Cast the First Stone by Chester Himes Page A

with Big John?”
    “Put him in the hole.”
    Old man Warren came up and chased him away. Warren was happy to have me back with him. “Look at him, men, here he is,” he said, stopping the whole job so they could hear him ride me. “Got one fellow’s head whipped and another put in the hole. Look at him. A big shot. The chaplain wanted him for a teacher but he couldn’t even do that. Running a big syndicated poker game.” Some of his rats laughed for him. “Look at him, right back in the coal company.”
    He looked at me over his glasses. “Which would you prefer to do, Mister Monroe? Would you prefer to roll or is rolling beneath your dignity?” That got another laugh out of his rats.
    I didn’t say anything. I hated his guts. He put me to rolling, without even assigning me to a bunk. But I beat that rap. When old man Warren picked up the afternoon sick call I said I had cramps. That was the one sure thing they’d take you to the hospital for.
    In the afternoon the prison doctor was usually absent. His convict assistant held sick call. The regular sick-call line formed at the back of the hospital on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. It was usually a half-mile long. But once each day the company guards took the critical cases over to the hospital lobby.
    It was an old gabled building of century-old American architecture. It had a brick base beneath the clapboards and a cupola with a weathercock. There was the main section, extending fore and aft, flanked by wings. Part of the basement was used for a storeroom. A colored cripple company bunked in another part. During the winter the two prison alligators, Ben and Bessie, were housed in a tank of tepid water with the colored cripples.
    Warren lined us up in the main hall before the reception desk. There were eight of us. The convict doctor was dressed in a starched white uniform. When it came my turn I told him my back pained me severely and that I was a patient of the industrial commission and drew compensation for total disability and they had me rolling coal which I wasn’t able to do. I said it all at once without giving him a chance to interrupt me.
    He sent me back into the minor-surgery section to see the convict supervisor, who was a short, curly-headed Italian called Tino. He had gray in his hair and a husky voice, and a way of looking at you as if he didn’t believe a word you were saying but that he was on your side, anyway.
    After listening to me he went into the chartroom and drew my chart. I told him it wasn’t on my chart because I’d been afraid to tell the doctor. He looked up at me, curiously. “It’s all on your chart, all right,” he said. He put me to bed in C ward. He didn’t like old man Warren, anyway, and he would have put me to bed even without the history of my injury being on my chart.
    Warren was plenty burnt up about it. But there wasn’t anything he could do.
    C ward was for new patients and convalescents. The beds were arranged against the wall down each side of the wide center aisle. At the front was the nurses’ desk; across from it the bath. It was wonderful to take a bath in a real bathtub again. There were windows opening on the yard. I could see all the activity from my bed. At the back of the ward was a built-on porch containing another row of beds. But those seemed to be reserved for the nurses’ afternoon siestas. The windows from the porch opened on the areaway by the wooden dormitory where I had bunked.
    Just before supper Mal came around and sent for me to come to the back window. He wanted to know if I needed anything. He couldn’t stay but a moment and he kept moving his feet and legs as if he was walking. I said I needed some smoking and my toothbrush and tooth paste. He said I looked funny in the white cotton gown. I told him to go to hell.
    The day staff of our ward was two nurses and an orderly. They wore white shirts and tight-fitting white pants. All of them were very bitchy. The little cute one came