Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  In Cakes and Ale, Somerset Maugham summarized the literary vocation thus:

  I began to meditate on the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax … of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man. 11

  Chester Himes never forgot anything, least of all his pride and anger. At no time during his life did poverty and the world’s indifference remove themselves far from his side. Chester Himes was never a free man.

  Chester Bomar Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, the state capital, on July 29, 1909, “across the street from the entrance to Lincoln Institute, where my father, Professor Joseph Sandy Himes, taught blacksmithing and wheelwrighting as head of the Mechanical Department.”12 Chester was the youngest of three brothers: Eddie, eight years his senior; Joseph Jr., with whom Chester became in youth inseparable, but one. No original birth certificate survives; in April of 1942, offering as documentation a family record of birth (most likely a family bible) and WPA employment records, Himes applied for and received a “delayed or special” certificate.

  Part of a network of land-grant Negro schools throughout the South, Lincoln Institute’s curriculum was split into two parts, agricultural and mechanical; today’s A&M colleges retain this nomenclature. Many of these colleges occupied campuses of formerly white schools. Alcorn College in Mississippi, for instance, where Joseph Sandy Himes later taught, moved onto a campus vacated by the state university’s relocation to Oxford, where the latter became known as Ole Miss (“made famous by William Faulkner and James Meredith,” Himes writes in a typical remark13). Other such facilities were ramshackle aggregations of buildings. Most were rurally located. Himes remembered his father quoting Booker T. Washington on the subject of these schools: “Let down your buckets where you are.”

  Lincoln Institute, founded in 1866 with $6,000 contributed by regiments of Negro volunteers from the Civil War, by 1914 had an enrollment of 435. Benjamin F. Allen’s presidency from 1902 to 1918 brought marked physical improvement, including a central heating system and, in 1908, wiring of all campus buildings for electricity, as well as new emphasis on students’ cultural development. A portrait of the 1912 faculty shows and lists “Joseph S. Himes, blacksmithing.” His annual salary is given as $700. In the Jefferson City Directory this entry appears: “Himes, Joseph S (col Estella B) instructor Lincoln Inst, r 710 Lafayette.”

  Jefferson City at that time had a population of around 15,000 and covered an area just under four square miles, with twenty-three miles of paved streets. A 1904 ordinance set the city speed limit at nine miles an hour. The Jefferson City Post in 1908 wrote of an auto trip from Kansas City to Jefferson City in an astonishingly brief fourteen hours.

  Himes, who was to become the chronicler of America’s great dispossessed, began not in poverty, then, but in a black middle class that few Americans even suspect existed at the time. Joseph Sandy Himes was, by his own standards and those of the community at large, a man of substantial prospects.

  Son of a slave, Joseph Sandy Himes never knew his father’s first name, knew only that he had been bought off the slave block by a man named Heinz or Himes who trained him as a blacksmith. The end of the Civil War found Joseph’s father in his mid-twenties and a father of four. With little real choice, he remained on his former master’s plantation but after a quarrel with an overseer, whom he almost certainly attacked, perhaps killed, he fled, abandoning his first family.

  Second wife Mary, herself an ex-slave from Georgia, bore him five children before dying of consumption. Joseph Sandy, Himes’s father, was the middle child, born in North Carolina, fourteen at the time of Mary’s death. Working at a variety of menial jobs, he put himself through South Carolina’s Claflin College; he may also have attended Boston Mechanical Institute.

  Now he taught metal trades, blacksmithing, and wheelwrighting and was called Professor Himes. At one college he also taught Negro history from texts that Chester wondered about but never saw again. There’s something Hephaestian about descriptions of Joseph: short, broad-shouldered and muscular, barrel chest set squarely on bowed legs. He had dark blue eyes, an ellipsoidal skull, and a large hooked nose that both his wife and son Chester referred to as Arabic. Joseph Sandy seems to have been an artisan of great skill. From The Third Generation:

  He was a fine blacksmith and wheelwright. His students had built some of the best carriages and wagons seen in that city. He could make the most elaborate andirons and coal tongs and gates and lampposts imaginable. He had made jewelry and lamps and dishes from gold and silver. He was an artist at the forge and anvil. There was practically nothing he couldn’t forge from metal.14

  Almost certainly it was Joseph’s ambition that attracted Estelle to him. In all other ways, physically, emotionally, in their background, they were markedly unalike. Himes spoke in later years of his father’s slave mentality, “which accepts the premise that white people knew best,” whereas mother Estelle “hated all manner of condescension from white people.”15 This contrast of attitudes was to establish in Himes networks of ambivalence extending to virtually every facet of his life. Initially, though, Estelle admired Joseph for the distance he had traveled; his by-the-bootstraps edification echoed her own family’s self-elevation through hard work and determination. And, always, Estelle Bomar was a great seer not of what is but of what could be, a woman who, had she read Wallace Stevens, might have adopted “Let be be finale of seem” as her creed. In Joseph Sandy she saw not a simple teacher of practical skills. She saw a future dean, an administrator. Unfortunately Joseph had progressed as far as he was ever likely to go, and Estelle’s relentless pushing for his advancement served only to cause him difficulties with superiors and to open marital rifts that with the years became unbreachable, till finally both he and the marriage broke on that wheel.

  Estelle always felt she’d married beneath her, and in the last analysis believed the Negro colleges themselves demeaning. She was being held back by circumstance, by Joseph’s lack of a resolve to match her own, and if she did not take steps, that same waywardness would claim her sons. Estelle pushed ever harder. “She could make allowances if he were a success.”16 She and Joseph quarreled bitterly again and again, endlessly, as young Chester and his brothers looked on “whimpering and trembling in terror.”17

  “I want my children to look like me,” he muttered.

  “So they can grow up handicapped and despised?”

  “Despised!” His face took on a lowering look. “What do you mean, despised? I suppose you think I’m handicapped and despised?”

  “Aren’t you?” The question startled him. “Can’t you see,” she went on, “I want the children to have it better, not just be common pickaninnies.”

  “Pickaninnies!” Her thoughtless remark cut him to the quick.

  “That’s better than being white men’s leavings.”

  She whitened with fury. It was the second time he’d slurred her parents but this time was all the more hurting because they were dead, and she revered their memory. Striking back, she said witheringly, “You’re nothing but a shanty nigger and never will be anything else. And you would love nothing better than to have my children turn out to be as low and common as yourself.”18

  With the years, giving up on high expectat
ions she’d had for his father, Estelle seems to have transferred those expectations, and ultimately her profound disappointment as well, onto Chester.

  In any account of Himes’s life, it’s at this point—in family recollections, biographical sketches, in Himes’s novel The Third Generation—that Joseph begins to fade away. He moves from one job to another, each a retreat, each a notch or two down on the jack; he ends up doing manual labor, waiting tables, janitoring. Ghetto life in St. Louis and Cleveland completes the rift between parents. The children drift away. With Estelle very near madness, the parents are divorced.

  It’s difficult to assess to what degree Joseph’s defeat arose internally, from lack of willfulness, some failure of will; which from his limited background and always tenuous position as a minimally educated black man in white society; and which from the pride and caprice of wife Estelle. More than once her refusal to mix with other blacks, her insistence upon being treated as though she were white, her confrontations with neighbors, college peers, and shopkeepers, led to a compromise in Joseph’s position, even to loss of a job. Broader social factors were at work here as well. Increased segregation led to fewer opportunities for Negroes to improve their lot, as Estelle’s parents had done, as merchants and in general service to whites. Meanwhile, increasing urbanization, industrialization, and rapidly advancing technology were well on the way to rendering trades such as those Joseph taught obsolete.

  With ongoing, ever more outright marital discord, with the dominolike series of retreats, and finally with his inability to support his family by manual work, all he can attain to after the move North, Joseph’s spirit falters and fails. He becomes the very image of the black man ground down, unable to care for his family. We know from his early history that Joseph once had great resolve. We know that he was a hard worker, a skilled artisan, a dedicated teacher. We know from Chester’s descriptions that Joseph for many years possessed considerable personal dignity and a pride that if not on the gargantuan order of his wife’s was equally manifest. (“Only his wife could make him feel inferior.”19) And with what we know of family dynamics we recognize the emotional balance Joseph must have had, and the emotional expenditures he must have made, continually to counterbalance Estelle’s excesses and bring the family back to an even keel. Finally Joseph seems to have exhausted his personal capital—seems to have been used up. To Estelle, this was proof of what she had suspected all along. God knows she’d done what she could to help this man make something more of himself. All to no avail.

  An octoroon with hazel or gray eyes, aquiline nose, and straight auburn hair, Estelle Bomar looked “like a white woman who had suffered a long siege of illness.”20 Often Estelle seems, from accounts, a woman comprised entirely of adjectives: genteel, churchgoing, cultured, prideful, proper, driven, ambitious. She spoke constantly of their heritage and drilled her sons in the necessity of living up to it while squeezing the bridges of their noses to keep them from becoming flat. If Joseph’s mind shaped itself around coals of accommodation and melioration, then Estelle’s danced over flames of indignation and impatience. In some manner, hers was the ultimate Republican dream: to re-create what never existed. In another, or certainly it must have seemed so to her, she was doing what had to be done—at that time, given that history. Estelle, like her son Chester, possessed a talent for living as though events that had not yet occurred, but that should occur, already had. Chester often seemed to catch on to things twenty or thirty years before anyone else did. Speaking of the Watts riots in the sixties, he remarked how surprising it was that they’d waited so long to happen.

  Look how far we’ve come with our superior blood and breeding, Estelle told her sons in a kind of litany. And it’s true that all three went on to great achievements, even if Chester in later years wrote Carl Van Vechten: “As I look back now, I feel that much of my retardation as a writer has been due to a subconscious (and conscious and deliberate) desire to escape my past. All mixed up no doubt with the Negro’s desire for respectability. It brought a lot of confusion to my mind.”21 This fundamental conflict within himself—of black versus white values, but just as importantly of patrician versus egalitarian—became perhaps the central theme in Himes’s life.

  Estelle’s accounts of her background, of that heritage she held so important, changed with time, elaborated and edited in ways reminiscent of her son’s later memoirs. Any narrative, after all, whether oral history, memoir, or fiction, takes shape from what, among countless possibilities, is chosen: what foregrounded, what passed over quickly. Memory, too, is a kind of storyteller, often more poet than reporter, selecting and rearranging details to correspond to some image we have of ourselves, or simply to make a better story.

  Estelle’s grandmother was born either to an Indian squaw or African princess, depending on when the story was told, and to an Irish overseer. Malinda, Estelle’s mother, light-skinned like herself, grew up to become handservant to a Carolina doctor named Cleveland who traced his own heritage back through a Revolutionary War general to British aristocracy. Despite laws forbidding literacy to slaves, Malinda was taught to read, perhaps by her master’s daughter. Malinda in turn gave birth to three children, two of them quite likely sired by Dr. Cleveland, the third by an Indian slave. Following the Civil War, Malinda married Chester Bomar, “a tall fair white-looking man with a long blond beard,”22 himself the issue of an octoroon and master John Earl Bomar.

  Chester, Malinda, and Malinda’s three children lived in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on land ceded them by Chester’s former master. Chester apprenticed as a brick mason while Malinda worked as a wet nurse and took in washing. Selling their land three years later, using money from the Freedman’s Bureau for transportation, they moved to Dalton, Georgia, where Chester worked as a stonemason. Within two years they relocated again, this time to Atlanta, hoping for steadier work. Chester there fell ill, and upon his recovery the family returned to Spartanburg, bringing with them three new children, Estelle, the youngest, born in February 1874. Chester and son Tom set up as builders, counting among their achievements the region’s first large cotton mills. They worked fiercely, every Bomar pitching in to do his part, pushing past setbacks, persevering, and by 1890 the family was well established in the local Negro bourgeoisie. Chester served his church as deacon, superintendent of the Sunday school and financial adviser.

  This bourgeoisie was a new thing in the world, and like most new things, fragile. Years later Chester Himes would say of fellow black Americans that “The face may be the face of Africa, but the heart has the beat of Wall Street.”23 He would spend much of his life alternately courting and railing against middle-class white values, an exemplar of double consciousness as described by W. E. B. Du Bois,

  this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others … One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.24

  Blacks, Du Bois insists, are forced by reason of their African ancestry to see themselves as second-class citizens, inferior in every way: physically, intellectually, culturally. Having accepting that, then and only then are they allowed the privilege of seeing themselves as American citizens.

  But it’s at just such cultural crossroads, just such stress points, that cracks may reach down to our deepest wells of creativity. Jazz developed in New Orleans because of that city’s uniquely rich cultural gumbo. Thus in The African-American Novel Bernard Bell points out that conflicts between black culture and white society led to crippling destructive tensions, as well as to intensely creative ones, in black people and their communities—as they did in Chester Himes himself. It’s difficult, of course, to elicit one from the other, to assess how these opposing forces counterbalance; to say, for instance, to what degree the creative response to the destructive is that and only that. To some extent jazz developed as a continuation of banned African drums, but also as a subv
ersion of the white society’s music. Recent critics such as Houston Baker (Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory) argue for the roots of African-American literature in blues, which wasn’t a way of immersing yourself in your troubles, as Joe Williams once remarked, but a way of getting outside them. Others such as Henry Louis Gates (The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism) hold out for signifying, an African language art that foregrounds ironic and parodic rhetorical elements, dissembling’s first cousin.

  The creative thrust, then, may be simply a reflexive response to the destructive; it may be an attempt to distance oneself from that destructive element, to hold it at arm’s length, as in dissembling and signifying; or it may strive to purge the destructive through catharsis. In Himes at various points, sometimes in the same work, even the same sentence, we see all three motives at work. He was a man of unresolvable tensions and contradictions, a man whose greatest strengths—as a writer—lay precisely where those conflicts remain manifest and unresolved.

  Unlike her son, Estelle Bomar Himes kept well hidden any conflicts or second thoughts she may have entertained concerning the new bourgeoisie. Early piano lessons earned her a place at what was then the South’s most elite school for young black women, Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina. Following graduation “by virtue of her literary attainments and good moral behavior,”25 she stayed on for two years as a teacher, though apparently taking time off for further study at the Philadelphia branch of the New England Conservatory of Music. Both her social status and religious upbringing fueled what was essentially a missionary zeal: she felt it her duty to spread the good word, to help in uplifting the more unfortunate of her race. Estelle pursued that duty in North and South Carolina public schools, the North Carolina School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, and at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In 1901, age twenty-seven, she married Joseph Sandy Himes.