blog12.8.2017

BLOG12.8.2017

CONVERSATIONS IN COLOR: Chester Himes

notes for a semi-formal lecture

Amistad Research Center  12/7/17

Detection = The act of finding out or the fact of being found out; discovery, as of something hidden or obscure

What interests me about the life and works of Chester B. Himes is detection, especially how acts of discovery incorporate anger and productive use of tauma.  Look at detection from three angles ----

a.  varieties of detection which are implicit and explicit in the tradition of African American literature (and motivated differently than is detection in American literature that seeks to erase ethnicity and race)

b.  how Himes detected what is systemic in American history and society, how he relentlessly illuminated the absurdity of racism/raced categories  in the practice of everyday life ( his observations are relatively silent about existentialism, although his writing does not exclude a folk understanding of the philosophical);  for Himes, detection is central in writing fiction and non-fiction, especially crime fiction; his aesthetic is politically very conscious

c.  Lawrence P. Jackson made good use of scholarly detection or detective work in writing a readable critical biography of Chester Himes; his thoroughness is commendable;  his management of "historical" facts is a model of how to use archives.  Jackson does not smother us with wilding theories.

Point A ----However much black literature is celebration of a people's enduring in a nation that wears the mask of democratic experiment, our literature  occupies that space where detecting rhetorical hypocrisy is essential. We are at once comic and tragic, serious and playful.  We are a complete, finely nuanced spectrum of whatever.

As Himes noted in his 1967 essay "on the Use of Force,"  black Americans have righteous justification in refusing to applauding the spectacle of "progress"; the changes are ultimately cosmetic; violence and force in new guises prevail. In an essay which is a prototype for those now written about #BLACK LIVES MATTER,  Himes detected that  "only the dead blacks lying in the dirty Ghetto streets know what it is like to be a black man in America" (Millan 473).  Contemporary adjustment for this quotation; "man" means woman and man and gender mixtures.  Like other engaged black writers, Himes detected the location and justification of resentment.  "In fact," he wrote, "in accordance with all the ideologies of all nations, this [resentment] is right and just.  Because the obedience and conformance of the blacks of the United States are imposed by force, theoretically blacks have the right to resist." (Millan 475)  Himes detected, as did his friend Richard Wright, that aesthetically tame literature ought to be complemented and challenged by aesthetically abrasive literature.  As far as his articulation of #BLACK LIVES MATTER is concerned, I am greatly impressed with his giving greater attention to the black mind than to the black body.  There is body enough in his fictions.

Himes affirms the right of African American literature to articulate, without shame or apology, the down and dirty (echoes of Langston Hughes in 1926 on artists and mountains).

Point B ---To appreciate the range and depth of Himes' intellect (mind), one must read "My Man Himes," the interview he had with John A. Williams in the late 1960s, as printed in the anthology Amistad I (1970).   If the central topic is Chester Himes' literary work and its impact on the African American Detective Genre, we commit the sin of myopia if we focus too exclusively on Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones and the doings in Harlem cycle.  Himes is bigger than that, more important for his impact on the tradition of African American fiction in general.   His insights about literature and literary politics are remarkable, but even more remarkable are his insights about human psychology, about the foibles and contradictions that define the human condition ---the kindness, the cruelty, the surplus of hypocrisy, self-deception, and bad faith.  Himes reflected and refracted all these insights in his short stories from 1932 up to 1945, the year his first novel IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO was published.

    [[ Note that this novel was  a proper embarrassment to integrationists and liberals of all colors in 1945, illuminating the abyss of class.  "The real target of IF HE HOLLERS was white liberal hypocrisy and black  accommodation to the status quo.  The book presents a series of flawed episodes of racial equality and the black pursuit of upward mobility" ( Jackson, Indignant 221) ]]  

 It is fair to say Himes made it his business as a writer to detect things from unexpected and dangerous angles; he signified independence of mind in thinking out intra- and interracial possibilities!  One wants to note especially what he had to say to Williams and others about the genre of detective fiction, about his contribution to that genre.  He came fairly late to the genre, and he did not need the genre to detect things.  He, like the tradition of black literature,  was very observant regardless of genres.

Point C ---Here at the Amistad Research Center and in other archives listed in Chester B. Himes: A Biography (2017), Lawrence P. Jackson did the detective work, the research, that enabled him to make a most judicious assessment of Himes' life and contributions to literary history.  Jackson is eloquent, possessed of an elegant critical mind.  Jackson's  interpretation of historical facts endows the book with special weight (methodology of detection) of the kind he brought to his first book Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002) and  his prize-winning second book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 ( 2011  ).  Jackson gives more than ordinary attention to the history of Himes' immediate family, casting much light on how class, caste, and investment in education imprinted his personality and determined certain qualities of his fictions and his two volumes of autobiography, The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity.

In his November 30 radio interview with E. Ethelbert Miller  ("On the Margin," WPFW 89.3 FM, Washington, DC), Jackson spoke eloquently about the necessity of doing the unglamorous detective work, of detecting the texture and details innate in Himes' "political evolution."  The sensational becomes the subjective correlative for making private investigation of American mystery, of figuring out that mystery and bringing a certain order to the topics of law & order and law & reason.  Those topics is very ambiguous in the West.   Himes' bringing out is tied up with naturalism, critical realism, satire, family and  autobiography, his guilt about sexual being-in-the-world,  his jerky success with the career of writing,  his prison education.  For Jackson, key events were the 1926 accident that left Chester's brother Joseph blind and the 1930 prison fire that produced profound trauma.  Key also is Chester's open admission (Chapter 15, page 459) that "I don't write for money accidentally; it's my main purpose."

  Jackson knew that archival detection warranted special attention to how troubled but unrepentant Himes was, to how steadfast and honest Chester Himes was in refusing to cheapen himself with  platitudes,  how forthcoming he was about the crimes of racism and the crimes of American and other national histories. He paid dues again and again in multiple ways.  Jackson helps us to think more clearly about all that was and continues to be at stake.  Jackson's detective work is foundational for critical appreciation, interpretation, and evaluation of Himes' life work. Jackson succeeds in informing us just how "woke" Himes was long before that slang term had any currency.

Some other notes

Soitos, pp. 141-142 ---"Himes is fascinating when he discusses his interpretation of the origins and influence of the detective novel" in My Life of Absurdity, 314. …."The ten detective novels do share characteristics with hardboiled fiction, particularly in their use of violence, uneven handling of gender, and cynical attitude concerning corruption and class.  However, contrary to Himes's own statement, he did create something different.  He continued to alter the detective persona as had black detective writers before him.  Second, he joyfully played with double consciousness, masquerade, and trickster figures.  Third, he elaborately extended the use of black vernaculars in his Harlem environment.  Finally, though his use of hoodoo elements was generally satirical, he developed a consistent worldview that radically altered the face of black detective fiction." (142)

Jackson, CHAAL, p. 715 --- James Baldwin look warily at Lonely Crusade (1947) and faulted Himes for leaving the protagonist ( Lee Gordon) "no way out of his morass."  Did Baldwin ever find a way out of his own morass before he died?  Baldwin wrote in his review of Himes' novel that   "In a group so pressed down, terrified and at bay and carrying generations of constricted, subterranean hostility, no real group identification is possible.  Nor is there a Negro tradition to cling to in the sense that Jews may be said to have a tradition; this was left in Africa long ago and no-one remembers it now. Lee Gordon is forced back on himself, not even bitterness can serve him as a weapon anymore."  From Baldwin, "History as Nightmare." New Leader (October 25, 1947): 11-15. 

Note that both Baldwin and Wright made pregnant comments about "no real group identification."  Unlike Ralph Ellison who wanted to create his group identification in a space where aesthetics and sociology had to occupy separate chambers, Wright, Baldwin, and Himes were more comfortable with the possibility that aesthetics and social science detection might coexist without enmity. 

What Jackson detects is precisely the so-called mainstream  critical attitude that helps to explain why James Baldwin is the 2017 poster boy for frantic left-leaning neo-liberals and 2017 object of disdain for right-leaning supreme conservatives;  these tribes   find comfort in Baldwin's morality (in humor of morality) and in his affirmation of African American wretchedness as he tried to leave the cage of wretchedness ( I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO OR YOUR NIGGER). These thinkers in meek bad faith commend  Toni Morrison's anointing of Ta-Nehisi Coates as the heir to Baldwin, fearful of saying that she is complicit in the HYPE of the publishing industry. They find in the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates ---Between the World and  Me and We Were Eight Years in Power --works that in the Age of Trump can garner rich rewards----they find affirmation of their prejudices in these works.  The one writer at a time rule is an anesthetic that supports ideological manipulation.  Coates and Colson Whitehead can be the one writers (male)  in different genre arenas; they can serve as smokescreens for the fact that such ethnics as Jewish Americans are not one-ruled and incarcerated in a literary arena.  The arena is drenched with sexism and elitism and racism.   I am not as the saying goes "hating" on Morrison or Coates.  I am, however, expressing resentment about how literary politics and policies are constituted.  I resent  that our nation , our mass media, our publishing industry, and many of our public intellectuals adamantly refuse to hear Richard Wright and Chester Himes ; I think this is sick and pathetic, an entrapment for all American readers .  I  prefer the abrasiveness of Malcolm X, Wanda Coleman, Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler, Harold Cruse and Ishmael Reed and other real detectives of where our national disgrace is coming from.  Himes was so right.  America is the paragon of absurdity in which benign genocide thrives along with hatred that is immune to redemption.  People who read and like Himes grasp that point very well.

Special References

Graham, Maryemma and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. The Cambridge History of African American Literature.  New York: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Jackson, Lawrence P. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton UP,  2011 .

Millan, Diego A. Introduction. Chester Himes, "On the Use of Force." PMLA 132.2 (March 2017): 471-476.

Nickerson, Catherine Ross, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction.  New York: Cambridge UP, 2010.

Soitos, Stephen F. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction.  Amherst: The U of Massachusetts P, 1996.

Williams, John A. and Charles F, Harris, eds. Amistad I: Writings on Black History and Culture. New York: Vintage, 1970.