To win that achievement Wright had become an expert classicist and Francophile and he stocked his library with books emphasizing the African role in the life of the mind and the creation of art. Thus for Joseph Himes, boarding at the school was another kind of education. Few blacks had ever seen as many books before dealing with the black condition (Claflin’s library held fourteen hundred volumes). In the college president’s personal collection were “huge encyclopedias—Britannica, Chambers’s; reference books; Bible commentaries; groups of books on the history of the nations, of religion, of philosophy; books on economics, politics, etc. and every available book written by a Negro-American.” Among Wright’s prized volumes was the abolitionist work An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes. Written by Henri Gregoire, a prominent French philosopher who’d corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, the translation presented the lives of distinguished blacks in science and the arts in order to dispute claims of racial inferiority. In Boggs Hall—where the president, his family, and college faculty (including Joseph) lived—the discussion regularly centered on Hebrew and Greek literature, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, and other favorites of Wright’s. Accordingly, Joseph built a library resembling the president’s.
But what the black teachers learned about African contributions to the world could not stave off the mounting pressure of racism. At the commencement exercises, the white school commissioner and Savannah mayor Peter Meldrim would have no problem telling the black crowd, “I do not believe in educating you people to want things you can never get. We must educate the Niggra to be the best possible Niggra and not a bad imitation of a white man.” To effect his prescription for a caste society where blacks would not reasonably aspire to citizenship, Meldrim spied on faculty and students at the school, getting reports on their conversations from the black groundskeeper—who, although uneducated, openly aspired to become the college president. The students and the faculty who recognized the liberal arts curriculum as the most direct route for the black elite to gain parity with whites found themselves in opposition to instructors who were beholden to the state legislature for the wherewithal to keep the college open. Ten years earlier it had been different. At Claflin commencement, speakers like African Methodist Episcopal Bishop William Arnett had encouraged the students to resist by every means, including their feet. “Get up and go!” he had exhorted, spurring westward migration. “Go, take your family with you.” Not willing to become western “exodusters” yet, Joseph and his friends had thrown themselves into work that proved or developed their competence, trying to balance what the black editor and novelist Pauline Hopkins called the “contending forces.”
By 1900, when he was still in his twenties, Joseph Himes was elevated from his position as instructor of blacksmithing to director of the industrial department, which contained agriculture, wheelwrighting, mechanical drawing, blacksmithing, carpentry, shoemaking, bricklaying, and painting. He reorganized the unit into two branches, one of manual training and the other of trades. The promotion showed Wright’s faith and Joseph’s ability to mount the administrative ladder. While the black intelligentsia strategized to combat Jim Crow, Joseph added a practical dimension to his classroom work. He ran a commercial blacksmithing and wheelwrighting shop at 309 Hall Street, specializing in horseshoeing and probably joined with his friend E. D. Bulkley in the National Negro Business League. With his higher salary and managerial self-confidence, he felt ready to consider marriage.
His colleague, masonry department chief Lewis B. Thompson, married President Wright’s daughter Essie, securing his future. Joseph turned his attention to the young Bomar women of Spartanburg, first courting Gertrude Bomar before focusing his attention on her older sister Estelle. For her part, Estelle was old enough to fear being left behind by her married sisters. She had lived and worked in Spartanburg for half a dozen years and she liked that Savannah was a well-groomed small city boasting a prominent educational institution. She saw in Joseph a young department head who could reasonably expect future leadership roles of greater importance.
And he appealed to her mildly baroque sensibility. He courted her with devotion and romanticism, bringing her fresh-cut flowers and other touches of refined grace. Estelle visited Joseph for “Violet Teas,” garden parties, and the “Yellow Buffet.” The faculty entertained the young couple lavishly, and soon Estelle and Joseph were engaged. An amenable Joseph spent Christmas 1900 with the Bomar family in Spartanburg and in his rich baritone voice he spun dreams of even more dramatic success and distinction in the years ahead.
Estelle and Joseph married on June 27, 1901, at Westminster Church in Spartanburg. Reverend Satterfield from Scotia had even agreed to perform the ceremony for a young lady who had been a distinguished pupil. That kind of symbolism for the new segregated American century was extraordinary: a white minister and college president marrying two Negroes and then socializing with them afterward. But, at the eleventh hour, Satterfield canceled his appearance and Westminster’s regular pastor, Hydar Stinson, administered the vows. Gertrude Bomar was maid of honor and Dr. E. D. Bulkley, who lived in New York, served as best man. Estelle had the church decorated in ferns and more extravagant flowers, and after the ceremony the “popular” young couple returned to the Gap Road house for an “elaborate reception” that included musical selections and refreshments. They stayed in Spartanburg until September, when school started. The Himeses soon started a family. Surrounded by family and friends at her mother’s house back in Spartanburg, Estelle delivered a healthy boy named Edward on May 26, 1902. When Estelle returned to Savannah, Joseph’s baby sister, Fannie, came to live with them to help care for Edward and keep house.
The newlyweds pressed ahead but the atmosphere in Georgia became ever more difficult. Mayor Meldrim hobbled the college’s liberal arts curriculum, trying to eliminate Latin, Greek, and calculus. The tools for imagining a world beyond, for abstraction, for uncovering sources, would be withheld. The students resisted strongly, and white visitors to the campus were greeted with deep suspicion.
Not surprisingly, there was a radical streak among the blacks in town, spearheaded by the college faculty and called the Savannah Sunday Men’s Club, a debate forum with a strong civil rights agenda that met at the Masonic Hall. The club, founded by Monroe N. Work, a University of Chicago MA and a researcher assisting W. E. B. Du Bois in his case studies at Atlanta University, was an explicit offshoot of the Niagara Movement, which would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It is likely that Joseph attended the meetings, as did his intellectual colleagues like mathematician Emanuel W. Houston. Monroe Work would go on to more lasting fame as the leader of his own studies on African Americans at Tuskegee. An adept journalist, Houston galvanized support to criticize the politically apathetic well-to-do members of Savannah’s black community in his Savannah Tribune columns under the pseudonym “Nuff-Sed.”
In October 1904, Estelle’s brother Thomas Bomar died unexpectedly, leaving a large estate. Thomas and his wife, Carrie, did not have any children and the estate was divided by his wife and siblings into equal shares. In November the court granted Estelle one-tenth, $752.04, or roughly $44,700 in 2015 dollars. When summonsed by the state, she signed her name “Estelle Hymes,” the only document carrying this spelling of the name, and perhaps indicating that she did not wish her husband, in business on his own, to have ready access to the money.
Around this time, the harmonious early seasons of their marriage had ended; Estelle and Joseph were beginning cycles of deep marital discord. It may have had to do with the fact that Joseph’s ascent had stalled. He had reached thirty and seemed content. The next step up for Joseph would have been joining the faculty at a larger school, such as Tuskegee or Hampton. His shop in downtown Savannah may have been one of their early conflicts. Estelle hoped that Joseph would find less satisfaction in the anvil in favor of administrative duties. Instead, he wanted to have his
own business and to take satisfaction in horseshoeing, “promptly and satisfactorily done.”
The state’s climate curdled too. In spite of a comforting visit from national hero Booker T. Washington to deliver the Georgia State Industrial commencement address in 1905, the year 1906 saw even more of the “ignorant and narrow-minded” discord that Washington had railed against. Candidate Hoke Smith ran for the Georgia statehouse on a “reform” movement ticket, which proposed regulations excluding blacks from politics and proscribing interracial social contact. The movement swept Georgia and culminated in cruelties against blacks in Atlanta in September 1906. During the violence, marauding white mobs scoured the downtown Five Points intersection, Brownsville, and the Fourth Ward, and “chased negroes, stoned and shot them to death, and boarded trolley cars, snatching off negroes and beat them to death with clubs and sticks.” At least twenty-five African Americans lost their lives. Estelle was familiar with the neighborhoods that had been attacked. Wholesale racial murder also demanded that people like Estelle who could pass for white pick sides with their family, neighbors, and friends who bore the brunt of the mob enmity. Future NAACP secretary Walter White, who became famous and beloved because he used his white appearance to investigate lynchings, was barely a teenager but had to shoulder a rifle during the riot to help protect his family.
In Savannah racial oppression was not as lethal but it was comprehensive nonetheless. The new laws were sure to pique a sensitive and intelligent woman like Estelle, whose marriage to a dark brown-skinned man away from where she was raised was taking on complications. The local board of education began requiring teachers to use a racially derogatory paraphrase of the song “Dixie” during regular classroom recitals, blacks were fined for “jeering” at whites, and could be expelled from the courthouse for sitting in “white folk’s seat.” A Jim Crow law officially passed in Savannah on September 12, 1906, segregating the streetcars, and introducing a series of insulting signs there, with chains stretching across the car to reserve a portion for whites. Black Savannah citizens boycotted the trolley cars, walking and taking buckboards and hacks driven by blacks wherever they needed to go. But the clock’s hands were turning backward. Nationally, President Theodore Roosevelt summarily dismissed, without so much as an investigation and against the advice of Booker T. Washington, three companies of black troops for defending fellow soldiers set upon by white civilians in Brownsville, Texas.
The college teachers insulated themselves where they could, but among many of them, particularly the Savannah Sunday Club members, the commitment to resistance was strong. R. E. Cobb, a mathematics professor, ran afoul of white sentiment on a streetcar when he dodged out of the way of an elderly white passenger who tried to “correct” him with a cane. Cobb was chased by a mob to the campus and his life threatened; it took soothing efforts by Wright, white patron Meldrim, and the Savannah sheriff to prevent an angry crowd from dragging him by the neck from the school grounds. At his trial, the sheriff tried to get Cobb to plea-bargain to a year on chain gang. A white attorney won the black academic’s freedom by arguing that “the Negro was emotional and like a beast was not controlled by reason,” and having Cobb pay a $250 fine. In Augusta, white mobs killed blacks for attempting to defend themselves after being attacked and beaten. Accepting the exodusters’ counsel from the 1880s, black Americans began talking up migration to the west. Missouri, alongside Kansas and Oklahoma at the turn of the century, seemed a potential western refuge for blacks leaving the traditional cotton belt and its thickening climate of hate.
Joseph’s buddy the competently trained classicist Benjamin F. Allen had already anticipated the ugliness of twentieth-century Savannah in the wake of the Atlanta riot and left. Previously, he had graduated from Atlanta University (as a classmate of the poet James Weldon Johnson) in 1894, and taken a job at Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri, as a professor of ancient languages. Allen had extensive interests in psychology and ethics and held a doctorate of law degree. An impeccably dressed, well-fed, light-complexioned man, with an imposing mustache that set off his completely bald head, Allen swaggered around his campus staring through a pincenez. In the fall of 1902 Allen returned to Lincoln to take the helm as the school president.
Joseph had gotten the chance to know Allen during the spring semester of the 1902 academic year. The men socialized and had parties, which were noticed in the press together in the company of Joseph’s dentist friend Bulkley, other faculty, and President Wright. Perhaps responding to anxious feelers sent out by his old comrade, on August 27, 1907, Allen got his trustee board to authorize the post “blacksmith in the industrial department” for Joseph. The pay was seventy dollars per month.
Grasping after the possibility of better times, Joseph took his wife and son to the capital of the Gateway State. The move out west to their own white house, to a place where they already had friends—away from Estelle’s family and away from Georgia, where black opportunity was more and more choked off—probably helped restore the marriage. Estelle delivered another son on August 4, 1908, and in what seems a conciliatory gesture on Estelle’s part to her husband, they agreed to name him Joseph Sandy. After Estelle successfully delivered Joseph Jr., she probably did not imagine that she would conceive again quickly. But ten weeks later, sometime in October 1908, thirty-four-year-old Estelle Himes was pregnant.
Chester’s earliest years took place on a campus of 535 students enrolled mainly in the secondary and the lower schools. If Joseph’s new school did not have the strongest college preparatory curriculum of the black institutions, it had a particular claim for pride. Black Civil War veterans of the Sixty-Second and Sixty-Fifth Regiments of the United States Colored Troops had founded the Lincoln Institute in 1866. In the months after the war the ex-slaves turned fighting men had managed to equip a permanent school to educate other Missouri freed people. At Lincoln, named after the Great Emancipator, the “fundamental idea shall be to combine study with labor, so that the old habits of those who have always labored, but never studied, shall not be thereby changed and that the emancipated slaves, who have neither capital to spend nor time to lose, may obtain an education.” By 1879 the state had taken over Lincoln in an effort to develop a normal school to train qualified teachers. The school’s inaugural president was Inman Page, the first African American to graduate from Brown University. A true exoduster, Page served twice as Lincoln’s president and went on to found secondary schools with strong liberal arts curriculums in Missouri and Oklahoma.
The impressive brick buildings on Lincoln’s campus outshone the world that the Himeses had been most intimately familiar with before. Twenty broad limestone steps led to the main arched entranceway of redbrick, castlelike Memorial Hall, Lincoln’s administrative and main building. The young men’s dormitory and Barnes-Krekel Hall, a twelve-classroom building, followed a similar splendid pattern. President Allen occupied an ornate, three-story Queen Anne style brick mansion. Estelle’s father had been a mason and she had seen buildings going up all of her life, but Lincoln’s cathedralesque brick marvels were of another scale.
It was the industrial curriculum in tailoring, shoemaking, carpentry, wood turning, machinery and blacksmithing that took up the majority of the faculty lines and school resources. Housed in four-story Chinn Hall, the artisan departments had a major practical significance: they enabled the institution to be self-sufficient and literally sustained the physical structure of school life. These teachers and their students designed and built the buildings, grew much of the food, sewed the clothes, and made the shoes. The black “college” was really a full-service, all-black town.
Joseph must have felt a certain fulfillment by 1910. He was father to three healthy sons, husband in a renewed marriage, and blacksmith of good reputation in Lincoln and Jefferson City. He had a modern, whitewashed brick shop to work in, with built-in ventilation, giant metal exhausts over the forges and bellows, and enormous floor-to-ceiling bands to run the grinders they used to shape the met
al. An “artist at the forge,” Joseph Himes was now highly skilled. He crafted Christmas toys that were the envy of the neighborhood and superior to any from a catalog or town craft shop: little replica wagons with spoke wheels and iron tires and springboard seats, miniature garden tools and sleds with iron runners. Joseph Himes was, at heart, a contented and modest artisan.
Estelle was not so easily satisfied. Her ambition for a world of refinement and equal rights was similar to the vision of another black woman she knew at Lincoln. Between 1906 and 1910 the most prestigious figure on campus was the slave-born celebrity academic Anna Julia Cooper. A veteran classicist pushed out of the principalship of the M Street High School in Washington, D.C., Cooper was an articulate advocate of the liberal arts and she spoke regularly at festivals and academic and religious institutions in Missouri. Estelle had probably had exposure to Latin at Scotia, but not even Georgia Industrial’s erudite Richard R. Wright would have rivaled the scope of a commanding intellectual like Cooper, a graduate of Oberlin College. Like many of her privileged peers, Cooper worked strenuously to include black people in a vision of grand American possibility. She echoed Theodore Roosevelt when she argued that “fresh and vigorous” American society was “synonymous with all that is progressive, elevating and inspiring.” When it came to “modern civilization,” Cooper approved of the “European bud and the American flower.”
If the romance of Anglo-Saxon imperialism seems odd a century later, Cooper presumed to include African Americans within the narrative of American exceptionalism in a more forceful manner than Booker T. Washington was then doing. She argued in her speeches that a uniquely valuable destiny was at hand for blacks in North America. “Here in America,” she predicted to her audiences, “is the arena in which the next triumph of civilization is to be won.” While at Lincoln, in between mounting scenes from the Aeneid that depicted Dido Queen of Carthage, prepping the Olive Branch female debate society, the Ruskin Literary Society and the Shakespeare Club, Cooper patrolled the dormitories and tried to inculcate students with “the vivifying touch of ideas and ideals.”
Chester B. Himes Page 3
