An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  For my first few months at Marianna, the administration spent a lot of time observing Silvia, Marilyn, and me; the United States launched the Gulf War; and the first full-blown AIDS case appeared in the prison and its victim died.

  Silvia, Marilyn, and I were confronted with a very difficult set of conditions, in which the appearance of things was more important than anything else. We had “free movement” in the building and we were allowed to possess more things than in any other prison I had been in. We had cable TV, our own clothes, and unlimited access to books that we could “donate” to the unit library. We were allowed to go outside in the recreation yard every day for several hours. At the same time our “freedom” was deceptive. We were under the total control of the prison authorities, we were thousands of miles from anyone we knew, and our isolation was extreme. The administration treated us as a bloc; special lieutenants read our mail, listened to our phone calls, and monitored our visits.

  I felt that I was suffocating in Marianna, and not even my past rituals and experiences seemed to help. For the most part, other prisoners were pleased with the “privileges” they received. Many had been snitches and had been sent to Marianna for protection. I felt that the place would erode my soul, and my spirit rebelled. One of the deepest commitments I had made to myself was that I would not allow prison or repression to erode my soul, and I felt that my soul was more deeply threatened now than at any time before. For the first time, I felt that my political will was not enough to give me the daily strength to survive.

  There was make-believe work like buffing beige corridors on which no one walked, or working as a “librarian” in a small room where there were almost no books and no one dropped in to read anything. There was only time, and it had slowed down to a snail’s pace. The only way to resist time was to use it; otherwise, it would just wear one down like sand on stone. I was beyond exhausted; I was burned out. I was so tired that I couldn’t even begin to imagine how to rethink my situation and evaluate my past actions. My sanity still depended on my identity as a political prisoner, but what that meant exactly in this new context was not clear to me. I knew in my heart that my ideology alone would not or could not save me this time.

  In early 1991, the United States launched the largest aerial bombardment it had undertaken since the Vietnam War. The U.S. forces dropped more bombs on Iraq than had been dropped in all of World War II. Saddam Hussein called for jihad; Iraq shot missiles at Tel Aviv.

  From inside, it seemed that the United States and its allies had finally finished their consolidation into a one-world system, run by only one superpower. With the end of the cold war, there was no opposition to speak of. Cuba, Yemen, and Algeria were the only countries in the world to call the war a U.S. invasion and condemn it. There was some European opposition, but not enough to stop the bombing. Meanwhile, we at Marianna were entombed in the midst of a militant and blind patriotic fervor.

  In the federal prison system during a war, the links between the prisons and the Army tighten. It is most clear during war how militarized prison life really is. At BOP factctories with U.S. Army contracts, prisoners work twenty-four hours a day to meet the increased demand for everything from parachutes to radio mounts for tanks. Many of the COs are active in the reserve and get called up in wartime. The BOP then deputizes others to act as COs in order to continue staffing the institution, and they lock the prison down for long stretches so that they can run it on a skeleton crew. Lockdown means that everyone is kept in their cells all day. Food is brought around to everyone on carts and handed to each individual through the food slot in the door. Everyone at Marianna knew long before the civilian population did that the U.S. Army had sent troops to Saudi Arabia.

  One day, a female CO, a Ms. Wilson, came to say good-bye to her favorite inmates. She was off to Saudi Arabia to staff the military brig. Her unit was one of the last to get called because the Army was just finishing its new detention centers. She laughingly said that she was well equipped for the job after dealing with us tough girls. One woman prisoner, who was always the first to take the guards’ side in any altercation between them and us, said after she was gone, “That’s a good use of her skills, working in the Army after dealing with us.” For fear of getting into a fight with any of the patriotic prisoners, I didn’t react, but the political irony of it all—the fact that the patriots themselves were not free—was not lost on me.

  Several days into the war, the atmosphere took a more somber turn: one of the COs in Saudi Arabia had been killed. The prison staff had an informal memorial in the men’s section in the auditorium. We heard about it from the chaplain, who asked us to pray for the CO’s family. Later, a group of COs and lieutenants came to our unit and called an early lockdown, screaming for us to get in our cells. “This is a shakedown,” one of them yelled. “If you act like a bunch of sand niggers, then you’re ours.” One by one they shook down the cells. They walked in and systematically took every piece of property, from toothbrushes to books, and threw them out of the cell into the hall. They cursed at us, pulling us out one by one, forcing us to spread-eagle. They went at it like that until they were exhausted. It appeared that they did not find anything worth taking. When they left the unit, they were empty-handed.

  Then one of them got on the PA system and yelled, “Listen up, convicts, we have the constitutional right to take you out to the recreation yard and shoot you all in a time of war. This has been a federal directive since the Civil War, since you will likely aid the enemy to obtain your freedom. We have the president’s order to take you out first.”

  Someone yelled back, “Bullshit!”

  Then someone else let loose a blistering scream: “We’re not fucking Arabs!”

  Finally another voice, filled with tears, was heard: “I was in the Army.”

  The COs and lieutenants left the unit with us still in lockdown. The war had reached us in maximum security.

  The BOP viewed all the political prisoners as the enemy personified. We were enemies of the state. And as abstract a concept as “the state” is to most Americans, upon entering its prisons, its inner sanctums, the concept becomes very concrete. You can lay your hands on it, feel it, touch it, and know that the state exercises its pure and rawest form of power in its prisons. The administration hated all the prisoners almost by definition and even more so those of us whose stance was against the war. They increased the repression against us by enforcing even tighter controls over us and cutting off what little connections we had that penetrated the isolation. Visits were denied with greater frequency and mail was withheld. We chafed against our chains to take an active role in opposing the war.

  Given the inflamed passions on both sides during this time, it was strange that the administration gave permission to an African American dance troupe from Florida A&M University (FAMU) to perform at the prison. The approval was granted in response to the federal government’s mandate on recognizing Black History Month. It was one of many paradoxes that would take me by surprise. I did not expect the BOP to respect advances in the social structure like the establishment of Black History or Women’s History Month.

  The dance troupe brought more color and music and energy than all sixty of us at Marianna could muster. They danced to Gershwin, Aretha, Coltrane, and Sweet Honey in the Rock. They brought rhythms from Senegal and Jamaica. The dancers were wearing African textiles, and most of them wore their hair in dreadlocks. Their drums and speed and flowing movements pierced my dead heart. I felt alive. Their free spirits brought liberation and joy. As they were packing up to leave, a woman prisoner approached me and said, “Susan, one of the dancers wants to speak with you.”

  I turned to see the tallest and oldest woman, who had been the lead dancer in several of the numbers, coming toward me. Her eyes were filled with warmth. “I’m so honored to meet you,” she said. “Halfway through one of the dances I saw you sitting right in front of me and realized this was the prison you had been sent to after Lexington.” She began crying
, and tears fell onto the African National Congress button pinned to her chest. I was stunned by the intensity that she exuded.

  I thanked her and told her that her spirit had touched me while she was dancing. She asked if she could give me a hug. As we embraced, she kissed me again and again. She said that seeing the documentary Through the Wire and learning about political prisoners in America had inspired her life. I looked around for Marilyn and Silvia, but I could not see them anywhere. She asked if she could write to me. I told her yes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a lieutenant moving, almost running toward us. I knew that I was about to pay for this encounter with the dancer and was grateful that I had been able to speak to her at all.

  The cops pushed the dancer off the floor and up the stairs. I tried to resist, but they dragged me into the medical room and ordered me to submit to a total strip search. After feeling so elated, I was inspired to rebel. I did not want to comply when the lieutenant said, “You knew her, didn’t you?”

  I laughed at him. “No,” I said, “we had only talked.” He turned and left, but the two female COs advanced on me. I put my hands up and relented. “I’ll do it.” I stripped. I had been strip-searched many times and I had always given in to the feeling of humiliation that was a main point of the punishment. This time, however, I did not let it get to me. The exchange that I had had that day with the dancer (whose name I later found out was Olibisi) shook me out of myself and intervened in my psychological downward spiral. Unbeknownst to her, that marvelous woman gave me strength.

  Chapter 13

  Breaking Rank

  EVERYTHING IN PRISON returns you to the moment that you committed your crime and reinforces the incident that landed you there. A “prison jacket” is security identification that determines your resulting placement in either a maximum- or minimum-security facility. It is based on the moment of the crime. Because the crime and its severity are frozen in time, this ensures that the prisoner is her crime. Because you cannot undo the events that have occurred, you are reduced to the greatest mistake of your life, or the most extreme behavior of your life. Those who maintain the procedures and processes of prison life do not care whether you are remorseful and recognize that you have made a mistake. People who say that rehabilitation is the purpose of incarceration are either ignorant or lying to themselves. The purpose of prison is to maintain control, not to rehabilitate. The impact of this reality on the prisoner is enormous. When you are seen only as the sum of your worst acts, then the past becomes the totality of the present and the present the half-life of prison. The deadening of the present to serve the past is a bitter reality for all those who endure it.

  I knew that I was in a struggle for my own life. I was facing years and years in prison and I felt that I had no purpose while “doing time” at Mariana. I had come from the D.C. jail with the idea of doing some kind of AIDS counseling at Marianna. I had become a peer advocate in D.C. after watching HIV-positive status give way to the opportunistic infections of full-blown AIDS; carrying women from their cells on stretchers to infirmaries knowing they would never return; calling families collect on pay phones, bearing news of illness and death; composing funeral messages and raising money for flowers; writing sentence reduction motions and early release papers only to have them denied; and calling, cajoling, and begging initially unresponsive outside organizations to support us inside.

  I had experienced a sense of purpose from organizing against the epidemic when I had been in Washington. I had learned that being an AIDS activist is a way to fight for justice, humanity, and dignity inside the walls. It is a way to organize prisoners and to resist the prison regime. It is one of the only vehicles that we the political people inside can use to work as activists within the prison itself. Fighting for the rights of people with AIDS was a way to challenge the lack of decent health care in the prison system. This lack of care showed everyone how health was secondary to security. The National Commission on AIDS criticized the BOP for its woefully inadequate programming and its medical and social neglect of the HIV-positive men and women in its prisons. Yet prison officials were obligated by law to respond to the AIDS crisis and so they allowed prisoners to work against the epidemic. If the authorities felt threatened by sick prisoners demanding their rights or reacting angrily to inadequate care, they subjected them to “diesel therapy,” placing them in transit for months at a time. The result was that you were never anywhere long enough to get medical care or appeal to anyone, including your family, and it was usually fatal.

  Constantly being bused from one hole to another hole is physically grueling and mentally draining, even for a healthy person, but it could only accelerate death for someone who was HIV positive.

  After prolonged negotiation with the prison administration, I was given permission to start an AIDS awareness group. Once permission was given, Marilyn and Silvia joined me and we conducted an awareness workshop with fifteen women for six weeks. We began by asking the women whether any of them would voluntarily cell with an HIV-positive person. Everyone said no. By the end of the workshop, however, they had changed their minds. We ran workshop after workshop until almost all the women in the unit had participated in at least one. The first time a woman came to me and told me that she was HIV positive, I felt that I had played at least a tiny role in reducing the disease’s social stigma, which was a first step in successfully battling the epidemic.

  We created a panel for the National AIDS quilt project. We tried to help women who were HIV positive but not yet sick get decent care without exposing them to threats and ostracism. Silvia, Marilyn, and I worked every day against the epidemic. Later Laura Whitehorn arrived at Marianna and added her fantastic organizing skills and her great compassion to our effort. Laura suggested, and all agreed to organize a walkathon to raise money to support a local direct-service AIDS project in Tallahassee. Having something meaningful to work on took us out of our heads and our past, and helped us maintain our humanity—the very thing that maximum security was designed to steal from us. I knew that unless I was actively engaged in the business of living, my past would become all-consuming.

  The AIDS advocacy work and opposition to the war in Iraq fueled my ability to resist the mind-deadening conditions and isolation I was facing, but still they were not enough for me. I wanted to write, but I wanted to get past writing in a journal and speak to a wider audience. I decided to enroll in a correspondence program with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and I began to write fiction. I hoped that writing fiction would get me closer to my own truth. As I wrote stories, portraits, and vignettes, I began to question myself, my assumptions, and my ideas. How do you change yourself without losing yourself? How do you question your past actions and still believe in the need for radical change? I asked myself if I had been corrupted by my support of armed struggle to make social change. How would I spend the rest of my life in prison when I no longer believed in many of the specific things that had sent me to prison, including and most importantly our own decision to use violence when we thought it necessary? The path to prison also included another decision that now profoundly disturbed me—the decision to submerge my identity to an organization. On top of that I had come to realize that the left had participated in its own marginalization through infighting and lack of democracy. How would I not become bitter? Ironically, writing fiction enabled me to answer these questions because in fiction I could explore what in my own life seemed impossible to challenge. In fiction I could examine alternative states of consciousness and find meaning in differing points of view.

  I had to loosen the mental bonds that I had created for much of my adult life. I had to take apart my own rigid left-wing ideology and hold each piece up to the light for re-examination. I had to rethink my positions about revolution. I had grown up and become an adult who believed in radical political change; I had believed that to change things meant going to the very bottom of the problem and uprooting it. The “it” was the entire socio-economic system in which we lived. I had
held to the views I had formed in the late 1960s of the need to change the government. I believed that the American Revolution was an example of a time when overthrowing a tyrannical power was an advance in the course of human history, and that the Declaration of Independence gave the people the right to rebel against an overpowering authority. I had believed that if voting did not work, I had to build illegal alternatives to prepare for the day when enough people recognized the need for change.

  That was my past. Now I had to liberate my mind from that past in order to stay alive in the present. The world had not developed as I had thought it would and the idea of radical change, however enticing, seemed almost impossible. To live for the future made no sense to me, but to live in the present with ongoing meaning demanded that I effect change in myself. These intellectual struggles were driving me to the very brink. I could have taken heroin, which was readily available in maximum security. I could have stood on line for psychotropic medication. I could have stayed in my cell and withdrawn from everyone and everything. Instead, I told my political friends both inside the prison and outside that I had to rethink my past views. I did not want to renounce anything or anyone, I said, but I no longer wanted to be actively involved in the political movement. What I meant by this was that I wanted to and needed to psychically disengage from group decision making and from working on different projects together. I didn’t want to write papers together or issue statements to the outside world as a group. While at earlier points in my incarceration, most specifically at Lexington, I had argued that as political prisoners we had to demand the right to association and recognition as a means of resistance to the BOP’s attempts to divide us. Political prisoners all over the world had fought for this, but now I did not want any association at all. I wanted independence from the collective. I did not want to be held accountable to anyone else’s opinions about how to live inside the walls and how to co-exist with other prisoners on a daily basis.