Trenton State Prison is a nasty, stinking, medieval cubbyhole that was built in 1849 for noncitizens and mules, eight years before the Supreme Kangaroo Court under Chief Racist Taney declared the black man in America should not be considered a citizen of these United States.2 It was located right in the heart of the state’s Capitol District, in the county of Mercer, and on what is now the property of millionairess Mary G. Roebling. Its ugly gray walls were huge, high, and indestructible, though the black-slated rooftops of the buildings somehow managed to lift their mangy heads up over the towering barricades.
At the entrance gate I could sense the depravity, violence, and racial bigotry within. Everything about it was wrong: from the sissified cops looking up my ass for make-believe contraband to their fingering my swipe for more contraband, the whole place seemed plagued by faggotry and ravaged by deep pockets of corruption.
During the search, Little A’s gaze met mine, and I knew that we had finally reached the bottom of the barrel. After this blatant display of disrespect for our bodies and their privates, I felt there could be nothing else worse in the world, except maybe death.
I had heard many grim stories told about Trenton State Prison and its monstrous racism before, and I soon found out that none were wilder or worse than the truth. As soon as Little A and I had been processed through the receiving gate and were inside the prison proper, we were hit by an impalpable wall of unmitigated musk. The air was fouled by the rancid odor of stale feces and mildewed humans, and intensified by the rotten pungency of men sitting idle too long on the shelves, like fetid cans of black caviar. Sitting there doing nothing, killing time, wasting away the years, and growing old, rotten, and stale against life, against people.
We came in at a place called the Center, the focal point of the institution. It was a large and barren, many-times-painted area with five iron gates leading to the seven wings of the jail. All traffic had to pass through this rotunda, and, standing there on an honest-to-God star, flushed with the arrogance of his authority and directing the flow of incarcerated humanity like a traffic cop downtown, was a big, burly, blue-uniformed guard with a blackjack about the size of a small oak tree.
“Hold it up, over there!” he shouted, raising the club for us to stop. “Awright, Two Wing coming out! Move it out, Two Wing!”
Then—
“Goddammit! I said hold it up over there, Seven Wing! Can‘t you fuckin’ cons understand English? Youse too, Four Wing! Hold it up over there! Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” the man snorted derisively.
And finally—
“Awright, Seven Wing, move it out! Get your hands out of your pockets! Tuck those shirttails in! Stay in line! Move it out!” he ordered. Spinning around then, he shouted, “Hey, Six Wing! Hold it up over there, you fuckin’ guys! Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” he swore, as if he just couldn’t stand it anymore. This would go on day after day, year after year. And he loved every little bit of it.
Like every other jail in New Jersey, Trenton State Prison had its quarantine area, and that’s where we were headed—to One Wing. A dimly lit dungeon of about one hundred cells standing side by side on top of each other, it was a huge, run-down warehouse for storing humans away like Christmas parcels. My slot numbered 337 to the fourth power—a dingy little cubbyhole on the fourth floor with a bare iron slat welded to the wall for a bed. Lying in the corner was a small, once-white, cruddy porcelain sink that had died a miserable death of a fractured basin years before.
Goddamn! I thought to myself. There wasn’t even a mattress to cover the slat.
After a few minutes we were pulled back out of our cells to have our heads shaved clean and our bodies measured for stripes (though we only had to wear stripes on our pants).
Then we had to march to another part of the jail, where we filled our homemade mattress covers with some moldy straw that we found in a rat-infested bin. We worked up a sweat shooing away the mice and stomping the straw and bugs into tiny bits and pieces until they were flat enough to lie on. These would be our mattresses.
Coming back through the narrow hallways shouldering these ungodly burdens of itchy straw, we cussed and fought tooth ‘n’ nail with the lice-infested bundles of shit every step of the way. We had to climb sideways up the three flights of stairs of our tier and beat the lumpish bedding through the cramped doorways of our cells. Man, shit! I was tired, and smelling like an angry bull. I needed a shower—bad! Instead, I was given a bucket of scalding hot water, then locked into my cell. Thus began my initiation into the weird ritual of “bird bathing.”
“Dip and dunk,” they called it. “Dip your towel, and with your soap you dunk, you scrub your tail in your own nasty funk.”
There were no showers in the buildings. They were all outside, in an old, dilapidated shack that once had been used as a barn and was now converted into a fifty-stall showering shed. It was a faggot’s heaven, a jailhouse punk’s haven, a rape artist’s happy hunting grounds—and a monument to the living hell the young kids in the joint had to suffer. Everyday, sometimes two or three times a day, some poor unsuspecting fool would get ripped off in the dense clouds of concealing steam. He would be stabbed in his back, then humped in his backside while the shower cop had his butt pressed against the wall and his senses shut off from the anguished cries. He was content with just protecting his own nasty ass.
My fifteen days in quarantine passed rather quickly. I was transferred from One Wing to Seven-Right, a predominantly black ghetto of the jail for hard-to-handle prisoners—and faggots—which had been the bloody arena of a riot in 1953. The Ku Klux Klan-minded guards, armed with machine guns, had stormed the tiers and killed everything in sight. The deep, mind-bending scars from the bullet holes were still visible in the repainted walls, the high ceilings, and even in the dented steel of the cages themselves. They still voiced their outrage at the holocaust that had swept through there like a mad broom, swallowing up lives like a greedy vacuum cleaner.
The wing had ten tiers, five floors on each side, and housed three hundred fifty men, thirty-five cells on each shelf, so to speak. It was operated by a noisy locking system that could open one cell at a time, or all of them together. It was never quiet in this building during the day. The heavy steel doors created enough racket to keep the living dead on the sharp edge of insanity.
Even so, I felt that I was lucky: I had a window in front of my cell, and that helped a lot. When the old man living next door to me happened to take a shit during the day, or maybe farted in his sleep at night, the window pulled the odor out into the streets and didn’t push it down into my lungs. It was good for something else, too. From it I watched children go to school every day, saw them grow up from gangling, knock-kneed youngsters to switching, sophisticated young women and dapper young men. Their growing process fascinated me no end.
But life soon became a dreary ritual. Time inside dragged, though the months flew past my window at an alarming rate. Each morning, at six o’clock sharp, a nerve-shattering bell would blow me out of my bed, demanding I wash, shave, and clean up my cell. Two more bells would dispatch me off to eat. ( Garbage! Shit! ) Thirty-five minutes later—that’s all I had—and another bell would order me to work, to make license plates or sew clothes, mop floors, or just plain lie idle in my cell for twenty-two hours a day.
Eight o’clock at night, after I had worked like a dog all day, the “quiet” bell would ring—no talking was allowed—and an hour or so later three more bells cut the lights off and tucked us into bed. Bells, bells, and more goddamn bells, that’s all we heard all day long—bells, bells, them goddamn bells!
I took to constant brooding, which in jail is a dangerous thing. Deep brooding usually leads to loud grumbling, which then becomes plans of mayhem, which then, in anybody’s book, becomes a bloody riot.
My hatred for the place and its people grew with each passing day. Discriminate hostility, always directed against the black population, masquerading around in a cloak of discretion, was the means by which racism was injected into prison life. The white inmates had the best of everything.
At the time I entered the penitentiary, the black inmates were locked into the violent throes of racial strife. They were demanding more black guards. The inmate population was eighty percent black, five percent Hispanic, and fifteen percent white, but only three black guards worked in the system. Meanwhile, a multitude of young white boys, who had very little schooling and whose only qualification was being cousin to somebody’s uncle who held a high position in the bureaucracy of the administration, came and went through the prison employment system daily. “On-the-job training,” they called it. Working piecemeal with their daddies, they dredged up the experience, the expertise for subduing some husky nigger with a stick to strap him into the electric chair.
The penitentiary was geared to making the black inmates rise to the heights of their own incompetencies—even in the protection of themselves. Once I heard somebody—Hasson, I think it was—say that a society that condones the murder of black Americans just because they are men enough to stand up and voice their opinions against a system that does not necessarily benefit them, is not a society at all but a penitentiary with a flag.
A black inmate named Jonesy was locked in the third cell down from my own. A big, bald-headed nigger whose nature was good, but whose expression was habitually wrapped up in the gloom of an embittered man’s thoughts, he was set up one morning by the guards and stabbed to death by a bunch of Nazi crackers just because the prison administration was scared to death of him. Forty times the man was stabbed, and nobody was ever prosecuted for the crime. But you let a black man pull a stunt like that, and if they didn’t kill him right then, they’d take his dumb ass out to court and add fifty more years to his time. White inmates didn’t get an extra day for daily murder.
Such was the nature of Trenton State Prison. It even surrounded its fags with this protective cloak. One day, while up in the movies, when everything was quiet and still, a young black jitterbug called Mother Herb started whupping on his faggot’s ass—which was white. That afternoon, Moko Reilly—a good-doing dude who was dedicated to the awesome proposition of peace and was studying law to lift the burden of sixty-five years off his back—went to Mother Herb and told him about the rumor going around that if he (Mother Herb) went out to the yard that afternoon, the white boys would kill him for what he had done to his faggot that morning.
But Mother Herb didn’t believe Moko, which only tended to prove his suicidal inclinations, since everybody knew that Moko Reilly didn’t play. So Mother Herb went out in the yard anyway. He died on his way back in, lying on a stretcher with his guts hanging out of his ripped-open stomach.
Jail made these men exactly what they were: regimented killing machines, wicked and deadly and utterly without mercy. They were hard men who asked for no breaks and gave none in return. I had to become that way too, to get my air space.
But inside me I felt a need to get something better for myself than this continual violence. I knew I would never leave this place of tortured souls alive unless I could change my attitude, reorder my priorities, and rechannel all aimlessly spent energy. I concluded that the only thing I really knew how to do was to fight. I was geared for that. Even born to it, I sometimes felt. So I decided to give up all of the worthless luxuries that most of the inmates craved —the cunt books, the fags, the cigarettes, the movies—and I made up my mind to stop talking again.
In jail, boredom was an inescapable fact of daily life—and an inmate’s worst enemy. It was with boxing that I began to fight this boredom, this killer adversary, and then everything fell into place like the picked tumblers of an opened safe. I lived only from day to day, not even thinking about tomorrow, watching the lonely sunsets flame and die outside my window. I watched the dawns come, saw the morning stir with its. first light, while the vicious community inside the walls remained a stifling jungle of hate.
In the yard, in the mess hall, everywhere I went, I demanded to be left alone. I let my eyes do my talking: I made them glitter like hot coals. They foreclosed on any communication and made my message perfectly clear in no uncertain terms: “Leave me alone, motherfucker, or I’ll kill you, dead!”
I even quit my job in the slave quarters of the tailor shop, and refused to work anywhere else in the penitentiary. At eleven cents a day they could stick their job up their motherfucking ass! I had no time for that bullshit. I was trying to get myself together for the streets. My training program began at four o’clock every morning when the church bells across the street would chime. While everybody else was sleeping and the scurrying rats were still sneaking in and out of the roach-infested cells to steal the inmates’ bread, I would get down on the floor and knock out five thousand push-ups—in sets of a hundred each—before the wake-up bells rang. And that only started my day.
Once back from the mess hall I would sit down at my desk and read Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, and Machiavelli until the slop in my stomach had digested enough not to cramp me up with a death-dealing garbage attack. Then I would put my books away and furiously shadowbox for a solid hour. I worked in front of my mirror, steaming, sweat popping off my bald head like a wet dog shaking its fur. I followed this with sit-ups, deep knee-bends, and more push-ups. By the time I finished, the working men would be straggling in for lunch, so I’d lay down and wait until the yard was called out after chow, then go outside to finish it up.
The prison’s yard was a little fortress in itself, barren-looking, ominous, a death trap if anything untoward should happen in it. The Big Dusty, we called it. An empty space of hard-packed dirt that was washed down in oil each day to keep the soil from blowing away, it was a steel-enforced, four-walled enclosure that measured an even furlong when you walked the edges, and was covered by four disheartening gun towers. Walk eight times around and you had a solid mile of shotguns loaded down with double-ought bucks, cocked and waiting, ready to blow your brains out at the slightest provocation.
In the summertime no air stirred in the quadrangle. It was hot, stifling hot, and tempers flared quickly. On the east wall five handball courts were painted; the dominoes and the checkerboards were on the north side. Weight lifters took the western corner, prize fighters the southern, and right smack-dab in the middle of it all was the intramural softball field, where league games were played daily.
The whole stupid thing was a screaming mass of calculated confusion. Even Barnum and Bailey’s three-ring circus was better organized than the activities in the yard, although they certainly didn’t have the assortment of talent displayed here. Like the jailhouse pimps, for instance. They leaned against the wall with their silk handkerchiefs out and ready to swoop down on that speck of dust that had the colossal gall to land on their fifty-dollar Stacy Adams, or their thirty-dollar Dino shirts—which were pressed down sharp as a mosquito’s peter in starched khaki trousers that had a black stripe down each side.
The pimps got in everybody’s way. They stood on the wall surrounded by giggling stables of faggots who clustered all over them and picked their faces and ran their slippery fingers through conk-olene hairdos, ohhhing and ahhhing about how sharp they got their daddies looking today, kissing on them, playing with their swipes, promising them to trick harder the next day so they could buy Daddy another pair of new shoes the next week.
Moving down the wall a little farther you had the “big-time : spenders,” the penny-ante racketeers. They were the grocery conglomerates of the jail, the cigarette loan-sharkers who talked millions, smoked Bull Durham, and rhapsodized out of the sides of their mouths about the block-long Cadillacs, the five-hundred-dollar suits, and the high-priced call girls that they still had hustling for them out on the streets. With the very next breath, of course, they’d ask you to save them a drag on your cigarette butt. It was a pathetic sight, because everybody out there was for real, serious to the point of death. There was no playing in this penitentiary.
Prison was big business to these guys. On the streets they were nothing. But here, cluttered among the real losers, their glib abilities to phantasmagorize their crimes made them kings. They might have been busted for snatching a pocketbook, the same way I was, but by the time they got finished telling the story, the poor woman had become a bank carrier, her purse the bank’s total receipts, and her welfare check was a hundred thousand grand.
Most of these guys lived in a dream world. They simply refused to accept the bitter truth of only being sad and weakly human. Their greed, their ambitions, or their need for some quick money always led them astray. But they were really harmless people—men who had been forced to live too long under a low profile and then suddenly found themselves institutionalized. Physically alert, but mentally dead, they were more comfortable in jail than anywhere else.
But now we come to the big honchos in the joint—the killers, the gamblers, the organizers of the prison sports, the fight managers, the boxing promoters—all the people who really controlled the big money. These were usually quiet types—and they took care of their business on the sly. They bought and sold prison officials, guards, ballplayers, prize fighters, and anything else they wanted like it was going out of style. To them everybody had a price.
They held boxing matches every day for big, big money. Murderous, blood-gushing brawls, they made the TV fights look like kindergarten romps. But the champs of each division had to defend their titles only once a week, on the weekends, when all the inmates could get out into the yard. This was the great extravaganza of the week. A lot of money, cigarettes, and food was won and lost by the mere flick of a gloved hand. So were many lives.
For my first couple of months behind these turbulent walls, I would begin to jog as soon as I was searched and could step out into the yard. Then I would run like a maniac from yard-out until they called yard-back-in, a period of about two and a half hours. I covered more than sixteen miles, running and exercising, jumping rope and shadowboxing, but I didn’t want to put the gloves on yet. I didn’t think I was ready.
As good as I was, I knew I wasn’t ready yet. They had some mean mister humdingers out there in those boxing gloves, some real bad motorscooters! I mean, the kind that could make you dance bowlegged, put you to sleep, make you dream, and then wake you back up before you knew you was even hit. Jimmy Isler! Booker Washington! Donald Bird! Fitzgerald! Teddy Roberts! Shannon! Northfleet! Chuck Carter! Bo Jingles! All of them, some bad motherfuckers! And yet, they weren’t what I was worried about.
It was the sorry fact that I was born a natural light-middleweight —a hundred and fifty pounds, even if I stuffed myself. Too heavy to be a welterweight, too light to be a middleweight, and too damn short to be anything else. But, proud fool that I am, my aspirations scaled the heights of insanity and rested on the idea of becoming the “heavyweight” champ of this jungle. I wasn’t satisfied with just one measly little boxing title. (I never could do anything in moderation.) I was too greedy for that. I wanted them all! And I was working hard to achieve that goal.
When the yard period was over, still running, I would head straight for the shower shed and grab a quick shower, wash my clothes, and go back to my cell. I’d lay down for a few minutes, until the working men dragged in at four, and then go back out in the yard to train some more (in the summer we had two yard periods), beating the heavy bag this time, the speed bag, and heaving the medicine ball. I always watched the other fighters work, familiarizing myself with their styles and mistakes, cataloging their habits and inclinations. It was like being in the Army all over again, only this atmosphere was a thousand times more intense. Stretchers were always on the move out here, scooping up the battered fighters and rushing them, quivering and unconscious, to the infirmary, where they would wake up and come right back out for some more.
At the end of the long hard day, when everything had quieted down and cooled off after chow, I would climb right back into my books. Studying long and hard, I learned new things about myself, and about, other people. I was determined to grow rather than become stagnated and conform to the degraded ways that were this penitentiary’s wont.
Sometimes I would just talk with Mr. Summers, my next-door neighbor. He was an easygoing, soft-spoken old man who’d been locked up in this hellhole for twenty years or more. For murder, they said. He had caught his wife in bed with a white man—the sheriff—and had killed them both. But he went to trial only for wiping out the cracker. They didn’t even try to prosecute him for his wife.
Mr. Summers was a good old man, a God-fearing Christian who really and truly didn’t belong in jail, but every time he went up to see the parole board the stinking bastards would hit him with two more years, and he would cry like a baby. He was a kind, experience-smart, humble old man, and I took to him like he was my father.
He used to talk about how the personality of the prison had changed since teenagers started coming into the jail, and how he found it difficult to establish any meaningful relationships with them. They had no respect for their elders, he would say. These were new-fangled people to him. Much different from the children he had left in South Jersey in 1936, and he couldn’t understand this new breed of viciousness. His closest friends were all dead, so he didn’t try to cultivate any new ones. His married daughter was his only link to the past, and he hadn’t seen her in twenty years. But she was still his hope, his salvation, his only real reason for living. He said he prayed to God every night that one day she would come and whisk him away from Trenton before he died. I think we all feared dying in jail.
Most of my conversations with Mr. Summers would be ended rather abruptly by the ringing of the “quiet” bell in the wing. Packing up my books, I would then get into the remaining exercises of my day: more push-ups, sit-ups, and more-shadowboxing. Armed with the other fighters’ mistakes of the day, the ones I had seen in the afternoon, I would work to cash in on their errors.
Thus, a normal day in prison for me meant working myself down into an exhausted stupor to drive the ever-haunting whammies away from my destiny. I stayed away from the jailhouse politics, and left the flat-backing faggots strictly to their swipe-swapping pimps. I dreamed sweet dreams of my future in prize fighting, of big bucks and good times, instead of always thinking about my swipe, which should have been reason enough to send me home right then.
Little A, who shouldn’t have ever gone in in the first place, got out on parole two years before I did.
Two of the hardest things about being in jail are, first, that you can never make a decision for yourself—every one, from the time to eat or sleep, walk, talk or even breathe, is already made up for you; the only thing that is yours to decide, which requires no deep concentration, is whether or not to stand up or sit down in your cell.
The other thing is the unreasonable absence of women. We inmates sit in prison and listen to the President of these United States fly all over the world in search of a mate for a jive-ass gorilla in some zoo, but for us, the people in his prisons, he doesn’t do a goddamn thing! Our position as humans is relegated to one inferior to that of the wildest beast.
I had never been able to understand what motivated this kind of thinking. But I soon found out. Great Googamoogoa, did I find out! Almost as soon as I walked through the doors of Trenton State Prison. Here were two hard-looking, dewy-eyed sissies straining against each other, kissing passionately in a hidden nook of the jail; a bald-headed, muscular black man withdrawing his oversized swipe from the flushed anus of a skinny, freckled-back white boy in a shower stall; two convicts sitting together in the movies, one of them with his hand in the cut-out pockets of the other one’s pants, jerking him off; a black hardcore tough guy titillating the nasty ass of a Confederate flag-tattooed cracker in the Catholic chaplain’s office with his nasty tongue; a jailhouse pimp sucking his fag’s dick in the officers’ locker room during mess.... Did I find out?
Jesus fucking Christ!
Faggots and fuck-boys were plentiful in this joint. They proliferated here unchecked. In fact, they owned the goddamn place. This was the prison’s little secret of control—the faggot weaponry! These vicious, gutter-sniping, he-shes were ten thousand times more deadly to the men in the jail than sickle cell anemia was to the entire black population on the streets.
They prowled the jail unmolested, searching for a victim. They picked out the weak and the unstable—the ones who were always looking to get their hips out of hock. Gradually, through a series of flip-flopping sex orgies, the fags would strip the masculinity from their victims and turn them into whores. To sisters! Swap-out partners, I mean. Just a few more vicious dick-chewing freaks to help further terrorize the jail.
Swishing, their tight, saucy, hip-hugging asses all over the penitentiary, they strutted around looking like Zsa Zsa Gabor in processed hairdos, wearing bright red lipstick and pink panties, dark eye shadow and padded brassieres. The men in the jail, meanwhile, knew they had better not be caught dead going too long without shaving, much less wearing a mustache. You had to be just plain crazy to even think about a beard. Any prisoner who was caught walking the jail with hair growing on his face, the administration surmised, was either a goddamn fool or trying to assert his manhood. So they would jump on that poor sucker and beat his brains out, while the good-doing “mommas” would lay back and dig it all, laughing, still swishing their nasty asses and glorifying in the fact that they were queens of a big-dick kingdom that had no kings!
If there was a fight going on someplace, all you had to do was just look for the nearest fag to be behind it all; if somebody gambled and won a lot of cigarettes, go down to the faggot’s tier and you’d find the winner and his cigarette under the bed buying some head, or getting fucked; if somebody got killed in the jail, either a fag did it, or another inmate “shanked” a fag’s husband to have the fag for himself. If the administration couldn’t control an inmate in the joint, they’d give him a fuck-boy to calm him down, and use him as a wedge; it was a warning to him to be cool, to slow down before they snatched his fag away, or killed him.
The powers that were didn’t care if they promoted more crime by committing crimes themselves, instituting uncivilized behavior with uncivilized actions—the very same traits in us the public was paying them to rehabilitate. The real tragedy of it was that some of these guys could have been saved. With just a little bit of help they could have been restored to society as valuable citizens at little or no expense. But the officials didn’t care if they used impatience to curb our impatience, or overbearing force to suppress our wills, or abuse and degradation to eliminate our insubordination, and this browbeating humiliation affected me strongly. I could almost understand why men leaving this penitentiary went out on the streets and at the first sign of danger, went berserk. At the first sign of hostility from the law, they became savage animals—men to be hunted down and ruthlessly destroyed.
They’d been locked away in this torture chamber for too long, living under the constant threat of death, and waking up in the middle of the night to the excruciating cries of some poor devil getting his brains knocked out. They knew that it could very well be themselves next, and they just couldn’t take any more of it. All the days, weeks, months, and years of being enslaved under this nigger-hating Nazi mentality and painful passivity would cut loose in their minds, and they just naturally went for broke.
And I could dig it! Never before in my life had I been so sure what my reaction would be to anything violent that jumped off, such as a riot, or a fight, or some kind of altercation with the cops. I thought a lot about it, even dreamed about it sometimes, and I came to the conclusion that I would probably be killed—shot down like a dog mad with rabies. Because I would fight! I would have to.
Quiet rage became my constant companion. It formed, crystal-like, against a solid backdrop of persistent helplessness, terror, and humiliation. It was mind-bending! But one day, out in the yard, it almost got away from me. I suddenly found myself caught up in the tight clutches of this feeling, experiencing a savage exhilaration that knew no bounds.
I was standing by the boxing ring, and saw a young jitterbug whup on my next-door neighbor, Mr. Summers. He was tarpapering the old man playfully and then viciously lashing out with sharp combinations to his head and body, taking pure advantage of his age.
Methodically slamming lefts and rights into Mr. Summers’ stomach, the big nigger hurt him deeply, and laughed about it. The old man struggled vainly to fight back, swinging wildly but always missing, tripping over his own graceless feet. He scampered around the ring in an awkward, clumsy shuffle, trying to duck the stinging blows. He threw a frightened glance around at the crowd watching the slaughter, swallowed visibly, and then started backing away. His pain-distorted face was bathed in a slick sheen of cold sweat.
Mr. Summers was built small, a bantam-sized old man in his late fifties or early sixties. He was mostly skin and bone, and his pants hung down off his butt like a huge cape. The only thing that age hadn’t caved in yet was his chest. Gray-haired and lean, he was brown-skinned and proud. He looked like a skinny “Uncle Ben” on a box of rice. But his dark eyes were still intelligently alive and flinty, still showing plenty of fire and glitter, though he mostly kept his feelings to himself.
He loved prize fighting dearly, having been a professional once himself, but his twenty years in the joint had stolen his dignity and bankrupted his spirits. It had preserved his health, his strong white teeth, and most of his kinky gray hair, but not his will.
“Whoooa! Hold on there, Mr. Summers!” I called, burrowing my way through the crowd and stepping in between the two men. My vision was blurred with both anger and sorrow. “Why don’t you take these gloves off, ole buddy-buddy,” I said softly, “before this nigger beats your brains out.” Mr. Summers was standing there holding on to me for dear life, his face slack from exhaustion.
“Why don’t you mind your own goddamn business!” the big jitterbug barked at me with the belligerence of a conqueror.
“Why don’t you kiss my motherfucking ass!” I shot right back at him, suddenly gripped in a fit of rage. “If you want to box somebody, nigger, I’ll box you! Or fight you! Or do anything else you wanna do, you punk motherfucker!” I said, and snatched the gloves from Mr. Summers.
The whole yard gathered around now.
“Bo Jingles” was the nigger’s name. An old archenemy from Jamesburg, now he was the heavyweight champ of this joint. A tough guy, a loud-mouthed touch-off, utterly without scruples, vicious and petty, he was the nasty afterbirth of all the state institutions: a liar, a thief, a jailhouse drug addict; he was the ringleader of all the jitterbugs in the jail. Shorter than me by an inch or more, he had an ugly razor scar stitched all the way around his throat to his ear on the opposite side. Fat, black, and bald-headed, he talked like a little bitch—high and whining-like, with glowering eyes that narrowed down into slits. He gloried in just the thought of a fight. He was big-boned, fast, and full of raw power. But he was also full of shit.
We squared off, and I nailed him with a leaping left hook.
I mean, I thought I did. But he was quicker than a cat on his feet, and I missed. His hands were quicker yet, and he nailed me with a left hook of his own. The numbing impact ricocheted off my chin and swept my legs right out from under me. I thought that somebody had sneaked up from behind me and tried to tear my head clean off. There had been no start to the punch that I could see—it just blurred out and hit me like a sledgehammer, and dropped me to my knees.
I stared down at the ground in a kind of awed wonder: the first punch of the fight, and I’m down on my knees. Goddamn! I pulled myself up out of the dirt and fell into my crouch, hands high and close together, and popped Bo Jingles in the mouth with a jab, then ducked as a whispering left hook zoomed over my head like a guided missile, unerringly controlled and right on target.
But I had his rhythm now, and he could take that left hook and stick it up his ass. I popped him again, and popped him twice more. When he moved that hooking arm I slammed across a straight right hand over the top of it and stopped him in his tracks. He blinked, grunted deeply, then shook his head like a stunned bull in a slaughterhouse when the hammer has only wounded its victim.
Bo Jingles even snorted like a bull. He straightened back up and shuffled flatfootedly forward. He faked a shot with his shiny head, then feinted a right hand, and fired off another sizzling left hook that burned me high on top of the head. But I came right back with a two-fist combination of my own, nailing him solidly in the ribs and his fat gut. It was unexpected; the air whooshed out of him in a loud rush. He bent over double and fell to his knees, then over on his side, clutching his stomach and gasping for breath.
I stood over him as he laid there moaning, and something invisible grabbed me, something from way down deep inside. Quiet fury stung my eyes. Numbly I realized that I wanted to beat this big nigger to death—not only for what he had done to Mr. Summers, but for what this ungodly penitentiary was doing to us all. It lent me the strength to help Bo Jingles up on his feet, and knock him right back down again.
The crowd was stunned by this unsportsmanlike display.
When Bo Jingles got back up once more, he was taking no chances. He let go with a desperate right hand, but I flicked it aside like a fly-swatter swatting a fly, and drove both my hands to his head. Then I rolled at the hips and slammed two more into his kidneys. He screamed, high-pitched, just like a little girl, doubled over and stumbled away, but I was right on top of him again, pounding away. I fought with arrogance now, with a brutal and ferocious desire to maim. At that particular time, the pleasure was not totally in the fighting. The real thrill could come only after had completely annihilated this overgrown jitterbug.
I stalked him like he was a piece of raw meat and 1 a hungry animal, sending him dazed and reeling from right hands into vicious left hooks, then switching up again and slamming home another shot to his groin. He couldn’t take that. He grunted heavily, and stood straight up, splay-footed. Then, in coldly calculated measures, I drove two more thundering right hands solidly home into his unprotected ribs. Next, I hooked one into his stomach, and poleaxed him in the head. He hit the ground as if struck dead by lightning, and sprawled out cold in the dirt.
“Stretcher up!” somebody called. “The Rube done got Bo Jingles!”
And that was only the beginning.
Looking at the faces of the unsavory crew around me, I saw awe, incredulity, and fear, but no hostility. I saw something else, too: tears of shame trickling down Mr. Summers’ face. The old man had really been deeply, hurt—you could see it in his skin. It was ashen, and beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. I could read the shame in him like it was large-type print written all over his face, and humiliation fit this proud old man about as well as a halo would fit the devil.
As I took my gloves off and walked over to where he was standing, his lips trembled weakly and his dark eyes looked tortured. He seemed close to revealing something terribly important. A shy, hesitant, embarrassed kind of smile crossed his face.
“You—you know what, Rube?” he gulped, his voice cracking. “I’ve just found out that I’m a tired old man.” He snorted in disgust. “Been here in this rotten old penitentiary for so doggone long, doing nothing, that I never even thought about it before. It took what just happened for me to really find out. I—really—found—out—” We walked back to the wing together, and he rambled on like that all the way. I could find nothing at all to say to him.
Later on that night, as I lay in my cell thinking about the day gone by, I promised myself never to underestimate another man again. I had learned something else of importance too—that my aggressive style of fighting would mean coming in off the streets early, working hard, and planning well. It would be my own brute strength, not my boxing ability that would keep me—
“Hey, Rube, you busy over there?” It was Mr. Summers knocking on the steel wall separating our cells. That devilish old “quiet” bell hadn’t rung yet, so I rolled off my bunk and stood up by the cell door.
“No, I ain’t busy, Mr. Summers. What can I do for you?”
“Put your hand outside the door,” he said. “I wanna show you something.”
I squeezed my arm out through the bars and stretched it over to his cell. He gave me a paper bag and I pulled it back in. When I opened it up, I saw that it contained his whole month’s pay from working in the tag shop making license plates: four packs of cigarettes, two bars of Lifebuoy soap, a packet of Gillette razor blades, and three candy bars—Fifth Avenues. His whole month’s pay; his appreciation; the sweat off his brow.
“I can’t take these things, Mr. Summers,” I told him. I handed them back and tried to think up a good excuse why. I knew the hardships they represented. “Whatcha trying to do—start me to smoking?” I laughed, trying to make a joke out of the whole thing. (But accepting stuff from people in this jail was serious business.)
“I know you don’t smoke, nigger!” Mr. Summers shot back briskly, ignoring my attempt to be funny. He was stone serious. “But I want you to have ‘em anyway,” he said. “Just keep ’em over there until I ask you for ‘em. I don’t want none of these thieving niggers breaking into my locker and stealing ’em on me.”
I was feeling kind of peculiar about the old man now, more embarrassed by this overreaction of his than from what had actually happened out in the yard that afternoon. So I didn’t say anything more to him, I just placed his valuables under lock ‘n’ key and let it go at that. But he wouldn’t. After a short pause, he knocked on my wall again.
“You know what I was just thinking about over here, Rube?” he asked. I got up from my bed and stood by the door again.
“No,” I answered. “What?”
“I was just thinking about myself over here, and how I used to be able to fight just like you once upon a time. Sho ’nuff,” he said. “I did! But now I wake up this morning and find an old man in place of my old self, and I can’t even hold my hands up anymore. I’m an old, tired, useless bum just feeding his face and getting in everybody’s way.”
“Shit!” I snorted. “You ain’t old. That’s just in your mind because of what happened today.” But I knew I was lying, and so did he. He continued to reminisce right over my words.
“I can recollect the time, Rube,” he said, “when I could have spanked that young rascal’s hindparts and nine or ten more of his jitterbugs all put together. I coulda done that even if I was drunk off moonshine, on crutches and cross-eyed, blind or crippled or crazy! But now I can’t even whup one of ’em,” he said sadly. “Lord! Lord! Lord!”
There was a long pause, and then he continued as if he hadn’t stopped at all. “I remember when I was down home,” he said. “I useta beat the sun up out of bed every morning, and be halfway finished with my chores even before that doggone rooster would get his lazy butt up outa bed. to crow. I would work all day and I never even thought about getting tired!” His voice almost broke into a sob.
“But now I gotta sleep all night and half the next day, just to get ready for tomorrow! Nawwww, Rube,” he sighed, really sounding tired now, “there’s no further use in me b-s’ing myself any longer. Today showed me up for exactly what I am—a useta-could-do-it, done-done-it, but cain’t-do-it-no-more! I’m just a tired old man.”
I could have cried. This fierce old man was still independent and proud, respected everybody and hated no one, not even his keepers. But this stifling penitentiary couldn’t hold back the hands of time. He was an old, old man, and he had finally realized it.
At some point during that long, dark and lonely night, Mr. Summers’ weariness must have given into the lassitude that all inmates are prone to, that deep pit of depression, and he hung it up. They found him the next morning hanging from his cell door, his earphone wires—which every inmate bought to listen to the institutional radio—carefully wrapped around his broken neck. His lips were puffy and swollen and curled up into a grotesque, enigmatic smile. He was a stomp-down trooper, even at the bitter end.
I looked at Mr. Summers lying there on that stretcher in disfigureinent and death, and a steady threat of nausea trembled in my stomach. My accomplishments of the day before receded. Even the joy of being alive had ebbed.
As they carried him out, surrounded by a crew of cackling and apathetic guards, right there, I knew, went one hell of an old man, one hell of a human being. But also, I thought very sadly, one hell of a tortured and frustrated soul. He had been betrayed by the vicious ugliness of the times, murdered by the strangling tentacles of this penitentiary’s deceptiveness.
Yesterday’s final insult had driven the spirit right out of his soul, bowing his proud shoulders with a weight that he could no longer bear. Like one who has diminished from a great reputation in the past and is suddenly cut down to a lesser degree of respect. Mr. Summers had always been undersized in life, and in death he appeared even smaller yet. But looking at him lying on that stretcher that morning, my heart swelled with pride, and moisture stung my eyes. His inner stature was more than enough to make up the difference for his physical size. He was a big, big, little giant of a black man!
Two miserable days later, while I was still smarting from the tragedy of Mr. Summers’ death, insult was added to injury when they brought in my childhood buddy and put him in the death house. It was Leroy “Lurkie” White of the old neighborhood Cherokees—the same treacherous little warlord who had helped me terrorize the city of Paterson when we were still hoodlum street kids.
Lurkie had been arrested and placed in the same cell with me and Little A in the Passaic County Jail four days before we had been sent to prison, and that’s when I learned his story. In the early 1950s Lurkie had been drafted into the Army, and volunteered for the paratroopers. He was seriously wounded in Korea, and, like so many other thousands of soldiers injured at that time, he was fed a steady diet of alkaloid morphine to numb his pain.
But when Lurkie was brought back to the States, he was discharged straightaway out of his hospital bed, without the Army’s even making a pretense of taking him off the drug. Back in civilian life, he soon found that he had come home not only with chunks of shrapnel still lodged in his body but with. a hitchhiking habit as well. Uncle Sam had hooked him on dope.
When Lurkie had been a civilian for only a few days, he became sick—deathly sick. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and pain racked his soul. Fever scorched his body and subjected it to ice-cold chills at the same time. Tears streaked down his face continuously, his nose wouldn’t stop running, he couldn’t control his bowels, and still he was ignorant of the hungry monkey who had thumbed a ride home with him and was now kicking his ass for food.
But the other drug addicts in the community knew. And with his money and their greedy connections, Lurkie was reduced to a pauper in a couple of weeks. Now he was hooked hopelessly on two kinds of drugs: the pain-killing morphine that his injuries craved, and a mind-bending heroin to feed his habit. It demanded more and more “scag,” and whupped on his ass if he happened to miss its feeding time. So he started throwing bricks at the penitentiary—stealing!
It happened one day when his “jones” was down, and he was sick and needed a fix. He and another drug addict in the same condition held up a grocery store in the neighborhood. They entered the place with a gun in their hands, subdued the owner, took his money, and then locked him in a closet and left. In trying to free himself, the proprietor suffered a heart attack, and in falling, he struck his head against the edge of the door and died from the concussion.
Lurkie and his partner were arrested and convicted of first-degree murder. His partner, Boobie, got life imprisonment—and at this writing has gone home; Lurkie was sentenced to die in the electric chair.
In my cell the night he arrived, I reflected on the profusion of gross injustice all around me. I was distressed by Lurkie’s situation, made all the more critical because the government did not have the patience to detoxify him while he was laid up in the hospital. It had me pacing the floor like a caged animal: three steps forward—that’s all I had—then around and three steps back. I experienced the same dreadful anxiety I knew Lurkie must be feeling in the death house.
I resented the treacherous hell that being black had created for all of us—all of us. I stalked that cage all night long, seething in a fit of bitter rage, trying to find some logical answer to it all that I could cling to.
“Why?” I asked myself. “Why is it always that this electric chair seems to be stealing my friends away?” I didn’t believe in God, but I had to have somebody to talk to.
But who?
Then it hit me like a straight right cross and a thundering left hook smashing into my solar plexus—the solution to all my problems—the electric chair! That was the enemy! That was the dirty bastard who was killing us all off, crackers notwithstanding. Why shouldn’t I go and have a talk with that chair, I mused. Maybe it would tell me something I didn’t know. After all, I thought, my future may very well depend upon its wisdom; survival was always at the forefront of my thoughts.
I wondered whom I should approach with this mad idea. Nobody was supposed to be allowed on death row but those condemned to die, but this rule wasn’t too strictly enforced at Trenton. Some guys were allowed to go in there all the time. So I decided to see a captain who was one of the few men in the prison system—with two other exceptions—who the inmates could go and talk to and be understood, without kissing somebody’s ass. These men had recognized the fact that I was trying to do something to help myself with boxing, and had gone out of their way many times to assist me all they could, and my request—to go visit the electric chair—was granted this time as well.
The death house was a small cement-block building situated within the prison’s walls, right outside the hospital—straight across from the iron door that led into the dusty yard, where all the inmates could see it. It was the administration’s little reminder to us that chained-lightning death was always present, always at their beck and call. The horrible thought of such a death could be sensed everywhere. Knees had a tendency to quake whenever they passed by that building.
When the captain unlocked the grille-gate door to the death house that morning, my knees were shaking something fierce, and I had to close my eyes when I stepped into the dimly lit corridor of death row. The darkness hurt. The bright sunshine from outside and the sixty-watt light bulbs in there seemed to have no relationship to each other. Strange. It was like stepping out of one weird world that promised you no tomorrow, smack-dab into another that guaranteed you none. The change was startling; the noise inside, deafening. I couldn’t even hear myself think.
The atmosphere was permeated with doom. It was everywhere —in the ceiling, on the floor. I could sense it, smell it, even almost touch it. Designed to hold only nineteen men, two tiers of the death house covered the whole right-hand side. The narrow passageway the captain and I were in ran straight as an arrow from the front door to the back door, a distance of about fifty feet. I started walking that storied “last mile” to the dark green door that opened onto the dreaded monster. I stopped sometimes, by some of the cells I passed on the way, and looked in at the men condemned to die.
There was Larry Hunt, Joe Grillo, Silvio DeVito, John Kolciek, Edgar Smith, Deathhouse Cleve, Lurkie White, and two others whom I didn’t know. Each man looked at me strangely as I passed. It was a sorry sight, I can tell you that, seeing young men caged up like animals to die.
“Whatcha doing down here, Rube?” Lurkie asked, flashing that brilliant smile. “We hear tell that you’re really killing ’em out there with the boxing gloves,” he said proudly. “You shoulda been doing that years ago. But whatcha doing down here?”
I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I just walked away.
The execution chamber was a windowless little room, painted green, that broadened out to twenty by thirty feet to the left-hand side of the door as you walked in. Three or four wooden benches were placed in the back and to the left for spectators to witness the killings. Straight in front of them stood a waist-high partition that acted as a barrier between them and the murder. Sitting directly behind that, but elevated ten or twelve inches off the floor on a platform, was the electric chair. It glared at me like a wordless indictment.
Dark and impressive, it was still adorned in all of its grisly splendor: from the waistband to the leg straps to the arm braces, and even to the metal headgear, waiting for another poor soul to burn. Deep and dark, it was polished like mahogany, though it was made of black oak. All it needed now was to be hooked up to the telephone pole outside, and it would be ready to go—ready to snuff out another indigent life.
I stood there by the door real quiet-like (the captain had unlocked it and walked away—I imagine because there was nothing in the room that I could damage; everything was bolted down to the floor), in deep reverence for the haunted feeling of the place, and sensed the presence of many lost souls still flitting restlessly about the room: Harry and Albert Wise, Alfred Stokes, Sconion-Eyed Jones, Chink. My heart throbbed with an acute fear of the unknown. That ungodly monster was only twenty-five feet away from me. Oh, how I hated the bastard! But step by trembling step I crept up closer to it, watching, fearful of it, making damn sure that it didn’t move. I thought I could hear a peculiar purr of anticipation emanating from it.
“Well, hello there, Rubin Carter,” it seemed to say. “So you’ve finally come to see me, huh?”
I spun around. My heart was pounding like a trip hammer.
“Oooooooh, come off it, man!” the chair said in my mind. “You know you don’t believe in ghosts. There’s nobody else in this room but us. So turn around and face me, tough guy. Turn around and meet your master, punk!”
I eased back around slowly, on the brink of bolting out of there, and stared at that black monster in defiance. This thing just couldn’t be! But then I saw it. A flaw in the chair, I suppose, some kind of defect in the grain of the wood that made a small pattern like a smile. This goddamn thing was laughing at me!
“Nowwww, that’s better,” I imagined I could hear it say. “I hate talking to people with their backs turned to me, don’t you? Why don’t you come over here and sit down, boy?” it seemed to be asking me. “You look kinda tired—like you been up all night. Come on. Have a seat—rest.”
“I’ve got to be losing my mind!” I exploded.
“Naw-naw, now don’t start that shit again!” its voice in my mind taunted. “All you tough guys come to see me sooner or later, and I’ve been waiting for you to come for a long time now, buddy! So come on. Sit down and take the load off your feet. I won’t burn you—yet! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha—”
This was insane! I thought, that’s it! I’m losing my mind! I’m going crazy! But I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
“Oooooooh, come on, now—Rube! I was looking for much better things coming from you. Don’t let me down now, man, and start getting scared like everybody else. Because we have something in common, you and me. People have been scared of us all our lives. So let’s not be afraid of each other. You know that you came here to talk with me about Lurkie’s plight. Admit it! Face up to the truth. Don’t start being a punk, now! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha—”
“Shut up, goddammit!” I kicked viciously at the wooden leg of the chair, then hawked a glob of spit on the seat like the foul scab that it was. But I only heard more laughter.
“See! See! That’s why I’m gonna get you, nigger!” it seemed to say. “Just like I got all the rest of your friends. Because you’ve got spirit, boy—hot spirit! Ha-ha-ha-ha. I get all the tough guys like you. Remember Sconion-Eyed Jones? And Chink? I got them, didn’t I? Tough guy, I betcha I get you, too!”
I couldn’t take it no more. The sweat was pouring off my face and soaking into my shirt, plastering it to my chest like a second skin. I despised that black monster with every beat of my heart, with every breath I drew, with every hateful thought of vengeance that I could possibly work up. I looked wildly around the room in search of a weapon to smash this thing—anything! I was going to crush this crazy maddening mother into harmless splinters, into toothpicks, if I could. Gold fury had swept my mind.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha—just look at yourself, boy!” I could imagine it crackle. “Now you’re trying to find something to destroy me with, to kill me, if you can! Ha-ha-ha-ha. But the State won’t let you hurt me, fool! I’m the salve that soothes their consciences. I get rid of all you bad niggers they’re too scared to get rid of themselves. Ha-ha-ha-ha—”
Low venomous growls started out from my throat. “So you’re gonna get me too, huh?” I screamed, furious at everything in the room being nailed down to the floor. So I took my Johnson out; and pissed all over that greasy monster.
“Here! You want me?” I said to it. “Take that! Now you got me! Here—take some more of me!” And I stood there pissing on that ungodly thing until my bladder was completely emptied.
“Ahhhhh, that’s what I like about you, boy—the fight!” the drenched chair seemed to sigh with glee. “First you spit on me, and then you piss on me, but when I get your tough ass strapped into my hot-seat, I’m gonna make you shit on me! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. They all do! All your friends did it! But they weren’t you; noooo, they came to me silently. But you will fight! Yeah, you’ll jump when I hit you, and squirm to the bitter end.”
Fuck that shit! I left the room—smoking!
But Lurkie was lucky. On the fifteenth day of December 1957, just a few short hours before he was scheduled to die, the governor gave him a reprieve which saved his life. And then came a new trial, and life imprisonment.
My time continued just barely moving along, with the days, weeks, months, and years becoming one great big tortured nightmare. The officials in the penitentiary regarded me as a somewhat unstable number who harbored the potential to do great violence if nudged in the wrong direction. They were right too! It was my only means to achieve a democratic solution to my problems. It was very simple: I would never start any trouble, but once it got started, you wouldn’t find me backing away from it. It was not a form of hostility by any means, but simply the reality of life and death in Trenton State Prison.
The constant threat of that death-dealing electric monster always grabbing at my life’s string, and the penitentiary’s ability to make wild animals out of human beings, helped to reinforce my flagging determination to carve something positive out of my life, to stay away from Paterson, and to fight—by boxing, preferably. So I began running through the prison’s prize fighters as if they were dry leaves and I was a forest fire burning down everything that got in my way.
Pretty soon the word spread through the grapevine that “Rubin Carter was ready to fight and settle down.” Offers started pouring in through the mails from Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, and from fight managers all over the world. They sent advance contracts, and some even volunteered money, while others dangled well-paying jobs in front of my nose that I could take when I was finally released. But none of them offered me a way out of jail.
I even got a proposal to be managed by a black guard who worked in the prison named Billy Legget. But if snot was dynamite, and getting me out of jail was the plunger, he couldn’t even blow his own nose! But his heart was in the right place—at that time, at least.
I answered each offer I got from elsewhere with the same letter: I told them that I would fight for anybody who could get me out of jail. I didn’t care who that person was or where that person was or even how that person was going to do it. If he could get only one day cut from my sentence, a few hours off my back, or even a mere smidgen of a free minute put back into my life, that would be good enough for me. That was all I could ask—just have enough faith in me to take that chance. But my luck was still running bad; nobody would do it.
So I continued my lonely dissection of prize fighting like a mad scientist studies a germ. To reach the pinnacle of prize fighting in the professional field became my ambition. I wanted to show everybody I could rise up from the depths of my humiliation on my own.
But even that wasn’t enough.
To really put the cap on top of the whole mammy-jammy thing, out of the grab bag of my future, out of the melting pot of the world, I ended up choosing Billy Legget to fight for after all, and Trenton, New Jersey to live in—as a constant reminder of what was taking place behind these walls. If things got too bad for me outside, I surmised, all I had to do was to walk down here and look at this nasty place. I’d know that as bad as I might be doing on the outside—maybe sleeping in hallways and sucking on raw eggs—I was still better off out there than anybody was in this prison.
On September 21, 1961—four years and two months after first walking in the door—I walked out of Trenton State Prison. I vowed upon everything holy never to come back alive.