In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most sophisticated medical facilities available in the Texas Prison System were at the Huntsville ‘Walls’ Unit, though investigations lamented that these were antiquated and inadequate.[28] In this era, doctors employed by the prison were to make weekly tours of the numerous farms where prisoners, leased to private and state farmers and railroad builders, lived, worked and died in conditions that were both putrid and violent. As the convict lease system fell into public disrepute and free-world wages dropped low enough to make the lease undesirable, the state assumed control of those farms, but medical care on these scattered sites remained inferior to that available at the Walls.[29] It should come as little surprise that white inmates, particularly young and compliant whites, benefited from the greater medical care available at the Walls, and that black, Mexican, and disobedient white inmates suffered disproportionately from medical neglect on the prison farms where they harvested cotton, corn and sugarcane, from sunrise to sunset, all year long.
Over the course of the 1930s, the prison’s medical system became increasingly sophisticated. A new hospital at Huntsville was completed in 1935, to the high praise of prison administrators who built it.[30] In 1941 the hospital at the State Farm Industries Unit was ‘equipped as a modern institution’, to serve inmates at prison farms scattered south of Houston. Tubercular prisoners were brought to Wynne Farm, which, in 1941 was updated to give ‘first-class attention’ to these infirm prisoners, and also modernised so ‘that no contact is had between these patients and the non-tubercular inmates’.[31] The construction of new buildings and increasing medical segregation guided physicians toward a progressive narrative that touted the always-improving medical care available in the prison. This narrative wasn’t entirely without merit: indeed, many inmates likely received medical attention that would have been unavailable to them prior to incarceration. That many services may in fact have been unavailable to the population at large bespeaks the social maldistribution of health, in which medical resources benefited wealthy whites disproportionately while neglecting poor blacks, Mexicans and whites, rather than the beneficence of the prison system.[32]
As the prison system assumed moral care and fiscal responsibility for inmates, the state, like slave owners of a previous era, sought to ensure a healthy and able-bodied population. As a result, inmates who fell ill at the farms now were more likely to be sent to the hospital at the Walls, rather than to suffer while still working on a prison farm. The goal, however, rarely stated outright but clear enough from many Annual Reports’ financial statements, was that the ill might become well enough to return to work chopping cotton or canning prison-grown vegetables, and thus offset the costs of their incarceration.
By the middle of the decade, then, as the ill were congregated for treatment there, most deaths at ‘The Walls’ were due to illnesses rather than fights or gunshots. After the new hospital at Huntsville was completed and as inmates from much of the scattered prison system were sent there, death at Huntsville, or at the nearby Wynne Tubercular unit, came slowly. It crept up in coughs and wheezes, from meningitis, and malignant lumps explained too late and chest infections treated ineffectively or too slowly.
As a result of the more efficient transfer of ill inmates to Huntsville across the decade, most of the dying done on other farms and in other units came from heat stroke and overwork — from accidents and ‘accidents’, from sudden heart attacks, from stabbings or beatings by inmates, or being shot by guards. Death became somewhat less frequent on the farms. But it could come suddenly, literally as a lightning strike, a falling tree, or as an old grievance and a knife in the side. It could come mysteriously, as ‘accidental asphyxia’, the cause of which is lost in the records. Prisoners on farms could expect some delay before being recognised as sufficiently ill to deserve transfer to Huntsville, and in that time could suffer greatly from medical neglect: G. B. Butler’s 11 August 1939 transfer from Clemens Farm, ill with jaundice, to the New Unit Hospital, came too late. He died there three days later.[33] That same year, even the expanded Huntsville hospital was running at near full capacity, a ‘condition’ diagnosed by prison officials as ‘caused by more transfers from the farms to Huntsville Hospital for treatment’.[34] Yet officials still found reason for self-congratulation. In 1940, Dr. Butler proudly reported to the Prison Board that ‘the Medical Departments of the recently visited prisons in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana are, as a whole, obsolete and inadequate compared to the Medical Department of our Texas Prison System’.[35] A dubious, if flattering, choice of comparisons.
Prison medical records consistently differentiated between kinds of death.[36] Prison health officials were curious about the distinction between death from coronary thrombosis, cardiac failure, and aortic insufficiency, the better to administer the lives of the imprisoned — so that they could return, in the ideal world, as productive rather than enervated citizens. But the more salient distinction for prison authorities was between violent and non-violent death, between death at the hands of another, and death from ‘natural causes’. Yet the difference between the two is a political difference, and this is a key point. Though prison officials saw sunstroke as a disease, an alternative argument is that sunstroke, or the more medicalised ‘thermic fever’ was a violent death, differing only from legal execution in that those who died from it were not, in fact, sentenced to die. They were worked to death in the Texas sun, driven by the lash and the guards' hopes to have a bumper crop of cotton or sugarcane, and to help finance the running of the prison itself.
While sunstroke, thermic fever and its variants were common ways to die — as was pneumonia — tuberculosis proved to be the second-most-likely cause of death for Texas prisoners between 1930 and 1941. Indeed, tuberculosis was second only to legal execution itself. While nearly one-fifth (18 per cent) of inmates who died in Texas prisons in these years were put to death in the electric chair, 15 per cent of the dead succumbed to tuberculosis in one form or another. Yet death from tuberculosis proved to be no more of a ‘natural’ cause of death than capital punishment or thermic fever. Just as Texas juries and District Attorneys pushed for capital sentencing based on the sex and race of the accused and the victim, tubercular morbidity and mortality were deeply implicated in the Southern political economy. Diet and living conditions were key indicators of death or survival for people infected with tuberculosis.[37] The specific demography of those who died in prison of tuberculosis is unavailable, but the conditions of overwork, crowded and dilapidated housing characteristic of black life in the Jim Crow South meant that African Americans were dramatically overrepresented among those who suffered from tuberculosis, and these conditions were exacerbated behind bars. According to Samuel Roberts, approximately one-quarter of Americans who died from tuberculosis in 1929 were black. Poor whites across the South also suffered from tuberculosis, but the largest Texas cities showed a dramatic racial disparity in the pain and death of illness. In Houston and Dallas, pulmonary tuberculosis mortality rates for non-whites in 1935 were roughly twice the white rates (with 67.5 whites and 127.5 non-whites per 100,000 dying in Houston, and 35.2 whites and 84.9 non-whites per 100,000 in Dallas).[38]
At the Wynne Tubercular farm, the Huntsville Walls unit and elsewhere, inmates played key roles in caring for the sick and the dying. Inmate nurses were sometimes even rewarded for their service, with time deducted from their sentences and awards of meritorious conduct, particularly in their treatment of inmates suffering from communicable diseases, such as spinal meningitis or during flu outbreaks.[39] The concern inmate nurses showed was remarkable, because it was perhaps more common for inmates to fight than to offer comfort.
Indeed, Texas prisons sustained a world of nearly-universal antagonism that made mutual support hard to achieve, and harder still to maintain. In fact, prison authorities institutionalised intra-prisoner violence in a practice known as the ‘building tender’ system. Building tenders were permitted to carry clubs and dirks, and had what might be called ‘officially unofficial’ sanction to maintain a brutal order based on sexual violence and fear.[40] Due in no small part to this system and the dominating hierarchies it supported, overtly violent pain and death were all too common. Violence was rained down by guards on prisoners, by prisoners on each other, and by prisoners onto their own bodies. Between 1930 and 1941, 11 per cent of Texas prisoners killed died of gunshot wounds, and five per cent were killed by other inmates — stabbed, clubbed, or by some other means. For people whose lives were deemed valueless by society — indeed, they held the legal status of the dead — life was cheap. In the prison context, violence became linked with masculinities, and violent hyper-masculinity became one form of currency, along with cash and tobacco, operating across subaltern prison economies and hierarchies. When folklorist Bruce Jackson interviewed long-time black prisoners in Texas, they described times when there ‘was a lot of killing’, and not just by guards. Much violence came ‘over petty debts, petty thefts, money, hustling money to gamble’.[41]
Indeed, the alienation of incarceration led to a great deal of the bloodshed that, a generation later, Frantz Fanon would identify as fratricidal. Building on Fanon, literary critic Adam Gussow makes the case that black and white southerners transferred violence done against themselves (structural, symbolic, as well as material) against their peers, and that this was a troubling act of personal empowerment when violence against those in positions of structural power seemed impossible.[42]
If killing, for some, became a twisted form of empowerment, suicide, for others, became an escape.[43] In such a death-world, being shot by a guard could have been a kind of release. It is impossible to know the motivations of the dead, but common sense in prison folklore holds that if a prisoner is tired of living, an escape attempt will guarantee their death. Johnny Cash's song ‘The Wall’ describes a prison inmate who tried to escape, knowing that no one had survived an escape attempt before: ‘The newspapers called it a jailbreak plan, But I know it was suicide, I know it was suicide.’ In Passed On, her literary history of black dying, Karla F. C. Holloway reflects on her son’s death while attempting to escape from prison, and she places his life in the long history of African American life — and death — in escapes from historical or contemporary forms of unfreedom.[44]
There is more than a grain of historical truth to the idea that death, and even self-mutilation, could become an escape from the tortures of prison life. Prison doctors like W. B. Veazy expressed surprise about ‘the apparent disregard the average inmate has for his health’, but Veazy misunderstood the social devaluing of prisoners’ bodies, a process to which prisoners were hardly immune.[45] How else are the many injuries that prisoners did to themselves intelligible, as they cut Achilles tendons, and severed fingers and hands? Prison doctors treated 20 self-inflicted arm fractures in 1940 alone.[46] Prisoners injured themselves to avoid work in the fields, to be sure, but also to control their own bodies, even through pain and destruction, in situations of radical disempowerment, in situations that warped the idea of agency developed by social historians of the past 30 years.[47] The line between state-sanctioned punishment, and self-destruction blurred in the modern penal regime.
Though Cecil Davis didn’t slash his wrist or tie a noose from a bed sheet, it appears that he did commit suicide.[48] The 33-year-old Davis was serving a two-year sentence on the Retrieve Farm, dedicated to white men over 25-years-old of ‘intermediate’ security risk and rehabilitative potential.
Slightly more than a week after his arrival, Davis tried his first escape. On 24 July, he worked with Hoe Squad #9 near the Retrieve Club House. At around 9:30 in the morning, he looked directly at Captain Brown, in position on horseback behind the squad, and told him, ‘Captain, I am going, you can kill me if you want to.’ Davis dashed into the cane patch, and the nearest guards tried to shoot him but missed. Captain Brown, on horseback, overtook Davis after about 300 yards. He talked to Davis for 20 minutes, and convinced him to return. On the way back, Davis reportedly told Brown ‘You might as well kill me, I'm not going back … I’m not going to do this time.’ Reflecting on the day to investigators, Brown tried to explain just how difficult the trip back to the building was: ‘You don’t realize how hard it was getting him back to the building and him talking that way to me.’
On his return, a visiting physician examined Davis. Dr. Blair concluded: ‘There isn't anything wrong with him. It seems to me like he just wanted to run off.’ Because the doctor found no mental or physical problems, he prescribed a universal cure: Davis ‘needed to be put back to work’. Davis was allowed to watch the picture show, and promised Captain Brown that he wouldn't try to escape again. That night, Brown warned him, ‘You had better not run anymore because somebody might kill you. I gave you your life today.’ On the Retrieve Farm, Davis’s life was not his own. For Captain Brown, riding hard after an escaping prisoner and convincing him to return was difficult work. It would have been easier to kill him.
Davis ran the following day. Brown shot him dead.
In her report on the investigation, Prison Board member Charlotte Teagle determined that the killing of Cecil Davis was very much justified. In fact she commended Captain Brown ‘for his patience and good judgment in getting the prisoner back to the building under such trying conditions’ the day before he killed him. She concluded that Davis was ‘in a very depressed state of mind’ or was perhaps ‘mentally unbalanced’, but that, in either case, ‘he placed himself in [a] position to be killed’.
While the evidence of the report clearly indicated that Davis would rather die than spend two years at Retrieve, inmates' testimony begged questions. The majority of inmates gave pointedly nondescriptive answers to Mrs. Teagle’s questions. After receiving numerous answers of ‘No’ or ‘No M’am’, she asked: ‘You men don't do much talking. Why?’ Eddie Canonico responded, ‘I came to do my time and give no trouble’, though trouble to whom is ambiguous. C. B. Bland's answer was more than simply unresponsive: ‘I had rather not make any statement, but at the same time I am not casting any reflections on Captain Miller [the Retrieve Farm Manager] personally, but for my own safety, since I am trying to secure my release, and for other reasons, I had rather not testify.’ The reasons for not testifying are unclear — perhaps he didn’t want to imply guard misconduct for fear of reprisal, or perhaps he didn’t want to challenge prisoners who may actually have intended to harm Davis, as Davis reportedly told Miller. Yet these were lost to the historical record when the dark cloud came over, and died with Davis on that hot July evening.