Harlem Composition: Adapting Chester Himes into French Comics

I. Looking Past Each Other

Melvin Van Peebles remembers that it was 1963 or 1964 when his boss at the weekly news magazine France-Observateur assigned him to do a story on someone “who had just won some big French crime writing prize.” That someone happened to be another Black American writer living in Paris, Chester Himes—although he had won the Grand prix de littérature policière in 1958, not recently. The award honored For Love of Imabelle (1957), a novel Himes had written at the urging of Gallimard’s Marcel Duhamel for his Série noire crime fiction imprint, where it appeared as La Reine des pommes (1958). The book proved so popular in France that it spurred Himes to write his own cycle of detective novels based in Harlem. These subsequent titles were published in French translation before or around the same time as the English-language versions, underscoring his popularity among the French. By 1964 Himes already had completed six titles in the series.

Van Peebles’s fuzzy recollection is in keeping with the fact that, at the time, he had no idea who Himes was. At their first meeting, he recalls coming face to face with a “medium-built man with European features and caramel-colored skin.” Not recognizing the author, he said in French, “Pardon me, monsieur, I’m looking for Chester Himes.” The man did not respond, so Van Peebles repeated his introduction. “I’m Chester Himes,” the man finally confirmed. The delayed response was apparently due to the fact that “Chester didn’t speak French” (Van Peebles, introduction to The Harlem Cycle, viii). They had been looking past each other: Van Peebles did not expect Himes to be Black, and Himes may have been thrown by a young Black man asking for him in French. The situation of these writers in Paris was disorienting enough to void the easy familiarity of race that prevailed stateside.

Himes eventually opened up and reflected on his influences and on the role of the Black writer in the civil rights struggle.[1] The story was filed. But what happened after the meeting only seemed to reinstate the initial wariness between them. Van Peebles arranged for the satirical magazine Hara-Kiri to publish La Reine des pommes as a bande dessinée, the Franco-Belgian medium of comics. Hara-Kiri ran the serialization from fall 1964 to summer 1965, with Van Peebles penning the story and dialogue and Georges Wolinski providing the art.[2] The adaptation evidently did not appeal to Himes. He made his opinion clear in a 1970 interview with scholar Michel Fabre: “I thought the cartoons were atrocious, but they paid me more for the permission to do that book than I earned from Gallimard when I originally sold it to them.”[3] A financial windfall, nothing more. Van Peebles probably heard as much, which is why his own account of meeting Himes makes no mention of the adaptation.

Yet if we look at the comic itself, it is possible to apprehend aspects of Himes’s aesthetic in the key of his French reception. In the novel, Himes plays on the idea that a man so square he has a fifth corner—as the manuscript’s original title, “The Five-Cornered Square,” jokes—could be the catalyst for a series of bloody and confounding events that consume Harlem’s underworld. The naive man, Jackson, is taken in for a con, and when his streetwise twin brother Goldy tries to entrap the schemers with the support of two Harlem detectives, all hell breaks loose. Whereas For Love of Imabelle appeared as a mass-market paperback from Fawcett, which downplayed its aesthetic innovation for entertaining kicks, La Reine des pommes came out as stylish noir from Gallimard, which afforded a more complex take on its depiction of vice and violence. Following the recent scholarly reassessment of Himes as the last of the transatlantic Black modernists who used the opportunity to write stories for the Série noire to pen surreal satires of America’s racial hang-ups, the intermedial adaptation appears more prescient than impertinent.[4]

Consider the first page of the comic (fig. 1).[5] We drop in on Jackson, the proverbial square, a working-class stiff whose job is that of an undertaker’s assistant. A large speech balloon appears in the center of the cityscape. Jackson sends up a prayer that a counterfeiting process that promises to multiply his money will work. He is taking this risk, entrusting his money to strangers, for the love and affection of his girlfriend Imabelle. Van Peebles’s text exposes the man’s gullibility by framing his words as an overwrought imploration. Jackson’s wide-eyed faith in God (who is addressed three ways, as “Seigneur,” “Dieu,” and “Sauveur”) is incongruously paired with his profane incantation of investing money from different sources into the operation: “All the money I saved for five years . . . All the money Mr. Clay [his boss] was good enough to advance me . . . All the money I could borrow from my friends.”[6] The prayer ends with “Amen” (uttered in English), and that unselfconscious note punctuates Van Peebles’s artful skewering of a man the reader comes to view as the perfect mark (La Reine, 9).

Wolinski’s art is an integral part of this tableau. The cityscape establishes the Harlem locale, yet the predominance of the speech bubble narrows the focus of the reader’s interest to the apartment from which the prayer is being issued. There, in the bottom right corner, the reader finds three smaller balloons clustered together. Wolinski situates these utterances closer to the apartment, which, in spatial terms, conveys the sense that they are less lofty, more grounded, statements. Indeed, each bubble offers encouraging words that aim to soothe the vulnerable Jackson: “You prayed well, my big bunny. But don’t worry, Daddy, he can do it,” and, “Don’t worry, Jackson. It’ll work veeeeery well!” (9). Deception is literally written all over these statements, particularly in the way Wolinski bolds and draws out “trèèÈÈÈs bien.” But the placement of Imabelle’s feminized speech also suggests Jackson is the victim of a more wide-ranging con: the idea that she loves him at all. Working within the page’s frame, Wolinski arranges Van Peebles’s text to establish characters’ competing motives and essential traits. Far from being atrocious, the renderings show tremendous tact. This kind of attention to composition runs throughout the work, adapting nuances and details Himes registers in prose into compact forms of visual storytelling.

Rather than rehearse a familiar story of expatriate rivalry, the following account contends that bande dessinée offered another distinctly French opportunity to reimagine Himes’s art. In La Reine des pommes, the reimagining takes place not along the grain of the author’s expectations but beyond his medial frame of reference. By approaching the adaptation as a cross-cultural narrative with medium-specific requirements, Van Peebles and Wolinski reactivate the unusual conditions that gave rise to the Harlem detective cycle. Himes admitted, in his 1976 memoir My Life of Absurdity, that being an expatriate gave him license to write “these strange, violent, unreal stories”: “I didn’t really know what it was like to be a citizen of Harlem; I had never worked there, raised children there, been hungry, sick or poor there. I had been as much of a tourist as a white man from downtown changing his luck” (126). The Hara-Kiri version of La Reine des pommes redoubles that estrangement, freeing up the narrative’s aesthetic sensibilities from a strictly textual interpretation. In so doing, Van Peebles and Wolinski draw out Himes’s interest in the detective story not for plot’s sake but as a means to explore action, setting, and situation—in short, the invented milieus of urban Black life. They realize that Himes’s Harlem is a work of visual composition.

II. French Connections

The underpinning for Van Peebles and Wolinski’s collaboration was a medium with special meaning in postwar France. Bande dessinée emerged in the interwar period, particularly in the form of the globetrotting adventurer Tintin, a creation of Belgian cartoonist Hergé (Georges Remi). Tintin was part of a “golden age” of French-language comics, which was unabashed in its admiration of the American comic book example. After the war, however, these comics veered sharply away from “Americanization,” a catchall term for the encroachment of mass culture upon European national identity. Postwar bande dessinée thus “produced very different artistic and literary effects” than its superheroes-oriented American counterpart, “with triumphant might giving way to character development, moral ambivalence, irony and ‘la question du réel,’” or the question of the real.[7] Unlike the transatlantic reception of film noir and detective fiction, which the Série noire helped facilitate, the French appreciation for comics ran up against American dismissal of the medium. Long before the rise of English-language graphic novels, French readers embraced bande dessinée as a medium of visual storytelling that could tackle important issues and convey psychological depth.

These qualities dovetailed with the editorial thrust of Hara-Kiri. The monthly journal was founded in 1960 when a cadre of left-leaning writers and artists decided to satirize the patriotic moralism of postwar France, especially under the new administration of President Charles de Gaulle. With a mix of parodic news stories, dirty jokes, and envelope-pushing cartoons, the journal proudly branded its sense of humor bête et méchant (stupid and malicious). It was the funnies for the savagely ironic, not the faint of heart. Hara-Kiri’s main editor was François Cavanna, a former children’s comics artist who wished to “provide contributors and readers alike with a source of illicit, carnivalesque pleasure where painful subjects could be explored in a context of unusually high freedom from any imperatives to take them seriously.”[8] Militarism and French politics were regular objects of derision in Hara-Kiri, but the journal also took aim at the dour solemnity of the French press. On its cover and lavishly illustrated pages, every issue of Hara-Kiri drew from “scatological, sexually explicit material and elements of the grotesque” to shock readers out of the “thematic and aesthetic blandness” trotted out by the national media (Weston, “Bête et méchant,” 112).

Georges Wolinski played an important role in developing Hara-Kiri’s look. Born in Tunis in 1934, Wolinski was a Tunisian-Polish Jew who had immigrated to France with his family in 1946. Having developed a talent for art in school, he was inspired to pursue it as a career during a stint in Algeria for military service. In a small town in the Sahara, Wolinski happened upon a poster advertising Hara-Kiri and featuring art by Roland Topor, a Frenchman of Polish Jewish origin.[9] He knew this was the kind of illustration he wanted to do for a living. Wolinski soon would become a regular contributor to the journal, making a name for himself with risqué cartoons about contemporary sexual mores. In the summer of 1962, he ran a career-defining parody of French-language comics’ interwar young hero in a strip titled “Tintin pour les dames” (Tintin for the ladies). Against the image of Hergé’s globetrotting do-gooder, the strip displayed “drunkenness, licentiousness and a stubble-faced, motorbike riding, cigarette-smoking Tintin” (Weston, “Bête et méchant,”112). It was this sort of iconoclasm that Wolinski brought to his work on La Reine des pommes.

His collaborator came in the form of Melvin Van Peebles. Born in Chicago in 1932, Van Peebles enlisted in the U.S. Air Force upon graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1953. He married a German woman, and the couple lived in Mexico for a brief period before moving (back) to the United States. In San Francisco, Van Peebles documented his experiences as a cable car operator in a photobook, The Big Heart, and wrote, directed, and composed music for two short films, Sunlight and Three Pickup Men for Herrick, all in 1957.[10] Seeking to expand his artistic orbit, the peripatetic Van Peebles embarked for Europe. He made his way to Amsterdam, where he studied astronomy, and then on to Paris, where, “apart from Chester Himes,” the now single Van Peebles “seldom associated with Americans.”[11] By 1962, he was pursuing new film projects and writing in French on a regular basis. For Hara-Kiri, Van Peebles penned a column, “L’Homme qui rit” (“The Man Who Laughs”), and through the journal he “became integrated into the group of avant-garde radical French cartoonists that included Topor, Cavanna, and Wolinski” (Fabre, From Harlem, 261).

This combination of medium, vehicle, and talent yielded a rare opportunity for Himes’s prose to undergo adaptation with careful attention to his form and context.[12] The author himself gestured toward that possibility when pressed by Fabre about the Van Peebles-Wolinski La Reine des pommes. In response to Fabre’s comparison of the “picturesque description” in the Harlem detective cycle to comics’ storytelling techniques, Himes submitted:

There’s some truth in that, but my way of creating a scene is to describe enough things in order to make an entire picture . . . You know, if you get a police report about an incident, and get all the statements from the witnesses, you tend to get a rather jumbled and confused picture. In a way, that’s another form of reality. I think that’s the kind of reality that you find in Harlem. You not only have the actual reality of the incident, but also the individual realities of each person who tries to remember it. Probably the nature of life in Harlem is such that the eyewitness accounts of any given event will be conflicting. I try to present things in such a way that the reader can understand this phenomenon. (Fabre, “Interview,” 92)

The response merits some unpacking. After quickly pivoting away from comics, Himes embraces the prompt to frame his aesthetic in pictorial terms. Specifically, he discusses his technique from a compositional and not strictly iconic perspective. What matters to Himes is capturing the collage-effect, or overlapping sense of visual perspective, in language. He thus abjures a singular, objective point of view—typically associated with narrative verisimilitude—in favor of a multiplied impression of the scene at hand. Himes describes his prose in visual terms: “conflicting” narratives appear “jumbled” within the frame of Harlem’s social reality.

Although he may not have had the medial understanding of comics to see the connection, La Reine des pommes manifests the visualization at the heart of Himes’s approach to writing for the Série noire. Consider the way Van Peebles and Wolinski represent Jackson’s rollercoaster evening trying to win back the money he lost to the counterfeiters at a gambling den (fig. 2). In this composition, Wolinski draws dice rolling across the page, one sequence at the top and the other on the bottom. At the top, dice carrying Jackson’s fervent hopes for the evening intersect with the contesting realities of Harlem’s underworld, as Himes might put it. The illusion of separate panels gives way to a picture of Jackson pressing the buzzer to gain entrance into the gambling den and then, moving left to right, the lookout doing the same to let the doorman know a “customer” (in English) is coming in (La Reine, 15). Wolinski’s sequential architecture opens up the scene to different perspectives, staging what happens when the hapless Jackson tries to take matters into his own hands.

The second set of panels is even more dramatic in the way it spatializes Jackson’s experience in the den. He enters, plays, gets lucky, gets unlucky, and then leaves—with barely a change to the other players around the table. In the novel, Jackson’s playing is overwhelmed by numbers: he is not only trying to win at craps (“He shot ten again, threw seven, let the twenty ride, threw another seven, shot the forty, and crapped out again”) but also making constant mental calculations about how much money he needs (“He had $376, but he needed $657.95 to cover the $500 he had stolen from Mr. Clay and the $157.95 to pay for his landlady’s stove”).[13] Van Peebles and Wolinski approximate the effect of these passages through a forward-moving yet cycle-repeating roll of the dice. The tableau is dynamic and static all at once. Starting out with high hopes at 10:00 p.m., winning through midnight, and losing most of it by 6:00 a.m.: the roll’s momentum from right to left, and then within the dice itself, guides the reader from one panel to another. Crucially, the final panel, which shows Jackson exiting the den, reveals the stoic cool of seasoned gamblers who know a desperate man when he walks through the door. The composition of the page thus traverses inside and outside, duration and instant, to suggest the total environment of this place where Jackson is only passing through. Page layout and panel design layer multiple impressions onto the experience of what Himes conceives as a typical night out in Harlem.

III. Gender Is Trouble

The novel introduces us to the cycle’s hard-boiled detective characters, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Covering the Harlem beat, the police duo launches an investigation into the counterfeiting scheme because its perpetrators also seem to be behind a more lucrative con that tricks people into investing in a fake gold mining operation. Himes, however, does not follow the detectives’ tracks on a whodunit; they make their first appearance in chapter eight, nearly a third of the way into the story. Instead, the novel, befitting its title, “The Queen of Apples,” which in idiomatic French means “the queen of hearts,” shows more interest in following the woman’s stake in turning men on to her. Van Peebles and Wolinski pick up on this aspect of the narrative, highlighting the critical role gender difference plays in the unfolding caper. Gender is rarely what it seems for Himes insofar as it is just as susceptible to perspectival distortion as anything else. The adaptation, in turn, revels in the world of appearances that characterize con games and gender performances alike among Harlem’s denizens.

Jackson’s brother Goldy agrees to help him find Imabelle, who has gone missing after the botched counterfeiting process. Unlike Jackson, Goldy has street smarts, but he expresses it in an unusual way: performing in drag as the pious Sister Gabriel in order to solicit donations or gain information from people. It is as Sister Gabriel that Goldy is depicted in various states of activity against and across an enlarged street map of Harlem (fig. 3). Van Peebles and Wolinski chart Goldy’s movements throughout the neighborhood. The page’s assemblage asks the reader’s eye to move from top left to bottom right, tracking Goldy’s movements in time and space. In each sector of the map, we see Goldy doing something to advance his investigation: atop, calling up Imabelle’s contacts; in the middle, going to the post office and seeing “Wanted” posters for the men who tricked Jackson; on the bottom, interviewing his associates. Following the convention of reading comics from left to right, with the city’s street grid replacing a panel layout, Wolinski envisions Goldy chasing down leads and piecing together details as a detective would. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed—two burly, lead-with-your-fists men—have been displaced by a figure who is more adept at navigating Harlem’s underworld.

Van Peebles’s text adds a crucial dimension to this composition. Wolinski draws three different Sister Gabriels, but Van Peebles writes at least five versions of the same character. The balloons in the first sector show Goldy posing as “the federal attorney” to Jackson’s churlish landlord; Rufus, “a friend of her husband,” to Imabelle’s irate sister; and an indistinct woman to Imabelle’s boss. In each of these exchanges, Van Peebles indexes Goldy’s shifting personae with distinct forms of address and modes of speech: the standard “Allô, madame” (to the landlord); the roughened “Allô, mam’zelle” (to the sister); and the deferential “Allô, pourrais-je parler à Mlle Imabelle?” (to the boss). Van Peebles then shifts in the middle sector to third-person narration, which precisely conveys how Goldy, disguised as Sister Gabriel, is processing the information about the wanted men. Last, an oversized Goldy looms over the ghetto’s denizens to ask, “Do you know if there’s a new gang in town?” (21). The humor of this sector lies in the fact that the reader must reconcile the figure’s habit of playing a nun with his stake in inquiring about criminal goings-on. The character is in drag throughout the page, but here Goldy’s investigative side emerges in the most ironic way. Adding another layer of humor is the fact that the French word for gang is “bande,” which also means “strip,” or the medium in which Van Peebles and Wolinski are composing their work.

This spatial rendering of an extended drag performance recalls Ralph Ellison’s insight about midcentury Harlem: “this is a world in which the major energy of the imagination goes not into creating works of art, but to overcome the frustrations of social discrimination.”[14] In this topsy-turvy world, “[l]ife becomes a masquerade, exotic costumes are worn every day,” and concrete survival entails acting out “the most surreal fantasies” (“Harlem is Nowhere,” 54, 43). Nothing is what it seems, in other words, and that is how Harlemites get by. So it is when Goldy and Jackson go to confront Imabelle at the con artists’ hideout (fig. 4). In the top center panel, Goldy plays his role as Sister Gabriel to a tee in order to get out of a traffic stop. The cops pull over a hearse, which Jackson has borrowed from his job, driving around in the middle of the night. Goldy’s spiritual observation, “There’s no good time to die,” and his feminine features—full lips, round eyes, enshrouded visage—provide the perfect cover of saintly mission for the brothers’ operation (La Reine, 42). The gentle falling of snow frames his image as the Madonna, sacred and serene. Goldy is the spitting image of “the nun on her errand of mercy” (Himes, A Rage in Harlem, 92).

In contrast to this performance is Imabelle’s ruse when she reunites with Jackson. She appears at the bottom of the page, busting out of the left panel, greeting him with outstretched arms. Her smile is overdrawn, her figure is camp: she is a parody of femininity. Only her stubbly armpits reveal the strain she has experienced being on the run. These details, malicious as Hara-Kiri intends them to be, make Jackson’s falling for her seem all the more ridiculous. Underneath his lovestruck figure Van Peebles narrates: “Seeing his beloved Imabelle again, Jackson is totally destroyed, gobsmacked, screwed.” The French is cuter in its assonance and thus more cutting: “tout fondu, moulu, foutu” (42). The reader, carried along by Goldy’s obvious skepticism, is made aware of Imabelle’s deceit—she is in cahoots with the con men. But Jackson remains in the dark. Goldy holds his head and calls his brother a “pomme,” which in this context is meant to signify a sucker (42).

The satire that Van Peebles and Wolinski allow to emerge from Himes’s text is that Sister Gabriel, the man in (religious) drag, is a more honest embodiment of femininity than the double-crossing Imabelle. While this is certainly implicit in the novel, the performative contrast between the two figures is given added dimensions in the comics. The point is not only to cast suspicion on the woman who has Jackson wrapped around her little finger—a classic hard-boiled conceit. It is also to recognize Goldy’s masquerade as a conduit for detection, one that can get a handle on the bad elements of Harlem precisely by playing their game. Although the cops Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are the official face of the investigation, Goldy is the one who is able to roll with the punches and identify the gang behind the rackets. He is the grounded skeptic who, both visually and narratively, lends structure to the story’s spirals of exploitation and violence.

IV. Body on the Line

The centrality of Goldy to Himes’s imagination justifies Van Peebles and Wolinski’s decision to make the image of his corpse the climax of La Reine des pommes (fig. 5). Goldy has indeed found out the gang, but they have also unmasked his masquerade. He pays a heavy price for his sleuthing in drag. Only three pages follow this one, and Van Peebles and Wolinski cram a lot of exposition into them to wrap up the story: bad guys are killed, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed close the case, and Jackson gets his girl, who convinces the police that she was coerced into working for the gang. In the end, Jackson remains besotted, leaving the reader to wonder at the futility of finding justice in such a madcap world. But rather than dwell on these points, Van Peebles and Wolinski linger over Goldy’s grotesque figure, no longer wigged, with blood streaming down his throat—or, rather, up over his lolling head since, true to Himes’s vivid description, “[t]he face was looking backward from a head-down position, resting on the back of the skull” (A Rage in Harlem, 123). The gang has stuffed Goldy in the very hearse in which he arrived, unintentionally making good on the promise of the nun running an errand of mercy.

Jackson discovers Goldy’s body after opening the hearse door on a busy street. The shock, perplexity, and dark humor of the crowd are captured in the speech balloons that pop up around the corpse: “Let me see!,” “That’s a sister!,” “Not true, that’s a brother, don’t you see his wig?,” and, “I told you so: fat people should always be careful!” (La Reine, 50). Jackson, for his part, is shown to have anxious thoughts pop out of his head, fearful that he will be accused of the murder. Raising the suspicion of white policemen, he reverts to doing what Mr. Clay pays him to do: take the dead away. Superimposed over all this text and imagery is the oversized, ghastly corpse of Goldy. Taking up the top left quadrant of the page, the street scene falls under its shadow. The chaos of the tableau spreads across the frames through the dead-alive image of Goldy’s arms and hands reaching out into the panels above, which is to say under, his face. The line between life and death in this neighborhood is thin, yet that existential precarity is precisely what draws people together.

The scene of the corpse hanging out of the hearse is one that Himes mentioned in his interview with Fabre when he explained why his prose style was distinct from Hara-Kiri’s treatment of La Reine des pommes. While Himes might have thought Wolinski’s illustrations were atrocious, the composite effect of the page situates that horror in a more pedestrian state of affairs. Ellison’s writing on Harlem again proves illuminating:

The phrase “I’m nowhere” expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes that they have no stable, recognized place in society. One’s identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable. One “is” literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a “displaced person” of American democracy. (“Harlem is Nowhere,” 57)

Ellison intuits that Black urbanites’ struggle to survive has thrown their sense of place and belonging into uncertainty, such that they often feel like strangers in their own land. In a similar vein, as Jackson speeds off in the hearse, the gruesome parading of Goldy’s body in the street holds up a funhouse mirror to onlookers’ own fragmented reality. There but for God’s grace go I.

Ellison is a Black modernist writer whose prose is lately being recognized for its visual composition.[15] He wrote the essay “Harlem Is Nowhere” in 1948, but it did not appear in print in Harper’s until 1964, the same year La Reine des pommes was serialized. As scholars have begun doing for Ellison, so might they do for Himes. The Van Peebles-Wolinski La Reine des pommes not only constitutes a major adaptation of the author’s writing but also highlights the interrelation between language and the visual in his imagination. Put differently, it is the kernel of pictorial description in Himes’s writing that Van Peebles and Wolinski recognized and then adapted into bande dessinée. As this essay has argued, the duo seized the medium, vehicle, and moment to reanimate the quality of transatlantic cultural exchange that had inspired Himes to write detective fiction in the first place. Marcel Duhamel’s invitation to Himes helped him produce a body of fiction that “embrac[es] absurdity as both a social condition and a narrative apparatus.” (Eburne, “Transatlantic Mysteries,” 807). Van Peebles and Wolinski’s La Reine des pommes succeeds in adapting that aesthetic to a different medium because it takes seriously the compositional logic undergirding the novelist’s prose. Himes did not appreciate the effort in his time, but a rereading may be just what’s needed to make the strange appear familiar today.

Notes

The author wishes to acknowledge the Duke University Graduate School for providing funds that supported the initial phase of research for this essay; Melvin Van Peebles, introduction to Chester Himes, The Harlem Cycle, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, UK: Canongate, 1996), vii–xv, vii.