“Okay, I’m gonna do this.”
So the turtle took the snake across the river. When they got to the other side, the snake bit him on the neck. As he was goin’ down, the turtle said, “You gave your word. You swore on your mama’s grave.” And the snake said, “Man, I bit her, too. I’m a snake. I can’t be anything else.”
Booker smiled in the darkness. It was a good story. It said something. He didn’t know exactly what, but it had a message of some kind.
Through the afternoon, Booker listened to the voices. He could identify five, and there seemed to be two or three others who had very little to say. All were white, some had the twang of the South in their voices and Booker, apparently the only colored man in the dungeon, listened for “nigra” or even “nigger”, but he didn’t hear either. Maybe it was awareness of his presence that stilled their tongues. Or maybe issues of race didn’t cross their minds. They sure talked about violence a lot, one story after another about fucking up somebody, or sticking somebody else.
They also talked about sports, especially baseball. Betting on baseball was apparently popular in San Quentin. The New York Yankees, led by The Babe and managed by Miller Huggins, were tearing up the American League.
As he listened, Booker experienced wonder. What was he doing here among thieves and killers? How could life take such swift and unexpected turns? Why had he lost his temper with that white man? It gave him satisfaction, sure enough, but goddamn it wasn’t worth the consequences. The papers said “joyriding”, but the real reason he was in prison was for hitting the white man. No, not just a white man – a white policeman. Thank God it was California rather than Tennessee. They might have lynched his black ass in Tennessee.
All that was behind him. Now he was here. If he kept his hat in his hand and his eyes down on the ground, he could get out in a year or so. He would see his mama. She would never be able to get up to the Bay Area. He would have to watch out for Lieutenant Whitehead. That redneck was bad news for colored folks.
He was thinking of these things when the night he’d had without sleep and the day of tension had their effect and he fell asleep.
During the night he was awakened when the outer door opened with a clanging noise and a cursing drunk was brought in. The splat of fists on flesh, the thud of bodies slamming into walls, the guards’ curses and a convict’s yells brought Booker – and all the others – to the tiny slots to see what was going on.
Several guards are dragging and kicking a drunken convict to the empty cell across from Booker.
Convicts in other cells are screaming, “Leave him alone! Let him Go!”
A guard rams a lead-tipped cane into the Indian’s stomach. When he doubles over, the cane is brought down across his shoulder. It drops him, and the guards fall on him.
A canvas strait jacket appears. They put the Indian in it; then roll him over on his stomach so they can get the laces tightened. He thrashes futilely, squirming around like a landed fish. It makes the guards grin. When they close the door, Booker feels pain and rage.
As the guards go out, a voice says: “You get away with it… but some citizen outside is going to pay for this.”
Laughing at the threat, the guards walk out.
*
The next morning, two guards opened his cell and said the Associate Warden wanted to see him. It surprised Booker, for he expected to wait until after the weekend, and to see the Captain, not the Associate Warden. It seemed Associate Warden Douglas was Officer of the Day, and had noted his presence in the dungeon and sent for him. Booker had to shield his eyes from the daylight when they brought him out and marched him to the porch of the big house beside the Garden Beautiful.
He waited on a gravel path, under the eye of a rifleman in an overhead booth, with several other convicts facing disciplinary court for minor offenses: sniffing shoe glue, missing a lockup, failing to stand at the bars for count. One by one, they were motioned through a door marked ‘J. Douglas, Associate Warden, Custody’.
Finally, a guard opened the door and motioned him into the office. Behind the desk sat Associate Warden James Douglas, a graying man with the flattened nose and scarred eyebrows of an ex-fighter. He was reading a report.
Three feet in front of the desk a red line was painted on the floor. Booker stopped behind it and waited. Associate Warden Douglas finished the report and closed the folder. It was a thin folder, a file just beginning to accumulate.
“You’re not charged with anything, Johnson, but when someone arrives from the hole in the county jail, or another prison, we like to talk to them before turning them loose on the yard.”
Booker wondered if he should comment, but could think of nothing to say, so he looked away and kept quiet.
“You slugged some deputies in the county jail,” Douglas continued. “Right?”
“Yessir – but…”
“But what?”
“I didn’t wanna… I mean I didn’ start it.”
“Lieutenant Whitehead says you’ve got a bad attitude… but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and let you out in the general population. I’m also going to give you some advice. You’re big and strong and pretty good with your fists, but you’re not too tough for San Quentin… not unless you don’t bleed. Fist fighters don’t carry much weight around here. We’ve got ninety-pound Mexicans with big knives and tennis shoes who’ll cut your heart out and feed it to you – if you fuck with ’em. The number one piece of convict philosophy is this -do your own time. You know what that means?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“It means mind your own business and don’t be conspicuous. I’ve got five thousand men inside these walls. If you keep quiet you’ll be out of here before the officers learn your name. I don’t think anybody’s gonna fuck with you unless you fuck with them.
“So I’m going to let you out in the yard. You don’t have any enemies, do you?”
“No, sir.”
“They’ll let you out after Count.” He closed the folder and indicated dismissal with his head.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Booker said and started to turn away.
“One more thing,” said Mr Douglas. “The probation report says you read at a third-grade level. We don’t have a regular school program, but on weekends some volunteers come in to tutor basic skills. Think about it.”
Booker nodded; he wanted to say more but was unable to decide what. He turned away, thinking about the weekend tutors.
When he stepped outside, where one guard waited to escort him, he heard the buzzer summon the next man. As he walked around the periphery of the Garden Beautiful, he looked across the roofline of the prison and thought of a small city. It was that, a tiny city of the damned.
An hour later, two convicts in the barber shop attacked a third with shivs. Blood flew, whistles blew – and the Captain needed room in the dungeon for the two convicts. Instead of waiting until after the Count, the Control Sergeant released Booker in the afternoon. At the Pass Window, he was given a cell assignment and sent to Distribution for clothing. Fifteen minutes later, wearing new denim pants and a chambray shirt with his number stenciled above the pocket, he walked down a road toward the Big Yard gate. The North cell-house was still being constructed, one of the huge fortress cell-houses that replaced the old Spanish cellblocks. One of these still remained; it would be used as “queen’s row” for another two decades, and then as administrative lockup, until it, too, was torn down and replaced by the Adjustment Center, a truly Orwellian creation.
As he neared the Big Yard gate, Booker walked into a wall of noise, the collected roar of several thousand voices walled in by the kitchen, mess halls and the East and South cell-houses. The last was the largest cell-house in the world, holding two thousand prisoners. The yard gate was open and he walked in against a tide of convicts pouring out and turning left down a long stairway to the lower yard and the industrial area beyond. They were going back to work. In the distance he could see Mount Tamalpais.
The yard was about the size of two football fields, paved in concrete, and half of it was covered by a high, corrugated weather shed that looked like a huge, open-walled hay barn. At the moment, it still held about half of San Quentin’s convicts.
Booker walked straight ahead under the shed. He looked up. On a catwalk overhead was a rifleman. The convict density was less under the shed; it was in the shade and chilly. Most of the men were out in the sun. Along the length of the East cell-house were picnic tables. All but one was used for dominoes, which were slammed hard upon the blanket-covered table. Some of the world’s best domino players were here every day, rain or shine, gambling on ‘killing big six’. The games were owned by convict entrepreneurs, who took a cut for guaranteeing that the winners got paid. One table was used for chess, on which convicts also gambled.
Booker was conspicuous in the dark, stiff new clothes, which marked him as a ‘fish’, the name for new arrivals. A few convicts looked him over, but most ignored him as he weaved his way across the Big Yard en route to the South Block, as designated on his cell move pass.
A guard let him through a rotunda – the steel door boomed as it closed – into the South Block. The rotunda also controlled pedestrian traffic to the prison hospital, which could be reached only via the South Cell-house. It was also necessary to go through the rotunda to reach the West Cell-house.
The cell-house office was in the center, under a steel stairway. The office had a dutch door. Inside was a convict clerk at a typewriter. He was a skinny white man, so old that the tattoos on his arms wrinkled with his flesh. He wore a long-billed denim cap of a cut never seen except in prison.
The clerk got up to take the pass. He filled out a tag and put it in a slot on the wall-board that listed every cell and its occupants. “Eight eight three is on the fourth tier, D section.”
“Are you McGurk?”
The wizened old convict looked at Booker for the first time. Only then did Booker see his face. A scar ran down from his forehead through his left eye, which was hazy white with blindness, and down to his chin. Somewhere along the line he’d been slapped in the face with a straight razor. “Yeah, I’m McGurk.”
“A guy named Sully said to tell you to give me what I need.”
“What do you need?”
“A couple stamps, some toothpaste and cigarettes.”
“We don’t have tailor made cigarettes. You can get some Bull Durham or Duke’s.”
“Damn, I don’t know how to roll cigarettes.”
“You’ll learn, or quit smokin’.”
A bell rang. From the rotunda a voice yelled, “They’re comin’ in,” followed by the fast moving leaders of the herd; they went to their cells like horses to water. After them came the two thousand convicts, California’s worst under age thirty. Most of those over thirty went to Folsom – when they had satisfied the requirement of having stabbed someone. From the sidelines, Booker watched the faces, mostly white – white and Mexican together. Black men were a minority. They stayed together, although he saw a light-skinned brother, with reddish hair and freckles bridging his nose, and his partners were two white queens. That was a term Booker had yet to learn and, when he first saw the trio, for a weird moment he wondered what two women were doing with these animals. When they passed closer, he realized they were men – but only because they couldn’t be anything else dressed in convict blues (which they had bleached until they were more blue tint than denim hue) and going upstairs at lockup.
Booker started up the steel stairs. He was behind the trio; two white sissies and a black freak. They seemed very carefree, and Booker knew instinctively that if race relations were murderous in here, this freaky cluster could never exist. The race crazies on both sides would never let it be. Where was cell eight eight three? On the wall at the end of the fourth tier was a sign: 851 to 900. It was right there.
Booker had to go around the trio. The light-skinned brother with the freckles was sucking tongue with one of the queens. Booker sidled past them. He thought he could hear the sound even amidst the cacophony of convicts around him. Someone wanted to bet on tomorrow’s baseball game and was being told to get fucked – but the freak and the queen kept kissing like man and woman… or something. Convicts passed them without paying attention. Booker did the same. What kind of a world was he in? In the county jail he’d heard the prison myths, but seeing men kiss each other was different than being told. Nobody would bother him. He’d been assured of that – nor did he really need assurance. He knew he could take care of himself. He might get killed, but he would never be pushed around. Or kiss another man on the mouth. Jesus Christ! Ugh…
Now he was on the tier, looking at the numbers stenciled over each cell. Eight sixty-five… seventy two… seventy nine… eighty one… eighty two… People looked him over. A white guy with bad acne winked and nodded.
In front of eighty-three stood a colored man several years older, but forty pounds lighter, than Booker. The knot in Booker’s gullet disappeared. He stuck out his hand. “I’m your cell partner, I think. Booker Johnson.”
The man nodded and reluctantly extended a hand. “Wilkins,” he said. It was then that Booker noticed his cell partner was covered with a brownish lint. It was all over him, including his hair and the stubble of his beard. It was from the jute mill, the prison’s biggest industry, where burlap was woven for fertilizer bags and other uses. A chorus of three hundred ancient looms, so he’d heard in the dungeon, seemed to chant all day: “got ya fucked… got ya fucked… got ya fucked…”
Booker didn’t know what to say. Wilkins didn’t seem to want to talk. Booker looked at the cell through the bars… and found it hard to believe what he saw. The cell was about four feet wide. The double bunk was made of US Army cots from the Spanish-American War. The bottom bunk was made up with a cover over a lumpy straw mattress. The upper bunk was bare, flat springs.
The lockup bell rang. All the security bars were raised above the cell gates. In ragged unison, every cell gate was pulled open, the convicts stepped inside and pulled each gate shut. The security bar crashed down.
Booker and Wilkins were locked in. Wilkins stepped into the space between the foot of the bunk and the cell bars. Booker didn’t know what to do. He squeezed along the bunk to the rear and started to sit down on the toilet bowl.
“Get up to the bars for count,” Wilkins said, motioning for emphasis.
Booker came to the front of the cell. A moment later, two guards came by, five feet apart, each with a hand counter. At the end of the tier they compared their tally and called it down to a Sergeant on the floor. The Sergeant relayed it to the cell-house office. The count was called into Control, the total of the cell-house, and then each tier. Often the total would be right, but one cell-house would be one too many, and another one too few. Someone was in the wrong place.
If the count cleared, the bell rang and the unlock for the evening meal began, tier by tier from the top down. The 5th tier came out, most moving toward the center stairwell, a few climbing over the rail to wait for friends on lower tiers. Wilkins combed his hair and waited for the 4th tier unlock.
Suddenly, McGurk appeared outside the cell. He dropped a mattress on the tier. “Pull it in when the bar goes up.” Then, from pockets sewn inside an oversized denim jacket, McGurk produced a carton of green-packaged Lucky Strike cigarettes, a terrycloth hand towel, toothpaste, soap, candy and ground coffee. “I got word from Sully to look after you.” McGurk was signaled by someone down the tier who Booker couldn’t see. “Gotta go,” McGurk said, and was instantly gone.
The 4th tier security bar went up and everyone pushed open their cell gate. Convicts streamed by, glancing in as Booker threw the mattress on the top bunk. There was a hole in it. He stuck his hand in – and came out with straw. “Aww, shit,” he said. Straw was a bitch to sleep on. Convicts streamed past him, most young white men whom he thought, back then, were mean looking. They paid him no mind as he pushed the mattress into the cell and closed th
e gate. The stream of men was all going one way. He joined it and became a human leaf carried along.
Down the steel stairs the voices blended to the clanging feet. On the landing below, convicts awaited the third tier unlock, so they could eat with their friends. On the gun-rail, across a dozen feet of empty space, was the olive-drab uniformed guard with a rifle fastened to a strap that went around his shoulder as a sling. Nobody was going to accidentally drop a 30.06 to the convicts below.
At the bottom, the throng moved straight forward through the South Cell-house rotunda and through two doors into the vast South Mess hall, where two thousand convicts could be fed at the same time – four serving lines and narrow tables the width of the new stainless steel trays, that all faced one way. If convicts sat facing each other across a table, the inevitable result would be violence. Somebody would find someone “eyeballing” him. So he would eyeball back. “So what are you looking at, sucker?” “Fuck your mother!”
Not only did everyone face the same direction, the mess hall was segregated. The sight made Booker pause in the doorway. “Go on, man,” someone said behind him. He moved ahead. He got in the line where everyone was colored. As he inched toward the serving counter, Booker noticed that whites, Mexicans, Indians and the occasional Asian, all ate together. Only colored men were segregated. He remembered Jim-Crow from his childhood in Tennessee, where he’d felt no resentment simply because it was the normal way of the world, or so he was led to believe. Now he knew more about its evil and its implications. Goddamn white folks made it easy to hate them.
In a semi-daze, he got his tray of food and followed the man ahead to the long table of all black faces and sat down. Later, when a guard signaled the row to rise, Booker blended in. Back within the cell, the security bar dropped and a convict keyman locked each cell gate. “That’s it for the night,” said his cell partner as he stretched out on the bunk.
Booker was alone in the dark with his anger. He would die in prison 54 years later, nine of them spent on Death Row for hitting a guard with a bedpan.
Death Row Breakout Page 5