The Odyssey of Chester Himes
There are absolutely no introductions to any of the 63 stories in this anthology, leaving the reader hopelessly guessing at times why the author was selected for inclusion. The previously-unpublished short story by the late, great Chester Himes, The Clochard, offers little to reflect on in its sparse rendering of an American tourist who is robbed while on a European vacation. It is simply an incident with no story and reflects none of the stunning, house a-fire writing on display in Himes’s visceral urban crime novels such as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) and Blind Man with a Pistol (1969).
Himes attended Ohio State University. He was convicted of armed robbery in 1929 and spent seven years at the Ohio State Penitentiary, where he began to write fiction. A number of his short stories from this period were published in Esquire. Upon release from prison in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression, Himes joined the Works Progress Administration and its local adjunct, The Ohio Writers Project.
His first two novels reflecting his encounters with racism within the defense industry and the US labor movement, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and The Lonely Crusade (1947), were greeted with favorable critical reception, but it was not until the mid-‘50s, when Himes joined other American expatriate writers in Paris, like James Baldwin, that he would find his greatest fame and success as a genre writer of tough and incredibly surreal crime fiction. (It was a French publisher who suggested that Himes should try his hand at noir. When Himes asked the publisher how to write that type of novel, the man told him to open the book with an incident of explosive, almost apocalyptic violence and then spend the rest of the plot unraveling what the hell happened. Every Himes novel featuring the unforgettable detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson follow this exact formula without fail.)
You have just been told more about Chester Himes than you can expect to find in the pages of Pow Wow, unless one scurries to the short alphabetically-listed biographies of the authors carelessly slapped together at the back of the book. This is a classroom with no teacher in attendance. (In Native American lore, a pow wow, or a gathering of tribes, is almost always moderated by a shaman or a tribal elder.)
It is not my intention to highlight or underscore the mediocre and downright sophomoric writing in this collection. That would be unfair to the writers; the examples are legion, in any event, and would stretch this analysis past the 3,000-word mark.
There certainly are some masterful works on display in Pow Wow, let there be no doubt about that. Frank Yery’s classic “The Homecoming” is here, the story of a decorated black soldier just home from World War II who is unmoving in his refusal to be subjugated by white society; the detail-rich world of a Massachusetts mixed-race trailer park is explored in the novella-length “The Guinea Pig Lady” by the modern American master Russell Banks. “Night of the FEMA Trailers” by Vivian Demuth addresses the Drunken Indian cliché with a light touch, nicely inserted, in a short narrative that explores how urban myths and folklore are created; and Wanda Coleman’s “Backcity Transit by Day”, an LA tale, reminds us of the small tragedies that intrude upon our lives – and our daily commutes – every day of the week.
“I Look Out For Ed Wolfe”, from the genius-laden pen of the late Stanley Elkin, is perhaps the most rewarding work in this anthology, an existential adventure into the inner-city underworld featuring a recently-fired collections representative who begins to downsize his life in some pretty spectacular ways. Here, in the opening pages of the story, are Elkin’s descriptions of the downtown office building where Ed Wolfe plies his trade:
The building was an outlaw. Low rents and a downtown address and the landlord’s indifference had brought together from the peripheries of business and professionalism a strange band of entrepreneurs and visionaries, men desperately but imaginatively failing: an eye doctor who corrected vision by massage; a radio evangelist; a black-belt judo champion; a self-help organization for crippled veterans; dealers in pornographic books, in paper flowers, in fireworks, in plastic jewelry, in the artificial, in the artfully made, in the imitated, in the copied, in the stolen, the unreal, the perversion, the plastic, the schlak.
At some point in my 50 years of life on this planet and in the dense urban jungles of Los Angeles and San Francisco, I have known and probably conducted business with most of Ed Wolfe’s “desperately but imaginatively failing” office-building neighbors; in fact, there’s scarcely a character in this multicultural collection that I have not encountered in one way, shape, or form, and that, of course, flies in the face of Reed’s contention that the writers assembled in this collection are shedding light on a divergent society that a homogenized white culture simply does not invite us to see. I would dare to suggest that American culture has become more integrated and post-racial than Reed is willing to believe.
America’s Classrooms Becoming Multicultural
Reed’s obsession with Hollywood in his framework forward is downright shrill and monomaniacal, peppered with occasional bashings for professional working writers and book critics. “Most American critics concentrate on literature authored by whites,” Reed complains, “regardless of right wing propaganda that falsely claims that in American universities and colleges Toni Morrison has replaced Shakespeare.” (The right wing propagated that?)
A Boston Globe article from May 2005, however, reveals that on high school reading lists in Boston’s western suburbs “dead white male writers” are being supplanted by more contemporary writers such as Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingslover, and Amy Tan. Further, the 20th century English class staple The Catcher in the Rye is being quietly removed from some required reading lists in Boston high schools “because working-class immigrants may find it difficult to relate to world-weary Holden Caulfield”, suggesting that a multicultural shift in how literature is being taught in public schools is happening right under Reed’s nose.
“The all-white male canon has been gone for quite awhile,” the director of a high school English program told The Globe. The reading list at Seattle’s Mariner High School, according to an April 2006 article by Lynne Thompson in The Seattle Times, now has about two dozen titles, many of them multicultural, among the 160 books approved by the school board:
They include Mi Vida Loco (My Crazy Life), the story of former world boxing champion Johnny Tapia; Children of the River, a tale of growing up in wartime Cambodia; and A Child Called It, about a victim of abuse … these stories share qualities to which students respond. They often are first-person narratives and seem true in a way the classics don’t. They focus on a young person, whereas the classics typically focus on adults. And because the contemporary books describe diverse cultures, the students, rather than just the teachers, can help interpret the texts.
Yet Reed insists, even positing such in his opening paragraph, that “most of the books reviewed are written by white males, whether the publication be The New York Review of Books, the American Book Review, or The Nation, even though the editor of the last magazine is a feminist.” If this is such an irrefutable fact, how is it then that books such as the aforementioned and novels like Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning The Life of Pi are making it onto high school and college reading lists across the United States?
Strange Bedfellows: Mark Fuhrman, Ted Haggard, and Farrah Fawcett
Reed blames what he calls “the middle persons” for boosting and perpetuating the fame of all-white male authors. The middle persons are “reviewers, academics, and publishers, who require that all writers belonging to a particular ethnic group or race write like the acceptable tokens whose sales at Bookscan are muscular. These middle people are depriving American readers of the variety of perspectives available to them.” Reed frets and fears that diversity is “missing from the world as depicted by the corporate media, where all men look like Tom Cruise and all women look like Farrah Fawcett.”
Farrah Fawcett? Is he pulling our leg? What kind of a late ‘70s time warp is this academic living in? Reed’s invocation of the former Charlie’s Angels star has even more grimly funny undertones when one considers that Fawcett starred in the groundbreaking 1984 television movie The Burning Bed about an abused white, middle-class housewife who answered her husband’s repeated beatings by setting their bed ablaze. The Emmy Award-winning motion picture is credited with bringing the issue of domestic violence into the public dialogue. But Reed, in hailing the Russell Banks short story “The Guinea Pig Lady”, foolishly asserts that Banks “shows that white men are capable of injuring women as well” as if this is news that has been hidden from the public at large by Reed’s most-feared demon, corporate media.
Reed writes that the trailer park protagonist of Banks’ story, Flora Pease, is “a woman who will never be played by Nicole Kidman” and that many of the writers in this collection “can present a variety of women who would never pass a screen test or recline on a director’s casting couch”, two of more than 20 mean-spirited swipes the author takes at Hollywood in his foreword like a conservative on crack, bashing Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg for presenting white-washed versions of World War II and Tom Cruise just for being Tom Cruise (perhaps we cannot fault Reed for that); he even manages to drag the ghost of disgraced LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman of O.J. Simpson trial fame into the mix, further cementing Fuhrman’s reputation as the worst human being on earth ever to utter the N word.
Reading the foreword, it’s hard to keep up with the sheer bombast of Reed’s statements:
As only a small percentage of writers earn a living from their craft, the majority who do not are able to address the issues of the day without stockholders peering over their shoulders or being held to the bottom line. They can tell the truth as they see it … A good writer can award hero status to those shunned by a mainstream whose heroes tend to be white and male … Unlike the 50-inch plasma TV screen, these writers offer three dimensional portraits of people of different ethnic groups.
In a recent appearance on CNN to promote her HBO documentary feature on disgraced evangelist Ted Haggard, filmmaker Alex Pelosi explained why she chose Haggard as a subject for her lens: “Real life is more dark and complex and twisted than what’s revealed in sound bites in the evening news.” Every one of us can recognize the truth lurking in Pelosi’s words, but Reed would have us believe that we are blind to this reality, enslaved to the false images of life given to us on TV and in the movies like we’re all a bunch of doddering middle-aged Indiana housewives serving up Best Foods mayonnaise sandwiches on Wonder Bread and settling in before the Magnavox to catch an episode of Father Knows Best.