XXIII
Convicts have a cunning and peculiar way of revenging themselves on bad and cruel keepers. When one of that type is put on night duty, following a prearranged sign the whole section suddenly starts a tremendous hullabaloo. Several hundred convicts, acting in unison, begin yelling, cat-calling, grunting, roaring, whistling, stamping their feet, beating the bars of their cages with tin cups and pail covers. The enraged keeper jumps up and down the tiers in a vain effort to catch the arch offenders, but on his coming a signal is passed to the whole tier, which suddenly becomes silent, the other sections in the meanwhile increasing the noise and disturbance until the warden appears. His presence seems only to put more zest, energy and lung power into the demonstration. Revolvers are fired to intimidate the men and they are threatened with dire punishment, but nothing seems to be able to quell the rebellion, and it is continued every night until the offending keeper is shifted.
These prearranged, noisy riots are rare and as a rule they occur only in cases when bad food or a series of persecutions have goaded the prisoners to the only real expression of protest which can be effective.
One night during the Hudson-Fulton celebration in New York, when all the city was gaily illuminated, and all the bridges were picked out in electric lights, and music and shouts could be heard in the distance, a rumpus started on a magnificent scale after the convicts had been locked up in their cells.
The whole prison seemed literally to have gone insane. The pandemonium let loose was so terrific that it could be heard both from the New York and the Brooklyn sides of the river. The warden and the keepers were perfectly helpless; they could not subdue the prisoners, who kept up their infernal racket for hour after hour, and stopped only from exhaustion, when there was no more lung power to draw on. This noisy and turbulent protest of a whole prison defying one of the strictest rules of jail law was a strange psychological curiosity; a mad, reckless, stentorian rebellion against the rules of silence when the great metropolis was heard noisily rejoicing across the river.
Prisoners are very quick to find out a bad or a good keeper, an honest or a grafting keeper.
Humane keepers always and invariably get the best results. They maintain discipline with very little effort, and the prisoners themselves see to it that the attitude of such keepers is not changed or embittered by malicious and silly conduct on their part or that of their companions. The foul-mouthed, brutal keeper never seems to be able to maintain discipline, and when he revenges himself by inflicting unjust punishments the men retaliate by all kinds of persecutions.
An unjust and exceedingly brutal keeper was waylaid one night on his way home by some released convicts, who "beat him up" in such a manner that he was sent to a hospital for almost a month.
The Jewish and Italian convicts are often victims of the persecutions of some keepers, who heap ridicule and injustice and punishment upon them. The "guineas," the "wops," the "sheenies" and "kikes," find no mercy at the hands of these keepers, who consider men of these races as inferior, fit only to be brutalized, slowly but surely, into superior races.
An Irish keeper said jokingly to an Italian convict who could not understand something in connection with his work:
"Let an Irishman show you. You dagoes don't know nothing. How does it come that they pick Popes from among the wops, I wonder?"
"Yes, sir," answered the Italian, "and never in two thousand years did they pick out an Irish Pope."