Assata
By Demetrius Buckley
Cubicles, tight corridors, living spaces; housing projects, cracked streets, assault rifles; cells, solitary, the hole; blood on clothes. Body. Spirit.
"How many wolves hid behind the bush to eat my child?"
This impenetrable line, and many others, crossed my daily consciousness as I read about Assata's life. Before she was a part of the Black Liberation Army, the Panthers, she, JoAnne Deborah Byron, was born in Jamaica, New York after her mother and father were divorced. They moved down south where her grandmother tried to instill dignity in her, a shield from a world that didn't want much to do with her.
"Who is better than you?" Her grandma had asked Assata.
"Nobody."
The language was very needed then and it had also threatened her own image too when she was told not to play with alley countrified rats, no shoes, indecent people. How did a decent person look?
Assata's book is a showing of a corrupt government that manipulates a society's image by covering up their own tracks. Her examples will show why these laws are in place and who these laws are in place for. We never hear the wolf's story after it is killed, only the Hunter's narrative. However, Assata changed that in her Autobiography. Her writings, and still living in Cuba, extends her power . She is still on the most wanted list and a wonder why should be the initiation of urgency. What would the government do to her body -- that is a substantial question now knowing what they do to the black body that has been rebellious.
Coming across Assata's vibrant life, her joining the Panther Party, began in the streets. The boys on the corners, the girls double-dutching on concrete, talked about her escape like a playoff football game. Hope circled the block I played on, that hope to forever escape the terror of being imprisoned. One woman, black woman, exposed America for what it was and is. However, in prison the language had changed. Her autobiography, her name, has been past around like daily contraband and to some degree, to the officials, it is contraband.
Her childhood struggles against the depiction of being a black girl in that society had collected in her future understanding of racial barriers. It reads like water: You can't exchange Martin Luther King for shit in the store window. Smashing windows will do me no good. I am beyond that. I want blood -- Assata was a force to be reckoned with when she began to feel and see these torn structures in the black lower class communities; it gave her a burning desire to align the people about what love really meant by utilizing action. Assata: An Autobiography mirrors the American greed and oppressive systems that manipulate a class of people in order to gain political strength.
Imprinted into the makeup of the American negro is to forget that he/she is an ancestor of a capturer, stolen. School textbooks explain slavery as if Africans willingly came across the mid Atlantic, the docile stories accepted and tweaked for it to be taught in classrooms; even TV in Assata's era programmed black families to accept white sitcom families as role models - 'though they had very little to do with the reality of their own existence and survival.' In her writings, Assata exposes what her own body meant then but not just her body, the body of black women in America. She taught in her book that there aren't one way to describe the plight of the black family, the strength in a woman. In the bars she worked in at a very young age, the men too working, they became a family in that place, how they were protective of her or how her auntie Evelyn challenged Assata with debates on history and new things to see in the world, the same as Miss Shirley, a prostitute, who took her off the streets for a little. Family isn't one way.
Dynamics in Assata's life molded her into a comradeship equipped with resilience to a struggle unbeknownst to her at that age. There was a need in her young blood, Ancestral blood -- the reason, “Why?” Assata thought, "Why was Tyrone so into fighting[the bishops]?", another black group, a gang. She couldn't see herself in his future of fighting her own kind, a housewife making him a lunch to go fight as if it was a job, but it seemed that the growing boys then were caught in a capitalistic food chain. The question was on the tip of her tongue:
Why are we (black folks) fighting and killing each other? Why don't we see the building blocks that continue the slave mentality? Why won't we learn who we truly are in study? Why are we subjects to the government?
The Black Liberation Army came first, then the attraction of the Panthers. Before her soul searching journey she read poets like Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and watched black playwrights. She discovered Africanism, their hairstyles and the colors adorned on accessories. During her days she talked about liberation for the black people mentally enslaved.
Assata aligned her and her comrades capturing on the New Jersey Turnpike to her captured adolescence; things had been taken since the beginning of her life. This interconnection is surreal, almost as if awake in a dream -- her arm numb from a gunshot, the reader's arm numb for the massive weight when we learn how the government will incessantly gorge at her person through kangaroo kourts and illegally manipulate their own laws to convict an innocent person. She was wanted for armed robbery, kidnapping a drug dealer, shooting a state trooper, and killing a drug dealer. The government put Assata in a male prison and the same as her mock prison time, her body had been taken again. While living in inhumane conditions, not getting adequate healthcare, she became with child during one of her trials. Mary's stigma resounded and stoked fear in authority figures that she'd bring upon this world a black Messiah, a holy one who would usurp a fallible government for its wronging to a people.
The media which is controlled by the rich, the rich who buys political advance to keep rich, the political components who insure judges to senators and representatives in sponsorship, played a major part in dehumanizing Assata. She ensured that the capitalist ran the country, the power rulers who are politically put in place. If you have money, a staplecenter within the government you are less likely to be subject to the harsh reality of prison. There will always be a , "If they were black they'd be dead or thrown under the jail." In consideration, who were tried in court when Biden incidentally drone-bomb 18 innocent women and children in the the middle east? We, the people in this country, were met with one apology, and it was never heard of again. Who gives this government the rights to not be held accountable?
Assata exposes the manipulation of an oppressive government, how, from Puerto Ricans, Cubans, African Americans, Asians are subject to police brutality, have a proclivity to poverty, injustice, and a racist institution; she further explains that the truth of black folks is not taught in schools which leaves the children and parents unequipped to a tactic of Americanization. We've always been passive, to not rise up against what is right -- subconscious training like the texture of a black person's hair or what jobs we only would work, or how black ancestors were barefoot and naked, dumb, stupid, and savages. These institutions and and how they desensitize facts are very real, as real as the Willie Lynch Letters by way of propaganda...these adaptations, the consistent mimicking of this racial divide has effected a black man's treatment of black women. "The slave masters taught us we were ugly, less than human, unintelligent, and many of us believed it. Black people became breeding animals: studs and mares. A black woman was fair game for anyone at any time: the master or visiting guest or any redneck who desired her."
In the Black Panther Party that same misogynistic, toxic masculinity behavior had been present as well. The inner infliction opposed a threat without the party knowing its dissension and disunity on a national level. Things weren't perfect, however, to make a conscious decision, a refined awareness, that, “Maybe that we are all running from something, all living a clandestine existence... A whole generation of Black women hiding out under dead white people's hair. I have the urge to cry, but I don't. It would draw attention. I keep from getting up until my stop comes. I pray and struggle for the day when we can all come out from under these wigs.”
Demetrius Buckley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Michigan Quarterly Review, where he won the 2020 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, Apogee, PEN America, and RHINO. He is the winner of the 2021 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize.