Buffalo Report 1 March 2002
Jack Henry Abbot, 58by Bruce Jackson
Jack Henry Abbott hanged himself with a bedsheet and shoelace in Wende Correctional Faculty on Sunday, February 10. At first his family was convinced he'd been murdered. "He wouldn't have killed himself that way," his sister told a reporter. Maybe a bedsheet and shoelace comprise an improbable instrument for Abbott, but they're equally improbable as a penitentiary murder weapon. In all the years I did research in prisons I never heard of anyone being strung up by a bedsheet and a shoelace. It's not how it's done.
Thus far, no evidence has turned up suggesting anybody had a hand in hanging Jack Henry Abbott other than Jack Henry Abbott. Two coroners, one hired by the state and the other hired by the family, have called it suicide and the prison authorities say they have a suicide note. They haven't released the note and they haven't said why they won't let anybody see it, but those guys adore secrets and maybe the note said true bad things about them they don't want anybody to know. Like Kaleida with the Hunter Group report.
Jack Henry Abbott spent the nine years before his eighteenth birthday in Utah reformatories. He was free for six months, then he was sent to the Utah penitentiary to do time for writing bad checks. He got more felony time three years later when he stabbed one inmate to death and injured another in a prison brawl. He robbed a bank during a brief escape in 1971; that earned him a nineteen-year federal sentence on top of the state time. He was then twenty-five years old.
In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner's Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott's letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott's first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).
When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.
Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that "they're the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn't know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will." He and several other men on the Row found the book's success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were.
While Abbott was at the halfway house he was the darling of New York literary society. He was on "Good Morning, America," and went to fancy parties. I heard Mailer talk about him several times on tv and remember thinking, "You've found your own Gary Gilmore." Mailer had never gotten to meet Gary Gilmore and I'd always thought that rankled him: he was hired to work on Executioner's Song by Lawrence Schiller after Gilmore's execution and he based his Gilmore dialog on Schiller's extensive interview tapes.
With Abbott, he had his own his pet convict. It was like those people who get a big animal you're not supposed to have and show it to you on a leash with a jewel-encrusted collar. You don't know if you're supposed to admire the animal or them for having it on the leash with the jewel-encrusted collar. Well, yes, you do know.
If Abbott had stayed out of trouble for eight weeks, he would have gone on parole. He didn't make it. Six weeks after he got to New York, he stabbed to death a waiter named Richard Adan. Because of his previous record, Abbott received the maximum sentence: 15 years to life. After he went back to prison Abbott wrote a second book, My Return (1987). That's a title that should have been used by Douglas MacArthur about getting off the barge in Leyte or Charles de Gaulle on having a cognac in Les Deux Magots after sitting out WWII in London. Or some politician who had been voted out of office and got back in again next time around because his successor was worse than he'd been. My Return.
I didn't like the book, and said so in a review. Shortly thereafter, a woman who had become involved with him after he got the manslaughter sentence sent me a copy of the pro se brief he'd sent to a New York judge a short time before. He was asking the judge to set him free. In her cover letter she told me that, like nearly everyone else, I'd failed to understand his sensibility. She said that if I read his brief carefully I'd have a better understanding of the kind of man Jack Henry Abbott was.
In that, she was correct, though I didn't come to the understanding she had in mind. I was struck by the fact that in the entire document Abbott wrote in the hope his sentence would be set aside, he never referred to Richard Adan by name. He referred only to "the deceased." The part that especially caught my attention consisted of these two sentences:
There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill. The deceased in this case was inflicted a single wound under circumstances which would have demanded the infliction of more wounds, if the single wound had been inflicted with the intent to kill and not merely to repel him.
I'll translate that into English for you: "They never proved I meant to kill the guy. If somebody like me really wanted to kill a guy like that, you think I'd stab him only once? Moi?" But that's not what Jack Henry Abbott wrote. What he wrote was,
There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill. The deceased in this case was inflicted a single wound under circumstances which would have demanded the infliction of more wounds, if the single wound had been inflicted with the intent to kill and not merely to repel him.
Jack Henry Abbott couldn't lie about the facts of the killing (there were witnesses); the only issue was the meaning of those facts. What impressed me about Abbott's statement is how astutely he had used language so he could talk about what happened without admitting any guilt or responsibility for what happened. He slipped into the passive voice, which has no actor, no agent. Things happen but nobody's there doing them. Scientists write in the passive all the time because they like to pretend the hand of humans didn't influence what went on: "The measurements were taken and were observed to be....Therefore, it was concluded that...."
We all do it when we feel the need. We don't think, "I'm switching into the passive now" any more than an experienced driver thinks about when to move the right foot from the accelerator to the brake pedal. Little kids do it all the time: "How did that plate full of cookies wind up on the floor?" "It fell."
After reading Abbott's statement I understood that there was in language a way to acknowledge events without in any way accepting responsibility or accountability for them. Language, I decided, had profound moral power that could appear to recast the very facts its users purport to present.
"His life was tragic from beginning to end," Norman Mailer said in a prepared statement after he learned of the suicide. "I never knew a man who had a worse life."
I don't know about that. Based on the two books and the pro se brief, Jack Henry Abbott was a man whose life made perfect sense to him, a man for whom the clumsy organization of the world was proof of the world's continuing inadequacy. I don't know what made him that way, why it was okay for him to kill that guy in prison and that waiter in Greenwich Village, and do all the other stuff he got locked up for. But those are the things he did and that's the way he was, right up to the end when he tied that bedsheet to the shoelace and quit the game on his own terms in his own good time.
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