Yesterday Will Make You Cry Book

After that no one said anything. Jimmy sat on his bunk. The darkness closed in and the silence became tangible. His shoulders drooped forward, his head bowed as if from the weight of the silence. His mind would not penetrate the darkness and his thoughts turned into themselves. He wished some one would start talking again because all he could hear was his own heart beating like a trip-hammer, and his thoughts became broken and scattered. He tried to say something himself, but when he opened his mouth to speak his voice would not come out.

It is never quiet in prison. Jimmy is heralded into his twenty year sentence on golden showers and rugs of body hair under slow no motion. Cat calls and caterwauling. Jimmy is not a real person. Time stoppingly handsome (he always blushes in pleasure. Wasn't it old by the billionth time?) in places the hands are the judge, jury and executioner. A college graduate (beauty before brains. This is touted plenty too, only not quite as nauseatingly often), an object in a bidding war. A bird behind bars without a song to sing. Sound escapes, hard of nothing and no flight.

Jimmy felt so very tender for the Rico whom he knew and was scared for him and wanted to protect him and change him all over from that Rico whom he did not know, the Rico who repulsed him so and whom he found so repellent on occasions. It must have been that on those times he was afraid that Rico would turn back and become the other Rico, and that he, Jimmy, would be again a goddamned, solid fool.

Have you ever looked on inmates who are headed to the big house? Some probably going for a long time. Long enough that it is forever. They are shackled to each other and the bars in mouths glow in the dark. The happy looks on their faces feels like falling. If it feels that way just to see them. If you could pull off their faces it is the corpses of the weight of dreaded centuries behind them. My stomach is pitted thinking about it. I wonder sometimes if this kind of knot inside you could turn into a self destruct capsule if you can't find a way to not think about it anymore. Yesterday Will Make You Cry is the best in the beginning when Jimmy first gets there and it is the too quiet. When it is the shift between I can't believe this is happening. He can't believe there's a poker game going on. People are laughing. It is best that Himes creates in that he sounds absolutely fake as shit in his pleasure in this. It isn't real. He's in the prison is real ball and it also isn't happening chains. They are stolen. Himes kinda fucked up making Jimmy a repeat offender, though. I can't believe that he is this naive about everything when he'd been locked up before. Jimmy becomes a-whatever-point-I-want-to-make-whim in his thoughts and beliefs. Don't believe him when he worries Rico won't love him. It won't be Rico's back walking away. I wish he had made a choice one way or the other to make Jimmy his see-through plastic bag on the face of prison, or the ducts. Jimmy doesn't know he's doing it until it is time for the shark to take a bite. I'm not empty. Fill up time. I felt so eyes in a dark room with objects to knock into (I know that's a dresser because it's always there) with him (and huge parts of the book are cringe worthy. Episodic cliches of prison life you could pick up anywhere else. If he were writing fake letters to home from camp he would sound more present). When he doesn't exist there any more they fill up whatever shape he has to take next. Maybe all of the sweat from all of the sex he has will rain down like tears on the faces of the many men who want his body so hard. Jimmy can get you anything you want. What is your poison? Newspapers, shoes, shower caps. Hey, handsome.

(This is probably trivial but I couldn't help noting the fashion. Himes was released in 1937. Men are described sporting the pants dropping drawers look. Come on, isn't it time for a new look already? I always found it interesting that so much of men's fashion is styled by the prison population. Maybe it is because so much of the population is in prison. That's depressing.)

So Chester Himes probably had this friend. Once upon a time the fat cats must've wink wink nudged nudged. "Oh, okay. Your friend. We get you." Yesterday Will Make You Cry was messed around with like fresh meat in the prison shark pool (I think it was four "retoolings"!) and called "Cast the First Stone". Yeah, we know Jimmy is written as a white man but wink wink. Decades later it is "restored" and to the original title and material. But, the cover is of a line-up of negro inmates. His "friend" Jimmy could not have been a white man, no matter it is Himes' damned book and not theirs? What gives? Famous author book blurbers such as Ishmael Reed bespeak of its "trenchant commentary about blacks living in a society that is hostile to them". I wonder if any one of the blurbers read any of the novel (or just flipped to the author photo in the back flap, probably). It is prison for everyone in there. To separate them based on color of their skin is missing it. Every moment, under the skin.

I don't get Jimmy. Okay, a lot of inmates will break your mama's back on she was so stupid she got lost on the way to Popeye's jokes. It is never quiet and a voice in the dark could be crying, or anything at all. But Jimmy doesn't hear it. He talks about wanting to hear it and THAT is the voice he and (unfortunately) myself hears. That girl I screwed when I was young was the love of my life. Blah, blah, blah shit eating grin of bravado. The abyss' abyss happens to the negro inmates, it makes a bitch out of every asshole and everyone has one of those. He turns on the fairy lights when some inmates die in a fire. I could have died! I'm going to make out with my "best friend" because what the hey, something has to happen (the kind of best friend you have with the kid who is the only kid your age living on your street).

'Yesterday' broke me during the long, long chapters of Jimmy's back story. (No one knows the troubles I've seen.) Taking him out of the prison context was another big fuck up, especially since it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, breathe any other kind of life to make this case about how prison stops meaning that cannot pretend inside it. Walter becomes Lively and his laughter turns into Rico's half trusting face cuddling to the backs of knowing inmates. We have nothing but time. He was a socket of getting into trouble to break the time to get there in the first place (he was already on parole when he got sent up again for armed robbery). Don't forget ridiculously good looking, Mars! Jimmy may go back or he'll see some pretty face and what the hey. I wish Himes had shown the black behind his tombstone smile for others, if Jimmy was going to be so important. Maybe someone hoped for a different voice in the dark when they enacted love on his "handsome" face. Maybe their love felt like Jimmy when he had to forget what his mother looked like until he could forget what prison looked like.

"It was fantasy and frenzy and delirium. It was dread and apprehension; new and weird and shameful, with its peak in the stars and its depths in slop, but above all indescribably fascinating." Himes uses those words to describe something else, but I think it describes my own thoughts while reading the book.

In a single word: raw. Prison riots, romance, detachment, connection, cowardice, hope, poetry. Whether Jimmy was numb or bleeding emotion, it felt like a wound exposed. It was ugly, painful, and yet a wonder and confirmation (and I don't necessarily mean a warm affirmation) of life. At 19, sentenced to 20 years in prison, Jimmy has to learn to live in the world he has brought himself to. This is a boy who lived in books and imagined himself Achilles, who also spent himself on prostitutes and willingly went into crime. The ebb and flow of acceptance, rage, joy, and emotional detachment were stunning to see poured out on page.

There are 4 parts to the book, each exploring a stage of Jimmy's life in prison. The rhythm of each is different although they do bleed into each other. I found myself rapt while reading about the prison fire, the hysteria of being in the hole, Jimmy's back story, and, unexpectedly, about Jimmy in love.

I actually approached this book curious about Himes' Harlem Cycle mystery novels, and read an article expounding this as his masterpiece. I knew from glancing online, that there was a homosexual relationship in the book, and (from I'm not sure where) have "known" that this was a part of prison life. What I didn't expect was the exploration of Jimmy's concept of masculinity and homosexuality. For the time period in which this was written (1930's), the ambiguity found in the text is expected, but not the depth of emotion and openness. (Am very curious to read Cast the First Stone, the bowdlerized and 1950s published version).

It was difficult to separate the very little I knew about the author from the story itself (especially here, where the introductions give you a peek at the history of both.) I think a part of me took all the emotions and thoughts of Jimmy as coming from Himes, and this had a huge impact on my fascination with this book. I was also in thrall with the writing. It worked for me: the naturalness and artificiality of it, the lyricism and crudity.

Side note: It annoys me that despite the introductions and extolling of printing this book in the form it was intended, that the cover of the book features 4 black men in a lineup. From what accounts I've read, Himes wrote Jimmy as a white man and changed him to black after pressure from the publishers. Melvin Van Peebles' intro speaks of the bowdlerized edition and points out that the writer of that blurb was unable to separate the author's race from the content of the book. Yet, in this attempt to correct the injustices of the past - we have the aforementioned cover, a quote at the back calling it a commentary about blacks, and the book itself is labeled African American Studies. Maybe I'm missing something, I haven't researched Himes. Maybe I'm reading this too out of context. The book was about a man struggling with his identity. He was in prison, by his own actions. What held him back was himself. Isn't that universal?