Assata: An Autobiography (21 page)

I smile uneasily, feeling out of place. All this talk is giving me a headache. Some fraternity brothers invite me to dance. One tells me that i look like a Delta girl. "How does a Delta girl look?" i ask. "Just like you in a swimsuit." Mr. Wonderful glares at them. I am picking up snatches of conversation from all around me. Talks of grants, poverty programs, and democratic politics. Talk of the NFL, and the football season. Talk of Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale's, and Saks Fifth Avenue. About speedboats and cruisers which nobody owns but everybody wants to.

Whiskey flows like water, and the speedboats turn into yachts. Everybody is just crazy about the islands: Jamaica, Bermuda, Nassau. Everybody is so chic. I'm so tired of hearing about it that I want to send them somewhere by way of foot-mine! It's a disgrace. Social workers talking about their clients like dogs, teachers who don't like to teach. A probation officer complaining about how dangerous his job is. A bunch of money-worshipers putting on a front for each other. Somebody asks me if i have my thing together. "Which thing?" i want to know. I take a walk up to the house to get away from it all. Some women are in the bathroom smoking reefer and blowing their hair dry. I go fishing in my bag for some aspirin. "Where'd you buy your suit?" one asks me. I don't want to say Klein's, but i say it anyway. "They have some nice things, some times," she says without conviction, dismissing me as a bargain basement case. They go back to talking about people and hair going back. They are putting on makeup to look like Black Barbie dolls on the beach.

I go back outside feeling like i'm from another planet. I feel lonely and serious. Something has been happening to me, a change that has been a long time coming. I want to be real. Am i the only bad-doing, hand-to-mouth, barely-making-it Black woman there? The struggle i've been going through and the struggle i've been seeing is too hard to lie about and i don't even want to try. I want to help free the ghetto, not run away from it, leaving my people behind. I don't want to style and profile in front of nobody. I want somebody i can relate to and talk about serious shit with.

This party is a lost cause. I get my beach towel and my book and ease on down the beach a little piece. Looking out at the ocean, i wonder how many of our people lie buried there, slaves of another era. I'm not quite sure what freedom is, but i know damn well what it ain't. How have we gotten so silly, i wonder. I get back off into James Baldwin. I don't give a damn if Sag Harbor sags into oblivion. Me and James Baldwin are communicating. His fiction is more real than this reality.

My patience was zero. I didn't want to wait for something to happen. I was into living and living for now. I was hungry, starving for life, but at the same time i was growing more and more cynical every day. I wanted to go everywhere, do everything, and be every thing, all at the same time. I wanted to experience everything, know how everything felt. I had many zigzag conflicting ideas rolling around in my head at the same time. One day i was happy just to be alive and young and moving. The next day i felt like the world was coming to an end. Everything in my life was jagged, sharp, un finished edges. Nothing happened calmly. Nothing was like i had thought it would be when i was little.

My friends were dying from OD and going into the army. My girlfriends had babies and were looking and sounding old. Nice old men sitting in the park weren't nice old men at all but were busy masturbating under their newspapers. I got so i didn't believe in anything. It seemed that everybody was in some kind of bag, the dope bag, the whiskey brown paper bag, the jesus bag, the love bag, the sex bag, the make-it bag, and none of those bags were doing anybody any good. I was looking for my own bag, but the pickings were slim. I kept on looking nevertheless, running and moving and hanging out until i was running myself ragged. One day i'd be downtown hanging out with my hippy, blippy (Black hippy) friends. The next night i'd be uptown hanging out with the hustlers. But nothing seemed like it was for real, you know? The same dudes who would be talking slick and sniffing coke out of $50 bills one day would be scrounging and begging for a loan the next. Even the most successful hustlers seemed to be nothing but flunkies and potential fall guys for the mafia. My friends from downtown weren't much better. At best, most of them were professional escape artists, into escaping the problems of the Black community or those of the white community. Some of them tried to escape through drugs, tripping over worlds that didn't exist on some kind of inner-space odyssey. But in their case, the drugs were usually not entirely self-destructive, although i know at least one who zoomed dead out of this world and didn't come back.

Through my hippy/blippy friends, i got turned on to a lot of things, though. I got into poets like Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Ferlinghetti, all kinds of novelists, music, food, etc. I didn't relate to everything i checked out, but my horizons got a whole lot broader.

My growing impatience with petty bourgeois upward-bound "Negroes" came to a head when i went to work with a Black employment agency. Evelyn had gotten me a job there as a typist. The agency was located in Rockafella Center in the same building with Johnson Publications, the publishers of Ebony and Jet magazines. I was happy as hell to get the job since i was tired of working for white people. The people in the office were nice and the atmosphere was completely lacking in tension. The boss was decent enough, and i had a pretty good relationship with him and his secretary, under whom i worked. At first i was excited, glad to be around so many Black people who seemed to be doing so good. Everybody was into making it, moving up the ladder. Black men and women with long lists of degrees, and briefcases, were in and out of the place. They were sharp, dressed to a tee, and talking about junior executive training programs, poverty programs, etc. Some of them talked about those companies as if they were going to be the president of the board of directors in five years.

Once in a while i went to lunch with a young man who worked at Johnson Publications. But we always got into arguments. Especially about Ebony magazine. Half the time, in the fashion section they would have these elaborate evening gowns that cost thousands of dollars. When i asked him what Black people could afford to buy them and whether they were gonna wear them to the corner bar, he got insulted. He was one of those Black people who think that you are free if you can go in a store and buy expensive things. I told him that the only Black woman who could afford those dresses was johnson's wife, and he got even more insulted. He told me that everything was changing, everything was so much better. I said that if things were so much better, how come every time a Black person got a good job or was a manager or something, it was news and was printed in Ebony. Our relationship ended abruptly when he accused me of always trying to bring Black people down and make it seem like we don't have nothing. I ended the matter by cursing him out and that was that.

These Black people went around acting as if there was no such thing as prejudice and that all you had to do was study and you could be president of the world. At the agency, we were working hard for an equal opportunity conference. The idea was to have Black college graduates from all over the country participate in interviews with representatives from the major corporations in amerika. Almost all of the big corporations were involved, and the graduates paid a substantial fee, plus transportation and hotel fees, to participate in the conference. It worked like this: students made out resumes and the corporate personnel officers decided which applicants they wanted to see. It was a big, plush affair in a major New York hotel, with the penthouse suite and quite a few lower floors rented out to the conference. I just knew that hundreds of these young, "qualified" Black people were going to get jobs. I was proud to have helped bring the conference about. It lasted a few days, and by the time it was over, i was ready to go somewhere and have a good cry.

Some of those Black graduates had spent hundreds of dollars to come to the conference and didn't have one interview. The only graduates the corporations even wanted to see were math, science, engineering, and business majors. Some corporations only wanted to interview graduates in very specialized categories, like petroleum engineering or geological engineering. Since most had majored in subjects like English, history, sociology, etc., they were out of the running from the jump.

I was shocked and upset. After the conference, i went out with one of the Black "executives" i had met in the agency. "I don't understand it," i kept telling him. "Why would those companies pay all that money to participate in the conference if they aren't really interested in hiring anybody? It doesn't make any sense."

"It makes a lot of sense, if you think about it.”

"Huh? I don't understand.”

"Listen," he went on, "the government says that in order for those companies to keep their contracts, they have to at least make an effort to look for 'qualified Black personnel.' The law doesn't say they have to hire anybody. The law says they've only got to look."

I was furious. They had used poor dumb me just like they use a drug dealer to conspire against his own people. I was part of the plot and i didn't even know it. There were some Blacks who got jobs, but mainly the thing was a sham, to make things look good on paper. My friend and i got stupidly drunk, singing oldies by the Sherrills on Lexington Avenue, he telling me about what bastards the bosses were and about the trials and treacheries of the democratic party machine and telling me how i was gonna get another job as a go-go dancer in the ladies' room.

About a week later, i made up a resume, described myself as a college graduate, and was hired as a marketing assistant. I didn’t believe in anything, and i wasn't gonna follow anyone's rules but my own. I got fired from that job a couple of weeks later, got another college job, and got fired from that too. I didn't care. I was going to deal with them just like they dealt with us. One time i got a job as a bookkeeper. I didn't know the first thing about it, but after i got the job i bought a couple of "bookkeeping made easy" books and when i didn't understand something I told them that we used a different system at the last place i worked.

The job involved a lot of cash and i had to be bonded. When you get bonded, they do a background check on you. The job wasn't too bad, and the boss was cool. It was an excellent way to learn bookkeeping and the insurance business. I knew they would fire me as soon as the report came in, but i didn't care. One day, my boss threw a detective's report on my desk. It had my name on it. I swallowed hard, knowing it was my last day. The more i read it, the more surprised i became. The report verified everything i had said: "Subject attended such and such high school," subject…graduated from such and such college," "subject worked at such and such places." They even reported that i lived on a quiet tree-lined street and that they had talked to my neighbors and learned that i was a nice person. I cracked up all the way home. Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.

But my patience was getting shorter and my temper was terrible. I was quick to tell people what i thought of them, and even i was surprised by my bluntness. Bonnie kept telling me, "Slow down, you're speeding, somebody's gonna give you a ticket." She was almost as restless and crazy as i was. We would check out things happening and make a joke of them. The world seemed to be so big and fixed and we couldn't think of anything to change it. Bonnie encouraged me to stop lying about going to college and go for real. "If you're smart enough to fool them, then you're smart enough to play their game." I knew that what she said made sense, but i had hated my last days in high school and had no desire to study anything else.

The only other person who stayed on my case and prodded me to go back to school was my friend from Kenya. We had grown to be serious friends. And we dug each other much more as friends than as lovers. He was studying economics out on Long Island, and we didn't get a chance to see each other much. Sometimes on the weekend we would hang out together. He was one of the few people i knew who was serious about almost everything he did in life and whose conversation was not just about his small world but about the whole world. One weekend we had arranged to hang out. I think we were supposed to go and hear somebody play at Count Basie's club. My apartment looked like some kind of hurricane had hit it, and i was trying to ease out the door without letting him in. Somehow he managed to get a glimpse inside. "No, we aren't going anywhere," he said. "How can you live like this? If your house looks like this i can just imagine what your head looks like."

I was embarrassed, but i had to admit he was right. I had everything thrown every which way, clothes flung all over the place. It was a wreck. He suggested that instead of going out he would help me clean up and get organized. "You'll be all right if you just get yourself organized. You can do almost anything you want as long as you organize yourself to do it." I decided he was right. It was time to get my life in some kind of order. It was time to take control. Life was like a bus: you could either be a passenger and go along for the ride, or you could be the driver. I didn't have the foggiest idea where i wanted to go, but i knew that i wanted to drive. I decided the first thing i would do was go back to school. I returned home to live with my mother in her new apartment in Flushing, Queens.

CULTURE

i must confess that waltzes
do not move me.
i have no sympathy
for symphonies.

i guess i hummed the Blues
too early,
and spent too many midnights
out wailing to the rain.

On July 19, 1973, while i was still at the middlesex county workhouse, i was brought to the u.s. district kourt for the eastern district of New York in Brooklyn, which has jurisdiction over all federal crimes committed in the counties of Brooklyn and Queens. I was taken there by federal writ to be arraigned on an indictment in which Andrew Jackson and i were accused of having robbed a bank in the county of Queens on August 23, 1971. While there were a lot of indictments against me all over New York State i didn't even know about that summer, this is one i surely could not have missed, because the bank surveillance photo taken of the woman holding up the bank with a gun was put on wanted posters that were pasted up in every subway station, posted in every bank and post office, and blown up in full-page news paper advertisements. They hit the streets on August 24, 1971, and remained even after my arrest on May 2, 1973.

Under the photo was the name Joanne Deborah Chesimard. Above the photo were the words "WANTED FOR BANK ROBBERY: $10,000 reward."

After the feds took a mug shot of me and fingerprinted me, i was arraigned, pled not guilty, and was returned to the workhouse on the same day. I heard nothing further about this indictment until January 1, 1975, when the feds brought me back to the eastern district kourt. Only this time it was to have me photographed.

The prosecutor has made a motion to have me photographed in the same angle, wearing the same kind of glasses, wig, and dress as the woman who had been photographed by the bank cameras during the robbery. The judge, a notorious, racist pig, is sure to grant the motion. I have decided to refuse. As far as i am concerned, the reasons are obvious. You put anybody in a monkey suit and they're gonna end up looking like a monkey. Besides, someone had told me about some trick the FBI uses. They take a photo of you in the same angle as the bank photo and superimpose a transparency of the bank photo over it. If you are unfortunate enough to have two eyes, a nose, and lips, in more or less the same place, you end up looking like the bank robber, no matter what you really look like. When i was arraigned i had permitted them to take all the photographs of me they wanted, and that, as far as i was concerned, was enough.

We enter the kourtroom. The judge is on the bench. The kourtroom has been rearranged. FBI agents, with cameras, are standing on top of tables. A group of federal marshals are buzzing around nervously like flies that smell rot. They are waiting for action. Evelyn gets up and says her piece. The judge ignores what she is saying and orders me to be photographed. I refuse, stating my objections as strongly as i can. In a hot second, the marshals and the FBI agents are crawling all over me. They seem to be trying to jerk my head off my shoulders. The judge has ordered that i am to be photographed, today, now, and that all the force necessary to take the pictures in the way the FBI wants to take them is to be used.

The FBI, the marshals, and i end up on the kourtroom floor, with me on the bottom. I hear Evelyn in the background. "Let the record reflect that the marshals are twisting my client's arms behind her back." "Let the record reflect that the marshals are choking my client." "Let the record reflect that there are five marshals manhandling my client." Evelyn goes on and on while the marshals twist me, jerk me, strangle me, kick me, and literally try to beat me into submission. The assault goes on and on with Evelyn putting it, blow by blow, into the record. Finally, it is over. The marshals lead me back into the holding pen. I lie on the bench like a rag doll with the stuffing hanging out, feeling like i have just been stampeded by a herd of buffalo.

Evelyn comes back for a lawyer's visit. She looks just as tired as i feel.

"That was unbelievable," she exclaims. "How's your arm? Are you okay?"

More or less, i tell her. My body is aching and my bad arm's numb. I sit back marveling at how cool Evelyn has been. It dawns on me how hard it must have been for her to watch what was happening and then, calmly, put it into the record. I am amazed at her control. She insists that a nurse be called to check me out.

"Did you hear that shit?" she asks me.

"Yeah, i heard it.”

"I can't wait for the record to be transcribed. If they don’t erase it, i think we've got that dumb asshole right on the record. If they don't erase it, then we can get the stupid moron off the case." Evelyn is looking triumphant and defiant, like she has just put her foot up somebody's butt.

"What the hell are you talking about?" i want to know.

"Didn't you hear him? He said, right on the record, that he thought you were guilty. He admitted he was prejudiced right on the record. Didn't you hear him?"

"I'm afraid i was otherwise occupied. What does it mean?"

"It means we'll be able to get rid of his stupid ass. Anybody else is bound to be better. This judge is out to hang you, and he'll go to any limits to try and convict you. If we're forced to go to trial in front of him, i'm afraid the only shot we'll have is in an appeals court."

"I sure hope they don't erase the record."

Evelyn and i sit there speculating on the chances of the record being changed. Evelyn thinks the judge is too dumb to even realize what he said. I am afraid that the judge will review the transcript and then have it changed. Evelyn thinks the judge is too racist and too arrogant to be worried about the record. It turns out that she is right. She files a motion, based on the transcript, to have the judge relieved from the case. After what seems like forever, the judge is removed and a new judge is assigned.

But before i went to trial on this case, the powers-that-be decided that i must first be tried on a state kidnapping case in brooklyn supreme kourt. I had been accused of kidnapping a drug dealer for ransom on December 28, 1972. Evelyn was my lawyer and there were two codefendants. One was Rema Olugbala (Melvin Kearney), a member of the Black Liberation Army and well known to me. The other codefendant was a young brother by the name of Ronald Myers. The pretrial motions were permeated by an aura of paranoia. Mine. No one i knew had ever heard of Ronald Myers, and no one understood why he had been targeted for this particular frame-up. In fact, i wondered if he was some kind of plant. It all seemed so strange.

Finally, we had a joint conference, which was arranged by a court order. I asked Rema about Ronald Myers. Rema told me that as far as he was concerned, Ron was just a brother who happened to have the misfortune of being framed along with us: an unsuspecting victim. But everything in this case was so strange that i couldn't figure it out. A joint legal conference was arranged be tween Ronald Myers, his lawyer, a young Black lawyer by the name of James Carroll, Evelyn, and me. Immediately upon seeing this brother most of my suspicions disappeared.

He was nineteen but looked like he was about sixteen. He had a quiet, soft, honest manner that i didn't think any police agent could feign. He seemed to be just as perplexed and out of it as we were. As i listened to him talk, i felt a kind of motherly protectiveness toward him. We were revolutionaries, supposedly prepared for such things. For years we had been preaching about and denouncing pig conspiracies to kill and imprison Black political activists. But looking at this soft-eyed young Black man, the thing seemed that much more horrible. Those were very cynical days, and we had developed very cynical attitudes to deal with it all. We had become masters at telling bitter, angry jokes about justice and equality and "democratic freedom." But seing this brother awakened such a sense of righteous indignation in us so-called veterans that we were all bitten by a sudden burst of energy. I pored over the discovery material and the police records tirelessly. Rema was tense, mysterious, and determined in his manner. We knew that the state was out to get us and we were more determined than ever not to let them.

The guards came and tore my cell apart. It was clear they were looking for something, standing on chairs, kneeling on all fours; they reminded me of bloodhound bitches. They seemed desperate. I tried to speculate on what they were looking for. One of the Black guards, who was halfway decent, was looking funny at me. Another guard, who had always been hostile, looked smug. Shortly after they left my cell, i tried to hook up with the wire to see what was going on. Finally i got the news. Rema Olugbala was dead. He had plunged to his death while trying to escape from the brooklyn house of detention. The makeshift rope that he was using to lower himself had broken. I felt too numb to do anything. Or say any thing. Some of the sisters helped me piece my cage together. There was nothing to say. Another Black man had died trying to be free. Everything was boiling up inside me. I had to do something, and most of my options seemed absurd.

It wasn't what i would like to have done. It didn't say half of what i wanted to say. But i guess it was the best thing i could have done at the moment. I wrote a poem.

For Rema Olugbala-Youngblood

They think they killed you.
But i saw you yesterday,
standing with your hands in your pockets
waiting for the real deal to go down.
I saw you smiling your "fuck it" smile, blood in your eyes,
your heart pumping freedom
Youngblood!

They think they killed you.
But i saw you yesterday
in the playground.
Black skin, sweaty, shiny,
hurling your ball bomb into the hoop
right on target.
Won't be no game next time
cause you ain't hardly playing.

They think they killed you.
But i saw you yesterday
with your back against the wall,
muscles bulging against the chains,
eyes absorbing truth.
Lips speaking it.
Heart learning how to love.
Head learning who to hate.
Blood ready to flow
towards freedom.
Youngblood!

Youngbloods ain't got no blood to waste
in no syringes, on no barroom floors,
in no strange lands
delaying other youngbloods' freedom.
We don't need no tired blood.
No anemic blood. No blood clots
in our new body.

They think they killed you.
But i saw you yesterday.
All them youngbloods
musta gave you a transfusion.
All that strong blood.
All that rich blood.
All that angry blood
flowing through your veins
toward tomorrow.

The next time we went to kourt, i winced when i saw the empty chairs. Slouching listlessly, i thought about Rema, completely unaware of what was being said. There was talk about this hearing and that hearing and this motion and another and none of them made the slightest sense to me. But Evelyn was on the case, letting nothing slide by, citing all of her objections "for the record." I was bored to death, completely out of it, until the jury selection process began.

There were two prosecutors: one exceedingly ugly lynch mob looking fat guy and another thin, bearded wolfman-looking dude, rather on the young side. I don't even remember their names. The judge's name was William Thompson, and he was a Black man, which surprised me. I guess they assigned the case to him because they were so sure we would be convicted and they figured a Black judge would, at least, give the illusion of justice. Thompson was somewhat of a character, who rarely sat up on the bench but constantly walked around the kourtroom. While he clearly could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be accused of ruling in our favor, and his political career would certainly not have been helped by our being acquitted, nevertheless the kourtroom did not have that out-and-out lynch-mob atmosphere we usually encountered.

The jury selection process really stood out in my mind. If anyone can write a book about how a Black lawyer can pick a jury and eliminate hostile, racist, prejudiced jurors from the panel, then Evelyn is surely the one to write the book. I was fascinated as i watched her. She was all honey and pie as she started to voir dire the jurors. At first, almost all of the white jurors began by saying they had no prejudices. By the time Evelyn finished asking them questions, we learned they had no Black friends or neighbors, would object to their children marrying a Black person, or had referred to Black people as niggers or some other derogatory name. After a while, many of the whites asked to be excused before Evelyn even asked them any questions. Most of them preferred to be excused rather than have their feelings toward Black people, Black militants, and Black Panthers questioned and explored. When you think about the fact that the average Black defendant on trial gets to ask prospective jurors only a few perfunctory questions, you can see why so many Black people end up in jail. Even with Evelyn putting everything she had into picking the jury, it was a long uphill struggle. But at the end, we managed to get four or five Black people on the jury, a remarkable accomplishment anywhere in amerika, except for D.C. The prosecutor even had the nerve to ask for extra peremptory challenges so he could bump some of the jurors off the panel.

The hardest thing in the world for me was to keep my mouth shut in the kourtroom, to sit quietly and suffer silently. Evelyn, well aware of that fact, happily consented to my acting as co-counsel. Although she remained skeptical about my ability to cross-examine major witnesses, she agreed that it would be an excellent idea for me to make the opening statement. Finally, after days of writing under the dim nightlight in the cell, i delivered it. I was nervous as hell, since i have never liked speaking in public, but i tried my best to express to the jury some of what i was feeling:

Judge Thompson, Brothers and Sisters, men and women of the jury.

I have decided to act as co-counsel, and to make this opening statement, not because i have any illusions about my legal abilities, but, rather, because there are things that i must say to you. I have spent many days and nights behind bars thinking about this trial, this outrage. And in my own mind, only someone who has been so intimately a victim of this madness as i have can do justice to what i have to say. And if you think that i am nervous, your senses do not deceive you. It is only because i know that this moment can never be lived again and that so much depends on it. I have to read this opening statement to you because i am afraid that if i don't, i will forget half of what i have to say. Please try to bear with me.