The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

CHAPTER VIII

In another instance, with quite different threads, the hand of fate seemed to have woven the destiny of the man, but I was slow in perceiving that it was not merely the tragedy of the prison that was unfolding before me but the wider drama of life itself.

Generally speaking, among my prison acquaintance there was some correspondence between the personality of the man and his history. The prisoner who said frankly to me, "I always cheat a man when I can, because I know he would cheat me if he had the chance: 'tis diamond cut diamond," this man curiously but logically resembled a fox. And any one could see at a glance that Gay Bowers was a man in whom was no guile.

But no clew to the complex nature of Harry Hastings was to be found in his appearance. We had exchanged a number of letters before we met. He wrote intelligently with but an occasional slip in spelling, and seemed to be a man of fair education. He was in prison for life on the charge of having shot in the street a woman of the streets; the man claimed innocence, but I never tried to unravel the case, as the principal witness for the defence had left the city where the shooting occurred, and there seemed to be no starting-point for an appeal for pardon. What the boy wanted of me—he was but little past twenty—was a channel through which he could reach the higher things of life. Passionate aspiration ran through all his letters, aspiration toward the true, the beautiful, and the good. He quoted Emerson and studied George Eliot—Romola, the woman, he criticised for being blinded to Tito's moral qualities by his superficial charms. He had a way of piercing to the heart of things and finding beauty where many others would have missed it. Music he loved above all else; and in music his memory was haunted by "The Coulin"—a wild, despairing cry of downtrodden Ireland, an air in which, some one has said, "Ireland gathered up her centuries of oppression and flung it to the world in those heart-breaking strains." It happened that I had never heard "The Coulin" except under my own fingers, and it struck me as a curious bit of the boy's make-up that this tragic music had become part of his mental endowment. He had heard it but once, played by a German musician. Barring glimpses of the world of music, the boy's life had been such as to exclude him from all the finer associations of life.

He had written me, in his second letter, that he was "coloured"; and he had given this information as if he were confessing a crime more serious even than murder. He really felt that he might be uncovering an impassable chasm between us. Race prejudices are against my principles, but I was taken aback when the writer of those interesting letters was materialized in the person of the blackest little negro I ever saw. "Black as the ace of spades," was my first thought. He had no father at that time but was devoted to his mother, who was an illiterate colored woman. As a growing boy he had gone to a horse-race and, fired with the ambition to become a horse-jockey, had hung around the racing-stables until his aptitude for the business attracted the horsemen. Harry was agile and fearless and of light weight, and when at last his ambition was attained he told me it was the proudest day of his life; and he felt that he had achieved glory enough to satisfy any one when the horse he rode as jockey won the race.

The associations of the race-track formed the school of those plastic years; and the thorn in the flesh was the nickname of "the little runt" by which he was known among the men. The consciousness of his stunted body and his black skin seemed seared upon his very heart, a living horror from which there was no escape. This, far more than his fate as a life prisoner, was the tragedy of his existence. Freedom he could hope for; but only death could release him from his black body. He did not despise the colored race; rather was he loyal to it; it was his individual destiny, the fact that his life was incased in that stunted black form that kept alive the sense of outrage. He hated to be known as "the little runt." He hated his coal-black skin.

Doubtless when free to mingle with colored people on the outside his other faculties came into play, for he had the darky love of fun and sense of humor; but the prison life cut him off from all that, and, the surface of his nature being stifled, what dormant strains of white ancestry might not have been aroused to activity? His skin was black, indeed; but his features told the story of the blending with another race. I could but feel that it was the mind of the white man that suffered so in the body of the black—that in this prisoner the aristocrat was chained to the slave. The love of literature, the thirst for the higher things of life, had no connection with "Little Runt," the ignorant horse-jockey. Was the man dying of homesickness for the lost plane of life?

The theosophist would tell us that Harry Hastings might have been a reincarnation of some cruel slave-trader, merciless of the suffering he inflicted upon his innocent victims; and possibilities of the stirring of latent inherited memories are also suggested. Be that as it may, we cannot solve the problem of that life in which two streams of being were so clearly defined, where the blue blood was never merged in the black.