by Bell, Ian
Then:
There’s an injustice that’s been done and you know that Rubin’s gonna get out. There’s no doubt about that, but the fact is that it can happen to anybody. We have to be confronted with that; people from the top to the bottom, they should be aware that it can happen to anybody, at any time.
Dylan and Levy were not the only ones to be moved and angered by Carter’s tale. In 1975, the fighters Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, no strangers to racism, would speak out fiercely in the Hurricane’s defence. Ali, in his second spell as heavyweight champion of the world, would dedicate his contest against Ron Lyle in May to the Hurricane. The champion thereafter became co-chairman of the Hurricane Defense Fund, established to aid Carter with his legal costs. In September of 1975, Ali led a march to City Hall in Newark, New Jersey, to publicise Rubin’s cause. Other prominent people – the writer Norman Mailer, the actor Burt Reynolds, the singers Harry Belafonte and Johnny Cash among them – signed up to the national committee of the Hurricane Trust Fund.18 The veteran Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, the author of The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), had meanwhile begun to research the case after being commissioned in 1974 to write a magazine article.
In the summer of 1975, aged 66, failing in his powers but fascinated by the town, Algren would even move to Paterson in an attempt to understand the murders. As the poet and playwright Joe Pintauro would later remember, this ‘dedication to the lost cause of clearing the boxer Hurricane Carter from a murder rap … drained Nelson’s energy and emptied his pockets. The Hurricane Carter case turned into a quicksand of unresolvable complexities and Hurricane was never cleared. After years of effort, Algren finally converted his commitment into material for his novel The Devil’s Stocking, but by then he had grown old and tired.’19
The novel was published posthumously in 1983, but Algren’s weariness was understandable. The case was a horrible tangle of claim and counterclaim. Thanks to recantations, undisclosed deals between prosecution and witnesses, and to apparent lying by Bello and Bradley, the new trial that had been denied to Carter in 1974 was granted. In March of 1976, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the grounds that the prosecution had withheld the tape of an interview with Bello proving he had been promised leniency for his misdoings in return for testimony. Hurricane and Artis were freed on bail, with most of the bail money posted by Muhammad Ali. The New Jersey prosecutor soon re-indicted the pair.20
In November 1976, after Bello yet again changed his mind and again claimed to have seen Hurricane and Artis near the Lafayette, the boxer was convicted for a second time. The judge had allowed testimony describing angry black people gathering outside the Waltz Inn after the shooting – by a white man – of the black bartender on the evening before the Lafayette murders. The prosecution claim that revenge had been the motive for the killings was therefore deemed to have been supported. Neither Bob Dylan songs nor famous novelists were of any help. Rubin Carter’s conviction was not overturned finally until 1985.
The last decision did not mean, contrary to what Nelson Mandela would choose to believe, that the boxer had spent ‘twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit’. It did not mean, as Dylan would sing, that the Hurricane was an innocent man. Prosecutors could have tried his case for a third time, but declined to make the attempt. The final ruling said only that ‘grave constitutional violations’ of the petitioner’s rights had occurred. Some chose to describe those abuses as ‘technicalities’, but a 1988 attempt by New Jersey’s prosecutors to have the case reviewed was thrown out by the United States Supreme Court. Bello, a confessed alcoholic, was in any case the sole remaining witness who had placed Hurricane and Artis at the murder scene. Whatever the truth, innocence – or guilt – was not established and Carter has made no attempt in the years since his release to obtain redress from the authorities. He has also continued to insist that he played no part in the killings.
Down the years Dylan-Levy have been accused, variously, of naivety, of the worst excesses of radical chic, of promoting a liberal conspiracy theory, and of inspiring a disputable Hollywood film, The Hurricane (1999). The last part is true. On its release, Norman Jewison’s movie was deemed particularly egregious by observers of the fight game for suggesting that Carter had only lost his middleweight title bout against Joey Giardello in 1964 because of racial bias among the judges. Even Rubin didn’t make that claim.
Meanwhile, a piece of dialogue in the song, supposedly an exchange between Bello and Patty Graham/Valentine, was said by the latter never to have happened. The claim that Carter was ‘far away in another part of town’ when the killings took place is disproven by his own alibi, placing him in a bar called the Nite Spot just a few blocks away. The general charge of racism is meanwhile hindered by the fact that the jury in the second trial contained two black members, and by the fact that the case was examined on behalf of the state of New Jersey by a black legislator who found the claim unjustified. Racist language attributed in the song to police officers was never documented.
Equally, the idea that Carter spent his spare time placidly riding horses, as the song describes, ‘where the trout streams flow and the air is nice’ cuts no ice with those who recall a frequenter of the Nite Spot and similar louche joints. Finally, there was a report carried by the UPI press agency on 8 June 1976. It began: ‘A woman [Carolyn Kelley, who had persuaded Ali to take an interest in the case] who was instrumental in the movement to win Rubin “Hurricane” Carter a new trial charged from her hospital bed Monday she was beaten by the former boxer at a Maryland hotel.’ Carter denied the claim and no indictments were issued.
In the Dylan-Levy song, a story is told that leaves no room for ambiguity. Dylan’s music strikes its chorus, time after time, like the sound of cell doors slamming shut. In 1975, the artist was immune to doubt, electing to begin what would be one of his bestselling albums with eight and a half minutes of livid rage and righteous denunciation. Under his direction, the first phase of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour would become, in large part, a campaign to secure Rubin Carter’s release. ‘Hurricane’ would be played at every show along the way. So what if Dylan was utterly wrong?
‘Topical song’ contains this curious dichotomy: it claims the status of historical truth and art simultaneously. Artists who weave poetry from facts have long wrestled with the ensuing paradoxes. Was Macbeth a weak and murderous usurper, or was the real man as pious and peaceable a King of Alba as a ruler could be a thousand years back? Perhaps it doesn’t matter much to an audience struggling with the complexities of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. If, on the other hand, you have co-written a hot-off-the-presses documentary song asserting that a blameless man has fallen victim to a sickness in your society, facts count. They count because you say they count. When racism and heinous murders are at issue, those facts are everything. That is part, an intrinsic part, of your story. But if other facts then say that no final judgement in the case of the Hurricane was ever possible, what remains?
*
Dylan’s instincts should never be underestimated. One fact concerning the song ‘Hurricane’ was not in dispute in 1975. Whatever happened at the Lafayette Bar and Grill, whoever was guilty or innocent, the Dylan-Levy account was only too plausible. That was the essence of the song’s power. In 1966, and for many years afterwards, Paterson was a melting-pot town with more than its share of ethnic tensions.21 The Lafayette was alleged, meanwhile, to have been a home-from-home for white racists. That might have made it a target for a revenge attack at 2.30 a.m. on a June night, but it also helped to explain the world inhabited by black men such as Rubin Carter.
One author of ‘Hurricane’ might say that injustice could ‘happen to anybody’, but it wasn’t quite true. Details within the verses were used at the time, as they are used still on certain websites, to dispute a bigger argument about law, race and power.22 Dylan and Levy took the figure of Carter and used what they knew about the case – and there was more than just ‘poetic licence
’ involved – to say something about America. Was the Hurricane an early victim of racial profiling? In his case, the jury (no joke intended) is still out. The song nevertheless posed a question: what kind of country is it that allows ethnic identity to become a standard tool of criminology, of law enforcement, and of penal procedure? One answer: a country that considers itself white. Dylan-Levy’s news was not always welcome news, therefore. That might explain why the flaws and failures of their song were seized upon with such zeal. But facts, as mentioned, are facts.
The General Social Survey (GSS) is a remarkable American project. Since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has been harvesting flecks of data from every aspect of daily existence to compile this ever-changing portrait of the nation. In 1972–3, when Rubin Carter was deep in the fight to overturn his conviction, the GSS disclosed encouraging news. As it turned out, only 3 per cent of Americans still believed that whites should have ‘first chance’ at a job; only 13 per cent endorsed racially segregated schools.
This was considered progress, but not all of the findings could be viewed in the same rosy light. As the authors of a 2009 paper from the Harvard Kennedy School put it, ‘just 1 in 4 (25 per cent) said that they would not vote for a qualified black presidential candidate nominated by their own party’.23 ‘Just’ might stand, no doubt, as a plausible statistical measure in the social sciences. The paper further recorded that in the early 1970s ‘only a third of Northern whites endorsed the idea that whites have the right to keep blacks out of their neighborhood, compared to 53 per cent of Southern whites’. Clearly, the word ‘only’ must also carry greater weight with sociologists than with some of us.
The Harvard paper continued: ‘Fully 86 per cent of white respondents rejected school busing as a tool for achieving school desegregation. Only about a quarter of white respondents thought the government was spending “too much” on assisting blacks, but most felt that such spending was already at the right level. Third, in 1972 74 per cent of whites nationwide agreed that “blacks should not push themselves” where they are not wanted.’
A few statements could be rephrased. You could as well say, for example, that at the beginning of the 1970s one in four Americans – from a survey involving all ethnic groups – thought too much money was being spent for the benefit of the recent descendants of slaves. Three Americans in every four were averse to black self-assertion, or – if ‘push themselves’ means anything – to political action by black people. Equally, ‘fewer than 15 per cent of whites nationwide’ – not just in the South, in other words – still hankered after a racist education system. The ‘idea that whites have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods’ enjoyed the support of 40 per cent of the population in 1972. In 1973, laws to prohibit racial discrimination by people selling their homes were still being opposed by 65 per cent of whites.
The authors of the Harvard paper, alert to the claim that Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008 had brought America to a ‘post-racial’ moment, also noted that in the year of his first triumph ‘a nontrivial proportion of whites nationwide, 28 per cent, still support an individual homeowner’s right to discriminate on the basis of race when selling a home, and even nearly 1 in 4 highly-educated Northern whites adopt this position’. The manifold assumptions behind the tiny comparative word ‘even’ could justify an entire field for study.
When Rubin Carter was publishing his first book and fighting his courtroom battles, the ‘86 per cent of white respondents’ opposed to the use of school buses in the battle against segregation found their cause célèbre in the city of Boston. Efforts there to enforce the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965 by moving children to shared classrooms were met with protests and riots. Thanks to busing, one black lawyer was attacked with the sharp end of a flagstaff bearing the Stars and Stripes; vengeful black teenagers then put a white man into a coma. The General Social Survey had already identified the roots of the argument. Most white people were sufficiently progressive as to abhor outright segregation in schooling. They welcomed black faces among their children. But not too many black faces.
Dylan-Levy had not plucked a glamorous controversy from the air, then, or manufactured a conflict to suit their unexamined Village-liberal attitudes. The so-called ‘incarceration boom’, the disproportionate jailing of young African American men, began in the mid-1970s. The General Social Survey meanwhile did not, and does not, see fit to gather data from anyone detained in a penal institution. So who really knew about the reality?
Even before mandatory sentencing – ‘three strikes and you’re out’ – blacks made up 41 per cent of inmates in state or federal prisons in 1970, at a time when African Americans were 11.1 per cent of the general population.24 The comparable figures as the twenty-first century began would be 72.7 per cent and 13 per cent respectively. In seizing on the case of the Hurricane, Dylan-Levy had seized on a bigger truth. Carter, right or wrong, was emblematic of the fact that, despite all the civil-rights struggles to which Dylan had once given his clamant songs, something foul was going on. In ‘Hurricane’ the familiar prophetic voice told of a society in which, by the century’s end, one in five black men in their 30s who lacked a college education would instead have a prison record.25
Does any of that count as an excuse for error by writers declaiming on issues of truth and justice? Dylan would be forced to re-record his ‘Hurricane’ – the result was a marked improvement – after Columbia’s lawyers fretted that Bello and Bradley might sue over the unsubstantiated claim that they had ‘robbed the bodies’ at the Lafayette. In 1982, Dylan-Levy would also be on the receiving end of a complaint under the heading ‘Patricia Ann Valentine, Plaintiff-Appellant v. CBS Inc. D/B/a Columbia Records, Bob Dylan A/K/a Robert Zimmerman, Jacques Levy and Warner Bros. Publications Inc.’. ‘D/B/a’ stands for ‘doing business as’, but neither at first hearing nor on appeal would the courts do business with Miss Patty Valentine’s claim for redress because, she said, of ‘common law defamation, invasion of privacy, and unauthorized publication of her name in violation of a Florida statute’. She had not been named in the song, as she alleged, as a party to a conspiracy.
Instead, back in reality, ‘all the criminals in their coats and ties / Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise’. Dylan had placed himself back in the arena of political argument, where beliefs too often pass for facts and facts are always open to interpretation. Even critics of ‘Hurricane’ accept that if Dylan-Levy had presented audiences with a piece of pop fiction, something akin to Elvis Presley’s ‘In the Ghetto’ or Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, applause would have been universal. The song spoke of truths about America that were hard to dispute.
On its own terms, in contrast, the piece drew its electrifying charge from the fact that it concerned the fate of a real man. There was, in any case, a bigger fact. Whatever the errors committed by Dylan-Levy, the Hurricane was never shown to be guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The very worst that could be said might be covered, instead, by the old Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’. The legal ‘technicalities’ that saw him freed existed for a reason, as Judge Haddon Lee Sarokin of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey made clear when he set aside the convictions of Carter and Artis in November 1985.26
In his judgment, Sarokin observed that the prosecution had been ‘predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure’. Throwing out the revenge theory, attacking the suppression of evidence, dismissing the reliability of Bello ‘after his unbelievable series of recantations and recantations of his recantations’, the judge said: ‘This court is convinced that a conviction which rests upon racial stereotypes, fears and prejudices violates rights too fundamental to permit deference to stand in the way of the relief sought.’ Sarokin also shredded the state’s claim that the ammunition allegedly discovered in Carter’s vehicle matched the murder weapons. He noted that police had tried and failed to halt an actua
l white getaway car on the night in question. Freeing Carter, the judge went on to say that ‘to permit a conviction to be urged based upon such factors, or to permit a conviction to stand having utilised such factors, diminishes our fundamental constitutional rights’.
So Dylan-Levy got some facts wrong. They were not quite as unreliable, it transpires, as those paid to administer and enforce the law in New Jersey in the aftermath of the Lafayette killings. The fact that the septuagenarian Rubin Carter is ‘not innocent’ in 2013 is somehow enough, for some amateur criminologists, to convict a man time and again in their virtual courts, and to condemn a song. This might be what Dylan-Levy had in mind when they wrote of being ‘ashamed to live in a land / Where justice is a game’.
In his own book on the Carter case, the late Paul B. Wice, a professor of political science at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, wrote that it ‘shows what can happen when police and prosecutors do not act professionally, critical witnesses lie, and the justice system is unwilling to correct its errors or admit its mistakes’.27 Perhaps it also shows what a songwriter, sometimes, is for. In ‘Hurricane’, the old, mistrusted idea that poetry is truth was illuminated to glorious effect. Rubin Carter was not always the best of black men. That didn’t make him a guilty black man.
*
On the Desire album, ‘Hurricane’ is followed instantly by ‘Isis’. It makes for an uncomfortable contrast. You have to muster a certain tolerance for a labouring melody to indulge the song that supposedly ‘meant something’ (or other) to Jacques Levy. Here’s one occasion when Scarlet Rivera’s plangent fiddle amounts to little more than exotic colouring, a tinting of the dull negative, mere tone. You must then summon patience towards symbolism, if it truly exists, for symbolism’s sake. Then, sometimes, you must remember to ask why you cared about Bob Dylan to begin with. With ‘Isis’, collaboration brought out his worst – which is to say most portentous – side. Compare this piece of mock-epic verse with ‘Shelter from the Storm’ from Blood on the Tracks and you see why two pairs of hands were less capable than one. ‘Isis’ has the feel of something manufactured from New Age bric-a-brac.