The Several Lives of Chester Himes Quotes

“Himes's message was the cruelty, the destructiveness, the absurdity of black oppression. These messages may be found in all his books, but his best writings transcend message to express a comic exuberance, a vitality, a richness of black life that all the injustices and dreadful miseries he records cannot overcome.”
― Edward Margolies, The Several Lives of Chester Himes

“his original manuscript of Cotton Comes to Harlem. Unfortunately, he left it behind on his return journey at the Athens”
― Edward Margolies, The Several Lives of Chester Himes

“The cause of the dispute was an apartment toilet that also served as a garbage disposal for an upstairs tenant. A trapdoor on the ceiling above the commode would occasionally open, and trash would suddenly descend chutelike.”
― Edward Margolies, The Several Lives of Chester Himes

“He believed, not
without some) ustification, that Doubleday had set out deliberately to subvert the book it had bought from him.”
― Edward Margolies, The Several Lives of Chester Himes

“Jack Warner "didn't want any niggers on his lot." At another studio where he was being considered for a publicity position, he learned that the all-Negro cast of Cabin in the Sky was excluded from the whites-only commissary.”
― Edward Margolies, The Several Lives of Chester Himes

“Himes observed at once that Negroes were not the only ones to suffer discrimination and violence. Filipinos, Mexicans, and Japanese Americans were also vulnerable. The fragile sense of interracial fraternity he had known during his WPA years was all but dissipated.”
― Edward Margolies, The Several Lives of Chester Himes

“One of the factors that drew Himes to Rico was their mutual need for fantasy. Movies especially entranced them. They lost themselves in Hollywood gossip, immersed themselves in movie magazine lore, and pretended to identify with the stars. But it was the films themselves-frequently shown in the prison-that most affected them, evoking images of life outside the walls and at the same time reminding them of where they were.”
― Edward Margolies, The Several Lives of Chester Himes

“There were two off-campus Negro fraternities, one of which Chester pledged for, but even these, he said later, admitted students on the basis of skin shadings, with men of lighter complexion being viewed as more desirable.2”
― Edward Margolies, The Several Lives of Chester Himes

“By the time Chester was born in i9o9, an agricultural depression, race riots in northern and southern cities, and nearly a thousand lynchings had further aggravated the precariousness of black lives.”
― Edward Margolies, The Several Lives of Chester Himes