THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602080632
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY
LENGTH: Long : 118 lines
ALL GOD'S CHILDREN
The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence
FOX BUTTERFIELD
Alfred A. Knopf. 389 pp. $27.50.
Willie James Bosket, nicknamed ``Dr. Hannibal Lecter'' by his keepers, sits in isolation in a specially designed cage at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility in New York's Catskill Mountains, four video cameras monitoring his every movement.
The men who guard him are forbidden to speak to him. On the rare occasions when someone comes to visit him, he is delivered to his guest cuffed, manacled and tied with an automobile tow chain - arms and legs splayed - to the iron bars of his cell door.
Prison officials consider Bosket ``the most violent criminal in New York state history.'' Bosket considers himself ``only a monster created by the system'' in which he has been incarcerated since the age of 9.
In his provocative book, All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence, New York Times correspondent Fox Butterfield takes a long, hard look at Bosket's life, the history of his family and the road that led to the solitary cage at Woodbourne. Against the backdrop of the current drive to inflict harsher punishment on America's increasingly violent children, it is a powerful, instructive and sobering saga.
Butterfield reaches back to the pre-Revolutionary white rural South to demonstrate vividly that violence is not a recent phenomenon in this country, nor was it invented by marginalized urban African Americans like Bosket. He exhaustively probes the history of Edgefield, S.C., the county where Willie Bosket's first known American ancestors were enslaved.
The statistics are telling, especially a study of judicial records between 1800 and 1860 showing that the murder rate in rural, agrarian South Carolina was four times higher than that of Massachusetts, then the most urban industrial state.
``The records also show,'' Butterfield writes, ``that the majority of the people put on trial for violent crimes in antebellum South Carolina were whites; the slaves were thought to be a gentle people.''
Edgefield had a murder rate double the state average. In what Butterfield speculates is ``probably an undercount,'' because a number of suspicious deaths were officially attributed to ``acts of God,'' the annual murder rate during the years between 1844 and 1858 averaged 18 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. According to FBI reports, only one state has ever come close to such a figure since - Louisiana, which, in 1992, recorded a rate of 17.4 murders per 100,000.
The fact that nearly everyone was armed, combined with a southern ``code of honor,'' reminiscent of today's street code of respect, was responsible for much of this mayhem, according to Butterfield's research. ``The constant fighting, looting and killing,'' he writes, ``left many people with a numbed, often casual attitude toward violence.
In such an atmosphere, most planters did not think twice about brutalizing their slaves, a dozen of whom were whipped to death without legal consequence between 1844 and 1858. In contrast, notes Butterfield, slave crime was treated ``quite seriously'' and slaves were executed ``at a high and consistent rate.''
Freedom made things worse. Freed slaves became scapegoats to assuage wounded southern pride as well as victims in the guerrilla war to re-establish white supremacy and bring back free labor.
Willie Bosket's great-great-grandfather, a meek and careful church deacon and sharecropper named Aaron Bosket, married a former slave who had been the mistress of a prosperous white farmer. Their firstborn son, Pud, did not take after his father. He fought back.
At 21, Pud Bosket ended his sharecropping career by grabbing a whip from a white farmer and pulling him off his wagon. After that, he ran moonshine, served time on chain gangs for burglary, theft and assault and - before dying in a car accident - made a name for himself as ``the baddest man'' in his county.
The violence that marked Pud Bosket's life, writes Butterfield, ``grew out of the old white southern code of honor, an extreme sensitivity to insult and the opinion of others. But where antebellum whites believed they were above the law, blacks at the turn of the century realized they were outside the law. The law was in the hands of the white man . . . and consequently, violence was the only alternative for resolving quarrels.''
This notion is at the heart of Butterfield's theory and his book's theme. It is a theory borne out well by the stories of Pud's son, James, his grandson, Butch, and his great-grandson, Willie. But like most theories, it is only part of the picture.
Also a part of the picture is a failed justice system and an ongoing legacy of racism, poverty and indifference to children of the poor. Their fathers often are gone or imprisoned or dead and their mothers are so overwhelmed by the brutality of their lives that they brutalize and abandon their children.
In New York, in 1950, Willie Bosket's grandmother gave a quarter to her 8-year-old son, Butch, put him on the subway, and told him never to come back.
``He rode the subway for several days until he was found by the police asleep in the subway car,'' Butterfield writes. He told them his mother had said, `Never darken this door again.' ''
Butch Bosket grew up to kill two men in a Milwaukee pawnshop, then became the first U.S. prison inmate to earn a Ph.D while incarcerated. He was released, re-arrested and killed by police during an escape attempt.
At 9, Butch's son, Willie, was sent to the same reform school that once housed his father. Also like his father, he committed two murders while still in his teens. His sentence of only five years prompted the state of New York to pass ``the Willie Bosket law,'' enabling children as young as 13 to be tried for murder as adults.
Willie Bosket is now 33. His behavior in prison has, at last count, earned him another 55 years in his isolation cage. The electrical outlets in the cage were removed after he began swallowing light bulbs. Its bars were sheathed in plexiglass when he started throwing excrement at the guards.
Author James Baldwin told an audience at a benefit for the reform school attended by the Boskets: ``These are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.''
His words are quoted at the beginning of Butterfield's book. MEMO: Laura LaFay is a staff writer. by CNB