Stanley “Tookie” Williams was a member of a Los Angeles street gang called the Crips – and an autobiographer.Footnote 1 He was condemned to death in 1981 for killing Albert Owen in the course of robbing a 7-Eleven, and for killing Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, and the elderly couple's daughter Yu-Chin Yang Lin in the course of robbing their motel. On 12 December 2005, California's Governor Schwarzenegger denied Williams's appeal for clemency. Williams was executed the next day, 13 December.
Williams's clemency appeal made several arguments, but its main point was that Williams had been redeemed:
The basis of this petition is the personal redemption of Stanley Williams and the positive impact of the message he sends. Thousands of students, teachers and parents have written to say that Stanley Williams and his message are of value – that Stanley Williams and his message lift them up, teach them, and give them hope.Footnote 2
“Redemption” alludes to Williams's autobiography, Redemption: From Original Gangster to Nobel Prize Nominee, and Williams's “message” was delivered largely through his autobiographical writings. It was Williams's hope that his autobiography would dissuade young people from joining gangs. Williams also co-wrote a series of eight semi-autobiographical children's books in the same hope, and he wrote a sobering account of his Life in Prison, also for children.
In his statement of denial Governor Schwarzenegger gave as one of his reasons that, in all of these hundreds of autobiographical pages, he found no real remorse for the Crips' victims:
the senseless killing that has ruined many families, particularly in African-American communities, in the name of the Crips and gang warfare is a tragedy … One would expect more explicit and direct reference to this byproduct of his former lifestyle in Williams' writings.Footnote 3
How could Williams have written autobiography with the frequently stated intention of warning young people away from gangs without showing remorse for his gang's victims? I will argue that Williams is telling the story of his life in a way that is like what we find in many other street-gang autobiographies – and in the autobiographies that come to us from warrior tribes. The status of tribal warriors, like the “respect” so important to gangbangers, depends largely on warlike deeds. Williams's sense of himself – and of the respect that is due him – is as inextricably tied to his warlike deeds as is a Sioux warrior's. So it is that they must tell stories about those deeds. And these stories reflect what tribal warriors and gangbangers alike early learn, that enemies are profoundly the other.
STREET GANGS AND WARRIOR TRIBES
According to Elijah Anderson, the “code” of the street “can be traced to the profound sense of alienation from mainstream society and its institutions felt by many poor, inner-city black people.”Footnote 4 Indeed, I am convinced that many young people in our subcultures are so entirely alienated from the larger society that they have reinvented something very like tribal warrior culture.
In order to see this, we must first remember that street gangs differ – importantly and by definition – from organized crime. Mafia dons have the power to command. Street gang leaders rarely do. Street gang leadership is diffused. Street gangs are loosely structured. And popular conceptions to the contrary, street gangs such as Williams remembers are not notably cohesive. Within a given gang, there may be a tight bond among a small group of friends who live on the same block or have the same homeroom at school. There may be a bond among the most active members of the gang; there will be small cliques, age groupings. But street gangs such as Williams's Crips were far from united.
Some might object that the Chicago gang that the sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh describes so vividly in Gang Leader for a Day is both organized and hierarchical.Footnote 5 But this is simply to say that some street gangs have evolved into organized crime. Prisons, too, have played a role in imposing more discipline on some street gangs, in moving them, then, in the direction of organized crime. The difference is definitional. A street gang “is not an organization that can readily act as a unit.”Footnote 6 The structure of a street gang is, in fact, strikingly like that of tribal societies.
What I mean by “tribe” is that form of human organization that was the commonest form throughout the world before the rise of the state, that form of human organization which did not recognize an authority with the power to enforce peace. In tribes human beings retain the right to use force in severalty. The famously peaceable Hopis, for example, had no state apparatus to adjudicate differences or enforce solutions – though they certainly had effective customary means of conflict resolution.Footnote 7 This, then, is the distinction that is crucial for what I have to say about “tribal” autobiographers. In this way the famously peaceable Hopi were like Ifugao headhunters in the Philippine highlands and like the Yanomamö in the Orinoco basin.
And gangbangers are cut off from the larger society. If you or I be harmed or if our property be taken, you or I would call 911 and hope for the best. If a gangbanger is harmed or his property taken, he relies upon himself and as many allies as he can gather together to seek redress. This is what the sociologist Irving Spergel has in mind when he calls street gangs “tribal or clanlike.”Footnote 8
Susan A. Phillips has described such commonalities in some detail. And this allowed her to explain, for example, why gangbangers usually fight among themselves instead of attacking Beverly Hills or Marin County. Like tribal kin groups,
gangs in the United States fight groups similar to themselves not only for resources and protection of their neighborhood space, but to negotiate reputation and identity at the level where it carries the greatest impact: internally. Warfare within the larger society makes little sense to them. What makes sense is warfare among people who are operating within the same system, so that they may most effectively influence their position within that realm.Footnote 9
Contrary to popular opinion, then, street gangs are not “psychopathological entities.”Footnote 10 Gangbangers fight for reasons that are very like the reasons that moved Yanomamö subtribes to fight other Yanomamö subtribes. Like the Yanomamö – who call themselves “the fierce people” – gangbangers think of themselves as making others fearful in order to make themselves safer.Footnote 11 Phillips also notes that, like warrior tribes, street gangs provide practices to define masculinity.
There are other ways in which gangs are like tribes: not all boys – to say nothing of girls – choose to become warriors, whether they live in the jungles of Ecuador or in South Central LA. Again contrary to popular opinion, relatively few inner-city boys become members of street gangs. Denver, for example, was one of the cities most troubled by gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, yet researchers estimated that just 7 percent of high-risk, inner-city juveniles were gang members. Other studies have suggested about the same percentages.Footnote 12 And so it is that many tribal and gangbanger autobiographers talk about their Warrior Choice, the courageous choice they made to become warriors.Footnote 13
Street gangs are also like warrior tribes in their death-by-violence rates: from 1989 to 1991, for example, LA's African American gangbangers died by violence at twenty times the rate for the US as a whole.Footnote 14 Such numbers are widely known – but we tend to minimize tribal violence. When an inner-city gangbanger forces himself upon a woman, we are likely to call it rape. Homer's Achilles kept captured women as concubines, but we do not think of Achilles as a rapist.Footnote 15 When American Indian warriors kept women and children captured in raids, we are inclined to call it “adoption.” But rape and violent death were more likely in tribal warrior cultures than in modern states. Modern wars kill far more people, of course, but looked at proportionately, death by violence was more likely in tribal societies. For example, Denig writes that from 1833 to 1856, when he was trading with the Crows, they were losing about a hundred people a year in their wars and raids.Footnote 16 This would have been about 3 percent each year. Imagine the United States losing nine million people a year to violence. John F. Peters wrote that in the Yanomamö villages he knew well, 40 percent of the men had killed human beings.Footnote 17 Carole and Clayton Robarchek estimated that over several generations before 1987 60 percent of Waorani deaths had been by violence.Footnote 18 In New Guinea some rates were higher than 20 percent.Footnote 19 Germany lost two twentieth-century wars, but Germany's population was so large that the average annual death-by-violence percentage for the century was below one percent, as was Japan's, even after two atom bombs.Footnote 20
Thus it was that, in a previous essay, I compared Shakur's Monster with tribal autobiographies.Footnote 21 But more of autobiographical similarities below.
THE KINDS OF GANGBANGER AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The first street-gang autobiography was published in 1930, by the pseudonymous Stanley. Colton Simpson's Inside the Crips was published in 2005,Footnote 22 and Dashaun Morris's War of the Bloods in my Veins in 2008.Footnote 23 Back when Tookie Williams was establishing his rep in South Central LA, Luis Rodriguez was active in a Chicano gang not many blocks away. After leaving the gang, he wrote Always Running: La Vida Loca.Footnote 24 Patrick Donadio was a member of an Italian street gang in Schenectady.Footnote 25 By the time Donadio began work on Touch Me If You Dare!, he was a pastor in Eagle River, Alaska. Mona Ruiz, once a member of a Chicana girl gang, had worked for some years as a member of the Santa Ana police force before collaborating with Geoff Boucher on Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz.Footnote 26 Terrell Wright was in prison when he wrote Home of the Body Bags.Footnote 27 Wright is still in prison, and he tells me that he is at work on a second volume of autobiography.Footnote 28
But diverse as they are in some ways, street-gang autobiographies are basically of three kinds. Some come to us from inside the life. Some look back upon the life, as though it had been on the far side of a chasm. And then there is a middle ground between the two, a kind of demilitarized zone of the soul. These distinctions, as we shall see, play themselves out not only in the attitudes of the autobiographers, but also in the very structure of their narratives.
IN-THE-LIFE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
“Cupid's Story” is the brief autobiography of a Chicago gangbanger named Cupid.Footnote 29 The anthropologist R. Lincoln Keiser tape-recorded Cupid in several sessions, and then transcribed the material and arranged it in chronological order.Footnote 30 But chronology aside, Keiser could have arranged Cupid's episodes in other ways with minimal effect. Cupid tells stories about joining the gang, about shooting his father, about extortion, about a gang war. In another story Cupid shoots a Golden Gloves boxer. “Cupid's Story,” then, is really Cupid's stories. It is not like autobiographies in the Western tradition. There is no climax; there is no turning point, no theme to provide organic unity; there is no moment of illumination – few, then, of the genre elements of such autobiographies as Augustine's Confessions and Ben Franklin's Autobiography have conditioned us to expect. But Cupid had at best only a basic literacy,Footnote 31 and his primary cultural affiliation was with the Vice Lords, and this was largely an oral culture. “Cupid's Story” is thus very like the as-told-to “autobiographies” of the Crow warrior Two Leggings and of Maxidiwiac, a Hidatsa woman who worked her fields with a bone hoe,Footnote 32 very like the stories that Gilbert Wilson took down from the Hidatsa warrior Wolf-Chief, stories of his eagle-trapping, his quest for spirit powers, his self-torture.Footnote 33 And we know that like Wolf-Chief, Cupid must have told his stories many times before.
Tribal cultures developed many occasions for the telling of autobiographical stories: stories to educate the young, stories about the acquisition of spirit powers, stories of self-vindication.Footnote 34 But most importantly and most often, tribal warriors told stories to publicize their warrior deeds. In tribal warrior cultures the deeds themselves were not enough – it was necessary to make them known. And so tribal warriors all over the world told what Plains Indians called “coup tales.” Among the Cheyenne alone there were more than a hundred ritual occasions requiring the ceremonial telling of coup tales.Footnote 35 New Guinea's Asmat warriors expected that their first act upon dying and entering the realm of souls would be to deliver their coup tales.Footnote 36
Like many another editor – McWhorter with Yellow Wolf, Neihardt with Black ElkFootnote 37 – Keiser could have filled out his informant's autobiography by asking questions, to elicit more about his childhood, more about his parents. He could have filled in chronological gaps. He could have edited it all into a proper Euro-American autobiography. But Keiser let Cupid speak to us in his own voice, with a minimum of editorial interference.Footnote 38 It is with street-gang autobiography, then, as it is with as-told-to American Indian autobiography: “In general, the more tightly unified the published autobiography of a pre-literate Indian, the more likely we are to be seeing the sensibility of the Anglo editor at work.”Footnote 39
Keiser also edited a book-length street-gang autobiography, Henry Williamson's Hustler;Footnote 40 and here Keiser's editorial hand was as light as it had been with Cupid's narrative. And so Hustler is also episodic, a succession of stories about Williamson's deeds. Again, we sense that these are stories that have been often told.
But such matters of narrative structure are subtle in comparison with what is, I think, the most striking aspect of in-the-life autobiographies: they generally lack any feeling for the people who have been robbed, shot, shamed, intimidated, raped, and beaten. When he was fifteen, Williamson did most of his robberies with his friend Benny: “Benny was the kind that wanted to whup everyone to death that he robbed.” Williamson remembers this as one of the interesting things about his friend:
That's the type of guy he was. When he'd rob somebody, he wasn't satisfied with takin' his money, he actually wanted to whup him to death! He always had two pistols, and the pistols were almost as big as he was.Footnote 41
Cupid tells his stories with the same objectivity, the same lack of affect and empathy. Here, for example, is his encapsulation of his gang's daily routine, at a time when he was thirteen:
We did whole lots, you know. We used to rob these people on the “L” all the time. We used to have a long sword, maybe three feet long, and we used to rob all those peoples and throw them off the “L.” We usually started around Tuesday night. We used to do it from Tuesday to Saturday – go out on peoples and take they stuff … Maybe we'd go out and bother somebody else, or go out to fight or something. We'd come back, get drinking, and get high again. That's all we did. It was a regular routine.Footnote 42
Warriors must learn to regard the enemy as fundamentally other. Read through the autobiographies of Two Leggings, Tukup,Footnote 43 Jungleman, and other tribal warriors, and you will find very little indeed that looks like empathy for those they had raided or killed or raped. Even though these tribal warriors are looking back at events many years in the past, the enemy remains the other. Here, for example, is the Crow warrior Two Leggings remembering the first man he killed: he shot a Piegan once in the shoulder, once in the chest, once in the stomach, and then, when he “was almost dead,” Two Leggings says,
I … played with him … He tried to dodge my next arrow but it went into his chest and came out of his lower back. Blood ran from his mouth and nose as he walked slowly towards his friends. I shot once more. He stumbled and fell and died a moment later.Footnote 44
Plenty-Coups was no psychopath. He remembers the story in this way for the same reason that he was able to kill the man in the first place: he had early learned to regard the Piegan as something other than fully human, as the other. Another Crow warrior, Plenty-Coups, shot a Sioux: “my arrow passed through his nose just above his mouth. Its blow whirled him half round, and he staggered backward, falling into the wash-out and looking as though he held my arrow between his teeth.”Footnote 45
OUT-OF-THE-LIFE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Homer's Nestor was unusual in that he was an old warrior. And this seems archetypal. Few warriors continue raiding and doing battle once they reach a certain age. Among the Meru of Mount Kenya, men lived in the warriors' barracks and went on raids only until they married.Footnote 46 And this, too, seems archetypal. Another way of putting this is that “age-grading” is common in warrior tribes and street gangs – indeed, age-grading has been called the single most characteristic feature of street gangs.Footnote 47 It is not surprising, then, that getting out of “the life” is so frequently a subject in street-gang autobiographies.
In fact, most street-gang autobiographies come to us from reformed gang members, from those who have age-graded out of gang life. Nicky Cruz,Footnote 48 Israel Narvaez,Footnote 49 Patrick Donadio, and Tom Skinner,Footnote 50 for example, all make it emphatically clear that they have turned their backs upon gang life. Like Paul on the way to Damascus, they have seen a great light. And like Paul, they want to tell about their lives in such a way as to demonstrate how great was the transformation wrought in them by Christ. Just as Paul wants us to know that he began as a persecutor of Christians, so Cruz, Narvaez, Donadio, and Skinner want us to know how heinous were their street-gang deeds. The greater the sins, the greater the miracle of redemption. They also intend that their harrowing stories will warn young people about the dangers of gang life.
These four books are specifically Christian conversion narratives, but other street-gang autobiographers describe similar conversions, without the Christianity. Perhaps “transformations” would be a better word. Rodriguez's Always Running is written in this way, as are Carl Joyeaux's Out of the Burning,Footnote 51 Tony Finazzo's Undertow,Footnote 52 Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land,Footnote 53 and Mona Ruiz's Two Badges.
Converted or transformed, out-of-the-life autobiographers are squarely in the Western tradition. Some out-of-the-life gangbangers do their own writing. Others have amanuenses – but all of their autobiographies follow the same pattern: exciting, down-and-dirty street-gang stories; a turning point; a transformation; and finally the reformed life. And almost always there is a Moment of Awful Realization. Claude Brown's Moment comes after he has reached legal age, the age at which his next conviction will put him in prison and give him a criminal record. And at this same time, he realizes that he has reached the age when fists and blades will no longer suffice: “I knew that the next time somebody stung me, I was going to have to kill him.”Footnote 54 And so he quits dealing drugs and enrolls in night school.
For Nicky Cruz the Moment comes when his closest friend is killed. Cruz thought himself inured to death; seventeen Mau Maus died in the year he was leader of the gang. But this death hits him hard. An enemy gang member knifes his friend, and Cruz sees him die:
His head rolled in my arms and I felt his chest collapse under his jacket … I had never seen death so close up – at least not face to face. He was my friend. One minute he was laughing and talking. The next he was lying on the street with blood bubbling out of his mouth … I had thought I was brave – unafraid of anything. But … I began to get sick at my stomach. Great waves of nausea swept over me and I gagged over and over.Footnote 55
A few pages later, he has his Christian conversion experience.
Joyeaux's Moment of Awful Realization comes when his friend Gent is nearly killed in a drive-by shooting. As Gent lies in the hospital, Joyeaux remembers that
Gent was in the Deacons mainly because he was my friend. He was the only boy in the club who did not drink, smoke, or hustle. He didn't even curse much … But it was he who had to get it in a gang war.Footnote 56
This passage is typical of gangbanger-transformation autobiographies in another way as well. The regret – the empathy – that Joyeaux feels is for a fellow gang member. Out-of-the-life autobiographies always express regret about lost comrades. Often they provide a catalogue of what has happened to the members of the old gang: so many dead, so many junkies, so many in prison, so many running from the law. Calvin Broadus, for example, looks at a photo of his Pop Warner football team: “From right to left, most of the brothers in that picture were either dead, on dope, or on death row. It was like a gallery of ghosts, their lives wasted.”Footnote 57
But while transformed autobiographers often express regret in this way about lost comrades – “wasted lives” is a favorite phrase – they very seldom express regret for, or empathy with, their victims. Geoffrey Canada and Mona Ruiz are strikingly perceptive exceptions,Footnote 58 but usually empathy, regret, is for homies. Victims were, and remain in the telling, the other. Joyeaux, for example, laments that he was one of just two Deacons to graduate from high school; he was one of just three of the “ten thousand boys who have passed through Warwick” reform school to graduate from college.Footnote 59 Joyeaux did manage to convince some of the Deacons into “jumping smooth.” But this
did not mean that everybody got religion and swore off … pot, broads, hustling and cursing. I would not say that none of us ever heisted anything, rolled a drunk, or slashed a joker in a private fight … To tell the truth, I plead guilty to a little backsliding myself that summer of 1950. I needed bread to live it up a little after [reform school]. But a recession had made summer jobs scarce.Footnote 60
One guesses that Joyeaux's impoverished neighbors did not remember his little lapses in the same humorous light. By the time Joyeaux told these stories to Darle Milne, he was at work on a master's degree.Footnote 61 But even now, even after his transformation, those he hustled, robbed, and “slashed” remain the other. We remember Two Leggings and Plenty Coups, who were telling about the Piegan and the Sioux they had killed decades after their last raid. Gangbangers and tribal warriors speak of their raids and wars in the same objective, affectless way – warrior cool – and they do so for the same reasons.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES IN THE DMZ
Some gangbanger autobiographies inhabit a kind of moral/psychological demilitarized zone (DMZ). Autobiographers in the DMZ insist that they have left gangbanging behind, and they insist that they want to tell their stories in order to call our attention to grave social ills and to instruct the young, that the young might avoid the gangs. Broadus, for example, insists that God has a “mission” for him, “To increase the peace.”Footnote 62 But as DMZ autobiographers tell their stories, we find ourselves convinced that, while they have age-graded out of the fighting, while they might be unlikely ever again to stick a gun in the face of the girl at the cash register of a Korean grocery store, they remain proud of their hard-won reputations.
Simpson's Inside the Crips, for example, ends with the hope that “this book will educate people so we work together to stop gangs.”Footnote 63 But Simpson tells his coup tales so proudly that Assistant District Attorney Stephen Gallon subpoenaed the book and Colton's editor, Ann Pearlman, as part of his successful case against Simpson for participation in a (post-transformation) jewelry store robbery.Footnote 64 In one passage, for example, Simpson mocks a man he had shot and crippled in the course of a robbery: “I couldn't believe it,” said Gallon, “It ticked me off.”Footnote 65 The same contradictions are obvious in Shakur's Monster.Footnote 66 Broadus, for another example, ends his autobiography by urging the youth of America to forswear gangbanging – and then he urges the youth of America to go out and buy his latest CD, Top Dogg, a CD that includes such lines as these: “Make ‘em bleed is the motto that I live by,/If you fuck with me it's a must you die.”
As Eithne Quinn has pointed out, “Rappers routinely send out mixed messages … shifting from a posture of antiviolence to depictions of a badman on a murderous warpath.”Footnote 67 But Broadus's contradictions run deeper than concern for CD sales figures. Broadus has age-graded out of the life, but that gangsta reputation – the respect he won as a gangbanger – seems to be as important to him personally as it is financially.
Concern for respect pervades the street-gang autobiographies, because the kind of honor that is central to the stories warriors tell is quintessentially public. Among the ancient Greeks, it was the obligation of every man to afford every other man his just measure of kleos, of honor. It was for these people, writes the historian Werner Jaeger, “the greatest of human tragedies” to be denied this. Jaeger continues, “The sources of honour and dishonour are praise and blame.”Footnote 68 Jaeger could as well have been writing about Plains Indian warriors, nineteenth-century Montenegrin blood-feuders – or the South Side of Chicago. It could be said for all of these peoples, as it has been said of the Samburu of East Africa: there was no distinction between “honor” and “respect.”Footnote 69 Elijah Anderson's account of the street code is a virtual paraphrase of Jaeger:
At the heart of the code is the issue of respect – loosely defined as being treated “right,” or granted the deference one deserves … In the street culture, especially among young people, respect is viewed as an almost external entity that is hard-won but easily lost, and so must be constantly guarded.Footnote 70
Simpson's autobiography provides a perfect illustration. Late in the book Simpson is yearning for his release from Tehachapi Prison, trying hard to stay out of trouble. But one day, a Blood inmate calls him a “buster.” Simpson struggles to control himself:
I have only four more years left before I make parole.
I'm off the bench and steaming toward him. “Brotha, I don't know you. I don't want no problems, but disrespect will not be tolerated.”
“What? Fuck you, crab.”
Crab is the most disrespectful epitaph that you can call a Crip. In one motion, I pull [a shiv] from my sleeve and stab him in the face, knocking him unconscious.Footnote 71
And so 180 days are added to his sentence. Even as he yearns for freedom, “disrespect will not be tolerated.” Honor/respect is, quite simply, the sine qua non of a tribal warrior culture – and so of tribal-warrior autobiography. Yearnings for respect suffuse most of the autobiographical narratives in Jah and Shah'Keyah's Uprising, for example. Every voice in the book speaks out for gang peace, and yet, and yet – here, for example, is Jimel Barnes: “I went out and found this guy named Tookie and built him up from a little small guy to be a gladiator like me.” Barnes tells us that once Tookie had put on sufficient muscle, the two of them were inseparable. Everywhere people were saying,
“Those are Crips, that's the way a Crip looks.” We would bully the police, move people out of the way. So kids saw us and they could identify with that … All you heard was, “Tookie and Jimel, two buff Crips. They look like gladiators.” Women would just go crazy … So rappers saw that, kids saw … how we wore our clothes, how we talked.Footnote 72
Barnes, then, is urgent that young people avoid gang life – but he is still insistent upon his place in Crip history and proud to claim credit for muscling up soon-to-be famous Tookie Williams. Can we doubt Barnes's nostalgia for his buff days, when he and Tookie, demanded respect, bullied the police, intimidated people – and the women just went crazy?
This ambivalence is most striking in Williams, because Williams's life depended upon convincing the world in general and Governor Schwarzenegger in particular that he was a changed man, that he had been transformed, that he was no longer a gangsta. And Williams expects his coup tales to win him the respect due to the cofounder of the Crips; indeed, he writes contemptuously in Redemption of Barnes's effrontery in claiming cofounder credit.Footnote 73 On the other hand, Williams devotes the second half of Redemption to his self-education, to conquering his drug addiction, to his efforts for gang peace. Like other street-gang autobiographers, Williams does mourn the “wasted lives” of his homies, but he still cannot bring himself to empathize with, or express remorse for, those he and his Crips had victimized. Williams has much to say about the injustices he and other gang members have suffered. He has learned, he says, not “to accept a one-sided version of justice … anything less than justice is an absolute injustice.”Footnote 74 But Williams has nothing at all to say about justice for those he remembers beating, intimidating, robbing, extorting. The victims in his coup tales remain – twenty years after the events – profoundly the other.
CONCLUSION, WITH A WORD TO TEACHERS
I am not arguing that the governor was right to deny clemency. My point is that the governor was responding to something that is deep in the fibers of street-gang autobiography. It is worrisome, then, that Redemption and other gangbanger autobiographies are so often recommended for middle- and high-school students. I think that we should be more skeptical about Williams's assumption that gangbanger stories will frighten children away from gang involvement by showing them the terrible reality of gang life. We must remember that in warrior tribes coup tales – tales of blood, victory, and courage; tales of wounds inflicted and received; accounts of dangers faced, respect won – inspired emulation, not aversion. Here is Two Leggings, remembering the effect upon him of just such stories as Williams tells:
As a boy I spent my evenings listening to the stories of our warriors … I wanted to be just as brave and honored … I thought that now I was poor and unknown, but soon people would be talking about me. And if I was not killed, some day I would become a chief with many honors.Footnote 75
And here is Shakur – Monster Kody – remembering Williams telling the same coup tales he tells in Redemption:
I remember going up to Tookie's house … to watch him lift weights and to hear the original Crip war stories … A lot of us used to go to his house to get firsthand knowledge of Cripism … Tookie was a Crip through and through … and he was a magnificent storyteller.Footnote 76
Williams's stories inspired Kody to become a Crip and taught him how to be a Crip.
Geoffrey Canada, who writes about growing up in the Bronx, and Mona Ruiz, who writes about her experiences in a Santa Ana girl gang, tell few coup tales. But they are more insightful and more likely to inspire young people to emulate the empathetic adults they became, rather than the violent adolescents they once were.
