The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

Harry's handwriting was firm, clear-cut, and uniform. I lent to a friend the most striking and characteristic of his letters, and I can give no direct quotations from them, as they were not returned; but writing was his most cherished resource, and he tells me that when answering my letters he almost forgot that he was a prisoner.

The terrible ordeal of life was mercifully short to Harry Hastings. When I saw him last, in the prison hospital, a wasted bit of humanity fast drifting toward the shores of the unknown, with dying breath he still asserted his innocence; but he felt himself utterly vanquished by the decree of an adverse fate. To the mystery of death was left the clearing of the mystery of life.

It was Hiram Johnson who taught me what a smothering, ghastly thing prison life in America may be. One of the guards had said to me, "Hiram Johnson is a life man who has been here for years. No one ever comes to see him, and I think a visit would do him lots of good." The man who appeared in answer to the summons was a short, thick-set fellow of thirty-five or more, with eyes reddened and disabled by marble-dust from the shop in which he had worked for years. He smiled when I greeted him, but had absolutely nothing to say. I found that visit hard work; the man utterly unresponsive; answering in the fewest words my commonplace inquiries as to his health, the shop he worked in, and how long he had been there. Six months after I saw him again with exactly the same experience. He had nothing to say and suggested nothing for me to say. I knew only that he expected to see me when I came to the prison, and after making his acquaintance I could never disappoint one of those desolate creatures whose one point of contact with the world was the half-hour spent with me twice a year.

When I had seen the man some half-dozen times, at the close of an interview I said, in half-apology for my futile attempts to keep up conversation: "I'm sorry that I haven't been more interesting to-day; I wanted to give you something pleasant to think of."

"It has meant a great deal to me," he answered. "You can't know what it means to a man just to know that some one remembers he is alive. That gives me something pleasant to think about when I get back to my cell."

We had begun correspondence at the opening of our acquaintance, but rarely was there a line in his earlier letters to which I could make reply or comment. Mainly made up of quotations from the Old Testament, scriptural imprecations upon enemies seemed to be his chief mental resource. The man considered himself "religious," and had read very little outside his Bible, which was little more intelligible to him than the original Greek would have been; excepting where it dealt with denunciations.

In my replies to these letters I simply aimed to give the prisoner glimpses of something outside, sometimes incidents of our own family life, and always the assurance that I counted him among my prison friends, that "there was some one who remembered that he was alive." It was five or six years before I succeeded in extracting the short story of his life, knowing only that he had killed some one. The moral fibre of a man, and the sequence of events which resulted in the commission of a crime have always interested me more than the one criminal act. One day, in an unusually communicative mood, Johnson told me that as a child he had lost both parents, that he grew up in western Missouri without even learning to read, serving as chore-boy and farm-hand until he was sixteen, when he joined the Southern forces in 1863, drifting into the guerilla warfare. It was not through conviction but merely by chance that he was fighting for rather than against the South; it was merely the best job that offered itself and the killing of men was only a matter of business. Afterward he thought a good deal about this guerilla warfare as it related itself to his own fate, and he said to me:

"I was paid for killing men, for shooting on sight men who had never done me any harm. The more men I killed the better soldier they called me. When the war was over I killed one more man. I had reason this time, good reason. The man was my enemy and had threatened to kill me, and that's why I shot him. But then they called me a murderer, and shut me up for the rest of my life. I was just eighteen years old."

Such was the brief story of Johnson's life; such the teaching of war. In prison the man was taught to read; in chapel he was taught that prison was not the worst fate for the murderer; that an avenging God had prepared endless confinement in hell-fire for sinners like him unless they repented and propitiated the wrath of the Ruler of the Universe. And so, against the logic of his own mind, while religion apparently justified war, he tried to discriminate between war and murder and to repent of taking the one life which he really felt justified in taking; he found a certain outlet for his warlike spirit or his elemental human desire to fight, in arraying himself on God's side and against the enemies of the Almighty. And no doubt he found a certain kind of consolation in denouncing in scriptural language the enemies of the Lord.

But all this while in the depths of Johnson's nature something else was working; a living heart was beating and the sluggish mind was seeking an outlet. A gradual change took place in his letters; the handwriting grew more legible, now and again gleams of the buried life broke through the surface, revealing unexpected tenderness toward nature, the birds, and the flowers. Genuine poetic feeling was expressed in his efforts to respond to my friendship, as where he writes: