ENG - Himes's underlying inspiration: The Trees, by Percival Everett

This novel by Percival Everett, published in 2022 in the United States (and covered with awards) has just been translated into French under the title Châtiment.

The French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné devotes a warm review to it (March 13, 2024), as a counterpoint to the review of a novel by Richard Wright, without ever, however, mentioning what jumped out at me: the link with Himes.

 

Indeed, in chapter 8 of the novel, a couple of black inspectors from the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) appear. Jim Davis and Ed Morgan remind us of Gravedigger and Ed Coffin: same friendship between the two men, same relaxation, same distance from their theoretical mission. The fundamental difference is that they are police officers in Mississippi and that they are confronted with local police officers (sheriffs) whose racism is consubstantial. We can even notice the resemblance with the late appearance of the two police officers, in A Rage in Harlem / For Love of Imabelle. We will measure the distance traveled since Himes's story and his improbable invention of two black police officers, powerful and resolute, in the Harlem of the 1950s. Alongside Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, we also find a black FBI agent and Asian police officers from California, all aware of their origin and their identity.

 

The evocation of Himes can also be read in the plot. Like Plan B, the last, unfinished novel in the Harlem cycle, The Trees recounts a scheme conceived by a mind of exceptional foresight and resolution, which exceeds its author's intention and degenerates into an uncontrollable war between races. Next to all the white victims, murdered and castrated, is the body of a young black man, lynched a few decades earlier, probably Emmet Tyll, lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1955.

 

A must read!

ENG - Chester Himes and James Thurber: a deja vu feeling

While reading Pinktoes and Plan B, I experienced a kind of deja vu feeling. It related to sudden collective movements in both novels: in Plan B, the war between whites and blacks, and in Pinktoes between black women and white women. My conclusion was that the text of Pinktoes and Plan B (Himes) bears a surprising analogous resemblance to the 15 thumbnails of The War between Men and Women (James Thurber).

The mode of narration used by Himes, characterized by the abruptness of the movements and the visual descriptions, constitutes a literary form most suitable to express sudden, explosive movements. There is always a momentum - a group pursues another, a group flees another - and sudden reversals.

"In Pinktoes, after a rumor is spread, according to which [Mamie Mason] only seeks to mongrelize the white race, a newspaper mentions ‘massive raids by black women on all white men.‘ The second phase of the war is marked by the radicalization of the positions of white women. As worthy ‘descendants of the pioneers who conquered the Redskins’ they assert themselves determined to ‘fight fire with fire’ and turn to the most diverse means to become black. Panic then overtakes black women. Racial antagonisms are affirmed in large movements where opinions and actions of the protagonists are illustrated in the extreme. There is no longer room for the individuals; only remaining are generic categories such as ‘black women’, ‘white women’, ‘all white men over forty years’. 

The same phenomenon can be seen in Plan B. After the massacre of dozens of blacks by the police, whites are horrified. Their collective guilt is reflected in different ways: extravagant blood collection, public atonement, personal and official mourning events. When the inquiry reveals that the massacre began after the death of three policemen killed by a black sniper armed with a mysterious gun, the situation is reversed. ‘Trepidation supplanted their orgy of guilt. Why should they feel so bad about a few blacks being killed by the police when all of their lives were in danger? Trepidation grew to anger. Were they asking too much to feel safe in their own country, their own homes, living their own lives? Hadn’t they done enough for the blacks who were imposed on them by their ancestors? Did they bring the blacks here from Africa? […] Inevitably, this resentment aroused strong, exaggerated hostilities on both sides of the color line." 

From Sylvie Escande, Chester Himes, l'unique, L'Harmattan, 2013.

The Google search does not reveal any connection between the two authors. It is likely that they never met. The author Himes, meanwhile, could not but know James Thurber, a famous New Yorker writer and cartoonist in the 1930’s.

The biographical elements they have in common separate them more than they link them: both of them studied at the University of Ohio in Columbus - Thurber fifteen years before Himes. He has given a very funny account of his studies in one of his short stories, University Days. Thurber was white - the only blacks in his books are servants speaking a colourful language. In The Third Generation, Himes’ autobiographical novel, one can clearly see the absolute separation that existed between white and black students. If the two authors shared an unremarkable university career, their subsequent paths logically diverged: a journalistic career for Thurber, crime and the Ohio State penitentiary for Himes.

Still, an intimate fact may have played a role: Thurber had lost an eye as a child, the victim of an arrow shot by his brother. We can see in two Himes’ novels the weight of his guilt after the accident that blinded his brother Joe, during a chemistry manipulation that the latter should never have performed alone (Yesterday Will Make you Cry, The Third Generation).

Most important, the two authors have in common a fantastic and surreal sensibility that allows them to identify, under the false pretences of the world, lines of force and violent clashes.

On the Google Images of The War Between Men and Women we can see, among other Thurber drawings and photos of the film that was shot, some thumbnails of the series. They have a distinctive number (in Roman numerals) and a very short caption.

ENG - Himes' tribute to Faulkner

While he was writing his first novel for the Série noire in 1957 (For the Love of Imabelle or A Rage in Harlem), Himes, lacking inspiration after the first 80 pages, turned to Faulkner: "The first thing I did on returning to my room was to reread an old beat-up paperback of Faulkner's Sanctuary to sustain my outrageousness and give me courage" (My Life of Absurdity). When he described in Plan B blacks  covered with dust and plaster after being shot by the police cannon, Himes wrote: "William Faulkner would have been vindicated in his description of black skin turning the grey of wood ashes".

Faulkner's influence is manifest in the narration. For example, the structure of Sanctuary, with its alternating focus on the two main characters (Temple and Horace Benbow), and the structuration of time essentially by light marks (in the 1st chapter, the conscience of the passing of time stems from the setting sun, the dusk, the light of a lamp) have certainly inspired Himes. The meeting of Horace Benbow and Popeye, which opens the book with its very cinematic eye contact is obviously quoted by Himes in the sequence between Dummy and Sugar in The Big Gold Dream (chapter 14) with its match cuts connecting the eyes and glances of the two characters.

And Faulkner is also present in the vision of the History of the South. In Plan B, the History of Tomsson Black's plantation is a "crappy counterpoint"[1] to the epical clearing and planting by Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom.

There is, finally, an issue on which the two authors coincide. We grasp it better thanks to the magnificent interpretation of Édouard Glissant in Faulkner, Mississipi. This is "the merciless impartiality" of Faulkner, his uncompromising gaze focused on blacks. Himes goes even further: the monstrous is present in The Heat's on, and in his last two novels, Blind Man with a Pistol and Plan B.

[1] Chester Himes, l’unique.

ENG - 'I Was Looking For a Street' - Chester Himes and Charles Willeford

I Was Looking For a Street is the title of the novel that Jesse Robinson vainly tries to get published in The End Of a Primitive  (1956). Himes had already given this title to the novel that Jethro is about to write in the autobiographical short story Da-Da-Dee (1948 - in Black On Black)*.

I Was Looking For a Street is also the title of Charles Willeford’s autobiography where he recalls his childhood and adolescence. Willeford’s’ parents died of TB when he was a child. During the Depression, from the age of 12, Willeford lived a vagabond life between trains, small jobs and soup kitchens. It is a beautiful book. To my knowledge, Willeford never explained why he had chosen this title, still it is probable that he thus paid homage to Himes. As a journalist in the Miami Herald, Willeford wrote in Himes’ obituary (1984): “He will be remembered as one of America’s greatest writers, black or white.”

The 4 Willeford’s novels with Hoke Moseley as a main character (hero doesn’t  become him) are Miami Blues, New Hope For the Dead, Sideswipe, and The Way We Die Now. Danièle and Pierre Bondil have translated them in French (Miami Blues, Une seconde chance pour les morts, Dérapages and Ainsi va la mort).

----------------------

* In the French translation: "On l'avait invité à la résidence pour travailler à un roman intitulé Le pigeon. Après avoir écrit une soixantaine de pages, il s'était arrêté pour commencer une autobiographie appelée Hier vous fera pleurer. Mais maintenant il était plein à déborder d'une histoire qu'il avait l'intention d'appeler Je cherchais une rue. Il l'avait trouvée, en effet. Il avait trouvé la rue, Congress Street, une petite rue pleine de boîtes noires, qui partait d'une colline pour rejoindre la rue principale."  Noir sur noir, Paris, 10/18, 1984. Translated by Yvonne and Maurice Cullaz.