Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  I picked up the single-typed sheet with a forced resignation, thinking, maybe after this he’ll find something to do. But after the first line I was caught, startled:

  Shadows, they are all about me. In the stench-laden corners of my dungeon they are black sentinels at the black gates of death, forbidding me sanctuary. On the slime-encrusted floor they lie motionless, writhing in the eyes of my fear. They hover alive in the space about me, vampires of thought, drinking the life of my soul. Shadows, flung into space by sharp corners, breaking off at unknown angles, falling on concrete floors, climbing black walls. Shadows, receding before light, racing rapidly off to hide behind bars, making blackness. Shadows of bars swinging out into space to fall with soul-bruising heaviness on shadows of men. Shadows of shadows, no longer men, victims of the night eternal, victims of the shadows…

  “Did you write this?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Do you like it?”

  “I think it is exceptional,” I said. It gave me a funny feeling, though. A creepy sort of feeling. I was sick with being afraid for him.

  “It came to me one night in the cell,” he said.

  I could picture him lying on his bunk in his darkened cell, haunted with terrible fears. “Come on, I’m going to get you some money and let you play some poker,” I said.

  He started to take the piece but I said, “No, leave it there, I want to read it over.”

  “I’m going to win today,” he said. “All for you.”

  I read his piece over. I always thought of it as “Shadows” after that. For some strange reason it provided a compelling incentive for what I was trying to do. My memory became sharp, my thoughts began assembling into a logical pattern. Everything within me seemed to struggle for a sanity. The cold, pure clarity of legal reasoning had never been so welcome. I wrote on my opinion rapidly and with assurance. The right terminology came without search. When I had finished it I felt confident of its merit. I was jubilant.

  When I was closing up my typewriter Signifier came up and told me that Dido was winning. I felt excited and glad. I went down and stood behind him with my foot on the bench. He looked up and smiled and then divided his chips.

  “Want to play, Jimmy?”

  I shook my head. “Too crowded.”

  There were already ten in the game and a dozen more waiting for a seat. Everyone wanted a chance to horse at Dido. He had a large stack of chips and was bulldozing the game. He was getting an immense kick out of it. After a time he said, “You can play my hand, Jimmy, if you want to.”

  I noticed several of the players about to protest but I grinned and said, “No, you keep on, you’re doing fine.” They were all relieved; they figured they might catch him in a pot and get even and they knew I wouldn’t give them a chance to get their money back. But after awhile he lost interest and quit, anyway.

  “I want to be with you,” he said.

  He was so happy and excited over winning that his eyes shone and he could hardly talk. “I waited until I got a pair before I’d call and they thought I didn’t have anything and bet into me and I—”

  “You turned them wrong-side out,” I supplied.

  “When I got a big stack of chips I ran them with nothing. I just took their money.”

  “I finished the thing I was working on, too,” I said.

  “Oh, let me read it,” he said.

  I got it and let him read it.

  “This is genius,” he said. “I didn’t know it could be that much better. You are a genius, Jimmy. Are you as happy and excited as I am?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  24

  DIDO AND I WERE talking one day—what about I could never afterwards recall—but in the course of the conversation he said, “Sure, but a convict is human, too,” and that started us off on something new that I never forgot.

  “We know it, but who else can you sell it to?” I said.

  “It is enough to sell it to yourself,” he said, surprising me.

  “You’re full of little philosophies,” I said.

  “That’s what prison does to you,” he said. “You come in as a neophyte and go out as a sage.”

  “Of course I can’t blame people much for not thinking of us as being human, too,” I said. “People have just so much sympathy inside of them and they don’t care to spend it on convicts.”

  “I can’t blame anybody for anything,” he said. “What deacon may have rung a bell with larceny in his heart, or what angel carried heaven’s tidings to hell?”

  “That sounds like Omar,” I said. “Where do you get so much fatalism?”

  “It’s not mine,” he said. “It’s life’s. The other person in everybody’s bed is death.”

  “What big teeth you have,” I said, sarcastically.

  But he was serious. “I’m twenty-four,” he said.

  “Now isn’t that a lot of living?” I said. “You’d better tie your long whiskers off the floor.”

  And deeply serious, brooding, remote, he said, “It might not be so much but it was plenty for me until I met you.”

  I jerked around and looked at him. He meant it. “That’s a funny thing to say.”

  “Everybody needs a purpose,” he said. It didn’t sound right.

  “You have a mother,” I argued.

  “I’m such a disappointment to her,” he confessed.

  “Sure, I’m a disappointment to my mother, too,” I said. “She had her heart set on me. But if I needed a feeling to pull me through the twenty years I started with, I could have gotten it from her.”

  “You don’t know my story,” he said. “I’ve gotten all of that already. You see, I was in the reformatory and my mother sent me three-hundred dollars to come home on.”

  “And you got broke and got into trouble and came back to prison,” I supplied. “I understand. But mothers are funny things, little boy. They wouldn’t sell you out for that, no matter how much of that stuff called mother love you destroy and abuse. They still have just as much left. It’s like a spring that never runs dry. Your mother wouldn’t ever fail you, little boy.”

  “She wouldn’t,” he said. “It’s me. I was out twelve days. I didn’t even get out of the state. You were so right when you called me haywire—” He broke off and asked, “Have you ever been scared?”

  I was slow in replying. “Of life? Of what it can do to you? Of the nights? Of being alone? Scared of thoughts and feelings and memories?” I took a deep breath. “Sure, I’ve been scared,” I confessed. I had never confessed that before to anyone. “I’ve been scared a lot of times. I’m still scared a lot of times.”

  “You’re so much like me, and yet so different.” He was silent for a moment and I said, “But I don’t think about it. If you don’t think about it, it can’t hurt you.” But he didn’t hear me. “That’s some of it, but not all,” he said slowly. “Have you ever been afraid of people not understanding you, and grown up feeling that no one ever understood you, not even your mother; and when you had given everyone a chance to understand you, and no one ever had, telling yourself that you didn’t give a damn if they never did—that you simply did not care? And then being wild and reckless and uncaring and saying, Take me or leave me and to hell with everybody, and not really meaning it? All the time so scared and lonely and away from everybody in a shadowed world and wanting so badly for someone to tell you that you are right; or if not that, for someone to tell you that you are all right, anyway?” When he stopped he was crying.

  I wanted to hold him in my arms as I would have a little baby and comfort and reassure him; I felt so tender toward him. “You’re all right,” I said. “You’re all right, kid.”

  A spark of worship flickered in his eyes. “Sometimes you’re wonderful,” he choked.

  “It’s only that you brood too much,” I said. “It’s only in your mind that no one understands you.”

  Suddenly he was laughing. “But of course you don’t understand; how could you? You don’t have to be afraid of yourself. You don
’t have to be afraid ever—” and now he was deeply bitter, “of doing something so sickening that you want to hang yourself a moment afterward, and still not being able to help it.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve done a lot of things that I’m not proud of,” I said.

  “But they’d still stand telling,” he said. “Let’s don’t talk about it,” I said. For the instant I hated him for everything he had implied; all the moments and all the men.

  Now it was his turn to reassure me. “You’re wrong, Jimmy,” he said. “It never came to that.”

  I felt better. “The trouble with you is that you have a fatalism, but it isn’t a true fatalism,” I said. “You don’t actually believe it or it wouldn’t desert you when you need it most.”

  “Now you’re getting fleas in your beard,” he said. We laughed.

  Sometimes in the evenings we’d stand beside his bunk with a magazine opened on the blanket and real aloud to each other just because we liked to hear each other’s voices. At other times we’d stand in the window and watch the sun setting beyond the bathhouse. “God, I wonder what’s beyond that horizon,” I’d say, and he’d say, “You can take it from me, Jimmy, it’s not what you think.”

  “I’d be willing to chance it, anyway.”

  “I hope you will and I’ll pray to God that you’ll never be as disappointed as I was.”

  “You sound like you’ve been a lot of places.”

  “I have, but that horizon was always there, between me and the other side.” And looking at me, he’d say, “And then I met you and something is happening to me. I don’t know myself just what it is, only that the horizon doesn’t matter any more because the other side is all inside of me now.”

  “You don’t have to worry any more,” I’d say, and he’d give me one of those scintillating smiles.

  On Tuesdays and Fridays he was taken to the hospital for treatments and I asked him why. “I have sinus trouble,” he said.

  “You don’t show any of the symptoms,” I said.

  “But I have it very bad at times,” he said. “It’s all up here.” He tapped his forehead just above the bridge of the nose. “Sometimes it’s so bad it almost drives me crazy. My mother has it too.”

  “I never thought it was very serious,” I said.

  “It is, though,” he said. “It is very serious and I hope you never have it. Ninety per cent of all the people who have it go crazy, or maybe it’s ninety per cent of all the people who go crazy have it. Anyway, it’s—”

  “Ninety per cent,” I said. “Like corn whiskey.”

  “—very serious, James Buchanan Monroe, and it will drive you crazy, and I hope you never have it.”

  “If it drives you crazy you’d better go over and have something done for it because you’re crazy enough as it is.”

  “I’m much better now, aren’t I?” he asked.

  “You’re splendid,” I said.

  The next time he went to the hospital he signed up for an operation and about the middle of December they took him over to the hospital to operate on him. I got Captain Tom to take me over to see him and I brought him the soap and toilet articles he would need. The next day when they operated on him, I got Tom to take me back on sick call and I was there when they wheeled him out of the operating room. I walked beside the stretchers and touched his hand and told him to take it easy, but he didn’t need me then because the anesthetic was still with him. When the anesthetic left him was when he needed me, but I wasn’t there.

  The long letters I sent over daily by the paper boy helped him a lot, he said in his replies. And those few lines he wrote to me helped me a great deal, too. It was dreadful in the dormitory with him away. I didn’t know it could get so dreadful in a dormitory filled with convicts.

  Signifier elected himself to cheer me. “You look terrible,” he said. “You look heartbroken. Cheer up, he’ll be back in a month or two. You better get hold of yourself, you’ll come down with t.b.”

  I paid the colored porter and the head nurse in A-ward a dollar a day each to look after him. But I didn’t tell him because I thought he wouldn’t have wanted me to.

  They let him out the day before Christmas. It was just like going home when he came back. They wanted to keep him in a week longer, he said, but he told them he had to get out in time for Christmas.

  “I told them it was a matter of life and death. I told them I just had to get out,” he said. “I just had to be with you this Christmas, Jimmy, there might never be another one.”

  There was no answer to that.

  I asked him how they had treated him and he said everyone had been swell. They all knew he was my friend and they were fine, he said.

  “They’ve got a swell bunch of fellows over there anyway,” I said, and he said, “They are, really, but I had expected them to be sort of snotty.”

  “They’ve just got a bad rep,” I said. The chiseling sons of bitches, I said under my breath. “But they’re all right,” I said.

  His mother had sent him two dollars, his monthly allowance, in a letter, but during the Christmas excitement it had been overlooked by the mail censor, and he received the two one-dollar bills with the letter. He had bought a bottle of sodium-amytal capsules with it. They were given to the t.b. patients as opiates, but taken two or three at one time with coffee, they gave a wonderful jag. The capsules were blue so we called them blue boys. After we got jagged we figured no one would know what we were talking about when we said blue boys. But everybody called them blue boys.

  About eight o’clock that night they brought me a box from my mother and he got one from his mother about an hour afterward. The boxes had been coming in all that day and they let the lights stay on until twelve o’clock to deliver them. We had a very fine jag from blue boys and were filled with good eats from home. We sang Christmas carols loudly while he played the accompaniment on his uke and at midnight we were so excited we couldn’t sleep and sat up and talked all night about all the Christmases we remembered.

  Christmas morning we took some more blue boys with our breakfast coffee and were wonderfully jagged when we went over to the show. Everything was very funny and delightful and we laughed all during the show.

  We took some more blue boys with our dinner coffee and that afternoon we played poker and lost and it was all so funny and nice. Everything was so funny and wonderful, just like a dream. We laughed at the prison and laughed at losing pots. We had completely forgotten the other convicts in the game until one of them exploded with pent-up laughter and then they were all laughing. We thought we would die from embarrassment. We had to quit and go away. But it was all like that. We didn’t know there was anyone else in the dormitory. Christmas seemed to belong to us alone.

  Everyone began talking about us, even Captain Tom and Captain Charlie. But we thought they were very stupid and funny people and we made little jokes about them and laughed behind their backs. Signifier and Candy came down the day after Christmas and helped us eat what was left of our boxes. We were very witty and hospitable hosts and pressed chicken and cake on them until they were stuffed. We teased them and made little quips about them which we thought, in our state of entrancement, they didn’t understand. Then we gave them some blue boys. Candy took all of his the first thing the next morning and went down in the colored convicts’ skin game and bamma-ed an eight spot through. When you play a blind card, after you have fallen and lost, they say you have bamma-ed it, because the boys from Alabama who think they are tough play that way. Sometimes another piker picks your card and plays it without knowing you are playing it too, and if you can shuffle your card into the dead at the end of the deal before it is noticed, all anybody can do is just grumble. But Candy wasn’t smart enough to get away with it and he got everybody’s money terribly mixed up. It took half of the convicts in the dormitory, including Dido and myself—especially Dido and myself—to get it straightened out and Candy wanted to fight all of us with the little home-made knife he carried, with the blade so shor
t you could hardly see it. It took Tom and the hall guard and Polack Paul and a half-dozen other convicts to keep the colored convicts from biting off his ears. Tom called Dido and me aside and told us to get rid of that dope and not to give Candy any more of it. But we were so jagged we could hardly wait to get away before we were laughing again.

  Later in the week Dido received a typewriter his mother had sent him for a Christmas present. I had never seen him so happy and excited. “Oh, isn’t she swell?” he gushed. “She’s perfect,” I said.

  It wasn’t a very good typewriter but we never let on that it wasn’t the very best. That night he took it apart while I sat by and watched, with varying degrees of apprehension.

  “Maybe you ought not to do it,” I said. “Maybe she wouldn’t like it.”

  “She’ll love it,” he said. “You’d love her, Jimmy. She was so young when I was born, only fifteen, and she didn’t know how to raise me. I’m her love child. People used to think she was my older sister.” He worked while he talked. “When I was old enough so we could talk she taught me a swell way to live. Whatever we thought was right, honestly and sincerely, we took for right and acted on it and lived by it. And all my life I’ve felt that way.” He stopped and looked up at me. “Don’t you think that’s a swell way to live?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “It is, Jimmy,” he said earnestly, like a little child. “Everything would be wrong if you couldn’t feel that it was right. In the middle of the night when you’re awake and can’t sleep, when you think about it you have to feel it’s right.”

  We took the last of our blue boys New Year’s morning. The whole week had been like a wonderful dream. The next day we had headaches and a nasty taste in our mouths. But we didn’t have any regrets.

  “You don’t know how swell it is not to have any regrets,” he said.

  Later on I discovered that I was one hundred and thirty-five dollars in debt. My typewriter was in pawn and his was all apart. We had jumped on a fellow and broken up his game and the only thing that had kept us out of the hole was Tom and Captain Charlie looking out for me. “You had a ball,” Signifier said enviously. “When did you take your blue boys?” I asked him. “I’m a chump,” he said. “I took mine that same night and didn’t do anything but sleep through breakfast.”