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Authors: Edward Bunker
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facing each other across a table, the inevitable result would be violence. Somebody would find someone “eyeballing” him. So he would eyeball back. “So what are you looking at, sucker?” “Fuck your mother!”
Not only did everyone face the same direction, the mess hall was segregated. The sight made Booker pause in the doorway. “Go on, man,” someone said behind him. He moved ahead. He got in the line where everyone was colored. As he inched toward the serving counter, Booker noticed that whites, Mexicans, Indians and the occasional Asian, all ate together. Only colored men were segregated. He remembered Jim-Crow from his childhood in Tennessee, where he’d felt no resentment simply because it was the normal way of the world, or so he was led to believe. Now he knew more about its evil and its implications. Goddamn white folks made it easy to hate them.
In a semi-daze, he got his tray of food and followed the man ahead to the long table of all black faces and sat down. Later, when a guard signaled the row to rise, Booker blended in. Back within the cell, the security bar dropped and a convict keyman locked each cell gate. “That’s it for the night,” said his cell partner as he stretched out on the bunk.
Booker was alone in the dark with his anger. He would die in prison 54 years later, nine of them spent on Death Row for hitting a guard with a bedpan.
He would never get his one phone call.
Entering The “House of Dracula”
They came for me after midnight on the tenth day following the sentence. I heard the rattling chains down the tier, and three deputies appeared. A fourth remained at the front to throw the lever that unlocked the cell gate. When they reached the cell, I was already waiting, my meager possessions in a shoe box tucked under my arm.
It was the darkness before dawn when the two-vehicle caravan exited the rear loading area. It was where the buses, trucks and garbage cans were kept. The stench was gross. I was in the screened off rear of a black and white station wagon. Two uniformed deputies rode in front. They followed the sedan through the predawn streets to the freeway ramp. Traffic was beginning to build, the gigantic Mack trucks and Kenilworth’s hitting the northbound highway. They would be in Sacramento by noon. When the sun was a faint orange line in the east, we departed out of Bakersfield to pass between endless green fields of cotton and strawberries filled with Mexican laborers bent to pluck the bolls and berries from the bushes. In the scorching sun, what terrible back breaking labor that was. I would rather be in a prison cell than picking cotton like a
nigger slave
, although that preference did not include the fate to which I was destined. I was lazy, not crazy.
Despite the leg irons cutting into my ankles and the handcuffs pressing dents in my wrists, and the awareness of my destination lurking constantly in my thoughts, the ride was not totally miserable. It had been almost nine months since I’d looked upon the free world. By most standards, it was a dreary length of highway, bordered by small stands selling whatever produce grew nearby, predominantly walnuts, strawberries and melons, but it was better than staring at a cell wall, or dwelling on whatever was in my brain.
When we passed truck stops or tiny communities, a local police or highway patrol cruiser was waiting and escorted us for ten or twenty miles before pulling to the side. The deputies were not related to Lewis Carroll for, though they talked of many things, none were of sailing ships, sealing wax or cabbages and kings. Their idea of a cogent intellectual comment was that all liberals were anti-American. One said it; the other concurred with a strenuous nod.
It was mid-morning when we went through Oakland and crossed the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and could see the shit-colored masonry of the California State Prison at San Quentin. “There it is, Cameron,” said the driver. “Your last
Not only did everyone face the same direction, the mess hall was segregated. The sight made Booker pause in the doorway. “Go on, man,” someone said behind him. He moved ahead. He got in the line where everyone was colored. As he inched toward the serving counter, Booker noticed that whites, Mexicans, Indians and the occasional Asian, all ate together. Only colored men were segregated. He remembered Jim-Crow from his childhood in Tennessee, where he’d felt no resentment simply because it was the normal way of the world, or so he was led to believe. Now he knew more about its evil and its implications. Goddamn white folks made it easy to hate them.
In a semi-daze, he got his tray of food and followed the man ahead to the long table of all black faces and sat down. Later, when a guard signaled the row to rise, Booker blended in. Back within the cell, the security bar dropped and a convict keyman locked each cell gate. “That’s it for the night,” said his cell partner as he stretched out on the bunk.
Booker was alone in the dark with his anger. He would die in prison 54 years later, nine of them spent on Death Row for hitting a guard with a bedpan.
He would never get his one phone call.
Entering The “House of Dracula”
They came for me after midnight on the tenth day following the sentence. I heard the rattling chains down the tier, and three deputies appeared. A fourth remained at the front to throw the lever that unlocked the cell gate. When they reached the cell, I was already waiting, my meager possessions in a shoe box tucked under my arm.
It was the darkness before dawn when the two-vehicle caravan exited the rear loading area. It was where the buses, trucks and garbage cans were kept. The stench was gross. I was in the screened off rear of a black and white station wagon. Two uniformed deputies rode in front. They followed the sedan through the predawn streets to the freeway ramp. Traffic was beginning to build, the gigantic Mack trucks and Kenilworth’s hitting the northbound highway. They would be in Sacramento by noon. When the sun was a faint orange line in the east, we departed out of Bakersfield to pass between endless green fields of cotton and strawberries filled with Mexican laborers bent to pluck the bolls and berries from the bushes. In the scorching sun, what terrible back breaking labor that was. I would rather be in a prison cell than picking cotton like a
nigger slave
, although that preference did not include the fate to which I was destined. I was lazy, not crazy.
Despite the leg irons cutting into my ankles and the handcuffs pressing dents in my wrists, and the awareness of my destination lurking constantly in my thoughts, the ride was not totally miserable. It had been almost nine months since I’d looked upon the free world. By most standards, it was a dreary length of highway, bordered by small stands selling whatever produce grew nearby, predominantly walnuts, strawberries and melons, but it was better than staring at a cell wall, or dwelling on whatever was in my brain.
When we passed truck stops or tiny communities, a local police or highway patrol cruiser was waiting and escorted us for ten or twenty miles before pulling to the side. The deputies were not related to Lewis Carroll for, though they talked of many things, none were of sailing ships, sealing wax or cabbages and kings. Their idea of a cogent intellectual comment was that all liberals were anti-American. One said it; the other concurred with a strenuous nod.
It was mid-morning when we went through Oakland and crossed the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and could see the shit-colored masonry of the California State Prison at San Quentin. “There it is, Cameron,” said the driver. “Your last
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