Doing time with Chester Himes

Monroe is repeatedly kicking himself, recalling how he asked a Chicago pawnshop owner for five hundred dollars for a stolen ring, then just stood there while the man phoned the police –  to run would have made him cowardly. The cops hit Monroe in the mouth, hanged him by his handcuffed feet upside down over a door, and beat his ribs with gun butts until, “with the live red pain eating out his guts and blood running down his unbearably hurting legs”, he confessed to highway robbery of the first degree. For Monroe read Himes, who got the same.

As the book blurb tells us, the novel was “Originally published in 1952, in an expurgated version, as ’Cast the First Stone’.” but that’s all we learn. The Budapest Times was intrigued and went looking for more particulars, and one is that the book was issued as Himes’ third novel when In fact it had been written before the first two, “If He Hollers Let Him Go” (1942) and “Lonely Crusade” (1947).

It had struggled to find a publisher (nothing unusual there for many would-be writers) until eventually released by Coward-McCann in 1952, though apparently barely resembling Himes’ original manuscript of some 10 years earlier. It had been rewritten multiple times by the author and suffered heavy bowdlerisation and rejigging by the publisher.

Written originally in the third person, it was rewritten in the first person in a more “hard-boiled” style. Then it went back to the third person. And somewhere along the line, the pulpish “Cast the First Stone” became the more sophisticated and complex “Yesterday Will Make you Cry”. One reason put forward for the corporate reticence is Himes’s unusually candid treatment for that time of his/Monroe’s homosexuality with another prisoner.

Himes’ demoralising experiences with the American publishing industry, not to mention widespread racial discrimination against black people, of whom he was one, led him to relocate permanently to Paris in 1953. From there he began to gain success, and some financial relief, especially with his eight crime novels set in New York’s Harlem district featuring two black police detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones.

Himes’ death in Spain in 1984 aged 75 meant he missed seeing his original “Cast the First Stone” manuscript published by Norton in 1998 under the correct title “Yesterday Will Make You Cry”. It now appears again this February 2025. Such can be an author’s fate. Still, it’s safe to say that even posthumous redemption is better than none (take Sylvia Plath, Stieg Larsson, Jim Thompson, John Kennedy Toole and numerous others, for example).

While an undergrad at Ohio State University, Himes had sought out a rougher kind of education in the gambling dens, speakeasies and bordellos around campus. After being expelled from college he took up crime, mostly robbing people and working in gambling dens. He was arrested more than once, including using fake ID and cashing a bad cheque.

Out on bail, Himes stole a car, drove to a white neighbourhood and, armed with a handgun, forced his way into a wealthy home and robbed the couple. He was caught the next day. While “Yesterday Will Make You Cry” is clearly based on Himes’ experiences in lock-up, fortunately prison marked the end of his criminal life and the start of his writing life.

He ordered himself a Remington typewriter bought partly with gambling winnings.

Trapped in his cement cellblock, he spent his time voraciously reading and practising his craft.  He was encouraged by a fellow prisoner with literary aspirations with whom he had a sexual relationship – a relationship Himes would fictionalise and not hide from his two wives.

His polished, tight short stories started appearing in black magazines such as Abbott’s Monthly and Atlanta Black Star, and eventually Esquire, the new magazine that was publishing articles and short fiction by Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes. One of his articles in Esquire was “To What Red Hell?”, published on October 1, 1934 after Himes had witnessed the Ohio State Prison fire on April 21, 1930, still the deadliest penitentiary fire in United States history, killing 322 inmates.

Such literary success was a factor in his eventual release on parole in 1936 after seven and a half years. Prison officials cited his writing and reading as proof that he had redeemed himself. A thought could be raised that rather than getting himself out of the cellblock by cutting through his bars with a nail file or tunnelling with a spoon, Himes wrote himself out.

Did the prison authorities, seeing what was coming out of the Remington, decide Himes was a man whom it would be better to let back into the wide world? Were they, one wonders, influenced by such powerfully fine writing as this, taken from Penguin Random House’s 2025 “Yesterday Will Make You Cry” – “Blue-coated firemen passed his vision; their loud, megaphoned voices reached his ears. In his eyes were the sight of policemen, of living convicts lugging the dead, of smoke and flame and water and prison guards. He could not help but think of these convicts who were working overtime at being heroes as men who had committed murder, rape, arson, men who had cut little living girls open with butcher knives to insert their oversized organs, who had mutilated women and carved their torsos into separate arms and legs and heads and packed them in trunks, who had stolen automobiles and forged checks and shot down policemen, working like hell, now, in the face of death to save the lives of other men who had raped their baby sisters.”

Prison, perhaps, could be the next-best thing to a hermit’s cave in the upper Himalayas for a spot of where-did-it-all-go-wrong self-contemplation, and Himes explores his thoughts and actions to the full. Using Monroe as his second self, he also dissects his pre-prison life – unfortunate relationships with his parents, peers, teachers, girls and employers; those bad attitudes and stupid decisions that brought him to his self-inflicted incarceration.

Much more is known these days about the perils of doing stir, which could make Himes’ experiences a little dated, but equally it could be a case of “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (The more things change, the more they stay the same). A sociologist, or historian, might tell us that reforms in US prison conditions between Himes’ time in the 1930s and today have been for the better. But for Himes in “Yesterday Will Make You Cry” it was a time of terror, chaos, brutality, corruption, sadists and sodomites. In the “hole”, or isolation cell, it was dark, silent and cold. There were a lot of shivs around. Death Row.

Alongside all the impressive writing, the insights and descriptions, there is inconsequential or overwritten material that could have been what made those early publishers wield the blue pencil. The gay stuff is awfully mushy. And a real surprise is that race is not front and centre, as quickly became the case with “If He Hollers Let Him Go” and onwards. All the central characters here are white, with an absence of the nigger-honky divide that Himes would pursue later. The inmates are tough but they have feelings and crave human connection.

Here is the novel/semi-autobiography, unabridged and solid, that set Chester Bomar Himes, born July 29, 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri, US, died November 12, 1984 in Moraira, Spain, convict number 59623, on the path to today’s status as an important black American writer.