Assata: An Autobiography (10 page)

You read your bible
but god never came.

Your daddy woulda loved you
but what would the neighbors say.

They hate you momma
cause you expose their madness.
And their cruelty.
They can see in your eyes
a thousand nightmares
that they have made come true.

Black woman. Baad woman.
Wear your bigness on your chest like a badge
cause you done earned it.

Strong woman. Amazon.
Wear your scars like jewelry
cause they were bought with blood.

They call you mad.
And almost had you believing that shit.

They called you ugly.
And you hid yourself
behind yourself
and wallowed in their shame.

Rhinocerous Woman-
This world is blind
and slight of mind
and cannot see
How beautiful you are.

I saw your light.
And it was shining.

Most of the women benefited from the "riot," though. Over the next few days almost everybody was released or sent to some kind of program. The jail was practically empty. It's strange how things work. When it suits the government's interest, they put people in jail for rioting. And when it suits their interests, they let them out of jail for the same thing. Afterward, the outer door to my cage remained shut at all times. This was no great deprivation since it had remained closed most of the time before anyway.

One day they brought me a big bushel of stringbeans. (They grew a lot of their food at the workhouse. The men worked in the field.) "Here, we want you to snap these stringbeans."

"How much are you gonna pay me?" i asked.

"We don't pay no inmate nothin', but if you snap these beans we'll let your door stay open while you snap them."

"I don't work for nothing. I ain't gonna be no slave for nobody. Don't you know that slavery was outlawed?"

"No," the guard said, "you're wrong. Slavery was outlawed with the exception of prisons. Slavery is legal in prisons."

I looked it up and sure enough, she was right. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution says:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punish ment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Well, that explained a lot of things. That explained why jails and prisons all over the country are filled to the brim with Black and Third World people, why so many Black people can't find a job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they know how. Once you're in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don't want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions. License plates alone would amount to millions. When Jimmy Carter was governor of Georgia, he brought a Black woman from prison to clean the state house and babysit for Amy. Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren't planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government's genocidal war against Black and Third World people.

On July 19, 1973, i was taken to New York to be arraigned on a Queens bank robbery indictment in Brooklyn federal court. The trip was like a surrealistic cartoon. There must have been at least twelve cars in the procession, and a new jersey state trooper's car was stationed at every exit on the turnpike. All the cars had lights on and sirens going. A helicopter trailed us. And the pigs in the car i was in were comical. At every point they said something like ''At least we got to the turnpike." "At least we got to the bridge." "At least we got to New York." "At least we made it to the court."

Whenever they passed a police car they waved and sometimes raised their fists. When the jersey police were replaced by New York police at the bridge to Staten Island, they shook hands and gave each other the power sign. They even called each other "brother." "This is my brother officer, so and so." They acted like they were on some dangerous mission inside Russia. They were actually afraid. White people's fear of Black people with guns will never cease to amaze me. Probably it's because they think about what they would do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so much dirt to Black people-their guilty conscience tells them to be afraid. When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.

In September, i was moved from the workhouse and entombed in the basement of the middlesex county jail, allegedly because of the jail's proximity to the middlesex county courthouse where the new jersey trial was scheduled to begin on October 1. I was the first, and last, woman ever imprisoned there. It has always been a men's jail.

When i arrived i was given a dirty, scratchy horse blanket and one sheet. Thinking they had made a mistake, i asked for another sheet. "That's all you get," they told me.

"I can't sleep with that filthy thing over me. I need another sheet."

" Sorry. “

"Why am i allowed only one sheet?”

"That's all the men get. We only give one because they might hang themselves.”

"They can hang themselves as easily with one sheet as they can with two," i reasoned.

"Sorry."

For me to sleep on that filthy thing with one sheet was out of the question. I hooped, hollered, demanded they call my lawyer, and told the guard that the next time she came into my cage i was going to wrap the sheet around her neck. Finally, she gave me another sheet.

If i wrote a hundred pages describing the basement of the middlesex county jail, it would be impossible for you to visualize it. It was a big, grayish, pukey-greenish cell. The ceiling was covered with all kinds of pipes, some small, some huge, some dry, some leaky. There was no natural light, and the jailers refused to open the small windows located near the ceiling. The average temperature was 95 degrees. It was infested with ants and centipedes. I had never seen a centipede before and they scared me to death. They were huge, albino monsters and they crawled all over me.
¹

Female guards were stationed at the door of my cell twenty four hours a day. Their job was to sit there and look in the cell at me. They could see every move i made. The first day i moved the bed against the wall, away from the guard's surveillance so that i could have a little privacy while i was sleeping. The guards ordered me to move the bed into the middle of the floor. I refused. The next day workmen nailed the bed to the floor in the center of the cell. They even peeked through the window in the bathroom when i was on the toilet or taking a shower. When i covered the peephole with a towel or a uniform, they ordered me to remove it and threatened to take away all towels and uniforms if i continued covering the window. I didn't refuse, i simply ignored them. After a while they gave up. A month later one of the sergeants told me that i was permitted to cover the window when i used the bathroom. But only for three minutes.

There were twelve four-foot-long fluorescent light bulbs in the cage that were blinding. When i got ready to go to sleep the first night, i asked the guard to turn off the lights. She refused. "I can't see you if the light isn't on."

"How in the world can you miss me? You can see everything in the cell."

"Sorry."

They kept me under those blinding lights for days. I felt like i was going blind. I was seeing everything in doubles and triples. When Evelyn, my lawyer, came to see me, i complained. Finally, after Evelyn accused them of torture, they turned the lights off at eleven. But every ten or fifteen minutes they would shine a huge floodlight into the cell.

Then the trial started. First, motions were argued. Practically all of our motions were denied. All the prosecution's were granted. Then jury selection began before Judge John E. Bachman.

When they brought in the first jury panel i thought i was gonna have a heart attack. There were only a few Blacks speckled here and there, and the panel looked more like a lynch mob than a jury. Most of the jurors openly glared at us, as if they would kill us if they could. Half said they thought we were guilty. The other half, although they didn't say it right out, answered questions like they believed more or less that we probably were guilty. I was convinced some of them deliberately lied just to get on the jury and convict us. Most of the few Black people excused themselves on the grounds of hardship. They had children, families, jobs and simply could not afford to be on a lengthy jury trial. If ever there was a case of the blues, i had it.

"Do something," i kept telling the lawyers. "Do something!"

"What can we do?" the lawyers would answer. "We're doing the best we can."

It was true, but i just could not accept it. This was my life they were talking about. I must have bugged the lawyers to death.

"Object to this, object to that," i would tell them.

"Our objection is already on the record.”

"Well, object again anyway." I was outraged, trapped and helpless. Whenever a juror said something that revealed out-and out prejudice, the judge would try to clean it up. Poor Ray Brown, one of the defense lawyers, caught most of my fire.

"I want you to object.”

"On what basis?" he would ask.

"Don't you see it? The judge is asking leading questions." "But the judge is legally allowed to ask leading questions during jury selection.”

"Well, object anyway." I knew nothing about law then. I had never even seen a trial. I just couldn't understand how the judge could be so blatantly prejudiced in favor of the prosecution and there was nothing we could do about it.

"Why can't y'all be like Perry Mason?" i asked the lawyers jokingly.

"Did you ever see Perry Mason defend a Black defendant?" Ray Brown answered.

Sundiata was a lifesaver. He would try to calm me down and would explain what to expect. Logically, i accepted what he said, but i was still frantic.

"We just can't let ourselves be railroaded," i'd say, coming up with one wild idea after another. Sundiata would patiently explain why none of my fantastic ideas would work. After a while of participating in my own legal lynching, i became convinced that Sundiata and i should fire the lawyers and defend ourselves. In that way we wouldn't be tied to those stupid rules and we could say anything we wanted to.

"That's not true," Sundiata told me. "Even if you defend yourself, you're still bound by their rules."

"How am i supposed to know those rules? I'm not a lawyer. And i still have a constitutional right to defend myself."

"True, but you still have to play according to their rules or they can bind and gag you. Look at what they did to Bobby Seale."

Every time i looked up at the jury box, i'd argue the point again. But i also knew that i didn't know one thing about the law, and it was hard to picture myself actually defending myself. Evelyn was always repeating the old cliche that a person who defends himself has a fool for a lawyer.

As we came closer and closer to completing the selection of the jury, i became more and more upset. Then, one day, a kid who couldn't have been more than twenty was being examined as a potential juror. He spilled the beans. The judge asked him if he had an opinion of the case and he said, "They say she's guilty." The judge questioned him further and he blurted it all out. The prospective jurors in the jury room were talking about the case, al though they had been ordered not to discuss it. The judge asked what they were saying.

"They say she's guilty.”

"Only Mrs. Chesimard?" the judge asked.

"They're saying they're Black, they're guilty.”

At that moment the lawyers were all on their feet, talking a mile a minute. They demanded a complete investigation of what was going on in the jury room. They wanted the juror asked more questions. They wanted the jurors to whom he talked questioned.

The judge immediately realized the boy had opened a can of worms. He did everything he could to avoid opening the can any further, but it had gotten out of his control. He finally agreed to conduct an impartial investigation. This time, when he questioned the jurors, he was very careful to downplay the gravity of what was going on in the jury room. But the other jurors substantiated what the boy had said. Our lawyers filed a motion asking that the jury be selected from another county because we couldn't get a fair trial in Middlesex. The assignment judge, not Judge Bachman, was to decide the motion. Meanwhile, the trial was stopped.

Evelyn told me the decision. The assignment judge had deter mined that it was in fact true that we couldn't get a fair trial in Middlesex County. The jury was to be picked from Morris County. "Where's that?" i asked Evelyn. She said she hadn't the faintest idea. Then Ray Brown came in.

"Where in the world is Morris County?" i asked him.

"Well," he said, "I'll tell you." Morris County was almost completely white with very few Black people and even fewer His panics and Asians.

"What does that mean? Are there ten percent Black people? Five percent? Or what?"

"A whole lot fewer.”

"A jury of your peers," Evelyn said bitterly.

"What can we do?" i asked.

"We'll just have to wait and see.”

"Can't we get the trial moved somewhere else where there are more Black people?”

"We can try, but don't get your hopes up too high."

I was coming back to earth, and fast.

The trial had been postponed for about a month, until January, because they needed time to secure the jail in Morristown, in Morris County.

"Maybe," i thought, "the lawyers will come up with some thing by then." I really didn't expect too much, but it seemed like such an obvious trick, such an obvious ploy, to ensure that we didn't receive a fair trial by a jury of our peers that i thought maybe something could be done about it. I was naive in those days. I knew it in theory, but i had not seen enough to accept the fact that there was absolutely no justice whatsoever for Black people in amerika. I still had some hope left. But they had taken something that was supposed to help us and turned it against us. They had used the law to abuse the law.