Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  I was instantly contrite. “Hit me,” I said. “Come on and hit me.” I wanted him to hit me.

  He put a handkerchief to his lips. Above it his eyes were unreadable. “Why don’t you come on and hit me?” I said. “I hit you.”

  He took the handkerchief away from his lips and they were slightly smiling. He licked the blood from them and said, “No.”

  It wasn’t real. There wasn’t anything about it that was real. And very soon it would be gone. We tried to put everything into each moment. We were very frantic and scared and desperate. Happiness was like rain drops on the desert sands.

  Once I said, “I don’t think I’ve been happy for one half an hour in all my life.”

  “Don’t I give you something?” he asked.

  “It isn’t that, that isn’t it—” I began. But there were no words for it.

  And that was the way it was, desperate and unreal and magnified and intense and grotesque and frantic. But life went on in the prison the same as it always had.

  The water was shut off again during those hot summer days. The Prison Times said the move was necessitated by our wasteful habits. But yet, on those waterless afternoons when our tongues were so dry they stuck to the roofs of our mouths, we could look out the window and watch the sprinklers running on the front lawn. Washing in the cells and dormitories was prohibited and the rule was rigidly enforced. But the prison commissary continued to take outside orders for underwear, socks, pajamas, and such articles of wearing apparel which could be washed in no other way.

  The Fourth of July brought another boxing tournament and some special eats and too much heat.

  One hot afternoon they brought in four desperadoes who had killed a sheriff. We watched the approach of the cortege from the windows. The first car was loaded with special deputies who seemed armed for war. The second car contained the prisoners. Then there were three more cars of armed deputies and two army vans of National Guardsmen with mounted machine guns.

  “Goddamn, that looks like the Big Parade,” someone said.

  “It’s the last parade, anyway.”

  “That’s the way they do it when you’re tough,” I said.

  “Tough!” Dido said. He was touched by it for some reason. “They’re not tough. They’re in the second car.” And that was being tough, I thought.

  The warden tightened the vigil about the institution and put on extra guards about the walls. Cars were not allowed to park along the street. Every precaution was taken to keep the four prisoners from being rescued. They even went to the trouble to build a new bullet-proof tower on the stockade across from death row. And one Sunday afternoon, while it was under construction, three convicts walked across the yard with a ladder and put it up against the wall and told the guard in the tower they were going to install a spotlight.

  “Come ahead,” the guard said, and they went up the ladder and slugged him and dropped over the wall. The first anyone heard about it was when a complete stranger came around to the front and tried to get to see somebody to inform. But the front guards stopped him at the sidewalk and wouldn’t let him enter. Among the precautions which had been taken to hold the four desperadoes were instructions to the front guards to keep out all strangers. So the man had to go away and find a telephone and call in to tell about the three convicts he had seen dropping over the walls. But by that time the convicts were gone. However, they were caught a few days later.

  They had gone about fifteen miles down the railroad tracks and holed-up in a jungle. From some place they had secured quite a bit of money, and three rifles and two pistols and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a case of liquor. When the posse swooped down on them they grabbed the liquor and ran. They were taken back and put in the hole. But they were so drunk it didn’t matter. All night long they sang “Mother Machree” at the tops of their voices. The same old thing.

  Time went on with its inexorable chain of events which we watched and discussed with detached interest. Nothing could make me so angry as when Dido let some part of it affect him.

  “What burns me up with you,” I would say, “is that you let some cheap, lousy convict get you mixed up in some cheap lousy situation and you make a damn fool out of yourself; whereas neither the convict nor whatever in the hell you’re trying to do has the least importance. The thing is you let little, insignificant things get you so mixed up that you lose your sense of proportion. I’ve seen you get so worked up trying to beat Johnny Brothers playing cooncan that you didn’t give a damn about anything else in the world except just to beat him. When in the first place cooncan’s a nigger’s game and you never will be able to beat him, and in the second place where you lost fourteen dollars, you couldn’t have won but a dollar if you had beat him all night, and in the third place it wasn’t important and never will be important. I don’t mind what you do, but don’t let it get important. Don’t let it touch you. There’s nothing worth touching you.” I didn’t even realize the incongruity of me preaching that doctrine.

  True to my word, when our team played again I wrapped my arm securely with adhesive tape and played shortstop. It had been five weeks since I had broken it and it didn’t trouble me at all. Once I fell forward on it fielding a slow roller, but no damage was done. Another time I made such a spectacular running catch that Tom swallowed his cigar and when they had beat him on the back and got him to breathing again he said, “That Jimmy’s a ball-playing son of a bitch. I sure hate to lose him.” Dido played center field and was excellent. He and I scored the winning runs. But they didn’t like him for it and he didn’t give a damn.

  But after that everything was swell between us and we were sitting on top of the world again, down there in our private corner. The dormitory was still there and the walls were still there and the convicts were still there, but we were unaware of them. On those hot summer days we’d lie side-by-side on my bunk and look out the window at the clouds in the sky, rolling by in great dirty flocks beneath the sun, and he would call them sheep. They did look something like sheep. Once we got a pair of smoked glasses and looked at them and everything was purple-tinted and fantastically beautiful. It was swell to be young and alive and have such a wonderful friendship, even if we were in prison. I had my mother send him a tenor guitar and the next time she visited me she asked about him. It made me feel swell.

  His mother sent him some pajamas and underwear and a very lovely scrapbook. It was wonderful of her and it made us feel a great deal better. When two people have things of their own, without being dependent on the other, it always makes things better. It put him on a more equal footing and he didn’t have to feel badly about accepting things from me. The pajamas were fine and I took one pair that I liked extremely well. He wanted me to take both pairs but I didn’t like the other pair so well.

  After that he carried himself erectly and there was a new confidence in his bearing and he looked very handsome. We didn’t have anything in particular to put in the scrapbook, so he pasted in some old pictures of me my mother had sent me.

  Once he came back from a poker game and told me that if Signifier was a friend of mine I’d better talk to him, because Signifier had just called him a curly-headed punk and he wouldn’t take that from anybody. I got up and went out to the game and asked Signifier about it. He said he wasn’t talking about Dido, he was just cursing his luck and had said something about a curly-headed punk, but he wasn’t talking about anyone.

  “It’s like this, Signifier,” I said. “Dido’s my friend and I’m going to try like hell to keep him out of trouble, but if he ever gets into any trouble I’m on his side. Anybody who hurts Dido hurts me.” I looked at everybody when I said it.

  “If that’s the way you feel, Jimmy, I don’t blame you,” Signifier said. “But you tell that kid I wasn’t talking about him. I wouldn’t say anything like that about him. He’s all right with me.”

  But I knew that he was lying about Dido being all right with him because Dido wasn’t all right with anyone in that dormitor
y any more. They were all down on him. It was just because they liked me that they treated him decently at all. I knew that and I tried to keep things smooth.

  “You don’t really need to gamble,” I told Dido when I returned to my bunk. “You’ve got everything you need. Let’s rest up for awhile.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said.

  One night we were talking in low, muted whispers when all of a sudden we became aware of the moon shining through the window. It seemed enormous and pale and distant and beautiful.

  “Can you see the face in the moon?” I asked.

  “Who, the man eating green cheese?”

  And then I said, “When the moon shines through your window think of me, maybe I’ll be looking at it, too.”

  When his voice came it was choked. “Don’t say that, please don’t say that.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you, boy,” I said. “Don’t take it like that. We can’t do anything about it. It was inevitable from the very start.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know. I’m sorry.” And then from a long way off his voice came, low and muffled, “Don’t ever lean your whole weight on happiness, Jimmy, you fall too hard when it gives away.”

  “You have a saying for everything, haven’t you?” I said.

  “Just the words,” he said. “Not the music.”

  We were silent and I was thoughtful. “Whenever I see a full moon after this I’ll think of you,” I said. “And I’ll think of this dormitory. I’ll see this goddamn dormitory and I’ll see you in it, and that isn’t the way it ought to be.”

  He was subdued and quiet after that and when I asked him why, he said, “You don’t need me at all any more, do you?”

  “Even if I didn’t, you’d always be my friend, kid,” I said.

  The first of August I was called over to the classification bureau for an interview. “We have a request from the governor’s office to have a little talk with you,” the sociologist said. I knew that this was it. I realized then that all along I had been afraid that it wasn’t so. But I wasn’t afraid any longer. I knew then, beyond all doubt, that I was going home. I thought of all the things I would do and of how glad my mother would be. And then I thought, Dido will certainly miss me. I felt very scared for him. I couldn’t imagine him making it without me.

  But when I told him about it he seemed extremely happy. He told me a thousand things he wanted me to do as if I was going home that very moment. He hugged me and wanted to kiss me. Signifier and Candy stopped by to find out about it and he told them I had made it. He was so excited and happy that he made all of us excited and happy, too.

  “Let’s get some blue boys and celebrate,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said. We got some blue boys and got jagged and went out and played some poker.

  He got broke but when I offered him some of my chips he declined, saying he wanted to lie down for awhile. I was winning so I kept on playing. I said I would be down after awhile.

  When I went back to our bunks I found him typing.

  “What are you writing, your life’s history?” I kidded.

  He was violently startled. He wheeled and looked at me and his face flooded crimson. “What the hell!” I said. He snatched the sheet from the typewriter and started to tear it up. “Don’t.” I stopped him. “Let me see it.”

  He looked at me for a long time with his face all broken up in a thousand different expressions, then he said, “All right, Jimmy, I’ll do anything for you.”

  I sat down on the bunk and began reading the typed pages, frowning slightly:

  I am twenty-four and know life. I wouldn’t know life if I wasn’t twenty-four, and I wouldn’t be twenty-four if I didn’t know life. I learned life and life and life until I knew it so well that even when they said, No charge to you, baby, I love it, I didn’t feel romantic.

  But love makes a difference. It comes like the Assyrian gleaming in neither purple nor gold but holding fast and hard to the path until its victim is won.

  Is that the wisdom of twenty-four?

  No, this is it. When the change is made there comes a most demanding need, greater than the need for plasma, for freedom, for life, greater than the need for heaven.

  Don’t you understand?

  I need a…without it…

  My mind began skipping words. My eyes saw them but my mind would not record them. I wanted to stop reading but I couldn’t.

  …drunk or sober…one way or another…

  When I came to the end my eyes kept darting back and forth across the page, trying to find something, I didn’t know what. I was afraid to look up. When I looked up I would have to face it. I didn’t want ever to face it. I didn’t think I could face it.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said finally.

  I looked down at him and looked quickly away. He was sitting on the board between the bunks, looking up at me. His eyes were like those of a dog that fears punishment.

  I took a deep breath and said, “Jesus Christ, I thought we’d gotten above that. Especially that.” I had to swallow. “You said once you put me in the stars. Remember? And now this puts us in the gutter. Right back where we started—before where we started. Listen, this takes away everything we ever thought we had.” I was silent for a moment. He didn’t speak. I asked, “Is this all you ever wanted from me?”

  “What else would I ever want?” he said.

  Everything went then. We were just two convicts who didn’t like each other any more, two convicts afraid of the other’s power to hurt. There was a beaten, unsmiling dullness in Dido’s face. The closeness we’d had for so long was now completely gone.

  “Listen,” I said. “Listen. If it was like that—if it was always like that, then I’ve wasted a hell of a lot of feelings.”

  He bowed his face between his hands. His shoulders sagged. His voice was muffled. “Tell me what you want, Jimmy? How would I know? I’ve never got anything for nothing in all my life.”

  “Anyway,” I said. “Anyway—” I finally got it out. “Anyway, not you. I don’t want you. You’re no different from all the rest.”

  He stood up, white-faced and remote, and began a dull, bitter plea. “Haven’t I tried to be what you wanted me to, Jimmy? Haven’t I gone around here and kissed these bastards’ behinds just because you wanted me to get along with them and treat them right, when I know they hate my guts? I’ve changed goddamn near everything about me, Jimmy, and just for you. I never did any of it for myself. I never cared a goddamn thing for myself or anyone except you.”

  “It isn’t that, that isn’t it, what I want you to do I want you to do not because of me but because you want to yourself. I want you to want to do these things. That’s the only way you’ll ever live to make it and get out and become somebody in the world. I want you to be somebody in this world, just as much as I want to be somebody myself in the world. You could be so damn easily. You’ve got everything it takes but the right attitude. It’s all sex with you,” I said. “And no kind of sex was ever worth the value you put on it, much less your kind.”

  For a moment he looked as if he was going to faint. Then his eyes became haunted and crazy and his face cracked like the white drum of a new banjo that’s been overheated. “You don’t think so,” he said, pushing the words out between paper-stiff lips. “You don’t think it’s worth that much. I’ll show you what it’s worth to me.” His head cocked to one side and his chin lifted and that sneer marred his lips again. “I’ll show you,” he said, looking down his nose at me. “I’ll kill myself.”

  I believed him and I was suddenly afraid. There came to me a vague feeling that his destiny hung on my next words; that I had been endowed with the power of God. The power was mine and I could feel it. I wanted to say the right thing because I felt that on my words hung his life, but for the life of me I could only say what came to mind.

  “That won’t prove anything. Anybody can kill himself.”

  “Be seeing you, pal,” he said, and walked away.

  I
felt choked. It was a feeling of an opportunity gone to have done something a little noble. It was as if I’d kicked a cripple who had asked for a dime, or slugged a blind man who had bumped into me.

  Just before bedtime he came back and knelt beside my bunk and burrowed his face in my blanket. “I didn’t have the nerve,” he said, his voice coming muffled from the blanket. “I’d like to do something very low, that’s all I am.

  I reached down and lifted his face in my hand. His eyes were bruised and dirty as if someone had filled them full of sweepings. “Go to bed and sleep it off, kid,” I said. “You’ll feel differently in the morning.”

  When the lights went off and the dormitory silenced I could hear him sobbing up above. One hell of a celebration, I thought.

  After that he was despondent and very desperate, although he tried to be very gay and not show it. He never referred to that night and he seemed very happy about my going home. But I could see how desperate and despondent he was underneath. It showed in his eyes, in the way he talked, in the way he wanted to take any rape-fiend chance in an effort to please me. I was afraid even to say, “That schmo sure gets on my nerves,” because he might have asked me who and then gone out and cut his throat. At night, he began staying awake and talking to me until dawn. It was as if he was afraid that sleep might rob him of some precious moment with me.

  Nothing was real.

  28

  AFTER THAT IT was like being washed away in a flood. Everything happened at once, it seemed. Things surged down on me in great waves and I was powerless before them. Everything was violent and chaotic and haywire. They happened suddenly and violently with no chance for defense against them nor preparation for them, and then they were gone. But their consequences remained. Their consequences were far-reaching and long-staying, and were like the treacherous backwash in which you drowned after fighting through the crest of the wave. The things swooped down on me and carried me away.