Promoting sport, commercialism, and sex, Esquire was also very nearly a magazine crafted around Ernest Hemingway, who appeared in the inaugural issue with John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, and Dashiell Hammett. Hemingway wrote for the magazine every other month in its first couple of years and always received top billing when he did. Promised a mere $250 per short story, Hemingway started out sending sporting letters from Bimini and Cuba; then, in August 1936 he published one of his finest short works there, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In its early years Esquire also published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maksim Gorky, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, and Langston Hughes. In September 1934, Esquire had a newsstand circulation of 121,812; in two years circulation was seven times that figure. The magazine quickly became a bellwether for American literary taste.
Gingrich had bragged to Hemingway that the new rag would have “ample hair on its chest, to say nothing of cojones,” and he incorporated another modern version of America in it as well. A bargain hunter for talent, he didn’t draw the color line, as long as the material didn’t reveal “any trace of any kind of accent” or ethnic badge. For practical commercial reasons Gingrich was initially reluctant to address American racial relations. Thus, the first issue, of 124 pages, contained 27 pages of drawings from a “fantastically talented colored kid” named E. Simms Campbell, who also designed the Esquire logo. Campbell’s drawings never revealed his African American ancestry.
By January 1934 Gingrich changed his mind, realizing that controversy was superb advertising. On his editorial page he announced to his readers his intention to publish a Langston Hughes short story about a wealthy New Yorker with a fetish for black chorus girls. In the next month, he printed all of the replies, and he joked that the commentaries indicated either “compulsory and universal miscegenation” or the “resumption of the Civil War.” Gingrich learned that the animus was genuine. One reader said, “If you print the story by the negro author, Langston Hughes, I shall not only cancel my subscription to your magazine, but shall discontinue any further business with Jacob Reed’s Sons, due to the fact that they recommend your magazine.” Another subscriber from Tulsa, a bigot who was still dismayed by the numbers of blacks “it took the city incinerator days to burn” after the infamous 1921 massacre, wrote, “Don’t you think having the only nigger in Congress is enough of an embarrassment to the administration without Chicago starting something that it may cost men and millions to stop?”
The clashing energy and affirming voices—“By all means shoot through the ‘high yaller’ story,” and “your readers would appreciate a little dash of spice”—were precisely the sort of titillated yelp that Gingrich needed for the young magazine. In April Hughes had his Esquire launch with “A Good Job Gone,” a tale of a wealthy banker, college-educated black butler, and oversexed chippie, “one of these golden brown’s, like an Alabama moon,” who emitted a “nigger laugh—one of ours. So deep and pretty.” A month later Esquire published Hughes’s “The Folks at Home,” a conventional racial-uplift story about the lynching of a black man whose elegant taste has taken him far away from his rural Southern roots.
Chester charmed his way into the magazine and “through correspondence, I came to know Arnold Gingrich well.” For his submissions to Esquire, Chester adhered to Gingrich’s initial wariness toward the ethnic trace and abandoned black protagonists and narrators and themes of racial uplift. At the same time he would send the magazine some of its coarsest material, sharply contesting Victorian mores that stressed restraint, moral uprightness and courage. Instead, Chester showed violent, cynical, emotionally overwrought men about to dissolve.
He was paid seventy-five dollars for his initial short story, and Gingrich bought two at once, “Crazy in Stir” and “To What Red Hell.” Chester debuted in the August issue, which included lead articles by Hemingway and Leon Trotsky and poetry by Ezra Pound. Esquire introduced Chester as “a long-term prisoner in a state penitentiary.” “Crazy in Stir”—“the first convict writing to appear in our pages,” Esquire boasted—tried to take the reader inside of the madness of a hard-boiled convict named Red whose confinement leads him to the brink of psychosis. Chester’s truculent inmate reflected the burgeoning classificatory system of the prison, which adjudged from a sample of 862 men 347 as “psychopathic” and 157 “psychotic.”
While Red was a popular name, one used among African Americans to note anyone light enough in color that he could be seen to blush, a convict named John “Red” Downing, electrocuted on March 10, 1933, had achieved a notoriety at the Ohio Penitentiary. He had killed the wife of Danile Bonzo, the chief record clerk. Chester’s character patrols the aisles of a bunk-filled dormitory, similar to Chester’s, raging at the cage he inhabits and the denizens of its corridors, from the tedious cretin trying to barter oranges for nickels to the Negro inmates singing and dancing near the latrine at the Black Bottom. Like a Hemingway hero, Red sharply disparages black Americans. “He would see what the hell they were doing, the black, stolid animals. . . . The days passed and they didn’t know it. Time meant nothing to them.”
When Red sees two colored men on a bunk praying, he thinks “singing to a white man’s idea of God.” Here Chester’s hard-bitten white protagonist cynically canceled out the agnostic religious position of “Prison Mass.” While Red shares common prejudices about black people—theirs is a life limited to sensation and corporality—in his tense parade through the barracks, he finds himself reluctantly drawn again and again to the Black Bottom, to its music and song, to “the anguish of a race that has learned to suffer.” Chester was penetrating the interior of a hurt man, by using description and dialogue, and he was pulling back from the heavy-handed narration that had limited some of his earlier works. He was also deftly alluding to complex racial dynamics in American life.
Publishing “Crazy in Stir” in a trendsetting magazine landed Chester on the front page of the Columbus newspaper. In a short time he was lauded for his powerful short story in the New York newspaper the Amsterdam News, where his cousin Henry had taken a position. The Amsterdam News even included him as a geographically distant member of the Negro Writers Guild and the Harlem Renaissance. “A ‘new O. Henry’ in the person of inmate Chester Himes (colored), is in the budding,” informed the paper.
Despite being incarcerated, from the reality of a cement-floor cell block and an open latrine, his prospects, in fact, looked amazing. With his second short story in Esquire, Chester actually began to make the difficult transition to novel writing, and he was putting together a longer work that rang out with fully convincing tragic intensity. If Chester had started with heroes similar to Hemingway’s, “To What Red Hell,” published in Gingrich’s magazine in October, presented another kind of man. Himes turned the mordant prison-fire episode into an absurdity-tinged quest for the personal salvation of a squeamish World War I veteran named Blackie, who struggles to withstand his baptism by fire. Like a tactician depicting the scene of battle, Chester shows the inferno, the grotesque array of dead, and the heroic black giants hauling men to safety.
Blackie has a “queer feeling” and shrinks from the rescue, unable to “lend a hand.” He assures himself that his lame response—“No can do”—is not based on fear. Instead of heroic martyrdom, he stakes out the ground of the prison, which duplicates the symbolic grid of western civilization’s response to the human crisis, including religion, science, and liberal humanism. Blackie ambles from the Protestant chapel, where a convict plays Handel’s “Death March,” to the hospital where convicts rob the corpses, over to a group in darkness advocating a passive-resistance prison reform movement, which he scorns. Blackie finds the tawdry homosexuality of prison life breaking into the open on the evening of the fire: a “big blonde guy kissing a nice-looking, brunette youth” and a “tall, black boy called Beautiful Slim” crying, “ ‘Oh Lawd, ma man’s dead.’ ” When he spots Beautiful Slim rifling a corpse’s pockets, Blackie tries to hit Slim and regain his ethical standing but, unlike the traditional
hero, he falls instead into the muck of charred entrails. Thinking of a Kate Chopin short story, “Dead Men’s Shoes,” which is set on an old plantation, Blackie advances to another house of worship, the Catholic chapel, where he generates an alternative creed of American nihilism: “I believe in the power of the press, maker of laws, the almighty dollar, political pull, a Colt’s .45.” After seeing a fireman shoot an arsonist, Blackie passes the death house, then the commissary and cafeteria, exposing the entire underbelly of the prison and its engines of condemnation, recrimination, and specious justice.
Chester used this short story to collapse the racial distance, gaping wide now after thirty-eight years of legally enforceable Jim Crow. First, the entire symbolic apparatus of the deadly fire erases racial identity. The white protagonist called Blackie notes that the dead all suffer the same “smoke-blackened flesh.” Blackie identifies a similar chiaroscuro melding among the living convicts, the “White faces, gleaming with sweat, streaked with soot” and the “White teeth in sweaty black faces.” Chester also presents notable blacks: a “big Negro called Eastern Bill” saving men from burning alive, the “tall, black boy called Beautiful Slim,” and Dangerous Blue, a scarred “wide-mouthed Negro standing on the kitchen range with a six-inch dirk in his hand.” While Chester did not ennoble all of these portraits, the black characters were distinct and remarkable; in a mainstream publication avoiding racial-uplift politics he had successfully moved black men beyond villains or comic menials. After Chester was out of prison, Meyer Levin, Gingrich’s astute literary assistant, would write to him saying that the short story “received the greatest ‘curtain call’ of any short story published in Esquire during its first years of publication.”
Chester had a rare perspective on black life from American society’s utter margin, one that he never relinquished. He managed to impose standards of artistic discipline and to cultivate his imagination. That he had done so—without artistic instruction and literary friendships, and in rejection of a code of social and racial improvement—while on a Negro convict’s bunk with a folding table next to a urinal was more than surprising. It was distinguished.
Undoubtedly, having a collaborator or artistic coconspirator, cerebral as well as sensual, helped Chester as he prepared his short stories. But his affection for Prince Rico also attracted unwanted attention. On August 2, 1934, both Chester and Rico had two months added to their sentences, likely for being caught in a sex act. While the novel Cast the First Stone has the men punished but specifically makes the relationship chaste, Chester revealed to Van Vechten that he and Rico “had a full and complete and very touching love affair, and fulfilled each other emotionally, and spiritually and physically.”
The punishment was offset by the Prince Rico’s deep friendship and admiration, which played a role in inspiring Chester during the extraordinary working twelve months between the publication of the final installment of “Prison Mass” in May 1933 and the acceptance of his Esquire stories. In spite of the penalty of extra time, Chester still managed a transfer to the London Prison Farm on September 21, 1934. As he concluded in the novel Cast the First Stone, “the farm was the way to freedom.”
London Prison Farm was a large working farm used to reward model prisoners and produce food for the other state institutions. During Chester’s time there, the population fluctuated between 1163 and 1561 men, monitored by a small number of guards. At “the Farm,” the “better class” of inmates remained incarcerated, but not behind bars. Of course, it was still prison: dreary, banal, and on the brink of violence.
In Chester’s earliest extant letter, written to the London Prison Farm censor Alice Armine, Warden William Armine’s daughter, he asked for permission to explore the unseemly side of penitentiary life. Calling his works in progress “script[s],” Chester testified to having received “so many upbraidings from the different officers of this institution” that he was weary. He had arrived at the London Prison Farm already preparing to send out versions of stories and chapters loosely based on his prison time. Chester confided to the prison censor that he labored on “a story that deals with the growth of affection between two convicts” with “the implication in one of the character’s thoughts of sex perversion—but not the statement.” He seems never to have considered writing that regretted the reality of his experience.
Chester’s final eighteen months serving his sentence would have reminded him of the rural life he had known slightly as a child in Lorman and then briefly driving the tractor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He lived on the farm throughout 1935, and while it could be tranquil, deadly violence was never far off even among men near parole. On May 16, one prisoner stabbed another to death with a guard standing only twenty feet away. Men perished regularly from tuberculosis and botched surgeries by prison doctors. If there was slightly less incentive for nearly released men to escape, the ease with which it could be done still enticed them regularly. Seven walked off at the end of August 1935. With only minimal educational facilities, boredom and idleness were severe, and the deputy warden added to Chester’s unease by glowering at him as he filed out of the mess hall.
In the winter of 1936, when Chester’s parole date was announced, it made news back at the Columbus prison. Prince Rico wrote to him from the coal company, two weeks before Chester’s release. “Glad you’re through with the long road,” the letter began. Rico was at work sending out short stories for prison anthologies “plugging hard at the writing game, and music.” While Chester concluded Cast the First Stone with Duke Dido’s suicide, real-life Prince Rico was thanking Chester for his help. “Working with you has done everything for me and my writing,” he admitted, in the midst of asking Chester for his radio once he was released. Rico’s emotional letter showed him balanced and still somewhat infatuated, in the manner in which Chester would show the denouement of their friendship in the novel. “I’m flattered and glad no end you think I was able to give you anything of value,” Prince Rico wrote, still referring to Chester as “Puggy Wuggy,” the endearment the men cribbed from O. Henry stories. Rico had taken out an annual subscription to Esquire and the former burglar praised Chester, who would publish another short story in the magazine that spring and again late in the summer. “I’ve learned to think, treat people as people, and use good judgment,” he wrote. The friends promised to meet again in Los Angeles, a promise that Chester would keep. Recalling the artists that they had discussed, like Langston Hughes and black cartoonist E. Simms Campbell, Rico’s letter also provided the first evidence of Chester having systematically looked at a modern novel—Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Even though Chester had sought an odd dance of restraint and intimacy with Rico, for much of 1934 he had at least found a fellow prisoner with whom he could exchange ideas and test out his knowledge. Rico had begun by serving as a literary secretary, retyping the stories for him, but he also became an artist in his own right. By the beginning of 1935, Prince Rico would be lauded in the press for trying to write an opera, based on black convict and farmhand work chants, very close to what the trained African American composers Nathaniel Dett and William L. Dawson (of Hampton and Tuskegee Institute, respectively) were trying to do. He had also made contact with playwright and screenwriter Jonathan Finn, the author behind the films Chalked Out and Jailbreak, in hope of getting his work anthologized.
Chester and Prince Rico had created a literary society together, and Chester had written and published strong work during their poignant friendship. For the remainder of his career, Chester required an intimate connection as a kind of daily ignition for writing. With Rico he had had the gift of being able to convince someone of the validity of his ambition, and he had matured beyond the callow youth of his most troubled years. “You’ll write great things because it is expected of you—by all of us,” Prince Rico wrote to him. Chester took that prophecy with him when his parole was finally granted on April 1, 1936.
Chapter Five
WHITE FOLKS AND THE DAYS
19
36–1941
On April 1, 1936, Chester took a bus back to his mother’s house on Miami Avenue in Columbus. In the tragic, slightly absurd short story “On Dreams and Reality,” which owed something to Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” Chester described a prisoner’s ragged coming home to mother and brother in Columbus after eight years of incarceration. It was a grim, deeply shattering event. Reassuring himself during his imprisonment with golden dreams of life on the outside, he had overlooked the Depression’s lacerating impact on his family. His narrator gasps, “ ‘This can’t be my home,’ ” as he takes in the “unkempt yard” where “dirty paper lay limp in the rain” and then treads the “worn, wooden steps” of a “bilious green” frame house.
A slip of paper tacked to the door-frame to his right held the notice, Bell out of order, please knock. Below were the names of his mother and brother. He laughed suddenly. What was the matter with him? he asked himself. Sure, it’d be all right here. It had to be.
He knocked and waited. The door cracked open and a haggard, gray-haired woman peered from a darkened room.
“Mother!” he exclaimed, his laugh choking off. “Mother!”
“James, my baby! James!” she sobbed, clinging to him.
He almost asked, “Oh, mother, what has happened to you?” but caught himself and said instead, “Gee, mother, it’s swell to be home.” . . . He followed her through the gloomy parlour, side-stepped the jutting edge of a cane rocker, and entered the central room, feeling deflated. His first impression was that of squalor; it hit him a solid blow below the belt.
Recalling his mother’s elaborate oyster luncheons spread out in the prison dayroom to revive his spirits, Chester now found it unnerving when Estelle said, “We’ll put the big pot in the little one and make hash out of the dish rag.” Another defeat was in store when he learned that the Ohio Industrial Commission was eliminating his workman’s compensation; he had no income for the first time since 1926.
Chester B. Himes Page 12
