Adding a psychological dimension to the pressing economic circumstances, Chester would find himself begrudging his mother’s devotion to Joe, who had just completed his course work and campus residency requirement toward his PhD. In June, Joe would begin work as the director of research for the Urban League, completing his doctorate two years later. Estelle loudly blamed Joseph Sr. for his failure to help speed Chester’s release from prison. The absence of a governor’s commutation record for Chester’s final parole from London Prison Farm strongly suggests that Chester served out the maximum sentence under the new laws and found no favoritism whatsoever, despite any wrangling or proceedings initiated by lawyers on his behalf. Meanwhile Chester, “more hysterical than I had ever been before,” after seven years and five months in prison, was trying to relieve himself of the memory of degradation of life behind bars, which meant also the personal shame of having homosexual relations there.
Although he swung into the routine of attending church with his mother and Joe, he knew that to woo successfully any of the young women of the black middle class would take a lifetime of reassembling the respectability he had lost to prison. So he crept along the underside of black Columbus for adult pleasures. With an eye on prestige, he satisfied his sexual longing by courting the white prostitutes working the ghetto and eluding their pimps. “Several times landlords had to intervene to keep me from being shot.” His peccadilloes escalating, he lined up with other ex-cons to “Georgia” a black girl—which meant to promise payment for sex and then renege on her fee—then stepped back when his turn came. One Sunday following church, he wandered up to Warren Street, where one of his hooligan friends turned him onto “gage”—marijuana—which made him hallucinate, prompting Estelle to summon a physician.
Mother and son argued forcefully about his conduct in matches that required Joe Jr. to step in and referee. Believing that Chester’s antics might jeopardize his brother’s career, his mother turned over control of his parole to his father. The move signaled the end of their kinship; Estelle had given up on him.
Returning to his father’s in Cleveland meant Aunt Fannie’s house and bussing tables at Wade Park Manor, where he’d nearly been crippled. This was a move as miserable as being berated by his mother. Joseph Sr. had been making ends meet with odd jobs and work teaching trades at the Woodland Center Neighborhood House, a community center lodged in a refurbished church that ran programs in music and vocational training. Now in his early sixties, he was still married to Agnes Rowe but had never been able to purchase another home. His younger sister probably needed her brother at the time. Fannie’s husband, Wade, by then was living with extraordinary pain from passing gallstones in his urine; he would die of hypertrophy of the prostate in ten months.
In Glenville aunt Leah and uncle Roddy Moon prepared a celebratory dinner for Chester’s first Sunday back in Cleveland. Glad to hear he had finished “with the past kind of living,” his staid older relatives tried to “make him feel as though nothing has ever happened.” Roddy Moon was “anxious to see him make good.” They meant well for him, in a general sense, but they insisted on a straitjacket of propriety. Another disaster on Chester’s part would bode ill for all his relatives, especially those like the Moons who lived on streets with white neighbors and whose thriving relied upon impeccable appearance and good relations. Roddy Moon was so strict that he had prevented his daughter, Ella, from marrying a man he considered beneath her, destroying his daughter’s confidence, health, and career in the process. Despite his dinner-table attempts at probity and telling everyone that he had written a novel and was working at the hotel, Chester, in the elder Moon’s eyes, “looks well but [is] somewhat downcast.”
That summer, Chester met Cleveland’s most famous writer, Langston Hughes, who had traveled to the Soviet Union with Henry to make a film in 1932. Hughes, the original black trailblazer in Esquire, was living with his mother on E. Eighty-Sixth Street, and was tightening his musical comedy Little Ham at the Karamu House, Cleveland’s local experimental black theater. In the fall at Karamu, the Gilpin Players would present Hughes’s Troubled Island, the first play about Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the successful revolt of the enslaved in Haiti. Fun to be around and easygoing in his manner, Hughes was not complacent or tepid. Although he was less black-looking than Chester, Hughes always asserted his racial identity with pride, something that Chester had waffled over in his early work. Hughes also argued forcefully on behalf of economic and political justice in those years, “because I am both a Negro and poor,” he told the press. Nor did he turn up his nose at Chester because of the stretch in the penitentiary; Hughes was in fact giving lectures at middle-class teas titled “Cowards in Our Colleges.” Hughes epitomized the socially conscious artist, and when he left Cleveland in 1937, it would be to use his talents as a journalist in war-torn Madrid. Chester now had an obvious model for a literary career.
But that goal was at odds with the job at Wade Park Manor Hotel, which lasted Chester through his first couple of check-ins with his probation officer. Clearing dinner tables and pushing dish carts weren’t the same as when he had been a rising freshman at Ohio State, keen on a career in medicine. After nearly eight years of prison and bunking with his father, who had known nothing other than demotions for almost thirty working years, service work probably struck Chester as a painful symbol of the likelihood of being a permanent member of the laboring class. In the same way that he had learned to be a convict, now he was learning to be a black servant without prospects for advance.
He did, however, gain a mature sensibility on the black headwaiter who hired him, the subject of a short story emphasizing the generation gap called “A Salute to the Passing.” An elegiac testament, Chester’s story revealed the obvious value of the old caste relations. Immaculately comported Dick Small has thrived in his role as headwaiter, “America’s principal servant,” “pampered protégé of millionaires and royalty among his own people.” But Chester endorsed the men of his father’s generation, who understood that the people whom he served “were his life,” with a significant caveat; whatever public achievements on behalf of racial progress they attained, the benefits were doled out as personal favors, not because of any real power.
Chester’s work for Esquire continued to sustain his identity as a writer. Gingrich published “The Night’s for Crying,” the story detailing Cleveland’s tough streets, in January 1937, and he probably bought another 1937 story, “Every Opportunity,” a lighthearted and facetious romp through Cedar Avenue poolrooms and gin parlors as a convict’s appetites lead him back to prison. That September Esquire published one of his better hard-boiled tales of prison life, “The Visiting Hour,” an exploration of a white inmate receiving his young wife in the prison visitors’ room, while trying to contain his anger at the slow and corrupt process of parole. In that same issue, Esquire announced Chester’s racial identity by printing a woodcut of him based on an unsmiling, mildly gangsterish photograph shot after his release. Although Chester was the lightest in color among his brothers, anyone who cared to pay attention would have noticed he was black.
With his son back at home, Joseph Senior attempted to secure new lodgings, a rented room or two in a frame house crowded with tenants on E. Ninety-Third Street. Chester described the tension of the little place in a letter to a friend, recalling “I had it hard.” Although his father’s second wife seems to have lived only intermittently with the men, Chester claimed that his father “had very little money” and that, like the moll in “The Visiting Hour,” Agnes “was taking that.” The house was shouting distance from the major crime and vice block on Cedar Avenue.
The broad suffering of the Depression at least made Chester feel that it wasn’t exclusively his family that was failing. When asked his occupation for the city directory, Chester tried to put on a confident mien and called himself a “businessman,” which must have seemed more prosperous to people like his aunt and uncle than “writer.” He wasn’t quite sure that “writer”
was it, but Gingrich, apparently seduced by Chester’s regular correspondence, increased his fee to one hundred dollars per story. However, the well was drying up. He had outlived some of his usefulness for Esquire: his special conceit of being a “long term penitentiary insider” had ended.
From the Ninety-Third Street room Chester rekindled the romance with Jean, who lived a couple of blocks away. When Chester was released from prison in 1936, Jean was living with her brother-in-law Philip Plater. No longer a brash teenager, Jean claimed that the drunken Harry Plater had abandoned her not six months into the marriage. Chester believed that she used men to live, but her interest in Chester, the boy with long eyelashes and tender manners, was earnest. Whatever the complex nature of her living situation when he arrived, he latched on to Jean like a person drowning: “I grew to love her too, desperately and completely.”
Inexperienced in romance, Chester asked Jean to marry him not long after getting to Cleveland, which was made difficult by the fact that she was still married. In November, Jean issued a summons and posted public notices in the Daily Legal News alerting Harry that she planned to petition for divorce, claiming abandonment. In March Jean’s attorney brought her case into the court of common pleas and cited Plater for “gross neglect of duty.” Plater had been only a few miles away but never appeared at any court proceedings. The court granted her petition and dissolved the marriage. A justice of the peace married Chester and Jean on Tuesday, July 13, 1937.
Born in Texas, Jean worked as a domestic when she could get work, but she was attractive and young, and housecleaning and caretaking—occupations that left women especially vulnerable to sexual assault—were humiliating to someone who could glimpse into the world of black women who had been to college, like Chester’s mother or his aunt Leah Moon. Both of them agreed that, rather than having Jean work as a maid, Chester should support the two of them. His reward, in a sense, was the appearance of being in charge.
He was frank with Jean regarding what precisely had taken place in the summer of 1934 in prison. In a complex dynamic within his own personality, Chester sought absolution for the homosexual desires he had indulged in prison through merciless candor. If the honesty was good medicine psychologically, what he did not understand immediately was that there would be other hills for him to climb connected to his masculinity. The difficulty to maintain a standard of living that would allow Jean to stay at home would take not one-time courageous revelations but much more: tedious, dull consistency and self-control.
Marrying Jean did more than absolve him of the “degeneracy” he had experienced in prison. He had tried to show himself a tough during the intense months of their 1928 courtship, actions that led to his dangerous robberies. She of course had her own secrets to divulge, her years with Harry and other men while he was locked up. For Chester, by marrying Jean, a humbly educated woman several shades browner in color than himself, he was also forcibly discarding his mother’s ideals of betterment and domestic progress. Jean, however, was welcomed by his father, the Moons, and the Wigginses as a cheerful, agreeable relative.
After tiring of hotel work, Chester turned to the whites-only Cleveland country club circuit going out to the suburb of Shaker Heights. The country club work required one quality above all others: submissiveness. He was exhausted trying to smile at the racist chortle that bubbled up when the members drank. Nightly, Chester had to persuade himself that the tips justified his playing small, his acting to “just be a nigger.”
For seven years he had focused his attention so sharply on release from prison that it was with difficulty that he faced the new realization: that he was black in America. “Until then there had been nothing racial about my hurt, unbelievable as this may seem,” he wrote in his autobiography. Married life, however, made “a difference.” The tattered rented rooms the couple could afford—skimping on heat and other necessities—galled Chester, as did his humbling employment. Jean’s divorce was made possible by accusing Harry Plater of abandoning and failing to support her, but inside the house he was doing little better.
In the time away from the mops and steam trays, he probed the magazines for publishing opportunities. Disappointed, Chester grumbled to Henry Lee Moon that he had been shut out of the moneyed magazines that were home to Hemingway: Scribner’s and Collier’s. “They have all admired my work, in fact they have requested to see some of it,” he assured his cousin, “but they all say the same thing—they can’t use it.” To put him over in New York, Chester had engaged Thomas Uzzell, part fiction editor, part literary charlatan, an agent who advertised himself as “the leading American teacher on the short story and novel.” Uzzell advertised pamphlets and by-mail seminars in the New York Times Book Review, and it was not surprising that Chester, who paid him twenty dollars upfront to place ten short stories, had no success. One of the short stories was probably “Did You Ever Catch a Moon,” which Chester retitled “A Nigger,” and gave itself over to the frank treatment of the love triangle or quadrangle with Jean before his arrest. To someone with better connections like Henry, a story about a kept woman and a contract with an unscrupulous literary agent seemed inexpert. The upside was that Chester wasn’t backing off from a career even if he was making a misstep. He maintained to Henry that the prison novel was “outlined in my mind” and “only needs writing.” At the end of 1937 Chester poured himself into the penitentiary tale, tentatively called Day After Day.
The irony of being financially better off and more successful as a short story writer while an inmate was easy to see but hard to accept. Chester’s only publication for 1938 was “Every Opportunity,” which Esquire had acquired earlier. In February 1938, he sold another story of a bewildered convict to Bachelor, a new men’s magazine for the “discerning cosmopolite” whose “ambition has been stifled by monotony.” Chester’s tale “Scram!,” an insider’s look at the isolation cell, was wearing gimmicks thin to bind an audience to the story, which was narrated in the second person. He grunted with the slang and prejudice of his implied white readers with lines like “You call out to the Negro on sudden impulse and ask him, ‘Say, shine, do you hear that guy saying “scram!”?’ ” But neither the writing nor the shared terrain with Hemingway (whose narrator used the word “nigger” eighteen times on the first page in the famous February 1936 Esquire short story “The Trademan’s Return”) was distinguished.
In March 1938 his brother crowned himself the winner of their sibling rivalry. Joe completed his doctorate in sociology and “enjoy[ed] the recognition” available to him in Columbus. He had not limited himself to academic success. Somehow Joe had managed to pledge Alpha Phi Alpha, the fraternity to which Chester had never completed his initiation, and a few years later he would marry a college-educated French-language teacher who had served as one of his readers. A well-connected sorority woman who finished a master’s degree at Ohio State, Theresa Estelle Jones was the granddaughter of the man who owned the land on which Tuskegee Institute was built. Everyone called her Estelle, just like Joe’s mother. Joe was a glimmering success.
Cousin Henry Lee Moon was having a career liftoff too. After writing for the New York Times on black voting power, the progress of antilynching law, public housing in Harlem, Liberia, and even the illegal “policy” lottery game, Moon accepted a position in the federal government serving Assistant Secretary of Housing Robert Weaver. He joined a group organized by the Himes and Bomar family friend Mary McLeod Bethune, now a college president (the Negro newspapers called her the convener of the “Black Cabinet” to President Franklin Roosevelt). Moon worked as secretary and public relations man for Weaver, a black wunderkind raised in Washington, D.C., who had completed a PhD in economics at Harvard by the time he was twenty-six. In August 1938, Henry wed his longtime confidante and girlfriend, Mollie Lewis.
Inspired by the splashy victories of Joe and Henry in regional and national affairs, Chester tried to press the case locally with the Cleveland dailies. Louis Seltzer at the Cleveland Press brusquely dismi
ssed him. “I could not hire you if you were Jesus Christ reincarnated,” Seltzer growled, by which he implied that the rejection had nothing to do with race. Chester kept at the typewriter. By the spring of 1938, Chester had amassed portions of a novel about his prison experience and a bundle of short stories. When Henry saw the “pile of manuscripts,” he envied the power and work ethic that his young cousin had shown, proudly noting that Chester had “got the stuff already.”
Chester had also secured a better agent, Gideon Kishur of the International Literary Bureau. Kishur sent out several of Chester’s stories to the most esteemed glossy magazines and got a comment back from Kenneth Littauer at Collier’s, who rejected one story because it was “rather depressing as an entertainment.” Chester hit upon the idea to write a feel-good narrative about Joe’s extraordinary success. But after American Magazine turned the story down, his country-club-experience-induced paranoia got the best of Chester. He wrote American Magazine politely to ask if they were racists. “I hope I am not presumptuous in this, my effort to ascertain your policy on this, a subject that may or may not be a ticklish one, but since I am not in a position to know, I must ask.” “This” was, of course, whether or not the editors had any use for profiles on American Negroes. U.S. magazine customs were changing, but slowly. When they upheld the rejection at the end of May, Chester found only that his tenderfooting had caused the staff to smother him with graciousness. “We were very much interested to read of the splendid record,” his rejection began, before plateauing with “we’re sorry we cannot cooperate with you on your friendly suggestion” but “many thanks for keeping us in mind.” Chester knew all he needed to know and abandoned the story about the professional triumphs of disabled Negro intellectuals.
Chester B. Himes Page 13
