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.