[In the following essay, Skinner analyzes two early Himes novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade, comparing them to the works of such Los Angeles writers as James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler.]

The most aptly-titled of the stories Chester Himes wrote about life and crime in Harlem is the one called Run, Man, Run.¹ In this terrifying noir tale, the protagonist, Jimmy Johnson, is the sole witness to the senseless murder of two of his co-workers by a drunken, psychotic white cop. The police refuse to take the word of a black man over that of a cop, and the rest of the novel chronicles Johnson's headlong flight to escape his own murder. Although he manages to survive, the book's conclusion is rife with Himesian irony. The murderer is killed by a fellow officer to protect the reputation of the police, and Johnson, himself, is jailed on a trumped-up minor charge, with only the promise of a reunion with Linda Lou, his courageous girlfriend, to leaven the injustice.

Run Man, Run evokes Himes's frequently stated belief that his life, and that of every other African American, is a life of absurdity. That black people are held to a stricter standard of behavior than whites, yet are consistently denied the right to rise above their poverty and misery, Himes believed, produces a climate in which black people could feel only a consuming dread of, and hatred for, their white oppressors.

Modern readers, if they know Himes at all, know him for a series of eight hard-boiled thrillers that chronicle the exploits of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, a pair of tough, straight-shooting black police detectives who keep an uneasy peace in Harlem, U.S.A. In these stories, Harlem is less an actual place than the symbolic locus of the many injustices done to American black people.

Himes's fictional universe, while often humorous, is a dark, corrupt place, peopled by demons as frightening as any in literature. Interestingly, these violent, drug-crazed criminals are as much products of their environment as are Himes's protagonists. All are oppressed by white forces, but the criminals either succumb to vicious madness or choose to collaborate with their oppressors. The women at center stage are alluring and sexually exciting, but often they are light-skinned and predatory. In Himes's Harlem, the lighter the skin, the more dangerous the character. White, in Himes's universe, is a symbolic color for evil.

Himes's earlier books, which he set in Los Angeles, are a rough cut of what he so skillfully managed in the Harlem Domestic Series. In those books, If He Hollers Let Him Go² and Lonely Crusade,³ the protagonists live, not in a fictional Harlem, but in a sprawling, white-dominated, wartime L.A. Like the Los Angeles of Paul Cain, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and Raymond Chandler, Himes's Los Angeles is a nightmarish place, with corruption and violence bubbling just under the surface. For Himes, it is a place where racism is no longer held in check, but given free rein by the murderous attack of other brown men, the Japanese, on Pearl Harbor. It is a place where Japanese-Americans have been locked up without trial, and Blacks and Chicanos symbolically lynched in “zoot suit” riots. The dangerous females of these early novels are not the “half-white bitches” of the Harlem Domestic Series, but white women who openly stalk, and bring ruin upon, the black protagonists.

Each of the novels surveys similar territory. Both protagonists are young, educated black men struggling with deep-rooted insecurity and the daily problems brought about by working with inherently racist co-workers and supervisors. In both stories, Himes displays considerable knowledge of the Los Angeles terrain, moving his characters from the shabby garishness of Watts's Central Avenue to the fashionable middle-class black Westside and on through the myriad small communities that made up the Los Angeles metropolitan area of the 1940s.

One of the hallmarks of the Los Angeles novel is the continuous travel by car over the landscape. Both Bob Jones and Lee Gordon drive long distances, each journey an attempt to escape the inescapable. The weight of doom hangs heavily upon each of Himes's protagonists from the opening pages, and the relentless travel serves only to bring each hero closer to it.

Both stories begin with frightened protagonists. Bob has been traumatized by the overt racism that the attack on Pearl Harbor has engendered in the white population. The roundup and imprisonment of the Nisei has him waiting and wondering when they will recognize that his skin is brown, like that of the Japanese attacker, and imprison him as well. His fear has driven him into a paranoiac state, and his sleep is riddled with bizarre dreams that symbolize his helplessness. Lee's fear is different. Somewhat older than Bob, and married, Lee has landed a respectable job as a labor organizer for a union attempting to win over the employees of Comstock Aircraft, an industry with national power and prestige. His happiness at earning this job is gradually undermined by the realization that he has deliberately put himself in a white environment, where he will be subjected to humiliation and insult at every turn.

Both novels have a strong subtext of social protest and labor struggle that places them in the tradition of the proletarian and “strike” novels of the 1930s. However, they differ from that earlier tradition in the way the characters react to their circumstances. Bob Jones, whose emotional anguish has nearly unhinged him, is not struggling for social or racial justice, but only to be accepted as an individual and to lose himself in an ordinariness that his name suggests he might achieve if only he were white. Lee Gordon, on the other hand, is searching for an identity that race cannot provide him. He eventually realizes that fulfillment can come only by merging his identity with the larger group identity of organized labor.

In If He Hollers Let Him Go, Bob Jones's troubles begin at the Atlas Shipyard where he is a leaderman of sheet metal workers. When he asks a white Texas woman, Madge, to work temporarily with his all-black crew, she refuses and calls him “nigger.” When he returns her insult, Bob is demoted. Later that day, after winning a crap game with some other workers, he is beaten unconscious and robbed of his money by Johnny Stoddard, a white man. These two events project Bob into a downward spiral from which he will not escape.

Bob sets two goals for himself after these key events. One is to kill Johnny Stoddard; the other to humble Madge. He tracks Johnny Stoddard to his home with a.38 in his hand, but leaves the killing undone when he realizes the extent of Stoddard's fear of him. Bob becomes euphoric over this new-found power but eventually realizes that his own spiritual weakness, a weakness resulting from a lifetime of racism, prevents him from carrying out the murder. His euphoria deteriorates into hopelessness. Bob's larger goal of humbling Madge is the more difficult, and it eventually leads him to ruin. Of all the female destroyers who inhabit the Los Angeles novel, Madge may be the most dangerous, perhaps because even she does not know what she truly wants.

When Bob confronts Madge for the first time in the novel, we realize that something unspoken has gone on between them before.

She was a peroxide blonde with a large featured, overly made-up face, and she had a large, bright-painted, fleshy mouth … her big blue babyish eyes were mascaraed like a burlesque queen's … She looked thirty and well sexed … as if she might have worked half those years in a cat house [or] she must have given a lot of it away.

(p. 19)

More tellingly, when their eyes meet, “she deliberately put on a frightened, wide-eyed look and backed away from me as if she were scared stiff, as if she was a naked virgin and I was King Kong. It wasn't the first time she had … put on that scared-to-death act” (p. 19). Bob realizes that Madge's pretending to fear him and watching his reaction gives her some kind of sexual thrill, knowledge that both enrages him and fills him with lust.

Without his realizing it, Madge has engaged Bob in the strangest of all mating dances, one that takes them from the narrow confines of a warship under construction, to the shipyard canteen, across town to Madge's shabby rooming house, and back into the bowels of the ship where the final act in the bizarre drama unfolds.

Bob's dilemma stems from the equally strong impulses of hatred and lust that the white woman provokes in him. He had entertained the curious, sometimes coy glances of white women before, but Madge has about her an aura of danger; she provides the dangerous lure of interracial sex that both attracts and repels Bob Jones. She has power over him. She can get him demoted, fired, and even killed, knowledge that weighs heavily upon the neurotic young man.

Bob is not starved for female companionship or sex. In the opening chapter he tells us that he has been sleeping with Ella Mae, his married landlady, when her husband isn't around. He trades flirtatious glances with black women at the shipyard and runs into a woman he sometimes plays with when he visits a bar on Watts's Central Avenue. Of more moment to the story is his engagement to Alice Harrison, the nearly-white daughter of a prominent black doctor in Los Angeles's fashionable Westside. Alice, a social worker who is more a therapist to Bob than a lover, expects great things from him, including his enrollment in law school. Like her light-skinned, socially pretentious family, Alice believes fervently in the integrationist line of the 1940s, which dictated that Negroes must quietly, and patiently, earn their equality. Her goal is to force Bob into a role that she finds acceptable. She never understands that all he wants is to escape the stigma of being a Negro in a white world. His painful desire is only to live a quiet, ordinary existence.

Bob's love/hate attraction to Madge eventually leads him to her rooming house where he is first tempted to sleep with her, but is ultimately frightened away when she tells him, “this'll get you lynched in Texas” (p. 147). He thinks: “Just the notion; just because she was white. But it got me, set me on edge again” (p. 147). Eventually she says the one thing that fills him with purest panic:

“All right, rape me then, Nigger!” Her voice was excited, thick, with threads in her throat.

I let her loose and bounced to my feet. Rape—just the sound of the word scared me, took everything out of me, my desire, my determination, my whole buildup. I was taut, poised, ready to light out and run a crooked mile. The only thing she had to do to make me stop was just say the word.

(pp. 147-48)

Bob retreats, totally defeated. He is nothing now, all his strength used up. He goes to see his white boss and tries to get his old job back, but the best he can get is a promise that if he behaves himself, and works hard, he will eventually be reconsidered for another supervisory post.

Alice convinces him, in his morally weakened state, that the only way to survive is to play it safe:

“I must tell you again, Bob darling,” she says. “You need some definite aim, a goal that you can attain within the segregated pattern in which we live.” When I started to interrupt she stopped me. “I know that sounds like a compromise. But it isn't, darling. We are Negroes and we can't change that. But as Negroes, we can accomplish many things, achieve success, live our own lives, own our own homes, and have happiness. There is no reason a Negro cannot control his destiny within this pattern. Really, darling, it is not cowardly. It is simply a form of self-preservation.”

(p. 168)

Bob accepts Alice's view of black life, and they make plans to be married the following month, but this happy future is not to be. Returning to the shipyard, he accidentally finds Madge asleep in an unfinished part of the ship. When two Navy inspectors on a routine tour try to get into the compartment where they are, Madge panics and cries rape. The men break into the cabin and beat Bob senseless. Somehow Bob escapes the shipyard, but he soon finds that the dangerous streets of Los Angeles lead only to dead ends. Neither Etta Mae nor Alice will help him, and he is eventually picked up at random by two policemen who don't even know of the rape charge.

The final irony is revealed in the courtroom. The president of the shipyard, who it is clear has learned the truth of the matter, comes before the judge to say that no charges will be pressed against Bob, a decision made to prevent “racial tension among the employees.” The judge offers Bob the choice of joining the military or going to jail. He chooses to leave the racial war at home for the shooting war overseas. Bereft of all his hopes, his symbolic lynching complete, he leaves for the military.

If He Hollers Let Him Go owes much to the influence of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. Bob Jones's tough, cynical narration and his inability to escape from Madge's destructive sexuality is strongly reminiscent of Double Indemnity's Walter Neff. Himes's intimate knowledge of Los Angeles surfaces in the same concrete rendering of the city we find in both Cain and Chandler.

Lonely Crusade contains many of the same elements, but bears none of the hallmarks of the tough-guy novels. Relying less on hard-boiled dialogue and more on philosophical reflection, Crusade is more, as critic and novelist James Sallis would have it, a proletarian novel of ideas.⁴ Lee Gordon, like Bob Jones, is educated, articulate, and both maddened and emasculated by the racism he confronts on a daily basis, but Gordon is no tough guy. Rather, he is a thinker who spends much of the story mulling over existential ideas or engaging in philosophical discussions with other characters.

Although long-winded philosophizing weakens the book, an undeniable tension permeates the story, derived from the knowledge that Lee Gordon is a marked man from the moment he reaches the gates of Comstock Aircraft. After a lengthy description of the general problems Lee will face in trying to organize black workers, hard-boiled union organizer Joe Ptak warns him:

“The communists will be after you. Just be prepared … They'll get somebody to make friends with you—either another colored man or a white girl. Then they'll try to recruit you. Anyway, they'll try to control you … Watch out they don't undermine you or double-cross you.”

(p. 25)

To add to his difficulty, Ptak adds, “on a job like this, the union can't show any special interest in your people or we antagonize the Southern whites. Don't look for none” (p. 25).

Gordon's problems are exacerbated by a deteriorating marriage. He has just emerged from a long period of unemployment, and his wife, Ruth, has been supporting the two of them. Even now, she makes more money than he does, and has her own secretary. His insecurity has made him violent and brutal with her at times, badly straining their relationship.

Ptak's warning comes true all too quickly. Luther McGregor, a brutish, dangerous black man that the communists have planted in the union tries to become his friend. Within a short period of time, Foster, the wealthy plant manager and board vice-president, invites Lee and his wife to his luxurious home for Sunday dinner. There, Foster and his bitterly anti-union personal secretary try to soften Lee up by flattering him, then offering an alluring bribe—a ＄5,000.00 a year job in the personnel department and a promise of other “breaks.” Lee is faced with a dilemma. Since his integrity will not allow him to accept the bribe, he must suffer the sting of Foster's considerable wrath. Ruth, devastated by Lee's refusal of a job that would put them on easy street, quarrels with him, and Lee leaves her.

Now in a state of emotional collapse, Lee is propelled into an affair with Jackie Forks, a white woman whom the local communist cell has set up to compromise him. Oddly, Jackie is a miscast femme fatale. She is a reluctant communist, has only positive feelings about race, and ends the affair out of sympathy for Ruth.

By now, the vindictive Foster has spread rumors of Lee's sell-out to the communists among the black factory workers. Lee subsequently finds that his union co-workers have also turned against him. Not long afterward, Lee and Luther McGregor are waylaid by L.A. County Sheriff's deputies in Foster's employ who first attempt to bribe Lee, then gun-whip him when he refuses to cooperate.

Alone, jobless, and living in a skid-row hotel, Lee is approached again by Luther McGregor. McGregor reveals to Lee that he has been working both ends against the middle—receiving money from Foster to spy on the union while working for the communists in the same capacity. Feeling now that there is nothing to believe in and little to lose, Lee accompanies Luther to the home of one of Foster's corrupt sheriff's deputies, to receive a payoff. There, the violent McGregor gets into an argument with the white policeman and stabs him to death. The police catch up to the fleeing pair, shoot McGregor, and arrest Lee for complicity.

In return for a union official's help in getting free of the murder charge, Lee launches himself into a feverish six-day attempt to undo the damage Foster has done to him, and to persuade black workers to vote for the union in an upcoming National Labor Relations Board election. Along the way, he regains his self-respect, and patches up his relationship with his wife. In the climactic final scene, the forces of the union are drawn up in front of the fortified factory gates, trying to break the line. When Joe Ptak and others are knocked down, Lee grabs the union banner, and heedless of the sheriff's department guns and clubs, breaks through.

It is impossible to read Lonely Crusade without feeling regret for what it could have been. The materials for a tense, gripping novel about a lone man's fight against the forces of corruption are there, but Himes never really makes the best use of them. Lee Gordon is a beleagured man lost in the urban jungle of wartime L.A. He is clearly the target on the one hand of tyrannical industrialists and their corrupt civic minions, and on the other of underhanded communists out to subvert the union and its members for their own purposes.

For perhaps the only time in his writing career, Himes had something other than racism on his mind. The prevailing concerns of this novel are ideas, among them the viability of Marxism as a solution to racism and economic tyranny, the potential unifying power of unionism, and the existential anguish of protagonist Lee Gordon. Unlike Bob Jones, whose major preoccupation was racial hatred, Lee Gordon's main concern is his fear of being used by the communists for aims having nothing to do with racial justice. Himes ground this concern on what he learned while being courted by communists he met in California in the early 1940s. American communists of this era saw black people as fertile ground for their ideas. Although Himes wasn't taken in by them, many black intellectuals, Richard Wright among them, did temporarily embrace communist ideology.

The last glimpse we have of Lee Gordon is that of a man who has found a long-sought identity in something bigger than himself. Whether he successfully crashes the line of deputies, or as a few commentators suggest, rushes to meet a cleansing death, it is an unusually positive ending for Himes.

While his picture of Los Angeles owes a great deal to writers like Cain and Chandler, Himes the writer was always his own man. In their concern for the dilemma of the black man looking for self-fulfillment in the white world, and their ambivalent view of interracial sexuality, both If He Hollers and Lonely Crusade are quintessential Himes books.

In each of these novels, and particularly in If He Hollers Let Him Go. Himes asserts that war with Japan has intensified a latent racism among the population of Southern California. He believes this intensification has served to demonize the non-white, and to justify his brutalization, imprisonment, and disenfranchisement. Himes underscores this at the end of If He Hollers, as Bob Jones loses his job, his socially prominent fiance, his automobile, and his opportunity to improve his lot in life. His all-encompassing loss serves as a symbolic lynching.

Himes had his own ideas about interracial sex, too, that are given voice in these two novels. On the one hand, Himes believed that black people involuntarily brought out a sexual degeneracy inherent in the white race. He mentioned this in interviews, and made both subtle and overt allusions to it in novels such as Blind Man with a Pistol⁵ and Plan B⁶ Madge's attraction to Bob Jones is the earliest evocation of this belief to appear in his work. In the scene that takes place in her rooming house, it is clear that Madge can become excited about sex only if she can make it seem like rape.

Alongside this notion is Himes's suggestion that sexual love between a black man and a white woman can have a healing effect on the damage to a black man's self esteem that racism has inflicted. This view is evident in the first volume of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt,⁷ in which he chronicles a lengthy love affair with a white woman he met while sailing to Europe in 1953. This was followed by a number of other affairs before he married an Englishwoman, Lesley Packard. In Lonely Crusade, Lee Gordon's feelings for Jackie Forks are far removed from Bob Jones's lust for Madge. When Lee goes to Jackie, he is suffering the loss of his job, his wife, and the trust of his union co-organizers. Jackie provides him with brief solace and comfort before her guilt and pity for Lee's wife causes her to break off the affair.

While Himes's Los Angeles period was a brief one, resulting in only two novels, he laid in them the cornerstones for a more productive period in the 1950s and 1960s. His concern with the effects of racism and the fight against it, along with his unusual notions about interracial relationships, were combined with the influence of the hard-boiled writers of the 1930s and 1940s to result in his own subgenre, the Harlem Domestic Series.

Perhaps as importantly, Himes set an example that continues to find new voice in the work of Walter Mosley, James Sallis, Gar Anthony Haywood, and other modern writers who have chosen to experiment with the black hero in the realm of tough-guy fiction.

Notes

1. Chester Himes, Run, Man, Run (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1966).

2. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (New York: Doubleday, 1945). Further references to this work are indicated parenthetically in the text.

3. Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). Further references to this work are indicated parenthetically in the text.

4. James Sallis, Difficult Lives—Jim Thompson—David Goodis—Chester Himes (Brooklyn: Gryphon Publications, 1993), p. 85.

5. Chester Himes, Blind Man With A Pistol (New York: William Morrow, 1969).

6. Chester Himes, Plan B (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993).

7. Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt (New York: Doubleday, 1972).