The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  The one time they had been skating on the millpond with the bunch. It had been a raw cold day with an icy blast coming down from Canada. But to please Willard she’d worn only her light skating suit. She’d become chilled to the bone. But Willard loved to skate and she wouldn’t leave him. Although cold and miserable she had been happy to glide along holding his arm.

  Finding her mother away when they’d returned home, he’d come in with her. Something in his attitude had made her know that he would ask. He’d looked at her with that appraising one-sided smile that had always made her heart turn over.

  By then her throat had ached terribly and she’d felt sick enough to faint. She’d wanted nothing better than to go to bed. But she’d felt a strange uneasiness that made her stay with him. She had been afraid to disappoint him; he had so many other places to go and there had been so many other girls who’d wanted him. She’d been afraid to admit to being so sick. But the room had begun to blur. Against her will she had found herself saying, “Willard, you had better go; I’m awfully sick.”

  After he’d gone she had thought, “I must be really awfully sick to send him home.” Then she’d stumbled up the stairs to bed.

  Her mother had thought at first she had a cold. But the next day the doctor had said she had diptheria.

  The other time Willard had arrived shortly after her mother had gone visiting. They’d been playing the phonograph and dancing when suddenly he’d drawn her down beside him on the sofa. She had known it was going to happen. She’d felt the same strange uneasiness she’d felt before. She’d been so afraid she’d disappoint him.

  He’d put his left arm about her waist and cupped her left breast in his hand. His look, at once confident and demanding, had hypnotized her. She had felt herself melt as his lips touched hers. Then his right hand had moved over her stomach. She had raised her hips so he could slide her panties from underneath her. The hot wet flame of her passion had grown unbearable.

  She had looked away from him, unable to breathe. And when she had felt his touch she had prayed, “Oh God, let him like me. Let him like me, God.” Then it had been lost in the first sharp hurt, and she had gasped.

  “Is this it?” she had asked herself. “Is this what they all rave about? What launched a thousand ships?” Then she had become conscious of his ecstasy, and that had been her reward. “I’ve given myself to him,” she had thought, and it had fired her with exaltation.

  There had been one other moment of panic, however. She’d been certain she would die on the spot if he hadn’t liked it. But he’d put his arms about her and had drawn her close again and kissed her passionately. And she had known that he had liked her. She had been so reassured and happy she had cried, “Oh, Willard, I love you with all my heart.”

  And a year later she’d gone to Chicago and had become engaged to Ronny, whom at first she had despised. But the gang had decided she was the girl for him and had always paired them together. At that time she hadn’t understood why she, a flaxen-haired, apple-cheeked, blue-eyed farm girl was deemed a match for this chunky, habitually boozed, over-brilliant, condescending, Yankee-hating, low-browed, black-haired, misanthropic Mississippian, and a senior to boot. He hadn’t given the impression of caring much for her either. Once when running up the stairs of International House with the gang she’d dropped her handkerchief, and he’d given it a glance and had kept on going.

  “Why, Ronny!” one of the older girls had cried indignantly. “Where are your southern manners? Why didn’t you pick up Kriss’s handkerchief?”

  He’d given Kriss an indifferent look as she came up with flaming face and had said, “She’s a Northern girl, she’s used to picking up her own things.” She’d never forgiven him for that. But all during that first term they’d gone about together, each instinctively disliking the other, but she trying to excite him to the pitch of asking so she could let him know how much she disliked him by refusing, while he, for his part, gave no indication that he would ever ask. However, it had given her prestige to be seen with him.

  A doll-like young Siamese prince with dusky velvet skin and dark doe eyes began courting her with flowers and candy and dinners in swank downtown restaurants. She’d spent a weekend with him in New York City. When Ronny had learned of that, he’d cursed her in a violent rage, calling her a “nigger lover”; in one breath asking her how she could do that to him, and in the next asking her to marry him. She hadn’t understood at that time those subtleties of white supremacy that inspired this native white supremacist to seek her hand in marriage who had bedded with a black, whereas before this incident (which she recalled as being scarcely more exciting than a conducted YWCA tour) he hadn’t paid much heed to her. She would have finally had her revenge, but for a letter from her mother stating that her father was ill and they could not afford to keep her there any longer. So she’d accepted his proposal and the next day they’d announced their betrothal to the gang; and the day after the gang had gotten up a party to celebrate and even then she hadn’t known what they were celebrating. An apartment had been provided for the prenuptial ceremony to which they had been jovially, if somewhat forcefully, escorted after the drinking bout. But she had no objections whatsoever, by then being very curious and knowing herself to be a lovely piece—she had only Willard’s word for this but somehow she knew that he was an authority. Spread across the bed she’d found a lovely sheer nightgown that showed her to advantage. But after fiddling about in the bathroom and kitchen for almost an hour without having removed his coat, insensitive to her charms which she paraded seductively in her transparent gown, he had suddenly announced, “I’m going to run to the comer drugstore and get some toothbrushes since we’re going to stay all night.” An hour later he had returned exhausted with two new toothbrushes to fall into a deep sleep, while she had lain awake and fuming until dawn. Thus they had sealed their engagement and had faced the world next day with shining teeth.

  The week before she returned home for the summer vacation she’d written to Willard, informing him of her engagement—a tender letter of consolation and entreaty, of humble pleas for his forgiveness and poignant regret for all those things that now could never be. He replied by marrying the local girl whom she most disliked on the day of her return; and she was greeted by the sight of the wedding procession of honking cars when she alighted from the train. From the depot she telephoned first one place and then another until she got in touch with him and begged him to see her for just five minutes. He came and took her to a roadhouse and at ten o’clock that night they went to bed in one of the rooms upstairs which served such purposes and it was twelve o’clock when he took her to her parents and he went to his bride. By then knowledge of their escapade had swept the town, and when he came into the small, dark room where he and his bride were to live until they found a more suitable place, his loving bride stabbed him with a small kitchen knife and then ran into the street crying, “I’ve killed him! I’ve killed him!” It was a cheap knife, however, with a dull blade and did more damage to Kriss’s mother by way of scandal, the shame penetrating her heart far deeper than the dull blade the lout’s flesh it was intended to lay low.

  Guilt drove Kriss back to Chicago where she suffered the remorse of the damned.

  That summer she worked on a WPA research project directed by Harold Ramsey, who was then becoming impressed by his destiny as a black Sigmund Freud in the blackest of all Black Belts. It was a glorious era of research into what is termed naively by U.S. terminologists as the “Negro Problem”—as if this American dilemma of what to do with twenty million descendants of American slaves, freed from bondage as a result of a bloody civil war, and granted equality by the due process of constitutional amendment, was some riddle these poor folk had cooked up for the mortification of white intellect and could themselves solve at a moment’s notice if they so desired.

  Educated blacks in great numbers—montebank, dim-witted, well-meaning, opportunistic, and otherwise—accepted this challenge and set about with
great zeal, augmented to a considerable degree by white folks’ money, to effect the solution, effecting sounding more impressive than confecting and more conscientious than affecting.

  Naturally Kriss was greatly impressed by Harold Ramsey, one of the brightest apostles of this noble cause; but at that time he hadn’t noticed her. She would have been both delighted and honoured to have married him and shared her genuine guilt with his professional torment, but unfortunately he was already married to one white woman whom he paraded about town in his big new automobile, being wined and dined, not to say consulted, by the rich and recent negrophiles—and two white wives would have been outrageous even in Chicago.

  So on the first Monday in October, shortly after the beginning of the Fall term, she had married Ronny in a veritable sweat of guilt. But it had been June of the following year before she had discovered the reason his friends had boosted the marriage was that he was a homosexual.

  They’d taken a three-room flat in an old converted mansion near the campus and had quickly settled down to a married life of work, study and carousing with the other tenants, similarly settled down, a motley assortment of students, artists, writers, and other rising young geniuses and a few old relics in whom the rising powder had evidently been omitted. There had been a party in one of the joints, shifting as was customary from flat to flat as the liquor ran out, and becoming enlarged on the way—like a seeded cat trying to get home to Akron from bitter exile in Cincinnati in the allotted three-score days—with couples drifting off from time to time to answer the call of nature. At three o’clock next morning when Kriss staggered with the assistance of some unidentified male to her flat and found Ronny in bed with some tramp of an artist from upstairs, she said indignantly, “I’m not going to sleep on the sofa.” Her escort said that was unnecessary as long as his double bed on the floor below remained untenanted. So at eight o’clock she returned, sleepier than before, and found that Ronny had changed bedmates for a strapping fine sailor. She was alone this time, outnumbered and outgunned, so she slept on the sofa after all.

  But that night, accompanied by much crying and continuous drinking, Ronny related the grim story of his love for a football hero, bosom friend from childhood, not to mention bedmate, who had been killed on a hunting expedition the two of them had taken one summer, by a black woodsman with an axe, the black being subsequently hunted down and lynched. This by way of being more of an explanation of why he’d slept with the sailor than why he’d dedicated his life to the Negro Problem. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation for both pursuits, but at that time she didn’t understand this and despised him on both accounts.

  It was after that a change came into the nature of her guilt. Where before, her guilt had provoked remorse, afterwards it provided a thrill. For a time following, her chief enjoyment came from feeling she was taking some man away from some lovelier and more desirable or superior woman. And she derived an evil satisfaction from what she’d done to Willard.

  “The lice! All of them are lice!” she thought. Judging her by a code of morals not one of them accepted for himself. “God knows I should know!” she thought. She’d been intimate with the President of the Foundation all during the time Ronny was in the army. He had been one of the most revered and important men in his field in the world, but in her bed he had been as much of a louse as any of the others. He’d brought home a whip from Mexico to whip her with, and ofttimes after they’d attended a serious conference in which weighty problems had been discussed and analyzed he had escorted her home and whipped her unmercifully until she had yielded to his every desire. And she had weekended in the White House and had found herself in bed with a man of such international importance she had never dared mention his name, who had wanted only that she play bitch-on-heat to his role of common dog, then there had been the worn-out heir of one of the nation’s most glorious mercantile names who had demanded detailed and graphic accounts of her sex acts with big black men, she having to invent these when none had occurred, then beating her until she begged for mercy, after which, catlike, he had soothed her hurts.

  How could they feel she wasn’t good enough for them? she thought, sobbingly. How could they? When they’d made her what she was themselves.

  So she railed against the injustice of it with all the bitterness of her soul, at the same time accepting the moral judgement that she was ruined. They’d given her a drunkard for a father and a louse for her first lover, two abortions and the loss of fertility, a homosexual for a husband and a bevy of men whose lusts she had been required to satisfy because of their importance, receiving no satisfaction in return; this along with a North Dakota farm girl’s strong healthy body and a hot ass, and expected her to be satisfied. Which was against all reason. But when she’d taken Negroes as lovers they’d crucified her. “Kriss is solving the Negro Problem in bed,” they’d said of her, solving their own problem in her own bed along with the Negro Problem, perhaps because of it, at the same time feeling she wasn’t good enough for them and treating her like dirt. They’d made her feel like dirt before she’d ever thought of sleeping with a black man; and only when sleeping with one could she feel secure in the knowledge that she wasn’t dirt. Which was the same thing they had done to the blacks. So with them she never felt ruined; they never thought of her as ruined. They were ruined by being born black, ruined in the eyes of her race, and they kept laughing at the idiocy of a race that ruined their own women and threw them in bed with men of another race they’d similarly ruined. To be sure, some of the blacks with whom she’d slept had been weird enough. But no more weird than awakening to the realization that she was married to a homosexual.

  They even had the effrontery to talk about their honour. “Is that what the son of a bitch is worried about—his honour?” she asked herself with venomous rage. He’d eaten her food and enjoyed her company and pleasured in her bed, never so much however as when he’d finally decided she was a whore whom he didn’t have to marry; and what was more he’d taken her extra paint she’d had blended especially for her own apartment to paint his own dirty flat. And this paint had been mixed by a black who had been recommended to her by black friends, and who had charged her three times what it was worth to paint her three-room flat in addition to the cost of the paint. And this son of a bitch had taken her extra paint, and now he was coming to get his watch which he had pawned to her the month before to pay his income tax, after he’d decided she wasn’t good enough for him to marry.

  “I’ll make you crawl, you son of a bitch!” she resolved. It being Friday night she could drink herself unconscious and disgust him even more with her. Because she knew that however he felt now, once he had wanted to marry her rather desperately. Nor would she let him have his watch, even if he had the money to pay his debt. And she’d be damned if she would give him dinner. “I’ll pay you out, you son of a bitch!” she resolved. She wished now that Jesse had left something, his hat or coat, which she could place in some obvious place for Dave to see.

  But sight of him brought a change of mind. He was a tall, straight-limbed man, conservatively dressed in a dark gray Brooks Brothers suit, black wingtip shoes, striped shirt and dark tie. The absence of shoulder pads in the formfitted jacket gave him a Pall Mall look, but his face had none of the blind snobbery of those escapees from socialism. It was a long narrow face with a strong nose and splendid bones and a wide sensuous mouth. His light brown hair was parted on the side and his dark shadowed eyes were serious. At sight of her in the red silk robe his quick mind conjured up the two thoughts, “Scarlet Letter” and “Burning Bush,” and his eyes softened with pity, his lips curling slightly in an indulgent smile.

  “Hello, Kriss,” he greeted in his deep controlled voice. “Expecting company?”

  Her heart melted and she felt suddenly cheap. Each time she saw him after a short absence he impressed her anew with being so clean and handsome, what she’d always envisioned as a “Harvard man.” And all at once she had a desire to please him, to be mod
em and restrained and prove she was a good loser; and because she knew he was courting another woman she wanted more than ever to sleep with him. Her glazed blue eyes beneath her swollen dead-white vaselined lids swam with sensuousness.

  “You’re company now,” she murmured, preceding him to the sitting room.

  Although he had keys to her apartment, to both outer and inner doors, he’d chosen to ring both bells to emphasize his position; and as he followed her down the hall, laid the three keys on the dining table.

  She took her glass for a refill, and asked him, grinning mischievously “Scotch still? Or have you changed to Kummel?”

  He lowered his lank frame on the sofa, ignoring the dig. “Have you seen the Monet exhibition?”

  “Dot wanted me to go with her, but I was too tired,” she called from the kitchen, mumbling the words in a manner she’d picked up from Maud.

  “What?”

  “Just a moment, dear.” After mixing the drinks she put the frozen whipped potatoes out to thaw and the steak to warm, and debated for a moment whether to make him potato pancakes, which he adored. But they were too much trouble, she’d just do the green peas and salad as she’d planned, although she wished she could make him something special. She felt a warm glow of passion, recalling Maud’s sage remark, “AH that men like is food, drink, and women,” and felt tingly to her fingertips. But when she passed the dining table and saw the three keys he had placed there surreptitiously, her mood went cold and malicious, the only hot thing left within her being rage. However, her outward appearance remained the same, she still grinned, so Dave didn’t notice the change.

  “Dot wanted to take me,” she said, placing his drink on a silver coaster on the table beside him. “But I’ve seen the best of Monet in the Louvre, and besides I’m weary of Dot.”