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FREEDOMWAYS SECOND QUARTER 1972
from $75,000 to $5,000. Which came as a result of either publicity, or a writ of habeas corpus, a last resort device used to force the courts to show cause why they have not done something, filed a few days before the decision on bail reduction was effected. The other motions are still pending.
However, the courts attempted to renege on the bail question. Once the necessary amounts were raised for all four, the courts said that one of the defendants, Wallace Baker, was mentally ill and therefore should not be allowed on the streets. This is particularly interesting since, at both retrials of the four, the defense attorney for Baker tried to have him severed on grounds of mental incompetence. The courts, however, had him checked by a psychiatrist from Bellevue who pronounced him fit to stand trial. The court would not allow an examination by a private psychiatrist.
It cannot be argued that justice, as we know it, is a singularly repressive tool held in the hands of an establishment force that uses it to its own advantage. There are those fundamental concepts, guaranteed long ago, that are still viable. But it is reality, that vested interests do seek to curb the functions of institutions-one being the courts-to align with their own ideological precepts. Because of this, therefore, there is a danger they can become pawns in a game of power brokers.
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BOOK REVIEWS
CHESTER HIMES-AN INDIGENOUS EXILE
THE QUALITY OF HURT: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CHESTER HIMES.
Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. 351 pages. $7.95.
SOMEWHERE in this autobiography Chester Himes wonders out loud why he ever wrote the book. After reading it I am even more puzzled. As autobiography it is strictly a minor league affair, without either literary or intellectual distinction. Perhaps its virtue is its candor, the author's willingness to bare his ordinariness to the world. He succeeded in this effort to an embarrassing degree which makes the book even more puzzling. Considering his ego, I don't think that was Chester Himes' intention at all. Arrogance being an essential ingredient in a writer's presumption of talent, he sometimes mistakes self-indulgence for candor. The Quality of Hurt is a veritable catalogue of self-indulgence.
Chester Himes was born in 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri, one of three sons to a "mulatto" mother and a father who was a college teacher until the family moved north to St. Louis, and then to Cleveland. What he tells us about his early years, his relationship with his family; the kind of life they lived; how they felt and reacted to he vicious racism of their time, is so one-dimensional, it scarcely qualified as autobiography. No one comes alive in this book-not even the autobiographer! He tells us he loved his mother but he doesn't describe her in any way that indicates any emotional feelings toward her one way or the other. He caused or felt he caused his brother's blindness in a freak accident but Chester Himes seemed more concerned about his feeling than the fact that his brother had lost his eyesight.
In Cleveland he becomes a successful gambler, hustler, man-about-town, lover, and petty criminal while still in his teens. And during his short stay at Ohio University his reputation as a dandy, who wore a bearskin overcoat and drove his own car, far outstripped his academic achievements. Himes never stinted in pursuit of his own pleasure. And despite the Depression, and the general hard lot of black people, his gambling kept his pockets full of money. Prison obviously was the turning point in his life for it was there he started to write. But Himes tells us nothing about why he started writing short stories, or how he learned the craft, or more importantly, why he
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-18 10:21:09
