Blood in the Water

by Thompson, Heather Ann

  Back in D Yard, the nine observers who had stayed—Eve, Jones, Steel, Tepper, Fitch, Kenyatta, and Soto, as well as the two representatives from the Young Lords Party, Juan Ortiz and Jose Paris—were unsure whether this had been a good idea. It had been Eve who had made the snap decision to stay, he later explained, because “the situation was so serious, the prisoners’ nerves were so on edge and they were feeling so let down.”55 In his mind, he had little choice but to “go ahead and present the package.”56 He knew, though, this could be disastrous.

  Arthur Eve could smell the fear of the prisoners as they talked worriedly among themselves in the darkening yard about the possibility that “the negotiations had broken down,” which, to them, was a terrifying development.57 When Eve mustered the courage to go to the mic to speak, he was showered with invective and cries of, “Where have you guys been all day?” At that point, Clarence Jones stepped to the mic and made his own attempt to talk calmly about the documents. He reminded them that they could never have expected to get all thirty-three of their demands met, and then of the real stakes here. It was all “well and good to quote Chairman Mao about power coming out of the barrel of a gun,” he noted, but the men needed to be clear that the only ones with guns in this situation were the “men outside,” and, in his view, “if the situation was not resolved by compromise, the ‘Kent State psychology’ would take over” and violence would ensue.58 Although it was up to them to decide, Jones said, he felt that the package the observers had gotten the men was the best they could hope for. He then began to read through the twenty-eight demands that Oswald had signed off on.

  The men listened quietly until they realized that Oswald had not agreed to an amnesty provision. When Jones began reading through the James letter, all hell broke loose once again. Sitting near Jones and watching him as he faced the crowd, Lewis Steel realized that he and the other observers were now facing “the most danger they had ever encountered.”59 As Jones was wrapping up, Steel could see that Bill Kunstler had come back into the yard and was making his way to the table. While he marveled at the man’s courage, he wasn’t sure that even Kunstler could dissipate the hostility. Kunstler quickly recognized that the situation had turned much uglier in the yard in the last thirty minutes. This worried as much as scared him since he had just come from seeing General Buzz O’Hara in the administration building and had been told “that what had been offered was the best they could get.”60

  Feeling tremendous pressure to ward off disaster, Kunstler rushed to the table and, grabbing the microphone from Jones, embarked upon a passionate speech in defense of the package Jones had just presented to them, not as something perfect, not even as something that they must accept, but as “the very best the state was willing to offer” and, very likely, “the best that they could hope to get.”61 Since he was after all their attorney, the men had at least some reason to trust what Kunstler had to say, and they did start to listen more attentively. Eve, Steel, and Jones all felt that, if nothing else had been accomplished that night, William Kunstler had just saved their lives.62

  But just as quickly, the tide turned again. In his effort to make sure that he understood exactly what the men’s position was so that he could render an accurate reporting of it to state officials, Kunstler unwittingly gave them news they had not yet heard. He really did understand their concern about forgoing amnesty, he said, “now that the guard has died.”63

  William Kunstler addresses the yard. (Courtesy of the Associated Press)

  A hush fell over the yard, and gasps of fear and disbelief could be heard. It was in that split second that Kunstler realized, horrified, that they hadn’t known about Quinn’s death. Suddenly, all was different. These men had been terrified of giving up without amnesty all along, but now they well knew that the stakes were even higher. In short, after “the death of Quinn…everyone could be indicted and [those who had been] elected as spokesmen…were definitely going to be under prosecution.”64 As if to emphasize this point, Richard Clark grabbed the copy of the twenty-eight points, jumped up onto the negotiating table, and with a flourish ripped the document to shreds. The meeting was over.

  Although no one had specifically said that the prisoners were rejecting the state’s proposal, and no vote was taken, the message was clear. The hostages knew it too. As hostage G. B. Smith put it, when the “word got out that Billy Quinn had died…there was a great mood swing in both inmates and hostages. Everybody knew that was a whole new ball game now.”65 The observers, now back up in the Steward’s Room, knew this, but at least a few of them still held out hope that Seale would come back in the morning, as promised, and help them to avert a tragic end to the prisoners’ protest.

  Leaving the prison to get a bit of sleep, Kunstler made sure that General Buzz O’Hara knew that both he and Seale might need transportation back to the prison the next morning. Herman Schwartz, who had dropped Seale off at the Holiday Inn earlier that evening, also made himself available should he be called to bring him back to Attica. Observers Wicker, McGowan, Badillo, Garcia, and Mathew were already at the Treadway Inn, having left earlier to make sure they could get a room. After grabbing a drink at the hotel bar and catching a bit of the Miss America pageant that was blaring on a TV screen above their heads, this group then headed over to a bowling alley–restaurant for a steak dinner. It wasn’t until Lewis Steel joined them that they learned about the prisoners’ rejection of the twenty-eight points, but Steel agreed with them: perhaps Seale could still turn things around. As Saturday ended it was clear that everyone was “waiting for Bobby.”66

  Commissioner Oswald refused to wait any longer, however. He couldn’t imagine anyone or anything turning this situation around. Demoralized and exhausted, in his heart Oswald believed that he had walked the last mile to meet the prisoners’ demands. As even he knew, some of the twenty-eight points he had committed himself to—such as the minimum wage and changing the penal code on parole—he personally had no power to implement, and, equally important, he knew that he had deliberately inserted words such as “reasonable,” “true,” and “adequate” to allow for some wiggle room regarding what he had in fact agreed to. Still he was devastated and even bitter that the prisoners hadn’t accepted the twenty-eight points. He now agreed with Rockefeller’s men that “instead of…the situation becoming better, it was worsening.”67

  Late Saturday night, when Oswald met again with Attica administrators, men from the governor’s office, and Major Monahan, even Oswald was willing to talk in earnest “about the possibility…or the desirability of taking the institution Sunday.”68 They settled on a plan. Unless something changed with the “unsettled state of ‘negotiations,’ ” an all-out assault on D Yard would likely commence at 6:00 the next morning, on Sunday, September 12.69

  Meanwhile, back in D Yard on that pitch-black Saturday night, a cold drizzle was soaking through the prisoners’ ragtag tents and shelters and no one knew whether they should sleep or remain vigilant. Deciding to make the hostages more comfortable, some prisoners went over to the men in the circle to make “sure they had extra blankets” and then scanned the night sky for any sign of trouble.70

  Blankets or no, the hostages in the circle were as anxious as the other men in D Yard. The same was true for their families and friends in the village of Attica. No one knew what was happening with the negotiations, and even the mayor, Richard W. Miller, whose brother Edward Miller was a civilian hostage, could get no news out of any state official. Hostage wife Paula Krotz, like many of the families, felt that she “might as well have been invisible,” since “the only person who spoke to us during all those days was Father Marcinkevich.”71 In fact, so desperate were locals to learn something from officials about their loved ones that they had been descending on Attica’s front lawn demanding answers for the last three days. So many people had crowded the grass by Saturday afternoon that according to reporters, “Salvation Army workers had served 32,510 cups of coffee and cold drinks, 750 dozen donuts, 6,500 sandw
iches, 3,000 cups of hot soup, 300 bottles of milk and an unknown quantity of sliced pizza.”72 Hostage Carl Valone’s wife, Ann, a nurse at St. Jerome’s Hospital, was one of those who parked for hours in front of Attica in her station wagon hoping in vain for some news; up until then, all she had been doing was “praying, and listening, and watching television,” but she had learned nothing.73

  Attica’s tiny streets were also swarming with outsiders seeking information. Scores of newspaper and television men had arrived, there was a steady stream of cars bearing prisoner supporters, and there were throngs of gawkers from nearby towns as well. Many of Attica’s townspeople felt as though they too were under siege.74 Hearing little news except for stories about the comings and goings of various observers only fueled locals’ fears, encouraging them to imagine the very worst. By Saturday, the town’s men were arming themselves while their wives kept vigil at living room windows to defend against any intruders.75 State troopers had also begun going door-to-door asking Attica’s residents to park their cars to block the side streets, so that any protester or prisoner sympathizer who might show up wouldn’t be able to dodge police roadblocks.76 In response to a rumor that prisoner supporters were coming to Attica via the Tonawanda Creek, troopers came to people’s houses that bordered streams, including that of hostage John Stockholm, to ask if they could take a dog along their property looking for outside agitators. Stockholm’s wife, Mary, agreed and for a while she enthusiastically helped a trooper patrol her yard.77 On every major street corner stood men armed with rifles and, responding to wholly unfounded rumors that black militants were coming to town to kidnap white children, the village of Attica closed its schools.78

  The townspeople weren’t just fearful, they were also hostile—particularly toward the observers who were staying at local hotels and eating at local restaurants. Some resented that these outsiders had more access to men like Commissioner Oswald than they did, and hated that these men were better informed about what was happening in the yard than the family members of the hostages. Most also believed that all of the observers were militantly pro-prisoner and would never be able to do right by the correction officers being held in D Yard. One afternoon, Congressman Badillo tried to get a hot dog at a food tent that the local Lions Club had set up in front of the prison, but he was told in no uncertain terms that “This food’s not for you.”79 Arthur Eve likewise found himself unable to order a meal at an Attica eatery because the staff refused even to acknowledge his presence.

  The families of the prisoners were equally unwelcome when they showed up in the village hoping for information, if they even were able to make the trip. For the families far downstate in boroughs like Brooklyn or the Bronx there was no way they could afford to head to Attica to stand vigil outside the prison, so they had to rely solely on television coverage and newspapers that had little new or meaningful to report. And, of course, for the many Spanish-speaking relatives of men in Attica, network news coverage was useless. Most prisoner families didn’t even know whether their sons and husbands were in D Yard or whether they were among those still under state control in C Block.

  In this respect L. D. Barkley’s mother, Laverne, was one of the lucky ones because she had at least seen her son on television. Like most mothers, Laverne Barkley didn’t learn that the prisoners had seized Attica on September 9 until she saw the nightly news and realized that the young man on the screen trying to explain to the world why the men had rebelled was none other than her own son. It was bad enough that the state had sent her son, the second eldest of her eleven children, to a maximum security facility for a minor parole violation—driving without a license. But now, just as he’d almost served his time and was all set to begin college so that the baby he had on the way would have a good future, he was in the midst of a prison uprising.80 She, her daughter Betty, and L.D.’s girlfriend had just visited L.D. on September 5. He had surprised them by showing them a book he’d been writing. L.D. had wanted his mother to take the volume home for him but she had persuaded him to hold on to it. “Elliot,” she had said, “you’re coming home in a few days, so you bring it with you when you come.”81 Laverne now deeply regretted not having taken that book.

  By Saturday night, no one—no prisoner relative sitting in a far-off city nervously watching the TV news, no hostage family member pacing the parking lot under Attica’s foreboding facade, no observer trying to get some sleep in a local motel, no trooper standing with arms at the ready on the prison’s vast lawn, and no man huddling in a tent in D Yard—thought that this standoff could continue much longer. Someone, somewhere, was going to break.

  17

  On the Precipice

  To his great annoyance, as dawn broke on Sunday, the 12th of September, NYSP Major John Monahan, head of Batavia’s Troop A, stood ready, but was not given the green light to commence a forcible retaking of Attica. Instead he was told to stand by. For him this was intensely frustrating because it seemed that every hour that state officials were talking with the prisoners, they were legitimizing their takeover. He firmly believed that had he been allowed to go in for a full retaking days earlier, this would all be long over.

  Meanwhile, waking up in nearby hotels, the observers saw things very differently. To them the prisoners had tried to get their grievances addressed through proper channels and had gotten nowhere. While the eruption four days earlier was not good, it was to them understandable. Now, the observers felt, it was up to them to make sure that something positive came out of this unfortunate situation. They were, however, tired and highly stressed. On Sunday morning those who had managed to grab a bed or some floor space on the matted shag carpeting of the Holiday Inn or the Treadway blearily buttoned up their now rumpled, smelly shirts and tried to psych themselves up for another day of negotiations. Tom Wicker and Lewis Steel were in Bill Kunstler’s room when he got the call that he had been waiting for from the Black Panthers in New York. Feeling desperate for some way to end the Attica standoff without violence, Kunstler had asked the Panthers to explore whether some of their contacts in countries such as Algeria might be willing to take some of Attica’s prisoners, should they manage to secure transport to a “non-imperialist” country. Wicker didn’t like hearing this. As he tried to remind Kunstler, the prisoners had already made it clear that this original “demand” in fact had very little support and, he went on, it would be a real distraction to bring it up again. In Wicker’s view the focus now should be solely on getting Bobby Seale, somehow, to persuade the men in the yard to accept the settlement they’d been offered.

  At 8:20 Sunday morning, Seale dutifully returned to Attica, but when Oswald told him he would not be allowed into D Yard unless he promised to endorse the twenty-eight points, Seale turned on his heel and left. Outside the prison, in front of a growing crowd pushing in to hear what he had to say, Seale read a statement he had just drafted:

  This morning, the commissioner and his aides would not let me in, saying that if I was not going inside to encourage the prisoners to accept the so-called demands made by the committee, they did not want me. I am not going to do that….The Black Panther Party position is this: The prisoners have to make their own decision. I will not encourage them to compromise their position. The Black Panther Party position is that all political prisoners who want to be released to go to non-imperialistic countries should be complied with by the New York state governments.1

  Back in the Steward’s Room, a few of the observers, including Kunstler, were supportive of Seale’s position and newly angry at Oswald. Others, however, were furious at Seale for what they believed to be dodging responsibility in the face of the crisis. Wicker, for example, felt strongly that Seale should have told the men in the yard, “Look, you’ve gone as far as you can. You’ve made a political point to the whole world. You’ve made The Man listen. Now a lot of you are going to get killed if you push it further.”2 Whatever their disagreements, however, all the observers agreed that they now needed a new plan.

  As
the minutes ticked by, consensus among the observers was hard to come by. Some thought that the prisoners should be told that they had a clear choice—accept what the state had offered them or face the possibility of death in a forcible retaking. Tom Soto went so far as to say that “the acts of the prisoners are in the interests of all the working people and the oppressed people of the world, regardless of whether they get slaughtered.”3 And Jabarr Kenyatta seemed almost enthusiastic about the possibility of a confrontation with the state: “We’ve got to have a commitment…when the man comes we don’t mind fighting.”4 Arthur Eve couldn’t have felt more differently. He was concerned not just about what might happen to the prisoners and their hostages if the troopers went in, but how it would affect his constituents. “If they come in there and kill people, Buffalo gonna blow up….If something happens here it’s gonna mirror in every community all over the city,” he worried out loud.5

  But as every observer was well aware, Oswald was under increasing and “tremendous pressure from officials in other states, correctional officers, organizations such as the PBA [Police Benevolent Association], the families of hostages and people on the street to use force.” The mayor of Auburn wrote to Rockefeller how “utterly dismayed and angered” he was by Oswald’s “permissiveness.”6