Chester B. Himes

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Chester B. Himes Page 51

by Lawrence P. Jackson


  Returning from London to Paris, Chester and Lesley moved to a third-floor apartment on Rue Abel Ferry in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, a distant post from his usual haunts, but where he found a mood remarkably similar to that of the United States. The students had barricaded themselves inside the Sorbonne and fought off the police. No public services were available and garbage piled up in the street; the trains were not running, and the din of protests and looming battle were a regular part of life. When Rosalyn and Bill Targ visited for a series of meetings and a holiday in July, Paris had become dangerous. Orly Airport was closed. Chester volunteered to drive them to Brussels so they could return to the United States. He drove the Jaguar like an airplane, at 115 miles an hour, a trip that the couples never forgot and served as Chester’s final act of muscular tenacity and nerve. Spain seemed perpetually serene by comparison.

  That summer of 1968 Chester went to Darmstadt, Germany, for quiet refuge. He spent time with Janheinz Jahn, one of his European friends and a man who also had considerable impact on black intellectuals. Jahn had become the German ambassador to Nigeria and Senegal, and his wife had become a practitioner of an African religion, where Jahn himself had considerable scholarly expertise. Jahn had written about the life-force concept of Muntu, which came from the Bantu peoples, the ancestral race of much of western, southern, and central Africa.

  Chester and Lesley returned briefly to Paris during the summer. In September they left for Spain and Chester began to plot a novel called Plan B, which would conclude his detective series with the black revolution. “I am trying to show . . . how the violence would be if the blacks resorted to this,” he would inform John Williams. This last book was about real revolt, when the militant’s “objective is not to stand up and talk,” but “to blow out [the enemy’s] brains.” The novel opened with a chapter called “Tang,” about a poor, middle-aged black couple, T-Bone and Tang. A lazy minstrel of a man, T-Bone embraces the stereotypes afforded blacks by white society; his wife, Tang, less contentedly accepts life as a cheap prostitute in Central Park. A mysterious box is delivered to them containing an automatic rifle and a note to begin the war of black liberation. T-Bone wishes to betray the cause while Tang cheers. “ ‘It’s the uprising, nigger!’ ” and “ ‘We gonna be free!’ ” Ideologically opposed, the couple struggles over the gun and T-Bone kills Tang. When Coffin Ed and Grave Digger show up, Digger kills T-Bone, setting up the final action in the drama.

  In a series of set pieces showing comic grotesque violence between blacks and whites, and with a backstory of the revolutionary hero whom Chester had hatched in the 1950s, the novel had at its core the question of nationalism and racial belonging. It evolved into a final confrontation between Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, in which Digger kills his partner, who threatens the revolution. “ ‘You can’t kill, Black, man,’ ” Grave Digger tells his partner. “He might be our last chance, despite the risk. I’d rather be dead than a subhuman in this world.” Chester was racing through the novel, referring to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 in South Africa and foreshadowing Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode’s explosive response in 1985 to MOVE. The gore and bald rhetoric made Plan B one of his least artistically interesting novels, even if he did presage the bloody blaxploitation films, slasher horror movies, and Quentin Tarantino films like Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, which would eventually delight American audiences. The possibility that the book was lightweight didn’t bother him. “The main thing in this game,” he told Williams, “is to keep putting books out. Even if you have to put out a lot of fillers—who knows but that they might become classics in time. Look at Hemingway.” Chester’s book might have become a kind of classic, if he could have gotten it out in the 1960s or early 1970s, during the strong periods of black revolutionary militancy in the United States. However, Plan B would not be released until 1986.

  Chester worked more diligently on his autobiography and determined, after he had written several hundred pages and had not quite begun his second round in Europe in late 1955, that he would write another volume. The book of his life covering 1954 to 1970, substantially filled with epistles he had collected from over the years, his long essay for The New Yorker about his car troubles (in the context of his work, a fascinating rejoinder to the idea of western industrial supremacy), infused with sex and modern profanity, would be an intertextual effort, quite different from the first volume. He liked the new possibilities available in language with the decline of censorship, one of his long-standing wars, and in Blind Man with a Pistol he had added a one-line “Foreword” from a “Harlem Intellectual”: “Motherfucking right, it’s confusing,” he purportedly quoted, “it’s a gas baby, you dig.”

  Blind Man with a Pistol did get a push from William Morrow (whose other strong books written by African Americans included the LeRoi Jones anthology Black Fire and Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual) and, unlike his other detective fiction, received a solo review in the New York Times. Perhaps because it eschewed the tight plot of the other books in the detective series and prevented, in its finale, the detectives from resolving or explaining away the crime, the book was understood, finally, as literature. “Reading Blind Man with a Pistol is like reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” considered one reviewer, “without the spiritual progress that alleviates the horrors of that novel.” Again the reviewer detrained at the question of Chester’s authentic representations of black life. “His Harlem blacks look and sound like the kind of idiots and psychopaths and punks a white man of similar background might think them all to be.” But the next year, when the Mystery Writers of America awards banquet was held in New York on May 1, Chester’s Blind Man with a Pistol was announced as runner-up for best mystery of the year. Chester’s buddy Phil Lomax described the dynamic of reading it: “I got my standard two laughs and a wince per page,” calling Chester’s “hack and slash” scene involving Dr. Mubuta, Mr. Sam, Viola, Van Raff, and Johnson X “a tour de force.” Chester had written the series for ten years, without becoming jaded or bored. The Times reviewer had proposed that a white man of “similar background” to Chester was around. In his forthcoming autobiography, he would remind the public that such a white person did not exist.

  Chester mailed off a nearly four-hundred-page draft of the first half of his autobiography to Rosalyn Targ in March 1969, hoping for a windfall from a good press. After an angry and disheartening exchange with the paperback house Dell over the cover of Run Man Run, which featured a lascivious Harlem belle (Dell editorial staff making the decision about the book’s cover declined to read the book itself, about a white detective killing unarmed black men), May was busy and filled with visitors. John Williams proved his devotion by trooping out to the city of Alicante for a five-day visit at Chester and Lesley’s apartment on Calle Duque de Zaragoza. The lengthy interview Williams conducted would have talismanic qualities for the next generation when it anchored Amistad 1, the Random House project conceived by Williams in 1970. But the rub between the two was evident. Williams would introduce the interview, which some reviewers thought “the highlight of the issue,” with what people reading the article recognized as a “self-indulgent” opening. For the second time he described Chester as decrepit, “almost sixty now” and “not well,” a description that no working writer would have liked. To introduce a long interview that was so revelatory as to be nearly shocking, Williams mainly emphasized the vulnerability and weakness of his older buddy: “Himes’ life has been filled with so many disasters, large and small, that I lived in dread that one of these would carry him away.” By noting Chester’s frailty, Williams nearly reproduced the oedipal struggle that Baldwin had confessed to Wright.

  The day after Williams left, May 15, Hoyt Fuller of Negro Digest (later Black World) arrived to interview him. Chester set out much of the same material again in another long conversation, but this time he settled his score with Ralph Ellison. Chester detailed the needling by Ellison at Vandi Haygood’s apartment in 1953 about Ellis
on’s Time magazine contacts as “the thing that cooled our relationship.” Ellison had chilled the relationship with Chester by 1948, given his embarrassment about Lonely Crusade. By 1968 he was becoming known as the antagonist to the young black novelists. In a book jacket blurb for James Alan McPherson’s Hue and Cry (1969), Ellison proposed that younger black writers were overpraised and “take being black as a privilege for being obscenely second-rate.” Chester endeared himself to blacks coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s himself by taking the opposite position: the American publishing industry itself represented the prime indecency and stupidity. And then he went further: Chester suggested that “the white press and writers” had introduced a canard by elevating Ellison. “They say [he] took time to learn his craft,” Chester fumed, considering the squabble in the winter of 1945 when Wright had huffed to them both that Ellison’s early chapters of Invisible Man were too similar to Native Son and Black Boy. Perhaps thinking of what he himself had accomplished in terms of storytelling in The End of a Primitive, Chester made a point of saying that he didn’t believe that Ellison “introduced any new techniques.”

  With his unfiltered disdain for established literary conventions and his immutable underdog credentials, Chester became the doyen of the black writers whose aesthetic values were formed in the maelstrom of the 1960s. For these talented writers on the margins, Chester’s retreat to Europe made principled sense. The bunch included novelists like Williams, Clarence Major, Arnold Kemp, Steve Cannon, Sam Greenlee, Ishmael Reed, Kristin Hunter, and Ronald Fair; memoirist Eldridge Cleaver; poets Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, and Maya Angelou; and critics Julius Lester, Hoyt Fuller, and Addison Gayle. As Williams wrote Chester in a letter in 1969, “the younger writers know of and have read Chester Himes. They want to know where he is, what he’s up to. This ‘black revolution’ or whatever it is has shocked them into life. They missed Wright and Hughes, and Ellison gives them nothing but platitudes from what I hear, and they are reaching desperately for roots—which means you.”

  By the end of the decade, James Baldwin started boosting Chester too. When Hollywood cribbed the title If He Hollers Let Him Go for one of the movies cashing in black misery in 1969, Baldwin was indignant on Chester’s behalf. Calling If He Hollers Let Him Go a “fine novel,” whose very title should never have been purloined by Hollywood, Baldwin found himself spouting Himesian lyrics about Americans not only “far from being able to abandon the doctrine of white supremacy” but being “prepared to blow up the globe to maintain it.” For the final twenty years of his career, Baldwin would find himself held in decreasing esteem as he pointed out the chronic ulcers of American life.

  Quite different from Chester’s formative literary years in the 1940s, the shift in American cultural space at the dawn of 1970 presented a wholesale transformation. Chester was a necessary antenna for perspicuity. Chicago Tribune reviewer Shane Stevens called him “the best black American novelist writing today.” The proof of the new acceptance was in celluloid, as Cotton Comes to Harlem neared completion. The film was shot on location in Harlem with the paramilitary Black Citizens Patrol guarding the props and the actor Godfrey Cambridge defending Chester’s vision on set against producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. When Roz Targ visited in July 1969, she reported that Cambridge was unafraid “to speak up if he feels Sam is going in any wrong direction.”

  Chester’s recognition as a writer and one with a novel being turned into a movie did not heal an old wound; even the bubbly Targ was struggling to find a taker for his autobiography. At Random House, a black editor named Charles Harris failed to persuade the senior staff to acquire the book. “White folks won’t know what Chester’s talking about,” he declared to John Williams, “they want a black autobiography, not one by a human being.” Harris would be fired in a year, eventually publishing the English-language version of Chester’s A Case of Rape at Howard University Press. Chester chalked up the failure at Random House to another source. “I can imagine,” he wrote to John Williams about the difficulties preventing a contract, “that most of them stem from Random House regarding Ralph Ellison as the oracle of black writing and all black thought, and anything that doesn’t follow the path of his platitudes is regarded as unmentionable.”

  Chester could add the dismissal to his other worries. By August 1969, he was trying to have a home built on the Moraira lots he’d bought in 1967. To construct the small villa on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean would be an all-consuming, drawn-out task, filled with the delay and difficulty he had come to expect in Spain. By late fall he had decided that the work on his home “looked like an imbecile child playing with mud.” In mid-1970, he remained strongly dissatisfied. He was annoyed by the tardy progress when his brother Joe wrote about visiting at the end of the summer. Chester discouraged him, describing the Costa Blanca retreat as “physically difficult” and possessing “uneven streets (I have had three different exhaust systems knocked from the bottom of my car by unseen rocks and protusions [sic]), heat, flies, crowds, and indifferent food.” Then he received an oddly cheery notice from Ken McCormick at Doubleday (“Nice to hear from you again via our legal department”), after Chester had made some boilerplate inquiries about the sales and rights of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Since he was reputably famous, Doubleday as well as Knopf responded now with speed and politesse. McCormick’s slight rapprochement betokened the source of Chester’s final major writings. Fickle Doubleday would bring out his personal annals in two volumes, beginning in 1972.

  The relationship was wobbly from the start. After Sandy Richardson, the company’s recently appointed editorial director, read the memoirs in April 1970, he offered $10,000 for the autobiography’s first volume; for the second volume, due the following year, Doubleday promised only $5,000. “I’m not very happy to be back with Doubleday, but beggars can’t be choosers” was how Chester summed up the situation to John Williams. One bright spot, Chester was working with a black editor, a young woman named Helen Jackson who adored him and his work. (Blacks were showing signs of some leverage in publishing. That summer Williams successfully demanded that a white Doubleday editorial staffer be fired for calling his book editor a “nigger-lover.”) Some of the earliest discussions with Doubleday were aimed at publishing both volumes of the autobiography within a year. Chester also seconded a contract to publish a revamped version of his abandoned short story collection of 1954, with the robust Baby Sister at its center, to be called Black on Black.

  With greetings from Amiri Baraka and the novelist Cecil Brown (of The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger fame), Chester felt better about traveling to New York. He reached the United States on August 26, 1970, to ink the deal with Doubleday and to enjoy the film success of Cotton Comes to Harlem. His no-holds-barred interview with Williams in Amistad 1 had “got a lot of things cracking.” In it, Chester had proved his uncanny ability to truthfully render the multiracial complexity of American writing while demolishing the myths of white superiority. Chester said repeatedly how much he admired William Faulkner, but then he told Williams, “Look, I have talked to black sharecroppers and convicts and various black people who could tell, without stopping, better stories than Faulkner could write.” His old editorial sparring partner Bill Targ, soon to be promoted to president at Putnam, admitted that Chester’s raw candor was “impressive as an overall, much needed commentary” and would contribute to “your long overdue recognition.”

  Back in June, Cotton Comes to Harlem—in director Ossie Davis’s words, featuring Harlem’s “colorful, exciting life-style and wit,” with a score by the creator of the hit Broadway musical Hair—had opened and delivered a knockout punch at the box office. In Philadelphia, theaters kept doors open twenty-four hours a day to handle overflow crowds, and Cotton broke the opening-day box-office records in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Detroit, finally grossing $5.1 million. Despite the young Chicago film critic Gene Siskel’s sour estimate—“the best way to handle ethnic humor is to leave it alone”—black au
diences especially seemed to express relief at a comedy, featuring underground talent like Redd Foxx, that placed serious political matters as the context and not the center. Remembering Chester fondly, the New York black newspaper the Amsterdam News had his back: “P.S.” its article concluded, “Chester Himes has been writing and getting published for too long without due recognition.”

  The New York Times greeted the film with “a sense of liberation, for here is a film by a new black director (Ossie Davis, otherwise the actor and author), based on the work of a black novelist (Chester Himes), shot in Harlem with a large and talented black cast.” While Davis couldn’t help from sputtering that “concessions” he made might have “cut the gut and heart out of what we are trying to say to black people,” the strong box-office appeal for the quirky humor indicated the emergence of a new genre.

  About six months later, Melvin Van Peebles started screening his independently produced revolutionary film Sweet Sweetback’s Baad-asssss Song, which would be distributed broadly in the spring of 1971. Himes’s old friend, whom Chester believed had “tapped [his] literary vault,” used guerrilla advertising methods, like handbills with the slogan “Rated X by an all-white jury,” to promote his unyielding film. Van Peebles directed and starred in the movie, which eventually grossed more than $10 million.

  The same year, Gordon Parks released Shaft, whose $12 million at the box office rescued parent company M-G-M from bankruptcy. Together, the three films proved the sound economic value of black-cast movies also written and directed by African Americans. After Shaft’s success was duplicated by the 1972 film Super Fly by Gordon Parks’s son, Gordon Parks Jr. (who had earned credentials filmmaking with Dominic-Pierre Gaisseau), a film featuring a criminal as its hero, the NAACP generated the term “black exploitation” (soon shortened to “blaxploitation”) to describe the trend of financially successful studio films, sometimes in the crime genre and sometimes “B movies,” with majority black actors. It was amusing to Chester that his old antagonists at the NAACP would point to Cotton Comes to Harlem as the originator of the trend.

 

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