They wandered in from all over the ward, the invited and the uninvited, the wary and the seeking, the… — Nelson Algren
They wandered in from all over the ward, the invited and the uninvited, the wary and the seeking, the strayed, the frayed, the happy and the hapless, the lost, the luckless, the lucky and the doomed. Some, on the assumption that if anyone were getting out of jail it must be the punk again, to congratulate Sparrow; only to find all the more reason for celebration when they learned that, just for this once, it wasn't the punk at all. / Everyone got congratulated for something or other whether he deserved it or not. Everyone but Old Man, who couldn't even get congratulated on his new socks. [...] And Violet, finding pity at the bottom of a whisky glass, began making every stewbum, who came up to kiss her, shake hands with Old Husband first and admire his socks. Till the old man, clutching his calendar dates like so many retrieved hours, felt the party must really be for him after all.
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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.
