Metamorphosis

by Sesh Heri

  “It was a scientific mutiny, created with cold, hate-filled logic and will. It was a plan for sudden death. This plan reached the ears of the warden through a prison stool pigeon. This time the warden did not round me and my men up and subject us to the usual punishments. Instead, in a panic, he contacted state officials and demanded that I and the twenty-four others under my command be immediately transferred out of Folsom Prison. Two days later we were all in San Quentin.”

  “So that’s how you came to be imprisoned up here where we’re going today,” I said.

  “That’s how,” Morrell said.

  “Did your living conditions improve when you got up here to San Quentin?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” Morrell said. “They were far worse. The prison was overcrowded. The whole place groaned. The hospitals, the dungeons, the torture cells— every inch of space was packed with suffering men, many on the edge of death. Everywhere was the atmosphere of suppressed murder. It only awaited the responsibility of leadership.

  “Soon I was chained to a dungeon wall for ‘dog-eyeing’ a guard. When I refused to answer to the questioning of the guards I was given thirty-five days in the hole and they cut my food rations. The guard that locked me up down there boasted that he was he was avenging a relative, a bounty-hunter killed by the Evans and Sontag gang during a chase.

  “I decided to take leadership of all the nineteen hundred convicts in San Quentin. I organized one hundred men this time and we took control of the jute mill and held all the guards there as hostages. We drew up a list of grievances. We wanted a new Commissary General who would investigate all the spoiled food being served the prisoners. We wanted those who were responsible for the purchase of the spoiled food to be prosecuted for graft. We had other demands, all legitimate demands. We wanted the living conditions of the prisoners changed from the inhuman to the human.

  “I presented the demands to the warden, and he agreed to meet them. But it was a double-cross. Later, I was dragged naked from my cell. Seven of us involved with the uprising were thrown into a closet-sized cell and hit with icy water from fire hoses. The cell was made like a tank. It filled with water up to the chins of the tallest men. All of us had to strain to keep our heads above water through the whole night.

  “After that it was a week in solitary for me. Then a stool pigeon told the warden I had organized a plan to smuggle a cache of guns into the prison. This was not true. But I was confined in solitary for thirty-six days and beaten and tortured to extract a confession from me. Finally, fearing that I would never tell them where the guns were hidden, the board of Prison Commissioners sentenced me to life imprisonment in solitary confinement.”

  “It was in solitary confinement where I fully discovered my powers. To keep from losing my mind, I developed the powers of my imagination. At first my thoughts ran in countless directions. But a little at a time, I brought the images drifting in and out of my mind under my conscious control. I experimented with self-hypnosis, and with the exercises that the old man had taught me in India. I began to attempt to project my mind out of the walls of San Quentin.

  “It was at this time that a new warden came to San Quentin. I called him ‘The Pirate’. He had only one good eye and wore an eye patch over the empty socket of the other. It was ‘The Pirate’ who introduced me to the straitjacket. My first confinement in the jacket lasted four days and fourteen hours. The pain of it— I cannot convey. I was brought to despair. I was bleeding when they removed the jacket from my body. I crawled on the ground to the water bucket.

  “For seven days and nights afterward I dreamed— dreamed dreams that were not dreams. To me they were real. In these dreams I confronted the hatred of my enemies— the wardens and the guards. I was shown things about them, secret things ranging downward into the depths of their souls. I reeled— shocked— at what I was seeing. My hated enemies I found were— human beings! They were human beings just like me! They, too, had suffered, just like me! And, yes, they, too, had sinned as I had sinned, and, yes, they had sinned against me and the other prisoners, but— most of all— they had sinned against themselves! As they beat upon my body it was as if they beat upon their own bodies! As all this was shown to me, I was filled with a tingling sensation and a voice rang out from an infinite space, bright and luminous. It spoke plainly— almost in my ear: ‘You have learned the unreality of pain and hence of fear. You have learned the futility of fighting your enemies with hatred, the double-edge sword that cuts into your own vitals rather than overcoming the evil that works against you.’

  “The voice went on, telling me many things. It told me that a new vista was opening for me. From this day forth, it said, my weapon would be— love— the sword of love— the only answer to hate. I was now to prepare for my new work. I was to be given knowledge of the future as proof of my power to my enemies. I was going to know the exact day of my release from prison and when the Governor of the state would in person deliver my pardon to San Quentin.

  “I was smiling when ‘The Pirate’ returned to my cell. He shouted, ‘You must like it!’ Again, into the straitjacket I was laced and terribly corseted, and again the pain was maddening, unbearable. But only at first. For the next three days I traveled out of San Quentin in my astral body. I made many journeys, traveled many places, and saw many people do many things. I traveled backwards along my own karmic path, following a kind of frequency wave that took me in and out of many lifetimes.

  “After that experience, they removed the jacket, and I was left to lie alone in my cell. But then ‘The Pirate’ came in again one day and screamed at me: ‘The guns or death!’ I told them I had no guns. ‘The Pirate’ ordered a double-jacketing. The prison doctor who was there supervising said that a double-jacketing would kill me in five days.

  “After four days in the jacket, a Senate investigation committee came to the prison. “The Pirate’ was afraid that word might leak out to the committee about what they were doing to me, and so the ‘The Pirate’ came down with the guards and they released me from the jacket.

  “I was temporarily paralyzed, unable to move. But as they all were leaving my cell, I called out: ‘This is the last time I will ever be tortured in a jacket! One year from today I will go out of this dungeon never to return to it a prisoner; and better still, four years from the day I leave this dungeon, I will walk from this prison a free man with a pardon in my hand.’ They all thought I was mad, but every word I said came true.”

  I looked northward. We were approaching the town of Tiburon at the shores of the Marin headlands.

  “How?” I asked. “How were you released?”

  Morrell said, “One year later the new warden walked into my solitary cell and introduced himself to me. He explained that he had been warden for three weeks, and from his first day he had been investigating my case. He explained to me that he had discovered that I had never been proven guilty in my trial and that he was demanding that my sentence be revoked.”

  “That is incredible!” I gasped.

  “And absolutely true,” Jack said.

  Morrell went on:

  “That new warden— Major John W. Tompkins— led me to the prison hospital. I spent months there recuperating. When I got better, Tompkins appointed me ‘head trusty’. He did this in opposition to all the officials on the Prison Board. It was at this time that Tompkins explained to me how he had come to be warden of San Quentin. The position of San Quentin warden had already been offered to Tompkins before, and he had refused it. When the new governor called Tompkins on the telephone to make the offer again, Tompkins sat in his study tapping a pencil on a pad of paper. He scribbled on the pad absentmindedly. Tompkins told the governor that he would think over the offer, and hung up the telephone. He then looked down at the pad before him and saw scribbled upon its surface the name ‘Ed Morrell’. This bothered Tompkins a good deal, for he could not recall ever hearing of an ‘Ed Morrell’. He called up a friend who was a state official and found out that ‘Ed Morrell’ was the dung
eon man in San Quentin. The next day Tompkins accepted the governor’s offer and became warden of San Quentin.”

  “And you think you sent the thought of your name to Tompkins over the astral plane?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Morrell said. “I think Tompkins was influenced by some extraordinary power, for he had never heard my name before. Four years precisely after I was led out of the dungeon, Governor Warren Porter personally handed me my pardon, just as I had foretold down in my dungeon. That is my story, and here is our landing place.”

  Jack, Morrell, and I disembarked the ferry boat and strolled along the main street of Tiburon until we came up to a taxi waiting by the curb. We all got in it.

  “Take us up to the prison,” Jack said.

  The driver started us off up the street and toward the hills.

  “So what are you doing now, Morrell?” I asked.

  “I am traveling the country giving lectures,” Morrell said.

  “Teaching astral travel and giving out fortunes in private readings?” I asked.

  Jack sighed again with a weary disgust.

  “No,” Morrell said quietly in a friendly tone. “None of that. Conscious astral travel is not for everyone. I was given that ability for a purpose. I have found my purpose.”

  “And what is that?” I asked.

  “Prison reform,” Morrell said. “That is my aim. That is my calling; that is the subject of my lectures— to bring out the prisoners from the prison.”

  “Don’t you think most of those who are in prisons deserve to be there?” I asked.

  “That is not the question,” Morrell said.

  “Then what is the question?” I asked.

  “Don’t you think prisons are an admission that society has failed to teach, guide, and grow the children of our nation? Don’t you think prisons in their present barbaric conditions add immeasurably to the problems that have already been created by a country that has failed to teach, guide, and grow its children? These are the questions you should be asking yourself. These are the questions we should all be asking ourselves.”

  I took in a breath to have my next say and found that I had no say. I had no say at all. I looked out the window. Our taxi was winding along a curving hill of rock and dried grass, that brown grass that is everywhere in California before the big rains come. Farther up the hill, in a fold in the earth, I saw patches of green.

  Finally I looked back to Morrell and said, “You are not a Spiritualist.”

  “One of those who claim to talk with the dead?” Morrell asked. “No. Like it says in the good book, let the dead bury the dead. I am only concerned with the living. As for the dead, I know they will live again. In the fundamental truth of things, at the bottom of all mysteries, all is life, and all time is now. Everything happens at once. You and I and the rest of us are only suffering from a delusion of sequences. But it is our proper lot to live out this delusion of sequences the best that we can.”

  Our driver steered our taxi along the winding road leading through the hills toward San Quentin. In a few minutes, I caught a glimpse of the prison between two hills, a glimpse that flashed out of sight as our taxi continued over the hill. Then the road curved back to the east to the prison, we rounded a hill, and the prison’s wall came into sight and, over the edge of the wall, a section of the prison yard. Beyond the yard rose a collection of gray rectangular buildings and smoke bellowing from their chimneys. I felt my muscles recoil in the pit of my stomach. A sense of foreboding evil and suffering radiated from the place. It was a feeling I had sensed in the presence of most prison walls. But San Quentin projected this feeling with an all-pervading intensity. I had felt it when I had seen the prison three weeks earlier, and I felt it even more now. There was no question about it: this prison was the abode of the damned.

  Our driver brought the taxi to a stop, and Jack, Morrell, and I got out.

  The way into San Quentin was a series of gates and doors, heavily guarded by armed guards, guards with dispassionate faces. These men led a life of the moment and of the literal. Their eyes constantly shifted about, betraying a fear that showed no where else on their persons. Their eyes shifted over Jack, Morrell, and me, as we went through the visitor’s station and were then led down a corridor, through more doors, and finally a big gate which led to the main yard.

  “Hey,” the guard at the gate said to Morrell. “Remember me?”

  “I remember your face,” Morrell said.

  “Long time,” the guard said, opening the door. “Hear you’re doing all right.”

  “I’m all right,” Morrell said. “How about you?”

  “About the same,” the guard said. “Things ain’t so interesting since you left.”

  On the other side of the gate, we were taken around the perimeter of the main yard with several guards in front and behind us. A wire fence separated us from the prisoners who stood in clumps of men all throughout the yard. We reached another gate and went through it, up some stairs, and down a hallway. A guard opened the door, and we were ushered into the waiting room of the warden’s office. The guard that had opened the outer door went to the warden’s office door and knocked. I heard a man’s voice say: “Come in.”

  The guard opened the door and leaned around it.

  “They’re here, warden,” the guard said.

  I heard a man’s voice say, “All right.”

  The guard came back toward us, and the Warden James Johnston appeared in the doorway. Johnston was a rather tall, strong-looking man wearing glasses. He walked right up to me.

  “Thanks for coming again, Houdini,” Johnston said to me, extending his right hand. I shook it.

  “Thanks for having us, warden,” I said. “You know Mr. Morrell.”

  “Yes,” Johnston said, shaking Morrell’s hand. “How are you doing, Ed?”

  “I’m fine,” Morrell said. “I feel a little uneasy, being back here again.”

  “Yes,” Johnston said. “I appreciate you coming here.”

  I said, “And this is Jack London.”

  “Yes,” Johnston said, shaking Jack’s hand.

  “The warden and I have met before,” Jack said.

  “I’m looking forward to your performance,” Johnston said to me. “So are the inmates. We’ve all read about what you did in Oakland the other day. That was quite a stunt. Did the two of you see it?”

  Morrell shook his head.

  “Ed was out of town, but I saw it,” Jack said. “The papers didn’t capture it.”

  “So what do you have to show us today?” the warden asked.

  “A magician never tells what he’s going to do,” I said. “He just does it.”

  Johnston smiled and nodded.

  “All right,” Johnston said. “Then let’s get on with the show. The audience is waiting.”

  We all walked out of the office together and back down the hall and stairs.

  “I’ll introduce Ed,” Johnston said to me, “and then he can introduce you. Do you need anything up on the platform? Tables? Chairs?”

  “Just me,” I said. “Just me and the blue sky— well, the gray sky; I’ll have to settle for that today.”

  Johnston and his guards led us back out into the prison yard, through a gate, and up the steps on a wooden platform. The inmates stood in their striped uniforms in the yard, hundreds of them. None of them moved from where they stood. Guards ringed the edges of the crowd, and up on the walls sharpshooters kept watch with their rifles held up in the air readied for instant aiming, shooting, and killing.

  Johnston stepped forward and spoke loudly:

  “All right, you men. Our visitors have arrived. Give them your attention and respect. They’ve taken their valuable time to come here today for your benefit. Our first distinguished visitor today, many of you know and remember: Ed Morrell.”

  Morrell stepped forward and shook hands with Johnston again. The inmates applauded. Morrell stepped up and addressed the assemblage. He said:

  “Hello.
Like the warden said, I’m Ed Morrell and I used to live here.”

  The prisoners laughed and some of them hooted.

  Morrell went on: “All you mugs are just as ugly as I remember.”

  More laughter. One prisoner shouted: “You ain’t purty, neither Ed!”

  More laughter and more hoots. A guard roared through a megaphone: “Quiet down!”

  “Yes,” Morrell said. “We’re all a bunch of ugly mugs, all right. You know, I lived here a long time. Most of the time I did here seemed a lot longer than it really was, because I hated this place, I hated the guards, and I hated the warden, hated the warden most of all. I know a lot of you remember ‘The Pirate’.”

  There was a low grumbling sound in the crowd.

  Morrell went on, “The time went by fast when I came to the day that I stopped hating. I can’t tell you how to stop hating. I’m not a preacher. But I know if you can find a way to stop hating everybody, your lives will get a whole lot better, your time will go by a whole lot faster, and everything for you will be a whole lot better, and better for everybody else, too. Hating is a losing proposition, I can tell you. There’s no profit in it. So, I wish all of you luck, and hope all of you can get out of here some day and go straight, and have a family. Everything I have now, you can have too. If I got out of here, you can get out of here. Those of you who know me, know that I was a lifer in solitary. It doesn’t get any worse than that, except for the death row. So if I can do it, you can do it. So do it. That’s about all I can tell you. Now, I want to introduce you to a very unusual person. A lot of you have probably read or heard about him. He’s over in Oakland now doing his magic shows in a theatre, and he’s got the whole town over there completely mystified. For those of you who don’t know, this man is a special kind of magician called an escape artist.”

  Much laughter and shouts from the inmates.

  “Can he paint me outta this hole?” somebody shouted.

  “Shut up!” a guard screamed from a megaphone.