Cast the First Stone by Chester Himes Read Free Book Online

turned west at the front of the dining room and south by the hospital, gabled and antique, and down past the deputy’s office and the hole next door. Then we had to stand outside in the cold to wait for a company to leave the barbershop, to make room for us. Our faces got chilled and tight in the cold so that when the hot strong lather was slapped on them the skin cracked open like a scalded tomato.
    Kish, the big Greek runner for the hole, came out and told us that Warren and two other guards had broken one of Johnson’s arms, cracked his skull, and put him in the hole. Kish said he would be there for a time. He seemed very pleased.
    Standing in the cold in the close-packed line, I could see the big new red-brick chapel building across the yard, and part of the west cell house where I had celled on 5-11. I could see the front cell house with its four rows of barred windows, and five-foot strip of polished stone underneath the eaves so the convicts couldn’t scale it; and the slanting slate roof. And in the middle the main gates of the prison, where beyond was freedom; and through which more men entered than ever left.
    The yard was criss-crossed with brick walks down which the gray men marched through the gray days; to the dining room, to the bathhouse, to the barbershop, to the hole, to the hospital, to the mills, to the Protestant and Catholic and Jewish and Christian Science chapels, to the electric chair. In front of the Protestant chapel was a small, empty pool. They said the band stood there and played marches on clear days, while the convicts marched to their meals. They said alligators were kept in the pool in the summer, but I didn’t believe that.
    A little beyond where we stood, across the areaway, was a square, gray-stone building which housed the school on the first floor, and the Catholic chapel above. And beyond, a brick walk leading out of sight around the corner, down by the front cell house to the death house.
    There was a pile of lumber and iron and wheelbarrows and junk over in front of the west cell house, left over from the building of the new 7&8 cell block.
    As we went up the outside stairway into the barbershop I saw one end of the long, flat, one-storied frame building behind the school. It was a dormitory. There were four thousand convicts in that prison which had been built for eighteen hundred.
    My whiskers weren’t very thick and I’d decided to shave only once a week. But when my turn came I didn’t want to say anything to Captain Warren. I went over and got into the chair. The shave left my face raw and burning. When Mal got out of his chair he came over and squeezed in beside me on the bench. He gave me some after-shave lotion, but it burned worse than the shave and smelled like menthol and alcohol.
    “What was that barber saying to you?” he asked.
    “Oh, he was just kidding.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He said I had baseball whiskers,” I said, blushing.
    “Nine on each side.” It was a stale joke.
    When we returned to the dormitory the convicts were sullen and hostile. Old man Warren was pleased. He kept on abusing the men. “You saw what Johnson got. You see what you get for fighting a guard.”
    He saw two men wrestling playfully. He ran up and jerked them apart and slapped one, and hit the other one across the arm with his stick. The men were very sullen. Warren stopped all the card games. Until he left, after supper, we couldn’t do anything but sit around and look sullen.
    But that night after the shift had changed, the games were good. The tobacco orders had come in that day at noon and had been delivered to us after we’d signed the yellow bills of sale. I struck a bargain with one of the gamekeepers, a Swede called Ole, and got some matches, two bars of soap, and a carton of cigarettes for a monthly order of the daily Gazette and some western-story magazines. I could have gambled with it. There was very little cash in the dormitory and merchandise was taken at the