Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  “I’m going out too,” I said, breaking after him.

  The day guard was standing in front of the door. “Get out of the way, I’m going out!” the convict said.

  “We’re going out!” I said.

  “You can’t go out,” the guard said.

  “The hell I can’t!” the convict said. He swung a long arched right and hit the guard just below the eye. The guard drew back his stick and the convict caught it in the air. I hit the guard in the stomach, as hard as I could with my left. I was excited out of my reason. The guard grunted, “Umph!” and doubled over. The convict came up with an uppercut and caught him in the face. I pushed him over to one side. Just as he fell the door opened from the outside and Nick came in, bareheaded and panting.

  “Get some blankets, boys,” he gasped, in a ravished voice. “Hurry and get some blankets. The boys are burning to death over there. Oh God, the boys are burning to death over there. Oh God, it’s terrible, it’s awful, they’re burning to death in their cells.”

  I snatched a blanket from a bunk and ran out of the door. Turning, I ran around the back of the hospital and started across the yard. Already the early night had settled over the prison. There was a wind blowing, making the air cool. I was coatless and hatless. I could feel the coolness of the air through my shirt, on my head.

  Smoke rolled up from the burning cell house in black, fire-tinged waves. The wind caught it and pushed it down over the prison yard like a thick, gray shroud, so low you could reach up and touch it with your hand. Flames, shooting through the windows and the roof of the cell house, seen through the smoke, looked like red tongues stuck out at the black night. Buildings were shadows in the crazy pattern of yellow light that streaked the black blanket of smoke. It was startling to be out at night. The fire was startling. The night itself was startling—it was like something suddenly discovered—like the night itself had been suddenly discovered and the fire in the night had been discovered.

  The front cell house stretching across the front of the prison was a big gray face of solid stone with grilled steel bars checkerboarding the yellow glow of windows. It was like a horizon about the night. The night stopped there.

  When I came out into the yard I had the odd feeling that I could hear those convicts a hundred yards away, crying, “Oh, God! Save me! Oh, God! Save me!” over and over again. The words spun a sudden, cold-tight fear through my mind.

  I looked up and the whole face of the yard was in my view. It was a mass of churning confusion. Thousands of convicts were loose on the yard. Everyone was running at top speed in a different direction, yelling to one another. Everybody was yelling and nobody was listening. In the background was the burning cell house and beside it the 7&8 cell house. The 7&8 cell house was like a huge, fire-eating monster sucking in the flame and smoke upon the writhing convicts in its belly. And beyond, down past the stockade behind the mills, was the gray stretch of walls, connecting the earth with the sky, closing in a world.

  Yellow light shining from the open door of the hospital cut a kaleidoscopic picture into the confusion of the yard; showed flashes of convicts coming into the picture, going out, coming in, going out, everybody running. The confusion swallowed me, made me a part of it, pushing out the memory of Blocker and Metz and Mal, pushing out the memory of the dormitory and the prison. It left me with a compelling urge to run.

  I started running across the yard with that high-stepping sense of being too tall to stay on the ground, that marijuana gives you. The harder I ran the less distance I covered. I felt as if I was running up and down in the same spot. I ran harder, lifted my feet higher, until I was churning with motion, going nowhere. And then I stepped into something. I looked down and saw that I had stepped into a burnt-up convict’s belly and had pushed out huge globules of vomit through his tightly clenched teeth and over his black-burned face. Suddenly I saw them, prone gray figures on the bare ground, spotting the face of the yard. Still more were coming. Figures of charred and smoke-blackened flesh wrapped snugly in new gray blankets that they had cried for all that winter and couldn’t get. I shuddered with sudden cold. “They don’t need the blankets,” I found myself protesting. “They don’t need the blankets. They don’t need the blankets, you goddamn fools!”

  Suddenly a variegated color pattern formed before my eyes—black, smoke-mantled night, yellow light, red flames, gray death, crisscrossing into maggoty confusion. I plowed through the sense of confusion, down in front of the hospital, feeling that each step I took was on a different color. To my left was the white glare of the hospital lobby; gray bodies on the floor and white-clad nurses bending over them. To my right was the black confusion of the yard with bodies lying in the semi-gloom amid the rushing, cursing convicts. At the fringe of the light where the shadow began, smoke was a thick, gray wall.

  I walked forward into the wall of smoke. For a moment I couldn’t see. Someone bumped into me hard, knocked me to my knees. The side of my head struck the iron railing about the walk. Out of the sudden hurt a loud voice filled my ears like a roar, “Gangway! Live one! Live one!”

  Four men swept by into the stream of the light and ran up the hospital stairs. They carried a writhing body—a live one!

  I got up and went down and stood on the sidewalk in front of the deputy’s office. The blanket which I had started out with was gone and my hands felt light from missing it. I felt in my pocket for a cigarette but didn’t have any. A convict rushed by, smoking a Bull Durham, and I said gimme a draw. He took the butt from his mouth and tossed it to me. I caught it and stuck it in my mouth. I stood there puffing on the butt while motion whirled about me as if I was standing in the center of a spinning wheel.

  The deputy’s office was the hub of the confusion. Everything began there, or ended there, or spun out from there like a ribbon of ticker tape tossed from a skyscraper window. Everything came by me. I saw everything. It was like watching a night barrage of fireworks from the top of a jag. My mind would not acquaint itself with the confusion, the rapid change of action, the finality of every spoken word, of every movement, of every curse, or every yell. I could not meet the shattering necessity of bridging the gap from life to death. The incidents which came quickly and shockingly left. I could not absorb it—the live ones and the dead ones and the strings of greenish vomit down the yellow-lighted walk. I felt only an increasing nausea.

  I saw a stream of people entering through the front gates from the outside. Doctors and newspaper reporters and policemen and black-robed priests, and a woman nurse who worked with the strangling stiffs on the yard all night and was never once molested. All mingling shoulder to shoulder with the three thousand and more slavering, running, always-running convicts. They rushed by me, over me; jostled me, cursed me.

  Suddenly I was running again, high-stepping and churning. I ran across the yard toward the burning cell block. The acrid fumes were thick over there. I began to cough. I stopped in front of the cell-house. I had forgotten what had prompted me to run.

  The scaffolding about the half-constructed 10&11 cell block was burning furiously. Smoke and flames were leaping across the stair well into the 7&8 block where the three top ranges of men were still locked in their cells. I could hear those strangled screams; those choked, unended prayers; those curses and coughs and gasps and moans and wails of those trapped men up there. The wooden joists of the roof had caught fire. I could see the furious flames of the burning roof through the gray smoke which reached down six tiers to the floor.

  Outside the cell-house door water covered the ground. Fire hoses were everywhere, like huge writhing snakes in the mud. There were two fire engines by the door. The other trucks were down at the end of the cell house, beyond the chapel. The slickered firemen rushed again and again into the dense smoke-filled block only to retreat coughing, strangling, vomiting. Several lay on the ground unconscious. Insane-looking convicts, naked to their waists, wrestled with the hoses. Water bouncing from the hot stone sprinkled my face.

  I start
ed through the door and heard a voice yell from up above, “Get me out of here, get me out of here! You sons of bitches! Oh, you goddamned bastards—” Ending on a choking scream.

  I backed out of the doorway. But I could still hear those muffled screams.

  “Oh, God! OhhhhhHHHHHHH Godddddddd! Ohhhh GOOOOOOODDDDDDDDDDD! Get me out of here! Get me out, I say! What the hell you tryna do, kill me? You tryna kill me? I ain’t done nothing! I ain’t done nothing to nobody! You tryna kill me, you goddamned sons of bitches…? Where in the hell is that goddamned—?”

  There was someone up there unlocking the cells, someone said. I didn’t believe it. I bent over and peered up through the smoke. All I could see was a vague outline of the block in the gray smoke with a top of flame, dripping water and slime and those horrible choking half-prayers, half-curses.

  A big colored convict called Block Buster loomed suddenly in the doorway. He had come out of the gray smoke like a sudden apparition. He had a limp figure draped across his shoulder. The unconscious figure strangled suddenly and vomited down the front of Block Buster’s shirt I looked at the slimy clotted filth, felt my stomach turn over.

  “Get a blanket and give me a hand here,” I heard a voice say. I could feel my lips twitching as a wave of nausea swept over me.

  “No can do,” I said in a low, choked whisper and backed away.

  A policeman pushed me out of the way to let four men pass with a blanket with a body. I stumbled backward over a fire hose, sat down in the slop. I jumped up and started to run again. I didn’t know where I was running—anywhere, so long as it was away.

  I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I didn’t feel scared. I wanted to go up there. My mind wanted to go up there. My mind kept prompting me to turn around and run back and go up there and save some poor bastard’s life. But I couldn’t. That was all. I couldn’t. I couldn’t go up there and bring one of them down, for love or money. I just couldn’t do it.

  I kept running through the confusion with a high-stepping churning gait. My mind was in a gray daze. Blue-coated firemen passed my vision. Their loud megaphoned voices reached my ears. The sights of the policemen were in my eyes. The sights of the living convicts lugging the dead. The sights of the smoke and the flame and the water and the guards. Of convicts who were in for murder and rape and arson, who had shot down policemen in dark alleys, who had snatched pocket books and run, who had stolen automobiles and forged checks, who had mutilated women and carved their torsos into separate arms and legs and heads and packed them into trunks; now working overtime at their jobs of being heroes, moving through the smoke with reckless haste to save some other bastard’s life. White faces gleaming with sweat, streaked with soot, white teeth flashing in greasy black faces; working like hell, some shouting, some laughing, some solemn, some hysterical; drunk from their momentary freedom, drunk from being brave for once in a cowardly life. Fun, excitement, something to do…something to do…something to do…something to do…

  In the distance, from wherever I ran, I saw the walls.

  There was an eternity in which I ran, running and gasping and shoving and running and cursing and striking out blindly with my clenched fists and slipping and running again, in which I seemed to be standing still while the chaos rushed past me, pulling at me, clutching at my sleeves, choking me. I reached the corner of the chapel, forty feet away.

  I tried the chapel door. It was unlocked. I walked inside. In the vestibule, just inside the doorway, a convict stood in the darkness, crying. He was repeating over and over again with slow, dull monotony, “Son of a bitch…! Jesus Christ…! Son of a bitch…! Jesus Christ…! Son of a bitch…! Jesus Christ…!”

  He didn’t see me. He didn’t seem to see anything.

  “Say a prayer for me, dear brother, say a prayer for me.” My lips formed the words involuntarily, shocking me.

  I went up the steps and into the chapel. Some convicts were shooting craps on the floor down in front of the pulpit. I listened for a moment to the snapping of their fingers, their low intent voices. “Eighter from Decatur…Huhn…! Be eight…!” The dice rattled again. One of the players looked up and saw me. “What you shoot, Jimmy?”

  I shook my head, feeling my face break crookedly. My mind snapped loose in sudden, grotesque fantasy. God and the devil gambling for the souls of the dying convicts…I bet this nigger murderer. He cut his wife into black bloody hash with a barlow chiv…All right, I’ll put up this white rape fiend. Omnipotence touched me. I saw the whole universe standing there before me in its bleached, fleshless skeleton.

  Then I heard a slow run on the bass keys of the piano. I heard a sound alien from the confusion outside. I saw the red glare through the frosted panes. I looked toward the stage. Someone had rolled the cover from the grand piano. A slim, curly-headed youth formed a question mark on the stool. He was playing Saul’s “Death March,” with slow feeling. A pencil-streak of firelight, coming through a broken pane high up on the wall, cut a white stripe down his face. It was like a scar. His cheeks were wet with tears. Then the slow, steady beat of the bass keys hammered on my mind like a hard fist.

  “Don’t you know people are dying outside, fool?” I asked.

  He looked around. After a wire-tight moment he said, without stopping, “I’m playing their parade march to some red hell.”

  Worms began crawling in my stomach. I backed out of the chapel, into the chaotic night, feeling those worms crawling in my stomach as if I, too, was dead and in the ground and already rotting. Everything was gone, the touch of omnipotence, the skeletoned universe.

  Outside the scene had changed as if another act had come onto a revolving stage. A snarling jam of convicts surged in a ragged mass about a circle of policemen who stood about the cell house door with submachine guns.

  I heard a voice scream, “The walls are falling.”

  I saw a policemen’s legs begin to tremble. The convicts surged slowly closer. His legs began to shake violently, the knees knocking together visibly. Something strange came out of me and I heard myself laughing. I felt an uncontrollable desire to throw something into that circle of policemen, and set off the fireworks.

  “Get out of the way, you bastards!” someone said.

  A crippled convict broke from the mass of tightly jammed convicts and ran toward the policemen in a hobbling, one-sided gait like a crayfish. A policeman grabbed him by the collar. The convicts started forward. Then the deputy came into the scene, holding up his hands. “Men! Men!” he pleaded.

  I turned and walked away. Suddenly I was running again, arms churning, knees pumping. At the end of the walk I stopped. I stood there, undecided.

  Two convicts were talking. One said, “There’s Yorky! He won near two hundred up in the idle house yesterday.”

  The other one looked at him. “What say we clip it?”

  “Sure, he don’t need it no more.”

  I turned away and went over into the school. Mal was coming out of the lavatory.

  “Where the hell you been?” I asked.

  “I was looking for you, then the deputy had me over in the 1&2 block knocking the locks off the doors with a sledge hammer.”

  “Yeah? What for?”

  “Aw, he wanted to let the rest of the guys out and they couldn’t find the keys. They can’t find the guards. They haven’t seen any of the cell-house guards since the fire began.”

  He was smiling and his face looked very clean and his teeth looked very white, with the two gold crowns shining in the light, and his lips looked very red and he looked very pretty. “They had to knock the locks off the cells in the 3&4 block, too,” he said, smiling and looking pretty. “They let everybody out, even the seven guys in death row. They’re out, too.”

  I put my arm about his waist and kissed him. He tried to pull away.

  I said, “Goddammit, let me kiss you!” He put his arms around me and we kissed each other.

  After a time he broke away and said, “I got to go.”

  I released h
im. I didn’t feel anything. There was no excitement, no passion, just a lingering feeling of the pressure of his lips.

  “I’ve got to go up in the tin shop,” he said, looking at me queerly. “Cap Hardy wants me to go up there and keep a lookout on things the rest of the night.”

  “Okay,” I said, looking at him, watching him turn and go through the schoolroom, watching the motion of his wide hips. After a moment I went outside. I looked around and suddenly I began running again. A convict at the corner of the deputy’s office stopped me. “Send a telegram home,” he said, thrusting out a handful of Western Union blanks. “Tell the folks you’re living.”

  “Gimme two,” I said. He gave them to me. I went back into the schoolroom and made out one each to my mother and father. “I’m living,” I wrote. “James Monroe.” But I couldn’t remember my mother’s address. I went out and turned in the blanks to the convict. “I can’t remember my mother’s address,” I said.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Just put the city on it.”

  The gray prone bodies got into my eyes. White man, black man, gentile, Jew. The old and the young, the lame and the sound. Some used to be bankers, some politicians, some sneak thieves, some racketeers. Just gray humps on the bare ground now. Whatever they had been, or had ever dreamed of being—whatever their race or their nationality or their background—that foot of greenish vomit hanging from their teeth made them all alike.

  Looking at them I didn’t get a thing, neither pity nor sorrow now awe nor fear—nothing. I saw Starlight there with the stink gone out of him, lying very still, no longer swaggering about the cell and poking out his fat belly, imagining himself a prize fighter. I saw Mother Jones, long and black and dead. And Blackie, small and delicate and white and dead. And Nig, big and black and tough and dead. I saw them all, scores of them on the bare ground, with their teeth bared and vomit in their lips, and their bodies grotesquely twisted, and their hands scorched and burned and gripping something, and their eyes open and staring at something. Out of the clear blue sky came the quotation with no connection whatsoever in my mind: “While you live, Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return…”