When Robert Jackson and his teen-age son George went to Los Angeles in 1956, they were attempting to effect a traditional American escape. At the time, it is doubtful that either knew any more about the place to which he was going than had the 19th Century fugitive slave or frontiersman, but both Jacksons knew well where they had been.

Yet this knowledge that each had of what their lives had been about in Chicago's Near-North Side was unstructured and incomplete. Robert Jackson knew that in Chicago--as earlier in East St. Louis, in rural Louisiana, and in the CCC camps during the Depression--his dreams, despite all his efforts to realize them, had been almost universally deferred. Often in the years before leaving Chicago, he might well have felt like Robert, the character in Jean Toomer's Cane, whose head was sealed inside a diving helmet so monstrous as to plummet him irrespressibly into the crushing depths of an ocean's clammy inferno. Doomed if he were to remove his monstrous mask and doomed if he did not, Robert Jackson could perhaps have done no more than he did: kick and stroke for 16 hours a day and hope. What Robert Jackson did not know or would not allow himself to recognize was the force that was dragging him down, the thing that had changed his natural blackness into the perfect imprisonment of a diving bell, and drowned all his hopes for himself, if not yet those he held for his family.

For 15 years, George Jackson had watched his father swimming on an aquatic treadmill. He observed what the older man got for his efforts to walk humbly, seek mercy, and do justice. At home and at school, he was urged to do likewise. However, by the time he was fifteen, George Jackson was already making it clear that he had no intention of conforming, of diving into his father's wake voluntarily. By then he had already ceased to make any real effort to appease, and had dropped out of school. He had learned the subtle lessons of resistance Papa Davis had offered him far more thoroughly than he had absorbed the passive rituals of St. Malachy's segregated Catholicism. Most important, George Jackson still buoyed the hopes that had been submerged in his father, and had stiffened these hopes into expectations.

"O children, O, don't you want to go to that gospel feast

That promised land, that land, where all is peace?"

Nonetheless, George Jackson at 15 was already well aware that the same forces that had consigned his father to the treadmill had a place on it reserved for him. Although at the time Jackson did not have the highly developed comprehension he would later develop of who and what these forces were or how they enacted their terminal gravity; he did have a presentiment of the closing presence of a diving bell with his number, if not his name, on it. He knew that the life of the diving bell and the treadmill was not what he wanted for himself, but he did not know how best to escape it. He knew that if he were to escape or perhaps merely survive, he would have to react, but he knew neither what tack to take nor what supplies he had to draw upon. So, as much out of a lack of alternatives as anything else, George Jackson went with his father west to America's Promised Land.

II

Until it exploded in 1965, Watts was America's most under-publicized slum. Largely this lack of notice stemmed from the fact that Watts does not strike the eye in the same way that Bedford-Stuyvesant, Columbia Point, or Hough does. Absent is the visual oppressiveness of old six-story run-downs, crumbling brownstone block houses, and the vertical caskets of towering, post-war housing projects. If one is not paying attention, it's possible and perhaps even easy to drive from nearby Inglewood across Watts to South Gate or above on the Harbor Freeway without sensing that the community is one of the most depressed areas in urban America. Absent is even the sense that Watts is an urban community. The broad streets, and ranch-style tract houses lend it an illusion of suburbanity. Yet Watts is no less of a socio-economic urban prison than the older slums of the East Coast. It is merely a prison without walls.

That Watts is little different from the place from which they came was soon recognized by Robert and George Jackson just as it has been by the thousands of other people, mainly black Southerners, who have flocked West in search of a better deal since World War II. Consequently, as has often been the case, Robert Jackson and his son simply picked up where each had left off in Chicago: the father stroking and kicking effort to read water submerged: and the son sinking fast into a life against the law.

III

For a man whose prison career was to provoke so much controversy, George Jackson's criminal record was unremarkable. Between January 5, 1957, when Jackson, then 15, was arrested for "suspicion of joyriding" until February 1, 1961 when he was given an indeterminate sentence which was to prove terminal, Jackson was arrested six times. None of his crimes resulted in bodily unjury to anyone but himself, and in only one instance was he charged with carrying a gun during the commission of a crime. Jackson and others have denied this, claiming he was not carrying a gun then either.

Half of the arrests George Jackson was to have charged against him occurred in the first three months of 1957. The joyriding charge, according to Jackson, stemmed from his purchase of a motorcycle. The bike was hot. When it was discovered by police in his possession, he produced a bill of sale allegedly signed by another person whose whereabouts were never located. Police claim that there was a strong resemblance between the handwriting on the bill of sale and Jackson's. However, either because there was insufficient evidence to merit the charge or because of Jackson's age, he was not prosecuted for forgery or for the theft of the bike. He was later released to his parents.

Later in the same month, Jackson was charged with a burglary. According to police, he broke into a motorcycle shop and stole various items of cycle gear. When brought in for booking, Jackson, who according to the police had already admitted to the crimes, allegedly instigated a fight with the arresting officer who had to be assisted by other policemen in controlling Jackson. Jackson was convicted of the burglary and put on probation.

In March of 1957, Jackson was arrested in the act of robbing a furniture store, and, according to police, was shot attempting to evade capture. Jackson records the story differently in Soledad Brother:

"I was 15, and full grown (I haven't grown an inch since then.) A cop shot me six times point-blank on that job, as I was standing with my hands in the air. After the second shot, when I was certain that he was trying to murder me. I charged him. His gun was empty and he had only hit me twice by the time I had closed with him--Oh, get this wild nigger off me.' ...I had two comrades with me on that job. They both got away because of the exchange between the pigs and me."

Jackson goes on to say that medical treatment for his wounds was made conditional on his cooperation with the police in their prosecution of him.