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Prison Life Writing, African American Narrative Strategies, and Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr Simon Rolston University of British Columbia

I know that the one writing it would only have to take words and fling them onto paper, the forbidden and accursed words, the bloody words, the words spit out in a lather, discharged with sperm, the slandered, reprobate words, the unwritten words—like the ultimate name of God—the dangerous, padlocked words, the words that don’t belong in the dictionary, because if they were written there, com- plete and not maimed by ellipses, they would say too quickly the suffocating misery of a solitude that is not accepted.

—Jean Genet (21)

In his introduction to George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1971), Jean Genet spends a great deal of time talking about the idea of bad language. He writes that the “forbidden and accursed words” that speak about prison life are “not accepted” outside of the prison in civil society. Genet insists that writing about prison is circumscribed by proscriptions and prescriptions that he represents as a kind of violence done to an already violent language: “[A]ny writing that reaches us from this infernal place should reach us as though mutilated, pruned of its overly tumultuous adornments” (21). For the “bloody words” of the prison to enter into the discourse of civil society, they have to be “maimed” and “mutilated,” “pruned” of their brutality and shocking immediacy.

Writing about Soledad Brother, an epistolary memoir, Genet specifically addresses prison life writing. As Genet suggests, prison life writing has rules about what kinds of speech and speaking subjects can enter into official (that is, published) autobiographical discourse. However, the rules of prison life writing can be difficult to identify because they are frequently tacit or implicit, de facto rather than de jure. Since the rules of prison life writing are often hard to spot, they are best recognized when broken or transgressed. Paul John Eakin identifies “three primary transgressions—there may be more—for which self-narrators have been called to account” (113) for contravening or transgressing the implicit or explicit

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regulations of autobiographical discourse: “(1) misrepresentation of biographical and historical truth, (2) infringement of the right to privacy, and (3) failure to display normative models of personhood” (113-14). Of the three rules that Eakin identifies here, the third—“failure to display normative models of personhood”— is instructive for understanding how Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr (1975) radically breaks the rules of prison life writing, particularly the genre’s tacit rules about representations of violence and crime. Prison writers who have committed acts of violence or engaged in criminal activity invariably seek to justify (or at least to explain) in their autobiographies the violence that they have perpetrated or the crimes that they have committed. James Carr, by comparison, describes murder- ing, raping, and brutalizing men and women inside and outside of the prison without justifying his violence. In fact, he resists providing any explanation for his crimes. By exploring Carr’s curious and often outlandish self-portrait of violent crime in Bad, this article will unearth the tacit rules of prison life writing and the African American autobiographical tradition and interrogate how working-class African American folkloric traditions engage a more mainstream, predominantly white reading public.

A scene early in Bad illustrates Carr’s approach to the genre of prison life writing. Carr describes how, when he was a boy, he stabbed another boy with a hunting knife and refused to provide the police with an explanation for the attack after he was caught: “They kept trying to discover some kind of motive. . . . I kept saying ‘I don’t know,’ while they kept thinking up possible reasons. It seemed like they were more nervous than I was thinking up new lines of questions” (24). Like Carr’s Bartleby-esque refusal to provide a motive for stabbing the boy, Bad pro- vides no moral, ethical, political, or ideological explanation or justification for its author’s predatory violence. Instead, Carr boasts about his violent crimes.

While Carr’s boasting about violence places him at odds with prison life writ- ing’s normative models of personhood, it does conform to a figure that appears in African American folklore, ballads, blaxploitation films, and later hip-hop called the “badman.” Jerry H. Bryant describes the badman as the “bad nigger” who “was the white man’s worst dream,” the “out-of-control black man, the surly slacker, the belligerent troublemaker, and occasionally the killer of whites” (2). Hypermasculine, the badman has historically been available as an archetype to men rather than women in the African American community. Of course, there are violent, boisterous, or anti-authoritarian women in African American storytelling, but such female characters do not have the same purchase on a legendary bad identity as their male counterparts. The badman story is traditionally about a bad man. Bryant isolates two manifestations of the badman, however: what historian Lawrence W. Levine calls the “moral hard man” and what folklorist Roger D. Abrahams calls the “hard man.”1 Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and George Jackson are badman figures, but they constitute “moral hard men” because

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they fight against white oppression and align themselves with social action (3).

Moral hard men “revolt mainly against whites within the white system,” writes

Bryant (2). Clearly, prison life writing accommodates the figure of the moral hard

man. The amoral hard man is a different story. The amoral hard man challenges the white system but also preys on weaker

members of his own community. According to Bryant, this figure was

a fierce individualist, a scourge in his own community, introducing disorder and arousing fear, disapproval, and alarm as well as a reluctant admiration. He was known for his viciousness, and his excesses were material for stories around a slave- cabin fire or, later, at the barber shop or pool hall and the springboard for exag- gerated tales of boundless priapic feats, triumphs over the devil, incomparable cruelties, and a cool style that young studs sought to emulate. In the black community, this “bad nigger” was the king of the street corner, the terror of the roadside honky-tonk, the superbly self-confident and solitary operator. (3)

The hard man, as defined by Bryant, is often talked about in prison life writing; however, it is rare for male prison autobiographers to speak or to write as hard men without including telling qualifications that make the violent figure of the hard man palatable for a non-prison readership. Prison autobiographers’ hard man performances are typically bracketed as politically motivated (and thus constitutive of the moral hard man) or represented as manifestations of selves from the past with little in common with the book’s author; in other words, they are explained or rationalized, which contrasts with the hard man’s devil-may-care braggadocio.

The autobiographical subjects of some of the most well-known prison life writings of the past fifty years initially accord with the amoral hard man but ultimately undergo some radical transformation whereby their chaotic violence is focused or supplemented by theological or political morality: in the course of their narratives, the narrator is usually transformed into the moral hard man. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Sanyika Shakur’s Monster (1993), and Stanley Tookie Williams’s Blue Rage, Black Redemption (2004), for example, employ a conversion narrative, which allows for a clear demarcation between past and present selves, between amoral hard men and moral hard men, and between “Detroit Red” and Malcolm X or between “Monster” Kody Scott and Sanyika Shakur. The phenomenon of prisoner conversion is not restricted to testaments of religious transformation, either. Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s The Sixteenth Round (1974), and Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler (1994) define prison as a site of radical, secular self- transformation that accords with the general paradigm of the religious conversion narrative: fall, conversion, and rebirth. These texts all depict radical transforma- tions of selfhood as a result of the autobiographer’s imprisonment, bracketing past

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criminality from present authorial identity. Finally, even prison life writers who explicitly identify themselves with the amoral hard man or with hard man-type violence, such as Cleaver in Soul on Ice (1968) or Jackson in Soledad Brother, channel their early, chaotic criminality and violence into markedly anti- individualistic forms of revolutionary social uplift.

2 By predominantly taking the

position of the amoral hard man in his autobiography, Carr radically breaks with an established tradition in African American prison life writing—a sometimes shocking, often troubling, but invariably fascinating decision.

This essay considers how Carr’s Bad brings the amoral hard man into prison life writing. Such a subject position reveals much about prison life that is otherwise excluded from autobiography, and therefore, consideration of this problematic and often disturbing voice is important. Carr and the men who helped him to write his autobiography bring the amoral hard man into autobiographical discourse by hybridizing autobiography with a genre that circulates in American prisons called “lying.” Lying—which does not necessarily denote the misrepresentation of facts—has very different rules from autobiography regarding representations of violence and crime, and the hard man is one of the central figures, if not the central figure, of the genre. Bad thus forms what Caren Kaplan calls an “outlaw genre” because it “breaks many of the elite literature’s laws” (120) by “mixing two conventionally ‘unmixable’ elements.” Although Kaplan suggests that outlaw genres blend “autobiography criticism and autobiography itself” (119), I suggest that Carr’s mixture of lying, an oral storytelling mode found in American prisons in the 1960s and 1970s, with autobiography, a written storytelling mode often associated with “high” cultural formations, likewise breaks rules of self-narration and disturbs the common sense of prison life writing and African American autobiographical discourse.

Because Carr takes the position of the hard man, much of the usual pruning that goes into a prison autobiography—such as mitigating the autobiographer’s involvement in acts of violence—is absent from Bad. Carr’s self-narration as a hard man contravenes acceptable models of personhood and uses some of the “reprobate,” “padlocked,” and censored words, sentences, and stories that Genet suggests adequately represent the brutality of prison life—and presumably, the brutality of some of the prison’s inhabitants. Claiming this subject position is certainly problematic. For example, Carr not only makes light of raping men and women but also celebrates such violence, gleefully affirming violent expressions of misogyny and homophobia in the process. Moreover, as with other hard men, Carr’s remorseless acts of violence risk invigorating stereotypes of African American male criminality.

Carr’s proximity to racist stereotypes is even more unexpected given the book’s editorial process and the whiteness of the book’s editors. Bad is an “as-told-to” autobiography: Carr told anecdotes from his life to two white, middle-class

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amanuenses—Dan Hammer and Isaac Cronin. After taping their conversations, Hammer and Cronin transcribed the tapes, ultimately turning Carr’s oral text into the written narrative.

3 The as-told-to nature of the book raises questions about the

authenticity of Carr’s story. I will accept Carr as the author, but I will also address the fraught position of his authorial identity, which is especially important given Carr’s capacity to energize racist stereotypes about black criminality. This text therefore telescopes but also complicates questions of authenticity, appropriation, black speech, and white writing that haunt many African American autobiogra- phies, from slave narratives to prison writing. In particular, Bad registers the troubled relations of power that crystallize when the hidden transcript of a work- ing-class African American folkloric tradition becomes a public transcript—a published autobiography that circulates in American culture with a predominantly white audience and readership.

Before turning to Carr’s autobiography in detail, it is worth emphasizing that this paradigm—where the typically suppressed voice of the African American hard man is brought into American dominant culture—has deep and tangled roots in American culture. Carr’s hard man persona is certainly exceptional in the prison life writing genre and the African American autobiographical canon. Yet Bad participates in, while also deviating from, a long tradition of African American hard men who periodically emerge in American literature, film, and music, raising difficult questions about the (dis)placement of African American expressive tra- ditions in American culture. Hard men were clearly part of slave culture, for example, reappearing in oral stories, writing, and songs. Eugene D. Genovese cites a number of first-person reports of antebellum hard men who fought whites but also threatened their own communities (625-30).

But antebellum hard men were unlikely autobiographers because they did not fit the template that abolitionists sought in their fugitive slave subjects.5 One exception was Nat Turner, the leader of the infamous 1831 slave rebellion that killed approximately sixty white and at least one hundred black Southerners, whose story was recorded by Thomas R. Gray, a lawyer and slaveholder, and published that year as a pamphlet titled The Confessions of Nat Turner. In his confession, Turner “made no attempt ‘to exculpate himself,’ but frankly and without remorse acknowledged his monstrous acts” (Gross and Bender 494), a lack of remorse that echoes the hard man in antebellum black folklore and res- onates with Carr’s violence. Turner’s story is, however, deeply suspect. Seymour L. Gross and Eileen Bender show how Turner’s badman persona in The Confessions of Nat Turner deviated from historical records and instead served Gray’s interest in depoliticizing Turner’s rebellion by pathologizing what was a collective, revolu- tionary project. The role that Gray played in shaping and defining Turner’s story has clear resonances with Hammer and Cronin’s involvement in the production of Bad (which I will explore later in this article), but Carr’s oral storytelling was

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produced under very different circumstances, and he clearly shared a political project with his amanuenses. Moreover, Turner framed his violent rebellion in religious terms—he sees himself as a vengeful, apocalyptic Christ-figure (48)— which aligns him with later moral hard men, such as Malcolm X.

Bad’s Carr is also similar to Jim Crow- and Great Migration-era hard men such as Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940). In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (1940), Wright says that he wanted Native Son to be a book that “bankers’ daughters” could not “read and weep over”; Thomas’s story “would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (454). Similarly, according to Hammer, Bad was written so as not to “appeal to . . . liberal allies on the outside” (13). But unlike Thomas, whose violence is an effect of broader social forces (a sign of the book’s naturalism), Carr’s violence is not represented as an effect of the brutal social constraints of the ghetto or the prison. Carr’s hard man persona is therefore without precedent in American culture until hip-hop’s mainstreaming of a ghettocentric identity through gangsta rap nearly twenty years later.

6 Gangsta hard men like N. W. A., the Geto Boys, The

Notorious B. I. G., and Tupac Shakur take on the hard man persona, commer- cializing “unauthorized and humorous stories about poor and working-class black rebellion, stylized violence, and lewd sexuality” that rarely had scratched the surface of the American mainstream (Quinn 113). As Eithne Quinn observes, these hard men “wilfully rebutted ideas of black gentility and assimilationist aspiration” in the post-civil rights era (113). Decades before hip-hop men cele- brated black transgressive performances of masculinity and rejected the politics of respectability of their parent culture, Bad extended hard man performances into new, unsettling, and often problematic territory.

James Carr: Jackal Dog

Resisting the psychoanalytic paradigm that often frames contemporary autobiog- raphy, Carr chooses not to discuss his early childhood in Bad. “Fuck, man, it was just one of those goddamned ghetto childhoods,” he tells Hammer, one of the book’s two editors. “You’ve heard a thousand stories like it” (qtd. in Hammer 12). Instead, Carr’s story begins with his first encounter with law enforcement. When he was nine years old, he burned down his elementary school in East Los Angeles to get even with a white boxing instructor who had banned him from the boxing ring and the playground for swearing (21). Carr was quickly caught by the police, who tricked him into confessing to the arson. Thereafter, Carr’s story of his adolescent street life in Los Angeles progresses from crime to crime—including arson, violent assault, theft, rape, and gang activity. He provides virtually no instance in his narrative where he is free from the purview of law enforcement,

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state institutions, or prisons. Even when he is no longer incarcerated at the end of the narrative, he is still on parole, a conditional state that he describes as an extension of the California carceral system: police and parole officers “follo[w] [him] around” and closely monitor his activities (196). Resonating with Michel Foucault’s concept of the “carceral continuum” (302-3), the period of Carr’s life covered in his book follows a pattern of ever-increasing degrees of punishment and containment that invariably lead to an indeterminate sentence—a sentence without a fixed term—in the California prison system. As a result, there is neither temporal nor spatial location outside of the carceral apparatus in the book: Carr’s story and the story of his emergent sense of himself as a self occur in relation to his criminalization and life in the prison.

Most of Bad focuses on Carr’s adolescence and young adulthood from the late 1950s to the early 1970s in California’s sprawling carceral system. Carr writes that the first “prison” that “[he] was ever sent to was called Alexander’s Boys’ Home”; he was eleven years old (27). When Carr was fourteen years old, he was incar- cerated at Paso Robles, a youth detention facility in California’s Central Valley (40). Aged sixteen years, he was sent to a youth detention camp near Yosemite called Mt. Bullion (55). After participating in the gang rape of another young prisoner at Mt. Bullion, Carr was transferred to the Deuel Vocational Institute in Tracy, California (58). At Tracy, Carr befriended famed prison writer and activist George Jackson,7 and the two young men became members of a prison gang called the “Wolf Pack.” Carr’s close friendship with Jackson gained him a degree of notoriety inside and outside of the prison. After this stretch of time behind bars, Carr was paroled but was soon charged with robbery and given a “five-to-life” indeterminate sentence in San Quentin (121). Several years later, Carr performed the role of the repentant prisoner in order to dupe the Adult Authority Board (California’s parole board) into thinking he was rehabilitated so that they would release him, which they ultimately did in 1971.

After Carr’s release, he joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) in which he served as Huey P. Newton’s bodyguard and enforcer for a time. In the short period when he was outside of prison, Carr, who had earned the nickname “Jackal Dog,” was rumored to have been involved in several high-profile murders, kidnappings, and prison escape attempts related to his involvement with the BPP and his close relationship with Jackson.8 Despite the rumors, Carr was never charged with any crimes, except for the charges that were brought against him for fighting at one of Jackson’s hearings—hearings that were part of the Soledad Brothers trials for the murder of John V. Mills, a guard at Soledad Prison. As a result of his fight at Jackson’s hearing, which constituted a violation of his parole, Carr spent nine months in the San Francisco County Jail in the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street. After Carr was released from County Jail and reinstated on parole, he teamed up with Hammer and Cronin, who agreed to help write his life story. On April 6, 1972,

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several days after the first draft of Bad was completed, Carr was gunned down by two Panther-affiliated assassins outside of his home.

As this brief biography shows, Carr’s life was steeped in the radical politics of 1960s California, and he was an important albeit disturbing figure in the BPP and affiliated African American revolutionary organizations (including the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee). He seems to conform to a characterization of black masculinity familiar to African American prison narratives of the post- war era that approximates the figure of the moral hard man rather than the hard man. As I have observed, however, most male prison autobiographies that describe an autobiographer’s conversion to a revolutionary cause—including Soul on Ice, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Soledad Brother—imply that the (hard man) criminality or violence of the narrator’s past has been supplanted by more meaningful and also more socially acceptable acts of (moral hard man) resistance. Even George Jackson, who argues that the “black criminal mentality” and the “black revolutionary mentality” are to some degree compatible, suggests in his own life narrative that his criminality was ultimately supplanted by a revolutionary ideology (Soledad 40). But Carr does not indicate that his turn to a revolutionary ideology domesticates, or at least decriminalizes, the violent, predatory gang member and prisoner that he was before his political conversion. Rather than pursue the familiar trajectory of the criminal who becomes a revolu- tionary, Bad privileges Carr’s criminality, his badness, and his hard man predation, despite his involvement in revolutionary organizations such as the Panthers. If, as I propose, the amoral hard man rarely takes the position of the speaking subject in prison life writing, then how do Carr, Hammer, and Cronin modify the generic borders of autobiographical discourse in order to allow Carr to take on this figure in his autobiography?

Lying and the “White Envelope”

Auli Ek writes: “Since the experience of being incarcerated is . . . marginal in that it is unknown to most readers, autobiographers tend to teach us how to read this experience by educating us about prison discourse and culture” (57). Carr provides just such a pedagogical moment when he describes lying:

I was lying back on my bed in there [the prison Adjustment Center—a form of solitary confinement] wondering what the cons did to pass the time, when a couple of dudes started calling, “Smitty, Smitty, tell us a lie.” They were answered by a black dude with a silkysmooth voice, the kind they put on a big- town jazz station. Smitty began a monologue about fucking a chick. . . . Smitty could lie.

“Smitty, we know you’re lying! Don’t just sit there and lie like that.” The dudes encouraged him by using a little negative psychology on him. . . . He described each

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thrust, each move. By the time he was ready, I was rooting for him to come, along with everyone else. When he did, I damned near joined him. It was that real.

Every night Smitty would get called on and lie. One night it would be Iwo Jima and Japs, the next about the biggest coke deal in history. . . . The dude had imagination. He might have made it big on the stage if he’d ever made it back to the streets. (89-90)

By describing lying as a prison storytelling practice, Carr teaches Hammer and Cronin how to receive and help to generate his story. In his introduction to Bad, Hammer discusses how the three men used lying as a way to produce the taped interviews that Hammer and Cronin would later shape into Carr’s autobiography: “Isaac and I would move Jimmy along the way other cons used to inspire the ‘liars,’ the cons who helped everyone pass the time by weaving incredible tales. The more fantastic the story, the more the listeners ride the storyteller with ‘Hey, Champ, that’s a loada shit,’ which makes the raconteur go even further into it” (16). Although this dialogic practice is discussed in Hammer’s introduction, it goes unmentioned in the body of Carr’s story (unlike Cleaver’s and Jackson’s autobiog- raphies, for example, whose epistolary forms register the prison-enforced dialogue of letter writing). Evidence of Hammer and Cronin’s complicity in producing the narrative is thus partially obscured. Bad is predominantly governed by Carr’s univocal, autobiographical “I,” which implies that the book’s “autobiographical pact” is solely between the reader and Carr, whose face graces the book’s cover and who is listed as the sole author.

Yet lying demonstrates that Hammer and Cronin’s influence is substantial. As Hammer suggests, the two men “move Jimmy along” and “inspire” his story- telling. Hammer and Cronin’s absence as possible co-storytellers in the narrative is problematic because it is quite possible that their conscious or unconscious cultural expectations (of Carr, prisoners, or black criminality, for example), along with Carr’s expectations of his two middle-class white readers’ desires, inform how Carr tells his life story, influencing the shape of his narrative— what he passes over and what he selects for inclusion. Added to the unspoken (and perhaps even unknown) prejudices, cultural expectations, and interpellations that likely occurred among these men, the editorial process further problematizes the notion that Bad can be read simply as Carr’s story.

Given the controversial nature of Carr’s hard man persona and its potential realization of what Katheryn K. Russell has called the stereotype of the “criminalblackman” (3), it is important to raise questions about the authenticity or appropriation of Carr’s voice and the scope and reach of the book’s white editors, even if those questions ultimately remain largely unanswered. In order to address these concerns, one could ask whether Bad deviates from other historical source material, which it does; the absence of any real discussion of Carr’s involvement in the BPP is an interesting lacuna, for example.10 But as Leigh

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Gilmore and Peaches Henry have shown, there can be a distinct difference between historical truth-telling and emotional truth in an autobiography: an autobiography need not, and in many cases should not, conform to its historical referent.

Trauma narratives, for example, often represent what Deborah Posel calls the “personal truth” of a traumatic experience (qtd. in Moss 100n6), which might deviate radically from the hard facts of the traumatizing event. Even if Carr’s story loosely corresponds to his characterization in histories of the era, it is hard to tell whether Bad constitutes an “authentic” account of how Carr experienced incidents in his life, especially given his penchant for embellishment and glaring omissions. To further assess the authenticity of Carr’s voice in the published autobiography, one could also compare the book with the materials culled during the oral produc- tion of the text, including the tape recordings of Carr, Hammer, and Cronin’s conversations. I have only heard approximately ninety minutes of their taped discussions (on a promotional tape, The View from the End of the World: Live Interviews of Life in Prison with James Carr [1975], that Cronin mailed to me), yet the taped stories seem to conform to those in the book. For example, Carr’s taped story about taking over Soledad Prison’s D-wing matches (often verbatim) the same story in Bad (102-6). This suggests a degree of parity between oral and written texts, at least on this single tape. But can such an approach differentiate among Carr, Hammer, and Cronin, given the fundamentally collaborative nature of Carr’s oral stories?

In order to analyze the reach of Hammer and Cronin’s editorial work, more- over, one could compare the book’s “paratext”—“the epigraphs, dedications, prefaces, and other bookish elements” (McCoy 156)—to its central narrative, which Gross and Bender do quite effectively in their analysis of The Confessions of Nat Turner. As Beth A. McCoy suggests, the paratext functions “as a zone transacting ever-changing modes of white domination and of resistance to that domination” in narratives “emerging from the African American freedom struggle” (156). Bad’s paratext is reminiscent of slave narratives that were coau- thored, transcribed, or edited by whites, such as The Confessions of Nat Turner or the narratives of Henry Box Brown or Harriet A. Jacobs. Slave narratives typically include authenticating documents written by whites before and after the narrative, what John Sekora has called the “white envelope” (482). As mentioned, Bad is similarly enveloped by white writing: the introduction is written by a white man, Hammer, and the afterword is written by a white woman, Betsy Carr, who is James Carr’s widow. (Additionally, in the recent AK Press edition, the foreword is written by Cronin and the new afterword by BM Blob.)

Bad’s paratext, particularly Hammer’s introduction, is potentially revealing. For one thing, Hammer mentions in his introduction that he and Cronin were very aware of the generic conventions of prison life writing—a genre that, he says, was invariably concerned with “proving that the prisoner was an innocent victim of

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social injustice” (13). Hammer and Cronin, who were heavily influenced by the Situationist International,

12 define the genre of prison life writing in a way that

loosely fits what the Situationists called détournement. According to Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, détournement is a “parodistic metho[d]” (15) that clashes “head-on with all social and legal conventions” (18). Carr’s hard man persona, which eschews any explanation for his violence, is perhaps a form of détournement that deliberately distorts prison life writing’s generic conventions, indicating that lying also served Hammer and Cronin’s political (and Situationist-inspired) goals.

Moreover, while there is a clear distinction between Hammer’s introduction and most of Carr’s narrative, the same cannot be said for Carr’s conclusion, the last chapter of the book attributed to James Carr (preceding Betsy Carr’s after- word). In the conclusion, there is a distinct change in tone and content from the rest of Carr’s narrative. Bad shifts from stories that are largely anecdotal and episodic—in fact, with the exception of the conclusion, all of Carr’s narrative, both before and during his prison life, is picaresque—to reflective and theoretical narrative. Carr’s authorial voice also changes. His rhetoric suddenly becomes explicitly political: he discusses questions of ideology, political theory, and the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. He even uses footnotes (192). In fact, Carr’s conclusion has more in common with Hammer’s introduction than the rest of the narrative. For example, some of the motifs employed in Hammer’s introduction are also used in Carr’s conclusion, although they do not appear elsewhere in the text. There is also repetition of the image of the African American prisoner-as- victim in both the introduction (13) and conclusion (192), and a shared emphasis on the genre of prison writing in both sections—“prison writing” (13) and “every con writer” (192). These overlaps between Hammer’s introduction and Carr’s conclusion point to a stronger editorial influence in the conclusion—or at least to a more collaborative relationship on the paratextual framing of Carr’s otherwise picaresque hard man stories. This is not to claim that Carr was incapable of discussing political theory, analyzing prison life writing, or deconstructing the popular image of the prisoner. However, the conclusion suggests a break, rather than a continuity, with the narrative, and its tone is more in line with Hammer’s introduction than the rest of Carr’s storytelling. Does this mean that Hammer and Cronin took a more active role in producing Carr’s conclusion, possibly because Carr was murdered before the book was completely finished? Does Carr’s auto- biography reflect the man and his stories as they were recorded on tape, or does the book reflect the interests of its editors? Could we infer that the conclusion was largely written by the book’s editors rather than its declared author?

Yet such questions may imply that there is some identifiably authentic African American subject at the core of Carr’s autobiography whose voice can be discon- nected from the two white men who helped to tell his story. The question of an authentic voice in Bad is worth considering, yet it may not be a question that can

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be answered with certainty because of the inherent slipperiness of lying as a narrative strategy. The linguistic trope of lying is heavily invested in subverting, playing with, or blurring the line between authentic and inauthentic, truth and fiction, and fact and colorful elaboration. Such inconclusiveness is productive, however, because it stages how hard men emerge out of a black working-class expressive tradition and white desires, imaginings, and expectations. For example, post-civil rights gangsta hard men, like their antebellum hard man progenitors, articulated black fears and fantasies, but they were responding to white restric- tions, desires, and anxieties, too. Gangsta rappers could thus be seen as “dupes” of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” according to bell hooks, and spokesmen for “the anger of young, black disenchanted folk,” according to McCall (qtd. in Quinn 150). Like Carr, whose story emerges within the constraints of whiteness but who also uses a black rhetorical strategy that allows him to articulate a black folkloric tradition, hard men cannot be uncoupled from the dominant culture that helps give them meaning. If anything, Bad highlights the complicity of whiteness in the production of the African American hard man—a complicity that is worth keeping in focus.

Lying and the Hard Man

Carr takes the position of the hard man by drawing on an African American working-class folk tradition, but his autobiographical persona is also the product of European American desires, imaginings, and expectations because, as lying suggests, Carr’s two white amanuenses are complicit in his narrative at a gen- erative level. While keeping these concerns in mind, I want to explore how lying interrupts what Eakin calls autobiography’s “rules” (113). Lying brings Carr’s story into discourse: lying among the three men is recorded on the tapes before the tapes are transcribed into an edited written text that eventually becomes the published memoir. As a result, the generic borders of Carr’s autobiography are reshaped according to a storytelling mode that circulates in prison. As its name suggests, lying allows for transgressive speech acts, what Eakin calls the “misrepresentation of biographical and historical truth.” It also provides discur- sive space for rule-breaking “models of personhood” that circulate widely in prison but are absent in prison life writing.

Lying emerges out of a rhetorical tradition beyond the prison situated in wider African American “speech communities” that have historically reconfigured bio- graphical and historical truth in storytelling to subvert a dominant and threatening white culture, to share sensitive information, or to articulate registers of truth that exceed factual records (Gates xviiii).

13 For example, in her autobiography Dust

Tracks on a Road (1942), Zora Neale Hurston describes how men in her rural

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hometown would conduct “lying sessions”: competitive storytelling that blended community stories with individual memory, rumor, and cultural folklore. The lying sessions were social texts providing meaning to a localized community in ways that factual texts could not. Lying sessions had an element of subversion to them as well: a topic that was difficult, problematic, or dangerous to mention in public was brought into discourse through subterfuge and blended with myth, cultural history, rumor, the artifice of the storyteller, and the participation of the listeners who “strai[n] against each other” in telling their stories (47). 14

Lying and lying sessions are variants of an African American rhetorical tactic called “signifyin(g).”

15 The meaning of signifyin(g) is often opaque to those out-

side of the specific speech community in which the story is told and to which the story often refers. Therefore, outsiders often presume signifyin(g) to be mean- ingless or unimportant wordplay. H. Rap Brown’s description of signifyin(g) registers the genre’s feigned insignificance: “I used to hang out in the bars just to hear the old men ‘talking shit’” (208). But “talking shit,” which may suggest wasteful or unimportant speech, a kind of language detritus, has great individual, cultural, and social importance. Brown’s old men, the men in Hurston’s commu- nity, and prisoners such as Smitty employ storytelling modes that are forms of linguistic subterfuge, covert and resistant texts whose meaning is indiscernible to those who are not members of the group or speech community. These storytellers also use modes of untruth—lies, talking shit, and lying sessions—as ways of telling truths that may not be accessible within traditional or dominant modes of speech. Further, their method often destabilizes the dominant vocabulary by deploying it in a radically altered fashion. For example, Carr, Hammer, and Cronin braid lying with a more dominant generic mode: autobiography.

Storytelling practices that blend fact with fiction and myth with history and biography are certainly useful in prison or on parole, where stories, particularly autobiographical stories about past criminal activity, can have legal (and other) consequences for an imprisoned or paroled storyteller. Framing Bad within lying perhaps provided Carr with the discursive space to talk about crimes that he might not have shared if he had used a genre that made stronger truth-claims. However, Bad does not blur the boundaries of truth in order to hide Carr’s crimes. Instead, as I have suggested, the book adamantly asserts Carr’s criminality, constituting a radically different relationship to discourses of truth and power than has been suggested in studies of autobiography and prison life writing.

Most analyses of prison life writing argue that autobiography qualifies or con- tests how the discourses of the law and the prison have constituted prison writers as criminals. For example, Ioan Davies argues that prisoners’ autobiographical writings are “anti-texts” because they can provide the prisoner or ex-prisoner with an alternative forum for truth-telling to the courtroom (85-114). In this formula- tion, autobiography becomes what Gilmore calls an “alternative hearing” (145).

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Or, as Deena Rymhs asserts, autobiography allows prisoners and ex-prisoners “to respond to the law’s authority over their public and personal identities”; by managing their texts in this way, “these writers manoeuvre around some of the constraints that the law places on self-representation” (14). Carr, though, does not “manoeuvre around” the “constraints that the law places on self-representation” so much as he uses them to articulate subversive forms of self-representation. Rather than contesting the subject position of criminal ascribed to him by the law, the police, and the prison, Carr embodies it, uses it, and expands and aggrandizes its signifying power.

Bad exaggerates rather than hides, qualifies, or contests Carr’s criminality because the book adheres to the generic rules of lying, which provide space for a different relationship to criminality than is commonly available in prison life writing. To understand the rules of lying, I turn to a form of signifyin(g) called the “toast.” Bryant describes the toast as “a narrative poem, usually cast in a sort of pre-rap rhythm, designed for oral delivery by a single performer to an informal or casual audience of other street people, usually young men” (89). Toasts, which are often called lies, were important textual formations in American prisons in the 1960s and 1970s when Carr was imprisoned.16 In fact, Carr’s description of lying seems to be a prose variant of the toast. Unlike prison life writing, the toast boasts about the speaker’s involvement in criminal activity and exaggerates his capacity for violence and ruthless brutality. Unlike prison life writers, toast storytellers not only talk about hard men, they talk as hard men who are central figures of the genre. Because Carr, Hammer, and Cronin reconfigure Carr’s as-told-to autobiog- raphy in terms of lying, a prose form of toasting, Carr can also talk as a hard man, articulating aspects of prison life otherwise excluded from the genre of prison life writing.

Consider, for example, how Carr’s descriptions of rape resonate with the lying/ toasting genre and accord with stories of the classic hard man, Stagolee. Stagolee—also known as Stagger Lee, Stackolee, or Stackalee in some versions of the toast—is the archetypal badman, first emerging in African American post- bellum badman ballads, precursors to the toast. Toasts that narrate variations on the old Stagolee story follow plot lines that are similar to their ballad predecessors: Stagolee is thrown out of his house by his wife; he wades through mud to a local bar called the “Bucket of Blood”; in a fit of fury, he murders the bartender, has rough sex—in some cases forced sex—with a prostitute, and shoots dead an adversary named Billy Lyon (also called Billy Lions, Billy Dilly, Ben Lee, and Benny Long in variants of the story). Some versions of the toast end with Billy’s death (Wepman, Newman, and Binderman 135-36), while other versions find Stagolee before a judge, charged with Billy Lyon’s murder (B. Jackson 51-52). One version even concludes with Stagolee in Hell after he is murdered by Billy’s mother, fighting the devil and having sex with the devil’s minions (B. Jackson 54-55).

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Violent misogyny and rape play central roles in the poetics of badman figures like Stagolee, providing a generic context for Carr’s rape stories. In one version of Stagolee (here called Stackolee), for example, “Stack” has violent, forced sex with a prostitute after murdering the Bucket of Blood’s bartender: “Now me and this broad we started to tussle / and I drove twelve inches a dick through her ass before she could move a muscle” (B. Jackson 47). In another version, when Stagolee is in Hell, he rapes a woman “bent over shovelin’ coal” (B. Jackson 55). Stagolee’s violent sexuality and misogyny are the norm in toasts, where badmen define their masculinity against and through the bodies of women. Bryant points out that sex for the toast badman “is empty of erotic pleasure”: “The point is to establish dominance, to overwhelm, to display a total lack of sensitivity or affection. As in the old badman ballads, the penis is employed as a weapon” (91). In the badman toasts, sex is bereft of desire and is usually an expression of power, dominance, and control.

Similarly, throughout Bad, sexuality is an extension of other expressions of violence and domination in Carr’s phallocratic street and prison life. For example, Carr regularly boasts about his involvement in gang rapes—described as “running a train”—that always take the most vulnerable women as objects of exchange. This masculine economy privileges men who can arrange a rape for their friends. Early in the narrative, Carr describes gang-raping women with a street gang called the Farmers. Their strategy involves finding some “sharp-looking chick” at a party and convincing her to leave with one of the gang members, ostensibly to “go to the store”: “When she got outside and into one of the Buicks, the next thing she knew she was all the way over in hell—in the middle of Watts with a squad of Buicks behind her. We’d take her down to our clubhouse and strip her down; then we’d all fuck her; as many as twenty guys in a train” (37-38).

McCall describes the dynamic of the gang rape by relating his involvement in and witnessing of gang rapes in the small, predominantly African American community called Cavalier Manor in Portsmouth, Virginia, where he grew up: “Different groups of guys set up their own trains. Although everybody knew it could lead to trouble with the law, I think few guys thought of it as rape. It was viewed as a social thing among hanging partners, like passing a joint. The dude who set up the train got pats on the back. He was considered a real player whose rap game was strong” (44). According to McCall, then, running a train was understood by its participants as a form of homosocial bonding (“a social thing among hanging partners”) that affirmed alliances between men and staged violent performances of masculinity over and through the bodies of young black women—women who are violently effaced in the homosocial exchange. As McCall indicates, rape was one way to define oneself as “a real player whose rap game was strong,” much as violent misogyny reinforces the badman’s mascu- line toughness.

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However, while McCall’s autobiography psychologizes gang rape in his commu- nity and explains how he was caught up in behavior that he eventually rejects, Carr never identifies rape as something worthy of regret, registering the degree to which his use of lying stretches the rules of autobiographical discourse. Carr frames gang rape as part of the “crazy” “routine” of street life, illustrating his point by comparing gang rape with a slapstick story about stealing cakes from a bakery (38). Bad thus flattens otherwise horrifying experiences of sexual violence into an almost ethics-free discourse that draws little distinction between rape and petty theft.

As McCall demonstrates, prison life writing makes room for discussions of heterosexual rape; by contrast, there is little space within the genre for male autobiographers to describe their involvement in same-sex rape or prison rape.

17 Ek argues that while some prisoners’ autobiographies are told from the

position of the rape victim—T. J. Parsell’s Fish (2006), for example—most describe prison rape from the position of the “disinterested observer.” However, none describes rape in prison from the position of the perpetrator, despite the overwhelming number of rapes that occur in American prisons (66). Ek’s observation suggests that the prison rapist is what Eakin describes as a proscribed model of personhood in autobiography.

Although the genre of prison life writing keeps the male prison rapist at the margins of discourse because his violence is taboo, the genres of lying and toasting enable the prison rapist to be a speaking subject because they frame same-sex rape according to very different ethical boundaries, defining male rape exclusively as a sign of masculine power. For example, in another version of Stagolee, this time recited in 1967 by “Big Stick,” an African American prisoner at New York’s Auburn Prison, Stagolee rapes his adversary, Billy Dilly. First, he threatens to “fuck Billy Dilly in his / motherfucking ass” if he encounters him. Then, when Stagolee is finally confronted by Billy, Stagolee attacks, rapes, and murders him. He tells Billy,

“. . . you’d better get down on your knees and slobber my head, ‘Cause if you don’t, you’re sure to be dead.” Billy Dilly dropped down and slobbered on his head, But Stag filled him full of lead. (Qtd. in Wepman, Newman, and Binderman 137)

Sex is indistinguishable from murder in this stanza: Stagolee’s penis and gun blur; Stagolee “fill[s] him full of lead” rather than semen. Stagolee’s sexual violence in this version of the poem is directed at another man, bearing the traces of the sexually homogeneous carceral space in which the toast was recited. The rape victim’s sex in this Stagolee toast is of little significance because sexuality in the hard man’s world is bereft of desire and only serves to demonstrate and enhance the potency of the hard man rapist.

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By framing his autobiography in terms of lying, Carr breaks prison life writing’s proscriptive formula for depictions of prison rape and identifies—even cele- brates—himself as a prison rapist. For example, Carr describes how he and his gang repeatedly rape a new prisoner (a “kid”) named Abernathy, whose victim- hood is representative of the other victims of sexual violence in the book and in prisons when Carr was incarcerated.

18 After being gang-raped in the shower,

Abernathy has a psychological breakdown. He “never came out of his cell again, and gradually went out of his head. He never saw a soul. . . . Pretty soon he was shitting on the floor and pissing in his pants. The shrink examined him and had him shipped off to Atascadero [State Hospital]” (64). Abernathy is a figure of some pathos, but once again, Carr never expresses regret for his violence. Carr’s descriptions of rape also follow the narratological format of lying as a genre in their carnivalesque treatment of sexual violence, as is conveyed in the brutal but jocular terms that Carr uses to narrate his actions. Thus, Carr frames gang-raping a “cute young kid” as a sadistic, humorous anecdote, for example, where the punchline is that Carr and the other two assailants are caught because they all contract the same venereal disease as a result of the attack (122). Likewise, Carr boasts about gang- raping a “cute white kid” with a group of young African American men at a prison camp near Yosemite. He describes raping the white kid as though it were a prank and follows it with a putatively comedic police chase through the woods, where Carr and the other rapists run amok “like Keystone Kops” (57).19 Lying’s violent and sadistic but bawdy humor provides a framework for Carr to speak about raping men because the genre’s humor resists acknowledging the pain of the victim, focusing instead on the priapic exploits of the hard man rapist.

Carr’s use of cute to modify “young kid” and “white kid” signals how his narrative deviates from the lie/toast genre by defining the hard man’s homosexu- ality in terms of desire and not simply as an expression of power and dominance. In fact, throughout the autobiography, Carr alludes to desiring young men that he calls “homos.” When he first arrives at California Men’s Colony East, for example, Carr sees “a procession of beautiful-looking boys [that] hurried across the yard and filed by me as if I was a judge in some fantastic beauty contest.” He ogles their “tight short-shorts, teased hair, make-up, perfume” and “get[s] right into the swing of things, introducing [him]self and handing out compliments.” Although Carr’s interest in men radically breaks with the hard man’s sexual code and conventional representations of African American masculinity in the 1960s and 1970s, the autobiography also reinscribes homophobic, patriarchal, and misogy- nistic mores. Carr insists that the “homos” are to be referred to as “she,” partially effacing his homosexual desire by framing it in heterosexual terms (161). While the men that he desires occupy a liminal space between masculinity and feminin- ity, their gender roles reproduce and exaggerate the subordination of women in American society, normalizing imbalances in male-female power relations by

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reproducing them in the prison. Finally, befitting his hard man image, Carr always represents sex with men as forced sex—sex that might involve desire but that is ultimately brutal domination.

Carr’s hard man persona is undoubtedly problematic. Beyond his brutal misogyny and predatory violence, his frank descriptions of prison rape potentially reify the stereotype of the “black beast rapist,” which at one time was held up in the Southern states as a justification for lynching black men (Rhodes 33). James Baldwin, discussing Wright’s Bigger Thomas, calls this figure “that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro; that fantastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash” (34). This “fearful image” of the violent African American male has significant cultural currency in representations of African American prisoners. As John M. Sloop demonstrates, one of the dominant images of African American prisoners during the period from 1969 to 1975—when Carr was imprisoned and when Bad was published—was of a nihilistically violent man: “[H]e is violent for the sake of violence alone. This prisoner is a rapist, a liar, a spoiler of white youth. Rather than struggling against a racist culture in order to preserve his heritage, he is repre- sented as following his nature, behaving in ways that defy transformation and thus demand restraint” (16). Historically, the stereotype of the violent black male has been crucial to sustaining different modes of “restraint” on black bodies: “Free blacks were often characterized as degraded, vicious, and depraved, supporting the rationale that blacks must be contained within the institution of slavery” (Rhodes 32). Dorothy E. Roberts likewise argues that legal decisions entrench and make use of racist stereotypes of black men: “[The] stereotype of the aggressive, ‘macho’ Black male legitimates the massive incarceration of young Black men” (qtd. in Levit 94). It is not surprising, then, that most “African American authors ‘vigi- lantly’ resist the traditional representation of the black male as rapist” (Ek 71). Because Carr embraces the image of the black male rapist and takes the position of the violent, chaotic, and destructive hard man, he risks reifying a stereotype that defines black male criminality as an inherent condition rather than as an effect of social, racial, or economic exploitation. However, it is crucial to remember Hammer and Cronin’s role in producing Carr as such an incendiary and troubling figure. Their ineluctable involvement in Carr’s autobiographical persona suggests deeper levels of complicity between hard men and a white majority whose restric- tions, proscriptions, and structural violence make such a figure possible.

Conclusion: Bad, Prison Writing, and Resistance

As a limit case of the prison writing genre, Bad illuminates the rules of autobiog- raphy and how those rules may attempt to prohibit particular selves from entering

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into discourse. Bad also brings into the genre a largely unrepresented aspect of the imaginative lives of African American prisoners (indeed, most prisoners). Certainly, prisoners tell stories about moral hard men; they tell stories about rehabilitation, conversion, social uplift, and political responsibility. But, as Bad illustrates, prisoners also tell tales of amoral hard men who, like Carr, are “bad motherfucker[s]” “right from the start” (22). Although disturbing, as Bad demon- strates, these tales constitute the latent, unspeakable content of the archive of prison life writing. Reading an autobiography such as Bad, with its “forbidden” words and its disturbingly transgressive autobiographical subject, reveals a rich cultural tradition whose subversive play and complex poetics are absent or difficult to discern in familiar exemplars of the genre of prison life writing.

However, while Bad speaks with the (usually expurgated) “bloody words” of prison culture, the book also invokes stereotypes about black criminality that give credence to the American prison industrial complex and the disproportionate incarceration of African American men. Bad thus problematizes the oft-repeated claim that prison writing is ipso facto a form of resistance. Even H. Bruce Franklin, whose critical work on American prison writing has largely defined the reception of the genre (even influencing a recent Supreme Court decision),

20 asserts that

“[p]rison literature . . . is intrinsically subversive” (235). While it is true that much prison writing resists the prison system, it is also true that prison writing, like other forms of literature, can have a variety of ideological effects. Carr’s autobiog- raphy, then, serves as a reminder that prison writing is a rich literary field, full of internal contradictions and tensions. Like Bad, a prisoner’s life writing can subvert and support the prison system, just as the prison system can repress and—as prison education, rehabilitation, and writing programs attest—produce prisoners’ writings, as well.

Notes

1. See also John W. Roberts (171-220), who compares the badman, an outlaw folk hero, with the “bad nigger,” who constituted a threat to the African American community. Roberts also questions the presumption among folklorists that the antebellum “bad nigger” was the prototype for the badman, and connects these figures with an Afrocentric rather than a Eurocentric history.

2. For more on the relationship between conversion narratives and prison life writing, see my article.

3. The “autobiographical pact,” as defined by Philippe Lejeune, is a tacit under- standing between the author and the reader that “the author, the narrator, and the protagonist must be identical” (5). As Lejeune writes, as-told-to autobiographies such as Bad “blu[r] in a disturbing way the question of responsibility” (192).

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4. For more on “hidden transcripts,” see James C. Scott (1-16).

5. For more on how white abolitionists policed the slave narrative genre, enabling some voices while silencing others, see John Sekora.

6. For a discussion of the term “ghettocentric,” see Nelson George.

7. In addition to Soledad Brother, George Jackson also wrote Blood in my Eye (1972), which was completed just before his death.

8. For an account of these incidents and James Carr’s suspected involvement in them, see Jo Durden-Smith (97-98, 103, 116-22, 125) and Paul Liberatore (16-17, 102-17).

9. The first edition of Bad has an interesting publication history. It was published in 1975 without an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and was not listed in Books in Print, which made it unrecognizable within the centralized systems for identifying all officially published books. (It has since been republished with an ISBN by AK Press in 2002.) Because Bad was without an ISBN and a Books in Print listing, book-ordering agencies had no way of knowing that the book existed, which made it difficult to sell and difficult to read. In the new afterword to the 2002 edition of Bad, BM Blob of AK Press suggests that the book went unlisted because the California Department of Corrections (CDC, now called the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation [CDCR]) threatened to sue the publisher, Herman Graf Associates, if the book went to press (226). However, in a telephone interview, Cronin told me a very different story about the book’s publication history. Cronin maintains that not listing the book was a deliberate decision on the part of the publishers themselves and certainly was not the result of a disagreement with the CDC. Cronin maintains that, at the last minute, Graf concluded that being allied with a book that challenged convention so aggressively would be bad for business. Since Graf had already signed a contract, it was forced to publish the book. However, it successfully managed to avoid officially listing Bad as one of its own.

10. Although the Black Panthers are never mentioned directly in Carr’s narrative, Carr crops up in studies of the Black Panther Party and in the autobiographies of ex-Panther members, including David Hilliard and Lewis Cole’s This Side of Glory (1993). Hilliard and Cole’s sketch of Carr defines him as a moral hard man by emphasizing his political role as a “radicalized” prisoner (295-96).

11. Peaches Henry defines three registers of autobiographical truth-telling that seek to capture the different forms of truth that may be at work in an autobio- graphical text: “referential truth,” which denotes the “potentially verifiable details provided by an autobiographer that allow a reader to connect the author to the world of reference, factual truth”; “subjective truth,” which accounts for the “inner workings of a person adumbrated by public displays, which attempts to render

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visible the inmost aspect of a human being, the personal identity”; and “ideological truth,” which “extends beyond the life of the author but that she wishes to advo- cate through her life; ideological truth is the personal conviction of an author concerning an aspect of human existence such as human rights, political rights, or social justice” (11).

12. The Situationist International was an avant-garde intellectual and artistic movement that sought to interrupt the alienating effects of twentieth-century capitalism. Hammer and Cronin were affiliated with American pro-Situationists such as Ken Knabb, who was an early adherent to the Situationist International and who eventually edited the Situationist International Anthology (1981).

13. Lying likely also intersects with (or draws some rhetorical force from) the broader American tradition of the tall tale. For more on the tradition of the tall tale, see Carolyn S. Brown and Timothy Dow Adams (x, 6, 37-38, 40, 47).

14. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also mentions that “[l]ies is a traditional Afro-American word for figurative discourse, tales, or stories” (56). He cites its use in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who discusses lies not only in Dust Tracks on a Road but also in Mules and Men (1935). Gates later notes that the use of the term lies to denote a form of signifyin(g) can be found in J. L. Dillard’s Lexicon of Black English (1977) and Sterling A. Brown, Arthur Paul Davis, and Ulysses Lee’s 1941 The Negro Caravan (57).

15. I use Gates’s formulation, “signifyin(g),” to register the word’s vernacular and often oral register.

16. Collectors of toasts at the time sought examples of this rich cultural tradition in prisons. Bruce Jackson collected toasts at Indiana State Penitentiary, and Dennis Wepman, Ronald B. Newman, and Murray B. Binderman culled their collection of toasts from impromptu recitations at a variety of New York prisons: Sing Sing, Attica, Clinton, and Auburn (6).

17. There are, as far as I know, no examples of female prison life writers describing their involvement in prison rape. For information on rape in women’s prisons, a crime usually perpetrated by guards rather than by other prisoners, see David Kaiser and Lovissa Stannow’s articles.

18. Abernathy’s story speaks to a very real phenomenon in American prisons. “In 2008, [the Bureau of Justice] now says,” write Kaiser and Stannow, “more than 216,600 people were sexually abused in prisons and jails and, in the case of at least 17,100 of them, in juvenile detention. Overall, that’s almost six hundred people a day—twenty-five an hour” (“Prison” 26). Abernathy is, of course, a face behind these statistics—but so is Carr. Befitting the badman archetype that his autobiographical subject is channelling, Carr boasts about raping prisoners such as Abernathy, making no attempt to shy away from the effects of his violence as a result.

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19. For an analysis of the black-on-white rape trope, see Andrew Sargent.

20. According to H. Bruce Franklin, the US Supreme Court noted his “sobering bibliography listing hundreds of works by American prisoners and ex-prisoners” in Simon and Schuster v. Crime Victims Bd. (qtd. in Franklin 241n8).

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