Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr by Carr James;

Author:Carr, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Three Rooms Press

NINE

THEY SENT ME TO QUENTIN. WHEN I got there, we had a fullblown race war on our hands, and things were heading toward a showdown. I was immediately assigned to close-custody, but since George Jackson had heard I was coming, he managed to walk by and say a few things. He told me he was going to see the Board soon and thought he might get paroled. We agreed to meet the next day, and the cops hustled me off to a cell.

George was still my partner. We’d been writing letters to each other, but the dude was genuinely pleased to see me; he was bursting with plans and stories that he hadn’t been able to write through the prison mails.

Since that time in the Hole at Soledad, George had been deepening his political philosophy. He had become convinced that there would never be any social change in this country—that everyone, blacks included, had been too brainwashed. He believed that our only hope lay in going back to Africa to participate in the political struggles going on there. George had studied Pan-Africanism and thoroughly mastered African history while I was away. According to George, the new black man was being formed in the struggles for national liberation going on in the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Guinea, and Mozambique. That was where the highest principles of justice and equality were being put into practice. He planned to pull a bunch of bank robberies when he got out to the streets to buy guns and ammunition—machine guns and bazookas—which we would transport to Africa on a boat that we would pirate. This’d be after George got a bunch of us out of prison.

To promote his ideas, George had started giving political education classes to the Pack; each dude had to read a certain amount of material by Garvey and other nationalists and different things from Pan-African magazines George had collected. All of his plans were based on getting us together and getting released. The officials had been stringing him along, hinting that he might be paroled sometime soon, which made George even more intent on action.

Africa was on our minds, but we had plenty to worry about right where we were, too. The three main groups—ours, the Nazis, and the Mexican Mafia—were on a collision course. You could feel the tension every time you walked out on the yard; everyone was nervous and wired up whenever the groups were in the same place. There was a constant series of petty harassments and minor antagonisms, with a major outbreak every few months.

Each time a riot happened somebody got killed. If the whites won, they’d be on top until we killed one of them to even the score. The side that was “behind” would initiate a surprise attack to get out of the red. If you caught somebody taking a shit, so much the better. Since the thing broke racially it didn’t matter if the guy you killed was in a group or not, just so long as he was the right color.

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