One year and three months after Clinton Duffy completed his cycle by being appointed Warden of San Quentin, George Jackson was born in Chicago. The first son of parents who had made the short but tragic migration on the IC from downstate Illinois, Jackson's childhood was spent retracing their journey. During the school year, he attended St. Malachy, an internally segregated parochial school in Chicago. His summers were spent with his mother's family in the southern Illinois town of Harrisburg.

As described in his remarkable book, Soledad Brother, a collection of his prison letters between 1964 and 1970 with an autobiography, the annual shift between Chicago and Harrisburg represented a change from relative captivity to relative freedom. In Chicago, Jackson had to contend first and always with the efforts of his mother and then also with those of the teachers and administrators of St. Malachy to confine and bend him to their wills. As he was later to view them, his mother's efforts began before Jackson was born. "As testimony of her love, and her fear for the fate of the man-child all slave mothers hold, she attempted to press, hide, push, capture me in the womb. The conflicts and contradictions that will follow me to the tomb started right there in the womb."

His mother's attempts at continuing the holding action met with an increasing lack of success once Jackson was out of the womb. He and his older sister. Delora, "were sometimes allowed to venture out into the world, which at that time meant no further than a fenced-off roof area adjoining our little three-room apartment...But, of course, I went out when I pleased." Occasionally, Jackson's determination to discover resulted in near-disasters, as when, in the interests of science, he dropped a book of flaming matches into a fifty-gallon drum of oil. The holding action of his sister, Delora, was the only thing that kept Jackson from being blinded from the ensuing explosion. In Soledad Brother, Jackson relates another incident that resulted from his unbridled desire to know. "Seeing the white boys up close in kindergarten was a traumatic event. I must have seen some before in magazines or books but never in the flesh. I approached one, felt his hair, scratched at his cheek, he hit me in the head with a baseball bat. They found me crumpled in a heap just outside the schoolyard fence."

Thus, perhaps it could be argued that there was some justification for the attempts of his mother and teachers to control him for his own good. However, Jackson did not see it that way and reacted accordingly. He sensed something innately wrong in his mother's efforts to circumscribe his movements about the neighborhood and in St. Malachy's endeavor to convince him "that love--touching fingertips, mouths, bellies, legs--was nasty." Perhaps if his mother and his school had backed their efforts with rational explanations of what had prompted them to try to control him or if they had satisfied his curiosity about the world and himself in other ways, George Jackson's life in Chicago might have taken a vastly different form. However, as it was, it became polarized: "In effect, I lived two lives, the one with my mama and sisters, and the thing on the street. Now and then I'd get caught at something...and my mama would fall all over me. I left home a thousand times never to return. We hoboed up and down the state. I did what I wanted (all my life I've done just that). When it came time to explain, I lied."

III

As a play of struggle between himself and forces attempting to control him, Jackson's early life was quite similar to those of many people who end up sitting in America's jails and to not a few who end up sitting upon the right hand of GM or any of the country's other major corporations. Yet just as the factors of racial caste and economic class separate George Jackson's background and boyhood from those of GM chairman John Roche, so did another set of factors separate Jackson's early life from those of many of the men who were late to be his brother inmates.

The first of these factors was George Jackson's summer experiences in Harrisburg. There, possessing the unrestrained mobility to explore the outside world and himself, Jackson's lives came close to merging. In rural Harrisburg, the home of his mother's family, Jackson learned to hunt, fish, and read Nature. He became the "scourge of the woods, the predatory man." Away from the consumptive maelstrom of the inner city, he discovered a community of blacks which although as poor as that in Chicago had managed to remain "a loyal and righteous people." Most importantly, Jackson, a man who was to spend half of his life in prison or on the run and die a month before his thirtieth birthday, discovered an inner peace in Harrisburg, tapped, for the first time and in its purest form the last, the strength and gentleness of his soul.

George Davis, Jackson's maternal grandfather whom he called "Papa," served as a link between Harrisburg and Chicago. Forced by economic considerations to live in Chicago, Davis was the kind of black man whose influence on other blacks and the history of the country has been so severely undernoticed as to make their existence a questionable issue to many. Yet many and perhaps, most black families have had a "Papa" Davis in them, and there are very few black people who after consideration can claim not to have known one. Jackson's description of "Papa" in Soledad Brother may be slightly inflated, yet any exaggeration is simply indicative of the powerful influence the "Papa"'s of the black world have had:

My grandfather, George "Papa" Davis, stands out of those early years more than any other figure in my total environment. He was separated from his wife by the system. Work for men was impossible to find in Harrisburg. He was living and working in Chicago--sending his wage back to the people downstate. He was an extremely aggressive man, and since aggression on the part of the slave means crime, he was in jail now and then. He tried to direct my great energy into the proper form of protest. He invented long simple allegories that always pictured the white politicians as animals...He and my mother went to great pains to impress on me that it was the worst form of niggerism to hook and jab, cut and stab at other blacks.

That description appears in the autobiography Jackson wrote at the request of the editor of Soledad Brother. Perhaps an even more meaningful evaluation of the influence Papa had on him is given in a letter Jackson wrote to his mother after Papa had died alone and broke during George Jackson's fifth year at San Quentin.

I loved him dearly and thought of him as one of our most practical and level-headed kin. You probably don't remember the long walks and talks Papa and I used to have...But I remember. He used to say things, probably just thinking aloud, sure that I wasn't listening or would not comprehend. But I did, and I think I knew him better than most. Do you remember how I used to answer "What" to every question put to me, and how Papa would deride me for this? He later in the course of our exchanges taught me to answer questions with "Why" instead of "What."

For George Jackson, Papa Davis was a model for manhood. Not a mannequin or a cardboard mock-up, but a living and responsive, vulnerable black man of dignity, Papa Davis taught him the distinction between weakness and tenderness, and impressed upon him that for the poor black in America there is not necessarily a valid connection between punishment and crime, nor need there be a separation between himself and his reason. Most importantly, Papa gave him a galvanic sensitivity to the most fertile possibilities of human life, an awareness that efforts were being made to deny most people access to these potentialities, and a conviction that this was a wrong that had to be rebalanced at any personal cost.

Jackson said later in the letter he wrote after Papa's death:

I wish he could have survived to see and enjoy the new world we plan to creat from this chaos. If I could have gotten out of here last year he would never have gone on sardines and crackers. I don't know how anyone else views the matter and don't care, but now for me he is one more voice added to the already thunderous chorus that cry from their unmarked and unhallowed graves for vindication.

In Soledad Brother, Jackson does not often refer to his Harrisburg experiences or his childhood relationship with his grandfather, summoning them as one does things very fragile and rare only at times of greatest stress. They seem to have constituted the last line of his defense of his own humanity during his ten year struggle to escape death on the installment plan in the penitentaries of California.

Of all the influences in Jackson's development, the most enigmatic and perhaps also the most important was that of his father, Robert Lester Jackson. Neither father nor son could wholly approve of the other, yet there was to exist between them a bond of love that was built of a strong, unusually durable fibre: the understanding that the same things that held them together also held them apart.

The type of black man that Robert Jackson is has received more attention than that type that Papa Davis was, yet neither has been exactly over-exposed. In fact, the Robert Jacksons could quite easily be termed the original Inivisible Men.

Robert Jackson was, like his wife, from downstate Illinois. However, while she had enjoyed the freedom and stability of growing up nestled among a large well-knit clan in Harrisburg, he had been abandoned at an early age in the river town of East St. Louis. The demands of survival seem to have burdened Robert Jackson with a particular psychological afflication that was endemic to black men whose youth was consumed in Depression America. As it dictated on a less severe level to other men, survival demanded of Robert Jackson and men like him that they make an operational adjustment to terminal disorder, that they maintain themselves in a protracted state of acceptance, that, in short, they perform a self-inflicted lobotomy. Yet the very instincts that caused men so condemned to abandon more extreme forms of resistance for the sake of their own survival in an environment that deemed them patently superfluous, also impelled them to resist. The inner conflicts and uncertainties produced by this interminable struggle of self against self extracted perhaps the greatest toll.

The specific forms that this array of conflicts took in Robert Jackson's life were not unusual. A man of no formal education, he understood the value of learning well enough as to teach himself the essentials and pursue whatever instruction was