Plan B by Chester Himes

Author:Chester Himes [Himes, Chester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

12

It was obvious that Tomsson Black was a much younger man than Hoop because he had never learned the simple facts of life. Nor had Tomsson Black accepted the realities of his two-faced environment; he had not acquired the stoicism that a black man needs to survive in the modern world. Nor had he learned the art of bald-faced hypocrisy that is so important in life. Tomsson Black was an innocent, still believing that whites could be honest, fair, decent, and just, even though they weren’t. He still believed they could make the right choice. There were many other blacks who shared his belief.

He was still so furious with the white woman who had sent him to prison for rape that he couldn’t bear to talk about her. He wasn’t like Hoop. He couldn’t stand to admit why he had raped her. He felt dirtied by her action as though she had covered him with her shit. He was both humiliated and outraged at once. He hadn’t forgiven her nor her hypocrite husband. He didn’t think getting life imprisonment for what he had done was funny. He promised himself that if he ever got out of prison and found them still alive anywhere on the planet Earth, he was going to cut their white throats to the bone.

It was these thoughts that gave him such a look of perpetual anger. Still, he was careful to be studiously well behaved. Partly because of his good behavior, and partly because the white woman he had raped had been from the North, the Southern white-trash hacks didn’t abuse him. Served her right, they thought, having a nigger on the same boat. Tomsson Black often had the same thought himself—in reverse—served his own ass right for being on the same boat with the teasing, nigger-happy whore.

But strangely enough, it had been inevitable. He had been heading for that white slut’s cunt all his life, although he hadn’t realized it. He had just moved in that direction faster during the previous year.

He had returned to the U. S. from his highly-publicized world travels in communist countries, where he had acquainted himself with modern revolutionary ideologies and the latest techniques and tactics for planning and executing guerilla warfare, and had found the American State Department reluctant to penalize him. However, he discovered the reason for this was the State Department’s understanding that blacks were both psychologically and emotionally incapable of organizing and conducting a coordinated action under the command of a single leader.

What he had known all along had just been further substantiated. Blacks were more individualistic than whites. Too many of them desired to be leaders and too few were willing to serve in the ranks. The knowledge dispirited him. He began to lose hope. He concluded that if blacks wouldn’t organize, they’d always remain vulnerable to the whites, they’d always be pissed on by whites, and forever remain second-class citizens.

It was then, as both escape and therapy, that he had begun moving in the

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