After the heavy sentence fell in Cleveland, Chester clambered aboard a guarded train with other manacled convicts destined for the state penitentiary in Columbus. He entered the prison two days after Christmas, alongside white and colored men in their late twenties, men convicted of burglary and robbery, writing bad checks and swindling the unaware. None of the “fish”—prison slang for a newcomer—had drawn as severe a sentence as Chester. The number 59623 was stenciled to his underwear. He could count on not being released before he was thirty-nine years old. He was numbly devastated.
An imposing thirty-foot-high wall of brick and stone enclosed the nearly century-old penitentiary complex in downtown Columbus. The four-story administration building, prison cell blocks, chapel and honor dormitories made a large L that stretched for a block on Spring Street and a portion on West Street. Heading east, the prison’s wall and intermittent guard towers stretched back toward the rail yards. Inside the walls, the main yard was dominated by a 100,000-gallon steel water tower and the two-story dining hall and kitchen. In the square between the moorings for the water tower, the Protestant chapel, and the interior entrance to the administration building were several plots of manicured grass with pruned trees and a fountain.
During Chester’s first winter inside, the penitentiary was jammed with about forty-two hundred convicts, almost three times as many men as it had been designed to contain. The prisoners themselves worked steadily to build new dormitories to ease the overcrowding and that winter cell block L and the Honor Dormitory were under construction. The Annex Building in the southeast corner of the yard, a small one-story brick carriage house, was brand-new when Chester arrived. It housed the penitentiary’s regularly used electric chair.
Prison life in the 1920s was designed to break the will of incorrigible men. The inmates were required to work hard, to submit to iron discipline, and to suffer nature’s elements. They marched in crisp lines and the guards forbade speaking, or else they thwacked the inmates with clubs. Death or permanent injury was not uncommon for prisoners. The inmates were assigned to companies for their daylong work assignments at the coal mill, power plant, tin shop, machine shop, woolen mill, knitting mill, print shop, auto tag shop, or shirt shop, which in turn dictated the cell blocks that they lived in. The outdoor work of the coal company, which required the men to shovel coal from a pile into a nonstop flow of wheelbarrows marched to a crusher and then to the furnace, was thought the dirtiest and most physically demanding job. Any job inside working as a porter was understood as a reward, or light duty. Housing as many as eight hundred men apiece, the alphabetically arranged cell blocks had six tiers. Black men and white men, wearing identical gray pants, coats, and caps, and hickory-striped shirts and allowed to bathe once per week, crowded the cafeteria tables, two thousand at a time, for their meals.
Racial segregation was enforced in the penitentiary. Black prisoners received permanent labor assignments in the coal company and as janitors cleaning latrines and hallways. The black men stood at the end of lines for guest visits, the commissary, recreation, and medical treatment, although the mess hall did not require strict segregation. In the dormitories black prisoners predominated in so-called black bottom sections, and cells were typically occupied by men of the same race. As overcrowding increased, however, Ohio’s penitentiary ended up less segregated than Ohio State University, particularly at dinner and chapel.
African Americans made up barely 5 percent of the Ohio population in the early 1930s, but constituted more than a quarter of the inmates at the state penitentiary. Among the black prisoners, most of the men, like Chester, had been born in the South, and many had come to Ohio in search of work. In all of Chester’s prison writing, the black characters are set off by strong accents, which was probably true of men he knew like the forty-six-year-old Kentuckian Flo Wallace, whom he bunked beside, or another dormitory mate, sixty-eight-year-old Georgian Simon Stevens, who had been born in slavery. When he entered the prison, Chester was able to accept other black Americans who he felt were like himself—bright and talented, or worldly and attracted to the fast life. Judging by his earliest fiction, however, he felt contemptuously uneasy about being grouped with the African American peasantry. (When his father mailed him a sack of flour, he threw it away.) Jaunty and guileful, Chester was partly a city boy who understood uneducated African Americans with Southern accents as comic stereotypes, undeserving of compassion or serious consideration.
Chester’s three teenage years scudding through the dice parlors, cabarets, speakeasies, and brothels had not earned him associates from Cleveland to help him adjust to penitentiary life. However, in the early weeks in prison he could certainly have been comforted by the simple fact that Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County sent the lion’s share of convicts to the state penitentiary. But beyond the fact of having a hometown in common with so many of the prisoners, Chester was unusual in nearly every dimension. There were 1645 new arrivals to the prison in 1929. Only about fifty of the other prisoners had ever set foot inside of a college classroom. Singling him out even more, only twenty of the newly admitted inmates were as young as he was; large numbers of men entered prison in their late twenties or early thirties, required to serve only a year or two. And of course the most obvious marker was time. Only twenty-five men were sentenced to twenty years or more. “He hadn’t ever had a chance to live, not really live,” remarked a character in an early short story, capturing Chester’s exact doomed sentiments upon arrival.
During the first weeks of his incarceration, Chester found the cell block on the top tier so cold that he had to sleep fully clothed. After the induction, including IQ testing, he was sent to the large dormitory housing the two hundred members of the coal company. The first thing to be overcome was his initial fear. “Every one of them looked big and tough,” his trepidation-filled character Jimmy Monroe reflects when he steps out into the dormitory. Crude cardboard signs regulating prisoners’ behavior hung from the naked lightbulbs dotting the large dormitory in the main part of the cell block where he slept: Spitting on the floor and wall forbidden. No running water after dinner. No sleeping naked in summer. No sweaters in the winter. No tailoring of the prison uniform. Then the unvarying prison routine began: up at six, line up for breakfast at seven, work, dinner at eleven, back to the dormitory, supper at three, lights out by nine. The men tramped by company in a line, adorned in identical threadbare caps, jackets, and brogans.
Chester complained about the rough wintertime assignment. The guards punished him for speaking up at all by sending him to “the hole”—the darkened isolation chamber of the prison—but he was transferred and became a porter. Finally, and possibly after some letter writing and wrangling by his mother, on account of his physical infirmity he gained an assignment to the “cripple” company, a large dormitory for the physically disabled lodged on a cell-block ground floor. This designation was sought after because the men couldn’t be forced to work; as for the convicts with disabilities themselves, Chester learned that they were a “treacherous” lot.
Chester’s minor privileges may not have been extraordinary at all. Jacob Nesbitt, convicted of second-degree spousal murder, and a former fraternity brother of the son of Warden Preston E. Thomas, was reputed to have been “free to roam the city,” eating in local restaurants and visiting the university campus, during his time in prison. After the initial adjustment to the routine of prison life, the reality that this terrible punishment would cost Chester his youth settled in painfully. Still dreaming that he was waiting for girls outside of the chemistry building at the university across town, he was learning to become a convict.
Attractive, slender, and with his face unmarked, Chester was vulnerable as a teenager and as a reflective person. The first episode that he recorded in both versions of his long prison works Cast the First Stone (1952) and Yesterday Will Make You Cry (first published posthumously, in 1998) began with an effeminate convict trying to seduce a twenty-year-old protagonist sentenced to twenty years for armed robbery. Initially, Chester greeted the predatorial sexuality in prison with disgust. Sodomy itself was regarded by prison officials, as well as by many of the men practicing it, as a descent into the realm of animal behavior, hence the classificatory term used by prison officials, “degeneracy.” Men were in fact committed to the penitentiary for sodomy, like prison newspaper writer Joseph Kerwin, who was sentenced to a minimum of five years for that crime, two months before Chester arrived. Like most of heterosexual society, Chester believed homosexuals were perverted. Disoriented and big-eyed when he arrived, Chester was like Jimmy Monroe in Cast the First Stone, “half afraid that every big tough-looking convict might try to rape me.” If he could avoid the strong-arm tactics of the wolves, he thought it would be a straightforward matter to also avoid homosexual contact.
The bleak prison monotony, the gray uniforms, the gray days, inside the gray barred walls of the gray city, gave over to electric moments of excitement and horror. Many of the convicts, and especially the men sentenced to life terms, were desperate and prepared to risk death for the possibility of even brief freedom. Opportunities to escape were regarded seriously. Pat McDermott, a murderer considered one of the most dangerous inmates, scaled the walls with two other murderers and two armed robbers. They were at large for several weeks during Chester’s second month in prison. Later on, the guards in the yard shot and killed a black convict during a scuffle, and prisoners briefly overcame the guards in a recreation room and held them at gunpoint, until one fearless captain restored order, clubbing some men into submission and emptying a revolver into others. Then, on February 28, 1930, Dr. James Howard Snook, an Ohio State professor and gold medalist at the 1920 Olympics, was electrocuted for the murder of a coed. The men yelled obscenities at the professor as he passed on his way to “the cooker,” as the convicts dubbed the electric chair. During the five full years that Chester stayed in the penitentiary in downtown Columbus, the death house and its “lightning ride” was the final destination for about forty-five men.
The guards attempted to enforce extensive rules—no whistling, no talking in line, no talking after lights out—to regulate behavior and demonstrate their control of the yard, but they were outnumbered by the often unruly men. All the myriad rules were negotiated and renegotiated. Prisoners feared deadly violence from one another more than from the guards. Typically each imprisoned man armed himself with a homemade knife called a “chiv,” and other assorted blades and clubs. The convicts ridiculed the warden and his staff, the prison doctors, and the chaplain, sometimes appropriately so, as men unfit for life outside of the prison. The professionals were flawed and unable to operate in the legitimate corporate or government world; the guards were too inept to perform as policemen or soldiers. The authority of the guards—themselves only a step beyond poverty—and other employees of the prison lay as much in coercion as it did in willful submission and cooperation. They were known to use the extralegal tactics at their disposal: prevarication, theft, brutality, and murder. But they also urged on friendships and cultivated relationships with prisoners. All were given the honorific title “captain.”
The warden of more than fifteen years, Preston Thomas, liked telling the men during the chapel services “in these hands I hold your destinies.” He struck the bulk of the convicts as corrupt, a profiteer from narcotics trafficking who allowed men like Toledo gangster Thomas Licavoli to run the prison. Chester described the warden as an addling big man wearing on his ring finger a diamond as big as a robin’s egg to make plain which side of the law he believed in. It would require the governor sending the National Guard to the prison to make Thomas finally resign in 1934.
Chester’s attitude after his first year and a half was still one of furious adjustment and depression. When the 1930 census was taken, for example, he claimed ignorance of the state his father had been born in, and he told the census enumerator that his mother hailed from Missouri. He spoke his name so that it was written “Hines.” He amused himself with the nonstop gambling games; the colored men’s favorite was Georgia Skin. The game went on all day and night in the Black Bottom part of the dormitories. Good with cards, Chester saw himself as a distinctive, educated man among hoi polloi, who gave him his due. The men flattered him and he enjoyed receiving it. “I didn’t get anything but what I had always wanted most in life, and that was adulation,” remarked Jimmy Monroe, the main protagonist created from his prison experience.
However, having little in common with the foreshortened aspirations and poverty of so many of the men, Chester was lonely. In prison the saying went that after the lies swapped in the halls during the day, “the night’s for crying.” Being half afraid of his fellow inmates and terrified of showing any weakness didn’t help. Chester took the point of view that it was nearly always safer to defy the guards than the convicts; men were killed in the dorms over petty arguments and minor discourtesies. A middleweight and not noted for his physical power, Chester walked the prison ranges and yard with a six-inch “deterrent” blade. After having been sent to the hole a number of times by a deputy, he back-talked to one of the range guards and was hit in the back of his head with a “loaded stick and the concrete range came up and touched my nose.” Surviving imprisonment would require incredible poise and no small degree of luck.
Shortly after the evening meal on April 21, 1930, Himes and his comrades in the dormitory above the barbershop and bathhouse, a narrow, long brick building with a wooden roof north of the chapel, heard shouts of the men in the G and H cell-block tiers. When they looked outside, they saw smoke. A fire had broken out right beside the scaffolding being used to construct more new cell blocks. The vaulted ceiling of the upper ranges of that building, constructed in slate over top of wooden timbers, had ignited. The guards, not realizing the urgency of the moment, only released prisoners haphazardly; some guards, believing that it was hazardous to release any prisoners, resisted efforts to open the cells. When the correctional officers finally understood the dangerous extent of the fire, they began unlocking the cell blocks of the bottom ranges first. By the time turnkeys had reached the third and fourth tiers, the heat and smoke were unbearable, except to a few intrepid convicts, who had begun wetting blankets and racing along the ranges with hammers to smash the locks so as to free the men. Doomed, screaming men rammed their heads into the toilets in a futile attempt to escape asphyxiation and death by fire. But the upper-range rescue efforts were not even piecemeal; the fifth and sixth tiers of the G and H cell blocks were completely incinerated. Adding to the overall sense that the prisoners were willfully sacrificed, Warden Thomas patrolled the locked gates outside of the prison with a shotgun, preparing to fire on the first convict daring to climb over the walls.
After the city fire department used high-pressure hoses to extinguish the blaze, the entire roof structure and top tier of the G and H cell blocks collapsed into a pile of charred rafters, joists, and heat-twisted metal bars. In the two-hour span before the fire was extinguished, 322 convicts perished. By nightfall, stiffened black-faced corpses with twelve inches of green vomit stretching from their teeth to their chests littered the prison yard. The Ohio Penitentiary prison fire would rank among the greatest incidents of death by fire in U.S. history. With seven of every fifty prisoners dying in the conflagration, the clerk made up a special stamp for the prison ledger. He used it to fill in the column “When and How Discharged”: “DIED in FIRE APRIL 21, 1930.”
Radio networks set up stations outside of the yard and gave prisoners a chance to tell their stories, like prisoner 46812, who produced such a vivid account he received a check of $500 from the head of CBS. That night and the next, prison discipline did not exist inside the walls. High on diluted ether purloined from the penitentiary hospital, the men refused to be locked in their cells. They had sex, shot dice, and played Cab Calloway on the organ in the chapel. On the fifth tier of cell block C a convict named Broadway Rose staged lewd shows and set up a red-curtained bordello.
The day after the fire khaki-clad troopers from the 166th Regiment of the Ohio National Guard began to arrive outside the prison, relieving the hastily called in and weary police. But after the phantasmagoric night of “bitchery and abomination” and leveling the power of the guards, the men declined to return to their work companies. More than a thousand convicts elected a “Forty for Facts” Committee and initiated a “passive resistance” campaign to enact an agenda of prison reform, including the removal of Warden Thomas. Cries of “down with the pig” percolated throughout the yard. On April 28, Warden Thomas brought into the main yard hundreds of heavily armed riot squads with ring-handle .45s and machine guns to quell the protesting men. One thousand men continued their calls for the removal of the warden in the white painted cells of the A, B, C, and D blocks, a section known as “White City.” The prisoners, termed “belligerent” by the warden, sabotaged the lights and fought guards for thirty-six hours; some of the men took the opportunity to begin seriously digging to try to escape.
On May 1, the National Guard took over the prison, routing the belligerent prisoners from the hovels of White City and herding them into the yard. The renegades were searched and stockaded in tents on the ball field, enclosed by a hastily assembled chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. A week later, on May 7, the stockaded men burned the tents; Warden Thomas declined to use any firefighting equipment, and punished 150 of those determined responsible with lockdown in White City and bread and water rations. The rest of the men remaining in the stockade slept on the ground. Around 6 A.M. the next morning, a guardsman accidentally squeezed the trigger of a Browning water-cooled heavy machine gun, releasing several 30.06 rounds into the heads of two convicts, one a Cleveland black named Albert Freeman who was working in a dormitory on the other side of the prison yard. The commandant of the 166th gave only the slightest notice to the killings. The gruesome deaths touched a deep nerve in Chester, pensive and maddened after surviving the apocalyptic fire, only to be confronted anew with random, purposeless death once more. Guard units manned machine-gun posts in squares around the stockade until May 27.
Perceiving himself the scapegoat for the public relations nightmare of state malfeasance, corruption, and overcrowding, Warden Thomas turned his attention to the “small rebellious army” of prisoners and began a plan of reclassifications, transfers, and sending the leaders of the resistance to the hole. By the middle of May the prisoners were reassigned and soon twenty-five hundred men were lined up in the yard, rolling gravel all day. A year later two prisoners would receive life sentences after pleading guilty to second-degree murder, confessing that they had rigged the roof fire in an attempt at escape. Ultimately, they committed suicide.
The bustle of construction, new concrete ceilings for the cell blocks, and state-sponsored reform commissions occupied much of the Ohio inmates’ interest for the duration of 1930. Shortly after the fire detritus had been cleaned up, in June executions began again, ending the lives of seventeen-year-old Lee Akers and of George Williams, both black and from Cleveland, each convicted of killing a police officer. Surrounded by death and ruin, Chester yet had no idea if it was possible to wager on the future.
The Negro inmates were the recognized heroes of the calamity, and individual blacks were credited with saving dozens of inmates from the flames. But in 1930 Chester did not draw from his racial background as a source of unique strength, pride, or identity. For him, the baffling terror of the deadly night magnified his loneliness and childlike vulnerability. Hardly imperturbable, he used two words over and over again to describe his new feeling: “queer” and “hysteric.”
Chester’s writing career seems to have its impetus in the fire and his attempt to cope with the trauma he had witnessed and his internal feelings of horrifying shame. The 1934 short story “To What Red Hell” and the two novels drawn from the same manuscript—Cast the First Stone and Yesterday Will Make You Cry—position a main character, a surrogate for Chester named Jimmy Monroe, in the laundry-and-barbershop dormitory, a two-story brick building separated by the chapel from the main cell blocks that were on fire. In these tales the protagonist wanders the yard, observing the spectacle of the dead and dying, the heroic and the indifferent. Chester’s character Jimmy, a young, attractive boy serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery, has a stark awakening while witnessing the men dying in the fire and gaining the brief freedom available during the chaos. He tells of being unable to bring himself to rescue anyone, and he sees himself as morally feeble and emotionally distressed, unable to contain a desire he considered perverse, thrust into a world of “grotesque fantasy.” But if the inferno of horrifying death was imminent and likely, what value should he attach to noble behavior and restraint?
In Cast the First Stone, Jimmy Monroe insists that a dormitory mate accept a passionate kiss and then tells him, “I want you for my woman.” If Chester, like Jimmy, had once thought “I haven’t got to the place where I can do that yet,” after a year and a half of prison and a devastating fire, he could have Jimmy say that homosexual acts did not “even shock me anymore.” The deadly prison fire loosed a homoerotic impulse in Chester that marked the middle period of his prison experience, and in his later detective fiction he would frequently remark upon the conjunction between eroticism and death. When writing his memoirs he allowed that “no one tried to rape me,” but what shifted in him internally following the fire was far different than relief at escaping attacks from predatorial convicts. The fiery explosion and his deep need for emotional contact certainly corresponded to Joe Jr.’s blinding and the loss of his brother and ultimately his mother as confidants. But clearly Chester no longer found the homosexual practices objectionable on principle. Instead he considered uncoerced situational homosexuality in prison a compensatory and human reflex to the despair of life behind bars. But this acceptance was difficult to handle.
Writing was one activity that helped him overcome lonely isolation and puzzle through the welter of emotions after the fire. Chester started putting pencil to paper on the ground floor of the E and H cell block in the crippled company. His efforts to deal with the personal tragedy of incarceration, loneliness, physical vulnerability, the conflict of homosexual desire, and the gruesome slush of human entrails in the yard during the long night of April 21 launched his writing career. The prison fire itself served as the imaginative ground for the best of his earliest successes, “To What Red Hell,” which in turn served as the bedrock for his first full manuscript, Black Sheep. He must have begun drafting the short story soon after the fire to preserve the sharp details of the event, but considering it was apprentice work, it is also polished and sophisticated. As Estelle the sonneteer’s precocious son, Chester had experimented with composition before, but even the trauma he had known—the trampled young girl in Alcorn, his brother’s blinding, the multiple arrests, the pregnant girlfriends he had abandoned, even the prisoners he had seen gunned down by guards—did not inspire him in the manner of listening to the shrieks of the dying, stumbling through the gore of two cell block tiers’ worth of burned alive men, and living in its aftermath. He had the seed of a searing emotional experience to drive his ambition.
Twelve months after the fire, Chester found another reason to ready himself for a life beyond bars. In April 1931, the Ohio legislature passed three laws expediting parole by reducing sentences for good behavior and applying the relief retroactively, thus addressing prison overcrowding. “Under the provisions of the parole law every inmate of a state penal or reformatory institution automatically becomes eligible for a hearing before the Board of Parole at a specified time, determined by the statute under which he was convicted and his prison record, except, of course, those convicted of treason or murder in the first degree,” read the warden’s annual report to the governor, reflecting the new legislation. All of a sudden, Chester’s twenty-year minimum had dropped to six years and five months. The night the word of the law’s change was announced, the prisoners’ ebullient cries could be heard all over downtown. By the middle of September, the penitentiary newspaper counseled the overanxious, bellyaching inmates to “take it easy,” predicting that the newly enlarged parole board would start meeting in a week and begin paroling men.
Chester celebrated too early. On September 17, 1931, he was taken before a prison court and punished by having fifteen days added to his original sentence. Although Chester was silent about this infraction, technically men could have their sentence extended for infractions as simple as talking out loud, although most were simply punished on the spot, demoted from a work assignment, or sent to the hole. Still, he had no cause to lose optimism at the end of that summer. Surviving the fire, and then having the sentence shortened by two-thirds, revived his pursuit of distinction. Upon hearing that his sentence has been dramatically reduced, Chester’s character Jimmy Monroe thinks, “having stared so long into the gray opaqueness of those solid twenty years, it seemed as if I could look right through them and see the end; see freedom in all its glory, standing there.” Now Chester would discipline himself for a new life.
His initial determination to begin ordering his life through writing also had support from his family, some of it inadvertent. His back seized up on him, and the remedy was a partial body cast, an impossible solution in a prison with dilapidated mattresses and irregular convalescent care. Finding a rusty nail discarded on the hospital ward floor, Chester hacked off the plaster cast, infuriating the ward doctor. Fearful of reprisals, he begged Estelle to return to Ohio from a furlough in South Carolina to look after him, which she did. His workman’s compensation money allowed him to help his parents as the Depression worsened. Joseph Himes, looking thin and gray, paid a lone visit and moaned plaintively “if I just had my life to live over.” In fact, he would do just that. In May 1932, Chester’s father remarried, to a woman almost half his age, an entertainer from Baltimore named Agnes Rowe. The thirty-one-year-old singer of the Harmonique Five, who made her living in the clubs Chester had patronized in his street odyssey, had been divorced for only nine months. Rowe was glitzy enough to have the Chicago Defender carry news of the nuptials. Chester forked over four hundred dollars of his savings to his father.
Chester’s brother Joe was eclipsing him. Despite his loss of vision, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin, draped in national medals, and had been asked to work toward a master’s degree in the fall. His successes were admired all over the nation. In 1932 Joe left Ohio altogether, to begin his career teaching modern languages at Shorter Junior College in Arkansas. The next year he went to Austin, Texas, to Samuel Houston College. He was fulfilling his parents’ dream of a responsible teaching career. Estelle accompanied Joseph Jr. proudly, prepared to keep house and carry on surrogate reading and typing duties. Chester would remain in the penitentiary and have to rely exclusively on his own resources.
The Ohio Penitentiary had groomed a few writers, notably the embezzler turned master of the short story William Sydney Porter—O. Henry—whom it was impossible not to hear about, and whose stories Chester devoured while in prison. Writing was held in no little esteem by numbers of the incarcerated men. The weekly prison paper, distributed Saturday afternoon and mainly staffed by men serving long sentences, contained considerable literary banter during Chester’s confinement. The Penitentiary News battled against the loudmouths who shouted from the tiers during all hours and ruined the concentration of the more cerebral prisoners. The paper trumpeted the writers’ creed, quoting Jack London: “There is one rule that I rigidly observe. Nothing must interfere. I write fifteen hundred words a day. I may do more, but never less. When I say ‘a day’ I mean every day, seven days per week, 365 days per year.” There were enough men around for Chester to think of writing, fiction in particular, as serious work, meriting his strongest effort. In Cast the First Stone, Chester wrote that the prison newspaper editor approached Jimmy about contributing, to which he responded, wise-guy style, “ ‘I asked him was there anything in it for me.’ ” But the novel Chester wrote was from the point of view of a white protagonist, and it is not at all clear that a black writer at any level of talent would have been able to participate on the Penitentiary News.
Inward-looking and aloof, Chester began cobbling together his own short stories. In his autobiography, he described the disregard with which his fellow convicts greeted his work. But he admitted to having met one “black murderer of great intelligence,” a jeweler. In Cast the First Stone, it is this convict, called Metz in the novel, who sits on his bunk with a “textbook on short-story writing,” and persuades Jimmy to study the craft with him: ‘I’m going to take you up on that writing course,’ I said. ‘I’d like to know something about writing.’ ”
With gambling winnings and his steady income, Chester secured a typewriter. Remington portables and Underwoods were sold among the convicts for sums between fifteen and forty dollars. The clerklike function of typing and the example of solitary intellectual activity made the guards look favorably upon writing, since it eased the inevitable tension of holding so many able-bodied men in prison. Chester’s relationship with the prison officials changed; he now counted several among them as friends. At twenty-two, the age his brother had finished college, Chester devoted himself to acquiring a refined skill.
A torrent of short stories poured out of him in different styles. Perusing magazines like Collier’s, Black Mask (where he read a serialized version of The Maltese Falcon), Liberty, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post, Chester began writing romances and crime thrillers for the black press, including the Atlanta Daily World and Abbott’s Monthly, where his first short story “His Last Day” was published in November 1932. That story featured a condemned black convict awaiting his trip to the electric chair, a theme Chester continued in another story, 1936’s “The Night’s for Crying.” Significantly his formal writing career began by creating men modeled physically on his uncle Wade Wiggins and spiritually on the toughs of Scovil and Cedar Avenues. Chester evolved these early portraits into one of his finest characters, Luther McGregor of Lonely Crusade, his most important novel. His early concern had an obvious origin: Chester wrote about the intimidators within prison, men who held the yardstick to his own manhood. “Most of the black convicts in the Ohio State Penitentiary were dull-witted, stupid, uneducated, practically illiterate, slightly above animals,” he recalled surly in his autobiography The Quality of Hurt. But he had to give them respect. He had to orchestrate carefully his actions to share the cell block with such men and retain his own pride; it makes sense that his earliest work reflects his attempts to understand black murderers from the street-corner bar.
Condemned for killing a policeman, Spats Wilson of “His Last Day,” a “dark brown skin” man with a “large, powerful body” and “jungle strength and animal cunning,” wants to appear carefree and fearless on his way to the electric chair. “I’ll be smiling when the juice is turned on,” he yells after the reporters, “I’m a man.” While the clumsier elements of the stereotype seem to stand in the way of the full development of a character named for his attire, Chester wanted the reader to grapple with the emotional complexity of a violent black convict who struts across the yard to the death house, while “in his eyes there was the subtle hint of utter fear.” Similarly, in “The Night’s for Crying,” the hero, Black Boy, crimps the edges of a stereotype by “crying softly” in his prison cell after his girlfriend has visited. With early characters like Spats and Big Blue from “A Cup of Tea,” Chester exposed the softer side of statuesque black men, and worked to render their voices in the argot of the black street.
Of course he drew the stories of condemned men from the more than 1400 African American prisoners at the Ohio Penitentiary, 263 of them serving life sentences by 1935. Chester was inspired to write “His Last Day” in the wake of the execution of two brothers, Walter and Blanton Ralls, put to death in 1931 for the murder of the Crawford County sheriff. Six months later, four men, three of them black, who were members of a gang, were executed within a few days of one another. Walker Brown, one of the gang, was twenty-four, about Chester’s age. In March 1933 Athay Brown was electrocuted for murdering a woman in Cleveland. Five months later, brothers James and Joseph Murphy were both executed, on August 14, and prior to their meeting with the electric chair, they delivered rehearsed public testimonials protesting the barbarism of the death penalty. Another black man, Merrill Chandler, died in the electric chair that November, for killing a guard.
Throughout 1933, Chester sent the lion’s share of his work, about half a dozen short stories, to Abbott’s Monthly, the entertaining brainchild of Chicago Defender founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott. In the first part of that year, Chester’s work was published in every single issue. A magazine of about one hundred illustrated pages that cost a quarter and featured a close-up drawing of a bobbed sepia beauty, Abbott’s Monthly specialized in “true confession” fiction, and reached a circulation of around 100,000 before it closed at the end of that year. Two other young African American Midwestern writers published in Abbott’s Monthly as well. The first African American to make his living exclusively from writing, Langston Hughes, best known by then for his collections of Jazz Age, racial uplift poetry and the novel Not Without Laughter, published in the magazine between 1932 and 1933 and was from Cleveland. Chester’s first cousin Henry Lee Moon was a buddy of Hughes. Chester, who might have heard specific details about Hughes’s career from his cousin, imitated several of Hughes’s publishing moves in the 1930s. The other Abbott’s Monthly writer was a Chicago man breaking into print for the first time who was almost Chester’s exact age: Richard Nathaniel Wright. Although later other magazines would claim to have nurtured his talent, Chester was a direct product of the literary black press of Chicago.
Chester mailed his stories to Abbott in bundles. They were accepted and published as the editor saw fit and had space. Chester, missing girlfriends and parties, and wondering about the kind of life that awaited him after he left prison, also scribbled glitzy tales like “Her Whole Existence” and “A Modern Marriage” about gangsters and molls, flirtatious chippies, and independent sexually curious young women who might romantically commit themselves to men of the criminal class.
After perhaps eighteen months, Chester outgrew the genre stories. Around the end of 1932 or beginning of 1933, he had crafted a formidable short story, the twenty-thousand-word “Prison Mass,” which appeared in Abbott’s Monthly in three successive issues, March through May 1933. Mature and deep, the story drew its characters from his own life. This important and slightly autobiographical long story served as the proving ground for the manuscript that became the 1952 novel Cast the First Stone. “Prison Mass” offers three black convicts, named Kid, Brightlights, and Signifier, attending Catholic mass as a commentary on the dilemma of prison life, the propensity toward evil, and the foundation of hopeful transformation. Signifier is a career criminal in middle age who is cynical, suspicious, and superficial. The Kid is an idealist, who unwittingly accepts a life sentence for a murder that he didn’t commit. His purity makes him capable of strong emotional responses, from the sentimental to the violent. And in a move that made him personally vulnerable, Himes wrote from autobiographical experience when he created the twenty-five-year-old man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery named Brightlights, “put in the ‘cripple’ company because he had a fractured vertebra and wore a steel back support.” Of course, all of the men shared portions of Chester’s experience. Signifier, a professional thief, recalls a woman named Jean who was “simply nuts about him.”
“Prison Mass” shows Chester leaping ahead with confidence and agility as a storyteller. He shifted the point of view from character to character without any transition, collapsing the distance in consciousness, so that, in the course of the religious service, the three troubled men reach a kind of joint revelation. The key epiphanic moment is held by Kid, an Achilles-like sacrificial man whose mother is dying and who will never gain release from prison. Chester was showing the capacity to encounter subjects of personal disinterest without denying their importance. “I might not have believed in all of that tommy-rot that the ministers were trying to cram down my throat,” thinks the character Brightlights, “but I respected their belief and their honest endeavors to teach others to believe, and I sure as hell didn’t mock it.”
While the men sit in a row in three shades of blackness from dark to “the whiteness of Swiss cheese,” little racial prejudice intrudes on the story. Nonetheless, Brightlights muses that “people were more religiously inclined when they were ignorant and afraid than when they were intelligent and courageous. That was true among his people especially, or at least that was the impression he had received.” Chester was not the race militant he would become; he was still picking through what he had learned around the dinner table at home, the homily of Booker T. Washington.
If Chester connected easily and naturally to a black audience, he also chafed in a basic and fundamental way against the Jim Crow society, an acrimony that never required an ideology to shore up. Whatever histrionics were connected to Estelle’s rendering of their complex racial origins, she had instilled in Chester and Joseph Jr. a sense of fierce competitiveness and an expansive horizon of possibility. “He wanted to do something worthwhile, but it had to be something that would bring fame. That was the secret reason he had taken up writing, he admitted to himself. He had wanted the renown more than the money; wanted to see his name.” In 1932 with some effort, but not perhaps as much effort as it would have taken for him to complete college, he found success, his name on the byline in a newspaper. It was an experience that he would have, as a young man behind bars, over and over again in 1933 and 1934. Not even midway through 1933, Chester’s gambler’s instincts told him that he might reach a large audience who wished to read what he had to say.
While he showed signs early on of wanting to explore a complex, artistically provocative style, Chester wrote energetically for a commercial audience. He pursued dozens of publications, winning acceptance in several, from Chicago, Atlanta, and New York. In 1933 and 1934 he had had accepted the short stories “A Cup of Tea” by the Atlanta Daily World and “The Black Man Has Red Blood” by the Chicago Defender. “A Cup of Tea” featured Big Blue, who starts punching furiously when he is served tea. The resulting fights lead to a riot in which guards machine-gun prisoners, making it gallows entertainment for the Atlanta Daily World readers. In the more explicitly race-conscious Chicago Defender, he wrote of a black butler charged with rape and murder who, in spite of his imminent lynching, preserves the innocence of his young white charge. The short story asked a painfully brilliant rhetorical question, one that posed a question that was uniquely Chester’s: “What right had a ‘nigger’ to a white man’s nobility?”
In the middle of the Depression, Chester had an edge over some of his competitors: a roof overhead, three daily meals, and plenty of time. The prison conditions were the opposite of ideal, to be sure, but the advantages couldn’t be denied, an ironic condition captured in this Black Bottom ditty of dormitory life: “we ate our good-doin’ bread and called it punk, slept on our good-doin’ bed and called it bunk.”
Chester became friends in 1933 with a man who encouraged his talent, a twenty-four-year-old convict named Prince Rico, who sometimes fancied himself with the nom de plume of Auber LaCarlton Williams. Sentenced to ten years for a robbery in Columbus, Rico entered the penitentiary on June 27, 1933, and was assigned to the cripple company on account of damaged knees. Theatrical, flamboyant, and tough, Rico had been born in Georgia and grown up in California. He had spent a nomadic youth wandering the country, working in circuses, and learning the musician’s trade and gaining a professional interest in black folklore and lyrics. He tramped around the dormitory with a ukulele attached by shoestrings to his neck.
There were dramatic differences in background between the two men and, having heard of Chester’s success in the literary world, Rico openly admired him. He was also sexually attracted to Chester, who reciprocated his feelings, while, apparently, still struggling with a desire that he understood as degenerate and which, if discovered by prison authorities, could lengthen his sentence. In a 1952 letter to Carl Van Vechten, the photographer and booster of black art, Chester admitted that Rico “was the boy in the story [Cast the First Stone], entire and absolute, and I was in love with him more, perhaps, than I have ever been in love with anyone before or since.” Fifteen years after prison Himes could cautiously admit some details about the relationship to a man like Van Vechten, a dear friend who was known to have homosexual affairs.
At the end of the spring 1934 academic term, Joseph Jr. and Estelle Himes returned from Texas to Columbus, to 49 E. Eleventh Street, and Joseph began the course work toward a doctorate in sociology. His acceptance in the graduate program again won newspaper acclaim. Joseph was the darling of his class, the student who had already mastered the theoretical positions that his peers were scurrying to adopt. Even though the brothers would never resume the intimacy of their youth in Mississippi and Arkansas, their successes weighed on each other. Chester’s budding victories in 1932 had turned into bona fide professional success by late 1934. Joseph countered by researching and writing an eighty-four page dissertation entitled “The Negro Delinquent in Columbus, 1935.” Estelle’s regular visits to Chester resumed and, in Joseph’s mildly begrudging view, it was her influence that single-handedly enabled Chester to launch a writing career. “I think Mother talked with the prison Administrator and persuaded him that because of his injuries, Chester could not work in the shops,” Joseph Jr. recalled years later. But Joe, who neither wrote to nor visited Chester in prison, made an unreliable claim; in 1932 and 1933 Estelle had lived with Joe so that he could begin his career. Chester’s earliest push was internal and had come earlier.
It is within the context of his friendship with Prince Rico that Chester’s ambition grew, almost as if an intensifier had been added to his literary skill. Chester pursued the next step as a writer in two directions, perhaps equally obvious. First, he wanted to get beyond the short story and require more of himself than being a sepia O. Henry. There was, however, an element of O. Henry’s success that Chester did want. Apparently the labile nature of race relations in northern and middle Ohio, as well as the absence of absolute segregation in high school, college, and prison, encouraged him to think squarely of success on the grandest—and most commercial—terms. Since he accepted black Americans as a minor ethnic group sullied by slavery, it made perfect sense to Chester to begin writing stories headed by white characters. As a man who was, on account of his prison term, completely déclassé himself, Chester did not consider first what the black bourgeoisie into which he had been born thought of him. He knew that American whites wished to read about themselves as forceful decision makers and that they understood black Americans as passive subordinates, distinctly lesser beings. If he was at all unsure on his course of action, he had only to look at the success of Ernest Hemingway, a Michigan-reared man who had lived abroad and whose early work—like The Sun Also Rises, “The Killers,” and “Fifty Grand”—deliberately attempted to project churlish and belittling racial attitudes. Captivated by Hemingway’s success and mystique, Chester would write stories of white life.
If “Prison Mass” was his breakthrough in theme and symbolism, the shift to white characters enabled him to land before a larger audience. In 1934, Chester wrote and published his best stories about prison life, featuring white protagonists, in a brand-new magazine shifting the terms of American masculinity, Esquire. Founded in October 1933 by Arnold Gingrich, a smart young graduate from the University of Michigan, Esquire was a men’s magazine first appearing at nearly the precise moment of the repeal of Prohibition.
Promoting sport, commercialism, and sex, Esquire was also very nearly a magazine crafted around Ernest Hemingway, who appeared in the inaugural issue with John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, and Dashiell Hammett. Hemingway wrote for the magazine every other month in its first couple of years and always received top billing when he did. Promised a mere $250 per short story, Hemingway started out sending sporting letters from Bimini and Cuba; then, in August 1936 he published one of his finest short works there, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In its early years Esquire also published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maksim Gorky, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, and Langston Hughes. In September 1934, Esquire had a newsstand circulation of 121,812; in two years circulation was seven times that figure. The magazine quickly became a bellwether for American literary taste.
Gingrich had bragged to Hemingway that the new rag would have “ample hair on its chest, to say nothing of cojones,” and he incorporated another modern version of America in it as well. A bargain hunter for talent, he didn’t draw the color line, as long as the material didn’t reveal “any trace of any kind of accent” or ethnic badge. For practical commercial reasons Gingrich was initially reluctant to address American racial relations. Thus, the first issue, of 124 pages, contained 27 pages of drawings from a “fantastically talented colored kid” named E. Simms Campbell, who also designed the Esquire logo. Campbell’s drawings never revealed his African American ancestry.
By January 1934 Gingrich changed his mind, realizing that controversy was superb advertising. On his editorial page he announced to his readers his intention to publish a Langston Hughes short story about a wealthy New Yorker with a fetish for black chorus girls. In the next month, he printed all of the replies, and he joked that the commentaries indicated either “compulsory and universal miscegenation” or the “resumption of the Civil War.” Gingrich learned that the animus was genuine. One reader said, “If you print the story by the negro author, Langston Hughes, I shall not only cancel my subscription to your magazine, but shall discontinue any further business with Jacob Reed’s Sons, due to the fact that they recommend your magazine.” Another subscriber from Tulsa, a bigot who was still dismayed by the numbers of blacks “it took the city incinerator days to burn” after the infamous 1921 massacre, wrote, “Don’t you think having the only nigger in Congress is enough of an embarrassment to the administration without Chicago starting something that it may cost men and millions to stop?”
The clashing energy and affirming voices—“By all means shoot through the ‘high yaller’ story,” and “your readers would appreciate a little dash of spice”—were precisely the sort of titillated yelp that Gingrich needed for the young magazine. In April Hughes had his Esquire launch with “A Good Job Gone,” a tale of a wealthy banker, college-educated black butler, and oversexed chippie, “one of these golden brown’s, like an Alabama moon,” who emitted a “nigger laugh—one of ours. So deep and pretty.” A month later Esquire published Hughes’s “The Folks at Home,” a conventional racial-uplift story about the lynching of a black man whose elegant taste has taken him far away from his rural Southern roots.
Chester charmed his way into the magazine and “through correspondence, I came to know Arnold Gingrich well.” For his submissions to Esquire, Chester adhered to Gingrich’s initial wariness toward the ethnic trace and abandoned black protagonists and narrators and themes of racial uplift. At the same time he would send the magazine some of its coarsest material, sharply contesting Victorian mores that stressed restraint, moral uprightness and courage. Instead, Chester showed violent, cynical, emotionally overwrought men about to dissolve.
He was paid seventy-five dollars for his initial short story, and Gingrich bought two at once, “Crazy in Stir” and “To What Red Hell.” Chester debuted in the August issue, which included lead articles by Hemingway and Leon Trotsky and poetry by Ezra Pound. Esquire introduced Chester as “a long-term prisoner in a state penitentiary.” “Crazy in Stir”—“the first convict writing to appear in our pages,” Esquire boasted—tried to take the reader inside of the madness of a hard-boiled convict named Red whose confinement leads him to the brink of psychosis. Chester’s truculent inmate reflected the burgeoning classificatory system of the prison, which adjudged from a sample of 862 men 347 as “psychopathic” and 157 “psychotic.”
While Red was a popular name, one used among African Americans to note anyone light enough in color that he could be seen to blush, a convict named John “Red” Downing, electrocuted on March 10, 1933, had achieved a notoriety at the Ohio Penitentiary. He had killed the wife of Danile Bonzo, the chief record clerk. Chester’s character patrols the aisles of a bunk-filled dormitory, similar to Chester’s, raging at the cage he inhabits and the denizens of its corridors, from the tedious cretin trying to barter oranges for nickels to the Negro inmates singing and dancing near the latrine at the Black Bottom. Like a Hemingway hero, Red sharply disparages black Americans. “He would see what the hell they were doing, the black, stolid animals. . . . The days passed and they didn’t know it. Time meant nothing to them.”
When Red sees two colored men on a bunk praying, he thinks “singing to a white man’s idea of God.” Here Chester’s hard-bitten white protagonist cynically canceled out the agnostic religious position of “Prison Mass.” While Red shares common prejudices about black people—theirs is a life limited to sensation and corporality—in his tense parade through the barracks, he finds himself reluctantly drawn again and again to the Black Bottom, to its music and song, to “the anguish of a race that has learned to suffer.” Chester was penetrating the interior of a hurt man, by using description and dialogue, and he was pulling back from the heavy-handed narration that had limited some of his earlier works. He was also deftly alluding to complex racial dynamics in American life.
Publishing “Crazy in Stir” in a trendsetting magazine landed Chester on the front page of the Columbus newspaper. In a short time he was lauded for his powerful short story in the New York newspaper the Amsterdam News, where his cousin Henry had taken a position. The Amsterdam News even included him as a geographically distant member of the Negro Writers Guild and the Harlem Renaissance. “A ‘new O. Henry’ in the person of inmate Chester Himes (colored), is in the budding,” informed the paper.
Despite being incarcerated, from the reality of a cement-floor cell block and an open latrine, his prospects, in fact, looked amazing. With his second short story in Esquire, Chester actually began to make the difficult transition to novel writing, and he was putting together a longer work that rang out with fully convincing tragic intensity. If Chester had started with heroes similar to Hemingway’s, “To What Red Hell,” published in Gingrich’s magazine in October, presented another kind of man. Himes turned the mordant prison-fire episode into an absurdity-tinged quest for the personal salvation of a squeamish World War I veteran named Blackie, who struggles to withstand his baptism by fire. Like a tactician depicting the scene of battle, Chester shows the inferno, the grotesque array of dead, and the heroic black giants hauling men to safety.
Blackie has a “queer feeling” and shrinks from the rescue, unable to “lend a hand.” He assures himself that his lame response—“No can do”—is not based on fear. Instead of heroic martyrdom, he stakes out the ground of the prison, which duplicates the symbolic grid of western civilization’s response to the human crisis, including religion, science, and liberal humanism. Blackie ambles from the Protestant chapel, where a convict plays Handel’s “Death March,” to the hospital where convicts rob the corpses, over to a group in darkness advocating a passive-resistance prison reform movement, which he scorns. Blackie finds the tawdry homosexuality of prison life breaking into the open on the evening of the fire: a “big blonde guy kissing a nice-looking, brunette youth” and a “tall, black boy called Beautiful Slim” crying, “ ‘Oh Lawd, ma man’s dead.’ ” When he spots Beautiful Slim rifling a corpse’s pockets, Blackie tries to hit Slim and regain his ethical standing but, unlike the traditional hero, he falls instead into the muck of charred entrails. Thinking of a Kate Chopin short story, “Dead Men’s Shoes,” which is set on an old plantation, Blackie advances to another house of worship, the Catholic chapel, where he generates an alternative creed of American nihilism: “I believe in the power of the press, maker of laws, the almighty dollar, political pull, a Colt’s .45.” After seeing a fireman shoot an arsonist, Blackie passes the death house, then the commissary and cafeteria, exposing the entire underbelly of the prison and its engines of condemnation, recrimination, and specious justice.
Chester used this short story to collapse the racial distance, gaping wide now after thirty-eight years of legally enforceable Jim Crow. First, the entire symbolic apparatus of the deadly fire erases racial identity. The white protagonist called Blackie notes that the dead all suffer the same “smoke-blackened flesh.” Blackie identifies a similar chiaroscuro melding among the living convicts, the “White faces, gleaming with sweat, streaked with soot” and the “White teeth in sweaty black faces.” Chester also presents notable blacks: a “big Negro called Eastern Bill” saving men from burning alive, the “tall, black boy called Beautiful Slim,” and Dangerous Blue, a scarred “wide-mouthed Negro standing on the kitchen range with a six-inch dirk in his hand.” While Chester did not ennoble all of these portraits, the black characters were distinct and remarkable; in a mainstream publication avoiding racial-uplift politics he had successfully moved black men beyond villains or comic menials. After Chester was out of prison, Meyer Levin, Gingrich’s astute literary assistant, would write to him saying that the short story “received the greatest ‘curtain call’ of any short story published in Esquire during its first years of publication.”
Chester had a rare perspective on black life from American society’s utter margin, one that he never relinquished. He managed to impose standards of artistic discipline and to cultivate his imagination. That he had done so—without artistic instruction and literary friendships, and in rejection of a code of social and racial improvement—while on a Negro convict’s bunk with a folding table next to a urinal was more than surprising. It was distinguished.
Undoubtedly, having a collaborator or artistic coconspirator, cerebral as well as sensual, helped Chester as he prepared his short stories. But his affection for Prince Rico also attracted unwanted attention. On August 2, 1934, both Chester and Rico had two months added to their sentences, likely for being caught in a sex act. While the novel Cast the First Stone has the men punished but specifically makes the relationship chaste, Chester revealed to Van Vechten that he and Rico “had a full and complete and very touching love affair, and fulfilled each other emotionally, and spiritually and physically.”
The punishment was offset by the Prince Rico’s deep friendship and admiration, which played a role in inspiring Chester during the extraordinary working twelve months between the publication of the final installment of “Prison Mass” in May 1933 and the acceptance of his Esquire stories. In spite of the penalty of extra time, Chester still managed a transfer to the London Prison Farm on September 21, 1934. As he concluded in the novel Cast the First Stone, “the farm was the way to freedom.”
London Prison Farm was a large working farm used to reward model prisoners and produce food for the other state institutions. During Chester’s time there, the population fluctuated between 1163 and 1561 men, monitored by a small number of guards. At “the Farm,” the “better class” of inmates remained incarcerated, but not behind bars. Of course, it was still prison: dreary, banal, and on the brink of violence.
In Chester’s earliest extant letter, written to the London Prison Farm censor Alice Armine, Warden William Armine’s daughter, he asked for permission to explore the unseemly side of penitentiary life. Calling his works in progress “script[s],” Chester testified to having received “so many upbraidings from the different officers of this institution” that he was weary. He had arrived at the London Prison Farm already preparing to send out versions of stories and chapters loosely based on his prison time. Chester confided to the prison censor that he labored on “a story that deals with the growth of affection between two convicts” with “the implication in one of the character’s thoughts of sex perversion—but not the statement.” He seems never to have considered writing that regretted the reality of his experience.
Chester’s final eighteen months serving his sentence would have reminded him of the rural life he had known slightly as a child in Lorman and then briefly driving the tractor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He lived on the farm throughout 1935, and while it could be tranquil, deadly violence was never far off even among men near parole. On May 16, one prisoner stabbed another to death with a guard standing only twenty feet away. Men perished regularly from tuberculosis and botched surgeries by prison doctors. If there was slightly less incentive for nearly released men to escape, the ease with which it could be done still enticed them regularly. Seven walked off at the end of August 1935. With only minimal educational facilities, boredom and idleness were severe, and the deputy warden added to Chester’s unease by glowering at him as he filed out of the mess hall.
In the winter of 1936, when Chester’s parole date was announced, it made news back at the Columbus prison. Prince Rico wrote to him from the coal company, two weeks before Chester’s release. “Glad you’re through with the long road,” the letter began. Rico was at work sending out short stories for prison anthologies “plugging hard at the writing game, and music.” While Chester concluded Cast the First Stone with Duke Dido’s suicide, real-life Prince Rico was thanking Chester for his help. “Working with you has done everything for me and my writing,” he admitted, in the midst of asking Chester for his radio once he was released. Rico’s emotional letter showed him balanced and still somewhat infatuated, in the manner in which Chester would show the denouement of their friendship in the novel. “I’m flattered and glad no end you think I was able to give you anything of value,” Prince Rico wrote, still referring to Chester as “Puggy Wuggy,” the endearment the men cribbed from O. Henry stories. Rico had taken out an annual subscription to Esquire and the former burglar praised Chester, who would publish another short story in the magazine that spring and again late in the summer. “I’ve learned to think, treat people as people, and use good judgment,” he wrote. The friends promised to meet again in Los Angeles, a promise that Chester would keep. Recalling the artists that they had discussed, like Langston Hughes and black cartoonist E. Simms Campbell, Rico’s letter also provided the first evidence of Chester having systematically looked at a modern novel—Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Even though Chester had sought an odd dance of restraint and intimacy with Rico, for much of 1934 he had at least found a fellow prisoner with whom he could exchange ideas and test out his knowledge. Rico had begun by serving as a literary secretary, retyping the stories for him, but he also became an artist in his own right. By the beginning of 1935, Prince Rico would be lauded in the press for trying to write an opera, based on black convict and farmhand work chants, very close to what the trained African American composers Nathaniel Dett and William L. Dawson (of Hampton and Tuskegee Institute, respectively) were trying to do. He had also made contact with playwright and screenwriter Jonathan Finn, the author behind the films Chalked Out and Jailbreak, in hope of getting his work anthologized.
Chester and Prince Rico had created a literary society together, and Chester had written and published strong work during their poignant friendship. For the remainder of his career, Chester required an intimate connection as a kind of daily ignition for writing. With Rico he had had the gift of being able to convince someone of the validity of his ambition, and he had matured beyond the callow youth of his most troubled years. “You’ll write great things because it is expected of you—by all of us,” Prince Rico wrote to him. Chester took that prophecy with him when his parole was finally granted on April 1, 1936.