CONSCIOUSNESS

Sister Subverter

“If you thought you were Jesse James…”

Frank and Ina Brown sit down on cold plastic chairs facing their daughter through wire mesh. Rita meets her dad’s eyes.  He demands: “If you thought you were Jesse James, why didn’t you get more damn money?” 

She laughs, protesting “I was just learning!”

To Frank, a white person born and raised in Arkansas, Jesse James is a rebel. A man who defied law enforcement and the powers they defended. James courageously lived out the desires of the little man and became a national icon. But the outlaw got his start as a criminal in a Confederate death squad during the Civil War and robbed his first train in a Ku Klux Klan outfit[1]—a stark contrast with Frank’s daughter, who is a captured member of an anarcho-communist urban guerilla cell, and a queer to boot. She’s been involved in nine bombings, five bank robberies, and one prisoner liberation. [2] There was one fatality and two casualties. One of Brown’s companions was injured; another one died.

Rita Brown is in jail at the Federal Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, awaiting trial on five counts of bank robbery and one of illegal weapons possession. Her parents Frank and Ina are in town because Ina has been subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify at her daughter’s trial.  The FBI first approached the Browns the previous year with grainy photos of a burly, mustachioed figure coercing money from a bank teller. Frank and Ina’s’ “I don’t know”s and “Could be”s changed when the Feds came up with video footage of what seemed to be the same person passing a hot check to purchase a gun. “That one kinda walks like her,” Ina commented innocently. After her daughter was captured in the winter of 1977, the prosecutor at the subsequent trial subpoenaed Ina. Although she is legally obliged to be present, she and Frank paid for the trip from their home in Klamath Falls out of their own pockets.

Woman Over the Edge of Crime

In which Brown’s criminal past is related, and she is introduced to the political thought of George Jackson in time to understand the significance of his death

This isn’t the first time Brown has been in trouble with the law, nor is it the first time she has faced a prison sentence.

When she was seventeen, Rita and her sixteen year old girlfriend Janice took Janice’s dad’s car out on a joyride. The car was protected with a driving coil wire, but Rita, who understood automobiles, circumvented it. The pair cruised around all day, burning up nearly a tank of gas.

            When Janice’s dad got home early and saw that his car wasn’t in the garage, he panicked and called the police. Janice and Rita were just returning when sirens intercepted them.  At the police station Janice’s dad, embarrassed, dropped the charges. 

The idea that his “little girl” was a “dyke” made Janice’s father squirm. That his daughter’s apparent girlfriend had criminal proclivities made him angry. The year following the joyride incident, he attempted to entrap the young couple in a compromising position so he could have Rita, a newly minted adult at eighteen, prosecuted for “statutory licentiousness.”

This was in 1965 in Klamath Falls, the conservative, primarily white, company town just north of the California border in which Rita, and her younger brother Kenny, were born. Their dad, Frank, worked in the Weyerhauser lumber mill, processing the Douglas firs, sugar pines and other assorted evergreens which came in from the dense forests of southern Oregon. Ina stayed at home.  By age five, Rita knew she didn’t want to be a housewife like her mother. After a decade of watching her father drink and rage, she knew it would destroy her to be like him.   

The idea of escape presented itself with increasing urgency as Rita entered her late teens. Small town prejudices—of which the incidents with Janice’s father were only the beginning—contributed to the mounting pressure for her to depart.

Other than Janice, there was nothing to hold her in Klamath Falls. She won a scholarship to the University of Oregon, but, ignorant of work study programs and loan options, still couldn’t afford it. Her parents sent her to a business college in Salem. After Rita completed a summer program her dad tried to get her a position at the mill, but he was politely declined.

Two enticing coastal cities were visible from the hills of southern Oregon: San Francisco and Seattle. Rita didn’t know what in particular to expect from either of them: simply life, something different, the freedom that would come with anonymity. Rita had a friend in Seattle, a circumstance which made the choice for her. After Janice graduated from high school, she joined her girlfriend in the big city.

Rita’s first job in Seattle was as an accounting clerk at a bank. She detested the requisite skirts and blouses. After six months, she was offered an opportunity to transfer to the computer department.  She would have been the first woman to do so.  But, because she was only 19, her boss—also a woman—wouldn’t give her permission. Impatient with her circumscribed options at the bank, Rita began to apply for other jobs.

            Janice, for her part, was chronically unemployed.  To ease the restraint of a limited income, the two occasionally shoplifted items at downtown department stores. Janice stashed desirable clothing items under her own clothes while Rita acted as lookout. On December 18, 1967, the couple was caught. Each was sentenced to probation and community work. Their drama-prone relationship ended shortly thereafter.

The Post Office hired Rita as a clerk. When she completed the probationary period and was granted a permanent position she threw away her dresses. Rita stayed for three and a half years, enjoying the physicality of the work: unloading railroad cars, unpacking bags, sorting mail onto belts. Later she was transferred to the distribution center, a hub for the Pacific Northwest located down in the old industrial district on Alaskan Way South.

The Post Office presented Rita with opportunities for illicit self-advancement.  Cold cash passed through her hands in envelopes. She decided that pocketing some wasn’t a bad idea. Although she considered it unethical to take tenants’ rent money—her mill town upbringing imbued her with a strong us and them class consciousness—she did occasionally grab dough landlords mailed to the bank.

The Post Office noticed a discrepancy. On February 17, 1971, Postal Inspector Merlin L. DeVere prepared a test for Brown: three envelopes containing cash were sent through her station.  They entered and didn’t come out.  The same day, she was stopped leaving the Post Office.  The marked bills were discovered in her pocket.

On March 9^th,, a federal grand jury charged Brown with three counts of possession of stolen mail, one for each of the letters stolen. The letter addressed to Wayside Chapel contained $9.50; the one to Pan Pacific Collection Agency $8.35. The amount contained in the one to the Commercial Bank of Seattle wasn’t disclosed.[3]

On March 15^th, in front of Judge William T. Beeks, Brown plead guilty to one count of mail theft.  Public defender Truman R. Castle represented her; Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerald E. Olson prosecuted. Brown signed a document stating in part “…being a postal service employee, to wit, a  regular clerk, [I] did unlawfully detain, delay, open, secrete and destroy a letter and mail entrusted to [I] which had come into your possession which was intended to be conveyed by mail…”

Judge Beeks looked critically at Brown and her current girlfriend, D.J., who was sitting in the stands behind her, and pronounced the sentence: “a year and a day.”[4]  Sentences of a year or less could be served locally: the extra day meant that Brown was going to the federal penitentiary.  The nearest federal correctional institute for women was Terminal Island in San Pedro, California.  Contending that she could parole out of prison sooner than she could be released from jail, the judge later claimed that “By giving her that extra day I make it possible for her to serve a much shorter sentence than she would if it had been a year…”[5]

Brown didn’t buy it. In the federal jail she would have been able to earn money in a work release program, and apply for weekend leaves, early release and placement in a halfway house. None of these options existed in the penitentiary; she would be lucky to see the parole board once.

Brown, increasingly out regarding her gender orientation and stand-offish when confronted with what she conceived to be prejudice, interpreted the sentence as retaliation for being lesbian.

‘You old prick,’ she fumed quietly. ‘Anyone who goes to the penitentiary does more time, and anyone would rather stay in their own city than get sent to another state!’

Rita, however, was not to be coddled.

Terminal Island

“The very first time, it was like dying… Capture, imprisonment, is the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life.”

            - George Jackson, Soledad Brother[6]

A Federal Marshall and his wife escorted Brown down to Terminal Island on a commercial flight. It was Rita’s first time on an airplane.

The complex of old barracks that constituted the women’s prison was on a peninsula past a military base and the men’s portion of the prison. While being bussed in Rita caught a pleasant glimpse of the sea. It was the San Pedro Channel, coursing between the California coast and Catalina Island. She then entered the small Admission and Orientation (A&O) building in which new inmates were confined for a 30 day period,

In A&O Brown was placed in a cell—clean, innocuous, small but not cramped—with another inmate named Brown. The woman was an African-American dope fiend with close cropped, bleached hair who was in for boosting. She bragged: “I can fit a TV between my legs and walk outta a store with it!” and used a rolled up blanket to demonstrate her technique for stealing fur coats. Rita made sure her pallid cellmate ate properly while the junkie, in return, hipped her to penitentiary survival skills. The two passed their interminable period in bureaucratic limbo playing cards. Although Rita had never gotten along with her father, she did have the occasion to thank him for one thing: having taught her bridge.

In general population Rita was assigned to a housing unit on the second floor of the administrative building. The thirty-odd inmates she shared the floor with were a mix of short termers, long termers, and people on work release. Each was assigned a cot in a cubicle with a door, toilet, sink, and dresser-desk. ‘This feels like a toilet stall,’ Rita observed sourly when she first stepped into her private compartment. ‘Two toilet stalls put together,’ she decided in a second, more generous, appraisal. A clipboard on one of the walls was the designated area for personalization.

Prisoners were allowed one phone call a month.  After three or four months, D.J. started missing their phone dates.  Rita began calling Ellen, a Filipina dyke friend from the Post Office, with whom she also corresponded.  While not a lover, Ellen proved to be the better friend.

Brown was assigned to the landscape maintenance crew.  The Southern California climate was completely alien. ‘It’s hot as fuck down here!’ She thought incredulously, having never previously visited an arid climate. She cut the legs off her pants and the sleeves off her shirt. While her own comfort was her primary concern, the tough individualization of her clothing flagged her as a butch, a desirable minority in the institution of sexually deprived females.  

In a couple weeks the supervising officer failed to show up. For two and a half months the inmates continued to do their work so that could be outdoors without “Correctional Officers” (C.O.s), as the Bureau of Prisons (BoP) dictated that their guards be called, harassing them. Brown worked with an older white woman who read people’s future in playing cards in exchange for cigarettes. The woman mowed, while Rita watered.

Together they ranged across “the campus,” another deceptively innocuous term imposed by the BoP, from the administration building to the drug offenders’ dormitory. One day they paused in front of a fence that barred the view of the ocean. The psychic mower introduced Brown to meditation.  “Stare at the fence until it disappears,” she instructed, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, “until all you can see is the sea… That’s meditation.”  Rita practiced diligently.  Before she left the penitentiary she was able to do it.

In the fall the prison hired several new guards. Three of the women were from the military and, though closeted, were obviously dykes.

One of these women, Officer B., was assigned to order around the landscape crew.  She was astounded to discover that the inmates had continued to do their jobs without supervision.  She wrote them letters of commendation, and requested that they be given back pay­­—$5 for each of the months they worked.

The administration paid everyone but Brown. They send Officer B. to tell her that they wouldn’t pay her because they didn’t like the way she dressed.

Brown was irritated by the order: by the administration which, perversely, employed a dyke to tell her not to be a dyke; and by the person in front of her, whose allegiances were confused enough for her to be willing to carry out the directive. She puffed: “Tell them I’ll dress the way I wanna dress. Not even my momma tells me how to dress anymore… And I know why they sent you to tell me!” All inmates were officially sexless. Butch dress not only forced the existence of inmate sexuality into public view, but highlighted its ostensibly perverted, homosexual form. Brown, though she didn’t engage in any sexual activity in the institution, refused to deform her person for the comfort of prison’s bureaucrats.

There were ten men to every woman in prison at Terminal Island. Half of the women were in on drug charges—many were “mules” caught importing into Los Angeles International Airport.  The male drug offenders were channeled into a program established by the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act (NARA) of 1966 which was part of the rehabilitation ideal cresting around the country. The program included a “therapeutic community” with it’s own dorm, which was known as the “NARA unit.” Psychology students and their professors from colleges throughout the LA area facilitated “Group.”  On paper the program wasn’t mandatory, but prisoners knew that if they didn’t go they would be docked points on the invisible ledgers maintained by the C.O.s. 

The administration considered the male drug offenders’ counseling group successful enough to begin a similar program once a week for all the female inmates.  Though the organizers of the sessions assured the prisoners that everything they said in Group was confidential, the prisoners knew the professionals and students immediately divulged any information they had gleaned to the C.O.s and prison administrators. Rita and a black inmate named Pearl both checked out the counselors cautiously.  They each threw out questions and observed people’s responses. When the results proved unsatisfactory, they declined to participate. In contrast to other prisoners, who liked to jabber, Rita and Pearl kept quiet. They did decide, however, to speak with one another.

            Pearl was in an underground Black women’s reading group and began bringing Rita books. One of them was Soledad Brother, a collection of prison letters from George Jackson, a black communist accused of killing a white guard. Jackson, now an inmate at San Quentin, was facing the death penalty. His words to his mother, little brother, defenders and supporters, depict, in vacillations between poignancy and rage, his development from a child who “loved people” and “understood from the beginning that the end purpose of life was simply to live, experience, contribute, connect, to gratify the body and the mind” into a damaged adult, who detailed his own advanced state of spirit death with clinical detachment.[7] Of his time in prison, Jackson wrote: “It has destroyed me as a person, a human being that is, but it was sudden, it was a sudden death, it seems like ten days rather than ten years.”[8]

Brown had only encountered the defiance in Jackson’s prose in one other man: Captain Jack, or “Kintapuasch,” the Modoc leader who catalyzed his people in a heroic defense against dishonest white settlers and the Union Army. As a child, she discovered a book on Captain Jack and was mesmerized: he became her first role model. The Modocs’ final stand occurred in volcanic craters only twenty miles from her home. Her father took her there: one of his many contradictions was that, though racist, he had a deep respect for Native people—before they became disenfranchised, dismal and desperate “drunk Indians.”

Captain Jack defined Brown’s conception of dignity. She innately understood “You can push us only this far, and no further.” With Jackson, it was something else which moved her: his capacity for love while trapped in a “concrete grave.”

Jackson’s discussion of the psychological impact of U.S. racism prompted Brown to recall the few experiences she had had with black people. In high school, she became friends with the daughter of an Air Force pilot stationed nearby; theirs was the only black family in the neighborhood and, being military, soon moved. Family visits to Arkansas were more disturbing. One time she was walking with her redneck boy cousins and a black woman, hands full of groceries, approached with her children. Rita stepped off the sidewalk to let the woman pass. Her cousins razzed her about this show of deference incessantly. The civil rights movement was, at most, a spectacle on the TV news which produced bigoted jeers from her father. Actually being in the south, Rita could not comprehend “colored only” drinking fountains and other manifestations of de jure segregation.

In the penitentiary, Rita played cards with a group of black women. She was respectful but not a fool. When one of the players encouraged her to smuggle drugs in through the visiting room she replied bluntly: “That would be stupid.” Being caught would subject her, a short termer, to an increased sentence, while succeeding would open her up to the machinations of the institution’s illicit drug trade. As a compromise, she snuck in candy, which she shared.

One evening Rita passed the cafeteria and heard jazz. ‘That sounds really good!’ She followed the arpeggiated shouts of the solo into a room off the main dining hall and stepped in. She immediately realized that she was the only white person. ‘Am I even supposed to fuckin’ be here?’ she wondered.

An old black butch probed calmly: “You like this music?”

“Yeah!”

“Then sit down and be quiet.”

She did, and she came back. Each night of the week the administration turned this cafeteria adjunct over to prisoners of different ethnicities who listened to the music of their culture. The jazz aficionados were primarily heroin addicts from L.A. Once a week they got high and chilled out. Brown had known that jazz existed, but she had had no idea just how far out Coltrane could go. Records by the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Dexter Gordon, Miles and Satchmo were supplemented by live performers considerate enough to enliven the inmates’ existence. The extraordinary jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln performed at Terminal Island during Brown’s term, as did the funky rock band Hot Tuna, who were accompanied by Papa John Creech on an electrified violin.

In recognition of Brown’s expanding consciousness, one of the women in the bridge-playing group invited her into the day room to watch a PBS program on black male prisoners. Soon after, devastating news about Jackson arrived. On August 21, 1971, Jackson and a small crew of comrades carried out an escape attempt. Jackson was shot down by a tower guard before he reached the institution’s outer gate. The placement of bullets made it apparent that after being wounded he was intentionally executed at close range.

            The lament Bob Dylan composed that day captures the mourning, and the pride, of many who admired Jackson:

            I woke up this mornin’

            There were tears in my bed

            They killed a man I really loved

            Shot him through the head

            Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down

            Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground…

            Prison guards, they cursed him

            As they watched him from above

            But they were frightened of his power

            They were scared of his love.

            Lord, Lord, so they cut George Jackson down

            Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground[9]

In observance of the death of “Comrade George”—as prisoners and outside politicos alike warmly called this symbol of black male revolutionary potency—the women prisoners at Terminal Island stopped work for a day. They learned that the female inmates at the federal correctional institute across the country in Alderson, West Virginia, did the same.

As Brown prepared to parole she was enrolled in a work release program at a Salvation Army in San Pedro. The prison drove the inmates to the edge of the federal property and permitted them to take a bus into town, provided that they report back by a certain hour. Brown worked with a couple of old ladies who were friendly regardless of her convict status. The women at the store culled donated clothes, while the men sorted and carried furniture. Because she was fast and strong Brown was quickly placed at the front of the clothes line. She was only there for six weeks. During that time the older women put together a trunk for her, filled with clothes and bedding, and instructed “Come by and get this on your way out.” 

Before leaving the pen, Brown found satisfaction in exposing one of the prison administration’s misdeeds. The incident centered on a woman Rita had gone out on work release with. She was in a counseling group that met in the men’s dormitory. Like many other primarily heterosexual prisoners she outsmarted C.O.s in order to carouse with a male prisoner. The C.O.s responded to the inmates’ duplicity by harassing women for petty infractions like not wearing bras. When a proclamation came down from the administration—“Those without bras are not permitted to leave the dormitory to go to Group”—inmates returned to the checkpoint with their bras on over their shirts. This particular woman became pregnant and, before she began showing, attempted an abortion with a knitting needle. Brown had never given her much thought, until she learned that she had bled to death in her cell.

An FBI investigation team invaded the institution after the discovery of the corpse. Agents came on strong, coercing prisoners into identifying “The Inseminator” and any female inmates who may have helped with the illicit operation.

 Brown refused to cooperate with the investigation. When she was called in for interrogation and asked if she knew the deceased woman, she replied combatively: “Yeah, I knew her.  We rode the bus together out of the pen every morning.  So the fuck what?”

The day after the FBI invasion, Rita and a young white dyke named Carolyn on a similar work schedule breakfasted together. Carolyn’s girlfriend, Mace, lived in the NARA unit, where the death occurred. Mace was a biker—one of the prison’s most visible subgroups, with their confrontational machismo and leather fetishism. As bikers, all white, commonly derided blacks, Brown had kept her distance from both Mace and Carolyn in the past. In this situation, however, Mace provided interesting information about the ongoing crackdown.

Work release prisoners were the only ones who could get out of the institution. Brown and her co-conspirator, noting they hadn’t seen anything in the press about the death, made a plan to leak the news. They drafted a paragraph to read to the press. At the first opportunity, each would go to a public telephone. Rita would call one paper and Carolyn another. The following day each woman completed her mission. The day after they phoned in their tips, the prisoner’s death and the subsequent investigation were on the front page of local newspapers. Rita and Carolyn stopped by a bar to celebrate before reporting back to the penitentiary.

Copyright© Daniel Burton Rose - Do not duplicate without permission.