The Last Supper: And Other Stories (13 page)

When we came to the open space at the end of the passageway, where the naked men were, a guard came to us and told us to take off our clothes. I was in my middle thirties then, but most of my associates were past fifty, men of age and dignity, three notable physicians, a college professor, a lawyer and others, men of standing, men whose lives were of a part with scholarship and inquiry, who had joined mental strife on the highest level of principle and moral courage, gentle people, and they were told to take off their clothes, which they did, and then stood naked under the cold and contempt-filled eyes of the prison guards.

Nothing moves quickly in prison; speed is for free men, and in prison there is an insufficiency of all but time, and we stood there naked for almost an hour. It is good that men should stand so. Strip a man to his skin, render him powerless, and let' him stand like that and he must begin to comprehend the nature of the new world he has entered.

And finally, with contempt and hatred, the guards said,

“Move here!”

“Come over here”

“Answer this and that and the next question!”

“And now here!”

Prison is an evil place, but most evil is what moves men who work in a prison and what happens to them and what they become when they are made the keepers of cages in which other men are penned. Long afterwards, I mentioned this to the warden of another prison where I was confined, and this warden, a wise man, tempered by his own suffering, replied,

“And who becomes a prison guard? Have you ever known a man who wanted to be a prison guard?”

Yet he did not account for the contempt on the faces of those who watched us move naked, who directed us, who were over us now.

There, is contempt in all bureaucrats, but the contempt of the prison guard is particular, singular, unique, a thing of itself; it is the contempt of small men whose power is enormous, small, hating, bigoted and cruel men who have the power of life and death in their hands, ignorant men who can command and destroy intelligent men, weak men who have power over strong men, cowards who can command fear from brave men—it is the contempt of the inhuman for the dehumanized, of the incompetent for the helpless. Perhaps in other places it is different and perhaps someday it will be different here; but today it is a part of the senselessness and futility of prisons in general, of the senseless brute thinking that says if you lock a man away from human society, from fresh air and sunshine, for long enough, he will become a different or better man.

A prison is its own world, and into that world, we walked naked. Once again, I walked by the side of the college professor, the scholar and man of thought and reflection, so bereft now of everything in his white-skinned nakedness, he who had spoken of dignity so well. We were hiding; in cracks and crannies and in dark places, we were hiding, but we walked through the antiseptic spray, the cold bath and the hot bath, until at last we were handed the faded, patched blue prison clothes that marked the beginning of what the government called “our correction.”

And dignity, the, dignity of walking upon two legs, of standing upright, of belonging to that highest achievement of organized matter, the human race—dignity began to return. It always returns, and in time to come I would learn the dignity of the broken men, the twisted, tortured, beaten men whose world was the world of prison before ever a political prisoner entered the gates.

Gentleman from Mississippi

A
T HALF PAST SIX ON THIS PARTICULAR MORNING, A BAND
of hot sunlight crossed the face of Congressman George Wicken. He had forgotten to tilt the blinds the night before, and he woke up coughing and hacking and swearing softly and fumbling for his cigarettes. He had to have a cigarette first thing on waking, and couldn't think or coordinate or do a human act without it. But this morning, he couldn't find the cigarettes. They just weren't where he was accustomed to leaving them, on top of his bed table. As he continued to grope for them, his anger continued to mount; and finally he opened his eyes completely and his mouth too, ready to chop the head off anyone who was at all within chopping distance. Some degree of calm descended upon him when he realized that he was not in his apartment on Maryland Avenue, not in his own bed, not with his own bed table at hand, but in a completely strange hotel room—one that became only moderately less strange as he recalled the events of the evening before.

“Gone,” he said, and he pronounced the word “go—in,” speaking less with a southern accent than with what was already known nationally as a Wicken accent. “Gone, and just as well! Just as well the bitch went and gone!”

He tried to remember the name of the woman he spoke of with such gallantry, and then he smiled to himself with a sort of gleeful pleasure as he realized that he could not remember her name at all.

“What do you know?” he said aloud. “Just suppose I come along and run into her some day next week or month, maybe, and look her straight in the eye and say, Honey, I don't know your name, and that's the God's honest truth! Well what do you know!”

His face became like a little boy's face, an imp's face, the long, loose jowls shaking with mirth. Then the smile disappeared, and he hawked across the room. Pride had sent him to bed with his dentures in, and his mouth felt like a sewer.

He threw back the blankets, allowing his long, skinny shanks to dangle. He wore only his pajama tops, which gave him a hobgoblin appearance as he hopped across the room to the bathroom—and a moment later howls of rage came forth from there. His pants were hanging behind the bathroom door, and, going through the pockets, he discovered that four ten dollar bills were missing.

“Oh, that bitch!” he howled. “That sure enough sneaking, miserable, dishonorable bitch! Oh, it breaks a man's heart to see what a bitch like that will do once he turns his back! I just never learn! I just go on trusting, trusting, trusting! I'm the world's biggest fool for trusting women!”

The canting and keening of this mournful discussion with himself went on while he made his toilet and dressed and did his black string tie, and stuffed his pajamas, shaving things and extra shirt into his briefcase. His appetite was good, and before he checked out, he had breakfast in the coffee room, bacon and eggs and grits and corn sticks and jam and three cups of coffee. In front of the hotel, waiting for his car to be brought to him, he lit a cigar and took great pleasure in the fine spring weather, the taste of good tobacco and the memories of the night before. The forty dollars—which he could well afford—plagued him only moderately; down underneath he admired the concealed larceny of the simple person he had temporarily given his heart to.

“It's a mighty interesting world,” he said aloud.

“How did you sleep, Congressman?” the bellhop asked, the fiction being that this Baltimore hotel provided him with a night's rest next to impossible in Washington.

“Dandy—just jim-dandy,” he answered.

The truth was, he felt just jim-dandy, and continued to feel that way all the distance back to Washington. It was a pleasure to drive along like this on such a fine morning, with so little traffic on the road and the early crows just lifting and the late roosters still crowing. It made him think again, as he had so often in the past, of his land, his country, and his fortune. How many places, lands, or eras were there where the son of a country grocer could reach the heights of accomplishment he had reached? Not to mention driving along a state road, as he was, with a two-door Buick de luxe humming under him and a fifty-cent cigar smoking down slowly and fragrantly!

Of late, he had been particularly bothered with bursitis and with throat pains, not to mention a post-nasal drip that kept him hawking like one of the tobacco-chewing old-timers back home. But this morning the air was so clean and sweet and delightful that he didn't feel a thing wrong with him, but instead felt younger and more alive than he had for the longest time. At one point, he saw walking up the side of the road, a young Negro lass of sixteen or so, probably the daughter of some tenant farmer, with her head held high as a queen's, the shoulders back, her spine straight, and her bust out firm and proud; and just the sight of that made him feel as randy and wholesome as any young fellow of twenty, and it was all he could do not to stand on the brakes and tumble out and go after her with a cold steel wrench to tame her down—just as if he was a lad of twenty years.

His high spirits and full stomach made him bear down harder on the gas pedal than he might have; but the road was empty, and the needle of his speedometer touched seventy-five miles per hour without him realizing how fast he was shooting down the road. The first he actually knew about it was when a motorcycle cop waved him over to the side of the road, pulled up alongside, and then sauntered over with his book out, boiling mad. He put some of that anger into words before he recognized Wicken.

“Ain't you Congressman Wicken?” he asked then. His anger tapered off quickly and considerably even before the congressman replied.

“Sure enough, son.” And Wicken opened his wallet to make his identity plain beyond doubt.

“I clocked you at seventy-five, Congressman.”

“And you were right to do so, son. Some of us get to thinking that we're just as high and mighty as God himself, and that ain't good. Sure, I was in a hurry. We got a committee hearing this morning, with one of them pink lizards crawling down from New York City, and I was afraid I'd miss it. So I just forgot myself and opened her up. But Lord, son, that's no excuse—none whatsoever, and I don't offer it as such. Tell you what I want you to do, son. I want you to give me a ticket, and I want you to hang onto me every blessed mile I was moving over the legal limit. I want you to go the limit, because while they say an old dog can't learn new tricks, I figure that what affects the public weal is something I damn well better learn, old or not. So just write it out and don't spare me one bit.”

The motorcycle policeman looked up and down the road uneasily and pulled at his lower lip in some embarrassment. “I don't want to give you a ticket, sir,” he said, “And I do admire the way you face it. It's a fine, public-spirited way, and mighty few people look at it that way. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't make no more fuss about this if it wasn't that two colored kids were run down on this stretch of slab only three days past.”

Wicken clucked. “It sure happens. It's a miracle that any of them grow up. But there's so many of them, it just don't seem to make no difference.”

“Well, that's all. I sure don't intend to give you a ticket, Congressman.”

“Smoke, son?”

“After meals, sir.”

“Well, put this away for after lunch. That's a fifty-cent Habana-Habana extra long, just as fine and nice and mild a smoke as you ever tasted.”

“Thank you, sir,” the policeman said.

“Don't mention it. And if you're in the District and up on the hill—drop in, drop in. Don't hesitate. Just drop in.”

“Yes, sir.”

As he opened up the Buick again, Congressman Wicken reflected that he had handled that quite well, quite well indeed. Without egotism, he admitted to himself that he had a good way and a keen sense with people. It was part of the game of politics, and if you didn't play it well, why it was just as sensible not to start.

He himself had started so long ago that sometimes it seemed that he couldn't rightly remember the beginning—but he had always exercised a talent for it. Just take this case with the motorcycle cop; some men would have gotten tough and nasty with the lad. Maybe they could have shouted him down; maybe not—but why try? In his case, he played it straight and sensible and put that youngster in a spot where he could not possibly have handed out a ticket. Not only that—he'd made another friend and supporter. Some thought that it was only necessary to win voters. Nothing was more short-sighted than that. With the damn reds spewing filth and slander on every side, every supporter counted.

The thought of reds recalled to Wicken the expression he had used before—“a pink lizard crawling down from New York City.” Just came to his lips from nowhere, and it was good! Very good! That was what they called inspiration—an idea like that coming out of nowhere.

He parked his car in front of the House Office Building and walked jauntily into the Committee waiting room. Miss Marian Carlton was already at her desk, opening the morning's mail, looking as starched and neat and fresh as she always did.

“Good morning, Congressman,” she smiled at him. “How do you feel?”

“Just couldn't feel better, Marian. All set for a little pink lizard, crawling down from Jew York. Jew York,” he repeated. Funny how things popped into his mind with no effort at all, strong, pungent phrases that packed a real wallop: There was inspiration again!

Journey to Boston

F
ROM THE JOURNAL OF REUBEN JOSHUA DOVER, IT WILL
be noted that even after he had well passed the allotted three score years and ten, he wrote with a firm, round hand. Therefore, it is not surprising that at the age of only sixty-six, he was a sound, dry and healthy man, able to do his day's work if it was necessary for him to do it; the trouble was that it was not wholly necessary, since he had four strong sons and two buxom daughters—and they were good children, which is not so often the case.

Like an old nut, Reuben Dover rattled a little, but he was sound, drying slowly like an apple that begins just bulging with juice and never has a bad spot on it. Of Puritan stock, he was city born, town born—he never forgot that and wore it like a badge—until the big layoff on the rope walk pushed him out to the stony fields of Middlesex where he hired on and learned what a damned crofter does. He was a man for a working wage, and he liked the feel of a wage and the companionship and good feeling that goes with a social way of work; and if left to himself he probably would have gone on that way, with occasional shipping out to see all the various Christian and heathen places of the world, the way a Boston boy does, until he ended deep in Davey Jones locker or on a board in the poorhouse; that's the way it probably would have been if left to himself, but he married Annie Cartwheel, an ambitious girl, and then he was not left to himself again, but had to go out after the war to the Mohawk bottoms and till the land and build a hard stone house. But prosperity never brought him the gladness of a glass of rum with the hard-headed boys on the waterfront. He had eighty-three milch cows, but he could climb his peaked barn roof and never see a ship or something that resembled one, and he could walk all over his acres and never see the pretty little whores that walked on King Street or the wonderful sights of the yellow Chinese or the great black men from the warm places. At night, there was the chirping of the crickets everywhere, but nowhere the soft sweet singing of the Portugee fishers who sailed their boats across from the Azores and often enough bedded down with and even married some Yankee lassie, and nowhere the gentle crooning of the Kanaka harpoon men, so strong and graceful.