Black Gangster

"A flashing talent straight from the streets of the lost."

-L'Expres

"After Chester Himes, the "Serie Noire" could not overlook Donald Goines, the most interesting black crime writer in many years. Goines writes with guts `n blood."

-La Republique du Centre

"What is great about Goines is that you feel you've become more intelligent once you have read his stories of pain and grief. His stories almost have an ethnographic value."

-La Liberte de I'Est

" . .dives into the hellish world of the ghetto dear to Chester Himes, minus the humor. Policemen shoot before asking questions. Fear and hatred can be read on all faces."

-La Croix

He had come to prison at the tender age of eighteen; now, four years later, he was leaving with an education a man could get nowhere else. He had learned the hard way that, if you were going to live a life of crime, go for the big buck. Now he was ready. By this time next year, he planned to have the city of Detroit all wrapped up.

DOPEFIEND

WHORESON

BLACK GANGSTER

STREET PLAYERS

WHITE MAN'S JUSTICE, BLACK MAN'S GRIEF

BLACK GIRL LOST

CRIME PARTNERS

CRY REVENGE

DADDY COOL

DEATH LIST

ELDORADO RED

INNER CITY HOODLUM

KENYATTA'S ESCAPE

KENYATTA'S LAST HIT

NEVER DIE ALONE

SWAMP MAN

Special Preview of Street Players-page 301

Donald Goines

THE SUN WAS SHINING through the bars on the window as Prince, tall, slim, and black, got up from his bed and paced back and forth in his cell. He stopped in front of the small calendar he kept on the wall and smiled. It had been a long time, but he had managed to keep his sanity. Suddenly the sound he had been waiting for reached him loud and clear.

"Break one!" The yell was sharp and, before it had diminished, the sound of over a hundred steel doors opening together drowned it out. "Break two!" came the yell again, followed by another hundred iron doors opening at the same time. Voices were raised in harsh humor as over four hundred men joked and argued back and forth. "Break three," the break man screamed as he reached the third gallery.

Prince glanced into the small mirror hanging over his facebowl, reached up and patted down his large afro hairstyle and then rushed to the front of his cell and snatched open the steel door. Then he stepped out on the gallery, slamming the door behind him with the experience of a convict who has been jailing for a long time. He quickly glanced back into his cell to see whether his bed was wrinkled. It was more a reflex motion than any real concern for the appearance of his cell.

Prince fell in step with the man in front of him. "How you feel, baby, gettin' up this morning?" the white inmate who locked next to him asked. From the sound of the man's voice, there was no way of telling whether he was black or white. This was not unusual in prison. Many white men after spending a lot of time behind prison walls adopted the mannerisms of black men.

"What's happening, Red?" Prince replied easily as they started down the concrete stairs. Glancing down from the third-floor gallery all you could see was a line of blue-dressed men.

"Break four!" came the yell as the break man let out the men locking on the fourth gallery. The sound of a hundred steel doors slamming shut came to their ears as they hurried down the stairway.

"Stop that running down there," a guard yelled from his gun tower. The gun tower was up on the fourth floor, built down from the ceiling, away from the gallery. The only way a man could reach it was from the roof. A prisoner could spend a lifetime behind the walls and never come close to seeing the inside of a gun tower. All he would ever see would be the bright steel of the gun barrel sticking out of one of the many slots.

The inmate guilty of running slowed down after he reached the friend he had run to catch up with. They began talking loudly as they continued on towards the line of men lined up on the base, the bottom floor. The sound of so many voices talking together was like the hum of a million bees. The old silent system had been abolished many years before. Now inmates could talk on the way to chow, while sitting in the dining hall, even while standing in the line as they went to eat. Jackson Prison, the largest penal institution in the United States, was becoming modem.

The men lined up and the guards waited patiently until the men quieted down before opening the doors and allowing them to file out quietly. Guards walked up and down the line speaking to individual prisoners.

"What's wrong, Jones, you ain't hungry this morning? You there, Collins, keep the bullshit up; we got all fuckin' day. If you don't eat, it's your own damn fault." From close association, most of the guards spoke the same language the inmates used. "I guess don't none of these boys want to peck today," the sergeant said loudly. He rubbed his huge potgut and laughed. None of the guards working the floors, or blocks, or yard, were allowed to carry any form of weapon. There were no more nightsticks or guns at the guards' sides. If violence occurred, it was up to the guard to get his ass to cover or under one of the gun towers.