"I Could Always Feel Race Trouble . . . Never More Than Two Feet Off": Chester Himes's Melancholic Perception

Abstract

In summer of 1950, having been fraudulently arrested and jailed for causing a minor automobile accident with a moneyed white woman, Chester Himes steeled himself for yet another round of ongoing anxiety he believed to typify and organize African American psychic experience. Don't let it throw you, Himes encouraged himself. Despair is characteristic of black (Quality 112). Though circumstances that surrounded writer's brief incarceration at time seemed bleak and unfair, this kind of unbridled pessimism about what he construed as psychological condition of all blacks--and incessant personal struggle to fight off such malaise--was not uncharacteristic of Himes. His published memoirs reveal artist to be poignantly aware that racism exacted a heavy psychological cost on black people, and that he himself may have been chief among its victims. Late in The Quality of Hurt (1972), first volume of his autobiography, Himes declares black man to be the most neurotic, complicated, schizophrenic ... specimen of mankind (285) after stating earlier in account that his entire life had conditioned [him] to a constant expectation of catastrophe (249). After all of accomplishments Himes had earned by early seventies, including a fiction-writing career that spanned a quarter century and had gained him international literary renown, why would writer feel compelled to foreground the quality of [his] hurt? Why, at a moment when he seemed most existentially at peace, while writing his memoirs by Spanish seaside, did Himes commit his pen to documenting what appears to be his lifelong unrest? In following essay, I argue that answers to these questions lie in Himes's theory of melancholia. Himes's ideas about melancholia, I argue, represent a sustained meditation on interminable mourning for loss first conceptualized by Freud in 1917, and which Ann Cheng and have recently revised in study of race in United States. Focusing on his late memoir, as well as his early novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), I will show that Himes was as much a theorist as he was a victim of racial melancholia. What Himes saw as eternal mourning of black Americans over impossibility of being white could be understood not merely as a paralyzing pathology but as a necessary strategy for endurance and engagement within spaces defined by white supremacy. Whereas racial paranoia and epistemology of prediction it implies may have stood for Himes as a virtually inevitable consequence of black life in United States, it was racial melancholia that furnished him with a viable theory of black political subjectivity. What makes Freud's theory of melancholia responsive to predicament of race in United States is that it seems directly to address how intersubjective--and thus social estrangement may produce in persons an unending experience of emotional strife. Since racialization is fundamentally a process of separation and subsequent objectification of human beings, a theory predicated on object loss is likely to provide some insight on race's psychic affects. Such is thinking of Anne Anlin Cheng, as she articulates it in The Melancholy of Race (2001). Cheng explains that melancholia is a condition in which both white and nonwhite subjects participate. This is possible because both subject positions take on other as an ambivalently desired object that is destined to be lost through uneven distribution of racial privilege and power. For whiteness, melancholia manifests itself in what Cheng calls exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others (Cheng 10). The codification of whiteness as a national ideal engenders exclusion, and thus loss of which Cheng speaks, yet national needs have historically worked to counterbalance this ban since nonwhites often provide human capital that enables economic growth. Though nonwhites are integral to reproduction of American life, attempts to circumscribe their privileges of citizenship despite their contributions--have been incessant. …