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Summary: The Calculus of Fear and Loathing
Review: I remember my father telling me how he kept "colored" workers out of the factory in Cleveland where he worked: He gave them a very low workbench so that they would have to bend down to operate the machinery and so suffer excruciating back pain until they quit. Now turn that around and BE that worker. Feel the mounting frustration, the fear and loathing. Not once, not a dozen times, not seven times seventy times. But every waking moment of every day. What Chester Himes does in this first volume of his autobiography is to make you, the reader, feel that frustration. You can see how it worked its way into Chester Himes's work, his relationships, even between the pores of his skin. It explodes into self-destructiveness when he is arrested and convicted for armed robbery, serving a seven and a half year sentence in the Ohio Penitentiary. When he could take it no more, he escapes to Europe. He spends time in France, England, and Spain and finds some few places where he could be a man without arousing strong antipathy. The early scenes in the United States have a frenetic quality about them, as Himes is always on the move. "And although I did not it at that time, I was never to stop moving, always one jump ahead of disaster, always a hair's breadth away from destitution; until I can truthfully say there has been nothing in my life but change." (p. 293) The second half of the book deals with his relationship with a white women named Alva whom he had met on the boat ride over to Europe. From Paris, they move to Arcachon, and then to London -- where the prejudice is so thick you could cut it with a knife -- and from thence to Mallorca and finally back again to Arcachon and Paris. All this takes place before the success of his Harlem detective novels with Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. "The American black is a new race of man ...," he writes on p. 285. "And for those hackneyed, diehard, outdated, slaverytime racists to keep thinking of him as a primitive is an insult to the intelligence. In fact, intelligence isn't required to know the black is a new man -- complex, intriguing, and not particularly likeable. I find it very difficult to like American blacks myself...." There is something rough-hewn and brutally honest about Himes that I've always liked. I could not stop thinking, however, that it was he who ran into my father in Cleveland and got the low workbench.
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