warned me that I would find it to my advantage to try and be as civil as
convenient. I protested that I had not meant anything disrespectful.
Then one of them took me to one side and said:
“Now look here, Johnny, it’s no use you playing softly wid us. We mane
business, ye know; and the sooner ye put us on the scent of a V, the
asier yell save yerself from a dale of trouble. Ye can’t get out o’ this
for anny less. Who’s your frinds?”
I told him I had not a single friend in all the land of America, and that
I was far from home and help, and very poor. And I begged him to let me
go.
He gathered the slack of my blouse collar in his grip and jerked and
shoved and hauled at me across the dungeon, and then unlocking an iron
cell-gate thrust me in with a kick and said:
“Rot there, ye furrin spawn, till ye lairn that there’s no room in
America for the likes of ye or your nation.”
AH SONG HI.
LETTER V
SAN FRANCISCO, 18–.
DEAR CHING-FOO: You will remember that I had just been thrust violently
into a cell in the city prison when I wrote last. I stumbled and fell on
some one. I got a blow and a curse= and on top of these a kick or two
and a shove. In a second or two it was plain that I was in a nest of
prisoners and was being “passed around”–for the instant I was knocked
out of the way of one I fell on the head or heels of another and was
promptly ejected, only to land on a third prisoner and get a new
contribution of kicks and curses and a new destination. I brought up at
last in an unoccupied corner, very much battered and bruised and sore,
but glad enough to be let alone for a little while. I was on the flag-
stones, for there was, no furniture in the den except a long, broad
board, or combination of boards, like a barn-door, and this bed was
accommodating five or six persons, and that was its full capacity. They
lay stretched side by side, snoring–when not fighting. One end of the
board was four, inches higher than the other, and so the slant answered
for a pillow. There were no blankets, and the night was a little chilly;
the nights are always a little chilly in San Francisco, though never
severely cold. The board was a deal more comfortable than the stones,
and occasionally some flag-stone plebeian like me would try to creep to a
place on it; and then the aristocrats would hammer him good and make him
think a flag pavement was a nice enough place after all.
I lay quiet in my corner, stroking my bruises, and listening to the
revelations the prisoners made to each other–and to me for some that
were near me talked to me a good deal. I had long had an idea that
Americans, being free, had no need of prisons, which are a contrivance of
despots for keeping restless patriots out of mischief. So I was
considerably surprised to find out my mistake.
Ours was a big general cell, it seemed, for the temporary accommodation
of all comers whose crimes were trifling. Among us they were two
Americans, two “Greasers” (Mexicans), a Frenchman, a German, four
Irishmen, a Chilenean (and, in the next cell, only separated from us by a
grating, two women), all drunk, and all more or less noisy; and as night
fell and advanced, they grew more and more discontented and disorderly,
occasionally; shaking the prison bars and glaring through them at the
slowly pacing officer, and cursing him with all their hearts. The two
women were nearly middle-aged, and they had only had enough liquor to
stimulate instead of stupefy them. Consequently they would fondle and
kiss each other for some minutes, and then fall to fighting and keep it
up till they were just two grotesque tangles of rags and blood and
tumbled hair. Then they would rest awhile and pant and swear. While