It Makes a Long Time Man Feel Bad

On August 21, a drama of irrationality was acted out in the Adjustment Center of San Quintin prison. The actual scenes and movements of that drama are at present known only to a small group of people. If, in fact, they are all known by anyone still living. However the body count, as always, has been widely circulated. Dead are George Jackson, central figure of the drama, three white guards--Frank DeLeon, Paul Krasnes and Jere Graham-- and two white inmates--John Lynn and Ronald Kane.

Less than a month after those six men died in San Quentin, a second drama of irrationality was performed in a prison a continent away. Unlike the California incident, much of what happened at Attica occurred in full view of reporters and television cameras. Nonetheless, there seems to be as much confusion about what happened at Attica and how it happened as there is about how the six men came to die on an afternoon in San Quentin.

In both cases, much of the confusion resulted from the fact that, consciously or accidentally, the officials involved misinformed the public. In California, San Quentin was quarantined while prison officials emerged periodically to present a string of stories and updates about how the six deaths had occurred. Similarly, New York officials changed stories with the impunity with which a snake sheds its skin. Alleging at first that the hostages who did not come out alive had been killed by inmates, the New York officials finally announced that all 40 of the deaths that day at Attica had resulted from gunfire by the invading forces of the state.

The damage, of course, had already been done by a combination of error and omission. A nation mesmerized by the pictures from Attica of a mass of exotically clad inmates, mainly black, holding hostages, All of whom were white, had generally accepted the initial report that the hostages who died had all had their throats slit. Some of the early reports also stated that several of the white dead had had their genitals severed and had suffered other forms of extreme physical abuse.

In some part of the public mind the visions conjured by these first false reports remain as if surgically implanted, and they will always be the first images summoned by editorials marking the anniversaries of the Attica massacre.

In the long run what is probably more important than the erroneous information the officials fed the public is the fact that they failed to deal in any meaningful way with why the two incidents occurred. The authorities at San Quentin claimed that George Jackson had been killed in an aborted escape attempt. Yet at no time did they or their supporters attempt to explain why Jackson would try to escape. Their entire treatment of the incident took Jackson's motivation as a given--as not susceptible to change nor of any particular consequence.

The New York officials seemed to have been caught slightly more off-guard by the riot at Attica and were too engrossed in their efforts to restore order in the prison to give much speculation to the emotional motivation of the prisoners. To be sure, Commissioner Oswald and the negotiating committee of outsiders attempted to discover the prisoners' physical grievances, yet the ultimate violent response of the state, and Governor Rockefeller's posture towards the revolt, the appearance of Bobby Seale, and even the entreaties of the negotiating committee revealed not so much a concern for the safety of the hostages--or even a respect for law and the imperative of maintaining some semblance of order--as a disrespect for the humanity of the inmates so irrational as to border on the conspicuously neurotic.

To the extent that any official in California or New York did deal with the question of motivation, it was only to dismiss it as a significant factor by depicting the prisoners as sub-humans incited by sinister terrorists. Governor Regan: "Many of these incidents (prison uprisings) appear to result from the unlawful designs of, self-proclaimed revolutionary forces operating within and without prison walls."

Faceless revolutionaries, men beyond the call of any sense of moral decency or reason is the image of the prisoners at Attica and of George Jackson which the authorities in California and New York have attempted to persuade the public to accept. To a large degree, the authorities were successful. Abetted by the Establishment media, they mustered all the representations of the prisoner as a dark and irrational man justly separated from the world of civilized men that have appeared in B-grade films and novels and armed these stereotypes with the most explosive rhetoric of insurrection and hate. In so doing, they have succeeded in turning public attention from the question of why these incidents occurred in San Quentin and Attica to how they occurred.

As a result of the emphasis placed on the physical mechanics of the killings and the public's acceptance of the authorities' explanation of the motivation of the prisoners, a debate has ensued between those who refuse to reject the officials' versions of the killings and those who refuse to accept them. The debate has been legalistic in tone, revolving around things like coroners' reports and ballistics that are basically peripheral to the human experience. Imprisoned in the heat of the debate--which, at best, can end in an impotent draw--people on both sides have lost sight of the principle issues involved in what happened at San Quentin and Attica. Regardless of whether or not they have accepted the stories the officials in California and New York have given of how the prisoners in the two institutions acted, people involved in the debate have, either openly or by default, accepted the officials' versions of why the prisoners may have acted in the manner in which the authorities claim.

Yet it is precisely this question of motivation that is the central one in both cases. It is the pivotal issue, not only because it is the key to the specific truth of what happened at San Quentin and Attica, but also because it is the portal to reaching an understanding of what significance the two incidents hold for those of us surviving, both inside and outside prison walls. It is only through an analysis of the human element of motivation that one can accurately answer the most enduring questions raised by the tragedies at San Quentin and Attica.

II

No come to terms with the motivation of the men involved in the two incidents one must begin by looking outside of the prisons, for neither George Jackson nor any of the inmates at Attica was born in prison, nor, in probability, were many if any of the guards held hostage.

Attica is a prison town, which (with the exception of some cities and large communities like Trenton that are the sites of state or federal penal institutions) is a place analogous to the company town. The majority of people in the community are directly connected in some form to the operation of the prison. Fathers, sons, and grandsons work as prison guards. Wives and daughters hold jobs as secretaries or other noncombative positions on the staff. Often in facilities large enough to provide employees housing inside the walls or in cases in which the town is too small to have a private or municipal hospital, children are born inside the prison. Clinton T. Duffy, a former warden at San Quentin, was born there--his father was a guard--grew up there--playing "prisoners-and-guards" instead of cowboys-and-Indians--and married there to the daughter of the Captain of the Yard.

However, the prisoners usually have to come from someplace else.

One year and three months after Clinton Duffy completed his cycle by being appointed Warden of San Quentin, George Jackson was born in Chicago. The first son of parents who had made the short but tragic migration on the IC from downstate Illinois, Jackson's childhood was spent retracing their journey. During the school year, he attended St. Malachy, an internally segregated parochial school in Chicago. His summers were spent with his mother's family in the southern Illinois town of Harrisburg.

As described in his remarkable book, Soledad Brother, a collection of his prison letters between 1964 and 1970 with an autobiography, the annual shift between Chicago and Harrisburg represented a change from relative captivity to relative freedom. In Chicago, Jackson had to contend first and always with the efforts of his mother and then also with those of the teachers and administrators of St. Malachy to confine and bend him to their wills. As he was later to view them, his mother's efforts began before Jackson was born. "As testimony of her love, and her fear for the fate of the man-child all slave mothers hold, she attempted to press, hide, push, capture me in the womb. The conflicts and contradictions that will follow me to the tomb started right there in the womb."

His mother's attempts at continuing the holding action met with an increasing lack of success once Jackson was out of the womb. He and his older sister. Delora, "were sometimes allowed to venture out into the world, which at that time meant no further than a fenced-off roof area adjoining our little three-room apartment...But, of course, I went out when I pleased." Occasionally, Jackson's determination to discover resulted in near-disasters, as when, in the interests of science, he dropped a book of flaming matches into a fifty-gallon drum of oil. The holding action of his sister, Delora, was the only thing that kept Jackson from being blinded from the ensuing explosion. In Soledad Brother, Jackson relates another incident that resulted from his unbridled desire to know. "Seeing the white boys up close in kindergarten was a traumatic event. I must have seen some before in magazines or books but never in the flesh. I approached one, felt his hair, scratched at his cheek, he hit me in the head with a baseball bat. They found me crumpled in a heap just outside the schoolyard fence."

Thus, perhaps it could be argued that there was some justification for the attempts of his mother and teachers to control him for his own good. However, Jackson did not see it that way and reacted accordingly. He sensed something innately wrong in his mother's efforts to circumscribe his movements about the neighborhood and in St. Malachy's endeavor to convince him "that love--touching fingertips, mouths, bellies, legs--was nasty." Perhaps if his mother and his school had backed their efforts with rational explanations of what had prompted them to try to control him or if they had satisfied his curiosity about the world and himself in other ways, George Jackson's life in Chicago might have taken a vastly different form. However, as it was, it became polarized: "In effect, I lived two lives, the one with my mama and sisters, and the thing on the street. Now and then I'd get caught at something...and my mama would fall all over me. I left home a thousand times never to return. We hoboed up and down the state. I did what I wanted (all my life I've done just that). When it came time to explain, I lied."

III

As a play of struggle between himself and forces attempting to control him, Jackson's early life was quite similar to those of many people who end up sitting in America's jails and to not a few who end up sitting upon the right hand of GM or any of the country's other major corporations. Yet just as the factors of racial caste and economic class separate George Jackson's background and boyhood from those of GM chairman John Roche, so did another set of factors separate Jackson's early life from those of many of the men who were late to be his brother inmates.

The first of these factors was George Jackson's summer experiences in Harrisburg. There, possessing the unrestrained mobility to explore the outside world and himself, Jackson's lives came close to merging. In rural Harrisburg, the home of his mother's family, Jackson learned to hunt, fish, and read Nature. He became the "scourge of the woods, the predatory man." Away from the consumptive maelstrom of the inner city, he discovered a community of blacks which although as poor as that in Chicago had managed to remain "a loyal and righteous people." Most importantly, Jackson, a man who was to spend half of his life in prison or on the run and die a month before his thirtieth birthday, discovered an inner peace in Harrisburg, tapped, for the first time and in its purest form the last, the strength and gentleness of his soul.

George Davis, Jackson's maternal grandfather whom he called "Papa," served as a link between Harrisburg and Chicago. Forced by economic considerations to live in Chicago, Davis was the kind of black man whose influence on other blacks and the history of the country has been so severely undernoticed as to make their existence a questionable issue to many. Yet many and perhaps, most black families have had a "Papa" Davis in them, and there are very few black people who after consideration can claim not to have known one. Jackson's description of "Papa" in Soledad Brother may be slightly inflated, yet any exaggeration is simply indicative of the powerful influence the "Papa"'s of the black world have had:

My grandfather, George "Papa" Davis, stands out of those early years more than any other figure in my total environment. He was separated from his wife by the system. Work for men was impossible to find in Harrisburg. He was living and working in Chicago--sending his wage back to the people downstate. He was an extremely aggressive man, and since aggression on the part of the slave means crime, he was in jail now and then. He tried to direct my great energy into the proper form of protest. He invented long simple allegories that always pictured the white politicians as animals...He and my mother went to great pains to impress on me that it was the worst form of niggerism to hook and jab, cut and stab at other blacks.

That description appears in the autobiography Jackson wrote at the request of the editor of Soledad Brother. Perhaps an even more meaningful evaluation of the influence Papa had on him is given in a letter Jackson wrote to his mother after Papa had died alone and broke during George Jackson's fifth year at San Quentin.

I loved him dearly and thought of him as one of our most practical and level-headed kin. You probably don't remember the long walks and talks Papa and I used to have...But I remember. He used to say things, probably just thinking aloud, sure that I wasn't listening or would not comprehend. But I did, and I think I knew him better than most. Do you remember how I used to answer "What" to every question put to me, and how Papa would deride me for this? He later in the course of our exchanges taught me to answer questions with "Why" instead of "What."

For George Jackson, Papa Davis was a model for manhood. Not a mannequin or a cardboard mock-up, but a living and responsive, vulnerable black man of dignity, Papa Davis taught him the distinction between weakness and tenderness, and impressed upon him that for the poor black in America there is not necessarily a valid connection between punishment and crime, nor need there be a separation between himself and his reason. Most importantly, Papa gave him a galvanic sensitivity to the most fertile possibilities of human life, an awareness that efforts were being made to deny most people access to these potentialities, and a conviction that this was a wrong that had to be rebalanced at any personal cost.

Jackson said later in the letter he wrote after Papa's death:

I wish he could have survived to see and enjoy the new world we plan to creat from this chaos. If I could have gotten out of here last year he would never have gone on sardines and crackers. I don't know how anyone else views the matter and don't care, but now for me he is one more voice added to the already thunderous chorus that cry from their unmarked and unhallowed graves for vindication.

In Soledad Brother, Jackson does not often refer to his Harrisburg experiences or his childhood relationship with his grandfather, summoning them as one does things very fragile and rare only at times of greatest stress. They seem to have constituted the last line of his defense of his own humanity during his ten year struggle to escape death on the installment plan in the penitentaries of California.

Of all the influences in Jackson's development, the most enigmatic and perhaps also the most important was that of his father, Robert Lester Jackson. Neither father nor son could wholly approve of the other, yet there was to exist between them a bond of love that was built of a strong, unusually durable fibre: the understanding that the same things that held them together also held them apart.

The type of black man that Robert Jackson is has received more attention than that type that Papa Davis was, yet neither has been exactly over-exposed. In fact, the Robert Jacksons could quite easily be termed the original Inivisible Men.

Robert Jackson was, like his wife, from downstate Illinois. However, while she had enjoyed the freedom and stability of growing up nestled among a large well-knit clan in Harrisburg, he had been abandoned at an early age in the river town of East St. Louis. The demands of survival seem to have burdened Robert Jackson with a particular psychological afflication that was endemic to black men whose youth was consumed in Depression America. As it dictated on a less severe level to other men, survival demanded of Robert Jackson and men like him that they make an operational adjustment to terminal disorder, that they maintain themselves in a protracted state of acceptance, that, in short, they perform a self-inflicted lobotomy. Yet the very instincts that caused men so condemned to abandon more extreme forms of resistance for the sake of their own survival in an environment that deemed them patently superfluous, also impelled them to resist. The inner conflicts and uncertainties produced by this interminable struggle of self against self extracted perhaps the greatest toll.

The specific forms that this array of conflicts took in Robert Jackson's life were not unusual. A man of no formal education, he understood the value of learning well enough as to teach himself the essentials and pursue whatever instruction was