The Jacket | Page 6

years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a man
to be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid brutes of guards were
rats, and they gnawed the intelligence of me, gnawed all the fine nerves
of the quick of me and of the consciousness of me. And I, who in my
past have been a most valiant fighter, in this present life was no fighter
at all. I was a farmer, an agriculturist, a desk-tied professor, a
laboratory slave, interested only in the soil and the increase of the
productiveness of the soil.
I fought in the Philippines because it was the tradition of the Standings
to fight. I had no aptitude for fighting. It was all too ridiculous, the
introducing of disruptive foreign substances into the bodies of little
black men-folk. It was laughable to behold Science prostituting all the
might of its achievement and the wit of its inventors to the violent
introducing of foreign substances into the bodies of black folk.
As I say, in obedience to the tradition of the Standings I went to war
and found that I had no aptitude for war. So did my officers find me out,
because they made me a quartermaster's clerk, and as a clerk, at a desk,
I fought through the Spanish-American War.
So it was not because I was a fighter, but because I was a thinker, that I

was enraged by the motion-wastage of the loom-rooms and was
persecuted by the guards into becoming an "incorrigible." One's brain
worked and I was punished for its working. As I told Warden Atherton,
when my incorrigibility had become so notorious that he had me in on
the carpet in his private office to plead with me; as I told him then:
"It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your rat-throttlers of
guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite
in my brain. The whole organization of this prison is stupid. You are a
politician. You can weave the political pull of San Francisco
saloon-men and ward heelers into a position of graft such as this one
you occupy; but you can't weave jute. Your loom- rooms are fifty years
behind the times. . . ."
But why continue the tirade?--for tirade it was. I showed him what a
fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless
incorrigible.
Give a dog a bad name--you know the saw. Very well. Warden
Atherton gave the final sanction to the badness of my name. I was fair
game. More than one convict's dereliction was shunted off on me, and
was paid for by me in the dungeon on bread and water, or in being
triced up by the thumbs on my tip-toes for long hours, each hour of
which was longer than any life I have ever lived.
Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The guards
and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters.
Listen, and you shall learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the
prison, a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet. He
was a forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. He was a
stool--strange words for a professor of agronomics to use in writing,
but a professor of agronomics may well learn strange words when pent
in prison for the term of his natural life.
This poet-forger's name was Cecil Winwood. He had had prior
convictions, and yet, because he was a snivelling cur of a yellow dog,
his last sentence had been only for seven years. Good credits would
materially reduce this time. My time was life. Yet this miserable

degenerate, in order to gain several short years of liberty for himself,
succeeded in adding a fair portion of eternity to my own life-time term.
I shall tell what happened the other way around, for it was only after a
weary period that I learned. This Cecil Winwood, in order to curry
favour with the Captain of the Yard, and thence the Warden, the Prison
Directors, the Board of Pardons, and the Governor of California,
framed up a prison-break. Now note three things: (a) Cecil Winwood
was so detested by his fellow-convicts that they would not have
permitted him to bet an ounce of Bull Durham on a bed-bug race--and
bed-bug racing was a great sport with the convicts; (b) I was the dog
that had been given a bad name: (c) for his frame-up, Cecil Winwood
needed the dogs with bad names, the lifetimers, the desperate ones, the
incorrigibles.
But the lifers detested Cecil Winwood, and, when he approached them
with his plan of a wholesale prison-break, they laughed at him and
turned away with