An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  “There’s a woman in one of the holding cells who wants to talk with you and I approved the request,” Chaplain Sheridan said. She was the senior chaplain and she definitely had the authority to do that.

  “Who is it?” I asked. But by then I remembered watching Pamela being escorted into the medical building. The chaplain did not answer.

  We walked together across the compound, up the stairs, and into the building. I was taken into the area where there were several holding cells. To call this a hospital was a total misnomer. It was one floor in an old building that housed a few medical staff, a few examination rooms, a locked pharmacy, and then several steel doors that led to what in other circumstances would be called strip cells. Typically, people are placed in these cells when they are on suicide watch, or waiting to be transferred to disciplinary proceedings, or when the authorities want them kept very isolated but not in the general segregation area of the prison. That section is called the special housing unit or, in prison language, “the hole.” The hole always connotes either punishment or protective custody. I knew that whatever had happened to Pamela was not the result of an infraction, but of bad news, either about her family or her case.

  As we walked through the holding cells, I looked through the windows of each one and they were empty. The sole piece of furniture in each room was a small bolted metal bunk with a plain mattress resting on top. When we got to the cell that Pam was in, I looked through the window and saw that she had her clothes on, but that they had taken her shoes and her earrings. She was lying on top of the bunk, eyes closed, very still. She was so quiet that I thought that she must be sedated. I bent down to the food slot, which was open, and looked in. The chaplain bent down, as well. They were not going to open the door and let us in; we could only talk through the slot. “Ms. Howard, this is Chaplain Sheridan. I am so sorry about your daughter. As soon as I can get someone to accompany you, the officers will let you make a phone call. I have Susan here.” No movement, not even a flutter.

  “Hello, Pamela. They won’t let me in. I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I’ll just sit here for a while until they take you to the phone and if you want to talk I’m here.”

  The chaplain nodded at me and then keyed the door and walked away.

  “Pamela, what happened? I don’t know why you’re here,” I said in a much lower voice.

  She lifted her head up and looked at me through the slot. Then she sat up, swinging her long legs over the side of the bunk. She did not get up, but kept looking at me through the slot. She looked pretty bad. Her face was streaked, and her normally neat braids were all twisted up.

  “Tynesha died this morning.”

  “Oh no. Oh God, I’m sorry. Did you talk to your family?” I asked.

  “I talked to my mother, who told me, and then I lost it and they brought me up here.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I don’t really know, my mom was crying so hard that I am not really sure.”

  Tynesha was Pamela’s five-year-old daughter who had been living with her mother.

  “She was jumping up and down on her bed; it was the top of a double bunk bed, and Ma was always fussing with her to stop. She got her robe caught on the hook, fell, and got hung. Mom came in and found her hung up and not breathing. The ambulance came and they couldn’t revive her.” She started sobbing.

  All I wanted to do was sit next to her and hold her. I knew that asking permission to do this would be pointless. I just watched her through the slot and kept repeating how sorry I was. Then I asked her if there was anything I could do, like call anyone, or talk to someone in the prison, or write a request to attend the funeral. That idea affected her.

  “You think I could go?”

  “I don’t know, where does your mom live? And what’s your classification?” I asked her.

  “D.C., we live in D.C. I am a low security, I have no other record.”

  “I don’t know, but maybe. It’s worth asking.” I wanted to do something useful and something specific, I did not want to stay much longer staring and communicating through a slot. “Try and get out of here; this isn’t right,” I said. “Did you say you were going to kill yourself?”

  “No, I just couldn’t stop crying. I think it freaked everyone out,” Pam said.

  I stood up trying to take the cramps out of my knees from squatting. “Susan.”

  “Yes, Pamela,” I answered. “You know I’m HIV positive.”

  I got so quiet and even sadder as soon as the words were out of her mouth. I had not known it. “No, I did not know that.” I stopped myself from saying anything else.

  “Tynesha was negative. I was so happy that she was HIV negative. I was so happy that she would have a whole life.” I felt so terribly inadequate and everything that came into my head to say just didn’t seem right. So I did not say anything. I just looked at her and tears came out of my eyes. I felt that I could not stand it. I do not know why, but there seems to be a much higher percentage of women in prison who have lost their children, either through violence and then death or through the foster care or child welfare system. So I was familiar with the kind of grief that mothers exhibit when something happens to their children. One of my best friends inside had lost her son and her broken heart never healed. I felt that awful sinking feeling for Pamela.

  I sat down on the floor cross-legged and said, looking at her through the slot, “Pamela, come here please.” She got up and came to the slot and squatted. I put my hand through the slot and she gave me hers. I pulled her hand through the opening and kissed her hand.

  “Anything I can do, just ask,” I said. I stood up and banged on the dividing door between the medical department and where we were. A CO came and keyed the door and let me out.

  Several days later, I was in the visiting room waiting for a visit when a family of about fifteen people was let in and all of them quietly took seats in one corner of the room. It was an unusually large party, one not generally allowed in the prison. When Pamela came out of the strip room and into the visiting room, the way she immediately eyed her mother from the far end of the room was as if an invisible cord was connecting them. Her mother stood up instantly and they walked toward each other and fused together as they wrapped their arms around each other. Their embrace and the feelings that I felt watching them left me breathless. There was so much pain and grief and empathy and love exchanged between mother and daughter that it was staggering. The energy vibrated around them and throughout the room. Her mother looks only ten years older than me, I thought. Her hair was in beautiful braids down her back and her darkly colored skin was very clear of blemishes and signs of age. Cowrie shells were carefully woven inside her braids. She was wearing a purple knit pullover sweater and blue jeans. Holding her daughter with such intimacy, without a shred of privacy, seemed most generous, and if she was filled with guilt I could not see it. Watching the scene, I had never seen such compassion exchanged between two people. There appeared to be no anger or blame emanating from Pam. Maybe that would come later, but her eyes were clear. Their arms encircled each other as they stood, whole bodies touching for a minute and then another and then another.

  The rest of the family was silent and stood in a circle around the two women. And then they separated. The mother whispered something to her daughter and the daughter nodded. Then the daughter turned and faintly smiled to the others. They each in turn hugged her and quietly sat down. It was one of the loveliest and ritualistic of exchanges of human emotion and particularly of grief I have ever seen. I thought, How marvelous to be able to grasp the reality that life is temporary and that things happen without reason and we can either be destroyed by misfortune or come to understand that it is all part of the picture. I felt honored that we had exchanged enough about poetry and prison life that Pam introduced me to her mother and that I could convey to this beautiful woman how terribly sorry I was for her suffering and her loss. I was happy to share, if only for a moment, in their community. How str
ange to have felt strengthened from that loss and not devastated. As my visitor arrived and the spell of Pam’s family and their emotional journey was broken, I knew that I had just learned something very important about the lifelong relationship we have with suffering and grief and the ways to respond to it, move with it, be changed by it, and not be destroyed by it.

  The HIV/AIDS epidemic forced me to live actively in the present. Becoming an HIV peer advocate pushed me beyond the limits I had established of my willingness to serve. Working against the HIV epidemic allowed me to find my own reservoir of compassion, a place that was free of all ideologies and structures. As a result, fighting the epidemic touched the deepest emotions in me. I found that touching emotion was a way to keep my heart from dying (even though people were dying all around) in an otherwise overwhelmingly sterile place.

  Chapter 17

  PAROLE

  WHILE I WAS dealing with HIV and life in general population and reconnecting with old friends and making new ones, my codefendant, Timothy Blunk, had been at Lewisburg Penitentiary for three years. He was applying for parole after previously having served time at the federal penitentiaries in Marion, Illinois, and Leavenworth, Kansas. At Lewisburg, he was closer to his roots in Pennsylvania, as I was at Danbury, Connecticut. This made doing time for Tim a little easier. He was with other political prisoners at Lewisburg, and they had a small community around which visitors and prisoners alike revolved. There was Alberto Rodriguez, one of the Puerto Rican political prisoners, and Larry Giddings, an anarchist prisoner who had come out of a radical prisoners’ support organization in the early 1970s. Larry and Alberto had been doing time for nineteen and thirteen years respectively.

  Tim had built a network of support on the outside, and he did creative and social work as a painter, a musician, and a teacher’s aide. He was planning on getting married to a woman named Mary who had become his greatest advocate and defender. He applied for parole in February 1996, after eleven and a half years in prison. At the end of his parole hearing, he was given a tentative release date of November 1996, twelve years to the month from the time of our arrest.

  All of Tim’s friends or associates were astonished that he was given a release date. Although he surely deserved it, given the disproportionate length of his sentence, his demonstration of remorse, and his clear conduct record, it was amazing that he was given a date because of his ill treatment during the past decade. Those of us who were classified as political prisoners had developed an entrenched view that none of us would ever get out of prison. It was not something we could talk about, but we all felt it in our own ways.

  I never allowed myself to think, When I get out of prison … I did not live for the fantasy; instead, I spent enormous amounts of energy dealing with the present and creating life in the present. But upon hearing that Tim had gotten a date for release, I took a flight of fantasy for him, for me, and for all the people I knew and loved inside. My flight was a freedom ride. It would hit me in the dining room; it would attack me while in a particularly rotten moment at work; it made me shake with hope that I would get out and see my mother alive; and it fueled my heart when I looked at Frin and thought I might see her again after she got out of prison. It felt like a threatening indulgence to the very secure mental structures that I had put in place to survive. These lines of demarcation functioned to limit my emotions of joy and agony, happiness and sadness.

  The idea of Tim getting out rocked my ossified world. I was thrilled for him and then for me because his release would have direct implications and help create grounds on which to argue for my release. The government had always viewed us differently because of the more extensive political history I had and the dismissed indictment from the Southern District of New York that had sent me underground in the first place. But, fundamentally, Tim and I had been convicted and sentenced for exactly the same thing.

  Tim’s date was ten months away. There was nothing to do but wait and see what happened. I did not want to go to the parole board until Tim was released. I did not want to upset any process that was in motion in relation to his parole process.

  I became a woman in waiting. I was waiting for enormous life changes, none of which I had any direct control over. I was waiting for Tim and his release and I was waiting for Frin to finish her sentence and be extradited to England. Their impending freedom now served to reinforce my incarceration. Waiting for their transitions weighed on me relentlessly. I tried to practice how I thought I would feel when Frin left. I would pretend when we went our separate ways during the course of a day that this separation was final. Then when she would saunter back into the unit or cell, I would be so relieved to see her that I would start crying. She would look at me and say, “You’ve been practicing again,” and shake her head and then take me in her arms if we were in our cell or just look at me if we were in public. “You silly girl,” she would say. But then she would give me a stricken look and we would both know that we could not predict the half of it.

  We had a lot of fun in those last months. We wrote a screenplay together called “More Than Suspect.” It was taken from a short story that I had written several years earlier called “Lee’s Time.” It was based on events that took place in Marianna prison where an African American male guard was falsely accused of raping a white female prisoner and the subsequent investigation and trial that took place. Neither of us had ever written a screenplay before, but we read lots of them, along with several how-to books, like Syd Field’s best-selling guide. We stole index cards from the education department and sat on our cell floor, writing and talking and arguing and writing some more. When we finished, we dreamed of getting the story produced so that it would help to free me, even though it had nothing to do with me or my real-life story. It became part of the mythology that we created to sustain us.

  Then, in early September, Frin’s extradition came through. The day it happened, she was at work in the education department and I was at work in the chapel. A friend of ours named Paula, who worked as the orderly in the captain’s office, came into the chapel and told me, “They are taking Frin to New York this afternoon.” My heart closed up as I overzealously thanked her for giving me the heads-up. I asked one of the other clerks to cover for me and returned to our cell.

  Frin was standing in the middle of the cell doing nothing, just staring out the window. For the first time since I had known her, there were no quick quips coming out of her mouth and no smile on her face at all. “This is it,” I said stupidly, over and over. “This is it.”

  Frin had a long, narrow cotton scarf in multiple shades of purple wrapped around her neck. She took it off and gave it to me. She then rummaged through her locker and pulled out our copy of the I Ching. She had embroidered a cover for it. I knew that she had been working on it, but did not know that she had finished it. Now she handed it to me. It had all our symbols on it—her Native American symbol, a brown bear, and mine, a raven. We had helped the Native American community at Danbury build a sweat lodge and as thanks, one of the religious leaders of the community had told us how to find our totem animals, the symbols that fed our spirits. Frin had also embroidered the beautiful old oak tree from the recreation yard. That tree was our best place, a place where we had sought and found refuge. On the side of the book were the tri-grams that made up the hexagrams that had defined our use of the text. It was quite a beautiful work of art. I started crying, making gasping sounds.

  “See the red string?” Frin asked.

  I nodded. It was in the center of the book and served as a book marker.

  “That’s from the Dalai Lama. That’s what I have been wearing around my neck. Now I give it to you.”

  This was very hard. We had talked so much about her leaving and my staying, how we would stay in communication, continue to collaborate on another screenplay, how it was not the end, and on and on. But somehow it felt like the end, as if we had deceived ourselves into thinking that the rest of my sentence would magically disappear, or that t
he prohibition against ex-felons re-entering the United States would not really be applied to Frin, or that being on different continents would not have an effect on our relationship. And yet, here at this moment, as she was about to walk out of the cell and through a series of successive doors and never come back, it felt as if we were dying.

  I quickly gave her one of my favorite earrings, which I had been able to smuggle from one prison to the next for over a decade. It was a tiny ruby embedded in a gold leaf. Then we traded watches and she gave me her earring. We said that we would trade them back one day. And then she walked out. I sat in the cell frozen, unable to move, think, react, or comprehend. I wanted to follow her, but we were extremely private in our relationship and never made any kind of public scenes. We never had and we wouldn’t now. Most people in the prison did not know that we were lovers and I did not want to be subjected to staff harassment or ridicule. So I simply sat for a long time in what had been our cell, where we had lived our lives. I heard the lunch bell ring, but I did not get up. Then Frin suddenly appeared.

  “Your transfer was canceled!” I stood up expectantly.

  “No, they told me to get lunch in the dining hall. They did not have any food back there, and the marshals aren’t coming until later this afternoon.”

  We looked at each other and started laughing.

  “That was only fifteen minutes. I don’t think I can live through the rest of my life.”

  We hugged and kissed each other for the next hour, and it was that reprieve, that totally random extra hour, during which I located a small place within me to always keep for Frin, a place that I have to this day. Then the guard came for her and she was really gone.