Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  By that time it was four o’clock in the afternoon and the telegraph office closed at five. In the meantime, I had been marched to the mess hall for my supper of stale bread, macaroni, and boiled cabbage, and marched back to my cell.

  Luckily, the warden couldn’t bear to see a woman cry. No doubt he thought she seemed to be a decent black woman and wondered how those decent black women always got mixed up with some no-good black man.

  * * *

  When I went into the waiting room, I saw at once that she’d been crying. Her body was trembling all over and her eyes looked huge and dark with anguish in her small heart-shaped face.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  We went back to police headquarters, where I had parked my car, and found a traffic violation ticket on it for parking overnight. I put the ticket into my pocket, started the motor, and drove back to the house.

  The young brother who wanted to buy the car was waiting for me on the porch. I knocked twenty-five dollars off the price because of the bent bumper and crumpled fender, and the brother was satisfied.

  Jean fixed a makeshift dinner and we ate silently. Afterward I said, “Let’s pack.”25

  This is another incident that Himes lops virtually whole from life to paste into The Primitive.

  At three-thirty he drove down to the corner of Fairfield Boulevard to buy cigarettes. On his return, when pulling from the curb, his front bumper caught in the fender of a new Buick Roadmaster that was passing too close on his left, and jerked it off. The Buick was driven by a white-haired white lady, dressed immaculately in a mauve-colored tweed suit that looked as if it might have cost more than he had earned from his second book—on which he had worked for more than a year. She was a very important person, and despite the fact she had been driving on the wrong side of a one-way street, and that her breath smelled pleasantly of excellent cocktails, she sent for a policeman and had him arrested for reckless driving. This not because she hated Negroes or wished to humiliate or harm him in any manner; simply because her husband was continuously cautioning her to drive carefully and she intended to prove by the record that she had done so.

  But he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t broken any laws. How could they arrest him?

  He found out shortly that to arrest him required very little skill. The policeman said, “Follow me,” and mounted his four-cylinder steed. “Shows what an ingenious people can do,” Jesse thought sourly as he followed in his battered jalopy.

  The desk sergeant set his bail at twenty-five dollars. “But I’m a well-known American writer,” he said. “You can release me on my own recognizance.”

  The desk sergeant said the law didn’t permit it.

  “Should have told him you were a porter, son,” Jesse reproached himself. “All Americans trust Negro porters and black mammies—even with their children.”26

  In its fictional avatar the incident occupies most of four pages, in its autobiographical about the same. Nowhere in Himes does the continuous dialogue being carried on among actual experience, recollected experience, and fictive reconstruction come closer to the surface. The Primitive, in particular—with its structural juxtapositions of what Jesse perceives or says and what he simultaneously thinks—calls into question this dialogue. And when the novel clicks to its end around just such a turnabout, rather like a couplet closing itself off—“‘I’m a nigger and I’ve just killed a white woman,’ Jesse said, giving the address, and hung up. ‘That’ll get the lead out of his seat,’ he thought half-amused’”27—we’ve long been prepared for it.

  At one point during this period Lurton Blassingame remained Chester’s agent, selling his story “The Snake” to Esquire, at another, Margot Johnson began representing him, sending around Black Sheep and The Third Generation. Richard Wright and family returned from a year’s stay in Paris. At some point, too, Chester and the Moons became terminally estranged. “Chester was really having a hard time,” Joe explained years later, “and the Moons were not very nice to him, or at least he thought they were not. Chester thought they turned on him like a poor relation … He harbored a grudge.”28 Richard Wright and family reembarked for France. Chester moved again, alone, to a room on Convent Avenue in Harlem. There, avoiding old friends, he went to ground, playing cards, cadging meals, and watching mindless TV with brother Eddie. Again—a failure.

  Where am I today? How did I get here? And tomorrow? (Never mind tomorrow.) Jean is there beside him when he turns his head, gone when he looks again. Then someone else, another woman. Today he had planned to … Sky outside, above, a blur. Street beneath also a blur. Feet moving along that street of their own volition, they know the way home. Still looking for a street he can understand. If only he could get that tune right. It’s a blur, too, like his voice, like the whole of last week, like these five years.

  Blur reigns.

  February 1952. The manuscripts of both The Third Generation and Black Sheep were making rounds of publishers, but that had come to be of little import. Chester faced the worst failure of all: his marriage was over. By April the overnight visits had ceased; he and Jean were living apart. “We should have done it a long time ago,” Chester wrote in a letter to Van Vechten late that year, “… Jean couldn’t bear the things I wrote nor the processes of my thought which caused me to write them.”29

  That summer I had convinced myself I was a failure as a writer, and poverty and loneliness and our enforced separation had convinced me I was a failure as a husband. After fourteen years of love and marriage we had lost each other. It was no one’s fault, really. We had been together longer than anyone expected. One might say my sins had caught up with me—the sins of pride and arrogance. And I was beginning to pay. Jean stopped coming to visit me and to support me, and I was faced with the necessity of having to support myself.30

  In his 1983 interview Joe likened Chester’s parting with Jean to their mother’s ultimate abandonment of Joseph Sandy. It was Estelle’s self-orientation that Chester perceived there, Joe said, her attitude that if her husband couldn’t take her where she wanted to go, then he was a liability and she’d just have to drop him and get there on her own.

  Well, I would guess—I am not sure about this, but I feel I have enough instinct to say—that Chester reached the point in the early 1950’s where he had become totally disillusioned with the American society. This was after he had published Lonely Crusade. He had come to the conclusion that it was impossible for a black person to succeed as a writer in this country, and he needed to leave this country. I think Chester also perceived that a black wife would be a handicap in Europe.

  Now, Jean is a nice girl. I know Jean very well, and I am extremely fond of her. Jean couldn’t help Chester do what he wanted to do in Europe, probably anywhere. So he said pragmatically, unemotionally, “Jean has to go. I’m going forward. She can’t help me, so I leave her.” And, he left her. I don’t think it was because he didn’t like Jean, or he didn’t care for Jean. It was a simple calculation, and Chester is like that on one level. Every thing that comes his way within sight is legitimate to be used to advance his goals.31

  As for Chester’s clamor over Jean’s being the breadwinner, Joe said, that was another of the points Chester picked, rather cynically, to play up to his audience, like his supposed guilt over the accident that blinded Joe, or his insistence that their parents’ discord centered on degrees of blackness. Jean indeed may have been the couple’s sole support, but for a brief period only, and Joe could not imagine Chester’s ever having been humiliated or bothered by this. “That does not strike me as consistent with his orientation to use people … There were so many times when he was using some woman to pay his bills and keep him while he wrote his books and lived the good life.”32 Chester could have been motivated simultaneously by shame at being kept and by gratitude to Jean, may have accepted her support as necessary in America while at the same time preparing to shed the skin of that support. Like the scientists in Destination Moon, he was lightening his load—du
mping chairs and control panels and provisions overboard—in order to take off. People have many layers, Joe said. They have a layer that’s pragmatic, utilitarian and exploitative, and they have another that’s sensitive, “made of guilt material.”33 And with that observation Joe touched, again, what is at the heart of Chester’s work, the very source of its amazing power: his ability to mine and shape into narrative, without losing any of their force, the many contradictions within himself.

  Chester would book passage to Europe exactly one year later, in February 1953. His father would die in Cleveland that January.

  Before her death in 1945, Chester’s mother Estelle had spoken of writing the history of her ancestors both black and white and had in fact begun making notes, material which Chester saw while in Durham visiting Joe. Soon he was talking about a story to be called “The Cord,” which would delve into the troubled relationship of parents closely resembling his own, the racial ambivalence that the mother had passed on to her sons, and her unnatural, investive attachment to one of the sons. This was the bare beginning of The Third Generation, of course, Himes’s instincts and intuition hitting on all cylinders as he groped his way toward new work. Later he would say of this book: “[E]ven if many of the scenes in the novel are based on real occurrences, the things causing and linking them, as well as the dramatic climax, are completely imaginary.”34 There’s scant record of the novel’s composition, but by late 1951 it had joined Himes’s prison novel on the great prowl, knocking at publishers’ doors asking to be let in. Its dedication was “To Jean.”

  The prison novel, submitted under the title Debt of Time, briefly called Solitary and finally Cast the First Stone, sold that April to Coward McCann for an advance of twelve hundred dollars. In November Himes sent three versions of the novel to Van Vechten for archiving at Yale. One, he said, dated from the years 1936–37 when he was just out of prison, one from 1939–40 following his WPA internship up till the time he signed on at Bromfield’s farm, and the Black Sheep version completed in 1949.

  Chester had gone back to work as bellhop at the New Prospects Hotel in Sullivan County, where he’d once contracted ptomaine poisoning. One night while filling in at the switchboard he received a telegram that William Targ, vice president and editor-in-chief at World Publishers, wanted to buy The Third Generation and was offering a two-thousand-dollar advance. Targ’s wife Roslyn would become Chester’s longtime agent, and remains so today; Targ himself later brought out a beautiful limited edition of Chester’s A Case of Rape, for many years the only available English-language edition.

  I had been saving my tips and had enough money for the fare back to New York. I went out to the kitchen and told the co-proprietor I was leaving, and went across the yard to my room and packed my bag. As I was standing by the gate trying to thumb a ride into town, he came out of the hotel and paid me what was due and had Joe, the other bellhop, drive me to the station in the old pickup.35

  Chester knew a few things now.

  He knew he couldn’t make it as a writer here.

  He knew that he’d been right when after publication of Lonely Crusade he’d made up his mind to leave for Europe.

  He knew that with the two advances he was, at least temporarily and by his own standards, rich.

  He knew he wanted to make love to a white woman.

  10

  Literature Will Not Save You

  By December of 1952, the money was mostly gone.

  In November, in the same letter to Van Vechten that discussed his and Jean’s separation, Chester wrote: “I am quite interested in a woman, Vandi Haygood … If all goes well and I get my divorce we will probably marry some time next year.”1

  In truth the divorce was put off a few years—until 1978, when Chester petitioned for same through the French government. Jean at that time lived in Chicago, on South Shore Drive. Papers had been sent her on September 23, October 3, October 27, and November 27, all of which she ignored; finally, at the French government’s request, a U.S. marshal was dispatched. Jean told the marshal that, yes, she had the papers, and that if Chester wanted a divorce, fine, but she was sixty-nine years old and she wasn’t going to do anything about it. She also complained over the papers being in French. Divorce was granted, according to article 237 of the Civil Code, on May 2.

  Neither did the anticipated (fanciful?) marriage to Vandi Haygood occur. In the wake of his windfall advance, Chester had grasped at the leavings of their old affair.

  I still had my room on Convent Avenue, but the first thing I desired now that I had money was to sleep with a white woman, and the only white woman in the city I knew at the time who was likely to sleep with me was Vandi Haygood. I had spent a weekend with her in Chicago many years before, when Jean and I had been living in Los Angeles. Vandi had been acting director of fellowships for the Rosenwald Foundation during the war while her husband, the director William C. Haygood, had been in the Army; and I had been given a Rosenwald Fellowship to complete my first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go. I had been to New York for some reason which I have forgotten, and on the way back to the coast I had stopped in Chicago and spent a wild, drunken week of sexual extravagance with Vandi, and for a time afterward she had genuinely loved me.2

  Now that wild, drunken week of sexual extravagance became eighteen months, extravagances likewise mounting, sweeping the two of them relentlessly along in a flood of heightened sensation and displaced passions.

  Blur still reigned.

  Vandi had become an executive for the International Institute of Education (called the India Institute in the novel) at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street in Manhattan, a screening center for government grants. Vandi always needed a man, “couldn’t go to sleep without a man beside her, any man,” and, divorced for five years, increasingly desperate, had just ended an affair with “a young Jew whom she had tried to get to marry her.”3 Neither Vandi nor Chester made much pretense that they were doing anything but using one another. Vandi was attractive, sexually uninhibited, terrified of being alone, self-destructive, white. Severely offtrack and balance, Chester grieved for his marriage as despair licked flames at his life and money burned holes in his pocket. His depiction of their affair in The Primitive on the one hand captures with clinical accuracy the animal-like, sexually obsessive, delirium-stained, and essentially heartless nature of their relationship while on the other, by means of superstructure and underpinning, elevating it to a kind of timeless myth: the particular and sordid become universal, tragic. Also at the heart of the book lies that identification of black man and white woman as damaged, perhaps irreparably, by American society which surfaces repeatedly in Himes.

  My book The Primitive was about our affair, and although it doesn’t tell the whole tedious story of my eighteen months with her, it gives the essence of the affair; in fact it is rather exact except that I didn’t kill her. I left that for her own race to do; they had already mortally hurt her before I began to live with her, and it was no more than right that they should be the ones to finish her.4

  Just such socially ordained destruction would become the central theme of A Case of Rape, but it was already in place in earlier work. Bob Jones’s lust and loathing toward victim-vamp Madge Perkins in If He Hollers reflects the force of threats both real and imagined to his manhood. As Milliken writes, Bob’s ambition is simply to live out the American myth of maleness as heroic fighter, leader of men, provider and protector of women—all things denied him by society. Lee Gordon in Lonely Crusade feels unmanned by his dependence on wife Ruth: “I like women who are women. I like to sleep with them and take care of them. I don’t want any woman taking care of me or even competing with me.”5 But with women who appear to him helpless and lost, women like Jackie Forks, Lee is compelled by a need to take care of them. Only by pitying her, by turning her into a symbolic Negro, can Lee feel equal to Jackie. She in turn experiences a certain nobility in giving herself to a Negro, deriving from the union that complex equation of sexual fulfillment and social
-sexual shame she requires.

  With the intensity of her need and her responsible position, Vandi Haygood was the perfect embodiment of all these contradictory urges. Beleaguered by fear and self-doubt—round her barking the mad and hungry dogs—Vandi used sex both to validate herself, in a sense to assure herself that she was real, to keep from fading away, and to punish herself for the faults of her character, her essential valuelessness. For Himes, in turn, sex with Vandi at different times could be used as an interpersonal weapon, could channel his rage against white men (getting even with them—Vandi taunted him over that), and could give form to his longing to protect this vulnerable, deeply hurt, powerless woman, for in one part of his mind Chester always saw himself as the courtly protector of his women.

  What we know of the affair, of those eighteen months, we know mostly from The Primitive. Himes had gone to ground for much of this time, avoiding old friends, drinking alone in his room or in cheap bars or wandering the city aimlessly. That The Primitive offers a symbolic depiction rather than a literal one, we take on faith. Still, given Himes’s own assertion that it was “rather exact except that I didn’t kill her,”6 as well as the evidence of so many actual events incorporated virtually intact, we take it on good faith.

  Here is Vandi’s counterpart Kriss Cummings from the beginning of The Primitive:

  The gold-plated Swiss clock on the nightstand whirred softly, curdling the silence of the small dark room. A woman stirred tentatively on the three-quarter-size bed, flung a heavy bare arm searchingly across the faded blue sheet. It encountered only emptiness. She became rigid, scarcely breathing, her nude body suddenly chilled beneath the two ample blankets, her emotions momentarily shattered by the blind panic she always experienced on awakening and finding herself alone.