Framing Chester Himes

Chester Himes’s detective novels are not best known for their aesthetic nuances but instead for their madcap descriptions of physical violence done to and by Black bodies, a selling point in lurid blurbs for cheap paperback editions. Critical readers, too, have generally focussed on the hyperbolic violence of the novels, which many interpret as a stylized projection of African American life generally or Himes’s in particular.Footnote ¹ Indeed, little stretching is required to personalize Himes’s remark that “American violence is public life … it became a detective story form,” given that he grew up in Jim Crow Missouri, Arkansas, and Ohio, and began writing while serving time in prison for armed robbery.Footnote ² However, such bare facts provide little insight into Himes’s personal experiences with violence, either as a witness or as a participant.Footnote ³ Moreover, readings preoccupied with Himes’s depictions of racialized violence tend to overlook his nuanced portraits of diverse, mutable individuals caught up in racialized infrastructures. In what follows, I attend to those portraits, which combined what Richard Wright called a “bio-social” perspective with an antiracist aesthetics that falsified simplistic racial categories.Footnote ⁴ I conclude that Himes’s Harlem novels did not simply reflect violent realities of African American lives but instead exhibited unresolved conflicts between antiracist imperatives, namely a recognition of individual complexities, on the one hand, and organized struggle against racially discriminatory institutions and practices on the other.

Readings that commend Himes’s detective novels for their parodies of anti-Black violence were prefigured in inverted form by earlier reviews that criticized his “serious” writings for implying that violence was the essence of Black lives. Most damningly, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin relegated Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade to the category of “social protest,” placing them alongside, or rather somewhere below, the writings of Richard Wright. Ellison distinguished himself from Wright along these lines in a letter to the literary theorist Kenneth Burke in 1945, chalking up the “esthetic over-simplification” of Wright’s fiction to “the hard-boiled character [Wright] is fighting against” and explaining that while he credited Wright for communicating the dehumanizing effects of anti-Black racism to a largely white public, “in my own work … I am aiming at something I believe to be broader, more psychological and employing, let us say, of twelve tones rather than one of five … I should like an esthetic that restores to man his full complexity.”Footnote ⁵ Baldwin extended Ellison’s condescending judgment to Himes, without the pretense of respect, in a review that compared the historical significance of Lonely Crusade (1947) to Wright’s Native Son and credited Himes for his “honesty” before charging him with “the most uninteresting and awkward prose [Baldwin had] read in recent years,” adding, in case that were not enough, that Himes “seems capable of some of the worst writing on this side of the Atlantic.”Footnote ⁶ In his influential 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin again reiterated Ellison’s judgment, and used some of the same terms, listing Wright’s Native Son among “multitudinous hard-boiled descendants” of Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin, along with the crime fiction of James Cain.Footnote ⁷ Two years later, Baldwin brought Himes in for the same treatment, placing Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) alongside Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal (1947) as an expression of the rudimentary observation that “black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world.”Footnote ⁸

Baldwin’s gratuitous insults may have been spurred by personal animus, but they reflected a reasonable concern he shared with Ellison, namely that by depicting damaged and enraged Black protagonists, writers like Wright and Himes might unwittingly reinforce stereotypes that justified racial discrimination. In his biography of Himes, Lawrence Jackson writes that Ellison took “the view that black people were completely healthy when properly recognized … [and] sharply critiqued Horace Cayton’s pet idea of a ‘fear–hate–fear’ complex operating in the mind of black men, a complex Cayton had illustrated with quotations from If He Hollers Let Him Go.Footnote ⁹ Himes’s Lonely Crusade also indicated that anti-Black racism damaged moral and psychic integrity along with political agency and economic opportunities. As if defying Ellison, who professed to have found in Wright’s Black Boy glimpses of mankind’s “innate nobility,” Himes wrote of his quasi-autobiographical protagonist, Gordon Lee, that struggles with the alternatives of humiliating accommodation and deadly resistance and “strangled every noble purpose he ever had.”Footnote ¹⁰ Himes confronted his critics more directly and embraced Clayton’s terminology (without naming names) in an address at the University of Chicago in 1948 titled “The Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in the U.S.” Framing negative reviews of his work as testaments to his integrity, Himes asserted that “honest” Black writers who revealed fear and hatred toward whites were rejected by liberal publishers eager to evade harsh truths, whereas more successful writers abetted such evasions by practicing “an elaborate and highly convincing technique of modern uncle-tomism.”Footnote ¹¹ He concluded by reciting a series of humanistic platitudes straight out of Heraclitus and J. S. Mill, a move so incongruous it comes across as parody:

Such hostile exchanges between Himes, Ellison, and Baldwin belied the complexity of their personal relationships (today they might be called frenemies), and, relatedly, the nuances of their shifting responses to the dilemma outlined above.Footnote ¹³ Ellison and Baldwin appealed to universal human potentials, but they hardly downplayed the harms of anti-Black racism in the United States, and it was more than unfair to cast their appeals to personal complexity or transracial love as forms of “uncle-tomism.” Conversely, Himes made clear that psychological conflicts afflicting Black men were the product of a racist society, and Baldwin’s characterization of Lonely Crusade as an artless protest exhibited a reductive “passion for categorizing” of the sort he disdained in others.Footnote ¹⁴ Regardless, thanks in part to a chorus of negative reviews of Lonely Crusade, Himes never achieved the public stature of Ellison and Baldwin – or of Wright, for that matter.Footnote ¹⁵ Judging by the critical and popular success of Ellison’s Invisible Man – sales of which eclipsed those of Wright’s novels soon after its publication in 1952 – a largely white readership preferred Ellison’s lyrical exposition of shared, complex humanity abiding at “lower frequencies.” And a half-century later, Ellison’s celebrated novel is still heralded for contesting white supremacism by plumbing the complex depths of individual psyches, or what the political theorist Jack Turner calls “inward plurality.”Footnote ¹⁶

More recently, some have sought to bring Himes into the pantheon. Defending Himes from Baldwin’s charges by closing the space between the two, Justus Nieland argues that “Lonely Crusade ultimately dismisses sentimentalism as one of a foreclosed series of humanist ideologies in the novel” and develops instead a vision of “humanity as a process, a dynamic and uncertain mutability” that Nieland attributes to Jacques Rancière and Hannah Arendt, thinkers whose concepts are typically aligned with Baldwin.Footnote ¹⁷ Lawrence P. Jackson concurs with Nieland regarding the literary merit of Lonely Crusade – he calls it “Chester’s greatest book” and compares it favorably to the works of Wright and Ellison – but he prioritizes the novel’s sociohistorical insight: “None of [Himes’s] characters were improbable cutouts. But even more significant than crafting the book’s uncompromising, smart originality, Chester had exposed the crisis of industrial work as the postwar national woe.”Footnote ¹⁸ Neither Nieland nor Jackson addresses Himes’s reflections on the significance of infra-racial differences in postwar labor struggles. Tasked with recruiting Black workers for a union campaign in a military-industrial plant in Los Angeles during the Second World War, Lee, Himes’s protagonist, “came to believe that more dissimilarities existed among Negro people than among the people of any other race on earth … That each one’s reaction to an interracial union was an individual emotional process, each reaction requiring an entire organizational campaign to itself.”Footnote ¹⁹

I concur that Himes’s early novels have both literary and political merits, but in what follows I extend the consideration to his detective novels, which differently challenged racial categories while also contending with obstacles posed to political struggles for racial justice by individual difference and dynamism. Like Ellison and Baldwin, Himes emphasized the diversity of individuals subjected to racialized urban infrastructures, social discrimination, and police violence. However, Himes’s Harlem novels contested racial stereotypes less with a transracial humanism grounded in psychological complexity than with an antiracist aesthetics, tracing dynamic interplays of psychic, bodily, and social forces manifest in what could be called outward plurality.

Antiracist aesthetics in Himes’s Harlem cycle

As it happened, Himes found commercial and critical success on the other side of the Atlantic and in a hard-boiled genre, namely with his “Harlem cycle” of detective novels that he wrote after moving to Paris in 1955.Footnote ²⁰ When he turned to crime fiction, Himes largely abandoned psychological introspection in favor of dramatic action, a move he later credited to his editor, Marcel Duhamel, who solicited the novels for La série noir and advised Himes to “make pictures. Like Motion Pictures. Always the scenes are visible. No stream of consciousness at all.”Footnote ²¹ However, while he adjusted to the cinematic conventions of the detective genre, Himes also modified them in key respects. First of all, he changed the players and the venue, centering African American detectives and setting the action in a fictionalized Harlem inhabited by “people of many colors, clad in garb of all descriptions.”Footnote ²² Second, he replaced the single private eye with two Black detectives. To observe infra- and transracial diversity, Himes employed the omniscient third-person perspective, zooming in for frequent close-ups and introducing even minor characters with detailed descriptions of their features, attire, postures, and mannerisms.Footnote ²³ Consider, for instance, the following description of a con artist selling treatments for male impotence:

While Himes’s “action stories,” as he sometimes called them, prioritized visual drama – three became premises for popular films – they defied Ellison’s conflation of the superficial with the simplistic.Footnote ²⁵ Himes portrayed bodies in at least twelve tones, variously describing complexions as purple, yellow, sepia, parchment, mahogany, cream, burnt ash, spotted, bright purple-black, and so on.Footnote ²⁶ Furthermore, complexions of all sorts transform over time, registering the effects of age, diet, alcohol, heat, acid, and blows. The falsification of simplistic racial categories by portraits of diverse, changeable individuals is especially conspicuous in The Heat’s On, which opens with a conversation between two Black men, one a gigantic, muscular, heavily scarred albino nicknamed Pinky, the other a hunchbacked dwarf with a “dirty yellow complexion, shades darker than that of the albino.”Footnote ²⁷ The former wears a T-shirt and soiled pants held up with a rope belt, the latter a hand-stitched, blue linen suit. The violence involved in racializing such disparate bodies is literalized in the following scene, when Pinky’s sensitive skin turns black and blue under the blows of axe handles wielded by enraged white firemen who arrive after he triggers a false alarm at Riverside Church in a misguided attempt to bring official attention to a supposed criminal plot against his adoptive father, Gus, the central mystery of the novel.Footnote ²⁸ Readers get a more complicated lesson about racialized misperceptions later in the novel when they learn that the conspicuousness of bruising on Pinky’s light skin led boxing judges to mistakenly think he was badly hurt, undercutting his once promising career in an economy of spectacular violence by exaggerating his vulnerability.Footnote ²⁹

Infra-racial diversity, Himes showed, is more than skin-deep. Throughout the novels, features register not only the impact of obtuse physical violence but also dances of private sensation and public display that make visible, if not always legible, physiological responses to evolving situations. A man’s “big yellow face distort[s] with rage” and later pales “to the color of a dirty sheet,” another’s “black skin [turns] putty-gray” after a desperate, sleepless night.Footnote ³⁰ Emotions register on white faces too, of course, usually in shades of red. Provoked by Digger’s sardonic remarks about the callous lasciviousness of white johns looking to change their luck in Harlem, a white sergeant alternately blanches and flushes, his face “changing color under his guilt complexes like a chameleon.”Footnote ³¹ Conversely, events that impact bodies also act on subjectivities, transfiguring emotions, dispositions, and perceptual faculties along with appearances. In the first book of the series, an acid attack that badly scars Coffin Ed’s face leaves him easily triggered both metaphorically and literally, hyper-alert to threats and quick to pull his gun, effects Himes captured with his own double entendre: “He would see, but he would never look the same again.”Footnote ³² In subsequent scenes and later novels, Digger frequently intervenes to prevent Ed from shooting suspects when alerted to the danger by twitches on Ed’s scarred face. And emotions mess with Digger’s looks too, as when his eyes “turned blood-red. He was so mad the captain’s image was blurred in his vision.”Footnote ³³

As indicated by the alternate title of the first novel in the series, rage is the dominant affect in Himes’s fictionalized Harlem, but contra Ellison’s and Baldwin’s dismissive criticisms, Himes also provided glimpses of psychic nuances, at times to tragic effect. In the aforementioned opening scene from The Heat’s On, Pinky “could make out the shapes of trees and benches, but he could only smell the flowers and the recently watered grass. A block away was the squat dark shape of Grant’s Tomb. None of that interested him.”Footnote ³⁴ The gigantic albino may initially appear cartoonish, but, though he is no tragic hero, neither is he a two-dimensional caricature. Rather, Himes suggested, his deeper thoughts and feelings are suppressed by urgent pressures that leave little room for introspection. His inner monologue may not be eloquent, but Pinky is no less human than the protagonist of Invisible Man.Footnote ³⁵

For the most part, certainly, Himes cast racializing visual codes more as absurd than tragic. He regularly juxtaposed granular third-person observations with obtuse, racist gazes that at once reduce people to appearances and distort perceptions.Footnote ³⁶ Wendy Walters highlights a passage from the Real Cool Killers in which white policemen “are immediately unable to decipher even the physical scene, see only blackness and two ‘tarbabies,’ and the sergeant even reads the scene as a ‘voodoo’ rite in a way that specifically emphasizes an intensely mystified othering of the African American subject.”Footnote ³⁷ Yet Himes could also be more subtle. Under interrogation by a white DA in a downtown office, Jackson, the gullible protagonist of For Love of Imabella, looks “shades blacker” than he ever did in Harlem.Footnote ³⁸ Moreover, Himes not only mocked the debilitating effects of white supremacism on perceptual acuities but also observed the uneven distribution and situational variability of racializing gazes. In Run Man Run, Walker, a bigoted white officer at the center of the plot, is confronted by a white lieutenant skeptical of his claim that a “Negro” witness can testify that he had acted in self-defense when he killed an unarmed Black luncheonette worker: “What did this Negro look like … Was he tall, short, fat, slim? … Black, yellow, brown? Young, old, middle aged?” Walker responds, “I didn’t notice, he just looked like a Negro.”Footnote ³⁹ Telegraphing his blustering defense, “The bright red spots stood out on [his] cheeks and his eyes began looking wild.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Himes’s blind spots

By comparison with their white colleagues, Ed and Digger are adept readers of the people and places of Harlem – another reason why the white power structure depends on them – but they too resort to stereotypes, dehumanizing women in particular as “cat-eyed” or duck-bottomed.Footnote ⁴¹ Himes had his own blind spots, and he was hardly innocent of caricature. The Big Gold Dream includes a crass portrait of Abie, an “avaricious” Jew who mines the furniture of deceased African Americans for hidden loot.Footnote ⁴² The familiar libel is complicated, though not disavowed, when a “greedy” thief kills Abie and then fights another intruder over the large sum of money Abie had extracted from a hidden compartment in the arm of a sofa.Footnote ⁴³ Things get more complicated still when the thief struggles to escape the dark basement. “It was as though the broken and dilapidated furniture had taken on life to torture him like a mob of lynchers.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Less complicated were Himes’s uniformly hostile depictions of light-skinned, “high yellow” women alternately pursued, worshipped, and spectacularly punished by dark-skinned men for whom their conquest represents status and power.Footnote ⁴⁵ In Cotton Comes to Harlem, Ed and Digger viciously beat Iris, the “half-white” consort of Reverend Deke O’Malley, a con man running a back-to-Africa scheme – a transparent cipher for the Garvey movement that Himes parodically set against a “Back to the Southland” scheme run by a white southern colonel – turning her skin “the color of the rainbow.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Afterwards, extorting her help with their case, they command her to “make yourself into a black woman” with dye.Footnote ⁴⁷ The colorist misogyny conspicuously channeled through Himes’s protagonists confirms the disabling effects of racialized gender dynamics on desires and perceptions, a phenomenon Himes observed sharply in others but dimly, at best, in himself.Footnote ⁴⁸

Bio-social lives: between structure and agency

In an insightful review of If He Hollers Let him Go, Richard Wright observed that Himes’s approach was not so much psychological as “bio-social,” a designation all the more apt for Himes’s crime novels, which describe ongoing transformations of bodies caught up in intersecting biological processes, social institutions, and accidental encounters.Footnote ⁴⁹ Borrowing other terms from Deleuze and Guattari, one could say that Himes’s detective novels ‘depict’ racialized bodies as assemblages constituted by an ongoing interplay of multiple durations, variously differing and becoming.Footnote ⁵⁰ As more careful readers of Deleuze and Guattari have emphasized, to attend to bio-social assemblage is not to subsume individual agents in determinate “structures,” and to emphasize the decentered character of agency is not to deny that human beings act, but rather to see their action as enmeshed in multiple, contending forces.Footnote ⁵¹ While Himes’s characters are literally shaped by their environments, they are also strategic actors who modify their appearances, albeit with uncertain results. Pinky’s sharp-witted aunt, a mercenary heroin dealer nicknamed Sister Heavenly who incorporates the drug in a faith-healing ritual she calls “de-incarnation,” alters her appearance with bleaching creams and dresses as a respectable older woman. “Her toothpick arms, extending from the pink jacket, were purple-hued at the top, graduating to parchment-colored hands so thin and fragile-looking as to appear transparent.”Footnote ⁵² Later in the novel, Pinky, on the run from the police, disguises himself by dyeing his pale skin with ink and dressing in clothes taken from his aunt’s trunk of cast-offs from past boyfriends. When his aunt sees him emerge from their house, watching from a stakeout across the street, even she is momentarily deceived. “Not only was he the blackest, but he was the sportiest man she had ever seen.”Footnote ⁵³ Costumes play a more central role in The Real Cool Killers, which features a clique known as the “real cool Muslims” who do themselves up as Arabs, complete with fake beards.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Cotton Comes to Harlem, when Ed laments that he and Digger cannot disguise themselves as white, implying that performative acts cannot surmount racial distinctions, Digger counters, “Canada Lee was made up as a white man, playing on Broadway in a Shakespearean play … I’m damn sure we could.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Infrastructures of racial difference: inhabiting and navigating the slum

Passing takes many forms in their plots, but Himes’s detective novels by no means suggest that infra-racial differences confound racist social codes or institutions. Alongside his textured, polychromatic portraits of individuals, Himes sketched impressionistic views of crowds framed by the clothing, lighting, and architecture of the urban slum, wherein “faces bubbled in the dim light,” “Black arms [protruded] from light cotton fabrics,” “naked black torsos gleamed in the sunshine on the upper windows,” and “windows were jammed with colored faces, looking like clusters of strange purple fruit in the stark white light.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Citing this last passage and noting Billie Holiday’s and Jean Toomer’s use of similar metaphors to describe black lynching victims, Walters argues that Himes “historicizes a critique of Southern racism by bringing it to a Northern urban context.”Footnote ⁵⁷ However, Himes used these metaphors differently to capture forms of anti-Black racism that corresponded with the social and economic environments of the urban North, his crowd scenes forming an aesthetic counterpart to lumpen populations deindividualized by racial codes, deprived of legitimate work by discriminatory labor markets, and crowded into segregated neighborhoods by real-estate restrictions and police violence.Footnote ⁵⁸

Racial assemblages are not monolithic, but even Himes’s most virtuosic characters, regardless of their varied hues and shapes, are consigned to the slum he vividly described in the first novel of his series, For Love of Imabelle (also published under the title A Rage in Harlem):

As typical as Himes’s poetic ear for catachresis, in this oft-quoted passage is his attention to the constitutive action of architecture on dispositions and behavior, action made explicit in a passage of Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), where a trail of blood coming from the cut throat of a pants-less white man leads Ed and Digger to a crudely fashioned boudoir off the boiler room of a decrepit tenement: “Take two crumbling, neglected, overcrowded brick buildings … slam them together with a hallway down the middle like a foul-air sandwich, put two cement columns flanking a dirt-darkened glass-paneled door, and put the words, COZY FLATS, on the transom, and you have an incubator of depravity.”Footnote ⁶⁰

A less poetic social scientist might say that Himes subscribed to an ecological theory of crime.Footnote ⁶¹ However, while Himes’s detective novels traced the influence of environmental factors on individual behavior, defying racist theories that identify black criminality with innate dispositions, they also described what Michel de Certeau called “tactical” navigations of strategically organized spaces, including informal constructions that create habitable spaces in abandoned buildings, conceal illegal brothels or gambling dens from police surveillance, and protect occupants from predatory competitors.Footnote ⁶² In For Love of Imabelle, Jackson’s brother Goldy maintains a windowless bolt hole in the rear of a tobacco shop, and the madam of a brothel (Big Kathy, one of Goldy’s drag sisters) communicates with her workers from behind a panel of one-way glass by manipulating a hidden switch that illuminates a radio dial.Footnote ⁶³ These characters may be shaped by their environments but they are no mere victims of circumstance, and their unlicensed architectural modifications sometimes confound even hip detectives like Ed and Digger.

In Himes’s Harlem, furthermore, racial lines are regularly crossed in brothels, nightclubs, and bars that cater to nonnormative sexual communities.Footnote ⁶⁴ Ed and Digger police these interstitial spaces, struggling to maintain order amidst blurred boundaries with their fists, their nickel-plated long-barreled .38 caliber pistols, and their leaded saps, given leeway by their white bosses to violate protocols but not indemnified from official sanction, at once agents and victims of unjust and imperfect repression.Footnote ⁶⁵ Responding to a white bar patron who questions his violent methods, Digger explains, “‘I’m just a cop … if you white people insist on coming up to Harlem where you force colored people to live in vice- and crime-ridden slums, it’s my job to see that you are safe.’ The white man turned bright red.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The man’s shameful blush betrays interlocking social and psychic repressions that sustain white privilege in integrated public spaces.

Unresolved conflicts: Himes’s revolutionary pessimism

I suggested at the outset that Himes’s Harlem novels did not simply reflect violent realities of African American lives but instead exhibited conflicting antiracist imperatives, namely a recognition of individual complexities on the one hand, and organized struggle against racial injustice on the other. Some critics resolve the conflict by reading the last installments of the series, especially, through the lens of Frantz Fanon’s account of decolonial insurrection. Such readings are bolstered by scattered compliments exchanged between Himes and Fanon as well as late interviews in which Himes rejected what he called “unorganized violence” in favor of organized Black revolution, a view he expressed bluntly in a 1970 interview with Michael Fabre a year after Blind Man was published:

Taking his cue from such remarks, Michael Denning superimposes Fanon’s taxonomy of violence on Himes’s crime novels, identifying intra-racial crime in the “native town” of Harlem with an early phase of violent struggle, followed in Fanon’s narrative sequence by a redemptive uprising that inverts the violence of colonization.Footnote ⁶⁸ Building on Denning’s suggestions, Christopher Raczkowski argues that Himes performed a “symbolic mapping of Harlem as colonial space,” and Matthew Scully attributes to Himes “a lifelong concern with resistance, revolution, and violence,” tracing a “textual dialogue” with Fanon.Footnote ⁶⁹

While Himes came to believe that only organized insurrection could challenge white supremacism, his Harlem novels did not exhibit much faith in a decolonial politics. Quite the contrary, whereas Fanon’s depiction of decolonization – in which the “pseudo-petrification” of internecine conflicts among the oppressed (including interpersonal crime) give way to revolutionary solidarity – echoed Marx’s triumphal narrative of proletarian revolution, Himes’s novels offered little hope for the overcoming of infra-racial differences in a revolutionary movement, much less for a happy outcome of race war in the United States.Footnote ⁷⁰ In Blind Man with a Pistol, the last and most politically tuned book in the series, Himes satirized a hodgepodge of schemes to solve the “Negro problem,” whether by outliving whites, loving them, or fighting them, making light of Baldwin and the Black Panthers alike.Footnote ⁷¹ Regarding the latter, Himes wrote, “They believed in black power. They’d give it a try anyway. Everything else had failed … and they might win. Who knew?”Footnote ⁷² Toward the end of the novel, the groups converge in a chaotic melee before the police swarm in to subdue them, Ed and Digger take part on the side of the authorities.Footnote ⁷³ The novel concludes with a race riot the results of which remain unknown.

In Plan B, a multi-generic dystopian fable published posthumously twenty-four years after Blind Man with a Pistol, Himes shifted from a satirical portrait of chaotic, disorganized violence to an even bloodier, still inconclusive, vision of organized Black insurrection.Footnote ⁷⁴ Defying genre categories, the novel oscillates between a Faulknerian Gothic set in a nineteenth-century American South – replete with intimate depictions of vicious racism and pornographic violence – and the postwar Harlem of Himes’s detective novels.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the latter thread of the novel, Himes’s old protagonists Ed and Digger investigate an escalating series of killings sparked by anonymous deliveries of machine guns to impoverished Black inhabitants of the slum. Linking these places and times is Tomsson Black (schoolboys had called his father an Uncle Tom), who emerges from the South and undergoes a series of increasingly disillusioned political conversions that ultimately lead him to instigate a race war in the urban North. Black, whose headquarters are sited on land where the grotesque violence depicted earlier in the novel took place, can thus be seen to emblematize a generational shift from accommodation to revolt.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, while the novel contemplates interracial war, it begins and ends with intra-racial murder, highlighting obstacles posed to revolutionary organization by individual differences. In the opening scene, an illiterate black war veteran, T-Bone, shrinks from the weapon delivered to his door, terrified at the prospect of a doomed battle with white authorities, and kills his girlfriend Tang, a literate prostitute eager to take up arms.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the final scene, Grave Digger kills Coffin Ed to protect Black, the mastermind of the violent uprising, declaring that Black’s insurgent program “might be our last chance, despite the risk,” and that he would “rather be dead than a subhuman in this world.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Black then kills Digger, explaining to his young female assistant that he couldn’t take the chance of Digger giving up the revolutionary plot under the torture sure to follow his betrayal of the authorities. The published version of the novel ends with her noncommittal response: “I hope you know what you’re doing.”Footnote ⁷⁹

In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin rejected revolutionary fantasies of a new society in which justice would be fully achieved and the corrupt eliminated – the dream of white innocence to which Fanon’s vision of decolonial emancipation formed an inverted counterpart – and proposed that the only way to overcome white supremacism was to accept the complicated, paradoxical reality of all human lives.Footnote ⁸⁰ Himes did not place much hope in acceptance, but nor did he suppose social harmony would likely emerge from revolutionary Black nationalism.Footnote ⁸¹ The bleak vision of Plan B, in which black dignity is bought at the cost of suicidal revolt, makes more plausible Adam Shatz’s descriptions of Himes as a forerunner for Afro-pessimism and “black American literature’s one authentic nihilist.”Footnote ⁸² Shatz does not elaborate on the suggestion, but others have made a more extensive case for reading Himes through the lens of Afro-pessimism. Applying to Himes’s Harlem novels a variety of concepts drawn from Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Christina Sharpe, among others, Dorotya Mozes describes Plan B as the “culmination” of “a progressive undoing of the optimism of the detective genre” that embraces a nihilistic view of the “totality of antiblackness,” such that “only the end of the world would mean a meaningful change in US race relations.”Footnote ⁸³ Mozes’s agenda does not prevent her from developing an attentive, original discussion of the “sonic assemblage” of The Heat’s On, but it draws her back to categorical oppositions.Footnote ⁸⁴ She writes,

Thus Mozes counters a totalizing anti-Blackness with a reified emancipatory Blackness.

On my reading, Himes’s fiction does not support either of these extremes. No doubt Plan B presents a sanguine view of organized Black insurrection against white supremacism in the United States. In a late scene, a Black janitor for a white church takes a fatal last stand, using the church’s stone poor box as a position from which to fire on a parade of white policemen. “If his death was in vain, and whites would not accept blacks as equal human beings, there was nothing to live for anyway.”Footnote ⁸⁶ However, Himes’s recurrent references to uncertainty and risk in this unfinished work, including the provisional “if” in this last line, suggest that even where it took a “paroxistic” form, as Fabre and Skinner put it, his pessimism was not totalizing.Footnote ⁸⁷ Conversely, it seems odd to describe earlier entries in Himes’s Harlem cycle as burdened by optimism, and even odder to posit emancipatory possibilities in their depictions of “messiness and disorganization.” Lastly, it should be noted that the aforementioned janitor who reconciles himself to martyrdom is one character among others, not all of whom share the same perspective, his voice comprising one part in what Mikhail Bakhtin called a polyphony “not reduced to a single ideological common denominator.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Highlighting the distance between author and characters in Plan B, Julie A. Fiorelli writes, “Himes perhaps pokes a bit of fun at black militants’ racial loyalty, but his protagonist undertakes the monochromatic model of organizing in all seriousness.”Footnote ⁸⁹ This at times jarring combination of seriousness and fun in the novel is poorly captured by the Afro-pessimist terms that Mozes deploys. While Himes sometimes resorted to polemical language and heavy-handed metaphors, he was neither an ideologist nor an organizer, but instead a novelist, and to read his books as expressions of political opinions is to gloss the uncertain significance of their interventions in a world suffused with fictions surrounding racial difference.

Against those who interpret Himes’s Harlem novels as expressions of ideological convictions, Lawrence P. Jackson describes Himes as “unencumbered” by either political position taking or psychological reflections of the crime genre.Footnote ⁹⁰ Jackson suggests that Himes knew that “his books … were in essence blues tales, ‘out of the American black’s secret mind.’”Footnote ⁹¹ Playing on the same theme in a review of Jackson’s biography, Shatz writes, “although he wouldn’t have admitted it, Himes was using the blues to transcend the absurd ordeals of black life, not unlike his old antagonist Ellison.”Footnote ⁹² Shatz may have had in mind a passage from Ellison’s review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy: “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolations of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”Footnote ⁹³ More cynically, and so more faithfully, one could argue that Himes’s Harlem novels, and the blaxploitation films they inspired, performed a different function comparable to the lyricism of the blues, namely transforming Black pain into a marketable commodity. As demonstrated by the commercial and critical success of those novels, Himes’s virtuosic combination of nuanced observation, parody, and propulsive plotting delivered hard-boiled realities in palatable form, though to call the books “near-comic” would be a gross understatement.

Of course, different genres of literature appeal to sensibilities unevenly distributed amongst dispersed individuals in variable states of receptivity. In his aforementioned letter to Kenneth Burke, Ellison expressed doubt that even his virtuosic literary exposition of individual complexity could “break through the stereotype-armored minds of white Americans.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Himes voiced less uncertainty about the impact of his Harlem novels, remarking that white Americans “are just looking for the exotic episodes … that will amuse or titillate.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The clunky armor of racist stereotypes may be easy to mock but it is difficult to pierce. Nevertheless, Himes sustained decades of creative endeavor amidst profound personal trauma, social obstacles, and professional setbacks. He eventually found some measure of public recognition, but far from being unencumbered, he left us troubled. He once remarked that “a fighter fights, a writer writes,” but, as I have tried to show, to glean from the equation only the common denominator of violence is to overlook the nuances both of fighting and of Himes’s literary exercises.Footnote ⁹⁶