The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  Suddenly the smell of something burning alerted his senses. On sight of smoke pouring from the kitchen doorway he jumped to his feet and rushed into the smoke-filled room. For a moment he was in complete command of his senses. He realized instantly that the steak had caught fire. Calmly he turned off the gas, threw open the window, speared the burning steak with a long-handled fork, tossed it into the sink and turned the cold water on it. “Black enough for Kriss now,” he thought.

  And the next thing he knew it was Sunday afternoon.

  Chapter 10

  Kriss never dreamed. But physical discomfort ofttimes penetrated her unconsciousness in a manner similar to a dream. In her sleep she became conscious of being chilly and awakened immediately. Before opening her eyes she flung a bare arm searchingly across the faded blue sheet. It encountered only emptiness. Every event of the previous night returned in one flash of memory. She became rigid, scarcely breathing, her emotions shattered by the blind panic she always experienced on awakening and finding herself alone. “Oh shit!” she exclaimed in acute chagrin. Not that she regretted having ordered Jesse home, but that he had gone. She felt as if her fair white body had betrayed her. It had been bad enough when Dave walked out, but for Jesse—for any Negro…

  She opened her eyes and saw she had slept uncovered. Critically she examined her neglected body. From her prone position she saw the hill of a soft white belly between two flat-top mounds of breasts, one arm outflung and the other curved around breasts and belly with the fingertips sunk in the straight sparse leaf-brown hairs surrounding her cloaca, and beyond, the square-toed feet in vague silhouette against the dark gray slit of open window. She thought of the time she used to have a lovely flat stomach and resolved to stop drinking for a month. Remembering how much she had drunk the night before she became enraged. “Damn Jesse to hell!” she muttered, as if he’d forced her to drink against her will. And then, tickled by the indignant thought: “At least he should have had the decency to screw me before leaving—even if I were unconscious,” she began to giggle. It was dim in the room; the door was open to a gray hall and outside it looked like a gray night. She turned on the night light and looked at the gold-plated Swiss clock. The hands stood at 6.11. She picked it up and found that it had stopped. She dialled Time and while waiting looked at her nude body with distaste. A woman’s controlled contralto voice purred affectedly, “When you hear the chime…the time will be…one thirty-two and one quarter…” It struck Kriss as being a sexy voice, whereas a man would have been irritated, and she listened for it to speak again, wondering what the woman looked like, blonde or brunette, buxom or petite, young or elderly, if she had been screwed last night, if she had liked it, if she screwed quietly or intensely or with a lot of pitching and gasping and crying or with the dull indifferent application of a woman trying to get it done; and when she heard her voice again she decided she did it in the first way and thought, “Come up to my house, baby,” and the next instant was shocked by such a thought. She got up and set the clock and started across the hall to the bathroom but heard a voice muttering, “Going to fuck you goddamit—open your goddam legs,” and stepped to the arch of the sitting room. In the semi-darkness she saw clothes strewn haphazardly over the floor and a nude brown body curled grotesquely on the sofa, a wrinkled sheet beneath it and one of her extra blankets wrapped about the head and shoulders. It faced outward, the buttocks pressed tightly against the sofa’s back, and erected penis pointing room-ward with which the right hand struggled spasmodically as if to tear it off. By his presence she was instantly relieved of her panic and chagrin and when she heard him scream in muffled frustration, “Don’t play around, goddamit!” she giggled with delight and felt warm and good all over. She felt an impulse to tickle his penis with a broom straw to see what he would do but was afraid she might awaken him, so instead she stood silently and listened. For a long time he didn’t speak again, then he cried in a voice of rage, “kill you!” and kicked out so violently his toe hit the cocktail table and sent a glass spinning across the floor. “Uhn!” he grunted in pain but didn’t awaken. Then quickly he turned on his stomach, pressing his erection against the sofa and she heard a jumble of words which sounded like, “Now that’s better, baby—but your skin feels rough.” His tan body minus its head was like a bronze statue in the dim light and she felt a strong desire to kneel beside it and kiss the firm smooth buttocks and hard slender thighs. But her curiosity proved stronger and she let him sleep.

  She performed her morning’s toilet as quickly as possible, brushed her teeth and showered briefly, slipped on a pair of rayon panties and then, as she was standing before the mirror surveying her legs, one ear cocked to listen, abruptly her stomach fell. She had felt no hangover on awakening but was now so suddenly hungry she felt nausea. In the doorway of the kitchen immediately after turning on the light, she stood stock still in consternation. The window was open wide on the rusty wet fire escape and a face peered from the window of the apartment across the murky airwell. It was raining grayly with that desolation of a miserable big city Sunday and she went quickly to shut the window and draw the blinds to close out the gloomy day and the leering face of the fat bald-headed salesman across the way who’d been vainly trying for the past two months to meet her accidentally in the corridor. The grill at the bottom of the oven was pulled out and charred black, and a soggy cinder of meat lay in the greasy sink. Atop the stove was a pan lined with burnt whipped potatoes, a charred paper container and some green stuff in a pot that resembled scum on a stagnant pool. On the table the cardboard carton in which the groceries had been delivered had been hacked to pieces, and then she saw the knife sticking from the centre of the door. Four of the white doughy uncooked club rolls were skewered on the blade like corpses of newborn quadruplets and the blade stabbed into the centre crossbar of the door with such force it remained in position as if awaiting the fire to barbecue. Kriss stared at it for some time, more out of curiosity than fear, wondering what had been in Jesse’s mind, and from what she knew of how he thought, the skewered rolls took the form of the four outsize testicles of the great-grandfathers of the whole white race pinned as a grim love token by a bitter Negro on a lush white woman’s door. She was so sexually excited by the sadistic thought that when she endeavoured to draw out the knife she found her fingertips caressing the dead white mutilated testicles and her mind picturing the black erection of the tan body on the sofa. Suddenly she was weak from hunger to the point of fainting. She ate a plain slice of white bread, then put on water to make coffee and boil eggs, and stepped back into the hall to clear a space on the table. Not until then did she notice the scrawled note, and as she stood reading it, ciphering the scrawled words, her sexual excitement was again heightened by the veiled frustration behind the drunken threats. This, combined with the telltale erection and the mutilated mammoth white testicles, conjured up a picture of frenzy that made her frantic, her mouth turning strange with opening glands, and she would have gone and turned him over if she hadn’t heard the water boil.

  She made coffee, two pieces of dry toast, soft-boiled one egg, got the Sunday Herald-Tribune from the mat outside her door, cleared a space on the table, and while sipping her black coffee and munching her egg-dipped toast, began methodically reading the paper from cover to cover. She read rapidly, making mental notes of all items concerning foundations and the India Institute, her brilliant mentality with its wide research experience rapidly condensing the facts and discarding the journalistic repetitions, functioning at the high degree of efficiency attributed to Harvard-trained scientists who live normal lives, eat balanced diets, are happily married and sexually complete, and have never tasted an intoxicating beverage. With one comer of her mind she listened to Jesse grinding his teeth and muttering angrily in his sleep and once, giggling with the therapeutic amusement which humans derive from the antics of monkeys in the zoo, paused for a moment to watch him thresh about like an eel in a net. “Kill you!” he shouted in a fit of rage and struck out w
ith his fist, striking the wall with such force she crossed the room to see if the paint was scarred. After that he turned onto his side, and tucked his bruised hand between his legs. He blew a snort of laughter and said in a distinct voice, ‘T got mine, now you get yours.” Kriss laughed girlishly with incurious delight and resumed her perusal of an address delivered for U. S. President Truman by U. S. Secretary of State Acheson to the effect that unless suffering was wiped out in underdeveloped countries it might be used by a new dictatorship “more terrible” than the Soviet Union.

  Since the first instant of sleep Jesse had dreamed countless horrible scenes of violent rape and murder and savage fights and apoplectic arguments, all of which had been blasted from memory at the moment of awakening by the last macabre dream of millions of black men, women and children being driven off a cliff into a bottomless gorge by a genial mob of white horsemen, himself watching them disappear, wave after wave, like mute zombies without anger or protest or entreaty, but when it came his turn he cried out in a voice of terror, “But I signed the paper!” and the laughing horsemen spurred their beasts toward him, one of them saying, “Who said you could write?” and trampled him over the edge, and as he fell turning over and over, he caught glimpses of columns of horsemen galloping through the sky and thought, half-amused, of a story his father used to tell about two slaves raiding the ham-house one dark and rainy night; old master was waiting inside and when the first slave reached underneath a loose board to swipe a ham, old master whacked his hand with a hammer, and hearing his buddy jerk back his hand, the second slave asked, “You get it?” to which the first slave replied, “Ah got mine, now you get yours.”

  He awakened instantly in the middle of his fall and feeling the blanket wound about his head thought someone was trying to strangle him, and took a desperate leap backward, clawing at the murderous hands. He landed with a loud thud on his side in the middle of the floor. When finally he’d torn off the offending blanket from his face he saw Kriss sitting at the table, grinning at him.

  “You’ve been having a bad time, baby,” she said. “Was some woman’s husband trying to trap you?”

  “I thought I was being strangled,” he confessed sheepishly.

  She giggled. “You shouldn’t fight so much, baby. You wouldn’t be so afraid.”

  He stood up, threw the blanket on the sofa and rubbed his bruised hip bone. “Those bastards jump me while I’m sleeping,” he said self-mockingly. “Won’t come out and fight when I’m awake and sober.”

  “When is that, dear?”

  He noticed his clothes on the floor, the knocked-over glass, slept-on sofa, heaped ashtrays, dirty dishes and blew laughter through his nose. “Kilroy was here. On a bender, too.” Then to himself, “Not Kilroy, Leroy!” Suddenly realizing he’d slept on a sheet, he asked wonderingly, “Did you make the sofa?”

  “No, dear, when I went to bed you were cooking.” She grinned. “You were having a cooking good time.”

  He remembered the burning steak and laughed. “Damn right!” Then he noticed her staring analytically at his nude body. “What am I bid?”

  “You have a beautiful body, Jesse,” she said with honest lasciviousness.

  “It ought to be,” he thought. “All those workouts I got pushing that mop in White Plains.”

  “If we still owned slaves I’d pay a year’s wages for you—”

  “Don’t be so goddam cheap!”

  “I’d keep you in my bedroom for a pet and give you a gold collar and nameplate—”

  “Be the envy of all the bitches with the Pekineses because I can talk.”

  “You can do more than talk, baby. You’re much better equipped than a Pekinese!”

  “Don’t have their finesse, evidently.”

  She grinned. “You are having a hard time getting started, aren’t you, baby?”

  “If this keeps up—” But in the middle of it he had a sudden attack of diarrhoea and had to dash. “Actions speak louder than words,” he thought, then, “Phew! Bastards not only beat me in my sleep but made me eat with the buzzards.” Afterwards he examined his drink-swollen face in the mirror. It had the smooth greasy sheen of a syphilitic pimp’s, and his glazed stunned eyes, now a jaundiced yellow, looked inhuman. “Black Dracula,” he said. He felt pleasantly dazed and slightly tickled as if a bubble of laughter floated about in his delightful derangement, yet perfectly normal, other than that his body felt sore and bruised. “Kriss, baby,” he called, sticking his head out of the doorway, “you haven’t by any chance been beating me with a poker in my sleep?”

  “No, dear, I regret to confess. You were beating it yourself.”

  Turning back, he shook his head at his reflection. “Jesse Robinson, what’s the matter, son? You’ve been with this bitch for two whole nights and still haven’t scored.” Then, while showering, “If you don’t get started soon, son, they’re gonna farm you out to the Bush League.” He put a new blade in her safety razor and shaved, applied her comb and brush to his wet kinks and used the first toothbrush he touched, thinking, “Don’t let those hygienists catch you, boy.”

  Returning to the sitting room he dressed in shorts, socks and shoes, hung the remainder of his clothes in her clothes closet, after which he went behind her and bent down and kissed her on the nape of her neck, noticing with a slight revulsion a faint rash on her back.

  “Get me my glasses, dear,” she commanded. “They’re on the night stand in the bedroom.”

  He fetched them obediently, thinking, “That bitch would love to switch me.” Aloud he asked, “How about breakfast, baby?”

  “I’ve had my breakfast, dear. I was eating while you were fighting your enemies in your sleep.”

  He started to say, “You call that a breakfast for a big girl like you,” but instantly realized she was too big a girl for that remark.

  Then on entering the kitchen he exclaimed, “Great damn, Kilroy brought his whole fuckin’ family,” adding amusedly when he saw the knife sticking in the door, “Blazed a trail for Mr Ward too!” Then, to himself, “Damn, son, you’ll never be a Hamlet at this rate.” But for an instant he was shocked out of his nice sensation of deranged normality and felt a tremor of fear. “I ought to get the hell out of here!” he thought, but quickly drowned it was a drink. They’d drunk two bottles of Scotch and a half bottle of bourbon, he noticed, as he started on the remainder of the bourbon.

  “Jesse!” Kriss spoke so sharply at his back he gave a violent start and dropped the empty glass in the sink where it shattered into pieces. “Goddamit, Kriss—” he gasped protestingly.

  She was vastly tickled by his frightened start but repressed it long enough to say viciously, “I want you to have that door fixed. I’m not going to have you niggers break up this apartment. Maud hacked my dining room table to pieces with a kitchen knife—”

  “Maud? I thought—”

  “That was in Chicago. She tried to make Harold pay me some money he owed me and he slapped her—”

  “Good for him!”

  But she wouldn’t let him off that easily. “It cost me three hundred dollars to have this place painted and I’m not going to let you hungry niggers—”

  “—Three hundred dollars? Before I’d have paid that I’d have fucked and got myself another one.”

  Grinning, she moved into him and squeezed him painfully. “You would?”

  “Ouch, goddamit, that hurts!”

  Their bodies locked together and they kissed with mechanical skill, but the sight of her clad only in shell-rimmed spectacles and rayon shorts kept reminding him of the cartoons of Africans clad only in top hats and interfered with his passion, and he took them off and began all over again. For the moment following her vicious abuse of him she felt passionate, but it soon waned and she broke away. “Jesse, I want you to clean up this mess you and Harold made—” Such animal rage spewed from his yellow eyes she broke off to giggle. His hands trembled as he poured a drink to steady himself. Gulping it, he gasped, “One of these times, bab
y—”

  “Oh, Jesse, why didn’t you drink the bourbon,” she complained with genuine emotion. “You and that son of a bitch drank up my good Scotch—”

  “He’s your friend, baby.”

  “I hate him!” she said, venomously, and returned to her paper.

  “Well, as long as there’s food, there’s hope,” he said to himself, and after making a tall iced bourbon highball, prepared for himself a breakfast of four sausages, four slices of kidney, three fried eggs and two browned rolls.

  “You going on a journey, baby?” she asked at the sight of his plate.

  “You called me a hungry nigger,”

  “Hungry, anyway.”

  “No, I like the hungry nigger better. I like to think of myself as a nigger when I’m fucking you.”

  She smiled her secret sensual smile and turned his face toward her and kissed his greasy mouth and after that he had a hard time swallowing it, but he made it.