Assata: An Autobiography (28 page)

Angela Davis was running for her life. They had hooked her up with Jonathan Jackson, charged her with kidnapping and murder at the kourthouse, even though she was nowhere on the set. They charged her with murder because they claimed that some of the guns used belonged to her. She was one of the most beautiful women i had ever seen. Not physically, but spiritually. I knew who she was, because i had been keeping clippings of her in my file. She was the sister who got fired from her job teaching at a California college because she told everybody she was a communist and if they didn't like it, they could go to hell.

But i wasn't surprised. They will charge Black people with anything, using any flimsy excuse. We were very glad they hadn't caught her. I hoped they never would. The air was charged, every thing was happening so fast, and i wasn't blind anymore. I was seeing things straight, seeing them more clearly than ever before. I had so many things to do. If you are deaf, dumb, and blind to what's happening in the world, you're under no obligation to do anything. But if you know what's happening and you don't do anything but sit on your ass, then you're nothing but a punk.

I tried to explain how i felt to some of the people i knew. I wanted to struggle on a full-time basis. They urged me to join the Panther Party. I went over in my mind all the criticisms i had of the party. They had said, "You'll be good for the Party, and the Party will be good for you. The Party is only as strong as its people." It made a lot of sense to me. For the first time in months i felt calm and sure of what i was going to do. I told them that the first thing i was going to do when i returned to New York was join the Party.

I thought about it all the way home. Of all the things i had wanted to be when i was a little girl, a revolutionary certainly wasn't one of them. And now it was the only thing i wanted to do. Everything else was secondary. It occurred to me that even though i wanted to become a revolutionary more than anything else in the world, i still didn't have the slightest idea what i would have to do to become one.

You're the property of the feds now," one of the marshals told me like he really believed it. "We're taking you to MCC [the federal prison, manhattan correctional center] where you'll stay while you stand trial for bank robbery." It was January 5, 1976, fifteen days after i had been acquitted on the kidnapping charge in Brooklyn supreme kourt; i was still on Rikers Island. He busied himself tying me up with what seemed an endless amount of chains and shackles. Another stupid-looking marshal told me how sorry he was to see me again. He said i'd given him hell the last time. I didn't even recognize him. He said he had worked on the last, other bank robbery trial and had gotten "chewed out" because i got pregnant. "You were framed," i told him. He looked at me all dumb, scratching his head. "Yeah, yeah. That's right." I started to laugh. Even the other marshals started to crack up. "It's not so funny," he said. "I lost my commendation that went down in my record." I laughed even harder.

The only way i can describe MCC is modern gray, with dabs of colored paint here and there. It's one of those ugly inner-city fortress buildings, antinature, antihuman, and cold to all the senses. There was no fresh air because the entire building was air-conditioned, and the only natural light came in from narrow glass slits cut into the side of the building and wired with alarms. The guards looked like space age robotons, with blue blazers, gray pants, walkie-talkies, and beepers. After i had been issued the standard uniform for women (a yellow jumpsuit and tennis shoes), i was led up to the women's section. To my absolute surprise i was placed in "general population," given a key to my cage, and told that there was no "lock-in" time. We were supposed to stand by the cell doors at various times of the day to be counted. The women's section was a relatively small area, comprising a central area for eating and recreation, a TV room, and three split-level tiers. There were a few offices, one or two rooms that served as classrooms, and that was it. The only other place the women could go, once in a while, was to recreation on the roof, which was covered with huge metal antihelicopter bars.

After spending more than a month in that confining little place, the women were climbing the walls, and i'm sure the men felt the same way. A few of the federal prisoners were big time, with money and connections; they'd been arrested for more "sophisticated" crimes than the average state prisoner. But the majority were poor, Black, or Third World, just like in the state jails. But just like in the street, money talks. A lot of the men on the honor floor, which was on the same floor as the women, had money, and rumor had it that they would send their favorite guards out to buy them Chinese or Italian food or send them to the Jewish delicatessen, depending on their mood. One drug dealer made frequent visits to the women's section in the wee small hours for conjugal visits with his wife. Since the men on the honor floor had contact with the women, many tried to buy them by sending them huge quantities of commissary items. Others tried to impress the women with tall tales about how much they had ripped off or how big they were on the street. I was sitting on the bench with this white guy, waiting for them to take me to kourt one morning, and he was steady talking one and two million dollar deals he had pulled off. He was some kind of con artist, busted for stock fraud. "You shouldn't be here," i told him. "You should be in the White House with all the other big-time con artists." "I was trying," he said, "I was trying like hell.'

There were two sisters who i knew from Rikers. I was really happy to see them both. Skeets was a strong, stand-up sister who kept her mouth shut, minded her business, and didn't take any shit from anybody. She was a real warmhearted person, generous and open, and maintained a whole lot of humanity, even though she was facing a hunk of time on a bank robbery case. I was shocked when i ran into Charlie, who i had known on Rikers as Charlene. She had changed completely. She was no longer the thin, round-faced young sister i had known on the rock. It was as if she had aged overnight. She had written some dynamite poetry and had been part of our drama group. But this time she had been arrested for parole violation on a technicality and just didn't give a damn about anything anymore. She was bitter and tired and her whole attitude can be summed up in the two words that she frequently used: "Shove it." She told me that her freedom depended on whether or not she passed a high school equivalency test. Everybody encouraged her to study, but she just didn't seem to care anymore. She said she was tired of jumping through hoops and didn't give a damn what happened. I understood how she felt, but i hated to see her so bitter and so hurt and nowhere to go with it, nothing positive to apply it to. I wanted to help her, but i didn't know how, and i was only going to be there for a hot minute. The only thing that perked her up was the struggle the women got into to improve medical care at the jail.

At the time, the health situation was horrible. Women came in off the street and were given no physical exam, no tests, no nothing. They had trouble seeing gynecologists and having their most basic needs met, medical or otherwise. Since we were a tiny minority of the prison population, our needs were ignored. The women got together and wrote complaints to the warden. Charlie was one of the women who worked the hardest to get better medical conditions. It's kind of ironic when i think about it now. A little more than a year later, i heard over the prison grapevine that Charlene had died from undiagnosed cancer of the uterus.

The Queens bank robbery trial, which I was here for, was one of the wildest trials i ever went through. We had just finished with the Brooklyn kidnapping case and i was not at all looking forward to going to trial again so soon.

For almost three years, now, Evelyn had worked on my cases continuously. She had quit her job as a professor at New York University Law School on the day I was arrested on the turnpike to become my lawyer. One of the few cases she had accepted since my arrest-mostly to earn some money-was ready for trial, and she couldn't postpone it any longer. So i had to get someone else for my trial. Some of the brothers and sisters recommended Stanley Cohen to me. They said he was a good lawyer and would do a good job on this kind of case. I was hesitant because i had always had Black lawyers representing me. I felt that they would probably be more understanding and more sensitive to the situation i was dealing with. I'm not talking about any old Black lawyer, because some of them make a whole lot of money and think like Richard Nixon. I'm talking about those who are concerned with the plight of Black people.

I was especially sensitive to the issue after months of listening to some of the sisters at Rikers. They were so brainwashed they thought a white lawyer, any white lawyer, was better than a Black lawyer. They also felt the same way about white doctors, white dentists, white teachers, etc. "I ain't going to court with no Black lawyer," they'd say. "I want me a white lawyer who is friendly with the judge and ain't gonna make him mad." I tried to tell them that it didn't matter what color their lawyer was, if the lawyer went against the judge and really put up a fight for the client, the judge was gonna get mad. Few, if any, Black defendants have ever been freed because the judge liked their lawyer. If you had a dime for every time a judge and a defense lawyer sat down to lunch and discussed some Black client rotting away in jail, you'd be able to stop working and live on the interest.

I decided to talk with Cohen and see whether i thought he would be good for the case. Stanley was a middle-aged, Jewish, fiesty-looking man who somehow reminded me of W. C. Fields. He had a dramatic streak in him and could change the tone and mood of his voice from indignant to pleading in a matter of seconds. He had a long list of acquittals in his record and told funny stories about the strategies he used in this or that trial. He had once been a member of the Communist party and continued to have progressive politics. "Why do you like being a criminal lawyer?" i asked him. "How can you stand to fight in the kourt system, knowing how much racism and injustice is involved?" It was a loaded question, put out there to see how he would answer it. I expected him to say something like somebody had to do it, somebody had to make the sacrifice. "I like to win," he said. "I do it because I like to win." I liked him and decided i wanted him to defend me on the bank robbery case.

Evelyn gave Stanley the transcripts from the time i was beaten up in kourt by the u.s. marshals trying to photograph me, together with all of the other documents in her file, and worked with him on the trial strategy. Andrew Jackson had pled guilty, so i was on trial alone. Everything was rush, rush, rush. The railroad train was whistling and it could hardly wait to take me up the river. The new judge assigned to the case wanted the case over with and he wanted it over with fast. We wanted to question the prospective jurors about their opinions, what they had seen and heard in the media, etc. The judge was determined not to have a long voir dire, and so we compromised. A questionnaire was made up asking some of the questions we submitted and others that the prosecutor submitted. After we went through the answers we were to pick or eliminate jurors, asking additional questions as needed. Some of the answers were so contradictory and such a study on the level of racism in amerika that it would take a book just to report on them. In one hundred percent of the cases we were able to tell whether the prospective juror was Black, white, or "other," just by reading the answers.

The trial had a lighthearted feel to it. Everyone had kind of decided that we would enjoy the fight and fight as hard as we could, without worrying about whether we were gonna win or lose. I don't think that there was a single one of us, with the possible exception of Afeni Shakur, who really thought we were going to win. Afeni, who was working as a legal assistant, kept telling me, "We're going to win this one, Assata." But i sure as hell didn't believe it. They had taken a bank picture of a woman robbing a bank, printed my name under it as being positively identified, and then placed that picture in newspapers, subway stations, and, i think, even on the sides of buses. They had this picture posted in every bank in New York. There was not a person in New York who went to the bank, rode the subway, or walked the streets who had not seen that photograph with my name printed under it a thou sand times. There was no way of even counting how many times that picture had been flashed on television, with the announcer calling out my name. The public had been so saturated with that image that i felt it was crazy to take this trial seriously. After Stanley was familiar with some of the facts, i had asked him what he thought my chances were. "I'd be lying if I told you that they looked good. In reality, they look pretty lousy. But, I believe you, and I'm going to fight for you. And, believe me, I like to fight." We agreed that i would act as co-counsel on the case. "You're a lousy lawyer," he would tell me every time we got into an argument over some strategy, "but you're better than a lotta lawyers I know who passed the bar."

The atmosphere was electric. The kourtroom was packed every day with sisters and brothers who had come to watch the circus. I couldn't stop staring. I have always said that the best thing about being on trial is getting to see and smile at the spectators. Seeing so many beautiful people in the kourtroom gave us the push.we needed to get down and take care of business. I felt that way during all of my trials, but this trial had an atmosphere that made it even more special. People from all over the Black community dropped by. The Muslim sisters and brothers brought their prayer rugs and broke out into prayer in the hallway of the kourthouse. People brought their children, explaining what was happening. One little girl broke up the whole kourtroom when she asked out loud, "Is that the fascist pig, Mommy?" pointing up at the judge. It was as if Black folks had just taken over the kourtroom, letting everybody know that they were watching what was going down.

The first thing we did was ask for a lineup. The way i had been "identified" was from a photo. The FBI had selected my photograph from the "militant casebook." This book contained the photographs of all the "militants" the FBI wanted to send to prison. After they had gotten my photograph out of the "militant case book," they put it in with a few other photographs of women. Of course, mine, a mug shot, was the only one with numbers across the front of it. The rest were normal. The FBI then showed this group of pictures to the robbery witnesses and asked them to identify someone who "somewhat resembled" or "bore a likeness" to the woman who robbed the bank. Two of the people who were in the bank signed affidavits saying that the photograph with the numbers across it, my mug shot, looked somewhat like the woman. The rest who had been in the bank at the time of the robbery made no such identification. We told the judge we wanted a lineup because we thought the initial identification of me as the bank robber was suggestive and tainted. But before the judge had arranged for the lineup, the prosecutor called one of the so-called witnesses to testify. Since i was the only Black woman sitting in the defendant's chair, of course he identified me. We protested the procedure, but the judge admitted his testimony anyway. We finally did arrange for a lineup, and, of course, the other so-called witnesses picked out another woman.

Since the photo identification part of the case was based on nothing more than "all niggers look alike," the FBI tried to use "scientific" evidence to gain a conviction. Their plan to superimpose the bank surveillance photo over my photograph failed be cause they had only one photo of me that was taken at the same angle as the bank robbery picture. It was one of the photographs taken when they assaulted me in the kourtroom before the trial began when I refused to let them take my picture. The FBI had blocked out the faces and hands of the marshals and FBI agents choking and assaulting me. They had cropped the picture so that the only thing the jury could see was my face. But my facial expression in the photograph was one of such agony that it was hard for them to convince the jury of anything else.