The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  He grunted a laugh and said aloud, “Really protest now!” The combination of this thought and the sight of the knife sticking from the heart of his manuscript amused him vastly. “You’re some boy, son,” he said. “Pope should see this now.” Then, smiling grimly, “But it’s a Freudian knot, not a Gordian knot, son.” The thought steadied him somewhat. “Deserves a drink,” he said. For the first time he noticed the empty whiskey bottle. “Dead, too.” And then, half-laughing, “Kill ‘em all.”

  Slipping into his robe and house shoes, he went to the bathroom. Leroy’s door was open but he and his boy were out. Napoleon came to the kitchen door and growled as he passed. Through the half-open window he looked down on the convent wall.

  On his way out he glanced into the kitchen and noticed two partly filled whiskey bottles amidst the orgiastic debris. On sudden impulse he knocked upon Mr Ward’s door and receiving no answer stepped into the kitchen and poured a gobletful of whiskey, half from each of the bottles. Napoleon stood at a distance and growled threateningly. Nero blinked sleepily from his deathbed beneath the stove. The sink was stacked with dirty dishes. Behind the door, crab shells overflowed the garbage pail. He drank half the whiskey at a gulp, gasped and grimaced. Then said laughingly, “They beat me to it; they got the still.” On second thought, “Maybe they just drank it straight.”

  The pop-eyed cur answered with a nasty growl. Carefully Jesse put down his glass. “Son,” he said to the dog. “This is going to be your Waterloo.” He got an old leather belt from the broom closet. Sensing his intention Napoleon retreated to the protection of his sire beneath the stove. “Your pappy can’t help you now, son,” he said, advancing. “And your play-pappy’s not here.” He flicked the bundle of cowardly fur with the end of the strap. The dog yelped and ran from the kitchen. He flicked its rump as it went through the door. The dog slipped on the polished floor of the hall. Following quickly he slapped it again, just before he also slipped and crashed into the chest of drawers. The dog yelped and the man cursed. The dog ran into Leroy’s room. He followed. The dog cowered beneath the bed. He got down on his knees and hit at it from one side. The dog ran back into the hall. He pursued, and got in another good lick before he slipped again and knocked over the white marble statue of a nude, that blocked the passage. He made a desperate lunge and caught the statue before it hit the floor, breaking its fall, then fell on top of it. He got up bruised and shaken and restored it to the table. “Good thing you’re not in Georgia, son,” he told himself. “Open and shut case of rape.”

  Returning to the kitchen he noticed the dog shaking like a dust mop in the corner beneath the stove. “And let that be a lesson to you,” he said to it, returning the belt to the broom closet. Laughing, he added, “Yes sir, just like the white folks beating us niggers. Gave that black son of a bitch a good lesson; I beat that bugger’s head until I fell over dead.”

  He drank the remainder of the whiskey and went back to his room. The walls had steadied and he felt almost normal. “Call Kriss at noon,” he reminded himself.

  After bathing, shaving, brushing his teeth, he donned his sport ensemble, went to the bank and drew out fifty dollars, ate a breakfast of fried sausage, scrambled eggs, hominy grits, toast and coffee. On his way home he stopped in a bar and had two gin-and-beers, then bought a bottle of cheap bourbon whiskey from the liquor store to take with him.

  He found Napoleon hovering in the front hall, peering cautiously from beneath the zoo-parade table to see whether it was friend or enemy. “Enemy!” he snarled and the cur fled to the kitchen. The “birds” were still flown, so he uncorked his bottle and refilled their bottles from which he had drunk, then got some ice cubes and a bottle of ginger ale from the refrigerator. Sight of the stabbed manuscript on the dresser accused him. “Since no one’s come to bury you, Caesar, I’ll bury you myself,” he said and stored it into the cabinet beside his bed. Then, sitting on the sofa by the windows, he sipped the mellow highballs and stared at the gray city in the gray day. For a moment he felt brilliant and creative.

  “Seven million people. If each person has one half-pound of brains, that’s three million, five hundred thousand pounds of brains. Seems like that amount of brains ought to produce the solution,” he thought. “Doesn’t though. Come out the wrong barrel. Solving kind still in heaven. Barrel’s never been tapped. Got an angel in charge of the brain room who can’t read. Still passing out those brains God condemned for lack of reasoning ingredients. If God doesn’t replace him soon going to lose the world. Too bad, too. Excellent brains but for that one flaw…”

  At twelve o’clock he put on his hat, hung his trench coat on his arm, went down to the basement and telephoned Kriss. Her line sounded the busy signal. He left the building and sauntered toward 145th Street, staggering slightly, but he didn’t feel drunk. Wraithlike people floated past and the buildings rocked gently in the gray day. He felt a remote, sardonic, self-deprecating amusement. “Looking for the fountain of miracles, eh. Son?” he thought.

  It occurred to him as he staggered along that since his return to the city he’d not once met anyone on the street whom he knew. “You’re a pipe dream, son,” he said. “Just something you dreamed up. Other folks smoking a different gage.”

  At 145th Street he turned downhill to the bar of the Chinese restaurant. After drinking two gin-and-beers he telephoned Kriss again. Still the busy signal. “Break it off,” he muttered irritably, and two more gin-and-beers, wondering the while to whom she was talking and feeling vaguely jealous. After telephoning again he began to feel frustrated. “All right, babe,” he said. “This is Sugar Hill—if one won’t, another will.”

  The scent of frying peppers from the basement kitchen made him hungry and he sat in a booth and ate an order of Peppers and Pork, then an order of Egg Foo Young. The food relieved him of his irritation but when he stood up to telephone again he found himself quite tight. “Fine,” he said, deciding to go down to her apartment instead of telephoning again. When he stepped outside, a brown heart-shaped face caught in the angle of his vision and he thought it was Becky. Before he’d seen his error his heart turned over in agonizing shock. He realized he was gasping. The familiar scene went strange in a blurred distortion. “Not that street, son,” he said, and re-entered the bar, lingering over his gin-and-beer to study his reflection in the mirror.

  A handsome, well-dressed, tan-skinned woman two seats down from him observed, “Looks familiar doesn’t he?” In his slightly blurred vision she seemed about Kriss’s age, lonely but cautious; then his attention returned to himself. “You see that son of a bitch—” he began, pointing toward his reflection. “That’s what the white folks call a primitive.” She smiled at his naivete. “Don’t let that worry you, baby. They like primitives.” He went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “He’s dangerous, a menace to society. He’d just as soon be white, rich and respected as black, poor and neglected. Proves right there he’s crazy—” and the next thing he knew it was five o’clock and he was re-entering his own apartment house, on his way up to see Susie, consoling himself with the homemade adage, “One cockroach in today’s soup is more nourishing than all of next year’s honey.”

  He had no memory of his bitter tirade against himself: “That s.o.b. thinks he’s a writer. That s.o.b. once wrote for publication, I consider it my duty to write the truth as I see it. And he made more people unhappy, stirred up more anger and animosity—let me tell you—he made more enemies by his version of the truth than Jesus Christ himself.”

  “Why do you do it then, baby?” she asked calmly.

  The question startled him. After a moment’s reflection he said, “See what I mean. Crazy beyond all doubt. Wants to tell the truth. Crucify that s.o.b. quick before he finds a fool who’ll believe him.”

  He had no memory of telephoning Kriss three times during the discussion; of finally calling the operator and having her tap the line; of deciding that Kriss had taken off the receiver to keep from talking to him because she had someone else t
here; of storming back to the bar and paying his bill with the intention of going down to Kriss’s and breaking in; of the woman stopping him, sensing his intention: “Why bother a white woman, baby, if she doesn’t want to see you?”

  “How do you know she’s white?”

  “I heard you give the operator a Gramercy number.”

  No memory of his buying her lunch and having another lunch himself—this time Sweet and Sour Pork; of their going up St. Nicholas to Jimmy’s Bar-and-Grill and listening to a natural-born comedian give a marvellous piano rendition of “What Makes Com Grow”, reciting the lyrics in a husky singsong voice:

  Oh, it’s dark and cosy in the shucks…

  Two little grains been belly-rubbing…

  Now they begins to—rhymes, baby rhymes…

  Where there were only two grains before…

  Now there is three, four or even more…

  No memory of going across the street to a blackjack game with this woman and another they’d picked up, of losing fifteen dollars and getting into an argument; of starting home for his knife, then changing his mind and taking the subway down to Kriss’s and pressing her bell continuously for five minutes; no memory of his blind rage at her refusal to answer; of going around to the airwell beneath her window and shouting curses at her until the super came out and threatened to call the police; of sitting in the White Rose Bar at 23rd Street and Fourth Avenue, drinking gin-and-beers and telephoning her at fifteen minute intervals; of finally giving up at four-thirty and taking the subway uptown…So now he wondered vaguely why he should console himself, because when he came to, he didn’t know he had intended visiting Susie and thought only that he was going to telephone again. He went down to the basement and telephoned Kriss in the same frame of mind in which he had first telephoned her, without any memory of his hours of rage and frustration.

  In the back of his mind he was humming da-da-dee in a light, gay motif as he listened to the phone ringing clearly and finally to Kriss’s forthright office voice: “Mrs Cummings speaking.”

  Chapter 9

  The faint sound of the telephone clicking awakened Kriss at four-thirty. She had slept through the din of Jesse’s doorbell ringing an hour earlier and the faint clicking sound which echoed at the other end as the busy signal had been going on for some time. She came awake abruptly and unnaturally alert. She saw at once the receiver was off the hook and had fallen behind the night table, but by the time she’d retrieved it the clicking had ceased. She divined instantly the caller had been Jesse and chuckled gleefully. She suffered none of her usual panic at awakening alone because of his call. Instead, she derived a delicious delight from his thinking she was talking to someone else. Then she noticed that it was four-thirty and she’d asked him to call at noon. Perhaps he’d been calling ever since noon and had got the busy signal each time. She felt a slight sense of guilt for standing him up for so long, and a slight trepidation of fear he’d not call again. But these tiny qualms were quickly dispelled by an abnormal sense of well-being. She felt more rested and refreshed than at any time in years, and for a moment she didn’t care whether Jesse called again or not. For a time she luxuriated in the resolve not to answer when he called again, and he’d think she’d gone out with someone else. It would serve him right, she thought. Niggers! Niggers! Niggers! All they wanted was to drink your whiskey and sleep with you—he’d be furious if she broke their date…She smiled with malicious sensuality…Let him find some bitch in Harlem. Sleep with Maud. She’d always wanted to have him…But the thought of Maud started a train of memory she couldn’t bear, as she had not yet taken her pill for “mental and emotional distress.” They threw me to the niggers themselves, she thought accusingly; although whom she accused by the pronoun they, if not her entire race, she wasn’t sure. She only knew that she wanted to be married to some decent cultured successful white man and bear his children as much as did any other white woman. It wasn’t her fault, she reasoned, that she was sterile, diseased and rapidly becoming an alcoholic. She wasn’t certain that she was diseased. Five years after she’d first contracted gonorrhea it had recurred, and she had been hospitalized four months. But she wasn’t certain that she was completely cured. At that time she’d been with the Institute just a little over a year. In addition to the strain and worry that someone on the job might discover the nature of her illness, and the humiliation and mortification of having the nurses know, were the pain and the terrible headaches that had come from the countless injections.

  She loved Nat Gold, her doctor, because he’d kept her sane during that awful time. She’d told him everything, about Ronny and the Negroes too—and all he’d ever said was: “Kriss, people are always asking. Would you have your daughter marry a Negro. To me my two daughters are the most precious girls in the world. But if one of them wanted to marry a Negro, I would just ask her. Do you honour him as much as you honour me?” She felt a maudlin gratitude toward him because even he treated her with respect, more as a friend than a patient.

  Then her mind flared in venomous hatred as she recalled the circumstances of her husband giving her gonorrhea. He’d been sleeping around with all manner of tramps, on a binge half the time, but she hadn’t minded because she’d begun sleeping with Harold by then. And then one night he’d come home weeping with guilt and remorse—had probably been sleeping with some Clark Street bouncer—and had begged her to give him a son. “Give me an heir, Kriss. Please, darling. I’m the last of my line. I can’t let my family die out with me.” She’d been certain at the time she couldn’t have children, nevertheless she’d slept with him. And that was when it had happened because the night before Harold had gone to Tuskegee and was away for two weeks and she hadn’t slept with anyone else since his second wife had left him and he’d tried three times to kill himself. There’d been some of her friends in for a drink that afternoon, ten days later. By then Ronny was on another binge, only God knew where, and she’d put on the red silk housecoat she’d owned then to entertain her friends. But she’d felt so sick after her second drink she’d turned pale and had had to lie on the sofa to keep from fainting. The sofa had just been done over in pale green and her friends accused her of posing for some newly patented aphrodisiac. But the next day she and her blear-eyed unshaven hungover husband had been admitted to the hospital. She’d been furious because he hadn’t suffered half as much as she. It was after their release Ronny first learned she’d been sleeping with Harold, although Harold had been positive he’d known it all the time. Harold had picked them up at the hospital in his car and had taken them to supper, trying to cheer them up by saying he’d had the clap seven times and, like the boys on State Street said, it was no more than a runny nose. But afterwards, sitting in the car before their apartment house, he’d said, “I told you to be careful, Kriss, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “After all, goddamit, I got it from Ronny!” she’d flared.

  “Well, it’s a bitch, it’s a bitch all right,” he’d said. “He’s your husband. But count me out from now on. I’m getting too old to take any chances.”

  “He said he wanted an heir,” she’d said without thinking, and had suddenly giggled.

  They had turned simultaneously to stare at Ronny who’d been sitting silently in the outside seat, and he could no longer pretend he didn’t understand.

  “You bastard,” he’d said to Harold. “All this time you’ve been pretending to be my friend you’ve been sleeping with my wife.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t know it.” Harold had replied. “I’ve seen you leave the house so we could go to bed.”

  “You son of a bitch! If I was in Mississippi you wouldn’t say that to me,” Ronny had protested crying.

  “You dirty pansy bastard!” Kriss thought as the vivid memory stung her. “You and your State Street whores! You ruined me, you son of a bitch…” And then: “I wish I’d told your mother, when she was telling me of all the beautiful southern belles you could have married, you couldn’t screw
a decent white woman.

  And God knows I wish you’d married one of them instead of me—or married some southern man. Maybe you’d have been happy lynching Negroes to get your courage up to screw your wife every two or three years so she could bear children for you. Maybe southern women are used to homosexuals for husbands; maybe that’s the reason they get so excited when they come north and meet a Negro man face to face. Maybe they’ve been dreaming of getting one good screwing before they die and can’t resist the first temptation…”

  She smiled maliciously as she recalled Ronny’s married cousin, Sissybelle, who’d visited her in Chicago the second summer of the war. Ronny had been in England and his mother had written to caution Kriss against introducing her to any Negroes who might be connected with that “charity you work for.” She’d underscored the lines: “Sissybelle is very sensitive and highstrung and the sight of a negra in the same room with herself might give her screaming hysterics.” She had screamed all right, because Kriss had heard her, and Kriss had no doubt but what she had been hysterical too. Because she had not only been in the same room with Negroes, but she’d spent most of her visit in the same bed with them. She was a beautiful blonde woman of the extreme nervous temperament that comes from sexual frustration, and the letter had so annoyed Kriss that on the night of her arrival she had arranged a party and had invited all the best equipped Negroes of her acquaintance. Although, for the most part, her own knowledge of their equipment had been hearsay. But during her two weeks stay Sissybelle had become an authority on the subject; and had returned to Mississippi five pounds fatter and fresh as a daisy. Ronny’s mother had written: “I don’t know what you did to Sissybelle but she’s a changed woman; she looks so rested and she isn’t a bit nervous anymore and Toliver says she’s even prettier. Although I bet he just says that because he says she’s a better wife to him than she used to be; and he says if he knew your treatment he’d recommend it for all his friends’ wives. Thank Glory you didn’t let her get close to any negras or she’d have been an hysterical wreck.”