Portrait of a Prisoner

By Roger Rosenblatt

"In my cell, I only have to worry about myself "

I don't think anything that has been created can be destroyed. --Sy Jackson on immortality

Had Mary Etta Jaque of Rochester, N.Y., been at home the night of Sept. 16, 1958, all this might never have happened. She would have opened her front door to her boyfriend, Sylvester Jackson, then 17, and she would have either snuggled up or scolded him for being exuberantly drunk on Thunderbird wine. As it turned out, Mary Etta was not at home that night, and big Sy Jackson, looped and annoyed, kicked in her door. That brought the police, who, says Sy, proceeded to beat up on him in the patrol car. One cop threw a punch, Sy ducked, the cop hit his partner, Sy ran. When Sy was caught, he was beaten up some more. The charge was second-degree assault. On his lawyer's advice, Sy pleaded guilty and was committed to the Elmira Correctional Facility. So began his tour of New York State prisons. By the time he celebrated his 41st birthday last April 18, he had spread 17 years of his life among institutions in Elmira, Comstock, Dannemora, Auburn, Stormville and now Attica, famous Attica.

It hardly looks troublesome these days, this odd, '30s fortress with the Greek-echo name. In September 1971, Attica put hell on display for the nation. There are no signs of a riot today. The shock to one's system lies simply in the place itself, its main wall rising 30 ft. around 53 acres in the middle of dead-quiet upstate greenery. The wall is gray gray. Nothing in nature, including a rock, could be that color. Guards say the wall goes down 30 ft. in spots so as to hold fast in the quicksand. At intervals along the flat surface, watch turrets sit with witch-hat tops; Disney World, had it been built by Albert Speer, would have this look. The wall encompasses five separate cell blocks. Inside these are individual cells, 7 ft. from floor to ceiling, 9 ft. by 6 ft. in area, in which some 2,000 men live among the possessions permitted them.

Sy Jackson sits hunched over at the tail end of his narrow cot. At 5 ft. 11 in. and slightly more than 200 lbs., he ought easily to fill his cell, but he seems to have willed a diminished appearance in order to stay in proportion with his furnishings. Most of these hang on the walls: a chain of beads, a pair of sunglasses, snapshots of his three children. He has copied William Ernest Henley's poem "Invictus" by hand and mounted it with cellophane tape. There is a picture postcard of a sailboat at sunset below what Sy calls his "mind stimulators," words of advice on how best to study: SURVEY, QUESTION, READ, REVIEW, RECITE. Between the postcard and the sunglasses lies a poetic formula: "You imagine what you desire/ You will what you imagine/ You create what you will."

For the most part Sy believes you create what you will, but he also believes one creates what others will for him. The stony face he wears now--the wary eyes resting on the bulging cheek bones, the rare smile that never shows wide enough for warmth--it was not always his look. In Elmira, he says, "I learned how to be hard and cold. I was neither before. I used to dislike fighting so much that if I ever did get into a fight with a kid, I couldn't even hit him in the face. That's the God-honest truth. Then in prison I went through a transition, as if I was beginning to understand another side of human nature, in myself as well as others." Specifically, he learned that generosity was interpreted as weakness. A fellow inmate at Elmira borrowed five packs of cigarettes and refused to pay Sy back. Sy fought him. "It wasn't my nature, it was survival. I would have thrown that guy out the third-floor window."

There is no doubt of it. Even today you see the indignation rising in him as he recalls the cigarette borrower. He talks with his hands; a swallow would be lost in them. Transferred to Comstock after the Elmira incident, Sy was involved in another fight for which he says he was given 45 days in the "strip cell" (one meal every third day, no clothes but shorts and a T shirt, sleep on the floor). Eventually he stopped fighting, but served five years anyway, developing a new opinion of himself. "I didn't like what I was becoming. I'm still not comfortable with me." By the time of his release at the age of 22, he trusted almost no one.

With all the changes that have occurred in him since then, Sy does not say that prison made him what he is; only that it helped. After completing the first five-year term, he took a job in Rochester working for a company that makes tanks for chemicals. He fell in love, got married, had three children. Between them, he and his wife were making close to $16,000 a year; quite enough at the time.

Still, he was moody, depressed.

One night when his two-year-old daughter would not stop crying, he reached for a sixpack. He recalls, horrified, that he was about to fling it at her, and glances sheepishly at the photograph of smiling Alicia, now 18, on the cell wall.

"The problem wasn't the family. It was me. The things that were in me: anger, bitterness, a lack of understanding. I don't want to get, you know, into a highly philosophical or psychological thing; but there was confusion that was not there before." (He uses "you know" when he is about to say something that does not appeal to him.) He pauses. "One day I started, you know, robbing people."

"What were you thinking when you pointed a gun at someone whose money you didn't even need?"

"I wasn't thinking. I was just acting out feelings."

"Why pick robbery?"

"I don't know. It could have been murder."

"Were you getting back at people?"

"No. I had become more like people." He shifts his weight on the cot and looks both certain and surprised.

For armed robbery, and because he was a two-time felony offender, they gave Sy 15 to 30 years, of which he served eleven.

During that time his wife divorced him. At Stormville he got on the wrong side of the "keepers" for speaking his mind, he contends. "This was in '71, when Attica jumped off." The reminder is suddenly chilling in this place. "They said I was trying to change people's ideas. I think any man who sees the truth is obligated to share that truth. That's what I was doing." For the effort, he says, he was handcuffed behind his back and "thrown down a couple of flights of stairs, you know. They fractured my eardrum. They fractured my left cheekbone."

He is interrupted by a rapid banging on the cell wall. He yells:

"Maestro, I'm busy right now!" His neighbor Maestro is so called because he plays the guitar. No, Maestro is not his friend. Sy has no friends. The worst time of day for him is when he is let out of his cell. He finds prison life too dangerous, too unpredictable. He, who would deem it dishonorable to steal from a fellow inmate, has already had a watch and a pocket calculator stolen. He mentions this twice, angrily, in the course of two hours. "In my cell," he says, "I only have to worry about myself."

In his cell he can also do the reading he seems to need. Having recently finished Wuthering Heights, he concludes that "Heathcliff was one of the book's lesser villains" and that "he wasn't as strong as he appeared to be. The real Heathcliff only came through at the end." Then, with curiosity: "When Heathcliff was himself, no one understood him any more." Of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables Sy observes, "Any time you make a person into something other than himself, you make a monster."

He has read almost all of Richard Wright, even The Outsider, Wright's existential novel about a criminal who seeks to get outside everything, including morality and history. To Sy this is impossible: "You can only become so much of an outsider." One is obliged to live in the world, although "you've got to walk up your own staircase, not someone else's." Moreover, Wright, like Bronte and Hugo, was portraying a hero who was partly the victim of others, and partly of himself. When Sy says, "I want to understand whether I was the sole cause of what has happened to me," his expression is earnest to the point of desperation.

On the poem "Invictus," he says he does not believe he is "the master of my fate." The poem is on the wall because such a thing represents a goal. Sy wrote a poem himself, at the age of 18, when he was in Comstock. He recites it too rapidly:

Reminiscing my childhood

past

Of the good and the bad The happy and the sad The wasted tears And future fears That all came true.

In spite of the accuracy of the poem's forecast, Sy is still bewildered by his latest crime. He is now doing six to twelve for the attempted murder of his "lady" in Poughkeepsie. After serving time for the robbery conviction, he began to work with delinquent teenagers, but he got into trouble there too, fighting with the authorities over their rough handling of the kids. "They told me: Everybody does it. I told them: / don't do it. I'm part of everybody." He lost that job and "drank and drank." Then he lost his lady, and one day he went after her where she worked--just to talk, he says. Nonetheless, he had a shotgun with him that went off in a scuffle with the woman's fellow employees. She was wounded. Sy didn't mean it. No, he does not see a parallel between this crime and his first trouble: pursuing a girlfriend and winding up in prison. "This time I was responsible." The thought does not console him.

Still, what clearly worries him more than the shooting incident is the recollection of how afraid of him the woman was. With her he had tried to make a whole life within a family of two, in a sense, as he describes it, to protect himself by building a cell on the outside. "But my lady couldn't adhere to my philosophy because she had nothing to base it on. My foundation was crumbling. I thought: Here it is, inside my unit." The "it" is threatening, but unidentified. He used to say to her: "The reason I love you is that you like the good side of me. But there is something else, and this I don't want you to see." Until the afternoon of the shooting, he had managed to stay out of jail for 3 1/2 years.

"So here I was in the grinder again. I knew what I had to face. You get into the machine and you're just a little cog. You're nothing major." An eerie falsetto fills the corridor. An inmate walks by outside the door to Sy's cell, shouting for his ID.

"Who are you now?"

"I don't really think about myself. I don't like myself, per se, because the things I have gone through have become such a part of me." As ever, there is no touch of self-pity in his voice. He seems to regard his life scientifically, like an unknown substance. "I was thrown into a place where I couldn't develop normally," he says, quickly surveying his surroundings.

Does he think he will do something to put himself back in prison after this sentence is served? He feels that he has learned to moderate his expectations; that, he says, will help. Yet his resolution continues to be undermined by his temper. Even now he is on disciplinary report for raising a hand to a guard. He demonstrates the gesture as if to denote its casual innocence, but in fact a flick of his wrist is menacing. "I will always be in prison," he says after a while. "It was something stamped on my soul."

What are prisons for, Sy? Punishment mainly, he believes, of four distinct types. The first is one's loss of freedom. The second, the loss of a sense of responsibility: "You're expected to think for yourself and at the same time to follow orders without asking questions." The third kind of punishment he calls "sensory deprivation," the forced absence of family, of feeling. The only emotions one knows in prison, he says, are the "negatives" of anger and disappointment. And the fourth type? That, to Sy, is the most severe. "The worst punishment is being compelled to be someone other than yourself."

To see Sy Jackson from the inside is to agree that, in part, he has been compelled to be someone else. To see him from the outside, from the other end of his cot, is to acknowledge that the man is an explosive, someone to be afraid of. With that view Sy would wholeheartedly sympathize; he is afraid of himself. If the prisons in which he has spent nearly half his life have provided various punishments, they have also given him a context for looking into his own mind. Since what frightens him about his mind was nurtured in prison, the process of self-examination is as circular and enclosed as Sy's upstate odyssey. Such nonprogress may be typical of a great many prisoners, but as one discovers in a place like Attica, no inmate is typical. All the instruments of uniformity in a prison--the architecture, the outfits, the language and routine--merely emphasize the fact that here, as elsewhere, every cell contains a person.

What disturbs anyone looking at Sy, however, is not his differences from the world but his obvious membership in it. In a sense a criminal is merely a man of extremes, someone who robs gas stations rather than the dignity of a colleague, or who terrorizes with a gun rather than a bullying personality, or who murders in fact instead of with gossip. Perhaps this is why Sy feels low, but not ignoble; the laws he breaks are on the books. Yet his internal torment is that of anyone who recognizes his own guilt and self-hate, who sees in Sy's black-brown eyes all the imprisonment of the species. It is doubtful that Sy realizes this. One thing a prison does naturally is to ostracize its residents, most of whom are bound to think there is no one in the outer world remotely like them.

Sy had a dream while taking a nap the other day. It was about "a big, gigantic bird without feathers, and he came into my cell and got lodged under my cot. And I'm wondering in my dream whether to free this monster or scream for help." The problem struck him funny. He did not recognize the beast. --By Roger Rosenblatt

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