Free Cast the First Stone by Chester Himes Page B

gone to sleep when I had had the chance.
    Just by trying hard enough I could keep from thinking about my mother and father and that wild, reckless year I’d lived after their divorce. I could keep from thinking about the guys who hung around the gambling joints and were my friends that year. Although it didn’t hurt to think about them because most of that gang were just lucky they weren’t in there with me. Only thinking about them made me think about Chicago, and thinking about Chicago made me want to vomit. It made me want them never to know what an utter fool I’d been, what a simple-minded schmo, a square, as to try to pawn that ring in that shop, of all places.
    There were many things about that dormitory, things that happened there and things that happened elsewhere while I was bunking there, which afterward I could remember without remembering the dormitory at all. By that I do not mean the dimensional or visual aspect of the dormitory, its breadth and length and height, its bunks and tables and such. That was like a color one will remember long after sight has left the scene. I mean the living, pulsing, vulgar, vicious, treacherous, humorous, piteous, tawdry heart of it; the living men, the living actions, the living speech, the constant sense of power just above, the ever-present breath of sudden death, that kept those two hundred and fifty-three convicts, with their total sentences numbering more years than the history of Christianity, within the confines of that eggshell wood; or, for that matter, kept them within those high stone walls to live on, day after day, under the prescribed routine and harsh discipline and grinding monotony which comes to all after a time.
    And there were convicts, too, whom I could remember without remembering the dormitory, as if, telescoping back into retrospect, I could pick them out; where they stood, what they said, how they looked at some given moment—without seeing beyond the circumference of the vision of the telescope, like sighting a buck at three hundred yards.
    There was Mal at the peephole, telling everyone who came near enough to hear his voice to tell his cousin, Jimmy Monroe, that he wanted to speak to him; until everyone within both dormitories had heard it said that I was his blood cousin and had remarked that we did look something alike, sure enough.
    “Hello, cousin,” he would say.
    All I could see would be his eye and I would begin to laugh. “All I can see is your eye. It looks funny.”
    “I can see all of you.”
    “I saw an ad in the paper,” I would say. “Hammon’s has a shoe sale on. Florsheims for $15.75. Two pairs for $30. Do you want a pair?”
    “You’re not kidding, Jimmy?”
    “Naw, I’m going to get a pair for myself.”
    “I need a pair, but I don’t know. You won’t be straining yourself?”
    “Fifteen dollars? What the hell!”
    “Fifteen seventy-five.”
    “Fifteen, if I get two pairs. I’ll get you a pair. I don’t care what you say.”
    “I’ll make it up to you, Jimmy,” he would promise.
    And I would say, “Aw, hell.”
    “I hear you’re a big shot now. I hear you’re running a poker game,” he would say.
    “Old Nick the Greek himself, that’s me.”
    By that time we’d have to get away and let some other cousins talk. He’d send for me again when they got through, or maybe he’d wait an hour or so until the lights went out. If I was busy dealing and couldn’t get down for that or some other reason he’d send for me the next day to come over to the window where the furnace was located. I’d stand at the window and talk outside to him while he stood inside of the furnace room, or in the doorway of the sand room where the sand was kept for the molds. That way he was hidden from the tin-shop guard who liked to stand in the window of his second-story office and spy out on the yard, so he could know every time some convict carried a kid to some hiding place so that afterward he could get the kid and have him