Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  Later that night I found out why Tino had put me in the hospital so readily. He was trying to make me. Before the week was out all of them had tried. Even the colored porters. I’d been so mad so long it had begun getting funny by then.

  They had a system. They’d take a new convict, if he was young and good-looking, feed him well and keep him there until he was too grateful to refuse. “It’s nothing to it,” they’d argue. “Everybody does it.” There was a song that went: “Slugs do it, bugs do it, even funny looking mugs in jugs do it,” or at least that was the way they had it. They had it all worked out. If one couldn’t succeed, another would try. Then, after the first one made him, they’d all have him.

  The whole hospital setup was a stinking, grafting racket. The doctor came around once a day. If there wasn’t anything wrong with a guy whom the nurses wanted to hold they’d chart him with a temperature. The doctor knew about it, but he didn’t care.

  They charged daily rentals to the big shots and sold the No. 1 diet, drugs and medicines. Every night there was a big poker game in the t.b. ward with hundreds of dollars in it. Sometimes the nurses played high-stake bridge on the porch downstairs. Everyone was either a wolf or a fag. The wolf is the so-called male of the species, a rare and almost obsolete animal. The fag is the female. And there were those who did not want to be associated with the fags, but were not actually wolves, who were loosely classified as wolverines, which was what most of the wolves were when it came to the test.

  Everyone who worked in the hospital made money. Each had his own racket. They didn’t make any money off me. I fell out with everyone except the supervisor, Tino, who had turned out to be a pretty good egg when he found out he couldn’t make me. A lot of guys would have tried to give me a tough way to go. But he didn’t ride me. He even insisted that I remain there when, in a huff one morning, I demanded my clothes and said I was getting the hell out of that whorehouse before I knocked out somebody’s teeth. He said Gout would put me in the soup company but that if I stayed a couple or three weeks longer I could probably get back in school.

  I didn’t fall out with the cute little nurse, Harry, either. He was neither a wolf nor a wolverine but just a pleasant bitch who had a crush on me. He made it very pleasant, not sexually of course, seeing that my bed was made with clean linen every day and rubbing me with alcohol and giving me eggnog with whiskey, and now and then the whiskey without the eggnog, and more food—ham and eggs for breakfast, liver and onions for lunch, steak and vegetables and salads for supper—than I could eat. But for all of that I soon got tired of it.

  It was a rotten, lousy joint. The hell of it was that they treated degeneracy as one does normal sex, with no more shame attached to it than one attaches to promiscuousness. I hadn’t been in prison long enough to see it from that view.

  There were a couple of big-shot bankers up in C ward, smoking their cigars and drinking whiskey and soda and walking about the hospital, in expensive robes, as if they owned it. The doctor greeted them with his horse-toothed smile as if they hired him by the day; which they probably did. That made me understand, more clearly than ever, the difference between robbing a bank from the inside and the outside.

  The gangsters got on, too—in fact anyone did who could produce the dough or who was young enough and good-looking enough and willing enough. It was a strictly money-and-sex proposition and if a poor bastard was really sick they patched him up and sent him out before he could embarrass them.

  A week of that stuff was enough for me. I felt polluted. I felt as if I had fallen into a cesspool. Every day some poor bastard would die and the doctor would go into another ward and crack about it. The nurses would say to the porters, “Another mattress for the passing show.”

  To hell with the school company, I thought. To hell with all the companies. I didn’t give a damn where they put me, in the soup company or wherever else they damn well pleased. I was getting out. The barber had just gotten through shaving me. He had left my face raw and bleeding. I had called him a fink and he had started at me with the razor. I had picked up the basin of water, of all things. I must have thought I was going to drown him. If Tino hadn’t come in and stopped it I don’t know where it might have ended, probably with me getting cut.

  It was Thursday morning in the middle of March with no break showing in the weather. I was transferred straight from the hospital to the soup company. But I wasn’t finished with the hospital.

  A week later I caught a cold. I let it get worse, hoping it would get better. In the end I had to go back to the hospital on the Monday-morning sick call, and stand in the line sticking out the back entrance deep into the yard. It was snowing that morning. We were like a line of Monday wash caught in the snow, only we were ragged convicts instead of ragged clothes; underfed and under-clothed, standing there in the subfreezing weather to wait our turn at the desk they rigged up for the doctor, in front of minor surgery, to hold sick call. He sat there, flanked by his staff, and dosed out pink tea to everyone who passed. Pink tea was a concentrated solution of Epsom salts with a dash of croton oil. The medicine was saved for the paying patients. He dosed out abuse, too, oral and physical, slapping a convict here, hitting another in the mouth.

  There were some with cramps and bloody piles and inflamed appendixes and tumors and cancer and lungs shot to hell; waiting for a shot of this, a bottle of lousy cough sirup, a tin of salve, an emergency operation, a last six months in the t.b. ward, a violent, vulgar, delirious death. Waiting in the goddamn cold.

  When I stepped inside the door to wait, with my back pressed against the wall for the line to move up, I saw a burning Bunsen burner. It was all I could do to keep from picking it up and setting myself on fire.

  By then, standing in the cold, I’d lost my voice. I couldn’t make a sound. All I could do was move my lips. The doctor, the big fleshy Dutch bastard with his flapping white jacket and soiled vest and contempt, thought I was being fresh because he hadn’t looked up to see my lips moving, and thought I hadn’t answered when he’d asked, “What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you?” He acted as if he was going to get up and slap me. It was said about him that, on losing his third patient on the operating table one morning, he became alarmed and furious and began whining, “What the hell they keep dying for?”

  But if he had slapped me that morning there would have been a dead Monroe or a dead doctor. More than likely a dead Monroe. I never saw but two convicts who had killed guards. They were serving life. Both of them had been beaten on the head until they were slap-happy. But they had killed the guards before my time.

  It was there, in minor surgery at that same desk, that the syphilitic cases were given arm and hip shots of mercury and Salvarsan. I never knew why they didn’t give them penicillin; maybe it cost too much. When they hit some of those poor suckers in the rump or arm they reeled away, vomiting. Their hair would come out and their teeth would fall out. They’d lose their sight and go deaf. A few were cured. The nurses shot them. The nurses were exceptionally rough and impatient on those occasions. It seemed as if they hoped everyone they shot would drop dead so they wouldn’t be troubled again.

  8

  THE SOUP COMPANY, one of Gout’s brain children, was created for the sick, they said; for those who had stomach trouble and ulcers and couldn’t eat the main-line grub and needed to be on a diet, but weren’t sick enough to warrant hospitalization.

  It was the 2-10 company on the second tier of 10 cells in the 10&11 cell block, the last of the old, crumbling, dark, damp, dim cell blocks of a past era when prisons were patterned, it seemed, after the dungeons of the medieval ages. It now seemed ready to crumble and fall. There were rotten wooden ranges, that trembled beneath each step, enclosed by waist-high iron railings. The cells had flat latticed bars, so closely interlaced as to make it almost impossible to see inside of them.

  “Here we are,” the runner said, stopping before cell No. 17. A name plate with the name, Green-100297, hung from the bars at the hea
d of the bottom bunk. The name was flanked by the letters P and T which designated that Green was a Protestant and that he retained his tobacco privileges. At that time we were given a plug of chewing tobacco on Wednesday, and a twist of dry tobacco that could be used for chewing or smoking, on Saturday. Whenever a convict lost his tobacco privilege the T on his name plate was painted out.

  The runner tried the cell door but found it locked. I hung my name plate on the bars at the head of the upper bunk and put my things on the range. The runner went for the guard.

  “Ain’t your name Monroe?” The voice came from inside the cell, but the lights had been dimmed for the day and I couldn’t see the fellow well.

  “Yeah, bud. Who’re you—Green?”

  “Naw, that’s just an alias. My name’s Starlight.”

  “Yeah?”

  From up the range a voice asked, “Did you get that new fellow, Mac?”

  “Naw, Starlight got him in the next cell.”

  “I got him. All you punks shut up and don’t start any signifying.”

  I still had the two bathrobes and a big brass-bound box. They must have thought I was prosperous.

  “You sure are lucky, punk,” someone said to Starlight It was like when a gambler gets a chump in a gambling joint and gets him off to himself in a head-and-head game. He feels good and the other chiselers are envious.

  “Do you guys always fight over cell buddies?” I kidded.

  “Tell him when they’re like him we do,” the voice from up the range said.

  “What say, Nig?” Starlight said.

  “Hiyuh, punk.” The new voice was deep and startling.

  I looked around. Down below, on the first range, stood the biggest colored man I’ve ever seen. His shoulders and chest were immense. He was in his shirt sleeves and his black shaved head shone like a billiard ball.

  “Hello, good-looking,” he said to me. He had a cigar in the corner of his mouth.

  I started to ignore him. Then I said, “What say, bud?”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Starlight said. “That’s Nig. He’s crazy.”

  “I’ll come up there and pop you in your kisser,” Nig said.

  “Come on,” Starlight said. “I’ll knock you on your can.”

  “Come on and get him, Nig,” Mac said from the next cell.

  “You want to watch that punk—Starlight,” Nig said to me. I didn’t answer.

  “What you saying, Nig?” someone called from down the range.

  “Hello, Wop, how you was, kid?”

  Another colored convict came out from beneath the range and looked up at me. He was taller than Nig, but thinner, with a long neck and a ball of kinky hair. “He’s a burner, ain’t he?” he said. Several other smaller colored convicts came out to look at me.

  “Ooooowah, man, he’s a burner, ain’t he?” the skinny convict said again. He had a loud jubilant voice.

  “What say, Feet?” Starlight said.

  “Don’t talk to me, fellow. You tricked me on that prize fight.”

  “He got you good, didn’t he, Feet?” one of the colored convicts said.

  “Man, don’t say a thing. That fellow beat me out of fifty sacks.”

  Nig was talking to a fellow down the range. Starlight and Feet were talking. All in a loud voice, ignoring the others. Shortly the runner returned with the guard. He unlocked the cell and let me in. Nobody stopped talking. I carried my things inside and let down my bunk from the wall. Then I looked the cell over. I’d celled in one similar to it when I’d first entered, up on 5-11. But I’d been so frightened at that time I’d never really seen what the cells looked like.

  They were narrow and had low, rounded ceilings. The walls and ceilings had been painted with a thick coating of greenish-yellow calcimine which was now beginning to flake. The two bunks hung from the wall by chains. They were made of a framework of steel and wood to which we attached the heavy wire mesh on which the mattress rested. The crevices between the steel and wood were bedbug paradises. Bugs lived and bred in there by the thousands, literally by the millions. Neither fire nor water nor bug juice nor anything except burning the bunks could get them out.

  Some of the convicts stole paint and painted their cells in attempts to get rid of them. Others put axle grease about the legs of their bunks, the hinges at the wall, and covered the chains. They even made barricades of grease along the floor at the front of the cell to keep the bugs from entering. Once a year the cells were fumigated. But nothing ever got rid of them. Like the dampness in the old crumbling walls, they were always there.

  We used to trap them with mirrors or shiny tin tops placed about the floor. They would crawl up on the ceiling and drop off until the shiny surfaces were black with them. This could keep up all night and the next night and every night. And a year later you could catch as many in a single night as you did at first. On a quiet night you could hear them dripping from the ceiling like drops of water. We’d mash them and trap some more.

  I never learned why they crawled up on the ceiling and dropped off on the shiny surfaces. Maybe they were attracted by the light. Most of the time they’d climb up and drop on our faces, and our white pillow cases, and get fat with blood and roll off to the floor, and the next morning we’d find them lying there so full of blood they couldn’t move. It didn’t do any good to try to smoke them out of the crevices. They would only come out and hide in the bunk. That night you’d be afraid to go to bed. Every time the guard came by you’d have to be sitting on your bucket. I tried it once and set my bunk on fire, and Starlight jumped up and threw the bucket of urine on my pillow case to put it out.

  Each of us had a bucket. The 2-11 company on the opposite side of the cell block from us, came around each morning after breakfast and emptied the buckets in a sewer down at the end of the first range. We put our buckets out on the range and they came and collected them and it was somewhat of a disgrace to be put in that company.

  But they had a chance to make money and a lot of convicts asked to be put in the bucket company in preference to the soup company. They rented the newer, cleaner, better buckets and kept them disinfected for you. If you couldn’t afford to pay them you always got the oldest, most battered buckets, and they were never rinsed or disinfected. It didn’t help much if both of the convicts in a cell didn’t do it.

  On summer days the odor hung in the cells like some vile miasma, thick and putrid, with no relief. There was always an argument and generally a fight when one of the cell mates had to take a physic.

  At the end of the range was a long wooden washtrough, similar to those in the dormitories. The water was turned on for five minutes before each meal and half of the company came out at a time and washed. It was then I got my first look at the other fellows in the company. They were a seedy lot with that decayed familiarity of convicts who have lost their pride. There were six cells of colored convicts in the company.

  “I thought the men in here were sick,” I said to Starlight.

  “Hell, naw, ain’t nobody in here sick. This is where Gout puts the men he calls ‘agitators.’ Most of them are gunsels and fags. They got Mother Jones and Snookums in here.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, they’re just a couple of nigger punks. Mother Jones is a tall, bald-headed nigger and Snookums is the little nigger with the straightened hair and red tie.”

  “Yeah?” I’d seen them go by to wash up.

  “They got Chump Charlie, Nick’s Indian kid, in here too; and Wop and Blackie.”

  “Are all of them queer?”

  “They’re notorious.”

  “When did they transfer Chump Charlie? I was in the dormitory with him.”

  “Oh, just last week.”

  I knew I wouldn’t like that company. When we lined up for dinner I was placed between Chump and a bushy-headed Armenian convict, named Mac, who talked so fast his words had no meaning whatsoever. I didn’t talk to either of them.

  Dinner consisted of soup and bread and coff
ee. Supper was the same soup, thinned out and warmed over, with tea instead of coffee. Breakfast was some sort of cereal with real milk and sugar—usually it was rice or oatmeal—and coffee. Everyone bellyached about the food, cursed Gout, the warden, and luck. They said they were going to see Jumpy Stone and get out of that company. No one ever did.

  After dinner we returned to the cells. The range boy brought me two blankets, a sheet and a pillowcase. One of the blankets was so dusty, dust spilled from it at a touch.

  “Why the hell didn’t you shake this out before you brought it up here?” I said.

  “Not allowed to,” he said.

  “This is Jimmy Monroe. You want to look out for him,” Starlight told the range boy. The range boy went off without replying.

  I started to make my bunk. The mattress was old and flat and grimy with a big stain in the center. The other side had dark stains which looked like blood.

  “I’ll get the range boy to get you a cover,” Starlight said.

  “Oh, to hell with it!”

  A hopelessness overwhelmed me. I felt as if I would never be able to make my twenty years.

  There was a stool for the upper bunk and I stood on it and spread the sheet. The working companies came in shortly after we’d eaten. There were three setups in the dining room. The first was for the dining-room workers and ourselves. The second was for the idle companies. The third was called the main line. It was for the working companies. Shortly after they’d come in, the working companies lined up for dinner. There was a banging of steel doors, loud curses, shouts, laughter, and the guards knocking their sticks and calling out their company numbers: “Thoid Ten…Third ‘Leven…Fourth ‘Leven…Fifth Ten…” I wondered why they didn’t call them out in rotation.