Clean-shaven and accentuating his youth, Chester flew back to the United States on January 2, 1963, and checked into the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village. He looked up a friend named Emile Caddoo and became mildly distracted by Emile’s pretty sister, Joyce, an artist and teacher of troubled youth. At Joyce’s St. Mark’s Place apartment, Chester met twenty-nine-year-old LeRoi Jones, the stirring jazz critic, poet, and playwright whose string of award-winning off-Broadway plays would begin the next year. Chester was familiar with Jones from his essays on jazz, which had appeared in the magazine Revolution and would be collected that May in the book Blues People. By this time, Jones had traveled to Cuba and taken over Richard Gibson’s job as chairman of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and he was experiencing the same sort of magnetic attraction to Malcolm X as Chester had felt in the previous summer. Jones reminded him of his younger self and the reason he’d gotten out of the United States. Jones’s eye was swollen shut because he had just been poleaxed by three drunk, off-duty policemen.
During that week, Chester took Joyce with him to visit Constance Pearlstein. Formerly Constance Webb, she had briefly married C. L. R. James, had a son, and then remarried Edward Pearlstein. He emptied bottles of scotch at John Williams’s place and when friends asked about other Yank writers around Paris, Chester sizzled, “What the hell do I want to see James Jones for?” (Jones was said to have made “disparaging remarks” about Chester’s detective novels.) Chester insisted to Williams that Paris offered little to blacks. As Himes was hoping, an obliging Williams introduced him to literary agent Carl Brandt at a good Italian restaurant. The meeting went well and Chester, who wrote Lesley that Brandt was “considered the best in New York,” forwarded all of his materials for consideration.
Feeling good, Chester gave Williams the speech he had delivered at the University of Chicago in 1948 for publication in The Angry Black, an anthology the younger writer was editing. After having read Williams’s third novel, a black family drama called Sissie, in manuscript that fall, Chester believed him “at the very top of all Negro writers who have lived.”
Chester even included Williams in some of his publicity efforts. Editor Allan Morrison of Jet, the glossy pocket-size weekly, interviewed Chester in his Sixth Avenue office and photographed him and Williams. Hoping to secure an agent to sell Pinktoes in the United States, Chester used the interview to sell himself. He reported having sold 480,000 copies of his books in France and he sang the tune of progress as it was then known. “One day people might cease to think of books by Negroes as Negro books but as books period.” He also claimed that “Negro” writers of the day were “more fashionable” than before, and he attributed some of their success to James Baldwin, though he managed to drive home that, unlike himself, Baldwin was “practically unknown in Europe.” But by the end of the short interview Chester was “very disappointed” and at odds with an American audience, black or white. “At this rate,” he observed, “it will be a long time before segregation is banished.”
Involuntarily he lingered in New York, waiting for decisions about paperback reprints and trying to sell a long story describing his travels in his Volkswagen in France and Germany. Admitting to himself that “my nerves are on the point of explosion,” Chester produced one of his classic axioms of the American scene. The publishers “just want brothers to keep on writing about our difficulties and persecutions,” he decided, “and they feel insulted by anything but our complaining about our racial injustices.” He mailed an entreaty to Knopf, requesting the reprint rights to Lonely Crusade, and then slipped out of town.
Chester flew to Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and on January 19 made his way to the village of Sisal, outside Mérida, to reunite with the ravishing Marianne Greenwood. She was renting a cottage—really a hut with a high palm-thatched roof, although it had running water and a toilet. A Mayan Indian family next door cleaned the rooms and brought over plates of corn tortillas, fish, beans, vegetables, and chilis. Initially Chester felt guilty about stringing Lesley along, as well as anxious over the condition of his literary estate. However, he wrote competently and steadily as Greenwood struggled with her own book. Before long he would be forced to admit that “it isn’t easy for two people to write in the same house.” His other company besides Greenwood was a potent local brew called pisa, a kind of tequila. Instead of conducting a sensual love affair, he sat alone in his room and wrote his book.
As for Greenwood, she was working on a travelog, which would be published in 1965 as The Tattooed Heart of Livingstone. It discussed her adventures and romances in Europe and Guatemala. She admired the natural beauty of Mérida and thought Chester, with his long hair and his bushy mustache, was looking attractive and manly. Tempted to stray from an “elaborate and sometimes difficult” book, Greenwood yearned for the bedroom, the “nicer ways to pass one’s time.”
Their friction, compounded by jealousy, began quickly. Always excessively possessive, but this time probably right, Chester believed Greenwood had first gone to Sisal accompanied by a Guatemalan boyfriend. She left his love life in France alone and marveled at Chester’s discipline, but his formidable concentration was a source of envy. Chester himself had to confess that “things did not go well.” Part of the problem stemmed from being two late-middle-aged people still aching for recognition, but nearly destitute in Mexico, constantly reminded of how near they were to success without truly having it.
During eight weeks in Sisal, Himes wrote a draft of the book he was calling Back to Africa, which would ultimately be published in English as Cotton Comes to Harlem. For the first time he deliberately revised a draft of one of the detective fictions, and the book worried him in a new way, coming as it did “sometimes well; sometimes poorly; sometimes rapidly; sometimes slowly.” In the caper that would characterize the entire series, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed pursue two con men, one black and one white, to rescue the money stolen from “our poor colored people.” The novel identified Chester’s friend Lewis Michaux as a contemporary Back to Africa proponent, carrying forward the ideas of Marcus Garvey, and featured as its most colorful antagonist Deke O’Malley, an ex-con-turned-minister who exploits Harlemites’ Back to Africa nostalgia. Chester considered “the Back to Africa program in the U.S. . . . one of the most absurd things the black people of America had ever supported,” but that did not mean that he dismissed it. In the novel that offered speculative riffs on the dense meaning of jazz and introduced the competing “Back-to-the-Southland” movement organized by white con men, Chester strongly sympathized with common black people enamored of the African repatriation scheme, “seeking a home—just the same as the Pilgrim Fathers.” Chester romantically portrayed the fierce feelings of ethnic pride and longing for an ancestral homeland away from the strife of racism and the history of enslavement. The pensive partner of the duo, Grave Digger, who notices the antique map upon which the bogus repatriation scheme had been based, explains his commitment to recover the lost money in similarly nostalgic terms: “ ‘I wouldn’t do this for nobody but my own black people.’ ” Chester’s portrait in Cotton Comes to Harlem of sentimental longing, absurd violence, urban slang, and droll country humor would captivate swathes of black America for many decades.
One night near the end of February 1963, Chester was making love to Greenwood, when he rolled over and felt pins and needles scoring the right side of his body. The pain increased until half his body was unable to move; his face was contorted into a grimace. Shivering irrepressibly, he presumed that he had been stung by a scorpion. After a while control of his body returned and he likely understood himself to be suffering physical exhaustion and alcoholic or narcotic tremors. Headed into his fifty-fourth year, Chester was sleeping with a woman who was not petite like Willa Thompson or Regine Fischer. The next morning he struggled out of bed and tramped down the beach past the yellow Coca-Cola stands, but his strides became heavier and slower. He and Greenwood cobbled together bus fare to Mérida, to seek medical assistance. On March 1 he saw a doctor who said he had suffered “a brain spasm” and checked him into the local Catholic hospital, a group of ramshackle one-story buildings. Doctors told him never to smoke again and drink only occasionally.
Once he was admitted to the hospital he had a new problem: getting out. He was there for two weeks trying to raise money to pay the bills. He shared the narrow ward with a single other patient, one slowly dying of cancer. Although Chester limped on his right side, he rallied and managed to type out the final chapter of the novel; he mailed it to Editions Plon the week before the contractual deadline, begging for the balance of his advance. He telegraphed Carl Brandt, asking for $200, and Brandt, who by then had already sent him $50 and learned of Chester’s habit of borrowing from his agents, declined to take Chester on as a client, sending a letter that frightened Chester by referring to heavy “ ‘financial obligations.’ ” In a hot, ragged barracks, with an electric fan, a single sheet, and hospital food, Chester was feeling hard-pressed again, and describing his ordeal as life “on the tip of a needle.” Finally, the German publisher Buchergilde Gutenberg came through, cabling $250. Chester returned to Sisal, collected his bags, and flew to New York on March 24. Greenwood wrote that she would visit New York as soon as she got some money, but they had already come to a “parting of the ways.” Chester wrote to John Williams, “Marianne and I have decided that we can’t possibly live together with our separate careers and our egos and without money.”
In New York, Chester returned to the Albert Hotel and was soon seen by a doctor, who directed him to the Neurological Institute on 168th Street. He wrote a hasty letter that was hand-delivered to Carl Van Vechten, requesting $50 to pay the room rent at the hotel and to help him distinguish the health of his body from the health of his finances. Another letter, this one mailed to Paris, was even more unguarded and sincere. Aware that his romance with Marianne had no future, and hoping that the stable, business-oriented Lesley had not chosen another man, Chester blurted out to her, “If you are involved with someone please for Christ’s sake say so.” His flailing about his health and finances made Lesley more attached to him. The eldest girl in her family, Lesley had lost her adored mother, who was considered the angel of her village, as a teenager. The role of nurturer came to her quite naturally. Packard’s compassionate instincts were put to the test at once because Marianne Greenwood did not give Chester up. She had learned of his relationship with Lesley and wrote to her, graphically exposing the details of their romance and, in spite of their differences making a future impossible, laying claim to Chester. While the letter caused a dramatic moment between Chester and Lesley, her rival’s strong pursuit also made Chester ever more desirable.
On April 2, he checked in for tests at the Neurological Institute, including early methods of brain tissue examination, a spinal tap, and multiple X-rays. He was diagnosed as having had a stroke, and he was also suffering from hypertension, a dangerous and prevalent ailment, especially among adult African American men. Adding to the pressure, he received a letter from Knopf scotching the possibility of a release of Lonely Crusade in paperback unless he repaid the $2000 advance from 1947. When the tests concluded, he wound up with a prescription to treat high blood pressure and advice to reduce salt and fat in his diet. “I feel much better, almost normal. Perhaps the feeling of security in being here helps,” he wrote to Van Vechten. By the afternoon of April 13, he was back at the Albert Hotel with a “clean bill of health,” although after that he walked with a slight, permanent limp. Jet magazine reported he had experienced “partial paralysis,” alerting Joe, who dropped him a mildly consoling line about his “slight indisposition.”
Feeling guilty about his agent’s rebuff, a devoted John Williams visited Chester daily while the money began to trickle in. A young director named Larry Kostroff decided to risk a slender stake on him, in the hopes of making a film of one of the detective stories. Chester had a short lunchtime conference with Bucklin Moon, their grievances patched up. Moon was now an editor at Pocket Books and, up to his old tricks, promised Chester a hefty $5000 for three chapters of a new book. Fifty dollars dribbled in from Nugget magazine for a story, and he wrote Lesley asking for money, which she sent. When Plon sent what was owed upon delivery of the manuscript, Chester selected a better room. Marianne, having scraped together the resources to fly out of Mexico, visited him briefly at the hotel. But although she showed some affectionate feeling by the gesture, Chester was disinclined to reverse himself about their affair. He resumed his visits with such friends as John Williams, Carl Van Vechten, and Joyce Caddoo.
Chester left for France, “where I am safe,” on April 26. “I have discovered,” he noted with some wincing, “that there is absolutely nothing for me here in the U.S.” He was not convinced that life in a busy European capital was a final refuge either. After having written his story of “the lost and hungry black people from black Harlem . . . dreaming of the day when they could also go back home in triumph and contentment,” he yearned to see Ghana. “I want to go to Africa,” he wrote to friends, but not to work on an African book: “I just want to go to Accra and live while I am writing.”
Upon his return to chilly, overcast Paris, Chester moved into Lesley’s apartment. As before, having been reduced to desperate measures in his relationship with the New York publishing world meant he would have to write without the security of an American publisher’s advance. In contrast, two publications strengthened his position in France, once again making him the heir apparent to Richard Wright. The Présence Africain pamphlet “Harlem, or, an American Cancer” was making the rounds of intellectual circles interested in the African diaspora and decolonization that spring. In May, A Case of Rape, Chester’s playful but most concisely intellectual book, was released as Une Affaire de viol by a small French press sympathetic to the Algerian liberation movement, Editions Les Yeux Ouverts; translated by André Mathieu, a Café Tournon pal, it featured an afterword by the French feminist writer Christiane Rochfort. The book brought him a new audience that started to connect him more to the Présence Africain article than the detective fiction and If He Hollers Let Him Go.
A Case of Rape, his foray into France and its touchy racial politics, produced a swirling controversy. “I became very much disliked,” Chester recalled. By suggesting that African Americans couldn’t get a fair trial in France, the book indirectly jabbed at French racism and strong anti-Algerian bias. “All the Parisian press claimed that I was calling the French racists,” he remembered. But he was helping them understand the world. Paris-Presse ran a headline “In Harlem This Summer It’s Going to Be Hot,” above an interview with him. Toward the latter part of 1963, he noticed “a number of articles in the French press about the growing racism in France (and how un-French it is),” and his work and words contributed to “a sort of soul searching.” If he did not get a best seller out of it, his publicizing the problem of racism in France during the epochal American summer of the March on Washington and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham brought him visitors by the score. By now, when he heard a knock on his door, he protected his time, shouting, “Go away!”
“People are crowding in on me and I am hoping to get somewhere relaxed and warm,” he told Van Vechten. As usual, he would hustle down to Torun and Walter Coleman’s home in the South of France. Before leaving, he had a visit with Thierry de Clermont-Tonnerra, the head of Editions Plon, and the marketing staff about the manuscript he had finished in Mexico. Chester insisted on a share of the royalties, “not like my other books that Plon had published” (La Troisième Génération and Mamie Mason). Like their American colleagues before them, the French publishers were unused to having an author call them dishonest; de Clermont-Tonnerra’s “face fell” and the head of publicity walked out.
Chester took solace in his friendship with Walter Coleman. The two chauvinists went to the Cannes Film Festival that spring, where Christiane Rochfort was secretary, and attended some of the champagne-fueled parties on the terrace at the Bleu Bar. When Rochfort called American directors over to shake Chester’s hand, and they instinctively snubbed Walter, Chester roared hysterically. Americans, he thought, would never change.
On his return to Paris, his notoriety had intensified. It struck him that he was “more famous in Paris than any black American who had ever lived.” What it meant was a nonstop parade of the trivially curious, and an end to his serenity. He balanced the superficiality of the celebrity by attending the talks at the Présence Africain lecture halls, where the elite of African writers held discussions. Guy de Bosscheres reviewed Une Affaire de viol in that magazine and decided, “The purpose of this work is precisely to denounce the odious mechanism of the racist conspiracy that irresistibly leads the black man in the infernal circuit from where he will be unable to escape henceforth only by forfeiture and death.”
One perk of fame was a radio broadcast that led to an invitation to tea with Clara Malraux, wife of France’s culture minister, the novelist André Malraux. Chester received a note the next day from the writer “asking me what had happened,” or if he and Clara had had sex. (They had not.) Meanwhile, a professor named Jacques Panijel enticingly dangled another potential film project; he wanted to bring Une Affaire de viol to the screen. Over drinks, Panijel, who had scored a hit with the controversial film October in Paris, concocted a plan to prepare a screenplay with Chester, enter a government-sponsored contest, and split the prize money for best film scenario. Chester thought it through while spending a month with Lesley on vacation in Antibes and Corsica, writing, seeing friends, and eating well.
He was getting to a comfortable place now. When Chester’s friend Dean Dixon, now sought-after, returned to Paris in November for concerts, Chester took the maestro out afterward to meet the saxophone sensation Roland Kirk. With Dixon and his old buddy tenor Charles Holland, Chester was sure of himself as an uncompromising professional, a black expatriate artist. After all, he wasn’t alone in his sacrifice or persecution, gargantuan as it appeared to him. Their expatriate choice seemed wise at the end of the month, when the assassination of President Kennedy exposed an instability in their country that had seemed reserved for the likes of Cameroon and Congo. Also, like France, America seemed vulnerable to being toppled by the grasping right.
In December 1963, Chester went back to his retreat in the South of France for thoroughgoing revisions of the Back to Africa novel, which he was now calling The Cops and the Cotton. From Christmas through January 7, he saw and spoke to no one, concentrating on his manuscript. Like the original in the series, La Reine des pommes, this book was not a potboiler. Philippe Daudy of Plon had asked for rewrites and Chester was surprised at the level of grammatical mistakes as he reworked and tightened the book. The added diligence allowed him “time to sharpen it and make the points.” The detectives “express just how they, and other black people, feel in Harlem,” he wrote in his regular update to Van Vechten. “It’s been so long since I’ve worked at my occupation,” he reflected, “that I am surprised to find out how well I like doing it, and how well I can write.” He had hit another stride. “I am a writer and a writer writes.”
Away from his desk, he dropped in on Walter and Torun, and dashed over to Nice for provisions, where fresh fish, chicken, oranges, tomatoes, and good quality typing paper were abundant and cheap. Falling into his old habit, on New Year’s Day Chester drank by himself a bottle of vodka with tomato juice, until his face swelled. “Holidays always bother me,” he philosophized, trying to figure out the emptiness that drove him so deeply into alcohol. Then, in a message to Lesley, he said simply, “I am a mean and evil man.” But for his next project, the mature rascal had a clear vision. “I am anxious to get to work on my projected book about my life and experiences in Europe—and that will shock EVERYBODY.”
At the end of 1963 Lesley Packard rented a duplex at 3 Rue de Bourbon-le-Château, a “fantastic location” with good markets nearby and where they could see St.-Germain-des-Prés and Place de Furstemberg underneath the window. She took over the apartment from a Smith College graduate. Chester admonished Lesley for having shared his books with the young American preppie, convinced that she represented precisely the type who had sought to demolish his career. “My books drive these people crazy,” he warned his lover. “She’ll make you suffer just a little, hoping it’s me.” He didn’t complain about the apartment, with its expansive red-carpeted living room, a built-in dining room table, large bath, and an upstairs bedroom with a grand balcony. The only downside was that it was seven flights up from the street.
The apartment he would enjoy with Lesley boded good things for the coming year. In 1964 Chester would be fortunate with his many publishers. Plon got behind Cotton Comes to Harlem (published in France as Retour en Afrique), issuing such a large print run that Chester was autographing books for two days. In the spring he would learn that, following the reissue of If He Hollers Let Him Go, NAL would reprint new paperback editions of The Third Generation and The Primitive, and Avon would reissue For Love of Imabelle under its most enduring title, A Rage in Harlem. Also back in the States, negotiations got under way with Stein and Day for Pinktoes, and Putnam promised a hardcover of Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1965. The angry, bluesy humor of these unflinching books had increased their value by explaining Americans to themselves as the sharp teeth of a cruel decade were bared.
One of his visitors from the French press was a young black American reporter with a Dutch surname. Melvin Van Peebles was a self-confident novelist and filmmaker in his early thirties from Chicago who had landed in France in 1960. Van Peebles was capable of surviving on his own. He didn’t flock to the Tournon and isolate himself among the soul brothers, but he wasn’t an opportunist mimicking Europeans. He was in the midst of preparing a tense, surreal screenplay about a black GI and his French girlfriend, called Story of a Three-Day Pass. In sync with Chester to explore the erotic energy from black-and-white pairings, Van Peebles’s cinematic oeuvre would bring the legendary black sexuality and its full implications—erotic, folkloric, and militantly revolutionary—to the big screen. When Story of a Three-Day Pass was released in 1968, it would mark the first time a U.S. motion picture directed by a black American was distributed by a major Hollywood studio.
But in February 1964, Van Peebles climbed to the top of the stairs and, after a little impolite confusion during which Chester initially told him to shove off, the two men delighted each other in long conversation. Lesley had marching orders from Chester to interrupt a discussion after twenty minutes to free him from the legion of visitors but, recognizing a friend, Chester waved her off. Go-getters with sympathetic artistic visions, Van Peebles and Himes had independently achieved their radical political goals.
Settling down to tall glasses of vin ordinaire to fortify themselves against the winter wind, the Midwesterners talked about black life in Paris. When Van Peebles asked about Richard Wright, Chester called him “the greatest black American writer who ever lived.” When he was asked about Baldwin, whose full color portrait had adorned a May 1963 issue of Time magazine, Chester used a long anecdote about the great bebop drummer Max Roach, the most political of the jazz musicians. After a show, a white man, a music producer who owed Roach’s son money, stood in a line to congratulate the musician. When the producer approached the drummer, Roach hit the man in the mouth with his fist, knocked him to the ground, and kicked him with his feet. He extracted the white man’s wallet and exactingly pocketed the money in question. He turned to his child. “Let that be a lesson to you, sonny,” Roach was heard to say. “He must be made to see that you exist.” Baldwin’s two breakaway best sellers in the United States, Another Country of 1962 and The Fire Next Time of the following year, had both explicitly chosen love as the best method to transform the country into a multiracial democracy. The eloquent Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. said much the same thing in his national addresses that year, but especially in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” touting a “more excellent way of love and non-violent protest.” Theirs was a path to social reform that Chester did not share. He told Van Peebles that what he had to say to Baldwin was that he needed to prepare himself for confrontational violence, akin to Roach. Van Peebles called the interview, “Chester Himes, the Unvanquished.”
Despite the fact that his detective series and satires finally seemed to be catching on in American markets, Chester ached to write what he called “a good book I suppose.” A “good book” meant a long, direct narrative drawn unflinchingly from his life. But when the left-wing French press asked what he was working on, he admitted to a change of heart about the value of his detective fictions. He told them he was writing in the spirit of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Dashiell Hammett, and Macbeth, a “very bloody book.” “I write novels, that’s all,” he told a reporter for Louis Aragon’s highbrow Communist-y literary sheet Les Lettres Françaises. “There’s no difference between the genres. There isn’t one side so to speak, the ‘detective stories,’ and the other the ordinary novels. . . . I simply describe the social conditions of poor people who need to win money.”
Chester and Lesley traveled to London, where he saw the film Dr. Strangelove, which satirized American military commanders bent on winning a nuclear war against the Soviet Union, and Chester had an epiphany to surrender to the autobiographical book he’d been wanting to write. He decided to continue the “long journey” that he had begun, fictionalizing the relationship between himself and Willa, and show the shift in the man’s affection, “the love goes into pity, the pity into sacrifice.”
His ambition was cooled at the end of May, when his health failed him again and he had to be hospitalized and reprioritize his physical well-being, taking the blood pressure medicines Ismelin and Hygroten. Soon to turn fifty-five, he had outlived Wright by three years. But when Arche magazine placed him on the cover of the June issue, with the tagline “Jews and Blacks: A Discussion with Chester Himes,” he looked “handsome” and “full of life” as an admirer recalled.
In July, Harlem cracked apart, as Chester had already indicated that it must, and deadly battles with the police, looting, and arson swept the neighborhood that he had introduced to the postwar French public as the most significant and subtle hive of black people on the globe. Chester noted the black revolutionary Jesse Gray speaking of almost the same strategy that he had advocated in 1945 in the Afro-American newspaper: fifty thousand well-organized black men ready to die could change the nature of U.S. race relations.
Van Peebles came to him again for another article for France-Observateur. In “Harlem on Fire,” Van Peebles compared remarks by New York police and the FBI to the effect that the rioters were simply criminals and hoodlums with “the same terms used by French authorities about 1954,” referring to the Algerian uprising. The article included a short fable by Chester called “The Mice and the Cheese,” his way of explaining the insincere liberal sops thrown at American blacks in pursuit of dignity in the north. Undeterred by the casualties that mounted in the violent unrest in the United States, Van Peebles and Himes considered the bloody riots a signal that “the black revolution is irreversible.” Chester’s views, which had trod vigorously against the opinions of both friends and enemies, would be vindicated in 1964 and made prophetic after 1967.
Chester was an offstage director of the extraordinary events unfolding in the United States, his work a conduit for the blistering attitudes of young black Americans, who were demanding either immediate full participation in the nation or their right to tear it apart. Congressional committees of inquiry would summon writers like Ralph Ellison and Claude Brown to Washington to explain the riotous summer, and soon enough politicians were waving studies declaring that black matriarchal households and emasculated patriarchs were the root cause of American racial inequality. The rage leading to violence and the crisis of black domesticity, much of it due to prejudice and economic inequality, had been Chester’s bailiwick in the 1940s and 1950s—even if the anomalous robust employment years of the Second World War, the massive suburban expansion aided by the GI Bill educating veterans and guaranteeing mortgages, and the subsequent interstate highway system had collectively made it difficult for his observations to take hold. Whites puzzling through televised images of escalating racial unrest and increasing reports exposing crushing economic inequity were wondering how the literary tradition and its custodians had been so inept at shining a light on these hidden nooks of U.S. life. Admitting that the media industry he worked for had never effectively published or distributed Chester’s writing, editor Don Preston wrote to him, “I’m sure you have not really had your say, and that recent turmoils and tensions have not left you entirely unmoved, even from a distance.” America was turning, somewhat, to Chester.
After the Harlem eruption, Chester gave in to his impatience to see Africa and be inspired. Needing a destination that was convenient and easy to secure entry to, he skedaddled with Lesley to Egypt for two weeks of bedbugs, nausea, and diarrhea. Most appalling to him was the obvious racism of the Arabs toward Africans. “Not only is there indefinable poverty shrouding Alexandria and Cairo, but the Arabs haven’t gotten over their tradition of slave trading. In fact, the black Africans and their descendants are still slaves in Egypt,” he fumed. Despite the squalor, the prejudice, and the bloody, fly-covered meat carted through the street, Chester was glad he had gotten to visit the ancient artifacts at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, “which I consider the best museum in the world.”
While Chester had convincing firsthand evidence discounting any racial panacea in parts of Africa itself, by October he had discovered in Paris “that racism has greatly increased her [sic], like the number of automobiles and the standard of living.” He mused, “I’m wondering where I can go now.” He found himself unsatisfied with his visits to the Côte d’Azur and dissatisfied with his homeboy Walter Coleman. Walter held Torun, a talented, pretty, successful woman greatly attractive to Chester, in a trance it seemed. But now Walter acted “as bad as those Egyptians, but in a different way.” Chester began to think of Walter as “a French uncle tom,” a black man who praised whites without the idea of a reward. As for the way Chester saw himself at the same time: “I’m an evil, highly sensitive, unsuccessful old man—but I am not an American Negro in the usual connotation of the word . . . unless there might be some resemblance to Malcolm X.” Publishers were recognizing that fact. On the recommendation of John Williams, Seymour Lawrence, vice president at Knopf—the same firm he was still disputing charges and the copyright to Lonely Crusade with—wrote a friendly letter to see whether he had written his memoirs, the project that Chester admitted to having held “in the back of my mind for some time.”
Replacing some of his longer standing friendships, Chester met that October a vibrant young black man fresh to Paris and with an accent and a manner that were difficult to place. Cosmopolitan and sure of himself, he spoke English like an American, Spanish like a South American, and French with ease. Carlos Moore was a Cuban, born to Jamaican parents, who had gone to high school in New York, and been introduced to the Harlem Writers Guild by the singer and poet Maya Angelou. In high school he had helped to organize a small insurrection of February 15, 1961, at the United Nations, protesting the organization’s involvement in the capture and murder of Patrice Lumumba. Daring, bright, and impatient with world affairs, Moore had returned to Cuba in 1961 and joined the Castro government, until his cries of racism within revolutionary Cuba caused him to become an object of persecution. By late 1963, he was forced to flee Cuba for his personal safety, finding refuge first in Guinea’s embassy before making his way to Egypt.
In Egypt Moore had befriended David Du Bois, the stepson of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Elijah Muhammad’s son Akbar Muhammad, who shared the work of their hero, William Gardner Smith. Then Moore made his way to Paris and started working on an article about Fidel Castro’s racist policies, particularly the suppression of the Yoruba religion, an important cultural force in Cuba and Brazil, where numbers of Yoruba had been enslaved. In Paris, he was welcomed by Ellen Wright and introduced to Smith. Impressed by the young expatriate, Smith ushered Moore to meet Chester Himes, the writer Smith believed the most talented in France, profoundly anti-Communist, and an arch advocate for black freedom. Moore recognized the name. As a boy in Havana he had rescued a paperback book from the trash purely on account of its intriguing cover, which seemed to feature a black man twisting the arm of a white woman. He proceeded to read If He Hollers Let Him Go.
Chester welcomed Smith and Moore during a time of crisis, surprise, and excitement. Retour en Afrique had become a best seller in France. The OAS kept threatening to topple de Gaulle’s government, causing a heightened military presence in Paris. And because of the flood of people still disturbing him as well as the threats from the OAS, Chester’s friends used a special combination knock on the door, so he’d let them in. At first, to Moore, Himes was “unfriendly, very savage, dangerous” and “viscerally anti-Communist.” But Himes liked Moore at once, partly because, Moore was a dark-skinned man proud of his heritage and that instinctive pride reminded Chester of his own father’s attempt to manage in a world of strong skin-color bias, from blacks as well as whites. He read the “wonderful” essay Moore was working on and determined to help him publish it.
True to their politics, Chester and Trotskyite William Gardner Smith quickly got into an argument about the appropriateness of socialism for blacks. “Chester had this thing about communism wouldn’t work for black people, so he and Bill Smith were always arguing on this issue,” Moore remembered. “Chester was explaining the manipulative attitude of Marxists and Communists,” and Smith dissented, although there was a high degree of affection between the two men. The year before Smith had published The Stone Face, a novel expressing deep solidarity with the struggle for Algerian independence and featuring a “bitter and hermetic” character based on Chester who would emerge “from his apartment now and then to drink heavily and launch an ironic tirade against the United States and the white world in general.” In an autumn that included discussion of the far-right militarist Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party presidential nominee, Moore observed that “Chester was a very bitter, bitter, bitter person.” When the conversation shifted away from politics, Chester told young Carlos that if he wanted to write, he had to stick to his artistry in the same manner in which a boxer boxes or a professional athlete trains. To make his point, Chester described the afternoon he took The Third Generation to a publisher and was turned down because the book was “too sad.” Rejection and punishment were a part of a writer’s training regimen.
That fall Chester was in his best position to laugh at the difficulties of the past. On November 4, after its French success, U.S. publishers Putnam (hardcover) and Dell (paperback) split the rights to Cotton Comes to Harlem, offering Chester $7500 on signing and another $7500 on publication in February 1965. It was his biggest payday ever. In January 1965 he would conclude a deal on Pinktoes with Stein and Day for $10,000. After publication it would become his first novel to earn royalties beyond its initial advance, and, as a Dell paperback, it would climb onto the best-seller list. He wrote to Van Vechten, quite happy that “the American publishers have forgiven me.” On American bookstands he now had the paperback reprints of If He Hollers Let Him Go, The Third Generation, A Rage in Harlem, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and The Primitive. Most sensationally, Adam, a French men’s magazine published by the creators of Vogue, focused their November 1964 issue on race in America and the riots in Harlem. A full-color photograph of Chester, his chin down and his penetrating eyes slanting in fury, was on the cover of the magazine, “displayed in the place of prominence on every newsstand in Paris, north, east, south and west.” Vainly in love with his magazine cover, which made him look like a sex symbol as much as a man of mystery, and which casual observers at first assumed to be Egyptian president Gamal Nasser, Chester knew a heightened level of fame. “After that everybody knew me by sight.” He framed the cover and hung it in his study.
Chester’s affinity to Nasser of Egypt or Malcolm X of Harlem became more apparent in late fall. In early 1964 Malcolm X had left the Nation of Islam and since July he had been traveling through Africa and the Islamic Middle East as a kind of minister without portfolio of black revolutionary nationalism. In November, from Ghana, Malcolm X contacted Ellen Wright to prepare for his visit to France, which was his final stop before returning to the United States. Ellen Wright contacted Carlos Moore, who had attended the Nation of Islam’s Harlem mosque and seen Malcolm X speak in New York. Moore went to Himes and the Frenchman Robert Sine, a cartoonist who had helped hide Algerian freedom fighters in safe houses, to strategize about the best way to defend Malcolm X from violent attack while in Paris. The black nationalist would be defended by half a dozen bodyguards from Guadeloupe and Martinique and, Chester suggested, hidden at the villa of the jazz singer Hazel Scott.
On November 22, Malcolm X arrived in Paris and went to Ellen Wright’s house, where he met Carlos Moore for the first time. Moore took him to the Café Realis, switching his orange juice with Malcolm X’s, worried that it might have been poisoned. Needing to discuss the security he had planned, Moore casually remarked to Malcolm X that they do so at Chester Himes’s home. Malcolm X replied, “Chester Himes is here?” surprising Moore, both that he knew the writer and was delighted to visit. After Malcolm and one of his young bodyguards climbed the seven flights of steps and made the secret knock and Chester opened the door, the two friends fell into each other’s arms laughing. Moore was suddenly in the presence of a Malcolm X “that few people had known,” a man who started swapping uproarious Harlem tales with Chester.
Their discussion swiftly reached a serious vein. Malcolm fell silent for twenty minutes while Chester, glass in hand, described his experience in Cairo and Alexandria and the antiblack racism of the Arabs. Chester emphasized his points about unreliable Arab partners saying, “Carlos knows this. These are slave traders.” Committing himself to establishing a chapter of Malcolm’s new group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, in Paris and prepared to give his life for Malcolm X, Moore was surprised by the unreserved barbs. To Moore, Chester’s mocking disbelief in the legends of ethnic, religious, or social-class solidarity was “way out . . . he was so anti-Arab, anti-Communist, anti-Muslim.” Chester continued to underscore the perfidy of Arab Muslims and professional Marxists alike, pointing to his young comrade Moore, who had to leave both Cuba and Egypt on account of his color and respect for African culture. “Carlos lived it,” Chester said over and over, referring to the racism of the Cuban Marxists and the Arabs.
Chester’s chorus to Malcolm X was “You’re being gullible . . . totally gullible.” Part of their discussion dealt with left-wing allies in armed revolutionary struggles where Malcolm X was trying to organize assistance, such as in the Congo. But Chester kept belittling the possibility of alliance with the Communists. “It won’t work,” he badgered the minister, “These people are no good.” Years after these meetings, Moore would write to Chester in praise of the “beautiful things” that the younger militants gleaned from Chester’s worldly tutorials: “a refusal to be caged in by epithets, ideologies, useless “isms,” and the constant search for truth, even at the cost of personal solitude.” For people born during the 1940s like Moore, Chester represented a unique form of independence and defiance, a life that in its own way was political art. As one of his admirers would say in 1970, “we are where we are because you and other cultural independents . . . you all had the integrity to give us a book of records.”
When they adjourned, Malcolm X was more at ease, but also somber. “They’re going to get me, Chester,” he confessed wearily. After they had departed, Malcolm X asked Moore about Chester’s diatribe, deeply impressed. “I talked to him and said that Chester was correct.” For Malcolm X, his trip abroad—meeting with black expatriate writers working in the Nkrumah government in Ghana like Julian Mayfield and Maya Angelou, then Himes and Moore, followed by a meeting with Aimé Césaire and Alioune Diop—was a turning point. Moore and Himes proved accurate in their predictions for Malcolm X. An hour after Malcolm X left the apartment, someone mounted the seven flights of stairs and rapped hard on the door several times. Chester and Lesley silently hunkered into the couch, waiting for the unannounced visitor to leave. It was thirty minutes before they heard footsteps going back down the stairs.
The next evening, Chester and Lesley attended Malcolm X’s lecture at the Sorbonne, with Moore translating him simultaneously into French. The lecture was partly arranged by Présence Africain, and Malcolm X presented himself as the leader of Organization of Afro-American Unity, working as a “bridge between the peoples on the African continent and their African descendants in the Americas.” Malcolm X held out the possibility of French exceptionalism—France was praiseworthy because she refused to be an American “satellite.” He suggested that Americans were merely carrying out the imperialist mandate put in place by Britain more than a century ago. The U.S. government, he advised his audience, was incapable of world leadership. “She’s morally bankrupt,” he insisted, “especially those at the helm.” He warned his listeners against the notion that somehow a new dawn had arisen concerning the issue of racism; instead he reminded them of the pressures of World War II and British and French decolonization that had led to legal change in the United States. The overtures made by administrators like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were strategic. “They want to Americanize us for fear that now we might become Africanized,” he said.
When asked how he felt about black and white romance, probably with friends like Chester in mind, Malcolm X said, “Whoever a person wants to love, that’s their business . . . their personal affair.” Even closer to home for Chester, Malcolm X scoffed at the African American obsession with their European ancestry, saying “it’s not a status symbol anymore to be running around talking about your Scotch blood.” And Carlos Moore, who continued to serve as Malcolm’s lieutenant in France for the next three months, observed that Malcolm was convinced by the conversation with Himes the day before. “In no country has the Black man ever come to the top, even in your so-called socialist and Marxist and other type societies.”
Three days before Christmas, Chester sadly learned that Carl Van Vechten had died in his sleep. He was eighty-four. If Chester typically felt like a fervent, uncompromising Malcolm X, in his personal life he had needed to know that it was possible to have sustaining friendships with white people like Van Vechten. Solicitously courteous until the end, Van Vechten had written him in the first week of December, congratulating him on completing Cotton Comes to Harlem. Chester had written back that he hoped the legal wrangling over Pinktoes would end soon and an American edition would be brought out, but certainly the hard years seemed past. Chester telegrammed Van Vechten’s spouse, Fania Marinoff, in earnest: I AM DREADFULLY SORRY. MAY I HELP?
The new year of 1965 brought little ease. Malcolm X was correct: Chester would not get a chance to see him again. Malcolm attempted to return to France on February 9, to another gathering held by the OAAU-Paris group. At the airport, the police detained him for two hours before declaring him an “undesirable” who would cause violent demonstrations and sending him back to London. The authorities referred to his November 23 lecture as evidence. Moore talked by telephone to Malcolm X, who was stranded in England, and read the speech that Malcolm X had planned to make at the gathering.
Chester believed that the French police prevented Malcolm X from entering to avoid the scandal of having him killed on French soil. Malcolm X concurred that he was being targeted for death by American governmental agents, telling the journalist Alex Haley, “the more I keep thinking about what happened to me in France. I’m going to quit saying it’s the muslims.” Back in the United States, Malcolm X’s house in Queens, New York, was firebombed on February 14, nearly killing his children. A week later, on February 21, Malcolm X was shot dead in front of his family by Nation of Islam gunmen at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, with several undercover police agents on hand. For several years Chester had believed that the climate in France was becoming more racist, and the public turning away of the younger man whom he admired and whose background reminded him so much of his own would prove to him that France was no western exception. He was ever more determined to leave.