Chester Himes Read Online Free Page A

egalitarian—became perhaps the central theme in Himes’s life.
    Estelle’s accounts of her background, of that heritage she held so important, changed with time, elaborated and edited in ways reminiscent of her son’s later memoirs. Any narrative, after all,whether oral history, memoir, or fiction, takes shape from what, among countless possibilities, is chosen: what foregrounded, what passed over quickly. Memory, too, is a kind of storyteller, often more poet than reporter, selecting and rearranging details to correspond to some image we have of ourselves, or simply to make a better story.
    Estelle’s grandmother was born either to an Indian squaw or African princess, depending on when the story was told, and to an Irish overseer. Malinda, Estelle’s mother, light-skinned like herself, grew up to become handservant to a Carolina doctor named Cleveland who traced his own heritage back through a Revolutionary War general to British aristocracy. Despite laws forbidding literacy to slaves, Malinda was taught to read, perhaps by her master’s daughter. Malinda in turn gave birth to three children, two of them quite likely sired by Dr. Cleveland, the third by an Indian slave. Following the Civil War, Malinda married Chester Bomar, “a tall fair white-looking man with a long blond beard,” 22 himself the issue of an octoroon and master John Earl Bomar.
    Chester, Malinda, and Malinda’s three children lived in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on land ceded them by Chester’s former master. Chester apprenticed as a brick mason while Malinda worked as a wet nurse and took in washing. Selling their land three years later, using money from the Freedman’s Bureau for transportation, they moved to Dalton, Georgia, where Chester worked as a stonemason. Within two years they relocated again, this time to Atlanta, hoping for steadier work. Chester there fell ill, and upon his recovery the family returned to Spartanburg, bringing with them three new children, Estelle, the youngest, born in February 1874. Chester and son Tom set up as builders, counting among their achievements the region’s first large cotton mills. They worked fiercely, every Bomar pitching in to do his part, pushing past setbacks, persevering, and by 1890 the family was well established in the local Negro bourgeoisie. Chester served his church as deacon, superintendent of the Sunday school and financial adviser.
    This bourgeoisie was a new thing in the world, and like most new things, fragile. Years later Chester Himes would say of fellow black Americans that “The face may be the face of Africa, but the heart has the beat of Wall Street.” 23 He would spend much of his life alternately courting and railing against middle-class whitevalues, an exemplar of double consciousness as described by W. E. B. Du Bois,
    this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others … One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. 24
    Blacks, Du Bois insists, are forced by reason of their African ancestry to see themselves as second-class citizens, inferior in every way: physically, intellectually, culturally. Having accepting that, then and only then are they allowed the privilege of seeing themselves as American citizens.
    But it’s at just such cultural crossroads, just such stress points, that cracks may reach down to our deepest wells of creativity. Jazz developed in New Orleans because of that city’s uniquely rich cultural gumbo. Thus in
The African-American Novel
Bernard Bell points out that conflicts between black culture and white society led to crippling destructive tensions, as well as to intensely creative ones, in black people and their communities—as they did in Chester Himes himself. It’s difficult, of course, to elicit