On July 19, 1973, i was taken to New York to be arraigned on a Queens bank robbery indictment in Brooklyn federal court. The trip was like a surrealistic cartoon. There must have been at least twelve cars in the procession, and a new jersey state trooper's car was stationed at every exit on the turnpike. All the cars had lights on and sirens going. A helicopter trailed us. And the pigs in the car i was in were comical. At every point they said something like ''At least we got to the turnpike." "At least we got to the bridge." "At least we got to New York." "At least we made it to the court."
Whenever they passed a police car they waved and sometimes raised their fists. When the jersey police were replaced by New York police at the bridge to Staten Island, they shook hands and gave each other the power sign. They even called each other "brother." "This is my brother officer, so and so." They acted like they were on some dangerous mission inside Russia. They were actually afraid. White people's fear of Black people with guns will never cease to amaze me. Probably it's because they think about what they would do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so much dirt to Black people-their guilty conscience tells them to be afraid. When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.
In September, i was moved from the workhouse and entombed in the basement of the middlesex county jail, allegedly because of the jail's proximity to the middlesex county courthouse where the new jersey trial was scheduled to begin on October 1. I was the first, and last, woman ever imprisoned there. It has always been a men's jail.
When i arrived i was given a dirty, scratchy horse blanket and one sheet. Thinking they had made a mistake, i asked for another sheet. "That's all you get," they told me.
"I can't sleep with that filthy thing over me. I need another sheet."
" Sorry. “
"Why am i allowed only one sheet?”
"That's all the men get. We only give one because they might hang themselves.”
"They can hang themselves as easily with one sheet as they can with two," i reasoned.
"Sorry."
For me to sleep on that filthy thing with one sheet was out of the question. I hooped, hollered, demanded they call my lawyer, and told the guard that the next time she came into my cage i was going to wrap the sheet around her neck. Finally, she gave me another sheet.
If i wrote a hundred pages describing the basement of the middlesex county jail, it would be impossible for you to visualize it. It was a big, grayish, pukey-greenish cell. The ceiling was covered with all kinds of pipes, some small, some huge, some dry, some leaky. There was no natural light, and the jailers refused to open the small windows located near the ceiling. The average temperature was 95 degrees. It was infested with ants and centipedes. I had never seen a centipede before and they scared me to death. They were huge, albino monsters and they crawled all over me.1
Female guards were stationed at the door of my cell twenty four hours a day. Their job was to sit there and look in the cell at me. They could see every move i made. The first day i moved the bed against the wall, away from the guard's surveillance so that i could have a little privacy while i was sleeping. The guards ordered me to move the bed into the middle of the floor. I refused. The next day workmen nailed the bed to the floor in the center of the cell. They even peeked through the window in the bathroom when i was on the toilet or taking a shower. When i covered the peephole with a towel or a uniform, they ordered me to remove it and threatened to take away all towels and uniforms if i continued covering the window. I didn't refuse, i simply ignored them. After a while they gave up. A month later one of the sergeants told me that i was permitted to cover the window when i used the bathroom. But only for three minutes.
There were twelve four-foot-long fluorescent light bulbs in the cage that were blinding. When i got ready to go to sleep the first night, i asked the guard to turn off the lights. She refused. "I can't see you if the light isn't on."
"How in the world can you miss me? You can see everything in the cell."
"Sorry."
They kept me under those blinding lights for days. I felt like i was going blind. I was seeing everything in doubles and triples. When Evelyn, my lawyer, came to see me, i complained. Finally, after Evelyn accused them of torture, they turned the lights off at eleven. But every ten or fifteen minutes they would shine a huge floodlight into the cell.
Then the trial started. First, motions were argued. Practically all of our motions were denied. All the prosecution's were granted. Then jury selection began before Judge John E. Bachman.
When they brought in the first jury panel i thought i was gonna have a heart attack. There were only a few Blacks speckled here and there, and the panel looked more like a lynch mob than a jury. Most of the jurors openly glared at us, as if they would kill us if they could. Half said they thought we were guilty. The other half, although they didn't say it right out, answered questions like they believed more or less that we probably were guilty. I was convinced some of them deliberately lied just to get on the jury and convict us. Most of the few Black people excused themselves on the grounds of hardship. They had children, families, jobs and simply could not afford to be on a lengthy jury trial. If ever there was a case of the blues, i had it.
"Do something," i kept telling the lawyers. "Do something!"
"What can we do?" the lawyers would answer. "We're doing the best we can."
It was true, but i just could not accept it. This was my life they were talking about. I must have bugged the lawyers to death.
"Object to this, object to that," i would tell them.
"Our objection is already on the record.”
"Well, object again anyway." I was outraged, trapped and helpless. Whenever a juror said something that revealed out-and out prejudice, the judge would try to clean it up. Poor Ray Brown, one of the defense lawyers, caught most of my fire.
"I want you to object.”
"On what basis?" he would ask.
"Don't you see it? The judge is asking leading questions." "But the judge is legally allowed to ask leading questions during jury selection.”
"Well, object anyway." I knew nothing about law then. I had never even seen a trial. I just couldn't understand how the judge could be so blatantly prejudiced in favor of the prosecution and there was nothing we could do about it.
"Why can't y'all be like Perry Mason?" i asked the lawyers jokingly.
"Did you ever see Perry Mason defend a Black defendant?" Ray Brown answered.
Sundiata was a lifesaver. He would try to calm me down and would explain what to expect. Logically, i accepted what he said, but i was still frantic.
"We just can't let ourselves be railroaded," i'd say, coming up with one wild idea after another. Sundiata would patiently explain why none of my fantastic ideas would work. After a while of participating in my own legal lynching, i became convinced that Sundiata and i should fire the lawyers and defend ourselves. In that way we wouldn't be tied to those stupid rules and we could say anything we wanted to.
"That's not true," Sundiata told me. "Even if you defend yourself, you're still bound by their rules."
"How am i supposed to know those rules? I'm not a lawyer. And i still have a constitutional right to defend myself."
"True, but you still have to play according to their rules or they can bind and gag you. Look at what they did to Bobby Seale."
Every time i looked up at the jury box, i'd argue the point again. But i also knew that i didn't know one thing about the law, and it was hard to picture myself actually defending myself. Evelyn was always repeating the old cliche that a person who defends himself has a fool for a lawyer.
As we came closer and closer to completing the selection of the jury, i became more and more upset. Then, one day, a kid who couldn't have been more than twenty was being examined as a potential juror. He spilled the beans. The judge asked him
if he had an opinion of the case and he said, "They say she's guilty." The judge questioned him further and he blurted it all out. The prospective jurors in the jury room were talking about the case, al though they had been ordered not to discuss it. The judge asked what they were saying.
"They say she's guilty.”
"Only Mrs. Chesimard?" the judge asked.
"They're saying they're Black, they're guilty.”
At that moment the lawyers were all on their feet, talking a mile a minute. They demanded a complete investigation of what was going on in the jury room. They wanted the juror asked more questions. They wanted the jurors to whom he talked questioned.
The judge immediately realized the boy had opened a can of worms. He did everything he could to avoid opening the can any further, but it had gotten out of his control. He finally agreed to conduct an impartial investigation. This time, when he questioned the jurors, he was very careful to downplay the gravity of what was going on in the jury room. But the other jurors substantiated what the boy had said. Our lawyers filed a motion asking that the jury be selected from another county because we couldn't get a fair trial in Middlesex. The assignment judge, not Judge Bachman, was to decide the motion. Meanwhile, the trial was stopped.
Evelyn told me the decision. The assignment judge had deter mined that it was in fact true that we couldn't get a fair trial in Middlesex County. The jury was to be picked from Morris County. "Where's that?" i asked Evelyn. She said she hadn't the faintest idea. Then Ray Brown came in.
"Where in the world is Morris County?" i asked him.
"Well," he said, "I'll tell you." Morris County was almost completely white with very few Black people and even fewer His panics and Asians.
"What does that mean? Are there ten percent Black people? Five percent? Or what?"
"A whole lot fewer.”
"A jury of your peers," Evelyn said bitterly.
"What can we do?" i asked.
"We'll just have to wait and see.”
"Can't we get the trial moved somewhere else where there are more Black people?”
"We can try, but don't get your hopes up too high."
I was coming back to earth, and fast.
The trial had been postponed for about a month, until January, because they needed time to secure the jail in Morristown, in Morris County.
"Maybe," i thought, "the lawyers will come up with some thing by then." I really didn't expect too much, but it seemed like such an obvious trick, such an obvious ploy, to ensure that we didn't receive a fair trial by a jury of our peers that i thought maybe something could be done about it. I was naive in those days. I knew it in theory, but i had not seen enough to accept the fact that there was absolutely no justice whatsoever for Black people in amerika. I still had some hope left. But they had taken something that was supposed to help us and turned it against us. They had used the law to abuse the law.
"Now, all we have to do," i reasoned, "is get the facts and figures and prove that they are trying to deny us a fair trial." How little did i know!
Chapter 4
Junior high school had its advantages and its disadvantages. It was more impersonal and much more confusing than elementary school, but it gave me the chance to move around and change classes, which i liked. Generally my subjects bored me, with the exception of English, history, and a newfound love of ceramics. Parsons Junior High School in Queens was mostly white. A lot of the Black kids had been put into remedial or what we called "dumb" classes. It never ceased to amaze me that the kids who were so smart in the street were always in the dumb classes.
In junior high everybody was going with some one. When girls got together to talk, the subject was always boys: who was cute, who was going with whom, who was fresh, etc., etc. A cute boy was tall, slim but well built, and usually had light skin. A boy was considered super-fine if, in addition to light skin, he had funny-colored eyes. Hazel and green eyes were the best. If a boy was popular or good at sports he usually got a play, but in general the boys we talked about were tall, not too dark, and handsome.
One of my earliest admirers was this boy named Joe. He was new in our neighborhood, from down South or somewhere, because everyone said he was country. He was real dark and had a long body with short little legs. He liked me, and, in the beginning, i think i kinda liked him too. Then everyone started teasing me, saying he was my boyfriend and saying he looked like a black frog because his legs were so short. At that age, i was worried to death about what every one thought of me. I wanted desperately to be one of the pack and i didn't want anybody to make fun of me. So whenever anybody said i liked Joe, i would deny it to the bitter end and talk about him worse than everybody else. But Joe was very sweet to me. Every time he saw me he would smile and say something nice. On Valentine's Day he gave me a beautiful big valentine and some candy. One day, in the spring, i heard somebody calling my name outside my bedroom window. It was Joe. Quickly, he put a flower on the sill and ran away. Every day after that he did the same thing. When i would see him on the street, i would smile. I was really touched by the flowers. Then one day my mother saw him at the window putting a flower on the sill.
"You tell that boy to stay away from that window," she said. "Now he's putting flowers in the window, the next thing you know he'll be trying to climb in." But she still thought it was kinda cute. The next thing i knew she was telling all her friends about it. While i was embarrassed, it also made me think i was cute. No boy had every paid me that much attention before and i loved it.
One day i was coming from the store and i saw Joe. He started walking beside me. He was kinda shy and he had never said anything to me except "You look nice" or "You look pretty." This day we tried to make conversation as we went along. Then, all of a sudden, he said, "Will you go with me? I want you to be my girl." Somehow i was shocked. Did he really think i would go with him and ruin my reputation forever?
"No," i answered.
"No," he repeated. "Why not?”
I didn't know what to say. My tongue became heavy and twisted, I started to stutter. Nothing came out of my mouth. "Why not?" he asked again. I stammered and stuttered and then, with icy bluntness, i said, "Because you're too black and ugly." I will never forget the look on his face. He looked at me with such cold hatred that i was stunned. I was instantly sorry for what i had said, but there was no taking it back. He looked at me as if he despised me more than anyone else on the face of the earth. I felt so ugly and dirty and depraved. I was shaken to the bone. For weeks, maybe months, afterward, i was haunted by what happened that day, by the snakes that had crawled out of my mouth. The sneering hatred on his face every time i saw him after that made me know there was nothing i could do to make it up to him. There was nothing i could do but change myself. Not for him, but for me. And i did change. After that i never said "Black" and "ugly" in the same sentence and never thought it. Of course, i couldn't undo all the years of self hatred and brainwashing in that short time, but it was a beginning. And although i still cared too much about what people thought about me, i always tried hard after that to stand on my own two feet, to stand by what i felt and thought and not just be a robot. I didn't always succeed, but i always tried like hell.
Mostly, when i was young, the news didn't seem real. In fact, my vision of the world was like a comic strip: In China they ate fortune cookies and the men wore braids; in Africa they lived in huts, wore bones in their noses, and were cannibals; in South Amerika they wore big hats, slept in the middle of the day, drank a lot of rum, and danced the cha-cha. The only place, besides the United States, that i could talk about with anything resembling realism was Europe. And my perception of Europe was almost as unreal. The first president i remember was Eisenhower and even he didn't seem real. My mother said that all he did was play golf. When he gave a speech on TV, we turned the channel, and, if he was on all the stations, we turned the TV off.
Only the news concerning Black people made any impact at all on me. And it seemed that each year the ne
ws got worse. The first of the really bad news that i remember was Montgomery, Alabama. That was when i first heard of Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white woman. The Black people boycotted the buses. It was a nasty struggle. Black people were harassed and attacked and, if i remember correctly, Martin Luther King's house was bombed. Then came Little Rock. I can still remember those ugly, terrifying white mobs attacking those little children who were close to my own age. When the news about Little Rock came on, you could hear a pin drop at my house. We would all sit there horrified. Sometimes, afterward, somebody would say something, but usually we would just sit there lost in our own thoughts. I guess there was nothing to say. And each year i would sit in front of that box, watching my people being attacked by white mobs, being bitten by dogs, beaten and water-hosed by police, arrested and murdered. Then the news seemed too real.
The older i got, the more i seemed to grow into myself. My mother and stepfather were having all kinds of problems. They were fussing and fighting like cats and dogs. They were like a whole lot of other Black people in that respect. They were catching hell every day on their jobs, in society, and they took their frustrations out on each other. To make matters worse, she was a teacher and he worked in the post office: she had been to college and he hadn't. As far as i'm concerned, if a Black man and woman make a marriage work in amerika, they've accomplished a miracle. Because every thing is against them. Just being poor is one of their biggest obstacles. Most of the arguments are about money. It's hard as hell to be loving and caring when you can't pay the bills and you don’t know where the next dollar is coming from. And the way that we’re brought up to think adds insult to injury. It's changing a little bit now, but when i was growing up, every white man on television was able to support his family with no particular strain. There was no need for his wife to work. Her job was to stay home and take care of the kids. Black people accepted those role models for themselves even though they had very little to do with the reality of their own existence and survival.
Assata: An Autobiography Page 9