Chester Himes by James Sallis Read Free Book Online

its past and as devoid of future as had been slaves torn from their African homeland. They merely endured, pushing through one day after another, moving between temporary shelters. The situation improved slightly when Joseph sold the house and the family moved into larger quarters in a better part of town. Their stay there was brief, however. Medical treatment at Barnes Hospital had done all it could for Joe, who now was able to distinguish dark from light, even to perceive movement and large nearby objects. Nothing bound them to St. Louis any longer. Within months the family decamped once again, moving to Cleveland, where in 1913, after leaving Jefferson City, wife and sons had lived with Joseph’s sisters while he settled into the Alcorn College job. Joseph himself had worked in Cleveland years back, before Chester was born, and been happy there. Also, the public school system included programs for the blind.
    The Third Generation
suggests that relocation once again was at Estelle’s urging:
    Professor Taylor lost his will. He lost his grip on ordinary things. Caught out in the backyard, halfway to the shed, with a hammer in his hand, he’d forget where he was going, what he’d intended to do.
    Only the mother’s indomitable will saved them. Now that she had overcome the attack of paranoia, she was stronger than before. She wouldn’t admit defeat.
    â€œWe’ll go to Cleveland,” she told her husband. “They have a famous clinic there. And we can live with your relatives until we get settled.” 38
    Joseph blamed himself, obliquely, for Joe’s blinding and for his own incapacity to do much to make things better for Joe afterward. He never forgot that he had forbidden Chester to take part in the demonstration; what might have been, what might not have been, weighed heavily on him.
    The family soon discovered that, as with most of the others, this move had failed to improve its lot by any good measure. Though there was no formal, legal segregation, blacks were largely ghettoized. Laborers from Poland and other European countries claimed the abundant unskilled jobs in factories and steel mills. The family moved in with Joseph’s sister Fanny Wiggins and husband Wade, who lived on East 69th Street in a racially mixed neighborhood near the Cleveland Indians’ ballpark. Estelle got along no better with her in-laws than she had with college administrators and faculty. Dark-skinned like Joseph, they neglected to show appreciation, Estelle thought, for Joseph’s initially having helped set them up here on his salary as a professor, and instead patronized him for now being unemployed. Certainly their ordinariness and their country ways put them beneath her own family socially.
    The little house was always crowded and the air was charged with flaring tempers and the clash of personalities.
    â€œYou don’t like black people but soon’s you get down and out you come running to us.”
    â€œI married a black man who happens to be your brother.”
    â€œYes, you just married him ’cause you thought he was gonna make you a great lady.”
    â€œI’ll not discuss it.”
    â€œYou’re in no position to say what you’ll discuss, sister. This is my house. I pay taxes on it.”
    â€œIf Mr. Taylor hadn’t spent all of his money sending you and your sister here from the South he’d have something of his own now.”
    â€œYou dragged him down yourself, don’t you go blaming it on us. If you’d made him a good wife instead of always nagging at him, he’d be president of a college today.”
    â€œMr. Taylor would never have been president of my foot. He hasn’t got it in him.”
    â€œThen why did you marry him?”
    â€œOnly God knows. I certainly don’t.” 39
    Chester and Joe enrolled in Cleveland’s chiefly white East High School, commuting by trolley, while Joseph did piecework, carpentry, and