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.
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:
"How happy would I be could I plant some thotte in the harte of my
friend that would give her pleasure for many a long day." And when
referring to some evidence of my remembrance of my prisoners, he said:
"We always love those littel for-gett-me-nottes that bloom in the harte
of our friends all the year round. Remember that we can love that which
is lovely."
Dwelling on the loneliness of prison life and the value of even an
occasional letter, he writes: "The kind word cheares my lonely hours
with the feelings that some one thinks of me. _Human nature seems to
have been made that way._ There are many who would soon brake down and
die without this simpathy."
Always was there the same incongruity between the spelling and a certain
dignity of diction, which I attributed to his familiarity with the
Psalms. His affinity with the more denunciatory Psalms is still
occasionally evident, as when he closes one letter with these sentences:
"One more of my enemies is dead. The hande of God is over them all. May
he gather them all to that country where the climate is warm and the
worm dieth not!"
To me this was but the echo of fragments of Old Testament teaching. At
last came one letter in which the prisoner voiced his fate in sentences
firm and clear as a piece of sculpture. This is the letter exactly as it
was written:
"MY DEAR FRIEND:
"I hope this may find you well. It has bin some time since I heard
from you and I feel that I should not trespass on you too offten.
You know that whether I write or not I shall in my thottes wander
to you and shall think I heare you saying some sweet chearing word
to incourage me, and it is such a pleasant thing, too. But you know
theas stripes are like bands of steel to keep one's mouth shut, and
the eye may not tell what the heart would say were the bondes
broken that keep the lippes shut. If one could hope and believe
that what the harte desired was true, then to think would be a
pleasure beyond anything else the world could give. But to be
contented here the soul in us must die. We must become stone
images.
"Yourse truly,
"HIRAM JOHNSON."
Not for himself alone did this man speak. "To be contented here the soul
in us must die." "We must become stone images." From the deepest depths
of his own experience it was given to this unlettered convict to say for
all time the final word as to the fate of the "life man," up to the
present day.
After this single outburst, if anything so restrained can be called an
outburst, Hiram Johnson subsided into much of his former immobility.
Like all "life men" he had begun his term in prison with the feeling
that it _must_ come to an end sometime. What little money he had was
given to a lawyer who drew up an application for shortening of the
sentence, the petition had been sent to the governor, and the papers,
duly filed, had long lain undisturbed in the governor's office. When I
first met Johnson he still cherished expectations that "something would
be done" in his case, but as years rolled by and nothing was done the
tides of hope ran low. Other men sentenced during the sixties received
pardons or commutations or had died, until at last "old Hiram Johnson"
arrived at the distinction of being the only man in that prison who had
served a fifty-year sentence.
Now, a fifty-year sentence does not mean fifty years of actual time. In
different States the "good time" allowed a convict differs, this good
time meaning that by good behavior the length of imprisonment is
reduced. In the prison of which I am writing long sentences could be
shortened by nearly one-half: thus by twenty-nine years of good conduct
Johnson had served a legal sentence of fifty years. No other convict in
that prison had lived and kept his reason for twenty-nine years. Johnson
had become a figure familiar to every one in and about the place. Other
convicts came and went, but he remained; plodding along, never
complaining, never giving trouble, doing his full duty within its
circumscribed limits. Altogether he had a good record and the
authorities were friendly to him.
Hitherto I had never asked executive clemency except in cases where it
was clear that the sentence had been unjust; and I had been careful to
keep my own record high in this respect, knowing that if I had the
reputation of being ready to intercede for any one who touched my
sympathies, I should lower my standing with the governors. But it seemed
to me that Johnson, by more than half his lifetime of good conduct in
prison had established a claim upon mercy, and earned the right to be
given another chance in freedom.
I found the governor in a favorable state of mind, as in one of his late
visits to the penitentiary Johnson had been pointed out to him as the
only man who had ever served a fifty-year sentence. After looking over
the petition for pardon then on file and ascertaining that Johnson had
relatives to whom he could go, the governor decided to grant his
release. But as an unlooked-for pardon was likely to prove too much of a
shock to the prisoner the sentence was commuted to a period which would
release him in six weeks, and to me was intrusted the breaking of the
news to Johnson and the papers giving him freedom. We knew that it was
necessary for Johnson to be given time to enable his mind to grasp the
fact of coming release and to make very definite plans to be met at the
prison-gates by some one on whom he could depend, for the man of
forty-seven would find a different world from the one he left when a boy
of eighteen. It gives one a thrill to hold in one's hands the papers
that are to open the doors of liberty to a man imprisoned for life, and
it was with a glad heart that I took the next train for the
penitentiary.
My interview with Johnson was undisturbed by any other presence, and he
greeted me with no premonition of the meaning of the roll of white paper
that I held. Very quietly our visit began; but when Johnson was quite at
his ease, I asked: "Has anything been done about your case since I saw
you last?" "Oh, no, nothing ever will be done for me! I've given up all
hope."
"I had a talk with the governor about you yesterday, and he was willing
to help you. He gave me this paper which you and I will look over
together." I watched in vain for any look of interest in his face as I
said this.
Slowly, aloud, I read the official words, Johnson's eyes following as I
read; but his realization of the meaning of the words came with
difficulty. When I had read the date of his release we both paused; as
the light broke into his mind, he said:
"Then in January I shall be free"; another pause, while he tried to
grasp just what this would mean to him; and then, "I shall be free. Now
I can work and earn money to send you to help other poor fellows." That
was his uppermost thought during the rest of the interview.
In the evening the Catholic chaplain, Father Cyriac, of beloved memory,
came to me with the request that I have another interview with Johnson,
saying: "The man is so distressed because in his overwhelming surprise
he forgot to thank you to-day."
"He thanked me better than he knew," I replied.
But of course I saw Johnson again the next day; and in this, our last
interview, he made a final desperate effort to tell me what his prison
life had been. "Behind me were stone walls, on each side of me were
stone walls, nothing before me but stone walls. And then you came and
brought hope into my life, and now you have brought freedom, and _I
cannot find words to thank you_." And dropping his head on his folded
arms the man burst into tears, his whole body shaken with sobs. I hope
that I made him realize that there was no need of words, that when deep
calleth unto deep the heart understands in silence.
Only yesterday, turning to my writing-desk in search of something else,
I chanced across a copy of the letter I wrote to the governor after my
interview with Johnson, and as it is still warm with the feelings of
that never-to-be-forgotten experience, I insert it here:
"I cannot complete my Thanksgiving Day until I have given you the
message of thanks entrusted to me by Hiram Johnson. At first he could
not realize that the long years of prison life were actually to be
ended. It was too bewildering, like a flood of light breaking upon one
who has long been blind. And when he began to grasp the meaning of your
gift the first thing he said to me was, 'Now I can work and earn money
to send you for some other poor fellow.'
"Not one thought of self, only of the value of liberty as a means, at
last, to do something for others. How _hard_ he tried to find words to
express his gratitude. It made my heart ache for the long, long years of
repression that had made direct expression almost impossible; and in
that thankfulness, so far too deep for words, I read, too, the measure
of how terrible the imprisoned life had been. Thank heaven and a good
governor, it will soon be over! Hiram Johnson has a generous heart and
true, and he will be a good man. And it is beautiful to know that
spiritual life can grow and unfold even under the hardest conditions."
What life meant to Johnson afterward I do not know; but I do know that
he found home and protection with relatives on a farm, and the letters
that he wrote me indicated that he took his place among them not as an
ex-convict so much as a man ready to work for his living and entitled to
respect. Being friendly he no doubt found friends; and though he was a
man near fifty, perhaps the long-buried spirit of youth came to life
again in the light of freedom. At all events, once more the blue skies
were above him and he drew again the blessed breath of liberty. Although
he never realized his dream of helping me to help others, I never
doubted the sincerity of his desire to do so.