Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Chester’s term with the WPA Writers’ Project ended in March 1941. After working briefly for a coffee and tea importer whom he left for unknown reasons, he was unable to find further employment. At one point he and Jean were forced to sell their furniture to provide a few more days’ food and shelter. Outside personnel offices at industries newly revived by war efforts—just as his character wished in “Looking Down the Street,” war had indeed brought an end to the Depression—he was turned away in favor of white applicants.

  Then there was that one final stopover before taking off for the promised land.

  In Lucas, just southwest of Cleveland, set among rolling hills in an area called Pleasant Valley, best-selling novelist Louis Bromfield had reclaimed acres of arid land and now practiced new agrarianism on Malabar Farm, as described by E. B. White in a book review for the New Yorker.

  Malabar Farm is the farm for me,

  It’s got what it takes, to a large degree:

  Beauty, alfalfa, constant movement,

  And a terrible rash of soil improvement.

  Far from orthodox in its tillage,

  Populous as many a village,

  Stuff being planted and stuff being written,

  Fields growing lush that were once unfitten …

  From far and wide folks came to view

  The things that a writing man will do.1

  Bromfield, winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Early Autumn, also worked extensively in Hollywood, on screenplays for Brigham Young and For Whom the Bell Tolls among others. The farm became a magnet for the talented and famous. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married there in 1945.

  Years later John A. Williams asked Himes if he had had any idea at the time that his own work would long outlive Bromfield’s.

  No, it never occurred to me at all. But I didn’t think that Bromfield’s work was substantial enough to last. It didn’t occur to me that Bromfield had been very successful then with The Rains Came. He was making quite a bit of money at that time. This was in the late thirties or 1940, and writers like Bromfield were getting that large money from the serialization in magazines. They were not so much concerned with things like book clubs or reprints and so forth. But the magazine serializations: Cosmopolitan was paying Bromfield seventy-five thousand dollars for the serialization of the book.2

  Through the intercession of the Jelliffes from Karamu House, Jean and Chester spent part of 1941 working as butler and cook for Bromfield, at a combined salary of $120 a month. It’s very difficult to picture Himes, that blazing, proud, angry being described by Dan Levin, in the role of domestic servant, but the two men seem to have gotten along well. Bromfield read Chester’s prison novel and offered help in getting it published. When he left for Hollywood that fall, he took a copy of the manuscript along with him.

  Chester and Jean soon followed, fetching up against racial barriers at every turn. Blacks in L.A. were treated the same way they were in Southern industrial towns, Himes said; the only difference was hypocrisy. In L.A. they turned you away thinking “Nigger, ain’t we good to you?”3

  It wasn’t being refused employment in the plants so much … It was the look on the people’s faces when you asked them about a job. Most of ’em didn’t say right out they wouldn’t hire me. They just looked so goddamned startled that I’d even asked. As if some friendly dog had come in through the door and said, “I can talk.” It shook me.4

  Himes’s dreams of studio work soon evaporated. Folks out there loved to have black faces around, Himes said; any meeting you went to, there’d always be one—for decor.

  One time Marc Connelly, who wrote Green Pastures, had a number of screenwriters, so-called intellectuals, and various others whom he had invited to a conference to discuss a film on George Washington Carver—along with two black faces for color, me and Arna Bontemps, I think … Marc Connelly was sitting at the head of the table with about twenty people sitting around, and he said, “Well, now I know how we’re going to start this film; I know that much about it, and then we can go on from there. Well, you see, Dr. Carver was a very humble man and he always ironed his own shirts. So when we start this film on Dr. Carver, he goes into the kitchen and irons his shirt.” So at that point I left.5

  Earlier, Himes thought he had a good chance of getting on as publicity writer for Cabin in the Sky, for which Hall Johnson, fellow traveler in the West Coast communist circles to which Himes had been admitted by referral from Langston Hughes, served as technical adviser. Himes resigned his shipyard job in San Francisco to return to Los Angeles, only to find that the position had already been given to a young black man named Phil Carter, now shut away in an ancient tiny dressing room safely distant from the public relations offices.

  Finally Himes tried out as a reader with the young man who ran that department at Warner Brothers.

  It was a job of no consequence. They were only offering something like forty-seven dollars a week to start, whereas you could make eighty-seven a week as a laborer. Anyway, he offered me the job and I was going to take it. I wrote the synopsis for The Magic Bow, a well-known book about Paganini, and submitted it. He said it was a good job and that they would employ me. And then—this is what he said: he was walking across the lot one day and he ran into Jack Warner and told him, “I have a new man, Mr. Warner, and I think he’s going to work out very well indeed.” Warner said, “That’s fine, boy,” and so forth. “Who is he?” And he said, “He’s a young black man.” And Warner said, “I don’t want no niggers on this lot.”6

  By his count Himes held twenty-three jobs in the three years before, with If He Hollers accepted by Doubleday, Doran, and Company, he left California for New York. Despite his intelligence and background, and despite the fact that he’d picked up valuable skills from his father—he could read blueprints, knew basic carpentry and construction, and was able to operate any number of machine tools—only two of those jobs, as apprentice shipfitter in Kaiser’s Shipyard No. 1 and as shipwright’s helper in the L.A. shipyard at San Pedro Harbor, were skilled. For the most part he worked at common labor, rebuilding tires and labeling cans, shoveling rock and sand for the California Rock Company, casting pipe for the Crane Company, carting about two-ton rolls of paper for the California Towel-Saver Company, warehousing for the Hughes Aircraft Company. Totin’ barges, liftin’ bales.

  Just as selectively he would remember other times and places (college and the Chicago police station among them) as those in which awareness of racism overcame him like tumblers falling in a lock, Himes spoke of his three years in L.A. as such in a Paris interview twenty years later.

  There, racism became an inescapable fact of life for me. I’d been able to ignore segregation up until then, but now I couldn’t. I felt I could “see” racism, and it seemed to stick to me. It contaminated everything. It was like a disease I couldn’t shake.7

  Los Angeles hurt him, he insisted, terribly. His own plight having sensitized him to others’ difficulties, he perceived the effects of racism everywhere he looked: in the armed forces, where Jean’s brothers confirmed a thoroughgoing racial prejudice; toward Japanese-Americans, many of whose families had lived for generations in California, then being torn from their lives like paper figures and relocated to detention camps; among Mexican- and Filipino-American communities. In a 1943 article for The Crisis, Himes described riots in which uniformed white servicemen mounted a savage attack on zoot-suited Hispanics on L.A. streets while (echoing the 1917 St. Louis riots) police remained conspicuously absent.

  This we know: That during the first two nights of the rioting, no policemen were in evidence until the gangs of sailors, outnumbering the pachucos two-three-four to one, had sapped up on the pachucos with belt buckles and knotted ropes. When the sailors departed in their cars, trucks, and taxi-cabs, furnished them no doubt by the nazi-minded citizenry, the police appeared as if they had been waiting around the corner and arrested the Mexican youths who had been knocked out, stunned, or too frightened to run.8

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p; Himes’s writing during this period generally became more political and more focused on race, in part, no doubt, due to personal experience but also due to valuable contacts through brother Joe and cousin Henry Lee Moon with activist publications where Himes knew his contributions would be welcome. In addition, close upon introductions from Langston Hughes, Himes was being courted by the Communist Party. So for a while he danced with the ones who brought him. At least a dozen pieces appeared in The Crisis alone, others in Opportunity and Common Ground; several were reprinted in 1975’s Black on Black.

  “Democracy Is for the Unafraid” (Common Ground) entreats white America once and for all to join the struggle for equality.

  “Now Is the Time! Here Is the Place!” (Opportunity) is a kind of rhetorical conjuring act calling for Negroes to invest the war effort with the energies of their own age-long battle for justice, to accept the folded lie that (in Milliken’s words) “the nation’s fight to preserve the status quo and their own fight to end the status quo were in fact the same fight.”9

  “Negro Martyrs Are Needed” (The Crisis) urged the black middle class to help bring about a peaceful revolution by giving up its silent complicity, by exposing injustice in all its sundry daily forms and influencing the Negro lower classes to follow. With this article Himes came under scrutiny by the FBI, which on June 12, 1944, opened file number 105–2502 on his suspected seditious activities.

  The names that Langston Hughes had given as contacts to help him find work led Himes in a straight line to the Communist Party. Wilford Wilson, working for the U.S. Employment Service at the time, routinely and pointedly sent Himes to businesses and plants that everyone knew did not employ Negroes. The Party was providing useful contacts, though, and while Himes may have resented being used as a chess piece, he went along, attending cell meetings and lectures and mixing with veterans of the Spanish Civil War and radical Hollywood writers such as John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo.

  Anyway, I went out to Hollywood—Los Angeles—where I met Hall Johnson and a number of other black people on the fringes of the movie industry … Most of them were connected with the Communist Party. I saw these people and then I got involved also with the Communists out there.10

  One Party project involved collecting used clothing from wealthy Hollywood patrons. Proceeds from sale of these donations supposedly went to refugee camps for those uprooted by the Spanish Civil War, but the collectors (perhaps more in touch with Communist reality than theory) as often as not wound up appropriating the finery for themselves. “I had more expensive clothes then than I’ve ever had since,”11 Himes remarked in a letter to Williams. Chester and a companion made the pickups at huge Hollywood estates where well-wishers would set them up with a few drinks in the kitchen. Sure, it was all for one and one for all, Himes said, laughing—but that didn’t mean they got out of the kitchen!

  I swear to God, my material for writing Lonely Crusade came from these experiences. I met these people. And the CIO union there was beginning to print a newspaper. At the same time I had been considered for a place on the staff. But, you see, the communists were also playing a game. They wanted people like me to help break the color line. I was a tool: they wanted to send me to thousands of places that had no intention of employing blacks at that time because Los Angeles was a very prejudiced place and the only jobs black people had were in the kitchens in Hollywood and Beverly Hills.12

  Believing it to be as exploitative in its own way as capitalism, if in a somewhat different manner, Himes grew increasingly cynical toward the Communist Party, and his final connections shattered with the Party’s condemnation of Lonely Crusade, published in 1947.

  Milliken contends that the articles Himes published between 1942 and 1945 “leave no doubt at all as to the completeness of his own commitment at that time to a social philosophy that was frankly idealistic and totally optimistic.”13 The important words here, the ones that go by so fast you hardly notice them, are at that time. For there’s much in the stridency of these articles, as there is in the very structure of Lonely Crusade, to suggest a man talking himself into something. Himes may have been reacting like the rest of the country, of course, to wartime camaraderie and factitious optimism, though neither his letters and memories of the time nor the self-questioning themes of If He Hollers or Lonely Crusade support that idea. The sense once again is more that of the fitting of a new, if temporary, self. Himes always wrote like some manic actor preparing for a part, spurring himself to the task, forever raising the stakes, as though he knows that in order to maintain momentum and intensity he has to jack reality up several notches and keep it there.

  “He was, as always,” Milliken reminds us, “a creature of extremes, and one set of preoccupations or one particular orientation never seemed to exclude another, even the most apparently incompatible.”14 Himes liked a new suit of clothes as much as the next man, so for a time he could be seen in public wearing political tracts and mawkish stories. Making sure, just as in his college days, that he was turned out well.

  Some apprehension of knife’s-edge truth may have attracted him to this work as well. In all of Himes’s writing there is a sense of gospel—of truth-telling, word in current slang—held in delicate balance with despair, one hauling furniture downstairs on its back as the other hauls it up. Specific gospel, word, or writ would change; would be abandoned, turned in for some new model. The despair and disillusionment remained the same. They’d come back onstage in patched old clothes, telling the same crusty jokes (“Then we must hang ourselves immediately”), and what else could you do but listen, laugh and, afterward, cry?

  As Himes’s articles grew more strident and posturing in this period, so too did the stories. In “All He Needs Is Feet” (1943) a black man, because he will not step off the sidewalk to let a white couple pass, has his feet doused with gasoline and set afire and consequently loses them. At the end of the story another white man becomes enraged when the man fails to stand for the playing of the national anthem at a movie theater, even though it is pointed out that he has no feet. In “Christmas Gift” (1944) a father and husband returning decorated from the war is senselessly beaten to death by two white sheriff’s deputies who refer to him only as “the Stevens nigger.”

  With stories like these, and with the far more accomplished “All God’s Chillun Got Pride” (also 1944), Himes began to edge toward his belief that racism is so endemic to American society, so much at its heart, that nothing short of programmed violence could ever erase it. This Himes is very close to the Himes of the Harlem novels, to the fulminating culmination of Blind Man with a Pistol and the apocalyptic “final” Harlem novel Plan B. Pitting Grave Digger and Coffin Ed against one another, Plan B tells the story of that necessary programmed violence: America’s second revolution. Left unfinished at Himes’s death, it has been ably completed by novelist and Himes scholar Robert Skinner.

  Soon with If He Hollers, all these strains, Himes’s own experiences in the L.A. shipyards and unions, his growing concern with racism as crippling and ubiquitous, the slow, inevitable failure of his marriage, would come together. Scooping up all of the promised land’s iciness, Himes threw it in America’s face, a snowball with the hard, hard rock of racism at its core.

  Not to put too keen an edge of romance on the thing, most writers by virtual definition are social if not metaphysical outlaws. They don’t make much money, they keep peculiar hours and habits; their very choice of profession makes for a lifestyle and a way of relating to the world that are rather outside the norm. This person living in a cheap room somewhere, burrowed in and obsessively trying to do what he does best, is necessarily at odds with much of the culture around him. As Frederic Exley, a man who knew better than most, pointed out, not only the act of writing but the enterprise itself sets one apart: “The malaise of writing—and it is of no consequence whether the writer is talented or otherwise—is that after a time a man writing arrives at a point outside human relationships, becomes, as it were, ahuman.”
15

  Writers, then, like many artists, choose to stand sideways to mainstream culture. All too often hardship and poverty, along with solitude, become part of the fallout they accept. Perhaps, too, they instinctively recognize that often the best work is done by outsiders, by those such as Tocqueville who move between cultures, by self-exiles such as Joyce and Beckett, or by those who stand so apart from their culture by temperament and perspective that effectively they become outsiders within it.

  In contemporary American culture where the writer becomes ever more marginal, it’s important to recall just how marginal a writer like Himes, a black ex-convict writing novels on themes and in manners no one seemed prepared to confront, was. Himes stood apart from America’s bounty long before he departed from America itself. For much of his life he lived on air, shuttling between cheap rooms or apartments and houses lent him by others, a chronic borrower (Ruth Seid recalls) as early as his Federal Writers’ Project days. Even Joe spoke of Chester’s habit of using people, especially women, without the least embarrassment or remorse. His early books earned little by way of advances; Cast the First Stone went begging for years; The Primitive knocked on door after door; most of the Harlem books appeared solely as cheap paperback originals in the States. Only late in life, with Pinktoes, movie sales and a steady income from foreign editions—even while his works were out of print in his own country—did Himes achieve some measure of comfort.

  “Dirty deals were Himes’ lot,” Calvin Hernton wrote in his introduction to the Collected Stories, “and he was consistently robbed. Broke most of his career, he was easy prey for the exploitative advance. Such was the situation with several of his nine Harlem novels … He wrote these novels quickly and sold them (practically gave them away) just as quickly, because he badly needed whatever money he could get.”16 In rhetoric reminiscent of his principal, Ishmael Reed remembers “the piddling advances, the racist distribution and promotional policies, the sleazy covers, and dumb jacket copy” that dogged Himes’s career that “make the promotional abilities of his publishers seem a step below those of the man who hawks hot dogs at the football game.”17