George L. Jackson - Blood in My Eye

George L. Jackson

Random House New York

To the black Communist youth

To their fathers

We will now criticize the unjust with the weapon

My dear only surviving son,

I went to Mount Vernon August 7th, 1971, to visit the grave site of my heart your keepers murdered in cold disregard for life.

His grave was supposed to be behind your grandfathers and grandmothers. But I couldnt find it. There was no marker. Just mowed grass. The story of our past. I sent the keeper a blank check for a headstoneand two extra sitesblood in my eye!!!

In his introduction to George Jacksons Soledad Brother, Jean Genet wrote, Nothing has been willed, written or composed for the sake of a book ... it is both a weapon of liberation and a poem of love. This book, too, is a weapon, but one entirely willed and purposeful. It was completed barely a week before the authors murder in San Quentin on August 21, 1971. It was sent out of the Adjustment Center with specific instructions for its publication, almost as if the author knew that he would never live to see its appearance in print. Describing it a few days before the end, George said, Im not a writer, but all of its me, the way I want it, the way I see it. What he saw and what he wanted, the central passion of his life, was war, the revolutionary war of the people against their oppressors, a war which grew out of perfect love and perfect hate.

Ive been in rebellion all my life, he wrote in one of his letters. For a young black growing up in the ghetto, the first rebellion is always crime. Georges first experience with Amerikan law came at fourteen when he was arrested in Chicago for stealing a purse. From then on, his life was a constant succession of arrests, juvenile homes, paroles and more arrests. At age eighteen he was convicted of stealing $70.00 from a gas station. His lawyer promised him that he would make a deal with the D.A. if George confessed to second degree robbery. He told George it was his only chance because he had a record. Dont put the court to the expense of a trial, and they will give you county time. Instead he was given an indeterminate sentenceone year to life.

The first time I was put in prison, it was just like dying. Just to exist at all calls for some very heavy psychic adjustment. Being captured was the first of my fears. It may have been an acquired characteristic built up over centuries of black bondage.

The turning point in his life came when

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao... and they redeemed me. For the first four years, I studied nothing but economics and military ideas. I met the black guerrillas, George Big Jake Lewis, and James Carr, W.C. Nolen, Bill Christmas, Tony Gibson and many others. We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.

He wasnt alone in his discovery. At the same time, other prisoners were just beginning to discover Marx, Fanon and Mao, who provided them with a new way of regarding themselves and their strugglea new standard of moral judgment. I have been in rebellion all my life. I just didnt know it. The social insights of Marx and others made it possible for them to have a sense of themselves as members of the human community, members of a revolutionary brotherhood.

In prison, commitment to revolution has a special meaning and a special price. To be identified as a revolutionary by the prison authorities means an almost permanent denial of parole, separation from the other prisoners, solitary confinement (usually in maximum security wings of the prison), transfers from one prison to another, beatings, bad food. It brings down on you the entire punitive and repressive force of a completely totalitarian system.

Inside prison George practiced a very special kind of devotion and love. When convicts talk about him, they often use the term for real. Many inmates murder mouth and sell wolf tickets; they do a lot of heavy talking, but when it comes down to the point of action, they disappear. George, however, was as good as his word. Whenever he made a statement of some kind, it would be followed by action. If you were the victim of a racial attack inside prison, there was a good chance that he would turn up fighting for you at your side.

Most of his offenses inside prisonthe reasons why he was forced to spend over seven years in various forms of solitary confinement, including the infamous strip cells in Soledads O wing, the reasons why he was never paroled involve his defense of other inmates. What made him particularly dangerous to the prison authorities was this enormous talent as an organizer.

We have got to be together. We have got to be in a position to tell the pig that if he doesnt serve the food when its warm and pass out the scouring powder on time, everybody on the tier is going to throw something at him, then things will change and life will be easier. You dont get that kind of unity when youre fighting with each other. Im always telling the brothers that some of those whites are willing to work with us against the pigs. All they got to do is stop talking honky. When the races start fighting, all you have is one maniac group against another. Thats just what the pigs want.

It is not coincidental that the need for unity among revolutionary groups is one of the major themes of this book.

Try to remember how you felt at the most depressing moment of your life, the moment of your deepest dejection. That is how I feel all the time. No matter what level my consciousness may be, asleep, awake, in between. The thing is there and it keeps me moving, pins my eye to the ball, uptight, twenty-four hours a day.

Locked down inside his cell, George devoted himself to study. His painfully acquired scholarship in the fields of Marxian economics and history rivaled that of most college professors. But sometimes, for days on end, reality itself would vanish from his cell.

I would be sitting in a special locked isolation cell, sometimes even with the lock welded shut, and there would be no one to talk tojust the sound of screaming voices. And because there is no human contact, you depend on books. No contact with people. Special lock welded on the door. Nobody around. Im strictly by myself. The only friend I had was a book. Sometimes Id find myself talking out loud to the author. Id sort of wake myself up and Id hear myself talking to this other person. I guess it was like some kind of wish fulfillment. When Im asleep at night, I still find myself talking to those guys.

Typing laboriously on a plastic typewriter, George published position papers which dealt with prison life and revolutionary politics from a Marxian point of view.

He paid a heavy price for his activities. When the prison couldnt break him through solitary confinement, they attempted to have him killed by other inmates: They were forced to frame me and set me up for the final kill. The word was out among white convicts: Get Jackson. It will do you some good. Once he remarked that there had been twenty setups on his life inside prison. It got so that when he left his cell he was always ready to parry an attack.

But nothing could mitigate the pain of confinement.

And the years stretched out and a whole decade passed.

In the context of his life what happened next had a grim inevitability.

On January 13, 1970, a new exercise yard was opened in the maximum security wing of Soledad Prison. Eight whites and seven blacks were skin-searched and sent out into the yard. Predictably a fight broke out between the whites and the blacks. Without any warning, a tower guard who had a reputation as a crack shot began to fire. He fired four times and three black inmates were killed. One white prisoner was wounded in the groin by a shot that ricocheted.