An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  Speechless, I stepped back and sat down. This was beyond my capacity to handle. The yelling kept up, and I tried to count the number of voices. If I had been less flipped out I would have tried to talk to someone, but I couldn’t stand up. I don’t know how long this went on, but eventually the door popped open and there were COs on the tier. One of them started yelling, “Shut up, everyone shut up, or you won’t get your shit!” Slowly the roar was reduced to a din and I stood at the bars. There were two women COs pushing a med cart, stopping at each cell, They were handing little plastic cups to the women, all of whom were now docilely standing at their bars.

  They stopped short of my cell, but didn’t even look my way. I yelled, “I want my phone call!” No response. They just wheeled their cart off the floor. It got quiet. I realized then that I was on the psychiatric ward. I started to cry.

  When the cops came back, I was ready. They were there to do “feeding.” A different set of COs was putting plastic trays on the shelf outside each cell. I stood facing them. “I demand my phone call. I am not supposed to be on this unit. Why am I on the psych unit? I demand to see the captain.” Again, they would not acknowledge me. “I am a political prisoner, and I want to see someone in authority. This isn’t Russia; we don’t put political prisoners in psychiatric units. Where are my codefendants?” Now I was raging. The cops thought this was funny, but they refused to speak. I knew they had been instructed not to talk to me. I told them, “I’m not eating until someone comes and speaks to me. Not until that or I get my phone call. You want to be responsible for that?”

  How many hours later the captain finally appeared, I don’t know. By then I was disoriented and beyond angry. The captain, again with multiple lieutenants, chained me up and escorted me down the tier and out into the hall. A pay phone that I had not noticed on the way in stood glistening, like a mirage. Flooded with relief, I asked, “What time is it?”

  The captain scowled. “It’s eleven thirty. Hurry up—it’s shift change.”

  I called a number I knew by heart and got hold of Susie Waysdorf, a paralegal who had moved to Washington, D.C., to work on the Lexington HSU lawsuit. She was also an old friend. “Hello,” I whispered not wanting the captain to hear me.

  “Susan?” my friend said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m on some psych unit in the D.C. jail. Please get me out of here. I got here with Linda, but she’s somewhere else.”

  “We’ve been trying to find you all day.” Susie sounded upset. “The jail refused to tell us if you’d arrived or where you were. The BOP wouldn’t tell us, either.”

  I realized then that Linda hadn’t been able to make a call, either. “Please get me out of here. I don’t want psych added to my jacket. This is the worst. This is worse than the HSU,” I said.

  “You’re being arraigned tomorrow. We’ll get you moved then.”

  It was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted out of there that second. My skin was crawling. “Are Alan and Marilyn and Laura here in D.C.?” I wanted to know.

  “We think so,” Susie said. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  A few hours later, another captain, a woman named Swanson, showed up with two lieutenants. They took me to another unit to take a shower. The captain and I stood in front of that shower while she uncuffed one hand. I took off my jumpsuit, stepped into the stall, and stuck my cuffed hand out. The captain said, “Give me your other wrist. I have to cuff you back up.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Showering cuffed was new even to me. I told her no way, it’s impossible. How can you get clean with cuffs on?

  She told me that it was policy, that my being on three-man hold made it mandatory. Three-man hold means accompaniment with no less than three officers whenever I was out of the cell. Again I told her no way. Her answer was, “Susan, if you don’t let me cuff you, I will call the lieutenants over here to remove you, naked or not, and you’ll go to court without a shower.”

  As I gave her my wrist, I berated myself for being a coward and not fighting it out, even if I couldn’t win. The only relief in the experience of that first particular humiliation was that I could control the temperature of the water, even with cuffs on. And then as I soaped up and the captain turned her back on me, I slipped one hand out of the cuff, put it back, and then slipped the other hand out. My revenge, as I thought of it, made me feel a shred better. This was the first of six months of these showers. This was the only woman captain, and the only high-ranking officer who was ordered to “shower” me. Needless to say, I didn’t get more than the legally allotted three showers a week.

  Laura, Alan, Tim, Linda, and I were all taken to court separately, but we met in the courtroom in our orange prison suits and bracelets. We were angry, and I know I at least was shell-shocked. Seeing everyone there in the courtroom was exciting. We were without counsel and several of us had not even read the indictment. There were cops of every stripe all over the courtroom. We were fortunate when William Kunstler, Ron Kuby, Mary O’Melveny, Susan Tipograph—all lawyers from New York—walked in. All the lawyers were among the most progressive and powerful civil rights lawyers in the U.S. The judge was Harold Greene, a long-standing liberal who everyone said was a fair judge. What to do? Obviously, we would plead not guilty. If this was courtroom drama and spectacle for the Reagan administration’s anti-terrorism policy, if this was designed by the government to counter the Iran-Contra hearings and the indictments of Oliver North and company, then we had to resist in kind. But having gone through one trial in which I had used the courtroom as a platform to argue my beliefs—throwing legal consequences to the wind, and then living with the consequences for three years—I did not want to do it again.

  Our first joint discussion, right there in the courtroom, which continued throughout the next two and a half years in countless forms, centered on whether we should say we were revolutionaries or political prisoners in our not-guilty plea. Should we say only that we were “not guilty” or that we were “not guilty of crimes.” To others it might sound as if we were splitting hairs, but the distinctions were important to us. We were revolutionaries, but all of us had already been in prison for years and had been fighting our struggles as prisoners. We had all broken the law. Yet, like political prisoners all over the world, we did not see ourselves as criminals and felt it imperative to oppose the government’s attempt to label us as such. And that is what William Kunstler told Judge Harold Greene: We were political prisoners, not guilty of crimes.

  No one could go head to head with authority better than Bill Kunstler. And that day, when the gavel fell and the judge was “doing housekeeping”—legal jargon for scheduling witnesses, paying the lawyers, unshackling the accused to allow them to prepare for trial—the discussion of my housing on the psychiatric ward took place. Mary and Bill wanted Judge Greene to court-order me off the unit and into population. They argued that we do not imprison political prisoners on psych wards in the United States. They further argued that I had no history of psychological disorder.

  The judge grew angry. His bald, high forehead turned red.

  “How dare you compare this great democracy with the Communist regime in Russia!” he yelled. “These defendants are not political prisoners; they are anything but that,” he went on.

  He knew this would be one hell of a trial, and he was not going to allow the rules and definitions to get reinterpreted. But, despite his angry outburst, Judge Greene ordered me moved. His decision was reasoned: I had no history of psychiatric disorders, I was not a danger to myself or others, and the only reason I had been placed on the psych unit in D.C. was that I had been transferred there from a psychological experimentation unit. And so began our legal case.

  From May, 1988, until November, 1989, the biggest challenge for me and my fellow defendants was the set of conditions under which we were imprisoned. The FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force, which led the training sessions for a security team of our D.C. jailers, classified us as “special handling.” This meant we were lock
ed down, shackled even in legal meetings, denied recreation, kept under special surveillance, and constantly harassed, with an underlying threat of physical assault. It also meant that anytime any one of us was let out of his or her cell, all other prisoners had to be locked in. This alone created conflicts between us and the rest of the population. The top of the administration’s agenda was to instill fear in the rest of the population so that no one would support us or help us. Each of us was housed on a different block at the jail. There were over three thousand prisoners, 99 percent of whom were young black men and women predominantly from the southeastern part of Washington, D.C. Most were caught in the revolving door of poverty, drugs, gangs, low-level crime, and jail. Most of the women were drug addicts and needed medical treatment more than anything else.

  The cell blocks were old, dark, and dirty. There were eighty cells in a block, all of which held short-term-sentenced women. Each cell had a forty-watt lightbulb, a metal bunk, a toilet, a sink, and a metal desk and stool attached to the wall. My cell was the first one on the bottom tier; it was under the COs’ station, an enclosed Plexiglas control room known as the “bubble,” where the COs sat and operated the doors. Perpendicular to my block was another, so this bubble controlled the movement of 160 women.

  The cell door was solid steel with a vertical window cut out of the steel, one foot high and six inches wide. The window had no covering, which meant that anyone walking by could throw something inside. It also meant that every sound could be heard. In those first days, I stood at the window watching everything. Several of the women had duties as kitchen workers, hospital workers, and orderlies in other parts of the jail, so there was a lot of movement in and out of the block. I had not seen this many people in one place for several years. Fascinated, I observed all the women and their comings and goings.

  After a few days, the sergeants started giving disciplinary write-ups to prisoners who tried to stop at my cell door and talk to me or even just look at me. But, as usually happens when you tell a group of people not to do something (especially if you say the restriction is for their own good), eventually curiosity gets the better of them and they question the order. In fact, they disobey the order. Slowly, one by one, every woman on my block came to check me out. Some spoke and some did not. They all peered in and made their own assessment.

  The first woman to break the rule was named Donna Nelson. She was someone who had grown up in D.C. and in the jail. She was short and stocky, weathered but young. She had one big gold loop in her ear, a missing front tooth, and a short red-blond Afro on which she had perched a knitted skullcap. She was vigorously chewing gum. “You a terrorist?” she asked.

  “Nope,” I answered.

  “You a white supremacist?”

  “Nope, just the opposite. That’s why I’m locked up.” I stared into her eyes. I liked her immediately.

  “You pretty skinny to be so dangerous.”

  I laughed. “I’m not dangerous. All this is to make you think I am, me and the other folks in my case.”

  She nodded and sauntered away. Five minutes later she was back. She tossed me an orange and a Snickers bar, and kept walking.

  Someone had seen her do it. The next morning I woke up to a lot of yelling. There were sergeants and a lieutenant on the block; the prisoners had been herded out of their cells and into the TV area. I heard the sergeant talking. She was giving a speech: “These people are racists. They are in the KKK, they are charged with bombing Jesse Jackson, and they have tried to blow up the jail. They are cold-blooded killers who want to kill your children.”

  I screamed at the top of my lungs, “That’s a lie, that’s a damn lie! We hate the KKK. We’re here because we support the Black Liberation Army. We would never bomb you, your kids, the jail, Jesse Jackson, or anyone else. Don’t believe this bullshit!”

  A lieutenant ran toward my cell, shouting, “Shut up, bitch!”

  I expected a beating. Everyone stood frozen, and I guess the lieutenant realized that he did not want so many witnesses. He stopped in his tracks and turned, facing all the women. “This terrorist is lying. Don’t believe her. And do not talk to her. You will be punished.” They ordered everyone to work or back to their cells and then locked the block down.

  I was livid. I paced and raged, and desperately wanted to tell someone the jailers were setting up me and the others to be killed.

  A few hours later, Donna appeared at the window. “Don’t worry—no one believes their shit.” She was gone before I could stand up. This would not be the last time Donna Nelson would come to my aid.

  As the afternoon wore on, first a candy bar was thrown in my cell, then a cigarette, then a book of matches, then a piece of fruit. All the most precious commodities. No one else talked to me that day, but I knew the jailers had just lost their first battle in their propaganda war against us. This happened on every block where the “codefendants” of the Resistance Conspiracy case (as we became known) were housed.

  The D.C. jail is just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. A hair’s breadth from the center of U.S. power, it seems to have been designed to keep the poor black community out of sight and out of mind. But the people who run the jail are from the same community as the prisoners. It is as Malcolm X might have put it: the field and the big house rolled into one big auction block. In the late 1980s, two epidemics hit urban centers all over America: crack and AIDS. And, since life in every city jail contains all the same social problems that exist in the larger society, crack and AIDS hit the D.C. jail with force.

  I had never seen crack and knew little about HIV. For the first several months, I just watched the women and noted two distinct types of energy. One was a laid-back, almost relaxed kind of fluidity. The other was a loud, frenetic, jerky, hostile energy. Finally, I realized that the differences were chemical: the first type of energy came from heroin, and the second from crack. Crack was even worse than heroin, if that was possible. In 1989, forty-five people were violently killed in D.C., and every single one of them was crack related. By the time people came to my block, they had been detoxed with the help of methadone, but crack, heroin, grass, speed, downers, and psychotrops were all easily “purchased.” Usually turning one trick was enough. Trading sex for drugs was the number one commodity. The COs made a little on the side with the drug trade.

  One night in the late fall of our first year, I was awake battling the cold. Steel and concrete were the only surfaces in the seven-by-four-foot box in which I lived. I was sitting on the bunk wrapped in every item of fabric I had. I was trying to breathe deeply and not succumb to the chattering that was rising in my chest. My light was out. All the lights were out. Everyone was quiet and the COs were asleep in the bubble. I heard the cell door next to mine pop open. I knew it was next door because by then I knew the origin of every sound in the place. I did not get up. Then the block door popped open and I went to the slot, standing to the side so that no one would see me. Several cops were half carrying and half pulling a woman down the stairs. She was flailing against them, but to no effect. They dumped her next door and nodded to the bubble cops, and the door slid shut. They walked off. Then it was quiet again.

  I whispered through the slot, “Hello, hello, hey there.”

  No answer. I went back to my cold self. Then the moaning began. It started low and in short spurts. Then I heard rustling. Maybe the woman had gotten off the bunk or stood up from the floor. Then I heard the sound of crying, interspersed with deeper groaning.

  “What’s going on? What’s wrong? Are you sick?” Stupid questions, but I didn’t know what to do, or what else to say.

  Then she started retching as violently as I have ever heard anyone retch. It made me nauseous to listen. What could I do? I went to the door and started yelling at the bubble. There was no one in it. “This woman is sick, she needs assistance,” I called.

  Someone at the far end of the block said, “Good luck.”

  She threw up long after a body should, long after whatever poisons were
in her had been expelled. And all the while I stood watch, waiting for one of the guards. Finally, it got quiet and she stopped. I sat down exhausted, freezing, and freaked out. I dozed off. I jerked up with a start as I realized that a rhythmic knocking had been coming from next door for what seemed like a long time. I couldn’t integrate the sound at first, but then I knew what it was. She was banging her head against the wall.

  I ran to the window. “Oh, honey, stop that. Stop it. We’ll get you help—don’t do that. Stop!” I begged. The thudding kept going. In the midst of that frozen night I started to sweat. She was killing herself and no one was going to do anything about it. I lost it. I started banging and hollering and cursing and throwing whatever I could to get someone’s attention (preferably someone with a key), to get the woman to hear me, to break the cycle, whatever. A few other women down the tier started yelling, too. And then a few others yelled to shut up. But no one in authority came. I slid down and sat with my back to the cell door and wept. The pounding kept on until it finally simply stopped dead.

  Later a CO came to do a routine count. It was close to 5:00 a.m. I sat there until he came to count me. I didn’t know him, but I started yelling, “You’re responsible for the woman next door. She’s dead! Where the fuck have you all been?”

  The CO looked in the cell and, without a word, ran out of the unit. A few minutes later, a group of lieutenants and COs showed up. I was standing at my door talking in their general direction. Crazy, I was absolutely crazy. One rookie looked into the woman’s cell, turned, and stuttered, “Oh, sh-shit.”

  The lieutenant came right up to my face and said, “Shut up, bitch”—one of the officers’ favorite sayings—“she’s not dead.” He said that several times at a loud volume.