Cell 2455—a highly guarded, next-to-inaccessible concrete and steel cubicle 4 ½ feet wide, 10 ½ feet long and 7 ½ feet high—is located on the south side of the top tier of the North cell block at the California State Prison at San Quentin. By design, not chance (because here nothing is left to chance), just getting to and into the cell is, in itself, no mean feat.
The initial, ground level leg of the trip carries us, under double escort and the hawk-sharp eyes of rifle-bearing gun rail guards, along a path leading through a garden perennially ablaze with color; past a check station and the old Spanish cell block, quaint, whitewashed remnant of the nineteenth century; past the modern, bustling educational building; past the quonset hut temporarily housing the library; to the western end of the towering North cell block; and then, through an arched and guarded gateway, into the Big Yard, the prison’s epicenter, a vast, rectangular expanse of cement surrounded by huge concrete and steel buildings dotted with gun towers and interlaced with gun walks.
On reaching the Big Yard, we veer sharply to the left and walk around what appears to be nothing more than a grouping of thin cement slabs stood upright by some casual, pranking esthete. However, we’re familiar with their functional purpose. Concealed within each is an electric eye that zealously probes for metals and clangorously announces its finds. (Since stool pigeons, human or mechanical, are not here generally looked upon as practitioners of a high calling, “The Eye” is one marvel of modern science whose virtues the inhabitants of this walled city do not enthusiastically acclaim.)
We’ve entered the Big Yard on a weekday morning a few minutes after the two mess halls have disgorged their small army of break-fasters. The yard seems to bulge with prisoners of all sizes and shapes, each garbed in blue work shirt, jeans, a jacket. Soon they will be on their way to work. The hum and babble of a thousand, two thousand, three thousand voices swells from this concrete canyon, speaking with a collective phonology of its own. Overhead a lone sea gull darts and squawks.
With a hundred briskly-taken steps we’ve crossed this, the northern end of the yard. We enter the North block rotunda, leaving the sun and the sky and the bright cheeriness of the new day behind. An old man with a wrinkled face and watery eyes looks at us incuriously as we enter. He is the doorkeeper of the rotunda, an ancient inmate who has seen so many come and go. He knows where we are going, but, after all, that is none of his concern.
One of the officers escorting us punches a button on the rotunda’s far wall; next to the button are two massive steel doors set one against the other. Both are manually locked and unlocked from the inside.
An eye peeps at us through a slot in the innermost door. The effect is momentarily comical, reminiscent of speakeasy days when the password was “Joe sent me.” Then we recall where we are and where we’re going, and we’re no longer amused.
The two ponderous doors are swung open—one inwardly, one outwardly—by the owner of the peeping eye, who proves to be a plumpish gnome with a wide and disarming, somewhat vacant grin. This grinning gnome is a trusty; faithfully, but with malice toward none, he guards these “gates” against interlopers—an incongruous, grinning Cerberus. Yet, strictly speaking, the gnome is really no guard at all, for no one covets access to the dread place above.
In we go, pausing with our escort as the gnome goes briskly about his business of closing and locking the doors behind us. Closed and locked behind us too are all the reassuring sounds, sights and smells which filled our senses a moment before. Too swiftly have these sensory impressions been blotted out.
His doors locked, the gnome tugs twice on a bell rope to signal our coming. From above, we hear a bell clang twice. With only slight assistance from our now stimulated imagination, the elevator cage to which we’re guided assumes the appearance of a gaping maw. Flanked by our escort, we ascend, in this gnome-operated cage, the equivalent of five floors, and step out, to the left, into a cramped, caged area.
According to a local wag we are now as close to Heaven as we will ever get; and, for a fact, the only direction one can go is down. That is where the gnome goes. The elevator door clicks shut; gnome and cage disappear.
From behind a bulletproof glass window set in a thick, rivet-warted steel door, the face of the correctional sergeant in charge of the unit is visible, slightly distorted by the poor refractive qualities of the glass. In front of this door is another, a screen-meshed, sliding one. Both, like those opening into the rotunda below, are locked and unlocked from the inside.
Our identity visually established (a phone call has notified the sergeant of our coming), these vault-like doors are quickly opened and we step within and halt. Behind us doors slide and slam; locks snap closed. To our left, in a “gun cage,” an armed guard alertly watches us. To the right, commanding a view of the entire length of the building on this side, is the sergeant’s office, the control and nerve center of the unit. Adjoining the office is a compact kitchen, and next to it a clothing room.
We’re searched. Trained fingers probe our pockets, run along our body down to our ankles, look in our footwear. Then we enter a steelbarred, multi-locked, double-doored enclosure resembling a huge bird cage, are passed through with a jangle of keys and a sliding of bolts, and, still under escort, walk some two hundred feet along a corridor fronting a row of cells and a shower stall. There we find Cell 2455. Its front is steel-barred, steel-slatted, designed for maximum security. Across the top of its door is a “safety bar”; when locked in position, this bar prevents the door from being opened, even when unlocked. On each side of the cell the walls jut out two feet into the corridor. The cell’s interior is functional, almost sterile, containing only a wooden table and stool, a sink and a toilet attached to the back wall, a cot and a board shelf above the cot which holds, neatly arranged, permitted articles and books. A set of earphones, with a ten-foot cord, hangs by a headband from a jack securely bolted to the back wall.
The safety bar across the top of the cell doors for the lower or far half of the cells away from the sergeant’s office is under the control of the armed guard who patrols behind a barred and screened walkway that runs the length of the corridor fronting the cells. When signaled to do so by our escort, the armed guard pulls the lever at the west end of the corridor and just outside the fenced-in area. Up goes the bar. One of the officers unlocks and opens the door. He motions us to enter. We step within. The door is shut, locked. With a squeak, the safety bar drops back into place.
There we are.
That, physically, is how we get to and into Cell 2455. Getting permanently out of the cell and living to tell about it, once having been lodged therein as a guest of the State of California, presents an infinitely more difficult problem. Considerably more than a few dozen odd doors, locks, bolts, bars, gnomes and armed guards stand in the way.
Cell 2455, you see, is a death cell.
And . . . Whit is in Cell 2455, twice doomed.
Whit is a broad-shouldered, 190-pound six footer in perfect health and physical condition, a trained and functional fighting machine who has survived the rigors of almost six years on Death Row. His appearance bears eloquent testimony to the life he has lived. His brown, wavy hair is cut short and is beginning to thin in front. His lips have been smashed almost shapeless, and his nose is battered and broken. He wears a four-tooth bridge; the teeth missing were knocked out. Scar tissue has formed above the alert hazel eyes which glitter when he’s angry, and there are innumerable turkey tracks beneath and beside them. His forehead is corrugated; his chin, scarred. An old injury to his left leg causes him to walk with a combined limp and bounce which is noticeable but which does not prevent full use or the leg.
By the most charitable standards, his face is not handsome or es-thetically pleasing. It is a face that has seen too much, a young-old face, scarred by violence. With its broken, humped nose, its washboard brow, its glittering, gold-flecked eyes, and when alerted to danger its aspect of bold, the-consequences-be-damned insolence, it is a predatory face that seemingly has found its rightful place in the gallery of the doomed.
Yet further observation reveals a disturbing quality about it which suggests the paradoxical duality of its possessor, for it is a face capable of grinning disarmingly, of laughing in great good humor, and when comically split by a grin or crinkled by laughter it becomes a homely, friendly face, devoid of ugly or fearful physical connotations. At those times, one realizes that much has been superimposed upon Nature’s original design, that violence, hatred and rebellion have remodeled it to suit their harsh, brutal fancies. Apparent, too, is the fact that its owner is wryly amused by its present, unlovely appearance. He remembers it was once a young, sensitive, wholesome face.
What changed it—and him?
That was long, long ago.
What brings a man to Death Row?