4
PARTISAN REVIEW
is turned on, these silver stripes catch the light and glisten and seem
to stand out a little, or rather, in a little, from the vines and flowers,
apparently shutting them off from me. I could almost imagine my-
self, if it would do any good, in a large silver bird-cage! But that is
parody, a fantasy on my real hopes and ambitions.
One must be
in;
that is the primary condition. And yet I have
known of isolated villages, or island towns, in our Southern states,
where the prisoners are not really imprisoned at all! They are dressed
in a distinctive uniform, usually the familiar picturesque suit of
horizontal black and white stripes with a rimless cap of the same
material, and sometimes, but not always, a leg iron. Then they are
,deliberately set at large every morning to work at assigned tasks in the
town, or to pick up such odd jobs for themselves as they can. I myseU
have seen them, pumping water, cleaning streets, even helping house-
wives wash the windows or shake the carpets. One of the most ef-
fective scenes that I have ever seen, for color-contrast, was a group
of these libertine convicts, in their black and white stripes, spraying,
or otherwise tending to, a large clump of tropical shrubbery on the
lawn of
CJ.
public building. There were several varieties of bushes and
plants in the arrangement, each of which had either: brilliantly colored
or conspicuously marked leaves. One bush, I remember, had long,
knife-like leaves, twisting as they grew into loose spirals, the upper side
of the leaf magenta, the under an ochre yellow. Another had large,
flat, glossy leaves, dark green, on which were scrawled magnificent
arabesques in lines of chalk-yellow. These designs, contrasting with the
bold stripes of the prison uniform, made an extraordinary, if some-
what florid, picture.
But the prisoners, if such they could be called,--there must have
hung over their lives the perpetual irksomeness of all half-measures,
of "not knowing where one is at." They had one rule: to report back
to the jaii, as "headquarters," at nine o'clock, 'in order to be locked
up for the night; and I was given to understand that it was a fairly
frequent occurrence for one or two, who arrived a few minutes too
late, to be locked out for the night !-when they would sometimes
return to their homes, if they came from the same district, or else
drop down and sleep on the very steps of the jail they were supposed
to be secured in. But this short-sighted and shiftless conception of
the meaning of prison could never satisfy me; I could never consent to
submit to such terms of imprisonment,--no,
never!
Perhaps my ideas on the subject may appear too exacting. It
may seem ridiculous to you for me to be laying down the tenns of my
own imprisonment in this manner. But let me say that I have given
this subject most of my thought and attention for several years, and
I
