Carols at Cherry Hill

Pennsylvania's Eastern State Penitentiary is old enough to be remembered with horror by Dickens in his American Notes (1842). It was known then, as now, as the Cherry Hill prison. One night last week, over Philadelphia's KYW, the inmates of 110-year-old Cherry Hill staged their Christmas musicale. Sixteen pent-up voices serenaded The Little Man Who Wasn't There; assorted whistlers, fiddlers, ladybug plunkers whanged away at heart strings beyond the walls. But the tune that dampened the eyes of Warden Herbert ("Cap") Smith and beefy Deputy Tom Meikrantz was a Chinese prisoner's song, written and sung in quavery, North China dialect by Canton-born William Yun. (Yun was jailed six weeks ago for working the badger game on a wealthy countryman named Lee Foo.)

The title: in Chinese, Pai jih p'o ching chih yuan;* in Tin Pan Alleyese, When I Get Out, Beloved. Inmate Yun, 27, based his song on a 2,000-year-old Cantonese legend of a separated bride & groom, joined again in old age with the aid of matching halves of a little round mirror each had treasured through the years.

It is my mistake that I am away from my wife . . . (his tenor went)

And when I am released from jail . . .

We shall join our mirrors and take that straight road

To love and everlasting happiness.

Warden Smith and Deputy Meikrantz were proud of Prisoner Yun's lament.They themselves had inspired Yun to his effort, for they set great store by the lyric abilities of the Chinese. A few years back, a hatchetman inmate had composed an unforgettable Christmas carol entitled: I'd Rather Be in Pekin, Than in Here Peekin' Out.

*Literally, "After the mirror having been broken 100 days, [I am] coming to the family homestead." The term "100 days" is used figuratively, to indicate a long time. Inmate Yun's sentence is two to four years.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.