Assata by Assata Shakur

Author:Assata Shakur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2012-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

I was taken to Roosevelt Hospital in Metuchen, new jersey, and shackled to the bed by my foot. Dr. Garrett had established that i was one month pregnant. When he visited me he demanded that the shackles be removed at once (based on the elementary principle that proper treatment, both mental and physical, of a woman threatening miscarriage would not seem to include being chained to a bedpost). My mental stability was also threatened by the round-the-clock guards who sat outside my hospital room with shotguns trained at my head.

After ten days, i was discharged from the hospital over the objections of my doctor, brought to the middlesex county jail for men, and kept in solitary confinement from February 1974 until May 1974.

At first, they wouldn’t even give me milk. Since pork was served as a staple meat almost daily, i began to slowly starve. (In county jails it goes like this: one sheet, one horse blanket, a metal cup; your cell is raided if you have luxuries, like salt.) They did everything they could to thwart the care Dr. Garrett was trying to give me. They hired their own doctor and insisted that whenever my doctor saw me, their man had to be present. This meant a severe limitation on the number of visits Dr. Garrett could arrange because their doctor happened often “not to make it” out to the prison on the days examinations had been agreed to and scheduled.

My lawyers had initiated a lawsuit against the state of new jersey in federal court charging medical maltreatment and dietary abuse. Before the date the hearing was scheduled, i was extradited to the State of New York, which made the federal court action moot. When i arrived at Rikers Island again, i was anemic and malnourished, according to my entrance physical. New jersey had been giving me iron pills, but i was anemic up to the last blood test before giving birth.

The pregnancy, or “special,” diet at Rikers, in addition to the regular food, was powdered milk, juice, and a hard-boiled egg daily. This was my diet until i gave birth, and things seemed to go normally

Meanwhile, the lawyers obtained another court order from the New York court permitting Dr. Garrett to continue treating me. When he first came to Rikers, i was in the infirmary. They told him the court order was “no good” and that he couldn’t see me. I was left in a room for three days with a woman who turned out later to have active tuberculosis. It was May and they had turned the heat off. It got cold again and women who were having seizures, methadone withdrawal, and one sister who they said had pneumonia all piled blankets on their beds. The sister got worse and worse. Finally, they brought her to Elmhurst Hospital where they discovered she did have tuberculosis. I found this out later, when she was returned to Rikers, kept in isolation, and the doctors wore masks and gloves when they visited her.

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