Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  She went to the warden and told him the story. At first the warden scoffed at the suggestion that my life would be endangered in the hospital. He refused to intercede. But my mother begged and pleaded for me. Finally he promised her that no harm would come to me while I was in the hospital. He sent one of his clerks inside to take me over to the hospital. When the doctor saw me coming in, with the warden’s clerk, he wouldn’t speak to me. But Jake Ingalls saw that I was taken care of. I stayed flat on my back for two weeks. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the ache left. My back felt as well as it had ever felt. I returned to my company.

  My mother had remained in the city during the time I was in the hospital. I wanted her to stay there near to me for a longer time, so I gave her the power of attorney to draw my compensation. It would not be enough for her to live on, I knew, but it would help. The papers were drawn up for one year and I signed them. I felt much safer with her living in the city.

  18

  DURING THE LAST week in July we were transferred back to 2-2. I was put into a cell with Chump Charlie, Big Loony, and a tall, skinny, dried-up Mississippi red neck called Pappy Calhoun. It wasn’t as tough in the cells as it had been before because in some miraculous manner, during our stay in 2-6, we had changed from “agitators” into legitimate cripples. How this had come about, since we were the same convicts with the same afflictions and attitudes, I didn’t know. But it was so, like the world when God got through making it.

  There were also cripple companies on 1-2 and 1- and 2-1, part of whom were also from the dormitory. During the afternoons, when the weather permitted, we were taken out behind the wooden dormitory in the area facing down from the death house along the outside wall. It was a recreation period for all four cripple companies. We pitched horseshoes and played softball, visited with each other or just strolled about in the bright sunshine. Later we were given permission to use the old baseball diamond as our playground. It had not been in use since the year before the fire. Weeds had overgrown the diamond and the wooden grandstand had rotted. But it was still good enough to hold those who wished to sit idly in the sun, and we pulled up a few weeds so we could see the base lines and played softball on the old diamond, with our raggedy balls made out of rocks wrapped in cotton socks and wrapped with hospital tape. Someone got hold of a set of rings and pitching quoits became popular also. It was very pleasant to get outside in the sun each day.

  In the mornings when we remained indoors the cells were unlocked and we had range privilege. We could visit from cell to cell and Blocker and I ran our poker game the same as we always had. After supper we were locked up again but the four of us in our cell used to play seven-up or gin rummy or canasta until bedtime. Chump always insisted on being my partner. It was very hot in the cells. Each evening after supper Nick would bring Chump a bucket of warm water so he could take his “bird bath.” Chump had a safety razor and all kinds of lotions and powders. He shaved every day and twice a week he shaved the hairs from his legs and underneath his arms. After he bathed he rubbed his skin with lotions, and powdered himself all over, and dabbled perfume underneath his arms and between his legs and back of his ears until the cell smelled like a whore house. It was impossible for the guards not to have noticed it because the convicts in the cells on either side, and above and below and even halfway down the range, could smell him when a breeze was blowing through.

  “I hear you, Chump,” someone would yell at him.

  “Do you hear me?”

  “We hear you over this way too, Chump?”

  “How do I sound?” he would ask, winking at me and looking very pleased with himself.

  “Sound like a mel-o-dee. Sweet-lee and loving-lee…”

  He’d get a great kick out of them. Later on while we were playing cards, he’d wear nylon undershirts and silk pajama trousers. His smooth, powdered and lotioned arms would be exposed, his freshly shaved and powdered face sticky with complacency, and his hair parted and falling down on each side like a careless bob; and smelling as bitchy as a doll on the make. If you could blame Nick for going for him you could do more than I could do, sitting there with my nostrils clogged with perfume and my eyes filled with the sight of his smooth, round hairless arms; or lying on my upper bunk across from his while he winked at me and made kissing sounds with his lips, his eyes as raw and open as those of a depraved woman watching a stallion in heat.

  “Come on over when they go to sleep, daddy, I’ll be nice to you,” he’d say, forming the words soundlessly with his lips.

  And there I was, choking on the perfume, looking into his heated eyes, watching his begging lips as he lay there in the semi-gloom of his upper bunk with the aisle light just missing him as it shone into our darkened cell, making his arms and legs—accentuated by the pink satin loincloth—look like an old oil painting. Myself as cocked as a hair-trigger forty-five, thinking of all the whores I should have had to carry me through all those years. Thinking, I’m a convict doing time and what in the hell have I got to lose? Thinking, after all, as simple as it is, what am I going through all this thinking for? And then, at the last moment, reneging, losing all desire and wanting to hit him in the mouth; cursing him, calling him everything but a child of God, while he lay there shivering with each curse as if I was whipping him with a switch and ecstatic currents of pain were passing through his body, going finally into a convulsion; while I lay there all night with an excruciating ache, until finally, just before dawn, I went to sleep.

  The next morning Chump said, “Hello, Jimmy,” in a tenor lilt as if we had really had a session the night before. But the session had been all his.

  “Good morning, Big Loony,” I said.

  “What do you say this fine morning, Pappy?”

  I turned to Chump and said coldly, “‘Lo.” But Chump didn’t let it bother him; he was as smug as if he had had it all his way.

  Chump kept after me, getting something, it seemed, from my abuse. It was the fact he thought he was going to win me that made me begin to hate him because I was afraid that he was going to do it. He thought he was so very clever and smart and wise, on top of being pretty, that sooner or later he would make me fall for him. And I was afraid that this was true.

  On candy-ordering day I would buy two boxes of candy and give them away and then help him eat his box and the extra one Nick would bring him. On nights when Nick sent him hot sandwiches from the kitchen, when he could get the night guard to bring them up, I’d always eat the choicest sandwich and let Chump eat the one I left. And when my underclothes and socks got dirty I’d have Chump wash them in the cell although he always sent his own out by Nick, to have them laundered. When we went out on the yard I made a point of obviously avoiding him and if he so much as spoke to me directly I’d turn him off with the most brusque reply I could think of. And still I couldn’t stop him.

  Once he said, “God, Jimmy, you treat me so rough when I love you so much. You’re asking me to take a hell of a lot, Jimmy, a hell of a lot.”

  “You can always quit, honey, when you get tired,” I said.

  I derived the greatest pleasure, however, when I could hurt him enough to make him cry. Then I would say, “I can stand you when you’re hot and bothered because that’s the way you are, and I can put up with the things you say because a bitch like you might say anything, but you’re just contemptible when you try to impose your tears on me because you know I don’t want to feel sorry for you and I’m not going to.”

  “What do you want with me, anyway, Jimmy?” he asked. “Don’t you even love me a little?”

  “To tell you the truth, I never think of you in quite that way,” I said. “When I think of you at all, I think of you loving me and not ever as me loving you.”

  “I’d kill you for that if I didn’t love you so much,” he said.

  “You’ve got a hell of a lot better reasons than that if you were going to,” I said.

  His eyes got hot and feverish. “You certainly do ask me to take a lot,” he said.


  “So it’s like that now, is it?” I said, feeling all the contempt for him that it was necessary for me to feel to keep from despising myself. But I despised myself, anyway. I couldn’t keep from despising myself.

  I was getting very tired of the prison and disgusted with myself. Everything was like stale, flat beer sitting warm and pallid in the sun; like a flaccid, bloated corpse just before it begins to rot. Tired of the prison and disgusted with myself. But the prison was indifferent. The days did not give a damn and the nights were no less long. Sunsets came and sunsets went and the walls were rooted just as deeply into the everlasting earth. Stone and steel, and time coming and going but never staying, and ever the eternal same. And I was getting tired of it. Tired of hearing and seeing and feeling and learning of the perfidy and degradation of convicts and of myself. Tired of murder and rape and jobs and punks and hacks and monstrosities.

  And then a simple-minded convict had to write another simple-minded bastard to tell him to keep his mouth shut and Tommy Tucker, to whom he had given the kite to be delivered, had to take it to the director and the director had to have the convicts over and get the truth out of them with a three-hour clubbing; and the two damn fools had to break down and confess that they were the ones who had set the prison afire and burned up two hundred and seventy-seven other convicts. And I had thought, my God, what the hell did they do that for? they’ll only burn them now and that will make two hundred and seventy-nine. What the hell did any of them do any of it for? What did Tommy have to rat for? And why couldn’t the officials, for once, have let it pass and no one but themselves would ever have been the wiser nor have thought about it nor have given a damn, one way or the other, how the prison fire had started? Since it had and since the two hundred and seventy-seven bastards had died and since, now that they were dead, there wasn’t anything anyone could do to bring them back to life; neither clubbing two incidental convicts into unconsciousness nor burning them to death in the electric chair nor giving Tommy Tucker an honor job, which was the customary reward for such services beyond the call of duty; which by then you knew so well you could close your eyes and see, and be tired of—be so completely tired of.

  But that wasn’t the way it turned out, which only made the difference you didn’t allow for so much the same as all the other differences in the past which you had not allowed for which were the same old differences. The way it turned out was that one of the fellows hanged himself in the hole one night and the other got life and waited for a year to hang himself, and Tommy Tucker was transferred out to the prison farm and his natural life commuted to take effect within ninety days. But after sixty days he couldn’t stand the farm any longer, after having stood the prison for nine years, so he ran away. He was away a week and was caught and brought back and his pardon revoked, so he hanged himself too, making it a grand slam. And then none of them held any malice or animosity against one another, nor did anything they had ever done any longer matter for the grass rooting in their rotten hearts was certainly no less greener, as Omar might have said, than grass rooting in the hearts of saints.

  We were transferred back into the 2-6 dormitory late that year.

  One night Chump said, “Kiss me, Jimmy.”

  I said. “My mother’s coming over to see me next w r eek, Chump, and I don’t want to kiss you until after she comes because I want to kiss her. you see. and it’ll take a full week to get my mouth clean now from kissing you before.”

  He went for his knife and I thought for a moment it was going to be on. But he put the knife away and went down to the front end of the dormitory and walked back and forth for hours and that night when he came back to bed he said. “I’m through. Jimmy. I still love you but you ask me to take toe much.”

  After that he let his beard grow long and his uniform get dirty and baggy and he gave away all his nylon underwear and silk pajamas and began wearing the state-issue drawers again and sleeping in them and looking like hell. And still I didn’t get anything out of it.

  It was about then that they installed an improved motion-picture machine in the chapel, and that Christmas most of us saw the first decent movie we had seen in years. After that we saw a picture each Saturday. The idle companies went in the morning and the working companies in the afternoon. The honor men went at night.

  Another year was gone. The things they brought they took away. The things they left I didn’t want, such as the shame and the self-contempt and the feeling of being a convict at last. They left a great weariness also. I was getting very tired and disgusted.

  19

  AROUND THE FIRST of the year we got a number of newcomers who were drawing disability compensation from the Veterans Administration. We already had quite a few old-timers drawing pensions of one kind or another from the first world war. We even had a couple of grandpappys drawing pensions from the Spanish American War. And there were a number of crippled vets in our company who’d been in prison several years and didn’t know before then that they could draw disability compensation for injuries sustained in civilian life. When they found out from the newcomers they, too, could get on the government gravy train they rushed over to the deputy’s office and sent in applications. It wasn’t long before we had more than fifty vets in our company drawing pensions of from twenty to one hundred and fifty dollars monthly.

  It was comical how some of those vets got fleeced out of their money. Wives who hadn’t visited them since their imprisonment began coming around regularly on visiting days. Those who didn’t have wives were tricked into long-distance affairs with other convict’s sisters or mothers or aunts or cousins or sweethearts—and even in some cases with other convict’s wives. A convict would tell the vet about the woman—his sister or mother or friend—and then help the vet smuggle a letter out to her. The next thing you knew the woman had a pass from the welfare department to visit the vet. and before you knew what was happening the vet was sending her his monthly check. In some instances the vets never even saw the women and just knew them through secret correspondence. But that didn’t stop them from giving those women their money.

  One of the convict nurses in the hospital had a rather pretty sister who used to come over to the chapel on Sundays with the outside visitors. He’d point her out to the vets on his sucker list and the next Sunday he’d have her smile at them. That was all that was needed. He promoted seven vets at the same time. Then one Sunday she didn’t show up and the following week all seven suckers got letters from her stating that she had become ill suddenly and had to have an expensive operation and didn’t know where she was going to get the money to pay for it. She got more than two thousand dollars from those guys. Shortly afterward the nurse got a pardon.

  The officials did all they could to stop this racket but the vets went over to the deputy’s office and swore out affidavits that these women were their wives, in many instances women they’d never seen. You couldn’t blame them much. They’d been going along for years, forgotten, woman-starved, and friendless. Month after month the money piled up in the front office. They couldn’t spend it. They were lonely and frustrated. Suddenly they found themselves with five hundred or a thousand dollars to their credit. They were ripe for plucking by the first woman to say, “I love you,” or for that matter by anyone—man, woman, or child—who wrote in from the outside on some scented stationery with an enclosed picture of a pretty girl. It didn’t make any difference whether the picture had been bought from some cheap studio or whether the woman ever existed. They believed that these women, whose pictures were enclosed in these perfumed letters, were interested in them because that was what they wanted to believe. One guy had a picture of a well-known movie actress inscribed, “For my darling Ronnie, with all my love, Yvonne.” It hung at the head of his bunk and he sent Yvonne eighty-five bucks every month. Several guys tried to tell him who the dame was but he didn’t believe them. We got a great laugh out of it.

  The colored boys really preened themselves. They went in for purple lounging rob
es and sky-blue silk pajamas and yellow socks and long, tan, pointed shoes; buying not one pair, but two and three. One colored boy named Sanders bought eight pairs of shoes, five tan and three black, for which he paid about twenty dollars a pair. The warden called him out to his office and asked him what he wanted with so many pairs of shoes.

  “I wants a pair for each day in the week and two for Sunday,” he grinned. The warden told him that he didn’t have that many pairs of shoes himself. “That’s all right,” Sanders said. “Don’t you worry. I’ll buy you a pair next ordering-day.”

  But I could understand what he meant. Outside they say clothes make the man, but in prison it’s shoes that make the convict.

  Another colored boy called Fofo, who was drawing a hundred and twenty dollars monthly, discovered he had over three thousand dollars to his credit. He’d been in about four years then and hadn’t had a visit in all that time. All of a sudden he sent to Alabama for his wife, whom he hadn’t seen since he went into the army at the beginning of the war, and had her set up housekeeping in the city. Then he got the ugliest, blackest fag in prison and set up housekeeping for himself inside. The officials did all they could to save some of his money for him. They stopped him from ordering anything from the outside and cut down his commissary order to fifty cents a week. But they didn’t think to stop him from ordering newspapers and magazines because they all knew old Fofo couldn’t read. So he’d get the paper and magazine men to give him cash for money orders, four dollars in cash for a five-dollar slip. One day it was discovered that he had sent in cashier’s slips for over four hundred dollars worth of papers and magazines. In three months they had him. He was stone-broke. The warden froze his compensation so he couldn’t touch it. His fag hit him over the head with a hockey stick. They transferred the fag to the girl-boy company on 5-4. The last he heard of his wife she was living with another man. But he was a good-natured old boy and he didn’t let it worry him a bit.