THE PENITENTIARY
"As long as a nation harbors a body of men authorized to inflict punishment, as long as there are prisons in which such a body can carry out these punishments, that nation cannot call itself civilized."
Message written on his prison wall,
by Francisco Ferrer.
It was a clear December morning when, from the little boat which carried me across the river, I spied the outline of the penitentiary squatting on the lower end of Blackwell's Island. It was my first view of it and the impression made on my mind was so ominous and sinister that my heart almost sank within me as I entered the fateful gates.
"Hey, there! Where do you t'ink you are? Take dem gloves off!" shouted a tough, strong voice as I stood waiting in front of the office window, recounting my pedigree and giving up my private belongings for safe keeping. In the old prison, I found six new prisoners waiting in line.
Our hair was clipped by a convict barber, and we were ordered to divest ourselves of our civilian clothes and take a shower bath. While we were trying to dry ourselves with two small hand towels, prison underwear and striped suits were thrown at our feet.
The trousers were decidedly too long, the coat, and the rag—unjustly named a vest—both too short; a cap which came down to my eyebrows made up this uniform of degradation and infamy. Harlequin's costume never looked more ridiculous than our own, which was mended, patched and repatched from long use by generations of long-suffering convicts.
The prison authorities, I suppose, are to be commended for their thrift; but I cannot help feeling that by putting on those frayed and wornout caricatures of uniforms we are endangering our health.
In the photographer's house behind the shower baths we are "mugged"; our Bertillon measurements are taken, even to "beauty spots" and pimples, by a red-haired, freckled-faced young man. A sign twelve inches long, black, with white numerals, is hung round my neck over a black cotton coat, and I am told to look pleasant until the camera has focussed my profile and full face.
Sitting on benches, waiting for their turn, are a dozen prisoners. They are all old, white-haired, naked and shivering; old offenders, recidivists, tramps, bums, drunken louts; lean, pale, bruised, with anemic, unhealthy skins, red noses, fishy eyes, bloated faces, large hands, knotty, ungainly feet, purple with the cold.
A very old man attracts my attention by his immobility, his general paleness, and his extraordinary gauntness, which shows the perfect outline of his muscles, and reminds me of the statue representing San Bartolommeo in the cathedral of Milan, holding his whole skin over his arm like a bath robe.
Squint-eyed and almost blind, this old man, of more than the allotted span of seventy years, seems unable to recollect his name, occupation or social status.
"A bum, I guess," remarks the keeper.
It appears that he is deaf, and his neighbour nudges him with an elbow and shouts in his ear:
"Say yes!"
"Yes, sir!" hastily answers the old man.
These derelicts of society are going to the workhouse on Monday.
Later we are ordered to clean and wash the small glass panes in the windows of the main prison. Trusties in smart, new, striped clothes, with creased pants and caps, rushed by eyeing us with curiosity. "Whatcheh in fer?" "What did the judge hand yeh?" are the leading whispered queries.
A pungent, musty, sickening smell pervades the old prison, which is barely lighted by a dismal and gray reflection filtering through the small windows. An inscription on the wall shows the date of construction to be 1864. The cell where Boss Tweed died is pointed out to me.
Suddenly the electric lights are switched on and a bell starts ringing in a loud, metallic, persistent note, not unlike the subway starting bells. A heavy, automatic, dull noise in the distance announces the approaching footsteps of the convicts returning from work. In measured step, each gang followed by its keeper, more than a thousand men march past the head keeper's desk.
All the varieties of ages, figures, physiognomies, expressions, are illustrated to my astonished eyes. Young men with red cheeks and simple faces; strong men with bullet heads, broad shouldered, surly or impassive; fat men with wabbling bellies and cheerful faces; old men bent and hoary with age; slow and listless young men with effeminate gestures; a few cripples on sticks or crutches, and wobbling along behind the lines, a paralytic led by a companion. They all file by, stamping their feet in German military fashion.
At moments the order is given to slow up or stop, and the convicts continue to move the legs in rhythmic step, their bodies almost touching, and giving the appearance of an enormous centipede dancing a gruesome, macabre saraband.
Finely shaped heads are rare; it looks as if an almighty sculptor had left his handiwork unfinished, or purposely kept it in rude outline. Foreheads are either too bulging or too retreating, eyes too sunken or too protruding, noses too large or too small, mouths too sensual or too cruel, chins too powerful or too weak.
Smiling or frowning, aggressive or indifferent, surly or pleasant, all the different expressions and gestures are sketched out in violent chiaroscuro, and compose a cartoon worthy of a Frans Hals or a Michelangelo.
My eyes absorb the kaleidoscopic, ignoble, unbelievable pageant. As an artist I am fascinated, hypnotized by this fantastic procession of human zebras, slashed with broad stripes of gray and black, with the four prison tiers as a background, and the dark blue uniforms and gold buttons of the keepers adding a touch of color.
As a human being I am shocked and repelled by this grotesque, degrading parade.
Is this really the Inferno or only the last Judgment, I ask myself?
"Get in line, you loafer!" shouts a red-faced keeper, shaking his stick at me. Thus I am awakened from my dreams.