by Frank Norris
I knew a “con” at San Quentin named Jim Davis who has been in prison for thirty-five years, and whose sentence expired last Friday. I went over to see Mr. Davis early Friday morning, to watch how they let him out.
Now, my friend Jim Davis is a sneak thief. He told me so, and it is the only thing he told me that the prison officers thought was true. I would have preferred him a murderer, a highwayman, or even an assault-with-a-deadly-weapon, but he is none of these — he is a sneak thief. At the time I got inside the court of San Quentin Penitentiary it was after six in the morning, and the “cons” were going in to breakfast. They came across from the yard, eleven hundred of them, each with his hands folded across his breast, in singularly inappropriate attitude of devout resignation, like monks going to confessional. They tramped into the huge dining room, and the first man went to the farthest seat at the farthest table and began to eat as soon as he sat down. The last man in the line took the only seat left nearest the door, but by the time he was sitting down the first man was through and was filing out, with arms meekly folded.
Davis was somewhere in the crowd of eleven hundred silent men, but I could not pick him out. I only met him when he came back to his cell after breakfast to get his bedding. I looked at him curiously then, as one would look at a man who is going back to liberty after thirty years of prison death-in-life. I was expecting anything. He might be elated over his thought of freedom; he might be depressed (I was ready even for this) at the idea of leaving his familiar all, and I thought of the prisoner of Chillon and of De Quincey’s “mot” to the effect that there is a certain sadness in doing anything for the last time, and that even a prisoner quits his cell with a feeling of regret. I had this last particularly in mind as Mr. Davis came up, and, as it were, I looked at him through it as through a coloured glass. This liberation business is a little drama, and as star actor I hoped Mr. Davis would act up to his part.
Stolidity, indifference, phlegmatic unconcern — anything you like but excitement — was Davis’s mood, and the worst of it was that he did not assume it. Set it down as an axiom, as a law to be carefully studied of writers of fiction, that the sensations of real life tend to the plane of the commonplace as inevitably as water seeks its level. Assume that everything is ordinary till it has been proved otherwise.
“Well,” said I, “you’re going out, Davis?”
“Yes,” said he, tying his blanket roll, “I’m going out.” As far as his demeanour went he might have said, “I’m going across the yard a minute.” He rolled up his blankets, gathered together one or two bits of furniture that the prison provides, and (I following) went across the court to the “old clothes room.”
The old clothes room of San Quentin is where the prison suits are kept — the clothes, caps, shoes, and all that. It is most like a country store — a counter, a stove, and racks along the wall filled with wearing apparel. The only difference is that the clothes are striped. A guard met us here and took charge of Davis, and he did not leave him during the rest of the time he was in the precincts of the jail. In the old clothes room Davis stripped and bathed. Captain Jameson, who presides here, took his “con’s” suit and stowed it away, and Davis dressed himself again in a completely new outfit that Jameson gave him. The clothes were gray shoddy of the cheapest kind. If my “con” felt any glow of returning self-respect at the feel of citizen’s clothes again he did not show it. He was not sullen, he was not sulking — he was merely ordinary. He spoke little. Next we went to the office of the Captain of the Guard. There was some conversation here. Davis gave his number, not his name, and told the captain for what crime he was serving. Then says the captain:
“Here is a ticket to Sunol. You were arrested there.”
“Yes,” answered Davis.
“And five dollars that the State gives you” (pushing a gold piece toward him). The “con” pocketed it silently.
“And here is the money found on you when arrested — seven dollars and a half.”
“Seven dollars and a half.”
The Captain of the Guard turned away.
From the prison to Greenbrae, where you take the train to the city, is about three miles. A bus runs to meet every train, and the ex-”cons” generally go down in it, but said Davis:
“I won’t wait for the bus — I’ll walk.” We went toward the outside gate of the prison. Once beyond this gate Davis was free. The crisis of this little drama of liberation was here. A turnkey swung open an inside grating for us. We went down a narrow stone passage to the outer gate, through whose grating one could see blue patches of the bay and of the sky. A second turnkey swung the outside gate, letting in a warm puff of air.
“Wait a minute,” said Davis’s guard, as the man who had been jailed for thirty years stepped forward. Davis stopped, and the guard handed him two or three folded papers with official seals.
“These are your restoration papers,” he explained, adding, “they restore your citizenship to you.” Silently Davis put them in his inside pocket. There was a pause. The turnkey stood holding open the grating. The guard drew back a step. I was in the background watching. Between the turnkey and the guard was the ex-”con.” He was older than any of us, and taller. Suddenly, back in the prison, the whistle of the jute mill blew, signalling the beginning of another day’s work.
“Well,” said Davis, breaking the silence, “anything more?”
“Nothing more,” answered the guard; “go on.”
Davis stepped across the threshold and walked down the road into the world. He was free.
San Francisco Wave, March 27, 1897.
AMONG CLIFF DWELLERS
OF COURSE one has heard of the strangeness of the neighbourhoods upon Telegraph Hill, and of course one has read a good deal in Bret Harte and Stevenson upon the subject, but the curiousness of the place cannot be altogether appreciated at second hand. You are told, for instance, that to enter this locality is to be transported to another country — to Italy, to France, or to Spain, as the case may be. This is quite true, but it is not all. The foreignness of, let us say, Ohio Street, is complete, and yet one fancies that one would recognize San Francisco in the place if one should suddenly drop into it out of the blue, as it were. They are a queer, extraordinary mingling of peoples, these Cliff Dwellers, for they are isolated enough to have begun already to lose their national characteristics and to develop into a new race. There are children romping about after hens perilously near that tremendous precipice that overhangs the extension of Sansome Street, of an origin so composite that not even the college of heralds could straighten the tangle. Here, for instance, is a child of an Italian woman and a Spanish half-breed. Think of that, now! The descendant of a Campagnian peasant, a Pueblo Indian and a water carrier of Andalusia, squattering up and down a San Francisco sidewalk, shrieking after an hysterical chicken. But there are queerer combinations than that. I have seen in a wine shop in this same Ohio Street a child who was half Jew, half Chinese, and its hair was red. I have heard of — may I yet live to see him! — a man who washes glasses in a Portuguese wine shop on the other side of the hill, whose father was a Negro and whose mother a Chinese slave girl. As I say, I have not yet set eyes on this particular Cliff Dweller. I can form no guess as to what his appearance should be. Can you? Imagine the Mongolian and African types merged into one. He should have the flat nose, and yet the almond eye; the thick lip, and yet the high cheek bone; but how as to his hair? Should it be short and crinkly, or long and straight, or merely wavy? But the ideas of the man, his bias, his prejudices, his conception of things, his thoughts — what a jumble, what an amorphous, formless mist!
But there is still another kind of Cliff Dweller — him I know and have talked with. He was watching a man paint a bunch of grapes upon the sign of a wine shop (there are neither bars, nor saloons, nor “resorts” in the country of the Cliff Dwellers, only wine shops), and on pretense of asking a direction I had some little speech with him. He was a very, very old Spaniard, and rather feeble. Do you
know that this man has never — but from a distance — seen the Emporium, nor the Mills Building, nor the “Call” Building, nor the dome of the City Hall; that he would be lost on Kearny or Market Street, that he hears or reads in the papers of plays given at the Baldwin or California or Columbia as we hear or read of a new Massenet opera in Paris or a piece at the Comedie Francaise or a successful ballet at La Scala? For eight years this old man has never been down into the city. Old age has trapped him on the top of that sheer hill, and lays siege to him there. Once up here he must stay, or if possibly he should get down, never could he climb those ladderlike sidewalks. No cable cars run over the hill, and the horses of the market carts pause on a corner one third of the way up, blowing till the cart rattles, while their drivers make the delivery on foot. This old man will never come down but feet first. The world rolls by beneath him, under his eyes and in reach of his ears; Kearny Street, like the dried bed of a canon overrun with beetles, hums and lives beneath his back windows, and ships from the Horn and the Cape and the Archipelago shift and slide below the seaward streets, and he sees it all and hears it all and is yet as out of it, as exiled from it as if marooned on a South Pacific atoll. Perched on that hill of the heart of the city, he is a hermit, a Simeon Stylites on a huge scale.
The houses are as indeterminate as the inhabitants. But while the Cliff Dwellers themselves are busily at the work of race forming, new and vigorous, the buildings are rapidly going to wrack — plaster is crumbling, brick walls disintegrating, wooden rails, worn to a rosewood polish, trembling and reeling drunkenly over the steep slopes. You may see them by the score, these collapsing buildings, the frailer and feebler ones invariably clinging to the very edge of the precipitous banks of the hill, like weaker things pushed to the wall. They are patched up indiscriminately, on stilts and beams, as if upon false legs or crutches, and the wind shoulders them grudgingly toward the brink, and their old bones rattle and quake with every blast from the excavations that are going forward halfway down the hill. My old man, the hermit, the castaway, told me of an ancient lady who lives in one of the shanties that are clawing and clutching at the verge of the cliff, who, with her house, will some day be quite literally blown over the ledge. At night, when the west wind blows (you may imagine for yourselves how strong can be this wind coming in from the Farallones to the cliffs at a single hungry leap), this ancient lady sits up till dawn quaking with the quaking of the house, ready to make a wild scramble to the door as soon as the stilts begin to go.
The houses of these people are of no particular style. Some are of plaster over brick, with a second-story piazza, Mexican fashion; some with flat faces and false fronts, and some with bays that are all glass in little frames somehow suggestive of the sea. There are even some with the blunt gable and green blinds that recall New England, and now and then one comes across a miserable, senile, decrepit rabbit warren of an old villa, the cupola turned into a bedroom, a wretched green fountain sunken into the hard-beaten earth of what was once a lawn, a goat or two looking through the crazy pickets, and a litter of kittens on a sunny corner of the porch roof. Thus they have their being, the Cliff Dwellers of this San Francisco of ours; mountaineers, if you will; race formers. The hill is swarming and boiling with the life of them. Here on this wartlike protuberance bulging above the city’s roof a great milling is going on, and a fusing of peoples, and in a few more generations the Celt and the Italian, the Mexican and the Chinaman, the Negro and the Portuguese, and the Levantines and the “scatter-mouches” will be merged into one type. And a curious type it will be.
San Francisco Wave, May 15, 1897.
SAILING OF THE EXCELSIOR
WELL, she’s gone, the Excelsior, this last of the Argos, and you and I are left behind in our offices and at our desks or counters to wonder whether, after all, we’ve done the wise thing to stay, or whether we have let slip the one golden opportunity of our lives. She cleared to-day at half-past two, Tuesday afternoon, and went out with the tide, while San Francisco looked into her wake and cheered her on her way. She is gone now, and with her our last chance — your last chance and mine, and it’s too late now to make up our minds.
The excitement of her departure from the Mission Street wharf was quite as thrilling as anything I remember to have seen, because twenty thousand people thronged about her, packed sardine fashion on the wharves, crowding upon roofs and ships and even into the rigging of near-by masts and yards. Every class and rank and grade was represented in that crowd, from girls in smart frocks who came down from Pacific Avenue in their own coupes, to stevedores and city-front touts, who stood about, thumbs in belt, nodding curt farewells to grubstaked “pals,” who, with blanket roll and haversack, huddled on the after deck. There were laughter and tears, sobs and smiles, shouts of encouragement and sighs of regret. Every mood played over that huge throng, every mood but that of indifference. Not a man or woman in those thousands could honestly say that they did not catch the excitement of the occasion, did not feel the thrill of the moment. One hasn’t got so far beyond the primitive type, after all — at least, not so far but that the first touch of gold, the pure, crude, virgin metal, stirs us to a ferment of emotion, a very fever heat of cupidity and desire. If you do not believe this, suppose for a moment that the Excelsior were bound upon some business venture, even one that involved millions of dollars, do you think twenty thousand men would rush together to see her go, and drown the noise of her whistle with the clamour of their shouting? Not by any means.
There was excitement in the air that verged upon hysteria; women who trailed down the gangplank after the last bell, red and wet as to the eyelids, awry as to bonnets, their veils still up after that last farewell kiss, were the next moment laughing at the veriest trifles and talking to anyone who would listen. And, indeed, all of us on that Mission Street wharf were friends; we stood upon a common ground; as lovers of gold, we were lovers of each other; and men talked together and slapped each other’s shoulders who will pass one another to-morrow on the street, their chins in the air, in most dignified and distant reserve. The thing was replete with incident. One fellow I noted who had not caught the fever. He stood near the gangplank grinning cynically at the embarking argonauts and prophesying direst and most dreadful failure for the whole expedition.
“Huh!” says he, with fine scorn. “Huh! whad they think they’re goin’ to do? — pick up the stuff right offun the ground, p’r’aps. Just in fistfuls. Huh! little ol’’Frisco’s good enough for me this while to come, I guess. I got a business in hides that’s all the gol’ mine I want. Huh! The Klond’ke! Huh! dam-fool gold bugs! Huh!” He spat into the water to illustrate the extremity of his contempt. About half an hour later, just as the Excelsior swung clear and began to feel the water with her screw and the crowd and whistle roared in concert, and the tossing white handkerchiefs swept over the black throng of heads like whitecaps in a black squall, this same man — I stood at his elbow — turned to a friend.
“Well,” says he, with a certain defiant ring in his voice, “I could ‘a’ gone ‘f I’d wanted to, couldn’t I, hey? Couldn’t I, hey?” Then, after a pause, in a gruff mumble, as if talking to himself. “An’ if that fool Batty” — Batty was his friend who had shipped— “an’ if that fool Batty comes back with a wad, I’ll kick myself ‘round the whole dam’ lot, I will.”
Did I say there was no one in that crowd who was indifferent? I was wrong; there was one man. You may not know it, but the wharves are a good place on which to sleep off your liquor, and for that reason are much affected by the drunks of the Front. Such an one was caught by the Excelsior crowd. He was reclining against a pile of boards, and the crowd had grown up around him, and he lay there oblivious to everything that was going forward. People walked over him, even stepped on him and stumbled over him. The babel of sound was a veritable thunder, and all the sign he made was an insensate lifting of an eyelid and a vacant smile. Think of it! The city thrilling from end to end with the great find, the thousands of people rush
ing in to say farewell to their argonauts, and this man lay there under foot, so close to the ship that he could have laid his hand upon her hull, and cared not whether she swam or sank — probably knew not why she sailed. Never has a drunken man seemed so loathly to me. One fairly quivered with a desire to kick him from the string-piece of the wharf, and allow to perish in the water a man so utterly out of the race as this one. Not even the courage to stow himself away — one might have forgiven that — but not so much as to look on, to wallow there under foot. Why, the veriest tough, the most worthless and vicious scapegoat on the Excelsior’s passenger list, is a hero to this beast of a man.
It was strange to see how the excitement told on the people — those who were passengers and those who were left. At the very last moment one man rushed down the plank with both hands full of silver, called a friend to him, and, as he poured the money into his hat, cried, “Give this to the wife; tell her I won’t want silver up there, nothin’ but gold.”