Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  The inaugural issue in April carried Chester’s “With Malice Toward None,” the story of Chick, a boozy Negro who works in the library copying old records for the WPA. (Jean nicknamed Chester “Chess” and “Chet.”) Crossroad had declined into a quarterly by summer but, never lacking a manuscript, Chester gave them “A Modern Fable—Of Mr. Slaughter, Mr. McDull, and the American Scene,” his earliest unambiguous wading into the political crisis of relief. The story was a lumbering allegory that contrasted the positions of the conservative and unprincipled Republican senator Harold A. McDull with those of an unemployed worker named Henry Slaughter. Chester showed the culpability of the senator, who, after voting to end WPA appropriations to the poor, tells the press, “My God, politics isn’t fatal, it isn’t a matter of life or death!” Slaughter attempts to assassinate the senator and is taken to an asylum; the reader is playfully counseled to ignore the imminent class war.

  Chester was making a turn in the direction of class friction and local politics, only to have the pace of world events overtake him. After a tense series of standoffs, annexations, negotiations, and international bickering, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. France and Great Britain declared war against Germany two days later.

  With calamitous world events under way, the Depression and racial discrimination appeared more solvable. Chester had kept up talks—pleas, really—with the Cleveland press, and with Louis Seltzer in particular, through the summer of 1939. Fearing the end of his job on the WPA, Chester encouraged Jean to start searching for a job as a nanny, which they upgraded to a “governess.” Needing something that didn’t exist, Chester approached the Chicago Defender with some ideas for a serious national Negro magazine, “which would inspire Negro art and literature and give it an outlet,” a resource that would “serve the Negro race as much so as a contribution to a school or church fund.” But the newspaper couldn’t find the money. Chester resolved to apply for a job in Cleveland’s mushrooming defense industry, which would grow from sales of $15 million in parts in 1939 to $120 million a year later.

  Private industry, however, was comfortable with a high level of racial discrimination. Instead of joining the market of skilled laborers, Chester earned an education in “what racial prejudice is like,” an experience which left him teetering on the edge of violence. Queuing for jobs at the tool company Warner & Swasey, American Steel & Wire, and the Aluminum Company of America was an exercise in futility. Whenever his turn came, he learned that the employment directors lunched between 11:30 A.M. and 3 P.M., the plants weren’t hiring, or that he hadn’t apprenticed; other times, after several hours in line, he simply trudged away, finally accepting the implausibility of getting a job as the lone black man alongside a hundred white men. Any redress at all was impossible until President Roosevelt issued an executive order in June 1941 outlawing racial discrimination by industries with government contracts and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission. But the FEPC was only an investigative body that heard charges brought before it, not a council issuing orders and levying fines. In Cleveland, very little changed; even highly qualified black applicants found themselves “shunted away” from skilled heavy industry “by means of evasions, excuses, and at times through the use of deliberate lies.” Chester’s writing was increasingly fueled by the impotent rage he felt at the mountain of freshly created racial discrimination in the defense industry.

  With his full citizenship restored, his temperature boiling, and Jean seriously pursuing work caretaking white children, Chester began to look elsewhere for opportunity. When Henry Moon popped up for a visit in February 1940, Chester drank down his conversation like a “tonic.” Cleveland sapped his energy and he hadn’t been able to write but Henry’s tales of mingling with national leaders in Washington and celebrities in New York, shook off his gloom. His straitlaced cousin—now earning $3200 a year, and married to a woman who spoke German and had lived in Berlin—was a minor marvel. Well aware that his versatility as a writer might be the difference between success and burial in Cleveland, Chester closely modeled himself after his older cousin. He got a copy of Henry’s 1938 article “Negroes Win Help in Fight for Jobs,” and interviewed Future Outlook League president John O. Holly, hoping to submit a piece to Seltzer’s Cleveland Press. Pondering the successful application of boycotts and pickets to change the employment picture for blacks in Harlem, he jotted down a few articles about the WPA for the CIO’s newspaper, the Union Leader; Chester turned these into an examination of race and class in the arena of heavy industry. He also wrote the text of the Future Outlook League Second Anniversary Yearbook. By summer of 1940, Chester was putting his weight behind a combination of bold black nationalism and union organizing.

  He had a minor success that spring with an encore in Esquire called “Marihuana and a Pistol,” showing a jilted criminal planning a bank robbery to win back his girl but getting high and winding up butchering a confectionery store owner instead. The nugget of the story partly reflected on the episode that had propelled him to leave Estelle’s house in Columbus. Chester was warning American audiences of the next stage in mood-altering substances after the legalization of alcohol. Perhaps concerned to demonstrate in print the pristine quality of his own citizenship, he brought the jazz musician’s “tea” and “gage” into view as a social menace; the “jag” of inebriation would spur outlaws to violence. His story culminated in a bloody shooting sure to please Esquire’s readers. This winning story would result in the magazine’s acceptance of an inferior mobster story, “Strictly Business,” for more money, later that summer.

  As the Nazi Army raced across the Low Countries and overran France, “Looking Down the Street: A Story of Import and Bitterness,” appeared in Crossroad’s pages. It was another dirge about Cleveland Depression life without heat or food, where the protagonist urges on war to speed the end to a decade of grinding poverty. He now fully linked his work to the local scene. Mayor Harold Burton had ended food subsidies for thousands at the end of 1939 and the palpable signs of cruel deprivation lingered throughout the city, especially so in the black ghetto strip bounded by Fourteenth and 105th Streets along Cedar and Central Avenues, where 90 percent of Cleveland’s 84,000 blacks lived in barely passable housing.

  More intoxicating than anything that had happened to his writing career was an event in New York, the publication of a novel about a young man not quite dissimilar to Chester and written by someone whose early career arc had, up to then, so sharply resembled his own. The novel was Native Son, written by Richard Wright. Chester read it shortly after hearing his and Wright’s mutual friend Langston Hughes appear at the end of April to speak at Cleveland’s Lane Metropolitan Church about the sensational book. At the time, Chester was “attacking Esquire with wave after wave of manuscripts,” hoping to regain his national reach. About the novel that would sell hundreds of thousands of copies as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and change the commercial expectations of all black writers, Chester gasped, “Native Son—some book! It got me.”

  Native Son was so pungent that it demanded something new from Chester—a literary review—and in a new place, New Masses, the Communist cultural journal. There, he defended the book, which Wright, then a Communist Party member, was being chastised for on the far left for failing to show a successful solution to racism and poverty and, on the right, for his ingratitude. Wright’s chief Communist detractor was silver-tongued, pedigreed Ben Davis, a Harvard-educated black lawyer whose father had edited an Atlanta newspaper. Although Davis was friends with Henry Moon, Chester would never feel at home with the pretentious banter, from conservative or ultraliberal, of the black elites. In touch with the depth of his ugly life experience, Chester “felt called” to enter the national debate and “to express the feelings” that Native Son “inspired in me.”

  He sent in an essay too long to print. His opening sentence revealed a novelist’s sense of what Wright was doing: “Bigger Thomas came alive to me when he st
ood on the street in front of the poolroom and got a sudden glimpse of life, feeling it push down inside of him through his shell of hard indifference which was his only defense against it.”

  For the rest of his life, Chester would admire Wright and his vision, at least partly because the characters from Native Son on—oppressed black young men cut off from their peers—put onto paper so many dimensions of his life before Chester had reached middle age. Native Son gave Chester back to himself as a man not simply flawed but also oppressed, as someone not merely capable of explosive violence as a partial response to segregation, but also one who could use it as a serious-minded act of rebellion for full inclusion. Wright had redeemed him. “When a person can see and feel the beauty and importance of the vast, eternal, changing mystery of life, and yearn to be part of it, no one can truthfully say that person is a bad nigger with all the degradation which the chauvinist term implies,” he argued. As for the controversial parts of the book, the murders of a white girl and a black girl, they were “inexorable.” While, with the exception of Cast the First Stone, Chester was too embarrassed to ever structure a novel around a criminal protagonist, he knew the terrain of Wright’s creation—more so than any of the writers of the coming generation—and he reminded the leftist audience of the American citizens Wright called forth that had eluded their imagination.

  By then Chester had achieved a kind of poor black man’s literary celebrity in Cleveland. A Karamu-sponsored production, Pre-vue Worlds Fair Concert, on June 21 at the House of Wills on E. Fifty-Fifth Street, flattered him by including his work. Chester was indisposed and missed the event, but an elegant, voluptuous, and confident Jean Himes read one of her husband’s short stories. When she finished she was “quite swept away by the reception.”

  At that time, a wily New York literary agent named Jacques Chambrun wrote to Chester offering his services. Chambrun had read the anthology The Best Short Stories 1940, edited by Edward O’Brien, and found Chester’s “A Salute to the Passing” saluted with two asterisks—O’Brien’s designation of the work as a distinguished short story. Chester’s work hadn’t been reprinted, an honor reserved for the likes of Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter, but he was the only Negro whose work was honorably noted, and, sensing another Native Son, Chambrun looked him up. By the end of the month, Chester and Jean decided they would go east to D.C. and to New York, “what with Hitler looking westward.” Who knew but that like Augusta and the cell blocks, it would all be in flames shortly?

  Chester and Jean vacationed east during early July, as the Germans began their systematic bombing campaign of England, having already conquered France in six weeks. The Himeses went to New York first, where they roomed at the renowned Theresa Hotel, were squired about by Henry’s wife, Mollie, and looked up Chester’s long lost brother Eddie. Then they took the train to Washington, D.C., where they were entertained Midwestern style by Henry, with Carstairs beer and Vienna sausage canapés. In D.C. they drank toasts alongside Sterling Brown and housing advisor Robert Weaver. A professional social worker, Henry’s wife, Mollie, struck Chester as a babbling, haughty parvenu, even if she was gentle with her husband. Chester began to note her personal traits, especially what she ate and her figure; he would remember her habits and mannerisms at best with sarcasm, at worst with outright contempt. The Himeses left on Tuesday, July 9 for home.

  Back in Cleveland, some leftover grants allowed Chester to continue his FWP career on a subsidiary renamed the Ohio Writers’ Project. He had been transferred after a series of promotions and demotions, which Chester now thought were explicitly racist. At this new project, he received his assignments from a “big fat mannish woman who wrote detective stories.” She told him he had been sent to her to be quietly fired; instead she chose to route to him the tasks of the entire division, working him to the height of his capacity. Chester accepted the challenge and the legend of his work ethic was born. He would claim to have crafted “the entire history of Cleveland by myself,” but that manuscript, a volume he identified as the “Cleveland Guide,” has never been located.

  Another project supervisor was Ted Robinson, an editor at the Plain Dealer newspaper. Chester wrote a seventy-eight-page book on Recreational Opportunities in Cleveland and was told that he might begin collecting material for a larger campaign fleshing out the history of the Negro in Cleveland—that is, if he could produce a list of two or three thousand subscribers. The Ohio Guide, which he most certainly worked on, was published in 1940. “I found the job of editing the whole thing wished on me,” he carped to Henry, and by the fall it was “driving me nuts.” The work was bringing him in contact with journalists and professors working at Cleveland College and Western Reserve and Chester took their measure. He came to accept the fact that, in spite of his lost years and mangled education, he could hold his own.

  At the end of 1940, he would be kicked off the WPA, now not so much the victim of Congress as a technicality: he had exhausted his eighteen consecutive months on relief. With polished chapters from the prison manuscript, Chester approached Nathaniel Howard, the white editor of the Cleveland News, to write him a recommendation letter for an Alfred A. Knopf publishing fellowship, which Howard agreed to do. A tall, slender Oberlin graduate, Howard sported bow ties, served on the Karamu House capital campaign board, and played the blues piano in his spare time. A person who had covered the 1930 prison fire, Howard felt a connection to Chester and, eleven years his senior, offered valuable words of consolation. “Chester, you have paid the penalty for your crime against society,” Howard told him, “now forget about it.” A humble, friendly man who confessed his own errors, Howard engaged in discussions about race with Chester that must have made him pause at the knee-jerk racist stereotypes his hard-boiled white men, flesh of the flesh of Hemingway’s Harry Morgan, had so consistently articulated. Howard kept the conversation open with Chester and brightened his outlook. They would discuss the work of William Faulkner, a novelist who was growing, it seemed, more aggressively liberal and complicated on the race issue, and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. Chester considered Howard one of his “best friends” in Cleveland.

  Impressed by Chester’s ability and noting the difficulty for serious black writers, Howard offered Chester an arrangement where he could contribute regularly to the newspaper. The sprightly, local-color, 150-word vignettes of Cleveland’s street corners would appear under the header “This Cleveland” in the back pages. Chester regarded the opportunity with pleasure and, since he perceived that whites on the staff would protest if his race were known, he agreed to sign the columns simply “C.H.” Howard paid a dollar a try, and starting on November 6, 1940, fifteen of Chester’s prose poems appeared through the end of that month. He began as an expressionist, detailing local sites—“The Mall, from Rockwell,” and “Playhouse Square”—until one of the columns “drew blood.” “E.55th–Central” exposed the crossroad of black Cleveland:

  People coming from the drug store at the corner, from the bar next door where the good fellows get together, from the church on the corner where they’re having a revival meeting, from the undertaker’s where they are having a tea, from the doctor’s, the dentist’s, the dice game up the alley, the pawnshops, barber shops, beauty shops, butcher shops. Black people. Brown people. Yellow people. Waiters. Porters. WPA laborers. Number writers. Racket boys in long, green, shiny cars. With long, tan, shiny shoes. Transients, looking for the place where the long green grows. Must be somewhere where the long green grows. This is a paradox. This poverty, squalor, and huge sums of cash. This is drunkenness, wantonness, and a struggle to see the light. But above all, this is a pure and simple faith in the white folks and the days.

  The “boys down there blew their tops,” he explained to Henry, referring to the crack he made of black people putting their “faith in the white folks.” He also knew that references to “poverty, squalor” made few friends. But Chester had found something that he enjoyed, putting his thumb in the eye of prigs
too squeamish to admit any moral dirtiness. He continued writing on class politics when he nosed around the old Central Market to record the abomination of steel mill sprawl. In “Shaker Square,” a vignette on the upper-middle-class suburb, he levied a quieter accusation: “is there not a little of disappointment, of frustration, and hopes that have gone astray.” But the legwork, haunting cold street corners for a couple of hours to get the atmosphere, seemed to keep him from the novel, so he quit writing these “prose poems.”

  Chester took a job with Weil Coffee and Tea Importers, biding his time and hoping for the Knopf fellowship, or a plum such as when Mademoiselle editor Marion Ives showed her pleasure at his work and almost took a story. Chester continued to labor on the prison manuscript that winter, “struggling to inject continuity” into his 200,000-word “sociological novel.” But the glimmer of success—if his survival as a writer could be called that—was upon him. On December 14, his friends the Jellifes entertained a man who would be helpful in arranging Chester’s future beyond Ohio: William Converse Haygood, director of the fellowship division of the Julius Rosenwald Fund.

  The Rosenwald Fund was a large endowment left by Julius Rosenwald, one of the principal managers of Sears, Roebuck. Guided by Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald had started building schools and libraries in the South to improve conditions, but race prejudice was so thick that by the early 1930s the fund directors, led by President Edwin Embree, were extending individual grants to cultivate creative and intellectual talents. By the time the fund exhausted its principal in 1948, roughly fifteen hundred individual awards would be made. Chester, alongside virtually every talented black or white artist in his cohort with a curiosity about race in America, would receive one. William Haygood, an Atlantan who completed an advance degree in library science at the University of Chicago, doled out the money. “Grand” and “enthusiastic,” Haygood encouraged the Jellifes to submit a few applications to advance Karamu House’s work. There is good reason to believe that the Jellifes praised the local short story sensation Himes to Haygood. Excepting the well-known and intermittently present Langston Hughes (dividing his time between Los Angeles and Carmel by 1940), Chester Himes was the stand-out writer of the “Colored Belt”—the neighborhood around the Karamu House.