Chester Himes (26 page)

When this attorney came back the following weekend he examined the soft-shelled eggs and stated authoritatively their deformity was due to the rooster fertilizing them. [They] sat around for two hours, drinking Canadian Club whiskey highballs, trying to decide what to do with the rooster … Jesse couldn't understand how the rooster who lived in the pigpen a half mile distant from the chicken coop could have fertilized the eggs, but of course he didn't say so, seeing as how he was drinking this attorney's good whiskey. Finally the solution burst on this attorney like a brain storm. He banged dramatically on the table with his open palm and said in the voice of a general giving an order to charge:
“Jesse! Kill the rooster!”
¹⁶

The Halperins met his departure with some bitterness, though Chester from the first had made it clear that his fealty was to his writing. Joe, now a sociology professor at the state Negro college in North Carolina, had arranged for Chester to give a seminar there in creative writing, and in June, Jean and Chester left for two weeks in Durham.

Chester had some concern over being back in the South, as well as over differences the brothers had in the past, but all went well. The couple stayed with Joe and wife Estelle in their pleasant, six-room house. Chester found himself a celebrity on campus; his seminar was well attended and written up in the Durham papers. (The newspapers' interest may have resulted in part, Chester held, from a wish to avoid the issues of the Korean War and a suit brought against the city by the NAACP demanding equal school facilities for blacks. Himes attended one of the hearings, at which future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall dropped by to advise the young Negro attorneys.) The brothers toured Duke University and local tobacco farms, visited North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company and other black-owned businesses in the area. Chester was impressed at the professional and personal courtesy extended Joe by librarians and researchers at the all-white University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Joe and he got on well but never again became intimate.

The latest version of
Black Sheep
had gone from Blanche Knopf to Rinehart, whose editor, Bill Smith, Himes met at a party given by Van Vechten's niece, and from there to Henry Holt when Smith moved on.
While in Durham, Himes received a telegram leading him to believe the novel had been accepted. He returned to New York, however, only to find the novel neatly wrapped in brown paper and waiting for him: Smith, his sole supporter at Holt, had backed down. On arrival Chester and Jean had thrown a party at the Theresa Hotel for everyone they knew; they were left with twelve dollars.

It's one of the recurring scenes, one of the touchstones, in Himes's life, this squandering. Years later Jean recalled how, again and again, sums of money came to Chester only to be burned away, in a matter of days, on alcohol, women, and parties. And if there was no money, then expectation of money might be good enough.
¹⁷

Loosely modeled on that visit to Holt, Himes's portrait of a publisher's visit in
The Primitive
amounts to an illustrated version of his Chicago speech.

Pope's face resumed its customary expression of shame and guilt, like that of a man who's murdered his mother and thrown her body in the well, to be forever afterwards haunted by her sweet smiling face.

“I'm afraid I have bad news for you.”

Jesse just looked at him, thinking, “Whatever bad news you got for me—as if I didn't know—you're going to have to say it without me helping you. I'm one of those ungracious niggers.”

“We've given your book six readings and Mr. Hobson has decided to drop the option.”

Jesse had been prepared for this from the moment he'd read Pope's letter and now, before the reaction had set in, he just felt argumentative. “I thought you were going to cut it.”

Pope reddened slightly. “That was my opinion. I like the book. I fought for it all the way. I think all it needs is cutting. But Hobson thinks it reads like fictional autobiography. And he doesn't like the title.”

“I
Was Looking for a Street,”
Jesse quoted, turning it over in his mind. “I was looking for a street that I could understand,” he thought, and for a moment he was lost in memory of the search.

“He said it sounds like a visiting fireman looking for a prostitute's address,” Pope said with his apologetic smile.

Jesse laughed. “That ought to make it sell.”

Pope again assumed his look of guilt and shame. “The truth is, fiction is doing very poorly. We're having our worst year for fiction.”

“Why not publish it as an autobiography then?”

“It would be the same. Hobson thinks the public is fed up with protest novels. And I must say, on consideration, I agree with him.”

“What's protest about this book?” Jesse argued. “If anything, it's tragedy. But no protest.”

“The consensus of the readers was that it's too sordid. It's pretty strong—almost vulgar, some of it.”

“Then what about Rabelais? The education of Gargantua? What's more vulgar than that?”

Pope blinked at him in disbelief. “But surely you realize that was satire? Rabelais was satirizing the humanist Renaissance—and certainly some of the best satire ever written … This”—tapping the manuscript neatly wrapped in brown paper on his desk—“is protest. It's vivid enough, but it's humorless. And there is too much bitterness and not enough just plain animal fun—”

“I wasn't writing about animals …”

“The reader is gripped in a vise of despair and bitterness from start to finish …”

“I thought some of it was funny.”

“Funny!” Pope stared at him incredulously.

“That part where the parents wear evening clothes to the older son's funeral,” Jesse said, watching Pope's expression and thinking, “What could be more funny than some niggers in evening clothes? I bet you laugh like hell at Amos and Andy on television.”

Pope looked as if he had suddenly been confronted by a snake, but was too much of a gentleman to enquire of the snake if it were poisonous.

“All right, maybe you don't think that's funny…”

“That made me cry,” Pope accused solemnly.

“I suppose you think I didn't cry when I wrote it,” Jesse thought, but aloud he continued, “But how do you make out it's protest?”

Looking suddenly lost, Pope said, “You killed one son and destroyed the other, killed the father and ruined the mother …”
and Jesse thought, “So you find some streets too that you don't understand,” and then, “Yes, that makes it protest, all right. Negroes must always live happily and never die.”

Aloud he argued, “What about
Hamlet?
Shakespeare destroyed everybody and killed everybody in that one.”

Pope shrugged, “Shakespeare.”

Jesse shrugged. “Jesus Christ. It's a good thing he isn't living now. His friends would never get a book published about him.”

Pope laughed. “You're a hell of a good writer, Jesse. Why don't you write a Negro success novel? An inspirational story? The public is tired of the plight of the poor downtrodden Negro.”

“I don't have that much imagination.”
¹⁸

Jesse departs with his manuscript, singing his private dirge,
da-da-dee:
¹⁹

Later, waking in his room at the tail end of a full-tilt binge, Jesse stands staring at the manuscript for several minutes before taking out his clasp knife and “with a cry of stricken rage, an animal sound, half howl, half scream,”
²⁰
plunging it into the manuscript with all his force.

It's here, then, that the ever discontinuous life becomes ever more so. Outside, the world speeds by: traffic becomes a blur, trees bloom, grow tall, and expire in a single day, the sun sweeps across the sky in a sudden arc and is gone. Tuesday's TV show turns into Thursday's rerun. What of all this is real? imagined? dreamed? remembered?

After that everything was a hodgepodge. I am not certain of the truth of what I do remember. What I think are memories of actual events might in reality be memories of bad dreams and nightmares. All the time following, until I went to Europe, seems like a period of recurring blackouts. I wonder what you call that? Shock, perhaps.

We roomed somewhere in Harlem, but I don't remember where. We lived, but I don't remember how; I don't remember working, except for a week or so as doorman for an expensive Jewish hotel in Long Beach when the Jewish high holy days were being celebrated. But that wouldn't have kept us alive for a week.
²¹

Chester and Jean again took refuge for a time with the Smiths in Vermont, and that fall Jean found work as recreational director at the State Women's Reformatory at Mount Kisco, New York. Required to live on the grounds, she was able to see Chester only on the two days a week she had off, spending a single night with him. Chester, after applying for editorial work with
Reader's Digest
and being turned down, worked a single day cutting stencils for the addressograph in its Pleasantville, New York, mailroom: “I must confess I ruined more of the metal plates than I got right and after I worked overtime on my first day the supervisor felt they could save money by keeping me away.”
²²
Chester used his day's earnings to buy Jean a cheap Christmas gift. He'd taken a room in the house of an elderly spinster in a black, staunchly middle-class neighborhood on the edge of White Plains. Following the
Reader's Digest
fiasco, he worked for three months as porter and janitor at the White Plains YMCA.

During this period, too, he bellhopped again in the Catskills' “borscht belt.” He scratched away halfheartedly at his latest version of
Black Sheep
, at drafts of stories and the aborted
Immortal Mammy
, began working with autobiographical materials that would coalesce into
The Third Generation
, wrote to Van Vechten that he was contemplating (in the manner of “Da-Da-Dee”?) a first-person account of his stay at Yaddo, which he would call (and did, years later, in a much-transformed work) “The End of a Primitive.” He and Jean spoke of returning to California, instead moved as
caretakers to a luxurious country club on Lake Copake where in January a hurricane hit, then to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where each morning Chester drove to a park by the Sound and sat with the typewriter on his knees, “at peace with his work”
²³
in the sound of lapping waves and the cry of gulls. But within months their money ran out and Chester was forced to sell the Plymouth he'd recently bought. On the day of sale he was involved in a minor traffic accident with the wife of a prominent white doctor and jailed overnight, with Jean out of touch in New York City looking for work and quarters. Absurdities proliferated: Jean returned from New York to find Chester gone and the buyer come to claim the car; the doctor's wife “had suffered from such severe shock”
²⁴
that she was unable to appear at next morning's hearing; because he'd not made bail Chester was carted off to the county prison; bail money wired by Jean's brother was returned to the telegraph office, where Jean was unable to retrieve it.

By that time it was four o'clock in the afternoon and the telegraph office closed at five. In the meantime, I had been marched to the mess hall for my supper of stale bread, macaroni, and boiled cabbage, and marched back to my cell.

Luckily, the warden couldn't bear to see a woman cry. No doubt he thought she seemed to be a decent black woman and wondered how those decent black women always got mixed up with some no-good black man.

* * *

When I went into the waiting room, I saw at once that she'd been crying. Her body was trembling all over and her eyes looked huge and dark with anguish in her small heart-shaped face.

“Let's get out of here,” I said.

We went back to police headquarters, where I had parked my car, and found a traffic violation ticket on it for parking overnight. I put the ticket into my pocket, started the motor, and drove back to the house.

The young brother who wanted to buy the car was waiting for me on the porch. I knocked twenty-five dollars off the price
because of the bent bumper and crumpled fender, and the brother was satisfied.

Jean fixed a makeshift dinner and we ate silently. Afterward I said, “Let's pack.”
²⁵

This is another incident that Himes lops virtually whole from life to paste into
The Primitive
.

At three-thirty he drove down to the corner of Fairfield Boulevard to buy cigarettes. On his return, when pulling from the curb, his front bumper caught in the fender of a new Buick Roadmaster that was passing too close on his left, and jerked it off. The Buick was driven by a white-haired white lady, dressed immaculately in a mauve-colored tweed suit that looked as if it might have cost more than he had earned from his second book—on which he had worked for more than a year. She was a very important person, and despite the fact she had been driving on the wrong side of a one-way street, and that her breath smelled pleasantly of excellent cocktails, she sent for a policeman and had him arrested for reckless driving. This not because she hated Negroes or wished to humiliate or harm him in any manner; simply because her husband was continuously cautioning her to drive carefully and she intended to prove by the record that she had done so.