Chester Himes (10 page)

Others of the early stories introduce what will become typically Himesian themes.

“Every Opportunity” with its portrait of a prisoner released into a world where he has no way of getting by recalls Himes's contention that America's racial problems truly began with emancipation, when whites “gave Negroes their freedom” without providing any way for them to meet their basic needs: “Well, this whole problem in America, as I see it, developed from the fact that the slaves were freed and that there was no legislation of any sort to make it possible for them to live.”
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“A Nigger” introduces the theme of the black's silent collaboration in the damage done him. A conservative white businessman regularly visits his mistress Fay in the Harlem apartment he maintains for her. Fay also has a black lover, Joe, “some kind of writer or poet or something,” who one day when Sugar Daddy arrives unexpectedly has to hide in the closet and listen to his harangues about “the lower classes” and FDR's welfare and social programs. Just before the white man leaves, he opens the closet door and, pretending that he's not seen Joe, immediately closes it—failing even to acknowledge Joe's existence.

The fact was he had kept standing there, taking it, even after he could no longer tell himself that it was a joke, a trim on a sucker, just so he could keep on eating off the bitch … Uncle Tomism, acceptance, toadying—all there in its most rugged form. One way to be a nigger. Other Negroes did it other ways—he did it the hard way. The same result—
a nigger.
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Joe takes his fury and frustration out on Fay, stopped only by the arrival of a neighbor brandishing a long-barreled .38.

“The Night's for Cryin'” moves from one closed society into another, from prison to Cleveland's black ghetto, to document the monstrous inhumanities spawned there. In the same interview quoted above, that with old friend and fellow novelist John A. Williams in
1970, Himes held that a major motivation in his writing was to force white Americans to confront the horror and violence-making of the black ghettos. Himes was working the claim of
Do the Right Thing
and
Boyz N the Hood
forty or fifty years before the rush.

White people in America, it seems to me, are titillated by the problem of the black people, more than taking it seriously. I want to see them take it seriously, good and goddamn seriously, and the only way that I think of to make them take it seriously is with violence.
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“Headwaiter” depicts a man (patterned after Himes's uncle) willfully following the rules in what he knows nevertheless to be an absurd world. In so doing the story prefigures Grave Digger's and Coffin Ed's knowledge of the futility of their efforts to effect real change, or, finally, even to keep the Harlem chaos in check. They're prefigured more directly in the detective team of “He Knew,” a story prefiguring, as well, Himes's theme of black-on-black violence and growing sense of absurdity.

Detectives John Jones and Henry Walls tramp their weary beat, “heads pulled down into the upturned collars of their overcoats like the heads of startled turtles, hats slanted forward against the cold December drizzle,” investigating a series of robberies in the waterfront district of “dismal warehouses and squalid tenements.”
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Their white precinct captain, sounding very much like the Harlem Cycle's Lieutenant Anderson, tells them: “I'm putting you two men on this job because it's a Negro neighborhood and I believe that it's Negroes who are pulling these jobs. You fellows are plodders and it's plodders we need.” The story's climactic shoot-out in pitch dark is something Himes will use again in the first Harlem novel,
For Love of Imabelle
. Like Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, the detectives are plain men doing an unpleasant, thankless job, in the final analysis little more than beards for the white power structure, just another form, even if a tacitly sanctioned form, of black-on-black violence.

Himes first was assigned to the so-called coal company, carting shavings from the lumber mill for use in heating. One frozen morning he refused to dig out shavings from under snow and ice and was
thrown in the hole with two others, with only scraps of blankets for warmth and the bite of bedbugs to keep their minds occupied. Pointing out that he continued to receive disability payments from the state, Himes was moved to lighter duties. He swept floors and swept away wheelbarrow tracks, taught briefly at the prison school, worked in the soup company, was in and out of the hospital with pneumonia, flu, sprained back, a broken arm or leg. Eventually he signed up for a correspondence course in law. He began writing petitions for parole and, finally, stories.

We assume that many of Jimmy Monroe's fellow convicts are modeled on those Himes knew. Redheaded runt Starlight, claiming Mafia connections and saying he was MacArthur's orderly in the war. Blackie, a mob gunman, serving two life terms for multiple murders. Male tramp Bobby Guy. Metz the ex-jeweler and wife killer who introduces Monroe to writing. Short Britches, Froggy, Donald Duck, Jumpy Stone, Dew Baby, Signifier, St. Louis Slick.

What a convict has been on the outside means very little in prison, no matter what they tell you. The convicts who were gangsters outside usually turn into finks inside, or they acquire t.b. and die, or they have money to buy their way and then they are still big shots. The toughies who had nothing but their outside reps got their throats cut by hickville punks who had never heard of them. Money talked as loud there as it does anywhere—if not louder.

And the days passed. Square and angular, with hardbeaten surfaces; confining, restricting, congesting. But down in the heart of these precise, square blocks of days there was love and hate; ambition and regret; there was hope, too, shining eternally through the long gray years; and perhaps there was even a little happiness.
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At heart,
Cast the First Stone
is a coming-of-age novel. Gradually, in part from a network of preceptors, in part from observation (and he is, like Himes, a fine observer), Jimmy Monroe (again like Himes, we presume) learns the bounds and mores of this world
bouleversé
. He understands the way in which prison forms and institutions are distorted versions of those in the larger society outside. He understands, too, that he must come to terms with—learn to control, or at very least
rechannel—his anger. In this he is not always successful, as his creator was not, then or in later life. The outward story documents down-and-out prison life; the inner story records Jimmy Monroe's wrestle with the angel of his own self-destructive impulses, a match he wins, but just barely.

We struggle, in part by our sufferings, in part by our identification through art and relationships with others, in part by those relationships themselves, toward redemption, Jimmy Monroe and Chester Himes no less than the rest of us. Monroe-Himes enters prison a man closed off, a man who will
not
be hurt again. There he relearns to open himself, learns not so much to make connections with others as to let them form spontaneously. As Robert Creeley says: It's only in the relationships we manage, that we live at all.

Cast the First Stone
is structured around four relationships, each marking a period of Jimmy's development. Mal shows up early in the book to appoint himself Jimmy's tutor-protector. Adamantly against “degeneracy,” he steers Jimmy clear of those “filthy sons of bitches” and instructs him in the small ways a man can maintain dignity in prison surroundings. The friendship comes to an end with the fire, when Jimmy, at the edge of hysteria, tells Mal “I want you for my woman.” Next is Blocker, after Jimmy gets transferred into the cripple company. Presented in more or less idealistic terms, this is the most uncomplicated relationship, as Jimmy learns to fit in; he and Blocker become central to prison society, buddies who might easily stride off together into the film's closing moments. With Blocker's parole Jimmy befriends Metz, who offers something new: “His conversation was a relief from the stale, monotonous babble of the prison. I'd get away from that when we talked … Metz was the first really decent fellow whom I had met in prison, although Blocker was my only true friend.”
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The final, all-important relationship, coming after Jimmy drifts to the very rim of madness then solidly back, is with Duke Dido. They're of an age, and Jimmy must see in Dido something of himself as newcomer five years before. Jimmy's commitment is instant, total. The two become inseparable, denounced, and persecuted by other convicts for whom same-sex acts are the norm but who can't accept such passionate engagement. When Dido is transferred to the girl-boy company, Jimmy insists upon going along, but the warden transfers
him to the prison farm instead. Dido, a naif who unlike Jimmy never was able to adapt to prison life, hangs himself.

I knew, beyond all doubt, that he had done it for me. He had done it to give me a perfect ending. It was so much like him to do this one irrevocable thing to let me know for always that I was the only one. Along with the terrible hurt I could not help but feel a great gladness and exaltation.
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Letters, drafts, and anecdotal evidence validate the Dido story in both broad outline and detail. Duke Dido was in real life Prince Rico. Whereas Himes's previous relationship, with a Catholic called Lively in one early draft of
Cast the First Stone
, was never consummated (despite Himes's devotion being such that he enrolled in catechism classes and probably converted), Rico and Himes quickly became lovers. They read to one another, wrote plays and an opera called
Bars and Stripes Forever
together, talked endlessly about movies they'd seen, called one another by pet names. Early drafts of the novel contain letters and instances of more frank romance between the lovers. Upon publication of
Cast the First Stone
in 1952, Himes wrote to Carl Van Vechten that the most fulfilling relationship he had ever had was with the character he'd called Dido in that novel.

One bond between Himes and Prince Rico was their strong need for fantasy. Like Luis and Valentin in Manuel Puig's
Kiss of the Spider Woman
, they talked endlessly of movies and their stars, pored over movie magazines. Himes felt a similar draw to stories in the slick popular magazines, experiencing as he read them “all the soft, mushy emotions”
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forbidden him by the prison experience and by his own obdurate nature. Subsequent shame over his sentimentality, he wrote, would lead him to become “invariably more vulgar, obscene, callous,”
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as though two men coexisted (and in many ways they did) inside Chester's skull. Himes's early plots, too, careen from familiar hard-boiled attitudes to frank sentimentality.

That same double consciousness emerged in somewhat different form in correspondence with Van Vechten:

As I look back now I feel that much of my retardation as a writer has been due to a subconscious (and conscious and deliberate)
desire to escape my past. All mixed up no doubt with the Negro's desire for respectability and such. It brought a lot of confusion to my own mind, added to which was a great deal of pressure of a thousand kinds being exerted by friends and relatives and loved ones who were half ashamed of what I wrote, forgetting that it was what I wrote that made me what I was, until I was caught in a bag which I didn't begin to break out of until I wrote
If He Hollers
. I wrote that defiantly, more or less, at the time without thought of it being published.
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Indeed, Stephen Milliken finds in this biform nature, this constant tug to discrete ends, the central critical problem presented by Himes's work. The work has obvious power, he asserts. It rarely fails to claim and move the reader.

Yet at all points in every part of Himes's work weaknesses of the most obvious kind are evident. The author seems continually to be choosing, for example, the more striking effect for its impact value alone, or to be choosing the most tired cliché available in full and triumphant knowledge of its falsity and tawdriness. He can in fact be embarrassingly bad, and yet the apparent weaknesses in Himes's work seem somehow to be essential to the strengths.
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Cast the First Stone
ends with Jimmy looking back at the prison on his way to the farm: “You big tough son of a bitch, you tried to kill me but I've got you beat now, I thought.”
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So does Himes's first-written novel become, finally, a story of redemption, for its author as much as its protagonist. In prison, in his stories, and especially in this novel, Chester Himes learned how our lives can be ransomed, if forever imperfectly, by the relationships we manage and by literature. Chester Himes, always “the hardbitten old pro”
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Life
magazine made him out to be, never one to take advice, never one to do things the right or expected or easy way. He'd create his books the same way he steered his life, by impulse and instinct, and if the life boiled over into chaos, then it would be a very
personal
kind of chaos, and the work that lanced out from it, those messages and novels, would be just as personal—like no light ever seen before.

In that idiosyncrasy, Himes's work seems peculiarly, unmistakably American. As a nation, as individuals, our strengths often rise directly from our weaknesses. We've a particular genius for quirkiness, for getting the job done despite ourselves. As has been suggested already, Himes's greatest strength as a writer lay precisely in his ability to confront the unresolvable tensions and contradictions within himself, to draw them out in all their untowardness and give them temporizing shape.

In the wake of the Easter morning fire and subsequent disclosure of prison conditions—beginning with 4,000 inmates housed in a facility built for 1,800—special review boards had been set up and many prisoners' sentences commuted to the statutory minimum. Following six months at the prison farm, having now served seven and a half years of his twenty to twenty-five-year sentence, on April 1,1936, Himes was paroled to his mother's custody. He stepped back out from that small world whose hard rules he had learned into a confusing, larger, somehow forever
soft
world, a world you could never quite get a hold on—and into the arms of the Depression.