Chester Himes (2 page)

Much like his work, Himes's life is filled with contradictions and uncertainties, sudden turns, stabs of violence, dark centers at the heart of light. In his time he was no easy man to know; time's filters haven't changed that. There is so
much
of the life, so many things done, so many places lived, so many apparent selves and so rich an internal life, that, every bit as much as his fiction, Himes's life seems always overblown, exaggerated,
too
vivid—as though all experience has been rendered down to one single dark, rich stock. One often feels that it is only the centripetal force of the tensions within him that keeps Himes's world from flying wholly apart. He seems a man who must always work everything out for himself and by himself, creating self and world anew with each effort at understanding, “remaining always (in critic Gilbert Muller's words) radical and unforgiving.”
⁶

Whatever they and their jacket notes claim, the majority of writers lead dull lives. They spend much of their lives alone in rooms staring at blank pages or half-filled screens. When not in those rooms, they wander half-lost about the house, quarrel with wives and lovers, drink, worry about their work going out of print or not finding a publisher, read new books to see who might be getting a leg up on them, share with other writers complaints over the horrible state of publishing.

Himes's life, on the other hand, is at least as fascinating as his fiction.

Autobiographical elements, of course, even appropriations of entire lives, are common in literature. Zuckerman is Roth in a funhouse mirror, Henry or Mr. Bones opens his mouth to let out John Berryman's words, Joyce cocoons his childhood in the guise of Stephen Daedalus: artful dodgers all. So one hesitates to insist too closely upon the link between writer and written. Perhaps especially in the case of Himes one hesitates. His late memoirs are rife with conflation and confabulation, highly suspect. Memory at best is an uncertain instrument, and the two volumes of autobiography Himes wrote when well past sixty resound with errors of fact, skewed sequences, even incorrect dates for central experiences. Nor does Himes ever back away from adorning fact, sending it out dressed in Sunday best or in rags according to his need, so that often the books are more documents of his emotions and reactions, of states of mind, than they are a record of the life lived. By selection and emphasis, then, the memoirs become as fictive in their own way as his novel
The Third Generation
, which in turn seems as much masked autobiography as fiction. And who is this writer, so much like Himes yet clearly invented, darting and skittering and peering out through the pages of
The Primitive
?

When Himes spoke of
The Third Generation
as his “most dishonest novel,”
⁷
it's just this manifest use of fact to which he may have been referring, this sense that he had failed in some elementary manner the mandates of fiction. Here Himes is writing so close to his own life that only crawl spaces remain.

Himes's life and fiction seem uniquely linked, then, if in complex ways, and his work, for all its apparent diversity, uniquely of a piece.

Chester Himes was no great thinker, never claiming a place among intellectuals. With a handful of exceptions, notably his 1948 speech at the University of Chicago, whenever he touched on ideas he spoke in
commonplaces, and often as not what he shows in his work may subvert what he says. He
was
, however, a marvelous observer and prodigious inventor, working by instinct towards attainment of discoveries and a singular vision irreducible to mere ideas.

Himes could be shockingly unobservant, even unmindful, of his own life and motives. Repeatedly, he let himself drift or be drawn into impossible situations. There was about him often a baffling passivity, a disengagement, that reminds us he spent formative adult years in prison and clashes oddly with the man's obvious passion. Again and again he voiced astonishment at actions or inactions that led (quite predictably, we should have thought) to disaster. Yet in his work he took close notice of the world from perspectives rarely encountered, convincing us with the sheer physicality of his writing, spinning out scenes we've never read before. When Himes writes of Harlem, you see the cars sunk like elephants onto tireless front wheels, cafés with hand-lettered signs and hustlers in tight bunches on corners; smell rotting garbage, sweat, bad grease, the sweet stench of pomades. When he shows Bob Jones and Kriss awakening in
If He Hollers Let Him Go
and
The Primitive
, respectively,
you
feel what they feel, all the fear, self-hatred, and confusion beating at the inner walls of selves.

Critic James Lundquist has called the opening chapter of
Blind Man with a Pistol
, with its hundred-year-old “black Mormon” advertising for a new wife to keep the number at twelve, with its stinking stewpot of chicken's feet and chitterlings and feeding troughs for children, “without exaggeration … one of the strangest in American literature.”
⁸
The final scene of the same book, with Himes's once-powerful detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson standing by helplessly shooting rats as full-scale riot breaks around them, is little less strange or memorable.

 

An hour later Lieutenant Anderson had Grave Digger on the radio-phone. “Can't you men stop that riot?” he demanded.

   “It's out of hand, boss,” Grave Digger said.

   “All right, I'll call for reinforcements. What started it?”

   “A blind man with a pistol.'

   “What's that?”

   “You heard me, boss.”

   “That don't make any sense.”

   “Sure don't.”
⁹

 

In the second volume of his autobiography,
My Life of Absurdity
, Himes describes “a painting I had seen in my youth of black soldiers clad in Union Army uniforms down on their hands and knees viciously biting the dogs the Southern rebels had turned on them, their big white dangerous teeth sinking into the dogs' throats while the dogs yelped futilely.”
¹⁰
That painting has always seemed profoundly emblematic of Himes's work. The terrible ambivalence of the black's place in society, Himes's own bitterness and rage, elements of graphic violence and
opéra bouffe
—this brief description of a painting seen fleetingly in youth describes as well four decades of work from one of America's most neglected and misunderstood major writers.

In
Cakes and Ale
, Somerset Maugham summarized the literary vocation thus:

I began to meditate on the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax … of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.
¹¹

Chester Himes never forgot anything, least of all his pride and anger. At no time during his life did poverty and the world's indifference remove themselves far from his side. Chester Himes was never a free man.

Chester Bomar Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, the state capital, on July 29, 1909, “across the street from the entrance to
Lincoln Institute, where my father, Professor Joseph Sandy Himes, taught blacksmithing and wheelwrighting as head of the Mechanical Department.”
¹²
Chester was the youngest of three brothers: Eddie, eight years his senior; Joseph Jr., with whom Chester became in youth inseparable, but one. No original birth certificate survives; in April of 1942, offering as documentation a family record of birth (most likely a family bible) and WPA employment records, Himes applied for and received a “delayed or special” certificate.

Part of a network of land-grant Negro schools throughout the South, Lincoln Institute's curriculum was split into two parts, agricultural and mechanical; today's A&M colleges retain this nomenclature. Many of these colleges occupied campuses of formerly white schools. Alcorn College in Mississippi, for instance, where Joseph Sandy Himes later taught, moved onto a campus vacated by the state university's relocation to Oxford, where the latter became known as Ole Miss (“made famous by William Faulkner and James Meredith,” Himes writes in a typical remark
¹³
). Other such facilities were ramshackle aggregations of buildings. Most were rurally located. Himes remembered his father quoting Booker T. Washington on the subject of these schools: “Let down your buckets where you are.”

Lincoln Institute, founded in 1866 with $6,000 contributed by regiments of Negro volunteers from the Civil War, by 1914 had an enrollment of 435. Benjamin F. Allen's presidency from 1902 to 1918 brought marked physical improvement, including a central heating system and, in 1908, wiring of all campus buildings for electricity, as well as new emphasis on students' cultural development. A portrait of the 1912 faculty shows and lists “Joseph S. Himes, blacksmithing.” His annual salary is given as $700. In the Jefferson City Directory this entry appears: “Himes, Joseph S (col Estella B) instructor Lincoln Inst, r 710 Lafayette.”

Jefferson City at that time had a population of around 15,000 and covered an area just under four square miles, with twenty-three miles of paved streets. A 1904 ordinance set the city speed limit at nine miles an hour. The
Jefferson City Post
in 1908 wrote of an auto trip from Kansas City to Jefferson City in an astonishingly brief fourteen hours.

Himes, who was to become the chronicler of America's great dispossessed, began not in poverty, then, but in a black middle class
that few Americans even suspect existed at the time. Joseph Sandy Himes was, by his own standards and those of the community at large, a man of substantial prospects.

Son of a slave, Joseph Sandy Himes never knew his father's first name, knew only that he had been bought off the slave block by a man named Heinz or Himes who trained him as a blacksmith. The end of the Civil War found Joseph's father in his mid-twenties and a father of four. With little real choice, he remained on his former master's plantation but after a quarrel with an overseer, whom he almost certainly attacked, perhaps killed, he fled, abandoning his first family.

Second wife Mary, herself an ex-slave from Georgia, bore him five children before dying of consumption. Joseph Sandy, Himes's father, was the middle child, born in North Carolina, fourteen at the time of Mary's death. Working at a variety of menial jobs, he put himself through South Carolina's Claflin College; he may also have attended Boston Mechanical Institute.

Now he taught metal trades, blacksmithing, and wheelwrighting and was called Professor Himes. At one college he also taught Negro history from texts that Chester wondered about but never saw again. There's something Hephaestian about descriptions of Joseph: short, broad-shouldered and muscular, barrel chest set squarely on bowed legs. He had dark blue eyes, an ellipsoidal skull, and a large hooked nose that both his wife and son Chester referred to as Arabic. Joseph Sandy seems to have been an artisan of great skill. From
The Third Generation:

He was a fine blacksmith and wheelwright. His students had built some of the best carriages and wagons seen in that city. He could make the most elaborate andirons and coal tongs and gates and lampposts imaginable. He had made jewelry and lamps and dishes from gold and silver. He was an artist at the forge and anvil. There was practically nothing he couldn't forge from metal.
¹⁴

Almost certainly it was Joseph's ambition that attracted Estelle to him. In all other ways, physically, emotionally, in their background, they were markedly unalike. Himes spoke in later years of his father's slave mentality, “which accepts the premise that white people knew best,” whereas mother Estelle “hated all manner of condescension
from white people.”
¹⁵
This contrast of attitudes was to establish in Himes networks of ambivalence extending to virtually every facet of his life. Initially, though, Estelle admired Joseph for the distance he had traveled; his by-the-bootstraps edification echoed her own family's self-elevation through hard work and determination. And, always, Estelle Bomar was a great seer not of what is but of what could be, a woman who, had she read Wallace Stevens, might have adopted “Let be be finale of seem” as her creed. In Joseph Sandy she saw not a simple teacher of practical skills. She saw a future dean, an administrator. Unfortunately Joseph had progressed as far as he was ever likely to go, and Estelle's relentless pushing for his advancement served only to cause him difficulties with superiors and to open marital rifts that with the years became unbreachable, till finally both he and the marriage broke on that wheel.

Estelle always felt she'd married beneath her, and in the last analysis believed the Negro colleges themselves demeaning. She was being held back by circumstance, by Joseph's lack of a resolve to match her own, and if she did not take steps, that same waywardness would claim her sons. Estelle pushed ever harder. “She could make allowances if he were a success.”
¹⁶
She and Joseph quarreled bitterly again and again, endlessly, as young Chester and his brothers looked on “whimpering and trembling in terror.”
¹⁷