Chester Himes by James Sallis Page A

but as writer.
    â€œI shall pass beneath this earth no common shade.” That was his motto now—I shall be no
forgotten man
. What was important in life? From his burning thoughts came the answer—ambition, achievement, fame. 17
    Himes himself gave several reasons for taking up writing. Not the least was the protection it afforded him. Fellow prisoners respected and superstitiously feared those who wrote. Guards thought twice before killing or too severely beating a prisoner known outside the walls, “or else convicts like Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver would never have gotten out of prison alive.” 18 Filling the train of endless empty days and years doubtless played some part as well. In
Cast the First Stone
a murderer who’s befriended him tells Jimmy Monroe about a writing course he’s taking. When Jimmy questions this, saying that he understood writing to require talent, the man responds: “Oh, I don’t ever expect to really write any stories … I’m just studying thisfor something to do. You know a fellow has to do something.” 19 When in the sixties Melvin Van Peebles, interviewing Himes in Paris, asked how it was that he became a writer, Chester responded: “I had a lot of free time.” 20
    Brother Joe believed that upon finding himself imprisoned, looking up the long, empty tunnel of his future, Himes “took himself in hand and decided that he had to do something with his life.” 21 Estelle supported Chester in his ambition. She provided a typewriter, paper, and pencils, helped persuade prison officials to let him work, encouraged him in every way.
    Himes says, starkly, “I began writing in prison,” 22 and goes on to catalog his publications. His first story was published in a black-owned magazine,
The Bronzeman
, sometime in 1931, but neither a copy of the story nor files of the magazine exist. Other early stories appeared in black newspapers and magazines such as
Abbott’s
, the
Atlanta Daily World
, the
Pittsburgh Courier
, and the
Afro-American
. In 1934 he sold two stories to
Esquire
. “Crazy in the Stir” was published with only his prison number, 59623, as byline. “To What Red Hell,” a fictionalized version of the 1930 prison fire that claimed over 300 lives, which Himes would depict again in
Cast the First Stone
, soon followed. “After that,” Himes wrote, “until I was released in May 1936, I was published only by
Esquire” 23
    Himes’s two stories for the magazine had been accepted simultaneously. “Crazy” appeared in August (“a long-term prisoner in a state penitentiary tells an authentic story about life on the ‘inside’”), “To What Red Hell” in October. Editor Arnold Gingrich would buy five more from Himes in the period 1934 to 1942; they’d appear alongside contributions from Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, Ben Hecht, Conrad Aiken, Bertrand Russell, Theodore Dreiser, and Langston Hughes. Exhilarating company for a young convict in an Ohio prison, Stephen Milliken points out. “He was at last, beyond all question, a writer.” 24
    Interestingly enough, Himes’s first stories for
Esquire
were not about blacks. (Himes was not identified as black until 1936, when a sketch appeared on the contributor’s page.) They
were
about what Himes just then knew best, crime and the people who committed it. As critic Robert Skinner remarks, characters in these stories with titles like “The Visiting Hour,” “Crazy in the Stir” and “The Night’s forCryin’” often resemble Himes, “men with violence deeply imbedded in them,” 25 men already in prison or half a step away. But, influenced as much by popular “slick” magazine fiction of the day as by anything else—and despite Himes’s admiration of Dashiell Hammett—they were quite different beasts from the sort of crime