Chester Himes (7 page)

Himes proved hardly the gentleman his appearance and manner might first suggest. Seventeen at the time, Jean was

the most beautiful brownskin girl I had ever seen … Her skin was the warm reddish brown of a perfectly roasted turkey breast the moment it comes from the oven. She had a heart-shaped face, thick hot lips, and brown eyes. What there was about me that attracted her so I never knew, but she fell desperately in love with my immortal soul … Eight years later I was to marry her and live with her for fourteen years, but at that time I treated her in the most casual manner; sometimes I would leave her standing on a corner waiting for me hours on end; and other times I would leave her in rooms we had rented for the night, in lieu of room rent, which I didn't have, and wouldn't see her again until several days later.
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Himes was desperate for money. There is also considerable evidence, from his clothes and flashy gambling, his performances for Benny, and treatment of Jean, that he was to some degree striking postures, trying on the mask of a hardened criminal. So when Benny asked him to come on a burglary, that fit right in. Through a friend who worked for the Ohio National Guard, Benny had learned that arms and ammunition were stored in the Negro branch of the YMCA on Cedar and Seventy-sixth. He planned to steal a case of Colt automatics and sell them to blacks who worked in the steel mills in nearby Warren and Youngstown. His friend would drive, he and Chester would break into the Y and get the guns.

The actual robbery went well. Everything else went wrong. On the way to Warren both back tires blew, forcing the Himes gang to hike into the nearest village and catch a bus to Warren. Himes remained there, knocking at doors in the ghetto asking after rooms to let, while the others left to find a tow truck. Finally they moved the guns into a hotel room and went off seeking buyers. As he made the rounds of dice games and drinking parties, Himes ran into a woman he'd seen earlier
that afternoon and came within a breath of a shooting match with her man. At three o'clock that morning police broke into the hotel room to arrest Benny and Himes. They were taken back to Cleveland.

The judge was a woman. My mother testified that I had been led astray by bad influence because my father didn't exercise the proper influence. The judge questioned my mother about my father's position and background and learned about my brother's accident and my father giving up his job as a Southern “professor” to bring his son North for treatment. She learned about my own accident and my withdrawal from college and was extraordinarily moved by the predicament of our family. Because the guns had been recovered and no harm had come from the theft she gave me a suspended sentence, over the vehement protest of the prosecuting attorney.
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Estelle tried first to gain control of Chester's pension, then, failing that, to have him placed in an institution for delinquents. For this, however, she needed Joseph's permission, which he refused to give. Chester always claimed there was a tacit agreement between him and his father; that since his disciplining Chester had resulted in Joe's blindness, he would never do it again. Furious and at wit's end, Estelle sued for divorce. Not long after, Joseph packed up and left. Benny meanwhile had returned from serving thirty days in jail; Chester moved in with Jean to occupy one of his two rooms. A week later he and Benny stole a car and drove back to Columbus.

Chester was exhilarated at being back on campus, driving a grand new car, looking every bit the great man. Benny, though, felt ill at ease, insisting they should steer clear of the school, find rooms in the ghetto, and sell the car as soon as possible. The next day he left and returned to Cleveland. On impulse Himes stole a student's ID card and doctored it to show his own signature. Then he went from store to store in downtown Columbus buying small items and paying for them by check. The checks were from a pad of blanks he'd picked up at the local bank; he wrote them on a fictitious Cleveland account, each time for fifteen or twenty dollars over purchase cost. Finally at a chic men's store a clerk questioned the check he offered and, when Himes protested that none of the other stores had refused him, demanded to
know
which
stores. The one across the street, he told her. Shortly the clerk from that store showed up with Himes's check. The police showed up not long after.

This time it was Joseph who came for the trial, at which Chester pled guilty and drew a two-year suspended sentence plus a five-year bench parole. Himes returned with his father to Cleveland, to a rented room on Eighty-Ninth off Cedar Avenue stinking “of my father's fear and defeat.”
⁶³
Chester stayed away as much as possible, over at Jean's or hanging around Bunch's old place and the brothels on Scoville and Central, packing his little Owlshead.

I discovered that I had become very violent. I saw a glimmer of fear and caution in the eyes of most people I encountered: squares, hustlers, gamblers, pimps, even whores. I had heard that people were saying, “Little Katzi will kill you.” I can't say what I might have done.
⁶⁴

Himes traded his .32 for a huge .44 Colt that “looked like a hand cannon and would shoot hard enough to kill a stone.”
⁶⁵
When one restaurant refused him service, he boasted—we're again in Himesland—that he leapt onto the counter, kicked everything off it, and beat the restaurant's owner about the head with his new pistol.

Himes had appeared in court in Columbus, on the check charge, in early November. By month's end he was arrested in Chicago for armed robbery.

One night at Bunch Boy's he'd heard a chauffeur bragging about how rich his boss was, about his platinum watch and two Cadillacs and how he always had loads of money at the house: “Like many blacks still possessed of a slave mentality, he boasted of his employer's possessions as though they were his own, or as though he had a vested interest in them.”
⁶⁶
Himes also heard the chauffeur say that he had Thanksgiving Eve off. On that night Himes drove out to Fairmount Boulevard in Cleveland Heights. He intended to ring the doorbell and, when the maid answered, force his way in at gunpoint, but the maid, suspicious, refused to open the door, instead calling the police. Himes hid in shrubbery until the police were gone and the owners returned home. Then, breaking a garage window, he let himself into the house and confronted the elderly couple. He took the cache of
money, as well as jewelry, and fled in one of the Cadillacs. Pursued briefly by police, he eluded them, eventually miring the car in mud and continuing on foot.

In
The Quality of Hurt
Himes asserts that he relieved the elderly couple of “five or six stacks of hundred and twenty dollar bills still wrapped in the bank bands,” plus “necklaces, bracelets, rings … platinum pocket watch and diamond-studded watch chain,”
⁶⁷
some $20,000 in cash, plus jewelry insured at just over $28,000. Biographers Fabre and Margolies put the take at $300 cash, $5,000 in jewelry. Court records list only a single ring valued at $1,500 and $200 cash. As so often, details of Himes's life are multiple choice.

In an early short story, “Prison Mass,” convict and would-be writer Brightlights thinks how “He could still experience a thrill as he recalled that midnight ride.”
⁶⁸
Himes recalled it this way in
The Quality of Hurt

So I just stepped on the gas and drove the Cadillac in a straight line down the snow-covered street. I remember it being exceedingly pleasant in the softly purring car moving swiftly through the virgin blanket of snow and the white translucent falling curtain. Soon the sound of shooting died away and the sight of the pursuing car disappeared in the snowscape in the rear-view mirror, and I was moving swiftly through the completely deserted, almost silent night. There was not a sign of life in sight. Falling snow refracted the headlights and shortened the perimeter of visibility and I had the illusion of hurtling silently through an endless cloud.
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Back downtown, Himes headed straight for Union Station and bought a ticket to Chicago. He'd heard Bunch Boy and others talk about a fence named Jew Sam; the next morning he dropped by his pawnshop near the Loop to sell the jewelry. Next stop, Tijuana. Sam took one of the rings and said he had to check it out. He went into a back room. Soon after, police arrived.

I suspected he was calling the police. I should have let him keep the ring and escaped. But I couldn't run; never could run. I have
always been afraid that that one stupid mental block is going to get me killed.
⁷⁰

Critic Stephen F. Milliken says of this incident: “The inability to run that can affect a threatened man, the absolute refusal to collaborate in any way, to acknowledge the existence of the threat even in avoiding it, was to remain one of his distinctive literary themes.”
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This was another manifestation of Himes's psychic inertia, his refusal-by-inaction to choose and so to be carried along, the Bartlebyan “I would prefer not to.” Himes himself wondered if his novel
Run Man Run
had its origin in this incident.

Finding the rest of the jewelry, the detectives took Himes downtown. He was interrogated. Then detectives handcuffed his hands behind his back, handcuffed his feet together, and hung him upside-down on a door. They wrapped their pistols in felt hats and beat him on the ribs and testicles. Just as he used elements of the robbery in various stories such as “Prison Mass,” Himes used the beating and general background in his prison novel, first published in truncated form as
Cast the First Stone
and recently, in its original version, as
Yesterday Will Make You Cry
. New convict Jim Monroe is trying to get to sleep.

All that stuff that happened in Chicago kept coming back. I could see myself asking that sonofabitching pawnbroker for five hundred dollars for the ring, and him saying just a minute and slipping out in the back room. I'd known he was calling the police. Even if he did have that one ring I had a lot of other stuff. But I couldn't run. I never could run.

I could feel the cops hitting me in the mouth, hanging me by my handcuffed feet upside down over a door, beating my ribs with their gun butts. I could feel the blood running down my legs from where the handcuffs pinched them on the anklebone.

I had stood it as long as I could, I thought, looking at the ceiling. I might have stood it longer if I'd lost consciousness. But there had been too much pain and not enough hurt to lose consciousness. I had confessed.
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* * *

There's a very absurdist, very Himesian touch here, in that the detectives actually were working on a robbery that occurred at the Blackstone Hotel the night before. The victim had already been in to identify the jewelry as hers, a captain of detectives told Himes, and was only awaiting his confession before she claimed her jewelry. When Himes said he could prove he'd been at his hotel room all night, the captain said “You better not try” and left, telling his men to get a signed confession. Himes suspected that he and the woman were accomplices.

The squad were startled, then displeased, when Himes confessed to a burglary in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, instead of the hotel robbery, but there was little they could do. Accompanied by an insurance agent to identify the jewelry, a detective came out from Cleveland to retrieve Himes.

Estelle visited him at Cuyahoga County jail, crying “My poor boy, you were so brilliant”—already speaking in the past tense, Himes notes. His father secured a lawyer for him and on one visit, touchingly, brought along the back brace Chester had stopped wearing long ago. On December 18, 1928, Judge Walter McMahon handed down the sentence: twenty to twenty-five years of hard labor. Himes was remanded to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus nine days after sentencing, on December 27, and remained there until September 21, 1934. At that time he was transferred to the London Prison Farm before being paroled to his mother's custody on April 1st, 1936. Chester would later say that he grew to manhood in prison.

One year before the gates clanged shut behind Himes, in 1927, Al Jolson peered out from blackface and the screen of the first talkie,
The Jazz Singer
, to tell the audience “You ain't heard nothing yet.”

The twenties were an economic house of cards, borne up by hopefulness at the end of the war and about to collapse into the Great Depression. Fitzgerald gave us, in Gatsby, the era's representative character. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis pilloried middle-class complacency and the oxymoron of received wisdom. Dos Passos and Hemingway wrote of the great dislocations and disillusionments of wartime. W. E. B. Du Bois had
his
say about Negroes and the war in 1919:

We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
¹

Meanwhile America managed to scare itself half to death over the boogeyman of Communism, paving the way for demagogues like J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. With mainstream society pitched full tilt against foreign influences, perhaps also as aftermath to the race riots that occurred in many major American cities in 1917–19, the Ku Klux Klan revived, claiming five million members by 1924.

Unemployment reached 50 percent, turning the highways and ditches, as John Steinbeck wrote, into swarms of migrants looking for work. Henry Ford remarked what a great education those young folks were going to get from all this traveling about.

FDR jacked up the wreck our economy had become and started hammering out dents, establishing the relief programs and federal
projects his predecessor the ever-patrician Herbert Hoover categorically rejected. FDR also took himself directly to the American people with his fireside chats. In conservative, well-to-do households he became reviled as “that man.” In poorer ones he was the closest thing they'd seen to a savior outside church. Blacks in vast numbers deserted the Republican Party, their home since Reconstruction, for FDR's Democrats.