_ I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me
pretty soon. In the meantime I say my say, and write in these pages
of the other times and places.
After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my "natural life" in
the prison of San Quentin. I proved incorrigible. An incorrigible
is a terrible human being--at least such is the connotation of
"incorrigible" in prison psychology. I became an incorrigible
because I abhorred waste motion. The prison, like all prisons, was
a scandal and an affront of waste motion. They put me in the jute-
mill. The criminality of wastefulness irritated me. Why should it
not? Elimination of waste motion was my speciality. Before the
invention of steam or steam-driven looms three thousand years
before, I had rotted in prison in old Babylon; and, trust me, I
speak the truth when I say that in that ancient day we prisoners
wove more efficiently on hand-looms than did the prisoners in the
steam-powered loom-rooms of San Quentin.
The crime of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the
guards a score or so of more efficient ways. I was reported. I was
given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food. I emerged
and tried to work in the chaos of inefficiency of the loom-rooms. I
rebelled. I was given the dungeon, plus the strait-jacket. I was
spread-eagled, and thumbed-up, and privily beaten by the stupid
guards whose totality of intelligence was only just sufficient to
show them that I was different from them and not so stupid.
Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for
a man to be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid brutes of
guards were rats, and they gnawed the intelligence of me, gnawed all
the fine nerves of the quick of me and of the consciousness of me.
And I, who in my past have been a most valiant fighter, in this
present life was no fighter at all. I was a farmer, an
agriculturist, a desk-tied professor, a laboratory slave, interested
only in the soil and the increase of the productiveness of the soil.
I fought in the Philippines because it was the tradition of the
Standings to fight. I had no aptitude for fighting. It was all too
ridiculous, the introducing of disruptive foreign substances into
the bodies of little black men-folk. It was laughable to behold
Science prostituting all the might of its achievement and the wit of
its inventors to the violent introducing of foreign substances into
the bodies of black folk.
As I say, in obedience to the tradition of the Standings I went to
war and found that I had no aptitude for war. So did my officers
find me out, because they made me a quartermaster's clerk, and as a
clerk, at a desk, I fought through the Spanish-American War.
So it was not because I was a fighter, but because I was a thinker,
that I was enraged by the motion-wastage of the loom-rooms and was
persecuted by the guards into becoming an "incorrigible." One's
brain worked and I was punished for its working. As I told Warden
Atherton, when my incorrigibility had become so notorious that he
had me in on the carpet in his private office to plead with me; as I
told him then:
"It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your rat-throttlers
of guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and
definite in my brain. The whole organization of this prison is
stupid. You are a politician. You can weave the political pull of
San Francisco saloon-men and ward heelers into a position of graft
such as this one you occupy; but you can't weave jute. Your loom-
rooms are fifty years behind the times. . . ."
But why continue the tirade?--for tirade it was. I showed him what
a fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless
incorrigible.
Give a dog a bad name--you know the saw. Very well. Warden
Atherton gave the final sanction to the badness of my name. I was
fair game. More than one convict's dereliction was shunted off on
me, and was paid for by me in the dungeon on bread and water, or in
being triced up by the thumbs on my tip-toes for long hours, each
hour of which was longer than any life I have ever lived.
Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The
guards and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid
monsters. Listen, and you shall learn what they did to me. There
was a poet in the prison, a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed,
degenerate poet. He was a forger. He was a coward. He was a
snitcher. He was a stool--strange words for a professor of
agronomics to use in writing, but a professor of agronomics may well
learn strange words when pent in prison for the term of his natural
life.
This poet-forger's name was Cecil Winwood. He had had prior
convictions, and yet, because he was a snivelling cur of a yellow
dog, his last sentence had been only for seven years. Good credits
would materially reduce this time. My time was life. Yet this
miserable degenerate, in order to gain several short years of
liberty for himself, succeeded in adding a fair portion of eternity
to my own life-time term.
I shall tell what happened the other way around, for it was only
after a weary period that I learned. This Cecil Winwood, in order
to curry favour with the Captain of the Yard, and thence the Warden,
the Prison Directors, the Board of Pardons, and the Governor of
California, framed up a prison-break. Now note three things: (a)
Cecil Winwood was so detested by his fellow-convicts that they would
not have permitted him to bet an ounce of Bull Durham on a bed-bug
race--and bed-bug racing was a great sport with the convicts; (b) I
was the dog that had been given a bad name: (c) for his frame-up,
Cecil Winwood needed the dogs with bad names, the lifetimers, the
desperate ones, the incorrigibles.
But the lifers detested Cecil Winwood, and, when he approached them
with his plan of a wholesale prison-break, they laughed at him and
turned away with curses for the stool that he was. But he fooled
them in the end, forty of the bitterest-wise ones in the pen. He
approached them again and again. He told of his power in the prison
by virtue of his being trusty in the Warden's office, and because of
the fact that he had the run of the dispensary.
"Show me," said Long Bill Hodge, a mountaineer doing life for train
robbery, and whose whole soul for years had been bent on escaping in
order to kill the companion in robbery who had turned state's
evidence on him.
Cecil Winwood accepted the test. He claimed that he could dope the
guards the night of the break.
"Talk is cheap," said Long Bill Hodge. "What we want is the goods.
Dope one of the guards to-night. There's Barnum. He's no good. He
beat up that crazy Chink yesterday in Bughouse Alley--when he was
off duty, too. He's on the night watch. Dope him to-night an' make
him lose his job. Show me, and we'll talk business with you."
All this Long Bill told me in the dungeons afterward. Cecil Winwood
demurred against the immediacy of the demonstration. He claimed
that he must have time in which to steal the dope from the
dispensary. They gave him the time, and a week later he announced
that he was ready. Forty hard-bitten lifers waited for the guard
Barnum to go to sleep on his shift. And Barnum did. He was found
asleep, and he was discharged for sleeping on duty.
Of course, that convinced the lifers. But there was the Captain of
the Yard to convince. To him, daily, Cecil Winwood was reporting
the progress of the break--all fancied and fabricated in his own
imagination. The Captain of the Yard demanded to be shown. Winwood
showed him, and the full details of the showing I did not learn
until a year afterward, so slowly do the secrets of prison intrigue
leak out.
Winwood said that the forty men in the break, in whose confidence he
was, had already such power in the Prison that they were about to
begin smuggling in automatic pistols by means of the guards they had
bought up.
"Show me," the Captain of the Yard must have demanded.
And the forger-poet showed him. In the Bakery, night work was a
regular thing. One of the convicts, a baker, was on the first
night-shift. He was a stool of the Captain of the Yard, and Winwood
knew it.
"To-night," he told the Captain, "Summerface will bring in a dozen
'44 automatics. On his next time off he'll bring in the ammunition.
But to-night he'll turn the automatics over to me in the bakery.
You've got a good stool there. He'll make you his report to-
morrow."
Now Summerface was a strapping figure of a bucolic guard who hailed
from Humboldt County. He was a simple-minded, good-natured dolt and
not above earning an honest dollar by smuggling in tobacco for the
convicts. On that night, returning from a trip to San Francisco, he
brought in with him fifteen pounds of prime cigarette tobacco. He
had done this before, and delivered the stuff to Cecil Winwood. So,
on that particular night, he, all unwitting, turned the stuff over
to Winwood in the bakery. It was a big, solid, paper-wrapped bundle
of innocent tobacco. The stool baker, from concealment, saw the
package delivered to Winwood and so reported to the Captain of the
Yard next morning.
But in the meantime the poet-forger's too-lively imagination ran
away with him. He was guilty of a slip that gave me five years of
solitary confinement and that placed me in this condemned cell in
which I now write. And all the time I knew nothing about it. I did
not even know of the break he had inveigled the forty lifers into
planning. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. And the rest knew
little. The lifers did not know he was giving them the cross. The
Captain of the Yard did not know that the cross know was being
worked on him. Summerface was the most innocent of all. At the
worst, his conscience could have accused him only of smuggling in
some harmless tobacco.
And now to the stupid, silly, melodramatic slip of Cecil Winwood.
Next morning, when he encountered the Captain of the Yard, he was
triumphant. His imagination took the bit in its teeth.
"Well, the stuff came in all right as you said," the captain of the
Yard remarked.
"And enough of it to blow half the prison sky-high," Winwood
corroborated.
"Enough of what?" the Captain demanded.
"Dynamite and detonators," the fool rattled on. "Thirty-five pounds
of it. Your stool saw Summerface pass it over to me."
And right there the Captain of the Yard must have nearly died. I
can actually sympathize with him--thirty-five pounds of dynamite
loose in the prison.
They say that Captain Jamie--that was his nickname--sat down and
held his head in his hands.
"Where is it now?" he cried. "I want it. Take me to it at once."
And right there Cecil Winwood saw his mistake.
"I planted it," he lied--for he was compelled to lie because, being
merely tobacco in small packages, it was long since distributed
among the convicts along the customary channels.
"Very well," said Captain Jamie, getting himself in hand. "Lead me
to it at once."
But there was no plant of high explosives to lead him to. The thing
did not exist, had never existed save in the imagination of the
wretched Winwood.
In a large prison like San Quentin there are always hiding-places
for things. And as Cecil Winwood led Captain Jamie he must have
done some rapid thinking.
As Captain Jamie testified before the Board of Directors, and as
Winwood also so testified, on the way to the hiding-place Winwood
said that he and I had planted the powder together.
And I, just released from five days in the dungeons and eighty hours
in the jacket; I, whom even the stupid guards could see was too weak
to work in the loom-room; I, who had been given the day off to
recuperate--from too terrible punishment--I was named as the one who
had helped hide the non-existent thirty-five pounds of high
explosive!
Winwood led Captain Jamie to the alleged hiding-place. Of course
they found no dynamite in it.
"My God!" Winwood lied. "Standing has given me the cross. He's
lifted the plant and stowed it somewhere else."
The Captain of the Yard said more emphatic things than "My God!"
Also, on the spur of the moment but cold-bloodedly, he took Winwood
into his own private office, looked the doors, and beat him up
frightfully--all of which came out before the Board of Directors.
But that was afterward. In the meantime, even while he took his
beating, Winwood swore by the truth of what he had told.
What was Captain Jamie to do? He was convinced that thirty-five
pounds of dynamite were loose in the prison and that forty desperate
lifers were ready for a break. Oh, he had Summerface in on the
carpet, and, although Summerface insisted the package contained
tobacco, Winwood swore it was dynamite and was believed.
At this stage I enter or, rather, I depart, for they took me away
out of the sunshine and the light of day to the dungeons, and in the
dungeons and in the solitary cells, out of the sunshine and the
light of day, I rotted for five years.
I was puzzled. I had only just been released from the dungeons, and
was lying pain-racked in my customary cell, when they took me back
to the dungeon.
"Now," said Winwood to Captain Jamie, "though we don't know where it
is, the dynamite is safe. Standing is the only man who does know,
and he can't pass the word out from the dungeon. The men are ready
to make the break. We can catch them red-handed. It is up to me to
set the time. I'll tell them two o'clock to-night and tell them
that, with the guards doped, I'll unlock their cells and give them
their automatics. If, at two o'clock to-night, you don't catch the
forty I shall name with their clothes on and wide awake, then,
Captain, you can give me solitary for the rest of my sentence. And
with Standing and the forty tight in the dungeons, we'll have all
the time in the world to locate the dynamite."
"If we have to tear the prison down stone by stone," Captain Jamie
added valiantly.
That was six years ago. In all the intervening time they have never
found that non-existent explosive, and they have turned the prison
upside-down a thousand times in searching for it. Nevertheless, to
his last day in office Warden Atherton believed in the existence of
that dynamite. Captain Jamie, who is still Captain of the Yard,
believes to this day that the dynamite is somewhere in the prison.
Only yesterday, he came all the way up from San Quentin to Folsom to
make one more effort to get me to reveal the hiding-place. I know
he will never breathe easy until they swing me off. _