A Time to Die: the Attica Prison Revolt. Tom Wicker. © Haymarket Books 2011, under license from the University of Nebraska Press (1994). 346 pages.
(In the next of my “attempts to understand the U.S. of my childhood” series …)
In September 1971, inmates at Attica Correctional Facility upstate New York took over part of the prison, holding 38 guards as hostages and presenting a list of demands and proposals to the authorities of New York State. At issue was the abominable condition of life for the prisoners.
They had asked for better conditions, asked to be heard, and had gotten nowhere. So they took action.
Among their demands, they made a list of folks that should be summoned as observers to be present and witness to the events of the takeover, to ensure their story was told accurately, their demands and negotiations presented accurately. Thus it was that Tom Wicker, middle-aged, white, politically barely-left-of-center associate editor for the New York Times, who had covered My Lai, Kent State, the Chicago convention, Orangeburg, and most other stories of unrest, now found himself at Attica.
This is Wicker’s story of five days that ended with 43 deaths — 11 guards and 32 inmates, almost all killed by prison guards and state troopers in a 6-minute melee that didn’t have to happen. That didn’t have to happen.
“Wicker’s story,” though, isn’t simply about that deadly day. He takes us through conversations and deliberations as observers come to know and trust each other, and as the prisoners come to know and trust them. They spend time in the occupied D-yard, listening to the hopeful and/or revolutionary oratory of the inmate leaders. As they try to be honest brokers of powerfully imbalanced negotiations, these observers have moments of fearing for their own safety — mostly from the armed guards.
Nor does Wicker’s story stay in the prison yard or in the moment.
The book is his reflection on race, (most of the prisoners were Black and Puerto Rican; the prison guards and officials were all white), on being raised in the Jim Crow south, about what it means to stand up for people, what it means to be a “liberal” vs a “revolutionary,” and the emotional toll of figuring it out. “(Fellow observer and Detroit Chronicle reporter, James) Ingram was right; they all were coming face to face with more knowledge of themselves than any could have wished.”
It is too, though, the story of those days in September, about Wicker’s coming to understand the inmates’ circumstances — the “conditions” — and the roots of their desire for improvements and their willingness to die in the attempt; about his attempt at intervention with state authorities, including a personal call to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (because when you’re with the Times, the governor takes your call), who approached every conversation as if it were a campaign event; about Wicker’s self-surprising willingness to put himself in danger for this cause. Ultimately, it is about his somewhat mournful realization that he had failed and was still a moderate. It is about his trust in institutions and reconsidering the “law ’n’ order” attitude of American politics that emerged in the 1970s and has been a factor in every administration since.
It is also Wicker’s indictment of a chasm he had barely known existed: that between his upper-middle-class world and the world of these inmates and their families — between the ones who run the world to their own benefit and the ones who are merely fodder for the grinding capitalist machinery.
Rockefeller refused to come to Attica, refused to do the one thing that might have quelled the tense and angry (but largely unarmed) inmates and the trigger-happy state police and corrections officers. He sent aides. And Wicker railed. It had been years brewing. Rockefeller had been governor 12 years and knew the conditions, but he was a robber baron long before that. “What right had Nelson Rockefeller to avert his face from the sores and abscesses of a society wrought as much in his name and faith as anyone’s?”
Much of the story reads like a train wreck happening in slow motion. You know what’s coming. The observers sequestered in their “Stewards Room” knew what was coming. They tried to tell the prison and state officials what was coming, a massacre, they said, and tried to divert them off the tracks to avoid the collision. The state authorities would not be moved.
When the invasion and massacre happened, it took just 6 minutes. The guards and troopers exhibited the worst of human behavior; the inmates, though given opportunity, did not kill the hostages they had carefully tended over the course of the occupation. The administration and higher ranking supervisors and officers assumed lower ranks of corrections officers would behave well, and left them unsupervised; instead, these prison guards, who were at the root of the problem to begin with, fired weapons indiscriminately, beat and sodomized inmates who had already been subdued, and humiliated them all. Their emotions and hormones were in overdrive; no one held them back from the vengeance that had been their daydream throughout the stand-off. It was also corrections officers and state troopers who killed the hostage prison guards, shooting many of them in the back, though the prison officials, abetted by lazy media, initially spread the false story that the inmates had killed and castrated the hostages.
The governor after Rockefeller, Hugh Carey, issued a blanket pardon for the event; as a result, none of those officers or administrators was ever charged with any crime.
Isn’t that the way it goes.
Badges and guns do something to a person — to the person carrying, and the person at whom they are pointed. “Wicker did not then understand that so many guns must sooner or later become a force in themselves, an imperative acting upon the men who supposedly control them. If the weapons are in hand, the question of those who have them ultimately becomes ‘Why not use them?’ The more weapons, the more insistent the question; and the burden of explaining why not to use them falls on those who have no guns. But those who have no guns have little credence with those who do.”
The slaughter and its aftermath are barely 10 percent of the length of the book, with much of the tome vacillating between negotiations of the moment and Wicker’s recollections of his earlier life, with a substantial chunk of social and political analysis and context along the way.
The book began slowly for me. Wicker’s insistence on taking us through his own racial upbringing, self-indulgent pages and pages (and pages) about the virtues of his father, his reminiscences of his own encounters with the worst of humanity: these added something, but not to the degree he perhaps intended.
Two specific points I’d like to make:
First, this book was first published in 1975, with reprints in 1994 and 2011. At some point, an editor should have removed Wicker’s casual use of the racial epithet that begins with “n.” It may have been abysmally common in 1975; no one can make that case in the reprints. It is distracting, insulting, painfully anachronistic.
Second, while Wicker quite helpfully included an alphabetical list of the observers who were part of the story at various times, he did not list the prisons administrators and state authorities. I had a challenging time remembering who was who, and the indexing was not as thorough as one might hope.
Kurt Vonnegut called this book “superb.” I found it challenging. I did better when I could read in large blocks rather than fits and starts, but I still napped with some frequency between pages.
Nevertheless, it is a story that needs to be told. My conversations with imprisoned folks these days testify to the ongoing need for the things the Attica inmates demanded: wages for the work they performed, healthy food, religious freedom, the ability to communicate with their families, educated correctional officers, programs of rehabilitation and education, a doctor available to them who speaks their language.
The speeches of the inmate leaders of the purpose of the occupation seemed to me to boil down to this one quote: “They had put out a statement that would be heard worldwide, where the world would know that Attica — ‘even Attica is in the world.’”
They wanted the world to know they existed. Which doesn’t seem revolutionary at all.
Wicker noted in his first tour of the place “that the idea of prison was wrong.” On this we agree. Perhaps the reason we suck at running prisons is because there is no good way to run a prison.