Chester Himes (3 page)

“I want my children to look like me,” he muttered.

“So they can grow up handicapped and despised?”

“Despised!” His face took on a lowering look. “What do you mean, despised? I suppose you think I'm handicapped and despised?”

“Aren't you?” The question startled him. “Can't you see,” she went on, “I want the children to have it better, not just be common pickaninnies.”

“Pickaninnies!” Her thoughtless remark cut him to the quick.

“That's better than being white men's leavings.”

She whitened with fury. It was the second time he'd slurred her parents but this time was all the more hurting because they were dead, and she revered their memory. Striking back, she said witheringly, “You're nothing but a shanty nigger and never will be anything else. And you would love nothing better than to
have my children turn out to be as low and common as yourself.”
¹⁸

With the years, giving up on high expectations she'd had for his father, Estelle seems to have transferred those expectations, and ultimately her profound disappointment as well, onto Chester.

In any account of Himes's life, it's at this point—in family recollections, biographical sketches, in Himes's novel
The Third Generation
—that Joseph begins to fade away. He moves from one job to another, each a retreat, each a notch or two down on the jack; he ends up doing manual labor, waiting tables, janitoring. Ghetto life in St. Louis and Cleveland completes the rift between parents. The children drift away. With Estelle very near madness, the parents are divorced.

It's difficult to assess to what degree Joseph's defeat arose internally, from lack of willfulness, some failure of will; which from his limited background and always tenuous position as a minimally educated black man in white society; and which from the pride and caprice of wife Estelle. More than once her refusal to mix with other blacks, her insistence upon being treated as though she were white, her confrontations with neighbors, college peers, and shopkeepers, led to a compromise in Joseph's position, even to loss of a job. Broader social factors were at work here as well. Increased segregation led to fewer opportunities for Negroes to improve their lot, as Estelle's parents had done, as merchants and in general service to whites. Meanwhile, increasing urbanization, industrialization, and rapidly advancing technology were well on the way to rendering trades such as those Joseph taught obsolete.

With ongoing, ever more outright marital discord, with the dominolike series of retreats, and finally with his inability to support his family by manual work, all he can attain to after the move North, Joseph's spirit falters and fails. He becomes the very image of the black man ground down, unable to care for his family. We know from his early history that Joseph once had great resolve. We know that he was a hard worker, a skilled artisan, a dedicated teacher. We know from Chester's descriptions that Joseph for many years possessed considerable personal dignity and a pride that if not on the gargantuan order of his wife's was equally manifest. (“Only his wife could make him feel inferior.”
¹⁹
) And with what we know of family
dynamics we recognize the emotional balance Joseph must have had, and the emotional expenditures he must have made, continually to counterbalance Estelle's excesses and bring the family back to an even keel. Finally Joseph seems to have exhausted his personal capital—seems to have been used up. To Estelle, this was proof of what she had suspected all along. God knows she'd done what
she
could to help this man make something more of himself. All to no avail.

An octoroon with hazel or gray eyes, aquiline nose, and straight auburn hair, Estelle Bomar looked “like a white woman who had suffered a long siege of illness.”
²⁰
Often Estelle seems, from accounts, a woman comprised entirely of adjectives: genteel, churchgoing, cultured, prideful, proper, driven, ambitious. She spoke constantly of their heritage and drilled her sons in the necessity of living up to it while squeezing the bridges of their noses to keep them from becoming flat. If Joseph's mind shaped itself around coals of accommodation and melioration, then Estelle's danced over flames of indignation and impatience. In some manner, hers was the ultimate Republican dream: to re-create what never existed. In another, or certainly it must have seemed so to her, she was doing what had to be done—at that time, given that history. Estelle, like her son Chester, possessed a talent for living as though events that had not yet occurred, but that should occur, already had. Chester often seemed to catch on to things twenty or thirty years before anyone else did. Speaking of the Watts riots in the sixties, he remarked how surprising it was that they'd waited so long to happen.

Look how far we've come with our superior blood and breeding, Estelle told her sons in a kind of litany. And it's true that all three went on to great achievements, even if Chester in later years wrote Carl Van Vechten: “As I look back now, I feel that much of my retardation as a writer has been due to a subconscious (and conscious and deliberate) desire to escape my past. All mixed up no doubt with the Negro's desire for respectability. It brought a lot of confusion to my mind.”
²¹
This fundamental conflict within himself—of black versus white values, but just as importantly of patrician versus egalitarian—became perhaps the central theme in Himes's life.

Estelle's accounts of her background, of that heritage she held so important, changed with time, elaborated and edited in ways reminiscent of her son's later memoirs. Any narrative, after all,
whether oral history, memoir, or fiction, takes shape from what, among countless possibilities, is chosen: what foregrounded, what passed over quickly. Memory, too, is a kind of storyteller, often more poet than reporter, selecting and rearranging details to correspond to some image we have of ourselves, or simply to make a better story.

Estelle's grandmother was born either to an Indian squaw or African princess, depending on when the story was told, and to an Irish overseer. Malinda, Estelle's mother, light-skinned like herself, grew up to become handservant to a Carolina doctor named Cleveland who traced his own heritage back through a Revolutionary War general to British aristocracy. Despite laws forbidding literacy to slaves, Malinda was taught to read, perhaps by her master's daughter. Malinda in turn gave birth to three children, two of them quite likely sired by Dr. Cleveland, the third by an Indian slave. Following the Civil War, Malinda married Chester Bomar, “a tall fair white-looking man with a long blond beard,”
²²
himself the issue of an octoroon and master John Earl Bomar.

Chester, Malinda, and Malinda's three children lived in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on land ceded them by Chester's former master. Chester apprenticed as a brick mason while Malinda worked as a wet nurse and took in washing. Selling their land three years later, using money from the Freedman's Bureau for transportation, they moved to Dalton, Georgia, where Chester worked as a stonemason. Within two years they relocated again, this time to Atlanta, hoping for steadier work. Chester there fell ill, and upon his recovery the family returned to Spartanburg, bringing with them three new children, Estelle, the youngest, born in February 1874. Chester and son Tom set up as builders, counting among their achievements the region's first large cotton mills. They worked fiercely, every Bomar pitching in to do his part, pushing past setbacks, persevering, and by 1890 the family was well established in the local Negro bourgeoisie. Chester served his church as deacon, superintendent of the Sunday school and financial adviser.

This bourgeoisie was a new thing in the world, and like most new things, fragile. Years later Chester Himes would say of fellow black Americans that “The face may be the face of Africa, but the heart has the beat of Wall Street.”
²³
He would spend much of his life alternately courting and railing against middle-class white
values, an exemplar of double consciousness as described by W. E. B. Du Bois,

this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others … One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
²⁴

Blacks, Du Bois insists, are forced by reason of their African ancestry to see themselves as second-class citizens, inferior in every way: physically, intellectually, culturally. Having accepting that, then and only then are they allowed the privilege of seeing themselves as American citizens.

But it's at just such cultural crossroads, just such stress points, that cracks may reach down to our deepest wells of creativity. Jazz developed in New Orleans because of that city's uniquely rich cultural gumbo. Thus in
The African-American Novel
Bernard Bell points out that conflicts between black culture and white society led to crippling destructive tensions, as well as to intensely creative ones, in black people and their communities—as they did in Chester Himes himself. It's difficult, of course, to elicit one from the other, to assess how these opposing forces counterbalance; to say, for instance, to what degree the creative response to the destructive is that and only that. To some extent jazz developed as a continuation of banned African drums, but also as a subversion of the white society's music. Recent critics such as Houston Baker
(Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory)
argue for the roots of African-American literature in blues, which wasn't a way of immersing yourself in your troubles, as Joe Williams once remarked, but a way of getting outside them. Others such as Henry Louis Gates
(The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism)
hold out for signifying, an African language art that foregrounds ironic and parodic rhetorical elements, dissembling's first cousin.

The creative thrust, then, may be simply a reflexive response to the destructive; it may be an attempt to distance oneself from that destructive element, to hold it at arm's length, as in dissembling and signifying; or it may strive to purge the destructive through catharsis. In Himes at various points, sometimes in the same work, even the
same sentence, we see all three motives at work. He was a man of unresolvable tensions and contradictions, a man whose greatest strengths—as a writer—lay precisely where those conflicts remain manifest and unresolved.

Unlike her son, Estelle Bomar Himes kept well hidden any conflicts or second thoughts she may have entertained concerning the new bourgeoisie. Early piano lessons earned her a place at what was then the South's most elite school for young black women, Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina. Following graduation “by virtue of her literary attainments and good moral behavior,”
²⁵
she stayed on for two years as a teacher, though apparently taking time off for further study at the Philadelphia branch of the New England Conservatory of Music. Both her social status and religious upbringing fueled what was essentially a missionary zeal: she felt it her duty to spread the good word, to help in uplifting the more unfortunate of her race. Estelle pursued that duty in North and South Carolina public schools, the North Carolina School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, and at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In 1901, age twenty-seven, she married Joseph Sandy Himes.

Our sympathies flow to Estelle at the same moment we despise her elitism and (not to swallow the word) her racism. For her color, her sex, and her time, she was remarkably well educated. Few men of color and far fewer women had her education or advantages. Estelle had a dream: she saw what could be. Like Malcolm, she also saw what marshaling of will and personal sacrifice would be necessary to attain that dream. There were many like her, rarely heard from. Few black men or women at the time refused to say what was expected, to say
these
things instead. Negroes in America had in fact developed dissembling—saying one thing and meaning another—into an art; this was a primary mask of double consciousness. Estelle did not so much defy conventions as she steadfastly ignored them, believing that social status should be awarded not on the basis of race but of refinement and culture. It must have occurred to her at some point that this was but another guise of the very thing she fought against. But Estelle, remember, was a master at revision, forever cutting and pasting the paragraphs of her life.

Chester Himes rarely could bring himself to say what was expected. And he always refused to dissemble. For forty years we would hear Himes's voice, dead on, even when attacks contrived to silence him,
when repeatedly his books fell out of print, when we stopped our ears and tried not to listen. Himes pointed unflinchingly at the situation of blacks in America, demanding response. And if his truthtelling often made blacks as uncomfortable as it made whites, well then: he was his mother's son in every way.

While Estelle sat learning the ways of noblesse oblige at Scotia Seminary, Southern legislators were passing laws that effectively fenced in and disenfranchised their Negro citizens.

In the period from Civil War's end to the first years of the new century, the U.S. elevated itself to a global power and bisected into the divided self—great wealth at one pole, great need at the other—still at the heart of its troubles. Robber barons like Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller amassed obscene reservoirs of wealth while the populace at large fell ever deeper into poverty and thirst. Our founders' vision of an enlightened aristocracy of gentlemen rulers narrowed to a squint of wealthy privilege. Today, living in Hamilton's world, we go on espousing Jeffersonian ideals.

Though labor, beast of a million backs as it was, proved slow to organize, unions lumbered and stammered into being during this period, among them the Noble Order of Knights of Labor (1886), Samuel Gompers's American Federation of Labor (1889) and Eugene V. Debs's American Railway Union (1893). Crusading journalists like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Jacob Riis, along with novels such as Stephen Crane's
Maggie, a Girl of the Streets
, Frank Norris's
The Octopus
, and Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle
, chronicled abuses of big business, government corruption, and worker exploitation. The tenor of the time shifted toward union and socialist ideals: that workers should control the means of production and profits be equitably distributed; that labor have fair representation; that any collective, properly united and with dynamic leadership, becomes a political force.