Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  By the middle of the summer, Chester’s thoughts drifted to the likelihood of having to serve in the segregated military, even though he had still not been called by the draft board. He let out the most generous and romantic elements of his imagination in the short story “So Softly Smiling,” a depiction of a nerve-frazzled veteran of North Africa falling in love and committing to Roosevelt’s version of socialism, the “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. “I—I don’t know just when it started, but I got to feeling that I was fighting for the Four Freedoms,” Chester’s character sputtered, finding his way. “Maybe I had to feel it; maybe I had to feel that it was a bigger fight than just to keep the same old thing we’ve always had. But it got to be big in my mind—bigger than just fighting a war. It got to be more like building, well, building security for peace and freedom for everyone.” Chester continued the homily of freedom and double V in two more short stories, one of them a humorously odd and slightly ghoulish set piece of black brutalization called “All He Needs Is Feet,” and the other, a throwback to his Cleveland WPA penury, “All God’s Chillun Got Pride.” Shifting away from the hard-bitten convict writer, he was solidifying a minor place now as the house wit for the black bourgeoisie, sometimes drawn to the far left, and often pulling in the direction of racial integration.

  While Chester made solid his position with the NAACP, his cousin Henry gained more influence in the powerful circles of government policy advisors, and was courted by the likes of Walter White and his efficient deputy Roy Wilkins. Mollie Moon had left her career as a social worker and had begun running an auxiliary organization for the Urban League, the Urban League Guild. There she created an annual Beaux Arts Ball, an interracial extravaganza of gaudy costumes, feasting, and music that brought out New York’s black elites and their white supporters and raised loads of cash for the Urban League. Mollie was also excellent friends with such influential whites as Edwin R. Embree, the director of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Additionally, the fund’s managers and advisors overlapped with the Urban League and prominent national interracial committees, granting Mollie much coveted social access to influential people.

  In Chicago in August 1943, Mollie attended a party with painter Charles White and Edwin Embree at Vandi Haygood’s home. Twenty-eight-year-old Vandi, a native of small-town Montana, was married to William Converse Haygood. When Haygood was drafted, Embree promoted Vandi to serve as acting director of the fellowship division of the Rosenwald Fund. She excelled in the position and became chummy with many prominent African Americans, like Horace Cayton, the director of Chicago’s Parkway Community House. In her circle of well-educated black and white liberal elites, Haygood was known for her sexual promiscuity and her heavy drinking. The same was said about Mollie Moon, with the addition of her appetite for good food. “Here I sit over at Vandy’s [sic]—both of us recovering from hangovers but mine not quite as bad as hers,” Mollie wrote to her husband about the Chicago visit. Then, insinuating the possibility of an affair with the black painter, Moon wrote, “I told her to ask for Charlie White and she did.”

  In November Chester applied for a Rosenwald fellowship, putting Henry’s name in the opening sentence of the letter addressed to Vandi Haygood. In pursuing the $1500 fellowship, which would give him the leisure and the confidence to write, he fully embraced his new identity as a racial uplifter. “During the past couple of years I have been writing short stories and essays for Opportunity (A Journal of Negro Life), and The Crisis,” he wrote to Haygood. Chester’s core impulse as a mature novelist was autobiographical and in the proposal he stated that he wanted to use fiction to examine his own life during the Depression and the early war years. He would give himself a break and erase his prison time, but the rest of the book, by and large, would depict his years in Cleveland and Los Angeles, as well as the stint at Malabar Farm.

  The novel would reveal the social evolution of Joe Wolf, a writer who happens to be Negro, but who becomes a Negro writer. At first Joe publishes short stories without black characters, desiring simply “success as an individual, not equality as a Negro.” Turned down as a reporter and hating his toil on a farm for a wealthy writer, Joe goes to Los Angeles, where black Communists befriend him and overcome his initial skepticism. However, after Pearl Harbor (not the invasion of the Soviet Union), Joe finds the Communists fully supporting segregationist management and he ends his fellow traveling. Joe learns “the hard way that there are no ‘unusual’ Negroes.” Then, following the riots in the middle of 1943, Joe becomes “dangerous, explosive,” “convinced that minority group problems will become worse before they become better.” Chester concluded the synopsis on an unusually bold stroke that would in fact become his signature.

  He knows that the Negro problem will never be solved until the problem of democracy is solved—until the white people of the nation decide whether or not they want democracy.

  And now what he wants is to know how to force this decision—one way or another.

  Chester believed in thunder, the efficacy of organized violence in the struggle to gain constitutionally guaranteed rights.

  Providing recommendations for Chester’s “strong and shrewd” project were Roy Wilkins, Nat Howard of the Cleveland Daily News, Arnold Gingrich, and Chester’s first cousin Henry Lee Moon. Henry claimed that if Chester could avoid the fallacy of excessive modernism—a tendency toward overerudite stream of consciousness—he might write “a dynamic and comprehensive story of Negro life.” In February 1944 Henry would also telegraph the fund on Chester’s behalf. Henry’s letter of recommendation was the most in-depth and supportive, perhaps because he had mercifully been left out of the story. Both Nat Howard and Arnold Gingrich recognized themselves in Chester’s synopsis. In his letter, Howard hoped to divert Chester from “consideration of his own opinions and emotions exclusively.” Roy Wilkins, cranky and overcautious after obviously having learned that Chester had served time, endorsed his newest writer with an extended caveat: “We have never met him personally. We have never seen his picture. We have never met anyone who knew him personally. All our business has been by correspondence.”

  Wilkins and Himes were not quite an odd pair. Alongside other major black newsmen, Wilkins had been called before the War Department’s Office of Facts and Figures (the predecessor of the Office of War Information) in June 1942 and prodded to boost the morale of black servicemen. The assembled black editors were made to understand that continued editorials in support of double V and reports exposing discrimination and brutality could be considered sedition. Defiant in a way, Wilkins defended his editorial choices at the meeting, saying, “The Negro has been psychologically demobilized in this war.” Chester, the least compromising writer that Wilkins published, would remain a “valued contributor.”

  Not long after the application was sent in, The Crisis published Chester’s “All He Needs Is Feet.” Set in Rome, Georgia, this short story invoked the infamous July 1942 beating of the internationally renowned black tenor Roland Hayes, who was accosted by police and local whites after his wife said, “Hitler ought to get you” to a rude clerk in a segregationist shoe store. Chester re-created the scene by making the violence more grotesque. For calling a tormentor “Hitler,” a black man named Ward has to defend his life with a knife, an act for which he has his feet set on fire. The story concludes with an Arkansas white man beating a feetless Ward in Chicago because he fails to stand for the national anthem.

  In the last months of 1943 Chester had a regular column in a union magazine called War Worker. He introduced himself as a man-about-town, able to get quotes and insider’s information about race relations from New York magazines and Hollywood honchos. Chester was taking advantage of every contact he had, and all of them—Gingrich, Wendell Willkie—were in favor of racial advances in Hollywood films. Chester attended a two-day writers’ congress organized by the Hollywood Writers Mobilization and held at UCLA, which opened on October 2. The particip
ants included Walter White, Marc Connelly, military officials, and university professors. James Cagney and Theodore Dreiser also put in appearances. Lawyer and historian Carey McWilliams, who got to know Chester at the conference, emphasized the importance of removing racist laws from immigration and naturalization. At a panel discussion on minority groups in American films, Dalton Trumbo delivered a stern rebuke. Hollywood made “tarts of the Negro’s daughters, crap shooters of his sons, obsequious Uncle Toms of his fathers, superstitious and grotesque crones of his mothers, strutting peacocks of his successful men, psalm-singing mountebanks of his priests, and Barnum and Bailey side-shows of his religion,” Trumbo charged. The black film star and Chicago Defender columnist Clarence Muse then stood up and exclaimed, “Here I am—exhibit A of the stereotype of the Negro! I’m glad to learn that as an actor I will soon return as a human being!” The audience roared in approval. With the praise of the battling USSR in the news, the radical movement regained some of its standing. In December, Trumbo would officially join the Communist Party. By 1944 Cabin in the Sky star Rex Ingram had too.

  Chester tried to raise awareness for the interned Japanese Americans. He obtained and published portions of an internee’s diary in War Worker, probably letters from his friend Mary Oyama Mittwer, to show the possibility of sedition among the multitudes “who have never been permitted to share the rights, privilege, and opportunities which make this nation magnificent.” He excerpted from the diary, “It is hard to feel loyal, or patriotic, sincere to the land of our birth when prejudice rears its ignorant head, or when we are dismissed as a ‘bunch of yellow Japs.’ ” But what made Chester’s work stand out, apart from the touching empathy he showed he was capable of for Japanese Americans, was his Swiftian satire at the conclusion: “If, after reading these excerpts from this Nisei’s diary all of us are consumed by our relentless hate for them, let’s not quibble, investigate, and vituperate”; instead, “let’s take them out and shoot them.”

  A visibly angry Chester waited on his Rosenwald application, prepared to abandon writing for politics once and for all. The segregation in the war industries in Los Angeles continued to be sharp and robust, and he took and abandoned menial tasks rather than investing himself emotionally in the fights to obtain good jobs at a place like the Kaiser-Hughes Aircraft Company. The Army called him up for a physical on February 15, 1944. He had told Jean that he would be shot before serving in a segregated military, but Chester did not have to make a decision. The physician examining him discovered a fractured vertebrae, an injury from the elevator shaft calamity of 1926, and classified him as 4-F, thus writing him out of the war.

  The same week as his physical, Chester impatiently watched Sweet-and-Hot, a flat-footed musical on Central Avenue, and he no longer brooked his disgust at such a piss-poor cultural stew. In the pages of Bass’s California Eagle, he cataloged the faults of black American pop culture: an inadequate “appeal to carnality”; “absolute unintelligence”; and lastly, abject imitation of “a white show.” If black entertainers themselves did not have the “courage of a Bert Williams, a Florence Mills, a Paul Robeson,” there could be no progress. In addition, “the white folks,” Chester wagged, “are now taking sides.” He vented in his unique hard-boiled idiom,

  Those that are on the other side are not going to support a Negro show even if we gave them a seven-course spread of Hollywood mammies. And those who are on our side want us to come out with the best we got, hard, fast and timely; they expect us to speak up, to voice our desires and protests in songs, demo[onstration]s and otherwise.

  He extended his literary contacts by agreeing to serve on the editorial board of Negro Story, Alice Browning’s new black magazine out of Chicago, but the hard-edged critic still struggled to hold down a job. In March he successfully applied for a job at the Los Angeles Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in the San Pedro harbor, becoming shipworker 35436. He was assigned a skilled job—as a sheet metal helper installing a ventilation system—only to quit a week later, faulting his back impairment. Himes later said he left for “domestic reasons.” Despite the contestatory ending of his position—whether Chester had to labor below his skill rating or if he had a bad row with Jean—the job had one tangible benefit: the dry dock company in San Pedro would become the setting of his novel If He Hollers Let Him Go.

  On April 24, a mild day in a week threatening rain, Chester received a letter from the Rosenwald Fund’s Vandi Haygood, a life buoy to an artist at sea. He had won a yearlong, $1500 fellowship. Although not war wages by any means, the regular monthly checks would be comfortable steady pay, roughly twice what a domestic in Cleveland earned. He aimed well beyond one of his least substantial Esquire prison stories, which came out in April, “Money Don’t Spend in Stir,” a humorous vehicle for a quick $100. In a florid tone, unusual to direct at someone he had not met, he explained to Vandi Haygood what the Rosenwald fellowship meant to him.

  It is difficult to express just how much this means to me. It is more than the actual award of the $1500. It is the confidence expressed by the Committee in my ability. Serious creative writing is an uphill grind against indifference, disapproval, antagonisms, and even destitution. Encouragement is seldom had from any source.

  I can truthfully say that this is my first “break” in fourteen years of writing. I hope I will never look back.

  For the first time since prison, he could devote himself uninterruptedly to a novel.

  Before he had known whether he would receive the fellowship, he had put his resolute if desperate logic about the struggle between the races into a jeremiad, published in The Crisis that May. In “Negro Martyrs Are Needed,” Chester wandered into the field of comparative political theory. The Crisis proclaimed “our author argues brilliantly for revolution and leaders in the tradition of Gabriel and Nat Turner,” but the essay was actually an odd mash. Moving between Crispus Attucks and Lenin, Chester wanted to encourage martyrs to sacrifice themselves in public acts of legal defiance to create the media spectacles necessary to stimulate a sociopolitical revolution. The revolutionary aim, however, was only “the enforcement of the Constitution of the United States.” While Chester believed that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution’s plan for representative government constituted the best “way of existence,” the revolution he hoped to inspire would undoubtedly “bring about the overthrow of our present form of government.” Not until the second page did he begin to identify his real target: the black middle class, prone to abandon its leaders and mistake social acceptance for democratic equality. “We have not achieved equality by week-ending with our white friends and drinking their liquor or flirting with their wives,” he complained. The black middle class was vain, soft, and unprincipled.

  Even though “Negro Martyrs” had equated communism to dictatorship, the Communications Section of the Federal Bureau of Investigation flagged him. On June 13, his Bureau file began with a memo from the Criminal Division of the Justice Department to Director J. Edgar Hoover and Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark. “You will note that the article recommends revolutionary action on the part of the colored people and for that reason I thought it should be brought to your attention,” wrote the lead investigator. Initially, the agents were trying to figure out whether the Chester Himes writing in The Crisis was the same man their informants had fingered in Los Angeles as “an adherent or supporter or perhaps a member of the Communist Party or other organizations reported to be in sympathy with the Communist Party.” They learned it was indeed the same man. Since “Negro Martyrs” coincided with a May directive from Hoover to address the “Negro Plan of Revolution,” the Bureau began a fuller investigation in July. Not “desirous of having an investigation of the publication, The Crisis, carried out,” the Justice Department asked “that this inquiry . . . be conducted as discreetly as possible.”

  Having received his grant, Chester dug into his proposed project, but that journey was unrewarding. He was riding along the surface of his own life since he had
been released from prison and the findings were messy and difficult for an audience to identify with. For The Crisis he wrote “All God’s Chillun Got Pride,” the Cleveland part of his story, where his hero, Keith Richards, works as the only black research assistant in a public library. The narrative is an exploration of a black man’s total fear: “every morning that he lived, he awakened scared.” Keith worries that he will be crushed by the stereotype “of being a black beast in white America.” If that discouraging account wasn’t enough, he echoed the horrifying possibility of extermination he had insisted upon in his Nisei diary article. “After he had seen the truth sheared of all falseness of tradition and ideology, there would have been nothing to have done with that ‘nigger’ but to have taken him out and shot him.”

  However, Chester had achieved one new conceit, borrowed from the “encouraging” spirit of L.A.’s black migrants, and which remained a part of his work. For the Rosenwald-funded novel, he had described a feeling of belonging and black identity. “He is proud of their independence, their defiance which they carry on their shoulders like chips. He receives courage from their numbers. His people. For some strange reason, among them he feels as if he has come home.” In spite of its general gloom, for his Crisis story he had created a protagonist “well-groomed,” “handsome” and whose “complexion was black [with] features like an African prince. . . . When he forgot his scowl and accidentally laughed, he came on like bright lights.” Chester had become proud of his racial background. Related to his ennobling brown-skinned male characters, he was no longer wedded to the black middle-class ideal of feminine beauty and success, sorority women who looked like pinups of Lena Horne and dripped with affluence and academic titles, women like Juanita Miller. Few people could understand why he was so angry, critical toward established customs, and dejected about the prospects of racial justice and employment during the war’s final twelve months.