The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  Leroy entered with a tray. “Ohhhh, Mr Robinson! You told me you were going to bed,” he said accusingly.

  “I changed my mind,” Jesse said shortly, but softened the brusque reply by adding. “I remembered several things I had to do.”

  “I brought you a little snack so you wouldn’t have to go to bed hungry,” Leroy said, placing the tray on the dresser and stealing a look at Jesse’s semi-nude torso.

  There was a plate of turkey sandwiches, a half bottle of whiskey, the cold bottle of ginger ale from the refrigerator, a glass, mixer, bowl of ice, and a slice of cake on the tray.

  “I’m no frog, you snake,” Jesse thought but, seeing the whiskey, relented. “That looks mighty good. Maybe I ought to go to bed at that.”

  Leroy’s expression didn’t change, but he gave the impression of rubbing his hands together. “You know what they say; let your conscience be your guide.” He was looking at Jesse’s shoulder as if he might take a bite out of it.

  “I don’t have much choice this morning,” Jesse said quickly, putting on his shirt. “If that son of a bitch makes a pass at me I’ll cut his throat,” he thought. “But I will have a drink,” he added.

  “Oh, help yourself,” Leroy said, trying to keep the disappointment from his voice. “I made it for you.”

  “I suppose you made the liquor, too,” Jesse thought. He took a stiff drink straight and when Leroy turned to leave, stopped him. “Oh, just a moment, Mr Martin. I want to show you where the dogs’ve been using my bed for a tree.”

  Leroy looked, then sniffed. “The nasty things! I’ll bet it was Napoleon, the nasty thing! I’ll bring him in here and put his nose in it and whip his little ass.”

  “No need of that. I just wanted to show it to you. My door’ll have to stay shut.” He didn’t have a key to his room and what he meant was he wished they’d close the door when they entered it during his absence to look through his things. Leroy understood perfectly what he meant. “The little dog didn’t mean any harm. When you gotta go, you gotta go, even if you are a dog.”

  Leroy laughed but caught himself just as he was about to slap Jesse on the shoulder, shake himself and shriek, “There’s nothing for it but to go!” Instead he said, almost gruffly from having to exercise so much control, “I’ll clean it up for you while you’re out, Mr Robinson,” and hurriedly left the room.

  “Jesus Christ, how’d I get mixed up with these birdmen?” Jesse asked himself. However, it hadn’t been as involved as he wanted to make out. Three weeks before, directly after he’d gotten the five hundred dollar option on his new novel, he’d quit his porter’s job in White Plains and had come to New York to look for a room.

  Finding rooms for its itinerant population is one of Harlem’s major businesses. One half of the population, at least a good two hundred thousand, live in rented rooms. They are never satisfied and move often. Or their landlords put them out. The rooming agent finds them another room, for which they pay a fee of five or ten dollars, depending on what kind of clothes they wear, cars they drive, or money they flash.

  Jesse had consulted a woman agent selected at random from the classified advertisements in a Harlem weekly newspaper. She had sent him to see a woman, a Mrs Susie Braithewaite, on the floor above him, who had registered a room with her agency. She hadn’t really had a vacancy. The room was rented for a good price, fifteen dollars weekly, to a bartender who only used it during his days off and one or two nights in between, which Mr Braithewaite thought was a “good deal.” But Susie didn’t like the fact that the bartender brought white girls there;

  and if he didn’t bring them they came anyway and stood out in the hall where they could be seen by the other respectable negro housewives, and rang her bell until someone answered. Who, of course, would not be the bartender; for unless he expected them he would have another white girl in his room, and two white girls at the same time always complicated matters. So she had decided to put the bartender out.

  She hadn’t apprised her husband of her intention until Jesse called for an interview, then she had telephoned him at the cleaners where he worked as a presser. He had said, “Hell no!” being a sensible man and realizing in the long run money was worth more than respectability. Besides which, the bartender threw some fine white girls his way every now and then—which was what his wife suspected.

  But she was attracted to Jesse on sight and didn’t want him to get away. She was one of those brown-skinned women who look as if they might be voracious in bed. She was about twenty-five, Jesse guessed, with the strong solid body of a girl athlete, the bosom of a wet nurse, and the big, high, ball-bearing hips of a miller. She ran the tip of her red tongue slowly across her wide full cushiony sensuous lips, making them wetly red, and looked him straight in the eyes with her own glassy speckled bedroom eyes. He stared back, feeling all of himself run down to one point, too weak to move, knowing his eyes were begging now! yes now! please now! it’s got to be now! oh now! the rust is all dissolved…and hers replying not now! you know it can’t be now! but soon! just wait! can’t you wait? it can’t be all that loaded….

  So she’d gotten him this room on the floor below with Mr Martin. He should have recognized Mr Martin as a Panette on sight. But you can’t expect a man in that state to be very observant. He’d paid his rent and moved in before he’d realized the setup. Of course he could have moved after the first week. But it wasn’t worth the trouble.

  “What the hell I care what people think!” he said defiantly, tying a Duke of Kent knot in his dark red tie.

  “I really ought to shave,” he said as he pulled on a gray, cable-knit sweater. “I wish that punk would get a job and get the hell away from here sometimes.” From a curtained alcove along the wall toward the sitting room which served as a clothes closet, he took down a gray tweed sport coat, brushed the dust from his dark brown suede shoes, and poured himself another drink. He was beginning to feel a light glow. “Not bad for an old man,” he said, looking at himself in the mirror. His hair was cut too short, but that couldn’t be helped. He’d gone to a barber in White Plains who kept getting one side shorter than the other until he’d almost cut it all off, like the story of how the dining room table became a flying saucer. “Good thing I didn’t get a shave there,” he thought. “Look like hell with my teeth sticking out my jaws.” He put on a welt-edge, snap-brim, dark brown hat, taking care to have it straight. The hat emphasized his tan skin and semi-caucasian features, hiding his kinky hair. He poured himself another drink, then, noticing that the bottle was almost empty, poured the remainder into his glass, gulped it down and made a face. “Can’t keep this up, son!” he told himself. He felt very gay, on the verge of laughter. “Long as his ass will lass. So, lass ass! Or should I say, ass, lass!”

  He found himself staggering slightly as he opened the door to the hall. A ball of tan hair, barking furiously, charged from the dark cave beneath the marble-top table as if to nip him on the shin bone. But a voice of concern called quickly from the dark sitting room, “Napoleon! Napoleon! You behave yourself!”

  Jesse glanced into the sitting-room. Mr Ward sat in the armchair watching a morning television program. He was clad in an old ragged and faded cotton robe, and on the brass coffee stand there was a bottle of whiskey and a half-filled highball glass.

  “Good morning, Mr Robinson.” His greeting was polite, respectful and impersonal.

  “Good morning, Mr Ward.”

  The door to Leroy’s bedroom was closed. Jesse switched on the lights and went cautiously down the long narrow hall toward the front door. He had once counted seven tables in this hall, in addition to much more incredible junk. Halfway down he turned on another light so he could see to get out.

  The door was bolted at the top and at the bottom and there were three locks. From the centre lock a long heavy steel bar extended on a slant to an anchor in the floor. To unlock it, the top end was slipped from its socket in the lock, and passed upright through a bracket as the door opened inward. “Fort Kno
x!” Jesse muttered, manipulating the locks and bolts. He heard Mr Ward call, “I’ll turn out the lights, Mr Robinson.”

  “Thanks, Mr Ward,” he called back.

  Outside the door in the tiled corridor there was an iron and rubber door mat, welded to a short chain, the chain locked to a bolt, the bolt embedded in concrete in the floor. He had to lock all three locks again with separate keys. “I don’t believe these people trust each other,” he said.

  A tall thin black and very old West Indian woman had just come from the apartment next door. She looked at him critically and disapprovingly. A couple emerged from an apartment farther down and looked at him curiously. The superintendent came from the elevator and looked at him interestedly. The super spoke. “What say, sport.” He looked as if they had a secret, but he wasn’t going to tell. “Can’t say,” Jesse replied. “All said.” The super grinned knowingly. “Keep ‘em guessing, sport.”

  Jesse was smiling to himself when he got in the elevator. “They all think I’m one of the boys,” he thought. It tickled him. He noticed a very good-looking girl in the corner of the elevator, probably a student or a model, staring at him. He winked at her. She kept staring without any change of expression and when the elevator stopped on the ground floor, she hurried off like a very independent and competent young miss on her way to business—whatever her business might be—her high, hard heels tapping rhythmically on the tiles, her tall lithe body tripping down the steps, swinging through the outer glass door. “You were born on the wrong side of the genitals, son,” he told himself, half-amused.

  It was a bright sunshiny April morning. He stood in front of the apartment for a moment, looking up and down the street. That part of Convent Avenue, from City College to 145th Street, was very attractive and clean, with its well-kept, picturesque old houses and stone and brick-faced apartment buildings among the most desirable residences in Harlem. Parking was restricted, and the black, slightly slanting macadam was lined with trees beginning to green. It was very pleasant standing there in the sun, watching the stream of students pass, the lovely young girls and the bright young men, as they came up from the Independent Subway at the corner of St. Nicolas and 145th Street. “From little icons big skyscrapers grow. Heaven’s the next floor, please,” he thought.

  Now that he was dressed and outdoors, he didn’t know where to go. He didn’t know anyone he could visit at that hour.“At any hour!” he said aloud. Two men passing looked at him. He looked away. He wasn’t hungry yet. The thought of braving a lonely breakfast in some cheap Harlem hash joint repelled him. The bars weren’t open yet.

  He decided to go down to 42nd Street and see what was showing at the cheap movie houses between Eighth Avenue and Times Square. They opened at eight. “Good thing you like movies, son,” he thought. “Otherwise you’d believe all that crap about your country you experience every day.”

  He started down the slope toward 145th Street. “I go down but it’s uptown,” he thought. Everyone else was going the other way. He went down the street walking against the crowd. He staggered a little, but didn’t feel drunk. Millions of thoughts were churning into grotesque patterns in the back of his head, crowding out the gaiety.

  Chapter 3

  Kriss alighted from the IRT local at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, turned west at 60th Street, and walked north on Madison Avenue.

  For more than twenty years this strip of Madison Avenue had been relinquished by the city fathers to old ladies of the Arsenic And Old Lace variety as a reservation in which to walk their cats and dogs. Then came the apocalyptic day when the quiet, genteel atmosphere of the reservation was shattered by house wreckers and steam shovels excavating for the foundation of the new, modern, aluminum building which, later, was to house the Ford Foundation. The old ladies freshened their arsenic and ventured forth, but the lower-class labourers didn’t drink tea. So the elderly females were forced to dally behind blackened curtains and had to learn to exercise their dogs and cats early in the morning and late in the afternoon when the danger of their being squashed into Harlem hamburger was minimized.

  They considered the clean, shining, bright building a profanation, a veritable tower of Babel, in which, as events have proved, they were not so far wrong. They sharpened their tealeaves and bided their time.

  But when the old stone Godwin Mansion was given over to the India Institute, and the reservation was invaded by its rabble of employees, Jews from Brooklyn, Italians from the Bronx, Irish from Hell’s Kitchen, blacks from Harlem, foreign Americans from such outlandish places as Akron Ohio, Gary Indiana, Tulsa Oklahoma, that was the bitter end. Now the old ladies walk their cats and dogs with veiled eyes and closed ears, seeing only the glory of the past and hearing only the quiet gentility of remembrance, the faint shape of bitterness in the puckers of their old lips, perhaps of sadness, of sorrow that they should have lived to see the day.

  Kriss liked the old ladies. She always smiled at them and sometimes spoke. She would stop to rub the arched back of a sleek fat spoiled blue Persian cat, cooing with genuine admiration, “Oh, isn’t he lovely! He’s the loveliest thing!” Or she would grin sympathetically at some old blind Scottie that had mistaken a gentleman’s leg for a lamp post and was about to make a faux pas; and would be seized by an almost incontrollable impulse to say, “No, no, darling, that’s a man’s leg,” and guide it gently to the proper edifice.

  The old ladies liked her. “She is the only real gentle lady of the lot,” they had informed themselves. “It’s too bad she had to associate with such trash, poor thing.”

  But there were no old ladies about this morning and Kriss had to be content with the greetings of a few old fat pigeons that moved aside grudgingly to let her pass.

  It was twenty minutes after nine when she ascended the worn stone stairs and entered the Godwin mansion. By this time the employees were all at their places and the huge reception hall with its marble fountain, the focal point of pre-work congregation, was deserted. Water no longer cascaded from the four mouths of the marble Brahma in timeless, uncreated, immaterial and illitimable streams upon the bevy of frolicking cherubins in the empty basin, but the four faces of the supreme soul looked down upon all who entered with benign intelligence and bliss. Kriss had once flirted with the Brahmanic concept, years before when she was a freshman at Chicago University and had tried sleeping with a Hindu; and many times of late, when passing beneath the four faces of this bastard monstrosity, she had the strange feeling that perhaps after all life was but a dream.

  The mansion, built in the shape of a U about an inner court devoted to a formal garden, was a weird combination of Renaissance architecture, Indian impressionism, English pretentiousness, adapted to the basic idea of American plumbing, lighting and comfort. It gave a fairly accurate reflection of the personality of old Marcus Cornelius Godwin who had erected it. By incorporating in both England and the United States, M. Cornelius Godwin had taken a fabulous fortune out of India during the nineteenth century and had died in 1905 at the age of eighty-nine an avowed Brahman—although this latter had not been taken seriously by his family who had given him a decent Episcopalian burial. Old Godwin had loved India but had been greatly impressed by the cold-blooded commercialism and upper-class idolatry of the British aristocracy. However, in his later years he had discovered, somewhat to his chagrin, that he had lost his enthusiasm for monocles, ice-cold castles, the correct thing, and conversations conducted in a smaller vocabulary then that employed by an English-speaking Zulu. So, in the 1880s he had built this monstrosity to pass his declining years in both style and comfort. It was not comfortable in the modern connotation of the word, but it had been warm, heated by a steam furnace that consumed in the winter an average of two tons of coal a day, and it had been lived-in despite the rococo decor, the gilded mirrors at every turn apprising him of approaching death, the lifesize angels in full flight about the ceilings of the rooms ready to bear him off at a moment’s notice, the English drawing room with its leaded windows
looking out on Madison Avenue, a concession to his youthful awe of titles. He had entertained many of the great and famous there, distant neighbours from Fifth Avenue, old cronies from Gramercy Park. There was a full length portrait of the old boy on the landing facing the double stairway.

  Most of the employees poked fun at the stern, bewhiskered visage of the erect, somewhat soldierly old pirate, dubbing it the Face on the Gold Room Floor. But Kriss revered the venerable old man and when no one was about, ofttimes stood for minutes before his portrait. He reminded her of her great grandfather, whom she vaguely remembered seeing when she was five or six. He had the same stern look and a great white forest of whiskers, and his eyes were the ice cold blue of the Godwin in the portrait. Her mother had always maintained that her great grandfather was a bona fide German count, but as a little girl Kriss had thought of him as God.

  However, this morning she didn’t pass the portrait but continued quickly along a side hall toward the elevator.

  There were four floors given over to the Institute personnel, including the basement. The main floor with its formal garden was unused, being maintained as a museum. And the servants’ quarters in the rear of the right wing were closed and empty, except for a suite occupied by the superintendent.

  Kriss’s office was on the third floor, in what had once been a guest bedroom, but was now partitioned into three small offices, of which hers was the centre. Along the inner wall a corridor had been fashioned by enclosing the cubicles with a glass and wallboard screen, such as might be found in banks. There was no privacy, and audibility between the three offices were unencumbered by the thin partitions.

  On her way past, Kriss smiled and said hello to Dorothy Stone, Kirby’s secretary, who had the office to her left. Dorothy gave her a scintillating smile in return, looking as if she had scads of things to talk about. But Kriss didn’t stop. Dot’s personality was not the type to start the day off right.