Chester Himes (41 page)

For Silberman at Dial, Himes summarized his novel as the story of how Mamie Mason tries to force the wife of great race leader Wallace Wright to come to one of her parties, how in so doing she all but ruins the lives of a number of people and then must go about setting them
right again. In a later note for one of his publishers Himes expanded rather grandiloquently on this synopsis, describing the novel as

a Rabelaisian treatment of the sex motivation of New York City's interracial set by a member of long standing. The author reveals some of the backstage and bedroom scenes in the great struggle of Negro equality in a graphic detail seldom found outside psychiatric case histories. Underlining the depiction of the Negro people's illimitable faith in a just solution of their dilemma is a hilarious account of the aphrodisiacal compulsions of the “Negro problem” in which the dedicated crusaders against racial bias are shown more often falling in bed than in battle. The story is authentic and many of the scenes and characters are drawn so closely to life as to be recognizable.
¹⁰

Like
The Primitive
, then,
Pinktoes
is a
romanà clef
, if a confusing one. Himes portrays himself as ever-broke and -hopeful outsider Julius Mason, brother to Mamie's husband Joe. He's something of a country-bumpkin figure, “a five-cornered square” who has left his wife behind in California and is staying with the Masons. Other life studies, though rarely direct given the nature of the novel, include Horace Cayton, Walter White, Himes's old editor Bucklin Moon, Richard Wright, Ollie Harrington, Paul Robeson, Adam Clayton Powell, and Ralph Bunche.

Pinktoes
was quite a departure from Himes's prior novels, and finally may have had more in common with his freewheeling conversation, which we understand from friends teemed with jokes, stories, and exaggerations, and with the goings-on among Ollie, himself, and others at Café Tournon, than with his fiction up to that point. It brought Himes's flair for outrageous comedy, so much a part of the Harlem cycle, into the foreground, as well as the associative, anecdotal style that increasingly occupied those novels. Most important, the freedom of invention that he found or allowed himself in this book seems to have worked to liberate him both from the earnestness of writing “proper” protest novels and from the burden of autobiography. Retrospectively at least, Himes agreed, remarking in
My Life of Absurdity
that

I had the creative urge, but the old, used forms for the black American writer did not fit my creations. I wanted to break
through the barrier that labelled me as a “protest writer.” I knew the life of an American black needed another image than just the victim of racism.
¹¹

A June 1956 letter to Van Vechten from La Ciotat, where Himes completed the novel, reaffirms this. The novel's conclusion, he writes, is terrific, much of it funny, none of it bitter. Curiously he calls the book an experiment in good will (the French title in full is
Mamie Mason, ou un exercice de la bonne volonté
), adding: “I have a great feeling now that I am going to be free forever.”
¹²

Pinktoes
came twelve years after Chester's extended stay with the Moons at their Harlem apartment. Much of it he wrote during long days at the heated Café au Départ, where he sat wrapped in his gray Burberry overcoat trying to stay warm, too impoverished to buy cigarettes or even stamps, cadging tiny sums from friends and watching the steady parade of interracial sex everywhere about him on the boulevards. He began the book in early 1956, in March sent two completed chapters to Walter Freeman at NAL, who in declining nonetheless passed it on to Dial Press's James Silberman. By April Himes had 120 pages in final draft. There, temporarily, feeling the strain of keeping up the novel's pace and comedy, he stalled, taking time out to write the synopsis of a long-contemplated novel about black American expatriates in Paris. Though he had conceived or at any rate spoken of the book as a major project, Himes went no further than this synopsis, eventually published as
A Case of Rape. Pinktoes
, however, he completed in two weeks at La Ciotat.

The new book went begging as Chester moved on to write the first of his detective novels. Finally in 1958 Plon, publishers of
The Third Generation
, offered an advance of 50,000 francs, then promptly lost the manuscript, necessitating Chester's appeal to Yale's James Weldon Johnson Collection for a copy of the manuscript he'd given over, per his agreement with Van Vechten, to their archives. Himes meanwhile sold the book to Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press, so that, when Plon in due course offered a contract, he signed it in violation of his prior contract with Girodias. Olympia published the book in English in 1961, Plon in its French translation in 1962; after much negotiation the
two publishers agreed that, in exchange for making no claim against French rights, Girodias would retain all foreign rights.

Maurice Girodias heard I was in Paris and knew exactly where I was and I was surprised one morning when I got a telephone call from him asking me to bring in the manuscript for him to read. I told him the manuscript was owned by Plon but he said he would take good care of it and read it overnight and we'd talk about it tomorrow. When I talked to him the next day he said if I put in six good sex scenes he'd give me a contract and a thousand dollars advance. I had Marlene [Regine] type the original manuscript, the one Plon had bought, and I went to work putting in six sex scenes; but I put in so many sex scenes I had to take two thirds of them out. Girodias wanted to call it
Zebra Stripes
, but I came up with
Pinktoes
, which he liked better.
¹³

Despite Himes's claim of juicing up the novel for Girodias, few significant variances between texts exist. Sex scenes there are, in abundance—“Bessie Shirley was hanging head down from a walking stick stuck through the chandelier with her long hair hanging to the floor, and embracing Mr. Tucker, who stood confronting her,”
¹⁴
for instance—but none appear to have been cobbled up to meet editorial demands or better suit Olympia's perceived image.

Mamie Mason
as published by Plon, Himes wrote in his memoirs, made quite a stir. Copies were on display all about the Left Bank, the book was well reviewed in the newspapers and magazines (one,
Paris-Presse
, ran a front-page story headed “Do You Want to Look Like an Overcooked Frankfurter, Madame”), strangers greeted him on the street: “I felt like a real author.”
¹⁵

But the thickets kept getting deeper. In 1964, claiming afterward that he didn't understand the rights were not his, Himes sold
Pinktoes
to Putnam, only to learn that rights had already been sold, by Girodias, to Stein & Day. Eventually, after much sawing back and forth, the two U.S. publishers worked out a unique agreement for copublication.
Pinktoes
appeared in hardback in 1965, and, the following year, in a paperback from Dell. Both editions sold extraordinarily well, providing Himes his highest advance to date ($10,000) as well as his sole best-seller.

Walter Minton was buying up Girodias' books. He had been successful with
Lolita
and
Candy
and he was anxious to get
Pinktoes
. Stein & Day had offered me seventy-five hundred, so Minton upped it twenty-five hundred. And then Stein & Day and Putnam started a lawsuit against one another, and that's why they published it jointly. They figured it'd be more expensive to go to court so they just decided that they would work out a system, a very elaborate one, so elaborate that I ran into difficulties with Stein & Day because—Putnam kept the trade book edition, they were responsible for that and for collecting my royalties—Stein & Day were responsible for the subsidiary rights and the reprint and foreign rights and so forth. And finally Stein & Day began rejecting various offers from foreign countries. The last one—the one that really made me angry—was that they had an offer from a German publisher to bring out a German edition of
Pinktoes
and Stein & Day rejected that, and I went to the Authors Guild and to the lawyers to see what I could do. And they said that that was the most complicated contract they had ever seen.
¹⁶

Himes's account, finding such fault with Stein & Day while failing to acknowledge at all his own culpability, is skewed in a fashion that, reading Chester, one soon comes to find familiar. He did, as cited, in mid-1968 address his misgivings to the Authors Guild. In a four-page letter of August 12 a Guild representative responded. In the usual one-author, one-publisher relationship, he wrote, there would be a number of fairly common and common-sense steps to take, though none seemed applicable in this case. He suggested several possible courses of action: putting the rights by mutual consent of all involved into the hands of an agent; arbitration; referral to a lawyer who would serve simultaneously as author's representative and as arbitrator between publishers. Ultimately, however, he had more or less to throw up his hands and quit the field: “I'm not King Solomon, and I don't have the wisdom to solve one of the most tangled contractual arrangements that I can recall hearing about.”
¹⁷

Pinktoes's
plot, meanwhile, gets about on as many confusing legs as does its commercial history. Himes's most atypical novel, it is yet a part of his broken-field run toward what Lundquist calls an “extension of humanity,” an opening outward on its author's part, an embrasure
of compassion.
¹⁸
Pinktoes's
characters may exist to be targets of satire and of the choreographed pratfalls their author prepares for them (which, indeed, none escape), but they are, for all that, for all the funny hats they must wear and all the contrived mugging, people linked inextricably and intimately to others, people forever struggling to be better, to be more, than they are, people who
need
and who
feel
with an intensity almost childlike.

Himes here takes up again his old jeremiad against the middle-class Negro, satirizes the pretensions of all liberals, white or black, parodies his own obsession with interracial sex. But he fires in passing and scattershot at many other targets as well: the New York publishing scene (the authors of
Dreamland
, a book on drug addiction, have cribbed it from a forgotten WPA project); charitable foundations (the “Rosenberg,” under direction of Dr. Oliver Wendell Garrett); fringe groups (D. Stetson Kissock and his Southern Committee for the Preservation of Justice); and the arts in general (white producer Will Robbins's latest film
Read and Run Nigger
has the subtitle
If You Can't Read Run Anyhow)
.

The plot gathers, inasmuch as it coheres at all, chiefly about two figures. Wallace Wright is a much-acclaimed race leader and Executive Chairman of the National Negro Political Society (NNPS), one-sixty-fourth Negro, who looks “so much like a white man that his white friends found it extremely difficult, in fact downright irritating, to have to remember he was colored.”
¹⁹
Art Wills is an editor, soon to take up those duties for a new Negro picture magazine, himself white, a philanderer, and generally so drunk that people have trouble getting his attention.

Harlem hostess Mamie Mason, angry at Wright for attending her parties without his wife, trumpets word of Wright's affair with a white woman. This leads to the rumor that he has left his wife of twenty years for a white woman half his age, and soon there's a run on hair straightener and bleaching cream, while black women's organizations champion slogans such as Be Happy That You Are Nappy and poets write poems with titles like “The Whiter the Face the Blacker the Disgrace.”

Mamie is also angry at Wills because he won't agree to feature her in the first issue of his magazine—and because, too drunk to take notice, he wouldn't be party to her subversion of Wright. When she informs
Wills's wife, Debbie, that he has proposed to a young black woman named Brown Sugar he met at a drunken party, Debbie goes home to her mother. This leads to the rumor that white liberals all over are abandoning their wives for young black women, and there's a run on suntan lotions, ultraviolet lamps, and cosmetics as white women rush to kink their hair, dye their gums blue, redden their eyes. The cosmetic firm making “Black No More” now brings out a companion product, “Blackamoor,” for whites.

The transformed white ladies quickly discover the advantages of being black, among them that sharks, not liking dark meat, will not eat them; that they needn't bathe, since dirt doesn't show on their skin; that they can now do the housework and pocket the maid's money; that they are able to wear all the loud colors they wish without friends laughing behind their back; that now they can forget the Negro problem and hate all the Negroes they wish without feeling guilty.

There is, too, a profusion of side stories. Panama Paul dreams of being in a heaven filled with white angels, unable to fly because his testicles are weighed down by anvils. Moe Miller in his Brooklyn home carries on a battle to the death with the rat who has taken it over. The nymphomaniacal Merto knits replicas of the genitals of all the black men she sleeps with, taking care to get size and color just right, and has to relate the story of each conquest, in precise detail, to gay husband Maurice; she turns up at the concluding costume ball as Eve, wearing a fig leaf and a necklace made of her knittings. Then there is Reverend Reddick, sent to Peggy, Wright's white mistress, by Mamie. He spends three days and nights there buck naked, wrestling with the demons inside Peggy, until the two of them, the Reverend and Peggy, decide to get married.

News of Peggy and the Reverend's marriage not only sends Art Wills over to Hoboken to fetch his wife home, it serves also to reunite Wallace Wright and wife Juanita.