Inside the San Quentin Prison Museum, preserved under glass, is the rope used to hang Rattlesnake James in 1942. James — who earned his sobriquet after putting his wife's leg in a box with two rattlesnakes in a bid to poison her (it failed, so he drowned her instead) — was the last man hanged in California. According to eyewitnesses, it was a gruesome finale. James swung from the gallows for 10 minutes, choking and purpling, before suffering the final indignity of shitting himself as spectators gawked.
Like most everything else in the San Quentin museum, the hangman's rope is both macabre and poignant. The longer you look at it, the less profound it becomes; and the less profound it becomes, the more horrifying it gets. Much like the adjacent display case, which holds a cigar box brimming with 33 miniature nooses fashioned by a prison guard who wanted to tally the number of inmates he'd executed. Grim, yes, but also possessing the charisma of folk art.
San Quentin's museum opened in 1993. It's housed in a low, concrete building just beyond the prison gate. From the museum's doorway you can look straight out to the gray-green cradle of the bay. Look due south and there's San Quentin itself: dun-colored and palm tree'd, seeming more like a place to recover in than suffer through. The whole bucolic hellscape is crawling with irony.
Jeff Craemer has minded the museum every Tuesday and Thursday (the only days it's open) for 22 years. He's the kind of man for whom the term "walking encyclopedia" was coined. On the afternoon I visited, he escorted me through the museum's three rooms, stiff-limbed but anecdotal, explaining the provenance of the firearms collection and the subtleties of the various shivs made from screwdriver handles and old newspapers and toilet paper rolls. He pointed out the black eye mask Barbara "Bloody Babs" Graham donned when she was gassed to death. He ushered me to the mock cell that holds a cast-iron bunk bed, a toilet, and a disembodied hand beneath the sheets. Meanwhile, a radio in the museum's front room chirped traffic and weather bulletins: It's another beautiful day around the Bay.
At one point, Craemer disappeared behind a door marked PERSONNEL ONLY and emerged with the prison's commitment and isolation logs. These were stately, oversized books, more like folios; inside were inked entire epochs of human turmoil. The roll call of names included the infamous — such as Bobby Kennedy killer Sirhan Sirhan, who did time in San Quentin in the '70s — and scores of ordinary men whose names are now tinged with ignominy.
A framed photo of the penitinerary's crowd control squad from 1969 emanates a different vibe. The photo is actually a pyramid of small black-and-white headshots showing serious men with pomaded hair and the longyard stares of bureaucracy. They were tasked with quelling prison riots and keeping San Quentin out of lockdown. One look at the tools of their trade — thumb cuffs, handcuffs, ankle cuffs, tear gas billy clubs, straitjackets — suggests how grueling that task probably was.
Not everything in the museum is so bleak. The front room, for example, includes a poster in Technicolor hues advertising JOHNNY CASH LIVE IN THE MESS HALL. The back room showcases an assortment of brass from the prison marching band. There's a scale model of the prison gas chamber, that, although unnerving — like a Fisher-Price death kit — is also wondrous in its precision. There's even a kind of queasy humor in the wire cage that held the first creature ever gassed to death at San Quentin: a 155-pound pig.
Still, the museum is a small trove of despair. As the oldest prison in California and largest death row in the nation, San Quentin has what's known euphemistically as "a reputation." Escapes, riots, executions, solitary confinement — little is off curatorial limits. Everywhere you look there's another grim memento: mugshots, bedsheets knotted into a rope, a stretcher built from chicken wire and pipes, a stuffed animal made by the prison's last female inmate, newspaper accounts of hangings ("You can't give that man too much praise. His courage to the last was remarkable."), badges, and headstones from the now-inaccessible prison cemetery where 697 inmates are buried.
It's a whiplash sensation, then, to step out of the museum into enormous daylight. If you leave the prison grounds and head towards the bay, you'll find a small beach with a view of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, curving like a slipknot into the blue horizon, and the hills across the water. Sea salt and kelp sting the air. There's a promontory from which you can survey the entirety of San Quentin and the surrounding water. It's a picturesque place to shake off all those hangings and gas chamber miseries. On my way there, a woman in a skirt, blazer, and white pumps cut across the prison parking lot. Later, I realized she was probably visiting an inmate. Her outfit was the same robin's egg blue as the gallows.
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