Straight Life - Art Pepper [173]
So I saw this guy one day and he motioned to me; he was alone. He said, "I'll meet you here later." He named a time. I was there, and he appeared with a big sack behind his back. He looked around and set the sack down. He talked off, away from me, and he said, "Well, I've really got it made right now if I can stay out of the adjustment center." He said, "Whenever any stuff comes in, I get it, and I'll lay it on you. But we got to be really careful because if the blacks ever saw me messing with you it would be all over for me. I'm going to leave now. Pick up this bag." In the bag there's cigarettes and coffee and a new razor and razor blades and perfume and aftershave that cost a lot of money, that the blacks gave him. He just laid this stuff on me, and this happened several times.
In the county jail there wasn't any TV, and in San Quentin in the South Block and the East Block there was nothing like that, but in the North Block they had a TV and we used to watch movies and all the sporting events. When we watched the boxing if there were two black boxers, it wasn't so bad, but if there was a Mexican and a black or, God forbid, a white and a black, it was just unbelievable the hatred that came out.
The Mexicans are quiet people. They're clannish, they're secretive, and they don't believe in infringing on other people's rights or annoying them. You can sit in a room full of Mexicans watching a thing like that and nothing will be said. So everything would have been fine but the blacks would get together in a group to aggravate everybody else.
See, the whites and the Mexicans, they sit wherever there's a seat, but the black guys all sit together. So, if you're sitting on a bench with a couple of blacks and there's no room for another person, well, some black guy will just come up and, "Heeey, baby! Saaay, home boy!" There's not enough room for him to sit but this guy sitting next to you says to the new guy, "Heeey, baby! Come on up here, blood!" And they'll just sit right on you. Either you can stay there and have them pushing you off the bench, being so loud and obnoxious that you can't enjoy anything, or you can fight with them and try to kill them, or else you can move. And that's what the white guy does or the Mexican. He moves. All you want to do is enjoy what you came to see, the TV. These blacks don't come to see TV: they come to get together. Any black guy will tell you that if he's honest. They come to annoy everybody else. Everyone in prison is consumed with resentment and hatred, and I guess the most convenient target for your anger is some other race of people. Maybe that's what these blacks were doing, assaulting us with noise, disrupting everything. You have to move. And then they look around, like, "Hey, boy, what's wrong?" There's nothing you can do, and they know that.
The fight starts on TV, and they start yelling: "Hey, brothah! Look at that brothah up theah! Git that white boy!" Whatever the white guy is, he's no good. The black guy is the greatest. Baseball, the same thing. They don't care about teams. All they care about is the black brothers and "blood" and all this, man. They've got their reasons, but why do they have to take their hate out on us, whites and Mexicans who have been discriminated against, raised just as badly or worse than they were? We're suffering just as much. We've been sentenced to prison. We're away from our loved ones.
As I said, the nonblacks are quieter about their anger, but after a while they can't stand it so they start in, too, raving, "Get that jigaboo! Kill that black