Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Believing that Pierre Lazareff could appreciate a full-blown critique, Chester was surprised and furious that the television producer sat on his hands with his Harlem essay. Chester was also uniquely disturbed by the slack pace of change in the United States, emblematized by a besieged student named James Meredith requiring 250 federal marshals to attend class at the University of Mississippi. On October 1, Chester banged out a sharply worded editorial for the magazine Candide. “James Meredith: It Will Take 450 Years,” compared “the racists in Mississippi to the OAS,” referring to the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, the French right-wing terrorist sect, which hoped to retain white control in Algeria. Although Chester, as he wrote to John Williams, had zingers in the piece like “U.S. racists were going to win and the French racists lose,” really he was still battling against the people who believed that America was swiftly changing. “It will happen, in the near future, some blacks will attend all of the schools of the U.S.,” he concluded in the published editorial, “but they will be a small number that can’t change the problem of education for blacks in its entirety. . . . At this rate, it must be 450 years before segregation disappears in its entirety in the South.” When he hit at racist whites, Chester was in rare form. Comparing them and their OAS compatriots with Christian martyrs who preferred death to accepting the rights of blacks, he answered his rhetorical question of how the problem could be solved: “The solution is to let them [bigoted whites] die.”

  Chester sounded exactly like Malcolm X when the article predicted a “rain of blood” that would soothe “the poor black American exile,” and his interviews and reportage work did not endear him to his neighbors in the South of France. “In trouble with the OAS,” he wrote Van Vechten. “I will have to leave France for a time.” While the OAS threat had to be taken quite seriously—that August, the group had tried to assassinate the French President Charles de Gaulle—Chester simply shuttled up to Paris.

  The last major writing of the year was more personal. In the final days of October, Chester set down a frank five-thousand-word narrative of his life and publishing career in a letter to John Williams, such as had not been exchanged between black writers who belonged to different generations. The account, nearly a father’s legacy to his son, wearied him. He also needed Williams to believe him because he was at odds with his latest U.S. agent, James Reach, who refused to release any manuscripts or books until he had been paid $500. Chester believed it possible that he might have owed his agent the money, but he also knew that it was a fantasy he would be able to pay such an amount. Instead, ever pursuing the American literary market, Chester tried to see if John Williams’s agent, Carl Brandt, would take him on, and for that, he needed Williams to act as his broker. The heartfelt letter worked. When he wrote Arnold Gingrich of Esquire with fresh stories in “a European locale,” he asked, if they were rejected, for them to be sent to his confidant John Williams in lower Manhattan.

  Since Lazareff seemed disinclined to make a media event of Himes’s contrasting Harlem article, with resignation and defiance Chester gave “Harlem: An American Cancer” to Présence Africain. The editors, Alioune Diop and Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, released it in the spring of 1963, probably seeing not a little of Richard Wright in Chester’s work. Impressed by the response to the article and understanding its significance, they republished it as a stand-alone pamphlet of forty pages, complete with the story of the protest involving Malcolm X, Michaux, and Jackie Robinson. Dr. Ramseger’s Die Welt also agreed to publish a portion in early 1964.

  Chester had made up his mind to get on with the book about his affairs with Willa, Regine, and Lesley, but he was unsure whether he should fictionalize the account or write straight autobiography. He appears to have begun drafting a long piece on the romance with Fischer, which became the foundation of the second volume of his autobiography, My Life of Absurdity. But would Americans be interested in reading a blunt discussion about a black man’s love affairs with white women? “I don’t know how this will take with the American public—and this is what I must come to New York to talk about,” he decided.

  All roads seemed to lead back to America. He needed a new literary agent to sell the detective stories to a large firm and continue the parlay with the film industry; it didn’t make any sense that he had best sellers in France and duds in the United States—everybody was twisting to the same dance craze, absorbing the same mass culture. He was also excited about the possibilities of getting further along in his romance with Greenwood, who was living in Mexico. But the move was dependent on Gaisseau making Baby Sister and well before Christmas Chester stopped hearing from him. The film project was dead in its tracks.

  Back in Paris, he stowed his gear at 39 Rue de la Harpe, Lesley’s apartment on the tourist-jammed streets between St.-Germain-des-Prés and the Seine, all the while trying to plan an encounter with Greenwood on another continent. Meanwhile, as had happened with Doubleday, Knopf, Coward-McCann, and World, Gallimard claimed that fall that Chester was indebted to them, for more than 11,000 francs. When Chester identified the misstatements on the ledgers given him by the accounting department, Duhamel wrote back a letter half-pleading that “I did my best.” But the other half of Duhamel’s letter threatened that if Chester’s explanations did not hold up to an attorney’s scrutiny, Gallimard “won’t let you publish the books elsewhere.” Chester fell silent with Duhamel for the next five years. He took his next detective story to Editions Plon, getting a contract for the book on December 17, 1962. Stipulating that the typescript was due by March 31, 1963, Plon paid 7500 francs for a book called Back to Africa. It was just enough for a flight to New York.

  Chapter Fourteen

  COTTON COMES TO HARLEM

  1963–1965

  Clean-shaven and accentuating his youth, Chester flew back to the United States on January 2, 1963, and checked into the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village. He looked up a friend named Emile Caddoo and became mildly distracted by Emile’s pretty sister, Joyce, an artist and teacher of troubled youth. At Joyce’s St. Mark’s Place apartment, Chester met twenty-nine-year-old LeRoi Jones, the stirring jazz critic, poet, and playwright whose string of award-winning off-Broadway plays would begin the next year. Chester was familiar with Jones from his essays on jazz, which had appeared in the magazine Revolution and would be collected that May in the book Blues People. By this time, Jones had traveled to Cuba and taken over Richard Gibson’s job as chairman of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and he was experiencing the same sort of magnetic attraction to Malcolm X as Chester had felt in the previous summer. Jones reminded him of his younger self and the reason he’d gotten out of the United States. Jones’s eye was swollen shut because he had just been poleaxed by three drunk, off-duty policemen.

  During that week, Chester took Joyce with him to visit Constance Pearlstein. Formerly Constance Webb, she had briefly married C. L. R. James, had a son, and then remarried Edward Pearlstein. He emptied bottles of scotch at John Williams’s place and when friends asked about other Yank writers around Paris, Chester sizzled, “What the hell do I want to see James Jones for?” (Jones was said to have made “disparaging remarks” about Chester’s detective novels.) Chester insisted to Williams that Paris offered little to blacks. As Himes was hoping, an obliging Williams introduced him to literary agent Carl Brandt at a good Italian restaurant. The meeting went well and Chester, who wrote Lesley that Brandt was “considered the best in New York,” forwarded all of his materials for consideration.

  Feeling good, Chester gave Williams the speech he had delivered at the University of Chicago in 1948 for publication in The Angry Black, an anthology the younger writer was editing. After having read Williams’s third novel, a black family drama called Sissie, in manuscript that fall, Chester believed him “at the very top of all Negro writers who have lived.”

  Chester even included Williams in some of his publicity efforts. Editor Allan Morrison of Jet, the glossy pocket-size weekly, interviewed Chester in his Sixth
Avenue office and photographed him and Williams. Hoping to secure an agent to sell Pinktoes in the United States, Chester used the interview to sell himself. He reported having sold 480,000 copies of his books in France and he sang the tune of progress as it was then known. “One day people might cease to think of books by Negroes as Negro books but as books period.” He also claimed that “Negro” writers of the day were “more fashionable” than before, and he attributed some of their success to James Baldwin, though he managed to drive home that, unlike himself, Baldwin was “practically unknown in Europe.” But by the end of the short interview Chester was “very disappointed” and at odds with an American audience, black or white. “At this rate,” he observed, “it will be a long time before segregation is banished.”

  Involuntarily he lingered in New York, waiting for decisions about paperback reprints and trying to sell a long story describing his travels in his Volkswagen in France and Germany. Admitting to himself that “my nerves are on the point of explosion,” Chester produced one of his classic axioms of the American scene. The publishers “just want brothers to keep on writing about our difficulties and persecutions,” he decided, “and they feel insulted by anything but our complaining about our racial injustices.” He mailed an entreaty to Knopf, requesting the reprint rights to Lonely Crusade, and then slipped out of town.

  Chester flew to Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and on January 19 made his way to the village of Sisal, outside Mérida, to reunite with the ravishing Marianne Greenwood. She was renting a cottage—really a hut with a high palm-thatched roof, although it had running water and a toilet. A Mayan Indian family next door cleaned the rooms and brought over plates of corn tortillas, fish, beans, vegetables, and chilis. Initially Chester felt guilty about stringing Lesley along, as well as anxious over the condition of his literary estate. However, he wrote competently and steadily as Greenwood struggled with her own book. Before long he would be forced to admit that “it isn’t easy for two people to write in the same house.” His other company besides Greenwood was a potent local brew called pisa, a kind of tequila. Instead of conducting a sensual love affair, he sat alone in his room and wrote his book.

  As for Greenwood, she was working on a travelog, which would be published in 1965 as The Tattooed Heart of Livingstone. It discussed her adventures and romances in Europe and Guatemala. She admired the natural beauty of Mérida and thought Chester, with his long hair and his bushy mustache, was looking attractive and manly. Tempted to stray from an “elaborate and sometimes difficult” book, Greenwood yearned for the bedroom, the “nicer ways to pass one’s time.”

  Their friction, compounded by jealousy, began quickly. Always excessively possessive, but this time probably right, Chester believed Greenwood had first gone to Sisal accompanied by a Guatemalan boyfriend. She left his love life in France alone and marveled at Chester’s discipline, but his formidable concentration was a source of envy. Chester himself had to confess that “things did not go well.” Part of the problem stemmed from being two late-middle-aged people still aching for recognition, but nearly destitute in Mexico, constantly reminded of how near they were to success without truly having it.

  During eight weeks in Sisal, Himes wrote a draft of the book he was calling Back to Africa, which would ultimately be published in English as Cotton Comes to Harlem. For the first time he deliberately revised a draft of one of the detective fictions, and the book worried him in a new way, coming as it did “sometimes well; sometimes poorly; sometimes rapidly; sometimes slowly.” In the caper that would characterize the entire series, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed pursue two con men, one black and one white, to rescue the money stolen from “our poor colored people.” The novel identified Chester’s friend Lewis Michaux as a contemporary Back to Africa proponent, carrying forward the ideas of Marcus Garvey, and featured as its most colorful antagonist Deke O’Malley, an ex-con-turned-minister who exploits Harlemites’ Back to Africa nostalgia. Chester considered “the Back to Africa program in the U.S. . . . one of the most absurd things the black people of America had ever supported,” but that did not mean that he dismissed it. In the novel that offered speculative riffs on the dense meaning of jazz and introduced the competing “Back-to-the-Southland” movement organized by white con men, Chester strongly sympathized with common black people enamored of the African repatriation scheme, “seeking a home—just the same as the Pilgrim Fathers.” Chester romantically portrayed the fierce feelings of ethnic pride and longing for an ancestral homeland away from the strife of racism and the history of enslavement. The pensive partner of the duo, Grave Digger, who notices the antique map upon which the bogus repatriation scheme had been based, explains his commitment to recover the lost money in similarly nostalgic terms: “ ‘I wouldn’t do this for nobody but my own black people.’ ” Chester’s portrait in Cotton Comes to Harlem of sentimental longing, absurd violence, urban slang, and droll country humor would captivate swathes of black America for many decades.

  One night near the end of February 1963, Chester was making love to Greenwood, when he rolled over and felt pins and needles scoring the right side of his body. The pain increased until half his body was unable to move; his face was contorted into a grimace. Shivering irrepressibly, he presumed that he had been stung by a scorpion. After a while control of his body returned and he likely understood himself to be suffering physical exhaustion and alcoholic or narcotic tremors. Headed into his fifty-fourth year, Chester was sleeping with a woman who was not petite like Willa Thompson or Regine Fischer. The next morning he struggled out of bed and tramped down the beach past the yellow Coca-Cola stands, but his strides became heavier and slower. He and Greenwood cobbled together bus fare to Mérida, to seek medical assistance. On March 1 he saw a doctor who said he had suffered “a brain spasm” and checked him into the local Catholic hospital, a group of ramshackle one-story buildings. Doctors told him never to smoke again and drink only occasionally.

  Once he was admitted to the hospital he had a new problem: getting out. He was there for two weeks trying to raise money to pay the bills. He shared the narrow ward with a single other patient, one slowly dying of cancer. Although Chester limped on his right side, he rallied and managed to type out the final chapter of the novel; he mailed it to Editions Plon the week before the contractual deadline, begging for the balance of his advance. He telegraphed Carl Brandt, asking for $200, and Brandt, who by then had already sent him $50 and learned of Chester’s habit of borrowing from his agents, declined to take Chester on as a client, sending a letter that frightened Chester by referring to heavy “ ‘financial obligations.’ ” In a hot, ragged barracks, with an electric fan, a single sheet, and hospital food, Chester was feeling hard-pressed again, and describing his ordeal as life “on the tip of a needle.” Finally, the German publisher Buchergilde Gutenberg came through, cabling $250. Chester returned to Sisal, collected his bags, and flew to New York on March 24. Greenwood wrote that she would visit New York as soon as she got some money, but they had already come to a “parting of the ways.” Chester wrote to John Williams, “Marianne and I have decided that we can’t possibly live together with our separate careers and our egos and without money.”

  In New York, Chester returned to the Albert Hotel and was soon seen by a doctor, who directed him to the Neurological Institute on 168th Street. He wrote a hasty letter that was hand-delivered to Carl Van Vechten, requesting $50 to pay the room rent at the hotel and to help him distinguish the health of his body from the health of his finances. Another letter, this one mailed to Paris, was even more unguarded and sincere. Aware that his romance with Marianne had no future, and hoping that the stable, business-oriented Lesley had not chosen another man, Chester blurted out to her, “If you are involved with someone please for Christ’s sake say so.” His flailing about his health and finances made Lesley more attached to him. The eldest girl in her family, Lesley had lost her adored mother, who was considered the angel of her village, as a teenager. The role of nurturer came t
o her quite naturally. Packard’s compassionate instincts were put to the test at once because Marianne Greenwood did not give Chester up. She had learned of his relationship with Lesley and wrote to her, graphically exposing the details of their romance and, in spite of their differences making a future impossible, laying claim to Chester. While the letter caused a dramatic moment between Chester and Lesley, her rival’s strong pursuit also made Chester ever more desirable.

  On April 2, he checked in for tests at the Neurological Institute, including early methods of brain tissue examination, a spinal tap, and multiple X-rays. He was diagnosed as having had a stroke, and he was also suffering from hypertension, a dangerous and prevalent ailment, especially among adult African American men. Adding to the pressure, he received a letter from Knopf scotching the possibility of a release of Lonely Crusade in paperback unless he repaid the $2000 advance from 1947. When the tests concluded, he wound up with a prescription to treat high blood pressure and advice to reduce salt and fat in his diet. “I feel much better, almost normal. Perhaps the feeling of security in being here helps,” he wrote to Van Vechten. By the afternoon of April 13, he was back at the Albert Hotel with a “clean bill of health,” although after that he walked with a slight, permanent limp. Jet magazine reported he had experienced “partial paralysis,” alerting Joe, who dropped him a mildly consoling line about his “slight indisposition.”

  Feeling guilty about his agent’s rebuff, a devoted John Williams visited Chester daily while the money began to trickle in. A young director named Larry Kostroff decided to risk a slender stake on him, in the hopes of making a film of one of the detective stories. Chester had a short lunchtime conference with Bucklin Moon, their grievances patched up. Moon was now an editor at Pocket Books and, up to his old tricks, promised Chester a hefty $5000 for three chapters of a new book. Fifty dollars dribbled in from Nugget magazine for a story, and he wrote Lesley asking for money, which she sent. When Plon sent what was owed upon delivery of the manuscript, Chester selected a better room. Marianne, having scraped together the resources to fly out of Mexico, visited him briefly at the hotel. But although she showed some affectionate feeling by the gesture, Chester was disinclined to reverse himself about their affair. He resumed his visits with such friends as John Williams, Carl Van Vechten, and Joyce Caddoo.