Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Chester Himes looks like an elegant sportsman, a man of distinction, and—with his beard—bears an uncanny resemblance to Ernest Hemingway. However, Himes is black and basic. “You know there is only one black writer. Just as soon as he makes it, they tear him down. We black writers have got to stop fighting each other. Whitey has always pitted one black against the other. The field slaves and the house slaves. Their motto has always been divide and conquer.”16

  Publishers Weekly also ran a feature in connection with Himes’s visit.

  Chester Himes, ex-convict, jewel thief, bedroom athlete, busboy, porter, expatriate, but above all writer, talks about himself—something he does with verve and brilliance—in the first volume of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (Doubleday), and in conversation with PW:

  “I was speaking to a black studies class at Hunter College,” he told PW, “and the young professor, who was black, kept quoting from an article in the Sunday Times Book Review (which I hadn’t read) that said I wasn’t a true spokesman for the black race, that the Harlem of my books was not the real Harlem …

  “Well, I explained that I had created a Harlem of my mind; that I have never attempted to be the spokesman for any segment of the black community. I take my stories from the Black Experience as I have undergone it.

  “Before long, the kids were on my side. Young people don’t want to confuse stories in books with their own reality. They resent books that claim to show the interior of their minds. They aren’t looking for any ’spokesmen.’ They can speak for themselves. The best a black writer can do is to deal with subjects which are personal; so he can tell how it was for him.”17

  That is very much what Himes had tried to do, according to his own lights, in The Quality of Hurt to tell how it was for him. A major essay-review from Ishmael Reed for Black World (running to twenty-three pages when reprinted in Reed’s collection Shrovetide in New Orleans) held that Himes had met his charge head-on, deeming the first volume “a big book; big as the career and as the man.”18

  The Quality of Hurt … is a love story, sometimes amusing, sometimes sorrowful; it’s a cops and robbers story as gory as Peckinpah; it’s a story about the tragedies that shatter a proud, noble, and gifted family.19

  . . . .

  Volume I … is told coolly and objectively, Himes utilizing his considerable novelistic gifts, one of the major qualities of which is a fantastic memory. His descriptions of Los Angeles, Cleveland, and New York geography read like street maps. He and writers like Albert Murray are scholars of Harlem’s topography as well as its innards.20

  . . . .

  Chester Himes is a great writer and a brave man. His life has shown that black writers are as heroic as the athletes, entertainers, scientists, cowboys, pimps, gangsters, and politicians they might write about.21

  . . . .

  The achievement of Volume I is even more staggering when you realize that another volume is on the way. Surely that will be an additional monster destined to mind slam the reader.22

  Time, meanwhile, was at the barricades of that “fantastic memory.” Not long after the New York trip, in April, Chester suffered another stroke and briefly entered the British-American Hospital in Madrid. In August of that year, 1972, Griot died. Himes was devastated, missing him terribly, but Lesley ordered from England a six-month-old Siamese kitten, Deros Cantabile, which Chester received on January 12. While in London on business that September, Himes consulted a number of English specialists who agreed that, given his general condition, there was little more to be done for him regarding his complaints of worsening arthritis, hernia, and stomach pain. Early in the new year he received word that not only was the second Grave Digger/Coffin Ed movie Come Back, Charleston Blue failing to make the inroads Cotton had, it had lost close to two million dollars. That spring Himes was guest speaker at a Black Literature Week organized by the NAACP in Stuttgart. He read there a revised version of the introduction he had written for Ishmael Reed’s anthology Yardbird Reader the year before, in which he claimed that the African American, summarily and for so long oppressed, ironically had attained as a result, in transcending his suffering, racial superiority.

  His letters make clear Himes’s gradual realization that his creative years were over. Hundreds of petty details (house, business correspondence, interviews) claimed his time and what energy he had left. He wrote that he had one more novel in him, and that would be it; that he hoped only to finish the second volume of his autobiography; that he would do whatever he could, travel anywhere, to promote his work and help keep it in print. He fiddled about with older material, assembling stories for a second collection, licensing reprints of the novels, but there was no new work. Loss of physical control—arthritis, severe back pain, increasingly slurred speech—heralded more urgent losses. He was prone to easy distraction and found it ever more difficult to concentrate. Things were getting away from him. He grew absentminded and feared that his memory, too, might be giving way, perhaps the only loss he felt he could not sustain.

  He was also, in a sense, losing America, “the bad mother”23 that had made him what he was and given him his eternal subject. On visits now he felt hopelessly out of touch, scarcely recognizing his erstwhile home, its society alien to him, the ways in which younger blacks thought and spoke all but impenetrable. He must have thought of old friend Richard Wright at the end of his career, gone so long from the homeland. And so Himes stood apart and at a hard angle to the new confrontations and accommodations building in America, gazing upon a world ever more surely taking on the shape of the one he had described in the Harlem cycle: bloody, unjust, absurd.

  Some time in the sixties, like a hammerblow it had struck an entire circumscribed nation: Things do not have to be this way. Young people, blacks, women, and minorities everywhere struggled to break through the crust of the culture’s dominant impulses and rediscover accountability, freedom, connection, spirituality. It was a gallant swim upstream against all currents, an attempt to bring on a revolution in values—and perhaps, as well, the last flare of our nation’s romanticism. And while the impulse lasted but a few years, brought down by excess, impracticality, and a dilating economy, bringing out at the same time something of the worst and something of the best in us all, a bitter residue remained. Now America was back on track, headed down that long, lonesome road of consumerism and complacency, unable to recollect just why it had ever seen fit to swerve off the road in the first place. It all seemed so impossibly idealistic now—just as had the social dreams of Himes’s young manhood. Cynicism and irony were the new hallmarks, as though, having rejected the possibilities of freedom along with its attendant responsibilities, like Caliban we could no longer bear to look straight on into the mirror.

  Through it all Chester Himes stood, as always, outside, watching.

  America’s very permutability, Himes knew, makes sincere difference-taking or protest all but impossible. Protean, the American process absorbs and transforms everything. The larger, commercial culture co-opts transgressive impulses wherever they pop up, subverts them without ever seeming to do so, holds them down and tickles till they give in. In a 1963 article written for a Marseilles jazz magazine Himes contended that white society’s talk of equality and justice was little more than bluff and misdirection. The white man, he wrote,

  believes that if he gives a sufficiently persuasive performance he will convince the world that he earnestly wishes to accede to the Negroes’ demands for equality and justice—and perhaps convince the Negroes too. If, in the end, he can do no better, he will try to corrupt the Negroes by allowing them enough of the benefits of American life to divert their desire for equality and justice to the accumulation of wealth (like himself).24

  Thereby dissipating, Himes continues, the very qualities of humanity that Negroes have earned in their generations of oppression. Often it seemed all bluff, misdirection and distraction. Here again is Ishmael Reed, the closest we have to a direct successor to Himes, looking back on Chester’s vis
it:

  In 1972, when Chester Himes made his triumphant return to the United States on the occasion of the publication of the first volume of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt, the establishment was just beginning to take revenge on black men for having caused much of the political ferment of the 1960s.

  Aware of this atmosphere, Himes said, prophetically, on the television show Soul, that the establishment was going to start a war between black men and black women. Himes was right. And so, unlike in the 1960s, when a vague entity known as the “white power structure” was blamed for the continuing problems of many African Americans, by the late 1980s, African Americans, or more specifically, black men, were blamed for these problems.25

  Whether or not one accepts that observation, even the most cursory glimpse at recent work by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, Gloria Naylor, and others (for it is—this, too, calling out for thought—black women who today among African-American novelists get read) has to give one pause. Atop the age-old hatred for the white, oppressor society, like a layer of sedimentary rock, is a secondary layer of rage against the shiftless, shirking, predatory black man, what Sven Birkerts has called “the story of the black matriarchy as written with a poisoned pen.”26

  Citing Himes’s contention that black people in this country are the only new race in modern times, Reed elsewhere argues that “nothing in history quite happened like it happened here” and that it’s for this reason that African-American fiction, while abjuring the weight of the white literary past, is forever historical in a way white fiction can never be. Addressing the confusion of white readers over loose-jointed, nonconformist African-American fiction, he might well be speaking of Himes; certainly he has him squarely in mind.

  So this is what we want: to sabotage history. They won’t know whether we’re serious or whether we are writing fiction. They made their own fiction, just like we make our own. But they can’t tell whether our fictions are the real thing or whether they’re merely fictional. Always keep them guessing. That’ll bug them, probably drive them up the walls. What it comes down to is that you let the social realists go after the flatfoots out there on the beat and we’ll go after the Pope and see which action causes a revolution. We are mystical detectives about to make an arrest.27

  In sparsely populated auditoriums of the mind, Reed falls silent and out there in the darkness beyond the footlights we hear Chester Himes, a man who knew a great deal about confusing them and who took great pleasure in bugging them till they climbed the walls, a man who knew not a little, as well, about mystical detectives, begin to applaud.

  20

  “I Never Found a Place I Fit”

  Toward the end Chester had grown so frail, his contractures so terrible, that, forcing his arms down to bathe or dress him, even to take his blood pressure, Lesley feared she might break his bones. Who would have thought I’d wind up like this, a cabbage? he asked her. When she read to him reviews of his work, letters or copies of essays written by young admirers, tears came to his eyes. He cried often, those last months. Finally he stopped speaking. One morning instead of following her with his eyes he turned his head toward her, and Lesley understood that he could no longer see.

  Late in May of 1974, Chester had entered University College Hospital in London for prostate and hernia surgery. Arthritis had become so bad, deterioration of his spinal column had so progressed, that even the physical effort of typing seemed too much for him. Two strokes had swept through his brain like thunderstorms, leaving wreckage and devastation behind. Now, following surgery, another occurred and, left side of his brain deprived of blood supply and oxygen, Chester fell into a brief coma, waking to find that he had lost further motor control. A string of visits to medical facilities would follow: that June to a Spanish clinic for hemorrhages, in September a return there, the following month a trip to the American Hospital in Paris, then in January another to Madrid for a checkup; in November 1976, following publication of My Life of Absurdity, a visit to New York’s Presbyterian Hospital for tests and consultations. Chester’s movement had become so restricted that Lesley feared leaving him alone. Nor was his mind often clear. His irritability, his irascibility, flew at the many walls closing in on him. Lesley wrote to his brother Joe that Chester was losing his memory, breaking into rages over the least upset. Chester himself not long before had written to Roslyn that he could scarcely walk and that he feared his mind, like the use of his legs, was going. “I don’t think I can continue,”1 he told his new editor at Doubleday, Larry Jordan, after seeing Jordan’s editing of the manuscript of My Life of Absurdity. Whether from introspection brought on by his work on the autobiography or from an inwardness ushered in by declining health, Chester found his way toward voicing regrets. In a September letter to Roslyn he begged forgiveness for his bad behavior and lack of thoughtfulness.2 Three months later he wrote her that he had been “an unmitigated pig” toward most women: “I was such a detestable person it makes me sick to write about myself…”3

  What concentration and resources of will he had left, Chester largely expended on finishing the second volume of the autobiography, stubbornly typing away at it with two fingers while Lesley, in another room, labored to make sense of and retype his pages. By spring of 1975 they had stitched together a first draft of the manuscript. That July, Chester and Lesley visited Chester’s cousin Robert Thomas, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon. Fall visitors to Spain included old friends Jean Miotte and Herb Gentry. A later visit, to Lesley’s family in England (spring 1977) did not go well. Edgy and tense the whole time, Chester began ranting when Lesley’s brother-in-law tousled her hair; on the third day he insisted they return to Spain.

  Another project, Chester’s proposed follow-up to 1971’s collection Black on Black, finally saw light in 1982 when Lieu Commun published Le Manteau de rêve. Black on Black had brought together stories mostly from the thirties and forties, Chester’s script for Baby Sister being the notable exception. This record of one soul’s struggle against all the forces conspiring to cheapen and degrade it serves as a précis of Himes’s eternal theme. In both form and theme, Milliken points out, Baby Sister is indeed quite close to Greek tragedy:

  It is, at least in part, an exercise in awe before the phenomenon of human greatness, the classic tragic formula. It offers a protagonist who is larger than life, heroically intense, crushed by forces that are inexorable and irrational but also predictable and consistent. It has the stark simplicity of myth and the precise symmetry of ritual.4

  The scenario restricts itself to three days, each day culminating in an act of violence against Baby Sister. With this introduction to a familiar Himesland, the film’s narrator sets the tone early on:

  Only the will of the community can save her from the wolves. But the inhabitants of this community, restricted, exploited, prostituted, violated and violent, timid and vicious, living in their rat-ridden, hotbox, stinking flats, are either the hungry wolves themselves, or are struggling desperately to save themselves from the hungry wolves.5

  Le Manteau de rêve completed the summing up of Himes’s early work begun with the initial volume. Originally to be titled Black on White, it collected such stories as “Crazy in the Stir,” “The Ghost of Rufus Jones,” “Spanish Gin,” “The Snake,” “One Night in New Jersey,” “A Night of New Roses,” and “In the Rain.” The book was dedicated

  To Lesley, my wife,

  for her love, her patience,

  her good humor and her solicitude.

  To Mrs. Roslyn Targ,

  my dear friend and my literary agent

  who has believed in me all these years.

  To Professor Michel Fabre,

  for his friendship and assistance.

  The book’s cover (by Yves Besnier) depicts a white-bearded, pensive Himes sitting alone in a room of bare walls and tiled floor, cane in hand, overcoat draped across the back of the chair. He is well dressed in sweater and sharply creased slacks, good shoes, yet seems to be dissol
ving: part of the Crosshatch of the wicker chair’s back shows through his body.

  In these last years Himes’s spirits and temperament careened back and forth from bravado to lamentation. One moment he had become in his own mind a social force to be reckoned with, a prophet for young blacks back in America, a hero for the cause; in the next he and his books were forgotten, he said, beaten down by time’s hammers or by disinterest, discarded, cast aside. He wrote to editor Larry Jordan that America was the “bad mother,” that all his life he’d been America’s whipping boy, that he’d tried again and again, and against all reason, to force America to “forgive” him.6 “His self-absorption had made it hard for him to imagine that most Americans had not heard of him,”7 Fabre and Margolies note, though at another level of mind, given that he knew the fate of his books in the United States, he must also have known (this knowledge held suspended in contradiction) the truth of his situation.

  But anything can keep you afloat if you grab it hard enough and hold on, and that was Himes’s lifeline: that sense of his work, that all this had been for something. Very little is needed to destroy a man, Artaud wrote; he needs only the conviction that his work is useless—against all intimations of which Chester now pitched his final struggle, wrestling the angels of history.

  In his poem “In Memory of Joe Brainard” Frank Bidart speaks of

  the remnant of a vast, oceanic

  bruise (wound delivered early and long ago)