Death Row Breakout (4 page)

For six days Booker remained on the cold concrete in utter darkness. Every hour a jailer banged a big key on the outside of the steel door. He had to call out: “Okay in here, boss. “If he didn’t, they would open the door to check on him, and that was cause to stomp him some more. When he had missed the first time, they let it go with a threat; he never again failed to answer.

For three days they opened the steel door before dawn and handed in six slices of soft white bread (the Sheriff’s wife owned the bakery that sold the bread to the County Jail) and a cardboard container with a quart of water. Off in the corner was a hole in the floor. It was hard to hit when he relieved himself in the darkness. The stench was awful until he became accustomed to it; by then he smelled it not at all. At first, when he heard scratching sounds, he had no idea what they might be; then something brushed against his foot and he jumped and yelled. It took a minute to realize it was a rat that had entered from the shit-hole in the floor.

On the third day they brought the water but not the bread. At noon they opened the door and handed in a paper plate of macaroni.

Mashed down on top was the ration of white bread, which he used to make sandwiches of the leftover macaroni, wrapping it in toilet paper.

He heard nothing, but hours later when he reached for a sandwich he found it had been attacked by the rats. He ate what was left anyway.

The next morning was back to the bread and water ration.

In total blackness, seconds stretched out. He had no idea if it was noon or midnight. He tried to do pushups, but the bolt of pain was too great as it stretched his cracked rib. The swelling of his eye went down somewhat. Sometimes he prayed, sometimes he sang all the songs to which he knew the words. More than once he wanted to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Through the walls he could hear ringing bells, and the rattle of gates before they slammed shut.

On the seventh day, the door opened. Four deputies told him to come out. As he stood up and took a step, he reeled and nearly went down. He struggled to gather himself; he didn’t want them to see any weakness. They threw him a bundle of clothes and, when he was dressed, they handcuffed him and led him through the jail to the court line. As he passed the tanks, sometimes he was recognized. Men crowded to the bars to get a look. The brawl with the deputies was already the stuff of jail legend, and the first chapter in the legend of Booker Johnson. In later years, the story was that he knocked deputies down as fast as they came through the door.

All the tanks were segregated. Then they passed one where Booker had to take a second look. Here the races were all mixed together, but half of those he saw wore homemade makeup and had their shirts tied into blouses in a gross parody of femininity. “I ne’er seen nuttin’ like that in Tennessee.”

The deputies took him to a floor divided into many cages, each holding prisoners going to a particular courtroom. Instead of putting him in a bullpen with others, they locked him in a small room with a solid steel door.

Late in the morning, they took him to a courtroom for a preliminary hearing. In some jurisdictions, the preliminary hearing served the function of the grand jury, establishing that a crime had been committed, and there was sufficient cause to hold the accused for trial. The prosecutor put on three witnesses. The car owner testified that he owned the car and had never given Booker Johnson permission to drive it. His boss, who would not look at him, next testified that he’d never authorized Booker Johnson to remove the car from the gas station garage. Finally, the police officer told how he had found Booker Johnson with the automobile at the intersection of Washington and Broadway.

The preliminary hearing took less than an hour. The Judge found probable cause to bind the defendant for trial in the Superior Court.

Back in the jail, they moved him from “The Hole” to “Siberia,” which was a row of regular cells, the occupants of which were locked up twenty-four hours a day without privileges. Booker stayed in Siberia for the rest of his sojourn in the LA County Jail.

A few days before his next court appearance, he was taken from Siberia to the Attorney Room to see a Deputy Public Defender. Surrounded by three escorts, he attracted looks as he was marched past the tanks. Someone recognized him and the word spread like wildfire. Soon the bars were lined with prisoners cheering and applauding – and the escort deputies seethed.

The public defender had eleven men to see that morning. All he knew of any of them was what he found in the thin folders given him before he left the office. He found Booker’s and scanned it for a minute. The case seemed simple and relatively minor. “Did it happen like they testified?” he asked.

Booker nodded.

“Nobody told you it was okay to take the car?”

“No. I mean… I didn’t think… anything… would happen. I just… uh… borrowed it, y’know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know… but you got caught. It isn’t the crime of the century. You don’t have a record?”

Booker shook his head.

“Never been arrested as a juvenile?”

“No.”

“You’ll get probation and time served.” The public defender believed what he said; it was what he saw from a superficial examination of the facts. He was seeing eleven men that morning, and eight more that afternoon. How could he be anything but superficial? Whatever idealism he’d possessed when graduating from law school had been worn away in two years of representing indigent criminal defendants, nearly all of whom were guilty – a truth he silently accepted after a few months of being a public defender. He had no heart for prosecuting, but he was about ready to go into private practice. If he was going to represent guilty criminals, he might as well do it for those who could pay. Some of his charges he found admirable in many ways. As for the young colored man he was talking to, he saw what had happened and was sure the court would be lenient. He was unaware, however, that Booker had subsequently broken one deputy’s jaw and damaged others.

“Here’s how it is,” the young lawyer said, “if you go to trial, you’ll be in jail for another three or four months, even if they find you innocent. That might happen. It’s a long-shot, but you didn’t really have the
intent
to steal. A jury might be sympathetic. I would expect them to find you guilty – on what you’ve told me and what the testimony was.

“If you plead guilty to a joyriding, taking a car without the owner’s permission, the judge can decide it’s a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Joyriding goes both ways. We’ll sure argue that, and the DA might not even oppose it.

“You don’t have any record. You’ll have been in jail for over a month. You’ve got a job… you live with your family –”

“Just my mother –” Booker corrected.

The lawyer nodded that he got it, and then continued with his pitch: “I can’t imagine you getting anything but time served and probation. Or sixty days if the judge had a bad night.”

Booker was dubious. Without any prior experience and totally unsophisticated about the world, he was sure the rebellion against the deputies would be somewhere in the equation. Yet the young white lawyer seemed to know what he was talking about. He was an educated man. He was a lawyer. So Booker trusted that the words were sincere. Yet he was also part of the white establishment, and Booker didn’t trust him enough – not in one twenty-minute meeting – to tell him about the deputy.

Besides, Booker had thought about it in Siberia, especially after the preliminary hearing, and had decided to plead guilty to get it over with. White folks had him T-rolled and there was nothing he could do – but this made it easy and firmed up the decision.

He told the public defender that he would plead guilty in the Superior Court.

The Public Defender made a note in the folder so any lawyer from the public defender’s office, who would never know his face, knew the posture of the case. He would waive and stipulate as good as anyone.

So when the Judge asked, “How do you plead?” Booker answered: “Guilty, Your Honor.” The public defender patted him on the arm, as if he’d done a wise thing. He was not the same public defender who had visited him – and the public defender who stood beside him at Judgment and Sentence was different from the one at the plea. The Judge turned the pages provided by the probation department, and when he looked over the tops of his glasses at Booker, his face was stern. “I sentence you to the California State Prison for the term prescribed by law, to be remanded into the custody of the Sheriff of Los Angeles County, for his delivery to the Warden of San Quentin…”

After that, wherever Booker went in the jail, he met ex-convicts, men who had previously journeyed north to sojourn in the legendary San Quentin. When he told them of his crime and sentence, they were incredulous. “I never heard of that… no record… no nuthin’… first time arrested… for
borrowin
’ a car –”

“It was a joyridin’. I didn’t tell the boss ‘forehand.”

“Yeah… shit… but goddamn! The joint right out of the box.”

“So how much time will I do?”

“They don’t never let anybody out in less’n a year. They say they ne’er woulda got sent to Quentin if the judge wanted ’em to serve less’n a year. You should do fifteen… eighteen months at the most. Keep your nose clean.”

Keep his nose clean! Sweet Jesus, help me keep my nose clean. It was his last thought before sleep in the ten days he waited after the sentence was passed. His time didn’t start until he got there. He wanted to go – despite a gnawing fear of the unknown.

Twelve days after Judgment, Booker Johnson was one of two-dozen prisoners taken from the LA County Jail to the nearby train station, where they were put in a special coach. Its windows were covered with sheet metal, although some had a narrow crack between metal and window frame, so it was possible to peer out at the black night and an occasional farm-light. At one end was a mesh wire cage, within which sat an armed deputy sheriff. The other end had a toilet with a waist high partition.

The prison car was hooked onto a milk-run train that departed at dusk and ran north through sunset into night. In Ventura, while the train made the pssshhhh, whang, pssshhh sound of a waiting train, two more prisoners came aboard, one white, one black. Next was Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, body receipts were signed and other men sentenced to San Quentin came aboard. Booker would always clearly remember two things about the trip. One was the cigarette smoke, especially when they boarded in LA. Almost everyone had to light up a Bull Durham or Lucky Strike the moment they sat down. The second thing Booker remembered was the man brought aboard at Salinas. A slight man, who looked even scrawnier with his skinny neck jutting from an oversized shirt collar, he was fish-white and wild-eyed, and from the waist-chains and leg-irons and the three deputies who accompanied him, it was obvious that he was sentenced to die. Booker was across the aisle from him; it was easy to study his face. Booker did so, although he had no idea what he expected to see. Who had the man killed? Booker asked the man beside him, and got in response a vacant look and a shrug. He knew nothing and wanted to know nothing. He was a drunk who had written some bad checks. Because it was his fourth offense, the judge had sent him to prison to get his attention. Now that he was sober, his attention was complete. A couple of times during the night, he sniffled and fought to hide his ‘woe is me’ tears. If he showed self-pity, he would earn the scorn of his peers.

Booker closed his eyes and listened to the unchanging rhythm of steel wheels on steel tracks, clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clickety clickety clack. Booker dozed off and slept until the railroad car was separated from the train and loaded on a ferry crossing from Richmond to the San Quentin peninsula. It was dawn.

While the ferry carried the railroad car across the water, the lights came on and the convicts onboard began to stir, which meant that everyone had a cigarette to get the taste of pre-sleep cigarettes from their mouths.

One man pressed an eye to the crack and called out that he could see the east block. Booker had to piss. No telling when he would get another chance. He stood up, the chain between his leg-irons was a foot long, so he took short steps and held onto seat backs. He had yet to learn the secret of walking in leg-irons, which is to stand on tiptoe and take short quick steps, shuffling like a Chinese woman with bound feet.

As he reached the last seat and had to cross the space to the latrine entrance, the ferry hit the dock and sent him lurching toward the gun cage. He crashed hard into the mesh, surprising the deputy, who let out a cry and jumped up, his back against the wall.

“Sorry, boss, sorry,” Booker said. “It done threw me, man. I didn’ mean nuttin’.”

“Okay… yeah… Watch yourself.”

Booker took his piss. Instead of returning to his previous seat, he took an empty space next to a young colored man who, at twenty-five, was returning to San Quentin as a second termer for robbery. Jeff Hawkins, called Hawk, was small-framed, but his muscles were like steel cables. He was dark-skinned, but his features were more Arabic than African: hooked nose, thin lips, sharp cheekbones. Booker had talked to him in the bullpen while waiting for court. “How ya doin’, Book?” he asked. “Tell me about it.”

“You tell me. You know it.”

“Jus’ wait a minute and they’ll come for us.”

It was only seconds. The door beside the gun cage opened. A man in prison guard uniform entered. He had a lieutenant’s bars on his shirt collar. Hawk made a sound of distaste. “Whitehead.”

“Who’s Whitehead?”

“That’s him… an’ he’s a dirty –”

Beside Whitehead appeared the sheriff’s deputy. Together they counted heads and signed a receipt. The prison guard carried a cane, the bottom six inches of which was tipped with lead. He banged it on the floor. “When I call your name, come forward. Who’s Johnson?”

Booker raised his hand. “Right here.”

“You stay where you are.” He began calling names. As each man hobbled to the door, a prison guard put handcuffs on him – and then the sheriff’s deputies removed the leg-irons and dropped them in a pile; property of Los Angeles County. The men now belonged to the State of California. They disappeared through the door. Booker watched Lieutenant Whitehead, a big man with rolls of flesh up his neck from his shirt collar to his cap. God had made him a physical bull, but at forty-one, rotgut Prohibition booze had added eight inches around the waist since he was twenty-two. His lead-tipped cane was draped over his wrist.