The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  Each morning he drove out to Barnum Park and found a quiet spot of shade beside the Sound in which to park; and sat on the back seat with his typewriter on his knees and wrote. The sounds of the lapping of the waves and the cries of the sea gulls fishing in the rocky shoals were ineffably soothing, and he was at peace with his work.

  Their money ran out about the middle of July and they decided to return to New York City from whence they’d gone upstate to the resort, and she would try to get a job in the welfare department. He advertized his car for sale in the classified section of the evening daily—First $100 gets sound-bodied Plymouth sedan containing floating-power motor.

  The day the ad ran Becky took their last twelve dollars and went to New York City to put in her application, intending to return that evening, leaving him a half dollar for cigarettes.

  At eleven-thirty that morning he contracted to sell the car to a young immigrant worker at the G. E. factory who was to return with the money shortly after he got off work at four.

  At three-thirty he drove down to the corner of Fairfield Boulevard to buy cigarettes. On his return, when pulling out from the curb, his front bumper caught in the fender of a new Buick Roadmaster that was passing too close on his left, and jerked it off. The Buick was driven by a white-haired white lady, dressed immaculately in a mauve-coloured tweed suit that looked as if it might have cost more than Jesse earned from his second book on which he had worked more than a year. She was a very important person, and despite the fact she had been driving on the wrong side of a one-way street, and that her breath smelled pleasantly of excellent cocktails, she sent for a policeman and had Jesse arrested for reckless driving—not because she hated blacks or wished to humiliate or harm him in any manner; but her husband was always cautioning her to drive carefully and she intended to prove by the record that she had done so.

  Watching her talk to the motorcycle policeman, Jesse thought, “Reason we’re going to fight the Russians, son—to prove by the record we were right.” But he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t seen any Russians about—not having the keen eyesight of Senator McCarthy. Nor had he broken any laws. How could they arrest him?

  He found out shortly that to arrest him required very little skill. The policeman said, “Follow me,” and mounted his four-cylinder steed. “Shows what an ingenious people can do,” he thought sourly as he followed in his battered jalopy.

  The desk sergeant set his bail at twenty-five dollars. He confessed he didn’t have twenty-five dollars. “But I’m a well-known American writer,” he said. “You can release me on my own recognizance.”

  The desk sergeant said the law didn’t permit it.

  “Should have told him you were a porter, son,” Jesse thought. “All Americans trust black porters and black mammies—even with their children.”

  It was Tuesday and his landlady wouldn’t be home until Thursday and he knew no one else to whom he could appeal. However, before sending him to the lockup the desk sergeant gave him permission to telephone his wife at eight o’clock, at which time he expected her home from New York City. But the guard shift changed at six and the night guard had no orders concerning him telephoning. He knew how much she would worry when he failed to come home, and as the night wore on, despair set in. “Don’t let it throw you, son,” he told himself. “Racial characteristic, like syphilis and servility and stealing.” He recalled the bit of doggerel:

  Some folks say that a nigger won’t steal

  But I found one in my corn field,

  and began composing scenes to pass the night:

  —What you doing in my cornfield, nigger?

  —What cornfield, boss?

  —This cornfield where you’re at, nigger.

  —Oh, this cornfield.

  —Yes, this cornfield.

  —I just come down to see what make the grass grow, boss.

  At eleven o’clock the next morning he was taken to the magistrate’s court. But the driver of the Buick had suffered from such severe shock she was unable to appear, and the hearing was postponed for a week. However, he was permitted to telephone. First he called his house. Receiving no reply, in desperation he telephoned Becky’s brother in Baltimore, Maryland, who promised to wire him a hundred dollars to the city jail immediately.

  Becky had had to stay overnight in New York City in order to interview the personnel director at nine o’clock that morning, and didn’t get back to Bridgeport until eleven. The telephone had been ringing when she let herself into the house but had stopped by the time she answered it. She noticed the car was gone and she thought he’d sold it; but when the young man called at eleven-thirty with the money to buy it, she began to worry. She noticed then that the bed hadn’t been slept in, and she was afraid he’d been hurt. She began telephoning the hospitals. It wasn’t until after one o’clock that it occurred to her that he might have been arrested for some traffic violation. She called police headquarters and learned that he was being held on a charge of reckless driving.

  At the same time Becky was talking to the desk officer, Jesse was being hustled into a patrol wagon along with other prisoners committed to the county prison. Since by then he hadn’t made bail he could be held no longer in the municipal jail. At the county prison he was mugged, fingerprinted, given a uniform of blue denim with his number stencilled on his shirt and locked in a cell on the third tier. He kept telling himself that the money for his bail would arrive any minute, and tried desperately not to think of Becky. But gradually, as the day wore on, laughter started welling up from the depths of his despair. “You should have stayed up in that tree, son,” he thought. “Not safe on the ground with lady drivers and atom bombs.”

  When Becky arrived at court she learned he’d been unable to raise his bail and had been committed to the county prison. First telegraphing her brother in Baltimore for twenty-five dollars, she rushed to the county prison but was informed that prisoners were not permitted visitors unless they had a pass from the court, and then only during visiting hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was Wednesday. She rushed home to see if the money had come and found a wire from her brother stating that he’d already wired a hundred dollars to the city jail.

  So she rushed back to the city jail to learn that the money had arrived but, the prisoner having already been committed to the county prison, it had been returned to the telegraph office. After getting a pass to see Jesse from the prosecutor, she hastened to the telegraph office to draw the money.

  But the telegram was addressed to Jesse and they wouldn’t give it to her. She explained that her husband was in the county prison waiting for the money to make bail. They said she’d have to obtain a statement from him, countersigned by the warden, authorizing them to pay her the money. She rushed to the county prison and luckily, got an audience with the warden. He said he was sorry, but prisoners were not permitted to receive money from the outside. And he could not permit her to visit her husband until visiting day. Then she began to cry.

  By that time it was four o’clock in the afternoon and the telegraph office closed at five. In the meantime, Jesse had been marched into the mess hall for his supper of stale bread, macaroni and boiled cabbage, and marched back to his cell. “Anyway, the food is better than in Russia—they say in the newspapers,” he thought half amused.

  Luckily, the warden couldn’t bear to see a woman cry. This seemed to be a decent woman. He wondered how these decent coloured women always got mixed up with some no-good bastard of a husband. So he relented, impressing upon her that he was breaking the prison rules, but he would see what he could do. He had a statement typed, giving her authority to draw the money, and sent it by a guard to Jesse’s cell to have it signed. Then he countersigned it, and by then it was fifteen minutes to five.

  She ran down the stairs and looked for a taxi. On the second street she found one and reached the telegraph office one minute before closing time. She drew the money, returned, and bailed Jesse out. When he came into the front hall where she waited, he saw at
once that she’d been crying. Her body was trembling all over and her eyes looked huge and dark with pain in her small heart-shaped face.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  They went back to police headquarters where he’d parked the car. It had a red ticket on it for parking overnight. He put the ticket in his pocket, started the motor, drove back to the house.

  The young man who wanted to buy the car was waiting for him on the porch. Jesse knocked twenty-five dollars off the price because of the bent bumper and crumpled fender, and the young man was satisfied.

  Becky fixed a makeshift dinner and they ate silently. Afterwards he said, “Let’s pack.”

  They had two wardrobe trunks and three suitcases, but they couldn’t get in everything they owned, so they left some clothing and several paintings in the basement of their landlady’s house. Then he went to the station and found a transfer man to take the trunks to the station.

  At eight o’clock next morning they caught the New Haven limited to New York City. When they came out into Grand Central Station, he paused for a moment beside a wastepaper container and tore the red Bridgeport traffic violation ticket into tiny bits. His customarily voluminous thoughts composed for the occasion only two words, “Fuck you!”

  And now, nine months later, lying on his bed in his rented room, drunk and fully dressed, recalling the incident, he thought, “Natural enough,” and after a moment of consideration, in which he realized all this had happened in a modem, liberal, democratic American city, during the middle of the twentieth century following the birth of Christ, without any maliciousness or deliberate injustice on the part of anyone, he thought further, “Perfectly natural! Happening all the time. That proves it. No doubt right too. Right attitude on the part of everyone. Inevitable, anyway. Even mine. Flea bites you, you squash it. If flea says Ouch! perfectly natural. What the hell you expect a squashed flea to say—Hallelujah?”

  For a time he thought about Becky. “Rough on her, though,” he thought. He wondered why she had kept on taking it for so long—twelve years. “Love—But, Jesus Christ! I used to love God, too, but it didn’t last for these past twelve years.” He began crying quietly somewhere inside. “I used to love her, too. Still do, I suppose.” But he had left her.

  When, shortly after the Bridgeport incident, she got a state welfare job in a hospital about thirty miles from New York City, he’d put an end to the farce of playing husband. It was a live-in job with one day off a week, and they’d taken a room in the Bronx where they had planned she would come and spend her day off with him. But after a month of it he couldn’t bear sitting there day after day, working on his typewriter at something no typical insecure American could bear to read, then having to face her haunted look when she came home for her few short hours of marriage.

  So he’d said to her, “Becky, let’s separate. If I’m ever a success, we’ll come back together. But now, let’s try it apart.”

  And now the memory of the hurt that had come into her eyes brought him to his feet. His hat with which he’d covered his face fell unnoticed to the floor. He stared at his greasy reflection in the mirror. His eyes were like red coals and his vision was fuzzy. “Jesse Robinson,” he spoke to his image. “You thought you were being noble? There ain’t no such thing, son. That’s a confidence twist they put down to make bastards like you, who won’t knuckle down and conform, voluntarily commit suicide, save them the trouble of killing you. Just a racket, son. You oughta know that by now.”

  But all along in the back of his mind he kept wondering why, in April with the weather getting warm and everything furnished where she worked, she wanted blankets and sheets? He had the feeling something was happening that he didn’t know. There was a lump in his chest that made it hard for him to breathe and everything began going and coming. “Unnatural bastard,” he said to his reflection. “O heart, lose not thy nature…Wonder where that old plagiarist stole all that crap. But it fits, though. It reckons. Maybe the old bastard was God, as Swinburne used to claim. Image anyway. Same as Mr Ward. For who could bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of dispiz’d love, the Law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make, with a bare bodkin? Who can say that makes less sense than: Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Or that both are not equally senseless?”

  It was ten minutes before ten, he noticed. “Get it my damn self,” he decided. He wiped his greasy face with a bath towel, put on his sunglasses and his hat, and took off his trench coat. There was a slight smudge of lipstick on his white shirt collar, but it didn’t matter.

  When he left his room, through the open door of the bedroom opposite, he saw Leroy standing beside the bed, his black body clad only in a brief undershirt. “Uncouth bastard!” he thought, hastening along. Then, “That’s where those old boys missed it. Those who lamented and those who railed and those like Henry James who avoided and ignored. If one of them had ever written: Alas poor Culture, I knew him when, a fellow of infinite jest: of a most excellent fancy, he hath borne me on his back a thousand times. Here hung those lips, that I have kissed I know not how oft. But now his place hath been taken by uncouthness, a mean and sordid fellow without humor or refinement. How I despise this lowborn role. But me thinks, fair friends, that he is here to stay, a way of life, for a thousand years to come—he might have rolled along with Homer.”

  Napoleon charged from the kitchen, skidding on the polished floor, barking furiously, nipping at his ankles, momentarily deflecting his train of thought; the dulcet voice of Leroy called, “Napoleon! You behave yourself and stop barking at Mr Robinson. Mr Robinson knows you’re here.”

  As he groped his way down the long dark corridor, pitch black through his sunglasses, the popeyed cur yapping at his heels, he returned to his stream of thought: “Once it was only the sport of kings; then the upper middle classes, aristocrats, and nouveau riche took it up. But now the masses have it. Everybody’s uncouth now. Probably a good thing, too.” And after a moment, half amused, “We niggers will at last have a chance to come into our own. We’ll be the most uncouth sons of bitches of them all.”

  Chapter 7

  Dave was coming for dinner and Kriss had donned her red silk Chinese Mandarin robe embellished with gold dragons, along with her pert Persian slippers of red suede hand-sewn with gold thread. Dave had called her at the office to say he wanted to see her and she had invited, nay, demanded, that he come to dinner. She knew he was coming, but whether he would get dinner depended on which turn her thoughts would take during the half hour before he was to arrive, not to say whether or not he would stay for dinner, a contingency the consideration of which she kept trying to float from her mind by a rapid succession of Scotch-whisky highballs.

  But this possibility, verily a probability, had refused to be floated, the proof of which was the flaming ensemble she now wore. She knew this was enough to set Dave’s teeth on edge. For she had cajoled him into buying the slippers to go with the robe which he afterwards had learned had been given her by Fuller Halperin—in fact, the information had come from herself: that Fuller had paid a hundred dollars for it in San Francisco and had given it to her that Christmas weekend in Washington when Dave had been under the impression she had gone to Chicago on business and had bought it in Marshal Field’s basement. After all, Dave was a lawyer and wasn’t expected to know merchandise. Besides which, Dave not only thought it made her look like a whore, but thought it proved the point as well. And because the sight of it on her so provoked him, she thought of it as her muleta.

  Now she smiled maliciously as she sat in her three-legged chair, leafing through the pages of the latest New Yorker, enjoying the cartoons along with her fifth highball, the combination being aphrodisical in a highly intellec
tual way, that is to say, stimulating the purely physical sex instinct which, alas, is also embodied in cats and dogs and even blacks, by an application of subtlety, culture and wit to the high-browed intellectual processes and refined sensibilities of the cultivated—which of course excludes the blacks, who do not possess such attributes, and even lets out the cats and dogs, the latter, however, because they don’t drink Scotch.

  The maliciousness in her smile was in no way related to her enjoyment of the New Yorker. The maliciousness derived from consideration of the contingency that would not be floated away, and the additional reflection that Dave would want to sleep with her, because she looked like a whore; and he’d sit there looking at her in the red robe thinking of how she’d slept with this Fuller person all during the year of their “engagement” and had received gifts and money from him almost equal to her salary, which proved she was a whore. “God knows how many others she has slept with,” he would think, wanting her in that way men, good and bad the world over, desire whores and promiscuous women, and despising himself because of it.

  And the thought lit a rage inside of her. “You son of a bitch!” she sobbed. “You Jewish son of a bitch! I’m not good enough for you?” She began to cry, her full matronly face stretching and puckering in the ugly grimace of a little tow-headed girl called “Dutch” crying because her mother had slapped her drunken father the day he lost his grocery store in a little village in North Dakota. “You ruined me, you son of a bitch!” And in that moment of emotional torture, she couldn’t have said who she meant by this last son of a bitch.

  There were many such moments now, since Dave had thrown her over, when she was confused as to really who had ruined her. Just as in later years ofttimes her memory confused the great event of losing her virginity with the time she first had diphtheria. The confusion was brought about by the recollection of her uneasiness, which had been the same in both instances; now twenty-one years later this being the most that she clearly recalled of either instance.