The Daily Worker Newspaper, January 2, 1926, Page 11

“EH morning was spent in unwinding the yards of red tape that are woven into the .| chains of a prison. The four I. Ww. W. | #isoncrs were checked thru several offices, » he warden spoke to them a moment or two, | hen.they turned in their gray prison clothes b wind received in exchange their own forgotten x +reased clothes, stale after five years’ repose ' nabag. Then they were searched twice for ! ~.:ontraband letters, then they were given their ailroad tickets to Chicago, the city where they iad been tried. fi “So.long, boys,” one of the guards at the 4 ast steel door leading to the world, said joy- « ‘ully to them. He -was a-tall, portly, serene rT rishman, with grey. walrus :‘moustaches, and « ie had seen’ hundreds’of released men stand ight, dazed as if they had been fetched from ‘he bottom of the sea. “So long, boys; drop in ®gain some time when you’re lonesome; we dyed your yisit,”-.. : be men smiled awkwardly at him, stiffly and .. the show of prison deference to a guard. they were still deferential and cautious like prisoners; in their minds they were not yet free. They walked silently down the flat dusty road ‘eading from the penitentiary to the highroad, their jaws set, their pale faces appearing unfam- iliar and haggard to each other as their eyes glanced from side to side. “So this is America!” said little Blackie Doan, heaving a deép sigh and spitting hard and far into the road to display his nonchalance. Blackie was more nervous and trembling inside than any of the other men; but he could never forget that a gentleman swaggers and grins and spits with a tough air when he is in a difficult situation. This blow of sudden freedom and sunlight after five years in prison fell harder upon Blackie than upon the other men. He had just come, the day before, from five month’s of solitary confinement been expiating the worst of prison offenses. He had battered with fists and feet a guard moré ’ 1 half. a foot his height for the reason that enedchad siete bea ing with fist and black- ack | sa weak, half-witted boy of nineteen who never. seemed to remember his place in the line—another enormous prison crime. “The land of the free and the home of “the of |brave!” John Brown, a tall, lanky Englishman, of jwit gray hair, hawk nose, and steady blue eyes 1d jadc -d monotonously, as in a litany. “Wish I r- jhaa-a chew of tobacco!” The other two I. W. W. prisoners just released €fafter their five years’ punishment for the crime of “4 having opposed 1 world war did not say a word + but stumbled along dumbly, as if~waiting for ething more interesting to happen. One was Jones, a husky young western American, _ the face and physique of a college football stared at the world like those of an unspoil child’s. The other I. W. W. was Ramon Gen- a young, slim, dark American-Mexican, the generation of those ha:d-working Mexi- ean peons who build the rdilroads of our western “Wish Thad a chew of tobacco!” repeated « linking like thesé°fdur in the strange sim-} | in a black, damp underground cell, where he had} ,aayer, and with large luminous green eyes that! FREE—A Story by MICHAEL GOLD Brown, licking his dry lips with his tongue, and} of dessert, and looked into a mirror at their pale sweeping the brown drab prairie with his. eyes. “Feel as if I could spit cotton!” The truth was, he wanted the tobacco to steady his nerves. “Like the others, he was quivering internally with a rout of weird emotions. He had lived for five years in a steel house, behind steel ‘bars, in a routine that was enforced by men with blackjacks and shotguns, and that was in- human and perfect as steel. Now he was free. No one was watching him; he was strolling down a hot country road, under the immense yellow sky. He was back in the world cf free men and free women; and he, and the others with hin should have breathed deeply, kissed the earth and reoiced; instead they seemed tense and worried, a little disappointed. What, had they expected? They could not have said, but like all, prisoners, they had built up, without knowing it, fantastic. and exaggerated notions of the world outside. It seemed a little ordinary to them now. The sky was a dun yel- lowish waste with a sun shining thru it. The wide dull prairie stretched on every hand like the floor of some empty barn, with shocks of gray rattling corn stacked in dreary rows, file after file to the horizon. A dog was barking some- where. Smoke was rising from a score of farm- houses, and they heard the whistle of a distant freight train. There was dull burning silence on everything, the silence of the sun. The world of freedom seemed dull; but prisons are tense with sleepless emotions of hope and fear. They were passing a farmer in a flannel shirt, plodding behind a team of huge horses in a field of stubble. His Jean, brown face was covered with sweat and fixed in grim, unsmiling lines as he held down the bucking plow and left a path of rich black soil behind him. : “Looks like a guy in for-life, doesn’t he?” said Brown, pointing to him with his thumb. “Looks like that murderer cell-mate of yours, doesn’t he, Ramon?” — The little Mexican cast a swift, worried glance with his black eyes at the dull fanatic behind the plow. “Yes,” he said sharply, and stared back at the 8 Patt aus Said Blackie; grin- ning, as he kicked a tin can out of the road, and spat, all in the same moment. “Same old god- damn, Hoosiers, raising the goddamn corn! Corn and Hoosiers—God, why don’t they raise a car- rot once in a while?” The others offered no answer to this American condrum. They were moving on to fresh sights in this new world they had’ been thrust into— they were staring at the bend in the highroad where the town street began, two miles away from the prison. The ugly frame houses of the middle west set among trees and smooth lawns, the trol- ley tracks, the stone pavements, then the stores and shop windows when they came nearer the heart. of the town—that was what they saw. Up and down the streets men and women walked. in the humdrum routine of life. A grocer was weighing out sugar in a dark window. They passed the little shop of an Italian cobbler. They passed a white school building, from which came the sound of fresh young voices singing. There was a line of Fords standing at the curb near the railroad depot. There were more women and men walking slowly about the square near the depot, discussing housework, and the election for sheriff and the price of corn and the price of hogs. This was the world. / “SE. don’t see no brass bands out to meet us home,” said Blackie, with his irrepressible grin. “How do you account for that, Hill? Ain’t they heard we’re coming pd Hill, the young husky quarterback with the large. green. eyes seemed unable to say a word. = TT at Blackie, it seemed, and shook his ea Pe: - +) “What’s the matter, Hill?” that worthy quer- ied, with an insolent grin, “ain’t we as good as the boys who fought to make the world safe for democracy ?” “Aw, shut up!” Hill Jones muttered, “you get as talkative as a parrot sometimes!” “I’m an agitator, that’s why I talk,” Blackie jeered and would have said more, but that the Englishman~Brown put his hand on Blackie’s arm. There was a policeman loitering on the next corner, and for some strange reason, known only to ex-prisoners, the impassive Englishman was suddenly shaken to his soul. “Let’s get some coffee and,” he said, leading them into the door of a cheap restaurant shaded by a wide brown maple tree. The four sat on stools against a broad counter loaded with plates prison faces. “Coffee and crullers,”/ordered the Englishman, naming the diet of all those who wander along the roads of America, and pick up their food like the sparrows where they can find it. “Ham and eggs,” said Hill. “Hand and eggs and French fried and coffee,” said Blackie. “Ham and eggs,” said Ramon; in a muffled voice. The restaurant proprietor, a fat, cheerful man. in a white apron had been counting bills at his cash ‘register and talking crops with a young farm hand in overalls. He locked the register with a sharp snap and took their orders leisurely, the while guessing their status with his shrwed eyes. He repeated the orders into the little cubby hole leading to the kitchen. “Solitary confinement, eh, what?” Blackie said to the Englishman, pointing at the forlorn, mid- dle-aged face of the cook that pered out of the cubby hole and repeated the orders as if ina voice from the tomb. fey Neither Brown nor the others answered, but waited with grim patience for their food. When it came, they wolfed it down rapidly, as if some- one were watching over them. Blackie could not be still however. : “This is better than the damn beans and rotten stew every day at the other hotel,” he muttered. “Real ham and eggs! Oh, Boy!” BrownNooked at the clock. It was just noon. “I guess the boys are having their grub now,” he said. “Yes, there goes the whistle. Gosh, you can hear it all the way over here!” Yes, it was the prison whistle, the high whining blast like the cry of some cruel hungry beast of prey, rising and falling over the little town and all the flat corn-lands, the voice of the master of life, the voice of the god of the corn-lands. The four prisoners in this restaurant knew that call well; and everyone in the town and everyone liv- ing on the corn-lands knew it as thoroly as.they did. “Look,” said Blackie, pointing thru a window behind them, “you can just see the top of the prison walls from here. Who would have thunk you tould see it so far?” ean ren 3 The men turned from their food to stare gloom- ily, while the fat proprietor hid a knowing smile behind his curled moustaches. : “Two thousand men in hell,” said Jones quietly, “and all these Hoosiers know is corn and hogs. God, is’it worth while? Twenty-five of our boys still in there, ninety-six still in Leaven- worth—God, why do we let ourselves be crucified for these Hoosiers?” “Jim Downey’s got fifteen more years to go; so has Frank Varrochek, Harry Bly, Ralph Snel- lins and four more,” said John Brown quietly, piercing with his deep blue eyes thru all the dis- tance. “And Jack Small has consumption; and George Mulvane is going crazy—Hill, do you think we'll ever get ’em out alive?” Ramon suddenly became hysterical. He stood up with brandished fists and shook them at the distant prison, quivering with the rage of five years of silence. His olive face dark- ened with blood, and locks of his long raven-black hair fell in his “eyes, so that he could not see. He flamed into sudden Latin eloquence. “Beasts !*he cried, in a choked, furious voice, “robbers of the poor, murderers of the young; hangmen, capitalists, patriots; you think you have punished us! You think we will be silent now, and not speak of your crimes!. You dirty fools, you can never silence us! You ean torture us, you can keep us in prison for all our lives—” “Oh, Ramon,” Blackie cried, pushing-him back into his seat, and patting him soothingly on the shoulder. “Easy, easy! We all feel as sore as you do, Ramon, and we hate just as hard. By God, we hate them. But easy now, old-timer, easy 1? The others helped quiet the nerve-wracked | young Mexican, and he finally subsided and sat” there with his face between his hands until they had finished their food. Then the four paid their check to the discreet but amused fat proprietor, and went into the street on their way to the railroad station, trying again to appear. casual and unconcerned, y ’ At the next corner another policeman was lounging against a store window, and it was with an effort that each of the freed men passed his vacant eye. They braced up and walked by bravely, but they still found it bard to believe that they were really free. It would take them some months to become ac- customed to the greater prison house known as the world,