1,800âspecial review boards had been set up and many prisonersâ sentences commuted to the statutory minimum. Following six months at the prison farm, having now served seven and a half years of his twenty to twenty-five-year sentence, on April 1,1936, Himes was paroled to his motherâs custody. He stepped back out from that small world whose hard rules he had learned into a confusing, larger, somehow forever
soft
world, a world you could never quite get a hold onâand into the arms of the Depression.
3
âOne Way to Be a Niggerâ
In his story âOn Dreams and Realityâ Himes tells of a young man returning home from prison with high hopes of a new life, only to find his family living in one squalid room, hanging on by the barest of threads. The story is a miniature, perfect tragedy, paralleling the failures of the prisoner unable to make his way in the outside world with the general failures of the Depression.
âIn the stagnant isolation of prison, dreams grow as tall as redwood trees,â 1 that story begins as James âHappyâ Trent awaits release. Reentry with all its joys and terrors must have been much on Himesâs mind, before and after his own. âEvery Opportunityâ presents another ex-conâs inability to break old habits despite best intentions, and, in the kind of abrupt, revelatory ending Himes favored for a time (a kind of shattering of the text), his return to prison. Other stories deal with memory and dreams that let prisoners go onâto them, there is little difference between memory and dreamâand with irruptions of reality. Nailed awake by his sense of loss in âFace in the Moonlight,â a prisoner half dreams, half remembers the life that brought him here. âI Donât Want to Dieâ gives us the reveries of a prisoner with a terminal disease, âHis Last Dayâ the experience of a man pacing down his final hours to execution. Both these last stories evidence the evocation of physical detail and the sensual surface, simultaneously lush and spare, that become a Himes trademark.
âThe Meanest Cop in the Worldâ drops us with great immediacy into a poor college studentâs wondrous fortune at meeting the beautiful Violet, then tears us from the dream, as he himself is torn from it, when for absolutely no reason a policeman shows up in the dream to attack him.
And then suddenly Jack realized that he wasnât a freshman in a nice old college, and he wasnât in love with a pretty girl called Violet, that he didnât even know such a girl, that he was just convict number 10012 in a dark, chilly cell, and he had eaten too many beans at supper. But for hours afterward he lay there silently cursing the huge policeman who had made him realize this. 2
Again and again, rents are torn in the sky, in walls thought solid, and unwanted truths push their way into his charactersâ worlds.
Amorphous fear, occult oppression, were by then signature Himes. Yet another story ends: âAll that day, copying records down at the city hall, half blind with a hangover and trembling visibly, he kept cursing something. He didnât know exactly what it was and he thought it was a hell of a thing when a man had to curse something without knowing what it was.â 3
Whereas the stories of the thirties deal mostly with prison and criminals, in the forties Himes began to extend his reach. He had become, inasmuch as he would ever align himself with any movement, a social activist, publishing fiction and articles in the National Urban Leagueâs
Opportunity
and the NAACPâs
Crisis
. In part this was typical Himes role-playing, in part the usual writerly trying on of new masks, in part simply the result of new opportunities for publication. But stories such as âBlack Laughterâ and âAll He Needs Is Feetâ reflect Himesâs deeper awareness of the great American inequation; many of them edge
soft
world, a world you could never quite get a hold onâand into the arms of the Depression.
3
âOne Way to Be a Niggerâ
In his story âOn Dreams and Realityâ Himes tells of a young man returning home from prison with high hopes of a new life, only to find his family living in one squalid room, hanging on by the barest of threads. The story is a miniature, perfect tragedy, paralleling the failures of the prisoner unable to make his way in the outside world with the general failures of the Depression.
âIn the stagnant isolation of prison, dreams grow as tall as redwood trees,â 1 that story begins as James âHappyâ Trent awaits release. Reentry with all its joys and terrors must have been much on Himesâs mind, before and after his own. âEvery Opportunityâ presents another ex-conâs inability to break old habits despite best intentions, and, in the kind of abrupt, revelatory ending Himes favored for a time (a kind of shattering of the text), his return to prison. Other stories deal with memory and dreams that let prisoners go onâto them, there is little difference between memory and dreamâand with irruptions of reality. Nailed awake by his sense of loss in âFace in the Moonlight,â a prisoner half dreams, half remembers the life that brought him here. âI Donât Want to Dieâ gives us the reveries of a prisoner with a terminal disease, âHis Last Dayâ the experience of a man pacing down his final hours to execution. Both these last stories evidence the evocation of physical detail and the sensual surface, simultaneously lush and spare, that become a Himes trademark.
âThe Meanest Cop in the Worldâ drops us with great immediacy into a poor college studentâs wondrous fortune at meeting the beautiful Violet, then tears us from the dream, as he himself is torn from it, when for absolutely no reason a policeman shows up in the dream to attack him.
And then suddenly Jack realized that he wasnât a freshman in a nice old college, and he wasnât in love with a pretty girl called Violet, that he didnât even know such a girl, that he was just convict number 10012 in a dark, chilly cell, and he had eaten too many beans at supper. But for hours afterward he lay there silently cursing the huge policeman who had made him realize this. 2
Again and again, rents are torn in the sky, in walls thought solid, and unwanted truths push their way into his charactersâ worlds.
Amorphous fear, occult oppression, were by then signature Himes. Yet another story ends: âAll that day, copying records down at the city hall, half blind with a hangover and trembling visibly, he kept cursing something. He didnât know exactly what it was and he thought it was a hell of a thing when a man had to curse something without knowing what it was.â 3
Whereas the stories of the thirties deal mostly with prison and criminals, in the forties Himes began to extend his reach. He had become, inasmuch as he would ever align himself with any movement, a social activist, publishing fiction and articles in the National Urban Leagueâs
Opportunity
and the NAACPâs
Crisis
. In part this was typical Himes role-playing, in part the usual writerly trying on of new masks, in part simply the result of new opportunities for publication. But stories such as âBlack Laughterâ and âAll He Needs Is Feetâ reflect Himesâs deeper awareness of the great American inequation; many of them edge
Similar Books
