Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  The commutation made headlines throughout New England and beyond. Every paper in Boston ran a front-page story on McCall’s action: “FREES JESSE POMEROY FROM SOLITARY CELL AT THE STATE PRISON” (the Herald); “POMEROY’S LONG TERM OF SOLITARY ENDED” (the Post); “POMEROY GRANTED GREATER FREEDOM” (the Globe). Even the New York Times took note of the story, running a piece headlined: “BAY STATE SOFTENS POMEROY’S PUNISHMENT. Removes Famous Prisoner After 40 Years From Solitary Confinement to Ordinary Cell.”

  Public reaction to the commutation was decidedly mixed. In the days immediately following McCall’s decision, his office was flooded with letters and telegrams, some of which roundly condemned him. One writer accused him of exposing the general prison population to a “bloodthirtsy animal” who was likely to “tear his fellow prisoners to pieces”; while another, with heavy-handed sarcasm, suggested that—since the governor and council were so intent on coddling Pomeroy—they might as well give him “a cradle and a nursing bottle.”

  Most correspondents, however, praised the governor. His action (in the words of one South Boston man) had effaced a “terrible blot on the fair name of Massachusetts.” Indeed, a number of people urged McCall to go even further and set Pomeroy free. In a gesture that was widely reported in the press, one prominent Back Bay woman made it known that—should Jesse be granted a full pardon—she was prepared to employ him as her servant.

  McCall himself had little to say about his decision, telling reporters that he “would rather have the act speak for itself.” Other officials were only slightly more forthcoming. “Pomeroy’s was a terrible crime,” declared Prison Commissioner Cyrus Adams, “but his has also been a terrible punishment. In view of his age and feebleness and his punishment of nearly forty-one years in solitary confinement, it seemed to me wise, just, and humane to recommend commutation of his sentence.” Warden Adams of Charlestown made it clear, however, that Jesse’s new liberties were entirely contingent on his good behavior and could be revoked at any time. “It is up to Pomeroy himself how long he enjoys the new privileges,” he told a group of reporters. “Should he fail to make good, it will be his fault alone. We will do the best we can for him.”

  At first, Jesse seemed delighted with the news. The morning after the governor’s announcement, a mob of newsmen descended on the prison and were granted permission to interview Pomeroy, who expressed his gratitude “to the Governor, his special committee, my attorney, Edwin I. Weiscopf, and others for this consideration.” Speaking in a voice that sounded weirdly shrill and unnatural, as though rusty from years of disuse, Jesse declared his “ambition to live honest and law-abiding and so deserve the added privileges now granted me. I can see that this opportunity to associate with fellow prisoners may lead to further favorable action. I will demonstrate that it is not dangerous for me to mingle with other men.

  “God is good,” he continued. “I only wish my dear mother were alive to know that one further step has been granted toward my freedom. She hoped to see that day, but she is gone.”

  Asked if he would pose for some photographs, Jesse responded with an enthusiastic, “Sure!” Throughout the shoot, he appeared to be in a buoyant mood. At one point, two of the cameramen asked him to turn in their direction. “Take it easy, boys,” Jesse cheerfully replied, “I can’t look both ways at once.”

  The following day, every daily in Boston featured at least one front-page photo of the “world-famous lifer.” In some of these shots, Jesse stands stiffly in a corner of the yard. Wearing his lumpy three-piece suit, a loosely knotted tie, and a round, small-brimmed cap, he looks less like a hardened criminal than an old-time railroad conductor—a holdover (as indeed he was) from the era of Jesse James and the Dalton Gang. In other pictures, he poses awkardly at a roll-top desk. With a pen clutched in his hand and his jacket lapel adorned with an American flag pin, he looks like the world’s shabbiest bank manager. Still other pictures are close-ups of his profoundly unappealing face: the disconcerting eyes, the massive jaw, the bristling moustache, and the frowning, lipless mouth. In none of the photos does he look a day younger than sixty-five.

  By the time these pictures appeared, however—less than two days after his long-coveted commutation was granted—Jesse’s attitude had undergone a confounding shift. When Warden Nathan Allen and a pair of guards showed up at his cell on Friday morning to escort him to his new quarters, they expected to find him waiting impatiently for the transfer, his belongings bundled up and ready to be moved. Instead, Pomeroy was seated at his table, composing a letter on a sheet of lined stationery. Everything in the cell—his books, papers, toilet articles, etc.—was still in its customary place.

  “What’s going on, Jesse?” asked Allen.

  Ignoring the question, Pomeroy continued with his writing. Several moments passed before he set down his pen. Only then did he look up at the warden and say: “I’m staying here.”

  “What do you mean?” Allen snapped.

  “If I can’t have a pardon, then I don’t want any change in my sentence,” Jesse answered. Reaching for the stationery, he handed it to Allen. The warden’s eyes narrowed slightly as he read.

  It was a letter to Governor McCall, respectfully declining the commutation and repeating Jesse’s demand for a full pardon.

  “You can’t do this, Jesse,” Allen said sternly. “The order’s been signed.”

  “I didn’t ask for a commutation,” Jesse said, “and I don’t want it.” As far as he was concerned, being released from solitary only made his situation worse. Dismal as it was, his old cell had certain amenities that the newer ones lacked, including running water, its own heating control, and enough space for his personal library. Besides, he had no interest in doing menial chores like the other inmates. “The state has made me a scholar,” he grandly proclaimed. His dream, he told Allen, was to get out of prison and become a schoolteacher. Until the governor released him, he intended to stay right where he was.

  Allen tried arguing with him, but Pomeroy wouldn’t budge. By refusing to obey the governor’s edict, Jesse was living up to his legend as Charlestown’s most persevering troublemaker, and the press made the most of the story. “POMEROY SPURNS COMMUTATION,” the Post trumpeted. “REFUSES TO WORK, DEMANDS FULL PARDON, AND WANTS TO TEACH THE YOUNG.” As the weekend progressed, the papers ran regular, front-page updates on the battle-of-wills between Jesse and his jailers. Bostonians learned all about Jesse’s refusal to march to meals with the other inmates, leave his cell for exercise, perform light work, or attend chapel services on Sunday.

  As for Warden Allen, though he was “not disposed to be harsh with the aged prisoner” (as the Boston Globe put it), he was compelled “to enforce the rules if he hoped to preserve discipline.” On Sunday evening, he presented Pomeroy with an ultimatum. If Jesse was not ready to accept his new sentence by the following day, he would receive the same punishment as any other insubordinate prisoner—i.e, he would be placed in a “detention cell” with no light, a wooden plank to sleep on, and a diet of bread and water.

  At around 8:30 the next morning—Monday, January 29—Allen and his deputy, William Hendry, arrived at Jesse’s cell and found him seated on the edge of his bunk.

  After bidding Pomeroy good morning, the warden asked if he had “thought over the matter we discussed last night?”

  “Yes,” Jesse answered.

  “And have you made up your mind to obey the orders of the governor and the rules and regulations of the prison?”

  “No,” Jesse said calmly.

  The old man’s cool obstinacy made Allen’s temper flare. “I order you now,” he commanded, “to go into the yard this morning with the other men. Will you go?”

  “No, sir,” Pomeroy said. “I won’t.”

  “Then you do not propose to obey the rules under the new sentence?” Allen said.

  “No.”

  Tightening his lips, Allen turned and nodded to Deputy Warden Hendry, who immediately stepped to the bunk, grabbed Pomeroy by one arm
, pulled him to his feet, and marched him to the Fort Russell section of the prison, where Jesse was shut up in a punishment cell.

  As it happened, he remained there for only twenty-four hours. On Monday afternoon, Warden Allen traveled to the State House to consult with the governor and other officials. In the end, they agreed that there was no sense in punishing Jesse. The whole point of the governor’s commutation was to defuse the accusations that the state’s treatment of Pomeroy was horribly inhumane. To keep him in prolonged detention would only make the Massachusetts prison system seem even more brutal than before. By 8:30 the following morning, Jesse was back in Cherry Hill.

  “Pomeroy Wins Out in Strike,” reported the Boston Globe. Still, his triumph wasn’t entirely without its costs. On Tuesday morning, Warden Allen announced that there would “be no more special bulletins from the prison about Pomeroy.” Jesse may have won the right to remain in his old cell, but he had lost something vitally important to him—the publicity that not only fed his pathological egotism but generated support for his still-hoped-for pardon.

  At some point, he clearly recognized that he had won a Pyrrhic victory. Jesse’s name would not appear in the newspapers for another few months. And when it finally did, it would be in an article headlined: “JESSE POMEROY GOES TO WORK. Notorious ‘Lifer’ Decides to Accept Commutation of Solitary Confinement.”

  According to the story, on the evening of Saturday, April 30, 1917—exactly three months after he had been released from detention and allowed to return to his old cell—Jesse suddenly announced that he was prepared to accept the change in his sentence. At 10:30 the following morning, he attended chapel with the other men. Later that afternoon (as the paper reported), “for the first time in more than 40 years [he] mingled with his fellow convicts in the main yard of the state prison” and “listened to the strains of the prison band.”

  Jesse, the story went on to say, would “be assigned the task of spading up soil in the prison yard, where a potato patch will be started.” Prison officials, however, did not expect the old man to be especially productive, since “his muscles, practically atrophied after years of solitary confinement, will be of little use on the planting line.”

  47

  I’m thinking of you,

  Yes, I’m thinking,

  As New Year’s comes along—

  Two score, nineteen hundred—

  Let’s heed its happy song;

  While golden Hope may spread

  A rainbow o’er the ways;

  I’m thinking of you,

  Ever thinking,

  As in those early Days.

  —Jesse Pomeroy, “I Am Thinking of You”

  In his celebrated history of the 1920s, Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen characterizes that colorful decade as the “Ballyhoo Years”—an era when “millions of men and women turned their attention, their talk, and their emotional interest upon a series of tremendous trifles,” from flagpole-sitting to the mahjong craze to the death of Rudolph Valentino. Sporadically throughout the twenties, news items about Jesse Pomeroy would appear in the press—and, in keeping with the giddy spirit of the times, they tended to deal with the most frivolous subjects.

  On Tuesday, February 3, 1920, for example, newspapers around the country carried stories about Pomeroy’s triumphant appearance in Charlestown’s second annual minstrel show. The show had taken place the previous evening in the prison chapel before a wildly enthusiastic crowd of inmates and visitors (whose number included some of the city’s most prominent men). The chapel had been decked out for the occasion with red-and-blue bunting, American flags, and a brilliant display of yellow-and-white artificial chrysanthemums. Beginning at 7:00 P.M., the audience—which filled every seat on the chapel floor, the auditorium, and the balcony—was treated to two and half hours of music, comedy, and dance by a cast of nearly fifty cons in checkered coats, white trousers, red neckties, and blackface. Highlights included Jack Mulhall’s toe-tapping rendition of “I Used to Call Her Baby,” Edward Washington’s juggling act, Walter Furness’s harmonica playing, Sylvester Parham and Harry Thornton’s performance of the “Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” and a “plantation breakdown” by Jack McGuffin.

  The greatest applause, however, was reserved for Jesse Pomeroy, who recited, wholly from memory, an original, thirteen-stanza poem entitled “Then and Now in Charlestown.” Dressed in a Prince Albert coat, white duck trousers, white gloves, and black shoes, Jesse—his face blackened with burnt cork—appeared nervous as a schoolboy as he began his recitation:

  “Good friends, to you would we recite

  A fascinating lay tonight.

  ’Tis of a place of great reknown

  At Prison Point, in Charlestown.

  Its walls of gray and ramparts high

  Look quite exclusive to the eye:

  But that’s a case where looks deceive,

  You can get in, but never leave.”

  Before long, however, he became fully relaxed. By the time he reached the end of his hundred-line poem, he was declaiming with all the vivacity of a practiced public orator:

  “Kind Friends, the palm is but your due,

  For sympathy, with kindness true;

  For all you’ve done to ease the load

  Our gratitude this eve has showed.

  To all who make our life so bright

  May Heaven bless you—and good night.”

  So wildly did the audience respond to his perfomance that Jesse was obliged to return to the footlights for a curtain call. At first, their cheers seemed to render him speechless. He quickly regained his composure, however, and—after waiting for the noise to subside—said: “I wish to thank you for your appreciation of my efforts to entertain you. This is the first time in sixty years I have received public applause. I want to thank the administration heads for their kindness and courtesy to me.”

  Then, with a little bow to his fans, he exited the stage.

  * * *

  Jesse had, in fact, been churning out poetry for years. Since 1915, he had been a frequent contributor to The Mentor, a monthly literary magazine produced by the inmates of Charlestown and devoted (in the words of its credo) “to the interest of that great body of men who, while in prison, are earnestly seeking for a way out into the light of Reason, up the Path of Courage, to Success.” Like his thirteen-stanza ode to Charlestown—recited to such acclaim at the minstrel show—his pieces for The Mentor were characterized by formal clumsiness, mawkish sentimentality, banal language, and utterly vapid subject matter.

  Nevertheless, Jesse took a deep pride in his writing abilities. At the time of the minstrel show, he was already sixty years old, a half-blind old man who answered to the nickname of “Grandpa” and had been behind bars for nearly half a century. His insipid verse and equally trite little essays (on subjects like “How I Learned Spanish” and “Some Momentous Events in History”) served an important function in his appallingly barren existence. They allowed him to believe that his life hadn’t been utterly wasted, that he had accomplished something worthwhile—“a good education by my own effort” (as he put it). When one of his compositions, a hundred-word essay titled “How to Make Good in Prison,” won a Christmas competition sponsored by a publication called The Volunteers’ Gazette, he proudly trumpeted the news to his fellow inmates. (He was especially gratified by the monetary part of the prize—$1.00 in cash—describing it as “the first money earned by any of my writings.”) Completely detached from reality, he regarded himself as a man of substantial intellectual achievement and real artistic talent.

  In January 1920, he collected his finest literary efforts and—reportedly with the financial assistance of “old friends from his boyhood days”—arranged for their private publication. Entitled Selections from the Writings of Jesse Harding Pomeroy, Life Prisoner since 1874, the resulting volume featured a formal frontispiece portrait of the author and thirty-one compositions in both poetry and prose on such stimulating subjects as “Mother’s Day,”
“The Reading of Books,” and “My First Movie Show.” A characteristic piece of verse (it is impossible to reprint the best of the bunch, since they are all more-or-less equally inept) is “An Industrial Muse,” a rapturous ode to the products manufactured in the prison shops. A typical stanza runs as follows:

  And Hosiery, both short and long,

  With underwear, so neat and strong;

  Our Brushes too

  Of all sorts view;

  And Mattresses for modest sum,

  With wares shaped from Aluminum.

  Jesse’s book elicited the kind of reaction that Samuel Johnson famously ascribed to the sight of a dog walking on its hind legs (“It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all”). Because of the author’s notoriety, the book attracted a certain amount of fascinated attention. A popular monthly magazine of the time, The Survey, described it as “a book of almost unique interest”—but only because it had been written by the most infamous life-prisoner in U.S. history. As for the writings themselves, the reviewer’s judgment was brutal (if accurate). Pomeroy’s poetry and prose only served to prove that he “could not acquire, even in the concentration of his cell, any real mental ability; there is nothing in his book of intrinsic merit.”