Chester Himes (47 page)

In October then, at the invitation of Chester's Dutch agent, Chester and Lesley relocated to Holland for several months. Later in the year they went to Spain, touring Madrid, Alicante, and Gibraltar, crossing to Tangiers for the holidays. In Alicante, overlooking the sea at Moraira-Teulada, they bought land upon which to have a house, Casa Griot, built. Remaining in Spain till the following May, they returned to Paris in time to witness the student riots, staying first in an apartment on rue Abel-Ferry in the 16th arrondissement belonging to
Nicole Toutain, longtime companion of Himes's old friend and Tournon compatriot Larry Potter. Upon return from a brief trip to London, however, they discovered that the rioting had broken out of the Latin Quarter and grown to dangerous levels, and they withdrew to quieter lodgings near Montparnasse.

That September, 1968, Chester and Lesley moved to Alicante, after which time visits to France were rare and of short duration: a stopover in May of the following year on the way to London, attendance at the Nice Book Fair from May 26 to June 2 of 1970, a trip then with the Targs to St. Tropez and Aries. Also in 1970 they returned to Paris to celebrate publication of
Blind Man with a Pistol
with parties at Gallimard, a TV program from ORTF and a private showing of
Cotton Comes to Harlem
. This was one of only three visits to Paris in the whole of the seventies, these generally for medical reasons. Chester's French decade, seven years in Paris, three mostly in the south of France, was over.

From Holland during that 1968 sojourn Himes had sent Bill Targ an early version of the autobiography. Targ divined in this early sample many of the project's ongoing problems. The whole thing was strangely off center, oddly displaced. There was far too much of Himes's emotional and romantic life, and far too little, finally, of the man himself, to engage the reader's sympathy. Page after page rushed past his writing, his first marriage, his literary friendships, the expatriate community, the development of his books, only to eulogize the white women he loved and expatiate yet again at the social taboos set against them.

From Holland also, Himes sent Roslyn Targ, on November 11, the manuscript of
Blind Man with a Pistol
.

In the summer of 1901, Harvard's Charles Peabody arrived in the Mississippi Delta to excavate Indian mounds near the Stovall and Carson plantations. In time-honored safari tradition he stopped at the nearest civilized outpost, Clarksdale, to stock up on provisions and equipment, and to hire a band of local workmen. As they struck out together for the site, Peabody was astonished to hear the band break into song. A leader would holler out a line, improvising, Peabody slowly realized, on the life about him—scenes they passed, women or other community members everyone knew, the proclivities of certain men in the crew—and others would respond. Shortly, as work at the site began, Peabody found himself incorporated into the songs. “Mighty long half-day Captain,” the crew sang at one point, on a Saturday when work failed to break off at noon as promised. On another, as Peabody and a white associate sat idly by, tossing a knife into the ground while workers labored deep in the excavation: “I'm so tired I'm most dead/Sittin' up there playin' mumbley-peg.” It was all remarkably impure: the workers sang (to Peabody's ear) badly out of tune, from time to time breaking into wild whooping sounds or contorting their voices as they commented on their surroundings, swapped insults, passed tall tales back and forth, or quoted from the Bible. But they were, Peabody perceived, and in ways he had never before encountered, all the while imaginatively, fluidly, vividly re-creating their world, even as it flowed about them.

Despite the excellence of much other work and
The End of a Primitives
deserved recognition as a classic, it is almost certainly for his Harlem detective novels that Chester Himes will be remembered. Even throughout Europe and in France, where
Lonely Crusade
upon publication was named one of the five best new novels from America,
Himes's greatest fame derived from the detective novels. These are the books that have kept him (if generally far back from the footlights) before the American public, attracting new generations of readers and conducting the more serious of them to earlier work. Much Himes criticism, circumventing or summarizing the rest of his output, goes directly to the detective novels; these, at least, have come to be regarded as extraordinary achievements, unique contributions in extending the reach of both the detective novel and the American social novel. Lundquist, Milliken, and Muller all devote fully a fifth of their studies to the Harlem novels. Dozens of scholarly and more general articles have addressed such aspects as the place of these novels in the history of the urban detective story or of protest literature, their affinities with the work of Hemingway and Faulkner and
Black Mask
writers, their satire or use of religious figures, relation to African-American storytelling traditions, possible origins in Himes's own background. Robert Skinner has written a fine, full-length study of the detective novels,
Two Guns from Harlem
. What Himes described almost thirty years ago in these novels and what people at the time thought flights of bitter fantasy, Skinner holds, has become routine front-page news:

Himes chronicled a bitter decade during which Blacks stopped allowing whites to ignore their world and forced Black concerns and Black problems into the light… Like Raymond Chandler and a few others, he has written, in fictional blood and crime, a social history of a time and place … the mean streets of Black America at mid-century.
¹

Stephen Soitos in
The Blues Detective
considers at length Himes's central position in transforming the black mystery from such early work as Rudolph Fisher's to the metacultural investigations of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major. Soitos tracks four tropes through the work of all these. The black detective persona, in contrast to that of the typical lone-wolf white detective, Soitos finds uniquely representative of a community with its own intrinsic values. “Double-consciousness detection” discovers its image in these works as an emphasis on masks, disguises, and false identities, embodying the figure of the trickster from African and African-American folklore. Black vernaculars, not only those of speech but also of cuisine, music, dance, and dress, are
embraced. Finally, in what may be the most potent expression of alternative African-American worldviews, hoodoo traditions assert their presence. Hoodoo is itself a type of black vernacular, one with tacit, deep-rooted assumptions about the true (as opposed to visible) nature of the world.

“While the Negro lives and moves in the midst of white civilization, everything that he touches is re-interpreted for his own use,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote.
²
Just as the black had initially to reinvent his life in this new land so utterly alien to him, so must he go on, in a land no longer new but one that still denies him much and remains in many ways alien, reimagining again and again a place for himself, a history and community, an identity, life. Himes in the Harlem novels directly occupied himself with depicting these reimaginings, those documented by the blues and by Professor Peabody on his expedition into deepest Mississippi as much as those signaled by Hurston and by Soitos's discussion of hoodoo. Himes's stories present themselves to us masked, borne up on floes of language, braggadocio, artful insult, irony, and circumlocution, spinning out tall and wild even as the tale-teller assures us all the while they are true—telling truths unavailable to mimetic European models. These stories document realities of African-American life as nothing before had done, give us 72-point headlines from a world that never existed: real toads in the most unrelenting imaginary gardens.

Until well into his forties, Chester Himes struggled to fit his individualist vision into accepted modes of the time. For all his brilliance and for all the force, sometimes raw, other times carefully marshaled, of his writing, his work was not all that different from contemporaries like Richard Wright. Whatever else he might be, though, he was a
serious
writer; his transition to writing detective novels, at least initially, surprised himself as much as it did his critics.
Surprise
may be the key word. Himes, like a jazzman taking up some old sow's ear of a song, looking to see what's
in there
, found a great deal in there, turning it to silk-purse music never heard before.

His remarkable combinations of humor, pathos, sex, horror, and just plain home truths are very similar to those of the bitter and beautiful blues lyrics and to the traditional black humor that is essentially laughter at black degradation, laughter curiously close
to tears or to howling rage. He kept intact all the paraphernalia of the detective subgenre—complicated intrigues, heroes and villains, shaggy monsters and interesting victims, horrendous acts of violence. He managed at the same time, with the sense of lived reality he infuses throughout these novels, to suggest very clearly what the quality of life must be in a huge black urban ghetto, a vast area within a modern city that is literally a jungle filled with rapacious animals, thanks to the impenetrable indifference of established authority to everything that goes on there.
³

The form of the detective novel freed Himes from autobiography and, one assumes, because of its presumed lack of seriousness, from inhibitions. Perhaps in giving him license to depict no-holds-barred his vision of our society as fundamentally racist and profoundly corrupt, the form also gave some release from his sense of the injustices America had done him. Certainly he discovered that the form's emphasis on suspicion, violence, and fear could prove a perfect vehicle for conveying his view of blacks in American society. And while their thrust was no longer autobiographical, Himes peopled the novels with intimates from his Ohio days and with protagonists modeled in part on himself. Sheik in
The Real Cool Killers
closely resembles Himes in appearance and mien;
⁴
Johnny Perry in
The Crazy Kill
seems almost an idealized self-portrait. With these books, Lundquist says, Himes reached “an objectified vision in which the pain he has known as a black man becomes externalized and even universalized,”
⁵
his detectives at once personifications of the racial problem in the United States and an inquiry into both its absurdities and possible outcomes. Most importantly, with creation of his larger-than-life detectives and overblown, hyperbolic style, Himes claimed for his work something of the power and authority of myth.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed weren't crooked detectives, but they were tough. They had to be tough to work in Harlem. Colored folks didn't respect colored cops. But they respected big shiny pistols and sudden death. It was said in Harlem that Coffin Ed's pistol would kill a rock and that Grave Digger's would bury it.

They took their tribute, like all real cops, from the established underworld catering to the essential needs of the people—
gamekeepers, madams, street-walkers, numbers writers, numbers bankers. But they were rough on purse snatchers, muggers, burglars, con men, and all strangers working any racket. And they didn't like rough stuff from anybody else but themselves. “Keep it cool,” they warned. “Don't make graves.”
⁶

Himes intended Grave Digger and Coffin Ed from the first to be heroes. They are, Milliken says, “just possibly the two toughest men alive.”
⁷
Born around 1922, homeboys raised in Harlem and veterans of World War 2, probably as M.P.'s, they were promoted to the rank of detective in the early fifties, and are still awaiting, over a decade later, when the books end, any further promotion, steadily losing ground to inflation, ever-higher costs of living, debts they've contracted for cars and neighboring homes on Long Island. They are, and are increasingly aware of being, mediators, go-betweens, ambassadors between parallel cultures—interlocutors. But on the streets of Harlem they rule, as in their unforgettable first appearance.

Grave Digger stood on the right side of the front end of the line, at the entrance to the Savoy. Coffin Ed stood on the left side of the line, at the rear end. Grave Digger had his pistol aimed south, in a straight line down the sidewalk. On the other side, Coffin Ed had his pistol aimed north, in a straight line. There was space enough between the two imaginary lines for two persons to stand side by side. Whenever anyone moved out of line, Grave Digger would shout, “Straighten up!” and Coffin Ed would echo, “Count off!” If the offender didn't straighten up the line immediately, one of the detectives would shoot into the air. The couples in the queue would close together as though pressed between two concrete walls. Folks in Harlem believed that Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson would shoot a man stone dead for not standing straight in a line.
⁸

Physical descriptions of the detectives verge on the formulaic, “tall, loose-jointed, sloppily dressed, ordinary-looking dark-brown colored men”
⁹
in that first appearance, subsequent descriptions echoing it while adding
lanky, big-shouldered, flat-footed, big, rugged, rough
, and
dangerous
to the catalog of adjectives. At various times the pair is said
to resemble “plowhands in Sunday suits at a Saturday night jamboree” and “two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town.”
¹⁰
They are “dressed in black mohair suits that looked as though they'd been slept in” “wearing dark battered felt hats and wrinkled black alpaca suits.”
¹¹
As though to emphasize the universality of his detectives, Himes rarely carries descriptions of them much further than this, demonstrating that particular genius informing the Harlem novels: his ability simultaneously to locate his narrative in a realistic, seemingly “ordinary” world, and in one timeless, dreamlike, metaphorical. For this very reason, Milliken notes, despite over half a million words devoted to them, “the two detectives remain to the end, in many ways, shadowy and elusive figures, more adumbrated than defined.”
¹²