The Case for Brotherhood

...A thousand psychiatrists working overtime could not rationalize their natures or change their behavior...

...In retrospect, with Abbott's over-praised writing in hand, it should have been simple...

...One such robbery goes awry, and in the confusion Robby's friend shoots and kills a Greek...

...Even the old radical chic crowd can't be accused of coddling criminals anymore...

...Puopolo had been a classmate of mine, a Harvard football player stabbed to death during a scuffle in Boston's notorious Combat Zone...

...It turns out Jim poisoned him and faked the note...

...teachers expect him to live up to the performance of his older brothers and sister...

...Not long after Abbott was freed from jail, when he was bugged by a young waiter at a Greenwich Village restaurant who wouldn't let him use the bathroom, he did what he said he would do on page five...

...Robby's past is no doubt typical of thousands of other inmates: the difference is that he is insightful enough to explain it, and lucky enough to have a brother who wants to put it between covers...

...Inside, where recidivism is so high, the saying goes, that the authorities reserve a place for you in the chow line once you get out, Robby becomes a Muslim...

...I mentioned Jim in an article I wrote for my college newspaper about the program, and when the editor saw it he said I must not have been in Massachusetts long enough to recognize the name...

...If it is not exclusively black, it is enough so that the culture of the ghetto might turn out to be as important to understand as it seemed 15 or 20 years ago, before the bitterness took over...

...They are people whose acquaintance self-assured research associates at, say, the Heritage Foundation are not eager to make, even through books...

...To be a star...

...Here the story changes in ways that are confusing for the people with pat answers...

...They must be...

...As we grew friendlier and his warm, unthreatening personality took hold, the question grew more puzzling...

...Were you crowded three to a cell and homosexually assaulted...

...The larger problem is, simply, an unquenchable need to be cool...

...There is, after all, a difference between a trigger man and an accomplice...

...On page five of his book, for instance, he writes of a fellow inmate who bugged him for a cigarette: "And I just looked into his sleazy eyes and wanted to kill his ass there in front of God and everyone...

...That's why .prisons exist...

...That's all he said before breaking into a grin and cracking a joke, his same old likable self...

...As recently as 1981, it hadn't been so easy for Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott's parole board to discern the truth...

...It wasn't considered polite to ask what they were in for, but the details eventually emerged...

...Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $15.95...

...Then the body of Jim's mother was discovered buried in his basement...

...His family moves to a tougher neighborhood and he falls in with a tougher crowd...

...This is a book about the black male experience at a time when people aren't writing about that, or at least not writing books that are being widely published and read...

...It's a glamour...

...He ran several programs inside the prison and served as a jailhouse lawyer...

...There are no quick cuts between sherry at Oxford and paper bag wine in Pittsburgh or extended meditations on marrying a white woman...

...The crime rate may be down a bit, but the bitterness of the victims has reached a critical mass, even among liberals...

...The best we can do is isolate them from the rest of the population, and reconcile ourselves to the fact that they are irredeemable...

...John is straight A's, basketball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, Rhodes Scholar, novelist, and English professor...

...First Robby grows withdrawn and alienated, in this case by the death of a friend whose illness is ignored by white doctors until it's too late...

...To let people know you're somebody...

...Blinded by their rage, they see all criminals as the same, and the prison as a place to let them rot...

...Valedictorian of the last prison class before budget cuts eliminate the program, he gives a graduation speech eloquently extolling the virtues of hard work over trying to be hip...

...Maybe Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien had it right in those old movies after all...

...You asked for it...

...Maybe nothing more than just taking the time to get to know an inmate or two...

...The main reason all of this works is that it is done through John Wideman, who is determined to figure out why he and his brother took different paths...

...It does so by taking readers into a world that they may have strong opinions about, but don't really know very well...

...Who said you were a pimp, I asked...

...Nobody could tell me nothin...

...But the book is not really about those contrasts...

...You out there to show your ass...

...That's about where John Edgar Wideman leaves off, though with the hope that the metal door will swing open again before too long...

...Imagine the liberal outrage that would have occurred ten years ago had a grand jury acquitted a Bernhard Goetz for murder after he shot three black teenagers on the subway, two of them in the back...

...The prosecutor, he answered, assuming I knew his case...

...You're not like these others...

...Yeah...

...The accomplishment of Brothers and Keepers is that it helps us take a second look at these people we've recently come to hate so much...

...The outlines of the story'are familiar enough...

...O'Brien, or whoever happened to be playing the golden-hearted priest, would be weeping softly, but he'd be certain justice could permit no other outcome...

...One day his boss was found dead, a suicide note on his desk...

...What is required of us...

...Like me, Jim loved politics...

...One can believe that criminals have done harm to us (and should be imprisoned for it), without believing that we should do harm to them (and revel in their misery...

...In other words, "Lock 'em up" may be right, but it also may not be enough...

...hear the bar go quiet when you walk through the door...

...But my own intense conversations with the attentionstarved inmates often left me brooding on the ride home...

...For about a second and a half Jim's eyes narrowed and his voice turned arctic: "I'd like to get that guy out here alone some day...

...This last point is so uncool to make that it tends to be underestimated as an explanation of youthful lawbreaking, not to mention many of the rest of the ills of Western civilization...

...But that's all it took...

...1 returned to Walpole, where Jim and I talked some more, but I still couldn't fathom it...

...Liberals no longer have much trouble facing the first idea, but millions of conservatives will not give the second idea even a thought...

...He recounts the stages of his adjustment to leading the double life of an assimilated black...

...Then there was Jim, a portly white inmate who was very smart and talked about everything in the world except himself...

...It is against the tide of Leon and Jim and Jack Henry Abbott that John Edgar Wideman is swimming in Brothers and Keepers*, a book full of ambiguous emotions on a subject that seems to have lost its ambiguity...

...Jim's case may seem like an easy one, but that is only a measure of how far even liberal attitudes have traveled in the last couple of years...

...Morrison and Walker are onto a gripping and relevant but entirely different black experience...

...That's why you shouldn't be here...

...His mother finds money missing from her purse and later discovers a syringe under his bed...

...Some of these guys are bad, very bad...

...They take to offering to sell hot TVs to a fence, then robbing the crooked buyers...

...He relies instead on a pastiche of confused impressions of his brother that somehow make sense...

...Robby is class clown, black revolutionary, dopehead, accomplice in an armed robbery attempt on some other petty thieves that results in a murder and puts him in prison for life...

...When I was in college I spent some time working in an unusual youth counseling program...

...Another few visits, no hints...

...Even black community leaders, while decrying the racist overtones to the Goetz case, have been conspicuously restrained in their defense of the teenagers...

...The thing was to make up your own rules, do your own thing, but make sure it's contrary to what society says or is . . . The next part of the story is also depressingly familiar...

...But there are others Wideman would say his brother is among them—who are not the same...

...His position as the family's youngest child is a factor...

...This time the ethnic group struggling to join the middle class isn't the Irish—Pat O'Brien as the priest and Jimmy Cagney as the gangster—but blacks...

...However out of synch with the times, Wideman's musings about his brother are an effort to scramble the new certitude on this issue, not through liberal bromides, but by simply throwing the old-fashioned notion of brotherhood into the mix, tossing all of those dimly recalled ambiguities back into the resisting mind of the reader...

...Now it's William Kunstler against the world...

...The law respects some of those differences...

...I was never sure if these visits actually helped our young charges or simply made them able to brag to their friends about knowing big-time crooks...

...How could someone who knew that Tom Dewey was called "the man on the wedding cake" have done something that would land him in a maximum security jail for life...

...Here's Robby on that subject, as filtered through his brother's typewriter: "Had this superfly thing...

...For reasons that are more taken for granted than explained, violent street crime is an exclusively male activity...

...Ten years apart in age and living in different cities, "it had taken guards, locks and bars to bring us together...

...between a first-time car thief and a repeat offender who sticks a knife in your ribs...

...Just before the credits rolled, Cagney or some other scarface would shuffle down the long hallway toward the prison door, head bowed...

...Then, by way of explanation, he said, simply, "I killed Andy Puopolo...

...As for me, I can't cry for Leon and Jim any more than the families of their dead victims can...

...The things we liked, we called tad . Man, that was a 'bad' girl...

...Finally one day I was so determined to get a little closer to his case that I casually dropped the name of the Boston Globe reporter who covered his trial...

...Different ." The point is, you don't have to agree with Wideman that Robby should not be in jail in order to agree that this particular inmate is wasting in jail...

...They flee to the West, visiting John Wideman briefly in Wyoming while on the lam, then are caught and sentenced to life imprisonment...

...But I do know that the kids we drove out to the prison that year are not the only ones who could learn from them...

...I had trouble talking to Leon after that...

...between the cold-blooded murder of an innocent stranger and the hot-blooded murder of a wife or a friend...

...Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Claude Brown, and Ralph Ellison have largely given way to the Toni Morrisons and Alice Walkers in the task of chronicling black life for the masses...

...Jonathan Alter is an associate editor of Newsweek and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The inmates would advise the kids about how to straighten out their lives and avoid the "Big House...

...Leon, an amiable black inmate with a silver earring who was popular with the kids, told me his life story one day, then began insisting he was not a pimp...

...This was, of course, a familiar narrative device in those gritty movie melodramas back in the 1930s...

...Robby and a couple of friends buy dope in Detroit with the hope of making a killing selling it in Pittsburgh, but the deal goes bad and they need money fast...

...After all, it's their own constituents who suffer the most from crime and from an unworkable criminal justice system...

...You're my brother, you're like me...

...Each week a friend of mine drove a van full of 12- and 13-year-old black kids, many with juvenile records, to Walpole state prison, onetime home of the Boston Strangler...

...The first reaction, in college, is like that of anyone moving from one class to another: "Coming home was kind of bragging, like the suntans people bring from Hawaii in the middle of the winter...

...See, it's a rep...

...A few years earlier Jim had been well known—former treasurer of McGovern's 1972 campaign in Massachusetts, vice president of a local business...

...If the Heritage types did take the time, they might in fact find many of their stereotypes confirmed...

...You out there to shine...

...Somewhere along the way people stopped caring very much that Leon was good with kids or that Jim could be a friend or that Jack Abbott knew how to write...

...It's the hardliners who sometimes have more trouble making the distinctions...

...Two brothers grow up in the city streets: the older becomes the family's pride and joy, the younger a source of heartbreak and shame...

...Robby, remarkably articulate about where he has gone wrong, buckles down and receives an associate college degree in engineering...

...By most accounts, today's thugs are meaner and more casual about taking a life than ever before...

...He does this by taking the figurative notion of brotherhood—the kind that people used to feel for men in jail—and making it literal brotherhood...