that took over certain prisoners, not unlike death row inmates who had already made their peace with walking down the long “green mile” to the death chamber. Chester Himes, who would later gain fame as the author of a series of detective novels set in Harlem featuring the black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, was a witness to this behavior, which he called “that queer docility common to prisoners.”44 He would draw on his experience as a survivor of the prison fire in his short story “To What Red Hell?,” in which a prisoner finds himself utterly incapable of functioning during the Ohio inferno. Prison conditioning has so diminished the protagonist that when he hears a voice tell him, “Get a blanket, and give a hand here,” he can only say, “‘No can do,’ in a low choky whisper…. He really wanted to go up in that smoking inferno where heroes were being made…. But he couldn’t, just couldn’t, that’s all.”45
But other convicts utilized their ingenuity and survival skills, honed during long hours of idleness and contemplation, and managed to live to tell their tales. Many improvised as the smoke poured into their cellblock. Inmate Wolfe advised his cellies to wet their handkerchiefs at the water fountain inside their cell and place them over their faces. Several convicts picked up chairs and started banging on doors for attention. Meanwhile, “bedlam was raring in the building” as the rest of the inmates began pounding on their doors to be let out.46
Charles Oliver of Toledo was trapped in his cell on the fourth tier. “Almost before we realized it the flames were sweeping along the cellblock and it began to get hot.” Together with his three cellmates, “We yelled and yelled for them to open the cell but they wouldn’t. When it seemed that we would be roasted alive we started the water running in the faucets of our cell and as the floor became flooded we lay down in the water,” putting their faces in it and splashing each other. “We were scared. I’ll admit it, scared to death … seemed we would be roasted alive. It got hotter and hotter. I hope I never go to hell if it’s this hot.” They had fully “expected to die, lying there in the water with flames all around us,” until miraculously some convicts came and knocked the cell locks off with sledgehammers. Oliver and his two companions got safely out of the cell, but not before they had a good bit of hair “singed off” their heads. It was a small price to pay for rescue. Once freed, rather than make a mad rush to freedom, Oliver and his partners joined others, dashing through a wall of flames to help free the inmates on the next range of cells.47 The scorching heat forced the rescuers to beat a hasty retreat after knocking the locks off just three cell doors.
Columbus residents, inmates, and guards survived with indelible images etched into their memories. One recalled a “negro clutching at the iron grilling of a window” on the fourth tier, pulling frantically at bars that wouldn’t budge. “Delirious with fear … he shouted at the guards, firemen and police below,” but no one could understand him as “he gibbered high up behind the grilling” of a solid window.48 A guard looked up at the caged convicts and “saw faces at the windows wreathed in smoke that poured through broken glass.” A United Press reporter observed a fellow being lowered down with a rope until it slipped and tightened around his neck, strangling him to death—a public hanging.49
Convicts on the fifth and sixth tiers, closest to the blazing roof, cursed and prayed, others broke down and cried, while others uttered “blasphemies, too horrible to repeat.” Some early accounts described men scratching at the doors to their cells “with bleeding hands.” Others “ripped at their hair” or “chewed at the steel barriers with their teeth like caged animals.” One report had a prisoner slashing his own throat with an improvised knife. One of the heroes of the evening, later confined in the hospital with severe burns, remembered passing one cell as he held an unconscious victim in his arms, where he saw a fellow convict “dangling at the end of a twisted shirt in the last throes of death by strangulation.”50
Few prisoners chronicled their Easter Monday fire experiences, and those who did often recorded their memories decades later, when they were liable to be distorted by the passage of time. Sugar Bill Baliff, a bank robber doing fifty years, was interviewed about the fire almost twenty years later. He was housed in a nearby cellblock, and it wasn’t long before the smoke was being pushed into his quarters. He recalled shouting for help until he was rescued by two men bearing sledgehammers, who helped break him out of the cell. Baliff claimed to have joined others from his block who headed to the burning cellblock to help in the rescue. He said, “We started to move the men. We didn’t have enough stretchers, so we used blankets. Some of the boys died locked together. After we [delivered] them out in the yard, we counted them—322.”51
Sonny Hanovich shared some of his memories over a half century later, offering some of the most detailed and insightful comments on the event. He remembered that it had been “a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining. The shadows were slowly creeping over the huge quadrangle and I noticed this sort of haze or mist.” He didn’t pay attention to it until it got darker and “began to sort of roll, like a fog. The next thing I know someone says that’s smoke, dammit, that’s smoke.” One of his cellmates asked him, “Sonny, do you hear anything?” He responded, “Yeah, the last few minutes I’ve been hearing something like screams, or something like that,” and in the next moments he heard someone shout “Fire.”
Fifty years later, Sonny still vividly remembered the bodies: “[I] thought … these were all colored men in there, because when we started carrying them out, stretching them out on the grass there, I thought they was all colored, that’s how charred they were.” Sonny was among the observers who were under the impression that “no one burned to death,” and that the burns must have been received after suffocating to death.
Although Hanovich was not housed in the threatened cellblocks, he recounted that many of the convicts in his block feared the whole pen was going to go up in flames, while others took “any opportunity at all” to “join in the melee and make as much racket as they could.” Sonny considered himself lucky for having been recently transferred from the fatal 6G tier to the A&B blocks in another building.
Like many other rescuers, Sonny could only make it up to the fourth range before being forced back by smoke. He backtracked to the third tier. By then “the smoke there was already down to a couple of feet from the top of range…. We walked along the cells there peering in to see whether or not we could see any signs of life…. This one man ahead of me, he passed one cell, and just as I approached it, I thought I see a man make a movement. Now there was inmates lying in all positions, some on the bed, some on the floor, and one guy had his head in the toilet, see. This one particular body, he had his fingers entwined in the cell grating and was just hanging there.” As he and another inmate tried to pull him away from the cell bars, “it just left most of the right hand there.” Thinking he saw one body move, Hanovich “hollered to this guy, ‘Hey get back here.’ He came back and I said ‘I think I saw that guy move.’ We stood there watching for a couple of seconds and he said, ‘No hell, all these guys along here are gone. Let’s go down to the next range, maybe we can help them.’” On their way down they could hear men battering with hammers, sledgehammers—but “there was no order…. There was no one there to take command, no guard or anything.” Sonny would later help remove the bodies. He and the other rescuers were instructed to use regular stretchers, instead of the makeshift alternatives they had assembled from blankets and other materials, “to make sure bodies didn’t fall apart.”52
One guard recounted “the heart rending” screams of the dying and those helpless before the searing flames. Agonized screams echoed through the cellblocks, probably not unlike how caged animals in a zoo respond in similar circumstances. Meanwhile, terrified guards, who had been conditioned against liberating their charges, saw the flames but hesitated to immediately unlock the cells, thus losing the brief window
