In the beginning when I visited with Mac, I was a journalist; I put my activist identity on the shelf. Mac made jokes about how they used to beat up hippies protesting the war in the early days of the Westies. I figured better safe than sorry. So when I sent him rough chapters of this book, including ones about my political history, I sweated it out for a month until our next visit.
I was cautious when Mac finally sat down. We made small talk. I bought him a cherry soda. Then he jumped in. “Ah, see, I told you you were like Angela Davis, with your big afro. I knew you were one of those radicals.” Grin splitting his face.
Relief spread throughout my body.
“So you knew, huh?” My grin in return.
“Yeah, I knew from the minute I saw you in the visit. I didn’t know what to expect that first time. I wasn’t nervous or nothing. But then I saw your afro. I liked you right away. I knew you were a radical. I admire people who fight for what they believe in.”
It’s strange how much this gangster’s acceptance meant to me.
“When I get out, I gotta go see one of those rallies of yours. I think that would be fun. I remember that one guy, who’s the guy you mentioned in your chapter, with the cop in Philly?” he asked.
“Mumia Abu-Jamal.”
“Yeah, yeah that’s him, Mumia. I heard about him, I remember that. They did him wrong, I’m telling you, he should have already gone free. But they set him up. They wanted him off the streets because he was telling the truth. The cops. Cops… They’d set up anybody for anything. We always hated them for that.” He grimaced.
“Yeah the Supreme Court just declined his request for a new trial,” I replied.
“Of course they did. They’re scared, is what they are. He’s too smart. They’re scared of him.”
I smiled in amazement. Never in my life did I imagine I would be discussing Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case with a convicted hitman for the mob—or that we would be in complete agreement.
“I remember another Black Panther, he was on trial the same time we were. He had a RICO charge against him too. You know him?”
I went through my mental rolodex of Black Liberation political prisoners, turning to 1987 and RICO charges. There were so many…
“He was a doctor, you know, he stuck needles in people to make ’em feel better.”
“Acupuncture! Sure, Mutulu Shakur was it?” I responded, incredulous at the connections.
“Yeah, yeah! That’s him! He was on trial the same time we were. We were housed at MCC [Metropolitan Correctional Center] together.”
How could I not have realized that? I knew the legal timelines for both cases. Of course they were there together. In my head, my work on this book with Mac and my political prisoner work were light years apart, connected only by the barbed wire of prisons. I have since come to realize they are literally a hand’s span apart, hands outstretched through bars giving pounds and support.
“Mutulu did that acupuncture thing on one of my friends there, it was real good. He was on trial with this little white girl…”
“Marilyn Buck,” I supplied, horrified to hear this political prisoner of decades, accomplished organizer, and poet referred to as a “little white girl.”
“Yeah! Marilyn Buck. She seemed nice. We only saw her on the elevator rides to the court. But she seemed nice.”
“What did you think of Mutulu?” I was curious to see his take on a Black Liberation Army member who was convicted of robbing a Brinks armored truck to expropriate funds for revolutionary activities, and convicted of freeing fellow BLA member Assata Shakur and spiriting her to decades of safety and exile in Cuba. Pretty different than whacking a mafioso and cutting up his body.
“Ah he was a great guy, real nice. Real smart. Like I said, that’s why they wanted to get these guys, ‘cause they were too smart. We weren’t like them. They wanted those guys for different reasons. We weren’t political prisoners…” He paused. “Were we?” Mac quizzed abruptly.
I almost choked on my orange juice.
“No.” I measured my words slowly. “No, I don’t think you guys could be called political prisoners at all.”
Mac shook his head decisively. “Yeah you’re right, we’re not.”
I could see Mac’s mind working, questioning and comparing the different circumstances of the cases and the punishment meted out. I saw him react as the idea that laws created to catch people like him were employed to stifle dissent. While the Westies were cutting people up for money, others were breaking laws in the pursuit of freedom, with the hope of making the world a better place.
“I like that you’re going to be telling all these stories together in your book—the political prisoners, the Irish and the Italian mobs. I was thinking, these political prisoners, you never hear about them. Some of those guys have twenty or more years in prison. But nobody ever writes about them, all they write about is Italian mob guys. Right?”
I nodded, dumbstruck. Was Mac really making these incredible connections about political repression in this country?
“I really don’t know too much about these political prisoners. It’s like the government don’t want anyone to know about them. They need a voice. That’s where you come in,” he stared at me intently. “Those are the guys you should be writing about,” Mac said decisively. “Those are the guys people need to know about ‘cause they are being punished for doing what’s right. Not a bunch of gangsters like us.”
“Well,” I smiled, “I think I can do both. You’re helping me do both right now.”
Mac grinned. We went on to talk about many different political topics. Mac gave me more information on the Westies, items brought to the forefront of his brain by my draft chapters. I scribbled on the scraps of paper the prison provided, using the little quarter golf pencil, just like I had done for the past four years interviewing Mac.
When our hour was up, we hugged. I promised to come back soon and spend more time, when I wasn’t rushed to attend a conference on prisons. I walked out quickly. I was already thinking about processing, and hoping it would go smoothly so I would have more time with my brother.
“Ma’am, what do you have in your hand?” a short female officer barked.
I looked down and saw the notes I had taken. “These are nothing, just some notes I wrote to myself. I’m going to put them in my car. I’m not bringing them back into the prison.”
“You’re going to have to hand those over,” she glared.
I did so, and waited, shifting from foot to foot while she called over her superior officer, an older white man with a walrus-sized white moustache drooping down his face. I had one eye on the clock, and one eye on my notes to make sure they didn’t go anywhere.
Walrus Moustache called me out of line and over to the side of the bright orange counter.
“And what,” he asked victoriously like he already knew the answer, “are these?” He shook the tiny pages covered in my almost illegible scrawl.
Evasiveness was my best route. Since I hadn’t officially informed the prison that I was working on this book, I didn’t want to start that discussion here. Not with my brother on the other side of the bars, waiting for me, checking the walkway every five minutes for my familiar afroed silhouette.
“They’re just some notes to myself. My friend was telling me some funny stories, and I wanted to remember them.”
This sounded pathetic even to my ears.
“They’re letters, aren’t they.” A statement, not a question.
“No, they’re notes, just notes. They’re not going to anyone but myself.”
“Well, you’re not allowed to bring any written material out of a prison visiting room. You violated one of the rules.”
My stomach dropped. I know people who were banned from a prison because they forgot they had a stick of gum in their pocket. They were told they were bringing in contraband. I saw an old woman banned from a prison when a drug test came up positive for her. They later discontinued the use of that test, because they found it gave almost as many false positives as true. She still had to fight for months to lift her ban. If there truly was a rule that I violated, my brother would be waiting a very long time to see me.
“I’ve taken notes out before on all my visits, for four years. I had no idea there was a rule,” I stammered. Panic rose in my chest, straining my voice.
He snorted. “It’s on the back of the visiting form you signed when you first came here.” He pulled out the form and slapped it on the counter, pointing to small print at the bottom, which read: “It is illegal to bring correspondence in or out of the visiting room, or pass it between inmates.”
“They’re just notes.” My voice took on a level of desperation. “I was putting them in my car, I have done it many times before. I didn’t know it was a problem. I can just throw them away. But my brother is waiting to see me. I was going back in to see him, can I go… please?”
The please tore at my throat, like swallowing gravel. But prison is all about humiliations. If my brother had his body violated by a body cavity search every time he came out to see me, I could crawl a little in front of this tin-plated dictator.
Walrus Moustache turned to the female guard. “How did she bring this out? Was she trying to hide it? Was she sneaking it out?”
I could hear the hope saturating his voice.
She looked at me coldly for a long minute. “No, she had it in her hand with her ID. There was nothing sneaky about it.”
He looked deflated by the answer.
“All right,” he begrudged, “you can go back in to see your brother.”
“Do you just want me to throw those away then?” I asked nervously, reaching for the papers.
“No, I’m going to keep it here to study it.”
My nervousness escalated to full blown anxiety. The notes were all over the place. Since I was writing by hand with a mere nub of a pencil, I just scratched the bare bones—like when Mac told me the story of how he and Jackie Coonan wanted to kill Rudolph Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney General, the one leading the charge to smash the Mafia and the Westies.
“Jackie and I, we worked on the set of The Days of Our Lives. We’d be there every morning at 5:30 in the morning. And like clockwork we’d see Giuliani walking his dog. Every morning, by himself, like he didn’t have a care in the world. I wanted to take him out so much. But Fat Tony [Salerno, head of the Genovese family] said no, we couldn’t. It would bring down too much heat to kill him. Well, Fat Tony got five hundred years when Giuliani was through with him. That’s not heat? Man, I wish we had done it.”
From this statement ensued a lengthy discussion between us about the political ramifications of Giuliani’s untimely death upon the state of the nation. It was sort of like sussing out the plot of a science fiction novel: What would have happened to Mac and the Westies? To the Mafia and organized crime? Would they all still be riding high, instead of limping along, waiting for that final bullet to put them all out of their misery? What about the radical movements of the 70s and 80s? Giuliani was responsible for a number of RICO charges, specifically against Black Liberation Movement. What would have happened to the movement if it hadn’t been dealt those blows? What would New York look like now if not for Giuliani’s “cleaning up” of the city, his “broken windows” zero tolerance policies, which were really an attack on the poor, the brown, the homeless, the street vendors, the “undesirable” in a way that allowed for accelerated gentrification of the city that never sleeps? What if Giuliani hadn’t been mayor during 9/11? What would the response of a city under attack have been? Might it have been one of thoughtful reflection? An attempt at healing? Would that have changed America’s response to the incident? Would we even be engaged in an endless war on terror around the world right now?
It was obviously all theoretical. It was fun nonetheless to pull the strings of history and imagine what would unravel, what would be unmade.
My notes of the conversation, however, just read, “Whack Giuliani with jackie. Fat Tony. Heat. 500 years. Mornings dog Days Lives. Change everything. Political prisoners freed?”
Visions of me being detained as an enemy combatant who planned to kill a former U.S. mayor filled my head. I could see Michael Chertoff, then head of Homeland Security, holding up my scraps of paper as evidence, bellowing that I was going to hold Giuliani hostage until they freed all the political prisoners and then kill him anyway.
I pasted a smile on my face and said to Walrus Moustache, “Sure, of course, keep them. Thank you so much.”
Through the entire visit with my brother, I stressed and worried. It loomed over me.
Still we had a great time. My brother can turn a visiting room into Showtime at the Apollo. We have a good-natured game of dozens, which begins the minute after we get finished hugging hello.
“Damn, scarecrow, what are you on that Kate Moss diet or something?” Kakamia poked me in the ribs.
“Whatever, fivehead,” I responded, “with a forehead that big you could land a plane on it.”
Usually when I visit prisons, I am my sweetest, most understanding self. I try to leave everything small and petty in the car, along with my wallet and my car alarm keychain.
But Kakamia and I are truly siblings, even if we weren’t born that way. It creates a sense of normalcy when we snap on each other. After a particularly good cut, we both can’t keep a straight face. Instead we crack up, hug, and move on to other topics.
“C’mon, Wa, let’s take a walk.” Kakamia meant we should go outside into the “recreation area,” which consisted of two metal outdoor tables on concrete surrounded by fencing, more dog pen than picnic. We strolled around the confined space in lazy circles. When we both got animated, arguing or discussing plans for him to come home, we both unconsciously sped up. We lapped other folks walking two by two. On this cement slab, located behind two high walls, with a clear shot of the snipers in the guard towers, I could still feel like we were strolling down a country road with sun on our faces, laughter in our throats.
As always, the visit ended all too quickly. I left, holding back tears I know hurt him more than they do me.
I was ready to face the music.
The female guard was there. Three other guards leaned on the orange counter. She stared down at me—pretty impressive because I had at least five inches on her.
I said in my smallest voice, “I just wanted to make sure that everything was all right from before. As I said, I didn’t know the rules and just want to make sure that there’s no trouble in the future…”
“If you were in trouble, ma’am,” she interrupted, spitting machine gun staccato, “you would already have known about it. Have a good evening.”
This, then, is the power of the prison system: the ability to sever and slice, to break and crush bones and bodies, and more importantly, connections and hearts.