Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Chester also picked up an education from the trade departments at Branch Normal, where he learned to drive a tractor and automobile. It was because of this foundation that, during the Second World War, Chester would be able to make the claim “I could read blueprints; I understood, at least partially, most of the necessary skills of building construction—carpentry, plumbing, electric wiring, bricklaying, roofing; I understood the fundamentals of combustion engines; I could operate a number of machine tools—turret lathes, drills, milling machines, etc.” For the young Chester, these were mildly thrilling, empowering experiences that connected him to his father and built a sense of masculine self-confidence.

  Chemistry was perhaps the most intriguing subject for the Himes brothers. They spent their “happiest hours” unsupervised in the chapel basement with Bunsen burners and mortar and pestle, melting crystals, heating mixtures, and grinding solids. The singular achievement was the combination of three chemicals—saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur—to make gunpowder. When they added potassium chlorate and ground glass, the mixture would detonate itself. “A delicate and dangerous performance,” Chester adjudged.

  Branch Normal’s commencement week exercises were under way on May 23, 1923, when Joe and Chester were scheduled to make a chemistry presentation in Corbin Hall to an assemblage of parents, students, and other guests. At the time for the presentation, Joseph Jr. went onto the stage by himself. Throughout the remainder of his life, Chester would mull over the events that happened that evening. He wrote that his mother had prevented him from participating because he had broken one of her many rules. He had been “naughty” and thrown an explosive compound against the house and defied her by talking back instead of apologizing and acting contrite. Confirming the breach between the two siblings that was about to occur, Joseph maintained that Chester simply refused to perform the experiment. Whatever the case, when Joseph mixed the last elements onstage for the famous gunpowder demonstration, he miscalculated the ingredients and the mixture erupted prematurely. In a loud puffing flash, a smoke cloud the size of a gallon jug engulfed him; ground glass had been driven into his eyes. Horrified, Chester and his parents watched as the ghastly haze enveloped Joe.

  They rushed the injured boy to Davis Hospital, the largest medical facility in Pine Bluff. There, the doctors summarily declined to treat him because he was black. Joseph Sr. pleaded, as did Branch Normal principal Robert Malone, but to no avail. When they returned to the Stutz touring car, Chester’s father was weeping. The family went next to Lucy Memorial Hospital, where, instead of surgeons attempting to remove the glass from Joe Jr.’s eyes, doctors could only dress and bandage his wounds, in preparation for a future trip to a hospital in a different city that might offer a higher level of care for black Americans. In the following days, Estelle traveled with Joe to St. Louis, to Barnes Hospital, which was available to all citizens “without distinction of creed.”

  Because he would need long-term care, Joseph and his mother took lodging in St. Louis. Back home, Chester and his father moved to one or two rooms close to the entrance of the campus. The family had begun unraveling earlier than this, but now the drama of dissolution took on the dimensions of epic tragedy. When the oldest Himes son, Edward, had gone out on his own, his loss to the family did not seem permanent or evidence of a mark against them. After Joe’s accident, however, Chester’s parents began reinterpreting family history, seeing the crises as a series of inexorable calamities marking Estelle and Joseph Sr. for special punishment, their comeuppance for overambition.

  During this summer of separation, Joseph Sr. also served as acting president over the small Branch faculty. Chester, now taller than his father at age fourteen, had completed the high school course. He played tennis, drove the school tractor around the grounds, and developed a crush on one of the young teachers from the summer school. At the church picnics and youth gatherings, he learned graphically about sex—at least as a voyeur. The country girls wanted to seduce him and the willing boys proved their mannish conquests by displaying to one another their vaginally slickened genitals. The mating, the public parade of intimacy, the braggadocio of the boys and girls, equally attracted and distressed Chester. Chaste and self-conscious, Chester preferred to walk with girls his age to the state fair, saying to one that she was “Penelope and I was Ulysses returning home from twenty years of wandering.” A youngster who inhabited a world of mythic quest literature more comfortably than he did one of a stray, behind-the-shed groping at sex, melancholy Chester was a boy whose valiant romantic ideal was clashing with the reality of shabby black town life.

  Considering the opportunities to continue his profession, Joseph Sr. made the rash decision that fall to reunite with Joe and Estelle in St. Louis, then a city of nearly 800,000. The family moved into the historic and crowded black neighborhood called the Ville, eventually settling on Belle Glade Avenue, a quiet street of one- and two-story brick tenement houses with built-in gardens on the median strip. The house was a few minutes’ walk from Chester’s new school.

  They lived near the downtown heart of the sprawling, wealthy, and sometimes angry metropolis of wide paved streets and tall brick and stone buildings, like the recently built and massive City Hall and unsegregated main library. But while the streetcars did not require segregation, St. Louis was no haven for blacks. Six years earlier, in July 1917, labor unrest and black migration had unleashed an orgy of white violence that had left an estimated fifty people dead and 240 buildings burned down across the river in East St. Louis.

  The decision to stake the entire fortunes of the family on the slender possibility of recuperation of one of its members was a tricky gamble. Joe had fleeting sight in one eye, enabling him to distinguish print a few inches away and shapes and sunlight at a distance. The other eye was useless. Bright and dutiful, Joe began instruction in Braille at the integrated Missouri School for the Blind. Certainly it would have been better for Chester if they had remained in Arkansas.

  Without a faculty job lined up, Joseph Sr. joined the ranks of black porters and laborers. Chester later captured the shrunken man that his father became after they moved. “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.” Bereft of a prestige occupation and fearing that his middle child and namesake might become an invalid, Joseph Sr. steadily lost his authority and his will to correct his youngest child.

  In the fall of 1923 Chester attended Charles Sumner High School. Named after the famed abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, Sumner was the first black secondary school west of the Mississippi. For the first time in his life, Chester was not known to adults on account of the stature of his father. He knew that his parents owned and rented some property, but he was embarrassed to admit that his father worked as an unskilled laborer, a problem at Sumner where it mattered a great deal who your parents were. Modern, competitive, and the only post for black educated elites, Sumner boasted nine professors teaching English, seven teaching math, and several of them held master’s degrees. The highly skilled faculty, headed by George Brantley, demeaned the work Chester had completed at Branch Normal, and his teachers belittled him when he insisted that Branch had a college division that he had attended. They dropped Chester in with his rough age group; at fourteen he started the tenth grade. Again. He smoldered with resentment.

  Chester was hoping to please his mother and become a medical doctor, and he took the “scientific” curriculum. For a full year he specialized in algebra I and II, geometry, chemistry, biology, physics, English, and German. He passed his classes with above average marks, but he never made As. Without Joe in class beside him, and having no rank on account of his surname, Chester was unsure of himself.

  The emotional pain connected to experiencing the reduced social esteem of his brother, his father, and himself in such a short span invented Chester’s famed quicksilver rage at ci
rcumstances beyond his control. He “hated” Sumner, finding his fellow black students “cheap-smart,” “city-dirty,” “preoccupied with themselves,” and “quick to ostracize and condescend.” He disliked the rituals and rhythm of the scholastic team sports, instead favoring rough-and-tumble games with working-class boys at Tandy Park, during which he scarred his ear and battered a shoulder blade. But grueling, unregulated contests were preferable to the classroom of black strivers and their mentors. Struggling to come to grips with the devastation of his family, he had found a convenient, lifelong scapegoat: the blacks of the middle class and their pretentiousness.

  By the fall of 1924, restoring Joe’s sight was making little progress. The Himeses clutched after family support and, as they had done before, retreated to Cleveland. Chester, dislodged again, would not even be allowed to finish out a complete academic year in St. Louis.

  Chapter Three

  BANQUETS AND COCAINE BALLS

  1925–1928

  At the hinge of downtown Cleveland stands the Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, a 140-ton granite column 125 feet high. Dedicated in 1894, the stolid Civil War monument depicts life-size bronze figures during four engagements of the conflict. Perhaps the most riveting scene shows a black man straining to fit a cannonball into an artillery piece. Equipped with an ample interior gallery, the monument’s northern inside wall contained a bronze frieze of Abraham Lincoln holding broken handcuffs and a freedman bracing himself on one knee and holding on to a rifle and cartridge box extended by Lincoln: the militant moment of emancipation. After a childhood in towns anchored around public monuments to the Confederacy, Chester, who had become preoccupied by a portrait his father had once shown him of black prisoners biting Confederate dogs, was now living in the northern United States.

  The city of Cleveland curved along the edge of Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes. A place of hot summers and cold, snow-filled winters, “Lake City” relied on its great heavy industries in steel and natural energy to fuel its boom during the 1920s. In 1920 Cleveland was America’s fifth-largest city. Densely populated by immigrants from Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Germany, as well as Jews who grouped together in a neighborhood called Glenville, Cleveland contrasted sharply with St. Louis, Pine Bluff, and rural Mississippi.

  Chester Himes’s family arrived piecemeal, and they faced their greatest challenge with dwindling resources. Joseph Sr. and Chester came first, in February 1925, and Estelle and Joseph Jr. followed in July. As in St. Louis, Joseph Sr. was reduced to manual labor. He advertised himself as a carpenter, and he tried to make a living in the building trades. Fannie Wiggins, the youngest of the Himes siblings, gave them quarters in her seven-room house at 1711 E. Sixty-Eighth Place. Chester’s older brother Edward had spent summers and perhaps a year at the home. Joseph Sr.’s brother Andrew, who worked in Cleveland as a waiter, seems to have lived there much of his adult life. Joseph Sr., Chester, and Joseph Jr. would live in the house off and on over the next fifteen years. The family ties were strong, as were the privileges that the Himes men expected and received from Fannie.

  By marrying a man fifteen years her senior from Seneca, South Carolina, Fannie had somewhat narrowed the gulf in experience between herself and her siblings. Her husband, Wade Hampton Wiggins, was named after a famous Confederate guerrilla fighter and worked as a “stationary engineer” for Standard Oil, shoveling coal in the boilers at the offices and warehouses. A gentle, tall, dark man whose shaved head accented an imposing physique, Wiggins was profligate. He owned a car he could not drive and rented a home. He had one serious concern in his house: consuming his rations in quantity, enough so that—be it simple fare like beef lungs and rice—it had to be served on a turkey platter. Chester’s aunt Fannie was not as simply or regularly pleased. When she could, she affected the air of a dapper stylish woman. Fannie hoped for cultivation beyond her means.

  By the time Joseph Sr. moved his family to his sister’s, the hub of black life was at the intersection of Central Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street. The Wiggins house on Sixty-Eighth Place, a black side street, had initially put them up against better-off white neighbors on the large boulevards, most of whom were northern European immigrants: Danes, Germans, and English. But in the mid-1920s, all of this was changing, as the slum quarters near the shipyard docks, manufacturing plants, and railroad depots crept outward along the rail lines. Unskilled black workers, often brought in temporarily and unused to urban living, spread into neighborhoods along transport routes and cheap housing and the once white boulevards became all black. From the later 1910s to the late 1920s, nearby Hough Avenue at the corner of E. Sixty-Eighth Street would become as solidly African American as Fifty-Fifth and Central. By 1930, Seventy-Ninth Street was the racial dividing line, which pushed beyond Ninety-Third Street a decade later.

  As black migrants poured in and faced a closed housing market, the glamour of the city soon gave way to grime. Chester’s most regular memory of life on the shores of Lake Erie was of soot raining down upon the plowed snow lining the street curbs, creating a blackened slush, the airborne residue of companies like Otis and Corrigan-McKinney Steel.

  Joseph’s sister Leah Moon and her husband, Roddy, had seemingly leapfrogged the problem of encroaching poverty. In 1915 they purchased a two-story home in Glenville on Bryant Avenue, several miles east of their relatives. Roddy Moon had become the extraordinary man in his community. If Moon got his initial government appointment on the basis of conservative political leanings connected to the Booker T. Washington machine, in 1912 he had turned in another direction and founded the Cleveland branch of the NAACP. For twenty years he headed the local black fight for equal treatment under the law.

  Pious, rigid, and ever mindful of appearing the confident educated American, Moon dominated his household. He introduced his youngest child, Henry Lee, to classic Victorian era writers, including Victor Hugo, Dunbar, Dumas fils, Dickens, and Browning. Leah Moon, a devoted cook, was best known for tending an immaculate, prize-winning garden, but she was also a friend of Mary McLeod Bethune, Estelle’s Scotia classmate. The Moons were model members of the black minority in Glenville. The family had not just adapted to successful careers in the North, they had transformed themselves and shucked off the misery of the past. Although Leah and Roddy had been born and bred in small South Carolina towns and the children had spent their early years in the South, none of the Moons retained a Southern accent. The glaring difference between the middling Wigginses and the starched Moons was obvious and put the freeloading Himeses in the middle.

  Chester believed his aunts and uncles exacerbated the escalating marital tensions between his parents. In his later years, he wrote, “My father’s people suspected my mother of looking down on them because they were black. Maybe she did. They hated her. She hated them.” Joseph Jr. felt similarly. Both of them oversimplified the family crisis. Estelle was almost certainly snooty toward the grade-school-educated Wigginses and Andrew Himes, even though she was relying upon their goodwill, if not their outright charity. But Estelle neither lived with nor had achieved enough to look down upon Leah and Roddy Moon. If she disliked something about them, it was that they were inclined to flatter themselves and look down upon her.

  Chester correctly identified the clash of wills between Estelle and Fannie Wiggins, who had worked in Estelle’s house back in Savannah, who did not know her own father well, and who did not have the same mother as her older siblings. Her education had probably been curtailed after her father died and the children had divided his estate. Fannie would have greeted her sister-in-law and her two hearty-eating boys with more than reluctance. In the novel The Third Generation, Chester condensed the crisis of his family, as they tried to get their footing in the North and his parents struggled to repair their marriage, into a classic battle between his youngest aunt and his mother.

  “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 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.”

  “You dragged him down yourself, don’t 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.”

  Comfortable with the pattern of providing for herself and Joseph Jr., Estelle responded after a short time to the strife in the Wiggins household by removing herself and her disabled son to another neighborhood, effectively walking out of the marriage while claiming it was for her blind son’s health. Joe thought he was “infantilized” in the process. Chester, as usual now, was an afterthought, and almost from the time they arrived in the city, he would seek a haven outside of the emotionally charged house.

  During his two semesters there, he was unable to achieve a refuge at East High School. One thousand students strong, East High was one of Cleveland’s strong academic public schools. Chester began his scholastic year in February 1925 alongside seven other black boys and girls. Unlike the black Cleveland poet Langston Hughes, a popular student when he graduated from rival Central High in 1920, Chester had a difficult time socially jumping into the final year. Without any history with the faculty or fellow students, and his brother now fully a year behind him in course work, Chester became ever more disinclined to prove his academic worth. The end-of-the-year chemistry experiments included explosives demonstrations, which must have made vivid Joe’s terrible mishap. If Chester had dominated the classroom in Pine Bluff and been able to disregard it but still succeed tolerably well in St. Louis, at East High School he could do neither. In a white classroom where students were considering the leading American colleges, pupils maneuvered to display skill. One young woman teased him when he made errors, and, in what he had now established as a pattern of rebellion, he became a show-off in the cafeteria and kept classroom activities at arm’s length.