"Sonny...was tree-top high. Seen from his drugged eyes, the dark night sky looked bright purple and the dingy smoke-blackened tenements looked like brand new skyscrapers made of strawberry colored bricks. The neon signs of the bars and pool rooms and greasy spoons burned like phosphorescent fires." The Real Cool Killers (1959).
 Chester Himes The detective novels of Chester Himes (1909-1984) are notable for their frenetic pace: the cop car came "down the street in a screaming fury," Himes wrote in The Crazy Killers (1959).
Approached by Marcel Duhamel, director of the French publisher Gallimard's crime story series La Serie Noire, and asked to produce a crime novel, forty-six-year-old Himes responded with A Rage in Harlem. Seven additional detective novels followed. Himes's detectives, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are tough guys, and the sight of their battered black Plymouth sedan on the streets of Harlem causes hearts to skip a beat.
Himes knew the world of crooks, hustlers, strong-arm men and women he wrote about. A teenage renegade, Himes ran with a tough crowd in Cleveland, Ohio, where he spent part of his adolescence, and was arrested at 19 for an armed robbery. Sentenced to 20 years, Himes did six inside Ohio State Penitentiary and two years at a prison farm before being paroled. He began his writing career behind bars, publishing his first stories in black-owned publications such as Abbott's Monthly, The Pittsburgh Courier, and the Atlanta Daily, and in 1934, Esquire Magazine. Esquire's publication of "Crazy in the Stir," and "To What Red Hell" gave Himes credibility as a marketable writer.
Born into a black middle-class family in Jefferson City, Missouri, youngest son Chester was home schooled by his mother, before being sent to public high school. After high school he did two semesters at Ohio State University before being expelled. His formative years were marked by at least two traumatic events: the accidental blinding of his brother Joe (witnessed by him), and his own fall down the elevator shaft of a Cleveland hotel he worked for (breaking bones and teeth).
Following his stint in the slammer, Chester married Jean Johnson and moved with her from the mid-West to Los Angeles where he dallied with Communists, worked in manual labor jobs, and wrote an early version of his prison novel, Cast the First Stone.
Ambition had been bred into Chester by his mother Estelle (born Bomar), who had high hopes for her three sons, Ed, Joe, and Chester. Like her husband Professor Joseph Himes Estelle had respect for culture and a belief in education as gateway to success. Unlike her husband, Estelle was light-skinned, an octoroon, Anglo in appearance ("looking like a white woman who had suffered a long siege of illness," Himes wrote in Volume One of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt). In The Third Generation, the most patently autobiographical of Himes's novels, he etches an indelible and somewhat merciless portrait of a mother, Lillian Taylor, outwardly resembling Estelle. Married to a dark-skinned college instructor, light-skinned Lillian feels superior to the husband she calls a "shanty nigger." Lillian tries to indoctrinate her sons with her elitism, but her social pretensions, imperious manner, and crazy behavior alienate her sons as well as her husband. The novel's protagonist, the sensitive, shy, and proud Charles Taylor, reveres his mother, yet also loathes her for belittling his father. Like Chester himself, the light-skinned Charles is confounded by simultaneous feelings of racial superiority, instilled by his mother, and inferiority, brought about by the dominant white society and the heritage of slavery. Charles's confusion is shared by other Himes's protagonists, as by Himes himself, due to the problems of living with dignity as a person of color in a racist society. Unlike his prison stories, which do not overtly deal with issues of race, the major theme of Himes's six novels preceding his first detective story is race relations--the so-called "Negro problem" in America.
Los Angeles serves as the scene for Himes's first two published novels: If He Hollers Let Him Go(1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947).
If He Hollers is set in the war years of 1941-45. The protagonist of the novel, Bob Jones, a black ship yard worker — and human time bomb — is at war with the white world and himself. Seemingly pathologically oversensitive, and obviously on the make, Bob is a hard character to like or empathize with. The novel bogs down at mid-point —the language becoming increasingly prosaic — and plods forward somewhat interminably. However it does end on a high note. As description of the LA ship yards during the war, the novel's sociological value surpasses its literary. Though a valiant effort, the novel is overly serious — a not atypical defect for a first novel —and without a hint of the humor so commonly found in Himes's later work.
Lonely Crusade, a naturalistic work like its predecessor, is the stronger novel, highly ambitious, but, to its detriment, a novel of ideas as much as action. Characters spin some heavy raps about a variety of "ism's" (Communism, Capitalism, Unionism, Racism, and anti-Semitism). The plot too often seems subservient to disbursement of ideas expounded ad nauseam. Some characters seem little more than adjuncts to their proselytized "ism." Protagonist Lee Gordon, a young college-educated married black man, is hired as the first, and only, black organizer by the union trying to unionize "Comstock Industrial." Like Bob Jones, Lee is of a mercurial temperament, but is more articulate, thoughtful, and, unlike Bob, capable of acting and not merely reacting.
Fired by the union after becoming an unwitting accomplice to murder, Lee makes the supreme sacrifice at the novel's end — not for Karl Marx (Lee rejects Communism — as did Himes) but in the name of Jesus Christ — for "mankind," white and black. It is a morally uplifting ending that somewhat compromises verisimilitude as Lee's martyrdom seems at odds with the brooding negativism of his character.
Himes's cousin Henry Moon, a reader for Doubleday, was instrumental in getting his first novel published. Moon's wife, the prototype for Himes' character Mamie Mason in his novel Pinktoes (1961) (a ribald though not particularly funny farce), steered Chester to the Rosenwald Foundation which awarded him a fellowship in 1944. The second novel, helped into print by Himes's friend, the photographer Carl Van Vechten, was composed during periods when Himes and his wife Jean worked as caretakers of summer homes on Long Island and lived rent-free in a rat-and-snake-infested cabin in California, a "poor man's version of Better Homes and Gardens" (James Sallis, Chester Himes: A Life, p. 119).
Jean was Himes's most ardent early supporter. For much of the fourteen-year marriage, she provided the means for Himes to continue to write. Himes, however, was not grateful for the support; he felt unmanned, in fact, because Jean was the primary bread winner, a situation that, Himes claims in his autobiography, led to the breakup of their marriage.
The year the marriage ended, 1952, Himes's prison novel was published. Cast the First Stone (reissued as Yesterday Will Make You Cry, 1998) starts strongly, like one of Himes's prison shorts (classics of the genre), but becomes dull and repetitive. The story of the love of convicts Jimmy and Rico for one another is told using clichéd language: "he could feel him in his heart" — "being together was like rain drops on desert sands". Himes's forte was not the love story--he was better at the hate story.
These early novels could be considered apprentice work leading to the powerful but flawed The Third Generation, a book of sorrows soaked in the tears of the Taylor family, and the novel The End of a Primitive, Himes's 5th published, and best, novel; his masterwork, a great American novel, published in abridged form in 1955 (as The Primitive) and reisssued in original form in 1997.
The novel features Jesse Robinson, black American novelist, and Kriss Cummings, white woman administrator for the "India Foundation" (portrait based on Vandi Heygood, administrator for the Rosenwald Foundation). Jesse is between novels and out-of-sorts, separated from his wife and living in the apartment of two gay men on 142nd Street, Harlem. He gravitates to Kriss's apartment on 21st Street, Manhattan. The two have a shared history as former lovers--before handsome Kriss, now 37 years old, developed through an excess of drinking the bicycle tire around her middle.
Essentially plot-less, the novel revolves around Jesse's movements, mostly between apartments, culminating in a days' long bacchanal. Jesse's inward musing and notations to self ("good thing you're not in Georgia, son") provide comic relief, also suggest a kind of split in consciousness. Jesse is like a man observing himself and commenting on his conduct. The remove, or distance, creates a kind of doubling, or split personality type, exacerbated by the character's abuse of drugs and alcohol. (Himes is great at evoking states of alcoholics deep in their cups.) In the novel, "perception and delirium have interpenetrated" (Sallis, pg. 233) — the complex, disjointedly contrapuntal writing style (polyphony of overlapping voices), far from the naturalistic methodology employed previous--gives the work more affinity with novels of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry than novels of John Steinbeck or Sinclair Lewis.
Partly protest, mostly condemnation, the novel illustrates Himes' contention that the system mistreats the black man and white woman equally. Jesse and Kriss are hurt, and hurting, victims — it is implied — of the white male dominated power structure. As victims they are also outcasts, each isolated and divested by the powers that be. Their obviously sick condition, a result of hatred turned inward, is a pathology Himes contends, created by the greater pathological condition of a racist and sick society that condemns each victim to a life of absurdity — that is, life lived with no relation to the society and its rulers ("antichristian killers," Jess thinks, "who solve all human problems through annihilation"). Cocooned in Kriss's apartment — the constantly running television introducing an element of inanity to the absurdity (the inanity of the world outside mirroring events within) — the pair embark on a fatal debauch of self-destruction, the debauch leading to murder, a senseless act in itself, but the logical conclusion, the novel implies, of the pathology.
With reprint-rights money Himes headed for Paris in 1953 aboard the Ile de France. Richard Wright, who Himes met in 1945, welcomed him to Paris. Wright was the daddy of the black American expatriate writers and artists frequenting the Parisian cafes. Publication of Native Son(1940) and Black Boy(1945) gave Wright preeminent status among the black American writers of his day.
During the ocean crossing Himes began a ship-board romance with a white American woman unhappily married to a Dutchman. The woman, called "Alva" in Himes' autobiography, accompanied him from Paris to Arcachon in Southern France, to London to Mallorca, and back to Paris —a year of continental adventure during which Himes wrote The End of a Primitive. After the adventure, Alva returned to the U.S. and Himes remained in Paris, living precariously — mostly on his wits — until, in 1955, he too returned to the states.
In New York, Himes lived in Harlem and worked as night porter for a Horn & Hardart automat — the job "Jimmy" of Himes's non-detective thriller Run Man Run(1966) holds. Himes' impressions of the city were later put to good use in his detective novels. Less than a year after returning, fed-up with racist attitudes endemic to the culture, and viewing his return as a mistake, Himes fled back to France and his Parisian life.
In 1956 Himes had the fortuitous meeting with Marcel Duhamel and began turning out detective novels at a rate of one every three months or so. The Harlem detective stories are unlike anything Himes previously wrote, though the seeds of the stories can be found in earlier work. Similar to characters of the detective stories are the crooks, con-men, and their marks featured in Himes's prison stories; echoed in the later novels are plots and scenarios of Pinktoes (also set in Harlem), a sort of dress rehearsal for the crime novels. The absurdity of the lives of outcasts (like Jesse and Kriss of The End of a Primitive), is magnified and heightened in the detective novels — novels Himes considered "absurd."
Himes's two Harlem detectives are mythic heroes of sorts — indomitable forces of nature, their status as heavy-handed enforcers for the Man elevated to Harlem legends. So pervasive is the legend that their presence isn't needed to inspire awe or fear, mention of their name is enough. They are the law, the Man, the "mens," also a law onto themselves, using extralegal means to induce compliance. Like knights of the Round Table in Authurian legend, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed rescue the virtuous and slay dragons. Instead of swords they carry long-barreled nickel-plated .38 caliber revolvers.
Grave Digger and Ed are "ordinary dark-brown colored men," who wear "misshapen snap-brim hats," and look like "hog farmers." As is the case with other mythologized characters, like Paul Bunyan and John Henry, the detectives' ordinariness serves to enhance their myth. Being "common," but possessing uncommon attributes, adds a supernatural aspect to such characterizations. How else, but through supernatural agency, could a common man or woman rise so far above other commoners? The element of divine aid or favor invests the characterization with an even greater aura.
In two of the detective novels —All Shot Up(1960) and Blind Man With a Pistol (1969) —the narrative revolves primarily around Grave Digger and Ed. In other novels the detectives remain on the periphery, looming like shadows in the Harlem night, while the actions of the vibrantly imagined and drawn secondary characters, bit-players, move the stories until things inevitably turn deadly and the detectives appear. Each novel presents a new cast of characters mingling with the regulars Grave Digger and Ed, Lieutenant Anderson, and H. Exodus Clay, Harlem undertaker. The setting of each story is Harlem, north of Central Park, west of the Harlem River, east of the Hudson, specifically 125th Street (Martin Luthur King Jr. Blvd) and intersections of north-south avenues (Lenox, Park, 5th, etc.), and The Valley —Harlem east of 7th Avenue (Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.) to the Harlem River.
The novels present a burlesque of human types, phantasmagoria of characters. Himes' evolution from naturalist to a kind of "fabulist" — begun in The End of a Primitive — reaches its apotheosis in the crime stories. The books are a hype, comic and serious by turns, reveling in the absurd; they are also social documents of a sort, chronicling the lives of those trapped racially and economically in the dark dangerous city. While the portraits of the detectives are romanticized, Harlem itself, despite the sensuality of its people, is presented as a city of stink and squalor whose people are "convulsed in desperate living." "Colored people passed along the sidewalks," Jackson of A Rage in Harlem observes," every mother's child of them looking as though they had trouble." Among the comic lines spoken in the masterfully funny The Big Gold Dream (1960), is a sadly poignant comment made by Alberta Peave Wright to a white detective questioning her belief in God: "if you is a black woman like me, you got to believe in something."
Alberta is one of Himes's finest characterizations; she is an innocent, a "square," and lovable because of her vulnerability. The hard-boiled and hip characters of the stories are fascinating, even when repulsive, but it's the "suckers," like Alberta, and Roman the Sailor of All Shot Up, and Jackson of A Rage in Harlem, who claim the reader's heart and give a human face, a warmth, to stories loaded with cold-hearted killers and whores.
In the last volume of the series, Blind Man With a Pistol (1969) (Himes left a 9th volume, PLAN B, unfinished), the two detectives become politicized. The time of the story is the height of the Black Power movement in America, and Grave Digger and Ed, for the first time in the series, bring the "race issue" into the precinct house. Assigned by Lieutenant Anderson to discover who is behind the race riots happening in Harlem, the detectives suggest white people, like the Lieutenant, are behind the riots. Anderson is hurt and baffled by the suggestion. Grave Digger and Ed are confused as well, unsure if, as cops, they are serving justice or are serving "whitey" and the power structure (thus oppressing their fellow brothers). Accused by some black "punks" of being Uncle Toms, Grave Digger tells the punks he's on the side of their leaders — meaning the NAACP. The kids reply that their leaders are Uncle Toms too. Grave Digger is stumped for a response. The world is changing, but the detectives are not. Standing in the street, outside an Urban Renewal project, the detectives shoot rats emerging from the pulverized buildings. A senseless act, perhaps, but also symbolic — illustrative of the detectives' confusion and powerlessness. Finding themselves in a world gone seemingly mad — not knowing who to shoot as good guys are no longer distinguishable from bad — they shoot the rats, arguably a reasonable activity in the circumstances.
Introduced at novel's end, the blind man with the pistol illustrates the indiscriminate results of unorganized violence. The black blind man aims a gun at a white man, the putative enemy, but shoots a peacemaking black minister. The blind man's rampage suggests that violence unorganized is just as apt to kill friend as foe, and is also self-destructive (he is killed after the shooting by a cop).
Following his return to Paris in l955, Himes took-up with a German girl. The beginning of the affair is hilariously described by Himes (writing with the aplomb of Henry Miller) in My Life of Absurdity, volume 2 of his autobiography. The end of the affair, painful for both parties, came as Himes was on the verge of success with his initial detective stories.
In l960 Himes met an Englishwoman named Lesley Packard who eventually became his second wife. Lesley shared Chester's peripatetic life style — the dizzying itinerary he maintained — moving back and forth across Europe (in his Jaguar), country to country, address to address.
Detective novels made Himes famous in France, but not rich or even well-off as he was not paid royalties for the novels, receiving instead a flat $1000 advance. He did not have a significant pay-off from his books until 1964 when Hollywood made a movie from Cotton Comes to Harlem(1964) and he collected $20,000 for the rights.
In 1963 Himes suffered the first in a series of strokes that weakened and finally incapacitated him. He died in Spain in l984, his wife nearby.
Himes's reputation as writer rests primarily on his eight detective novels (and one non-detective thriller). His reputation as writer of some of the hardest-hitting crime stories in American literature is well deserved, but his masterwork, The End of a Primitive, remains neglected. Beginning as a protest novelist, following in the footsteps of Richard Wright, Himes broke the mold with The End of a Primitive and in his detective stories discarded the mold altogether. For many years he was like a prophet crying-out in the wilderness, his work too far ahead of its time to receive consideration it was due. In his late work he became chiefly an entertainer but never lost his seriousness of purpose. How racism and oppression deform the human spirit and mind is the theme of his most serious work. His crime novels, coupling craft with a searing and sometimes brutal black-humored "fabulism," transcended the genre. In his life, he broke through the tremendous barriers of race and class. His triumph against the odds is, ultimately, our victory. The best of his work is and will remain, no doubt, an indelible part of America's literature.
Wayne F. Burke, Montpelier, Vermont. This essay is chapter 2 of a work-in-progress titled Writers Left of Center.
|
