Chester Himes Read Online Free

assess to what degree Joseph’s defeat arose internally, from lack of willfulness, some failure of will; which from his limited background and always tenuous position as a minimally educated black man in white society; and which from the pride and caprice of wife Estelle. More than once her refusal to mix with other blacks, her insistence upon being treated as though she were white, her confrontations with neighbors, college peers, and shopkeepers, led to a compromise in Joseph’s position, even to loss of a job. Broader social factors were at work here as well. Increased segregation led to fewer opportunities for Negroes to improve their lot, as Estelle’s parents had done, as merchants and in general service to whites. Meanwhile, increasing urbanization, industrialization, and rapidly advancing technology were well on the way to rendering trades such as those Joseph taught obsolete.
    With ongoing, ever more outright marital discord, with the dominolike series of retreats, and finally with his inability to support his family by manual work, all he can attain to after the move North, Joseph’s spirit falters and fails. He becomes the very image of the black man ground down, unable to care for his family. We know from his early history that Joseph once had great resolve. We know that he was a hard worker, a skilled artisan, a dedicated teacher. We know from Chester’s descriptions that Joseph for many years possessed considerable personal dignity and a pride that if not on the gargantuan order of his wife’s was equally manifest. (“Only his wife could make him feel inferior.” 19 ) And with what we know of familydynamics we recognize the emotional balance Joseph must have had, and the emotional expenditures he must have made, continually to counterbalance Estelle’s excesses and bring the family back to an even keel. Finally Joseph seems to have exhausted his personal capital—seems to have been used up. To Estelle, this was proof of what she had suspected all along. God knows she’d done what
she
could to help this man make something more of himself. All to no avail.
    An octoroon with hazel or gray eyes, aquiline nose, and straight auburn hair, Estelle Bomar looked “like a white woman who had suffered a long siege of illness.” 20 Often Estelle seems, from accounts, a woman comprised entirely of adjectives: genteel, churchgoing, cultured, prideful, proper, driven, ambitious. She spoke constantly of their heritage and drilled her sons in the necessity of living up to it while squeezing the bridges of their noses to keep them from becoming flat. If Joseph’s mind shaped itself around coals of accommodation and melioration, then Estelle’s danced over flames of indignation and impatience. In some manner, hers was the ultimate Republican dream: to re-create what never existed. In another, or certainly it must have seemed so to her, she was doing what had to be done—at that time, given that history. Estelle, like her son Chester, possessed a talent for living as though events that had not yet occurred, but that should occur, already had. Chester often seemed to catch on to things twenty or thirty years before anyone else did. Speaking of the Watts riots in the sixties, he remarked how surprising it was that they’d waited so long to happen.
    Look how far we’ve come with our superior blood and breeding, Estelle told her sons in a kind of litany. And it’s true that all three went on to great achievements, even if Chester in later years wrote Carl Van Vechten: “As I look back now, I feel that much of my retardation as a writer has been due to a subconscious (and conscious and deliberate) desire to escape my past. All mixed up no doubt with the Negro’s desire for respectability. It brought a lot of confusion to my mind.” 21 This fundamental conflict within himself—of black versus white values, but just as importantly of patrician versus