An X-Ray of the Soul

In September 1971, the same month Gwendolyn Brooks began a one-year teaching stint at City College of New York, the deadliest prison uprising in United States history took place at Attica Correctional Facility upstate, just outside Buffalo. Like Americans across the nation, Brooks was transfixed by the steady, sensationalized media coverage. Time magazine ran a glossy feature containing photographs of white state police troopers, their faces obscured by sleek gas masks, readying their weapons after five days of tense negotiations. Before the troopers stormed the prison, helicopters blanketed the incarcerated men in tear gas, inciting vomiting, asphyxiation, and blurred vision. The gas still hung thick in the air when troopers entered the yard, which those imprisoned at Attica controlled, and opened fire indiscriminately on more than 1,200 predominantly Black and Latino men wearing broken football helmets, wool blankets, and towels. Ultimately, the state’s response to the uprising was so frenzied that 29 incarcerated men and 10 correctional officers were killed; nearly 100 more were wounded.

Turning to the second page of Time, a photo showing the first four lines of Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die,” a handwritten copy in neatly slanting inked script, caught Brooks’s eye.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

The article identified the poem as an example of the political writings that men imprisoned at Attica passed among themselves, along with copies of books by Malcolm X and Bobby Seale. McKay’s poem was written in response to a wave of anti-Black killings across the country in the summer of 1919—a spasm of bloodshed that James Weldon Johnson dubbed the “Red Summer”—and the poem stresses the dignity of terrorized Black people. “If we must die, O let us nobly die,” the poem continues, “So that our precious blood may not be shed / In vain.” It was indeed a fitting poem for Attica, where men were literally penned in inhumane conditions: hard labor in the metal shop for only 25 cents per day, one shower per week, one roll of toilet paper per month, inedible food, overcrowded conditions, and negligent medical care. There were no translation services for Spanish-language speakers and only one Spanish-speaking employee. Religious practices were discouraged, mail was censored, and solitary confinement was meted out liberally for even minor infractions. For months, those incarcerated at Attica—and their advocates on the outside—petitioned Governor Nelson Rockefeller to reform the prison but to no avail.

As Brooks knew, Time got one fact quite wrong about the poem: the article made no mention of McKay, asserting instead that these lines were the “clandestine writings” of men at Attica. (The article described the poem as “crude but touching in its would-be heroic style.”) Brooks sent a withering letter to the editor: “Please tell the poetry specialist,” she wrote, “that his ‘find’ is a portion of one of the most famous poems ever written—known to Hitler, elementary school children to say nothing of Winston Churchill.” She concluded by quoting the poem in full. Brooks understood that, in misattributing McKay’s poem, Time maligned not only the famous poet but also the men inside Attica. The magazine had dismissed a master sonnet as inept and derivative because it was supposedly composed by an incarcerated person of color.

The poets of Attica proved Time wrong. In 1974, they published their own volume of poetry, Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica. Long out of print, the text has just been reissued in a new edition titled When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022), edited by Celes Tisdale, who led Attica’s poetry workshop in the 1970s. Supported by Attica administrators and a local nonprofit, Tisdale launched the workshop after the riot as a rehabilitation measure. When the men convened each week, they explored the history of poetry and read Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe alongside the contemporary writings of Black Arts Movement figures such as Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni. Tisdale also required workshop attendees to bring in their own poetry each week. Together, they critiqued, revised, and improved, admiring when a line’s rhythm caught just the right beat or an image that seared. Brooks, who visited the workshop, was impressed by what she witnessed and encouraged Tisdale to pursue publication. Eventually, her own publisher, the Black-owned Broadside Press in Detroit, put out the original edition of Betcha Ain’t.

Tisdale’s workshop was the first of its kind at Attica—and it was certainly the first poetry workshop convened in response to such horrific carceral violence. But the concept of a writing workshop within prison walls was not unique. During the 1940s and 1950s, prison reformers worked diligently to increase educational resources for the incarcerated; proponents argued that access to books and learning is a basic human necessity. Norfolk Prison in Massachusetts is an early example, with its ties to Boston institutions, including Harvard, Emerson, and Boston University. At Norfolk, Malcolm X, held for robbery, joined a weekly debate team in the 1940s and honed a skill set that helped launch his career. Community-building educational programs such as debate teams and workshops became especially viable when studies revealed that social learning significantly reduces recidivism. During the 1960s and 1970s, the number of college-level programs increased from scarcely a dozen to about 200 nationally. Incarcerated poets were vital contributors to the Black Arts and Nuyorican Movements of this era. Key figures—including Baraka, Carolyn Baxter, Ericka Huggins, Judy A. Lucero, Ricardo Sánchez, Raúl R. Salinas, Luis J. Rodriguez, and Etheridge Knight—spent time behind bars. The critique of America’s prisons is key to their poetry and to the movements they helped build.

As a committed educator and activist, Tisdale knew the political significance of his workshop. The Rockefeller administration encouraged the view that men at Attica were hardened criminals who deserved punishment, not poetry. Thanks to the outright lies of state officials, many Americans believed that men incarcerated at Attica murdered and mutilated eight correctional officers held as hostages during the five-day standoff. In fact, autopsies later proved that two men died in the hours before troopers stormed the yard, and both were imprisoned men, not guards. All other deaths, including the state’s own casualties, were traced to bullet and buckshot wounds, which could have come only from state forces because Attica’s men didn’t have guns. Still, these stories continued to circulate, fueling public support of harsh measures. What happened at Attica confirmed many people’s deeply held prejudice that incarcerated Americans were less than human. As another letter writer to Time’s editors asserted, “Those men were put in prison because they were inhuman and brutal.”

Tisdale was no stranger to such hatred, especially as it intersected with anti-Black racism. Born in a Gullah community in Salters, South Carolina, in 1941, he grew up in Willert Park Courts on Buffalo’s East Side, a predominantly Black neighborhood. The Willert Park project was Buffalo’s answer to racist housing policies that excluded Black residents from affordable neighborhoods. The complex’s small library was a boon for Tisdale, who loved to read. As a budding writer and literary critic, he was in good company at Willert Park: the poet and novelist Ishmael Reed was a neighbor, and Tisdale’s mother, Rachel, passed on her love for poetry to her son, reading him Paul Laurence Dunbar’s work. Noticing his talent in English class, some of Tisdale’s high school teachers convinced him to apply for college. He studied at the State University College at Buffalo, paying his way by working as a cook and a waiter on weekends. While still a student, he took on leadership positions in Buffalo’s Black community. He became president of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and then the college chapter of the NAACP and went on to become associate director of Buffalo’s Urban League and African American Cultural Center. In 1963, the summer after he received his English degree, Tisdale joined Martin Luther King Jr. and more than 250,000 demonstrators at the March on Washington. He climbed a tree in the National Mall to get a better view of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Tisdale’s political commitments were always closely tied to his art and literary work. Before Attica, he founded a community writing group for Black writers, the Nia Writers, and participated in Buffalo’s Black Drama Workshop, which sometimes found him in New York City acting in plays by Baraka. Through that workshop, a local nonprofit, Hospital Audiences Inc., approached Tisdale about facilitating a prison poetry group. He also took gig work in local TV and radio news shows, including a series titled The Black Man’s Experience in Buffalo and America. But Tisdale’s primary calling was in education. He taught in public high schools and junior high schools for many years before proceeding with a graduate degree. He had just started a new teaching job at Buffalo State when the uprising at Attica happened.

On a May evening in 1972—eight months after the uprising—Tisdale passed through Attica’s security gates and held his first workshop. He began by asking his students, “What is poetry?” He recorded their answers in his journal: “Personal, deals with emotions, historical, compact (concise), eternal, revolutionary, beauty, rhyme, rhythm, a verbal X-ray of the soul.” Knowing he was under nearly as much scrutiny as the imprisoned men, Tisdale approached the “revolutionary” aspects of poetry with caution. Attica’s administrators feared another revolt. Officers were always present for the workshops; Tisdale’s journal makes special note of the occasions when a Black officer, recruited after the uprising, attended. Regardless of the surveillance, the workshop began to gel after the first few weeks as participants became more comfortable with Tisdale. He noticed quickly that many contributors possessed great skill as poets. They told him that nothing had changed at Attica since the revolt; prison conditions remained abhorrent. They shared an urgency to write about the violence they had witnessed and America’s carceral system in general, and they did not hold back.

The poems of When the Smoke Cleared bear testimony to the poets’ immense skill and to the weight of prison life. Numerous poems respond to the revolt itself. In these, McKay’s poem is like a suture stitched through the collection; so many poems seem to be colored with its thread. A ballad by Isaiah Hawkins depicts the moments just before state troopers stormed the prison and regained control: “the white folks were coming / to lay some black brothers away.” The ballad ends just before the violence, with military helicopters looming over the men in the yard below. The helicopter’s loudspeakers blare commands:

“Put your hands on your heads
     and you won’t get hurt,
lie on your bellies,
     put your face in the dirt.”
 
Then from a distance
     Came a black brother’s cry.
“I’m a man, white folks,
     and like a man I’ll die.”

The Black brother’s cry echoes McKay’s rallying call—“If we must die, O let us nobly die”—with its hope that loss of life may, at least, help demonstrate a just cause. Notably, though, Hawkins’s speaker doesn’t mention nobility or honor but simply asserts his humanity, his lonely cry, insistent, “I’m a man.” Compared to McKay’s communal we, Hawkins’s speaker is distinctly singular, emphasizing his vulnerability against the assault. The men of Attica may well have felt isolated and abandoned in the wake of September 1971 when their just cause was too easily ignored in the media frenzy.

Though Hawkins’s poem records the horror of state violence at Attica, other works look to its aftermath and seek a way forward. In “Revolution Is,” by Jamail (Robert Sims), the idea of McKay’s we is centered: the poem calls for brotherly love and an end to intra-racial violence:  

Black brother—
     revolution is loving you,—
for a change;
     calling you brother
instead of Mutha,—
for a change.
Even grinning at you—
     for a change.
Then—killing them,
     not you,—
for a change.

Poems such as this register the anger of Attica’s incarcerated men in the aftermath of the uprising, with their wish for retaliation (“killing them, / not you.”). “Revolution Is” also bears testimony to the community that formed during the five-day takeover. When they gained control of the prison yard, the men quickly organized to ensure medical care for the injured, meet the hostages’ needs, and draft their initial demands for negotiations with State Corrections Commissioner Russell G. Oswald. As the negotiations proceeded, the men settled into their newly reclaimed space and enjoyed one another’s company. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the uprising, Blood in the Water (2016), Heather Ann Thompson describes the camaraderie that emerged in the few days of freedom. Someone found a guitar, drums, and a saxophone, and the men made music together out in the open air. “I haven’t seen the stars in 22 years,” one man observed. Although this community was decimated on September 13, Jamail’s poem carries its spirit forward. After all, it’s “Revolution Is,” not “was.”

Another poem, “Formula for Attica Repeats,” by Mshaka (Willie Monroe), is similarly interested in the revolt’s legacy. This poem, one of whose lines furnishes When the Smoke Cleared with its title, describes what happened when the haze of gunfire subsided and Governor Rockefeller’s emissaries appeared.

They came tearless
tremblers,
apologetic grin factories
that breathed Kool
smoke-rings
and state-prepared speeches.
They came
like so many unfeeling fingers
groping without touching
the 43 dead men
who listened…
threatening to rise
again…

With prison administrators just as unwilling as before to acknowledge the needs of the incarcerated men, this is indeed a “formula” for repeating events at Attica. But now, it’s not only the imprisoned “threatening to rise” again. After all, 10 corrections officers, all white men, were among those killed at Attica. In this poem, they, too, will retaliate. Mshaka’s poem recalls McKay’s exhortation that “If we must die,” then at least a noble final stand will demonstrate strength of cause and character: “even the monsters we defy / Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!” Governor Rockefeller and his representatives failed to honor the fallen at Attica. These bureaucratic “grin factories” are simply incapable of understanding the significance of such losses. Those who died get the last word in Mshaka’s poem, poised for resurrection. With its eye toward the long trajectory of prison reform, Mshaka’s poem honors those who lost their lives at Attica while acknowledging the ongoing struggle.

Although poems about the uprising form the backbone of this collection, at its heart are poems that respond to Attica’s everyday intellectual landscape. Some poems question God: L. Alexander Brooks’s “Dialing” imagines a direct telephone line to God, but when the speaker dials the number, “the line is always busy, / Or the phone just keeps ringing and ringing, / And nobody ever answers, not even Nobody.” Other poems search for spiritual meaning in difficult times, such as Sanford X’s “A Humble Muslim,” which traces the ironies, frustrations, and blessings of a committed prayer life. Many poems recall scenes from lives lived far from Attica. “Mercy Killing,” by Leonard C. Mackey, explores memories of the atomic bomb; Harold E. Packwood’s “Night Flight to Hanoi” recalls the “shrapnel-braided hair” of the Vietnam War. Africa inspires many of the poems, including John Lee Norris’s “Betcha Ain’t.” Norris sketches a tour of African landscapes, from “a tangerine sun” slipping behind a hillside to “heat waves / hopscotching / over honey-colored wheat fields” to the smiles of “blueblackbrown / children,” the rainbow of African skin tones. But each stanza’s evocative snapshot is clouded by a taunting refrain: “betcha ain’t never seen”:

Hey!
Betcha ain’t
never seen a tangerine sun
kiss
the rolling hills and
mountain valleys of Africa

Has the poet witnessed the beauty mapped in this vivid poem? Is this refrain a lament for himself, locked away in upstate New York, far from the Africa of his ancestry? Whether or not Norris has seen Africa, his poem demands that readers see him, its declarative “Hey!” calling them out and its challenge, “Betcha ain’t,” imploring their response.

Other poems reflect on childhood, families, and loved ones. Chico’s ode to his mother, “To Moms,” is “For soul things they don’t speak of,” the everyday ways of maternal love. In “Black Dolphin,” Harold E. Packwood describes a boyhood rich with imagination and good food, despite the real poverty threatening to cave in on his family at any moment, literally collapsing the kitchen ceiling:

And following
       the frying smoke
to the falling ceiling
       I knew
my dreams
         were dreams
But love
         and pancakes
eased the pain
       of reality

With a stair-stepping left-hand margin, Packwood’s lines suggest another spiral to match the frying smoke ascending to the ceiling. Like love and pancakes, the poem, too, eases the pain of reality.

Packwood imagines another happy childhood in “Little Girl,” this time for a daughter. The poem lists everything that the speaker would do as a father: “I’ll buy you ribbons for your hair” and “Teach you Swahili,” he writes, “Read you poetry, / And sing black songs, / To hear your laughter tinkle.” The joy of this poem, as in “Black Dolphin,” is ultimately tainted by hard facts: “But your Mama don’t love me no more, / And your Daddy won’t be me.” When the speaker consoles himself in the final lines, it’s evident he’s barely met his daughter:

Still if I should see you,
I will smile and speak,
We will not be total strangers,
When we meet.

Coming from an incarcerated poet, the tentative “if I should see you” is especially poignant. Tisdale’s journal gives a glimpse into Packwood’s efforts to reunite with his family, including multiple applications for parole. Eventually, Packwood was transferred to Albion Correctional Facility, a low-security prison north of Attica. With Tisdale’s help, he was permitted to leave Albion by day to attend classes at Buffalo State College and return to the prison at night. Packwood was reportedly released in January of 1974. He later told Tisdale that the poetry workshop at Attica “might have kept a few of us from taking the gun.”

Packwood dreamed of a more robust education program at Attica—and at prisons everywhere—that included Black history, languages, political science, and land-based economics classes as well as creative writing. Increasingly, colleges and universities are coordinating with nearby prisons to establish the types of programs Packwood envisioned. The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program and Arizona State’s Prison Education Programming (formerly Prison English) are ready examples. Related efforts, such as Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Freedom Reads program and the Women’s Prison Book Project, are working diligently to supply books to incarcerated people in the United States.

Yet, the United States remains the country with the highest incarceration rate globally, with more than 2 million people imprisoned or jailed in 2022. In fact, scholars such as Thompson point to the Attica uprising as an inflection point. At first, there was an outpouring of support for men incarcerated at Attica in the 1970s, including from celebrities such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Vital advocacy organizations, including the ACLU’s National Prison Project, were founded in response. But calls for progressive reforms also fueled a major backlash, resulting in worse conditions at Attica and in American prisons overall. Already overcrowded in 1971, Attica’s prison population doubled just a decade later and continued to grow. Today, US citizens are still in an era of mass incarceration. Moreover, given their percentage of the national population, non-white people such as Packwood still make up a disproportionately large part of the prison population overall, due in part to decades of racist policing practices and discriminatory court sentencings.

Perhaps thinking of this grim outcome, Tisdale’s poem-epilogue, “Remember This,” sounds almost despondent when it asks, “will there be a coda of hope, an interlude / Before we die again, again.” The question ends in a period, not a question mark, an ominous dying fall that just about answers itself by despairing of the question. But then, once again, an Attica poet reaches for McKay’s cold comfort:

But, the poet said, “If we must die . . .” —
What will we remember to tell the others who heard
And could not understand why this, why that.
We will say, remember this, and never forget
            The You of You, like men . . .

Even if the cause is nearly hopeless, Tisdale suggests, people must still say what happened and why. In other words, write it, he urges. When the Smoke Cleared demonstrates the profound resilience of those who lived through the Attica uprising, who demanded justice, and who were violently silenced on September 13, 1971. Their poems still speak for those who died—and for incarcerated people everywhere.