For the prisoners' fund
I am making this contribution in memory of my older
brother, Pierre. He died last month at the age of 39. It was
a second burst aortic aneurysm.
Very much a proletarian, Pierre worked as a miner, a logger, and a fisher. For the past 10 years, he was a blue- collar worker for the Parks Department of the town we grew up in, Richmond. It's a suburb of Vancouver.
Growing up, Pierre fell in love with New York City. The Sharks and the Jets. The Rockettes. "Kilroy was here." He had to get there one day.
So, when he was 14 years old, he ran away from home. (He had smashed up dad's car.) In the rail yards of North Vancouver, he got into the first boxcar he could. But the door was shut behind him. It was opened three days later, and he hadn't even made it to the Rockies. From then on he traveled at the end of grain cars, or used the keys from windshields to sit in trucks and autos. Moving across the Prairies, all he had was a duffel-bag full of bubble gum. Some Natives he met in Manitoba thought that was pretty funny and shared their red wine and macaroni.
Eventually, he made it to Detroit. But the border guards wouldn't let him cross, said he was a vagrant. So he hitchhiked to Buffalo. There, he told them he was from New York and they let him cross.
For the next eight months, he had the time of his life. He got to stay in a boys' home in Brooklyn called Jennings Hall. He wrote home and told us how there were 400 other boys - mostly Black, some Latinos, and a few Irish. Mom figured they must have took him for a Puerto Rican because he had fairly dark skin considering his Quebecois-Ukrainian ancestry.
With his food, clothing, and shelter taken care of, Pierre was free to roam the boroughs - Queens, Bronx, Manhattan. Coney Island and Long Island too.
But the city was going bankrupt and decided to cut back social services. When they found that Pierre wasn't supposed to be there, he was immediately deported. Our parents got a letter saying, "... your son is an illegal alien..." I remember, I was 10 years old, reading that and thinking, "Oh no, if my brother is an alien, what does that make me?"
It seems that from hanging around with the boys of New York, their hero became his hero. Because Pierre adored Malcolm X. His favorite story was how Malcolm avoided the draft. (By telling the recruiting officer, "I can't wait to get a hold of a rifle so I can shoot me up some crackers.")
Over the years, on his birthday or at Christmas, I gave Pierre some Pathfinder books; Malcolm X Speaks, By Any Means Necessary, and The Final Speeches: February 1965. He read them all, several times each, and then passed them on to friends and co-workers. So he knew that the Militant provided a forum for Malcolm X. He also knew about the mural on the Pathfinder Press building. I have the posters of the mural and the close-up of Malcolm X in big, fancy picture frames that Pierre gave me to put them in. In fact, one of the last times we talked, he had called to let me know that Spike Lee's movie, Malcolm X, was on TV in case I wanted to see it, again.
Like Malcolm, Pierre too, for a time, was cubically contained. At 17 years old, he took off from home, again. (He smashed up dad's car, again.) He ended up in Northern Ontario, freezing and starving. So he broke into a railway shack and got caught. He couldn't pay the fine, so he had to do the time. Years later, I gave him a T-shirt that he liked so much, he wore it all the time. It said, "Alcatraz triathlon: 100 yard dig, 3/4 mile run, 1.3 mile swim."
Pierre was a worker who loved New York City and Malcolm X. He hated prisons and cops. That's why I think he would have liked more prisoners to read the Militant newspaper and Pathfinder books.
For a world without prisons!
Robert Demorest
Vancouver, British Columbia
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