Soul at the White Heat

by Joyce Carol Oates

  These were “new recruits” in Cell Block C. Their gang identifications had not yet been determined. They were younger than the typical San Quentin inmate, and more “restless.” This was the population that was most susceptible to suicides, the lieutenant said, as well as “other kinds of violence.”

  The lieutenant introduced us to cell block guards, who barely nodded at us. We were of no interest to them and if they felt anything for us, it was likely to be contempt. What the criminology students were thinking by this time, I could only guess. I knew, from my experience at the Trenton prison, that any close confrontation with prison inmates, though there are bars between you and them, is not going to be a pleasant one and still less is it a pleasant experience for women.

  As the lieutenant was telling us about the history of the cell blocks—and of their present-day overcrowding—a movement overhead attracted my attention and I looked up to see, on a catwalk about five feet above the lieutenant’s head, a uniformed guard with a rifle resting in the crook of his arm. The guard did not so much as glance down at me. He was indifferent to the guided tour as to the recited words of the tour guide. The barrel of his rifle did not seem quite aimed at anyone in the cell block, but it was clearly in readiness of being aimed. On a wall nearby was the ominous sign NO WARNING SHOTS.

  Three inmates had been taken from their cells and were standing in the narrow passageway, not far from us. We could not help but stare—as they stared at us, in turn—for these were prison inmates of a kind you would find in a Hollywood action film. Two Hispanics, and a “white” man—husky, muscled, beefy, deep-chested, with thick necks. The white man had a shaved head and was covered in tattoos of a lurid sort: Nazi swastikas primarily. I had never seen anyone with a scalp tattooed in Nazi tattoos. The man had had to be a member of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang. Yet this man had been taken from his cell, and he stood quietly in the aisle among guards as if in an easy sort of fraternization; apparently he was no threat to the guards or to us. For as it turned out, he and the other two inmates had been paroled—or had served their full sentences—and would be now escorted out of the prison.

  I thought But who would hire a man covered in Nazi tattoos?

  The answer could only be Another man covered in Nazi tattoos.

  The lieutenant now said, as I’d been hoping he would not, that it was time for a “walk around the block.”

  In Trenton, something of the same phraseology had been used. But the inmates we’d seen had not been confined to a cell block, but to a large grim windowless space like an animal pen. They’d been loose, milling and pacing about, restless, edgy, staring in our direction as we’d looked down at them from a raised platform, at a height of about five feet.

  The situation is different here, I thought. Yet I felt a stab of panic, for perhaps the situation would come to the same thing. It had been a nightmare I’d more or less managed to forget, or had pushed out of my mind. I told myself, It won’t be the same thing again. I am prepared this time.

  I was safer here in the cell block because of the abundance of other, younger women in the group. To the inmates, some of whom had already glimpsed them, the criminology students must have looked like high school girls. Their presence in this grim place was a kind of outrage, a provocation; it would arouse excitement, frustration, incredulity, wrath. Adroitly I’d maneuvered myself to the front of the line, just behind the lieutenant. I would walk just behind him “around the block”—I would not make the mistake of holding back and coming late in the line. For, at the start of the walk, the inmates whose cells we passed wouldn’t quite grasp the situation, as we walked quickly by; but, by the time the fourth or fifth visitor passed a cell, all the prisoners would have been alerted to the tour by shouts and whistles. There would be a nightmare, but it would be a contained nightmare and it would not be mine this time.

  The lieutenant warned: “Walk fast—move along. Don’t stare into the cells. Don’t get too close to the cells. Walk as far to the left as you can. If they can reach you, if they grab you, you might be seriously hurt. And the prison might go into lockdown.”

  Several of the criminology students were asking if they could stay behind. If they could just wait, and rejoin the group after the walk-around-the-block. Their voices were plaintive and pleading, but the lieutenant explained that this was not possible.

  “The tour takes us through Cell Block C. We are all going to ‘walk around the block’ together.”

  Quietly enough the walk began along a walkway that spanned the full length of the first tier of cells. I was close behind the lieutenant and I was not going to look into the cells, for I did not want to make “eye contact” with an inmate whose desire at that moment might be to reach grunting through the bars and grab me and not let go until guards swarmed to his cell. I did not have that sort of curiosity—I was determined to walk fast, and to keep in motion. And so, as I passed the cells, one after another after another, the men inside had but a blurred awareness of me, as, at the periphery of my vision, they were but a blurred presence to me, though I glimpsed enough to be aware of the cramped living conditions: bunk beds so close to the wall, inmates would have to pass sideways between the bunks and the walls; and a cell size of about nine by twelve feet. I was very nervous, and I was perspiring; and I could hear, behind us, the uplifted voices of men, shouts, whistles, whooping noises of elation, derision. I would have liked to press my hands over my ears. I did not glance back, at the terrified young women, forced to walk this gauntlet as close as possible to the wall, away from the prison bars. I knew what they were feeling, as I’d had to run a gauntlet of a kind, in Trenton.

  But I’d been alone in my misery, in Trenton. For there, by chance, I’d been the single female in the guided tour, a much smaller group than that at San Quentin, only about five or six people. The Trenton prison had not seemed so “secure” as San Quentin, and the tour guide not so experienced; but that might have been a misconception.

  In a haze of discomfort, I followed the lieutenant in the “walk-around-the-block.” I did not inflame any inmate by passing too near his cell, or looking overtly into it; but I was aware of the rippling, rising excitement in my wake, as the young women were forced to march past the cells, one by one by one. The slumberous hive was being roused, shaken; the buzzing hum rose to crude shouts, whistles, whoops. But I am spared, this time.

  When we left the cell block, to return to the outside air, the tour group was abashed, shaken. What relief to get outside, to breathe! Especially the young women had been made to realize how little their femininity was valued, in such a place; to be pretty here, to suggest sexual empowerment here, was to invite the most primitive and pitiless violence, as in an atavistic revenge of the male against the female. Civilization protects the female against the male, essentially: this is a hard, crude truth to ponder if you hope to transcend the rigid gender-limits of sexism.

  The meaning of the walk-around-the-block is to make a woman understand this simple biological fact, that may be mistaken as a feminist proposition.

  The meaning of the walk-around-the-block is to make both men and women understand: you must be protected from your fellow man by high walls, bars, razor wire, and high-powered rifles manned by guards in the service of the State. And if you don’t think so, you are very naïve, or a fool.

  This is not the sunlit rationalist world of the Enlightenment, still less an evolving America envisioned by liberal intellectuals. It is very far from the affable mysticism of California’s New Age. In San Quentin we recognize the starkly familiar dead end of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) in which life is defined as “nasty, brutish, and short”—unless it is a highly controlled, defined, and subjugated life not unlike a maximum-security prison.

  We were exhausted by the cell block gauntlet and we were eager for the (interminable) tour to end, but there was a final destination awaiting.

  Not Death Row: “We don’t take visitors to Death Row.”

  Our guide led
us past a tall fortress-like building—the “Condemned Unit”—which housed over seven hundred men awaiting execution. (Condemned women, of whom there are far fewer, are housed at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.) With a sort of grim boastfulness the lieutenant spoke to us of the famous inmates who’d been executed at San Quentin: Caryl Chessman, William Bonin (the “Freeway Killer”), Clarence Ray Allen (at seventy-six, the “oldest person ever executed in California, in 2006) among many others. And there were those awaiting execution: pregnant-wife-killer Scott Peterson, serial killer-sadist Charles Ng, Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” of the 1980s. In a perverse way the San Quentin authority appeared to be proud of its list of executed and condemned prisoners and proud of its distinction as the sole Death Row for men in the state of California.

  When I asked the lieutenant which part of San Quentin he most liked to work in, without hesitation he said Death Row.

  This was a surprise to me. I asked why and he said that the Death Row inmate was “more settled.”

  Death Row inmates had “come to accept” that they were going to die and some of them had acquired “wisdom.”

  Of course, some of these inmates were hoping for reprieves. Many were involved with Legal Defense lawyers and anti-capital punishment volunteers working to get their death sentences commuted. But the ones the lieutenant had liked to work with, he said, were the older men, who were “settled” in their minds.

  The lieutenant had not spoken at such length to anyone else on the tour, or so warmly, as he was speaking now to me.

  The lieutenant led us now to a nondescript building that housed the execution chamber. With a flourish of an old-fashioned key he unlocked the door that led directly into the chamber; it was noted that we did not have to pass through another checkpoint. (“No prisoners enter here except if they are going to be executed. And then, they do not return.”) No one in our group was very enthusiastic about entering the execution chamber, but there was no escape: you could see that this was a ritual of the San Quentin tour, not to be avoided.

  “When the death warrant is signed, the clock starts ticking for the condemned man. When it’s time, the Death Team comes for him and brings him here.”

  There was a particular horror to these matter-of-fact words, that had surely been uttered many times in this somber place.

  The room was not large, windowless and dimly lighted. There was a feeling here of underground. Plain straight-back wooden chairs arranged in a semicircle in an incongruously ordinary space except that, at the front of the room, was a bathysphere.

  A bathysphere! Painted robin’s-egg blue.

  The lieutenant explained to his surprised charges that the San Quentin authority had purchased a “deep-sea diving bell” from a marine carnival some years ago, in an era when execution was by cyanide gas. The diving bell was airproof, and efficient.

  Slowly we shuffled inside. There was a sour, sad odor here. The young women had lost all remnants of their initial vivacity, and the men in the group were looking grimly stoic. Like an MC on a TV reality show the lieutenant was hoping to seat some of us in “witness’s chairs” at the front of the room—“C’mon! These are great seats.” The hardback chairs provided an intimate look through the slotted Plexiglas windows of the diving bell into the interior at what appeared to be a hospital gurney, outfitted with straps.

  “In the days when there was gas, it was practical to execute two at a time. Now, with lethal injection, they don’t do that. And when we had an electric chair, they had just the one chair, not two.”

  “Two men executed at once?”

  “Yes, sir. When there was gas.”

  But now, the lieutenant explained, gas had been declared cruel and unusual punishment. So there was just lethal injection—“People think it’s some easy way to die. But it ain’t.”

  A few of the young women students were sitting, weakly. But not at the front of the room; no one wanted to sit in these chairs, which brought witnesses within mere inches of the diving-bell windows. (The chairs were so bizarrely close, a witness’s knees would be pressed against the exterior of the diving bell. Unless you shut your eyes, you would be staring at a dying man’s contorted face from a distance of about twelve inches.) Most of us shrank from sitting down at all, as if to remain standing might be to accelerate the visit, and escape.

  The plain wooden chairs so arranged suggested amateur theatrics—very amateur, as in a middle school. The (somewhat dingy) robin’s-egg blue diving bell suggested sport, recreation, carny fun. But inside the bell, the death-apparatus with its sinister black straps suggested a makeshift operating room, as in a cheap horror film.

  I thought of, but did not mention, Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” one of the great prophetic surrealist tales of the twentieth century, by a writer who might very likely have perished in a Nazi death camp if he had not died prematurely of tuberculosis in 1924.

  The lieutenant was indicating those front-row chairs reserved for “family members of the victim.” Beside these were chairs for the warden and other prison officials and law enforcement officers who’d apprehended the inmate; in the second row were chairs for other professionals and interested parties; in the back row, chairs for the “press.”

  Someone asked if executions were televised or recorded. The lieutenant shook his head with a frown, as if this were a foolish question—“No, sir.”

  I was wondering how the family of the victim could bear to sit so close to the diving bell, to peer through the narrow windows at the writhings of a dying man only inches away. Was this a way of assuaging grief, horror? Was this a way of providing “closure”? I thought rather it must be another element of nightmare, a stark and irremediable image to set beside other, horrific images of loss and degradation. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Was that a gratifying sort of folk-justice?

  Yet it certainly seemed to be an honored custom that the family of a murderer’s victim was invited to the execution. The somber way in which the lieutenant spoke of the “family of the victim” and the special seats reserved for them suggested the importance of such witnessing—this was a gift, perhaps the only gift law enforcement could provide, to the families of victims.

  Perhaps in older, less civilized societies the murderer’s heart or severed head was also given to the victim’s family, to do with it what they would.

  But then I thought, it isn’t given to us to understand, who have not suffered such losses. The appetite for blood, for revenge, for a settling of “injustice,” that so fueled ancient Greek tragedies as well as the great revenge tragedies of the Renaissance, amid which Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the surpassing model.

  Yet I don’t think I would want to “witness” such a horrific sight. Probably, I could not forgive—(I certainly could not forgive in place of someone who’d been murdered)—and I could not forget; but I would not want to witness another’s death, even for the sake of revenge.

  The lieutenant was telling us that no one had been executed at San Quentin since 2006—“There’s some court case pending.” But, he said, in a neutral voice that nonetheless suggested optimism, that was going to change soon—“In another year or two, executions will be resumed.”

  In the meantime, the “backlog” of the condemned was increasing in the Condemned Unit.

  “Now ladies, gentlemen—how would you choose to die?”

  It was a jaunty friendly question posed to us by the tour guide. Of course, it was a ritual question: you could assume that the lieutenant had asked it many times before.

  “Gas, or lethal injection? Or—electrocution, hanging, firing squad? All were approved methods at one time.”

  At first no one spoke. It was a disconcerting question, and there seemed no good answer.

  More fancifully the lieutenant said: “Or maybe—hit by a truck? Jump off Golden Gate Bridge?”

  There were hesitant answers. Reluctant murmurs of “lethal injection.”

  The criminology students and t
heir female professor concurred: “lethal injection.”

  The newest way of execution must always seem the most humane, I supposed. At one time, hanging. Or firing squad. Then, electrocution. Then gas. And now, with its suggestion of hospital care gone just slightly wrong—“lethal injection.”

  I said, I would start with one way of being executed and if I didn’t like it, I’d switch to another.

  It was an awkward sort of joke. It was the sort of joke a bright, brash ninth grade boy might make, to startle and impress his teacher. Why I said this, when I was feeling in no way like joking, I have no idea.

  Except I resented the tour guide quizzing us in this way. I resented the tour guide punishing us for our civilians status.

  No one laughed at my joke. The lieutenant frowned at me. “But you have to choose,” he said. “Gas, electrocution, lethal injection, hanging—”

  I could not seem to reply. My awkward joke had been a surprise to me. Did I hope to alleviate the mood?—the mood of an execution chamber? Did I wish to appear naïve, that I might not be revealed as agitated, angry, indignant?

  One of the men in the group said that he would refuse to choose—he would not participate in his own death. Triumphantly the lieutenant objected, if you don’t choose, the warden will choose for you, but the man persisted: he would not participate in his own death.

  This was a good answer, I thought. But a depressing answer.

  For really there is no good answer to the lieutenant’s question.

  It is said that, if you are resolutely against capital punishment, you should not educate yourself in the sorts of crimes for which the “condemned” are executed. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”—originally, this was a liberal principle, to discourage disproportionate punishments, and punishments against relatives of the alleged criminal. It was not considered harsh but rather a reasonable and equitable punishment.

  By this time I’d begun to feel very strange. I had been staring at the gurney for too long.