There is a remedy for this state of affairs. We have a legislature, a bar association, and a legal aid society. Among all these could not some arrangement be made for inspectors, to whom a man unjustly convicted could complain and receive assistance? Is there no relief or redress for the sufferers from the fourth degree, when even the third degree is forbidden by law?
If the third degree is brutal, the fourth is hellish. Call the third illegal assault, and you must name the fourth murder illegally designed. By means of the fourth a gentleman can be hounded to death by his enemies. In the third degree a criminal has his ears boxed.
CHAPTER XIV
It’s Just Like Her (A Chronicle of the Tombs)
The missionaries I have met! Mind, I am not speaking of the professional ones, those who are officially connected with the Tombs, or with Sing Sing prison; nor the chaplains. Years of experience have taught them their good work; they do it properly and without the aid of trumpets. Nor do I mean the ladies, who out of the goodness of their hearts, come and sing to us on Sundays. I am referring to those kind creatures who have made it their “life work” to come here occasionally and bestow tracts and cheering words upon us; the kind that carry enormous Bibles, full of colored book marks, pressed against their flat chests, and who punctuate their sentences by rolling their eyes upward. These book marks, I am convinced, are what make them so round-shouldered. They do not come during all the year: with summer they receive calls, doubtless from a celestial source, to “green fields and pastures new”; while the real helpers stay and, with us, bear the heat and burden of the day.
How I have been comforted by the visitations (on clear days during the winter, and how I have prayed for stormy ones) of these devoted and self-appointed examiners of my beliefs, and by a perusal of the literature they thrust upon me, “The Drunkard’s Home” (this to me, who have never tasted liquor in my life); “The Path to Hell” (when I am there already); “A Life of Sin” (I have always lived at home with my parents). Still another piece of literature informs me that I may possibly be a Christian, but not a clean one—if I smoke. Oh, the irony of life! with all this abundant and excellent supply, I am not allowed, while in the Tombs, to shave myself!
What a spiritual uplift I experienced by the sudden appearance of a female of uncertain age, who demanded: “Where are you going to spend eternity?” and before I could answer, “Not with you if I can help it,” she put her second question. “Do you pray, brother? Do you get right down on your knees and lift yourself up?” (wouldn’t that be a stunt? it is also a mixed metaphor, but what do missionaries care for rhetoric?)
On the first day of my incarceration a good lady (she is also a type of all the others) introduced herself to me in this manner: Transfixing me with an awful glance she said, “Man’s nature is threefold: physical, intellectual, spiritual. I am here to minister to your spiritual necessities.” This she proceeded to do by telling me to “look up, hope on, it is brighter further off”; and that I was in a prison cell—“for a purpose.”
Hardly had she passed on and left me happy in my solitude when her place was taken by another, and then another, who gave place to still another, all with the same tracts and expostulations. Not one of them neglected to tell me, that even St. Paul had been put in prison (for a purpose, doubtless), and that John Bunyan, although in a similar state of durance, had written that great and good book, “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Had I ever read it? I pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to read it again for my own good. After several hours of this, I also was in the mood to write—I wrote this and to my mother—begging her to come and sit in front of my cell all day, and to bring a broom; but still they came. My mother’s presence and the absence of the broom but gave them the opportunity to inflict her also.