Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist 0195053583

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Oxford University Press Oxford

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Copyright

©

1978, 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

First paperback edition published 1982 by

Lawrence

Hill

&

Co., Inc.,

520 Riverside Avenue,

Westport, Connecticut 06880 by permission of the Oxford University Press.

under the title The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from American Prison by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 First published in 1978

the

First issued as

Oxford

is

an Oxford University Press paperback, 1989

a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Franklin, H. Bruce (Howard Bruce), 1934Prison literature in America

:

the victim as criminal and artist

/

H. Bruce Franklin, p.

cm.

“Expanded edition” Bibliography:

— Introd.

Includes index.

p.

ISBN 0-19-505358-3

(pbk.)

— —

American History and criticism. 2. Criminals’ writings, American History and criticism. 3. Slaves’ writings, American History and criticism. 4. American literature Afro-American authors History and criticism. 5. Crime and criminals in literature. 6. Slavery and slaves in literature. I.

Prisoner’s writings,

—

7.

9.

—

Afro-Americans in literature. 8. Prisons in literature. Victims in literature. 10. Canon (Literature) I. Title.

PS153.P74F7 1988 810'.9'920692—dcl9

88-27467

CIP

Permissions acknowledgments will be found on page

10

98765432

1

Printed in the United States of America

v.

“It

Was

a

Funky

Deal,” “The

Warden Said

to

Me

the Other Day,” “Hard Rock Returns to

Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane,” and “For Freckle-Faced Gerald” are from

© 1968 by Etheridge Knight. Reprinted by permission of Broadside Press. Lines from “Black thoughts ’71 (malcolm)” by Insan, and “Listen to Your Heartbeat” by

Poems from Prison by Etheridge Knight. Copyright

James Lang are from Who Took by

Little,

Brown. Copyright

©

the Weight? Black Voices from Norfolk Prison, published 1972 by Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, Inc. Reprinted by

Elma Lewis. Poem for Black Rhythmeticians,” “Running Upon a Wall,” “One Day Ten Minutes a Thousand Years,” and the complete poem “What Next” are from Less Than a Score, But a Point: Poems by T. J. Reddy. Copyright © 1971, 1974 by T. J. Reddy. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. and T. J. Reddy. “Fourteen Year Old Boys Make the Easiest Targets” by Ross Laursen, and lines from “A permission of

Lines from “A

&

Blue Experience” by Banners L. X. are from Captive Voices: An Anthology from Folsom Prison. Copyright © 1975 by Dustbooks. Reprinted by permission. “Nothing Human Is Alien,” “from Sestina to San Quentin,” “Poetry,” and “Who’s Bitter” are from San Quentin's Stranger by William Wantling, published by Caveman Press, Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1973. Copyright by William Wantling. Reprinted by permission of Black

Ms. Ruth Wantling. It Necessary” by Sam Washington, and “Formula for the Attica Repeats” by Mshaka Monroe) are from Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica, edited by Celes Tisdale. Copyright © 1974 by Broadside Press. Reprinted by permission of Broadside Press.

“Was

(Willie

Vlll

THE VICTIM AS CRIMINAL AND ARTIST

the Humanities at Wesleyan and a Humanities Fellowship from

the Rockefeller Foundation.

Substantial sections of Chapter 6 have been published as “The Literature of the American Prison” in The Massachusetts Review 18 (Spring, 1977), 51-78. The section of Chapter 5 on Malcolm Braly has been published, in substantially the same form, as

“Malcolm Braly: Novelist of the American Prison”

Contemportion of Chapter in

porary Literature 18 (Spring 1977), 217-40. A 1 has been published, in substantially the same form, as “Animal Farm Unbound” in New Letters 43 (Spring 1977), 25-46. An earlier and much abbreviated version of Chapter 2 was published as “Herman Melville: Artist of the Worker’s World” in

Weapons of Criticism, ed. Norman Rudich (Palo Alto, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1976), 287-310. A much earlier version of some “ parts of Chapter 1 was published as ‘A’ Is for Afro-American: A Primer on the Study of American Literature” in The Minnesota Review n.s. 5 (Fall 1975), 53-64. Parts of the Introduction to the Expanded Edition were published in “Hard Cell,” Village Voice, July 27, 1982, 37-38.

Contents

Introduction to the Expanded Edition Introduction to the First Edition

Artist

The First Literary Genre of the United The Slave Narrative 3 The Worker as Criminal and Artist:

States:

in 1.

Chapter

2.

Chapter

3.

Chapter

4.

5.

1.

Herman

Melville

Part

History

11.

31

Plantation to Penitentiary: Songs of Slavery, Peonage, and Prison 73 A. Songs of Slavery 73 98 B. Songs of an Imprisoned People A History of Literature by Convicts in America 124

Part Chapter

xxiii

The Victim as Criminal and America

Part

Chapter

xi

Two

III.

The Present

Novelists of the American Prison A. Malcolm Braly 181 206 B. Chester Himes

181

THE VICTIM AS CRIMINAL AND ARTIST

X Chapter

6.

From Malcolm X

to Attica

and Beyond:

Contemporary American Prison Literature 233 Notes 277 An Annotated Bibliography of Published Works by American Prisoners and Ex-prisoners 1798-1988 291 Index 342

Introduction to the Expanded Edition This book explores the literature of the American prison, beginning with the British convict colonies, moving through AfroAmerican slavery and the interwoven development of the modern penitentiary, leading into an epoch when the shadows of the prison overspread more and more of everyday life. In the ten years that have passed since the first edition, over one hundred million non-traffic arrests have taken place in the United States. During this decade, the number of people caged in America’s federal and state prisons has almost doubled. The ratio of the nation’s sentenced prisoners to its overall population is now three times that of the United Kingdom, almost four times that of Germany or Turkey, five times that of France, six times that of Italy, and ten times that of the Netherlands. In addition, the people now awaiting trial in municipal and county jails constitute another group almost as large as the total convict population of a decade ago. Only one country in the “Free World” incarcerates a higher proportion of its people: South Africa.^ Research proving that the prison system in South Africa “had not been developed as a humanitarian approach or even as a rehabilitative measure, but as a form of forced labor ‘to fill the vacuum created by the abolition of slavery’ ” evoked dismay in the New York Times of October 18, 1987. Yet this statement just as accurately describes the modern prison system in the United States, which arose as a corollary of emancipation and

XU

THE VICTIM AS CRIMINAL AND ARTIST

where the current rate of incarceration

over seven times the rate for whites. Obviously one must comprehend the role of the South African prison to understand the society and culture of the Republic of South Africa. Comprehending the role for

Blacks

is

American prison is even more essential to understanding the society and culture of the United States of America. of the

This thesis of the first edition is brought closer to home by each subsequent year. The deepening economic crisis drives more and more people into crime. Harsh sentencing laws are passed, making the construction of new prisons a recession-resistant growth industry. Constitutional liberties give way to “law and order.” The social crisis spreads addiction to drugs; even in affluent suburbs, uniformed guards patrol the corridors of high schools. Citizens triple-lock themselves in their homes and grow accustomed to electronic surveillance. The growing resemblance between prisons and the rest of society becomes harder to ignore. Thus it is no surprise that literature by American prisoners became recognized as a crucial part of our culture soon after the first edition. So many books by American convicts appeared or were discovered within the next four years that the annotated bibliography almost doubled in size by the 1982 second edition. Writings on contemporary prison authors ran the gamut from doctoral dissertation to Parade, the weekly magazine stuffed into twenty-four million copies of American newspapers each Sunday.^ Big movie studios vied for rights to novels by convicts. Some of the authors discussed in this book were finally admitted into college curricula and academic anthologies. For example, Etheridge Knight, whose work was unknown in the established literary world prior to the first edition, had his next book published by a major press, became widely anthologized, and won both a Guggenheim fellowship and the Shelley Memorial Prize for Poetry.

But

this literature

was

also a special target for the reaction

mid 1980s. By 1984, every litpublishing poetry and stories by pris-

that characterized the early and

erary journal devoted to oners had been wiped out. State laws were passed denying royalties to convict authors. Many of the most influential books that viewed American society from the bottom were taken out of print, while the autobiographies of wealthy white-collar criminals be-

INTRODUCTION TO THE EXPANDED EDITION

came

chic.^

Xlll

Even authors who had achieved recognition a few

years earlier were shoved back into obscurity. To follow the example of Etheridge Knight, his The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986), according to Book Review Index, received only a single one-paragraph notice, though it was published by a distinguished university press and though it won the American Book Award for 1987. Emblematic of prison literature’s roller-coaster rides in these years was Jack Henry Abbott, whose In the Belly of the Beast became an overnight literary sensation as it went through five printings in a few months of 1981. When Abbott killed a cafe manager in a fight (he gives his verison of the affair in a play included in his 1987 collection My Return), disillusion spread among many of those who admired his writing, and his name was used to anathematize prison literature in general. But one main message of Abbott’s book was dramatized, not invalidated, by his actions. For he was trying to communicate to his relatively affluent and sheltered readers what kind of people they are creating in their system of “corrections.” First incarcerated when he was nine years old, Abbott was sent to a juvenile penal prison at the age of twelve for the “crime” of “failure to adjust to foster homes.” There he was imprisoned, except for six months, until he was eighteen. After being free for five months, he was next given an indeterminate sentence of up to five years in the Utah State Penitentiary for the crime of “issuing a check for insufficient funds.” Three years later, he killed another convict in a fight. Between the ages of twelve and thirtyseven, when he wrote the letters to Norman Mailer collected as In the Belly of the Beast, he had been free less than one year. Abbott’s revelations about his decades of torture beatings, starvation, forced injections of dangerous drugs, and a total of ten years spent in solitary confinement, sometimes in total darkness, almost always in cells awash in feces and urine produced mixed reactions in the literary world: shock, sympathy, admiration, and contempt. What sort of man did his readers expect him to be? How did they or the authorities expect him to behave when, still a prisoner of the United States government, he was dumped into a sleazy “halfway house” in a neighborhood of lower

—

—

Manhattan notorious

for drugs, derelicts,

and

street

murder? After

THE VICTIM AS CRIMINAL AND ARTIST

XIV

Abbott had written that our penal institutions force each prisoner to become either a broken, cringing animal, fawning before all authority and power, or a resister, clinging to human dignity through defiance, rebellion, and violence. This is a central theme of much recent prison literature. It is dramatized poignantly in the 1981 semiautobiographical novel Little Boy Blue by another child of the state, Edward Bunker. Little Boy Blue shows precisely how our “correctional” institutions convert a love-starved little boy into an implacable enemy of society who perceives the police and guards who torture him as merely the “surrogates” of his real oppressor, the respectable people he robs. Bunker and Abbott, like most white contempoall,

rary convict authors, ridicule the

inmates how

to

bott’s words,

is

myth

that prisons teach their

commit crimes. What prisons inculcate, in AbOr as Jerome “the will to commit crimes.”

Washington puts it in A Bright Spot in the Yard, his fine collection of stories and aphorisms about prison, “every inmate becomes a walking time bomb, a lethal weapon aimed at society.” Edward Bunker’s novel The Animal Factory (1977) uses an ideal point-of-view character to bridge the chasm between the author and most of his readers: an educated, liberal, first-time convict. He, like Abbott, discovers that the modern American prison is a racist nightmare where racial hatred, inflamed by the guards and officials, is used to keep the prisoners fighting among themselves. Although Bunker’s liberal young convict sympathizes with the Blacks, he sees no

way

to avoid catching the

“endemic disease” of consuming racism. Nathan Heard’s House of Slammers (1983), arguably the most important novel yet published about the American prison, explores territory that lies beyond both the experience of white prisoners and his own earlier naturalistic novels about ghetto life. So long as they are possessed by grandiose criminal aspirations or divisive political ideologies uninformed by history, convicts are shown to be “lost sheep chasing the dreams that wolves dreamed and being devoured in the process,” while their most effective prison is their own racial antagonism, which keeps them from unifying against those who derive profit and power from their debasement. When Heard’s protagonist brings his experiential knowledge of Black life in America to his systematic

INTRODUCTION TO THE EXPANDED EDITION

XV

reading of political theory and philosophy, he emerges with a political analysis that transcends the most vicious racial contradictions of the prison, together with a willingness to sacrifice himself so that the prisoners can achieve, even if only for a few days, a triumph of existential dignity and unity. The “minorities” who constitute the majority of America’s prison population share an experience different from that of the white convicts. Most of the nonwhites recognize that they are in prison not for what they have done as individuals but for what they are collectively, and therefore perceive the dominant white society as the enemy. White prisoners who adopt a similar understanding of their own lives are thus especially dangerous, for they begin to challenge the racial conflicts essential to the functioning of the modern American prison. White convicts are threatened with the stick of being reduced to the level of nonwhites while being offered the carrot of reintegration into the dominant white society represented immediately by the prison officials, ultimately by the hierarchy outside if they only acknowledge that the problem lies within them, that they themselves are responsible for their living in cages. As Jack Abbott puts it: “I have never accepted that I did this to myself. I have never been successfully indoctrinated with that belief’ (15). Abbott was able to make the extraordinary leap from his own experience of oppression as an individual into a comprehension of the Black experience of oppression as a people:

—

—

When

think of the profundity of the injustices done to black people in America, I feel a horror I cannot easily describe. I would not be a man if I believed that blacks are not justified socially in treating any and all white people in this society with I

violence and hatred. (148)

In this book

I

have tried

to

show how and why the prison

sys-

tem, designed largely to replace the earlier form of Black chattel slavery, is central to the oppression of Black people since the 1860s. The so-called “minorities” Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian now constitute 58% of the U.S. male prison population. Two 1977 studies, one by criminologist Eugene Doleschal, the other by former deputy warden William G. Nagel,

—

—

^

XVI

THE VICTIM AS CRIMINAL AND ARTIST

both prove that the prison rate in various states and regions is not at all determined by the crime rate but strictly by the size of the nonwhite population. Areas with very low crime rates and very high Black populations (Mississippi, for example) have very high rates of imprisonment, with Blacks sometimes forming two thirds or more of the prison population. In New Jersey, the arrest rate for violent offenses among nonwhites is eleven times the comparable rate among whites. Even more revealing is the fact that among nonwhites the commitment rate for those convicted of violent offenses is 22 times the commitment rate among whites. Blacks convicted of the same offense as whites, with the same records, consistently receive sentences far more harsh. The District of Columbia, where one third of the population is white, recently listed as prisoners 4,192 Black males and 123 white males. A retired judge discovered that in New York City only 3.1 percent of the children arrested, charged as felons, and sent to Rikers Island were white. Prisons of course are intended for those on the bottom of society, who also made up the bulk of the conscript army sent to Vietnam. During the massive campaign spuriously alleging that some of the 1800 men missing in action in Vietnam were still held as prisoners, a 1978 U.S. General Accounting Office report discovered 125,000 Vietnam veterans in U.S. state prisons. No movies have shown Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris rescuing these actual prisoners. While the flow of prison literature visible to the cultural establishment was largely choked off in the mid 1980s, a steady stream still reached a Black mass audience. Invisible to most of the readers and critics of Abbott, Bunker, and other authors published by major presses, this stream forms a major subterranean current in modern American culture. Much of it comes from Holloway House, a publisher specializing in “Black Experience” books, particularly by or about Black convict authors such as Donald Goines and Robert Beck, better known as Iceberg Slim. Donald Goines’s meteoric career began in 1971, with the publication of two novels written in prison. By 1974, he had authored sixteen novels, all of which have remained in print and have sold well over five million copies. His writing came to an end in late 1974 when two white men entered his apartment in

INTRODUCTION TO THE EXPANDED EDITION

XVll

gunned him and his wife down before the eyes of their two young daughters. His sixteen novels are an impressive though very uneven achievement. At their core is an unflinching revelation of the Detroit and

horrors of

life

in the Black underworld, especially the devastat-

ing physical and psychological effects of drugs, and the consuming fantasies of power among people daily robbed by the capital-

economic structure and ground down under the heel of the white state. The first two novels. Whoreson (1971) and Dopefiend (1971), are implacably naturalistic. Then emerges a nascent revolutionary imagination in Black Gangster (1972), the tale of a ruthless ex-convict who builds a minor criminal empire, partly by creatist

ing a phony organization ostensibly dedicated to the liberation of nonwhite people, only to be drowned in bloody struggle against the Mafia, the police, and an authentic revolutionary group

modeled on the Black Panther Party. White Man's Justice, Black Man's Gr/e/ (1973) presents one of the most appalling visions of prison in the terrifying pages of prison literature. Four out of Goines’s last seven books constitute an epic tetralogy of the rise and fall of the ambiguous Black revolutionary Kenyatta, a giant of a man with enormous passions, who builds a personal army of Black fighters dedicated to wiping out the drug trade in the ghettos. Counterpointed to Kenyatta’s messianic imagination are the contradictory views of a pair of detectives, one white and one Black, hunting him down. Goines has sometimes been branded as a “reverse racist” whose fiction shows unrelenting hatred of whites, but probably the most consistently admirable character in his work is Paul Pawloski, the son and grandson of Jews killed by the Nazis, a down-andout writer in Never Die Alone (1974). Paul takes a dying Black con man, notorious in the ghetto for his viciousness, to a hospital, and is rewarded by the dead man’s illicit fortune and autobiographical manuscript. In a sometimes dazzling display of shifting points of view, the manuscript and Paul’s reactions form a contrapuntal commentary on Goines’s own writings, many other “Black Experience” narratives, and the responses of their readers. Paul has trouble deciding whether the manuscript is primarily a diary or a novel: “The poor sonofabitch was really trying

THE VICTIM AS CRIMINAL AND ARTIST

XVUl to write a book!

Now I wonder just how much

of this shit in here

an over-worked imagination.” The distinction between fantasy and reality is a principal theme in a subgenre of Black Experience literature: the fictional and nonfictional narrative of pimps. Although this literature is foreshadowed in the section of The Autobiography of Malcolm X describing his life as a pimp, the archetypal work is Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967) by Iceberg Slim. This autobiography chronicles the pimp culture the world of “players” at the “game” of “cop and blow” (capturing and losing whores) especially during the Depression and the years just after World War II. The even earlier legendary history comes from Slim’s master teacher, who tells him that the “game” was invented by ex-slaves who migrated to the Northern cities only to discover that these were replicas of “the plantations down South.” These first pimps were “black geniuses” who wrote in their own minds the “skull book on pimping,” a systematic way to turn affluent and powerful white men into mere “tricks” willing to pay a price to satisfy their most depraved urges with Black women. Just as these white men perceive these Black women as mere animals, their racism also leads them into incessant gullibility to a variety of con games, for each usually has a “com-

is real,

or just parts of

—

—

plete inability to conceive that the ‘black boy’ before intelligent

Of

enough

to fool

him was

him.”

course, the other side of this

game

of

naked power

is

the

reenslavement of Black women, this time to the pimps. Unlike some other pimp books, which are little more than extended indulgences in sexual fantasies. Iceberg Slim’s works insist that pimping “ain’t no sex game” but the most brutal exercise of cunning and punishment designed to turn women into instruments of wealth and power so that the Black pimp can become just “like a slick white boss.” The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (1971), a collection of autobiographical and political essays, goes even deeper in its expose of the fantasies of pimps. Here the author expresses in a magnificent letter of reconciliation to his father his acceptance of both the strengths and weaknesses of the “straight” life of Black working people, and shows how the Black Panther Party helped him to understand both the self-deceptive brutality of the pimps’

INTRODUCTION TO THE EXPANDED EDITION

XIX

“game” and the revolutionary potential implicit

in the confron-

tation with Black reality.

His 1977 novel Death Wish, a complex and fully wrought work of art, dramatizes a further stage in the dialectic. Here the Mafia is locked in struggle with a primarily Black but interracial revolutionary organization dedicated, like the

army

of Goines’s

Kenyatta, to smashing the organized apparatus of the most terrifying slavery: drug addiction. Although the Mafia incarnates social and psychological evil, and their nemesis the Warriors embody a progressive force, we are gradually led to see that the Warriors are doomed to tragic failure because they have not purged themselves of violence, self-delusion, and male supremacy. Scenes in the two camps alternate (a la the Iliad), and the turning point for each comes when the wife of its principal leader decides to leave him. In this novel by a Black ex-pimp, it is the wife of the Mafia chieftain who implies another level of struggle: “Fm glad women have declared war on men to force their humanity. I’m thrilled to join that war to save the world’s sanity for our children.” The 1977 novel A Right to Anger by Karamoko Baye (a former bank robber who founded PACE, an organization for prisoners’ art and education) imagines a multiracial alliance in which both ex-prisoners and women play leading roles. Here the revolutionary organization is betrayed by the appropriately named Willie Lumpen, who embodies the most treacherous qualities of the street hustler, just as the protagonist, a pimp known as Blood, gradually comes to embody the hustler’s progressive potential. But the final words of the novel are spoken by one of Blood’s Black prostitutes, who scorns the adventurist bomb-throwing shootout in which the would-be revolutionaries are cut down: “I can’t be bothered with all that mess. Them niggas is goin’ crazy. What they oughtta be about, is building a party.” The literature by female prisoners gives insights not generally accessible in literature by men, whether convicts or not. This literature is not voluminous. Since only four percent of the population in federal and state prisons are

women, most

of their

published works are found in anthologies from the local and county jails where women are more often incarcerated. Viewed from the women’s side, the fantasies of the pimps’ world

XX

THE VICTIM AS CRIMINAL AND ARTIST

look thin and ragged. These fantasies also serve as clear projections of a capitalist culture that reduces all human relations to

money and the things money can buy. Thus Carolyn Baxter’s “Lower Court,” a poem in her splendid chapbook, Prison Solitary and Other Free Government Services (1979), the relations between

displays a prostitute reduced in a courtroom to an assortment of objects:

She opens her mouth wider, crumpled one dollar along with prophylactics,

bills

perfume, lipstick, a newspaper clipping for a pair of $30 boots, a whip, an explanation for the forged driver’s license/a picture of her favorite group, “The Shantells.”

fall out,

10