24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Budapest Times
Black author committed to damning the black experience
Readers of this Books section should be well acquainted with Chester Bomar Himes, the black American writer (1909-1984) best known for his hard-boiled but wry Harlem Detectives series, all eight of which, and a couple of his others, we have featured as they were republished in the past four years. Now here are eight of his short stories, perhaps some of them written from prison, in a slim volume that is one of a whopping 90 new books selected from the Penguin Random House archive.
The 90 are to celebrate the 90th anniversary of what is now the largest book publisher in the United Kingdom. It was in 1935 that Allen Lane (1902-1970) together with his brothers Richard and John founded Penguin Books to bring high-quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. The simple idea was that quality literature shouldn't cost more than a packet of cigarettes. Publishers and booksellers were sceptical at first but within a year Penguin had caused a revolution in the industry, with three million sold.
The Himes book is typical of the 90, it being a short 142-page selection and thus selling at a reduced UK price of £5.99 compared with a normal paperback for £9.99-16.99. The eight stories come from 'The Collected Stories of Chester Himes' that was originally published in 1990 and contained a fulsome 60 tales spanning some four decades of his writing.
Like the other 89 archive titles, 'All God's Chillun Got Pride' has a simple but striking cover, which draws on Penguin's design heritage. The new series uses only one colour, and that colour is red foil, otherwise known as the colour of passion, the idea being that this is intended as a love letter from the publisher for the birthday. The red foil lettering is stamped onto naked white covers, showing the story, author and the year when the author was first published as a Penguin. In Himes' case, he has been 'A Penguin since 1974'.
Otherwise, no further details are given about the contents, which is a pity. It would have been nice to know when Himes wrote his eight stories and where they were first published, because he, of course, started writing at the Ohio State Penitentiary after committing armed robbery and being arrested while attempting to pawn the stolen jewellery in Chicago.
It was 1929 and he was 19 years old. The court gave him the maximum 25 years in prison but he was released on parole in 1936. Biographers say that while incarcerated he bought a Remington typewriter and began tapping out stories. These were sent to magazines and the like, and his work was published in the Pittsburgh Courier, Bronzeman, Atlanta Daily World, Abbott's Monthly and Esquire.
A victim of racism himself, Himes used his writing career to concern himself with black protagonists doomed by white racism and self-hate. This set of eight tales opens with 'Headwaiter', which we think was first published in Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life in 1937. The story explores the necessarily repressed feelings of a black headwaiter, Dick Small, who has held the postion at the Park Manor Hotel for 20 years and must defer to an exclusively white clientele while overseeing an equally exclusively black waiting staff.
These waiters have a Negroid langour that bespeaks liberal tips. Small is reminded of the negro of Mark Twain legend who said he didn't want to make a dime 'cause he had a dime. One diner observes that 'all a nigger needs is something to eat and someplace to sleep'. The diner knows because he's got a plantation of them. A busboy, shouted at by a lady diner, 'jumped a full yard backward, his nostrils flaring like a winded horse's and his eyes white-rimmed in his black face'.
'Lunching at the Rtizmore' is a satirical story about a student bet that will supposedly disprove the existence of racism in Los Angeles. Consternation ensues as the city's down-and-outs tag along to see whether a negro will be allowed to eat in restaurants, ultimately at the Ritzmore, the swankiest of West Coast hotels. How is the bet resolved? It doesn't matter really. It's all rather tongue-in-cheek from Himes. What racism?
The titular short story, 'All God's Chillun Got Pride', is a brilliantly powerful and relentless summation of the daily fear and humiliation that a 'black beast', a nigger, goes through in white America. The man, Keith Richards, known as 'Dick', keeps up a bold front but he's afraid that one day he will crack, and that will be his doom.
'So each day, of a necessity, in order to live and breathe, he did as many of these things of which he was scared to do as he could do short of self-destruction. He did them to prove he wasn't scared so the next day he would be able to get up and live and breathe and go down to the library and work as a research assistant with a group of white people.'
'Pork Chop Paradise' has writing almost as strong, in which an illiterate black man, a convicted rapist, comes to be called God by black and white men and women, duped into fake faith by his messianic messaging and because, for a while, he is able to assuage their hunger. Pavements turned into pork chops? Here is a denunciation of phoney religious cults.
Finally, 'God' is brought to grief by falling to his own suppressed human desires, especially sex, losing his head with a blinding lust for Cleo, 'a high-yellah gal… from down Harlem way, and she sent him to the dogs. Sent him to the dogs'.
The opening pages of 'Friends' are a bit difficult to follow – the alligators – until we reach a murder that is difficult to read, because the bloody and horrific account is so chillingly recounted. It is harrowing. The rapist accidentally cuts off his penis to free it from the corpse with a butcher knife. Phew.
In 'His Last Day', cop killer 'Spats' Wilson is on Death Row and hours away from the big chair. He's determined not to give way to fear, to go to his destiny with a smile on his face, though mainly for the benefit of his fellow inmates and the newspaper coverage. Deep down he is desperate for a reprieve, which never comes, and he is scared. He rejects the preacher who wants him to make peace with God. He just about manages to carry off his final minutes with bravado, but take at look at his eyes and see his true feelings. (Written in prison and Himes' first published short story, in Abbott's Monthly in 1933.)
In 'The Snake', the search for a rattlesnake that has invaded a woman's home leads to the discovery of her missing husband in a grave under the floorboards. (Esquire published this on October 1, 1959.)
Black America needed, and probably still does – Black Lives Matter – the perspective of a person such as Himes. As he mentions here, didn't (Founding Father, United States President and slave owner) Thomas Jefferson write that 'All men are created equal'? Not in Himes' telling of the black experience.
'They don't hang Negoes in the north; they have other and more subtle ways of killing them,' he writes. But when you shear away the falseness of tradition and ideology, who can tell the black from the white?
Let's hope that 'All God's Chillun Got Pride', which is in effect a sampler, generates enough interest to allow 'The Collected Stories of Chester Himes' to see the light again.
