He feared that his career might be over before it had begun properly. Five years later, he would describe the agony of trying to live from his writing after prison as a conflict between his white identification and his black lived experience: “It does not occur to him that now he is trying to write ‘white’ out of a subconscious store of Negro knowledge, Negro incident, language, emotion, reaction, motivation, obstruction, culmination, and such, imposed on him by his condition of living ‘black.’ ” Instead, he became convinced that the editors knew that he was a Negro, and that they rejected him on account of it. Chester was growing “bitterly resentful [of] that fate” which “identified him with the Negro race,” more or less the spirit of his brittle and caustic mother Estelle.
Splitting his time between Washington, D.C., and New York, Henry Moon made an important assist. He discussed Chester’s work over lunch with Sterling Brown, a Howard University English professor, an esteemed poet, and the director of Negro affairs for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After the meeting, Brown, who already knew about Chester’s writing from Esquire, fired off a brief letter of advice to him. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Chester admired Brown’s work—his poetry collection Southern Road bore, arguably for the first time, the robust and soulful personality of black workers who had evolved a magnificent cultural tradition in the face of an often bleak situation. As much as any other writer of the time, Brown had seemed to resolve the dilemma of wanting the best that exclusive white America had to offer without denigrating one iota of black language, culture, or people. Developing Brown as a friend, Chester asked for critical feedback on his stories. Brown had not encountered a black writer like Chester before, astute but honest, humorous, admiring of the laconic, matter-of-fact tradition of Hemingway, but with squishy emotions, which Himes’s short stories meditated upon figuratively and literally, and prone toward a tragic theme. Admitting that he was missing being published by a hair, Chester had the humility—and confidence—to ask for help. “I am happy to know of your interest in my work. Perhaps after reading one or two you may be able to drop me a helpful hint.”
A genuine dean of African American literature and culture in the 1930s, Brown went much further. Brown had schooled at the famous black academy the M Street High School of Anna Julia Cooper. He’d gone on to distinction at Williams College and got his MA in English at Harvard University; then he’d started teaching at Lincoln Institute and lived in the house where Chester was born. Having spent several years as the regular literary critic at the Urban League journal Opportunity, Brown was writing on his signature ideas about the prevalence of black stereotypes in white American literature. In the late fall of 1938 he sent concerned suggestions to Chester, who showed the aplomb and seriousness to weather a professor’s scrutiny. Glowing with appreciation, Chester admitted that the responses were “the first clear, pointed and understandable criticism which I have received during the six years which I have been trying to write.”
Brown counseled Chester to be wary of overwriting—the flaw of adornment—and to examine his tendency toward tragic themes and desperate acts. He told him that the hard-boiled style then in vogue was already on its way to being a cliché. In language that was gentle and brotherly, Brown explained the tastes of the American reading public—especially the decision-making magazine editors—as fundamentally biased away from black truth in favor of stereotyped shenanigans. Chester had already exploited this vein and pushed at its limits, presenting the stereotype to get closer to the human being underneath.
Approaching thirty, Chester understood, in spite of Brown’s rare gift of criticism, that he had his own lights to follow. His long prison years, the grisly fire, the added months on his sentence with Rico and then resurrecting himself with Jean, for better or for worse, had made him a writer. “What seems ‘tragically desperate’ to you,” he countered, “—and the editors and the reading public—is just a matter of course to me.” Still beside his prison years, Chester wouldn’t apologize for his brutish view of the world and the language he insisted upon to describe it. “If I have one ‘bastard’ kill another ‘bastard’ in a story, it’s just one dead bastard and another one electric-chair bound as far as I am concerned,” he wrote back. “I am indifferent, unsympathetic, and can see nothing shocking, unusual, or repulsive about any of it.” But if Chester held tight to his point of view, he did not flatter himself about the jejune short tales. He decided in his considerate reply to Brown, “I can mark them down to apprenticeship served and go ahead to better work.”
Chester did not reveal all of what he was about to Brown. If the magazines didn’t take his shorts, he continued to hammer away at his first-person novel, an effort 650 pages long by that May. Chester thrived off of the madcap defiance of what he was attempting—a sympathetic portrait of a convict’s years inside the penitentiary replete with graphic depictions of violent and homosexual acts. He built the book by the episode and let the structure take care of itself. By “packing in a maze of essentials,” he believed that he had achieved a tone that was “brusk [sic], to the point, and unsentimental,” but revealing “every phase” of the prison insider’s life. Shielding nothing, Chester described himself as “stating the facts as best I can and letting the explanations and psychoanalyzing go.”
With no publisher in sight for this magnum opus of uninhibited material, for the more immediate task of survival he turned to the WPA. Although Chester applied for the Ohio branch of the Federal Writers Project (FWP), he was added to Cleveland’s 78,000 WPA workers as a ditchdigger, the kind of work he hadn’t even been forced to do in prison. For $60.50 per month the men labored in the snow and slush, building roads, sewers, drains, parks, cultural gardens and recreation areas throughout the city. The ideal of freedom in the Cuyahoga County WPA was utterly hypocritical. No African American was employed in white-collar work: no state staff people, no executive or administrative personnel, not even any clerks. Taking his own publication career seriously, Chester wrote letters to local officials insisting on a desk job.
He followed in a tradition. In the spring of 1938, black Cleveland—led by Assistant State’s Attorney Perry B. Jackson, city councilmen Harold Gassaway and Lawrence Payne, and Reverend Sylvester Williams—began to demand the inclusion of blacks in more diverse employment than unskilled labor. Initially they were inelegantly rebuffed, but they made enough noise to receive minor adjustments. Using his own contact with the upper-level national administration, Sterling Brown himself, Chester complained that May about the racism in Cleveland that required him to shovel, even though he was a nationally published writer and merited appointment to the state FWP.
If racism abounded, the WPA jobs were precarious anyway: supervisors evaluated positions month to month and dismissed workers at whim; congressional authorizations sometimes flagged, forcing massive, nationwide layoffs. Chester’s jolting experience inspired a new formulation; he found that the horror of death and the problem of confinement had a counterpart in the world of daily work in the Depression. Chester worked the dread into “With Malice Toward None,” a new short story:
He filled with a recurrence of the numb, cold fear which had haunted him ever since he went to work on the W.P.A. No one would realize how scared one stayed in that living from hand to mouth, from one check to another, he reflected bitterly. It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d tell a man he had so many months to work and that was all, but to keep him like this, on pins and needles, never knowing when the layoff would come and no work open, it was worse in a way than downright starvation. It kept a man scared all the time.
As a relief he worked up an intense resentment toward his wife.
The formulation of fear compounded by externally directed loathing, drawn from his own life certainly but transmuted into literary expression, was a signal and essential observation of Himes’s literary art. And also a bright flare commenting that his marriage was in trouble.
The local black newspaper, the Cleveland Call and Post, took a lead role in expo
sing Jim Crow in the Cuyahoga County WPA, especially the practice of demoting foremen and allowing local supervisors to fire workers at will. The mood of black Clevelanders was stiffening against Jim Crow employment policies generally. The black radical organization the Future Outlook League directed militant attempts at white businesses to force them to employ blacks and started publishing a journal recording their victories in the fall of 1937. (In 1939 the local clamor against the WPA would initiate a federal investigation, resulting in Charles Dickinson being appointed a labor investigator and becoming the top ranked black in the state.) Chester lobbied vigorously by mail for a position as a writer on the FWP, and in the process started to associate with men like Urban League director Sidney Williams, and Grant Reynolds, minister of the important Mt. Zion Congregational Church on Cedar Avenue. After Chester’s contentions reached the desk of the state FWP director, Ohio State University professor Harlan Hatcher, and probably with a note of support from Sterling Brown, he was granted a transfer to the writers’ project. Before the end of June 1938, Chester was making a “favorable impression” as a research assistant and writer for the Cleveland Public Library Project. His monthly pay jumped to $95.
Writers on the Ohio FWP worked out of the imposing five-story main branch of the Cleveland Public Library. Opened in 1925, the heavy marble, French Renaissance style library helped to renew his dignity and properly reinforced the gravity of his work. Typically, the FWP writers worked anonymously to construct large single-volume state guidebooks; in New York and Chicago, a few elite writers worked on their own manuscripts. Surprised by his credentials and admiring his typing speed, the FWP put Chester to work writing vocational bulletins. As the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) tried to unionize the library workers, he showed interest and started to contribute articles to their local organ, the Cleveland Union Leader. Chester received another promotion to “professional” status and drew assignments writing on little-known aspects of Cleveland history. He warmed to the challenge. All that survives of the Cleveland project writing is a thirty-page essay on the history of Cleveland in the Ohio Guide. The essay pointed to a unique criterion for Cleveland’s national distinction: “one of the most racially diversified communities in the United States.” As for the value of the legacy of black people to the city, the guidebook was unsure.
Most of Cleveland’s Negroes, who came in during the labor famine of the World War and immediately after, live in the slum area extending from the fringes of the business section to East 105th Street and south of Carnegie Avenue. The few who became affluent move to other sections of the city, but the birth rate of those who remain has created a serious housing problem.
Politically undecided, groomed by gangsters, and having been reared in a Tuskegee-friendly home, Chester was certainly capable of presenting poor black Americans as a drain on society. He was aggrieved by humiliating segregation but disinclined to make common cause with the black poor. He could accept himself as black and ghetto-built, but he easily blamed black people for the misery that they faced. He had little critique of a modern political economy, which Joe and Henry were studying seriously. “While on the Writers’ Project,” he judged at a later date, “I did not feel the racial hurt so much.” When Chester felt comfortable, he had the capacity to forget his race, in the way that a “hincty,” or snobbish person, might. But if he couldn’t have started with the assumption that he shared the same fundamental attitudes as his white classmates from East High, he wouldn’t have been able to imagine an audience for his fiction.
In a room where project writers worked on the library’s third floor, Chester got to know Ruth Seid, a young assured woman who, since she was the child of immigrant Polish Jews, published under the name Jo Sinclair. Chester immediately charmed Ruth. He had also begun blaming Jean for his difficulties in getting work and publishing and was on the lookout for something that hinted of more than friendship. The attraction was mutual, but Seid left the sex alone. They chatted about films, music, theater, and politics. She told him about a new book she had read and its author, who had won the $500 Story magazine prize: Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright. Surprised that Chester didn’t know about the latest black writing sensation, Seid underestimated him, which he disliked but tolerated, wishing not to repeat the failures of high school and college. Like Chester, she too had a slender understanding of the economic structure of racial discrimination. When they talked about local politics, she found Chester bitter and cynical regarding antidiscrimination groups.
Chester introduced Ruth to Jean and the three of them whiled away hours together. Ruth thought him mannerly at first, then, after a few rounds of whiskey and reefer, she believed him loud and egotistical. Once, he took them to a ghetto dive after the nightclubs had closed. Chester’s parole requirements forbade his association with known criminals; blue laws forbade gatherings after hours. On cue, the police raided the house, and Ruth’s active imagination was considering the iniquity of the women’s bull pen at the city jail. Chester showed himself adequate to the occasion, remarking to Ruth as he ushered her to safety, “This’ll be good for you as a writer.” Nor was the range of contacts limited to the dives off Cedar Avenue. Pearl Moody, the pair’s supervisor and a professional librarian, invited Chester, Jean, and Ruth to her home in the exclusive suburb of Shaker Heights many times, an unusually bold gathering in the 1930s.
Like Chester, Seid began her short story career publishing in Esquire, in February 1938. She continued to find success in some of Gingrich’s later projects, like the arts monthly Coronet and the more politically dense and uncompromising Ken. In the December 1938 issue of Ken, she made her friendship with Chester pay dividends. The article, “Cleveland’s Negro Problem,” embarrassed Chester later, and showed the caustic skepticism that consumed him in the years immediately after he’d left prison. Seid described with suspicion and misgiving the Future Outlook League’s organized pickets against employment discrimination, a technique of resistance growing increasingly popular in the North. In March 1938 the U.S. Supreme Court had levied a favorable decision emboldening picket lines, in a determination that race discrimination in employment was akin to discrimination on the basis of union affiliation. But what his cousin Henry had praised in the pages of the New York Times as “an effective campaign for jobs,” Seid had decided, apparently with Chester’s goading, was simple extortion.
In sympathy with the Jewish shop-owning class in the Negro slum areas against which the protests had been mounted, she opened her essay in Ken with the lines “Sam Katz opened a wine store on Central Avenue. All of a sudden wine was popular with the colored people; they were drinking it like water.” Her information from the black street came from “a Cleveland negro writer . . . an intelligent, thinking young man,” obviously Chester. Her anonymous source inferred that the Future Outlook League, “located in the heart of the racket district,” was twisting public perception to hide an illegal reality. But the story of Sam Katz concluded with a vintage observation by Chester: “If the undernourished and absolutely powerless are suddenly given a bit of power, they may well lose a little balance in the process. You know how it is. But look out for possible race riots, I say!” Chester wanted to help out a new friend but, only sure of the likelihood of conflict, his language was bombastic. When he recalled the piece a few years later, he would find Seid guilty of “insidious Jewish chauvinism.” She continued to draw on their friendship, using Chester’s life as the source of inspiration for the character Aaron Wright in her unpublished “They Gave Us Jobs,” written in 1940.
The summer of hard, rewarding work on the “Cleveland Guide” and his novel did not keep the wolf from the door. Chester had a working knowledge of carpentry, plumbing, and auto mechanics, but he badly mismanaged household affairs, always living beyond his means. He wanted the privilege of drinking or entertaining when he chose, and the result always left a gnawing deficit “to catch up on financially” and no savings. By August 1938, he and Jean were shuffling along
a circuit of coarse rooms just east of Rockefeller Park, a nomadic search for decency and a tawdry limping away from bad debts. Chester penned the forlorn short stories “With Malice Toward None,” “Looking Down the Street,” and “All God’s Chillun Got Pride,” during their summer and fall wanderings. Probably toward the end of fall, Opportunity took the restaurant maitre d’ story, “A Salute to the Passing.”
By winter, they had returned to E. Ninety-Third Street, to a room at the home of Mary Reese, a forty-seven-year-old domestic who put down their talk of New York by claiming that when she had visited Manhattan, the Savoy Ballroom and Small’s Paradise Inn failed to surpass the dance halls and juke joints on Cedar Avenue. Chester’s writing and his $900 annual salary on the FWP did provide something more coveted than decent quarters. The great boost to his confidence that year was a successful petition to Ohio governor John Bricker that would in 1939 restore Chester’s full citizenship rights. For the first time in his life, he would be able to vote.
Reconsidering his strategy to reach the national magazines, Chester published with the locals. Through Langston Hughes, Chester met Rowena Jellife, the founder of Karamu House. Rowena and her husband, Russell, were 1910 Oberlin graduates and almost certainly knew of Joe’s successes there. Rowena Jellife served on the editorial board of a new Cleveland literary venture called Crossroad, a “medium for creative talent in every field.” Crossroad featured left-wing short stories and modernist visual art, including abstract impressionist prints, suitable for “mounting and framing.” Cleveland’s white liberal crowd, including associate editors at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Milton Fox of the Cleveland Art Museum, and music professors from Case Western Reserve University all participated; Dan Levin, a young Communist and Western Reserve graduate, recruited the local artists. Contributing three short stories to the magazine during its first year, Chester got through his rough patch of literary rejection and financial hardship in the pages of Crossroad.
Chester B. Himes Page 14
