Free Chester Himes by James Sallis

into swarms of migrants looking for work. Henry Ford remarked what a great education those young folks were going to get from all this traveling about.
    FDR jacked up the wreck our economy had become and started hammering out dents, establishing the relief programs and federalprojects his predecessor the ever-patrician Herbert Hoover categorically rejected. FDR also took himself directly to the American people with his fireside chats. In conservative, well-to-do households he became reviled as “that man.” In poorer ones he was the closest thing they’d seen to a savior outside church. Blacks in vast numbers deserted the Republican Party, their home since Reconstruction, for FDR’s Democrats.
    â€œI grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary,” 2 Himes wrote. He was nineteen when he went through the gate, twenty-six when he came back out. He learned what he had to do to survive, he said, or he wouldn’t have, even if at the time he didn’t realize he was learning. “On occasion, it must have seemed to others that I was bent on self-destruction.” 3
    Here we come to a major enigma of Himes’s memoirs. In two books totalling 743 pages, only six pages are devoted to Himes’s years in prison. Of these almost a full page is given to disclaimers of homosexuality, most of another to gambling, two to his writing. If prison was the chief turning point of his life, and it must have been, why then do we have so little information here about it? This, again, is the overarching problem with the memoirs: throughout, Himes skips lightly over central issues, barely touching down, while lingering on peripheral matters. Little is shown of the inner life and a great deal of the outer: clothing, pets, cars, visitors, apartments, quarrels. It’s a curious lens through which to watch. Rarely have candor and reticence so cohabited. Himes makes a very odd kind of hero of himself, picking open wounds one moment, telling us nothing can touch him the next.
    There’s little doubt that prison was the first major pivot point of Himes’s life. H. Bruce Franklin writes in
Prison Literature in America:
    Himes’s achievement as a writer of fiction, indeed his very existence as an author, came directly from his experience in prison, which shaped his creative imagination and determined much of his outlook on American society. 4
    Franklin goes on to say that looking back at those early stories of the 1930s one finds, along with overwhelming evidence both of his power and internal contradictions, the very matrix of Himes’s vision: thestamp of characteristic images and symbols that would occupy him for his forty years as a writer.
    Himes’s voiced feelings about prison remained deeply ambivalent. “Nothing happened in prison that I had not already encountered in outside life,” 5 he wrote at one point. At another: “It is nonsense, even falsehood, to say that serving seven and a half years in one of the most violent prisons on earth will have no effect on a human being. But as far as I could determine at the time, and for a long time afterwards, the only effect it had on me was to convince me that people will do anything—white people, black people, all people. Why should I be surprised when white men cut out some poor black man’s nuts, or when black men eat the tasty palms of white explorers?” 6 Beginning the memoirs by speaking of his reasons for moving to Europe, Himes wrote:
    I don’t remember them clearly. It was like the many impressions my seven and a half prison years had made on me: I knew that my long prison term had left its scars, I knew that many aspects of prison life had made deep impressions on my subconscious, but now I cannot distinctly recall what they are or should have been. I find it necessary to read what I have written in the past about my prison experiences to recall any part of them … And I think it has partly convinced me …