Con Lit

Take it from one who knows - walls talk; no 'if these coulds' about it.

And the thicker the walls, the more they seem to have to say. Further, when the walls start rambling on and on, it's downright rude not to talk back. Given time, this phenomena might make for some mighty interesting conversation; it also might make for insanity. Like Alvin Lucier's "I am sitting in a room," the words eventually become an unintelligible murmur of mad talk spitting back on itself.

Nowhere is this spitback more in evidence than in prison, a place where the walls seldom shut up. Worse, as much as a joint's walls jabber, they never, ever listen, and even a rogue's voice desires to be heard every once in awhile. A smart con, then, might wanna spill some ink on the problem, endeavor to bring the conversation outside the walls, before it - and they - turn in on his- or herself. Call it survival of the fittest wit.

Bandits and BiblesWitfully fit and surviving to rue another dog day are the smuggled scribblings in one Dr. Larry E. Sullivan's Bandits & Bibles: Convict Literature in Nineteenth Century America (Akashic Books, $14.95), a grab-bag of gab from some very bad men who just so happen to've found themselves behind some very thick walls.

Indeed these are not your modern-day hokey pokeys, where Rights' Groups reign and shine. Here (or then), reform means bread to go with the water, shackles and chains replace the leather straps, and a rock pile instead of a coal mine. The entries, from sad saps and cunning knaves alike, read like some of Ned Buntline's more brutal outlaw-based penny dreadfuls, which, come to think of it, just about sums up the lives contained therein.

Take Light-Fingered Jim, for instance, a hophead who tells Hutchins Hopgood "What the Burglar Faces" (1903): Dal does the Dutch act (suicide); Jack Donovan drowns in an escape attempt; and Henny does his entire Sing Sing stint thinkin' he's a funnyman for The Detroit Free Press. And these guys got off easy. D. B. Smith ("Punishments" 1885) recounts Iowa's slave-pen "pulley punishment" (a kinda diabolical marionetting device). A Life Prisoner ("Concerning Punishments, General and Particular, and Their Effects" 1906) recoils at the thought of being hog-tied and thrown facedown into "The Kansas Inferno's" steel "crib."

And then things really get bad, so bad in fact that Seth Wilbur Payne ("Prison Diary" 1873) would consider "it an act of great mercy to kill a man outright, all at once, either by choking, strangling, shooting, spearing, burning or cutting off his head rather than shut him up in a cold damp prison and torture him to death by inches." Or, to simplify Payne's take on humaneness - "They shoot horses don't they?"

So cry me up a river.

"The way of the transgressor is hard," says whoever poison-penned Proverbs, which could be both a warning as well as a tagline. It also could be a severe understatement. If crime and its consequences are hard, these cats had it the hardest. Still, somehow, between the enforced silence and the reinforced lockstep, the beatings, the bleedings and the bleatings, a semblance of life slips through.

Number 1500 ("I Go To Sing Sing" 1904) is so damn giddy that he's been delivered from Manhattan's Tombs, a veritable smile accompanies his rundown of the distinguished guests in his new scenic slammer, and his shortlist of double-talk ("Slang Among Convicts") is positively delicious. Simeon Coy ("Tramps and Escapes" 1889) sings high the praises of the professional criminal class, and bemoans low the heat-wreaking shenanigans of bums (the crackheads of the 19th century). And Josiah Flynt's "From One Who Has Squared It" (1901) could be straight outta Jack Black's You Can't Win in its unnamed gun's angle of enlightenment - "just dig down deep as you can and you'll get wise."

And then, of course, there are the Bible bangers, those who turn to God for a Get Out of Jail Free card, then as now a significant portion of the prison populace. I'll grant Sullivan his occasional "transformative and redemptive power to religion" - Jerry McCauley ("Outside" 1876) and his still-kicking New York City mission is a perfect case in point. I'll also counter that transformation and redemption are too often mere matters of convenience. For every con who see the proverbial light, many more use that light simply to get out of the tunnel. Give McCauley his mission, or the legions of ex-con preachers their pulpits, but don't give me the run-around. And don't tell me God is not a hustle, not when preening prisoners are pulling pastoral strings to get paroled, and not when their string-pulling enables sects such as The Church of the New Song (Bluffs, Illinois), a noble batch of ex-con God-Mongers who claim as communion elements porterhouse steaks and Harvey's Bristol Créme.

But I digress.

Bandits & Bibles, thankfully, is heavier of bandits than Bibles, and some of the bandits rank as relative heavyweights. John Wesley Hardin offers a post-Transcendentalist course in "Self Preservation" (1896); "Cole" Younger (of the James Gang, natch) gives up the "Real Facts About the Northfield, Minnesota Bank Robbery" (1909), and - justly - Julian (son of Nat) Hawthorne has a bid in an Atlanta pen brighten much his formerly "dim view of convicts" ("Persons and Things 'In'" 1893).

Star power aside, Doc Sullivan - Professor of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York and Chief Librarian at John Jay (where twice now his pulp fact books have been displayed) - knows cons. More, he knows a good story when he reads one, and he's not afraid to share. Consider Bandits & Bibles a not-nice companion piece to Herbert Asbury's perpetually-resurrected Gangs of New York. Then reconsider your own life and time, and how damn good it is to be on the outside looking in.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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