{"id":92607,"date":"2015-12-07T15:29:42","date_gmt":"2015-12-07T20:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=92607"},"modified":"2015-12-07T16:22:48","modified_gmt":"2015-12-07T21:22:48","slug":"extreme-remedies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/07\/extreme-remedies\/","title":{"rendered":"Extreme Remedies"},"content":{"rendered":"

George Jackson\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Soledad Brother, forty years later.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

George Jackson<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on\u00a0t<\/em>he French revolutionary Madame Roland<\/a><\/em>, here<\/em>.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

On August 21, 1971, George Jackson pulled a pistol on his wardens at San Quentin, the notoriously racist maximum-security prison to which he\u2019d recently been relocated. When the news broke that he\u2019d freed several of his fellow inmates, presided over the slashing of eight prison officials\u2019 throats (six guards and two trustees), and then died under heavy gunfire while sprinting to freedom, it provoked a strange mixture of shock, anger, revulsion, and grief. Gregory Armstrong, Jackson\u2019s editor at Bantam, would later confess to a reporter how relieved he was that he hadn\u2019t followed through on his offer to help the younger man escape. Bob Dylan wrote a protest song in Jackson\u2019s praise. (\u201cHe wouldn\u2019t take shit from no one \/ He wouldn\u2019t bow down or kneel \/ Authorities they hated him \/ Because he was just too real.\u201d) Jackson\u2019s attorney, Stephen Bingham, under suspicion of having smuggled in the escape weapon, fled the country for thirteen years. Huey Newton gave Jackson a long, effusive eulogy (\u201che lived the life that we must praise\u201d). A group of Black Panthers imprisoned in Folsom advised his parents to \u201ctake pride in the fact that you have a large strong family of budding warriors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the 1970 publication of Soledad Brother<\/a><\/em>, his ferocious, disquieting collection of letters from prison, Jackson had been an international celebrity. In his introduction to the book\u2019s first printing, Jean Genet insisted that the collection \u201cmust be read as a manifesto, as a tract, as a call to rebellion, since it is that first of all.\u201d Abdellatif La\u00e2bi read the letters admiringly during his own imprisonment; they let \u201cone follow,\u201d he told his wife in 1975, \u201cthe transformation of a man who challenges a new kind of slavery, strips its mechanisms down, and keeps his dignity intact throughout the worst kind of ordeal.\u201d The day before Jackson\u2019s death in 1971, Derrida wrote Genet a long letter worrying that the introduction hadn\u2019t done justice to the dire situation Jackson\u2019s writing was meant to expose. \u201cWith the best intentions in the world,\u201d he cautioned, \u201cwith the most sincere moral indignation in the face of what, in effect, remains unbearable and inadmissible, one could then lock up again that which one says one wants to liberate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like Jackson\u2019s writings themselves, Derrida\u2019s hand-wringing letter is dated in some respects and eerily prophetic in others. During his life, Jackson often aroused the \u201csincere moral indignation\u201d of white supporters who never, he knew, understood how radical and transformative his political project was meant to be. In addition to Armstrong and Bingham, there was Joan Hammer, a financially comfortable middle-aged activist, and Fay Stender, the civil rights lawyer who guided Soledad Brother <\/em>to publication only to fall out with Jackson shortly after the book\u2019s release. She committed suicide in 1980 after having been shot in her home by an intruder demanding vengeance for Jackson\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Since 1971, Jackson has been vilified and mythologized in equal measure. He would have had little patience for the sympathetic accounts of his death that cast him as a passive victim. (The Road to Hell<\/em>, an expos\u00e9 by the crime reporter Paul Liberatore that recounts the murders committed during Jackson\u2019s revolt in stomach-churning detail, perhaps over-corrects this mistake.) Jackson aspired to lead nothing less than an armed revolution against America\u2019s white ruling class. \u201cPure<\/em> nonviolence as a political ideal \u2026 is absurd,\u201d he wrote Stender in 1970. \u201cIf this agitation that we term as nonviolent is to have any meaning at all we must force the fascist to taste the bitterness of our wrath.\u201d His letters were vigilance exercises; didactic monologues; purification rituals; preparations for the violent emergence of a new order.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In 1956, four years before the eighteen-year-old Jackson was convicted for robbing a convenience store of seventy dollars, his family moved from Chicago to LA. One of five siblings, he was precocious, restless, and unruly. The moment his father, a postal worker, left him alone with the family\u2019s \u201949 Hudson, he remembers in the first letter in Soledad Brother<\/em>, he took the car for a joyride and crashed it into the window of the barbershop down the street. \u201cMy father fixed the brother\u2019s shop with his own hands,\u201d he wrote admiringly. \u201cHe never said a word to me about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon after his family\u2019s move\u2014and already burdened with an arrest record from various thefts, muggings, and pettier offenses in Chicago\u2014Jackson did time in the tank of a California county jail for having attempted to hold up a department store. (He was shot twice during the arrest.) A few years later, he found himself in court again; \u201cI agreed to confess,\u201d he later wrote, \u201cand spare the county court costs in return for a light county jail sentence.\u201d Instead, he was sent to the state penitentiary for a year to life. The next eleven years, which he spent primarily in Soledad and then San Quentin, were a long string of disciplinary infractions, parole refusals, and\u2014on Jackson\u2019s part\u2014indignant, violent outbursts. He kept a clean record for a stretch of eight months, having been promised parole in return, only to end up before a board that overturned the earlier members\u2019 word.<\/p>\n

His early letters are lost; he\u2019d later describe them as \u201cextremely bitter.\u201d Soledad Brother<\/em> picks up the sequence in June 1964, and the letters that comprise its first half are nearly all to Jackson\u2019s parents. Reading them, however, you might think they were from a teacher to a slow or stubborn pupil. \u201cNow I have arrived at a state of awareness that (because of the education system) few Negroes reach in the U.S.,\u201d he wrote his father in a particularly irate mood after the older man warned the prison wardens that he might be difficult. \u201cIn my concern for you, I try to share the benefits of my experience and my observations, but am rewarded by being called a madman.\u201d For Jackson, his father embodied a generation of nominally free black men who existed in a state of constant economic slavery, cowed into acquiescence by low wages and repetitive labor. (\u201cYou have worked hard, hard, and obeyed the laws of our masters but you still have nothing.\u201d) With his mother, he was capable of sincere gestures of affection as well as accusations it would chill a parent to hear. \u201cI feel that you have failed me Mama,\u201d he wrote in an early letter. \u201cI know that you have failed me. I also know that Robert\u201d\u2014he almost always called his parents by their first names\u2014\u201chas never held an opinion of his own. You have always had the running of things \u2026 You are a woman, you think like a bourgeois woman. This is a predatory man\u2019s world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the social hierarchy Jackson had by this point developed, men were Spartan warriors and women their obliging assistants. \u201cWomen like to be dominated, love being strong-armed, need an overseer to supplement their weakness,\u201d he wrote Robert in 1967. \u201cFor this reason we should never allow women to express any opinions on the subject, but just to sit, listen to us, and attempt to understand.\u201d Passages like this come up throughout Jackson\u2019s letters, which have a way of veering suddenly from the noxious to the stirring, the searchingly open-minded to the ruthlessly doctrinaire. The longer he was left to smolder in Soledad, and the more firmly he attached himself to Maoism, the more the latter tone started to win out over the former. On January 1, 1966, he wrote Robert:<\/p>\n

\n

To have lived through the period of your early youth is in itself a qualifier for respect \u2026 All the honor that you are due I freely give. However, we, the humble representatives of the future generations, have at our disposal all the accumulated knowledge and experiences of all past generations to build our thoughts. I have made no mark as yet to be sure, but why is it that we cannot communicate? What is it that bars our efforts to exchange thoughts and ideas? The fault could lie in my presentation. If so, I will make every effort to correct my deficiency because it is to the interest of us both that we meet on the same level.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Two years later, he was writing in a less hopeful key. \u201cYou have misjudged the depth of my feeling on these matters,\u201d he told Robert in November 1967. \u201cThey mean everything to me \u2026 I anticipated failure in this from the start, so I am not shocked or surprised now that the last has been said and we find ourselves poles apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Soledad Brothers: George Jackson (center, in glasses), John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cThese matters\u201d overlapped up to a point with the party program of the Black Panthers, with whom Jackson was powerfully but somewhat uneasily associated for the last years of his life. That America\u2019s black underclass was a colonized people; that the country\u2019s institutions depended on their continued enslavement and subjugation; and that this state of affairs could only be reversed by an armed, violent revolution: in his core political commitments, Jackson didn\u2019t stray far from the Panther\u2019s central course. What set him apart was the rigor, focus, and monkish self-discipline with which he applied himself to the job of bringing that revolution about. He gave himself a punishing daily push-up routine, taught himself karate and slept, he claims, for three hours a night.<\/p>\n

In the twenty-three and a half hours he spent alone in his cell each day, he educated himself in Marxist-Leninist thought. He fell particularly, disastrously hard for Mao. \u201cNo one starves in China,\u201d he describes having told one of his high school teachers. \u201cIs it possible that you are ignorant enough to think that people starve in China still, because they were starving in such great numbers when you were there in the forties serving the fascist-military establishment?\u201d It\u2019s one of Jackson\u2019s many contradictions that he could accept one dogma so uncritically and spend his every waking moment steeling himself against the effects of another. \u201cI have completely restrained myself and my thinking to the point now that I think and dream of one thing only,\u201d he wrote in the summer of 1967. \u201cI have no habits, no ego, no name, no face. I feel no love, no tenderness, for anyone who does not think as I do.\u201d This is the tone of Jackson\u2019s later writing: taut, toned, aspiring to a total absence of weakness or flab. \u201cI\u2019m not a very nice person,\u201d he wrote Angela Davis during their first, flushed exchange of love letters in 1970. \u201cI\u2019ve been forced to adopt a set of responses, reflexes, attitudes that have made me more kin to the cat than anything else, the big black one.\u201d<\/p>\n

By this time, he had become one of the most feared and respected inmates in Soledad\u2019s infamous O Wing, where guards were widely known to put their support behind all-white gangs. In at least one notorious instance of official racism, a tower guard broke up a fight on the yard by shooting down the darker-skinned combatants, killing three. After a grand jury cleared the officer, an uninvolved guard was thrown to his death from a cell-block railing. Jackson\u2019s publishers named his collection of letters after the media\u2019s phrase for the group of three men\u2014Jackson included\u2014who went to trial for the crime.<\/p>\n

As one of the Soledad Brothers, Jackson began to attract the attention of white activists and sympathizers. He made no effort to conceal his convictions when he wrote figures like Joan Hammer\u2014to whom he once claimed that \u201cwe must move along two lines in concert, instruction of the unrighteous and destruction of the unrighteous\u201d\u2014but he did subtly soften his tone. \u201cWhen I think of the very lovely people, the innocent, when I read your descriptions and some others, my mind strays momentarily from the fact that I\u2019ll never be safe,\u201d he wrote her in the summer of 1970 with a strange mixture of diplomacy and candor:<\/p>\n

\n

At these moments I feel a thrill of promise, but that\u2019s only for a moment, the rest of the day is elevated to the pledge I made to myself, a compact that I would never live at ease as long as there was or is<\/em> one man who would restrict my and your self-determination.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If the struggle to meet his parents on the same level was the drama of Jackson\u2019s earlier letters, here is the drama of his later ones. Jackson became famous as a writer at precisely the time he had come to see writing as a kind of ancillary activity to the more pressing business of marshaling a guerilla-war campaign. He asked his closest supporters insistently to smuggle him weapons and explosives. At the end of a long letter to Fay Stender in 1970, several months before his younger brother Jonathan died making a kidnapping attempt to negotiate his freedom, he wrote that \u201cI have a young courageous brother whom I love more than I love myself, but I have given him up to the revolution \u2026 I accept the possibility of his eventual death as I accept the possibility of my own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even then, he was no less capable of magisterial expressions of tenderness or love\u2014for Jonathan, for his parents, and most often for Davis. His letters to her show him palpably more relaxed and unguarded, worrying about the public literary performances he\u2019d locked himself into keeping up. He kept them up, but not without doubts. \u201cThe question is,\u201d he wrote her about two years before Derrida\u2019s letter to Genet, \u201cdo these nice people really want to hear what I have to say\u2014as a victim of the first order\u2014will they mistake it\u2014as extreme\u2014can these wonderful people understand that some situations call for extreme remedies?\u201d<\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em><\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em><\/em>n+1, <\/em><\/em>Film Comment, and <\/em><\/em>The Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Previous entries in Prison Lit<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n