Word: sy
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...might never have happened. She would have opened her front door to her boyfriend, Sylvester Jackson, then 17, and she would have either snuggled up or scolded him for being exuberantly drunk on Thunderbird wine. As it turned out, Mary Etta was not at home that night, and big Sy Jackson, looped and annoyed, kicked in her door. That brought the police, who, says Sy, proceeded to beat up on him in the patrol car. One cop threw a punch, Sy ducked, the cop hit his partner, Sy ran. When Sy was caught, he was beaten up some more...
...Sy Jackson sits hunched over at the tail end of his narrow cot. At 5 ft. 11 in. and slightly more than 200 lbs., he ought easily to fill his cell, but he seems to have willed a diminished appearance in order to stay in proportion with his furnishings. Most of these hang on the walls: a chain of beads, a pair of sunglasses, snapshots of his three children. He has copied William Ernest Henley's poem "Invictus" by hand and mounted it with cellophane tape. There is a picture postcard of a sailboat at sunset below what Sy...
...most part Sy believes you create what you will, but he also believes one creates what others will for him. The stony face he wears now-the wary eyes resting on the bulging cheek bones, the rare smile that never shows wide enough for warmth-it was not always his look. In Elmira, he says, "I learned how to be hard and cold. I was neither before. I used to dislike fighting so much that if I ever did get into a fight with a kid, I couldn't even hit him in the face. That...
There is no doubt of it. Even today you see the indignation rising in him as he recalls the cigarette borrower. He talks with his hands; a swallow would be lost in them. Transferred to Comstock after the Elmira incident, Sy was involved in another fight for which he says he was given 45 days in the "strip cell" (one meal every third day, no clothes but shorts and a T shirt, sleep on the floor). Eventually he stopped fighting, but served five years anyway, developing a new opinion of himself. "I didn't like what I was becoming...
With all the changes that have occurred in him since then, Sy does not say that prison made him what he is; only that it helped. After completing the first five-year term, he took a job in Rochester working for a company that makes tanks for chemicals. He fell in love, got married, had three children. Between them, he and his wife were making close to $16,000 a year; quite enough at the time...