Assata: An Autobiography (Assata Shakur)

Assata: An Autobiography
Assata: An Autobiography
Author	Assata Shakur
Written in	1987
Publisher	Lawrence Hill Books
First published	1987
Type	Book
ISBN	1-55652-074-3

Forward by Angela Davis

In the 1970s, as Assata Shakur awaited trial on charges of being an accomplice to murder, I participated in a benefit at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to raise funds for her legal defense. At the time, Assata was being held nearby in the Middlesex County Correctional Facility for Men. Lennox Hinds, a member of the Rutgers faculty, had invited me to be one of the featured speakers at the benefit. Lennox was a leader of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and represented Assata in a federal lawsuit contesting the appalling conditions of her confinement in the New Jersey prison. He had previously worked on my case, and we had both served in the leadership of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression since its founding in 1973. Attending the benefit were Rutgers faculty members, a sizable number of black professionals, and local activists who were the mainstay of numerous campaigns to free the political prisoners of that era.

It was an upbeat event, imbued with the optimism of the times. My own recent acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy stood as a dramatic example of how we could successfully challenge the government's offenses against radical anti-racist movements. However powerful the forces arrayed against Assata-the FBI's counterintelligence program, and the New York and New Jersey police organizations-no one could have persuaded us then that we were not capable of building a triumphant movement for Assata's freedom. This benefit was one small step in that direction, and, as we left the event, we were quite satisfied with the three thousand dollars we raised that afternoon.

By then, every radical activist had learned to assume that our public meetings were subject to routine police and/or FBI surveillance. Yet we were entirely unprepared for what seemed like a reenactment of the 1973 events for which Assata faced charges of murder. Assata, Zayd Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli had been stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike by state troopers who claimed that they had a faulty tail light. The encounter left Assata critically wounded and two others-state trooper Werner Forster and Assata's friend Zayd Shakur-dead. As a group of us left the benefit and drove down a country road towards Lennox Hinds's house, where we were having a small after-party, we were quite startled when local police signaled for our car to stop. My friend Charlene Mitchell, at that time the executive director of the Alliance, was told to step out of the car, along with the driver and the other person riding with us. As the policemen taunted us by clearly placing their hands on their holstered guns, I was instructed to stay in the otherwise empty automobile. Lennox, whose car we had been following, immediately doubled back and approached the police with his attorney's identification card in hand, explaining that he was our lawyer. This caused the officers to become more visibly nervous, including one who pulled a riot gun from his police car and proceeded to aim at Lennox from close range. All of us froze. We knew only too well that any innocent gesture could be construed as a reach for a weapon and that this confrontation could easily become a recapitulation of the events that had left Assata with a murder charge.

The spurious explanation given by police for the ambush was a warrant for my arrest (later proven false). Though they allowed us to leave, it was only shortly after we arrived at Lennox's house that we discovered they had already called for reinforcements and literally surrounded the house. With one of the first black woman judged in New Jersey and several other prominent community figures at the house, we were nonetheless compelled to call on higher powers, in the form of Congressman John Conyers in Washington. We figured a request for a federal escort out of the state of New Jersey might put some pressure on local police. These were the kinds of measures-and friends-needed in such a volatile time.

I relate this incident in detail because it may help readers of Assata's autobiography not only to focus on the political role of the police during the 1970s but also to better understand important historical aspects of the routine racial profiling associated with current police practices. Such a historical perspective is especially important today when brazen expressions of structural racism-such as the pattern of mass imprisonment to which communities of color are subjugated-are rendered invisible by the prevailing moral panic over crime. And if this were not enough, we find that at the same time such remedies as affirmative action programs and such safety nets as social welfare are being consistently disestablished.

When Richard Nixon raised the slogan of “law and order” in the 1970s, it was used in part to discredit the black liberation movement and to justify the deployment of police, courts, and prisons against key figures in this and other radical movements of that era. Today, the ironic coupling of a declining crime rate and the consolidation of a prison industrial complex that makes increased rates of incarceration its economic necessity has facilitated the imprisonment of more than two million people in the United States. In this ideological context, political prisoners like Assata Shakur, Mumbai Abu-Jamal, and Leonard Peltier are represented in popular discourse as criminals who deserve either to be executed or to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

During the late 1990s, the racist hysteria directed against Assata was resuscitated when the New Jersey State Police reputedly prevailed upon Pope John Paul II to use the occasion of his first trip to Cuba to pressure Fidel Castro to extradite Assata. As if this were not enough, New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman offered a $50,000 reward-later doubled-for Assata's return, and congress passed a bill calling on the government of Cuba to initiate extradition procedures.

In an open letter to the Pope, Assata asks a question that should concern all of us: “Why, I wonder, do I warrant such attention? What do I represent that is such a threat?” We would all do well to seriously ponder her questions. Why, indeed, was she constructed by the government and mass media as a consummate enemy in the 1970s, only to reemerge at the turn of the century as a singular target of governors, Congress, and the Fraternal Order of Police? What has she been made to represent? What ideological work has this representation performed?

In the 1970s, Assata Shakur's image was deployed on official FBI wanted posters and in the popular media as visual evidence of the terrorist motivations of the black liberation movement. Black militants were assumed to be enemies of the state and were associated with communist challenges to capitalist democracy. The protracted search for Assata, during which she was demonized in ways that are now unimaginable, served to further justify the imprisonment of vast numbers of political activists, many of whom remain locked up today.

Twenty-five years later, the retailoring of the image of Assata as an enemy is even more damaging, omitting the original political context and representing her as a common criminal-a bank robbery and a murderer. This lifting of her image out of the past for very contemporary purposes serves to justify the consolidation of a vast prison industrial complex, which Assata herself has described as “... not only a mechanism to convert public tax money into profits for private corporations [but also] an essential element of modern neoliberal capitalism.” In her view, this new formation serves two purposes: “one, to neutralize and contain huge segments of potentially rebellious sectors of the population, and two, to sustain a system of super-exploitation, where mainly black and Latino captives are imprisoned in white rural, overseer communities.”

As the above quotation reveals, Assata remains very much engaged with contemporary radical politics specific to the United States, even though she has been unable to visit the country since her escape from prison and her decision to settle in Cuba many years ago. As you read her extraordinary autobiography, you will discover a woman who has nothing in common with the hostile representations that refuse to expire. I urge you to reflect on what it must mean for her to have been unable to attend her mother's funeral or to visit with her new grandchild. As you follow her life story, you will discover a compassionate human being with an unswerving commitment to justice that travels easily across racial and ethnic lines, in and out of prison and across oceans and time. She speaks to all of us, and especially to those of us who are sequestered in a growing global network of prisons and jails. At a time when optimism has receded from political vocabulary, she offers invaluable gifts-inspiration and hope. Her words remind us, as Walter Benjamin once observed, that it is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

Angela Y. Davis

University of California, Santa Cruz

March 2000

Forward by Lennox S. Hinds

The publication of this extraordinary autobiography provides a rare opportunity to see behind the carefully orchestrated distortions of fact concerning the life and motivations of Assata Shakur. Writing simply and vividly about the racism that permeated her childhood and young womanhood-those ordinary experiences of Black people in the United States that have driven millions to despair and many to rebellion-Assata leads us all to understand more about the society we live in. Clearly, it was the racism riddling every aspect of the early life of this sensitive, intellectually gifted, and life-passionate child, as she struggled to establish her own identity, that led her to seek solutions to the catastrophic impact of racism and economic oppression on all people of color in the United States. It is racist America that provides the context for the making of this Black revolutionary.

People struggling for self-determination are a phenomenon of the twentieth century. These struggles are frequently understood and supported by people of goodwill in the United States when the struggles take place in South Africa, El Salvador, the Philippines, or Palestinian refugee camps. Assata Shakur's own words, as she writes about her struggles for growth and meaning in the streets of New York and in the South as a child and as a woman, present as clear a case for self-determination and development in the United States as do the lives of her brothers and sisters throughout the world. For although her book is intensely personal, it is also absolutely political. She writes about her experiences not as a historical icon seeking to crystallize the "Official Life" but as one whose experiences searching for change can provide a key to her own life and to all those others, who, as she so vividly puts it, "have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy," and for whom "a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down."

As a lawyer, teacher, and student of history, I know that while Assata's story may be unique in its energy, creativity, and passion for life and principle, it is typical of the ways the United States has responded historically to individuals that the government sees as political threats to domestic tranquility.

Since Assata touches only lightly on the events that led to her being a target for police fire on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973 and on the flimsy evidence on which she was finally convicted in 1977, I will attempt to sketch some of the details that contributed to the fearsome image generated by the state and perpetrated in the media.

I first met Assata Shakur in 1973, as she lay in the hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while state, local, and federal police attempted to question her. As the national director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, an organization that has been called on to defend political activists in the Black community since its founding in 1968, I was no stranger to the carefully orchestrated disinformation campaigns that federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies had engaged in against Black activists under the leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Prior to meeting Assata, we had represented Angela Davis, had initiated inquiries into the 1969 police executions of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the 1971 police attack and indictments of the leadership of the Republic of New Afrika, and had defended many other Black men and women who had been identified as targets of the FBI. The FBI's systematic surveillance of and attacks on Black groups and individuals were orchestrated by its counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), which was directed specifically against what the FBI termed "Black nationalist hate groups." COINTELPRO's first targets were Martin Luther King and thousands of less prominent civil rights activists. Elsewhere, I have written extensively about COINTELPRO and the criminal disruption and destruction of Black leaders and groups that were the specific goals of this government program. The pertinent and unimpeachable documents collected in the Church committee report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities were also reprinted in that book. In addition, the findings of the Domestic Intelligence Subcommittee, headed by Senator Walter Mondale, which were published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1976, provided incontrovertible documentation of this government-sponsored conspiracy against the civil and human rights of all sorts of political activists and, most particularly, Black people. It is important to remember that Assata Shakur's decision to join the Black Panthers occurred soon after J. Edgar Hoover ordered the forty-one FBI offices to intensify their efforts "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize" Black nationalist organizations and their leaders. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Nation of Islam, and above all, the Black Panthers were specifically targeted, as were, among many Blacks, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and, as we shall see, Assata Shakur, also known as JoAnne Chesimard.

As is now clear, a carefully orchestrated intelligence and counterintelligence campaign was conducted by the FBI in cooperation with state and local law enforcement agencies designed to criminalize, defame, harass, and intimidate Assata beginning at least in 1971. By the time Assata Shakur was shot and captured on the New Jersey Turnpike on May 2, 1973, she was wanted for a number of most serious crimes.

Massive prejudicial publicity had been generated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York City Police Department to create an image of dangerousness and to convict her in every aspect of the mass media before any trial. Orders had been issued to apprehend her, dead or alive. She spells out the dread and terror when she writes:

Everywhere i went it seemed like i would turn around to find two detectives following behind me. I would look out my window and there, in the middle of Harlem, in front of my house, would be two white men sitting and reading the newspaper. I was scared to death to talk in my own house.

Assata could no longer go home. She was on the FBI's Most Wanted list, accused of being armed, of being a bank robber and, subsequently, of being a kidnapper and murderer. A photograph alleged to be Assata Shakur taken at the scene of a bank robbery in August 1971 appeared in a full-page advertisement in the New York Daily News on July 10, 1972. It was a duplicate of a poster placed in every bank in the city and state of New York and post offices and subway stations. This advertisement announcing "Wanted for Bank Robbery, $10,000 Reward" was printed above four photographs, one of them the picture of a woman allegedly taken during the 1971 bank robbery. Beneath the picture, in bold capital letters, was the name "JoAnne Deborah Chesimard."

During her trial for this bank robbery, which ended in acquittal, a jury found that it was not a picture of Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard). The photograph had been released by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office to the New York Clearing House Association (a bank's association), which placed the ad and posters. Even after Assata had been acquitted of this bank robbery in January 1976, another advertisement offering the same reward for unapprehended bank robbers appeared in the Daily News in March 1976. This time, however, the photograph was a recognizable mug shot of Assata, with the word "APPREHENDED" across her face. This poster appeared two months after her acquittal on the August 1971 charge, two years after her acquittal on the September 1972 bank robbery charge, and while no bank robbery charges were outstanding against her.

On February 12, 1973, four months before Assata was apprehended on the New Jersey Turnpike, New York magazine published an article under the title "Target Blue," written by Robert Daley, an excerpt of this book of the same title. The cover of the magazine depicted a uniformed police officer. The subtitle was "The Story Behind the Police Assassinations." The article purported to provide intimate details about the Black Liberation Army, whose activities, the article claimed, were cop killing, bank robbing, and efforts to overthrow the U.S. Government. Above a picture of Assata Shakur were the words "Gunmen of the Black Liberation Army," and she was described by former Deputy Police Commissioner Daley as the "mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting." Notwithstanding this trial by media, the only indictment against Assata for killing a police officer was dismissed in October 1974 for lack of evidence.

As the chart that follows this essay shows, on May 2, 1973, when the shooting on the New Jersey Turnpike occurred, Assata was "wanted" for all these crimes. The irony is that not one of the charges led to conviction. When she was apprehended, shot down on the New Jersey Turnpike, leading to her only conviction, she should have enjoyed the presumption of innocence that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is supposed to grant to any of us when accused.

On May 2, 1973, Assata, Sundiata Acoli, and Zayd Malik Shakur were traveling south on the New Jersey Turnpike in a white Pontiac. They were stopped by New Jersey state trooper James Harper for reasons consistent with the FBI COINTELPRO guidelines, which directed that activist be arrested for minor traffic Violations. The Pontiac allegedly had defective taillights. Harper's testimony, however, leaves open the suggestion that the Pontiac was simply a target.

Harper testified that when he first saw the Pontiac he was two miles north of the turnpike administration building, headquarters for the troopers. He followed the car for two miles until it was close to the administration building before he pulled it over because "the light was better and there was more security." The Pontiac was traveling at normal speed in the center lane. Harper first passed it in the left lane, observed the driver, and "made a mental note of his description." He then moved to the right lane and let the Pontiac pass him, at which time he "made a mental note of the sex and race of the passengers." He then approached the Pontiac in the left lane, motioned the driver (Sundiata) to pull over, and called the administration building for assistance. When trooper Robert Palenchar was directed to assist Harper, he commented over his radio, "Meet you at the pass, partner," and sped to the administration building at 120 miles an hour. Trooper Werner Foerster also went to assist in this "stop" for which, Harper testified, only a summons would have been issued.

Over the years, I was to learn much about the selective, arbitrary, and ferocious ways the law and its processes would be applied against Assata Shakur from the moment I met her in that hospital in May 1973 where she clung to life.

I can certainly not improve on Assata's account of her experiences before, during, and after her numerous trials, but I must point out that she understates the awfulness of the conditions in which she was incarcerated. As she mentions, even a hearing officer appointed by Middlesex County, at the instruction of one of the federal judges before whom we argued our suits on the inhumanity of the conditions in which she was held, found the conditions shocking.

In the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has ever been treated as she was, continuously confined in a men's prison, under twenty-four-hour surveillance of her most intimate functions, without intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention, and exercise, and without the company of other women for all the years she was in their custody. We filed one civil rights lawsuit after another complaining of the barbarous treatment selectively meted out to her, with limited success. As you read her story, imagine the effect these conditions must have had on this proud and sensitive woman.

Another bitter irony of her situation is that during the course of those years awaiting trial in New Jersey, the many other charges that caused her to become a fugitive, leading to the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike, were dropped for lack of evidence, were dismissed, or resulted in acquittal, and yet the physical conditions under which she was held worsened, at best. Once again, the manipulation of facts by the media became a substitute for reality-none of the acquittals or dismissals was publicized. The massive security precautions for the pending New Jersey trial were the major stories on the front pages of the local newspapers, day after day, in the community from which the jury was selected.

The sheer number of these baseless charges supports the contention held by many people that the extraordinary efforts of the state of New Jersey to get Assata Shakur convicted, notwithstanding the flimsy evidence, were undertaken to justify the fabricated image of mad-dog killer that had failed, so humiliatingly, to get her convicted in New York state and federal courts.

Assata was convicted in New Jersey as an accomplice to the murder of state trooper Werner Foerster and of atrocious assault on James Harper with the intent to kill. Under New Jersey law, if a person's presence at the scene of a crime can be construed as "aiding and abetting" the crime, that person can be convicted of the substantive crime itself. The state of New Jersey convicted Sundiata Acoli for these same murders after Assata was severed from the proceedings because of her pregnancy. The jury at Assata's trial for the same offenses was permitted to speculate that her "mere presence" at a scene of violence, with weapons in the vehicle, was sufficient to sustain a conviction-even though three neurologists testified at the trial that her median nerve had been severed by gunshot wounds, rendering her unable to pull a trigger, and that her clavicle had been shattered by a shot that could only have been made while she was seated in the car with her hands raised. Other experts testified that the neutron activation analysis administered by the police right after the shootout showed no gun residue on her fingers, meaning she had not shot a weapon. She was also convicted of possession of weapons-none of which could be identified having been handled by her and of the attempted murder of state trooper Harper, who had sustained a minor injury at the shootout.

It had been and is my view that it was the racism in Middlesex County, fueled by biased, inflammatory publicity in the local press before and throughout the trial, fanned by the documented government lawlessness, that made it possible for the white jury to convict Assata on the uncorroborated, contradictory, and generally incredible testimony of trooper Harper, the only other witness to the events on the turnpike. Harper's testimony as well as that of all the other state's witnesses was riddled with inconsistencies and discrepancies. On three separate official reports, including his grand jury testimony, Harper said that he saw Assata take a gun from her pocketbook, while in the car, and shoot him. He admitted, on cross-examination during both Sundiata's trial and Assata's trial, that he never saw Assata with a gun and did not see her shoot him-that, in fact, he had lied.

In addition, the judge refused to permit the defense to present any testimony on COINTELPRO. The truth is very simple. Assata Shakur did not receive a fair trial in Middlesex County, New Jersey, She had been convicted in the press and in the minds of the general public from the moment she was apprehended in New Jersey and over and over again until the trial. The conviction in court was but a formality.

Dear Sister, thank you for sending us your vital voice and sharing your passion and commitment with us. Meanwhile, we in this society must remind ourselves again how we threaten our own interests and rights when we condone by our silence the government's use of surveillance, attacks on the legitimacy of political activists, and the use of the criminal law to suppress and punish political dissent.

In 1975, Attorney General Edward H. Levi, under the direction of President Carter and in consideration of the Church committee's findings, designed the first set of guidelines to keep the FBI within the Constitution in its investigations of individuals and groups allegedly dangerous to national security. The Levi guidelines, while not heartily applauded by civil libertarians, did attempt to restrain the unbridled use of the government's power to penetrate and disrupt organizations.

By 1983, Attorney General William French Smith, under President Reagan, had rescinded the Levi guidelines, and each year since then protections of the Bill of Rights have been further eroded. For example, the FBI is now free to investigate persons or groups accused of advocating criminal activity. Clearly, the federal government is continuing the unrestrained abuse of power by which it attempted to destroy Assata Shakur and other Black individuals and groups by surveillance, rumor, innuendo, eavesdropping, arrest and prosecution, incarceration, and murder throughout the sixties and seventies.

As long as members of Congress, still intimidated by ABSCAM, are afraid to antagonize the FBI, and as long as FBI guidelines are drafted internally by the FBI and as long as the Justice Department is subject to the political imperatives of the President, monitored only within the system but without public accountability, we are all in danger of the kinds of repression and government secrecy that victimized Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Viola Liuzzo, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, Obadele Imari, Assata Shakur, and many other brothers and sisters whose ideas and advocacy are threatening to the administration. We are all potential victims.

I encourage you now to enter the heart and soul of Assata Shakur who, despite all that has happened to her, preserves fresh idealism and confidence in the power of principled people to make change together for the common good of the peoples of the world.

LENNOX S. HINDS

New York City

Trial Chronology


DATE OF ALLEGED CRIME AND CHARGE	JURIDICTION STATE-FEDERAL	DATE OF ARRAIGNMENT	TRIAL DATE	DISPOSITION

Chapter 1

Affirmation

I believe in the living

I believe in the spectrum

of Beta days and Gamma people.

I believe in sunshine.

In windmills and waterfalls,

tricycles and rocking chairs.

And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.

And sprouts grow into trees.

I believe in the magic of the hands.

And in the wisdom of the eyes.

I believe in rain and tears.

And in the blood of infinity.

I believe in life.

And i have seen the death parade

march through the torso of the earth,

sculpting mud bodies in its path.

I have seen the destruction of the daylight,

and seen bloodthirsty maggots

prayed to and saluted.

I have seen the kind become the blind

and the blind become the bind

in one easy lesson.

I have walked on cut glass.

I have eaten crow and blunder bread

and breathed the stench of indifference.

I have been locked by the lawless.

Handcuffed by the haters.

Gagged by the greedy.

And, if i know anything at all,

it's that a wall is just a wall

and nothing more at all.

It can be broken down.

I believe in living.

I believe in birth.

I believe in the sweat of love

and in the fire of truth.

And i believe that a lost ship,

steered by tired, seasick sailors,

can still be guided home

to port.

There were lights and sirens. Zayd was dead. My mind knew that Zayd was dead. The air was like cold glass. Huge bubbles rose and burst. Each one felt like an explosion in my chest. My mouth tasted like blood and dirt. The car spun around me and then something like sleep overtook me. In the background i could hear what sounded like gunfire. But i was fading and dreaming.

Suddenly, the door flew open and i felt myself being dragged out onto the pavement. Pushed and punched, a foot upside my head, a kick in the stomach. Police were everywhere. One had a gun to my head.

"Which way did they go?" he was shouting. "Bitch, you'd better open your goddamn mouth or I'll blow your goddamn head off!" I nodded my head across the highway. I was sure that nobody had gone that way. A few of the cops were off and running.

One pig said, "We oughta finish her off." But the others were all busy around the car, searching it. They were pulling and prodding.

"Ya find the gun?" they kept asking each other. Later, one of them asked another, "Should we put'er in the car?"

"Naw. Let'er lay in the gutter where she belongs. Just get'er out of the way."

I felt myself being dragged by the feet across the pavement. My chest was on fire. My blouse was purple with blood. I was convinced that my arm had been shot off and was hanging inside my shirt by a few strips of flesh. I could not feel it.

Finally the ambulance came and they moved me into it. Being moved was agony, but the blankets were worth it. I was so cold. The medics examined me. I tried to talk, but only bubbles came out. I was foaming at the mouth.

"Where's she hit?" they asked each other as if i wasn't there, They concluded their examination. I was relieved.

"Let's move it," one of them said.

"O.K., but wait a minute," said the driver and he got out. "Hit twice," i heard him say. "We gotta wait." The driver slammed the door.

He said something else but i didn't understand it. Time passed. I was floating off again. It felt so weird, like a dream, a nightmare. More time passed. It seemed like forever. I was in and out, in and out.

A rough voice asked, "Is she dead yet?" I floated off again. I heard another voice. "Is she dead yet?" I wondered how long the ambulance had been sitting there. The attendants looked nervous. The bubbles in my chest felt like they were growing bigger. When they burst, my whole chest shattered. I faded again and it was down South in the summertime. I thought about my grandmother. At last the ambulance was moving. "If i live," i remember thinking, "i'll only have one arm."

The hospital is glaring white. Everybody i see is white. Everyone seems to be waiting. All at once they are in motion. Blood pressure, pulse, needles, etc. Two detectives come in. I know they're detectives because they look like detectives. One of them has a face like a bulldog, with jowls hanging down the sides. They supervise the nurse as she cuts off my clothes. After a while, one of them dabs my fingertips with what look like Q-tips. Later i find out that this is the neutron activation test to determine whether or not i have fired a weapon. Another one then tries to fingerprint me, but he has trouble because my hand is dead.

"Gimme the dead man's kit." He puts my fingers into spoon-looking things used to fingerprint dead people. They begin to ask me questions, but a bunch of doctors come in. One of them, who appears to be the head doctor, examines me. He pokes and prods, throwing me around like a rag doll. Then, like he is going to kill me, he jerks me around so that i'm on my stomach. The pain is like an electric shock. I moan.

"Don't cry now, girlie," he says. "Why'd you shoot the trooper? Why'd you shoot the trooper?"

I want to kick him in his face. I know he would kill me if he had the chance. I can see the scalpel slipping. One of the other doctors says something about calling the operating room. "Hell no!" is all i can think of. "Hell no!”

After a while, they all leave. Then a Black nurse comes into the room. I am glad as I could be to see her. She bends over me.

"What is your name?" she asks. "What is your name?"

I think about it and decide to say nothing. If i tell them my name they will know who i am and they will kill me for sure.

"What is your name?" she keeps asking, enunciating each syllable in the way that people talk to someone who has trouble hearing or understanding. "What is your name? What is your address? Where do you live?" Her voice is getting louder. "We need your signature, miss," she says, waving a piece of paper in front of me. "We need your permission for treatment, in case we have to operate." She repeats the same thing, over and over. "Who shall we contact in case of emergency?" (I think that's kind of funny.) "What is your name? Where do you live?" I close my eyes, wishing she

would go away. She keeps right on talking. I drift off, thinking about my arm. It is still there.

"Nerve damage. Paralyzed," i heard them say. It has never occurred to me. It isn't that bad, i remember thinking. I can live with that if i have to.

More voices, other voices, grating my ears and my consciousness.

"She can talk," one is saying. "The doctor says she can talk. Where were you going? What is your name? Where were you coming from? Who was in the car with you? How many of you were there? I know she can hear me."

I keep my eyes closed. One of them leans down real close to me. I feel his breath on my cheek. And smell it.

"I know you can hear me and I know you can talk, and if you don't hurry up and start talking, I'm gonna bash your face in for you."

My eyes fly open in spite of myself. Immediately they are all in my face, throwing question after question at me. I say nothing. After a while, i close my eyes again.

"Oh, she doesn't feel good," one of them says in a sweet, mocking voice. "Where does it hurt? Here? Here? HERE?"

With each here comes a crash. I look around wildly, but no one is there. More thumps and punches, but none of them hurts as bad as my chest is hurting. I try to scream but i know immediately that that's a mistake. My chest erupts and i think i am gonna die. They go on and on. Questions and bangs. I think they will never stop.

A woman's voice. "Telephone."

"Thank you," one of them says, giving me an ugly grin. They are gone.

Another pig comes in. A Black pig. In uniform. He comes closer and i see that he is not a cop but a hospital security guard. He stands not too far from where i am lying and i can see he is not at all hostile. His face breaks into a kind of reserved smile and, very discreetly, he clenches his fist and gives me the power sign. That man will never know how much better he made me feel at that moment.

The detectives come back with a nurse. They begin to move the stretcher. My mind races. Where are they taking me? The only place i can think of is the operating room. When we arrive at the X- ray room, i'm thankful. Because i have to move around, the X-rays are painful, but the technician is cool. X-rays are over and i am rolled down the hallway, determined to keep my eyes closed. All of a sudden, flashes of light. My eyes pop open. This time they are taking my picture.

The police photographer asks, "Don't you wanna give us a smile? Come on. Give us a smile."

I close my eyes again. We are moving. The stretcher stops. One of the pigs tells the nurse he has a headache. She volunteers to get him something.

The stretcher is moving again. Where the hell are they taking me? Again the light is changing and, although my eyes are closed, i can feel the difference. It feels like i'm in the dark. I can't take it any longer and i look. The room is dark, but there is some light. My eyes slowly adjust. There's something lying next to me. I can see an outline. Something in plastic. Something-my mind slowly realizes that it is a man in a plastic bag. And that the man is Zayd. My body stiffens. My mind spins.

One of the troopers says, "That's what's gonna happen to you before the night is over if you don't tell us what we want to know."

I say nothing, but inside i'm raging. "Dogs! Swine! Filthy pigs! Dirty slimy scum! Bastards! Sons of bitches!" I rage on and on. "I wouldn't tell you the right time of day," i remember thinking. "I wouldn't tell you that shit stinks!"

The night crawls along. Nurses, doctors, and troopers. I am still scared, but i am just as angry and evil as i am scared. The detectives are in and out and, when nobody is there except them, they get in their digs and bangs. But after a while i don't think about them too much. I am thinking about living, about surviving, thinking about what is going to happen next. They are gonna do what they are gonna do and there isn't much i can do about it. I just have to be myself, stay as strong as i can, and do my best. That's all. There is nowhere to run and i am in no shape to try. I realize how isolated and vulnerable i am. What if i really do need an operation? I need help from the outside world. I have to try to get word out to someone. The Black nurse has been back and forth, asking me the same questions. Each time i have closed my eyes until she goes away. I decide to ask her to get in touch with my people the next time she comes by. Maybe she will be cool. She is my best shot; the guard is long gone.

I doze off for a little while. When i wake up, a nurse and a priest are standing over me. The priest is mumbling and seems to be rubbing something on my forehead. At first i don't understand what he is doing. Then it dawns on me. Last rites. Last rites are for the dying.

"Go away," i say out loud. I don't have the strength to say anything else. But i know i don't want anybody's last rites. I am not going to die, and even if i do die, i'm not going to die nobody's hypocrite.

The Black nurse comes back and starts her questions again. Before she can get started good, i beckon her to come closer. There is no one else around. I ask her to get in contact with my lawyer (who is also my aunt). I give her my name and ask her to make the call herself. She has a hard time understanding me and keeps asking me to repeat my name. I can barely talk, and each time she asks me to repeat myself, i feel like screaming. Then it occurs to me that Assata is foreign to her ears. She has probably never heard the name before. So i give her my slave name. Then i give her the number and she is off and running.

Two minutes later the detectives are on me like white on rice. They threaten and plead, reason and offer me the world. They hurl question after question at me, acting crazier than before. One plays the nice cop who is trying to save me from the bad cop, if only i will cooperate. I am tired and their act is even tireder. I can see exhaustion in their faces. The whole night is coming down on me. Their voices begin to sound far away. I can't take it anymore. They can go to hell. I am going to sleep. This time i am going out for real.

When i wake up the stretcher is moving. After a little while we arrive at the intensive care part of the hospital. The place is packed with nurses. I am elated. All i want to do is sleep. Soon i'm drifting off again.

I wake up and it's the next day. The doctors are making their rounds. One of them, an intern i think, is very kind to me. They examine me and spend the rest of the morning doing blood tests, X-rays, EKGs, etc., etc.

Soon i learn that they're going to move me again. I also find out that i'm in middlesex county hospital, I hear the nurses talking They are glad i am being moved because the police are driving them crazy

When they come to move me it looks like a police parade. The rooms i am moved to are called the Johnson Suite. I can't believe it. I have never imagined that hospitals have rooms like this. There is a sitting room, a huge hospital-equipped room (where i am kept), a den, a kitchen, a full bathroom and another little room whose purpose i will never learn. They transfer me to the bed and handcuff one of my legs to the side rail.

I keep looking around. It is elegant and clearly for rich people. I am probably the first Black person who has ever been in this room. And the only reason i am there is for security. They have sealed off the doors and no one can enter except through the sitting room next door where three state troopers are stationed. Two regulars and one sergeant.

The police radio in the room cackles all day long. "A carload of suspicious-looking coloreds in a white Ford coupe." "A suspicious-looking Negro walking near the hospital in a blue jacker and sneakers." No suspicious-looking white people are reported. From listening to the police talk next door, and to the radio, i learn that the hospital is saturated with state troopers. They seem to be under the impression that somebody is going to try and break me out. I feel better. The Demerol has me flying a little and makes it easier for me to lie in the contorted position i am forced into because of the cuff on my leg.

Later that afternoon, it begins again. Detectives and more detectives. Questions and more questions. This time the questions are different. Now they want to know about the Black Liberation Army: how big is it; what cities is it in, who is in it, etc., etc. But the main focus of their questions centers around "the guy that got away." I am delighted! I figure that Sundiata is somewhere safe by now, cooling out.

They are more careful where and how they hit me now. I guess they don't want to leave any marks. One sticks his fingers in my eyes. I don't know what he has on his fingertips, but whatever it is burns like hell. I think I am gonna be blind forever. He says he will keep doing it until i am completely blind. I close my eyes and hold them as tight as i can. He strikes me a few more times. Some of the stuff gets into my eyes anyway. Burning tears pour down my face and my whole head is throbbing. I think he is going to keep on, but he begins to curse me, calling me all kind of nigger bitches. Finally, he and the others leave.

On one of those first days, a white doctor comes to examine me. He acts very nice, sweet as pie. He examines me slowly, the whole time making friendly conversation. I wonder what kind of specialist he is since i haven't seen him before and i know he isn't one of the regulars. He says he knows how terrible i must feel and makes a big deal of protesting that i am chained to the bed. He keeps on talking and, after a while, pulls a chair close to the bed. Then he starts to ask friendly little questions. The conversation goes something like this:

"Those guys on the turnpike are rough. They'll give you a ticket for anything. I take the turnpike every day. You live in jersey? I live in Newark. You ever been there? You must really be lonely up here. I'll bet you really need someone to talk to. I went to medical school in New York. You're from there, aren't you?"

I get suspicious and say nothing to him. I tell him i want to go to sleep and he leaves. I never saw him again, but to this day i'm convinced he was some kind of police or FBI agent.

On the third or fourth day, most of my troubles came to an end. Well, not really, but the punch, bang, poke, and prod part of my troubles ended. A nurse with a German accent came to my aid. She was one of the morning nurses, very professional and exacting, to the point that she could be a pain in the neck. But she was a lifesaver. It was she who had first protested the tightness of the handcuff on my leg. My leg had begun to swell and she had insisted they loosen it and that the cuff be covered with gauze. Of course, as soon as she was gone they tightened it again, but the gauze helped somewhat. I could tell by the little things she said and did that she knew what was going on. One morning she came in as usual and, after she had finished her normal routine, she reached behind the bed, pulled at something, and then handed me an electric call button on a cord.

"Anytime you need me or need anything from the nurses, just press this button," she said. "Don't be afraid to use it," she added, giving me a knowing look.

I could have kissed her. Later, when she returned to the room, after the troopers realized i had the call button, one came in behind her.

"Is there any way to disconnect that thing?" he asked. "She might hurt someone with it or hurt herself."

"No," she said, "there is no way to remove it. If you pull it out, it will just keep ringing in the nurses' station. She is having difficulty breathing and she needs it.”

Right on!" i thought. "Das ist richtig." After that, whenever the police came within two feet of my bed, i would push the button. Finally, they gave up the idea of beating on me and contented themselves with threats and other kinds of harassment. A favorite was to stand in the door and point their guns at me. Each day was my last day on earth. Each night was my last night. After a while, i became accustomed. Immune. Sometimes they would cock a gun i didn't know was empty, give a long, impassioned speech, and then pull the trigger. Other times i was invited to a game of Russian roulette, they all expressed a bitter hatred for me. They were state troopers and i was accused of killing one of them.

Every day there were three shifts of police. When they changed shifts, the two troopers would salute the sergeant. Some saluted an army salute, but others saluted like the nazis did in Germany. They held their hands in front of them and clicked their heels. I couldn't believe it. One day one of them came in and gave me a speech about how he fought in World War II on the wrong side. He went on and on and there was no question that he believed everything he said. He talked about how messed up the world is. How decent people couldn't walk the streets. He said that if Hitler had won, the world wouldn't be in the mess it is in today, that niggers like me, no-good niggers, wouldn't be going around shooting new jersey state troopers.

He went on to say that the white race had invented everything because they were smart and worked hard, that other races wanted to riot and use terrorism to take everything the white race had worked so hard to get. I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut. He talked about empires, the Roman, the Greek, the Spanish, the British. He told me white people created empires because they were more civilized than the rest of the world. White people created ballet and opera and symphonies. "Did you ever hear of a nigger writing a symphony?" he asked. Every day he gave me a speech about nazism. Sometimes other nazis would join in. I asked him if there were a lot of nazis in the state troopers, but he just laughed and kept on talking.

When i was in the Black Panther Party, we used to call the police "fascist pigs," but i had called them fascists not because i believed they were nazis but because of the way they acted in our communities. As many times as i had referred to police as fascists, these shocked me by the truth of my own rhetoric. I later learned that the state troopers in new jersey was started by a German, that their uniforms were patterned after some type of German uniform (very similar to the uniforms South African police wear), that they are notorious for stopping Black, Hispanic, and long-haired people on the turnpike and beating, harassing, and arresting them.

The nazis headed the harassment campaign against me. They spit in my food and turned down the thermostat in the room until it was freezing. For a while their campaign centered on keeping me from sleeping. They stamped their feet on the floor, sang songs all night, played with their guns, shouted, etc. I told the nurses about it, but it was no use.

I could deal with whatever they were putting out, but how long would this go on? I had heard nothing from the outside world, and i didn't even know if anybody knew where i was or whether i was dead or alive. My chest was feeling better, but i still could hardly breathe. I thought i was past the point of needing an operation, but i wasn't sure if it was because of the painkillers they had given me or because i was really getting better.

Every day i asked them to contact my lawyer, and every day they said they had tried but there was no answer. I knew that was a lie because Evelyn had an answering service. Every day i asked them to contact my family. The response to this was usually obscene.

"Oh, you got a family, do you? Is your mother a nigger whore like you? We don't allow no pickaninnies at this hospital."

They went on and on about my family until they found something else to go on and on about. Whoever said that no news is good news had to be out of his mind.

Well, there was news, but it wasn't good news. They told me they had arrested Sundiata. At first i didn't believe them, but they were too glib and arrogant. I knew something had happened.

"We got your friend," they said, "and he's singing like a bird. Yeah, he's singing like a bird, and he's giving you all the weight. It's a good thing for you he didn't know what color undies you had on or he would have told us that. We know where you were coming from. We know where you were going. We know that you stopped at a Howard Johnson. He even told us what you ordered and that you just love potato chips."

"What?" i thought. "How did they know that?" Then i remembered that we had bought potato chips at a Howard Johnson on the turnpike. Maybe someone had seen me and remembered.

"Yes, Clark Squire tells us that you took the trooper's gun and shot him in the head. Now, you wouldn't do a thing like that, would you? Well, JoAnne, you're in a hell of a fix. If I were you, I wouldn't let him get away with it. It's a low-down thing to do, giving all the weight to a woman. I'll make a deal with you. You tell us everything that happened and I promise well light on you. just don't like to see you get a bad break, that's all. You know you're facing a lot of time in prison, the way things stand, if he testifies against you. You could get life in prison or even the chair, but all you have to do is tell us what happened and we'll see to in that you do just a couple of years and go home. You're young. You don't want to rot away your whole life in prison, do you? Maybe you think you owe something to the cause. You think he's thinking about the cause now? No, he's singing his head off, trying to give you all the weight. They're all the same. They talk all this shit about Black people, equal rights, civil rights, but when it comes down to the wire, all they care about is their hide. He's thinking about his hide and you better think about yours. You think the cause gives a damn about you? Your own people don't give a damn about you. To them you're just a common criminal. Now I'm giving you this one chance to save yourself and come clean. If you don't take it, you're a fool."

They really did think Black people were stupid. Their line had to be the oldest in the book. He was sitting there like he just knew his corny little speech had done the trick. I said nothing. If you don't say anything to them, they have nothing to turn around and use against you. "Divide and conquer" has always been their motto.

When they realized i wasn't going to talk, they began to leave. Then one came back. "Oh," he said, "I almost forgot to read you your rights." He pulled out this little card and read from it. ""You have the right to remain silent.... You have the right to... etc.'l wouldn't want you to say that we didn't read you your rights."

Thursday afternoon. They're letting me make a phone call. I don't believe it. I call my aunt. She's not in. The answering service answers. I don't know who else to call. The only lawyers whose names i know worked on the Panther 21 trial. I call them at random. No one is in, but secretaries promise to give them messages. I'm disappointed but i feel a lot better. Things are looking up.

It is Friday. From the activity in the room next door, i can tell something is up. Voices and whispers. They are back and forth, in and out, arranging this, moving that. The police radio is jumping. What is happening? Whatever it is, it can't be too bad, i think. They are leaving me alone. In a little while a policewoman comes in. She is in a brown uniform and her insignia says "Sheriff's Department.” She's Black or Hispanic. I can't tell exactly, except that she isn't white. Then some more police come in, dressed in uniforms similar to hers. Then more police. They are state troopers. One of them moves to the door and stands at attention. Then some men in suits come in. Then a man comes in with a stenographic machine.

"The Honorable Joseph F. Bradshaw, State of New Jersey, County of Middlesex. All rise."

Then this judge walks in with a black robe on. One of the men in a suit reads the charges against me:

We are here today to serve complaints upon you for the matters arising out of the shooting of May 2 of 1973. I will read you the complaints, leave copies with you of the charges that will be pending against you. The Judge will then advise you on the arraignment of such rights you may have.

…you are charged under Complaint Number 119977, by Detective Taranto, New Jersey State Police, who says on the 2nd of May, 1973, within the confines of the Township of East Brunswick, County of Middlesex, that you unlawfully and illegally resisted a lawful arrest being made by New Jersey State Trooper James Harper by discharging a dangerous pistol and wounding the said James Harper and fleeing the scene of the incident, all in violation of N.J.S. 2A:85-1....

You are also charged,... under complaint Number 5 119979, by Detective Sergeant Taranto of the New Jersey State Police, who says that on the 2nd of May, 1973, within the Township of East Brunswick, County of Middlesex, that you did commit an Atrocious Assault and Battery upon New Jersey State Trooper James Harper by shooting, wounding and maiming the said James Harper with a hand gun then and there discharged by the defendant, all in viola- tion of N.J.S. 2A:90-1.

In the Second Count you are charged by the said officer who says that defendant Joanne Deborah Chesimard did on the afore- mentioned date and place unlawfully and illegally assault the said James Harper with intent to kill, murder and slay him by use of a hand gun then and there held by the defendant, all in violation of N.J.S. 2A:90-2.

It further charges in the Third Count that the aforementioned defendant did at the above mentioned time and place commit an unlawful and illegal assault and battery on a law enforcement officer, to wit, one James Harper, a duly sworn Trooper of the New Jersey State Police, by discharging a firearm and wounding the said James Harper, all in violation of N.J.5. 2A:90-4....

In S 119980 you are charged with illegally and unlawfully committing the crime of murder by willfully and with malice aforethought shooting, killing and slaying New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, all in violation of N.J.S. 2A:113-1 and N.JS. 2A:85-14...

You are further being charged under $ 119981 with one count, wherein Detective Sergeant Taranto charges you on the 2nd day of May, 1973, within the Township of East Brunswick, County of Middlesex, that you did unlawfully, illegally and with malice aforethought cause or affect the murder of James Coston a/k/a Zayd Shakur, while resisting or avoiding a lawful arrest then and there being affected by New Jersey State Trooper James Harper, all in violation of N.J.S. 2A:113-2.

You are charged with S 119982 by State Police Sergeant Louis Taranto, that on the 2nd day of May, 1973, in the Township of East Brunswick, County of Middlesex, you unlawfully and illegally possessed on your person, under your custody and control, an illegal weapon, to wit, one Browning 9 milimeter automatic pistol, one Browning automatic .380 caliber, one .38 caliber Llama automatic pistol, serial number 24831, all without having obtained any necessary permit for the carrying of same, in violation of N.J.S. 2A:151-41 (a)....

You are further charged in Complaint S 119983, wherein Detective Sergeant Taranto says on the 2nd day of May, 1973, in the Township of East Brunswick, County of Middlesex, that you did unlawfully and illegally and forcibly take from the person of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster a 38 caliber revolver by violence, to wit, by shooting, slaying and killing the same Werner Foerster, all in violation of N.J.S. 2A:141-1.

The Second Count of that Complaint charges you with committing that act while being armed, in violation of N.J.S. 2A:151-5…

…you are being charged by State Trooper Detective Sergeant Taranto, Complaint S 119984, who says on the 2nd day of May, 1973, in the Township of East Brunswick, County of Middlesex, that you did illegally, unlawfully conspire with James Coston, a/k/a Zayd Shakur and one John Doe to commit the crime of murder of the said Trooper Werner Foerster, and in the affectuation of said conspiracy did execute the following overt acts:

1. That the said defendant Joanne Deborah Chesimard did have in her possession a pistol with which to affectuate the ends of the conspiracy on the above-mentioned time and ..... at the above-mentioned place.

2. The above named defendant Joanne Deborah Chesimard in concert with and by common scheme and plan did assault Trooper James Harper and otherwise discharge her weapon at the said Trooper James Harper with the intent to affect the ends of the conspiracy by otherwise wounding, maiming or killing him, all in violation of N.J.S. 2A:98-1 and N.J.5. 2A:113-1.

I think he will never stop. Half of the charges i don't even understand. I interrupt the proceedings. "I don't have a lawyer here," i protest. "I would like to have a lawyer present." They ignore

me and keep on reading. "How do you plead?" they ask me.

"I would like to have a lawyer present. Don't i have a right to a lawyer?"

"That will not be necessary," the judge says coldly. "Enter a plea of not guilty for the defendant."

And just as quickly as they entered, the procession departs.

Later the same policewoman comes back. She stands rigidly against the wall. Her face is a mask. "Oh, no!" i think. "Court again? What are they gonna do, railroad me here and now?" 1 imagine myself being tried right there in the bed with no lawyer.

The door opens. It is Evelyn-my lawyer and aunt. She is the most beautiful sight in the world. She embraces me and sits down next to me. As usual, she is business first.

"I only have five minutes," she tells me. "They told me that I couldn't see you. I had to go to court and get a court order to see you. The judge would give us only five minutes apiece. Your mother and sister are outside. So talk fast."

We look up. The police are practically standing in our mouths.

"I would like to talk with my client in private," Evelyn says. "Would you please move back. This is an outrage. This is an attorney-client visit and we have a constitutional right to privacy."

The police move back one inch. I tell Evelyn about the kangaroo court in the morning. My mouth moves so fast it's like one of those old-style movies, but a talkie. I can see from the expression on her face that i must look horrible.

"How are they treating you?" she asks.

I don't have time to tell her the whole story, but i have to let her know what is going on. I don't know what they will do next. I have to try to get someone to put pressure on them to stop. I tell her some of it, but i just can't tell her the worst things. Her face looks so pitiful and every time i tell her something else, her hands shake.

"Try to do what you can," i say.

"Time's up. Time's up, miss!"

Evelyn makes her futile protests. "I need to talk with my client. This is just not enough time.”

"Sorry, miss. Time's up!" They move toward her like they an going to beat her up.

Then she is gone. I brace myself for my mother and my sister It. has been such a long time since i have seen them. I don't know

what to expect. My mother comes in. She looks worried but strong. She kisses me

"I'm proud of you," she says.

The words spin around me, weaving a warm blanket of love. I am so happy. I can hardly contain myself. My mother is proud of me. She loves me and she is proud of me.

Too soon the time with my mother is up. My sister comes in. She has her hair wrapped in a turban and she looks so pale. As soon as she sees me, she breaks out crying. Tears stream down her already puffy face. I can tell she has been crying a lot.

"I love you," she says simply.

We don't do a lot of talking, but i feel so very close to her during those few minutes.

"Time's up." Again. And then she is gone.

I lie there full of emotion. All of this is so hard on my family. They look vulnerable and shaken. This is maybe harder on them than it is on me. I wish there was something i can do to make them happy.

Two Black nurses were very kind to me. When they were on duty, they would go out of their way to make sure i was all right. They made frequent trips to my room, for which i was especially grateful during those first days.

"If you need anything, just ring," they said knowingly. One night one of the nurses came in and gave me three books.

I hadn't even thought about reading. The books were a godsend. They had been carefully selected. One was a book of Black poetry, one was a book called Black Women in White Amerika, and the third was a novel, Siddbartha, by Hermann Hesse. Whenever i tired of the verbal abuse of my captors, i would drown them out by reading the poetry out loud. "Invictus" and "If We Must Die" were the poems i usually read. I read them over and over, until i was sure the guards had heard every word. The poems were my message to them.

When i read the book about Black women, i felt the spirits of those sisters feeding me, making me stronger. Black women have been struggling and helping each other to survive the blows of life since the beginning of time. And when i read Siddhartha, a peace came over me. I felt a unity with all things living. The world, in spite of oppression, is a beautiful place. I would say "Om" softly to myself, letting my lips vibrate. I felt the birds, the sun, and the trees. I was in communion with all the forces on the earth that truly love people, in communion with all the revolutionary forces on the earth.

I was definitely getting better. They were even unchaining me so that i could hobble to the bathroom every now and then, with the help of the nurse. I was still weak and, when i returned from the bathroom, i would flop on the bed as if i had just accomplished a great physical feat. But at least now i knew what was wrong with me. During those first days i could barely ask, and when i did, they acted as if my condition were some top secret information i was not privy to. I had three bullet holes. There was a bullet in my chest (it's still there); an injured lung with fluid in it, a broken clavicle, and a paralyzed arm with undetermined damage to the nerves. I kept asking if i would be able to use my hand again. One or two doctors said, flatly, no. The others said, "Maybe yes, maybe no."

Anyway, i was gonna live.

STORY

You died.

I cried.

And kept on getting up.

A little slower.

And a lot more deadly.

Chapter 2

The FBI cannot find any evidence that i was born. On my FBI Wanted poster, they list my birth date as July 16, 1947, and, in parentheses, "not substantiated by birth records."

Anyway, i was born. I am the older of two children. My sister, Beverly, was born five years later. The name my momma gave me was JoAnne Deborah Byron. I am told that i was a fat, happy baby and that i was talking in complete sentences when i was about nine months old. They say that i was lazy, though, that i talked way before i learned to walk. Everybody says that i had my days mixed up with my nights and kept everybody up all night. (I'm still pretty much a night owl.) The only other tale i remember hearing about my babyhood was that i would scream at the top of my lungs whenever anybody wearing furs or feathers came near me. (I'm still not too fond of furs and feathers.)

My mother and father were divorced shortly after i was born. I lived with my mother, my aunt (now Evelyn Williams), my grandmother (Lulu Hill), and my grandfather (Frank Hill) in a house in the Bricktown section of Jamaica, New York. The only thing i remember about that house is the backyard, which i loved, and the huge dog next door. I remember the dog well because he terrified me. To my young eyes he looked like a giant, a canine version of King Kong or Mighty Joe Young. (I'm still not too wild about dogs.) When i was three years old, my grandparents sold the house and moved down South. I moved with them.

We moved into a big wooden house on Seventh Street in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was the house my grandfather had grown up in. It had a wraparound porch with a big green swing and, of course, rosebushes in the front yard and a pecan tree in the back. My grandfather originally thought that the house had belonged to my great-grandfather, Pappa Linc (short for Lincoln), but they found out he had only been given the use of the house for his lifetime. Pappa Line had worked as a chauffeur for one of the most prominent white families in Wilmington and, the story goes, had been a prominent member of the Black community. He and my great-grandmother, Momma Jessie, had worked hard all their lives, had raised eleven children in that house, and had died under the impression that the house was theirs. Fine print and white lawyers have a way of robbing Black people of what is theirs. My grandparents were forced to buy the house again.

"Who's better than you?"

"Nobody."

"Who?"

"Nobody."

"Get that head up."

"Yes."

"Yes, who?"

"Yes, Grandmommy."

"I want that head held up high, and i don't want you taking no mess from anybody, you understand?"

"Yes, Grandmommy."

"Don't you let me hear about anybody walking over my grandbaby."

"No, Grandmommy."

"I don't want nobody taking advantage of you, you bear me?"

"Yes, I hear you."

"Yes, who?"

"Yes, Grandmommy."

All of my family tried to instill in me a sense of personal dignity, but my grandmother and my grandfather were really fanatic about it. Over and over they would tell me, "You're as good as anyone else.

Don't let anybody tell you that they're better than you." My grandparents strictly forbade me to say "yes ma'am" and "yes sir" or to look down at my shoes or to make subservient gestures when talking to white people. "You look them in the eye when you talk to them, i was told. "And speak up like you've got some sense." I was told to speak in a loud, clear voice and to hold my head up high, or risk having my grandparents knock it off my shoulders.

My grandparents were big on respect. I was to be polite and respectful to adults, to say "good morning" or "good evening" as i passed the neighbors houses. Any kind of back talk or sass was simply out of the question. My grandparents didn't even permit me to answer questions with a simple "yes" or "no." Instead I had to say "yes, Grandmother" or "no, Grandfather." But when it came to dealing with white people in the segregated South, my grandmother would tell me, menacingly, "Don't you respect nobody that don't respect you, you hear me?" "Yes, Grandmother," i would answer, my voice almost a whisper. "Speak up!" she would tell me repeatedly, something she seemed hell-bent on making me do. She would send me to the store with clear instructions on what to bring back. I was, under no circumstances, to come home with inferior goods, something which happened all too often to Black people in the South. "You tell them that you don't want any garbage, and you'd better not come back with any," she would warn me. If the store owner sold me something that my grandmother didn't like, i would have to return to the store and get the thing changed or get my money back. "You speak up loud and clear. Don't let me have to go down to that store." Scared to death of the fuss my grandmother would make if she had to go to the store herself, i would hurry back to the store, prepared to raise almighty hell.

Whenever my grandmother heard about somebody being mistreated, especially if it was a man mistreating a woman, she would glare at me and say, "Don't you let anybody mistreat you, you hear? We're not raising you up to be mistreated, you hear? I don't want you taking no mess off of nobody, you understand?" "Yes, Grandmother," i would answer, for what seemed like the millionth time, wondering why my grandmother liked to repeat herself so often. The tactics that my grandparents used were crude, and i hated it when they would repeat everything so often. But the lessons that they taught me, more than anything else learned in life, helped me to deal with the things i would face growing up in amerika.

But a lot of times, for my grandparents, pride and dignity were hooked up to things like position and money. For them, being "just as good" as white people meant having what white people had. They would tell me to go to school and study so that i could have a nice house and nice clothes and a nice car. "White people don't want to see us with nothing, they would tell me. "That's why you've got to get your education so that you can be somebody and have something in life." Becoming "somebody" in life just didn't mean too much to me. I wanted to feel happy, to feel good. My awareness of class differences in the Black community came at an early age. Although my grandmother taught me more about being proud and strong than anyone i know, she had a lot of Booker T. Washington, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, "talented tenth" ideas. She had worked hard and had made a decent living as a pieceworker in a factory, but she had other ideas for me. She was determined that i would become part of Wilmington's talented tenth-the privileged class-part of the so-called Black bourgeoisie.

One of her first steps was to sternly forbid me to play with "alley rats." It was impossible for me to obey her orders since i had absolutely no idea what an alley rat was. I often became the unwitting object of my grandmother's fury, charged with the crime of alley rat playing. My grandmother, writhing with annoyance, would threaten me with untold punishments if i continued my evil ways. I received strict orders to abandon my penchant for alley rats and play with "decent children." But we could never agree on who "decent children" were. Decent children, to my grandmother, were a whole 'nother story.

"Decent children" came from "decent families". How did you know what a decent family was? A decent family lived in a decent house. How did you know what a decent house was? A decent house was fixed up nice and had a sidewalk in front of it. Decent families didn't let their kids play in the street with no shoes on and didn't let their kids say "ain't." Little did my grandmother know that ain't was my favorite word once i got two feet out of her hearing range. My grandmother had a little alley rat right under her roof and she didn't even know it. Alley rats supposedly lived in alleys, in run-down shacks, but my grandmother would often call one of my friends an alley rat even if the kid didn't live in an alley.

Dutifully, to put some sense in my head, she would take me to visit "decent children." These decent little souls were invariably the offspring of Wilmington's Black doctors, lawyers, preachers, and undertakers. Schoolteachers, barbershop owners, and the editor of the "colored" newspaper were also decent. In most of these "decent" little play sessions, the other kids and I would stand around looking at each other awkwardly. Sometimes we would get it on and have some fun. But more often than not, it would be glare-at-each-other time or show-and-tell time (the kids showing me their toys and such while the grownups oohed and aahed). The worst times were eating at the preacher's house, where they would take an hour saying grace, or playing ball with the undertaker's daughter. She always wanted to play ball and i was scared to death that the ball was going to roll into the part where they kept the dead people and end up in the mouth of some corpse. My grandmother would have caught a shitfit if she had known that one of her favorite little decent kids' favorite game was playing show and tell with his ding-a-ling and threatening to pee on everybody.

After these visits, my grandmother would chirp for a week about how nice my little decent friends were and about how nicely we had played together, while i would groan silently and keep the expression on my face one shade away from insolence. My grandmother and i waged a standoff battle damn near until i was grown. It wasn't that i wanted to defy her, it was that i just liked who i liked. I didn't care what kind of house my friends had or whether or not they lived in alleys. All that mattered was whether i liked them. I was convinced then, and i'm still convinced, that in some things kids have a lot more sense than adults.

But, to my young mind, life in Wilmington was exciting. There were always new places to go and new cousins, aunts, and uncles to meet. One of my favorite relatives was Aunt Lou. She was Momma Jessie's sister and she lived across town. She was my grandfather's only remaining relative in Wilmington, the rest having moved up North or out West. Aunt Lou had a magic house, full of all kinds of flavors, textures, smells, and things. There were whole worlds in her house to explore. She would always feed me something good to eat and then let me run wild.

I didn't know until i was grown that Aunt Lou had a son. His name was Uncle Willie and he died before i was born. Uncle Willie was something of a legend around Wilmington during the twenties, thirties, and forties. Whenever he came to town, they say, Aunt Lou would plead and moan and worry until he was in safer territory up North. They say that he would tear down the "colored" and "white only" signs and break the Jim Crow laws at whim. He would go around demanding his rights and denouncing the oppression of Black people, and it is logical that no one who loved him felt the least bit comfortable until he was long gone. They called him "Wild Willie" or "that crazy Indian" (he was supposedly Black and Cherokee), but people called him that because of his nature. They say he had a lot of friends and that he died of natural causes.

The rest of the relatives i met came from my grandmother's side. My grandmother's family lived in Seabreeze, outside of Wilmington, close to Carolina Beach. Their last name was Freeman, and they were famous for being high-strung, quick-tempered, and emotional. They seldom worked for anybody, choosing instead to live on the land their father had left them. They worked as farmers and fishermen, and they owned small stores. I have also heard that they were in the bootleg business. My grandmother's father was a Cherokee Indian. He died when my grandmother was very young. Nobody knows too much about him, except that, somehow, he acquired a great deal of land and left it to his children. The land was very valuable because much of it bordered either on the river or on the ocean. Everybody had a different theory about what my great-grandfather had done to acquire it. But it was because of this land that my grandparents had moved down South.

In 1950, the year we moved to Wilmington, the South was completely segregated. Black people were forbidden to go many places, and that included the beach. Sometimes they would travel all the way to South Carolina just to see the ocean. My grandparents decided to open a business on their land. It consisted of a restaurant, lockers where people could change their clothes, and an area for dancing and hanging out.

The popular name for the beach was Bop City, although my grandparents insisted on calling it Freeman's Beach. Throughout my childhood, the name Freeman had no particular significance. It was a name just like any other name. It wasn't until i was grown and began to read Black history that i discovered the significance of the name. After slavery, many Black people refused to use the last names of their masters. They called themselves "Freeman" instead. The name was also used by Africans who were freed before slavery was "officially" abolished, but it was mainly after the abolition of chattel slavery that many Black people changed their names to Freeman. After learning this, i saw my ancestors in a new light.

For me, the beach was a wonderful place, and to this day there is no place on this earth that i love more. I have never seen a beach more beautiful than it was then, before they decided to build a canal right through the property of my grandparents. It is now just a pale shadow of what it used to be, most of it destroyed by erosion. But back then there were majestic sand dunes covered with tall sea grass where my cousins and i would build forts, houses, and, sometimes, cities. When time permitted, we spent hours hiding and making sneak attacks on one another. The sand was fine and clean and, in the beginning of summer, we could find just about every imaginable kind of sea shell. When the sun got too hot, we would sit in the old blue jeep my grandfather drove and play with frilly things like paper dolls and teacups. After i learned to read, i would sit in the sun, under the huge hats my grandmother always made me wear, and read one book after another.

Every other week my grandfather went to the "colored" library on Red Cross Street and the librarian would send ten or so books for me to read. As soon as i finished reading them, my grandfather would go and get another batch. My imagination was vivid. With fragments of pirates and the Bobbsey Twins floating around, i would sit looking out at the ocean and think about everything. I imagined all the places i had read about on the other side of the ocean and wondered if i would ever see them. And, of course, i daydreamed about all kinds of stuff, most of it silly.

But my days were not spent simply daydreaming. My grandparents were firm believers in work. They had worked all of their lives and there was no way they were gonna tolerate any "lazy-good-for-nothin's" around them. Every day there were chores to do and there was no playing until they were completed. I did things like putting the potato chips on the racks, putting sodas in the cooler, wiping the tables clean, etc. When customers were there, i would sell small stuff like potato chips, Nabs, pickles, and pickled pigs feet. I would also set the tables and bring customers things they needed. But my main job was collecting fifty cents for parking. Because there was no road to our beach (the paved road ended with the white section), my grandparents had to pay for a dirt road and parking lot to be laid over the sand. Truckloads of dirt were brought and a steamroller mashed it down so that it was hard enough to drive on. This was an expensive process, so my grandparents decided to charge fifty cents for parking. I could count and make change at a very early age, so it was my job to collect the fifty cents. During the week it wasn't too time-consuming, but on the weekends, if the weather was nice, it was an all-day job.

Cars and buses of people came from all over North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. There were church groups, school groups, social clubs, women's clubs, boy scouts, and girl scouts. All kinds of people would come to the beach, some with a little money and some that you could tell were real poor. In all the years i spent on that beach, only one or two people hassled me. Most of them treated me very kindly, just like i was their kid.

The people who came to the beach fascinated me. I loved to see them come and go. After a while, i would recognize the regulars and it didn't take me too long to learn their names. Some of them gave me tips, which i usually spent on the picolo (jukebox). There were lots of lovers and i spent some of my time spying on them in the parking lot, but they weren't too interesting. All they did was squirm a lot. Checking license plates (i could recognize almost all of the states' license plates on sight) and collecting bugs (i had a huge collection) were much more interesting. But watching families was better, on their picnics with their fried chicken, potato salads, and watermelons. Some of them looked so happy you could tell they didn't get a chance to go to many picnics. And i was always on the watch for kids to play with when I wasn't busy.

Then there were the goodtimers. Their cars smelled like whiskey. They would dance a lot, eat a lot, spend a lot on the picolo, and many times i would wonder if they had made it home all right.

A lot of poor people came to the beach. Sometimes the floors of their raggedy old cars or trucks were half rotted out. Usually a lot of little children were with them and they wouldn't have bathing suits. They went swimming in whatever clothes they had worn to the beach, and half the time the little kids wore nothing. Then there were those who came to put on airs, usually in the evening, all dressed up, to eat dinner.

Many would say, "I can't stand the sun," "I'm too Black already, I ain't goin' out in no sun." It was amazing the number of people who said they were too Black already. We looked at them like they were crazy because we loved the sun. But the umbrellas for rent went like hotcakes. Some people draped clothes and blankets around the umbrellas so that no light penetrated whatsoever. One lady always put a paper bag on her head and poked holes in it for her eyes. Some of the women refused to go near the water because they were afraid their hair would "go bad."

One of the moving things for me was when someone saw the ocean for the first time. It was amazing to watch. They would stand there, in awe, overpowered and overwhelmed, as if they had come face to face with God or with the vastness of the universe. I remember one time a preacher brought an old lady to the beach. She was the oldest-looking person i had ever seen. She said that she just wanted to see the ocean before she died. She stood there in one spot for so long she looked like she was in a trance. Then, with the help of the preacher, she hobbled around, picked up the mundane shells, and put them into her handkerchief as if they were the most precious things in the world.

I loved to eat (still do) and the beach was right up my alley. Right now, when i think of the fried chicken and fish dinners, my mouth starts to water. But what really sends me off is remembering those seafood platters with fish, shrimps, oysters, deviled crab, clam fritters, and french fries with lettuce and tomatoes on the side. If my memory is any good, i think they sold for $1.50.

Next to food, music was my love. Fats Domino, Nat King Cole, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Platters, Brook Benton, Bobby "Blue" Bland, James Brown, Dinah Washington, Maxine Brown, Big Maybelle were some of the people I listened to during those beach years. I loved to dance. They would play that music and i would dance my natural heart out. That was another way i collected tips. People would egg me on, "Go on, gal, go. Boy, looket that little girl dance." But i loved to see people dance, too. Many a time my grandmother or grandfather had to call me out of the trance i was in watching somebody dance instead of doing my chores.

At night, my cousins, who sometimes came over to work on the beach, told ghost stories. They loved to tell them to me because i would get scared out of my wits. They would tell me about people who came back from the dead, about snakes that could crawl a hundred miles an hour and beat you to death with their tails, and about red phantoms and haints and all kinds of other horrible things. My imagination was vivid, and before the night was over the sea grass turned to monsters and the wind made ghost howls.

Sometimes even my grandmother and grandfather would get into the ghost story sessions. My grandfather's favorite one goes like this: He was driving home in a terrible storm one night. It was lightning and thundering like crazy. He saw lightning hit a tree ahead of him and saw the tree fall across the road. He tried to stop, but it was too late. He braced himself to hit the tree, but nothing happened. The car went smoothly through it as if it weren't there. He turned around and, sure enough, the tree was still lying across the road. He swears that the story is true and i'm convinced that he thoroughly believes it is.

We were, however, visited by real, live ghosts. They were the phantoms of the parking lot. It seems that the white citizens of Wilmington and Carolina Beach were not at all happy that my grandparents had dared to build on the land and to start a "colored" business. We were too close for their comfort. So they would visit us from time to time to express their disapproval. I don't know for a fact that they were card-carrying members of the Klan, but, judging from their behavior, i think they were. But then, of course, they weren't wearing their sheets. They could've just been red- blooded amerikan boys out for some good clean fun. The parking lot was made of dirt, and cars spinning around on it at breakneck speed would ruin it in no time. Two or three of them would ride around the parking lot, spinning and skidding, while they shouted curses and racist insults. One time they fired guns in the air. I remember seeing them and hearing them out there and wondering what they were gonna do next. More than once i saw my grandfather go to where he kept his gun and carry it quietly to where he had been sitting. Somehow this made me more afraid, because i knew that he, too, thought they were scary.

Finally my grandfather put a big fat chain, almost as big as the kind used to anchor ships, across the road at the entrance to the parking lot. This soon eliminated our nightly visitors. One night, as my grandmother and i were fastening the chain

in place and locking it, a white man drove up to the lot and, in an arrogant tone of voice, ordered my grandmother to open the gate so that he could turn his car around. My grandmother, looking very dignified, said, "No, I can't let you do that." Then, in a nicer voice, he asked my grandmother again to open the gate. "No," she said again. "Come on now, auntie, I got a mammy in my house. Now open the gate and lemme turn around." "Wha'd you say?" asked my grandmother. "I said I got a mammy in my house, now come on, open up." My grandmother leaned over in the man's face. "I don't care how many mammies you got in your house. I don't care if you've got a hundred mammies in your house, you're gonna back out of here tonight. And I want you off of my property now! Right now!"

That man turned as red as a redneck can turn and started to back his car up. The road was very narrow, barely wide enough for one car, and there was no way he could turn around without getting stuck in the sand. He backed up for more than a quarter of a mile. As we looked at him backing up, my grandmother and i laughed so hard the tears fell from our eyes.

Every day when we drove from the house on Seventh Street to the beach, we passed a beautiful park with a zoo. And every day i would beg, plead, whine, and nag my grandmother to take me to the zoo. It was almost an obsession. She would always say that "one day" she would take me, but "one day" never came. I would sit in the car pouting, thinking how mean she was. I thought that she had to be the meanest woman on the face of the earth. Finally, with the strangest look on her face, she told me that we were not allowed in the zoo. Because we were Black.

When we were on the beach we shopped at Carolina Beach. It had an amusement park, but of course Black people were not permitted to go in. Every time we passed it i looked at the merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel and the little cars and airplanes and my heart would just long to ride them. But my favorite forbidden ride had little boats in a pool of water, and every time i passed them i felt frustrated and deprived. Of course, peristent creature that i am, i always asked to be taken on the rides, knowing full well what the answer would be. One summer my mother and sister and i were ansking down the boardwalk. My mother was spending part of her walking helping my grandparents in the business. As soon as we neared the rides, i went into my usual act. I continued, ad nauseam, until my mother, grinning, said. "All right now, I'm gonna try to get us in. When we get over there, I don't want to hear one word out of either of you. Just let me do the talking. And if they ask you anything, don't answer. Okay? Okay!"

My mother went over to the ticket booth and began talking. I didn't understand a word she was saying. The lady at the ticket window kept telling my mother that she couldn't sell her any tickets. My mother kept talking, very fast, and waving her hands. The manager came over and told my mother she couldn't buy any tickets and that we couldn't go into the park. My mother kept talking and waving her hands and soon she was screaming this foreign language. I didn't know if she was speaking a play language or a real one. Several other men came over. They talked to my mother. She continued. After the men went to one side and had a conference, they returned and told the ticket seller to give my mother the tickets.

I couldn't believe it. All at once we were laughing and giggling and riding the rides. All the white people were staring at us, but we didn't care. We were busy having a ball. When i got into one of those little boats, my mother practically had to drag me out. I was in my glory. When we finished the rides we went to the Dairy Queen for ice cream. We sang and laughed all the way home.

When we got home my mother explained that she had been speaking Spanish and had told the managers that she was from a Spanish country and that if he didn't let us in she would call the embassy and the United Nations and i don't know who all else. We laughed and talked about it for days. But it was a lesson i never forgot. Anybody, no matter who they were, could come right off the boat and get more rights and respect than amerikan-born Blacks.

My first school experience was Mrs. Perkins's school in Wilmington. It was a little two-room school on Red Cross Street where i learned the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic. I was four years old. Mrs. Perkins's school was the closest thing to nursery school that Black people in Wilmington had, but she didn't play that baby play stuff. We were there to learn. I was prone to colds, however, and i guess the potbellied stove in the school didn't give off enough heat. I was out sick more than i was in school. But i learned enough so that when i went to first grade, everything was easy. I could already read.

I spent most of first grade in New York with my mother, the rest of the first and all of the second down South with my grandparents. I went to Gregory Elementary School in Wilmington. My teachers knew my grandparents well and gave them daily reports of my progress. The teachers were strict and believed solemnly in the paddle, but we learned.

Of course, our school was segregated, but the teachers took more of an interest in our lives because they lived in our world, in the same neighborhoods. They knew what we were up against and what we would be facing as adults, and they tried to protect us as much as they could. More than once we were punished because some children had made fun of a student who was poor and badly dressed. I'm not saying that segregation was a good system. Our schools were inferior. The books were used and torn, handed down from white schools. We received only a fraction of the state money allotted to white schools, and the conditions under which many Black children received an education can only be described as horrible. But Black children encountered support and understanding and encouragement instead of the hostile indifference they often met in the "integrated" schools.

There was a big dirt yard next to the school where we would play and fight. We grew up fighting; it was really hard to get through school without a few fights, just to survive. But i always wondered what made people fight. Especially after we learned about wars. I used to look out on the remains of the sunken ship that tilted up in front of our beach and wonder how people had died in it. It was covered with green moss and i imagined skeletons floating around inside. The ship had been sunk during the Civil War and i always wondered if it carried Northerners or Southerners. Back in those days i used to think the Northerners were the good guys.

But I never could make much sense out of war. I remember being taught that World War I was the war to end all wars. Well, we know that was a lie because there was World War II. I remember a teacher telling us that World War I was started because Prince Ferdinand, somewhere in Austria, got killed. (When we learned history, we were never taught the real reasons for things. We were just taught useless trivia, simplistic facts, key phrases, and miscellaneous, meaningless dates.) I couldn't understand it. What were people all the way in amerika doing in a war because some prince got killed in Austria? I could just imagine going home and telling my grandmother that i got in got killed. a fight because some dude in Europe

They made war sound so glorious in school, so heroic. But the wars we had on the way home from school and in the playground were anything but glorious. Besides the cuts and scratches we received on our battleground, we were likely to get spanked for fighting or for getting our clothes dirty. I was pretty lucky in that respect. When my grandmother would discover that i was all in one piece she wouldn't make too much of a fuss. I guess i looked pretty much the same after a fight as i did any other day when i came home from school. I was a natural tomboy and a natural slob. My blouse was always hanging out of my skirt, one of my socks always fell down in my shoe, and my hair always flew wild around my head. I always managed to get something torn and dirty and, because i was awkward and clumsy, i always looked like a victim of about fifty wars.

Most of our fights started over petty disputes like stepped-on shoes, flying spitballs, and the contested ownership of pens and pencils. But behind our fights, self-hatred was clearly visible.

"Nappy head, nappy head, I catch your ass, you goin' be dead."

"You think you Black and ugly now; I'm gonna beat you till you purple."

"You just another nigga to me. Ima show you what I do with niggas like you."

"You better shut your big blubber lips."

We would call each other "jungle bunnies" and "bush boogies." We would talk about each other's ugly, big lips and flat noses. We would call each other pickaninnies and nappy-haired so-and-so's.

"Act your age, not your color," we would tell each other.

"You gon thank me when I'm through with you, Ima beat you so bad, I'm gon beat the black offa you."

Black made any insult worse. When you called somebody a "bastard," that was bad. But when you called somebody a "Black bastard," now that was terrible. In fact, when i was growing up, being called "Black," period, was grounds for fighting.

"Who you callin' Black?" we would say. We had never heard the words "Black is beautiful" and the idea had never occurred to most of us.

I hated for my grandmother to comb my hair. And she hated to comb it. My hair has always been thick and long and nappy and it would give my grandmother hell. She has straight hair, so she was impatient with mine. When she combed my hair she always remembered something i had done wrong the day before or earlier that day and popped me in the head with the comb. She would always tell me during these sessions, "Now, when you grow up, I want you to marry some man with 'good hair so your children will have good hair. You hear me?" "Yes, Grandmother." I used to wonder why she hadn't followed her own advice since my grandfather's hair is far from straight, but i never dared ask. My grandmother just said what everybody knew was a common fact: good hair was better than bad hair, meaning that straight hair was better than nappy hair.

When my sister Beverly was little, i remember teasing her about her lips. She has big, beautiful lips, but back then we looked at them as something of a liability. I never thought of them as ugly-my sister has always seemed very pretty to me-but her lips were something good to tease her about. I once told her, "With those big lips, the only thing you've got going for you is your long hair; you better never cut it off." I will never know how much damage all my "teasing" did to my sister. But i was only saying what everybody knew: little, thin lips were better than big, thick lips. Everybody knew that.

There was one girl in our school whose mother made her wear a clothespin on her nose to make it thin. There were quite a few girls who tried to bleach their skin white with bleaching cream and who got pimples instead. And, of course, we went to the beauty parlor and got our hair straightened. I couldn't wait to go to the beauty parlor and get my hair all fried up. I wanted Shirley Temple curls just like Shirley Temple. I hated the smell of fried hair and having my ears burned, but we were taught that women had to make great sacrifices to be beautiful. And everybody knew you had to be crazy to walk the streets with nappy hair sticking out. And of course long hair was better than short hair. We all knew that.

We had been completely brainwashed and we didn't even know it. We accepted white value systems and white standards of beauty and, at times, we accepted the white man's view of ourselves. We had never been exposed to any other point of view or any other standard of beauty. From when i was a tot, i can remember Black people saying, "Niggas ain't shit." "You know how lazy niggas are." "Give a nigga an inch and he'll take a mile." Everybody knew what "niggas" like to do after they eat: sleep. Everybody knew that "niggas" couldn't be on time, that's why there was c.p.t. (colored people's time). "Niggas don't take care of nothin'." "Niggas don't stick together." The list could go on and on. To varying degrees we accepted these statements as true. And, to varying degrees, we each made them true within ourselves because we believed them.

I entered third grade in P.S. 154 in Queens. The school was almost all white, and i was the only Black kid in my class. Everybody in my family was glad i was going to school in New York. "The schools are better," they said. "You'll get a better education up North than in that segregated school down South."

School up North was much different for me than school down South. For one thing, the teachers (they were all white-i don't remember having any Black teachers until i was in high school) were always grinning at me. And the older i got, the less i liked those grins. I didn't have a name for them then, but now i call them the "little nigga grins."

My third grade teacher was young, blond, very prissy, and middle class. Whenever i came into the room she would show me all thirty-two of her teeth, but there was nothing sincere about her smile. It never made me feel good. There was always something unnatural and exaggerated about her behavior with me. On my first or second day in class she was teaching us penmanship. "Does anyone know how to make a capital L in script?" she asked. Nobody raised a hand. Timidly, i did. "You know how to do it?" she asked incredulously. "Yes," i told her, "we had that last year down South." "Well, come and write it on the blackboard, then," she told me. I wrote my pitiful little second grade L on the blackboard. After looking at me and nodding, she made a big, fancy L next to mine.

"Is this what you're trying to make, JoAnne?" Her expression was smug. The whole class broke out laughing. I wanted to go somewhere and hide. After that, it seemed that every time i mentioned something i learned down South she got mad. She never saw my raised hand. When she couldn't ignore it, like when no one else raised theirs, she would say something like "Oh, do you know the answer, JoAnne?"

Every holiday a class was assigned to put on a play. There were plays for Columbus Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Our class had George Washington's birthday, and our play was about his cutting down this cherry tree when he was a little boy. I was selected to be in the play. I was tickled pink and so proud. I was cast as one of the cherry trees. The teacher put some green crepe paper over my head and told me to stand at the back of the stage where i was to stay until the end of the play. Then the cherry trees were supposed to sway from side to side and sing: "George Washington never told a lie, never told a lie, he never told a lie. George Washington never told a lie, and the truth goes marching on."

I didn't know what a fool they had made out of me until i grew up and started to read real history. Not only was George Washington probably a big liar, but he had once sold a slave for a keg of rum. Here they had this old craka slavemaster, who didn't give a damn about Black people, and they had me, an unwitting little Black child, doing a play in his honor. When George Washington was fighting for freedom in the Revolutionary War, he was fighting for the freedom of "whites only." Rich whites, at that. After the so-called Revolution, you couldn't vote unless you were a white man and you owned a plot of land. The Revolutionary War was led by some rich white boys who got tired of paying heavy taxes to the king. It didn't have anything at all to do with freedom, justice, and equality for all.

Again, in the fourth grade, i was the only Black kid in my class. My teacher, Mr. Trobawitz, was cool, though, and a very good teacher. He had modern ideas about teaching, and instead of making us read those old boring readers, he had us read real books and write reports about them. His class was always interesting. He told us all kinds of jokes and stories and he seemed to be sincerely concerned about us. That year we were learning about the Civil War and about Lincoln's freeing the slaves. Like all the other teachers, Mr. Trobawitz taught us "fairy-tale history," but at least he made it interesting. That year i was crazy about Lincoln. I memorized the entire "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman and recited it to the class.

Little did i know that Lincoln was an archracist who had openly expressed his disdain for Black people. He was of the opinion that Black people should be forcibly deported to Africa or anywhere else. We had been taught that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves, and it was not until i was in college that i learned that the Civil War was fought for economic reasons. The fact that "official" slavery was abolished was only incidental. Northern industrialists were fighting to control the economy. Before the Civil War, the northern industrial economy was largely dependent on southern cotton. The slave economy of the South was a threat to northern capitalism. What if the slaveholders of the South decided to set up factories and process the cotton themselves? Northern capitalists could not possibly compete with slave labor, and their capitalist economy would be destroyed. To ensure that this didn't happen, the North went to war.

When i was still in the fourth grade, i fell off a swing and broke my leg. Mr. Trobawitz came to my house and gave me lessons and assignments. When i returned to school, Mr. Trobawitz had left to teach in college. Everybody in the class was sad. A bird-beaked, stick-to-the-book, teach-by-rote teacher replaced him. She made us go back to reading in the readers and changed the desks around so that once again we were sitting in rows. I didn't like her and she bored me to death.

One time our class had a dance. It was a big event for me since i loved to dance. The white kids couldn't dance for nothing. They looked like a bunch of drunken kangaroos, hopping all over the place, out of time with the music. I sat there with my hand over my mouth trying to suppress my laughter. I ached to get out there and show them how to do it. But nobody asked me to dance. I don't think it ever occurred to them, and, if it did, they knew better. Dancing with a "nigger" was surely good for a week or so of teasing. But these whites were not at all out in the open with their racism. It was undercover, like their parents' racism. Anyhow, i just sat there, looking at them flop around until this one kid (i'll never forget his name: Richard Kennedy; he was a poor Irish kid with red hair) came over to where i was sitting and said, "If you give me a dime, i'll dance with you." The sad part of the story is that i almost gave him the dime.

In the fifth grade, i was put into the class of the school's most notorious battle-ax, Mrs. Hoffler. I knew from the first day it was going to be a long, hot year. The only good thing was that there was another Black kid in the class. The teacher put us in the back, next to each other. His name was David something, but i called him David Peacan. The teacher was one of those military types and her classes resembled boot camp. We were told where to sit, how to sit, and what kind of notebooks, pens, pencils, etc., to use. She permitted no talking and gave tons of homework. Her punishment for everything was extra homework. Whenever somebody got caught talking or doing anything she disapproved of, she gave extra homework. When you didn't have your homework, she gave extra homework. And every time she gave you extra homework she wrote your name on the blackboard and refused to remove it until you had turned in the "punishment." By the time i left her class my name covered practically the entire blackboard.

David and i were her favorite targets. The whole class would be in an uproar, but we were the only ones she saw with our mouths open. The more she rode our backs, the more rebellious i became. I would sit in the back of the class and make jokes about her.

One day when we were talking and giggling, she came up and pulled David out of his seat by the ear, twisting it until the whole side of his face was red and contorted with pain. I made up my mind right then and there that she wasn't going to do it to me. A few days later, she came after me. When she put her hands on me, i kicked her or hit her. I don't remember which. Anyway, the next thing i knew i was in the principal's office being sent home with a note. I was scared to death my mother would find out, so i signed the note myself and brought it to school the next day. My signature didn't fool anybody. To make a long story short, when my mother found out i confessed everything and i told her about Mrs. Hoffler. I think she had some idea about what was going on because she had seen a change in me. I had always been very quiet and obedient in school. My mother went to the school, talked to the teacher and the principal, and demanded i be moved to another class. It's a good thing she wasn't one of those parents who believe the teacher is always right because i don't know what would have happened. I guess the fact that she's a teacher and is acutely aware of the racism and hostility that Black children are exposed to from the time they enter school had something to do with it.

I don't remember the name of my other fifth grade teacher except that it was a mile long and began with a Z, but she was very nice and a very good teacher. She introduced us to art, literature, and philosophy. I remember studying the French Revolution in her class. She made names like Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, and Robespierre come alive. She talked about philosophers like Rousseau who influenced the thinking of the period and about how the French Revolution was influenced by the amerikan Revolution. She even showed us pictures of the art and architecture of the period. She was the first teacher (one of a very few) who taught subjects as if they related to each other.

Before i was in her class, i would never have imagined that history was connected to art, that philosophy was connected to science, and so on. The usual way that people are taught to think in amerika is that each subject is in a little compartment and has no relation to any other subject. For the most part, we receive fragments of unrelated knowledge, and our education follows no logical format or pattern. It is exactly this kind of education that produces people who don't have the ability to think for themselves and who are easily manipulated.

As we grew older, the differences between the Black and white, the poor and rich students grew bigger and bigger. Once a new teacher told us to make mobiles as homework. Most of us brought in cardboard, wood, or paper mobiles. One kid brought in a mobile made out of metals-not just one kind of metal, but metals of different colors. I was in awe of this kid who had the resources to cut all those different, perfectly formed geometric shapes. Calder would have taken notice.

The school was in a largely Jewish, middle-class neighborhood. There was a little island of Black people in the middle, and that was where i lived. It was almost completely segregated from the white section. The school was right in the middle. In most of the Black families the mother and father both worked, and many worked two or three jobs and weren't able to spend a lot of time in the school. But some of the white parents were there for every little thing from trips to cookie selling. And talk about pushy parents! To this day, i believe that some of them did most of their kids homework. Black kids wrote a composition or a book report on plain lined paper and handed it in. Some of the white kids presented their reports bound in expensive binders, some were typed, and each page was covered with plastic. I could just imagine asking my mother to type my homework for me or to give me money to buy binders and plastic sheets. She would surely have thought i had gone crazy. The white kids came to school with all kinds of junk: expensive pen and pencil sets, compasses, and one kid even had a slide rule, which i doubt he had the faintest idea how to use.

The older they grew, the more snobbish the white kids became. They were always talking about what they had and what their parents had bought them. One girl, Marsha, horribly ugly to me, was always dressed like some kid in the movies or on TV. She was one of the super-snobs in the class. One day she came to school with weird-looking mittens on. She said they were made of chinchilla and that it was the most expensive fur in the world. I raced home to ask my mother. I just knew she had to be lying because i had never even heard of chinchilla and everybody i knew thought that mink was the most expensive fur on the market. I was really shocked when my mother told me she was telling the truth.

Every year when we came back to school, we would inevitably be told to write a composition entitled "My Summer Vacation." Usually we stood in front of the room and read our compositions aloud. I was always fascinated by some of the places these kids had been to during the summer: places like Spain, England, Brazil, and Bermuda. Some of them even brought slides and movies of their trips. After they finished talking, i wouldn't even want to read my composition about being down South with my grandparents. One of the things that had been drilled into my head since birth was that we were just as good as white people. "You show those white people that you are just as good as they are," i was told. This meant that i was to get good marks in school, that i was to always be neat and clean when i went to school, that i was to speak as "properly" as they did, and that i would show them whenever i could that Black people (we called ourselves Negroes then) could do whatever white people could do and that we could appreciate what white people appreciated.

I was supposed to be a child version of a goodwill ambassador, out to prove that Black people were not stupid or dirty or smelly or uncultured. I carried out this mission as best i could to show that i was as good as they were. I never questioned the things they thought were good. White people said classical music was the highest form of music; white people said that ballet was the highest form of dance; and i accepted those things as true. After all, wasn't i as cultured as they were? And everything that they wanted, i wanted. If they wanted poodle jackets, i wanted a poodle jacket. If they wanted a Star of David necklace, i wanted a Star of David necklace. If they wanted a Revlon doll, i wanted a Revlon doll. If they could act snobby, then i could act snobby. I saved my culture, my music, my dancing, the richness of Black speech for the times when i was with my own people. I remember how those kids would talk about gefilte fish and matzos. It would never have occurred to me to talk about black-eyed peas and rice or collard greens and ham hocks. I would never have given them an opportunity to ridicule me. Anyway, half the white people thought that all we ate was grits and watermelon. In many ways i was living a double existence.

I became interested in television in the fifth or sixth grade. Or, rather, i should say that that was about the time television started to corrode my brain. You name any stupid show that existed back in those days and it was probably one of my favorites. "Ozzie and Harriet," "Leave It to Beaver," "Donna Reed," "Father Knows Best," "Bachelor Father," "Lassie," etc. After a while i wanted to be just like those people on television. After all, they were what families were supposed to be like.

Why didn't my mother have freshly baked cookies ready when i came home from school? Why didn't we live in a house with a backyard and a front yard instead of an ole apartment? I remember looking at my mother as she cleaned the house in her old raggedy housecoat with her hair in curlers. "How disgusting," i would think. Why didn't she clean the house in high heels and shirtwaist dresses like they did on television? I began to resent my chores. The kids on television never had any work to do. All they did was their homework and then they went out to play. They never went to the laundromat or did the shopping. They never had to do the dishes or scrub the floor or empty the garbage. They didn't even have to make their own beds. And the kids on television got everything they wanted. Their parents never said, "I don't have the money, I can't afford it." I had very little sympathy for my mother. It never occurred to me that she worked all day, went to school at night, cooked, cleaned, washed and ironed, raised two children, and, in her "spare" time, graded tests and papers and wrote her thesis. I was furious with her because she wasn't like Donna Reed.

And, of course, the commericals took another toll. I wanted everything i saw. My mother always bought Brand X. 1 would be so exasperated when we went shopping. I wanted her to buy Hostess Twinkies and Silvercup white bread. Instead, she bought whole wheat bread and apples. She would never get good cereals like Sugar Crunchies and Coco Puffs. She always bought some stuff that was supposed to be good for us. I thought she was crazy. If Hostess Twinkies were good enough for the kids on TV, then why weren't they good enough for me? But my mother remained unmoved. And i remained disgusted. I was a puppet and i didn't even know who was pulling the strings.

One year everybody was wearing buttons on their coats. Some had writing on them and others had pictures of movie stars. I went somewhere with my mother and my aunt, and they asked me if i wanted a button. I picked out one with Elvis Presley on it. All the kids at school thought Elvis Presley was cool. I wore that button religiously, all winter, and that summer, when i went down South, i went to see one of Elvis Presley's movies.

In Wilmington, at that time, there was only one movie theater where Black people were allowed to go. It was called the Bailey Theater. Once you bought your ticket, you went up a long staircase on the side of the theater to the second balcony, the "colored" section. Shame on you if you were nearsighted. The movie was like all the rest of Elvis's movies-forgettable! When it was over, i went downstairs. All the white kids were leaving with pictures of Elvis Presley that they had bought. I started to walk to my grandparents restaurant on Red Cross Street, but then i turned around and walked back. If the white kids could have a picture of Elvis, then so could i. At least i was gonna try. I knew it would be absolutely no use to go to the ticket booth and ask the woman anything. She would most assuredly say no, So i walked right on past her, straight into the white section of the theater. What a surprise it was! It was just like the movies in New York. They had soda machines, a butter popcorn machine, and all kinds of candy and potato chips and things. Upstairs in the "colored" section, they had some old, stale plain popcorn and a few candy bars and that was it.

The moment i walked in, all the action stopped. Everybody's eyes were on me. I walked over to the counter where they were selling the pictures. Before i could open my mouth, the salesgirl told me, "You're in the wrong section; just go outside and go up the stairs on the side."

39

"I want to buy a picture of Elvis Presley," i said.

"What'd you say, again?" she drawled.

"I want to buy a picture of Elvis Presley," i repeated. "They don't have any upstairs.'

"Well, I don't know," she said. "I'll have to get the manager." She said something to the other woman behind the counter and then left. By this time a crowd had gathered around me.

"What's she doing in here?" they kept asking each other. "Now, she knows better," somebody was saying. "Look, Ma, a colored girl." "Ya get lost, honey?" "What's she want?" "Don't they have no pictures in the colored section?" "What's she need with a picture anyway?"

The crowd was all around me, gawking. It seemed like the manager would never come.

"Can't she read? Don't she know that we don't allow no colored in here?" "I don't know what it's about. Something about a picture." "Came walking right in here bold as day."

Finally the salesgirl came back. A man was with her. All eyes were fixed on the manager. He took one look at me and another at the crowd forming around me.

"Give her the picture and get'er out of here," he told the salesgirl. Hurriedly, she sold me the picture.

"All right, folks, it's all over now. Go on about your business."

I took my picture and went prancing out into the daylight. I was feeling good. It seemed funny when i thought about it. The looks on those crakas' faces, all puffed up like balloons. I had a good time, laughing all the way to my grandparents' restaurant. And of course the minute i got there, i told everybody what happened. I was just so proud. I took my picture and put it on the back counter right next to the funeral parlor calendar. The picture stayed there a few days until Johnnie from the cab stand across the street came and told me that Elvis had said the only thing a Black person could do for him was to buy his records and shine his shoes. Quietly, i slid the picture into obscurity, then oblivion. (Later i read that Elvis had given Spiro Agnew a gold-plated .357 Magnum and had volunteered to work for the FBI.)

Evelyn, my aunt, was the heroine of my childhood. She was always taking me places and "exposing me to things," as she called it. She took me to museums-i think we visited just about every museum in the city of New York. She turned me into a real an lover. Before i was ten, i could recognize a Van Gogh on sight, and knew what cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism were Picasso, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Modigliani were my favorite artists. I didn't know the name of one Black artist in those days Very few, if any, museums exhibited the work of Black artists, so just assumed that Black people weren't too good at painting. But i learned about African art from my mother. From the time i can remember, my mother always had African sculpture in the house. It was the only kind she had. I always loved those pieces and it really annoyed me when i took art history in school and the teacher referred to African art as primitive. In fact, if the art was by anyone else but a white person, it was called primitive art.

In addition to museums, Evelyn would take me to see plays and movies, and we would experiment with all kinds of restaurants. We would go to parks, go bicycle riding, and it was Evelyn who gave me my first rowboat lesson. She was very sophisticated and knew all kinds of things. She was right up my alley because i was forever asking all kinds of questions. I wanted to know everything. She would give me a book and say, "Read this," and i would eat up that book like it was ice cream.

It was Evelyn who took me to see my first show at the Apollo. We saw Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. I was walking on clouds. After that, as soon as i learned to ride the subway by myself, I went to the daytime shows. If my mother and my aunt had known, they would have had a fit. I guess people wondered what this little girl was doing in the Apollo all by herself, but nobody ever bothered me. I was always pretty lucky that way.

Barbara was a little girl who lived next door to us in Queens. She was my main friend and foe for quite a while. One day i saw her leaving her house wearing a white dress and a little white veil like a bride wears. Everything she had on was white, all the way down το her shoes. She even had a little white Bible in her hands. I thought she was gonna be in a Tom Thumb wedding like they have down South. So i went up to her and asked her who she was marrying. She said she was making her first communion, that she was Catholic.

Well, i became an instant convert. I wanted to wear a white dress and dress up like a bride, too. And Catholics even got out early from school on Wednesdays. I raced home to tell my mother. My mother was very permissive where religion was concerned. She gave us carte blanche to be Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, of whatever. So started going to mass and to catechism classes on Wednesday.

The Catholic Church was like no other church i had ever been to. Down South i always went to church. But those services were rich with music and emotion. I would sit caught up in the music and watch those people who had "got happy" or "got the spirit" jumping around all over the place. I was never holy-holy, but i had liked going to church. In the Black churches that i had been in, the air was charged. The music rocked and the preacher preached and sang at the same time. People felt free to do what they needed to do. If they felt like dancing, they danced; if they felt like praying, they prayed; if they felt like screaming, they screamed; and if they felt like crying, they cried. The church was there to give them strength and to get them through the long week ahead of them. Where we lived in Queens, there was no Black church.

The Catholic Church was different. It was silent and cold. The music was terrible and you couldn't understand nine-tenths of the service. But what fascinated me was the spookiness of it. They had so much weird stuff attached to their religion. When you walked in the door, you had to cross yourself with holy water; then, before you could sit down, you had to genuflect. And throughout the mass, you were forever up and down, sitting, standing, and kneeling. And there was so much stuff to learn. The stations of the cross, rosary beads, lighting candles, going to confession. It was all so spooky i just knew that this had to be the real god. The nuns really tripped me out. They walked around with rings on their fingers saying they were married to God. That was really weird. And they could never have children or "do it," and people said they had bald heads under their habits. I was simply overwhelmed.

The catechism class was nothing like Sunday school. They never told good stories about Jesus and we never sang "Yes, Jesus Loves Me." In catechism class, we learned all about the saints-it seemed like they had a million of them. And then there was the Virgin Mary. They made a big deal out of her. They even had us praying to her. I would do it, but that story was always kind of hard for me to swallow. Nothing about the Catholics was simple; they even had different kinds of hell. They had a special one for babies and then they had one in between and then they had the sho nuff, sho nuff hell.

They even had two kinds of sin. I can still hear that nun, as if it were yesterday. Now, a venial sin is a sin that's not so bad; it's a white sin. But a mortal sin is terrible; it is a black sin.

The night before i was to make my first communion, i had to run to the church with my baptismal certificate. They needed it to prove i had been baptized. My mother had had a hell of a time finding it. I was tickled to be going because they told me to bring it to the convent where the nuns lived. I had been dying to see what it looked like inside. It was just as cold and lifeless as the church, When i gave the nun my baptismal certificate, she looked at it and almost jumped out of her chair. "Oh, no, this won't do," she said "This is not a Catholic baptismal certificate. You weren't really baptized."

"What?" i said. "I was too baptized."

"No, you weren't," she said. "It's not a Catholic baptism, so it doesn't count. You'll have to be baptized tonight or you can't make your first communion tomorrow,

I was not ready for that one. I caught an instant attitude. She was talking about my godparents like they were dirt under her feet. They called my mother and told her she had to come to the church. Then they got these total strangers from somewhere and told me they were supposed to be my godparents and they baptized me. I never saw those people again, and if you ask me their names i couldn't tell you. I had had a godmother all my life and here they were telling me she wasn't my godmother because she wasn't Catholic. They really made me mad that day, bur i didn't say too much about it. I really wanted to make my first communion. I did and, later, my confirmation, but i never looked at them the same.

The sixth grade passed along rather uneventfully. There was another Black in my class, Gail. We became friendly, but my relationships with the white kids deteriorated even more. They made it pretty evident that they didn't care too much for me, and i made it clear right back that i didn't care for them. The thing i disliked most about them was their assumptions about me. For one thing, they automatically assumed that i was stupid, and they would really act surprised when i showed i had some brains. One of the biggest fights i had was when this kid in my class couldn't find some pen that his father had given him and accused me of stealing it. I waited for him outside the classroom and as soon as he came out the door, i jumped on him like a crazy person. Some teachers broke us up. "I'm surprised at you," they kept saying, "I never thought you'd act that way." I was usually very quiet and well behaved. They acted like i had jumped on that boy for nothing, and they couldn't understand why i was so angry. As a matter of fact, even i didn't understand. Then.

Outside of school was a whole 'nother matter. When i wasn't doing homework or chores, would go "exploring." My bicycle was one of the great loves of my life. I would jump on it and ride all over Queens. Sometimes on Saturdays or Sundays i would ride all day long, leaving early in the morning and returning as late as i was allowed to. And if i wasn't on my bicycle, i was somewhere playing with my friends. We played everything from house to handball. 1 played with the boys more than with the girls because the boys had better games. I loved punch ball and handball, anything that involved running. The playground was right across the street from my house and i took full advantage of everything that was there. 1 played hopscotch, marbles, and cowboys and Indians. I always wanted to be an Indian and would hide over or under something and leap out shrieking at the top of my lungs. I guess i was unusual in that respect, because most of the kids wanted to be cowboys.

I was always rough and clumsy and i played everything as if my life depended on it. Some of the girls didn't like to play with me because they said i was too rough. And i was always excluded from the rope-jumping sessions. I was too clumsy to jump double-Dutch and they didn't even like me to turn because they said i was "uneven-handed."

But i always had one best friend and she was always a girl. I had other friends to play with and hang out with, but i always had one special friend that i could really talk to. We would go to the candy store and the movies and places like that and we would sit and talk for hours about just anything. By the time i reached the sixth grade, i began to idolize and imitate the big kids who went to junior high school. I couldn't wait to grow up. The grownup world was so exciting, and when you were grown up you could do anything you wanted to. Besides, i was beginning to feel different. I was beginning to be interested in boys.

CRACKERJACKS

I coulda told you,

in the old days,

in the park,

or skating down some hill

what it was all about.

I coulda sat next to you

on some stairway

and gave you half my bubblegum,

and, in between the bubbles and the giggles,

I coulda told you.

But we are grown up now.

And it is all so complicated

when you dig somebody.

Now, when i open up my crackerjacks,

I find no heart-shaped ring.

Only a puzzle

that i don't wanna solve.

Chapter 3

It seemed like the middle of the night. Someone was calling me. Waking me up. What did they want? Suddenly i was aware of all kinds of activity.

Police, the crackling of walkie-talkies. The place was buzzing. “Here, put this on,” one of them said, handing me a bathrobe. “What’s going on?” i asked.

“You’re being moved.” “Where am i being moved to?”

“You’ll find out when you get there.”

A wheelchair was waiting. I figured they were taking me to jail. There was a caravan of police cars outside the hospital. It looked like i was gonna be in a parade again.

The ride was pleasant. Just looking at houses and trees and people passing by in cars was good. We arrived at the prison at sunrise, in the middle of nowhere. It was an ugly, two-story brick building. They pushed me up the stairs to the second floor.

I was put in a cell with two doors. A door of bars was on the inside, and directly outside of that was a heavy metal door with a tiny peephole that i could barely see through. The cell contained a cot with a rough green blanket on it and a dirty white wooden bench with a hundred names scratched on it. Adjacent to the cell was the bathroom, with a sink, a toilet, and a shower. Hanging above the sink was the bottom of a pot or pan. It was supposed to serve as a mirror, but i could barely see myself in it. There was one window covered by three thick metal screens facing a parking lot, a field, and, in the distance, a wooded area.

I walked around the cell, to the bath, to the window, to the door. Back and forth until i had tired myself out. I was still pretty weak. Then i lay down on the cot and wondered what this place was going to be like. Here i was, my first day in prison.

In about an hour, a guard unlocked the outside door and asked me if i wanted breakfast. I said, “Yes,” and in a few minutes she came back with eggs and bread in a plastic bowl and a metal cup containing something that was supposed to be coffee.

The eggs didn’t taste too bad. “Maybe prison food isn’t as bad as they say it is,” i remember thinking.

I heard voices and it was clear they weren’t police voices. Then the radio came on. Black music. It sounded so good. I looked through the peephole and saw faces, weird and distorted because of the concave glass, but Black faces to match the Black voices i had heard.

“How y‘all doin’?” i asked.

No response. Then i realized how thick the metal door was, so i shouted this time: “How y‘all doin’?” A chorus of muffled “Fine”s came back. I was feeling good. Real people were just on the other side of the wall.

The guard opened the metal door and handed me some uniforms, maid’s uniforms—royal blue, white buttons, collars, and cuffs.

I kept trying them on until two of them fit. Then she gave me a huge cotton slip that looked like a tent dress and a nightgown that looked exactly like the slip.

“You are entitled to a clean uniform once a week.”

“Once a week?” i nearly screeched. They had to be crazy. Behind the guard, through the open door, i could see some of the women standing around.

They were all, it seemed, Black. They smiled and waved at me. It was so good to see them, it was like a piece of home.

“When are you going to unlock me and let me go out there?” i asked, motioning to the other women. The guard looked surprised.

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the warden.” “Well, when can i see the warden?” i pushed. “I don’t know.”

“Well, why am i being locked in here? Why can’t i go out there with the other women?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why can’t you let me out?”

“We were told you were to remain in your room.”

“Well, how long am i supposed to stay in here locked up like this?” “I don’t know.”

I saw it was useless. “Would you please tell the warden or the sheriff that i would like to see him?” i requested.

The guard locked the door and was gone.

The metal door was unlocked again. An ugly, shriveled white woman stood in front of the bars. “My name is Mrs. Butterworth and I am the warden of the women’s section of the workhouse.” She reminded me of a dilapidated horse. “Well, JoAnne, is there something I can do for you?”

I didn’t like her looks or her tone of voice, but i decided to ignore that for the moment and get to the business at hand.

“When can i be unlocked from this cell and go outside in the big room with the other women?”

“Well, I don’t know, JoAnne. Why do you want to go out there?”

“Well, i don’t want to stay in here all day, locked up by myself.”

“Why, JoAnne, don’t you like your room? It’s a very nice room. We had it painted just for you.”

“That’s not the point,” i said. “I would like to know when i will be able to be with the other women.”

“Well, JoAnne, I don’t know when you’ll be able to come out. You see, we have to keep you in here for your own safety because there are threats on your life. You know, JoAnne,” she said, lowering her voice like she was speaking confidentially, “cop killers are not very popular in correctional institutions.”

“Have any of the women here made threats against me?” “Well, I don’t know, but I’m sure they have.”

“I’ll bet,” i said to myself. “Nobody has threatened my life. They just don’t want to let me outta here.”

“Well, JoAnne, the important thing is for you to behave and to cooperate with us so that we’ll be able to send a good report to the judge. It’s important for our girls to behave like ladies.”

This woman was making me sick. Did she think i was fool enough to believe that either she or the judge was gonna help me in any way? But it was the superior-sounding tinge to her voice that really ticked me off.

“Butterworth, is it?” i asked. “What’s your first name?” “Why, I never tell my girls my first name.”

“I’m not one of your girls. I’m a grown woman. Why don’t you tell people your first name? Are you ashamed of it?”

“No, JoAnne, I’m not ashamed of my name. It’s a matter of respect. I am the warden here. My girls call me Mrs. Butterworth and I call them by their first names.”

“Well, you haven’t done anything for me to respect you for. I give people respect only when they earn it. Since you won’t tell me your first name, then i want you to call me by my last name. You can either call me Ms.

Shakur or Ms. Chesimard.”

“I’m not going to call you by your last name. I’m going to continue calling you JoAnne.”

“Well, that’s okay by me, if you can stand me calling you Miss Bitch whenever i see you. I don’t give anybody respect when they don’t respect me.”

“Lock the door,” she told the guard and walked away.

Days passed. Evelyn called the sheriff, the warden (there were two wardens in that jail: Butterworth and a man named Cahill. Cahill had all the power, though. Butterworth was only a figurehead) and everybody else. Nothing more could be done outside of going to kourt.

I had little or no feeling in my right arm. I knew i needed physical therapy if i was ever to use it again. I had learned to write with my left hand, but that was no substitute. I needed a more specific diagnosis of exactly what had been damaged before i would know whether or not i would ever use it again, even with physical therapy.

Isolation was driving me up the walls. I needed materials to write and to draw, paint, or sketch. All my requests went unheeded. I was permitted nothing, including peanut oil and a small ball to aid movement in my arm.

When the jail doctor examined me i asked him about my arm.

“Why, we doctors aren’t gods, you know. There’s nothing anyone can do when someone is paralyzed.”

“But they said i might get better,” I protested. “Oh, yes, and the physical therapist at Roosevelt Hospital said that some peanut oil might help.”

“Peanut oil?” he asked, laughing. “That’s a good one. I can’t write a prescription for that now, can I? My advice to you is to forget about all of that stuff. You don’t need any of it. Sometimes in life we just have to accept things that are unpleasant. You still have one good arm.”

I kept talking but i could see i was wasting my time. He had no intention of even trying to help me. “Well, would you at least prescribe some vitamin B?”

“All right, but you really don’t need it.”

Every time they called me to see the doctor after that, i went reluctantly. He would take my arm out of the sling and move it back and forth about two inches. “Oh, yes, you’re getting better,” he would say. I always asked about physical therapy and he always said there was nothing he could do.

Finally, Evelyn went to court. Some of the items we petitioned for were ridiculous. In addition to physical therapy and nerve tests, we asked for peanut oil, a rubber ball, a rubber grip, books, and stuff to draw or paint with. The kourt finally granted a physical therapist if we would find one and pay the bill, but i never got one. It seems that no physical therapist in Middlesex County was willing to come to the prison to treat me, and only a physical therapist from Middlesex County was permitted.

But i did get the peanut oil and the grip. And in a short time i had a whole physical therapy program worked out.

I was receiving a lot of mail from all over the country. Most of it came from people i didn’t know, mostly militant Black people, either in the streets or in prison. I got some hate mail, though, and some letters from religious people who were trying to save my soul. I wasn’t able to answer all of those letters because the prison permitted us to write only two letters a week, subject to inspection and censorship by the prison authorities. It was hard for me to write anyway. I was also very paranoid about letters. I could not bear the thought of the police, FBI, guards, whoever, reading my letters and getting daily insight on how i was feeling and thinking. But i would like to offer my sincerest apology to those who were kind enough to write to me over the years and who received no answer.

I spent my first month at the middlesex county workhouse writing. Evelyn had brought some newspaper clippings and it was obvious the press was trying to railroad me, to make me seem like a monster. According to them i was a common criminal, just going around shooting down cops for the hell of it. I had to make a statement. I had to talk to my people and let them know what i was about, where i was really coming from. The statement seemed to take forever to write. I wanted to make a tape of it and enlisted Evelyn’s help. As my lawyer, she was dead set against it and advised me not to make the tape. But as a Black woman living in amerika, Evelyn understood why it was important and necessary. When the prosecutor found out about the tape he tried to get her thrown off the case. She was ordered by the court never to bring a tape recorder again when she visited me.

I made the tape of “To My People” on July 4, 1973, and it was broadcast on many radio stations. Here is what I said:

Black brothers, Black sisters, i want you to know that i love you and i hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me. My name is Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty- bellied.

I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless robots who protect them and their property.

I am a Black revolutionary, and, as such, i am a victim of all the wrath, hatred, and slander that amerika is capable of. Like all other Black revolutionaries, amerika is trying to lynch me.

I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspapers. They have offered over fifty thousand

dollars in rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.

I am a Black revolutionary, and, by definition, that makes me a part of the Black Liberation Army. The pigs have used their newspapers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals.

They have called us gangsters and gun molls and have compared us to such characters as john dillinger and ma barker. It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the criminals.

It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are. Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. As was proved by Watergate, the top law enforcement officials in this country are a lying bunch of criminals. The president, two attorney generals, the head of the fbi, the head of the cia, and half the white house staff have been implicated in the Watergate crimes.

They call us murderers, but we did not murder over two hundred fifty unarmed Black men, women, and children, or wound thousands of others in the riots they provoked during the sixties. The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives. They call us murderers, but we were not responsible for the twenty-eight brother inmates and nine hostages murdered at attica. They call us murderers, but we did not murder and wound over thirty unarmed Black students at Jackson State—or Southern State, either.

They call us murderers, but we did not murder Martin Luther King, Jr., Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Nat Turner, James Chaney, and countless others. We did not murder, by shooting in the back, sixteen-year-old Rita Lloyd, eleven-year-old Rickie Bodden, or ten- year-old Clifford Glover. They call us murderers, but we do not control or enforce a system of racism and oppression that systematically murders Black and Third World people. Although Black people supposedly comprise about fifteen percent of the total amerikkkan population, at least sixty percent of murder victims are Black. For every pig that is killed in the

so-called line of duty, there are at least fifty Black people murdered by the police.

Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. But they have got the gall to call us murderers.

They call us kidnappers, yet Brother Clark Squire (who is accused, along with me, of murdering a new jersey state trooper) was kidnapped on April 2, 1969, from our Black community and held on one million dollars’ ransom in the New York Panther 21 conspiracy case. He was acquitted on May 13, 1971, along with all the others, of 156 counts of conspiracy by a jury that took less than two hours to deliberate. Brother Squire was innocent. Yet he was kidnapped from his community and family. Over two years of his life was stolen, but they call us kidnappers. We did not kidnap the thousands of Brothers and Sisters held captive in amerika’s concentration camps. Ninety percent of the prison population in this country are Black and Third World people who can afford neither bail nor lawyers.

They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives. They call us thieves, yet it is not we who rip off billions of dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.

They call us thieves, but we did not rob and murder millions of Indians by ripping off their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers. They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Asia, and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom while the people who live there are sick and starving. The rulers of this country and their flunkies have committed

some of the most brutal, vicious crimes in history. They are the bandits. They are the murderers. And they should be treated as such. These maniacs are not fit to judge me, Clark, or any other Black person on trial in amerika. Black people should and, inevitably, must determine our destinies.

Every revolution in history has been accomplished by actions, although words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us and spears that penetrate our enemies. Black people must learn how to struggle by struggling. We must learn by our mistakes.

I want to apologize to you, my Black brothers and sisters, for being on the new jersey turnpike. I should have known better. The turnpike is a checkpoint where Black people are stopped, searched, harassed, and assaulted. Revolutionaries must never be in too much of a hurry or make careless decisions. He who runs when the sun is sleeping will stumble many times.

Every time a Black Freedom Fighter is murdered or captured, the pigs try to create the impression that they have quashed the movement, destroyed our forces, and put down the Black Revolution. The pigs also try to give the impression that five or ten guerrillas are responsible for every revolutionary action carried out in amerika. That is nonsense. That is absurd. Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us. Many jobless Black veterans and welfare mothers are joining our ranks. Brothers and sisters from all walks of life, who are tired of suffering passively, make up the BLA.

There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the Black Liberation Army at this time is to create good examples, to struggle for Black freedom, and to prepare for the future. We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary.

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains:

In the spirit of:

Ronald Carter William Christmas Mark Clark

Mark Essex

Frank “Heavy” Fields

Woodie Changa Olugbala Green Fred Hampton

Lil’ Bobby Hutton George Jackson Jonathan Jackson James McClain Harold Russell Zayd Malik Shakur

Anthony Kumu Olugbala White We must fight on.

The workhouse had a whole heap of rules, most of them stupid. No newspapers or magazines were permitted. When i asked why we couldn’t read newspapers, they told me that newspapers were “inflammatory.” Obviously, if a person read in the paper that his or her sister had been raped, he would wait until the rapist came to jail and then do him bodily harm.

“But,” i protested, “the other inmates watch television and listen to the radio (i wasn’t allowed either). They could receive the same information that way or from a visit from home.”

“In that case,” the warden told me, “we don’t let you read newspapers because they are a fire hazard.”

One of the saddest rules prohibited children from visiting their mothers in jail. I could see the children waiting outside, looking up at that ugly old building with sad, frustrated faces. Their mothers would run to the only window that faced the parking lot just to get a glimpse of their children.

Yelling out of the window was a no-no, but once in a while somebody would get carried away. Sometimes their frantic screams went unheard.

Gradually, i began to know the women. They were all very kind to me and treated me like a sister. They laughed like hell when i told them that i was supposedly being protected from them. Those first days, before i had really learned to maneuver with one hand, they did whatever they could to make things easier for me. They volunteered to iron my uniforms and sneak them into the laundry to be washed more than once a week. When they told me their charges and the time they were doing, i couldn’t believe it. Quite a few of them were doing time for the numbers, either six months or a year. In New York, doing time for number running was practically unheard of, and it certainly didn’t get six months or a year. Everybody in the world knows that the numbers business keeps the cops fat. These women hadn’t hurt anybody or stolen anything, yet they were sitting in jail, probably busted by the same cops that they paid off. Their only crime was competing with the state lottery. Most of them had already been sentenced. If the sentence was less than a year, time was served in the county jail rather than in the state penitentiary.

If i had expected to find so-called hardened criminals or big-time female gangsters or gun molls in the workhouse, i would have been sadly disappointed. The rest of the women who weren’t doing time for the numbers were in for some form of petty theft, like shoplifting or passing bad checks. Most of those sisters were on welfare and all of them had been barely able to make ends meet. The courts had shown them no mercy. They brought in this sister shortly after i arrived who was eight months pregnant and had been sentenced to a month for shoplifting something that cost less than twenty dollars.

Later a middle-aged sister began coming to the workhouse on weekends. She worked during the week and served her six-month sentence for drunken driving on weekends. Knowing that white women with the same charges would never have received such a sentence, i thought it was harsh. But i didn’t realize how harsh until she told me that she had been arrested for drunken driving in the driveway of her own house. She hadn’t even been on a public road. She also told me that the cops had arrested her because they didn’t like the way she talked to them.

In that jail it was nothing to see a woman brought in all beat up. In some cases, the only charge was “resisting arrest.” A Puerto Rican sister was brought in one night. She had been so badly beaten by the police that the matron on duty didn’t want to admit her. “I don’t want her dying on my shift,” she kept saying. It was days before this sister was able to get out of bed.

In spite of it all, those sisters kept the place jumping. They told all kinds of funny stories about their lives, things they had seen and experienced. Some had a natural knack for comedy. What amazed me was the way they told the saddest stories in the world and made everybody laugh about them.

Girl, that nigga was always in my pocketbook stealing my money. And all he did with it was blow it at the racetracks. Girl, that man spent so much money on the racetracks, he made me wish i was a horse. One day i fixed his ass, though. I was sick and tired of his mess. Betcha he won’t go in nobody’s pocketbook no time soon. I put a mousetrap in that sucker. Girl, you should have heard that nigga howl.

My husband and me, we used to fight like cats and dogs. And he was jealous as the day is long. Chile, we went to the bar this night and the nigga got all high, and started thinkin’ i was messing around with some dude at the bar. As soon as we got outside, boy, he jumped on me like a gorilla jumps on a banana. Don’t you know that man hit me so hard he knocked my teeth straight out of my mouth. “Now, hold on a minute!” i told that fool.

“We can fight later. I ain’t got no ’nother four hundred dollars to spend on no false teeth.” Chile, we was drunk as skunks, down on our knees for ’bout an hour looking for those teeth. And when that fool found them, he said the teeth jumped up and tried to bite him. Lord, chile, that man is a fool.

I could listen to these stories only when the outside door was open. During the day they had a female “sheriff’s officer” posted outside my cell. When she was there, the door usually stayed open.

The whole time i was at that jail i saw very few white women. The few who did come were there only a few hours or a day or so before they were bailed out. There was one white woman who was busted on the turnpike with fifty pounds of reefer. Everyone waited to see what her bail would be. Then we found out she had been released on her own recognizance (that is, without bond). To be released on recognizance in the state of new jersey, one of the requirements is jersey residence. The woman lived in Vermont. But nobody was really shocked. She was white.

I was going crazy in that little cell. The only time they let me out was for visits and to see the so-called doctor. I have always been an active and restless person, and being locked up in that little cage all day drove me wild. I needed to stretch my legs. I started to run around the cell. I would run in this tiny circle until i was exhausted. Two or three days after i started, the warden, Miss Bitch, accompanied by some male guards, visited me.

“We hear that you are running around your cell,” she said. “You will have to stop this activity at once.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you are disturbing the people downstairs.” “What people?”

“There is an office underneath you and you are disturbing the workers.”

“Are you crazy? They’ll just have to be disturbed. I don’t run for that long anyhow If you let me go out into the yard to exercise with the other women, i’ll stop running around my cell.”

“I order you to stop running around your room.”

“I don’t remember joining your army,” i said. “When i join your army, then you can order me around.”

She left in a huff and i kept on running. That was the end of that. I have to thank her, though. If she hadn’t come and harassed me, i would have probably given up running around that tiny space in a few days.

The food in the workhouse was horrible. Actually, it was disgusting. The food there is worse than the food in any jail that i have been in since, and that is quite an accomplishment. I would sit and wait for lunch or dinner, hungry as hell, and they would bring me some greenish-brown iridescent chunks floating around in a watery liquid (liver stew, they called it) or some lamb fat floating around in some water which was supposed to be lamb stew. And that nasty-looking, foul-smelling stuff tasted much worse than it looked. The place was infested with flies and so was the food. The only thing edible was eggs, when they had them, and mashed potatoes. I lived off the nuts and candy i bought from the commissary and the fruit my family brought on visits.

Every single day for one whole week they brought us this nasty stuff that was supposed to be ravioli. Well, that was the last straw. We all decided to go on a food strike. I wrote a petition which everybody signed and we sent it down to the warden’s office. Later, the warden agreed to discuss making the food more edible, but he refused to talk to me. He said the fact that i had referred to the food as “slop” showed i was unreasonable. The food was better for a few days, and then it reverted to the same old nasty slop.

The woman sheriff’s officer who guarded me had to be the oldest “dumb” blonde alive. She played the part to a bust. She was nosy and was the world’s biggest gossip. Every time she saw me she smiled and pretended to be oh so friendly. One day some workmen were drilling a big hole in the

wall to install new electrical circuits. Of course, as soon as she came in, the nosy sheriff’s officer began her questions.

“What are they building?”

I said, “Haven’t you heard? Well, you know, they passed a special law and they’re going to execute me. They’re building the gas chamber now.”

“Well!” she said indignantly “Well! Nobody told me about it.” And she rushed off to find out why no one had informed her.

The lights were turned off every night at ten. I was lucky because there was a night switch that i controlled in the bathroom adjacent to my cell. I would move the cot so that i was in as much light as possible and i would read way into the night. When i tired of reading, i’d turn off the light and look out the window. Outside, police patrolled the area. A lot of times there were two police on foot who seemed to be standing around near the parking lot. They carried rifles and shotguns. One night, in my usual condition of boredom, while standing at the window and feeling mischievous, i cried out a birdlike sound in the shrillest voice i could muster: “Eeeeenk, eeeenk, eeeeenk, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenk.” The pigs started looking around like crazy. They jerked this way and that way as if they thought someone was behind them.

Again i cried, “Eeeeeeenk, eeeeeeeeenk, eeeeeeeeewa, eeeeeeeeeeeewa.” This time they really jumped around. You would have thought it was World War II and the Japanese were two feet away. I waited awhile. When they calmed down, in a voice even shriller than before, i cried, “Naaaaaaeeeeee, naaaaeeeeeee, naaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeee.” They pointed their guns and actually walked backward, prepared to fire at anything moving. Then, quite by accident, my metal cup fell to the floor. Well, in a second they were down on the ground, crawling, holding their rifles. When i saw these fools crawling around on the ground like that, i just couldn’t take it anymore. I laughed until i was sick. Great, big, bad police, crawling around scared of their own shadows. Every once in a while i tried it again with different police and usually the results were similar, but it was never as good as that first night.

Because i had a broken clavicle, i had to wear a figure-eight brace around my shoulders. It was made of foam and cotton with a tiny belt buckle

fastener in the back, about a half-inch wide. One morning, as i was eating, the guard came in my cell and took it.

“You can’t have this.” “Why?”

“Because it contains metal,” she replied. “You can’t have anything with metal on it.” Now, there i was, sitting on a metal cot, drinking out of a metal cup, eating out of a metal bowl, and this policewoman was standing in my face telling me i couldn’t have my brace because of this tiny metal buckle. I raised all the hell i could, but i saw that she was, like she said, like they all say, “only following orders.”

“If the prison doctor says you need it, you can have it back.”

As soon as Dr. Miller came into the workhouse, i asked to see him. Without the brace, my shoulder felt weak and fragile. I could barely hold myself up straight..

“Don’t worry about that old brace,” Herr doctor told me. “You don’t need that thing anyway ”

It was all i could do not to kick him in his groin. Luckily, later that week, the bone specialist came out from the hospital to see me. He was a very good doctor and a very kind man. He told the warden in no uncertain terms that i needed my brace and without it i could be disfigured. He gave me a lot of encouragement for my hand so that i could regain full use of it.

Finally, they returned the brace.

It was about that time that the miracles started. I was sure now that my hand was coming back to life. I was beginning to be able to tell it to do things and it would actually respond. Each little bit of progress was a miracle.

Being able to touch my pinky with my thumb, to pick up a cup, to hold a pencil, to pinch myself were feats that took days of practice and exercise to accomplish. And then the day came when i knew i was almost there. After months of trying, i could finally snap my fingers. Whenever anyone came

to see me, i would show them my new talents. I felt like a little kid saying, “Look, Mommy, see what i can do.”

Finally a joint conference was arranged between Sundiata and me with Evelyn present. It took place at the workhouse. Sundiata was brought from the new brunswick jail. I’ve never been happier to see anyone in my life. It was difficult to talk because the guards were practically sitting in our laps. I can’t whisper for nothing and Evelyn kept telling me to lower my voice. We talked about the case and decided that it was politically correct to be tried together. Just seeing Sundiata cooled me right out. I was feeling bad and i was real self-conscious about how i looked. I had broken out in a horrible rash from the prison soap and i looked like a lopsided scarecrow with bumps. There is something about Sundiata that exudes calm. From every part of his being you can sense the presence of revolutionary spirit and fervor. And his love for Black people is so intense that you can almost touch it and hold it in your hand. There’s nothing put on about him. He is a real folksy kind of person. Every time i see him he looks like he belongs on a porch somewhere down South, breathing in the summer air and bouncing babies off his knee. The truth of the matter is that Sundiata is country. He would deny it to the bitter end, but he is sho nuff country. And when he laughs that giggle laugh of his, it’s like a trip to Texas in the backwoods.

When the conference ended, i was a different person. I felt much stronger and i didn’t feel alone.

I don’t know when, but somewhere along the way i started to collect the metal cups we were given to drink from. At first i think it was just my slow way of drinking that caused the cups to accumulate. I was none too popular with the guards, especially the men. Most of them hadn’t said boo to me and vice versa, but they hated my guts. To them, i was a cop killer and they were cops. Something told me to be real careful. They had given me a little table to eat and write on, and at night, before i went to sleep, i pushed the table up next to the bars and stacked the cups precariously on top of it. The bars opened into the cell, and the slightest movement would send the whole stack of cups clanging to the floor. I would push the wooden bench behind the table. In that way, anyone who tried to come in would have to apply some real pressure. I went through this routine every night, feeling slightly foolish but compelled.

One night, in the middle of the night, the cups came crashing down. I immediately awoke to find four or five male guards standing in the doorway of my cell.

I screamed, “What do you want? What are you doing in my cell?” loud enough for someone to hear me. The guards stood in the doorway like they didn’t know what to do. Finally one of them locked the door and said, “We heard a noise and we came to investigate. We were just checking it out.” They weren’t even supposed to be in the women’s section. The female guard on duty that night, the slimiest one in the prison, was nowhere in sight. After that, no matter what jail i was in, i always found some way to barricade my cell. In prisons, it is not at all uncommon to find a prisoner hanged or burned to death in his cell. No matter how suspicious the circumstances, these deaths are always ruled “suicides.” They are usually Black inmates, considered to be a “threat to the orderly running of the prison.” They are usually among the most politically aware and socially conscious inmates in the prison.

When Eva came to the workhouse it was something of an event. Usually she occupied the cell i was in. (The rest of the women were housed in two open dormitories.) The guards didn’t know what to do with her. She had been in that jail many times before and she was known as a hell raiser.

Everybody said she was crazy.

My first encounter with Eva was when she came over to the bars and sat down outside my cell and told me she could astro-travel. She called it something like astro-space projection.

“I can go anywhere I want to, whenever I want to,” she told me. “I’ve just come from Jupiter.”

“How was it?” i asked her.

“Oh, it was fine. They had these cute little people. They were purple with crocodile skin and blue hair. You can go anywhere you want to,” she told me. “You just have to project yourself.”

“Can you show me how to project myself the hell out of here?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said, “I do that all the time. As a matter of fact, I’m not here now.”

“No,” i said, “that’s not good enough. I want to project my mind and my body out of here.”

“You’ll be in jail wherever you go,” Eva said.

“You have a point there,” i told her, ‘but i’d rather be in a minimum security prison or on the streets than in the maximum security prison in here. The only difference between here and the streets is that one is maximum security and the other is minimum security. The police patrol our communities just like the guards patrol here. I don’t have the faintest idea how it feels to be free.”

Eva told me that she knew how i felt. She had to know. Any Black person in amerika, if they are honest with themselves, have got to come to the conclusion that they don’t know what it feels like to be free. We aren’t free politically, economically, or socially. We have very little power over what happens in our lives. In fact, a Black person in amerika isn’t even free to walk down the street. Walk down the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood at night, and you know what happens.

Eva and i got on famously. A lot of times i didn’t understand what in the world she was talking about. But at times she made so much sense i wondered if it was really the world that was crazy. She taught me a lot about prison, and she was forever telling some funny story about her life.

Eva was a huge sister; she weighed about 300 pounds. She had very dark skin and her hair was cut short next to her scalp. People who have accepted white, European standards of beauty would find her unattractive. But to me there was something beautiful about her and i loved to look at her. She is one of the few people that i have met in life who have the courage to be almost totally honest.

Altogether, Eva had spent about ten years in the clinton correctional facility for women in new jersey. She had been there in the old days when the women worked out on the farm. She told me how the women were treated,

that state troopers would be called in for the slightest disturbance. She was there during a riot at clinton and had seen state troopers beat the women mercilessly; once they had beaten a pregnant woman so badly she lost her baby.

Around this time i started taking my little walks. Staying cooped up in that cage all day was driving me up the wall. So when the guards brought my food, i would walk past them into what was called the day room, where the women ate and watched TV. I would walk first to one dorm, then to the other, and then return to my cell. There was no place i could run to since there were two or three locked doors between me and the outside. Most of the guards would nag me to come back into my cell and, after a short time, i would. But none of them got too crazy about it until one day a guard yelled at me, “Get back here! Did you hear me? Get back here!”

If there’s one thing i can’t stand it’s being ordered around, and if there’s another thing that makes me go wild it’s for a white person to talk to me in that tone of voice. “You make me come here,” i told her. “You so big and bad, i want to see you make me come back in there.” She made a move like she was going to grab me. “You put your hands on me and it’s gonna be you and me. You lay a hand on me and i’m gonna splatter your brains all over these walls.” It’s a good thing she didn’t try me, though, because she outweighed me by at least fifty pounds and i was still pretty much the one- armed bandit. But i would have given her a hell of a fight. I was mad and frustrated and i had already stored up about two or three months of anger.

Anyway, i finally went back into the cell, when i was ready. But her attitude made me defiant. Whenever she opened my cell for anything, i would push past her and walk around for a minute. She would stand in the doorway like she was a door or something and i would rear back and butt her out of the way. She was as big as a house, but she didn’t have one bit of strength.

Finally, she called the male guards. I was in one of the dorms talking to the women, wondering why she wasn’t bothering me, when about ten male guards came into the room.

“Who is JoAnne Chesimard?” the head guard asked. Nobody said anything. “Which one of you is JoAnne Chesimard?” They looked like they were ready to leap on somebody. Again no one responded. “All right, I’m gonna ask you again, which one of you is JoAnne Chesimard?”

“I’m JoAnne Chesimard,” Eva said. Well, when the guards took one look at Eva and saw how big she was, their tone changed immediately.

“Miss Chesimard, would you please return to your cell?”

One of the guards came from the back and tapped the sergeant on the shoulder.

“I know her,” he said. “She’s not Chesimard.”

“I am who you are looking for, ” i said. I didn’t want Eva to get too involved in my madness. “I’ll see you sisters later. I’ve had enough excitement for the moment.” I walked past them and went to my cell and opened a book.

The next day this same guard managed to tick me off again.

“I don’t want anymore trouble out of you,” she said. “I don’t want to have to call the men again.”

“You can call the national guard, the militia, the FBI, and anybody else for all i care. You can call your mother if you want to,” i told her. As soon as she opened the door for lunch, i pushed right past her. I took my tray, sat down with the other women and started eating my lunch. I didn’t know what was going to happen but i wanted to see what they were gonna do. I had about three mouthfuls of food left on my plate when the goon squad came in.

“All right, get up and get in your cell.”

“As soon as i finish what i have on my plate.” “Now!” they ordered.

“I only have two spoonfuls left.”

“Now!” They beckoned to the female guard. “Remove the prisoner to her cell.” She came near me with her hands stretched out.

“Don’t you put your hands on me,” i told her. “I’ll walk to my cell.”

“Remove the prisoner to her cell,” they ordered. She went to grab my arm and all at once the room was in motion. Chairs, tables, cups, trays were flying in the air. Everybody was either running to get out of the way or fighting. The female guard made a wild dash for the door. The male guards jumped on me. I was hitting, kicking, scratching, punching, biting, and i don’t know what all else. They finally managed to get me in my cell and the other women locked in their dormitories. None of the women was seriously injured. I had a few nicks and scratches, but otherwise i was fine. And i felt fine. Some of that anger pent up inside me had been released. One of the guards was wounded. Somehow his face had got cut. He was the same little runt who had sat across from me in the hospital, pointing a shotgun at me and switching the safety on and off, talking about how he liked to kill animals. Nobody knows how he was cut or who cut him. But everybody knows that the hunter got hunted.

Later that day they brought a photographer to photograph the evidence. The local newspaper later reported a “riot” at the workhouse. Some police and the sheriff came around and searched the jail. They said they were looking for the weapon that had cut the guard. They didn’t find anything. That night they came and got Eva. They took her to the Vroom Building, the new jersey “hospital” for the criminally insane. She spent about three weeks there before she came back. The night she left i felt sad and guilty. Here i had got her caught up in my madness. I was sitting and thinking about her. So i sat down and wrote this poem:

Rhinocerous woman

Who nobody wants

and everybody used.

They say you’re crazy

cause you not crazy enough

to kneel when told to kneel.

Hey, big woman—

with scars on the head

and scars on the heart

that never seem to heal—

I saw your light

And it was shining.

You gave them love.

They gave you shit.

You gave them you.

They gave you hollywood.

They purr at you

cause you know how to roar

and back it up with realness.

Rhinocerous woman.

Big momma in a little world.

You closed your eyes

and neon spun inside your head

cause it was dark outside.

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. Bad 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 punishment 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.³

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 cliché 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, although 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 determined 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 Hispanics 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 something 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.

“Now, all we have to do,” i reasoned, “is get the facts and figures and prove that they are trying to deny us a fair trial.” How little did i know!

Chapter 4

Junior high school had its advantages and its disadvantages. It was more impersonal and much more confusing than elementary school, but it gave me the chance to move around and change classes, which i liked. Generally my subjects bored me, with the exception of English, history, and a newfound love of ceramics. Parsons Junior High School in Queens was mostly white. A lot of the Black kids had been put into remedial or what we called “dumb” classes. It never ceased to amaze me that the kids who were so smart in the street were always in the dumb classes.

In junior high everybody was going with someone. When girls got together to talk, the subject was always boys: who was cute, who was going with whom, who was fresh, etc., etc. A cute boy was tall, slim but well built, and usually had light skin. A boy was considered super-fine if, in addition to light skin, he had funny-colored eyes. Hazel and green eyes were the best.

If a boy was popular or good at sports he usually got a play, but in general the boys we talked about were tall, not too dark, and handsome.

One of my earliest admirers was this boy named Joe. He was new in our neighborhood, from down South or somewhere, because everyone said he was country. He was real dark and had a long body with short little legs. He liked me, and, in the beginning, i think i kinda liked him too. Then everyone started teasing me, saying he was my boyfriend and saying he looked like a black frog because his legs were so short. At that age, i was worried to death about what everyone thought of me. I wanted desperately to be one of the pack and i didn’t want anybody to make fun of me. So whenever anybody said i liked Joe, i would deny it to the bitter end and talk about him worse than everybody else. But Joe was very sweet to me. Every time he saw me he would smile and say something nice. On Valentine’s Day he gave me a beautiful big valentine and some candy. One day, in the spring, i heard somebody calling my name outside my bedroom window. It was Joe. Quickly, he put a flower on the sill and ran away. Every day after that he did the same thing. When i would see him on the street, i would

smile. I was really touched by the flowers. Then one day my mother saw him at the window putting a flower on the sill.

“You tell that boy to stay away from that window,” she said. “Now he’s putting flowers in the window, the next thing you know he’ll be trying to climb in.” But she still thought it was kinda cute. The next thing i knew she was telling all her friends about it. While i was embarrassed, it also made me think i was cute. No boy had every paid me that much attention before and i loved it.

One day i was coming from the store and i saw Joe. He started walking beside me. He was kinda shy and he had never said anything to me except “You look nice” or “You look pretty.” This day we tried to make conversation as we went along. Then, all of a sudden, he said, “Will you go with me? I want you to be my girl.” Somehow i was shocked. Did he really think i would go with him and ruin my reputation forever?

“No,” i answered.

“No,” he repeated. “Why not?”

I didn’t know what to say. My tongue became heavy and twisted, I started to stutter. Nothing came out of my mouth. “Why not?” he asked again. I stammered and stuttered and then, with icy bluntness, i said, “Because you’re too black and ugly.” I will never forget the look on his face. He looked at me with such cold hatred that i was stunned. I was instantly sorry for what i had said, but there was no taking it back. He looked at me as if he despised me more than anyone else on the face of the earth. I felt so ugly and dirty and depraved. I was shaken to the bone. For weeks, maybe months, afterward, i was haunted by what happened that day, by the snakes that had crawled out of my mouth. The sneering hatred on his face every time i saw him after that made me know there was nothing i could do to make it up to him. There was nothing i could do but change myself. Not for him, but for me. And i did change. After that i never said “Black” and “ugly” in the same sentence and never thought it. Of course, i couldn’t undo all the years of self-hatred and brainwashing in that short time, but it was a beginning. And although i still cared too much about what people thought about me, i always tried hard after that to stand on my own two feet, to

stand by what i felt and thought and not just be a robot. I didn’t always succeed, but i always tried like hell.

Mostly, when i was young, the news didn’t seem real. In fact, my vision of the world was like a comic strip: In China they ate fortune cookies and the men wore braids; in Africa they lived in huts, wore bones in their noses, and were cannibals; in South Amerika they wore big hats, slept in the middle of the day, drank a lot of rum, and danced the cha-cha. The only place, besides the United States, that i could talk about with anything resembling realism was Europe. And my perception of Europe was almost as unreal. The first president i remember was Eisenhower and even he didn’t seem real. My mother said that all he did was play golf. When he gave a speech on TV, we turned the channel, and, if he was on all the stations, we turned the TV off.

Only the news concerning Black people made any impact at all on me. And it seemed that each year the news got worse. The first of the really bad news that i remember was Montgomery, Alabama. That was when i first heard of Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white woman. The Black people boycotted the buses. It was a nasty struggle. Black people were harassed and attacked and, if i remember correctly, Martin Luther King’s house was bombed. Then came Little Rock. I can still remember those ugly, terrifying white mobs attacking those little children who were close to my own age. When the news about Little Rock came on, you could hear a pin drop at my house. We would all sit there horrified. Sometimes, afterward, somebody would say something, but usually we would just sit there lost in our own thoughts. I guess there was nothing to say. And each year i would sit in front of that box, watching my people being attacked by white mobs, being bitten by dogs, beaten and water-hosed by police, arrested and murdered. Then the news seemed too real.

The older i got, the more i seemed to grow into myself. My mother and stepfather were having all kinds of problems. They were fussing and fighting like cats and dogs. They were like a whole lot of other Black people in that respect. They were catching hell every day on their jobs, in society, and they took their frustrations out on each other. To make matters

worse, she was a teacher and he worked in the post office: she had been to college and he hadn’t. As far as i’m concerned, if a Black man and woman make a marriage work in amerika, they’ve accomplished a miracle. Because everything is against them. Just being poor is one of their biggest obstacles. Most of the arguments are about money. It’s hard as hell to be loving and caring when you can’t pay the bills and you don’t know where the next dollar is coming from. And the way that we’re brought up to think adds insult to injury. It’s changing a little bit now, but when i was growing up, every white man on television was able to support his family with no particular strain. There was no need for his wife to work. Her job was to stay home and take care of the kids. Black people accepted those role models for themselves even though they had very little to do with the reality of their own existence and survival.

While my parents were going through their changes, i was going through mine. I was at the age where i questioned everything. The world was beginning to have more and more impact on me. I was curious about, and wanted to experience, everything. On weekends, whenever i could, i would take off. I went to the movies or to the library, but my favorite activity was riding subways and buses. I would hop on any subway or bus, ride until i got tired, then get off at any stop and walk around. Sometimes i talked to people or played handball with kids my age. Other times i just walked and looked. I went into all kinds of neighborhoods—white, Black, Puerto Rican, Chinatown too. But Harlem was my favorite place. I was fascinated by the street life. I was always trying to figure out what was going on. Everything was so colorful and busy. Men standing on the corner drinking, boys playing basketball, hustlers buzzing up and down the streets huddling and making deals. It was the land of dream books, kitchenettes, and Johnnie Walker Red. I loved the stores. From the market on Park Avenue to the greasy fish joints, to the candy stores that sold penny candy and penny cigarettes and god knows what else. I would walk and look and think. The world for me then was a big question mark, and the biggest question of all was where i fit in.

I was always late getting home and in trouble. It was like i had some kind of disease. I could never make it home on time. I would leave with the best intentions, but as soon as i got out in the street, it was as if i was in a trance.

I would forget all about the time until it was too late. And half the time when i realized that it was getting dark, i didn’t even know where i was, much less how to get home. My mother would talk to me, slap me, shake me, punish me, but nothing worked. I was a lost cause. I was running away from home and i didn’t even know it. And one thing always led to another. I was turning into a fantastic liar. As soon as i got near home i began making up lies. When i look back at it now, i know my mother must have wanted to choke me when she heard those farfetched creations, but at the time i thought they were brilliant. As the problems in my family intensified, i ran away-consciously instead of unconsciously.

The first time i ran away, i went to Evelyn’s house. She wasn’t home so i fell asleep on the stairway. When she came home, she thought i was some kind of drunken bum, so she walked by me and went to her apartment. I came back the next day and she talked to me, played shrink and family counselor, and sent me home. It worked for a while, but things were a mess. My mother and i couldn’t see eye to eye about anything, and i was just as stubborn and self-willed as she was. And even when i tried to do right, it just seemed like i couldn’t do anything that made her happy. And when my mother and stepfather were at each other’s throats, it drove me wild. I would simply get my coat and walk out. Some days i just didn’t come back.

At times, running away was fun and exciting. At other times it was miserable, cold, and lonely. The part i dug about it, though, was surviving. Being out there, face to face with the raunchiest side of life was like living on a roller-coaster, everything hurling itself at you at breakneck speed. It was one hell of an education, and, when i think about it, i was one lucky chile. So many things could have happened to me, and almost did.

The first time i ran away i had just the clothes on my back and very little money. I rode the subway and slept in hallways until i just couldn’t take it anymore. Then i started talking to people. One of the first people i met was this boy named David. I told him that my mother was in the hospital and that i didn’t have any other family in New York and i was scared to stay home alone. He took me home to his mother’s house and we told his mother the same story. She said it would be okay for me to spend the night. They lived in the Farragut Projects in Brooklyn. David took me out and

introduced me to all his friends. We got along fine until nighttime. Then it was war—an all-night wrestling match. When he wasn’t attacking me, he was begging and pleading and thinking up a thousand arguments why i should give him some. I told him i was afraid of getting pregnant. He went and got this big jar of Vaseline and told me that, if you used Vaseline, you couldn’t get pregnant. I was dumb, but not that dumb. I told him to go to hell, and the wrestling match continued. After a day or two at David’s, i was ready to move on. Besides, his mother was getting suspicious.

My next new friend was a girl. I couldn’t take any more Davids. Tina lived in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn with her mother and her brother in a brownstone house. It was a rickety old house and half of it looked like it was condemned. There was nothing whatsoever in that house that was orderly. There were rooms with all kinds of junk in them, stacked almost to the ceiling: tables, chairs, record players, old radios. I told the same old story to Tina’s mother and she was sweet as pie. I could stay there just as long as i wanted, she said. In fact, she said, she “just loved to have young people around her.” And she wasn’t lying either. All day long there was a procession of people in and out of that house, and most of them were young. When Tina’s mother saw that i didn’t have any clothes, she said, “We’ll just have to take you shopping.” I remember thinking how nice she was, to be willing to spend money on me, a stranger. The next morning we went down to Fulton Street.

“All right,” she told me, “now I want you to go with Tina into A&S and pick out what you want; I’ll be here at the soda place. Just remember where everything is.”

Off we went, Tina and I. I was happy as a jaybird; my clothes were kind of on the funky side. When we got inside the store, i started to pick up things and got ready to try them on.

“Be cool,” said Tina. “Don’t you know what size you wear?” “Yeah,” i said. “Why?”

“Let’s just get the stuff and get out of here. If you like something, just say so. Don’t go picking it up and putting it on and carrying on.”

“O.K.,” i said, thinking that she was strange. I liked a plaid kilt with a big safety pin and a blouse and sweater to match.

“This will go with it, too,” Tina said, pointing to a white blouse. “Now you just do what i tell you. Step in this.”

“Step in what?” i said, looking down.

“Be cool, fool!” Tina whispered. “Just keep looking ahead and help me pull this thing up.” She had already got half the skirt up around my thighs.

Finally we got the skirt up and fastened under my own skirt. “O.K., let’s get out of here,” Tina said. “Wait a minute. Roll that skirt up, it’s hanging down, and don’t look down!” I was scared out of my wits, but i started to roll.

“Not your skirt, fool,” Tina whispered, “the one underneath.”

Well, i was walking and rolling and trying to look cool and, if anyone had seen me, i know i musta looked like a slapstick comedy. But somehow we made it out of there. I expected the police to come swooping down on us at any moment. Tina’s mother was still sitting in the same place, sipping on a soda.

“How’d it go?” she asked Tina.

“She’s O.K.,” Tina said. “She don’t know nothin’, but she was cool.” I felt like fainting. Everybody else’s mother i knew would knock you down if they even thought you were stealing. This was surely something new. I just kept staring at Tina’s mother. She must’ve seen me staring at her, too, because she told me, “That’s right, i steal and my kids steal, too. They tryin’ to take my house from me. Tryin’ to take everythin’ i got. I got to survive by the best way i know how. But it ain’t really stealing; it’s just a discount. You need a discount, high as these stores is. We call it the ‘five-finger discount.’ ” She started laughing.

When we got to the house, she said, “All right, let’s see all the pretty clothes you got.” Tina took the blouses and sweater from somewhere and i took the skirt from under my skirt. “That’s all you got?”

“Yeah,” said Tina. “She don’t know how to do nothin’, an’ we was takin’ too long.”

“Y’all didn’t get no underwear?” Tina’s mother asked. “No.”

“Well, here,” she said, giving us some money. “Go to the five and dime and buy some. And I don’t want y‘all taking nothin’, ya hear? I didn’t raise no nickel-and-dime-store kids, understan’?”

“Yes.” And we were gone.

“We’re gon teach you how to deal,” Tina said on the way from the store. I just looked at her. My mind was spinning. Then i started to feel glad about it. We had gotten over. We had gotten over tough. The idea of five-finger discounts was beginning to appeal to me. And it was easy as hell.

That night i dressed up in my new clothes and went with Tina and her brother to hang out. He was on the quiet side, and evil-looking, but he turned out to be nice. We were going to a party at the Fort Greene Projects. We stopped and bought some french fries and Thunderbird. At the party, Tina introduced me to Tyrone. It was love at first sight. I thought he was the cutest boy i’d ever seen. Tyrone was the warlord of the Fort Greene Chaplins, and i thought it was just so romantic, like West Side Story. We sat in the hallway, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. I had smoked before, but i had never drunk any wine. The music was playing and the lights were down low and i was feeling goooooooddd. They were playing those old slow sides like “Wind,” “Gloria,” “In the Still of the Night,” “Sunday Kind of Love.” We went inside and started to dance. I was in love and dancing on clouds, whirling around the dance floor. I was whirling and spinning, and all of a sudden i was outside, holding onto some bench for dear life, drunk as a skunk and sick as a dog. When i was finally able to stand, Tyrone walked me to Tina’s house. We held hands all the way and he made a big deal out of kissing me good night, although i’ll never understand how he could stand my vomit-tasting mouth.

I woke up the next morning feeling like elephants had been doing the Watusi on my forehead and like i was walking on my eyelids. Tina’s mother wanted me to go someplace with her. I got up, washed, and got dressed. “What kind of jewelry do you like?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” i said. “I guess i like rubies because they are my birthstone.”

“Oh, no! You look like a girl that’s made strictly for diamonds.” “Really?” i asked, flattered.

“Oh yeah, diamonds are a girl’s best friend. And I’m gonna show you how to get some.” She spent the morning and most of the afternoon showing me how to do just that. “You have nothin’ to worry about,” she kept telling me. “Even if they catch you, they can’t do nothin’ to you, you’re a kid.” I was supposed to go in a store and talk very proper. I was to ask the price of everything and tell the clerk that my father gave me $80 to spend, but that i had some money of my own. Tina and her brother would come in and create a diversion and, while everyone was looking at them, i was to put the biggest earrings i could get in my mouth under my tongue. I was to say something to the salesman and walk calmly out of the store. There were a few more parts to the plan, but i don’t remember them. She had me practice talking with things under my tongue.

When we got to the store, i thought i was going to die of fright. I acted like i didn’t know Tina and her brother and went in as planned. The store was pretty crowded and i went into my act. I was so scared, i felt like i was having hot flashes. At first the salesman acted like he didn’t want to show me anything, but when i told him about the $80 and my extra money, he hurried up and pulled out trays. I held them up, saying, “Do you think she’ll like these? Do you think she’ll like these better?” Then, all of a sudden, Tina and her brother came running into the store. They were laughing real loud and chasing and grabbing each other. I almost forgot what i was supposed to be doing because I was so busy watching them. Then i remembered and, when i saw that no one was watching, i picked up the biggest earrings i saw and put them into my mouth. “I don’t see anything

Mommy would really like,” i said. “Maybe i’ll come back later.” I started walking to the door. I just knew that that man was going to call me back.

“Miss,” someone called. I felt like dropping through the floor. I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw that it was another salesman calling someone else. I walked out of the store, turned a corner, and ran. I was halfway to Tina’s house before they caught up with me. The earrings were still in my mouth.

“Did you get over?” Tina asked me. I looked at her almost as if i didn’t know her. “Did you cop or not?” she asked again, impatiently. Finally, i spit the earrings out into my hand.

“Shit,” said Tina’s mother, “them’s pretty numbers there, I like them myself.” As it turned out, the earrings were for pierced ears and my ears weren’t pierced. “Sell them to me,” Tina’s mother said. “I’ll give you $20 for them.”

“It’s a deal,” i told her. I was glad as hell to get $20. I didn’t care about no diamond earrings and i needed some money to get away and try to find a job. I was convinced that i wasn’t cut out to be no thief.

That night we went out to celebrate. Tina’s mother had given me $20 plus

$2 extra for good work and she had also given me a pretty, gold-colored dress and nice black shoes. I was dressed up clean as the board of health and we all had some money in our pockets and were ready to “do it.” We looked for Tyrone but he wasn’t home. We walked all around the projects until we found him. He was at the house of these twins Jessie and James, or something like that. They all went downstairs for some kinda meeting.

Everybody said they were gonna fight. They were at war with another gang, the Bishops, and one of their members had got messed up by the Bishops.

Finally, the meeting was over and Tyrone came and hung out with us. But it wasn’t the same. He spent the whole night talking about what he was gonna do to the Bishops. And if he wasn’t talking about that, he was talking about the fights he’d had before, gang fights, school fights, fight fights, etc. It seemed like his whole life was fighting.

“Why?” i kept thinking. “Why was he so into fighting?” The question was on the tip of my tongue, but i just couldn’t bring myself to ask it. I tried to imagine the future, Mrs. Tyrone whateverhisnamewas, and the children.

Me, packing his lunch as he went off to fight the Bishops. Somehow, the picture didn’t work. I was tired of this adventure. I was ready to go home. Whatever the consequences!

Contents

Forward by Angela Davis

Forward by Lennox S. Hinds

Trial Chronology

Chapter 1

Affirmation

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4