Perry Smith’s hunger strike

Perry Smith’s hunger strike turns a death-row prisoner’s refusal into a physical confrontation with the institution holding him. Beginning in June amid isolation, illness, and humiliation, it brings him within reach of death; a postcard from his father, Tex John Smith, finally reverses the course. Perry’s return to eating is not a release from confinement, but a choice to keep his life from being surrendered on someone else’s terms.

Isolation and the onset of the fast

Perry’s cell adjoined Dick’s, and the two men could converse despite being unable to see one another. Their relationship had settled into mutual toleration after a few mild reproaches, but Perry seldom spoke to Dick. He guarded what he called his “private business” from guards and inmates, especially Lowell Lee Andrews, whom other prisoners called Andy. Andrews’s educated speech and habit of correcting Perry’s grammar made their encounters humiliating for a man who, despite having left school after the third grade, liked to think himself more learned than his acquaintances. Andrews’s correction, “Don’t say disinterested. When what you mean is uninterested,” became one example of the kind of rebuke Perry could not bear.

Perry did not disclose that this friction was why he sulked after such encounters and ignored the meals delivered three times a day. At the beginning of June, the refusals became absolute: he stopped taking food and water and stopped speaking to anyone. He told Dick, “You can wait around for the rope. But not me.” The remark linked his fast to the prospect of execution, though Dick later rejected the idea that Perry meant to kill himself. The account leaves room for several pressures at once: Perry’s guardedness, his resentment of humiliation, and his refusal to meet the expected end passively.

The body under force

The fast lasted five days before the warden treated it as an emergency. On the sixth day Perry was transferred to the prison hospital, but the change of location did not break his resolve. When staff attempted to feed him by force, he resisted physically, tossing his head and clenching his jaws until they were rigid. He had to be restrained and given nourishment intravenously or through a tube inserted through a nostril.

The intervention kept food entering his body but did not halt the decline. Over the following nine weeks, Perry’s weight fell from 168 pounds to 115. The warden was warned that forced feeding could not keep him alive indefinitely. His condition moved between half-waking stupors and sick, sweat-drenched sleep through the summer. This is not presented as a clean contest of will: Perry’s refusal becomes increasingly dependent on medical restraint, while his wasting body makes the danger plain. Dick, impressed by his resolve, nevertheless told Andrews that Perry was faking even after reports that he had fallen into a coma, insisting, “He just wants them to think he’s crazy.” Andrews allowed that Perry might be mentally ill, pointing instead to the extremity of starving himself.

Dreams, death, and the postcard

During the fast, Perry’s confused waking life and dreams repeatedly brought death close. A voice in his head kept asking, “Where is Jesus? Where?” Once he woke shouting, “The bird is Jesus! The bird is Jesus!” His recurring fantasy of himself as “Perry O’Parsons, The One-Man Symphony” returned as a dream set in a Las Vegas nightclub. In a white top hat and tuxedo, he played a sequence of instruments, sang “You Are My Sunshine,” and tap-danced up gold-painted steps before an immense, silent audience. He recognized the assembled figures as ghosts of people who had been legally killed, and understood that the steps led to a scaffold. The platform opened beneath him; his hat fell, and the dream ended in a vision of his own execution. The fantasy of performance thus becomes an image of a death sentence: an audience is present, but there is no applause or rescue.

One afternoon Perry woke from a dream to find the warden beside his hospital bed. The warden tried again to persuade him to stop fasting, then said he had something from Perry’s father. Perry did not answer or look at the postcard while the warden remained. After the warden left it on the bedside table and departed, Perry read it that night. Posted from Blue Lake, California, it was addressed to the warden and written in Tex John Smith’s familiar, awkward hand: “Dear Sir, I understand you have my boy Perry back in custody. Write me please what did he do wrong and if I come there could I see him. Alls well with me and trust the same with you. Tex J. Smith.” Perry destroyed the card, but its message stayed with him. It revived love and hate and reminded him that he was still alive. He later explained that he decided to remain so, reasoning that anyone who wanted his life would have to fight for it rather than receive help from him.

Return to the Row

The next morning Perry asked for a glass of milk, the first food or drink he had voluntarily accepted in fourteen weeks. He gradually regained weight on eggnogs and orange juice. By October the prison physician judged him strong enough to leave the hospital and return to the Row. Dick greeted him with, “Welcome home, honey.” That casual welcome marks a stark return to their shared confinement: the fast has ended, but the sentence and the relationship between the cellmates remain.

The postcard is the decisive turn in the fast, not because it resolves Perry’s conflict with execution or prison, but because it restores a claim on life that his refusal had nearly erased. His choice is expressed as resistance: he will not make his own death easier for those who might take his life. The episode holds that act alongside its bodily cost—forced feeding, severe weight loss, and a near-comatose state—so that survival appears neither simple nor triumphant. Perry resumes eating, returns to his cell, and remains under the sentence that had shaped the fast from its beginning.