The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  THE END OF A

  PRIMITIVE

  Chester Himes

  First published by

  The New American Library

  1955

  (as The Primitive)

  The shockingly honest novel of a daring and unconventional love affair.

  Jesse Robinson wakes from his nightmares and fantasies to dirty, fitful real life in a noisy Harlem slum. He’s an acclaimed black writer—or was. Now he lives on gin and chocolate and hangover cures, and women don’t come near him…

  Kriss wakes up alone, divorced, disillusioned, in her plush Manhattan apartment, to resume her high-salary, low-excitement existence on Madison Avenue, and wonders what went wrong…

  They have nothing in common. Just one amazing, passionate weekend in Chicago, seven years ago, and a sudden, overwhelming urge to meet again, to throw off all that has happened since. But too much has happened, and what’s up ahead may be just as passionate, but it might just be deadly…

  Chester Himes’ brilliant novel traces the violent collision-course of two headstrong and desperate lovers fighting their colour, their background, their past and each other, in the bright light and fury of New York.

  Kriss hated to wake up alone. It frightened her even more than the nightmares of her drink-soaked sleep. Divorced, fortyish, she had just been thrown over by the man whom she hoped to marry. When Jessie arrived at her apartment, she welcomed him. Jessie was a man; even better, he was a Negro.

  That’s the way the weekend began. A frantic weekend of drinking, lovemaking, more drinking. A weekend that released the submerged wrath and sick anger of two self-destructive people and provoked a nightmare of passion and tragedy.

  Chester Himes re-creates New York’s frantic, pseudo-intellectual world, where the beatnik, the homosexual, the monied failures, and the pretentious rebels of both races live a life of irresponsible indulgence and desperation…in a novel remarkable for its insight and honesty.

  SHE was a beautiful but aging careerist. He was a once-promising novelist turned drunkard. Their affair was spontaneous, inevitable…and violent.

  This powerful novel by the author of PINKTOES examines a side of the intimate relationship that is seldom explored in print. With driving honesty, Chester Himes probes the destructive emotions that compel a Negro man and a white woman to defy convention—the self-hatred that poses as love and brings the misfits of both sexes together in an affair that courts tragedy.

  “A writer with an enormous capacity to record sensuous life as it is experienced from one moment to the next.”

  —New York Times

  “As one of the most important black writers of the 20th century, Himes is unquestionably the most underrated and least understood of his generation.”

  —South Magazine

  “An unforgettable novel of love and hate, rage and pride, from one of this century’s greatest black writers, standing “with Richard Wright and James Baldwin at the headwater of black American writing.”

  —Book World

  “Pungent, violent, and mordantly funny…”

  —Newsweek

  “Unique and unmissable…”

  —The Face

  Chapter 1

  The gold-plated Swiss clock on the nightstand whirred softly, curdling the silence of the small dark room. A woman stirred tentatively on the three-quarter size bed, flung a heavy bare arm searchingly across the faded blue sheet. It encountered only emptiness. She became rigid, scarcely breathing, her nude body suddenly chilled beneath the two ample blankets, her emotions momentarily shattered by the blind panic she always experienced on awakening and finding herself alone.

  When it came as her first conscious realization of the day, she found the aloneness terrifying. More than mere loneliness, for one could be lonely in the arms of a lover, by the side of a spouse, in the midst of a crowd. She had always been lonely with Ronny, throughout the ten years of their marriage. She could not recall a time when awakening by his side that she had not thought first of other things, other men. But there had been the security of his presence, his being there, his heart pulse at her side, assuring her that she was not alone, that her desires and emotions, her living and breathing, were joined with another’s, linked in a chain of the larger whole, if only temporarily, before his first cross babyish mewling cut them in two, if only by the nearness of his flesh, shaped and molded into that ofttimes repulsive thing called man.

  Aloneness was her greatest fear, had always been her greatest fear; greater than her fear of becoming an alcoholic, or a slut, the lesser two but mere eruptions from the sickness of aloneness. Even as a child in North Dakota, a lonely child ostracized by her German heritage during the years following the First World War, she had feared aloneness. Her mother was of sturdy Norwegian peasant stock, but her father was the last soured dregs of a line of German nobility, embittered by the German defeat, castrated by his isolation, a broken, lonely man, sitting despised and aloof in the back room of the local bootleggers, drinking himself into oblivion. She couldn’t think of her father without crying. He was the epitome of defeat. Not defecated like a man in battle, but like a woman defeated by her sex, by the outraged indignity of childbearing, of monthly periods, long hair, skirts, and sitting down to pee. Like a prostitute she’d seen once in a Third Avenue bar crying over a jukebox song: “It makes no difference now…” His defeat had filled their home with a dark despair in which she had grown up always on the verge of terror, sometimes within the terror, never far away. Once, during her first year in school, she had come home to find her mother gone. Three young boys, playing hookey from school, had been buried alive in a water-soaked cave at the outskirts of town. One of them had lived next door and there had been many strange cars and trucks parked on the street, alarming her before she’d reached her house. She had called to her mother on entering and had raced from room to room, screaming, the terror pursuing her in the empty house, finally engulfing her in a black void that was like death. On returning from next door, her mother had found her in a faint. But she had never forgotten the terror of the empty house, the feeling of complete aloneness somehow coming from her father too in a way she couldn’t understand.

  Now it was more. Now, fifteen years after she had married Ronny to escape the despair that had settled in her home, aloneness in bed on awakening was an indication of her failure as a woman. To have lived for thirty-seven years in this world, five of those years in New York City, eleven in Chicago; to have slept with countless men—once she had counted up to one hundred and eighty-seven—most of whom had respected her, many of whom had loved her, felt some manner of affection for her—and now to find herself alone, unloved, even the link with the larger whole broken, gone completely; it was almost like defeat. How many times during the five years since she had divorced Ronny had she awakened alone? she wondered vaguely. Too many! Too, too many! And not because she played hard to get. She was easy—too easy, she knew—but she couldn’t help it; she hardly ever did it now for any other reason than to keep them near. God, what sons of bitches some of them had turned out to be!

  But at this moment of awakening, before her mind had restored its defences, regained its equanimity, phrased its justifications, hardened its antagonisms, erected its rationalizations; at this moment of emotional helplessness when the mind is not fully detached from the body, when thoughts are still vaguely orgastic, to a large degree physiological, sleep-stupid and defenseless; when the feminine mind suffers its one brief period of honesty, she could not blame all on the men. That was for a time later in the day. Night was the time for crying, and day for lying; but morning was the time of fear.

  It was a terrible thing to face this fear each day at the moment of awakening, to face another
empty day which could only be filled by one’s self. In her apartment, situated as it was on the first floor rear, entombed by the concrete cliffs of other buildings, as remote from the sounds of voices and traffic on the street as the crown of Everest, a veritable dungeon where the light of day penetrated only for a few brief hours in the late afternoon when she was seldom there, this sense of being alone was almost complete; not only shut off from people, from others of the species, but shut off from time, from seasons, from distance, from life—all life, dog life, cat life, cockroach life—shut off from eternity. It was like waking in a grave.

  For a time she lay unmoving, rigid, fighting off the panic. Slowly her thoughts took nebulous shape in the form of memory and the events of the night before returned like sequences of a dream. Bill had dropped by for a moment before dinner to bring some illustrated maps of Italy, Sicily and Mallorca. She was planning to tour Europe during the coming summer and he was trying to be helpful; he had studied architecture in Rome two years before and was consequently an authority on Europe. Bill was the helpful type—tall, skinny, redheaded, freckled, ugly, perseveringly cheerful, and sexless as cold boiled potatoes.

  They had become engrossed in an exchange of accounts of their great adventures. He had lived in a miserable pensione near a noisome area of mouldy ruins, unable to speak the language.

  repulsed by the filth, and had made no acquaintances and had been unhappy all the time. While for her part she had spent three weeks in Paris, three years previous, in an attempt at reconciliation with her husband, which had turned into a nightmare of wet-nursing him through a siege of disgusting drunkenness and at the same time trying to sleep with whoever became available in protest. He had cried long and hard over their “ruined” lives; he had vowed tearfully he wanted to marry her again. She would have married him again at any time if she could have found some means of keeping him erect long enough. But she decided it wasn’t worth it. He had been drunk from the moment she arrived until she left; perhaps from fear of having to sleep with her again. He couldn’t get over the fact she had divorced him to marry a black man. She hadn’t married the black man, but that was beside the point. Perhaps he was afraid if he slept with her again it would bring on a recurrence of his homosexual urges which he had spent ten thousand dollars to get rid of by psychoanalysis. It couldn’t have been just because of the black man, because he’d known of her sleeping with blacks while they were still married and together, and all he’d done in the end was join the army as a buck private when he could have had a commission for the asking. God knows he loved blacks as much as anyone; his love for them had impelled him, a Mississippi boy, to devote the ten best years of his life working on their behalf, ten frustrated and guilt-ridden and cuckolded years in what he had once called in postmortem regret “the bright, shining world of race relations!” For ten years he had been a negrophile, an extreme negrophile, enjoying the beds of his black colleagues’ wives without any condescension whatsoever. But much of it had gone after the analysis. He had been analyzed to rid himself of a homosexual bent so he could sire an heir, and it had turned out that afterwards he loved blacks less. That always struck him as being very strange. He had discussed it at great length with her.

  But she didn’t hint of this to Bill. He respected her, so she didn’t dare risk hurting him. He thought that she was pure. Perhaps not pure—but not easy! She had such a highly respectable job he couldn’t possibly have thought otherwise, being the very nice young man that he was, the type that believes the job makes the lady. Perhaps chaste would be a better word.

  Well, why not? she asked herself. She’d never felt completely like a slut at any time. Besides it was nice to have one man think of her like that.

  At ten o’clock, realizing he had kept her from dinner, he had invited her to a supper club. But she’d declined. That would have been the bitter end, going out to dinner at some night club with Bill and coming home to sleep alone.

  Then, as Bill was leaving, Harold had staggered in, drunk as usual. A frown came into her thoughts. She wasn’t ashamed of Harold—she wasn’t ashamed of any of her black friends, what few she had left. Besides which, Harold was an impressive looking man when sober. And once she had respected him more than any man she’d ever known, really worshipped him. Anyway, Bill had met him there before. But why the hell did he have to come crawling around to her place every time he got helplessly drunk?

  Suddenly she recalled having loaned him another twenty-five dollars. “Oh shit!” she said aloud. It gave her a perverse satisfaction to pronounce the word. She was really through with him this time, she firmly resolved. She had sat drinking with him, trying to comfort him—he’d been hurt and dejected as usual—and had forgotten to eat. After he had borrowed the money she had become so enraged she had put him out of her apartment, despite the fact that by then he was barely able to stand and had begun weeping sloppily over his cruel fate. “You make more money than I do, and besides you’re fifteen years older, you son of a bitch!” she’d condemned him bitterly.

  Now, in the recollection of it, of all those great things he had been to her during her first year at the university—he’d been a great man on the campus in those days, one who was going great places; he hadn’t seen her, a little country girl—of all those “bright, shining years” of which he’d been a part, nothing was real any longer. It was this moment she feared the most. The unreality. The years of dust. The blubbering self-pity of men…Ronny crying in her room at the Commodore Hotel that winter when she’d divorced him and come to New York to marry Ted…“Don’t marry a nigger, Kriss…Don’t kill me, Kriss…I know I’ve been a bastard, but don’t break me…I’m from Mississippi….” Herself replying with sensual cruelty, “Go back to Mississippi then, you son of a bitch.

  and sleep with all those black women you’re always boasting of having grown up on. You don’t know how to have a white woman….” His tears wetting her new nylons. “Please don’t, Kriss! I’ll get analyzed. I’ll give you a baby….” Her final stab, “Give yourself a baby, you louse; you’ve tried hard enough!”

  “What an awful rotten life!” she thought. “I’m a good girl, really.” In some manner the strange thought brought a sharp vivid memory of Willard, the year he was such a star on the football team, and the two abortions at sixteen which had prevented her from ever bearing children.

  “I must call mother tonight,” she told herself firmly, groping blindly for this one last hold to reality.

  She glanced at the luminous dial of the clock. It was ten after eight. Abruptly she sat up, her bare feet groping for her golden mules. Absently she cupped her breasts in her hands, gently squeezing them, relieved by the slight pain. Her nude body, heavy with years, was Buddhistic in vague dejection. Her mind was flat, stale, stupid, but she didn’t have a hangover. Tim, her doctor, had advised her to drink only the best of whisky because it contained less fossil oil. She paid six dollars and forty-two cents a fifth for her Scotch, and averaged six bottles weekly. But no matter how much she drank, she never suffered from hangovers. On the physical side, she was disgustingly healthy.

  It was just these awful depressions on awakening.

  Now she stood up and went into the breakfast nook and switched on the lights of the sitting room. The entrance hall of her small, three-room apartment angled like a short-handled crank, encasing two deep storage closets in the angle at front, and widening beyond the kitchen door into the breakfast nook containing a blond oak table shaped like a heart, on which reposed two watery highball glasses on silver coasters and a flat silver ashtray with several squashed butts. Here the hall angled once more, ending at the full length mirror on the closet door, across which faced the doors of the bedroom and the bath. The far corner of the breakfast nook was cut diagonally by an archway opening onto the sunken sitting room, one step lower than the rest of the compact, well-designed flat.

  It was a modern room with a stunning decor, the facing walls done in soft pastel shades of gray and pink, the floor i
n rose coloured carpet, and the far wall with its two windows looking down on a concrete well completely covered by floor-length drapes of a deep maroon colour.

  Along the gray wall ran a waist-high, handsome, highly polished blond oak storage cabinet, above which hung a large, rectangular charcoal drawing of three antelopes in flight. Centred against the maroon drapes was a blond television set on a three-legged stand, atop which stood a slender female nude carved from caramel coloured wood. The pink wall held a small blond oak writing desk with a tubular chair padded in foam rubber and covered by removable terry cloth slips of dove gray. On that wall were three paintings, a large oil of a small Indian girl sitting disconsolately on a curb, vaguely reminiscent of the famous painting of the papoose by Diego Rivera; a smaller water colour in abstract design, which might have been a portrait of the inflamed lungs of an alligator that died of pneumonia in the upper reaches of the Nile one cold and stormy winter; and a dark somewhat menacing drawing in pastel of a Polynesian woman with large bare breasts and large round eyes. The sofa set against the bedroom wall as if in ill repute, its upholstery a somewhat faded grayish-green, like an elderly but undefeated matron among a bevy of cover girls, gone but not forgetting. Beside it stood a set of glass-top coffee stands that fitted one atop another, on which sat another watery highball glass in a silver coaster and a large, lovely foam-glass ashtray filled with lipsticked cigarette butts. Just inside the archway, at the corner of the storage cabinet, was Kriss’s favourite chair, a wrought-iron, three-legged straight-backed thing with a large opening between the seat and the high small back ostensibly to trap the behinds of well-cushioned females, as was once suggested in a New Yorker magazine cartoon.

  Sometimes this room gave Kriss pleasure, and she loved to show it off. The paintings had been done by artists who’d received fellowships from the Chicago Foundation, and were adjudged good and valuable by those who knew such things. But now, as she crossed to switch on the television set, it had a morning-after look which fed her general depression.