Читать книгу An American Radical: - Susan Rosenberg - Страница 16

THE TWO-LANE highway was empty except for speeding trucks and an occasional car. It was a cold November. The ice was thick, and the sun glistened on the snow piled high on each embankment. The light, mixed with the freezing air, made the passing scene sharp and clear. We were driving through the Pennsylvania hills early in the morning. In the now-familiar black Mercedes-Benz it was a smooth ride, for sure. The windows were rolled up, the air heavy. Five hours passed in silence, and the tension rose. The driver, part of a new detail, kept watching me in the rearview mirror. The trooper in the front kept checking his revolver. The jangling of my waist chains and a sporadic cackle from the police radio were the only sounds. The phone rang and the driver picked it up. After some murmuring back and forth the driver accelerated. The helicopter overhead flew low and buzzed us. The driver said, “We’re late, but they’ll hold the plane.” When we passed the road sign for Harrisburg, I knew we were approaching our destination. I knew because I had heard that this was the East Coast departure point for the federal prisoner transport.

I never knew until I was in prison that at most major airports, in the back or off to the side, there is a military section. It is for use by all branches of the Department of Defense in case of national emergencies, for private use by those with executive privilege, for civil defense maneuvers, and for the shipping and handling of federal prisoners. We drove to the back of the Harrisburg airport, where we were screened, checked, and waved through the gate. As we passed through the rows of fences and barbed wire I thought, Dual function, to keep us in—and keep the rest out. I was sad and afraid: this was my departure from the past, from the life I had known. I was leaving the East Coast, my family, my friends, my patients, my compatriots, everything that was familiar though now distorted by the extreme circumstances of my arrest and the turmoil of the trial. Going to what? To where? To be with whom? Serving fifty-eight years in prison was impossible to fathom. I wasn’t fazed by the military presence and police intimidation; rather, what I feared was the unknowable future. The slow death that had been imposed on me by vindictive prosecution and over sentencing produced the deepest of aches. And what of the movement? I didn’t know.

We drove onto the runway toward the plane. It was a standard-looking Boeing 707. The stairs were down; ice hung from the wings. Prison guards and U.S. marshals surrounded the plane. They all had shotguns or automatic weapons cradled in their arms. It occurred to me that many of these men, these police, had probably been in Vietnam. In that split instant of surveying the scene, the full military nature of the transport hit me. Should I have tried to escape, the sheer overkill of the firepower would have been directed at me.

Then I saw a line of about sixty men standing perpendicular to the tail of the plane. All of them were dressed in short-sleeved khaki shirts and pants and blue prison-issue slip-on sneakers. They were handcuffed and chained. It was below freezing. Many were stamping their feet, jumping up and down, and blowing air that formed frost. Almost all of them were young African Americans. They had been removed from the plane so that I could be put on.

Time stopped, and thoughts began to crowd my head as I looked at these black men standing in the cold, surrounded by white men with weapons. I remembered the first funeral of a black revolutionary that I had ever attended. In 1973, a former Black Panther turned Black Liberation Army member was in a shootout with the New York City police. Wanted for bank robbery, twenty-one-year-old Twyman Myers led a rooftop chase for many blocks before being brought down by eighty bullets. His funeral in Harlem had brought hundreds of mourners, including busloads of schoolchildren from a community center in Brooklyn that was then part of the Black United Front. In one life-altering moment I watched the children pile out of the buses and then I looked up to see flak-jacketed sharpshooters lying facedown on rooftops with their rifles trained on the children.

As my mind returned to the present, I felt a unity with the men, despite the divide between us. I peered into the distance to see their faces, understanding that their history as black people had placed them there. Their journey had begun with the “middle passage” four hundred years ago when they had been originally captured as slaves, and now, in their struggle to survive and live, they were waiting to enter the modern slave ship. Knowing that these men were standing and waiting for me brought my life into sharp relief. I remembered the words of John Brown—“America is birthed in the blood of slavery”—and all my sadness turned to fury. I went hot in the cold morning.

The marshals had surrounded me and hustled me out of the car, almost picking me up to get me to the stairs and onto the plane. For hours, through the entire drive, I had not said a word, not uttered a sound, but as I stood up from the car in anger, I found my voice. I yelled to the men standing there, “I am sorry these police made you wait in the cold, brothers! I’m sorry! They didn’t need to do that!”

And for one short moment, the chains, the guns, the cold, the agony—all of it receded into the background. A man on the line yelled back: “Aren’t you Susan? I was with Ray at MCC!”

“Yes!” I shouted. “I am!”

He turned to the others and said, “She is ours! She’s Black Liberation Army!”

Another man called out: “Thank God for the BLA! Don’t worry, baby! The more they fear you, the more they respect you!”

“We will win one day!” I yelled. “Maybe not now, but one day!”

A third man said, “I know about Assata! Don’t worry!”

In the few seconds the exchange lasted, the guards turned their weapons first on me and then on the line of prisoners. The marshals began to drag me toward the plane. At the top of the stairs I turned to look once more at the dreary, bleak northeastern landscape. The cold wind hit my face hard as tears streamed down my cheeks.

The prison transport is like no other air travel. The plane is stripped down to the bone; there are no dividers between first class and coach, and there is no movie telling you where emergency exits are or how to use your seat as a flotation device in case of a water crash. In addition to my forty pounds of chains, I wore handcuffs encased in the dreaded “black box,” a wooden box that closes over the few links between each cuff and is in turn shut with a padlock, completely immobilizing the hands. The black box is always the sign of a serious criminal. Back then very few prisoners were black-boxed, and the number of women even fewer.

The prisoners who had been waiting on the tarmac were moved to their seats, and the plane took off. In the front row, directly behind the cockpit, I was surrounded by marshals whose duty it was to ensure that no one communicated with me. Every few days the transport moves hundreds of prisoners—men and women—from one place to another, all over the country. There are many reasons why a prisoner is moved. Most prisoners are moved several times during the course of their sentence. Some are being sent from their trials to their first prison, some are being sent by court order to a specific prison, others are being shipped to prison hospitals or mental units, and a few are being released.

Our first stop was in Ohio. A group of men entered the plane and the vibes, which were already hostile, got worse. This group looked like they had been through a shipwreck. Six of them were chained together by twos, and they were dirty and disheveled. They all appeared to be drugged. I heard one marshal call them the “psycho crew.” These men were going to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, known back then as the prison for the criminally insane. I could not stop turning around to peer at them. One man looked like he had been locked up forever. His beard was down to his chest, his face so chiseled that his skin was translucent. I noticed that his glasses were held together with paperclips on both sides, and so he became “Paperclip” to me. He was very tall and painfully skinny. The marshals shoved him into a window seat in the middle rows of the plane. The man next to him, a small, dark Latino, was none too pleased. He kept shooting glances at Paperclip and scowling. I thought to myself, Chill, the guy is sick. He can’t help the way he looks.

On this leg of the flight they fed us. Everyone was given a white box, containing an ancient apple, some colored juice facsimile, and a wrapped sandwich consisting of two pieces of white bread and a slab of mystery meat. The rumble of complaints that went through the passengers only got worse when the marshals pulled out their Big Macs and fries and munched in front of us.

We were to land in Indianapolis, where we would all be driven to the county jail to wait until the airlift took off again the next day. As the plane began its descent, the marshals removed our lunch boxes. Just as the pilot said, “Everyone, be seated,” I felt the air pressure drop. My stomach went into my throat and turned over. The landing wheels engaged and, in the same instant, a scream of terror reverberated through the rush of air. Air released at ninety miles an hour is one of the loudest sounds imaginable, and yet that scream cut through it and reverberated.

I turned around so I could see the rest of the seats in back of me. I took in the scene behind me. The emergency window exit was gone and the Latino prisoner was in danger of being sucked out of the plane. He had looped his cuffs around the armrest, but his body was horizontal. Paperclip had gone through the window and was lying flattened against the wing, holding on to the edge. The plane had still not touched the ground.

For a moment, everyone on the plane was frozen in time. Then a tumult ensued. The head marshal grabbed the clinging Latino prisoner and threw him into the aisle in order to reach the window. The prisoners started yelling and cheering. One marshal ran to the front, where all the others had gathered around me, since I had been deemed the greatest security threat and “escape risk.” (Good, I thought.) Then the marshal in charge started screaming at one of the younger ones. “Get out on that wing, get that motherfucker.”

The man looked at him a moment before screaming back, “Fuck you! You go out there, you fat fuck.” The chain of command instantly broke. This only incited the prisoners to yell even louder. Now everyone was standing up and almost chanting, “Go, man, go!”

The plane taxied to a stop and the marshals worked to retake control. Stun guns and batons came out. There was frantic running in and out of the cockpit, the copilot finally emerging with a pistol in his hand. The prisoners got quiet and sat back down. While the plane was still pulling into the gate, the marshals were giving each other orders to search the plane and all of us. As soon as the plane stopped, they were on the ground handing off the prisoners one at a time, shaking them down, and putting them on the buses.

The sirens outside the plane began to blast. Alarms were going off everywhere. Paperclip had vanished. A team from the Federal Bureau of Prisons came out to meet us in full riot gear, loaded, vested, and now reorganized for a hunt. The buses drove off as soon as they filled up.

I remained on the plane, watching it all happen, until they transferred me to a van that was serving as the communications post for the search. I sat in that van on the runway for hours and listened to all the radio communications, first from airport security, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the U.S. marshals, the Indiana State Police, the Indianapolis police, and finally from the FBI. After the first hour, two Jeeps drove up. A team of marshals emerged from the first Jeep holding a pair of handcuffs and a torn BOP uniform shirt. One held part of the plastic frame from a pair of standard BOP-issue eyeglasses. Out of the second Jeep came three men wearing FBI windbreakers. They were the forensics team. They took the items and drove off. While I watched, I kept thinking I would see bloodhounds. I had visions of Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier, in the classic movie The Defiant Ones, dragging themselves through the swamps with the dogs at their backs. But in the midst of all this manpower and activity, it took many hours before the lieutenant manning the radios realized that they had forgotten the canine unit. By then, Paperclip was long gone.

The next day, I was taken on a small jet to my newest point of entry into the system. The Men’s Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Arizona, had transformed a portion of its segregation unit into a detention center for women. There were over a thousand men housed there and only three women. I arrived in the middle of the night. I was bundled off the plane and into a waiting van, accompanied by dozens of cars with agents of all types. When we arrived at the entrance to the prison, there was a line of correctional officers standing at the front gate. Every one of them was armed. I was rushed past them and into the prison, behind the walls. It was now early morning and I knew that there were many more staff people than there would usually be at that hour. I hoped that they were not all there to receive me, but they were. Even still, no one made visual or verbal contact with me. I was “the package” and I was being “delivered.” Even though I was surrounded by officers inside the prison building, which itself lay behind two barbed-wire fences, I was still not in a secure enough setting for them. I was still in my street clothes—a pair of jeans, leather shoes, and a purple long-sleeved shirt with a suit jacket over it. I was happy to be dressed in those clothes; they were mine and they fit, and although I was surrounded by people foreign to me and shackled to the hilt, I still felt familiar to myself. Still, I knew that the people around me would not be satisfied until I was in a jumpsuit and locked behind a foot-thick steel door.

I was escorted into a large room that looked like a storage room, but it was devoid of any equipment or supplies. The officers locked the door and left me standing there. I was alone for the first time since leaving New York two days earlier. The reality of my situation was settling in, and I did not like it. I had seen too many cowboy hats on the way in and had felt lots of hostility. I had to assume that my reputation preceded me and that I was in for a bad time.

The fact that so few other women were there would mean almost complete lockdown, and I knew that I might be in solitary confinement for a very long time.

As I was dwelling on all these thoughts, the door opened and five female COs walked in. One of them was carrying an armful of jumpsuits, and another had a stun gun in her hand. None of them moved very quickly to remove my chains, but I did not make a sound. I really was in unknown territory and I did not know what was going to happen. I was afraid. The COs all appeared to be in their late twenties (my age), and they looked well fed and fit. All of them were white. The one carrying the uniforms dropped them on the floor. For a while we just stood there staring at one another. Then I stuck out my chained hands and said, “Can we take these off now?” The CO with the most stripes on her shirt nodded to the other officers and they flew into action. One of them uncuffed my feet; another removed the black box. But then the handcuff key did not work. Each one took turns trying to turn the key, but to no avail. It was ludicrous, but I was not laughing because the thought of their having to use metal cutters to break the cuffs made me anxious.

The tension grew until one of the COs walked out and, after a few minutes, came back with several people in tow. One of them was the prison locksmith. He was a smiling, jovial fellow who thought the whole thing was funny. He was also the first person in Tucson who spoke to me.

“Hey, girl, we won’t cut off your wrist,” he said, laughing. He took out a ring of keys and soon the lock fell open.

When he was through I looked him in the eye and just said, “Thanks, man.”

Once the cuffs were off, everything went into high gear. “Strip, bend, spread them, lift your tongue, lift your breasts, raise your arms, squat again.” And I complied—I had decided when I left New York that as long as I wasn’t having a cavity search I would comply. Finally, one of the COs picked up an orange-colored jumpsuit from the floor. It was enormous. I looked at it with disgust, particularly since the others were at that moment ripping up my own clothes and putting them into a plastic garbage bag.

“What size is that?” I asked.

“It’s a size forty.”

I just looked at them. I was a size six. At last I said, “No way, you have to get a smaller one.”

One of the COs blurted out, “We thought you’d be a lot bigger.”

It turned out to be a men’s size forty. But there wasn’t a smaller one in the pile. And so they dressed me in it, walked me from building to building through a maze of halls and passageways, all of which led to a single cell with a steel door, and there I began my federal sentence.