Chester and Jean arrived at Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm on June 5, 1941, and stayed the summer. At first Chester thought the pastoral retreat would refresh his writing. The squalor of Central Avenue, parsing through the intrigues of black labor organizing, and the timid caution of his relatives had been stifling. He put it in slang when he confided to Henry, “I had to give up Cleveland because the colored people there were jiving me.” An unhurried summer at the idyllic “museum piece” estate of one of America’s best-known writers seemed like the antidote.
Busy Malabar Farm was recognized by most of its visitors as an arcadia. The grounds contained the sprawling clapboard manor, known as the Big House, sustained by a thicket of outbuildings, including barns and a brick smokehouse, all sharing identical copper roofs. Bromfield’s six-hundred-acre village in the Ohio foothills was of beauty scenic enough that when Chester laid eyes on it he fancied, “I would be content to remain here the rest of my life.”
Bromfield employed a professional staff including Ray Smith, a uniformed black chauffeur from Cleveland, and Reba Williams, a black cook. Chester found the staff was fully needed because Malabar was more a hotel than a working farm. From April to New Year’s Day, Malabar averaged twenty overnight visitors daily, with the kitchen serving guests three full meals. The arrangement, poorly conceived, was for Chester to serve as butler and Jean to help out in the kitchen. Jointly they were paid $120 a month, and they had Sunday afternoons and every other Thursday off. Chester would write, apparently, like Bromfield himself, in daily two-hour bursts of vitality between more callousing labors. Bromfield dashed off his sentences “until I’m numb,” he liked to brag, “then I go out and plow.” When he wasn’t doing either, he exhorted his servants and guests to pitch in, and his young daughter Ellen fondly remembered the admonition delivered by the squire who had never known anything other than ample board. “Them that works, eats,” he said, repeatedly, loudly, obnoxiously. Fights between spirited guests and Bromfield himself were known to break out on account of the demanding regimen, but Bromfield thrived off of the rippling currents in his household. He always had another intense spectacle on the rise. In July, Bromfield hosted a Malabar carnival, an extravaganza of flower shows, garden parties, dances, Monte Carlo games, and musical entertainment. Instead of serenity, Chester was up to his eyeballs in service.
Bromfield encouraged everyone, including his family, to call him “the Boss” and he expected hirelings to double up on chores. As butler, Chester worked close to the Boss and his live-in secretary, George Hawkins. After a fortnight, Chester found the job “exceedingly hard, the hours exceedingly long.” He told Henry, “The main reason for coming down here was that I thought Bromfield might give me a lift.” But the lift went down and not up. Chester was too exhausted to write anything. “All I get out of it is a lot of work from 7 A.M. to 8 P.M., which is too goddamned much.” Beguiled at first by the authority he respected from his mother and which had been imposed on him by the state, Chester began swiftly to chafe against it.
Rewriting Black Sheep, the novel of a Mississippi white boy’s experience in an Ohio prison, would have been onerous regardless of the burden of service work at Malabar. The editors at Doubleday got back to him with a report that flattered and floored him all at once. Chester wrote “extremely well and vividly” but the world he described—his no-holds-barred account of American prison life—was “perhaps too vivid.” “Frankly,” Doubleday’s representative admitted, “we do not feel that we can sell a book as grim as this one.” He couldn’t understand the rejection as biased when Edward Dodd, from Dodd Mead, shared a similar written estimate. While Chester could “write so well I’d hate to let him go,” and the book itself was “unusually powerful,” the “morbid” and dyspeptic theme was “strong meat for public consumption.” Touching on the abundant reference to degeneracy in prison life, one of the readers had suggested, “I should think he could soft pedal one element of it.” With praise for his writing but no contract for the rough novel, he was facing adversity now that reminded him of censorship in prison. But by making all of the main characters white, he could at least imagine that the color barrier was not holding him down.
As for Bromfield and his wife, Mary, “despise” was the adjective that characterized Chester’s emotions by the third week of toting and hefting. He determined to leave after the first payday, and he did little to hide his enmity toward Bromfield. However, according to Chester, his employer disliked being thought ill of by subordinates. Bromfield responded to Chester’s sour mood by offering to take his Black Sheep manuscript to Hollywood film producers. In August Bromfield would make three trips from Ohio to Los Angeles to work on screenplays and negotiate contracts. Bromfield also promised his new butler that he would heartily recommend the prison manuscript on his October trip to New York, and get Black Sheep over the hump with cautious publishers. Urging Chester to go west, the Boss held out the tantalizing dream of big-time publication and Hollywood success.
The source of Bromfield’s kindness had something to do with the Jellifes in Cleveland, but probably even more with Bromfield’s good friend Edna Ferber, the author of Show Boat. When that novel was adapted for Broadway, it had helped to make Paul Robeson famous with the hit song “Old Man River.” To her credit, Ferber had helped educate the important black novelist Waters Turpin, the son of her maid. Bromfield would go Ferber one better by launching a man farther down, a black ex-con.
Chester and Jean began planning to relocate to Los Angeles, where he had been assured he could find work writing screenplays and serving as a consultant on Hollywood movies with prison themes. The studios had brought out three such films in 1940, Castle on the Hudson, Millionaires in Prison, and Johnny Apollo, and they were casting or planning City Without Men, Prison Mutiny, and Escape from Crime that fall.
Nevertheless, Chester regarded the friendly gesture as an example of liberal guilt. While he hoped to use Bromfield’s leverage, Chester retained his contempt toward the man. Five years later, when he drafted the novel Lonely Crusade, Chester would depict Louis Bromfield as the fictional Louis Foster, the “tall, gangling man in plaid woolen shirt and old corduroy trousers,” an industrialist and aircraft company executive, and the novel’s fascist villain. That novel would be one of the best books probing the overlapping realms of race, class, and sexuality after the Second World War. Instead of cherishing Bromfield’s liberalism—Bromfield had begun as a New Dealer, until the government started regulating farms—Chester would forever point to America’s self-made aristocrats as haughty, spoiled bullies.
“There is no place like America,” Foster said, and the emotion in his voice was genuine because the opportunity for betterment afforded by America was his special love. He was convinced that any American (except women, whom he did not consider men’s equal; Negroes, whom he did not consider as men; Jews, whom he did not consider as Americans; and the foreign born, whom he did not consider at all), possessed of ingenuity, aggressiveness, and blessed with good fortune, could pull himself up by his bootstraps to become one of the most wealthy and influential men in the nation—even President. The fact that neither he nor his associates had been faced with this necessity had no bearing on his conviction. Like other fables of the American legend, the truth made little difference—as long as he believed, just as he now believed that there was no other place on earth where a Negro son of servant parents could achieve a college education. “No place like America,” he repeated.
Not content merely to smear Bromfield and what he represented, Chester was capably examining his own complicity, which made both Bromfield’s swagger and his own obsequiousness possible. With their authority so unequal, he admitted his own “compulsion to agree, flatter, serve the vanity of this great white man.” As an obsequious man, he understood perfectly well that Jean would lose respect for him, a difference in sphere but not in kind from what he had witnessed in his own household as a child. At Malabar Farm, comparing himself with a cocksure white writer who had attained wealth beyond all that he and Jean hoped to achieve and who was in the process of accumulating more . . . well, that comparison was deeply unflattering.
Chester visited his father in Cleveland and consulted with him about the possible excursion west. He encouraged Joseph Sr. to tag along. Chester believed he might be on the verge of making it big, and his father had always supported his youngest son, even when he had not provided practical guidance. Joseph Sr. told him he would consider the relocation. At a going-away party their Cleveland relatives wished the couple well. Jean’s folks presented them with a black horsehide suitcase, while Chester’s Aunt Leah presumed he was headed for more flittering and foundering. “I hope that they will soon find themselves? They don’t seem to know what they want to do” was her general observation about the couple. Chester then went down on his own to Columbus to see his mother and Joe Jr. When Jean met him there, about the first week of October, they boarded a Greyhound bus for Los Angeles.
Chester and Jean arrived in a West Coast metropolis that was a migrant’s beacon but becoming increasingly like the American South. Exodusters from Oklahoma and Arkansas flooded California at the end of the 1930s, fleeing the Depression and drought that ravaged their farms. Barely 63,000 of L.A.’s 1.5 million people were black in 1941, but by 1944 that figure would jump to 118,000. Chester viewed goodly portions of the 448-square-mile city as “a drab panorama of one-storied, stuccoed buildings unfolded in monotonous repetition.” With “no place for Negroes to live” in Hollywood or Beverly Hills, where there was domestic work, he and Jean had to find lodging in a corridor that Langston Hughes called the “remote districts,” an area south of downtown, in the central part of the city.
In a show of extravagance, the Himeses booked rooms at the posh Erskine Apartments at 1464 Central Avenue, close to the Twelfth Street streetcar line and the bustling crossroads of black Los Angeles, fondly called “the Harlem of the West.” Central Avenue, nicknamed the “Great Black Way,” was the mighty river for Southern California’s African American community, connecting downtown to the southern suburb of Watts. At Forty-First Street and Central lay the key strip with bars, lounges, jazz clubs, and nightclubs, like the Club Alabam, the Downbeat Club, and the cocktail lounge at the Dunbar Hotel (the first luxury hotel for African Americans), while the Lincoln Theater at Twenty-Third Street and the Plantation Club farther up Central rounded out the nightlife. The high-paying aircraft and shipbuilding industries were an automobile ride away at the docks of San Pedro near Long Beach. African American film celebrities and jazz musicians flocked to Los Angeles, some working on big-budget productions like The Green Pastures (1936). Celluloid minstrel Eddie “Rochester” Anderson had a house with a fabulous swimming pool and garage at Thirty-Sixth Street and Western Boulevard, so dubbed “Rochester Lane.” If perhaps the main draw was yet the opulence of the Hollywood film industry, all of L.A.’s parts helped to sustain an atmosphere of carefree stylishness along the palm-tree-lined streets.
Sunny Los Angeles had elements of a dreamworld in the early fall of 1941 for the young Midwesterners, used to the sooty pall of an industrial city frozen for half of the year. But 1941 L.A. was not progressive. Even after the Second World War, crowds would balk at interracial bands, like the combo led by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and not merely on account of racism, but inadequate cultural antennae. “California,” remembered Gillespie’s drummer Stan Levey, “was in those days ten or fifteen years behind the times.” Gillespie himself put a more pointed racial marker on the people in Los Angeles: “Man, it’s a whole lotta ‘Toms’ and musical nothings and all that.” In even more stark terms, a specific meanness kept Chester and Jean alert. If Jean walked down Central or Vernon Avenue alone, “ten, fifteen, or twenty” cars would sidle up to the curb, driven by white men, soliciting.
Bromfield had topped off their pay with a $100 bonus, so the Himeses had a small stake of perhaps $300. They needed to find work—and success—immediately. Chester quickly secured a job with the California Sanitary Canning Company, who hired him as a labeling machine helper. If it was unskilled labor, at least it wasn’t pushing a broom or swinging a mop. Buoyed up by the employment and getting used to clutching Jean by the arm as they traveled, Chester softened his opinion on L.A. a bit, writing to Langston Hughes in mid-October that he and Jean liked “the city a little better than we did at first.” But the favorable impression was fleeting. After a short time Chester quit the job, claiming racial discrimination, and he did so with enough public theater to be remembered by the foreman. The unfair labor conditions forced Chester to conclude that “black people were treated much the same as [in] an industrial city in the South.” Yet, L.A.’s whites seemed to want blacks to understand that they were receiving deluxe treatment for which they should be conspicuously pleased.
Generous and gracious, Langston Hughes sent Chester a full roster of contacts, directing him to the black literati of Los Angeles, especially those on the left: his comrade the civil rights attorney Loren Miller, the bright youngsters Welford Wilson and John Kinloch, policeman Jess Kimbrough, and his old friend and sometime nemesis, novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. A week later, when Hughes was asked to preside over a League of American Writers dinner for L.A.’s black scribblers, he put Chester’s name first on his list of invitees for the early November event. A supportive Hughes then approached Blanche Knopf in New York directly about publishing Chester’s prison novel. Chester took the lists of introduction and tried to wend his way into professional circles.
Some of the people were inaccessible. The recent winner of the Anisfield Wolf Prize for race relations, the well-known Hurston had secluded herself to work on a novel and on an opera with composer William Grant Still. But Chester received a hearty response from Welford Wilson. An orator and former track star at City College in New York who had been a leader in opposing Jim Crow at athletic events in the mid-1930s, Wilson worked for the U.S. Employment Agency and was also a budding novelist. Wilson had known Hughes since the end of the 1920s, and Hughes recommended him for the Communist-backed League of American Writers School in Los Angeles. Energetic, bright, and invested in radical politics, Wilson too was newly arrived to Los Angeles. Heavily involved in Communist Party organizing, he tried to recruit Chester. “I was given the works,” Chester remembered, recalling their attendance at cell meetings, social affairs, lectures, dinner parties, and interviews in the fall of 1940.
Chester went with Wilson as he spoke or hobnobbed with ambitious young California blacks like the Reverend Clayton Russell, the young minister of the three-thousand-strong congregation of the Independent Church of Christ. Flamboyant and nervy, Russell had just returned from a trip to Europe and had visited several of the capitals prior to their fall to the Nazis. Chester also met two Los Angeles black veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Edward Carter and Eluard McDaniel, who had fought heroically in Spain. On account of his contacts and devoted politics, Wilson had “a great influence” over Chester in those early months in L.A.
In the course of his meanderings, Chester was introduced to Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson, Hollywood’s leading Communist screenwriters; more than a quarter of the screenwriters were thought to belong to the Party in the early 1940s. Trumbo especially had the career that Chester wanted. He had published the novel Johnny Got His Gun and then been hired by Warner Bros. for sixty dollars a week and raced up the writing ladder with speed. In spite of his wealth and success, Trumbo was a principled antiracist. When FBI agents visited him, under the pretense of examining pro-fascist mail he received, but grilling him more closely for his leftist politics, he pivoted back, “Are you anti-Semitic? anti-Catholic? anti-Negro?”
Lawson was the dean of the Communist writers. It was said that at Lawson’s parties he invited guests into his elegant, spacious home and proclaimed, “Welcome to the Communist Party.” Lawson was a mover and shaker in the California chapter of the League of American Writers, fundamentally an offshoot of the Party’s John Reed Clubs from the early 1930s, but still functioning as a broad organization that bonded creative artists, leftists, New Dealers, and antifascists of all stripes. Both Lawson and Trumbo were known for helping novice writers, especially by critiquing their work. Chester never fully thawed the big shots like Trumbo and Lawson, who invited him in for a drink, but always informally, in the kitchen.
Chester was more at home among the local black left-wing intelligentsia, a group that included California Eagle publisher Charlotta Bass and her nephew and managing editor John Kinloch, a member of the Screen Writers Guild who was hoping to develop an African American film production company, and a member of Clayton Russell’s church. At the center of the circle was Loren Miller, Hughes’s good friend who had gone on the ill-fated film trip to Russia in 1932 with Henry Moon. A biracial self-described cynic, Miller was then hard at work on developing a legal means to defy restrictive real estate covenants and thinking of running for Congress. He would go on to write most of the NAACP brief for perhaps the most consequential Supreme Court case of the twentieth century, Brown v. Board of Education. Unconcerned to be among those openly connected to Communist organizations and journals, Miller sat on the fence between Communist proselytizer and comfortable bourgeois attorney. By the early 1940s, Henry Lee Moon was finding Miller using the word “duplicity” to discuss the Party and its relationship with black Americans, but at very least Miller was a strong believer in Marxist principles. He was also a literary man, who had joined the League of American Writers in 1939, wrote literary and cultural criticism, and offered analyses of the creative work of his friends, like the white screenwriter John Bright. He advocated the study of black literature as a part of the whole American culture, hoping to evaluate black writing “realistically” and in the context of its “social history.” Probably what Chester enjoyed about him best was his tendency to satirize mercilessly and use his wit to “burn holes in the toughest skin.” In Miller’s company, Chester met men like Clarence Johnson, the national field representative for Negro employment and training for the War Production Board. Miller and Johnson steeped Chester in a dense factual overview about the state of black migration, race relations, the legal structure, and the possibilities for organized labor to wear down corporate managers.
For a short time Chester’s best friend from prison, Prince Rico, regularly visited the couple. Rico had always admired him, and Chester had continued to build on the literary promise that set him apart in prison. About the intimate connection that the two men had forged, Chester later wrote, “I don’t know when it got over, but when it got over, it was completely over.” In the career that Chester was embarking upon, he would refer to homosexuality from time to time, most explicitly in his prison manuscript, sometimes scornfully to belittle a fiction character, and sometimes playfully, as evidence of an exotic desire. At nearly the end of his writing career, in the novel Blind Man with a Pistol, he wrote about homosexuality as an ordinary part of human life. But in terms of his sexual preference, Chester seems to have ended his same-sex desire in prison.
A small olive branch from the slick magazines came when Chester met Collier’s editor Kenneth Littauer, who was visiting Beverly Hills and who encouraged him to keep sending fiction treatments to the magazine. Littauer assured Chester of the popularity and value of his Esquire stories. The pep talk was followed by a chat with Meyer Levin, his old Esquire editor, who was then working at Columbia Pictures, and Chester felt more optimistic about his chances to work on scripts. Levin mentioned Zora Neale Hurston’s being retained by Paramount as an expert on Haiti; surely Himes could do the same, maybe for Columbia’s City Without Men. During this time an agent for Warner Bros. read over Chester’s prison manuscript, probably considering whether to use him as an advisor for director Ross Lederman’s Escape from Crime. But Chester “got to feeling funny about it”—perhaps he thought he would be ripped off—and he raced over to the studio asking for the return of his material. Then Esquire sent what seemed an acceptance letter followed by a crisp rejection from Gingrich personally the next week. With nothing to eat but smiles and promises, it seemed as if Chester had been foolish to venture to Los Angeles even while gleaming success seemed to be at hand if he pushed hard enough. The ambivalence left him feeling “jittery.”
Shortly after Esquire’s reneging on the story, he confessed that “things are getting a little pressing.” The familiar wretchedness he had known in Cleveland had returned. Straitened circumstances had Chester and Jean camped out at Welford Wilson’s small one-story bungalow on Crocker Street. Wilson’s wife, Juanita, had recently arrived from New York and the Party helped him secure a bigger place. Chester made up his mind to forsake Los Angeles and search for work, but he wasn’t sure where to go. Then on Sunday, December 7, Japanese naval aircraft attacked the U.S. Seventh Fleet based in Pearl Harbor, in the American territory of Hawaii. The next day Franklin Roosevelt addressed Congress, which then passed a declaration of war. Instantly there was a palpable escalation in racial tension in Los Angeles. “This town is getting too hot for me,” Chester thought, and he headed for San Francisco, where he found a job in the Henry J. Kaiser No. 1 Shipyard in Richmond, just north of Oakland. He apprenticed as a shipfitter trainee, preparing the ten-day-wonders of resupply, the so-called Liberty ships. But the labor situation was exactly the same as in Los Angeles.
While he tried to use a blowtorch and a rivet for Allied victory against Japan and Germany, Chester heard the news of the gruesome January 25, 1942, lynching of a man named Cleo Wright in Missouri. Pittsburgh Courier columnist Arthur Huff Fausett welcomed the outpouring of letters and telegrams from disgusted black Americans, who now fashioned lapel emblems making a double V, to signify victory against fascism abroad and lynchers and racists at home. Referring to lapel emblems, Fausett wrote, “I think the suggestion that Negroes should wear a Double V for Double Victory, is a brilliant one.” The slogan became the nationwide trademark of nearly two million readers of the black press. The motto was taken so seriously by some black servicemen that they burned the logo onto their skin.
The northern California hiatus ended when Hall Johnson, the renowned black arranger and composer whose choirs had integrated Hollywood sound tracks and film scores, sent Chester an urgent message about possible publicity work at M-G-M. The cast for the film version of Cabin in the Sky was set and Johnson, a technical director for the production, believed that additional blacks were to be hired on the other side of the camera. Scholarly and gentle, Johnson had gotten his start as a violinist in the orchestra of the Broadway musical Shuffle Along. He then arranged Georgia slave songs for a trained choir and brought it successfully to the stage in Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures. In 1935 he introduced the choir to California, where the choir debuted in the film version of the musical; it subsequently appeared in dozens of Hollywood films.
Chester returned to L.A. in the spring of 1942, but the job was put on hold. Closer than before to Hollywood stars, he pitched a Lena Horne profile to Collier’s. The magazine took him seriously but decided the piece was too big for an amateur and assigned it to a regular feature writer.
Nosing around the studios, Chester talked to Johnson about screen treatments and met several talented entertainers. He hit it off with Charles Holland, who sang in the choir. A tenor with a voice like Roland Hayes, Holland had wowed radio audiences and gone on to win a role in the 1940 M-G-M feature Hullabaloo. Classically trained and hoping for opera auditions, Holland resented the prohibitions restricting his talent in the same manner as Chester had sounded off against the Federal Writers Project in Cleveland. The two men would remain lifelong friends.
While they did not go so far as to hire black writers, Hollywood studios did get pressure to build black morale from the federal government’s Office of War Information, and in the persons of NAACP Secretary Walter White and his friend Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican Party presidential nominee. At a luncheon hosted by producer Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century–Fox, White told those gathered that the “restriction of Negroes to roles with rolling eyes . . . [and] none too bright servants . . . perpetuates a stereotype which is doing the Negro infinite harm.” Simply put, the Hollywood film’s “mentally inferior” stereotypes, which made wealthy actors of Stepin Fetchit (né Lincoln Perry) and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, were key “reasons for the denial to the Negro of opportunity.”
Chester remained to the left of the NAACP. To help his chances in films, he joined a group called Hollywood Writers Mobilization, whose members included the screenwriting crowd who were among some of the most committed leftists, and also got a scholarship to the League of American Writers School. News bulletins like Communiqué, created by rank-and-file members of the Screen Writers Guild like Ring Lardner Jr., attempted to change the attitudes of the industry from within. Lardner exposed the long-standing complicity of the screenwriters in perpetuating stereotypes. “We’ve been discriminating as surely as, and probably more effectively than any Klu-Kluxer [sic].” For his stands against discrimination—used as evidence to prove his Communist ties—Lardner Jr. would eventually be blacklisted and shut out of Hollywood.
However, in Tinseltown some black actors feared that if screenplays eliminated minstrel roles and featured light-complexioned beauties like Lena Horne, dark-skinned performers would vanish from the screen altogether. Hattie McDaniel, Warners’ contract black star, seemed to both curry favor with the executives and preserve her livelihood when she told the press in August, “I don’t believe we will gain by rushing or attempting to force studios to do anything they are not readily inclined to do.”
So the barriers remained on both sides of the camera. Chester went to Warner Bros. and met the head of the reading department. He was asked to write the synopsis for The Magic Bow, a well-known book about the Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini, entry-level work. On the basis of his written report, a low-level studio factotum offered him a job. But within days he was perplexed; the bias at the studios was no different from that of the aircraft unions. Studio head Jack Warner barked to Chester’s supervisor, “I don’t want no niggers on this lot.”
Waylaid by the attitudes of studio executives, Chester hoped for help from Hall Johnson. He learned that M-G-M would hire an African American to cover publicity for Cabin in the Sky, to tap into the segregated American media networks. He hustled over to the studio only to find that Phil Carter, a young black from New York, had already landed the job. Then Chester noted that Carter’s office was not really in the studio publicity department; he had been secreted at the very end of a corridor of abandoned dressing rooms. Meanwhile, the Chicago Defender heralded the appointment in an article called “Phil Carter, Harlem Scribe, in Film Job,” noting that Carter “has his own office.” Chester was disgusted and amused. He enjoyed the point of view of Leon Washington, the maverick publisher of the local Los Angeles Sentinel, who believed that Cabin in the Sky was “degrading” and also a cattle call “so that the employed Negroes would use pressure to hush up the militant Negroes.”
Disgruntled by race prejudice in the war services industries, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, rejected by the studios for work he was qualified to do, and having to eke out a living in an expensive city where he needed a car, Chester fell into the steady orbit of the Communist Party in 1942. He hoped to work as a screenwriter or expert consultant for Hollywood, but it was mainly through the informal Communist Party networks that he rubbed shoulders in Hollywood at all. In none of Chester’s writings in 1942 and 1943 did he dramatize an attempt to integrate the studios. Instead, he focused on what he knew best, and what he presumed his friends wanted and needed to read: stories about blacks and whites working together on the political left to overcome segregation and desegregate the war services industries.
Los Angeles was also racially redrawing itself. By mid-February President Roosevelt signed an executive order to create exclusion zones that effectively allowed for the removal of anyone of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast. The next month, in Los Angeles, Japanese citizens were removed to a way station at the Santa Anita racetrack. By May 8, the Los Angeles Times estimated that only 4000 Japanese remained in the city, down from a prewar population of 50,000. Little Tokyo, which began at the downtown dock of Central Avenue extending toward the Los Angeles River and had housed 30,000 Japanese Americans, became Bronzeville, which soon spilled over with 80,000 blacks. In Boyle Heights and City Terrace, the neighborhoods due east of Little Tokyo, For Rent signs sprouted.
Understanding the linked fates between the nonwhite Americans—Japanese and blacks—Chester noted with dismay the families herded onto busses and trucks for the internment camps. Some of his literary comrades were among the victims. Probably when the fledgling writer Mary Oyama Mittwer and her husband, Frederick, and their son, Rickey, were sent off on “unforgettable” May 9, Chester and Jean took over their prize bungalow at 120 E. Second Street for a portion of 1942. But in 1942, the Himeses also rented a house in City Terrace on North De Garmo Drive, overlooking downtown L.A. With a yard to grow carrots, beans, cabbage, and beets, the house was a symbol of true prosperity. Their neighbors were white and Latino, and for a while Chester scratched along with a forklift job at a warehouse for $22.50 a week. At first, Jean did only a little better earning $24 per week working the four-to-midnight shift at a defense plant, and resigning herself to a four-hour daily commute.
Chester abandoned the forklift job to devote himself more fully to writing fiction cognizant of the problems of organizing the black laborer. In the spring of 1942, Chester had gotten to know a similarly committed writer, also on Langston Hughes’s list, an old-time, rock-hard black police officer named Jess Kimbrough. Chester was always ready to talk crime, and the playful “Strictly Business,” his Cleveland syndicate hit man story, had appeared in Esquire that February. Originally from Texas, the forty-nine-year-old Kimbrough had joined the department in the early 1920s and reached the rank of detective lieutenant at the Newtown Station. He was precisely the kind of police officer that Chester was lucky not to have encountered during his youthful sprees of lawlessness. Like his partner Charles Broady (who retired that spring after a battle that left another officer dead), Kimbrough had excelled on the basis of his unforgiving manner toward suspected black criminals; other black officers on the force were notorious for shooting and killing unarmed black teens. The lethal antics of these policemen lodged in the recesses of Chester’s imagination, and he learned enough about their reputations to call them “pitiless bastards.”
Surprising to some, Kimbrough was a member of the Communist Party. He wrote short stories for the International Writers Union magazine International Literature. When he met Chester, Kimbrough had just published a play called Georgia Sundown, about a militant black World War I veteran who gives his life to defeat white supremacy. Philosophical about the contradiction between his work as a lawman defending white property and people and his pro-black socialist convictions, Kimbrough puzzled to no end “how I managed to carry out a sworn duty and preserve my dreams.” Chester marveled at the balancing act as well, finding Kimbrough a “much better writer” than those accepted by Sterling Brown’s new anthology Negro Caravan, which reprinted his own story “The Night’s for Crying.”
Chester was concerned that the prison manuscript and indeed his own criminal past were sinking him. Louis Bromfield had dropped out of contact, and Chester wrote to Sterling Brown requesting that any reference to his prison record be removed from his author biography for Negro Caravan. His new agent in New York, Lurton Blassingame, a forty-two-year-old from Alabama who liked pulp fiction and had success by selling a novel called Chicken Every Sunday, was proving unable to help him crack the literary market. But Blassingame had little to work with. Given the difficulty of finding a suitable place to work and live, Chester had not produced anything as complex and layered as the early prison short stories “To What Red Hell,” “Prison Mass,” and “Crazy in Stir.” Even the racial-uplift journals Opportunity and The Crisis, which paid only a nominal fee for fiction and had limited audience reach, had said they were unable to use his material. “I have just about come to the conclusion that my destiny lies in hard work building up to one final everlasting explosion,” he admitted with exasperation.
No direction he turned to seemed fully satisfying. If the Communist Party opened for him a door of interracial collegiality and radical ideas, there was also the mechanistic bureaucracy connected to the organization’s national position, what was known as the “Party line.” Weeks before Germany had invaded Poland, the Soviets signed a pact with the Nazis. Earl Browder, the American Communist Party’s head, accordingly pressed for nonintervention in the war by the United States. That policy had plenty of benefits for black Americans, particularly loud advocacy of civil rights and antisegregation maneuvers. But after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the line shifted, and the Party’s black arguments decreased in volume, to the extreme point of countenancing segregated blood banks.
The fifteen hundred or so members of the Los Angeles chapter were led by an African American named Pettis Perry, a spectacled, scholarly man who reminded Chester of his cousin Henry Moon. With an organizational structure duplicating the electoral political divisions, the Los Angeles Communist Party grouped most black Angelenos into the Fourteenth Congressional District; the district “organizer” or head was another African American, Lou Rosser. Nationally, Communist activity was dominated by what culminated in a meeting in Tehran among Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt in December 1943: the “Tehran line,” with its antistrike pledges, was designed to keep war industries open.
Locally, however, the Los Angeles Communist Party had a dynamic policy shaped by activists like Dorothy Healey, who pushed the chapter’s attention toward issues like Loren Miller’s fight against the real estate covenants that kept blacks from living in white areas, police brutality, and the NAACP’s work against Hollywood stereotypes. Chester himself burned shoe leather to test racist hiring practices, by systematically answering in person news advertisements for positions for which he was qualified—that is, until the employers saw his face. That experience proved to him once and for all that L.A. was “as Jim-Crowed as Atlanta, Georgia.” For him, the new allies and new foes produced feelings difficult to contain and channel. He found the “mental corrosion of race prejudice” was leaving him “bitter and saturated with hate,” an inner roiling that worked its way into his fiction.
He befriended thirty-year-old Eluard McDaniel, who had published in Story magazine, and visited Hollywood on clothing drives for the Spanish refugees and on employment campaigns testing segregation laws. The jaunts on behalf of the refugees netted the men opulent cast-off wardrobes from Hollywood directors and producers. Dark-skinned, proud, and revered among the veterans from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for his ability to pitch grenades, McDaniel was a colorful man who had left Mississippi at ten and traveled the nation, arriving at San Francisco at eighteen. There, he attracted the attention of an innovative photographer twice his age, Consuela Kanaga, a white woman who enjoyed erotic photographic play by manipulating skin color and light. She helped McDaniel gain an education and in her company he entered circles of radical politics and high art. Chester would immortalize him as Luther Macgregor in the novel Lonely Crusade.
After a late summer political rally, featuring Charlotta Bass and members of the Indian National Congress, Chester wrote for the West Coast Communist newspaper the People’s Daily World. In wooden-sounding prose, Chester connected support for Indian nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru to the Party goal of opening up a second military front. While the latter was a key plank of the Soviet agenda of 1942, the former, immediate decolonization, was not. Chester was feeling his way and he felt compelled to reveal his own irrevocable proletariat standing—an utterly dispossessed industrial worker and an ex-convict. And yet, in his moment of peak fellow traveling, as unofficial Communist membership was then called in America, he wouldn’t choose class over race, writing that “regardless of the capitalist politics to split the unity of the people,” India deserved its independence from Britain. Chester was a double V internationalist.
Within a few weeks, he had worked through his position on the domestic colonial front. In a call to arms in Opportunity entitled “Now Is the Time! Here Is the Place!,” he recommended a dynamic plan: victory for the so-called United Nations (a collective term then used by progressives that included Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the fight against fascism) required black victory over segregation at home. He wrote, “Now, in the year 1942, is the time, here, in the United States of America, is the place for 13,000,000 Negro Americans to make their fight for freedom . . . to engage and overcome our most persistent enemies: Our native American fascists.” The turning point of the Second World War, the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad, was in the distance. At the moment when German Panzers were within a hundred miles of taking the Soviet capital of Moscow, Chester didn’t want to be labeled strategically naïve. But for Chester, without a home front victory, the future could hold only a major or minor version of Nazism.
He began his article with an apology to his past: “the character of this writer is vulnerable, open to attack, easy to be smeared.” In the Urban League’s house journal, Chester explored, using euphemisms for the word “Communist,” the Party’s backpedaling on black rights, as well as the credulity gap between what committed socialists argued was realistically necessary to defeat the Nazis and what was idealistically necessary in the future to implement socialism in the United States. He described this two-step dance as the “fight to preserve and make strong a form of government which will never serve the purpose for which one fights, and as a consequence, after the victory for its continuance is attained, must be overthrown and replaced by another form of government.” Chester suggested such a doctrine was incomprehensible.
After the article came out, Chester would begin to trust his own vision, shorn of bourgeois propriety and Party politics. His best short story in several years went also to Opportunity, where, in a sense, he was remaking his name. Increasingly he wanted to find the backbone of white liberal motive. “In the Night” dramatized an interracial Communist cell in Los Angeles, where the black worker Sonny Wilson faces the unwavering force of racial discrimination in the aircraft industry, a shut door that threatens his capacity to have congenial relationships with whites at all. Although Sonny studied for several months and passed the necessary examination, he can’t earn a skilled position. (At Lockheed’s Los Angeles plant, the International Association of Machinists included in their induction ritual a decree to pledge only “qualified white mechanics.”) Sonny’s white Communist comrades have to understand the motivation that got them beyond bigotry and into a radical movement. Chester’s fiction explained that unconscious libidinal desire prodded the whites to join. A white Communist named Carol needs to fulfill maternal drives: “she would mother the entire Negro race; or, if not that, give birth from her own deep love to an entire new social order.” A man named Andy has a “queer sympathy for the underdog, sensual in its development.” What all of the young Communists lack is toughness, the quality that might elevate their convictions beyond a self-serving affection for the downtrodden to the will to transform a nation.
The principal voice in Chester’s short story belonged to Cal, a black Communist who distinguishes himself generationally from twenty-year-old Sonny with a curious atavistic quality. He tells his comrades that when push comes to shove, his skill as an old-time Negro will rescue him: “I can revert. I can go raggedy . . . somebody will have to take care of me. I can walk down the street and whistle. I can stop in front of a joint where the juke box’s playing and cut a step of off-time boogie and listen to the white folks say, ‘Look at that nigger dance.’ ” Sonny, who silently observes the discussion, is the modern black citizen, incapable of Uncle Tomming. Himes ends the story by implying that without this younger, more virtuous, tougher man, “the revolution had never seemed so far away.”
As evidence of his own distance from “revolution,” Chester exclusively published in the NAACP’s Crisis in 1943, even if the journal was an excellent place to counter stereotypes and caricatures. Founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910, the magazine was edited by Roy Wilkins. Sterling Brown sat on the advisory board. The Crisis kept Chester’s name and salty approach to life before Henry and Mollie Moon’s set of liberal reformers, a connection that would soon pay dividends. Humorous and slightly farcical, Chester’s “Lunching at the Ritzmore” joked about the scientific reluctance to concede to the reality of racial discrimination, which could be overcome by a combined mass movement.
“Two Soldiers,” a short story of a black martyr whose heroism reforms the abject racism of a southern white soldier, was published in January 1943. Two months later, Chester published a folk allegory of the generational conflict called “Heaven Has Changed.” Instead of heaven as a place where race strife and hard labor have ended, Jim Crow reigns unabated. The short story seemed shaped by conversations Chester had had with his father, who was more Theodore than Franklin Roosevelt, stoutly religious, pro-business, pro–Booker T. Washington, and reluctant to protest publicly against racial discrimination. Chester reflected on the problems of material and aesthetic differences between the generations, from the picket protest against the “little God” Jim Crow to the fight between enthusiasts of spirituals and the children of hot jazz. “Led by Uncle Tom’s son, they threw down their sacks and rebelled and organized a procession and marched toward the big manor house where the Big God lived.” Although the resolution of the story was indecisive, his ear to reproduce speech, tell a joke, and identify black divisiveness had grown sharper.
Chester worked hard at home in 1943, and Jean alone seems to have carried the financial load. In fact, they were on completely different employment trajectories. Loren Miller’s wife, Juanita, was a consulting supervisor for the city housing authority and through her influence Jean soon secured a white-collar job as a civilian war aide and community services director at a large, racially integrated housing project at Pueblo del Rio. On Jean’s initiative the community center strengthened its curriculum with a ceramics class, taught by a University of Southern California professor, that attracted the attention of the press and the Los Angeles Museum of Fine Arts. While Jean had always excelled in the role as Chester’s adoring fan, as a professional making decisions in the workplace, she reached a milestone in development unconnected to him. In some portions of their lives together, she had represented herself as helpless and devoted, which inspired Chester’s masculinity. But when she began to trump his prestige regularly in the nine-to-five world, insecurity began to gnaw at him. Chester was irked because Jean was “respected and included” by her white coworkers, and now clubby with “well-to-do blacks of the Los Angeles middle class who wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole.” Chester almost certainly meant finely mannered Juanita Miller, a slender, light-skinned USC graduate, with an advanced degree in social work, and a charter member of the USC Delta Sigma Theta chapter.
Simmering on the inside about his marriage, Chester was even edgier as he noticed the neighbors around him. From their De Garmo Drive retreat, Chester observed a new phenomenon—whites living down the hill looking up at him with what he took to be envy. Like other disgruntled black Americans, especially in the cities, a part of him savored every Japanese victory and the sight of humiliated, frightened white people. Chester put aside his prison manuscript and started thinking about a new short story, something that showed white fear.
The tension within the city that spring—as eager black and white Southern migrants poured into defense industries, and the Japanese military was keeping the U.S. Navy at bay in the Pacific—created new problems for the artist. First, on May 19, Los Angeles’s stolid, unimaginative Mayor Fletcher Bowron addressed the city over the radio and kindled racist hysteria. “When the war is over,” he told Southern Californians, “some legal method may be worked out to deprive the native-born Japanese of citizenship.” He continued even more worrisomely, “The Japanese can never be assimilated. . . . They are a race apart.”
Animosity to other ethnic groups was cresting as well. During the first week of June 1943, initially dozens, then hundreds, and ultimately thousands of uniformed white servicemen descended on L.A.’s Mexican and black neighborhoods, stripping and beating so-called zoot suiters and anyone else who got in their way. The sailors—members of the U.S. military branch that still proudly prohibited blacks from any other job than servant—marched on Central Avenue for a week, pulling men and boys out of theaters and restaurants, thrashing and terrifying them. Not only did the Los Angeles police refuse to intervene, they were observed using nightsticks on disabled Latino men and on Latina women carrying infants in their arms. The conflagration, at a hot spot at Twelfth and Central, seemed eerily similar to the race war promised by the Nazis. Surprisingly no one was reported raped or killed.
In an article for The Crisis, Chester, an “eye-witness of the recent riots in Los Angeles,” schooled the NAACP’s audience on the West Coast violence, which was framed by the mainstream media as juvenile delinquency suitably corrected. Less compromising than before, he defined the brutality as a home-grown Kristallnacht, characterized by “the birth of the storm troopers.” Down the hill from Chester’s home in City Terrace was the Belvedere neighborhood; after getting off the “P” streetcar there, Chester often waited at Rowan Street to catch a cab for a quarter ride up the hill. The cabstand had become a flashpoint for the attacks. Chester believed that the police, corralled briefly after the Sleepy Lagoon case, a recent murder investigation in which they were found to have coerced confessions from young Chicanos, wanted badly to harm the Latinos, but instead “got the sailors to do it for them.” While the rioting flared, Chester sat on his steps with a Winchester rifle, looking down into Belvedere, waiting to see if his white neighbors below would make good on their threats.
But his rifle always deferred to his typewriter. Charlotta Bass’s California Eagle caught up to him, proud of Chester’s legendary absorption, his unwillingness to allow “aimless bridge games, barstools and telephone sessions” to derail the solitary task of writing. More and more now, he gave his mind over to the possibility of the ugliest racial violence breaking out. He eased his fears by toying with an idea for a story that amused him, “the compulsion making a Negro kill white people, most of whom he didn’t know and had never seen, simply because they were white.” There were few writers or intellectuals he knew to whom he could describe such a plot. To his NAACP friends, he said he was working on a novel about the growth of a black writer.
As Chester achieved more recognition from the black middle class, he became friends with Bill Smith, a roustabout newspaperman from Kansas City. White-looking and belligerent, Smith had roughed around, managed to complete three years at the University of Kansas, and landed in Los Angeles in his late thirties still seeking his fortune. He carried a heavy chip on his shoulder. Like Chester, as a young man he had turned his back on respectability, squandering the chance to join his stepfather as physician on the staff of a hospital that he directed. But by the mid-1940s Smith had turned in the direction of propriety and married Helen Chappel, a Wilberforce University graduate and sorority president, who wrote for the California Eagle and had been appointed to the Los Angeles Youth Commission.
Helen had probably met fellow Ohioan Jean through the network of city recreation centers and learned that she was married to the man who wrote for Esquire and The Crisis. A “beautifully brown” professional woman like Jean, but one who did not cook, Helen invited the Himeses over for dinner. When they arrived she told them about her husband Bill’s lengthy manuscript, abandoned in the garage.
Bill Smith too had been shocked and outraged by the Japanese internment, which struck him as “the ruin of a golden dream.” Smith admired Chester’s pluck, the fact that he had “refused to be stopped” as a bold writer when up against “cultural segregation.” He recalled, “For years I had pulled back,” but Chester had “stubbornly shoved ahead.” Finally Chester had a colleague with whom to discuss the accumulated rage he felt. They argued about the best method to advance racial equality and publish unrestrained prose. Smith thought of Chester as a combatant, a person who believed that “you had to slug until something gave.” Not faint of heart when it came to slugging, Smith felt that he had reached a point where public combat was unfair to the well-being of his wife and two children. “What’s the matter . . . scared?” Chester sometimes taunted him. “Perhaps,” answered Smith honestly. Childless and married to a woman who had known something of street-corner life, Chester didn’t have the same problem and became known as the person always edging the discussion toward “thunder.” Chester paid back the compliment of his high personal regard for Smith by writing “he was that type of mulatto black who will shoot a white man on sight.”
By the middle of the summer, Chester’s thoughts drifted to the likelihood of having to serve in the segregated military, even though he had still not been called by the draft board. He let out the most generous and romantic elements of his imagination in the short story “So Softly Smiling,” a depiction of a nerve-frazzled veteran of North Africa falling in love and committing to Roosevelt’s version of socialism, the “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. “I—I don’t know just when it started, but I got to feeling that I was fighting for the Four Freedoms,” Chester’s character sputtered, finding his way. “Maybe I had to feel it; maybe I had to feel that it was a bigger fight than just to keep the same old thing we’ve always had. But it got to be big in my mind—bigger than just fighting a war. It got to be more like building, well, building security for peace and freedom for everyone.” Chester continued the homily of freedom and double V in two more short stories, one of them a humorously odd and slightly ghoulish set piece of black brutalization called “All He Needs Is Feet,” and the other, a throwback to his Cleveland WPA penury, “All God’s Chillun Got Pride.” Shifting away from the hard-bitten convict writer, he was solidifying a minor place now as the house wit for the black bourgeoisie, sometimes drawn to the far left, and often pulling in the direction of racial integration.
While Chester made solid his position with the NAACP, his cousin Henry gained more influence in the powerful circles of government policy advisors, and was courted by the likes of Walter White and his efficient deputy Roy Wilkins. Mollie Moon had left her career as a social worker and had begun running an auxiliary organization for the Urban League, the Urban League Guild. There she created an annual Beaux Arts Ball, an interracial extravaganza of gaudy costumes, feasting, and music that brought out New York’s black elites and their white supporters and raised loads of cash for the Urban League. Mollie was also excellent friends with such influential whites as Edwin R. Embree, the director of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Additionally, the fund’s managers and advisors overlapped with the Urban League and prominent national interracial committees, granting Mollie much coveted social access to influential people.
In Chicago in August 1943, Mollie attended a party with painter Charles White and Edwin Embree at Vandi Haygood’s home. Twenty-eight-year-old Vandi, a native of small-town Montana, was married to William Converse Haygood. When Haygood was drafted, Embree promoted Vandi to serve as acting director of the fellowship division of the Rosenwald Fund. She excelled in the position and became chummy with many prominent African Americans, like Horace Cayton, the director of Chicago’s Parkway Community House. In her circle of well-educated black and white liberal elites, Haygood was known for her sexual promiscuity and her heavy drinking. The same was said about Mollie Moon, with the addition of her appetite for good food. “Here I sit over at Vandy’s [sic]—both of us recovering from hangovers but mine not quite as bad as hers,” Mollie wrote to her husband about the Chicago visit. Then, insinuating the possibility of an affair with the black painter, Moon wrote, “I told her to ask for Charlie White and she did.”
In November Chester applied for a Rosenwald fellowship, putting Henry’s name in the opening sentence of the letter addressed to Vandi Haygood. In pursuing the $1500 fellowship, which would give him the leisure and the confidence to write, he fully embraced his new identity as a racial uplifter. “During the past couple of years I have been writing short stories and essays for Opportunity (A Journal of Negro Life), and The Crisis,” he wrote to Haygood. Chester’s core impulse as a mature novelist was autobiographical and in the proposal he stated that he wanted to use fiction to examine his own life during the Depression and the early war years. He would give himself a break and erase his prison time, but the rest of the book, by and large, would depict his years in Cleveland and Los Angeles, as well as the stint at Malabar Farm.
The novel would reveal the social evolution of Joe Wolf, a writer who happens to be Negro, but who becomes a Negro writer. At first Joe publishes short stories without black characters, desiring simply “success as an individual, not equality as a Negro.” Turned down as a reporter and hating his toil on a farm for a wealthy writer, Joe goes to Los Angeles, where black Communists befriend him and overcome his initial skepticism. However, after Pearl Harbor (not the invasion of the Soviet Union), Joe finds the Communists fully supporting segregationist management and he ends his fellow traveling. Joe learns “the hard way that there are no ‘unusual’ Negroes.” Then, following the riots in the middle of 1943, Joe becomes “dangerous, explosive,” “convinced that minority group problems will become worse before they become better.” Chester concluded the synopsis on an unusually bold stroke that would in fact become his signature.
He knows that the Negro problem will never be solved until the problem of democracy is solved—until the white people of the nation decide whether or not they want democracy.
And now what he wants is to know how to force this decision—one way or another.
Chester believed in thunder, the efficacy of organized violence in the struggle to gain constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Providing recommendations for Chester’s “strong and shrewd” project were Roy Wilkins, Nat Howard of the Cleveland Daily News, Arnold Gingrich, and Chester’s first cousin Henry Lee Moon. Henry claimed that if Chester could avoid the fallacy of excessive modernism—a tendency toward overerudite stream of consciousness—he might write “a dynamic and comprehensive story of Negro life.” In February 1944 Henry would also telegraph the fund on Chester’s behalf. Henry’s letter of recommendation was the most in-depth and supportive, perhaps because he had mercifully been left out of the story. Both Nat Howard and Arnold Gingrich recognized themselves in Chester’s synopsis. In his letter, Howard hoped to divert Chester from “consideration of his own opinions and emotions exclusively.” Roy Wilkins, cranky and overcautious after obviously having learned that Chester had served time, endorsed his newest writer with an extended caveat: “We have never met him personally. We have never seen his picture. We have never met anyone who knew him personally. All our business has been by correspondence.”
Wilkins and Himes were not quite an odd pair. Alongside other major black newsmen, Wilkins had been called before the War Department’s Office of Facts and Figures (the predecessor of the Office of War Information) in June 1942 and prodded to boost the morale of black servicemen. The assembled black editors were made to understand that continued editorials in support of double V and reports exposing discrimination and brutality could be considered sedition. Defiant in a way, Wilkins defended his editorial choices at the meeting, saying, “The Negro has been psychologically demobilized in this war.” Chester, the least compromising writer that Wilkins published, would remain a “valued contributor.”
Not long after the application was sent in, The Crisis published Chester’s “All He Needs Is Feet.” Set in Rome, Georgia, this short story invoked the infamous July 1942 beating of the internationally renowned black tenor Roland Hayes, who was accosted by police and local whites after his wife said, “Hitler ought to get you” to a rude clerk in a segregationist shoe store. Chester re-created the scene by making the violence more grotesque. For calling a tormentor “Hitler,” a black man named Ward has to defend his life with a knife, an act for which he has his feet set on fire. The story concludes with an Arkansas white man beating a feetless Ward in Chicago because he fails to stand for the national anthem.
In the last months of 1943 Chester had a regular column in a union magazine called War Worker. He introduced himself as a man-about-town, able to get quotes and insider’s information about race relations from New York magazines and Hollywood honchos. Chester was taking advantage of every contact he had, and all of them—Gingrich, Wendell Willkie—were in favor of racial advances in Hollywood films. Chester attended a two-day writers’ congress organized by the Hollywood Writers Mobilization and held at UCLA, which opened on October 2. The participants included Walter White, Marc Connelly, military officials, and university professors. James Cagney and Theodore Dreiser also put in appearances. Lawyer and historian Carey McWilliams, who got to know Chester at the conference, emphasized the importance of removing racist laws from immigration and naturalization. At a panel discussion on minority groups in American films, Dalton Trumbo delivered a stern rebuke. Hollywood made “tarts of the Negro’s daughters, crap shooters of his sons, obsequious Uncle Toms of his fathers, superstitious and grotesque crones of his mothers, strutting peacocks of his successful men, psalm-singing mountebanks of his priests, and Barnum and Bailey side-shows of his religion,” Trumbo charged. The black film star and Chicago Defender columnist Clarence Muse then stood up and exclaimed, “Here I am—exhibit A of the stereotype of the Negro! I’m glad to learn that as an actor I will soon return as a human being!” The audience roared in approval. With the praise of the battling USSR in the news, the radical movement regained some of its standing. In December, Trumbo would officially join the Communist Party. By 1944 Cabin in the Sky star Rex Ingram had too.
Chester tried to raise awareness for the interned Japanese Americans. He obtained and published portions of an internee’s diary in War Worker, probably letters from his friend Mary Oyama Mittwer, to show the possibility of sedition among the multitudes “who have never been permitted to share the rights, privilege, and opportunities which make this nation magnificent.” He excerpted from the diary, “It is hard to feel loyal, or patriotic, sincere to the land of our birth when prejudice rears its ignorant head, or when we are dismissed as a ‘bunch of yellow Japs.’ ” But what made Chester’s work stand out, apart from the touching empathy he showed he was capable of for Japanese Americans, was his Swiftian satire at the conclusion: “If, after reading these excerpts from this Nisei’s diary all of us are consumed by our relentless hate for them, let’s not quibble, investigate, and vituperate”; instead, “let’s take them out and shoot them.”
A visibly angry Chester waited on his Rosenwald application, prepared to abandon writing for politics once and for all. The segregation in the war industries in Los Angeles continued to be sharp and robust, and he took and abandoned menial tasks rather than investing himself emotionally in the fights to obtain good jobs at a place like the Kaiser-Hughes Aircraft Company. The Army called him up for a physical on February 15, 1944. He had told Jean that he would be shot before serving in a segregated military, but Chester did not have to make a decision. The physician examining him discovered a fractured vertebrae, an injury from the elevator shaft calamity of 1926, and classified him as 4-F, thus writing him out of the war.
The same week as his physical, Chester impatiently watched Sweet-and-Hot, a flat-footed musical on Central Avenue, and he no longer brooked his disgust at such a piss-poor cultural stew. In the pages of Bass’s California Eagle, he cataloged the faults of black American pop culture: an inadequate “appeal to carnality”; “absolute unintelligence”; and lastly, abject imitation of “a white show.” If black entertainers themselves did not have the “courage of a Bert Williams, a Florence Mills, a Paul Robeson,” there could be no progress. In addition, “the white folks,” Chester wagged, “are now taking sides.” He vented in his unique hard-boiled idiom,
Those that are on the other side are not going to support a Negro show even if we gave them a seven-course spread of Hollywood mammies. And those who are on our side want us to come out with the best we got, hard, fast and timely; they expect us to speak up, to voice our desires and protests in songs, demo[onstration]s and otherwise.
He extended his literary contacts by agreeing to serve on the editorial board of Negro Story, Alice Browning’s new black magazine out of Chicago, but the hard-edged critic still struggled to hold down a job. In March he successfully applied for a job at the Los Angeles Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in the San Pedro harbor, becoming shipworker 35436. He was assigned a skilled job—as a sheet metal helper installing a ventilation system—only to quit a week later, faulting his back impairment. Himes later said he left for “domestic reasons.” Despite the contestatory ending of his position—whether Chester had to labor below his skill rating or if he had a bad row with Jean—the job had one tangible benefit: the dry dock company in San Pedro would become the setting of his novel If He Hollers Let Him Go.
On April 24, a mild day in a week threatening rain, Chester received a letter from the Rosenwald Fund’s Vandi Haygood, a life buoy to an artist at sea. He had won a yearlong, $1500 fellowship. Although not war wages by any means, the regular monthly checks would be comfortable steady pay, roughly twice what a domestic in Cleveland earned. He aimed well beyond one of his least substantial Esquire prison stories, which came out in April, “Money Don’t Spend in Stir,” a humorous vehicle for a quick $100. In a florid tone, unusual to direct at someone he had not met, he explained to Vandi Haygood what the Rosenwald fellowship meant to him.
It is difficult to express just how much this means to me. It is more than the actual award of the $1500. It is the confidence expressed by the Committee in my ability. Serious creative writing is an uphill grind against indifference, disapproval, antagonisms, and even destitution. Encouragement is seldom had from any source.
I can truthfully say that this is my first “break” in fourteen years of writing. I hope I will never look back.
For the first time since prison, he could devote himself uninterruptedly to a novel.
Before he had known whether he would receive the fellowship, he had put his resolute if desperate logic about the struggle between the races into a jeremiad, published in The Crisis that May. In “Negro Martyrs Are Needed,” Chester wandered into the field of comparative political theory. The Crisis proclaimed “our author argues brilliantly for revolution and leaders in the tradition of Gabriel and Nat Turner,” but the essay was actually an odd mash. Moving between Crispus Attucks and Lenin, Chester wanted to encourage martyrs to sacrifice themselves in public acts of legal defiance to create the media spectacles necessary to stimulate a sociopolitical revolution. The revolutionary aim, however, was only “the enforcement of the Constitution of the United States.” While Chester believed that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution’s plan for representative government constituted the best “way of existence,” the revolution he hoped to inspire would undoubtedly “bring about the overthrow of our present form of government.” Not until the second page did he begin to identify his real target: the black middle class, prone to abandon its leaders and mistake social acceptance for democratic equality. “We have not achieved equality by week-ending with our white friends and drinking their liquor or flirting with their wives,” he complained. The black middle class was vain, soft, and unprincipled.
Even though “Negro Martyrs” had equated communism to dictatorship, the Communications Section of the Federal Bureau of Investigation flagged him. On June 13, his Bureau file began with a memo from the Criminal Division of the Justice Department to Director J. Edgar Hoover and Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark. “You will note that the article recommends revolutionary action on the part of the colored people and for that reason I thought it should be brought to your attention,” wrote the lead investigator. Initially, the agents were trying to figure out whether the Chester Himes writing in The Crisis was the same man their informants had fingered in Los Angeles as “an adherent or supporter or perhaps a member of the Communist Party or other organizations reported to be in sympathy with the Communist Party.” They learned it was indeed the same man. Since “Negro Martyrs” coincided with a May directive from Hoover to address the “Negro Plan of Revolution,” the Bureau began a fuller investigation in July. Not “desirous of having an investigation of the publication, The Crisis, carried out,” the Justice Department asked “that this inquiry . . . be conducted as discreetly as possible.”
Having received his grant, Chester dug into his proposed project, but that journey was unrewarding. He was riding along the surface of his own life since he had been released from prison and the findings were messy and difficult for an audience to identify with. For The Crisis he wrote “All God’s Chillun Got Pride,” the Cleveland part of his story, where his hero, Keith Richards, works as the only black research assistant in a public library. The narrative is an exploration of a black man’s total fear: “every morning that he lived, he awakened scared.” Keith worries that he will be crushed by the stereotype “of being a black beast in white America.” If that discouraging account wasn’t enough, he echoed the horrifying possibility of extermination he had insisted upon in his Nisei diary article. “After he had seen the truth sheared of all falseness of tradition and ideology, there would have been nothing to have done with that ‘nigger’ but to have taken him out and shot him.”
However, Chester had achieved one new conceit, borrowed from the “encouraging” spirit of L.A.’s black migrants, and which remained a part of his work. For the Rosenwald-funded novel, he had described a feeling of belonging and black identity. “He is proud of their independence, their defiance which they carry on their shoulders like chips. He receives courage from their numbers. His people. For some strange reason, among them he feels as if he has come home.” In spite of its general gloom, for his Crisis story he had created a protagonist “well-groomed,” “handsome” and whose “complexion was black [with] features like an African prince. . . . When he forgot his scowl and accidentally laughed, he came on like bright lights.” Chester had become proud of his racial background. Related to his ennobling brown-skinned male characters, he was no longer wedded to the black middle-class ideal of feminine beauty and success, sorority women who looked like pinups of Lena Horne and dripped with affluence and academic titles, women like Juanita Miller. Few people could understand why he was so angry, critical toward established customs, and dejected about the prospects of racial justice and employment during the war’s final twelve months.
America then had the highest employment levels in its history and the Depression conditions of “All God’s Chillun Got Pride” seemed fully over. After only marginally successful attacks in North Africa and Italy, on June 6, the second front was launched in France by the colossal invading D-day force of American and Allied troops. Delighted by the turn in military events, U.S. Communists, under the leadership of Earl Browder, downgraded themselves from a revolutionary party to a political association, sending the strong signal that American capital and American labor had no fundamental disagreements. Since the Japanese losses at Midway and Guadalcanal in 1942, the Pacific war had slowly begun to favor the Americans, even if to eyes like Chester’s it appeared as if a race war were under way in Asia, with the rigidly segregated U.S. Navy and Marines fighting on terms similar to the “zoot suit” battles of 1943.
Meanwhile, Jean Himes’s career revealed evidence of racial and gender barriers giving way under the pressure of wartime labor shortages. Vivacious and cordial, she had flourished developing recreational programs at Pueblo Del Rio and by the summer of 1944 had joined the United Service Organizations (USO), the private charity partnering with the War and Navy Department to provide leisure activities and relaxation for members of the armed forces. Jean now worked closely with white regional directors and she caught the eye of the press. With regular radio programs, film events, and maneuvering celebrities to different troop camps and local centers, the job enabled her to glow in public and in the eyes of black Angelenos.
In short order Jean became the high-placed coordinator for women’s activities for the Los Angeles USO. But Chester’s wife’s continued white-collar successes undermined him psychologically, in spite of the Rosenwald fellowship. He described her managerial success and public notice as starting “the dissolution of our marriage.” When Jean said in an interview with the Baltimore-based newspaper the Afro-American, “I gave up my good job with the City of Cleveland and we went traipsing off to California,” she caused Chester to moan about the nature of American labor exploitation that promoted black women and not black men. “It hurt for my wife to have a better job than I did.” Jean’s success stung too because a deep part of Chester required her inertia, her never-ending adoration and subordinate standing, and the “adulation” he had craved in prison. So Chester blamed her and pitied himself. “I was no longer a husband to my wife; I was her pimp. She didn’t mind and that hurt all the more.” He eased his mind by drinking heavily.
The battle with his wife’s success and the forty painful hours at the shipyard in March stuck in his craw as he abandoned the Cleveland novel based on his own life. “Shattered” by the “mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles,” Chester persuaded Henry Moon to host him in New York, and in September he went there. Either unwilling to accompany him, or discouraged from doing so, Jean remained in L.A. He channeled his feelings about the war, black opportunity, and Jean’s prospects at work into the redirected novel, a frantic and brilliant exploration of black labor conditions and American sexuality that he wrote “defiantly,” and “without thought of it being published.” After years of coyly shielding his audience from his thunderous rage, he would force the reader to confront implacable fury.