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Who Are the Real Enemies?

By Philip Berrigan

Yesterday was my birthday (forty-eight), my third in jail. People are embarrassingly kind and thoughtful. Frankly, I would have preferred to forget it.

A rumble begins in my dormitory, where seventy-five men live in uneasy truce. Overcrowding is such a burden that the enemy is not the Man, who stays out of sight pretty much, but the guy in the upper bunk or in the next one. The Man doesn't bug you--doesn't talk all night, doesn't snore, doesn't scatter his garbage, doesn't close the window when it's warm outside, doesn't steal from you, doesn't snitch on you, doesn't betray your confidence, doesn't curse you out. But in our dorm the next guy is likely to. Everyone is just too close.

In any event, this is a drug joint, and drugs--hard and soft--move despite measures to choke off the import. the other day, when returning from a visit and its customary strip-search, a guy said to me, "I've been here two years, and I've never seen them catch drugs by stripping people down. You know what I saw in the john the other day? Five different guys vomiting up drugs. They get'em in a condom or a balloon from folks, swallow them, get back to their dorm, drink warm water, and puke them up. Then they shoot them, sometimes in broad daylight."

Such being the bare facts of dormitory life, rhubarbs and rumbles are predictable--indeed, inevitable. Mostly they center on cards and pools (cigarettes) and drugs (heroin). Now it appears that a young French-Canadian has gotten drugs from, or has dealt drugs to, some Puerto Ricans. There was, at any rate, some complicity, and the Spanish-speaking accuse him of ratting them out. He denies the charge vehemently, a fight breaks out, others umpire and quiet it down. But, alas, the Puerto Ricans return with a task force intent upon retribution, carrying pipes, two-by-fours, broomstick handles. They work over Frenchie in a brief, violent encounter, and leave him with his head split.

He is in the hospital now, not badly hurt. I talk with one of the whites standing by, suffering over one man going down under that vengeful little mob of Latins. The only lesson he draws is: "Them Spics are together, and we ain't!"

He's wrong, poor guy! The Puerto Ricans are not "together"; neither are the whites nor the blacks. Those who are together are the Nixons, Mitchells, Rockefellers, Mellons, Fords who know no other way of life except lordship of the world, no other relationship to people except domination and control. What my poor friend does not know is that Big brother creates "enemies" for the poor to fight--and they are invariably one another. What's the difference between a prison dormitory and 116 Street and Third Avenue? They're both ghettos. And in the ghetto one never resists the right enemies. They're not around--they're in the boardrooms, in the Bahamas or Nice, or in Westchester and in Greenwich, Connecticut.

So one turns on the brother, the one who bugs you with petty irritations. He doesn't overcharge you for squalid, rotten housing; he doesn't begrudge you the miserable subsistence of welfare; he doesn't raise and process the drugs overseas, and sneak them into the country through his craven, greedy slaves; he doesn't hate you because you're black or Spanish-speaking; he doesn't steal your sons for war; he doesn't hang a "cheap labor" label on you for your life's remainder; he hasn't decided that you are human offal, unworthy of dignity, incapable of feeling. The ones who do these things are not at hand; they have no desire to see their handiwork. So one rages against the brother and loses one's innocence terrorizing the innocent.

Source:  Philip Berrigan. Widen the Prison Gates: Writings from Jails April 1970-September 1972 Danbury Federal Correctional Institute October 1971. Publisher: Simon and Schuster 1973

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updated 10 June 2008