Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  His distaste for Mollie was becoming attached to his yearning for a partner endowed beyond what Jean, who was eerily becoming like Juanita Miller (but without her polished background), had to offer. With the final breakthrough—the fellowship in the spring and the book contract by the fall—he started to envision a future that wasn’t ever shaped by the collapse of his family and the stain of prison. Partly insecure and partly ungrateful, Chester drew fictional characters close enough to real-life people so that the resemblance stung. In several of his fictions, Mollie and Jean appeared. But in his first novel, he rendered a complex but still unflattering portrait of a kind of saccharine black female professional, closely modeled on Juanita, the acme of a type of light-skinned affluent success. He would begin the separation from his wife by tearing down the ideal Jean seemed to be striving for.

  After the elections, Chester’s investigation by FBI agents shifted into a higher gear. Special Agent in Charge R. B. Hood was making the rounds in Los Angeles, tracking down Chester’s contributions to left-wing periodicals, adding his prison record to the file, and noting his friendships and sympathies with Communists, although he was “not known to be a member or active therein himself.” Observing his NAACP membership and not wishing to attract untoward notice, the Bureau applied customary discretion to see whether his book had been published and could then be examined for “seditious or revolutionary material.”

  Chester made his own allies at confidential parties held at the Moon apartment when Mollie was away. He befriended Constance H. Curtis, the regular book reviewer for the Amsterdam News, who singled out the majesty of Melvin B. Tolson’s Rendezvous with America, and who had challenged her audience to read books that “deal with life in direct terms and direct language.” Chester’s ambitions suited Curtis’s scheme to win foundation support for black writers who could devote themselves to “a real literature which concerns itself with our people.” Langston Hughes, the best-known black writer connecting to “our people,” partied too. He lived farther down St. Nicholas Avenue and was spending that fall reading his poetry at black high schools. Tireless Hughes was also the lead writer, black or white, for Common Ground. In January 1943 he had launched in the pages of his Chicago Defender column an enduringly popular character called “My Simple Minded Friend,” later shortened to just “Simple.” He and Chester met for drinks at the Theresa Hotel bar.

  Constance Curtis brought to Chester’s parties a bookish young man originally from Oklahoma City. Thirty-one-year-old Ralph Ellison was the most talked about unknown black writer in New York. The same height as Chester but losing his hair, Ellison was reprinting his apprentice pieces alongside Chester’s Negro troop-morale builders in Negro Story that year, while also serving on that magazine’s editorial board. A concert-trained trumpeter who had gone to school at Tuskegee, Ellison was cycling away from the Communist Party, in which he had been heavily involved since 1937, to the point of preparing to fight in Spain. An editor at the Communist New Masses but a ghost in the world of the well-to-do black elite, Ellison lived down the hill from the Moons’ fashionable digs. Chester, who knew the Urban League’s Lester Granger, might also have noticed Ralph speaking at an event sponsored by that group at the East and West Association with crusading author Pearl Buck on October 24. In spite of his poverty and obscurity, Ellison was rapidly becoming the black literary intellectual of his age, and he had one most attractive calling card for Chester: he was perhaps the closest friend and confidant of Richard Wright.

  Ellison had spent a good portion of his summer proclaiming and defending Wright’s work, whose two-part article “I Tried to Be a Communist” caused a sensation when it appeared in Atlantic Monthly. Both Ellison and Himes had gone through periods of infatuation, reliance, and dissatisfaction with the Communist movement, though Chester’s significant mainstream success early in his career had prevented a strong attachment from forming with the hard left. Ellison, on the other hand, had begun writing at the suggestion of Hughes and Wright, and had all of his early publications in Communist magazines. He had reached, however, a turning point in his career. That September Ellison had secured a deal at publisher Reynal and Hitchcock similar to Chester’s at Doubleday. With brand new short stories like “King of the Bingo Game” and “Flying Home,” Ellison had started to write a new, intellectual, symbol-laden style of fiction that was attracting the eye of the critics. In 1944 he would successfully apply for a Rosenwald fellowship and Bucklin Moon, Himes’s editor, would support Ellison with letters of recommendation.

  The men liked each other. Although he was in the process of developing a legendary intolerance for sentimentality in discussions of race relations, art, or politics, Ellison was “congenial and attentive” in those early encounters with Himes. They had contrasting styles. Chester hung out regularly in bars swapping lies about the black folklore character Signifying Monkey with GIs, while Ellison, sifting through Communist Party maneuvers and Marxist philosophy in spirited discussions with literary friends, was more worried about the draft and being sent overseas. The men were often in each other’s company, most memorably at Ralph’s 147th Street apartment for a mess of pressure-cooked pig feet and rice, where Chester consumed more trotters than anybody.

  An historic gathering of black writers took place a month after the election. Langston Hughes threw a gala party on Sunday, December 10, that brought the black intelligentsia to the two-room apartment he shared with Toi and Emerson Harper. The guests included Cuban writer Jose Antonio Fernandez de Castro, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mollie and Henry, Owen Dodson, Alta Douglas, Nora Holt, Alice Browning, Dan Burley, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Fanny Buford, Charles Holland, and Oliver Harrington and his Norwegian wife. Hughes gave the party to honor Loren Miller, visiting from Los Angeles with Juanita. Chester had established himself so well in Los Angeles, and now impressively gotten a book contract in New York, that Miller took the occasion to thank him and remind him that L.A. was his “home town.” When Chester’s book appeared the next year, he would become the first nationally published Los Angeles–based black novelist.

  The party’s most impressive guest to Chester was Wright, then editing the galleys of his next book. Accompanied by a juvenile delinquency expert, Wright arrived to the cramped party where Du Bois was “reigning in the place of honor,” a phenomenon that stoked Wright’s own private disgust about his relationship to members of the black educated elite—a feeling he and Chester would share. Chester remembered Wright’s mood as “antagonistic and resentful.” A few days before the party Wright had learned that his attempts to place a reasonable program of black family life on the radio had been thwarted by a “very small and prejudiced minority” of “so-called Negro leaders that I’ve had to deal with ever since I’ve been writing.” Wright connected Mollie’s crowd of “middle-class matrons,” represented by Alta Douglas, Nora Holt, and visitor Juanita Miller, to those trying to snub him.

  The other significant attendee to the party was Jean, who had rejoined Chester for what was at first a traumatic reunion. According to Chester, Jean arrived in Harlem and “found me deeply involved in so many affairs that she tried to take her own life.” Jean drank heavily alongside Chester and in that condition might easily have made a melodramatic flourish in a desperate hour; certainly a fain theatricality had become a part of her manner. Friends remembered a drunk Chester carrying passed-out Jean back up St. Nicholas Avenue, and an ungallant Chester threatening meek rivals over imaginary slights. For New Year’s the Moons invited Vandi Haygood to the apartment, undoubtedly increasing the degree of drinking and bawdiness in closed quarters. In a short story he was working on, punningly titled “A Night of New Roses,” published at the end of 1945, Chester summed up a disposition that reflected his practical approach to life in the war years: “I spent half my time thinking about murdering white men. The other half of the time taking my spite out in having white women. And in between, protesting, bellyaching, crying.”

  After the German offensive operations
ended following the Battle of the Bulge, it was merely a question of time before the collapse of the Nazi regime and the end of the war in Europe. The prime literary event in the early winter of 1945 was the arrival of Richard Wright’s fourth book, Black Boy. This autobiography, his second selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, was a rare best-selling work of nonfiction that didn’t deal with the war. Wright proved that racism need not impair the commercial success of a black writer. Setting new standards for himself, Chester worked hard on his manuscript.

  In the years following Native Son, alert commentators had picked up on the fact that the symbolic interaction between Bigger Thomas and Mary Dalton had a sexual component. In his novel, now called If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester reversed the symbols and used the sexual tension between a black male and a white female as the center of the novel. His black hero was middle-class and upwardly mobile, and his white villain was a dissipated cracker biddy. If He Hollers Let Him Go supplies an adrenaline-filled five days in the life of Bob Jones, a charismatic young black man with two years of college who is the lone black “leaderman” at a California shipyard. The novel begins with its hero at the height of prosperity. He owns a car, is nearly engaged to a glamorous, white-looking social worker, the daughter of a local black physician. By the end of the novel Jones has been arrested for the attempted rape of a washed-out blowsy white Mississippi welder’s helper, mainly because, in the published version, after a series of intense dalliances, he refuses to have sex with her. All of Jones’s tangible symbols of success are gone: job, fiancée, car, and draft deferment. The racial, environmental, and biological tensions of the naturalistic world prove steadily ruinous, but the psychology of internalized racial oppression is the novel’s prime focus. If He Hollers concludes with Jones physically broken and being mustered into the Army, which for a black soldier meant at least a long drink of humiliation during basic training at a Southern camp. The book’s title came from the children’s counting rhyme, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe / Catch a nigger by the toe / If he hollers let him go / Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.”

  The arc of the published plot was quite tame in comparison with the sex-and-profanity-laced manuscript that Chester submitted to Bucklin Moon in the spring of 1945. The mild-mannered editor found Chester’s imaginative world quite different from the one he had glimpsed bantering over cocktails at Mollie’s. Buck Moon was taken aback and understood that the manuscript was a professional precipice from which “there was no way out.” He would have to stand his ground with the Doubleday higher-ups to get the book published at all. He could admire the value of Chester’s “memorable” project, which trumpeted “the psychological lynchings which every Negro suffers almost daily,” but he didn’t prefer the caustic tone or the pessimistic ending.

  The book was remarkable. Chester deliberately speared conventional good taste, writing with the confidence of a man whose own personal life would seem to have lifted him beyond reproach. In early drafts Chester even used the word “fuck,” which was outlawed in 1944. But the rib-breaking punch he sought to deliver lay in the depictions of raw interracial sex and rape. He seemed determined to force American readers to recognize that on their own terms Negro men had slept with white women, a violation of not just the great American taboo, but a great many enforced laws. Furthermore, in his original draft, it is not clear that Bob Jones does not rape Madge.

  “I’m gonna have you or we’re gonna fight all night,” I panted.

  “You nigger, nigger, nigger,” she grated.

  “Call me what you want,” I said. “You don’t hurt me baby.”

  “Get up then, goddamnit,” she said. “You can’t do nothing like this.”

  I got back on my knees, ready to pounce if she made a false move. She clutched her robe, flung it open. “Here.” She didn’t have on a nightgown, and her big white body spread out on the dark robe like the one that had every nigger lynched.

  I had her right there on the floor, fully dressed, and out of breath, panting like a dog. She started gasping “Nigger, nigger, nigger,” and she almost screamed it, and that was it.

  Chester had written a graphic account of rape as a calculated act of retribution for racism. But he was living in a completely different world, one where white men raped with impunity, black women suffered assault and degradation, and black men could be easily killed.

  In December the CIO’s Political Action Committee was helping to organize the Committee for Equal Justice for Recy Taylor, an effort to investigate the gang rape of Mrs. Taylor, a black woman abducted and brutalized as she walked home from church in Alabama that September. Chester’s book would not simply be banned, but might serve as a legal resource verifying black bestiality, exposing Chester himself as well as other black Americans to assault. Not even Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman had rendered so controversial an account of interracial sex.

  Chester thought it important to explain what had taken place, graphically, at a later point when the two principal characters are again skin to skin. He wanted to, in a single document, modernize race relations by revealing the libidinal underside of prejudice, upheld legally by fear-filled white men and women, who secretly desired intimacy with blacks. At the same time, he wasn’t seeking to fall into the trap of producing black saviors who, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, redeem white barbarity by way of their saintliness. His hero would have ample sex desire, fused with explicit black rage.

  “You can’t insult me, nigger,” she told me. “You’d die for these fine white thighs of mine, you can’t fool me.”

  “Die in ’em,” I grinned, peeling off my clothes.

  She lay on the bed beside me, looking at the ceiling. “There’s something about a nigger screwing you that gets in your blood. I can just think about you raping me last night and wet all over myself. Gotdoggit, it ain’t—.” She broke off suddenly and asked me, “You ever been to Chicago?”

  “Sure, plenty of times,” I said. “I know some fine white chicks in Chicago.”

  “They tell me niggers is married to white women in Chicago and nobody does anything about it,” she said.

  “Hell, that happens everywhere,” I said.

  “Let’s go to Chicago and get married,” she said.

  We both rolled over to face each other at the same time. I wanted to see if she was kidding. I don’t know what she wanted to see, but I thought it was a good time to hurt her if I could, so I said, “If I was going to marry a white woman I wouldn’t marry a slut like you.”

  Her whole body began twitching and her face was like a square red bar. “You know what I’m going to do with you, nigger. I’m gonna make you screw me then I’m gonna get you lynched. I’ll be the last white woman you ever screw.”

  I began pawing at her. “Take off your gown, goddammit,” I said impatiently.

  She peeled off her clothes, her big white body spreading out on the bed like the grandmother of all the whores in the world. I tried to win a home. She went through her rigmarole of, “Nigger, rape me; oh, rape me, nigger!” as she had done the night before. Her face was flushed bright crimson and her eyes threw off weird sparks. But she didn’t fight.

  When we had finished we lay there a while and she said harshly, “Gawdddd-damnnnn, a nigger just sets me on fire. I wanna run through the fields and get raped by every nigger in Texas.”

  I lit a cigaret and became analytical, lying there, puffing. “You’re just like all the other southern white women,” I said. “You’re frustrated and inhibited. If it wasn’t all this business about race, you probably wouldn’t even think about colored men.”

  Himes topped off his draft by including a graphic lesbian scene involving Bob Jones’s middle-class society girlfriend, Alice.

  Doubleday would not publish it.

  Bucklin Moon was not prudish; in his own novel the heroine works as a streetwalker to support herself. But she was black. And, in December 1944 Buck Moon submitted “Slack’s Blues” to Alice Browning’s Negro Story; it was a deeply sens
itive and historically revealing portrait of a blues-playing piano man from Alabama making it in New York, a guy who knew how to handle himself. Moon reworked some of the materials from the famous jazz club scene in The Sun Also Rises, where the black drummer is the potent masculine comrade to Brett Ashley (James Baldwin, Moon’s young protégé, would, in a dozen years, take a similar story to even further heights). But Moon had met Chester in the company of civil rights lobbyists, and he expected that the material would not explode in his hands. He wanted at least a slight portrait of black heroism and keeping Bob Jones chaste in the novel and having Madge falsely accuse him of rape at the conclusion would help. Even within those limitations, the novel could still carry the scorpion’s sting of sex and race.

  So Chester and his editor settled on rough, sexually charged interactions, nudity, and sexual frustration. Himes gave his archetypal description of the dissolute white welder from Texas, Madge Perkins, in chapter 17:

  Her blonde hair, dark at the roots, was done up in metal curlers tight to her head. Without lipstick or make-up she looked older; there were deep blue circles underneath her eyes and blue hollows on each side of the bridge of her nose. Tiny crow’s-feet spread out from the outer corners of her eyes and hard slanting lines calipered obliquely from her nostrils. . . .

  She looked like hell. She was really a beat biddy, trampish-looking and pure rebbish. . . .