Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Now the denture-wearing literary militant, remarkably enough, was flush. Samuel Goldwyn extended the movie option and seemed to retain his excitement about the film of Cotton Comes to Harlem. And with Chester’s Times appearance and his hustling new agent Rosalyn Targ, he had cachet in New York, in spite of his age. Constance Pearlstein, the lover of C. L. R. James, brought him soup while his gums healed. Dramatist Shirley Clarke welcomed him and Joyce Caddoo over to her penthouse at the Chelsea Hotel for a party. Chester’s royalties from Pinktoes since publication amounted to $3999. He cabled Lesley to take a flight over in the middle of June: “expense is no matter.”

  Lesley arrived on June 17 at his room in the graffiti-dappled hallways of the Hotel Albert. Chester felt relief at her being there. The next day, a tall man wearing tortoiseshell glasses and conservative clothes knocked at the door: Samuel Goldwyn Jr. in the flesh. Chester prepared strong French coffee and they discussed Cotton Comes to Harlem. After disapproving of Chester’s work on the screenplay, Goldwyn had engaged a professional television writer to produce a new script. Chester looked it over with distaste. Goldwyn did not feel that the detectives were distinct enough and he hoped to develop two more characters, the villain Deke O’Malley and Lieutenant Anderson, to broaden the dramatic appeal. Chester bristled, as he did at all criticism, and certainly because Lieutenant Anderson, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed’s boss, was mainly a foil to reveal the plot. Goldwyn’s determination to change the script became harder to deal with when he insisted that Chester collapse the detectives solely into Grave Digger, whom Goldwyn believed more compelling than the acid-splashed Coffin Ed. Goldwyn had a commanding personality and was the film professional. He was also a multimillionaire. Chester agreed to shift the characterization and to devote himself to writing the screenplay for a retainer of $750 per month.

  Chester spent the ensuing several days visiting friends and shopping with Lesley on Fifth Avenue, in the throes of a “buying jag.” He felt elegant, well heeled, and frivolous; he bought beach clothes that he would give away before ever wearing. Toward the end of the New York holiday, they had a party, inviting Rosalyn and Bill Targ; Constance and Edward Pearlstein; Joyce Caddoo; his typist Helen; and Charles, Torun’s new but already estranged husband, who had returned to the United States. Chester expressed his fury on occasion, like a time when Leslie accidentally spilled oranges on the floor, and when white barbers refused to cut his hair. But although Chester still drank, he remained under control. Mostly, he was reformed.

  Chester left America in July, just before pitched battles between militant blacks and police erupted in Newark, New Jersey, on the twelfth; over five days, twenty-six people were killed and a thousand injured. On July 14 New Jersey’s governor ordered National Guard units into the city, including armored personnel carriers, machine-gun units, and tanks, which opened fire on a public housing project. The same day playwright LeRoi Jones was arrested, charged with carrying concealed revolvers, and photographed in a police station with a head wound. In the white sections of the city, crowds gathered in support of martial law, shouting, “Shoot the niggers.” The newspapers carried passages that called to mind the same terms as used for slave rebellions: “there were so many Negroes it was impossible to control them.”

  Deeply moved, Chester sat down and set aside the work with Goldwyn, the book on his love affairs, and his latest detective story in order to produce an extended treatment of the Newark revolt, “On the Use of Force.” Newark blacks looting stores, burning buildings, and sniping at police were “invisible,” he wrote for his French readers. Unlike the trendy black American tourists seen in the shops along the Champs-Elysées, the majority of black American citizens were “never seen until they lie bloody and dead from a policeman’s bullet on the hot dirty pavement of a Ghetto street.” That ghetto, Chester decided, was “shockingly similar to that in large cities in South Africa” and he insisted that the police manhandled African American citizens with the same techniques as the apartheid regime. “Police brutality toward black people in the United States is of such common usage and longstanding as to have attained acceptance of proper behavior,” Chester wrote. “The theory has always been that the way to treat black people is like children; that they have to be punished when they misbehave and make a nuisance of themselves such as asking for their civil rights.”

  If the police believed in force, many blacks considered resistance to physical assault by whites as “noble,” their principal right since the abolition of slavery. Chester made an observation that needed to be heard: “Every race riot in the United States has stemmed from the one single fact that a white law enforcement officer has committed a brutality against a black citizen.” Chester then correctly predicted that a United States capable of electing a black president was thirty or forty years in the future, when Americans then under twenty “assume control of all aspects of American life.”

  Chester and Lesley found a short-term rental on Rue de L’Estrapade near Rue Mouffetard, where Chester went back to work, mainly on his detective story, the bread and butter of his European career. He continued drafting his book on Regine Fischer, whom he had renamed “Marlene,” and he hoped to sell the book through a short treatment, similar to Une Affaire de viol. The portrait pursued sexuality as the sole preoccupation of the main characters. When Bill Targ asked him about his narrator’s “thoughts on writing, writers, books, publishers . . . political scandals . . . Bardot? Camus? De Beauvoir? The War?” he found Chester unresponsive. Chester was having more fun with Leroy Haynes at the soul food restaurant, gawking at the nude photographs of Haynes and his wife at French beaches, and stopping by the jazz club Living Room to hear Art Simmons, who was writing a column for Jet magazine on blacks in Europe. In August Chester and Lesley left town for the Netherlands, where they rented a dilapidated mansion in a tony Amsterdam suburb called Blaricum; there they regularly visited Charles Holland, who was taking a break from his marriage. In Amsterdam, Chester was treated well by his Dutch publisher, who arranged for extensive press and news coverage, including television programs. The Dutch were fascinated by Pinktoes.

  While enjoying the Netherlands, Chester met with Phil Lomax, a buddy Melvin Van Peebles had introduced to him in Paris. Lomax told Chester a story about a blind man on the subway train in Brooklyn, responding to a physical insult by wildly shooting a pistol in the direction of his foe. Naturally (though black blind men had been known to shoot robbers), the blind man missed his assailant and shot wildly.

  Chester enjoyed this anecdote well enough to work it into the new novel, Blind Man with a Pistol. He regarded this book “not [as] a detective story,” but rather “a wild sort of ‘psychodelic,’—if that is how it is spelled—novel about Harlem in the grip of crime, riots, fantasies, and such,—in fact a number of wild scenes held together only by the ambience.” That “ambience” was not enough to keep the book at Putnam, where Editor in Chief Bill Targ decided the manuscript was “not up to the standard you set in the other Harlem novels.” Amicably—and in a sea change of difference from the 1940s—Chester’s agent Rosalyn Targ (Bill’s wife) quickly found another home for the book, at William Morrow. Chester’s new publisher did not quite think the “ambience” held the book together enough either, but his editor there, James Landis, agreed with Chester to “let the book stand as it is, with all its confusions, because it’s a very confusing, and confused, world you’re writing about.” The book satirized the often internecine, bloody, fiery, disconcerting urban conflagrations. While Chester believed the violence was therapeutic and necessary and, of course, supremely vindicating, he called it mistaken, analogizing its probable success to a blind man wielding a firearm. However, the novel concludes with his blind man shooting a racist police officer in the head. Chester would later say about his fiction to Newsweek, “Shooting people in the head generates power.”

  Chester returned to tinkering on the script of Cotton Comes to Harlem, but in October a “most unhappy” Goldwyn chastised him for his effo
rts. Goldwyn only conceded, “I had expected too much for a first try.” Feeling beloved after a long interview for Dutch television, Chester blew up at the letter, having turned the screenplay into a battle between Grave Digger and Deke O’Malley. Goldwyn still felt that he had only a “loose construction of a movie. . . . We must still find a way to prolong the search to give us this kaleidoscopic view of Harlem as Grave Digger unravels the crime.” Chester believed that Goldwyn “with all the screenwriters in Hollywood at his disposal . . . wanted [me] to do the impossible.” Goldwyn suggested bringing Himes to Hollywood for a series of discussions about the script, but never did.

  Chester’s friend John Williams published his major work, The Man Who Cried I Am, in November of 1967 and, at first, Chester read the book avidly and with delight. Telling Williams that he had written “the only milestone produced (legitimate milestone) since Native Son,” Chester called The Man Who Cried I Am, “the greatest book, the most compelling book, ever written about the scene.” Williams visited Himes in Spain a few months after publication. There was one problem: the brilliant, powerfully written book about a black American writer was partly a roman à clef, drawing amply from the stories that Chester had bubbled with over the years about himself and his friendship with Richard Wright. Williams had reproduced G. David Schine’s visit to Wright’s apartment in April 1953, as well as the subsequent discussion with James Baldwin (called Marion Dawes in Williams’s novel) a few hours later. The entire book hinged around a plot by American intelligence agencies to silence black writers who have stumbled upon a conspiracy for black genocide carried out by western governments, the legend a favorite tale of Chester’s and Harrington’s. When Chester shared his confidential stories with Williams, he could not have imagined that another writer would do so much with them. Chester had been ignored and shut out for so long that when someone saw the value in what he had to say, he became affronted. Williams had used the information to create a compelling suspense plot, and then given the novel the emotional depth of Himes’s Lonely Crusade. He had done so by taking Chester seriously as an historical actor in a way that Chester did not allow much of his own later work to reflect. Chester could also see in the fully developed treatment that Williams was expert at the missed chance for A Case of Rape which, in its abbreviated form, never achieved the high seriousness of Williams’s book.

  The depth of friendship between the two men was difficult to measure. In a complimentary review essay at the end of 1964 that had some prickly lines, Williams had described Chester as “a nervous, wretched man.” Chester didn’t forget that, adding the cutting remark to his increased petulance in 1967, and would avoid Williams for the rest of the year. “Angered,” Williams would wonder why Chester had turned cold and shut him out. “More than you could ever know I shared your misfortunes and grief,” he wrote sadly to Chester before the end of the year. Asking forgiveness for the “seeming indifference,” and admitting “I have been passing time on the outskirts of life,” Chester reheated the friendship, which helped him conduct business in the United States. Nevertheless, with The Man Who Cried I Am, Williams was a rare late-twentieth-century African American novelist who perceived a genuine richness in the postwar black literary tradition, and who went to pains to articulate his historical moment and recover its creative black expatriate actors.

  Feeling his creative gifts waning, Chester began to perceive the same exploitation from other blacks like Williams as he had from publishers. And he was not always being paranoid or bitter. In Amsterdam in 1968, Phil Lomax confessed shamefully to publishing Chester’s written material under his own name. “It’s all right, man, relax. Nothing is hurt,” Chester soothingly told him, as the two huddled behind closed doors. The next year though, Chester went out of his way to acknowledge Lomax’s contribution to the plot of Blind Man with a Pistol. “A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol,” he began on the book’s first page, in a “Preface,” something he’d never used before. He wanted to send a message to the younger men about integrity.

  In other encounters he was less forgiving. His anger and feelings of persecution flared more openly when Richard Gibson tried to contact him after more than ten years. Gibson had just left southern Africa and was now an expert on that region’s anti-imperialist struggles. His experiences would produce a book called African Liberation Movements: Contemporary Struggles Against White Minority Rule. Like Chester, Lesley was convinced that Gibson worked for the American intelligence services and was conducting FBI-like “pretext” calls to track Chester’s whereabouts. When he telephoned the house, Chester angrily shouted from the bathroom for Lesley to hang up. He never spoke to Gibson again.

  The cold of northern Europe was increasingly difficult to tolerate, but there was little doubt that Chester had his best success as a black American author writing and living in Europe. In addition money stretched further in the Old World than in New York, to him the most habitable American metropolis. Chester required the anonymity and historical complexity of European cities, but the South of France, where he preferred living, was still too pricey. He looked farther south, to Spain, a place with traditionally warm weather and excellent food.

  When Chester and Lesley headed south of Barcelona in December 1967, testing the waters for the possibility of buying a house, they saw on the sides of walls “Deutsche Haus,” a welcome sign in German to Nazis in hiding. A bulwark against communism since the Spanish Civil War, Spain in the late 1960s was nearing the end of the Franco dictatorship, and becoming more attractive for permanent residency. Despite its tightly controlled state and cowed public (constitutional rights would be suspended in 1968), Spain would miss some of the painful public turmoil that marked France and America, especially in the next year. Chester had not voted regularly when he lived in the United States, so the thought of moving to a country without democratic elections and where the Communist Party was outlawed did not discourage him. As in France, he assumed that if he avoided touchy issues, such as the number of people executed by the Nationalist government during the civil war of 1936–1939 and afterward (the estimates were 200,000), the state police would not pursue him. Although Chester told people that his books could not be sold in Spain, The Primitive had been translated and made available there; perhaps the more strongly pro-union If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade would have made the authorities less comfortable.

  Chester and Lesley inched southward along the coast, until they reached the province of Alicante, with its Moorish terraced landscapes and alcazar watchtowers designed to counter the invasions from Africa. Chester’s early impression of the town where he would spend the remainder of his life was swift and disapproving: “Moraira was as racist as the American South,” he wrote to his agent. Rosalyn Targ advised him, “Spain is not a place where you feel comfortable, and I think the best thing would be for you to leave as soon as possible.” But swiftly a kind of fatalism set in. Spain had been a kind of sanctuary since 1954. Was the racism there any worse than the other varieties he had so painstakingly observed? At the end of the month, in Moraira, the Arabic-named town with Spanish people darker in skin color than Chester, he impulsively bought two plots of land overlooking the sea and initiated plans to build a house.

  Duplicating an earlier trip, Chester and Lesley walked over to Gibraltar and left the Jaguar for mechanical repair; the roads in Spain had been spottily maintained and Chester had not eased up on his speed to accommodate them. They went north in early 1968 and took an apartment in Sitges, about twenty minutes south of the Barcelona airport. Again, Chester “divorced the United States from my mind.” He was returned there when the news of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, and the resulting widespread rioting and arson throughout the black sections of urban America reached them.

  The day after the announcements of King’s death headlined papers around the world, Chester began to appear in the headlines himself. “Comic Suspense Film of Negro Detectives to Be Made
in Harlem” reported the Philadelphia Tribune. It had not been an easy path getting to the point of filming. Not three weeks after King’s death, Chester and Lesley went to the Lancaster Gate Hotel in London to celebrate. Chester was delighted that, after three years, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. had finally purchased the film rights for Cotton Comes to Harlem, which was going into production. Good money and publicity for the series would now be at hand.

  When Goldwyn finally decided to make the film with United Artists, to write the screenplay he hired Arnold Perl, best known for one-act plays on Russian Jews, but probably selected on account of his Who Do You Kill?, a 1963 televised play about race and economic discrimination. The first thing that Perl did was to reinsert Coffin Ed into the script. Goldwyn admitted his imperfections: “Perhaps that was one of the mistakes which I made before.” Despite the putative liberalism of Perl, Chester found what had been done to the story “offensive.” In a candid discussion with Hoyt Fuller, the editor of Negro Digest, Chester would resentfully accuse Perl of gimmicky exploitation, which he resented more because Chester surmised that Perl believed “the Jews had a right to do so.” As a counterproposal, Chester suggested LeRoi Jones, who had, in the wake of the Newark riots, changed his name to Amiri Baraka. However, Baraka refused to accept anything less than the scale for Hollywood screenwriters, which Goldwyn was unwilling to pay. In the second half of 1968, Ossie Davis, the actor and activist who had delivered the funeral eulogy for Malcolm X, was brought on board to deliver a script; Davis would also direct the film.