Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Black students at Lincoln shared Cooper’s view regarding the value of an American nationality in a world of escalating European rivalry. “It is necessary for us who are by birth already Americans,” a student leader wrote, “not to throw down our birth right, and with contemptible folly, to back down to the alien gods which our forefathers have forsaken.” If they favored being Americans over Africans, they were conscious of not wanting to be Europeans either. Young women, togged in mandatory mortarboards, were convincing themselves that “to be a first class American is much better than to be a first class imitator of a Frenchman or an Englishman.”

  This sort of Cooper-inspired blend of smarts, maturity, patriotism, polish, and worldliness certainly would have appealed to Estelle during the middle of her journey in Missouri. Dainty and fastidious, Estelle resented the shabbiness of everyday life and people who didn’t try to improve themselves. She disapproved of her neighbors, the Cains, who lived in a house next door, and she refused to let Joe and Chester play with their children because they spoke what she termed “bad English” and used “vulgar” words. She preferred to have her sons play tamely with President Allen’s daughter Julia, who was the same age as Chester, on the other side of street, up at the top of the hill.

  Her prim demeanor and expectation of refined treatment created the perception that Estelle Himes was “color struck,” or inclined strongly toward the society of lighter-skin blacks like herself. Possibly she did express a preference for her own kind, but there was a significant social-class dimension to the prejudices she displayed. Estelle celebrated blacks who had partial descent from the Southern aristocracy. But in an episode as a toddler that Chester Himes remembered all of his years, he and his brother Joe had found an open can of paint around the house on Lafayette Street. Chester delightedly smeared paint throughout his never-cut hair. To clean them up, Joseph Himes shaved his sons’ heads and Chester’s hair grew back as kinky as his father’s. Estelle considered the loss of Chester’s softly curled hair—which emphasized his complex racial ancestry and delicate upbringing—a minor tragedy.

  If Estelle Himes indeed possessed a bias against the man she married and darker-skinned people generally, it was a view she mainly kept to herself. To have done otherwise would have been to open herself to being reminded of her own mother’s trials and misfortunes during slavery. And while she might have sought out light-skinned blacks, they were not in the majority in the places she lived. Also, if, in South Carolina or coastal Georgia, the skills learned from working in wealthy white households and literacy gave obviously mixed-race African Americans a kind of prestige, in places like Scotia and Georgia Industrial, such persons were not conspicuously prominent among faculty or students.

  Nor did their presence easily translate into fawning attitudes toward white people generally. At Lincoln, Anna Julia Cooper expressed disdain for her slave-master father. Leah Himes’s husband Roddy Moon, a dark-skinned man six years older than Joseph and Estelle, seems to have had his sister-in-law in mind when he made some observations about skin color and appearance. After graduating from Claflin University, Moon had been a school principal in South Carolina with his wife. He developed the habit of appearing verbally impressive, as well as the habit of projecting himself as well-prepared and left the educational field. By 1904 he had been appointed to the federal bureau of agriculture as a meat inspector. He started that career in St. Joseph, Missouri, moving to Cleveland in 1906. When he made friends he observed an upheaval in social caste. “All the leading Negroes are black or dark brown. I have not seen but one bright skin professional man.” One woman’s skin was so light that “you cannot tell her from a white woman to save your life.” Another person, Carriou, was less unusual “about Sisters color.” Roddy Moon mentioned Estelle when writing to his wife, Leah, who had remained in Ohio. Joe’s “bleached” wife Estelle was a little different from them, certainly, but not unusual, and not the kind of person who “you cannot tell from a white woman to save your life.”

  The Himeses found a new dragon that westward movement had not slain, the national upheaval over industrialization and black schools and which seems to have contributed to the souring of the relationship between Joseph and President Allen. The transition from the horse-and-buggy era and subsequent curricular transformations coincided at Lincoln with other messy politics. Traveling to other black schools to recruit professors, Allen returned in the spring of 1913 to find roughly a quarter of his teaching staff in what he treated like revolt. To consolidate his power, he dismantled his faculty. Allen docked salaries of Fannie Moten in elocution, Frederick Parker in shoemaking, and Grace Hammond and O. W. Ferguson, all of them punished for what he used military language to describe, being “absent without leave.” Over the next several months he made moves to replace the entire industrial department. Allen replaced the wood-turning and mechanical drawing instructor and the shoemaker.

  In August 1913, after the trustees had restocked the machine shop with fresh lathes and new tools that they bought at a St. Louis symposium and as they prepared for courses in auto mechanics, Allen fired his old friend Joseph Himes. It was just as well. “The automobile has replaced the wagon and buggy to a great extent,” admitted the school bulletin a few years later. The blacksmithing course remained necessary only “to do the work connected with auto repairs.” By 1914 there was a student revolt, quashed when the board of trustees dismissed all of the signatories to a protest letter, and resulting with not a single student enrolled in the college preparatory curriculum the next fall.

  Joseph and Estelle hauled the children to Joseph’s sister Leah Moon in Cleveland. The summer bled into the fall, and all of the Himes children enrolled in school, which meant kindergarten for Chester. The Moons had as many children as the Himeses, but theirs were older: Joe, a twenty-one-year-old house painter who also worked in hotels, fourteen-year-old Ellen, and eleven-year-old Henry Lee. The Moons were also determined to outmaneuver Jim Crow, as Roddy’s job with the federal government indicated. They were the rare migrant black family living on a main street with German, Swiss, English, and other white American neighbors, which might have seemed refreshing to Joe Sr. and Estelle, whose lives had been spent in the South.

  Less pleasant, though, were the cramped quarters with the Moons and the recently married, new mother Fannie Himes Wiggins, whose son Gerald was one year old. Estelle’s high-strung manners now rattled Fannie, pressing hair for a living, and who had done the housework and child care for her sister-in-law in Savannah as a teenager. The crowded household and clashing temperaments were sowing the seeds of future discord.

  Chapter Two

  THE SOUTHERN CROSSES THE YELLOW DOG

  1914–1925

  Harried in the search for a new post, Chester’s father secured work in a place where nineteenth-century industrial education seemed on sure footing. He became the new blacksmith professor at Alcorn College in the rural hamlet of Lorman, Mississippi, about thirty miles south of Vicksburg. Eerie, isolated, and serene, Alcorn was located along a series of rolling hills dipping into ravines, shaped by the mighty mile-wide Mississippi River to the west, the ridges of rich soil yielding forests of sweetgum, red oak, water oak, and magnolia trees draped with Spanish moss. At one time vast expanses of Claiborne County had been cleared and planted in cotton, but the boll weevil infestation of the 1890s had wiped out the cash crop, and scraggly low-grade timber was returning the land to a condition before the plantation era. The closest town to the school was nearby Port Gibson, from 1918 on the home of the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. That company’s notable members included two of the most original blues singers of all time, Ida Cox and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. The accent that Chester had for the rest of his life was the soft Southern speech of Mississippi. He referred to it as his “lazy Missouri accent,” because that was where he had been born, but his speech habits were stamped in Lorman. When Chester revisited his images of childhood security and satisfying innocence, the mental reflections that he conjured were o
f the family’s roughly seven-year stretch in Mississippi.

  Founded as Oakland College in 1828 by Southern Presbyterians and sold in 1871 to the state for the education of “Negro citizens,” Alcorn College bore the name of Mississippi’s Reconstruction-era governor James A. Alcorn. A man who had favored gradual emancipation and the use of black Confederate troops during the Civil War, Alcorn had suggested a future for Negroes in Mississippi that it would take more than a century to achieve, “protected in all their rights of person and property.” Hiram Revels, the first elected Negro senator in United States history, had served as Alcorn College’s earliest president. For Estelle and Joseph Himes, Mississippi could be uncomfortable like Georgia, but, on the other hand, the remote campus was a cocoon that “shielded” the boys from “the harshness of race relations.”

  When the Himes family arrived in 1914, the school flaunted some signs of modest prosperity, like a new three-story brick dormitory for boys called Mississippi Hall. Relatively austere in comparison with the extravagance of Lincoln, the campus still had some elements of antebellum architectural charm. Alcorn had two historic buildings on the campus, holdouts from the Oakland College days, the Old Chapel and the Belles Lettres Building. The elaborately detailed seventeen-step iron staircase of the Old Chapel had been dismantled from the ruins of a nearby plantation called Windsor Castle and reinstalled intact at Alcorn, a minor engineering feat. The chapel, the president’s mansion, the dormitories and the academic buildings, were grouped in a horseshoe around a grove of magnolia, pine, and oak trees.

  With an enrollment comparable to Lincoln, Alcorn had only a quarter of its students in the college department. The tuition was free to Mississippi natives and room and board stood at $17.50. When Joseph Himes arrived with his family, the ailing mathematician John A. Martin was president of the school. He would die in 1915, and Levi Rowan, the head of the English department and a former president who had fallen off the log in a difficult balancing act with the board of trustees, resumed his role as president. Rowan—who, on one occasion as president, turned away a hundred female students because he had no dormitory space—faced fundamental problems, like providing clean drinking water for the college. Only a few years older than Joseph, Rowan’s English department conducted an elementary mission, to “give the students a thorough mastery of the mother tongue in order that they may better be able to comprehend the instructions given in the other Departments.” The local Woodville Republican would report the state education superintendent as voicing more precise fears that “the negro dialect and foreign tongues is [sic] contaminating the speech of pupils.” If for different reasons, Chester’s mother and father concurred heartily with this sentiment; at the threshold of their door they drew a line for the sake of grammatically correct English: “ain’t” was “absolutely prohibited.” Estelle would also prohibit Joseph Jr. and Chester from attending the local grammar school, preferring to teach them at home.

  As the director of the “Blacksmithing, Horse Shoeing and Wheelwrighting Department,” Joseph supported his family on the same salary that he had drawn in Missouri, and he instructed about fifty male students. Alcorn was not attempting to train the intellectual vanguard. Every student in the college department ultimately had to select a trade—carpentry, blacksmithing, laundry, or agriculture for the men; sewing, nursing, and domestic science for the women. Outfitted with electric lighting and a furnace, the single-story Mechanical Building, where Joseph Himes took the reins, was the only modern structure on campus.

  But in spite of Alcorn’s seeming commitment to the trades, the credentials necessary for the faculty to advance had dramatically increased. Of the twenty-six teachers, every teacher had a college degree, and fifteen had completed college degrees in the academic subjects. President Rowan had even completed a doctorate. As the Himeses approached middle age, the mounting academic qualifications for genuine leadership among “New Negroes” threatened to leave them behind.

  It was also increasingly difficult to ignore that after twenty years, Joseph Himes’s craft was outmoded. Even for Mississippians, the long-standing aim, “to train practical blacksmiths,” decreased every year. At first, between 1913 and 1915, about five Alcorn graduates each year finished in blacksmithing; but by 1916 and 1917, the department was only producing one graduate annually. Henry Ford’s Model T assembly-line factory in Michigan was eliminating the rationale for the horse-and-buggy equipment and piecework metal crafts; the aftermath of World War I would make industrial-scale metal manufacture standard.

  Dissatisfaction had pressed Estelle from the beginning. Settled in a simple, whitewashed two-story frame house, one of the seventeen plain wooden-frame structures allotted to the teaching staff along a white-picket fence lane, the Himeses had little refinement. Their lot included a square backyard of baked clay, complete with an outhouse, a shed, a water well, and a chicken coop. In the winter a damp chill seeped through every crack in the wall of their thinly insulated cottage. Joseph and Estelle planted crops on the nine-acre field behind the house, but the unattended front yard went wild, and the children copied the locals and started walking barefoot. The seasons in western Mississippi seemed distinct only in terms of the peculiar force of the elements. In the summer clouds of red dust were sandwiched by sheets of rain that quickly turned the land into a floodplain and rutted the roads. The ubiquitous sight of cornfields and pine forests, as well as the pungent odor of manure, mud, and draft animals, barely concealed the distance from insidious plantation slavery. Estelle stiffly told her husband that the move to backwater Lorman was “a comedown.”

  Even leisure lost its innocence. In an episode that Chester reproduced in his autobiography and in the novel The Third Generation, he remembered witnessing an early moment of horror. As a small boy, he had enjoyed watching the Alcorn men pull a wagon full of young women from the school’s gates to the dorm in an elaborate annual display of strength. But during the merriment one year, a girl fell and slipped underneath the full weight of the wagon wheels and was crushed to death. The macabre sight of the jet of dark blood from the young coed’s mouth shocked Chester as if the wheels were crushing him, as if he too “had been hurt.” He fainted and had to be carried home and given medical attention. The trauma haunted him, foreshadowing his own immense personal suffering.

  His disappointed mother was also tough-minded, willful, and independent, and she showed her mounting dissatisfaction in the fall of 1915 by accepting a position as a music instructor at Haines Normal and Industrial School in Augusta, Georgia. Her son Joseph would characterize the year in eastern Georgia as an “escape safari.” Augusta was an “escape” from Mississippi, but to Joe, the experience was odd enough to remain a voyage into the wild. Considering the gruesome August public murder of pregnant Mary Turner—hanged, shot, set afire, and her fetus cut out and then stomped by a mob because she had threatened to expose her husband’s lynchers—Georgia certainly evoked wildness. But it was mainly a chance at family for Estelle. Her young nieces Mabel and Margaret Bomar, “very fair girls with brown wavy hair,” were teaching at Haines and would bolster her spirits.

  Haines Institute had been chartered by the remarkable ex-slave Lucy Laney. Begun in the basement of a Presbyterian church in 1883, by 1915 twenty-six teachers and 694 students crowded two large three-story brick academic buildings. The iron-willed Laney had been born in Macon, Georgia, in 1854 to an enslaved mother and a free black father. Stocky and dark-skinned, the young Ms. Laney had been known in Macon for her ability to translate Latin with ease. She graduated from Atlanta University alongside Richard R. Wright and the famous classicist William Scarborough, the first black member of the Modern Language Association.

  Chester did not recall the founder’s ease in handling the classics, but rather, the contrast between her and his mother. He wrote that he and his brother were “shocked by the sight of the big, black ox-like woman who greeted them in a deep, gruff voice.” Like Joseph, Chester imagined them to be in a foreign, mildly feral land.
When he met Laney, she was past sixty, a taskmaster applauded by President William Howard Taft who hoped to inspire her students and deserved the reputation of one of the premier educators of the era. Resilience and determination were necessary traits for Laney, who operated in a state that did not provide public high schools for Negroes. But even the success of the Haines School could only do so much to soften the rough edges of the crowded shanty neighborhood and the folkways that made Estelle especially uncomfortable. The children at Haines spoke a version of black dialect called Gullah, which made the idiom of the Mississippi normal school’s enrollees seem to be a model of English enunciation by comparison. Chester always recalled a locally born student, mourning the loss of the school mascot, by heralding “de goat done dead.”

  At once their Georgia schoolmates nicknamed Joe “Goat,” for his prominent nose, narrow face, and slender, plodding style, and Chester “Cat,” for his feline quickness and sly attractiveness, his easy charm, and his hysterical squabbling. And Chester found reason for crying there. He well remembered that when he disobeyed Lucy Laney she dropped his pants and hit him with an oaken paddle with holes in it.

  Much greater calamity hallmarked Chester’s time in Augusta. On March 22, 1916, an apocalyptic fire, complete with bursting gas pipes shooting flames fifty feet into the air and pillars of smoke overwhelming the skies, destroyed two miles of the downtown business district. Augusta’s “Cotton Row” of filled warehouses, its skyscrapers and newspaper offices were ruined, and three thousand people were left homeless. The Haines School was a mile from the flames and no one was killed, although citizens fled the residential areas, stacking their belongings in the street. At the end of the school year, perhaps due to the calamity, Estelle and her children returned to Mississippi.