Chester Himes (11 page)

In his story “On Dreams and Reality” Himes tells of a young man returning home from prison with high hopes of a new life, only to find his family living in one squalid room, hanging on by the barest of threads. The story is a miniature, perfect tragedy, paralleling the failures of the prisoner unable to make his way in the outside world with the general failures of the Depression.

“In the stagnant isolation of prison, dreams grow as tall as redwood trees,”
¹
that story begins as James “Happy” Trent awaits release. Reentry with all its joys and terrors must have been much on Himes's mind, before and after his own. “Every Opportunity” presents another ex-con's inability to break old habits despite best intentions, and, in the kind of abrupt, revelatory ending Himes favored for a time (a kind of shattering of the text), his return to prison. Other stories deal with memory and dreams that let prisoners go on—to them, there is little difference between memory and dream—and with irruptions of reality. Nailed awake by his sense of loss in “Face in the Moonlight,” a prisoner half dreams, half remembers the life that brought him here. “I Don't Want to Die” gives us the reveries of a prisoner with a terminal disease, “His Last Day” the experience of a man pacing down his final hours to execution. Both these last stories evidence the evocation of physical detail and the sensual surface, simultaneously lush and spare, that become a Himes trademark.

“The Meanest Cop in the World” drops us with great immediacy into a poor college student's wondrous fortune at meeting the beautiful Violet, then tears us from the dream, as he himself is torn from it, when for absolutely no reason a policeman shows up in the dream to attack him.

And then suddenly Jack realized that he wasn't a freshman in a nice old college, and he wasn't in love with a pretty girl called Violet, that he didn't even know such a girl, that he was just convict number 10012 in a dark, chilly cell, and he had eaten too many beans at supper. But for hours afterward he lay there silently cursing the huge policeman who had made him realize this.
²

Again and again, rents are torn in the sky, in walls thought solid, and unwanted truths push their way into his characters' worlds.

Amorphous fear, occult oppression, were by then signature Himes. Yet another story ends: “All that day, copying records down at the city hall, half blind with a hangover and trembling visibly, he kept cursing something. He didn't know exactly what it was and he thought it was a hell of a thing when a man had to curse something without knowing what it was.”
³

Whereas the stories of the thirties deal mostly with prison and criminals, in the forties Himes began to extend his reach. He had become, inasmuch as he would ever align himself with any movement, a social activist, publishing fiction and articles in the National Urban League's
Opportunity
and the NAACP's
Crisis
. In part this was typical Himes role-playing, in part the usual writerly trying on of new masks, in part simply the result of new opportunities for publication. But stories such as “Black Laughter” and “All He Needs Is Feet” reflect Himes's deeper awareness of the great American inequation; many of them edge toward attitudes and preoccupations we closely associate with the mature writer.

And although he tried to get outside this teaching of America, it was inside of him, making him scared … Not of being lynched; this was Cleveland, Ohio. They don't hang Negroes in the north; they have other and more subtle ways of killing them.
⁴

Or this from the same story, “All God's Chillun Got Pride,” published nine years before Himes's expatriation:

Having been educated in America, he had learned of course that living and breathing unaccompanied by certain other inalienable rights, such as liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were of small
consequence; but he had learned, also, that this ideology did not apply to him. He never really sat down and thought about it for any length of time; because he knew that if he ever did, living in America would become impossible.
⁵

Subsequently incorporated in
Lonely Crusade
, this story seems a landmark on several fronts. It offers what amounts to a prototype of the emerging Himes protagonist: a well-educated, articulate personality disintegrating under pressures of circumstance, pervasive fear, and his own self-destructive patterns. Compulsively he analyzes himself, picking at the scab, but he can never get at the wound. The story exhibits, moreover, an adroit use of reimagined autobiography prefiguring Himes's first novels and, most importantly,
The Primitive
.

In much the same way that the free-floating fear of “All God's Chillun Got Pride” transports us to
If He Hollers
territory (“I felt torn all loose inside, shrivelled, paralyzed, as if after a while I'd have to get up and die”
⁶
), stories like “A Night of New Roses” underline Himes's castings-about with hypotheses on their way to becoming axioms, here an equation of racial pain with personal. By the time we reach “Daydream,” we're deep into Himesland. A wild and woolly tale of wreaking vengeance on white Southern peckerwoods fades to a black man sitting alone in his New York hotel room: “‘You are sick, son,' I said to my smiling reflection. After a moment I added, ‘But that isn't anything to worry about. We are all sick. Sicker than we know.'”
⁷

In these stories Himes, as always, worked by instinct, blindly feeling his way through rooms of unaccustomed furniture, eccentric doorways, sudden walls. From all accounts he wrote in a state of fervid excitement, flailing away at the material with both hands. Chips of logic and emotion fell where they might. Yet his face begins recognizably to emerge.

Reimagined autobiography, along with a new sense of structure and with an intensity deriving more from that structure, from interiority and from the language itself than from incident, all come together in “Da-Da-Dee,” a remarkably mature story from 1948 whose protagonist shares his author's alcoholic blackouts, dalliance with radicalism in L.A., and residence at an artist's colony (here called Skiddoo). Written in the wake of hostile criticism for his early novels and amidst the
wreckage of his marriage to Jean, the story is a virtual sketch for
The Primitive;
its protagonist even plans a story titled
I Was Looking for a Street
, a title Himes will attribute to alter ego Jesse in that novel. Here Jethro Adams, genius kid turned writer turned drunk, lies abed thinking over the course of his life.
When they started talking about how things could be you believed them, didn't you?
he tells himself.

He felt as if nothing would ever matter again one way or another. He thought it was something Congress Street did to him … It was like going back to Central Avenue, a street of dives and whores of which he had been a part at seventeen and nothing mattered but the night. It was like putting behind him everything that he had learned and experienced since and going back to that year of vice and indifference. He was never meant to be anything but a cheap, smiling gambler with a flashy front, he told himself. He was a simple man.
⁸

The Chester Himes who stepped to freedom from the Ohio State Penitentiary on April 1, 1936, was anything but a simple man. He had survived. Learned what he had to, done what he had to, to survive. He had seen the worst in man and, in rare instances, as when inmates labored to save others during the Easter fire, he had seen the best as well. He had found friendship and, briefly, love. And if he had been to some degree unmanned (as he must have been) by the prison experience, as by racism and by his own self-destructive urges, prison had also given him, in his writing, a means of redirecting pain and anger, a field phone he had only to crank and spark to discharge those emotions, to
use
them.

The state of Ohio ended Himes's disability payments just weeks prior to his release. What money he'd had in prison was gone, some of it put toward Joe's college expenses. “Broke and without income for the first time in my adult life,”
⁹
Himes must have felt himself shipwrecked on the Depression's shores. Back in Columbus Joe was completing his doctorate in sociology; soon he'd begin working as an administrator for the Columbus Urban League. Estelle kept house for Joe, and herself would soon return to South Carolina. Theirs was an orderly, directed life. They must have awaited Chester's return with profoundly mixed feelings.

Chester, of course, had profoundly mixed feelings of his own. He emerged into a changed world. Now twenty-six years old, having survived and come to his manhood in one of the toughest prisons in America, suddenly, from lack of money and from parole stipulations, he found himself in a state of almost childlike dependency. Still, he resolved that, despite the marks against him, despite the Depression, he would make his way by sheer force of will and innate talent. He would be,
was
, a writer.

First, though, he'd take time out: after all those years locked away, he deserved the chance to savor his freedom. One wonders, too, if rebelliousness against his dependency on Estelle and Joe may have been as much a factor in his behavior as simple recidivism. At any rate, soon he was back among whores in the city's black slums. He was also back among gamblers, pimps, and other ex-convicts. This, we assume, he kept from Estelle, as he had earlier kept secret his work at Bunch Boy's. But she smelled the women on him when he came home in the early hours, leading to “such dreadful rows that Joe had to intervene.”
¹⁰

Characteristically, Himes boasted in his memoirs that the Columbus whores serviced him free, presumably for his general attractiveness, charm, and educated manner as much as for his prodigious sexual appetite.

I didn't have any money so I had to look for whores I could have for free. There were numerous white whores in the black ghettos of Columbus at the time, and I had success because I took them out, so long as they paid. Of course I had to keep out of the way of their pimps. Several times landlords had to intervene to keep me from being shot.
¹¹

He also tells of being persuaded by a group of ex-cons to go along with them to “Georgia,” a teenage black whore, that is, to use her then not pay her, and, touched by her tears as she realized what was going on, of refusing to take part. That split-hair moral stance within what was from any perspective a contemptible situation seems typically Himes, as does his derisory final word on the matter: “I learned afterwards that all the others had caught gonorrhea from her.”
¹²

Another instance of easy acquiescence finally pushed Estelle to action. One Sunday, telling Estelle he had to go see about a job, Chester
instead joined a young man he knew slightly to smoke marijuana and returned to the house so high that he thought he was having a heart attack. (His description of his response to the drug takes up two full pages and recalls more than anything else “psychedelic” sequences from sixties movies.) Chester admitted marijuana use to the doctor, who passed the admission on to his mother, who immediately dressed and left for a long tête-à-tête with Chester's parole officer. The following week, parole was reassigned to his father.

Chester arrived in Cleveland in July. Joseph at that time was working for the WPA as a mechanics teacher. He lived in a two-room flat off Cedar Avenue on Ninety-third Street and spent much of his free time with a woman friend. Mostly he left Chester alone and to his own devices, as he'd always done. So while Chester's economic prospects remained grim, at least he had escaped his mother's oppressive witness and the resentment he felt at forced dependence on her. He no longer like a bad conjurer had to obscure his every move with misdirection and quick patter. Any man that long shut away under the supervision of others must hunger to be his own man. Add in Chester's age and obstinacy, and the hunger becomes volatile.

Though he found temporary part-time work as a waiter and bellhop, this did little to improve his finances in any substantial way. He turned again to fiction, trying unsuccessfully to write for the slick magazines. He did manage to sell again to
Esquire
, stories that Fabre and Margolies characterize as expressing “a mix of melancholy and unrelenting fury.”
¹³
“The Visiting Hour” appeared in September 1936, “The Night's For Cryin'” the following January. “Headwaiter,” also from this period and first published in the National Urban League's
Opportunity
as “Salute to the Passing,” memorializes Himes's boss at his first job out of prison, when uncle Andrew arranged for Chester to wait tables part-time at Wade Park Manor Hotel, the very place Chester had met his accident in the elevator.

Himes continued to work at his writing, squeezing out stories and recasting several as plays, among them a homoerotic tale of two prisoners titled “Idle Hours.” During this period he also continued writing and rewriting his prison novel. At least three distinct drafts of it exist, along with fragments. And if writing never quite turned the corner from avocation, nor seemed likely to do so anytime soon, Himes did begin to find supporters and sponsors. One was his cousin Henry
Lee Moon, then working as a federal housing official in Washington and later to become publicity director for the NAACP, who read Chester's work, told him what he thought, even suggested possible venues for publication. Through Joe he met editors and writers for magazines like
Opportunity
and
The Crisis
, for which he himself began writing stories and strident editorials. Sidney Williams, director of the Cleveland Urban League, and politician-minister Grant Reynolds also offered Himes advice and support.