SOURCE: Glasrud, Bruce A., and Laurie Champion. “‘No Land of the Free’: Chester Himes Confronts California (1940-1946).” CLA Journal 44, no. 3 (March 2001): 391-416.

[In the following essay, Glasrud and Champion examine Himes's World War II-era short stories, novels, and essays, which reveal the effects of racism on both African Americans and other minorities during this period.]

During World War II thousands of African Americans sought new opportunities and pursued the lure of the West by moving to California in search of the “elusive Eden.” They had reason for high expectations—the West was celebrated as the region with more freedom, and defense contracts and spending for the “Arsenal of Democracy” opened up employment prospects.¹ However, they soon were disabused of their expectations—not only did the California to which they migrated promise much more than it delivered, but it also featured racial animosity and rampant discrimination.

Among black Americans who moved to California during this period was Chester B. Himes,² a significant twentieth-century African-American novelist. He and his wife, Jean, arrived in California in the fall of 1940 filled with optimism and the assumption that his life and work would take a pronounced turn for the better. Among reasons for going to California, Himes wanted to publish his manuscript novel Black Sheep and to seek work in the burgeoning film industry.³ Unfortunately, he encountered continual ostracism in his artistic efforts (Jack Warner would allow “no niggers on this lot”⁴), and to survive in this ostensible Eden he labored in at least twenty-three jobs around Los Angeles and San Francisco.⁵ As Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre point out in The Several Lives of Chester Himes, Himes' California sojourn was one of many episodes that evoked his feelings of “constant restlessness.”⁶ Recalling his search for employment in Los Angeles, in his early autobiography, The Quality of Hurt, he notes:

[I]t wasn't being refused in plants so much. … It was the look on people's faces when you asked them about a job. Most of them didn't say outright they wouldn't hire me. They first looked goddamned startled that I asked. It shook me. … Los Angeles hurt me racially as much as any city I have ever known. … It was the lying hypocrisy that hurt me.⁷

This disappointment mirrored that of thousands of Afro-Californians during the second World War.

To make matters worse, from Himes' perspective, his wife gained a high profile position that paid more than he was able to earn. His inability to earn as much as his wife made Himes feel as if “I was no longer a husband to my wife; I was her pimp. She didn't mind, and that hurt all the more” (Quality 75). In many ways, the racism that prevented Himes from gaining successful employment also threatened his masculinity.⁸ This threat became a vital issue in his California fiction.

Himes and other African Americans who journeyed West to seek opportunity encountered fierce hostility from white Californians—many of whom were arriving for work or as soldiers from Southern states (and bringing with them virulent racial prejudice). The dire consequences of overt protest during these years also served as very visible reminders of racism to black Californians, and Himes understood and pointed out their significance. Himes' California essays and fiction dramatically depict racism, prejudice, and segregation to expose the lure of the West as an unfulfilled dream for blacks. Himes exposes this flawed California dream in a series of journalistic and fictional works that culminate in his novels If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade.

Himes depicts World War II California in many of his short stories and journalistic essays, in which he reveals racism both as it affects African Americans and as it is directed at other minorities. Because these works concern the war years, many of them address racism as it relates to the military. For example, Himes demonstrates the irony of blacks who fight for a racist country. In “So Softly Smiling” (1943), Lieutenant Roy Johnny Squires returns from the war and concludes, “Let the white people fight their own war—I've got nothing to win.”⁹ Blacks fighting against international persecution while becoming victims of national racism is demonstrated with poetic justice in “Two Soldiers” (1943), where seven soldiers are chased by Nazis. Private Crabtree, who is upset because the only black soldier sits beside him in a bomb gully, becomes so obsessed with racial prejudice that he fails to see a Nazi aiming at him.

Similarly, “Let Me at the Enemy—An George Brown” (1944) reveals a character who transposes the level of the enemy from national to personal status. After conning him into leaving Los Angeles to pick cotton in Bakersfield, George plans to marry High C's girlfriend. When High C gets drafted into the Army, he is stationed at the same army base as George. He becomes eager to fight George, now his personal enemy, but remains apathetic about fighting a national enemy. In an exaggerated tone, Himes describes the job High C performs and implies that even when industry jobs are plentiful, blacks are still picking cotton for white foremen. Ironically, High C discovers that his search for an “elusive Eden” represents regression, not progression, in terms of the status of blacks in California.

For African-American soldiers, defeat prompted by racism frequently superseded military successes. Johnny Jones, the protagonist of “Make with the Shape” (1945), returns from the Army to surprise his wife in Los Angeles. When a dog approaches them while walking along the sidewalk, his wife attacks it. Jones feels inadequate as a male protector because his wife protects him from danger, so he throws his military medals in the trash. He feels so unempowered that he disregards his own accomplishments. The overall result, Phyllis Klotman reminds us, is that “there is only one role forbidden the black male—that of man.”¹⁰

Himes points out through his fiction that during the war, black and white men were encouraged to stand together against a common enemy, yet America was still segregated in practice. With a slight tongue-in-cheek tone, “Lunching at the Ritzmore” (1942) concerns two white men who bet the price of their meals and a black man's meal whether or not the black man will be served in a restaurant. The black man pauses and says, “They're liable to serve me around here. And then your're gonna think it's like that all over the city. And I know it ain't” (19). In classic Himes sarcasm, the black man is served, and the story concludes that “it was thus proved by the gentleman of Pershing Square that no discrimination exists in the beautiful city of Los Angeles” (21). However, Himes adds that the man who won the bet is the only one with money, so he has to pay for lunch; therefore, for all practical purposes he lost the bet. That the man essentially loses the bet parallels the idea that although the black man is served at the Ritzmore, he would not be served at all restaurants in Los Angeles. That Los Angeles restaurants do not practice Jim Crow is an illusion much like the lure of the West was for blacks.

The allegory “Heaven Has Changed” (1943) also illustrates Jim Crow. A black soldier who is killed in action walks down a dusty road and is told that Uncle Tom is dead. African Americans are prevented by a monster from attending Uncle Tom's funeral. Uncle Tom's children want to elect a new god who will better protect them and attempt to usurp Old Jim Crow. When they accomplish both goals, they desegregate heaven. The soldier returns to Earth and tells the other soldiers not to fear death because even though they are forced to accept segregation in the military, they can at least anticipate a desgregated heaven. Perhaps “Heaven Has Changed” demonstrates that the snake in the garden disrupts the “elusive Eden” for blacks: the benefits of the lure of the West are only realized through death and subsequent entrance into spiritual paradise.

To demonstrate the devastating consequences of racism that resulted in the alienation that blacks experienced, Himes frequently places characters in surreal-like situations, sometimes mixed with grotesque humor.¹¹ These illustrations reflect the alienation that Himes experienced; as he notes, “in the lives of black people, there are so many absurd situations, made that way by racism, that black life could sometimes be described as surrealistic.”¹² Three of his California stories, “The Something in a Colored Man” (1946), “One More Way to Die” (1946), and “He Seen It in the Stars” (1944) are packed with absurdity and set in a world where nothing makes sense. In “The Something in a Colored Man,” Mac wanders from bar to bar and admits that he has killed a man. He is sentenced to San Quentin's death row, where he contemplates why a man would admit to a crime for which he would be executed. In “One More Way to Die,” the first-person narrator describes in the present tense how he is killed by transplanted Texas cops, who take him to a dark alley and shoot him; thus bringing “one more way to die” from the white South to blacks in California.

Similarly, in “He Seen It in the Stars,” Accidental Brown has worked at Cal Ship as a boiler-maker's helper for fifteen years. His wife persuades him to accompany her to see the film Hitler's Children, and he falls asleep during the movie. He dreams that a Nazi submarine saves him from drowning in the Atlantic ocean. Beaten and tortured, he feigns insanity. When he awakens, his shouting both terrifies and embarrasses his wife, who asks him what he has dreamt. The wife's question poses the depth of the terror that Brown's dream signifies. In Brown's dream, the actual horror of racism becomes Nazi torture. Racial oppression frightens Brown both in his dreams and in real life.

Himes also wrote journalistic essays that depicted the frightening aspects of racism in the military and in California society. The dire conditions led him to make suggestions for black actions during World War II that are prescribed in his essay “Now Is the Time! Here Is the Place!” He proclaims that blacks should fight for freedoms within their own country while the fight against tyranny continues abroad. He asserts that more than a battle for racial equality, the war for blacks in America is a struggle for justice in a broader sense and a “form of government in which people will be bound together … by common objectives and aims for the benefit of all.”¹³ Himes' petition for blacks to take action against racism parallels his belief that equality can be achieved only through revolution. He outlines a three-step movement for equality that includes such revolution in his essay “Negro Martyrs Are Needed”: (1) progress can be brought about only by revolution, (2) incidents are needed for revolutions, and (3) martyrs are necessary to evoke incidents. He adds that black martyrs are needed “to create the incident which will mobilize the forces of justice and carry us forward from the pivot of change to a way of existence wherein everyone is free.”¹⁴ Himes even promoted violence as a means for blacks to achieve equality. Along with the violence he illustrates in much of his work, he says, “The only way the American Negro will ever be able to participate in the American way of life is by a series of acts of violence. It's tragic, but it's true.”¹⁵

It was also tragic that America's leaders, from Himes' perspective, supported accommodation rather than prescribing a more direct approach to end oppression. Himes does not support accommodation tactics as remedies for racism and takes issue with those, like Eleanor Roosevelt, who asserted, “If I were a Negro today … I would not do too much demanding. I would take every chance that came my way to prove my quality and my ability … knowing in the end good performance has to be acknowledged.”¹⁶ Himes often mocks those who conform to ideas that promote passive acceptance of racial oppression. The consequences of accommodation frequently play roles in Himes fiction, especially his California novels.¹⁷

Himes comprehensively and compassionately points out that during the war years racism was directed not only at blacks but at other California minorities as well. Noting the increase of racist actions which ensued after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Himes introduced and promoted the publication of a sketch in The War Worker by a Japanese American who had been placed in a West Coast concentration camp. Perceptively, Himes also noted the “crazy, wild-eyed unleashed hatred” in white people's faces after the bombing of Pearl harbor.¹⁸ In the essay published for The War Worker, he printed pages from a Nisei's diary to inspire in his readers “a better understanding of the problems confronting these Japanese-Americans” (7). It also served as a warning: if this incarceration can happen to one minority group, it can happen to another. He also wrote the most penetrating analysis of the Zoot Suit Riots (the violent attacks by white soldiers on Mexican Americans in the Los Angeles area) and correctly and forcefully blamed the attacks on racism. In “Zoot Suit Riots Are Race Riots,” he describes the horrors of the infamous June 1943 Zoot Suit Riots and blames them on racism manifested as white soldiers and sailors indiscriminately beating Mexican youths (or other people of color) who wore Zoot Suits—not for any particular reason, but as Himes notes, simply because “the South has won Los Angeles.”¹⁹

In another essay, “Democracy Is for the Unafraid,” Himes discusses the situation of blacks who fought in World War II. He argues that “the cowardice of a relatively small percentage of white Americans is seeping into the consciousness of the majority and making them afraid of the darker races.”²⁰ He contrasts America's hatred of blacks with its fight against Germany and points out that true democracy is incompatible with prejudice, the very attitude the United States embraces yet professes to fight. Perhaps prophetically, Lee Gordon, the protagonist of Lonely Crusade, reflects, “Give them a General in the army … and you'd have them eating out of your hand while you Jim Crowed the other hundreds of thousands in uniform.”²¹

Of all of Himes' essays and stories, “The Snake” (1956), a short story based on his experience while staying at his brother-in-law's ranch, most powerfully demonstrates the drastic physical and mental effects of racism. Himes encountered six-foot-long timber rattlesnakes that apparently intrigued yet bothered him, and the snakes became perplexing yet welcome adversaries compared to humans. In the story a snake virtually signifies how difficult it is to abrogate racism. Himes' description of a snake threatening a woman includes its hiss, hatred, despisement, and contempt. Similar to many of Himes' protagonists' responses to racism, “the woman shuddered as if her blood was chilled.” After she kills the snake, its mate returns the next day and bites the woman seven times, signifying the infinite degree of her death. Whereas by killing the first snake the woman symbolically evades racism momentarily, it returns to kill her absolutely. Himes seems to suggest that attempts to conquer racism may bring it back more violently. Like the snake in the garden, this snake's “sinister poison seemed to emanate from its cold gleaming skin” (333). Because Himes suggests that racism is a far more dangerous poison than a snake's venom, one can conclude that oppressors of African Americans are even more adversarial than the snake the woman in the story encounters.

Himes most vividly illustrates the hardening racial climate wrought by the war in his California novels—If He Hollers Let Him Go, set in 1944, and Lonely Crusade, set in 1943.²² Unfair hiring practices and unsuitable working situations added to the disillusionment of the lure of the West for blacks during World War II, a time when the war-related industries created numerous jobs. Although not always providing solutions, Himes' novels illustrate cogently the problems blacks experienced in the work force during the war years. Frequently, as Himes shows, blacks were given jobs only as unskilled laborers, which prevented them from learning any skills they might use to gain higher positions. When they achieved responsible positions, they incurred white wrath and obstructions. They lost senority when making lateral moves and were unable to make upward moves. As Robert E. Skinner asserts, “these barriers prevented blacks from taking any real advantage of the shipbuilding war boom.”²³ Racism was a powerful force that corrupted job opportunities for blacks, even if some were initially successful in their employment searches. In addition to creating economic disadvantages, racism aroused multifaceted psychological consequences. It is therefore not surprising that fear is a dominant subject in both novels—Bob Jones, the primary character of If He Hollers, fears the coming racial crisis precipitated by Pearl Harbor, and Lee Gordon, the protagonist of Lonely Crusade, is both psychologically and physically frightened of whites.

Like many African Americans during World War II, Jones experiences conflicting emotions because he feels obligated to support a country that oppresses blacks. If He Hollers ends with Jones' awareness of the irony of the war. As his friend says, “Every time a colored man gets in the Army he's fighting against himself. Of course there isn't anything else he can do. If he refuses to go they send him to the pen” (115).

Jones is a shipyard crew foreman in a department where working conditions are confining both physically and emotionally. He describes the physical structure of the building in which he works as “a cramped quarters aft, a labyrinth of narrow, hard-angled companionways, jammed with staging, and workers who had to be contortionists first of all” (22). The following verbs are used to describe efforts he must make even to reach his department: “climb,” “crawl,” “duck,” “jerk,” “punch,” “crouch,” and “bump” (22-23). The “stifling hot” building (23), obviously physically uncomfortable, also serves as a metaphor for psychological conditions the black workers experience. Rather than becoming the Eden-like environment blacks had hoped to find, Jones' workplace is described as a living hell—not only was the dream of many blacks unfulfilled, but it became the very opposite of what they sought.

The dream-turned-nightmare embodied as racism provokes Jones to criticize Los Angeles: “Los Angeles is the most overrated, lousiest, countriest, phoniest city I've ever been in” (42). Similar to Jones's comment, in the sarcastic tone Himes uses throughout his fiction a character from the short story “Prison Mass” sums up his assessment of the West: “Go west, young man, where prisons are tough and sentences are long” (174). Obviously, Himes uses Jones and other characters to vent some of his views of urban California's racial antagonisms during World War II. As contemporary black California author Ishmael Reed asserts in Airing Dirty Laundry, “Himes's America is alive and well, and racism, that ugly social parasite, has found a host in parts other than the South.”²⁴ Due to these racist attitudes, Jones' white peers refuse to cooperate with him. For example, Jones' supervisor is late submitting blueprints he needs to complete his job. Later, a supervisor refuses to ask crew members who are not busy to help Jones complete a job.

The incident that precipitates Jones' downfall involves Madge, a white woman who refuses to work with Jones and calls him a “nigger.” Ironically, he is physically attracted to her and they have a romantic affair. “Madge, the Texas cracker,” Phyllis Klotman points out, “thrives on the notion that blacks are savage and sexually aggressive. Armed with a Southern psyche and a blowzy body, she insults Jones.”²⁵ When he retaliates by calling her a “cracker bitch,” he is demoted. Although she is not a physical beauty, Madge's attraction to Jones is similar to that of blacks for California. Madge, like California, is seductive, ornamental, and superficial; but little substance is found under the glitter. The attraction to the West was as devastating to blacks as Madge was to Jones. As Stephen F. Milliken astutely iterates, Madge, the big blonde from Texas, who is “an object both of aversion and desire,” leads Jones “to the semilynching that is his fate.”²⁶

One example which clearly portrays this fateful attraction involves Madge's sister-in law. She tells Jones he should only associate with other blacks and leave white women alone. He asks if her comment insinuates that she does not want his company, and she responds,

I declare, you colored folks from California is so sensitive. Colored boys in Texas know better'n to sit beside a white woman. Not that I mind if Madge don't. It's just that most colored folks like to stay to themselves. That' why we ain't never had no trouble in Texas. … We love colored folks in Texas, and I bet you a silver dollar colored folks love us too.

(126)

Madge personifies the search for the “elusive Eden” as experienced by blacks. “She sees herself as inordinately desirable to Robert Jones, … in spite of her obvious lack of charm, beauty, intelligence and … rejection by her white husband.²⁷ Madge tantalizes and tempts Jones, only to become the source of his downfall. Her racism causes her to become the snake in the garden that destroys Jones' hope of paradise and creates in him feelings of inferiority.

Madge's relationship with Jones is a sort of master trope of false promises faced by blacks in California—the depth of the promise parallels the extent of the deceipt. Worse than becoming merely an unfulfilled promise, it was wrought with negative experiences. An example of ways the promise becomes a curse is that instead of reaping benefits from the war economy, Jones is victimized by underlying racist attitudes that cause him to feel “scared, powerless, unprotected” (37), “ridiculous,” “ignored,” “despised” (69), “cold scared … weak and black and powerless” (74), “tense” and “jerky” (75), “conspicuous, ill at ease, out of place” (76), and “flustered, caught, guilty” (113).

This continual and omnipresent fear is frequently depicted as dreams that illustrate the psychological depth of the effects of racism. Throughout If He Hollers descriptions of Jones' dreams represent the psychological depth of his distress. In his dreams, whites manipulate and oppress him and other blacks, who are consistently victims of racism. The theme of racial inequity emerges as a powerful characteristic that perpetuates Jones' anger and despair.

Jones' psychological reactions to racism are further developed in “A Night of New Roses” (1945; Original title “A Night of Neurosis”), a story that continues If He Hollers. In the short story, Jones aimlessly drives along the Los Angeles highway, considers his recent situation, and realizes that his reaction to racism has led to his having joined the Army:

[M]y thoughts kept burning into me, lacerating me, until I wanted to die. It was stupid, I thought. Nonsensical. Futile. Bewildering. It didn't make any sense, but yet it drove you. Nothing but race. White and black. Nothing to do to get away from it. Nothing to think about. No escape. I spent half my time thinking about murdering white men. The other half taking my spite out in having white women. And in between, protesting, bellyaching, crying. It sat on top of me like a weight, pressed down through my skull, smothered my reason. Always! Was it always gonna be this goddamned race business grinding a dull aching frustration through me?

(126)

Although driven to thoughts of suicide because of these frustrations, Jones decides that he will not let whites have the satisfaction of promoting his death. He recalls the “cracker bitch” who cost him his job, ponders the army, and expresses bitterness because he must fight and support a Jim Crow country. He goes to a bar, where he begins to cry; but no one seems to notice. As he leaves, a man opens the door for him and says, “Hurry back” (130), as if Jones' emotions have become truly invisible. Himes points out that the needs of the oppressed are ignored by most of the empowered and that even some of the victims do not recognize the extent or consequences of oppression.

As in his other California works, racial segregation during the war is demonstrated in If He Hollers as yet another means of racial oppression. When Jones takes Alice Harrison, his upper-class, light-skinned African-American girlfriend, to an uptown restaurant, they are served, but seated in the back of the restaurant at a small table. They are unable to enjoy the meal because of the hostile environment.

Jones' accommodationist girlfriend is unwilling to challenge whites, and because of his refusal to cooperate with racist whites, she tells him:

Bob, I've been thinking seriously that perhaps I'm not the type of woman for you. I'm ambitious and demanding. I want to be important in the world. I want a husband who is important and respected and wealthy enough so that I can avoid a major part of the discriminatory practices which I am sensible enough to know I cannot change. I don't want to be pulled down by a person who can't adjust himself to the limitations of his race—a person who feels he has to make a fist fight out of every issue—a person who'd jeopardize his entire future because of some slight, or say, because some ignorant white person should call him a nigger—

(93)

At the end of the novel, Jones assumes that if he marries Alice and returns to college, people will consider him an important black man. Describing his working-class background, he says,

All I had when I came to the Coast was my height and weight and the fact I believed that being born in America gave everybody a certain importance. … In the three years in L.A. I'd worked up to a good job in a shipyard, bought a new Buick car, and cornered off the finest colored chick west of Chicago—to my way of thinking. All I had to do was marry her and my future was in the bag. If a black boy couldn't be satisfied with that he couldn't be satisfied with anything. … But I knew I'd wake up someday and say the hell with it, I didn't want to be the biggest Negro who ever lived. …

(144-45)

Accommodation to either white society or upper-middle-class black society was a compromise that Jones, like Himes, was unwilling to make.

Jones' desire to be accepted without distinction of color poses other complex dilemmas throughout the novel. He recognizes that whites use empowerment based on color to demean and degrade blacks. He views racism as the instigator of actions such as blacks having to wait for change during business transactions, blacks having to wait behind whites for streetcar transfers, and blacks given the worst possible seat when white ushers seat them in theaters. The tantalizing (Madge-like), superficial glitter of California was tarnished.

The California dream also remains unfulfilling for Lee Gordon, the main character of Lonely Crusade. Gordon works as a labor organizer and tries to persuade the employees of Comstock Aircraft to join a labor union.²⁸ As Robert E. Skinner points out in “The Black Man in the Literature of Labor,” Gordon ultimately recognizes that the union will not help blacks find equality because they will face racial discrimination after the plant is organized. Because the basis of the union is seniority, eventually the union will betray them. Blacks will continue to be the last hired and the first fired. Lack of experience perpetuated by hiring practices that exclude blacks prevents black workers from achieving success beyond entry level positions.²⁹ Gordon recognizes that “under the company merit system Negroes could at least hope that by application and hard work, superior acumen and Uncle-Toming, they might get a better job than they would by process of seniority” (Lonely Crusade 139). His hope for more opportunity shattered, Gordon recalls unhappy memories of his childhood in Pasadena: “He had no pleasant memories of Pasadena; he had been born in the backyard and in his unhappiness had known only the back door. He and his parents had been driven away like thieves in the night” (167).

Blacks struggled with the difficulty of how to act in response to racial oppression. Should they pretend? If so, what should they pretend? Gordon wonders if in Foster's presence he should act

like the timid Negro son of domestic servant parents; or the reserved and quiet Negro college graduate, picking his chances to speak, weighing his words for the impression they might make; or as the blustering unioneer, walking hard and talking loud and trying to give the appearance of being unafraid. … And with this thought all of his senses tightened and panic overwhelmed him. It was as if the unseen gatekeepers of the white overlords demanded of him a toll to enter—an incredible toll in disquiet, anxiety, trepidation, and greatest of all, in fear. He could not help his fear, he knew, and waited for it to strike.

(167-68)

Such fear on another occasion turns to “a stricture of the soul, the torture of the damned, a shriveling up inside, an actual diminution of his organs and the stoppage of their functions” (18). Gordon recognizes his fears as those shared by African Californians and experiences an identity crisis that makes him feel as if he is

looking into a mirror and seeing his own fear, suspicion, resentments, frustrations, inadequacies, and the insidious anguish of his days reflected on the faces of other Negroes. It frightened him all the more because he could not divide himself from the sum total of them all. What they were, he was; and what they had been, he also had been. Their traditions were his traditions; and their identities described him too. What life held for them, it also held for him—there was no escaping.

(60)

Internal peace for Gordon did not arrive even though he recognized that others shared his fears.

Even more devastating, segregation for Gordon spirals into a sense of rejection that goes beyond feeling ill at ease. When refused service at a restaurant, he becomes enraged because Ruth witnesses his subservience, an event that leads to domestic violence, “marking his manhood through violence” as Eileen Boris puts it.³⁰ Gordon recalls that the “first time he slapped [Ruth] was not for anything she did, but for what he did not do” (39). Later, in a theater, Ruth asks a white man sitting in front of her to remove his hat so she can see, and he tells her to sit somewhere else. Gordon displaces his anger towards whites with resentment towards Ruth because he is frustrated that he cannot make white men treat her respectfully. Whites have denied Gordon his masculinity.³¹

Consequently, Gordon fears that he cannot offer to his wife benefits equal to those of white men. His fear creates insecurities that prompt him to try harder to support and protect Ruth. Ironically, in Gordon's case the very fear of not being able to satisfy Ruth leads to domestic violence and threatens his relationship with her, the very relationship he wishes to maintain. The part of him that fears he will lose Ruth is attracted to a white woman with whom he has an affair that severely damages and perhaps destroys his marriage. He is lured to the woman for similar reasons that Jones is attracted to Madge, and again, as with Jones, the attraction signifies the false promises of the lure of the West.

Himes personally experienced this false lure of the West. When he left California four years after his arrival, he felt embittered, crushed, and hateful. He had neither published his book nor found meaningful employment nor received support from the movie industry. Rather, he discovered intense segregation and racism, accepted unskilled labor, and unsuccessfully traversed the state seeking opportunities during the hectic years of World War II. As he sums up in his autobiography The Quality of Hurt, “I was thirty-one and whole when I went to Los Angeles and thirty-five and shattered when I left to go to New York.” Furthermore, he noted, “Under the mental corrosion of race prejudice … I had become bitter and saturated with hate” (76). Since Himes, along with so many other black Americans, had arrived in this apparent land of Eden with hopes for a promising future, California's brand of racism seemed worse and hurt them more than the racism they encountered in the Midwest and the South. Chester Himes confronted California, learned from California, wrote about California, and escaped from California; but he could not persuade World War II California to relent.

In the summer of 1946, Himes visited his brother-in-law's ranch in northern California to work on his novel Lonely Crusade. In route from New York to California, he “bought a 303 Savage rifle in New York because I had read that the Ku Klux Klan was active in the region of northern California where we were headed; but I found race hatred so frightening that I kept it loaded and within easy reach from the time I entered Illinois.” “California itself,” he wrote, “was certainly no ‘land of the free’” (Quality 78). Fortunately for Himes, for the most part his final confrontation with California seemed uneventful: he did not need his rifle except to shoot rattlesnakes, he completed his novel, and he soon left the state for good. As he later acknowledged, “I remember that summer as one of the most pleasant of our life” (Quality 93). And it might well be viewed that way. The war was over, he lived sheltered from segregated and prejudiced California society, and he was working at a task which consumed his considerable talents and skills. But he remembered World War II California, and California should remember him. Chester Himes' explosive works served to accomplish what he was unable to do in World War II California. While as an individual Himes unsuccessfully challenged California, as an author he poignantly exposed California's false Eden.

Notes

1. For an excellent review of the background of California history see Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, and Richard J. Orsi, The Elusive Eden: A New History of California (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). On race relations during World War II, see Sally Jane Sandoval, “Ghetto Growing Pains: The Impact of Negro Migration on the City of Los Angeles, 1940-1960,” master's thesis, California State U., Fullerton, 1974; Alonzo Nelson Smith, “Black Employment in the Los Angeles Area, 1938-1948,” diss., U of California, Los Angeles, 1978; Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954 (Lawrence: U of Kansas, 1993); Lawrence B. de Graaf, Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930-1950 (San Francisco: R. and E. Research Associates, 1974); Edward E. France, “Some Aspects of the Migration of the Negro to the San Francisco Bay area since 1940,” diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1962); Bernice Anita Reed, “Accommodation Between Negro and White Employees in a West Coast Aircraft Industry, 1942-1944,” Social Forces 26 (1947): 77-82.

2. For a list of Himes' works, see “Works By.” Himes published eighteen novels, a two-volume autobiography, and a collection of short stories. Posthumously his entire output of short stories was collected into a single, lengthy volume; some of his less numerous essays are included in our account. Himes is held with affectionate esteem by many: Stephen F. Milliken refers to him as “sui generis”; Ishmael Reed dedicated 19 Necromancers from Now to “The Great Mojo Bojo,” Chester Himes; and John A. Williams called his Himes interview “My Man Himes.”

3. For scholarly investigations of Himes' life and career, see “Studies Of.” By the time Himes arrived in California in the fall of 1940, he already had experienced a full life, albeit at the youthful age of thirty-one. Born in Missouri, his family moved often before settling in Cleveland, Ohio. Himes attended and was expelled from Ohio State University and served time for armed robbery in the Ohio State Penitentiary. While in prison he wrote about his experiences, published short stories and essays, and was paroled after serving seven and one half years of his twenty-year sentence. He also wrote a novel that vividly explicates black prison life but could not get it published. This novel, the first written by Himes, was the third published. However, to gain a publisher, Himes reduced the length by at least one third, eliminated some strident comments, and whitewashed the characters. No longer a novel of black prison life, it became a story of prisoners. The title was changed from Black Sheep to Cast the First Stone.

4. Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, eds., Conversations with Chester Himes (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995) 56.

5. On Himes in California, see Gilbert H. Muller, “California on Parade: If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade, Chester Himes,” by Muller (Boston: Twayne, 1989) 20-38; Robert E. Skinner, “The Black Man in the Literature of Labor: The Early Novels of Chester Himes,” Labor's Heritage 1 (1989): 51-65; Robert E. Skinner, “Streets of Fear: The Los Angeles Novels of Chester Himes,” Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, ed. David Fine (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1995) 227-38; Eileen Boris, “‘You Wouldn't Want One of 'Em Dancing with Your Wife’: Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II,” American Quarterly 50 (March 1998): 77-108.

6. Edward Margolies and Michael Fabre, The Several Lives of Chester Himes (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997) xi.

7. Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt (New York: Doubleday, 1972) 73, Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

8. A common theme in Himes' writings, masculinity among African Americans, has been an increasingly discussed topic, especially since Louis Farrakhan's preparation and implementation of the Million Man March on Washington, D.C., in the mid 1990s. Scholars began studying the historical and literary origins; see for example Andrew Shin and Barbara Judson, “Beneath the Black Aesthetic: James Baldwin's Primer of Black American Masculinity,” African American Review 32.2 (1998): 247-61; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “‘Masculinity’ in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” American Quarterly 47 (December 1995): 595-618; Maurice Walker, “‘Are We Men?’: Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775-1865,” American Literary History 9 (Fall 1997): 396-424. However, to this date, no one seems to have explicated the many and complicated aspects of black masculinity that authors such as Chester Himes, Eldridge Cleaver, and Ishmael Reed have developed in their fiction and in their essays. Such a study must begin with, in addition to the Himes works listed at the end of this paper, Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968); Ishmael Reed, Airing Dirty Laundry (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993); Nathan Hare, “Will the Real Black Man Please Stand Up?” Black Scholar 2 (June 1971): 32-35; Rebecca Carroll, ed., Swing Low: Black Men Writing (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995); and Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham, eds., Representing Black Men (New York: Routledge, 1996). Two black psychiatrists raised some of the issues in William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968); see also Robert Staples, Black Masculinity: The Black Male's Role in American Society (San Francisco: Black Scholar Press, 1982).

9. Chester Himes The Collected Stories of Chester Himes (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991) 68. Unless otherwise noted the short stories are from this collection and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

10. Phyllis R. Klotman “The White Bitch Archetype in Contemporary Black Fiction,” Midwest Modern Language Association Bulletin 6 (1973): 101.

11. For more on Himes' utilization of the grotesque, see A. Robert Lee, “Hurts, Absurdities and Violence: The Contrary Dimensions of Chester Himes,” Journal of American Studies 12 (1978): 99-114.

12. Fabre and Skinner 140.

13. Chester Himes, “Now Is the Time! Here Is the Place,” Opportunity 20 (1942): 273.

14. Chester Himes, “Negro Martyrs Are Needed,” The Crisis 51 (1944): 159.

15. Fabre and Skinner 21-22.

16. Chester Himes, “The People We Know,” The War Worker (November, 1943): 6.

17. Accommodation is also the theme of one of his California short stories: “The Song Says ‘Keep on Smiling’.” The story involves a young woman who refuses to sit quietly and wait for the pretense of equality. Jean Delaney sings with the shipyard orchestra and works on shipway as a shipfitter helper. She suggests that women organize a club so they will have something to do besides pine for boyfriends in service. The white women organize such a club, but exclude Jean. On a bus, Jean gets invited to sing for the Sweethearts Club. She goes to a club and meets a man who tells her that when he was white he believed in justice, but because he is black, he is just an opportunist. She is frustrated and confused and goes home and goes to bed. The lady she lives with tells her after thirty years of working for a white family, the family gave her money to buy a house. Not wanting to wait thirty years to find her place in the world, Jean recognizes that although the song says “keep on smiling,” smiles and acquiescence to unequal treatment will not advance her or her race.

18. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1945) 7. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

19. Chester Himes, “Zoot Suit Riots Are Race Riots,” The Crisis 50 (1943): 222. The beatings were fomented by Los Angeles newspapers, applauded and encouraged by white citizens, and allowed to continue by Los Angeles police. Finally, the military, fearing a major mutiny, halted the beatings. Information on these “riots” can be found in Mauricio Mazon, “The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: U of Texas P, 1984); and Marily Domer, “The Zoot-Suit Riot: A Culmination of Social Tensions in Los Angeles,” master's thesis, Claremont Graduate School, 1955. However, none is as clear and forthright as Himes' initial response.

20. Chester Himes, “Democracy Is for the Unafraid,” Common Ground 4 (1944): 53-54.

21. Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947) 364. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

22. Himes' vivid and stark portrayal of California's World War II race relations caused these novels to be referred to as “protest” novels in the tradition of James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Although they are protest novels, this nomenclature trivializes the magnitude of Himes' (as well as Baldwin's and Wright's) skilled representation of United States society.

23. Robert E. Skinner, “The Black Man in the Literature of Labor: The Early Novels of Chester Himes,” Labor's Heritage 1 (1989): 54-55.

24. Ishmael Reed, “Chester Himes: Writer,” Airing Dirty Laundry (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993) 155.

25. Klotman 102.

26. Stephen F. Millican, Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1976) 92-93.

27. Klotman 98.

28. The ideas related to labor found in Lonely Crusade are also developed in “In the Night,” a story that involves three communists, one black, two white. When Sonny had studied at the NYA defense school, the communists did not encourage him to seek employment because they did not want the responsibility of promising him a job. He passed the exams, but received a letter from the defense plant saying it would not support his employment at the aircraft company now or at any time in the future. Unable to find a solution for discrimination, all the characters stand at a sort of frightened stance, not knowing where to turn for answers. To Himes, racism is more powerful than ideology.

29. Skinner, “The Black Man” 62.

30. Eileen Boris “‘You Wouldn't Want One of 'Em Dancing with Your Wife’: Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II,” American Quarterly 50 (1998): 78.

31. Boris also discusses ways that Jones is denied masculinity: “Obsessed with manhood and color, protagonist Bob Jones chafes under cultural notions of gender and race” (77). Additional studies on black masculinity include Herb Boyd and Robert L. Allen, eds., Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), which includes a selection from Lonely Crusade; Charles Johnson and John McCluskey, Jr., eds., Black Men Speaking (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997); Robert Staples, “Masculinity and Race: The Dual Dilemma of Black Men,” Journal of Social Issues 34 (1978): 69-183; Clemmont E. Vontress, “The Black Male Personality,” Black Scholar 2 (June 1971): 10-17; and Doris Y. Wilkinson and Ronald L. Taylor, eds., The Black Male in America: Perspectives on His Status in Contemporary Society (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977).

A Selected Bibliography

Works by Chester Himes

Novels

If He Hollers Let Him Go. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Doran, 1945.

Lonely Crusade. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.

Cast the First Stone. New York: Coward-McCann, 1952.

The Third Generation. Cleveland: World Publishers, 1954.

The End of the Primitive. New York: New American Library, 1956.

For Love of Imabelle. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1957; revised as A Rage in Harlem. New York: Avon, 1965.

The Real Cool Killers. New York: Avon, 1959.

The Crazy Kill. New York: Avon, 1959.

The Big Gold Dream. New York: Avon, 1960.

All Shot Up. New York: Avon, 1960.

Pinktoes. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1965.

Cotton Comes to Harlem. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1965.

The Heat's On. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1966.

Run Man, Run. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1966.

Blind Man with a Pistol. New York: William Morrow, 1969.

A Case of Rape. New York: Targ, 1980.

Plan B. Edited by Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

Un Joli coup de lune [The Lunatic Fringe]. Trans. Hélène Devauz-Minié. Paris: Lieu Commun, 1988.

Short Stories

Black on Black: Baby Sister and Selected Writings. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973.

The Collected Stories of Chester Himes. Foreword Calvin Hernton. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991.

Autobiographies

The Quality of Hurt. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

Studies of Chester Himes

Alter, Nora M. “Chester Himes: Black Guns and Words.” Alternatives. Ed. Warren Motte and Gerald Prince. Lexington, KY: French Forum Publishers, 1993. 11-24.

Bennett, Stephen B., and William W. Nichols. “Violence in Afro-American Fiction: An Hypothesis.” Modern Fiction Studies 17 (1971): 221-28.

Berry, Jay R., Jr. “Chester Himes and the Hard-Boiled Tradition.” Armchair Detective 15.1 (1982): 38-43.

Boris, Eileen. “‘You Wouldn't Want One of 'Em Dancing with Your Wife’: Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II.” American Quarterly 50 (March 1998): 77-108.

Braham, Persephone. “Violence and Patriotism: La Novela Negra from Chester Himes to Paco Ignacio Taibo II.” Journal of American Culture 20 (1997): 159-69.

Cochran, David. “So Much Nonsense Must Make Sense: The Black Vision of Chester Himes.” Midwest Quarterly 38 (1996): 1-30.

Crooks, Robert. “From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Moseley.” College Literature 22 (1995): 68-90.

Davis, Ursula Broschke. “Chester Himes.” Paris without Regret: James Baldwin, Kenny Clarke, Chester Himes, and Donald Byrd. Iowa CIty: U of Iowa P, 1986. 65-96.

Denning, Michael. “Topographies of Violence: Chester Himes' Harlem Domestic Novels.” Critical Texts 5:1 (1988): 10-18.

Evans, Veichal Jerome. “Chester Himes: Chronicler of the Black Experience.” Diss. Oklahoma State U, 1980.

Fabre, Michel. “Chester Himes's Ambivalent Triumph.” From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. 215-37.

Fabre, Michel, Robert E. Skinner, and Lester Sullivan, comps. Chester Himes: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992.

Fabre, Michel, and Robert E. Skinner, eds. Conversations with Chester Himes. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995.

Feuser, Wilfried. “Prophet of Violence: Chester Himes.” African Literature Today. Ed. Eldred Durosimi Jones. New York: Africana Publishing, 1978. 59-76.

Freese, Peter. “Chester Himes's Cotton Comes to Harlem: Black Tough Guys in the Urban Ghetto.” The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman. Essen: Verl. Die Blaue Eule, 1992. 15-90.

Glasrud, Bruce A., and Laurie Champion. “Chester Himes.” Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999.

Hairston, Loyle. “Chester Himes—‘Alien’ in Exile.” Freedomways 17.1 (1977): 14-18.

Lee, A. Robert. “Hurts, Absurdities and Violence: The Contrary Dimensions of Chester Himes.” Journal of American Studies 12 (1978): 99-114.

Lundquist, James. Chester Himes. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976.

Margolies, Edward. “Chester Himes's Black Comedy: The Genre Is the Message.” Which Way Did He Go? The Private Eye in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Ross MacDonald. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. 53-70.

———. “Experiences of the Black Expatriate Writer: Chester Himes.” CLA Journal 15 (1972): 421-27.

———. “The Thrillers of Chester Himes.” Studies in Black Literature 1 (1970): 1-11.

Margolies, Edward, and Michel Fabre. The Several Lives of Chester Himes. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997.

Milliken, Stephen F. Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1976.

Muller, Gilbert H. Chester Himes. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Nelson, Raymond. “Domestic Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes.” Virginia Quarterly Review 48 (1972): 260-72.

Peters, Melvin Troy. “Too Close to the Truth: The American Fiction of Chester Himes.” Diss. Michigan State U, 1978.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. “Chandler Comes to Harlem: Racial Politics in the Thrillers of Chester Himes.” The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolution, and Current Trends in Detective Fiction. Ed. Barbara A. Rader and Howard G. Zettler. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. 19-29.

Reed, Ishmael. “Chester Himes: Writer.” Black World 21 (1972): 23-38, 83-86.

———. “Chester Himes: Writer.” Airing Dirty Laundry. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993. 152-56.

Reilly, John M. “Chester Himes' Harlem Tough Guys.” Journal of Popular Culture 9 (1976): 935-47.

Sallis, James. “Chester Himes: America's Black Heartland.” Difficult Lives: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Chester Himes. Brooklyn: Gryphon Publications, 1993. 72-98.

———. “In America's Black Heartland: The Achievement of Chester Himes.” Western Humanities Review 37.3 (1983): 191-206.

Saunders, Archie D. “The Image of the Negro in Five Major Novels by Chester Himes.” Master's thesis, Howard U, 1965.

Skinner, Robert E. “The Black Man in the Literature of Labor: The Early Novels of Chester Himes.” Labor's Heritage 1 (1989): 51-65.

———. “Streets of Fear: The Los Angeles Novels of Chester Himes.” Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays. Ed. David Fine. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1995. 227-38.

———. Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1989.

Soitos, Stephen F. “City within a City: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes.” The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996. 125-78, 243-44.

Walters, Wendy W. “Limited Options: Strategic Manueverings in Himes's Harlem.” African American Review 28 (1994): 615-31.

Wilson, M. L. Chester Himes. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

Wilson, Ruth Ann. “The Black Sheep: The Novels of Chester Himes.” Master's thesis, Stephen F. Austin State U, 1972.