Long before becoming a famous novelist, Chester Himes was a budding criminal. But his life changed after he was arrested in Chicago.
With little fanfare, Himes was posthumously honored in Chicago this October, when he was inducted into Chicago State University’s National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. He was not as well known or appreciated as most of his fellow honorees–distinguished writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. His popular legacy may rest solely on a series of detective novels, which follow the exploits of a pair of black police detectives in Harlem; that series spawned three movies, including 1970’s Cotton Comes to Harlem. But Himes produced 17 novels, more than 60 short stories, and two autobiographical volumes, revealing a unique knowledge of the dark side of human nature and the corrupting influence of racism. He believed in the basic brutality of man and, especially in his early works, man’s helplessness in the face of circumstances. Life is often a stacked deck. Himes retained this perspective throughout his career, perhaps because it evolved out of his own experience.
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The youngest of three sons, Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909 to parents who were radically different from each other. His father, Joseph, was a dark-skinned male in a racially explosive era. He was a friendly, almost obsequious man who taught mechanical arts at black colleges in the south. Himes’s mother, Estelle, was a housewife who had studied music in a Philadelphia conservatory. She taught Chester and his brother at home for a few years after the family moved to Mississippi, because she felt the elementary schools there were not good enough. A fair-skinned woman, she was fiercely proud of being part white. Himes inherited both her pride and her hatred of racism. In the first volume of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt, he wrote: “My father was born and raised in the tradition of the Southern Uncle Tom; that tradition derived from an inherited slave mentality which accepts the premise that white people know best, that blacks should accept what whites offer and be thankful, that blacks should count their blessings. My mother, who looked white and felt that she should have been white, was the complete opposite….She was a tiny woman who hated all manner of condescension from white people and hated all black people who accepted it.” The couple’s personality differences created bitter arguments.
Himes entered prison at the age of 19, yet the experience didn’t slow him down. He helped oversee the convicts’ gambling activities, settling disputes and paying off the guards. He saw a lot of violence. In The Quality of Hurt he recalled, “Two black convicts cut each other to death over a dispute as to whether Paris was in France or France in Paris. I saw another killed for not passing the bread. In the school dormitory a convict slipped up on another while he was sleeping and cut his throat to the bone; I was awakened by a gurgling scream to see a fountain of blood spurting from the cut throat onto the bottom of the mattress of the bunk overhead.” When he disobeyed guards, he suffered whippings to his head, periods in solitary confinement, and starvation rations. But with his mother’s encouragement, he began to write short stories. He first submitted these stories to black newspapers and magazines like Abbott’s Monthly and the Pittsburgh Courier. Then in 1934 Esquire published his short stories “Crazy in the Stir” and “To What Red Hell.” According to the biography The Several Lives of Chester Himes, his success earned him some respect from his fellow inmates.
Life had given Himes some rough edges. Cynical to the end, he believed people were capable of anything. In “To What Red Hell,” a fictional account of a fire he witnessed in prison, two inmates encounter a dead convict lying on the ground and decide to rifle his pockets. John A. Williams acknowledged Himes’s tough side in the introduction to his 1969 interview with the writer, later collected in the book Conversations With Chester Himes: “He is a fiercely independent man and has been known to terminate friendships and conversations alike with two well-chosen, one-syllable words.” Himes’s writing is similarly terse and street-smart, avoiding the use of symbols. His prose is blunt and unflinchingly harsh. He could be violent. In both volumes of his autobiography he admits to striking women.
Himes based the novel If He Hollers Let Him Go on his periodic stints working in the Los Angeles shipyards. The lead character is a black supervisor tormented by nightmares, which are caused by both his hatred and his fear of whites. After a white woman refuses to work with his all-black crew, he gets demoted for cursing at her. The situation is further complicated by the pair’s mutual attraction. Near the end of the novel, the supervisor decides to put aside his fears, get married, apologize to his coworker, and ask for his old job back. Everything goes according to plan, until he’s trapped alone in a room with the white woman. She falsely accuses him of rape, and he is beaten by a mob. He accepts a judge’s offer to enlist in the army in exchange for dropping the charges against him.
In Cotton Comes to Harlem, the two detectives solve a series of murders committed by criminals trying to find a bale of cotton. The cotton contains $87,000 conned out of Harlem residents who think they’re buying tickets to Africa. The detectives catch the gangsters, but they never find the money. Yet they persist in trying to repay the residents. They accomplish this by blackmailing one of the murderers–a white man from Alabama. The Alabaman is shocked by their actions: “Incredible! You’re going to give them back their money?”
