by O. Henry
Dr. John M. Thomas was then chief physician at the prison. His letter is especially interesting for the light that it throws on the origin of the stories contained in “The Gentle Grafter”:
Druggists were scarce and I felt I was fortunate in securing the services of Sydney Porter, for he was a registered pharmacist and unusually competent. In fact, he could do anything in the drug line. Previous to his banking career in Texas he had worked in a drug store in North Carolina, so he told me. While Porter was drug clerk Jimmie Consedine, one time proprietor of the old hotel Metropole in New York, was a muse. Consedine spent all his time painting. Out of this came a falling out with O. Henry. Consedine painted a cow with its tail touching the ground. Porter gave a Texas cowman’s explanation of the absurdity of such a thing and won Consedine’s undying hatred.
After serving some time as drug clerk O. Henry came to me and said: “I have never asked a favor of you before but there is one I should like to ask now. I can be private secretary to the steward outside [meaning that he would be outside the walls and trusted]. It depends on your recommendation.” I asked him if he wanted to go. When he said he did, I called up the steward, Mr. C. N. Wilcox, and in twenty minutes O. Henry was outside.
He did not associate very much with any of the other inmates of the prison except the western outlaws. A ery few of the officers or attendants at the prison ever saw him. Most convicts would tell me frankly how they got into jail. They did not seem to suffer much from mortification. O. Henry, on the other hand, was very much weighed down by his imprisonment. In my experience of handling over ten thousand prisoners in the eight years I was physician at the prison, I have never known a man who was so deeply humiliated by his prison experience as O. Henry. He was a model prisoner, willing, obedient, faithful. His record is clear in every respect.
It was very seldom that he mentioned his imprisonment or in any way discussed the subject. One time we had a little misunderstanding about some alcohol which was disappearing too rapidly for the ordinary uses to which it was put. I requested that he wait for me one morning so that I could find out how much alcohol he was using in his night rounds, and after asking him a few questions he became excited when he thought I might be suspicion- ing him. “I am not a thief,” he said, “and I never stole a thing in my life. I was sent here for embezzling bank funds, not one cent of which I ever got. Some one else got it all, and I am doing time for it.”
You can tell when a prisoner is lying as well as you can in the case of anybody else. I believed O. Henry implicitly. I soon discovered that he was not the offender in the matter of the alcohol. But the question disturbed him and he asked me once or twice afterward if I really thought that he ever stole anything.
Once in a long while he would talk about his supposed crime and the great mistake he made in going to Central America as soon as there was any suspicion cast on him. When he disappeared suspicion became conviction. After his return from Central America, when he was tried, he never told anything that would clear himself. While he was in Central America he met A1 Jennings who was likewise a fugitive from justice. After they returned to the States they renewed their friendship at the prison, where both eventually landed. Jennings was also one of the trusted prisoners and in the afternoon they would often come into my office and tell stories.
O. Henry liked the western prisoners, those from Arizona, Texas, and Indian Territory, and he got stories from them all and retold them in the office. Since reading his books I recognize many of the stories I heard there. As I mentioned before, he was an unusually good pharmacist and for this reason was permitted to look after the minor ills of the prisoners at night. He would spend two or three hours on the range or tiers of cells every night and knew most of the prisoners and their life stories.
“The Gentle Grafter” portrays the stories told him on his night rounds. I remember having heard him recount many of them. He wrote quite a number of short stories while in prison and it was a frequent thing for me to find a story written on scrap paper on my desk in the morning, with a note telling me to read it before he sent it out. We would often joke about the price the story would bring, anything from twenty-five to fifty dollars. He wrote them at night in from one to three hours, he told me.
The night doctor at the penitentiary was Dr. George W. Williard. He also became a friend and admirer of O. Henry and was the first to recognize the original of Jimmy Valentine, the leading character in “A Retrieved Reformation.” Dr. Williard contributes the following reminiscences:
He was the last man in the world you would ever pick for a crook. Toward every one he was quiet, reserved, almost taciturn. He seldom spoke unless in answer. He never told me of his hopes, his aims, his family, his crime, his views of life, his writing, in fact, he spoke of little save the details of his pharmaceutical work in which he was exceptionally careful and efficient. The chief means by which I judged his character was by the way he acted and by one or two little incidents which brought out the man’s courage and faithfulness.
I respected him for his strict attention to business, his blameless conduct, and his refusal to mix in the affairs of other prisoners. He seemed to like me personally because I did not ask him personal questions and because I showed that I felt as one intelligent man must feel toward another under such circumstances. So we grew to be friends.
He was as careful and conscientious as if the drug store at the prison had been his own property. His hours were from six in the evening to six in the morning. Often I left at midnight with Porter in charge and I knew things would run as regularly and effectively until morning as if I had remained. Porter was almost as free from prison life as any one on the outside. He received all the magazines and did lots of reading. He did not sleep in a cell but on a cot in the hospital during the day time. His ability and conduct were such that, once he had demonstrated them, there was never any danger that he would have to eat and sleep and work in the shops with other prisoners.
Convicts who were ill or who claimed to be ill would be brought into the hospital in charge of a guard and, ranging themselves along the front of the drug counter, would be given mcdicines by the drug elerk according to my instructions. It was part of Porter’s duties to know a couple of hundred drugs by number as well as by name and to be able to hand them out without mistake quickly. Constant desire of prisoners to escape work by feigning illness necessitated the physician and his clerk being always on their guard against shams. Often some violent convict, when refused medicine, would rebel.
One night a huge negro to whom I refused a drug became abusive. The guard who had brought him in had stepped away for a moment and the prisoner directed at me a fearful torrent of profanity. I was looking around for the guard when Sydney Porter, my drug clerk, went over his counter like a panther. All of his hundred and seventy or eighty pounds were behind the blow he sent into the negro’s jaw. The negro came down on the floor like a ton of brick. Instantly Porter was behind his counter again. He did not utter a word.
Another time a certain piece of equipment was stolen from the penitentiary hospital. There had been a good deal of stealing going on and I was responsible when it happened during my “trick.” I mentioned this to Porter and he gave me the name of a certain official of the prison who, he said, had stolen the property. I told the warden who had taken the property and said it would have to come back at once. In twelve hours it was back. Porter said in his quiet way: “Well, I see you got in your work.” It was the only time he ever told on any one and he did it merely out of loyalty to me. Although nearly every drug clerk at the prison was at some time or other guilty of petty trafficking in drugs or whisky, Porter was always above reproach. He always had the keys to the whisky cabinet, yet I never heard of his taking a drink.
The moment I read O. Henry’s description and character delineation of Jimmy Valentine in “A Retrieved Reformation,” I said, “That’s Jimmy Connors through and through.” Connors was in for blowing a postoffice safe. He was day drug clerk in the p
rison hospital at the same time Porter was night clerk. The men were friendly and often, early in the evening, before Connors went to bed, he would come and talk to Porter and tell him of his experiences.
Although Connors admitted himself guilty of many other jobs he claimed not to be guilty of the one for which he was serving time. Another man who resembled Connors had blown a safe and Connors was arrested and sent to prison for it. Because of fear of implicating himself in other jobs of which he was guilty, he said, he never told on the other man but went to prison innocent. This statement was borne out early in his term in the penitentiary by the arrival of the sheriff who had sent him up and who, in the meantime, had arrested the real culprit and secured from him a confession. To right his wrong the sheriff went to Washington, but the inspectors knew Jimmy Connors and said he doubtless was guilty of some other jobs and had best stay in prison for safekeeping. He did stay, giving O. Henry the chance to meet him and find inspiration for “A Retrieved Reformation.”
Porter never said a word to me about his own crime, but another man once told me that Porter had told him that he had been “railroaded” to prison, so I think that he secretly held himself unjustly dealt with. The fact that he and Jimmy Connors agreed on this point in their respective cases doubtless drew them together.
Poor Jimmy! He never lived to try any sort of reformation on the outside. He died of kidney trouble in the penitentiary hospital, May 19, 1902, which was after Porter left and before Jimmy Valentine became famous in story, play, and song. He was a wonderful chemist and I still, in my daily practice, use one formula he gave me. It is not saying too much, I am sure, to state that the recent craze for “crook” plays in the theatrical world may be traced directly to this dead prisoner, for from him O. Henry drew the character which made the story famous, and from the story came the first “crook” play which won wide success, leading the way to the production of many similar plays. You would recognize instantly, if you knew customs and conditions, that the prison atmosphere at the beginning of the story was gathered bodily from Ohio penitentiary life as Porter knew it.
Mr. J. B. Rumer, a night guard at the penitentiary, was thrown with O. Henry during the latter’s working hours, from midnight till dawn. There was little conversation between them, O. Henry being absorbed in his stories. Mr. Rumer says:
After most of his work was finished and we had eaten our midnight supper, he would begin to write. He always wrote with pen and ink and would often work for two hours continuously without rising. He seemed oblivious to the world of sleeping convicts about him, hearing not even the occasional sigh or groan from the beds which were stretched before him in the hospital ward or the tramp of the passing guards. After he had written for perhaps two hours he would rise, make a round of the hospital, and then come back to his work again. He got checks at different times and once told me that he had only two stories rejected while he was in prison.
Another side of O. Henry impressed Alexander Hobbs, a coloured prisoner who acted as valet to one of the physicians. Hobbs was afterward the political boss of the coloured voters of Columbus:
Mr. Porter was from the South and he always called colored men niggers. I never got fresh with him. I treated him with respect but let him alone. One day he asked me about it and I said: “Mr. Porter, I know you all don’t want nothing to do with no black folks.” He laughed and after that we always got along fine.
Mr. Porter was a nurse over in the hospital and he hadn’t been in long when by mistake one day WTarden E. G. Coffin was given an overdose of Fowler’s solution of arsenic. The right antidote couldn’t be found and the day physician, the nurses, and all the prison officers were crowded around the bed on which the warden was lying, in great fright. Everybody was panic-stricken and it looked like the warden, who was unconscious, was going to die with doctors and a drug store right there beside him.
Then Mr. Porter, who had been upstairs nursing a sick prisoner, came walking down. He had learned what was the matter. I can just see him yet, as he came down them stairs, as quiet and composed as a free citizen out for a walk. “Be quiet, gentlemen,” he says, and walks over to the drug store and takes charge, just as easy as if he owned the prison. Then he mixes a little drink, just like mixing a soda water. In an hour the warden was out of danger and the next day Mr. Porter was made night drug clerk.
O. Henry’s letters from prison tell their own story. The life was intolerable at first but he lived in constant expectation of a pardon. When this hope failed he turned all the more whole-heartedly to story writing. His appointment by Doctor Thomas, in October, 1900, to a position in the steward’s office (see page 148) was evidently a turning-point in his life and was so recognized by him. It is needless to say, as the letters show, that Margaret did not know where her father was. From the moment of his sentence O. Henry’s chief concern was that she should never know. And she did not know till he told her face to face.
May 18, 1898.
Dear Mr. Roach:
I wrote you about ten days ago a letter which I sent through the office of this place. I could not say in it what I wanted to as the letters are all read here and they are very strict about what is in them. I now have the opportunity to send an occasional letter by a private way, and to receive them by the same means. I want to give you some idea of the condition of things here.
I accidentally fell into a place on the day I arrived that is a light one in comparison with others. I am the night druggist in the hospital, and as far as work is concerned it is light enough, and all the men stationed in the hospital live a hundred per cent, better than the rest of the 2,500 men here. There are four doctors and about twenty-five other men in the hospital force. The hospital is a separate building and is one of the finest equipped institutions in the country. It is large and finely finished and has every appliance of medicine and surgery.
We men who are on the hospital detail fare very well comparatively. We have good food well cooked and in unlimited abundance, and large clean sleeping apartments. We go about where we please over the place, and are not bound down by strict rules as the others are. I go on duty at five o’clock p. m. and off at five a. m. The work is about the same as in any drug store, filling prescriptions, etc. and is pretty lively up to about ten o’clock. At seven p. m. I take a medicine case and go the rounds with the night physician to see the ones over in the main building who have become sick during the day.
The doctor goes to bed about ten o’clock and from then on during the night I prescribe for the patients myself and go out and attend calls that come in. If I find any one seriously ill I have them brought to the hospital and attended to by the doctor. I never imagined human life was held as cheap as it is here. The men are regarded as animals without soul or feeling. They carry on all kinds of work here; there are foundries and all kinds of manufacturing done, and everybody works and works twice as hard as men in the same employment outside do. They work thirteen hours a day and each man must do a certain amount or be punished. Some few strong ones stand the work, but it is simply slow death to the majority. If a man gets sick and can’t work they take him into a cellar and turn a powerful stream of water on him from a hose that knocks the breath out of him. Then a doctor revives him and they hang him up by his hands with his feet off the floor for an hour or two. This generally makes him go to work again, and when he gives out and can’t stand up they bring him on a stretcher to the hospital to get well or die as the case may be.
The hospital wards have from one hundred to two hundred patients in them all the time. They have all kinds of diseases — at present typhus fever and measles are the fashion. Consumption here is more common than bad colds are at home. There are about thirty hopeless cases of it in the hospital just now and nearly all the nurses and attendants are contracting it. There are hundreds of other cases of it among the men who are working in the shops and foundries. Twice a day they have a sick call at the hospital, and from two hundred to three hundred men are marched in each day suffering from va
rious disorders. They march in single file past the doctor and he prescribes for each one “on the fly.” The procession passes the drug counter and the medicines are handed out to each one as they march without stopping the line.
I have tried to reconcile myself to remaining here for a time, but am about at the end of my endurance. There is absolutely not one thing in life at present or in prospect that makes it of value. I have decided to wait until the New Orleans court decides the appeal, provided it is heard within a reasonable time, and see what chance there conies out of it.
I can stand any kind of hardships or privations on the outside, but I am utterly unable to continue the life I lead here. I know all the arguments that could be advanced as to why I should endure it, but I have reached the limit of endurance. It will be better for every one else and a thousand times better for me to end the trouble instead of dragging it out longer.
July 8, 1898.
Dear Mrs. R.
I have little to say about myself, except that as far as physical comfort goes I am as well situated as any one here. I -attend to my business (that of night druggist) and no one interferes with me, as the doctor leaves everything in my hands at night. I attend to sick calls and administer whatever I think proper unless it happens to be a severe case and then I wake up the doctor. I am treated with plentiful consideration by all the officials, have a large, airy, clean sleeping room and the range of the whole place, and big, well kept yard full of trees, flowers, and grass. The hospital here is a fine new building, fully as large as the City Hall in Austin, and the office and drug store is as fine and up-to-date as a first class hotel. I have my desk and office chair inside the drug store railing, gas lights, all kinds of books, the latest novels, etc. brought in every day or two, three or four daily papers, and good meals, sent down the dumb waiter from the kitchen at ten o’clock and three p. m. There are five wards in the hospital and they generally have from fifty to two hundred patients in them all the time.