Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Replacing some of his longer standing friendships, Chester met that October a vibrant young black man fresh to Paris and with an accent and a manner that were difficult to place. Cosmopolitan and sure of himself, he spoke English like an American, Spanish like a South American, and French with ease. Carlos Moore was a Cuban, born to Jamaican parents, who had gone to high school in New York, and been introduced to the Harlem Writers Guild by the singer and poet Maya Angelou. In high school he had helped to organize a small insurrection of February 15, 1961, at the United Nations, protesting the organization’s involvement in the capture and murder of Patrice Lumumba. Daring, bright, and impatient with world affairs, Moore had returned to Cuba in 1961 and joined the Castro government, until his cries of racism within revolutionary Cuba caused him to become an object of persecution. By late 1963, he was forced to flee Cuba for his personal safety, finding refuge first in Guinea’s embassy before making his way to Egypt.

  In Egypt Moore had befriended David Du Bois, the stepson of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Elijah Muhammad’s son Akbar Muhammad, who shared the work of their hero, William Gardner Smith. Then Moore made his way to Paris and started working on an article about Fidel Castro’s racist policies, particularly the suppression of the Yoruba religion, an important cultural force in Cuba and Brazil, where numbers of Yoruba had been enslaved. In Paris, he was welcomed by Ellen Wright and introduced to Smith. Impressed by the young expatriate, Smith ushered Moore to meet Chester Himes, the writer Smith believed the most talented in France, profoundly anti-Communist, and an arch advocate for black freedom. Moore recognized the name. As a boy in Havana he had rescued a paperback book from the trash purely on account of its intriguing cover, which seemed to feature a black man twisting the arm of a white woman. He proceeded to read If He Hollers Let Him Go.

  Chester welcomed Smith and Moore during a time of crisis, surprise, and excitement. Retour en Afrique had become a best seller in France. The OAS kept threatening to topple de Gaulle’s government, causing a heightened military presence in Paris. And because of the flood of people still disturbing him as well as the threats from the OAS, Chester’s friends used a special combination knock on the door, so he’d let them in. At first, to Moore, Himes was “unfriendly, very savage, dangerous” and “viscerally anti-Communist.” But Himes liked Moore at once, partly because, Moore was a dark-skinned man proud of his heritage and that instinctive pride reminded Chester of his own father’s attempt to manage in a world of strong skin-color bias, from blacks as well as whites. He read the “wonderful” essay Moore was working on and determined to help him publish it.

  True to their politics, Chester and Trotskyite William Gardner Smith quickly got into an argument about the appropriateness of socialism for blacks. “Chester had this thing about communism wouldn’t work for black people, so he and Bill Smith were always arguing on this issue,” Moore remembered. “Chester was explaining the manipulative attitude of Marxists and Communists,” and Smith dissented, although there was a high degree of affection between the two men. The year before Smith had published The Stone Face, a novel expressing deep solidarity with the struggle for Algerian independence and featuring a “bitter and hermetic” character based on Chester who would emerge “from his apartment now and then to drink heavily and launch an ironic tirade against the United States and the white world in general.” In an autumn that included discussion of the far-right militarist Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party presidential nominee, Moore observed that “Chester was a very bitter, bitter, bitter person.” When the conversation shifted away from politics, Chester told young Carlos that if he wanted to write, he had to stick to his artistry in the same manner in which a boxer boxes or a professional athlete trains. To make his point, Chester described the afternoon he took The Third Generation to a publisher and was turned down because the book was “too sad.” Rejection and punishment were a part of a writer’s training regimen.

  That fall Chester was in his best position to laugh at the difficulties of the past. On November 4, after its French success, U.S. publishers Putnam (hardcover) and Dell (paperback) split the rights to Cotton Comes to Harlem, offering Chester $7500 on signing and another $7500 on publication in February 1965. It was his biggest payday ever. In January 1965 he would conclude a deal on Pinktoes with Stein and Day for $10,000. After publication it would become his first novel to earn royalties beyond its initial advance, and, as a Dell paperback, it would climb onto the best-seller list. He wrote to Van Vechten, quite happy that “the American publishers have forgiven me.” On American bookstands he now had the paperback reprints of If He Hollers Let Him Go, The Third Generation, A Rage in Harlem, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and The Primitive. Most sensationally, Adam, a French men’s magazine published by the creators of Vogue, focused their November 1964 issue on race in America and the riots in Harlem. A full-color photograph of Chester, his chin down and his penetrating eyes slanting in fury, was on the cover of the magazine, “displayed in the place of prominence on every newsstand in Paris, north, east, south and west.” Vainly in love with his magazine cover, which made him look like a sex symbol as much as a man of mystery, and which casual observers at first assumed to be Egyptian president Gamal Nasser, Chester knew a heightened level of fame. “After that everybody knew me by sight.” He framed the cover and hung it in his study.

  Chester’s affinity to Nasser of Egypt or Malcolm X of Harlem became more apparent in late fall. In early 1964 Malcolm X had left the Nation of Islam and since July he had been traveling through Africa and the Islamic Middle East as a kind of minister without portfolio of black revolutionary nationalism. In November, from Ghana, Malcolm X contacted Ellen Wright to prepare for his visit to France, which was his final stop before returning to the United States. Ellen Wright contacted Carlos Moore, who had attended the Nation of Islam’s Harlem mosque and seen Malcolm X speak in New York. Moore went to Himes and the Frenchman Robert Sine, a cartoonist who had helped hide Algerian freedom fighters in safe houses, to strategize about the best way to defend Malcolm X from violent attack while in Paris. The black nationalist would be defended by half a dozen bodyguards from Guadeloupe and Martinique and, Chester suggested, hidden at the villa of the jazz singer Hazel Scott.

  On November 22, Malcolm X arrived in Paris and went to Ellen Wright’s house, where he met Carlos Moore for the first time. Moore took him to the Café Realis, switching his orange juice with Malcolm X’s, worried that it might have been poisoned. Needing to discuss the security he had planned, Moore casually remarked to Malcolm X that they do so at Chester Himes’s home. Malcolm X replied, “Chester Himes is here?” surprising Moore, both that he knew the writer and was delighted to visit. After Malcolm and one of his young bodyguards climbed the seven flights of steps and made the secret knock and Chester opened the door, the two friends fell into each other’s arms laughing. Moore was suddenly in the presence of a Malcolm X “that few people had known,” a man who started swapping uproarious Harlem tales with Chester.

  Their discussion swiftly reached a serious vein. Malcolm fell silent for twenty minutes while Chester, glass in hand, described his experience in Cairo and Alexandria and the antiblack racism of the Arabs. Chester emphasized his points about unreliable Arab partners saying, “Carlos knows this. These are slave traders.” Committing himself to establishing a chapter of Malcolm’s new group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, in Paris and prepared to give his life for Malcolm X, Moore was surprised by the unreserved barbs. To Moore, Chester’s mocking disbelief in the legends of ethnic, religious, or social-class solidarity was “way out . . . he was so anti-Arab, anti-Communist, anti-Muslim.” Chester continued to underscore the perfidy of Arab Muslims and professional Marxists alike, pointing to his young comrade Moore, who had to leave both Cuba and Egypt on account of his color and respect for African culture. “Carlos lived it,” Chester said over and over, referring to the racism of the Cuban Marxists and the Arabs.

  Chester’s chorus to Malcolm X was “Yo
u’re being gullible . . . totally gullible.” Part of their discussion dealt with left-wing allies in armed revolutionary struggles where Malcolm X was trying to organize assistance, such as in the Congo. But Chester kept belittling the possibility of alliance with the Communists. “It won’t work,” he badgered the minister, “These people are no good.” Years after these meetings, Moore would write to Chester in praise of the “beautiful things” that the younger militants gleaned from Chester’s worldly tutorials: “a refusal to be caged in by epithets, ideologies, useless “isms,” and the constant search for truth, even at the cost of personal solitude.” For people born during the 1940s like Moore, Chester represented a unique form of independence and defiance, a life that in its own way was political art. As one of his admirers would say in 1970, “we are where we are because you and other cultural independents . . . you all had the integrity to give us a book of records.”

  When they adjourned, Malcolm X was more at ease, but also somber. “They’re going to get me, Chester,” he confessed wearily. After they had departed, Malcolm X asked Moore about Chester’s diatribe, deeply impressed. “I talked to him and said that Chester was correct.” For Malcolm X, his trip abroad—meeting with black expatriate writers working in the Nkrumah government in Ghana like Julian Mayfield and Maya Angelou, then Himes and Moore, followed by a meeting with Aimé Césaire and Alioune Diop—was a turning point. Moore and Himes proved accurate in their predictions for Malcolm X. An hour after Malcolm X left the apartment, someone mounted the seven flights of stairs and rapped hard on the door several times. Chester and Lesley silently hunkered into the couch, waiting for the unannounced visitor to leave. It was thirty minutes before they heard footsteps going back down the stairs.

  The next evening, Chester and Lesley attended Malcolm X’s lecture at the Sorbonne, with Moore translating him simultaneously into French. The lecture was partly arranged by Présence Africain, and Malcolm X presented himself as the leader of Organization of Afro-American Unity, working as a “bridge between the peoples on the African continent and their African descendants in the Americas.” Malcolm X held out the possibility of French exceptionalism—France was praiseworthy because she refused to be an American “satellite.” He suggested that Americans were merely carrying out the imperialist mandate put in place by Britain more than a century ago. The U.S. government, he advised his audience, was incapable of world leadership. “She’s morally bankrupt,” he insisted, “especially those at the helm.” He warned his listeners against the notion that somehow a new dawn had arisen concerning the issue of racism; instead he reminded them of the pressures of World War II and British and French decolonization that had led to legal change in the United States. The overtures made by administrators like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were strategic. “They want to Americanize us for fear that now we might become Africanized,” he said.

  When asked how he felt about black and white romance, probably with friends like Chester in mind, Malcolm X said, “Whoever a person wants to love, that’s their business . . . their personal affair.” Even closer to home for Chester, Malcolm X scoffed at the African American obsession with their European ancestry, saying “it’s not a status symbol anymore to be running around talking about your Scotch blood.” And Carlos Moore, who continued to serve as Malcolm’s lieutenant in France for the next three months, observed that Malcolm was convinced by the conversation with Himes the day before. “In no country has the Black man ever come to the top, even in your so-called socialist and Marxist and other type societies.”

  Three days before Christmas, Chester sadly learned that Carl Van Vechten had died in his sleep. He was eighty-four. If Chester typically felt like a fervent, uncompromising Malcolm X, in his personal life he had needed to know that it was possible to have sustaining friendships with white people like Van Vechten. Solicitously courteous until the end, Van Vechten had written him in the first week of December, congratulating him on completing Cotton Comes to Harlem. Chester had written back that he hoped the legal wrangling over Pinktoes would end soon and an American edition would be brought out, but certainly the hard years seemed past. Chester telegrammed Van Vechten’s spouse, Fania Marinoff, in earnest: I AM DREADFULLY SORRY. MAY I HELP?

  The new year of 1965 brought little ease. Malcolm X was correct: Chester would not get a chance to see him again. Malcolm attempted to return to France on February 9, to another gathering held by the OAAU-Paris group. At the airport, the police detained him for two hours before declaring him an “undesirable” who would cause violent demonstrations and sending him back to London. The authorities referred to his November 23 lecture as evidence. Moore talked by telephone to Malcolm X, who was stranded in England, and read the speech that Malcolm X had planned to make at the gathering.

  Chester believed that the French police prevented Malcolm X from entering to avoid the scandal of having him killed on French soil. Malcolm X concurred that he was being targeted for death by American governmental agents, telling the journalist Alex Haley, “the more I keep thinking about what happened to me in France. I’m going to quit saying it’s the muslims.” Back in the United States, Malcolm X’s house in Queens, New York, was firebombed on February 14, nearly killing his children. A week later, on February 21, Malcolm X was shot dead in front of his family by Nation of Islam gunmen at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, with several undercover police agents on hand. For several years Chester had believed that the climate in France was becoming more racist, and the public turning away of the younger man whom he admired and whose background reminded him so much of his own would prove to him that France was no western exception. He was ever more determined to leave.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A MOOR IN SPAIN

  1965–1972

  The horrifying assassination of Malcolm X caught Chester up with his biological age and years of hand-to-mouth living. Graying at the temples and in his mustache, slurring words, and struggling a bit more in his gait, he couldn’t dodge the look now of an elder statesman of black literary affairs. Chester too had cried out against racial oppression, and if he had not quite created the menacing enemies of Malcolm X and Richard Wright, certainly he had stimulated fear. But something changed, as he no longer casually sought political enemies, even as he felt chased more ardently than ever by admirers. The man who tirelessly pursued a fling, ordered his liquor by the case, and battled every taunt had retired.

  In the early months of 1965, Chester’s main problem was unconnected to the demise of the militant leader. He had to resolve a legal problem brought on by his having somewhat knavishly signed contracts for Pinktoes with the American publishers Putnam and Dell after Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press published an English-language edition in France. Complicating matters further, the American press Stein and Day bought Olympia’s list and planned to bring Pinktoes out in the United States. Chester reached a signed agreement with Girodias and Putnam and Stein and Day on January 29, 1965: Putnam would publish the trade hardcover edition of Pinktoes in the United States, and Stein and Day would handle all subsidiary rights. Dell would produce a Pinktoes paperback a year later. Although Chester and Girodias were each paid $10,000, he could not have anticipated that the book, about ten years after its drafting, would become a top seller. The New York publishers took out advertisements with impish slogans like “All that most middle-class Negroes want is status and white women.”

  Since he had the money to live wherever he liked to, Chester took a studio in Cannes at the Palais Rouaze and settled into work on his latest Harlem thriller, Blind Man with a Pistol. Once he had described his writing process to Melvin Van Peebles as putting 220 sheets of paper on the left side of the typewriter and then concluding the story as the pile dwindled. Success had raised the bar. “My novel moves all right,” he wrote Lesley, “but it is not swinging. I like to both read and write novels that swing.” Finally he swung into eight pages of the new work and he could see that the typical anatomy of the detective story was inadequate
to address his needs. Blind Man read “like a cross between La Reine des pommes and Pinktoes,” or a book that was moving away from a mysterious killing followed by a resolution to a book featuring a sequence of roughly connected episodes. He would “let it go and see what happens.” Blind Man, a roundabout murder mystery satirizing the militant power movement and the exotic power of black sexuality, was completely unlike the other novels featuring the detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed.

  Always requiring heavy reassurance by mail that he was on the mind of any current girlfriend, Chester was dealing with a new sort of loneliness too. He now pressed for a permanent tie. “You should marry me, Lesley,” he wrote, knowing he had not yet been able to afford to pay for the divorce from Jean he had proposed in 1956, but wanting to ensure her caring for him. He also did not want to be made a fool of by rumors that she was having other lovers in Paris.