by Colin Asher
So, when Hogan found himself inside Rahway Prison, he asked to meet with Carter. At first, they just got to know each other, but eventually, they began discussing Carter’s case and the evidence that had been used against him. Carter and Artis both maintained their innocence, and soon Hogan was convinced they were telling the truth and began investigating the case on his own time.
That investigation was the reason Nelson visited Newark. Esquire magazine had offered him $1,250 to write a profile of Carter, and said they wanted something Algrenesque—maybe a psychological portrait of a boxer turned killer. Nelson knew little about Carter’s trial and was excited to write the piece Esquire had commissioned—but then he met Fred Hogan.
By the time Nelson reached New Jersey in 1973, Hogan was spending all of his free time immersed in the minutiae of Carter’s case. He had been sifting through the evidence used during the trial, and had recently heard rumors that both of the men who testified against Carter—Bello and Bradley—later told acquaintances that they lied on the stand. Hogan was sure, he told Nelson, that he could get them to admit that they had perjured themselves because the statute of limitations for that crime had passed. He just needed to find them.
Nelson was intrigued, and before he returned to Chicago, he visited Carter at a hospital in Newark. Carter had just had an operation on his right eye, so he was lying in bed and wearing a robe when Nelson arrived, but he looked dignified nonetheless. He had recently completed a memoir called The Sixteenth Round that was due to be released the following year, and he seemed like a warrior-scholar to Nelson—intense, brooding, concise in his speech, and self-assured.
Nelson closed the door to Carter’s room after he entered, without thinking, and a guard soon appeared and opened it.
“Sorry, Rubin,” the guard said, “the door has to stay open.”
Carter stood up and walked toward the guard, and when he was close enough to reach out and touch him, he said, “We’re on the fourth floor, man. Do you think I can fly out of here?” Then he closed the door.
The guard was silent, and Carter turned toward Nelson. “I’ve had this trouble before,” he said. “What they do now is phone the Bureau of Institutions and Agencies to find out what they’re supposed to do. Don’t worry. The door will stay closed. What can they do?”
Then he answered his own question. “They can kill me, that’s all.”
Nelson left New Jersey with a copy of Carter and Artis’s trial transcript, and his own nascent doubts about Carter’s guilt. He didn’t think Carter was the sort of person who would throw his life away for the thrill of killing strangers in a bar, and by the time he finished reading the trial transcripts, he was convinced that Carter had been framed.
Nelson returned to New Jersey in March 1974, to interview Carter a second time. This time, they met in the visiting area of Rahway State Prison, and Carter looked even more dignified. He was wearing frameless eyeglasses, and though everyone else was wearing state-issued uniforms, he was dressed in civilian clothes.
“I don’t wear prison dress,” Carter told Nelson. “Why should I? I’m not supposed to be here.” When they tried to put me on a work detail, Carter said, I turned it down flat. “I love work,” he said. “But for 80 cents a day? Not on your life.”
Nelson left Rahway Prison that day more impressed by Carter than he had been after their first meeting. He’s “the sanest man I’ve ever met,” he wrote to a friend soon afterward. He refuses to allow himself to be dehumanized by the prison, but he doesn’t openly challenge authority or cause trouble, so the “guards just let him alone. He sleeps during the day and does his own work at night. He doesn’t fuck with anybody, black or white, in the joint, and they’re content to stay out of his way. If he doesn’t like somebody’s approach he tells him to fuck off, that’s all.”
Nelson spent the remainder of that spring writing about Carter. Esquire had commissioned him to write something lyrical and character-driven, but instead, he composed a straightforward piece of journalism that drew heavily on trial transcripts and interview material. He laid out the facts and tried to make the case that Carter and Artis deserved a new trial.
Nelson submitted his article sometime that summer, and Esquire rejected it soon afterward. Jim Ryan, the editor who commissioned the story, was impressed by the effort Nelson put into it, but didn’t want to print it. “It wasn’t Nelson Algren at all,” he said later. “It was a reporter reporting all kinds of goddamn facts that hadn’t been properly presented before, but for our purposes it wasn’t a story.”
Ryan asked Nelson to start over from scratch, but Nelson declined. I’ll do it if you pay me twice, he said. And when Ryan refused, Nelson said, “Well, to hell with you then.”
Esquire’s rejection didn’t faze Nelson. He sent his story to The New Yorker next, and when they rejected it, he began to think of Carter’s case as a long-term project. By then, Fred Hogan had found Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley and convinced them to sign statements confirming that they had perjured themselves on the stand during Carter’s trial because they had been pressured by the Paterson police. The New York Times had just reported on the recantations, and it seemed inevitable that Carter and Artis would receive a new trial. If they did, it would be a sensation and Nelson would be in an ideal position to write about it.
Nelson spent the fall as an instructor at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, and then he traveled to Paterson by train, checked into a downtown hotel, and began searching for an apartment. A few days later, he found one on the first floor of 38 Quinn Street and moved in with nothing but a suitcase, his typewriter, and the research he had been collecting on Carter’s case. He spent Christmas on the Jersey Shore with Fred Hogan, and by January, he had decided to move east permanently. He was hoping to earn enough writing about Carter and Artis to finance his retirement, but he had kept that ambition to himself—maybe because it was such a far-fetched plan.
Nelson told Steve Deutch that he was moving to Paterson in February, but did so casually. He said that he would return home soon to wrap up his affairs and clear out his apartment, but that he didn’t intend to stay. Leaving Chicago—the city he had been raised in, lived in for decades, loving and hating it in equal measure the entire time, and helped define through his writing—was a monumental decision, but Nelson acted as if it was of no consequence. He said that Chicago hadn’t had any use for him in years, and joked that his impending move made perfect sense. “I don’t know why you, or anyone, should be surprised at my moving to Paterson,” he wrote. “I’ve been telling you, for at least a decade, that I planned to move to San Francisco, and Paterson is directly on the way.”
Nelson had been complaining about Chicago publicly for a very long time by 1975. He had been referring to the city as a “great gray sub-civilization” for more than a decade, and accusing it of being shallow and conformist for far longer. The year The Last Carousel was released, he even told a reporter, “I don’t see Chicago ever becoming a city that is fun to live in. That’s out of the question. It’s a money city, a city to make money in, it’s not an Athenian city, it’s a Spartan city, which is why almost everybody leaves here, you know, if they’re interested in writing or the theater.”
But even so, no one had seriously considered the possibility that Nelson would ever leave, and when he announced that he was moving to Paterson, New Jersey, the response was overwhelming. The day after the news broke, the Tribune ran an article entitled “GOLDEN ARM” AMBIENCE GONE, AUTHOR GOES, TOO. The Daily News followed five days later with a story headlined ALGREN HITS THE OPEN ROAD and a quote of Nelson saying, “There’s nothing left for me in Chicago. I’m not involved with anything here. Chicago is gone.” The Tribune ran a second story about Nelson’s departure the same week, its gossip columnist reported that he had been spotted eating lunch at the Corona Café, and then it ran a third story. Not to be outdone, the Chicago Sun-Times published a column calling Nelson’s departure “tragic.”
Then Nelson ann
ounced he would be auctioning off the contents of his apartment, and the city’s papers spent days chasing each other to report on the sale. Before Nelson escaped, Chicago’s readers had been subjected to thirteen articles about his decision to leave—and heard about it on the radio and seen it reported on TV.
When Nelson’s auction began at noon on March 8, 1975, there was a crowd of people waiting outside 1958 West Evergreen Street. They were each holding a number that guaranteed them admission to his apartment, and when the front door opened, twenty people climbed the unlit stairs that led to the third-floor flat. For the remainder of the day, the apartment remained full.
Nelson had shipped seventy-five boxes of books, collages, and pictures to Paterson, but he was hoping to sell everything else—and very nearly did. Writers, admirers, academics, gadflies, and reporters all visited the auction, and every one of them seemed to walk away with something. A Sun-Times reporter bought an old card table—with a rip in its felt—that Nelson had once used as a writing desk. A political consultant bought an unwashed frying pan for fifty cents. Nelson’s friend Louis Szathmary bought the cookbook manuscript Nelson wrote for the WPA Writers’ Project back in 1937—and someone unscrewed a hook from the inside of the bathroom door and pocketed it.
On the second day, Nelson sold his refrigerator and was forced to clean it out. There was butter inside, and frozen sausages, and he carried them downstairs and knocked on his neighbor’s door.
“Hi, it’s me,” he said when she answered. He tried to place the food in her hands, but they didn’t know each other well and she didn’t speak English, so she backed away. “No, no,” he said. “It’s okay, it’s fresh. You see, I just sold my fridge and—” The woman accepted the food then, and closed the door.
Nelson climbed the stairs and grabbed half a loaf of bread and some meatloaf from the kitchen and carried them to the back porch so that no one would buy them. He might get hungry later, and there was nothing else to eat. There was a reporter following him, and when they got outside, Nelson turned to him and said, “This is all worthwhile. For the first time in my life—now that I’m leaving—Chicago is finally saying some nice things about me. You know, the kind of praise I wouldn’t be getting unless I had just died.”
Part V
EXILE
You know, Hemingway said that the main point is to last. And I guess I’m still here.
—Nelson Algren, March 1981
Paterson, New Jersey
(March 14, 1975–July 1977)
Nelson and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter discussing Carter’s conviction and pending legal appeal inside the Trenton State Prison library in 1975. Photo by Linda Kay
Nelson embraced Paterson after his move, and at first, he felt the city was charming and quaint. His neighbors hung their laundry on clotheslines in their yards, and his block was clean and quiet. There was a little park near his house, and a bakery whose owner greeted him warmly each morning, and one day he checked his mailbox and discovered a book written by a local poet named Louis Ginsberg—Allen Ginsberg’s father—that had been signed and delivered by its author.
The New York Times called Nelson for an interview that same week, and found him at ease in his new home. He hadn’t even unpacked yet, but he was already thinking about retiring in Paterson. It’s a “pleasant little country town,” he said. “I have no plans beyond this. I like the climate. . . . I like the water tank on the hill. I’ll just stay here and review books.”
By then, Nelson’s project had expanded. He had already written several hundred pages about Carter and his trial and knew he wanted to turn them into a series of articles, but he didn’t know how many yet, or how long they would take to write. Work “proceeds slowly,” he told a friend. “Mostly a matter of chasing down facts.” Luckily, time was on his side. Carter and Artis had appealed their convictions after Bello and Bradley recanted their confessions, but their appeals had been denied. Their case was heading for the state supreme court, but it would be months before it was heard.
The Carter story dominated Nelson’s life that spring and summer. He invested hundreds of hours in sorting through his research materials and trying to shape the police reports and courtroom testimony he had gathered into a narrative. He also interviewed witnesses and visited locations important to the case. Once, he went to the Lafayette Bar and Grill and tried to talk his way into a second-floor apartment—one of the witnesses at the trial had been living there on the night of the shootings, and Nelson wanted to see the street from her perspective—but the building’s owner wouldn’t allow him inside.
Over the course of his first months in Paterson, Nelson made himself more knowledgeable about Carter’s life and legal case than anyone except Carter, Fred Hogan, and Carter’s lawyers, and in that process, his understanding of the events surrounding the murders at the Lafayette Bar and Grill evolved. As his investigation progressed, he became more certain that Carter and Artis had been railroaded, but also more convinced their case could only be understood in the context of Paterson’s history.
Paterson had once been an industrial hub—the country’s first manufacturing capital. Industry thrived along the banks of the Passaic River for more than a century, and the city’s factories and mills made silk, guns, beer, and aircraft engines—but after World War II, manufacturers moved to larger cities with busier ports, and Paterson began to decline.
Black southerners began arriving in Paterson around the same time as part of the Great Migration, and the city’s white residents—Italians, mainly, whose forebears had been discriminated against when they immigrated decades earlier—responded by fleeing to the suburbs, or holding fast and growing paranoid and angry. The city’s new black residents felt embattled as well, but with good reason. By the 1960s, they constituted almost one-fifth of the population, but weren’t represented anywhere in government—not on the police force, not in City Hall, and not in the management of the remaining factories.
Inevitably, there was conflict. Urban uprisings and riots swept through the country in 1964, and over the course of a few months, people fought against police and National Guard troops in the streets of Harlem, Philadelphia, Chicago, Jersey City, and Rochester, New York—and then Paterson. That August, black residents smashed windows and threw Molotov cocktails, and in return, the police fired live rounds and tear gas. The riots dragged on for two days and didn’t stop until Frank X. Graves—the city’s mayor—appeared downtown in a police helmet, grabbed a radio, and announced that officers were free to “meet any violence with total force.”
The fighting ended soon afterward, but white flight intensified in the months following. People abandoned their homes or sold them at discount, and the city never recovered.
Nelson could still feel the tension created that summer, and he soon realized that, beneath its quaint veneer, Paterson was seething with rage and riven along racial lines. Even for someone from Chicago, the level of vitriol and distrust he sensed was shocking. He never saw any black faces in his neighborhood or in the Italian restaurants he frequented, and when he hired a black man to install a phone line in his apartment, his landlady objected and barred the man from entering the building’s basement to complete his task.
By summer, Nelson had begun calling Paterson an apartheid city and thinking of Rubin Carter’s conviction as part of a larger story. Carter’s case was so controversial, he realized, because it distilled the city’s racial anxieties. Carter was an archetypal angry black man, and the Lafayette Bar and Grill was a redoubt of racial privilege—the neighborhood surrounding it had recently become majority black when the murders took place, but its bartender only served white patrons. Worse yet, Carter was defiant, so a reversal of his conviction would be understood as a challenge to the authority of the police department that had arrested him, the court that convicted him, and the newspapers that had denounced him.
People were scared of Carter even though he was in prison, and because Nelson was involved with Carter’s case, they were worried
about him as well. Fred Hogan thought Nelson’s life was in danger while he was in Paterson, and he called every day to check on him.
One morning in September, a precocious young journalist named Linda Kay met Nelson at his apartment so they could visit Rubin Carter in Trenton State Prison.
Nelson welcomed Kay inside, led her into his kitchen, offered her a glass of water, and then dumped a dozen rolls onto a table and said, “Let’s eat.” She picked one up to be polite, though she wasn’t hungry, and watched Nelson. He ate hurriedly, while standing, and tore at his rolls and chewed them with his mouth open. He barely looked at her during his meal, and didn’t speak.
Nelson finished eating after a few minutes, and then he and Kay got into her car and began driving. The trip took about an hour, and Nelson was silent the entire time.
Kay had known Nelson for five months by then, and had never seen him act so oddly. She had first knocked on his door four days after he moved into the apartment on Quinn Street. She asked him for an interview that day, and he politely declined, but a few weeks later, he called her desk at the Paterson News and said he was ready to talk. He told her that he had read some of her articles and been impressed, and they had been in touch ever since. She wrote a story about his move to Paterson, and afterward he introduced her to Fred Hogan and convinced Rubin Carter to grant her an interview.
Nelson and Kay were separated when they reached the prison, and they were searched in different rooms. When they met afterward, Nelson was even more agitated. He still wasn’t speaking, and there was a pained expression on his face. Later, he told Kay he couldn’t tolerate confinement, and that even the thought of it terrified him.
