Part 7

The appetite of the men, with the exception of the sick, is always of the best. They are very particular about the quantity as well as the quality of the food. There is no reason to complain about it, except the coffee, which is served downstairs, and which is no coffee at all, but roasted bread crust which spoils the water in which it is soaked. Many a man would prefer pure water to the unsweetened, light-brown mixture, called "bootleg." It isn't even near coffee, but it is insidiously named "coffee," so as to prove to the public that the convicts are pampered and spoiled.

One day a member of the Prison Commission who was visiting the penitentiary picked up a tin cup of "coffee" which was standing in the mess hall, where the convicts were watching the visitors testing the food which had been picked out for that purpose. The Commissioner drank half a mouthful of the "bootleg," and then, with a wry face, swiftly spat it on the floor. The convicts did not laugh; they were too well disciplined for that; but an almost imperceptible whispering titter swept all over the mess hall like a June breeze wafting over a wheat field.

XXI

The other day a man was brought up to the hospital to have his broken arm bandaged. He had got up in the mess hall and started to voice a protest against the rotten meat. Two keepers jumped on him with their sticks and beat him until he was insensible. Later the "Dep" came upstairs to look him over, and said: "So you think you are a tough guy!" The man kept silent; but later he was sent to the "cooler."

There is an old Italian tailor in the hospital who has become popular because he mends our socks and makes pockets in our trousers. He eats enormous quantities of food, and after he is through he wipes his mouth with the crust of bread which does service for him as a napkin!

A dope fiend, who had kept us awake five nights: in succession, was allowed to sit at the table after he had broken his fast with milk. He was warned to eat sparingly. One Friday, as fish was served and I knew only two pieces had been eaten, I was wondering where it all had gone when I emptied the dishes in the garbage can. Out of sixteen pieces of fish that had been served, only two could be accounted for. I turned to look over the room, and I noticed our dope fiend still chewing away at something. Then I noticed the shirt round his belt bulging in an unusual fashion across his very lean body; and I was surprised to discover what had happened to the missing portions of fish.

Not satisfied with having eaten two pieces of fish, our dope fiend had stuffed the other fourteen pieces inside his shirt, so as to make sure that he would have enough food to last him through the night.

For five consecutive nights he had kept us awake with his moaning and raving, sitting upright in his bed, swinging his body back and forth pendulum fashion. He could not keep anything in his stomach, either food or water. He begged piteously for an injection of morphine, but the new doctor was obdurate; he said that it was either cure or kill. When the morphine was eliminated he became himself again, and he was cured of his habit. Some morphine fiends die from the stoppage of the supply, but many of them are effectively cured.

A bald-headed, consumptive negro keeps us in constant laughter--when prison lets us laugh--with wonderful and never ending stories of his adventurous life. Even the doctor will stand by the hour listening to his quaint speech and stories. Although he is an old rascal and an old offender, one cannot help liking him for his cheerful, gay attitude towards life.

He related how one time, after serving a term in the reformatory, he went back to his wife in New York. She lived in an apartment on the ground floor, and she seemed to be happy to see him again. She inquired about his health and asked about his future prospects. While they were talking he heard somebody opening the front door with a latch key. He became quite nervous, and asked his wife who it was that dared to come in without ringing the bell. "Dat's de husband I'se married while you was in jail; and he's a big black coon," she said.

He jumped hastily through the window, he confessed to us, so as not to embarrass husband number two, and leaving behind a grip with his clothes. He came back next night to get his belongings, and he used the window this time as a means of entrance. But fate was against him. As he emerged from the window again he fell into the arms of a watchful policeman, who promptly arrested him. Being an ex-convict, he was sentenced to a year in the penitentiary, as he said, for stealing his own pants!

A tall, blond Pole behaved in such a disgusting manner at the table that the keeper ordered him back to his bed.

The first two weeks that he was in bed we could not induce him to get up to perform the most normal animal functions. But, as there did not seem to be anything the matter with him, he was finally forced to get up and go to the bathroom.

For more than two weeks we had plied him with questions--myself, the doctors, and all the convicts who knew different languages. He looked at us with his big, blue eyes, shaking his head as if he did not understand what we were talking about. We finally came to the conclusion that he either spoke some unknown language, or that maybe he was deaf and mute.

One day Richard, the young assistant, made him get up, but instead of walking, he crept on all fours to the bathroom. Then he got up like a human being and started drinking water from the faucet. Richard took him to task for his uncleanliness. He said to him: "Wash your face, you dirty pig!" And to the utter amazement of Richard, the supposed deaf mute turned round angrily and said, in perfect English: "You go to hell, will you!" A few weeks later he was taken to Matteawan.

Later I gathered from another Pole who had talked to him and succeeded in making him answer, that he had been a petty officer in the Russian navy, and that he had mutinied, and later had succeeded in escaping to America.

He had hit upon the idea of feigning insanity in order to foil the vigilant Russian secret service agents, who would be on the lookout for him upon his release from the Island; he feared that they would create an opportunity to "shanghai" him on board a Russian ship, and he knew that they would hang him if he ever was returned to the fatherland. He had been sentenced to sixty days on the Island for vagrancy.

XXII

Protestant clergymen, Catholic priests, Rabbis, Sisters of Mercy, missionaries and even a Theosophist preacher, visit the prison and the hospital regularly. Saturday afternoon is a very busy time for the "sky pilots."

One "sky pilot" comes only during the lunch hour and, walking to the busy table, invariably asks: "Well, boys, how goes it?" He has never been known to change his query in years--and that is the only service he has ever done for the souls of the convicts.

A tall, thin, spectacled, Protestant missionary devotes a great deal of his time to what he calls "saving souls from eternal damnation"; his way of doing this mysterious thing is by leaving tracts on our beds. They contain startling headlines, such, for instance, as this: "Be with Jesus. He is your only pal!"

When I laughed at one of his quotations from the Bible, which I claimed was incorrect, he retorted by saying that my spirit was full of unclean devils. I answered by saying that I would rather be a real devil than a false saint of his type, and he at once proved the truth of my assertion by calling me unseemly and unchristian epithets, greatly to the merriment of the listening convicts and the keeper. I told him to go away from me and let me alone, but fifteen minutes later he came back and apologized for his offensive and undignified behaviour, adding that he had looked up the quotation in a Bible at the keeper's desk and to his great astonishment found that he had been mistaken.

Although I am not of his faith, the Rabbi comes to speak to me every week. He has taken a great interest in my case, and he offers his services to get me a pardon, deploring my attitude in wasting time behind the bars and in the vain hope that my appeal will be successful.

But he is surprised when I inform him that I do not expect to succeed in my appeal, and that I have made up my mind not to accept any favors from the parties who were responsible for my prosecution and imprisonment, so that I can keep my hands free to act in case there are further revelations.

A few weeks later another Rabbi takes his place. A kinder and gentler soul it would be difficult to meet.

The Sisters of Mercy appear every month or so; they are loved and venerated by the convicts. I have noticed that, unlike the other missionaries who take care of our spiritual welfare, the Sisters never ask a convict: "What crime did you commit?" but always: "How long must you serve?" "Have you mother, sister, wife, or children?" "What can we do to help them?"

The Sisters never argue, discuss or theorize about religion, but they help the convicts in the only practical, useful and efficient ways; they visit and appeal to judges and District Attorneys; they call on the families of the convicts and their friends; they furnish money to needy relatives and to the men themselves when they come penniless out of prison.

The Protestant clergymen, the Catholic priests, the Rabbis, the missionaries, as a rule talk only to the men of their own faith. But the Sisters of Mercy speak to everybody, no matter to what race or faith they may belong. They never inquire into a man's crimes; all they ask is to be told of his troubles and worries and to be allowed to do what they can to relieve them.

One of the Sisters is said to be responsible for the elimination of stripes in Sing Sing.

XXIII

Convicts have a cunning and peculiar way of revenging themselves on bad and cruel keepers. When one of that type is put on night duty, following a prearranged sign the whole section suddenly starts a tremendous hullabaloo. Several hundred convicts, acting in unison, begin yelling, cat-calling, grunting, roaring, whistling, stamping their feet, beating the bars of their cages with tin cups and pail covers. The enraged keeper jumps up and down the tiers in a vain effort to catch the arch offenders, but on his coming a signal is passed to the whole tier, which suddenly becomes silent, the other sections in the meanwhile increasing the noise and disturbance until the warden appears. His presence seems only to put more zest, energy and lung power into the demonstration. Revolvers are fired to intimidate the men and they are threatened with dire punishment, but nothing seems to be able to quell the rebellion, and it is continued every night until the offending keeper is shifted.

These prearranged, noisy riots are rare and as a rule they occur only in cases when bad food or a series of persecutions have goaded the prisoners to the only real expression of protest which can be effective.

One night during the Hudson-Fulton celebration in New York, when all the city was gaily illuminated, and all the bridges were picked out in electric lights, and music and shouts could be heard in the distance, a rumpus started on a magnificent scale after the convicts had been locked up in their cells.

The whole prison seemed literally to have gone insane. The pandemonium let loose was so terrific that it could be heard both from the New York and the Brooklyn sides of the river. The warden and the keepers were perfectly helpless; they could not subdue the prisoners, who kept up their infernal racket for hour after hour, and stopped only from exhaustion, when there was no more lung power to draw on. This noisy and turbulent protest of a whole prison defying one of the strictest rules of jail law was a strange psychological curiosity; a mad, reckless, stentorian rebellion against the rules of silence when the great metropolis was heard noisily rejoicing across the river.

Prisoners are very quick to find out a bad or a good keeper, an honest or a grafting keeper.

Humane keepers always and invariably get the best results. They maintain discipline with very little effort, and the prisoners themselves see to it that the attitude of such keepers is not changed or embittered by malicious and silly conduct on their part or that of their companions. The foul-mouthed, brutal keeper never seems to be able to maintain discipline, and when he revenges himself by inflicting unjust punishments the men retaliate by all kinds of persecutions.

An unjust and exceedingly brutal keeper was waylaid one night on his way home by some released convicts, who "beat him up" in such a manner that he was sent to a hospital for almost a month.

The Jewish and Italian convicts are often victims of the persecutions of some keepers, who heap ridicule and injustice and punishment upon them. The "guineas," the "wops," the "sheenies" and "kikes," find no mercy at the hands of these keepers, who consider men of these races as inferior, fit only to be brutalized, slowly but surely, into superior races.

An Irish keeper said jokingly to an Italian convict who could not understand something in connection with his work:

"Let an Irishman show you. You dagoes don't know nothing. How does it come that they pick Popes from among the wops, I wonder?"

"Yes, sir," answered the Italian, "and never in two thousand years did they pick out an Irish Pope."

XXIV

The outlook from the windows of our hospital is a source of never ending interest.

We can watch the grass grow and the trees, the birds hunting for food, the hospital cat waiting patiently under a bush for a stray sparrow, the orderly of the warden, haughty and always in a hurry, followed by a yellow dog. Another orderly is a red-headed young man who is called a "sugar man." He and two other men are the "goats" for the higher officials of the Sugar Trust.

We watch the visitors come in from the boats; the doctors, the officials, the prisoners arriving escorted by the sheriffs. The average prisoner is well dressed; some of them are quite dandified in their appearance, while others are poorly dressed, some of them even without an overcoat in winter time. One day a bum came, escorted by a sheriff, all alone, with a straw hat, at the height of the winter season.

The other morning a big, square-shouldered tramp was following the sheriff in a lazy, shuffling manner. There was no hat on his long, dishevelled mop of reddish hair; his beard was of enormous proportions; his face was brick red, as well as the hands, from dirt and exposure to the air. A coat and trousers which almost dropped from his body, so ragged were they; no shirt, no underwear, and a pair of shoes through which his toes peeped smilingly, completed his wardrobe. A sudden gust of wind would have divested him of all covering.

Half an hour later I happened to pass near the head keeper's desk, and I could hardly believe my eyes when I beheld that tramp. In his case the transformation was highly creditable to prison methods. They had clipped his hair, cut his beard, given him a bath, covered him with a striped shirt and a striped suit, and he was standing in brand-new, prison-made shoes. He looked indeed like a gentleman as compared with his former wild, dirty, disreputable and pitiful appearance.

On Sunday droves of visitors come to the island on the 23rd Street boat. The women are more numerous than the men; poorly dressed women are in the majority; often flashily dressed women with expensive fur coats and stylish hats are seen elbowing old and homely women wearing shawls and with babies on their arms. Almost everybody carries packages of fruit to the inmates. Little boys and girls often accompany the women, and handkerchiefs are often raised to wipe away tears. It is a tragic, fateful, unhappy procession.

XXV

The first and the last week seem longest in the term of imprisonment. During the rest of the time the hours pass in swift succession, as the work and the regular hours help to shorten the time; there is a spirit of patience, and the mind becomes more and more introspective and philosophical.

But in the last week all the thoughts, the plans, the ambitions, the discoveries of a new future, seem to be concentrated. The minutes drag by with a laborious and torpid slowness, and there is an intensity of time which seems to crowd sixty hours into one single hour by the clock. The ordinary patient, often of a cheerful habit of mind, is of a sudden transformed into a cranky, impatient, unruly, violent attitude.

During that last week I very nearly got into trouble, for the first time in my ten months of imprisonment "with good behaviour;" and this when an impertinent answer might have kept me two months longer within this barred prison.

A keeper known and hated for his brutal and insulting attitude towards the prisoners was relieving our own hospital keeper during the lunch hour. He was watching the prisoners file into the room at the opposite end of the hospital to wait for the arrival of the dentist. A belated man came in holding a handkerchief close to his mouth as if he were suffering from an agonizing toothache.

The keeper spoke: "Who is that dirty bum?"

"What do you mean?" I said.

"I mean who is that dirty bum who just came in?" he repeated.

"I don't understand you," I rejoined, angry at his remark.

"I see you're rather particular about expressions," he said in a surprised tone.

"Yes," I retorted, "and I don't see what right you have to call an inoffensive convict a dirty bum, when if it wasn't for us dirty bums you wouldn't be sitting here now."

The situation was saved by an old Irish keeper who added laughingly, "That's right, you wouldn't be getting twenty-five per a week to keep a chair from flying out of a window, if it wasn't for those dirty bums."

XXVI

Only after a long while did the influence, the pernicious influx of the thought waves emanating from hundreds of convict minds, begin to play on my mind. I never imagined that convict habits and thoughts could touch me or have any effect on my inmost thoughts, my better self. During the day, in fact, when the conscious mind was active, nothing seemed to effect my habitual, set and crystallized character, my old trend of mental, moral and intellectual associations.

Only in the last month, during my sleep or half-sleep, did I recognize the ascendency of the magnetic, unhealthy, collective thoughts of the prison. They arose slowly, like poisonous miasmas, insidious and permeating, with a persistency that amazed my startled and thoroughly alarmed consciousness.

Thoughts, images, desires, which I had been used from my youth and all through my life to consider unhealthy, degenerate or simply unworthy of my attention, came sneaking into my subconscious mind, in the form of disgusting, appalling, terrifying dreams. The back yard of my mind had begun to register and absorb all the wretched, unclean, monstrous, unmentionable yearnings, desires and actions of the collective prison dreams; it was inhaling the moral stench which arose as from a "cloaca maxima."

I thought of all the weak, unbalanced, receptive young minds which must have been corrupted by this intangible, powerful magnetism; and of how this unnatural, abnormal, degrading prison life began in any absorbent or indifferent temperament a slow corrosion and led to a complete and effective disruption and destruction of all moral and intellectual integrity.

I felt as if hundreds of unspeakable and undreamed of sins, taking shape of gliding snakes, noiseless and black, with glittering eyes and fiery tongues, were descending upon me, winding round my body and my legs and arms, fastening their pin-like fangs in my flesh to poison my brain and body.

And I thanked my stars and my fate and my power of will when the last night of my sentence arrived to relieve me of an oppressive, suffocating succession of nightmares.

I did not sleep one solitary wink, but how rosy, exquisite, exhilarating, radiant, were the thoughts that filled me on that prison cot, how transparent those bars seemed on that last night, never to be forgotten, like the first night I spent in that horrible dungeon.

XXVII

I am finally called downstairs. The sun streaming through the narrow bars gives the gloomy prison almost a bright appearance. Hastily I put on my street clothes. I feel like a man putting on a strange, exotic costume for a fancy dress ball; the collar and necktie seem to choke me with a kind of joy and affection. Accompanied by my lawyer, I walk out of the fateful gates, and then I turn to look back, and to glance upwards to the hospital windows where the patients and the old keeper wave a friendly salute and farewell.

Friends are waiting to greet me at the other side of the river. I look in wonder and amaze at the people in the streets. Everything is so interesting; the most commonplace and sordid sights are delightful and picturesque. The men; the women, with their wonderful clothes; the sky, the houses, the cars, the signs, everything, seem so novel, so friendly; every minute so precious, so full of surprises and possibilities.

I have grown fat and pale in prison, but my spirit is as light and quick as the spirit of a humming bird. Everybody greets me as a traveller returned from a strange, unknown, and very distant land--and yet all the while I have been living in the very heart of the metropolis. Everybody seems to realize and to reassure me that the acceptance of a pardon would have been a grievous mistake. To refuse it meant a great sacrifice, but making that sacrifice has confirmed a general suspicion that unfair methods, dangerous to American traditions, have been used against me.

The day of reckoning will come in time. Meanwhile, how beautiful, perfect, intoxicating is the sense of untrammelled liberty! It repays me for many a dark, tragic hour.