Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  They were by this time in their second home in Spain, a smaller one that Lesley had built without stairs and with doorways wide enough to accommodate Chester’s wheelchair, Casa Deros, named after the cat Lesley had sent from England to replace their beloved Griot.

  But a few years before, in June 1970, Chester and Lesley had sat with Bill and Roslyn Targ in the courtyard of Casa Griot, into which they had moved four months earlier, drinking Bloody Marys as Roslyn exclaimed “Chester, at last you’ve got your own house”—at age 61—and they all had a good cry.

  Writing had become ever more difficult for Himes these past years. Distractions accounted in part for this: relocations and resettlings, the never-ending search for housing, inquiries from foreign publishers, visitors, joustings with filmmakers. Health problems contributed significantly, as did his boredom with what he’d been writing. He wondered if he had not by this time followed that road to its natural end, burrowed in like a hedgehog and snuffled out like a fox everything those detective novels had to tell him, so that the experience of writing yet another resembled more the filling-in of a crossword than it did true composition: mere pattern-making. In My Life of Absurdity he recalled 1966, when he and Lesley touched down in Aix-en-Provence.

  I tried to write. Until then I had written the start of several detective stories. I stuck some paper into my typewriter and started another one. That made the sixth or seventh start. I had a standing contract with Duhamel. I didn’t really want to write another detective story or even about Harlem any more or even about American blacks. But I didn’t really know anyone else. I knew so little about the French I couldn’t even talk about them, much less write about them. I didn’t really think too much about them. That’s why I became obsessed with a house, and not even my house. When it came right down to the facts, I didn’t really know anyone but myself. I didn’t go to see French movies or plays or read French books, newspapers, or about French wars, or politics. I had never really arrived in France, but the Americans didn’t want me. I wrote quick, short vignettes about the way I saw blacks in their country, or even in other countries. I kept writing about myself, the life of my mind, hoping to put these vignettes together into a book. And it had become very boring.1

  Among their many visitors during this time was Phil Lomax, who at one point presented himself to Lesley saying that he must speak to Chester in private, wishing to confess that he had plagiarized material of Chester’s for an article published under his own name. Chester told him no harm done. During another visit Lomax related something that had happened back home in Brooklyn, when a blind man on the subway pulled out a pistol and shot at the man who had slapped him, killing an innocent bystander. Himes grew obsessed with this story.

  It signaled me but I didn’t know how; it was telling me something but I didn’t know what. I put my story of Marlene [Regine] aside and concentrated on the beginnings of detective stories I had written …

  In the meantime Samuel Goldwyn Jr. renewed his option for a year on Cotton Comes to Harlem. At the same time he wrote asking me to come to Hollywood to collaborate with him on the screen treatment, all of which he thought I had in my head. At the time my head was filled with the story of Blind Man with a Pistol, of which I had written the first three chapters up to the middle of Chapter 4, and I did not want to go to Hollywood.2

  He finished the book not long after, disparate and seemingly discrete strands of narrative congealing around the image of Lomax’s blind man. When the new novel came back from Bill Targ, who had brought out his last in the U.S., with a detailed letter of rejection, Chester wrapped it again and sent it to Roslyn, who in March of 1968 sold it to William Morrow. Chester and Lesley returned to Paris the following month, camping out at Nicole Toutain’s apartment and witnessing the start of the student riots.

  Back in the States, as well, 1968 was a fulcrum year. The first Kennedy had already gone down; the Watts riots were just around the corner. Memphis lay in wait for Martin Luther King Jr., L.A. for Robert Kennedy, a lectern in the Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, for Malcolm X. Three civil-rights workers were murdered down in Mississippi. During the summer Olympics in Mexico City two African-American athletes were suspended for giving a black-power salute. The Tet Offensive also started up that year—along with bloody racial riots on the unreported back lots of Vietnam.

  Early September, the couple packed and debarked for Spain, proceeding directly to Alicante and lodging at the Palace Hotel until they found an apartment behind the city’s market. There they stayed while having Casa Griot built.

  In the building in which we lived we had a wood-burning furnace for central heating taken care of by the doorman, who started it up about three o’clock every afternoon and ran it until midnight. We bought a small gas burner for our bedroom, which was at the back of the apartment with windows opening onto the terrace. We would use the heater in a small bedroom beyond the tiny kitchen which I used as a study. Sun poured into the big front room through the glass panes heating it from nine o’clock in the morning until dark, bleaching all the furniture, reminding me of my landlady in London who used to draw the shades against the sun to protect the furniture.3

  Following lines of thought pursued also in Blind Man, Himes had started a new detective novel, Plan B, about a black revolution in which ultimately his two detectives take opposite sides, Grave Digger killing Coffin Ed. There in the Alicante apartment he continued work on the book, though he recognized that it “was gradually heading for disaster.”4Some years later in an interview with Michel Fabre he recalled the difficulties he’d set for himself:

  I started another thriller, called Plan B, which is about a largescale black rebellion led by a black subversive organization, but I didn’t quite finish it. In it, the man who secretly sends weapons to blacks finds his plan wrecked because black people don’t have the political maturity needed to band together into an effective force. Instead of waiting for an organization to form, each one of them begins shooting white people for his own personal reasons … I became uncomfortable with it after a while, because the story became too exaggerated. I originally envisioned a general conflict between the races, but in the final scene Coffin Ed and Grave Digger shoot at each other. One of them takes the side of his race brothers, while the other one chooses to uphold law and order, not because he feels any loyalty to whites, but because the political and social implications of the rebellion are too much for him.5

  Himes had by this time finished the first volume of the autobiography, for which shortly he would receive an advance of $10,000 from Doubleday, and begun, most likely working from the fictionalized version of his affair with Regine he had earlier sent Roslyn, on the second.

  In September 1969, following a stay in Paris and a brief jaunt to London where Chester appeared on the BBC, he and Lesley summarily packed their belongings for the move to Spain but discovered upon arrival that their new house remained only half built. By turns exasperated, furious, and depressed, they found an apartment nearby and, five months later, at last took occupancy, though not without first coming to the verge of litigation over the contractor’s malfeasance. Construction fell ever further behind schedule, walls and doorways were set askew, wiring and plumbing were slipshod throughout. Chester recalled watching from afar as unsupervised workers milled about ineffectually. In his letters Himes poured out an unbroken stream of invective against Spain: its roads had ruined his car, the entire country was as racist as the American South, workers were lazy, incompetent, and hopelessly ignorant, no one there was to be trusted, they couldn’t even produce acceptable cat food. His railings against publishers continued as well, despite Gallimard’s proud launch of L’Aveugle au pistolet (Blind Man with a Pistol) under its prestigious Du monde entier imprint, the decision of Le Monde des Livres to feature him in the center spread it reserved for only the most important writers and issues, interviews with the London magazine Nova, the Sunday Times and the BBC, and the stream of journalists, critics and students who increasingly wrote or i
n many cases made the trip to Spain to interview him.

  It was a time, too, of strong if distant attachments as Himes sent out from Spain letter after letter, like grappling hooks seeking purchase. There were dozens to John Williams, a long series to Ishmael Reed, finally, even once most others had stopped, cascades of letters to Roslyn Targ. Those letters, the daily mail, were Chester’s lifeline and anchor, Lesley said; by them were his days measured, his mood set. Disappointing mail left him distraught and unable to work. Good news, checks, and letters from friends cheered him, leveled him out, made him talkative: “He was so geared up that his mail was the most important thing to him. It was his means of keeping in contact with the world.”6

  Sometimes, as well, it became his means of breaking contact. Deciding that Melvin Van Peebles’s hit play Watermelon Man had been stolen from an old short story of his, “The Ghost of Rufus Jones” Himes fell out of communication with Van Peebles. Later, he persuaded himself that John Williams had copyrighted anthologized material of his (his Chicago speech “The Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in the United States” in Beyond the Angry Black) in order to collect royalties. Williams heard of his complaints and confronted him, explaining that he had done this only to protect Chester’s material, but Chester persisted in his belief; soon after, their correspondence fell off, not to be resumed.

  Chester’s anger, always close to the surface, broke through more and more often now in sudden fits of rage. While Lesley learned to turn these aside, she could never understand them. And while she maintains that Chester was never violent towards her, the question arises again and again in interviews. John Williams recalls a time when, failing to negotiate a step from one room into another at the Albert Hotel, Chester flew into a rage at Lesley, shouting that he told her not to wax the floors. There was the time at Walter Coleman’s that he supposedly struck her in jealousy over the attention she gave Walter’s brother. Ed Pearlstein recalls coming across Chester in the lobby of the Albert Hotel not long after first meeting him.

  He was sitting on a bench, and Lesley was standing in front of him. He was furious about something, and Lesley motioned to me not to stop … There had been a racist incident, I think when he went to get a haircut. What impressed me was the intensity of his anger—I could feel it as I passed.7

  “There was only one time that I saw him lose his temper,” Constance Pearlstein insists.

  He and Lesley came in from shopping when Edward and I were living at the Albert Hotel. Chester had one huge bag of oranges, much too full, and it split down the side. Oranges rolled all over our kitchen floor. He yelled at Lesley that it was her fault. She should have gotten a stronger bag or fewer oranges. Edward, Lesley, and I did not answer and we all, Chester included, began picking up the oranges. By the time we’d finished, Chester was laughing at the episode. That was another quality; he could laugh at himself and often did.8

  Chester’s emotional lability, the way in which he could be joking and laughing one moment, then suddenly sullen, closed in, not talking at all, or how he’d pass from fury to laughter in a beat, gets remarked universally. Still, for all the reported incidents of anger, fury, and rage, there remains little evidence of physical violence, and those closest to Himes adamantly deny it. That he often blazed with anger can’t be questioned. Nor that sometimes he spoke of, even threatened, physical violence. Years back, in prison, he had learned that physical violence might be circumvented by his intelligence and command of language, a lesson he never quite forgot.

  Joe Hunter, who remembers several incidents when, challenged, Himes flew into rages, and who is quick to add that the “violence” remained merely verbal, also suggests that Chester was a man you got to know only so well, to a certain depth, before he instinctively drew back and away.9 You could see the eyes change, Hunter says; as though curtains had been pulled. Many report Himes’s reluctance to talk about himself in person, even though in his writing he would broach the most intimate, cruel, personal things. One questions to what extent all these, the anger and remove as much as the laughter, were protective mechanisms, tools honed early on and kept in good repair for survival.

  Only for brief periods had Himes ever felt he was securely in control of his life. Again and again decisions were being made, beyond his ken, by others: school officials, parents, judges, prison guards, editors, publishers, critics. Now, compromised physically by multiple strokes, advancing arthritis and severe back pain, stomach and dental problems, he knew that he was losing control on far more elemental levels. What else could he do but rage—rage, and try to fix in memory the forms of that life slipping away from him, try to make certain the work that had been so much of his life did not fade with him. Rage, and remember, and laugh.

  Even if loss was the tonic from which the daily music departed and to which it always returned, still there were many grace notes and bridges.

  In 1970 Chester and Lesley flew to New York for the opening of Cotton Comes to Harlem. A “Welcome Home, Himes” reception with entertainment by the Jackson Five was held, also a party for Chester at the UN Building, with Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and many others in attendance.10 Among interviewers was Life’s Rudolph Chelminski, whose article “The Hard-Bitten Old Pro Who Wrote ’Cotton’ Cashes In” began:

  Hollywood has finally cottoned on. The amazing success of the wild detective comedy Cotton Comes to Harlem has proved once and for all that movies do not have to be lily-white—or even “integrated”—to be big box office. They can be jet black. Directed entirely in Harlem by black actor-playwright Ossie Davis, Cotton has grossed over $6 million in three months.11

  If Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques in their tailored suits failed to match Himes’s own description of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed as “two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town,”12 they nonetheless gave credible, strong performances, and they shared with the detective pair they were recreating at least one important trait, that of imposing presence. As Milliken remarks, the two actors

  had built their careers on their ability to dominate the films they appeared in with no dependence at all on strongly written parts. Both had developed stage presence that went far beyond charismatic, all the way to hypnotic, and they managed to upstage the film’s heady combination of erotic nude scenes and noisy gunfights with little more than exchanges of sidelong glances.13

  Himes’s attitude toward the film seems to have shifted according to his audience. He told Black News that what he had seen was a minstrel show. In My Life of Absurdity he wrote: “On first sight of the film Cotton I thought it was badly acted and noisy, but time changed my opinion until I thought it was both reasonably acted and relatively quiet.”14 Elsewhere he criticized the producers for not following his story closely enough, complaining that they had dropped some of his best material; praised Davis’s rewrite of the original script by Arnold Perls, which gave the whole a much stronger black orientation; and spoke out against the excessive violence of popular black films.

  Among those soon to see Cotton was future community activist and crime writer Gary Phillips, then seventeen, and its influence on him was profound.

  Up there on the Temple’s screen was the tall and menacing Raymond St. Jacques as Coffin Ed Johnson, and a slimmed-down Godfrey Cambridge as the only slightly more reasonable Grave Digger Jones. They were razor sharp in their grey tailored suits, wide black ties offset by their slate-blue shirts, glinting gold cufflinks, and bad-ass felt fedoras shoved down on top of their skulls. Certainly not the lived-in suits and hog farmer builds Himes described his characters as possessing in the books, I’d later discover.

  What hit me the second these two cats made the scene was just how cool and aware they were; how they inhabited a world called Harlem I’d only been to once because I had cousins who lived there; and how their Harlem was like my South Central Los Angeles, a place that was part of, yet very much removed from, the rest of America.

  The film led Phillips, as it led others, to Chester Himes’s books. To the Harlem novels
, shot through with violence. To the amazing Blind Man with a Pistol. To Lonely Crusade, whose insights had Phillips, by then immersed in community work, nodding his head in agreement. Still today, he says, those books affect the very way he thinks and writes.

  Himes wrote the Coffin Ed and Grave Digger stories because he was down and out in Paris. Like the ex-patriot African-American jazz men who populated Paris in that era of the Fifties, Himes was riffing and improvising on the typewriter his unique take on detective fiction. His plots were only the starting point as he set down his red hot licks, taking his two crusaders on errands that even they couldn’t quite articulate. But in the doing, the being, they existed and blew through a life that promised nothing and delivered less. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger were the original gangstas who lived by their wits and ruthlessness, trying their damndest to keep shit from raining down on their stomping grounds.

  Himes got the cosmic joke, and let us in on parts of it in each successive book. I keep trying to follow his lead.15

  In February 1972 Chester and Lesley flew to New York for the launch of The Quality of Hurt, were again met with warm receptions everywhere, and spent several days in North Carolina with Joe and Edward, the first time all three brothers had been together since their mother’s funeral. That Christmas Joe and wife Estelle visited them in Spain; the following December, Chester and Lesley flew to New York to visit Edward, then on to Greensboro to see Joe and Estelle. On the February 1972 American visit Chester was widely interviewed and gave a brief speech at a reception for black writers by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One interviewer was Nikki Giovanni, for CBS’s Camera Three. Another, for The Village Voice, was novelist Charles Wright, who found Himes in the Chelsea Hotel, “a place where a man might wait for the countdown or enjoy the spoils of victory,” and sat with him admiring “the magnificent Edward Hopper window view” as seventeen-year-old Griot twined about their legs.