Undisputed Classic 11

Classic by a POC Author. Chester Himes is best-known as the author of the noir crime novels set in Harlem starring two black police detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. The short novels are marked by bizarre violent incidents, wild plot turns, and sardonic humor about blacks and whites. Himes was a truth-teller.

A Case of Rape - Chester Himes

When Chester Himes went to France in 1953 he did not kid himself that Europe would be a haven from the prejudice, stress and violence directed at black people in the USA. He knew he would meet haters as racist as in the US. Based in Paris, he wrote novels in English which were translated into French and sold like crazy.

This novel is about four African-American men from the USA who are accused, tried and convicted of raping and killing an American woman in a room in a Paris residential hotel. The writing style is like a case study, and sprinkled with Himes’ cutting remarks and extraordinary claims. He writes of a Belgian dentist who is a monstrous husband as

that type of European . . . imbued with an ingrown, refined evil of generations of decadence, an evil distilled from all the dark superstitions of Christian expedience and aged in the slowly rotting bien faite culture of a blase and jaded city. It was ... an evil that had been in existence for so long, it had attained another status, termed by [white] Americans as continental.

Anybody who has been introduced to a Western or Scandinavian European and then been looked at by stone cold eyes as if one were a bug will know, trust me, that Himes is not being unjust.

Similar to A Captive Mind, Himes gives fascinating mini-biographies of his characters. Here is an expatriate reaction to Paris.

What Scott disliked most about Paris was what it did to dreamers who gravitated there. It was not the manner in which it destroyed the young and foolish dreams placed hourly on the altar. It was the manner of destroying the capacity for dreaming 

All meanings were changed or distorted, or perhaps they were given their true definition and shape, which was equally destroyed. Love became sexuality, aspirations became ambition. Achievement was limited to a single day, culminating in bed - yours or someone else's - where everything Parisian was reputedly made. One traded in a dream of happiness for a night of love.

Himes examines the racist and sexist formulations that haunt us all. Himes does not let anybody off the hook, including the reader. Himes welds risky circumstances with the inauthenticity and irresponsibility of the characters, only human and thus hardly paragons of intellectual or emotional integrity. Supposedly, Himes wrote this as a synopsis for a larger work but it is still a compelling, uncomfortable read.