If He Hollers: Remembering Chester Himes
I have in my collection of rare pulp fiction a 1969 printing of Chester Himes' Run Man Run. The jacket copy is simultaneously to the point and over the top: "Lush sex and stark violence colored black and served up raw by a great Negro writer." If one were to crank out a micro-summary of Chester Himes's work, that would pretty much be it.
Himes, who would have turned 100 this past July 29th, fairly personified the grit and grandeur of the hard-boiled life. As a teen in Cleveland, he lost his virginity to what he described as "an old fat ugly whore." As a young man, he was kicked out of Ohio State University, eventually nicked for armed robbery and sentenced to 25 years hard labor. Once inside, however, Himes bided his time writing short stories and eventually was published in Esquire, using his prison number as his pen name -- 59623.
In 1945, Himes' novel If He Hollers Let Him Go was published -- both his first, and the first in the vein of what some contemporaries would deride as protest novels. And they were. Himes never soft-pedaled his disdain for the systemic racism of the day or for black integrationists, whom he referred to as "whining beggars."
Fed up with race politics, and much like his friend and fellow writer James Baldwin, Himes eventually ditched America for Paris ... and, in 1955, abandoned the protest novel to begin a new series of books: The Harlem Cycle. Starting with For Love of Imabelle in 1957 and ending with Blind Man With a Pistol in 1969, the eight-novel Harlem Cycle became not only Himes' most enduring work, but also some of the most powerful American fiction ever written. With NYPD Detectives "Coffin" Ed Johnson and "Grave Digger" Jones as protagonists, readers were given a tour of New York's Harlem that didn't patronize and didn't flinch. "I put the slang, the daily routine and complex human relationships of Harlem into my detective novels," Himes once said.
He took what was previously an "exotic" place and people and made them real. It's why Himes preferred to call his books "domestic novels" rather than detective fiction.
Some have glibly referred to Himes as the Jackie Robinson of noir fiction. Not hardly true. Despite the fact that Himes went on to receive France's most prestigious prize for crime fiction, his success opened few doors. Hard-boiled fiction is still largely the domain of a particular kind of writer.
One hundred years after his birth, for better and for worse, the great Chester Himes remains nearly one of a kind.
This commentary appeared earlier at NPR.org. For More perspective, please visit That Minority Thing.com
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To anyone who hasn't yet read Himes' two volumes of memoirs - The Quality of Hurt, and My Life of Absurdity - I recommend them very highly.
Thanks for remembering Chester Himes- truly a great writer.
I discovered Chester Himes when I worked on the US premiere production of Every Black Day, a play about Hines' life in college. A very young Samuel L. Jackson starred as Gravedigger Jones. Hines was a fascinating guy, and I'm not really sure the play did his life justice.
Never heard of Chester Himes. But I did see Ossie Davis's "Cotton Comes to Harlem", featuring Coffin Ed and Digger.
That was a terrific movie, as I recall. And had the darndest strip tease I've ever seen.
Love Himes. But you kind of diss Walter Moseley by saying Himes is virtually the only one.
Himes would be 100. Mosely is 50-something. Without dissing either great writer, that is hardly a movement. And it's hardly a diss to either to say that each is one of a kind with some obvious overlap, the biggest one being that both are a joy to read.
I guess so. There's also Donald Goines, who was a major influence on those other venues for black urban noir-- rap and hip hop.
I will be teaching Chester Himes in the spring semester next year in my Black Novel course and I'm very excited that he has been recognized here. Himes is a one-of-a-kind writer and his novels have continued to resonate in the Harlem's, Philly's and Bronzeville's of the world. His brother in literature, James Baldwin, has been my favorite writer since I was seven years old and from reading Baldwin, I lerned about Himes. Thanks Brother Himes for all of your work; and thank you Joe Ridley for remembering him here!
I used to teach _Real Cool Killers_. Helluva good author.
Im going to buy one of his novels. Ive never heard about him but thks 4 telling me. His sounds really interesting.
Dude you are on point.
Last month i purchased by first Chester Himes novel "Pinktoes".
Thanks
Pinktoes is really funny, isn't it? (And has lots of "shock value," to this day, strictly because it's a very honest book.)
Thank you so much. I have heard of HImes and have seen the films made from his work. While crime fiction is not what I normally read, he will be placed on my list of must reads. Thanks again form your fine work. Ashe.
One of America's finest writers - dark, powerful, sometimes surreal, often hilarious, insightful, uncompromising. It's is shameful that he is not more widely known and appreciated. Thank you for this post.
I discovered Chester Himes, not as, primarily, a "black" writer, but as a crime writer; my obsession with authors like Chandler, Hammett, James Cain, and Cornell Woolrich, eventually led me to pick up a Chester Himes novel called Cotton Comes to Harlem - one of the Harlem cop stories you mention in your article. A really excellent book. (I haven't even sat down and read the whole series; maybe I will now.) I also really enjoyed his novel Pink Toes, which is all about the Harlem interracial dating "scene" (white women picking up black men, and the black men who seek them, being the central matters the novel was concerned with); the honesty and humor Himes brought to that subject matter are still amazing - I think if you wrote Pink Toes today, you'd STILL have trouble getting it published.
Mr. Ridley, I loved reading "Love is a Racket'. You got the touch, we ain't the same, but we ain't all that different. Keep pluggin, I enjoy your work.
This might be nitpicking, but I don't think you can call 'Blind Man With a Pistol' the end of the Harlem cycle. While it may be posthumously-published and aggressively unfinished . . . unfinished, I might add, because its vision of an apocalyptic race war was too much even for him . . . that honor really belongs to the last 'Grave Digger' Jones/Coffin Ed' Johnson novel, 'Plan B'
Reading Chester Himes for the first time was like eating a bomb. Holy moley, what a writer.
Thank you! I just couldn't find the right words but you said it perfectly - "like eating a bomb." Love, love, LOVE, Chester Himes.
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