Review, Chester Himes, Plan B (University of Mississippi Press, 1993)

Columbia Missourian, January 30, 1994

From 1956 through 1969, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones patrolled the streets of Harlem as representatives of the New York City Police Department in a series of eight crime novels by the African-American expatriate author Chester Himes. As black detectives on New York’s toughest beat, the two meted out their own peculiar brand of justice with their fists and signature long-barreled .38-caliber pistols on .44-caliber frames, seeking to maintain order in the violent, absurd world that was Himes’s fictitious portrait of Harlem.

As the series progressed, Himes’s vision grew increasingly chaotic, mirroring the cultural changes during the late 1960s. At the end of the final book, Blind Man With a Pistol, Harlem erupts in a riot sparked by the title character, who opens fire on a subway while the police, including Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, stand by helplessly. As Himes wrote in the prologue, the novel’s metaphor was based on a true story he heard, “and I thought, ‘damn right, sounds like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East.’ And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.”

But before writing Blind Man With a Pistol, Himes had worked on a different type of crime novel, in which Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are called in to help foil an organized black rebellion. Titled Plan B, the novel was to end with Grave Digger joining the revolution and killing Coffin Ed for his efforts to prevent it. Himes never finished the novel, though, and after completing his Harlem series spent the years until his death in 1984 writing his two-volume autobiography. Plan B was published as an unfinished novel in France in 1984 and now, for the first time, in English.

The disordered and absurd vision that marks all of Himes’s Harlem novels grew out of his life experiences. Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909, Himes was raised in several border and Southern states, where his father taught blacksmithing at black colleges. His family history was one of downward mobility as the family fell victim to a combination of personal and professional misfortunes.

Ending up in Cleveland as a teenager, Himes began consorting with the city’s underworld. After graduating from high school, Himes spent a semester at Ohio State University before being expelled. He was then arrested for armed robbery and spent seven and a half years in the Ohio State Penitentiary before being paroled in 1936. The violent and absurd world of prison in many ways mirrored the portrait of Harlem in his crime novels.

While in prison, Himes began his writing career, publishing short stories in Esquire. After being paroled, he moved to Southern California and wrote two protest novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade, dealing with black workers in the booming war industries. The first was a modest success, but the failure of the second convinced Himes of two things. First, he was determined to leave the United States as soon as he could afford to, and in 1953 he emigrated to Europe. Second, he felt he needed to define himself as something other than a “protest writer,” then virtually the only available option for black authors. “I had the creative urge,” he would later say, “but the old, used forms for the black American writer did not fit my creations. I wanted to break through the barrier that labeled me as a ‘protest writer.’ I knew the life of an American black needed another image than just the victim of racism. We were more than just victims.”

Himes found this form when his French editor suggested he try writing detective stories. Only by allowing himself to be typecast as a writer within another fictional genre—one relegated to second-class citizenship in the field of literature—could Himes escape the confines of being a black writer. The Harlem series was extremely popular in France, while also slowly gaining popularity in the United States.

The universe of Himes’s crime series was marked by ambiguity, violence and what he described as “that bitter self-corroding irony which white people call ‘Negro humor.’” In his stylized portrait of Harlem, he discovered a perfect metaphor for his worldview.

Largely missing from this universe, though, is a specific political vision. Himes understood the difficulty of formulating a coherent political program from a worldview built on irony, ambiguity, chaos and absurdity. Thus, after the failure of Lonely Crusade, he largely avoided political writing.

As Plan B demonstrates, no one should mistake Himes’s silence for a lack of interest. In his own way, Himes was seeking to understand the possibilities and consequences of a full-scale black revolution, which he believed would need to employ urban guerrilla tactics and violence on a massive scale.

But Himes could not make up his mind what type of book he wanted to write. Occasionally powerful vignettes are mixed with interminable political discussions and gratuitous history lessons in which the ribald humor falls flat. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger pop in and out of the story but are not really integrated into the events. Finally, the book’s heavy-handed moralism diminishes the complexity and irony of the worldview of Himes’s other works.

There are two types of unfinished novels—those the author intended to complete but died before being able to, and those the author never intended to finish. Plan B is obviously the second type. As such, it is valuable for those wishing to know more about Himes or about African-American culture in the late 1960s. But for most readers, Plan B is important primarily for the cathartic function it must have served for Himes, allowing him to go on and write the brilliant Blind Man With a Pistol.