Lonely Crusade

No one ever wrote a novel like this. Himes' literary novels had an ability to reasonably place his heros up against powerful social forces and powerful personal conflict. In such powerful circumstances, the basic human instinct to preserve character, belief and integrity become enough to produce heroism, say big things, and still not leave a believable if uncomfortable reality. In the Lonely Crusade, the target is the war time complicity of the Communist Party with the government and employers in stopping war time struggles for Black rights and struggles by workers in the war industries. This is hinted at in Himes's other novel of the Second World War, _If He Hollers Let Him Go_ which is a far superior novel to _The Lonely Crusade_, although less politically specific. Lee Gordon, the character in this novel faces a savage frame up. His acquisition of a "Negro-first" union post as a stepping stone to management or middle class upward mobility leads him to a struggle where he must battle both the union official dom and the CP. Finally, the CPers whom he meets in the union and who at first champion him and who try to lure him with chances of advancement and sexual opportunities, turn into his enemies because Gordon will not back down from the struggle. He is left with one person who sympathetizes, a long-time union activist who is in the party, but realizes Gordon is right and the CP is wrong, but this man can do nothing but hear Gordon's story, be afraid for him, and do nothing. This novel led to Himes being Black Balled by literary critics associated with the CP who were numerous in the mid and late 1940s. Along with the hostility of the rest of the critics to Himes's wholesale denunciation of racism, particularly in the literary community, and the approaching witch hunt, this rejection was one of the reasons Chester Himes fled the US for Europe where he began writing his famous dectective novels which draw exact pictures of life in Harlem in the late 40s and early 1950s, even though their author never had enough resources to visit his native country in those years. Himes' literary novels have been republished. They are great reading regardless of their literary or political significance. They're important novels because they voice sentiment and feeling absent from other pages. They're also important because most of them are strong reads, strong stories. Himes was a unique individual, a prisoner who began writing in prison, a self-made intellectual, but a man who never lived separately from the lives of working class African Americans, until he felt he had to go into exile to continue writing. In some ways his views sound more cynical or ironic than Wright or Langston Hughes, two who went before him. Yet, to my mind this was often because Himes reflected the real feelings, the sweat and the grit, of day-to-day working class African Americans and reflected our point of view, rather than analyzed it from above.