Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  The next month, on January 23, Joseph Himes Sr. came to Columbus for Chester’s plea agreement before Judge Robert P. Duncan. Chester changed his plea to guilty in exchange for a suspended sentence and a supervised probation. Joseph Sr. took his eighteen-year-old home with him to Cleveland. A boy who had now spent several months in the Franklin County jail, Chester was officially an embarrassment to his mother and father, as well as to his father’s family. Angry, confused, and with his nuclear family now torn apart, Chester faced life in a seedy rented room with his father on the East Side, near a block of Cedar called “the Avenue,” “a congested area of vice and destitution.” Joseph Himes was as dispirited as his son, and almost certainly the profit from the sale of the home went to Chester’s legal fees.

  Hardened by the season in jail and wild and unsupervised after the separation of his parents, Chester began working as a bellhop at the Gilsy Hotel on E. Ninth Street near Euclid Avenue. A fleabag hotel with $1.50 rooms, the Gilsy exposed him to well-organized prostitution, bootlegging, and racketeering. “Home” was little better. Partly to escape the dank quarters with his father, Chester resumed his friendships with Benny Barnett and Harry Plater, another young petty criminal.

  At a party at Benny’s two-room basement flat on Cedar Avenue, he was introduced to a provocative sixteen-year-old named Jean Lucinda Johnson. Enjoying the all-night parties of booze and dope with the young gamblers, Jean was breaking off from her poor family. Good-looking, brown-skinned, and nearly as tall as Chester in her bare feet, Jean turned heads with her grown-up body. She had not yet finished high school when she took over one of the rooms in Barnett’s apartment and allowed Chester to live with her. Some nights they ambled out together, getting drunk, and he left her alone to fend for herself. However, Jean clung hard to Chester, the light-skinned ex-college boy from a good family.

  With a desirable girlfriend to defend, Chester started carrying a pistol, an owl’s head .32 revolver. Even Bunch, Chester’s patron, hoped to take Jean to Detroit and lure her into the sex trade. But shooting the moderate-caliber pistol made only a slight impression on the neighborhood thugs, and Chester had to upgrade to a .44 caliber Colt. All of his running partners carried guns.

  On June 18 Chester had an especially anguished moment: his father’s attorney subpoenaed him to testify in the divorce case. Roddy Moon and Fannie Wiggins, among others, were also conscripted on Joseph Sr.’s behalf, but Chester did not wish to have to choose between parents, to go on record in a way that might forever wound his mother. Nor, as his own forays into the underworld expanded, had he any desire to participate in a courtroom proceeding. At a June 20 hearing, Estelle completed the divorce from Joseph Himes, winning $7 per week in alimony; $300 for the maintenance of her blind son, Joseph; $811.23, half of the proceeds from sale of the Everton Avenue house; and her attorney’s costs. His family shattered and feeling as if he had to pick sides, Chester gave himself more fully to his girlfriend, Jean, and the more dangerous places to hang out on Cedar Avenue and then over to the sketchy part of Scovil Avenue, the “Bucket of Blood.”

  By the end of the summer he was out of control. Possibly Jean was pregnant or believed herself pregnant and asked him to marry her. If so, for the second time in twelve months, Chester was faced with what seemed a permanent tie to a woman and a child whom he would be obligated to support financially for the foreseeable future. He did not want to face the considerable, vigorous objection from his mother, and he could also picture a future of being unhappily married, like his father. It was too much. In his emotionally revealing novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry appears a scene that had its basis in truth:

  She told him she thought she was going to have a baby. . . . Then he said, “I know a swell guy in the pool room here who’s just crazy about you, Joan. I’m going in and get him and send him out. Marry him, Joan. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  . . . .

  He closed the door behind him and sent Eddie out to her. She married Eddie.

  That tiny, oblique narrative, buried in the first novel he wrote, is important because it is all that sheds light on one of the cloudiest moments in Chester’s life. On September 12, 1928, Harry Plater married Chester’s seventeen-year-old girlfriend Jean, who raised her age on the certificate to nineteen.

  Exactly two weeks later, Chester, Benny Barnett, and Cornalee Thatch, an auto mechanic who captained the heist, robbed the Ohio National Guard Armory on Cedar Avenue of a cache of .45 automatic pistols. Next, the men kicked in the window of a furrier and drove to Warren, Ohio, to sell all of the loot to steel mill hands. But the amateurs botched the escapade: the police arrested them on October 9 and returned them to Cleveland.

  When Chester had had his sentence suspended in Columbus in January, the court believed that he was “not likely to engage in an offensive course of conduct and that the public good does not demand that he be immediately sentenced.” His October arrest signaled otherwise. However, the weapons and fur coats were recovered, and Barnett and Thatch pleaded guilty. Thatch went to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for eighteen months. A wise attorney provided by his parents used Chester’s youth to have his case heard before a sympathetic female judge at the municipal court, who listened attentively to the Himes family saga and, undoubtedly impressed by the formidable public success of Joe Jr. and shy, boyish-acting Chester, who wore knickers instead of long pants to the trial, paroled him “over the vehement protests” of the prosecuting attorney. Neither contrite nor steadied in the days that followed, Chester began minor assaults in restaurants and swilled liquor in the Cedar Avenue dives. His sullen distemper was evident to anyone who wanted to see it. One night at Bunch’s gambling club he heard a light-skinned chauffeur bragging about the riches of his employer, and Chester, convinced now that he ought to escape Cleveland, decided upon an impulsive course.

  On November 25, he stole a car and drove to the wealthy home of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Miller in Cleveland’s Fairmount Heights neighborhood, the one their chauffeur had described at Bunch Boy’s. The maid, a suspicious black woman, refused to let him in and called the police. Chester hid from the patrolmen, then waited in the garage while trying steel his nerves to commit a major crime alone. The Millers returned to the house about 1:30 A.M. and went inside; then Mr. Miller returned to the garage, where Chester had secreted himself. This time, Chester emerged from the cars, produced a handgun, and demanded entry. Samuel Miller let him in and apparently tried to satisfy Chester with the contents of his wife’s purse, but Chester directed them to the bedroom wall safe, hidden in a closet, alerting them to the fact that he had informed knowledge of their home. He had been led to believe that the couple had quantities of cash on hand; when the safe was opened, it held less than a few hundred dollars. Chester, knowing it was foolhardy, stole four rings worth about five thousand dollars and fled in a snowstorm in their Cadillac. The couple must have been amazed by the ferocity of the sensitive-faced boy with even white teeth and manicured hands, who hadn’t yet put a razor to his face. Chester was telling himself that he would flee to Mexico.

  Chester showed cunning and nervy execution when he hopped a passenger train early in the morning and hightailed it to Chicago to sell the jewels. But after one night as a criminal mastermind, the next day he was arrested in a pawnshop trying to sell the jewelry, taken to a nearby police precinct, and hung upside down and beaten on his testicles until he confessed.

  A Cleveland detective named Gill Frabel escorted him back home and on November 27 a Cuyahoga County grand jury indicted him for the robbery. On December 4 he entered a plea of not guilty and had his bond fixed at $20,000. His distraught parents had no more resources to cope with this new bout of lawlessness. The state-appointed public defender encouraged him to plead guilty to lessen the severity of the sentence. Chester was told he could expect six months at the state reformatory. Two days later he appeared again before the court and entered his guilty plea. Chester said later that all he could recall of the December weeks in prison was a lou
d argument he had with a guard, and the combination of flared tempers and the shifting pleas for the very young man seemed to have made the court sympathetic. Initially it assigned his case to the probation department, requiring an examination by Dr. George H. Reeves, a state-appointed psychiatrist.

  On December 19, 1928, after three weeks in the county jail, Chester was brought before the Common Pleas Judge Walter McMahon, a heavyset man in his fifties who looked not unlike Herbert Hoover. Stern and unforgiving, McMahon astonished the defendant by describing Chester’s impulsive night out with a pistol as “one of the boldest and most cautiously plotted robberies in the history of Greater Cleveland.” Nineteen-year-old Chester had thrown himself on the mercy of the court in hopes of leniency, but quite obviously now the state reformatory was out of the question. Instead, undoubtedly noting that Chester had already received probation for forgery and robbery, the judge drew down the hardest penalty levied against any person he saw that day. In a crushing blow, McMahon sentenced Chester to a minimum of twenty years in prison, with a maximum of twenty-five years. Chester would not be eligible for parole until 1948. It was his turn to whip Joe in the bout for local headlines: “Robber Gets 20 Years: Youth Sent in Pen for Holdup in Heights.”

  Chapter Four

  GRAY CITY OF EXILED MEN

  1928–1936

  After the heavy sentence fell in Cleveland, Chester clambered aboard a guarded train with other manacled convicts destined for the state penitentiary in Columbus. He entered the prison two days after Christmas, alongside white and colored men in their late twenties, men convicted of burglary and robbery, writing bad checks and swindling the unaware. None of the “fish”—prison slang for a newcomer—had drawn as severe a sentence as Chester. The number 59623 was stenciled to his underwear. He could count on not being released before he was thirty-nine years old. He was numbly devastated.

  An imposing thirty-foot-high wall of brick and stone enclosed the nearly century-old penitentiary complex in downtown Columbus. The four-story administration building, prison cell blocks, chapel and honor dormitories made a large L that stretched for a block on Spring Street and a portion on West Street. Heading east, the prison’s wall and intermittent guard towers stretched back toward the rail yards. Inside the walls, the main yard was dominated by a 100,000-gallon steel water tower and the two-story dining hall and kitchen. In the square between the moorings for the water tower, the Protestant chapel, and the interior entrance to the administration building were several plots of manicured grass with pruned trees and a fountain.

  During Chester’s first winter inside, the penitentiary was jammed with about forty-two hundred convicts, almost three times as many men as it had been designed to contain. The prisoners themselves worked steadily to build new dormitories to ease the overcrowding and that winter cell block L and the Honor Dormitory were under construction. The Annex Building in the southeast corner of the yard, a small one-story brick carriage house, was brand-new when Chester arrived. It housed the penitentiary’s regularly used electric chair.

  Prison life in the 1920s was designed to break the will of incorrigible men. The inmates were required to work hard, to submit to iron discipline, and to suffer nature’s elements. They marched in crisp lines and the guards forbade speaking, or else they thwacked the inmates with clubs. Death or permanent injury was not uncommon for prisoners. The inmates were assigned to companies for their daylong work assignments at the coal mill, power plant, tin shop, machine shop, woolen mill, knitting mill, print shop, auto tag shop, or shirt shop, which in turn dictated the cell blocks that they lived in. The outdoor work of the coal company, which required the men to shovel coal from a pile into a nonstop flow of wheelbarrows marched to a crusher and then to the furnace, was thought the dirtiest and most physically demanding job. Any job inside working as a porter was understood as a reward, or light duty. Housing as many as eight hundred men apiece, the alphabetically arranged cell blocks had six tiers. Black men and white men, wearing identical gray pants, coats, and caps, and hickory-striped shirts and allowed to bathe once per week, crowded the cafeteria tables, two thousand at a time, for their meals.

  Racial segregation was enforced in the penitentiary. Black prisoners received permanent labor assignments in the coal company and as janitors cleaning latrines and hallways. The black men stood at the end of lines for guest visits, the commissary, recreation, and medical treatment, although the mess hall did not require strict segregation. In the dormitories black prisoners predominated in so-called black bottom sections, and cells were typically occupied by men of the same race. As overcrowding increased, however, Ohio’s penitentiary ended up less segregated than Ohio State University, particularly at dinner and chapel.

  African Americans made up barely 5 percent of the Ohio population in the early 1930s, but constituted more than a quarter of the inmates at the state penitentiary. Among the black prisoners, most of the men, like Chester, had been born in the South, and many had come to Ohio in search of work. In all of Chester’s prison writing, the black characters are set off by strong accents, which was probably true of men he knew like the forty-six-year-old Kentuckian Flo Wallace, whom he bunked beside, or another dormitory mate, sixty-eight-year-old Georgian Simon Stevens, who had been born in slavery. When he entered the prison, Chester was able to accept other black Americans who he felt were like himself—bright and talented, or worldly and attracted to the fast life. Judging by his earliest fiction, however, he felt contemptuously uneasy about being grouped with the African American peasantry. (When his father mailed him a sack of flour, he threw it away.) Jaunty and guileful, Chester was partly a city boy who understood uneducated African Americans with Southern accents as comic stereotypes, undeserving of compassion or serious consideration.

  Chester’s three teenage years scudding through the dice parlors, cabarets, speakeasies, and brothels had not earned him associates from Cleveland to help him adjust to penitentiary life. However, in the early weeks in prison he could certainly have been comforted by the simple fact that Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County sent the lion’s share of convicts to the state penitentiary. But beyond the fact of having a hometown in common with so many of the prisoners, Chester was unusual in nearly every dimension. There were 1645 new arrivals to the prison in 1929. Only about fifty of the other prisoners had ever set foot inside of a college classroom. Singling him out even more, only twenty of the newly admitted inmates were as young as he was; large numbers of men entered prison in their late twenties or early thirties, required to serve only a year or two. And of course the most obvious marker was time. Only twenty-five men were sentenced to twenty years or more. “He hadn’t ever had a chance to live, not really live,” remarked a character in an early short story, capturing Chester’s exact doomed sentiments upon arrival.

  During the first weeks of his incarceration, Chester found the cell block on the top tier so cold that he had to sleep fully clothed. After the induction, including IQ testing, he was sent to the large dormitory housing the two hundred members of the coal company. The first thing to be overcome was his initial fear. “Every one of them looked big and tough,” his trepidation-filled character Jimmy Monroe reflects when he steps out into the dormitory. Crude cardboard signs regulating prisoners’ behavior hung from the naked lightbulbs dotting the large dormitory in the main part of the cell block where he slept: Spitting on the floor and wall forbidden. No running water after dinner. No sleeping naked in summer. No sweaters in the winter. No tailoring of the prison uniform. Then the unvarying prison routine began: up at six, line up for breakfast at seven, work, dinner at eleven, back to the dormitory, supper at three, lights out by nine. The men tramped by company in a line, adorned in identical threadbare caps, jackets, and brogans.

  Chester complained about the rough wintertime assignment. The guards punished him for speaking up at all by sending him to “the hole”—the darkened isolation chamber of the prison—but he was transferred and became a porter. Finally, and possibly after
some letter writing and wrangling by his mother, on account of his physical infirmity he gained an assignment to the “cripple” company, a large dormitory for the physically disabled lodged on a cell-block ground floor. This designation was sought after because the men couldn’t be forced to work; as for the convicts with disabilities themselves, Chester learned that they were a “treacherous” lot.

  Chester’s minor privileges may not have been extraordinary at all. Jacob Nesbitt, convicted of second-degree spousal murder, and a former fraternity brother of the son of Warden Preston E. Thomas, was reputed to have been “free to roam the city,” eating in local restaurants and visiting the university campus, during his time in prison. After the initial adjustment to the routine of prison life, the reality that this terrible punishment would cost Chester his youth settled in painfully. Still dreaming that he was waiting for girls outside of the chemistry building at the university across town, he was learning to become a convict.

  Attractive, slender, and with his face unmarked, Chester was vulnerable as a teenager and as a reflective person. The first episode that he recorded in both versions of his long prison works Cast the First Stone (1952) and Yesterday Will Make You Cry (first published posthumously, in 1998) began with an effeminate convict trying to seduce a twenty-year-old protagonist sentenced to twenty years for armed robbery. Initially, Chester greeted the predatorial sexuality in prison with disgust. Sodomy itself was regarded by prison officials, as well as by many of the men practicing it, as a descent into the realm of animal behavior, hence the classificatory term used by prison officials, “degeneracy.” Men were in fact committed to the penitentiary for sodomy, like prison newspaper writer Joseph Kerwin, who was sentenced to a minimum of five years for that crime, two months before Chester arrived. Like most of heterosexual society, Chester believed homosexuals were perverted. Disoriented and big-eyed when he arrived, Chester was like Jimmy Monroe in Cast the First Stone, “half afraid that every big tough-looking convict might try to rape me.” If he could avoid the strong-arm tactics of the wolves, he thought it would be a straightforward matter to also avoid homosexual contact.