Chester Himes by James Sallis Page B

stories one encountered in pulps such as
Black Mask
and
Detective Story
. They exhibit little of the trademark headlong narratives and violence of those magazines, or, for that matter, of Himes’s own later work. And while often strong on character and plot development, they remain, the earliest of them at any rate, essentially apprentice work. Swayback syntax peeps out from the corners of uncertain sentences, the clichés and commonplaces of received wisdom float to the top, a scab of sentimentality forms over them. Himes may have realized this in 1971 when, assembling his anthology
Black on Black
, he passed over all but one of these stories, 1937’s “The Night’s for Cryin’.”
    Yet even as he postured, writing (one assumes) the sort of things he imagined readers (and editors) wanted, Himes, ever intuitive, had begun groping his way toward what would become his real work; the engines are there. He was stretching muscles, trying out this new, deeper voice, finding out just how large a container he might fill. The stories are a kind of laboratory, then. Himes quickly eliminated his more obvious mistakes, Milliken notes, and just as quickly began showing considerable control over his medium; the stories “represent an amazingly rapid progress towards professional competence.” 26 If early stories are manifestly didactic, if others court clichés of film and romance fiction, if moments of spare brilliance alternate with doldrums of troweled-in autobiography, soon all this starts cooking down in the stew. The leap from the overwrought and overwritten thickets of “His Last Day” (published November 1932) to “Prison Mass” (March, April, May 1933) with its control, clarity, and complexity is truly impressive.
    For all its faults, however (and they are peculiarly Himesian faults), “His Last Day” demonstrates the kind of evocation of fear at its basest, physical level, the reek and swelter of it, that Himes does better than anyone else, calling to mind those nightmarish waking scenes of
If He Hollers Let Him Go
and
The Primitive
. In “Prison Mass” we encounter early examples of the cadenced, poetic writing we grow to expect from Himes:
    A tiny flake of vagrant snow fluttered in through an open window, appearing eerily from the translucent gray of the early morning like a frightened ghost seeking the brilliant cheer of the lighted chapel, and quickly melted on the back of a convict’s hand. 27
    Similarly, while chapters 14 and 21 of
Cast the First Stone
closely parallel the first two
Esquire
stories “Crazy in the Stir” and “To What Red Hell,” even to the point of retaining phrases and sentences, Himes has not only fully rewritten but also fully
reimagined
the material. These chapters are as structured and precise as the stories are simplistic and wayward. Nothing better illustrates Himes’s growing skill.
    Not only does Himes learn to write in these stories but, as Franklin suggests, all his major themes, all the engines of his art, surface in them.
    There is, for instance, the fascination with grotesques that came to fruition in the Harlem cycle: ogrelike Pork Chop Smith of “Pork Chop Paradise,” half frog, half ape; or the monstrous Black Boy of “The Night’s For Cryin’” with his thick red lips, plate-shaped face, and perpetual popeyed expression.
    There is, too, this weird, duple integrity Himes’s characters so often have. His hustlers and hard cases may represent themselves outwardly as unbreachable and unyielding, and may in fact be so, but the front doesn’t carry over to their inner lives. There they become, like all of us, simple Boolean equations of fear and desire. Himes’s monsters don’t rationalize or dissemble: they know themselves for what they are.
    In the account of his Chicago arrest Himes cited his inability to run. That same inability, to flee when flight is the only