ENG - Chester Himes, my neighbor

On the cover of My Life of Absurdity*, Chester in the last years of his life. We can see by his emaciated face that he is sick, but Anne-Christine who knew him at that time describes a man with demonstrative joy, happy to be in the company of children and in love with his cats.

We used to go on holidays to Moraira (a Spanish village located between Valencia and Alicante on the Costa Blanca), in a house that my parents had bought in 1962. It was called Casa Ana Cristina and was lost in the pine forest, but we still had a few neighbors.

In Pla del Mar (name of the small hill on which our house was located), the summers were the same from one year to the next...

On the other side of the pine forest that you had to cross to access it, Casa Griot, a rather imposing house belonged to Lesley and Chester Himes. The advantage of this pretty house over the others was its beautiful swimming pool, a promise of freshness during these hot summers.

We were very often invited there for endless baths (my parents and the Himes were friends since their installation in Moraira). Chester, despite his handicap, took baths with us, strapped in a sort of big black buoy (a big tyre inner tube!) and we played. He laughed heartily, I imagine he was happy to find a little carelessness and lightness.

Then Lesley would help him out and put him in his wheelchair by the pool under a small arbor and he would watch us play in the water.

I knew from my parents that he wrote books, but for a 10-year-old girl, it was pretty vague. I was also aware of his accident. No matter, for my brother and I he was a man who liked to laugh, to bathe in all simplicity with us.

I still remember his thunderous laugh during the many dinners and other celebrations at home. Chester liked to sit at the large rattan table on the terrace in front of the house, always in the same chair. He seemed to be enjoying mom's food and the good Spanish wine.

He told stories in his big voice (in English, my parents luckily spoke it well) and, for us, his presence was the assurance of going to bed late and staying with "the grown-ups".

Sometimes we went to their place, always for a final swim in the pool and then we had dinner under a sort of large veranda which was accessed via a large staircase. Lesley concocted nice meals. She was always imperturbable and dressed in white!

Chester’s cats  accompanied these evenings. He had a passion for these animals (Abyssinian cats I believe). They were impressive and enigmatic and sometimes even a little scary.

Lesley and Chester then left this house, which was no longer convenient for him, and they settled (still in Pla del Mar) in a one-story house.

It wasn't until much later that I realized that we had a "somewhat special" neighbor. From these memories, there are a few photos left in the family albums and in my mother's library the works of Chester with this dedication "For Pierre and Nicole from Chester".

Anne-Christine T-M (January 2017)

Dedication to Anne Christine's parents.

* My Life of Absurdity (1976) is the second volume of Himes' autobiography.

ENG - The invention of Harlem - 1: How Himes got to know the city

Evita recently asked on this blog the following question: "How authentic is Chester Himes’ Harlem? I understand that he never actually lived there, however there is an abundant description of addresses, bars / clubs (real or fictitious); the fashions and hairstyles, songs and dances sound particularly accurate. Harlem seems to be at that time a unique microcosm in the United States. Could it be inspired by another city, or memories, or is it an entirely fictitious neighborhood that one reads in its novels?"

The question calls for a balanced answer. Yes, Himes is very familiar with Harlem and his physical and social geography. Other places and characters also inspire him, however, mainly those of Cleveland, the city where he spent his youth and ended pimping and gambling. Above all, in his crime novels, Harlem is a mixture of realism and invention, which makes possible the improbable: a city separated from the white world where two black policemen make the law. The last two novels of the Harlem domestic novels (Blind Man with the Pistol, Plan B) will destroy this construction and will give another image of Harlem, dominated and crisscrossed by whites.

Himes is not a Harlemite. He was born in the South and spent his teens in Cleveland. He discovers Harlem in July 1940, at the age of 31. He stays there for several days and sleeps one night in the famous Theresa Hotel, at the crossroads of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. After the war years spent in California, he moves to New York with Jean, his wife. He lives in Harlem between September 1944 and November 1945 and between January and June 1947 and eventually, occasionally, between the spring of 1952 and his departure for France, on April 3, 1953. Between these stays, he resides most often in Brooklyn, in the Bronx and in the New England properties where he and Jean work as caretakers. In 1972, Himes recalls his happiness when walking the streets of Harlem: "I was going down south [...] beyond Fat Man's bar on the 155th, Eddie's chicken restaurant and Lucky night club, and all the hairdressers, restaurants and beauty parlors that served the lottery barons, the numbers racketeers and the black bourgeoisie  who lived on 140th St and the neighboring streets. I would take 145th St to Brother 'Lightfoot' Michaux's Harlem Temple, then headed south again, into the neon jungle of 7th Avenue, Harlem's main street (which I've always considered the land of dreams), past the Renaissance dance hall, Small's Paradise Inn and Dickie-Wells Restaurant & Bar."[1]

For the most part, however, his discovery of Harlem is subsequent to his exile in France (1953). In 1955, from the end of January to mid-December, Himes spends 10 months in New York. He lives in Greenwich Village but cruises Harlem and becomes impregnated with the city: "It was at that moment that I really made my acquaintance with Harlem: its geography, the way of life of its inhabitants, its mobsters, its vices, its slang, its absurdities. I acquired all this knowledge unintentionally. Perhaps it saved my life later because it allowed me to write the novels that appeared in the Série Noire at Gallimard Editions in France."[2] It is interesting to note that Himes then doesn’t have any detective novel in mind. The crucial meeting with Marcel Duhamel, the director of the Série Noire, will only take place in 1957.

1 Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, The Several Lives of Chester Himes,       p. 53-54.

2 Chester Himes, Regrets sans repentir, Paris, Gallimard, 1979, p. 224.

ENG - Chester Himes and the Ohio State Pen fire (1930)

On several American websites (see below), one can find articles about the Ohio State Penitentiary fire - Easter Monday fire - on April 21, 1930. They are illustrated by some extraordinary photographs (the penitentiary on fire, the caskets in the improvised morgue).

Chester Himes was a convict in the penitentiary at that time, having been sentenced to 20 to 25 years in 1928. One of his short stories, To What Red Hell (1934), is related to this fire. It shows the disarray of a convict, running to and fro in a desperate attempt to rescue other inmates. Himes used it again later as a chapter of his prison novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, initially titled Cast the First Stone.

"From the dormitory windows they saw the fire trucks come through the stockade gates. They heard the clang of bells, the motor roar. They saw convicts running across the yard, the sudden surge of Negro convicts from the wheel barrow company,carrying blankets in their arms; then the white convicts from the dining room company. Guards came running. Everyone was running." (beginning of chapter 8).

At the turn of the 20th century, the Ohio Pen was presented as a modern model prison. From the start, however, the reality was quite different. In the 19th century, a cholera epidemic killed 121 inmates. The websites articles (below) reveal that even if prisoners may have initiated the fire as a means of diversion to protect their escape, the extreme overcrowding of the penitentiary - the prison population exceeded twice its capacity at the time of the fire - and the lack of safety devices and emergency procedures were the main causes of the extension of the fire, which caused 322 deaths.

After the fire, the Ohio Parole Board was established in 1931. It eventually decided the release of more than 2,000 prisoners. Himes was one of them. He was released in 1936, after 8 years in the Pen. He had already published short stories in several popular magazines, which was considered by the Parole Board as a token of rehabilitation.

Websites

The Ohio Penitentiary Fire

The Report of the Board of Inquiry on the causes of the fire (May, 1930)
The history of the Ohio Pen

ENG - The Paris black bank

The cover of La rive noire : de Harlem à la Seine (by Michel Fabre, 1985; it has not been translated into English) shows a black-faced Statue of Liberty. The title literally means: “The Black Bank: From Harlem to The Seine”. Michel Fabre, the best connoisseur both of R. Wright and C. Himes, shows how from the middle of the 19th century till the ‘70s, Paris was the destination of many black writers and artists. For example, after WW2, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester Himes settled in Paris (respectively in 1946, 1948 and 1953). Wright died in France in 1960, Himes spent there nearly 30 years before moving to Spain – where he had a house built for him, which he could not afford in France in spite of his success, and Baldwin only went back to the US in 1960.

Several particular reasons motivated Himes’ exile to France: Lonely Crusade, his second novel was badly received by all his most likely readers (white liberals, Blacks, Jews, communists) and was a commercial failure. He also nearly killed Vandi Haygood, his white girl friend; this would later inspire The End of a Primitive (1956), maybe his most beautiful novel. But the fundamental reason was the same for the three authors: the absolute necessity of fleeing from a nightmarish existence. For them as for those who preceded them, France meant freedom and Alexandre Dumas whose grand-mother was a black slave was considered a token of France’s difference. 

The black bank corresponded to a part of the left bank of Paris, from the Latin Quarter to Montparnasse. In his autobiography, one can follow Himes in the left bank cafés where the Black Americans spent a lot of time because of the cold and uncomfortable conditions of their hotels: first the bar Monaco, on the rue Monsieur le Prince, then the café Tournon, near the Luxembourg gardens, launched by William Gardner Smith, “Dick’s domain”*, which Himes was happy to leave for the Select, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, after La reine des pommes (The Five-Cornered Square).

As regard Himes’ feelings towards France after arriving there, it is somewhat difficult to sort out between the sources and periods. In an unpublished article quoted by M. Fabre, dating from the first months or years of Himes’ exile, the latter says: “My fate, whatever it be, is in America. I’m American, as a Frenchman is French, as an Englishman is English and I will be back (to quote Mac Arthur, another American) to fight in America until death.” Later, recalling the success of La reine des pommes (The Five-Cornered Square - 1958) in the 2^nd volume of his autobiography, My Life of Absurdity (1976), he writes: “I was now a French writer.”

Still Himes lived in a permanent inner revolt and antagonism against the Whites. He also was remarkably ungifted at learning languages and his courageous attempts to learn French were totally unsuccessful. M. Fabre concludes: “He was the stranger everywhere, only a passenger lingering in France.” Indeed Himes appears quite isolated from the French, in particular from the French intelligentsia, compared to the friendships Richard Wright gained in France: the Sartre-Beauvoir couple, Marcel Camus, Léopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire. In France as in the US, Wright tended to be the American Black Writer.

* Dick: Richard Wright (My Life of Absurdity).