Chester himes: exile & 125th Street

by Michael A. Gonzales

(An abbreviated version of this essay first appeared in Stop Smiling #36, The Expatriate Issue)

Eleven years ago, dread-locked and recently divorced writer Darius James quietly stacked boxes in a rusty garden shed in the backyard of his father’s house in New Haven, Connecticut.

A few days before he was due to leave the country for Berlin, the Black bizarro author of 1993’s Negrophobia (a cult classic that author Dennis Cooper once called “one of the most extraordinary and undervalued novels to come out of the East Village scene”) was sifting through thirty years of stuff. Indeed, the then forty-two-year-old was ready to jet away for his own ex parte experience.

Certainly, the perceived romance of dwelling in Europe had always held a certain allure for folks of color. Be them stories of Negro war vets, diva Josephine Baker, jazz musician Sidney Bechet, painter Beauford Delany, artist Lois Mailou Jones, nightclub owner Bricktop or lit-genius Richard Wright, the mythology of being “on the other side of the ocean” was one that I too had once embraced.

In author Tyler Stovall’s splendid Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light (1996), he points out: “Both French officials and ordinary citizens often reacted with surprise and dismay to the bigoted attitudes of white Americans. Many simply could not understand why Americans would treat their fellow countrymen so poorly.”

However, on that spring afternoon in 1997 as I helped Darius move countless cartons, I was pleasantly startled when I stumbled across a box that contained a collection of Chester Himes’ pulp fiction reprints from the seventies.

“It’s a shame how they treated my man Himes,” I said, gazing at the gaudy covers of The Crazy Kill, The Big Gold Dream and Cotton Comes to Harlem, the latter of which had been adapted into an MGM blaxploitation flick (1970) directed by famed actor Ossie Davis.

Ever since I first started collecting Himes' brilliant Harlem detective series (there were eight in total, including the incomplete Plan B, published posthumously in 1984) in the mid-eighties, the late Ohio native had become a lit-hero in my personal canon.

“What do you mean?” Darius asked.

“Hell, you would never have seen covers like this on Invisible Man. No dis to Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin or Richard Wright, but if you ask me, Chester Himes was always the better writer.”

“And don’t think he didn’t know it either,” Darius laughed.

***

Twenty years after becoming my personal patron saint of dark alleyways and damaged souls, the textual webs that Himes weaved into his fictional landscapes has inspired a generation of bleak storytellers that includes television writers Tom Fontana and George Pelecanos, comic book creators Frank Miller and Howard Chaykin and novelists Gary Phillips and Charlotte Carter.

Hell, even cultural critic and director Nelson George once suggested in his Village Voice essay “Hyper as a Heart Attack” that the cryptic rhythms and brutal beats heard in the music of Eric B. & Rakim would be the ideal soundtrack for Chester Himes’ crime series.

With narratives filled to the brim with crazed street gangs, pistol whippings, runaway cars, shifty soul sisters, crooked ministers and sightless shooters, Himes’ Harlem (which he had completely re-imagined in Paris) was a wild ride through the surrealism of his psyche and the racism of his reality.

Perhaps my favorite fictional accounts of life above 110th street, Chester’s fiction gave the term “black comedy” a completely different meaning. Like his friend Pablo Picasso, brother Himes’ simply had a different way of observing the world.

“The humor in my stories is the dark humor of the ghetto,” Himes said in a 1970 radio interview.

Treated as a visionary writer in Europe, who had no problem mixing brutal street poetics with urbane existentialism, Himes stated to journalist Helmut M. Braem, “I got an opportunity to make a living in Paris, using Harlem as a locale for some detective novels. I just did it to make a living, but ultimately realized that my work had become a kind of classic in the field.”

Indeed, the work of this moody yet handsome lady-killer (in the symbolic sense) has always stood tall next to criminal-minded contemporaries David Goodis and Jim Thompson as one of the most hard-boiled storytellers of his generation. By embracing the Black Mask magazine template that had been perfected by his crime-lit muse Dashiell Hammett (“he placed his stories against a stark background; peopled them with men and women who seemed truly to sweat, bleed and ache; and made the pursuit of justice a noble as well a necessary goal”), Himes figuratively spiked his prose with a hit of cocaine and a Count Basie soundtrack.

“I would say that Chester was more significant to France than Miles Davis,” says French-born novelist and translator Thierry Marignac. “We took pride in the fact that Himes lived in France, that it was a French editor (Marcel Duhamel) who had given him his first real chance to be a writer of significance. Chester Himes and Iggy and the Stooges, were, to our drugged minds, the real definitions of Frog taste.”

Despite the lean boldness of Himes’ Harlem novels (as opposed to the sometimes overwrought James Baldwin texts written about the same locale), the writer is still treated less seriously in literary discussions than either big-daddy Richard Wright or relative newcomer Colson Whitehead.

As biographer James Sallis (who himself is also a first-rate crime novelist) pointed out in Chester Himes: A Life (2000), the author still remains, “one of America’s most neglected and misunderstood major writers.”

***

In our age of ghetto-lit novelists writing about their misadventures in the butt-naked city of “da hood” and prison, Chester Himes’ early life has the concrete jungle boogie of a narrative in a Terri Woods or Relentless Aaron book. Nevertheless, unlike the current crop of “hip-hop” novelists, Himes wrote passionately about the inner-city, but the he wasn’t raised ghetto.

Born into a bourgeois, yet highly dysfunctional family of educators, Chester had been through so much Gothic shit one would have sworn that some witch had put a mojo on him from birth. His ordeals with his parent’s hatred for one another as well as blaming himself for an accident that blinded his brother, always stayed with him.

Though he enrolled in Ohio State University in 1926 to study medicine, Chester spent more time prowling the streets than studying. Hanging-out with “Cleveland’s gamblers, hustlers and high rollers,” he later ended-up in prison for an eight-year stretch for a jewel robbery charge.

Explaining his jail stint in his 1972 autobiography The Quality of Hurt, Himes wrote, “I found the convicts like idiot children, like the idiot giant in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, intensely grateful for small favors and incomprehensibly dangerous from small slights…”

Going behind bars at nineteen and coming out when he was twenty-six, it was while serving time that Himes decided to become a writer. Moreover, as the best writing teachers have always suggested, Himes wrote about the people that he knew best.

Influenced, as critic Robert Skinner later put it, by “men with violence deeply imbedded in them,” he began submitting stories to Abbott’s Monthly (founded by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, owner of the Chicago Defender) and the Atlanta Daily Word in 1933.

“There was nothing to do,” Himes told the New York Times in 1969. “All you had to do was tell it like it is.” Yet, it wasn’t until Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich bought two of Himes’ prison stories in 1934 (“Crazy in the Stir” and “To What Red Hell”) that the incarcerated scribe finally felt like a real writer. “After that, until I was released in May 1936, I was published only in Esquire,” Himes declared.

Contemporary mystery writer, teacher and editor Christopher Chambers (The Darker Mask) separates Himes’ penitentiary writings from modern day prison scribes. “Unlike some jailhouse writers I could name, Chester never wrote characters that were caricatures,” Chambers explained. “Most of these new-school ghetto writers are into depicting stereotypes, but Himes put so much complexity, angst and fear into his work, which is why his works are classic literature.”

Having written two novels about FBI Agent Angela Bivens including 2003’s A Prayer for Deliverance, the D.C. based writer continued: “When I started writing, Chester was who I was trying to emulate. He had his finger on the pulse of damaged people just trying to survive in the world with nothing but hardness and humor.”

Publishing two naturalist “protest” novels after his release, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947), it wasn’t until a backlash over the politics of the latter tome (“Hate runs through this book like a streak of yellow bile,” the Atlantic Monthly wrote) that Himes stopped writing for five years.

Following the death of his father in 1953, Himes decided to leave America by ship that April. A week later, Himes had finally arrived in France. In the interim, Chester wrote countless short stories and two more novels in a four-year span.

Still, it wasn’t until 1957 when he met editor Marcel Duhamel, the director of Gallimard Press’ detective line La Série Noire, that Himes was encouraged to write his first so-called police procedural.

Though at age forty-seven Himes was hardly a spring chick, he wrote with the fierce fearlessness of a man in his twenties. Fuelled by Faulkner, rum, blues music, Dostoyevsky, beautiful women, café conversations with Wright and moonlit memories of various American ghettos, Himes embarked on a literary journey that equated pleasure and anger, laughter and sin into 220 typewritten pages originally called The Five-Cornered Square. The book title changed to For Love of Imabelle when it was released in America and later flipped again, this time to A Rage in Harlem.

Three months later, he turned in the manuscript and was already working on a follow-up called The Real Cool Killers.

In 1958, the Parisian government awarded Himes their highest literary award, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for his debut crime novel. It was the first time a non-French-speaking author had won the award.

Until his death from a stroke in the Orwellian year of 1984 while living in Spain, Chester Himes continued to change the game of literature while always playing by his own rules.

###

(c) copyright Michael A. Gonzales, 2008

 

Journalist and short story writer MICHAEL A. GONZALES has written for New York magazine and Vibe, and currently blogs at Uptownlife.net. His short fiction has appeared in The Darker Mask edited by Gary Phillips and Chris Chambers, Bronx Biannual edited by Miles Marshall Lewis and the forthcoming Tell Tales IV edited by Monique Roffey and Courttia Newland.