Chester B. Himes
Page 1
CHESTER B.
HIMES
A BIOGRAPHY
Lawrence P. Jackson
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
NEW YORK LONDON
This book is dedicated to my mother, Verna M. Jackson; my sister, Lynn S. Jackson; my grandmothers, Eleanor Christine Macklin Mitchell and Virginia Jefferson Jackson Rowe; my children, Katani, Nathaniel, and Mitchell; and the women who bring us forth:
Sarah Farrar
Francis Jones
Amanda Jones
Maude J. Macklin
Betsey Maclin
Frances Maclin
Daisy M. Mitchell
Luvenia Daughtery
Sandra Daugherty
Grace Macklin
Grace Gee
Harriet Macklin
Marsha M. Thomas
Vera Macklin
Sally Macklin
Teresa Hutchinson
Deanne Hutchinson
Doris Mitchell
Clara Mitchell
Sally Breedlove
Dicey Lee Waller
Alice Jefferson
Morning Hundley
Celestia H. Jackson
Jennie Dickerson
Mary J. Kesee
Martha J. Womack
Marnice Tolber
Elizabeth Mills
Barbara Dugger
Gennifer Dugger
Jackie Martin
Anne Taylor
Carol Taylor
Veronica Norwood
Dr. Jeanette Dates
Doris Brunot
Kay Drayton
Jewell Campbell
Barbara Golden
Juanita Wilson
Betty Nunn
Jean Smith
Shirley Anderson
Bertha Blow
Mary Holman
Alicia Allen
Carol Miller
Janette Hopkins
Carolyn Tubman
Twilah Grant
Phyllis Shelton
Dianne Claiborne
Dr. Nina Rawlings
Helen Bentley
Eula Gray
Patricia Jessamy
Sarah Taylor
Martha Allen
Irvina Mallory
Elise Mason
Carol Carter
Carrie Dorom
Marylin Washington
Edna Mae Greer
Thelma Jackson
Rosie Hutchinson
Gwynn Tartar
Ada Lovick
Nancy Barrick
Bernice Beaird
Ella Edemy
Olivia Dixon
Candace Simms
Camay C. Murphy
Phyllis Alston
Eliza Johnson
Rosalee Smith
Jacquelyn Jackson
Reba Robinson
Ruby Fuller
Gladys Despaigne
Delores Lewis
Naomi McGadney
Regine Jackson
Marie Ostine
Patricia D. Ouisley
For all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.
—OLD FLEECE, MOBY-DICK
Contents
Prologue
CHAPTERS
1OLD SCHOOL NEGRO
1909–1914
2THE SOUTHERN CROSSES THE YELLOW DOG
1914–1925
3BANQUETS AND COCAINE BALLS
1925–1928
4GRAY CITY OF EXILED MEN
1928–1936
5WHITE FOLKS AND THE DAYS
1936–1941
6RUIN OF THE GOLDEN DREAM
1941–1944
7TRYING TO WIN A HOME
1944–1945
8MONKEY AN’ THE LION
1946–1948
9INFLICTING A WOUND UPON HIMSELF
1948–1952
10CADILLACS TO COTTON SACKS
1952–1954
11OTHELLO
1954–1955
12A PISTOL IN HIS HAND, AGAIN
1955–1959
13FIVE CORNERED SQUARE
1959–1962
14COTTON COMES TO HARLEM
1963–1965
15A MOOR IN SPAIN
1965–1972
16AFRO-AMERICAN PEOPLE’S NOVELIST
1972–1984
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Prologue
In the spring of 1934 a young prisoner in Ohio’s maximum security penitentiary sat in a raw dormitory near an open latrine with a typewriter purchased from his gambling winnings. For three years, he had plunked away at short stories, one after another, dozens of them, mailing them out to newspapers in Chicago and Atlanta. Slowly he had mastered his craft while reading everything that the prison trustee had in the cart, from glossy magazines and detective stories, to Omar Khayyám and the latest by John O’Hara. He studied the writings of Ernest Hemingway. Five years into his sentence, the twenty-four-year-old had known some minor literary successes, but in that year he would have some major ones. Although it wasn’t unheard of for an Ohio convict to achieve literary fame—O. Henry had walked the same yard—there was a difference. Chester Himes was black.
If race has reasserted its powerful relevance in the twenty-first century, in the early 1930s it had fully evolved into what the sociologist and writer W. E. B. Du Bois forecast in 1903 as “the problem of the Twentieth Century . . . the problem of the color line.” Up to 1934 there had been one black professional writer of regular national reach, the short-lived poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was best known for poetry in black “dialect,” what he himself was prone to dismiss as a “jingle in a broken tongue.” Others had tried and abandoned the job, moving on to steadier work. For most people whose parents or grandparents had reached adulthood as chattel slaves, it was thought improvident and foolhardy, if not genuinely odd, to pursue a career exclusively as a professional writer of fiction.
This was certainly true for Chester Himes. At the beginning, he ignored, denied, erased, or felt ashamed of much of what is understood today as racial ancestry or racial identity. He knew mainly that blackness had helped him pull a twenty-year-sentence for an armed robbery, a punishment he received at nineteen after he threw himself on the mercy of the court and confessed. A broken back was the only reason he had the leisure to write in the segregated prison and, unlike the other black convicts, wasn’t shoveling coal all day, everyday.
But to look at Chester Himes in 1934 was not, however, to be overwhelmed by something that mattered little to him. Light-skinned and slightly built, he exuded boyish, almost feminine charm. He had chipped teeth and several prominent scars, the main one on his chin, but they were the result of an accident, not street fights. For all of his life he would strive to appear tougher than what he felt inside, and writing helped him steel himself emotionally. He often compared the literary life to prizefighting and he accepted the discipline of training, punishment, and rejection, saying that “a fighter fights, and a writer writes.”
What he would accomplish in gray dungarees on the gray bunk surrounded by the clamor of unruly men suffering through the winter of their confinement would land him in a national magazine in 1934, repeatedly, alongside the best American writers, Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes, another young black man from Ohio attempting to make a career in writing stick. Within ten years, after an early parole, Chester Himes fulfilled all of his youthful promise, and published a fiery first novel with America’s largest press, Doubleday. Not even two years after that, and with arguably America’s best literary publisher, Knopf, he completed the book that would define his career, Lonely Crusade. But although he was acclaimed—“if he is not the greatest
writer of fiction among contemporary American Negroes, there is none greater”—by the American impresario of modern art Carl Van Vechten, Himes fled the United States as soon as he could, in 1953, returning in contrite humiliation for ten months in 1955, then happily abandoning America forever. In France, Chester Himes became a writer of international renown and shaped the attitudes of the next generation. He did it by living in an unbending style and pioneering black stories in a new genre: detective fiction.
Himes was driven to expose racial injustice, especially its subliminal and libidinal dimensions, and all of his work was that of a bold man struggling to survive by the writer’s discipline. His candid, revealing books shamed other writers and always repulsed and offended parts of his audience. Early on, his publishers considered him unique “for sheer intensity of feeling, for conveying utter frustration, the heart-breaking effect of constant defeat, and fear that can be dissolved only by violence.” But he insisted on taking his fight not simply to the most obvious sources of racial cruelty in American society, but to the doorstep of progressive liberals congratulating themselves for their altruism and kindness. He specialized in biting the hand that fed him, and he earned that reputation by accusing the presses that acquired him of perfidy. His first book, If He Hollers Let Him Go, made one of his editors at Doubleday remark that he “nauseated her,” which led Himes to develop a critique, which he made over and over, that the company sabotaged and cheated him. Doubleday’s editor in chief once responded testily, “We are not accustomed to having our word questioned the way you question it in that letter, Chester.” The editor would be joined by virtually everyone who ever published Chester Himes. Chester worked both sides of that street. He was the rare black writer to earn official condemnation from the NAACP.
Chester Himes soldiered on, writing books with a vulnerable honesty that left him wounded when the works floundered, typically on account of the claim that the author was too bitter, too graphic, and ignoring the progress in U.S. race relations after the 1954 Brown decision. He became, midway through his career, a scapegoat, the black writer unwilling to accept that the United States had become a blameless, functioning multiracial democracy. He was outcast for his blunt unwillingness to herald a Pollyannish future of healthy racial integration and economic justice. History has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.
In an America that was enjoying Amos ’n’ Andy, Himes wrote about black men lusting after white women, crippling skin-color prejudice, and the difficulty of combat against the power of corporate industrialists. Himes might have been considered a prophet if he had not begun a career in the era when Richard Wright was the recognized black writer exploring the arc of race relations, Willard Motley the best-selling author who had completely eschewed the race problem, and Ralph Ellison the shining artist-intellectual who transcended race and wrote because he loved his craft.
Although Chester wrote about Harlem and black workers struggling to get ahead, he was reared in the Deep South and Cleveland, the middle-class child of college teachers. He was the first twentieth-century black American to walk the path of petty criminal and convict turned dynamic writer that would later make celebrities out of Malcolm X, Claude Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Robert Beck, Nathan McCall, and several others. Himes’s early novels—If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Lonely Crusade (1947), The Third Generation (1953), and The Primitive (1955)—revealed a fundamentally racist American society less inclined to lynch blacks but preferring to dismantle them psychologically. In his French detective series starring Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, he reversed gear, discarding the exposure of corruption and ethical hypocrisy and instead exaggerating the gross carnival created by slavery and segregation. Himes resolved the pain and indignation of his life by revealing the humor in it and by acknowledging the absurdity of western humanity and the inextricability of black people from any vision of America. His vernacular tales gained wide appeal and were turned into films. The generation who became writers after the assassination of Malcolm X, proudly calling themselves “black,” defining their identities in the storm of left-wing politics and black nationalist aesthetics, considered him their forebear. Their respect and admiration was unsurprising. During his lifetime, Chester Himes published seventeen novels, a book combining a major playscript along with several short stories, and a two-volume autobiography: he left a decisive archive and a legacy that endures.
CHESTER B. HIMES
Chapter One
OLD SCHOOL NEGRO
1909-1914
Chester Bomar Himes was born on July 29, 1909, in a comfortable white two-story, three-bedroom cottage at 710 Lafayette Street on the corner of Dunklin Street in Jefferson City, Missouri. In the late 1920s, the poet Sterling Brown and his wife, Daisy, would occupy the same house. On the other side of Lafayette from the house stood the limestone pillars and wrought-iron main gates of the campus of Lincoln Institute. The school’s elaborate brick buildings towered on the hill opposite the house, and the students could be seen scrimmaging at football on the school grounds below. Chester was born into a family, on both parents’ sides, of professors teaching in America’s Negro higher education system. The last of three sons, Chester was named by his mother, Estelle, to honor her father Elias Bomar, who was known to his family and friends by his middle name, Chester.
An exacting, slight woman in adulthood, Estelle Himes was proud of her family and ancestry. Both of Estelle’s parents had been born into slavery in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in the 1830s and emancipated as adults after the Civil War. While they were light complexioned enough to pass as not being black (exasperating and befuddling to the Dalton, Georgia, census numerator), they were hardly considered white. Born after legal chattel slavery, Estelle belonged to a generation of African Americans who heard rumors about the identity of some of their grandparents. South Carolina, especially its coastal parts, also had a tradition of using the terms “turks” and “brass ankles” to include mulattoes among whites in times of need or to palliate ardent natives refusing enslavement and black codes. But wistful Estelle pondered about her forebears, and she developed elaborate genealogical and romantic myths, linking herself at every turn to aristocrats. Estelle liked to describe her mother as the offspring of a “pedigreed Englishman,” an Irish trader, and a woman whose mother was an “African princess.” She proudly described her father’s father as “a direct descendent from an English noble family.”
The truth was a bit messier than the family legends she raised her younger sons, Joseph and Chester, to admire. Estelle’s mother, Malinda Cleveland, had grown up a prize possession of Jesse Cleveland, a prosperous Spartanburg merchant, whose father had distinguished himself as a Revolutionary War captain at the Battle of King’s Mountain. Hardy and independent, Cleveland conducted his business in dry goods and slaves overland by wagon train to ports in Baltimore and Philadelphia to elude the import taxes applied to the goods shipped by boat from Charleston’s harbor. He claimed title to much of the original land that became the town of Spartanburg and, by 1835, was named a trustee of the Spartanburg Male Academy, along with another prominent citizen, Elisha Bomar. In his will, Cleveland donated his cow pasture, or the land west of the courthouse, to what is today’s Wofford College.
When Cleveland died in December 1851, Malinda was a young girl of about twelve, and she was valued at $700. Apparently a striking child, Malinda looked like a mixture of Irish or English with Native American and African, a common outcome of the sexual relations that slaveholders forced upon enslaved women and girls. Malinda was moved to the town household of Cleveland’s middle son, Robert, in the northwest part of the village. A silver-tongued graduate of Charleston Medical College, Robert Easley Cleveland was a well-liked doctor in his thirties specializing in typhoid cases. By 1860 the younger Cleveland was wealthy and owned $39,000 worth of “personal property,” mainly enslaved mixed-race people. Although her mother’s presence nearby may have helped her put off the pressures of concubinage for a time, in her l
ate teens Malinda found herself in a sexual relationship with a white man, probably Cleveland. By 1867, when she was in her late twenties, she had four children: eight-year-old Maggie, six-year-old Thomas, two-year-old Phillis, and newborn Charles. Phillis seems to have been the last Cleveland child, and Maggie seems to have been the first. While the other children were probably fathered by Elias Bomar, there is no way of knowing with certainty.
At some point during this period, Malinda fell in love with the spirited and dashing young groom and mason Elias Bomar. As a child she had had the opportunity to first meet Elias, who was quite difficult to distinguish physically from a white man, when Robert Cleveland married Elizabeth Bomar in Spartanburg in 1844. Elizabeth was the oldest daughter of John Bomar Jr. and the marriage united two of the town’s prominent white families. The Bomars descended from Whig Englishmen who had settled in Halifax County, Virginia, fought the British and then trekked down to South Carolina after the surrender at Yorktown. Elisha Bomar was the local patriarch, who married Amaryllis Earle in 1823 and, like Jesse Cleveland, sent his children into the professions. His son John Earle Bomar was born July 29, 1827.
Technically, Estelle Himes’s father, Elias, was never owned by any Bomar. Theron Earle, a relative of Amaryllis, owned the title to the man, and in 1840, before Elias was ten, his estimated value was $550. In piecemeal notes about her father written at the end of her own life, Estelle described him as the son of an “octoroon” and a “white Englishman.” Earlier, during Chester’s childhood, she told her sons that she was the granddaughter of Elisha Bomar from Spartanburg, which is possible. Elisha Bomar might have visited Theron Earle’s farm at some point in the 1830s and conceived a son who came under his control during later years. After Earle’s death in 1841, roughly three-year-old Elias seems to have been entrusted to Elisha and Amaryllis Bomar, and became the valet to their fourteen-year-old son John.
The slavery that Elias knew at the hands of the Bomar family was unique. Like other Southerners with pretensions, the family preferred the term “servant” to “slave,” and they built sturdy brick dwellings on their grounds for slave houses. Bomar children weren’t permitted to slough off their chores onto the servants. Elias’s main job, along with walking the cows to pasture, was probably as a groom. When John attended the famed Charleston military academy The Citadel (he did not graduate) and then took classes at Erskine College (again without finishing a degree), Elias probably accompanied him. John then found his true vocation, working as the editor of the two-sheet Spartanburg paper the Carolina Spartan, where it was claimed that, “no one ever wielded a more graceful pen.” Bomar became county clerk, or intendant, before the war, and he amassed a large library stocked with works by Alexander Pope, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Scott, along with a complete set of Charles Dickens, which he enjoyed reading aloud. In the wake of the master’s professional climb—the colleges, newspapers and books—Elias learned how to read. His second daughter, Estelle, would have a son named after her father who shared a birthday with his grandfather’s slave master John Earle Bomar who had wanted to become a writer.