stairs were down; ice hung from the wings. Prison guards and U.S. marshals surrounded the plane. They all had shotguns or automatic weapons cradled in their arms. It occurred to me that many of these men, these police, had probably been in Vietnam. In that split instant of surveying the scene, the full military nature of the transport hit me. Should I have tried to escape, the sheer overkill of the firepower would have been directed at me.
Then I saw a line of about sixty men standing perpendicular to the tail of the plane. All of them were dressed in short-sleeved khaki shirts and pants and blue prison-issue slip-on sneakers. They were handcuffed and chained. It was below freezing. Many were stamping their feet, jumping up and down, and blowing air that formed frost. Almost all of them were young African Americans. They had been removed from the plane so that I could be put on.
Time stopped, and thoughts began to crowd my head as I looked at these black men standing in the cold, surrounded by white men with weapons. I remembered the first funeral of a black revolutionary that I had ever attended. In 1973, a former Black Panther turned Black Liberation Army member was in a shootout with the New York City police. Wanted for bank robbery, twenty-one-year-old Twyman Myers led a rooftop chase for many blocks before being brought down by eighty bullets. His funeral in Harlem had brought hundreds of mourners, including busloads of schoolchildren from a community center in Brooklyn that was then part of the Black United Front. In one life-altering moment I watched the children pile out of the buses and then I looked up to see flak-jacketed sharpshooters lying facedown on rooftops with their rifles trained on the children.
As my mind returned to the present, I felt a unity with the men, despite the divide between us. I peered into the distance to see their faces, understanding that their history as black people had placed them there. Their journey had begun with the “middle passage” four hundred years ago when they had been originally captured as slaves, and now, in their struggle to survive and live, they were waiting to enter the modern slave ship. Knowing that these men were standing and waiting for me brought my life into sharp relief. I remembered the words of John Brown—“America is birthed in the blood of slavery”—and all my sadness turned to fury. I went hot in the cold morning.
The marshals had surrounded me and hustled me out of the car, almost picking me up to get me to the stairs and onto the plane. For hours, through the entire drive, I had not said a word, not uttered a sound, but as I stood up from the car in anger, I found my voice. I yelled to the men standing there, “I am sorry these police made you wait in the cold, brothers! I’m sorry! They didn’t need to do that!”
And for one short moment, the chains, the guns, the cold, the agony—all of it receded into the background. A man on the line yelled back: “Aren’t you Susan? I was with Ray at MCC!”
“Yes!” I shouted. “I am!”
He turned to the others and said, “She is ours! She’s Black Liberation Army!”
Another man called out: “Thank God for the BLA! Don’t worry, baby! The more they fear you, the more they respect you!”
“We will win one day!” I yelled. “Maybe not now, but one day!”
A third man said, “I know about Assata! Don’t worry!”
In the few seconds the exchange lasted, the guards turned their weapons first on me and then on the line of prisoners. The marshals began to drag me toward the plane. At the top of the stairs I turned to look once more at the dreary, bleak northeastern landscape. The cold wind hit my face hard as tears streamed down my cheeks.
The prison transport is like no other air travel. The plane is stripped down to the bone; there are no dividers between first class and coach, and there is no movie telling you where emergency exits are or how to use your seat as a flotation device in case of a water crash. In addition to my forty pounds of chains, I wore handcuffs encased in the dreaded “black box,” a wooden box that closes over the few links between each cuff and is in turn shut with a padlock, completely immobilizing the hands. The black box is always the sign of a serious criminal. Back then very few prisoners were black-boxed, and the number of women even fewer.
The prisoners who had been waiting on the tarmac were moved to their seats, and the plane took off. In the front row, directly behind the cockpit, I was surrounded by marshals whose duty it was to ensure that no one communicated with me. Every few days the transport moves hundreds of prisoners—men and women—from one place to another, all over the country. There are many reasons why a prisoner is moved. Most prisoners are moved several times during the course of their sentence. Some are being sent from their trials to their first prison, some are being sent by court order to a specific prison, others are being shipped to prison hospitals or mental units, and a few are being released.
Our first stop was in Ohio. A group of men entered the plane and the vibes, which were already hostile, got worse. This group looked like they had been through a shipwreck. Six of them were chained together by twos, and they were dirty and disheveled. They all appeared to be drugged. I heard one marshal call them the “psycho crew.” These men were going to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, known back then as the prison for the criminally insane. I could not stop turning around to peer at them. One man looked like he had been locked up forever. His beard was down to his chest, his face so chiseled that his skin was translucent. I noticed that his glasses were held together with paperclips on both sides, and so he became “Paperclip” to me. He was very tall and painfully skinny. The marshals shoved him into a window seat in the middle rows of the plane. The man next to him, a small, dark Latino, was none too pleased. He kept shooting glances at Paperclip and scowling. I thought to myself, Chill, the guy is sick. He can’t help the way he looks.
On this leg of the flight they fed us. Everyone was given a white box, containing an ancient apple, some colored juice facsimile, and a wrapped sandwich consisting of two pieces of white bread and a slab of mystery meat. The rumble of complaints that went through the passengers only got worse when the marshals pulled out their Big Macs and fries and munched in front of us.
We were to land in Indianapolis, where we would all be driven to the county jail to wait until the airlift took off again the next day. As the plane began its descent, the marshals removed our lunch boxes. Just as the pilot said, “Everyone, be seated,” I felt the air pressure drop. My stomach went into my throat and turned over. The landing wheels engaged and, in the same instant, a scream of terror reverberated through the rush of air. Air released at ninety miles an hour is one of the loudest sounds imaginable, and yet that scream cut through it and reverberated.
I turned around so I could see the rest of the seats in back of me. I took in the scene behind me. The emergency window exit was gone and the Latino prisoner was in danger of being sucked out of the plane. He had looped his cuffs around the armrest, but his body was horizontal. Paperclip had gone through the window and was lying flattened against the wing, holding on to the edge. The plane had still not touched the ground.
For a moment, everyone on the plane was frozen in time. Then a tumult ensued. The head marshal grabbed the clinging Latino prisoner and threw him into the aisle in order to reach the window. The prisoners started yelling and cheering. One marshal ran to the front, where all the others had gathered around me, since I had been deemed the greatest security threat and “escape risk.” (Good, I thought.) Then the marshal in charge started screaming at one of the younger ones. “Get out on that wing, get that motherfucker.”
The man looked at him a moment before screaming back, “Fuck you! You go out there, you fat fuck.” The chain of command instantly broke. This only incited the prisoners to yell even louder. Now everyone was standing up and almost chanting, “Go, man, go!”
The plane taxied to a stop and the marshals worked to retake control. Stun guns and batons came out. There was frantic running in and out of the cockpit, the copilot finally emerging with a pistol in his hand. The prisoners got quiet and sat back down. While the plane was still pulling into the gate, the marshals were giving each other orders to search the plane and all of us. As soon as the plane stopped, they were on the ground handing off the prisoners one at a time, shaking them down, and putting them on the buses.
The sirens outside