Free Chester Himes by James Sallis Page B

hospital right away. At night the bugs swarm. They fall onto your pillow and face, drop to the floor too bloated with blood to move. Once, trying to smoke them out, you set your mattress afire and your bunkmate puts it out with the bucket of stale urine you both use as a toilet.
    Joseph Sandy visited Chester only once in those years. Chester claimed that it wasn’t so much visit as forage; that his father came to him for money and walked off with most of Chester’s earnings from gambling. Estelle visited regularly at first, but in 1932 moved with Joe Jr. to Arkansas, where he had a teaching position. When Joe returned to Columbus and graduate school at Ohio State two years later, Estelle resumed regular visits. Jean Johnson was a stalwart visitor.
    Just as he mines
The Third Generation
for information about Himes’s early life with caution, the critic approaches
Cast the First Stone
as documentation of Himes’s prison experience at his own peril—and if the critic is at peril, the biographer is doubly so. Multiple problems present themselves.
    First, of course, there’s the general question as to what proportion and portions of the novel are directly autobiographical, what reconstructed or reimagined autobiography, and what fully fictive. This is a difficult enough question in its pure form, but to complicate things still further, the novel existed in several avatars as Himes rewrote it over the decade it took to get published. Its black protagonist somewhere along the way became white; Himes’s original title was
Black Sheep
. Also, in the published version, probably at the behest of Himes’s editor, the story gets updated to the years just after World War II, the occasional anachronism flashing like a Victorian ankle from beneath the skirt of this transformation.
    In
The Quality of Hurt
Himes wrote: “I had made the protagonist of my prison story a Mississippi white boy; that ought to tell me something but I don’t know what—but obviously it was the story of my own prison experiences.” 10 By 1976 and the second volume of the memoirs, however, he’d changed his mind: “My publishers wished to imply that the story in
Cast the First Stone
was the story of my life and problems and I wanted to state outright that it had nothing to do with me.” 11 Much quite patently is from Himes’s own experience: the background on “all that stuff that happened in Chicago,” 12 the general outline of the prison term, Jimmy’s awakening interest in writing, the pervasive sense of fear wrapped in deadly tedium.
    Writing of prison creates, of course, a society in microcosm, abstracting social forms and strains to bold strokes, throwing them into high relief. The novel’s prison yard is described as though it were, say, a frontier town, workshop here, barber there, sidewalks, bath house, dining hall;
Cast the First Stone
easily might be read as an account of Jimmy Monroe’s socialization. On the one hand, deleting racial considerations falsifies the field. On the other—perhaps this is what Himes or his editor had in mind; we are, after all, by definition dealing with an artificial society—considerations of racism might draw attention away from other, primary issues.
    A third major question here is that of homosexuality.
The Quality of Hurt
contains a 245-word disquisition on “wolves,” “wolverines,” “boy-girls,” “pussy without bone,” and Chester’s exemption from rape by dint of intimidating intelligence and an air of violence. In
All Shot Up
, Caspar Holmes’s closet homosexuality serves as symbol of the evil nature concealed beneath his outward goodness. John Babson in
Blind Man with a Pistol
, cooperating with Grave Digger and Coffin Ed because he is attracted to them, is treated by them with contempt and needless cruelty.
The Primitive
likewise voices disdain and disgust in such portrayals. Homosexuals