Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  More feisty than disconsolate, Estelle used her writing to bring Lorman up to her standard. She proved to the small faculty her view on class and bearing in a way that made her husband proud. By 1918 Estelle had written “Alcorn Ode,” a celebratory poem that remains the school song.

  Beneath the shade of giant trees,

  Fanned by a balmy southern breeze,

  Thy classic walls have dared to stand—

  A giant thou in learning’s band;

  O, Alcorn dear, our mother, hear

  Thy name we praise, thy name we sing

  Thy name thy sons have honored far;

  A crown of gems thy daughters are;

  When country called, her flag to bear,

  The Gold and Purple answered, “Here.”

  O, Alcorn dear, our mother, hear

  Thy name we praise, thy name we sing

  Far as our race thy claim shall need—

  So far to progress thou shalt lead

  Thy sons, with clashing arms of trades

  In useful arts, full garbed, thy maids;

  O, Alcorn dear, we proudly bear

  Thy standard on to victory.

  “These were the moments he lived for,” Chester later wrote about his father, married to a woman who, when she chose, was quite capable of impressing President Rowan and the college-educated faculty.

  Estelle’s ode reinforced the patriotic ethos of Anna J. Cooper and seems to have echoed the popular July 1918 editorial in The Crisis written by W. E. B. Du Bois. “Forget our special grievances,” was Du Bois’s famous counsel, “and close ranks with our own fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.” Closing ranks was not easy. In theory at least, Alcorn faculty would be dismissed for reading northern periodicals like The Crisis that engaged the race question. But the Du Bois lines showed that even the professionally radical were patriotic during that peak summer of American involvement in the war in France. Military necessity aside, in composing her poem Estelle managed to champion her husband’s craft in the phrases “clashing arms of trades” and “useful arts,” and she included her particular embarrassment in Mississippi, her hope that the “maids” would be “full garbed.”

  One dramatic incident of rural shamelessness concerned Estelle. The Himeses paid a Sunday visit to a student’s family in the Delta and attended a country church there. At the climax of the sermon, while singing and dancing, women did more than bare just their souls to God. Chester wrote the scene down in The Third Generation.

  Women were standing in the pews, eyes glazed, tearing the riotous colored clothes from their strong dark bodies, shouting to their God.

  “Ah is pure. Look on me, God. Ah is pure.”

  Raising strong black arms to heaven, full black breasts lifting, buxom black bodies tautening, their shocking black buttocks bare as at birth.

  Believing the naked expressions of religious frenzy inappropriate, Estelle reacted with more than distaste and hustled her sons out of the church.

  To keep her youngest away from other children who came to Alcorn straight from the wooden shacks that were the area’s version of primary schools and the raw version of black Christianity that emphasized passion without restraint and propriety, Estelle Himes invested a great deal of energy in teaching her young boys at home. With the exception of the Haines year, she instructed them personally from about 1914 to 1922, carrying over her Scotia liberal arts preparation, and imparting “high levels of expectation” in the process. But Estelle’s declaration of the unfitness of the local public schools for blacks caused her to cloister Joe and Chester. She discouraged play even with the children of faculty. Instead of gaining friends and a peer group, Chester would rely upon his mother and father, but especially his brother. “We were a small, close-knit family,” Joseph Jr. later recalled, and the central activity of that unit was reading. Chester saw the home library as a place of “security and happiness.”

  At Christmas, Estelle wrote original stories for her boys. She strongly encouraged reading but also would have to discipline precocious Chester, who was always overstepping well-known family rules. When Chester was reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” he exclaimed the word “damn” in the living room where his family sat, each engrossed in a book or magazine. Of course this deed required punishment. Estelle also put her musical training to use, insisting that the boys hear “good” music, and she played the piano for their education, for entertainment, and to overcome her own isolation. Chester loved to hear her at the piano for hours at a time playing Chopin’s “Fantaisie Impromptu” and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” The Himeses bought a phonograph and spun 78-rpm recordings of Enrico Caruso, Fritz Kreisler, and John Philip Sousa. Chester loved Caruso’s arias and Kreisler’s version of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” but when his mother played Sousa’s version of the second act of Verdi’s Il Trovatore—“The Anvil Chorus”—she brought the house down. During the climactic moment when the chorus chants the lyrics “Chi del gitano i giorni abbella? La zingarella,” Chester and Joseph Jr. shouted and hammered in accompaniment with the percussion players.

  Estelle’s deliberate efforts to make Verdi counteract the nude church amazons and to prevent the consumption of the chitterlings that her husband loved, had a hand in dismantling what she was fighting to keep together: her marriage. Increasingly she seemed inclined to push outward into the world, whatever the cost. In her early forties, she began to resist the protocols of racial segregation. Estelle instructed her small sons in a kind of catechism that she imagined as her most powerful safeguard against the low self-esteem and low expectations that Jim Crow ingrained. “You mustn’t think of yourself as colored,” she told Joe and Chester with a spooky intensity. “Your mother is as white as anyone. You both have white blood—fine white blood—in your veins. And never forget it.” Her recitation of the creed of mixed bloodlines seems to have begun around the time that Eddie, her eldest son, entered the junior preparatory class at Alcorn in 1915. Her earnest sincerity must have struck the boys as poignant, but over time her children found the claims uncomfortable and bizarre.

  Edward was on the verge of leaving the family, and he would, of the three sons, accept the least direction from his mother. By the fall of 1920, he had begun the college preparatory curriculum at Atlanta University. But his years at Alcorn did not stand him well. He returned to Atlanta in his second year, still a freshman. After that academic trial, he apparently withdrew from the university and never completed his degree. The combination of embarrassment and stung pride would drive a wedge between him and his parents, and he never again lived for a long period with his family.

  Nothing better captured the growing distance between the two spouses than Joseph Sr.’s relish for life on the Mississippi, and apparently even for Governor Theodore Bilbo, the official president of the board of trustees at Alcorn, and a regular visitor to the school. When the governor, who had served under the malicious James Vardaman who encouraged lynching, conducted the commencement exercises, Joseph Himes joked with him in the odd idiom of familiarity allowed blacks and whites within the caste system. Years later, Chester grumbled that such affinity was possible because “my father was born and raised in the tradition of the Southern Uncle Tom,” which was nothing more than “an inherited slave mentality.” The irony of Chester’s view was that Joseph Sr. did not inherit the submissive mentality from his own rebellious and independent father, who actually had been enslaved.

  If the flattery and camaraderie with the powerful—done within accepted Jim Crow avenues for adult behavior—gratified Joseph Himes, it did nothing to make his wife more satisfied. The marriage only grew more openly rancorous, and the children took front-row seats. “Mother kept chopping him down to size because what he did wasn’t like anything he boasted about,” thought Joseph Jr. As Estelle kept at him, her husband “got to be dissatisfied with her nagging” and simply came to believe that his wife possessed “a quarrelsome nature.”

  The home li
fe of bickering and tense silence between mother and father was made more difficult because Joseph was a hero to his children, nearly like a figure out of the Greek and Roman myths that Estelle read to them at night. His sons admired him as a thoughtful man’s man. A leather apron over his white shirt and vest, Joseph combined precise mathematical knowledge, physical strength, and craftsmanship, in a sphere well regarded by rural men of the era. Powerful when it called for it, he was a man who held a horse’s leg between his knees, used planes and chisels on wood, and taught students to melt iron and drive steel.

  But the heroic myths never spent their poetry on the inner workings of a modern marriage. With their heads shaved and dressed in overalls, Chester and Joseph looked more and more like the country black boys who populated the grammar school at Alcorn. The boys got chicken pox, and the severity of that common disease was magnified in a countryside with few doctors. But particularly troubling was the worldwide influenza epidemic, which began devastating Claiborne County. In November 1918 the public schools closed and by the next month thirty-two people were dead from the dreaded illness. By the time the outbreak reached its highest proportions in the area, in February 1920, Estelle had enough leverage to insist on a change.

  In the summer of 1920, the Himeses left Mississippi for St. Louis, Missouri, where they owned an investment property at 4525 Garfield Avenue, at the corner of Taylor Street. By that fall, Joseph made arrangements for a new position in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at Branch Normal, Arkansas’s state-supported secondary institute for Negroes. (In 1922, the school would change its name to Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal, and became a division of the University of Arkansas.) The family, minus Edward, who was by then enrolled full-time at Atlanta University, joined a wartime surge of blacks to the cotton-rich soil on the western bank of the Mississippi north of Louisiana.

  For black Americans it was a difficult time, defined by the so-called Red Summer of 1919 and extending for many years, from Rosewood, Florida, to Tulsa, Oklahoma. When black soldiers began returning from overseas duty, warlike racial riots broke out in more than twenty-six cities across the United States; they left scores of African Americans dead. Chicago was the site of the deadliest urban riot, which resembled the 1906 Atlanta debacle in its violence. Elaine, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta about one hundred miles east of Pine Bluff, was the site of the estimated largest loss of black lives in the country: in late September 1919, unionizing black sharecroppers of Phillips County found themselves at the mercy of large numbers of armed whites, joined by regular Army soldiers, who committed atrocities. Hundreds of Africans Americans are believed to have lost their lives.

  In addition to the turmoil of those years, Joseph stepped into the most contentious teaching post he had yet known. In 1911, the trustees at Branch Normal had removed its director, Isaac Fisher, for trying to implement industrial education. Local blacks were suspicious of industrial education because whites supported it. The year before Fisher was removed, the entire senior class had their diplomas rescinded after the state demanded an evaluation and none of the graduates passed. Jefferson Ish, a mathematician, was superintendent in 1920, and the school itself was moving academically in the direction of a junior college degree—the pride of the administration.

  Still more changes in leadership occurred. Charles Smith, also a mathematician, became superintendent on an interim basis at the end of the Himeses’ first year in Pine Bluff. In 1922 Robert Malone replaced Smith. Malone was junior to Joseph Himes by ten years, and, in spite of the fact that cotton prices were still high from war contracts, resulting in students wearing fine clothes and driving new automobiles, the situation for the middle-aged Joseph Sr. was tottering. Branch Normal represented the last grasp at family life and professional success for the Himeses.

  The humble campus, two blocks away from a branch of the Arkansas River, had as its showpiece two-story Corbin Hall, the home to the academic classes. Twelve-year-old Joe and eleven-year-old Chester began their formal educations in the six classrooms on the ground floor. Assemblies capable of seating four hundred were held on the second floor of the building. The girls’ dormitory, where some of the unmarried female professors lived, was an old military barracks. A boys’ dormitory, a trades buildings for both sexes, and the Training School Building completed the campus.

  At first the Himes family boarded downtown with a forty-year-old widow named Lillie Grotia at 519 W. Sixth Street, near a Catholic church. Later they settled more permanently in a plain frame house at 2020 W. Tenth Street in an expansion neighborhood about a mile south of the campus. Sitting on an unpaved road, the Himes neighborhood catered to workers from the lumber mill; only one or two blacks of the professional class lived in their midst. On their walk down Tenth Street to school, Chester and Joe skirted avenues of black women lolling and bantering provocatively with men.

  Decidedly more reliable than Chester, Joe became a drugstore porter making bicycle deliveries. They were both growing up “where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog,” a blues song lyric describing the intersection of the two large railroads in Pine Bluff. Estelle tried giving them piano lessons, but the neighborhood, the locomotive switch engines, and the bustle ignited a new curiosity in her sons. Nervy and energetic, Chester practiced jumping aboard the cars and leaping off before the trains got out of town. A bookish lad in the backwoods of Alcorn, Chester had tended to measure himself against heroes in search of the golden fleece; now, in the clanging world of the larger town of Pine Bluff, the boundaries between adventurousness and foolhardiness came close together.

  In September 1920, the superintendent and his staff examined the new matriculates. The Himes boys were placed in the first section of the second year of the normal department—the tenth grade—alongside about seventy other students. That level was very close to the limit of what was being taught at Branch Normal. There were roughly eighteen professors on the faculty, but, as elsewhere in the region, they were heavily weighted toward trades. However, most of the traditional college preparatory courses were taught: pedagogy, psychology, mathematics, biology, chemistry, history, civics, English, geography, music, and history. The academic department took advantage of the new professor Joseph Himes Sr., bringing him into its ranks as history teacher.

  For Chester, the pubescent struggle for school-age belonging had begun. In a school that had a great many teenagers, Chester and Joe had their classes in the upper division with the school’s older teens. The boys were thoughtful and academically advanced but, having been schooled at home, less comfortable in a classroom. Their classmates were usually between sixteen and eighteen, the age today of students in the last stage of high school; Chester and Joe were closer to the age of students entering junior high school, with Chester being the youngest student enrolled. Thirty U.S. Army veterans rounded out the student population.

  The Himes boys’ adjustment to school included dispiriting moments that characterized the inelegance of the serve-all segregated institution, which catered to the needs of adults and children in the same classroom. Noting the naïveté of the bright youngest member of his class, an older student played a rough joke. He bade Chester to report his absence during the morning roll by telling the professor that he had “gone to Memphis chasing whores.” Although not every schoolboy would have been unfamiliar with that term, Chester was. He could only parse out that “ ‘hoers’ were always needed to hoe cotton and chop corn.” When the class resumed a day later and the roll was called, Chester repeated the message word for word. The professor called him to the front of the class and attempted to paddle him, but now Chester fought back. The teacher threw him to the ground, and his brother Joe leaped up, both children tussling against the instructor in front of the roaring class of older students. “It caused,” Chester remembered dryly, “quite a scandal in the school.” And the next day he learned, of course, what the scandal was about, and it changed his walk along the avenues.

  The bright spot at Branch Normal was the stand-out Engli
sh teacher, Ernestine Copeland. Using a textbook called Composition and Rhetoric, she taught the simple foundation and construction of the English language, diagramming sentences and conjugating verbs. Copeland’s was a strong, up-to-date academic class. She even brought into the classroom the iconoclastic New York magazine The Independent, which sometimes carried book reviews that throttled the “sentimentality and hypocrisy” coating discussions of race mixing in the “mongrel South.” By 1923 she had provided Chester with his initial exposure to Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Canterbury Tales and allowed “theme” essays to be drawn from her students’ personal experience. Chester “ate that stuff up!” remembered his brother. Copeland’s class was the singular academic experience in Chester’s educational career.

  Equally inspirational, Chester’s father began to offer a one-of-a-kind class in black history. The normal school department considered it important to require “History of the Negro,” a course that would “acquaint the student with the facts as they are in order that he may find his place without friction and perform most efficiently his part in the social welfare.” Beginning with literary critic Benjamin Brawley’s 1913 book A Short History of the American Negro, Chester’s father strove to make students understand “the origin of the more harsh system of chattel slavery in the New World.” To prepare his lectures, Joseph pored over his copy of the twenty-volume Encyclopedia Britannica, which would have emphasized the value of hard work, discipline, and talented individuals triumphing against overwhelming odds. Inside the classroom, Chester’s father used Carter G. Woodson’s The Negro in Our History, a comprehensive volume by the champion black historian of the twentieth century. Woodson’s red-covered book, just off the press, was among “a number of textbooks and reference books on Negro history which I have never seen since,” Chester recalled. For Joseph Sr.’s sons, reading about the achievements of blacks in the past was “a thrilling and eye-opening experience.”