Chester Himes (40 page)

So much hers in fact that in the wake of that suicide attempt he agreed to accompany Regine on a visit to her home in Germany, one of the strangest decisions he ever made, and precipitating one of the strangest scenes. “There were many reasons why I went with her,” he wrote, “but the chief reason was to prove to myself that I was not afraid to go.”
²³

At the family home in Bielefeld, Westphalia, Himes was cordially if guardedly received by Regine's father and mother in a fourth-floor sitting room complete with grand piano and overstuffed furniture. Dr.
Fischer, a small man with a snow-white goatee and equally white ring of hair around a shiny bald head, owned a bookstore and art gallery; he met them attired in black coat, striped trousers, and vest. Regine's mother, handsome and full-bodied, looked to Chester “like a voluptuous woman tightly bound in expensive clothes for propriety's sake.”
²⁴
Since neither parent spoke English, all conversation had to be routed through Regine, a situation creating, along with considerable embarrassment, not a little suspicion as each side began to wonder just what was being translated. This terrible comedy culminated with Himes and Dr. Fischer sitting facing one another on sofa and armchair as Regine, seated beside Chester, translated “in a dogged monotone, face without expression like a robot” her father's ponderous remarks about her neglected childhood, her poor education, lack of experience and shameful paucity of morals, her general unsuitability to life.
²⁵
He did not doubt that his daughter loved Himes, Herr Fischer said, but there were such obstacles. Himes was twice her age, he was of another country and background, even another race. Herr Fischer asked only that they remain apart for one year. Meanwhile Regine could finish her secretarial studies.

Shortly thereafter Chester walked out, at Regine's insistence paying the family a final visit for dinner that night before returning the following day, alone, to Paris. Regine had told him that hers was one of the most bourgeois cities in Germany; he in turn, interpreting the family's stiff, old-world civility by his own measure, believed that he had never seen such hypocrisy. He professed surprise and shock at the trip's outcome, never intimating any realization (such realization as he must have had) that it could not possibly have gone otherwise.

For her part, Regine felt forsaken, believing that Himes should have taken a stand against her father. Daily she wrote pleading for Chester to send for her, to rescue her. Sometime before Christmas she briefly visited Paris, returning to her family for the holidays. When things began to fall into place with Gallimard, Himes wrote asking her to join him, but by the time he had completed his first novel for the firm,
The Five-Cornered Square
, in January, she still had not done so. Having pled for so long to come back, now she seemed to find excuse after excuse to delay doing so. Himes later came to believe that her father held her virtual captive; in the memoirs he reports her arriving at his door, having made her escape, half-starved
and shabbily dressed. As the couple subsequently visited the Fischers on a regular basis, this seems doubtful. With completion of the novel, at any rate, he had sent a registered, special delivery letter:
I've done it. Come back now or never
.

Meanwhile, having received the remainder of his advance from Gallimard, Himes hit the streets feeling flush and thinking to himself: “Now I was a French writer and the United States could kiss my ass.”
²⁶
He celebrated in typical fashion by updating his wardrobe.

I wrote a new ending the same day, and the next I went down to Old England men's store on Boulevard des Capucines to buy a shirt. After I had bought a shirt to please me, a tan and black checked woolen shirt to go with my brown and black sports jacket and charcoal brown slacks, I stopped in the shoe department and bought an outrageously expensive pair of English-made yellow brogues

and, after getting blind drunk, took comfort from a fat Swedish woman with “repellent, unkempt, greasy dark hair hanging over her fat repulsive shoulders like snakes from Medusa's head.”
²⁷
A few days later, Regine walked into his room. Himes bought her new clothes and a cheap imitation-silver ring; they worked their way through a major confrontation in which Himes hit her in the face and kicked her in the stomach in “a blind insensate fury,” then went on to a party at Walter Coleman's and Torun's; they settled back into life together.
²⁸
This was the period in which at Regine's urging Himes attended classes daily at the Alliance Française. The classes took up his mornings and, as he made little progress, after a month he dropped them, insisting that they interfered with his writing.

All those years, and all the years to come, the French language and Chester Himes were to stand staring one another down across an impassable river. He tells how the first time he tried out his new language, on the boat across, a waiter rather imperiously corrected him; he had used the incorrect auxiliary verb. Elsewhere he writes how, meeting translator Yves Malartic and wife Yvonne for the first time, he rushed toward them to enunciate the greeting he had memorized and practiced over and over: “Yves! Yves! Je suis très content de vous avoir.”
²⁹
Malartic, looking puzzled and not a little
embarrassed, responded, “I'm so sorry, Himes, you must forgive me, but I don't understand American very well.” It had been like that all along, Chester said. He shouted and screamed and threatened and cursed and these people just refused to understand him.

Just as they did in his own language—and in his books?

Jesse Robinson in
The Primitive
, walking New York streets and reminiscing about 1944 when all the liberals, black and white, were lining up behind Roosevelt and there was nothing like politics for getting love black or white, thinks of Harlem hostess Maud:

“What a bitch!” he thought. “A great woman, really. Greater than anybody'll ever know!” Many times he'd considered writing a novel about her. But he'd never been able to get the handle to the story. “Great Madame, actually. Worked with her tools. That whore did everything. Besides which she was a cheat, liar, thief, master of intrigue, without conscience or scruples, and respectable too. That was the lick—the respectability.” He felt a cynical amusement. “Son, that's the trick. Here's a whore who's friend of the mighty, lunches with the mayor's wife, entertains the rich, the very rich, on all kinds of interracial committees, a great Negro social leader.”
¹

Maud had made an earlier appearance, as Mamie, in
Lonely Crusade
. There, she is a “fat, light-complexioned woman with black hair and sleepy eyes, clad in flaming red lounging pajamas”
²
who at her St. Nicholas Avenue apartment hosts a more or less continuous party in which important blacks and inconsequential whites mingle. On a trip to New York, Lee Gordon attends with an old friend he's run into at the Theresa Hotel.

But he had listened in vain for anyone, white or Negro, to make a single statement that had any meaning whatsoever. The Negroes were being niggers in a very sophisticated manner as tribute to
their white liberal friends. And the whites were enjoying the Negroes' tribute as only white liberals can.

It would have had some meaning to Lee if the purpose of the party had been sex. A prelude for adultery, or even suicide. But there at Mamie's, sex had been but a vulgar joke.
³

If Jesse Robinson never had been able to get the handle to the story, Chester Himes did. The result was
Mamie Mason
, published in the U.S. as
Pinktoes
, where, unlike that of
Lonely Crusade
, the purpose of the party, the purpose of everything, it seems, is sex. Himes's only extended satire,
Pinktoes
proves more successful by far than such earlier satiric forays as the scenes with Alice's family in
If He Hollers
or Kriss's drink-riddled black guests in
The Primitive
. Its sexual farce leapfrogs in part off a novel virtually unknown to whites but one which would have been familiar to black readers of the time, George Schuyler's
Black No More
(1931), in which Negroes pay to be by “the strange and wonderful workings of science in the land of the free” turned white, gaining “the open sesame of a pork-colored skin.”
⁴

Here, Mamie becomes “Harlem's most famous hostess … of a color termed ‘yellow' by other Negroes and ‘tan' by white people … a thirty-nine-year-old, big-boned, hard-drinking, ambitious, energetic woman with the instincts of a lecherous glutton.”
⁵
Given to periodic consumption of entire turkeys and hams and eternal dieting in order to fit into her fashionable size-twelve sheath dresses, Mamie is always seen smiling or laughing, “both of which she could perform convincingly while in a state of raging fury.”
⁶
With husband Joe, a consultant on interracial relations for the national committee of a major political party, she aspires by way of her freewheeling parties to be recognized as the undisputed social leader of Harlem and simultaneously to solve the Negro problem, or “if not solve it, at least tire it out.”
⁷
Here, from a chapter entitled “Wrestling and Pole Vaulting,” is one interracial summit conference.

So what happened to the unidentified distinguished-looking white lady and the young dark Negro poet who looked like Jackson? They left Mamie's to go somewhere and make some poetry, and, oh, brother, they are making it, white and black poetry, that is.

This poetry is not only being made but it is being said, between pants and grunts and groans, that is.

Finally the verses ceased as the rhythm increased to a crashing crescendo with a long wailing finale:

Much of the inspiration for
Pinktoes
seems to derive from several months Chester spent as guest at the Moons' Harlem apartment in 1944 after returning to New York from California. Henry was then public relations director for the NAACP, Molly volunteer president of the National Urban League Guild she had founded two years previously; both, as part of the President's “Black cabinet,” were staunch campaigners for FDR. Henry and Chester had corresponded on and off since Chester's prison days. Henry, passing copies of his cousin's stories on to Sterling Brown, then its director, had been instrumental in getting Himes work with the WPA; the Moons' support also helped secure the Rosenwald Fellowship that allowed Chester to complete
If He Hollers
. (The “Rosenberg” Foundation and its fellowships become a comedic element in
Pinktoes.)

I went to New York to live with Henry and Mollie Moon in their fabulous apartment at 940 St. Nicholas. It was during the time Roosevelt was running for his last term. The communists, the negroes, the negrophiles and friends were getting together to elect Roosevelt. Henry Lee was working for the CIO Political Action Committee … and Mollie was giving parties sponsored and paid for by the various groups, including the Democratic National Committee … There is hardly a prominent middle class negro of today I did not meet at that time—Walter White & Co., Lester Granger, Ralph Bunche—oh hell, all of them. It was from this time and from these people I have taken the scenes and characters for my book.
⁹

Relations grew strained even while Chester was there, especially over a woman with whom he had an affair and of whom the Moons roundly disapproved. Shortly after that 1944 visit, the relationship would decay. The Moons failed to praise unreservedly
If He Hollers
when published the following year and, with most liberals black and white, no doubt harbored still more fervid reservations toward Himes's portrayal of interracial relations and leftist movements in 1947's
Lonely Crusade
. On Himes's part there seems to have been a curious if altogether Himeslike anthology of emotions: envy of the Moons' central position in Negro and New York intellectual life, disdain of their middle-class lifestyle and disgust at their hypocrisy, disappointment that they'd not done more to help him and grudging resentment at what they
had
done. Either because he felt he had license to such use or because he had made them so imaginatively his own, so recast them, in the work, Chester always expressed surprise when those in his life from whom he had modeled characters—Jean, Vandi—disapproved, and it was no different with the Moons. How could anyone possibly be upset by this? It was all in the cause of good literature, or of good fun, was it not? And (this thought, too, must have crossed his mind) had he ever in his fiction been harsher on anyone, used anyone else harder or more unsparingly than he had himself?