One night Rider came to my cell and said, “Theresa is sick. She is really sick. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Rider, I think I understand.”
For five months Theresa hid herself, hoping it would undo her sickness. She wasted away in silence. She shielded herself against the rumors, the cruelty of other people’s speculation, and the pain of her mental and physical suffering. She never was counseled; if the medical care was inadequate, the social neglect was criminal. Theresa lied to keep her secret, to deny her reality. But Rider knew, and I knew. And then Theresa was too sick to stay in the cell block.
After Theresa was sent to the prison ward of the D.C. General Hospital, nothing could take away the stricken look of anguish from Rider’s eyes. Rider was powerless. The fact that she and Theresa had been lovers for nine years, both in and out of prison, did not count to the officials. It mattered nothing to them that Rider loved Theresa more than anything or anyone, that she took care of her in sickness, that she wanted to spend her life with her, or lie down and die with her. There was no compassionate release in the District then.
Theresa was initially admitted to the intensive care unit in a Code Blue state. Her heart had stopped due to complications from pneumocystis pneumonia associated with the final stages of AIDS. She was revived and placed on a respirator. In the following days, she went into Code Blue again, almost died, and was revived, but finally failed to respond to drug therapy. Theresa had been serving a nine-month sentence on a parole violation. She had been scheduled for release in two months. Nine days after Theresa left the cell block, and four days after her thirty-third birthday, Theresa died while shackled to the bed.
The following day, Rider was at my door, telling me that the funeral was Friday. She asked me whether she should try to go—could she go, would it be possible for her to go as her husband, or her wife, or anything? “After all,” she said, “I was real family. If I had been free, I’d have been with her every minute.”
If you are in prison and a family member dies, you generally are not allowed to attend the funeral. It is a question of security, not humanity. But if a “grief furlough” is approved, you go in chains, accompanied by armed marshals to the funeral home, where you are allowed merely a few moments to view the body alone.
Rider decided not to fight it out, not to go. Then she held out a plastic bag filled with jail-issued medications. Cream, pills, and suppositories. She said, “Can you explain all this stuff to me?” The question of what had happened to Theresa was only partially answerable. But now Rider had to know. With their specific instructions, the pills and cream made it clear. AZT, acyclovir, and steroid cream were the only approved medications for prisoners with AIDS. They had been dispensed irregularly and with no monitoring. I explained each medication and its use.
As Rider stood at my door with tears streaming down her face, she said, “I knew she was sick, but I didn’t know for sure she would die.” And then the pitch in her voice dropped to a whisper. “You know, I am a very open-minded person. I would never have left someone sick, not ever, and never her. She was, well, you know, I love her.”
If Theresa had lived longer, Rider would have tried for a hospital visit, to take her in her arms one more time, tell her it was all okay and say good-bye. Instead, we called a friend of mine and asked them to send her roses. The note Rider included was “To Theresa, My love always, Rider.” We heard that Theresa’s pimp was not happy, but kept the flowers anyway.
One night after many days of overcrowding and out-of-control tempers, there was a shakedown. We heard the COs, all twenty of them, marching down the hall leading to the block. Of all the conditions in the jail, the shakedowns were the most invasive, the most enraging, and the most irrational. Of course, there were drugs. Dope hit the unit every week. Of course, people made weapons. Of course, there was contraband food from the kitchen. We saw the cops sell dope, and a weapon could be fashioned from an aluminum can from the commissary. The COs would come suited up in combat gear. Each cell was hit one by one, and mine was always first. Having heard them well in advance of their actual arrival, I had already flushed my contraband coffee grinds—my big illegal item.
“Step out,” they ordered. I was handcuffed and told, “Spread.” This meant facing the wall and stretching out my arms and legs. I was patted down and told to stand next to the door. Four of them went in. They searched every single thing. They unscrewed the lightbulb, they climbed on the top bunk and looked at the windowsill, and they went through every legal and personal paper one by one. They dragged the mattress onto the tier. They took shampoo and talcum powder and poured them out onto the mattress. They took scooped peanut butter from an old jar and smeared it on my personal photographs. They uncuffed me, put me back inside, shut the door, and repeated the process in every cell down the line.
Everyone was yelling. In the cells that hadn’t been hit yet, women were standing and watching. The violence seemed to increase with each cell. And then they got to the last three cells. They popped open the door and one of them roared, “Step out!” The woman inside was brushing her teeth. One of them stepped in and grabbed her. She spit out her mouthful of toothpaste and saliva on him. If they had waited ten seconds she would have stepped out on her own. But she was disobeying an order, so four of them began to beat her up, with all the rest of us watching.
This small woman fought back. Everyone was hollering and throwing things out of their windows. An egg went flying and hit one of the guards. Four of them dragged the woman up the stairs and into the entrance to the block. The cops had bloodlust in their eyes. In the hall they couldn’t get the cuffs onto her. Her fury matched theirs. Eventually they overpowered her and carried her off. I had never before seen that level of brutality directed against a woman. We were all crying from anger, frustration, and fear. And yet in the D.C. jail, it was almost normal. It was not extreme—a little more brutal than usual, but only a little. To administer by fear and control by terror was a tactic that was understood by the prisoners; it was a natural way of life, inside or outside. I cried because I didn’t know how to resist that level of dehumanization.
Amid the wreckage of my cell, I spotted a book of poetry on the floor. I found the well-known poem by Langston Hughes, “Harlem,” the one that begins “What happens to a dream deferred?” I stood at my window and in the pulsating silence, in the aftermath of what we had just been through, I read it at the top of my lungs. No one said anything. Then a single voice started singing “Amazing Grace,” and then another and another until there were many voices. Everyone knew the words. It was a most beautiful rendition, the richest I had ever heard. And as the sound rose and fell I remembered hearing somewhere that that song had been written by a slaver, a ship captain who experienced a dramatic conversion and later spoke out strongly against slavery. “I once was lost, but now am found.”
What I was learning in those endless days at the jail was the relentlessness of prison and oppression and the constant abuse of authority as a way of life. To lessen one’s expectations about the quality and content of life is a terrible thing. In prison one faces a direct attempt to destroy the human spirit. More than anything else, life in the D.C. jail was designed to dehumanize us in order to enslave us.
No nation can enslave a group of people for hundreds of years, set them free—bedraggled and penniless—pit them, without assistance, in a hostile environment against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the gap between the heirs of the two groups to narrow. Lines begun parallel and left alone can never touch.1
Living inside the community that has developed on that unequal parallel line transformed my eyesight, my heart, and my sensibilities. Living amid the suffering, the violence, and the beauty of black people, experiencing their genius in multiple acts of compassion and tradition, and witnessing the physical and psychological damage that results from racist oppression changed my entire life. For the most part, the men and women in that jail were effectively “disappeared.” They wer
e exiled from the free world, with little chance of making their way back. The jail was a warehouse, as most prisons are. When life is lived where human emotions are always right on the very surface, and where any provocation can set off an explosive event, the tension and pain are never ending. There are moments when it feels like you have been hurled at a brick wall and all your bones are broken. At those times you can only pray to whatever you pray to, and hope that your bones knit so that you can go on another day.
My associates and I were not similarly ground down and thrown out, in part because we were a political group and because we were of the white middle class—and even in those most profoundly appalling and anguished conditions, that made a difference. We had come from a movement; we had family and friends. We were connected to others around the world in similar circumstances, and we built upon those connections. Without them we surely would not have survived.
There were political prisoners all over the world struggling for recognition, for freedom, and for justice. In South Africa, the seventy-five years of the African independence movement and the forty-year struggle against apartheid were coming to fruition. All throughout 1989, the Botha government was confronted with worldwide condemnation. The prisoners in Robben Island and all the other jails in South Africa were organizing. The mass demonstrations of millions in Africa and around the world were slicing through the steel girders of the most vicious and racist system in the world. There were rumors of Nelson Mandela’s release.
In January 1990, the Velvet Revolution released thousands of prisoners all over Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia thirty thousand, in East Germany and Hungary twenty-two thousand each—all were freed by governmental amnesties. The European Parliament banned the death penalty, and the UN passed the “Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners.” The crumbling of various social systems, the protest against others, the ending of civil wars in Central America—these events were facts. We were entering a different world. It was a world of post-national liberation, a post–cold war world, and a world turning into … what? We would soon see. Yet the oppression in our own country continued. The gap between our narrow four-walled world and the heaving of change outside at most moments seemed unbridgeable. And then on February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela, the single most important political prisoner in the world, walked arm in arm with his wife, Winnie Mandela, across a prison yard into a waiting Mercedes, drove to Cape Town, and addressed hundreds of thousands of South African people, an event twenty-seven years in the making.
At that moment, the chains fell away from every prisoner around the world. His freedom was ours, his victory ours. The project of human liberation that was repressed, no matter where in the world, breathed free in that instant. On my block, we watched his walk to freedom on television. The jubilation was extraordinary. A friend of mine named Celeste sat next to me. Celeste was a brilliant and thoughtful woman, and a twenty-year dope fiend. Her influences and the people she talked about were blues singer Billie Holiday, the jazz musician Charlie “Byrd” Parker, and the playwright LeRoi Jones (whom she refused to call Amiri Baraka). With tears streaming down her face, she said, “Thank God somewhere in this world there is an African who makes one want to live, who gives our children a model.” Her wet ashen cheeks made her blackness blacker. “I lived to see this, thank God.” Then she turned, facing me, and said, “I have AIDS.” She whispered it. I hadn’t known.
Later, I thought how Celeste had waited for the right moment to tell me. And I thought that there are some events in the course of one’s life where everything one desires is crystallized into pure joy—a joy that reaffirms the spirit and potential and holds out the reality that this world can be wondrous, and just. And I thought about how these events are often brought about by the collective work of the known and unknown, of thousands, even millions commingling their efforts. Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom was one of those.
Chapter 11
Cancer
ONE MONTH LATER, in April 1990, Alan was diagnosed with a recurrence of lymphoma. He had first been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma while in custody in 1986. He had noticed an enlarged lymph node under his arm and had had to fight tooth and nail for a diagnosis and treatment. Up until this point in his incarceration in D.C., his cancer had been in remission for four years. He was supposed to get CAT scans every six months to monitor the remission, but that had not happened. He had been seven months past due for a scan when he felt a mass, this time in his abdomen. He said it was the size of a meatball.
Immediately, the lethal nature of neglect that served as prison health care went into effect. The jail did everything it could to hinder his fight for life. He could not go to the hospital because there was not enough staff. He could not get the right tests because no one could schedule them. He was not allowed to move to a different unit because it was not secure enough, and on and on. There was an air of premeditation in all of it. It took organizing and intervention by those on the outside to get Alan the minimum level of care.
Alan had spent the past two years living in a unit under the hardest and the worst conditions. The men’s maximum-security block was in an utter state of turmoil. Every week there were fires, flooding, and the whole tier was maced. He got even less sleep than the rest of us and almost never went outside. The stress, the anger, the constant waiting to go on trial, the uncertainty of whether he would get another forty years added to his sentence, and the denial of parole after he was already eligible all combined into what felt like a fait accompli.
Everyone was sick. Marilyn had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, Laura was sick with migraines, Linda had developed asthma, and Tim repeatedly had pneumonia. But Alan’s cancer was life threatening. We tried to joke—we called it a “war of attrition” and we said we were the “attrited”—but for us, Alan’s illness was a deadly serious matter. We asked our lawyers to begin discussions with the prosecution. We wanted Alan sent somewhere else for care and treatment. The medical negotiations began, but the prosecution fought to keep him in the filthy D.C. jail and have him treated at the D.C. General Hospital. We wanted him to go to either Georgetown Hospital or to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
The government’s appeal of our successful double jeopardy motion was still in court. We thought a decision would be issued at the end of the summer of 1990. Alan was too sick and could not stand trial. The estimate for his return to medical fitness was now nine months away in January 1991. The prosecution’s case was weakening if only three women remained in the case without evidence of weapons or explosives.
The statistics were not good. Having cancer or AIDS or any other life-threatening illness in prison creates the greatest fear inside, the fear of dying. For us, it represented “parole by death.” At the time, I wrote: “I chronicle Alan’s illness to keep a record of the malevolence of the authorities and to remember the repression that has been targeted against him. I chronicle this because the saying that the attacks on one are an attack on all and without unity there can be no victory is a truth we all put into practice and lived through.”
The story ran like this:
Finally having been permitted to receive care, Alan was sent to D.C. General for a CAT scan. The oncologist said the results were normal. Alan noticed that the date on the scan was 1988. The doctor retrieved the current scan and noted an abnormal swelling in nodes located near the iliac, deep in the abdomen. The doctor said it was nothing and not to worry. Alan argued for another scan in a month. Eventually, the doctor agreed. Later that night, Alan did a self-exam and located a mass in the area.
In May 1990, Alan was given a biopsy that came back positive for lymphoma. He was told by the security personnel who accompanied him to D.C. General that if he were not a doctor himself he would never have been diagnosed at all. In mid-May, Alan began experimental chemotherapy conducted by Georgetown oncologists at D.C. General Hospital. The government refused to allow him to go to Georgetown.
In June, discussions began with ou
r lawyers and with the government about a possible deal so that we could avoid a trial and get Alan moved. On June 17, Alan was returned to the jail. He had eight days between chemo treatments. He was getting extremely high dosages of an experimental combination of drugs and he was profoundly weakened by it. Chemotherapy destroys white blood cells; consequently, Alan was in constant danger of becoming septic. He was given steroids to ward off septicemia. He was housed on the medical ward of the jail, but there was an active tuberculosis epidemic on the ward and no one took preventive measures. This was not a safe place for him to be.1
On June 23, Alan was back in the hospital. He was taken abruptly off steroids by an intern. As a result, he went into adrenal shock. If he had been septic he would have died. After being dosed with steroids and antibiotics, he stabilized. This was the closest to death he had ever been. This is how lymphoma patients die—from the side effects that cause infection that result in death.
On July 26, Alan sent us a letter from the hospital. He knew we had made a deal, in part to ensure his continued medical treatment under better conditions. The deal was that Marilyn, Laura, and Linda would plead guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of bombing—the bombing of the U.S. Capitol. Tim, Alan, and I were dismissed from the case. The other proviso to this plea was that Alan would go to Rochester to the BOP Medical Center and be treated at the Mayo Clinic.
An American Radical Page 16
