At the hinge of downtown Cleveland stands the Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, a 140-ton granite column 125 feet high. Dedicated in 1894, the stolid Civil War monument depicts life-size bronze figures during four engagements of the conflict. Perhaps the most riveting scene shows a black man straining to fit a cannonball into an artillery piece. Equipped with an ample interior gallery, the monument’s northern inside wall contained a bronze frieze of Abraham Lincoln holding broken handcuffs and a freedman bracing himself on one knee and holding on to a rifle and cartridge box extended by Lincoln: the militant moment of emancipation. After a childhood in towns anchored around public monuments to the Confederacy, Chester, who had become preoccupied by a portrait his father had once shown him of black prisoners biting Confederate dogs, was now living in the northern United States.
The city of Cleveland curved along the edge of Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes. A place of hot summers and cold, snow-filled winters, “Lake City” relied on its great heavy industries in steel and natural energy to fuel its boom during the 1920s. In 1920 Cleveland was America’s fifth-largest city. Densely populated by immigrants from Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Germany, as well as Jews who grouped together in a neighborhood called Glenville, Cleveland contrasted sharply with St. Louis, Pine Bluff, and rural Mississippi.
Chester Himes’s family arrived piecemeal, and they faced their greatest challenge with dwindling resources. Joseph Sr. and Chester came first, in February 1925, and Estelle and Joseph Jr. followed in July. As in St. Louis, Joseph Sr. was reduced to manual labor. He advertised himself as a carpenter, and he tried to make a living in the building trades. Fannie Wiggins, the youngest of the Himes siblings, gave them quarters in her seven-room house at 1711 E. Sixty-Eighth Place. Chester’s older brother Edward had spent summers and perhaps a year at the home. Joseph Sr.’s brother Andrew, who worked in Cleveland as a waiter, seems to have lived there much of his adult life. Joseph Sr., Chester, and Joseph Jr. would live in the house off and on over the next fifteen years. The family ties were strong, as were the privileges that the Himes men expected and received from Fannie.
By marrying a man fifteen years her senior from Seneca, South Carolina, Fannie had somewhat narrowed the gulf in experience between herself and her siblings. Her husband, Wade Hampton Wiggins, was named after a famous Confederate guerrilla fighter and worked as a “stationary engineer” for Standard Oil, shoveling coal in the boilers at the offices and warehouses. A gentle, tall, dark man whose shaved head accented an imposing physique, Wiggins was profligate. He owned a car he could not drive and rented a home. He had one serious concern in his house: consuming his rations in quantity, enough so that—be it simple fare like beef lungs and rice—it had to be served on a turkey platter. Chester’s aunt Fannie was not as simply or regularly pleased. When she could, she affected the air of a dapper stylish woman. Fannie hoped for cultivation beyond her means.
By the time Joseph Sr. moved his family to his sister’s, the hub of black life was at the intersection of Central Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street. The Wiggins house on Sixty-Eighth Place, a black side street, had initially put them up against better-off white neighbors on the large boulevards, most of whom were northern European immigrants: Danes, Germans, and English. But in the mid-1920s, all of this was changing, as the slum quarters near the shipyard docks, manufacturing plants, and railroad depots crept outward along the rail lines. Unskilled black workers, often brought in temporarily and unused to urban living, spread into neighborhoods along transport routes and cheap housing and the once white boulevards became all black. From the later 1910s to the late 1920s, nearby Hough Avenue at the corner of E. Sixty-Eighth Street would become as solidly African American as Fifty-Fifth and Central. By 1930, Seventy-Ninth Street was the racial dividing line, which pushed beyond Ninety-Third Street a decade later.
As black migrants poured in and faced a closed housing market, the glamour of the city soon gave way to grime. Chester’s most regular memory of life on the shores of Lake Erie was of soot raining down upon the plowed snow lining the street curbs, creating a blackened slush, the airborne residue of companies like Otis and Corrigan-McKinney Steel.
Joseph’s sister Leah Moon and her husband, Roddy, had seemingly leapfrogged the problem of encroaching poverty. In 1915 they purchased a two-story home in Glenville on Bryant Avenue, several miles east of their relatives. Roddy Moon had become the extraordinary man in his community. If Moon got his initial government appointment on the basis of conservative political leanings connected to the Booker T. Washington machine, in 1912 he had turned in another direction and founded the Cleveland branch of the NAACP. For twenty years he headed the local black fight for equal treatment under the law.
Pious, rigid, and ever mindful of appearing the confident educated American, Moon dominated his household. He introduced his youngest child, Henry Lee, to classic Victorian era writers, including Victor Hugo, Dunbar, Dumas fils, Dickens, and Browning. Leah Moon, a devoted cook, was best known for tending an immaculate, prize-winning garden, but she was also a friend of Mary McLeod Bethune, Estelle’s Scotia classmate. The Moons were model members of the black minority in Glenville. The family had not just adapted to successful careers in the North, they had transformed themselves and shucked off the misery of the past. Although Leah and Roddy had been born and bred in small South Carolina towns and the children had spent their early years in the South, none of the Moons retained a Southern accent. The glaring difference between the middling Wigginses and the starched Moons was obvious and put the freeloading Himeses in the middle.
Chester believed his aunts and uncles exacerbated the escalating marital tensions between his parents. In his later years, he wrote, “My father’s people suspected my mother of looking down on them because they were black. Maybe she did. They hated her. She hated them.” Joseph Jr. felt similarly. Both of them oversimplified the family crisis. Estelle was almost certainly snooty toward the grade-school-educated Wigginses and Andrew Himes, even though she was relying upon their goodwill, if not their outright charity. But Estelle neither lived with nor had achieved enough to look down upon Leah and Roddy Moon. If she disliked something about them, it was that they were inclined to flatter themselves and look down upon her.
Chester correctly identified the clash of wills between Estelle and Fannie Wiggins, who had worked in Estelle’s house back in Savannah, who did not know her own father well, and who did not have the same mother as her older siblings. Her education had probably been curtailed after her father died and the children had divided his estate. Fannie would have greeted her sister-in-law and her two hearty-eating boys with more than reluctance. In the novel The Third Generation, Chester condensed the crisis of his family, as they tried to get their footing in the North and his parents struggled to repair their marriage, into a classic battle between his youngest aunt and his mother.
“You don’t like black people but soon’s you get down and out you come running to us.”
“I married a black man who happens to be your brother.”
“Yes, you married him ’cause you thought he was gonna make you a great lady.”
“I’ll not discuss it.”
“You’re in no position to say what you’ll discuss, sister. This is my house. I pay taxes on it.”
“If Mr. Taylor hadn’t spent all of his money sending you and your sister here from the South he’d have something of his own.”
“You dragged him down yourself, don’t go blaming it on us. If you’d made him a good wife instead of always nagging at him, he’d be president of a college today.”
Comfortable with the pattern of providing for herself and Joseph Jr., Estelle responded after a short time to the strife in the Wiggins household by removing herself and her disabled son to another neighborhood, effectively walking out of the marriage while claiming it was for her blind son’s health. Joe thought he was “infantilized” in the process. Chester, as usual now, was an afterthought, and almost from the time they arrived in the city, he would seek a haven outside of the emotionally charged house.
During his two semesters there, he was unable to achieve a refuge at East High School. One thousand students strong, East High was one of Cleveland’s strong academic public schools. Chester began his scholastic year in February 1925 alongside seven other black boys and girls. Unlike the black Cleveland poet Langston Hughes, a popular student when he graduated from rival Central High in 1920, Chester had a difficult time socially jumping into the final year. Without any history with the faculty or fellow students, and his brother now fully a year behind him in course work, Chester became ever more disinclined to prove his academic worth. The end-of-the-year chemistry experiments included explosives demonstrations, which must have made vivid Joe’s terrible mishap. If Chester had dominated the classroom in Pine Bluff and been able to disregard it but still succeed tolerably well in St. Louis, at East High School he could do neither. In a white classroom where students were considering the leading American colleges, pupils maneuvered to display skill. One young woman teased him when he made errors, and, in what he had now established as a pattern of rebellion, he became a show-off in the cafeteria and kept classroom activities at arm’s length.
Nor did Chester warm to the organized exclusive social activities, like the Friday Frolics, afternoon dances held in the gymnasium, the Atheneum Literary Society, or the football games that East High lost every single time that season. Fifteen years old and fresh from St. Louis, he was “anxious to prove I was an all right guy.” This meant smoking cigarettes and telling the baseball crowd that he had the slugging power of Babe Ruth, then ditching entire afternoons of class and jogging over to play the Catholic school boys at Rockefeller Park. But Chester was no Sultan of Swat. One afternoon he foul-tipped a ball into his own eye and the ballplayers razzed him for a couple of days, but for a brief period of time he felt included.
By his second term, in the fall of 1925, the final semester he needed to graduate, the college prep curriculum at East High was a maddening chore for Chester. The public schools in Cleveland organized classes according to student scores on IQ tests, part of the classification rage after the First World War. Chester’s strong score balanced his miserable classroom performances and made him egotistical, the misunderstood genius. Complicating matters, Joe entered the East High School junior class that fall, speedily made the honor roll, and then kept a 90 average. Chester was not even competing with his brother, who was more or less blind, and he quietly resented his mother’s focus on Joe, their movement from city to city in search of doctors and schools.
Meanwhile, on October 8, 1925, his parents bought a three-story colonial revival at 10713 Everton Avenue. Constructed in 1918, the spacious five-bedroom was, as Joseph Himes recalled, “the nicest house we ever lived in.” Chester rejoiced in the new home, which erased the shame of their frequent moves, dip into poverty, and family quarrels—the Thursday the Himeses bought it would be the brightest day in his life for the next ten years. The four Himeses were also trailblazers. The block they moved on was completely white, and Estelle could have the satisfaction of living even farther away from the ever-widening black slums than even her sister-in-law Leah. The ample house and the address in Glenville gave both sons elite standing in black Cleveland.
Chester beamed at the new status and the possibility that his parents’ troubled marriage was on the mend. He gravitated to a new group of young people, accommodating himself to mastering the complex Charleston dance and slicking his hair down with Vaseline and black goo to achieve the Pomp, the imitation of the Rudolph Valentino hairdo from the popular 1921 film The Sheik. But possibly by then the ragtag pilgrimage had taken its toll on him. The requirement of submitting to the discipline of a pioneering family like the Moons—who responded to the requirement of being the “first” blacks on their street as if awakening to a trumpet blast—was uncomfortable. Unprepared to cope with the slights, the shouts of “colored boy” and “nigger” from neighbors and schoolmates, such as his cousin Henry had already endured, Chester was less inclined to leap the hurdles required to win friends and impress adults.
East High School’s winter commencement exercises were on Thursday, January 28, 1926. The eager students sang and gave orations, but the moment was bittersweet for Chester, who had been asked to return to school to repeat a course. In error, one of the Latin teachers had written “86” on his report card in place of the 56 that he had earned; he was awarded his diploma by clerical mistake. Adopting a belligerence that he would never fully discard, Chester felt, of course, that he had, by then, graduated three times from high school: from Branch Normal, from Sumner in St. Louis, and from East High.
Prideful, he decided to attend Ohio State University along with dozens of other members of the class, telling people that he would become a medical doctor. He would have received firsthand information from his cousin Henry about the opportunity for a quality education available in Columbus at the flagship university for the state. Henry Lee Moon had gone to Howard University as an undergraduate, pledging the Omega fraternity there, and then completed a master’s degree in journalism at Ohio State, to his father’s satisfaction. Despite that accomplishment, Chester’s Aunt Leah then tried to push her younger son into the medical field, advising him on a creed she undoubtedly shared with her nephew: “Our people need more doctors; besides you’ll be your own man and will not have to take tips and orders from any white man.” Tuition for Ohio residents was only $10, although fees, including room and board, were estimated at another $658. If the Himes family had a real discussion at home about where Chester ought to go to school—Joseph likely supporting a Southern Negro college and Estelle advocating for anything but—the decision might easily have revolved around Estelle’s willingness to help foot the cost of fees. Their eldest son Eddie’s difficulty when at Atlanta University wouldn’t have helped Joseph’s case for the potential of all-black schools. Chester, who had limped away from East High, decided he would try to outdo his older cousin Henry: he would become a doctor in six or seven years and do all of the work at Ohio State.
Following his winter graduation, Chester’s father got him a job through a church connection at the luxurious Wade Park Manor, an extended-stay hotel off Wade Park, one of Cleveland’s planned public squares and gardens. Constructed in Gilded Age grandeur, the twelve-story hotel overlooked a lake and was staffed by black busboys, waiters, and maids. “No matter what your aim is in life, waiting tables is a good profession to know. Many of our most prominent men got their start waiting table,” Chester was told. The opposite was true too, as he knew and his mother and Aunt Leah certainly forewarned: the Moon family were convinced that their older boy, Joe, had been “ruined” after a season as a bellman at the Cleveland Athletic Club. By getting used to accepting gratuities from the rich, a black man could permanently lose his dignity and willpower.
If Joseph Sr. feared he was leading his son down the path of his brother Andrew or his nephew he did not let on, but supported the basic position of value in honest work. Showing off, Chester had already wrecked the Wiggins automobile, and the accident had encouraged his father to believe that steady labor was the most important quality that Chester yet needed. But Joseph Sr. was unsuccessful at bending his youngest son to the value of a work ethic, saving, and ambition. With his hotel salary and exposure to the older men’s locker room talk, and two flirtatious white girls at the hotel check counter, Chester took five dollars from his earnings to an establishment in the red-light district on Scovil Avenue to lose his virginity.
Himes wrote more than one version of this coming-of-age moment, and in one, he acquainted himself with the scarred, run-down wooden tenements and abandoned cars of Scovil at the height of winter. In his memoir, he writes that he impetuously began his sexual initiation in this area known as the “Bucket of Blood,” a young cad making his way “to an old fat ugly whore sitting on a stool outside her hovel.”
What fascinated him in his adulthood about the Cleveland tenderloin was that the prostitution had grown out of the forces of the American race dynamic. Steel industrialists in the Cuyahoga River valley had imported male laborers from Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. These men were herded into ghettos and, with the money that they earned, were able to employ black women as cooks and laundresses. Sexual unions for pay, pleasure, and romance began at the same time. Black men locked out of the labor market began procuring women for the lonely foreigners. By the 1920s, black female prostitution was very nearly an industrial commodity itself, and a hardened lot of women earned a living along Scovil Avenue.
However, Chester’s sexual triumph was short-lived. He had been at work about two weeks when, in the middle of February, not looking while chatting with the young white girls who scrutinized the dinner trays headed up to the hotel patrons, he stepped backward through open elevator doors. Although the doors to the elevator parted, the carriage had already passed to a floor above. He fell two stories down the shaft, shattering his chin and jaw, his left arm, which he used to break his fall, his pelvis, and three vertebrae. Chester likened the sensation of hitting the steel plate at the elevator shaft bottom to “spattering open like a ripe watermelon.” Gurgling blood and spitting out teeth, he was rushed to the hospital.
Near the hotel was the brand-new and technically advanced University Hospitals of Cleveland. Doctors there turned him away on account of space constraints, after first giving him an injection of morphine. Inevitably the scene reminded him of Joseph’s rejection in Arkansas by a whites-only facility. Accepted at the homeopathic-friendly Huron Road Hospital for charity cases, about two miles from the scene of his accident, he was given a room on a crowded ward with patients who were terminally ill. Ohio Industrial Commission physicians placed sixteen-year-old Chester in a complete body cast. A few hours later and under emergency conditions they inserted a tube in his bladder to substitute for a ruptured urethra. Chester had smoked cigarettes before and he had experimented with booze, but the injections he began receiving to deal with the pain of his injuries opened him to a new range of psychic moods. The reality of his wounds and pains, the distancing from his own paralyzed body, and the likelihood of his permanent injury led him to a place of brittle irony with others, and self-pity with himself.
After an investigation presented findings of hotel negligence, the newly established workman’s compensation fund began paying Chester seventy-five dollars a month; Ward Park Manor also continued his salary. Estelle Himes wanted to sue the hotel. Joseph Sr., astounded by the existence of state laws regulating the workplace—which meant the hospital bills were paid and that Chester would get the same salary his father had earned for the best years of his working life, even if the boy seemed as if he might never walk again—encouraged Chester to sign away legal liability for the accident, which he did. The arguments between his parents deepened in their rancor, also carrying the strong symbolism of an ideological conflict. Chester’s white-looking mother was acting as the rebellious dissenter while his dark-skinned father played the obsequious Uncle Tom. In short order, Estelle and Joseph’s putative reunion in the new house began to sputter.
The catastrophe also tore Chester’s relationship with his mother. He had identified something in her, a kind of “incontinent vanity,” the indulgent prickly side of her willful intention to ignore racial barriers and proclaim as true her fantasy heritage. When Estelle visited him at the hospital and berated the hotel, he recoiled. “Mother,” his character Charles Taylor groans through his bandages in the novel The Third Generation, “will you please-please-please shut up!” Thinking of his family’s vagabond trail along Southern outposts, and the loss of her affection to blinded Joe, Chester re-created the scene by having the wounded boy strike out savagely, “You’re as much to blame as anyone.”
Dropping weight from an already slender frame, Chester managed to heal over four months, and, once his wrist had mended and he could wiggle his toes, he willed himself to stand and take tentative new steps. But the experience was more complicated than regaining strength. Before he could walk, he watched two men die on his ward, a confrontation with tragedy and doom that opened full his new window on despair. With the beds aligned in rows within a hall, the intimate lives of his neighbors were unavoidable. The man beside him recited the Lord’s Prayer for eight hours before dying, giving Chester ample time to recall the image of the young girl in Alcorn beneath the wagon wheel. To his personality now came an edge of fatalism.
On July 3, 1926, Chester left the hospital to return home. A conscientious commission-appointed dentist canalled, filled, and crowned his broken teeth. Chester was nearly an invalid, learning how to walk again, and encumbered by a leather-and-steel back brace that fastened underneath his groin and that Estelle helped him attach. His mother was also angry, and she defied Joseph Sr. and continued to argue the case at the hotel, which she claimed had taken advantage of teenaged Chester. The only result was the suspension of his monthly salary of fifty dollars and renewed outbursts at home. It was a final rough passage in a marriage, where she had doted affection on her sons in lieu of her husband. She was again caring for Chester, whom she adored, he would later believe, because he was the lightest-colored of her children and perhaps the least outwardly masculine. But in response, Chester left the house and found another woman.
In one version of his life, Chester wrote about spending the postconvalescent end of July and August on Cedar Avenue in the arms of a prostitute. If the encounters took place as he wrote them in the 1953 autobiographical novel The Third Generation, they occurred habitually not just because he had the temerity to venture into the red-light blocks, but because of the pension from his accident. The relationship, which required the sex worker to refasten him into his back brace after intercourse, began a period when sensual joy and ecstasy would always be inflected by deep feelings of shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and the need for secrecy. The experience also disabused him of his boyhood romantic ideal. Chester was quick-witted enough to grasp the ancient hierarchy of the street, which put the “trick” in the sex trade at the bottom, the “whore” in the middle, and the “pimp” or “madam” at the top. At the end of his adolescence, Chester subconsciously connected sexual desire, pleasure, and fulfillment with using people and expecting to be used in return.
The summer trysts twined the violation of his parents’ and the state’s rules with a healthy growth beyond his family. He learned to drink white mule—a highly potent alcoholic beverage of Prohibition—and edged toward more serious illegal behavior. The Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the sale of intoxicating beverages and enforced by the 1919 Volstead Act, had the effect in cities like Cleveland of dramatically building up organized crime and urban criminal zones. Chester’s classmates wrote short stories about Cleveland’s pistol-wielding bandits (and comic, fearful black menials) in the high school paper.
In September, with money from workman’s compensation and without telling his parents, Chester bought a beat-up Model T and left Cleveland for college in Columbus. A state-sponsored land-grant university designed at its outset to train farmers and mechanics, Ohio State University enrolled 8693 in 1926 and had blossomed into the largest institution for higher education in Ohio. Student life for freshmen got under way with an orientation week that included placement examinations and physicals at the gymnasium. Still gamely wishing for distinction, but without the day-to-day discipline instilled by his mother, Chester signed up for a premedical curriculum, with an emphasis on chemistry. But the summer spent recovering from the accident, his parents’ troubled marriage, drinking, and visiting prostitutes colored his September arrival. What should have been memorable was anticlimactic.
The cornerstone of his academic career that fall was the advanced chemistry class, the gateway to premed. The class was broken up into an hour-long lecture, followed a day later by an hour-long recitation, and completed by two three-hour laboratory sessions. Students sat in assigned seats and attendance was habitually taken by the graduate teaching assistants who conducted the labs. Chester’s other courses met daily for an hour and included elementary German and introduction to American literature, which focused on the nineteenth century, with “a brief survey of recent literature.” (Ernest Hemingway’s daring hit novel The Sun Also Rises was published in late October.) The academic program for the quarter included a mandatory one-credit course with William Henderson, the dean of the college, sharing his wisdom on picking classes, study habits, and campus rules.
After fifty successful years, the sprawling university was a miniature city, with late-Victorian-style academic buildings clustered around an enormous oval. Off to the southwest of the library was large Mirror Lake, where freshmen and sophomores engaged in a ritual tug-of-war battle that ended that fall with the frosh being pulled into the water. On October 2, when the freshmen went to the psychology department to take IQ tests, Chester placed an impressive fourth. The joyfully frivolous opening days of school, called “Know Ohio Week,” were precisely the ritual dramas of belonging he had missed in high school. Toward the end of October the physical education and military science departments “permanently excused” Chester from drill and exercise, required of all freshmen, because of the disabilities from his fall. He ditched the beanie hat required of frosh, and strutted the campus in the blazer worn by the most ardent of school boosters, with broad vertical red and gray stripes. By mid-fall, with his Model T nearby, he had assumed the pose of an upperclassman.
African American students had begun attending Ohio State in 1892. By the fall of 1926, more than two hundred blacks were enrolled. Black Ohioans also saw themselves with a key stake in the school and had successfully petitioned the university president to prohibit professors in the departments of history and anatomy from using racial epithets like “nigger” and “coon” in the classroom. As for those professors who performed an annual minstrel show, there was less they could do. In 1926 a single African American participated in intercollegiate athletics, on the track and cross-country team. (Track star Jesse Owens would arrive on campus in 1930.) No blacks were permitted to join the white fraternities or eating clubs, effectively sealing them off from campus life. A family named Harrison ran a popular rooming house for African Americans at 236 E. Eleventh Street, where Chester’s friend Oscar Stanton De Priest, the communications major, lived. With his ample budget, Chester took a private room in a large house at 1389 Summit Street, about four blocks east of the main campus. Despite being so ubiquitous as to appear normal, the obtrusive, steady racial prejudice was jarring. “He dreaded the classes where no one spoke to him, he hated the clubs he couldn’t join, he scorned the restaurants in which he couldn’t eat,” Himes would later write. The psychological impact on the black students was perhaps also indicated by their attrition rate. Only fifteen graduated in 1926, and rarely more than thirty in any year. As for the official attitude toward racial segregation, school president W. O. Thompson thought that “colored people should not undertake to force that issue, and if it came about I should ask them not do it.”
In response, the black students created a segregated playland on the black east side of Columbus. The boys took their dates to Long Street dances at the Crystal Slipper Ballroom and home-brew and whiskey joints there crowded onto “the Block.” At the Empress Theater, the Columbus version of the famed Apollo in Harlem, emcees and announcers sang and strutted to engage the young coeds who copied the performers’ manners. The artistic excellence and sensuality of musicals like Runnin’ Wild featuring Ethel Waters or Josephine Baker blended with street-corner brawls and violence. Brassfield’s Restaurant satisfied their appetites and then Lincoln Park afforded the students a secluded wooded reprieve for romance.
Chester later realized that the frantic pace of the social activities was partly designed to shield the black coeds from the oddity of segregation, the tenuousness of their membership in the college community. His own attitude during the period was “slightly hysterical,” by which he meant frantic, enthusiastic, uneasy, and garrulous about private matters. Chester worked overtime to commit himself socially, enjoying the brash self-confidence of the group that Howard University philosopher Alain Locke was calling the New Negroes. Swiftly, Chester joined forty-four other black boys as Sphinxmen pledges for Alpha Phi Alpha—a leader in the fraternity system of the New Negroes that had begun at places like Cornell and Indiana University. Fellow pledge Jesse Jackson was his closest friend. With his pension, Chester could masquerade as one of the carelessly affluent. He palled around with some of the black upper crust, including Stanton De Priest of Chicago, whose father Oscar would in 1929 become the only African American serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. Always there was a sense of the possibility of extraordinary success given hard work and some luck; always there was the poison of maddening and numbing slights.
During early 1925, when he had lived at his aunt’s house, he had felt the sting of skin-color divisions among African Americans. Chester now found at the university considerable proof for Aunt Fannie’s disgust: “Light-complexioned blacks were more prejudiced toward darker blacks than were many white people.” In his childhood Chester had accepted simply the complex dimensions of the slave descent of his parents: white-looking valets and concubines and dark-skinned artisans and field workers. His experience and heritage caused him to recoil against the skin-color snobbery: “I despised the in-group class distinctions based on color and the degree of white blood in one’s veins.” At this crucial moment of making the transition from adolescence to adulthood, he wanted to show that he was fully a black man, someone who accepted his ancestry and was not attempting to pull off a white imitation.
But the manner of his showing his black preference was not balanced. Instead of trying to romance one of his peers, he ditched the campus belles and took his libidinal urges to the Columbus brothels. In a move of risky defiance, he took up with a good-looking prostitute named Rose. At first, it was difficult to believe that a “young and beautiful,” seemingly healthy woman would make herself available sexually. Rose encouraged him with faint praise, “You got an awful lot of steam for a li’l boy.”
His newfound pleasures cost him quite a bit. Around Thanksgiving, Chester began to experience the painful urination and pus discharge indicating gonorrhea. Ashamed to admit the symptoms to a physician on campus, he went to a private doctor, who prescribed a solution of silver mercury, which Chester injected into the meatus of his glans to rid himself of the disease. The fall quarter examinations took place between December 18 and 22, and their outcome verified where Chester had passed his ten weeks. He turned in a blank form for the German final, and pulled a D. English was the high mark, with a satisfactory grade. He hadn’t bothered to attend the course taught by Dean Henderson and took home another D. He failed chemistry outright. Following a fistfight with one of the graduate students who ran the laboratory portion of the chemistry class, he had simply stopped attending. Those marks ended the beginning of Chester Himes, M.D.
Chester hobbled back to Cleveland a few days before Christmas 1926. His collegiate misadventures seem to have helped accelerate the final dissolution of his parents’ marriage. His father sympathized with Chester, blaming his son’s failure on the uncertainty of their lives in Cleveland, the disaster of the parents’ marriage, the ravages of the elevator accident, and his own shaky employment.
During the two-week break, Chester discovered the fullness of the black ghetto at Cedar Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street by way of the cabaret at the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks. At the Elks lodge Bud Jenkins’s Virginia Ravers played “Bugle Blues,” and, at least to Chester, Cleveland’s black domestics responded as had the women in the remote church in Mississippi. In descriptions of his youth that always tripped over themselves with sex, he wrote that the women “leaped atop tables and pulled up their dresses showing strong black legs and black pussies as though on the slave block.” Chester Himes recorded the moment in the classic mixed-metaphor idiom that he made his own, combining the voluntary expression of intimate desire with sexual coercion. But the image of women exhibiting themselves, not so much for the pleasure of men as for their own exhibitionist fantasy and congress with the music, emphasizes the sexual abandon that swept portions of America during the “roaring” 1920s and which Chester always felt coursing through black slums. “Practically every night during the holidays,” Himes remembered, “I wound up with some black woman in the Majestic Hotel.” The Majestic Hotel was down the street from the Elks Cabaret, and Chester believed that he had perhaps graduated from paying for sex to being able to initiate reciprocal sensual relationships. Light-skinned Chester was also “sweetmeat” for the domestics who had carefree moments on their days off.
When he returned to Columbus in January to begin the winter quarter, his academic standing was perilous. Freshmen who failed two-thirds of their academic load were placed on probation. Demonstrating his worldliness to his fellow pledges and their dates at a stiff, invitation-only dance, Chester led the group to the parlor of the brothel where he had kept his assignations with Rose. The man who operated the house told Chester that Rose was asleep. When the coeds began slow dancing, Rose awoke and stumbled upon a scene that included Chester in the arms of a proper, middle-class young woman. Possessive of Chester, Rose exploded, breaking phonograph records. The couples fled in fright and Rose glared at Chester with contempt. “I fixed your little red wagon, you snotty little motherfucker!” Then the proprietor of the house beat her for her tirade. Hapless, Chester slunk away. A few days later, he was summoned to the office of Dean Henderson, who had received a report from one of the young women. The dean allowed him to save face: on Valentine’s Day 1927, Chester withdrew from school on account of “ill health and failing grades.” Embarrassed about what had happened, he hung around Columbus for another six weeks until the examinations began, then returned to Cleveland. Still only seventeen, Chester had concluded his formal education.
Feckless, he appeased his family by playing up the elevator accident and keeping abed until the weather brightened. At the start of the summer he revived a bit and began seeing Maude, a woman he described as “one of those soft, pleasing, flat-featured mulatto women with big cushiony mouths, bedroom eyes and a thick caressing voice.” She was an easygoing Georgia girl temporarily living with her married sister, who herself was sleeping with one of Chester’s buddies on the side. Maude is the only woman whom he ever admitted to impregnating. Chester claimed that she presented him with the fact of his paternity at the end of the summer. On both sides of Chester’s family, pregnancy and marriage went together, and, barely eighteen, Chester believed that the early marriage to an unaccomplished woman would forever ruin his relationship with his ambitious mother. He evaded Maude, who left Cleveland, he believed, to have the baby. His abandonment of her, and his difficulty distinguishing between romantic attachment and sexual pleasure, inclined Chester to attempt outwardly to harden his emotions. But he was arcing swiftly toward an emotional crisis. He tried to redeem himself from the episode thirty years later by concluding his novel The Third Generation with the protagonist, Charles Taylor, looking for the mother of his child. But this was not what he did in real life.
In a case of dubious charity, one of the busboys at Wade Park Manor took Chester to a sporting house on Cedar Avenue, on a respectable stretch of the road up by Ninety-Fifth Street. The gambling house was run by a man from Arkansas who knew what to do if a casual girlfriend got pregnant. His sporting name was “Bunch Boy,” but Chester, who admired him, got to know him as Gus Smith, a “small, dried up looking, light-complexioned man with straight hair, strange washed-out blue eyes, and a cynical expression.” Smith was in his early fifties, lived on an exclusive street near Rockefeller Park, and dressed the part of the hustler, togged in “silk shirts, English-tailored suits, and Stacy Adams shoes.” Chester was enthralled by Bunch Boy’s forbidden world. Smith called Chester “Little Katzi,” from the popular Katzenjammer Kids comic strip. With his expensive Packard Coupe, Smith took on a paternal role for Chester. Chester’s own father was pushing a broom at a joint called the Sixty Club from midnight to eight in the morning. The tragedy of the black college teacher whose son could not finish a quarter in good academic standing and was imitating local gangsters was complete.
At Bunch Boy’s there were two regular games, craps and blackjack. Both of the games had professional dealers or referees, and Chester became intrigued by blackjack and befriended the gentlemanly operator of the game, Johnny Perry. Other than Perry, there were no guards, and the seductively quiet operation of the house did not advertise itself as breaking the law. Most of the patrons held steady jobs “in service,” the euphemism for black domestic work, and Perry himself was “soft-spoken, handsome and married, a pleasant-appearing man with a soft voice and a superficial air of culture.” From Smith, Perry, and the card-game lookout named Val, Chester began an education in the streets. In the novel Lonely Crusade, Himes described the emotional link between a character very much like himself as a young man and an older crook, “that peculiar, almost virgin love that the Negro hustler and criminal sometimes feels for the young, ambitious, educated Negro with sense enough to know the score—a sort of inverted hero worship that led them on to back these youths in what they did, as if it would make themselves bigger, more important men.” Chester warmed to his fast-life tutors and the ambience of Negro decadence.
After a time he learned that the black men were not really in charge. In Cleveland the Sicilian Mafia, with ties to Al Capone in Chicago and the large families in New York, controlled liquor and gambling. The syndicate bosses were Italians and Jews, and the largest, “Big” Joe Lonardo and Joe Porello, operated a legitimate business as sugar wholesalers to the distillers who then stocked the speakeasies and private clientele with liquor. Operating around the Italian lower East Side neighborhood, the large crime families of Lonardo and Porello operated by supplying the distillers—bootleggers—with sugar and in turn assisting with the distribution of the prohibited alcohol products, colloquially known as “white lightning” and “white mule.” The mobsters were generally known as the Mayfield Road Gang. The violence connected to these figures and the price of doing illegal business in liquor was changing the nature of crime in Cleveland. Gruesome killings in public of over one hundred bootleggers occurred in the city during the thirteen years of Prohibition. Crime boss Joe Lonardo was gunned down at a barbershop at the so-called Bloody Corner, E. 110th Street and Woodland Avenue, in October 1927. Twenty months later Angelo Lonardo killed his father’s assassin, enabling Angelo to become the head of the Cleveland Mafia.
Using his workman’s compensation income as his stake, Chester avidly played cards at Smith’s, frequently opening the games. His initiation led to other things, and soon he was across the street, accompanied by his busboy friend, to shoot craps with a high rolling and violent crowd at Hot Stuff Johnson’s. Craps was a large, standing dice game, where a dice thrower rolls to hit seven or eleven or to match the number he rolls the very first time. Chester was now in a place where an armed man kept the door and searched everyone who entered the premises, removing weapons of all kinds, including pistols. At the green baize table, a dog chain stretching over the center, Chester met the pillars of Cleveland’s gambling set: gray-haired Abie the Jew, who bet the dice to win or lose, a pimp named Chink Charlie, and professional gamblers Dummy, Red Johnny, and Four-Four, whom he featured in his first detective fiction in 1957, For Love of Imabelle. The idiom that Chester accustomed himself to now would shape the rest of his writing life. In his first novel, in 1945, he would revisit the lingo that became a part of him: “ ‘Unchain ’em in the big corral,’ the boys used to say in Hot Stuff’s crap game back in Cleveland.”
The card club on Cedar became so successful that Smith opened a new location farther downtown on Central Avenue, in the true ghetto, with a rougher, more freely spending crowd and the new game that was thriving in Chicago, policy. Without the steadying influence of the chic underworld manager, Chester was influenced by less restrained men like Perry and Val, the card sharpie who tried to sexually exploit Chester to hard-edged madams who ran the brothels on Central Avenue. Their discussions were less about cards than the Italian mob in Cleveland, the numbers and policy syndicates, different Midwestern pawnshop and store owners who might expertly dispense stolen goods, and the prized getaways if anyone ever made a bonanza. To escape the scrutiny of his parents, he told his mother that he worked as a night waiter at the Gilsy Hotel and was saving money to return to college.
Between gambling and drinking with his demimonde pals, Chester met a professional thief named Benny Barnett, “a big-framed, light-brown-skinned, simpleminded boy,” who befriended him and took him farther into the alleys off of Cleveland’s slum streets. Twenty-one and on his own, Barnett introduced Chester to automobile theft and hard drugs. “But where he got his real kick,” Chester wrote about a character like himself in an early short story, “his mind leaping afar, was out gambling or sitting around with a bunch of pretty molls ‘sniffing’ cocaine. Cocaine!” Thrilled by gambling, sex, and narcotics, Chester had fully forgotten Maude, college, and his parents.
He had a moment of sobriety in August when he accompanied Joe Jr. to Oberlin College. Years earlier Chester had lost whatever distinction he’d felt as the favorite within his own family. The Himeses had taken up residence in Cleveland on account of their middle son, who was now proving the value of his parents’ trust, having graduated with the highest overall grade average in the history of East High, in spite of his disability, and been awarded a full academic scholarship to college. Joe’s accomplishment gained notice in national newspapers and East High principal Daniel Lothman proclaimed Joe a “genius” to the press. With determined effort, Joseph embarked on a career where he attained academic distinction every semester. Within six months of starting at Oberlin, the school president, Ernest Wilkins, would write him “hearty congratulations on your excellent standing.” Throughout the 1930s Joe’s accomplishments would mount. Joe was the herald of the Himes family, and now the son for whom Estelle would make every sacrifice. Chester’s mannish behavior helped intensify the arguments between his parents so much that by August his mother had moved into a spare bedroom.
Chester sought thrills in more dangerous paths. A few weeks after Joe left, he and Benny stole a car and drove to Columbus, returning to his old haunts for a weekend of partying. Arrogant and high, on September 26, 1927, Chester committed a series of bungling confidence scams and wound up in jail in Columbus, charged with fraud. He had stolen a university identification card that belonged to Phillip J. Dann Jr. and cashed a bogus thirty-five-dollar check drawn from the Cleveland Trust Company at one of the men’s clothing stores near the university. At the beginning of the year he’d been a student at Ohio State; nine months later he was an inmate at the nearby Franklin County jail.
His parents were notified and the embarrassment of a jailed child of the middle class was the equivalent to their unusual step that fall, divorce. Chester’s loss of moral compass had as its source the collapse of his immediate family. He witnessed his father’s professional ruin coupled with the mounting and sticky paranoia of his mother, which all culminated in his parents’ court battle during an era when divorce was infrequent. On November 16, 1927, Estelle pushed her brinksmanship to the edge, unexpectedly filing for alimony and “an absolute divorce from the Plaintiff” even while she and Joseph Sr. remained in the same house. She went to the courts to compel her husband to support her, claiming that he had “failed and willfully neglected to provide her with the common necessaries of life” and had on more than one occasion “desert[ed] and abandon[ed] her.” Just three days later, on November 19 the couple had a violent fight, Estelle throwing whatever she could get her hands on and both of them cursing and impugning each other with candid vigor. Joseph Sr. temporarily left the Everton Avenue home, dismissing a reconciliation with Estelle on terms not to his liking. Not long after that, she moved permanently to another part of town.
The battlefield shifted to their joint property. In 1925 when they had bought the house, the Himeses had paid $3700 up front. Now Estelle claimed that she had contributed $2200 of that down payment; Joseph countered that he had paid every penny. Estelle pursued Joseph for increases in alimony while the divorce was in process, and she had Joseph in court on December 6, arguing that with his monthly income of eighty dollars and odd jobs as a carpenter and mechanic he could more than afford to pay her between five and ten dollars per week. She had the county sheriff summon Joseph to court multiple times in 1927 and 1928 for alimony relief. On December 20, 1927, they sold the Everton Avenue house to Marrilla and William Jackson. Chester would not live in a home with the Himes name on the deed for forty years.
The next month, on January 23, Joseph Himes Sr. came to Columbus for Chester’s plea agreement before Judge Robert P. Duncan. Chester changed his plea to guilty in exchange for a suspended sentence and a supervised probation. Joseph Sr. took his eighteen-year-old home with him to Cleveland. A boy who had now spent several months in the Franklin County jail, Chester was officially an embarrassment to his mother and father, as well as to his father’s family. Angry, confused, and with his nuclear family now torn apart, Chester faced life in a seedy rented room with his father on the East Side, near a block of Cedar called “the Avenue,” “a congested area of vice and destitution.” Joseph Himes was as dispirited as his son, and almost certainly the profit from the sale of the home went to Chester’s legal fees.
Hardened by the season in jail and wild and unsupervised after the separation of his parents, Chester began working as a bellhop at the Gilsy Hotel on E. Ninth Street near Euclid Avenue. A fleabag hotel with $1.50 rooms, the Gilsy exposed him to well-organized prostitution, bootlegging, and racketeering. “Home” was little better. Partly to escape the dank quarters with his father, Chester resumed his friendships with Benny Barnett and Harry Plater, another young petty criminal.
At a party at Benny’s two-room basement flat on Cedar Avenue, he was introduced to a provocative sixteen-year-old named Jean Lucinda Johnson. Enjoying the all-night parties of booze and dope with the young gamblers, Jean was breaking off from her poor family. Good-looking, brown-skinned, and nearly as tall as Chester in her bare feet, Jean turned heads with her grown-up body. She had not yet finished high school when she took over one of the rooms in Barnett’s apartment and allowed Chester to live with her. Some nights they ambled out together, getting drunk, and he left her alone to fend for herself. However, Jean clung hard to Chester, the light-skinned ex-college boy from a good family.
With a desirable girlfriend to defend, Chester started carrying a pistol, an owl’s head .32 revolver. Even Bunch, Chester’s patron, hoped to take Jean to Detroit and lure her into the sex trade. But shooting the moderate-caliber pistol made only a slight impression on the neighborhood thugs, and Chester had to upgrade to a .44 caliber Colt. All of his running partners carried guns.
On June 18 Chester had an especially anguished moment: his father’s attorney subpoenaed him to testify in the divorce case. Roddy Moon and Fannie Wiggins, among others, were also conscripted on Joseph Sr.’s behalf, but Chester did not wish to have to choose between parents, to go on record in a way that might forever wound his mother. Nor, as his own forays into the underworld expanded, had he any desire to participate in a courtroom proceeding. At a June 20 hearing, Estelle completed the divorce from Joseph Himes, winning $7 per week in alimony; $300 for the maintenance of her blind son, Joseph; $811.23, half of the proceeds from sale of the Everton Avenue house; and her attorney’s costs. His family shattered and feeling as if he had to pick sides, Chester gave himself more fully to his girlfriend, Jean, and the more dangerous places to hang out on Cedar Avenue and then over to the sketchy part of Scovil Avenue, the “Bucket of Blood.”
By the end of the summer he was out of control. Possibly Jean was pregnant or believed herself pregnant and asked him to marry her. If so, for the second time in twelve months, Chester was faced with what seemed a permanent tie to a woman and a child whom he would be obligated to support financially for the foreseeable future. He did not want to face the considerable, vigorous objection from his mother, and he could also picture a future of being unhappily married, like his father. It was too much. In his emotionally revealing novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry appears a scene that had its basis in truth:
She told him she thought she was going to have a baby. . . . Then he said, “I know a swell guy in the pool room here who’s just crazy about you, Joan. I’m going in and get him and send him out. Marry him, Joan. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
. . . .
He closed the door behind him and sent Eddie out to her. She married Eddie.
That tiny, oblique narrative, buried in the first novel he wrote, is important because it is all that sheds light on one of the cloudiest moments in Chester’s life. On September 12, 1928, Harry Plater married Chester’s seventeen-year-old girlfriend Jean, who raised her age on the certificate to nineteen.
Exactly two weeks later, Chester, Benny Barnett, and Cornalee Thatch, an auto mechanic who captained the heist, robbed the Ohio National Guard Armory on Cedar Avenue of a cache of .45 automatic pistols. Next, the men kicked in the window of a furrier and drove to Warren, Ohio, to sell all of the loot to steel mill hands. But the amateurs botched the escapade: the police arrested them on October 9 and returned them to Cleveland.
When Chester had had his sentence suspended in Columbus in January, the court believed that he was “not likely to engage in an offensive course of conduct and that the public good does not demand that he be immediately sentenced.” His October arrest signaled otherwise. However, the weapons and fur coats were recovered, and Barnett and Thatch pleaded guilty. Thatch went to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for eighteen months. A wise attorney provided by his parents used Chester’s youth to have his case heard before a sympathetic female judge at the municipal court, who listened attentively to the Himes family saga and, undoubtedly impressed by the formidable public success of Joe Jr. and shy, boyish-acting Chester, who wore knickers instead of long pants to the trial, paroled him “over the vehement protests” of the prosecuting attorney. Neither contrite nor steadied in the days that followed, Chester began minor assaults in restaurants and swilled liquor in the Cedar Avenue dives. His sullen distemper was evident to anyone who wanted to see it. One night at Bunch’s gambling club he heard a light-skinned chauffeur bragging about the riches of his employer, and Chester, convinced now that he ought to escape Cleveland, decided upon an impulsive course.
On November 25, he stole a car and drove to the wealthy home of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Miller in Cleveland’s Fairmount Heights neighborhood, the one their chauffeur had described at Bunch Boy’s. The maid, a suspicious black woman, refused to let him in and called the police. Chester hid from the patrolmen, then waited in the garage while trying steel his nerves to commit a major crime alone. The Millers returned to the house about 1:30 A.M. and went inside; then Mr. Miller returned to the garage, where Chester had secreted himself. This time, Chester emerged from the cars, produced a handgun, and demanded entry. Samuel Miller let him in and apparently tried to satisfy Chester with the contents of his wife’s purse, but Chester directed them to the bedroom wall safe, hidden in a closet, alerting them to the fact that he had informed knowledge of their home. He had been led to believe that the couple had quantities of cash on hand; when the safe was opened, it held less than a few hundred dollars. Chester, knowing it was foolhardy, stole four rings worth about five thousand dollars and fled in a snowstorm in their Cadillac. The couple must have been amazed by the ferocity of the sensitive-faced boy with even white teeth and manicured hands, who hadn’t yet put a razor to his face. Chester was telling himself that he would flee to Mexico.
Chester showed cunning and nervy execution when he hopped a passenger train early in the morning and hightailed it to Chicago to sell the jewels. But after one night as a criminal mastermind, the next day he was arrested in a pawnshop trying to sell the jewelry, taken to a nearby police precinct, and hung upside down and beaten on his testicles until he confessed.
A Cleveland detective named Gill Frabel escorted him back home and on November 27 a Cuyahoga County grand jury indicted him for the robbery. On December 4 he entered a plea of not guilty and had his bond fixed at $20,000. His distraught parents had no more resources to cope with this new bout of lawlessness. The state-appointed public defender encouraged him to plead guilty to lessen the severity of the sentence. Chester was told he could expect six months at the state reformatory. Two days later he appeared again before the court and entered his guilty plea. Chester said later that all he could recall of the December weeks in prison was a loud argument he had with a guard, and the combination of flared tempers and the shifting pleas for the very young man seemed to have made the court sympathetic. Initially it assigned his case to the probation department, requiring an examination by Dr. George H. Reeves, a state-appointed psychiatrist.
On December 19, 1928, after three weeks in the county jail, Chester was brought before the Common Pleas Judge Walter McMahon, a heavyset man in his fifties who looked not unlike Herbert Hoover. Stern and unforgiving, McMahon astonished the defendant by describing Chester’s impulsive night out with a pistol as “one of the boldest and most cautiously plotted robberies in the history of Greater Cleveland.” Nineteen-year-old Chester had thrown himself on the mercy of the court in hopes of leniency, but quite obviously now the state reformatory was out of the question. Instead, undoubtedly noting that Chester had already received probation for forgery and robbery, the judge drew down the hardest penalty levied against any person he saw that day. In a crushing blow, McMahon sentenced Chester to a minimum of twenty years in prison, with a maximum of twenty-five years. Chester would not be eligible for parole until 1948. It was his turn to whip Joe in the bout for local headlines: “Robber Gets 20 Years: Youth Sent in Pen for Holdup in Heights.”