Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  Hawwwww, hawwwww, hawwwwwwww!” Or maybe it went like this on another morning: “Rich con use his good smellin’ soap. An’ de slickah do de same. But a po’ low-down con use a bar of lye. But he washin’ jes de same…”

  Ending with the rat-tat-tat of the prison guards’ sticks, the flashing of lights, semidarkness and quiet. And in between some died, some left, some entered, but most did the same goddamned thing they had done the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. But sunsets were no less beautiful than they ever were, if you ever got to see one; nor was the sky any higher, any bluer, any grayer.

  In the prison day the one high spot was in the evening after supper when they called out mail. Everyone who had ever received a letter, or ever hoped to receive a letter, ganged about the guard as he stood atop the table and called off the names and numbers on the slit envelopes, stamped with the red emblem of the prison censor. And there were plenty who had never received a letter and did not hope to receive one, who stood there with the others, because, I suppose, the human being is a companionable animal and is not made to live alone. I could get so goddamned filled up just thinking about them I wanted to cry. I could feel so goddamned sorry for them then. The years didn’t trouble me then; the twenty years were nothing in my sorrow for all those other convicts. Nothing mattered very much then, not even God; least of all God.

  To see a twelve-year robber with a six months’ continuance. That was pitiful. That was like looking at a pregnant whore. That was like catching God sloppy drunk. A convict who’d served twelve long, tough, hard years getting a six months’ flop by the parole board for “investigation.”

  “What the hell they been doing all those twelve goddamned years?” he asked, his lips quivering, his hands trembling, his eyes bewildered.

  The findings of the parole board were returned with the mail. After a board meeting when word had gotten about that the slips were in the mail everyone who had had a hearing was tense and nervous. They’d gang about the guard when they saw the batch of brown envelopes. As soon as each one got his return he’d rip it open furiously, while others hemmed them all in, to read with avid eyes the cold, irrevocable, unappealable announcement: “…continued until—”

  Seven years! Continued for seven years! “Jesus Christ!”

  Some of them would keep their envelopes unopened until the dead of the night when they could look at them in secret. Sometimes they’d never tell what they got.

  Some of them got paroled.

  Some of them tried to escape.

  Some of them did escape.

  Blocker stopped by my bunk on his way to wash up that January morning. “All of 1-3 broke out last night.” They had moved the redshirt desperadoes from 1-11 to 1-3 when they began tearing down the old 10&11 cell block.

  I jumped from my bunk, excited. “Yeah? Last night?”

  Another convict came from the washtrough, looking more excited than either of us. “There wasn’t but twelve that got out. The rest wouldn’t go.”

  “I wonder how they got out,” I said.

  “They must have tunneled out,” Blocker said.

  “Frankie Kane tunneled out two years ago and was almost ready to scram when someone squealed on him,” another fellow said.

  Suddenly we had a crowd. But we weren’t the only crowd. They were bunched together in little knots all over the dormitory. Everyone had forgotten to wash, in their excitement.

  “How long’s Frankie been in the redshirters?”

  “About three years now. You know he was in there when those seven guys crushed through the gate that day.”

  “He was the leader.”

  “Yeah, he was the one who knocked old Bringhurst down when he tried to stop them.”

  “They tell me the warden’s daughter came running downstairs with a big forty-five in each hand, trying to stop them.”

  “Annie get your gun.”

  We laughed.

  “Was Frankie in this bunch?”

  “He must have been.”

  “I bet he was the leader.”

  “I bet Jiggs was in it too.”

  “And Earl Linn.”

  “And Phil Potosi.”

  “And Tank Tony.” They called the role of the desperadoes.

  “When’d they miss ‘em?”

  “I don’t know. When the morning guard took his count, I suppose.”

  “Hell, they count them guys every hour.”

  “I don’t know, then. I guess they must have missed them right away.”

  “Hey!” someone called from the corner of the dormitory. “Chump’s got the flashes on his radio.”

  We all made a break for Chump’s bunk. I snatched up my bathrobe and put it on going down the aisle. So many convicts were jammed up down there I had to climb up on top of an upper bunk in order to see the radio. It was as if I couldn’t hear the radio unless I could see it. The others who had radios had them turned on, too, and convicts were grouped about their bunks also. Chump sat there looking as important as if he had planned the break himself.

  “…John Sidney Bippus…” the loud metallic voice of the radio blared…“John Sidney Bippus…Better known as Sid Bip…Five feet, five and one half inches…Five feet, five and one half inches…Weight—one hundred and thirty-two pounds…Weight—one hundred and thirty-two pounds…Blue eyes…Blue eyes…Brown hair…Brown hair…Probably dressed in gray prison uniform…Probably dressed in gray prison uniform…Serving life for first-degree murder…Serving life for first-degree murder…Very dangerous if armed…Very dangerous if armed…CAUTION…Do not attempt to capture this man as he is very dangerous…If seen, notify police…If seen, notify police…CAUTION!…Do not attempt to capture this man as he is very dangerous…If seen, notify police…Karl Luther Mueller…Karl Luther Mueller…”

  “Sid wasn’t in 1-3. Sid was in the heart-trouble company,” someone said.

  “Sid was on 1-4.”

  “Weren’t none of them out of 1-3?” someone else asked.

  “Shut up and let us hear.”

  “Well, listen then!”

  “Well, shut up then!”

  “Kiss my ass!”

  “Kiss your mother’s—” There was the usual fight.

  We hung about the radio until the breakfast bell rang. Our guards had been listening at another radio and hadn’t heard the breakfast bell. They didn’t knock for us to line up until one of the sergeants came in to investigate. I had to rush to get dressed. They scrambled pell-mell through the doorway. There was no semblance of order in the line. I was left. I had to run across the yard to catch up.

  It was all we talked about at breakfast. The guards were grouped about the walls, talking about it too. The noise of all the talk was a loud, steady hum, like the sound of a powerful dynamo. Excitement was so thick you could feel it.

  “Man, if that Sid Bip gets a gun it’ll be just too bad.”

  “You sure ain’t told no lie. That Mueller is a desperate sonofabitch too.”

  “Yeah, but not like Sid. It took the G-men to get Sid in here.” Bippus had been convicted of being the trigger man in the murder of Ben Levin, a La Fayette newspaper editor. “They never will forget him around La Fayette.”

  “You heard what the radio said.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Said he was the most dangerous of all five.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Wonder what he was doing in 1-4.”

  “Oh, his ticker went bad.”

  “You mean he wanted to chisel in on that special diet?”

  “Now that’s right.”

  “It’ll be just too bad if he gets a gun.”

  “They never will get him without somebody being killed, if he gets a gun.”

  “Without a whole lot of ‘em being killed.”

  “They’ll never get Sid Bip.”

  When we left the dining room we saw guards mounting machine guns on tripods in the yard. The convicts marched under the blunt snouts of the machine gu
ns, excited and tense and ready to explode. Another machine gun was mounted on top of the warden’s quarters, overlooking the prison yard.

  “You better watch out, kid,” Blocker said, grinning. “Don’t you take a notion to get mad today.”

  “No worry, with all that artillery about,” I said.

  By dinnertime we had learned that five convicts from 1-4 had crawled up the ventilator in the 3&4 cell block and lowered themselves from the roof to the front yard with sheets tied together. The night guard had missed them shortly after twelve o’clock.

  Sid Bippus was the first to be captured. A housewife on the outskirts of town had seen him slinking through her back yard and had called the sheriff’s office. An old, feeble, gray-haired deputy sheriff named Kingman, whom I had cursed out many times when I’d been in the county jail out there, had gone out to this lady’s house and had taken Sid out of the barn loft where he had been hiding half-frozen and had brought him back. Sid had been armed with a pistol, the newspapers said, but had put up no resistance.

  Mueller was shot and killed a week later in a public park in Indianapolis. Another of the men was arrested and returned from Kansas City, Kansas. By then we had forgotten about them.

  And then one day, weeks later, I said to the guy next to me in school, “Say, wake up, Freddy, the sergeant just came in.”

  He straightened up, rubbing his eyes and grinning sheepishly.

  “Damn, you sleep every day,” I said. “You must be digging out at night.”

  “I am,” he said, grinning.

  He was a good-natured kid of about twenty with a very pleasant smile, and corn-colored hair that flagged across his forehead. He was out of Stateline, they said.

  That night about twelve o’clock I was awakened by a shot. I heard several scattered shots and then a sudden fusillade. And then there were some shots which punctured the thin walls of the dormitory and drove the men, rushing and excited, from that entire end. There was some shooting around the corner of the dormitory, and some more shots through the dormitory walls and another fusillade, and some more excitement inside of the dormitory. The excitement inside of the dormitory was more dramatic than the shooting. The shooting was over in about a half hour, although a half hour’s shooting was plenty of shooting in prison. It was almost too much shooting without the National Guard being called. But the excitement lasted all night and ‘way up into the morning.

  In the morning, before breakfast, some of us slipped outside of the dormitory and went around to the other side—the side toward the walls—to examine the bullet holes.

  “Hey, look, there’s the rope they used.”

  We looked up and saw a knotted chain of sheets swinging from the bars of the ventilator intake, high up the side of the sheer stone wall of the front cell house. By that time guards were converging on us from every quarter and we beat it back inside of the dormitory. Some of the fellows got caught and taken to the hole.

  Later that day we learned that Fred Veeders, the kid I’d spoken to in school the day before, and his brother, Harry, and a crippled convict named Tap Spence had escaped from their cell in 6-1 by digging through the reinforced concrete walls. They had walked down the catwalk between the 1&2 cells, to the end of the cell house where there was an iron ladder leading up to the outside window.

  The narrow space between the cells was necessary to install and repair the plumbing and electrical installations. They had then sawed through two of the window bars and lowered the sheet to the catwalk atop the forty-foot section of outside wall connecting the 1&2 cell block with the main west wall, and separating the prison proper from the honor men’s dormitory. Although this section of prison wall was the same as the regular outside walls, beyond it was the enclosed dormitory and in order to escape one had to go down it to the west wall. There was a guard tower in the corner where the wall abutted and two power spotlights cast their beams at right angles down the two walls. Just inside, and below this wall, was the death house with its black slanting roof, and beside the death house was a heavy plate steel door opening into the back yard of the honor men’s dormitory.

  In order to lower themselves from the ventilator intake of the cell house to the catwalk the men were exposed the full route in the blinding glare of the corner spotlight; which would have made them visible even to a casual window-gazer in a passing train a half mile down the railroad tracks which ran outside the walls. After reaching the catwalk they had to walk straight into the glare of light, behind which the wall guard should have been sitting with his machine gun trained on them. But the tower guard was asleep. It seemed impossible for these three convicts to have known he would be asleep on this particular night at this particular hour. They could not see him for all the blinding light which they had to pass through after coming from the black, dark passage between the cells. Nevertheless, he was asleep. They slipped up on him and took his rifle and submachine gun and riot gun and gas gun, and beat him unconscious and tossed him down on the cinders which covered that portion of the prison yard.

  After that they evidently waited for the night yard guard to come around the dormitory on his nightly patrol, and then cut loose at him with the rifle and submachine gun. They didn’t hit the guard, however. He was the guard who had killed Red Swayzee back of the hospital that night and we were all sorry that he wasn’t killed.

  But the guard ducked back around the corner of the dormitory and, from its protection, returned the convicts’ fire. He was joined by a number of other guards. The three convicts remained in the corner tower shooting at the guards during the whole half hour, without any guards going outside and attacking them from that side. Finally the convict named Tap Spence was shot in the thigh. The Veeders brothers jumped to the ground outside. When Tap made the jump his thigh, which had been shot, split open like a burst watermelon. The Veeders brothers had to leave him there to die while they made their escape. They left the submachine gun with him and two loaded clips. Tap wouldn’t let anybody get close to him and finally he was shot by a guard sergeant who mounted the wall by means of a ladder from the inside, and pumped a submachine gun full of bullets down into him from atop the wall. While I still remembered them the Veeders brothers were never caught.

  And there were some who were killed by the due process of the law. They were first electrocuted and then the prison doctor ran a long thin needle through their hearts.

  There had been quite a lot in the newspapers about Doctor Snodgrass ever since it had been discovered that he was the one who had killed the girl. The papers were full of it all during the trial and after the conviction and they got full of it again, shortly before the date of execution.

  He was a well-known surgeon from Springfield, out of a socially prominent family. The girl, whom he had killed by knocking her in the head with a hammer, then severing some important arteries by sticking a knife blade up her ears and reaming them out, was a college student. He had given her Spanish fly during the period of their intimacy in order to teach her various manners of sex degeneracy, and they had smoked marijuana weed together and blown their tops during their sex-maddened tea jags; and he had finally, “in order to obtain complete satisfaction, utterly debased himself before her, receiving the exaltation of his sensation from the stimulation of his utter debasement—” That’s what the little pamphlets said, which sold for twenty-five cents, and which were very frank about the matter.

  “It don’t count on a bop binge, anyway,” one of the convicts in school argued.

  “Hell, it was young stuff,” another confirmed. “She was only nineteen.”

  We were in school that afternoon, baiting our teacher as usual, when one of the fellows looked out the window and said, “Here comes Doctor Snodgrass.”

  “Where?”

  We jumped up and rushed to the school windows.

  “That him?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t believe that’s him.”

  “Sure that’s him, the lousy
rotten bastard. I’d know him anywhere I see him, as much as I’ve seen his picture.”

  “That’s him all right.”

  I still didn’t believe it. A tallish, bald-headed man walked beside a stoutish woman clad in a black fur coat with a dark felt hat pulled low over her face, and a handkerchief held up to her eyes as if she was crying. The man had a seamed, ravaged face, as if he had worried a great deal, but at the time he was calmly smoking a cigar. The woman walked close to him on the other side. She was holding his arm. The man was bareheaded and dressed in a blue suit with a white shirt and dark tie. He did not wear an overcoat. They walked slowly. Behind them, about twenty feet, the deputy followed with a guard to whom he was talking. The man and the woman were also talking. There was no one else.

  Blocker had come in from the other room and squeezed into the window beside me. “That’s him all right, kid.”

  A convict called Candy yelled from the window, “Take that cigar out your mouth, you rape-fiend murdering bastard!” The convicts didn’t like the doctor. There was something about his act of killing the girl, just to keep it from being discovered that he was having an affair with her, that they couldn’t take.

  The deputy looked up and saw us jammed in the windows and came over and made us go back to our seats. As soon as he turned away we rushed right back to the windows. The school guards didn’t object; they were trying to see too. Several other convicts yelled obscenities at the doctor. He didn’t give any sign that he heard them. The deputy waved us away from the windows again, but he didn’t come over. We didn’t move.

  The doctor and his wife walked down the brick walk toward the death house and passed out of sight around the corner of our dormitory. The deputy and the guard followed. There was no other excitement on the yard. It was as if they were two visitors to the prison.

  I felt vaguely dissatisfied and annoyed. “Damn, don’t they have any guards with them when they take them to the chair?”

  “They do as a rule,” a convict said.

  “They ought to have some with that bastard son of a bitch,” another convict said.