The horrifying assassination of Malcolm X caught Chester up with his biological age and years of hand-to-mouth living. Graying at the temples and in his mustache, slurring words, and struggling a bit more in his gait, he couldn’t dodge the look now of an elder statesman of black literary affairs. Chester too had cried out against racial oppression, and if he had not quite created the menacing enemies of Malcolm X and Richard Wright, certainly he had stimulated fear. But something changed, as he no longer casually sought political enemies, even as he felt chased more ardently than ever by admirers. The man who tirelessly pursued a fling, ordered his liquor by the case, and battled every taunt had retired.
In the early months of 1965, Chester’s main problem was unconnected to the demise of the militant leader. He had to resolve a legal problem brought on by his having somewhat knavishly signed contracts for Pinktoes with the American publishers Putnam and Dell after Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press published an English-language edition in France. Complicating matters further, the American press Stein and Day bought Olympia’s list and planned to bring Pinktoes out in the United States. Chester reached a signed agreement with Girodias and Putnam and Stein and Day on January 29, 1965: Putnam would publish the trade hardcover edition of Pinktoes in the United States, and Stein and Day would handle all subsidiary rights. Dell would produce a Pinktoes paperback a year later. Although Chester and Girodias were each paid $10,000, he could not have anticipated that the book, about ten years after its drafting, would become a top seller. The New York publishers took out advertisements with impish slogans like “All that most middle-class Negroes want is status and white women.”
Since he had the money to live wherever he liked to, Chester took a studio in Cannes at the Palais Rouaze and settled into work on his latest Harlem thriller, Blind Man with a Pistol. Once he had described his writing process to Melvin Van Peebles as putting 220 sheets of paper on the left side of the typewriter and then concluding the story as the pile dwindled. Success had raised the bar. “My novel moves all right,” he wrote Lesley, “but it is not swinging. I like to both read and write novels that swing.” Finally he swung into eight pages of the new work and he could see that the typical anatomy of the detective story was inadequate to address his needs. Blind Man read “like a cross between La Reine des pommes and Pinktoes,” or a book that was moving away from a mysterious killing followed by a resolution to a book featuring a sequence of roughly connected episodes. He would “let it go and see what happens.” Blind Man, a roundabout murder mystery satirizing the militant power movement and the exotic power of black sexuality, was completely unlike the other novels featuring the detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed.
Always requiring heavy reassurance by mail that he was on the mind of any current girlfriend, Chester was dealing with a new sort of loneliness too. He now pressed for a permanent tie. “You should marry me, Lesley,” he wrote, knowing he had not yet been able to afford to pay for the divorce from Jean he had proposed in 1956, but wanting to ensure her caring for him. He also did not want to be made a fool of by rumors that she was having other lovers in Paris.
In February he saw a Les Temps Modernes article he liked that had been written by René Micha. “The Parishioners of Chester Himes” praised Chester’s detective books as a technical achievement beyond his earlier fiction. Complimenting Duhamel’s thought concerning the power of the absurd, Micha recommended the books because they were unconcerned with bitter resentment and nineteenth-century moralizing:
a humorous catalog of Harlem painted one could say by a Flemish or a Dutch: which shows in turn the garden of delicacies, the triumph of death, the miracles, the proverbs, the games: not to make horror but to make laughter. More satisfying from the aesthetic point of view than from the moral view: allowing illumination which is not at all from grace, which is from the pittura brillante.
Chester was now officially addressed by the French left intellectual scene, at roughly the same time that he had the economic wherewithal to become something more than a prole. Undeniably on the ascent with his Putnam advance, the largest single payment he had ever received, he started scanning car advertisements, determined finally to purchase the most exclusive of English automobiles, a Jaguar. Now, as he neared completion of the new novel, he rewarded himself with a Greek holiday. Draped in a shantung silk suit and Italian leather shoes, Chester took Lesley to Rhodes on May 1 and then to Crete, where they spent two weeks feasting on roast kid and honey-covered yogurt and puttering around at the excavation of a Heraklean temple. He had his brief moment of luxury appropriate to an Achillean hero.
In the Athens airport, Chester left a manuscript on a seat in the lounge and forgot it while boarding. He never saw it again, although Lesley tried to bolt from the plane to retrieve it. The man known for sending a table load of dishes to the sidewalk when he wasn’t seated quickly enough at a café had become uninspired by physical activity. Lesley would double up on tasks. As Van Peebles would crisply report, there was a strong functional element to the deepening relationship with Lesley: “Chester needed a fucking nurse.”
Chester and Lesley returned to Nice to find Walter and Torun separated and, when they did stumble across the couple, the pair were engaging in bitter, sometimes violent fights. Although Torun had visited Chester at his studio apartment alone, they had remained chaste friends. While at fifty-five he had better control over his sexual impulse, she gave him one final seductive taste: Chester, Lesley, and Torun together sunbathed nude on her terrace. “I hated to give up the pleasure of looking at her,” he wrote after the neighbors complained. Torun left Walter in Nice and drove to Paris with Chester and Lesley, where she planned to return to Sweden. Always fond of the underdog, in Paris Torun met and quickly took up with a young black guitarist from Detroit named Charles who had gone tone-deaf. Meanwhile, Chester and Lesley took another apartment, on Rue d’Assas.
Before the end of winter, Chester could also see that he had something of a hit on his hands with the U.S. publication of Cotton Comes to Harlem. The detective series, which he had considered in the beginning as “cheap,” had won over the critics. The New York Times now decided he had an “extraordinary series.” In Los Angeles, where there would be a catastrophic explosion of violence that summer in Watts, the work was considered beyond simple genre fiction, and likened to the edgy intellectual humor of black comedian and civil rights star Dick Gregory, who also had had a hand in instructing Malcolm X. “More important in this book than its entertainment value is the social comment it makes throughout,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “In this picaresque novel of crime and violence, Himes has employed a plot that enables him to speak out in an oblique way on some of the Negro problems current in this country.” The only problem was that Cotton Comes to Harlem—like the reissued The Heat’s On after it, as well as Run Man Run several years before—sputtered in hardcover sales; what kept him in good graces at Putnam were the paperback deals for these three books, which turned “losses into a modest profit.” Genre fiction aimed at a mass market was destined for paperbacks.
Back in Paris, he and Lesley made themselves comfortable. He was contacted by Bill Targ, his old editor from World, who was now the editor in chief at Putnam, and learned that Targ was marrying a young literary agent. Rosalyn Siegel came to Paris and she and Chester went to dinner, where Chester marveled at the “quick, sharp, sexy” and “good looking blond businesswoman.” He thought that Rosalyn would be fiercely loyal and tireless on his behalf, “just the type of agent I needed.” Almost as surely, she created the terms for a renewed friendship between Chester and Bill Targ, after the Third Generation misfire and the aborted story collection My People, My People in 1954.
Chester traveled to London to pick up his sand-colored 1966 Jaguar MK10. The car cost more than £2000. Within a few days of returning to France he had dinged it up, but this swift (“faster than any car I had ever driven”) large auto that stopped traffic made his point. Success was at hand. Chester and Lesley turned over the new Rue d’Assas apartment to Melvin Van Peebles, who had just won a French award for an original screenplay, the same prize for which Jacques Panijel had tried to submit Une Affaire de viol. Van Peebles would also write a graphic adaptation of La Reine des pommes for the French satirical magazine Hara Kiri, published in June 1966.
Piling their belongings into the luxury car that fall, Chester and Lesley drove to Copenhagen. They rented a town house in Holte, an outpost eighteen miles north of Copenhagen. With his new common-law wife, beautiful car, and cash, Chester succumbed to the more boorish element of his personality. At a succulent meal with a painter named Herb Gentry and his circle of friends, Chester told the crowd that he had not even a dilettante’s concern about the quality of his art or its political dimensions. “I don’t write for money accidentally,” he lectured, “it’s my main purpose.” Continuing, he said that he wrote “just for money, to buy a Jaguar.” His guests had expected a more delicate inspiration, and Chester continued to exalt wealth until everyone felt uncomfortable and left. After so many years with so little to show for it, he refused to apologize for good fortune.
He was also more comfortable with his crude parts. When he and Lesley proudly received a work of art from their friend Romare Bearden, the Harlem-based painter famous for his collages, Chester drowned it in varnish. He similarly ruined a bottle of prime champagne at a party by dumping it into a punch. There was a gauche quality about him, a streak of unsophistication, linked to having been bred in the rural South, and come to adult maturity in prison.
The same ragged edges enabled him to maintain the salacious fawning after Torun, whom Lesley heartily disliked. Nonetheless, he and Lesley took off for a “rugged” Christmas in Sweden with Torun and Charles at Torun’s family’s farm, southeast of Malmö.
When Putnam brought out the novel The Heat’s On in January 1966, Chester received applause. Name recognition, book sales, and the tensions before a summer that would bring more rioting would make this story of a speedball-shooting albino giant appeal to a wider readership than ever before. “In its wild funhouse-mirror way a powerfully contemptuous picture of a venal and vicious world,” clucked Anthony Boucher. Chester’s writing hadn’t gotten better, but the New York Times critic of crime and suspense tales no longer ribbed him for creating hyperboles for European audiences. Back in 1959, unable to ignore Chester, Boucher had erected a special category of disdain for him. “I have a feeling [Chester’s characters] would be denounced as chauvinistic stereotypes if they were written by a white,” he had suggested about The Crazy Kill. In America, if there was no higher praise for a writer born Negro than to claim they had transcended their race, there was no stronger criticism than to claim a black person was demanding the right to do something from which whites were excluded. Typically Boucher had liked to give Himes a slight brace of adjectives: “perverse blend of sordid realism and macabre fantasy-humor”; “shocking, grotesque”; “turbulent, nightmarish, sometimes harshly comic.” But by 1966 Chester’s naturalistic arguments of black bitterness in standard English had pierced white literary circles. Now they began to see Chester as “underrated and underpublicized,” and they were willing to understand something else about his work that had been there all along, the point that he “tempers anger with humor.” So Boucher had espied the new land for Himes when he called Cotton Comes to Harlem “the wildest of camps—grotesque, macabre, black humor (using ‘black’ in a quite nonracial sense).”
One of the people reading Boucher’s assessment was the film producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., son of one of the founders of M-G-M. In 1944 Chester’s fortunes had nosedived when Jack Warner determined that “niggers” didn’t belong at his film studio. More than twenty years later, in late fall of 1966, Goldwyn took an option to film Cotton Comes to Harlem. Goldwyn had first come across Chester’s name in a biography of Ian Fleming, the creator of the James Bond novels, who died in 1964 and had admired Chester Himes. Then Boucher’s swirling adjectives in the New York Times caught his attention, and Goldwyn plucked a few books from the shelves. “I’m convinced they will make superb, unusual thrillers that also will be gallows humor at its best,” Goldwyn told the press after inking the deal in December. Chester was delighted and wrote back to Goldwyn suggesting that he secure Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, America’s angry young black memoirist, to write the screenplay. Although the film industry was notoriously labyrinthine and fickle, especially concerning financial arrangements, if the deal went through, Chester would reap a considerable financial reward.
Lasting fame and financial success had arrived later in life. By now Chester was achy. He checked into a hospital when he got a cold that winter, only to discover that he was really bothered by arthritis. He was hobbling around, unable to carry anything heavier than the groceries, and relying more than ever on Lesley for the necessities of daily life. In 1966 they would go down to La Ciotat, taking a ferry from Sweden and driving through East Germany on their way to Switzerland and France. Chester reunited with Daniel Guérin, rented the main house, Rustique Olivette, where the artists’ colony formerly had been housed, and hosted a “sumptuous feast.” In a warm house with a roaring coal furnace and plenty of bouillabaisse to eat, Chester turned seriously to his latest project, his autobiography; he would poach from what he had already attempted in The Way It Was, the novel describing his relationships with three white women.
Patricia Highsmith wrote him from London, letting him know that she had reviewed Cotton Comes to Harlem for the Times Literary Supplement. Surprisingly to Chester, she began the review by admitting the fact of racism. As an “American Negro, one can understand why he chose to live in France,” she allowed, while noting that he was no longer wielding the “hatred” of If He Hollers Let Him Go days. Now that he was “mellowed,” making money with the detective stories and poking fun at Harlem high society in Pinktoes, Highsmith felt that he had become an artist. While Chester was yet “concerned with the Negro’s plight,” and although “Mr. Himes’s underlying violence is still with him,” he had reached a new plateau for her and those she represented: he was a “novelist.” “It is his value as a writer, and it makes this book a novel, that he jests at all of it, makes stiletto social comments, and keeps his story running at the speed of his Buick ‘Roadmasters’ in the days of yore.” Nearly twenty years later, she wanted to let people know that she knew the kind of car Chester had once driven. In 1965 and 1966, Chester would make almost $50,000, his best earnings ever for a two-year period. Now he was a member of the club, and the independently wealthy Highsmith was solicitous, as she would continue to be for the rest of the decade.
The spring at La Ciotat was pleasant, with trips to see a jazz band led by Roger Luccioni and slurp crème de cassis cocktails on a yacht owned by Roger’s father, the proprietor of a large Bandol estate. Chester was visited by Alan Albert, a Jewish French writer who had published critiques in Présence Africain and masqueraded as a black person, apparently a ploy to help him publish a novel. Daniel Guérin took Chester and Lesley to swank restaurants along the coast and Chester was “beginning to enjoy France for the first time.” New followers took inspiration from his work. A young black New Yorker named Kristin Hunter wrote a novel about housing exploitation called The Landlord and dedicated it to Chester. Closer to the urban turmoil that would engulf America shortly, the young black Chicago poet Don L. Lee, a legend in the making, published a poem “Understanding but Not Forgetting,” that was “about my mother whom I didn’t understand but / She read Richard Wright and Chester Himes and / I thought they were bad books.” Chester’s years priming the pump for black activist-artists had begun to yield results as he moved ever further from the fray. Later in 1966, he and Lesley rented a mud-walled two-story farmhouse in Aix-en-Provence, where they were surrounded by the lush French countryside and a town teeming with cafés and well-stocked food stores plentiful with wine. “It was the first time I had really lived as I wanted,” he remembered.
Living as he wanted and dealing with the arthritis and tooth troubles made him more cantankerous. Chester could be generous from time to time, like when the old-timer Jay Clifford stopped by for a drink, but was mean with everybody else. Carl Van Vechten had warned John Williams back in 1962 that “people say bad things about [Chester] because he doesn’t like most people and he shows it,” but Chester was living up to his reputation and the friendship with Williams, who had been slated to visit Chester in Paris in late October 1965 but had a travel mix-up, would soon suffer. Walter Coleman came by for the big catered feast of New Year’s 1966 with his new Polish wife, but Chester’s attitude showed brittle disappointment. Now he feared his creativity and work ethic were lost. After the days of writing with his typewriter on his knees in a car, or in longhand at a café, he now brooded listlessly in his ample studio, trying to compose, but “nothing jelled.” He found that the thrill of writing the racially explosive work had waned once he had landed better deals and had domestic tranquility. “Once upon a time I could run across a sentence in If He Hollers Let Him Go, or For Love of Imabelle that would thrill me like writing them had. But no more. I was thrilled by driving my Jaguar 125 miles per hour.”
Chester’s anxiety extended to the screenplay he was sweating over for the film version of Cotton Comes to Harlem. Goldwyn had written him that he wanted more from the novel’s villain Deke O’Malley, “a wonderful character.” “As I’m sure you know,” the producer advised Chester, “this kind of melo-dramatic movie is often as good as the villains in it are.” Goldwyn also felt strongly drawn to the commingling “quality of violence and wacky humor with its underlying seriousness.” If Chester didn’t want to botch the possibility of making the film, with its possible payday and acclaim, he would have to continue to work on the screenplay.
Taking a break from his obligations, Chester plotted a speedy trip to Spain, where he sought relief from the French winter. It was also an excuse to get into the Jaguar and drive. In a journey of notable scenic beauty, he and Lesley sped down the Spanish coast, walked into Gibraltar, and then hurried back to Aix. Chester seemed on the verge of living the life of a successful tourist. But in April 1967 he had a characteristic experience in France that sweetened his thoughts about the Spanish countryside. He went to the dentist, who, before making any inquiries, pulled his front tooth, which had had serious and costly recuperative work. When he learned that the patient was the famous writer Chester Himes, the dentist apologized for resorting to methods reserved for the indigent. Chester felt the sting of being a black man in France. “That was my entire life in France; I was treated like a nigger until the natives recognized me and then I became a celebrity and the natives tried to make up for the damage they had inflicted.”
As before, he needed the resources of home. He arrived alone in New York on May 2 for dental work and business. Chester had all of his teeth pulled after the dentist confirmed their poor condition. Looking as if he had gone a few rounds in a boxing ring, Chester awaited his dentures and stared into the utter erosion of his youth and vitality. When the false teeth arrived in June, they cut into his gums for a couple of days, but he was pleased with the job.
Also that spring, the New York Times Book Review, which he considered his nemesis, solicited a couple of paragraphs describing which of his books he would most enjoy rereading. Always eager for U.S. press, Chester had responded with alacrity. His reply was in the June 4 edition, along with others from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Isaac Bashevis Singer, and John Updike. In what was Chester’s last essay for the highly literate American public, who saw little of the social critiques he had published in France in the early part of the decade, he would claim, “It has always been my opinion that we American Negroes are one of the most sophisticated people in the history of mankind.” He defined his terms: sophisticated as in deprived of original simplicity, complicated, refined, subtle. Chester boosted his new favorite among his works, The Primitive, and punished Willa and her class in the process. He had written the book “while living with an American woman socialite, graduate of Smith College, descendant of the Pilgrims, in a state of near destitution . . . on the hot, dirty square at the foot of the steps in Deya, Mallorca.” If The Primitive had not fully reached an American audience, he would yet find a way to drag America’s best and brightest through his own brand of blackjack mud.
Chester had reversed the stereotype. “Believing that this cultured woman with whom I lived and this other white woman of whom I wrote were more primitive than I, it amused me to write this book, and it still amuses me to read it,” he offered. He gloated about having the affair in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. He cast whites like Willa Thompson and Vandi Haygood as primitives. “Being largely autobiographical (I did not kill the white woman, however gladly I might have), the book acted as a catharsis, purging me of all mental and emotional inhibitions that restricted my writing.” But with the climate in the United States boiling—urban riots that summer of 1967 would be put down by Vietnam-hardened paratroopers in a situation like the French in the Algerian capital in 1956—Chester’s representation of black frustration leading to homicide now made perfect sense. The junior staffer who solicited his reply wrote him back delighted by the “superb” comment. As America swiveled toward its year of public death and conflagration, Chester’s previously considered outrageous observations on American culture were becoming practical common sense.
Now the denture-wearing literary militant, remarkably enough, was flush. Samuel Goldwyn extended the movie option and seemed to retain his excitement about the film of Cotton Comes to Harlem. And with Chester’s Times appearance and his hustling new agent Rosalyn Targ, he had cachet in New York, in spite of his age. Constance Pearlstein, the lover of C. L. R. James, brought him soup while his gums healed. Dramatist Shirley Clarke welcomed him and Joyce Caddoo over to her penthouse at the Chelsea Hotel for a party. Chester’s royalties from Pinktoes since publication amounted to $3999. He cabled Lesley to take a flight over in the middle of June: “expense is no matter.”
Lesley arrived on June 17 at his room in the graffiti-dappled hallways of the Hotel Albert. Chester felt relief at her being there. The next day, a tall man wearing tortoiseshell glasses and conservative clothes knocked at the door: Samuel Goldwyn Jr. in the flesh. Chester prepared strong French coffee and they discussed Cotton Comes to Harlem. After disapproving of Chester’s work on the screenplay, Goldwyn had engaged a professional television writer to produce a new script. Chester looked it over with distaste. Goldwyn did not feel that the detectives were distinct enough and he hoped to develop two more characters, the villain Deke O’Malley and Lieutenant Anderson, to broaden the dramatic appeal. Chester bristled, as he did at all criticism, and certainly because Lieutenant Anderson, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed’s boss, was mainly a foil to reveal the plot. Goldwyn’s determination to change the script became harder to deal with when he insisted that Chester collapse the detectives solely into Grave Digger, whom Goldwyn believed more compelling than the acid-splashed Coffin Ed. Goldwyn had a commanding personality and was the film professional. He was also a multimillionaire. Chester agreed to shift the characterization and to devote himself to writing the screenplay for a retainer of $750 per month.
Chester spent the ensuing several days visiting friends and shopping with Lesley on Fifth Avenue, in the throes of a “buying jag.” He felt elegant, well heeled, and frivolous; he bought beach clothes that he would give away before ever wearing. Toward the end of the New York holiday, they had a party, inviting Rosalyn and Bill Targ; Constance and Edward Pearlstein; Joyce Caddoo; his typist Helen; and Charles, Torun’s new but already estranged husband, who had returned to the United States. Chester expressed his fury on occasion, like a time when Leslie accidentally spilled oranges on the floor, and when white barbers refused to cut his hair. But although Chester still drank, he remained under control. Mostly, he was reformed.
Chester left America in July, just before pitched battles between militant blacks and police erupted in Newark, New Jersey, on the twelfth; over five days, twenty-six people were killed and a thousand injured. On July 14 New Jersey’s governor ordered National Guard units into the city, including armored personnel carriers, machine-gun units, and tanks, which opened fire on a public housing project. The same day playwright LeRoi Jones was arrested, charged with carrying concealed revolvers, and photographed in a police station with a head wound. In the white sections of the city, crowds gathered in support of martial law, shouting, “Shoot the niggers.” The newspapers carried passages that called to mind the same terms as used for slave rebellions: “there were so many Negroes it was impossible to control them.”
Deeply moved, Chester sat down and set aside the work with Goldwyn, the book on his love affairs, and his latest detective story in order to produce an extended treatment of the Newark revolt, “On the Use of Force.” Newark blacks looting stores, burning buildings, and sniping at police were “invisible,” he wrote for his French readers. Unlike the trendy black American tourists seen in the shops along the Champs-Elysées, the majority of black American citizens were “never seen until they lie bloody and dead from a policeman’s bullet on the hot dirty pavement of a Ghetto street.” That ghetto, Chester decided, was “shockingly similar to that in large cities in South Africa” and he insisted that the police manhandled African American citizens with the same techniques as the apartheid regime. “Police brutality toward black people in the United States is of such common usage and longstanding as to have attained acceptance of proper behavior,” Chester wrote. “The theory has always been that the way to treat black people is like children; that they have to be punished when they misbehave and make a nuisance of themselves such as asking for their civil rights.”
If the police believed in force, many blacks considered resistance to physical assault by whites as “noble,” their principal right since the abolition of slavery. Chester made an observation that needed to be heard: “Every race riot in the United States has stemmed from the one single fact that a white law enforcement officer has committed a brutality against a black citizen.” Chester then correctly predicted that a United States capable of electing a black president was thirty or forty years in the future, when Americans then under twenty “assume control of all aspects of American life.”
Chester and Lesley found a short-term rental on Rue de L’Estrapade near Rue Mouffetard, where Chester went back to work, mainly on his detective story, the bread and butter of his European career. He continued drafting his book on Regine Fischer, whom he had renamed “Marlene,” and he hoped to sell the book through a short treatment, similar to Une Affaire de viol. The portrait pursued sexuality as the sole preoccupation of the main characters. When Bill Targ asked him about his narrator’s “thoughts on writing, writers, books, publishers . . . political scandals . . . Bardot? Camus? De Beauvoir? The War?” he found Chester unresponsive. Chester was having more fun with Leroy Haynes at the soul food restaurant, gawking at the nude photographs of Haynes and his wife at French beaches, and stopping by the jazz club Living Room to hear Art Simmons, who was writing a column for Jet magazine on blacks in Europe. In August Chester and Lesley left town for the Netherlands, where they rented a dilapidated mansion in a tony Amsterdam suburb called Blaricum; there they regularly visited Charles Holland, who was taking a break from his marriage. In Amsterdam, Chester was treated well by his Dutch publisher, who arranged for extensive press and news coverage, including television programs. The Dutch were fascinated by Pinktoes.
While enjoying the Netherlands, Chester met with Phil Lomax, a buddy Melvin Van Peebles had introduced to him in Paris. Lomax told Chester a story about a blind man on the subway train in Brooklyn, responding to a physical insult by wildly shooting a pistol in the direction of his foe. Naturally (though black blind men had been known to shoot robbers), the blind man missed his assailant and shot wildly.
Chester enjoyed this anecdote well enough to work it into the new novel, Blind Man with a Pistol. He regarded this book “not [as] a detective story,” but rather “a wild sort of ‘psychodelic,’—if that is how it is spelled—novel about Harlem in the grip of crime, riots, fantasies, and such,—in fact a number of wild scenes held together only by the ambience.” That “ambience” was not enough to keep the book at Putnam, where Editor in Chief Bill Targ decided the manuscript was “not up to the standard you set in the other Harlem novels.” Amicably—and in a sea change of difference from the 1940s—Chester’s agent Rosalyn Targ (Bill’s wife) quickly found another home for the book, at William Morrow. Chester’s new publisher did not quite think the “ambience” held the book together enough either, but his editor there, James Landis, agreed with Chester to “let the book stand as it is, with all its confusions, because it’s a very confusing, and confused, world you’re writing about.” The book satirized the often internecine, bloody, fiery, disconcerting urban conflagrations. While Chester believed the violence was therapeutic and necessary and, of course, supremely vindicating, he called it mistaken, analogizing its probable success to a blind man wielding a firearm. However, the novel concludes with his blind man shooting a racist police officer in the head. Chester would later say about his fiction to Newsweek, “Shooting people in the head generates power.”
Chester returned to tinkering on the script of Cotton Comes to Harlem, but in October a “most unhappy” Goldwyn chastised him for his efforts. Goldwyn only conceded, “I had expected too much for a first try.” Feeling beloved after a long interview for Dutch television, Chester blew up at the letter, having turned the screenplay into a battle between Grave Digger and Deke O’Malley. Goldwyn still felt that he had only a “loose construction of a movie. . . . We must still find a way to prolong the search to give us this kaleidoscopic view of Harlem as Grave Digger unravels the crime.” Chester believed that Goldwyn “with all the screenwriters in Hollywood at his disposal . . . wanted [me] to do the impossible.” Goldwyn suggested bringing Himes to Hollywood for a series of discussions about the script, but never did.
Chester’s friend John Williams published his major work, The Man Who Cried I Am, in November of 1967 and, at first, Chester read the book avidly and with delight. Telling Williams that he had written “the only milestone produced (legitimate milestone) since Native Son,” Chester called The Man Who Cried I Am, “the greatest book, the most compelling book, ever written about the scene.” Williams visited Himes in Spain a few months after publication. There was one problem: the brilliant, powerfully written book about a black American writer was partly a roman à clef, drawing amply from the stories that Chester had bubbled with over the years about himself and his friendship with Richard Wright. Williams had reproduced G. David Schine’s visit to Wright’s apartment in April 1953, as well as the subsequent discussion with James Baldwin (called Marion Dawes in Williams’s novel) a few hours later. The entire book hinged around a plot by American intelligence agencies to silence black writers who have stumbled upon a conspiracy for black genocide carried out by western governments, the legend a favorite tale of Chester’s and Harrington’s. When Chester shared his confidential stories with Williams, he could not have imagined that another writer would do so much with them. Chester had been ignored and shut out for so long that when someone saw the value in what he had to say, he became affronted. Williams had used the information to create a compelling suspense plot, and then given the novel the emotional depth of Himes’s Lonely Crusade. He had done so by taking Chester seriously as an historical actor in a way that Chester did not allow much of his own later work to reflect. Chester could also see in the fully developed treatment that Williams was expert at the missed chance for A Case of Rape which, in its abbreviated form, never achieved the high seriousness of Williams’s book.
The depth of friendship between the two men was difficult to measure. In a complimentary review essay at the end of 1964 that had some prickly lines, Williams had described Chester as “a nervous, wretched man.” Chester didn’t forget that, adding the cutting remark to his increased petulance in 1967, and would avoid Williams for the rest of the year. “Angered,” Williams would wonder why Chester had turned cold and shut him out. “More than you could ever know I shared your misfortunes and grief,” he wrote sadly to Chester before the end of the year. Asking forgiveness for the “seeming indifference,” and admitting “I have been passing time on the outskirts of life,” Chester reheated the friendship, which helped him conduct business in the United States. Nevertheless, with The Man Who Cried I Am, Williams was a rare late-twentieth-century African American novelist who perceived a genuine richness in the postwar black literary tradition, and who went to pains to articulate his historical moment and recover its creative black expatriate actors.
Feeling his creative gifts waning, Chester began to perceive the same exploitation from other blacks like Williams as he had from publishers. And he was not always being paranoid or bitter. In Amsterdam in 1968, Phil Lomax confessed shamefully to publishing Chester’s written material under his own name. “It’s all right, man, relax. Nothing is hurt,” Chester soothingly told him, as the two huddled behind closed doors. The next year though, Chester went out of his way to acknowledge Lomax’s contribution to the plot of Blind Man with a Pistol. “A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol,” he began on the book’s first page, in a “Preface,” something he’d never used before. He wanted to send a message to the younger men about integrity.
In other encounters he was less forgiving. His anger and feelings of persecution flared more openly when Richard Gibson tried to contact him after more than ten years. Gibson had just left southern Africa and was now an expert on that region’s anti-imperialist struggles. His experiences would produce a book called African Liberation Movements: Contemporary Struggles Against White Minority Rule. Like Chester, Lesley was convinced that Gibson worked for the American intelligence services and was conducting FBI-like “pretext” calls to track Chester’s whereabouts. When he telephoned the house, Chester angrily shouted from the bathroom for Lesley to hang up. He never spoke to Gibson again.
The cold of northern Europe was increasingly difficult to tolerate, but there was little doubt that Chester had his best success as a black American author writing and living in Europe. In addition money stretched further in the Old World than in New York, to him the most habitable American metropolis. Chester required the anonymity and historical complexity of European cities, but the South of France, where he preferred living, was still too pricey. He looked farther south, to Spain, a place with traditionally warm weather and excellent food.
When Chester and Lesley headed south of Barcelona in December 1967, testing the waters for the possibility of buying a house, they saw on the sides of walls “Deutsche Haus,” a welcome sign in German to Nazis in hiding. A bulwark against communism since the Spanish Civil War, Spain in the late 1960s was nearing the end of the Franco dictatorship, and becoming more attractive for permanent residency. Despite its tightly controlled state and cowed public (constitutional rights would be suspended in 1968), Spain would miss some of the painful public turmoil that marked France and America, especially in the next year. Chester had not voted regularly when he lived in the United States, so the thought of moving to a country without democratic elections and where the Communist Party was outlawed did not discourage him. As in France, he assumed that if he avoided touchy issues, such as the number of people executed by the Nationalist government during the civil war of 1936–1939 and afterward (the estimates were 200,000), the state police would not pursue him. Although Chester told people that his books could not be sold in Spain, The Primitive had been translated and made available there; perhaps the more strongly pro-union If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade would have made the authorities less comfortable.
Chester and Lesley inched southward along the coast, until they reached the province of Alicante, with its Moorish terraced landscapes and alcazar watchtowers designed to counter the invasions from Africa. Chester’s early impression of the town where he would spend the remainder of his life was swift and disapproving: “Moraira was as racist as the American South,” he wrote to his agent. Rosalyn Targ advised him, “Spain is not a place where you feel comfortable, and I think the best thing would be for you to leave as soon as possible.” But swiftly a kind of fatalism set in. Spain had been a kind of sanctuary since 1954. Was the racism there any worse than the other varieties he had so painstakingly observed? At the end of the month, in Moraira, the Arabic-named town with Spanish people darker in skin color than Chester, he impulsively bought two plots of land overlooking the sea and initiated plans to build a house.
Duplicating an earlier trip, Chester and Lesley walked over to Gibraltar and left the Jaguar for mechanical repair; the roads in Spain had been spottily maintained and Chester had not eased up on his speed to accommodate them. They went north in early 1968 and took an apartment in Sitges, about twenty minutes south of the Barcelona airport. Again, Chester “divorced the United States from my mind.” He was returned there when the news of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, and the resulting widespread rioting and arson throughout the black sections of urban America reached them.
The day after the announcements of King’s death headlined papers around the world, Chester began to appear in the headlines himself. “Comic Suspense Film of Negro Detectives to Be Made in Harlem” reported the Philadelphia Tribune. It had not been an easy path getting to the point of filming. Not three weeks after King’s death, Chester and Lesley went to the Lancaster Gate Hotel in London to celebrate. Chester was delighted that, after three years, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. had finally purchased the film rights for Cotton Comes to Harlem, which was going into production. Good money and publicity for the series would now be at hand.
When Goldwyn finally decided to make the film with United Artists, to write the screenplay he hired Arnold Perl, best known for one-act plays on Russian Jews, but probably selected on account of his Who Do You Kill?, a 1963 televised play about race and economic discrimination. The first thing that Perl did was to reinsert Coffin Ed into the script. Goldwyn admitted his imperfections: “Perhaps that was one of the mistakes which I made before.” Despite the putative liberalism of Perl, Chester found what had been done to the story “offensive.” In a candid discussion with Hoyt Fuller, the editor of Negro Digest, Chester would resentfully accuse Perl of gimmicky exploitation, which he resented more because Chester surmised that Perl believed “the Jews had a right to do so.” As a counterproposal, Chester suggested LeRoi Jones, who had, in the wake of the Newark riots, changed his name to Amiri Baraka. However, Baraka refused to accept anything less than the scale for Hollywood screenwriters, which Goldwyn was unwilling to pay. In the second half of 1968, Ossie Davis, the actor and activist who had delivered the funeral eulogy for Malcolm X, was brought on board to deliver a script; Davis would also direct the film.
Returning from London to Paris, Chester and Lesley moved to a third-floor apartment on Rue Abel Ferry in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, a distant post from his usual haunts, but where he found a mood remarkably similar to that of the United States. The students had barricaded themselves inside the Sorbonne and fought off the police. No public services were available and garbage piled up in the street; the trains were not running, and the din of protests and looming battle were a regular part of life. When Rosalyn and Bill Targ visited for a series of meetings and a holiday in July, Paris had become dangerous. Orly Airport was closed. Chester volunteered to drive them to Brussels so they could return to the United States. He drove the Jaguar like an airplane, at 115 miles an hour, a trip that the couples never forgot and served as Chester’s final act of muscular tenacity and nerve. Spain seemed perpetually serene by comparison.
That summer of 1968 Chester went to Darmstadt, Germany, for quiet refuge. He spent time with Janheinz Jahn, one of his European friends and a man who also had considerable impact on black intellectuals. Jahn had become the German ambassador to Nigeria and Senegal, and his wife had become a practitioner of an African religion, where Jahn himself had considerable scholarly expertise. Jahn had written about the life-force concept of Muntu, which came from the Bantu peoples, the ancestral race of much of western, southern, and central Africa.
Chester and Lesley returned briefly to Paris during the summer. In September they left for Spain and Chester began to plot a novel called Plan B, which would conclude his detective series with the black revolution. “I am trying to show . . . how the violence would be if the blacks resorted to this,” he would inform John Williams. This last book was about real revolt, when the militant’s “objective is not to stand up and talk,” but “to blow out [the enemy’s] brains.” The novel opened with a chapter called “Tang,” about a poor, middle-aged black couple, T-Bone and Tang. A lazy minstrel of a man, T-Bone embraces the stereotypes afforded blacks by white society; his wife, Tang, less contentedly accepts life as a cheap prostitute in Central Park. A mysterious box is delivered to them containing an automatic rifle and a note to begin the war of black liberation. T-Bone wishes to betray the cause while Tang cheers. “ ‘It’s the uprising, nigger!’ ” and “ ‘We gonna be free!’ ” Ideologically opposed, the couple struggles over the gun and T-Bone kills Tang. When Coffin Ed and Grave Digger show up, Digger kills T-Bone, setting up the final action in the drama.
In a series of set pieces showing comic grotesque violence between blacks and whites, and with a backstory of the revolutionary hero whom Chester had hatched in the 1950s, the novel had at its core the question of nationalism and racial belonging. It evolved into a final confrontation between Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, in which Digger kills his partner, who threatens the revolution. “ ‘You can’t kill, Black, man,’ ” Grave Digger tells his partner. “He might be our last chance, despite the risk. I’d rather be dead than a subhuman in this world.” Chester was racing through the novel, referring to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 in South Africa and foreshadowing Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode’s explosive response in 1985 to MOVE. The gore and bald rhetoric made Plan B one of his least artistically interesting novels, even if he did presage the bloody blaxploitation films, slasher horror movies, and Quentin Tarantino films like Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, which would eventually delight American audiences. The possibility that the book was lightweight didn’t bother him. “The main thing in this game,” he told Williams, “is to keep putting books out. Even if you have to put out a lot of fillers—who knows but that they might become classics in time. Look at Hemingway.” Chester’s book might have become a kind of classic, if he could have gotten it out in the 1960s or early 1970s, during the strong periods of black revolutionary militancy in the United States. However, Plan B would not be released until 1986.
Chester worked more diligently on his autobiography and determined, after he had written several hundred pages and had not quite begun his second round in Europe in late 1955, that he would write another volume. The book of his life covering 1954 to 1970, substantially filled with epistles he had collected from over the years, his long essay for The New Yorker about his car troubles (in the context of his work, a fascinating rejoinder to the idea of western industrial supremacy), infused with sex and modern profanity, would be an intertextual effort, quite different from the first volume. He liked the new possibilities available in language with the decline of censorship, one of his long-standing wars, and in Blind Man with a Pistol he had added a one-line “Foreword” from a “Harlem Intellectual”: “Motherfucking right, it’s confusing,” he purportedly quoted, “it’s a gas baby, you dig.”
Blind Man with a Pistol did get a push from William Morrow (whose other strong books written by African Americans included the LeRoi Jones anthology Black Fire and Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual) and, unlike his other detective fiction, received a solo review in the New York Times. Perhaps because it eschewed the tight plot of the other books in the detective series and prevented, in its finale, the detectives from resolving or explaining away the crime, the book was understood, finally, as literature. “Reading Blind Man with a Pistol is like reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” considered one reviewer, “without the spiritual progress that alleviates the horrors of that novel.” Again the reviewer detrained at the question of Chester’s authentic representations of black life. “His Harlem blacks look and sound like the kind of idiots and psychopaths and punks a white man of similar background might think them all to be.” But the next year, when the Mystery Writers of America awards banquet was held in New York on May 1, Chester’s Blind Man with a Pistol was announced as runner-up for best mystery of the year. Chester’s buddy Phil Lomax described the dynamic of reading it: “I got my standard two laughs and a wince per page,” calling Chester’s “hack and slash” scene involving Dr. Mubuta, Mr. Sam, Viola, Van Raff, and Johnson X “a tour de force.” Chester had written the series for ten years, without becoming jaded or bored. The Times reviewer had proposed that a white man of “similar background” to Chester was around. In his forthcoming autobiography, he would remind the public that such a white person did not exist.
Chester mailed off a nearly four-hundred-page draft of the first half of his autobiography to Rosalyn Targ in March 1969, hoping for a windfall from a good press. After an angry and disheartening exchange with the paperback house Dell over the cover of Run Man Run, which featured a lascivious Harlem belle (Dell editorial staff making the decision about the book’s cover declined to read the book itself, about a white detective killing unarmed black men), May was busy and filled with visitors. John Williams proved his devotion by trooping out to the city of Alicante for a five-day visit at Chester and Lesley’s apartment on Calle Duque de Zaragoza. The lengthy interview Williams conducted would have talismanic qualities for the next generation when it anchored Amistad 1, the Random House project conceived by Williams in 1970. But the rub between the two was evident. Williams would introduce the interview, which some reviewers thought “the highlight of the issue,” with what people reading the article recognized as a “self-indulgent” opening. For the second time he described Chester as decrepit, “almost sixty now” and “not well,” a description that no working writer would have liked. To introduce a long interview that was so revelatory as to be nearly shocking, Williams mainly emphasized the vulnerability and weakness of his older buddy: “Himes’ life has been filled with so many disasters, large and small, that I lived in dread that one of these would carry him away.” By noting Chester’s frailty, Williams nearly reproduced the oedipal struggle that Baldwin had confessed to Wright.
The day after Williams left, May 15, Hoyt Fuller of Negro Digest (later Black World) arrived to interview him. Chester set out much of the same material again in another long conversation, but this time he settled his score with Ralph Ellison. Chester detailed the needling by Ellison at Vandi Haygood’s apartment in 1953 about Ellison’s Time magazine contacts as “the thing that cooled our relationship.” Ellison had chilled the relationship with Chester by 1948, given his embarrassment about Lonely Crusade. By 1968 he was becoming known as the antagonist to the young black novelists. In a book jacket blurb for James Alan McPherson’s Hue and Cry (1969), Ellison proposed that younger black writers were overpraised and “take being black as a privilege for being obscenely second-rate.” Chester endeared himself to blacks coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s himself by taking the opposite position: the American publishing industry itself represented the prime indecency and stupidity. And then he went further: Chester suggested that “the white press and writers” had introduced a canard by elevating Ellison. “They say [he] took time to learn his craft,” Chester fumed, considering the squabble in the winter of 1945 when Wright had huffed to them both that Ellison’s early chapters of Invisible Man were too similar to Native Son and Black Boy. Perhaps thinking of what he himself had accomplished in terms of storytelling in The End of a Primitive, Chester made a point of saying that he didn’t believe that Ellison “introduced any new techniques.”
With his unfiltered disdain for established literary conventions and his immutable underdog credentials, Chester became the doyen of the black writers whose aesthetic values were formed in the maelstrom of the 1960s. For these talented writers on the margins, Chester’s retreat to Europe made principled sense. The bunch included novelists like Williams, Clarence Major, Arnold Kemp, Steve Cannon, Sam Greenlee, Ishmael Reed, Kristin Hunter, and Ronald Fair; memoirist Eldridge Cleaver; poets Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, and Maya Angelou; and critics Julius Lester, Hoyt Fuller, and Addison Gayle. As Williams wrote Chester in a letter in 1969, “the younger writers know of and have read Chester Himes. They want to know where he is, what he’s up to. This ‘black revolution’ or whatever it is has shocked them into life. They missed Wright and Hughes, and Ellison gives them nothing but platitudes from what I hear, and they are reaching desperately for roots—which means you.”
By the end of the decade, James Baldwin started boosting Chester too. When Hollywood cribbed the title If He Hollers Let Him Go for one of the movies cashing in black misery in 1969, Baldwin was indignant on Chester’s behalf. Calling If He Hollers Let Him Go a “fine novel,” whose very title should never have been purloined by Hollywood, Baldwin found himself spouting Himesian lyrics about Americans not only “far from being able to abandon the doctrine of white supremacy” but being “prepared to blow up the globe to maintain it.” For the final twenty years of his career, Baldwin would find himself held in decreasing esteem as he pointed out the chronic ulcers of American life.
Quite different from Chester’s formative literary years in the 1940s, the shift in American cultural space at the dawn of 1970 presented a wholesale transformation. Chester was a necessary antenna for perspicuity. Chicago Tribune reviewer Shane Stevens called him “the best black American novelist writing today.” The proof of the new acceptance was in celluloid, as Cotton Comes to Harlem neared completion. The film was shot on location in Harlem with the paramilitary Black Citizens Patrol guarding the props and the actor Godfrey Cambridge defending Chester’s vision on set against producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. When Roz Targ visited in July 1969, she reported that Cambridge was unafraid “to speak up if he feels Sam is going in any wrong direction.”
Chester’s recognition as a writer and one with a novel being turned into a movie did not heal an old wound; even the bubbly Targ was struggling to find a taker for his autobiography. At Random House, a black editor named Charles Harris failed to persuade the senior staff to acquire the book. “White folks won’t know what Chester’s talking about,” he declared to John Williams, “they want a black autobiography, not one by a human being.” Harris would be fired in a year, eventually publishing the English-language version of Chester’s A Case of Rape at Howard University Press. Chester chalked up the failure at Random House to another source. “I can imagine,” he wrote to John Williams about the difficulties preventing a contract, “that most of them stem from Random House regarding Ralph Ellison as the oracle of black writing and all black thought, and anything that doesn’t follow the path of his platitudes is regarded as unmentionable.”
Chester could add the dismissal to his other worries. By August 1969, he was trying to have a home built on the Moraira lots he’d bought in 1967. To construct the small villa on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean would be an all-consuming, drawn-out task, filled with the delay and difficulty he had come to expect in Spain. By late fall he had decided that the work on his home “looked like an imbecile child playing with mud.” In mid-1970, he remained strongly dissatisfied. He was annoyed by the tardy progress when his brother Joe wrote about visiting at the end of the summer. Chester discouraged him, describing the Costa Blanca retreat as “physically difficult” and possessing “uneven streets (I have had three different exhaust systems knocked from the bottom of my car by unseen rocks and protusions [sic]), heat, flies, crowds, and indifferent food.” Then he received an oddly cheery notice from Ken McCormick at Doubleday (“Nice to hear from you again via our legal department”), after Chester had made some boilerplate inquiries about the sales and rights of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Since he was reputably famous, Doubleday as well as Knopf responded now with speed and politesse. McCormick’s slight rapprochement betokened the source of Chester’s final major writings. Fickle Doubleday would bring out his personal annals in two volumes, beginning in 1972.
The relationship was wobbly from the start. After Sandy Richardson, the company’s recently appointed editorial director, read the memoirs in April 1970, he offered $10,000 for the autobiography’s first volume; for the second volume, due the following year, Doubleday promised only $5,000. “I’m not very happy to be back with Doubleday, but beggars can’t be choosers” was how Chester summed up the situation to John Williams. One bright spot, Chester was working with a black editor, a young woman named Helen Jackson who adored him and his work. (Blacks were showing signs of some leverage in publishing. That summer Williams successfully demanded that a white Doubleday editorial staffer be fired for calling his book editor a “nigger-lover.”) Some of the earliest discussions with Doubleday were aimed at publishing both volumes of the autobiography within a year. Chester also seconded a contract to publish a revamped version of his abandoned short story collection of 1954, with the robust Baby Sister at its center, to be called Black on Black.
With greetings from Amiri Baraka and the novelist Cecil Brown (of The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger fame), Chester felt better about traveling to New York. He reached the United States on August 26, 1970, to ink the deal with Doubleday and to enjoy the film success of Cotton Comes to Harlem. His no-holds-barred interview with Williams in Amistad 1 had “got a lot of things cracking.” In it, Chester had proved his uncanny ability to truthfully render the multiracial complexity of American writing while demolishing the myths of white superiority. Chester said repeatedly how much he admired William Faulkner, but then he told Williams, “Look, I have talked to black sharecroppers and convicts and various black people who could tell, without stopping, better stories than Faulkner could write.” His old editorial sparring partner Bill Targ, soon to be promoted to president at Putnam, admitted that Chester’s raw candor was “impressive as an overall, much needed commentary” and would contribute to “your long overdue recognition.”
Back in June, Cotton Comes to Harlem—in director Ossie Davis’s words, featuring Harlem’s “colorful, exciting life-style and wit,” with a score by the creator of the hit Broadway musical Hair—had opened and delivered a knockout punch at the box office. In Philadelphia, theaters kept doors open twenty-four hours a day to handle overflow crowds, and Cotton broke the opening-day box-office records in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Detroit, finally grossing $5.1 million. Despite the young Chicago film critic Gene Siskel’s sour estimate—“the best way to handle ethnic humor is to leave it alone”—black audiences especially seemed to express relief at a comedy, featuring underground talent like Redd Foxx, that placed serious political matters as the context and not the center. Remembering Chester fondly, the New York black newspaper the Amsterdam News had his back: “P.S.” its article concluded, “Chester Himes has been writing and getting published for too long without due recognition.”
The New York Times greeted the film with “a sense of liberation, for here is a film by a new black director (Ossie Davis, otherwise the actor and author), based on the work of a black novelist (Chester Himes), shot in Harlem with a large and talented black cast.” While Davis couldn’t help from sputtering that “concessions” he made might have “cut the gut and heart out of what we are trying to say to black people,” the strong box-office appeal for the quirky humor indicated the emergence of a new genre.
About six months later, Melvin Van Peebles started screening his independently produced revolutionary film Sweet Sweetback’s Baad-asssss Song, which would be distributed broadly in the spring of 1971. Himes’s old friend, whom Chester believed had “tapped [his] literary vault,” used guerrilla advertising methods, like handbills with the slogan “Rated X by an all-white jury,” to promote his unyielding film. Van Peebles directed and starred in the movie, which eventually grossed more than $10 million.
The same year, Gordon Parks released Shaft, whose $12 million at the box office rescued parent company M-G-M from bankruptcy. Together, the three films proved the sound economic value of black-cast movies also written and directed by African Americans. After Shaft’s success was duplicated by the 1972 film Super Fly by Gordon Parks’s son, Gordon Parks Jr. (who had earned credentials filmmaking with Dominic-Pierre Gaisseau), a film featuring a criminal as its hero, the NAACP generated the term “black exploitation” (soon shortened to “blaxploitation”) to describe the trend of financially successful studio films, sometimes in the crime genre and sometimes “B movies,” with majority black actors. It was amusing to Chester that his old antagonists at the NAACP would point to Cotton Comes to Harlem as the originator of the trend.
Chester, who did not earn a percentage of the film gross, considered himself the primary person exploited. He told the Hollywood studios who came after Cotton’s success that he wanted $100,000 for the rights to use the other novels featuring his gun-toting detectives. In New York he spent some time with the latest black artist to achieve a national audience, six-foot-tall Maya Angelou. He made a “big hit” with Angelou, who was in turn later “duly pleased” to hear that Chester had liked her. Then Chester broke a denture eating a rabbit’s leg and had to be rescued by his dentist. He went to Los Angeles to discuss future projects with Goldwyn, to whom he sold The Heat’s On, which became the film Come Back Charleston Blue, the sequel to Cotton Comes to Harlem. During the negotiations, in light of the inconsiderate “general American attitude toward the value of my work,” Chester backed down to $25,000, but he would receive 5 percent of the studio’s net profit.
The U.S. visit also allowed him to be in New York on September 20, 1970, for the inaugural award ceremony of the Black American Academy of Arts and Letters, an organization that grew out of the black cultural nationalist explosion of the period; the idea was to create a permanent institution somewhat parallel to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Someone burglarized his hotel room while he stayed in New York, but Chester was more happily distracted by appearing on television shows and the rising tide of approval from younger black writers. Ishmael Reed dedicated his new book 19 Necromancers from Now to Chester, and Donald Goines, a cult favorite of black readers, went on to call the protagonist of his novel White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief, “Chester Hines,” the same name from the 1930 Ohio penitentiary census report.
Chester returned to his new but poorly constructed home in Spain. He welcomed his editor Helen Jackson to Moraira in October and they worked hard to get The Quality of Hurt, his autobiography, ready for publication in the fall of 1971. The book he published differed from the graphic manuscript he had submitted. “As you know,” his editor told him after a few months of work on the project, “there were deletions and occasional rewrites of sections dealing with subsidiary characters and major revisions of the references to Willa. These were mandatory—not based on editorial considerations but on legal grounds—and are not subject to reinstatement.” By May 1971 Helen Jackson had taken the unusual step of traveling to Spain again to see him because of difficulties at the publisher. Jackson told him that the editorial director Sandy Richardson “has shirked all responsibility” and that Chester’s agent, Rosalyn Targ, was “so busy playing the ‘grand dame’ ” that she had become “frankly impossible.” With all the corrections, Jackson worried that Chester would understand himself to be reliving the censorship crisis he had faced with Doubleday in 1945 with If He Hollers.
Doubleday asked Chester to tone down the sexual references to get the book into municipal libraries. Fearing that the autobiography would suffer in the process, at one point in the summer Jackson turned the entire project over to Sandy Richardson, insisting that he devote expertise to the manuscript. Jackson wrote Himes clarifying the racial terrain in a way he could clearly understand and for the first time in his publishing career. “Major authors are not given to junior editors—major white authors are not.” So, instead of appearing in the fall of 1971, the book was released in the spring of 1972 and Helen Jackson left Doubleday to open up a bookshop in the Caribbean.
When the galleys were sent out, Chester got raves from his latest group of admirers, the black artists drawing direct inspiration from the U.S. counterculture and revolutionary black politics. Maya Angelou put plainly the case for his esteem from younger black artists. “For those who wonder what to do with and about the young black radicals of 1972, it is incumbent upon them to read Mr. Himes’ book.” She insisted, “I admire the writer and after reading The Quality of Hurt I love the man.” The echo was heard overseas. Lindsey Barrett wrote from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria that his new collection of poems Lip Skybound was “influenced by your work and personality” and acknowledging that “many of us have only now begun to know your strength.” Howard University English professor Addison Gayle sent Chester a copy of his new work, The Black Aesthetic. Clarence Major, another significant talent as a poet and novelist, wrote to Chester that he enjoyed best the portraits of Spanish landscape and the train ride in Mallorca. Chester had written a relievedly humanist document for the black writers coming out of the deadly 1960s, “a very lasting and important human record for human beings who care about the individual pain and struggle of other human beings.” But the highlight of the year, beyond being embraced by a new bunch of glamorous and seemingly fearless young writers, came in December when he wrote to Bill Targ to have Putnam forward his share of the purchase price of the dramatic rights for Cotton Comes to Harlem. It was a check for $25,000. The sum was the rough equivalent of what he might have hoped to have gotten on the snowy November night in 1928 when he went to rob the Samuel Millers at their house in Cleveland.
The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, Volume I was fairly well received in American newspapers, caught now between roaring militants quick to accuse them of racist gatekeeping and the old tradition of expecting gratitude from black writers for any notice at all. Arnold Gingrich tried to have it both ways, in a widely serialized review, by claiming credit for having launched Chester, while also complaining of Chester’s “son-of-a-bitchery.” A weirder, more openly negative critique appeared in the New York Times Book Review. The reviewer was Nathan Huggins, a black Columbia professor who had just published The Harlem Renaissance, a history of black writers of the 1920s. Proclaiming that Alex Haley’s portrait of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (both men mentioned by name in the prison sequence of The Quality of Hurt) had achieved “direct, straightforward, honest, self-critical, socially critical, and proud black self-expression,” Huggins accused Himes of writing a book that was “vacuous and unimportant.” And Huggins’s comment that the book was “perhaps directed to American readers of the early 1950s, who might have found something daring in interracial sex,” showed the formidable amnesia that had already set in. Chester had been unable to sell his novels in the 1950s precisely because they broached sex, as he had struggled in the 1940s when they broached politics.
Activist and writer Julius Lester wrote to the Times to correct the “unfair” review, “so unkind and cruel.” Lester, who sent Chester a note saying “I feel that it is the job of some of us younger black writers to deal with a review like that,” was a Himes fan. “Because this book tells me of a world I could know no other way, it is an extremely valuable addition to my life and the lives of other young blacks.” The Los Angeles Times called the book “raw” and “penetrating,” and the Amsterdam News’s Myra Bain admired the “truthful” portrait of the writer and his milieu. Given that white literary critics like Christopher Lehmann-Haupt judged Chester first and foremost “an angry, alienated black who feels that his considerable body of writing has suffered because of bigotry,” the notices were not bad.
Chester returned to the United States with Lesley in early February 1972 for, considering his health, a whirlwind series of interviews, book parties, signings, and readings, mainly in New York. A portion of the book came out in Contact magazine and on the twenty-seventh he was interviewed for the television show Soul by Nikki Giovanni, the twenty-six-year-old member of the radical black aesthetic vanguard. Giovanni threw a party for him at her apartment downtown and old friends like Melvin Van Peebles stopped by. A core group of irreverent black artists appointed him their hero.
On March 12, after Chester traveled in New York and to North Carolina to see Joe, the Harlem Writers Guild, under the direction of Rosa Guy, held a book signing for him at the United Nations Plaza Hotel. There were seven hundred guests, most of them young and black, and they were unapologetically outspoken. Critics like Addison Gayle, Larry Neale, Mel Watkins, and John Henrik Clarke, novelist Toni Cade Bambara, playwrights Loften Mitchell and Ed Bullins, and uncompromising jazz musician Max Roach were on hand to cheer him, along with five hundred copies of the book. Ossie Davis opened the program and his wife, Ruby Dee, read from The Quality of Hurt. Then John Williams introduced Chester, who gave a short speech.
Another day the young black literary lions Steve Cannon, Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, and Clarence Major partied with Chester in his suite at the Park Lane Hotel. Chester served so much scotch that when Cannon got to the Fifty-Seventh Street subway station, he fell down an entire flight of stairs and was bedridden for a week. Reed, an uncompromising high priest of his artistic generation, seconded the assessment of the event that produced some memorable photographs: “all of us really enjoyed being with you and Leslie [sic] and the cat that wonderful afternoon at the Park Lane.”
Thankful for being largely left out of Chester’s autobiography, Ralph and Fanny Ellison got back in touch with him. (Ellison, who sparred throughout the 1970s with this same group, told Steve Cannon that Chester had stabbed him at Vandi Haygood’s New Year’s party in 1953.) In his account Chester had not removed them from his memoir, but he had quietly glossed the action, boiling down the sequence of rich events between the fall of 1944 and the summer of 1947 until he had reduced them to less than two pages. Both volumes of the memoir would show his life with two women: Willa Thompson in volume one and Regine Fischer in volume two. Jean Himes and Lesley Packard, respectively, would obliquely balance it out with their understated roles in each volume. In effect, Chester had fleshed out a bit the material he had wanted to write on a black man’s love affairs abroad.
Despite the memoir’s preoccupation with interracial sex (and avoiding the backlash that John Williams feared from the reviewers “who are proponents of the every white chick is a tramp theory”), Chester continued to get a lift from black-run publishers and magazines and the younger generation. Melba Boyd, an assistant editor at Dudley Randall’s radical Broadside Press, wrote to him, enthralled by his corpus. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a twenty-two-year-old black graduate student at Oxford University who would become a famous academic in the 1980s and ’90s, was among those clamoring to talk to Chester. Writing an article on black expatriates for Time, and having succeeded in interviewing James Baldwin and Josephine Baker, he hurriedly telegrammed Chester, sending greetings from Baker, and imploring, STOPRY [sic] INCOMPLETE UNTIL I SEE YOU. Chester’s buddy Nikki Giovanni told him the story he knew, but which she was reckoning with at the age he had just gotten out of prison. “I think fame,” she wrote to him about celebrity in the United States, “is more trouble than it is generally stated to be.” Chester knew she was right. After the large parties and interviews in New York, he and Lesley went back to Spain at the end of spring 1972. There, Chester felt the telltale tingling and numbness. It was another stroke.