Chester Himes (20 page)

They stopped in Cleveland to visit Chester's father and his old friend from WPA days, Ruth Seid, then called in at Malabar Farm to say hello to Louis Bromfield. Unwelcome there, Himes said, they were kept waiting, shown into the kitchen, introduced to the servants, and
shown the door. Not too surprising, perhaps, that Bromfield should shortly emerge as
Lonely Crusade's
misanthropic archconservative and capitalist Foster.

In Columbus the couple stayed overnight with Joe and Estelle. Joe had accepted a position at North Carolina State College (later North Carolina Central University) in Durham, where he would remain as professor of sociology from 1946 to '49 before moving up to the university at Greensboro. Meanwhile he planned on spending the summer seeing new parts of the country, and promised to visit his brother at the ranch.

Following a brief stop in San Francisco to visit friends of Jean's from L.A. days, Chester and Jean picked up Hugo in Oakland and rode back through Reno to his property seventy-five miles to the north between Susanville and Milford, just across the California line. Hugo was an impressive figure, “a heavy-set man with the blunt brown face of a Filipino and a cauliflower ear from the time he had been middleweight champion of the Navy, in his neat blue chief's uniform with six gold hash stripes down the sleeve.” He commanded respect of everyone, Himes wrote, “from brothel keepers to the proprietors on Oakland's famous Seventh Street, one of the gaudiest, most violent, treacherous, and dangerous main streets of any black ghetto nation.”
⁶

The ranch comprised several hundred acres of arable land bordering the lake and, across the highway, hundreds of acres more, this larger portion mostly arid mountain land. The land had lain dormant for years, unfarmed and untended. The three-room shack into which Chester and Jean settled was heavily populated with lizards and with field rats that chewed away in the walls at night; rattlesnakes often came for visits. There was a main house as well, whose longtime occupants, a Portuguese couple, had moved out upon learning they were to have black neighbors. Another couple, an ancient Texan and his forty-year-old, sluttish woman “Fertile Myrtle,” had replaced them. Myrtle was said to have had eleven children, each by a different father; she and the Texan lived in incredible squalor.

Immediately Chester set to work, putting up a new door and screens, patching the cabin's many holes with sheet metal, rigging a hammock made from rope and a set of iron bedsprings in the patch of sand that passed for backyard. Himes's Savage rifle went up, cocked and loaded at all times, on an improvised rack of tenpenny nails at the head of their
bed. He'd pull it down to blast away at rattlesnakes. These were so bad that whenever he returned to the shack, even if he'd only been away on a brief shopping trip to Susanville, he searched thoroughly, poking at every conceivable hiding place with the gun barrel. Once as Jean sat on the porch a snake emerged from beneath the shack and crawled under her legs. The resulting
mano a mano
between snake and writer led to Chester's 1955 story “The Snake” for
Esquire
. Far worse than the rattlesnakes, though, were the rats. Hundreds of them had been living in and around the shack for years. When Himes put out poison, the smell got so awful so quickly that he had to rake their swollen, rotting bodies into piles and burn them.

Amid riding out for provisions to Susanville, defending the homestead from vermin, and his poor man's version of
Better Homes and Gardens
, Himes the gentleman rancher, planting his typewriter on a table in the front room, got down to his real work. Chester wrote, as always, steadily, compulsively. Even when Joe and Estelle came in July as planned, Chester went on working as the others tiptoed past him in the front room. The brothers hiked and hunted in the mountains, reminisced about their childhood and talked about their father's illness, shared Joe's concerns as a sociologist with Negro crime and delinquency and labor movements in Ohio, and Chester's with the legacy of subjection, the character traits of an oppressed people.

On one of Hugo's visits he and Chester painted the main house and shack. On another they took a friend of Hugo's, a young, seemingly retarded man, deer hunting, Himes's account of which in
The Quality of Hurt
becomes pure Faulknerian comedy.

All this time as he plodded along at the new book Himes felt at his ankles familiar nibbles and snaps of self-doubt. Was it all too automatic, too obvious? Too much a rehash of
If He Hollers?
Some would think the sex excessively graphic, he knew—and be outraged in the first place at the very recognition of interracial sex. And the Communists would hate it, of course, no question of that. Ever ready in his letters to throw on the buskins, ever the masterful complainer, Himes in those of this period to Van Vechten spoke of exhaustion, despair, of his feelings (like those of Jethro in “Da-Da-Dee”) that nothing would ever matter again. While Van Vechten tried to reassure him, his letters upon reading the book in manuscript confirmed at least some of Chester's own misgivings.
In typical fashion Himes responded that he was going to take Van Vechten's advice to heart, then promptly ignored it.

Chester's concerns about the novel's possible reception were underscored in an incident bespeaking his and Jean's rapidly deteriorating relationship. Chester had gone with Hugo to Susanville to see about repairs on Chester's car, damaged, irreparably as it turned out, in an accident. Returning after dark, they found the house empty and, panicked by thoughts of the ranch's isolation, deadly snakes, and rumors of Klan activity, they searched barns, outbuildings, fields, and hills before starting out for nearby Janesville around midnight, hoping to organize a search party.

About three miles down the highway we found her stumbling aimlessly along, sobbing to herself. We thought at first she had been attacked. My first emotion was a violent rage: if I discovered who attacked her, I would blow off his head, I wouldn't give a damn who it was.

But she threw herself into her brother's arms and denied that anyone had approached her, but begged him to take her away. We were both flabbergasted. She said she didn't want to live with me. Finally Hugo persuaded her to return to the house, chiefly perhaps by explaining that he couldn't take her away that night if he wanted to because the next bus to Reno wouldn't pass until nine-thirty the next morning and we didn't have any other means of transportation.

We eventually discovered the reason for her sudden animosity. She had been reading some of my manuscript, which I had advised her not to do. The black wife of the black protagonist in my book
Lonely Crusade
is named Ruth; and I think the relation between her and Lee (the protagonist) is one of the most beautiful love stories in American fiction; but both characters have pronounced race and color complexes. I did not intend to portray myself or anyone I knew. But Jean thought that I had patterned the character Ruth after herself, and she was chagrined and hurt to learn I had had this opinion of her after all the years of our marriage.
⁷

Himes of course routinely used characters drawn from life: his family, Molly Moon, Vandi Haygood. And he could be (or feign to be)
blissfully oblivious of people's reactions to this piracy. The Moons broke off all relations after
Pinktoes;
one has to wonder what Vandi may have made of her transformation into
The Primitive's
Kriss. Himes did like to play the innocent set upon by the misunderstandings of others: it was a favorite role. Later in the passage concerning Jean he admits that he often wonders if in his analysis of a marriage in
Lonely Crusade
he had not “drawn a true picture of which I was not consciously aware.”
⁸

In a 1994 conversation with Gwendoline Lewis Roget, Joe Himes spoke at length of Chester's use of people—in both senses.

Himes: There were so many times when he was using some woman to pay his bills and keep him while he wrote his books and lived the good life. If you look at the people who have been the basis for the characters in his stories … You remember, in
The Quality of Hurt
, he talks about this white woman in Chicago who worked with the Rosenwald Foundation?

Roget: Yes, you are referring to Vandi Haygood. In speaking about his affair with Vandi, Chester spares neither the intimate nor graphic details of their relationship, which he portrays as tempestuous and destructive, filled with lust and brutality, with obsessive jealousy on both sides.

Himes: Vicious. I wouldn't do that to my enemy. But it made a good episode for his stories. So he didn't hesitate to use her [in his fiction], to call her by name [in his autobiography]. That's why I hope he never uses me in his books, because every time he mentions me, he uses me. One of the ways he uses me, one of his great themes, is, “Joe is blind because I didn't help him that day. If I had been there to help him in that experiment, he wouldn't be blind. I am to blame.” It's a wonderful cross to carry for a whole generation, publicly … It was not his fault, but he did not ask me what I thought about it. He didn't pay a bit of attention to me. It's a good gimmick for the image of Chester Himes, so he did it.
⁹

While Chester had managed to complete a first draft of
Lonely Crusade
at the ranch, he and Jean couldn't go on living there without a car; he'd finish the novel back east. Late that fall they traveled by bus to
Reno, then by train to New York. By mid-October, probably through an introduction from Richard Wright, they had settled in “a tiny flat over a one-car clapboard garage”
¹⁰
in Wading River, Long Island, on the estate of neurologist Dr. Frank Safford. Aside from the garage apartment and the big house in which Safford's family stayed during the summer and on weekends, the estate consisted of four or five picturesque cottages. Summers, the grounds became an impromptu artist's colony as writers swarmed from the city to occupy the cottages. During winter the estate's isolation was all but complete, residents of Wading River seldom about or visible, the Himeses' only company a stone-deaf, stone-drunk caretaker.

Their flat consisted of four tiny rooms of which only one, heated by a Franklin stove, was habitable. Chester's chief duty seems to have been feeding and looking after Safford's pregnant English setter Susie. Putting the finishing touches on
Lonely Crusade
, he again took up work on his prison novel, now called
Yesterday Will Make You Cry
. He and Jean took long walks in the woods, gathering dead branches for firewood. The Saffords came out during Christmas; Susie, sleeping so soundly by the Franklin stove that she didn't budge even when sparks flew out and singed her fur, kept them constant company; and at least one weekend Ralph and Fanny Ellison came to visit. A brief passage from
The Quality of Hurt
concerning his host demonstrates how closely descriptions of people in Himes's life resemble those of characters in his fiction: that materials are fed through the same filter.

The Saffords brought their family down and occupied the big house during the Christmas holidays. He had two children by a former marriage: a daughter who was a jazz buff, and caused her father a good deal of concern by sitting about small nightclubs until the early hours of the morning, mesmerized by black jazz musicians; and a big-framed, silent teenage son with corn-colored hair who spent most of his holiday chopping logs for their big fireplace. And from his second marriage, he had a precocious girl-child of about four when we were there, who used to dance at her mother's instigation when they were entertaining grownups and would brook no distraction when she was performing her ballet. Once she banged me in the face with a sofa pillow for not paying attention.
¹¹

Another demonstrates his growing disillusionment with America.

There was a cauliflower plot on the other side of the woods from which most of the edible cauliflowers had been picked. By January, when the sun shone, it smelled to high heaven. And farther on there was a section of the long pile of Long Island potatoes, reaching almost from one end of the island to the other, which had been sprayed with kerosene to render them unfit for human consumption as part of the federal price control program. In that year, 1947, with all the starving people in the world, we wondered why these millions of tons of potatoes couldn't be shipped abroad. But I read that the cost of shipping would be prohibitive. Just like America, I thought; lots of money for the war-ravaged governments of the world but nothing for the hungry people to eat.
¹²

Jean and Chester remained in Wading River until the second week of January, moving at that time to Harlem's Theresa Hotel, the famous stopover at Seventh Avenue and 125th Street where Himes and Jean had stayed on an earlier trip to visit the Moons, and which Chester would recall lovingly (if contradictorily) in his 1972 talk for CBS. Jean found work as recreational director for a Welfare Island facility where delinquent girls were detained pending trial in youth court and, if committed for psychiatric treatment, held. Chester meanwhile was in a familiar holding pattern, suspended in anticipation as he circled the field of
Lonely Crusade's
publication, banking all his bets on one more throw of the dice.

To get past the shoals of what he felt sure would prove a temporary shortage, what he
always
felt sure would prove a temporary shortage, book after book and year after year, Himes appealed again to the Rosenwald Foundation, where he was rejected; to Knopf, where agent Lurton Blassingame levered a second advance of two thousand dollars; to Richard Wright, who arranged a loan from the Authors' League; and, at Hughes's and Van Vechten's urging, to Yaddo.

Soon Jean and Chester were forced to relocate again, this time to a dismal, shabbily furnished room on West 147th before moving on in mid-June to quarters on Welfare Island where Jean worked. Some respite from the dreariness of existence in that dismal room came in
trips out to Vermont to see Bill Smith, a writer Himes knew from L.A. days. Married to a white woman, Smith had moved to Vermont to escape L.A.'s pervasive racism. Richard Wright, also married to a white woman and encountering similar racism in Greenwich Village, considered a move to Vermont before deciding on expatriation.