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 able to 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 the barred 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 it I 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 completely overcame 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 the head 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—— do you want?"
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 the Deputy. 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 listen to 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 well without 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 from neuralgia 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 from blood 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'h?te, 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 and races 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 he mends our socks and makes pockets in our trousers. He eats enormous quantities of food, and after he is through he wipes his mouth with the crust of bread which does service for him as a napkin!
A dope fiend, who had kept us awake five nights: in succession, was allowed to sit at the table after he had broken his fast with milk. He was warned to eat sparingly. One Friday, as fish was served and I knew only two pieces had been eaten, I was wondering where it all had gone when I emptied the dishes in the garbage can. Out of sixteen pieces of fish that had been served, only two could be accounted for. I turned to look over the room, and I noticed our dope fiend still chewing away at something. Then I noticed the shirt round his belt bulging in an unusual fashion across his very lean body; and I was surprised to discover what had happened to the missing portions of fish.
Not satisfied with having eaten two pieces of fish, our dope fiend had stuffed the other fourteen pieces inside his shirt, so as to make sure that he would have enough food to last him through the night.
For five consecutive nights he had kept us awake with his moaning and raving, sitting upright in his bed, swinging his body back and forth pendulum fashion. He could not keep anything in his stomach, either food or water. He begged piteously for an injection of morphine, but the new doctor was obdurate; he said that it was either cure or kill. When the morphine was eliminated he became himself again, and he was cured of his habit. Some morphine fiends die from the stoppage of the supply, but many of them are effectively cured.
A bald-headed, consumptive negro keeps us in constant laughter—when prison lets us laugh—with wonderful and never ending stories of his adventurous life. Even the doctor will stand by the hour listening to his quaint speech and stories. Although he is an old rascal and an old offender, one cannot help liking him for his cheerful, gay attitude towards life.
He related how one time, after serving a term in the reformatory, he went back to his wife in New York. She lived in an apartment on the ground floor, and she seemed to be happy to see him again. She inquired about his health and asked about his future prospects. While they were talking he heard somebody opening the front door with a latch key. He became quite nervous, and asked his wife who it was that dared to come in without ringing the bell. "Dat's de husband I'se married while you was in jail; and he's a big black coon," she said.
He jumped hastily through the window, he confessed to us, so as not to embarrass husband number two, and leaving behind a grip with his clothes. He came back next night to get his belongings, and he used the window this time as a means of entrance. But fate was against him. As he emerged from the window again he fell into the arms of a watchful policeman, who promptly arrested him. Being an ex-convict, he was sentenced to a year in the penitentiary, as he said, for stealing his own pants!
A tall, blond Pole behaved in such a disgusting manner at the table that the keeper ordered him back to his bed.
The first two weeks that he was in bed we could not induce him to get up to perform the most normal animal functions. But, as there did not seem to be anything the matter with him, he was finally forced to get up and go to the bathroom.
For more than two weeks we had plied him with questions—myself, the doctors, and all the convicts who knew different languages. He looked at us with his big, blue eyes, shaking his head as if he did not understand what we were talking about. We finally came to the conclusion that he either spoke some unknown language, or that maybe he was deaf and mute.
One day Richard, the young assistant, made him get up, but instead of walking, he crept on all fours to the bathroom. Then he got up like a human being and started drinking water from the faucet. Richard took him to task for his uncleanliness. He said to him: "Wash your face, you dirty pig!" And to the utter amazement of Richard, the supposed deaf mute turned round angrily and said, in perfect English: "You go to hell, will you!" A few weeks later he was taken to Matteawan.
Later I gathered from another Pole who had talked to him and succeeded in making him answer, that he had been a petty officer in the Russian navy, and that he had mutinied, and later had succeeded in escaping to America.
He had hit upon the idea of feigning insanity in order to foil the vigilant Russian secret service agents, who would be on the lookout for him upon his release from the Island; he feared that they would create an opportunity to "shanghai" him on board a Russian ship, and he knew that they would hang him if he ever was returned to the fatherland. He had been sentenced to sixty days on the Island for vagrancy.