Printed in the United States of America
By The Cornwall Press
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This book is dedicated to Fremont Older, to Judge Frank H. Dunne, to the unnamed friend who sawed me out of the San Francisco jail and to that dirty, drunken, disreputable, crippled beggar, “Sticks” Sullivan, who picked the buckshot out of my back—under the bridge—at Baraboo, Wisconsin.
The Author.
FOREWORD
The revelations of a thief or of a prostitute are rightfully suspected by the normal citizen of having been dressed for publicity, either sensational or sentimental or both. An unstable emotionalism in the subject, perhaps psychopathic, induces a melodramatic and unreal treatment of past experience. The tale is told not as it happened but rather as the subject likes, in reverie, to think it happened or as he believes the reader would like to have had it happen. There is nothing of that sort in Jack Black’s story of his life as a professional thief. The honesty of the “confession” is self-evident. With a few lapses into the conventional, the expected, he displays the rare literary power of letting the facts speak for themselves, without any window-dressing, either lachrymose or hilarious. He has an instinct for realities.
Indeed it is that mental grip, enabling him to perceive and apply realities, that obviously brought him out in the end so that he could break the shackles of his criminal habits and reinstate himself completely in accord with society. It was almost purely a mental feat. At the end, to be sure, he dwells upon the helpfulness of kind friends, especially of Mr. Older, of the “square deal” he got from Judge Dunne, and recognizes fully the impulse of gratitude to a friend who helped him escape from prison by “cutting out the hop”—the hardest single bond he had to break. Those were emotional responses. But if it had not been for his own good mind which he had slowly disciplined by reason, that resolve “to go straight” would have been but another feeble human aspiration for amendment with which the human hell is paved. The chief interest I find in Black’s rapid survey of his life as a thief is this progress of mental awakening and a corresponding growth of character as a man, without which all the help of kind and enlightened friends would have availed naught. It is what Black did for himself, what he was, that counted most.
Jack Black was an experimental psychologist: he discovered slowly and painfully, as most do, the psychological character of himself and of the world in which he was placed. Thus he explored the law of habit and the purely mental quality of self-control long before he attempted to apply his knowledge to his own case. Any habit, he maintains, apropos of the opium habit, can be broken provided the victim wants sufficiently to change, and he notes the power of substitution, welcoming even his worries as distractions, mentally, from the obsession of opium. His emphasis on the necessity of a subjective desire for change is an unerring diagnosis of self. He wanted another kind of life enough to make it come true. That is the great distinction of Jack Black as professional lawbreaker and person.
His case is so common in our restless, mobile civilization that it may be called typical or standard. An active, intelligent, likable boy with no stable ties, he adventured on the open road, almost by accident, the wide world tempting him on, took what he wanted, learned the habits and the resources of vagrancy, of criminality, of vice. But he did not sink to the dregs per formula. He went to the top of his society. Stirred by emulation with the only companions he had—hoboes, thieves, gamblers, yeggs—he distinguished himself not only by success in individual exploits but by a superiority of character that would not break, “snitch,” or play the other fellow’s game—and by loyalty to his mates.
Then came as he was emerging from youth the chance that landed him in a well-run Canadian prison and fertilized the seed of intellectual interest by giving him access to a good library. For the first time he discovered consciously his own mind—the interest of it—and from this period it is evident that the habit of reading, of thinking, gained on him until with relentless logic his mind, thus freed and fed, convinced him that his boy’s life of defiance and lawlessness was wrong. After he was convinced, it took years to free himself from all the implications of twenty years of crime. But once convinced, with a mind of that quality, the result was inevitable. Strange irony that the mental life so essential to Black’s salvation should have been further fostered by the gift of a library which Abe Ruef gave to the prison where he and Black happened to be fellow prisoners. Ruef had taken the money which he bestowed in this form on his fellow criminals from the public of San Francisco. Mr. Fremont Older, as a powerful newspaper editor, was largely responsible for putting Ruef into the prison (and later in freeing him!) where Ruef was indirectly an instrument in freeing Jack Black from his bonds.