In 1928, at 19 years of age, officers handcuffed Chester Himes’s ankles and beat him as he dangled upside down from a door until he confessed for armed robbery.  He was sentenced to twenty to twenty-five years and sent to Ohio State Penitentiary, where he arrived on December 27, 1928 to begin serving his sentence.  He remained imprisoned for eight years until his paroled release on April 1, 1936 (Margolies 29-30).  This is a part of Himes’s story, but only a fraction of it – the outline of a skeleton – because only so much can be told in the cold, analytical account of so-called facts.  Such is the lesson one learns when reading about Himes’s life through biographies, autobiographies, short stories and novels, each of which tells a different version of Himes’s prison experience, each of them true in their own right.  The purpose of this essay is to explore one of Himes’s modes of representation in particular: the novel (specifically, Yesterday Will Make You Cry) and to discuss the specific devices Himes uses to navigate the task of communicating a prison experience through fiction, including repetition, the elimination of temporality, and the use of deeply poetic language.  Furthermore, this essay implicates the prison as a site of traumatic experience for those incarcerated and analyzes Himes’s ability to represent a trauma which many scholars argue defies language entirely.

 

Trauma theory scholars overwhelmingly agree upon the tendency of trauma to resist language.  Elaine Scarry is often quoted from her book The Body in Pain for her analysis of how pain – and not just physical pin, but psychological pain as well – affects language: “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (Scarry 4).  This reveals, then, one of the major projects for the writer: to find some way around this inexpressibility of pain in an attempt to communicate something of his experience to others.  For example, Scarry’s observation about the destruction of language to some point anterior to language itself is represented in Himes’s novel. 

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The auditory description readers most often receive upon reading Himes’s novel is not that of language but of other sounds within the prison.  Himes represents the everyday language of the prison through yells, clumping, clanging, banging: “And then he began to hear the noises peculiar to convicts – clumping of hard heels on concrete, yells, curses, off-key ballads, arguing, eternal arguing – all blended into a convict medley” (Himes “Yesterday” 28).  He also depicts the language of more acute pain within the prison, such as the pain of the fire that burned many inmates alive in their cells: “He could hear those strangled screams, those unended prayers, those curses and coughs and gasps and moans and wails of locked-up convicts” (Himes “Yesterday” 98).  This last example is especially difficult to read, the “and…and…and” structure making it feel as though the noises will never end; this is perhaps the effect Himes intended.  Perhaps for him those noises will never end.  Perhaps he hears them in his dreams.  Readers are meant to be horrified by this description of noises which makes them spectators in the tragedy of the fire.  Himes describes all of these instances not as words but as noises, guttural things that escape the lips when words become unavailable.  If words are unavailable, then, one can’t help but wonder at Himes’s ability to represent his experience in writing at all.  Himes, after all, cannot write to us in noises, but he can make us imagine the noises – and that’s what his novel accomplishes.

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Perhaps, then, the resistance of traumatic experience to language as told by Scarry and as represented by Himes can tell us something about Himes’s decision to create a fictionalized account of what were real experiences.  For example, in her book The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore observes in autobiographies a set of genre expectations that produce tension and anxiety regarding truth-telling: “For the writers I study here, autobiography’s project – to tell the story of one’s life – appears to constrain self-representation through its almost legalistic definition of truth telling, its anxiety about invention, and its preference for the literal and verifiable, even in the presence of some ambivalence about those criteria” (Gilmore 3).  Gilmore’s argument points to a usefulness in modes of writing such as fiction and poetry for representing one’s experience without having to endure the skeptical gaze of those who intend to verify the facts.  When it comes to those critics’ definitions of truth, the novelist must answer to nobody.  In other words, with a major preoccupation in the expression of trauma being the search for adequate language, it becomes useful for the writer to escape constraints in memoir or autobiography for a mode in which creativity and experimentation are acceptable methods for arriving at the so-called truth. 

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In fact, what is interesting to note about Himes is that, in addition to authoring numerous novels and short stories, he did engage with the genre of autobiography.  However, what is even more fascinating is that those skeptics intent on verifying the facts of one’s autobiography have uncovered discrepancies in Himes’s: “The two volumes of autobiography he wrote…are fraught with errors of fact, incorrect sequences of events, and even incorrect dates of central experiences. Further, Himes was not averse to putting a romanticized or ideological ‘spin’ on some of his accounts” (Margolies ix).  Perhaps those “mistakes” are the product of degenerating memory as Himes approached old age; however, it is worth proposing that Himes found the “facts” an inadequate means of expressing his life.  Himes as a novelist is playful with language and creative with form, which is largely what makes his writing so intriguing and a joy to read.  Readers should look at Himes’s description of the fire scene with the knowledge that his account of it (of which are there are a few, a phenomenon that will be explored later in this essay), regardless of its existence in a novel rather than in a memoir, is true.  According to Anne Whitehead, author of Trauma Fiction, “…writers of trauma narrative push the realist project to its limits, not because they have given up on knowledge but in order to suggest that traumatic knowledge cannot be fully communicated or retrieved without distortion” (Whitehead 84).  Let us therefore honor the many distortions in the accounts of Himes’s prison experience as a means of addressing what was a traumatic experience and read those distortions not as mistakes but as devices used in an attempt to communicate an experience which resists communication.

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Himes makes use of several devices in his novel that operate in meaningful ways, both for the writer and for the reader.  One of those devices Himes employs is what Whitehead refers to as the collapse of temporality: “Novelists have frequently fond that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterized by repetition and indirection” (Whitehead 3).  The question of temporality and chronology in Yesterday Will Make You Cry is unanswerable: Himes gives readers no marker or index as an account of when events take place.  Readers as spectators of life in prison are meant to lose track of time as the imprisoned men do; there is no conception of dates or times in the novel – things just seem to happen, one after the other after the other, until reality seems to get lost and time stands still.  Himes’s novel without a timeline therefore mimics the experience of prison life itself.  Himes writes, “Nothing had a past or a future; and when the feeling or action happened, stirring up its sensation, that was all.  He could not bring it back to conjure up that laugh again, nor could it come back of its own account to bring those tears…Each happening lived and died, unrelated to the ones that came before or those that came afterwards…He lived inside a pattern, an old and musty pattern that some convict had used before he got there, and which some convict would use after he was gone; he lived by seeing, smelling, feeling” (Himes “Yesterday” 68-69).  Per Himes’s account, thought became suspended, and the experience of living inside was reduced to the primitive senses of seeing, smelling, and feeling.  He writes that things happened as though events had no agent, as though being imprisoned was like being caught in a current that took him from event to event, never with any apparent meaning, as he bobbed there, suspended.  This is the experience of reading Himes’s novel: the reader becomes suspended, entirely disoriented by the various happenings.  Himes’s language does good work in telling readers what the experience of imprisonment and the lost sensation of temporality is like (as demonstrated in the example above), but his novel as a whole goes one step beyond that, showing readers what it is like to have experiences that are detached from the abstracts of thought and time. 

 

It isn’t long after the fire scene, for example, when Jimmy has his first homosexual encounter with Walter (Himes “Yesterday” 102).  A reader can’t be sure whether the two events take place on the same day, within a few hours, or a week apart; all the events that unfold during and after the saga of the prison fire, including the scene with Walter, are written into the novel in such a way that leaves readers wondering how long the fire lasted: was it an hour? Five hours? An entire day?  Jimmy’s disorientation is transferred to readers through the narrator’s broken explanation of events; there is little time to make sense of what is happening before the next thing happens, and then the next.  In a narrative style that H. Bruce Franklin affectionately calls “over-the-top grotesque absurdism” (Franklin “Portrait” n.p.), Himes is able to extinguish the reader’s sense of time and initiate within readers a disorientation that makes it difficult for anybody to have a cognitive hold on the situation.  Says Franklin: “…the very essence of Himes’ vision of prison – and of the American society which has made prison such a central institution – is that things don’t make sense” (Franklin “Portrait” n.p.).  Himes’s demonstration of this nonsensicality and his embrace of the absurd one-after-another happenings speak to his philosophy about the American prison system.  Where writers of traumatic experiences often attempt to unpack the happenings and derive meaning from their pain, Himes’s ultimate success is in succumbing to the meaninglessness and using that meaninglessness as his central critique of the prison system.  

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In an examination of the trauma related to his own incarceration experience, professor Mika’il DeVeaux notes, “Living in prison is what I imagine living in suspended animation would be like.  I imagined my existence as being on ice, frozen in time” (DeVeaux 276).  The suspension of time and meaning as central to Himes’s novel, therefore, is not unique to his experience, but is a primary effect of the prison system, perhaps even another means by which the state punishes incarcerated people.  DeVeaux examines this effect in regards to its traumatic implications: the effects, for example, of mind-numbing routine and erasure of reality on one’s mental well-being.  His description of an existence that must be imagined is especially intriguing, and speaks to the institution’s power in eliminating identity and one’s sense of being.  Himes’s novel is an attempt to transform the argument represented by DeVeaux’s two sentences into an experience for the reader.  The reader, therefore, can assume the characters and fictional elements that depart from Himes’s real life experience are an attempt by Himes at re-imagining his experience, re-imagining his existence at that point in his life, and finding words that do justice to the feeling of aging without ever having lived.

 

Another of Himes’s most powerful literary devices in his novel is his use

of repetition.  Repetition in Himes’s novel operates on multiple levels; sentences are repeated, events take place during the daily routine of Jimmy’s life that makes a reader feel as though he is reading the same pages as earlier, and even the novel as a whole could be an interpretation of this enactment of repetition, to the degree that the novel repeats and retells Himes’s own experiences.  For example, after a prison break, Jimmy and the other men gather around the radio to hear the following message alerting the public about one of the escapees: “Patrick Michael McDermot…Answers to the name of Pat McDermot…Five feet, five and one half inches…Five feet, five and one half inches…Weight: one hundred and thirty-two pounds…Weight: one hundred and thirty-two pounds…Blue eyes…Blue eyes…Brown hair…Brown hair…” (Himes “Yesterday” 89).  This excerpt, which continues beyond what is given here for about another ten lines, is perhaps one of the most obvious of the sentence-level repetitions in Himes’s novel.  Its effect is to slow down the transferal of information from the radio operator to the men, from Himes to the reader, and becomes, therefore, another example of how detached from the real world the incarcerated men are made to be; the radio operator’s words are echoed as if in some dream-like trance where time moves slower.  The repetition throughout the novel adds to the effect of suspended temporality and dramatizes the slowing down of time in a way that provokes anxiety for the reader.

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What’s more, Himes’s repetition is present whenever Jimmy gets involved in a poker game or loses money.  It is there when Jimmy talks about buying shoes for Lively or broods about his mother’s impending visit.  After reading Yesterday Will Make You Cry and taking a step back, it becomes evident that the entire novel is built on repetition, much the same way that life in prison is built on repetition and routine.  According to Whitehead, “Repetition mimics the effects of trauma, for it suggests the insistent return of the event and the disruption of narrative chronology or progression” (Whitehead 86).  It is intriguing, therefore, that Himes chooses the repetition of phrases in the passage with the radio and the escapee; since the escapee described in the radio broadcast is eventually caught, along with the rest of the men involved in the prison break, the slow repetition of phrases describing him seems like an accurate depiction of the torture that happens when one experiences the same things over and over, when men escape and come back, and when Jimmy wins and loses and wins and loses at poker.  In other words, even in broadcasting a supposedly successful prison break, the repetition of the radio broadcast represents the true inescapability of the prison.

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Furthermore, as someone who experienced not only the trauma of prison itself but the trauma of horrific occurrences that happened within and because of the prison system (namely the fire scene), perhaps Himes experienced this repetition even after he reached freedom, like a reverberating echo from his time inside.  It is eerily appropriate that Himes’s prison writings have undergone so many various editions over the years; it is as if every reprint is a repetition in itself.  In 1934, Himes printed his story “To What Red Hell?” in Esquire magazine (Franklin “Prison Writing” 119), a narrative account of the prison fire Himes witnessed that burned hundreds of men alive in their prison cells.  Then again, Cast the First Stone, the precursor to Yesterday Will Make You Cry was printed in 1952 (Van Peebles 16-19) and also included a version of the fire scene depicted in “To What Red Hell?”, a scene that is yet again replicated in Yesterday Will Make You Cry.  These various narratives of the same scene are not identical, perhaps speaking to the ongoing process involved with creating a representation of a traumatic experience in as accurate a way as possible.  The fact that Himes underwent various versions of the same narrative scene is yet another example of repetition; it speaks to the haunting effect of such a horrifying experience, and to the painful knowledge that these tragedies are recurring and continue to manifest themselves in various ways, even today.  The system of the prison is, after all, a cycle, with cells being emptied and filled with more and more faces, undergoing the same patterns.  In observing Himes’s novel and in reflecting upon the various editions of his narratives, one can’t help but feel that it all keeps going and going and going.

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Additionally, Himes’s poetic language, often lauded as his claim to literary fame amongst his fans, is arguably Himes’s most successful strategy in his attempt to capture his prison experience in novel form.  One example that is particularly haunting after reading Himes’s novel is his description of being locked outside in the winter by a guard:  “At first it was just on the outside, on his bare hands and face and ears; and then it was in his skin, down in his chest and around his bones – the cold.  Then it was in his bones, in the marrow, creeping up his spinal column to his brain, filling his brain and leaking out his eyes and down his nostrils in an endless glacier; it came out the roots of his hair in long needles of obscene, goddamned, unearthly cold.  And then it was in his soul, in his spirit…” (Himes “Yesterday” 46).  This is one of many examples in Yesterday Will Make You Cry where the reader bears witness to Jimmy – to Himes’s – pain in a highly visual and affecting way.  Some of the intensity of this particular passage comes from the structure of the sentences: “At first…Then…And then…”, mimicking in sentence structure the feeling of being gradually overtaken by the cold, a feeling which appeals to readers’ own experiences which can be used to understand the narrator’s encounter with hypothermia in the moment described.  What’s more, part of the genius of this passage is the description of the cold – the agent of pain – rather than the pain itself.  According to Scarry, “It is because vision and hearing are, under ordinary conditions, so exclusively bound up with their object rather than their bodily location that they are the senses most frequently invoked by poets as the sensory analogues for the imagination” (Scarry 165).  In other words, an attempt to describe the pain of hypothermia might have been less successful than this highly affecting passage that describes the cold and its gradual infiltration of the body.  Rather than attempting to understand and imagine a description of pain, Himes allows readers to visualize the cold as some object which infiltrates and causes pain to the body.

 

This imagery and violent description of pain is yet another advantage the trauma writer earns by making use of narrative fiction as his primary mode of representation.  It is doubtful, for example, that a reader could be so affected by the same passage if it followed the conventions of autobiography, a genre that perhaps would not immediately welcome an abstract representation of hypothermia.  Yet again, the same scene represented visually – as in a photograph – would present an image of the pain itself without any of the abstraction, without the metaphor of a creeping, parasitic cold, and without the author’s mediation.  Through such acute detail and highly stylized prose, Himes creates an image of pain that seems to dodge the problem of “‘aesthetic attitude’…when we pay attention to a thing simply for the way it looks or sounds or feels…” (Reinhardt 21).  In other words, readers of Himes’s fiction are privy to the image and the visual description, but are also made aware of the struggle with representing that pain through language, the need to externalize the pain and describe its agent instead, and above all, the cause of the scene: a guard who locks Jimmy outdoors and leaves him to suffer.

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Himes’s novel is, above all, a testament to the horrors of prison and to the struggle of writing about it; his work is an example of trauma writing that works around the resistance of trauma to language.  After reading Yesterday Will Make You Cry, one can’t help believing that there could be no other medium by which Himes, a wordsmith, could evoke the tragedy and tedium of imprisonment.  Himes dabbled in short stories, published other novels, and even wrote a two-volume autobiography, yet Yesterday Will Make You Cry is perhaps the most infamous in regards to its exhausting publication process and its endurance of Himes’s overbearing editors. Having survived censorship and eventually published in one piece, Yesterday Will Make You Cry promises a raw account of a man’s time on the inside; and, amazingly, with Himes’s characteristic fictional embellishments, stylistic flourishes and structural gimmicks, the novel still strikes as close to the “truth” as a writer can get.

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Works Cited

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Franklin, H. Bruce. Prison Writing in 20th-century America. New York:

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-- "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Convict." Chester Himes and the

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Himes, Chester B. Yesterday Will Make You Cry. New York: Norton, 1998.

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-- To What Red Hell? Prison Writing in 20th-century America. Ed. H. Bruce

Franklin. New York: Penguin, 1998. 119-29. Print. 

Margolies, Edward, and Michel Fabre. The Several Lives of Chester Himes.

Jackson: U of Mississippi, 1997. Print.

Reinhardt, Mark. "Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of

Critique." Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic on Pain ;. By Erina Duganne and Holly Edwards. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago, 2007. 13-36. Print.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.

Van Peebles, Melvin. “His Wonders to Perform.” Yesterday Will Make You

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Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Google

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