An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  My parents had struggled on from the horrors of Lexington and the near death of Alan Berkman, whom my father absolutely loved, through my father’s own prostate cancer to my mother’s transformation into a public speaker on U.S. political prisoners. They embodied grace under pressure and were simply and completely amazing. They never lost their cool in front of the cops; they gave respect and demanded it in return. Even the worst of the correctional officers had to speak to them with decency. My parents had come to believe that my friends and I were in fact political prisoners. They thought we were all extremists who had made irrevocable and costly mistakes—we had been “stoopid,” as my mother put it. But even when they were angry with us, they believed that we were motivated by deeply held views on justice and racism, and that we wanted a world of equality and peace. One could scoff and say, “Of course they were like that—they are your flesh and blood,” but no other Marianna parents were as committed to us as they were. Many of the political people made peace with their parents and brothers and sisters, but my parents were a special gift in my life and in theirs.

  Both before and after that month-long visit, I talked to my folks once a week on the phone. For almost all the years up until then, I would call collect and we would talk in what I came to think of as “repression snippets.” Every conversation was listened to and recorded. Anything deemed irregular was investigated. In every prison I was in, the COs knew my business from the tapped phones. But in those snippets my parents and I succeeded in conveying our feelings, which strengthened our understanding and thus allowed me to continue to resist.

  In none of our visits, phone conversations, or letters did my parents and I ever talk about my getting out. Instead, we talked about everything and everyone else but that. I do not know if my parents thought I would do a life sentence. I think they believed that eventually I would get parole. They rarely revealed the pain they felt about my incarceration, and when they did, it was not with an intention to hurt me. During the first years, they were angry. During our visit at the Manhattan detention center right after my sentencing, my mother had sat furious but stone-faced, refusing to utter a word. She said later that she had been angry at how predictable it all seemed, and that my radicalism had been played out by script, in which she was an unwitting but central actor. But my mother understood that the government would treat me with a massive amount of security overkill, and her anger at that eventually overshadowed her anger at me.

  In those Marianna visits we began to sort out the prior years of incarceration. We talked about my parents’ experiences of Lexington and D.C. and my own. Three years earlier, when I was in the D.C. jail, my parents and I had finally won the right to a contact visit. My mother had not touched me in almost three years, and all she could do the entire time was grip my knee until it was black and blue. Being able to have physical contact with me distracted her so (all she could think about was how bony my knees were), that she forgot to tell me that my father had cancer. In a Marianna visit, my father told me how he had thrown up after their first visit to Lexington. Yet in telling me all this, my parents were not trying to make me feel bad. As a result of these conversations and in the more relaxed visits during their stay in Florida, I began to gain insight into their suffering and to see the consequences of my choices. They had embraced all of it with dignity, but doing so cost them a high price.

  My father recounted some of the experiences that had helped him cope with my imprisonment. He had, for example, gone to Puerto Rico on a speaking tour organized by the Committee to Free the Puerto Rican Prisoners of War; I had been given honorary citizenship from the independence movement and he had accepted it on my behalf. In 1990, my father, who was not a religious man, met Rabbi Marshall Meyer at the B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, two blocks from where my parents had lived for over thirty years. The social action committee of B’nai Jeshurun was showing the documentary film about Lexington, Through the Wire, and the rabbi and my father were on the panel.

  My father told the rabbi that he had last been in a synagogue to bury his parents, but as a nonbeliever he felt far removed from organized Judaism. He knew from his organizing experience with the Puerto Rican independence movement that having religious community support was crucial to its success, but he said that the organized Jewish community was too self-absorbed and too preoccupied with Israel to support U.S. political radicals who had resorted to illegal and violent means. It was many years in the past from the days of the black and Jewish alliance of the civil rights movement. Yet in Rabbi Meyer my dad found a kindred spirit, a man of prophetic and joyous influence. It struck my father dumb, he told me. He went back to the synagogue, for the small measure of peace it gave his raging soul. He stood at the back of the pews and listened. Friday nights, he would revel in the celebratory practices of Shabbat and, being a man who loved to dance (his friends called him “Gene” for Gene Kelly), he joined in.

  Rabbi Meyer had fought for the disappeared of Argentina. He had struggled to secure human rights for Argentineans affected by the junta-led “Dirty War,” in which over thirty thousand people were tortured, killed, imprisoned, or exiled during the late 1970s and early 1980s. He understood prisons and he accepted my father’s view that his daughter was a political prisoner being repressed by the Reagan and then Bush administrations. At Rabbi Meyer’s suggestion, his student and friend Rabbi Rolando Matalon began to work in our defense. Roly, as we came to call him, was himself Argentinean and completely understood the power confronting us.

  My parents had been longtime Upper West Side Democrats. They had helped to found the early anti-nuclear organization called SANE and the antiwar organization Peace Now, and they were friends with Democratic Party members. They had supported Congressman Ted Weiss and later Jerrold Nadler. As fate or luck would have it, Nadler was a member of the B’nai Jeshurun congregation. Upper West Side politics and connections were a world away from Marianna, yet there were people there who understood the harsh conditions and treatment, the injustice of disproportionate sentences, and the aftereffects of psychological torture.

  In early April 1993, a few months after their long visit with me in Florida, I learned that my seventy-five-year-old father was selling his dental practice and going into a semi-retirement of sorts. This meant that my mom and dad would have more time to spend in their country house on Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Connecticut. On one of my weekly calls to them, I reached them there.

  “Mom, how are you? What’s happening? How is the country?” I asked.

  “Your father is gardening,” my mother said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “He’s never gardened in his life. He has raked a lot of leaves and shoveled a lot of snow, but gardened?”

  “What is he planting?” I asked.

  “Your father saw these crocuses and daffodils, and they need to go in the ground in April, but the ground is still frozen.”

  We laughed and went on exchanging news. When I hung up, I thought about my father and his complete dedication to life. I thought that he probably decided that because he was semi-retired he should take up new hobbies and that creating beauty was probably one of the better ones he could choose. I imagined he would become a great gardener.

  The next time that I called, they were still in Connecticut. My father said, “I hurt my back, but I sure did plant those flowers, in frozen ground and all.”

  “Ah, but was it worth it?” I kidded him.

  “We’ll just have to see in July, won’t we?”

  My mother told me that my dad couldn’t be too injured because he was still playing golf. But by the end of April, my dad’s back was worse, and although an X-ray showed nothing, the doctors at Danbury Hospital had ordered an MRI. He went for the test at the beginning of May, but he had such a profound attack of claustrophobia that the technicians had to stop. He told me that he felt as if he were being buried alive and he panicked. There were no results from the incomplete test. At the beginning of June, my father was in such sev
ere pain that he and my mom went back to Danbury Hospital. He could barely drive. When the doctors looked at the X-ray, they ordered immediate back surgery. He had a malignant tumor that had snaked up and down the inside of his spine. To get to the spot, they had to remove pieces of his spine and replace them with metal tubing.

  A phone conversation with my mother revealed the gravity of his situation. I think I asked what the prognosis was, although it seemed obvious. She said she had no idea. I hung up the phone, went to the law library, and typed a request to visit my father. I photocopied it and put the copies into envelopes to the unit manager, the chaplain, and my lawyer, Mary. I was more than aware of the BOP’s policy regarding visits to dying family members, having written countless requests on behalf of others over the years. A prisoner may request a two-hour deathbed visit or (and the “or” is big) attendance at the funeral. A prisoner may not request both. If granted permission for the visit, the prisoner must pay the salary of the accompanying security detail. The payment must be made up front and in cash. In less than one in a thousand cases, the BOP will let a low- or minimum-security prisoner take a death furlough unaccompanied by security.

  In the middle of June, I went to Ms. Nolan, the unit manager, and repeated my request in person. Ms. Nolan already knew about it from the transcripts of the taped phone calls. Knowing this made me feel more violated and invaded than surveillance normally made me feel. She opened my “cop-out” in front of me. A cop-out is the first level of request, grievance, or complaint initiated by a prisoner. Once in the Tucson FCI, I had seen a unit manager’s office in which every inch of wall space, from the ceiling to the floor, was papered with cop-outs. It was the manager’s way of saying “Don’t ask me for a thing.” For the most part, a cop-out was not worth the paper it was written on. But for the persistent among us, those with a sense of self, filing a cop-out was the way to begin a paper trail.

  Ms. Nolan sat behind her desk with a long shatterproof, bulletproof window at her back. She always repeated to anyone who entered that it was “state-of-the-art” glass. The view was a straight look onto Marianna’s double electric fences with their multiple rows of razor wire. Off to the side, at a break in the wire, was a low tower next to a gate. In the distance was the officer and visitor parking lot, and past that was arid land as far as the eye could see. Except for the clear sky above all the metal, it was a most depressing vista. Whenever I stood facing Ms. Nolan in that office, I trained my vision to look above the fences to get a clear view of an unfettered sky. I was always longing for a pure horizon.

  Standing there that day, I wondered, Can you like your enemy? Even though Ms Nolan’s purpose was to keep us all tightly locked up, and her training dictated that she rule as if presiding over her own little fiefdom, I could see her humanity. I could see that, for all her power over us, she was big and overgrown and just as insecure as could be. She always wore flowery or patterned dresses that yelled, “See me.” Her nickname, in fact, became “Big Dress.” Despite being a tough Texas woman, she, too, was out of place in the midst of maximum security. Her marriage had failed, her career was not challenging, and she was trying to raise a son in the middle of the no-man’s-land we were all in. She said she was a Southern Democrat, a risky claim given where we were. And for all those reasons, and whatever other inexplicable reasons she had, she saw in all of us something that she could not help but like and respect.

  “I want to see my father,” I said. “It is very important to me.”

  “It’s okay with me,” she replied.

  I thought that her response was a trick, that having been informed about the situation she already knew I would never go anywhere. I stood there burning.

  “Really, it has my approval,” she went on. “But you need to get me a lot of information. I need a certified letter from your father’s primary care doctor verifying that he is dying and estimating his life span. I need to talk to another family member assuring me that they will pay for the cost of the security detail, and I need a letter from the hospital stating that he is actually there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You think it can be approved?”

  “I’ll get it approved.”

  It was hard to believe her, but I wanted more than anything else to think she was telling the truth, and at least she had not given me an immediate and flat-out no. I knew that she would have to go to the highest echelons of the bureaucracy of the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice, but she said she would try. I left her office thinking it was against the odds, but it was nevertheless possible. I desperately wanted to see my dad.

  I was not able to speak to my father for a few weeks. He was always in rehab when I called. I assumed that he was dying and that, without parts of his spine, he would be permanently immobile. But he had announced to my mother and his doctors that he would walk again, and with all his might and will he was working at it.

  The next few months felt like one long march. Every day I woke up thinking about my dad and every day I strained harder against my incarceration. The line between my acceptance of my circumstances and anger at those very same circumstances of confinement grew with time. The mental accommodations I had made to accept my circumstances and “do time” as productively as possible were being shattered bit by bit by my father’s impending death. I came to understand how precarious those mental acrobatics really were. I was still drawing from a muted well of hostility, and I had to keep myself from jumping Ms. Nolan every time I saw her. She merely kept repeating that things would be fine.

  My father left the hospital at the end of July. He needed full-time care, and parts of the house had to be remodeled for him. He was paralyzed from the waist down, but the fact that he could use his upper body at all indicated remarkable physical progress. I could not imagine him unable to stand upright. My father had been a very physical man. He had been an all-around athlete, a golfer, a tennis player, a champion Ping-Pong player, a swimmer, and above all a very good dancer. As a dentist, he had stood on his feet his whole career. Even as my mother relayed his progress, I could hear the anguish in her voice. Neither of us broke down, at least not on the phone.

  I called one day and my father answered. I was flooded with such relief that I had to sit down. I got a folding chair from the common area and set it in front of the phone booth.

  “Susie, how ya doing?” He was shaky but definitely alert.

  “Hey, Dad, thought we’d lost you there,” I said with a smile in my voice.

  “Not yet, no way. I’ll be golfing again.”

  We chatted for a while, and then my dad became serious.

  “Susie, I’ve been thinking a lot about you and all the others, and I want you to know that the last ten years have been really important to me, too. You know, because of your being in jail, I have met a whole group of people that I would never have met otherwise, people who have shown me that humanity and solidarity and love are the most important qualities. I haven’t always agreed with you, and at times I’ve violently disagreed with you and all your friends, but with all your sacrifices, you all have made me proud to be associated and proud to be your father.” He went on, gaining strength with each breath. “Susie, don’t take this wrong, because I am deeply upset at the terrible suffering and deprivation, but you all have restored my faith in human beings.”

  Tears were spilling down my cheeks.

  “Barbara, Alan, who had survived his bout with cancer and been released, Mary, and the others who have visited me in the hospital gave me the most love I have ever felt.”

  I could hear from his manner and the formality that was coating his voice that he had been preparing to tell me this. My father wrote notes to himself whenever he had important things on his mind and in his heart. He had told me that he did this because he would get so emotional that he would forget what he wanted to say, and that writing things down made him clearer.

  “Where are you?” I asked, wanting to get a visual picture of him in my mind.

  “I’m
in the bedroom in the back, your old bedroom.”

  I told him that what he had just said was very important to me, but that I had already known it from all his actions and all his work. I said that I felt his enormous heart enveloping me all the time. I told him that I was still getting letters from other people behind the walls who he had visited, or sent money to, or had supported by treating their families as a dentist. I told him that I would get out of prison one day, I could not say exactly when, but I would get out.

  He said, “I am so happy to hear your voice. I have missed you so.”

  That was when I started really crying. I had to get off the phone. “Dad, someone wants the phone, I gotta go. I love you. Get better.”

  “Susie, give my love to all the women.”

  “Right.” I hung up and went to my cell. Wrung out, strung out, and hurting more than I could stand, I threw myself on my bunk and cried and cried and cried.

  Laura came looking for me. Laura always helped make things feel lighter—with humor and warmth, she took on and shared my burdens and pain. She did it with everyone she was around. It was as though she was a natural weightlifter for whom no burden was too heavy. Sometimes I thought her heart would burst under all those loads. But it never did. Her magnificent spirit radiated compassion.