Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  At a cocktail party given by New York Herald Tribune columnist Naomi Barry, Chester, accompanied by William Gardner Smith, was introduced to NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill, a hard-charging thirty-seven-year-old Jewish American. Studious and tenacious, Hill had a contract from Knopf for an anthology of black writers. He presented himself as if he had all of the answers to the race problem. A former member of the Harlem branch of the Socialist Workers Party, Hill also traveled with Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. as his labor advisor, and of course in New York he worked alongside Henry Lee Moon, who was now the NAACP national publicity secretary. Unmindful of the bitterness between Chester and his cousin Henry, Hill talked affably with Chester about the projected anthology, which would be published in 1963 and called Soon, One Morning.

  For Hill’s new project, Chester fished out an excerpt from Pinktoes, “A Mamie Mason Party.” The day after meeting Hill, Chester took him over to Girodias’s office to get the chapter. Chester knew that it was unorthodox, even insulting, to offer a critique of black civil rights elites, no matter how mild or farcical, but something about Hill’s style—like Mezz Mezzrow at Leroy Haynes’s restaurant—indicated he would appreciate the material. When Hill returned to the United States, the NAACP man wrote Chester “absolutely delighted with the piece and certainly plan to use it.” However, Hill was two-faced and cultivated Chester primarily to secure an essay from Richard Wright’s estate. “I hope I am not imposing too much,” he began a request, before asking Chester to intervene with Ollie Harrington and Ellen Wright for the essay. Harrington, perhaps aware of some of the other dynamics at play, had evaded Hill.

  Chester also agreed to help Hill track down black writers in Europe. In exchange, he hoped for Hill’s assistance in New York gathering paperback copies of his books to send to a new agent. After agreeing, the labor secretary neglected Chester’s not inconsiderable request, then declined it outright. To assist with the anthology project, Chester delivered a letter from Richard Wright to his editor Edward Aswell, but Ollie Harrington, in Corsica with a girlfriend, couldn’t be reached. Chester marveled at how Harrington seemed able to hold it all in balance: the Communists and the liberals, his work, his personal finances and his romances.

  Planning ahead for the summer of 1961, Regine engaged the home of the vacationing Dr. Ramseger in Hamburg, where they had spent time in 1959. Chester and Regine bumped into Ellen and Rachel, the Wrights’ younger daughter, and invited them to a celebratory dinner with Girodias at his restaurant La Grande Séverine. The meal, complete with house-band jazz musicians offering Ellen condolences, went so well that Chester and Regine made available to the widow and her younger daughter a summer month in Hamburg. Wright’s family decided to go in August, relieving some of the antagonism in Chester’s relationship with Ellen.

  Chester and Regine’s summertime visit to Germany was topped off by an entertaining August evening near Frankfurt with Dean Dixon, a black New York conductor who had chucked the United States to earn a living at his craft. A genius who had graduated Juilliard, finished a Columbia PhD, and been directing interracial orchestras since he was a teenager, Dixon had been told that to break into conducting in America he should try performing in white face and with white gloves. Equally outspoken about racism, Dean and Chester always had plenty to talk about. The Dixon family was celebrating Dean’s appointment as conductor of the Hesse Radio Orchestra in Frankfurt. At the party Chester got so drunk that when he drove away, after the inevitable argument with Regine, he got her out of the car, turned himself over to the police, and spent the night in jail.

  The drunken episode, complete with a permanent demerit on his driver’s license, made for a convenient excuse to leave Regine in Germany and to return to the Côte d’Azur. In the interim Girodias had brought out Pinktoes and the Gallimard edition of The Heat’s On, under the title Ne nous énervons pas!, had become a hit. He wrote Duhamel asking for a $500 advance on a new book and was invited to the editor’s vacation home in Mouans-Sartoux, about fifteen miles from Biot. He was surprised to find a village of houses that looked rustic but contained modern plumbing, heating, and electric conveniences. Chester toured an engineering marvel, a seventeenth-century castle that had been completely disassembled, refurbished, transported to a new site, and rebuilt. The luxury of the surroundings alerted him as he approached Duhamel’s modest-appearing two-story house. Although the home looked simple from the outside, Chester realized the real effort had gone into the design; there were elaborate open interior spaces, three bedrooms each with its own bath, and an open wall facing a rear patio along with a delicious vista of the surrounding countryside. Among Duhamel’s trophies of modernist art was a heavy lead-coated door at the back of the house with all the titles from La Série Noire inscribed on it. In magnificent size La Reine des pommes began horizontally at the top corner and stretched to the bottom, “like a mighty river taking all its tributaries to the sea.” Chester’s heart stood “utterly still” as he shockingly recognized the small fortune that his book had generated for Gallimard and Duhamel personally. Chester would keep appealing to Duhamel throughout the fall, thoroughly convinced now that Gallimard had enslaved him.

  In September Chester got a place in Mougins, near Biot. “I find that to get down to work alone in a strange city is rather terrifying,” he wrote, hungover, to Lesley. Part of his new problem was notoriety, recognition in “almost every bar or café where I go” and where well-wishers plied him with whiskey and then launched into lengthy orations in incomprehensible French. He usually lunched with Walter and Torun, who was breaking under the stress of marriage and recently had deliberately driven her car into a ditch. But before Chester could get any writing under way, he became involved with Marianne Greenwood, an attractive Swedish photographer. Greenwood had photographed Pablo Picasso’s art and was at work on a book called Picasso at Antibes. On Sunday, September 10, Chester had had a long leisurely lunch with Picasso and Duhamel on the beach in Cannes and then was treated to a tour of Picasso’s formal gallery, studio, and ceramics workshop at his château in Antibes. Chester told Lesley that he had to remain in the South to protect Greenwood from a gangster boyfriend.

  Chester anguished over his competing attraction to the two women. A tall, sought-after professional artist, Marianne enticed him, but Lesley was a more practical companion. He borrowed $200 from Gallimard and on October 14 dashed over to London with Greenwood for a frolic, “very much in love.” Three days later they returned to Paris. Greenwood was preparing to depart for South America to take photographs for a book on the United Fruit Company with the writer Everet Taube. Chester left at three in the morning for Antibes. On his drive south, Chester, likely inebriated, hit a tree at 50 mph and “sailed over the crushed steering wheel through the windshield.”

  At a public hospital in Sens, Chester was told he had no significant injuries, but that he should remain a couple of days for observation. He got along so imbibingly well there that they called him “the barkeeper.” News of his accident made the press. A concerned visitor was French filmmaker Dominique-Pierre Gaisseau, ushered into his room by Marianne Greenwood, who had postponed her trip to be with him. Gaisseau claimed he had been looking for Chester since he had seen the premiere of the American film A Raisin in the Sun, based on Lorraine Hansberry’s play, at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it won a specially created award for “outstanding human values.” A quick-witted, high-strung, and risk-prone artist, Gaisseau was convinced Chester could write a screenplay more faithful to black American life than Hansberry’s safe melodrama. Once, when Gaisseau had been prohibited from making a new film, he had turned his adventures in French West Africa into a book called The Sacred Forest. Frustrated that others on La Série Noire were making a mint with the cinematic version of their novels, Chester made an appointment to see the film director when he left the hospital. He and Greenwood cut a side deal about making a book with Harlem photographs illustrating the screenplay. Harrington drove down to Sens and brought
Chester back to Paris.

  Chester checked into the Hôtel Aviatic on Rue de Vaugirard. He collected $500 from Girodias on Pinktoes and some more money from Gallimard. Walking near Gare Montparnasse, Chester fell down in the street and had to be rushed to the American Hospital. After examining X-rays, bone specialists noticed a hairline fracture in his pelvis and confined him to bed for two weeks. Concerned about how he would pay for it all, Chester wrote Lesley asking her to request further assistance from Gallimard. Toward the end of October, Duhamel wrote, promising “I’ll do what I can,” but “you must understand that this is my personal money.” Duhamel had heard rumors of Chester’s intentions to visit the firm personally with a representative to inspect the accounts, which he believed in error. Fearing that Chester’s strong sense of recrimination would irretrievably damage their publishing relationship, Duhamel sighed that, destructive as such a gesture might be, he might as well go ahead. “Once an author has got it in his head that he is gypped or something—no argument, not even proof—will make him listen to reason.” Reminding fifty-two-year-old Chester of the “favors, help and friendship” which he had shown, Duhamel hoped it would turn out well, after the hospital bill was paid. His advice was more hard work. “If I show Gallimard another good book soon I might be able to convince them to make a full reprint of La Reine des P. which is the only way to settle the matter of your advance,” he cautioned. Chester thought Duhamel was concerned only about “defending the honor and integrity of Gallimard’s accounting department.”

  Gaisseau visited Chester again in the Parisian hospital, and this time he was accompanied by an American from Switzerland, six-foot-two Arthur Cohn. The president of Michael Arthur Films and brother to Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, Cohn had produced Gaisseau’s recently released film The Sky Above, the Mud Below, a documentary of tribal life in Papua, New Guinea. The producer liked projects “out of the ordinary, enriching, and apt to be remembered for a long time.” Reaching a formal agreement with Chester, Cohn and coproducer René Lafuite paid him 12,000 francs (more than $4000) to write a film scenario. Chester finally got his big-time payday. “I was beginning to feel rich.”

  Out of the hospital, Chester pursued his amorous connection to Marianne Greenwood. Still on crutches, he flew to Stockholm on November 21 to spend a week with Greenwood before she sailed for South America on December 5. Back in Paris, his downhill relationship with Gallimard hit bottom. He believed that Ne nous énervons pas! was a “runaway best-seller,” but there had been no royalties. By Christmas Chester was seeing new Swiss book-club editions of La Reine des pommes that seemed mysteriously absent from the statements he received from Gallimard. As a result, although he contracted with the firm to publish the French translation of Blind Man with a Pistol in 1970 (the first of the detective fictions to initially appear in English), he never published another original book with Gallimard again.

  In order to write the screenplay, Chester took over Greenwood’s apartment in Antibes. In rooms overlooking the Mediterranean, with the Italian coast sometimes in view, and an occasional hurricane forcefully lashing the shore, he lost himself in the story. Chester gave up drinking for a time to channel his energy and found his mind “so lucid and active it is overloaded with every imaginable type of thought and imagery.” He told friends he was working “very-very hard” as he neared finishing the screenplay, tentatively called Baby Sister. He knew how dicey it was to try to write about black life and appeal to popular American tastes. “We are trying to begin it in utter secrecy,” he told Carl Van Vechten, “otherwise it might destroy it.” During the last days of 1961 he completed Baby Sister, “a Greek tragedy in blackface.” Writing the play’s concluding line, Chester broke into tears. Cohn and Gaisseau were impressed and wanted to rush forward, hoping to start production in the United States in March.

  In the film scenario, Chester had indeed seemed to utterly reverse the story of the striving black family of A Raisin in the Sun. He had written a script that might be applauded by a hip audience. However, he was vulnerable to accusations from the prim blacks and whites connected to the American civil rights movement that he had created a drama of carnally fixated black depravity. One element of his Harlem-set passion play directly appealed to the instincts of a man like Gaisseau: cannibalism. What Harlemites succumb to “when you have no food is to eat your baby sister,” he wrote. Bookended by funerals, the plot featured the maneuverings of Susie, a violently cruel older brother, and Pigmeat, his protective younger brother, to keep the white police detective Fischer from continuing his affair with Baby Sister, their wanton seventeen-year-old sibling. Chester took a character like Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger or Ann Petry’s Lutie Johnson and gave her a taste for skintight clothes, sex, cocktails, and nightclubs. To survive, Baby Sister must destroy the patriarchal order of Harlem—killing father, brother, and her detective lover in order to achieve freedom. In the process Baby Sister makes love to strangers, has an abortion, and is about to be sold to a pimp by her incest-fueled brother Susie, who refers to her as a “natural-born call girl.” Switchblades glint in five different scenes of the drama.

  Back in Paris in a stylish gray flannel suit and cashmere overcoat, Chester enjoyed the parties following New Year 1962 with his new friend the film director. He learned that during the filming of The Sky Above, the Mud Below, Gaisseau had become lost in the jungle but, in spite of inadequate supplies, had refused to abandon the project. Three of Gaisseau’s crew died due to the director’s resolve. Some professionals in the arts world wouldn’t speak to Gaisseau, and often enough it was Chester’s name that got them past the doormen at the clubs. Another evening—which would end with Chester, drunk and high, passing out, and Gaisseau, in the same condition, parking his car in the middle of the street and breaking the axle—they listened to Bud Powell, now fully “on the downgrade,” at the Blue Note. Angry, Chester despised the cruel exploitation of this jazz giant, which seemed like tolerance. The French public didn’t condemn addiction to drugs or alcohol in the same manner as Americans, but Chester saw Powell “making the white Frenchman rich and paying for it with his life.” Powell, whose famous psychiatric problems and alcoholism had begun when he was viciously beaten by New York City policemen as a teenager, would be dead within a year. Three years earlier, Chester had listened to Lester Young, another supreme black musician whose music he loved but whose spirit had been shattered by the U.S. Army, school a younger saxophonist in front of Club St.-Germain: “To play jazz you must suffer,” Young counseled. Young’s suffering had ended in 1959, but Chester, who likened Young’s saxophone to “someone laughing their way toward death,” would be damned if he would let it happen to him. It also seemed unlikely. Editions Plon’s French translation of Mamie Mason was released that winter and for several months Chester received favorable notices, sometimes being compared to Rabelais, from Le Figaro to Le Revue de Paris.

  After putting Chester on a monthly salary, Arthur Cohn left for the United States in early 1962 to secure additional studio help to finance and develop Baby Sister. Chester returned to Antibes and worked on a new screenplay called Back to Africa (unfortunately, there is no trace of it). The momentum increased in April, when Gaisseau’s film won the Academy Award for best documentary, although Cohn, in Hollywood, somehow managed to have the name of the prize converted to “Best Achievement in Documentary Production” so the Oscar was given to himself and René Lafuite and not to the director. The situation precipitated some distrust and bad blood with Gaisseau and thus with his friend Chester. By the end of April, Chester was writing Cohn requesting the return of his rights, terminating the contract, and agreeing to repay the 12,000 francs if he sold the scenario elsewhere.

  In late spring, French producer Pierre Lazareff of the news show Cinq Colonnes à la Une, broadcast by the ORTF station, asked Chester to assist a French crew that would be making a short documentary film in Harlem that summer. Chester was needed to arrange the locales for the shots and, since he could
understand French somewhat, help in rough translations to set up the show. Lazareff funded Chester to make it possible. Gaisseau, whose photograph adorned the cover of several major United States magazines that summer, would go at the same time to the United States to try to sell Chester’s film scenario to a producer.

  Brother Joe and sister-in-law Estelle visited Chester in June, on their way back to the United States after Joe’s year as a Fulbright fellow in Helsinki. Joe had stepped beyond the segregated college network to take a permanent job at the University of North Carolina’s Greensboro campus. Joe saw a Chester different from the threadbare outcast in 1956, when he had last visited his brother. Chester proudly ushered them over to Plon, where an editor gushed about how well Mamie Mason was selling. Joe praised him in a manner Chester had always badly needed to hear from his brother, whose suffering, discipline, and success he was never sure he had matched.