I tried to pacify him, but he was in a state of abject terror. So, thinking it best to do so, I offered him what he imagined to be poison. He drank it quickly and with great relish, waiting impatiently, with gleaming eyes and a sickly, malicious grin, for the death that was to come. But death did not come; the medicine was only a strong dose of salts. This second cathartic potion cured him effectively of his suicidal mania, for thus he came finally to the conclusion that all the alleged poisons in the hospital were only snares and delusions.
After a few months two men with paperscame over from the asylum of Matteawan and plied him with questions, his answers to which one of the men wrote down. The poor German cobbler was scared stiff, answering the queries as if his life depended on his replies.
Among other things, he was asked why he had jumped into the river.
"To learn shwimming," was his quick retort.
While we were getting him ready to be taken to the insane asylum he was blubbering and sputtering, frightened and inarticulate; and the tears streamed down his round, fat, childish face.
The hospital has become a sort of observatory for the insane. But all the convicts who show signs of insanity are not brought up to the hospital.
Confinement in the cells without work orexercise from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, and the punishment in the "cooler," are responsible for most of the cases of insanity.
When the supposedly insane convicts do not try to commit suicide, or do not keep the prison section awake at night by their yells, they are usually kept in solitary confinement in a cell, sometimes for weeks at a time, until at last they are visited by doctors and declared insane.
An Italian peddler who claimed to have been sentenced unjustly for buying stolen copper wire, was found within a few weeks after his arrival at the island with two tin cups in his cell. One cup had been left behind by a released convict, the other belonged to him. Although he could not have known of the infraction of the rules, he was dragged to the wall by a keeper. When the warden came to dispense "justice," he heard the keeper's story and then asked the prisoner to explain. The man tried to explain inhis broken English that he had found the cup in his cell; but the warden cut the gordian knot impatiently by saying: "None of your damned excuses! Two days in the cooler!"
The result can be imagined. The unfortunate peddler, frantic already from the idea of having been unjustly sentenced, and worried sick over the fate of his helpless wife and children, could not stand this other bolt from the sky; this punishment for something he did not understand, in the form of terrible torture in a pitch dark cell, without food or water, for an infraction of unknown rules; and he broke down completely under the strain. When he came out of the "cooler" he was, as the keeper declared, "completely bug-house."
For some time we were kept busy watching the peddler; even his shoes had to be taken from under his bed as he tried to knock the heels into his skull.
Much to my dismay, I was put to sleep near his bed. Half a dozen times he triedto strangle himself, and on the morning of his release, while I was asleep with my back to him, he jumped on my bed like a cat, and with his two powerful hands tried to choke me to death. Convicts came to my rescue; and when he was asked the reason for his attempt on my life, he calmly declared that it was because I had signed the warrant for his death at nine o'clock in the morning.
When we took him downstairs later, he refused to change his striped suit for his street clothes, and shouted that he had made up his mind to die in the "cooler" at nine o'clock. His wife had to be brought over from the 54th Street side, and she induced him to dress and go home.
A religious maniac was put under our care a week before his release. His particular delusion was that he was preaching in the desert. When a keeper approached to silence him, he lifted his right arm and, with eyes popping out of their sockets and a terrified look on his face, he shouted in astentorian voice: "Vade retro satanas!" ("Get thee behind me, Satan!") "I say, for it is written, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve!"
In his sane moments he was silent and morose; and when told about his strange behaviour, he answered that he knew by the sudden rising of heat to his head when a fit was coming.
His religious sermons, which kept us awake several hours in the night, were interrupted by excursions under beds and tables, while he barked like a dog at any one who tried to stop him. He was then impersonating the champion bulldog, Rodney Stone.
Another addition to our collection of the insane was a giant negro; but fortunately the expression of his derangement was only before meals, when he knelt at the table, saying grace, but refusing all food.
Even Matteawan sent us a man who was supposed to be cured. He was a muscular,low-browed German sailor who spoke bad, ungrammatical German and worse English. An accident to his leg brought him upstairs, and when the doctor undressed him we saw that his whole body was covered with blue and red tattoos, primitive and childish drawings of nude figures, which reminded me of some of Matisse's masterpieces.
He asked us every few hours in a terrified whisper if we did not see the furniture and the walls rock as if in an earthquake. At night he would point a long finger to the ceiling, where he claimed to see a small opening out of which a keeper thrust his head, abusing him with vile names, and shouting that in a short time he would be electrocuted.
Otherwise he was inoffensive; and sometimes he would amuse us by relating his adventures with the women in Matteawan.
Like most insane men, he slept very little, sitting up in his bed all night, holding two crutches tightly clutched, on the alertfor the keeper who was going to electrocute him.
But an unwise threat to brain Richard, the assistant, deprived him of the necessary but dangerous crutches.
Another patient was sent up by the doctor. He seemed so sick and weak it appeared a wonder that he could still walk. He was a poor Jew, suffering from stomach trouble. Emaciated, yellow, with an expression of intense suffering on his face, which was deeply furrowed by wrinkles, with a beard a week old, and his long, pointed nose, he looked like a sick vulture.
When he begged for special food, the orderly sarcastically offered him the choice between filet mignon with potatoes, or cutlets with French peas. The doctor, however, realized that unless he was put on a special diet, the man would die on his hands.
He had been sentenced to two months in the penitentiary for stealing two packages of cigarettes, and the judge did not realize that it was his death sentence. The tenacity of the man in clinging to life was amazing; it exemplified anew the remarkable vitality of his race.
He was always disobeying the doctor's orders. He tried to get up from his bed one afternoon, but he fell, and the bed pan, with all its contents, emptied over him and all over the floor. I ran to assist him, but—I was never well in prison—the stench was so overpowering that I became sick and hesitated for a moment, and had to turn away. Two convicts who had joined me saw my sickly face and smilingly said: "Never mind, boss; you go to the window to get some fresh air. We'll clean up the mess for you."
Everybody wondered how the poor man had managed to keep a flicker of life in a body which was mere bone and skin.
One night in my sleep I imagined that I had heard him call. As I sat up in my cot I heard his rattling, hoarse whisper calling the night orderly: "Oh, Mr——, please give me some water! A glass of water! I am dying!"
The orderly, who had been sleeping with his feet on the desk, woke up, looked towards the patient, changed the position of his feet, and shouted: "Ah, shut up, you kike!"
I got up and brought him a glass of water. He thanked me, and whispered: "I am dying! I don't want to die in jail!"
I tried to cheer him up with the thought that he would be released in two weeks; but he shook his head. Terror was written on his ghastly features. "Please, I don't want to die in jail," he said.
They were his last words.
A boy with blond hair, blue eyes, pink and white as a girl, modest as a nun, gentlemanly and soft spoken as Lord Fauntleroy, came upstairs to be operated on for a tumor. A sentence of two and a half years had been inflicted on him for selling cocaine. This deadly drug was furnished to him by a friend once when he was suffering from a cold. He did not know what it was, but he felt a wonderful exhilaration and a new strength come upon him, so that his illness seemed to vanish. The reaction was terrific, but he became addicted to the drug; and as he could not afford to buy the stuff, he began selling it, both for the profit and to be able to acquire it. His youth, and his already weak will, made him an easy prey to the evil company into which he was soon thrown. His father and mother and sisters were respectable and law abiding people of the middle class, but they did not seem ableto cope with the peculiar conditions into which he had fallen.
Now that he is behind the bars he seems to realize the danger of his weakness, and he speaks of going back home to work among his own people.
After he was well again they sent him downstairs to work in the machine shop. Within two months he was back again in the hospital to be operated on for another tumor.
What a transformation! Instead of the gentle, well-mannered, repentant young sinner, we found a pale-faced young tough, with a sneering grin, walking with stooped shoulders, chin forward, arms curved, closed fists, in imitation of "gorillas" looking for trouble.
In his speech there was also a great change. Where there had been little personality or color, there was now a picturesque wealth of blasphemies; names and adjectives and punctuation were expressed by short but intensely vile words.
When we remarked at the astonishing change, he answered, speaking through one side of his mouth: "Ah, quit your kiddin'! You talk like a preacher. I ain't no sissy no more. When I gets out o' here I'll pull something big that'll knock you stiff. You get me?" And he spat sideways on the floor in supreme contempt. But when we laughed at his pretence and strutting, he blushed in anger and disappointment.
It seems that when he was sent downstairs after his first operation he was "doubled up" with a notorious burglar, who undertook to educate him and train him, with a view to using the lad to assist him in his work after his release. A few weeks later his mentor joined him in the hospital, but unlike his talkative pupil, who was quickly ordered to "shut his mug," he was reserved and secretive as to his life and plans.
But one evening at dusk, as we were both watching the New York skyline from thebarred windows, the reserve gave way, and the cracksman told me of his life.
It was one of those rare moments when even a strong and evil spirit will waver and doubt; when his heart will overflow with disgust and the hopelessness of his earthly quest. The attitude of contrition dissipated like smoke when he was asked if it was not possible to make a living in an honest way.
"Nothing doing," he said. "The bulls won't give me a chance. They'll spot me and job me if I don't put up the dough. It's a fight to a finish. At the other end there is either Sing Sing or the death chair. There ain't no hope. I'll live and die a crook."
Two years later I read that my friend the cracksman and his pals had been caught trying to blow up a safe in a most daring and scientific manner. And the whole gang was sentenced to Sing Sing for a long term.
A Jewish pickpocket is one of the patients who is under suspicion of faking. The young doctor suggested my watching him, and when I reported, he declared that he was satisfied in his suspicion, but did not send him to his cell at once, as he would have been punished.
Meanwhile he helps and amuses us with stories of his checkered career. At first I could not make out what was the matter with him. He couldn't walk any distance without jerking his head backwards. I thought he suffered from some peculiar nervous trouble in the muscles of the neck. When I asked him about it he confessed that it was a habit formed by years of unconscious but very useful watching to see if he was followed by detectives. Even in the hospital, when he knew that he was not followed, he would throw his head in quick glances backwards.
He told us that the last time he had been caught by the detectives he was taken to headquarters and given a taste of the third degree. As he wouldn't confess, the brave detectives, wearing masks, beat him until he was insensible, and even broke two of his front teeth. The generous head of the detectives promised that if he did not make a complaint to the newspapers he would see to it that he would be sent for only a year to the penitentiary instead of up the river for several years.
We have several pickpockets in the hospital. One of them has grown a beard; he is a Jew, tall, thin but muscular, and when he walks to the bathroom in his night shirt, he seems like a caricature of one of the prophets of his faith.
He volunteered to rub sulphur ointment on my body as the doctor had ordered. The strength of his muscles, and the vise-like grip of his hands, was almost beyond belief. When he took hold of my arm to massage itI felt that he could easily have broken it with a quick blow; but he was very gentle and kind withal.
A red-headed consumptive, who killed his wife and child in a fit of anger and jealousy, was sent over from the Tombs while waiting for trial. He ordered me in a peremptory manner to do something for him. I repeated to him the lecture I had read to the bulldog negro, but he lost his temper, and began foaming at the mouth and abusing me in a violent and insane fit of anger.
I did not answer, as I felt that he was not responsible for his actions; and left him alone. Fifteen minutes later he came into the bathroom, where I was cleaning some medicine bottles. I fully expected to have to defend myself against an attack. Instead of that, however, he began apologizing for his unwarranted behaviour, adding that when he lost his temper he did not know what he was saying or doing; that anger went to his head like poison and completelyovercame his reason. He begged me to forgive him and accept his apology.
This is the third time that a convict has offered an apology for having lost his temper and used profane language to me.
I asked one of the convicts who had apologized if he thought I had kept silent because I was afraid of him. "No," he said. "The man who loses his temper is the one who is afraid. The one who never becomes angry is never afraid; he is the better man of the two."
I had been three months in the hospital before I began to suspect that I would never get over my skin disease so long as I wore the tattered and patched striped trousers which had been handed to me on my arrival. Therefore I begged the hospital keeper for permission to get a new or at least a clean pair. He told me to go downstairs to thehead keeper's desk. The reception I got from the head keeper was not surprising, but his sudden burst of anger and his intemperate language puzzled me not a little. As soon as I approached him he turned around sharply and shouted: "What the h—— doyouwant?"
Before I had time to complete my request he interrupted me, and shaking his fist at me, yelled: "A pair of trousers! What do you think of that dude in the hospital wanting a new pair of trousers! Go on back to your hospital, you dirty bum. You ——! Get out!"
I turned back slowly without answering, trying meanwhile to puzzle out how I could represent two such different social extremes in the mind of the irate keeper—a dude and a dirty bum!
When I related the incident to my hospital keeper, he shook his head and declared the head keeper an uncouth, stupid animal, and promised to speak about it to theDeputy. Next day a runner brought me a brand new pair of striped trousers, which looked quite becoming and a good fit after the rags I had worn for so long.
A great many doctors come to visit the hospital. Sometimes the young students from the city hospital, then the aristocratic and famous surgeons who operate on desperate cases, specialists, all grades and classes of physicians, enter accompanied by the little doctor who lives upstairs on the top floor. His name is B. Davidson. He is so small that he seems almost a schoolboy; his eye-glasses are the only elderly thing about him. But he is very efficient, scrupulous and—a marvelous thing in prison—humane in his treatment of the convicts.
The warden and the keepers hamper him continually in his work, as he will not listento their opinion about convicts who, according to them, are all fakers. They have the temerity to place their ignorance, and their hatred of the prisoners, against the professional knowledge and humanity of the doctor.
The boy who had a tumor on his back was kept a week locked in a cell, and was not allowed to see a doctor, because the keeper claimed that he was faking. The doctor laughed when he related the story. "Imagine anybody faking a tumor the size of a cocoanut!"
In the opinion of most prison keepers, every man who reports on the sick list is an incipient faker. The sick man has to inform his own keeper and he is then reported to the head keeper. Should they diagnose the case as a fake, then the prisoner is shoved back gently to the line; but should the convict in spite of their verdict insist that he is sick, he is locked up in a cell to get wellwithout a doctor, or to rot in it, until even the doctor's help is of no avail.
Most cases of consumption, paralysis, insanity, or any internal disorder, are considered fake cases. Only when a man breaks a limb or splits his head open, or when some disease "breaks out" on him, is he believed to be sincere.
The sturdy young sailor who had worked at my side in the tailor shop was brought to the hospital. He was so changed that I hardly recognized him. I had to ask him his name, and if he remembered having worked in the same shop with me, before I became convinced that he was the same man.
They kept him locked up in a cell a whole week before the doctor was permitted to visit him, and then they discovered that he was suffering from typhoid fever. Meanwhile he had been eating food from tin plates which were washed in the kitchen.
A convict who was in perfect agony fromneuralgia of the teeth was visited twice. As no cavity could be discovered, they punished him by extracting forcibly three perfectly healthy teeth from his jaw.
This incident was related as a great joke by a young assistant to a doctor, to two companions who were preparing a patient for an operation.
A pair of prison-made shoes, with a nail sticking up inside the heel, was forced on a new-comer by the head keeper. When he protested, he was abused, insulted and threatened with punishment if he did not put on that particular pair of shoes. For two days the unfortunate man hobbled about, working in the kitchen, trying as best he could to ease the intense pain on his heel inflicted by a rusty nail. His foot began swelling and, made desperate by the pain, he finally refused to work until he had seen a doctor. When the doctor examined him, he discovered that he was suffering fromblood poisoning of the foot, and he had to be kept over two months in the hospital.
A boy was discovered, by accident, working in the bakery suffering from a loathsome venereal disease.
The young doctor could not stand the persecution of the system, and he left in disgust.
The new doctor is a sallow-faced, green-eyed individual, evidently a dope fiend. He leaves morphine hypodermic syringes lying all over the place; and any one who wants an injection can have it for the asking. Luckily for us, he did not stay very long.
One night we were kept awake by heart-rending, piercing howls, which came from the apartment occupied by the doctor on the top floor. He had, as we found out later, taken an overdose of morphine.
Next day he appeared in the hospital, staggering sideways, breathing heavily and with a hollow sound, like a damaged bellows. His body shook as if with the palsy,his hands trembled as they groped for support; and all the while he was moaning, whining, grunting. He fell into a sitting posture on the floor, and began catching imaginary flies on his sleeves.
We had to carry him upstairs and put him to bed. He went away the next day.
The doctor who succeeded him is a young man who seems sympathetic and efficient, but he has to keep his job, and so he takes orders from the consulting keepers, who diagnose cases before he is allowed to see them or to send them to the hospital.
The conversation at our meals in the hospital table d'hôte, although carried on in an undertone, is very often amusing and enlivened by quite witty repartee. The table manners of the men are not as bad as might be expected from the motley crowd which adorns our board. All the nationalities andraces and classes of this wide world have been waited upon by us: negroes, Chinamen, Mexicans, Slavs, Italians, Jews, Hungarians, Arabs, Syrians, Hindus; members of all the different professions, such as waiters, lawyers, hold-up men, capitalists, fortune tellers, doctors, sneak thieves, bankers, bums, dentists, burglars, "sky pilots," grafters, butchers, gamblers, street car conductors, confidence men, tailors, insane men, tramps, crooks, horse poisoners, saloon keepers—everybody and everything!
In a restaurant, in a public café, in a barroom, one meets or sees many people whose profession or real status is a mystery, and often a secret; but here everybody's profession, character, antecedents, sentence, criminal record, are known, judged and commented upon. Here nobody can put on airs because he has a fat bank account, finer clothes, more expensive jewelry, better family connections, or greater political influence. A man is judged by his character,his personality, his attitude toward the prisoners and the keepers. This is one place where fine feathers do not make fine birds.
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.
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 hemends 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 piecesof 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 heis 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 eitherspoke 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 thelookout 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.
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 andto 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 ourspiritual 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.
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 thedemonstration. 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 keeperswere 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 beable 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 thatthey 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."
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. Theaverage 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 thattramp. 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.
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 impertinentanswer 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 convicta 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."
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 sleepor 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, powerfulmagnetism; 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, likethe first night I spent in that horrible dungeon.
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.