Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Chester’s brother Joe was eclipsing him. Despite his loss of vision, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin, draped in national medals, and had been asked to work toward a master’s degree in the fall. His successes were admired all over the nation. In 1932 Joe left Ohio altogether, to begin his career teaching modern languages at Shorter Junior College in Arkansas. The next year he went to Austin, Texas, to Samuel Houston College. He was fulfilling his parents’ dream of a responsible teaching career. Estelle accompanied Joseph Jr. proudly, prepared to keep house and carry on surrogate reading and typing duties. Chester would remain in the penitentiary and have to rely exclusively on his own resources.

  The Ohio Penitentiary had groomed a few writers, notably the embezzler turned master of the short story William Sydney Porter—O. Henry—whom it was impossible not to hear about, and whose stories Chester devoured while in prison. Writing was held in no little esteem by numbers of the incarcerated men. The weekly prison paper, distributed Saturday afternoon and mainly staffed by men serving long sentences, contained considerable literary banter during Chester’s confinement. The Penitentiary News battled against the loudmouths who shouted from the tiers during all hours and ruined the concentration of the more cerebral prisoners. The paper trumpeted the writers’ creed, quoting Jack London: “There is one rule that I rigidly observe. Nothing must interfere. I write fifteen hundred words a day. I may do more, but never less. When I say ‘a day’ I mean every day, seven days per week, 365 days per year.” There were enough men around for Chester to think of writing, fiction in particular, as serious work, meriting his strongest effort. In Cast the First Stone, Chester wrote that the prison newspaper editor approached Jimmy about contributing, to which he responded, wise-guy style, “ ‘I asked him was there anything in it for me.’ ” But the novel Chester wrote was from the point of view of a white protagonist, and it is not at all clear that a black writer at any level of talent would have been able to participate on the Penitentiary News.

  Inward-looking and aloof, Chester began cobbling together his own short stories. In his autobiography, he described the disregard with which his fellow convicts greeted his work. But he admitted to having met one “black murderer of great intelligence,” a jeweler. In Cast the First Stone, it is this convict, called Metz in the novel, who sits on his bunk with a “textbook on short-story writing,” and persuades Jimmy to study the craft with him: ‘I’m going to take you up on that writing course,’ I said. ‘I’d like to know something about writing.’ ”

  With gambling winnings and his steady income, Chester secured a typewriter. Remington portables and Underwoods were sold among the convicts for sums between fifteen and forty dollars. The clerklike function of typing and the example of solitary intellectual activity made the guards look favorably upon writing, since it eased the inevitable tension of holding so many able-bodied men in prison. Chester’s relationship with the prison officials changed; he now counted several among them as friends. At twenty-two, the age his brother had finished college, Chester devoted himself to acquiring a refined skill.

  A torrent of short stories poured out of him in different styles. Perusing magazines like Collier’s, Black Mask (where he read a serialized version of The Maltese Falcon), Liberty, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post, Chester began writing romances and crime thrillers for the black press, including the Atlanta Daily World and Abbott’s Monthly, where his first short story “His Last Day” was published in November 1932. That story featured a condemned black convict awaiting his trip to the electric chair, a theme Chester continued in another story, 1936’s “The Night’s for Crying.” Significantly his formal writing career began by creating men modeled physically on his uncle Wade Wiggins and spiritually on the toughs of Scovil and Cedar Avenues. Chester evolved these early portraits into one of his finest characters, Luther McGregor of Lonely Crusade, his most important novel. His early concern had an obvious origin: Chester wrote about the intimidators within prison, men who held the yardstick to his own manhood. “Most of the black convicts in the Ohio State Penitentiary were dull-witted, stupid, uneducated, practically illiterate, slightly above animals,” he recalled surly in his autobiography The Quality of Hurt. But he had to give them respect. He had to orchestrate carefully his actions to share the cell block with such men and retain his own pride; it makes sense that his earliest work reflects his attempts to understand black murderers from the street-corner bar.

  Condemned for killing a policeman, Spats Wilson of “His Last Day,” a “dark brown skin” man with a “large, powerful body” and “jungle strength and animal cunning,” wants to appear carefree and fearless on his way to the electric chair. “I’ll be smiling when the juice is turned on,” he yells after the reporters, “I’m a man.” While the clumsier elements of the stereotype seem to stand in the way of the full development of a character named for his attire, Chester wanted the reader to grapple with the emotional complexity of a violent black convict who struts across the yard to the death house, while “in his eyes there was the subtle hint of utter fear.” Similarly, in “The Night’s for Crying,” the hero, Black Boy, crimps the edges of a stereotype by “crying softly” in his prison cell after his girlfriend has visited. With early characters like Spats and Big Blue from “A Cup of Tea,” Chester exposed the softer side of statuesque black men, and worked to render their voices in the argot of the black street.

  Of course he drew the stories of condemned men from the more than 1400 African American prisoners at the Ohio Penitentiary, 263 of them serving life sentences by 1935. Chester was inspired to write “His Last Day” in the wake of the execution of two brothers, Walter and Blanton Ralls, put to death in 1931 for the murder of the Crawford County sheriff. Six months later, four men, three of them black, who were members of a gang, were executed within a few days of one another. Walker Brown, one of the gang, was twenty-four, about Chester’s age. In March 1933 Athay Brown was electrocuted for murdering a woman in Cleveland. Five months later, brothers James and Joseph Murphy were both executed, on August 14, and prior to their meeting with the electric chair, they delivered rehearsed public testimonials protesting the barbarism of the death penalty. Another black man, Merrill Chandler, died in the electric chair that November, for killing a guard.

  Throughout 1933, Chester sent the lion’s share of his work, about half a dozen short stories, to Abbott’s Monthly, the entertaining brainchild of Chicago Defender founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott. In the first part of that year, Chester’s work was published in every single issue. A magazine of about one hundred illustrated pages that cost a quarter and featured a close-up drawing of a bobbed sepia beauty, Abbott’s Monthly specialized in “true confession” fiction, and reached a circulation of around 100,000 before it closed at the end of that year. Two other young African American Midwestern writers published in Abbott’s Monthly as well. The first African American to make his living exclusively from writing, Langston Hughes, best known by then for his collections of Jazz Age, racial uplift poetry and the novel Not Without Laughter, published in the magazine between 1932 and 1933 and was from Cleveland. Chester’s first cousin Henry Lee Moon was a buddy of Hughes. Chester, who might have heard specific details about Hughes’s career from his cousin, imitated several of Hughes’s publishing moves in the 1930s. The other Abbott’s Monthly writer was a Chicago man breaking into print for the first time who was almost Chester’s exact age: Richard Nathaniel Wright. Although later other magazines would claim to have nurtured his talent, Chester was a direct product of the literary black press of Chicago.

  Chester mailed his stories to Abbott in bundles. They were accepted and published as the editor saw fit and had space. Chester, missing girlfriends and parties, and wondering about the kind of life that awaited him after he left prison, also scribbled glitzy tales like “Her Whole Existence” and “A Modern Marriage” about gangsters and molls, flirtatious chippies, and independent sexually curious young women who might romantically commit themse
lves to men of the criminal class.

  After perhaps eighteen months, Chester outgrew the genre stories. Around the end of 1932 or beginning of 1933, he had crafted a formidable short story, the twenty-thousand-word “Prison Mass,” which appeared in Abbott’s Monthly in three successive issues, March through May 1933. Mature and deep, the story drew its characters from his own life. This important and slightly autobiographical long story served as the proving ground for the manuscript that became the 1952 novel Cast the First Stone. “Prison Mass” offers three black convicts, named Kid, Brightlights, and Signifier, attending Catholic mass as a commentary on the dilemma of prison life, the propensity toward evil, and the foundation of hopeful transformation. Signifier is a career criminal in middle age who is cynical, suspicious, and superficial. The Kid is an idealist, who unwittingly accepts a life sentence for a murder that he didn’t commit. His purity makes him capable of strong emotional responses, from the sentimental to the violent. And in a move that made him personally vulnerable, Himes wrote from autobiographical experience when he created the twenty-five-year-old man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery named Brightlights, “put in the ‘cripple’ company because he had a fractured vertebra and wore a steel back support.” Of course, all of the men shared portions of Chester’s experience. Signifier, a professional thief, recalls a woman named Jean who was “simply nuts about him.”

  “Prison Mass” shows Chester leaping ahead with confidence and agility as a storyteller. He shifted the point of view from character to character without any transition, collapsing the distance in consciousness, so that, in the course of the religious service, the three troubled men reach a kind of joint revelation. The key epiphanic moment is held by Kid, an Achilles-like sacrificial man whose mother is dying and who will never gain release from prison. Chester was showing the capacity to encounter subjects of personal disinterest without denying their importance. “I might not have believed in all of that tommy-rot that the ministers were trying to cram down my throat,” thinks the character Brightlights, “but I respected their belief and their honest endeavors to teach others to believe, and I sure as hell didn’t mock it.”

  While the men sit in a row in three shades of blackness from dark to “the whiteness of Swiss cheese,” little racial prejudice intrudes on the story. Nonetheless, Brightlights muses that “people were more religiously inclined when they were ignorant and afraid than when they were intelligent and courageous. That was true among his people especially, or at least that was the impression he had received.” Chester was not the race militant he would become; he was still picking through what he had learned around the dinner table at home, the homily of Booker T. Washington.

  If Chester connected easily and naturally to a black audience, he also chafed in a basic and fundamental way against the Jim Crow society, an acrimony that never required an ideology to shore up. Whatever histrionics were connected to Estelle’s rendering of their complex racial origins, she had instilled in Chester and Joseph Jr. a sense of fierce competitiveness and an expansive horizon of possibility. “He wanted to do something worthwhile, but it had to be something that would bring fame. That was the secret reason he had taken up writing, he admitted to himself. He had wanted the renown more than the money; wanted to see his name.” In 1932 with some effort, but not perhaps as much effort as it would have taken for him to complete college, he found success, his name on the byline in a newspaper. It was an experience that he would have, as a young man behind bars, over and over again in 1933 and 1934. Not even midway through 1933, Chester’s gambler’s instincts told him that he might reach a large audience who wished to read what he had to say.

  While he showed signs early on of wanting to explore a complex, artistically provocative style, Chester wrote energetically for a commercial audience. He pursued dozens of publications, winning acceptance in several, from Chicago, Atlanta, and New York. In 1933 and 1934 he had had accepted the short stories “A Cup of Tea” by the Atlanta Daily World and “The Black Man Has Red Blood” by the Chicago Defender. “A Cup of Tea” featured Big Blue, who starts punching furiously when he is served tea. The resulting fights lead to a riot in which guards machine-gun prisoners, making it gallows entertainment for the Atlanta Daily World readers. In the more explicitly race-conscious Chicago Defender, he wrote of a black butler charged with rape and murder who, in spite of his imminent lynching, preserves the innocence of his young white charge. The short story asked a painfully brilliant rhetorical question, one that posed a question that was uniquely Chester’s: “What right had a ‘nigger’ to a white man’s nobility?”

  In the middle of the Depression, Chester had an edge over some of his competitors: a roof overhead, three daily meals, and plenty of time. The prison conditions were the opposite of ideal, to be sure, but the advantages couldn’t be denied, an ironic condition captured in this Black Bottom ditty of dormitory life: “we ate our good-doin’ bread and called it punk, slept on our good-doin’ bed and called it bunk.”

  Chester became friends in 1933 with a man who encouraged his talent, a twenty-four-year-old convict named Prince Rico, who sometimes fancied himself with the nom de plume of Auber LaCarlton Williams. Sentenced to ten years for a robbery in Columbus, Rico entered the penitentiary on June 27, 1933, and was assigned to the cripple company on account of damaged knees. Theatrical, flamboyant, and tough, Rico had been born in Georgia and grown up in California. He had spent a nomadic youth wandering the country, working in circuses, and learning the musician’s trade and gaining a professional interest in black folklore and lyrics. He tramped around the dormitory with a ukulele attached by shoestrings to his neck.

  There were dramatic differences in background between the two men and, having heard of Chester’s success in the literary world, Rico openly admired him. He was also sexually attracted to Chester, who reciprocated his feelings, while, apparently, still struggling with a desire that he understood as degenerate and which, if discovered by prison authorities, could lengthen his sentence. In a 1952 letter to Carl Van Vechten, the photographer and booster of black art, Chester admitted that Rico “was the boy in the story [Cast the First Stone], entire and absolute, and I was in love with him more, perhaps, than I have ever been in love with anyone before or since.” Fifteen years after prison Himes could cautiously admit some details about the relationship to a man like Van Vechten, a dear friend who was known to have homosexual affairs.

  At the end of the spring 1934 academic term, Joseph Jr. and Estelle Himes returned from Texas to Columbus, to 49 E. Eleventh Street, and Joseph began the course work toward a doctorate in sociology. His acceptance in the graduate program again won newspaper acclaim. Joseph was the darling of his class, the student who had already mastered the theoretical positions that his peers were scurrying to adopt. Even though the brothers would never resume the intimacy of their youth in Mississippi and Arkansas, their successes weighed on each other. Chester’s budding victories in 1932 had turned into bona fide professional success by late 1934. Joseph countered by researching and writing an eighty-four page dissertation entitled “The Negro Delinquent in Columbus, 1935.” Estelle’s regular visits to Chester resumed and, in Joseph’s mildly begrudging view, it was her influence that single-handedly enabled Chester to launch a writing career. “I think Mother talked with the prison Administrator and persuaded him that because of his injuries, Chester could not work in the shops,” Joseph Jr. recalled years later. But Joe, who neither wrote to nor visited Chester in prison, made an unreliable claim; in 1932 and 1933 Estelle had lived with Joe so that he could begin his career. Chester’s earliest push was internal and had come earlier.

  It is within the context of his friendship with Prince Rico that Chester’s ambition grew, almost as if an intensifier had been added to his literary skill. Chester pursued the next step as a writer in two directions, perhaps equally obvious. First, he wanted to get beyond the short story and require more of himself than being a sepia O. Henry. There was, however, an eleme
nt of O. Henry’s success that Chester did want. Apparently the labile nature of race relations in northern and middle Ohio, as well as the absence of absolute segregation in high school, college, and prison, encouraged him to think squarely of success on the grandest—and most commercial—terms. Since he accepted black Americans as a minor ethnic group sullied by slavery, it made perfect sense to Chester to begin writing stories headed by white characters. As a man who was, on account of his prison term, completely déclassé himself, Chester did not consider first what the black bourgeoisie into which he had been born thought of him. He knew that American whites wished to read about themselves as forceful decision makers and that they understood black Americans as passive subordinates, distinctly lesser beings. If he was at all unsure on his course of action, he had only to look at the success of Ernest Hemingway, a Michigan-reared man who had lived abroad and whose early work—like The Sun Also Rises, “The Killers,” and “Fifty Grand”—deliberately attempted to project churlish and belittling racial attitudes. Captivated by Hemingway’s success and mystique, Chester would write stories of white life.

  If “Prison Mass” was his breakthrough in theme and symbolism, the shift to white characters enabled him to land before a larger audience. In 1934, Chester wrote and published his best stories about prison life, featuring white protagonists, in a brand-new magazine shifting the terms of American masculinity, Esquire. Founded in October 1933 by Arnold Gingrich, a smart young graduate from the University of Michigan, Esquire was a men’s magazine first appearing at nearly the precise moment of the repeal of Prohibition.