My Generation (33 page)

T
wenty years ago, when he was thirty, a talented white college-educated jazz pianist named James Blake found himself serving a two-year sentence in the Duval County jail in Jacksonville, Florida, charged with petit larceny and breaking and entering. It was his first experience at doing time, and although Blake was absurdly out of character as a criminal type and, by his own admission, the world's most inept burglar, he discovered that confinement offered such sovereign satisfactions and fulfillments that he caused himself to be incarcerated at the Jacksonville jail or, even more happily, at “The Joint,” the Florida State Penitentiary at Raiford, for thirteen of the next twenty years.

Blake's work—a collection of letters written to various friends, including two writers he had come to know and who had befriended him, Nelson Algren and James Purdy—comprises a vivid and illuminating chronicle. It is one of the most wickedly entertaining of its kind, a thief's journal that reflects the mordant, droll, nervously sensitive consciousness of a man for whom prison was far less a purgatory than a retreat, a kind of timeless, walled Yaddo for the gifted misfit.

Since the Marquis de Sade there has been a paucity of significant prison literature and there have been too few articulate recorders of prison life. In our own time, save for the work of Jean Genet, writings by and about prisoners have not often surpassed in quality the level of the Sunday supplements.
Our legacy of inside accounts has tended to be characterized by garishly colored tall tales about escapes from Devil's Island, pedestrian reminiscences by celebrity cons, death-row sensationalism on the order of
The Last Mile
, and characteristically American examples of uplift and redemption, such as
The Birdman of Alcatraz
.

Many of these are well-meaning and even informative but often grossly lurid and, in any case, lacking the perceptions and insights necessary to render the prison environment and the lives of its victims with the complexity they deserve. There has been much earnest sociology, some of it readable, useful polemics by knowledgeable observers like John Bartlow Martin, and sympathetic accounts by such humane officials as Warden Lewis E. Lawes and Warden Clinton T. Duffy, who despite their sincerity and compassion retain the point of view of the overlord, the Establishment.

To some extent, this situation resembles that of the historiography of American Negro slavery. Of those “many thousand gone,” only a few such eloquent witnesses as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Josiah Henson (all ex-slaves) survived to tell us what it was truly like to live under that unspeakable oppression. In particular Douglass, a superb psychologist who would be horrified to observe the foolishness being purveyed about Negro history by many present-day black militant intellectuals, knew that slavery (which to an important degree resembles prison in that both are closed, totalitarian systems) could foster rebelliousness and the wildest desire for freedom in the breasts of many men while at the same time the very ruthless and monolithic nature of its despotism might, in certain circumstances, wreck the personalities of other men, making them supinely content with bondage, eager and happy to genuflect before authority.

Like slavery, prison life is an abominable but nonetheless human situation in which men will respond to their predicament in diverse ways that still reflect their individuality and humanity. It is a measure of the excellence of James Blake's work and the grace of his survival that he has given us a record that is both an enormously revealing chronicle of life behind walls and a fascinating self-portrait by a man who continues to be steadfastly an individualist, telling his own truths.

Like Genet, Blake is both a prose stylist of distinction and a homosexual; the incandescent homosexual activity of prison life is of course the preoccupying concern—the obsession—of Genet and the entire jailhouse mystique of carnal love is a large element in Genet's recidivism, as, at least
implicitly, it is for Blake. But here the resemblance ends. Genet is a visionary and a mystical genius, and Blake's gift, however beguiling, is a minor one. Then, too, his voice, unlike that of the Frenchman whose tone is passionately embroiled, remains detached, ironic, witty, lyrical.

If Genet is the rhapsodist of criminals and their greatest metaphysician, Blake is an artificer in light verse, the criminal's best satirist, a sardonic voice that is often surprisingly poignant—one is somehow reminded of Chaplin. An epistolary collection runs the risk of monotony, however; the reader begins to detect that solitary, self-concerned, droning sound. One of the strengths of Blake's letters is their consistent readability, the secret of which is a lilting, rueful, bittersweet awareness of the sheer monstrousness of things, and a gift for hilarity in the midst of a depiction of grim events that blows like a fresh wind through the pages and keeps them mercifully cleansed of self-pity.

Blake is especially brilliant in his descriptions of his fellow convicts—both the “straight” ones and those with whom he is having homosexual relationships—and often writes with a fine novelist's canny eye for detail, incorporating so much in a brief passage that its resonance, physical and moral, haunts one bleakly long afterwards:

So now I am back on the J-Range where I feel more comfortable, and my cell partner is a check artist from Maryland who has been ostensibly rehabilitated to the extent that he is leaving on parole next week. Glib, devious, sadly shallow and incredibly beautiful, the Narcissine mirror that goes everywhere with him has prevented him from absorbing anything. (He was locked up with David Siqueiros in Mexico City and could only shrug when I asked him about it.) He claims he is the way he is because his mother held his hand in the fire when she caught him stealing. She should have put his head in the fire. No no no, that is quite wrong. He has been amiable, pleasant and almost completely absent, it has been like coming together with a Popsicle. Put the blame on the cosmos, put the blame on Mame. His prognosis, murky, and what is not?

Or, describing another relationship, Blake indulges his flair for extravaganza:

I'm sharing a cell now with a young cat sentenced to the chair for gangbang. He's a beautiful child, a little solemn sometimes, which I guess is
allowable under the circumstances. He asked me what I thought Eternity was like, and all I could offer was a guess—an Olivia de Havilland movie on television….Ina laudable attempt to dodge the thunderbolt (his case is on appeal) he has been improving each shining hour by hitting the Glory Road with the travelling bands of flagellants that haunt the jail—Holy Rollers, Mormons, Baptists, Anabaptists—and he has become an Eleventh Hour postulant in the Seventh Day Opportunists. These pious acts swing a lot of weight, such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Bless the boy, he's far too beautiful to go down for such a flimsy transgression, and I hope he makes it. The Holy Ones have a lobby in Tallahassee that don't quit.

Yet I should not want to give the impression that the tone of these letters is one of unalloyed facetiousness in the face of adversity, for Blake is a profoundly serious writer, and the jocular tone often is merely a decorative gloss upon insights that are original and startling: “I remember a black lover I had….Our arrangement was an eminently workable one. We were aware that the powerful attraction we felt was because we were bizarre to one another, and we were also aware that hate was just as much present as love in our relationship. That was a really swinging affair, no nonsense at all. Not a hell of a lot of conversation, but then there wasn't much time for it, either.”

But why is it that so many felons return to The Joint, abandon freedom in favor of prison's seductive lure? We know through their own confessions that many men—more than is comfortable to think about—have murdered for the very reason that they were aware that the consequence of their act would be the noose or the electric chair. If this alone is almost sufficient justification for the abolition of the death penalty, it would likewise seem that the hunger, the visceral longing, the truly quivering nostalgia that Blake, representing so many other men, felt for The Joint when away from it would be sound enough reason to abolish the institution of the prison itself. More than once Blake committed crimes—chiefly burglary as a result of the need for drugs—through a barely subliminal impulse to achieve his reincarceration; it is this mighty urge to return to the smooth, amniotic surroundings of The Joint—where all things are provided and the tensions of a too-often-terrifying and monstrous outer world are erased—that Blake anatomizes
better than any convict before him and, together with the theme of homosexuality with which that urge is so closely connected, helps give the book the quality of revelation.

If some of the true horrors of prison life are absent from
The Joint
and if one does not obtain a sense of the dark midnight of the soul that one gets from such prison sojourners as Wilde and Dostoevsky, it is simply that for a man for whom prison is a shelter and a haven—a spiritual home—the horrors cannot seem so oppressive after all. Also, Blake is a self-confessed masochist; such a predilection for suffering, needless to say, takes care of a lot of things when one's associates, as Blake describes them once with a kind of half-hearted antipathy, are “dull and brutal and often more square than the squares outside.”

In a remarkable passage written from freedom, Blake describes what it is about prison that he finds so irresistibly appealing; how many legions of men have felt the same way can only be a matter of conjecture, though it must assuredly be vast.

You know what's in my mind? The Joint. I thought I was getting off free from that experience. I thought they hadn't managed to touch me, but it colors every moment and every action of my life. I think always of the peace that I had there—this working to survive and surviving to work seems increasingly like an arrangement I would not have chosen were it up to me. Those gates, man, they're inviting. So much lovely time stretches out before you, time to read, to write, to play, to practice, to speculate, contemplate—and without the idiot necessity to Hold Up Your End. It is so well understood, the lines are so definitely drawn: I am Society and you are Not, and there is such a weary patience with nonconforming, it is infinitely restful.

Elsewhere:

[I feel] the inexplicable pull of The Joint, trying to fathom the Why of this incredible homesickness, trying to name for myself the kinship of the doomed I felt for the other cons when I was in.

Nearing the time of one of his paroles, Blake wrote to a friend:

There's a steady and joyful surge of anticipation when I think about the Outside. I think of the freedom to walk in the night under the stars in the blessed dark, after these endless months of living my life in the shrillness of daylight—savoring again the poignancy of twilight. When I think of how shining new things will seem to me, I am filled with excitement.

This of course is fustian (though truly meant at the time) and, significantly, the tribute it pays to liberty strikes perhaps the only false note in a unique, honest, moving book which, telling us much about the paradoxes of one man's mind, enhancing our knowledge about the nature of freedom (if only because it demonstrates that we are still unable to define it), also tells us much about ourselves and our most fallible institution, The Joint.

[
New York Times Book Review
, April 25, 1971.]

T
oward the end of Joan Barthel's excellent book about Peter Reilly, Judge John Speziale—the jurist who presided over the trial and who later granted Peter a new trial—is quoted as saying: “The law is imperfect.” As portrayed in this book, Judge Speziale appears an exemplary man of the law, as fair and compassionate a mediator as we have any right to expect in a system where all too many of his colleagues are mediocre or self-serving or simply crooked. Certainly his decision in favor of a retrial—an action in itself so extraordinary as to be nearly historic—was the product of a humane and civilized intellect. Judge Speziale is one of the truly attractive figures in this book, which, although it has many winning people among its dramatis personae, contains more than one deplorable actor. And the judge is of course right: the law
is
imperfect. His apprehension of this fact is a triumph over the ordinary and the expected (in how many prisons now languish other Peter Reillys, victims of the law's “imperfections” but lacking Peter's many salvaging angels?), and is woven into his most honorable decision to grant Peter a new trial. But though he doubtless spoke from the heart as well as the mind and with the best intentions, the judge has to be found guilty of an enormous understatement.

The law (and one must assume that a definition of the law includes the totality of its many arms, including the one known as law enforcement) is not merely imperfect, it is all too often a catastrophe. To the weak and the
underprivileged the law in all of its manifestations is usually a punitive nightmare. Even in the abstract the law is an institution of chaotic inequity, administered so many times with such arrogant disdain for the most basic principles of justice and human decency as to make mild admissions of “imperfection” sound presumptuous. If it is true that the law is the best institution human beings have devised to mediate their own eternal discord, this must not obscure the fact that the law's power is too often invested in the hands of mortal men who are corrupt, or if not corrupt, stupid, or if not stupid, then devious or lazy, and all of them capable of the most grievous mischief. The case of Peter Reilly, and Joan Barthel's book, powerfully demonstrate this ever-present danger and the sleepless vigilance ordinary citizens must steadfastly keep if the mechanism we have devised for our own protection does not from time to time try to destroy even the least of our children.

Naturally the foregoing implies, accurately, that I am convinced of Peter Reilly's innocence. I had begun to be convinced of at least the very strong possibility of his innocence when I first read Mrs. Barthel's article in the magazine
New Times
early in 1974.
¹
I happened on the article by sheerest chance, perhaps lured into reading it with more interest than I otherwise might have by the fact that the murder it described took place in Canaan, hardly an hour's drive away from my home in west-central Connecticut. (Is there not something reverberantly sinister about it, and indicative of the commonplaceness of atrocity in our time, that I should not until then have known about this vicious crime so close at hand and taking place only a few months before?) The Barthel article was a stark, forceful, searing piece, which in essence demonstrated how an eighteen-year-old boy, suspected by the police of murdering his mother, could be crudely yet subtly (and there is no contradiction in those terms) manipulated by law-enforcement officers so as to cause him to make an incriminating, albeit fuzzy and ambiguous, statement of responsibility for the crime. What I read was shocking, although I did not find it a novel experience. I am not by nature a taker-up of causes but in the preceding twelve years I had enlisted myself in aiding two people whom I felt to be victims of the law. Unlike Peter, both of these persons were young black men.

In the earlier of these cases the issue was not guilt but rather the punishment. Ben Reid, convicted of murdering a woman in the black ghetto of Hartford, had been sentenced to die in Connecticut's electric chair. His was
the classic case of the woebegone survivor of poverty and abandonment who, largely because of his disadvantaged or minority status, was the recipient of the state's most terrible revenge. I wrote an article about Ben Reid in a national magazine and was enormously gratified when I saw that the piece helped significantly in the successful movement by a lot of other indignant people to have Ben's life spared. The other case involved Tony Maynard, whom I had known through James Baldwin and who had been convicted and sentenced to a long term for allegedly killing a marine in Greenwich Village. I worked to help extricate Tony, believing that he was innocent, which he was—as indeed the law finally admitted by freeing him, but after seven years of Tony's incarceration (among other unspeakable adversities he was badly injured as an innocent bystander in the cataclysm at Attica) and a series of retrials in which his devoted lawyers finally demonstrated the wretched police collusion, false and perjured evidence, shady deals on the part of the district attorney's office, and other maggoty odds and ends of the law's “imperfection,” which had caused his unjust imprisonment in the first place.

These experiments, then, led me to absorb the Barthel article in
New Times
with something akin to a shock of recognition; horrifying in what it revealed, the piece recapitulated much of the essence of the law's malfeasance that had created Tony Maynard's seven-year martyrdom. It should be noted at this moment, incidentally, that Mrs. Barthel's article was of absolutely crucial significance in the Reilly case, not only because it was the catalytic agent whereby the bulk of Peter's bail was raised, but because it so masterfully crystallized and made clear the sinister issues of the use of the lie detector and the extraction of a confession by the police, thereby making Peter's guilt at least problematical to all but the most obtuse reader. Precise and objective yet governed throughout, one felt, by a rigorous moral conscience, the article was a superb example of journalism at its most effective and powerful. (It was nearly inexcusable that this piece and its author received no mention in the otherwise praiseworthy report on the Reilly case published by
The New York Times
in 1975.)
²
Given the power of the essay, then, I have wondered later why I so readily let Peter Reilly and his plight pass from my mind and my concern. I think it may have been because of the fact that since Peter was not black or even of any shade of tan he would somehow be exempt from that ultimate dungeon-bound ordeal that is overwhelmingly the lot of those who spring from minorities in America. But one
need not even be a good Marxist to flinch at this misapprehension. The truth is simpler. Bad enough that Peter lived in a shacklike house with his “disreputable” mother; the critical part is this:
he was poor
. Fancy Peter, if you will, as an affluent day-student at Hotchkiss School only a few miles away, the mother murdered but in an ambience of coffee tables and wall-to-wall carpeting. It takes small imagination to envision the phalanx of horn-rimmed and button-down lawyers interposed immediately between Peter and Sergeant Kelly with his insufferable lie detector.

This detestable machine, the polygraph (the etymology of which shows that the word means “to write much,” which is about all that can be said for it), is to my mind this book's chief villain, and the one from which Peter Reilly's most miserable griefs subsequently flowed. It is such an American device, such a perfect example of our blind belief in “scientism” and the efficacy of gadgets; and its performance in the hands of its operator—friendly, fatherly Sergeant Timothy Kelly, the mild collector of seashells—is also so American in the way it produces its benign but ruthless coercion. Like nearly all the law-enforcement officers in this drama, Sergeant Kelly is “nice”; it is as hard to conceive of him with a truncheon or a blackjack as with a volume of Proust. Plainly, neither Kelly nor his colleague Lieutenant Shay, who was actively responsible for Peter's confession, are vicious men; they are merely undiscerningly obedient, totally devoid of that flexibility of mind we call imagination, and they both have a passionate faith in the machine. Kelly especially is an unquestioning votary. “We go strictly by the charts,” he tells an exhausted boy. “And the charts say you hurt your mother last night.”

In a society where everything sooner or later breaks down or goes haywire, where cars fall apart and ovens explode and vacuum cleaners expire through planned obsolescence (surely Kelly must have been victim, like us all, of the Toastmaster), there is something manic, even awesome, about the sergeant's pious belief in the infallibility of his polygraph. And so at a point in his ordeal Peter, tired, confused, only hours removed from the trauma of witnessing his mother's mutilated body, asks, “Have you ever been proven totally wrong? A person, just from nervousness, responds that way?” Kelly replies, “No, the polygraph can never be wrong, because it's only a recording instrument, reacting to you. It's the person interpreting it who could be wrong. But I haven't made that many mistakes in twelve years, in the thousands of people who sat here, Pete.” Such mighty faith and assurances would
have alone been enough to decisively wipe out a young man at the end of his tether. Add to this faith the presumed assumption of Peter's guilt on the part of the sergeant, and to this the outrageously tendentious nature of his questioning, and it is no wonder that a numb and bedraggled Peter was a setup for Lieutenant Shay, whose manner of extracting a confession from this troubled boy must be deemed a triumph of benevolent intimidation. Together the transcripts of the polygraph testimony and Peter's confession—much of which is recorded in this book—have to comprise another one of those depressing but instructive scandals that litter the annals of American justice.

Yet there is much more in the case of Peter Reilly, set down on these pages in rich detail, which makes it such a memorable and unique affair. What could be more harmoniously “American,” in the best sense of that mangled word, than the spectacle of a New England village rising practically en masse to come to the support of one of their own young whom they felt to be betrayed and abandoned? Mrs. Barthel, who lived with this case month in and month out during the past few years, and who got to know well so many of Peter's friends and his surrogate “family,” tells this part of the story with color, humor, and affection; and her feeling for the community life of a small town like Canaan—with its family ties and hostilities, its warmth and crankiness and crooked edges—gives both a depth and vivacity to her narrative; never is she lured into the purely sensational. As in every story of crime and justice, the major thrust of the drama derives from its central figures, and they are all here: not only the law's automata—the two “nice” cops whose dismal stratagems thrust Peter into his nightmare at the outset—but the judge, prosecutor, and counsel for the defense. Regarding these personages, Mrs. Barthel's art most often and tellingly lies in her subtle selectivity—and her onlooker's silence. What she allows the State's Attorney, Mr. Bianchi, simply to utter with his own lips, for instance, says more about Mr. Bianchi and the savagery of a certain genus of prosecutorial mind than any amount of editorializing or speculative gloss. As for the fascinating aftermath of the trial—Arthur Miller's stubborn and deservedly celebrated detective work in company with the redoubtable Mr. Conway, the brilliantly executed labors of the new defense counsel, the discovery of fresh evidence that led to the order of another trial, and other matters—all of these bring to a climax an eccentric, tangled, significant, and cautionary chronicle of the wrongdoing of the law and its belated redemption.

Joan Barthel's book would deserve our attention if for no other reason than that it focuses a bright light on the unconscionable methods which the law, acting through its enforcement agencies and because of its lust for punishment, uses to victimize the most helpless members of our society. And thus it once again shows the law's tragic and perdurable imperfection. It also reminds us that while judicial oppression undoubtedly falls the heaviest on those from minority groups, it will almost as surely hasten to afflict the poor and the “unrespectable,” no matter what their color. But rather triumphantly, and perhaps most importantly,
A Death in Canaan
demonstrates the will of ordinary people, in their ever astonishing energy and determination, to see true justice prevail over the law's dereliction.

[Introduction to
A Death in Canaan
, by Joan Barthel; Dutton, 1976.]