An American Tragedy (125 page)

And Clyde, amazed and dumb and pondering. For how was one to take such an introduction as this? What to say—what to do? Should he be friendly with these men? Yet, his instinct for tact prompting him even here to reply, most courteously and promptly: “Clyde Griffiths.” And one of the first voices continuing: “Oh, sure! We know who you are. Welcome, Griffiths. We ain’t as bad as we sound. We been readin’ a lot about you, up dere in Bridgeburg. We thought you’d be along pretty soon now.” And another voice; “You don’t want to be too down. It ain’t so worse here. At least de place is all right—a roof over your head, as dey say.” And then a laugh from somewhere.

But Clyde, too horrified and sickened for words, was sadly gazing at the walls and door, then over at the Chinaman, who, silent at his door, was once more gazing at him, Horrible! Horrible! And they talked to each other like that, and to a stranger among them so familiarly. No thought for his wretchedness, his strangeness, his timidity—the horror he must be suffering. But why should a murderer seem timid to any one, perhaps, or miserable? Worst of all they had been speculating
here
as to how long it would be before he would be along which meant that everything concerning him was known here. Would they nag—or bully—or make trouble for one unless one did just as they wished? If Sondra, or any one of all the people he had known, should see or even dream of him as he was here now . . . God!—And his own mother was coming to-morrow.

And then an hour later, now evening, a tall, cadaverous guard in a more pleasing uniform, putting an iron tray with food on it through that hole in the door. Food! And for him here. And that sallow, rickety Chinaman over the way taking his. Whom had he murdered? How? And then the savage scraping of iron trays in the various cells! Sounds that reminded him more of hungry animals being fed than men. And some of these men were actually talking as they ate and scraped. It sickened him.

“Gee! It’s a wonder them guys in the mush gallery couldn’t think of somepin else besides cold beans and fried potatoes and coffee.”

“The coffee to-night . . . oh, boy! . . . Now in the jail at Buffalo—though . . .”

“Oh, cut it out,” came from another corner. “We’ve heard enough about the jail at Buffalo and your swell chow. You don’t show any afternoon tea appetite around here, I notice.”

“Just the same,” continued the first voice, “as I look back on’t now, it musta been pretty good. Dat’s a way it seems, anyhow, now.”

“Oh, Rafferty, do let up,” called still another.

And then, presumably “Rafferty” once more, who said: “Now, I’ll just take a little siesta after dis—and den I’ll call me chauffeur and go for a little spin. De air to-night must be fine.”

Then from still another hoarse voice: “Oh, you with your sick imagination. Say, I’d give me life for a smoker. And den a good game of cards.”

“Do they play cards here?” thought Clyde.

“I suppose since Rosenstein was defeated for mayor here he won’t play.”

“Won’t he, though?” This presumably from Rosenstein.

To Clyde’s left, in the cell next to him, a voice, to a passing guard, low and yet distinctly audible: “Psst! Any word from Albany yet?”

“No word, Herman.”

“And no letter, I suppose.”

“No letter.”

The voice was very strained, very tense, very miserable, and after this, silence.

A moment later, from another cell farther off, a voice from the lowest hell to which a soul can descend—complete and unutterable despair—“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

And then from the tier above another voice: “Oh, Jesus! Is that farmer going to begin again? I can’t stand it. Guard! Guard! Can’t you get some dope for that guy?”

Once more the voice from the lowest: “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

Clyde was up, his finger clinched. His nerves were as taut as cords about to snap. A murderer! And about to die, perhaps. Or grieving over some terrible thing like his own fate. Moaning—as he in spirit at least had so often moaned there in Bridgeburg. Crying like that! God! And there must be others!

And day after day and night after day more of this, no doubt, until, maybe—who could tell—unless. But, oh, no! Oh, no! Not himself—not that—not his day. Oh, no. A whole year must elapse before that could possibly happen—or so Jephson had said. Maybe two. But, at that—! . . . in two years!!! He found himself stricken with an ague because of the thought that even in so brief a time as two years. . . .

That other room! It was in here somewhere too. This room was connected with it. He knew that. There was a door. It led to that chair.
That chair.

And then the voice again, as before, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

He sank to his couch and covered his ears with his hands.

THE “death house” in this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenance of human insensitiveness and stupidity principally for which no one primarily was really responsible. Indeed, its total plan and procedure were the results of a series of primary legislative enactments, followed by decisions and compulsions as devised by the temperaments and seeming necessities of various wardens, until at last—by degrees and without anything worthy of the name of thinking on any one’s part—there had been gathered and was now being enforced all that could possibly be imagined in the way of unnecessary and really unauthorized cruelty or stupid and destructive torture. And to the end that a man, once condemned by a jury, would be compelled to suffer not alone the death for which his sentence called, but a thousand others before that. For the very room by its arrangement, as well as the rules governing the lives and actions of the inmates, was sufficient to bring about this torture, willy-nilly.

It was a room thirty by fifty feet, of stone and concrete and steel, and surmounted some thirty feet from the floor by a skylight. Presumably an improvement over an older and worse death house, with which it was still connected by a door, it was divided lengthwise by a broad passage, along which, on the ground floor, were twelve cells, six on a side and eight by ten each and facing each other. And above again a second tier of what were known as balcony cells—five on a side.

There was, however, at the center of this main passage—and dividing these lower cells equally as to number—a second and narrower passage, which at one end gave into what was now known as the Old Death House (where at present only visitors to the inmates of the new Death House were received), and at the other into the execution room in which stood the electric chair. Two of the cells on the lower passage—those at the junction of the narrower passage—faced the execution-room door. The two opposite these, on the corresponding corners, faced the passage that gave into the Old Death House or what now by a large stretch of the imagination, could be called the condemned men’s reception room, where twice weekly an immediate relative or a lawyer might be met. But no others.

In the Old Death House (or present reception room), the cells still there, and an integral part of this reception plan, were all in a row and on one side only of a corridor, thus preventing prying inspection by one inmate of another, and with a wire screen in front as well as green shades which might be drawn in front of each cell. For, in an older day, whenever a new convict arrived or departed, or took his daily walk, or went for his bath, or was led eventually through the little iron door to the west where formerly was the execution chamber, these shades were drawn. He was not supposed to be seen by his associates. Yet the old death house, because of this very courtesy and privacy, although intense solitude, was later deemed inhuman and hence this newer and better death house, as the thoughtful and condescending authorities saw it, was devised.

In this, to be sure, were no such small and gloomy cells as those which characterized the old, for there the ceiling was low and the sanitary arrangements wretched, whereas in the new one the ceiling was high, the rooms and corridors brightly lighted and in every instance no less than eight by ten feet in size. But by contrast with the older room, they had the enormous disadvantage of the unscreened if not uncurtained cell doors.

Besides, by housing all together in two such tiers as were here, it placed upon each convict the compulsion of enduring all the horrors of all the vicious, morbid or completely collapsed and despairing temperaments about him. No true privacy of any kind. By day—a blaze of light pouring through an over-arching skylight high above the walls. By night—glistening incandescents of large size and power which flooded each nook and cranny of the various cells. No privacy, no games other than cards and checkers—the only ones playable without releasing the prisoners from their cells. Books, newspapers, to be sure, for all who could read or enjoy them under the circumstances. And visits—mornings and afternoons, as a rule, from a priest, and less regularly from a rabbi and a Protestant minister, each offering his sympathies or services to such as would accept them.

But the curse of the place was not because of these advantages, such as they were, but in spite of them—this unremitted contact, as any one could see, with minds now terrorized and discolored by the thought of an approaching death that was so near for many that it was as an icy hand upon the brow or shoulder. And none—whatever the bravado—capable of enduring it without mental or physical deterioration in some form. The glooms—the strains—the indefinable terrors and despairs that blew like winds or breaths about this place and depressed or terrorized all by turns! They were manifest at the most unexpected moments, by curses, sighs, tears even, calls for a song—for God’s sake!—or the most unintended and unexpected yells or groans.

Worse yet, and productive of perhaps the most grinding and destroying of all the miseries here—the transverse passage leading between the old death house on the one hand and the execution-chamber on the other. For this from time to time—alas, how frequently—was the scene or stage for at least a part of the tragedy that was here so regularly enacted—the final business of execution.

For through this passage, on his last day, a man was transferred from his
better
cell in the new building, where he might have been incarcerated for so much as a year or two, to one of the older ones in the old death house, in order that he might spend his last hours in solitude, although compelled at the final moment, none-the-less (the death march), to retrace his steps along this narrower cross passage—and where all might see—into the execution chamber at the other end of it.

Also at any time, in going to visit a lawyer or relative brought into the old death house for this purpose, it was necessary to pass along the middle passage to this smaller one and so into the old death house, there to be housed in a cell, fronted by a wire screen two feet distant, between which and the cell proper a guard must sit while a prisoner and his guest (wife, son, mother, daughter, brother, lawyer) should converse—the guard hearing all. No handclasps, no kisses, no friendly touches of any kind—not even an intimate word that a listening guard might not hear. And when the fatal hour for any one had at last arrived, every prisoner—if sinister or simple, sensitive or of rugged texture—was actually if not intentionally compelled to hear if not witness the final preparations—the removal of the condemned man to one of the cells of the older death house, the final and perhaps weeping visit of a mother, son, daughter, father.

No thought in either the planning or the practice of all this of the unnecessary and unfair torture for those who were brought here, not to be promptly executed, by any means, but rather to be held until the higher courts should have passed upon the merits of their cases—an appeal.

At first, of course, Clyde sensed little if anything of all this. In so far as his first day was concerned, he had but tasted the veriest spoonful of it all. And to lighten or darken his burden his mother came at noon the very next day. Not having been permitted to accompany him, she had waited over for a final conference with Belknap and Jephson, as well as to write in full her personal impressions in connection with her son’s departure—(Those nervously searing impressions!) And although anxious to find a room somewhere near the penitentiary, she hurried first to the office of the penitentiary immediately upon her arrival at Auburn and, after presenting an order from Justice Oberwaltzer as well as a solicitous letter from Belknap and Jephson urging the courtesy of a private interview with Clyde to begin with at least, she was permitted to see her son in a room entirely apart from the old death house. For already the warden himself had been reading of her activities and sacrifices and was interested in seeing not only her but Clyde also.

But so shaken was she by Clyde’s so sudden and amazingly changed appearance here that she could scarcely speak upon his entrance, even in recognition of him, so blanched and gray were his cheeks and so shadowy and strained his eyes. His head clipped that way! This uniform! And in this dreadful place of iron gates and locks and long passages with uniformed guards at every turn!

For a moment she winced and trembled, quite faint under the strain, although previous to this she had entered many a jail and larger prison—in Kansas City, Chicago, Denver—and delivered tracts and exhortations and proffered her services in connection with anything she might do. But this—this! Her own son! Her broad, strong bosom began to heave. She looked, and then turned her heavy, broad back to hide her face for the nonce. Her lips and chin quivered. She began to fumble in the small bag she carried for her handkerchief at the same time that she was muttering to herself: “My God—why hast Thou forsaken me?” But even as she did so there came the thought—no, no, he must not see her so. What a way was this to do—and by her tears weaken him. And yet despite her great strength she could not now cease at once but cried on.

And Clyde seeing this, and despite his previous determination to bear up and say some comforting and heartening word to his mother, now began: