by Jo Piazza
“I long ago recognized that were Jesus to return, many of those imprisoned in US federal prisons today for peaceful demonstrations against US nuke weapons would be those with whom he would associate. Megan Rice, I believe, is one of those,” Mr. Love told me.
Standing, huddled in a corner, were Francis Lloyd, the local Knoxville attorney, and Bill Quigley, a dapper law professor from Loyola University New Orleans.
Thousands of civil disobedience cases are tried each year, and while the group gathered in the basement was keen to focus on the grander issues surrounding nuclear disarmament, they couldn’t ignore the fact that they were sitting on public relations gold with this particular case.
“What they’re asking for is the death penalty for an octogenarian nun,” Mr. Love declared, his voice rising in excitement and his fist rapping on the distinguished dark wood table in the church basement conference room. He wanted no less than to start a petition asking that Sister Megan receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom rather than sixteen years in prison. “Hopefully because of the buzz with Sister Rice, we get enough media attention that people all over the world sign up,” Mr. Love said.
Everyone in the room agreed that the more awareness they could bring to “the nun thing,” the better off their case would be.
“If you guys were willing to cross-dress, we’d get more attention,” Mr. Hutchinson said to Sister Megan’s male co-conspirators. “It would be the cute little nun and the not-so-cute other nuns.”
Sister Megan stayed quiet and wrapped a fleece blanket around her shoulders, even though the basement was a little bit warm. She was the only one reluctant to play the nun card. “It’s not about me. It’s about the three of us, and the message,” she quietly told me.
The nun card was a thing that commanded attention, though, attracting reporters from the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Washington Post for a story that wouldn’t have otherwise gotten much attention outside of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dan Zak, a reporter for the Post who wrote a pitch-perfect account of the break-in, aftermath, and trial, described it to me as perfect casting for the perfect news story.
“A break-in at Y-12 would have made a splash because of Megan’s age, but you add on top of that the fact that she is a nun, and people really perk up,” Zak told me. “First off you did have this older woman doing this thing, but then she was also a nun, doing something that most people wouldn’t consider nunlike at all.”
It was strangely warm for November, even in the South, and from St. John’s it was just a meandering five-minute walk across the red and gold tree-lined Cumberland Avenue to the Howard H. Baker Jr. Courthouse in Knoxville’s town center. Sister Megan was happy for the little bit of exercise. “I have to get it in while I can,” she joked, the first of many I’m-probably-going-to-prison-soon cracks she made during our time together. The Baker courthouse is something straight out of a Hollywood movie—pristine, white, and unapologetically antebellum in design. Until the mid-1930s it was home to the publishing empire of a gentleman named Chris Whittle. The four-block campus, with its 250,000-square-foot neo-Georgian building, was once the headquarters for Whittle’s nine hundred employees and hub for forty media products, including nineteen magazines and the youth news program Channel One, most famous for giving CNN stalwart Anderson Cooper his first newsanchor job. When Whittle’s empire unraveled and the scraps of the company moved in a reverse carpetbag to New York City, the elaborate campus was sold off to the federal government.
Sister Megan threw her shoulders back as she strode through the pristine white doors of the courthouse and past a statue of Lady Justice. Scarred by bird feces and wearing an odd Indian headdress, the mistress of the law faces away from the entrance to the Knoxville federal court.
No one told the nun where she should sit, so she found a practical place in the third row of the courtroom. “When you’re the guest of honor, you get to sit up front,” her attorney, Mr. Lloyd, told her. She hugged him in thanks and he guided her to the defendant’s table by her elbow. Nearly dwarfed by the great piece of furniture, she sat calmly and quietly, placing her two index fingers in a steeple supporting her chin.
The section for the audience was split into two sides like at a formal wedding, the defense on the right and the prosecution on the left. The right side was filled with gray-haired peace activists who held hands and sang “Peace Is Flowing Like a River” before the start of the proceedings. The prosecution, conservative in their well-tailored suits, glanced sideways at them with thinly masked disdain.
“The defendants know a lot of people think they’re fools,” Bill Quigley told me when he noted my own sideways glance during the hand-holding and the folk singing. “They know the judge and the prosecutors are looking down on them, but they don’t care. They’re totally at peace with themselves and what they are doing.”
That day, the defense team argued to dismiss the charges against their clients on the basis of the presumed illegality of nuclear weapons under international law. The prosecution, meanwhile, was just keen to keep any conversation of morality and religion out of their courtroom. They knew the defense would play up the fact that Sister Megan was a nun and they wanted to neutralize it from the start.
“The whole legal process is trying to muzzle them so they can’t explain what happened. They will be gagged in court and stripped of any meaningful way to have a defense,” Mr. Quigley told me. “The chances of them being convicted will be extremely high . . . even Sister Megan. They want to seem tough enough to justify themselves to other people. Nobody wants to be the one who sentences a nun to die in prison.”
Sister Megan is resilient, but she is not invincible. Just two months prior to her hearing in Knoxville for the Y-12 incident, she shattered both wrists after tripping over a box in the Washington, DC, office of the group Witness for Peace and had to have surgery on both joints. She circled them, first in one direction, then in the other, as the attorneys argued over what kinds of evidence would be allowed into the courtroom. Their arguments went on for hours, leading nowhere. It would be weeks before Judge C. Clifford Shirley would make any kind of decision, months before it went to trial, and almost a year before a jury would reach a verdict.
I had planned on staying in a hotel that night, one of the Days Inns littered along the highway, but Sister Megan wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted that I come to a dinner with the group and then stay with one of the peace activists. “You’re one of us now,” she said, clapping me on the back before offering up half her own bed at the home of a woman named Shelly. “I don’t think I snore,” she told me. “And I don’t take up very much room at all.”
For dinner we visited a restaurant called King Tut’s for what was promised to be the best Middle Eastern food in all of Knoxville. Their specialty was a Greek salad the size of a watermelon.
“We take all of our criminals here,” Ralph Hutchinson joked as he passed me some couscous.
I immersed myself in the OREPA community that night, driving for a late-night dumpster dive to retrieve a Thanksgiving meal from the bins behind Trader Joe’s and sleeping on the couch of Ralph’s ex-wife, Lisa, kept warm by three eight-week-old kittens nestled on my belly.
Dawn hadn’t yet broken when we prepared to start the journey home. Sister Megan asked that we say the Prayer for the Traveler before we began the 487-mile road trip. We clasped hands and I moved my mouth along to words I had never heard:
O Almighty and merciful God, who hast commissioned Thy angels to guide and protect us, command them to be our assiduous companions from our setting out until our return; to clothe us with their invisible protection; to keep from us all danger of collision, of fire, of explosion, of fall and bruises, and finally, having preserved us from all evil, and especially from sin, to guide us to our heavenly home. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
Sister Megan knows how to pack lightly, and she’d brought one outfit with many la
yers for the four-day trip. For our car ride, she wore the same sweater and lavender hoodie from the day before, topped off with a bright-red woolen cap and gray poncho, as she offered to sit in the middle of the backseat of the rented PT Cruiser. “You take the window, sweetie. You’ll want to look at the scenery,” she said to me through a brief cough. Sister Megan was en route to DC to spend the weekend at the Dorothy Day Worker House, while I would be in the city to say good-bye to my best friend, Matt, a Foreign Service Officer about to ship off to China for two years. As we drove through the suburban neighborhoods on the outskirts of Knoxville, Sister Megan asked me dozens of questions about what my friend would be doing in China. She told me she would pray for him.
“I’ve been lucky that I have been able to travel the world,” she told me, raising her eyebrows above the silver rim of her lightly tinted oval glasses with the energy that comes only from the anticipation of a story about to be told.
Born on January 31, 1930, the nuclear nun, as the newspapers would eventually call her, spent her first few years in Connecticut before her family moved to a wealthy block on Claremont Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City. She was the youngest of three girls, two of whom would become Catholic sisters. Her mother used to joke that she was becoming a nursery for the Holy Child order. Her father was an obstetrician who taught at New York University and treated patients at Bellevue Hospital. Her mother had gone to college at Barnard with the anthropologist Margaret Mead, got a master’s from Columbia in history, and then received her doctorate there. She wrote her dissertation on Catholic views about slavery, one of the first studies that could rightly be called African American history. Good Upper West Side liberals, her parents were both heavily involved in the Catholic Worker movement from its early days and were close friends with its founder, Dorothy Day. Sister Megan remembers copies of the Catholic Worker newspaper scattered around her house like bits of carpet. It was on its pages that she first learned about concepts like pacifism and voluntary poverty, ideas that rattled about in her young brain and made her acutely aware of the extreme poverty and unspeakable suffering taking place right outside her door.
As a Depression baby, she said, “I had a desire to try to make the world a more fair place.” The conversations around her at the dinner table centered on how to transform the lack of fairness and justice in the world, how to eliminate discrimination.
At fifteen, Megan was away at a summer camp in Maine run by the Diocese of Portland when the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
“They told us this terrible bomb had been exploded,” Sister Megan told me, recalling that her mother learned of the bombing from reading the New York Daily News as she emerged from the 116th Street subway station in Manhattan. “Atom Bomb Dropped on Japan,” the headline read.
“I had an ominous feeling that it was awful and horrible,” Sister Megan said.
By then she knew that she wanted to be a nun, mainly because she wanted to be of service to the world. At the time, in the 1940s, her options were limited. There was no Peace Corps yet, no NGO she could work for.
At St. Walburga’s Academy on 140th Street and Riverside Drive, Megan was taught by a woman by the name of Sister Mary Laurentina Dalton, one of the pioneering nuns who had volunteered to teach children in Nigeria at the time. Sister Mary was the Latin teacher but injected tales of her time in Nigeria into nearly every lesson.
“By the time I was a senior, I really wanted to get there as quickly as I could and get to Africa,” Sister Megan said about joining Sister Mary’s order, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, at age eighteen. “They were sending sisters to help begin the education of women in West Africa and so I was very much attracted to that, especially because of the incidents of discrimination. Teachers were needed there more than they were needed in the United States, and I thought perhaps I could fill that gap.”
But first Megan received a bachelor’s degree in secondary school biology from Villanova University and then a master’s from Boston College. Once in Africa, her first station was very rural, in an area where they had never had a school, let alone a school for girls. Megan and her fellow sisters opened the first school for girls in 1962. With no housing for miles, at night they slept in the classroom without electricity or running water.
She continued her work as a science teacher in Nigeria on and off for the next twenty years. During a civil war in 1963, Sister Megan was briefly evacuated to Cameroon. To flee the country, she perched on top of a boat with twelve other sisters wearing their full formal habits, long skirts flapping in the breeze as they rode the swell of the waves amidst the treble of gunfire.
In the 1970s, Sister Megan was given the opportunity to study scripture in Sinai.
“In Palestine we walked two miles every day up and down the Mount of Olives. It was quite an up-and-down, let me tell you,” she said, remembering the acropolis of the ancient Judean kingdom and the place where Jesus is believed to have ascended to heaven. She also did pastoral studies in Kenya, where she integrated Bible study with courses on justice, death, and dying.
Everything changed when she returned to Manhattan in the 1980s and started attending anti-nuclear protests. Living at the Catholic Worker house in Harlem, near her mother, who was by then living on her own after the passing of her father, Sister Megan found a home in the activist movement. When she was feeling up to it, her mother would accompany her to anti-nuclear protests. In 1998, Sister Megan was arrested for the first time while protesting at the School of the Americas, an Army school at Fort Benning, Georgia, where generations of Latin American soldiers were taught to fight leftist insurgencies. She was sentenced to six months in prison. Sister Megan arrived at the Muskogee County Jail in Oklahoma at five in the evening. The prisoners were ready for her after seeing a local news segment about a nun arriving at their facility. They were so excited to be made a little bit famous. A group came and hugged her when she walked in.
As Sister Megan told it, sixty-four women lived there in a facility built for thirty-two. “The excess women slept on mats on the floor. They just gave you a mat and a blanket and a sheet and a few little things. I was put in a pod with two women. One was a larger woman, so there was no thought of her getting off the bottom bunk. The other woman got off of the top bunk for me and moved underneath the bed with her mat,” she told me with tears in her eyes. “You just cannot imagine the goodness of those women.”
Our route out to Washington took us through the dark green Appalachian foothills, parallel to the border of West Virginia, through nameless old coal-mining towns. We stopped at a Waffle House outside of Roanoke and without asking me, Sister Megan spooned a heaping bite of greasy home fries doused in salt, pepper, and ketchup into my mouth like I was an infant. “You’ve been working so hard, you need food,” she said like the kindly grandmother I never had.
As we continued the drive, she alternated between the past and the future, reading her Bible—a well-worn book covered in hand-carved leather from a student she once taught in Nigeria—and pecking away at her iPad, a gift from a friend. She called it her “toy.”
My patience was tested five hours into the trip. Mr. Boertje-Obed slept in the passenger seat for most of the journey. Mr. Walli was partial to long and drawn-out diatribes on everything from the plethora of uneaten food thrown away each year in our country and the completely intact human skeleton he once found in a trash can, to drone warfare and conspiracy theories about 9/11. I felt bad asking him to be quiet for a while so that I could hear Sister Megan talk, but he didn’t listen to me anyway. Sister Megan was able to silence him just by saying his name.
“Michael.” She dropped her voice on the second syllable, and for the first time since I met him, Mike Walli stopped speaking and shifted his gaze out the window.
Sister Megan was struggling, trying to pull up a news article for me about the priest Roy Bourgeois, a friend and activist priest who was
dismissed from his Maryknoll order and excommunicated for his belief that women should be allowed to become Catholic priests. After five minutes of error pages, I reached over her and tapped a few terms into Google to find what she needed, making the article appear in seconds. The corners of Sister Megan’s tiny mouth curled up and she grabbed my hand. “So impressive,” she said. “You will have to teach me how to be better at using this.” Something in me softened. “I will.” I smiled. Months later I would mail her a new iPad case with a keyboard attached that would make it easier for her to type through the pain in her wrists. That is part of what makes Sister Megan so special. You feel good about helping her and want to multiply that feeling of goodness in the world.
“Are you afraid of being excommunicated like Roy Bourgeois?” I asked her.
She yawned as if it were a silly question. “I don’t believe in excommunication, because I don’t see the institutional Church as the real Church.”
She napped for about an hour after that, her breathing growing shallow as she gently snored on my shoulder. When she woke up, I was anxious to get in as many questions as possible in the remaining hour that we had together. I asked her if she was scared of prison.
She thought for a moment, curling her lower lip under the top in a way that made her resemble a wise tortoise. “No,” she told me.
“If I go, I would like to go to Alderson. I’ve never been there,” she said, tucking her hands, one with a gold band signifying her marriage to Jesus Christ and the other with a matching black band representing her solidarity with the poor, into her fleece vest. She said it in the tone that other older women might use to remark that they haven’t gotten to see the Broadway show Jersey Boys yet.
Alderson is the all-women’s federal prison in the Allegheny foothills of West Virginia. The women’s facility gained attention in 2005 when lifestyle acolyte Martha Stewart famously knitted a poncho there during her five-month stay.
