Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  The bleak prison monotony, the gray uniforms, the gray days, inside the gray barred walls of the gray city, gave over to electric moments of excitement and horror. Many of the convicts, and especially the men sentenced to life terms, were desperate and prepared to risk death for the possibility of even brief freedom. Opportunities to escape were regarded seriously. Pat McDermott, a murderer considered one of the most dangerous inmates, scaled the walls with two other murderers and two armed robbers. They were at large for several weeks during Chester’s second month in prison. Later on, the guards in the yard shot and killed a black convict during a scuffle, and prisoners briefly overcame the guards in a recreation room and held them at gunpoint, until one fearless captain restored order, clubbing some men into submission and emptying a revolver into others. Then, on February 28, 1930, Dr. James Howard Snook, an Ohio State professor and gold medalist at the 1920 Olympics, was electrocuted for the murder of a coed. The men yelled obscenities at the professor as he passed on his way to “the cooker,” as the convicts dubbed the electric chair. During the five full years that Chester stayed in the penitentiary in downtown Columbus, the death house and its “lightning ride” was the final destination for about forty-five men.

  The guards attempted to enforce extensive rules—no whistling, no talking in line, no talking after lights out—to regulate behavior and demonstrate their control of the yard, but they were outnumbered by the often unruly men. All the myriad rules were negotiated and renegotiated. Prisoners feared deadly violence from one another more than from the guards. Typically each imprisoned man armed himself with a homemade knife called a “chiv,” and other assorted blades and clubs. The convicts ridiculed the warden and his staff, the prison doctors, and the chaplain, sometimes appropriately so, as men unfit for life outside of the prison. The professionals were flawed and unable to operate in the legitimate corporate or government world; the guards were too inept to perform as policemen or soldiers. The authority of the guards—themselves only a step beyond poverty—and other employees of the prison lay as much in coercion as it did in willful submission and cooperation. They were known to use the extralegal tactics at their disposal: prevarication, theft, brutality, and murder. But they also urged on friendships and cultivated relationships with prisoners. All were given the honorific title “captain.”

  The warden of more than fifteen years, Preston Thomas, liked telling the men during the chapel services “in these hands I hold your destinies.” He struck the bulk of the convicts as corrupt, a profiteer from narcotics trafficking who allowed men like Toledo gangster Thomas Licavoli to run the prison. Chester described the warden as an addling big man wearing on his ring finger a diamond as big as a robin’s egg to make plain which side of the law he believed in. It would require the governor sending the National Guard to the prison to make Thomas finally resign in 1934.

  Chester’s attitude after his first year and a half was still one of furious adjustment and depression. When the 1930 census was taken, for example, he claimed ignorance of the state his father had been born in, and he told the census enumerator that his mother hailed from Missouri. He spoke his name so that it was written “Hines.” He amused himself with the nonstop gambling games; the colored men’s favorite was Georgia Skin. The game went on all day and night in the Black Bottom part of the dormitories. Good with cards, Chester saw himself as a distinctive, educated man among hoi polloi, who gave him his due. The men flattered him and he enjoyed receiving it. “I didn’t get anything but what I had always wanted most in life, and that was adulation,” remarked Jimmy Monroe, the main protagonist created from his prison experience.

  However, having little in common with the foreshortened aspirations and poverty of so many of the men, Chester was lonely. In prison the saying went that after the lies swapped in the halls during the day, “the night’s for crying.” Being half afraid of his fellow inmates and terrified of showing any weakness didn’t help. Chester took the point of view that it was nearly always safer to defy the guards than the convicts; men were killed in the dorms over petty arguments and minor discourtesies. A middleweight and not noted for his physical power, Chester walked the prison ranges and yard with a six-inch “deterrent” blade. After having been sent to the hole a number of times by a deputy, he back-talked to one of the range guards and was hit in the back of his head with a “loaded stick and the concrete range came up and touched my nose.” Surviving imprisonment would require incredible poise and no small degree of luck.

  Shortly after the evening meal on April 21, 1930, Himes and his comrades in the dormitory above the barbershop and bathhouse, a narrow, long brick building with a wooden roof north of the chapel, heard shouts of the men in the G and H cell-block tiers. When they looked outside, they saw smoke. A fire had broken out right beside the scaffolding being used to construct more new cell blocks. The vaulted ceiling of the upper ranges of that building, constructed in slate over top of wooden timbers, had ignited. The guards, not realizing the urgency of the moment, only released prisoners haphazardly; some guards, believing that it was hazardous to release any prisoners, resisted efforts to open the cells. When the correctional officers finally understood the dangerous extent of the fire, they began unlocking the cell blocks of the bottom ranges first. By the time turnkeys had reached the third and fourth tiers, the heat and smoke were unbearable, except to a few intrepid convicts, who had begun wetting blankets and racing along the ranges with hammers to smash the locks so as to free the men. Doomed, screaming men rammed their heads into the toilets in a futile attempt to escape asphyxiation and death by fire. But the upper-range rescue efforts were not even piecemeal; the fifth and sixth tiers of the G and H cell blocks were completely incinerated. Adding to the overall sense that the prisoners were willfully sacrificed, Warden Thomas patrolled the locked gates outside of the prison with a shotgun, preparing to fire on the first convict daring to climb over the walls.

  After the city fire department used high-pressure hoses to extinguish the blaze, the entire roof structure and top tier of the G and H cell blocks collapsed into a pile of charred rafters, joists, and heat-twisted metal bars. In the two-hour span before the fire was extinguished, 322 convicts perished. By nightfall, stiffened black-faced corpses with twelve inches of green vomit stretching from their teeth to their chests littered the prison yard. The Ohio Penitentiary prison fire would rank among the greatest incidents of death by fire in U.S. history. With seven of every fifty prisoners dying in the conflagration, the clerk made up a special stamp for the prison ledger. He used it to fill in the column “When and How Discharged”: “DIED in FIRE APRIL 21, 1930.”

  Radio networks set up stations outside of the yard and gave prisoners a chance to tell their stories, like prisoner 46812, who produced such a vivid account he received a check of $500 from the head of CBS. That night and the next, prison discipline did not exist inside the walls. High on diluted ether purloined from the penitentiary hospital, the men refused to be locked in their cells. They had sex, shot dice, and played Cab Calloway on the organ in the chapel. On the fifth tier of cell block C a convict named Broadway Rose staged lewd shows and set up a red-curtained bordello.

  The day after the fire khaki-clad troopers from the 166th Regiment of the Ohio National Guard began to arrive outside the prison, relieving the hastily called in and weary police. But after the phantasmagoric night of “bitchery and abomination” and leveling the power of the guards, the men declined to return to their work companies. More than a thousand convicts elected a “Forty for Facts” Committee and initiated a “passive resistance” campaign to enact an agenda of prison reform, including the removal of Warden Thomas. Cries of “down with the pig” percolated throughout the yard. On April 28, Warden Thomas brought into the main yard hundreds of heavily armed riot squads with ring-handle .45s and machine guns to quell the protesting men. One thousand men continued their calls for the removal of the warden in the white painted cells of the A, B, C, and D blocks, a section known as “Whit
e City.” The prisoners, termed “belligerent” by the warden, sabotaged the lights and fought guards for thirty-six hours; some of the men took the opportunity to begin seriously digging to try to escape.

  On May 1, the National Guard took over the prison, routing the belligerent prisoners from the hovels of White City and herding them into the yard. The renegades were searched and stockaded in tents on the ball field, enclosed by a hastily assembled chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. A week later, on May 7, the stockaded men burned the tents; Warden Thomas declined to use any firefighting equipment, and punished 150 of those determined responsible with lockdown in White City and bread and water rations. The rest of the men remaining in the stockade slept on the ground. Around 6 A.M. the next morning, a guardsman accidentally squeezed the trigger of a Browning water-cooled heavy machine gun, releasing several 30.06 rounds into the heads of two convicts, one a Cleveland black named Albert Freeman who was working in a dormitory on the other side of the prison yard. The commandant of the 166th gave only the slightest notice to the killings. The gruesome deaths touched a deep nerve in Chester, pensive and maddened after surviving the apocalyptic fire, only to be confronted anew with random, purposeless death once more. Guard units manned machine-gun posts in squares around the stockade until May 27.

  Perceiving himself the scapegoat for the public relations nightmare of state malfeasance, corruption, and overcrowding, Warden Thomas turned his attention to the “small rebellious army” of prisoners and began a plan of reclassifications, transfers, and sending the leaders of the resistance to the hole. By the middle of May the prisoners were reassigned and soon twenty-five hundred men were lined up in the yard, rolling gravel all day. A year later two prisoners would receive life sentences after pleading guilty to second-degree murder, confessing that they had rigged the roof fire in an attempt at escape. Ultimately, they committed suicide.

  The bustle of construction, new concrete ceilings for the cell blocks, and state-sponsored reform commissions occupied much of the Ohio inmates’ interest for the duration of 1930. Shortly after the fire detritus had been cleaned up, in June executions began again, ending the lives of seventeen-year-old Lee Akers and of George Williams, both black and from Cleveland, each convicted of killing a police officer. Surrounded by death and ruin, Chester yet had no idea if it was possible to wager on the future.

  The Negro inmates were the recognized heroes of the calamity, and individual blacks were credited with saving dozens of inmates from the flames. But in 1930 Chester did not draw from his racial background as a source of unique strength, pride, or identity. For him, the baffling terror of the deadly night magnified his loneliness and childlike vulnerability. Hardly imperturbable, he used two words over and over again to describe his new feeling: “queer” and “hysteric.”

  Chester’s writing career seems to have its impetus in the fire and his attempt to cope with the trauma he had witnessed and his internal feelings of horrifying shame. The 1934 short story “To What Red Hell” and the two novels drawn from the same manuscript—Cast the First Stone and Yesterday Will Make You Cry—position a main character, a surrogate for Chester named Jimmy Monroe, in the laundry-and-barbershop dormitory, a two-story brick building separated by the chapel from the main cell blocks that were on fire. In these tales the protagonist wanders the yard, observing the spectacle of the dead and dying, the heroic and the indifferent. Chester’s character Jimmy, a young, attractive boy serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery, has a stark awakening while witnessing the men dying in the fire and gaining the brief freedom available during the chaos. He tells of being unable to bring himself to rescue anyone, and he sees himself as morally feeble and emotionally distressed, unable to contain a desire he considered perverse, thrust into a world of “grotesque fantasy.” But if the inferno of horrifying death was imminent and likely, what value should he attach to noble behavior and restraint?

  In Cast the First Stone, Jimmy Monroe insists that a dormitory mate accept a passionate kiss and then tells him, “I want you for my woman.” If Chester, like Jimmy, had once thought “I haven’t got to the place where I can do that yet,” after a year and a half of prison and a devastating fire, he could have Jimmy say that homosexual acts did not “even shock me anymore.” The deadly prison fire loosed a homoerotic impulse in Chester that marked the middle period of his prison experience, and in his later detective fiction he would frequently remark upon the conjunction between eroticism and death. When writing his memoirs he allowed that “no one tried to rape me,” but what shifted in him internally following the fire was far different than relief at escaping attacks from predatorial convicts. The fiery explosion and his deep need for emotional contact certainly corresponded to Joe Jr.’s blinding and the loss of his brother and ultimately his mother as confidants. But clearly Chester no longer found the homosexual practices objectionable on principle. Instead he considered uncoerced situational homosexuality in prison a compensatory and human reflex to the despair of life behind bars. But this acceptance was difficult to handle.

  Writing was one activity that helped him overcome lonely isolation and puzzle through the welter of emotions after the fire. Chester started putting pencil to paper on the ground floor of the E and H cell block in the crippled company. His efforts to deal with the personal tragedy of incarceration, loneliness, physical vulnerability, the conflict of homosexual desire, and the gruesome slush of human entrails in the yard during the long night of April 21 launched his writing career. The prison fire itself served as the imaginative ground for the best of his earliest successes, “To What Red Hell,” which in turn served as the bedrock for his first full manuscript, Black Sheep. He must have begun drafting the short story soon after the fire to preserve the sharp details of the event, but considering it was apprentice work, it is also polished and sophisticated. As Estelle the sonneteer’s precocious son, Chester had experimented with composition before, but even the trauma he had known—the trampled young girl in Alcorn, his brother’s blinding, the multiple arrests, the pregnant girlfriends he had abandoned, even the prisoners he had seen gunned down by guards—did not inspire him in the manner of listening to the shrieks of the dying, stumbling through the gore of two cell block tiers’ worth of burned alive men, and living in its aftermath. He had the seed of a searing emotional experience to drive his ambition.

  Twelve months after the fire, Chester found another reason to ready himself for a life beyond bars. In April 1931, the Ohio legislature passed three laws expediting parole by reducing sentences for good behavior and applying the relief retroactively, thus addressing prison overcrowding. “Under the provisions of the parole law every inmate of a state penal or reformatory institution automatically becomes eligible for a hearing before the Board of Parole at a specified time, determined by the statute under which he was convicted and his prison record, except, of course, those convicted of treason or murder in the first degree,” read the warden’s annual report to the governor, reflecting the new legislation. All of a sudden, Chester’s twenty-year minimum had dropped to six years and five months. The night the word of the law’s change was announced, the prisoners’ ebullient cries could be heard all over downtown. By the middle of September, the penitentiary newspaper counseled the overanxious, bellyaching inmates to “take it easy,” predicting that the newly enlarged parole board would start meeting in a week and begin paroling men.

  Chester celebrated too early. On September 17, 1931, he was taken before a prison court and punished by having fifteen days added to his original sentence. Although Chester was silent about this infraction, technically men could have their sentence extended for infractions as simple as talking out loud, although most were simply punished on the spot, demoted from a work assignment, or sent to the hole. Still, he had no cause to lose optimism at the end of that summer. Surviving the fire, and then having the sentence shortened by two-thirds, revived his pursuit of distinction. Upon hearing that his sentence has been dramatically reduced, Chester�
�s character Jimmy Monroe thinks, “having stared so long into the gray opaqueness of those solid twenty years, it seemed as if I could look right through them and see the end; see freedom in all its glory, standing there.” Now Chester would discipline himself for a new life.

  His initial determination to begin ordering his life through writing also had support from his family, some of it inadvertent. His back seized up on him, and the remedy was a partial body cast, an impossible solution in a prison with dilapidated mattresses and irregular convalescent care. Finding a rusty nail discarded on the hospital ward floor, Chester hacked off the plaster cast, infuriating the ward doctor. Fearful of reprisals, he begged Estelle to return to Ohio from a furlough in South Carolina to look after him, which she did. His workman’s compensation money allowed him to help his parents as the Depression worsened. Joseph Himes, looking thin and gray, paid a lone visit and moaned plaintively “if I just had my life to live over.” In fact, he would do just that. In May 1932, Chester’s father remarried, to a woman almost half his age, an entertainer from Baltimore named Agnes Rowe. The thirty-one-year-old singer of the Harmonique Five, who made her living in the clubs Chester had patronized in his street odyssey, had been divorced for only nine months. Rowe was glitzy enough to have the Chicago Defender carry news of the nuptials. Chester forked over four hundred dollars of his savings to his father.