Chester Himes (51 page)

What hit me the second these two cats made the scene was just how cool and aware they were; how they inhabited a world called Harlem I'd only been to once because I had cousins who lived there; and how their Harlem was like my South Central Los Angeles, a place that was part of, yet very much removed from, the rest of America.

The film led Phillips, as it led others, to Chester Himes's books. To the Harlem novels, shot through with violence. To the amazing
Blind Man with a Pistol
. To
Lonely Crusade
, whose insights had Phillips, by then immersed in community work, nodding his head in agreement. Still today, he says, those books affect the very way he thinks and writes.

Himes wrote the Coffin Ed and Grave Digger stories because he was down and out in Paris. Like the ex-patriot African-American jazz men who populated Paris in that era of the Fifties, Himes was riffing and improvising on the typewriter his unique take on detective fiction. His plots were only the starting point as he set down his red hot licks, taking his two crusaders on errands that even they couldn't quite articulate. But in the doing, the being, they existed and blew through a life that promised nothing and delivered less. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger were the original gangstas who lived by their wits and ruthlessness, trying their damndest to keep shit from raining down on their stomping grounds.

Himes got the cosmic joke, and let us in on parts of it in each successive book. I keep trying to follow his lead.
¹⁵

In February 1972 Chester and Lesley flew to New York for the launch of
The Quality of Hurt
, were again met with warm receptions everywhere, and spent several days in North Carolina with Joe and Edward, the first time all three brothers had been together since their mother's funeral. That Christmas Joe and wife Estelle visited them in Spain; the following December, Chester and Lesley flew to New York to visit Edward, then on to Greensboro to see Joe and Estelle. On the February 1972 American visit Chester was widely interviewed and gave a brief speech at a reception for black writers by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One interviewer was Nikki Giovanni, for CBS's
Camera Three
. Another, for
The Village Voice
, was novelist Charles Wright, who found Himes in the Chelsea Hotel, “a place where a man might wait for the countdown or enjoy the spoils of victory,” and sat with him admiring “the magnificent Edward Hopper window view” as seventeen-year-old Griot twined about their legs.

Chester Himes looks like an elegant sportsman, a man of distinction, and—with his beard—bears an uncanny resemblance to Ernest Hemingway. However, Himes is black and basic. “You know there is only one black writer. Just as soon as he makes it, they tear him down. We black writers have got to stop fighting each other. Whitey has always pitted one black against the other. The field slaves and the house slaves. Their motto has always been divide and conquer.”
¹⁶

Publishers Weekly
also ran a feature in connection with Himes's visit.

Chester Himes, ex-convict, jewel thief, bedroom athlete, busboy, porter, expatriate, but above all writer, talks about himself—something he does with verve and brilliance—in the first volume of his autobiography,
The Quality of Hurt
(Doubleday), and in conversation with
PW:

“I was speaking to a black studies class at Hunter College,” he told
PW
, “and the young professor, who was black, kept quoting
from an article in the
Sunday Times Book Review
(which I hadn't read) that said I wasn't a true spokesman for the black race, that the Harlem of my books was not the real Harlem …

“Well, I explained that I had created a Harlem of my mind; that I have never attempted to be the spokesman for any segment of the black community. I take my stories from the Black Experience as I have undergone it.

“Before long, the kids were on my side. Young people don't want to confuse stories in books with their own reality. They resent books that claim to show the interior of their minds. They aren't looking for any 'spokesmen.' They can speak for themselves. The best a black writer can do is to deal with subjects which are personal; so he can tell how it was for him.”
¹⁷

That is very much what Himes had tried to do, according to his own lights, in
The Quality of Hurt
to tell how it was for him. A major essay-review from Ishmael Reed for
Black World
(running to twenty-three pages when reprinted in Reed's collection
Shrovetide in New Orleans)
held that Himes had met his charge head-on, deeming the first volume “a big book; big as the career and as the man.”
¹⁸

The Quality of Hurt
… is a love story, sometimes amusing, sometimes sorrowful; it's a cops and robbers story as gory as Peckinpah; it's a story about the tragedies that shatter a proud, noble, and gifted family.
¹⁹

. . . .

Volume I … is told coolly and objectively, Himes utilizing his considerable novelistic gifts, one of the major qualities of which is a fantastic memory. His descriptions of Los Angeles, Cleveland, and New York geography read like street maps. He and writers like Albert Murray are scholars of Harlem's topography as well as its innards.
²⁰

. . . .

Chester Himes is a great writer and a brave man. His life has shown that black writers are as heroic as the athletes, entertainers, scientists, cowboys, pimps, gangsters, and politicians they might write about.
²¹

. . . .

The achievement of Volume I is even more staggering when you realize that another volume is on the way. Surely that will be an additional monster destined to mind slam the reader.
²²

Time, meanwhile, was at the barricades of that “fantastic memory.” Not long after the New York trip, in April, Chester suffered another stroke and briefly entered the British-American Hospital in Madrid. In August of that year, 1972, Griot died. Himes was devastated, missing him terribly, but Lesley ordered from England a six-month-old Siamese kitten, Deros Cantabile, which Chester received on January 12. While in London on business that September, Himes consulted a number of English specialists who agreed that, given his general condition, there was little more to be done for him regarding his complaints of worsening arthritis, hernia, and stomach pain. Early in the new year he received word that not only was the second Grave Digger/Coffin Ed movie
Come Back, Charleston Blue
failing to make the inroads
Cotton
had, it had lost close to two million dollars. That spring Himes was guest speaker at a Black Literature Week organized by the NAACP in Stuttgart. He read there a revised version of the introduction he had written for Ishmael Reed's anthology
Yardbird Reader
the year before, in which he claimed that the African American, summarily and for so long oppressed, ironically had attained as a result, in transcending his suffering, racial superiority.

His letters make clear Himes's gradual realization that his creative years were over. Hundreds of petty details (house, business correspondence, interviews) claimed his time and what energy he had left. He wrote that he had one more novel in him, and that would be it; that he hoped only to finish the second volume of his autobiography; that he would do whatever he could, travel anywhere, to promote his work and help keep it in print. He fiddled about with older material, assembling stories for a second collection, licensing reprints of the novels, but there was no new work. Loss of physical control—arthritis, severe back pain, increasingly slurred speech—heralded more urgent losses. He was prone to easy distraction and found it ever more difficult to concentrate. Things were getting away from him. He grew absentminded and feared that his memory, too, might be giving way, perhaps the only loss he felt he could not sustain.

He was also, in a sense, losing America, “the bad mother”
²³
that had made him what he was and given him his eternal subject. On visits now he felt hopelessly out of touch, scarcely recognizing his erstwhile home, its society alien to him, the ways in which younger blacks thought and spoke all but impenetrable. He must have thought of old friend Richard Wright at the end of
his
career, gone so long from the homeland. And so Himes stood apart and at a hard angle to the new confrontations and accommodations building in America, gazing upon a world ever more surely taking on the shape of the one he had described in the Harlem cycle: bloody, unjust, absurd.

Some time in the sixties, like a hammerblow it had struck an entire circumscribed nation:
Things do not have to be this way
. Young people, blacks, women, and minorities everywhere struggled to break through the crust of the culture's dominant impulses and rediscover accountability, freedom, connection, spirituality. It was a gallant swim upstream against all currents, an attempt to bring on a revolution in values—and perhaps, as well, the last flare of our nation's romanticism. And while the impulse lasted but a few years, brought down by excess, impracticality, and a dilating economy, bringing out at the same time something of the worst and something of the best in us all, a bitter residue remained. Now America was back on track, headed down that long, lonesome road of consumerism and complacency, unable to recollect just why it had ever seen fit to swerve off the road in the first place. It all seemed so impossibly idealistic now—just as had the social dreams of Himes's young manhood. Cynicism and irony were the new hallmarks, as though, having rejected the possibilities of freedom along with its attendant responsibilities, like Caliban we could no longer bear to look straight on into the mirror.

Through it all Chester Himes stood, as always, outside, watching.

America's very permutability, Himes knew, makes sincere difference-taking or protest all but impossible. Protean, the American process absorbs and transforms everything. The larger, commercial culture co-opts transgressive impulses wherever they pop up, subverts them without ever seeming to do so, holds them down and tickles till they give in. In a 1963 article written for a Marseilles jazz magazine Himes contended that white society's talk of equality and justice was little more than bluff and misdirection. The white man, he wrote,

believes that if he gives a sufficiently persuasive performance he will convince the world that he earnestly wishes to accede to the Negroes' demands for equality and justice—and perhaps convince the Negroes too. If, in the end, he can do no better, he will try to corrupt the Negroes by allowing them enough of the benefits of American life to divert their desire for equality and justice to the accumulation of wealth (like himself).
²⁴

Thereby dissipating, Himes continues, the very qualities of humanity that Negroes have earned in their generations of oppression. Often it seemed
all
bluff, misdirection and distraction. Here again is Ishmael Reed, the closest we have to a direct successor to Himes, looking back on Chester's visit:

In 1972, when Chester Himes made his triumphant return to the United States on the occasion of the publication of the first volume of his autobiography,
The Quality of Hurt
, the establishment was just beginning to take revenge on black men for having caused much of the political ferment of the 1960s.

Aware of this atmosphere, Himes said, prophetically, on the television show
Soul
, that the establishment was going to start a war between black men and black women. Himes was right. And so, unlike in the 1960s, when a vague entity known as the “white power structure” was blamed for the continuing problems of many African Americans, by the late 1980s, African Americans, or more specifically, black men, were blamed for these problems.
²⁵

Whether or not one accepts that observation, even the most cursory glimpse at recent work by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, Gloria Naylor, and others (for it is—this, too, calling out for thought—black women who today among African-American novelists get
read)
has to give one pause. Atop the age-old hatred for the white, oppressor society, like a layer of sedimentary rock, is a secondary layer of rage against the shiftless, shirking, predatory black man, what Sven Birkerts has called “the story of the black matriarchy as written with a poisoned pen.”
²⁶

Citing Himes's contention that black people in this country are the only new race in modern times, Reed elsewhere argues that “nothing
in history quite happened like it happened here” and that it's for this reason that African-American fiction, while abjuring the weight of the white literary past, is forever historical in a way white fiction can never be. Addressing the confusion of white readers over loose-jointed, nonconformist African-American fiction, he might well be speaking of Himes; certainly he has him squarely in mind.

So this is what we want: to sabotage history. They won't know whether we're serious or whether we are writing fiction. They made their own fiction, just like we make our own. But they can't tell whether our fictions are the real thing or whether they're merely fictional. Always keep them guessing. That'll bug them, probably drive them up the walls. What it comes down to is that you let the social realists go after the flatfoots out there on the beat and we'll go after the Pope and see which action causes a revolution. We are mystical detectives about to make an arrest.
²⁷

In sparsely populated auditoriums of the mind, Reed falls silent and out there in the darkness beyond the footlights we hear Chester Himes, a man who knew a great deal about confusing them and who took great pleasure in bugging them till they climbed the walls, a man who knew not a little, as well, about mystical detectives, begin to applaud.