XX
The conversation at our meals in the hospital table d'hôte, although carried on in an undertone, is very often amusing and enlivened by quite witty repartee. The table manners of the men are not as bad as might be expected from the motley crowd which adorns our board. All the nationalities and races and classes of this wide world have been waited upon by us: negroes, Chinamen, Mexicans, Slavs, Italians, Jews, Hungarians, Arabs, Syrians, Hindus; members of all the different professions, such as waiters, lawyers, hold-up men, capitalists, fortune tellers, doctors, sneak thieves, bankers, bums, dentists, burglars, "sky pilots," grafters, butchers, gamblers, street car conductors, confidence men, tailors, insane men, tramps, crooks, horse poisoners, saloon keepers—everybody and everything!
In a restaurant, in a public café, in a barroom, one meets or sees many people whose profession or real status is a mystery, and often a secret; but here everybody's profession, character, antecedents, sentence, criminal record, are known, judged and commented upon. Here nobody can put on airs because he has a fat bank account, finer clothes, more expensive jewelry, better family connections, or greater political influence. A man is judged by his character, his personality, his attitude toward the prisoners and the keepers. This is one place where fine feathers do not make fine birds.
The appetite of the men, with the exception of the sick, is always of the best. They are very particular about the quantity as well as the quality of the food. There is no reason to complain about it, except the coffee, which is served downstairs, and which is no coffee at all, but roasted bread crust which spoils the water in which it is soaked. Many a man would prefer pure water to the unsweetened, light-brown mixture, called "bootleg." It isn't even near coffee, but it is insidiously named "coffee," so as to prove to the public that the convicts are pampered and spoiled.
One day a member of the Prison Commission who was visiting the penitentiary picked up a tin cup of "coffee" which was standing in the mess hall, where the convicts were watching the visitors testing the food which had been picked out for that purpose. The Commissioner drank half a mouthful of the "bootleg," and then, with a wry face, swiftly spat it on the floor. The convicts did not laugh; they were too well disciplined for that; but an almost imperceptible whispering titter swept all over the mess hall like a June breeze wafting over a wheat field.