America then had the highest employment levels in its history and the Depression conditions of “All God’s Chillun Got Pride” seemed fully over. After only marginally successful attacks in North Africa and Italy, on June 6, the second front was launched in France by the colossal invading D-day force of American and Allied troops. Delighted by the turn in military events, U.S. Communists, under the leadership of Earl Browder, downgraded themselves from a revolutionary party to a political association, sending the strong signal that American capital and American labor had no fundamental disagreements. Since the Japanese losses at Midway and Guadalcanal in 1942, the Pacific war had slowly begun to favor the Americans, even if to eyes like Chester’s it appeared as if a race war were under way in Asia, with the rigidly segregated U.S. Navy and Marines fighting on terms similar to the “zoot suit” battles of 1943.
Meanwhile, Jean Himes’s career revealed evidence of racial and gender barriers giving way under the pressure of wartime labor shortages. Vivacious and cordial, she had flourished developing recreational programs at Pueblo Del Rio and by the summer of 1944 had joined the United Service Organizations (USO), the private charity partnering with the War and Navy Department to provide leisure activities and relaxation for members of the armed forces. Jean now worked closely with white regional directors and she caught the eye of the press. With regular radio programs, film events, and maneuvering celebrities to different troop camps and local centers, the job enabled her to glow in public and in the eyes of black Angelenos.
In short order Jean became the high-placed coordinator for women’s activities for the Los Angeles USO. But Chester’s wife’s continued white-collar successes undermined him psychologically, in spite of the Rosenwald fellowship. He described her managerial success and public notice as starting “the dissolution of our marriage.” When Jean said in an interview with the Baltimore-based newspaper the Afro-American, “I gave up my good job with the City of Cleveland and we went traipsing off to California,” she caused Chester to moan about the nature of American labor exploitation that promoted black women and not black men. “It hurt for my wife to have a better job than I did.” Jean’s success stung too because a deep part of Chester required her inertia, her never-ending adoration and subordinate standing, and the “adulation” he had craved in prison. So Chester blamed her and pitied himself. “I was no longer a husband to my wife; I was her pimp. She didn’t mind and that hurt all the more.” He eased his mind by drinking heavily.
The battle with his wife’s success and the forty painful hours at the shipyard in March stuck in his craw as he abandoned the Cleveland novel based on his own life. “Shattered” by the “mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles,” Chester persuaded Henry Moon to host him in New York, and in September he went there. Either unwilling to accompany him, or discouraged from doing so, Jean remained in L.A. He channeled his feelings about the war, black opportunity, and Jean’s prospects at work into the redirected novel, a frantic and brilliant exploration of black labor conditions and American sexuality that he wrote “defiantly,” and “without thought of it being published.” After years of coyly shielding his audience from his thunderous rage, he would force the reader to confront implacable fury.
Chapter Seven
TRYING TO WIN A HOME
1944–1945
By the time Chester arrived in New York, he had set out on a full-scale drunken bender. He arrived at his cousin’s three-bedroom apartment at 940 St. Nicholas Avenue. From the window of the spare bedroom, where he slept, he could see lower Harlem, the East River, and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. But the real view was his perch in Harlem’s most elegant neighborhood, Sugar Hill. “Harlem’s most talked about men and women in law, sports, civil liberties, music, medicine, painting, business and literature live on Sugar Hill,” declared Ebony magazine. Chester had arrived at the playground of “the moneyed, the talented, the socially prominent, the intellectually distinguished, the fast crowd.” And in that crowd Henry’s wife, Mollie, might have claimed the crown as the most socially prominent. Part of the allure of the Moons was the whiskey that seemed to run from the tap and which kept Chester going. People introduced to him at this period would begin future inquiries about him asking simply, “Was Chester drunk?”
The cross street for the Moon building was 157th Street, an easy stroll away from 409 Edgecombe Avenue and the famous fourteen-story building where W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and the painter Aaron Douglas lived, the “tallest and best kept apartment for blacks” that Chester had ever laid eyes on. Chester had arrived in the neighborhood in the city where a leading minister was called a “matinee idol in the pulpit” and was divorcing one beautiful showgirl wife for an even more beautiful, more talented star. Two blocks down St. Nicholas Avenue was Chester’s favorite neighborhood haunt, the Fat Man’s Bar-and-Grill, a hangout for jazz musicians and film celebrities. Eddie’s Chicken Shack, as well as the other bars, the barbershops, and fronts for numbers houses, provided down-home pleasures. At 145th Street and a few blocks east was Harlem’s Seventh Avenue, “the land of dreams,” where a hard drinking and good-looking man or woman need never be lonely. The Renaissance Ballroom, Small’s Paradise Inn, and Dickie Well’s Restaurant all featured fine dining, dancing, and big bands. There was no shortage of glamour.
Despite the binge drinking, Chester was able to hold his own at the typewriter. With the assured income from his fellowship, he swiftly amassed chapters of a manuscript about the destruction of a favored black shipyard foreman and readied himself to sell his book in New York. Probably, as Chester boasted to the Chicago Defender that October, he had already drafted the novel he was calling, apparently because he was immersed in Tolstoy, Race, Sex and War. Writing at Mollie and Henry’s wasn’t easy, however; he landed at his cousin’s during a time of bedlam. Henry and Mollie were fully devoted to the extraordinary campaign to reelect Franklin Roosevelt when Chester arrived. In April 1944 Henry had left his federal job with the housing agency to join the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Political Action Committee. Sidney Hillman, the director of war production, a dapper Lithuanian immigrant who had made a name for himself as an organizer in the garment industry and from 1914 as president of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, headed this committee; Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Weaver, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Howard University Law School dean William Hastie sat on its board. Henry would lend his talents as a journalist and public relations expert to organize and inform black members of the union, registering them to vote and educating them about politics.
Even though the group was theoretically nonpartisan, by May it had declared for Roosevelt and “progressive” liberal legislators. Hillman told audiences that “all of labor’s gains and all progress made by minority groups during the past twelve years will be endangered if we do not elect progressive congressmen and a liberal president.” The committee, which paid Henry a comfortable salary of $250 per month, was funded by CIO dues. While his work on the Political Action Committee focused on the election cycle, Henry also hoped to keep black industrial employment at high levels following the war, and he advocated a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission to protect gains. However, by the summer’s end, important supporters like Hastie resigned from the CIO committee, disappointed that they were in the process of delivering a black vote for no new tangible gains.
Several prominent black Communist artists—including Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and poet, professor, and journalist Melvin B. Tolson—also joined a Hillman-led offshoot called the National Citizens Political Action Committee during the summer. Whether Henry was in or out of town, everyone headed over to his apartment, where he and Mollie hosted almost nightly celebrations, supper parties, get-togethers, and toasts, in the process creating one of America’s earliest genuinely interracial salons. The white Americans included Winthrop Rockefeller, the young vagabond son of the oil billionaire, Commission on Interracial Cooperation head Will W. Alexander, and Doubleday ed
itor Bucklin Moon. The African Americans were the bright lights of the striving middle class, most of them hoping to finally break the back of segregation in some reputable field: NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, Walter White, Richard Wright, Abyssinian Baptist Church minister Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Illinois congressman William Dawson, and Crisis editor Roy Wilkins.
While Chester had known elites of the black world in Cleveland and Los Angeles, the sight of all of these New Yorkers together putting their efforts on the Roosevelt campaign was powerful and overwhelming. Years later, when he looked back on that fall, he decided that the nightly socializing to get a Democrat elected took on the “strangely religious” elements of a primitive ritual. To Chester it was sometimes pompous and sometimes preposterous. When Chester joined Mollie, her boon companion Polly Johnson, and others in fêting Winthrop Rockefeller at the grill at the Theresa Hotel, Johnson, tears of gratitude in her eyes, told the table of cosmopolitan elites, “This is social equality.” Whether or not racial barriers in housing, education, or employment would ever trickle down from Sugar Hill seemed a minor concern.
A nightly guest to the Moon household was a young woman from Cincinnati named Ann Mason, who headed the Women’s Division at the CIO Political Action Committee office. “Brilliant and charming,” Ann was an attractive, ninety-pound divorcée, a year older than Chester. A former public schoolteacher and Pittsburgh Courier writer, Mason was another new arrival to New York. Touting the fact that women would cast 60 percent of the vote in 1944, Mason concentrated her efforts on recruiting black women in the CIO to the polls, where they could apply “the weapon most useful to the Negro.” Sometimes with Henry, she barnstormed heavily populated California, Texas, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, building caucuses of black women among the industrial workers, echoing the value of voting rights and the ballot.
At the soirees on St. Nicholas Avenue, Ann and Chester began an affair. “I lost myself in sex and drunkenness” was Chester’s memory of the fall of 1944, a maze of adultery and flirtation. Even such public models of respectability like NAACP secretary Walter White, whose marriage to his wife, Gladys, according to the biographer Kenneth Janken, “had been a charade” for several decades, apparently escorted his flame, white socialite Poppy Cannon, to Mollie Moon’s shindigs. Other guests—such as singer Paul Robeson and his wife, Essie—were known to have an open marriage, and pursue multiple love interests. The sexual double standard that allowed indulgence for the affluent and sacrifice and condemnation for the commoner was on full display.
In some corner of his mind Chester resented his cousin’s wife for her role as hostess to the erotic buffet. Witnessing the viciousness of the race rioting of 1943 in L.A. had dealt a powerful blow to his ideal of American democracy. Life in New York in the last year of the war among the Talented Tenth bruised too his ideal of middle-class marriage. When he tried to explain himself in a forum that he knew Jean would have access to, he described what he indulged in as “the decadent, rotten sense of freedom that comes with being absolved of the responsibility of trying any longer to be a man in a world that will not accept you.” As he had written about while in Los Angeles, he was disgusted by the substitution of specious sexual kicks for genuine political freedom. Chester was internally pained by the black promiscuity of New York, even as he participated in it.
Among the white partygoers to Mollie’s was the tall, formidably built, and open-minded Doubleday editor Bucklin Moon. Buck Moon enjoyed the stimulating conversations and soaked in the moody atmosphere, “sometimes one of frustration and rage” but also “barbed with a bitter and almost sardonic humor.” Originally from Minnesota, Buck had gone to college in Winter Park, Florida, where he had befriended Zora Neale Hurston from nearby Eatonville. Moon had joined Doubleday in August 1940 and worked his way up to the editorial staff after a couple of months managing one of the firm’s New York bookshops. Recognizing the uphill battles and sacrifices necessary to render just portraits of black Americans in the field of letters, Moon had gone into publishing “with a feeling akin to someone about to enter the clergy.” A lifelong stutterer and legendary drinker, he was steadied by his belief that “one of the greatest stories to come from the Negro in America is in the migrations from the South to the North,” and in fact he wrote a 1943 novel on that topic, The Darker Brother.
Buck Moon scouted black literary talent at Henry and Mollie’s, signing Walter White to a contract for A Rising Wind, his investigation of the attitudes of black soldiers and British colonial subjects. While undeniably more fond of Negroes than most American whites, Moon believed he had to publish upbeat, original voices. He had “strong feeling[s]” by the fall of 1944 that “too many negative novels with a race background” had made their way into print, some of them as “standardized as the slick magazine serial.” Chester’s novel set in Los Angeles certainly seemed unique, if Moon tended to look at Chester’s stories and political commentaries as overly bright reflections on a future without racism. To tempt Chester, Moon promised him the inaugural George Washington Carver Book Award, a new Doubleday promotional tool awarding $2500 for the best book “that deals with American Negroes.” Black writers like Ann Petry and Roi Ottley had been celebrated for winning Houghton Mifflin pre-publishing prizes before, but the award in Carver’s name seemed earmarked for a young black writer like Chester. Looking rather favorably on Chester’s novel exploring racism in the West Coast war industry from the vantage of a middle-class striver, on October 19, 1944, Moon signed Chester to a contract with Doubleday, the country’s largest publisher.
Asserting himself with more political writing, Chester hit the liberal New York Four Freedoms crowd that fall with a piece called “Democracy Is for the Unafraid” for the interracial amity magazine Common Ground. In this article Chester explored some of the recent material on the foundation of race prejudice and the authoritarian personality. Chester now embraced the point of view that modern man committed his most heinous acts because of fear. White supremacy, however, was doubly deadly because, in his view, when its purveyors became conscious of their fear, they reacted with renewed violence against nonwhites. “What frightens me most today,” he began, were not the cruel stereotypes against black people, the race riots, the economic pressures, or the internment of the Japanese “(whose loyalty to the ideology of white supremacy is doubted).” Instead, Chester exposed the problem of “the white man’s sudden consciousness of his own fear of other races.” Chester’s impersonal, academic position on the race problem—that it belonged to whites and was rooted in their insecurity—won esteem from his new friends. Bucklin Moon liked the piece so well that he reprinted it in an anthology he had under way called Primer for White Folks.
To celebrate her cousin’s book contract, on Thursday, November 2, 1944, Mollie threw Chester one of her “famed get-togethers,” a drunken bash attended by Alta Douglas, wife of the painter Aaron Douglas; Mrs. Edward Matthews, wife of the highly regarded concert baritone; white Gladys Ottley, the wife of Roi Ottley, who was reporting from the European war zone; Horace Sheffield, national representative of the United Auto Workers–CIO; Lewis Fairclough, chief of oral surgery at Harlem Hospital, and his spouse; Bucklin Moon; and Ann Mason. Nearly all of the attendees would be caricatured in Chester’s novel Pinktoes.
Perhaps the most intriguing guest was Chester’s old acquaintance from Cleveland, Reverend Grant Reynolds, former pastor of Mt. Zion Congregational Church. Reynolds had risen to the rank of captain as a chaplain in the Army and had supervised Jean’s brother Andrew before being discharged for protesting too boisterously against discrimination. Like Chester, Reynolds was impatient with segregation and not reluctant to combine acts of intrepidness with publicity seeking. Two weeks before the party, Reynolds had resigned from the NAACP to found his own organization, the Non Partisan Council for the Abolition of Discrimination in Military and Veterans Affairs; he now proclaimed he was voting against Roosevelt “for the debasement he has allowed to befall Negro men in u
niform.” Reynolds and Henry Moon were fraternity buddies, and Reynolds would run, unsuccessfully, as a Republican against Adam Clayton Powell Jr. for Congress in 1946. Having just begun law school at Columbia, Reynolds crackled with energy, studiousness, and righteous indignation.
Although Chester could bluster through these crowds, he did not prefer them. Almost certainly he concealed his prison record when he was among them, as he did when he got his first press in the Chicago Defender and facetiously told a reporter that his stories in Abbott’s Monthly turned his “career from medicine to writing by accepting his first short stories.” The campaign for Roosevelt and liberal democratic equality seemed superficial and insincere when he sobered up, so he worked on not doing that. That week and the next, he was so drunk and disillusioned that he missed voting in the election. He even resented the sex. As he waded through “white women who wanted to give me their bodies,” a voice inside Chester insisted that Mollie was to blame. To Chester, Mollie was a black person of obviously common origin who had somehow maneuvered into a gilded world of plenty and could paw over rich and influential blacks and whites. But what was worse than whatever she did was her shameless talking about it, which Chester, “a puritan all my life,” disliked hearing.
Chester B. Himes Page 20
