The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  “That made me cry,” Pope accused solemnly.

  “I suppose you think I didn’t cry too when I wrote it, you son of a bitch,” Jesse thought, but aloud he continued, “But how do you make out it’s protest?”

  Looking suddenly lost. Pope said, “You killed one son and destroyed the other, killed the father and ruined the mother…” and Jesse thought, “So you find some streets too that you don’t understand,” and then, “Yes, that makes it protest, all right. Negroes must always live happily and never die.”

  Aloud he argued, “What about Hamlet? Shakespeare destroyed everybody, ruined everybody and killed everybody in that one.”

  Pope shrugged. “Shakespeare.”

  Jesse shrugged. “Jesus Christ. It’s a good thing he isn’t living now. His friends would never get a book published about him.”

  Pope laughed. “You’re a hell of a good writer, Jesse. Why don’t you write a black success novel? An inspirational story?

  The public is tired of the plight of the poor downtrodden Negro.”

  “I don’t have that much imagination.”

  “How about yourself? You’re certainly a success story. You’ve published twelve novels that were very well received.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Damn right you don’t,” Jesse thought. He didn’t care to remind Pope that a moment or so back he’d termed the rejected novel as autobiographical. Instead he arose and picked up the manuscript. “There’s nothing more futile than arguing with a rejection.”

  “You don’t owe us a thing,” Pope said, also standing.

  Jesse grinned. “If I could get five hundred dollars from every six readers, I’d soon catch up with Norman Vincent Peale.”

  Pope walked with him to the elevator, pressed the button, and stood with him. “For my part I liked the book, Jesse. It’s a powerful piece of writing.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And please don’t think of me as an enemy. Keep in touch with me, please do.”

  “I will, thanks.”

  “I’m going to be in Breadloaf the month of August. I’d like very much to have you come up and spend a weekend with me.

  Jesse gave him a quick curious look. “Thanks.”

  The elevator door opened. They shook hands again.

  “Good luck with the manuscript,” Pope said.

  “Thanks.”

  There were two women and three men beside the operator in the elevator, but already Jesse’s thoughts had turned inward and he didn’t see them. “Jesse Robinson,” he said distinctly. One of the women gave a slight start and everyone turned to look at him. “What did you think, son,” he went on, “They’d shave you for nothing and give you a drink.” The two women moved to the far comer of the elevator and looked straight ahead. The men stared at him curiously. But he was not aware. He smiled. “The ass,” he said.

  Jesse put the manuscript on the dresser amidst the other junk and poured a half glass of the cheap bourbon. He tossed it off and grimaced in the mirror. “You were looking for a street, eh, son?” he said. “But all you found was a blind alley.” He had eaten a substantial lunch of two fried pork chops, fried potatoes, and what went for apple pie in a “Home Cooking” lunch counter on Amsterdam Avenue, but found himself hungry again. He was out of raw eggs and the milk had soured, so he munched a chocolate bar absently and poured another drink, thinking, “When in doubt, get pie-eyed.” And then, “Be nonchalant, drink a bottle of bourbon.” And after another moment, “You hired out for it, son. Nobody made you. You were the best porter that Briggs & Sons ever had; old man Briggs said so himself…” His thoughts wandered off and he stood for a moment with his right thumb dug into his right cheek, stroking his upper lip with his index finger, his mind a vacuum.

  Then he looked at his special account bank book and discovered that he had $198.47 left from the $500.00. He felt a slight shock. “Oh, how the lucre fugit,” he thought, and recited aloud a half-remembered jinglet from his childhood:

  Oh how de ham do smell

  Oh how de boarders yell

  W’en dey hears dat dinner bell

  He laughed silently and said, “Damn right.” And the next thing he was conscious of was walking south on Convent toward the arch of City College. His mind drew a blank for the elapsed two hours and now it was six-thirty of a soft April evening. Students were coming in a stream up toward the 145th Street entrance to the subway. He went down the other way, walking against the crowd. He staggered a little but didn’t feel drunk. Although he didn’t know when he’d left the house nor where he’d intended going, it didn’t worry him. He was accustomed to these blanks of memory, and as far as he knew nothing dreadful had ever happened to him during one of them. At the moment he didn’t remember the rejection, but felt strangely depressed for some unattributable reason, and in the back of his mind began silently singing his private dirge, da-da-dee:

  di

  dee dee

  da da-da-da deeeeeee da

  da-da dee dee-dee

  da dee-dee do

  do da

  doooooo

  At 140th Street he turned down the steep incline toward St. Nicolas Avenue. To his befuddled senses the slope seemed quite level but his body tended to fall face-forward and he began to run to keep up with his head which seemed some distance out in front of him. As he passed the church at the comer of Hamilton Avenue, he thought half-amusedly, “Open de door, brethren, ol’ devil’s chasin’ me; I’m gonna pop in, once more around the block…”

  The next he knew he was sitting alone in Frank’s restaurant, eating apple pie a la mode and a heavy-set dark brother sitting opposite a buxom dark sister in the booth opposite him, said with a tolerant grin, “That’s an interesting theory, young man—seems to me as if I’ve heard it before—but I don’t believe we’ll solve this problem by making an all-Negro state. Who’re we gonna be working for? Now my idea is what we need are more Negro-owned factories. Now the Negroes who got money ought to build factories to hire the Negroes who ain’t; that’s what the white folks do and that’s why they got everything. Now take Joe Louis and all the money he had…” Jesse’s attention wandered. The woman looked disapproving. He wondered what he had said. Finally, when the man stopped giving his theories about Negro-owned factories and Negro-owned steamships and Negro-owned skyscrapers and why Negroes in the South didn’t get together and buy up a heap of land and why those in the North didn’t get together and make their own automobiles and distil their own whiskey and can their own vegetables and why those in South Africa didn’t mine their own diamonds, Jesse said, “It was just an idea.”

  He felt quite sober as he looked about at the many-hued faces of the diners, here and there an interracial couple, and three tables in the rear seating large groups of whites, probably families. Although it was located on 125th Street just off St. Nicolas Avenue, in the heart of Harlem, when Jesse first came to New York eight years before, blacks had only been served at the tables along one side. Now they ate all over. “You see, boy,” he said to himself. “Someday we’ll all wake up and find all this race business gone and everything changed, people living in complete harmony without any thought of colour.” Then, blowing laughter through his nose, added, “But old Gabriel is going to have one hell of a job blowing.”

  The waiter brought him a check for a roast beef dinner with soup and salad extra. “I must have eaten it,” he muttered, and then in reply to the waiter’s perplexed look, added, “It’s always good to know what one eats.”

  “You can always depend on Frank’s,” the waiter beamed.

  The bill was for $3.05. “Damn right,” Jesse thought. “Too bad I didn’t get here first.”

  Outside was a soft warm night and the Harlem folk were crowded in the street. Jesse walked through the milling crowds, jostling and being jostled. The neon-lighted bars were jumping and the red buses bullied through the tight stream of traffic. Here and there a big braying voice pushe
d from the bubble of noise. The unforgettable scent of smoking marijuana pierced the gaseous mixture of motor fumes, cheap colognes, alcohol, foul breath, sweat stink, dust and smoke that passed for air. “Going to float to heaven in a dream.” Jesse thought.

  He went down to Seventh Avenue and stood for a moment watching the fat black boys with their bright gold babes glide past in their shiny Cadillacs. “Can’t beat that, son,” he said. “Heaven already. No need of going any further.” Then he turned and went back to the Apollo bar and began drinking gin and beer. A big sloppy black prostitute sidled up to the tall black man in a light green gabardine suit on the stool beside him and asked in a thick whiskey voice, “Wanna see a girl, baby?” The black man looked her up and down. “Where she at?” he asked. Jesse laughed to himself.

  The next thing he knew he was in the balcony of the Apollo theatre watching a gangster picture on the screen. Weird faces in graduated rows appeared dimly in a thick blue haze of marijuana smoke like grim trophies of a ravenous cannibal. On the screen two thieves were quarrelling over a pile of loot when suddenly one drew his gun and shot the other dead, and Jesse thought, “Solved now!”

  Over to one side a high boy stated, “Easy come, easy go,” and from another section someone added, “Get yours in heaven.” Not to be outdone a third cried, “Open de door, Peter.” Jesse said, “Your people, son.”

  He found himself getting a marijuana jag from inhaling the smoke and the black and white film began taking on patches of brilliant technicolour. “If I sit here long enough the problem will solve itself,” he thought. “Everybody will turn green.”

  Then he was walking north on Seventh Avenue beneath a bright purple sky and the dingy, smoke-blackened tenements were new brick red with yellow windows and green sills and the lights of the bars and greasy spoons slanting across the dirty walk burned like phosphorescent fires. “No wonder the cats smoke gage,” he thought, then said aloud, “Every man his own Nero.”

  “What?” a feminine voice asked.

  He looked about and found a woman on his arm. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said, thinking he was teasing. He had been buying her drinks at Small’s bar for the past hour and now she was taking him home. “In here, baby,” she said, steering him toward the entrance to a violet-coloured apartment house. He gave her a good look then and saw a pretty brown-skinned woman in a soft blue suit. Her full-lipped mouth was deep purple like a lamb kidney and her black eyes shiny as twin cockroaches. “Is it good?” he asked. She smiled with teeth as yellow as canary birds.

  At one-thirty he found himself having trouble with the locks of the front door at the apartment where he lived. He didn’t know whether he’d gone to bed with the woman or not, for by then he had forgotten her. Nor did he know how long he’d been fumbling with the locks to the door. Finally he got it open and found it almost as difficult to get it locked again. Slowly he groped his way though the dark hall. Napoleon growled from the dark but did not attack, being uncertain whether it was a bona fide burglar or just the roomer. Jesse noticed immediately that the bedding was gone. Then his gaze went next to the rejected manuscript.

  Up until then nothing had seemed strange. Now he was plunged into a state of mind where nothing seemed natural. Becky was gone and the book was returned. You couldn’t marry a book. “No matter how much you sleep with it, you don’t get any babies,” he thought. “Else, son, you would have sired more manuscripts than the whole Victorian age.” He looked at his reflection in the mirror. His greasy face was haggard, his eyes glazed and sunken, deep weary lines framing a catfish mouth. “Jesse Robinson,” he said. “Can’t eat bitter, son. No more than natural, anyway. Christian nation. Don’t forget that. Pagans nutted all black slaves. Christians let them keep their God-given nuts. Profit in it too. Don’t forget the profit. More nuts more pickaninnies grow. Just don’t get bitter, son. Remember it was business; strictly business. Funny, really. Funny as hell if you just get the handle to the joke. Like the Englishman said to the cannibal. You may eat me, you savage, but you’ll play hell digesting me. Or would an Englishman say ‘play hell’? Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s ever digested an Englishman yet. Black men not that hard to digest but our Christians have weak stomachs. Can’t even digest their own Christianity. Too bad, son. Too bad, so sad, you’re mad. No point in being mad, son. Better get your black ass glad.” He stared at his ugly reflection. “Don’t blame them, either,” he said. “Hard a time as they had getting this world, make no sense to give it away, share it up with some whining idiot like you. Sensible people. Look what they did with Christianity. Here a poor martyr died to bring his people freedom. And these people used his philosophy to enslave the world. If that ain’t smart it will have to do. Get smart too, son. Be happy. Smile. A nigger’s big white teeth are worth more than a college education. Show your teeth, son. Show your worth. Pry those gums open with a smile.” He looked for his bottle of whiskey, found it nearly finished. He had no recollection of drinking the greater part of it. “No wonder,” he said, emptying the bottle into his glass. He raised the glass to his reflection. “Smile.” He grimaced as the sharp liquor burnt down his throat.

  Before he’d finished undressing, the dirge had started faintly in the back of his mind:

  dee-dee-dee-dee-dee dee dee dee

  o o o o o doooooooooooooo

  For a short time after he’d gone to bed he tried to decide what course to take with the manuscript, whether to buckle down and try to do the necessary revisions himself before his money ran out, or whether to try to find another publisher and get a contract first. “A writer writes, a fighter fights,” he muttered finally. “You jumped the gun, son. This is the age of the great black fighters. Next century for great black writers. They played you a dirty trick. You might have been a great fighter. But some practical joker put a pen in your hand. You should have stuck it in the bastard’s ass.”

  dee-dee-dee-dee dee-dee dee dee dee dee

  o o o o o o o

  doooooooooooooooooo

  When he lay flat the room swam. His heart beat with great slow strokes, like an artesian pump, shaking his entire body. He felt physically exhausted but his mind kept churning at fever pitch, twitching convulsively as if in the throes of death. He decided to read and took down his volume of Gorki’s Bystander. The book fell open at a page and he found himself reading over and over again in a strange feverish daze the two lines he’d already read a hundred times: “Clim heard someone in the crowd question gravely, doubtfully: ‘But was there really a boy? Perhaps there was no boy at all!’” He was convinced that those words contained a message, that through them some force was endeavouring to communicate some profound knowledge to him, perhaps the whole solution to the mystery, which he couldn’t interpret…Perhaps there was no boy at all…Perhaps there was no boy at all’…“Upon the churning water there floated only a black caracul cap. Small, leaden pieces of ice swam about it. The water heaved up in little waves, reddish in the rays of the sunset…” Perhaps there was no boy all…Beating the boy! That’s the way black intellectuals referred to discussions of the black problem. Beating the boy!…Perhaps there was no boy at all…That’s the sheet you got to bleach…What’s your plan, Charlie Chan?…He felt the solution was contained in one sentence. In two words, perhaps…He tried combinations of words…Black-love…black-thin…white-right…white-light…repeat-defeat…change-same…change-stay…change-ever…Adam-atom…beige-age…blood-black…blood-mix…time-fall…time-level…But his thoughts returned again and again to the combination white-woman…He suffered a frenzy of frustration…problem-woman…problem-black…problem-white…white-woman…The mental effort made him dizzy. Nausea grew in his stomach like a bomb about to burst…The room began to spin…He closed his eyes to steady it…

  He dreamed he was in a house with a thousand rooms of different sizes made entirely of distorted mirrors. There were others beside himself but he could not tell how many because their reflections went on into infinity in the distort
ed mirrors. Nor could he see their true shape because in one mirror they all appeared to be obese dwarfs and in another tall, thin, cadaverous skeletons. He ran panic-stricken from room to room trying to find a familiar human shape, but he saw only the grotesque reflections, the brutal faces that leered from some distortions, the sweet smiles from others, the sad eyes, the gentle mouths, the sinister stares, the treacherous grins, the threatening scowls, hating and bestial, suffering and saintly, gracious and kind, and he knew that none of them was the true face and he continued to run in frantic terror until he found a door and escaped. The house sat on a hill higher than the Empire State Building and from the front steps he could see all of Manhattan Island from the Battery to the Cloisters, the East side and the West side, and he could see all the people in their streets and in the buildings at work and in the houses at home as if the walls were glass, the white people and the black people, the Gentiles and the Jews, the people of all the nationalities who dwelt and worked therein, side by side, day after day, all normal in physical form, their faces bearing normal everyday expressions, and he could see into their minds and read their thoughts and they were normal thoughts which had been associated with human mentality since the beginning of recorded history, but from his point of view this normal struggle for existence appeared so greatly distorted by emotional idiocy, senseless loves and hatreds, lunatic ambitions, bestial passions, grotesque reasoning, fantastic behaviour, that he turned in horror and fled back into the house of distorted mirrors where by comparison everything seemed normal.

  He threshed about in his sleep, grinding his teeth and groaning, and once he struck out with a stabbing motion, crying aloud through clenched teeth in a voice of insensate rage, “I’ll kill you!”

  At nine o’clock he awakened, got up and looked at his nude body in the mirror. His face was swollen and had the smooth greasy sheen of over-drinking; his eyes were glassy, almost senseless. He skinned back his lips and examined his dull yellow teeth. As yet he had no hangover, but his senses were deadened. For five full minutes he stood and stared at the paper-wrapped manuscript without any conscious thought. The room seemed to undulate almost imperceptibly. Outside the windows the day was gray. He turned his attention to the clock and watched the minute hand move from 9:07 to 9:10. Without being conscious of his reason for doing so, he picked up his big clasp knife, opened it, then stood with the naked blade and stared at his manuscript for another two minutes. Abruptly, with a cry of stricken rage, an animal sound, half howl, half scream, he stabbed the manuscript with all his force. The strong forged blade went deep into the pages without breaking. Then all of a sudden thought surged back into his mind.