The Devil's Stocking

by Nelson Algren

  “What we have to demand,” Calhoun picked up his interrupted counsel, “is protection against reprisals. We have to demand an injunction restraining the correction officers when these negotiations have ended.”

  A federal injunction might be obtained, it was then suggested, from the same judge who had handed down the decision limiting the administration’s powers of censorship.

  “She doesn’t have jurisdiction over the prison,” Wilson advised the prisoners, “but a federal injunction isn’t necessary anyhow. A state injunction will serve the same purpose.”

  “A state injunction will not serve the same purpose,” Elvie Barker assured Wilson. “It has to be federal.”

  “Then I’ll get you a goddamned federal injunction,” Wilson promised.

  He left that afternoon, by plane, caught a federal judge vacationing in New England, and was back at Athens the following morning with the signed injunction in hand. He handed it to the Prisoners’ Council with a sense of triumph.

  Several prisoners read it yet said nothing. When it got to Barker he tossed it back at Wilson.

  “This is worthless,” Barker told him.

  “Why?”

  “It doesn’t have a seal.”

  “It doesn’t have to have a seal.”

  “Mister, you’re not dealing with the Mohawks here,” Barker told Wilson.

  “All right,” Wilson gave in once again, “I’ll get you a goddamned seal.” He dispatched the injunction, by police car and by plane, back to the federal judge. He got it back the following morning, with a seal. Once again he handed it to the Prisoners’ Council.

  “We’re not talking about reprisals today,” Barker informed Wilson. “Today we’re talking about amnesty. Complete amnesty. And flight to a third world nation of our own choosing.”

  “Aren’t you going to read the signed and sealed federal injunction you’ve been demanding for days?” Wilson asked.

  Barker picked it up. Then, conscious of the TV cameras upon him, tore it in two and flung away the pieces, seal and all.

  “I’ve given everything, I’ve gotten nothing,” Wilson grieved. “I can give you no more assurances.”

  The man was confronted by a dozen prisoners adamant on amnesty; behind him were three hundred correction officers of whom many did not even understand the word.

  Some of the officers had fashioned slingshots and were slinging at prisoners from crannies in the administration building.

  “All we could do,” Wilson tried later to explain, “was to try to keep buying time in hope of getting personal support from the governor. Even the hostages’ wives asked the governor to come down. Just to talk to us. He didn’t have to go into the Square. They would have known he was here and that alone would have made them listen closer. One of the wives suggested that the prisoners be asked if they would release one hostage every morning at nine A.M. in return for one hour of negotiation. I thought it was a good idea myself.

  “When we told the governor that his presence would gain us time, he asked, ‘Whom do you want to buy time from? Are you worried that the prisoners are going to move and kill the hostages? Or are you worried that the state is going to move?” I told him I was more afraid of the move the state might make than I was about what the prisoners might do.”

  Max Epstein, acting now for the prisoners, quoted examples of criminal amnesty already granted: the Canadian government had flown twenty-six people to Cuba in return for a British economic advisor from Montreal in 1970. The British had released a suspected Arab terrorist in return for the safety of passengers aboard a BOAC plane down in the desert. Brazil had released a hundred political prisoners for the life of a Swiss ambassador.

  “That’s dishonest,” Wilson rejected Epstein’s argument. “Either it’s amnesty or it isn’t amnesty.”

  The hostages wanted amnesty granted. “If they would have granted them transportation,” one hostage reflected, “and transportation to a nonimperialist country, each one of us hostages would have paid for one airline ticket for anybody who wanted to leave. Amnesty was a small price to pay for our lives.”

  “We must give them clemency,” another hostage sent a note to Wilson, “clemency from criminal prosecution. Anything else than that is as good as dropping dead. It’s cut and dry. That’s all there is to it.”

  Then it was too late. Connery was dead. And everyone, inside the Square or not, realized that everyone inside the Square could now be charged with murder. A fresh desperation began pervading the plea for amnesty.

  The seven white men held in one corner of the hostage tent to await charges of treason, were given a choice between digging a large trench in the Square or of being executed. They chose to dig a trench.

  Calhoun was escorting Wilson across the Square where the seven whites were digging, when someone called, “Hold him! Hold him for hostage!”

  Calhoun stopped in the middle of the Square, picked up a bullhorn and answered the shouts:

  “Brothers!” he advised the crowd, “we have given our word that Mr. Wilson will be returned safely to the administration building. That is where he is being taken now and that is where he is going to go.”

  Black Muslims, including Calhoun, got Wilson to the gate and into the hands of correction officers.

  He wouldn’t be coming back; everyone knew that. The only question now remaining was whether the men assembling outside could, once inside, be controlled. They made up a small army: 587 state troopers; 250 sheriff’s deputies; a contingent of park policemen and—unofficially—over 300 correction officers determined, despite the governor’s specific order, to take part in the assault.

  This little army also had two helicopters and its troops were equipped with rifles with telescopic sights, sidearms and twelve-gauge shotguns loaded with OO pellets, ordinarily employed for hunting big game at distances exceeding thirty yards. Their commander had forbidden them to engage in hand-to-hand combat. When they apprehended danger they were to fire.

  The men inside had baseball bats, iron pipes and homemade knives. They thought that, as traditional in warfare, the side possessing overwhelming force would offer terms of surrender. That is only what they thought.

  They didn’t expect troops to come in firing. They were already on the verge of surrender. They’d been sleeping for four nights on the ground in a season of rain and mists. Their food supply was dwindling. They were tired, tense, disappointed and afraid. They’d begun talking, among themselves, of resisting their own leaders.

  A small group of men, between a dozen and twenty, were running the whole show. Their security guards were their officers and the mob in the Square were peasants: they had no voice in anything. In the name of democracy they had set up a despotism more tyrannical, by far, than the administration’s tyranny.

  Many of the men in the Square were doing time only for violation of parole. They wouldn’t have wanted to fly out of the country even if given such a chance. They had had no say in the negotiations.

  At 9:44 A.M. Major Hanrahan gave the order to switch off the prison’s electricity. Then a yellow helicopter rose above the Square.

  Some prisoners conjectured that it must be the governor, arriving at last to settle everything. Others said, No, the plane had come to offer transportation, to those who desired it, to a third world country of their choice. It didn’t occur to anyone, apparently, that the helicopter’s message was simpler, much simpler, than that. Its message was that the hostages had now become expendable.

  When troopers appeared on the walls, eight hostages were blind-folded and made to kneel on the catwalk below the wall, plainly visible. A Muslim security guard stood behind each hostage with a knife at the hostage’s throat.

  “Why me?” one hostage asked.

  “Because you’re white,” he was told.

  A black liberation flag was unfurled above the heads of the hostages.

  “Hold your fire,” Hanrahan instructed his troopers, “until you see an overt act by the executioners.” Then, to
the rebels, he added, “Release the hostages. The Citizens’ Committee will meet with you.”

  “Negative,” the reply came back without hesitation. “Negative.”

  “Do not harm the hostages,” Pat Wilson made a final desperate plea. “Surrender peacefully. You will not be harmed.”

  Then a yellow gas began descending from the helicopter and the correction officers opened fire. Troopers, not knowing where the firing was coming from, fired back blindly. The park policemen then joined in, just as blindly, into the gas-filled square.

  “Put your hands on top of your heads,” Hanrahan hollered into the drifting mist in which men were milling about, falling, crawling and stumbling. “Sit or lie down.”

  “The gunfire was necessary,” one state inspector said later, recalling an occasion when he’d been involved in civil disturbances among blacks in Newark. “There were no fatalities in Newark and this was because we were dealing with people, not criminals. Here we were up against something else, a situation entirely unparalleled in the history of the United States. These were less than people and could not therefore be treated with the slightest leniency.”

  The inspector knew history as little as he knew people. In 1929, and again in 1964, state police had been called upon to quell prison riots.

  To the accusation of the prisoners, that they were treated like dogs, the inspector gave full justification: twenty-nine prisoners and ten hostages shot dead.

  No one inside the walls had committed a crime so heinous.

  A crime perpetrated needlessly, mindlessly: the prison could have been retaken without loss of a single life.

  “Most of the people in there deserved to be in there,” one correction officer explained. “Some of them were three-time losers. They were hard criminals. That is what aroused our emotions so much. We felt we had a job to do and we did it. The confrontation was forced upon us by inmates already confined for heinous crimes against society.”

  For the most heinous crime, that of demanding that men be broken to dogs, committed by society against the criminal, no mention was made.

  Yet, there had been a job to do. And yes, they had done it.

  For what reason thirty-eight men, criminals and civilians alike, had to be murdered to achieve this, no explanation was brought forth. The same job could have been accomplished without a single killing.

  The confrontation was the state’s. Because men are everywhere going to resist at being treated as less than men.

  The uprising had not been a race riot until the correction officers made it into one.

  “If a prisoner took his hands off his head,” one survivor reported, “the officers circling him would swing from the floor. When he fell he’d get hit for minutes. One guard would step up and slug him, then step back and give another a clean shot. One officer hit another by mistake—a glancing blow. The officer who got hit yelled, ‘This is for his hitting me, you black sonofabitch!’ and gave the man a resounding blow.”

  “You want your amnesty?” one correction officer kept asking. “Here’s your damned amnesty!”

  “We’ve taken your guff,” another officer warned the prisoners, “now you’re going to take ours!”

  Six minutes of gunfire left the men in the Square stumbling among their collapsed tents in a yellow mist. After they had been ordered to lie down on the grass, one officer told a prisoner to take off his watch. “He pushed my head down with his foot,” the prisoner said. “I handed the watch up to him. He tossed it onto the ground and stomped on it. ‘You aren’t going to need to tell time anymore,’ he told me.”

  When a thousand men were lying face down in the mud, the officers went about strip-searching them and identifying them, here and there, as “executioner,” “security guard,” or “negotiator.” Men so suspected were chalk-marked with an X across their backs. The correction officers acted as if they felt they could not feel themselves to be men again until they had made every man on the ground feel he was less than a man.

  A big black man was forced to lie, stripped, across a recreation table, with a football beneath his chin. “If the football falls,” he was assured, “you’re dead.” An officer then explained to a national guardsman, “He castrated a hostage. Some of our men were disembowelled and abused sexually.”

  The guardsman phoned the administration building for help. “Watch your people,” he told the super, “they’re talking and acting bonkers.”

  None of the hostages had been abused sexually, disembowelled or castrated. They had been fed and guarded. And one officer repaid his treatment in kind. “This guy took care of me,” he indicated a black prisoner, “take care of him. He’s all right.”

  When several young doctors arrived to volunteer their services they found a dozen young blacks and Puerto Ricans stretched out in the hospital corridor. “Nothing but first aid for them,” the doctors were instructed by a correction officer, “they’re ring leaders.” Other correction officers stood around but refused to lend doctors or nurses a hand.

  Elvie Barker survived the shooting. He was found dead in his cell the following day with a gunshot wound in his head. Gary Stein’s body was found two days later. He’d been beaten to death. Two of the men stretched out in the corridor died while awaiting treatment.

  Prisoners could not be moved to a local hospital because the prison had no contract with that particular hospital. Next, use of ambulances was out of the question because insurance had not been taken out. Then it developed that no wounded man could be moved without the specific authorization of the super. And the super was nowhere to be found.

  When he finally materialized, he decided that every prisoner transferred to a hospital would first have to be photographed and fingerprinted, although all of them had been fingerprinted and photographed when they’d arrived at the prison.

  Every prisoner so released, the super added, would have to be accompanied by two correction officers. He was finally persuaded that one officer would suffice. Two more men died while the red tape unwound.

  “The deaths of the hostages,” one paper reported, “reflect a barbarism wholly alien to our civilized society. Prisoners slashed the throats of utterly helpless guards whom they held captive through round-the-clock negotiations, while making increasingly revolutionary demands. Others they stabbed and beat with iron pipes. ‘I saw seven throats cut,’ one trooper assures us. ‘Those cons didn’t wait a second, they just slit throats. We were hit by gasoline bombs, makeshift spears, rocks and iron bars. It’s a marvel more of us weren’t seriously injured.”

  Other papers followed this lead. It was only following the autopsies, and then only after the original false story had been implanted, that reluctant admission was made at last: all ten of the hostages had lost their lives by gunfire. None had had his throat slit. None had been castrated or abused sexually.

  Nothing was reported about the beatings, administered by groups of correction officers, five or six in a group, upon blacks and Puerto Ricans held naked in their cells.

  No reference was made to Governor Nelson’s demonstration of physical and moral cowardice.

  “One little lie,” Calhoun assured Kerrigan, “covers the whole world by the time the truth can get its boots on.”

  “They came down on me at twelve midnight,” Calhoun told Barney Kerrigan at Green Meadow, a couple months after the collapse of the riot at Athens. “Must have been fifty men in helmets, with shotguns and movie cameras. In the event I balked for a moment they could show how they had been forced to gun me down in order to keep me from raping their wives. ‘We had to fire in self-defense,’ would have been the story—‘he’s a murderer.’

  “People will believe anything that supports their prejudices—particularly where there are promotions to be had.

  “There are no people more brutal, nor more cowardly, than those who control our prisons. Army people are disciplined: they have learned to control their fear. Not these P.B.A. creeps. The P.B.A. people panic at every rumor. We learned that fro
m the correction officers at Athens.

  “We lost at Athens,” he added, “but we learned something. We learned about bringing in the outside world. There’s no way of bucking an administration from inside. So long as they have barbed wire and censorship they’ll do whatever they want with you. Which is simply to crush you as a human being.

  “I remain a threat because I remain uncrushed. I never acknowledge guilt. I dress in my own clothes here according to my own taste. I do no work. That would be an act of repentance and I have nothing to repent.

  “We’ve had visits here from doctors, lawyers, editors and clergymen; sometimes singly, sometimes in groups. Twenty-two of us lifers—we call ourselves ‘The Lifers’ Club’—met for lunch here with a citizens’ group. Of course we couldn’t talk too much because of the guards. It worked all the same. We weren’t out to complain or to proselytize them. All we wanted them to realize was that we are men like other men. Not, after all, monsters. We wanted them to catch some faint notion of what it’s like to be locked in a cage for life. They caught it.

  “Myself, I’m a man walking a fence at high noon. I cast shadows on both sides. The administration thinks I’m a black nationalist because I’m not on the Prisoners’ Council. Not so. I’m not a nationalist. No way. I’m a human being among other human beings, nothing more or less. The administration sent a psychoanalyst to see me. He needed help, poor fellow, but I couldn’t do anything for him. I just walked away.

  “It isn’t fear of another riot that makes the administration here handle me with kid gloves. We accomplished more, at Athens, by appealing legally to the state than we did by threatening them with violence. They can always handle violence. What they can’t handle is the appeal to reason. They fear it because they don’t live by reason themselves. When it pops up they reach for a gun.

  “What would you do if you were a correction officer, and you came to work and found the prisoners guarding themselves? Wouldn’t that scare the living bejesus out of you? What would you do if you were a civilian supervisor and found that nobody needed supervision? What would you do if you were a warden and found a warden was no longer needed? Nothing is more dangerous than making the state feel useless. What if it became apparent that prisons themselves are unnecessary? What would happen to the contractors and politicians whose whole lives are invested in protecting society from criminals? What if it looked as if there were no real difference, no basic difference, between people inside the walls and people outside? God almighty, what a fright that would be, top to bottom. The P.B.A. would be running in circles. If you told them, cool it, you’ll stay on the payroll two full years, that’ll give you plenty of time to look around for another type of work, they wouldn’t even hear you. Just trying to reason with this kind of man infu-riates him.