Publisher's Synopsis
I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me pretty soon. In the meantime Isay my say, and write in these pages of the other times and places.After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my "natural life" in the prison of San Quentin. Iproved incorrigible. An incorrigible is a terrible human being-at least such is the connotation of"incorrigible" in prison psychology. I became an incorrigible because I abhorred wastemotion. The prison, like all prisons, was a scandal and an affront of waste motion. They put me inthe jute-mill. The criminality of wastefulness irritated me. Why should it not? Elimination of wastemotion was my speciality. Before the invention of steam or steam-driven looms three thousandyears before, I had rotted in prison in old Babylon; and, trust me, I speak the truth when I say that inthat ancient day we prisoners wove more efficiently on hand-looms than did the prisoners in thesteam-powered loom-rooms of San Quentin.The crime of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the guards a score or so of moreefficient ways. I was reported. I was given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food. Iemerged and tried to work in the chaos of inefficiency of the loom-rooms. I rebelled. I was giventhe dungeon, plus the strait-jacket. I was spread-eagled, and thumbed-up, and privily beaten by thestupid guards whose totality of intelligence was only just sufficient to show them that I was differentfrom them and not so stupid.Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a man to be tied down and gnawedby rats. The stupid brutes of guards were rats, and they gnawed the intelligence of me, gnawed allthe fine nerves of the quick of me and of the consciousness of me. And I, who in my past havebeen a most valiant fighter, in this present life was no fighter at all. I was a farmer, an agriculturist, adesk-tied professor, a laboratory slave, interested only in the soil and the increase of theproductiveness of the soil.I fought in the Philippines because it was the tradition of the Standings to fight. I had no aptitudefor fighting. It was all too ridiculous, the introducing of disruptive foreign substances into thebodies of little black men-folk. It was laughable to behold Science prostituting all the might of itsachievement and the wit of its inventors to the violent introducing of foreign substances into thebodies of black folk.
