Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  In response, the black students created a segregated playland on the black east side of Columbus. The boys took their dates to Long Street dances at the Crystal Slipper Ballroom and home-brew and whiskey joints there crowded onto “the Block.” At the Empress Theater, the Columbus version of the famed Apollo in Harlem, emcees and announcers sang and strutted to engage the young coeds who copied the performers’ manners. The artistic excellence and sensuality of musicals like Runnin’ Wild featuring Ethel Waters or Josephine Baker blended with street-corner brawls and violence. Brassfield’s Restaurant satisfied their appetites and then Lincoln Park afforded the students a secluded wooded reprieve for romance.

  Chester later realized that the frantic pace of the social activities was partly designed to shield the black coeds from the oddity of segregation, the tenuousness of their membership in the college community. His own attitude during the period was “slightly hysterical,” by which he meant frantic, enthusiastic, uneasy, and garrulous about private matters. Chester worked overtime to commit himself socially, enjoying the brash self-confidence of the group that Howard University philosopher Alain Locke was calling the New Negroes. Swiftly, Chester joined forty-four other black boys as Sphinxmen pledges for Alpha Phi Alpha—a leader in the fraternity system of the New Negroes that had begun at places like Cornell and Indiana University. Fellow pledge Jesse Jackson was his closest friend. With his pension, Chester could masquerade as one of the carelessly affluent. He palled around with some of the black upper crust, including Stanton De Priest of Chicago, whose father Oscar would in 1929 become the only African American serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. Always there was a sense of the possibility of extraordinary success given hard work and some luck; always there was the poison of maddening and numbing slights.

  During early 1925, when he had lived at his aunt’s house, he had felt the sting of skin-color divisions among African Americans. Chester now found at the university considerable proof for Aunt Fannie’s disgust: “Light-complexioned blacks were more prejudiced toward darker blacks than were many white people.” In his childhood Chester had accepted simply the complex dimensions of the slave descent of his parents: white-looking valets and concubines and dark-skinned artisans and field workers. His experience and heritage caused him to recoil against the skin-color snobbery: “I despised the in-group class distinctions based on color and the degree of white blood in one’s veins.” At this crucial moment of making the transition from adolescence to adulthood, he wanted to show that he was fully a black man, someone who accepted his ancestry and was not attempting to pull off a white imitation.

  But the manner of his showing his black preference was not balanced. Instead of trying to romance one of his peers, he ditched the campus belles and took his libidinal urges to the Columbus brothels. In a move of risky defiance, he took up with a good-looking prostitute named Rose. At first, it was difficult to believe that a “young and beautiful,” seemingly healthy woman would make herself available sexually. Rose encouraged him with faint praise, “You got an awful lot of steam for a li’l boy.”

  His newfound pleasures cost him quite a bit. Around Thanksgiving, Chester began to experience the painful urination and pus discharge indicating gonorrhea. Ashamed to admit the symptoms to a physician on campus, he went to a private doctor, who prescribed a solution of silver mercury, which Chester injected into the meatus of his glans to rid himself of the disease. The fall quarter examinations took place between December 18 and 22, and their outcome verified where Chester had passed his ten weeks. He turned in a blank form for the German final, and pulled a D. English was the high mark, with a satisfactory grade. He hadn’t bothered to attend the course taught by Dean Henderson and took home another D. He failed chemistry outright. Following a fistfight with one of the graduate students who ran the laboratory portion of the chemistry class, he had simply stopped attending. Those marks ended the beginning of Chester Himes, M.D.

  Chester hobbled back to Cleveland a few days before Christmas 1926. His collegiate misadventures seem to have helped accelerate the final dissolution of his parents’ marriage. His father sympathized with Chester, blaming his son’s failure on the uncertainty of their lives in Cleveland, the disaster of the parents’ marriage, the ravages of the elevator accident, and his own shaky employment.

  During the two-week break, Chester discovered the fullness of the black ghetto at Cedar Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street by way of the cabaret at the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks. At the Elks lodge Bud Jenkins’s Virginia Ravers played “Bugle Blues,” and, at least to Chester, Cleveland’s black domestics responded as had the women in the remote church in Mississippi. In descriptions of his youth that always tripped over themselves with sex, he wrote that the women “leaped atop tables and pulled up their dresses showing strong black legs and black pussies as though on the slave block.” Chester Himes recorded the moment in the classic mixed-metaphor idiom that he made his own, combining the voluntary expression of intimate desire with sexual coercion. But the image of women exhibiting themselves, not so much for the pleasure of men as for their own exhibitionist fantasy and congress with the music, emphasizes the sexual abandon that swept portions of America during the “roaring” 1920s and which Chester always felt coursing through black slums. “Practically every night during the holidays,” Himes remembered, “I wound up with some black woman in the Majestic Hotel.” The Majestic Hotel was down the street from the Elks Cabaret, and Chester believed that he had perhaps graduated from paying for sex to being able to initiate reciprocal sensual relationships. Light-skinned Chester was also “sweetmeat” for the domestics who had carefree moments on their days off.

  When he returned to Columbus in January to begin the winter quarter, his academic standing was perilous. Freshmen who failed two-thirds of their academic load were placed on probation. Demonstrating his worldliness to his fellow pledges and their dates at a stiff, invitation-only dance, Chester led the group to the parlor of the brothel where he had kept his assignations with Rose. The man who operated the house told Chester that Rose was asleep. When the coeds began slow dancing, Rose awoke and stumbled upon a scene that included Chester in the arms of a proper, middle-class young woman. Possessive of Chester, Rose exploded, breaking phonograph records. The couples fled in fright and Rose glared at Chester with contempt. “I fixed your little red wagon, you snotty little motherfucker!” Then the proprietor of the house beat her for her tirade. Hapless, Chester slunk away. A few days later, he was summoned to the office of Dean Henderson, who had received a report from one of the young women. The dean allowed him to save face: on Valentine’s Day 1927, Chester withdrew from school on account of “ill health and failing grades.” Embarrassed about what had happened, he hung around Columbus for another six weeks until the examinations began, then returned to Cleveland. Still only seventeen, Chester had concluded his formal education.

  Feckless, he appeased his family by playing up the elevator accident and keeping abed until the weather brightened. At the start of the summer he revived a bit and began seeing Maude, a woman he described as “one of those soft, pleasing, flat-featured mulatto women with big cushiony mouths, bedroom eyes and a thick caressing voice.” She was an easygoing Georgia girl temporarily living with her married sister, who herself was sleeping with one of Chester’s buddies on the side. Maude is the only woman whom he ever admitted to impregnating. Chester claimed that she presented him with the fact of his paternity at the end of the summer. On both sides of Chester’s family, pregnancy and marriage went together, and, barely eighteen, Chester believed that the early marriage to an unaccomplished woman would forever ruin his relationship with his ambitious mother. He evaded Maude, who left Cleveland, he believed, to have the baby. His abandonment of her, and his difficulty distinguishing between romantic attachment and sexual pleasure, inclined Chester to attempt outwardly to harden his emotions. But he was arcing swiftly toward an emotional crisis. He tried to redeem himself from the episode thir
ty years later by concluding his novel The Third Generation with the protagonist, Charles Taylor, looking for the mother of his child. But this was not what he did in real life.

  In a case of dubious charity, one of the busboys at Wade Park Manor took Chester to a sporting house on Cedar Avenue, on a respectable stretch of the road up by Ninety-Fifth Street. The gambling house was run by a man from Arkansas who knew what to do if a casual girlfriend got pregnant. His sporting name was “Bunch Boy,” but Chester, who admired him, got to know him as Gus Smith, a “small, dried up looking, light-complexioned man with straight hair, strange washed-out blue eyes, and a cynical expression.” Smith was in his early fifties, lived on an exclusive street near Rockefeller Park, and dressed the part of the hustler, togged in “silk shirts, English-tailored suits, and Stacy Adams shoes.” Chester was enthralled by Bunch Boy’s forbidden world. Smith called Chester “Little Katzi,” from the popular Katzenjammer Kids comic strip. With his expensive Packard Coupe, Smith took on a paternal role for Chester. Chester’s own father was pushing a broom at a joint called the Sixty Club from midnight to eight in the morning. The tragedy of the black college teacher whose son could not finish a quarter in good academic standing and was imitating local gangsters was complete.

  At Bunch Boy’s there were two regular games, craps and blackjack. Both of the games had professional dealers or referees, and Chester became intrigued by blackjack and befriended the gentlemanly operator of the game, Johnny Perry. Other than Perry, there were no guards, and the seductively quiet operation of the house did not advertise itself as breaking the law. Most of the patrons held steady jobs “in service,” the euphemism for black domestic work, and Perry himself was “soft-spoken, handsome and married, a pleasant-appearing man with a soft voice and a superficial air of culture.” From Smith, Perry, and the card-game lookout named Val, Chester began an education in the streets. In the novel Lonely Crusade, Himes described the emotional link between a character very much like himself as a young man and an older crook, “that peculiar, almost virgin love that the Negro hustler and criminal sometimes feels for the young, ambitious, educated Negro with sense enough to know the score—a sort of inverted hero worship that led them on to back these youths in what they did, as if it would make themselves bigger, more important men.” Chester warmed to his fast-life tutors and the ambience of Negro decadence.

  After a time he learned that the black men were not really in charge. In Cleveland the Sicilian Mafia, with ties to Al Capone in Chicago and the large families in New York, controlled liquor and gambling. The syndicate bosses were Italians and Jews, and the largest, “Big” Joe Lonardo and Joe Porello, operated a legitimate business as sugar wholesalers to the distillers who then stocked the speakeasies and private clientele with liquor. Operating around the Italian lower East Side neighborhood, the large crime families of Lonardo and Porello operated by supplying the distillers—bootleggers—with sugar and in turn assisting with the distribution of the prohibited alcohol products, colloquially known as “white lightning” and “white mule.” The mobsters were generally known as the Mayfield Road Gang. The violence connected to these figures and the price of doing illegal business in liquor was changing the nature of crime in Cleveland. Gruesome killings in public of over one hundred bootleggers occurred in the city during the thirteen years of Prohibition. Crime boss Joe Lonardo was gunned down at a barbershop at the so-called Bloody Corner, E. 110th Street and Woodland Avenue, in October 1927. Twenty months later Angelo Lonardo killed his father’s assassin, enabling Angelo to become the head of the Cleveland Mafia.

  Using his workman’s compensation income as his stake, Chester avidly played cards at Smith’s, frequently opening the games. His initiation led to other things, and soon he was across the street, accompanied by his busboy friend, to shoot craps with a high rolling and violent crowd at Hot Stuff Johnson’s. Craps was a large, standing dice game, where a dice thrower rolls to hit seven or eleven or to match the number he rolls the very first time. Chester was now in a place where an armed man kept the door and searched everyone who entered the premises, removing weapons of all kinds, including pistols. At the green baize table, a dog chain stretching over the center, Chester met the pillars of Cleveland’s gambling set: gray-haired Abie the Jew, who bet the dice to win or lose, a pimp named Chink Charlie, and professional gamblers Dummy, Red Johnny, and Four-Four, whom he featured in his first detective fiction in 1957, For Love of Imabelle. The idiom that Chester accustomed himself to now would shape the rest of his writing life. In his first novel, in 1945, he would revisit the lingo that became a part of him: “ ‘Unchain ’em in the big corral,’ the boys used to say in Hot Stuff’s crap game back in Cleveland.”

  The card club on Cedar became so successful that Smith opened a new location farther downtown on Central Avenue, in the true ghetto, with a rougher, more freely spending crowd and the new game that was thriving in Chicago, policy. Without the steadying influence of the chic underworld manager, Chester was influenced by less restrained men like Perry and Val, the card sharpie who tried to sexually exploit Chester to hard-edged madams who ran the brothels on Central Avenue. Their discussions were less about cards than the Italian mob in Cleveland, the numbers and policy syndicates, different Midwestern pawnshop and store owners who might expertly dispense stolen goods, and the prized getaways if anyone ever made a bonanza. To escape the scrutiny of his parents, he told his mother that he worked as a night waiter at the Gilsy Hotel and was saving money to return to college.

  Between gambling and drinking with his demimonde pals, Chester met a professional thief named Benny Barnett, “a big-framed, light-brown-skinned, simpleminded boy,” who befriended him and took him farther into the alleys off of Cleveland’s slum streets. Twenty-one and on his own, Barnett introduced Chester to automobile theft and hard drugs. “But where he got his real kick,” Chester wrote about a character like himself in an early short story, “his mind leaping afar, was out gambling or sitting around with a bunch of pretty molls ‘sniffing’ cocaine. Cocaine!” Thrilled by gambling, sex, and narcotics, Chester had fully forgotten Maude, college, and his parents.

  He had a moment of sobriety in August when he accompanied Joe Jr. to Oberlin College. Years earlier Chester had lost whatever distinction he’d felt as the favorite within his own family. The Himeses had taken up residence in Cleveland on account of their middle son, who was now proving the value of his parents’ trust, having graduated with the highest overall grade average in the history of East High, in spite of his disability, and been awarded a full academic scholarship to college. Joe’s accomplishment gained notice in national newspapers and East High principal Daniel Lothman proclaimed Joe a “genius” to the press. With determined effort, Joseph embarked on a career where he attained academic distinction every semester. Within six months of starting at Oberlin, the school president, Ernest Wilkins, would write him “hearty congratulations on your excellent standing.” Throughout the 1930s Joe’s accomplishments would mount. Joe was the herald of the Himes family, and now the son for whom Estelle would make every sacrifice. Chester’s mannish behavior helped intensify the arguments between his parents so much that by August his mother had moved into a spare bedroom.

  Chester sought thrills in more dangerous paths. A few weeks after Joe left, he and Benny stole a car and drove to Columbus, returning to his old haunts for a weekend of partying. Arrogant and high, on September 26, 1927, Chester committed a series of bungling confidence scams and wound up in jail in Columbus, charged with fraud. He had stolen a university identification card that belonged to Phillip J. Dann Jr. and cashed a bogus thirty-five-dollar check drawn from the Cleveland Trust Company at one of the men’s clothing stores near the university. At the beginning of the year he’d been a student at Ohio State; nine months later he was an inmate at the nearby Franklin County jail.

  His parents were notified and the embarrassment of a jailed child of the middle class was the equivalent to their unusual step that fall, divorce.
Chester’s loss of moral compass had as its source the collapse of his immediate family. He witnessed his father’s professional ruin coupled with the mounting and sticky paranoia of his mother, which all culminated in his parents’ court battle during an era when divorce was infrequent. On November 16, 1927, Estelle pushed her brinksmanship to the edge, unexpectedly filing for alimony and “an absolute divorce from the Plaintiff” even while she and Joseph Sr. remained in the same house. She went to the courts to compel her husband to support her, claiming that he had “failed and willfully neglected to provide her with the common necessaries of life” and had on more than one occasion “desert[ed] and abandon[ed] her.” Just three days later, on November 19 the couple had a violent fight, Estelle throwing whatever she could get her hands on and both of them cursing and impugning each other with candid vigor. Joseph Sr. temporarily left the Everton Avenue home, dismissing a reconciliation with Estelle on terms not to his liking. Not long after that, she moved permanently to another part of town.

  The battlefield shifted to their joint property. In 1925 when they had bought the house, the Himeses had paid $3700 up front. Now Estelle claimed that she had contributed $2200 of that down payment; Joseph countered that he had paid every penny. Estelle pursued Joseph for increases in alimony while the divorce was in process, and she had Joseph in court on December 6, arguing that with his monthly income of eighty dollars and odd jobs as a carpenter and mechanic he could more than afford to pay her between five and ten dollars per week. She had the county sheriff summon Joseph to court multiple times in 1927 and 1928 for alimony relief. On December 20, 1927, they sold the Everton Avenue house to Marrilla and William Jackson. Chester would not live in a home with the Himes name on the deed for forty years.