Chester Himes Read Online Free Page B

one from the other, to assess how these opposing forces counterbalance; to say, for instance, to what degree the creative response to the destructive is that and only that. To some extent jazz developed as a continuation of banned African drums, but also as a subversion of the white society’s music. Recent critics such as Houston Baker
(Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory)
argue for the roots of African-American literature in blues, which wasn’t a way of immersing yourself in your troubles, as Joe Williams once remarked, but a way of getting outside them. Others such as Henry Louis Gates
(The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism)
hold out for signifying, an African language art that foregrounds ironic and parodic rhetorical elements, dissembling’s first cousin.
    The creative thrust, then, may be simply a reflexive response to the destructive; it may be an attempt to distance oneself from that destructive element, to hold it at arm’s length, as in dissembling and signifying; or it may strive to purge the destructive through catharsis. In Himes at various points, sometimes in the same work, even thesame sentence, we see all three motives at work. He was a man of unresolvable tensions and contradictions, a man whose greatest strengths—as a writer—lay precisely where those conflicts remain manifest and unresolved.
    Unlike her son, Estelle Bomar Himes kept well hidden any conflicts or second thoughts she may have entertained concerning the new bourgeoisie. Early piano lessons earned her a place at what was then the South’s most elite school for young black women, Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina. Following graduation “by virtue of her literary attainments and good moral behavior,” 25 she stayed on for two years as a teacher, though apparently taking time off for further study at the Philadelphia branch of the New England Conservatory of Music. Both her social status and religious upbringing fueled what was essentially a missionary zeal: she felt it her duty to spread the good word, to help in uplifting the more unfortunate of her race. Estelle pursued that duty in North and South Carolina public schools, the North Carolina School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, and at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In 1901, age twenty-seven, she married Joseph Sandy Himes.
    Our sympathies flow to Estelle at the same moment we despise her elitism and (not to swallow the word) her racism. For her color, her sex, and her time, she was remarkably well educated. Few men of color and far fewer women had her education or advantages. Estelle had a dream: she saw what could be. Like Malcolm, she also saw what marshaling of will and personal sacrifice would be necessary to attain that dream. There were many like her, rarely heard from. Few black men or women at the time refused to say what was expected, to say
these
things instead. Negroes in America had in fact developed dissembling—saying one thing and meaning another—into an art; this was a primary mask of double consciousness. Estelle did not so much defy conventions as she steadfastly ignored them, believing that social status should be awarded not on the basis of race but of refinement and culture. It must have occurred to her at some point that this was but another guise of the very thing she fought against. But Estelle, remember, was a master at revision, forever cutting and pasting the paragraphs of her life.
    Chester Himes rarely could bring himself to say what was expected. And he always refused to dissemble. For forty years we would hear Himes’s voice, dead on, even when attacks contrived to silence him,when repeatedly his books fell out of print, when we stopped our ears and tried not to listen. Himes pointed unflinchingly at the situation of blacks in America, demanding response. And if his truthtelling often made blacks as uncomfortable as it made whites, well then: he