THE SOUTHERN CROSSES THE YELLOW DOG
Harried in the search for a new post, Chester’s father secured work in a place where nineteenth-century industrial education seemed on sure footing. He became the new blacksmith professor at Alcorn College in the rural hamlet of Lorman, Mississippi, about thirty miles south of Vicksburg. Eerie, isolated, and serene, Alcorn was located along a series of rolling hills dipping into ravines, shaped by the mighty mile-wide Mississippi River to the west, the ridges of rich soil yielding forests of sweetgum, red oak, water oak, and magnolia trees draped with Spanish moss. At one time vast expanses of Claiborne County had been cleared and planted in cotton, but the boll weevil infestation of the 1890s had wiped out the cash crop, and scraggly low-grade timber was returning the land to a condition before the plantation era. The closest town to the school was nearby Port Gibson, from 1918 on the home of the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. That company’s notable members included two of the most original blues singers of all time, Ida Cox and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. The accent that Chester had for the rest of his life was the soft Southern speech of Mississippi. He referred to it as his “lazy Missouri accent,” because that was where he had been born, but his speech habits were stamped in Lorman. When Chester revisited his images of childhood security and satisfying innocence, the mental reflections that he conjured were of the family’s roughly seven-year stretch in Mississippi.
Founded as Oakland College in 1828 by Southern Presbyterians and sold in 1871 to the state for the education of “Negro citizens,” Alcorn College bore the name of Mississippi’s Reconstruction-era governor James A. Alcorn. A man who had favored gradual emancipation and the use of black Confederate troops during the Civil War, Alcorn had suggested a future for Negroes in Mississippi that it would take more than a century to achieve, “protected in all their rights of person and property.” Hiram Revels, the first elected Negro senator in United States history, had served as Alcorn College’s earliest president. For Estelle and Joseph Himes, Mississippi could be uncomfortable like Georgia, but, on the other hand, the remote campus was a cocoon that “shielded” the boys from “the harshness of race relations.”
When the Himes family arrived in 1914, the school flaunted some signs of modest prosperity, like a new three-story brick dormitory for boys called Mississippi Hall. Relatively austere in comparison with the extravagance of Lincoln, the campus still had some elements of antebellum architectural charm. Alcorn had two historic buildings on the campus, holdouts from the Oakland College days, the Old Chapel and the Belles Lettres Building. The elaborately detailed seventeen-step iron staircase of the Old Chapel had been dismantled from the ruins of a nearby plantation called Windsor Castle and reinstalled intact at Alcorn, a minor engineering feat. The chapel, the president’s mansion, the dormitories and the academic buildings, were grouped in a horseshoe around a grove of magnolia, pine, and oak trees.
With an enrollment comparable to Lincoln, Alcorn had only a quarter of its students in the college department. The tuition was free to Mississippi natives and room and board stood at $17.50. When Joseph Himes arrived with his family, the ailing mathematician John A. Martin was president of the school. He would die in 1915, and Levi Rowan, the head of the English department and a former president who had fallen off the log in a difficult balancing act with the board of trustees, resumed his role as president. Rowan—who, on one occasion as president, turned away a hundred female students because he had no dormitory space—faced fundamental problems, like providing clean drinking water for the college. Only a few years older than Joseph, Rowan’s English department conducted an elementary mission, to “give the students a thorough mastery of the mother tongue in order that they may better be able to comprehend the instructions given in the other Departments.” The local Woodville Republican would report the state education superintendent as voicing more precise fears that “the negro dialect and foreign tongues is [sic] contaminating the speech of pupils.” If for different reasons, Chester’s mother and father concurred heartily with this sentiment; at the threshold of their door they drew a line for the sake of grammatically correct English: “ain’t” was “absolutely prohibited.” Estelle would also prohibit Joseph Jr. and Chester from attending the local grammar school, preferring to teach them at home.
As the director of the “Blacksmithing, Horse Shoeing and Wheelwrighting Department,” Joseph supported his family on the same salary that he had drawn in Missouri, and he instructed about fifty male students. Alcorn was not attempting to train the intellectual vanguard. Every student in the college department ultimately had to select a trade—carpentry, blacksmithing, laundry, or agriculture for the men; sewing, nursing, and domestic science for the women. Outfitted with electric lighting and a furnace, the single-story Mechanical Building, where Joseph Himes took the reins, was the only modern structure on campus.
But in spite of Alcorn’s seeming commitment to the trades, the credentials necessary for the faculty to advance had dramatically increased. Of the twenty-six teachers, every teacher had a college degree, and fifteen had completed college degrees in the academic subjects. President Rowan had even completed a doctorate. As the Himeses approached middle age, the mounting academic qualifications for genuine leadership among “New Negroes” threatened to leave them behind.
It was also increasingly difficult to ignore that after twenty years, Joseph Himes’s craft was outmoded. Even for Mississippians, the long-standing aim, “to train practical blacksmiths,” decreased every year. At first, between 1913 and 1915, about five Alcorn graduates each year finished in blacksmithing; but by 1916 and 1917, the department was only producing one graduate annually. Henry Ford’s Model T assembly-line factory in Michigan was eliminating the rationale for the horse-and-buggy equipment and piecework metal crafts; the aftermath of World War I would make industrial-scale metal manufacture standard.
Dissatisfaction had pressed Estelle from the beginning. Settled in a simple, whitewashed two-story frame house, one of the seventeen plain wooden-frame structures allotted to the teaching staff along a white-picket fence lane, the Himeses had little refinement. Their lot included a square backyard of baked clay, complete with an outhouse, a shed, a water well, and a chicken coop. In the winter a damp chill seeped through every crack in the wall of their thinly insulated cottage. Joseph and Estelle planted crops on the nine-acre field behind the house, but the unattended front yard went wild, and the children copied the locals and started walking barefoot. The seasons in western Mississippi seemed distinct only in terms of the peculiar force of the elements. In the summer clouds of red dust were sandwiched by sheets of rain that quickly turned the land into a floodplain and rutted the roads. The ubiquitous sight of cornfields and pine forests, as well as the pungent odor of manure, mud, and draft animals, barely concealed the distance from insidious plantation slavery. Estelle stiffly told her husband that the move to backwater Lorman was “a comedown.”
Even leisure lost its innocence. In an episode that Chester reproduced in his autobiography and in the novel The Third Generation, he remembered witnessing an early moment of horror. As a small boy, he had enjoyed watching the Alcorn men pull a wagon full of young women from the school’s gates to the dorm in an elaborate annual display of strength. But during the merriment one year, a girl fell and slipped underneath the full weight of the wagon wheels and was crushed to death. The macabre sight of the jet of dark blood from the young coed’s mouth shocked Chester as if the wheels were crushing him, as if he too “had been hurt.” He fainted and had to be carried home and given medical attention. The trauma haunted him, foreshadowing his own immense personal suffering.
His disappointed mother was also tough-minded, willful, and independent, and she showed her mounting dissatisfaction in the fall of 1915 by accepting a position as a music instructor at Haines Normal and Industrial School in Augusta, Georgia. Her son Joseph would characterize the year in eastern Georgia as an “escape safari.” Augusta was an “escape” from Mississippi, but to Joe, the experience was odd enough to remain a voyage into the wild. Considering the gruesome August public murder of pregnant Mary Turner—hanged, shot, set afire, and her fetus cut out and then stomped by a mob because she had threatened to expose her husband’s lynchers—Georgia certainly evoked wildness. But it was mainly a chance at family for Estelle. Her young nieces Mabel and Margaret Bomar, “very fair girls with brown wavy hair,” were teaching at Haines and would bolster her spirits.
Haines Institute had been chartered by the remarkable ex-slave Lucy Laney. Begun in the basement of a Presbyterian church in 1883, by 1915 twenty-six teachers and 694 students crowded two large three-story brick academic buildings. The iron-willed Laney had been born in Macon, Georgia, in 1854 to an enslaved mother and a free black father. Stocky and dark-skinned, the young Ms. Laney had been known in Macon for her ability to translate Latin with ease. She graduated from Atlanta University alongside Richard R. Wright and the famous classicist William Scarborough, the first black member of the Modern Language Association.
Chester did not recall the founder’s ease in handling the classics, but rather, the contrast between her and his mother. He wrote that he and his brother were “shocked by the sight of the big, black ox-like woman who greeted them in a deep, gruff voice.” Like Joseph, Chester imagined them to be in a foreign, mildly feral land. When he met Laney, she was past sixty, a taskmaster applauded by President William Howard Taft who hoped to inspire her students and deserved the reputation of one of the premier educators of the era. Resilience and determination were necessary traits for Laney, who operated in a state that did not provide public high schools for Negroes. But even the success of the Haines School could only do so much to soften the rough edges of the crowded shanty neighborhood and the folkways that made Estelle especially uncomfortable. The children at Haines spoke a version of black dialect called Gullah, which made the idiom of the Mississippi normal school’s enrollees seem to be a model of English enunciation by comparison. Chester always recalled a locally born student, mourning the loss of the school mascot, by heralding “de goat done dead.”
At once their Georgia schoolmates nicknamed Joe “Goat,” for his prominent nose, narrow face, and slender, plodding style, and Chester “Cat,” for his feline quickness and sly attractiveness, his easy charm, and his hysterical squabbling. And Chester found reason for crying there. He well remembered that when he disobeyed Lucy Laney she dropped his pants and hit him with an oaken paddle with holes in it.
Much greater calamity hallmarked Chester’s time in Augusta. On March 22, 1916, an apocalyptic fire, complete with bursting gas pipes shooting flames fifty feet into the air and pillars of smoke overwhelming the skies, destroyed two miles of the downtown business district. Augusta’s “Cotton Row” of filled warehouses, its skyscrapers and newspaper offices were ruined, and three thousand people were left homeless. The Haines School was a mile from the flames and no one was killed, although citizens fled the residential areas, stacking their belongings in the street. At the end of the school year, perhaps due to the calamity, Estelle and her children returned to Mississippi.
More feisty than disconsolate, Estelle used her writing to bring Lorman up to her standard. She proved to the small faculty her view on class and bearing in a way that made her husband proud. By 1918 Estelle had written “Alcorn Ode,” a celebratory poem that remains the school song.
Beneath the shade of giant trees,
Fanned by a balmy southern breeze,
Thy classic walls have dared to stand—
A giant thou in learning’s band;
O, Alcorn dear, our mother, hear
Thy name we praise, thy name we sing
Thy name thy sons have honored far;
A crown of gems thy daughters are;
When country called, her flag to bear,
The Gold and Purple answered, “Here.”
O, Alcorn dear, our mother, hear
Thy name we praise, thy name we sing
Far as our race thy claim shall need—
So far to progress thou shalt lead
Thy sons, with clashing arms of trades
In useful arts, full garbed, thy maids;
O, Alcorn dear, we proudly bear
Thy standard on to victory.
“These were the moments he lived for,” Chester later wrote about his father, married to a woman who, when she chose, was quite capable of impressing President Rowan and the college-educated faculty.
Estelle’s ode reinforced the patriotic ethos of Anna J. Cooper and seems to have echoed the popular July 1918 editorial in The Crisis written by W. E. B. Du Bois. “Forget our special grievances,” was Du Bois’s famous counsel, “and close ranks with our own fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.” Closing ranks was not easy. In theory at least, Alcorn faculty would be dismissed for reading northern periodicals like The Crisis that engaged the race question. But the Du Bois lines showed that even the professionally radical were patriotic during that peak summer of American involvement in the war in France. Military necessity aside, in composing her poem Estelle managed to champion her husband’s craft in the phrases “clashing arms of trades” and “useful arts,” and she included her particular embarrassment in Mississippi, her hope that the “maids” would be “full garbed.”
One dramatic incident of rural shamelessness concerned Estelle. The Himeses paid a Sunday visit to a student’s family in the Delta and attended a country church there. At the climax of the sermon, while singing and dancing, women did more than bare just their souls to God. Chester wrote the scene down in The Third Generation.
Women were standing in the pews, eyes glazed, tearing the riotous colored clothes from their strong dark bodies, shouting to their God.
“Ah is pure. Look on me, God. Ah is pure.”
Raising strong black arms to heaven, full black breasts lifting, buxom black bodies tautening, their shocking black buttocks bare as at birth.
Believing the naked expressions of religious frenzy inappropriate, Estelle reacted with more than distaste and hustled her sons out of the church.
To keep her youngest away from other children who came to Alcorn straight from the wooden shacks that were the area’s version of primary schools and the raw version of black Christianity that emphasized passion without restraint and propriety, Estelle Himes invested a great deal of energy in teaching her young boys at home. With the exception of the Haines year, she instructed them personally from about 1914 to 1922, carrying over her Scotia liberal arts preparation, and imparting “high levels of expectation” in the process. But Estelle’s declaration of the unfitness of the local public schools for blacks caused her to cloister Joe and Chester. She discouraged play even with the children of faculty. Instead of gaining friends and a peer group, Chester would rely upon his mother and father, but especially his brother. “We were a small, close-knit family,” Joseph Jr. later recalled, and the central activity of that unit was reading. Chester saw the home library as a place of “security and happiness.”
At Christmas, Estelle wrote original stories for her boys. She strongly encouraged reading but also would have to discipline precocious Chester, who was always overstepping well-known family rules. When Chester was reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” he exclaimed the word “damn” in the living room where his family sat, each engrossed in a book or magazine. Of course this deed required punishment. Estelle also put her musical training to use, insisting that the boys hear “good” music, and she played the piano for their education, for entertainment, and to overcome her own isolation. Chester loved to hear her at the piano for hours at a time playing Chopin’s “Fantaisie Impromptu” and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” The Himeses bought a phonograph and spun 78-rpm recordings of Enrico Caruso, Fritz Kreisler, and John Philip Sousa. Chester loved Caruso’s arias and Kreisler’s version of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” but when his mother played Sousa’s version of the second act of Verdi’s Il Trovatore—“The Anvil Chorus”—she brought the house down. During the climactic moment when the chorus chants the lyrics “Chi del gitano i giorni abbella? La zingarella,” Chester and Joseph Jr. shouted and hammered in accompaniment with the percussion players.
Estelle’s deliberate efforts to make Verdi counteract the nude church amazons and to prevent the consumption of the chitterlings that her husband loved, had a hand in dismantling what she was fighting to keep together: her marriage. Increasingly she seemed inclined to push outward into the world, whatever the cost. In her early forties, she began to resist the protocols of racial segregation. Estelle instructed her small sons in a kind of catechism that she imagined as her most powerful safeguard against the low self-esteem and low expectations that Jim Crow ingrained. “You mustn’t think of yourself as colored,” she told Joe and Chester with a spooky intensity. “Your mother is as white as anyone. You both have white blood—fine white blood—in your veins. And never forget it.” Her recitation of the creed of mixed bloodlines seems to have begun around the time that Eddie, her eldest son, entered the junior preparatory class at Alcorn in 1915. Her earnest sincerity must have struck the boys as poignant, but over time her children found the claims uncomfortable and bizarre.
Edward was on the verge of leaving the family, and he would, of the three sons, accept the least direction from his mother. By the fall of 1920, he had begun the college preparatory curriculum at Atlanta University. But his years at Alcorn did not stand him well. He returned to Atlanta in his second year, still a freshman. After that academic trial, he apparently withdrew from the university and never completed his degree. The combination of embarrassment and stung pride would drive a wedge between him and his parents, and he never again lived for a long period with his family.
Nothing better captured the growing distance between the two spouses than Joseph Sr.’s relish for life on the Mississippi, and apparently even for Governor Theodore Bilbo, the official president of the board of trustees at Alcorn, and a regular visitor to the school. When the governor, who had served under the malicious James Vardaman who encouraged lynching, conducted the commencement exercises, Joseph Himes joked with him in the odd idiom of familiarity allowed blacks and whites within the caste system. Years later, Chester grumbled that such affinity was possible because “my father was born and raised in the tradition of the Southern Uncle Tom,” which was nothing more than “an inherited slave mentality.” The irony of Chester’s view was that Joseph Sr. did not inherit the submissive mentality from his own rebellious and independent father, who actually had been enslaved.
If the flattery and camaraderie with the powerful—done within accepted Jim Crow avenues for adult behavior—gratified Joseph Himes, it did nothing to make his wife more satisfied. The marriage only grew more openly rancorous, and the children took front-row seats. “Mother kept chopping him down to size because what he did wasn’t like anything he boasted about,” thought Joseph Jr. As Estelle kept at him, her husband “got to be dissatisfied with her nagging” and simply came to believe that his wife possessed “a quarrelsome nature.”
The home life of bickering and tense silence between mother and father was made more difficult because Joseph was a hero to his children, nearly like a figure out of the Greek and Roman myths that Estelle read to them at night. His sons admired him as a thoughtful man’s man. A leather apron over his white shirt and vest, Joseph combined precise mathematical knowledge, physical strength, and craftsmanship, in a sphere well regarded by rural men of the era. Powerful when it called for it, he was a man who held a horse’s leg between his knees, used planes and chisels on wood, and taught students to melt iron and drive steel.
But the heroic myths never spent their poetry on the inner workings of a modern marriage. With their heads shaved and dressed in overalls, Chester and Joseph looked more and more like the country black boys who populated the grammar school at Alcorn. The boys got chicken pox, and the severity of that common disease was magnified in a countryside with few doctors. But particularly troubling was the worldwide influenza epidemic, which began devastating Claiborne County. In November 1918 the public schools closed and by the next month thirty-two people were dead from the dreaded illness. By the time the outbreak reached its highest proportions in the area, in February 1920, Estelle had enough leverage to insist on a change.
In the summer of 1920, the Himeses left Mississippi for St. Louis, Missouri, where they owned an investment property at 4525 Garfield Avenue, at the corner of Taylor Street. By that fall, Joseph made arrangements for a new position in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at Branch Normal, Arkansas’s state-supported secondary institute for Negroes. (In 1922, the school would change its name to Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal, and became a division of the University of Arkansas.) The family, minus Edward, who was by then enrolled full-time at Atlanta University, joined a wartime surge of blacks to the cotton-rich soil on the western bank of the Mississippi north of Louisiana.
For black Americans it was a difficult time, defined by the so-called Red Summer of 1919 and extending for many years, from Rosewood, Florida, to Tulsa, Oklahoma. When black soldiers began returning from overseas duty, warlike racial riots broke out in more than twenty-six cities across the United States; they left scores of African Americans dead. Chicago was the site of the deadliest urban riot, which resembled the 1906 Atlanta debacle in its violence. Elaine, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta about one hundred miles east of Pine Bluff, was the site of the estimated largest loss of black lives in the country: in late September 1919, unionizing black sharecroppers of Phillips County found themselves at the mercy of large numbers of armed whites, joined by regular Army soldiers, who committed atrocities. Hundreds of Africans Americans are believed to have lost their lives.
In addition to the turmoil of those years, Joseph stepped into the most contentious teaching post he had yet known. In 1911, the trustees at Branch Normal had removed its director, Isaac Fisher, for trying to implement industrial education. Local blacks were suspicious of industrial education because whites supported it. The year before Fisher was removed, the entire senior class had their diplomas rescinded after the state demanded an evaluation and none of the graduates passed. Jefferson Ish, a mathematician, was superintendent in 1920, and the school itself was moving academically in the direction of a junior college degree—the pride of the administration.
Still more changes in leadership occurred. Charles Smith, also a mathematician, became superintendent on an interim basis at the end of the Himeses’ first year in Pine Bluff. In 1922 Robert Malone replaced Smith. Malone was junior to Joseph Himes by ten years, and, in spite of the fact that cotton prices were still high from war contracts, resulting in students wearing fine clothes and driving new automobiles, the situation for the middle-aged Joseph Sr. was tottering. Branch Normal represented the last grasp at family life and professional success for the Himeses.
The humble campus, two blocks away from a branch of the Arkansas River, had as its showpiece two-story Corbin Hall, the home to the academic classes. Twelve-year-old Joe and eleven-year-old Chester began their formal educations in the six classrooms on the ground floor. Assemblies capable of seating four hundred were held on the second floor of the building. The girls’ dormitory, where some of the unmarried female professors lived, was an old military barracks. A boys’ dormitory, a trades buildings for both sexes, and the Training School Building completed the campus.
At first the Himes family boarded downtown with a forty-year-old widow named Lillie Grotia at 519 W. Sixth Street, near a Catholic church. Later they settled more permanently in a plain frame house at 2020 W. Tenth Street in an expansion neighborhood about a mile south of the campus. Sitting on an unpaved road, the Himes neighborhood catered to workers from the lumber mill; only one or two blacks of the professional class lived in their midst. On their walk down Tenth Street to school, Chester and Joe skirted avenues of black women lolling and bantering provocatively with men.
Decidedly more reliable than Chester, Joe became a drugstore porter making bicycle deliveries. They were both growing up “where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog,” a blues song lyric describing the intersection of the two large railroads in Pine Bluff. Estelle tried giving them piano lessons, but the neighborhood, the locomotive switch engines, and the bustle ignited a new curiosity in her sons. Nervy and energetic, Chester practiced jumping aboard the cars and leaping off before the trains got out of town. A bookish lad in the backwoods of Alcorn, Chester had tended to measure himself against heroes in search of the golden fleece; now, in the clanging world of the larger town of Pine Bluff, the boundaries between adventurousness and foolhardiness came close together.
In September 1920, the superintendent and his staff examined the new matriculates. The Himes boys were placed in the first section of the second year of the normal department—the tenth grade—alongside about seventy other students. That level was very close to the limit of what was being taught at Branch Normal. There were roughly eighteen professors on the faculty, but, as elsewhere in the region, they were heavily weighted toward trades. However, most of the traditional college preparatory courses were taught: pedagogy, psychology, mathematics, biology, chemistry, history, civics, English, geography, music, and history. The academic department took advantage of the new professor Joseph Himes Sr., bringing him into its ranks as history teacher.
For Chester, the pubescent struggle for school-age belonging had begun. In a school that had a great many teenagers, Chester and Joe had their classes in the upper division with the school’s older teens. The boys were thoughtful and academically advanced but, having been schooled at home, less comfortable in a classroom. Their classmates were usually between sixteen and eighteen, the age today of students in the last stage of high school; Chester and Joe were closer to the age of students entering junior high school, with Chester being the youngest student enrolled. Thirty U.S. Army veterans rounded out the student population.
The Himes boys’ adjustment to school included dispiriting moments that characterized the inelegance of the serve-all segregated institution, which catered to the needs of adults and children in the same classroom. Noting the naïveté of the bright youngest member of his class, an older student played a rough joke. He bade Chester to report his absence during the morning roll by telling the professor that he had “gone to Memphis chasing whores.” Although not every schoolboy would have been unfamiliar with that term, Chester was. He could only parse out that “ ‘hoers’ were always needed to hoe cotton and chop corn.” When the class resumed a day later and the roll was called, Chester repeated the message word for word. The professor called him to the front of the class and attempted to paddle him, but now Chester fought back. The teacher threw him to the ground, and his brother Joe leaped up, both children tussling against the instructor in front of the roaring class of older students. “It caused,” Chester remembered dryly, “quite a scandal in the school.” And the next day he learned, of course, what the scandal was about, and it changed his walk along the avenues.
The bright spot at Branch Normal was the stand-out English teacher, Ernestine Copeland. Using a textbook called Composition and Rhetoric, she taught the simple foundation and construction of the English language, diagramming sentences and conjugating verbs. Copeland’s was a strong, up-to-date academic class. She even brought into the classroom the iconoclastic New York magazine The Independent, which sometimes carried book reviews that throttled the “sentimentality and hypocrisy” coating discussions of race mixing in the “mongrel South.” By 1923 she had provided Chester with his initial exposure to Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Canterbury Tales and allowed “theme” essays to be drawn from her students’ personal experience. Chester “ate that stuff up!” remembered his brother. Copeland’s class was the singular academic experience in Chester’s educational career.
Equally inspirational, Chester’s father began to offer a one-of-a-kind class in black history. The normal school department considered it important to require “History of the Negro,” a course that would “acquaint the student with the facts as they are in order that he may find his place without friction and perform most efficiently his part in the social welfare.” Beginning with literary critic Benjamin Brawley’s 1913 book A Short History of the American Negro, Chester’s father strove to make students understand “the origin of the more harsh system of chattel slavery in the New World.” To prepare his lectures, Joseph pored over his copy of the twenty-volume Encyclopedia Britannica, which would have emphasized the value of hard work, discipline, and talented individuals triumphing against overwhelming odds. Inside the classroom, Chester’s father used Carter G. Woodson’s The Negro in Our History, a comprehensive volume by the champion black historian of the twentieth century. Woodson’s red-covered book, just off the press, was among “a number of textbooks and reference books on Negro history which I have never seen since,” Chester recalled. For Joseph Sr.’s sons, reading about the achievements of blacks in the past was “a thrilling and eye-opening experience.”
Chester also picked up an education from the trade departments at Branch Normal, where he learned to drive a tractor and automobile. It was because of this foundation that, during the Second World War, Chester would be able to make the claim “I could read blueprints; I understood, at least partially, most of the necessary skills of building construction—carpentry, plumbing, electric wiring, bricklaying, roofing; I understood the fundamentals of combustion engines; I could operate a number of machine tools—turret lathes, drills, milling machines, etc.” For the young Chester, these were mildly thrilling, empowering experiences that connected him to his father and built a sense of masculine self-confidence.
Chemistry was perhaps the most intriguing subject for the Himes brothers. They spent their “happiest hours” unsupervised in the chapel basement with Bunsen burners and mortar and pestle, melting crystals, heating mixtures, and grinding solids. The singular achievement was the combination of three chemicals—saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur—to make gunpowder. When they added potassium chlorate and ground glass, the mixture would detonate itself. “A delicate and dangerous performance,” Chester adjudged.
Branch Normal’s commencement week exercises were under way on May 23, 1923, when Joe and Chester were scheduled to make a chemistry presentation in Corbin Hall to an assemblage of parents, students, and other guests. At the time for the presentation, Joseph Jr. went onto the stage by himself. Throughout the remainder of his life, Chester would mull over the events that happened that evening. He wrote that his mother had prevented him from participating because he had broken one of her many rules. He had been “naughty” and thrown an explosive compound against the house and defied her by talking back instead of apologizing and acting contrite. Confirming the breach between the two siblings that was about to occur, Joseph maintained that Chester simply refused to perform the experiment. Whatever the case, when Joseph mixed the last elements onstage for the famous gunpowder demonstration, he miscalculated the ingredients and the mixture erupted prematurely. In a loud puffing flash, a smoke cloud the size of a gallon jug engulfed him; ground glass had been driven into his eyes. Horrified, Chester and his parents watched as the ghastly haze enveloped Joe.
They rushed the injured boy to Davis Hospital, the largest medical facility in Pine Bluff. There, the doctors summarily declined to treat him because he was black. Joseph Sr. pleaded, as did Branch Normal principal Robert Malone, but to no avail. When they returned to the Stutz touring car, Chester’s father was weeping. The family went next to Lucy Memorial Hospital, where, instead of surgeons attempting to remove the glass from Joe Jr.’s eyes, doctors could only dress and bandage his wounds, in preparation for a future trip to a hospital in a different city that might offer a higher level of care for black Americans. In the following days, Estelle traveled with Joe to St. Louis, to Barnes Hospital, which was available to all citizens “without distinction of creed.”
Because he would need long-term care, Joseph and his mother took lodging in St. Louis. Back home, Chester and his father moved to one or two rooms close to the entrance of the campus. The family had begun unraveling earlier than this, but now the drama of dissolution took on the dimensions of epic tragedy. When the oldest Himes son, Edward, had gone out on his own, his loss to the family did not seem permanent or evidence of a mark against them. After Joe’s accident, however, Chester’s parents began reinterpreting family history, seeing the crises as a series of inexorable calamities marking Estelle and Joseph Sr. for special punishment, their comeuppance for overambition.
During this summer of separation, Joseph Sr. also served as acting president over the small Branch faculty. Chester, now taller than his father at age fourteen, had completed the high school course. He played tennis, drove the school tractor around the grounds, and developed a crush on one of the young teachers from the summer school. At the church picnics and youth gatherings, he learned graphically about sex—at least as a voyeur. The country girls wanted to seduce him and the willing boys proved their mannish conquests by displaying to one another their vaginally slickened genitals. The mating, the public parade of intimacy, the braggadocio of the boys and girls, equally attracted and distressed Chester. Chaste and self-conscious, Chester preferred to walk with girls his age to the state fair, saying to one that she was “Penelope and I was Ulysses returning home from twenty years of wandering.” A youngster who inhabited a world of mythic quest literature more comfortably than he did one of a stray, behind-the-shed groping at sex, melancholy Chester was a boy whose valiant romantic ideal was clashing with the reality of shabby black town life.
Considering the opportunities to continue his profession, Joseph Sr. made the rash decision that fall to reunite with Joe and Estelle in St. Louis, then a city of nearly 800,000. The family moved into the historic and crowded black neighborhood called the Ville, eventually settling on Belle Glade Avenue, a quiet street of one- and two-story brick tenement houses with built-in gardens on the median strip. The house was a few minutes’ walk from Chester’s new school.
They lived near the downtown heart of the sprawling, wealthy, and sometimes angry metropolis of wide paved streets and tall brick and stone buildings, like the recently built and massive City Hall and unsegregated main library. But while the streetcars did not require segregation, St. Louis was no haven for blacks. Six years earlier, in July 1917, labor unrest and black migration had unleashed an orgy of white violence that had left an estimated fifty people dead and 240 buildings burned down across the river in East St. Louis.
The decision to stake the entire fortunes of the family on the slender possibility of recuperation of one of its members was a tricky gamble. Joe had fleeting sight in one eye, enabling him to distinguish print a few inches away and shapes and sunlight at a distance. The other eye was useless. Bright and dutiful, Joe began instruction in Braille at the integrated Missouri School for the Blind. Certainly it would have been better for Chester if they had remained in Arkansas.
Without a faculty job lined up, Joseph Sr. joined the ranks of black porters and laborers. Chester later captured the shrunken man that his father became after they moved. “He was a pathetic figure coming home from work; a small black man hunched over and frowning, shambling in a tired-footed walk, crushed old cap pulled down over his tired, glazed eyes, a cigarette dangling from loose lips.” Bereft of a prestige occupation and fearing that his middle child and namesake might become an invalid, Joseph Sr. steadily lost his authority and his will to correct his youngest child.
In the fall of 1923 Chester attended Charles Sumner High School. Named after the famed abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, Sumner was the first black secondary school west of the Mississippi. For the first time in his life, Chester was not known to adults on account of the stature of his father. He knew that his parents owned and rented some property, but he was embarrassed to admit that his father worked as an unskilled laborer, a problem at Sumner where it mattered a great deal who your parents were. Modern, competitive, and the only post for black educated elites, Sumner boasted nine professors teaching English, seven teaching math, and several of them held master’s degrees. The highly skilled faculty, headed by George Brantley, demeaned the work Chester had completed at Branch Normal, and his teachers belittled him when he insisted that Branch had a college division that he had attended. They dropped Chester in with his rough age group; at fourteen he started the tenth grade. Again. He smoldered with resentment.
Chester was hoping to please his mother and become a medical doctor, and he took the “scientific” curriculum. For a full year he specialized in algebra I and II, geometry, chemistry, biology, physics, English, and German. He passed his classes with above average marks, but he never made As. Without Joe in class beside him, and having no rank on account of his surname, Chester was unsure of himself.
The emotional pain connected to experiencing the reduced social esteem of his brother, his father, and himself in such a short span invented Chester’s famed quicksilver rage at circumstances beyond his control. He “hated” Sumner, finding his fellow black students “cheap-smart,” “city-dirty,” “preoccupied with themselves,” and “quick to ostracize and condescend.” He disliked the rituals and rhythm of the scholastic team sports, instead favoring rough-and-tumble games with working-class boys at Tandy Park, during which he scarred his ear and battered a shoulder blade. But grueling, unregulated contests were preferable to the classroom of black strivers and their mentors. Struggling to come to grips with the devastation of his family, he had found a convenient, lifelong scapegoat: the blacks of the middle class and their pretentiousness.
By the fall of 1924, restoring Joe’s sight was making little progress. The Himeses clutched after family support and, as they had done before, retreated to Cleveland. Chester, dislodged again, would not even be allowed to finish out a complete academic year in St. Louis.