Cast the First Stone (22 page)

“My God!” Pete said and turned abruptly away and vomited all over the floor.

I stood there for awhile and looked at the body. The hair was partly floating in the dirty water and there were red-blistered burns on the back of the neck and ears, and a big hole was burned in the back of the shirt. His hands were tightly gripping the edges of the commode as if he had been trying to ram his head clear down the sewer.

“Come on, kid, let’s get out of here,” Blocker said.

I spat on the floor and turned to go. A colored convict came into the cell and looked about. He glanced indifferently at the body. “You know him?” I shook my head. He saw a half-burnt radio at the head of the bunk and took it. “He don’t need this,” he said, grinning at me. His teeth were decayed and tobacco-stained. He looked like a small scavenger animal.

“He don’t need that,” I said, going out on the range after Blocker and Pete.

As we went along we found the cells were full of them, white and colored convicts rummaging in the ruins, like maggots in a piece of rotting meat. They took everything they found that was even remotely valuable or had ever been of any value. They took those things that would not do them any good, but which they had always wanted, and now had a chance to take from the soot-blackened cells.

“Damned dirty buzzards!” Pete said.

“They’re not hurting anybody,” I said.

“They’re not going to find any money, anyway,” Blocker said. “Most of the guys who had any layers had it on ‘em and they’ve already been clipped.”

“I just hate to see it,” Pete said.

“Well get our share of it just as soon as they start gambling, won’t we kid?” Blocker said.

“Let’s go eat,” I said.

We went back across the yard to the dining room. Breakfast was being cooked but it wasn’t ready. They told us to wait awhile and they’d have breakfast for everyone. We went over to the 5&6 dormitories and past the front gates to the 3&4 cell block and then to the 1&2 cell block and finally back to our dormitory. Most of the convicts were sleeping. They were sprawled across the bunks in two’s and three’s with their clothes wrinkled and twisted about their bodies. I noticed that most slept with their mouths open and drooling saliva. I stretched out on my bunk. I was very sleepy but I couldn’t sleep.

After a time the breakfast bell rang and we went over to the dining room and had breakfast of bacon and eggs. There were no lines or companies. They came over in groups and filled up the empty seats. The policemen stepped aside to let them pass and stood about and watched us eat. There was very little talk. Everyone seemed sleepy and exhausted. They ate doggedly. When we left the dining room we saw the last truck load of bodies starting away. “Go wash up and get something to eat,” the deputy told the men who had just finished loading it.

“They got bacon and eggs for breakfast,” someone said.

“Hell, come on,” another convict said. “We can wash up in the kitchen. I’m hungry.”

Blocker and Pete and I went over and sat on the front steps of the hospital and watched the activity on the yard. From where we sat the prison looked about the same, now that the bodies had been moved. We saw only three regular prison guards and they had hangdog expressions and stood about grinning at every convict who passed. The stone and steel and concrete, solid, immovable, eternal, rooted prison was much the same. The birds sat on the wires and cheeped. The new grass was as green as it had been two days before, and freedom was as distant as freedom always is. Only the convicts were different. They were too weary and stunned to be violent. But they were quietly determined to obey no more rules, to work no more in the shops and mills. Mostly they wanted to sleep. They returned to their cells and dormitories, doubling up with the convicts who had come out of the 7&8 cell block alive. They lay on their bunks or sat about the tables talking listlessly or lackadaisically playing cards, as if with their last remaining ounce of energy they had to show that they would be defiant.

For the most part they were very orderly. Word had gone around that two companies of soldiers were patrolling the walls outside. Just before dinner the police lined up and marched out through the front gate. National Guardsmen and naval reserves, little apple-cheeked boys with tight fitting blue sailor pants, came in to take their place. Martial law prevailed, although no one seemed to know just what it meant. That first day after the fire no effort was made to restore the routine of the prison. No orders were issued. The convicts and the guardsmen and the sailors wandered aimlessly about the yard.

Shortly after noon the two largest national broadcasting systems installed mikes on the main walk down near the front gates. News analysts interviewed some of the convicts who had gathered around. Most of the convicts who showed any manner of heroism during the fire were asleep at the time. Those who got a chance to talk over the air were the loud-mouthed phonies. I noticed that they all shouted into the mikes. They ignored the questions of the interviewers and shouted loudly about their great heroism. One began proclaiming that he was innocent of the crime for which he’d been convicted. They had to pull him away from the mike. Most of them just told how many convicts’ lives they had saved.

A colored convict called Hard-Walking Shorty because he was a small, gnarled man with a game leg, began by clutching the mike as if it was an all-day sucker and shouting, “This is Hard-Walking Shorty. Hello, world! I’m a man of a few words but a lot of action. I brought down thirty men from 6-8. I doan know how I did it. I was stumblin’ through the smoke and flame with two men on each shoulder…” Before he got through he had saved over four hundred and ninety-nine men by actual count.

In fact, the dozen or so convicts who went on the air, by their accounts, had saved more lives than there were convicts in the prison. The news analysts didn’t seem to realize that the convicts were simply talking for a pardon. Finally the men began blaming the warden for the fire. The warden sent a couple of honor men down into the front yard to cut the broadcasting lines. But by then many of the convicts who hadn’t gotten any closer to the burning cell block than I had had become national celebrities.

That night it was rumored that during the confusion of the fire one convict had changed into civilian clothes, picked a pass from a reporter’s pocket, and walked calmly through the front gate. But he was the only one who escaped. Even the condemned men who were out on the yard did not try to escape. The convict whom the fireman shot in front of the dormitory and another who was shot by a guard—shot in the guts with a shotgun loaded with bird shot—were the only ones who had been killed. Their bodies had been hidden under some tarpaulin in the hole and the next morning loaded on one of the trucks with the burnt convicts, without word of the killings getting about. We learned afterward that the bodies had been taken to the fairgrounds and laid out in rows on the tables until identified and claimed. Those that were not claimed by relatives or friends were buried in Potter’s Field.

During the night the guardsmen were organized into patrol groups. Machine guns were mounted at strategic points about the yard, on top of buildings, and along the walls. When they saw the machine guns next morning some of the convicts permitted the guards to line them up and march them back to work. But most of the convicts still maintained their defiance.

That morning a Committee of Nine was organized by the convicts, in defiance of the warden. Dunlap, the instigator, called a mass meeting of the convicts on the yard that afternoon. The committeemen circulated among the convicts, passing along the word. They wore badges which said “
Committee
” and assumed the authority of guards.

Most of the convicts attended the meeting that afternoon. The yard was jammed with milling, noisy convicts. The patrol units of guardsmen and sailors were spaced along the outer walks. They carried rifles, riot guns and gas grenades. A platform had been erected by the alligator pool, and the p.a. system borrowed from the chapel. Dun-lap mounted the platform and called for silence. He was a short, powerfully built man with a forceful personality. He said it was the idea of the committee to direct a campaign of passive resistance against the warden.

“We just want to get rid of that bastard. We don’t want to riot. We don’t want to destroy any property. We don’t want to harm any of the guards or officials. Just ignore them if they say anything to you. Now this is the idea. We won’t have any more companies, no more routine, and no more work until the welfare department has completed an investigation and appointed a new warden and a new order of guards.” Everybody screamed and whistled and hurrahed. “The only person we want to keep is the deputy,” Dunlap said. “The deputy is all right. We’re going to ask the governor to appoint him warden.” The convicts shouted their approval.

The deputy was standing at the edge of the mass of convicts, bobbing his head. We felt that he condoned the proceedings and in time the rumor grew that he had instigated them. Before the fire he had never been actively disliked as had Gout, the warden, and others, but he had never been very popular. But following that meeting the convicts began to worship him. He couldn’t do anything wrong. He was the only official whom the convicts would obey. For a time the other officials and guards would not set foot within the yard. They congregated in the front offices and remained there all day.

Passive resistance was the order of the day. In conversation it took the place of the fire. All you could hear was “down with the pig.” The committee ran all activities within the walls. The deputy worked with them. The laundry, dining room, and powerhouse were kept in operation. All other activities were suspended. The convicts ate, slept, and gambled. They had that punk they’d always wanted, stayed up all night, ran wild in droves like hungry wolves, stole from each other and robbed each other with knives at throats in the darkness, raped each other. But no one escaped.

It was bitchery and abomination, Sodom and Gomorrah in the flower of its vulgarity, stark and putrid and obscene, grotesque and nauseating. I moved through the sickening, stinking, sordid, sloppy, sensuous sights and scenes hollow-eyed and stunned, as if I was walking in my sleep. All that time I couldn’t sleep. I lost weight rapidly and became very thin. Nothing I saw made any impression on me. I could no longer see any connection between the convicts and humanity. I didn’t even think of humanity at all.

Tables were carried outdoors and the convicts gambled on the yard. Blocker and I ran our game on a desk we dragged from the school. At night we dragged it back inside the school. We took turns to eat because our game ran continuously, day and night. We had to hire three extra dealers to work shifts, and six tough convicts to protect the game from being robbed.

Bunks had been moved into the school to house convicts from the 7&8 cell block and, for a time, the school became the center of gambling and perversion. One night some convicts got hold of a package of marijuana weed. A dozen or so convicts stripped naked and had a “circus” in one of the schoolrooms. Convicts came from all over the prison to watch.

Occasionally Blocker and I would leave the game and wander about the prison to see what was going on in other places. We always took along two bodyguards. I saw a colored convict in the coal company who had twelve radios stacked about his bunk. Most of them were burnt and damaged beyond repair. None of them would play. But they were now his and he sat in the middle of them, looking very proud.

The fags paid fabulous sums to have articles of feminine apparel and make-up smuggled inside. It was said one cop made enough money from this business to buy a new car. In the 3&4 cell block the fags paraded about in their silk panties and nylon stockings and bright colored kimonos and diaphanous negligees. They wore heavily padded pink and black satin loincloths and their legs and arms and armpits were shaved. Their bodies were powdered and their faces rouged and their mouths heavy with lipstick. During the day they switched about the yard, rouged and powdered, but wearing their uniform trousers and silk blouses. They solicited around the gambling tables and at night they returned to their cells and did business.

Mississippi Rose, the liver-lipped colored convict whom I had seen robbing the dead Negro on the yard the night of the fire, had opened a red-light dive on 5-3. He had curtained off the front of the cell and covered the inside light with red tissue paper. Chick, a small blond fellow, had his hair marcelled. He had a cell on 5-4 where four or five fags worked in turns. The most popular girl-boy of all was a small, girlish sailor who was very animated and cute and had quick little movements and a bright little smile. It was rumored that he was charging twenty-five dollars and getting it.

A canteen had been set up in front of the chapel where ice cream, cake and cigarettes could be bought. All day long it was crowded with convicts spoiling with their kids.

The following Sunday services were held in commemoration of “…our dear dead comrades,” as Deacon Smith defined them. I attended the services in the Protestant chapel. The chaplain said a prayer for the departed souls. That was the first time I had seen him since the previous Sunday. I hadn’t even thought of him. Afterward Deacon Smith said a prayer and several visiting ministers prayed. I thought that the souls were getting a great send-off. Then a fat-faced fag sang “My Buddy.” Tears poured down his cheeks like showers of rain. Many of the convicts began crying. I began crying also. I wondered what the hell I was crying about. But I couldn’t help it. The chaplain said another prayer for the living convicts and we got up and sauntered out. As we crossed the yard we saw little black Doorbelly chasing big black Gravy down the main walk. Doorbelly had a brick in each hand and Gravy was highballing. The guardsmen were laughing. Doorbelly cut loose with one of the bricks and smashed a dining-room window. One of the committeemen ran over and stopped him.

There was plenty of money. I heard a National Guardsman who was watching a crap game say, “By golly, there’s more money in here than I ever seen before.” There probably was.