Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Chester and Gaisseau flew to the United States on June 22, 1962, Chester’s first return since December 1955. They stopped by the French consulate, then went to Harlem, where Chester helped Lazareff’s crew settle and make their arrangements. They stayed at the Theresa Hotel on their split mission. First, the ORTF crew would, with Chester’s help, make preparations to film the documentary on Harlem life. Next, Chester and Gaisseau hoped to secure a new producer and funding to make Baby Sister. Gaisseau wanted to take a “semidocumentary” approach to the feature film. They would shoot exclusively on location and, even with principal characters, use an “unprofessional” cast of actors. “The important thing to me,” Gaisseau told the press in July, “ is that we not follow our script exactly and allow leeway to develop natural, lifelike situations and dialogue.”

  Chester arranged for the Cinq Colonnes crew to shoot scenes at Small’s Paradise, now owned by the basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, as well as at the Palm Café, a 125th Street bank, a motorcycle club, and a fashion show. He was most interested in the lengthy interview conducted with Malcolm X, the dynamic, youthful Nation of Islam minister and rising political star who had received nationwide notoriety in a 1959 CBS news broadcast called The Hate That Hate Produced. Chester gravitated to the gangly, red-haired, clean-shaven minister who roped an evangelist’s fire-and-brimstone style into the service of a street-corner, pan-Africanist theology. While members of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam declined to participate in the civil rights struggles of the integrationist groups SNCC, CORE, and NAACP, they were ultraradical in a way that aligned them with avant-garde artists who were making symbolic militant gestures. Malcolm and his colleagues were publicly antiwhite, railing that whites were diabolical and merited dire punishment for their crimes against blacks. When a jetliner of Atlanta’s elite had crashed taking off from Paris’s Orly Airport that spring, Malcolm X had welcomed the news at a Muslim rally, telling his faithful that divine intervention had struck the white race for the death a few weeks earlier of Ronald Stokes, a Muslim man shot in the back by the Los Angeles police. Although denounced by civil rights leaders, Malcolm X’s unkind remark only proved the axiom that all press is good press. By the middle of the summer, Malcolm X was a national force.

  Impressed by his skillful manipulation of the news media and the loud black-nationalist philosophy, Chester “got to know” Malcolm X “well” during his summer in Harlem. Lewis Michaux, a friend of Chester who owned the National Memorial Bookstore at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, introduced the two men at his shop. Malcolm X excitedly recalled having read If He Hollers Let Him Go in prison. Chester made Michaux’s bookstore the headquarters for the film, and Malcolm X enjoyed holding informal tribunals condemning western society on the street outside. Wearing his sunglasses, Malcolm X shared the gory pictures of the slain Ronald Stokes with Chester and Gaisseau. Malcolm X and Chester discussed and agreed upon a new phenomenon uptown: syndicated drug sales, different from the prostitution and gambling that they both had known when they were young. “White syndicates control, encourage, and distribute” the drugs, Malcolm X said. To the generation coming of age, which Malcolm X led, Chester appeared to be a “tough, honest, hip” man in the know and disinclined to overvalue civil rights victories. Separated by sixteen years, the two ex-cons from Midwestern, middle-class homes of light-skinned mothers and dark-skinned fathers understood each other perfectly.

  While Chester did not admire the Islamized religion espoused by Malcolm X, he was delighted to find someone persuasively booming his pet beliefs: “distrusting white people” and the “only means of achieving equality is armed rebellion.” A photograph of Chester, Gaisseau, and Malcolm X appeared at the end of July in the Nation of Islam’s flagship newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. On cue, the FBI added Chester’s contact with Malcolm X to the writer’s briefly reopened file.

  Michaux and Malcolm X belonged to the A. Philip Randolph–led Emergency Committee, which addressed Harlem’s problems, and they were drawing strength from their similar nationalist messages and impulses that July. A plain-spoken, diminutive man in his late seventies, Michaux was Harlem’s everyday pan-Africanist, organizing the local “Back to Africa” and “Buy Black” movements. Michaux organized protesters against the opening of a white-owned steakhouse on 125th Street. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson denounced the picketers as anti-Semitic in his weekly newspaper column, and was verbally throttled by Michaux in return. The dispute later brought intervention from Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s New York State Commission for Human Rights.

  The summertime grievances were topics for Malcolm X at a 2500-person rally on July 21 in Harlem Square, the locale of Michaux’s bookstore and Chester’s hotel. Because he addressed the audience in language foreseeing bloody Armageddon—“The fuse has already been lit, the crisis been reached and if something is not done immediately there will be an explosive situation in the Negro community more dangerous and destructive than a hundred megaton bombs”—Malcolm X both startled and provoked. Inflected by Islam, Malcolm X’s pitch was not very different from Cleveland’s Future Outlook League or the Los Angeles Communist Party, which Chester had grown impatient with. But what was new was the sight of educated blacks—people who worked with the NAACP or SCLC like attorney Percy Sutton, civil rights organizer Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and Gandhian pacifist Bayard Rustin—seated on the platform alongside an ex-convict as obviously ferocious as Malcolm X. The next week at the Waldorf-Astoria, Malcolm X caught the public off-guard again by loudly denouncing Los Angeles mayor Samuel Yorty on the issue of police brutality against blacks in L.A. during a question-and-answer session following the mayor’s address. Was Malcolm X a confidence man, draped in the flamboyant garb of a religious cult? Or had he harnessed an organization to broadcast more effectively the observations available from the ghetto street corners, where exploitation was naked? Or was he what he claimed to be, the organic messiah, ready to lead the poor blacks in the cities to rightful reparations? Whichever one, he became ever more important to the solid citizens of the northern black civil rights movement, who increasingly sought to debate him, be seen with him, and court his favor. Chester was right in the middle and where he would remain, compelled by the idea of militantly achieving black freedom, but incredulous at the possibility of its execution.

  Chester had already rendered a gangster treatment of the Muslim vogue in The Real Cool Killers, giving the Sheik, the key character, Malcolm’s physical qualities. Even so, the nationalist militants would preoccupy his thoughts for the rest of the 1960s. He was nearly alone among his contemporaries in recognizing them at all. In the novel he was to begin once back in France, published in 1965 as Cotton Comes to Harlem, Chester would prepare a critique of the Garveyite back-to-Africa position, and show how a putatively black nationalist Christian minister exploited Harlemites on the basis of black nationalist yearnings. But the essence of that novel, arguably the finest treatment of the soul-food-eating detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson he created, reflected his understanding of the serious but quixotic impulse of African return for ordinary black Americans.

  During his summer in the United States, striking Marianne Greenwood made a guest appearance. Chester introduced her to his mildly amused brothers at lunch in Harlem (Joe Jr. had just met him with Lesley in Paris). When Chester visited Van Vechten’s new apartment on Central Park West to have his photograph taken, he brought along Greenwood as well. She recognized in Van Vechten’s professional voyeurism a kindred spirit and immediately saw how he might aid her career and began writing him. In Chester’s parlance, Van Vechten had made “an intense impression on her and she loves you.” But Greenwood was still wavering toward Chester. He had finally met his match in terms of a woman capable of exhausting everything that he could provide and who still yearned for more.

  Van Vechten engineered a crucial meeting between Chester and someone who was a bit more generous, the thirty-six-year-old writer John A. Williams. A Navy veteran born in Mississippi but rai
sed in upstate New York, Williams had returned from the war, attended Syracuse University, gone into the publishing industry, and, seemingly by dint of will, forged himself into a serious novelist. Reserved and charming but also cool and unbending when it called for it, Williams had taken the craft of the intense, personal novel about black middle-class life to a new height with his 1960 work The Angry Ones. This was followed a year later by a novel about a heroin-addicted jazz musician and his white friend, Night Song.

  The year Williams met Chester was unforgettable for all of the wrong reasons. In January the American Academy of Arts and Letters had notified his publisher that Williams had been awarded the academy’s Rome Prize, the same fellowship held by Ralph Ellison between 1955 and 1957. Then a week later he was written that the award was subject to the approval of the academy’s office in Rome. Following a perfunctory interview in February with academy director Richard Kimball, the offer was withdrawn. Williams understood that he had been disallowed because of rumors that he was married to a white woman. After receiving pressure from Williams’s editor, Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, the American Academy of Arts and Letters jury, which included John Hersey and John Cheever, voted to award Williams $2000 for travel, but Williams rejected the face-saving bribe. Publicly shamed by the obvious racism, the academy would suspend its funding for the Rome Prize in October.

  No other serious black novelist in 1962 held as deep a suspicion of the American literary establishment as Himes, whose grim view of the publishing world and the highly selective promotion of black talent easily confirmed the painful, publicly humiliating experience Williams had suffered. Williams became convinced of the importance of Chester’s work and his struggle for integrity, and took it upon himself to keep Chester’s books alive.

  After the French film crew finished capturing shots of churches, beauty parlors, and Eighth Avenue bars, Himes took up residence at the Albert Hotel near Washington Square and attempted to help Gaisseau sell Baby Sister and draft a budget for an interested producer named Joseph E. Levine of Embassy Pictures. While Gaisseau hoped to have the project as a French nationality film to cut costs, in New York the labor union laws would require him to employ a local crew. To use both a French and American crew would make the film too costly, but everyone connected to the project recognized the importance of shooting the movie in Harlem. Before arriving in the United States, Chester had been counting on Herbert Hill, whom he presumed to be an ally, to secure a low-cost, racially integrated film crew.

  By then, Hill had reversed himself on Chester’s chapter from Pinktoes, but he did wrangle a few pages of Lonely Crusade from Knopf for the anthology, showing Lee Gordon’s party with Communists. He was anything but an ally by the summer. In fact, he had begun strangling the film project in April. Not long after Hill had returned to the United States, on April 16, he wrote to Arthur Cohn’s production company, throwing the NAACP’s weight around to scuttle the project. “Baby Sister consists almost entirely of banal caricatures, unrelieved violence and endlessly repeated eroticism,” Hill intoned. Calling the screenplay “a travesty on Negro life in Harlem,” Hill charged, “It has no relationship to reality and is not redeemed by any literary values.” He insisted, “This opinion is shared by all my colleagues in the Association.” His activities obstructing Chester and Gaisseau were complicated by the fact that, by the middle of 1962, Hill had become an FBI informant, interested in blocking leftists from participating in the Monroe movement in North Carolina, an effort to organize armed blacks to resist the Ku Klux Klan, which had been led by former NAACP bureau chief Robert F. Williams before he’d exiled himself to Cuba. In August FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself attempted to block Baby Sister by contacting the French government and asking for scrutiny and disavowal of Gaisseau because he had been in touch with Malcolm X, the leader of a “fanatical” “antiwhite organization.”

  Chester fell prey to an odd confluence of pressing issues. Hill cooperated with the FBI, but he did so knowing that, as a former member of the Socialist Workers Party, he himself could be exposed and have his career destroyed. At precisely the same time Hill was emerging as the national gatekeeper for black actors and workers in Hollywood. By June of 1963 Hill would make national headlines at a press conference where he stated his intentions to file formal complaints with the National Labor Relations Board to have Hollywood’s craft guilds decertified for excluding black members. Continuing Walter White’s fight, Hill also demanded that “the Negro” be depicted “more honestly” by screenwriters and directors in their films. The NAACP promised mass street demonstrations, and the next month more than one hundred executives convened at the Motion Pictures Producers headquarters in Los Angeles to negotiate the particulars with him. In this climate, Hill’s activities had an unusual impact on the production of films like Baby Sister, though presenting raw material about black life—at least when written by whites—was not impossible. White writer Warren Miller’s 1958 novel The Cool World went to Broadway (and introduced to audiences actors Billy Dee Williams, Calvin Lockhart, and Raymond St. Jacques) then was turned into a film by Shirley Clarke in 1963. That book and film made Himes appear, by comparison, a squeamish sentimentalist in his depiction of black ghetto life. By 1964 Clarke would begin discussions with Chester about filming For Love of Imabelle, and Lockhart and St. Jacques would be standout actors in the 1970 film of Cotton Comes to Harlem.

  The problem with Hill helped to cement Chester’s quick bond to John A. Williams. Williams had also fallen out with Herbert Hill and his anthology of black cultural stewardship. When Soon, One Morning was published in 1963, more than one newspaper touched on the flaw that “such important new writers as John Williams” were “somehow overlooked.” In August 1963, when Hill spotted Williams in the crowd during the March on Washington and rushed over to greet him, happy to acknowledge and be acknowledged by a dark-skinned black American on that historic day, Williams told Hill that he would not “shake his motherfucking hand for nothing in the world.” Card-carrying members in the brotherhood of frank talkers, Williams and Himes responded quickly and aggressively to racist slights, especially of the paternalistic sort, a common ground that brought them together.

  Despite the friendship that developed with Williams, the summer visit to the United States bore little fruit. Chester, still in the habit of drinking heavily during the day and popping “blue boys” to sleep at night, was overwhelmed by the prospect of a Hollywood success. In turn, he disturbed Gaisseau. “I suppose I offered too many suggestions for the essential necessities,” Chester wrote guardedly in his memoir. In the attempt to deal with the excitement of his Harlem room at the Theresa Hotel, his face on the cover of American magazines, and Chester’s persistence for “necessities,” Gaisseau suffered a “nervous breakdown” and returned to Paris. Deflated by the failure to get a producer for his screenplay, and miffed at Berkley Books for not snapping up reprint rights for The Primitive and Cast the First Stone, Himes too flew back to France on August 14, retreating to Antibes.

  When a rough edit of the Cinq Colonnes film premiered to an audience of influential French studio officials and celebrities on September 7, 1962, Chester walked out of the screening, displeased probably by the film’s exotic view of Harlem, showcasing the dancers doing the twist and lingering scenes emphasizing “primitive” black religion at a storefront church. The footage of Malcolm X at the rally, the simmering discontent, the compulsive consumption of the bourgeoisie, were all lost. “I did not like at all the documentary film they made on Harlem,” he wrote Van Vechten. But he believed that by walking out of the screening, he had “cut off” his career in Paris. He had a reputation now only with “the nobodies of the Latin Quarter.”

  To relieve his disgust, Chester sat down and wrote out his major objections in response to the aestheticization of blackness in the film. Himes called the essay, his first return to critical work since 1948, “Harlem, or, an American Cancer.” In this thirty-five-page article he offered a richly det
ailed political and ethnic history of black life in New York, leading to the formation of a black Harlem. Pierre Lazareff had promised him a couple hundred dollars for the “reportage” work.

  The rebuttal grew to about ten thousand words, in order to offer a succinct and accurate historical overview of Harlem, but one that would also contain startling facts, like the “$10K Cadillac driving by while poor are crawling on sidewalk.” In a work that should have prepared his audience for the disaster of rioting in urban American cities that would start in July 1964, he asked the rhetorical question, “How can a negro love Harlem”? He tripped up his readers completely when he suggested that Depression-era public welfare programs like the Works Progress Administration only accented the precariousness of black life, alienating black Americans from their segregated neighborhoods, where they were always renters, always exploited by businesses. And he quoted E. Franklin Frazier (“the black bourgeoisie is a bastard class that lives in a state of nothingness”) and comedian Dick Gregory (“you are a nigger, no matter what your social class”) to attack the stuffed black entrepreneurs. When it was published, the essay would introduce the French-language audience to Malcolm X, whom he quoted saying gently and scholastically, “Our primary objective is to teach Negroes about their race so that they don’t feel inferior to whites.” After describing Harlem’s origins in black migrants fleeing the Ku Klux Klan, Chester included a full discussion of “les stupefiants”—narcotics. There were a few other writers who had recorded what he saw—such as, perhaps unsurprisingly, two jazz-loving Jewish New Yorkers, Seymour Krim and Norman Mailer—but Chester’s intellectually sharp and detailed reportage, which doubled down on what he had revealed in the detective fictions, was scabrous, lacerating news. The U.S. ghettos would not be relieved by civil rights legislation.