An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  For oak and elm have pleasant leaves

  that in the spring-time shoot:

  But grim to see is the gallows-tree,

  With its adder-bitten root,

  And, green or dry, a man must die

  Before it bears its fruit!

  Once she comprehended the text, poetry in the education department, especially the Prison Walls program, was banned. When several education workers went to Ms. Cotter’s office to appeal her decision, she screamed at them, calling them elitist and anti-American.

  Frin and Silvia brought films to the prison. They convinced their boss, a teacher/cop known as Mr. Z., to borrow them from the Marist College film library for an adult continuing education class that Frin taught. We saw films by Charlie Chaplin, Luis Bu-ñuel, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Orson Welles. We even saw the silent films of Salvador Dalí, which were Frin’s favorites. Women who had never seen a foreign film in their life watched them and then discussed them. The imagination unleashed during that year at Danbury was, for me, a leap to a new depth intellectually. Frin, in a most quiet way, was the main architect who transformed the sterility of prison into a splendid little island of stimulating beauty.

  While I was falling in love, the HIV epidemic was raging. In our AIDS education classes, our outreach programs, our counseling sessions, and the literature we distributed, I and other peer advocates emphasized that being HIV positive was not a death sentence. The AIDS organizations from the outside that were granted permission to come inside for programs and education emphasized it, too. But we were lying for the purpose of our own success. Before the discovery of anti-retroviral drugs, an HIV infection almost invariably led to death, so much so that the BOP built an AIDS ward for women at the Carswell Medical Center in Texas as a unit in which to die. Even in the rare instances in which compassionate releases were granted, the affected women were almost always too sick to go home, and had to enter nursing homes, shelters, and hospital wards. The vast majority of women with AIDS died behind bars.

  As lower-level participation in the drug trade became criminalized in the 1980s and 1990s, more and more drug addicts were locked up. The women’s population in the D.C. jail was moved almost en mass to Danbury. This population, 95 percent black, was a mix of the older and younger generations ranging in age from eighteen to sixty. The bulk of the HIV-positive population came from D.C., and I knew many of them.

  When Silvia Baraldini arrived at Danbury in 1994, she began an AIDS awareness group and began building an extensive AIDS resource center and library. When I arrived, I helped build the group and teach the classes. Besides Silvia, Frin, and me, the group included Kemba Smith, a twenty-two-year-old African American woman who, under the mandatory minimum sentencing guid-lines, was sentenced to twenty-five years for being the girlfriend of a drug dealer. We wrote to members of ACT UP and other anti-AIDS groups, some of whom Silvia and I had known in the political movement from the 1970s and 1980s. We secured donations of videos and organized AIDS educators to come into the prison and lead workshops. We got to the point where we were talking to the medical department about setting up a buddy system for HIV-positive women. We used ACT UP posters with political statements and pictures of condoms, and we quietly distributed information about such things as using bleach to clean needles and lesbian transmission of the virus. Our curriculum covered topics that included exposing the myths of HIV/AIDS, basic prevention education, care of HIV-positive patients, and prisoners’ rights in care and treatment.

  The prison’s psychology department was our sponsor, but we also got support from the education department and the chapel. My prison job was working as a clerk in the chapel. The head chaplain was a Franciscan nun whom I had first met at Marianna. Chaplain Sheridan hired me almost as soon as I was transferred to Danbury to work for her and help her create an inter-denominational library. She knew that I had been a librarian at Marianna. She was sympathetic to the plight of HIV-positive women, and allowed the chapel to be a resource for the AIDS work. We made use of every resource we could to push and organize for AIDS awareness. We all felt, however, that HIV peer advocacy which included helping HIV-positive women analyze their treatment options, going with them to the medical department, helping them if they were sick, teaching prevention and education to challenge the discrimination they faced, helping them file motions for treatment of early release, exceeded the boundaries of what the prison wanted to allow. The officials did not want to talk about or allow us to talk about sex and drugs or how to develop prevention strategies. They would have rather closed their eyes and pretended that it wasn’t there. We knew that we were pushing the limits that the administration had set, but we also knew that the epidemic spread through stigma and through fear of the unknown.

  We were working hard and everything seemed to be going well until one day in October 1995, when the warden extended his usual five-minute walk around the grounds into the long hallways of the recreational building. The front hall led to the gymnasium on one side and to the chapel on the other. It was the most-traveled hall in the prison. On the wall leading to the gym we had placed a poster that we had decided was rather benign: it depicted a heart pierced by an arrow that pointed to a condom. Underneath the image were the words “Fabulous Sex = Safe Sex.” The warden saw the poster, stopped, pulled it off the wall, and marched into the chapel where I worked as a clerk. I was sitting at my desk, organizing the lending library, when the warden and his entourage (wardens never walk alone, just as they never ever eat food prepared by prisoners) stormed in.

  One of his nicknames was the “Short Warden,” but some of us called him the “Catholic King,” for his professed devout beliefs. He was on great terms with my boss, the head chaplain.

  “Katherine Ann,” the warden bellowed, calling for the head chaplain.

  I went into the hallway where he was standing and I said, “Sir, the chaplain is in a meeting.”

  “You?” He shook the poster in my face.

  I tried to calculate how to respond. “That poster was approved,” I said.

  “Not by me, it wasn’t.” He crumpled it up and threw it on the floor.

  Not very respectful of the chapel, I thought. Then for a moment I forgot who was standing before me, and who I was, and I kept talking. “Warden, this is important information; people need to know this.”

  “This is disgusting, this promotes filth! No one has sex in my prison.” He was turning red. “We have zero tolerance. I know you know what that means,” he said, and then stormed off.

  The next day the SWAT team descended on the chapel, the education department, and the cell of every member of the AIDS-prevention groups. They tore up literature, pulled tape out of cassettes, and searched through books. They ripped up some Good News Bibles while examining their spines. We watched silently, knowing that the officials were merely trying to intimidate the staff who had supported and approved our work. For us, this kind of tactic was old news, and we knew that eventually we would rebuild. It served us all well never to become attached to anything, and we tried to have multiple copies of materials in multiple locations to increase the chances that at least part of our resources would escape destruction.

  At Danbury, the senior staff was easily scared and always embroiled in internal power struggles. It was a corrupt kingdom in which alliances were always shifting and petty contrivances could set off great suffering. I say “kingdom” because the warden was king; he had subjects, not prisoners with rights, and he had serfs, not employees, who did the back-breaking work required to make the prison run and turn a profit. He had an army at his disposal to compel his subjects to cooperate, and ultimately he had control over life in the face of death. Most important, he had little accountability: he had enormous latitude in the interpretation of regulations and was subject to scrutiny only from afar. Whatever legal or governmental checks and balances had been set up to ensure the safety and security of all federal institutions had long ago been so disregarded that the federal prison
s were as corrupt and mean-spirited as their infamous maximum-security counterparts in the Southern penitentiary state system. The BOP policy of abstinence-only was enforced with a vengeance by the Catholic warden.

  While we were trying to survive the many attacks on us by the administration, we decided to create a panel for the national AIDS quilt. We thought making a panel would be the most benign project we could do and would create a break from the administration’s growing fear of our work. After all, how could sewing be considered subversive? We first discussed making a panel in the fall of 1995 because we knew that the saying “If you are not infected, you are affected” was particularly true of this prison population. Everyone knew someone who was infected with the HIV virus and if they thought that they did not know anyone, it was because whoever they knew was afraid to tell them. We hoped that making a panel for the Names Project for the quilt would bring HIV out of the shadows. The chaplain contacted the Names Project local Connecticut chapter and they were given permission to bring in several panels of the quilt to show us. We were very excited to have AIDS activists come to Danbury to help us.

  The gymnasium filled up with several hundred women. We met with the quilt team in the chapel for a few minutes right before the program began. The chaplain wanted to turn the program into an ecumenical service, but we did not want to do that. The volunteers had never been in a prison and were overwhelmed by the security, the rules, the searches, and the briefing that they had had, even before they could set foot inside the place. They did not care if there was a religious cast to the program or not. They had four panels and a very organized and dramatic way of showing them.

  In the end we had a religious service because we had no choice. The choir began the program by singing “Amazing Grace.” The choir was an all-black Baptist gospel choir. If the soloist was good and everyone clicked, then they could tear the roof off. But if the soloist was off, then the whole choir could sound terrible. That day, I have to admit, they rocked the gym. The soloist, a high soprano, a young woman named Janelle whose voice was a marvelous mix of clarity and depth, not to mention perfect pitch, led them beautifully. She led them and they followed, singing more sweetly than normal, their demeanor infused with hers.

  The quilt group members were all dressed in white and as they unfurled each of the panels and placed them on the floor, they walked around in a circle, holding each end and moving in a very stylized way. As each panel of the quilt touched the ground, one of them read the name stitched on the panel. They did not have to explain anything. There was a hush in the gym after the panels were spread on the floor. We invited everyone to stand up and look at the panels. Everyone ended up forming a large circle and then a larger circle around the first panel. People were staring to see all the individual details. One panel was stitched with glitter glued to colored threads that spelled “Sarah Millner—our beloved sister,” and there were different cutouts of felt and cloth illustrating bits and pieces of Sarah’s loves and life.

  The chaplain gave a brief speech about God’s love and then we asked everyone to come up to the microphone and name someone they knew who had died of AIDS. There was total silence until finally Silvia stepped up to the microphone and said, “My friend Aaron, I miss him.” Then a woman named Zulma stood up and said “Jimmy Rivera,” and then I took the microphone and said, “Donna Nelson and Celestine Washington, and Jon.” Then an influential and popular woman who had been incarcerated with many members of her own family got up and walked to the microphone and whispered, “John Henry, my baby brother.” I thought that if this woman, whose name was Amma, could help break the silence and come out against HIV, then maybe we had a chance in combating the ignorance and stigma. Within the structure of prison life, prison families are central to how people live, how information is transmitted between the authorities and the prisoners, how privileges are doled out. Informally, Amma was as powerful as any prison official. Her willingness to stand up and acknowledge that HIV had affected her own family would have an enormous impact on our ability to get support from within the prison population.

  After this stunning display and the first public breakthrough against discrimination on the compound, we decided to create our own panel. How to design the panel was the next question. We could make only one panel, but we needed to be able to memorialize hundreds of names on it. The core group of women who did AIDS education met with the women who liked to sew. Another group met with the education department to get permission to sew the quilt panel inside the building, and get some help in collecting bits and pieces of felt and threads and materials with which to make it. Finally, it was determined that we would make one panel equivalent in size to four and that the design would replicate the inner compound of the prison with the housing units facing in. Each window of the cell blocks would be an individual panel. Women could make individual eight-by-eleven-inch sections that would then be stitched onto the big panel. Seventy women worked on the quilt for more than seven months. Fifty-five women made small individual panels, and another fifteen met four times a week to create the quilt’s overall design and creation.

  We started in September 1995 and ended in April 1996. When the quilt was finished, we laid it on the chapel floor and people came to add a name, to write a paragraph about someone they lost, or to simply observe. Hundreds of women filed through. The normally raucous prison chatter was still. I stood in front of the quilt, overwhelmed that we had succeeded in making it. The fifty-five individual panels and the names that were added as the quilt was on public display equaled 195 names, and the number kept growing. The sheer number of the dead was overwhelming. This quilt meant so much to those who made it. For Bea, Jane, Maureen, Jennifer, Frin, and the others, it was the first time that they had publicly claimed their loved ones and shared their losses in a common community.

  As we closed up the chapel and put the quilt away, I meditated about many things. My own grief was overwhelming. I personally had known more than twenty people memorialized in the panel. I thought about the political struggle that had taken place in the late 1980s, a struggle I had learned about from people I had known in ACT UP who had rejected the idea of the quilt as being too reformist and not challenging enough to the powers that were responsible for treating and stopping the epidemic. I thought that in the context of prison, the quilt was an effective symbol of protest.

  I thought about the class and racial divisions that are so great that they prevent those who should be natural allies from unifying. I thought about those who need so much more than quilts. As we locked up the chapel, my last thought was the need to figure out how we could force the government to acknowledge and respond to the suffering of all these women.

  The next day was the final day for public viewing. The following week, the Connecticut chapter of the Names Project would collect the quilt for transfer to the “big quilt,” where it would be stitched on. As I and others from the committee were getting the space ready for more women to come to the program, the head of the special security team from the captain’s office accompanied by his entourage strode into the chapel. They had a video and thirty-five-milimeter camera with them. They demanded that we leave the room and that the chaplain come to speak with them. The whole team spent more than an hour with the chaplain behind closed doors. When they finally opened the doors and walked out, no one was smiling. When the chaplain closed the front door and spoke with us, her Irish brogue got a bit thicker. “Well, girls,” she said, “it seems that the warden and the captain have a problem with our quilt. They object to the tombstone on the corner, with the quote ‘Mourn the dead, but fight like hell for the living,’ and most strenuously, they object to the purple helicopter flying over the fence, pulling the banner. They are convinced that embedded in the design is a message about how to escape.” After she spoke, she burst out laughing. We were talking about a three-inch piece of felt cut into the shape of a toylike helicopter. At that moment, I liked her better than I ever had. She was my boss and we had had several b
ad and challenging exchanges over how she implemented her chaplaincy and my view of the repressive role that religion played. But in this instance, I knew that she had persuaded them that it was a benign expression and so the quilt would not be seized as contraband.

  Prison contained so many layers of loss. Frin and I had a joke, really a refrain, for when something truly terrible or wonderful would happen. We would ask, “How do I love thee?” This would begin a litany of descriptions for either love or horror and dismay. How did I find relief from the suffering all around me and then from my own past?

  If you seek redemption, then you will have a hard time finding it. Redemption comes when you are not thinking about it at all. A woman prisoner that I knew from the compound—a poet who had shown me her work, who had discussed writing, and had read with me—was struggling with her incarceration and trying to make sense out of a senseless set of circumstances. She was a thoughtful young woman who strained at her imprisonment. Pamela Howard was twenty-four years old and had a ten-year prison sentence for selling cocaine to an undercover agent.

  I knew her from her poetry and her quiet and thoughtful manner and in how she conducted herself in public, but I did not know the facts or the details of her life. We were not close like that. But one day I was outside the education building and I heard this unearthly howl coming from the short-term living unit. I saw several women run toward the sound. A few minutes later, I saw a group of women surrounding Pamela and walking with her toward the medical building. I did not move to see or find out what was happening. I thought that her friends had it covered, whatever the problem was, and that I would no doubt find out about it later in the day. Bad news travels faster than the speed of light at Danbury. A few hours later, I was at my job in the chapel when the chaplain came into the library where I was working. She asked me to accompany her to the medical building. “Why?” I asked her. This was highly unusual and I became fearful that they were going to tell me some terrible news. But as I sorted out my own responses, I realized that if something was wrong with my mother, the chaplain would have told me right then and there.