At last I am told to appear before the judge who is to pass sentence on me. They handcuff me to a negro and we climb into the "Black Maria," an omnibus with facing seats, tightly locked, and with small holes for ventilation. A mob collects in the streets to witness our humiliation. The room in the court house is crowded with people. Several men are sentenced, one after another, in rotation. I espy some of my loyal friends there; they look pale and uncomfortable.
My name is called. I am freed of my handcuffs and I stand at the bar, facing the judge.
Instead of listening to the learned judge deliver his wise sentence, I am watching intently a lonesome fly buzzing in a vibrating aureole frantically round the top of his head. I am wondering what the judge had for luncheon. My absurd cogitations are suddenly interrupted by a phrase spoken in a louder tone than the rest of the sentence.
... Fornaro, that you be imprisoned for one year at hard labor in the penitentiary.... The fly stopped buzzing as the judge lifted his head to look at me.
My lawyer, K——, runs out. He is to try to get a certificate of reasonable doubt, which acts as a stay of sentence; otherwise I would be taken early in the morning to the penitentiary.
While these proceedings are going on, I am temporarily transferred to the old prison, which is full of crawling parasites. Luckily, however, in a few hours I am returned to my cell in the Tombs to wait until the certificate is either granted or denied. But the certificate is refused, of course, as I knew it would be, and as I think my lawyer knew it would be. It was a forlorn hope.
In the evening a letter is brought to me and I am asked to sign for it. It is written in Spanish and is an attack on Vice-President Corral of Mexico, who is accused of having furnished me with money to publish "Diaz, Czar of Mexico," and then of leaving me in the lurch. This piece of Spanish fiction is inspired by a bitter enemy of Corral in the hope of eliminating Corral as a Vice-Presidential candidate. But I refuse to sign the letter.
Another fairy tale comes directly from the District Attorney's office; I am told that they know that President Cabrera of Guatemala, a bitter enemy of Porfirio Diaz, has furnished me with $5,000 to publish my libelous pamphlet.
A friend arrives from Mexico and brings an oral message from Ramon Corral, who inquires if I have empowered an agent to negotiate the sale of my book for $50,000, as he doubts the statement. A letter is written advising the Vice-President that he is right in his surmise, and that the alleged agent is only trying to get money under false pretences.
A labor leader visits me offering financial help in my fight. As money will not be needed in the penitentiary, I suggest that an investigation might be started in Congress into the persecutions of Mexican liberals by American officials in this country. The promise is made and fulfilled seven months later.
Two sisters of mercy come to see the prisoners during the hours of exercise; they distribute fruit, and walk freely and unconcerned among the men, who seem to think a great deal of them. One of them has kindly and intelligent looking eyes behind large, gold-rimmed spectacles, and speaks in the well modulated and authoritative voice of the woman of the world. Unlike other prison missionaries, they do not make religious propaganda by distributing tracts and pamphlets; their attitude is one of charity, humility and usefulness.
Protestant clergymen, rabbis, and even a theosophist, come to save us in spite of ourselves. Their attitude is one of aggressive virtue and militant religious contention—or contagion. A certain missionary is very indignant because I refuse to look at his tracts or listen to his childish twaddle; and finally becomes so arrogant and insulting that I have to order him away from my cell door.
THE PENITENTIARY
"As long as a nation harbors a body of men authorized to inflict punishment, as long as there are prisons in which such a body can carry out these punishments, that nation cannot call itself civilized."
Message written on his prison wall,
by Francisco Ferrer.
It was a clear December morning when, from the little boat which carried me across the river, I spied the outline of the penitentiary squatting on the lower end of Blackwell's Island. It was my first view of it and the impression made on my mind was so ominous and sinister that my heart almost sank within me as I entered the fateful gates.
Hey, there! Where do you t'ink you are? Take dem gloves off! shouted a tough, strong voice as I stood waiting in front of the office window, recounting my pedigree and giving up my private belongings for safe keeping. In the old prison, I found six new prisoners waiting in line.
Our hair was clipped by a convict barber, and we were ordered to divest ourselves of our civilian clothes and take a shower bath. While we were trying to dry ourselves with two small hand towels, prison underwear and striped suits were thrown at our feet.
The trousers were decidedly too long, the coat, and the rag—unjustly named a vest—both too short; a cap which came down to my eyebrows made up this uniform of degradation and infamy. Harlequin's costume never looked more ridiculous than our own, which was mended, patched and repatched from long use by generations of long-suffering convicts.
The prison authorities, I suppose, are to be commended for their thrift; but I cannot help feeling that by putting on those frayed and wornout caricatures of uniforms we are endangering our health.
In the photographer's house behind the shower baths we are "mugged"; our Bertillon measurements are taken, even to "beauty spots" and pimples, by a red-haired, freckled-faced young man. A sign twelve inches long, black, with white numerals, is hung round my neck over a black cotton coat, and I am told to look pleasant until the camera has focussed my profile and full face.
Sitting on benches, waiting for their turn, are a dozen prisoners. They are all old, white-haired, naked and shivering; old offenders, recidivists, tramps, bums, drunken louts; lean, pale, bruised, with anemic, unhealthy skins, red noses, fishy eyes, bloated faces, large hands, knotty, ungainly feet, purple with the cold.
A very old man attracts my attention by his immobility, his general paleness, and his extraordinary gauntness, which shows the perfect outline of his muscles, and reminds me of the statue representing San Bartolommeo in the cathedral of Milan, holding his whole skin over his arm like a bath robe.
Squint-eyed and almost blind, this old man, of more than the allotted span of seventy years, seems unable to recollect his name, occupation or social status.
A bum, I guess, remarks the keeper.
It appears that he is deaf, and his neighbour nudges him with an elbow and shouts in his ear:
Say yes!
Yes, sir! hastily answers the old man.
These derelicts of society are going to the workhouse on Monday.
Later we are ordered to clean and wash the small glass panes in the windows of the main prison. Trusties in smart, new, striped clothes, with creased pants and caps, rushed by eyeing us with curiosity. "Whatcheh in fer?" "What did the judge hand yeh?" are the leading whispered queries.
A pungent, musty, sickening smell pervades the old prison, which is barely lighted by a dismal and gray reflection filtering through the small windows. An inscription on the wall shows the date of construction to be 1864. The cell where Boss Tweed died is pointed out to me.
Suddenly the electric lights are switched on and a bell starts ringing in a loud, metallic, persistent note, not unlike the subway starting bells. A heavy, automatic, dull noise in the distance announces the approaching footsteps of the convicts returning from work. In measured step, each gang followed by its keeper, more than a thousand men march past the head keeper's desk.
All the varieties of ages, figures, physiognomies, expressions, are illustrated to my astonished eyes. Young men with red cheeks and simple faces; strong men with bullet heads, broad shouldered, surly or impassive; fat men with wabbling bellies and cheerful faces; old men bent and hoary with age; slow and listless young men with effeminate gestures; a few cripples on sticks or crutches, and wobbling along behind the lines, a paralytic led by a companion. They all file by, stamping their feet in German military fashion.
At moments the order is given to slow up or stop, and the convicts continue to move the legs in rhythmic step, their bodies almost touching, and giving the appearance of an enormous centipede dancing a gruesome, macabre saraband.
Finely shaped heads are rare; it looks as if an almighty sculptor had left his handiwork unfinished, or purposely kept it in rude outline. Foreheads are either too bulging or too retreating, eyes too sunken or too protruding, noses too large or too small, mouths too sensual or too cruel, chins too powerful or too weak.
Smiling or frowning, aggressive or indifferent, surly or pleasant, all the different expressions and gestures are sketched out in violent chiaroscuro, and compose a cartoon worthy of a Frans Hals or a Michelangelo.
My eyes absorb the kaleidoscopic, ignoble, unbelievable pageant. As an artist I am fascinated, hypnotized by this fantastic procession of human zebras, slashed with broad stripes of gray and black, with the four prison tiers as a background, and the dark blue uniforms and gold buttons of the keepers adding a touch of color.
As a human being I am shocked and repelled by this grotesque, degrading parade.
Is this really the Inferno or only the last Judgment, I ask myself?
Get in line, you loafer! shouts a red-faced keeper, shaking his stick at me. Thus I am awakened from my dreams.
I am locked in the old prison for the night—my first night in the penitentiary.
A bed made of an iron frame with coarse canvas stretched across it, two cheap cotton blankets, a straw pillow, a large covered pail and a drinking cup, complete the total of my furniture. It is the simple life with a vengeance. The bed takes up the whole length of the cell; there is no room for walking except sideways from the bucket to the cell door. Sitting in a lateral position on the couch, with my back touching the wall, I can place my legs on the opposite wall only in a bended posture.
A tier man comes to the cell shouting "Water." While pouring it into my cup from a large can I peer at his face through the bars. His pale features, beaked nose, cruel mouth and yellow eyes make him seem like some tropical carrion-eating bird. I am so fascinated by his depraved and satanic look that I allow water from the cup to drop onto the floor.
He utters curses, "not loud, but deep," and returns to mop the floor.
I try to interest myself in an old magazine, but my mind seems unable to concentrate in a continued effort; I read, but my imagination wanders away in an interminable circle without beginning or end.
The cold is intense; the blankets, thin and gray, afford no protection. My whole body is shivering and shaking uncontrollably as if in high fever, my teeth rattle like castanets accompanying a Spanish fandango. I light a cigar and watch the smoke curl slowly, lazily across the cell until it appears like a veil between the ceiling and the floor and finally settles over my couch like a pale, transparent shroud.
Evidently there is no ventilation, but I continue to puff away, hoping to fumigate and kill the fetid odor in the cell.
Everything is still except for the occasional moaning of a sick man. Finally the electric light at the foot of the bed is extinguished, and I am left in the dark.
I turn into bed with all my clothes, including cap and shoes, trusting in this manner to warm myself and in the hope of forgetting my troubles in blissful sleep.
But there seems to be no rest for me.
As soon as a little heat radiates from my body, scores of bedbugs are attracted and start a vicious, incessant campaign. When I am deceived into sleep by a lessening of their attacks, I am awakened by the cold air under the canvas, which freezes my back and forces me to shift my position.
Horrible nightmares shake me with a start as soon as I am lulled into slumber. My throat is parched as if sand had been my last meal, and I pick up the tin cup to get a drink; to my intense despair the rusty, filthy cup has a leak, and all the water has trickled to the floor.
I dream that the cell, with its massive walls reeking with stench and humidity, is growing smaller, closing upon me like an accordeon, until the cell door is as small as a keyhole from which I get the last gasp of air; then instead of air, an endless cool, refreshing flow of water runs down my throat. But, unluckily, my intense thirst awakens me and I start toward the cell door calling for water in a faint, hoarse whisper.
A keeper silences me with a gruff, impatient voice: "Where in hell do you think I can get it?"
And I can hear the water dripping lustily from a faucet into a full barrel on the ground floor!
I try philosophically to force my thoughts into past and pleasant memories, but the present distress is so tyrannical and overpowering that all the physical, moral and intellectual suffering of the world seems to be centered within the few square feet of this dungeon. My via crucis has begun. I reflect with terror that my mind may not withstand the strain of uninterrupted agony, and suicide appears as an easy solution.
The absurdity of the impulse is evident, for my death in this filthy cell, like a rat in a hole, would delight those responsible for my presence here; and furthermore it would shock and sadden those dearest to me.
What is all my fortitude and philosophy worth if it cannot steady and concentrate my will at the most crucial, heart racking and desperate moment of my life?
Why should my trained mind crumble like a match box and be destroyed under physical torture, mental distress and moral humiliation?
Is not suffering the greatest of all tests, necessary, purifying and regenerating? Why not wait patiently and courageously for the day of reckoning, worthy of the gods on Olympus?
I count my heart-beats to get an idea of the passing of time. The minutes seem to have frozen on the fountain of time; they drip laboriously as if each and every one of them represented eons of memories and experiences; as if each was attempting to demonstrate that in the accounting of eternity they were as significant as centuries. In a supreme physical effort of my will I grip the bars and grit my teeth to stop the impending and foolish disintegration of my mind. The waves of despair, the racking pain, the insane delirium are slowly beaten back into submission, like a defeated army. The imagination is disciplined, the will has thrown the switch and illuminated the real inward self, as I stand watching, through the steel bars, the windows on the opposite wall. I feel calm, serene and strong.
Of a sudden, as if to illustrate my state of mind, out of the gray, blue mist, a large, luminous, rose disk slowly arises beyond the opening.
The sun, the glorious sun! Silently it looms up, magnificent through the haze, like a mirage announcing the advent of better things and more hopeful days.
The same sun I had seen arise in India, Egypt, Italy, Mexico, in many frames of classical and tropical beauty; but never has it seemed to me so divine, so perfect, so precious as on that awful morning.
At 6 A. M. a quick, metallic carol announces a new day—and a Sunday. With a clanking noise and in swift succession the cell doors are unlocked and on every tier the whole line of convicts walks along the galleries and down to the ground floor, to a long iron sink, divided into small dirty tubs that are filled with murky water.
Our ablutions are performed in rapid military style; those not strong or nimble enough to get near the crowded trough, before the command, "Back out," is shouted, have to return to their cells half-washed or dirty. Sometimes a laggard insists on finishing his washing; and then an angry voice assails him rudely: "Come on, you God damn bum, didn't yeh hear me? Back out!" And a guard "fans" him over the back with a club, pushing and shoving him all the way to the galleries, as a reminder to quicker obedience.
Back at the cells, every man stands at attention behind the door with hands on the bars, waiting for the keeper to count the men until he orders, "Close," and with a deafening noise every iron door bangs in unison. Then after a short rest the bell rings for breakfast, and we march into the mess hall.
What a depressing, fantastic assemblage there unfolded itself before my eyes! Row after row of cropped gray heads, the black and gray stripes, moving unceasingly in a rippling pattern, giving the semblance of an enormous, ghostly, shivering tiger skin. The faint light from the barred windows forces the tonality to a low pitch and adds to the vagueness, uneasiness and consternation of my mind.
The benches and narrow tables seat fifteen to twenty in a row; and the two mess halls over a thousand convicts.
Breakfast is served in dented low pans, filled with potato and corn beef hash, alternating every other day with oatmeal and syrup. The rusty tin cups are half filled with an unsweetened, brownish, transparent concoction called coffee, which the convicts long ago nicknamed "bootleg."
But the bread, made of wheat and cornmeal, is very good. The raising of the hand is the signal for an additional slice of bread, which is distributed by a convict, and when it reaches you it has usually been handled by ten or fifteen different, not to say unclean, hands.
The men eat voraciously and in great haste, coughing, chewing, smacking their lips; grunting and snorting like pigs with their snouts in the trough. My poor appetite is not improved by their disconcerting exhibition, and my portion is quickly swallowed by my neighbours.
On both sides of the hall we are watched by keepers standing against the wall, or perched on high stools, swinging their sticks.
On my right there is a goodnatured-looking keeper with a bullet head and sleepy eyes; on the other hand a small, wiry, thin-faced, long-nosed, white-mustached keeper, with wicked eagle eyes, who uses not only the foulest of language, but also his stick, on the slightest provocation.
After the "feed" comes the bucket parade. Each man carries his own bucket into the yard behind the prison building, facing the Brooklyn side. The Queensboro bridge on the north, with two feet on the island uniting Brooklyn and New York, appears gigantic on the horizon.
The air is cold, crisp, exhilarating, after the oppressive night. The whole prison is marching line after line to a well-shaped opening, wherein the dirty water and excreta are dumped in succession by the men, while an old convict belabors its interior with a long pole to prevent the opening being clogged. The clear morning air cannot blow away the overpowering stench of a thousand dirty buckets, intensified by the acrid smell of chloride of lime which is thrown into the hastily washed pails.
The resting day without reading or occupation or exercise of any sort is agonizing; intolerable in the extreme.
From four o'clock on Saturday afternoon until Monday morning at eight, except for the short freedom for meals, we are locked up in our cells. There is no exercise, no work, for almost forty hours. Most of the cases of insanity in prison are due to this enforced inaction, and the accumulation of foul air in the cells. Even the keepers who have to inspect the top tiers run swiftly along the galleries with their noses closed tight.
Hoping to break up this dreadful monotony, I attend the Catholic mass in the morning and the Protestant service in the afternoon. The one delightful and exquisite balm to our jaded minds is the music of the organs, which accompanies the singing of hymns by convicts.
The chapel on the second floor is crowded with prisoners; and on one side there are a few women, with large poke bonnets covering their faces to prevent their flirting with the men.
A convict informs me that I would have been punished "against the wall" if I had been caught going to the two services. At the slightest infraction of the rules, I learn, the offender is dragged towards the main prison and kept standing, facing the wall, sometimes all day without food or water—and there is no way of finding out what and how many rules there are.
On week days the warden stops to inquire and punishes according to the state of his mind or his stomach, or perhaps the weather.
The dinner consists of a soup of beans, carrots, lentils or potatoes; meat with vegetables, or cornbeef and cabbage; and "bootleg." For supper there is unsweetened tea, bologna sausage or red gelatine with bread.
The anticipation of another night like the last one fills my mind with uneasiness and dread and fright. The memory of it is burned forever into my consciousness. But fortunately it was not so full of terror. It was bad; but no other night ever could be as horrible as the first night I spent in that place.
In the morning we are ordered into the new section of the prison. The old bums go to the workhouse, and we await our turn to be placed in the shops, according to our sentences and our work or profession. The distribution of labor among us is strange and mysterious. A butcher, for instance, is sent to work in the stone quarry, a smuggler into the kitchen gang, a lawyer in the "skin gang," a "sissy" into the coal gang, a waiter into the garden; a burglar is sent to make socks, and I am sent into the tailor shop.
In this simple distribution of labor we shall learn many things which will be highly useful and remunerative when we go out into the world again.
I am finally alone in my new cell, which is spacious, clean, airy. I can walk seven or eight paces up and down, like an animal in a cage.
The steel beds are chained to the walls; instead of the filthy canvas, a steel wire is stretched across the frame, but there is no mattress or sheets as there were in the Tombs. There is also a covered bucket in the lower corner, and a tin cup. The bars are strong, but nevertheless plenty of air and light come in from the large windows opposite our cells. Two small hand towels and a piece of scrubbing soap are added to our simple belongings.
The number of my cell is 23, the last one in our row, and on the second tier, which contains men who work in the tailor shop. The shops stand together, in a separate building between the prison and the river, on the Brooklyn side. The shops where they make brushes, shoes, beds, and the tailor and repair shops, are under one roof, and under the control of a contractor. In the shops all kinds of work are performed: repairing, cutting and making clothes for outgoing prisoners; there are machines turning out underwear and socks; mattresses are made, stuffed and sewn up. At one end of the large room a keeper sits on a platform, while another surveys it from the other end.
Although the prisoners are forbidden to talk, nevertheless they communicate as freely as if the rule did not exist. When I attempted to ask my neighbour a question, he hushed me up with a hissing noise—but he answered my question. His lips did not move, but I could hear him talk in a faint murmur which would have been inaudible ten paces away.
It is very hard at first to follow this new method of carrying on conversation, as in everyday life one is used to watching a man's eyes and lips while listening to his voice. But after a while the hearing becomes used to it and is trained to listen and catch these slightest sounds, which escape the untrained ear of the keeper.
The convicts never glance into the speaker's face or at his lips; they look straight ahead and talk in the manner of ventriloquists, but instead of using a loud and clear tone they whisper in a low murmur. Men who have passed years in jail can always be recognized by their monotonous, whispering manner and their almost expressionless faces. This form of speech is necessary in order to avoid punishment.
Under the pretext of helping me, a young convict comes over to my side of the shop. He shows me the intricate workings of the machine which turns out the uncut cloth for the prisoners. Later it is cut and fashioned into prison underwear.
On top of the machine the spools feed the thread incessantly. Care has to be taken not to use "sabotage" methods, as punishment is meted out unmercifully by the contractor, who seems to have as much power over us as the warden.
My other companion is a young Russian sailor, healthy looking, fair and quite peaceful when let alone. He warns me that my anxious instructor is a "stool pigeon," who proves his status by giving me very detailed instructions as to how to manage to escape successfully.
I ask why he has not put his own methods into practice; and he gives as an excuse that he is going to be released in a few days.
Then he furnishes me with paper, pencil, and soap; and he even offers to send out letters for me. When I answer that I have no letters to write he recites an endless list of rules, and tells me how to evade them, and how to keep the friendship of the keepers.
He reveals to my astonished ears the underground system of communication with the outer world. With money and friends a convict can get all the contraband he desires: dope, newspapers, matches, letters—coming in and going out—whiskey, writing paper and pens, stamps, delicacies, tobacco. My mentor has passed a year in the penitentiary for the offense of "repeating," or of voting many times on election day. The gang leader who paid him for his work is looking out for him from his Brooklyn haunts.
Facing us there is a long table at which old convicts are sitting, without making a pretence at working. As long as they keep quiet nobody notices them. Some of them look over seventy years old; sad-faced, pallid, curved, almost venerable in their old age. They are mostly old sneak thieves and pickpockets, the wrecks and failures of their profession. They sit like graven images, silently, patiently, hour after hour, year in and year out, until some fine day one of them will be found rigid in his cell, and then four striped convicts and a keeper acting as a pallbearer will carry him away in a large black coffin to the morgue.
To-day for the first time since my incarceration I beheld the reflection of my face in a mirror. The sight was humiliating and shocking in the extreme. My keen sense of caricature lowered my well fed conceit half way down the ladder of vanity.
Then I consoled myself by thinking of all the good-looking, impressive, well-groomed men friends, enemies and acquaintances of mine; and I tried to imagine them with clipped hair, togged out in ill-fitting, patched, striped garments and cap; collarless and tieless; with a week's growth of beard on their cheeks—and the comparison made me laugh and cheered me up considerably.
The Deputy Warden comes in on his daily visit. His approach has been telegraphed in some mysterious manner and the whole shop takes on a lively bustling appearance. Second in rank as an officer of the penitentiary, the "Dep," a tall, good-looking man, strides into the room like a Prussian officer. He is not disliked by the convicts, as he seems just in his dealings with them.
Going back from work through the yards, a fat German convict who had been working in the brush shops, broke away from the line and, before he could be stopped, jumped into the river in an attempt to drown himself. A few shots were fired. A negro and two white convicts jumped in after him, and with the help of a keeper who patrols the island in a row boat, they fished him out. They laid him flat on the ground and worked to revive him.
His fat belly stuck out like a barrel, his face was livid, his lips purple. Finally he opened his eyes, and sputtered and murmured: "Let me die! Let me die!" "Shut up, you s——!" yelled an angry keeper, and he was dragged feet first to the hospital.