Doing Time in/as “The Monster”: Subjectivity and Abjection in Narratives of Incarceration

Abstract

Chester Himes’s most commercially successful novels were those featuring his Harlem detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. His creation of this surreal, violent, and “dark” series of detective novels, however, was the indirect result of the seven years he spent in prison, or rather, the result of editors’ squeamish reactions to the novel he wrote in response to his prison time. Begun in the 1940s, variously entitled Black Sheep, The Way It Was, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, Debt of Time, and Solitary, Himes’s first novel was published in 1953 (after six years of revisions) as Cast the First Stone.¹. The novel was written in the Richard Wright protest-naturalist style, one of five similarly styled novels Himes wrote between 1945 and 1955. More so than any of the other five, this novel was butchered by editors at Coward McCann, who “deliberately and relentlessly” erased the complexity and “artistic aspects” of the novel to form a “hard-boiled prison novel” (Gerald and Blumenfeld 9). Yet it was this “hard-boiled” quality that eventually prompted Marcel Duhamel, the editor of La Serie Noire for Gallimard, to request that Himes try his hand at detective fiction: “start with a bizarre incident, any bizarre incident, and see where it takes you,” Duhamel told him, instructing also that he avoid “excessive exposition” and “introspective characters” and focus on the comical, violent actions of Harlemites (Margolies and Fabre 98). The result was a blend of gritty realism, surrealist absurdity, and satirical comedy that won Himes’s For the Love of Imabelle. the Grand-Prix de la de littérature policière in 1958.

What was left was a nineteen year old man lacking the qualities that would have made it human. Now to this man, named Jimmy, each moment was absolute, like a still life photograph. Each happening lived and died, unrelated to the ones that came before or those that came afterwards. … There was no past. No outside world. No thought. No memory. He lived inside a pattern. … It was simply that his mother’s visit tipped him into that stunned stage of senselessness which permitted him to do time. In that way it helped, for any old-timer could have told him, you do time on top of each moment, no more, no less, for the past will drive you crazy and the future kill you dead … How?. you do not think of. And why?. You do not care.

—Himes, Yesterday (69)

If it were desolation you were facing, it would probably inspire you in some way … But what faces you [in the strip-cell] is a cesspool world of murk and slime; a subterranean world of things that squirm and slide through noxious sewage, piles of shit and vomit and piss. … If you are in that cell for weeks that add up to months, you do not ignore all this and live “with it”; you enter. it and become a part of it.

—Abbott (34)

So most of these inmates are sick, my friend, but who created the monster in them? They all stand right now as products of their environment.

—Jackson Soledad (163)