Chester Himes (17 page)

It's not by coincidence that the American detective novel developed in the late thirties, at the very point this country changed virtually overnight from a rural to urban, agricultural to industrial, society. After the Industrial Revolution, Robert Bly writes, all things happen at once. And now of a sudden there were these cities, these towered, sprawling climes into which we were all tossed, where the old rules, and the old values, no longer applied.

Our frontier myth of the loner, the good man who stands apart (deriving as much from European romances as from the frontier itself), easily became that of the private eye. He, later she, would traverse the city from high to low, wealthy suburb to shabby bar, giving up everything in his search for truth and justice. He would be our eyes and ears, the very voice, the soul, of the city itself.

From this initial impulse, from the attempt to make sense of the urban environment, to forge new maps and codes of conduct, stems our ongoing identification of detective and city: Matt Scudder with New York, Spenser with Boston, Marlowe inextricably with L.A. The impulse abides, and crime fiction remains today
the
urban fiction.

Not so surprisingly in light of his short stories and what eventually became
Cast the First Stone
, the original design of Himes's first published novel had it a mystery in which whites were being killed apparently at random all about L.A. Transformed to airier stuff, something of that original intent lives on in Bob Jones's pervasive fear, in his near-murderous rages, and in his railings against “peckerwood” white workers holding him back, the self-satisfied black bourgeoisie endlessly rationalizing its own caste system, and dronelike ghetto dwellers.

Then I turned over and dreamed on the other side.

I was working in a war plant where a white fellow named Frankie Childs had been killed and the police were there trying to find out who did it.

The police lieutenant said, “We got to find a big tall man with strong arms, big hands, and a crippled leg.”

So they started calling in the colored fellows.
¹

Soon enough Bob Jones wakes from his dreams, where events
seem
at least to have meaning, to a reality where they have none. Leaderman at a shipyard, owner of a shiny fast car he adores, engaged to a beautiful, professional, light-skinned woman, Bob Jones has a life most others might envy. In elemental ways he remains a simple, ordinary man, wanting nothing more than to be resolutely that: to go about his life unnoticed, to be left alone.

Anyone who wanted to could be nigger-rich, nigger-important, have their Jim Crow religion, and go to nigger heaven.

I'd settle for a leaderman job at Atlas Shipyard—if I could be a man, defined by Webster as a male human being. That's all I'd ever wanted—just to be accepted as a man—without ambition, without distinction, either of race, creed, or color; just a simple Joe walking down an American street, going my simple way, without any other identifying characteristic but weight, height and gender.
²

Such simplicity will not be allowed him, however. Fear has inhabited him like a parasite and slowly devours him. And before his story ends, his nightmares of impotence and injury will become real.

The alarm went off again; I knew that it had been the alarm that had awakened me. I groped for it blindly, shut it off; I kept my eyes shut tight. But I began feeling scared in spite of hiding from the day. It came along with consciousness. It came into my head first, somewhere back of my closed eyes, moved slowly underneath my skull to the base of my brain, cold and hollow. It seeped down my spine, into my arms, spread through my groin with an almost sexual torture, settled in my
stomach like butterfly wings. For a moment I felt torn all loose inside, shrivelled, paralysed, as if after a while I'd have to get up and die.
³

For critic Edward Margolies
If He Hollers
is a kind of halfway house, fusing the protest and hard-boiled genres, focusing on characters in states of constant threat. Graham Hodges in an introduction to the Thunder's Mouth reissue of
If He Hollers
agrees, emphasizing not only Himes's stylistic indebtedness, the muscular prose and pervasive violence, but also that air of existential despair so much at the heart of hard-boiled writing. Further, Hodges remarks, the novel affords a capsule history of black workers during an important transitional period. Escalating demand for labor in a war economy having opened new doors to employment for Afro-Americans, they migrated by the hundreds to Los Angeles and San Diego, to the munitions factories and shipyards there. It's a little-known chapter in American history, one to which Himes's novel uniquely bears witness: “Through Jones' eyes, we are given a street tour of L.A.'s bars, restaurants, fast-food joints, and party scenes in nearly photographic detail. The novel is a Baedeker of high and low, white and black Angeleno life during the 1940's.”
⁴

H. Bruce Franklin first pointed out that Himes's novels form a concise social history of the United States from World War II through the black urban rebellions of the 1960s.
⁵
Cotton Comes to Harlem
was published on the eve of those rebellions, in 1964.

Five years would pass before the appearance of the next and the final complete novel in the Harlem detective series,
Blind Man with a Pistol
. Himes published no novel at all during this period of the rebellions, as though waiting to see how they would turn out. In 1965 Himes met another convict, Malcolm X, and found that he thoroughly agreed with all his politics (but not with his religion). Two weeks later, Malcolm X was assassinated. Then in 1965–66, an America in upheaval began to discover Chester Himes. In 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated. The following year appeared
Blind Man with a Pistol
, whose subject is explicitly the black rebellions, the political and religious
leadership of the black community, the disintegration of the power Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are supposed to enforce, and the beginnings of an apocalypse.
⁶

In a 1964 interview, recalling cousin Henry Moon's contention upon reading
If He Hollers
that “these aren't things that white people want to hear about,” things that should be kept quiet, between colored people, Himes remarked:

My novel, which Malcolm X read when he was twenty, is a violent, angry story. I meant for it to be a shock treatment, the same kind of treatment that Malcolm X wanted to inflict on the American public.
If He Hollers Let Him Go
expressed feelings that black people had always known, things that were always kept quiet, but are today exploding into the American consciousness. My novel is being reprinted, in some measure because of today's racial climate. But when it was written, even black people were shocked by what I wrote.
⁷

Violent and angry it is indeed. Bob Jones lives at the very border of double consciousness, out there on the edge of violence, one moment conforming, the next poised for open rebellion, “battered from emotional pillar to post by external pressures which he can't control.”
⁸
Anger flares at the slightest provocation: the borrowing of a tool, the impossible position he's been put in as leaderman whose crew will not take his orders, his girlfriend's accommodationist parents and good advice. Meeting the trampy, white Madge, he recognizes that she will prove the instrument of his destruction yet cannot stay away from her. For all his anger, all his fear, for all the times he goes out into the world with gun or club, Bob Jones will destroy himself before he destroys anyone else. This is the most pervasive criticism Himes makes of American society, Lundquist writes: that the black's anger is turned back on himself, that his life is “wired for destruction.”
⁹

Halfway through the novel, Wednesday in a narrative running from Monday through Friday of a single week, Bob Jones admits that “I never knew before how good a job the white folks had done on me”
¹⁰
and, earlier, that

I was even scared to tell anybody. If I'd gone to a psychiatrist he'd have had me put away. Living everyday scared, walled in, locked up, I didn't feel like fighting any more … I had to fight hard enough each day just to keep on living.
¹¹

But of course Bob Jones
has
been put away—defined, reduced, and shelved, rendered ineffective—his life whittled down to mere existence: “I'm still here,” as he says at the end of a narrative in which he loses everything.

Calling the former “a vicious and bitter commentary on American involvement in World War II,” Lundquist approaches both
If He Hollers
and
Lonely Crusade
as war novels.
If He Hollers
, he says, is “a nightmarish vision of American society as an enormous war factory” within which is going on a racial war not unlike those being waged without in the Pacific or at Auschwitz, one “fueled by racial hatred as much as it is by love of freedom or a commitment to the preservation of democracy.”
¹²

Propaganda said: America's war against Hitler was in large part a war against Hitler's racism, therefore by extension against the entire notion of white supremacy. Propaganda said: Surely this was the theater in which mankind's new conscience would be forged. Surely, inevitably, a new era in race relations was now at hand.

Truth, as so often, was something apart.

“Every time a colored man gets in the Army he's fighting against himself. Of course there's nothing else he can do. If he refuses to go they send him to the pen. But if he does go and take what they put on him, and then fight so he can keep on taking it, he's a cowardly son of a bitch.”

Smitty had stopped his work to listen. “I wouldn't say that,” he argued. “You can't call colored soldiers cowards, man. They can't keep the Army from being like what it is, but hell, they ain't no cowards.”

“Any man's a coward who won't die for what he believes … As long as the Army is Jim Crowed a Negro who fights in it is fighting against himself … You'll never get anything from these goddamn white people unless you fight them … Isn't that right, Bob?”

“That's right,” I said.
¹³

Early in the novel, trying to recall just when he became so terrified, Bob Jones thinks of his arrival in Los Angeles and his first applications for jobs. It wasn't being refused employment that bothered him so much as the attitude. They wouldn't tell him outright they wouldn't hire him, but instead looked startled that he'd even ask—as though some friendly dog had come through the door and said “I can talk.”

Maybe it had started then, I'm not sure, or maybe it wasn't until I'd seen them send the Japanese away that I'd noticed it. Little Riki Oyana singing “God Bless America” and going to Santa Anita with his parents next day. It was taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance. Without a trial. Without a charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word. It was thinking about if they ever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones's dark son, that started me to getting scared.

After that it was everything. It was the look in the white people's faces when I walked down the streets. It was that crazy, wild-eyed, unleashed hatred that the first Jap bomb on Pearl Harbor let loose in a flood. All that tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes. Every time I stepped outside I saw a challenge I had to accept or ignore. Every day I had to make one decision a thousand times:
Is it now? Is now the time?
¹⁴

For Bob Jones carries in his heart like a serpent, and cannot set it loose, those very ideals America so constantly espouses. Steadfastly, for reasons he himself but partly understands, he refuses to acknowledge the tacit agreements of discrimination. He is the most intransigent of idealists, saying no to the folded lies, vocably preferring
not to
, insisting that the world be as it seems. And consuming himself in the process.

In one key scene, giving Bob an ultimatum, accede to his inferior station with grace or she will end their engagement, fiancée Alice offers one reading of the book's title. Blacks exist in the white world only by dint of sufferance, she says, ever dependent on the support and shelter of white patrons. They must never disturb those patrons, never trouble the waters. For if they do so, if they break the code—if they holler—they'll be let go, to fall back into nothingness.

On the textual level,
If He Hollers
demonstrates that jacking up of reality we've seen already in the stories, “magnifying normal emotions to pathological intensity,”
¹⁵
in critic Robert Bone's words. Every gleam of light on a surface is a blade, every glancing regard a blow, each rejection a measured apocalypse. Gilbert Muller adds:

Filtered through Jones's hard-boiled comic imagination, all people seem to be portrayed in absurd one-dimensional postures. This is not a naturalistic or realistic style but rather the style of the grotesque.
¹⁶

The narrative proceeds in the foreground by thematic repetition of key words and phrases—“beyond my control,” “I didn't have a chance,” “I don't have anything at all to say about what's happening to me,” “the white folks sitting on my brain, controlling my every day and night,” various forms of
to die
as metaphor—and overall, similarly, by accrual of incidents which are basically variations on a theme. Though marvelous scenes abound, there's little true narrative thrust, and the novel comes to a stop finally as much from the exhaustion of its effort—as though worn down, like Bob Jones, by the sheer weight of events—as from dramatic necessity.

The whole of the story is a chain of ironies. In one incarnation of a principal Himes theme, that of demanding from a man what he is simultaneously barred from doing (remember the man with no feet, think of the detectives in
Blind Man with a Pistol)
, Bob Jones is made leaderman with full knowledge that no one will follow his lead. In the course of the book Bob discovers that he cannot kill a white man and cannot rape a white woman, yet at book's end he is jailed for attempted murder and rape. On the book's last night Bob dreams of a sergeant who brags “I done killed all kinda sonabitches, raped all kinda women” and has been highly decorated for it, while Bob is about to be lynched for crimes which he did not commit.