By the time Chester arrived in New York, he had set out on a full-scale drunken bender. He arrived at his cousin’s three-bedroom apartment at 940 St. Nicholas Avenue. From the window of the spare bedroom, where he slept, he could see lower Harlem, the East River, and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. But the real view was his perch in Harlem’s most elegant neighborhood, Sugar Hill. “Harlem’s most talked about men and women in law, sports, civil liberties, music, medicine, painting, business and literature live on Sugar Hill,” declared Ebony magazine. Chester had arrived at the playground of “the moneyed, the talented, the socially prominent, the intellectually distinguished, the fast crowd.” And in that crowd Henry’s wife, Mollie, might have claimed the crown as the most socially prominent. Part of the allure of the Moons was the whiskey that seemed to run from the tap and which kept Chester going. People introduced to him at this period would begin future inquiries about him asking simply, “Was Chester drunk?”
The cross street for the Moon building was 157th Street, an easy stroll away from 409 Edgecombe Avenue and the famous fourteen-story building where W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and the painter Aaron Douglas lived, the “tallest and best kept apartment for blacks” that Chester had ever laid eyes on. Chester had arrived in the neighborhood in the city where a leading minister was called a “matinee idol in the pulpit” and was divorcing one beautiful showgirl wife for an even more beautiful, more talented star. Two blocks down St. Nicholas Avenue was Chester’s favorite neighborhood haunt, the Fat Man’s Bar-and-Grill, a hangout for jazz musicians and film celebrities. Eddie’s Chicken Shack, as well as the other bars, the barbershops, and fronts for numbers houses, provided down-home pleasures. At 145th Street and a few blocks east was Harlem’s Seventh Avenue, “the land of dreams,” where a hard drinking and good-looking man or woman need never be lonely. The Renaissance Ballroom, Small’s Paradise Inn, and Dickie Well’s Restaurant all featured fine dining, dancing, and big bands. There was no shortage of glamour.
Despite the binge drinking, Chester was able to hold his own at the typewriter. With the assured income from his fellowship, he swiftly amassed chapters of a manuscript about the destruction of a favored black shipyard foreman and readied himself to sell his book in New York. Probably, as Chester boasted to the Chicago Defender that October, he had already drafted the novel he was calling, apparently because he was immersed in Tolstoy, Race, Sex and War. Writing at Mollie and Henry’s wasn’t easy, however; he landed at his cousin’s during a time of bedlam. Henry and Mollie were fully devoted to the extraordinary campaign to reelect Franklin Roosevelt when Chester arrived. In April 1944 Henry had left his federal job with the housing agency to join the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Political Action Committee. Sidney Hillman, the director of war production, a dapper Lithuanian immigrant who had made a name for himself as an organizer in the garment industry and from 1914 as president of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, headed this committee; Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Weaver, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Howard University Law School dean William Hastie sat on its board. Henry would lend his talents as a journalist and public relations expert to organize and inform black members of the union, registering them to vote and educating them about politics.
Even though the group was theoretically nonpartisan, by May it had declared for Roosevelt and “progressive” liberal legislators. Hillman told audiences that “all of labor’s gains and all progress made by minority groups during the past twelve years will be endangered if we do not elect progressive congressmen and a liberal president.” The committee, which paid Henry a comfortable salary of $250 per month, was funded by CIO dues. While his work on the Political Action Committee focused on the election cycle, Henry also hoped to keep black industrial employment at high levels following the war, and he advocated a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission to protect gains. However, by the summer’s end, important supporters like Hastie resigned from the CIO committee, disappointed that they were in the process of delivering a black vote for no new tangible gains.
Several prominent black Communist artists—including Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and poet, professor, and journalist Melvin B. Tolson—also joined a Hillman-led offshoot called the National Citizens Political Action Committee during the summer. Whether Henry was in or out of town, everyone headed over to his apartment, where he and Mollie hosted almost nightly celebrations, supper parties, get-togethers, and toasts, in the process creating one of America’s earliest genuinely interracial salons. The white Americans included Winthrop Rockefeller, the young vagabond son of the oil billionaire, Commission on Interracial Cooperation head Will W. Alexander, and Doubleday editor Bucklin Moon. The African Americans were the bright lights of the striving middle class, most of them hoping to finally break the back of segregation in some reputable field: NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, Walter White, Richard Wright, Abyssinian Baptist Church minister Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Illinois congressman William Dawson, and Crisis editor Roy Wilkins.
While Chester had known elites of the black world in Cleveland and Los Angeles, the sight of all of these New Yorkers together putting their efforts on the Roosevelt campaign was powerful and overwhelming. Years later, when he looked back on that fall, he decided that the nightly socializing to get a Democrat elected took on the “strangely religious” elements of a primitive ritual. To Chester it was sometimes pompous and sometimes preposterous. When Chester joined Mollie, her boon companion Polly Johnson, and others in fêting Winthrop Rockefeller at the grill at the Theresa Hotel, Johnson, tears of gratitude in her eyes, told the table of cosmopolitan elites, “This is social equality.” Whether or not racial barriers in housing, education, or employment would ever trickle down from Sugar Hill seemed a minor concern.
A nightly guest to the Moon household was a young woman from Cincinnati named Ann Mason, who headed the Women’s Division at the CIO Political Action Committee office. “Brilliant and charming,” Ann was an attractive, ninety-pound divorcée, a year older than Chester. A former public schoolteacher and Pittsburgh Courier writer, Mason was another new arrival to New York. Touting the fact that women would cast 60 percent of the vote in 1944, Mason concentrated her efforts on recruiting black women in the CIO to the polls, where they could apply “the weapon most useful to the Negro.” Sometimes with Henry, she barnstormed heavily populated California, Texas, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, building caucuses of black women among the industrial workers, echoing the value of voting rights and the ballot.
At the soirees on St. Nicholas Avenue, Ann and Chester began an affair. “I lost myself in sex and drunkenness” was Chester’s memory of the fall of 1944, a maze of adultery and flirtation. Even such public models of respectability like NAACP secretary Walter White, whose marriage to his wife, Gladys, according to the biographer Kenneth Janken, “had been a charade” for several decades, apparently escorted his flame, white socialite Poppy Cannon, to Mollie Moon’s shindigs. Other guests—such as singer Paul Robeson and his wife, Essie—were known to have an open marriage, and pursue multiple love interests. The sexual double standard that allowed indulgence for the affluent and sacrifice and condemnation for the commoner was on full display.
In some corner of his mind Chester resented his cousin’s wife for her role as hostess to the erotic buffet. Witnessing the viciousness of the race rioting of 1943 in L.A. had dealt a powerful blow to his ideal of American democracy. Life in New York in the last year of the war among the Talented Tenth bruised too his ideal of middle-class marriage. When he tried to explain himself in a forum that he knew Jean would have access to, he described what he indulged in as “the decadent, rotten sense of freedom that comes with being absolved of the responsibility of trying any longer to be a man in a world that will not accept you.” As he had written about while in Los Angeles, he was disgusted by the substitution of specious sexual kicks for genuine political freedom. Chester was internally pained by the black promiscuity of New York, even as he participated in it.
Among the white partygoers to Mollie’s was the tall, formidably built, and open-minded Doubleday editor Bucklin Moon. Buck Moon enjoyed the stimulating conversations and soaked in the moody atmosphere, “sometimes one of frustration and rage” but also “barbed with a bitter and almost sardonic humor.” Originally from Minnesota, Buck had gone to college in Winter Park, Florida, where he had befriended Zora Neale Hurston from nearby Eatonville. Moon had joined Doubleday in August 1940 and worked his way up to the editorial staff after a couple of months managing one of the firm’s New York bookshops. Recognizing the uphill battles and sacrifices necessary to render just portraits of black Americans in the field of letters, Moon had gone into publishing “with a feeling akin to someone about to enter the clergy.” A lifelong stutterer and legendary drinker, he was steadied by his belief that “one of the greatest stories to come from the Negro in America is in the migrations from the South to the North,” and in fact he wrote a 1943 novel on that topic, The Darker Brother.
Buck Moon scouted black literary talent at Henry and Mollie’s, signing Walter White to a contract for A Rising Wind, his investigation of the attitudes of black soldiers and British colonial subjects. While undeniably more fond of Negroes than most American whites, Moon believed he had to publish upbeat, original voices. He had “strong feeling[s]” by the fall of 1944 that “too many negative novels with a race background” had made their way into print, some of them as “standardized as the slick magazine serial.” Chester’s novel set in Los Angeles certainly seemed unique, if Moon tended to look at Chester’s stories and political commentaries as overly bright reflections on a future without racism. To tempt Chester, Moon promised him the inaugural George Washington Carver Book Award, a new Doubleday promotional tool awarding $2500 for the best book “that deals with American Negroes.” Black writers like Ann Petry and Roi Ottley had been celebrated for winning Houghton Mifflin pre-publishing prizes before, but the award in Carver’s name seemed earmarked for a young black writer like Chester. Looking rather favorably on Chester’s novel exploring racism in the West Coast war industry from the vantage of a middle-class striver, on October 19, 1944, Moon signed Chester to a contract with Doubleday, the country’s largest publisher.
Asserting himself with more political writing, Chester hit the liberal New York Four Freedoms crowd that fall with a piece called “Democracy Is for the Unafraid” for the interracial amity magazine Common Ground. In this article Chester explored some of the recent material on the foundation of race prejudice and the authoritarian personality. Chester now embraced the point of view that modern man committed his most heinous acts because of fear. White supremacy, however, was doubly deadly because, in his view, when its purveyors became conscious of their fear, they reacted with renewed violence against nonwhites. “What frightens me most today,” he began, were not the cruel stereotypes against black people, the race riots, the economic pressures, or the internment of the Japanese “(whose loyalty to the ideology of white supremacy is doubted).” Instead, Chester exposed the problem of “the white man’s sudden consciousness of his own fear of other races.” Chester’s impersonal, academic position on the race problem—that it belonged to whites and was rooted in their insecurity—won esteem from his new friends. Bucklin Moon liked the piece so well that he reprinted it in an anthology he had under way called Primer for White Folks.
To celebrate her cousin’s book contract, on Thursday, November 2, 1944, Mollie threw Chester one of her “famed get-togethers,” a drunken bash attended by Alta Douglas, wife of the painter Aaron Douglas; Mrs. Edward Matthews, wife of the highly regarded concert baritone; white Gladys Ottley, the wife of Roi Ottley, who was reporting from the European war zone; Horace Sheffield, national representative of the United Auto Workers–CIO; Lewis Fairclough, chief of oral surgery at Harlem Hospital, and his spouse; Bucklin Moon; and Ann Mason. Nearly all of the attendees would be caricatured in Chester’s novel Pinktoes.
Perhaps the most intriguing guest was Chester’s old acquaintance from Cleveland, Reverend Grant Reynolds, former pastor of Mt. Zion Congregational Church. Reynolds had risen to the rank of captain as a chaplain in the Army and had supervised Jean’s brother Andrew before being discharged for protesting too boisterously against discrimination. Like Chester, Reynolds was impatient with segregation and not reluctant to combine acts of intrepidness with publicity seeking. Two weeks before the party, Reynolds had resigned from the NAACP to found his own organization, the Non Partisan Council for the Abolition of Discrimination in Military and Veterans Affairs; he now proclaimed he was voting against Roosevelt “for the debasement he has allowed to befall Negro men in uniform.” Reynolds and Henry Moon were fraternity buddies, and Reynolds would run, unsuccessfully, as a Republican against Adam Clayton Powell Jr. for Congress in 1946. Having just begun law school at Columbia, Reynolds crackled with energy, studiousness, and righteous indignation.
Although Chester could bluster through these crowds, he did not prefer them. Almost certainly he concealed his prison record when he was among them, as he did when he got his first press in the Chicago Defender and facetiously told a reporter that his stories in Abbott’s Monthly turned his “career from medicine to writing by accepting his first short stories.” The campaign for Roosevelt and liberal democratic equality seemed superficial and insincere when he sobered up, so he worked on not doing that. That week and the next, he was so drunk and disillusioned that he missed voting in the election. He even resented the sex. As he waded through “white women who wanted to give me their bodies,” a voice inside Chester insisted that Mollie was to blame. To Chester, Mollie was a black person of obviously common origin who had somehow maneuvered into a gilded world of plenty and could paw over rich and influential blacks and whites. But what was worse than whatever she did was her shameless talking about it, which Chester, “a puritan all my life,” disliked hearing.
His distaste for Mollie was becoming attached to his yearning for a partner endowed beyond what Jean, who was eerily becoming like Juanita Miller (but without her polished background), had to offer. With the final breakthrough—the fellowship in the spring and the book contract by the fall—he started to envision a future that wasn’t ever shaped by the collapse of his family and the stain of prison. Partly insecure and partly ungrateful, Chester drew fictional characters close enough to real-life people so that the resemblance stung. In several of his fictions, Mollie and Jean appeared. But in his first novel, he rendered a complex but still unflattering portrait of a kind of saccharine black female professional, closely modeled on Juanita, the acme of a type of light-skinned affluent success. He would begin the separation from his wife by tearing down the ideal Jean seemed to be striving for.
After the elections, Chester’s investigation by FBI agents shifted into a higher gear. Special Agent in Charge R. B. Hood was making the rounds in Los Angeles, tracking down Chester’s contributions to left-wing periodicals, adding his prison record to the file, and noting his friendships and sympathies with Communists, although he was “not known to be a member or active therein himself.” Observing his NAACP membership and not wishing to attract untoward notice, the Bureau applied customary discretion to see whether his book had been published and could then be examined for “seditious or revolutionary material.”
Chester made his own allies at confidential parties held at the Moon apartment when Mollie was away. He befriended Constance H. Curtis, the regular book reviewer for the Amsterdam News, who singled out the majesty of Melvin B. Tolson’s Rendezvous with America, and who had challenged her audience to read books that “deal with life in direct terms and direct language.” Chester’s ambitions suited Curtis’s scheme to win foundation support for black writers who could devote themselves to “a real literature which concerns itself with our people.” Langston Hughes, the best-known black writer connecting to “our people,” partied too. He lived farther down St. Nicholas Avenue and was spending that fall reading his poetry at black high schools. Tireless Hughes was also the lead writer, black or white, for Common Ground. In January 1943 he had launched in the pages of his Chicago Defender column an enduringly popular character called “My Simple Minded Friend,” later shortened to just “Simple.” He and Chester met for drinks at the Theresa Hotel bar.
Constance Curtis brought to Chester’s parties a bookish young man originally from Oklahoma City. Thirty-one-year-old Ralph Ellison was the most talked about unknown black writer in New York. The same height as Chester but losing his hair, Ellison was reprinting his apprentice pieces alongside Chester’s Negro troop-morale builders in Negro Story that year, while also serving on that magazine’s editorial board. A concert-trained trumpeter who had gone to school at Tuskegee, Ellison was cycling away from the Communist Party, in which he had been heavily involved since 1937, to the point of preparing to fight in Spain. An editor at the Communist New Masses but a ghost in the world of the well-to-do black elite, Ellison lived down the hill from the Moons’ fashionable digs. Chester, who knew the Urban League’s Lester Granger, might also have noticed Ralph speaking at an event sponsored by that group at the East and West Association with crusading author Pearl Buck on October 24. In spite of his poverty and obscurity, Ellison was rapidly becoming the black literary intellectual of his age, and he had one most attractive calling card for Chester: he was perhaps the closest friend and confidant of Richard Wright.
Ellison had spent a good portion of his summer proclaiming and defending Wright’s work, whose two-part article “I Tried to Be a Communist” caused a sensation when it appeared in Atlantic Monthly. Both Ellison and Himes had gone through periods of infatuation, reliance, and dissatisfaction with the Communist movement, though Chester’s significant mainstream success early in his career had prevented a strong attachment from forming with the hard left. Ellison, on the other hand, had begun writing at the suggestion of Hughes and Wright, and had all of his early publications in Communist magazines. He had reached, however, a turning point in his career. That September Ellison had secured a deal at publisher Reynal and Hitchcock similar to Chester’s at Doubleday. With brand new short stories like “King of the Bingo Game” and “Flying Home,” Ellison had started to write a new, intellectual, symbol-laden style of fiction that was attracting the eye of the critics. In 1944 he would successfully apply for a Rosenwald fellowship and Bucklin Moon, Himes’s editor, would support Ellison with letters of recommendation.
The men liked each other. Although he was in the process of developing a legendary intolerance for sentimentality in discussions of race relations, art, or politics, Ellison was “congenial and attentive” in those early encounters with Himes. They had contrasting styles. Chester hung out regularly in bars swapping lies about the black folklore character Signifying Monkey with GIs, while Ellison, sifting through Communist Party maneuvers and Marxist philosophy in spirited discussions with literary friends, was more worried about the draft and being sent overseas. The men were often in each other’s company, most memorably at Ralph’s 147th Street apartment for a mess of pressure-cooked pig feet and rice, where Chester consumed more trotters than anybody.
An historic gathering of black writers took place a month after the election. Langston Hughes threw a gala party on Sunday, December 10, that brought the black intelligentsia to the two-room apartment he shared with Toi and Emerson Harper. The guests included Cuban writer Jose Antonio Fernandez de Castro, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mollie and Henry, Owen Dodson, Alta Douglas, Nora Holt, Alice Browning, Dan Burley, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Fanny Buford, Charles Holland, and Oliver Harrington and his Norwegian wife. Hughes gave the party to honor Loren Miller, visiting from Los Angeles with Juanita. Chester had established himself so well in Los Angeles, and now impressively gotten a book contract in New York, that Miller took the occasion to thank him and remind him that L.A. was his “home town.” When Chester’s book appeared the next year, he would become the first nationally published Los Angeles–based black novelist.
The party’s most impressive guest to Chester was Wright, then editing the galleys of his next book. Accompanied by a juvenile delinquency expert, Wright arrived to the cramped party where Du Bois was “reigning in the place of honor,” a phenomenon that stoked Wright’s own private disgust about his relationship to members of the black educated elite—a feeling he and Chester would share. Chester remembered Wright’s mood as “antagonistic and resentful.” A few days before the party Wright had learned that his attempts to place a reasonable program of black family life on the radio had been thwarted by a “very small and prejudiced minority” of “so-called Negro leaders that I’ve had to deal with ever since I’ve been writing.” Wright connected Mollie’s crowd of “middle-class matrons,” represented by Alta Douglas, Nora Holt, and visitor Juanita Miller, to those trying to snub him.
The other significant attendee to the party was Jean, who had rejoined Chester for what was at first a traumatic reunion. According to Chester, Jean arrived in Harlem and “found me deeply involved in so many affairs that she tried to take her own life.” Jean drank heavily alongside Chester and in that condition might easily have made a melodramatic flourish in a desperate hour; certainly a fain theatricality had become a part of her manner. Friends remembered a drunk Chester carrying passed-out Jean back up St. Nicholas Avenue, and an ungallant Chester threatening meek rivals over imaginary slights. For New Year’s the Moons invited Vandi Haygood to the apartment, undoubtedly increasing the degree of drinking and bawdiness in closed quarters. In a short story he was working on, punningly titled “A Night of New Roses,” published at the end of 1945, Chester summed up a disposition that reflected his practical approach to life in the war years: “I spent half my time thinking about murdering white men. The other half of the time taking my spite out in having white women. And in between, protesting, bellyaching, crying.”
After the German offensive operations ended following the Battle of the Bulge, it was merely a question of time before the collapse of the Nazi regime and the end of the war in Europe. The prime literary event in the early winter of 1945 was the arrival of Richard Wright’s fourth book, Black Boy. This autobiography, his second selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, was a rare best-selling work of nonfiction that didn’t deal with the war. Wright proved that racism need not impair the commercial success of a black writer. Setting new standards for himself, Chester worked hard on his manuscript.
In the years following Native Son, alert commentators had picked up on the fact that the symbolic interaction between Bigger Thomas and Mary Dalton had a sexual component. In his novel, now called If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester reversed the symbols and used the sexual tension between a black male and a white female as the center of the novel. His black hero was middle-class and upwardly mobile, and his white villain was a dissipated cracker biddy. If He Hollers Let Him Go supplies an adrenaline-filled five days in the life of Bob Jones, a charismatic young black man with two years of college who is the lone black “leaderman” at a California shipyard. The novel begins with its hero at the height of prosperity. He owns a car, is nearly engaged to a glamorous, white-looking social worker, the daughter of a local black physician. By the end of the novel Jones has been arrested for the attempted rape of a washed-out blowsy white Mississippi welder’s helper, mainly because, in the published version, after a series of intense dalliances, he refuses to have sex with her. All of Jones’s tangible symbols of success are gone: job, fiancée, car, and draft deferment. The racial, environmental, and biological tensions of the naturalistic world prove steadily ruinous, but the psychology of internalized racial oppression is the novel’s prime focus. If He Hollers concludes with Jones physically broken and being mustered into the Army, which for a black soldier meant at least a long drink of humiliation during basic training at a Southern camp. The book’s title came from the children’s counting rhyme, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe / Catch a nigger by the toe / If he hollers let him go / Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.”
The arc of the published plot was quite tame in comparison with the sex-and-profanity-laced manuscript that Chester submitted to Bucklin Moon in the spring of 1945. The mild-mannered editor found Chester’s imaginative world quite different from the one he had glimpsed bantering over cocktails at Mollie’s. Buck Moon was taken aback and understood that the manuscript was a professional precipice from which “there was no way out.” He would have to stand his ground with the Doubleday higher-ups to get the book published at all. He could admire the value of Chester’s “memorable” project, which trumpeted “the psychological lynchings which every Negro suffers almost daily,” but he didn’t prefer the caustic tone or the pessimistic ending.
The book was remarkable. Chester deliberately speared conventional good taste, writing with the confidence of a man whose own personal life would seem to have lifted him beyond reproach. In early drafts Chester even used the word “fuck,” which was outlawed in 1944. But the rib-breaking punch he sought to deliver lay in the depictions of raw interracial sex and rape. He seemed determined to force American readers to recognize that on their own terms Negro men had slept with white women, a violation of not just the great American taboo, but a great many enforced laws. Furthermore, in his original draft, it is not clear that Bob Jones does not rape Madge.
“I’m gonna have you or we’re gonna fight all night,” I panted.
“You nigger, nigger, nigger,” she grated.
“Call me what you want,” I said. “You don’t hurt me baby.”
“Get up then, goddamnit,” she said. “You can’t do nothing like this.”
I got back on my knees, ready to pounce if she made a false move. She clutched her robe, flung it open. “Here.” She didn’t have on a nightgown, and her big white body spread out on the dark robe like the one that had every nigger lynched.
I had her right there on the floor, fully dressed, and out of breath, panting like a dog. She started gasping “Nigger, nigger, nigger,” and she almost screamed it, and that was it.
Chester had written a graphic account of rape as a calculated act of retribution for racism. But he was living in a completely different world, one where white men raped with impunity, black women suffered assault and degradation, and black men could be easily killed.
In December the CIO’s Political Action Committee was helping to organize the Committee for Equal Justice for Recy Taylor, an effort to investigate the gang rape of Mrs. Taylor, a black woman abducted and brutalized as she walked home from church in Alabama that September. Chester’s book would not simply be banned, but might serve as a legal resource verifying black bestiality, exposing Chester himself as well as other black Americans to assault. Not even Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman had rendered so controversial an account of interracial sex.
Chester thought it important to explain what had taken place, graphically, at a later point when the two principal characters are again skin to skin. He wanted to, in a single document, modernize race relations by revealing the libidinal underside of prejudice, upheld legally by fear-filled white men and women, who secretly desired intimacy with blacks. At the same time, he wasn’t seeking to fall into the trap of producing black saviors who, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, redeem white barbarity by way of their saintliness. His hero would have ample sex desire, fused with explicit black rage.
“You can’t insult me, nigger,” she told me. “You’d die for these fine white thighs of mine, you can’t fool me.”
“Die in ’em,” I grinned, peeling off my clothes.
She lay on the bed beside me, looking at the ceiling. “There’s something about a nigger screwing you that gets in your blood. I can just think about you raping me last night and wet all over myself. Gotdoggit, it ain’t—.” She broke off suddenly and asked me, “You ever been to Chicago?”
“Sure, plenty of times,” I said. “I know some fine white chicks in Chicago.”
“They tell me niggers is married to white women in Chicago and nobody does anything about it,” she said.
“Hell, that happens everywhere,” I said.
“Let’s go to Chicago and get married,” she said.
We both rolled over to face each other at the same time. I wanted to see if she was kidding. I don’t know what she wanted to see, but I thought it was a good time to hurt her if I could, so I said, “If I was going to marry a white woman I wouldn’t marry a slut like you.”
Her whole body began twitching and her face was like a square red bar. “You know what I’m going to do with you, nigger. I’m gonna make you screw me then I’m gonna get you lynched. I’ll be the last white woman you ever screw.”
I began pawing at her. “Take off your gown, goddammit,” I said impatiently.
She peeled off her clothes, her big white body spreading out on the bed like the grandmother of all the whores in the world. I tried to win a home. She went through her rigmarole of, “Nigger, rape me; oh, rape me, nigger!” as she had done the night before. Her face was flushed bright crimson and her eyes threw off weird sparks. But she didn’t fight.
When we had finished we lay there a while and she said harshly, “Gawdddd-damnnnn, a nigger just sets me on fire. I wanna run through the fields and get raped by every nigger in Texas.”
I lit a cigaret and became analytical, lying there, puffing. “You’re just like all the other southern white women,” I said. “You’re frustrated and inhibited. If it wasn’t all this business about race, you probably wouldn’t even think about colored men.”
Himes topped off his draft by including a graphic lesbian scene involving Bob Jones’s middle-class society girlfriend, Alice.
Doubleday would not publish it.
Bucklin Moon was not prudish; in his own novel the heroine works as a streetwalker to support herself. But she was black. And, in December 1944 Buck Moon submitted “Slack’s Blues” to Alice Browning’s Negro Story; it was a deeply sensitive and historically revealing portrait of a blues-playing piano man from Alabama making it in New York, a guy who knew how to handle himself. Moon reworked some of the materials from the famous jazz club scene in The Sun Also Rises, where the black drummer is the potent masculine comrade to Brett Ashley (James Baldwin, Moon’s young protégé, would, in a dozen years, take a similar story to even further heights). But Moon had met Chester in the company of civil rights lobbyists, and he expected that the material would not explode in his hands. He wanted at least a slight portrait of black heroism and keeping Bob Jones chaste in the novel and having Madge falsely accuse him of rape at the conclusion would help. Even within those limitations, the novel could still carry the scorpion’s sting of sex and race.
So Chester and his editor settled on rough, sexually charged interactions, nudity, and sexual frustration. Himes gave his archetypal description of the dissolute white welder from Texas, Madge Perkins, in chapter 17:
Her blonde hair, dark at the roots, was done up in metal curlers tight to her head. Without lipstick or make-up she looked older; there were deep blue circles underneath her eyes and blue hollows on each side of the bridge of her nose. Tiny crow’s-feet spread out from the outer corners of her eyes and hard slanting lines calipered obliquely from her nostrils. . . .
She looked like hell. She was really a beat biddy, trampish-looking and pure rebbish. . . .
She had a big mature body with large sagging breasts and brownish-pink nipples the size of silver dollars. Her stomach was soft and puffy and there were bulges at the top of her big wide thighs.
As his manuscript went through editing, Chester dashed off pro-Roosevelt racial-uplift stories. One, “Let Me at the Enemy—an’ George Brown,” was a black language experiment in the jive idiom that was becoming an increasingly accepted part of American life by way of Dan Burley’s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, Cab Calloway’s performances, and radio disc jockeys all over the nation. He also dealt with the shifting gender expectations after women joined the war industry. In two stories set in California—“The Song Says ‘Keep on Smiling,’ ” which appeared in April in The Crisis, and “Make with a Shape,” which followed later in the summer in Negro Story—Chester wrote about contemporary married life. A tongue-in-cheek set piece, “Make with a Shape,” expresses dismay at the remade, wartime spouse, “so industrialized and athletic and self reliant.” The story after all was not just a hyperbolic allegory of his own life. Jean had rallied from her disappointment at his affairs and was conducting “a tour of inspection” of USO facilities in Philadelphia, and handing out quotes to the press.
Chester sent his revised draft to Moon, who then put the manuscript into production, sending it to the copy editor. By March 1945 Chester was “roughly in the middle” of a new novel and asking his acquaintance Vandi Haygood at the foundation to extend his award so that he could continue writing. Chester needed to return to Los Angeles to concentrate and sober up. He and Jean told the press that they were leaving to avoid the “many social obligations they would have in New York City [that] would take too much time from writing.” The Julius Rosenwald Fund extended his fellowship, with a new grant of $500. Jean returned to L.A. by April and Chester followed the next month, to a house at 1717½ W. Thirty-Seventh Street, in the crowded Central Avenue neighborhood. The FBI was now “pretext”-calling his house to determine his whereabouts and using its resources to take a look at his manuscript.
Chester traveled to California in the aftermath of the European war, as a mushrooming euphoria swept the United States. When the train stopped in Chicago, he took the opportunity to drop by the Ellis Avenue headquarters of the Rosenwald Fund, in Hyde Park, just north of the University of Chicago, and meet the staff. He visited Vandi Haygood, who had approved his fellowship as “a good bet,” but who also didn’t “like Himes’ project much.” The layover became a torrid affair, “a wild, drunken week of sexual extravagance.” Precisely what he meant at first to Haygood is unclear. Some white women who had a taste for black men did find him elegant, graceful, and “very put together,” but Chester also initially struck people as “meek mannered,” effusively polite, and speaking with a mild speech impediment (perhaps only his Mississippi twang). With Vandi, Chester could palaver with a graduate of the University of Chicago about the highbrow publishing world, literature, and the arts, and also receive her sympathy on account of the day-to-day racism and poverty he endured. Whatever the impetus for the liaison, in Vandi Haygood Chester found a feminine ideal—attractive, sure of herself, and with the means to provide.
Back in L.A. and still hoping to crack the fortunes of Hollywood screenwriting, Chester accepted an invitation from the Actors’ Lab, a collective touting the “very progressive” and “very political” training that steeped young migrants to Hollywood in the Stanislavsky method and other exercises to heighten concentration. But L.A. was still the kind of place where columnist Hedda Hopper believed that “dancing between Whites and Negroes” at the Actors’ Lab was “the sort of thing that leads to race riots.” So with some wariness, Chester agreed to meet Marc Connelly there and discuss a new project on George Washington Carver, the famous black Tuskegee scientist who pioneered peanut production. Connelly had also secured the services of Arna Bontemps, a novelist and the librarian at Fisk University; he was “summoned” to Los Angeles in mid-May on an expenses-paid trip by M-G-M to see whether the play St. Louis Woman could be transformed into a screen-ready musical. Bontemps was talking to Lena Horne, whom he hoped to interest in the starring role. He had also just served on the Rosenwald Fund committee that had decided to extend Chester’s grant. Even-tempered and a literary man to the core, Bontemps loved writing and black culture and was best friends with Langston Hughes, but kept his family life at center stage and never established a big name.
Bontemps and Himes had quite a bit to chat about. Bontemps and his white friend Jack Conroy were nearing publication of their Doubleday book about black migration, They Seek a City; they too had worked with Bucklin Moon and also had been promised the Carver Award. By the mid-1940s, Bontemps was pragmatic about literary deals and publishing companies. He did not open himself to sorrow on account of the way the business trendily picked up and then discarded black writers or black themes.
Connelly, understood as one of the great liberal voices in American film and theater as the creator of The Green Pastures, began his meeting with Chester and Bontemps by declaring that all he was certain of was the opening to the film. “Dr. Carver was a very humble man, and he always ironed his own shirts. So when we start this film on Dr. Carver, he goes into the kitchen and irons his shirt.” Insulted, Chester stood up and walked out. Bontemps, who lived in Nashville, could swallow quite a bit more than that. Writing Bucklin Moon, he attributed all the dramatics to Chester’s anxiety about the publication of his first novel. “I think he is too excited about his immediately forthcoming novel to make the headway he would like on his second one, but he’ll calm down and get in stride presently.”
But Chester would have to do more than exit a room in outrage to preserve his artistic vision. Before the summer began, he received unnerving news. Publishers Weekly announced on June 9 that the Carver Award, a prize of $2500 that came with a handsome amount of publicity, had gone to Fannie Cook’s Mrs. Palmer’s Honey, a novel about a black domestic voting for Roosevelt. The New York Times remarked later that “it seems a little grotesque to honor as undistinguished a book as Mrs. Palmer’s Honey.” Chester, who believed that Bucklin Moon had promised him the award to launch If He Hollers, felt betrayed.
The situation was actually worse than not getting the award. Moon had been out of the office the entire spring, preparing his anthology Primer for White Folks and writing a new novel. Around the middle of July, he guardedly conveyed to Himes that If He Hollers Let Him Go was in trouble at Doubleday; this was followed by official misgivings about the manuscript from the legal department. Apparently fearing that Chester would take the removal of major portions of his novel personally, Moon attributed the corrections to an anonymous editor and kept the person’s identity secret, except for her sex. “One of the women executives said that the book made her sick at the stomach,” he informed Chester. Even with the dramatic adjustments to the manuscript, Chester learned from his editor that he had a real foe at the publisher. Moon told Chester that if this highly placed woman “had known what [the novel] was like she would have fought its acceptance.” The editor disinclined to publish If He Hollers Let Him Go and strong enough to make her dissent meaningful could only have been Clara Claasen. Chester never learned her identity.
As he had done when he thought he was wrongfully treated on the writers’ project in Cleveland, a frantic Chester started writing letters. Fit to be tied, he explained to heartthrob Vandi Haygood the new problems with the revisions and scrambled back to New York to his cousin’s apartment on July 19. By then, the manuscript had been set into type and galleys were ready for him to read.
Aside from any possible vendetta held by Claasen, Doubleday attorneys had gone over the manuscript because of concerns with two issues. First, had Chester written any scenes that might be considered obscene? Lillian Smith’s 1944 novel Strange Fruit had just caused an uproar and launched a legal case on account of profanity, an allusion to the rape of a black woman by a white man, and a suggestion of lesbianism. In chapter 17 of Chester’s novel, the hero, Bob Jones, goes to the hotel room of the white female antagonist and tries to rape her; in another chapter Bob slums at an erotic party with his girlfriend and several lesbians. The legal department would also have considered the point of view of the four-year-old Council on Books in Wartime, whose executive board included two Doubleday executives. The council was responsible for getting reprints to servicemen, keeping up their morale, and bolstering emotional confidence on the home front. Chester’s book emphatically climaxed with Bob Jones’s defeat, a vanquishing symbolized by his being railroaded into the military. Chester’s combination of raw sexuality and rejection of military duty must have tested the Doubleday legal team. A conservative judge might easily have placed a ban on the book.
For Chester, the occasion of examining the galleys proved a minor scandal in a writing career that would involve legendarily bitter accusations levied at publishers. Responding to a secretary’s telephone call, Chester arrived in the late afternoon at the Doubleday office at Rockefeller Center. Bucklin Moon was out of town and it seemed to Chester as if the staff were questioning his identity. He couldn’t be sure if he was only unfamiliar or if they were automatically dismissive because he was black. An employee asked him to read the galleys in Moon’s office before their editorial suite closed for the day at five o’clock. Chester loudly insisted on his right to take the galleys home. That night, when Himes finished reading them, it became clear that the manuscript had not been just edited: it had been ransacked.
He and Moon had already toned down chapter 17, but now it had been completely eliminated. The furor over the accepted manuscript and the considerations from the legal department had apparently led to the unusual step of re-editing without any notice to the author. Chester telephoned Vandi Haygood, searching for a sympathetic ear. Then, dealing with Bucklin Moon, also apparently by telephone, Chester became adamant and fought skillfully enough to have the hotel room tempest between Bob and Madge restored. Through Moon he learned that a company vice president and the legal department had required the re-editing. If being outspoken was enabling some victories like the restored chapter, he was also earning the label of troublemaker.
Jean joined him from California in September. Knowing his vulnerability and tendency toward debauchery, they wisely left the Henry Moon apartment and sought their own place to live. But even in the outer boroughs, racism and the postwar population surge was making it impossible to find an apartment. They wound up taking a room with a young, cheerful schoolteacher at 121 Bainbridge Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Mollie Moon continued to dutifully invite them to her choice gatherings, which she managed to schedule around her own appearances at Café Society, Broadway premieres, and NAACP showdowns between Walter White and Countee Cullen over the musical St. Louis Woman. Mollie had befriended Hollywood now, and was boosting screenwriter John Bright, who also became friends with Chester. But she was showing weariness at having to deal with her “crazy cousins,” who were known to overstep, and maybe now more so that Henry was always on the road building coalitions for the CIO’s Political Action Committee. When she had her crowd over on Sunday, September 16, she wrote to Henry that “everyone had a nice time, including the Himeses, whom I kept sober.”
On September 30 Chester got devastating news from Ohio: his seventy-one-year-old mother had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He cried hysterically, despite their long emotional separation. With the Rosenwald money long gone, Chester had to scrounge around for train fare. He traveled alone to Columbus, where Estelle had been living with Joe Jr. and his wife. The day before his mother was cremated, on October 2, his aunt Fannie Wiggins died at fifty-eight in Cleveland. Estelle’s sister-in-law and nemesis was buried three days after Estelle. A week later, Henry’s father, Roddy Moon, had a serious illness that required medical attention. The generation born in the aftermath of slavery was giving way.
Estelle’s death hurt Chester more because she had not lived long enough to see him praised and redeemed in the way he had dreamed of when he was in prison. He was reconsidering her contumacious personality, which had defied his father, his father’s employers, and the strictures of white society at large, dominating his household and driving him into the streets. Compared with other adults, he thought of Estelle as “a woman of iron will and ruthless determination and burning ambition.” But her death allowed him to glimpse a new, softer quality: “my mother had been innocent.” He was recognizing that he knew little of the struggles of her life. He did know that she would have been disappointed by a novel like If He Hollers Let Him Go, with its rough language, obsession with sexuality and interracial conflict, and its contempt for upper-class light-skinned blacks. For the rest of his life, Chester derived strength by explicitly repudiating some of Estelle’s cherished values, while he escaped having to confront her about his own choices. But the chance of his having misjudged her and needing something that she had lavished upon him remained.
His bereavement roughly coincided with the earliest advertisements for his book. In the weeks before Estelle’s death, Doubleday ran two ads in Publishers Weekly, which showed the cover and referred to Himes’s book as “a tough, controversial novel, loaded with dynamite, built around the racial tension inherent in a West Coast shipyard.” The second ad, appearing in the next issue, was a full page that presented the novel as a thriller: “A Real Shocker! Dynamite! Tough! Fast Paced! Reading as Gripping as The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Doubleday’s ads used graffiti-style letters for the book title. The publication of If He Hollers Let Him Go was set for November 1.
In the final days of October, a “surprised” Chester saw the first copy of the book, “very much discouraged by the jacket and preface.” Himes could not have liked the dust-jacket language, which praised his realism by belittling his creative skill: “what he writes comes from firsthand information rather than from a fertile imagination.” Nowhere was his mastery of craft, his journeyman years with Esquire and the racial-uplift magazines, or his Rosenwald fellowship mentioned. A week before publication, he learned that Doubleday had no biographical portfolio on him, and that metropolitan dailies and literary people in Cleveland and Los Angeles who knew Chester personally had not been targeted. Seeking to rescue his book, Chester prepared lists of names to be sent press releases and review copies. But his mood was prickly, defensive, and accusatory.
Reading Bucklin Moon’s Primer for White Folks while in Detroit at the end of October, Henry Moon was excited for his cousin Chester, after so much recent raw pain in the family, including the death of Henry’s older brother, Joe Hubbard Moon, in 1944. In spite of the hiccoughs in their relationship, Henry was giddy on the eve of publication and asked his wife to “remember me kindly to Jean and to him.” At the same time Bucklin Moon requested that Henry and Mollie throw the official Doubleday book party for Chester at their home. The white junior editor might have considered the request thoroughly ordinary, since Henry and Mollie gave smashing interracial parties to the smart set in New York and could generate publicity with easy flair. They agreed to hold the event at their apartment on November 2.
Chester interpreted the gesture quite differently. Doubleday threw parties for white authors like Earl Wilson at the Copacabana and Elizabeth Janeway at the Rainbow Room. In a couple of weeks a rival press would debut first-time black writer Ann Petry at the Hotel Biltmore to two hundred guests. Added to the Carver Award betrayal, Himes now felt small-timed and Jim Crowed by his publisher.
Chester reacted to his publisher’s slight and his mother’s death in a battle of words with Mollie a few days before the book launch. He brought her to tears. Weary and wounded “deeply,” she called Henry, who responded with uncharacteristic anger. “I don’t like it one bit and will let him know when I see him,” Henry threatened. Containing his disfavor, Henry encouraged Mollie to carry on with the celebration, giving her painstaking advice on the invitations, and asking her to include all of the “in” crowd: Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Walter White, Roy Wilkins, P. L. Prattis of the Pittsburgh Courier, George Schuyler, Doxey Wilkerson, Dan Burley, John Bright, William Attaway, Countee Cullen, and Ralph Ellison.
Chester had a reason to be happy. In spite of what he understood as his publisher’s bungling, the day before the party the book had received a lengthy review in the New York Times. While hardly an endorsement of Chester as an artist, the review signaled that he had indeed struck the nerve he was after. The Times decreed If He Hollers “a mixture of polemics and melodrama,” but it did not ignore the gauntlet Chester threw down with full force: “Bob is forever wanting to kill someone.”
Chester “took his bow” that Friday evening “amid the clinking of many glasses and the shaking of many hands.” Unperturbed, Mollie grinned and hammed it up at the party. Pictures show Chester looking genuinely happy, shaking hands with John Bright while Owen Dodson cheers him. A head taller than everyone else, Sterling Brown (who was teaching at Vassar that year) and Bucklin Moon look down approvingly. Jean beamed at everyone who had a good word for Chester. Referring to two of the revered black brainiacs from the Harlem Renaissance, Amsterdam News gossip columnist Dan Burley thought that the convivial creative spirit of the 1920s had been revived: “ ’Twas like years ago in the days of [Rudolph] Fisher, Wallace Thurman et. al. eh, Ted Poston?”
Dour about the event retrospectively, Chester would write dismissively, “I consented to go to the party, which I thought was a flop.” Flop or not, he wouldn’t have another book party like it for almost thirty years. The aftermath of the party also cut family ties. Henry returned to New York sick and in a bad mood, considering the “nerve-wracking” tension of his job, worrying about his father and “Chester’s reaction.” After whatever confrontation occurred between the two men, the former camaraderie and coaching were permanently ended. Chester never again stayed at the apartment and rationalized his spiteful ingratitude by deciding that cautious, bookish Henry, wrapped around his “Mollishka,” would no longer be useful. The original title to If He Hollers had been Breakout, and now that Chester had battled his publishers, friends, family, and censors in his passage to becoming a novelist, breaking out was what he wanted to do.
On November 10, Chester gave a “Meet the Author” talk at the George Washington Carver School on 125th Street, an adult education bureau run by the poet Gwendolyn Bennett with heavy Communist support. A Harlem Renaissance belle, the Marxist Bennett approved of Himes’s novel for “presenting a true picture” of white prejudice and black psychological response. On the flyers, he was presented as “Chester Himes, author of the forthcoming George Washington Carver Memorial Award novel,” an error that was a source of embarrassment and resentment for him. Meanwhile, he received a self-described “fan letter” from his old Cleveland friend Ruth Seid. It was a compliment wrapped in barbed wire. While she “enjoyed” If He Hollers “very much,” she emphasized that she knew as much about writing as he did: “I’m more eager to see the next book. I suspect that it will be less purely bitter, or if as bitter, then more focused.”
A week later, he had a satisfying role on a panel at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg branch on 135th Street with sociologist Horace Cayton and anthropologist St. Clair Drake. The two social scientists had just completed Negro Metropolis, an enormous study of black-belt Chicago. Richard Wright had helped the men get a trade contract for the book and had written the introduction. A man with a perpetual curiosity regarding the social psychology of race relations, Cayton had fallen in love with If He Hollers Let Him Go. Before he left Chicago for New York, he wrote to Richard Wright, “very much excited about this book . . . I’ve gone all out for it.” Cayton, whose father had graduated from Alcorn, admired the book in his columns in the Chicago Sun and Pittsburgh Courier. A social reformer, Cayton prized the exposure of “the paralyzing fear and hatred which Negroes have developed toward their white suppressors” and encouraged his readers to buy the “courageous and strong book . . . a great piece of literature.”
The momentum of the reviews picked up. In Cleveland, Ted Robinson, the Plain Dealer’s reviewer, certified If He Hollers as “the ticket-of-admission of Chester B. Himes to the limited company of our top-flight novelists.” In New York Chester’s buddy Constance Curtis praised him for showing “the calculated castration of prejudice,” and, unlike the Times, glimpsed that the real problem was that “Bob had too much of the desire for unequivocal equality. That was his mistake.” Even in the pages of the more staid Crisis, editor Roy Wilkins admitted that Chester “tells so accurately how Negroes feel about the countless humiliations heaped upon them hour after hour.”
But to Chester the most important praise came from Richard Wright. Wright had approached the alternative left-leaning newspaper PM to examine If He Hollers Let Him Go alongside a new book by Arthur Miller. Wright delivered the review on November 25, beginning his article with a quote from Karl Marx and calling the two books “fairly competently executed novels.” Then Wright zeroed in on Chester’s book:
Jerky in pace, If He Hollers Let Him Go has been compared with the novels of James M. Cain, but there is more honest passion in 20 pages of Himes than in the whole of Cain. Tough-minded Himes has no illusions: I doubt if he has ever had any. He sees too clearly to be fooled by the symbolic guises in which Negro behavior tries to hide, and he traces the transformations by which sex is expressed in equations of race pride, murder in the language of personal redemption and love in terms of hate.
To read Himes conventionally is to miss the significance of the (to coin a phrase) bio-social level of his writing. Bob Jones is so charged with elementary passion that he ceases to be a personality and becomes a man reacting only with nerves, blood and motor responses.
Ironically, the several dreams that head each chapter do not really come off. Indeed, Himes’ brutal prose is more authentically dreamlike than his consciously contrived dreams. And that is as it should be.
In this, his first novel, Himes establishes himself not as what has quaintly been called a New Negro, but as a new kind of writing man.
Chester and Wright became men of shared vision. Recuperating at home from a bad cold, Wright received Chester on December 14. Having their boyhoods in Mississippi in common—Himes in Lorman near Vicksburg and Wright seventy-five miles north in Jackson—the two men bonded easily and warmly. Chester confided to Wright about his youthful criminal rebellion, and his nearly eight years in jail—this was of great interest to Wright, who that spring had completed a novel about juvenile gangs and crime he was calling The Jackal (it would be published after his death as Rite of Passage). Unlike the literary men whose work came exclusively from the library, Chester had known and survived deadly, torturous adversity. After recounting the adventures and punishments, he told Wright, “Nothing can hurt me.” Chester’s prison experience impressed and thrilled Wright, a mild-mannered man, as the verification of a kind of machismo. Nevertheless, at about the same time that Chester’s relationship collapsed with Henry Moon, a guiding force for him for eight years, Chester befriended and was befriended by Richard Wright, the most famous living black writer.
A couple of days after their get-together Chester sent Wright a note of “appreciation.” “The manner in which Horace Cayton, you, Ralph Ellison have come forward with such good will and interest,” the letter began warmly, “is indicative of a new day on the literary front.” Chester thought Wright able and mature, beyond the “petty jealousies, snipings, bickerings, animosities that have plagued Negro writers.” He proudly enrolled himself “in this new school which it has fallen your responsibility to head.” A day later they arranged a morning rendezvous so that the Himeses and the Wrights could meet. Chester and Jean later had “a wonderful time” at the Wrights’ Christmas Eve party. On other occasions they met over West Indian food at a restaurant called Connie’s in Greenwich Village. When Joseph Himes Jr. came to town for New Year’s, Chester and Jean invited the Wrights to their party. In turn, Wright took Himes to meet some of the staff at the Book-of-the-Month Club, and publicist Vivian Wolfert helped Chester draw out a new strategy to advertise If He Hollers. They continued getting together at the Wrights’ Washington Square apartment with Wright’s inner circle of friends, including Ellison, Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, C. L. R. James, and his companion, the professional model and socialist Constance Webb. While the good times were genuine, sometimes serious tensions flared up. At one of the parties, according to Webb, Wright teased Ralph Ellison about his novel in progress so persistently that a frustrated Ellison drew a knife and Himes intervened to disarm him. Wright would sometimes exaggerate to his other friends that Chester had committed murder.
Chester almost certainly mentioned to Wright his relationship to Ruth Seid. Before Seid’s The Wasteland was published in 1946, Wright reviewed the galleys of the book, a novel he liked because it helped him understand the narrow racial prejudice of his mother-in-law, an immigrant Jew from Poland. But that circle of acquaintance was too small for Chester. He put some distance between himself and the next star alum of Cleveland’s Writers’ Project. If Seid thought his character’s emotion overblown, he declared that she “used to pump frustration through me almost as intense as that suffered by Bob—only I, being inhibited by the numerous restraints of life, never quite showed the depth of my resentment.” Chester wanted her to understand that she had no right to presume any familiarity. He had been out of sorts, more or less at every stage in his life, and had finally found peers. He was now anxious to keep others at bay.
The year 1945 for Chester was a watershed, like 1928: the book publication and his mother’s death, the survival of the marriage to Jean—or her forceful claim to it, in spite of his drunken infidelities—and the cutting of his ties with his influential cousin, in favor of two of the twentieth century’s most influential American novelists. In the process, Chester had become a national figure. Near year’s end, he gave an interview to Earl Conrad of the Chicago Defender. Conrad’s article, complete with a large photograph of Chester, corralled him, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright into a “blues school of writers” who were “trying to show what the inexplorable caste system can do to the human being.” Chester offered a series of polite, highly temperate responses and he revealed to Conrad that while he worked on the WPA, “I developed a hatred of the ruling class of whites.” But Conrad regarded Chester as having internalized racism and turned negrophobia on its head. He wrote of Chester and his mates as “literary projections of the social type they portray—Bigger Thomas.” If they were not driven to murder in their confrontation with racial discrimination, the “blues school” men were “highly sensitized, nervous, jittery, ultra-critical, cynical.” Chester’s cynicism and rejection of ideology were palpable to all, and they paid at least one tangible dividend. In December 1945, deciding that he made poor material for the Communists, the special agent in charge from Los Angeles requested that the director of the FBI shutter Himes’s file.