A TRUE PLACE OF PENITENCE

“ Americans are thrice happy, because your destiny is in your hands.”- W.H. Seward’s college graduation speech Union College June, 1820

    Scattered amongst all these intra-histories are single names like Quack, Sambo, Hasty, Sook, Stick, Zeno, Floor, and the apathetic classic- Dick Likewise. For centuries these African Americans bring horse, grab gun, lock door, fetch water, save children, and risked their lives repeatedly for their masters and mistresses. They fought and died, side by side their owners, never to be memorialized in bronze or marble on the many monuments dotting the American landscape.  A handful of African Americans, like Gershom Prince, “a negro servant of Captain Durkee’s” are the exception, at least tacitly historicized in print and remembered with the odd, dusty reliquary object, "taken from his lifeless body on the battlefield of Wyoming,.” With the carved inscription “Prince + Negro His Horn,” it ended up, like Sheriff Thomas Osterhout’s cane, in a glass case at The Wyoming Historical Society, in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania. There’s 227 scalps listed as taken by Butler’s Rangers ($10 per paid by the crown). Ranger William Osterhout could have been there in Wyoming, fighting alongside the British and the Mohawks. The names of 182 white Americans are listed “killed in battle,” on the Wyoming memorial…. so far still in place. Finding Gershom Prince’s powder horn on the battlefield proves, without a doubt, Prince died right alongside all the other American white men at the Wyoming Massacre. His name is the last one listed under Privates- “Gershom Prince-colored.”

    

    Recently I’ve dug into George Jackson’s book of prison letters, Soledad Brother, and re-read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Both these men had good lawyers, who helped their thoughts and rage find the printed page. Jack Hodges was illiterate, but even his words found an audience through Rev. Ansel Eddy’s religious tract. The radical inmate literature, of Malcolm X, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jackson and Cleaver, beautifully written, dripping in self-righteous fury, is the inheritor of Coffey’s report and Austin Reed’s memoir from the war zone at Auburn Prison in the 1850’s.

    In the late 1980’s I was hired as a columnist for PAPER Magazine, a New York City scenester monthly. Although my column (crazily enough) was about religion, the editors gave me free reign to write about whatever I pleased. Not surprisingly, race was in the air. On April 19, 1989 a white woman was brutally beaten and raped in Central Park. Five young black men were railroaded (with the help of the police, courts, media and Donald Trump) and falsely convicted for the crime; one ending up at Auburn.

     A day after celebrating my 37th birthday, Black Panther Huey Newton was killed in Oakland, California. The next day, August 23, 1989, Yusef Hawkins was attacked, and murdered, by a mob of angry whites, in a racially motivated killing, in the predominantly Italian-American neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. These three events were connected by a lynch mob mentally, fueled by sadistic men like Trump, finding renewed vigor in the United States. 

    On August 5, 1989 Matias Reyes was arrested for rape and murder in New York City. Because of a previously scheduled engagement to lecture at Tony Labat’s San Francisco Art Institute class, I was in California in August. Labat and I found ourselves standing, alongside 600 other mourners, spilling out of the Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, attending Huey’s funeral; two of the few white faces in the crowd. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you why exactly we were there, only that, inspired by the outpouring of grief for this black revolutionary, I went home and wrote my PAPER column; memorializing both Yusef Hawkins and Huey Newton.

     It would take years before the innocent Central Park boys, Kevin Richardson, Antron Mccray, Raymond Santana, Jr, and Yusef Salaam, would be released back into society as state traumatized men. In May 2002 Matias Reyes confessed to raping and leaving for dead Trisha Meill, “the Central Park jogger.” His D.N.A. was all over the evidence. Only then would the fifth boy (man) who had been the most severely savaged (mentally and physically) by the system at Auburn and other New York State prisons, Korey Wise, be freed. All five sued and received a combined 41 million dollar judgement. A small price. If Trump had had his way they’d all be dead.