Whit was recommitted to reform school—for vehicle theft and forgery—by the same chief juvenile judge who had ordered his unconditional release but a few weeks earlier. The hearing was in chambers and brief. That Whit had stolen the Pasadena postmaster’s car and used the credit card by forging a name and creating a fictitious identity appeared reasonably certain. That he had been involved in other and more serious offenses could only be strongly suspected. Physical or tangible proof was lacking, and Whit had declined to implicate himself beyond leading the officers on several wild goose chases.
Near the conclusion of the hearing, the judge fixed his gaze upon Whit and said sternly, “Apparently you didn’t learn your lesson, and certainly this report shows you haven’t been cooperative with the investigating officers. I see no alternative but to commit you to the industrial school in the hope further training there will prove beneficial.”
Whit’s eyes met and held the judge’s, and they were squinting with appraisal. Apparently you didn’t learn your lesson . . . haven’t been cooperative . . . further training . . . The same old words. The same meaningless mumbo jumbo. The same complete lack of rapport.
Whit smiled faintly—or did he sneer? And he, then being judged, passed judgment.
What did he have to say for himself?
Nothing.
Whit was returned to the overcrowded juvenile tank at the jail to await transfer to the school. Another folly, jamming all these youngsters in together—the dumb ones and the bright ones, the lions and the lambs, the romantics and the psychotics—and then leaving them that way for weeks at a time, while their cases were being processed through the courts. Leaving them to fight and gamble and agitate and scheme and dream and brag and bully and pervert. Establishing a hierarchy of cunning and brute force. A nice place for a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old—unless he happens to be your son.
Whit was self-reliant. He got along. Nobody tried to hoosier him out of his money. Nobody bothered him. He didn’t bother the others. He did his own time, minded his own business. Then he was on his way.
While being driven north, he and another boy to whom he was manacled escaped by a ruse from the two officers transporting them. For a hectic hour the two boys ran, hid and ran. Then, still manacled together, they were recaptured by a posse of high-school students who had volunteered to aid the police and the juvenile oflicers in the search for them. On arrival at the school, both boys were ordered to the isolated two-story building where the most rebellious of the institution’s wards were quartered. The other boy’s mind and body proved less durable than Whit’s. He lost his reason. He deliberately infected his hand and then, after transfer to the school’s hospital, where he persisted in sticking wire and pins into the infected area and tearing off the bandages, he was sent to a mental hospital. He had failed to benefit by the training program.
This disciplinary unit was called G Company. Here Whit’s room was a cell, with a steel door and bars and heavy mesh screening on the window which kept out most of the sunlight. A low-watt bulb furnished illumination and was turned off at nine in the evening. Whit spent sixteen hours a day behind the locked steel door and sixteen times a day a supervisor, making a check of the cells, would peer in at him through a rectangular opening in the door. One of the supervisors, who clomped heavily when he walked on his rounds, invariably would ask, “Still in there?” Whit never answered but many of the other boys did. An excitable youngster quartered next door to Whit listened to the question for a couple of weeks and men, one evening, shouted back, “Yeah, and I got your peg-legged, syphilitic mama in here with me, you bastard!” This malefactor was, of course, appropriately disciplined.
A Bible was kept in each cell and was the only reading material permitted. Whit knew many of the inmates used the thin pages to roll smuggled tobacco in. He discovered, however, that no pages were missing from the Bible in his cell. He read the book through from cover to cover. He reread it. Particularly was his mind provoked by Ecclesiastes:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: . . . a time to die . . . a time to kill ... a time to cast away ... a time to hate . . . a time of war.
Out of context? Admitted. But no more so than this place was out of social context.
It was midsummer of the year 1938. The school’s brick yard, where its segregated disciplinary offenders worked, was a veritable hell hole. There, shirtless, his face caked with sweat and brick dust, his hands blistered and raw before the thick calluses formed, his body being bronzed by the burning sun’s rays, Whit labored each weekday with a kind of maniacal fury, ruthlessly driving himself to the very limit of his endurance. One of the many supervisors, seated close by in the shade, marveled at Whit’s astonishing industry and grew curious.
“Hey, kid, come here a minute. . . . Yeah, you there.”
Whit set his wheelbarrow down and approached the supervisor, a large man turned flabby and sour, with watery eyes and numerous chins.
“What’re you trying to do, kid, impress somebody?”
Whit smiled, and his face was more masked than ever. “Maybe you could call it that,” he replied, amiably insolent. “I just wanted you people to know that the tougher it gets the better I like it.”
“Oh, a tough guy, huh?” the supervisor snapped, his fleshy, sagging face crimsoning with sudden anger. “Well, we got ways of teaching you tough guys some respect for authority.”
“Have you?” Whit said. “I never would have guessed it.”
The supervisor bit off an angry retort, clamping his jaws shut. A vein near his Adam’s apple throbbed. His thin lips parted in a travesty of a smile, and he said, “Now, now; there’s no reason for you to feel like that. Here, have a drink.” He offered Whit his canteen.
Whit contemptuously matched the other’s surface change of attitude. “Sure, be glad to,” he said, unsuspecting. He should have known better. He knew he had been working for two hours under a broiling sun; he knew supervisors carried ice water in their canteens. But he didn’t stop to think. He filled his belly with ice water, drinking greedily, and promptly became violently sick.
The supervisor laughed mirthlessly. “Now, tough guy, get back to work.”
Whit retched, worked and cursed himself for a fool.
Two days later he was caught whispering to another youngster and put on light rations, the standard punishment for those seen or heard violating the strictly enforced no-talking rule—strictly enforced, that is, unless you were one of The Man’s pets or finks. For breakfast light rations meant some prune juice, three or four prunes, a scoop of mush; for the noon and night meal, one soggy slice of bread, some bean juice, a few beans and a cup of milk. The boys on light rations were fed in their cells, but they were worked the same as those on the regular diet. This latter group ate in a small mess hall on the first floor; they filed in and stood at their assigned places. When The Man clapped his hands they seated themselves and began to eat. When he clapped again they got up and filed out. If you bolted the food you got enough. Sometimes.
A blind anger he did not attempt to control took possession of Whit one evening when another of the supervisors accompanied the inmate waiter to his cell with the light rations and made a smart crack.
“You pus-gutted bastard,” Whit said, “take those goddam beans and . . .” He took a step toward the supervisor, his fists clenched tightly.
The supervisor slapped him across the face with a beefy hand that held the cell door keys. He struck back. The supervisor slammed the door shut in his face, locking it, and minutes later returned with two other supervisors. Whit was forcibly taken from his cell and marched to a special, empty cell. He knew what was coming. When the door banged shut on him, the supervisor said through the slot, “Here’s something to keep you company.” Then they shot a cartridge of tear gas into the cell.
The next several minutes of Whit’s life were not pleasant ones.
They were didactic minutes. They taught him the folly, the futility of open, unbending defiance against such embodiments of authority as the world’s Supervisors. Whit perceived that the social function of The Supervisors was a relatively simple one—they were the agency through which the rebel, if goaded to self-destruction by an ugly, unreasoning hate, quickly achieved his unnatural purpose.
The Supervisors were vise-turners. But they didn’t put you in the vise; they waited for you to do it. And when you did, they would keep turning until you told them—politely, hoarsely, shudderingly, however you were able—that you had had enough. Then they released you to the custody of gentler hands, if not less inflexible minds. Yet should the pain of the vise so enrage you that you defied them to turn and be damned, they would accede to your masochistic demand. Refusing to bend, you broke.
Jackie broke. One day at work he tried to run a pick through his head and only failed when another boy grabbed him. Back in his cell, Jackie became hysterical. He cursed the supervisors. That was his mistake. They gassed Jackie. Whit listened to him alternately continue to scream obscene defiance and beg for a drink of water after he was brought from the gas cell and put into a stripped cell. They tried to shut Jackie up; they slapped him around, but this only made him worse. So they took him to the hospital and when he failed to improve they shipped him to the “bug house.” They used a lot of big words to describe what was wrong with Jackie and to explain why it was he had reacted so adversely to the school’s training program.
After his enlightening experience with the tear gas, after observing what happened to the Jackies and the others, Whit grinned and fought back in more cunningly subtle ways. The brick yard baked almost all traces of his asthma out of him. Simultaneously, he let the brick yard bake Hate into him. He made Hate his friend and counsellor. Hate told him to grin. To be wily. He heeded the advice. It won him release from the disciplinary company into the school’s general population and a short while later reassignment to his former job in the assistant superintendent’s office.
First he was hospitalized, but not because he had become a “bug.” The physical machine he owned simply had been subjected to too great a strain. His pulse was irregular; he had developed a heart murmur, a rapid pulse; he ran a fever; he had night sweats. They had him in a private room and for a week he didn’t think he would make it. But he did, and here again Hate helped him when medicine and medical care couldn’t. One of the attendants used his bathroom to sneak a smoke every day. And one morning this boy had just walked out when Table Legs, one of the nurses, walked in, smelled smoke and accused Whit of malingering, of just pretending to be sick, of himself sneaking into the bathroom and smoking. Table Legs ranted at him for ten solid minutes. And he just grinned, denying nothing, and thereby agitated this bombastic female all die more.
Sure he was sick—he was so sick he had diought he was going to die—but Table Legs would never know it. She and the rest of them could flunk what they pleased. In time he recovered, with Hate’s help, by simply getting out of bed and ignoring what was wrong with him; by getting back up when he fell on his face; by refilling his belly when he threw up what he had eaten; by paying no attention to the black dizziness, and acting as though it weren’t there.
Back at his job in the assistant superintendent’s office, a friendly grin and a willingness and ability to carry an enormous work load offered the protective coloration he needed while he sought an early release. Again he was made a cadet officer, but his enthusiasm to help the weak ones was gone, put on cold storage. And he didn’t fight as often; slugging it out with the big-mouthed tigers was no longer a pleasure. It was simply a job to be done when they got in his face and that was the only way to get them out. He knew what he was doing—withdrawing. Reform school had taught him all it could; truly he had learned his lessons. Not singular; plural. He was nearing his eighteenth birthday—he felt as though it might be his eightieth—and he knew he had a choice to make. It was a very simple choice. He either had to go out, go home, settle down, get a job, get married, have kids, forget everything he had seen and had started out to learn, becoming a washer in a barrel, or he had to go on living in the jungle until he destroyed it or it destroyed him.
A square, a John, with its effete, futile, burlesque connotations. A blindly believing, wholly obedient, ineffectual, unthinking square. That was the safe thing to become. Safe until he started to think. Until he recalled what happened to the weak and the meek. Until the Hate rose up in him and his trigger finger began to itch.
An employee of the school had drawn Whit to one side, covertly sympathized with his mistrust of his society. His capitalist society. Blame your plight on that society and its cancerous economics, he had been told. Its degradation, its enslavement of the masses. Look you that Marx and Lenin and the other comrades have conceived how the perfect society may be achieved. So put your Hate to work, consecrate it. Become one of us.
Of course this proposition had not been made suddenly or crudely. First there had been the build-up, the winning of confidence, the offered friendship, the doing of small favors, the idea planting. But in vain. “No thanks,” Whit had said. “I don’t think I’m interested.” Why not? “Let’s say I just don’t think I’d make a very good comrade and let it go at that.”
Why not? Because the Hate inside him didn’t deserve consecration. Because it was a disease with a peculiar pathology of its own, not a noble weapon. Whit had traded fear for it, and for guile.
And that was his trouble. He had allowed Hate and Guile to serve him too well. He had contracted with them to do his bidding, and their devotion to him had become fanatic. They clamored to aid him in everything he did. Their loyalty to him was so fierce, so unwavering, they made him believe he could not get along without them. They made him believe they were the only friends he had whose loyalty was absolute. They had persuasive ways of convincing him even against his will.
For example, Whit’s work brought him into daily contact with an attractive female administrative employee. Whit liked Miss Turner—as we shall call her—because she was never superior or highhanded with the inmates, and particularly because she wasn’t forever lecturing or scolding them. Being totally human, she refused to take offense because others were human too. Her evident friendliness to the school’s charges assigned to do clerical or cleanup work in the administration building set prudish tongues to wagging and prompted one prim lady to warn her that “I think it’s only fair I tell you what ‘they’ are saying.”
Miss Turner responded to this warning by laughing heartily in the prim lady’s face.
“Well, I never!” huffed the prim lady indignantly before marching off. The prim lady saw her duty and set out to do it. She pumped a sneaky boy who did house-squad work on the top floor of the administration building where Miss Turner and other employees had rooms, learning from the sneaky one that the friendly lady now and then had a bottle of beer in her room, which was strictly verboten by the rules. By promising a rich reward of extra credits, the prim lady exacted an assurance from the sneaky one that he would keep his eyes open and promptly report to her the next time he located a bottle of the brew in the friendly lady’s room.
From another house-squad worker Whit learned that the sneaky one was prowling Miss Turner’s room and that the prim lady was evincing an unusual interest in the sneaky one’s activities. Whit cornered the sneaky one at the first opportunity and said, “I hear stuff has been missing from the rooms upstairs and that they’ve got you under suspicion because you’ve been seen sneaking into them.”
“I ain’t been taking nothing,” the sneaky one whined. “I just been looking.”
“For what?” Whit demanded. To emphasize his demand, he said, “You think that old bag is going to stick her neck out for you when they put you in the brick yard?”
“They ain’t gonna put me there,” the sneaky one said. “They’re gonna give me a parole if I let ’em know when I find a bottle of beer in Miss Turner’s room.”
Whit fought the impulse to smash the sneaky one in his face. “So that’s it,” he said.
“Sure,” the sneaky one said. “I’m just trying to help myself.”
I’m just trying to help myself! More famous last words. A new kind of Brazen Age—when commissary punks would betray their mothers for a price, for any slight advantage.
“Then go right ahead,” Whit said, as if the fact the sneaky one was simply trying to help himself explained and justified all. “By all means, go right ahead.”
“And you ain’t gonna say nothing to Miss Turner?”
“Why, no,” Whit said. “Why should I?”
It took a couple of days for the sneaky one to get his nerve back. Whit, in the meantime, connived a bottle of root beer and waited, saying nothing to the friendly lady, Miss Turner, because his code declared he could not. When he got the signal from his friend assigned to the upstairs house squad, he snitched the door key to Miss Turner’s room from her purse, grabbed the bottle of root beer from where he had hidden it and raced unobserved up the back stairs. His friend had gone up the front stairs. Reaching the top floor, this youngster had kicked up a diversionary fuss, thus enabling Whit to duck unseen into Miss Turner’s room, remove from a tiny ice chest the bottle in question (it was discreetly wrapped in a wet towel), put the bottle of root beer in its place, dash down the back stairs and cache the beer. On his way to Miss Turner’s office he observed the prim lady closeted with the assistant superintendent in the latter’s office, and he grinned.
He found the friendly lady busy at a filing cabinet. “You know, Miss Turner, I have a funny feeling that in about another minute or two you will be called in by the assistant superintendent and asked if there isn’t a bottle of beer in your room.”
The friendly lady blanched.
“Naturally,” Whit continued, “since there isn’t, you’ll laugh when he asks you. You’ll tell him what is there is a bottle of root beer. You’ll become mildly indignant that anyone thinks otherwise, and you will insist he go with you to your room and see for himself.”
Then Whit handed the friendly lady her door key, turned and walked away. Moments later the friendly lady was informed the assistant superintendent wanted to speak to her.
For a considerable time thereafter the prim lady was conspicuously red of face, and the sneaky one, needless to add, did not get his parole.
And so it was that a grin became Whit’s trade-mark, and hate and guile the tools of his trade. Whit was still grinning the day of his release on parole. He was grinning when, a few days prior to leaving the school, he delivered the final speech at the supper held for those scheduled for parole release during the next thirty days. He glowingly lauded all the school had done for him. He warmly thanked its personnel for what they had taught him, particularly singling out for praise the important lessons learned from The Supervisors regarding a “respect for authority,” and the necessity for “high moral standards” as exemplified in the person and daily life of the prim lady. He assured them all that the training he had received, coupled with his experiences at the school, would stay with him and influence him throughout his life. And he hoped one day to repay them for all they had done for him.
Miss Turner alone, of all those present, recognized the real meaning of Whit’s glittering words. The prim lady, accepting those words at face value, preened herself. “Wasn’t that simply the nicest talk! I’m just positive now, after listening to him, the boy will make good. And I feel ever so proud, to know we are rendering such a worth-while service to society by helping these unfortunate, misguided young men and showing them the right way.”
One supervisor did not share the prim lady’s enthusiasm. If anything, he then appeared more dour than ever. “Don’t be too sure about that one,” he said glumly. “He’s too smart for his own good. And don’t let that grin or those words of his fool you. He’s not grinning inside, unless it’s at us. He talks nice. But when he doesn’t know he’s being watched, he looks as mean and deadly as a cobra. Mark my words. We’ll be hearing more about that one. He’ll come to no good end.”
And, seemingly, the prophecy has been proved correct. The man now confined to Cell 2455 quite clearly has “come to no good end.” After nine years of criminal violence and penal servitude following his release from reform school, he has come to the Condemned Row at California’s San Quentin Prison—twice sentenced to death, fifteen times to terms of imprisonment ranging from a life sentence without possibility of parole on down to an indeterminate sentence of from one to ten years. And on top of that, his present discharge date on prior, unexpired commitments to prison is December 10, 2009. Of course, he will not have to worry about serving all that time if and when the state’s professional technicians of death once manage to strap him down in one of the gas cell’s two chairs.
But, being keenly aware of the infallible efficiency of that squat, ugly, green chamber, he has exhibited a conspicuously obstinate disinclination to go near it. Patently, however, disinclination alone is not enough to thwart the will of the state; for if it were, the executioner’s art would soon become a lost one. Yet add to disinclination ruthless self-discipline, bulldog tenacity, the knack of using words, a willingness to gamble boldly, a calculating mind impervious to defeat after defeat, and a mobilized triumvirate of legal skill, imaginative opportunism and intellectual craft—do that and you have the materials from which may be fashioned weapons with which, in the judicial arena, you can wage lively battle for survival, asking no quarter and giving none.
Singlehandedly, for the last more than five years of his life, the beleaguered man in Cell 2455 has stood alone in the cold shadow of the state’s gas chamber. By tirelessly wielding legal bludgeon and rapier, he has so far defied the Grim Reaper, stubbornly refusing to acquiesce to California’s demand that he forfeit his life, the only possession he has left. Each time the net has been drawn tightly around him he has found a hole in it or a way to slash his way through it. Time after time he has taken the offensive and sought from one court or another a finding that he was, in the legal sense, wrongly and unconstitutionally convicted; time after time he has sought to have the sentences of death and imprisonment vacated and a new trial ordered. Rebuffed, he has retreated, trading space for time, to borrow the language of the military tactician, and figured out another angle of attack. Not long ago he came within three days of being executed, and at the time this book is being written he is engaged in what undoubtedly is a final and decisive court battle. He must win or die.
In answering a recent collateral legal action he instituted against prison officials to test the area and extent of his legal rights in representing himself, an assistant to the California Attorney General characterized Cell 2455’s present occupant as “a man who regards the law as a plaything” and, further, one who has made a “mockery of the law.” Bay Area dailies have branded him a “chronic troublemaker” on the Row. The San Francisco Chronicle, in reporting his filing of an earlier petition for habeas corpus in a federal court, wrote: “He has led riots and participated in fights and other infractions of prison rules during his tenure in death row and has kept his case almost continually before the courts.” In a feature story the San Francisco Examiner has profiled him as a “hunching 190 pound man . . . brilliant, but absolutely ruthless and callous.” The Los Angeles Daily News was the first to tag him a “criminal genius.”
The majority opinion of the California Supreme Court affirming the death and other judgments pronounced against him stated the evidence adduced at his trial indicates he is a “clever professional criminal” with a “self-admitted violent criminal past and [a] present dangerous, antisocial state of mind.”
The foregoing is not, to be sure, a pretty or a flattering sketch, but a harsh and a shocking one. Inevitably the time came when society was obliged, in the judgment of its servants, to test decisively his right to survive.
That time came unexpectedly. A curious, incredible set of circumstances brought him to the Row, psychically a mighty grim place, and it is here he has waged a long, relentless battle for survival against almost hopeless odds.
This account of his life and probable death could be brought to abrupt conclusion by trumpeting an obvious and oft-trumpeted moral —CRIME DOESN’T PAY!—and then letting it go at that. But law-abiding citizens already know this and a large segment of the so-called criminal element (those apprehended for their penal misdeeds) have heard these resounding words so often they have become wholly meaningless.
So let us try a new tack. At least tentatively, let us accept the thought that the only thing the execution of the man in Cell 2455 will prove is that he will be dead. And then let us ask: What will his being dead prove?
The problem of dealing with crime and criminals obviously will not die with him. The harsh fact is that society can execute him and his kind until it wallows neck deep in their blood and still there will be crime. Still there will be “criminals.”
Social vengeance—disguised as justice—is therefore a monumentally futile thing and society needlessly confounds itself by exacting it.
This writer knows.
He, you see, is himself the occupant of Cell 2455!
This is his own story, told in his own words, written while he waits to die.