Chester Himes (50 page)

Among their many visitors during this time was Phil Lomax, who at one point presented himself to Lesley saying that he must speak to Chester in private, wishing to confess that he had plagiarized material of Chester's for an article published under his own name. Chester told
him no harm done. During another visit Lomax related something that had happened back home in Brooklyn, when a blind man on the subway pulled out a pistol and shot at the man who had slapped him, killing an innocent bystander. Himes grew obsessed with this story.

It signaled me but I didn't know how; it was telling me something but I didn't know what. I put my story of Marlene [Regine] aside and concentrated on the beginnings of detective stories I had written …

In the meantime Samuel Goldwyn Jr. renewed his option for a year on
Cotton Comes to Harlem
. At the same time he wrote asking me to come to Hollywood to collaborate with him on the screen treatment, all of which he thought I had in my head. At the time my head was filled with the story of
Blind Man with a Pistol
, of which I had written the first three chapters up to the middle of
Chapter 4
, and I did not want to go to Hollywood.
²

He finished the book not long after, disparate and seemingly discrete strands of narrative congealing around the image of Lomax's blind man. When the new novel came back from Bill Targ, who had brought out his last in the U.S., with a detailed letter of rejection, Chester wrapped it again and sent it to Roslyn, who in March of 1968 sold it to William Morrow. Chester and Lesley returned to Paris the following month, camping out at Nicole Toutain's apartment and witnessing the start of the student riots.

Back in the States, as well, 1968 was a fulcrum year. The first Kennedy had already gone down; the Watts riots were just around the corner. Memphis lay in wait for Martin Luther King Jr., L.A. for Robert Kennedy, a lectern in the Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, for Malcolm X. Three civil-rights workers were murdered down in Mississippi. During the summer Olympics in Mexico City two African-American athletes were suspended for giving a black-power salute. The Tet Offensive also started up that year—along with bloody racial riots on the unreported back lots of Vietnam.

Early September, the couple packed and debarked for Spain, proceeding directly to Alicante and lodging at the Palace Hotel until they found an apartment behind the city's market. There they stayed while having Casa Griot built.

In the building in which we lived we had a wood-burning furnace for central heating taken care of by the doorman, who started it up about three o'clock every afternoon and ran it until midnight. We bought a small gas burner for our bedroom, which was at the back of the apartment with windows opening onto the terrace. We would use the heater in a small bedroom beyond the tiny kitchen which I used as a study. Sun poured into the big front room through the glass panes heating it from nine o'clock in the morning until dark, bleaching all the furniture, reminding me of my landlady in London who used to draw the shades against the sun to protect the furniture.
³

Following lines of thought pursued also in
Blind Man
, Himes had started a new detective novel,
Plan B
, about a black revolution in which ultimately his two detectives take opposite sides, Grave Digger killing Coffin Ed. There in the Alicante apartment he continued work on the book, though he recognized that it “was gradually heading for disaster.”
⁴
Some years later in an interview with Michel Fabre he recalled the difficulties he'd set for himself:

I started another thriller, called
Plan
B, which is about a largescale black rebellion led by a black subversive organization, but I didn't quite finish it. In it, the man who secretly sends weapons to blacks finds his plan wrecked because black people don't have the political maturity needed to band together into an effective force. Instead of waiting for an organization to form, each one of them begins shooting white people for his own personal reasons … I became uncomfortable with it after a while, because the story became too exaggerated. I originally envisioned a general conflict between the races, but in the final scene Coffin Ed and Grave Digger shoot at each other. One of them takes the side of his race brothers, while the other one chooses to uphold law and order, not because he feels any loyalty to whites, but because the political and social implications of the rebellion are too much for him.
⁵

Himes had by this time finished the first volume of the autobiography, for which shortly he would receive an advance of $10,000 from Doubleday, and begun, most likely working from the fictionalized
version of his affair with Regine he had earlier sent Roslyn, on the second.

In September 1969, following a stay in Paris and a brief jaunt to London where Chester appeared on the BBC, he and Lesley summarily packed their belongings for the move to Spain but discovered upon arrival that their new house remained only half built. By turns exasperated, furious, and depressed, they found an apartment nearby and, five months later, at last took occupancy, though not without first coming to the verge of litigation over the contractor's malfeasance. Construction fell ever further behind schedule, walls and doorways were set askew, wiring and plumbing were slipshod throughout. Chester recalled watching from afar as unsupervised workers milled about ineffectually. In his letters Himes poured out an unbroken stream of invective against Spain: its roads had ruined his car, the entire country was as racist as the American South, workers were lazy, incompetent, and hopelessly ignorant, no one there was to be trusted, they couldn't even produce acceptable cat food. His railings against publishers continued as well, despite Gallimard's proud launch of
L'Aveugle au pistolet (Blind Man with a Pistol)
under its prestigious Du monde entier imprint, the decision of
Le Monde des Livres
to feature him in the center spread it reserved for only the most important writers and issues, interviews with the London magazine
Nova
, the
Sunday Times
and the BBC, and the stream of journalists, critics and students who increasingly wrote or in many cases made the trip to Spain to interview him.

It was a time, too, of strong if distant attachments as Himes sent out from Spain letter after letter, like grappling hooks seeking purchase. There were dozens to John Williams, a long series to Ishmael Reed, finally, even once most others had stopped, cascades of letters to Roslyn Targ. Those letters, the daily mail, were Chester's lifeline and anchor, Lesley said; by them were his days measured, his mood set. Disappointing mail left him distraught and unable to work. Good news, checks, and letters from friends cheered him, leveled him out, made him talkative: “He was so geared up that his mail was the most important thing to him. It was his means of keeping in contact with the world.”
⁶

Sometimes, as well, it became his means of breaking contact. Deciding that Melvin Van Peebles's hit play
Watermelon Man
had been
stolen from an old short story of his, “The Ghost of Rufus Jones” Himes fell out of communication with Van Peebles. Later, he persuaded himself that John Williams had copyrighted anthologized material of his (his Chicago speech “The Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in the United States” in
Beyond the Angry Black)
in order to collect royalties. Williams heard of his complaints and confronted him, explaining that he had done this only to protect Chester's material, but Chester persisted in his belief; soon after, their correspondence fell off, not to be resumed.

Chester's anger, always close to the surface, broke through more and more often now in sudden fits of rage. While Lesley learned to turn these aside, she could never understand them. And while she maintains that Chester was never violent towards her, the question arises again and again in interviews. John Williams recalls a time when, failing to negotiate a step from one room into another at the Albert Hotel, Chester flew into a rage at Lesley, shouting that he
told
her not to wax the floors. There was the time at Walter Coleman's that he supposedly struck her in jealousy over the attention she gave Walter's brother. Ed Pearlstein recalls coming across Chester in the lobby of the Albert Hotel not long after first meeting him.

He was sitting on a bench, and Lesley was standing in front of him. He was furious about something, and Lesley motioned to me not to stop … There had been a racist incident, I think when he went to get a haircut. What impressed me was the intensity of his anger—I could feel it as I passed.
⁷

“There was only one time that I saw him lose his temper,” Constance Pearlstein insists.

He and Lesley came in from shopping when Edward and I were living at the Albert Hotel. Chester had one huge bag of oranges, much too full, and it split down the side. Oranges rolled all over our kitchen floor. He yelled at Lesley that it was her fault. She should have gotten a stronger bag or fewer oranges. Edward, Lesley, and I did not answer and we all, Chester included, began picking up the oranges. By the time we'd finished, Chester was laughing at the episode. That was another quality; he could laugh at himself and often did.
⁸

Chester's emotional lability, the way in which he could be joking and laughing one moment, then suddenly sullen, closed in, not talking at all, or how he'd pass from fury to laughter in a beat, gets remarked universally. Still, for all the reported incidents of anger, fury, and rage, there remains little evidence of physical violence, and those closest to Himes adamantly deny it. That he often blazed with anger can't be questioned. Nor that sometimes he spoke of, even threatened, physical violence. Years back, in prison, he had learned that physical violence might be circumvented by his intelligence and command of language, a lesson he never quite forgot.

Joe Hunter, who remembers several incidents when, challenged, Himes flew into rages, and who is quick to add that the “violence” remained merely verbal, also suggests that Chester was a man you got to know only so well, to a certain depth, before he instinctively drew back and away.
⁹
You could see the eyes change, Hunter says; as though curtains had been pulled. Many report Himes's reluctance to talk about himself in person, even though in his writing he would broach the most intimate, cruel, personal things. One questions to what extent all these, the anger and remove as much as the laughter, were protective mechanisms, tools honed early on and kept in good repair for survival.

Only for brief periods had Himes ever felt he was securely in control of his life. Again and again decisions were being made, beyond his ken, by others: school officials, parents, judges, prison guards, editors, publishers, critics. Now, compromised physically by multiple strokes, advancing arthritis and severe back pain, stomach and dental problems, he knew that he was losing control on far more elemental levels. What else could he do but rage—rage, and try to fix in memory the forms of that life slipping away from him, try to make certain the work that had been so much of his life did not fade with him. Rage, and remember, and laugh.

Even if loss was the tonic from which the daily music departed and to which it always returned, still there were many grace notes and bridges.

In 1970 Chester and Lesley flew to New York for the opening of
Cotton Comes to Harlem
. A “Welcome Home, Himes” reception with entertainment by the Jackson Five was held, also a party for Chester at
the UN Building, with Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and many others in attendance.
¹⁰
Among interviewers was
Life's
Rudolph Chelminski, whose article “The Hard-Bitten Old Pro Who Wrote 'Cotton' Cashes In” began:

Hollywood has finally cottoned on. The amazing success of the wild detective comedy
Cotton Comes to Harlem
has proved once and for all that movies do not have to be lily-white—or even “integrated”—to be big box office. They can be jet black. Directed entirely in Harlem by black actor-playwright Ossie Davis,
Cotton
has grossed over $6 million in three months.
¹¹

If Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques in their tailored suits failed to match Himes's own description of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed as “two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town,”
¹²
they nonetheless gave credible, strong performances, and they shared with the detective pair they were recreating at least one important trait, that of imposing presence. As Milliken remarks, the two actors

had built their careers on their ability to dominate the films they appeared in with no dependence at all on strongly written parts. Both had developed stage presence that went far beyond charismatic, all the way to hypnotic, and they managed to upstage the film's heady combination of erotic nude scenes and noisy gunfights with little more than exchanges of sidelong glances.
¹³

Himes's attitude toward the film seems to have shifted according to his audience. He told
Black News
that what he had seen was a minstrel show. In
My Life of Absurdity
he wrote: “On first sight of the film
Cotton
I thought it was badly acted and noisy, but time changed my opinion until I thought it was both reasonably acted and relatively quiet.”
¹⁴
Elsewhere he criticized the producers for not following his story closely enough, complaining that they had dropped some of his best material; praised Davis's rewrite of the original script by Arnold Perls, which gave the whole a much stronger black orientation; and spoke out against the excessive violence of popular black films.

Among those soon to see
Cotton
was future community activist and crime writer Gary Phillips, then seventeen, and its influence on him was profound.

Up there on the Temple's screen was the tall and menacing Raymond St. Jacques as Coffin Ed Johnson, and a slimmed-down Godfrey Cambridge as the only slightly more reasonable Grave Digger Jones. They were razor sharp in their grey tailored suits, wide black ties offset by their slate-blue shirts, glinting gold cufflinks, and bad-ass felt fedoras shoved down on top of their skulls. Certainly not the lived-in suits and hog farmer builds Himes described his characters as possessing in the books, I'd later discover.