Chester Himes (48 page)

Repeatedly, as with the hog farmer and plowhand similes, Himes stresses—quite in contrast to their fierce reputation throughout Harlem—the unremarkable appearance of his pair, adding again and again, still further to emphasize this, that they are virtually indistinguishable one from another. Ed's face, scarred by acid thrown at him in
A Rage in Harlem
, represents the chief difference. For this, Ed has gained comparisons to and the occasional nickname Frankenstein. The grafted skin is a shade or so lighter than the old; in addition, a tic develops when he is tense and helps transform his face to a devil mask. Ed is ever the more pragmatic and quicker to act, and often must be restrained by Digger, who is himself more given, if but slightly more, to thoughtfulness, even to brooding. The two, however, are remarkably in accord, machines that, set in motion, continue on course, rolling through or over every obstacle, until the job gets done. This heroic stance makes all the more vivid their growing impotence, so that when in
Blind Man with a Pistol
we see them standing forlornly by, their car having been torched and themselves beaten, or told by young Black Muslim minister Michael X that the two of them “don't really count in the overall pattern,”
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these are terrible moments.

Robert Skinner has suggested that Himes was taken by the romanticism of the heroic myth.
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Not only Johnson and Jones but also characters such as Casper Holmes and Johnny Perry reflect this. Himes's heroes, though, are not the saintly heroes of Christian myth but ambiguous, deeply flawed ones common to such as Greek or Norse mythology, who use otherworldly strength and power to satisfy quite
worldly instincts. Skinner points to the pistols, always lovingly described and brandished about like the magical weapons of sword-and-sorcery heroes—even, in the tracer bullets favored by the detectives in
Cotton Comes to Harlem
, taking on the gods' own element, fire.

Near the end of
Blind Man with a Pistol
, in pages riddled with the words
think, believe, know, ask
, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed look about them in the African-American bookstore where they meet Michael X. Stripped of their powers and of understanding, the detectives find that “In that room it was easy to believe in a Black World.”
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But outside, the streets of Harlem are boiling over, and one of the store's back rooms is filled with relics of the slave trade. Michael intimates that he knows who Mister Big is but won't say, telling the detectives repeatedly to ask their boss. We all know by this time who “Mister Big” is, of course: the whole corrupt society.

“You keep on talking like that you won't live long,” Grave Digger said.

Michael X put on his polished spectacles and looked at the detectives with a sharp-eyed sardonicism. “You think someone is going to kill me?”

“People been killed for less,” Grave Digger said.
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Except for the fact of his black characters and Harlem setting, Himes began the series in
A Rage in Harlem
as more or less standard crime fare. The plot hinges on a scam, a machine that supposedly turns small-denomination bills to larger ones. There is an ongoing parade of Harlem lowlife, a treasure (in this case a trunk of “gold ore”) that keeps changing hands, a good-hearted innocent suffering at the hand of sharpies, the ever-present imprint of religion (Jackson repeatedly prays for strength during his ordeals and twice visits a minister for counsel, half-brother Goldy works the streets disguised as a nun), and comedy of every mettle: slapstick, cartoonlike, bitter. Much of the text expounds Himes's own brand of outrageous street-level realism; the canvas is large.

The Harlem of Chester Himes's detective stories is seen almost exclusively through the distorting lens of crime, but the spectrum of characters included is astonishingly full and varied. Almost all of these characters are representative types… but they
are all vigorously alive. They function as caricatures and symbols but also as viable literary characters. The axis about which they orient themselves is crime, either adherence to crime as a way of life or a passionate (though not exactly uncompromising) rejection of crime in all its forms. They are either innocent or guilty, in the terms of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, but, more fundamentally, they are either “squares” or “sharpies,” an equally absolute distinction.
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Skinner points out that Himes's work resembles not so much Hammett's or Chandler's as it does that of James M. Cain or W. R. Burnett, writers who dealt with life at the bottom, often writing from the transgressor's point of view. For Himes's detectives violence, greed, treachery, and deception of every sort are simple coin of the realm; they expect little else. The pair maintain a network of snitches among Harlem's petty thieves and hustlers, routinely use their influence to shield some wrongdoers in exchange for information on others, even keep a pusher on tap to supply drugs to their stoolies. In
The Real Cool Killers
Grave Digger slaps a barkeep after pulling him halfway across the bar; in
The Crazy Kill
the detectives torture young gambler Chink Charlie for information; in
A Rage in Harlem
Digger tells Imabelle “I'll pistol-whip your face until no man ever looks at you again”; in
The Heat's On
Ed strips a witness and cuts her, then, when she faints, slaps her back to consciousness.

Johnson and Jones take their attitude from the American national philosophy, pragmatism: damn the explanations and full speed ahead, go with what works. Their judgments are simplistic, rigid, self-righteous, authoritarian. Yet, as if from the first they recognize some deep divide in their souls, they spend considerable time rationalizing their actions to others and to themselves. They know that in their own manner they are as morally wrong, as misdirected in their efforts and as predatory, as are those they come up against. They belong to a simpler, less complex time—as they themselves come to realize. By
Blind Man with a Pistol
their world simply does not work anymore. Given a series of cases to solve, they beat at the heads of presumed witnesses and threaten half the populace of Harlem all to no avail. They cannot penetrate any of the mysteries presented them, they no longer understand the swirls of activity about them on the street. And
they wonder aloud what has changed.
Their
generation never really believed that white America would give them equality, Grave Digger says.
This
generation does, and it makes them crazy.

“Hell, Ed, you got to realize times have changed since we were sprites. These youngsters were born just after we got through fighting a war to wipe out racism and make the world safe for the four freedoms. And you and me were born just after our pappys had got through fighting a war to make the world safe for democracy. But the difference is that by the time we'd fought in a jim crow army to whip the Nazis and had come home to our native racism, we didn't believe any of that shit. We knew better. We had grown up in the Depression and fought under hypocrites against hypocrites and we'd learned by then that whitey is a liar. Maybe our parents were just like our children and believed their lies but we had learned the only difference between the home-grown racist and the foreign racist was who had the nigger. Our side won so our white rulers were able to keep their niggers so they would yap to their heart's content about how they were going to give us equality as soon as we were ready.”
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Coffin Ed and Grave Digger came into being at a critical time in the civil-rights struggle. From the first, born to accommodation's formal dress and living with more contemporary casual styles, they were anachronistic, brandishing icons of black pride and black culture while enforcing the white man's coercive laws. And in their lifetime the world has bootstrapped itself almost beyond recognition. As Lundquist notes: “Gamblers and opium-addict preachers are one thing to deal with; Brotherhood, Black Power, Black Jesus, and the Black Muslims are quite another.”
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It's in part from the social changes swirling about the detectives, in larger part from the divide within their own souls, that the Harlem books evolve. The unwinding of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed as they move from earlier settings, in which crimes are actually solved, through increasing confusion to the cul de sacs of
Blind Man
is in itself a powerful statement on this period in our country's history, Lundquist points out, continuing: “But it is perhaps not so much
what Himes says by way of protest as he extends the Grave Digger and Coffin Ed stories over the years that is important, but how he says it through the modification of the detective novel itself.”
²⁰
This modification, like any evolution, was gradual and progressive, following a logic of its own as Himes pushed ever deeper into the territory. Edward Margolies suggests that Himes never transcended the formula, as occasionally Hammett and Chandler did, but that instead he simply pushed the pulp-detective view to its logical conclusion. As he did so, his Harlem figures become ever more grotesque, moving from clownish innocents, fast-talking hustlers, and pimps to the Black Jesus, or Reverend Sam with his bevy of wives and flock of naked children feeding from troughs.

Margolies also points out that Himes's detective novels, six of the eight published within five years and three written in one twelvemonth period in 1957–58, may appear at first glance artless. Momentum and surprise seem everything. The often bewildering plots accrue from chains of brief scenes which are themselves composed of runs of dialogue, like planks laid out across sawhorses of physical description. Narrated in omniscient third person, the stories move back and forth in time as well as space, hopscotching from one line of action or set of characters to another, from present-time scenes to scenes set hours, even days, earlier.

The action unfolds in perpetual, and very elastic, present time. Whenever the narrative line shifts, and it shifts drastically every five or six pages, the move is always to the point of maximum contrast, without regard to chronology.
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No one had written like this before. Yet it was the perfect medium for capturing Himes's inner city, the fervid, feverish activity of it, its diversity and confusion of forces, the eternal present of its people. The technique, Milliken notes, is close to that of film, perhaps as close as writing can come. There is little discursiveness. We know Himes's characters solely by their appearance, their conversation, their actions. Passages such as this one from
The Crazy Kill
demonstrate how remarkably visual the style has become. While watching police chase a thief in the streets below, a man has leaned too far out an upper-story window and landed in a delivery truck.

Time passed.

Slowly the surface of the bread began to stir. A loaf rose and dropped over the side of the basket to the sidewalk as though the bread had begun to boil. Another squashed loaf followed.

Slowly, the man began erupting from the basket like a zombie rising from the grave. His head and shoulders came up first. He gripped the edges of the basket, and his torso straightened. He put a leg over the side and felt for the sidewalk with his foot. The sidewalk was still there. He put a little weight on his foot to test the sidewalk. The sidewalk was steady.
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Throughout the series, too—these quickly became a trademark—Himes introduced static, descriptive vignettes, brief set pieces that have a documentary feel, reading as though the camera were tracking soundlessly down Harlem streets and across rooftops.

Even at past two in the morning, “The Valley,” that flat lowland of Harlem east of Seventh Avenue, was like the frying pan of hell. Heat was coming out of the pavement, bubbling from the asphalt; and the atmospheric pressure was pushing it back to earth like the lid on a pan.

Colored people were cooking in their overcrowded, overpriced tenements; cooking in the streets, in the after-hours joints, in the brothels; seasoned with vice, disease and crime.

An effluvium of hot stinks arose from the frying pan and hung in the hot motionless air, no higher than the rooftops—the smell of sizzling barbecue, fried hair, exhaust fumes, rotting garbage, cheap perfumes, unwashed bodies, decayed buildings, dog-rat-and-cat offal, whiskey and vomit, and all the old dried-up odors of poverty.

Half-nude people sat in open windows, crowded on the fire escapes, shuffled up and down the sidewalks, prowled up and down the streets in dilapidated cars.

It was too hot to sleep. Everyone was too evil to love. And it was too noisy to relax and dream of cool swimming holes and the shade of chinaberry trees. The night was filled with the blare of countless radios, the frenetic blasting of spasm cats playing in the
streets, hysterical laughter, automobile horns, strident curses, loudmouthed arguments, the screams of knife fights.

The bars were closed so they were drinking out of bottles. That was all there was left to do, drink strong bad whiskey and get hotter; and after that steal and fight.
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. . . .

Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corner swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in the dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn't anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal—always running, ducking, and dodging. Listless mothers stood in the dark entrances of tenements and swapped talk about their men, their jobs, their poverty, their hunger, their debts, their Gods, their religions, their preachers, their children, their aches and pains, their bad luck with numbers and the evilness of white people.
²⁴

. . . .

Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of gray rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of a sea. Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub.