Permeable Borders and American Prisons: Malcolm Braly’s <i>On the Yard</i>

Abstract

Permeable Borders and American Prisons: Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard Katy Ryan Malcolm Braly’s fourth novel begins simply enough: “Society Red was the first man on the yard that morning” (3). An account of men living slow days in San Quentin in the 1960s—their fantasies, interactions, supreme boredom—On the Yard (1967) continues in this direct, unembellished style for well over three hundred pages. Braly’s novel is, as Jonathan Lethem notes in his fine introduction to the most recent edition, as -ical as its title” (vii). Our need to have “prisons be one simple thing — either horrific zoos for the irretrievably demented and corrupt, or inhumane machines which grind down innocent men” —is unsatisfied by Braly’s writing (Lethem, vii). Praised by critics and declared by Kurt Vonnegut “the great American prison novel,” On the Yard has been out of print twice and has received little scholarly attention.1 In 2002 the New York Review of Books republished the novel as part of its lost classics series. Braly, who spent much of his adult life in prison for burglary and armed robbery convictions, composed three novels while incarcerated: Felony Tank (1961), Shake Him Till He Rattles (1963), and It’s Cold Out There (1966). After his final release from San Quentin, published, in addition to On the Yard, an autobiography, False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons (1976), and another novel, The Protector (1979). At the time of his death in 1980, he was, according to H. Bruce Franklin, “beginning to attain recognition as one of the finest novelists to emerge from America’s prisons” (Prison Writing, 217). On the Yard emerges at a critical moment in U.S. American literary history. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965, marks the beginning of what Franklin calls “an unprecedented surge of prison literature” (Prison Writing, 12). Among the more well-known of these works are Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968), George Jackson’s Soledad, Brother (1970), Robert Beck’s The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (1971), Manuel Piñero’s Short Eyes (1972), Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide (1973), James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could [End Page 285] Talk (1974), and Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974). Franklin identifies the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s as the motivating context for this literature; Dylan Rodriguez develops his theory of “radical prison praxis” from the same time period; and Michael Hames-García engages with this body of literature in order to theorize and put into practice its ethical and moral insights. Yet Braly’s novel is not political in the way much of this writing is. It does not provide an exposé or analysis of the dire failings of the criminal judicial system. Nor does it attempt to explain, or even represent, the disproportionate impact of mass incarceration on racial minorities. In a 1971 New York Times op-ed piece on George Jackson, Braly expressed his impatience with “the mistaken assumptions, exaggerations, and, sometimes, outright lies on which liberals and radical writers base their current outrage at prison conditions” (35). Braly maintained that there was no “systematic political prejudice” against black Americans in the justice system, though he admitted individual instances of bias in the California prison system. His inaccurate assessments of both the role race plays in judicial processes and the cultural significance of black liberation struggles arguably interfere with his ability to tell a reliable tale about U.S. American prisons.2 Franklin summarizes, “Because his vision did not encompass the historical significance of the changes going on both in the prison and on the outside, Malcolm Braly remained limited in range as a novelist, despite all his profound insights” (Prison Literature, 206).3 What contributions, then, can Braly make to American literary and cultural history? It was to the novel that Braly first turned, a genre utilized less often by writers dealing with prison than autobiography, poetry, oratory, and essay. And it is precisely the dialogic structure of On the Yard that generates its most important social commentary. Franklin credits the artistic success of On the Yard to...