YOUTH ON THE LAM

I really made an effort to go straight. I enlisted in the Army but was son discharged because I was too young. I hung around Mom and the girls, and was arrested. This time I happened to be innocent of the crime of which I was accused. But with my record, no one would believe me. Even Mom wasn’t too sure I was innocent. And so at seventeen I was sentenced to serve a year in the country Jail at Sacramento, under the shadow of the Capital.

What a joint! And the people of the state of California are supposed to be proud of it! This is where they lock up their criminals to reform them, or to set them firmer in the mold of evil. Sacramento County Jail was, and still is, one of the filthiest jails in the state of California. I know. I’ve been in a number of them and I worked in the kitchen in Sacramento, helping to prepare the slop the men were expected to eat. It was cooked like slop and dished out like slop into utensils that weren’t even clean.

Breakfast was coffee and mush with dark syrup. The coffee was burnt barley or something like that. Often there were weevils in the mush, but the dark syrup helped to hide them.

There were only two meals a day. That made a man hungry enough to eat the stuff. The other meal, served in the late afternoon, was stew without meat, beans boiled without much flavoring, or macaroni boiled with salt. On Sunday came the meatloaf with very little meat. Treatment like that doesn’t reform a man. He would grimly determine never to be caught again, but that’s as far as he goes. Bitterness burned deeper and deeper into my soul.

After six months, with one month off for good behavior, I was released; mad at the world, swearing under my breath to get even.

Mother met me at the door. Her shoulders were stooped from hard work, her hands rough and calloused, and her eyes deeper with sorrow, but she held her little round chin just a little higher. She put her hand on my arm and she asked, “Phil, won’t you come home and live with us?”

She meant herself, and my four sisters (Paul was working away from home), and I answered, “Sure.”

When we reached the rather shabby house in which she and the girls lived, she bravely said, Phil as far as the world is concerned, you haven’t been a very good boy, and I’ve faith.

Faith I repeated, thinking of the joint in which I spent the last year. How could a man believe in anything in a place like that? But I didn’t tell her what the jail had been like.

Yes, faith. God is on my side. Your father and I gave you to the Lord at the altar for His service when you were fifteen days old. And God has promised, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive. And I believe.

I didn’t answer her. Vaguely I knew what she believed, but fresh from my boiled beans and hard mattress, and the rough talk of the men, it seemed far away.

I stayed home for awhile, and then I worked with my brother, Paul, in San Leandro. I met a Mr. Chaddock and he got me a job in Oakland at the piggly Wiggly. Ed, the manager, was good to me. Mom worked and we kept the home for my sisters. Some of my hardness seemed to wear off. Mom and I even went to church a few times and Mom was rejoicing in the Lord. Her son was going to straighten out at last! Such high hopes!