Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  However, one element of Chester’s new prestige as a nationally reviewed novelist was the ability to hit back. On February 26, three weeks following the unflattering advertisement in Saturday Review, Chester had his druthers in the magazine. He insisted that If He Hollers Let Him Go presented “a tiny facet of the frustrations inherent in the lives of present day Americans” and the resulting “compulsive behavior.” Chester struck out against the public and his own publisher’s presumption that because he had the nerve to broach the issue of racial discord he had to be a civil rights problem-solver. He refused to back down about the raw materials in his book:

  the only change I would consider would be to restore some of the passages that were deleted from the script for fear of offending the delicate sensitivities of the American public. . . . Certainly I would not attempt to offer a solution for the “Negro problem.” . . . Nor would I saddle an underprivileged, uneducated, poverty stricken, oppressed racial group with this responsibility (and I have nothing but antipathy for those who do).

  Eight years later, Chester declared that the “New York Critics have never forgiven me” for this tart article, a most stinging cry against whites for black artistic freedom during the 1940s.

  In the black press Chester was more easygoing. He sent a letter to Walter White, agreeing that black writers should construct Negro heroes such as Cook had done with her political volunteers in Mrs. Palmer’s Honey. Chester suggested that “the bitter cries of a suppressed people” was actually a stimulant for white bigots, a chemical that purged “the slovenliness from their ambitions and impels them to drive on to great white supremacy.” Since it was really black pain and torture that fueled white Americans’ strength, “there are very few white people, including most white liberals, who sincerely want to hear of Negro heroes,” he ventured. But he would keep pitching until something stuck. He told White, “However, if you give us a chance, we’ll get some Negro heroes in—I, personally will make you that promise.”

  The solid reviews and the Doubleday mishandling left him in the gap between artistic notoriety and full-fledged success. He would learn eventually that part of his debut’s greatest value was its timing and its ability to cadge reviews at all, but his career might never have continued if Chester had known that this first book would remain his best-known novel in a long career. During its year and a half of hardcover sales, Doubleday sold 13,211 hardcovers. In 1949, the reprint rights were sold to New American Library for $5461, and they then sold, over two decades, more than 450,000 paperback copies. The book was translated into French by a man named Marcel Duhamel and published in 1949 by Albin Michel. Chester’s commitment to bringing the contemporary speech rhythm and experience of black urban life to print would have long-term impact. His hardcover sales were respectable and suggested that he might create at least a coterie following. The problem was that to cut that narrow slice he would have to top Richard Wright. Underscoring the growth he’d need to show to go beyond Wright’s achievements, Esquire brought out one of Chester’s stories that had likely been purchased in 1941, “The Something in a Colored Man.” The piece was a “coffin caper” story told in “jive” and set on L.A.’s Central Avenue. With the delayed appearance of this early work, Chester was regrettably back in national magazines as a stereotype of himself in prison learning to write.

  There were also competitors vying to top Wright’s high mark of achievement. During the winter of 1945–1946, Chester was familiarly dropping by Wright’s house in the company of his buddy Ralph Ellison. As the three men gathered to “beat that boy”—Ellison’s preferred term for a discussion of race relations—Himes lapped up the chance to discuss literature, politics, and American race problems with brainy, courageous comrades.

  Wright certainly was not slowing down. By March, he was putting in his passport application, determined to exchange Greenwich Village for the Latin Quarter, hoping that Paris would have the enchantment and wonder for him that it had had for Americans from the time of Benjamin Franklin. Wright had met Jean-Paul Sartre a year earlier when the guru of the existentialist philosophy arrived in New York. He had also taken up a literary correspondence with Gertrude Stein. In the subsequent year he had been building himself up on the existentialist movement, conferring with Hannah Arendt and Paul Tillich, and in April he would consult with a visiting Albert Camus. But Wright downplayed all of the scurrying and parlaying to Chester, a subterfuge done partly because of political difficulties Wright anticipated around obtaining his passport. However, Chester also discerned another quality. Although they were the same age and Wright was generous, he sometimes acted bored with Chester.

  One way that Wright seemed to put Chester in a notch below was by keeping “the important people to himself.” Nevertheless, in March 1946 Chester accompanied him on a trip that proved invaluable. The occasion was an appointment at the posh Central Park West apartment of the famously bucktoothed white cultural critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten. Now sixty-five, the foppish Van Vechten had introduced American audiences to Stravinsky’s symphonies, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, modern dance, and Gertrude Stein. Van Vechten had also done as much as anyone to trounce the barriers of racial apartheid in American social life. His special affinity for black people and jazz had begun during his student days at the University of Chicago, when he would crash all-black parties and be “invariably taken for a coon.” He called jazz music not the last hope or the best hope of America: “it is the only hope.” In New York he was known as “the undisputed downtown authority on uptown night life,” and as a good buddy of Langston Hughes, whom he helped to launch at the same time as Paul Robeson. When Chester met him, Van Vechten had started collecting manuscripts from African American writers and personally photographing as many black artists, singers, and published writers as he could get to pose. Wright’s papers would one day find their way into the collection Van Vechten established in James Weldon Johnson’s name at Yale.

  Chester found the scene comic. Wright was uncomfortable around Van Vechten and masked his discomfort by being “pompous.” Wright’s artifice made Chester “hysterical” with laughter, and Van Vechten shared a few bemused glances with Chester in confidence. “Intrigued” by Himes and unable to forget his loud guffaws, Van Vechten opened the door to a warm, crucial friendship for Chester. He invited Chester back for his own series of photographs the next day; afterward, Van Vechten wrote to suggest that Chester, like Richard Wright and other black authors, send him manuscripts of his published novels for preservation at the Yale Library. In their discussions over the years, Chester would find the “calm and serene” older man a steadying force—even if Chester always catered to Van Vechten in soothing tones of fidelity.

  Revisiting his promise to Walter White, Chester partnered with his brother Joe to deliver a short story about discrimination in the war industries called “The Boiling Point” in the pages of the Afro-American on March 9. Openly discriminated against at the war plants, the main character, Impetuous Brown, is sued for claiming discrimination, then bribed. On March 16, Chester returned to the New York Public Library on 135th Street where the Schomburg Collection of Negro History and Literature was held and Laurence Reddick the librarian. Chester described his work on a panel with Carey McWilliams, the Los Angeles writer and labor lawyer. At the event Chester worked hard to generate support from liberals like McWilliams for his career beyond Clevelanders and racial uplifters.

  Chester had written in his Saturday Review article that the only criticism he would accept from the self-appointed apostles of black writing would be in the area of technique. This was untrue; he took the criticisms of political content to heart. In the novel he was writing during the period when If He Hollers Let Him Go was garnering reviews, Chester looked fondly at the CIO and organizations like its Political Action Committee as broad solutions to racial and economic injustice (as his competitor Fannie Cook had). Chester kept the self-searching quest cited in his original Rosenwald fel
lowship application in his new book, but he redirected its punch by nodding toward these two groups (without naming either) as a means to destroy segregation in heavy industry. The hero of the book would be a union organizer, an intellectual whose job was to educate and unionize black industrial workers. The novel would itself explore the abundant tension facing a black intellectual, from interactions with black Southern migrants at work, union bosses, politicos like the Communists, and in the bedroom with his spouse. Chester had darts to throw at every category, but he was not anti-Communist. He still believed that, in terms of political freedom for blacks, “citizens of the communist-dominated socialist state of the U.S.S.R. have come closest.” Chester’s hero, now called Lee Gordon, would combine the aims of the CIO and its Political Action Committee, and also come to terms with the Communist Party. Using the revolutionary martyr he had described in his “Negro Martyrs Are Needed” program, the novel concluded with the evolution of the left-wing political movement, consisting of labor, Communists, and blacks. Chester’s approach to the political scene was widely shared by many Americans, indicated by the groundswell that would later coalesce behind the alternative political candidate for president in 1947–1948, former vice president Henry A. Wallace.

  Despite his difficulties at Doubleday, Chester felt potent as a writer and in good spirits. He roared into the new novel, sometimes pulling forty pages from the typewriter in a day. On the side, he worked on a review of Ann Petry’s first book, The Street, a naturalistic treatment of a black woman’s downfall in Harlem. Chester applauded almost everything about that book, save its retinue of black men who abused and exploited black women and refused to support their families. If he believed himself committed to the male duties neglected by Petry’s characters, racist New York made some of them impossible. Despite the cash windfall he’d drawn, he remained unable to rent a decent apartment in New York.

  Out of sorts and tired of looking for a place in crowded, segregated New York, Chester and Jean decided upon a sabbatical in California, this time to the northern part of the state, where her brother owned property. They bought a Mercury Coupe and, because the Klan was active and lynchings were surging, a .303 Savage rifle for “security.” Shouldering the firearm was done for the same reason “other Negroes own long-bladed knives,” Chester joked, half serious. After a final colloquy with Wright, who would sail for Paris on May 1, and a hurried telephone call to Ralph Ellison, Chester left New York with Jean about April 18, coasting comfortably along America’s first cross-country national road, the Lincoln Highway.

  Their route would take them through Ohio. In Cleveland Chester checked on his father; invited his brother Joe Jr. and his wife, Estelle, to spend a portion of the summer in California with them; and chatted with Ruth Seid. Ruth was now famous, having won a $10,000 literary prize from Harper’s at the beginning of the year for her unsparing novel The Wasteland. When they talked, Ruth mentioned that she disliked the lesbian scene in If He Hollers Let Him Go; Chester blamed the cuts to the book and told her to get the original manuscript from Wright, which probably would have rankled her further. But he looked in vain in the shops for If He Hollers.

  Before leaving Ohio, he and Jean went to Malabar Farm. He wanted badly to prove to Louis Bromfield that, after five years, he was more than capable of handling his career himself. The experience backfired. Bromfield hustled them in through the front door of the Big House and offered them neither seats nor refreshment, seeming unimpressed that his former servant had won a Rosenwald fellowship and achieved national reviews and good sales for his novel. Instead, only Bromfield sat down, “chatted with us then took us back to the kitchen to meet the help and let us out the back door.”

  Bromfield had prepared them for the rest of journey. After the Himeses left Illinois and until they got to California, they found “no place” where they could “sit down to a table and have a meal.” During the thirty hours of driving that it took between Denver and Reno, Nevada, they would not be able to purchase any food at all. Unsurprised by mean bigotry in the United States during the 1940s, even Chester found it difficult to endure “brutal and vicious . . . American race prejudice in the North.” When he wrote Van Vechten, he was noting the wisdom of Wright’s exodus: “I hope to be following him within a year.”

  Chester and Jean reached California at the end of April. They drove over to Oakland for Jean’s older brother, Hugo Johnson, a forty-five-year-old noncommissioned officer who had served more than half of his life in the Navy. He was working in San Francisco as chief of the shore patrol at the Embarcadero. With Jean’s blunt, muscular, and humorless brother, they drove 350 miles to a ranch in Milford, California, arriving on May 7. Johnson owned a ten-thousand-acre farm, most of it barren, between the dried-out, ten-mile-wide Honey Lake and the six-thousand-foot peaks of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada.

  Although they rented their place from a black man, Hugo Johnson’s tenants had left when they learned a Negro couple were coming to spend the summer there. A malnourished, lewd squatter family had taken the opportunity to camp out in the dilapidated two-story house that served as the main dwelling, a hovel so unseemly that Chester repaired and painted another building on the property, a “modern version of a sharecropper’s shanty,” for living quarters. He and Jean lived in a three-room shack, sitting fifty yards from the road, and separated from the tottering main house by a grove of fruit trees. And although he and Hugo hunted a deer that summer, Chester used the rifle mainly to shoot rattlesnakes coming out of hibernation. In the pristine Sierra wilderness in the shack besieged by rats, lizards, and snakes, Himes would put in some of the finest writing days of his career. He recalled, “I remember that summer as one of the most pleasant of our life.”

  Despite the travails at Doubleday imperiling his young career, his editor, Bucklin Moon, was telling the black American public in the pages of Negro Digest that the publishing climate for black-themed books was fantastic. Happy about such progress, Moon acknowledged that ten years earlier “no publisher would have touched” a book as “bitter” and “explosive” as If He Hollers Let Him Go and praised Chester for having “power and rare insight.” But Moon continued to defend Doubleday and white liberalism. He insisted that the only negative sentiment against Chester’s book was “from a Negro who felt that writers like Richard Wright and Chester Himes . . . were setting back race relations fifty years!”

  Chester couldn’t have disagreed more. In the first week of June he wrote Doubleday requesting “a better relationship with them or a release.” His hope now went out to Carl Van Vechten, who had a keen friendship with publisher Blanche Knopf. He wanted Knopf to buy out the Doubleday contract and pay him an additional $500. He admitted that he was “a spendthrift,” and the car and the trip had already consumed all the royalties received to date. Alert to the books that Van Vechten had written with gay themes, Chester introduced his three-part prison story, calling it partly “a homo-sexual love story.” The book was now called Yesterday Will Make You Cry. Thinking that the “homo-sexual story seems to have killed it,” Chester mailed the manuscript. Van Vechten, working on an introduction for Gertrude Stein’s new book, took the time to read it and became a permanent supporter and fan of Chester’s, the Howells to his Dunbar. Meanwhile, the pictures that Van Vechten had taken of Chester earlier that year had been forwarded to California. Chester disliked the photographer’s prettying touch, preferring the “blemishes, marks, scars, and lines of the face to show, even at the risk of appearing like a thug.”

  A week later, Chester wrote Ken McCormick at Doubleday, seeking to draw further royalties. The reply shocked him. Claiming an accounting error, McCormick wrote that Chester owed the company more than one thousand dollars. Sensing mistreatment, Chester asked formally to be released from the contract for his new book and McCormick reputedly sent him a long saga about Doubleday’s attempts to sign black authors and place black books. But they assented, and three weeks into June, Doubleday agreed to release Chester if he repaid about two
thousand dollars (and, ultimately, if he purchased 2400 remaindered copies). He was beginning a long career of what he perceived as métayage to publishers, a relationship where, as he saw it, he was mysteriously overadvanced and then ever tied to his publisher until someone bought his debt, shackling him to a new boss.

  By the time of the discussions to leave Doubleday, Chester had a rough draft of three hundred pages of his new novel about the union organizer, what he thought was about two-thirds of the book. His agent, Lurton Blassingame, and Knopf conferred in mid-July. Knopf awaited the manuscript before making a final decision. Now the pages came more slowly to Chester “as it nears the end.” Four weeks after that, in early August, he had a completed draft of a new novel. He was scared that the book might be rejected by Knopf as amateurish, even as he felt the emotional loss connected to completing a massive project

  Weakened by “absolute exhaustion,” he suffered extremely when news reached him of his father’s costly operation in a Cleveland hospital, followed by the death of his puppy, hit by a car. The anxieties about the new book and the personal traumas came pouring out in a message to Van Vechten: “Few things that ever happened to me hurt me so, not even when I was sentenced to twenty years in prison,” he wrote from the lodge in the Sierras. Ostensibly about his dog, the message was referring to his anxiety about all of his writing. Badly needing affirmation, Chester airmailed the newly finished manuscript to Van Vechten to provide a “general evaluation.” Van Vechten read the long manuscript and sent back a letter of reassurance. Van Vechten’s main caution was for the future; he noticed that, like Ernest Hemingway, Himes was using the same “quick-tempered but charming” protagonists. But the writer whose novel Nigger Heaven had stirred controversy during the Harlem Renaissance deemed Lonely Crusade, as the book had been renamed, “tremendous and powerful.”