The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  Outside she was greeted by a bright April morning. Her apartment building, an eight-storied, light brick structure erected during the middle nineteen-thirties, faced south on 21st Street, between Third Avenue and the south end of Lexington at Gramercy Park. To one side was an old blackened church: to the other a renovated brick residence, converted into apartments, with big, pleasant, modern windows catching the morning sun.

  It was a pleasant street, she thought, as she walked briskly along in the sunshine. Expensive, sophisticated. To her left the old Irving Hotel, facing the Park; to her right a modern, yellow brick, high-rent apartment house with beautiful windows, all lit at night, revealing the many wondrous decors. Down here it was so rich and luxurious with a quiet, expensive exclusiveness. Rich in tradition, also. She loved it here. She loved New York. But she loved it here far more than any other place she had ever lived in New York. It made her feel confident and exclusive. Her telephone exchange was Gramercy—“Right up the street, a few doors from Gramercy Park,” she always said when directing friends to her address; never, “Right down the street a few doors from Third Avenue.” But she liked that part of Third Avenue, too; there were wonderful stores in that section.

  The street had emptied since the eight-thirty rush; only the service people and executives hailing taxis from the stand facing Lexington were about at this late hour. A few nurses already had their charges in the park. “I must remember to get a key,” she reminded herself. It was a private park enclosed by a high, iron fence, and the gates were kept locked. But the neighbourhood residents could rent a key for twelve dollars annually—or was it twenty?—by applying to the Gramercy Park Association. The trees were already beginning to green, and red and yellow tulips were blooming in the well-tended plots. Although what she’d do with a key, frankly she didn’t know. No one she knew would be found dead spooning on a hard bench in a dark chilly park when there was her beautifully furnished apartment so near, equipped with television and bed. After a moment she thought, “Spooning? What an ancient word for it!”

  She walked erectly, with long quick steps, but it was a feminine walk and very attractive. Most of the service people along the way knew her by sight. She always looked at them directly. “You’re late again. Miss,” a taxi driver said. She grinned. Another said, “Maybe she knows the boss.” The first one Replied, “Maybe she is the boss.” She passed on without commenting. “Probably means I sleep with the boss,” she thought; then, smiling sensually, “Wouldn’t mind if I did.” Across the street the doorman of the Gramercy Park Hotel saluted briskly. She gave him a smile. Dave had taken her there to dinner several times, and at other times she had dropped in the bar alone. It was a pleasant bar, dark and intimate, but with that complete safety of high-class American bars. A woman was as safe there as at home in bed—safer, really. New York being what it is.

  She continued down 21st Street to Fourth Avenue, turned north to the subway entrance at 22nd Street. There was a smile on her lips. She felt very happy. Passers-by, even the surly printers and warehousemen of the neighbourhood, noticed her happiness and smiled at her. She smiled in return, suddenly recalling the Harlem saying she’d often heard at Maud’s:

  I’d rather be a doggy lamp post in New York City

  Than Governor General of the state of Mississippi.

  Chapter 2

  He had dreamed fitfully.

  At first he had dreamed he was skating somewhere in a crowd and had broken through the ice. “Help! Help!” he had called as the icy current tugged at him. He had a thin grip on the broken edge of ice but he couldn’t swim and the cold water tore at him, trying to pull him under. “Help! Help!” he had called again, desperately, as he felt his grip loosen. But none of the other skaters, all of whom were couples, boys and girls, men and women, looked in his direction or gave any indication that they had heard his cries. They skated about the hole, smiling and chatting, engrossed in each other. “Jesus Christ! They don’t even see me!” he thought as his grip broke and he went down beneath the icy water, clutched in an ice cold fear.

  He awakened and went to the dresser and poured a water glass full of gin. The faint glow of the city night came through the two side windows, silhouetting his nude body in the dim mirror. His hand trembled and his teeth chattered against the glass as he forced the gin down his throat. He held his mouth open, gasping until he got his breath, then he went back to bed.

  “That ought to knock me out,” he thought.

  But he dreamed again.

  He dreamed he was at a banquet, sitting near the end of the table where two very pretty young blonde women sat side by side. But there was an empty space between his seat and the end which hindered him from speaking to them. Then the man on his right stood up and moved because he didn’t like his neighbour on the other side, and that left him sitting at the banquet table between the two empty spaces. He felt suddenly isolated. He was vaguely aware that he was the only black at the banquet, but that didn’t have anything to do with the feeling of isolation until a very well-dressed, very handsome, very assured black magazine editor, whom he knew quite well, passed by without speaking and took a place at the head of the table. Then he thought, “Jesus Christ!—Even that son of a bitch ignores me!” But when the banquet was over and the guests began to leave, a black woman with a putty-coloured complexion, short straightened hair, and several strange embossed scars down her cheeks, but very well-dressed in a rose-beige evening gown and a black satin cape, stopped for a moment beside his chair and smiled at him. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll get one to go. Just keep on trying.” He felt so grateful he wanted to kiss her hand, but she had gone on down the stairs and he saw her getting into an expensive foreign car with the magazine editor who had ignored him.

  “Jesse Robinson!” he muttered in his sleep. His voice was so vicious it made the name a curse. “You goddam bastard! You goddam fool!” he ground out between clenched teeth. His body threshed about in a wild fury; his right fist lashed out in a rage. Then a blinding flash exploded in his brain like a flash of lightning and he cried, “Unhn!” His body became still but he began to grind his teeth like the muted sound of rats gnawing.

  Then he dreamed he went down the stairs from the banquet room to a small parking lot where many cars were jammed together, trying to get away. There was no order and the cars were running into one another denting fenders and locking bumpers. In the centre of the parking lot was a big bus, and a short squat man stood at one side leisurely washing it. Suddenly there was a commotion and a big wild-eyed man came around from behind the bus and began cursing the short squat man in a loud, uncontrolled voice. “I’ll kick out your teeth!” he shouted. A crowd of men were standing about and someone said, “He’s drunk.” The short squat man backed away and several of the bystanders tried to restrain the big wild drunken man. But he broke loose from them and kicked viciously at the short squat man’s face. His foot missed by inches but his shoe flew off from the force of the kick and went over the heads of the crowd and out of sight like a mightily powered line drive clearing the bleachers in Yankee Stadium. The big wild man was so enraged that he had missed, he wound up with his right fist and hit the short squat man in the mouth, despite the fact that six or seven men were trying to restrain him. Then he wound up his left fist and hit him again. Everyone thought it was time for the short squat man to run. But instead he ducked down and hit the big wild drunken man in the stomach with a long looping right as hard as he could. “Oof!” the breath went out of the big man as he doubled forward. But he straightened up instantly, more enraged than ever, looking to see where the short squat man had gone. Now was really the time to run! everyone thought. But the short squat man had got behind the big wild man and he picked up a heavy oak chair and hit him across the back of the head as hard as he could hit. “Jesus Christ!” the big wild drunken man howled painfully like a wounded dog and fell stretched out as if dead on his back. Jesse laughed in his sleep and muttered, “Damn right!” Then he dreamed the swe
etest dream. He was seventeen years old and he was wrestling playfully on a bed with the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, trying to kiss her. She had a coffee-cream complexion and short black curls and her eyes flashed laughingly as she struggled to get loose from him. She had a strong slender body, hard and round, and she wore a middy blouse and skirt. She gave a quick turn and was free, her body extended away from him, tensed for flight. But instead of escaping she lay passively on her back, her hair spread out on the white counterpane, and he bent forward tenderly, looking into her dark laughing eyes, and kissed her from an upside down position. He knew it was the first time she had been kissed, and it was also the first time he had kissed a girl. He felt a sweet, nameless sensation spread all over him.

  He opened his eyes wide. The sweet sensation was still with him and he lay unmoving, scarcely breathing, trying to hold it a little longer. But immediately his mind began analyzing it, dissecting it, breaking it up, pulling it down, twisting it this way and then the other. It was sweet because it was so pure. Never in all of his life had he felt a pure sex feeling—not even with his wife. But pure wasn’t just the word. His thoughts began leafing through the dictionary of his mind: good, look under good; pleasant, virtuous, admirable. How about clean? nice? good?—there’s that goddamned good again. There must be some goddamned word!

  Sex in his mind had always been something a little soiled, a little weird, perhaps somewhat sordid too. Not in a bad sense always, but always a little tainted by his protestant upbringing, his grotesque memory, his strange imagination. But this sex feeling in his dream had been completely undefiled. Perhaps the way two virgins felt. He’d never had a virgin; perhaps he’d never been a virgin, either.

  Leroy’s laugh came through his closed door and he heard the nasty little dogs racing over the hall floor…“Now Napoleon, behave yourself. You come back here and get into your collar, you bad little thing.” It was a man’s falsetto voice affecting a womanish air. “Goddamned homos,” he thought. “The dogs too.”

  All the sweetness went and the loneliness closed in. He was lying diagonally across the wide, old-fashioned, dilapidated, mahogany bed, and had to roll over to reach the night table where his cigarettes lay. “There’s nothing lonelier than a double bed,” he thought, putting a paper match to his cigarette, and with the first inhalation the dizziness came. He was still too drunk for a hangover but his head felt unset and his body unjointed and everything had a double-edged, distorted look like a four colour advertisement with each colour slightly out of line.

  However, his brain was sharp. For the past five years it had never let him down. It was always packed with some definite emotion, defined in intellectual terms; futile rages, tearing frustrations, moods of black despair, fits of suicidal depressions—all in terms of cause and effect, of racial impact and “sociological import”—intellectual horseshit—but nagging as an unsolved problem, slugging it out in his mind, like desperate warriors. No matter how much he drank, whatever he did to deaden his thoughts, there was this part of his mind that never became numb, never relaxed. It was always tense, hypersensitive, uncertain, probing—there must be some goddamned reason for this, for that. It had started with the publication of his second book, five years before…Some goddamned reason for all the hate, the animosity, the gratuitous ill will—for all the processed American idiocy, ripened artificially like canned cheese.

  The night before he’d wandered from bar to bar, trying to find a safe-looking pickup. At the Ebony up the street, on Amsterdam, he’d tried to make the hostess, a show-girl type, what the guys used to call a “Brown-skin Model.” The joint had been practically empty and she had come and sat with him at the bar. He recalled trying to kiss her, and her asking him to go with her the next day out to a used car lot near Atlantic Beach, across the street from Cab Calloway’s roadhouse, where she was to pick up a new Cadillac she had ordered; and him telling her he’d like to but he had to go down to the 57th Street dock where he was picking up a new ocean liner he’d ordered; and her getting angry and telling him to go to hell; and him saying he wished she’d got angry before drinking seven Scotch highballs at his expense.

  “Everybody’s lonely in this goddamn city,” he thought bitterly.

  He’d come home and begun drinking gin and reading Gorki’s Bystander, hoping the combination would render him unconscious. But the story came and went as he read on into the early hours, confusing itself with stories of his own imagining, until he’d become entombed in a completely new and frightening world. And still his thoughts had kept on churning, turning back to one passage and another, here and there snagged by a line like one’s clothes in a bramble thicket: “To love, to love! Life is so frightful—it is torment if one doesn’t love!…An habitual—just grasp this!—an habitual lack of desire on the part of others to look into your soul kindly, tenderly…You must learn this: all women are incurably sick with loneliness. This is the cause of all that is incomprehensible to you men—unexpected infidelities, and everything. None of you seeks, none of you thirsts for such intimacy with a human being as we do…” And always they came back to the passage describing the drowning of Boris, Clim’s friend, and the line: “Clim heard someone in the crowd question gravely, doubtfully: ‘But was there really a boy? Perhaps there was no boy at all!’”

  —Jesse Robinson.

  —mmmm…Jack Robinson…James Robinson…Jeff Robinson…Jim—we have no Jesse Robinson listed here.

  —J-E-S-S-E…Jesse…You must have me on the list…

  —mmmm…Jeff…Jim…

  —But I lived in the world for forty-one years…

  —mmmm…

  —I was a writer! I wrote two books—about blacks.

  —mmmm…

  —I was an American—a black American…I wrote about the black problem in America….

  —Ah yes! A very grave problem. We are very much concerned about the black problem….

  —Then certainly you’ve heard about me. I wrote two books about the black problem. It was all in the newspapers, in the book review sections. They reviewed my books. One of them said—I remember quite well: Robinson writes like a Dark Avenging Angel with his pen dipped in gall…You must have heard of me!

  —Jesse Robinson…Let’s see…Jeff…Jim…Funny…Are you absolutely sure there was a Jesse Robinson?…Perhaps there was no Jesse Robinson at all!

  “Just think: half the men and women in the whole world in these few moments are loving one another, even as you and I are…My dearest, my unexpected one…”

  —Perhaps there was no Jesse Robinson at all!…

  “Or magnanimity, of compassion toward a woman, in a word!…”

  —Lawd! There ain’t nobody in this coffin!

  —Ain’t Jesse Robinson—

  —Nobody!

  —But Jesse Robinson—

  —Who’s Jesse Robinson?

  —He de one wu’t died uf lonesomeness. Say fust time in hist’ry uh nigger die frum lonesomeness. In all de newspapers….

  —But ain’t nobody in dis coffin!

  —Lemme see…mmmm…empty as a minister’s plate!…But whar de body of Jesse Robinson?

  —Now you is askin’ me…Ah doan b’lieve dare evah wuz uh Jesse Robinson tuh bagin wid!…

  Abruptly he opened his eyes. The cigarette butt was burning his fingers and he mashed it out in the cheap glass ashtray atop a battered, ancient, mahogany radio cabinet that served as a night table. Beyond the ashtray was a half-emptied package of Camel cigarettes, a half-eaten, twenty-five cent bar of milk chocolate, a half-emptied, pint-sized carton of milk, a small white enamelled alarm clock with a broken crystal, and a milk-stained water glass smelling of gin. All were clustered like a repulsive brood of hybrids about a pumpkin-sized spherical bottle containing a green solution, which comprised the base of a night lamp which had a large, faded pink shade that sat loosely on a frame made for something else. Inside the cabinet, behind the closed doors, were his stacks of unpublished manuscripts, carbon copies, old papers a
nd letters which he always kept nearby, carting them from place to place, hanging on to them year after year, to remind himself that—no matter what he did for a living—he was a writer by profession.

  According to the cracked face of the clock, it was ten minutes after eight. The sun was over East River at about 125th Street, beyond the flats of Harlem and south of the Triborough Bridge, but in a direct line with Flushing, L.I. Sunlight slanted through the open Venetian blinds, making thin stairways of light and shadow on the pale green of the opposite wall, and underneath the blinds, where they failed to reach the window sills by a matter of over two feet, a solid block of light fell obliquely across the hideous green, red and yellow cover of the couch.

  His windows, facing south, were on the fifth floor, overlooking 142nd Street between Convent and Amsterdam Avenues, midway in that stone ridge, probably from the ice age, that runs up the western shore of Manhattan Island from 135th Street to the Cloisters. He could not see the Hudson River because at this point Amsterdam Avenue was higher and Broadway was in between, but over the rooftops of the houses across the street he could see the stone arch of the entrance to City College, the towers of Riverside Drive Cathedral higher toward the right, and on clear days the spire of the Empire State Building down at 34th Street and 5th Avenue. He was never impressed by the view. He liked best the fact that no one from across the street could look in through his windows. For many times in the night he walked about in the nude with his lights on and the blinds open.

  He got up and surveyed his nude body in the mirror. It was a trim, muscular body, the colour of Manilla paper, with the broad-shouldered proportions of a pugilist. From the neck down he could have been anywhere from twenty-five to thirty. Only his face ever showed his age, now it was swollen from heavy drinking and had the smooth, dead, dull-eyed look of a Harlem pimp. The bright windows in the background impaired his reflection, so he leaned forward and stared at his image close-up. “Jesse Robinson,” he said aloud. It was a reflex comment of a man whose name has been so beaten and battered it’s out on its feet. “I oughta just tricked with the bitch.” He didn’t realize he said the latter aloud. He had been talking aloud to himself for a long time now without knowing it. “Anyway—” Whatever it was he intended to say, eh forgot before he had said it.