Alan wanted to come back to the jail to say good-bye; he was expecting to die. We were all in the deepest state of grief when Alan returned to the jail. He looked like he was a hundred years old. He was gray and frail.
We met together in our legal room, where we had been meeting since 1988. We whispered old jokes and told stories, and each one of us also spoke to him by ourselves. I could barely keep from crying. It was nearly impossible to keep it together. Alan and I had been friends for almost twenty years, and we had had an incredible ride in this life, both together and apart. I flashed back to an earlier and easier time in 1977 right after Alan’s daughter Sarah was born, when he had been delirious with joy and had played “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder. I remembered standing outside his living room, hearing him shout the lyrics over and over. Every one of us had a deep love for him. We wept, but we did not let the guards see our tears. The guards took Alan away from us in handcuffs. Throughout every medical procedure, he (like all high-security prisoners) had been surrounded by automatic weapons and chains. The hospital was locked down, and the medical staffs were terrified by the guns and all the overly dramatic security to create an aura of submission. Very few doctors will stand up to that kind of armed power to assert medical need over security. Having to fight for his own care, to be his own advocate, took additional energy that Alan didn’t have to spare and this was part of what made Alan’s treatment so difficult and so wearying.
In September, Linda, Laura and Marilyn changed their plea from not guilty to guilty. It was a hard day and we had struggled with the choice for months and months. The three who pleaded guilty felt that they were accepting the government’s definitions of their history and actions. It was a compromise with a personal and political cost: automatic sentences of twenty years for Laura, ten for Marilyn, and five for Linda. That made Marilyn’s sentence eighty years, Linda’s forty-five, and Laura’s twenty. It was a sacrifice they made in real terms. Despite the incredible public display against all of us, the prosecution had no evidence of actual participation in any of the acts in the indictment. My friends took the plea so that Alan would not face another trial and would get the medical care that he desperately needed, and so that Tim, Alan, and I would not face possible exposure to more prison time.
Alan was scheduled for an evaluation in October. He was still very ill, but he was alive. When the Resistance Conspiracy case finally came to an end, the future for Alan and for the rest of us held out years of prison, and a return to federal custody.
Once the plea agreement was reached and the legal case ended, it was as though all the energy we had spent in resisting had been utterly wasted. It was like air from a balloon that had escaped and the balloon turned out to be but a plastic shell. It was too soon to try to understand what the last two and a half years had been about, but I was overwhelmed that we had won anything at all. I thought about all the factors that had gone into our struggle over the time we had spent in the D.C. jail. I thought about our commonality with all political prisoners everywhere who fight with every bit of brains, heart, and soul to live under the most difficult and depressing conditions in order to give meaning to their incarcerations, and I thought we lived up to our counterparts. I thought about our friends, our families, and our lawyers (who were also so much more than lawyers), who visited us, fought for us in the world, and brought our cases to the attention of everyone who would listen. I thought about the supporters who built a defense committee and organized to defend and free us, and who helped us carry on. They were extraordinary. I thought about the deepest success of all, which was that after two and a half years, we the “codefendants” were still speaking to one another, and still filled with a commitment to our solidarity. We rose above our history and differences, our conflicting interests and views, and built upon our strengths to fight the government. This could never have happened without our fundamental love for one another.
When we arrived in the D.C. jail, the government’s goal was to destroy us through isolation, through exile, life sentences, medical negligence, and horrible physical conditions. In that they failed. We made lifelong friends, life partners in some cases. We also found old friends we had not seen, or thought had forgotten us, and new friends, as well. I met William Wardlaw, “B,” an anarchist and peace activist, who along with a friend, refused to stand up for Judge Parker during my court appearance in the Lexington case. They were arrested, beaten up and charged with assault on a federal officer. The case would go on in court for years. Our correspondence turned into a great dialogue and deep friendship. Only much later would I find out that he was scion to one of the wealthiest families of Atlanta, Georgia. I also met Shirley Cloyes, an activist, intellectual, writer, and editor, who visited me at the jail. Shirley was the publisher of Lawrence Hill Books. She had edited and then published Assata Shakur’s autobiography. Through that project, she had come to know Mary O’Melveny, who was then working for the law firm that had represented Assata after she was targeted and later apprehended as a leader in the Black Liberation Army. Mary in turn introduced her to me. Both B and Shirley would become great friends of mine and would later be crucial to winning my release. I read more, studied poetry and writing, and wrote more than I had ever written in my life. I fell in and out of love with unattainable women and men who helped keep the heart beating. I lived side by side with women whose entire lives were worse than my time in the D.C. jail. I tried not to weep. If I did, I was afraid I would drown in the waters of my soul.
I felt the suffering and pain around me. At times, it was so bad, I extinguished the difference between my own pain and others. As before, I thought about killing myself as a way of release from the cursed consciousness of suffering when I was beyond the point of caring or compassion. But in reality, suicide was counter to my beliefs. I held on (admittedly at times by a shred) to the notion that people can change, that societies can change, and that my life in prison was not a waste. My understanding of American history—that our history of slavery, stolen land, occupation, and exploitation that had led me to make the choices I had made in my life—was now filtered through the lives of individuals who were no longer abstractions of systems and causes. Theresa had died, others with whom I had been living side by side were dying: Celeste, Regina, Frederika, and on and on. Outside, too, people were dying: Elliot, David, Arawn, and others in the gay liberation movement. And not only Alan, Marilyn, and Silvia had cancer. My father did, as well. All that dying and sickness was impossible to rationalize. The structural violence that resulted in genocidal death in the jail, or in the black community, or the failures of government to respond to the AIDS epidemic seemed to me to be part of a war against the marginalized of America. And as in all wars, the dialogue with death was a constant. I wrote a poem to reflect my understanding of this:
We Are Not Well
Our deaths inconsequential
Where one day more is one day less
I have met Death in the cold of this prison.
Her imprint etched on every wall
in every crevice, in every corner,
screaming with despair.
Wind whips through howling
as if a frozen vapor alone can
hold back her onslaught.
Cold shoots through me
leaving its tracings
where veins should be.
And I
arrogant enough to believe that even death
can be reasoned with
converse.
Her nocturnal visitation
where we debate polarities between
reason and justice
cause and effect
have shown me that
while equal measure of hope and despair can put this
death march on notice
it is but a temporary holdover.
I have met Death in the cold of this prison.
She arrives in a multitude of forms
In dope
In disease
In
desperation
She thrives in a culture where
the dispossessed are disempowered and
disrespect is internalized.
There is no inner peace
between chaos and a hurricane
between racism and genocide.
Ancestral energies explode in minute details
Survival every generation’s duty
And while the plagues of modern times
do not obliterate the human spirit
We are not well.
In October 1990, I turned thirty-five. That month, my father’s cancer went into remission. I was so relieved. I could not imagine my father sick. He was so vital and filled with a beautiful spirit. My parents had delayed telling me about his cancer, not wanting to worry me, but when they finally did, I was shattered by the idea that he would die and I would be in prison. Alan was evaluated with the conclusion that he needed more chemotherapy and I prepared to leave for federal custody.
At our group’s sentencing in November, Marilyn Buck said:
Even in my youthful ignorance and unconsciousness I have always believed in equality. Going out into the world quickly revealed what inequality is and does in a raw and brutal world. It is painful, degrading, demoralizing, and finally enraging to be treated as less than an equal. I know it as a woman and I see it everywhere I look. But inequality can be changed, that I believe and know from history. But if it is not fought for then it certainly will not change. That is why I am here, because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. I stand in the place where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers, and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash. I am being sentenced and condemned because I dare to be a white person in a white-dominated country who advocated that black people have the right to determine their national destiny, that Puerto Rico has the right to its independence, that this society must undergo profound changes if it is not to be condemned to the nightmares of worse than we can imagine.
I didn’t know exactly when I was being transferred, but the night before I was transferred to Florida’s new maximum-security women’s prison, I dreamed that I was in a field of wildflowers, as described by the Sufi mystic poet Rumi. This field was quiet and still. The sun was shining, the wind blowing, and I could smell the scent of wildness. It washed over me in waves. I was lying in the field alone. As I closed my eyes, all the terror and horror receded and I started singing. I knew that I did not want to leave the field and I was reluctant to return to wherever that was. I embraced that field. When I woke up, I was calm. Until the security team came all suited up, and I was taken from the jail.
Part Five
Mariana
Chapter 12
Mariana Maximum Security
THE FIRST LEG of the transfer to Florida began with a siren-blaring exit from the District of Columbia. The police and a whole entourage of one van and five cars drove through the back streets until the thruway entrance appeared. Several minutes later, we were entering the state of Virginia.
It was freezing cold in the prison van outside the Alexandria County jail. There were three of us who were all being transferred from the D.C. jail and we had been joined by two other women on the drive south to Florida, to the new maximum-security women’s prison at Marianna that lay two hours from Tallahassee. We had been sitting for quite some time and the marshals and local jail officials had been whispering to one another in between steaming breaths while they stood around, waiting. One marshal was cradling his rifle as he paced. Everyone was getting colder and more uptight. The door at the side of the main driveway burst open to reveal two male COs dragging a small woman and shouting at her as they came toward the van. I slid over to the window and peered through the mesh covering to get a better look at the commotion. The woman was wrapped in chains—leg cuffs, handcuffs, belly chains, and black boxes. Even through the mesh I could see that the woman was on some other plane of existence.
They put her in the van next to me. She sat totally immobile, as if in a trance. I spoke to her, but there was not even the flutter of an eyelid in response. Once she must have been delicate and fine boned, but now she was emaciated and her long black hair was dull from lack of care. I thought that she looked Vietnamese. I found out later that she was. I took in her looks and her energy and tried to give off calm and caring vibes. Then I saw her hands. Her wrists were purple and were bulging out around the cuffs, pulsing. Scarred, they looked like she had slashed them over and over. I tried not to blanch, but my breath got ragged. The terrible pain in her was searing me in that cold van. As the van finally began to move, there was a stony silence from all of us in the back. The only sound was the intermittent crackling of the police radio.
Lien (as one of the marshals called her) never uttered a word on the seven-hour drive. When we stopped to use the bathroom—a cumbersome and scene-stopping embarrassment because of our orange jumpsuits, chains, and armed escort—I found myself with another woman, Jackie, who had been in the Virginia jail. She whispered to me not to touch Lien because she had AIDS and was crazy. I whispered back, caught up in some kind of conspiratorial thing, “What did she do?” It did not really matter to me, but I wanted to hear some kind of explanation. “She killed her father, shot him dead through the heart,” Jackie said in awe. “Really?” I asked, not whispering anymore. Jackie nodded and stared at me.
The ride to the city jail in Georgia where we stopped for the night was the longest leg of the trip. There was no conversation among us prisoners and the marshals were focused solely on driving us. In the silence, I had a seven-hour meditation on how we had all ended up in the BOP van in shackles, what forces in the universe had propelled us, propelled me, to be sitting next to a Vietnamese woman with AIDS facing the death penalty. I tried everything not to be drawn into Lien’s agony. Vietnam, it had all really begun with Vietnam: her path, my path. She and I were the consequences of the illegal, immoral, and genocidal war waged by my government against her people. We were minor characters in an ongoing drama of actions, reactions, and forever-reverberating consequences. I fantasized many scenarios for Lien. She was a boat person, and she had come here to find her father; when she finally met him, he had shunned her and left her to fend for herself in the streets of some U.S. city, where she had become a prostitute to survive and contracted AIDS. I wanted to tell Lien that I had been against the war, that I was an antiwar American who had some understanding of what happened to her country and her people. But as she sat pushed up against me, I saw the vacancy in her eyes and I realized that my thoughts were born of some narcissistic need to feel better, while she was past the point of hearing or caring. My romanticism fueled my imagination as I automatically created my own story about Lien. I really had no idea what the facts were, only jailhouse rumor and what I could see and feel sitting next to her.
When we arrived at the city jail outside of Atlanta, I was put into segregation. By then, my emotions were beyond my control. In response to all the suffering going on around me, I began to cry. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t think I was crying for myself, but I was. I thought about being both observer and participant, a conscious actor in an ongoing drama, and I rededicated myself to bearing witness, to recording the indignities and the pain so as to remember every detail. Up until that first day of my transfer in late December 1990, there had been moments I had come to call “freeze frames”: visual experiences—an image, a scene, a dialogue, an encounter—that took my breath, made my heart pound, or knocked me backward off my feet. These moments shattered the repressive tedium, and they always, at least metaphorically, kicked me in the head. They distilled the surrounding conditions into pure crystals of truth that brought me back to who I was and why I was there. They became reference points through which I could navigate between memory and the present. The journey sitting next to Lien became a profound experience for me. Whether it was because
she and I were unable to communicate yet forced to touch, our thighs pressing against each other, or because of my machinations and explanations regarding her circumstances causing me to reflect on the political meaning of my own life, I felt her suffering, and it allowed me to feel my own.
The next day when we left, Lien was not with us. I never saw or heard anything about her again.
We arrived in Marianna, Florida, that day. The trip had been grueling, and as we passed through gate after gate, I got quieter and quieter inside myself. We drove straight to the heart of the complex, a prison within a prison as Lexington had been, only instead of being a basement, the Florida complex was housed in its own building. The sun glinted off the rows and rows of razor wire. As I was pulled out of the back of the van onto the tarmac road, my laceless sneakers sank into the hot asphalt.
The building was big and clean and flat. It had a fake-adobe look, with stones and potted plants at the front entrance. We walked past a row of portraits hanging in the lobby. The one that caught my eye was a grinning President George H.W. Bush. It was the middle of the afternoon, and there was no one around. The building reminded me of Lexington, and in the midst of the terrible heat, a cold chill swept through me. If Tucson had been the preparation for Lexington and the first physical assault, and Lexington had been systematic psychological torture, and the D. C. jail the most physically arduous and emotionally consuming years of my life—what would Marianna bring?
As we crossed the lobby and walked through a set of steel doors that popped open, I knew that the well-oiled machinery of the surveillance and security mechanisms were functioning in high gear. There were no people around and no sound, only the whirring of the air-conditioning and the humming of the electronic doors and gates. I was definitely back in the federal system, and it was familiar and worse than I had remembered. At the end of a long hall, a final door opened and I found myself on a tier with locked steel doors. The Beatles song “Back in the USSR” played in my head as I realized I was back in the hole.
An American Radical Page 17