Pacifist, page 10
The big thing with Gregg, I remember, was tomatoes. He meant someday to grow, organically, incontrovertibly real tomatoes.
Then we happened onto some material on the construction of houses—homes—made of rammed earth. We approached it cautiously. I recall clearly our initial skepticism. Rammed earth?
We became obsessed with it. For days on end we talked of little else but the problems and possibilities of the construction of human habitations, this side of the grave, made simply of dirt. We drew floor plans, made sketches; house, trees, sky and all. We schemed. We would do it, each of us, build a house of earth itself, a home—simply, as a beaver gnaws down a tree, a woodchuck burrows—when we were free.
In the meantime, we built time.
The shoe shop occupied a corner room at the front of the building that housed the prison laundry. In a small room to itself, between the laundry and the shoe shop, was the large vault-like tank in which the shoes to be repaired were first treated under pressure with formaldehyde. This treatment left the shoes reasonably clear of fungi and infectious bacteria, and stinking of formaldehyde rather than feet. It was my job to run the cooker, as it was called.
Behind the tank, in a welter of pipes and conduit, wine was being made. The wine makings were in several glass jars, and consisted of sugar, raisins and water. (Raisins were often served as a breakfast fruit.) At certain stages of the wine making process the brew actually put off an odor identifiable as that of fermenting fruit. During such times I operated the cooker with a frequency that I was certain would alert the guard, but which never did. By opening the tank door before the pressure gauge had quite returned to zero, I could be sure—while burning my eyes and lungs—that the acrid mortuary odor of formaldehyde would obliterate, for hours, the winey-sweet odor of fermenting fruit.
In return for my cooperation I was entitled to share in the finished product. It was sorry stuff. I drank it on occasion, chiefly to be companionable, and with a salute to prison, to war; it tasted like formaldehyde.
28
Prison, in my experience, is every rotten thing that all the books written by prisoners say it is. However, it is not my purpose here seriously to attempt any real contribution to the literature of this genre. By and large—and I don’t mean the observation to be perjorative—I find books by prisoners to contain much the same general message as do books by infantrymen, which is, “Consider now this deadly folly, which I have managed to survive.”
Certainly such books are worth the writing; but I would rather my purpose be understood as being simply anti-war; the writing of a tract, if it must be, but an anti-war tract, and one dealing with prison only as I for a time was prisoner through being pacifist.
This much having been said by way of disclaimer, a few personal observations then about pacificsts in prison and myself, once, as one of them, and since.
And since …
To this day I can hear a sound of metal on metal—a certain pitched and timbered hollow-sounding clang—that will turn my blood cold. I am, also now, always a little uncomfortable in the halls of any government building, while the silence, the air of captivity peculiar to schools, can make me downright uneasy. In my youth I was in no way claustrophobic, but I can not now enter an elevator or ride in a compact car without severe disquiet. It has become impossible for me to sleep in a pup tent, no matter that its walls are of canvas.
Small scars; but scars.
Imprisonment is a physical thing; it is being caged. I think that one necessarily must have been caged for a time fully to understand it, what it feels like, what it is. Nothing in our common experience anticipates it, or lets us easily imagine it; as, for instance, we can imagine quite accurately, I believe, drowning or suffocating or being beaten; but not so, I think, imprisonment.
It is the force—and for its duration it is merciless and unyielding—which society exercises upon its individual transgressors; to have felt it is, indeed, to fear the law.
Today, only with the greatest reluctance and possibly not at all would I seek recourse through the law if cheated, robbed or assaulted. It is not yet in my experience or inclination to perceive the law and its power as other chiefly than the tool of the privileged, an instrument equally for the suppression of the dissident and the oppression of the poor.
Surely the law must be more than this; but I have known, and I know it to be, at least this.
It seems to me obvious that there are similarities between armies and prisons, in the way each is operated and in their functions generally; certainly these rigid and authoritarian institutions have more in common than that their members find the wearing of uniforms obligatory.
I suggest, for instance, that they also have this in common. That they are the two most prevalent institutions in modern society that are everywhere, and hugely, failures; that each not only fails to serve the purpose for which ostensibly it exists, but in fact serves a purpose quite the opposite; prisons being, more than anything else, training schools for criminals; and armies—as the targets of other armies—being the occasion, if not precisely the cause, of the destruction of large segments of those populations which they are supposed to protect.
With the exception of the United States—spared by a happenstance of distance, a happenstance no longer in effect—the various nations involved in World War Two took non-combatant, civilian casualties, of both sexes and all ages, in the thousands and hundreds of thousands; and in America it is a young criminal today—the barest child—who does not have a prison record.
Prisons and armies, as with insect societies, are run by fiat, unquestioned decree. (With insect societies, of course, the decree is biological and quite beyond appeal; which can appear to be the case, at times, with human societies as well.) But what works for a bug would not seem to work too well for a man. The car thieves, bootleggers and bank robbers that I came to know in Chillicothe and Ashland prisons left these institutions—to my first-hand knowledge—not better citizens but better car thieves, bootleggers and bank robbers, a decree and imprisonment to the contrary notwithstanding; as I, in fact, left Ashland a more iconoclastic, if not a better, pacifist.
Having lived in prison for a time with a group of pacifists, I am of the opinion that most of us would have made lousy soldiers under any conditions. It was in our natures, in any authoritarian, conformist environment, to be trouble makers. Simply put, we wouldn’t march well.
Strangely, I am not certain if it was at Ashland or at Chillicothe—I believe it was at Ashland—when for a brief time we were required to march in lock step. It is one of my more vivid, if isolated, prison memories. Beyond the obvious imposition upon us of a demeaning and excessive ritual conformity, it was the ridiculous intimacy of the lock step march to which I objected. I recall thinking at the time that even circus elephants are not so forcibly ass-to-groin paraded, but circle the arena trunk-to-tail, having room at least decently to breathe or pass wind.
(Interestingly enough, the official justification of the use of lock step was that it enabled the authorities immediately to detect any troublesome behavior on the part of an inmate, any ‘stepping out of line.’)
I remember especially how at first we were tightly lined up … and then made endlessly to wait. Then, at the blowing of a whistle, row upon row, as mechanically as men can be made to function, we moved about as though on conveyor belts; we were as lines of robots, blind-shuffling through the halls, twisting the same along the outside walks, no matter that it rained or snowed, or that a wind blew.
I remember moving in lock step across a prison yard through a crashing, sky-splitting electrical storm. I was amazed that we were spared. Any decent God would have wiped us out in contempt, flattened us all in a row, like dominoes.
However, it is my understanding now that we altogether did away with lock step in those federal prisons where conscientious objectors, in significant numbers, were held for any length of time. It was a matter of passive resistance, of stepping out of line. And it worked. A small victory perhaps; but to alter anything about a prison is quite a trick, even so.
The pacifist is often asked what he would do in the event the United States were to be conquered by a hostile power. The assumption on the part of the questioner is almost always that we would simply assume the proper position in which best to have our asses kicked. I suggest that anyone who believes that such would be the pacifist response to the imposition in America of an oppressive, authoritarian rule—foreign or domestic—should consult the prison authorities that were in power when America’s prisons were host to some six thousand pacifists. I am sure it will be found that we have not been forgotten.
Most certainly we did not roll over and play dead; and we made some changes, large and small. A small thing, but I remember particularly how we conspired to get rid of a particularly bullying and abusive officer. Unable to discover a shred of good in the man, we set about bringing out the worst in him, which was easy enough to do, and which soon led to his removal. He was trouble, and as such he was transferred to the federal prison in Atlanta, I believe, where his charges would be murderers and such, to bully as he might, or might not.
At Ashland, also, as at other federal prisons holding pacifists, we radically reduced the area within the prison where a policy of racial discrimination was being practiced. In this effort at Ashland we had to deal not only with the opposition of the prison authorities but with the larger part of the non-pacifist prison population as well. We took some lumps; but then we never said we wouldn’t.
A general misconception in regard to pacifists is that they suppose violence can be opposed non-violently with never a casualty. The pacifist, of course, thinks no such a thing. No matter, the popularity of this misconception persists. Only let it be argued successfully by your average citizen that in a confrontation with hostile armed forces the pacifists might take some casualties, number some dead—that such might be expected—and it is taken as being shown beyond all further dispute that the case for the efficacy of non-violence has been demolished.
Most of all in this would it seem to be proved that the pacifist simply is not a realist.
That the opponents of pacifism advance this bit of spurious reasoning so consistently, and are themselves apparently so persuaded of its reasonableness, is all the more difficult to understand in view of the fact that it is taken quite for granted by these very people, and without demurer, that in reliance upon violence, in conventional warfare, casualties inevitably will be taken in great number.
Whatever; what the pacifist does in fact believe is that a recourse to non-violence, particularly as a matter of national policy, in whatever our nation’s imaginable future confrontations with other nations, would result in casualties neither so numerous or so horrendous as would otherwise be a certainty; nor—and perhaps more importantly—would they prove to be, in the long run, so pointless.
A non-violent war to end war, for instance, just might work.
29
It is difficult for a prisoner in an American penitentiary to remember who he is. This forgetfulness on the prisoner’s part is obviously one of the ends that imprisonment is intended to accomplish; the assumption being, I suppose, that prisoners are bad people who had best be forgotten, even by themselves, if ever any good is to come of them. Out, that is, with the old and criminal personality, and maybe a new and better one will take its place. Or perhaps the idea is simply that it is easier to run a prison, as it is an army, when personalities don’t have to be taken into account.
Whatever; mail was deliverd to us in Ashland by a guard standing at the cellblock door and calling out the prison number—no names, ever—of those who had received mail. I refused to acknowledge or to receive mail identified in this manner—by number only—as being mine.
I wasn’t joined in this campaign for a name by other objectors, who seemed to feel, rightly, I guess, that this was a personal matter, and in the larger view, trivial. None the less, I stuck with it.
Actually, it wasn’t all that great a sacrifice. Neither my father nor my girl, by that time, would have anything to do with me; and most of the other people I wished to hear from were either in prison somewhere else or had been denied approval as my correspondents by prison authorities. My most regular correspondents up to then had been my aunt and my older brother, both of whom avoided mention of my pacifism and the fact that I happened to be in prison as they would have avoided mentioning cancer if they had known I was dying of it. I might as well have been in for rape. It was not the most difficult correspondence in the world to give up.
Still, I did recognize my number when it was called out, and on a bad day the temptation to acknowledge it was real enough. But I didn’t. How long this continued I don’t really recall; a matter of several weeks, surely. Then the day came. My number was called; there was a pause; and then, “Wetzel?”
Was there someone here of that name?
There was.
To modest applause I went to the bars and received the letter from my aunt.
Bayard Rustin arrived at Ashland some time during my first few months there. His career in the black activists and civil rights movements was still largely before him—he was to help Martin Luther King organize the Montgomery bus boycott and to serve as the chief tactician and organizer of the 1963 Washington Freedom March—but even at that time he was a respected civil rights spokesman and leader in the war resisters movement. I knew him from a visit he had paid to Big Flats during my time there, and by reputation. (Earlier, when it wasn’t being done yet at all, Rustin traveled into the south, to sit at the front of the bus and at the white man’s public table; to be almost always jailed, often beaten.)
Bayard, even then, was a gifted and persuasive public speaker, and altogether genuine in his intellectual and moral commitment to non-violence. He also—and quite incidentally—sang. He did so for the prisoners at Ashland once. We had written some satirical skits for a prison entertainment; as I remember it, Bayard arrived a few days before the show was to be performed. Pacifist friends prevailed upon him to join the program. His was the concluding act. He sat informally at the edge of the stage in the prison auditorium and sang Negro folk songs, a cappella, in a high, thin, sweet falsetto, which gave me goose flesh.
It was too damn sweet.
He sang, “Mana’s little baby love shortening bread.”
Oh, Jesus Christ, I thought. I looked around, incredulous, at his friends. Surely they must have known. He sang in the voice of a woman. You fucking idiots, I thought.
It did not seem to me, that is, the smartest way for a man to be introduced to his fellow prisoners.
Gregg was of a similar mind. He talked about it wonderingly. “It’s all right that he’s smart, and if he wants to talk like an Englishman,” he said, “but he should know better than to sing like that.”
I argued it with him, poorly.
What a pity I thought later—and think still—that a sweetness in a man, that which we regard as a feminine quality—no matter how proven worthy the man—should seem so deadly, so damaging a gift, in one who would lead.
They’ll kill his ass, Gregg said.
They didn’t. In time there was an incident, and Bayard, as I remember it, was transferred to Lewisburg shortly thereafter.
I have, through the years, followed Bayard Rustin’s career with continuing admiration for his dedication, his very considerable abilities, and for his great personal courage.
30
World War Two; my war.
My memory of it:
I became ill that first winter at Ashland, although it was not until spring that I sought treatment for it, an intestinal thing that would come and go, and of which, because it had to do with my gut, I was ashamed.
What I remember most, however, was the cold, the hills frozen and the world at war, and nothing, on my part, to be done about it further. My warmth was gone. The cold, I remember, worked to the bone. I went to bed fully clothed except for my shoes, and lay listening to winds that seemed to come from around the world. No warmth came to me, no matter how still I lay. I cursed my smallness, my frailty, my futility; and in the long cold nights I moved in thought as though among stars and grieved for a stricken world like a god.
Toward spring, for the first time ever, it was made clear to me that I was mortal and might die.
It was, the prison doctor said, the prison itself that was my sickness; my refusal to adjust, to accept imprisonment; my mind, a fox in the cloak, eating at my guts. The doctor, a decent man, prescribed belladonna and a change of heart.
No doubt it was prison, but it was more than that, too. It had been the winter of my war, but I had had no stomach for it, for the outrage or the pity or the terror, for children under bombs, Jews in death camps, in those long nights, in that unblinking cold.
Such, at least, is my memory of that winter and the war.
(The pain still flares up in my gut again now and then. It burns like fire. It has nothing to do, I’m quite sure, with prison or the past; to paraphrase Thoreau, one war at a time.)
31
At the motel:
I suppose it’s the table—the plan now is to have it set up in the lobby—requested by the Four Hundredth Engineers for the display of war mementos, that bothers me most. It is obscene; war mementos, to titillate old soldiers; a kind of pornography.
I wonder; do they have to fondle the damn things? Right here in the lobby?
There is, I think, a sexual content—a denial of impotence—or perhaps it is more than sexual—a fear, a denial of the certain approach of death itself—that is manifest increasingly today in a kind of hunger for crisis, for catastrophe, for war, among many of the elderly.
It would seem they would rather go out with a bang.
