The mystery of Muhammad Ali is this spiritual greatness, that seemed to have emerged out of a far more ordinary, even callow personality. With the passage of time, the rebel who’d been reviled by many Americans would be transformed into an American hero, especially in the light of a general disenchantment with the Vietnam War. The young man who’d been denounced as a traitor was transformed into the iconic figure of our time, a compassionate figure who seems to transcend race. A warm, sepia light irradiates the past, glossing out crude or jarring details. Ali had long ago transcended his own origins and his own, specific identity. As he’d once said: “Boxing was nothing. It wasn’t important at all. Boxing was just a means to introduce me to the world” (1983).
Who can say that there are no second acts, let alone third or fourth acts, in American lives?
IV
REAL LIFE
A VISIT TO SAN QUENTIN
We came to San Quentin on a chill sunny morning in April 2011.
The visitor to San Quentin is surprised that, from a little distance, the prison buildings are very distinctive. The main building is likely to be warmly glowing in sunshine and more resembles a historic architectural landmark, or a resort hotel, than one of the most notorious prisons in North America. Beyond the prison compound, to the south, are hills as denuded of trees as the rolling, dreamlike hills in a Grant Wood painting; to the north, blue-sparkling San Francisco Bay and beyond it the glittering high-rise buildings of the fabled city of San Francisco several miles away.
San Quentin Point is one of the most valuable real estate properties in the United States, and so it’s ironic that the prison, first built in 1852, the oldest prison in California, takes up 275 acres of this waterside property. Almost you would think that some of the inmates must have spectacular views from their cell windows—except you will learn that San Quentin’s cells, arranged in densely populated “cell blocks” in the interior of buildings, like rabbit warrens, don’t have windows.
On the morning we drove to San Quentin from Berkeley, the sky was vivid-blue and the air in continual gusts. The hills beyond the prison were vivid-green from an unusually wet and protracted Northern California winter.
Is that the prison?—a first-time visitor is likely to exclaim.
But this is from a distance.
I had visited a maximum-security prison once before, in Trenton, New Jersey, in the 1980s. It had not been a pleasant experience nor one I had ever anticipated repeating, and yet, on this day, I was scheduled to be taken on a guided tour through San Quentin with approximately fifteen other individuals of whom the great majority were young women graduate students and their female professor from a criminology course at a university in San Francisco.
Waiting in line for the guided-tour leader to arrive, the young women—(you would have to call them girls in their behavior, appearance, mannerisms)—talked loudly and vivaciously together, as if oblivious of their surroundings, and eager for an entertaining adventure; once the tour began, they were to fall silent; and when the tour led us into the very interior of the prison, where the fact of what a prison is becomes viscerally evident, they were very silent, abashed, and intimidated. That is always the way with the guided tour into a maximum-security prison: you are not being taken on a mere tour but “taught a lesson.” And you are not quite the person emerging whom you’d believed yourself to be, entering.
In the parking lot, in the trunk of our car, we’d had to leave behind all electronic devices, as well as our wallets, from which we’d taken our ID’s. In San Quentin you are forbidden to bring many things designated as “contraband” and you are forbidden to wear certain colors—(primarily blue, the prisoners’ color). Even men must not wear “open” shoes, i.e., sandals. Your arms must be covered, and clothing “appropriate.”
Despite the warning beforehand, one of our group, an older man, was discovered to be wearing sandals and had to acquire proper footwear from one of the guards before he was allowed into the facility.
Our tour guide was late. From remarks told to us, the man’s “lateness” was a matter of his own discretion: he was not often “on time.” There was the sense, communicated to us subtly by guards, that civilians were not particularly welcome in the facility; it was a “favor” to the public, that guided tours were arranged from time to time. And so we were made to wait in the sunny, gusty air outside the first checkpoint, which was both a vehicular and a pedestrian checkpoint manned by a number of guards.
In the imagination a prison is a remote and lonely place but in reality, a prison is a place of business: a busy place. Delivery vehicles constantly arrived to move through the checkpoint. Corrections officers and other employees arrived. When at last our tour leader arrived, a lieutenant corrections officer, we were led singly through the pedestrian checkpoint and along a hilly pavement in the direction of the prison, some distance away; to our left, beautiful San Francisco Bay reflecting the sun; to our right, the rolling hills of a pastoral landscape. The visitor is tempted to think This is a magical place. This is not an ugly place.
Now through the second checkpoint, where we signed into a log and where, when we left, we had to sign out: otherwise, the prison would go into “lockdown”—the assumption being that a visitor was unaccounted-for inside the facility.
Our wrists were stamped with invisible ink. Grimly we were told that if we forgot and washed our hands, and washed away the ink, we would precipitate another “lockdown”—the assumption being that there was a visitor unaccounted-for inside the facility.
Corrections officers were passing through the checkpoint, as we prepared to go through. It was prison protocol to allow them to go first. The guards were both female and male—the females as sturdy-bodied as the males, sexless in their dun-colored uniforms. They did not greet us, smile at us, acknowledge us at all.
The lieutenant led us into a spacious sun-filled courtyard. Here were extensive flowerbeds, planted by prisoners. There was not a prisoner in sight.
“The flag always flies at half-mast here.”
We stared at a memorial stone as the lieutenant spoke of CO’s who’d “died in the line of duty” at San Quentin, a double column of names dating back to the nineteenth century. The lieutenant recounted for us how as a young CO he’d been on duty during the “most violent ten minutes” in the prison’s history: in 1969 a Black Panther defense attorney had smuggled a firearm into the prison to give to his client, who hid it inside his clothing until, as he was being escorted back to his cell block, he suddenly began shooting, killing several CO’s and fellow prisoners before tower guards shot him dead.
We were aware now of tower guards. We were aware of high stone walls strung with razor wire like a deranged sort of tinsel. We were told that if a siren sounded, if the commandment All down! All down! was broadcast, we were to throw ourselves down to the ground without question. If we remained standing, we would be in danger of being shot down by guards in the towers. They would be training their rifles on us, invisibly.
Did we understand?
My old unease, which had begun at the first checkpoint, quickened now. For always you think, too late—I have made a mistake coming here. Why did I come to this terrible place!
The answers are idealist: to learn. To learn more about the world. To be less sheltered. To be less naïve. To know.
Americans imprison—and execute—so many more individuals in proportion to our population than any other country in the world except China, one is compelled to know.
The lieutenant was saying that a CO’s family doesn’t know if he or she will be returning home from the prison. Inside, anything can happen, and it was likely to happen suddenly and unexpectedly and irrevocably.
“Irrevocably” was not the lieutenant’s exact word. But this was his meaning.
He led us across the square and into the prison chapel, which was non-denominational. At the front of the room, which had seats for perhaps 150 people, was, not a crucifix, but a large cross in the shape of a T.
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At a pulpit stood an inmate in prison attire, to address the tour group. He was in his thirties perhaps, with Hispanic features. Like one who has given a presentation many times before he told us with disarming frankness of his life: how he’d belonged to a gang, how he’d killed his own sister in a moment of panicked confusion, how he’d been sentenced to thirty-years-to-life—meaning that he was a “lifer,” who might be granted parole sometime, if he didn’t jeopardize his chances inside the prison.
The inmate wore blue: blue shirt, blue sweatpants, loose clothing. Down the sides of the trouser legs were letters in vivid white:
P
R
I
S
O
N
E
R
The inmate prayed, he said. Every day of his life he prayed for his sister, his mother, his family, himself. His manner was eager, earnest. He was due to meet with the parole board that very afternoon, he said. (He’d been turned down for parole at least once; inmates are typically turned down many times before being granted parole, if ever.) You could see that this was a San Quentin inmate who had accrued the approval of the prison authority and would not ever risk losing it: once a gang member, now he was one of theirs.
One of ours. Someone like ourselves.
Obviously he’d been “rehabilitated” in prison. And this was the goal of the enlightened prison—of course.
Abruptly then the session ended. The inmate was escorted from the pulpit by guards, and the tour group was led out of the chapel by the lieutenant.
Now we were being led into the interior of the prison—the “real” prison. We were led from the picturesque courtyard along a hilly paved walk, in a chilly wind. Around a corner, and into the “Yard.”
That is, we stepped onto the edge of the “Yard.” Here was a vast windswept space, part pavement and part scrubby grassland. We stared. Hundreds—could it really be hundreds?—of inmates in the Yard under the supervision of what appeared to be, to the casual eye, a dismayingly few guards.
Of course, there were the guard towers: the armed guards.
The prison population was somewhere beyond 5,000 inmates though the “design capacity” was for 3,082. Clearly just a fraction of these inmates were in the Yard at this time but their numbers seemed daunting.
We were led relentlessly forward, skirting the edge of the Yard. We were surprised to see a number of older inmates, several with long white beards, like comic representations of elderly men; they walked with canes, on the dirt track, while younger inmates jogged past them or, elsewhere in the Yard, tossed basketballs at netless rims, lifted weights and did exercises, or stood together talking, pacing about. You had the impression of rippling, seething, pulsing energy and restlessness, and you had the impression that the nearer of the inmates were watching us covertly, intensely. Everyone in the guided tour was very quiet now. The young women visitors were quiet now. The fact of the prison and what it contained was beginning to become real to us not merely an idea. For there were no fences between the inmates and us, only just open space.
The lieutenant advised us not to look at the inmates. Not to stare.
“No ‘eye contact.’ No ‘fraternizing’ with inmates.”
The lieutenant explained how the prison population was divided into gangs, primarily; and these gangs—African-Americans, Hispanics, Mexicans (Northern California, Southern California), “whites”—with now, in recent decades, “Chinese”—(Asian) had territorial possession of particular parts of the Yard that were off-limits to non-gang-members. There were desirable areas of the Yard dominated by Hispanics and “whites”—(Aryan Brotherhood)—and less desirable areas, near the urinals, where African-Americans gathered. (Why? Because Californian African-Americans are so divided into warring gangs, they can’t make up their differences in prison.)
We were shocked to see, not many yards away, open urinals in a row, against a wall. We were warned—If anybody is using a urinal, don’t look.
It was a protocol of the Yard: Don’t look, don’t stare. A man using one of the open-air urinals was invisible, and to cause him to feel visible is to invite trouble.
The lieutenant led us past the single-story wooden structure that held classrooms. He led us into a dining hall—a vast, double dining hall—with rows of tables—empty at this time of day. You could not imagine this enormous dining hall filled with men—the noise, the restlessness; the food-smells, the smells of men’s bodies. The lieutenant spoke of the murals on the walls, which had been painted by an inmate named Alfredo Santos in the 1950s: striking, bizarre, a collage of renderings of newspaper photos and more ordinary individuals including a heroin addict (Santos himself). This art called to mind the slickly illustrative work of Thomas Hart Benton but also the matter-of-fact distortions of Hieronymus Bosch.
The lieutenant meant to entertain us by summoning a food worker, to provide us with food-samples from the kitchen—“Any volunteers?”
Two members of the tour volunteered: a man and one of the young criminology students, who took bites of what resembled chicken nuggets, burritos, French fries, something that resembled cornmeal, and bravely pronounced them “Good”—“Pretty good.”
The lieutenant told of the feat of “feeding” thousands of men three times a day. There was something disconcerting in the word “feeding”: you had a vision of a cattle or a hog trough into which “feed” was dumped.
The lieutenant spoke proudly of the fact that the prison was mostly inmate-staffed—“Otherwise, there couldn’t be a prison.”
The original San Quentin had been built by prisoners, in fact. It had housed only sixty-eight inmates. Prior to that, California’s first prison had been a 268-ton wooden ship anchored in San Francisco Bay and equipped to hold thirty prisoners.
But the prison facility was now badly overcrowded, like all prison facilities in the economically stressed state of California. Where there is overcrowding, three men to a cell, men quartered in places meant for other purposes, like a gym, there is likely to be more trouble.
The lieutenant told of uprisings in the dining hall, sudden riots, gang killings. At any meal there is the possibility of violence, with so many men crammed into so relatively small a space. The lieutenant showed us a cache of homemade weapons: a toothbrush sharpened to a deadly point, a razor blade attached to a papier-mâché handle, a metal hook fashioned out of paper clips, a spike, a nail, a pencil. . . . In the Yard, buried in the ground in certain places, were similar weapons, which gangs controlled; as soon as guards discovered the weapons and confiscated them, more weapons appeared and were buried in the ground.
Ingenious! The wish to harm others is a stimulant to the most amazing creativity and patience.
Wasn’t it likely, most of the contraband to be fashioned into weapons was smuggled into San Quentin by guards—CO’s? For there was a drug trade here, and there were forbidden cell phones—how otherwise could such things be smuggled into the facility except by CO’s?
(The California corrections officers union is one of the strongest unions in the state. Much stronger, and its members much better paid, than the members of the teachers’ union. The prison authority could not risk antagonizing such a powerful union.)
At no point in the tour did I think it would be prudent to ask questions about smuggled contraband. No one else asked, either.
During our visit in the dining hall, sirens erupted. Bells clanged. For a terrible few seconds it seemed to us that the prison was after all going to go into “lockdown”—(whatever precisely that meant: we had a vague, ominous sense of its meaning); but, fortunately, the sirens turned out to be a false alarm.
Maybe it was a suicide attempt, the lieutenant said. Adding laconically, or a suicide.
Next, the lieutenant led us to another grim building; and another time, we went through a checkpoint. The invisible ink on our wrists was examined by frowning guards in ultraviolet light.
I was trying to imagine a plausible scenario in
which an individual who had not been officially admitted to San Quentin as a visitor was now discovered in the very interior of the prison, somehow having managed to attach him- or herself to a tour group, who would be identified as an impostor or an intruder through this scrutiny, but I could not imagine this scenario.
He was taking us to Cell Block C, the lieutenant said. Into the very bowels of the prison he might have said.
Until now, the visit to San Quentin had been bearable. It had not provoked anxiety or even much unease, I think. If there was unease, I had resolved not to think about it, at least not yet. I had come here to be educated and illuminated and not entertained. And the others in our group must have felt more or less the same. For nothing threatening had happened to us, except the temporary alarms in the dining room, which had turned out to be false alarms. Our only firsthand experience of an inmate had been the speaker in the chapel, who had seemed to want to please us, like an earnest student. In the Yard, we’d seen men at a distance—it had seemed, a safe distance.
But now in Cell Block C there was a very different atmosphere. The air was tense as the air before an electrical storm. A powerful smell of men’s bodies. There was a high din as of the thrum of a hive—if you brought your ear close to the hive, you would be shocked at the myriad angry-sounding vibrations, that never sleep. We would see now the typical inmates of San Quentin, in their own habitat.
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