On April 1, 1936, Chester took a bus back to his mother’s house on Miami Avenue in Columbus. In the tragic, slightly absurd short story “On Dreams and Reality,” which owed something to Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” Chester described a prisoner’s ragged coming home to mother and brother in Columbus after eight years of incarceration. It was a grim, deeply shattering event. Reassuring himself during his imprisonment with golden dreams of life on the outside, he had overlooked the Depression’s lacerating impact on his family. His narrator gasps, “ ‘This can’t be my home,’ ” as he takes in the “unkempt yard” where “dirty paper lay limp in the rain” and then treads the “worn, wooden steps” of a “bilious green” frame house.
A slip of paper tacked to the door-frame to his right held the notice, Bell out of order, please knock. Below were the names of his mother and brother. He laughed suddenly. What was the matter with him? he asked himself. Sure, it’d be all right here. It had to be.
He knocked and waited. The door cracked open and a haggard, gray-haired woman peered from a darkened room.
“Mother!” he exclaimed, his laugh choking off. “Mother!”
“James, my baby! James!” she sobbed, clinging to him.
He almost asked, “Oh, mother, what has happened to you?” but caught himself and said instead, “Gee, mother, it’s swell to be home.” . . . He followed her through the gloomy parlour, side-stepped the jutting edge of a cane rocker, and entered the central room, feeling deflated. His first impression was that of squalor; it hit him a solid blow below the belt.
Recalling his mother’s elaborate oyster luncheons spread out in the prison dayroom to revive his spirits, Chester now found it unnerving when Estelle said, “We’ll put the big pot in the little one and make hash out of the dish rag.” Another defeat was in store when he learned that the Ohio Industrial Commission was eliminating his workman’s compensation; he had no income for the first time since 1926.
Adding a psychological dimension to the pressing economic circumstances, Chester would find himself begrudging his mother’s devotion to Joe, who had just completed his course work and campus residency requirement toward his PhD. In June, Joe would begin work as the director of research for the Urban League, completing his doctorate two years later. Estelle loudly blamed Joseph Sr. for his failure to help speed Chester’s release from prison. The absence of a governor’s commutation record for Chester’s final parole from London Prison Farm strongly suggests that Chester served out the maximum sentence under the new laws and found no favoritism whatsoever, despite any wrangling or proceedings initiated by lawyers on his behalf. Meanwhile Chester, “more hysterical than I had ever been before,” after seven years and five months in prison, was trying to relieve himself of the memory of degradation of life behind bars, which meant also the personal shame of having homosexual relations there.
Although he swung into the routine of attending church with his mother and Joe, he knew that to woo successfully any of the young women of the black middle class would take a lifetime of reassembling the respectability he had lost to prison. So he crept along the underside of black Columbus for adult pleasures. With an eye on prestige, he satisfied his sexual longing by courting the white prostitutes working the ghetto and eluding their pimps. “Several times landlords had to intervene to keep me from being shot.” His peccadilloes escalating, he lined up with other ex-cons to “Georgia” a black girl—which meant to promise payment for sex and then renege on her fee—then stepped back when his turn came. One Sunday following church, he wandered up to Warren Street, where one of his hooligan friends turned him onto “gage”—marijuana—which made him hallucinate, prompting Estelle to summon a physician.
Mother and son argued forcefully about his conduct in matches that required Joe Jr. to step in and referee. Believing that Chester’s antics might jeopardize his brother’s career, his mother turned over control of his parole to his father. The move signaled the end of their kinship; Estelle had given up on him.
Returning to his father’s in Cleveland meant Aunt Fannie’s house and bussing tables at Wade Park Manor, where he’d nearly been crippled. This was a move as miserable as being berated by his mother. Joseph Sr. had been making ends meet with odd jobs and work teaching trades at the Woodland Center Neighborhood House, a community center lodged in a refurbished church that ran programs in music and vocational training. Now in his early sixties, he was still married to Agnes Rowe but had never been able to purchase another home. His younger sister probably needed her brother at the time. Fannie’s husband, Wade, by then was living with extraordinary pain from passing gallstones in his urine; he would die of hypertrophy of the prostate in ten months.
In Glenville aunt Leah and uncle Roddy Moon prepared a celebratory dinner for Chester’s first Sunday back in Cleveland. Glad to hear he had finished “with the past kind of living,” his staid older relatives tried to “make him feel as though nothing has ever happened.” Roddy Moon was “anxious to see him make good.” They meant well for him, in a general sense, but they insisted on a straitjacket of propriety. Another disaster on Chester’s part would bode ill for all his relatives, especially those like the Moons who lived on streets with white neighbors and whose thriving relied upon impeccable appearance and good relations. Roddy Moon was so strict that he had prevented his daughter, Ella, from marrying a man he considered beneath her, destroying his daughter’s confidence, health, and career in the process. Despite his dinner-table attempts at probity and telling everyone that he had written a novel and was working at the hotel, Chester, in the elder Moon’s eyes, “looks well but [is] somewhat downcast.”
That summer, Chester met Cleveland’s most famous writer, Langston Hughes, who had traveled to the Soviet Union with Henry to make a film in 1932. Hughes, the original black trailblazer in Esquire, was living with his mother on E. Eighty-Sixth Street, and was tightening his musical comedy Little Ham at the Karamu House, Cleveland’s local experimental black theater. In the fall at Karamu, the Gilpin Players would present Hughes’s Troubled Island, the first play about Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the successful revolt of the enslaved in Haiti. Fun to be around and easygoing in his manner, Hughes was not complacent or tepid. Although he was less black-looking than Chester, Hughes always asserted his racial identity with pride, something that Chester had waffled over in his early work. Hughes also argued forcefully on behalf of economic and political justice in those years, “because I am both a Negro and poor,” he told the press. Nor did he turn up his nose at Chester because of the stretch in the penitentiary; Hughes was in fact giving lectures at middle-class teas titled “Cowards in Our Colleges.” Hughes epitomized the socially conscious artist, and when he left Cleveland in 1937, it would be to use his talents as a journalist in war-torn Madrid. Chester now had an obvious model for a literary career.
But that goal was at odds with the job at Wade Park Manor Hotel, which lasted Chester through his first couple of check-ins with his probation officer. Clearing dinner tables and pushing dish carts weren’t the same as when he had been a rising freshman at Ohio State, keen on a career in medicine. After nearly eight years of prison and bunking with his father, who had known nothing other than demotions for almost thirty working years, service work probably struck Chester as a painful symbol of the likelihood of being a permanent member of the laboring class. In the same way that he had learned to be a convict, now he was learning to be a black servant without prospects for advance.
He did, however, gain a mature sensibility on the black headwaiter who hired him, the subject of a short story emphasizing the generation gap called “A Salute to the Passing.” An elegiac testament, Chester’s story revealed the obvious value of the old caste relations. Immaculately comported Dick Small has thrived in his role as headwaiter, “America’s principal servant,” “pampered protégé of millionaires and royalty among his own people.” But Chester endorsed the men of his father’s generation, who understood that the people whom he served “were his life,” with a significant caveat; whatever public achievements on behalf of racial progress they attained, the benefits were doled out as personal favors, not because of any real power.
Chester’s work for Esquire continued to sustain his identity as a writer. Gingrich published “The Night’s for Crying,” the story detailing Cleveland’s tough streets, in January 1937, and he probably bought another 1937 story, “Every Opportunity,” a lighthearted and facetious romp through Cedar Avenue poolrooms and gin parlors as a convict’s appetites lead him back to prison. That September Esquire published one of his better hard-boiled tales of prison life, “The Visiting Hour,” an exploration of a white inmate receiving his young wife in the prison visitors’ room, while trying to contain his anger at the slow and corrupt process of parole. In that same issue, Esquire announced Chester’s racial identity by printing a woodcut of him based on an unsmiling, mildly gangsterish photograph shot after his release. Although Chester was the lightest in color among his brothers, anyone who cared to pay attention would have noticed he was black.
With his son back at home, Joseph Senior attempted to secure new lodgings, a rented room or two in a frame house crowded with tenants on E. Ninety-Third Street. Chester described the tension of the little place in a letter to a friend, recalling “I had it hard.” Although his father’s second wife seems to have lived only intermittently with the men, Chester claimed that his father “had very little money” and that, like the moll in “The Visiting Hour,” Agnes “was taking that.” The house was shouting distance from the major crime and vice block on Cedar Avenue.
The broad suffering of the Depression at least made Chester feel that it wasn’t exclusively his family that was failing. When asked his occupation for the city directory, Chester tried to put on a confident mien and called himself a “businessman,” which must have seemed more prosperous to people like his aunt and uncle than “writer.” He wasn’t quite sure that “writer” was it, but Gingrich, apparently seduced by Chester’s regular correspondence, increased his fee to one hundred dollars per story. However, the well was drying up. He had outlived some of his usefulness for Esquire: his special conceit of being a “long term penitentiary insider” had ended.
From the Ninety-Third Street room Chester rekindled the romance with Jean, who lived a couple of blocks away. When Chester was released from prison in 1936, Jean was living with her brother-in-law Philip Plater. No longer a brash teenager, Jean claimed that the drunken Harry Plater had abandoned her not six months into the marriage. Chester believed that she used men to live, but her interest in Chester, the boy with long eyelashes and tender manners, was earnest. Whatever the complex nature of her living situation when he arrived, he latched on to Jean like a person drowning: “I grew to love her too, desperately and completely.”
Inexperienced in romance, Chester asked Jean to marry him not long after getting to Cleveland, which was made difficult by the fact that she was still married. In November, Jean issued a summons and posted public notices in the Daily Legal News alerting Harry that she planned to petition for divorce, claiming abandonment. In March Jean’s attorney brought her case into the court of common pleas and cited Plater for “gross neglect of duty.” Plater had been only a few miles away but never appeared at any court proceedings. The court granted her petition and dissolved the marriage. A justice of the peace married Chester and Jean on Tuesday, July 13, 1937.
Born in Texas, Jean worked as a domestic when she could get work, but she was attractive and young, and housecleaning and caretaking—occupations that left women especially vulnerable to sexual assault—were humiliating to someone who could glimpse into the world of black women who had been to college, like Chester’s mother or his aunt Leah Moon. Both of them agreed that, rather than having Jean work as a maid, Chester should support the two of them. His reward, in a sense, was the appearance of being in charge.
He was frank with Jean regarding what precisely had taken place in the summer of 1934 in prison. In a complex dynamic within his own personality, Chester sought absolution for the homosexual desires he had indulged in prison through merciless candor. If the honesty was good medicine psychologically, what he did not understand immediately was that there would be other hills for him to climb connected to his masculinity. The difficulty to maintain a standard of living that would allow Jean to stay at home would take not one-time courageous revelations but much more: tedious, dull consistency and self-control.
Marrying Jean did more than absolve him of the “degeneracy” he had experienced in prison. He had tried to show himself a tough during the intense months of their 1928 courtship, actions that led to his dangerous robberies. She of course had her own secrets to divulge, her years with Harry and other men while he was locked up. For Chester, by marrying Jean, a humbly educated woman several shades browner in color than himself, he was also forcibly discarding his mother’s ideals of betterment and domestic progress. Jean, however, was welcomed by his father, the Moons, and the Wigginses as a cheerful, agreeable relative.
After tiring of hotel work, Chester turned to the whites-only Cleveland country club circuit going out to the suburb of Shaker Heights. The country club work required one quality above all others: submissiveness. He was exhausted trying to smile at the racist chortle that bubbled up when the members drank. Nightly, Chester had to persuade himself that the tips justified his playing small, his acting to “just be a nigger.”
For seven years he had focused his attention so sharply on release from prison that it was with difficulty that he faced the new realization: that he was black in America. “Until then there had been nothing racial about my hurt, unbelievable as this may seem,” he wrote in his autobiography. Married life, however, made “a difference.” The tattered rented rooms the couple could afford—skimping on heat and other necessities—galled Chester, as did his humbling employment. Jean’s divorce was made possible by accusing Harry Plater of abandoning and failing to support her, but inside the house he was doing little better.
In the time away from the mops and steam trays, he probed the magazines for publishing opportunities. Disappointed, Chester grumbled to Henry Lee Moon that he had been shut out of the moneyed magazines that were home to Hemingway: Scribner’s and Collier’s. “They have all admired my work, in fact they have requested to see some of it,” he assured his cousin, “but they all say the same thing—they can’t use it.” To put him over in New York, Chester had engaged Thomas Uzzell, part fiction editor, part literary charlatan, an agent who advertised himself as “the leading American teacher on the short story and novel.” Uzzell advertised pamphlets and by-mail seminars in the New York Times Book Review, and it was not surprising that Chester, who paid him twenty dollars upfront to place ten short stories, had no success. One of the short stories was probably “Did You Ever Catch a Moon,” which Chester retitled “A Nigger,” and gave itself over to the frank treatment of the love triangle or quadrangle with Jean before his arrest. To someone with better connections like Henry, a story about a kept woman and a contract with an unscrupulous literary agent seemed inexpert. The upside was that Chester wasn’t backing off from a career even if he was making a misstep. He maintained to Henry that the prison novel was “outlined in my mind” and “only needs writing.” At the end of 1937 Chester poured himself into the penitentiary tale, tentatively called Day After Day.
The irony of being financially better off and more successful as a short story writer while an inmate was easy to see but hard to accept. Chester’s only publication for 1938 was “Every Opportunity,” which Esquire had acquired earlier. In February 1938, he sold another story of a bewildered convict to Bachelor, a new men’s magazine for the “discerning cosmopolite” whose “ambition has been stifled by monotony.” Chester’s tale “Scram!,” an insider’s look at the isolation cell, was wearing gimmicks thin to bind an audience to the story, which was narrated in the second person. He grunted with the slang and prejudice of his implied white readers with lines like “You call out to the Negro on sudden impulse and ask him, ‘Say, shine, do you hear that guy saying “scram!”?’ ” But neither the writing nor the shared terrain with Hemingway (whose narrator used the word “nigger” eighteen times on the first page in the famous February 1936 Esquire short story “The Trademan’s Return”) was distinguished.
In March 1938 his brother crowned himself the winner of their sibling rivalry. Joe completed his doctorate in sociology and “enjoy[ed] the recognition” available to him in Columbus. He had not limited himself to academic success. Somehow Joe had managed to pledge Alpha Phi Alpha, the fraternity to which Chester had never completed his initiation, and a few years later he would marry a college-educated French-language teacher who had served as one of his readers. A well-connected sorority woman who finished a master’s degree at Ohio State, Theresa Estelle Jones was the granddaughter of the man who owned the land on which Tuskegee Institute was built. Everyone called her Estelle, just like Joe’s mother. Joe was a glimmering success.
Cousin Henry Lee Moon was having a career liftoff too. After writing for the New York Times on black voting power, the progress of antilynching law, public housing in Harlem, Liberia, and even the illegal “policy” lottery game, Moon accepted a position in the federal government serving Assistant Secretary of Housing Robert Weaver. He joined a group organized by the Himes and Bomar family friend Mary McLeod Bethune, now a college president (the Negro newspapers called her the convener of the “Black Cabinet” to President Franklin Roosevelt). Moon worked as secretary and public relations man for Weaver, a black wunderkind raised in Washington, D.C., who had completed a PhD in economics at Harvard by the time he was twenty-six. In August 1938, Henry wed his longtime confidante and girlfriend, Mollie Lewis.
Inspired by the splashy victories of Joe and Henry in regional and national affairs, Chester tried to press the case locally with the Cleveland dailies. Louis Seltzer at the Cleveland Press brusquely dismissed him. “I could not hire you if you were Jesus Christ reincarnated,” Seltzer growled, by which he implied that the rejection had nothing to do with race. Chester kept at the typewriter. By the spring of 1938, Chester had amassed portions of a novel about his prison experience and a bundle of short stories. When Henry saw the “pile of manuscripts,” he envied the power and work ethic that his young cousin had shown, proudly noting that Chester had “got the stuff already.”
Chester had also secured a better agent, Gideon Kishur of the International Literary Bureau. Kishur sent out several of Chester’s stories to the most esteemed glossy magazines and got a comment back from Kenneth Littauer at Collier’s, who rejected one story because it was “rather depressing as an entertainment.” Chester hit upon the idea to write a feel-good narrative about Joe’s extraordinary success. But after American Magazine turned the story down, his country-club-experience-induced paranoia got the best of Chester. He wrote American Magazine politely to ask if they were racists. “I hope I am not presumptuous in this, my effort to ascertain your policy on this, a subject that may or may not be a ticklish one, but since I am not in a position to know, I must ask.” “This” was, of course, whether or not the editors had any use for profiles on American Negroes. U.S. magazine customs were changing, but slowly. When they upheld the rejection at the end of May, Chester found only that his tenderfooting had caused the staff to smother him with graciousness. “We were very much interested to read of the splendid record,” his rejection began, before plateauing with “we’re sorry we cannot cooperate with you on your friendly suggestion” but “many thanks for keeping us in mind.” Chester knew all he needed to know and abandoned the story about the professional triumphs of disabled Negro intellectuals.
He feared that his career might be over before it had begun properly. Five years later, he would describe the agony of trying to live from his writing after prison as a conflict between his white identification and his black lived experience: “It does not occur to him that now he is trying to write ‘white’ out of a subconscious store of Negro knowledge, Negro incident, language, emotion, reaction, motivation, obstruction, culmination, and such, imposed on him by his condition of living ‘black.’ ” Instead, he became convinced that the editors knew that he was a Negro, and that they rejected him on account of it. Chester was growing “bitterly resentful [of] that fate” which “identified him with the Negro race,” more or less the spirit of his brittle and caustic mother Estelle.
Splitting his time between Washington, D.C., and New York, Henry Moon made an important assist. He discussed Chester’s work over lunch with Sterling Brown, a Howard University English professor, an esteemed poet, and the director of Negro affairs for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After the meeting, Brown, who already knew about Chester’s writing from Esquire, fired off a brief letter of advice to him. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Chester admired Brown’s work—his poetry collection Southern Road bore, arguably for the first time, the robust and soulful personality of black workers who had evolved a magnificent cultural tradition in the face of an often bleak situation. As much as any other writer of the time, Brown had seemed to resolve the dilemma of wanting the best that exclusive white America had to offer without denigrating one iota of black language, culture, or people. Developing Brown as a friend, Chester asked for critical feedback on his stories. Brown had not encountered a black writer like Chester before, astute but honest, humorous, admiring of the laconic, matter-of-fact tradition of Hemingway, but with squishy emotions, which Himes’s short stories meditated upon figuratively and literally, and prone toward a tragic theme. Admitting that he was missing being published by a hair, Chester had the humility—and confidence—to ask for help. “I am happy to know of your interest in my work. Perhaps after reading one or two you may be able to drop me a helpful hint.”
A genuine dean of African American literature and culture in the 1930s, Brown went much further. Brown had schooled at the famous black academy the M Street High School of Anna Julia Cooper. He’d gone on to distinction at Williams College and got his MA in English at Harvard University; then he’d started teaching at Lincoln Institute and lived in the house where Chester was born. Having spent several years as the regular literary critic at the Urban League journal Opportunity, Brown was writing on his signature ideas about the prevalence of black stereotypes in white American literature. In the late fall of 1938 he sent concerned suggestions to Chester, who showed the aplomb and seriousness to weather a professor’s scrutiny. Glowing with appreciation, Chester admitted that the responses were “the first clear, pointed and understandable criticism which I have received during the six years which I have been trying to write.”
Brown counseled Chester to be wary of overwriting—the flaw of adornment—and to examine his tendency toward tragic themes and desperate acts. He told him that the hard-boiled style then in vogue was already on its way to being a cliché. In language that was gentle and brotherly, Brown explained the tastes of the American reading public—especially the decision-making magazine editors—as fundamentally biased away from black truth in favor of stereotyped shenanigans. Chester had already exploited this vein and pushed at its limits, presenting the stereotype to get closer to the human being underneath.
Approaching thirty, Chester understood, in spite of Brown’s rare gift of criticism, that he had his own lights to follow. His long prison years, the grisly fire, the added months on his sentence with Rico and then resurrecting himself with Jean, for better or for worse, had made him a writer. “What seems ‘tragically desperate’ to you,” he countered, “—and the editors and the reading public—is just a matter of course to me.” Still beside his prison years, Chester wouldn’t apologize for his brutish view of the world and the language he insisted upon to describe it. “If I have one ‘bastard’ kill another ‘bastard’ in a story, it’s just one dead bastard and another one electric-chair bound as far as I am concerned,” he wrote back. “I am indifferent, unsympathetic, and can see nothing shocking, unusual, or repulsive about any of it.” But if Chester held tight to his point of view, he did not flatter himself about the jejune short tales. He decided in his considerate reply to Brown, “I can mark them down to apprenticeship served and go ahead to better work.”
Chester did not reveal all of what he was about to Brown. If the magazines didn’t take his shorts, he continued to hammer away at his first-person novel, an effort 650 pages long by that May. Chester thrived off of the madcap defiance of what he was attempting—a sympathetic portrait of a convict’s years inside the penitentiary replete with graphic depictions of violent and homosexual acts. He built the book by the episode and let the structure take care of itself. By “packing in a maze of essentials,” he believed that he had achieved a tone that was “brusk [sic], to the point, and unsentimental,” but revealing “every phase” of the prison insider’s life. Shielding nothing, Chester described himself as “stating the facts as best I can and letting the explanations and psychoanalyzing go.”
With no publisher in sight for this magnum opus of uninhibited material, for the more immediate task of survival he turned to the WPA. Although Chester applied for the Ohio branch of the Federal Writers Project (FWP), he was added to Cleveland’s 78,000 WPA workers as a ditchdigger, the kind of work he hadn’t even been forced to do in prison. For $60.50 per month the men labored in the snow and slush, building roads, sewers, drains, parks, cultural gardens and recreation areas throughout the city. The ideal of freedom in the Cuyahoga County WPA was utterly hypocritical. No African American was employed in white-collar work: no state staff people, no executive or administrative personnel, not even any clerks. Taking his own publication career seriously, Chester wrote letters to local officials insisting on a desk job.
He followed in a tradition. In the spring of 1938, black Cleveland—led by Assistant State’s Attorney Perry B. Jackson, city councilmen Harold Gassaway and Lawrence Payne, and Reverend Sylvester Williams—began to demand the inclusion of blacks in more diverse employment than unskilled labor. Initially they were inelegantly rebuffed, but they made enough noise to receive minor adjustments. Using his own contact with the upper-level national administration, Sterling Brown himself, Chester complained that May about the racism in Cleveland that required him to shovel, even though he was a nationally published writer and merited appointment to the state FWP.
If racism abounded, the WPA jobs were precarious anyway: supervisors evaluated positions month to month and dismissed workers at whim; congressional authorizations sometimes flagged, forcing massive, nationwide layoffs. Chester’s jolting experience inspired a new formulation; he found that the horror of death and the problem of confinement had a counterpart in the world of daily work in the Depression. Chester worked the dread into “With Malice Toward None,” a new short story:
He filled with a recurrence of the numb, cold fear which had haunted him ever since he went to work on the W.P.A. No one would realize how scared one stayed in that living from hand to mouth, from one check to another, he reflected bitterly. It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d tell a man he had so many months to work and that was all, but to keep him like this, on pins and needles, never knowing when the layoff would come and no work open, it was worse in a way than downright starvation. It kept a man scared all the time.
As a relief he worked up an intense resentment toward his wife.
The formulation of fear compounded by externally directed loathing, drawn from his own life certainly but transmuted into literary expression, was a signal and essential observation of Himes’s literary art. And also a bright flare commenting that his marriage was in trouble.
The local black newspaper, the Cleveland Call and Post, took a lead role in exposing Jim Crow in the Cuyahoga County WPA, especially the practice of demoting foremen and allowing local supervisors to fire workers at will. The mood of black Clevelanders was stiffening against Jim Crow employment policies generally. The black radical organization the Future Outlook League directed militant attempts at white businesses to force them to employ blacks and started publishing a journal recording their victories in the fall of 1937. (In 1939 the local clamor against the WPA would initiate a federal investigation, resulting in Charles Dickinson being appointed a labor investigator and becoming the top ranked black in the state.) Chester lobbied vigorously by mail for a position as a writer on the FWP, and in the process started to associate with men like Urban League director Sidney Williams, and Grant Reynolds, minister of the important Mt. Zion Congregational Church on Cedar Avenue. After Chester’s contentions reached the desk of the state FWP director, Ohio State University professor Harlan Hatcher, and probably with a note of support from Sterling Brown, he was granted a transfer to the writers’ project. Before the end of June 1938, Chester was making a “favorable impression” as a research assistant and writer for the Cleveland Public Library Project. His monthly pay jumped to $95.
Writers on the Ohio FWP worked out of the imposing five-story main branch of the Cleveland Public Library. Opened in 1925, the heavy marble, French Renaissance style library helped to renew his dignity and properly reinforced the gravity of his work. Typically, the FWP writers worked anonymously to construct large single-volume state guidebooks; in New York and Chicago, a few elite writers worked on their own manuscripts. Surprised by his credentials and admiring his typing speed, the FWP put Chester to work writing vocational bulletins. As the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) tried to unionize the library workers, he showed interest and started to contribute articles to their local organ, the Cleveland Union Leader. Chester received another promotion to “professional” status and drew assignments writing on little-known aspects of Cleveland history. He warmed to the challenge. All that survives of the Cleveland project writing is a thirty-page essay on the history of Cleveland in the Ohio Guide. The essay pointed to a unique criterion for Cleveland’s national distinction: “one of the most racially diversified communities in the United States.” As for the value of the legacy of black people to the city, the guidebook was unsure.
Most of Cleveland’s Negroes, who came in during the labor famine of the World War and immediately after, live in the slum area extending from the fringes of the business section to East 105th Street and south of Carnegie Avenue. The few who became affluent move to other sections of the city, but the birth rate of those who remain has created a serious housing problem.
Politically undecided, groomed by gangsters, and having been reared in a Tuskegee-friendly home, Chester was certainly capable of presenting poor black Americans as a drain on society. He was aggrieved by humiliating segregation but disinclined to make common cause with the black poor. He could accept himself as black and ghetto-built, but he easily blamed black people for the misery that they faced. He had little critique of a modern political economy, which Joe and Henry were studying seriously. “While on the Writers’ Project,” he judged at a later date, “I did not feel the racial hurt so much.” When Chester felt comfortable, he had the capacity to forget his race, in the way that a “hincty,” or snobbish person, might. But if he couldn’t have started with the assumption that he shared the same fundamental attitudes as his white classmates from East High, he wouldn’t have been able to imagine an audience for his fiction.
In a room where project writers worked on the library’s third floor, Chester got to know Ruth Seid, a young assured woman who, since she was the child of immigrant Polish Jews, published under the name Jo Sinclair. Chester immediately charmed Ruth. He had also begun blaming Jean for his difficulties in getting work and publishing and was on the lookout for something that hinted of more than friendship. The attraction was mutual, but Seid left the sex alone. They chatted about films, music, theater, and politics. She told him about a new book she had read and its author, who had won the $500 Story magazine prize: Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright. Surprised that Chester didn’t know about the latest black writing sensation, Seid underestimated him, which he disliked but tolerated, wishing not to repeat the failures of high school and college. Like Chester, she too had a slender understanding of the economic structure of racial discrimination. When they talked about local politics, she found Chester bitter and cynical regarding antidiscrimination groups.
Chester introduced Ruth to Jean and the three of them whiled away hours together. Ruth thought him mannerly at first, then, after a few rounds of whiskey and reefer, she believed him loud and egotistical. Once, he took them to a ghetto dive after the nightclubs had closed. Chester’s parole requirements forbade his association with known criminals; blue laws forbade gatherings after hours. On cue, the police raided the house, and Ruth’s active imagination was considering the iniquity of the women’s bull pen at the city jail. Chester showed himself adequate to the occasion, remarking to Ruth as he ushered her to safety, “This’ll be good for you as a writer.” Nor was the range of contacts limited to the dives off Cedar Avenue. Pearl Moody, the pair’s supervisor and a professional librarian, invited Chester, Jean, and Ruth to her home in the exclusive suburb of Shaker Heights many times, an unusually bold gathering in the 1930s.
Like Chester, Seid began her short story career publishing in Esquire, in February 1938. She continued to find success in some of Gingrich’s later projects, like the arts monthly Coronet and the more politically dense and uncompromising Ken. In the December 1938 issue of Ken, she made her friendship with Chester pay dividends. The article, “Cleveland’s Negro Problem,” embarrassed Chester later, and showed the caustic skepticism that consumed him in the years immediately after he’d left prison. Seid described with suspicion and misgiving the Future Outlook League’s organized pickets against employment discrimination, a technique of resistance growing increasingly popular in the North. In March 1938 the U.S. Supreme Court had levied a favorable decision emboldening picket lines, in a determination that race discrimination in employment was akin to discrimination on the basis of union affiliation. But what his cousin Henry had praised in the pages of the New York Times as “an effective campaign for jobs,” Seid had decided, apparently with Chester’s goading, was simple extortion.
In sympathy with the Jewish shop-owning class in the Negro slum areas against which the protests had been mounted, she opened her essay in Ken with the lines “Sam Katz opened a wine store on Central Avenue. All of a sudden wine was popular with the colored people; they were drinking it like water.” Her information from the black street came from “a Cleveland negro writer . . . an intelligent, thinking young man,” obviously Chester. Her anonymous source inferred that the Future Outlook League, “located in the heart of the racket district,” was twisting public perception to hide an illegal reality. But the story of Sam Katz concluded with a vintage observation by Chester: “If the undernourished and absolutely powerless are suddenly given a bit of power, they may well lose a little balance in the process. You know how it is. But look out for possible race riots, I say!” Chester wanted to help out a new friend but, only sure of the likelihood of conflict, his language was bombastic. When he recalled the piece a few years later, he would find Seid guilty of “insidious Jewish chauvinism.” She continued to draw on their friendship, using Chester’s life as the source of inspiration for the character Aaron Wright in her unpublished “They Gave Us Jobs,” written in 1940.
The summer of hard, rewarding work on the “Cleveland Guide” and his novel did not keep the wolf from the door. Chester had a working knowledge of carpentry, plumbing, and auto mechanics, but he badly mismanaged household affairs, always living beyond his means. He wanted the privilege of drinking or entertaining when he chose, and the result always left a gnawing deficit “to catch up on financially” and no savings. By August 1938, he and Jean were shuffling along a circuit of coarse rooms just east of Rockefeller Park, a nomadic search for decency and a tawdry limping away from bad debts. Chester penned the forlorn short stories “With Malice Toward None,” “Looking Down the Street,” and “All God’s Chillun Got Pride,” during their summer and fall wanderings. Probably toward the end of fall, Opportunity took the restaurant maitre d’ story, “A Salute to the Passing.”
By winter, they had returned to E. Ninety-Third Street, to a room at the home of Mary Reese, a forty-seven-year-old domestic who put down their talk of New York by claiming that when she had visited Manhattan, the Savoy Ballroom and Small’s Paradise Inn failed to surpass the dance halls and juke joints on Cedar Avenue. Chester’s writing and his $900 annual salary on the FWP did provide something more coveted than decent quarters. The great boost to his confidence that year was a successful petition to Ohio governor John Bricker that would in 1939 restore Chester’s full citizenship rights. For the first time in his life, he would be able to vote.
Reconsidering his strategy to reach the national magazines, Chester published with the locals. Through Langston Hughes, Chester met Rowena Jellife, the founder of Karamu House. Rowena and her husband, Russell, were 1910 Oberlin graduates and almost certainly knew of Joe’s successes there. Rowena Jellife served on the editorial board of a new Cleveland literary venture called Crossroad, a “medium for creative talent in every field.” Crossroad featured left-wing short stories and modernist visual art, including abstract impressionist prints, suitable for “mounting and framing.” Cleveland’s white liberal crowd, including associate editors at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Milton Fox of the Cleveland Art Museum, and music professors from Case Western Reserve University all participated; Dan Levin, a young Communist and Western Reserve graduate, recruited the local artists. Contributing three short stories to the magazine during its first year, Chester got through his rough patch of literary rejection and financial hardship in the pages of Crossroad.
The inaugural issue in April carried Chester’s “With Malice Toward None,” the story of Chick, a boozy Negro who works in the library copying old records for the WPA. (Jean nicknamed Chester “Chess” and “Chet.”) Crossroad had declined into a quarterly by summer but, never lacking a manuscript, Chester gave them “A Modern Fable—Of Mr. Slaughter, Mr. McDull, and the American Scene,” his earliest unambiguous wading into the political crisis of relief. The story was a lumbering allegory that contrasted the positions of the conservative and unprincipled Republican senator Harold A. McDull with those of an unemployed worker named Henry Slaughter. Chester showed the culpability of the senator, who, after voting to end WPA appropriations to the poor, tells the press, “My God, politics isn’t fatal, it isn’t a matter of life or death!” Slaughter attempts to assassinate the senator and is taken to an asylum; the reader is playfully counseled to ignore the imminent class war.
Chester was making a turn in the direction of class friction and local politics, only to have the pace of world events overtake him. After a tense series of standoffs, annexations, negotiations, and international bickering, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. France and Great Britain declared war against Germany two days later.
With calamitous world events under way, the Depression and racial discrimination appeared more solvable. Chester had kept up talks—pleas, really—with the Cleveland press, and with Louis Seltzer in particular, through the summer of 1939. Fearing the end of his job on the WPA, Chester encouraged Jean to start searching for a job as a nanny, which they upgraded to a “governess.” Needing something that didn’t exist, Chester approached the Chicago Defender with some ideas for a serious national Negro magazine, “which would inspire Negro art and literature and give it an outlet,” a resource that would “serve the Negro race as much so as a contribution to a school or church fund.” But the newspaper couldn’t find the money. Chester resolved to apply for a job in Cleveland’s mushrooming defense industry, which would grow from sales of $15 million in parts in 1939 to $120 million a year later.
Private industry, however, was comfortable with a high level of racial discrimination. Instead of joining the market of skilled laborers, Chester earned an education in “what racial prejudice is like,” an experience which left him teetering on the edge of violence. Queuing for jobs at the tool company Warner & Swasey, American Steel & Wire, and the Aluminum Company of America was an exercise in futility. Whenever his turn came, he learned that the employment directors lunched between 11:30 A.M. and 3 P.M., the plants weren’t hiring, or that he hadn’t apprenticed; other times, after several hours in line, he simply trudged away, finally accepting the implausibility of getting a job as the lone black man alongside a hundred white men. Any redress at all was impossible until President Roosevelt issued an executive order in June 1941 outlawing racial discrimination by industries with government contracts and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission. But the FEPC was only an investigative body that heard charges brought before it, not a council issuing orders and levying fines. In Cleveland, very little changed; even highly qualified black applicants found themselves “shunted away” from skilled heavy industry “by means of evasions, excuses, and at times through the use of deliberate lies.” Chester’s writing was increasingly fueled by the impotent rage he felt at the mountain of freshly created racial discrimination in the defense industry.
With his full citizenship restored, his temperature boiling, and Jean seriously pursuing work caretaking white children, Chester began to look elsewhere for opportunity. When Henry Moon popped up for a visit in February 1940, Chester drank down his conversation like a “tonic.” Cleveland sapped his energy and he hadn’t been able to write but Henry’s tales of mingling with national leaders in Washington and celebrities in New York, shook off his gloom. His straitlaced cousin—now earning $3200 a year, and married to a woman who spoke German and had lived in Berlin—was a minor marvel. Well aware that his versatility as a writer might be the difference between success and burial in Cleveland, Chester closely modeled himself after his older cousin. He got a copy of Henry’s 1938 article “Negroes Win Help in Fight for Jobs,” and interviewed Future Outlook League president John O. Holly, hoping to submit a piece to Seltzer’s Cleveland Press. Pondering the successful application of boycotts and pickets to change the employment picture for blacks in Harlem, he jotted down a few articles about the WPA for the CIO’s newspaper, the Union Leader; Chester turned these into an examination of race and class in the arena of heavy industry. He also wrote the text of the Future Outlook League Second Anniversary Yearbook. By summer of 1940, Chester was putting his weight behind a combination of bold black nationalism and union organizing.
He had a minor success that spring with an encore in Esquire called “Marihuana and a Pistol,” showing a jilted criminal planning a bank robbery to win back his girl but getting high and winding up butchering a confectionery store owner instead. The nugget of the story partly reflected on the episode that had propelled him to leave Estelle’s house in Columbus. Chester was warning American audiences of the next stage in mood-altering substances after the legalization of alcohol. Perhaps concerned to demonstrate in print the pristine quality of his own citizenship, he brought the jazz musician’s “tea” and “gage” into view as a social menace; the “jag” of inebriation would spur outlaws to violence. His story culminated in a bloody shooting sure to please Esquire’s readers. This winning story would result in the magazine’s acceptance of an inferior mobster story, “Strictly Business,” for more money, later that summer.
As the Nazi Army raced across the Low Countries and overran France, “Looking Down the Street: A Story of Import and Bitterness,” appeared in Crossroad’s pages. It was another dirge about Cleveland Depression life without heat or food, where the protagonist urges on war to speed the end to a decade of grinding poverty. He now fully linked his work to the local scene. Mayor Harold Burton had ended food subsidies for thousands at the end of 1939 and the palpable signs of cruel deprivation lingered throughout the city, especially so in the black ghetto strip bounded by Fourteenth and 105th Streets along Cedar and Central Avenues, where 90 percent of Cleveland’s 84,000 blacks lived in barely passable housing.
More intoxicating than anything that had happened to his writing career was an event in New York, the publication of a novel about a young man not quite dissimilar to Chester and written by someone whose early career arc had, up to then, so sharply resembled his own. The novel was Native Son, written by Richard Wright. Chester read it shortly after hearing his and Wright’s mutual friend Langston Hughes appear at the end of April to speak at Cleveland’s Lane Metropolitan Church about the sensational book. At the time, Chester was “attacking Esquire with wave after wave of manuscripts,” hoping to regain his national reach. About the novel that would sell hundreds of thousands of copies as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and change the commercial expectations of all black writers, Chester gasped, “Native Son—some book! It got me.”
Native Son was so pungent that it demanded something new from Chester—a literary review—and in a new place, New Masses, the Communist cultural journal. There, he defended the book, which Wright, then a Communist Party member, was being chastised for on the far left for failing to show a successful solution to racism and poverty and, on the right, for his ingratitude. Wright’s chief Communist detractor was silver-tongued, pedigreed Ben Davis, a Harvard-educated black lawyer whose father had edited an Atlanta newspaper. Although Davis was friends with Henry Moon, Chester would never feel at home with the pretentious banter, from conservative or ultraliberal, of the black elites. In touch with the depth of his ugly life experience, Chester “felt called” to enter the national debate and “to express the feelings” that Native Son “inspired in me.”
He sent in an essay too long to print. His opening sentence revealed a novelist’s sense of what Wright was doing: “Bigger Thomas came alive to me when he stood on the street in front of the poolroom and got a sudden glimpse of life, feeling it push down inside of him through his shell of hard indifference which was his only defense against it.”
For the rest of his life, Chester would admire Wright and his vision, at least partly because the characters from Native Son on—oppressed black young men cut off from their peers—put onto paper so many dimensions of his life before Chester had reached middle age. Native Son gave Chester back to himself as a man not simply flawed but also oppressed, as someone not merely capable of explosive violence as a partial response to segregation, but also one who could use it as a serious-minded act of rebellion for full inclusion. Wright had redeemed him. “When a person can see and feel the beauty and importance of the vast, eternal, changing mystery of life, and yearn to be part of it, no one can truthfully say that person is a bad nigger with all the degradation which the chauvinist term implies,” he argued. As for the controversial parts of the book, the murders of a white girl and a black girl, they were “inexorable.” While, with the exception of Cast the First Stone, Chester was too embarrassed to ever structure a novel around a criminal protagonist, he knew the terrain of Wright’s creation—more so than any of the writers of the coming generation—and he reminded the leftist audience of the American citizens Wright called forth that had eluded their imagination.
By then Chester had achieved a kind of poor black man’s literary celebrity in Cleveland. A Karamu-sponsored production, Pre-vue Worlds Fair Concert, on June 21 at the House of Wills on E. Fifty-Fifth Street, flattered him by including his work. Chester was indisposed and missed the event, but an elegant, voluptuous, and confident Jean Himes read one of her husband’s short stories. When she finished she was “quite swept away by the reception.”
At that time, a wily New York literary agent named Jacques Chambrun wrote to Chester offering his services. Chambrun had read the anthology The Best Short Stories 1940, edited by Edward O’Brien, and found Chester’s “A Salute to the Passing” saluted with two asterisks—O’Brien’s designation of the work as a distinguished short story. Chester’s work hadn’t been reprinted, an honor reserved for the likes of Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter, but he was the only Negro whose work was honorably noted, and, sensing another Native Son, Chambrun looked him up. By the end of the month, Chester and Jean decided they would go east to D.C. and to New York, “what with Hitler looking westward.” Who knew but that like Augusta and the cell blocks, it would all be in flames shortly?
Chester and Jean vacationed east during early July, as the Germans began their systematic bombing campaign of England, having already conquered France in six weeks. The Himeses went to New York first, where they roomed at the renowned Theresa Hotel, were squired about by Henry’s wife, Mollie, and looked up Chester’s long lost brother Eddie. Then they took the train to Washington, D.C., where they were entertained Midwestern style by Henry, with Carstairs beer and Vienna sausage canapés. In D.C. they drank toasts alongside Sterling Brown and housing advisor Robert Weaver. A professional social worker, Henry’s wife, Mollie, struck Chester as a babbling, haughty parvenu, even if she was gentle with her husband. Chester began to note her personal traits, especially what she ate and her figure; he would remember her habits and mannerisms at best with sarcasm, at worst with outright contempt. The Himeses left on Tuesday, July 9 for home.
Back in Cleveland, some leftover grants allowed Chester to continue his FWP career on a subsidiary renamed the Ohio Writers’ Project. He had been transferred after a series of promotions and demotions, which Chester now thought were explicitly racist. At this new project, he received his assignments from a “big fat mannish woman who wrote detective stories.” She told him he had been sent to her to be quietly fired; instead she chose to route to him the tasks of the entire division, working him to the height of his capacity. Chester accepted the challenge and the legend of his work ethic was born. He would claim to have crafted “the entire history of Cleveland by myself,” but that manuscript, a volume he identified as the “Cleveland Guide,” has never been located.
Another project supervisor was Ted Robinson, an editor at the Plain Dealer newspaper. Chester wrote a seventy-eight-page book on Recreational Opportunities in Cleveland and was told that he might begin collecting material for a larger campaign fleshing out the history of the Negro in Cleveland—that is, if he could produce a list of two or three thousand subscribers. The Ohio Guide, which he most certainly worked on, was published in 1940. “I found the job of editing the whole thing wished on me,” he carped to Henry, and by the fall it was “driving me nuts.” The work was bringing him in contact with journalists and professors working at Cleveland College and Western Reserve and Chester took their measure. He came to accept the fact that, in spite of his lost years and mangled education, he could hold his own.
At the end of 1940, he would be kicked off the WPA, now not so much the victim of Congress as a technicality: he had exhausted his eighteen consecutive months on relief. With polished chapters from the prison manuscript, Chester approached Nathaniel Howard, the white editor of the Cleveland News, to write him a recommendation letter for an Alfred A. Knopf publishing fellowship, which Howard agreed to do. A tall, slender Oberlin graduate, Howard sported bow ties, served on the Karamu House capital campaign board, and played the blues piano in his spare time. A person who had covered the 1930 prison fire, Howard felt a connection to Chester and, eleven years his senior, offered valuable words of consolation. “Chester, you have paid the penalty for your crime against society,” Howard told him, “now forget about it.” A humble, friendly man who confessed his own errors, Howard engaged in discussions about race with Chester that must have made him pause at the knee-jerk racist stereotypes his hard-boiled white men, flesh of the flesh of Hemingway’s Harry Morgan, had so consistently articulated. Howard kept the conversation open with Chester and brightened his outlook. They would discuss the work of William Faulkner, a novelist who was growing, it seemed, more aggressively liberal and complicated on the race issue, and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. Chester considered Howard one of his “best friends” in Cleveland.
Impressed by Chester’s ability and noting the difficulty for serious black writers, Howard offered Chester an arrangement where he could contribute regularly to the newspaper. The sprightly, local-color, 150-word vignettes of Cleveland’s street corners would appear under the header “This Cleveland” in the back pages. Chester regarded the opportunity with pleasure and, since he perceived that whites on the staff would protest if his race were known, he agreed to sign the columns simply “C.H.” Howard paid a dollar a try, and starting on November 6, 1940, fifteen of Chester’s prose poems appeared through the end of that month. He began as an expressionist, detailing local sites—“The Mall, from Rockwell,” and “Playhouse Square”—until one of the columns “drew blood.” “E.55th–Central” exposed the crossroad of black Cleveland:
People coming from the drug store at the corner, from the bar next door where the good fellows get together, from the church on the corner where they’re having a revival meeting, from the undertaker’s where they are having a tea, from the doctor’s, the dentist’s, the dice game up the alley, the pawnshops, barber shops, beauty shops, butcher shops. Black people. Brown people. Yellow people. Waiters. Porters. WPA laborers. Number writers. Racket boys in long, green, shiny cars. With long, tan, shiny shoes. Transients, looking for the place where the long green grows. Must be somewhere where the long green grows. This is a paradox. This poverty, squalor, and huge sums of cash. This is drunkenness, wantonness, and a struggle to see the light. But above all, this is a pure and simple faith in the white folks and the days.
The “boys down there blew their tops,” he explained to Henry, referring to the crack he made of black people putting their “faith in the white folks.” He also knew that references to “poverty, squalor” made few friends. But Chester had found something that he enjoyed, putting his thumb in the eye of prigs too squeamish to admit any moral dirtiness. He continued writing on class politics when he nosed around the old Central Market to record the abomination of steel mill sprawl. In “Shaker Square,” a vignette on the upper-middle-class suburb, he levied a quieter accusation: “is there not a little of disappointment, of frustration, and hopes that have gone astray.” But the legwork, haunting cold street corners for a couple of hours to get the atmosphere, seemed to keep him from the novel, so he quit writing these “prose poems.”
Chester took a job with Weil Coffee and Tea Importers, biding his time and hoping for the Knopf fellowship, or a plum such as when Mademoiselle editor Marion Ives showed her pleasure at his work and almost took a story. Chester continued to labor on the prison manuscript that winter, “struggling to inject continuity” into his 200,000-word “sociological novel.” But the glimmer of success—if his survival as a writer could be called that—was upon him. On December 14, his friends the Jellifes entertained a man who would be helpful in arranging Chester’s future beyond Ohio: William Converse Haygood, director of the fellowship division of the Julius Rosenwald Fund.
The Rosenwald Fund was a large endowment left by Julius Rosenwald, one of the principal managers of Sears, Roebuck. Guided by Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald had started building schools and libraries in the South to improve conditions, but race prejudice was so thick that by the early 1930s the fund directors, led by President Edwin Embree, were extending individual grants to cultivate creative and intellectual talents. By the time the fund exhausted its principal in 1948, roughly fifteen hundred individual awards would be made. Chester, alongside virtually every talented black or white artist in his cohort with a curiosity about race in America, would receive one. William Haygood, an Atlantan who completed an advance degree in library science at the University of Chicago, doled out the money. “Grand” and “enthusiastic,” Haygood encouraged the Jellifes to submit a few applications to advance Karamu House’s work. There is good reason to believe that the Jellifes praised the local short story sensation Himes to Haygood. Excepting the well-known and intermittently present Langston Hughes (dividing his time between Los Angeles and Carmel by 1940), Chester Himes was the stand-out writer of the “Colored Belt”—the neighborhood around the Karamu House.
The Jellifes also introduced Chester to Louis Bromfield, Ohio’s best-known popular writer. An early Pulitzer Prize winner, who had served in the ambulance corps during World War I alongside Dos Passos and Hemingway, Bromfield was an imposing man who saw the world through a blend of arrogance and fulsome American pride. Sometimes the critics chided him as the “poor man’s [Somerset] Maugham.” Tall and vigorous, he had lived for more than a dozen years just north of Paris, returning to the United States in 1939 to live near the town of his birth, Mansfield, Ohio. Bromfield had a quality of vitality that was reflected by the energy he could command at the writing table: in thirty-four years as a working novelist he wrote thirty-seven books. But in 1939 he divided that energy in a variety of ways. First, he worked for Hollywood, where he commanded sums of $50,000 to $60,000 for the rights to his own books and where, for $5000 per week, he worked on the screenplay of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Accordingly, Bromfield was cozy with celebrities—Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart would marry at his Ohio home in 1945. More demandingly, he had taken on a side career as not merely a gentleman farmer, but as an agricultural priest, a prophet of soil conservation and independent, government-regulation-free farming. He lived in a thirty-room house on a six-hundred-acre estate called Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio.
Chester admired a success, and Bromfield, then at work on a novel describing the occupation of New Orleans by federal troops during the Civil War, was nothing if not that. Booming and profane in conversation, he could turn on charm as if from a tap and humor people he imagined beneath him when it suited him. Bromfield, who had also lived in India, was tickled by the Negro ex-convict whose parents had graduated college and who had written a coming-of-age novel while in Ohio’s grim prison. After a brief parley, Bromfield invited Chester to join the household at Malabar, ostensibly to revise his prison novel. In exchange, Chester would perform seasonal chores. Sensing opportunity and believing in Bromfield, Chester agreed to leave Cleveland for Malabar in the late spring of 1941. Deliriously excited about their good fortune, he and Jean crammed their apartment with credit-bought furniture, but, in a never-ending pattern of profligacy, in a few weeks the bounty of merchandise was repossessed.
In February the Esquire offshoot Coronet published his “Face in the Moonlight,” a second-person account of the “queer nonsense” that occurs during prison isolation. The magazine still introduced him as an outlaw: “Chester B. Himes writes with authority about the locale of his story: he spent seven years behind grey walls for robbery.” But the venue had reach and publishers like Doubleday and Dodd Mead started sending Chester query letters. Another prison story, “The Things You Do,” lifted straight out of the novel manuscript, went to Opportunity. Chester was cutting and rewriting and trying to respond as best he was able during “one of those periods of frustration that undermines the confidence.” The quandary was the problem of specialty: would he fit into the narrow groove of a prison writer or this new idea that was tugging at him, the black writer of social justice?
Reinventing his relationship to his mother would help him answer the question. In “The Things You Do” he sentimentally exposed the tortured encounters with Estelle on visiting days, emphasizing the way that the pain of his sentence had aged her. But at the same time he was acknowledging the grief and destruction he had caused, he observed that his mother’s zealous righteousness was too crowded with white supremacist bigotry. In the winter of 1941, he worried that she might be moving from Columbus to Cleveland, something he didn’t want. “I’d hate to see mother come up here for she hasn’t changed any and she never will,” he lamented to his cousin Henry. Estelle’s paranoid rattling about slights and conspiracies “to harm her” seemed too strongly rooted in the isolation she imposed upon herself on account of her appearance. For years Chester had only censored her “mentally for her attitude,” but he no longer could face her in close quarters and discard her influence. Chester was compassionate and loving and he had just acknowledged the real pain he knew himself to have caused his mother. But he also was recognizing the accumulated damage of racism and the manner that it warped the personalities of people like Estelle. If he allowed the warping to distort his artistic vision before publishing a major work, he might never become an independent artist.
Chester didn’t recoil only against the possibility of conflict with his mother as he tried to hone his prison manuscript. He wanted space to consider unashamedly his prison experience, as well as the skewer of racial oppression that leaped out to him from Wright’s new book. It was hard to do that while scraping by for work and relying on the charity of family, who were “half ashamed” that he wrote about prison, poverty, or being black at all. What he remembered of the moment before he went to Louis Bromfield’s farm was “I had the story Yesterday Will Make You Cry and then let it get away by yielding to personal pressures and such.” By leaving Cleveland, the city he had roared through as a wild teenager from a disintegrating family, and then submitted to as an adult, a married man putting felonious life behind, Chester would find himself.