An American Tragedy

by Theodore Dreiser

  And that done, a smile from Mrs. Griffiths to her boy and an answering smile from Clyde to her. For since he had announced that he was not guilty—here—her spirit had risen in the face of this sentence. He was really innocent,—he must be, since he had declared it here. And Clyde because of her smile saying to himself, his mother believed in him now. She had not been swayed by all the evidence against him. And this faith, mistaken or not, was now so sustaining—so needed. What he had just said was true as he now saw it. He had not struck Roberta. That was true. And therefore he was not guilty. Yet Kraut and Slack were once more seizing him and escorting him to the cell.

  Immediately thereafter his mother seating herself at a press table proceeded to explain to contiguous press representatives now curiously gathering about her: “You mustn’t think too badly of me, you gentlemen of the papers. I don’t know much about this but it is the only way I could think of to be with my boy. I couldn’t have come otherwise.” And then one lanky correspondent stepping up to say: “Don’t worry, mother. Is there any way I can help you? Want me to straighten out what you want to say? I’ll be glad to.” And then sitting down beside her and proceeding to help her arrange her impressions in the form in which he assumed her Denver paper might like them. And others as well offering to do anything they could—and all greatly moved.

  Two days later, the proper commitment papers having been prepared and his mother notified of the change but not permitted to accompany him, Clyde was removed to Auburn, the Western penitentiary of the State of New York, where in the “death house” or “Murderers’ Row,” as it was called—as gloomy and torturesome an inferno as one could imagine any human compelled to endure—a combination of some twenty-two cells on two separate levels—he was to be restrained until ordered retried or executed.

  Yet as he traveled from Bridgeburg to this place, impressive crowds at every station—young and old—men, women and children—all seeking a glimpse of the astonishingly youthly slayer. And girls and women, under the guise of kindly interest, but which, at best, spelled little more than a desire to achieve a facile intimacy with this daring and romantic, if unfortunate figure, throwing him a flower here and there and calling to him gayly and loudly as the train moved out from one station or another:

  “Hello, Clyde! Hope to see you soon again. Don’t say too long down there.” “If you take an appeal, you’re sure to be acquitted. We hope so, anyhow.”

  And with Clyde not a little astonished and later even heartened by this seemingly favorable discrepancy between the attitude of the crowds in Bridgeburg and this sudden, morbid, feverish and even hectic curiosity here, bowing and smiling and even waving with his hand. Yet thinking, none the less, “I am on the way to the death house and they can be so friendly. It is a wonder they dare.” And with Kraut and Sissel, his guards, because of the distinction and notoriety of being both his captors and jailors, as well also because of these unusual attentions from passengers on the train and individuals in these throngs without being themselves flattered and ennobled.

  But after this one brief colorful flight in the open since his arrest, past these waiting throngs and over winter sunlit fields and hills of snow that reminded him of Lycurgus, Sondra, Roberta, and all that he had so kaleidoscopically and fatally known in the twenty months just past, the gray and restraining walls of Auburn itself—with, once he was presented to a clerk in the warden’s office and his name and crime entered in the books—himself assigned to two assistants, who saw to it that he was given a prison bath and hair cut—all the wavy, black hair he so much admired cut away—a prison-striped uniform and hideous cap of the same material, prison underwear and heavy gray felt shoes to quiet the restless prison tread in which in time he might indulge, together with the number, 77221.

  And so accoutered, immediately transferred to the death house proper, where in a cell on the ground floor he was now locked—a squarish light clean space, eight by ten feet in size and fitted with sanitary plumbing as well as a cot bed, a table, a chair and a small rack for books. And here then, while he barely sensed that there were other cells about him—ranging up and down a wide hall—he first stood—and then seated himself—now no longer buoyed by the more intimate and sociable life of the jail at Bridgeburg—or those strange throngs and scenes that had punctuated his trip here.

  The hectic tensity and misery of these hours! That sentence to die; that trip with all those people calling to him; that cutting of his hair downstairs in that prison barber shop—and by a convict; the suit and underwear that was now his and that he now had on. There was no mirror here—or anywhere,—but no matter—he could feel how he looked. This baggy coat and trousers and this striped cap. He threw it hopelessly to the floor. For but an hour before he had been clothed in a decent suit and shirt and tie and shoes, and his appearance had been neat and pleasing as he himself had thought as he left Bridgeburg. But now—how must he look? And to-morrow his mother would be coming—and later Jephson or Belknap, maybe. God!

  But worse—there, in that cell directly opposite him, a sallow and emaciated and sinister-looking Chinaman in a suit exactly like his own, who had come to the bars of his door and was looking at him out of inscrutable slant eyes, but as immediately turning and scratching himself—vermin, maybe, as Clyde immediately feared. There had been bedbugs at Bridgeburg.

  A Chinese murderer. For was not this the death house? But as good as himself here. And with a garb like his own. Thank God visitors were probably not many. He had heard from his mother that scarcely any were allowed—that only she and Belknap and Jephson and any minister he chose might come once a week. But now these hard, white-painted walls brightly lighted by wide unobstructed skylights by day and as he could see—by incandescent lamps in the hall without at night—yet all so different from Bridgeburg,—so much more bright or harsh illuminatively. For there, the jail being old, the walls were a gray-brown, and not very clean—the cells larger, the furnishings more numerous—a table with a cloth on it at times, books, papers, a chess- and checker-board—whereas here—here was nothing, these hard narrow walls—the iron bars rising to a heavy solid ceiling above—and that very, very heavy iron door which yet—like the one at Bridgeburg, had a small hole through which food would be passed, of course.

  But just then a voice from somewhere:

  “Hey! we got a new one wid us, fellers! Ground tier, second cell, east.” And then a second voice: “You don’t say. Wot’s he like?” And a third; “Wot’s yer name, new man? Don’t be scared. You ain’t no worse off than the rest of us.” And then the first voice, answering number two: “Kinda tall and skinny. A kid. Looks a little like mamma’s boy, but not bad at dat. Hey, you! Tell us your name!”

  And Clyde, amazed and dumb and pondering. For how was one to take such an introduction as this? What to say—what to do? Should he be friendly with these men? Yet, his instinct for tact prompting him even here to reply, most courteously and promptly: “Clyde Griffiths.” And one of the first voices continuing: “Oh, sure! We know who you are. Welcome, Griffiths. We ain’t as bad as we sound. We been readin’ a lot about you, up dere in Bridgeburg. We thought you’d be along pretty soon now.” And another voice; “You don’t want to be too down. It ain’t so worse here. At least de place is all right—a roof over your head, as dey say.” And then a laugh from somewhere.

  But Clyde, too horrified and sickened for words, was sadly gazing at the walls and door, then over at the Chinaman, who, silent at his door, was once more gazing at him, Horrible! Horrible! And they talked to each other like that, and to a stranger among them so familiarly. No thought for his wretchedness, his strangeness, his timidity—the horror he must be suffering. But why should a murderer seem timid to any one, perhaps, or miserable? Worst of all they had been speculating here as to how long it would be before he would be along which meant that everything concerning him was known here. Would they nag—or bully—or make trouble for one unless one did just as they wished? If Sondra, or any one of all the people he had
known, should see or even dream of him as he was here now . . . God!—And his own mother was coming to-morrow.

  And then an hour later, now evening, a tall, cadaverous guard in a more pleasing uniform, putting an iron tray with food on it through that hole in the door. Food! And for him here. And that sallow, rickety Chinaman over the way taking his. Whom had he murdered? How? And then the savage scraping of iron trays in the various cells! Sounds that reminded him more of hungry animals being fed than men. And some of these men were actually talking as they ate and scraped. It sickened him.

  “Gee! It’s a wonder them guys in the mush gallery couldn’t think of somepin else besides cold beans and fried potatoes and coffee.”

  “The coffee to-night . . . oh, boy! . . . Now in the jail at Buffalo—though . . .”

  “Oh, cut it out,” came from another corner. “We’ve heard enough about the jail at Buffalo and your swell chow. You don’t show any afternoon tea appetite around here, I notice.”

  “Just the same,” continued the first voice, “as I look back on’t now, it musta been pretty good. Dat’s a way it seems, anyhow, now.”

  “Oh, Rafferty, do let up,” called still another.

  And then, presumably “Rafferty” once more, who said: “Now, I’ll just take a little siesta after dis—and den I’ll call me chauffeur and go for a little spin. De air to-night must be fine.”

  Then from still another hoarse voice: “Oh, you with your sick imagination. Say, I’d give me life for a smoker. And den a good game of cards.”

  “Do they play cards here?” thought Clyde.

  “I suppose since Rosenstein was defeated for mayor here he won’t play.”

  “Won’t he, though?” This presumably from Rosenstein.

  To Clyde’s left, in the cell next to him, a voice, to a passing guard, low and yet distinctly audible: “Psst! Any word from Albany yet?”

  “No word, Herman.”

  “And no letter, I suppose.”

  “No letter.”

  The voice was very strained, very tense, very miserable, and after this, silence.

  A moment later, from another cell farther off, a voice from the lowest hell to which a soul can descend—complete and unutterable despair—“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

  And then from the tier above another voice: “Oh, Jesus! Is that farmer going to begin again? I can’t stand it. Guard! Guard! Can’t you get some dope for that guy?”

  Once more the voice from the lowest: “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

  Clyde was up, his finger clinched. His nerves were as taut as cords about to snap. A murderer! And about to die, perhaps. Or grieving over some terrible thing like his own fate. Moaning—as he in spirit at least had so often moaned there in Bridgeburg. Crying like that! God! And there must be others!

  And day after day and night after day more of this, no doubt, until, maybe—who could tell—unless. But, oh, no! Oh, no! Not himself—not that—not his day. Oh, no. A whole year must elapse before that could possibly happen—or so Jephson had said. Maybe two. But, at that—! . . . in two years!!! He found himself stricken with an ague because of the thought that even in so brief a time as two years. . . .

  That other room! It was in here somewhere too. This room was connected with it. He knew that. There was a door. It led to that chair. That chair.

  And then the voice again, as before, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

  He sank to his couch and covered his ears with his hands.

  Chapter 29

  THE “death house” in this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenance of human insensitiveness and stupidity principally for which no one primarily was really responsible. Indeed, its total plan and procedure were the results of a series of primary legislative enactments, followed by decisions and compulsions as devised by the temperaments and seeming necessities of various wardens, until at last—by degrees and without anything worthy of the name of thinking on any one’s part—there had been gathered and was now being enforced all that could possibly be imagined in the way of unnecessary and really unauthorized cruelty or stupid and destructive torture. And to the end that a man, once condemned by a jury, would be compelled to suffer not alone the death for which his sentence called, but a thousand others before that. For the very room by its arrangement, as well as the rules governing the lives and actions of the inmates, was sufficient to bring about this torture, willy-nilly.

  It was a room thirty by fifty feet, of stone and concrete and steel, and surmounted some thirty feet from the floor by a skylight. Presumably an improvement over an older and worse death house, with which it was still connected by a door, it was divided lengthwise by a broad passage, along which, on the ground floor, were twelve cells, six on a side and eight by ten each and facing each other. And above again a second tier of what were known as balcony cells—five on a side.

  There was, however, at the center of this main passage—and dividing these lower cells equally as to number—a second and narrower passage, which at one end gave into what was now known as the Old Death House (where at present only visitors to the inmates of the new Death House were received), and at the other into the execution room in which stood the electric chair. Two of the cells on the lower passage—those at the junction of the narrower passage—faced the execution-room door. The two opposite these, on the corresponding corners, faced the passage that gave into the Old Death House or what now by a large stretch of the imagination, could be called the condemned men’s reception room, where twice weekly an immediate relative or a lawyer might be met. But no others.

  In the Old Death House (or present reception room), the cells still there, and an integral part of this reception plan, were all in a row and on one side only of a corridor, thus preventing prying inspection by one inmate of another, and with a wire screen in front as well as green shades which might be drawn in front of each cell. For, in an older day, whenever a new convict arrived or departed, or took his daily walk, or went for his bath, or was led eventually through the little iron door to the west where formerly was the execution chamber, these shades were drawn. He was not supposed to be seen by his associates. Yet the old death house, because of this very courtesy and privacy, although intense solitude, was later deemed inhuman and hence this newer and better death house, as the thoughtful and condescending authorities saw it, was devised.

  In this, to be sure, were no such small and gloomy cells as those which characterized the old, for there the ceiling was low and the sanitary arrangements wretched, whereas in the new one the ceiling was high, the rooms and corridors brightly lighted and in every instance no less than eight by ten feet in size. But by contrast with the older room, they had the enormous disadvantage of the unscreened if not uncurtained cell doors.

  Besides, by housing all together in two such tiers as were here, it placed upon each convict the compulsion of enduring all the horrors of all the vicious, morbid or completely collapsed and despairing temperaments about him. No true privacy of any kind. By day—a blaze of light pouring through an over-arching skylight high above the walls. By night—glistening incandescents of large size and power which flooded each nook and cranny of the various cells. No privacy, no games other than cards and checkers—the only ones playable without releasing the prisoners from their cells. Books, newspapers, to be sure, for all who could read or enjoy them under the circumstances. And visits—mornings and afternoons, as a rule, from a priest, and less regularly from a rabbi and a Protestant minister, each offering his sympathies or services to such as would accept them.

  But the curse of the place was not because of these advantages, such as they were, but in spite of them—this unremitted contact, as any one could see, with minds now terrorized and discolored by the thought of an approaching death that was so near for many that it was as an icy hand upon the brow or shoulder. And none—whatever the bravado—capable of enduring it without mental or physical deterioration in some form. The glooms—the strains�
�the indefinable terrors and despairs that blew like winds or breaths about this place and depressed or terrorized all by turns! They were manifest at the most unexpected moments, by curses, sighs, tears even, calls for a song—for God’s sake!—or the most unintended and unexpected yells or groans.

  Worse yet, and productive of perhaps the most grinding and destroying of all the miseries here—the transverse passage leading between the old death house on the one hand and the execution-chamber on the other. For this from time to time—alas, how frequently—was the scene or stage for at least a part of the tragedy that was here so regularly enacted—the final business of execution.

  For through this passage, on his last day, a man was transferred from his better cell in the new building, where he might have been incarcerated for so much as a year or two, to one of the older ones in the old death house, in order that he might spend his last hours in solitude, although compelled at the final moment, none-the-less (the death march), to retrace his steps along this narrower cross passage—and where all might see—into the execution chamber at the other end of it.

  Also at any time, in going to visit a lawyer or relative brought into the old death house for this purpose, it was necessary to pass along the middle passage to this smaller one and so into the old death house, there to be housed in a cell, fronted by a wire screen two feet distant, between which and the cell proper a guard must sit while a prisoner and his guest (wife, son, mother, daughter, brother, lawyer) should converse—the guard hearing all. No handclasps, no kisses, no friendly touches of any kind—not even an intimate word that a listening guard might not hear. And when the fatal hour for any one had at last arrived, every prisoner—if sinister or simple, sensitive or of rugged texture—was actually if not intentionally compelled to hear if not witness the final preparations—the removal of the condemned man to one of the cells of the older death house, the final and perhaps weeping visit of a mother, son, daughter, father.