Many thousand gone and the show goes on and on. Nothing can be done for George Jackson and the five other men who died with him in San Questin. Nor can anything be done for the 43 cadavers carried out of Attica. Theirs was a final exit. But the irrational drama in which they once participated continues--in California, where on the basis of the testimony of 25 witnesses (all of whom were guards) a Marin County grand jury has indicted seven San Questin cons for conspiracy in the killings of the five dead whites--in New York, where a special ultra-maximum security lock-up has been proposed for "revolutionary" inmates--and in Boston, where Malik Hakim, a-k-a Albert Bradford, awaits what may well be his final exit.

I

Malik Hakim lay in his bed in the jail ward of Boston City Hospital. A young black woman sat in a chair beside him, her head and body bent forward as if to allow her to physically absorb what he was saying.

Hakim spoke quietly, punctuating his words with whichever hand he was not using to prop up his head. Finally, he stopped talking and leaned back against the pillows piled at the head of his bed. The woman bent further forward, kissed him on the cheek and then walked over to the jail ward's wire-mesh door. As a red headed state policeman negotiated the lock, the young woman looked back at the bed where Malik Hakim, torn tendons in both his legs, lay. Hakim touched his dark, long-fingered hands together, and inclined his head towards them and her with an air of silent benevolence.

After the young woman left, the red-headed guard stepped inside the room Hakim shared with a white prisoner. Hakim and the guard bantered while another state policeman stood outside in the corridor inspecting my dismantled tape recorder. "How's it going, King?" the red-headed guard asked Hakim. "You sure don't seem to be having too bad a time of it with all these pretty girls running in and out of here. Not bad at all, King."

The guard was right. There was something regal about Hakim's presence. Even as he lay in a jail ward bed, a torn hospital night shirt hung loosely about him like a toga, his uncombed hair greying at the temples and behind his ears. Hakim exuded an easy hegemony. However, it was not the regality of a king at court, but of a condemned king held in the Tower.

Hakim, born 36 years ago in St. Louis, has spent almost half his life in the joint. In 1951 he, or more precisely. Albert Bradford, was incarcerated in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City to serve three concurrent life sentences for robbery and two charges of rape. He was 16 years old.

The road that led Albert Bradford to the joint is a familiar one--so familiar that it would be a cliche if it were not for the fact that it continues to be a main artery to a dead end for people born poor and-or black in America. "By the time I was 12, I was considered an exceptionally good artist," Hakim says of Bradford. "By the time I was 13, I was a junkie. It's like any other fellow who grows up in the ghetto. You're confronted with images. Images of values you can never aspire to because you're black. As Malcolm taught us, this process teaches us to hate ourselves, to despise everything about ourselves, and to try to make ourselves into what we wasn't and what we never could be--white folks."

Locked into the frustrations constructed by this gap between promise and accessible reality, "You become schizophrenic in your thinking. You love yourself, but you hate yourself, see; so you begin to seek escape mechanisms. This occurs, say, when you're about eight or ten years old, but then you don't even know what escape mechanisms are all about. You don't even know why you want to escape. Older cats have found a way to escape confronting these realities, and by the mere fact that you grow up on the playground with them, you begin to do the things they do even though you're not their age. Like you begin to drain their wine bottles, you know, you begin to take the pills, and smoke the grass because this affords you an opportunity to get away."

Albert Bradford's way out--a consumptive involvement with drugs--was actually only a means of getting deeper into the mire. He became a part of the ghetto's plankton, drifting in the flow of the demand and supply of junk and junk money. "By the time I was 16, I was so hooked on skag all I could see was drugs. When I saw dollar bills. I saw skag."

But the demand for young, black, unskilled labor in St. Louis during the late Forties was no greater than it is now throughout urban America where young blacks have the highest rate of unemployment. So, for Bradford, the need to supply his habit demanded crime.

In December of 1951, Bradford, then 16, and a 15-year-old black were arrested and charged with robbery. An indictment for rape was also added against Bradford.

Hakim admits the validity of the robbery charge. He also acknowledges that the rape was committed, but denies that he did it. "Here was the thing. When I was getting the dough, this cat that was with me, Teddy, took the woman in the back, you know. I told him to take the woman in the back, tie her up and gag her so we could get away, you know, He, took her in the back and screwed her. Okay, I come back then to see what he's spending so much time in. He was into his thing. I screamed on him; but really, truthfully. I wasn't concerned. I was concerned with getting to the dope man's house cause I was sick, you know. The next day we got busted."

When informed that he was being charged with the rape. "I tried to get the point across that not only was I not interested in raping. I wasn't interested in no sex--period." However, Bradford never got a chance to tell this to a jury. His attorney, a public defender, "convinced my parents to get me to plead guilty to clean the books because, he said, if you clean the books they'll give you a break." Despite his own misgivings. Bradford went along.

Thus, as George Jackson was later to do in California, 16-year-old Albert Bradford sold whatever legal rights of self-defense he had in the Missouri court system for the promise of a deal. Like Jackson, he was to discover that the promise was not merely false but almost fatal.