Chester Bomar Himes was born on July 29, 1909, in a comfortable white two-story, three-bedroom cottage at 710 Lafayette Street on the corner of Dunklin Street in Jefferson City, Missouri. In the late 1920s, the poet Sterling Brown and his wife, Daisy, would occupy the same house. On the other side of Lafayette from the house stood the limestone pillars and wrought-iron main gates of the campus of Lincoln Institute. The school’s elaborate brick buildings towered on the hill opposite the house, and the students could be seen scrimmaging at football on the school grounds below. Chester was born into a family, on both parents’ sides, of professors teaching in America’s Negro higher education system. The last of three sons, Chester was named by his mother, Estelle, to honor her father Elias Bomar, who was known to his family and friends by his middle name, Chester.
An exacting, slight woman in adulthood, Estelle Himes was proud of her family and ancestry. Both of Estelle’s parents had been born into slavery in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in the 1830s and emancipated as adults after the Civil War. While they were light complexioned enough to pass as not being black (exasperating and befuddling to the Dalton, Georgia, census numerator), they were hardly considered white. Born after legal chattel slavery, Estelle belonged to a generation of African Americans who heard rumors about the identity of some of their grandparents. South Carolina, especially its coastal parts, also had a tradition of using the terms “turks” and “brass ankles” to include mulattoes among whites in times of need or to palliate ardent natives refusing enslavement and black codes. But wistful Estelle pondered about her forebears, and she developed elaborate genealogical and romantic myths, linking herself at every turn to aristocrats. Estelle liked to describe her mother as the offspring of a “pedigreed Englishman,” an Irish trader, and a woman whose mother was an “African princess.” She proudly described her father’s father as “a direct descendent from an English noble family.”
The truth was a bit messier than the family legends she raised her younger sons, Joseph and Chester, to admire. Estelle’s mother, Malinda Cleveland, had grown up a prize possession of Jesse Cleveland, a prosperous Spartanburg merchant, whose father had distinguished himself as a Revolutionary War captain at the Battle of King’s Mountain. Hardy and independent, Cleveland conducted his business in dry goods and slaves overland by wagon train to ports in Baltimore and Philadelphia to elude the import taxes applied to the goods shipped by boat from Charleston’s harbor. He claimed title to much of the original land that became the town of Spartanburg and, by 1835, was named a trustee of the Spartanburg Male Academy, along with another prominent citizen, Elisha Bomar. In his will, Cleveland donated his cow pasture, or the land west of the courthouse, to what is today’s Wofford College.
When Cleveland died in December 1851, Malinda was a young girl of about twelve, and she was valued at $700. Apparently a striking child, Malinda looked like a mixture of Irish or English with Native American and African, a common outcome of the sexual relations that slaveholders forced upon enslaved women and girls. Malinda was moved to the town household of Cleveland’s middle son, Robert, in the northwest part of the village. A silver-tongued graduate of Charleston Medical College, Robert Easley Cleveland was a well-liked doctor in his thirties specializing in typhoid cases. By 1860 the younger Cleveland was wealthy and owned $39,000 worth of “personal property,” mainly enslaved mixed-race people. Although her mother’s presence nearby may have helped her put off the pressures of concubinage for a time, in her late teens Malinda found herself in a sexual relationship with a white man, probably Cleveland. By 1867, when she was in her late twenties, she had four children: eight-year-old Maggie, six-year-old Thomas, two-year-old Phillis, and newborn Charles. Phillis seems to have been the last Cleveland child, and Maggie seems to have been the first. While the other children were probably fathered by Elias Bomar, there is no way of knowing with certainty.
At some point during this period, Malinda fell in love with the spirited and dashing young groom and mason Elias Bomar. As a child she had had the opportunity to first meet Elias, who was quite difficult to distinguish physically from a white man, when Robert Cleveland married Elizabeth Bomar in Spartanburg in 1844. Elizabeth was the oldest daughter of John Bomar Jr. and the marriage united two of the town’s prominent white families. The Bomars descended from Whig Englishmen who had settled in Halifax County, Virginia, fought the British and then trekked down to South Carolina after the surrender at Yorktown. Elisha Bomar was the local patriarch, who married Amaryllis Earle in 1823 and, like Jesse Cleveland, sent his children into the professions. His son John Earle Bomar was born July 29, 1827.
Technically, Estelle Himes’s father, Elias, was never owned by any Bomar. Theron Earle, a relative of Amaryllis, owned the title to the man, and in 1840, before Elias was ten, his estimated value was $550. In piecemeal notes about her father written at the end of her own life, Estelle described him as the son of an “octoroon” and a “white Englishman.” Earlier, during Chester’s childhood, she told her sons that she was the granddaughter of Elisha Bomar from Spartanburg, which is possible. Elisha Bomar might have visited Theron Earle’s farm at some point in the 1830s and conceived a son who came under his control during later years. After Earle’s death in 1841, roughly three-year-old Elias seems to have been entrusted to Elisha and Amaryllis Bomar, and became the valet to their fourteen-year-old son John.
The slavery that Elias knew at the hands of the Bomar family was unique. Like other Southerners with pretensions, the family preferred the term “servant” to “slave,” and they built sturdy brick dwellings on their grounds for slave houses. Bomar children weren’t permitted to slough off their chores onto the servants. Elias’s main job, along with walking the cows to pasture, was probably as a groom. When John attended the famed Charleston military academy The Citadel (he did not graduate) and then took classes at Erskine College (again without finishing a degree), Elias probably accompanied him. John then found his true vocation, working as the editor of the two-sheet Spartanburg paper the Carolina Spartan, where it was claimed that, “no one ever wielded a more graceful pen.” Bomar became county clerk, or intendant, before the war, and he amassed a large library stocked with works by Alexander Pope, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Walter Scott, along with a complete set of Charles Dickens, which he enjoyed reading aloud. In the wake of the master’s professional climb—the colleges, newspapers and books—Elias learned how to read. His second daughter, Estelle, would have a son named after her father who shared a birthday with his grandfather’s slave master John Earle Bomar who had wanted to become a writer.
Journalist Bomar was also a master mason who had lain the corner stone of the town’s courthouse. He passed on the trade to his servant, and by the end of the 1850s Elias had become a skilled mason. Then came the century’s and the nation’s defining crisis, the Civil War. Genteel slaveholder that he may have been, Bomar gathered together local men into the Holcombe Legion and was elected captain of Company C. Groom Elias Bomar, tall, “white looking,” and with “a long blond beard,” accompanied his master to war. The Holcombe Legion participated in optimistic skirmishes in early March 1862, where individual valor seemed important. By June, however, immediately after the Battle of Seven Pines, it had become immersed in the massive slaughter for which the Civil War was to be known, the inauguration of horrifying modern warfare. After only a few months the Confederate army discharged John Earle Bomar because of ill health, and he returned home with Elias while his unit fought on until Appomattox. By 1864, even Spartanburg natives were dismayed by the bedraggled Holcombe Legion, saying that it was “seldom” to find “a worse heart-broken, low-spirited, set of chaps.”
After the end of the Civil War, Elias and Malinda decided, like many freedmen, to marry and make their emancipation genuine by leaving South Carolina. The Bomars tried Dalton, Georgia, a town still “vivid” in “devastation wrought by war,” and thus needed to have all of its brick buildings rebuilt or repaired. By 1871 Elias had prospered enough to pay $125 for a lot to build a house on E. Morris Street near the railroad. Estelle, her mother’s seventh child, was born on February 23, 1874. Her birth occurred as her own family fortunes sank, forcing them to sell their home at a loss and become renters in the “Gate City”—Atlanta—where Malinda had to take in wash. But Estelle would carry only sketchy memories of her Georgia girlhood. Her family left their Atlanta residence on Foundry Street when her father’s health was broken by consumption (the term used then for tuberculosis), and by 1878 the Bomars had returned to Spartanburg, the place Estelle thought of as home.
When the Bomars returned to Spartanburg, Elias’s brother Charles was prospering as a grocer, an undertaker, a realtor, and a landlord. Both Bomar brothers got in on the ground floor of the spurting Spartanburg economy before the end of the 1870s. On November 15, 1878, O. P. Earle, serving as the executor for Elias’s former owner Theron Earle, accepted $103 from Elias and Charles for 5½ acres of land on the “Gap” road off Howard Street, about two miles west of downtown. The brothers built houses in the shadow of the construction of the gigantic Spartan Mills cotton factory, the largest cotton mill of its kind in the South. Elias and his son and stepsons helped to construct the sprawling cotton warehouses and tenements for workers and profit as landowners putting up houses to rent. Soon the Bomars could claim membership in Spartanburg’s African American bourgeoisie: teachers, clergy, builders, merchants, two doctors, and one journalist.
Estelle’s brother Thomas genuinely flourished, securing contracts to erect many of Spartanburg’s downtown brick buildings. A gifted architect, a meticulous craftsman and a swift deal maker, he purchased multiple shares of stock in the leading companies he saw popping up around him, like the Spartanburg Savings Bank and the Saxon Mills cotton manufacturer. Thomas would eventually own twenty-seven shares of stock in the Spartan Mills manufacturing campus. The only nonwhite man elected to the town council, Thomas was Spartanburg’s principal black citizen.
Perhaps because of ill health, Elias Bomar became increasingly devout. He claimed a founding membership at the Westminster Presbyterian Church, a single-story gable-roofed wooden building just north of the courthouse square. The white Bomars were Baptists, but not their ex-slaves. The Presbyterians were known for fair dealings with blacks and setting up schools for freedmen. Thus the Bomar girls were sent and dutifully thrived at the Presbyterian college for black women, Scotia Seminary, in Concord, North Carolina, about one hundred miles northeast on the rail line. A school of three hundred students and twenty teachers founded in 1867, Scotia’s catalogs carried the slogan of its New England mission: “We must make this institution the Mount Holyoke for the African people.” Scotia offered two tracks: a four-year grammar program, including English, arithmetic, algebra, geography, science, history, and literature; and a three-year normal and scientific program, including geometry, astronomy, physics, chemistry, history, Latin, and rhetoric. The industrial department taught cooking and sewing, but for its era Scotia offered a strong liberal arts curriculum. Cultured refinement, appropriate diction, dress and manners were emphasized as strenuously as the course work. Music teachers like Ida Cathcart not only taught the piano but also provided poorer students with shoes and undergarments.
In the nineteenth century the administration of black education after grade school was exclusively white, but at Scotia the school faculty was racially mixed. Despite the fact that there were not many black Presbyterians, the church always had a large number—three-fifths—of black teachers at their schools and a few had graduated from liberal arts colleges like Oberlin. The president of the school during most of the years that the Bomar girls attended was David Junkin Satterfield, a Princeton alumnus. Satterfield tried to bridge the racial divide, disdaining to use the common logic that segregated the races into “you people” and the white majority. He was also a severe theology teacher who demanded that the young women “know the Book from cover to cover and their Catechism word for word.” Estelle admired him and specialized in music.
Estelle’s older sister, Hattie, achieved early success and became a young member of the Scotia faculty in the 1890s. Teenagers like future college founder and U.S. presidential adviser Mary McLeod (later Bethune), brimming with pluck and ambition, but straight from the South Carolina cotton rows, stood in awe of Hattie Bomar. McLeod, who graduated a year before Estelle, explained that Hattie Bomar “gave me my very first vision of the culture and ability of Negro women.” Like some of the other girls, McLeod had never before met young black women who combined the qualities of erudition, cultural refinement, and chastity, or had eaten at a table set with linen and flatware.
Naturally the conspicuous refinement served a very practical purpose: it was impossible to be further from the cotton furrow, the musky animals, the huts with dirt floors, the offal, and the households with children who shared no common paternal ancestry. Even liberals from the North, like Harvard educator Albert Bushnell Hart, who toured North Carolina in the 1890s, were dismissive of “the greater part of the [Negro] race,” living in a “nether world of great ignorance and greater degradation.” Hart did more than just describe conditions; he passed a judgment. “The long continuance of slavery is not wholly responsible for this degradation,” he suggested, advancing a view shared by many whites, “it is a defect in the character of the race.” The Scotia women felt personally bound to disprove him. McLeod’s elegant manners and Estelle Bomar’s competent Chopin études and sonnet writing, as well as the gourmet aestheticism that the school cultivated, strode against the “nether world.”
Inspired with commitment after her education, Mary McLeod decided to become a missionary and go to Africa; Estelle was content, like her older sister, Hattie, to continue teaching the children of freedmen. Although Estelle spent a couple of summers in the 1890s receiving musical training in Philadelphia, she readied herself to become a public school teacher in Spartanburg. By the time she was seventeen she earned a first-class certificate on her teaching exam, placing second (behind a Scotia upperclasswoman), and was on her way to professional standing. For several years in the 1890s Estelle divided her time between Spartanburg schools and working at Scotia, alongside Hattie. The center of black education in Spartanburg was the graded school on 239 North Dean Street, headed in 1891 by principal C. C. Scott and later in the decade by R. M. Alexander. At the Dean Street School, the Bomar girls began their teaching careers.
The man Estelle would marry, Joseph Sandy Himes, was born on February 2, in 1873 or 1874, in the middle of Georgia, near Tennille, his father’s birthplace. He spent his adolescence in Newberry, South Carolina, some forty miles southeast of Spartanburg. He and Estelle had a great deal in common, beginning with the fact that both of them were born in Georgia but raised in relative prosperity in South Carolina’s Up Country. Black people in the highlands had known hard slavery, but theirs was not the total slave society of the low-lying rice-cultivation country in the coastal areas around Charleston. Newberry was a prosperous, stylish village, with federal-style brick buildings lining the downtown along Pratt Street between the Newberry Opera House and College Street, an attractiveness that later earned it the designation as America’s “most charming” small town.
Joseph had grown up the fourth child of a blacksmith also named Joseph Sandy Himes, known for the first half of his life as Sandy Neely. His mother was Anna Robinson Himes and she may have grown up on the farm of the Washington County, Georgia, planter Samuel Robinson. Sandy Neely was almost certainly enslaved nearby. Down the road from the Robinson place lived Elizabeth Hines, who in 1860 owned several men in their twenties and a large farm. Better known than Elizabeth though was the most noted farmer in antebellum Washington County and the owner of the celebrated Whitehall Plantation, Joseph Henry Hines. This line of the Hines name in Georgia had originated with a 1650 Virginia immigrant named John William Hines, who came from Londonderry, Ireland. The original name there was O’Heyne, or O’hEidhin. The Hines name was connected to remarkable wealth in Tennille and surrounding Washington County. Strong Southern accents parsed little distinction between “Hines” and “Himes,” and for years Chester and his father would have their surnames spelled either way on official records.
Born around 1847, Sandy Neely was rather admired himself. Rumored to have had an “ungovernable temper,” he was thought to have killed an overseer after slavery had ended, the sort of violent, racially charged event that was not uncommon among the fifteen thousand citizens of Washington County, where blacks outnumbered whites. But Sandy Neely was known better for his prominence at the forge; he was the unusual skilled freedman with a business large enough to employ fellow blacks. In 1874, he ran a carriage-making and blacksmithing shop in Tennille, and he owned personal goods worth almost two hundred dollars. Whites in the town accorded him the sort of respect that they denied virtually all other black Americans. Continuing in the spirit of slavery, the postbellum Washington County tax lists were segregated by race and enumerated freedmen under the names of their employers, in a separate register at the end of the district account. Neely was the only African American in the county registered under his own name.
Once he left Tennille and switched his name to be nearly the same as the most prominent man he had come across, Joseph Sandy Himes settled in Newberry, South Carolina in 1880, and, along with his thirty-three-year-old wife, was the parent of six children. Thirteen-year-old Leah was oldest. She excelled at school and would go on to study at Hampton Institute in Virginia, perhaps the most famous school for freedmen in the South. Thomas was eleven, Bennie nine, Sandy seven, Wesley five, and Andrew only a year. All but Andrew had been born in Georgia.
The Himeses lived in a section of Newberry with shops and Negro tenements called Amasoka, close to the railroad line, where merchants, the railroad supervisor, machinists, laborers, and cooks kept busy in wooden stores clustered together on Caldwell Avenue. Newberry provided a singular advantage to African Americans: nearby to Amasoka was the Hoge School for freedmen. Even five-year-old Wesley was enrolled for study, the great fulfillment of the promise of emancipation. In the middle of September 1885, mother Anna Himes died, and Joseph married again, to a woman named Mary. They had a child named Fannie in 1886.
Not four years after Fannie’s birth, on February 29, 1890, Sandy died, leaving his large family the mechanics shop and half-acre parcel of land by Vincent Street. By then, the “well known and highly honored” Himeses could boast of Leah, who had graduated from Hampton, earned a first-grade South Carolina teaching certificate, and taught school in Newberry. On February 4, 1891, a diminutive and shy Leah married a schoolteacher named Rodney Moon. Moon was from just beyond the city limits in Mendenhall, and he had stayed in state for his education, attending Claflin University. In the fall of 1890, it had been to Claflin too, that Leah’s bright younger brother Joseph Sandy Himes went.
Short, pigeon-toed, dark-skinned and blue-eyed, and called Sandy like his father, Joseph Sandy Himes entered the first-year normal school class in blacksmithing in 1890 at Claflin University, in Orangeburg, eighty miles southeast of Newberry. The school carried the name of an abolitionist governor of Massachusetts. Young Sandy possessed the qualities necessary for admission to the Claflin normal department—“a good moral character” and the ability “to read and write well.” He faced the world without great means, but with a confidence that endeared him to men and women alike. His son would describe him as a “magnificent actor,” who could “dissemble” and “pose” “with validity.” Joseph and his sister Leah would become the best educated and the most distinguished of their family, leading very different lives and affording their children vastly different opportunities than could their brothers and one other sister, who spent their lives as hotel waiters, porters, and hairdressers. Joseph’s matriculation to college must have fulfilled a dream of his slave-born father. The son belonged to a generation who would turn a handcraft into a white-collar job.
Nearly one hundred other sons of freedmen joined Joseph at Claflin in the field that he had first learned at the Vincent Street shop. Claflin was “fully committed to Industrial Education” and made the promise demonstrative. Shortly before Joseph arrived at the school gates, a new large blacksmith shop had been completed, and steam fans drove eight billowing forges. There were even courses in steam engineering. Claflin boasted impressive young men, like recent blacksmithing graduate and teaching assistant Wilson Cooke, who spent summers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on to design buildings for the federal government. Cooke was living proof that, followed as one track, the industrial arts were gateways to professions like engineering and architecture.
At Claflin Joseph witnessed the sharp tensions and occasional, violent conflicts over the direction of black schools. White Claflin professors sometimes directly attacked their black colleagues. Students resented bigoted white professors and they resisted the mounting Jim Crow protocols emerging in the South. But even while he acknowledged the right to black self-determination, white founding school president Lorenzo Dutton derided the leadership ability of the poor children of ex-slaves: “not one in 1,000 has enough executive ability to manage the concerns of his own household successfully.” Unlike many of the students who had known only rural hardship, Joseph put his years in his father’s shop to use and succeeded admirably well. He finished the three-year course in blacksmithing and mechanical drawing with marks good enough to land a job at Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth in Savannah. Starting in 1893, he taught a standard curriculum on how to design, care for, and use a blacksmith forge, to file, chip, and anneal metal, and to make tools.
Its ornate public squares of English-style gardens made the port city of Savannah one of the most attractive destinations in Georgia and, until nearly 1880, the state’s most densely populated town. Cosmopolitan and richer than the South Carolina Up Country, it had liberal origins as a debtors’ colony that had outlawed slavery. Savannah was home to a population that included several comfortable and well-educated African Americans. At the turn of the century, more than 28,000 of Savannah’s 55,268 residents were African American. Much of their optimism centered on the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth.
Set on an eighty-one-acre farm, Georgia State Industrial had been founded in 1891 as a result of an 1890 amendment to the Morrill Act, which had created the land-grant colleges in the United States in the 1860s. That amendment required states to make provisions for Negro Americans. The school had gotten under way with four professors and forty students, most of the instruction and living occurring, at first, in Boggs Hall, an old plantation mansion. Parsons Hall, the dormitory for students, had been erected with money from the sale of the last gang of African captives sold into Georgia in 1859. In 1896 the school opened Meldrim Hall, a two-story wooden-frame industrial arts building, with an eight-hundred-seat chapel on the second floor, a building put up with Joseph Himes’s help.
The college was led by erudite Richard R. Wright, who became one of the paramount black educators of his generation. When the one-armed Union general Oliver Otis Howard, later Freedman’s Bureau head and founder of Howard University, had stopped in Atlanta to meet with Georgia freedmen and asked a crowd of begrimed ex-slaves what message to carry to the North about their condition, an illiterate twelve-year-old Wright had sturdily replied, “Massa, tell ’em we are rising.” He lived up to his legendary reply by graduating from Atlanta University as valedictorian in its first college class, and was known far and wide as “We’se a-risin Wright.”
To win that achievement Wright had become an expert classicist and Francophile and he stocked his library with books emphasizing the African role in the life of the mind and the creation of art. Thus for Joseph Himes, boarding at the school was another kind of education. Few blacks had ever seen as many books before dealing with the black condition (Claflin’s library held fourteen hundred volumes). In the college president’s personal collection were “huge encyclopedias—Britannica, Chambers’s; reference books; Bible commentaries; groups of books on the history of the nations, of religion, of philosophy; books on economics, politics, etc. and every available book written by a Negro-American.” Among Wright’s prized volumes was the abolitionist work An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes. Written by Henri Gregoire, a prominent French philosopher who’d corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, the translation presented the lives of distinguished blacks in science and the arts in order to dispute claims of racial inferiority. In Boggs Hall—where the president, his family, and college faculty (including Joseph) lived—the discussion regularly centered on Hebrew and Greek literature, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, and other favorites of Wright’s. Accordingly, Joseph built a library resembling the president’s.
But what the black teachers learned about African contributions to the world could not stave off the mounting pressure of racism. At the commencement exercises, the white school commissioner and Savannah mayor Peter Meldrim would have no problem telling the black crowd, “I do not believe in educating you people to want things you can never get. We must educate the Niggra to be the best possible Niggra and not a bad imitation of a white man.” To effect his prescription for a caste society where blacks would not reasonably aspire to citizenship, Meldrim spied on faculty and students at the school, getting reports on their conversations from the black groundskeeper—who, although uneducated, openly aspired to become the college president. The students and the faculty who recognized the liberal arts curriculum as the most direct route for the black elite to gain parity with whites found themselves in opposition to instructors who were beholden to the state legislature for the wherewithal to keep the college open. Ten years earlier it had been different. At Claflin commencement, speakers like African Methodist Episcopal Bishop William Arnett had encouraged the students to resist by every means, including their feet. “Get up and go!” he had exhorted, spurring westward migration. “Go, take your family with you.” Not willing to become western “exodusters” yet, Joseph and his friends had thrown themselves into work that proved or developed their competence, trying to balance what the black editor and novelist Pauline Hopkins called the “contending forces.”
By 1900, when he was still in his twenties, Joseph Himes was elevated from his position as instructor of blacksmithing to director of the industrial department, which contained agriculture, wheelwrighting, mechanical drawing, blacksmithing, carpentry, shoemaking, bricklaying, and painting. He reorganized the unit into two branches, one of manual training and the other of trades. The promotion showed Wright’s faith and Joseph’s ability to mount the administrative ladder. While the black intelligentsia strategized to combat Jim Crow, Joseph added a practical dimension to his classroom work. He ran a commercial blacksmithing and wheelwrighting shop at 309 Hall Street, specializing in horseshoeing and probably joined with his friend E. D. Bulkley in the National Negro Business League. With his higher salary and managerial self-confidence, he felt ready to consider marriage.
His colleague, masonry department chief Lewis B. Thompson, married President Wright’s daughter Essie, securing his future. Joseph turned his attention to the young Bomar women of Spartanburg, first courting Gertrude Bomar before focusing his attention on her older sister Estelle. For her part, Estelle was old enough to fear being left behind by her married sisters. She had lived and worked in Spartanburg for half a dozen years and she liked that Savannah was a well-groomed small city boasting a prominent educational institution. She saw in Joseph a young department head who could reasonably expect future leadership roles of greater importance.
And he appealed to her mildly baroque sensibility. He courted her with devotion and romanticism, bringing her fresh-cut flowers and other touches of refined grace. Estelle visited Joseph for “Violet Teas,” garden parties, and the “Yellow Buffet.” The faculty entertained the young couple lavishly, and soon Estelle and Joseph were engaged. An amenable Joseph spent Christmas 1900 with the Bomar family in Spartanburg and in his rich baritone voice he spun dreams of even more dramatic success and distinction in the years ahead.
Estelle and Joseph married on June 27, 1901, at Westminster Church in Spartanburg. Reverend Satterfield from Scotia had even agreed to perform the ceremony for a young lady who had been a distinguished pupil. That kind of symbolism for the new segregated American century was extraordinary: a white minister and college president marrying two Negroes and then socializing with them afterward. But, at the eleventh hour, Satterfield canceled his appearance and Westminster’s regular pastor, Hydar Stinson, administered the vows. Gertrude Bomar was maid of honor and Dr. E. D. Bulkley, who lived in New York, served as best man. Estelle had the church decorated in ferns and more extravagant flowers, and after the ceremony the “popular” young couple returned to the Gap Road house for an “elaborate reception” that included musical selections and refreshments. They stayed in Spartanburg until September, when school started. The Himeses soon started a family. Surrounded by family and friends at her mother’s house back in Spartanburg, Estelle delivered a healthy boy named Edward on May 26, 1902. When Estelle returned to Savannah, Joseph’s baby sister, Fannie, came to live with them to help care for Edward and keep house.
The newlyweds pressed ahead but the atmosphere in Georgia became ever more difficult. Mayor Meldrim hobbled the college’s liberal arts curriculum, trying to eliminate Latin, Greek, and calculus. The tools for imagining a world beyond, for abstraction, for uncovering sources, would be withheld. The students resisted strongly, and white visitors to the campus were greeted with deep suspicion.
Not surprisingly, there was a radical streak among the blacks in town, spearheaded by the college faculty and called the Savannah Sunday Men’s Club, a debate forum with a strong civil rights agenda that met at the Masonic Hall. The club, founded by Monroe N. Work, a University of Chicago MA and a researcher assisting W. E. B. Du Bois in his case studies at Atlanta University, was an explicit offshoot of the Niagara Movement, which would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It is likely that Joseph attended the meetings, as did his intellectual colleagues like mathematician Emanuel W. Houston. Monroe Work would go on to more lasting fame as the leader of his own studies on African Americans at Tuskegee. An adept journalist, Houston galvanized support to criticize the politically apathetic well-to-do members of Savannah’s black community in his Savannah Tribune columns under the pseudonym “Nuff-Sed.”
In October 1904, Estelle’s brother Thomas Bomar died unexpectedly, leaving a large estate. Thomas and his wife, Carrie, did not have any children and the estate was divided by his wife and siblings into equal shares. In November the court granted Estelle one-tenth, $752.04, or roughly $44,700 in 2015 dollars. When summonsed by the state, she signed her name “Estelle Hymes,” the only document carrying this spelling of the name, and perhaps indicating that she did not wish her husband, in business on his own, to have ready access to the money.
Around this time, the harmonious early seasons of their marriage had ended; Estelle and Joseph were beginning cycles of deep marital discord. It may have had to do with the fact that Joseph’s ascent had stalled. He had reached thirty and seemed content. The next step up for Joseph would have been joining the faculty at a larger school, such as Tuskegee or Hampton. His shop in downtown Savannah may have been one of their early conflicts. Estelle hoped that Joseph would find less satisfaction in the anvil in favor of administrative duties. Instead, he wanted to have his own business and to take satisfaction in horseshoeing, “promptly and satisfactorily done.”
The state’s climate curdled too. In spite of a comforting visit from national hero Booker T. Washington to deliver the Georgia State Industrial commencement address in 1905, the year 1906 saw even more of the “ignorant and narrow-minded” discord that Washington had railed against. Candidate Hoke Smith ran for the Georgia statehouse on a “reform” movement ticket, which proposed regulations excluding blacks from politics and proscribing interracial social contact. The movement swept Georgia and culminated in cruelties against blacks in Atlanta in September 1906. During the violence, marauding white mobs scoured the downtown Five Points intersection, Brownsville, and the Fourth Ward, and “chased negroes, stoned and shot them to death, and boarded trolley cars, snatching off negroes and beat them to death with clubs and sticks.” At least twenty-five African Americans lost their lives. Estelle was familiar with the neighborhoods that had been attacked. Wholesale racial murder also demanded that people like Estelle who could pass for white pick sides with their family, neighbors, and friends who bore the brunt of the mob enmity. Future NAACP secretary Walter White, who became famous and beloved because he used his white appearance to investigate lynchings, was barely a teenager but had to shoulder a rifle during the riot to help protect his family.
In Savannah racial oppression was not as lethal but it was comprehensive nonetheless. The new laws were sure to pique a sensitive and intelligent woman like Estelle, whose marriage to a dark brown-skinned man away from where she was raised was taking on complications. The local board of education began requiring teachers to use a racially derogatory paraphrase of the song “Dixie” during regular classroom recitals, blacks were fined for “jeering” at whites, and could be expelled from the courthouse for sitting in “white folk’s seat.” A Jim Crow law officially passed in Savannah on September 12, 1906, segregating the streetcars, and introducing a series of insulting signs there, with chains stretching across the car to reserve a portion for whites. Black Savannah citizens boycotted the trolley cars, walking and taking buckboards and hacks driven by blacks wherever they needed to go. But the clock’s hands were turning backward. Nationally, President Theodore Roosevelt summarily dismissed, without so much as an investigation and against the advice of Booker T. Washington, three companies of black troops for defending fellow soldiers set upon by white civilians in Brownsville, Texas.
The college teachers insulated themselves where they could, but among many of them, particularly the Savannah Sunday Club members, the commitment to resistance was strong. R. E. Cobb, a mathematics professor, ran afoul of white sentiment on a streetcar when he dodged out of the way of an elderly white passenger who tried to “correct” him with a cane. Cobb was chased by a mob to the campus and his life threatened; it took soothing efforts by Wright, white patron Meldrim, and the Savannah sheriff to prevent an angry crowd from dragging him by the neck from the school grounds. At his trial, the sheriff tried to get Cobb to plea-bargain to a year on chain gang. A white attorney won the black academic’s freedom by arguing that “the Negro was emotional and like a beast was not controlled by reason,” and having Cobb pay a $250 fine. In Augusta, white mobs killed blacks for attempting to defend themselves after being attacked and beaten. Accepting the exodusters’ counsel from the 1880s, black Americans began talking up migration to the west. Missouri, alongside Kansas and Oklahoma at the turn of the century, seemed a potential western refuge for blacks leaving the traditional cotton belt and its thickening climate of hate.
Joseph’s buddy the competently trained classicist Benjamin F. Allen had already anticipated the ugliness of twentieth-century Savannah in the wake of the Atlanta riot and left. Previously, he had graduated from Atlanta University (as a classmate of the poet James Weldon Johnson) in 1894, and taken a job at Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri, as a professor of ancient languages. Allen had extensive interests in psychology and ethics and held a doctorate of law degree. An impeccably dressed, well-fed, light-complexioned man, with an imposing mustache that set off his completely bald head, Allen swaggered around his campus staring through a pincenez. In the fall of 1902 Allen returned to Lincoln to take the helm as the school president.
Joseph had gotten the chance to know Allen during the spring semester of the 1902 academic year. The men socialized and had parties, which were noticed in the press together in the company of Joseph’s dentist friend Bulkley, other faculty, and President Wright. Perhaps responding to anxious feelers sent out by his old comrade, on August 27, 1907, Allen got his trustee board to authorize the post “blacksmith in the industrial department” for Joseph. The pay was seventy dollars per month.
Grasping after the possibility of better times, Joseph took his wife and son to the capital of the Gateway State. The move out west to their own white house, to a place where they already had friends—away from Estelle’s family and away from Georgia, where black opportunity was more and more choked off—probably helped restore the marriage. Estelle delivered another son on August 4, 1908, and in what seems a conciliatory gesture on Estelle’s part to her husband, they agreed to name him Joseph Sandy. After Estelle successfully delivered Joseph Jr., she probably did not imagine that she would conceive again quickly. But ten weeks later, sometime in October 1908, thirty-four-year-old Estelle Himes was pregnant.
Chester’s earliest years took place on a campus of 535 students enrolled mainly in the secondary and the lower schools. If Joseph’s new school did not have the strongest college preparatory curriculum of the black institutions, it had a particular claim for pride. Black Civil War veterans of the Sixty-Second and Sixty-Fifth Regiments of the United States Colored Troops had founded the Lincoln Institute in 1866. In the months after the war the ex-slaves turned fighting men had managed to equip a permanent school to educate other Missouri freed people. At Lincoln, named after the Great Emancipator, the “fundamental idea shall be to combine study with labor, so that the old habits of those who have always labored, but never studied, shall not be thereby changed and that the emancipated slaves, who have neither capital to spend nor time to lose, may obtain an education.” By 1879 the state had taken over Lincoln in an effort to develop a normal school to train qualified teachers. The school’s inaugural president was Inman Page, the first African American to graduate from Brown University. A true exoduster, Page served twice as Lincoln’s president and went on to found secondary schools with strong liberal arts curriculums in Missouri and Oklahoma.
The impressive brick buildings on Lincoln’s campus outshone the world that the Himeses had been most intimately familiar with before. Twenty broad limestone steps led to the main arched entranceway of redbrick, castlelike Memorial Hall, Lincoln’s administrative and main building. The young men’s dormitory and Barnes-Krekel Hall, a twelve-classroom building, followed a similar splendid pattern. President Allen occupied an ornate, three-story Queen Anne style brick mansion. Estelle’s father had been a mason and she had seen buildings going up all of her life, but Lincoln’s cathedralesque brick marvels were of another scale.
It was the industrial curriculum in tailoring, shoemaking, carpentry, wood turning, machinery and blacksmithing that took up the majority of the faculty lines and school resources. Housed in four-story Chinn Hall, the artisan departments had a major practical significance: they enabled the institution to be self-sufficient and literally sustained the physical structure of school life. These teachers and their students designed and built the buildings, grew much of the food, sewed the clothes, and made the shoes. The black “college” was really a full-service, all-black town.
Joseph must have felt a certain fulfillment by 1910. He was father to three healthy sons, husband in a renewed marriage, and blacksmith of good reputation in Lincoln and Jefferson City. He had a modern, whitewashed brick shop to work in, with built-in ventilation, giant metal exhausts over the forges and bellows, and enormous floor-to-ceiling bands to run the grinders they used to shape the metal. An “artist at the forge,” Joseph Himes was now highly skilled. He crafted Christmas toys that were the envy of the neighborhood and superior to any from a catalog or town craft shop: little replica wagons with spoke wheels and iron tires and springboard seats, miniature garden tools and sleds with iron runners. Joseph Himes was, at heart, a contented and modest artisan.
Estelle was not so easily satisfied. Her ambition for a world of refinement and equal rights was similar to the vision of another black woman she knew at Lincoln. Between 1906 and 1910 the most prestigious figure on campus was the slave-born celebrity academic Anna Julia Cooper. A veteran classicist pushed out of the principalship of the M Street High School in Washington, D.C., Cooper was an articulate advocate of the liberal arts and she spoke regularly at festivals and academic and religious institutions in Missouri. Estelle had probably had exposure to Latin at Scotia, but not even Georgia Industrial’s erudite Richard R. Wright would have rivaled the scope of a commanding intellectual like Cooper, a graduate of Oberlin College. Like many of her privileged peers, Cooper worked strenuously to include black people in a vision of grand American possibility. She echoed Theodore Roosevelt when she argued that “fresh and vigorous” American society was “synonymous with all that is progressive, elevating and inspiring.” When it came to “modern civilization,” Cooper approved of the “European bud and the American flower.”
If the romance of Anglo-Saxon imperialism seems odd a century later, Cooper presumed to include African Americans within the narrative of American exceptionalism in a more forceful manner than Booker T. Washington was then doing. She argued in her speeches that a uniquely valuable destiny was at hand for blacks in North America. “Here in America,” she predicted to her audiences, “is the arena in which the next triumph of civilization is to be won.” While at Lincoln, in between mounting scenes from the Aeneid that depicted Dido Queen of Carthage, prepping the Olive Branch female debate society, the Ruskin Literary Society and the Shakespeare Club, Cooper patrolled the dormitories and tried to inculcate students with “the vivifying touch of ideas and ideals.”
Black students at Lincoln shared Cooper’s view regarding the value of an American nationality in a world of escalating European rivalry. “It is necessary for us who are by birth already Americans,” a student leader wrote, “not to throw down our birth right, and with contemptible folly, to back down to the alien gods which our forefathers have forsaken.” If they favored being Americans over Africans, they were conscious of not wanting to be Europeans either. Young women, togged in mandatory mortarboards, were convincing themselves that “to be a first class American is much better than to be a first class imitator of a Frenchman or an Englishman.”
This sort of Cooper-inspired blend of smarts, maturity, patriotism, polish, and worldliness certainly would have appealed to Estelle during the middle of her journey in Missouri. Dainty and fastidious, Estelle resented the shabbiness of everyday life and people who didn’t try to improve themselves. She disapproved of her neighbors, the Cains, who lived in a house next door, and she refused to let Joe and Chester play with their children because they spoke what she termed “bad English” and used “vulgar” words. She preferred to have her sons play tamely with President Allen’s daughter Julia, who was the same age as Chester, on the other side of street, up at the top of the hill.
Her prim demeanor and expectation of refined treatment created the perception that Estelle Himes was “color struck,” or inclined strongly toward the society of lighter-skin blacks like herself. Possibly she did express a preference for her own kind, but there was a significant social-class dimension to the prejudices she displayed. Estelle celebrated blacks who had partial descent from the Southern aristocracy. But in an episode as a toddler that Chester Himes remembered all of his years, he and his brother Joe had found an open can of paint around the house on Lafayette Street. Chester delightedly smeared paint throughout his never-cut hair. To clean them up, Joseph Himes shaved his sons’ heads and Chester’s hair grew back as kinky as his father’s. Estelle considered the loss of Chester’s softly curled hair—which emphasized his complex racial ancestry and delicate upbringing—a minor tragedy.
If Estelle Himes indeed possessed a bias against the man she married and darker-skinned people generally, it was a view she mainly kept to herself. To have done otherwise would have been to open herself to being reminded of her own mother’s trials and misfortunes during slavery. And while she might have sought out light-skinned blacks, they were not in the majority in the places she lived. Also, if, in South Carolina or coastal Georgia, the skills learned from working in wealthy white households and literacy gave obviously mixed-race African Americans a kind of prestige, in places like Scotia and Georgia Industrial, such persons were not conspicuously prominent among faculty or students.
Nor did their presence easily translate into fawning attitudes toward white people generally. At Lincoln, Anna Julia Cooper expressed disdain for her slave-master father. Leah Himes’s husband Roddy Moon, a dark-skinned man six years older than Joseph and Estelle, seems to have had his sister-in-law in mind when he made some observations about skin color and appearance. After graduating from Claflin University, Moon had been a school principal in South Carolina with his wife. He developed the habit of appearing verbally impressive, as well as the habit of projecting himself as well-prepared and left the educational field. By 1904 he had been appointed to the federal bureau of agriculture as a meat inspector. He started that career in St. Joseph, Missouri, moving to Cleveland in 1906. When he made friends he observed an upheaval in social caste. “All the leading Negroes are black or dark brown. I have not seen but one bright skin professional man.” One woman’s skin was so light that “you cannot tell her from a white woman to save your life.” Another person, Carriou, was less unusual “about Sisters color.” Roddy Moon mentioned Estelle when writing to his wife, Leah, who had remained in Ohio. Joe’s “bleached” wife Estelle was a little different from them, certainly, but not unusual, and not the kind of person who “you cannot tell from a white woman to save your life.”
The Himeses found a new dragon that westward movement had not slain, the national upheaval over industrialization and black schools and which seems to have contributed to the souring of the relationship between Joseph and President Allen. The transition from the horse-and-buggy era and subsequent curricular transformations coincided at Lincoln with other messy politics. Traveling to other black schools to recruit professors, Allen returned in the spring of 1913 to find roughly a quarter of his teaching staff in what he treated like revolt. To consolidate his power, he dismantled his faculty. Allen docked salaries of Fannie Moten in elocution, Frederick Parker in shoemaking, and Grace Hammond and O. W. Ferguson, all of them punished for what he used military language to describe, being “absent without leave.” Over the next several months he made moves to replace the entire industrial department. Allen replaced the wood-turning and mechanical drawing instructor and the shoemaker.
In August 1913, after the trustees had restocked the machine shop with fresh lathes and new tools that they bought at a St. Louis symposium and as they prepared for courses in auto mechanics, Allen fired his old friend Joseph Himes. It was just as well. “The automobile has replaced the wagon and buggy to a great extent,” admitted the school bulletin a few years later. The blacksmithing course remained necessary only “to do the work connected with auto repairs.” By 1914 there was a student revolt, quashed when the board of trustees dismissed all of the signatories to a protest letter, and resulting with not a single student enrolled in the college preparatory curriculum the next fall.
Joseph and Estelle hauled the children to Joseph’s sister Leah Moon in Cleveland. The summer bled into the fall, and all of the Himes children enrolled in school, which meant kindergarten for Chester. The Moons had as many children as the Himeses, but theirs were older: Joe, a twenty-one-year-old house painter who also worked in hotels, fourteen-year-old Ellen, and eleven-year-old Henry Lee. The Moons were also determined to outmaneuver Jim Crow, as Roddy’s job with the federal government indicated. They were the rare migrant black family living on a main street with German, Swiss, English, and other white American neighbors, which might have seemed refreshing to Joe Sr. and Estelle, whose lives had been spent in the South.
Less pleasant, though, were the cramped quarters with the Moons and the recently married, new mother Fannie Himes Wiggins, whose son Gerald was one year old. Estelle’s high-strung manners now rattled Fannie, pressing hair for a living, and who had done the housework and child care for her sister-in-law in Savannah as a teenager. The crowded household and clashing temperaments were sowing the seeds of future discord.