler, less complex time—as they themselves come to realize. By Blind Man with a Pistol their world simply does not work anymore. Given a series of cases to solve, they beat at the heads of presumed witnesses and threaten half the populace of Harlem all to no avail. They cannot penetrate any of the mysteries presented them, they no longer understand the swirls of activity about them on the street. And they wonder aloud what has changed. Their generation never really believed that white America would give them equality, Grave Digger says. This generation does, and it makes them crazy.
