Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  In the end, Mrs. Taylor got them out. She went to Vicksburg and registered in a white hotel. When she came down next morning the manager confronted her.

  “You gave a college for your address. What college is this, Madam?”

  “The state college.”

  “The state college? But that’s in—”

  “The state college for Negroes.”

  Again the governor had to intervene. He telephoned Professor Taylor at the college.

  “Willie, Ah’ll give you forty-eight hours to get that woman out of Mississippi.”31

  By September, however, Joseph had received an offer from the Branch Normal School in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, thirty-eight miles south of Little Rock and 142 miles southwest of Memphis, where they soon resettled.

  Branch Normal (now UAPB) was established in 1875, ten years after passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, under guidance of Professor J. C. Corbin, who labored as its only teacher until 1882, and with seven students. Black voters had been enrolled in Arkansas, some 21,000 of them, for the first time in 1868. During Reconstruction, Negroes served as justices of the peace, sheriffs, county clerks, and tax assessors; more than forty-five held seats in the state legislature. By the 1890s, however, black Arkansans, like blacks throughout the South, found themselves under siege. In 1891 Arkansas’s General Assembly passed a bill requiring separate railroad coaches. By 1900 Negroes were largely denied access to public facilities and excluded from voting.

  The school, as one might expect, was shabby and half derelict, the entire area severely depressed economically. It was here that, in addition to mechanical arts, Joseph taught black history. Family tensions remained high. Estelle busied herself with church affairs and with public-school teaching. Further clashes with administration resulted from Estelle’s demeanor.

  Chester, struggling with internal conflicts, during this period seems to have become introverted. Joe remembered him as all but living in Poe’s stories. Enrolled in freshman classes with students eight years older, the boys could not have felt other than isolated and alone; they clung to one another. And while Chester with his smooth talk and excellent manners could easily be gracious and charming, his fierce temper could flare at any moment. He did well in studies, however, and under the influence of an English teacher who communicated her own deep love of the language and of literature, first may have been turned toward writing.

  Everything changed on graduation day in June of 1923. Demonstrating before the assembly how gunpowder was made, Joe was blinded when the ingredients spontaneously ignited. This moment traumatized Chester. He felt responsibility, even guilt: he was supposed to be with Joe for the demonstration but because of an argument with his mother had been forbidden by his father to participate.

  Joe was rushed to the nearest hospital, where white doctors refused to treat him. At the hospital for blacks his eyes were bathed and bandaged and he was put to bed; doctors told Estelle there was nothing more they could do. Five days later, Estelle took Joe to a St. Louis hospital specializing in eye injuries. Getting decent treatment and training for Joe would dominate all their lives over the next years, as the family came fully apart. Chester stayed on in Pine Bluff with his father until September, then the family again moved into the house in St. Louis, “within walking distance of the one black high school, Wendell Phillips, and the Overton beauty products company known as Poro College, which made hair straighteners and skin lighteners and creams and scents for Negro women.”32 There the family lived in close quarters, letting out the rest of the house to tenants. Estelle took Joe to Barnes Hospital every day for treatment—doctors were scraping scar tissue from his eyes—then returned him to the Missouri State School for the Blind, where he learned braille and music. He spent weekends at home. Joseph Sandy worked at odd jobs, and for a time as a waiter in a speakeasy. All in all, these were terrible years.

  St. Louis became a city of frustration for the Taylor family. Though they’d gotten back their house, it never became a home. Within it they became prisoners of their despair.33

  Now completely alone, having lost even his beloved Joe, Chester was more than ever a man of contradictions, “lonely, shy, and insufferably belligerent.”34 His guilt enlarged itself as though to fill the growing spaces between members of his family, to the point that he believed himself responsible not only for Joe’s blinding, but for the family’s dissolution as well. He cut classes, made certain to become unpopular with other students, threw himself into sports with “suicidal intensity.”35 Such self-destructive activity took its toll: a broken shoulder blade that healed poorly, chipped teeth, one ear torn half off.

  Only Eddie, long flown, and Joe, in part protected by his residency at the school, escaped damage in the marital storms.

  Professor Taylor had no ability at all for city life. At heart he was a missionary. He’d lived his life in southern Negro colleges. There, a professor was somebody. He counted in the neighborhood. His family counted too. But in St. Louis he didn’t count…

  It was in his home that he’d been defeated. He was a pathetic figure coming home from work; a small black man hunched over and frowning, shambling in a tired-footed walk, crushed old cap pulled down over his tired, glazed eyes, a cigarette dangling from loose lips.36

  Estelle in turn, at least by evidence of The Third Generation, seems to have come perilously close to madness. At one point she sent Joe out into the streets to peddle copies of a poem she’d written, “The Blind Boy’s Appeal.” Suffering bouts of acute paranoia, she would flee the house for white restaurants and compulsively engage strangers in conversation, telling them, “I destroyed my life by marrying a Negro.”37

  All their lives had lost mooring. Nothing connected anymore, there were no patterns or certainties to grasp, the family seemed to Chester as sundered from its past and as devoid of future as had been slaves torn from their African homeland. They merely endured, pushing through one day after another, moving between temporary shelters. The situation improved slightly when Joseph sold the house and the family moved into larger quarters in a better part of town. Their stay there was brief, however. Medical treatment at Barnes Hospital had done all it could for Joe, who now was able to distinguish dark from light, even to perceive movement and large nearby objects. Nothing bound them to St. Louis any longer. Within months the family decamped once again, moving to Cleveland, where in 1913, after leaving Jefferson City, wife and sons had lived with Joseph’s sisters while he settled into the Alcorn College job. Joseph himself had worked in Cleveland years back, before Chester was born, and been happy there. Also, the public school system included programs for the blind.

  The Third Generation suggests that relocation once again was at Estelle’s urging:

  Professor Taylor lost his will. He lost his grip on ordinary things. Caught out in the backyard, halfway to the shed, with a hammer in his hand, he’d forget where he was going, what he’d intended to do.

  Only the mother’s indomitable will saved them. Now that she had overcome the attack of paranoia, she was stronger than before. She wouldn’t admit defeat.

  “We’ll go to Cleveland,” she told her husband. “They have a famous clinic there. And we can live with your relatives until we get settled.”38

  Joseph blamed himself, obliquely, for Joe’s blinding and for his own incapacity to do much to make things better for Joe afterward. He never forgot that he had forbidden Chester to take part in the demonstration; what might have been, what might not have been, weighed heavily on him.

  The family soon discovered that, as with most of the others, this move had failed to improve its lot by any good measure. Though there was no formal, legal segregation, blacks were largely ghettoized. Laborers from Poland and other European countries claimed the abundant unskilled jobs in factories and steel mills. The family moved in with Joseph’s sister Fanny Wiggins and husband Wade, who lived on East 69th Street in a racially mixed neighborhood near the Cleveland Indians’ ballpark. Estelle got along no b
etter with her in-laws than she had with college administrators and faculty. Dark-skinned like Joseph, they neglected to show appreciation, Estelle thought, for Joseph’s initially having helped set them up here on his salary as a professor, and instead patronized him for now being unemployed. Certainly their ordinariness and their country ways put them beneath her own family socially.

  The little house was always crowded and the air was charged with flaring tempers and the clash of personalities.

  “You don’t like black people but soon’s you get down and out you come running to us.”

  “I married a black man who happens to be your brother.”

  “Yes, you just married him ’cause you thought he was gonna make you a great lady.”

  “I’ll not discuss it.”

  “You’re in no position to say what you’ll discuss, sister. This is my house. I pay taxes on it.”

  “If Mr. Taylor hadn’t spent all of his money sending you and your sister here from the South he’d have something of his own now.”

  “You dragged him down yourself, don’t you go blaming it on us. If you’d made him a good wife instead of always nagging at him, he’d be president of a college today.”

  “Mr. Taylor would never have been president of my foot. He hasn’t got it in him.”

  “Then why did you marry him?”

  “Only God knows. I certainly don’t.”39

  Chester and Joe enrolled in Cleveland’s chiefly white East High School, commuting by trolley, while Joseph did piecework, carpentry, and construction, and continued to seek full-time employment. Tensions between Estelle and Joseph weren’t much better than those between Estelle and her in-laws. At one point, Estelle gathered up Joe and fled to a rented room far across town. “I don’t think my father ever forgave her for that,” Chester wrote.40

  Presumably with money from the sale of the St. Louis property, Joseph and Estelle bought a house on Everton Avenue in the Glenville section of Cleveland, at that time a middle-class Jewish neighborhood, and the family once again reunited. Among the Himes’s new neighbors in Glenville were Joseph’s older sister, Leah, and husband Rodney Moon, a federal meat inspector and part-time real estate agent. The couple had two children, Henry Lee and Ella. Henry Lee graduated from Howard University (it’s been suggested that Joseph may have contributed to his college expenses, outraging Estelle) and taught for a time in Alabama before settling in as editor of Harlem’s Amsterdam News. Later he served on the national executive board of the NAACP and as editor of The Crisis. Years along, he would provide introductions for Chester to New York’s literati, wife Molly Moon providing the model for Harlem hostess Mamie Mason in Himes’s satire of those very intellectuals in Pinktoes.

  Himes’s counterpart in The Third Generation delights in the new quarters: “The house did something wonderful for Charles. He was home again. He’d never realized how much he’d missed a home.”41 The family’s history of rootlessness deeply affected Himes. Most of his life, until he settled in Spain in 1968, Himes would wander, Cleveland to L.A. to New York to Paris and back again, moving in and out of successions of hotel rooms, apartments, loaned houses, and cabins. And he would write of characters with no home, or whose homes had been taken away, or who had forcibly removed themselves from homes: the uprooted, the dispossessed, the torn away—material ghosts.

  Chester was now one term short of graduation, which took place in January 1926. His grades were not the best, and that final semester became a struggle. He actually failed his Latin exam, but a clerical error, 86 getting entered instead of 56, saved him. Still, any graduate of a public high school in the state was eligible to attend Ohio State University, and Chester planned to do so the following September. Meanwhile he intended to find work and stockpile as much money as possible.

  He was in rough waters, just coming to his sexuality, confused and driven. “I was sixteen years old and still a virgin,” he wrote in The Quality of Hurt. “I remember standing behind the curtains of the parlor windows and masturbating at the sight of the big-tittied Jewish girls when they came out of school.”42 He still felt guilt over Joe’s accident and his family’s dissolution. His relationship with his mother was particularly exasperating for a young man in search of separate identity: all in the same breath he loved her, desperately wanted free of her, reviled himself because of his desperate need for her. “Tender and turbulent,” Edward Margolies43 says of their relationship—a phrase describing many of Chester’s relations with women. For his father he could feel sorrow, along with rage at his failures (“that room that stank of my father’s fear and defeat”44); and, always, new guilt for feeling such things.

  Joe’s account of this period differed markedly from that of Chester in both memoirs and novel. Where Chester presented himself as overly sensitive, rejected and misunderstood at every turn, rather a Byronic figure, Joe recalled him as being immensely popular among black and white alike, a handsome young man who charmed everyone he saw, an enthusiastic dancer and a favorite of the girls. Adolescence, of course, is a stage in which we try on various personalities, swinging wildly from emotion to emotion, and quite likely both Chesters existed at different times. For that matter, both Chesters, the socially adept and the reclusive brooder, coexisted in the adult as well.

  Chester’s uncle Andrew helped him find work as a busboy in chic Wade Park Manor Hotel in east Cleveland, where at his first job Chester felt simultaneously superior and hopelessly intimidated.

  He felt like an intruder, a tourist who has wandered upon the ceremonial rites of a primitive tribe. He didn’t know it was his manner that set him apart. At one glance they knew he was not of them. He had none of the extroversion the occupation requires. Inside he was taut with timidity. Outwardly he strove to show a hard indifference.45

  His job was to retrieve room service trays and roll them two or three at a time into the service elevator for return to the kitchen. Two young women sat in a glass booth facing the elevators to check the trays before waiters took them upstairs. These women were white and good-looking, and immediately took to Chester. In The Third Generation’s account, a supervisor jokes with Charles:

  “These young ladies cause more havoc on my station than a four-alarm fire,” Mr. Jackson warned. “You must inure yourself against their charms, son. You won’t be able to find the elevators.”46

  In fact the women got Chester so worked up that he sallied off to the ghetto slums on Scoville Avenue and lost his virginity to “an old fat ugly whore sitting on a stool outside her hovel.”47 Himes’s description of Scoville Avenue, with its poverty, its aimless men living off whores, drinking raw alcohol and cutting one another up, reads like a sketch for the Harlem of his detective novels.

  One morning two weeks after he started the job, feeling less at odds, Chester stopped by the girls in their booth planning to ask for a date. Sensing this, the checkers quickly steered the conversation elsewhere. Chester, crestfallen, pulled open the elevator doors, stepped in—and fell forty feet.

  I remember the sensation of falling through space and landing on a solid platform with the feeling of my body spattering open like a ripe watermelon.

  I remember calling for help in a tiny voice. My mouth felt as though it were filled with gravel. Later I discovered that it was only my teeth.

  My chin had hit something that cut the flesh to the bone, broke my lower jaw, and shattered all my teeth. My left arm hit something and both bones broke just above the wrist so that they came out through the skin, dead white with drops of blood in the bone fractures. My spine hit something and the last three vertebrae were fractured.48

  Finding the hotel responsible for the accident—it should not have been possible to open the outer doors when the elevator was on another floor—the Ohio State Industrial Commission paid all hospital bills and awarded Chester a disability payment of $75 a month. The hotel offered to continue his salary of $50 a month. This led to further bitterness between his parents. Joseph had urged Chester to sign waivers to all rig
hts for additional claims; Estelle believed that he should have rejected pension and waivers alike and sued Wade Manor. She went so far as to confront the hotel’s management, accusing them of taking advantage of her son. The hotel responded by withdrawing its offer to maintain Chester on salary. Joseph and Estelle quarreled horribly, he insisting that she was only making a fool of herself and antagonizing everyone who might help them, she accusing him of inertia and Uncle Tomism.

  At this point in The Third Generation there’s a moment of great feeling for both parents.

  Mrs. Taylor’s long and bitter fight was to save herself as much as anything. She didn’t realize this. She thought of herself as doing what a mother should. And yet, in the end, she lost herself. Both lost themselves. She became mean and petty. And although Professor Taylor had been without a teaching post for four long years, he had still felt he belonged. Deep down he had still considered himself a teacher. Now he didn’t. It broke him inside where it counted. He gave up. He lost his will to try. In many ways, the effect on this little black man born in a Georgia cabin, who’d tried so hard to be someone of consequence in this world, to live a respectable life, rear his children to be good, and teach his backward people, was the greatest tragedy of all. Mrs. Taylor never gave up as he did. But she had to feel the world was turned against her to justify herself.49

  After four months in hospital, Chester returned home wearing a complicated back brace of leather and stainless steel that made him feel “like a trussed fowl.”50 His teeth were repaired by Industrial Commission dentists in a long series of visits. Chester was happy to return home, but tensions ran high there. He looked forward to September more than ever before.

  Arriving in Columbus, Himes took a room in a boarding house several blocks off campus. Ohio State at that time had a student population of 12,296, of which some 600 were black. Cost of a year’s schooling, with room and board, books, deposits, and other fees, came to approximately $658. Black students were not admitted to the dormitories, student union, or dining halls.