Chester Himes

Franklin Nelson

Inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States of America, Donald Trump wasted no time in evoking, in rich, declarative terms, how he would reshape the country of which he is Commander in Chief for the second time in four years. ‘I will, very simply, put America first,’ he announced inside the Capitol in Washington DC on January 20 2025, pledging to make Martin Luther King’s dream ‘a reality’ on the national holiday for the assassinated Civil Rights leader. ‘Our nation’s glorious destiny will no longer be denied.’

Were he to be alive today, Chester Himes would probably have something to say about Trump’s claims of the US as ‘history’s greatest civilisation’ and ‘one people, one family’. Born in the Midwestern state of Missouri in 1909 to parents who taught in the segregated schools system, Himes was caught early by one of America’s still visible stains: the disproportionate incarceration of black men. Handed a prison term of 25 years at the age of nineteen for armed robbery, he took to gambling in prison and bought a typewriter with his winnings, as Lawrence P. Jackson notes in Chester B. Himes: A Biography (2017). Writing, somewhat incredibly, was to become the young man’s get-out-of-jail card after his short stories made it into the national press and resulted in a book contract. Yet Himes felt so alienated from his mother country that he left; first in 1953 and, after a brief return, for good two years later, settling in France and then Spain, where he died in 1984. Even if his work consistently puts America first, telling stories across both East and West coasts, the flaws and lies of the civilisation Himes left behind were not left unremarked upon. Far from it. The dream, if it wasn’t deferred like so many others, had to be lived out not at home but abroad. 

The decision by Penguin Books to re-issue four of Himes’s novels at the end of 2024 in its Modern Classics series underlines the pertinence of his prose, most of which was written in the heat of the last century, to our present. In his debut If He Hollers, Let Him Go and three books from the Harlem Detective series – Blind Man with a Pistol, The Big Gold Dream and The Crazy Kill – Himes paints pictures of an America struggling under the weight of its own claims to exceptionalism and the everyday experiences of its black brothers and sisters. The tone differs between the novels, to be sure, and the novels have different ends in mind. But the ideologies that constrain the inner and outer lives of their characters are broadly steadfast. Fear, rage, lies, violence, setbacks and successes: if Himes was, as Jackson argues, ‘a bold man struggling to survive by the writer’s discipline’, then his creations’ very humanity calls for close attention in view of our own social cauldrons.

Written ‘with youthful panache and a bellyful of anger’, according to a review in The Observer newspaper, If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945) tracks Robert Jones from an oneiric beginning, in which he imagines feeling ‘small and humiliated and desperate’ thanks to ‘two big white men’ in a dream, through to a somewhat tragic end. This shipyard worker lives ‘every day scared, walled in, locked up’ in Los Angeles, negotiating a ‘crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes’ as he goes to and from the wharf, his home and the home of Alice, his middle-class African-American girlfriend. The city of angels turns out to be full of wretches, with Jones dismissed from his job after being accused of raping a white female colleague and increasingly distressed with his lot. 

Race is not, as it were, part of the fabric of his life. It is his life. For all his intelligence, Jones exists and is interpreted in racial terms, viscerally, in all places and at all times. All the same, to think of If He Hollers solely as a novel of black life would to be overlook its sharp scrutiny of labour and class under capitalism, with workers relocating in search of better opportunities and engaging with Communist ideas, and tensions between Alice and her boyfriend exacerbated by the money and status on which she can draw. The ‘pure and simple colours of America’ are shown to be pretty sullen, even if there are individual examples of non-white advancement. Jones’s induction at the novel’s end into the armed forces – the archetypal domain of masculinity and pride in one’s country – to avoid a lengthy jail term underscores just how far short society has watched him fall from the one ‘little thing’ he wanted: ‘just to be a man’. 

Colour is present but does not cast so large a shadow in The Big Gold Dream (1960). The novel’s setting of Harlem, home to ‘the largest concentration of black people in the world’ by the turn of the 20th century, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, goes some way to explaining this. If there is a ‘glorious destiny’ in this novel, it is first one of faith, although the ‘solid gold dream’ of religion quickly becomes rooted in financial gain after the devout Alberta Wright is seen to die during a street sermon given by Sweet Prophet Brown and Alberta’s small fortune goes missing. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, Himes’s pair of detectives, unravel the case, in which we learn that Wright did not die at all and that the man of God is, in fact, the ultimate crook. ‘If you is a black woman like me, you got to believe in something,’ Wright insists.      

There is language and characterisation here that is anti-Semitic; notably repeated references to ‘the Jew’ who clears Wright’s apartment after she ‘dies’, and descriptions of ‘saliva trickl[ing] from the corners of his mouth’ as he handles money. Nevertheless, after coming under fire for editing some contentious words out of books by Roald Dahl two years ago, for which it later apologised, Penguin has wisely not re-written Himes. To have done so would have been to distort the author’s portrait of Harlem, however firmly we might disagree with it today. There is, separately, much drama (and some farce), as friends and enemies help and hurt each other and themselves, and the bodies pile up in a manner that stretches credulity. But perhaps that is the point: the very real worlds of The Big Gold Dream and If He Hollers, Let Him Go are, in their own ways, dream worlds, places where the importance of belief and hope chafes against the urgency of reality. To wake up from them and to do something about them, or to go on denying that they exist as they do: this is the question Himes leaves us with.