Jungle Habitat

By R.Z. Shepard

A TIME TO DIE

by TOM WICKER

342 pages. Quadrangle. $10.

The 1971 prison rebellion at Attica, N.Y., was part of a siege of domestic violence that began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and continued in a demoralizing blur through the deaths of R.F.K., Martin Luther King, the flames of Newark and Watts, the bashing by (and of) war protesters, the torn victims of radical bombings, and the savage abbreviation of young lives at Kent and Jackson State.

Tom Wicker's career soared on such turbulence. As a correspondent for the New York Times, he distinguished himself in Dallas on Nov. 22,1963. As a liberal Southerner from Hamlet, N.C., he brought a blend of hard perception and raw emotion to the coverage of civil rights. He was also a workmanlike but disappointed novelist. When he became the Times's Washington bureau chief and later took over the retired Arthur Krock's "In the Nation" column it appeared that Wicker's metamorphosis into a gentleman-journalist was complete.

But Wicker does not seem to wear his prestige and rewards comfortably. He notes that he lives in a large house and is "affluent beyond his sense of decency." He guiltily admits that he is "a dissident, not a revolutionary." Up to a point, he might even agree with Gay Talese's conclusion in The Kingdom and the Power--that Wicker "became caught up in the current of journalism, the daily opiate of the restless."

Wicker's involvement at Attica was anything but narcotic. Shortly after the rebellion began on Sept. 9, 1971, he was asked by prisoners to join a 37-man committee of observers to mediate and publicize their fight for better conditions and safeguard them against reprisal. Five days and 43 lives later, Wicker returned to Washington a haggard, angry and sad man--but a man who no longer was hesitant about using power "to force," as he says, "elementary humanity upon even greater power."

A Time to Die is both his attempt to re-create the experience in every detail, combined with an examination of the morality and responsibility of the observer in times of action. It is a book of extraordinary tension. There are the 1,500 Attica inmates, flushed with their initial victory yet frantic with the knowledge that their moment of freedom is doomed by the authorities' unchallenged power and willingness to kill them. The heavily armed guards and state troopers poised over D-yard, where the uprising was encamped, were inflamed by false rumors that the hostages were being beaten, even sodomized.

Open Racism. With more than 60% of the inmates either black or Puerto Rican, racism burned openly. White members of the observer committee were openly referred to by guards and townspeople as "nigger lovers." A black committee member was thrown out of a local diner. Both black and white observers, Wicker included, heard muttered threats from the guards and troopers that when the shooting started, they would be the first to get it.

New York Congressman Herman Badillo, another observer, contributed the most famous and most pertinent summation of what eventually happened at Attica. "There's always time to die. I don't know what the rush was," he said, after six minutes of uncontrolled shotgun and rifle fire had killed ten hostages, 29 inmates, and left more than 80 wounded.

No Amnesty. Like many other witnesses, Wicker believes that the bloodshed and the brutal reprisals by guards and state troopers would have been postponed and possibly avoided if only New York State's Governor Nelson Rockefeller had agreed to come to Attica. At the time, Rockefeller said he did not believe he had the constitutional power to grant blanket amnesty to the rebels--especially since one of the guards had already died in the hospital after his skull was fractured at the beginning of the riot. In Rockefeller's action--a euphemistic order to "reopen the institution"--Wicker sees a man not "callous and careless of human life," but one dedicated to maintaining "the order of things."

Elsewhere, though, the author speculates that Rockefeller refused to come to Attica simply from fear of "voter reaction." During the crisis, Wicker had only one personal contact with the Governor. When he called him to describe the seriousness of the situation and to appeal for a meeting, the Governor suddenly interrupted him with what Wicker regarded as unnerving campaign enthusiasm: "I know you've all worked hard and taken great risks and I appreciate it. I really do. It's just great . . . Just great." Rockefeller was not the only one wirh an eye on his constituency. Black Panther Bobby Scale flatly refused to present New York State Corrections Commissioner Russell Oswald's settlement proposal to the prisoners. Why? Because, Wicker surmises, he did not want to appear to be dealing with the Man.

The cast of characters in A Time to Die is enormous. On both sides of the wall, gibberish and eloquence, madness and reason know no race, class or educational background. As Wicker watches political power dissipate through the state's bureaucracy and firepower build on the walls surrounding D-yard, the outcome--even in hindsight--looms with the inevitability of Greek tragedy. The impact of Wicker's book shatters the convenient forgetfulness that cocoons disturbing memories. Even his thin, novelizing technique, which includes writing about himself in the third person singular and larding the narrative with bits of autobiography, does not lessen the book's overall effect. Whether Wicker was being a participatory journalist or a journalist participant matters little in the face of the events and issues that he at once confronts and manages to get down on the page in their wild, unpredictable state. He has written a book that even a disappointed novelist can be proud of. qedR.Z. Sheppard

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