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7. A Dark Cloud Would Go Over: Death and Dying
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| 189 7 A Dark Cloud Would Go Over Death and Dying There were many ways to die. From the capitally condemned to the tubercular to the overworked to those stabbed in fights, prisoners developed an intimacy with death. At San Quentin, they called it “going out the back door” or getting a “backdoor parole.” The condemned to hang would “do the air dance,” those sentenced to the gas chamber would “sniff the eggs.” In Texas, black prisoners spoke of death as a dark cloud. The dead could walk for some Texas prisoners, who might call on them for strength to keep living , as they worked on these haunted grounds. Augustus “Track Horse” Haggerty called out in song, “Oh just wake up dead man, help me carry my row.” Another song called Mississippi’s Parchman Farm a “murderer’s home,” and Texas prison farms were no kinder.1 Death was always proximate: random or targeted violence, accidental deaths or deliberate killings—there was not always a distinction. Grasping the nature of prison life requires that violence—always an amorphous concept—be defined beyond the ordinary sense of a knife, a fist, or a bullet. For a full accounting, violence, in the prison world, must include a microbe, forced labor under a scorching sun, putrid water, new and “humane” forms of execution, and even a rope used to hang oneself. Death was perhaps a bit less proximate in the 1930s than it had been in each state’s convict lease era, when even the pretense of concern would have been an improvement. Prisons heightened the immanence of violence—state violence and interpersonal violence—as well as the chance of dying from disease. These were structural impositions—institutional ways of death and life. Inside America’s growing carceral facilities—the underside, and thus a foundation, of the modern regulatory state—prisoners died by means that ranged across a spectrum of medical, legal, and illegal concerns: from state sanctions like capital execution to diseases like pneumonia; from “accidental” drowning to gunshot wounds; from inmate stabbings to sun stroke. Some were recorded as deaths 190 | A Dark Cloud Would Go Over from “natural causes,” others as violent illegal killings, others still as executions fully approved by the state. Too often, scholars have misunderstood these deathways as analytically and politically distinct.2 Yet the line between these kinds of death was not always clear, and decisions as to where officials drew it were subjective. In fact—and this insight extends beyond the prison—there is no such thing as dying of “natural causes.” Death is a condition of life, but belief in death from natural causes is based on an understanding of nature as a precultural, nonpolitical state of being. All lives, and their ends, are invariably shaped by cultural practices , the power relations of which are always historical, and always political.3 When three black men died on a single day from “the heat” on Clemens State Farm in 1930, the Texas Prison Board determined that these deaths could not have been avoided: “The evidence show[s] that the utmost care was taken to prevent these unfortunate circumstances, and that the death of these three men is not the fault of the employees of Clemens State Farm.”4 In extant records, the deaths were attributed to “heat exhaustion” rather than human action, and to circumstances as uncontrollable as the weather. These men’s deaths at everyday labor under state control reveal the prison ’s function in institutionalizing a zone of indistinction, a threshold space between life and death.5 It also reveals a shift from nineteenth- to twentiethcentury modes of state formation.In the nineteenth century, racist lynch violence bolstered a relatively weak state, while the convict lease system worked countless black prisoners, often to death, in the interest of an expanding capitalist infrastructure and political economy. Punishment in the Depression differed in many respects; indeed, modernizing and New Deal states would protect and extend subjects’ lives in innovative ways. But they would continue to permit degrees of death for unruly and racially degraded criminals, as crucial Others to the category of the citizen, who would be more closely protected. A growing historiographical, anthropological, and philosophical literature has developed around the meaning and ways of dying. Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower as the modern governmental regulation of life rather than sovereign rule through death is but one element of this. New histories of southern lynch mobs have convincingly argued that as the modern regulatory...