Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  “Hell, Ed, you got to realize times have changed since we were sprites. These youngsters were born just after we got through fighting a war to wipe out racism and make the world safe for the four freedoms. And you and me were born just after our pappys had got through fighting a war to make the world safe for democracy. But the difference is that by the time we’d fought in a jim crow army to whip the Nazis and had come home to our native racism, we didn’t believe any of that shit. We knew better. We had grown up in the Depression and fought under hypocrites against hypocrites and we’d learned by then that whitey is a liar. Maybe our parents were just like our children and believed their lies but we had learned the only difference between the home-grown racist and the foreign racist was who had the nigger. Our side won so our white rulers were able to keep their niggers so they would yap to their heart’s content about how they were going to give us equality as soon as we were ready.”18

  Coffin Ed and Grave Digger came into being at a critical time in the civil-rights struggle. From the first, born to accommodation’s formal dress and living with more contemporary casual styles, they were anachronistic, brandishing icons of black pride and black culture while enforcing the white man’s coercive laws. And in their lifetime the world has bootstrapped itself almost beyond recognition. As Lundquist notes: “Gamblers and opium-addict preachers are one thing to deal with; Brotherhood, Black Power, Black Jesus, and the Black Muslims are quite another.”19

  It’s in part from the social changes swirling about the detectives, in larger part from the divide within their own souls, that the Harlem books evolve. The unwinding of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed as they move from earlier settings, in which crimes are actually solved, through increasing confusion to the cul de sacs of Blind Man is in itself a powerful statement on this period in our country’s history, Lundquist points out, continuing: “But it is perhaps not so much what Himes says by way of protest as he extends the Grave Digger and Coffin Ed stories over the years that is important, but how he says it through the modification of the detective novel itself.”20 This modification, like any evolution, was gradual and progressive, following a logic of its own as Himes pushed ever deeper into the territory. Edward Margolies suggests that Himes never transcended the formula, as occasionally Hammett and Chandler did, but that instead he simply pushed the pulp-detective view to its logical conclusion. As he did so, his Harlem figures become ever more grotesque, moving from clownish innocents, fast-talking hustlers, and pimps to the Black Jesus, or Reverend Sam with his bevy of wives and flock of naked children feeding from troughs.

  Margolies also points out that Himes’s detective novels, six of the eight published within five years and three written in one twelvemonth period in 1957–58, may appear at first glance artless. Momentum and surprise seem everything. The often bewildering plots accrue from chains of brief scenes which are themselves composed of runs of dialogue, like planks laid out across sawhorses of physical description. Narrated in omniscient third person, the stories move back and forth in time as well as space, hopscotching from one line of action or set of characters to another, from present-time scenes to scenes set hours, even days, earlier.

  The action unfolds in perpetual, and very elastic, present time. Whenever the narrative line shifts, and it shifts drastically every five or six pages, the move is always to the point of maximum contrast, without regard to chronology.21

  No one had written like this before. Yet it was the perfect medium for capturing Himes’s inner city, the fervid, feverish activity of it, its diversity and confusion of forces, the eternal present of its people. The technique, Milliken notes, is close to that of film, perhaps as close as writing can come. There is little discursiveness. We know Himes’s characters solely by their appearance, their conversation, their actions. Passages such as this one from The Crazy Kill demonstrate how remarkably visual the style has become. While watching police chase a thief in the streets below, a man has leaned too far out an upper-story window and landed in a delivery truck.

  Time passed.

  Slowly the surface of the bread began to stir. A loaf rose and dropped over the side of the basket to the sidewalk as though the bread had begun to boil. Another squashed loaf followed.

  Slowly, the man began erupting from the basket like a zombie rising from the grave. His head and shoulders came up first. He gripped the edges of the basket, and his torso straightened. He put a leg over the side and felt for the sidewalk with his foot. The sidewalk was still there. He put a little weight on his foot to test the sidewalk. The sidewalk was steady.22

  Throughout the series, too—these quickly became a trademark—Himes introduced static, descriptive vignettes, brief set pieces that have a documentary feel, reading as though the camera were tracking soundlessly down Harlem streets and across rooftops.

  Even at past two in the morning, “The Valley,” that flat lowland of Harlem east of Seventh Avenue, was like the frying pan of hell. Heat was coming out of the pavement, bubbling from the asphalt; and the atmospheric pressure was pushing it back to earth like the lid on a pan.

  Colored people were cooking in their overcrowded, overpriced tenements; cooking in the streets, in the after-hours joints, in the brothels; seasoned with vice, disease and crime.

  An effluvium of hot stinks arose from the frying pan and hung in the hot motionless air, no higher than the rooftops—the smell of sizzling barbecue, fried hair, exhaust fumes, rotting garbage, cheap perfumes, unwashed bodies, decayed buildings, dog-rat-and-cat offal, whiskey and vomit, and all the old dried-up odors of poverty.

  Half-nude people sat in open windows, crowded on the fire escapes, shuffled up and down the sidewalks, prowled up and down the streets in dilapidated cars.

  It was too hot to sleep. Everyone was too evil to love. And it was too noisy to relax and dream of cool swimming holes and the shade of chinaberry trees. The night was filled with the blare of countless radios, the frenetic blasting of spasm cats playing in the streets, hysterical laughter, automobile horns, strident curses, loudmouthed arguments, the screams of knife fights.

  The bars were closed so they were drinking out of bottles. That was all there was left to do, drink strong bad whiskey and get hotter; and after that steal and fight.23

  . . . .

  Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corner swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in the dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn’t anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal—always running, ducking, and dodging. Listless mothers stood in the dark entrances of tenements and swapped talk about their men, their jobs, their poverty, their hunger, their debts, their Gods, their religions, their preachers, their children, their aches and pains, their bad luck with numbers and the evilness of white people.24

  . . . .

  Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of gray rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of a sea. Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub.

  That is Harlem.

  The farther east it goes, the blacker it gets.

  East of Seventh Avenue to the Harlem River is called The Valley. Tenements thick with teeming life spread in dismal squalor. Rats and cockroaches compete with the mangy dogs and cats for the man-gnawed bones.25

  Himes’s Harlem is an imaginary place, owing as much to traditions of the folktale as to observation or attempts at verisimilitude. Out of this “big turbulent sea of black humanity”26 surface a wide range of characters, some but for an instant, others for the duration of a book, all of them, for all their diversity, their bizarreness, and their cr
uelties, united by suffering. Forced to live in such circumstances, their lives have become warped and stunted to fit. Life is a continuous struggle just to stay afloat, so one must keep moving. Death—ugly, quick, real—peers out at them from every dark doorway, every alley mouth, every stopped car.

  Deception, violence, and death are the very streets and stairways of Himes’s Harlem. And because the comic voice springs up always to fill the crawlspaces between the presumed and the actual, between what we pretend life to be and what it is, comedy here becomes Harlem’s native language. In A Rage in Harlem everyone plots to take possession of a trunk of what turns out to be only fool’s gold. In Cotton Comes to Harlem it’s a bale of cotton filled with $87,000 belonging to a fanatic white Alabaman colonel that keeps changing hands, in The Heat’s On three million dollars’ worth of heroin stuffed into a string of Hudson River eels. A motorcyclist chased by Grave Digger and Coffin Ed passes a truck carrying sheet metal and is decapitated, but his body carries on, the motorcycle at last crashing into a jewelry store whose sign reads We Will Give Credit to the Dead. A man walks about Harlem with a knife handle protruding from one side of his skull, two inches of blade from the other. A lady talking to her minister has the back of her dress cut away by a thief to get the purse strapped to her back and goes off down the street showing buttocks and rose-colored underwear to passersby, one of whom finally tells her “Lady … your ass is out.” An old man sits on the marquee of a movie house fishing with his cane pole among pork ribs cooking on a makeshift grill below.

  Interestingly, Himes’s theme of violence and his most exacting depiction of Harlem, of an actual rather than metaphoric Harlem, reached its peak in his one nondetective thriller, Run Man Run, a small masterpiece of sustained narrative momentum and intense psychological terror. Himes took great pains to get everything right here, describing streets and settings in detail, freely appropriating elements of his own life, from alcoholic blackouts and the ignominy of an educated man relegated to unskilled labor, to actual circumstances of his employment at Horn & Hardart, to lend his story verisimilitude.

  Jimmy Johnson, graduate of a black college in Durham, North Carolina, attends Columbia University, where he studies law, and works nights as porter in an automat. Six feet tall and powerfully built, he is intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate, but also upon occasion truculent, unwilling to yield when his rights are challenged by whites: “He just wanted to be treated like a man, was all.”27 One night Jimmy witnesses the murder of two other porters by white policeman Matt Walker who in thrall to an alcoholic blackout has misplaced his car and wildly surmised that the porters are responsible then thinks better of it but decides “to scare the Negroes anyway. It’d be good for them. If they were innocent, it’d help keep them that way.”28 Accidentally shooting the first man sobers Walker at a blow but he goes ahead and kills him, then kills the second porter and chases after Jimmy, who has just surfaced from the basement. The book is given over to Walker’s inexorable pursuit of Jimmy Johnson.

  Walker is boyish, attractive, and charming, protected by his position, by his very whiteness, and by his brother-in-law, Matt’s direct superior on the force, who knows early on what has happened yet keeps hoping Walker will come to his senses. But with the shooting something has snapped, setting free within Walker a psychotic hatred of blacks.

  Matt Walker may be the purest symbol of American racism Himes ever proposed. To all pretense and appearance one thing—a force for the good, a protector, a kindhearted man who takes an interest in those he meets (presenting himself in this manner to Jimmy’s girlfriend before he seduces her)—he is quite another. In a closed loop reminiscent of the later Blind Mans absurdism (recalling also Kenneth Fearing’s classic use of this trope), Walker is set to investigate the very crime he committed. He is protected by society’s own two-facedness, by the gaps between what it says and what it does—by, in fact, every force of society. And Jimmy cannot get away from him. “What menaces Jimmy, basically,” Milliken states, “is not one sick young man in a privileged position, but the national psychosis of racism, fully exposed.”29

  Jimmy’s constant attempts, as an intelligent man, to understand what is happening only serve to highlight the meaninglessness of Walker’s violence.

  “Maybe he was all right when he first went on the force. Maybe something happened to him since he’s been a detective. Some of them can’t take it. There are men who go crazy from the power it gives them to carry a gun. And he’s on the vice squad too. There’s no telling what might happen to a man’s mind who constantly associates with criminals and prostitutes.”30

  All of Jimmy’s intelligence and understanding are of no avail against Walker’s hatred and society’s indifference. Himes’s choice of scenes and language, the very artfulness of this book, with The Primitive and If He Hollers, his most carefully constructed novel, lend an amazing impact to Jimmy’s plight. On the novel’s first page “an ice-cold razor-edged wind” whistles down Fifth Avenue. Jimmy first escapes Walker through a series of underground passages linking the basements of separate buildings, after which in effect the entire city becomes a maze, a labyrinth.

  Rather like Himes’s detective team by the time of Blind Man, Jimmy Johnson in many ways seems the product of earlier, simpler days. Girlfriend Linda calls him a fool and a baby, protected (she implies) by his privileged upbringing, his education, and his pretense of a rational world. Harlem here, too, sometimes seems more closely akin to the Harlem Renaissance’s brief, bright headlights than to the surrounding darkness. Passing a bookstore, in a scene reminiscent of Grave Digger’s and Coffin Ed’s meeting with Michael X in another bookstore where they feel for a moment the possibilities of a secure black world before venturing again into the streets, Jimmy sees books by Richard Wright, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Rudolph Fisher on display.

  Suddenly he felt safe. There, in the heart of the Negro community, he was lulled into a sense of absolute security. He was surrounded by black people who talked his language and thought his thoughts; he was served by black people in businesses catering to black people; he was presented with the literature of black people. Black was a big word in Harlem. No wonder so many Negro people desired their own neighborhood, he thought. They felt safe; there was safety in numbers.31

  But of course, as Jimmy finds, there is no safety in numbers, nor in Harlem, nor in American society, and his sense of same is little more than further manifestation of his self-deception.

  Stephen Soitos believes that the detective story, conflated with the social background of Harlem, perfectly suited Himes’s anecdotal style, race-consciousness, and flair for satire, allowing him in the Harlem cycle to fuse imagination and reality in fresh, exciting ways. Himes took the violence so integral to detective fiction to new planes of expression, Soitos holds, moving “from comic vision to a serious confrontation.”32 Gradually violence replaced religion, sex, and money as the means of unifying Himes’s narrative and, ultimately, of describing his world.

  The violence in Himes’s novels develops throughout the works as he portrays a community in turmoil, tilting towards chaos and then erupting into anarchy. Finally, in the last works, violence becomes a tool of revolt as well as an expression of despair.33

  For Soitos, Run Man Run, with its portrayal of racial hatred in the pursuit of young Jimmy Johnson by psychotic white policeman Matt Walker, and Blind Man with a Pistol, with its condemnation of unorganized violence, are key texts in Himes’s use of violence. Plan B’s apocalyptic vision of the futility of all violence took this theme to its last bitter end, but the apocalypse is there already at the halfway point of Blind Man with a Pistol. On Nat Turner Day, three marching groups, all of them led by messianic figures, converge from different directions towards a free-for-all at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Brotherly Love is shepherded by a well-intentioned, simple-minded black youth and his white female companion, Black Power by a man whose exceedingly comfortable life is suppor
ted by funds from disciples and from the troop of black prostitutes he manages, Black Jesus by Prophet Ham whose own hatred of whites whips his acolytes to a frenzy. While Himes presents the confrontation in broad comic strokes, clearly he despises the simplistic thinking and hypocrisies these groups represent, self-exploitations that can only add to the misery, impoverishment, and isolation of the black community. The clash, the cataclysm, is inevitable, however, and at book’s end his detectives stand impotently by, shooting at rats as they swarm from a tenement under demolition. The novel’s final words are:

  “That don’t make any sense.”

  “Sure don’t.”34

  The investigation is over, abandoned. The self-interrogations—of the detective story, of Harlem, of American society—are done. We are all guilty, and Chester Himes has written our confession.

  19

  The Bad Mother

  In the last years Lesley would shower and dress her husband and, because he refused to stay in all day, take him on long drives through the Spanish countryside where he would sit beside her, looking quite debonair, and soon fall fast asleep. One day they had a flat. Lesley, who knew nothing about changing a tire, got Chester into his wheelchair and positioned so that he could direct her, but proved too weak to loosen the lugs. As she crouched there struggling, two cars pulled up alongside, and, turning to look at Chester, Lesley found that he had moved his chair back and fallen into the ditch. Only his feet were visible, waving in the air above like pennants. Drivers and passengers exited cars angrily, certain that she had knocked this man into the ditch. Once she had convinced them that she was not trying to kill him, that he was her husband and both of them victims of misadventure, the tire got changed in no time.

  It was a story the two of them often laughed over in later days, as they did so many other stories. People are forever recalling Chester’s laughter: how it would spring up suddenly at the least provocation, how it would change his face and take over the room. Humor, Lesley says, was his last and greatest weapon. And it held out for him, as the strokes shut down compartment after compartment of his brain like rooms never to be come back to, as his speech slurred and became unintelligible and finally stopped, as gradually he lost control of body and of self, almost to the end.