An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  I stood in the cell and tried not to drown in the alien, soulless waters of this new place. I was still suffering trauma from the previous six years. For the first time, I wished that I could go to a psychiatric clinic to get help. I wanted to go to a clinic for victims of torture. I wanted to talk to someone about my time in Tucson, Lexington, and in the D.C. jail. I had been so dehumanized and humiliated by the previous years of incarceration that my very being felt frozen. At such a clinic, I would not have to explain all my politics, yet still get help. I had never previously admitted to myself that any torture had occurred, much less that it had left me damaged.

  In all the years at the D.C. jail, I had not stopped to deal with the effects of my incarceration, although my friends outside and my friends and codefendants inside had tried to make it clear to me that doing so would not be a sign a weakness or a fall from “revolutionary grace.” But I could not admit that I needed to keep the anger going to fuel the action. Anger was a source of energy for me, and I had lots of things to be angry about. I believed that to stop and admit the effects—to acknowledge them even to myself—would open me up to a psychic invasion by the authorities, and I could never let that happen. So by keeping the external conditions primary in my mind, I did not look beneath the surface of my own psyche. I could never get to the internal demons that propelled me. But as I reentered the federal prison system, I had a fleeting sense that a time to look into the caverns of my own mind and heart would come soon.

  My cell was bigger than any other cell I had seen. It was clean and new and it had a window I could slide up and down. There were metal bars outside the window, but at least I could regulate the temperature in the cell. Bang! I opened the window. Bang! I closed it. It made me ecstatic to perform that simple act. I opened and closed the window dozens of times a day.

  After the first day and a half had passed, I demanded to know why I was in segregation and asked to make a phone call. I could hear voices in the entrance hallway when the guards electronically popped open the door, but otherwise I was alone. My first encounter was with a man who showed up without notice, looking uncomfortable in a brown seersucker suit. His tie was loose, and there was sweat on his graying temples. He walked in front of the closed steel door and peeped through the glass window.

  “Hey, Susan, how ya doing?”

  I didn’t like him calling me “Susan” at all.

  “Why am I in seg?”

  “That’s what your buddies Silvia and Marilyn want to know. They won’t get off my back for a second. It’s just through classification. We have to make sure that you won’t kill yourself or anybody else.” He laughed.

  “I need paper, and I want a phone call,” I said.

  “Don’t you worry, we’re getting you a typewriter, and I have a bag of things that your buddies sent you.” He turned to some camera and yelled, “Open it.”

  The door to my cell popped open and he handed me a shopping bag. The first things I saw were a pack of Camels and several cans of tuna fish.

  Then he stepped back and out and pulled the door shut, as though he couldn’t wait to erase the open space between us.

  “Hey, who are you? Hey, man, you have a match?” I said quickly before he walked away.

  “Mr. Doyle. I’m your counselor. There’s some in the bag.”

  Eventually I learned that Mr. Doyle was a BOP man, a cop who just wanted to complete his time and collect his double retirement check. After serving in the Army, he had become a CO and had risen to the position of counselor. It was not a very high rank within the system; they were administrators, but at the lowest level.

  After he left, I sat down on the bunk and inspected the bag. Silvia and Marilyn had done a great job. Besides the cigarettes and tuna, there were oatmeal packets, raisins, an apple, an orange, and a Snickers bar. There were pens and a notepad, stamps and envelopes, soap and shampoo, and two paperback mysteries. They had me outfitted. I hoped that I would be out of segregation before I used it all, but it was a pleasure to know that people were out there and fighting for me to come out of segregation.

  I sat down, opened the cigarettes, and found the matches. I was perplexed. I had never been in a segregation situation where a prisoner could have matches or a can of any kind. Matches and metal lids can be used as weapons, although not many shanks (knives) were made from tuna can lids. Their letting me have them meant they did not really think that I was going to hurt anyone and that they were keeping me in the hole just because they could. I decided to use the time to calm down rather than to fight. I opened the window and lit a cigarette. I began my bargaining litany. If this is the worst, then I can handle it.

  At that moment, a CO electronically opened my door and rolled in a typewriter on a metal stand. Neither one of us said a word. I do not know who was more shocked, him or me.

  I began to write. First I wrote by hand and then at the typewriter. I was not ready to begin a new phase of doing time. I was not ready to be back in federal custody, even if the cell was clean and they had just given me a typewriter. The D.C. jail had been chaotic and crazy, but it had teemed with life and spirit. The feds, on the other hand, were about mind control. I reminded myself to flush the ribbon when I was finished typing. That, of course, was false logic, since the authorities could seize what I had written on paper, but I wanted to do everything I could to keep them from learning my thoughts.

  I had been thinking about Lien, the Vietnamese woman in the van. I wrote the following prose poem for her and for me:

  Prison Transfer with Questions

  My generation will remember

  in an instant the photo

  of over one hundred children piled in a ditch.

  Naked and bloody.

  A photo of an Asian forest made bare from defoliants,

  no leaves, only bodies.

  The caption read “Remember the My Lai Massacre.” My generation will remember Lt. Calley and his defense,

  “I was carrying out my superiors’ order.”

  Carrying out orders. And it’s true. He was.

  This same generation never healed from the consequences

  of that unjust war. That war of aggression and intervention.

  No reparations were paid, no relations restored, no bilateral

  discussions held. Once the enemy, always the enemy.

  And particularly if the enemy wins.

  But monuments went up to pay homage to the dead.

  (And even that was way too late.)

  Marble to substitute for international law, in place of resources and respect.

  Apocalyptic movies made at great cost, and great profit,

  textbooks written, history reworked to fit the current time.

  Who won? Why were we there? What is genocide?

  Doesn’t Agent Orange grow on trees?

  The generals learned. Better than we.

  Grenada

  Panama

  Nicaragua

  Iraq

  The Vietnamese people are suffering still, as they always will

  until someone takes responsibility.

  And we suffer, but they suffer more.

  And yesterday while in transit in a prison van In shackles I sat, thinking of wars.

  And beside me a woman sat. A woman born ten years after me in 1965.

  A woman born in Saigon. A Vietnamese woman, a woman once beautiful and delicate.

  This Vietnamese woman named Lien was a prisoner, too, only for her the black box to immobilize handcuffed wrists.

  Her wrists were slashed and the cuffs made her scars stand out in bright purple.

  And as I looked at this woman from Vietnam, who was born in Saigon but raised on

  McDonald’s, I knew she was sick, I knew she was dying.

  A victim of war.

  This Vietnamese woman born in Saigon to an American father who left her

  While she suffers from AIDS dementia, which caused her to attack a white man

  And kill him with his own gun.<
br />
  This once delicate young woman with AIDS, demented, in chains, en route to her death, in a prison van, a victim of war.

  Which war? I do not know.

  Wasn’t Lt. Calley only following orders?

  And doesn’t Agent Orange kill more than trees?

  I could only hope that writing would help me again as it had before. It had become my means of survival.

  The recreation yard was the size of a small backyard plot, It was a fenced-in inner yard, all concrete and surrounded by buildings. Even with the bright Florida sun glinting off the razor wire, it was bleak. A basketball hoop had been unceremoniously stuck on the wall; otherwise, it was empty. Walking the perimeter took thirty steps, not enough to work up a sweat.

  I was walking in circles, trying to get my blood moving while my brain was buzzing around, when the door from the hole opened. A middle-aged white woman with long, scraggly brown hair stepped through the gate. Wearing an oversize orange jumpsuit, she surveyed her surroundings and then me. I did not miss a step. Feeling worn down, I did not want to talk to her. Since arriving in Florida my own internal surveillance system was in full gear and I had not seen one black prisoner. This woman looked like a Midwestern meth edrine addict, old before her time. I was not up for conversation.

  She fell right in step with me. “My name is Janet.”

  I nodded, looking at her out of the corner of my eye. Her pale, parched skin and red-rimmed crystal blue eyes told me she had only recently arrived. From her look I guessed she had been shunted from one jail to another for quite a while.

  Oblivious to the aloofness that I was trying to send her way, she asked, “Who are you?”

  “Rosenberg,” I muttered.

  She stopped walking. “I know who you are.”

  I thought for a second that I would have to fight her. Not being able to tell where she was coming from, I kept walking.

  “I’m a political prisoner, too.” The emphasis was on the word “too.”

  “Yeah, what did you do?” I asked, getting more exasperated with each turn in the yard.

  “I hate the government,” she said.

  I kept my pace.

  “I bomb abortion clinics,” she went on. “Me and my husband, that’s what we do. We’ve bombed nine of them.”

  I took one full look at her and turned on my heel, walking back to the seg door.

  She said, “I saw you in that documentary, Through the Wire.”

  “Then you know to leave me alone.” I had no idea what I meant by that; all I knew was that I was seething at her, at the guard for putting us together, and at the whole scene I was now in.

  She was still talking as I tried to get back into the building. “I’m in the hole for refusing to work. Our hatred of the federal government gives us common ground.”

  Common ground? I did not want common ground with her. I did not want my enemies’ enemy to become my friend. I did not want to be in this white federal world. I missed my black sisters, my community, and the D.C. life that had become my reality. I missed being the minority in an all-black majority. How could I have common ground with someone I assumed was a white supremacist, but whom I knew bombed women’s health clinics? I missed living in a black community because I had spent my whole adult life trying to oppose racism. While I was not black, I had come to believe and feel that black people’s culture of response to their history of enslavement was the best of American culture. When I had studied at New York’s City College many years earlier, I had majored in American history and written my senior thesis on the role of gospel music in resisting slavery.

  Years after that, when I and others in my underground group had gone to public and legal gun shows in the Midwest, we had encountered gun sellers and buyers who were part of the organized white supremacist movement. They had been filled with utter contempt and hatred for black people. I remember one booth in particular that was offering AR-15 assault rifles at a discount with free paper practice targets, and the images were caricatures of black people as monkeys and slaves. The sellers were proud of those targets. I remember wanting to destroy the booth and burn those targets.

  I could not have foreseen then that I would be in segregation in a federal prison with someone who seemed to me to fit into the same category as those gun sellers. I could hear the cop’s argument: “You people are the same; you both bomb to get what you want.” It was a perverse argument that I did not want to hear, let alone have to live with on a daily basis. It would become a litany: “Right wing, left wing, you all are terrorists, our job is just to keep you, and it’s all the same to us.” Back in my cell, I sat on the bunk and wept. It was Christmas Eve, 1990.

  The Marianna High Security Unit for women was the first official maximum-security prison for women in the Bureau of Prisons. It followed in the line of experiments and developments from Alderson, West Virginia, where the first behavior modification programs were conducted in Davis Hall, the segregation unit at Alderson. Numerous political prisoners were incarcerated there from the 1960s until the 1990s: Lolita Lebrón, Assata Shakur, Safiya Bukari, Marilyn Buck, Rita “Bo” Brown, Susan Saxe, and Laura Whitehorn were among those who did hard time there. Then the BOP created the Lexington HSU, which had now morphed into the Marianna maximum-security prison. It was under court supervision conducted by the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, a direct result of our litigation against the BOP. It was set up for what the BOP considered the most “hard-core” prisoners.

  At Marianna, I found women from my past political life and from previous prisons, along with others that I knew by reputation. Seeing my friends Silvia Baraldini and Marilyn Buck, both of whom I had had court cases with, gave me such relief and happiness that I would not be alone in doing this new part of my time. Sylvia Brown had been at Lexington with us, and Belinda Carter, who had flown out of a federal prison in California in her lover’s commandeered helicopter, were the most well-known escapees. There was Lynette Fromme from the Manson Family and Helen Wood-son, a Plowshares activist who had violated parole rules over and over again in her unyielding dedication to ending nuclear weapons proliferation. There were several Colombian drug women who ranged in importance from wives of big cartel leaders to “mules” who had become informants and were being housed at Marianna for witness protection purposes. There were several junkies who had undertaken botched armed robberies to support their drug habits, and there was Conchita and Vieja, heroin dealers from the Mexican mafia who each had a single teardrop tattoo at the corner of her eye denoting gang allegiance. There were women who had run a methedrine lab in Oklahoma, and gang members from the Bloods and Crips. There were a handful of black women with nicknames like Princess, Tender, and Miami. Some of them were former crackheads transferred from general population for “bad” behavior. There were mentally ill women who had nowhere else to go, including women who self-mutilated (“cutters” and “bleeders”), who lived in and out of four-point restraint (meaning shackling at the hand and foot to the metal “bed”) in segregation. Finally, there were a few Marielitas, Cuban detainees with absolutely no charges, no rights, no outside contacts, and no release dates. They had not been convicted and yet they were for all intents and purposes sentenced indefinitely, for as long as diplomatic dialogue between the United States and the Cuban government failed.

  I got out of segregation and stepped into what appeared on the surface to be a clean, brand-new unit. It was in a large building whose central structure was a two-tiered oblong that resembled decks on a boat. Everything was in that oblong, including a small building that housed thirty computers to be used for a data entry factory. Most federal facilities have a contract from another part of the government for prisoner labor. This one was a contract from the U.S. patent office. Prisoners would sit all day five days a week, eight hours a day and input patent numbers. This was for seventeen cents an hour. There was a kitchen, a medical wing, the segregation unit, and an internal fenced-in courtyard slightly bigger than a handba
ll court. The outdoor recreation field, the size of a football field, butted up against the men’s prison and their factory.

  The Marianna HSU had originally been designed to be a protective-custody unit for men. But because of the Lexington lawsuit, the BOP changed the mission of the Florida unit to accommodate the court, and Marianna became the little sister to the prison for men in Marion. Following the opening of the prison, there were rumors swirling that a new, even more hard-core unit à la the Lexington HSU was being built in Fort Worth, Texas, and that eventually we would all be sent there. As long as Silvia and I were in the unit, the legal threads from the closure of Lexington to the opening and running of Mariana still existed, even if tenuously.

  The BOP was establishing more and more twenty-four-hour lockdown units and building multi-million-dollar industrial complexes. These complexes, housing all levels of prisoners, comprised hundreds of acres in isolated areas. The first of them had been built at Florence, Colorado, where the administrative maximum (ADMAX) facility had been built to replace Illinois’s Marion prison. No facility just for women existed yet. The Fort Worth, Texas, prison complex already included a hospital, a mental unit, an AIDS ward, a minimum-security prison, and a camp—and soon it would have a lockdown wing for the maximum-security prisoners.

  Meanwhile, we at Marianna were stuck in a netherworld of isolation, control, and a barrage of verbal assaults. One day when an officer yelled at some prisoners, “This ain’t no cruise ship,” someone yelled back, “No, it’s a shipwreck!” That notion became a metaphor. We were survivors on a shipwreck, and the question was, would we destroy ourselves in lieu of rescue?