Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Journalist Bomar was also a master mason who had lain the corner stone of the town’s courthouse. He passed on the trade to his servant, and by the end of the 1850s Elias had become a skilled mason. Then came the century’s and the nation’s defining crisis, the Civil War. Genteel slaveholder that he may have been, Bomar gathered together local men into the Holcombe Legion and was elected captain of Company C. Groom Elias Bomar, tall, “white looking,” and with “a long blond beard,” accompanied his master to war. The Holcombe Legion participated in optimistic skirmishes in early March 1862, where individual valor seemed important. By June, however, immediately after the Battle of Seven Pines, it had become immersed in the massive slaughter for which the Civil War was to be known, the inauguration of horrifying modern warfare. After only a few months the Confederate army discharged John Earle Bomar because of ill health, and he returned home with Elias while his unit fought on until Appomattox. By 1864, even Spartanburg natives were dismayed by the bedraggled Holcombe Legion, saying that it was “seldom” to find “a worse heart-broken, low-spirited, set of chaps.”

  After the end of the Civil War, Elias and Malinda decided, like many freedmen, to marry and make their emancipation genuine by leaving South Carolina. The Bomars tried Dalton, Georgia, a town still “vivid” in “devastation wrought by war,” and thus needed to have all of its brick buildings rebuilt or repaired. By 1871 Elias had prospered enough to pay $125 for a lot to build a house on E. Morris Street near the railroad. Estelle, her mother’s seventh child, was born on February 23, 1874. Her birth occurred as her own family fortunes sank, forcing them to sell their home at a loss and become renters in the “Gate City”—Atlanta—where Malinda had to take in wash. But Estelle would carry only sketchy memories of her Georgia girlhood. Her family left their Atlanta residence on Foundry Street when her father’s health was broken by consumption (the term used then for tuberculosis), and by 1878 the Bomars had returned to Spartanburg, the place Estelle thought of as home.

  When the Bomars returned to Spartanburg, Elias’s brother Charles was prospering as a grocer, an undertaker, a realtor, and a landlord. Both Bomar brothers got in on the ground floor of the spurting Spartanburg economy before the end of the 1870s. On November 15, 1878, O. P. Earle, serving as the executor for Elias’s former owner Theron Earle, accepted $103 from Elias and Charles for 5½ acres of land on the “Gap” road off Howard Street, about two miles west of downtown. The brothers built houses in the shadow of the construction of the gigantic Spartan Mills cotton factory, the largest cotton mill of its kind in the South. Elias and his son and stepsons helped to construct the sprawling cotton warehouses and tenements for workers and profit as landowners putting up houses to rent. Soon the Bomars could claim membership in Spartanburg’s African American bourgeoisie: teachers, clergy, builders, merchants, two doctors, and one journalist.

  Estelle’s brother Thomas genuinely flourished, securing contracts to erect many of Spartanburg’s downtown brick buildings. A gifted architect, a meticulous craftsman and a swift deal maker, he purchased multiple shares of stock in the leading companies he saw popping up around him, like the Spartanburg Savings Bank and the Saxon Mills cotton manufacturer. Thomas would eventually own twenty-seven shares of stock in the Spartan Mills manufacturing campus. The only nonwhite man elected to the town council, Thomas was Spartanburg’s principal black citizen.

  Perhaps because of ill health, Elias Bomar became increasingly devout. He claimed a founding membership at the Westminster Presbyterian Church, a single-story gable-roofed wooden building just north of the courthouse square. The white Bomars were Baptists, but not their ex-slaves. The Presbyterians were known for fair dealings with blacks and setting up schools for freedmen. Thus the Bomar girls were sent and dutifully thrived at the Presbyterian college for black women, Scotia Seminary, in Concord, North Carolina, about one hundred miles northeast on the rail line. A school of three hundred students and twenty teachers founded in 1867, Scotia’s catalogs carried the slogan of its New England mission: “We must make this institution the Mount Holyoke for the African people.” Scotia offered two tracks: a four-year grammar program, including English, arithmetic, algebra, geography, science, history, and literature; and a three-year normal and scientific program, including geometry, astronomy, physics, chemistry, history, Latin, and rhetoric. The industrial department taught cooking and sewing, but for its era Scotia offered a strong liberal arts curriculum. Cultured refinement, appropriate diction, dress and manners were emphasized as strenuously as the course work. Music teachers like Ida Cathcart not only taught the piano but also provided poorer students with shoes and undergarments.

  In the nineteenth century the administration of black education after grade school was exclusively white, but at Scotia the school faculty was racially mixed. Despite the fact that there were not many black Presbyterians, the church always had a large number—three-fifths—of black teachers at their schools and a few had graduated from liberal arts colleges like Oberlin. The president of the school during most of the years that the Bomar girls attended was David Junkin Satterfield, a Princeton alumnus. Satterfield tried to bridge the racial divide, disdaining to use the common logic that segregated the races into “you people” and the white majority. He was also a severe theology teacher who demanded that the young women “know the Book from cover to cover and their Catechism word for word.” Estelle admired him and specialized in music.

  Estelle’s older sister, Hattie, achieved early success and became a young member of the Scotia faculty in the 1890s. Teenagers like future college founder and U.S. presidential adviser Mary McLeod (later Bethune), brimming with pluck and ambition, but straight from the South Carolina cotton rows, stood in awe of Hattie Bomar. McLeod, who graduated a year before Estelle, explained that Hattie Bomar “gave me my very first vision of the culture and ability of Negro women.” Like some of the other girls, McLeod had never before met young black women who combined the qualities of erudition, cultural refinement, and chastity, or had eaten at a table set with linen and flatware.

  Naturally the conspicuous refinement served a very practical purpose: it was impossible to be further from the cotton furrow, the musky animals, the huts with dirt floors, the offal, and the households with children who shared no common paternal ancestry. Even liberals from the North, like Harvard educator Albert Bushnell Hart, who toured North Carolina in the 1890s, were dismissive of “the greater part of the [Negro] race,” living in a “nether world of great ignorance and greater degradation.” Hart did more than just describe conditions; he passed a judgment. “The long continuance of slavery is not wholly responsible for this degradation,” he suggested, advancing a view shared by many whites, “it is a defect in the character of the race.” The Scotia women felt personally bound to disprove him. McLeod’s elegant manners and Estelle Bomar’s competent Chopin études and sonnet writing, as well as the gourmet aestheticism that the school cultivated, strode against the “nether world.”

  Inspired with commitment after her education, Mary McLeod decided to become a missionary and go to Africa; Estelle was content, like her older sister, Hattie, to continue teaching the children of freedmen. Although Estelle spent a couple of summers in the 1890s receiving musical training in Philadelphia, she readied herself to become a public school teacher in Spartanburg. By the time she was seventeen she earned a first-class certificate on her teaching exam, placing second (behind a Scotia upperclasswoman), and was on her way to professional standing. For several years in the 1890s Estelle divided her time between Spartanburg schools and working at Scotia, alongside Hattie. The center of black education in Spartanburg was the graded school on 239 North Dean Street, headed in 1891 by principal C. C. Scott and later in the decade by R. M. Alexander. At the Dean Street School, the Bomar girls began their teaching careers.

  The man Estelle would marry, Joseph Sandy Himes, was born on February 2, in 1873 or 1874, in the middle of Georgia, near Tennille, his father’s birthplace. He spent his adolescenc
e in Newberry, South Carolina, some forty miles southeast of Spartanburg. He and Estelle had a great deal in common, beginning with the fact that both of them were born in Georgia but raised in relative prosperity in South Carolina’s Up Country. Black people in the highlands had known hard slavery, but theirs was not the total slave society of the low-lying rice-cultivation country in the coastal areas around Charleston. Newberry was a prosperous, stylish village, with federal-style brick buildings lining the downtown along Pratt Street between the Newberry Opera House and College Street, an attractiveness that later earned it the designation as America’s “most charming” small town.

  Joseph had grown up the fourth child of a blacksmith also named Joseph Sandy Himes, known for the first half of his life as Sandy Neely. His mother was Anna Robinson Himes and she may have grown up on the farm of the Washington County, Georgia, planter Samuel Robinson. Sandy Neely was almost certainly enslaved nearby. Down the road from the Robinson place lived Elizabeth Hines, who in 1860 owned several men in their twenties and a large farm. Better known than Elizabeth though was the most noted farmer in antebellum Washington County and the owner of the celebrated Whitehall Plantation, Joseph Henry Hines. This line of the Hines name in Georgia had originated with a 1650 Virginia immigrant named John William Hines, who came from Londonderry, Ireland. The original name there was O’Heyne, or O’hEidhin. The Hines name was connected to remarkable wealth in Tennille and surrounding Washington County. Strong Southern accents parsed little distinction between “Hines” and “Himes,” and for years Chester and his father would have their surnames spelled either way on official records.

  Born around 1847, Sandy Neely was rather admired himself. Rumored to have had an “ungovernable temper,” he was thought to have killed an overseer after slavery had ended, the sort of violent, racially charged event that was not uncommon among the fifteen thousand citizens of Washington County, where blacks outnumbered whites. But Sandy Neely was known better for his prominence at the forge; he was the unusual skilled freedman with a business large enough to employ fellow blacks. In 1874, he ran a carriage-making and blacksmithing shop in Tennille, and he owned personal goods worth almost two hundred dollars. Whites in the town accorded him the sort of respect that they denied virtually all other black Americans. Continuing in the spirit of slavery, the postbellum Washington County tax lists were segregated by race and enumerated freedmen under the names of their employers, in a separate register at the end of the district account. Neely was the only African American in the county registered under his own name.

  Once he left Tennille and switched his name to be nearly the same as the most prominent man he had come across, Joseph Sandy Himes settled in Newberry, South Carolina in 1880, and, along with his thirty-three-year-old wife, was the parent of six children. Thirteen-year-old Leah was oldest. She excelled at school and would go on to study at Hampton Institute in Virginia, perhaps the most famous school for freedmen in the South. Thomas was eleven, Bennie nine, Sandy seven, Wesley five, and Andrew only a year. All but Andrew had been born in Georgia.

  The Himeses lived in a section of Newberry with shops and Negro tenements called Amasoka, close to the railroad line, where merchants, the railroad supervisor, machinists, laborers, and cooks kept busy in wooden stores clustered together on Caldwell Avenue. Newberry provided a singular advantage to African Americans: nearby to Amasoka was the Hoge School for freedmen. Even five-year-old Wesley was enrolled for study, the great fulfillment of the promise of emancipation. In the middle of September 1885, mother Anna Himes died, and Joseph married again, to a woman named Mary. They had a child named Fannie in 1886.

  Not four years after Fannie’s birth, on February 29, 1890, Sandy died, leaving his large family the mechanics shop and half-acre parcel of land by Vincent Street. By then, the “well known and highly honored” Himeses could boast of Leah, who had graduated from Hampton, earned a first-grade South Carolina teaching certificate, and taught school in Newberry. On February 4, 1891, a diminutive and shy Leah married a schoolteacher named Rodney Moon. Moon was from just beyond the city limits in Mendenhall, and he had stayed in state for his education, attending Claflin University. In the fall of 1890, it had been to Claflin too, that Leah’s bright younger brother Joseph Sandy Himes went.

  Short, pigeon-toed, dark-skinned and blue-eyed, and called Sandy like his father, Joseph Sandy Himes entered the first-year normal school class in blacksmithing in 1890 at Claflin University, in Orangeburg, eighty miles southeast of Newberry. The school carried the name of an abolitionist governor of Massachusetts. Young Sandy possessed the qualities necessary for admission to the Claflin normal department—“a good moral character” and the ability “to read and write well.” He faced the world without great means, but with a confidence that endeared him to men and women alike. His son would describe him as a “magnificent actor,” who could “dissemble” and “pose” “with validity.” Joseph and his sister Leah would become the best educated and the most distinguished of their family, leading very different lives and affording their children vastly different opportunities than could their brothers and one other sister, who spent their lives as hotel waiters, porters, and hairdressers. Joseph’s matriculation to college must have fulfilled a dream of his slave-born father. The son belonged to a generation who would turn a handcraft into a white-collar job.

  Nearly one hundred other sons of freedmen joined Joseph at Claflin in the field that he had first learned at the Vincent Street shop. Claflin was “fully committed to Industrial Education” and made the promise demonstrative. Shortly before Joseph arrived at the school gates, a new large blacksmith shop had been completed, and steam fans drove eight billowing forges. There were even courses in steam engineering. Claflin boasted impressive young men, like recent blacksmithing graduate and teaching assistant Wilson Cooke, who spent summers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on to design buildings for the federal government. Cooke was living proof that, followed as one track, the industrial arts were gateways to professions like engineering and architecture.

  At Claflin Joseph witnessed the sharp tensions and occasional, violent conflicts over the direction of black schools. White Claflin professors sometimes directly attacked their black colleagues. Students resented bigoted white professors and they resisted the mounting Jim Crow protocols emerging in the South. But even while he acknowledged the right to black self-determination, white founding school president Lorenzo Dutton derided the leadership ability of the poor children of ex-slaves: “not one in 1,000 has enough executive ability to manage the concerns of his own household successfully.” Unlike many of the students who had known only rural hardship, Joseph put his years in his father’s shop to use and succeeded admirably well. He finished the three-year course in blacksmithing and mechanical drawing with marks good enough to land a job at Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth in Savannah. Starting in 1893, he taught a standard curriculum on how to design, care for, and use a blacksmith forge, to file, chip, and anneal metal, and to make tools.

  Its ornate public squares of English-style gardens made the port city of Savannah one of the most attractive destinations in Georgia and, until nearly 1880, the state’s most densely populated town. Cosmopolitan and richer than the South Carolina Up Country, it had liberal origins as a debtors’ colony that had outlawed slavery. Savannah was home to a population that included several comfortable and well-educated African Americans. At the turn of the century, more than 28,000 of Savannah’s 55,268 residents were African American. Much of their optimism centered on the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth.

  Set on an eighty-one-acre farm, Georgia State Industrial had been founded in 1891 as a result of an 1890 amendment to the Morrill Act, which had created the land-grant colleges in the United States in the 1860s. That amendment required states to make provisions for Negro Americans. The school had gotten under way with four professors and forty students, most of the instruction and living occurring, at first, in Bo
ggs Hall, an old plantation mansion. Parsons Hall, the dormitory for students, had been erected with money from the sale of the last gang of African captives sold into Georgia in 1859. In 1896 the school opened Meldrim Hall, a two-story wooden-frame industrial arts building, with an eight-hundred-seat chapel on the second floor, a building put up with Joseph Himes’s help.

  The college was led by erudite Richard R. Wright, who became one of the paramount black educators of his generation. When the one-armed Union general Oliver Otis Howard, later Freedman’s Bureau head and founder of Howard University, had stopped in Atlanta to meet with Georgia freedmen and asked a crowd of begrimed ex-slaves what message to carry to the North about their condition, an illiterate twelve-year-old Wright had sturdily replied, “Massa, tell ’em we are rising.” He lived up to his legendary reply by graduating from Atlanta University as valedictorian in its first college class, and was known far and wide as “We’se a-risin Wright.”