One morning as a young convict was walking on an errand towards the shops, a letter dropped from his coat onto the ground in the yard. The warden, who was walking in the same direction, not far behind, picked up the letter and shouted to the man to stop. The convict turned back and appeared confused when he saw the warden with his letter in his hands. The warden flayed him with his heavy sarcasm, upbraided him for violating the rules about writing letters, and leered at him in malicious anticipation of the punishment to come. Finally he condescended to read the letter, so as to fit the punishment with a few quotations from the letter.
But strange to relate, after he had read the letter, his frown disappeared, and with it his terrible anger. In a voice which had turned from a broken falsetto of anger to a gentle, low pitch, he inquired where the young man was working, how many more months he had yet to serve, and finally asked if he had a preference for any other place besides his present assignment. The young convict reluctantly admitted that he would prefer to work in the keeper's kitchen.
The same day he was transferred to his new duties, which are considered privileged by convicts because of the liberty and the better food they afford. The young convict, being disgusted with the prison fare, and the monotonous, unhealthy work in his shop, with a cunning almost Machiavellian, had hit upon the original and brilliant idea of writing a letter to an imaginary friend in which he praised the penitentiary and lauded the warden in fulsome, enthusiastic, unstinted praise. He dropped the letter purposely, knowing that the warden was only a few paces behind him. The acting was done to perfection, the trick worked without a hitch, and our youthful Ulysses got his job for a laudatory song.
The tale went round the prison, and although it made the warden the laughing stock of the penitentiary, he never discovered the deception.
The warden, unlike the deputy warden, is very much disliked by the convicts. Among themselves they call him the "old hyena." Convicts as well as visitors all seem to be united in accusing him of brutality, coarseness, and intemperance of speech. Visitors who have to support themselves with their daily work find that all kinds of difficulties are put in their way. They have to get a card at the commissioner's office at 20th Street, then they must take a special boat, and when they arrive at the prison they are forced to wait an hour before they are searched.
Thus nearly a whole day, from nine in the morning till two in the afternoon, is given just to see the object of all the trouble, and then, separated by a thick screen of wire, they are allowed only fifteen minutes.
Under the rules visitors are permitted only once a month, but twice by a card from the prison commissioner.
One day a poor Italian woman, after overcoming all the difficulties in actually getting to the gates of the prison, happened to arrive a few minutes late. The iron gates were banged in her face and she was ordered away.
She had come a long way to see her son, and she could not tear herself away from the neighborhood of the prison. She was poorly dressed, without even a hat. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. In her ignorance she looked up to the barred windows of our hospital imagining that it contained her son. She waved her hand, smiling through her tears, hoping—perhaps thinking—that she could communicate to him that little, distant greeting. Then a keeper came out, shook a stick at her and ordered her away.
She went back to the docks and onto the little boat that was to carry her back to New York. As the boat moved away she continued to wave a red bandanna handkerchief until she disappeared from view.
Miss M—— came to see me one day but she was refused admittance because I had had another visitor in the same month. The warden asked her: "What do you want to see him for? Are you his wife?" "No," answered Miss M——, "I wouldn't visit him if he was my husband."
The warden is very punctilious and severe towards infractions of the rules relating to visits and visitors. His strict regard for the rules, however, did not deter him from allowing two detectives, sent by agents of the Mexican government, to visit me without my permission; he even placed another detective on the line next to another visitor so that he could overhear our conversation.
I had written to a friend that, as it was not only unwise, but impossible in my situation to put on paper certain matters of importance and of grave concern to me, I would wait for the day of his visit to communicate it orally.
On that day a red-headed detective was placed next in line to my visitor, ostensibly to talk to a convict; but the prisoner told me afterwards that he did not know the alleged visitor and that he had never seen him before.
I had to whisper my message in French so as to prevent the spy from overhearing and understanding it.
This proved to me that my letters were copied by somebody in the Warden's office, and communicated to the American lawyers representing the Mexican government; and also that somebody was powerful enough politically to give orders in the Commissioner's office, which in its turn placed the detective at my visitor's side.
But when two newspaper men asked permission to see me I was informed that I would not be permitted to stay in the hospital if I allowed reporters to visit me.
One day I heard the warden upbraid a girl who had come for the first time to see her brother. Not being used to such ill-mannered treatment she began to weep, and that of course only made matters worse.
Half an hour later the Commissioner of Prisons arrived on a visit of inspection. In the hospital he called the warden to task for something—but the warden was as mute as an oyster. Together they went into the consumptive ward, where the warden began extolling the quality and quantity of the fresh air circulating in the room. The commissioner turned round and snapped impatiently: "And that's about all they ever get!" But the warden never said a word. This man, this mighty czar of the penitentiary, who is so brutal and so insolent to the convicts, so arrogant to the keepers, and so uncouth to the visitors, in the presence of the man who could take his good job away from him, was as meek as a lamb.
A keeper who knew the warden well remarked: "He has the soul of a valet, insulting to his inferiors and fawning to his superiors."
About a dozen women convicts come twice a week to scrub the hardwood floor of the hospital. The majority of them are colored; the white women are either old and faded, or young and dissipated-looking. Very few of them are either refined or good-looking. Petty larceny is the crime for which most of them are sent to the prison.
Two negro women, young and rather tough-looking, are scrubbing the floor. They are in prison for having held up and robbed a man in the streets of New York. The man never recovered his $800.
As the convicts always attempt to joke and to flirt with the scrubbing women, they are usually ordered into the bathroom until the work is done, with the exception of the bedridden patients.
I discovered that quite a correspondence goes on between the men and women convicts. A young convict became quite enamored of a blonde, sporty-looking girl, and they took great risks to communicate their love notes. I was made the confidante in their love affair. Some of the passages read thus: "I love you, I love you, where did youse put the tobacco?" ... "I dreams of you day and night.... Get me some butter." ... "You was the best looker I ever seen.... Don't forget to put the matches at the foot of the stairs."
The women do not get the weekly ration of tobacco allowed to the men, and as a consequence they must beg tobacco and matches from the men.
All the house work, such as making beds, sweeping, cooking and waiting on table, in the house of the warden, in the apartment of the deputy warden, and in the dormitories of the keepers and matrons, is performed by the women convicts.
An old Irish woman while in prison took such loving care of the children of a former warden that whenever her time was up and she was discharged, her weakness was encouraged, and she was even purposely made drunk, then arrested and sentenced to the penitentiary again as an old offender, year after year, until the children of the warden grew big enough to take care of themselves.
Before the present system of having a physician live in the prison came into vogue, doctors visited the patients once a day; the surgeons came over only for the operations. The operating room is always shown with great pride to visitors, but never the "cooler."
'Twas told that one night, in the earlier period, when there was no resident physician, a woman convict startled the prison with piercing cries. She was in the throes of child-birth. The doctor and the warden being absent, the matrons did not dare to open the cell. Later a young doctor from the city hospital was called in. He peered through the bars, then turned and declared that the woman would be all right in the morning. When the cell door was opened next day the woman was found unconscious and the child was dead, strangled or suffocated.
The other day I went for the first time into the women's section to take some medicines and carry away our laundry. The women's section is under the same roof as the old prison wherein I passed the first two nights. A wall divides them, but the cells and the system of tiers are the same.
The cells measure about 3 by 7 feet, with gray, damp, greasy, massive walls, without any ventilation.
As I was looking around I noticed many women sitting in their cells, some working outside, sewing or knitting, others sweeping or mopping the tiers or the floor.
My attention was attracted by two women with babies in their arms. A third, a young, quite delicate, fine-looking girl convict, was sitting on a chair sewing. Near her, as if afraid to move, stood a little girl three or four years old, with dark, curly hair, red cheeks, and big, black serious eyes. She looked at me with the sad, wistful smile of some of Da Vinci's women.
My imagination carried me back to the trial room where the little girl had stood near her mother to hear the sentence; I thought of how she had shared with her the cell in the Tombs; how she had been carried to the penitentiary in the "Black Maria," with her mother shackled to another convict; how every night she slept in the narrow, dark, foul cell, barred and locked; how she ate the prison food, and remained all day behind gray walls, without seeing the sun or the sky or any flowers—only striped convicts, matrons and steel bars.
The innocent child must have seen all these strange happenings, and wondered what it all meant. And some day, when she is grown to womanhood, or motherhood, she will remember it all, she will know that she lived with her mother in a prison. She will recall the infamy, the degradation—and the shame of it will be branded on her soul as long as she lives.
Never a month passes but some convict is brought up to the hospital to be kept under observation to determine whether he is insane or faking insanity.
The warden and the keepers always suspect prisoners of faking sickness or feigning insanity. As a rule the convicts do not like to stay very long in the hospital, as they are not allowed to smoke, and the time is very slow and tedious without any kind of work.
A small, stocky, bearded, wild-looking Italian was brought over from the Tombs before his trial. He would not touch food, and the Tombs keepers were afraid that he might die on their hands.
It took six men and one doctor, sitting on his arms, legs and stomach, to feed him a glass of milk by a rubber tube through his nostrils. It was a nauseating performance, and luckily it was not repeated.
We have to dress and undress him every morning and night. About six o'clock every morning he starts walking up and down from the bathroom to the bay window, a distance of about twenty-five paces; and he continues it all day long, without rest or pause, until nine o'clock at night. Every fifteen minutes or so he calls out in a sing-song, southern dialect: "Oh! Giorgio Washington! Warden of this great prison! My dear wife! My beautiful little children!" And then he looks up at the clock and adds: "And the Holy Ghost of the clock!"
After he has been put to bed he covers his head with the bed sheets, but every hour he sticks his head out and like a cuckoo bird in a Swiss clock he repeats his monotonous story.
Everybody is kept awake, the patients as well as the keepers. The first night an old keeper who was on watch tried to hush him up, but without success; so he stood at the head of the bed watching for the moment when the man would uncover his head again and sing out.
We waited breathlessly, looking forward to the expected minute. Suddenly the head appeared and the old keeper swiftly hit it a stinging whack with a wet towel, which cut the "Giorgio Washington" in two; the head went right back under the bed sheets for the rest of the night.
After two weeks the man was finally sent back to the Tombs. Although he had eaten only once in that time, it took half a dozen sturdy men to dress him up and turn him over to the sheriff.
Once in a moment of lucidity he asked me to get him some food, for which he was willing to pay. Then he begged me to write to his wife, and when the letter was written and addressed, he became mad again and tore it to little bits, and resumed his peripatetic, insane round.
A young Pole, about twenty-five years old, is brought over from the workhouse. His face is blue and his lips are bleeding from blows. We have to dress and undress him also like a child. Whenever food is brought, and he is told to eat, he weeps; whenever anybody speaks to him he weeps; and he whines and carries on like a frightened baby in a strange place. He has the body of a powerful longshoreman and the mentality of a new born baby.
There is a convict here afflicted with suicidal mania. Those in the hospital who are not insane have been told to watch him and prevent him from harming himself. He is the same man who tried to drown himself by jumping into the river. We have to keep the medicine closet locked and the bread knife hidden.
One night he waited until everybody was asleep, then, sneaking into the bathroom, he took a bottle of medicine which had been left standing on top of the ice box, and gulped a great quantity before the bottle was torn from his lips. He was quite sick for two days. Luckily the bottle only contained "Cascara Sagrada," a powerful cathartic.
Another time he tried even to push the razor into his throat while a convict barber was shaving him. And yet, every time the barred door is locked or unlocked, he seems to be in mortal fear that somebody is coming to shoot him.
The other evening he sat near me while I was reading and suddenly he leaned over and, with quivering nostrils and in a hoarse terrified whisper, asked me, in German, if I was his friend.
Certainly, I answered. "What can I do for you?"
They are going to shoot me to-night! he said. "Get me the bread knife so that I can cut my throat, or some poison to kill myself."
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 papers came 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 or exercise 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 in his 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 tried to 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 a stentorian 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 alert for 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.