You Can’t Win ~ Jack Black
Somewhere, buried in an article about something else, I saw an oblique reference to Jack Black’s 1926 memoir as a little known cult classic. Hooked. I’m a sucker for little known classics, so I had to read this one. A sort of cautionary tale replete with gentle sermonizing, it’s also a truly fascinating account of the incubation, life and reform of a professional drifter, hobo and petty career criminal. There’s an innocence (if that;s the right word) reading it now from the perspective of the 21st Century. Writing about his formative years, his education as a criminal, his many incarcerations and his eventual reform, Black’s memoir is a rapid, straight ahead read that holds the reader’s interest with his inside look at the criminal mind – though this criminal mind probably is more insightful than most.
It’s the details of his criminal activities that are riveting – the stick-ups and heists, especially the planning of them, the fencing, the house break-ins, the hotel knock-offs, the safe cracking – as well as his descriptions of the prison systems (of both Canada and the US) back in those years. And it’s the prison systems and the reforms that Black felt made sense that must have been the real impetus for this book. One can’t help but think of our current approach to ‘crime and punishment’ when Black talks his straight talk about what works, what doesn’t, and is mostly counter-productive.
Jack Black. From juvenile ‘delinquent’ to rail car hoppin’ hobo, to on the lam criminal, to brutalized inmate, to bottom of the barrel ‘hop-head’, to prison reform librarian….it’s all here, and though Black admits his failings, he makes no excuses for himself. The code of the criminal that is a large part of Black’s memoir, carries over to Black’s post-criminal life with a consistent code of dispassionate self-examination. Therein lies the respect that Black earns from the reader with his honesty.
It’s difficult to explain to a layman the pride of a professional thief. Nevertheless he must have pride or he would steal his clothes, beat his board bills, and borrow money with no thought of repaying it. He doesn’t do those things day after day, but day after day he takes chances and is proud that he can keep his end up and pay for the things he needs. All wrong, of course, but there it is. If I had brains enough to grease a griddle, I would have taken a hundred dollars from the boss Chinaman in the matter of Chew Chee and gone off somewhere, got a job, and tried to do the right thing by myself and others. But no, I was a journeyman; I had served a long and careful apprenticeship; professional pride – I don’t know what else to call it – would not permit me to take the Chinaman’s money for rescuing him from our common enemy, the law, and I went out to get money in my own way.
I was wrong. I knew I was wrong, and yet I persisted. If that is possible of any explanation it is this: From the day I left my father my lines had been cast, or I cast them myself, among crooked people. I had not spent one hour in the company of an honest person. I had lived in an atmosphere of larceny, theft, crime. I thought in terms of theft. Houses were built to be burglarized, citizens were to be robbed, police to be avoided and hated, stool pigeons to be chastised, and thieves to be cultivated and protected. That was my code; the code of my companions. That was the atmosphere I breathed. “If you live with wolves, you will learn to howl.”
Of reforming the criminal, Black has lots to say about the penal system as it existed in the early decades of the 20th Century. And while the reform of that system may have been one of the prime motivators for the writing of this memoir, it’s in the area of responsibility and self reform that Black really is very clear and speaks from experience – whether it’s in kicking a drug habit or changing one’s criminal ways.
I had long realized that my every act was wrong and criminal; yet I never thought of changing my ways. After thinking it all over with all the clarity and logic and fairness I could command, I was convinced that nobody but myself was to blame, and that I had just drifted along from one thing to another until I was on the rocks. I hadn’t been forced into this life, and this predicament, by any set of circumstances or any power beyond my control. I had traveled along this road largely of my own free will, and it followed that I could get on the right road any time I willed it.
Somewhat dated in a quaint way, a period piece of sorts, it’s still refreshing for its honesty and candor.
