Chester Himes (49 page)

That is Harlem.

The farther east it goes, the blacker it gets.

East of Seventh Avenue to the Harlem River is called The Valley. Tenements thick with teeming life spread in dismal squalor. Rats and cockroaches compete with the mangy dogs and cats for the man-gnawed bones.
²⁵

Himes's Harlem is an imaginary place, owing as much to traditions of the folktale as to observation or attempts at verisimilitude. Out of
this “big turbulent sea of black humanity”
²⁶
surface a wide range of characters, some but for an instant, others for the duration of a book, all of them, for all their diversity, their bizarreness, and their cruelties, united by suffering. Forced to live in such circumstances, their lives have become warped and stunted to fit. Life is a continuous struggle just to stay afloat, so one must keep moving. Death—ugly, quick, real—peers out at them from every dark doorway, every alley mouth, every stopped car.

Deception, violence, and death are the very streets and stairways of Himes's Harlem. And because the comic voice springs up always to fill the crawlspaces between the presumed and the actual, between what we pretend life to be and what it is, comedy here becomes Harlem's native language. In
A Rage in Harlem
everyone plots to take possession of a trunk of what turns out to be only fool's gold. In
Cotton Comes to Harlem
it's a bale of cotton filled with $87,000 belonging to a fanatic white Alabaman colonel that keeps changing hands, in
The Heat's On
three million dollars' worth of heroin stuffed into a string of Hudson River eels. A motorcyclist chased by Grave Digger and Coffin Ed passes a truck carrying sheet metal and is decapitated, but his body carries on, the motorcycle at last crashing into a jewelry store whose sign reads
We Will Give Credit to the Dead
. A man walks about Harlem with a knife handle protruding from one side of his skull, two inches of blade from the other. A lady talking to her minister has the back of her dress cut away by a thief to get the purse strapped to her back and goes off down the street showing buttocks and rose-colored underwear to passersby, one of whom finally tells her “Lady … your ass is out.” An old man sits on the marquee of a movie house fishing with his cane pole among pork ribs cooking on a makeshift grill below.

Interestingly, Himes's theme of violence and his most exacting depiction of Harlem, of an actual rather than metaphoric Harlem, reached its peak in his one nondetective thriller,
Run Man Run
, a small masterpiece of sustained narrative momentum and intense psychological terror. Himes took great pains to get everything right here, describing streets and settings in detail, freely appropriating elements of his own life, from alcoholic blackouts and the ignominy of an educated man relegated to unskilled labor, to actual circumstances of his employment at Horn & Hardart, to lend his story verisimilitude.

Jimmy Johnson, graduate of a black college in Durham, North Carolina, attends Columbia University, where he studies law, and works nights as porter in an automat. Six feet tall and powerfully built, he is intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate, but also upon occasion truculent, unwilling to yield when his rights are challenged by whites: “He just wanted to be treated like a man, was all.”
²⁷
One night Jimmy witnesses the murder of two other porters by white policeman Matt Walker who in thrall to an alcoholic blackout has misplaced his car and wildly surmised that the porters are responsible then thinks better of it but decides “to scare the Negroes anyway. It'd be good for them. If they were innocent, it'd help keep them that way.”
²⁸
Accidentally shooting the first man sobers Walker at a blow but he goes ahead and kills him, then kills the second porter and chases after Jimmy, who has just surfaced from the basement. The book is given over to Walker's inexorable pursuit of Jimmy Johnson.

Walker is boyish, attractive, and charming, protected by his position, by his very whiteness, and by his brother-in-law, Matt's direct superior on the force, who knows early on what has happened yet keeps hoping Walker will come to his senses. But with the shooting something has snapped, setting free within Walker a psychotic hatred of blacks.

Matt Walker may be the purest symbol of American racism Himes ever proposed. To all pretense and appearance one thing—a force for the good, a protector, a kindhearted man who takes an interest in those he meets (presenting himself in this manner to Jimmy's girlfriend before he seduces her)—he is quite another. In a closed loop reminiscent of the later
Blind Mans
absurdism (recalling also Kenneth Fearing's classic use of this trope), Walker is set to investigate the very crime he committed. He is protected by society's own two-facedness, by the gaps between what it says and what it does—by, in fact, every force of society. And Jimmy cannot get away from him. “What menaces Jimmy, basically,” Milliken states, “is not one sick young man in a privileged position, but the national psychosis of racism, fully exposed.”
²⁹

Jimmy's constant attempts, as an intelligent man, to understand what is happening only serve to highlight the meaninglessness of Walker's violence.

“Maybe he was all right when he first went on the force. Maybe something happened to him since he's been a detective. Some of them can't take it. There are men who go crazy from the power it gives them to carry a gun. And he's on the vice squad too. There's no telling what might happen to a man's mind who constantly associates with criminals and prostitutes.”
³⁰

All of Jimmy's intelligence and understanding are of no avail against Walker's hatred and society's indifference. Himes's choice of scenes and language, the very artfulness of this book, with
The Primitive
and
If He Hollers
, his most carefully constructed novel, lend an amazing impact to Jimmy's plight. On the novel's first page “an ice-cold razor-edged wind” whistles down Fifth Avenue. Jimmy first escapes Walker through a series of underground passages linking the basements of separate buildings, after which in effect the entire city becomes a maze, a labyrinth.

Rather like Himes's detective team by the time of
Blind Man
, Jimmy Johnson in many ways seems the product of earlier, simpler days. Girlfriend Linda calls him a fool and a baby, protected (she implies) by his privileged upbringing, his education, and his pretense of a rational world. Harlem here, too, sometimes seems more closely akin to the Harlem Renaissance's brief, bright headlights than to the surrounding darkness. Passing a bookstore, in a scene reminiscent of Grave Digger's and Coffin Ed's meeting with Michael X in another bookstore where they feel for a moment the possibilities of a secure black world before venturing again into the streets, Jimmy sees books by Richard Wright, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Rudolph Fisher on display.

Suddenly he felt safe. There, in the heart of the Negro community, he was lulled into a sense of absolute security. He was surrounded by black people who talked his language and thought his thoughts; he was served by black people in businesses catering to black people; he was presented with the literature of black people.
Black
was a big word in Harlem. No wonder so many Negro people desired their own neighborhood, he thought. They felt safe; there was safety in numbers.
³¹

But of course, as Jimmy finds, there
is
no safety in numbers, nor in Harlem, nor in American society, and his sense of same is little more than further manifestation of his self-deception.

Stephen Soitos believes that the detective story, conflated with the social background of Harlem, perfectly suited Himes's anecdotal style, race-consciousness, and flair for satire, allowing him in the Harlem cycle to fuse imagination and reality in fresh, exciting ways. Himes took the violence so integral to detective fiction to new planes of expression, Soitos holds, moving “from comic vision to a serious confrontation.”
³²
Gradually violence replaced religion, sex, and money as the means of unifying Himes's narrative and, ultimately, of describing his world.

The violence in Himes's novels develops throughout the works as he portrays a community in turmoil, tilting towards chaos and then erupting into anarchy. Finally, in the last works, violence becomes a tool of revolt as well as an expression of despair.
³³

For Soitos,
Run Man Run
, with its portrayal of racial hatred in the pursuit of young Jimmy Johnson by psychotic white policeman Matt Walker, and
Blind Man with a Pistol
, with its condemnation of unorganized violence, are key texts in Himes's use of violence.
Plan B's
apocalyptic vision of the futility of
all
violence took this theme to its last bitter end, but the apocalypse is there already at the halfway point of
Blind Man with a Pistol
. On Nat Turner Day, three marching groups, all of them led by messianic figures, converge from different directions towards a free-for-all at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Brotherly Love is shepherded by a well-intentioned, simple-minded black youth and his white female companion, Black Power by a man whose exceedingly comfortable life is supported by funds from disciples and from the troop of black prostitutes he manages, Black Jesus by Prophet Ham whose own hatred of whites whips his acolytes to a frenzy. While Himes presents the confrontation in broad comic strokes, clearly he despises the simplistic thinking and hypocrisies these groups represent, self-exploitations that can only add to the misery, impoverishment, and isolation of the black community. The clash, the cataclysm, is inevitable,
however, and at book's end his detectives stand impotently by, shooting at rats as they swarm from a tenement under demolition. The novel's final words are:

“That don't make any sense.”

“Sure don't.”
³⁴

The investigation is over, abandoned. The self-interrogations—of the detective story, of Harlem, of American society—are done. We are all guilty, and Chester Himes has written our confession.

In the last years Lesley would shower and dress her husband and, because he refused to stay in all day, take him on long drives through the Spanish countryside where he would sit beside her, looking quite debonair, and soon fall fast asleep. One day they had a flat. Lesley, who knew nothing about changing a tire, got Chester into his wheelchair and positioned so that he could direct her, but proved too weak to loosen the lugs. As she crouched there struggling, two cars pulled up alongside, and, turning to look at Chester, Lesley found that he had moved his chair back and fallen into the ditch. Only his feet were visible, waving in the air above like pennants. Drivers and passengers exited cars angrily, certain that she had knocked this man into the ditch. Once she had convinced them that she was not trying to kill him, that he was her husband and both of them victims of misadventure, the tire got changed in no time.

It was a story the two of them often laughed over in later days, as they did so many other stories. People are forever recalling Chester's laughter: how it would spring up suddenly at the least provocation, how it would change his face and take over the room. Humor, Lesley says, was his last and greatest weapon. And it held out for him, as the strokes shut down compartment after compartment of his brain like rooms never to be come back to, as his speech slurred and became unintelligible and finally stopped, as gradually he lost control of body and of self, almost to the end.

They were by this time in their second home in Spain, a smaller one that Lesley had built without stairs and with doorways wide enough to accommodate Chester's wheelchair, Casa Deros, named after the cat Lesley had sent from England to replace their beloved Griot.

But a few years before, in June 1970, Chester and Lesley had sat with Bill and Roslyn Targ in the courtyard of Casa Griot, into which they
had moved four months earlier, drinking Bloody Marys as Roslyn exclaimed “Chester, at last you've got your own house”—at age 61—and they all had a good cry.

Writing had become ever more difficult for Himes these past years. Distractions accounted in part for this: relocations and resettlings, the never-ending search for housing, inquiries from foreign publishers, visitors, joustings with filmmakers. Health problems contributed significantly, as did his boredom with what he'd been writing. He wondered if he had not by this time followed that road to its natural end, burrowed in like a hedgehog and snuffled out like a fox everything those detective novels had to tell him, so that the experience of writing yet another resembled more the filling-in of a crossword than it did true composition: mere pattern-making. In
My Life of Absurdity
he recalled 1966, when he and Lesley touched down in Aix-en-Provence.

I tried to write. Until then I had written the start of several detective stories. I stuck some paper into my typewriter and started another one. That made the sixth or seventh start. I had a standing contract with Duhamel. I didn't really want to write another detective story or even about Harlem any more or even about American blacks. But I didn't really know anyone else. I knew so little about the French I couldn't even talk about them, much less write about them. I didn't really think too much about them. That's why I became obsessed with a house, and not even my house. When it came right down to the facts, I didn't really know anyone but myself. I didn't go to see French movies or plays or read French books, newspapers, or about French wars, or politics. I had never really arrived in France, but the Americans didn't want me. I wrote quick, short vignettes about the way I saw blacks in their country, or even in other countries. I kept writing about myself, the life of my mind, hoping to put these vignettes together into a book. And it had become very boring.
¹