Generous and gracious, Langston Hughes sent Chester a full roster of contacts, directing him to the black literati of Los Angeles, especially those on the left: his comrade the civil rights attorney Loren Miller, the bright youngsters Welford Wilson and John Kinloch, policeman Jess Kimbrough, and his old friend and sometime nemesis, novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. A week later, when Hughes was asked to preside over a League of American Writers dinner for L.A.’s black scribblers, he put Chester’s name first on his list of invitees for the early November event. A supportive Hughes then approached Blanche Knopf in New York directly about publishing Chester’s prison novel. Chester took the lists of introduction and tried to wend his way into professional circles.
Some of the people were inaccessible. The recent winner of the Anisfield Wolf Prize for race relations, the well-known Hurston had secluded herself to work on a novel and on an opera with composer William Grant Still. But Chester received a hearty response from Welford Wilson. An orator and former track star at City College in New York who had been a leader in opposing Jim Crow at athletic events in the mid-1930s, Wilson worked for the U.S. Employment Agency and was also a budding novelist. Wilson had known Hughes since the end of the 1920s, and Hughes recommended him for the Communist-backed League of American Writers School in Los Angeles. Energetic, bright, and invested in radical politics, Wilson too was newly arrived to Los Angeles. Heavily involved in Communist Party organizing, he tried to recruit Chester. “I was given the works,” Chester remembered, recalling their attendance at cell meetings, social affairs, lectures, dinner parties, and interviews in the fall of 1940.
Chester went with Wilson as he spoke or hobnobbed with ambitious young California blacks like the Reverend Clayton Russell, the young minister of the three-thousand-strong congregation of the Independent Church of Christ. Flamboyant and nervy, Russell had just returned from a trip to Europe and had visited several of the capitals prior to their fall to the Nazis. Chester also met two Los Angeles black veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Edward Carter and Eluard McDaniel, who had fought heroically in Spain. On account of his contacts and devoted politics, Wilson had “a great influence” over Chester in those early months in L.A.
In the course of his meanderings, Chester was introduced to Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson, Hollywood’s leading Communist screenwriters; more than a quarter of the screenwriters were thought to belong to the Party in the early 1940s. Trumbo especially had the career that Chester wanted. He had published the novel Johnny Got His Gun and then been hired by Warner Bros. for sixty dollars a week and raced up the writing ladder with speed. In spite of his wealth and success, Trumbo was a principled antiracist. When FBI agents visited him, under the pretense of examining pro-fascist mail he received, but grilling him more closely for his leftist politics, he pivoted back, “Are you anti-Semitic? anti-Catholic? anti-Negro?”
Lawson was the dean of the Communist writers. It was said that at Lawson’s parties he invited guests into his elegant, spacious home and proclaimed, “Welcome to the Communist Party.” Lawson was a mover and shaker in the California chapter of the League of American Writers, fundamentally an offshoot of the Party’s John Reed Clubs from the early 1930s, but still functioning as a broad organization that bonded creative artists, leftists, New Dealers, and antifascists of all stripes. Both Lawson and Trumbo were known for helping novice writers, especially by critiquing their work. Chester never fully thawed the big shots like Trumbo and Lawson, who invited him in for a drink, but always informally, in the kitchen.
Chester was more at home among the local black left-wing intelligentsia, a group that included California Eagle publisher Charlotta Bass and her nephew and managing editor John Kinloch, a member of the Screen Writers Guild who was hoping to develop an African American film production company, and a member of Clayton Russell’s church. At the center of the circle was Loren Miller, Hughes’s good friend who had gone on the ill-fated film trip to Russia in 1932 with Henry Moon. A biracial self-described cynic, Miller was then hard at work on developing a legal means to defy restrictive real estate covenants and thinking of running for Congress. He would go on to write most of the NAACP brief for perhaps the most consequential Supreme Court case of the twentieth century, Brown v. Board of Education. Unconcerned to be among those openly connected to Communist organizations and journals, Miller sat on the fence between Communist proselytizer and comfortable bourgeois attorney. By the early 1940s, Henry Lee Moon was finding Miller using the word “duplicity” to discuss the Party and its relationship with black Americans, but at very least Miller was a strong believer in Marxist principles. He was also a literary man, who had joined the League of American Writers in 1939, wrote literary and cultural criticism, and offered analyses of the creative work of his friends, like the white screenwriter John Bright. He advocated the study of black literature as a part of the whole American culture, hoping to evaluate black writing “realistically” and in the context of its “social history.” Probably what Chester enjoyed about him best was his tendency to satirize mercilessly and use his wit to “burn holes in the toughest skin.” In Miller’s company, Chester met men like Clarence Johnson, the national field representative for Negro employment and training for the War Production Board. Miller and Johnson steeped Chester in a dense factual overview about the state of black migration, race relations, the legal structure, and the possibilities for organized labor to wear down corporate managers.
For a short time Chester’s best friend from prison, Prince Rico, regularly visited the couple. Rico had always admired him, and Chester had continued to build on the literary promise that set him apart in prison. About the intimate connection that the two men had forged, Chester later wrote, “I don’t know when it got over, but when it got over, it was completely over.” In the career that Chester was embarking upon, he would refer to homosexuality from time to time, most explicitly in his prison manuscript, sometimes scornfully to belittle a fiction character, and sometimes playfully, as evidence of an exotic desire. At nearly the end of his writing career, in the novel Blind Man with a Pistol, he wrote about homosexuality as an ordinary part of human life. But in terms of his sexual preference, Chester seems to have ended his same-sex desire in prison.
A small olive branch from the slick magazines came when Chester met Collier’s editor Kenneth Littauer, who was visiting Beverly Hills and who encouraged him to keep sending fiction treatments to the magazine. Littauer assured Chester of the popularity and value of his Esquire stories. The pep talk was followed by a chat with Meyer Levin, his old Esquire editor, who was then working at Columbia Pictures, and Chester felt more optimistic about his chances to work on scripts. Levin mentioned Zora Neale Hurston’s being retained by Paramount as an expert on Haiti; surely Himes could do the same, maybe for Columbia’s City Without Men. During this time an agent for Warner Bros. read over Chester’s prison manuscript, probably considering whether to use him as an advisor for director Ross Lederman’s Escape from Crime. But Chester “got to feeling funny about it”—perhaps he thought he would be ripped off—and he raced over to the studio asking for the return of his material. Then Esquire sent what seemed an acceptance letter followed by a crisp rejection from Gingrich personally the next week. With nothing to eat but smiles and promises, it seemed as if Chester had been foolish to venture to Los Angeles even while gleaming success seemed to be at hand if he pushed hard enough. The ambivalence left him feeling “jittery.”
Shortly after Esquire’s reneging on the story, he confessed that “things are getting a little pressing.” The familiar wretchedness he had known in Cleveland had returned. Straitened circumstances had Chester and Jean camped out at Welford Wilson’s small one-story bungalow on Crocker Street. Wilson’s wife, Juanita, had recently arrived from New York and the Party helped him secure a bigger place. Chester made up his mind to forsake Los Angeles and search for work, but he wasn’t sure where to go. Then on Sunday, December 7, Japanese naval aircraft attacked the U.S
. Seventh Fleet based in Pearl Harbor, in the American territory of Hawaii. The next day Franklin Roosevelt addressed Congress, which then passed a declaration of war. Instantly there was a palpable escalation in racial tension in Los Angeles. “This town is getting too hot for me,” Chester thought, and he headed for San Francisco, where he found a job in the Henry J. Kaiser No. 1 Shipyard in Richmond, just north of Oakland. He apprenticed as a shipfitter trainee, preparing the ten-day-wonders of resupply, the so-called Liberty ships. But the labor situation was exactly the same as in Los Angeles.
While he tried to use a blowtorch and a rivet for Allied victory against Japan and Germany, Chester heard the news of the gruesome January 25, 1942, lynching of a man named Cleo Wright in Missouri. Pittsburgh Courier columnist Arthur Huff Fausett welcomed the outpouring of letters and telegrams from disgusted black Americans, who now fashioned lapel emblems making a double V, to signify victory against fascism abroad and lynchers and racists at home. Referring to lapel emblems, Fausett wrote, “I think the suggestion that Negroes should wear a Double V for Double Victory, is a brilliant one.” The slogan became the nationwide trademark of nearly two million readers of the black press. The motto was taken so seriously by some black servicemen that they burned the logo onto their skin.
The northern California hiatus ended when Hall Johnson, the renowned black arranger and composer whose choirs had integrated Hollywood sound tracks and film scores, sent Chester an urgent message about possible publicity work at M-G-M. The cast for the film version of Cabin in the Sky was set and Johnson, a technical director for the production, believed that additional blacks were to be hired on the other side of the camera. Scholarly and gentle, Johnson had gotten his start as a violinist in the orchestra of the Broadway musical Shuffle Along. He then arranged Georgia slave songs for a trained choir and brought it successfully to the stage in Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures. In 1935 he introduced the choir to California, where the choir debuted in the film version of the musical; it subsequently appeared in dozens of Hollywood films.
Chester returned to L.A. in the spring of 1942, but the job was put on hold. Closer than before to Hollywood stars, he pitched a Lena Horne profile to Collier’s. The magazine took him seriously but decided the piece was too big for an amateur and assigned it to a regular feature writer.
Nosing around the studios, Chester talked to Johnson about screen treatments and met several talented entertainers. He hit it off with Charles Holland, who sang in the choir. A tenor with a voice like Roland Hayes, Holland had wowed radio audiences and gone on to win a role in the 1940 M-G-M feature Hullabaloo. Classically trained and hoping for opera auditions, Holland resented the prohibitions restricting his talent in the same manner as Chester had sounded off against the Federal Writers Project in Cleveland. The two men would remain lifelong friends.
While they did not go so far as to hire black writers, Hollywood studios did get pressure to build black morale from the federal government’s Office of War Information, and in the persons of NAACP Secretary Walter White and his friend Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican Party presidential nominee. At a luncheon hosted by producer Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century–Fox, White told those gathered that the “restriction of Negroes to roles with rolling eyes . . . [and] none too bright servants . . . perpetuates a stereotype which is doing the Negro infinite harm.” Simply put, the Hollywood film’s “mentally inferior” stereotypes, which made wealthy actors of Stepin Fetchit (né Lincoln Perry) and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, were key “reasons for the denial to the Negro of opportunity.”
Chester remained to the left of the NAACP. To help his chances in films, he joined a group called Hollywood Writers Mobilization, whose members included the screenwriting crowd who were among some of the most committed leftists, and also got a scholarship to the League of American Writers School. News bulletins like Communiqué, created by rank-and-file members of the Screen Writers Guild like Ring Lardner Jr., attempted to change the attitudes of the industry from within. Lardner exposed the long-standing complicity of the screenwriters in perpetuating stereotypes. “We’ve been discriminating as surely as, and probably more effectively than any Klu-Kluxer [sic].” For his stands against discrimination—used as evidence to prove his Communist ties—Lardner Jr. would eventually be blacklisted and shut out of Hollywood.
However, in Tinseltown some black actors feared that if screenplays eliminated minstrel roles and featured light-complexioned beauties like Lena Horne, dark-skinned performers would vanish from the screen altogether. Hattie McDaniel, Warners’ contract black star, seemed to both curry favor with the executives and preserve her livelihood when she told the press in August, “I don’t believe we will gain by rushing or attempting to force studios to do anything they are not readily inclined to do.”
So the barriers remained on both sides of the camera. Chester went to Warner Bros. and met the head of the reading department. He was asked to write the synopsis for The Magic Bow, a well-known book about the Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini, entry-level work. On the basis of his written report, a low-level studio factotum offered him a job. But within days he was perplexed; the bias at the studios was no different from that of the aircraft unions. Studio head Jack Warner barked to Chester’s supervisor, “I don’t want no niggers on this lot.”
Waylaid by the attitudes of studio executives, Chester hoped for help from Hall Johnson. He learned that M-G-M would hire an African American to cover publicity for Cabin in the Sky, to tap into the segregated American media networks. He hustled over to the studio only to find that Phil Carter, a young black from New York, had already landed the job. Then Chester noted that Carter’s office was not really in the studio publicity department; he had been secreted at the very end of a corridor of abandoned dressing rooms. Meanwhile, the Chicago Defender heralded the appointment in an article called “Phil Carter, Harlem Scribe, in Film Job,” noting that Carter “has his own office.” Chester was disgusted and amused. He enjoyed the point of view of Leon Washington, the maverick publisher of the local Los Angeles Sentinel, who believed that Cabin in the Sky was “degrading” and also a cattle call “so that the employed Negroes would use pressure to hush up the militant Negroes.”
Disgruntled by race prejudice in the war services industries, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, rejected by the studios for work he was qualified to do, and having to eke out a living in an expensive city where he needed a car, Chester fell into the steady orbit of the Communist Party in 1942. He hoped to work as a screenwriter or expert consultant for Hollywood, but it was mainly through the informal Communist Party networks that he rubbed shoulders in Hollywood at all. In none of Chester’s writings in 1942 and 1943 did he dramatize an attempt to integrate the studios. Instead, he focused on what he knew best, and what he presumed his friends wanted and needed to read: stories about blacks and whites working together on the political left to overcome segregation and desegregate the war services industries.
Los Angeles was also racially redrawing itself. By mid-February President Roosevelt signed an executive order to create exclusion zones that effectively allowed for the removal of anyone of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast. The next month, in Los Angeles, Japanese citizens were removed to a way station at the Santa Anita racetrack. By May 8, the Los Angeles Times estimated that only 4000 Japanese remained in the city, down from a prewar population of 50,000. Little Tokyo, which began at the downtown dock of Central Avenue extending toward the Los Angeles River and had housed 30,000 Japanese Americans, became Bronzeville, which soon spilled over with 80,000 blacks. In Boyle Heights and City Terrace, the neighborhoods due east of Little Tokyo, For Rent signs sprouted.
Understanding the linked fates between the nonwhite Americans—Japanese and blacks—Chester noted with dismay the families herded onto busses and trucks for the internment camps. Some of his literary comrades were among the victims. Probably when the fledgling writer Mary Oyama Mittwer and her husband, Frederick, and their son, Rickey
, were sent off on “unforgettable” May 9, Chester and Jean took over their prize bungalow at 120 E. Second Street for a portion of 1942. But in 1942, the Himeses also rented a house in City Terrace on North De Garmo Drive, overlooking downtown L.A. With a yard to grow carrots, beans, cabbage, and beets, the house was a symbol of true prosperity. Their neighbors were white and Latino, and for a while Chester scratched along with a forklift job at a warehouse for $22.50 a week. At first, Jean did only a little better earning $24 per week working the four-to-midnight shift at a defense plant, and resigning herself to a four-hour daily commute.
Chester abandoned the forklift job to devote himself more fully to writing fiction cognizant of the problems of organizing the black laborer. In the spring of 1942, Chester had gotten to know a similarly committed writer, also on Langston Hughes’s list, an old-time, rock-hard black police officer named Jess Kimbrough. Chester was always ready to talk crime, and the playful “Strictly Business,” his Cleveland syndicate hit man story, had appeared in Esquire that February. Originally from Texas, the forty-nine-year-old Kimbrough had joined the department in the early 1920s and reached the rank of detective lieutenant at the Newtown Station. He was precisely the kind of police officer that Chester was lucky not to have encountered during his youthful sprees of lawlessness. Like his partner Charles Broady (who retired that spring after a battle that left another officer dead), Kimbrough had excelled on the basis of his unforgiving manner toward suspected black criminals; other black officers on the force were notorious for shooting and killing unarmed black teens. The lethal antics of these policemen lodged in the recesses of Chester’s imagination, and he learned enough about their reputations to call them “pitiless bastards.”
Chester B. Himes Page 17
