Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  The Jellifes also introduced Chester to Louis Bromfield, Ohio’s best-known popular writer. An early Pulitzer Prize winner, who had served in the ambulance corps during World War I alongside Dos Passos and Hemingway, Bromfield was an imposing man who saw the world through a blend of arrogance and fulsome American pride. Sometimes the critics chided him as the “poor man’s [Somerset] Maugham.” Tall and vigorous, he had lived for more than a dozen years just north of Paris, returning to the United States in 1939 to live near the town of his birth, Mansfield, Ohio. Bromfield had a quality of vitality that was reflected by the energy he could command at the writing table: in thirty-four years as a working novelist he wrote thirty-seven books. But in 1939 he divided that energy in a variety of ways. First, he worked for Hollywood, where he commanded sums of $50,000 to $60,000 for the rights to his own books and where, for $5000 per week, he worked on the screenplay of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Accordingly, Bromfield was cozy with celebrities—Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart would marry at his Ohio home in 1945. More demandingly, he had taken on a side career as not merely a gentleman farmer, but as an agricultural priest, a prophet of soil conservation and independent, government-regulation-free farming. He lived in a thirty-room house on a six-hundred-acre estate called Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio.

  Chester admired a success, and Bromfield, then at work on a novel describing the occupation of New Orleans by federal troops during the Civil War, was nothing if not that. Booming and profane in conversation, he could turn on charm as if from a tap and humor people he imagined beneath him when it suited him. Bromfield, who had also lived in India, was tickled by the Negro ex-convict whose parents had graduated college and who had written a coming-of-age novel while in Ohio’s grim prison. After a brief parley, Bromfield invited Chester to join the household at Malabar, ostensibly to revise his prison novel. In exchange, Chester would perform seasonal chores. Sensing opportunity and believing in Bromfield, Chester agreed to leave Cleveland for Malabar in the late spring of 1941. Deliriously excited about their good fortune, he and Jean crammed their apartment with credit-bought furniture, but, in a never-ending pattern of profligacy, in a few weeks the bounty of merchandise was repossessed.

  In February the Esquire offshoot Coronet published his “Face in the Moonlight,” a second-person account of the “queer nonsense” that occurs during prison isolation. The magazine still introduced him as an outlaw: “Chester B. Himes writes with authority about the locale of his story: he spent seven years behind grey walls for robbery.” But the venue had reach and publishers like Doubleday and Dodd Mead started sending Chester query letters. Another prison story, “The Things You Do,” lifted straight out of the novel manuscript, went to Opportunity. Chester was cutting and rewriting and trying to respond as best he was able during “one of those periods of frustration that undermines the confidence.” The quandary was the problem of specialty: would he fit into the narrow groove of a prison writer or this new idea that was tugging at him, the black writer of social justice?

  Reinventing his relationship to his mother would help him answer the question. In “The Things You Do” he sentimentally exposed the tortured encounters with Estelle on visiting days, emphasizing the way that the pain of his sentence had aged her. But at the same time he was acknowledging the grief and destruction he had caused, he observed that his mother’s zealous righteousness was too crowded with white supremacist bigotry. In the winter of 1941, he worried that she might be moving from Columbus to Cleveland, something he didn’t want. “I’d hate to see mother come up here for she hasn’t changed any and she never will,” he lamented to his cousin Henry. Estelle’s paranoid rattling about slights and conspiracies “to harm her” seemed too strongly rooted in the isolation she imposed upon herself on account of her appearance. For years Chester had only censored her “mentally for her attitude,” but he no longer could face her in close quarters and discard her influence. Chester was compassionate and loving and he had just acknowledged the real pain he knew himself to have caused his mother. But he also was recognizing the accumulated damage of racism and the manner that it warped the personalities of people like Estelle. If he allowed the warping to distort his artistic vision before publishing a major work, he might never become an independent artist.

  Chester didn’t recoil only against the possibility of conflict with his mother as he tried to hone his prison manuscript. He wanted space to consider unashamedly his prison experience, as well as the skewer of racial oppression that leaped out to him from Wright’s new book. It was hard to do that while scraping by for work and relying on the charity of family, who were “half ashamed” that he wrote about prison, poverty, or being black at all. What he remembered of the moment before he went to Louis Bromfield’s farm was “I had the story Yesterday Will Make You Cry and then let it get away by yielding to personal pressures and such.” By leaving Cleveland, the city he had roared through as a wild teenager from a disintegrating family, and then submitted to as an adult, a married man putting felonious life behind, Chester would find himself.

  Chapter Six

  RUIN OF THE GOLDEN DREAM

  1941–1944

  Chester and Jean arrived at Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm on June 5, 1941, and stayed the summer. At first Chester thought the pastoral retreat would refresh his writing. The squalor of Central Avenue, parsing through the intrigues of black labor organizing, and the timid caution of his relatives had been stifling. He put it in slang when he confided to Henry, “I had to give up Cleveland because the colored people there were jiving me.” An unhurried summer at the idyllic “museum piece” estate of one of America’s best-known writers seemed like the antidote.

  Busy Malabar Farm was recognized by most of its visitors as an arcadia. The grounds contained the sprawling clapboard manor, known as the Big House, sustained by a thicket of outbuildings, including barns and a brick smokehouse, all sharing identical copper roofs. Bromfield’s six-hundred-acre village in the Ohio foothills was of beauty scenic enough that when Chester laid eyes on it he fancied, “I would be content to remain here the rest of my life.”

  Bromfield employed a professional staff including Ray Smith, a uniformed black chauffeur from Cleveland, and Reba Williams, a black cook. Chester found the staff was fully needed because Malabar was more a hotel than a working farm. From April to New Year’s Day, Malabar averaged twenty overnight visitors daily, with the kitchen serving guests three full meals. The arrangement, poorly conceived, was for Chester to serve as butler and Jean to help out in the kitchen. Jointly they were paid $120 a month, and they had Sunday afternoons and every other Thursday off. Chester would write, apparently, like Bromfield himself, in daily two-hour bursts of vitality between more callousing labors. Bromfield dashed off his sentences “until I’m numb,” he liked to brag, “then I go out and plow.” When he wasn’t doing either, he exhorted his servants and guests to pitch in, and his young daughter Ellen fondly remembered the admonition delivered by the squire who had never known anything other than ample board. “Them that works, eats,” he said, repeatedly, loudly, obnoxiously. Fights between spirited guests and Bromfield himself were known to break out on account of the demanding regimen, but Bromfield thrived off of the rippling currents in his household. He always had another intense spectacle on the rise. In July, Bromfield hosted a Malabar carnival, an extravaganza of flower shows, garden parties, dances, Monte Carlo games, and musical entertainment. Instead of serenity, Chester was up to his eyeballs in service.

  Bromfield encouraged everyone, including his family, to call him “the Boss” and he expected hirelings to double up on chores. As butler, Chester worked close to the Boss and his live-in secretary, George Hawkins. After a fortnight, Chester found the job “exceedingly hard, the hours exceedingly long.” He told Henry, “The main reason for coming down here was that I thought Bromfield might give me a lift.” But the lift went down and not up. Chester was too exhausted to write anything. “All I get out of it is a lot
of work from 7 A.M. to 8 P.M., which is too goddamned much.” Beguiled at first by the authority he respected from his mother and which had been imposed on him by the state, Chester began swiftly to chafe against it.

  Rewriting Black Sheep, the novel of a Mississippi white boy’s experience in an Ohio prison, would have been onerous regardless of the burden of service work at Malabar. The editors at Doubleday got back to him with a report that flattered and floored him all at once. Chester wrote “extremely well and vividly” but the world he described—his no-holds-barred account of American prison life—was “perhaps too vivid.” “Frankly,” Doubleday’s representative admitted, “we do not feel that we can sell a book as grim as this one.” He couldn’t understand the rejection as biased when Edward Dodd, from Dodd Mead, shared a similar written estimate. While Chester could “write so well I’d hate to let him go,” and the book itself was “unusually powerful,” the “morbid” and dyspeptic theme was “strong meat for public consumption.” Touching on the abundant reference to degeneracy in prison life, one of the readers had suggested, “I should think he could soft pedal one element of it.” With praise for his writing but no contract for the rough novel, he was facing adversity now that reminded him of censorship in prison. But by making all of the main characters white, he could at least imagine that the color barrier was not holding him down.

  As for Bromfield and his wife, Mary, “despise” was the adjective that characterized Chester’s emotions by the third week of toting and hefting. He determined to leave after the first payday, and he did little to hide his enmity toward Bromfield. However, according to Chester, his employer disliked being thought ill of by subordinates. Bromfield responded to Chester’s sour mood by offering to take his Black Sheep manuscript to Hollywood film producers. In August Bromfield would make three trips from Ohio to Los Angeles to work on screenplays and negotiate contracts. Bromfield also promised his new butler that he would heartily recommend the prison manuscript on his October trip to New York, and get Black Sheep over the hump with cautious publishers. Urging Chester to go west, the Boss held out the tantalizing dream of big-time publication and Hollywood success.

  The source of Bromfield’s kindness had something to do with the Jellifes in Cleveland, but probably even more with Bromfield’s good friend Edna Ferber, the author of Show Boat. When that novel was adapted for Broadway, it had helped to make Paul Robeson famous with the hit song “Old Man River.” To her credit, Ferber had helped educate the important black novelist Waters Turpin, the son of her maid. Bromfield would go Ferber one better by launching a man farther down, a black ex-con.

  Chester and Jean began planning to relocate to Los Angeles, where he had been assured he could find work writing screenplays and serving as a consultant on Hollywood movies with prison themes. The studios had brought out three such films in 1940, Castle on the Hudson, Millionaires in Prison, and Johnny Apollo, and they were casting or planning City Without Men, Prison Mutiny, and Escape from Crime that fall.

  Nevertheless, Chester regarded the friendly gesture as an example of liberal guilt. While he hoped to use Bromfield’s leverage, Chester retained his contempt toward the man. Five years later, when he drafted the novel Lonely Crusade, Chester would depict Louis Bromfield as the fictional Louis Foster, the “tall, gangling man in plaid woolen shirt and old corduroy trousers,” an industrialist and aircraft company executive, and the novel’s fascist villain. That novel would be one of the best books probing the overlapping realms of race, class, and sexuality after the Second World War. Instead of cherishing Bromfield’s liberalism—Bromfield had begun as a New Dealer, until the government started regulating farms—Chester would forever point to America’s self-made aristocrats as haughty, spoiled bullies.

  “There is no place like America,” Foster said, and the emotion in his voice was genuine because the opportunity for betterment afforded by America was his special love. He was convinced that any American (except women, whom he did not consider men’s equal; Negroes, whom he did not consider as men; Jews, whom he did not consider as Americans; and the foreign born, whom he did not consider at all), possessed of ingenuity, aggressiveness, and blessed with good fortune, could pull himself up by his bootstraps to become one of the most wealthy and influential men in the nation—even President. The fact that neither he nor his associates had been faced with this necessity had no bearing on his conviction. Like other fables of the American legend, the truth made little difference—as long as he believed, just as he now believed that there was no other place on earth where a Negro son of servant parents could achieve a college education. “No place like America,” he repeated.

  Not content merely to smear Bromfield and what he represented, Chester was capably examining his own complicity, which made both Bromfield’s swagger and his own obsequiousness possible. With their authority so unequal, he admitted his own “compulsion to agree, flatter, serve the vanity of this great white man.” As an obsequious man, he understood perfectly well that Jean would lose respect for him, a difference in sphere but not in kind from what he had witnessed in his own household as a child. At Malabar Farm, comparing himself with a cocksure white writer who had attained wealth beyond all that he and Jean hoped to achieve and who was in the process of accumulating more . . . well, that comparison was deeply unflattering.

  Chester visited his father in Cleveland and consulted with him about the possible excursion west. He encouraged Joseph Sr. to tag along. Chester believed he might be on the verge of making it big, and his father had always supported his youngest son, even when he had not provided practical guidance. Joseph Sr. told him he would consider the relocation. At a going-away party their Cleveland relatives wished the couple well. Jean’s folks presented them with a black horsehide suitcase, while Chester’s Aunt Leah presumed he was headed for more flittering and foundering. “I hope that they will soon find themselves? They don’t seem to know what they want to do” was her general observation about the couple. Chester then went down on his own to Columbus to see his mother and Joe Jr. When Jean met him there, about the first week of October, they boarded a Greyhound bus for Los Angeles.

  Chester and Jean arrived in a West Coast metropolis that was a migrant’s beacon but becoming increasingly like the American South. Exodusters from Oklahoma and Arkansas flooded California at the end of the 1930s, fleeing the Depression and drought that ravaged their farms. Barely 63,000 of L.A.’s 1.5 million people were black in 1941, but by 1944 that figure would jump to 118,000. Chester viewed goodly portions of the 448-square-mile city as “a drab panorama of one-storied, stuccoed buildings unfolded in monotonous repetition.” With “no place for Negroes to live” in Hollywood or Beverly Hills, where there was domestic work, he and Jean had to find lodging in a corridor that Langston Hughes called the “remote districts,” an area south of downtown, in the central part of the city.

  In a show of extravagance, the Himeses booked rooms at the posh Erskine Apartments at 1464 Central Avenue, close to the Twelfth Street streetcar line and the bustling crossroads of black Los Angeles, fondly called “the Harlem of the West.” Central Avenue, nicknamed the “Great Black Way,” was the mighty river for Southern California’s African American community, connecting downtown to the southern suburb of Watts. At Forty-First Street and Central lay the key strip with bars, lounges, jazz clubs, and nightclubs, like the Club Alabam, the Downbeat Club, and the cocktail lounge at the Dunbar Hotel (the first luxury hotel for African Americans), while the Lincoln Theater at Twenty-Third Street and the Plantation Club farther up Central rounded out the nightlife. The high-paying aircraft and shipbuilding industries were an automobile ride away at the docks of San Pedro near Long Beach. African American film celebrities and jazz musicians flocked to Los Angeles, some working on big-budget productions like The Green Pastures (1936). Celluloid minstrel Eddie “Rochester” Anderson had a house with a fabulous swimming pool and garage at Thirty-Sixth Street and Western Boulevard, so dubbed “Rochester Lane.” If perhaps the main
draw was yet the opulence of the Hollywood film industry, all of L.A.’s parts helped to sustain an atmosphere of carefree stylishness along the palm-tree-lined streets.

  Sunny Los Angeles had elements of a dreamworld in the early fall of 1941 for the young Midwesterners, used to the sooty pall of an industrial city frozen for half of the year. But 1941 L.A. was not progressive. Even after the Second World War, crowds would balk at interracial bands, like the combo led by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and not merely on account of racism, but inadequate cultural antennae. “California,” remembered Gillespie’s drummer Stan Levey, “was in those days ten or fifteen years behind the times.” Gillespie himself put a more pointed racial marker on the people in Los Angeles: “Man, it’s a whole lotta ‘Toms’ and musical nothings and all that.” In even more stark terms, a specific meanness kept Chester and Jean alert. If Jean walked down Central or Vernon Avenue alone, “ten, fifteen, or twenty” cars would sidle up to the curb, driven by white men, soliciting.

  Bromfield had topped off their pay with a $100 bonus, so the Himeses had a small stake of perhaps $300. They needed to find work—and success—immediately. Chester quickly secured a job with the California Sanitary Canning Company, who hired him as a labeling machine helper. If it was unskilled labor, at least it wasn’t pushing a broom or swinging a mop. Buoyed up by the employment and getting used to clutching Jean by the arm as they traveled, Chester softened his opinion on L.A. a bit, writing to Langston Hughes in mid-October that he and Jean liked “the city a little better than we did at first.” But the favorable impression was fleeting. After a short time Chester quit the job, claiming racial discrimination, and he did so with enough public theater to be remembered by the foreman. The unfair labor conditions forced Chester to conclude that “black people were treated much the same as [in] an industrial city in the South.” Yet, L.A.’s whites seemed to want blacks to understand that they were receiving deluxe treatment for which they should be conspicuously pleased.