Conversations with Chester Himes

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Bernard W. Bell

Reviewed by

Bernard W. Bell Pennsylvania State University

"American male writers don't produce manly books," John A. Williams wrote after reading the manuscript of the first volume of Chester Himes's autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972); "Himes' autobiography is that of a man." This provocative comment on Himes the man and writer appears in the introduction to Williams's "My Man Himes: An Interview with Chester Himes," the most illuminating and important of the eighteen "interviews" in Michel Fabre's and Robert E. Skinner's Conversations with Chester Himes. The most frequently recurring themes in these interviews and paraphrased, journalistic conversations that range chronologically from 1955 to 1985 are the deep-rooted violence of American culture; the absurdity of American racism; the schizophrenic, sensual lives of petty black criminals and their victims in Harlem; the need for organized revolution in the struggle for social justice and equality; and the exploitation of black American writers. Even though several of these conversations and interviews are rather short and sketchy, they offer useful complements to the story of Himes's life as a black American man and artist that he more passionately and provocatively reveals in his eighteen semi-autobiographical novels, numerous short stories and essays, film script, and two-volume autobiography. "The reappearance of nearly all of his fiction in the recent past," the editors write, "suggests we are very close to a major reappraisal of Chester Himes, and this collection will help in that process."

How does this collection help readers to reconstruct and reappraise Chester Bomar Himes as a black American man and artist? Because most of the selections were translated from French or German into English (seven) or conducted by Michel Fabre (four), the interviews and conversations are primarily European vignettes, reconstructed by the French, of Himes's national, racial, gender, and class identity formations as they were orally constructed over time by Himes himself. The translator of a French volume of Himes's short stories in 1982 and a French edition of his Plan B in 1983, the co-author with Edward Margolies of The Several Lives of Chester Himes, and the former Director of the Center for African American Studies and New Literatures in English at the New Sorbonne, Fabre is apparently the senior editor of this collection. Fabre's co-editor for this project is Robert E. Skinner, a librarian at Xavier University who, with Fabre, co-edited the English edition of Himes's unfinished apocalyptic novel of racial conflict, Plan B (1993). Although the editors helpfully tell us that "the picture is sometimes confusing because Himes occasionally contradicts himself and other times gives out information that is incomplete or erroneous," they provide inadequate corrections and clarifications in the introduction and footnotes to selections by some of the ostensibly more naive and less critical European interviewers.

For example, contrary to the two interviews by Annie Brierre and Francois Bott, Chester's mother, as the editors note, was not white. In fact, according to Himes's autobiography and admittedly autobiographical The Third Generation (1954), Estelle Bomar Himes was a light-complexioned, educated, color- and class-conscious, ambitious, neurotic mother who frequently humiliated and abused her dark-complected, humble husband, Joseph Sandy. Lacking his wife's determination and defiance, Sandy was a professor of blacksmithing and wheel-wrighting, as well as the head of mechanical departments at several predominantly black Southern agricultural and mechanical colleges. Although Himes was "advocating Negro revolution back in the 1940s," he was not, as Philip Oakes fallaciously declares, "a founding father of the Black Power movement." In addition, the harsh criticism by Communists of Lonely Crusade, which Himes tells interviewers appeared in The Daily Worker, actually appeared in a review in New Masses. And even though he told several interviewers that If He Hollers Let Him Go was a bestseller, according to the editors, "there is no evidence to support this claim." On the other hand, Himes reveals the fallibility of his memory by telling one interviewer that the models for Coffin Ed and Grave Digger were two lieutenant cops in Chicago and by telling another that they were inspired by a captain and a lieutenant in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, his explanation to Michael Mok that "the two cops, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, are roughly based on a black lieutenant and his sergeant partner who worked the Central Avenue ghetto in L.A. back in the 1940s" is not found in either volume of his autobiography.

Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909, young Chester Himes was educated mainly by a mother who doted on him and by petty criminal acquaintances before being expelled from college during his freshman year. He grew into manhood as a hustler and writer in the Ohio State Penitentiary, to which at nineteen years old he was sentenced in 1928 to twenty years for armed robbery. But he was released on parole in 1936 and married Jean Johnson in 1937. Ambivalently representing himself as agent and victim in the construction of his racial identity, Himes tells an interviewer: "My wife was black and beautiful, with the same shade of skin as Josephine Baker. We stayed together for fourteen years, but I could never provide the kind of life for her I wanted because we were Negroes. In the end we separated." Concerning his writing, he was bitterly disappointed by the mixed critical reception of his first three novels: If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945), Lonely Crusade (1947), and Cast the First Stone (1952), which Himes tells Fabre is one of his "most autobiographical novels" and which I believe is the most realistic novel of prison life in American literature. In part because of frustrations with the critical reception of his books and because of anxieties about an abusive love affair with a white woman, he emigrated to France in 1953, where he published The Primitive (1956) and became an international literary success with his Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones Harlem detective series. In declining health after a couple of strokes, he died in the care of his British wife Lesley Packard in Benissa, Spain, in 1984.