Chester Himes (13 page)

Particulars of a life accumulate, thickets of incident and action we look back on later, try to see through.

In fall of 1941, Jean and Chester Himes joined the waves of hopefuls breaking on California's beach: poor whites trying to get out from under Depression hard times, blacks fleeing Jim Crow laws to seek work in shipyards and munitions plants, soldiers and sailors gearing up for the gathering war. Chester came hoping for work in the studios, the dream of living by his writing reborn. He carried his
Esquire
stories and a draft of
Black Sheep
from studio to studio but was turned down everywhere. Later he claimed that he stalked out of one story conference because of the racial attitudes of other writers. This may be true but sounds suspiciously like Himes self-reinvention. It's far more likely from what we know that he would have been on his best behavior as he made the rounds and that whatever stalking out there was took place afterward, verbally, before Jean. Jack Warner's simple interdiction “I don't want no niggers on this lot,” Himes said, reversed his employment as a script reader. He was also considered, but finally passed over, as publicity writer for
Cabin in the Sky
starring Ethel Waters, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Lena Home, none of whom, he liked to point out, could be served in the MGM commissary.

Mounting a Greyhound in Columbus, Chester and Jean rode it to the continent's edge in Los Angeles, half expecting (as one perennially does with each relocation, each new quest, each rebirth or reinvention of self) to disembark in a different world. Back in heartland Ohio, Chester had joined the queues of the bedraggled seeking work at Cuyahoga Valley's thriving private industries, American Wire & Steel, Warner & Swasey, the Aluminum Company of America, only to be turned down day after day, week after week. Helplessness, frustration,
and rage rose in him like sap. He thought his subsequent withdrawal to Malabar Farm might assuage these feelings but finally decided that he was only hiding out there.

Himes's citizenship had been fully restored the previous March when he petitioned the governor for termination of parole. In July that year, Chester and Jean visited cousin Henry Lee Moon in New York. Moon, now working as a writer and editor for the NAACP, had married Molly Lewis, herself a well-known intellectual, who became Chester's model for
Pinktoes'
Harlem hostess Mamie Mason. The trip didn't pan out as Himes had intended, many of the people he had wanted to meet proving unavailable, though he enjoyed the time spent with Moon, toward whom he was surprisingly deferential. The trip also provided Himes with his first glimpse of the city that would prove so important to his work—a city he always loved, widow Lesley Himes says, even after he'd grown to feel that he could no longer possibly live there.

Early that year also, Himes became involved with the Council of Industrial Organizations, purportedly writing articles on CIO history for the Cleveland Industrial Council's yearbook and the Cleveland
Union Leader
. With many others, Himes believed that the fledgling organization, which unlike the American Federation of Labor neither catered to skilled laborers nor excluded Negroes, offered blacks a rare chance for advancement. Experiences here, his early enthusiasm and eventual disillusion, his belief that organized labor never understood Negro psychology and Negro needs but instead merely exploited them to its own ends, would become central to
If He Hollers
and
Lonely Crusade
.

Chester's term with the WPA Writers' Project ended in March 1941. After working briefly for a coffee and tea importer whom he left for unknown reasons, he was unable to find further employment. At one point he and Jean were forced to sell their furniture to provide a few more days' food and shelter. Outside personnel offices at industries newly revived by war efforts—just as his character wished in “Looking Down the Street,” war had indeed brought an end to the Depression—he was turned away in favor of white applicants.

Then there was that one final stopover before taking off for the promised land.

In Lucas, just southwest of Cleveland, set among rolling hills in an area called Pleasant Valley, best-selling novelist Louis Bromfield had
reclaimed acres of arid land and now practiced new agrarianism on Malabar Farm, as described by E. B. White in a book review for the
New Yorker
.

Malabar Farm is the farm for me,
It's got what it takes, to a large degree:
Beauty, alfalfa, constant movement,
And a terrible rash of soil improvement.
Far from orthodox in its tillage,
Populous as many a village,
Stuff being planted and stuff being written,
Fields growing lush that were once unfitten …

From far and wide folks came to view
The things that a writing man will do.
¹

Bromfield, winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for
Early Autumn
, also worked extensively in Hollywood, on screenplays for
Brigham Young
and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
among others. The farm became a magnet for the talented and famous. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married there in 1945.

Years later John A. Williams asked Himes if he had had any idea at the time that his own work would long outlive Bromfield's.

No, it never occurred to me at all. But I didn't think that Bromfield's work was substantial enough to last. It didn't occur to me that Bromfield had been very successful then with
The Rains Came
. He was making quite a bit of money at that time. This was in the late thirties or 1940, and writers like Bromfield were getting that large money from the serialization in magazines. They were not so much concerned with things like book clubs or reprints and so forth. But the magazine serializations:
Cosmopolitan
was paying Bromfield seventy-five thousand dollars for the serialization of the book.
²

Through the intercession of the Jelliffes from Karamu House, Jean and Chester spent part of 1941 working as butler and cook for
Bromfield, at a combined salary of $120 a month. It's very difficult to picture Himes, that blazing, proud, angry being described by Dan Levin, in the role of domestic servant, but the two men seem to have gotten along well. Bromfield read Chester's prison novel and offered help in getting it published. When he left for Hollywood that fall, he took a copy of the manuscript along with him.

Chester and Jean soon followed, fetching up against racial barriers at every turn. Blacks in L.A. were treated the same way they were in Southern industrial towns, Himes said; the only difference was hypocrisy. In L.A. they turned you away thinking “Nigger, ain't we good to you?”
³

It wasn't being refused employment in the plants so much … It was the look on the people's faces when you asked them about a job. Most of 'em didn't say right out they wouldn't hire me. They just looked so goddamned startled that I'd even asked. As if some friendly dog had come in through the door and said, “I can talk.” It shook me.
⁴

Himes's dreams of studio work soon evaporated. Folks out there loved to have black faces around, Himes said; any meeting you went to, there'd always be one—for decor.

One time Marc Connelly, who wrote
Green Pastures
, had a number of screenwriters, so-called intellectuals, and various others whom he had invited to a conference to discuss a film on George Washington Carver—along with two black faces for color, me and Arna Bontemps, I think … Marc Connelly was sitting at the head of the table with about twenty people sitting around, and he said, “Well, now I know how we're going to start this film; I know that much about it, and then we can go on from there. Well, you see, Dr. Carver was a very humble man and he always ironed his own shirts. So when we start this film on Dr. Carver, he goes into the kitchen and irons his shirt.” So at that point I left.
⁵

Earlier, Himes thought he had a good chance of getting on as publicity writer for
Cabin in the Sky
, for which Hall Johnson, fellow
traveler in the West Coast communist circles to which Himes had been admitted by referral from Langston Hughes, served as technical adviser. Himes resigned his shipyard job in San Francisco to return to Los Angeles, only to find that the position had already been given to a young black man named Phil Carter, now shut away in an ancient tiny dressing room safely distant from the public relations offices.

Finally Himes tried out as a reader with the young man who ran that department at Warner Brothers.

It was a job of no consequence. They were only offering something like forty-seven dollars a week to start, whereas you could make eighty-seven a week as a laborer. Anyway, he offered me the job and I was going to take it. I wrote the synopsis for
The Magic Bow
, a well-known book about Paganini, and submitted it. He said it was a good job and that they would employ me. And then—this is what
he
said: he was walking across the lot one day and he ran into Jack Warner and told him, “I have a new man, Mr. Warner, and I think he's going to work out very well indeed.” Warner said, “That's fine, boy,” and so forth. “Who is he?” And he said, “He's a young black man.” And Warner said, “I don't want no niggers on this lot.”
⁶

By his count Himes held twenty-three jobs in the three years before, with
If He Hollers
accepted by Doubleday, Doran, and Company, he left California for New York. Despite his intelligence and background, and despite the fact that he'd picked up valuable skills from his father—he could read blueprints, knew basic carpentry and construction, and was able to operate any number of machine tools—only two of those jobs, as apprentice shipfitter in Kaiser's Shipyard No. 1 and as shipwright's helper in the L.A. shipyard at San Pedro Harbor, were skilled. For the most part he worked at common labor, rebuilding tires and labeling cans, shoveling rock and sand for the California Rock Company, casting pipe for the Crane Company, carting about two-ton rolls of paper for the California Towel-Saver Company, warehousing for the Hughes Aircraft Company. Totin' barges, liftin' bales.

Just as selectively he would remember other times and places (college and the Chicago police station among them) as those in which awareness of racism overcame him like tumblers falling in a
lock, Himes spoke of his three years in L.A. as such in a Paris interview twenty years later.

There, racism became an inescapable fact of life for me. I'd been able to ignore segregation up until then, but now I couldn't. I felt I could “see” racism, and it seemed to stick to me. It contaminated everything. It was like a disease I couldn't shake.
⁷

Los Angeles hurt him, he insisted, terribly. His own plight having sensitized him to others' difficulties, he perceived the effects of racism everywhere he looked: in the armed forces, where Jean's brothers confirmed a thoroughgoing racial prejudice; toward Japanese-Americans, many of whose families had lived for generations in California, then being torn from their lives like paper figures and relocated to detention camps; among Mexican- and Filipino-American communities. In a 1943 article for
The Crisis
, Himes described riots in which uniformed white servicemen mounted a savage attack on zoot-suited Hispanics on L.A. streets while (echoing the 1917 St. Louis riots) police remained conspicuously absent.

This we know: That during the first two nights of the rioting, no policemen were in evidence until the gangs of sailors, outnumbering the pachucos two-three-four to one, had sapped up on the pachucos with belt buckles and knotted ropes. When the sailors departed in their cars, trucks, and taxi-cabs, furnished them no doubt by the nazi-minded citizenry, the police appeared as if they had been waiting around the corner and arrested the Mexican youths who had been knocked out, stunned, or too frightened to run.
⁸

Himes's writing during this period generally became more political and more focused on race, in part, no doubt, due to personal experience but also due to valuable contacts through brother Joe and cousin Henry Lee Moon with activist publications where Himes knew his contributions would be welcome. In addition, close upon introductions from Langston Hughes, Himes was being courted by the Communist Party. So for a while he danced with the ones who brought him. At least a dozen pieces
appeared in
The Crisis
alone, others in
Opportunity
and
Common Ground;
several were reprinted in 1975's
Black on Black
.

“Democracy Is for the Unafraid”
(Common Ground)
entreats white America once and for all to join the struggle for equality.

“Now Is the Time! Here Is the Place!”
(Opportunity)
is a kind of rhetorical conjuring act calling for Negroes to invest the war effort with the energies of their own age-long battle for justice, to accept the folded lie that (in Milliken's words) “the nation's fight to preserve the
status quo
and their own fight to end the
status quo
were in fact the same fight.”
⁹

“Negro Martyrs Are Needed”
(The Crisis)
urged the black middle class to help bring about a peaceful revolution by giving up its silent complicity, by exposing injustice in all its sundry daily forms and influencing the Negro lower classes to follow. With this article Himes came under scrutiny by the FBI, which on June 12, 1944, opened file number 105–2502 on his suspected seditious activities.

The names that Langston Hughes had given as contacts to help him find work led Himes in a straight line to the Communist Party. Wilford Wilson, working for the U.S. Employment Service at the time, routinely and pointedly sent Himes to businesses and plants that everyone knew did not employ Negroes. The Party was providing useful contacts, though, and while Himes may have resented being used as a chess piece, he went along, attending cell meetings and lectures and mixing with veterans of the Spanish Civil War and radical Hollywood writers such as John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo.