Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Nor did Chester warm to the organized exclusive social activities, like the Friday Frolics, afternoon dances held in the gymnasium, the Atheneum Literary Society, or the football games that East High lost every single time that season. Fifteen years old and fresh from St. Louis, he was “anxious to prove I was an all right guy.” This meant smoking cigarettes and telling the baseball crowd that he had the slugging power of Babe Ruth, then ditching entire afternoons of class and jogging over to play the Catholic school boys at Rockefeller Park. But Chester was no Sultan of Swat. One afternoon he foul-tipped a ball into his own eye and the ballplayers razzed him for a couple of days, but for a brief period of time he felt included.

  By his second term, in the fall of 1925, the final semester he needed to graduate, the college prep curriculum at East High was a maddening chore for Chester. The public schools in Cleveland organized classes according to student scores on IQ tests, part of the classification rage after the First World War. Chester’s strong score balanced his miserable classroom performances and made him egotistical, the misunderstood genius. Complicating matters, Joe entered the East High School junior class that fall, speedily made the honor roll, and then kept a 90 average. Chester was not even competing with his brother, who was more or less blind, and he quietly resented his mother’s focus on Joe, their movement from city to city in search of doctors and schools.

  Meanwhile, on October 8, 1925, his parents bought a three-story colonial revival at 10713 Everton Avenue. Constructed in 1918, the spacious five-bedroom was, as Joseph Himes recalled, “the nicest house we ever lived in.” Chester rejoiced in the new home, which erased the shame of their frequent moves, dip into poverty, and family quarrels—the Thursday the Himeses bought it would be the brightest day in his life for the next ten years. The four Himeses were also trailblazers. The block they moved on was completely white, and Estelle could have the satisfaction of living even farther away from the ever-widening black slums than even her sister-in-law Leah. The ample house and the address in Glenville gave both sons elite standing in black Cleveland.

  Chester beamed at the new status and the possibility that his parents’ troubled marriage was on the mend. He gravitated to a new group of young people, accommodating himself to mastering the complex Charleston dance and slicking his hair down with Vaseline and black goo to achieve the Pomp, the imitation of the Rudolph Valentino hairdo from the popular 1921 film The Sheik. But possibly by then the ragtag pilgrimage had taken its toll on him. The requirement of submitting to the discipline of a pioneering family like the Moons—who responded to the requirement of being the “first” blacks on their street as if awakening to a trumpet blast—was uncomfortable. Unprepared to cope with the slights, the shouts of “colored boy” and “nigger” from neighbors and schoolmates, such as his cousin Henry had already endured, Chester was less inclined to leap the hurdles required to win friends and impress adults.

  East High School’s winter commencement exercises were on Thursday, January 28, 1926. The eager students sang and gave orations, but the moment was bittersweet for Chester, who had been asked to return to school to repeat a course. In error, one of the Latin teachers had written “86” on his report card in place of the 56 that he had earned; he was awarded his diploma by clerical mistake. Adopting a belligerence that he would never fully discard, Chester felt, of course, that he had, by then, graduated three times from high school: from Branch Normal, from Sumner in St. Louis, and from East High.

  Prideful, he decided to attend Ohio State University along with dozens of other members of the class, telling people that he would become a medical doctor. He would have received firsthand information from his cousin Henry about the opportunity for a quality education available in Columbus at the flagship university for the state. Henry Lee Moon had gone to Howard University as an undergraduate, pledging the Omega fraternity there, and then completed a master’s degree in journalism at Ohio State, to his father’s satisfaction. Despite that accomplishment, Chester’s Aunt Leah then tried to push her younger son into the medical field, advising him on a creed she undoubtedly shared with her nephew: “Our people need more doctors; besides you’ll be your own man and will not have to take tips and orders from any white man.” Tuition for Ohio residents was only $10, although fees, including room and board, were estimated at another $658. If the Himes family had a real discussion at home about where Chester ought to go to school—Joseph likely supporting a Southern Negro college and Estelle advocating for anything but—the decision might easily have revolved around Estelle’s willingness to help foot the cost of fees. Their eldest son Eddie’s difficulty when at Atlanta University wouldn’t have helped Joseph’s case for the potential of all-black schools. Chester, who had limped away from East High, decided he would try to outdo his older cousin Henry: he would become a doctor in six or seven years and do all of the work at Ohio State.

  Following his winter graduation, Chester’s father got him a job through a church connection at the luxurious Wade Park Manor, an extended-stay hotel off Wade Park, one of Cleveland’s planned public squares and gardens. Constructed in Gilded Age grandeur, the twelve-story hotel overlooked a lake and was staffed by black busboys, waiters, and maids. “No matter what your aim is in life, waiting tables is a good profession to know. Many of our most prominent men got their start waiting table,” Chester was told. The opposite was true too, as he knew and his mother and Aunt Leah certainly forewarned: the Moon family were convinced that their older boy, Joe, had been “ruined” after a season as a bellman at the Cleveland Athletic Club. By getting used to accepting gratuities from the rich, a black man could permanently lose his dignity and willpower.

  If Joseph Sr. feared he was leading his son down the path of his brother Andrew or his nephew he did not let on, but supported the basic position of value in honest work. Showing off, Chester had already wrecked the Wiggins automobile, and the accident had encouraged his father to believe that steady labor was the most important quality that Chester yet needed. But Joseph Sr. was unsuccessful at bending his youngest son to the value of a work ethic, saving, and ambition. With his hotel salary and exposure to the older men’s locker room talk, and two flirtatious white girls at the hotel check counter, Chester took five dollars from his earnings to an establishment in the red-light district on Scovil Avenue to lose his virginity.

  Himes wrote more than one version of this coming-of-age moment, and in one, he acquainted himself with the scarred, run-down wooden tenements and abandoned cars of Scovil at the height of winter. In his memoir, he writes that he impetuously began his sexual initiation in this area known as the “Bucket of Blood,” a young cad making his way “to an old fat ugly whore sitting on a stool outside her hovel.”

  What fascinated him in his adulthood about the Cleveland tenderloin was that the prostitution had grown out of the forces of the American race dynamic. Steel industrialists in the Cuyahoga River valley had imported male laborers from Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. These men were herded into ghettos and, with the money that they earned, were able to employ black women as cooks and laundresses. Sexual unions for pay, pleasure, and romance began at the same time. Black men locked out of the labor market began procuring women for the lonely foreigners. By the 1920s, black female prostitution was very nearly an industrial commodity itself, and a hardened lot of women earned a living along Scovil Avenue.

  However, Chester’s sexual triumph was short-lived. He had been at work about two weeks when, in the middle of February, not looking while chatting with the young white girls who scrutinized the dinner trays headed up to the hotel patrons, he stepped backward through open elevator doors. Although the doors to the elevator parted, the carriage had already passed to a floor above. He fell two stories down the shaft, shattering his chin and jaw, his left arm, which he used to break his fall, his pelvis, and three vertebrae. Chester likened the sensation of hitting the steel plate at the elevator shaft bottom to “spattering open like a ripe watermelon.” G
urgling blood and spitting out teeth, he was rushed to the hospital.

  Near the hotel was the brand-new and technically advanced University Hospitals of Cleveland. Doctors there turned him away on account of space constraints, after first giving him an injection of morphine. Inevitably the scene reminded him of Joseph’s rejection in Arkansas by a whites-only facility. Accepted at the homeopathic-friendly Huron Road Hospital for charity cases, about two miles from the scene of his accident, he was given a room on a crowded ward with patients who were terminally ill. Ohio Industrial Commission physicians placed sixteen-year-old Chester in a complete body cast. A few hours later and under emergency conditions they inserted a tube in his bladder to substitute for a ruptured urethra. Chester had smoked cigarettes before and he had experimented with booze, but the injections he began receiving to deal with the pain of his injuries opened him to a new range of psychic moods. The reality of his wounds and pains, the distancing from his own paralyzed body, and the likelihood of his permanent injury led him to a place of brittle irony with others, and self-pity with himself.

  After an investigation presented findings of hotel negligence, the newly established workman’s compensation fund began paying Chester seventy-five dollars a month; Ward Park Manor also continued his salary. Estelle Himes wanted to sue the hotel. Joseph Sr., astounded by the existence of state laws regulating the workplace—which meant the hospital bills were paid and that Chester would get the same salary his father had earned for the best years of his working life, even if the boy seemed as if he might never walk again—encouraged Chester to sign away legal liability for the accident, which he did. The arguments between his parents deepened in their rancor, also carrying the strong symbolism of an ideological conflict. Chester’s white-looking mother was acting as the rebellious dissenter while his dark-skinned father played the obsequious Uncle Tom. In short order, Estelle and Joseph’s putative reunion in the new house began to sputter.

  The catastrophe also tore Chester’s relationship with his mother. He had identified something in her, a kind of “incontinent vanity,” the indulgent prickly side of her willful intention to ignore racial barriers and proclaim as true her fantasy heritage. When Estelle visited him at the hospital and berated the hotel, he recoiled. “Mother,” his character Charles Taylor groans through his bandages in the novel The Third Generation, “will you please-please-please shut up!” Thinking of his family’s vagabond trail along Southern outposts, and the loss of her affection to blinded Joe, Chester re-created the scene by having the wounded boy strike out savagely, “You’re as much to blame as anyone.”

  Dropping weight from an already slender frame, Chester managed to heal over four months, and, once his wrist had mended and he could wiggle his toes, he willed himself to stand and take tentative new steps. But the experience was more complicated than regaining strength. Before he could walk, he watched two men die on his ward, a confrontation with tragedy and doom that opened full his new window on despair. With the beds aligned in rows within a hall, the intimate lives of his neighbors were unavoidable. The man beside him recited the Lord’s Prayer for eight hours before dying, giving Chester ample time to recall the image of the young girl in Alcorn beneath the wagon wheel. To his personality now came an edge of fatalism.

  On July 3, 1926, Chester left the hospital to return home. A conscientious commission-appointed dentist canalled, filled, and crowned his broken teeth. Chester was nearly an invalid, learning how to walk again, and encumbered by a leather-and-steel back brace that fastened underneath his groin and that Estelle helped him attach. His mother was also angry, and she defied Joseph Sr. and continued to argue the case at the hotel, which she claimed had taken advantage of teenaged Chester. The only result was the suspension of his monthly salary of fifty dollars and renewed outbursts at home. It was a final rough passage in a marriage, where she had doted affection on her sons in lieu of her husband. She was again caring for Chester, whom she adored, he would later believe, because he was the lightest-colored of her children and perhaps the least outwardly masculine. But in response, Chester left the house and found another woman.

  In one version of his life, Chester wrote about spending the postconvalescent end of July and August on Cedar Avenue in the arms of a prostitute. If the encounters took place as he wrote them in the 1953 autobiographical novel The Third Generation, they occurred habitually not just because he had the temerity to venture into the red-light blocks, but because of the pension from his accident. The relationship, which required the sex worker to refasten him into his back brace after intercourse, began a period when sensual joy and ecstasy would always be inflected by deep feelings of shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and the need for secrecy. The experience also disabused him of his boyhood romantic ideal. Chester was quick-witted enough to grasp the ancient hierarchy of the street, which put the “trick” in the sex trade at the bottom, the “whore” in the middle, and the “pimp” or “madam” at the top. At the end of his adolescence, Chester subconsciously connected sexual desire, pleasure, and fulfillment with using people and expecting to be used in return.

  The summer trysts twined the violation of his parents’ and the state’s rules with a healthy growth beyond his family. He learned to drink white mule—a highly potent alcoholic beverage of Prohibition—and edged toward more serious illegal behavior. The Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the sale of intoxicating beverages and enforced by the 1919 Volstead Act, had the effect in cities like Cleveland of dramatically building up organized crime and urban criminal zones. Chester’s classmates wrote short stories about Cleveland’s pistol-wielding bandits (and comic, fearful black menials) in the high school paper.

  In September, with money from workman’s compensation and without telling his parents, Chester bought a beat-up Model T and left Cleveland for college in Columbus. A state-sponsored land-grant university designed at its outset to train farmers and mechanics, Ohio State University enrolled 8693 in 1926 and had blossomed into the largest institution for higher education in Ohio. Student life for freshmen got under way with an orientation week that included placement examinations and physicals at the gymnasium. Still gamely wishing for distinction, but without the day-to-day discipline instilled by his mother, Chester signed up for a premedical curriculum, with an emphasis on chemistry. But the summer spent recovering from the accident, his parents’ troubled marriage, drinking, and visiting prostitutes colored his September arrival. What should have been memorable was anticlimactic.

  The cornerstone of his academic career that fall was the advanced chemistry class, the gateway to premed. The class was broken up into an hour-long lecture, followed a day later by an hour-long recitation, and completed by two three-hour laboratory sessions. Students sat in assigned seats and attendance was habitually taken by the graduate teaching assistants who conducted the labs. Chester’s other courses met daily for an hour and included elementary German and introduction to American literature, which focused on the nineteenth century, with “a brief survey of recent literature.” (Ernest Hemingway’s daring hit novel The Sun Also Rises was published in late October.) The academic program for the quarter included a mandatory one-credit course with William Henderson, the dean of the college, sharing his wisdom on picking classes, study habits, and campus rules.

  After fifty successful years, the sprawling university was a miniature city, with late-Victorian-style academic buildings clustered around an enormous oval. Off to the southwest of the library was large Mirror Lake, where freshmen and sophomores engaged in a ritual tug-of-war battle that ended that fall with the frosh being pulled into the water. On October 2, when the freshmen went to the psychology department to take IQ tests, Chester placed an impressive fourth. The joyfully frivolous opening days of school, called “Know Ohio Week,” were precisely the ritual dramas of belonging he had missed in high school. Toward the end of October the physical education and military science departments “permanently excused” Chester from drill and exercise, required of all fre
shmen, because of the disabilities from his fall. He ditched the beanie hat required of frosh, and strutted the campus in the blazer worn by the most ardent of school boosters, with broad vertical red and gray stripes. By mid-fall, with his Model T nearby, he had assumed the pose of an upperclassman.

  African American students had begun attending Ohio State in 1892. By the fall of 1926, more than two hundred blacks were enrolled. Black Ohioans also saw themselves with a key stake in the school and had successfully petitioned the university president to prohibit professors in the departments of history and anatomy from using racial epithets like “nigger” and “coon” in the classroom. As for those professors who performed an annual minstrel show, there was less they could do. In 1926 a single African American participated in intercollegiate athletics, on the track and cross-country team. (Track star Jesse Owens would arrive on campus in 1930.) No blacks were permitted to join the white fraternities or eating clubs, effectively sealing them off from campus life. A family named Harrison ran a popular rooming house for African Americans at 236 E. Eleventh Street, where Chester’s friend Oscar Stanton De Priest, the communications major, lived. With his ample budget, Chester took a private room in a large house at 1389 Summit Street, about four blocks east of the main campus. Despite being so ubiquitous as to appear normal, the obtrusive, steady racial prejudice was jarring. “He dreaded the classes where no one spoke to him, he hated the clubs he couldn’t join, he scorned the restaurants in which he couldn’t eat,” Himes would later write. The psychological impact on the black students was perhaps also indicated by their attrition rate. Only fifteen graduated in 1926, and rarely more than thirty in any year. As for the official attitude toward racial segregation, school president W. O. Thompson thought that “colored people should not undertake to force that issue, and if it came about I should ask them not do it.”