Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  “I bought a coonskin coat for three hundred dollars, a knickerbocker suit, a long-stemmed pipe, and a Model T Ford roadster, and I became a collegian,”51 Himes wrote years later. He even pledged one of the two black fraternities. “The white students didn’t know exactly what to make of me … I rarely spoke to white people, and never unless I was addressed first by them, and yet I would find them always looking at me.”52 Himes struck quite a figure tooling about campus in his raccoon coat, cruising town in his roadster, taking in movies like Flesh and the Devil and black road shows with young artists such as Josephine Baker and Ethel Waters. He seems to have been popular with college women. Classes were a different matter. Here Himes found himself far behind the other students. He quarreled openly with a chemistry teacher, was utterly at sea in German, couldn’t fathom the math needed for physics. Himes’s account of this period is a curious mixture of braggadocio (that he scored fourth highest on the IQ test, that he could have had his pick of college women) and self-sorrow (that he was always on the outside, that he didn’t belong and never would).

  Charles was in conflict with the university from the day of his arrival. He was at once inspired by the thought of being a student, and dispirited by the knowledge this thought inspired. On the one hand he began to run, not outwardly, but in his emotions, like a dog freed from its leash; while on the other he was fettered by every circumstance of the university life which relegated him to insignificance. He dreaded the classes where no one spoke to him, he hated the clubs he couldn’t join, he scorned the restaurants in which he couldn’t eat.53

  Though like alter ego Charles he contrived many excuses for essentially not even trying—he hadn’t the academic background for the pre-med courses he’d chosen; the studies were too difficult, the classes too formal; his hit-or-miss schooling, from Georgia to Mississippi to Arkansas to Missouri, had left him unprepared for the discipline of university study—Himes knew deep down that he was rebelling. He’d always been like that: if he couldn’t take part in everything, then he wouldn’t take part in anything. And without his mother to push him on through this inertia, he succumbed to it. He had started off doing his best to become a kind of pastiche of the white collegiate. The rigidity and hypocrisy of Northern segregation gnawed away at him, though, and turning against that, he turned against himself as well.

  Himes began to withdraw, taking refuge in the brothels and clubs of the sprawling Negro slums. He seems to have had a steady companion there, from whom he may have contracted venereal disease. Fully expecting dismissal, he was shocked to learn that he’d passed all his courses and, following Christmas vacation at home, would have to return to the university.

  But by then I was tired of Ohio State University and its policy of discrimination and segregation, fed up with the condescension, which I could never bear, and disgusted with myself for my whoremongering and my inability to play games, my instinctive withdrawal from intimacy, and my schizophrenic impulses to be inconspicuous and conspicuous at the same time. It was much later in life that I came to understand I simply hadn’t accepted my status as a “nigger.”54

  Following a disastrous Christmastime at home, where father and mother engaged in what now seemed one endless argument, head of one dispute eating the tail of the last, Himes returned to campus more disenchanted than ever. Toward the end of the second quarter his fraternity sponsored a formal dance. Himes attended with tux and a young woman he hardly knew: “I was bored and my teeth were set on edge by the very proper behavior of these very proper young black people who were trying so hard to ape white people.”55 He decided to introduce these sheltered, privileged young people to the real world, and took them to the brothel he frequented. Here they sat drinking home brew and listening to recordings until Himes’s steady came upon them and exploded in fury. This self-immolative pattern would repeat itself often in his life, Himes sailing blithely into mined waters, professing surprise when the ship went down.

  Called before the dean the following morning, Himes was allowed to withdraw for reasons of ill health and failing grades. In gentlemanly fashion, the previous evening’s incident was never mentioned.

  For a long time he stood on the stone steps of University Hall, looking across the snow-covered oval. He was saying good-bye again, this time to many things, to all of his mother’s hopes and prayers, to so many of his own golden dreams, to the kind of future he’d been brought up to expect, and to a kind of life … But at the time he didn’t realize it. He felt trapped again, pushed into something against his will.56

  Chester Himes, the wizard of leave-taking, in his life stood on many such shores.

  Back in Cleveland, though his parents argued fiercely over how he was to be disciplined, Himes escaped any reckoning, their arguments between themselves deflecting anger from him. Joseph Sandy, now working as a janitor, refused to take responsibility or action, however loudly Estelle railed. Chester fell ill, perhaps reacting to the tensions about him: “My back froze up … The atmosphere in our house was depressing. Thoughts of myself were depressing. I didn’t think. I passed the spring in a daze.”57 But when summer came, he was up and about, making rounds of the brothels, bars, and gambling clubs. His favorite was Bunch Boy’s on Cedar Avenue near Ninety-fifth Street. He and a young man he’d worked with at Wade Park Manor, Ramsey, hung out there so much that the owner started calling them “the Katzi Kids” after the Katzenjammer Kids cartoon strip, and eventually put Himes to work at the blackjack table.

  To cover, Himes told his mother he’d taken a night job at the Gilsy Hotel on Ninth Street. He’d leave home early afternoon and return at three or four the next morning. He actually did work at the Gilsy for about a month, filling in for an acquaintance, running prostitutes up to the rooms and providing whiskey brewed by the bell captain. Himes never made less than fifty dollars a night, but the money went fast, on clothes and gambling. “I bought very expensive suits,” Himes recalled, “shirts, ties, shoes, and coats—stylish, but not outlandish … I liked tweeds, Cheviots, and worsteds. I remember my most daring venture was a pair of square-toed yellow pigskin bluchers by Florsheim, which today in Paris would be the height of fashion. I got to know the expensive men’s stores where blacks rarely ventured.”58 In the spring he bought a secondhand Nash, parking it several blocks from his home so his parents wouldn’t know.

  I seemed to be in a trance. I think it was the result of so many emotional shocks. My parents’ quarreling had entered its final stage; sometimes my father would strike my mother and she struck back. I would separate them when I was home … I ran my car into a concrete stanchion underneath the railroad bridge over Cedar Avenue and wrecked it.59

  Joe won honors at East High and a scholarship to Oberlin College. Bunch Boy left the gambling club to devote his attentions to a policy house. Ramsey stopped coming around. Bunch Boy had been something of a father figure to Himes, certainly a stabilizing influence, and with him gone, solitary once again, Himes was at loose ends. Eventually he fell in with a sneak thief named Benny, “a big-framed, light-brown-skinned, simpleminded boy who elected me as his hero.”60 To live up to Benny’s adulation, Himes later wrote, he did a lot of things he’d otherwise not have done, including learning to smoke opium and stealing cars. It was at a party in Benny’s basement apartment just off Cedar Avenue in the Eighties that Himes first met his future wife Jean Johnson.

  Soon Himes and Jean were working together at a whiskey joint in the alley behind Bunch Boy’s. They lived there, too; that way, the owner, a woman named Margaret, said, when times got bad, Chester could put Jean to tricking for him. Times got bad pretty quickly. Chester had bought the twenties equivalent of a Saturday night special, a little Owlshead .32, and developed the habit of shooting at people who pressed for Jean’s favors. Luckily he always missed, but that was enough for Margaret to put them out.

  Himes proved hardly the gentleman his appearance and manner might first suggest. Seventeen at the time, Jean was

  the most beautiful brownskin g
irl I had ever seen … Her skin was the warm reddish brown of a perfectly roasted turkey breast the moment it comes from the oven. She had a heart-shaped face, thick hot lips, and brown eyes. What there was about me that attracted her so I never knew, but she fell desperately in love with my immortal soul … Eight years later I was to marry her and live with her for fourteen years, but at that time I treated her in the most casual manner; sometimes I would leave her standing on a corner waiting for me hours on end; and other times I would leave her in rooms we had rented for the night, in lieu of room rent, which I didn’t have, and wouldn’t see her again until several days later.61

  Himes was desperate for money. There is also considerable evidence, from his clothes and flashy gambling, his performances for Benny, and treatment of Jean, that he was to some degree striking postures, trying on the mask of a hardened criminal. So when Benny asked him to come on a burglary, that fit right in. Through a friend who worked for the Ohio National Guard, Benny had learned that arms and ammunition were stored in the Negro branch of the YMCA on Cedar and Seventy-sixth. He planned to steal a case of Colt automatics and sell them to blacks who worked in the steel mills in nearby Warren and Youngstown. His friend would drive, he and Chester would break into the Y and get the guns.

  The actual robbery went well. Everything else went wrong. On the way to Warren both back tires blew, forcing the Himes gang to hike into the nearest village and catch a bus to Warren. Himes remained there, knocking at doors in the ghetto asking after rooms to let, while the others left to find a tow truck. Finally they moved the guns into a hotel room and went off seeking buyers. As he made the rounds of dice games and drinking parties, Himes ran into a woman he’d seen earlier that afternoon and came within a breath of a shooting match with her man. At three o’clock that morning police broke into the hotel room to arrest Benny and Himes. They were taken back to Cleveland.

  The judge was a woman. My mother testified that I had been led astray by bad influence because my father didn’t exercise the proper influence. The judge questioned my mother about my father’s position and background and learned about my brother’s accident and my father giving up his job as a Southern “professor” to bring his son North for treatment. She learned about my own accident and my withdrawal from college and was extraordinarily moved by the predicament of our family. Because the guns had been recovered and no harm had come from the theft she gave me a suspended sentence, over the vehement protest of the prosecuting attorney.62

  Estelle tried first to gain control of Chester’s pension, then, failing that, to have him placed in an institution for delinquents. For this, however, she needed Joseph’s permission, which he refused to give. Chester always claimed there was a tacit agreement between him and his father; that since his disciplining Chester had resulted in Joe’s blindness, he would never do it again. Furious and at wit’s end, Estelle sued for divorce. Not long after, Joseph packed up and left. Benny meanwhile had returned from serving thirty days in jail; Chester moved in with Jean to occupy one of his two rooms. A week later he and Benny stole a car and drove back to Columbus.

  Chester was exhilarated at being back on campus, driving a grand new car, looking every bit the great man. Benny, though, felt ill at ease, insisting they should steer clear of the school, find rooms in the ghetto, and sell the car as soon as possible. The next day he left and returned to Cleveland. On impulse Himes stole a student’s ID card and doctored it to show his own signature. Then he went from store to store in downtown Columbus buying small items and paying for them by check. The checks were from a pad of blanks he’d picked up at the local bank; he wrote them on a fictitious Cleveland account, each time for fifteen or twenty dollars over purchase cost. Finally at a chic men’s store a clerk questioned the check he offered and, when Himes protested that none of the other stores had refused him, demanded to know which stores. The one across the street, he told her. Shortly the clerk from that store showed up with Himes’s check. The police showed up not long after.

  This time it was Joseph who came for the trial, at which Chester pled guilty and drew a two-year suspended sentence plus a five-year bench parole. Himes returned with his father to Cleveland, to a rented room on Eighty-Ninth off Cedar Avenue stinking “of my father’s fear and defeat.”63 Chester stayed away as much as possible, over at Jean’s or hanging around Bunch’s old place and the brothels on Scoville and Central, packing his little Owlshead.

  I discovered that I had become very violent. I saw a glimmer of fear and caution in the eyes of most people I encountered: squares, hustlers, gamblers, pimps, even whores. I had heard that people were saying, “Little Katzi will kill you.” I can’t say what I might have done.64

  Himes traded his .32 for a huge .44 Colt that “looked like a hand cannon and would shoot hard enough to kill a stone.”65 When one restaurant refused him service, he boasted—we’re again in Himesland—that he leapt onto the counter, kicked everything off it, and beat the restaurant’s owner about the head with his new pistol.

  Himes had appeared in court in Columbus, on the check charge, in early November. By month’s end he was arrested in Chicago for armed robbery.

  One night at Bunch Boy’s he’d heard a chauffeur bragging about how rich his boss was, about his platinum watch and two Cadillacs and how he always had loads of money at the house: “Like many blacks still possessed of a slave mentality, he boasted of his employer’s possessions as though they were his own, or as though he had a vested interest in them.”66 Himes also heard the chauffeur say that he had Thanksgiving Eve off. On that night Himes drove out to Fairmount Boulevard in Cleveland Heights. He intended to ring the doorbell and, when the maid answered, force his way in at gunpoint, but the maid, suspicious, refused to open the door, instead calling the police. Himes hid in shrubbery until the police were gone and the owners returned home. Then, breaking a garage window, he let himself into the house and confronted the elderly couple. He took the cache of money, as well as jewelry, and fled in one of the Cadillacs. Pursued briefly by police, he eluded them, eventually miring the car in mud and continuing on foot.

  In The Quality of Hurt Himes asserts that he relieved the elderly couple of “five or six stacks of hundred and twenty dollar bills still wrapped in the bank bands,” plus “necklaces, bracelets, rings … platinum pocket watch and diamond-studded watch chain,”67 some $20,000 in cash, plus jewelry insured at just over $28,000. Biographers Fabre and Margolies put the take at $300 cash, $5,000 in jewelry. Court records list only a single ring valued at $1,500 and $200 cash. As so often, details of Himes’s life are multiple choice.

  In an early short story, “Prison Mass,” convict and would-be writer Brightlights thinks how “He could still experience a thrill as he recalled that midnight ride.”68 Himes recalled it this way in The Quality of Hurt

  So I just stepped on the gas and drove the Cadillac in a straight line down the snow-covered street. I remember it being exceedingly pleasant in the softly purring car moving swiftly through the virgin blanket of snow and the white translucent falling curtain. Soon the sound of shooting died away and the sight of the pursuing car disappeared in the snowscape in the rear-view mirror, and I was moving swiftly through the completely deserted, almost silent night. There was not a sign of life in sight. Falling snow refracted the headlights and shortened the perimeter of visibility and I had the illusion of hurtling silently through an endless cloud.69

  Back downtown, Himes headed straight for Union Station and bought a ticket to Chicago. He’d heard Bunch Boy and others talk about a fence named Jew Sam; the next morning he dropped by his pawnshop near the Loop to sell the jewelry. Next stop, Tijuana. Sam took one of the rings and said he had to check it out. He went into a back room. Soon after, police arrived.

  I suspected he was calling the police. I should have let him keep the ring and escaped. But I couldn’t run; never could run. I have always been afraid that that one stupid mental block is going to get me killed.70

  Critic Stephen F. Millike
n says of this incident: “The inability to run that can affect a threatened man, the absolute refusal to collaborate in any way, to acknowledge the existence of the threat even in avoiding it, was to remain one of his distinctive literary themes.”71 This was another manifestation of Himes’s psychic inertia, his refusal-by-inaction to choose and so to be carried along, the Bartlebyan “I would prefer not to.” Himes himself wondered if his novel Run Man Run had its origin in this incident.

  Finding the rest of the jewelry, the detectives took Himes downtown. He was interrogated. Then detectives handcuffed his hands behind his back, handcuffed his feet together, and hung him upside-down on a door. They wrapped their pistols in felt hats and beat him on the ribs and testicles. Just as he used elements of the robbery in various stories such as “Prison Mass,” Himes used the beating and general background in his prison novel, first published in truncated form as Cast the First Stone and recently, in its original version, as Yesterday Will Make You Cry. New convict Jim Monroe is trying to get to sleep.

  All that stuff that happened in Chicago kept coming back. I could see myself asking that sonofabitching pawnbroker for five hundred dollars for the ring, and him saying just a minute and slipping out in the back room. I’d known he was calling the police. Even if he did have that one ring I had a lot of other stuff. But I couldn’t run. I never could run.

  I could feel the cops hitting me in the mouth, hanging me by my handcuffed feet upside down over a door, beating my ribs with their gun butts. I could feel the blood running down my legs from where the handcuffs pinched them on the anklebone.

  I had stood it as long as I could, I thought, looking at the ceiling. I might have stood it longer if I’d lost consciousness. But there had been too much pain and not enough hurt to lose consciousness. I had confessed.72

  * * *

  There’s a very absurdist, very Himesian touch here, in that the detectives actually were working on a robbery that occurred at the Blackstone Hotel the night before. The victim had already been in to identify the jewelry as hers, a captain of detectives told Himes, and was only awaiting his confession before she claimed her jewelry. When Himes said he could prove he’d been at his hotel room all night, the captain said “You better not try” and left, telling his men to get a signed confession. Himes suspected that he and the woman were accomplices.