The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  He sipped his drink and put it down, smiling at her absentmindedly. “What have you been doing lately?”

  The question infuriated her, all the more because he seemed preoccupied and didn’t give a damn what she’d been doing. She felt an impulse to tell him, “Just sleeping around, you son of a bitch! What do you think?” But she only giggled in a way that had always irritated him; it reminded him of the way his sister had giggled when she’d done something naughty. And then she assumed her secret sensual smile and said offhandedly, “Oh, the usual thing. I went to a party Sunday—just a staff party at Kirby’s house in Bronxville. Arty was by Monday—you’ve met him…” He nodded slightly. “He flew in from Chicago to attend a conference. And Tuesday Johnny took me to see Guys and Dolls—that’s the third time I’ve seen it—you know you took me to see it the first time—and it’s just as funny as ever.” She giggled reminiscently. “I adore that floating crap game scene. Afterwards we went to the Versailles. Then Fuller took me shopping Wednesday.” She gave him a covert glance to see the effect of this thrust, but he didn’t seem to be listening. “You needn’t try to be so superior, you son of a bitch, I know the time when that would have killed you,” she thought, viciously, continuing aloud with a sweet innocent smile, “Oh, just the usual things a bachelor girl does in New York.” And after a pause, “Jesse Robinson was by last night.” Something in her voice made him look up.

  “Jesse Robinson?”

  “Oh, that’s right. You never met him. You met Harold.”

  “Is he a sociologist too?”

  She knew he wanted to ask if he was another Negro she had slept with, and she smiled with an appearance of sensual reminiscence. “He’s a novelist. But that’s right, you don’t read novels.” She finished her drink and gave him a lidded look. “But that’s not what I like him for,” she added, feeling an evil delight at the dull flush that mounted his face.

  He’d scarcely touched his glass but she asked sweetly, “Would you like another drink, dear?” knowing that he detested Scotch and never drank more than one highball, and that only at some social gathering. He shook his head, half angrily. She said, “It’s just as well. Jesse practically cleaned me out, although he brought a bottle of his own.” She giggled, seeing his flush deepen. “All writers drink like crazy anyway.”

  “He had a good partner in you,” he muttered.

  “Partner in drink, partner in bed,” she thought, smiling sensually as she said, “I almost married him once,” and flounced to the kitchen to mix her drink, throwing her hips more than usual, and feeling quite giggly inside.

  At last she’s achieved that superior feeling she used to achieve with Ronny after she’d cuckolded him to his face and challenged him to accuse her. She felt a delicious sense of evil which tickled her all inside and the sight of the melting potatoes and blood-dripping steak tickled her all the more. “You can eat it raw, you son of a bitch!” she thought, taking a half glass of the strong Scotch neat before mixing the highball, and when she returned to Dave she staggered slightly and knew she was getting drunk. Placing her drink with elaborate care on its silver coaster atop the storage cabinet, she lowered herself as carefully into her favourite three-legged chair as amused by and interested in the spectacle of herself as any curious bystander.

  “I almost married you once, too,” she resumed, her sensuous smile now mixed with such maliciousness it seemed to drip with sticky venom. “Always a bedmate but never a bride.”

  He flushed crimson, straightening in his seat as the pins and needles pricked, but kept his low deliberate voice controlled. “I really shouldn’t have called, Kriss, but I wanted to leave your keys and get my watch. I’ll give you a check with whatever interest—”

  “Oh, wait till after dinner, dear…You know you’re invited to dinner?”

  “Oh, I—” He was a nice man and she had cornered him.

  “Please be sensible, Kriss. You know that I know you’re not going to prepare any dinner. You know I know you that well.”

  “You ought to, you son of a bitch, as long as you’ve slept with me,” she said savagely.

  He was red to the roots of his hair. “For God’s sake, Kriss, can’t we do a simple business transaction without a sordid fight?”

  “You can because you’re a gentleman.” She giggled suddenly and added, “But I can’t because I’m a whore. That’s what you called me, remember?”

  “For Christ’s sake! You’re throwing that up again. We were both angry and you called me far worse.”

  “Did your mother tell you I was a whore? Or did you find it out by yourself?”

  He shrugged with disgust. “My mother likes you—”

  “But I’m not Jewish. If I joined the Synagogue and—” giggling “—had the Rabbi circumcise me, would I be Jewish enough for her then?”

  “Let up, Kriss, let up!” he said in a low angry voice. “This isn’t getting us anywhere—”

  “Certainly isn’t, dear—”

  “—and it’d be silly to part hating one another—”

  “You’ve always hated me!” she flared. “You hate all gentiles, you son of a bitch! You condescending son of a bitch! You think gentiles are dirt under your feet.”

  “—so let me give you a check for a hundred dollars and take my watch and let’s call it quits. Okay?”

  “What’s the extra twenty-five dollars for? A tip? Or do you want to spend the night? Fuller always gives me at least a hundred dollars every time he sleeps with me.” Watching the colour drain from his face, she thought, “I’m a bitch!”

  His long handsome face assumed an expression of infinite pity. “You always hate me when you’re drunk,” he said as if somewhat benumbed. “Why do you always hate me when you’re drunk?”

  His pity struck her like a contemptuous slap, hurting far more than his hatred or an actual blow; and she blubbered senselessly, “You sonavabitch—” and if the telephone had not rung at that moment she would have cried wantonly and disgustingly like a drunken prostitute with her brain gone in liquor and disease, crying without knowing what she’s crying for.

  She staggered to the bedroom and for half an hour carried on a disjointed incoherent conversation with some black unionist from Washington, D.C. on his way to Detroit, staying overnight at the Commodore, who was trying to persuade her to come down and have a drink. She’d slept with him one night in a black hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, and had disliked him ever afterwards, but she kept him dallying on the phone, he saying, “What?…What?…I can’t understand you…You sound like Maud…Talk a little louder…Are you drunk?…“and herself replying, “Go on buy some you bastard—” giggling in between, giving the whole performance just to keep Dave waiting.

  He sat leafing through the New Yorker, his white face quivering now and then from the anger he could scarcely contain. He’d written her a check for seventy-nine dollars and fifty cents, giving her six percent interest on the loan, and he’d placed it on the cabinet beside her empty glass. Now he just wanted to get his watch and go.

  But she ignored the check and picked up her glass and staggered toward the kitchen for a refill, all the time talking incoherently, “He wanted me to come down to the Commodore and sleep with him—said drink but that’s the way you say it…” her voice fading out as she fumbled about in the kitchen, then grew in volume on her return “…once a black man sleeps with Kriss he never forgets. They all come back.” She smiled with infinite pleasure. “Never forget. I took Ted away from—” He had stood up and began walking toward the door. “All right, go to hell then, you son of a bitch. I slept with Jesse last night!” she called as loudly as she could, but he had closed the door behind him and didn’t hear her.

  She looked at his check and smiled as one bemused in idiocy. The drink sobered her slightly and she dreaded being alone. Staggering to the telephone, supporting herself against the wall, she called Jesse. An extremely courteous male voice, Mr Ward’s, informed her that Jesse was out. She was overcome by such a fury, the ins
trument trembled in her hand. “Probably in bed with some black Harlem bitch!” she raged inwardly. “Probably with his wife…If I find you sleeping with your wife, I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!” she muttered. The rage passed as quickly as it had come, and she began to giggle. Groping about in the haze before her, she found the receiver and began dialling another number without being aware that Mr Ward was still patiently waiting on the line to ask if there was a message for Jesse, “Hello, is this the Windemere Hotel?”

  “I don’t understand you,” Mr Ward replied. “You were asking for Mr Robinson.”

  “Robinson?” She had forgotten his existence. “Oh, Jesse Robinson. Damn Jesse Robinson!” And she hung up and dialled again.

  Harold was as drunk as herself. “Kriss? That you, Kriss? It’s a bitch, girl! It’s a bitch!”

  “Come over and sleep with me. I’m cold.”

  “You know I can’t sleep with you, Kriss. I haven’t slept with you since you had the clap.”

  “I don’t want you to screw me, baby. Just keep me warm.”

  “Margaret is here. She wants me to screw her. We been fighting and now we got to fuck.”

  “Bring her along, baby. I’ll give you half the bed.” She giggled. “That’s enough to screw on. That is if you’re going to screw the old-fashioned way.”

  “That’s the only way I do it now. My analyst said too much of that other’ll make a homosexual outa one. Just old State Street grind. Not tryna win no home no more.”

  “Come on then and grind over here. I’ll wait until you’re finished.”

  “No, you’ll never do that to me, my dear.”

  “What, baby?”

  “I lost one woman to a dike—”

  “You son of a bitch, you—”

  “Call me what you please, my dear, but you like it. You’re not fooling me, my dear. I—”

  She tried to bang the receiver on the rack, but it missed and fell behind the nightstand, and she left it dangling on its cord and staggered into the bathroom. “Harold, what did you say that for?” she thought accusingly, now crying bitterly, unrestrainedly, tears making ugly streaks down her distorted face. “Why did you say that? Why did you say that to me?”

  Desperately she fumbled in the medicine cabinet, groping for the bottle of sleeping pills which now she couldn’t see. Finally her hands encountered the small glass bottle. She held it close to her eyes so she would make no mistake. It was filled to the brim with small red and yellow capsules. She pulled out the stopper and dumped them all into one hand. With the other hand she turned on the faucet of the basin and filled her plastic toothbrush glass. “Why did you do that to me?” she sobbed, her mind having gone to another hurt, but she didn’t know what it was. “Why did you do that to me?” Opening her mouth wide, she threw in the capsules with one hand and raised the glass of water with the other. She choked slightly, and then got them down. She didn’t know that only four capsules had gone into her mouth, the rest scattering about the floor and in the basin. She thought she had swallowed them all, and in a vague alcoholic daze, she accepted her death with the thought, “Now try to get your watch, you son of a bitch,” not knowing what she meant by it, and got as far as her bed and fell face down across it.

  Chapter 8

  On his return from the liquor store, Jesse stopped at the super’s and got the keys to the storeroom where his trunks were stored. From the steamer trunk containing leftovers from their lighthouse-keeping days, he took two blankets, four sheets and four pillowcases for Becky. He looked at the dusty junk about him, abandoned trunks, broken furniture, wornout baby carriages and tried not to think of her.

  “Don’t Leroy give you bedding?” the super asked, eyeing his load.

  “Oh sure, this is for a friend.”

  “Settin’ ‘em up now, eh?”

  “No, just laying ‘em still.”

  The super laughed. “You got the best go, sport. You got the combination.”

  “No, you the one’s got the gimmick. I see you slipping here and there when you think nobody’s looking.”

  “I’ll be slipping up your way soon.”

  “Come get your throat cut,” Jesse thought, half-amused.

  Leroy was out with the dogs and he managed the dark corridor without being assaulted. On his dresser was a letter from his editor at Hobson’s, asking him to call. He called from Leroy’s room and the editor asked if he could come in that afternoon at three.

  “Now what?” he thought, going fluttery inside as the world became distorted again. Sighing, he poured a half glass of the cheap bourbon and tossed it off, grimacing in the mirror.

  He took off his coat and shirt and prepared to shave. Then, half-smiling, said, “Better wash this white stink off; no need taking any chances,” and stripped. The water in that house was always scalding hot, and as he ran the huge, old-fashioned tub full to the overflow drain, he thought, “Smart super, not his coal.” Then as he lay stretched out in water hot enough to scald a fowl for pickling, he laughed, “Can’t be a nigger, using the white man’s coal to heat water for other niggers—to bathe in, too. Not American nigger! Must be a Mau Mau, or a Russian in disguise. Better tip off McCarthy. Russian masquerading as nigger janitor creating coal and water shortage. See the headlines: McCarthy discovers Communist cell in Harlem Basement.”

  Hobson’s was in an old building in the twenties on Fourth Avenue. An elderly and dignified receptionist mistook him for a messenger boy when he asked to see Mr Pope. But when he explained it was his own manuscript he wished to discuss she flushed slightly and hastened to buzz Mr Pope. “Go to the end of this corridor and turn to the right,” she directed, smiling sympathetically. “His is the last office in the comer. And he’ll be waiting for you.” This last to the tune of, I’ll be waiting for you, Nellie. I don’t expect him to jump out the window,” he thought, and after a moment smiling inwardly, “No such luck.”

  James Pope was a tall thin man with graying hair and a British mustache, something of a cross between Chamberlain and Eden, dressed in Baggy Brooks Brothers tweeds. He came around the desk to shake Jesse’s hand, his narrow face creased in an apologetic smile.

  “Welcome to the bastard’s comer.” He gripped Jesse’s hand and released it quickly.

  “Black, isn’t it,” Jesse thought, but said aloud, smiling, “Howya, Jim. You got us wrong. We just love editors.”

  Pope pulled up a worn leather chair. “Sit down.” He went behind his desk and offered cigarettes. Jesse declined. “Can’t say as I much blame them,” Pope reflected. “The publishing business is lousy these days.”

  Jesse felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. How many times had he heard these words, always a prologue to a rejection. But he kept up his front. “We modern writers are just spoiled. In the old days a writer starved in a garret for fifty years and wrote seventy books, all masterpieces. We write one book and want to get rich. I blame it all on Margaret Mitchell.”

  Pope’s face resumed its customary expression of shame and guilt, like that of a man who’s murdered his mother and thrown her body in the well, to be forever afterwards haunted by her sweet smiling face.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”

  Jesse just looked at him, thinking, “Whatever bad news you got for me—as if I didn’t know—you’re going to have to say it without me helping you. I’m one of those ungracious niggers.”

  “We’ve given your book six readings and Mr Hobson has decided to drop the option.”

  Jesse had been prepared for this from the moment he’d read Pope’s letter and now, before the reaction had set in, he just felt argumentative. “I thought you were going to cut it.”

  Pope reddened slightly. “That was my opinion. I like the book. I fought for it all the way. I think all it needs is cutting. But Hobson thinks it reads like fictional autobiography. And he doesn’t like the title.”

  “I WAS LOOKING FOR A STREET,” Jesse quoted, turning it over in his mind. “I was looking for a street that I c
ould understand,” he thought, and for a moment he was lost in memory of the search.

  “He said it sounds like a visiting fireman looking for a prostitute’s address,” Pope said with his apologetic smile.

  Jesse laughed. “That ought to make it sell.”

  Pope again assumed his look of shame and guilt. “The truth is, fiction is doing very poorly. We’re having our worst year for fiction.”

  “Why not publish it as an autobiography then?”

  “It would be the same. Hobson thinks the public is fed up with protest novels. And I must say, on consideration, I agree with him.”

  “What’s protest about this book?” Jesse argued. “If anything, it’s tragedy. But no protest.”

  “The consensus of the readers was that it’s too sordid. It’s pretty strong—almost vulgar, some of it.”

  “Then what about Rabelais? The education of Gargantua? What’s more sordid than that?”

  Pope blinked in disbelief. “But surely you realize that that was satire—Rabelais was satirizing the humanist Renaissance—and certainly some of the best satire ever written…This—” tapping the manuscript neatly wrapped in brown paper on his desk—“is protest. It’s vivid enough, but it’s humourless. And there is too much bitterness and not enough just plain animal fun—”

  “I wasn’t writing about animals—”

  “The reader is gripped in a vice of despair and bitterness from start to finish—”

  “I thought some of it was funny.”

  “Funny!” Pope stared at him incredulously.

  “That part where the parents wear evening clothes to the older son’s funeral,” Jesse said, watching Pope’s expression and thinking, “What could be more funny than some niggers in evening clothes? I bet you laugh like hell at Amos and Andy on television.”

  Pope looked as if he’d suddenly been confronted by a snake, but was too much of a gentleman to enquire of the snake if it were poisonous.

  “All right, maybe you don’t think that’s funny—”