Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Brother Joe believed that upon finding himself imprisoned, looking up the long, empty tunnel of his future, Himes “took himself in hand and decided that he had to do something with his life.”21 Estelle supported Chester in his ambition. She provided a typewriter, paper, and pencils, helped persuade prison officials to let him work, encouraged him in every way.

  Himes says, starkly, “I began writing in prison,”22 and goes on to catalog his publications. His first story was published in a black-owned magazine, The Bronzeman, sometime in 1931, but neither a copy of the story nor files of the magazine exist. Other early stories appeared in black newspapers and magazines such as Abbott’s, the Atlanta Daily World, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Afro-American. In 1934 he sold two stories to Esquire. “Crazy in the Stir” was published with only his prison number, 59623, as byline. “To What Red Hell,” a fictionalized version of the 1930 prison fire that claimed over 300 lives, which Himes would depict again in Cast the First Stone, soon followed. “After that,” Himes wrote, “until I was released in May 1936, I was published only by Esquire”23

  Himes’s two stories for the magazine had been accepted simultaneously. “Crazy” appeared in August (“a long-term prisoner in a state penitentiary tells an authentic story about life on the ‘inside’”), “To What Red Hell” in October. Editor Arnold Gingrich would buy five more from Himes in the period 1934 to 1942; they’d appear alongside contributions from Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, Ben Hecht, Conrad Aiken, Bertrand Russell, Theodore Dreiser, and Langston Hughes. Exhilarating company for a young convict in an Ohio prison, Stephen Milliken points out. “He was at last, beyond all question, a writer.”24

  Interestingly enough, Himes’s first stories for Esquire were not about blacks. (Himes was not identified as black until 1936, when a sketch appeared on the contributor’s page.) They were about what Himes just then knew best, crime and the people who committed it. As critic Robert Skinner remarks, characters in these stories with titles like “The Visiting Hour,” “Crazy in the Stir” and “The Night’s for Cryin’” often resemble Himes, “men with violence deeply imbedded in them,”25 men already in prison or half a step away. But, influenced as much by popular “slick” magazine fiction of the day as by anything else—and despite Himes’s admiration of Dashiell Hammett—they were quite different beasts from the sort of crime stories one encountered in pulps such as Black Mask and Detective Story. They exhibit little of the trademark headlong narratives and violence of those magazines, or, for that matter, of Himes’s own later work. And while often strong on character and plot development, they remain, the earliest of them at any rate, essentially apprentice work. Swayback syntax peeps out from the corners of uncertain sentences, the clichés and commonplaces of received wisdom float to the top, a scab of sentimentality forms over them. Himes may have realized this in 1971 when, assembling his anthology Black on Black, he passed over all but one of these stories, 1937’s “The Night’s for Cryin’.”

  Yet even as he postured, writing (one assumes) the sort of things he imagined readers (and editors) wanted, Himes, ever intuitive, had begun groping his way toward what would become his real work; the engines are there. He was stretching muscles, trying out this new, deeper voice, finding out just how large a container he might fill. The stories are a kind of laboratory, then. Himes quickly eliminated his more obvious mistakes, Milliken notes, and just as quickly began showing considerable control over his medium; the stories “represent an amazingly rapid progress towards professional competence.”26 If early stories are manifestly didactic, if others court clichés of film and romance fiction, if moments of spare brilliance alternate with doldrums of troweled-in autobiography, soon all this starts cooking down in the stew. The leap from the overwrought and overwritten thickets of “His Last Day” (published November 1932) to “Prison Mass” (March, April, May 1933) with its control, clarity, and complexity is truly impressive.

  For all its faults, however (and they are peculiarly Himesian faults), “His Last Day” demonstrates the kind of evocation of fear at its basest, physical level, the reek and swelter of it, that Himes does better than anyone else, calling to mind those nightmarish waking scenes of If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Primitive. In “Prison Mass” we encounter early examples of the cadenced, poetic writing we grow to expect from Himes:

  A tiny flake of vagrant snow fluttered in through an open window, appearing eerily from the translucent gray of the early morning like a frightened ghost seeking the brilliant cheer of the lighted chapel, and quickly melted on the back of a convict’s hand.27

  Similarly, while chapters 14 and 21 of Cast the First Stone closely parallel the first two Esquire stories “Crazy in the Stir” and “To What Red Hell,” even to the point of retaining phrases and sentences, Himes has not only fully rewritten but also fully reimagined the material. These chapters are as structured and precise as the stories are simplistic and wayward. Nothing better illustrates Himes’s growing skill.

  Not only does Himes learn to write in these stories but, as Franklin suggests, all his major themes, all the engines of his art, surface in them.

  There is, for instance, the fascination with grotesques that came to fruition in the Harlem cycle: ogrelike Pork Chop Smith of “Pork Chop Paradise,” half frog, half ape; or the monstrous Black Boy of “The Night’s For Cryin’” with his thick red lips, plate-shaped face, and perpetual popeyed expression.

  There is, too, this weird, duple integrity Himes’s characters so often have. His hustlers and hard cases may represent themselves outwardly as unbreachable and unyielding, and may in fact be so, but the front doesn’t carry over to their inner lives. There they become, like all of us, simple Boolean equations of fear and desire. Himes’s monsters don’t rationalize or dissemble: they know themselves for what they are.

  In the account of his Chicago arrest Himes cited his inability to run. That same inability, to flee when flight is the only sane choice, or to act when action is imperative, turns up repeatedly in Himes’s characters, as far back as Signifier in “Prison Mass.” The protagonist of “Crazy in the Stir,” driven mad by loss of privacy and the prison’s constant din, is forever pulled back from the brink of violence by conditioning, “that queer docility common to prisoners.”28 Prison conditioning has so diminished the protagonist of “To What Red Hell” that during the fire he finds himself wholly incapable of functioning.

  He heard a voice say: “Get a blanket and give a hand here.” His lips twitched slightly as a nausea swept over him. He said: “No can do,” in a low choky whisper … He really wanted to go up in that smoking inferno … But he couldn’t, just couldn’t, that’s all.29

  Similarly unmanned, Jimmy Monroe in Cast the First Stone climbs atop a wall to jump to his death but, when lights flash signaling bedtime, docilely climbs down and into bed, boiling with helplessness, frustration, and rage.

  Most important perhaps, in the Esquire stories Himes developed his genius for observing and then recording a scene in such physical detail as to completely overtake the reader. These stories also demonstrate a technique Himes would perfect with Cast the First Stone and use ever thereafter, a kind of jacking up of reality, amassing physical detail and impressions with such rapidity and to such degree that they collapse into one another, become distorted, almost surreal.

  I swung at his shiny face. I missed him and went sprawling over a corpse. The soft, mushy form gave beneath me. I jumped up, shook my hands as if I had fallen into a puddle of filth. Then the centipede began crawling about in my head. It was mashed in the middle and it crawled slowly through my brain just underneath the skull, dragging its mashed middle. I could feel its legs all gooey with the slimy green stuff that had been mashed out of it.

  And then I was running again. I was running blindly over the stiffs, stepping in their guts, their faces. I could feel the soft squashy give of their bellies, the roll of muscles over bones. I put my face down behind my left hand, bowed my head and plowed forward.r />
  A moment later I found myself standing in front of the entrance to the Catholic chapel. I felt a queer desire to laugh.30

  Finally, then, the place of violence in Himes’s work.

  Nathanael West remarked that he was able to write such short yet intense books because in the United States we don’t have to prepare for violence. Violence is our birthright, the very air we breathe. In prison Himes watched fellow prisoners cut, cripple, or kill one another for nonsensical reasons, or for no reason at all. Himes cites two convicts killing one another over their argument as to whether Paris was in France or France in Paris. (In The Crazy Kill Grave Digger tells this same story to an Irish police lieutenant who then tops him, in what musicians would call a cutting contest, with his own absurdist tale of two Irishmen.) Another was murdered for not passing the bread. Once Himes awoke to the sound of a gurgling scream and the sight of blood spurting from a cut throat onto the mattress below. The experience taught him, he said, that people will do anything. And he carried that sense of pervasive, absurdist violence into his mature work, where it became that work’s major theme: the violence society lowers against its members, the violence blacks level against blacks, the violence we do against those we love and against ourselves.

  For Himes, violence is at the same time matter-of-fact and so intense as to be almost cartoonlike: an inescapable, mundane part of black life as well as a metaphor for the absurdity of that life. When after treading across that carpet of corpses Jimmy Monroe feels “a queer desire to laugh” he points up a fundamental element in Himesian violence. Violence is always edged with humor in Himes. Boundaries dissolve; often we’re unable to say where one leaves off and the other begins. We laugh at the woman fused to the wall by a hit-and-run driver and arctic temperatures, clothes falling away to reveal her as a transvestite—laugh, then are horrified at ourselves for doing so.

  Or this scene from well along in Blind Man with a Pistol:

  The black man walked forward down a urine-stinking hallway beneath the feet of a gigantic black plaster of paris image of Jesus Christ, hanging by his neck from the rotting white ceiling of a large square room. There was an expression of teeth-bared rage on Christ’s black face. His arms were spread, his fists balled, his toes curled. Black blood dripped from red nail holes. The legend underneath read:

  THEY LYNCHED ME.31

  One of many subplots in Pinktoes is that of black journalist Moe Miller, fighting a perpetual war against a giant rat in his home in Brooklyn. The rat even moves traps that Moe sets for it, placing them strategically where they break Moe’s toes. When at one point Moe throws his hunting knife at it, the rat clasps the knife in its teeth and rushes him. Moe flees the apartment, telegraphing his wife:

  FOR GOD SAKE DO NOT COME STOP RAT HAS GOT KNIFE STOP IN POSSESSION OF HOUSE STOP I AM DROPPING THE NEGRO PROBLEM UNTIL RAT IS CAUGHT STOP.32

  It’s in The Primitive that this fusion of comedy and violence reaches its apotheosis, moving from there into the Harlem cycle.

  Others of the early stories introduce what will become typically Himesian themes.

  “Every Opportunity” with its portrait of a prisoner released into a world where he has no way of getting by recalls Himes’s contention that America’s racial problems truly began with emancipation, when whites “gave Negroes their freedom” without providing any way for them to meet their basic needs: “Well, this whole problem in America, as I see it, developed from the fact that the slaves were freed and that there was no legislation of any sort to make it possible for them to live.”33

  “A Nigger” introduces the theme of the black’s silent collaboration in the damage done him. A conservative white businessman regularly visits his mistress Fay in the Harlem apartment he maintains for her. Fay also has a black lover, Joe, “some kind of writer or poet or something,” who one day when Sugar Daddy arrives unexpectedly has to hide in the closet and listen to his harangues about “the lower classes” and FDR’s welfare and social programs. Just before the white man leaves, he opens the closet door and, pretending that he’s not seen Joe, immediately closes it—failing even to acknowledge Joe’s existence.

  The fact was he had kept standing there, taking it, even after he could no longer tell himself that it was a joke, a trim on a sucker, just so he could keep on eating off the bitch … Uncle Tomism, acceptance, toadying—all there in its most rugged form. One way to be a nigger. Other Negroes did it other ways—he did it the hard way. The same result—a nigger.34

  Joe takes his fury and frustration out on Fay, stopped only by the arrival of a neighbor brandishing a long-barreled .38.

  “The Night’s for Cryin’” moves from one closed society into another, from prison to Cleveland’s black ghetto, to document the monstrous inhumanities spawned there. In the same interview quoted above, that with old friend and fellow novelist John A. Williams in 1970, Himes held that a major motivation in his writing was to force white Americans to confront the horror and violence-making of the black ghettos. Himes was working the claim of Do the Right Thing and Boyz N the Hood forty or fifty years before the rush.

  White people in America, it seems to me, are titillated by the problem of the black people, more than taking it seriously. I want to see them take it seriously, good and goddamn seriously, and the only way that I think of to make them take it seriously is with violence.35

  “Headwaiter” depicts a man (patterned after Himes’s uncle) willfully following the rules in what he knows nevertheless to be an absurd world. In so doing the story prefigures Grave Digger’s and Coffin Ed’s knowledge of the futility of their efforts to effect real change, or, finally, even to keep the Harlem chaos in check. They’re prefigured more directly in the detective team of “He Knew,” a story prefiguring, as well, Himes’s theme of black-on-black violence and growing sense of absurdity.

  Detectives John Jones and Henry Walls tramp their weary beat, “heads pulled down into the upturned collars of their overcoats like the heads of startled turtles, hats slanted forward against the cold December drizzle,” investigating a series of robberies in the waterfront district of “dismal warehouses and squalid tenements.”36 Their white precinct captain, sounding very much like the Harlem Cycle’s Lieutenant Anderson, tells them: “I’m putting you two men on this job because it’s a Negro neighborhood and I believe that it’s Negroes who are pulling these jobs. You fellows are plodders and it’s plodders we need.” The story’s climactic shoot-out in pitch dark is something Himes will use again in the first Harlem novel, For Love of Imabelle. Like Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, the detectives are plain men doing an unpleasant, thankless job, in the final analysis little more than beards for the white power structure, just another form, even if a tacitly sanctioned form, of black-on-black violence.

  Himes first was assigned to the so-called coal company, carting shavings from the lumber mill for use in heating. One frozen morning he refused to dig out shavings from under snow and ice and was thrown in the hole with two others, with only scraps of blankets for warmth and the bite of bedbugs to keep their minds occupied. Pointing out that he continued to receive disability payments from the state, Himes was moved to lighter duties. He swept floors and swept away wheelbarrow tracks, taught briefly at the prison school, worked in the soup company, was in and out of the hospital with pneumonia, flu, sprained back, a broken arm or leg. Eventually he signed up for a correspondence course in law. He began writing petitions for parole and, finally, stories.

  We assume that many of Jimmy Monroe’s fellow convicts are modeled on those Himes knew. Redheaded runt Starlight, claiming Mafia connections and saying he was MacArthur’s orderly in the war. Blackie, a mob gunman, serving two life terms for multiple murders. Male tramp Bobby Guy. Metz the ex-jeweler and wife killer who introduces Monroe to writing. Short Britches, Froggy, Donald Duck, Jumpy Stone, Dew Baby, Signifier, St. Louis Slick.

  What a convict has been on the outside means very little in prison, no matter what they tell you. The convicts who were gangster
s outside usually turn into finks inside, or they acquire t.b. and die, or they have money to buy their way and then they are still big shots. The toughies who had nothing but their outside reps got their throats cut by hickville punks who had never heard of them. Money talked as loud there as it does anywhere—if not louder.

  And the days passed. Square and angular, with hardbeaten surfaces; confining, restricting, congesting. But down in the heart of these precise, square blocks of days there was love and hate; ambition and regret; there was hope, too, shining eternally through the long gray years; and perhaps there was even a little happiness.37

  At heart, Cast the First Stone is a coming-of-age novel. Gradually, in part from a network of preceptors, in part from observation (and he is, like Himes, a fine observer), Jimmy Monroe (again like Himes, we presume) learns the bounds and mores of this world bouleversé. He understands the way in which prison forms and institutions are distorted versions of those in the larger society outside. He understands, too, that he must come to terms with—learn to control, or at very least rechannel—his anger. In this he is not always successful, as his creator was not, then or in later life. The outward story documents down-and-out prison life; the inner story records Jimmy Monroe’s wrestle with the angel of his own self-destructive impulses, a match he wins, but just barely.

  We struggle, in part by our sufferings, in part by our identification through art and relationships with others, in part by those relationships themselves, toward redemption, Jimmy Monroe and Chester Himes no less than the rest of us. Monroe-Himes enters prison a man closed off, a man who will not be hurt again. There he relearns to open himself, learns not so much to make connections with others as to let them form spontaneously. As Robert Creeley says: It’s only in the relationships we manage, that we live at all.