By all accounts, life in the death house was grim. Its nine cells looked onto ‘the long last mile’, a hallway that ended at a grey, solid steel door. The electric chair, known to all as ‘Old Sparky’, was behind that steel door, in a small, low-ceilinged room.[54] A guard was always on duty on this, the ‘death watch’ shift.
Though surely there was much antipathy among the condemned, some sense of final camaraderie was in evidence among the black, white, Mexican, and Native American men who spent their final days there. African Americans, though, were the largest number of those sentenced to die. Of the 191 men executed from 1929 to 1942, 107 were black (56 per cent), 63 were white (33 per cent), 20 were Mexican (11 per cent), and one was Native American.[55] J. F. Hogan, a white man convicted of murder in Hidalgo county, spent 57 days in the death house prior to the commutation of his sentence in 1934. In Hogan’s two months in the death house, two men were put to death: as he said, ‘a couple of Negroes; I don't remember their names.’ Yet while Hogan was on death row, ‘about four o'clock one evening when one of the Negroes was going down that night, we sort of held court on the Row, and the Negro willed all his personal belongings to the other boys he was to leave behind’.[56] As the condemned ordered their last meals, they frequently placed orders for five bowls of ice cream, six pieces of pie, and so on. This wasn’t simple gluttony or a final sensory inundation. Many ate last meals with gusto, others didn’t touch the food. Rather, these extra pieces of pie went to the other prisoners in the death house. It was part of the community made among the nearly-dead, among men who knew, almost to the minute, when they would die.[57]
Fear and apprehension and the memories of home and of crimes must have been thick in the death house. As elsewhere in the prison system, music proved to be a powerful way for inmates to imagine other times and places than the walls that surrounded them. Country singer Merle Haggard's mournful ‘Sing Me Back Home’ poignantly intermingles music, memory and penal space. It tells the story of a prisoner on his way to his execution who asks a fellow inmate to ‘Sing me back home, Before I die.’ Haggard served time in prison, but he could hardly have known that the events his song described literally took place in the Texas death house, decades before he wrote it.
Paul Mitchell, a white prisoner who played harmonica, spent time on the Texas Death Row prior to having his sentence commuted. In Mitchell's words:
I played a mouth organ quite a bit then, and one of the men took a fancy to ‘Chicken Reel’. He asked me to play it for him when his time came — said he wanted to go down with that tune ringing in his ears. I thought it would be easy, but … well, at midnight he came by and shook hands with me. I had the harmonica in my hand. He tried to say goodbye-but he just kind of choked up. Then he pointed to the mouth organ, and I began playing … and he began walking toward that little gray door. Mister, that was the hardest piece I ever played in my life! And it kept getting harder! Then, when it was over, I threw my harmonica into the corner and both sides flew off of it. Now I never play ‘Chicken Reel’ anymore.[58]
While condemned prisoners found solace in song and in each other, they also found solace in religion, and had frequent visits from prison chaplains. Most prisoners who died were not religious men (in 1929, one of the rare years when this statistic was kept in the Annual Report, 28 of the 52 who died listed no religion[59]), but it is easy to imagine that as their last days approached, some inmates had a change of heart, and used their final hours in spiritual pursuits. Religious officials saw the death house and the hospitals as fertile ground for their harvest of souls. Certainly questions of the afterlife pressed more urgently for those on death row than elsewhere in the prison system, and chaplains tried to fill this need. Indeed, the Catholic Reverend Hugh Finnegan felt his most important service was among the condemned. There, he said, his work’s benefits were ‘most evidently manifested’. He was thankful to provide real consolation in the Death House.[60]