David Dellinger left Yale during the Great Depression, walking away one day without money or even a change of clothes to join the men and women in shelters and bread lines. So began his life of activism far social change.
In the following years, Dellinger marched for civil rights, led hunger strikes, and organized nonviolent civil disobedience demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He continues to work for change today. Just last year he joined a forty-two-day People’s Fast for Justice and Peace in the Americas.
This essay, excerpted from Dellinger’s memoir From Yale to Jail, describes his experience in prison in 1940 after he was convicted for refusing to register for the draft.
— Pamela Tarr Penick
Shortly after I arrived at the Danbury federal prison in the fall of 1940 I was put in solitary confinement for sitting in the black section at my first Saturday night movie. Later, my fellow war objectors and I organized protests against the government’s policy of racial segregation in federal prisons, but this time it was just a case of sitting next to someone I had been talking with when we walked in. How could I obey when the guard motioned me to go into the white section and waved him into the black section?
A few weeks after I got out of solitary, they put me in the hole. Probably it was because I refused to go to the captain’s office when the loudspeaker summoned me by my prison number. I had explained politely earlier that I didn’t object to the number if they used my name too, but that wasn’t good enough for them. Or maybe they put me in because I refused to remake my bed after the guard standing over me had ripped it out and said it wasn’t made the way they make them in the army. But I was the one who slept in it, and nobody saw it except me and the guards. Besides, I was there because I objected to the army, not just people killing people and fighting for Big Business, but people becoming robots, doing whatever they are told.
So now I was in the hole for the first time, no light, no bed, shivering in midsummer in a cell that was damper and darker than the Swiss dungeon of Chillon that Byron had written about and that I had visited a couple of years earlier. “You won’t come out,” the guards had said, “until you agree to obey orders, all orders.”
I was scared. Earlier, Tough Tony, who terrorized the prisoners and was supposed to be a hit man for the Mafia, had been put in the hole for sassing a guard. In the middle of the night, when everything was quiet, they had carried him out screaming, four guards carrying him past my cell to the mental ward. The prisoner in the cell next to mine told me through the ventilator, “Nobody can stand it. Don’t ever do anything to give them an excuse to put you there.” Perhaps he was a stool pigeon, saying what he had been told to say to an uppity troublemaker like me, but I couldn’t tell. Three days earlier I hadn’t even known there was a hole, let alone whether I could stand it.
Later I saw plenty of guys come out of there saying, “It was a vacation. I could have done it standing on my head, the motherfuckers.” But others were broken by it. From then on they had a haunted, hunted look I’ll never forget. It wasn’t just that they couldn’t look the guard in the eye; they couldn’t look anyone in the eye, not even themselves — like dogs that have been beaten until they are broken. That’s what society calls rehabilitating them, making them good citizens who obey the laws and have proper respect for authority.
Some of the ones who came out claiming they loved it, that it was easy time, never were the same afterward either, but in a different way. They could look the guard right in the eye — with a cold, steely hatred. They were letting him know that one day they would kill him. Usually they didn’t; they’d kill someone else instead. Perhaps it would be another prisoner or someone after they got out, someone who did some little thing that seemed to interfere with their freedom and reminded them how impotent they had been made to feel — and this time they could do something about it. I know, because that was the history of some of the guys I did time with, then and later.
I was plenty scared that first time in the hole, and I tried to comfort myself by thinking of the prisoner of Chillon and how he had survived undaunted for years. When I’d visited Chillon, I’d been told that a flower had grown through the stones in his dungeon, and he had discovered that it was all the companionship and beauty he needed. I wished that I had a flower, or even a blade of grass, but there were no cracks in the cement floor or walls and no light, and I laughed at myself for indulging in such romantic thoughts. I laughed but I wondered how long I could hold out until I cracked, as Tough Tony had cracked.
Then it began to happen. For no reason I can explain, I began to discover how little it matters where you are or what anyone does to you. I was sure that what I had done to get put in the hole was right, and somehow the longer I was there the better I felt. Maybe that wasn’t it at all, but I’d never felt better in my life, even if I was shivering and wished I had some food or a cigarette. I was trying to sleep standing in a corner because it wasn’t so cold that way and my hips ached from lying on the cement floor. But when I dozed off, I started to fall. If I wasn’t careful, I’d hurt myself. If I cracked my head on the floor and knocked myself out, it might be hours before anyone found me.
I wondered how many hours it had been. Maybe it was only a few minutes. I remembered a story by Edgar Allan Poe about a man accidentally locked in a sepulcher when he went back to look at his dead fiancée one last time. He thought he was there a week, but his friends missed him after a few hours and came back for him. His hair had turned white and he was shaking, as I was shaking. He never got over it; he shook the rest of his life.
They can do terrible things to you and probably will, but they can’t hurt you unless you do it to yourself. From then on, I knew that no one would ever frighten or control me, no one would stop me from living to the full and loving to the full, loving everyone, fighting for justice without seeing anyone as an enemy.
Then, unexpectedly, I felt good again, and I didn’t care how long it had been or would be. I felt warm inside and filled with love for everyone I knew and everyone I didn’t know, for plants, fish, animals, even bankers, generals, prison guards, and lying politicians — everything and everyone. Why did I feel so good? Was it God? Or approaching death? Or just the way life is supposed to be if we weren’t so busy trying to make it something else?
It didn’t matter why. The only thing that mattered was that it was happening. I didn’t try to make it happen. I didn’t even know it could happen, especially not there. I’d never felt so good before, not even when I’d kissed Rena (which was a long time ago, but she was still the best), or when I’d won the two-mile run in the Yale-Cornell meet (my first varsity victory), or when I’d fought J.D. in the fifth grade because he was punching out some little kid. He was a lot older than me and beat the shit out of me, but I felt good anyway. The next day he had a black eye, and everyone said how tough I was. I knew I wasn’t, but it felt good to hear them say it.
I thought about having been in Spain during its civil war. The peasants and some of the soldiers from the People’s University were the most inspiring people I had ever met, and I knew then that I would always be a revolutionary; it would never leave me. But I’d be a nonviolent revolutionary, because though the other way is tempting it doesn’t work.
I had almost picked up a gun on the third day in Madrid, in the People’s Park, when Franco’s troops were half a mile away and advancing. I thought that if my friends were going to die I was ready to die with them, and who knows, maybe we’d win. But by then I knew that the Communists were shooting the Trotskyists, both were shooting the anarchists, and the anarchists had shot at the car in which I had been riding in Barcelona when it made a wrong turn into their sector. Whoever won that way, it wouldn’t be the people. I knew I had to find a better way of fighting. Not picking up the gun in Spain was the hardest decision I ever made in my life. After that I knew I would never consciously injure anyone (but I have hurt people many times). After Spain, World War II was simple. I wasn’t even tempted to pick up a gun to fight for General Electric, U.S. Steel, and the Chase Manhattan Bank, even if Hitler was running the other side.
Now I was in the hole and I felt the way I had in Spain, only more so. Then I heard a key in the door. Hudson, whom everyone called a stool pigeon, was standing there with a guard. He handed me a tray of food and whispered, “The light switch, the light switch.” Then the door clanged shut and it was pitch black again. I hoped the guard hadn’t heard him because I didn’t want him to get into trouble, even if he was a stool pigeon.
I was pretty sure that there wasn’t a light switch, but before I drank the cold coffee and ate the bologna sandwich, I felt the walls in the dark, up and down and all around. Finally I located a steel plate. The screws were loose, and after I turned them with my fingernail the plate came off. Inside I found cigarettes and matches, and I knew that the brotherhood of man was real. (Nowadays I call it the sisterhood, to even up a little for all those years of brotherhood.)
When I found the cigarettes, I felt a surge of love for Hudson. I loved him and because of him I loved everyone. I just wished that everyone were more human, as he was. I was sure that he was a stool pigeon, but that only emphasized something I already knew — how mixed up and inconsistent everyone is, including me.
I was in the hole thinking about such things. Something was happening to me, and I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t describe it but the word that kept coming to me was heaven. I felt that I was in heaven.
Ordinarily I don’t like to use that word (or God, which can be even more confusing). I am afraid that people will misunderstand me, thinking that I am mouthing words I don’t know anything about because they don’t come out of my own experience and affect my life. If so, they’ll close up even more than usual, as I sometimes do when I hear people use those words. Even in divinity school I didn’t get interested in most of the theology they taught. It seemed too much like using fancy words to describe things that can’t be put into words, taking all the life out of them.
Maybe I wasn’t in heaven. Maybe I was drunk, like Kenneth Patchen was when he wrote, “Jesus Christ, mother of fine apples, I feel drunk all the time.” Yet I’d never been more possessed of all my faculties. I realized that if you fight clean and hard people can kill you but they can’t hurt you. They can do terrible things to you and probably will, but they can’t hurt you unless you do it to yourself. From then on, I knew that no one would ever frighten or control me, no one would stop me from living to the full and loving to the full, loving everyone, fighting for justice without seeing anyone as an enemy.
After a while, I thought about going to sleep, not caring whether I was awake or asleep, alive or dead. Even dead I knew I would be alive, and if I weren’t, it wouldn’t matter. Everything that happened was good. Life kept expanding inside and all around me, becoming more and more alive and making me part of it until I was floating in an endless ocean of live air, of music in color, and there was no separation between me and the music.
It’s hard for me to talk about the music part, even now when I’m trying not to hide. It’s hard because I’d always heard people say that heaven was a place where angels played music all the time on their harps. When people talked like that, it sounded sickly and pale, and I knew I’d rather play football, have a boxing match, or climb a tree than go to that kind of heaven.
Was this what they had been talking about and I was too snotty to have realized it? Or were they just mouthing words they had heard in church but knew nothing about, not having experienced anything similar to what I was experiencing? Had they known something that I didn’t? Or was it the same as the way they sang in church about “the glorious cross” but wouldn’t risk having to suffer a scornful word or raised eyebrow by speaking up against injustice.
I didn’t know and I didn’t have time to figure it out. I would have to think about it later, after I got out of the hole and wasn’t so busy. Right now I loved not only Hudson but the warden, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Adolph Hitler. But trying to explain that could lead to worse misunderstandings than saying God or talking about heaven and the heavenly music I had become. After a while I decided that I loved them as if they were kids who insist on being pitcher or else they won’t let other kids play with their ball. Now they were grown up and were playing with prisons and factories, food supplies and banks, guns and armies, everyone’s lives. Millions of people were living grimly, suffering, getting killed, so that these few could be pitcher. I loved them but that didn’t stop me from being angry. I was sad and angry because wars were going on, profits were up and people were down. I loved them but I didn’t like them or the things they were doing. I loved everyone, but the ones I wanted to join forces with were the victims. Helping them would help everyone, even the ones who were doing terrible things to them.
Having figured that out, I went to sleep. I woke up stiff and cold, but it didn’t matter. Whatever it was that was happening, it just wouldn’t stop. I had gone from freedom to jail, from jail to solitary confinement, from solitary confinement to a damp, black dungeon they called punitive isolation — and I had never been so free. For the first time in my life I had nothing, and for the first time in my life I had everything.
From FROM YALE TO JAIL by David Dellinger. Copyright © 1993 by David Dellinger. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
