Chester Himes (12 page)

Editor N. R. Howard of the Cleveland
Daily News
, who had read Chester's work in
Esquire
, supposedly took him under wing as well; they'd sit talking for hours about writing and books, Richard Wright's
Uncle Tom's Children
among others. While local newspapers at the time didn't employ blacks (one editor telling Chester that he couldn't hire him if he was Jesus Christ reincarnated), Himes always maintained that he wrote fifty pieces titled “This Cleveland” for Howard, who paid him out of pocket, a dollar apiece. A typically hyperbolic 1946 letter to Carl Van Vechten ups the ante on all this: “I wrote by-line articles for the CIO weekly organ, the
Union Leader
, and then the daily vignettes for the editorial page of the
Cleveland News
which were very popular (one or two were reprinted in the
New Yorker)
. I wrote for two or three Cleveland magazines.”
¹⁴
No such columns or evidence of same exist in the newspaper's files; a single draft for what may have been intended as such a piece is among Himes's papers at Yale.

Sometime in August Himes made his most important new contact. When Oberlin graduates Russell and Rowena Jelliffe opened the Karamu House as a neighborhood arts center in 1927, one of their most faithful patrons was high-school student Langston Hughes. Now Hughes had become well known, and Karamu House stood alone in regularly producing plays written and performed by Negroes; they remained loosely associated. Hughes was impressed enough by two plays Himes submitted, reworkings of “To What Red Hell?” and “Day After Day,” that, while the plays were passed over, the two became friends of a sort. Hughes would later champion Himes's first novel, recommending it to his own publisher, Blanche Knopf. He would also provide introductions for Himes in New York and Los Angeles.

The year before, Karamu House had staged Hughes's
Little Ham
, a slapstick comedy set in the Harlem of the twenties, whose lead character, shoeshine boy and ladies' man Hamlet Hitchcock Jones,
seems in direct contradiction to its author's manifestoes for a new Negro literature.

The movement in which Hughes had become a major figure, the Harlem Renaissance, reflecting monumental changes in American society and within the Negro intelligentsia, attained its zenith about the time Himes entered prison.

In the period from 1890 to 1920 with the breakneck transition of their social base from peasantry to urban proletariat, blacks suffered a dislocation second only to slavery. Doubling its population, Harlem became a discrete metropolis within the greater metropolis of New York City; it became, also, a kind of racial capital. The times were a rare cocktail of postwar catharsis, Jazz Age liberties, defiance of authority, sexual revolution, and spiritual alienation. White society romanced the Negro, setting him up as a symbol of freedom from restraint—the innocent at his pleasure, unbound by strictures of civilization: the primitive. Blacks themselves, reversing assimilationist trends, entered into a period of self-discovery, searching for alternative values within their own tradition. In part this was fueled by waves of black nationalism taking forms as diverse as Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement and alignment with the Communist Party whose official gloss held that Negroes comprised an internal oppressed nation. Black self-realization had worked its way from the Niagara Movement, through Negro defense groups such as the NAACP and National Urban League, particularly by way of their house organs
The Crisis
and
Opportunity
, to this New Negro movement of the twenties.

As LeRoi Jones pointed out in
Blues People
, the earliest black art ignored African-American culture, striving instead to join the mainstream. Only with the Harlem Renaissance's New Negro did black writers and artists embrace their folk culture. The shift was from social mimicry to individuality, from a sense of the marginal (marginal both, as Negroes, to that mainstream culture and, as a cultured elite, to their own) to a sense of their own centrality. Not until the militant spirit of the sixties will we see again such concerted motive. The Harlem Renaissance dead-ended in the economic crash; reflecting the cynicism, disillusion, and dashed hopes of the time, that later movement shattered into pieces.

Whatever was distinctly Negro, by Harlem School creed, was of folk or slave origin. Its practitioners recognized that Negro literature came
of different roots than those of the dominant, white literature, roots based in the folktale, in exaggeration and in specific language arts. Such a distinctive literature required distinctive language; it would co-opt rhythms of jazz, inflections of the street, jive. And it would be more interested in interpreting Negro culture than in pleading the cause of racial justice. With Santayana, members of the Harlem School might have said that a culture could be judged only by the excellence, or example, of the individual life.

Writing in
The Nation
in 1926, Langston Hughes proclaimed: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter … If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either.”
¹⁵

The Depression broke the back of the Harlem Renaissance movement as it broke so many others. Primacies of survival reasserted themselves. Any black culture apart from the mainstream American culture seemed sheerest fantasy now. James Weldon Johnson had been correct: separate black institutions were contingent. Increasingly the black intelligentsia turned toward leftist movements, curling and tucking and holding their breaths to fit into the Procrustean bed of identification with the masses, with workers black and white alike moving together toward Bartolomeo Vanzetti's “serene white light of a reasonable world.”

Hughes's sponsorship of Himes was not unreserved. In one 1946 essay, citing
If He Hollers Let Him Go
and Richard Wright's
Black Boy
and sounding a bit Old Guard, Hughes called for “a good novel about
good
Negroes who do not come to a bad end,” pointing out that there were millions of Negroes “who never murder anyone, or rape or get raped or want to rape, who never lust after white bodies, or cringe before white stupidity, or Uncle Tom, or go crazy with race, or off-balance with frustration.”
¹⁶
Asked to provide a blurb for
Lonely Crusade
, Hughes declined, writing to Blanche Knopf that “Most of the people in it just do not seem to me to have good sense or be in their right minds, they behave so badly, which makes it difficult to care very much what happens to any of them.”
¹⁷

With his first published novels, Himes had tried his level best to go with the times, writing stories of educated Negroes (sons of the rising
black middle class, like those of the Harlem Renaissance) who (like the adaptive intellectuals they were) now pledged their talents to the great work of unionism. Himes never had much luck fitting his work to others' standards, though. He'd aim his ship for India and hit America every time. He'd start out with this simple enough notion, a story for the slicks, a proletariat novel, a detective story, then intuition and improvisation would take over and the notion started squirming and changing and whipping about in his hand. As often as not, he wouldn't even notice how it had changed fundamentally: that it had become something else. That he'd created, yet again, something profoundly against the tide and profoundly (the very word) unfashionable. In work as in life, for all his efforts and resolve, somehow Chester generally wound up going about things the hard way, standing ashore looking at the wreckage in the water about him, thinking
Hell of a swim!

The same month he met Hughes, on August 13, Himes made another important move: with the consent of his parole officer, he married Jean Johnson. Immediately the couple went off “to live by ourselves in a series of shabby rented rooms” and begin “slowly starving together.”
¹⁸
Thin ice everywhere, the situation further complicated by Chester's not wanting Jean to work. He felt it incumbent upon him to be provider, even if providings were slim. “She didn't seem to mind too much, she was loyal and loving and she believed in me. But I began to feel cornered in a black world.”
¹⁹
Uncle Roddy and Aunt Leah had the newlyweds over for dinner whenever they could, and sent them home with extra food. The marriage was strong in the face of all adversity. Jean and Chester loved one another deeply. She knew his background, had been with or beside him for years, knew at first hand his moodiness and explosive temper. Chester found new identity in the role of married man and provider, new sources of strength in his wife's steady initiative. He was no longer alone.

Several descriptions exist of the young couple during this period. Pearl Moody, Chester's supervisor at the Cleveland Public Library, where he soon found work, spoke of him as a remarkably attractive, capable young man, but “nervous, restless, not at all settled in his ways.”
²⁰
Co-worker Ruth Seid (who then had published a couple of stories and later wrote novels under the name Jo Sinclair) talked endlessly about books with Chester and often joined the couple for cheap evenings out. Chester was a charmer, she said, handsome and
articulate.
²¹
Jean was his perfect counterpart: every bit as intelligent and articulate as Chester, every bit as attractive, and crazy about him into the bargain.

Dan Levin got to know them when he put word out for writers for his new magazine
Crossroad
. He'd later serve as model for
Lonely Crusade's
Abe Rosenberg. Chester struck him from the first as “hurt, high strung and brilliant,”
²²
Jean as rather reserved but possessed of great dignity and poise. Levin described standing at the window watching Himes stride away forcefully from their initial meeting with Jean walking “calmly beside him as if steadying him to keep him from blazing away like an angry comet.”
²³

A brief stint as WPA laborer precipitated a flurry of letters to local and state officials pointing out his status as a writer, whereupon Chester was reassigned to the library. He began as a research assistant writing vocational bulletins and earning ninety-five dollars a month; within the year, promoted to writer, he was engaged in writing a 75,000-word history of Ohio and, by 1940, a Cleveland Guide. Neither saw print.

Quite aside from providing employment to hundreds of writers during the Depression, the Federal Writers' Project became important on other counts. Within its closed society, Negroes were accepted on a basis of social equality—this in a period when black and white musicians could record together only surreptitiously. Through the government workers' union the Project also brought writers into position with the American labor movement, an association that was to have far-reaching effect. This would also provide settings for Himes's first published novels.

Here, too, Himes managed to make a bed he had trouble lying in. Demoted to research assistant for an irreverent piece he wrote concerning struggles between nineteenth-century Shakers and Mennonites, he was restored only after another burst of letters to state and national directors and, finally, FDR himself. Possibly his cousin Henry Lee Moon intervened as well.

The stories published during this period are odd ones. As in Himes's early stories, race recedes in order to foreground other concerns, there prison experience, here abject need. Humiliation and despair are everywhere in these stories. “A Modern Fable” deals with the shooting of Harold A. McDull, who “oozes” Americanism and wants to end the WPA because it costs too much, by citizen and onetime “true believer”
Henry Slaughter. “Looking Down the Street” finds a man in utter extremis, starved and freezing, hoping for “the biggest Goddam war that was ever fought” to save him. “With Malice Toward None” ends with a passage previously quoted: “All that day … 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.”
²⁴
Interestingly, Himes's characters now have acquired wives whom they cannot support.

Himes himself, meanwhile, was well on his way to being unmanned as never before, not even by prison, by his failure to provide for Jean.

His parents' troubled marriage still much in his mind, Himes must have equated his father's failures to provide with his own failure, and remembered Joseph's crumbling manhood. Often he would react to inner turmoil with promiscuous behavior and with drinking, both of which served only to compound his self-contempt, then turn his bloated fury against Jean. Later he would put names to the serpents uncoiling then in his chest. He would come to understand poverty as the source of despair, a kind of bottomless well. He would perceive poverty as both origin and reflection of the racism he saw all about him, in every aspect and mien of American life. And he would wonder again and again at poverty's social, psychological, and sexual consequences.

Of that time he wrote: “While on the Writers' Project I did not feel the racial hurt so much … My domestic life was happy and we were all, black and white alike, bound together into the human family by our desperate struggle for bread.”
²⁵

Years later, long after Jean had disappeared from his life, he would write of the marriage's decline: “… I had convinced myself I was a failure as a writer, and poverty and loneliness and our enforced separation had convinced me I was a failure as a husband. After fourteen years of love and marriage we had lost each other.”
²⁶