"Tom Wicker Signifying" is a review of A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt by Tom Wicker that was printed in the New York Times Book Review on March 9, 1975. It also features a collage by John Collier.
Summary[]
Nelson Rockefeller, 1975
Wicker recounts his four days as an observer of the Attica State Prison uprising in September 1971 at the invitation of the convicts. Viewing himself as "a variously flawed and capable stranger", Wicker pushed then-Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to show patience with the situation before the assault by State Police which resulted in the deaths of 10 hostages and 29 inmates. The book is part objective account, part autobiography and "a demonstration of how difficult it is for a careful and experienced journalist to write angrily". Known to readers of the New York Times as a trusted, intelligent, and honorable journalist, Wicker presents himself in the book as a man on the verge of a divorce who recently quit smoking and is puzzled by his eminence as a journalist, wishing instead to, in his own words, "signify as a writer". Vonnegut notes the "intransitive use of 'signify'" by the southern Wicker, who has already been the author of seven novels.
Thus this factual account is given the set up of a fictional tale, with Wicker as a middle-aged journalist wishing to be a respected writer, sent for the first time into a violent situation for a news story. Wicker as a character unites all the seemingly disjointed elements in the book, recounting his discharge from the Navy in 1946, taking a train car filled with mostly black soldiers, then suddenly shifting to the arrival of Bobby Seale to address the inmates and being instructed not to inflame them. The "primitive energy" of the Attica account are the best parts of the book, despite Wicker's desire to "signify" as a writer, providing an inside account of what led to the final attack on "virtually unarmed prisoners... who were mainly urban Puerto Ricans and blacks".
Although they are useful, the book would work just as well without the novelistic aspects which largely remind the reader about the pervasive racism in the United States. Novels, however, set up the reader to expect people to change from spectacular events that happen to them, but Wicker does not, merely leaving not angry but tired, calculating if he can meet his publication deadline. This unnovelistic conclusion, which Vonnegut prefers, is offset by the final sentence that "there would have to be a time for anger", but the book itself is more heartbroken by the "cruelty and stupidity and cowardice and self-righteousness" that it relates. Its ultimate conclusion that the society must negotiate with its unluckiest members when they use collective violence since they themselves are "victims of perpetual violence" who are only heard when they become dangerous. But even Governor Rockefeller is made to look simply like a "public servant with an average mind" and it is "American mediocrity and racism and gun-craziness" which is condemned.[1]
See Also[]
- Hocus Pocus, which is centered around a prison uprising
- "Stars and Bit Players", which also makes reference to the Attica Uprising and Governor Rockefeller's response
- ↑ "Tom Wicker Signifying", New York Times Book Review, March 9, 1975, pp. 2-3.