‘If there ain't nothin' in the papers about it,’ Molly told him, ‘it just means they're keepin' it out so… — Nelson Algren
‘If there ain't nothin' in the papers about it,’ Molly told him, ‘it just means they're keepin' it out so you'll get careless 'n walk into the chair for them.’ / Frankie sounded hurt. ‘There ain't no chair about it, Molly-O. It's manslaughter is all. Happens every day of the week.’ / ‘It must be nice not to have to worry about a little thing like doin' one to twenty then,’ she feigned admiration of anyone so lucky. / He grinned wryly. ‘Don't forget that good-conduct time. I may get out in sixteen.’ / ‘You couldn't behave yourself that long if they handcuffed you to the warden.’ / Of course Molly-O was right, she had that way of knowing what was wisest and best for Frankie; it was only for herself she couldn't tell what was wisest.
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The alleys had always been his sanctuary; they had been kinder to him than the streets. He had spent those long-ago days searching the ashcans for the tinfoil in discarded cigarette packs. Though the boulevard gutters had been better for tinfoil prospecting, the alleys had always been safer. / The tinfoil racket had been abandoned for the pursuit of beer corks. A still on Blackhawk Street had paid a dime a hundred for them in those days.
The whites went to school in the mornings and blacks in the afternoons. The sign in the mess-hall library said: / THINK / Read a good book / Which didn't at all mean that a black punk should be caught reading a good book at the same time as a white punk; and didn't say just what book. Each went to think separately, for the thinking of separate thoughts. For the black con's brain, it appeared, was darker than the white con's and therefore required the afternoon sunlight to assist the thinking of certain scheduled thoughts. / Yet, strangely enough, the chair in the basement accepted any color at all.
But any one side of any jailhouse wall is never much different than any other side. There are only the same old threadbare variations on the same age-old warnings against all the well-tried ancestral foes: whisky and women, sin and cigarettes, marijuana and morphine, marked cards and capped cocaine, dirty laughter and easy tears, engineered dice and casual disease, bad luck and adultery, old age and shyster lawyers, quack doctors and ambitious cops, crooked priests and honest burglars, lack of money and hard work.
