The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  He crossed to the bathroom in his bare feet and Kriss, sitting in her favourite chair with an iced highball by her side, watching her favourite television program, Mr Peepers, and thinking herself unseen, was giggling like an imbecile and did not hear him. Between them, she and Don had cleaned up the mess, and now she had grilled the ham-steak Jesse had brought and made her dinner, and now, being entertained by modern science, delightfully intoxicated by aged whiskey, with a healthy anxious and qualified male negro awaiting her in her bed in her own apartment in the greatest city in the world, with the whole night ahead, she felt wonderful.

  Instinctively Jesse first closed the bathroom window to keep the neighbours from seeing a black man in a white woman’s apartment, then studied his reflection in the mirror. “What do you keep looking for, son? A miracle?” he asked himself. “You’re going to keep on looking at yourself until you see something you don’t want to see.” He then brushed his teeth, gargled, showered hot then cold until his teeth began to chatter. He was drying himself when Kriss looked in the door and asked, grinning cheerfully, “How do you feel now, baby?”

  He towelled about his groin and between his legs, looking at her with detached camera-eye coldness. And what he saw was a definitely mature bloated-stomach fat-jowled blonde white woman with glassy blue eyes of a strange oriental shape and skin as white as a fish’s belly.

  A woman who had probably slept with a hundred or more blacks, mostly men, grinning at him in what he interpreted as that strange idiotic manner of white Americans laughing at every black they see, no matter how unfunny that black might be, as if laughing at blacks was as obligatory as standing for the national anthem.

  “I feel fine,” he said flatly.

  But she was in a playful mood and reached out and clutched him hurtingly, as if shaking hands. “If you don’t make good tonight, Peter, you’re fired.”

  “Goddamit, cut it out!” he said angrily. “That isn’t a subway strap.”

  “All aboard!” she said, giggling, and gave two jerks. “Toot-toot!”

  His brain exploded with the quick blind rage of killing, and he would have hit her in the face involuntarily had she not pinioned his arms in a tight embrace and, still grinning, forced her tongue between his teeth. His obvious resentment enhanced her enjoyment all the more and she let go his arms and pinched his buttocks, drawing back her face to say, “You have a beautiful derrière, baby; if I was a man I’d like you.”

  He disengaged himself without comment, coldly and soberly hating himself for ever wanting to sleep with this white woman or any white women, and yet thinking on the other side of his mind, half-amused by the sober picture of himself: “Logical enough, though. Unavoidable really. Nigger’s got to want to screw white women. Got no choice the way they got it set up. Wouldn’t be human if he didn’t. Absolutely right too. Should want to screw ‘em. Good for his ego; great therapeutic qualities in screwing white woman. White man kick his ass until he gets sick; get some white woman ass and get well. Good for her too. White man kick her ass till she gets sick; screw some black niggers and get even. Don’t let him catch her though; but be sure and let him know about it, otherwise lose half its curative value. Not just logical and unavoidable and right, but essential in our culture. Necessary balance. Besides which, what the hell else is there to expect—the country’s full of white women who want to be screwed and everything from Saucy Dames to Henry James says they’re the firstest with the mostest…”

  “Are you hungry, baby?” she asked solicitously.

  Applying her best hair brush to his wet kinks in a deliberate effort to annoy her, he replied shortly, “No.”

  But this only added to her enjoyment of his vexation. They say the best way to keep a woman is barefooted and knocked up, but she liked her men bare-bodied and knocked down. Grinning, she offered, “I’ll make you a drink while you dress, baby.”

  “I’ll make it myself,” he muttered, pushing past her and going naked to the kitchen.

  She brought her glass and made a civilized Scotch highball while watching him uncork a bottle of gin, pour a half glass, and gulp it down. He gasped and she giggled, her eyes brightly amused. For her, this was the best part of it, all her past hurts were dissolved, watching the symptomatic self-destructiveness of a frustrated Negro male in a white woman’s room. She was sexually thrilled by the look of raw hatred he turned on her and was only deterred from clutching him again by the risk of getting smashed in the face.

  “You gave Don a messy job, baby,” she said giggling.

  He poured another drink of gin to quickly blur his sharp-angled perspective, in which everything seemed so strange and incredibly depraved.

  “It seems as if every time you see him you get sick and vomit, baby.”

  “Small wonder.”

  “He said it would be nice to see what you were like when you were sober.”

  “Fuck what he said.”

  Daringly, she gave him a quick painful jerk and ducked into the hall before he could react. “Hurry baby,” she called cheerfully.

  “What for?” he muttered, then to himself. “Son, you ought to go home.” But the thought of leaving that small bright cell of debauchery and invading the outside darkness invoked an incomprehensible fear. It was as if, during his twenty-six hours in her apartment, the outside had become the unknown, and was infested with dangers and evils and, what was more to be feared, imponderables of what was termed normality too terrifying to be ventured. Inside he felt secure, when sufficiently drunk to pleasantly subside into a dementia praecox befitting the circumstances and complimenting the bitch. Besides which he hadn’t yet screwed her. After taking another drink of gin he went naked into the sitting-room and closed in on Kriss as she bent over the dials of the television set, taking her about the waist and drawing her to him. “Get off this goddam rag,” he said hoarsely, “I’m gonna screw you on the floor.”

  She giggled, playfully shaking her derrière against him, but when he jerked savagely about, fumbling with the zipper of her rompers, she flushed with rage. “Jesse! If you knock over my television set—”

  His mind went into a great white blinding flash and the next thing he knew she was struggling beneath him on the floor with a great rent down the front of her rompers, giggling with such intense sexual fury she felt an orgasm being forced unwillingly from her subdued body. The telephone rang and her glands closed in an absolute dispersion of passion, like a turtle drawing in its head. “Goddammit let me answer the telephone!” she cried. Her sudden animus had changed the very nature of her flesh into so much spongy and undesirable meat. His passion went out too, leaving him with a detached, almost clinical desire to hold her by the throat with one hand and slap her face with the other. But she began struggling, with the crazed panic of one being forcibly drowned—“That might be my boss, you son of a bitch!”—and was out from beneath him and away before he could begin to slap her.

  He lay on his side watching the zigzag streaks of white and black chase one another furiously across the television screen, as if it were the intention of the studio to depict continual distortion, and when he heard a faint voice from the television say, “…and that, ladies and gentlemen of the television audience, is the news of the world,” he thought, half-amused, “Might be news to you, son, but I knowed it all along.”

  “Walter Martin and Lucille are coming over shortly,” Kriss announced from the hall.

  “That ass!” he muttered irritably.

  “He’s better than you think,” she said, smiling her secret sensual smile.

  “Who haven’t you slept with?” he asked in disgust.

  She grinned. “Not many.”

  “When you run out of these, there’re plenty more in the jungle.”

  “Hurry and get dressed, dear, they’ll be here soon.”

  “In addition to which there are the apes. Now an ape I’m told—”

  “Jesse!” she said viciously. “If you’re going to be disagreeable I want you to go home now.�
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  “Kriss, baby,” he said cheerily, clambering to his feet, “the next time you tell me to go home I’m going to knock your teeth out.”

  They dressed in silent antagonism, she in the black square-neck party dress and heavy silver jewelry she’d worn to Nick’s, even to the affectation of middle-class respectability; and he in his full regalia of a weekend lay for a sexually frustrated white business lady.

  Walter came galloping in astride his aggressive personality like the mighty Richard Coeur de Lion astride his mighty horse and Jesse thought, as he was clapped mightily on the shoulder by the mighty man’s mighty hand, “Knight me, big boy, knight me!” Walter was one of the editors of a successful black picture magazine and consequently knew everything knowable within the realm of human knowledge and much that was without it—a great deal without it. He was a handsome man with a handsome moustache and a complexion the colour of dried cow dung. Every two weeks he went to a barber shop up on Seventh Avenue and for four dollars a treatment had a white lye paste applied to his thick kinky hair which made it as soft and as straight as white folks’ hair. The hair was killed by this treatment. However, Walter preferred dead white-folks’-hair to live nigger-kinks.

  Placing his drink on the seldom used desk, he turned the desk chair about to face the room. Then, seating himself in executive fashion, took command of the conversation: “I was in San Francisco last week interviewing Mayor Robinson—no relation to Jesse—on the problem of the new Negro slums that have grown up there since the war. What Mayor Robinson doesn’t know—”

  “You told him of course,” Jesse thought and quit listening to examine Lucille who sat beside him on the sofa wearing a long-suffering look. She was a petite brown-skinned woman with a tiny waist, a rather pretty narrow face, a shyly sexy mouth and big legs. She smelled of woman-and-perfume and Jesse lit a cigarette to keep from being disturbed by it. Catching a moment when both her mighty man and his white woman audience were taking a drink at once, she said to Jesse, “I heard you’ve written a new book,” but Walter was too quick for them, having a big gullet no doubt, and grabbed back the conversation before he could reply.

  “The trouble with Jess is he writes for a limited audience—”

  “—hates white people so much—” Kriss was trying to say, but Walter’s big executive voice shouted her down:

  “Got to write so people will read you, Jess boy—”

  “—My writing teacher played a dirty joke—” Jesse was trying to get in edgewise but Walter had no liking for anyone’s voice but his own:

  “You write plain enough but what do they see? In my profession we say one picture is worth ten pages—”

  “He’ll never write a successful book until he stops hating—” Kriss piped up but Walter mowed her down: “Take Dickens—clear picture on every page, great composition, hard black on stark white—”

  Jesse slipped in with: “Your libido is showing.”

  Kriss had started to say: “White people are tired of being hated by you—” when suddenly she realized the meaning of Jesse’s quip and broke off to giggle, stealing a furtive, sidelong look at Lucille.

  “What I am trying to tell Jess is—” Walter recovered ponderously, and Jesse leaned his head back on the sofa and watched the bright, mottled colour-sounds bob on the bloody blurred sea. He felt sealed within a vague amusement by the idiocy of it all.

  “Why don’t you and Kriss give Jesse a chance to defend himself?” Lucille interrupted the great man daringly, and Jesse said thickly, speaking in his careful drunken voice, “My next book is going to be an outstanding best seller. It is going to be selected by all seven book clubs—all eleven that is—” and for once he had their undivided attention. Blowing laughter through his nose he said slowly, “At first I was undecided. I was going to write my autobiography and entitle it: Massa’s Old Black Mammy Takes Her Last Crap, but my editors objected to the use of the pronoun her—they thought it should be it—” he was vaguely aware of Kriss giggling, Walter looking disgusted and Lucille staring at him in amazement “—so I gave that one up. And now I’m going to write the biography of the great white ape who rules all the black apes in the jungle. Mister A., as he is known to the black apes. Of course the title will be. Gone With The Apes.” He became so tickled he couldn’t continue.

  “You’re joking—” Walter began.

  “Don’t tell me you knew all along?” he gasped.

  “—but I’m trying to tell you something for your own good. You Negro writers—”

  “Don’t look at me, boss, I ain’t done nothing!”

  “—want you to listen, nigger! I’m telling you something—” Walter was getting angry.

  “—catching every word, boss—”

  “Jesse!” Kriss said sharply, furious at being ignored. But her good humour was restored by the sudden start he gave, knocking over his glass. “Make the drinks for us, dear,” she said, grinning cheerfully.

  He stood up, smiling, and said thickly, “For one sweet look from your big blue beautiful braised eyes, will cross deepest ocean, be it filled with gin…” and staggered about the room, clutching the glasses to his belly, then lurched teetering toward the kitchen, banging into the table and ricocheting against the opposite wall. Spontaneously, Lucille started from her seat to help him, but Walter, taking his cue from the malicious grin of Kriss, motioned her to stay seated.

  Jesse poured a quarter of a glass of gin for himself and drank it quickly to steady the bottles that had begun acquiring reptilian life.

  And the next thing he knew he was sitting in Kriss’s favourite three-legged chair speaking in his normal voice with great animation “—without prejudice or favour and he’ll hate you forever. But call him either a saint or a bastard and he’ll either love you or forgive you—” to Harold who was sitting on a stool across the room with his back to the wall between the sofa and desk, listening with the appreciative relish of one hearing his enemies maligned. Kriss was sitting on the sofa talking shop with Lucille, who worked for a Foundation in Brooklyn, smelling her femininity in much the same fashion Jesse had smelled it previously, staring with unconscious lust at the whip and coil of Lucille’s lips which she wetted with her tongue-tip between every sentence or two. While Walter was leaning back in his desk chair, looking at the whole assembly with the expression of cynical disdain which he had assiduously rehearsed for such occasions as this, but seen from without in lieu of from within appeared a great deal more like the lowering expression of a half-treed coon. “—because if you’re a nigger,” Jesse went on talking to Harold, unmindful of the others, “he won’t believe you can see him as he is. If you’re a bad nigger he expects you to hate him and if you’re a good nigger he knows damn well that you love him. But he doesn’t know what to do with a nigger who neither loves nor hates him—”

  “But to kill him!” Harold said, chuckling deprecatingly as if he’d warned that nigger to watch out. “Jesse, you know, old man, I’ve found out there’s one thing drives a white man to murder—”

  “Screwing white women.”

  “Jesse, ol’ man, let me tell you something I’ve found out; the American white man wants you to screw his women—”

  “—all you niggers can think about is screwing white women,” Walter said disgustedly, and Kriss, attracted by the unconscious envy in his voice, deserted Lucille in the middle of a sentence and staggered across the room with her white body to console him. She sat on the arm of his chair facing him with her back to the room as if she were going to offer him a fat white breast to chew on, but instead she kissed him, grinning all the time, and mumbled incoherently, “—an’ Jesse hates white people so. You don’t hate white people, do you, baby?”

  “—but if he ever suspects that you know how he thinks—” Harold was saying, with Jesse interposing: “—kill you sure as—” and Kriss mumbling sensually, “—tell me you don’t hate white people too, baby—” and Walter stroking her breast as if to get milk but still trying to talk around her s
houlder to Harold and Jesse: “It’s time you niggers count your blessings—”

  “—know how insecure he is, you give him a problem he can’t solve and he’s panic-stricken, can’t think—”

  “—ever tell you the story of—”

  “—white race has never solved a single problem in all its history except by extermination. Dead Indians good Indians—”

  “—I went up to Connecticut to work as a caretaker for this guy—New York City attorney, senior member in a firm that handled a lot of movie business—”

  “—sa bitch, ol’ man, itsa bitch—”

  “—had a beautiful farm—used for breeding thoroughbred horses before he got it—beautiful stalls; wooden floors, electric lights in each stall—”

  “—tell you, ol’ man—”

  “—were there, Becky and I, before the son of a bitch came up for the summer an’ wanted us to do housework—we quit—but that’s beside the story…”

  There was a big fine yellow rooster in the pig pen, a little bantam hen that lived in one of the wagon sheds, and seventeen fat white ducks in the wire enclosed chicken yard. This attorney had decided to put in some laying hens, so he came out one weekend and killed the ducks by standing outside the wire fence and shooting them with a shotgun. After which he drove off to order two dozen pullets and pick up a Negro in the city to pluck the ducks, which Jesse had refused to do. The following week Jesse cleaned and whitewashed the henhouse, forked the chicken yard, bought two hundred-pound sacks of chicken mash and scratch, drove over in the Jeep and picked up the pullets and installed them in their new home. But he’d been feeding them from a sack of old mash, which happened to be pig mash, and the eggs were ill-formed and had soft shells. When this attorney came back the following weekend he examined the soft-shelled eggs and stated authoritatively their deformity was due to the rooster fertilizing them. The ignorant Negro who had plucked the ducks stopped by for his pay after dinner, and this attorney called Jesse to the kitchen and the three of them sat around for two hours, drinking Canadian Club whiskey highballs, trying to decide what to do with the rooster. This ignorant Negro suggested that the rooster be denutted but Jesse said he’d never seen any nuts on a rooster carcass, so this attorney went into his library and brought back a book on poultry-raising, but all he discovered about roosters nuts was a section of the rooster referred to as primaries. Being an attorney who was familiar with all manner of terms, he was able to state authoritatively that the primaries were the nuts, but there was no way of separating them from the rooster. Jesse couldn’t understand how this rooster who lived in the pig pen a half mile distant from the chicken coop could have fertilized the eggs, even with such portentous sounding nuts as primaries, or for that matter even had he been as well-equipped as a Man O’ War. But of course he didn’t say so, being as he was drinking this attorney’s good whiskey. Finally the solution burst on this attorney like a brainstorm. He banged dramatically on the table with his open palm and said in the voice of a general giving the order to charge: “Jesse! KILL THE ROOSTER!”