Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  She had a big mature body with large sagging breasts and brownish-pink nipples the size of silver dollars. Her stomach was soft and puffy and there were bulges at the top of her big wide thighs.

  As his manuscript went through editing, Chester dashed off pro-Roosevelt racial-uplift stories. One, “Let Me at the Enemy—an’ George Brown,” was a black language experiment in the jive idiom that was becoming an increasingly accepted part of American life by way of Dan Burley’s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, Cab Calloway’s performances, and radio disc jockeys all over the nation. He also dealt with the shifting gender expectations after women joined the war industry. In two stories set in California—“The Song Says ‘Keep on Smiling,’ ” which appeared in April in The Crisis, and “Make with a Shape,” which followed later in the summer in Negro Story—Chester wrote about contemporary married life. A tongue-in-cheek set piece, “Make with a Shape,” expresses dismay at the remade, wartime spouse, “so industrialized and athletic and self reliant.” The story after all was not just a hyperbolic allegory of his own life. Jean had rallied from her disappointment at his affairs and was conducting “a tour of inspection” of USO facilities in Philadelphia, and handing out quotes to the press.

  Chester sent his revised draft to Moon, who then put the manuscript into production, sending it to the copy editor. By March 1945 Chester was “roughly in the middle” of a new novel and asking his acquaintance Vandi Haygood at the foundation to extend his award so that he could continue writing. Chester needed to return to Los Angeles to concentrate and sober up. He and Jean told the press that they were leaving to avoid the “many social obligations they would have in New York City [that] would take too much time from writing.” The Julius Rosenwald Fund extended his fellowship, with a new grant of $500. Jean returned to L.A. by April and Chester followed the next month, to a house at 1717½ W. Thirty-Seventh Street, in the crowded Central Avenue neighborhood. The FBI was now “pretext”-calling his house to determine his whereabouts and using its resources to take a look at his manuscript.

  Chester traveled to California in the aftermath of the European war, as a mushrooming euphoria swept the United States. When the train stopped in Chicago, he took the opportunity to drop by the Ellis Avenue headquarters of the Rosenwald Fund, in Hyde Park, just north of the University of Chicago, and meet the staff. He visited Vandi Haygood, who had approved his fellowship as “a good bet,” but who also didn’t “like Himes’ project much.” The layover became a torrid affair, “a wild, drunken week of sexual extravagance.” Precisely what he meant at first to Haygood is unclear. Some white women who had a taste for black men did find him elegant, graceful, and “very put together,” but Chester also initially struck people as “meek mannered,” effusively polite, and speaking with a mild speech impediment (perhaps only his Mississippi twang). With Vandi, Chester could palaver with a graduate of the University of Chicago about the highbrow publishing world, literature, and the arts, and also receive her sympathy on account of the day-to-day racism and poverty he endured. Whatever the impetus for the liaison, in Vandi Haygood Chester found a feminine ideal—attractive, sure of herself, and with the means to provide.

  Back in L.A. and still hoping to crack the fortunes of Hollywood screenwriting, Chester accepted an invitation from the Actors’ Lab, a collective touting the “very progressive” and “very political” training that steeped young migrants to Hollywood in the Stanislavsky method and other exercises to heighten concentration. But L.A. was still the kind of place where columnist Hedda Hopper believed that “dancing between Whites and Negroes” at the Actors’ Lab was “the sort of thing that leads to race riots.” So with some wariness, Chester agreed to meet Marc Connelly there and discuss a new project on George Washington Carver, the famous black Tuskegee scientist who pioneered peanut production. Connelly had also secured the services of Arna Bontemps, a novelist and the librarian at Fisk University; he was “summoned” to Los Angeles in mid-May on an expenses-paid trip by M-G-M to see whether the play St. Louis Woman could be transformed into a screen-ready musical. Bontemps was talking to Lena Horne, whom he hoped to interest in the starring role. He had also just served on the Rosenwald Fund committee that had decided to extend Chester’s grant. Even-tempered and a literary man to the core, Bontemps loved writing and black culture and was best friends with Langston Hughes, but kept his family life at center stage and never established a big name.

  Bontemps and Himes had quite a bit to chat about. Bontemps and his white friend Jack Conroy were nearing publication of their Doubleday book about black migration, They Seek a City; they too had worked with Bucklin Moon and also had been promised the Carver Award. By the mid-1940s, Bontemps was pragmatic about literary deals and publishing companies. He did not open himself to sorrow on account of the way the business trendily picked up and then discarded black writers or black themes.

  Connelly, understood as one of the great liberal voices in American film and theater as the creator of The Green Pastures, began his meeting with Chester and Bontemps by declaring that all he was certain of was the opening to the film. “Dr. Carver was a very humble man, and he always ironed his own shirts. So when we start this film on Dr. Carver, he goes into the kitchen and irons his shirt.” Insulted, Chester stood up and walked out. Bontemps, who lived in Nashville, could swallow quite a bit more than that. Writing Bucklin Moon, he attributed all the dramatics to Chester’s anxiety about the publication of his first novel. “I think he is too excited about his immediately forthcoming novel to make the headway he would like on his second one, but he’ll calm down and get in stride presently.”

  But Chester would have to do more than exit a room in outrage to preserve his artistic vision. Before the summer began, he received unnerving news. Publishers Weekly announced on June 9 that the Carver Award, a prize of $2500 that came with a handsome amount of publicity, had gone to Fannie Cook’s Mrs. Palmer’s Honey, a novel about a black domestic voting for Roosevelt. The New York Times remarked later that “it seems a little grotesque to honor as undistinguished a book as Mrs. Palmer’s Honey.” Chester, who believed that Bucklin Moon had promised him the award to launch If He Hollers, felt betrayed.

  The situation was actually worse than not getting the award. Moon had been out of the office the entire spring, preparing his anthology Primer for White Folks and writing a new novel. Around the middle of July, he guardedly conveyed to Himes that If He Hollers Let Him Go was in trouble at Doubleday; this was followed by official misgivings about the manuscript from the legal department. Apparently fearing that Chester would take the removal of major portions of his novel personally, Moon attributed the corrections to an anonymous editor and kept the person’s identity secret, except for her sex. “One of the women executives said that the book made her sick at the stomach,” he informed Chester. Even with the dramatic adjustments to the manuscript, Chester learned from his editor that he had a real foe at the publisher. Moon told Chester that if this highly placed woman “had known what [the novel] was like she would have fought its acceptance.” The editor disinclined to publish If He Hollers Let Him Go and strong enough to make her dissent meaningful could only have been Clara Claasen. Chester never learned her identity.

  As he had done when he thought he was wrongfully treated on the writers’ project in Cleveland, a frantic Chester started writing letters. Fit to be tied, he explained to heartthrob Vandi Haygood the new problems with the revisions and scrambled back to New York to his cousin’s apartment on July 19. By then, the manuscript had been set into type and galleys were ready for him to read.

  Aside from any possible vendetta held by Claasen, Doubleday attorneys had gone over the manuscript because of concerns with two issues. First, had Chester written any scenes that might be considered obscene? Lillian Smith’s 1944 novel Strange Fruit had just caused an uproar and launched a legal case on account of profanity, an allusion to the rape of a black woman by a white man, and a suggestion of lesbianism. In chapter 17 of Chester’s nove
l, the hero, Bob Jones, goes to the hotel room of the white female antagonist and tries to rape her; in another chapter Bob slums at an erotic party with his girlfriend and several lesbians. The legal department would also have considered the point of view of the four-year-old Council on Books in Wartime, whose executive board included two Doubleday executives. The council was responsible for getting reprints to servicemen, keeping up their morale, and bolstering emotional confidence on the home front. Chester’s book emphatically climaxed with Bob Jones’s defeat, a vanquishing symbolized by his being railroaded into the military. Chester’s combination of raw sexuality and rejection of military duty must have tested the Doubleday legal team. A conservative judge might easily have placed a ban on the book.

  For Chester, the occasion of examining the galleys proved a minor scandal in a writing career that would involve legendarily bitter accusations levied at publishers. Responding to a secretary’s telephone call, Chester arrived in the late afternoon at the Doubleday office at Rockefeller Center. Bucklin Moon was out of town and it seemed to Chester as if the staff were questioning his identity. He couldn’t be sure if he was only unfamiliar or if they were automatically dismissive because he was black. An employee asked him to read the galleys in Moon’s office before their editorial suite closed for the day at five o’clock. Chester loudly insisted on his right to take the galleys home. That night, when Himes finished reading them, it became clear that the manuscript had not been just edited: it had been ransacked.

  He and Moon had already toned down chapter 17, but now it had been completely eliminated. The furor over the accepted manuscript and the considerations from the legal department had apparently led to the unusual step of re-editing without any notice to the author. Chester telephoned Vandi Haygood, searching for a sympathetic ear. Then, dealing with Bucklin Moon, also apparently by telephone, Chester became adamant and fought skillfully enough to have the hotel room tempest between Bob and Madge restored. Through Moon he learned that a company vice president and the legal department had required the re-editing. If being outspoken was enabling some victories like the restored chapter, he was also earning the label of troublemaker.

  Jean joined him from California in September. Knowing his vulnerability and tendency toward debauchery, they wisely left the Henry Moon apartment and sought their own place to live. But even in the outer boroughs, racism and the postwar population surge was making it impossible to find an apartment. They wound up taking a room with a young, cheerful schoolteacher at 121 Bainbridge Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Mollie Moon continued to dutifully invite them to her choice gatherings, which she managed to schedule around her own appearances at Café Society, Broadway premieres, and NAACP showdowns between Walter White and Countee Cullen over the musical St. Louis Woman. Mollie had befriended Hollywood now, and was boosting screenwriter John Bright, who also became friends with Chester. But she was showing weariness at having to deal with her “crazy cousins,” who were known to overstep, and maybe now more so that Henry was always on the road building coalitions for the CIO’s Political Action Committee. When she had her crowd over on Sunday, September 16, she wrote to Henry that “everyone had a nice time, including the Himeses, whom I kept sober.”

  On September 30 Chester got devastating news from Ohio: his seventy-one-year-old mother had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He cried hysterically, despite their long emotional separation. With the Rosenwald money long gone, Chester had to scrounge around for train fare. He traveled alone to Columbus, where Estelle had been living with Joe Jr. and his wife. The day before his mother was cremated, on October 2, his aunt Fannie Wiggins died at fifty-eight in Cleveland. Estelle’s sister-in-law and nemesis was buried three days after Estelle. A week later, Henry’s father, Roddy Moon, had a serious illness that required medical attention. The generation born in the aftermath of slavery was giving way.

  Estelle’s death hurt Chester more because she had not lived long enough to see him praised and redeemed in the way he had dreamed of when he was in prison. He was reconsidering her contumacious personality, which had defied his father, his father’s employers, and the strictures of white society at large, dominating his household and driving him into the streets. Compared with other adults, he thought of Estelle as “a woman of iron will and ruthless determination and burning ambition.” But her death allowed him to glimpse a new, softer quality: “my mother had been innocent.” He was recognizing that he knew little of the struggles of her life. He did know that she would have been disappointed by a novel like If He Hollers Let Him Go, with its rough language, obsession with sexuality and interracial conflict, and its contempt for upper-class light-skinned blacks. For the rest of his life, Chester derived strength by explicitly repudiating some of Estelle’s cherished values, while he escaped having to confront her about his own choices. But the chance of his having misjudged her and needing something that she had lavished upon him remained.

  His bereavement roughly coincided with the earliest advertisements for his book. In the weeks before Estelle’s death, Doubleday ran two ads in Publishers Weekly, which showed the cover and referred to Himes’s book as “a tough, controversial novel, loaded with dynamite, built around the racial tension inherent in a West Coast shipyard.” The second ad, appearing in the next issue, was a full page that presented the novel as a thriller: “A Real Shocker! Dynamite! Tough! Fast Paced! Reading as Gripping as The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Doubleday’s ads used graffiti-style letters for the book title. The publication of If He Hollers Let Him Go was set for November 1.

  In the final days of October, a “surprised” Chester saw the first copy of the book, “very much discouraged by the jacket and preface.” Himes could not have liked the dust-jacket language, which praised his realism by belittling his creative skill: “what he writes comes from firsthand information rather than from a fertile imagination.” Nowhere was his mastery of craft, his journeyman years with Esquire and the racial-uplift magazines, or his Rosenwald fellowship mentioned. A week before publication, he learned that Doubleday had no biographical portfolio on him, and that metropolitan dailies and literary people in Cleveland and Los Angeles who knew Chester personally had not been targeted. Seeking to rescue his book, Chester prepared lists of names to be sent press releases and review copies. But his mood was prickly, defensive, and accusatory.

  Reading Bucklin Moon’s Primer for White Folks while in Detroit at the end of October, Henry Moon was excited for his cousin Chester, after so much recent raw pain in the family, including the death of Henry’s older brother, Joe Hubbard Moon, in 1944. In spite of the hiccoughs in their relationship, Henry was giddy on the eve of publication and asked his wife to “remember me kindly to Jean and to him.” At the same time Bucklin Moon requested that Henry and Mollie throw the official Doubleday book party for Chester at their home. The white junior editor might have considered the request thoroughly ordinary, since Henry and Mollie gave smashing interracial parties to the smart set in New York and could generate publicity with easy flair. They agreed to hold the event at their apartment on November 2.

  Chester interpreted the gesture quite differently. Doubleday threw parties for white authors like Earl Wilson at the Copacabana and Elizabeth Janeway at the Rainbow Room. In a couple of weeks a rival press would debut first-time black writer Ann Petry at the Hotel Biltmore to two hundred guests. Added to the Carver Award betrayal, Himes now felt small-timed and Jim Crowed by his publisher.

  Chester reacted to his publisher’s slight and his mother’s death in a battle of words with Mollie a few days before the book launch. He brought her to tears. Weary and wounded “deeply,” she called Henry, who responded with uncharacteristic anger. “I don’t like it one bit and will let him know when I see him,” Henry threatened. Containing his disfavor, Henry encouraged Mollie to carry on with the celebration, giving her painstaking advice on the invitations, and asking her to include all of the “in” crowd: Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Walter White, Roy Wilkins, P. L
. Prattis of the Pittsburgh Courier, George Schuyler, Doxey Wilkerson, Dan Burley, John Bright, William Attaway, Countee Cullen, and Ralph Ellison.

  Chester had a reason to be happy. In spite of what he understood as his publisher’s bungling, the day before the party the book had received a lengthy review in the New York Times. While hardly an endorsement of Chester as an artist, the review signaled that he had indeed struck the nerve he was after. The Times decreed If He Hollers “a mixture of polemics and melodrama,” but it did not ignore the gauntlet Chester threw down with full force: “Bob is forever wanting to kill someone.”

  Chester “took his bow” that Friday evening “amid the clinking of many glasses and the shaking of many hands.” Unperturbed, Mollie grinned and hammed it up at the party. Pictures show Chester looking genuinely happy, shaking hands with John Bright while Owen Dodson cheers him. A head taller than everyone else, Sterling Brown (who was teaching at Vassar that year) and Bucklin Moon look down approvingly. Jean beamed at everyone who had a good word for Chester. Referring to two of the revered black brainiacs from the Harlem Renaissance, Amsterdam News gossip columnist Dan Burley thought that the convivial creative spirit of the 1920s had been revived: “ ’Twas like years ago in the days of [Rudolph] Fisher, Wallace Thurman et. al. eh, Ted Poston?”

  Dour about the event retrospectively, Chester would write dismissively, “I consented to go to the party, which I thought was a flop.” Flop or not, he wouldn’t have another book party like it for almost thirty years. The aftermath of the party also cut family ties. Henry returned to New York sick and in a bad mood, considering the “nerve-wracking” tension of his job, worrying about his father and “Chester’s reaction.” After whatever confrontation occurred between the two men, the former camaraderie and coaching were permanently ended. Chester never again stayed at the apartment and rationalized his spiteful ingratitude by deciding that cautious, bookish Henry, wrapped around his “Mollishka,” would no longer be useful. The original title to If He Hollers had been Breakout, and now that Chester had battled his publishers, friends, family, and censors in his passage to becoming a novelist, breaking out was what he wanted to do.