"I would sit in my room and become hysterical thinking about the wild, incredible story I was writing. But it was only for the French, I thought, and they would believe anything about Americans, black or white, if it was bad enough. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference."
The late 20th and early 21st centuries are the age of the liminal individual. Liminality, which is one of those fussy academic words, refers to the sensation or actuality of being "caught between" portions of reality.
Those of a mixed racial background often describe themselves as such in regards to their relation to general society, as do teenagers while in that awkward developmental stage where they are caught between childhood and adulthood. J.D. Vance, in his recent, bestselling autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, addresses the liminal when he describes what it is like to be born in Midwestern poverty and familial addictive disorder and feel out of place even while excelling at Yale Law School.
It is interesting to note that, in American literature of the 20th century, the best explorations of liminality are found in detective fiction. Dashiell Hammett's main character, Sam Spade, in the novel The Maltese Falcon, operates with his own moral sense, impervious to the corruption that surrounds him. Raymond Chandler's private eye, Philip Marlowe, does the same, often commenting on the isolation he senses when he abides in that liminal ground between criminal larceny and police corruption. Certainly, cinema has worked, re-worked, chewed upon, vivisected, dissected, consumed, and destroyed into a cliche the notion of the "anti-hero" as a liminal character.
Of Marlowe, Chandler once wrote in an essay, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
Into this rich mine of fiction are two other characters, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, woefully neglected on the contemporary scene, who deserve notice, as does their creator who was, without question, a classic liminal man himself.
Chester Himes' father was a college professor and his mother a teacher. They were educated, middle-class professionals living in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The locals described his mother as "high yellow". However, as they were also black, they experienced the common, and remarkably casual, racism in the south of the early 1920's when Himes older brother, wounded in a school project involving gunpowder [Schools have really changed, haven't they?], was refused emergency treatment at the "white" hospital. Himes would later note in his memoirs that this incident at the age of twelve revealed for him the liminality of the black experience in American culture. It would become the theme of his life and fiction.
Shortly afterwards, the Himes family moved from Arkansas to Cleveland, Ohio, a more racially differentiated city with a strong, black middle-class and the absence of Jim Crow laws. As Langston Hughes, a leading literary light of the era, had begun his writing career in Cleveland, it was recognized as second only to Harlem in promoting black writers. It was here that Himes would be educated and also begin his adolescent adventures in liminal reality. Mainly, this was realized during his college years at Ohio State University when he would sometimes sneak off campus to explore the gambling dens of Columbus. He would eventually be caught doing this and expelled.
While literary biographers tend to gloss over Himes' next seminal experience, and the circumstances are a bit nebulous, we know he was convicted of armed robbery in 1928 and sentenced to 20 to 25 years of hard labor at the Ohio State Penitentiary and, later in his sentence, transferred to the London [Ohio] Prison Farm.
[An aside: One of the other prisoners at the prison farm during this time was my great-uncle, Bob, who, as if from a scene in a Victor Hugo novel, had stolen bread with which to feed his and some other local families whose resources had been stretched during The Great Depression. Well, he stole a truck that happened to have bread in it. Either way, he had been caught. Great Uncle Bob once noted to me that the London Prison Farm was well-run and encouraged vocations that would ensure the prisoners would have something to help keep them out of "the system" in the future. He also noted that the food there was better than the food at Mansfield State Penitentiary, where my other great-uncle had served time. They used to argue their respective points at family get-togethers. This is my family, folks, and I would have had no other.]
While in London, Himes began to write fiction, mostly in the form of short stories, that were published in the pulp magazines of the era. As he honed his ability, his work came to be published in better journals, such as Esquire, drawing the attention of Langston Hughes, who encouraged Himes' avocation, eventually enabling him to be released in 1936, only eight years into his sentence. Himes recent, and most careful, biographer notes that his subject did not experience some transformative experience while incarcerated. In fact, he grew even angrier and more bitter about race and class and the absurdity of black life in America. While this could make his stories unpleasant, uncomfortable, and even violent, it also imbued them with an energy that made them compelling.
Accepting odd jobs and writing whenever he could, Himes began to explore previously taboo subjects about race, intimate human interaction, and homosexuality; rare topics to be so confronted in the 1930's and '40's. As with many disaffected people, he found fellow travelers in the American Communist Party and reflected their language and social attitude in his fiction. [Another aside: One may see the same language and social stratification in the current Black Lives Matters movement, which is also tied to the American Communists.] Barred from military service due to his prison record, Himes published his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, in 1945. It met with positive criticism, with Himes being compared favorably with Richard Wright, the author of Native Son. Wright would later help Himes and, as with Hughes before him, find his friendship ultimately rejected.
If He Hollers... is shockingly violent, at least in terms of the protagonist's imagination, and while it caused those who read it some discomfort, it also drove readership and interest in the author. However, a steady diet of bitterness is not an attractive sales feature, and the public quickly tired of Himes' world view; his next two novels were failures. His reputation was not secured by his personality, either, as he was unpleasant, prickly, and vindictive with critics and fellow writers. After an unsuccessful period as a Hollywood screenwriter, Hines, realizing that he would not be regarded as equal to or above the triumvirate of Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, moved to the more favorable racial atmosphere in Paris, where many African-American artists and musicians had gone to live in the years after World War II.
While in Paris, Himes made the acquaintance of Marcel Duhamel, an actor/screenwriter/translator who also owned a publishing house specializing in French crime fiction, who suggested that he write a detective story, as they were the rage in the French literary market, especially if set in the United States and exploiting the country's supposed social flaws. It was then, at the age of 48, that Himes began the most critically and commercially successful portion of his life when he published A Rage in Harlem.
Concerning the cons, tricksters, sex workers, huckster clergy, hapless fools, and, in particular, police department of New York City, Himes wove a tale of betrayal and revenge that captured the quirky wonder of what is sometimes called "black humor". At turns macabre and absurd, in his plot Himes introduced his two lasting characters, the NYPD detectives, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, the absolute representations of the liminal man.
Being the only black detectives in Harlem, Jones and Johnson work without the white cops, save for their sympathetic lieutenant. On one side, they face the criminal wiles of the residents of Harlem, on the other, the corrupt and racist members of their own department. Because of their special status in Harlem, they are left alone to establish justice through resolute means. Jones and Johnson will beat, shoot, slice, or otherwise brutalize criminals in order to save those in their community whom they deem innocent and in need of their protection and, on occasion, vengeance. However, they will also tolerate the gamblers, drug addicts, the procurers and their women who do what is necessary to survive in the neighborhoods. In this, they maintain the classic role of the detective as the one who maintains a highly individual, yet rigid, moral system.
A Rage in Harlem was so popular in France that it won the Grand Prix de la Litterature Policière in 1958 and launched what is now known as Himes' "Harlem Detective" series, especially after American publishers discovered the book and contracted Himes to write as many as he wanted, all to be published in the United States.Those of a mixed racial background often describe themselves as such in regards to their relation to general society, as do teenagers while in that awkward developmental stage where they are caught between childhood and adulthood. J.D. Vance, in his recent, bestselling autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, addresses the liminal when he describes what it is like to be born in Midwestern poverty and familial addictive disorder and feel out of place even while excelling at Yale Law School.
It is interesting to note that, in American literature of the 20th century, the best explorations of liminality are found in detective fiction. Dashiell Hammett's main character, Sam Spade, in the novel The Maltese Falcon, operates with his own moral sense, impervious to the corruption that surrounds him. Raymond Chandler's private eye, Philip Marlowe, does the same, often commenting on the isolation he senses when he abides in that liminal ground between criminal larceny and police corruption. Certainly, cinema has worked, re-worked, chewed upon, vivisected, dissected, consumed, and destroyed into a cliche the notion of the "anti-hero" as a liminal character.
Of Marlowe, Chandler once wrote in an essay, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
Into this rich mine of fiction are two other characters, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, woefully neglected on the contemporary scene, who deserve notice, as does their creator who was, without question, a classic liminal man himself.
Chester Himes' father was a college professor and his mother a teacher. They were educated, middle-class professionals living in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The locals described his mother as "high yellow". However, as they were also black, they experienced the common, and remarkably casual, racism in the south of the early 1920's when Himes older brother, wounded in a school project involving gunpowder [Schools have really changed, haven't they?], was refused emergency treatment at the "white" hospital. Himes would later note in his memoirs that this incident at the age of twelve revealed for him the liminality of the black experience in American culture. It would become the theme of his life and fiction.
Shortly afterwards, the Himes family moved from Arkansas to Cleveland, Ohio, a more racially differentiated city with a strong, black middle-class and the absence of Jim Crow laws. As Langston Hughes, a leading literary light of the era, had begun his writing career in Cleveland, it was recognized as second only to Harlem in promoting black writers. It was here that Himes would be educated and also begin his adolescent adventures in liminal reality. Mainly, this was realized during his college years at Ohio State University when he would sometimes sneak off campus to explore the gambling dens of Columbus. He would eventually be caught doing this and expelled.
While literary biographers tend to gloss over Himes' next seminal experience, and the circumstances are a bit nebulous, we know he was convicted of armed robbery in 1928 and sentenced to 20 to 25 years of hard labor at the Ohio State Penitentiary and, later in his sentence, transferred to the London [Ohio] Prison Farm.
[An aside: One of the other prisoners at the prison farm during this time was my great-uncle, Bob, who, as if from a scene in a Victor Hugo novel, had stolen bread with which to feed his and some other local families whose resources had been stretched during The Great Depression. Well, he stole a truck that happened to have bread in it. Either way, he had been caught. Great Uncle Bob once noted to me that the London Prison Farm was well-run and encouraged vocations that would ensure the prisoners would have something to help keep them out of "the system" in the future. He also noted that the food there was better than the food at Mansfield State Penitentiary, where my other great-uncle had served time. They used to argue their respective points at family get-togethers. This is my family, folks, and I would have had no other.]
While in London, Himes began to write fiction, mostly in the form of short stories, that were published in the pulp magazines of the era. As he honed his ability, his work came to be published in better journals, such as Esquire, drawing the attention of Langston Hughes, who encouraged Himes' avocation, eventually enabling him to be released in 1936, only eight years into his sentence. Himes recent, and most careful, biographer notes that his subject did not experience some transformative experience while incarcerated. In fact, he grew even angrier and more bitter about race and class and the absurdity of black life in America. While this could make his stories unpleasant, uncomfortable, and even violent, it also imbued them with an energy that made them compelling.
Accepting odd jobs and writing whenever he could, Himes began to explore previously taboo subjects about race, intimate human interaction, and homosexuality; rare topics to be so confronted in the 1930's and '40's. As with many disaffected people, he found fellow travelers in the American Communist Party and reflected their language and social attitude in his fiction. [Another aside: One may see the same language and social stratification in the current Black Lives Matters movement, which is also tied to the American Communists.] Barred from military service due to his prison record, Himes published his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, in 1945. It met with positive criticism, with Himes being compared favorably with Richard Wright, the author of Native Son. Wright would later help Himes and, as with Hughes before him, find his friendship ultimately rejected.
If He Hollers... is shockingly violent, at least in terms of the protagonist's imagination, and while it caused those who read it some discomfort, it also drove readership and interest in the author. However, a steady diet of bitterness is not an attractive sales feature, and the public quickly tired of Himes' world view; his next two novels were failures. His reputation was not secured by his personality, either, as he was unpleasant, prickly, and vindictive with critics and fellow writers. After an unsuccessful period as a Hollywood screenwriter, Hines, realizing that he would not be regarded as equal to or above the triumvirate of Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, moved to the more favorable racial atmosphere in Paris, where many African-American artists and musicians had gone to live in the years after World War II.
While in Paris, Himes made the acquaintance of Marcel Duhamel, an actor/screenwriter/translator who also owned a publishing house specializing in French crime fiction, who suggested that he write a detective story, as they were the rage in the French literary market, especially if set in the United States and exploiting the country's supposed social flaws. It was then, at the age of 48, that Himes began the most critically and commercially successful portion of his life when he published A Rage in Harlem.
Being the only black detectives in Harlem, Jones and Johnson work without the white cops, save for their sympathetic lieutenant. On one side, they face the criminal wiles of the residents of Harlem, on the other, the corrupt and racist members of their own department. Because of their special status in Harlem, they are left alone to establish justice through resolute means. Jones and Johnson will beat, shoot, slice, or otherwise brutalize criminals in order to save those in their community whom they deem innocent and in need of their protection and, on occasion, vengeance. However, they will also tolerate the gamblers, drug addicts, the procurers and their women who do what is necessary to survive in the neighborhoods. In this, they maintain the classic role of the detective as the one who maintains a highly individual, yet rigid, moral system.
"As far back as Lieutenant Anderson could remember, both of them, his two ace detectives with their identical big hard-shooting, head-whipping pistols, had always looked like two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town. Grave Digger has a lumpy face, reddish brown eyes that always seem to smolder, and a big and rugged frame. He is more articulate than Coffin Ed who has one distinct feature - his face, which has been badly scarred by a thrown glass of acid. Their nicknames indicate the respect they receive in Harlem. They drive the streets in a nondescript battered super-charged Plymouth and work mainly through sheer presence, chance and, what we call today, brutality. As Grave Digger says to the commissioner, "We got the highest crime rate on earth among the colored people in Harlem. And there ain't but three things to do about it: Make the criminals pay for it - you don't want to do that; pay the people enough to live decently - you ain't going to do that; so all that's left is let'em eat one another up."
Eight novels in this series would be published during Himes' lifetime, securing his reputation as a writer and enabling him to earn a healthy living. His gambling, occasional drug use, and suppressed anger would eventually take its toll on his body and, after a stroke and nervous disease, Himes would die at the age of 75 in 1984.
Since his death, Chester Himes reputation as an artist has continued to grow, even if his querulous personality continues to vex. He is considered by some critics as the father of noir fiction, or certainly on the podium with Hammett and Chandler, and the direct inspiration for Walter Mosley's novels about Easy Rawlins. Even his other novels, those not about Harlem cops, reveal the same darkness and rage, the same existential absurdity that, if not as artfully presented as by other black authors, retains its raw energy and unflinching regard.
His only request of his widow, granted on his death bed, was to "keep my books alive". Certainly she, and those who recognize Himes place in 20th century American literature, have done so as the Harlem Detective novels are still in print as are most of his other books. His two-volume autobiography, (The Quality of Hurt, 1972, and My Life of Absurdity, 1977), is an excellent meditation on his sense of liminality and should be read by any student of race in America.
