Chester Himes (6 page)

Joe's account of this period differed markedly from that of Chester in both memoirs and novel. Where Chester presented himself as overly sensitive, rejected and misunderstood at every turn, rather a Byronic figure, Joe recalled him as being immensely popular among black and white alike, a handsome young man who charmed everyone he saw, an enthusiastic dancer and a favorite of the girls. Adolescence, of course, is a stage in which we try on various personalities, swinging wildly from emotion to emotion, and quite likely both Chesters existed at different times. For that matter, both Chesters, the socially adept and the reclusive brooder, coexisted in the adult as well.

Chester's uncle Andrew helped him find work as a busboy in chic Wade Park Manor Hotel in east Cleveland, where at his first job Chester felt simultaneously superior and hopelessly intimidated.

He felt like an intruder, a tourist who has wandered upon the ceremonial rites of a primitive tribe. He didn't know it was his manner that set him apart. At one glance they knew he was not of them. He had none of the extroversion the occupation requires. Inside he was taut with timidity. Outwardly he strove to show a hard indifference.
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His job was to retrieve room service trays and roll them two or three at a time into the service elevator for return to the kitchen. Two young women sat in a glass booth facing the elevators to check the trays before waiters took them upstairs. These women were white and good-looking, and immediately took to Chester. In
The Third Generation's
account, a supervisor jokes with Charles:

“These young ladies cause more havoc on my station than a four-alarm fire,” Mr. Jackson warned. “You must inure yourself against their charms, son. You won't be able to find the elevators.”
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In fact the women got Chester so worked up that he sallied off to the ghetto slums on Scoville Avenue and lost his virginity to “an old fat ugly whore sitting on a stool outside her hovel.”
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Himes's description of Scoville Avenue, with its poverty, its aimless men living off whores, drinking raw alcohol and cutting one another up, reads like a sketch for the Harlem of his detective novels.

One morning two weeks after he started the job, feeling less at odds, Chester stopped by the girls in their booth planning to ask for a date. Sensing this, the checkers quickly steered the conversation elsewhere. Chester, crestfallen, pulled open the elevator doors, stepped in—and fell forty feet.

I remember the sensation of falling through space and landing on a solid platform with the feeling of my body spattering open like a ripe watermelon.

I remember calling for help in a tiny voice. My mouth felt as though it were filled with gravel. Later I discovered that it was only my teeth.

My chin had hit something that cut the flesh to the bone, broke my lower jaw, and shattered all my teeth. My left arm hit something and both bones broke just above the wrist so that they came out through the skin, dead white with drops of blood in the bone fractures. My spine hit something and the last three vertebrae were fractured.
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Finding the hotel responsible for the accident—it should not have been possible to open the outer doors when the elevator was on another floor—the Ohio State Industrial Commission paid all hospital bills and awarded Chester a disability payment of $75 a month. The hotel offered to continue his salary of $50 a month. This led to further bitterness between his parents. Joseph had urged Chester to sign waivers to all rights for additional claims; Estelle believed that he should have rejected pension and waivers alike and sued Wade Manor. She went so far as to confront the hotel's management, accusing them of taking advantage of her son. The hotel responded by withdrawing its offer to maintain Chester on salary. Joseph and Estelle quarreled horribly, he insisting that she was only making a fool of herself and antagonizing everyone who might help them, she accusing him of inertia and Uncle Tomism.

At this point in
The Third Generation
there's a moment of great feeling for both parents.

Mrs. Taylor's long and bitter fight was to save herself as much as anything. She didn't realize this. She thought of herself as doing what a mother should. And yet, in the end, she lost herself. Both lost themselves. She became mean and petty. And although Professor Taylor had been without a teaching post for four long years, he had still felt he belonged. Deep down he had still considered himself a teacher. Now he didn't. It broke him inside where it counted. He gave up. He lost his will to try. In many ways, the effect on this little black man born in a Georgia cabin, who'd tried so hard to be someone of consequence in this world, to live a respectable life, rear his children to be good, and teach his backward people, was the greatest tragedy of all. Mrs.
Taylor never gave up as he did. But she had to feel the world was turned against her to justify herself.
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After four months in hospital, Chester returned home wearing a complicated back brace of leather and stainless steel that made him feel “like a trussed fowl.”
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His teeth were repaired by Industrial Commission dentists in a long series of visits. Chester was happy to return home, but tensions ran high there. He looked forward to September more than ever before.

Arriving in Columbus, Himes took a room in a boarding house several blocks off campus. Ohio State at that time had a student population of 12,296, of which some 600 were black. Cost of a year's schooling, with room and board, books, deposits, and other fees, came to approximately $658. Black students were not admitted to the dormitories, student union, or dining halls.

“I bought a coonskin coat for three hundred dollars, a knickerbocker suit, a long-stemmed pipe, and a Model T Ford roadster, and I became a collegian,”
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Himes wrote years later. He even pledged one of the two black fraternities. “The white students didn't know exactly what to make of me … I rarely spoke to white people, and never unless I was addressed first by them, and yet I would find them always looking at me.”
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Himes struck quite a figure tooling about campus in his raccoon coat, cruising town in his roadster, taking in movies like
Flesh and the Devil
and black road shows with young artists such as Josephine Baker and Ethel Waters. He seems to have been popular with college women. Classes were a different matter. Here Himes found himself far behind the other students. He quarreled openly with a chemistry teacher, was utterly at sea in German, couldn't fathom the math needed for physics. Himes's account of this period is a curious mixture of braggadocio (that he scored fourth highest on the IQ test, that he could have had his pick of college women) and self-sorrow (that he was always on the outside, that he didn't belong and never would).

Charles was in conflict with the university from the day of his arrival. He was at once inspired by the thought of being a student, and dispirited by the knowledge this thought inspired. On the one hand he began to run, not outwardly, but in his emotions, like a
dog freed from its leash; while on the other he was fettered by every circumstance of the university life which relegated him to insignificance. 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.
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Though like alter ego Charles he contrived many excuses for essentially not even trying—he hadn't the academic background for the pre-med courses he'd chosen; the studies were too difficult, the classes too formal; his hit-or-miss schooling, from Georgia to Mississippi to Arkansas to Missouri, had left him unprepared for the discipline of university study—Himes knew deep down that he was rebelling. He'd always been like that: if he couldn't take part in everything, then he wouldn't take part in anything. And without his mother to push him on through this inertia, he succumbed to it. He had started off doing his best to become a kind of pastiche of the white collegiate. The rigidity and hypocrisy of Northern segregation gnawed away at him, though, and turning against that, he turned against himself as well.

Himes began to withdraw, taking refuge in the brothels and clubs of the sprawling Negro slums. He seems to have had a steady companion there, from whom he may have contracted venereal disease. Fully expecting dismissal, he was shocked to learn that he'd passed all his courses and, following Christmas vacation at home, would have to return to the university.

But by then I was tired of Ohio State University and its policy of discrimination and segregation, fed up with the condescension, which I could never bear, and disgusted with myself for my whoremongering and my inability to play games, my instinctive withdrawal from intimacy, and my schizophrenic impulses to be inconspicuous and conspicuous at the same time. It was much later in life that I came to understand I simply hadn't accepted my status as a “nigger.”
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Following a disastrous Christmastime at home, where father and mother engaged in what now seemed one endless argument, head of one dispute eating the tail of the last, Himes returned to campus more disenchanted than ever. Toward the end of the second quarter
his fraternity sponsored a formal dance. Himes attended with tux and a young woman he hardly knew: “I was bored and my teeth were set on edge by the very proper behavior of these very proper young black people who were trying so hard to ape white people.”
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He decided to introduce these sheltered, privileged young people to the real world, and took them to the brothel he frequented. Here they sat drinking home brew and listening to recordings until Himes's steady came upon them and exploded in fury. This self-immolative pattern would repeat itself often in his life, Himes sailing blithely into mined waters, professing surprise when the ship went down.

Called before the dean the following morning, Himes was allowed to withdraw for reasons of ill health and failing grades. In gentlemanly fashion, the previous evening's incident was never mentioned.

For a long time he stood on the stone steps of University Hall, looking across the snow-covered oval. He was saying good-bye again, this time to many things, to all of his mother's hopes and prayers, to so many of his own golden dreams, to the kind of future he'd been brought up to expect, and to a kind of life … But at the time he didn't realize it. He felt trapped again, pushed into something against his will.
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Chester Himes, the wizard of leave-taking, in his life stood on many such shores.

Back in Cleveland, though his parents argued fiercely over how he was to be disciplined, Himes escaped any reckoning, their arguments between themselves deflecting anger from him. Joseph Sandy, now working as a janitor, refused to take responsibility or action, however loudly Estelle railed. Chester fell ill, perhaps reacting to the tensions about him: “My back froze up … The atmosphere in our house was depressing. Thoughts of myself were depressing. I didn't think. I passed the spring in a daze.”
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But when summer came, he was up and about, making rounds of the brothels, bars, and gambling clubs. His favorite was Bunch Boy's on Cedar Avenue near Ninety-fifth Street. He and a young man he'd worked with at Wade Park Manor, Ramsey, hung out there so much that the owner started calling them “the Katzi Kids” after the Katzenjammer Kids cartoon strip, and eventually put Himes to work at the blackjack table.

To cover, Himes told his mother he'd taken a night job at the Gilsy Hotel on Ninth Street. He'd leave home early afternoon and return at three or four the next morning. He actually did work at the Gilsy for about a month, filling in for an acquaintance, running prostitutes up to the rooms and providing whiskey brewed by the bell captain. Himes never made less than fifty dollars a night, but the money went fast, on clothes and gambling. “I bought very expensive suits,” Himes recalled, “shirts, ties, shoes, and coats—stylish, but not outlandish … I liked tweeds, Cheviots, and worsteds. I remember my most daring venture was a pair of square-toed yellow pigskin bluchers by Florsheim, which today in Paris would be the height of fashion. I got to know the expensive men's stores where blacks rarely ventured.”
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In the spring he bought a secondhand Nash, parking it several blocks from his home so his parents wouldn't know.

I seemed to be in a trance. I think it was the result of so many emotional shocks. My parents' quarreling had entered its final stage; sometimes my father would strike my mother and she struck back. I would separate them when I was home … I ran my car into a concrete stanchion underneath the railroad bridge over Cedar Avenue and wrecked it.
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Joe won honors at East High and a scholarship to Oberlin College. Bunch Boy left the gambling club to devote his attentions to a policy house. Ramsey stopped coming around. Bunch Boy had been something of a father figure to Himes, certainly a stabilizing influence, and with him gone, solitary once again, Himes was at loose ends. Eventually he fell in with a sneak thief named Benny, “a big-framed, light-brown-skinned, simpleminded boy who elected me as his hero.”
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To live up to Benny's adulation, Himes later wrote, he did a lot of things he'd otherwise not have done, including learning to smoke opium and stealing cars. It was at a party in Benny's basement apartment just off Cedar Avenue in the Eighties that Himes first met his future wife Jean Johnson.

Soon Himes and Jean were working together at a whiskey joint in the alley behind Bunch Boy's. They lived there, too; that way, the owner, a woman named Margaret, said, when times got bad, Chester could put Jean to tricking for him. Times got bad pretty quickly. Chester had
bought the twenties equivalent of a Saturday night special, a little Owlshead .32, and developed the habit of shooting at people who pressed for Jean's favors. Luckily he always missed, but that was enough for Margaret to put them out.