Chester Himes by James Sallis

in Himes, if they are not killers, are effeminate and ineffectual, moral weaklings, prostitutes—people to be used. Yet
Cast the First Stone
, particularly in its second half, is beyond question a love story, and while in prison Himes had relationships with at least two fellow convicts. Of course, it’s not at all unusual that men finding themselves in prison adapt to same-sex practices and continue so for years without ever considering themselves other than heterosexual.
    Critic Stephen Milliken sums up the basic problem here vis-à-vis the memoirs, novels, and life lived.
    Unfortunately, Himes did not choose, in his autobiography
The Quality of Hurt
(1972), to clarify in any detail the exact relation of fiction to fact in his three autobiographical novels of the early 1950s—
Cast the First Stone
(1952),
The Third Generation
(1954), and
The Primitive
(1955). The sections of his life that he explored so exhaustively in the novels are hastily sketched in
The Quality of Hurt
… The love affair that furnished the central theme for
The Primitive
is given only three pages. It is firmly established that almost all of the basic events that make up the plot structures of the three novels are factual, but no light at all is shed on the validity of the characterizations and patterns of motivation developed in the novels. 13
    As it turned out, Himes arrived at prison with survival kit well packed. Gambling was a major occupation in the closed prison society, and Himes soon discovered that his years hanging around Bunch Boy’s had prepared him well: “I survived, I suppose, because I knew how to gamble.” 14 Soon he was gambling boss among black convicts. He kept it clean, headed off fights, stopped the cheating, did what he could to protect the chumps. His pension made him a rich man among poor. All in all, though, it was intelligence that proved his greatest advantage. His education and ability to negotiate payments with guards and disputes among prisoners became invaluable. Most fellow inmates were dull-witted, practically illiterate, and Himes found that he could talk them into almost anything.
    Despite a relatively small stature at 5 feet 9 inches and 165 pounds, his violent air also gave him some measure of protection. He broke into such explosive rage that men twice his size would back away: “In my fits of insensate fury I would have smashed the world, crushed it in my hands, kicked down the universe.” 15 But that violent air could just as easily back up on him. He wrote that he lost his temper constantly while gambling, and that it was a wonder he was still alive. Explosive episodes, along with his refusal of work assignments and disobedience of orders, led again and again to beatings, reduced rations, even solitary confinement. Once he was on starvation wagesso long that his hair began falling out. He bore all his life the scars of head whippings.
    They punished me in many more subtle ways which I have discovered to be peculiar to the white race. During my last year, when I was at the farm, the deputy warden, a sick man with a paralyzed arm, used to stand beside the dining-room door when we went to meals and wait for me so he could lean forward and grit his teeth at me. 16
    Intelligence and gambling acumen were two reasons Himes survived. He also survived, not only in prison, but ultimately, for another reason: he became a writer. Prison would turn Chester Himes into a writer and simultaneously deliver to him a lifetime of subject matter.
    Writing, Stephen Milliken suggests, gave Himes a foothold on treacherous ground, offering him some degree of mastery over the most painful, even all but unendurable, experiences. Certainly it helped him, if not to control, then at least to channel, his rage. We don’t really know what triggered this transformation. In the story “Prison Mass” Brightlights muses on his need for adulation, vowing no longer to seek that adulation as gambler,