Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d ya do, break it?”

  “No, I’m doing twenty years for robbery.”

  His mouth came open. “Je-hesus Christ!”

  Captain Warren came in with the deputy and we stopped talking. The deputy stood very erect and walked with short, fast steps. He didn’t look at any of us. He walked jerkily and his head bobbed up and down. He kept straight on back to the courtroom.

  Kish came in from outside and followed them. There was a grimy old window between the courtroom and the waiting room. I saw the deputy take the middle of the three chairs behind the scarred, flat-topped desk.

  Kish stuck his head out of the door and called, “Wilkerson, 102697.” The youth got up and went inside. He wasn’t giggling now. We kept silent, watching the door, trying to hear what was being said. All we could hear was a jumble of voices. Then the voices stopped. Kish stuck his head out the door.

  “Glass, 101253.”

  When he passed me Glass said, “Jumpy’s in his sins today.” He didn’t come out either. Then Kish called me. I went inside and stood before the desk, leaning forward with the palms of my hands on the desk and my cap stuck in my coat pocket. Kish stood in front of the far door above which was the legend: correction cells.

  Warren stood to my right, at the side of the desk. “Take your cap out of your pocket and fold your hands,” he said. The deputy was reading the yellow report card before him on the desk. I folded my arms, holding my cap in my left hand. Old man Warren took it out of my hand and said, “See, he’s got slick already. He’s got a tailor-made cap.” The deputy didn’t look up. I reached for my cap. Warren said, “Oh, no, I’ll keep this.” I felt myself getting tight again.

  “‘Refusing to work,’” the deputy read from the card. He looked up at me. “You’re starting pretty soon, pretty soon, pretty soon, Monroe.”

  “I gave him every chance,” Warren said. “But he won’t work. I gave him a porter’s job inside, but he quit that…”

  “I got fired,” I interrupted. “Old B&O wanted me…”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Warren shouted, drawing back as if to slap me. “Don’t you interrupt me like that.”

  I burnt up. I could feel the fire in my eyes and face. My whole body got stiff and wooden.

  “I did get fired, goddammit!”

  Kish came up behind me and held my arms. Warren slapped me twice in the mouth.

  “That’ll do, that’ll do,” the deputy said.

  Kish held me for a moment longer to see if I would put up any resistance. I didn’t move. I was saying to myself—so he hit me, he hit me. I’m not going to take that. I’m damned if I take that. Then Kish turned me loose. I still didn’t move.

  After a moment I said dully, “All right, all right. You hit me!” I tasted a little blood on my lips.

  The deputy looked at the card again. “What’s the matter you can’t work, Monroe? What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” He was very impatient and his eyes were snapping-sharp. I couldn’t meet his gaze.

  “I’m not able to,” I said, looking down at the desk.

  “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

  “I’m injured!” I shouted. Then I told him about my back.

  “There’s nothing about it on his hospital card,” Warren said.

  “I didn’t tell the doctor.”

  “We’ll see about it, well see about it,” the deputy said.

  “He’s very impertinent, too,” Warren said.

  “All right, all right, all right, all right,” the deputy said, beginning to shake all over. “All right, all right, all right. Refusing to work. Put him in the hole. Put him in the hole.” He had a rapid, brittle voice. All the while he talked his head kept bobbing up and down.

  “I’m not refusing to work,” I argued. “I’ll do what I can. I’m just not able.”

  “We’ll see about it in the morning. Take him back, take him back, take him back!” He was very impatient.

  I looked around at Warren. “You hit me,” I said, biting my lips. I was going back to the hole anyway. I just may as well bust him one, I thought. I kept biting my lips, trying to get up enough nerve to sock him one. But it wouldn’t come.

  “Watch out, watch out, watch out he doesn’t hit you again,” the deputy said.

  Kish took me by the arm and pushed me through the back door into a small dressing room. There was a bunk against the concrete wall, where he slept. He handed me a pair of overalls and told me to undress. The other two fellows were sitting on the bench waiting for me. They’d already put on their overalls. I stripped naked and put on mine. I could hear Warren still talking to the deputy. But I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  “The dirty son of a bitch,” I muttered.

  “He hit you?” Glass asked. I nodded. “Wipe that blood off your lips,” he said. I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. My lips were swelling. The other fellow giggled. He was a little simple-minded.

  Across the room was a heavy barred door. Behind that was a door of solid steel. Kish opened both doors and motioned us to enter. We walked forward into the hole. It was completely black inside. Kish snapped on the lights.

  Inside there was a miniature cell block made of solid steel. It sat in the center of the floor. The cells, six on each side, faced outwards toward the thick, windowless walls. It was very cold and damp. My teeth began to chatter immediately. I felt my hands getting numb.

  “Put us all together,” Glass asked Kish.

  “You all want to cell together?” Kish asked.

  “I want to cell with him,” Wilkerson said, pointing to Glass. I didn’t answer.

  Kish put the three of us in the last cell, down on the North side. He locked the cell door. There was a steel strait jacket built to the inside of the door. We listened to Kish’s footsteps on the concrete floor. Then we heard the outer doors being locked. The lights were turned out. It was so dark we couldn’t see one another’s eyes.

  “What you punks in for?” The voice sounded as if it came from the other side. It had a muffled note. We didn’t answer. I could hear myself breathe.

  “Who’s a punk?” Glass shouted. It came so unexpectedly I jumped.

  “Aw, I didn’t mean no harm, buddy.” It was the laconic, indifferent voice of an old-timer. “You know I didn’t mean no harm. Got a cigarette?”

  For a time none of us replied. Finally Glass said, “No.”

  “Got a cigarette paper?”

  “No.”

  “Got a match?”

  “No. We haven’t got a thing, buddy.”

  “Go to hell then you goddamn punk. You stinking schmo. You fat gunsel.” The voice was still laconic, indifferent, unraised. I felt like laughing.

  “Aw, shut up, you screwball,” Glass said. “You’re stir-simple.”

  “Your mother’s a screwball. Your sister is stir-simple.”

  This time none of us replied. For a long time it was silent in the hole. “Ain’t you even got a butt?”

  “Kiss something, rat!” Glass yelled. I wondered why he sounded so vehement.

  “Aw, shut up, you fat louse. I bet that’s you doing all the talking. I’ll catch you out there when I empty my bucket tomorrow morning and kick your ass out your nose.”

  Glass got agitated. “I’ll meet you!” he shouted, jumping around. “I’ll fight you! I’m not scared of you!”

  He stepped on my foot and I said, “Goddammit, wait and fight him in the morning.”

  The voice didn’t say anything else so he sat down. There was a slab of steel projecting from the back wall for a bed. It was very cold and the cold came quickly up through my overalls. Glass said there were some blankets in the cell. We felt around on the bench and on the floor without finding them. Then we got down on our hands and knees and groped around on the floor. I knocked into something that rattled. I jumped back as if I’d touched a rattlesnake and knocked into Glass.

  “What the hell’s that?” I asked, shakily.
>
  “That’s your bucket,” Glass said.

  “Bucket? Water bucket?”

  Glass laughed. The other fellow giggled. I began smelling the stink. I’d knocked the top off. I fumbled around and found it and put it back on. “We all use the same bucket?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t they ever wash it out?”

  “Sure, one of us will have to wash it out in the morning.”

  “I hope it ain’t me,” I said.

  Finally Glass found the blankets stuffed back into a corner. “Here they are,” he said.

  There were two pieces which must have been one blanket torn in half and another piece, no larger than a face towel. They felt very grimy to touch. We sat on the bench and wrapped up in them as best we could. Glass took the smallest piece. He said he would sit in the middle and we could sit close to him and keep warm.

  “Damn right,” I laughed. “Hot as you are.” After awhile we began to warm each other.

  “Twenty years. Jesus Christ. You must have stuck up a bank, Jimmy,” Glass commented.

  “No, just some people.”

  “Fat Funky fink!” the voice yelled from the other side. “I bet you got a fat mama.”

  “Dirty screwball,” Glass muttered to himself. “Aw, let him alone,” I said. We were silent for awhile. “I’m cold,” I said.

  Wilkerson hadn’t said anything at all. “I’m hot,” Glass said. “I’ll put my arm around you and that’ll keep you warm.”

  I had my half-a-blanket wrapped about my shoulders but it wasn’t long enough to cover up my front. I held it together at my throat. “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll get warm in a minute.”

  Then Wilkerson said, “Put your arm around me, Ben.” After a time the bedbugs began to bite. I didn’t know bedbugs could live in that much cold but they certainly worked on me. They bit me all over. I began scratching and moving about. The bench began to hurt the end of my spine. I was cold and itching and thoroughly miserable.

  “I want a fire!” the voice yelled from the other side. It sounded hollow and metallic as if the fellow was standing at the back of his cell. “I want something to eat!”

  After a time I heard the sticks banging outside. I could just barely hear them. “Damn!” I whispered. It was just bedtime.

  I tried to go to sleep. I said to myself if I sit in one position and keep my eyes closed I’ll go to sleep. I’m tired, I’ll go to sleep. I’m tired, I’ll go to sleep. I’m tired, I’ll go to sleep…I sat perfectly still. A bedbug bit me. Something crawled over my bare leg. My neck and throat and legs itched intolerably. I itched all over. And then a trickle of pain crept into my body. It began at the base of my spine. It flowed down my legs, up my back. I’ll be asleep in a minute, I said. And then it came in a rush. The pain and the itching and the biting and the cold. “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn,” I sobbed. “Take it easy, Jimmy,” Glass said. “I’ll take it easy,” I said.

  “We’re lucky they didn’t put us in strait jackets,” he said.

  I heard the distant scream of a locomotive whistle. I could imagine the long line of coaches, gliding through the night, with its chain of yellow-lighted windows filled with people, going somewhere, going anywhere.

  “Damned if I’m lucky,” I said.

  That was the longest night I spent in prison. In the morning the deputy asked me if I was ready to go back to work. I said, “Yes, sir.” He sent me back to the coal company. Warren gave me a job sweeping off the wheelbarrow tracks. It was an easy job.

  That afternoon I was transferred into the school company to teach school. The chaplain had charge of the school. He sent for me and told me he had heard I was a college student. I told him I’d attended the state university. He asked me how would I like to teach school. I said fine. He had me transferred.

  5

  THE 5-6 DORMITORY, to which they transferred me, was the coal company dormitory over again, only it was long and narrow. It was housed in the north half of the wooden building which housed the 5-5 dormitory to which Mal had been transferred.

  There were the same double-decked bunks and the same center aisle, with the wooden tables with attached benches, and at night there were three poker games instead of one. There was a blackjack game and a Georgia skin game which the colored convicts played. There were also colored convicts in this dormitory.

  The outside door was at the end of the dormitory which was the middle of the building, adjoining the door to 5-5. The dormitories were separated by a thin wooden partition. At the back a hole had been cut in the partition through which notes and money and messages were passed from one dormitory to the other. Once or twice each evening Mal sent for me to come to the peephole so he could talk to me. The colored convicts bunked down at the end of the dormitory and the latrine was down there also.

  I was assigned to a lower bunk on the center aisle next to the guardstand. “Right under the gun,” Mal said when I told him. “I’m glad—you won’t be able to get into any mischief.”

  On awakening each morning I had my choice of looking at the convicts dress in their grayed and sweat-stained underwear and sweat-stiffened socks which they wore from week to week and their bagged stinking trousers which they wore from year to year, and their gaunt and patched coats which the officials seemed to think never wore out; or I could look underneath the sagging upper mattresses out of the west windows at the back of the hospital, weather-stained and still asleep, housing tuberculosis and syphilis and cuts and lacerations and contusions and infections and operations and skulls cracked by guards’ sticks, and death. With mattresses lying out beside the front entrance, almost every morning, which would be taken away and burned because the convict who had last slept on them would not need them any more; or need anything else any more except a six-foot plot in Potter’s Field and the soft, close embrace of mother earth. Or, displeased with that, I could look across the aisle and over the unmade bunks, out of the east windows, at the stretch of dark gray wall against the darker sky, cutting out the smell of burnt gasoline; and a home at night with a mother and a father, and the tinkle of ice in tall glasses, and the unforgettable perfume of a woman’s hair.

  Or I could lie in bed and pretend I wasn’t going that morning, and watch the others spread their sheets and make their bunks and join the ragged soap-and-towel procession down to where the washtroughs were located, by the latrine. No matter how early you arose the colored convicts would have a skin game roaring down by the latrine, as if it had never stopped all night.

  At night I could lie and watch the nightly latrine brigade with their open drawers and felt house shoes stolen from the hospital. Or I could read by the eternal droplight overhead; or listen to the steady, planted stride of the night guard making his rounds; or watch the furtive slitherings of those bent on degeneracy and maiming, and sometimes even murder—as was in the case of the colored convict called Sonny who slipped up on another colored convict called Badeye, while he was asleep, and cut his throat from ear to ear.

  It was a sort of gurgle that I had heard, for it was late and quiet. When I got down there, peering over the shoulders of the convicts in front of me, I saw Badeye lying there with blood bubbling out of his mouth in large and small and very fine slavering bubbles, like the mouth of a dog gone mad; only the bubbles on Badeye’s mouth were bloody, and not quite so frothy, and the blood was running out of his nostrils and down his black greasy skin on the dirty gray sheet, and the blood had spurted out of his throat all over the dusty blanket and his dirty cotton underwear and even on the bottom of the mattress on the bunk above. His arms were half drawn-up and he was flopping very slightly but after awhile even the flopping stopped, and the blood seemed as if it had stopped, and he was lying there in such a pool of blood that you could hardly see him.

  Or I could listen to the putrid, vulgar conversations of the convict who bunked above me and who was also a teacher; but I never learned exactly what he was to all those convicts who stopped to whisper every night when the lights we
re out and when the guard was at the other end.

  Or I could talk to the guard whom we all called Captain Charlie. He was a short, sort of cherubic-looking old man. He had taken a liking to me. We talked in whispers about crime and punishment, virtues and vices, history and ambitions. He said it was such a pity that a boy of my age should have to come to prison. We did not talk of politics or of the warden. Although he was very nice he was also very old and couldn’t have gotten another job easily. Nor did we talk of convicts. I was determined not to get the reputation of being a rat, or being one. But I enjoyed talking to him. We talked of many other things which were of mutual, but not malicious, interest. Pretty soon he was bringing me candy which his wife, who had once run a candy shop, made especially for me. It was exceedingly good candy except for those pieces they fooled me with which were balls of cotton dipped in chocolate.

  If I so desired, in the evenings after supper I could lie on my bunk and watch the evening promenade; up the aisle on one side, down on the other, up and down, up and down, mile after mile, which—put together—would have been a good way out into freedom, but which ended up each night at the bunks where it started. Or I could watch the amateur prize fighters who worked out in the aisle beside my bunk in front of the guardstand. I could smell them, too, the pungent unwashed bodies.

  I could lie on my bunk and close my eyes and say I was back in Lake City at the Lotus Gardens again, or at the Far East restaurant listening to Roy Bugle’s Serenaders or out to the Hawaiian Gardens, or at Shady Beach, or at the Palace D’Or, or at Hudson Park, or at the baseball park with a double-header playing underneath the hot July sky. Or I could say I was on the road at night doing a cool seventy, with the motor roar spilling out behind me and catching up with me only when I passed through some small town with the heavy-leafed tree limbs hanging low over the road, and the white vine-clustered houses reflecting the sound. I could say I was in White City the night I drove Johnny down to catch the boat; or that I was back at State again boning for my finals; or back at high school playing quarterback on the varsity team. I could say I was in Chicago, too, and had sold that ring and had kept on down to Santa Anita for the winter races, with a pocket full of money. But I couldn’t make myself play that game, no matter how hard I tried, or how tightly I closed my eyes or how much I cursed God or Fate or Luck, or whatever you care to call it. Sooner or later, anyway, all my thoughts would come back to Chicago from wherever they had gone, no matter how far, how many miles or how many years, and I’d feel again that sickening, unbearable chagrin as intensely as when the judge had said, “I sentence you to be taken to the penitentiary where you shall remain incarcerated at hard labor for a period of not less than twenty years and not more than twenty-five years.” And I would wish to God that I had gone to sleep when I had had the chance.