freedom

Jail is an odd place to find freedom, but that was the place I first found mine: in the Alameda County Jail in Oakland in 1964. This jail is located on the tenth floor of the Alameda County Court House, the huge, white building we call “Moby Dick.” When I was falsely convicted of the assault against Odell Lee, Judge Dieden sent me there to await sentencing. Shortly after I arrived, I was made a trusty, which gave me an opportunity to move about freely. Conditions were not good; in fact, the place blew up a few weeks later, when the inmates refused to go on eating starches and split-pea soup at almost every meal, and went on a food strike. I joined them. When we were brought our split-pea soup, we hurled it back through the bars, all over the walls, and refused to lock up in our cells.

I was the only trusty who took part in the strike, and because I could move between cell blocks, they charged me with organizing it. True, I had carried a few messages back and forth, but I was not an organizer then, not that it mattered to the jail administration. Trusties were supposed to go along with the Establishment in everything, and since I could not do that, I was slapped with the organizing label and put in the “hole”—what Black prisoners call the “soul breaker.”

I was twenty-two years old, and I had been in jail before on various beefs, mostly burglary and petty larceny. My parents were pretty sick of me in my late teens and the years following; so I had to depend on Sonny Man to come up from Los Angeles, or wherever he was, to bail me out. Since I had been “given” to him, he came whenever he could. But sometimes I could not find him. At any rate, I was no stranger to jail by 1964, although I had never been in extreme solitary confinement.

Within jail, there are four levels of confinement: the main line, segregation, isolation, and solitary—the “soul breaker.” You can be in jail in jail, but the soul breaker is your “last” end of the world. In 1964, there were two of these deprivation cells at the Alameda County Court House; each was four and a half feet wide, by six feet long, by ten feet high. The floor was dark red rubber tile, and the walls were black. If the guards wanted to, they could turn on a light in the ceiling, but I was always kept in the dark, and nude. That is part of the deprivation, why the soul breaker is called a strip cell. Sometimes the prisoner in the other cell would get a blanket, but they never gave me one. He sometimes got toilet paper, too—the limit was two squares—and when he begged for more, he was told no, that is part of the punishment. There was no bunk, no washbasin, no toilet, nothing but bare floors, bare walls, a solid steel door, and a round hole four inches in diameter and six inches deep in the middle of the floor. The prisoner was supposed to urinate and defecate in this hole.

A half-gallon milk carton filled with water was my liquid for the week. Twice a day and always at night the guards brought a little cup of cold split-pea soup, right out of the can. Sometimes during the day they brought “fruit loaf,” a patty of cooked vegetables mashed together into a little ball. When I first went in there, I wanted to eat and stay healthy, but soon I realized that was another trick, because when I ate I had to defecate. At night no light came in under the door. I could not even find the hole if I had wanted to. If I was desperate, I had to search with my hand; when I found it, the hole was always slimy with the filth that had gone in before. I was just like a mole looking for the sun; I hated finding it when I did. After a few days the hole filled up and overflowed, so that I could not lie down without wallowing in my own waste. Once every week or two the guard ran a hose into the cell and washed out the urine and defecation. This cleared the air for a while and made it all right to take a deep breath. I had been told I would break before the fifteen days were up. Most men did. After two or three days they would begin to scream and beg for someone to come and take them out, and the captain would pay a visit and say, “We don’t want to treat you this way. Just come out now and abide by the rules and don’t be so arrogant. We’ll treat you fairly. The doors here are large.” To tell the truth, after two or three days I was in bad shape. Why I did not break I do not know. Stubbornness, probably. I did not want to beg. Certainly my resistance was not connected to any kind of ideology or program. That came later. Anyway, I did not scream and beg; I learned the secrets of survival.

One secret was the same that Mahatma Gandhi learned—to take little sips of nourishment, just enough to keep up one’s strength, but never enough to have to defecate until the fifteen days were up. That way I kept the air somewhat clean and did not have the overflow. I did the same with water, taking little sips every few hours. My body absorbed all of it, and I did not have to urinate.

There was another, more important secret, one that took longer to learn. During the day a little light showed in the two-inch crack at the bottom of the steel door. At night, as the sun went down and the lights clicked off one by one, I heard all the cells closing, and all the locks. I held my hands up in front of my face, and soon I could not see them. For me, that was the testing time, the time when I had to save myself or break.

Outside jail, the brain is always being bombarded by external stimuli. These ordinary sights and sounds of life help to keep our mental processes in order, rational. In deprivation, you have to somehow replace the stimuli, provide an interior environment for yourself. Ever since I was a little boy I have been able to overcome stress by calling up pleasant thoughts. So very soon I began to reflect on the most soothing parts of my past, not to keep out any evil thoughts, but to reinforce myself in some kind of rewarding experience. Here I learned something. This was different.

When I had a pleasant memory, what was I to do with it? Should I throw it out and get another or try to keep it to entertain myself as long as possible? If you are not disciplined, a strange thing happens. The pleasant thought comes, and then another and another, like quick cuts flashing vividly across a movie screen. At first they are organized. Then they start to pick up speed, pushing in on top of one another going faster, faster, faster, faster. The pleasant thoughts are not so pleasant now; they are horrible and grotesque caricatures, whirling around in your head. Stop! I heard myself say, stop, stop, stop. I did not scream. I was able to stop them. Now what do I do?

I started to exercise, especially when I heard the jangle of keys as the guards came with the split-pea soup and fruit loaf. I would not scream; I would not apologize, even though they came every day, saying they would let me out if I gave in. When they were coming, I would get up and start my calisthenics, and when they went away, I would start the pleasant thoughts again. If I was too tired to stand, I would lie down and find myself on my back. Later, I learned that my position, with my back arched and only my shoulders and tight buttocks touching the floor, was a Zen Buddhist posture. I did not know it then, of course; I just found myself on my back. When the thoughts started coming again, to entertain me, and when the same thing happened with the speed-up, faster, faster, I would say stop! and start again.

Over a span of time—I do not know how long it took—I mastered my thoughts. I could start them and stop them; I could slow them down and speed them up. It was a very conscious exercise. For a while, I feared I would lose control. I could not think; I could not stop thinking. Only later did I learn through practice to go at the speed I wanted. I call them film clips, but they are really thought patterns, the most vivid pictures of my family, girls, good times. Soon I could lie with my back arched for hours on end, and I placed no importance on the passage of time. Control. I learned to control my food, my body, and my mind through a deliberate act of will.

After fifteen days the guards pulled me out and sent me back to a regular cell for twenty-four hours, where I took a shower and saw a medical doctor and a psychiatrist. They were worried that prisoners would become mentally disorganized in such deprivation. Then, because I had not repented, they sent me back to the hole. By then it held no fears for me. I had won my freedom.

Soul breakers exist because the authorities know that such conditions would drive them to the breaking point, but when I resolved that they would not conquer my will, I became stronger than they were. I understood them better than they understood me. No longer dependent on the things of the world, I felt really free for the first time in my life. In the past I had been like my jailers; I had pursued the goals of capitalistic America. Now I had a higher freedom.

Most people who know me do not realize that I have been in and out of jail for the past twelve years. They know only of my eleven months in solitary in 1967, waiting for the murder trial to begin, and the twenty-two months at the Penal Colony after that. But 1967 would not have been possible without 1964. I could not have handled the Penal Colony solitary without the soul breaker behind me. Therefore, I cannot tell inexperienced young comrades to go into jail and into solitary, that that is the way to defy the authorities and exercise their freedom. I know what solitary can do to a man.

The strip cell has been outlawed throughout the United States. Prisoners I talk to in California tell me it is no longer in use on the West Coast. That was the work of Charles Garry, the lawyer who defended me in 1968, when he fought the case of Warren Wells, a Black Panther accused of shooting a policeman. The Superior Court of California said it was an outrage to human decency to put any man through such extreme deprivation. Of course prisons have their ways, and out there right now, somewhere, prisoners without lawyers are probably lying in their own filth in the soul breaker.

I was in the hole for a month. My sentence, when it came, was for six months on the county farm at Santa Rita, about fifty miles south of Oakland. This is an honor camp with no walls, and the inmates are not locked up. There is a barbed-wire fence, but anyone can easily walk off during the daytime. The inmates work at tending livestock, harvesting crops, and doing other farm work.

I was not in the honor camp long. A few days after I arrived, I had a fight with a fat Black inmate named Bojack, who served in the mess hall. Bojack was a diligent enforcer of small helpings, and I was a “dipper.” Whenever Bojack turned away, I would dip for more with my spoon. One day he tried to prevent me from dipping, and I called him for protecting the oppressor’s interests and smashed him with a steel tray. When they pulled me off him, I was hustled next door to Graystone, the maximum security prison at Santa Rita.

Here, prisoners are locked up all day inside a stone building. Not only that, I was put in solitary confinement for the remaining months of my sentence. Because of my experience in the hole, I could survive. Still, I did not submit willingly. The food was as bad in Graystone as it had been in Alameda, and I constantly protested about that and the lack of heat in my cell. Half the time we had no heat at all.

Wherever you go in prison there are disturbed inmates. One on my block at Santa Rita screamed night and day as loudly as he could; his vocal cords seemed made of iron. From time to time, the guards came into his cell and threw buckets of cold water on him. Gradually, as the inmate wore down, the scream became a croak and then a squeak and then a whisper. Long after he gave out, the sound lingered in my head.

The Santa Rita administration finally got disgusted with my continual complaints and protests and shipped me back to the jail in Oakland, where I spent the rest of my time in solitary. By then I was used to the cold. Even now, I do not like any heat at all wherever I stay, no matter what the outside temperature. Even so, the way I was treated told me a lot about those who devised such punishment. I know them well.