Chester Himes (19 page)

It isn't really autobiographical, although I always strive to develop a story within an environment I can recreate from my own personal experience. These are the reasons, I believe, why a novel such as
If He Hollers Let Him Go
has such a ring of truth.
³⁴

It's useful in this light to compare
If He Hollers
with Richard Wright's
Native Son
. A sentence from that book might almost serve as epigraph for Himes's novel: “He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else.”
³⁵
But Himes's novel is more a reaction or response to Wright's than it is a reverberation. Both depict the shattering effects of racism on the individual. But Bob Jones, educated, superficially at ease in his society, is quite a different man from Bigger Thomas. At one point in the novel, conversation turns to Negro literature.

“
Native Son
turned my stomach,” Arline said. “It just proved what the white Southerner has always said about us; that our men are rapists and murderers.”

“Well, I will agree that the selection of Bigger Thomas to prove the point of Negro oppression was an unfortunate choice,” Leighton said.

“What do you think, Mr. Jones?” Cleo asked.

I said, “Well, you couldn't pick a better person than Bigger Thomas to prove the point. But after you prove it, then what? Most white people I know are quite proud of having made Negroes into Bigger Thomases.”
³⁶

Implicit is his determination
not
to be made into one, of course.

In his 1948 speech at the University of Chicago Himes responded to criticism that his characters were
too
special: too angry, too confused, too rebellious, to the point of being pathological. Negro life
is
pathological, Himes insisted—shaped, controlled, and defined by fear.

There can be no understanding of Negro life, of Negroes' compulsions, reactions, and actions; there can be no understanding of
the sexual impulses, of Negro crime, of Negro marital relations, of our spiritual entreaties, our ambitions and our defeats, until this fear has been revealed at work behind the false-fronted facades of our ghettoes; until others have experienced with us to the same extent the impact of fear upon our personalities. It is no longer enough to say the Negro is a victim of a stupid myth. We must know the truth and what it does to us.

If this plumbing for the truth reveals within the Negro personality, homicidal mania, lust for white women, a pathetic sense of inferiority, paradoxical anti-Semitism, arrogance, uncle-tomism, hate and fear of self-hate, this then is the effect of oppression on the human personality. These are the daily horrors, the daily realities, the daily experiences of an oppressed minority.
³⁷

Especially in the early novels it often seems as though Himes's characters earn their keep by energetically competing, as individuals, with their role as representations. There is a curious struggle going on between fiction's very specific intent—to portray one man's life in society—and a broader, almost salvational intent. This is part of the latticework of internal contradictions that serves to give Himes's work its singular power. It may also be in part what reviewers at the time reacted to, and what readers still do: reading Himes can be unsettling in ways that have little to do with mere subject matter, theme, or style. Beginning with
The Primitive
and culminating with the Harlem cycle, Himes learns to exploit and turn this to his advantage, introducing characters
as
icons and playing a double-edged game, his own brand of dirty dozens, off our preconceptions and presumptions.

The first atomic bomb went off at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945; Truman learned of the trial's success while meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam. Three weeks later the real show, no mere test pattern this time, tore open the sky above Hiroshima.

Time now (in this country with its particular genius for building on the ruins of others, generations of black slaves, the whole of an indigenous population, exploited immigrants, proud fallen Europe) for “the American century.” Time for Uncle Miltie, the
Today
show,
Peyton Place
and Perry Como, Ike alounge in his golf shirts and
The Power of Positive Thinking
. This country that would carry so many burdens (its own double vision of self perhaps the greatest of all) became responsible (again, in its own view) for the world.

The shift to creature comfort and consumerism initiated with thirties urbanization and interrupted by the war now in postwar prosperity came to full bloom. Conformity—homogeneity—became America's
vade mecum
.

Popular literature, as ever, provided a shibboleth, pressure relief valves, safe enclosed spaces where society could say what it was about without seeming to do so. Original paperback novels flourished, their garish covers speaking of “the ignoble corners of life beyond the glow of Jane Powell,
Father Knows Best
, and the healthy, smiling faces in magazines advertising milk or frozen dinners or trips to California,”
¹
writing the subtext of a nation.

The boogeyman of World Communism was coming for us, you see, and if a movie such as
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
suggested that the danger lay not without, but within, that we brewed, bottled, and bonded our own boogeymen—well then, that was only a cheap science fiction movie, after all. Loyalty boards came into being in
1947, paranoia peaking two years later with accusations against Alger Hiss. Small-minded men with smaller spirits, all those Nixons and McCarthys, floated to the top grinning.

In July 1950, segregated black troops of the 24th Infantry Regiment scored our first victory of the Korean War with recapture of Yechon. Months later Pfc. William Thompson received the Medal of Honor for heroism, the first black so honored since the Spanish-American War. In September 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first black to win the Pulitzer; that same month Ralph J. Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of the Palestine conflict.

Fifteen million blacks lived in America in an invisible, borderless compound, lives rigorously delimited, illiteracy all but guaranteed by “separate but equal” school systems. Finally in 1954, 1896's
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
was overturned. Sounding not a little like Himes in his Chicago speech six years before, Chief Justice Earl Warren held that separating children “from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

Coming when it did, the court's decision reaffirmed that, at some point within its conflicted, confused, often errant and chaotic heart, the United States still stood for something beyond chickens in pots, material comfort, endless passive amusements.

The mad and hungry dogs were leashed. The gleam that's always there, always there even when the eye itself wanders, the gleam of this impossible created place and union, the hopeless ideals we've broken ourselves upon again and again, this gleam expressing something more than mere humanism, something more like the essence of humanity itself—shone again in America's eye.

Some of the bases and bus stops:

All the King's Men
(1946),
The Naked and the Dead
(1948),
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951),
On the Road
(1955).

Casablanca
(1942),
The Lost Weekend
(1945),
The Big Sleep
(1946),
Sunset Boulevard
(1950).

Meanwhile books such as David Reisman's
The Lonely Crowd
(1950) and William Whyte's
The Organization Man
(1956) explored that peculiar American need to conform noted by Tocqueville a hundred years before. And therein perhaps lies America's most profound schism,
the great divide at its heart: on the one hand, our need to conform, on the other, this eternal fascination we have with the outlaw, the loner, the mountain man, cowboy, private eye, gangsta.

The celebrated author completes a new novel, caps his elegant pen, and immediately takes himself off for several weeks' well-earned relaxation at beach or mountain retreat, lounging about his lavish rooms in dressing gown and pajamas fresh from the laundry, sipping at fine wines, dipping in and out of conversation with friends old and new. Soon, in a month, or three, but not now, not now, it will be time to begin another book.

Truth is, most times he must get right along to the next book, or back to the real work, teaching, journalism, carpentry, that supports his literary avocation. He ends this book beset by doubt, as he has ended each of the others, uncertain if anyone out there is still listening, uncertain if anyone
ever
was, or why they should be, finding it harder each time to marshal the arguments to persuade himself to go on, that it's worth the effort, the dedication, the many renunciations.

Maybe he takes an afternoon off to go bowling, or watches three movies back to back in a suburban cineplex close by, or does a little reading. Or maybe he spends a few nights pounding down Scotch. Then it's back to work. With the fox, that knows many things, farther out ahead than ever now.

Himes mined memory hard to make an idyll of the time between first and second books, some weeks of it spent in splendid isolation in the desert near Milford, California, in a shack belonging to Jean's brother Hugo.

I remember that summer as one of the most pleasant of our life. Despite the rattlesnakes and other minor nuisances, it had been a calm and creative period, and we had enjoyed making love in complete isolation, at any hour of day or night, to the constant sound of the wind in the leaves of the huge overhanging oak.
²

Withdrawal becomes a subterranean river, its presence, its draw, never far off: withdrawal from society, first to this Western frontier, then to various shadowlands; from the company of peers during his
1948 stay at Yaddo; from marriage; from writing; finally in 1952 from America itself.

The brief California idyll ended with return to the east that fall, where Chester signed on as caretaker for the summer home of New York physician Frank Safford in Wading River, Long Island. There he continued working on
Lonely Crusade
. There, too, began a transmutation of his anger. Previously directed socially toward whites and middle-class blacks, now it began to embody also, even primarily, his growing rage at the failure of his books to achieve the readership or notice they deserved. That rage burrowed more deeply inward with every catapult, every cannon volley, let go over the walls. Soon Himes would plunge into terrifying drinking bouts, debilitating, arbitrary affairs, horrendous lapses. The idyll had lasted three months, the marriage fourteen years. Both were over. So too, for a time it seemed, was his career. This is, after prison, the second great turning point in Himes's life. Once again we're left to question to what degree the transformation was chosen, to what degree ordained.

Cornerstone here is the story “Da-Da-Dee,” written in 1948 shortly after Himes's aborted stay at the Yaddo artists' colony, called Skidoo in the story. He'd applied at the urging of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, one of a number of stopgap measures that included a fresh appeal to the Rosenwald Foundation, a new advance from Knopf engineered by agent Lurton Blassingame, and a loan from the Authors' League arranged by Richard Wright. Pointing one long finger down the road toward
The Primitive
, which it closely resembles both in substance and in its manner of reconstructed autobiography, the story sums up, with painful verisimilitude, this desperate period in Himes's life.

Like
The Primitive's
Jesse Robinson (both have works in progress titled
I Was Looking for a Street)
, Jethro Adams is a failed black novelist, “famous author of two race novels” and “something a little inhuman,” out of his element, out of inspiration, out of tricks, out of bounds. The story follows Jethro's drunken retreat from a bar in town to his berth at Skidoo, trying all the while to sing a song he can't quite remember, scatting his way shakily through this relentless hour of an unredeemed life.

His skin was greasy; his eyes deep-sunk and haggard. There were harsh, deep lines pulling down the edges of his mouth. His age was showing in his face. At such times he looked a great deal like his father, a small, black man who had faded to a parchment-colored mummy in his old age.

He was humming and he could feel the sharp vibrations of the sounds in his nostrils. It filled his head with a great melancholy. He felt as if nothing would ever matter again one way or another … He was never meant to be anything but a cheap, smiling gambler with a flashy front, he told himself.
³

When you're in the last bloody ditch, Beckett wrote, there's nothing left but to sing. Jethro's procession “home” is that song, “a melodic wailing of pain as if he were being beaten to some rhythmic beat … as if the loud wailing notes, themselves, relieved the pain.”
⁴
He becomes ship and sea in one: reader or listener seeking in art a conduit, a container, for his own pain, and artist forever grasping after a thing he has glimpsed yet knows he will not, cannot, ever quite get; he is his own pain, and Chester Himes's pain, and at the same time something larger, something curiously beyond pain, something crudely transcendent.

Westward again, then.

Jean's brother Hugo had offered use of his California ranch on Honey Lake along U.S. Highway 395, about seventy-five miles north of Reno. Chester hoped that there he'd be able to write with few distractions. That May of 1946 he bought a six-year-old Mercury and (because he'd heard the Ku Klux Klan was active in northern California) a rifle, and he and Jean set out across the continent, rolling past Joliet, Des Moines, Davenport, Omaha, Salt Lake City, Reno. They passed through towns too small to have self-supporting ghettoes where they might find food and shelter, Himes wrote, and literally none of the whites operating hotels, motels and restaurants along the way wanted to serve the “clean, respectably dressed black couple.”
⁵