by James Sallis
The taste of bile came up in my mouth in a tidal wave and I felt my scalp grow cold and prickly and my hair lifted from my skull. And the first thing I thought of was the line from The End of a Primitive: “Forgive her, God, she was a good girl …” And then, like Jesse, I was crying in the hotel telephone booth in great wracking sobs.8
How simply (as Wallace Stevens wrote) the fictive hero becomes the real.
Afterward Chester Himes must have hung up the phone, walked away, stood looking out on New York City thinking again about what this country was, what it claimed to be, and what it did to those who fell into the spaces and silences between. One gets the essentials of a culture, according to Alfred North Whitehead, not by looking at what is said but at what is not said, at the society’s underlying assumptions, those too obvious and implicit to be stated. Truth, he said, resides in those silences. This was forever the text Himes saw when he looked upon America: things unsaid, silent truths—the speechless and unspeakable. It was the text Himes went on reading, the text he went on writing, all his life.
An unpublished autobiographical fragment now among Himes’s papers in the Amistad collection at Tulane, reads:
When I was forty-five years old, I made the biggest mistake of my life. It had taken me 44 years to get away from the U.S. And less than two years later I went back. And that was the mistake I had never gotten over.
With the return to America Himes felt he had estranged everyone, exhausted every career and personal resource, burned every bridge, closed it all down. No one wished him well now. Whatever respect he had gained with his early work was lost. He was a writer no longer, and something less than a man. Likening himself to a laboratory mouse in a letter that March to Van Vechten, Himes wrote: “those long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”9 And in My Life of Absurdity, in recollection: “I wished that I could make myself into nothing so I could pass through life unnoticed, unhated, irresponsible.”10 Invisible, in a word, an ironic inversion of future writer Brightlight’s declaration in Himes’s early story “Prison Mass”: “I shall pass beneath this earth no common shade … I shall be no forgotten man.”11
Himes was in New York for most of a year, from late January to mid-December 1955, a year filled with leave-takings of every sort; with endless self-laceration, isolation, and profoundly asocial behavior, with a scant handful of new stories, with odd jobs from “the slave markets on Chambers Street”12 that could not have been other than degrading to a man of his age, accomplishment, and past ambition, and with seeing The Primitive through, traumatically, to publication.
From various pickup jobs Himes happened onto work as a substitute porter for Horn & Hardart, which at that time had over a hundred automats scattered about the city, then into a regular position as night porter at their location on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street, not a bad compromise for someone needing employment but wanting to keep to himself. Predictably he failed to fit in or to get along with management there, boasting in his memoirs that he was the best porter and the most disagreeable employee they’d ever had. He railed about payroll deductions, about bookkeeping errors, about white waitresses and supervisors. But he ate extraordinarily well, three quarts of orange juice and two dozen raw eggs along with leftovers from the freezer and fried chicken or steaks in a single shift, and after a while the supervisors learned to leave him alone. When one night a drunken policeman staggered into the automat waving his gun at Chester and the other two night porters, many of the things Himes saw on the street and many of the things about which he was obsessively thinking began to come together; they’d coalesce almost a decade later in his novel Run Man Run.
Here is the automat from that novel. Detective Matt Walker, drunk, has forgotten where he parked his car and, stumbling into “Schmidt and Schindler” at five in the morning, accuses the Negro porters of stealing it, shooting two of them for no reason and for the remainder of the novel pursuing the third, younger porter, Jimmy.
He pressed his face against the plate-glass window at front. Light from the Lord & Taylor Christmas tree was reflected by the stainless-steel equipment and plastic counters. His searching gaze probed among the shining coffee urns, steaming soup urns, grills, toasters, milk and fruit juice cisterns, refrigerated storage cabinets and along the linoleum floor on both sides of the counter. But there was no sign of life.13
Meanwhile, first in the company of Jamaican novelist George Lamming, whom he met at Van Vechten’s, then on his own, Himes had taken to spending his leisure time in Harlem, becoming reacquainted with the rich street life, the pimps, gamblers, prostitutes, and other hustlers he had known so well from his younger years, discovering that
I still liked black people and felt exceptionally good among them, warm and happy. I dug the brothers’ gallows humor and was turned on by the black chicks. I felt at home and I could have stayed there forever if I didn’t have to go out into the white world to earn my living.14
It’s chiefly from this period that Himes takes those impressions of Harlem he’ll use to such fine effect in the late novels. Just as references and asides in Cast the First Stone with its supposed contemporary setting betray a forties origin, so Himes’s Harlem in these novels (published 1957 through 1969) seems patently to date from earlier years.
Some years back Chester’s now-estranged cousin Henry Moon had written in a review for the New Republic that
For nearly a quarter of a century, Harlem has been widely publicized as the world’s most populous Negro community. At times it has been glamorized as a vast night club with gay and bizarre entertainment provided by the dancing feet and singing hearts of its carefree citizens.
….
Color there is a plenty in Harlem. And joy and pathos, beauty and ugliness, triumph and defeat, indifference and revolt, hope and frustration. Yet out of this melange, there has come no novel of enduring quality, no story which has probed deep into the social and economic conditions and given a representative picture of the community.15
Little could Moon have suspected that it would be Himes who would provide that very picture, though if decidedly not in any manner one might easily have anticipated. There was with Himes, after all, and always, what Ishmael Reed calls his “cantankerous, irascible, feisty, brilliant self,”16 the self that seemed forever to be snuffling after the most difficult means of conducting an affair, the most improbable way to go about writing a book, tree-strewn paths, boulders. Coming to believe that straightforward social realism could never depict the truth of the American Negro’s life, Himes called up parodic, folkloric elements common to African-American tradition to forge a new kind of narrative, one that might be able to get at the deeper, almost dreamlike realities: those things unsaid, those silent truths. Reviewing Lonely Crusade in 1947, James Baldwin had noted that it was “an ugly story but the story of American Negroes is a far uglier story and with more sinister implications than have yet found their way into print.”17 Himes would make damned sure they did.
Himes’s story “The Snake,” written some time before and triggered by an incident from Jean’s and his stay at Hugo’s ranch, sold to Esquire. In the story a woman kills her weak husband, who can’t satisfy her, and buries him on their desolate South Dakota land, then tries to lure his father to her bed. Two other stories of the time, “Boomerang” and “A Little Seed,” Himes based on Willa’s marital strife; these apparently remained unpublished. “Spanish Gin” tracks the winding down of a party among expatriates at Puerto de Pollensa, Majorca. Its protagonist surfaces periodically through alcoholic blackouts, uncomprehending that his companion has died in a fall in the next room, or that, drunkenly priming his alcohol cookstove, he has set himself (and the villa cat) afire. A brief vignette, “One Night in New Jersey,” follows a caretaker returning from a booze run to the summer camp where he and his wife work as caretakers; the sketch reads as though taken directly from life. “Daydream” with its shoot-�
�em-up fantasy of a strong black man wreaking vengeance on white Southern peckerwoods has been cited before, in Chapter 3. Fading to an insignificant black man sitting alone in his New York hotel room, the dream concludes:
“You are sick, son,” I said to my smiling reflection. After a moment I added, “But that isn’t anything to worry about. We are all sick. Sicker than we know.”18
After many rejections, Himes had finally sold The End of a Primitive to New American Library, receiving “a many-page contract that took all rights, hard-cover, paperback, domestic, and foreign,”19 all of it for one thousand dollars. In an accompanying letter Victor Weybright extolled the virtues of the author’s taking a small advance on “sizeable and continuing accruals.”20 He was still waiting for those accruals fifteen years later, Himes said. Difficulties with NAL’s editors, adamant to delete anything controversial from the book, cropped up immediately. Himes responded that in that case they might as well throw the whole book away, because it was all controversial and damned well intended to be so. He must have recalled those days he sat in Majorca writing his novel, thinking the whole while that he was finally giving them “something to hate me for.”21 “I want these people just to take me seriously,” he told John Williams years after. “I don’t care if they think I’m a barbarian, a savage, or what they think; just think I’m a serious savage.”22
Van Vechten’s birthday came that June. Penniless, and believing Carlo close to the only American friend he had left, Himes handcrafted a present for him, an engraved copper plaque he spent hours fashioning from a roofing square and polishing to a high shine with steel wool. On July 27 Willa departed for Europe. She traveled first to visit her children in Belgium, then took work, again in a medical office, in Paris; for a time, at least, she stayed in touch. Two days after Willa’s departure Himes celebrated his forty-sixth birthday by drinking both bottles of vodka Van Vechten sent him as a present.
The next day, he roused beneath the thunderhead of a massive hangover to receive galley proofs for The Primitive. It wasn’t only that the title’s tail had been bobbed; the whole thing looked like a different dog. Upon reading a few pages, Himes demanded to see his manuscript, getting it, he said, only after NAL became convinced that he wouldn’t turn over the galleys until they acceded. Apparently everyone in the publisher’s office had had a go at fixing up Himes’s novel.
Five separate colors had been used to edit my manuscript and I supposed each color was employed by a different copy editor. Thousands of stupid, senseless, pointless, mean, petty, and spiteful changes had been made …
It took days to restore my manuscript to its original form. Since the color green had not been used by any of the copy editors, I used green ink to restore all changes. When I had finished, my manuscript looked like a painting of a writer’s nightmare by Dubuffet. Then I had to argue heatedly, vehemently, bitterly for each restoration. To get my manuscript published with even the slightest resemblance it now bears to the original required more effort than writing the damn thing.23
That year, 1955, the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision on Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka making segregation in schools illegal was reinforced by its “Brown II” ruling that integration must be accomplished with “all deliberate speed.” In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks’s arrest upon refusing to surrender her seat at the front of the bus triggered a yearlong bus boycott by blacks that put an end to segregation on public transportation; it was spearheaded by Parks’s minister, the twenty-six-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Countermeasures against blacks came quickly; further arrests, cancelations of automobile and home insurance policies, firebombings, KKK marches. In 1956 came “The Southern Manifesto”:
This unwarranted exercise of power by the court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the states principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.24
And in 1957, in defiance of federal order, Governor Orville Faubus posted Arkansas National Guardsmen outside Little Rock schools to deny black children entry. Eisenhower pushed the issue, at last sending in over a thousand federal troops—the first time since Reconstruction that U.S. troops were in the South to protect the rights of blacks.
Also in 1955, the U.S. provided direct aid, military training, and more than $200 million to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, much of it to the Saigon government. In October, following a rigged election organized by the United States, Prime Minister Diem proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam.
“The novels of Chester Himes,” H. Bruce Franklin suggests,
together with the American critical responses to them, provide a kind of miniature social history of the United States from World War II through the days of the Black urban rebellions of the 1960s. Himes has been not only one of the most neglected of major modern American authors, but also one of the most misunderstood. In fact, it took those Black rebellions to make any significant number of critics realize that Himes is a major writer.25
Cotton Comes to Harlem, Franklin points out, was published in 1964, on the very eve of those Black urban rebellions of 1964–68. Five years then passed without new publication—as though Himes were waiting to see how they would turn out, Franklin says. In 1965, two weeks before his assassination, Himes met Malcolm X. In 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated; the following year Blind Man with a Pistol appeared, its subject patently “the Black rebellions, the political and religious leadership of the Black community … and the beginnings of an apocalypse.”26 Himes couldn’t carry through on the apocalypse; he tried in Plan B and bogged down hopelessly. But with the urban riots and stand-offs of the sixties, some had their first intimations that it was Himes’s world we had been living in all along.
There in New York in 1955 Himes peered into newspapers and watched the streets to see what might come of all this. Driven by newly aroused social expectations as much as by personal failure, he grew furious at the invidious racism about him: white cab drivers who refused to take black citizens to Harlem or to pick them up at all, restaurants denying service to black customers by simply refusing to see them, publishers turning away books by black writers. This confirmed everything Himes felt pacing across the bare floors of his heart. He sought out argument, confrontation, wrung dissembling’s neck. Sat in his “solitary room at the top of the Hotel Albert, where, except for the occasional sounds of revelry from my neighbors, I felt as remote from civilization as though I lived atop the Himalayas”27 and went into the streets like some anchorite down from his mountain, amazed at what he saw and forever apart from it. Ascetic? Scourged, rather. And if nothing human was alien to him, neither was it, now, a part of him. Chester Himes had seceded.
He had been trying for some time to obtain an overdue advance from Berkley Books for its reprint of If He Hollers. Finally he appealed to the Authors’ Guild, who straightened it out with a phone call. Himes went directly from the Berkley offices to a bank where he exchanged the publisher’s thousand-dollar check for traveler’s checks, and from there to the Holland America Line to book second-class passage for France. A week before departing, he had dropped by Van Vechten’s to have his photograph, the one that eventually appeared on the cover of The Quality of Hurt, taken. “How I could appear so young and happy I will never know,” Chester said.28
The S.S. Ryndam sailed at midnight on December 14. In Himes’s luggage were a new tweed overcoat for windy, raw Paris days, a brown and black tweed jacket, and charcoal brown slacks that would be a “second skin” for him, and newly printed copies of The Primitive.29
The book’s back cover read: “This is a powerful novel about a white woman and an embittered Negro man, each a misfit in his own world, whose desperate effort to find love ended in a nightmare of drink and debauchery.” Three brief lines were quoted from a longish blu
rb Van Vechten had provided: “… immense flow of intensity and passion; it must have been written at white heat.” Inside were ads for a Herbert Gold book, for Ann Petry’s interracial novel The Narrows, for Invisible Man and The Outsider, and for Hubert Creekmore’s saga of three generations of a Southern Negro family, The Chain in the Heart. It was Signet book #1264, and sold for thirty-five cents.
14
Beautiful White Ruins of America
“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and translate the passions which are its material.”1
T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and Individual Talent”—and by Eliot’s standards, Chester Himes might have been the very image of the imperfect artist.
But Eliot, for all the modernist trappings of his work, emerged from essentially late-Romantic notions wherein that conjunction of “perfect” and “artist” went unquestioned, a conjunction more likely, in our skeptical era, to bring knowing smiles. We might also suggest at this remove, apprised of the facts of his life, that Mr. Eliot plays hide-and-seek here, expressing in terms of general criticism something of the mask of propriety, of the life, he so carefully constructed for himself.