IN THE CENTURY AND SOME SINCE a Spanish prison ship ran aground on the tip of the peninsula called Point San Quentin and a plank was run to shore to create San Quentin Prison, it has been the site of turbulent events. I cannot imagine how many murders have been committed there. In the age of the noose, it shared with Folsom in having a gallows, but with the gas chamber’s advent, San Quentin stood alone as California’s execution site. It has had violent breakouts (once the prisoners took the parole board; now the parole board meets outside the walls) and an escape or two when the authorities still don’t know how the con got out. (I do.) It once headquartered a counterfeiting ring. The opposite side of the coin was that it was the studio for a coast-to-coast radio program (long before television), called San Quentin on the Air, which aired over the NBC Blue Network during prime time on Sunday evening. Convict #4242 sang the theme song: “Time on My Hands.”
Nothing, however, was both so wild and so hilarious as the time of which I write. From the early forties through the fifties, San Quentin went from being one of America’s most notoriously brutal prisons to being a leader in progressive penology and rehabilitation. Like other prisons, it was not ready for what happened when the revolution came to America. As drugs flooded the cities, likewise they flooded San Quentin. The racial turmoil of the streets was magnified in San Quentin’s sardine can world. The polarization within can be illustrated by two events. In 1963 when John Kennedy was assassinated, it was lunchtime in the Big Yard. Everyone fell into a stunned silence. Eyes that hadn’t cried since early childhood filled with tears, including those of the toughest black convicts. Five years later, when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head, the response was different. Black convicts called out, “Right on!” “The chickens come home to roost,” said the Black Panther newspaper. “Ten for one!” was the cry of black nationalists: kill ten whites for one black and they would win the revolution. The fiery political rhetoric was taken literally by unsophisticated men within the cage. In Soledad a rifleman in a gun tower fired three shots into a melee where five blacks had jumped two whites in the Adjustment Center yard. He killed three black convicts, one of them the brother of Cornell Nolan, who celled beside me in the Folsom Adjustment Center. That night in another wing of Soledad, a young white guard was thrown off the third tier to the concrete below. He died. Three black convicts, George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and Clutchette, were locked up and charged with the crime. A Bay Area lawyer, Fay Stender, a socialist if not a full-blown Marxist, took George Jackson’s case. She edited his letters, got Jean Genet to write an introduction, and had them published as Soledad Brother. The book made the three cause célèbres. She got them a change of venue to San Francisco and arranged for a transfer to San Quentin, where they were locked in the Adjustment Center. Because of the attention on the case, Angela Davis came to the courtroom. An avowed Marxist, Miss Davis lived in a different universe from the bourgeoisie. She saw a handsome, powerful black man in chains—and they did weigh him with tonnage. She became instantly enamored with the image and the fantasy, for that was all it could be. Nothing could come of it absent a miracle, and a sort of miracle came to pass, for Cluchette and Drumgo were eventually acquitted. Alas, George Jackson was pure sociopath and had the sociopath’s characteristic lack of patience. Moreover, he had a worm’s-eye view of the world and somehow believed the revolution was imminent.
A black inmate who was scheduled to testify against them for a parole was being held in the San Quentin prison hospital in a locked room with a guard at the door. Albert Johnson and another black convict managed to sneak into the hospital and make their way to the second floor. They murdered the guard seated outside the door, never imagining that the guard wouldn’t have the room key. Poorly planned, one might say.
Another black inmate, Yogi Pinell, made a spear by rolling up pages of a magazine and fastening a stabbing device at the end. He managed to stab and kill a guard through the bars.
In the mess hall a black convict named Willy Christmas suddenly pulled a knife and went after the guard at the end of the steam table. It had one hilarious aspect. The guard ran through the kitchen screaming for help with Willy Christmas in hot pursuit, knife in hand.
For almost two decades no guard had been killed in a California prison. Then within a few months a dozen were killed in San Quentin, Soledad, and Folsom, all by blacks. Guards, who are invariably conservative and narrow-minded at the outset, heard the inflammatory rhetoric along with the murders and saw it as a direct personal threat. If they had been secret bigots, they now turned into outright racists.
For several years before the guards became combatants there had been a race war limited to Black Muslims and the self-proclaimed American Nazis. The Nazis had one copy of Mein Kampf that they passed around as if it were a Holy Bible. No one could really understand it. How could they? It borders on gibberish. Except for one or two, these erstwhile Nazis were skinny, pimple-faced kids who were afraid that someone would fuck them, but that fear didn’t mean that several together would hesitate in stabbing someone. Indeed, most wanted to stab someone and get a reputation. My concern was academic. As long as they limited the murders to each other or, as my friend Danny Trejo said, “power to the people as long as they don’t hurt my white old lady or dent my Cadillac,” everything went by me. It was George Jackson who expanded the violence to the noninvolved. It started when several Muslims ambushed Stan Owens, the lead Nazi, and used him for bayonet practice. Anywhere else, he would have died, but as I said, San Quentin’s doctors are the world’s best with knife wounds. He lived—with one less kidney and a severe limp. Within the week the Nazis retaliated three times. One died; one survived as a paraplegic. The blacks in lockup thought the doctors deliberately let the black man die.
That was too much for George Jackson. He was not a Black Muslim; he was a racial militant. One day he pulled together a crew of three or four and at the after-lunch lockup, led them along the second tier of the South Cell House. There they stabbed every white on the tier, all of whom wore white jumpsuits, for they had just gotten off the bus and had no idea they would be attacked for being white. One died, and one who vaulted the railing to avoid the stabbing blades broke both his ankles on the concrete below.
Within hours all the assailants were in the hole, but none was indicted in outside court. George Jackson was transferred to Tracy, where he ignited another racial conflict. He got himself locked up and transferred to Soledad.
In prison movies it is a convention bordering on cliché that some super-tough convict within runs the show. In the days of Bogart and Cagney that kingpin con was white; now he was usually black. That notion may have validity in a small, soft prison in someplace like Maine or Vermont. But if someone really hard-core turns up in one of those joints, he is transferred under the Interstate Prison Compact. No convict runs the show in Leavenworth, Marion, San Quentin, Folsom, Angola, Jeff City, Joliet, Huntsville or other hard-core penitentiaries. Nobody of any color is that tough. Indeed, convicts do have little homilies such as, “tough guys are in the grave,” or: “everybody bleeds, everybody dies, and anybody can kill you.” Over the years I saw bona fide tough guys come to San Quentin or Folsom (usually San Quentin, because they don’t last long enough to reach Folsom) and think they could take over on the muscle. One of them was a Bronx Puerto Rican who weighed about 120 pounds. He stabbed somebody within weeks of reaching the Guidance Center. He seriously believed that he was a killer and had everyone intimidated. He lasted eleven months. They found him in his cell with a piece of electrician’s wire wrapped around his neck and eleven puncture wounds just under his rib cage, most of them directly in the heart. Someone gave a very terse eulogy: “Another tough motherfucker bites the dust.”
With those parameters and constraints in mind, I think I had as much power and influence as any convict among the four thousand walking San Quentin’s yard. Over the years I had assumed a code and attitude that mixed John Wayne with Machiavelli. I respected every man, including the weak and despicable, for it is better to have anyone or anything as a friend, even a mangy dog, rather than as an enemy. My friends were the toughest white and Chicano convicts. I maintained their loyalty by being loyal and their respect by being smart in several areas. One friend, Denis Kanos, whom I left in Folsom when I was transferred, had been granted a hearing in the California Supreme Court on the petition I had filed. Not only had they granted the hearing; they reversed the conviction. Denis, who had been required to wait fifteen years before being even eligible for parole, went free.
Within a couple of months of his release he was, as always, a kingpin drug trafficker again in Southern California. Every month or so, he would send me an ounce of heroin. Other men who got narcotics had to sell enough to pay for it. I paid nothing and was generous with my friends. It is difficult to convey what heroin is really worth in prison. Cocaine had almost no value, for convicts wanted what soothed them, not what made them crazier. A gram of heroin, a tiny fraction of an ounce, would, for example, easily purchase murder from many takes. When someone wanted to know who had heroin, they asked, “Who’s God today?” Such was the power of the white serpent.
Although I played the game (it was the only game in town), I was really tired of it. I had prison under control, but I started thinking about when I would be free again. Without a miracle I would return to crime. It was the only way I knew to make money. God, if I could only sell a book. That, however, would be like hitting Lotto.
IT WAS 4:00 P.M. From my cell on the third tier of the yard side of the North Cell House I could look out the high window into the Big Yard. It was rapidly filling with convicts pouring in from their jobs. I had just finished typing a handwritten page of my sixth novel and was adding it to the extra-large loose-leaf binder. It was nearly finished. I had no idea if it was any good. It was, however, the first I’d written without self-consciously trying to follow a formula or a combination of formulas found in the “how to” books advertised in Writer’s Digest. That manuscript would become No Beast So Fierce, my first published novel and, I think, my best all the way around.
Soon the Big Yard would be filled, the whistles would blow, and four thousand cons would file into the cell houses for lockup and count. That meant it was time for me to go out. As usual, the yard looked cold. Rain was predicted. I pulled a gray sweatshirt with Neiman Marcus across the chest over my prison shirt, then added two jackets, a black melton on the inside, covered by denim on the outside. In San Quentin it was a good idea to always take a jacket to the yard.
The North Cell House was one of two honor blocks. A convict tier tender on each tier had a key to the cells. As I went down the tier, I told him to lock my cell behind me.
I descended the steel stairway. To reach the yard I had to pass the cell house office. Several guards were around the doorway, getting packets of mail each would count for the tier. As I started past, the sergeant stepped out. “Bunker.”
My first thought was a frisk, but the sergeant was extending an envelope. A letter. Who might write me? “Thanks.” I looked at the return address: “Alexander Aris, 26 Main Geranium, Elbow, Texas.” It was from Denis and the return address made me grin. It was a joke only a few would understand.
“I’m watching you, Bunker,” the sergeant said.
“Hey, you know I’m a model inmate.”
“It was your cell, wasn’t it?”
Oh no, I thought. “No, oh no,” I replied.
He nodded in a way that said yes, it was. A week earlier, several convicts had been fixing in my cell. I fixed first and left. Three were still in the cell cooking up, with a lookout (point man) standing on the tier. It was the middle of the tier and no guard could walk up unseen, but the outfit plugged up and the convicts in the cell were trying to unplug it, their heads huddled together. The lookout on the tier looked over his shoulder, got interested, and came inside. “Hey, ese. Put some water in the dropper and put a fire on the needle as you squeeze. It will swell up the metal and spit it out.”
Just then the sergeant, who was walking the tiers on a routine patrol, happened to come down the third tier. When he reached my cell, he looked in and saw four of San Quentin’s well-known sleazy convicts with their heads together like a football huddle. He walked in, put his head in the huddle, and simply took the outfit out of the guy’s hand. Chaos. The sergeant blocked the door, and he must have been panicked, too. He managed to get their ID cards and walked them down to the office to call for backup.
Pretty Henry found me in the Big Yard right after that and told me what had happened. I told him to go back to my cell, put the stool away, straighten it up, turn out the light, and close the door.
Sure enough, the sergeant went back to the tier. He wasn’t sure if it was the third or the fourth tier. He walked up and down, looking in the cells. He was unable to remember—at least not until late that night when I returned from work near midnight and he had to let me into my cell. Then a light went on. He told Lt. E. F. Ziemer, the third watch commander, but Ziemer told him that he didn’t have a case. The next night Ziemer told me to watch myself: “He’d like to bust you. It would be a feather in his cap, and if he gets you dirty, I can’t stop it.”
“I always watch myself, boss,” which wasn’t quite true. When the day shift left at 4:30, Lieutenant Ziemer was the watch commander. He was the highest-ranking officer in the prison. If the warden or associate warden or captain came inside, whoever was on the gate would phone ahead. I had the run of San Quentin during those hours.
Before stepping onto the yard, I opened the letter from Denis. It said: “Twelve-page habeas petition mailed Marin County Court this afternoon.” That translated: Twelve spoons, or twenty-four grams, of heroin had been sent to an address in Marin County. The address was that of Big Arm Barney’s mother. She would deliver it.
There was one problem. The post office had gone on strike yesterday.
I plunged into the wall of noise made by the accumulation of several thousand voices in the pit formed by the cell houses. They made a churning lake of blue denim and faces. Right here it was all black. I veered left, along the East Cell House wall, past the hot-water spigot that steamed near boiling. It was for making instant coffee. As always, a few convicts loitered about, clutching plastic Tupperware tumblers wrapped in tape, steam rising. It was cold on the yard. Somewhere I’d read, perhaps in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, that the San Quentin Big Yard was the only place in the world where the wind blew four ways at once. It did seem to swirl in every direction simultaneously.
I moved carefully through the mass of denim-wearing men, acknowledging those I knew with a nod or other gesture. Paranoia was too common in this milieu. Who could know what trivial slight might stir crazy thoughts? I was looking for Paul Allen and, to a lesser extent, the tough youngsters who were our partners and our backup. I found them gathered far down by the East Cell House wall. Paul, as usual, had the floor, while the younger men, T. D. Bingham, Wayne Odom, Blinky Williamson, Vito Rodriquez, Dicky Bird, and a couple more, listened with grins on their faces. Paul was telling a story: “. . . about fifteen of us in this jail yard when the guy got stabbed. It had one stall urinal off in the corner. They called everyone in for questioning, and the next day the newspaper said: ‘Nobody witnesses stabbing. Fifteen prisoners using one urinal during incident.’”
Paul noticed my arrival. “What’s up?”
I proffered the note from Denis. Paul read it, then grinned and pumped his elbows in a parody of the funky chicken. “Awright! We’re in power again. Did you tell Big Arm?”
“I just came out the door. Don’t get too happy. The post office is goin’ on strike tomorrow. Right?”
The glee was wiped from Paul’s face. “Awww . . . shit! I thought public employees can’t strike. It’s against the law, isn’t it?”
“All I know is what I read in the paper. The Chronicle says they’re gonna strike. We’ll get it as soon as the strike’s over.”
“That’s right,” Wayne said. “Barney’s ma ain’ gonna shoot it up.”
Suddenly a dozen police whistles bleated simultaneously. It was 4:30, time for the main count lockup. Guards moved along the domino tables, “Pick ’em up . . . pick ’em up.”
I moved against the tide toward the yard gate, where a few stragglers were still coming in. I was on an out count, along with a couple of other convicts, at the Yard Office, which faintly resembled a modernistic hot dog stand. It had two rooms and a rest room. Except for the rest room it had windows all the way around. The former Yard Office had a closed back room that had acquired some notoriety over the years. Nothing could happen unseen in the new Yard Office. It had a cyclone fence and two gates across the road in front, one for vehicles, one for pedestrians. Directly behind it was the modern Adjustment Center, its door ten feet from the back door to the Yard Office. The Yard Office was situated so that anyone coming or going from the yard to the Garden Chapel, Custody Office, dental department, or other departments had to pass in front of the Yard Office. The bridge to the Old Industrial Building, which had contained the gym when I arrived, was in front of the Yard Office. Now all the upper floors were empty. Because the building was made of brick with lots of old, dry wood floors and other inflammable materials a convict was assigned as a “fire watch.” This was known as a bonaroo job. Whoever had it had the run of the huge old building. It had many crevices and spaces where home brew could be made. One fire watch convict constructed a still for white lightning.
As I neared the Yard Office, I saw Bulldog hurrying across the Garden Beautiful, which was now nearly bare earth. He was about five-seven, with heart and a grin as big as anyone’s. He was a talented athlete and could have been a professional golfer. He had certainly carried my clumsy ass on the handball court more than once. I waited for him outside the door, then walked a few paces with him back toward the yard. “Where you been?” I asked.
“Visiting room.”
“I didn’t think you got any visitors.”
“Check this. C’mon.”
I looked back over my shoulder. I had a minute and could get back before the count started. I walked with him toward the yard.
“You’ll never guess who it was.” He paused, then said, “That broad lawyer. Fay Stender.”
“That radical, the one that’s representing Jackson?”
“Yeah. He’s out there now. He was waiting to see her after me, and he looked kinda hot ’cause he had to wait.”
“Shit, ’dog, he’s a celebrity. Damn near a star.” I wanted to add that all it took was an act of suicidal rebellion, but Bulldog cut me off.
“You won’t believe this, man, but you know what that broad wanted? . . . She wanted us, white dudes, to kill some bulls.”
“Say what? She said it right out like that?”
“Yeah . . . well . . . like she said, how come the blacks are in the revolution and we’re not helping ’em with the pig’s?”
“I’d have told her there’s no bull wantin’ to kill me. She’s nutty as a fruitcake. What’d you tell her?”
“I told her she was nutty as a fruitcake. . . . No, I really told her that I’d talk to the fellas and blah blah blah. . . . Can you imagine . . . ? I want outta here. Killin’ a bull ain’t gonna get me out . . . or put any money in my pocket. I ain’t no cop lover, but I’m no cop killer, either. If I get in a spot and kill a cop, it’s ’cause it was that or throwin’ down my gun for a life sentence. Damn, killin’ anybody is serious . . . double serious. Isn’t that the craziest shit you ever heard?”
“Damn near.” And it was. When we reached the yard gate, I had to turn back. As he hurried through, I could see that the yard was almost empty. The last of the lines were going into the East Cell House. Some vagrant sunlight got through the clouds and sparkled on the fifty-foot-high cell house windows. I remembered seeing this same view from the same perspective eighteen years earlier, and it now went through my mind that if I had known I would stand here eighteen years later, I would have killed myself. But I hadn’t anticipated it and couldn’t anticipate another eighteen years or anywhere near it. I turned and headed back toward the Yard Office.
Big was Yard Office officer during the day watch. He was just huge, neither particularly muscular, nor particularly fat. He weighed 310 pounds and was as playful as an eight-year-old. “What were you talking to Bulldog about?”
“ ‘Bulldog’! Who’s Bulldog?”
“I’ll bet you were makin’ some kind of drug deal. You think I don’t know?”
“No, Big, we were talkin’ about you mama.”
“Hey, hey, that’s enough of that.”
“Fuck you, Big.”
He jerked open the bottom desk drawer and pulled out a nightstick. “Lemme smack you on the kneecap with this,” he said. “I wanna see if it works.” He slammed it down on the desk. It was a wicked sound. Nightsticks hurt. I can still feel the one that crashed into my back when I was fourteen years old and trying to sneak into a movie theater with the men’s room down at the front.
“You sure do sound smart,” I said with mocking scorn. Big liked all this. “Fuck around and I’ll snitch you off . . . ’bout that medallion under your shirt.” Big wore a heavy swastika medallion on a chain around his neck. He had gotten it when a guard was murdered in the prison hospital. Although Big had previously held racist views, having once told me, “I can’t help it; I just think niggers on the whole are dumber than white people,” he had been evenhanded in how he treated convicts. Now, however, there had been several long, hot summers of burning American cities and the racial murders in San Quentin. (He’d seen a Portuguese convict named Rios fight a black one on one in the lower yard. A mob of blacks attacked and stomped and beat Rios’s head in with a baseball bat, until his skull was a flat as if an automobile had run over it.) Big’s subdued bigotry had become nearly obsessed racial hatred. He had a peace officer’s right to carry a pistol and repeatedly told me he was waiting for the right situation to kill a nigger and get away with it. I could understand how he felt, just as I could understand the streak of paranoid hate that ran through many blacks toward whites. I’d often thought that if I were black I would have made white society kill me a long time ago. I wasn’t black, and I didn’t intend to be a poster boy for black vengeance, either. I’d learned in juvenile hall and reform school that black racism is perhaps more virulent than white racism. Someone had once told me, “W hen we’re racists, we just want to stay away from ’em. When they’re racists, they want to kill us.” It was true: black racists wanted revenge; white racists wanted segregation. Every black wasn’t a racist, nor was every white. I really wished that everyone was oblivious to race and, absent that, everyone should be civil and respectful to everyone else. It is impossible to have a civil society without civility.
From the bridge-walkway to the Old Industrial Building Willy Hart appeared. I’d known Willy since he first came to San Quentin more than a dozen years earlier. He was an armed robber, but certainly not the public’s vision of an armed robber. If someone had said, “No, I won’t do that,” and sat down with arms folded, Willy would have shrugged and departed. In other words, he wasn’t going to hurt somebody—although if someone pulled a gun and started shooting at Willie, he would have shot back or shot first if he had to. This was his second time in for armed robbery. He had never had a serious moment during a decade and a half in San Quentin and Folsom. “Hey, Bunk, how the fuck ya doin’ these days?” he asked as he crossed the road to the Yard Office. He, too, counted here, as did another convict, the lead man of the night yard crew. The moment the count cleared, the rest of the yard crew were unlocked. While the lines of convicts filed into the mess halls, the night yard crew used big fire hoses with bay water to wash away the phlegm and cigarette butts and the thousands of pieces of orange peel if oranges had been served. It was one of the better job assignments in San Quentin. The lead man was a holdover from the days when San Quentin functioned with con bosses.
As for Willy Hart, he’d first come to San Quentin on a transfer from a youth prison at Tracy, which had replaced Lancaster and filled the same niche, youthful felons from age eighteen to twenty-five. My first memory of him was his last night back then in Lancaster. He was in the showers with the rest of his tier. “Yeah . . . yeah,” he proclaimed. “I escaped all these perverts. Nobody got my bunghole.” His banter was boisterous and funny. He had one of the fastest mouths in the Department of Corrections, and it occasionally got him into trouble.
“Where you going?” he asked.
I replied with a gesture of eating. “Mess hall.”
Just then the sally port opened. There were two guards with George Jackson between them. He was returning from the visiting room to the Adjustment Center, the door to which was fifteen feet from where we stood. He wore handcuffs. We watched him approach. I’d read Soledad Brother. It had been very successful without saying anything new. Eldridge Cleaver had covered the same terrain in Soul on Ice better, which was a few essays from Ramparts and more letters. Both books took a Marxist position on America, calling for armed revolution and a communist state. I think that George Jackson was introduced to Marxist rhetoric when he was discovered by white Bay Area Marxists, with Fay Stender being first and foremost. Until then he had simply hated whites. I was already a veteran when he first came to prison, and was in a nearby cell. I heard him say that he didn’t want equality; he wanted vengeance on the European race. This, however, was the first time I’d seen him for longer than a glance when he’d passed my cell. By any standard he was a handsome young man. I estimate he was six-foot or six-one and weighed 200 pounds, and he had the swagger of a warrior. He could see the two white convicts standing within a few feet of where he would pass. As he went by, he looked at us and made a head gesture that could be acknowledgment or challenge. I stared without expression. I could not acknowledge a man who killed people for no reason except that they were white, nor was it my style to say anything to him.
Not Willy, though, for just as George Jackson went by and the escort rang the entry bell at the adjustment center, a U.S. Air Force Phantom went by with a sonic boom. “That’s mighty Whitey up there,” Willy said, pointing to the sky.
I did not laugh, but I could not suppress a grin. Just before stepping through the door, George Jackson looked back with pure hate. When the door closed, Willy danced around and put up a hand for a high five. “I got off a good one, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, I gotta give you a gold star for that one.”
I FINISHED MY SIXTH NOVEL and, using a teacher who had befriended a partner of mine, I had it smuggled out and mailed to my agents, Mike Watkins and Gloria Loomis. Within a couple of weeks, Mike wrote back that he hoped and believed that he could get it published. It was only a hope, but it was still the best news I’d had in years. Indeed, it was the first letter I’d received in years.
One morning I was over by the Garden Chapel when I saw two blacks taken out of the Adjustment Center in chains: one of them I recognized, Willie Christmas. He had tried to stab a guard in the North Mess Hall. Now he was going to court in Marin County.
I thought nothing of it. Inmates were going to court in Marin County all the time. A few hours later I saw the captain run out of the Custody Office en route to the sally port, followed a moment later by a couple of lieutenants. Although it wasn’t time for me to work, I went to the Yard Office to find out what was going on.
Big Brown was on the phone. The prison’s tactical squad, known colloquially as the goon squad, was being called out. Brown was so excited that he stuttered.
“What’s up?” I asked when Brown hung up.
“Christmas and that other nigger, they took over the courtroom.”
“Took over the courtroom?”
“Guns! They’ve got guns and they’ve got hostages.”
A couple of the goon squad with somber faces hurried by. The Marin County courthouse was a few minutes away. Would the law that forbid an escape from prison with hostages apply to this situation? That was something we would find out very soon. While Brown was on the telephone again, I headed toward the yard to share the news with my partners.
It was midmorning and the yard had more seagulls than convicts. A few were going to the canteen, and a couple were pacing the length of the yard, scattering a flock of pigeons and a few seagulls being fed bread crumbs by a convict. “I hope they shit all over you,” I muttered as I went by. Over by the hot-water spigot on the East Cell House wall were a half-score of white and Chicano convicts gathered around Danny Trejo. From his intensity and their rapt attention it was obvious he knew about the events transpiring at the courthouse. It was a running joke that when anything happened, violent or scandalous, and anyone wanted the news, the word was: “Ask Danny.” He was San Quentin’s resident gossip columnist, speaking as I walked up:
“. . . some young rug stood up in the courtroom with an Uzi and said, I’m taking over.’ He had a shitloadful of guns and passed ’em out to those crazy motherfuckers. They got the judge, the DA, the jury . . . everybody as a hostage. They might have God himself as a hostage.”
“If they was in the walls, it wouldn’t make no never mind. They’d blow ’em away faster’n God could get the news.”
“Check this. . . . They got a sawed-off shotgun cocked and wired around the judge’s neck. If the dude coughs, it’ll blow his head off.”
“Hey, Danny, you sure you ain’t tellin’ another goddamn lie. You know how you are.”
“Yeah, I tell a good lie from time to time, ese, but this is straight shit, carnal.”
“It’s the truth,” I said. “I heard about it in four post. The goon squad went runnin’ out the gate.”
“Damn,” someone said, “them niggers is in trouble,” which elicited nods of general agreement.
Willy Hart came through the gate and started across the yard. Seeing us, he veered over and approached, fairly vibrating with his excitement. “You guys hear what happened?”
“Yeah, we heard.”
“It’s all over now. They got out to the parking lot. I think the sheriff’s department was backing off, but a couple bulls from the joint showed up. They shot the shit out of them fools. There’s dead niggers and dead judges. There’s bodies all over the place.”
“Dead niggers and dead judges . . . how lucky can a peckerwood get? Ha . . . ha . . . ha . . . ha!”
I looked at the commentator, Dean Lakey. He aspired to be among the bona fide tough guys and would go far, but there was something mushy down deep, and he folded up down the line, when he faced someone tough and preferred to lockup. Once Lakey had crossed that barrier and was forever stigmatized, it was easy for him to go all the way to informant. He knew of several murders, including two where he was involved in a minor way, like standing point while the killing went down. When he made the aforementioned statement about niggers, judges, and peckerwoods, it resonated falsely. It was like someone trying to appear more racist and more cold than anyone could imagine who is not of this milieu. It was one of those, “methinks thou dost protest too much.”
I wanted to know what had really happened. I would read the newspapers and talk to a black man who had been subpoenaed as a defense witness. When the madness broke out, they asked him if he wanted to go, and he said thanks but no thanks. He had a parole date within six months. He was doing what amounted to a drunk sentence. He was from the old school and much wiser.
What I learned that really went down was that the courtroom that day was nearly empty of spectators and none of the court personnel, judge, clerk, bailiff, deputy district attorney, noticed when Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson’s seventeen-year-old brother, came in. He walked down the aisle and turned into a row of spectator benches. He carried a small duffel bag.
The only person who saw him was the defendant, Willie Christmas.
The others noticed him when he stood up with a pistol and said clearly, “All right, gentlemen, I’m taking over.” I must say after careful reflection, whatever else the statement says, it has a certain élan. I think his brother had convinced him of the revolution’s imminence.
Jonathan quickly armed Willie Christmas, disarmed the bailiff, plus took his keys, and unlocked the bullpen. Ruchell Magee was quick to arm himself. The convict I knew shook his head and stayed. The others left and he watched through the crack in the door. He couldn’t see the whole courtroom, but he did see young Jackson put a wire noose attached to a shotgun over the judge’s head and down on his neck. The primed shotgun was resting on his shoulder under his chin.
The convicts then gathered the hostages around them and made their way to the parking lot where a yellow van with sliding doors waited for them. The sheriff’s squad moved with them but was afraid to take a shot.
They were getting in the van when one of the prison guards, using a big hunting rifle with scope sights, lined up the cross hairs and squeezed the trigger. The first shot dropped one convict. Then everyone else opened fire, the authorities pouring bullets through the thin van walls, the convicts shooting hostages. The judge’s head was blown off; the deputy district attorney had his spine severed. He lived as a paraplegic and was later appointed to the bench of the Superior Court. The only convict who survived was Ruchell Magee. He was wounded but recovered. He was already doing a life sentence. That evening, the television news had film of the convicts’ bodies being dragged from the van with ropes, like carcasses of beef. The authorities claimed a fear of booby traps, but I saw rage in their gesture. It would forever change how San Quentin convicts were handled in the courtrooms of Marin County.
It was revealed a few days later that the weapons used in the courtroom belonged to Angela Davis, the black communist professor. She fled before she could be arrested. A fugitive warrant was issued, charging her with being an accessory. It was several months before she was caught and brought back to America’s most liberal city, San Francisco, for trial. She was represented by Charles Garry, the best trial lawyer in Northern California. His book on jury selection is a seminal work on the issue. After the trial, the jury not only acquitted Angela Davis but also gave her a party. I have no idea if she gave Jonathan Jackson the weapons or if he took them without her knowledge, but I do believe that she was in love with George Jackson. Big and handsome, he must have stirred deep feelings when she saw him draped in the white man’s chains. To her he was no murderer, no matter if or who he killed. He was an enslaved black man in rebellion against his oppressors and therefore justified in all he did.
The Marin courthouse shootout made nationwide headlines and network news. The Soledad brothers became a greater cause célèbre. George Jackson was made a field marshal in the Black Panther Party. He was proud of his seventeen-year-old baby brother, who was pulled from the van with a piece of rope as if he were a side of beef. Fay Stender realized that talking of armed revolution was different game from judges getting their heads shot off, convicts being slaughtered, and a deputy district attorney being made a paraplegic. She gave up the cause and quit the case.
The Vietnam War rocked America’s college campuses. Bombs exploded; white radicals became revolutionaries and robbed banks. Meanwhile the black ghettos in one American city after another burned in “long, hot summers” to the chant of “burn, baby, burn.” In Mississippi the Klan murdered civil rights workers. In San Francisco a group of blacks prowled the night and killed whites they caught alone. These were called the Zebra Killings, and I thought it likely that black ex-convicts were involved (I was right), for only in California’s prisons had I seen similar killings. Both sides did it, but George Jackson was the first. As with everyone, he did no evil in his own mind. All that matters is for the individual to justify himself in the mirror, and George did so with the four hundred years of slavery and then Jim Crow. Journalists came from around the world to interview him. He spent more time in the visiting room than his cell. Writers came from Time, Newsiveek, Le Monde, the London Times, and the New York Times. It was the Department of Corrections policy to allow such interviews, and George got at least one, and sometimes several, every day of the week. The guards hated him and the “commie pinko bastards who took a hate-filled killer and made him a revolutionary hero.” They didn’t appreciate being called pigs and fascists, which none saw when they looked in their mirrors, although a few would wink when queried about racism, especially when they started being killed.
White convicts also resented being referred to as neo-Nazis and white supremacists, the villains of the plot, as it were. There were several race wars behind San Quentin’s walls. In San Quentin there was so much racial paranoia that real provocation was unnecessary to evoke murder. Almost any excuse was enough to break out the shivs. One particular war began with events just lightly related to race.
It was a spring evening after chow, and the seven hundred convicts in the East Cell House straggled across the Big Yard into the building. The five tiers were crowded with some men waiting near their cells for the lockup, while others roamed the tiers, trying to hustle a paper of heroin, a tab of acid, a quart of home brew, or anything to soften the reality of the long night ahead of them. I lived in the North Cell House, but because of ex officio status, I roamed where I wanted. This evening I wanted to make a bet on the NCAA Final Four.
I ran up the stairs to the third tier, swung around the rail, and started down the tier. A humming roar of noise hung over everything, a sound so common and pervasive in the cell house that it ceased to be noticed when you became accustomed to it. It was the kind of noise that only attracts attention when it stops or its rhythm changes.
The rhythm changed. From a lower tier came the thud and grunt of struggling bodies, the bang as someone bumped against a cell gate and it hit the frame. Convicts nearby froze and turned, wary as animals at a sharp sound. Others on tiers above and below craned their necks to see what was going on. Tension spread like electricity through connected wires. Men forty yards away sensed within seconds that something had happened.
The gun rail guard, a rookie, ran back and forth, looking for the trouble. He saw something, a jumble of motion. His whistle bleated, repeated itself, and ended any trace of doubt that someone was being stabbed. San Quentin’s convicts gave up fistfighting long ago to settle disputes. If it’s not worth killing about, forget it. If you punch somebody in the mouth and let him go, he’s liable to brood about it for a month or two and come back with a shiv.
There was suddenly silence throughout the cell house except for the scrape of running feet. More than one man was breaking through the crowd to get away. The guard leveled his rifle but was unable to shoot into the press of bodies. He tried to follow along the gun rail, still blasting his whistle in accusation, but the quarry disappeared down the rear stairs.
Guards on the cell house floor were too late to reach the scene. The assailants got away.
I decided to forgo my NCAA wager and get out of the cell house before the rotunda gate was locked. They might even ask me some questions. As I hurried back toward the front stairs, I looked down at the floor of the cell house. Four blacks were pushing a flatbed handcart used to move laundry hampers and metal trash barrels. Now it carried a “brother” who was being rushed toward the hospital. He was on his back, legs drawn up, denim jacket open, a red stain spread across his white tank top. The blacks who pushed the cart would have let a white man die, and a white convict who gave aid to a wounded black (unless the white was assigned to the hospital) would be ostracized by other whites, if not attacked. The first rumor was that he had been stabbed and thrown from the fourth tier. When you looked down, that seemed unlikely. The victim was on his back, legs drawn up, head raised. If he had been dropped forty feet to the concrete, bones would have been broken. He would have looked different than he did.
From the rows of tiers above, hundreds of convicts stared down at the exiting group. The question was who had stabbed him. If it was another black, it was between assailant, victim, and their partners. If it was a Chicano, so far that had not caused any widespread trouble, but if it was white on black or black on white, there would most certainly be trouble.
As I reached the rotunda door of the building, the sergeant was coming from another angle to lock it. In the background the public-address system was crackling and bellowing, ”Lock up! Bay side, lock up! Yard side, lock up!” The sergeant raised a hand of restraint, recognized me, then let me slip out into the Big Yard night. Guards were coming on the double, holding their jangling key rings in one hand and batons in the other.
I started back across the yard. It was an Edward Hopper study in light and shadow, with several figures working. One wielded the nozzle of a heavy canvas fire hose, while another dragged the weight along behind. The powerful hose blasted the sputum and empty cigarette packs and made the thousands of pieces of orange peel dance to the water-running gutter next to the shed. Other convicts were sweeping up trash and shoveling it into wheelbarrows. Convicts made the yard a filthy mess every day. The night yard crew were all friends of mine. They couldn’t get assigned without my wink to the lieutenant. Paul Allen was approaching, waving his broom. From the yard at night you could see into the lighted cell house. “What happened in there?”
“Some nigger got stabbed up on the fourth tier.” Although I used the racial epithet, it was without animus. Although I would not have used it with any black, even joking with a friend, if I used anything different with Paul he would have commented.
“We got another war kickin’ off?”
“I dunno who got him. He doesn’t seem to be hurt bad.”
Through the yard gate came Lt. E. F. Ziemer. A man in his mid-fifties, he had the gait of someone who had spent years on a rolling ship. In his case it had been a submarine. His hat was tilted rakishly to the side. He was sauntering toward the East Block rotunda. He was my boss and I gave him a half-salute. He stopped. “Hey, Bunk!” he called. “Keep yourself available. We’re going to have reports to write tonight.”
“I’ll be around, boss.”
“One other thing.”
“What’s up, boss?”
“They’re supposed to gas Aaron Mitchell a week from Friday. It’s pretty messy over there. I sent Willy Hart over to hit it with a mop. He wanted me to ask you to help him.”
“He would.”
“Sure. How do I get in?” Keys to the execution area were kept in #2 Gun Tower over the Big Yard gate.
Just then a guard came out of the North Cell House rotunda, which provided entry to both the cell house through a steel door on the left and the overnight condemned cells through another steel door straight ahead. The guard was the runner, who picked up and delivered mail and memos and escorted convicts (say to the hospital) at night. He was heading toward #2 Gun Tower, obviously to return the key. Ziemer called his name and we walked over to meet him.
When the runner opened the green steel door, Willy was in the open gate of one of the two overnight cells. He had a broom in one hand and a grin on his face. Beside him was a bucket on wheels with a mop handle protruding. Behind him was an open green steel door, and two or three feet beyond that was the open oval door into the gas chamber, somewhat reminiscent of a diving bell. There sat two chairs side by side. I immediately thought of the story of Allen and Smitty, Folsom convicts executed for killing another inmate. A bull told me that when the door was closed and the wheel turned to seal it, they leaned their heads together and kissed good-bye, chair to chair. As I thought of it, I laughed. Willy had just said something funny, he was often very funny, and thought I was laughing at his witticism.
“Hey, Bunk, I see you came to help.”
“I’ll be back for you two in half an hour,” the guard said. “How’s that?”
“Sounds good,” Willy said. “We should be done by then.”
The guard closed the door and we were alone with the overnight cells and the gas chamber. I stood in the opened gateway of the first cell. One step out, one step to the right through the door. One long step (or two short steps or one skid mark of dragged feet) was the entrance to the gas chamber. Damn, it was small. It was painted green and shaped in an octagon, with windows from about waist-height up. Venetian blinds now hid the interior from the witnesses. They stood outside. The first row had their noses inches from the glass, and the doomed fellow was inches on the other side. A witness definitely witnessed things up close.
“Didn’t Shorty Schrekendost paint this place?” Willy asked.
“I think so . . .’ bout ten years ago.”
“I think he wrote his name under one of the seats.”
“He wrote it everywhere else in the joint. Lemme check.” So I flopped on the floor and rolled over on my back so I could see. I saw no graffiti, but I did see how death was administered, low technology, a lever with a hook where the gauze bag of cyanide pellets was draped. When the lever was moved, the bag dipped down into a bucket of sulphuric acid and gas was created. The seat bottom was perforated to ease the gas’s flow upward.
I raised my head. Thinking about smells and stuff stirred a memory. “What about my outfit? Where’s it at?”
“I got it stashed out there. As soon as we leave . . .”
“I hope you cleaned it so it doesn’t stink.” I was riding Willy as a joke. It was part of the relationship. If I acted otherwise, he would suspect some kind of put-on.
“It’s clean . . . and oh, I’ve got a present for you, brother.”
From a shirt pocket he brought forth a matchbook. Inserted so it stuck out both sides was a joint. “Well, fire the sucker up,” I said.
So he did. We sat side by side in the gas chamber, passing the joint back and forth. It was pretty good pot, and we got high, laughing and telling stories until we heard the key turn in the outside lock. We jumped up and looked busy. Willy was swinging the mop, and I was swiping a rag across the witness chairs. I wondered how many pissed in their britches when the cyanide hit the pan and they were eyeball-to-eyeball with the dying man.
The guard was unconcerned with cleanliness, although he did sniff the air and ask, “What’s that I smell?”
“I don’t smell anything,” Willy said. “You smell anything, Legend?”
“You put Pine Sol in the mop bucket, didn’t you?”
Willy shook his head. “No . . . nuthin’ but a little ammonia.”
“That’s what it’s gotta be.”
The guard sensed a put-on but didn’t know what or why; he didn’t recognize the smell. “C’mon,” he said, and told Willy to bring the gear. “The lieutenant wants to see you pronto,” he said to me. I went out with a grin.
WHILE WILLY AND I WERE MOPPING the execution chamber, Lieutenant Ziemer had been questioning convicts who had cells where the incident occurred. He had discovered very little, but he had to file a report of some kind. That was my job. All incident reports had the same form: “At approximately ——, on ——date, while on duty as ——, I observed, was told,” etc. It was very ritualized, and I had it down pat:
The victim, Robinson, B00000, suffered three puncture wounds from an unknown instrument in his right upper chest. (See medical report.) Subject claims he was assaulted by an unknown Mexican. It should be noted that Robinson was recently transferred to this institution following several disciplinary reports at the California Men’s Colony. It should be noted that the subject has a hostile demeanor. The writer placed him on administrative lockup pending investigation and disposition of this incident.
Lieutenant Ziemer read the report and signed it. “Goddam I write a helluva report,” he said, widening his eyes and gaping his mouth in feigned naivete. “Big Red Nelson complimented me at the last staff meeting. He asked how you were doing.”
“I’M GOIN’ OVER TO THE CELL house,” I said. “Unless you need me.”
“Be around about eleven. Those officers working the East Block will have to file reports.”
“I’ll be here, boss.”
When I reached the yard, where the yard crew was finished cleaning and putting away their equipment, Danny Trejo had the real news about the East Block stabbing. The altercation had begun in the education building where the Chicano and the black were both enrolled in literacy training, which means they had tested lower than the fourth-grade level and were being taught to read. Somehow they had exchanged stares, which became sneers and then a word or two: “So?” “So whatever.” The bell then rang ending the period. Both existed in worlds where it was impossible to conceive, much less articulate, the senselessness of murder arising from locked stares and nothing more.
When word got around that it was Chicano and black, most whites relaxed, glad not to be involved. Some especially militant blacks plotted retaliation. As far as they were concerned, a brother had been stabbed and nothing else mattered. Chicanos anticipated possible trouble and readied themselves. Black tier tenders delivered knives from mattresses and ventilators. Chicano cell house workers did the same. Perhaps a dozen on each side actually armed themselves, taping large, crudely honed, but deadly knives to their forearms so they were easy to jerk from their sleeves. Or they poked a hole in the bottom of their front pants pocket, so the blade went down against their thighs while they held the handle out of sight in their pocket. It could be drawn in an instant. As in the Wild West, the quickest draw often decided who lived and who died.
The prison slept without realization that the tinder of black rage toward the white man had been ignited. No one could have imagined how hot the inferno would be or how long it would burn.
TWO GIANT MESS HALLS fed San Quentin’s convicts. The larger of the two, the South, was divided into four sections, with murals of California history on their walls. It was like a high school cafeteria instead of the feeding place of robbers, rapists and murderers, drug addicts, and child molesters. Both mess halls together were inadequate to feed all of the convicts simultaneously, so it was done in shifts. The North and West Cell Houses ate first in the morning. After eating, the inmates could go out on the yard or back to their cell house until the 8:00 work call.
By 7:30 the last of the East and South Cell Houses were usually in the mess halls. Those first unlocked were, as a rule, already leaving for the yard. I never got up for breakfast, but this morning Veto Tewksbury (a San Fernando Valley Chicano despite the name, which came from an English squire who owned many thousands of acres in Arizona once upon a time) reached through the bars and shook my foot. “Get up, man. Shit’s gonna hit the fan out in the yard.”
I stood up and looked out through the cell house bars and the cell house bars to the Big Yard. Sure enough, it was more segregated than usual. As always, blacks were gathered along the North Cell House, directly below my window, but though they were usually joshing, laughing, and talking, this morning they were somber and silent. The line dividing the races was usually narrow and overlapping, with nobody paying real attention to the territorial imperatives, but on this morning the space between the races was at least thirty yards. About three hundred blacks stared balefully at two clusters of Mexicans; one cluster of about a hundred was partially under the shed on the blacks’ right flank. Another hundred faced the blacks head-on across the empty asphalt. Behind the Chicanos, backing them, were a dozen young Nazis and a score of Hell’s Angels. Sprinkled among the Chicanos were ten or fifteen whites ready to back their homeboys, or tight partners. One clique of whites was conspicuous standing on benches along the East Cell House wall. In the last black-versus-white race war, they had carried the brunt of the mayhem and had committed other stabbings and murders. It was the strongest white clique, but its numbers in the general population had been depleted by officials’ locking them in segregation and transferring them. Though violent, the clique was not especially racist: that is, they would not start a race war. But its members, like me, had Chicano partners who backed us in a confrontation with a large Mexican gang, which would become La Nuestra Familia, mortal enemy of the Mexican Mafia, aka La Eme. In the Southwest, especially in Southern California but also in Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Texas, it is far better to be an enemy of La Cosa Nostra than La Eme. On this particular morning, however, these gangs were still nameless embryos.
The guards were aware of the volatile situation in the yards and several were armed with rifles; one, a body-building sergeant, had an antiquated but effective Thompson submachine gun, and they were all lined up on the gun rail outside the North Cell House wall. It was easy to tell that most were lined up on the blacks. (It wasn’t whites or Chicanos who had killed several guards during the last year.) One black guard, however, was conspicuously targeting the Mexican ranks. That was the racial situation in San Quentin. I was disgusted with the whole ignorant mess. It was beyond racism, race pride, or even revolution. It was something out of the tribal wars in the New Guinea jungle, complete with headhunting. No matter how insane it was, it wasn’t something I could ignore. Too many whites, then still the majority, tried that tactic. It only invited aggression.
The standoff and stare-down continued for the next ten minutes as the mess halls finished disgorging prisoners into the yard. The ranks swelled. The riflemen watching from above anticipated an open riot, and tension was reaching an unbearable pitch.
From the sidelines a black and a Chicano appeared. The black, light-skinned and handsome, was a prizefighter so good that nobody within forty pounds of his weight would fight him. He did perform Ali’s mantra of dancing like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. He was a dope fiend and disregarded racial lines to satisfy his craving. He was not known as a militant, although some suspected him of undercover agitation. I don’t think he hated whites, but he was a proud black man and, like me, when the lines were drawn, he stood with his own. Nobody could blame him for that. The Chicano, who had recently returned to San Quentin on a murder conviction, wanted to be a “shot caller” in the prison firmament and had gathered a clique of about a dozen, whose members now stood with the throng under the shed.
When the two reached the center of the empty asphalt, the black prizefighter motioned toward the mass of blacks. Two came forward, both tall and military in bearing, one with a head shaved and oiled like my own. It glistened in the morning sunlight. He had influence among the Black Muslims. The other wore tiny Ben Franklin glasses and a bushy Afro, the style favored by blacks at the time.
The quartet stood in a tight circle. The blacks spoke and gestured, tense with accusation and ire. The Chicano took over and held the floor, and the conversation went on while the yard gate was opened and the steam whistle blew the morning work call. Half the convicts in the yard streamed out, glad to avoid possible trouble. The faced-off warriors on both sides held their places. So did the riflemen looking down from the gun walk. The conference was allowed to continue because it might settle things without any further bloodshed.
The conference broke up. The black fighter shook hands with the two militants, and the Mexican walked back to his waiting crew. He said something and gestured toward the gate, leading his clique off the yard. The black spokesmen went back to their waiting throng. A dozen black warriors gathered around them and listened to what they said.
The public-address system blared an order to clear the yard. T.D. and Bulldog stepped off the bench along the wall and walked past me. T.D. held up a packet of canteen ducats. “I’m buyin’ the spread.” (He meant pints of ice cream that would be passed out and eaten with IDs, which were perfect for dipping into the pint boxes.) “Ain’t nuthin’ gonna happen.”
“And everybody’s glad,” another voice said.
To which I thought, I don’t know about everybody, but I’m damn sure glad.
The confrontation disintegrated, turning into individuals and tiny clots moving toward their assignments. Within minutes the yard was nearly empty except for a few night workers, our crew standing in a circle. The seagulls and pigeons that saw their chances descended to take them. T.D. handed me an open pint of Neopolitan. I had my ID card ready to dig in.
“I was ready to get it on,” T.D. said, draping a meaty forearm on Veto Rodriquez’s shoulder. “Nobody was gonna hurt Mule.” Veto was sometimes called Mule because of his large penis, and he really needed very little help to avoid being hurt.
“I wonder what they said out there,” Paul said. “You think he apologized?” The last comment brought laughter but no further speculation. My thought was, Who cares? Days later, the truth was revealed: the Mexican clique leader had disowned the assailant, claiming that he was a Nazi, not a Chicano—hence there was no trouble between brown and black.
WHILE THE TROUBLE WAS BREWING between the Nazi Mex (he was, indeed, an admirer of the Nazis, especially the black SS uniforms, but as he was illiterate, how much could he know?) and the black, another fuse was burning elsewhere. Two burly white bikers had swindled a black for twenty papers of heroin with a counterfeit $100 bill. A wife of one of the bikers had smuggled him several bills in the visiting room. The black gave it to his own wife to buy more smack. She took their children to Disneyland, and the ticket booth cashier recognized the counterfeit. She was taken in and her children were taken away. Because she had no record and there was only a single piece of currency, the U.S. Attorney declined to indict. She, however, was mad as hell, which was quite understandable. She told her man that she was bringing him no more drugs. The black was enraged at being conned by a pair of “motorcycle-drivin’, tattoo-wearin’, bad-smellin’ honkies. . . .” An hour after the standoff in the Big Yard, the victimized black and several friends caught the two bikers at the rear of the South Cell House and began swinging knives. The whites, both young and strong, managed to fight off being killed, but they were badly carved up and hospitalized.
The leading white clique, several of whom would later found the Aryan Brotherhood, knew about the burn behind the stabbing and decided not to get involved. “They brought that shit on themselves,” was Bulldog’s observation. “What’d they expect . . . they could burn the dude and nothin’ would happen. Bullshit!” He emphasized his judgment by turning a thumb down, and that was the decision; he had great influence over the clique. Far more than I did.
Because my job assignment was four to midnight, my days were free. I seldom ate lunch, but during the lunch hour I frequently preferred my cell to the crowded yard. It was then that I typed what I had written in #2 pencil the night before using a pilfered flashlight that nobody cared I had. On this day, however, Paul Allen wanted me to shill in a poker game he was running. How could I refuse? We had no idea that the previous night’s stabbing, aggravated by the one earlier today, had started the war in earnest. Men who lived in the North Cell House could come and go from their cells when they wanted. A tier tender on each tier had a key to the cells. He unlocked the gate when you asked.
While waiting for the poker players on the yard so we could take them to the boiler room where the game was being held, I tried to feel the tension on the yard. It was more than usual, but far less than earlier in the day. I put it down to something residual, for most convicts had no idea what was going on in such matters.
Guards then appeared, hurrying from several directions toward the North Cell House. Something had happened in the cell house or up on death row. Everything on the yard stopped except the whirling seagulls overhead. Everything was silent except the gulls with their raucous cries. All eyes faced the cell house door. Moments later, four white convicts rushed out of the cell house carrying a man on a litter. Two guards trotted along beside them. As the retinue crossed the yard diagonally toward the South Cell House entrance and the hospital beyond, a couple of the man’s friends came out of the crowd and hurried along beside him. The escorting guards waved them away and were ignored. I could see the man on the litter talking and gesturing. When the litter reached the end of the building where the friends could go no farther, they turned back. The yard was silent. Three thousand sets of eyes were watching. The convict, whom I didn’t know, threw his hands wide and screamed, “Goddamned fucking niggers!”
“I don’t think we’re playing poker today,” Paul said.
A queasiness started in my stomach and spread through my limbs. This was so utterly senseless. Later, when I was summoned to type the reports, my misgivings were replaced by indignation. The wounded man would survive with some scars and diminished use of his right hand, because a tendon had been severed as he warded off knife blows. He was doing time for receiving stolen property and worked in the furniture factory. He’d never had a disciplinary infraction and had a medical lay-in. He was taking a nap with his cell gate open. Why not? He had no enemies. One black stepped in and stabbed him while the other kept lookout in the doorway. He had no idea who they were, and they didn’t know him. He was selected because he was white and asleep. It could just as easily have been me, although I probably would not have taken a nap with the gate unlocked. Still, the black tier tender could have opened the gate for them.
Another voice yelled, “You banjo-lipped nigger motherfuckers!”
“Fuck you, honky!” was the retort from someone in the black crowd.
On the overhead catwalk appeared a guard with a bucket of tear gas grenades and a short-barreled launcher. Behind him, sweating and panting from the exertion, came a couple of guards lugging carbines. The convicts below, black and white, were confused. The shot callers had told them nothing. They had no idea what to do.
The steam whistle blew afternoon work call, and the convicts, like trained milk cows, began moving slowly toward their job assignments. I went back to my cell to continue reading a biography of Alexander the Great. Never in history did anyone deserve that appellation more than the Macedonian warrior king. I learned about the victory over Darius and the Persians, the burning of Persopolis, and the founding of the world’s first great library at Alexandria by Ptolemy, Alexander’s general, whose descendants ruled Egypt to the time of Cleopatra. In a lockup somewhere, I’d had an argument with a semiliterate black who asserted that Cleopatra was a “black African queen with skin of ebony.” It almost reached a physical altercation when I said that she may indeed have been black, but no reputable historian disputes that her antecedents were Greek—and that was an undisputed fact. Then came the ad hominem vitriol: “White devils steal the black man’s history.” I had not known of Alexander’s fantastic march through the Kush and the Khyber Pass, conquering all who opposed him and tainting his golden image with what we would call war crimes. His will was indomitable, and he was often victorious through sheer determination. When he was my age he had already conquered the world and was both dead and immortal, whereas I was an outlaw and outcast serving time in a gray rock penitentiary. I had been born in the wrong era and under the wrong circumstances.
About two-thirty I had switched to Camus’s Reflection on the Guillotine, perhaps the most thoughtful, and certainly the most beautifully written, essay on capital punishment. I stood up to unkink my back and take a leak. When I turned away from the toilet, I could see the yard through the windows. Convicts were trudging en masse toward the cell houses. No lines were being formed. It was an hour and a half until the regular lockup. Something was still going on, and I knew it was about race conflict. Had there been another incident?
Within a minute I could hear them begin to come through the rotunda door and trudge up the stairway to the tiers. A few passed my cell, moving too fast to stop and ask. Then Billy Michaels appeared. A tall, blond, handsome dope fiend—what is called a hope-to-die dope fiend—he was the kind that wants more than merely feeling good. He wants to keep fixing until his chin rests on his chest and he is oblivious of the world going on around him. Before I could ask him what was going on, he asked, “Lemme borrow your outfit.”
“Whaddya got?”
“I ain’t got nuthin’, but Chente just came off a visit. His old lady gave him a taste. A couple grams. He can’t get his back at the job because they’re lockin’ the joint down. I can slide in if I can get him a rig.”
“I don’t have it here.”
“Shit!”
The tiers were rapidly filling with bodies. A voice on the loudspeaker said that all inmates were to proceed to their assignment for the main count. That meant me. “I can go get it and bring it back after the count clears.”
“Oh, man, I’d sure appreciate that.”
“I know I’m good for a fix.”
“Oh, man! He ain’t got but a gram or two.”
“Two fixes is pretty easy—if he wants to get high tonight.”
“I’ll put it to him.”
“What’s this lockup about?”
“I dunno. Probably about all this race shit.”
“I didn’t hear anything. I was cutting hair downstairs.”
The cell house bell rang out. Security bars were raised and a thousand gates opened as convicts stepped in. I stepped out onto an empty tier of slamming gates and the inevitable straggler running hard to reach his cell before being locked out. Missing a lockup wasn’t a disciplinary offense, but several misses could bring one. It tended to be the same convicts who missed lockups.
As I went through the yard gate, two groups of guards were hustling a pair of black convicts toward B Section lockup. I knew neither by name, but one had frequented the Folsom law library when I was the clerk. He was trying to find an error in his extradition. The FBI had kidnapped him from Mexico. Barely literate, he was one of many convicts who seemed to believe that if you find the right cases and repeat the citations like some kind of magical chant, the prison gates will fly open. I tried to explain the essential law: the Supreme Court said that it didn’t matter how they got you before the court; the court didn’t lose jurisdiction. He didn’t like it. I remember saying, “Okay, okay, forget it. I was just trying to help you.” His reply was laden with venom: “No white man ever helped a black man.” It left nothing more to say, then or now. He had been Fanonized, even if he never heard of Franz Fanon. He sneered at me as he went by. Not to be undone, I sneered in reply, but inside I felt a keening ache. It was a sad, sad day.
When I reached the Yard Office, I found out what had happened. A fifty-year-old white convict who was being transferred wanted to say good-bye to a teacher. The classroom was up a stairway in an annex to the education building. Three blacks waited in the shadows on the landing to ambush whatever white appeared. It happened to be the man being transferred. They came out of the shadows while he was on the top stair before the landing, so surprising him that he fell crashing back down the stairway.
In the classroom, the teacher heard the ruckus and went to the door. As he opened it, the assailants were going down the stairs. The erstwhile victim cried out. The teacher began to sound the alarm with his whistle. Nearby guards came running. They caught two of the blacks as they ran out. As they were led away, one yelled, “Power to the people!” The elderly white convict had a sprained ankle.
That aborted assault was enough to bring the order to lock the prison down. The cons were sent back to the cell houses. On the tiers, paranoia ran high, for in the narrow space it was impossible to know when, or if, the long shivs would be pulled. Men without friends, those trying to quietly serve a term and get out, were in the worst predicament. They had no allies. Whites were indignant and afraid. Blacks were both jubilant and afraid, though they waited to yell their pleasure until they were locked in their cells and were anonymous voices.
That night guards and freemen began a search of the prison that would continue for days and reveal hundreds of weapons. Cell blocks were first. Personnel filed along the fifth tier without warning until two stood outside each cell gate. Riflemen behind them gave cover. Security bars were raised, and convicts were ordered to strip to their underwear and step out onto the tier. As soon as the convicts realized what was happening, knives were thrown between the bars, sailing down to clatter on the floor of the bottom tier. It was really unnecessary to discard the weapons, for the searchers were sadly out of shape, accustomed to sitting on their butts. Before finishing two cells they were panting, unable to do more than perfunctorily raise a mattress. Many just walked into cells and sat down.
On each tier behind the cells was a narrow service passage with plumbing and electrical conduits. Convict electricians and plumbers had access to the passages. Guards found two dozen knives and three roofing hatchets in the East Cell House passageways. The arsenal belonged to whites and Chicanos, as the plumber and electrician were a white and Chicano.
The only convicts out of their cells were essential workers—a couple of Captain’s Office clerks, hospital attendants, the fire watch, the late cleanup crew in the kitchen, and me. I could wander almost wherever I wanted within San Quentin’s walls until midnight. I went to the South Cell House. It was the skid row of San Quentin. The oldest of the big cell houses, it was divided into four sections, one of them the notorious long-term segregation unit named B Section. The rest of the cell house was quiet, but B Section was a cacophonous uproar until dawn; then the men slept the day away, rising up just for meals and an hour in the exercise yard. Many were now in segregation from the last race war. I don’t remember all the details of that one, but after a cycle of stabbing, retaliation, stabbing, retaliation, the militant white convicts worked up a plan. Each of several really violent convicts would take a group of two or three or four to various positions, i.e., the library, the education building, and elsewhere. As soon as the afternoon work whistle blew at 1:00 P.M., each squad would attack and murder every black in the vicinity.
At 12:45 a fistfight broke out in the segregation unit exercise yard. The gun rail officer blew his whistle (no response) and fired the obligatory warning shot. That fight broke apart, but the rifle shot was heard throughout the prison. The white convicts waiting in the lower yard thought the general attack was under way. They drew their weapons and charged a group of unarmed blacks lounging around the gate into industries, men waiting to return to work after lunch. Unarmed and taken completely by surprise, they ran for their lives. There were two stragglers, gray-haired old men who failed to realize their mortal danger in time. They tried to run, but the pack of wolves closed on them swiftly. The leader sprang upon one’s back. Down he went, disappearing under half a dozen more, the rising and falling knives red in the sun. The second old man reached the chain-link fence around the gardener’s area. They tore him loose and fell upon him with the fury of wild dogs. The medical report said he suffered at least forty-two wounds that could have caused his death.
San Quentin was locked down for two months after all that. Daily buses rolled to Folsom, Soledad, Tracy. A couple of the craziest were sent to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville and given electric shock therapy. That took away their aggression but also a few points of IQ that these guys couldn’t afford to lose.
THE LOCKUP CONTINUED. The white clique and their Chicano partners managed to exchange a few words on the grapevine. The words were, “wait . . . wait . . . wait. . . .” They had been taken totally off guard by the series of attacks. They had no idea it was in retaliation for the black being stabbed in the East Cell House. That had been done by a Chicano. So what if he was a fan of Hitler’s SS?
Nothing happened on the following Wednesday and Thursday. The lockup was too tight. Every convict out of the cell was searched several times. Even I got frisked by a rookie bull. On the weekend the West Honor Unit returned to normal schedule. A few other workers were pulled from the breakfast lines.
The associate warden had many inmates brought to his office. He wanted to know the mood of the prison. This associate warden, however, was both disliked and lacking in contacts with the right convicts. Those he called lacked prestige or influence in the yard. He appointed a committee of convicts to “cool” the situation, but those on the committee were without respect among their peers. The blacks, especially, had no juice. The very fact that they would even talk to the “chief pig” closed them off from their brothers.
A black program administrator summoned me and three other whites considered leaders. He wanted us to assure him that nothing more would happen. I told him that I didn’t run anything and couldn’t speak for anybody. Two others stood silent, heads down. The third flushed and stuttered, “They done downed five or six white dudes . . . old men and strays who didn’t do nothin’ to nobody. Next they’ll want us to pluck our eyebrows and get a black joker. Me . . . I’m not promising anything.” Nothing was resolved.
The plan of waiting for normal routine was gaining acceptance. Nazis and Hell’s Angels backed away, claiming that none of their brothers had been hit and they would stay on the sideline until that happened.
The blacks weren’t waiting for whitey. They continued on the offensive.
I happened to be on the fifth tier, standing outside a cell occupied by a couple friends of mine, when I saw two blacks appear around the corner and start down the tier. Luckily, my friends had a roofing hatchet in the cell. They passed it through the bars. The blacks saw it, stopped, and went the other way. It wasn’t cowardice—but even if they killed me, I would surely inflict some wounds, and wounds would get them caught.
On the fourth tier, another white, a motorcycle rider, was in front of a cell trying to buy a tab of acid. He worked in the mess hall scullery and had just gotten off work. In fact, he was still wearing the heavy rubber boots from the job. The cell where he stood was in the middle of the tier. The same two blacks came down the tier from the rear. A third black walked along the tier below and climbed up near the front. The white was between them. He saw them and sensed danger, for he backed up against the rail, refusing to turn his back. Had I been in his situation, I would have climbed over the tier long before they arrived. The white convict spread his arms and rested his hands on the railing, leaning back so he could look up. He was probably trying to hide evidence of fear. A smart convict, white or black, would have climbed up or down without hesitation. This man probably thought he wasn’t involved; he hadn’t done anything to anyone. He was insufficiently afraid to save his own life. The black from the front arrived first. When ten feet away, he pulled his shiv and rushed forward. The white turned to face him and threw up his hands to ward off the blade. It went between his hands and plunged into his chest. An instant later the other two arrived from the rear. One knifed him in the back. The biggest of the trio grabbed him from behind and pinned his arms. The first black stabbed at his throat. The blade entered just above the collarbone and drove down through his lungs and into his heart. He continued struggling, but blood was spewing from his mouth and he was already dying. The second black kept stabbing him. There were no screams, just grunts and gasps and the horrifying sound of tearing flesh. Mirrors jutted between bars along the tier, periscopes of men trying to see what was going on. Whites began yelling and rattling the bars to drive off the killers. They were watching a murder and unable to do anything to stop it. Men on tiers above and below called out, “What’s goin’ on?”
“Them niggers is killin’ a motherfucker!” A black voice: “Gonna get all you honky motherfuckers.”
The killers sprinted down the rear stairs as a score of guards arrived on the run. Only six blacks were out of their cells. All were taken into custody for investigation. A bloody knife was found beneath a blood-spattered denim jacket in a trash can. Neither item led to anyone. The next morning, following calls from the local NAACP chapter, the associate warden told the captain to release the six blacks because there was no evidence against them. Instead he ordered several friends of the victim to be locked up, the logic being that they might try to retaliate. Before they could be released, guards discovered traces of blood on the shoes of three; plus they told conflicting stories. The associate warden rescinded the release order.
That afternoon, word got around that guards would look the other way when whites struck back. Bias was long established, but outright license to kill was something new. The unholy alliance of white guards and convicts was not mutual love but shared hatred. Until recent years, most guards had been even-handed dealing with convicts.
The senseless murder in the East Cell House was the catalyst to madness. Even I, who had empathy for the anguish of the black man in America, now seethed with racial hatred. When the slow unlock for supper began, half a tier at a time, faces showed how things were going. White convicts were sullen and silent; blacks were laughing and joking. When the fifth tier of the East Cell House was unlocked, whistles suddenly began bleating. Guards ran up the stairway. They found two blacks in their cell, lying in their blood. One walked out, seriously wounded. The other was half under the bottom bunk, spuming blood from his mouth with each breath. That indicated a punctured lung. A gun rail guard had four whites covered, and blacks on the tier were pointing them out. Most guards were uninterested in investigating what had happened. Both victims lived. They claimed that two whites had run into their cell and started stabbing the moment the security bar went up, while the other two whites held everyone else at bay on the tier. The jocular laughter had turned to silence.
Seventy-two hours passed without incident except for a fistfight. The officials were considering a return to normal routine. Kitchen workers were already following the usual routine. The culinary department had a locker room and shower on the second floor. It could be reached only up a narrow concrete-walled stairway. More than one unsolved murder had occurred in the area, the last one of a stool pigeon whose jugular was literally torn from his throat. While officials were considering an unlock, half a dozen white convicts filed up the stairway, each with a knife in his belt. Five blacks were in the room, shaving, showering, rinsing their hands, or standing at the urinal, when the whites came through the door. One black saw the attack coming and ran into a wire enclosure where towels were stored. He held the door closed. The others had nowhere to go. Within seconds, blood was splattering the walls. Blacks were running in circles, followed by whites with knives. One husky black youth lowered his head and charged at the narrow entrance to the stairs. Two Hell’s Angels waited. He got past the first one and crashed into the second. Both of them went down the stairs. The white broke his ankle. The black had several wounds, and a shiv was hanging from his buttock. He ran into the kitchen proper, where I happened to be standing next to Lieutenant Ziemer and the watch sergeant, both of whom were eating bacon-and-egg sandwiches. “I’m hit,” the black convict said. Indeed, his white T-shirt was bloody and the shiv was dangling. It had a certain absurdity. The sergeant told him, “You’re not hurt that bad. Wait over there.”
The black who got down the stairs actually saved the lives of the others. The whites thought the alarm was given, and they fled before finishing off the remaining trio. One of the victims died. His spinal cord had been severed. He went into a coma and never regained consciousness. The other victims were never shown photos to identify. Higher officials were hamstrung by the hostile indifference of their sergeants and lieutenants. The plan to unlock the prison was put on hold. Cold sandwiches were pushed through the bars twice a day, except for the previously mentioned “essential workers.” They were served hot meals. I was locked up all day, but when the shift changed I was let out. About 10:00 P.M., Lieutenant Ziemer went to Key Control and drew the keys to the kitchen’s walk-in refrigerators. It was T-bone time for the favored few, me and the late cleanup crew. During the day I worked on cutting the novel and writing my first essay; it was about prison’s racial troubles.
Gone was the laughter by blacks of the first few days, but blacks and whites who had known each other since childhood now passed with stone faces, without speaking or even acknowledging the other’s existence. Friendships ceased. In a world absolutely integrated, each cell identical with every other cell, each man eating the same food and wearing the same clothes, racial hatred was malevolent and intractable. Most convicts lacked a sanctuary where they could relax. Even the cell offered no safety. An empty jar could be filled with gas and smashed against the bars, followed by a book of flaming matches. It happened more than once. Going to eat, even half a tier at a time, with two gun bulls fifteen feet away, required passing blind spots on the stair landings where an ambush could be laid. A group of whites or blacks could be waiting for someone of the opposite color, or maybe they were simply waiting for another friend—but someone of the opposite color wouldn’t know why they were there and had to virtually brush against them while going by. A white was jumped that way, but he managed to get away. Ten minutes later in another cell house, a white lunged at a black but exposed his knife before he was in range. The black saw it and bolted down the tier.
The associate warden’s committee of inmates was allowed to roam the cell houses at night, hopefully to talk to the militants and end the war. One white used the peacekeeping unlock to take a shower. A black caught him naked and wet and stabbed him in the neck. Miraculously he survived. Two black guards worked the cell house that night. They covered for the black assailant as the white guards had covered for whites in other situations.
The next day a friend of the latest victim lunged into a group of blacks with a knife. He stabbed one through the upper arm. Another black jumped on the assailant’s back and pulled him down. Guards arrived and overpowered him. He would get a five-to-life for possession of the knife.
In the North Cell House the convicts reached a truce. No attacks would be made in the building. Outside the building it was still open season. Neither side entirely believed the other. No white or group of whites could speak for every other white, nor could any group of blacks speak for all other blacks. Yet the truce held as days became weeks, at least in the North Cell House.
In the rest of San Quentin a week went by, then two weeks. So many convicts were locked up that they were four and five deep in the hole, and the buses were rolling. After another ten days, the prison was slowly returned to regular schedule. On Saturday afternoon the weekend movie was shown in the North Mess Hall. One of the blacks involved in the shower stabbing had not been picked up. He was in the movie. When “The End” flashed onscreen and the lights went up, the crowd started moving toward the exits. A white and his Chicano homeboy tried to stick the black, but someone yelled a warning and he got away.
Minutes later a hundred blacks were bunched under the weather shed, facing an equal number of whites and some Chicanos grouped next to the East Cell House. The Big Yard was totally silent. The convict disc jockey in the prison radio room then turned the country music full blast. I’ll never forget the song: “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You.” I couldn’t help laughing.
Only four or five of the white clique who did the killing were still in the general population. The rest were in segregation. Two of the remainder walked toward the blacks, as if going for a drink of water at the fountain amid them. One small black started to ease forward through the crowd, trying to move in from the rear. Several others moved with him. The two whites turned suddenly. One drew a roofing hatchet, the other a shiv the size of a short sword. The small black ducked back and discarded his knife, stopped by both the size and weaponry of the opposition and by the clacking sound of lever-action rifles being readied. It was the blacks that the white guards would shoot.
The whites near the East Cell House had started forward but now stopped. The two men in front got back into the crowd. A black guard kept one of them in sight, but the convict managed to drop his shiv and kick it into the crowd. Someone got rid of it.
Once more the prison was locked down. Two months passed before it was slowly unlocked. Now, however, guards carried nightsticks, the first time since the lead-tipped canes were taken away in 1940. Nobody was indicted or convicted of the stabbing and killings. Marin County didn’t want San Quentin convicts in its courthouse.
DURING THE DAYS OF the long lockdown, I cut 20 percent of the book I was working on, No Beast So Fierce. Every extraneous page, paragraph, sentence, or word was considered. That was what Merrill Pollack at W. W. Norton & Co. said he wanted, and even if he couldn’t offer me a contract in advance, his had been the most interest anyone had shown in seventeen years. Besides, what else did I have to do? When I sent it back, I included a story about the race war I’ve just described.
Two months later, I had a pass to see my caseworker to prepare the report for my yearly appearance before the parole board. Each cell house now had a row of cinder block offices on the floor. A young man fresh from San Francisco State, he had been a caseworker for several months. I knocked on the door.
“Oh yeah, Bunker. Come in. Let’s go get your file.” As we walked along the front of the cinder block cubicles to the first cell where records were kept in file cabinets, he said, “By the way, the warden’s office called and authorized a phone call to New York.”
“A phone call to New York? What about?”
“They didn’t say.”
He unlocked the cabinet and went through the manila folders. Most files or “jackets” were between a quarter- and a half-inch thick. The caseworker found mine and grunted as he pulled it out. It was about the thickness of a Los Angeles central telephone directory. While walking back to the office, he hoisted it to test the weight. “I’ve never even seen a file this big. As a matter of fact, this is twice the size of any file I’ve seen.” We turned into the office, and he went behind the desk. “What’s this?” He put on his glasses and looked at a slip of paper Scotch-taped to the outside of the folder, then burst into laughter. “Do you know what it says?”
I shook my head.
“It says: ’See file number two.’”
I saw the humor, but it was also sad. It was my life.
“Let’s make this call,” he said. He had the prison operator give him an outside line; then he dialed and handed me the telephone.
“Watkins Agency,” a woman said.
“My name’s Edward Bunker. I’m supposed to call.”
“Oh yes, Mike wants to talk to you.”
A voice one would expect from Victorian times came on the line. “Why, hello, Mr. Bunker, Mike Watkins here. I finally get to talk to you. Do you know what this is all about?”
“Uhhh . . . maybe . . . I dunno . . . I mean I hope.”
He chuckled. “Merrill Pollack at W. W. Norton has made an offer to publish your book. The advance is small, but Norton is a good publishing house and I think we should take the offer.”
“Oh . . . yes . . . sure . . . whatever you say.”
“I was sure that was what you’d say. Oh, and one more thing. Louis Lapham at Harper’s wants to publish that article you sent him about prison race war. He wants it for the February lead.”
Seventeen years, six unpublished novels, scores of unpublished stories without seeing so much as one word in print. Writing had become my only chance to escape the morass of my existence. I had persevered even when the candle of hope had burned out. I had persevered from habit, because I had no idea what else to do. Now, in one day in one phone call, one of America’s most prestigious magazines and a quality book publisher had agreed to publish my first essay and my sixth novel. Years before, when I first embarked on the path of becoming a writer, I had visions of what it would do for me. I would live a mixture of Hemingway, Scott and Zelda, and the then-famous Françoise Sagan, who had a smash international best-seller while a teenager. Writing a good book would open doors for me. The world would read the truths I would write. I would make a lotus grow from the mud. Those dreams were seventeen years old, fourteen of which had been spent behind grim prison walls. I was happy, of course, but time had taken the sheen from the dream. I had no idea what the future would hold beyond my continuing to write. I had already embarked on another novel.
That night in my cell I tried to conjure the same old dreams. They remained opaque and obscure. The truth of the subsequent two and a half decades would be greater, in most respects, than my visions of forty-five years ago. The dream was fulfilled—in spades. My four novels are still in print in nine countries, and the first, No Beast So Fierce, remains so twenty-five years after initial publication. A lotus definitely grows from the mud.