Surprising to some, Kimbrough was a member of the Communist Party. He wrote short stories for the International Writers Union magazine International Literature. When he met Chester, Kimbrough had just published a play called Georgia Sundown, about a militant black World War I veteran who gives his life to defeat white supremacy. Philosophical about the contradiction between his work as a lawman defending white property and people and his pro-black socialist convictions, Kimbrough puzzled to no end “how I managed to carry out a sworn duty and preserve my dreams.” Chester marveled at the balancing act as well, finding Kimbrough a “much better writer” than those accepted by Sterling Brown’s new anthology Negro Caravan, which reprinted his own story “The Night’s for Crying.”
Chester was concerned that the prison manuscript and indeed his own criminal past were sinking him. Louis Bromfield had dropped out of contact, and Chester wrote to Sterling Brown requesting that any reference to his prison record be removed from his author biography for Negro Caravan. His new agent in New York, Lurton Blassingame, a forty-two-year-old from Alabama who liked pulp fiction and had success by selling a novel called Chicken Every Sunday, was proving unable to help him crack the literary market. But Blassingame had little to work with. Given the difficulty of finding a suitable place to work and live, Chester had not produced anything as complex and layered as the early prison short stories “To What Red Hell,” “Prison Mass,” and “Crazy in Stir.” Even the racial-uplift journals Opportunity and The Crisis, which paid only a nominal fee for fiction and had limited audience reach, had said they were unable to use his material. “I have just about come to the conclusion that my destiny lies in hard work building up to one final everlasting explosion,” he admitted with exasperation.
No direction he turned to seemed fully satisfying. If the Communist Party opened for him a door of interracial collegiality and radical ideas, there was also the mechanistic bureaucracy connected to the organization’s national position, what was known as the “Party line.” Weeks before Germany had invaded Poland, the Soviets signed a pact with the Nazis. Earl Browder, the American Communist Party’s head, accordingly pressed for nonintervention in the war by the United States. That policy had plenty of benefits for black Americans, particularly loud advocacy of civil rights and antisegregation maneuvers. But after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the line shifted, and the Party’s black arguments decreased in volume, to the extreme point of countenancing segregated blood banks.
The fifteen hundred or so members of the Los Angeles chapter were led by an African American named Pettis Perry, a spectacled, scholarly man who reminded Chester of his cousin Henry Moon. With an organizational structure duplicating the electoral political divisions, the Los Angeles Communist Party grouped most black Angelenos into the Fourteenth Congressional District; the district “organizer” or head was another African American, Lou Rosser. Nationally, Communist activity was dominated by what culminated in a meeting in Tehran among Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt in December 1943: the “Tehran line,” with its antistrike pledges, was designed to keep war industries open.
Locally, however, the Los Angeles Communist Party had a dynamic policy shaped by activists like Dorothy Healey, who pushed the chapter’s attention toward issues like Loren Miller’s fight against the real estate covenants that kept blacks from living in white areas, police brutality, and the NAACP’s work against Hollywood stereotypes. Chester himself burned shoe leather to test racist hiring practices, by systematically answering in person news advertisements for positions for which he was qualified—that is, until the employers saw his face. That experience proved to him once and for all that L.A. was “as Jim-Crowed as Atlanta, Georgia.” For him, the new allies and new foes produced feelings difficult to contain and channel. He found the “mental corrosion of race prejudice” was leaving him “bitter and saturated with hate,” an inner roiling that worked its way into his fiction.
He befriended thirty-year-old Eluard McDaniel, who had published in Story magazine, and visited Hollywood on clothing drives for the Spanish refugees and on employment campaigns testing segregation laws. The jaunts on behalf of the refugees netted the men opulent cast-off wardrobes from Hollywood directors and producers. Dark-skinned, proud, and revered among the veterans from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for his ability to pitch grenades, McDaniel was a colorful man who had left Mississippi at ten and traveled the nation, arriving at San Francisco at eighteen. There, he attracted the attention of an innovative photographer twice his age, Consuela Kanaga, a white woman who enjoyed erotic photographic play by manipulating skin color and light. She helped McDaniel gain an education and in her company he entered circles of radical politics and high art. Chester would immortalize him as Luther Macgregor in the novel Lonely Crusade.
After a late summer political rally, featuring Charlotta Bass and members of the Indian National Congress, Chester wrote for the West Coast Communist newspaper the People’s Daily World. In wooden-sounding prose, Chester connected support for Indian nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru to the Party goal of opening up a second military front. While the latter was a key plank of the Soviet agenda of 1942, the former, immediate decolonization, was not. Chester was feeling his way and he felt compelled to reveal his own irrevocable proletariat standing—an utterly dispossessed industrial worker and an ex-convict. And yet, in his moment of peak fellow traveling, as unofficial Communist membership was then called in America, he wouldn’t choose class over race, writing that “regardless of the capitalist politics to split the unity of the people,” India deserved its independence from Britain. Chester was a double V internationalist.
Within a few weeks, he had worked through his position on the domestic colonial front. In a call to arms in Opportunity entitled “Now Is the Time! Here Is the Place!,” he recommended a dynamic plan: victory for the so-called United Nations (a collective term then used by progressives that included Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the fight against fascism) required black victory over segregation at home. He wrote, “Now, in the year 1942, is the time, here, in the United States of America, is the place for 13,000,000 Negro Americans to make their fight for freedom . . . to engage and overcome our most persistent enemies: Our native American fascists.” The turning point of the Second World War, the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad, was in the distance. At the moment when German Panzers were within a hundred miles of taking the Soviet capital of Moscow, Chester didn’t want to be labeled strategically naïve. But for Chester, without a home front victory, the future could hold only a major or minor version of Nazism.
He began his article with an apology to his past: “the character of this writer is vulnerable, open to attack, easy to be smeared.” In the Urban League’s house journal, Chester explored, using euphemisms for the word “Communist,” the Party’s backpedaling on black rights, as well as the credulity gap between what committed socialists argued was realistically necessary to defeat the Nazis and what was idealistically necessary in the future to implement socialism in the United States. He described this two-step dance as the “fight to preserve and make strong a form of government which will never serve the purpose for which one fights, and as a consequence, after the victory for its continuance is attained, must be overthrown and replaced by another form of government.” Chester suggested such a doctrine was incomprehensible.
After the article came out, Chester would begin to trust his own vision, shorn of bourgeois propriety and Party politics. His best short story in several years went also to Opportunity, where, in a sense, he was remaking his name. Increasingly he wanted to find the backbone of white liberal motive. “In the Night” dramatized an interracial Communist cell in Los Angeles, where the black worker Sonny Wilson faces the unwavering force of racial discrimination in the aircraft industry, a shut door that threatens his capacity to have congenial relationships with whites at all. Although Sonny studied for several months and passed the necessary examination, he can’t earn a skilled position. (At Lockheed’s
Los Angeles plant, the International Association of Machinists included in their induction ritual a decree to pledge only “qualified white mechanics.”) Sonny’s white Communist comrades have to understand the motivation that got them beyond bigotry and into a radical movement. Chester’s fiction explained that unconscious libidinal desire prodded the whites to join. A white Communist named Carol needs to fulfill maternal drives: “she would mother the entire Negro race; or, if not that, give birth from her own deep love to an entire new social order.” A man named Andy has a “queer sympathy for the underdog, sensual in its development.” What all of the young Communists lack is toughness, the quality that might elevate their convictions beyond a self-serving affection for the downtrodden to the will to transform a nation.
The principal voice in Chester’s short story belonged to Cal, a black Communist who distinguishes himself generationally from twenty-year-old Sonny with a curious atavistic quality. He tells his comrades that when push comes to shove, his skill as an old-time Negro will rescue him: “I can revert. I can go raggedy . . . somebody will have to take care of me. I can walk down the street and whistle. I can stop in front of a joint where the juke box’s playing and cut a step of off-time boogie and listen to the white folks say, ‘Look at that nigger dance.’ ” Sonny, who silently observes the discussion, is the modern black citizen, incapable of Uncle Tomming. Himes ends the story by implying that without this younger, more virtuous, tougher man, “the revolution had never seemed so far away.”
As evidence of his own distance from “revolution,” Chester exclusively published in the NAACP’s Crisis in 1943, even if the journal was an excellent place to counter stereotypes and caricatures. Founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910, the magazine was edited by Roy Wilkins. Sterling Brown sat on the advisory board. The Crisis kept Chester’s name and salty approach to life before Henry and Mollie Moon’s set of liberal reformers, a connection that would soon pay dividends. Humorous and slightly farcical, Chester’s “Lunching at the Ritzmore” joked about the scientific reluctance to concede to the reality of racial discrimination, which could be overcome by a combined mass movement.
“Two Soldiers,” a short story of a black martyr whose heroism reforms the abject racism of a southern white soldier, was published in January 1943. Two months later, Chester published a folk allegory of the generational conflict called “Heaven Has Changed.” Instead of heaven as a place where race strife and hard labor have ended, Jim Crow reigns unabated. The short story seemed shaped by conversations Chester had had with his father, who was more Theodore than Franklin Roosevelt, stoutly religious, pro-business, pro–Booker T. Washington, and reluctant to protest publicly against racial discrimination. Chester reflected on the problems of material and aesthetic differences between the generations, from the picket protest against the “little God” Jim Crow to the fight between enthusiasts of spirituals and the children of hot jazz. “Led by Uncle Tom’s son, they threw down their sacks and rebelled and organized a procession and marched toward the big manor house where the Big God lived.” Although the resolution of the story was indecisive, his ear to reproduce speech, tell a joke, and identify black divisiveness had grown sharper.
Chester worked hard at home in 1943, and Jean alone seems to have carried the financial load. In fact, they were on completely different employment trajectories. Loren Miller’s wife, Juanita, was a consulting supervisor for the city housing authority and through her influence Jean soon secured a white-collar job as a civilian war aide and community services director at a large, racially integrated housing project at Pueblo del Rio. On Jean’s initiative the community center strengthened its curriculum with a ceramics class, taught by a University of Southern California professor, that attracted the attention of the press and the Los Angeles Museum of Fine Arts. While Jean had always excelled in the role as Chester’s adoring fan, as a professional making decisions in the workplace, she reached a milestone in development unconnected to him. In some portions of their lives together, she had represented herself as helpless and devoted, which inspired Chester’s masculinity. But when she began to trump his prestige regularly in the nine-to-five world, insecurity began to gnaw at him. Chester was irked because Jean was “respected and included” by her white coworkers, and now clubby with “well-to-do blacks of the Los Angeles middle class who wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole.” Chester almost certainly meant finely mannered Juanita Miller, a slender, light-skinned USC graduate, with an advanced degree in social work, and a charter member of the USC Delta Sigma Theta chapter.
Simmering on the inside about his marriage, Chester was even edgier as he noticed the neighbors around him. From their De Garmo Drive retreat, Chester observed a new phenomenon—whites living down the hill looking up at him with what he took to be envy. Like other disgruntled black Americans, especially in the cities, a part of him savored every Japanese victory and the sight of humiliated, frightened white people. Chester put aside his prison manuscript and started thinking about a new short story, something that showed white fear.
The tension within the city that spring—as eager black and white Southern migrants poured into defense industries, and the Japanese military was keeping the U.S. Navy at bay in the Pacific—created new problems for the artist. First, on May 19, Los Angeles’s stolid, unimaginative Mayor Fletcher Bowron addressed the city over the radio and kindled racist hysteria. “When the war is over,” he told Southern Californians, “some legal method may be worked out to deprive the native-born Japanese of citizenship.” He continued even more worrisomely, “The Japanese can never be assimilated. . . . They are a race apart.”
Animosity to other ethnic groups was cresting as well. During the first week of June 1943, initially dozens, then hundreds, and ultimately thousands of uniformed white servicemen descended on L.A.’s Mexican and black neighborhoods, stripping and beating so-called zoot suiters and anyone else who got in their way. The sailors—members of the U.S. military branch that still proudly prohibited blacks from any other job than servant—marched on Central Avenue for a week, pulling men and boys out of theaters and restaurants, thrashing and terrifying them. Not only did the Los Angeles police refuse to intervene, they were observed using nightsticks on disabled Latino men and on Latina women carrying infants in their arms. The conflagration, at a hot spot at Twelfth and Central, seemed eerily similar to the race war promised by the Nazis. Surprisingly no one was reported raped or killed.
In an article for The Crisis, Chester, an “eye-witness of the recent riots in Los Angeles,” schooled the NAACP’s audience on the West Coast violence, which was framed by the mainstream media as juvenile delinquency suitably corrected. Less compromising than before, he defined the brutality as a home-grown Kristallnacht, characterized by “the birth of the storm troopers.” Down the hill from Chester’s home in City Terrace was the Belvedere neighborhood; after getting off the “P” streetcar there, Chester often waited at Rowan Street to catch a cab for a quarter ride up the hill. The cabstand had become a flashpoint for the attacks. Chester believed that the police, corralled briefly after the Sleepy Lagoon case, a recent murder investigation in which they were found to have coerced confessions from young Chicanos, wanted badly to harm the Latinos, but instead “got the sailors to do it for them.” While the rioting flared, Chester sat on his steps with a Winchester rifle, looking down into Belvedere, waiting to see if his white neighbors below would make good on their threats.
But his rifle always deferred to his typewriter. Charlotta Bass’s California Eagle caught up to him, proud of Chester’s legendary absorption, his unwillingness to allow “aimless bridge games, barstools and telephone sessions” to derail the solitary task of writing. More and more now, he gave his mind over to the possibility of the ugliest racial violence breaking out. He eased his fears by toying with an idea for a story that amused him, “the compulsion making a Negro kill white people, most of whom he didn’t know and had never seen, simply because they were white.” There were few writers o
r intellectuals he knew to whom he could describe such a plot. To his NAACP friends, he said he was working on a novel about the growth of a black writer.
As Chester achieved more recognition from the black middle class, he became friends with Bill Smith, a roustabout newspaperman from Kansas City. White-looking and belligerent, Smith had roughed around, managed to complete three years at the University of Kansas, and landed in Los Angeles in his late thirties still seeking his fortune. He carried a heavy chip on his shoulder. Like Chester, as a young man he had turned his back on respectability, squandering the chance to join his stepfather as physician on the staff of a hospital that he directed. But by the mid-1940s Smith had turned in the direction of propriety and married Helen Chappel, a Wilberforce University graduate and sorority president, who wrote for the California Eagle and had been appointed to the Los Angeles Youth Commission.
Helen had probably met fellow Ohioan Jean through the network of city recreation centers and learned that she was married to the man who wrote for Esquire and The Crisis. A “beautifully brown” professional woman like Jean, but one who did not cook, Helen invited the Himeses over for dinner. When they arrived she told them about her husband Bill’s lengthy manuscript, abandoned in the garage.
Bill Smith too had been shocked and outraged by the Japanese internment, which struck him as “the ruin of a golden dream.” Smith admired Chester’s pluck, the fact that he had “refused to be stopped” as a bold writer when up against “cultural segregation.” He recalled, “For years I had pulled back,” but Chester had “stubbornly shoved ahead.” Finally Chester had a colleague with whom to discuss the accumulated rage he felt. They argued about the best method to advance racial equality and publish unrestrained prose. Smith thought of Chester as a combatant, a person who believed that “you had to slug until something gave.” Not faint of heart when it came to slugging, Smith felt that he had reached a point where public combat was unfair to the well-being of his wife and two children. “What’s the matter . . . scared?” Chester sometimes taunted him. “Perhaps,” answered Smith honestly. Childless and married to a woman who had known something of street-corner life, Chester didn’t have the same problem and became known as the person always edging the discussion toward “thunder.” Chester paid back the compliment of his high personal regard for Smith by writing “he was that type of mulatto black who will shoot a white man on sight.”
Chester B. Himes Page 18