Free Chester Himes by James Sallis Page A

that I can never again be hurt as much as I have already been hurt, even though I should live one hundred thousand years. 7
    In addition, imprisonment largely severed any remaining intimate connections with his family (a fact that Himes, subconsciously at least, may have welcomed), so that we have no secondary sources concerning this period. Eddie had vanished. Joseph Sandy was working at menial jobs when he could find them, living in a squalid apartment. Joe concentrated on school work while Estelle kept house for him. Only future wife Jean Johnson could have told us; sadly, she never did.
    Because Himes wrote so little about the experience in his memoirs, then, and given this utter lack of alternative sources, most of our information (as in the passage above he said of his own) must come obliquely from reading what he wrote elsewhere. We proceed, wobbling and trying to make them ours, on legs of conjecture andextrapolation. The short stories are of some use in catching up the moods of prison life, more so in documenting Himes’s development as a writer. And whatever land mines it may contain, the best plot of ground we have on which to build remains his prison novel, first published as
Cast the First Stone
. (A recent restoration of the original version, published as
Yesterday Will Make You Cry
, will be discussed in Chapter 10 .)
    At the end of that book’s first chapter, new inmate Jimmy Monroe lies abed at night recalling his disgrace at the Chicago police station, thinking how strange everything is, and remembering his fear upon arrival. The fear has not vanished; it’s still there, will always be there in the background; but now a kind of acceptance builds as well.
    I turned my head and looked out the window that was just a little above the level of my eyes. I saw the moon in a deep blue sky and a guard-turret with spotlights down the walls. I saw the guard silhouetted against the sky, a rifle cradled in his arm, the intermittent glow of the cigarette in his mouth. I saw the long black sweep of the walls … When you looked at the walls your vision stopped. Everything stopped at the walls. The walls were about fifty feet from the dormitory building. Just fifty feet away was freedom, I thought. Fifty feet—and twenty years. 8
    No one who has forfeited freedom for whatever reason, even briefly, ever forgets what it was like the moment those doors swung shut behind. Absolutely no part of your life belongs to you anymore; you’re utterly at the mercy of others. The very thought of prison was terrible, of course, to Himes as to character Jimmy Monroe. There were strange, wholly irrational rules at work here. Yet prison life was unspeakably mundane. “It was all anticlimax,” Himes wrote. “All seven and a half years of it.” 9
    Time no longer exists. There is only the monotonous procession of days, each of them as featureless as every other, until finally you find yourself longing for eruptions of violence, an attempted escape, rioting—
anything
that will break the dull chain, make you feel alive again, even if only for a moment. Each identical morning you get up and put on your gray stained underwear and sweat-stiffened socks and the bagged stinking trousers you wear week after week and stand in lineto wash your face in water so cold that the rock-hard lye soap won’t lather, then try to dry your face on a greasy towel that only smears the water and dirt around. You stand up on command from your breakfast of bread, watery oatmeal with powdered milk and sausages cold-welded to aluminum plates by congealed grease, go across one or another of crisscrossing brick sidewalks to the tin shop, or the mill, or back to the dormitory with its rows of double-decked bunks.
    Tuesdays and Thursdays are barbershop days. Friday everyone gets a three-minute bath. There’s sick call Monday, Wednesday, and Friday but you learn that if you complain of cramps they’ll take you to the