Cast the First Stone

by Chester Himes

  “Who? You mean what’ll Short Britches do to Nig?”

  I nodded.

  “Nothing. He’s not even going down there. Nig’s one bad nigger. He’s got some old white canvas gloves he puts on and he fights these roaches as fast as they can gang up. Man, he can knock a man down without even drawing back. I’ve seen him fighting so many of them they hit each other’s sticks hitting at him, and every time he hit one of them he’d knock ‘im down.”

  “Yeah?” I didn’t believe it. He wasn’t my hero. “Why don’t they shoot him?”

  “Aw, Jumpy Stone thinks he’s crazy. He won’t let them shoot him.”

  “Yeah.” But he was wrong about the guard not going down there.

  Pretty soon I heard the guard down below. “What’s the matter with you, Nig?”

  “Aw, take it easy, punk. Gimme one of those good smellin’ cigars you’re smoking.”

  “You know it’s against the rules to talk out of your cell.”

  “Aw, forget about it, punk. Gimme a cigar.”

  After a time, after the guard had gone and we couldn’t even hear his footsteps, I saw the bluish cigar smoke coming up over the range and smelt the smoking cigar. It looked to me as if Nig was the tough one in that prison.

  But the next night I changed my mind in favor of the guard. He took two convicts out of their cells, sapped them with his blackjack, and locked them back again. “Now let that be a lesson.”

  The block was silent. Then someone yelled from down at the far end, on top somewhere, “Lay down, you bastard.”

  “I’ll come up there and sap you, too.”

  “You’ll come up here and get this.” But the convict knew that the guard couldn’t locate him.

  The night after that two colored convicts down below got to arguing after the lights had gone out. The guard went down to quiet them in the rough.

  “Oh! Oh! Please doan hit me no mo’, cap’n. Please doan hit me no mo’, cap’n. Ah wasn’t doin’ nuttin’.”

  “Short Britches got him another one,” Starlight said.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you black bastards? Every damn night you get into an argument.”

  “Cap’n, Ah wasn’t doin’ nuttin. It’s him. He walks all night an’ keeps me wake.”

  “What’s the matter with you, nigger?”

  There was no answer. I had a feeling that the whole cell block was awake and listening.

  “Smart nigger, eh? Come on out of there!” I heard the slight suction of the gun being pulled from the oiled holster, the snap of the safety, or perhaps the cocking of the trigger. It was very quiet. “Come out or I’ll blow you out.”

  “Aw, let that poor bastard alone, he’s crazy,” someone up on our range said.

  “Come out, goddammit!”

  The Negro came out. His coat was half on, his cap was on backwards. He was coal black and African-looking.

  Starlight was standing on the stool so he could get a better view below. “That’s Marcus,” he whispered. “He’s really crazy.”

  The guard kicked Marcus. After they’d come out on the range I could see them from my upper bunk. Marcus started to run, then stopped suddenly, looking back over his shoulder at the guard, grinning, his eyes white slits in his blank stupid face. He looked crazy as hell. It gave me the creeps. Then he ran out of sight and the guard went out of sight after him. I heard the outer door open and bang shut. I slid back beneath the covers.

  “Short Britches is just trying to be like Two-gun Tracy,” Starlight said. “We had a young guard in here named Tracy. About my size. He was a real sport…”

  I wasn’t listening. About fifteen minutes later I heard distant gunshots; one, then two more, then one, then a whole fusillade. Then silence.

  “That was inside,” Starlight said.

  “Say, you hear shooting?” a voice called from above.

  “Yeah, sounded like it was inside,” came a reply.

  “Wonder who it could be?”

  “Damned if I know. Did they take that colored fellow out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hey, down there! Hey, down there on 1-10. Did they take that fellow out?”

  No reply. The colored convicts weren’t talking.

  “Hey, they just killed Marcus,” someone called from the first cell, either on our range or down below on 1-10.

  “Where…?”

  “Who killed him…?”

  “Was he the colored fellow…?”

  “The dirty sons of bitches! Who did it…?”

  “Short Britches shot him first—”

  “He says Short Britches shot him first—”

  “Shut up, goddammit, I can hear him!”

  “Kish and Short Britches and the night captain were beating him with a piece of pipe, out in front of the hole, and he broke and ran—”

  “They wanted him to run.”

  “Sure, that’s why they didn’t take him inside where he couldn’t run.”

  “Short Britches shot at him first, then the night captain. He ran around behind the hospital down by the coal company. The wall guard saw them shooting at him and cut loose with his machine gun—”

  “Why, the dirty son…Why, the dirty…” Whoever he was he couldn’t find a suitable word.

  “A damn dirty shame,” Starlight said. “That guy was really nuts.”

  Well, that wouldn’t bring him back, I thought. “How the hell do those guys down there in the first cells know so much about it?”

  “Aw, some guard told them. These guards can’t keep nothing to themselves.”

  There was plenty talk, lasting up into the night.

  And then Blackie and Wop got into a fight up in the idle house one day. A big good-natured guard, called Big Irish, went down and parted them. It was during the dull hours of the afternoon and Big Irish wanted to get in the remainder of his nap, so he didn’t take them to the hole.

  Demotte, another guard, gray-haired and squat with a blunt mean face, wasn’t satisfied. He went in between the benches to get Blackie to take him to the hole. When Blackie passed Wop, who seemed to be getting off, he hit him on the nose without warning. Blood spurted from Wop’s nose and as he staggered up Blackie hit him again. Then Demotte hit Blackie across the back of the head with his stick, and Blackie went down like a sack of cement.

  Four convicts jumped up and hit at Demotte at the same time. He ducked one, but the other three hit him. He tried to protect himself but they were on top of him. Someone jerked his stick from his hand and beat him across the head until blood matted in his hair. He fell down between the benches, and the convict with the stick bent over and kept hitting at him.

  Before the head guard, who was fat and lazy, sitting on the stand by the door, could get to his feet someone threw a tin cuspidor of sawdust and tobacco spittle in his face. Then a bunch of other convicts grabbed him by the legs and yanked him out of the stand, underneath the railing, down on the floor where they began kicking out his guts. They kept on kicking him until blood started coming out his mouth.

  There were three other guards and five hundred convicts. Big Irish stood up and pleaded with the men. A convict snatched the chair out from behind him and hit him across the head. The other two guards tried to run. The last I saw of them they were smothered by convicts. The band guard stuck his head out of the bandroom, took one look and snatched it back. He shut the door and locked it.

  Cuspidors were thrown. Windows were smashed. The noise, which began as a confused babble of voices, rose into a shrill, loud, continuous wail, earsplitting and nerve-shattering. Benches were splintered. It seemed as if Demotte and the head guard were being killed. I started to get up and beat it for the door.

  Chump Charlie grabbed me by the arm. “Keep your seat. That’s the only way to keep out of it.”

  I heard someone yell, “Let’s make a break!”

  “Goddammit, let’s go!”

  “Let’s crush through the front gates!”

  “Let’s go get th
e pig!”

  “Kill the goddamn pig!”

  Suddenly I saw that two of them had guns. They must have taken them from the guards. They rushed toward the door. Five hundred wild-eyed, disheveled, freedom-crazed, howling convicts with two guns.

  “Let’s break down the stockade gates!”

  “Down with the stockade gates!”

  “Bastard son of a bitch!”

  “Shoot the son of a bitch in the guts!”

  “Aw, cut his goddamned throat. We want to save the bullets.”

  At the door they stopped as if they had run into an invisible wall. They backed up, step by step. The two convicts with the guns kept backing into the others until suddenly the others broke for their seats. The hands holding the guns began to tremble. The guns dropped to the floor as if the strength had gone out of the hands that held them.

  I don’t know what I expected to see. But what I saw shocked me deeply, violently, as I have never been shocked before or since.

  One man came through the door. Just one man—Cody.

  He wore a dark blue uniform cap, with the gold legend of a sergeant, low over his eyes, and a black slicker buttoned about his throat and wet with rain. He did not rush or hesitate but came steadily through the doorway, his empty hands hanging at his sides, his lips tight and bloodless, his face a burnt-red—raw-edged and hard as baked clay—his eyes a half-hidden tricky gleam beneath the brim of his cap. He came straight ahead across the floor, never hesitating once, and up to the two convicts who had had the guns. He slapped one of them on the side of his head so hard it laid him his full length on the floor. The other one broke to run but he grabbed him by the collar, and holding him at a distance, slapped him until his face was raw and swelling, red and turning blue. Then he said, “Stand over by the door.” His thin bloodless lips did not seem to move but his voice came out loud, harsh, uncompromising.

  The two convicts scrambled over to the door. Cody picked up the guns, then stood there for a moment looking us over. A convict went crazy from the strain. He jumped up, his arms outstretched to the ceiling as if hollering hallelujah, his fingers stiffened and extended out like prongs, and his hair rising on his skull. He screamed, “Oh, you goddamned dog!”

  Before his feet touched the floor Cody shot him five times with one of the guns, so that when he fell he must have already been dead. He fell across the convict in front of him. The convict jumped aside. He fell on the back of the bench, slid slowly off, crumpled to the floor between the benches.

  In the silence following the echo of the gun shots I could hear the three buttons of his uniform coat scrape across the back of the bench as he slid to the floor. I could hear, distinctly, the stifled breathing of the convicts and the hard, fast thumping of my own heart. I could hear the moans of the injured guards and, from below, the deliberate, monotonous, mocking, eternal clank of the looms of the woolen mill, beating out their blunt-toned melody. Then from somewhere down below in the yard came the stentorian bellow, “CompaneeeeEEEEEEEE…! MARCH!”

  “Oh, please! Oh, please! Oh, please!” I never knew whether I said it in my mind or aloud.

  10

  AT THE BEGINNING of summer we shed our coats. We left our collars unbuttoned when the guard wasn’t watching. But nothing helped that idle house, sitting up there on a level with the sun, hotter than a Virginia coke oven. “Hot? As a pussy with the pox!” they’d say. On those sultry summer days there was a squad of convicts whose only duty was to revive the men who fell out from the heat.

  On Saturday afternoons we had baseball games. Outside teams came in to play our prison grays. We would go and sit out on the grandstand, down beside the walls, getting a tan watching the fellows park home runs over the corner stockade guard tower. It was plenty of fun. Most of the convicts rooted for the visiting team.

  There was cash and tobacco and merchandise bet on the games. Afterward there was the necessary fighting to collect the bets. My mother had sent me some undershirts and shorts and I had sold them for cash, and won about forty dollars in the dice game up in the bandroom. When the ball games began I’d stake one of the fellows to a fin and then bet him on the hits. That made it peppier.

  Outside visitors always came in with the teams. Sometimes there would be more than a hundred, both men and women. If there were any pretty girls among them we’d always find some excuse to pass their section of the grandstand so we could get our gapper’s bit. They’d soon catch on after the parade had started. Some of them would give us a show.

  On Decoration Day we had the privilege of the yard. All of the companies except Death Row and the 1-11 company, where the redshirt desperadoes were kept in solitary, were turned out in the yard for a couple of hours before dinner. Immediately dozens of crap games came to life. Several guys got cut, several got caught. Mal looked me up as soon as the rout order was given.

  “Give me something, Jimmy,” he greeted. “I heard about you breaking everybody.”

  “Hell, I just gave you four dollars last week. You must be keeping up some kid.”

  “I don’t like that.”

  “Well maybe you’re keeping up some man, then. I heard that the hack up there in the tin shop was sweet on you.”

  “Aw, go to hell.”

  “Come on, let’s get in this game. I’ll stake you.”

  “I don’t want to gamble. Let’s talk. Gunner Garson and Red Cork are going to win it all, anyway, and I’ll get a chance at them in the dormitory tonight.”

  “I staked Cocky,” I said.

  “He argues too much.”

  “He wins too, sometimes.”

  “Come on, let’s walk.” We went down by the dining room, past the powerhouse, toward the ball diamond. There were thirty or forty convicts down there playing ball, with twelve or sixteen men on each team. We went over to the grandstand and sat down.

  “There’s a game this afternoon, I hear,” I said.

  “We’re playing the Pott’s Brewers. They’re gonna beat hell out of us.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. We almost beat them before.”

  “How do you know? You weren’t watching the game. Every time I saw you you were passing the visitors’ stand.”

  “Did you see me?”

  “Sure I saw you. You thought you were cute with your cap off. I could see you grinning from ‘way over where I was.”

  I laughed. “I was looking at the little blonde in the green dress. Did you see her?”

  “Sure, I passed by there myself. I wanted to see what she had to keep you walking all afternoon.”

  “I sure would like to get that. She didn’t have a damn thing on underneath her dress. Every time I passed she’d open up her legs and let me see it.”

  “She was just teasing you. She just let you see it because you couldn’t get it.”

  “I bet I could if I was out.”

  “You always want something you can’t get.”

  We were silent after that. Then I said, “I was over to court, Monday.”

  “I heard. What for?”

  “You know that note you wrote on the back of my first cashier’s receipt? Something about ‘dear cousin, I hope you will always hold me in the high esteem which I hold you—’ you know all that slush you wrote.”

  “That wasn’t slush.”

  “The hell it wasn’t.”

  “I meant it.”

  “Sure, but it was slush just the same. Anyway, old man Warren was standing by the chapel doorway Sunday and when I went by he pulled me out of line and shook me down. He found the receipt in my pocket and wrote me up.”

  “What did he pull you out for?”

  “Oh, nothing. He’s been trying to get something on me ever since I got out of the coal company.”

  “What did Jumpy say?”

  “He asked me were you my cousin.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said sure, our mothers were sisters.”

  “Did he believe it?”

  “Hell, naw. He doesn’t believe a
ny damn thing. He said that if we were cousins it was a legitimate relationship and one that could not be helped.”

  “But the other?” he grinned.

  “He just implied that,” I grinned back.

  Some fellows passed and one of them called, “What say, Mal? Is that your cousin?”

  “Hello, Joe. Yeah, this is Jimmy.”

  “He’s better-looking than you are.”

  I found myself blushing. After they’d passed, Mal said, “Bobby Guy is coming to the soup company tomorrow.”

  “Who’s Bobby Guy?”

  “Oh, he’s just a boy. Doing ten to twenty-five.”

  “What did you tell me about him for?”

  “I just don’t want you to fall in love with him.”

  “No danger.”

  Nick and Chump Charlie strolled by. “What say, Mal? I see you and Jimmy are catching a little sun,” Nick said, smirking.

  “Hello, Nick,” Mal greeted.

  “Hello, Jimmy,” Charlie said, smiling around Nick’s shoulder. “Are you trying to get a tan?”

  “What say, Charlie? What say, Nick?”

  Nick hesitated a moment as if he wanted to say something else, then he said, “Take it easy,” and went on.

  “Don’t you know Chump?” I asked Mal.

  “We don’t speak. I don’t like the little bitch.”

  “Oh!”

  “I hear you like him well enough,” he said. “You like him well enough for both of us.”

  “I haven’t got anything against him. I don’t like him, though.”

  He looked at me solemnly. “You’ve changed a lot, Jimmy. When you first came in you wouldn’t even talk to anyone you thought was like that.”

  I became serious for a moment too. “Hell, everybody in the soup company’s some kind of freak or other,” I said, defensively. “I’ve got to talk to somebody.”

  “You don’t have to associate with ‘em. There are a lot of good fellows in here.”

  I laughed. “Sure, I know. Just like Sunday School.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean who aren’t wolves and punks, and aren’t always running around trying to find somebody new.”

  “Where are they? Hidden? Damned if I’ve seen any of them.”