The charge of highway robbery lodged against Choc Floyd was strong. He would not dare admit it, but Choc knew as soon as Bert Cotton pulled him over and found the loot that the law had him dead to rights. When the St. Louis authorities arrived and pored over the evidence, Choc became resolved that at least for a few years he was going to experience life in the home state of Jesse James. It would not be pleasant.
Seven years after his arrest for the payroll job, Choc would explain to a tenacious female reporter, “I was just a green country kid that got caught on a job that I didn’t know much about….”
On September 17, 1925, the train out of Sallisaw, which carried “the green country kid,” pulled into St. Louis. It stopped at Union Station, an imposing four-story landmark made of Bedford stone and part of a twenty-acre complex on the south side of Market Street. The prisoners were escorted from the cavernous train shed, the largest in the nation, to an outside entrance where police squad cars waited to take them five blocks up Market Street to the city jail at the rear of the Municipal Courts Building.
Inside the jail, Choc was fingerprinted and booked in as number 22318. He had spent a little time in country jail houses in the past. This was the first occasion on which he had been given an official identification number. Choc was also provided with legal counsel, although there was not much a defense attorney could do but wait for the wheels of justice to grind. That often took some time.
Intense questioning, which had started back in Sallisaw, continued. Choc, who did not have any incriminating evidence in his possession at the time of his arrest, admitted to nothing. Even under pressure in a smoky interrogation room, he refused to break. Fred Hildebrand, however, spilled the beans. He not only confessed to his role in the September 11 holdup but also implicated Choc Floyd and a storekeeper named Joseph Hlavaty as his accomplices. Police officers went to Hlavaty’s Meramec Highland grocery and found a suitcase containing $2,311 of the stolen payroll money. When he was grilled, Hlavaty admitted his part in the robbery. He said he had met Hildebrand and Floyd in early September when they were camping on the Meramec River, and they had accosted a couple of local girls. Later, the girls identified Choc as one of their attackers, but the criminal case was weak and no additional charges were filed. The young women’s statements, however, did put Choc and Hildebrand together in the state around the time of the robbery.
A Kroger Company paymaster placed Choc at the scene of the crime. The witness picked out Choc as one of the bandits who had confronted him and made off with the payroll. The paymaster reportedly remembered him as “a young fellow, about twenty or twenty-two, with a round, kind of pretty face.” If the paymaster did indeed call Choc “pretty,” that remark undoubtedly hurt the macho Oklahoman’s feelings more than the man fingering him as a robber.
Given the state of affairs in the countryside of Oklahoma and elsewhere, the arrest of a young man like Charles Floyd was hardly extraordinary. Many such boys, in fact, came from decent homes much like the Floyds. The day Choc returned as a prisoner to St. Louis, a sixteen-year-old nephew of slain bank robber Henry Starr pleaded guilty to robbery in Newkirk, Oklahoma. He was given a fifteen-year prison sentence. Douglas Starr had been found by lawmen in a cornfield after he was seriously wounded during a gun battle with two men he had tried to rob. Less than a week before, in a separate incident on September 12, as Choc and Hildebrand were driving down from Missouri with their newly purchased Studebaker, another of Henry Starr’s nephews—Emmet R. Daugherty—had been fatally wounded by deputy sheriffs. Daugherty, a veteran of World War I, fired three shots from a .45 saddle rifle as the deputies approached him at a midnight drinking party during an Indian stomp dance northeast of Bartlesville. Too much liquor proved his downfall.
The abuse of alcohol was on the rise not only among country boys like Starr’s nephew but also with college students and others, according to a national survey that was released that week of 185 representative cities. Prohibition was not working—far from it. As reflected by the arrests for intoxication, drinking had greatly increased in the 1920s at universities across the nation. The survey found that “the college bootlegger is a popular and much sought after person.” Prohibition caused other casualties. In Cleveland, Ohio, it was revealed on September 17 that a half dozen federal agents were being treated for partial loss of sight or violent illness after they sampled bootleg liquor they found in a raid, as was required by the government’s rules of evidence.
Church officials protested that many Americans were going to the dogs because of alcohol. In Tulsa that September, even a dog was found to have become a hopeless drunk. The bulldog, owned by Police Captain Woodrow Wilson, lost his home because of illegal alcohol. A resident mascot at police headquarters, the dog found an open jar of choc beer and got a taste for the stuff. He became a confirmed rum hound and was given the dubious name Rummy Bull. He could not be stopped from sniffing out other containers of contraband liquor, supposedly evidence in bootlegger raids, and lapping it up until he became too tipsy to patrol the hallways without a noticeable starboard list. When Rummy Bull got tanked up on some corn liquor and battled with Tom, a resurrected alley cat and another revered police mascot, the feline made short work of the drunken dog. Bleeding from scratches, the bulldog went howling for cover. When Rummy sobered up, he found he had been demoted and given to a strict Baptist family. His wild drinking days were over, and no doubt his name was changed.
There were times that boozy autumn when Charley Floyd would have given anything for a swig of Rummy Bull’s choc beer to help break the monotony of sitting in a cramped jail cell. However, at least his predicament was not life-threatening, nor was the sentence he finally received as severe as the punishment dealt to the nephews of Henry Starr.
After lingering at the jail and the city workhouse for several months, Choc was finally brought into a district courtroom on December 8, 1925. His appearance in court that Tuesday morning was merely a formality. He had long ago decided to plead guilty and take his medicine. All the paperwork was in order and lawyers from both sides were in their pressed woolen suits with vests.
Choc hardly blinked when he heard the judge say, “I hereby sentence you to five years in the state penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri.”
Afterward, though, when he was being shuffled back to his cell, the judge’s words finally soaked in, and Choc got a lump in his throat the size of one of Maggie Hardgrave’s good biscuits. Five years: That was 1,825 days gone right down the hole in the outhouse. That was a mess of living he could never get back.
Hlavaty was also given a five-year prison term, and Hildebrand, the one who had squealed on the rest, was handed an eight-year sentence. So much for being an informer. Ten days after he entered his guilty plea and heard his punishment, Choc was taken back to Union Station to board a train along with forty-eight others, including some female prisoners, bound for the state pen. All of them were dressed in street clothes and were in handcuffs and leg irons linked by a sturdy chain.
If some of the policemen who escorted the prisoners down to Union Station that morning seemed on edge, it was because the night before a pack of bandits had shot and killed a young traffic officer near Grand Boulevard and Olive Street when he surprised the gunmen in the act of holding up a cigar store. The cop killers were at large and none of the men in blue would sleep well until they were nabbed or killed.
Choc’s train trip from St. Louis to the state prison was not nearly as exciting as the previous evening’s chase. The forty-eight St. Louis prisoners sat quietly on the Missouri Pacific train and looked out the windows as the countryside flashed by their blank faces.
D. L. Thompson, who later traded convict’s stripes for a cleric’s collar by becoming an ordained minister in Independence, Missouri, was another one of the young prisoners headed for Jefferson City that day. He could always easily recall Charley Floyd and that 129-mile train ride to the penitentiary.
“I remember he bought candy bars for all of us, and the five women on the chain, too,” Thompson said almost a half century later. There would be few other pleasant memories for the prisoners once they reached their new home.
The rails ran alongside the Missouri River, and as the train moved west beyond Gray Summit, it took the passengers through villages settled more than a century past by thrifty and industrious Germans. They passed by Washington, with its narrow streets, zither factory, and plants turning out corncob pipes. The towns of New Haven, Berger, Hermann, Gasconade, Morrison, and Chamois came and went. After they reached the Osage River and the land where the Osage Indians had long before maintained their villages, there was a stir among the prisoners who had made this trip before. They knew their final destination was near.
The penitentiary was located in Jefferson City, smack-dab in the center of the state. Named for Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri, straddled the steep southern bluff of the Missouri River, and was known to its citizens, mostly government employees, as Jeff or Jeff City. Thirty-one miles to the north in Columbia, was the University of Missouri, the state’s primary center for higher learning. Railroad lines linked Jeff with Kansas City 148 miles to the west and St. Louis in the east, and had helped draw a few industries to the area. State government was Jeff City’s primary business, however. File clerks, stenographers, and an assortment of wearied bureaucrats resided in frame, brick, and stone homes built along the city’s hilly avenues.
Jeff had progressed from a rough frontier village with hogs wandering the streets, when it was incorporated in 1839, to a comfortable city of about twenty thousand industrious citizens whose lives depended on the red tape and regulations of civil service. The state’s seat of government had been moved to Jeff City from the temporary capital of St. Charles in 1826. Since then, there had been two capitol buildings lost to fires, the first one in 1837 and then again on the night of February 5, 1911, when a bolt of lightning struck the dome. Construction of the new capitol building, located on the site of the former statehouse at High Street between Broadway and Washington streets, had been completed in 1917, only eight years before Charley’s arrival. Built of almost eight hundred train carloads of stone and finished with Carthage marble that had been mined out of southwest Missouri, the four stories of the capitol rose above the river into a lanterned dome topped by a bronze statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. The nearby three-story governor’s mansion, erected in 1871 when the James gang was gathering a full head of steam, was enclosed with an ornamental iron fence and faced the capitol from the bluff overlooking the river.
Four blocks east of the mansion on Capitol Avenue was the state penitentiary. Authorized in 1832, it was the first state prison built west of the Mississippi River and originally consisted of a few small buildings on a quarter-acre lot surrounded by a wooden stockade. The state legislature set aside $25,000 to build a proper penitentiary in 1833. Construction of the prison was completed in 1836. When Wilson Edison, a twenty-two-year-old Tennessean sentenced from Greene County to two years and forty-five days of solitary confinement for stealing a thirty-nine-dollar watch, was received as the first prisoner on March 8, 1836—just two days after Mexican forces led by General Santa Anna breached the walls of the Alamo and killed all the defenders—the prison property had grown to four acres.
In December 1925, when Charley Floyd and the others attached to the chain of prisoners were delivered at the main gates, the state pen included more than thirty acres within the walls. There were more than three thousand inmates, and the population grew daily. The prisoners lived and worked in red and buff brick cell blocks, dormitories, factories, and other buildings surrounded by turreted limestone walls built by inmate labor. Heavily armed guards kept watch around the clock. Like the nearby capitol building, the penitentiary sprawled over a rocky point above the winding Missouri River, and below the bluffs, near the railroad tracks, were garment and shoe factories and the shops of the Missouri Pacific Railroad. At night, when they were tucked inside their dark cells, inmates lay on their bunks and listened for the passing trains. Above the nightmare cries and the snores, they heard the mournful whistles and they let their imaginations take them far away.
The penitentiary Charley Floyd would know as his home for the next several years was much improved from the old days when prisoners got little nourishing food and wore tattered clothes, but still the pen had many internal problems. Despite the fact that in 1917 there had been some reforms, including abolishment of the punishment known as the “rings,” which called for an inmate to be suspended by the wrists for long periods, the penitentiary was a harsh and cruel place. It was practically devoid of any hope or chance that the average inmate would be successfully rehabilitated.
Emma Goldman, the prominent political radical, and Kate Richards O’Hare, a St. Louis socialist organizer, were convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for their antiwar activities. They spent time in the women’s section of the Jefferson City prison. Both became outspoken critics of the state’s explosive prison labor system, which they called “slave labor.” Their letters to newspapers, magazines, congressmen, and state legislators brought national attention to this blatant misuse of convict labor.
Twelve-hour workdays remained the standard for both inmates and guards. Flogging was an acceptable method of discipline. Unmanageable prisoners were treated to ice baths, the sweatbox, or locked to a ball and chain. Hard-core recalcitrants ended up in the hole, with only a thin mattress and a steady diet of bread and water. Although it was useless to try to escape, for such flights could easily result in death, some inmates spent every waking moment plotting breakouts from behind the high stone walls. For them, even dying was preferable to life inside the Big House.
On September 13, 1925, the day that Charley and Hildebrand had been picked up by police in Sallisaw, prison officials announced that they had squelched a plot involving twenty-two convicts, most of them members of an inmate musical band, to break out of the Jeff City pen. A tunnel had been dug under the stage in the prison chapel to a sewer that ran below the prison yard and continued beyond the outside walls. The tunnel was discovered after guards found two loaded revolvers and ammunition hidden in some brush near the yard. Prison authorities figured that while most of the inmates were outside taking their exercise, the conspirators from the band rehearsing inside the chapel had loosened floorboards and worked on the tunnel. They used tools stolen from the machine shop, and scattered the dirt under the stage. Two ringleaders were thrown into solitary confinement, and prison officials assured the local citizenry that even if the convicts had been able to reach the sewer line, large steel bars blocked the pipe at the point where it emptied into the river below the penitentiary.
The talk about the foiled prison break was nearly ancient history the afternoon of December 18, when Charley and the other new arrivals were being processed. Christmas was exactly one week away and, even in the pen, there was at least a slight semblance of holiday anticipation. Prison officials had decided to prohibit all gifts of food and other perishables. Even so, the clerks in the outer office at the big institution stayed busy sorting, inspecting, and delivering presents to those unfortunate men and women who had been remembered by the outside world. That following week alone, more than two thousand packages were handled at the prison. The inmate who received the most was Everett Adams, a high school boy from Ohio who was in prison for killing a professor on the road between Jefferson City and Sedalia. Adams was sent more than one hundred Yuletide letters and wrapped presents from family and friends.
Most prisoners would have traded every gift and Christmas card for a chance at freedom. Some of them knew they would never take a breath on the outside again. The day Charley entered the penal system, one of those inmates—Carl Wagman, who had been sent up from St. Louis ten years before for a life sentence—died in the prison hospital after a lengthy illness. He went home in a prison coffin.
Charley was fingerprinted, issued a striped prison uniform, and a few essentials. He was also assigned a new identification number. For the next several years, he would be classified as number 29078. While he was still wearing his civilian necktie and suit, Charley was told to stand up straight and look right at the camera while a clerk took his official penitentiary mug shot. After that he stripped down, showered, and put on his convict clothes. A physical examination showed him to be in good health. Vital statistics listed his height at five foot, seven and one-half inches; weight, 157 pounds; length one foot, ten and one-half inches; hair, black; eyes, blue-gray; complexion, ruddy; religion, Protestant.
He was also given his own copy of an inmate rulebook that had been first issued by the Missouri State Prison Board in 1917. The forty-two rules for prisoners listed inside gave Charley shivers when he read them. A few of the rules were especially noteworthy.
Be gentlemanly everywhere and at all times.
Do not talk or call to men in other cells.
Do not whistle, sing or make any unnecessary noise.
You must not, at any time, have a knife on your person, or in your cell.
When marching in line, keep your head erect, and your face turned toward the front.
Make it your business to keep your cell clean and free from vermin.
Make careful inspection of your bedding every day.
If any bugs are found, report the fact immediately to your guard.
You are not compelled to attend chapel services, but because the moral support of religious instruction is necessary for you, you are admonished to do so.
Cuspidors will be provided and must be used.
Charley was informed that he could receive and keep only certain items, including underwear, sheets, handkerchiefs (white only), shoes (black only), a toothbrush and a hairbrush, tobacco, writing material, family photographs, and “books of proper character.” No liquids or factory-made cigarettes were allowed, and all mail and packages coming in and going out were, of course, closely examined. There were also any number of offenses that could get an inmate into trouble, such as profanity, quarreling, mutiny, neglect of work, bed not properly made, crookedness, creating a disturbance, shirt not buttoned at neck, insolence, loafing, laughing and fooling, loud talk, larceny, lying, spitting on the floor, and wasting food.
After he was processed, Charley was assigned to a cell in C Hall, built in 1914 during the years when D. C. McClung served as warden. The cell house was attached by an expansive rotunda with B Hall, and the four-tiered complex was referred to as McClung Hall. Facing it was Q Hall, in later years known as A Hall. Built in 1868 of gray limestone, which had been hand-hewn by inmates and was one of the oldest buildings inside the segregated prison, Q Hall housed hundreds of convicts, including black felons. For many years, even decades after Charley had departed from the penitentiary, there were as many as seven or eight black prisoners jammed into a cell designed for three inmates. Nearby E Hall was built of red bricks before the turn of the century. It also stayed filled to capacity.
Each of the cells on the four levels of Charley’s cell house was intended to hold two or more men. On the three upper tiers, the cell doors opened onto suspended walkways. Charley’s cell was about nine feet by six feet in size. Inside was a built-in commode, fold-up cots attached to the wall, and the obligatory cuspidors were provided. The cells were icy cold during the winter months, and in the summertime, inmates sweltered at night when they went to their bunks to rest.
It took Charley little time to learn the prison procedures. A bell rang before dawn each morning and he rose promptly and dressed to the sounds of men hacking and coughing and cleaning out their spittoons. Charley and the other inmates made up their bunks and swept and tidied their cells before washing and shaving. At the guards’ command, the inmates left their cells, entered the corridor, and marched off in lockstep for breakfast and work assignments.
A whole set of rules existed just for the dining hall. Convicts quickly and quietly took their seats at stools on both sides of long tables in the big room. Only the noise from the exposed steam pipes hissing and rattling overhead could be heard. Inmates remained erect, with their arms folded in front of them and their eyes to the front until a guard gave the signal to commence eating. Strict silence was observed at all times during the meals. Staring at others, any talking or laughter, or gazing around the hall was forbidden.
Meal planning, in the days before nutritionists, showed little imagination. The food served up was basic, bland, and, like everything else in the pen, it was dreary. During the growing season, vegetables abounded from the prison farms, but they were cooked until they were reduced to mush. Choicer cuts of meat were rarely offered, and pie or cake was usually served only on weekends or for special occasions. Many of the standard dishes, such as beans and spuds, were brought to the tables in pans and were passed around family style. Convict waiters served the rest of the food, including meat, bread, and beverages, and the inmates had prescribed signals to use in order to communicate with them. If a man wanted more bread, he held up his right hand; more coffee or water, he held up his cup; more meat, he held up his fork; more soup, he held up his spoon; more vegetables, he held up his knife. If a prisoner at a table wished to speak to a guard about the food or service, he held up his left hand. Wasting food was a sin. Even a small bread crust left on a plate could result in problems for the offender. Water and coffee were served from metal pitchers and the inmates drank from metal cups. After each meal, the eating utensils were carefully counted to make sure no potential weapons had been removed from the premises. A table knife or a spoon that was ground down could make a handy shiv to stick between someone’s ribs.
Charley was a survivor. He kept his nose out of other people’s business. Whenever he was returning to his block for the evening lock-up, Charley knew better than to stop on the range to look into other inmates’ cells, or “cribs.” He was careful not to get caught using a hand mirror to watch the comings and goings of officers making their rounds on the range. At 9:00 P.M. when the final bell sounded, signaling lights out and bedtime, Charley placed his shoes at his cell door and laid out his clothes in plain sight. If he approached a guard indoors, he always remembered to doff his cap, and outside he touched the cap before speaking. He learned to use only the officer or guard’s last name when addressing him and he put a Mr. in front. If he did not know the person’s last name, he called him Sir.
The guards, also known as “bulls” or “screws,” were still not part of the state merit system and were hired on the basis of their political affiliation. They did not receive any formal training, were paid poorly, and did not get any overtime, sick leave, insurance, or other legitimate fringe benefits. Prison bulls wore their own clothes and were still years away from donning the blue serge suits that guards were required to buy in the late 1930s. All of the guards carried whistles and small clubs that were made for them by convicts and were used to keep ornery jailbirds in line. The saying around the yard was that “the bulls are just like prison toilet paper—they’re rough, always white, and they don’t take shit off any prisoner.”
Charley Floyd gave the worst of the guards and yard bulls wide berth. That went for certain types of convicts, as well. He stayed away from the rats and stooges, who received favors by informing on other inmates, and the bullies who buggered and gang-raped the “fags” and pretty youngsters and made them into their jail-house punks and penitentiary whores. According to a lingo of the joint, Charley was a stand-up guy trying only to do hard time on a “nickel,” or five-year sentence. He made a few friends, including facing a “dime,” or a ten-year hitch, and others who were maximum-security lifers.
The first work detail assigned to Charley was in the kitchen. Later on, he transferred to the machine shop as a plumber’s helper and he also worked outside the walls at one of the prison farms. Penitentiary officials remembered Floyd to be a generally good prisoner, and Charles Hargus, assistant deputy warden at the time of Charley’s incarceration, pegged him as being smarter than most of the prison population.
“He was intelligent,” said Hargus. “That doesn’t mean that he was a model prisoner. He would steal things, like most of the convicts, but he didn’t go out of his way to hunt trouble. Floyd seemed to have a desire to let alone more than anything else. He kept to himself, went quietly about his tasks, and showed no disposition as a troublemaker.”
Charley was not without worries during his tenure in the Jeff City pen. His first year went smoothly enough. Charley kept his head about him and tried not to dwell on his wife and son and the events on the outside that he could not control. Even when Jack Dempsey had his clock cleaned by Gene Tunney, the fighting marine from New York, and lost a ten-round decision on September 23, 1926, Charley remained calm. He wrote off the defeat as a fluke. Dempsey had a good attitude about losing.
“I have no alibis to offer,” Dempsey said after the fight. “I lost to a good man, an American—who speaks the English language. I have no alibis.” Charley always knew Dempsey was a stand-up gentleman.
But a year later—on September 22, 1927—at Soldiers Field in Chicago, lightning struck once again. In an effort to regain the world heavyweight crown, something that had never occurred before, Dempsey squared off with Tunney in a rematch. It would be one of the most famous fights in the history of twentieth-century boxing. During the seventh round, Dempsey threw a left hook that knocked Tunney to the canvas. Dempsey towered over the dazed Tunney, and even though four critical seconds had ticked off the clock, referee Dave Barry stopped the timekeeper until Dempsey returned to a neutral corner. At nine seconds of the new count, Tunney managed to pull himself up on wobbly legs and square off with his surprised opponent. Somehow he held off Dempsey, not only for the balance of the seventh but the last three rounds of the contest. At the end of the fight, officials said Tunney had won seven of the ten rounds, losing only the third, sixth, and the controversial seventh. Tunney retained the crown. What would be known and argued over in bars, barracks, and jail houses as “the long count” of thirteen seconds had defeated the Manassa Mauler.
“I was robbed,” said Dempsey afterward.
Charley, of course, agreed. Jeff City convicts, like inmates at Sing Sing and several other penitentiaries, had been allowed to stay up late to listen to the fight through snarls of static from radios set up on cell block catwalks. Afterward, a well-meaning guard stopped at Charley’s cell to chat about the results of the fight and what had transpired in the seventh round. Charley went berserk and kicked a cuspidor into the wall. When he regained his composure, he told his bunk mates and the guard that Tunney and the referee should be in the joint doing ten to twenty for grand theft. In his mind, Dempsey would always be the champ.
Later that year Charley got into a jam of his own. During an unannounced search of the cells, guards found some narcotics in his possession. The offense took place on December 18, 1927, coincidentally the second anniversary of his arrival at the prison. Records listed the infraction only as an inmate “having possession of dope.” The ledger did not state the type of drug nor the amount. Floyd was not a “hop head.” He was no doubt bootlegging drugs to make some money. Whatever his reason was for holding drugs, Charley was summarily disciplined. The violation was marked against his “good time” record. This had an adverse impact on Charley’s chance for parole at the earliest possible date.
There was only one other official disciplinary action entered on Charley’s prison record. This transgression occurred on May 15, 1928. Charley struck a guard—a misdeed that was even more serious than getting caught with contraband dope. It was a Tuesday morning and, like every other day of the week, that meant rising early to face the same routine. Assistant Deputy Warden Hargus handled the matter.
“It happened at morning call,” recalled Hargus. “Floyd was a little slow in getting up. One of the guards swore at him and Floyd, who was hot tempered, knocked the guard down. We put him in solitary for a few days.”
Hargus did not remember whether Charley also received a few well-placed lumps for his trouble before being pitched into an isolated cell. There were other breaches involving Charley, but in these instances, a guard or foreman administered discipline on the spot and saw no need to make an entry in Charley’s file.
One of his favorite ploys was to steal potatoes from the kitchen. Prisoners brewed up a potato-water concoction that, when fermented and cooked, gave them a dandy alcoholic jolt. A competent Oklahoma moonshiner like Charley Floyd, with all the skills needed, had only to get his hands on the correct ingredients to be back in business.
“Floyd used to come after ice,” said Harry Hayes, foreman of the prison cold-storage plant when Charley was in the stir. “He would take advantage of the opportunity to steal potatoes, which the convicts used in making whiskey.
“The potato room was not visible from my office, and while I was sure Floyd was stealing potatoes every time he came after ice, I couldn’t catch him at it. I tried to be out in the hall when he came, but he was smart and came at a different time every day.”
Finally, Hayes caught on to Charley’s tricks. He watched Charley enter the room and saw him pick up a bag of potatoes, carry them outside, and throw them in a wheelbarrow along with a block of ice.
“Floyd saw me coming after him, dropped the wheelbarrow, and started running,” said Hayes. “He was rounded up in the yard. He acted insolent and I cuffed his ears a few times.”
The exhilaration of stealing and the anticipated comfort of strong drink made the risk of a beating worth it. Charley and other inmates kept their wits by trying to outsmart the screws and the inmate trusties, or hall tenders, at every opportunity. Prison could defeat the strongest men. Some of the best bank robbers and thieves in the business kept their sanity by scheming ways to melt down chocolate bars for forbidden cups of late-night cocoa, or else they cooked up illegal prison coffee, which they called “jamoke.” Other tales abounded about crafty cons who dealt in the smuggled cigarette trade. They tied cigarettes with thread around trained cockroaches that delivered their cargo to preferred customers’ cells. Nobody questioned how an insect, especially a lowly roach, could be directed to go to a certain cell. It did not matter as far as the inmates were concerned. It was a good story and just telling it gave a convict pleasure. Pulling fast ones somehow made the prisoners feel better about themselves.
Charley found that the penitentiary brought out the worst in men. The population was made up of murderers, cutthroat thieves, rapists, child killers, grave robbers, and degenerates of every kind: men whose skin was gray from fear and loneliness; terrified men; violent men; men who lived with demons; condemned beings with no remorse; men who could not see sunshine or watch the snow fall without someone else’s permission.
There were no counselors, no psychiatrists, no psychologists. No one ever heard laughter. Uneducated guards behaved like zookeepers. Some of them could have changed clothes with the inmates and no one would have noticed. That was because no one cared. Plenty of men went stir-crazy. Those who wanted to go home so much that they could not stand it any longer turned to suicide. There was a chaplain and a place to pray, but God was afraid to enter.
Monsters lived there.