The demolition of the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus was completed in 1998, the same year that Chester Himes’ novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry, set within that very same prison’s walls, was published. The autobiographical novel narrates the story of Jimmy Monroe, Himes’ white alter ego, who finds himself doing time at the Ohio Pen, where Himes was incarcerated between 1929 and 1934.
The eighth chapter of the novel describes Jimmy’s survival of the 1930 fire in the prison, that killed over 300 inmates, which Himes too survived and which he originally wrote about while in the jail. It was published as the short story “To What Red Hell?” while Himes was still inside (in 1934), with Blackie the name of the protagonist, though still a white man. Yet the only version of the novel published in Himes’ lifetime was a bowdlerized 1953 edition, under the title Cast the First Stone (other possible titles included Debt of Time and Solitary).
The editors of the 1998 restored text describe this earlier edition as:
a totally different book, much of which had simply been thrown away by Himes’ editors at Coward McCann. They upset the whole structure of the book and reordered the chapters, even rewriting certain passages.
The editors use this disturbing narrative about the previous edition as a framework to guide readers through the restored edition they are now holding:
In order to fully understand the demolition work methodically carried out by Himes’ editors, it is necessary to go back to the original project which the author had planned.
What the editors do not mention, however, was one of the reasons for the ‘demolition’ of the original text may have been its explicit homosexual content. As Clare Rolens notes in her 2014 article “Write Like a Man: Chester Himes and the Criminal Text Beyond Bars”:
Ultimately, the most significant difference between the two texts is that Yesterday tells the story of a homosexual romance with a redemptive happy ending for the lovers, whereas Cast tells the story of a young man who attains redemption precisely because he resists the sexual and gender perversions of prison.
While the main romantic story of original novel was set between Jimmy and Rico (named Dido in Cast), Rolens chooses to compare and contrast a scene during the fire in which Jimmy runs into an inmate called Mal (Walter in Yesterday). In both versions, the two men kiss passionately, although in what follows in the bowdlerized text Rolens notes a tone of judgment in Mal’s reaction that is less pronounced in that of Yesterday. Furthermore, in the Cast version, Rolens tells us, there is a handwritten addition to the manuscript, in which Jimmy states that he ‘felt repulsed’, missing from the original text. While there is still other potential ways to read this exchange, Rolens argues that the ambiguity is written out by the first published version of 1953:
The tone of the passage before being altered allows for a multiplicity of readings and does not tell the reader what to think about Jimmy’s or Walter’s uncertainty and attraction as a response to the horror and trauma of the fire.
When we turn back to “To What Red Hell?” from 1934, we find, unsurprisingly, this scene is not there. So, rather than debate the change of the text in the publication history of the novel, we can turn to the question of why Himes added it in the first place? My suspicion is that Himes wanted to develop a theme, introduced in the moment immediately prior to the meeting with Mal/Walter. Let me explain.
As Blackie/Jimmy runs through the prison, he comes to the chapel. Here is the Yesterday version:
Then he heard the slow run on the bass keys of a piano, heard the crackle of flame from the fire outside, saw the read glare through the frosted panes.
He looked toward the rostrum. The cover had been rolled from the grand piano and a slim, curly-headed youth formed a question mark on the stool, playing Saul’s Death March with a slow feeling. A pencil streak of fire-light, coming through a broken pane high up behind the stage, cut a white stripe down his face. His cheeks were wet with tears.
Then the slow, steady bass notes hammered on Jimmy’s mind like measured blows from a hard fist. “Don’t you know people are dying outside, you goddamn fool?” he shouted.
The youth stopped and looked around. “I’m no fool,” he said after a wire-tight moment. “I’m playing their parade march into some red hell.”
Comparing this passage in the two versions of the novel with the 1934 Esquire story, there is not much change (in the story the ‘youth’ was called a ‘boy’ and the ‘hard fist’ was originally more specifically ‘a cop’s fist’). Of course, one implication for the reader of “To What Red Hell?”, lost on the reader of the novel(s), is that it is the variation of the words of the boy that give the story its name. This gives this episode a pivotal significance, that it may appear to lose in the novel. However, another way to look at it is that the scene with the boy and the piano may have paved the way for another moment rich with pathos and ambiguity in the novel: the kiss with Walter. Read this way, Himes reflects on how both music and sexual desire offer his protagonist prisoner a momentary respite from the unfolding horror of the fire, both showing passing glimmers of hope and fantasy amid the reality of a burning death creeping in from the outside.
What do we make of this reading of the enchanting piano music in the Pen? Could it just be a reference to Himes’ mother’s vocation as a piano teacher? Or should it be seized upon as a moment that illuminates the complexities of prison life, where so much of outside is brought within, but without the accompanying joy and freedom? Of course, the bass notes of the piano in the burning prison can easily turn into another form of hell. Just as the 1930 fire inspired Himes to write his story, it also inspired popular music, immediately written and performed after the tragedy, first with Carson Jay Robison’s “Columbus Prison Fire” and then by Charlotte and Bob Miller’s “Ohio Prison Fire”.
In our next episode we will follow the piano’s notes through some more recent local history of the Ohio Pen, in the stories and artworks that issue from its period as a ruin. With such works we may ask, can they too shatter the deadening realism of the prison and be part of the demolition of the system that produced them?
Tune in tomorrow for the second episode of Our Local Debt of Time!