An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  When we had been at Lexington four years earlier, we had had a running debate about how “we” should relate to drug dealers. Could we befriend them? Should we befriend them? Could we associate with them, or would doing so taint us and show the government a weakening of our resolve? Would associating with them imply that we were supporting the drug trade? It seemed to me that more than three-fourths of the prison population had been or was still involved in the drug trade in one way or another and that setting a rule against talking to them was more than absurd. With whom would we talk then? Only ourselves? My fellow political prisoners’ view on this subject seemed to me excessively narrow, and I was beginning to believe that it was our narrow mindedness that had contributed to our failure.

  To underscore my growing psychological need to separate from the past, I became involved with a woman who could not have been further removed from me politically. She was a “good ol’ girl” from West Texas who had been in and out of prison for over a decade. She had a hard core and hard edges and had escaped from more prisons than any other woman in BOP history. Kate Baker was her name, but for some reason she was known as K.C. She had walked past the fence at Alderson, the women’s prison in West Virginia, and then at Texas maximum-security prison, and at a Colorado women’s prison. She had cut the fence at the Pleasanton, California, federal women’s medium-security facility located in the middle of a U.S. Army base, and had been on the run for almost a year when she finally got caught. She had been at Lexington and had struggled against the psychological torture. She was not a part of the lawsuit that we had filed at Lexington because she was not considered a political prisoner, but she had resisted the manipulative divide-and-conquer tactics of the BOP.

  She had enormous anger coursing through her and proclaimed herself a sociopath. She did not seem like one to me, though. She had two children she loved with all her heart and they communicated with her and loved her right back. In fact, it was that love that motivated her attempts and that kept bringing her back to prison. The cops went straight to her children and busted her each time she escaped because that is where she physically returned every time she got out. While in Lexington, K.C. turned forty-five, and by the time we were in Marianna she was tired of being locked up. She said that she could escape from the prison, and I believed her.

  I respected her toughness and loved her fearless heart, but her temper was extreme and she did little to control it. She was only five foot one but afraid of no one. We had a strange and charged relationship. Some of my comrades were furious at me for getting involved with her. They did not trust her. They thought she had been used by the government when we were at Lexington. They thought she would try to escape again and that we would get blamed for it. Some called her a snitch and said she was just using me to conceal her identity and would break us all apart. Others thought that the relationship was my own private business but that it reflected bad judgment on my part.

  I really could not figure out what K.C. might be using me for, and I rejected my friends’ opinions. Getting involved with K.C. was, for me, the beginning of an unraveling of the rigid, ultra-sectarian, holier-than-thou kind of arrogance that I had embraced in my youthful attempts to organize for politics and platforms. In the free world, I had been part of a small group that had simply gotten smaller and smaller, by blaming everyone but ourselves for our failures. We were quite capable of repeating that history of blame in prison. I did not want to be a part of that history anymore; the days of toeing a “correct line” were over for me, even though I had been one of the people creating “the line.” I was done with that.

  I could not see how having a personal relationship with someone outside the group was a betrayal or a violation against anyone. Instead, I saw my relationship with K.C. as a means of keeping my own heart alive and finding some comfort. As it turned out, my relationship with her ended up causing an even greater schism in our group than did my declaration that I would no longer work cooperatively. All of us tried to keep the division hidden from the COs, and I think for the most part succeeded.

  While the group of us were having disagreements over how to do time, what things were and were not politically correct, and how to co-exist in the prison, the unit was filling up with greater numbers of women. Marianna housed almost one hundred women by 1992, and increasing numbers of them had been convicted of aggressive and brutal crimes. The prison was a hotbed of hostile and angry young women that the authorities chose to control through regimentation and lockdown.

  In every federal prison, it is the unit manager who sets the tone for how life is lived. Our unit manager, a Mr. Deveraux, imprinted the routine with his own brand of psychology. He was an African American from a small city in South Carolina and had begun his law enforcement career by racially integrating the local police force. He brought a small-town mentality with him when he graduated to running protective custody units and special security units at federal corrections facilities. He found being assigned to work with women ludicrous and pathetic and considered us irrelevant to the real work of corrections. He figured that to control us, all he had to do was pit us against one another. He enjoyed playing with us and dehumanizing us with his incessant verbal contempt.

  Deveraux had been brought on board, he said, because he was black and a good public relations advantage for the BOP. He told us that he knew how to deal with “bullshit” from the ACLU and the National Prison Project (NPP) lawyers. He hated Adjoa Aiyetoro, the lead attorney for the NPP, with a seething passion. When she came to monitor the unit for her reports to the court, Mr. Deveraux oozed a smarmy glibness that I did not think helped the public relations campaign of the BOP, but did seem to work for the local Florida media. He called his job “babysitting a bunch of bitches,” and it seemed that he hated us and blamed us for being responsible for his transfer to unit manager. Everyone knew that he was counting the minutes until he was promoted to associate warden and transferred to another institution.

  Mr. Deveraux allowed the unit to be turned into a brothel for his officers, which made it a most difficult place for everyone who wouldn’t play along. The sexual undercurrent was omnipresent. We were guarded by male COs and lieutenants, with very few female COs or administrators. There were a few female counselors, teachers, and psychologists, but almost everyone else who dealt with us was male. Officers and prisoners were having consensual sex throughout the unit—in the factory, the kitchen, the segregation unit, broom closets, and laundry rooms—wherever they could steal a few moments of privacy. Prisoners traded sex for everything from perfume, makeup, and drugs to merely a momentary sense of being desired, of something more than being an inmate. I understood the need it fulfilled for the women. The longing to be touched, to feel something, was overwhelming. I also understood that the men did it because they could get away with it, and because of the way in which they viewed us and hated us for transgressing. For those of us who witnessed the sexual dynamics it was painful and upsetting, and unless we constantly looked the other way we were in danger of being hurt, locked up, harassed, or raped into silence or complicity.

  Mr. Deveraux allowed the abuse of power to continue unchecked for a year. Then, one day, a lieutenant caught a white CO pants down with a white woman prisoner in the laundry room after the night lockdown. The woman was whisked into segregation and then sent to another prison a thousand miles away. The CO was escorted off the grounds and quietly fired. This, however, was only the first of many such instances; in each case, the white prisoner would get transferred and the white officer would be escorted off the grounds, his job terminated. We joked that it was the only way to get a transfer out of maximum security.

  One day, a month later, a clique of five white female prisoners who worked in the data entry factory took their break on the recreation yard. This was a rare occurrence; we knew there were gangs, but they never met openly. It had to be something important for them to be meeting in plain view. The rest of us noticed this get-together immediately. There were no cop
s in the vicinity and the prisoners were taking their time. When they finished speaking, they casually filed back into the building and returned to work. There was great speculation as to what had happened.

  A few days later, a rumor began to circulate that an African American CO named Johnson had raped a prisoner named Deborah. It was an open secret that the two had been having sex, but the relationship had appeared to be consensual. Deborah, a white woman, was in prison for her participation in conspiring to murder her husband. It had been a brutal murder and she had received a thirty-year sentence. She was desperate to get parole, but there was no way anyone in maximum security was getting parole. She wanted a transfer out of maximum security badly enough to do just about anything. Deborah claimed that Johnson had raped her. The six-month investigation that followed produced enough fear and loathing to rival the Salem witch hunts. Led by the U.S. attorney general’s office, it began with a grand jury that called in more than ten prisoners and many BOP staff.

  I was called to the unit manager’s office; the civilian investigators wanted to know what I knew. They said my cell was visually in line with Deborah’s and they knew that I knew something. Though I had expected them to call me in, I was angry about it. I told them that I had not cooperated with Justice Department officials in the past and I was not about to start now. I told them that their in-house oversight was never effective and that I did not talk to police; I was not a snitch. They did not try to coerce me because they knew that I would make problems for them if they used this investigation to further harass me or the other political prisoners in the unit. They told other women that new charges against them would be filed if they didn’t cooperate, that they would be charged with perjury, and that they would be denied parole and put in administrative detention indefinitely. In the end, they got an indictment against Johnson, who was charged with rape and other crimes. They took him to trial and he was convicted on the basis of inmate testimony and given a twenty-year sentence. Deborah got sent to Danbury Correctional Facility and Johnson went off to spend seventeen and a half years in protective custody in a federal detention facility.

  After the trial, I could not help thinking of that meeting on the yard those many months back. My visual memory placed Deborah at the center of it, with the clique from data entry sitting or standing in a semi-circle around her. I kept mulling the scene over and over. I knew that I had done the right thing by not talking, but no one had even mentioned Deborah’s possible motive—transfer and eventually parole. Still, I did not really have the facts.

  I brought it up with my friend, Sue Gambill, a paralegal and my most frequent visitor. Sue had been visiting all of the political women since the week we had arrived. She was a lifeline for me, working in conjunction with my lawyer, Mary.

  Sue—a radical activist, a writer, and a lesbian organizer—helped me stay sane. She had first written to me when I was in the D.C. jail. She had heard about our case and sympathized, although she thoroughly disagreed with our methods. I liked her letters and thought that we had more commonalities than differences. She lived in Tallahassee, about seventy miles from Marianna, and worked as a Legal Aid defense investigator for death row prisoner appeals. She visited monthly, communicated with our friends and families, organized visits, and opened her home to our political support networks. She also helped me write, resist, and change within those hideous walls.

  Regarding the rape case, she said, “Write about it, Susan.” With those words I began to think through all the implications: I had observed what might have been a legal lynching of a person who was, by definition, my captor—yet I had done nothing. I pondered the never-ending sexual dynamics involving incarcerated white women and African American male guards. I rewrote the events into a short story with a point of view that was not my own. I walked the yard and talked with Laura, one of my oldest and dearest friends. She had missed the events around Johnson, having arrived at Marianna only recently. She had come out of D.C. and organized the first women’s support group at the women’s general population prison in Lexington, Kentucky, and had been sent here on a disciplinary charge after leading a sit-down strike in response to racism and brutaity against women by male prisoners. I was sorry that she would have to suffer under the conditions that we were living in because I thought they were probably worse than in Lexington, but I was happy for myself that she was coming to Marianna. She descended on the unit in an airlift straight from the hole at Lexington. Soon, she and I had logged hundreds of miles jogging in circles. Laura had me look at the rape case from every point of view imaginable. What if Johnson had in fact raped Deborah? What if he had been white? What if she had been black? What if the other prisoners had told the police the truth? In the back and forth of our dialogue, we gave ourselves permission to step out of our own black-and-white worldview and consider shades of gray. In the end of that process, writing the story was liberating. It freed me from the dogma of thinking things were always all one way or all another. I began to write other stories, too, and the more I played with words—finding exquisite pleasure in creating a character or describing a scene—the further I got from my cell. The further I got from my cell, the more I was able to live in the moment.

  With Laura’s arrival, the humor and laughter quotient went way up. Being inside with Laura always offered a relief from the repressive, hostile dictates of the police because she made fun of all the petty rules and attacks. We made jokes about the COs’ stupidity and we imagined them on the outside. We wrote a prison sitcom that revolved around the security procedures of the administration. The first episode we wrote, “The Shakedown,” involved ten grown men running into a woman’s small cell, unscrewing the lights, and searching the cell while the prisoner stood outside and let loose a running stream of banter. We came up with titles like “The Wrath of Con” and “Convictions,” and most important, we were able to laugh at ourselves. Our laughter was a defense against the terrible conditions of our lives, which we characterized as the “continuing existential devolution.”

  I was sitting on the bunk bed in my cell one day when the door swung open and a huge, red-haired woman, six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, walked in. She filled the whole doorway. “I’m the new unit manager, Ms. Nolan,” she said. “I’m taking inventory.”

  I jumped up and stood with my back against the far wall. I had no idea what to expect.

  Ms. Nolan went on, “Now, I want you to know, Susan, that I know you all are political prisoners and not terrorists.”

  I stared at her. I had never heard a BOPer say anything even close to that. My fellow politicos and I were the “terrorist bitches,” the “cop killers.” To hear the words “political prisoners” from her lips was totally shocking. She went on to give a lengthy speech that appeared to have been prepared. She talked about the 1960s, her teenage years in the early 1970s, and her opposition to the war in Vietnam. She said the difference between her and us was that she had been smarter—she knew that to make change she would have to “bore from within.” I snorted at that. She went on to say that by joining the most entrenched of the law enforcement agencies she had more effect than if she had stayed outside the system.

  I know I must have looked at her as if she had two heads. I said, “Yeah, so, if you know who we are, then send us to population. You know we don’t need to be buried in this hole.”

  She said, “I wanted to work this unit.”

  “Good career move,” I retorted.

  She turned and strode off down the tier to give a version of her rap to the other political prisoners. That first encounter set the tone of our relationship for the next several years.

  Ms. Nolan had been born and raised in Texas; she had gone to college in Austin in the 1970s and had studied psychology. She had a failed marriage and a teenage son, drove a Mustang, and always carried a Walther PPK 380. We thought she was a lesbian, but she insisted she was not. Things did change with her in charge, but whether for the better or not was a matter of opinion. She relax
ed the internal controls, yet strengthened the isolation by tightly monitoring the communication between us and our supporters. She gave permission for some women to grow a garden that ultimately helped feed the entire unit. She allowed the animal shelter to come in once a month and bring cats and dogs for us to play with. Some of us had not seen an animal in over a decade. She gave us permission to run an AIDS program that brought AIDS service volunteers on the outside into the prison to talk and work with us. But she personally read our mail, stopped our visits, and paid mere lip service to our continual requests for transfer.

  Ms. Nolan believed that the way to control us was to rule with a gentle hand. After she read an article about the innovative cosmetics company The Body Shop and its founder, Anita Roddick, she decided that the company should be allowed to sell its products to us at a discount. She understood that for many women in prison, looks and self-esteem were integrally intertwined. She understood that if we had good makeup, we would fight her less about being buried alive thousands of miles from nowhere. So in came the youthful saleswomen from the Tallahassee Body Shop (all of whom had to have special training before meeting us). I have to admit that although I knew full well we were being placated and manipulated with the soft hand of repression rather than the hard end of the whip, having mango body butter and avocado creams were a fine treat. Between The Body Shop and the puppies, it was like being in the Twilight Zone.

  Chapter 14

  My Father

  IN JANUARY 1993, my parents came to visit. They spent a month living in Panama City Beach at an oceanside motel owned by our friends Bob and Arlene. Bob and Arlene had heard about us from Sue Gambill and had become supporters of ours. Everyone who came to visit us at Marianna stayed at their motel. My folks came to see me in Marianna several days a week. These were the most extensive visits we had ever had, and they was marvelous. They took my friends and me away from the visiting room with their tales of the beach and the movies and the lives we were not living. We played cards and Scrabble and ate awful prison visiting room food. (We had gotten the prison administrators to put yogurt and bagels in the visiting room food machines. The bagels were fake, but we ate them until we were silly. It had been years and years since we had seen bagels.) My folks visited all the political prisoners and everyone enjoyed their love and support.