“Sweet-scented Breezes”
The judge issued a guilty verdict for all 26 defendants. Sentences ranged from two years probation, with no prison time, to one year
in federal prison with fines as high as $3,000.
Allies are everywhere present as news of our convictions spread. Three among the SOA 26 are from Western North Carolina: Jon Hunt of Boone, and Kathryn Temple and I from Asheville. We do not go forward alone. Our willingness to risk has touched many lives.
Kathryn’s journey over the line at Fort Benning began at an Amnesty International conference in Atlanta, where she saw a documentary about the School of the Americas.
“I still remember the image from the film: the children's mass grave in the town of El Mozote in El Salvador is being exhumed,” Kathryn told Beth Trigg, for the Asheville Global Report. “A woman picks up a papery crumple of fabric. With a sleeve in each hand, she lifts it up for the camera: a little girl’s dress caked with earth and blood and ten years of silence.”
Kathryn began to paint images of the massacre, a project that was to consume almost a year of her life. She displayed her wrenchingly magnificent art work, expressing so powerfully the truth of the El Mozote massacre, at a solidarity benefit at Asheville’s International Link community center, and again in Columbus, Georgia, as she stood before Judge Faircloth. He sentenced her to two years of supervised probation and a $500 fine for her act of peaceful dissent at Fort Benning.
July 2001, Asheville, North Carolina
Dear Clare,
As you enter the next phase of the journey ...
I would never want to see you on a pedestal. You belong on the earth that you came from. I am
standing right beside you.
Kathryn Temple
The postman arrived at my home in early July with a registered letter from the US Probation Officer, US District Court, Middle District of Georgia:
This is to advise you that we have received notification from the Bureau of Prisons of the location designated for you to begin service of your sentence. For service of this sentence, you are instructed to report to the FPC Alderson ... no later than 2:00 p.m., on July 17, 2001.
Lavender blossoms scented the mid-summer breeze as I paused in my garden to read the terse communication. I looked up and noticed my 90-year-old neighbor leaning over the front-porch banister to check on her pole beans. They were hanging in ready-to-pick clusters.
With the disruption of my life imminent, the reality of my circumstances was finally hitting home. I was relieved to finally know when my prison sentence would begin.
Email
July 9, 2001, Foley, Alabama
Dear Mom,
I love you and I really do not want you to go
to jail. But I do understand and I do feel very proud that such a dedicated and intelligent
woman is my mother.
Jessica
July 10, 2001, Memphis, Tennessee
Dear Clare,
I love you, take care and bow your head for
a blessing from your mother: In the Name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
Amen.
Mama
Before the trial I’d considered the option of surrendering into immediate custody of the Federal Marshall after a guilty verdict, rather than paying the $250 release bond, then having to wait until the BOP assigned me a prison bed.
“No need to make it any harder on yourself,” my friend Charlie Thomas argued. “If you accept the Judge’s offer of self-surrender, I’ll drive you to the prison.”
I needed that offer of help. It gave me a way to temper my resistance to a level where the consequences more nearly matched what I felt able to endure. My few experiences in county jails in the South had taught me that I do not fare well locked up for 23 out of 24 hours a day, especially in a windowless cell waiting the uncertain period it takes the Bureau of Prisons to assign a bed in a federal penitentiary.
Charlie knows prison. He spent two years in federal custody in Ashland, Kentucky, during the Vietnam war for his refusal to cooperate with the military induction process. The road to freedom has led many before us into prison, and many more may follow.
I wrote to my friends and allies on an Email list, one that my
friend Gardenia would use to post all my letters from prison.
“I feel a little afraid. But that will pass soon enough and another sweet-scented breeze will blow,” I wrote.
“Though I have many and varied emotional shifts on the surface, at center I have a deep current of trust, resolve, and peace about this. That is the stream that will carry me safely through. Meanwhile, the garden is in full bloom and life is good.”
When the day to leave for prison arrived, I walked from my home to Pritchard Park in Asheville’s city center for the send-off celebration. I was amazed at the number of friends who met me there and surrounded me in a circle of support that strengthened my courage and resolve.
Email
July 6, 2001, Lake Junaluska, NC
Dear Clare,
Your summons to prison seems unreal, an
altogether unfair price to pay for summoning the conscience of America to rid itself of ghoulish
institutions of murder and mayhem.
You’re tough and will endure. Can the same
be said for the rest of us? Your allies will have a
burden of outrage and gall. How gracious of you
to speak of a “sweet scented breeze.” And of all
places Alderson! I have a friend who once
worked in the Catholic Worker hospitality house
there. I hope I can visit you.
David Swain
July 12, 2001, Los Angeles, California
Dear Clare,
Good wishes today, through all the kinds of
breezes. You are quite right, knowing that another
breeze will blow and feelings will change.
Prison offers the same opportunity that other places do to be aware of the changes in the breezes of the spirit, but maybe with less outer distraction it’s easier to take advantage of the opportunity.
I found a little consolation as my imprisonment approached in the thought that those of us imprisoned when I was (1968-71) would be helpful as resource people. I had expected that thousands would be imprisoned in the growing counter- establishment movements of the late 1960’s. And indeed, thousands and hundreds of thousands were, but not in the way I had thought.
The hardest thing as I now reflect on having been imprisoned back then is just to think that the US federal and state governments hold in prison now between five and six times as many people as they held thirty years ago — but we don’t have five or six times the population.
Now we have five times the images of shocked S. returning from a visit with his wife and children, barely able to roll his cigarette, trying to tell me about his six-year-old boy, who had grabbed his father’s leg and screamed and cried that he wanted to stay with his daddy (till the mother and guard pried him off).
Now we have five times the stories, five times the divided families, five times the game playing (all sorts), five times the tragedy, five times the guards being brutalized by their social role trying to hold the whole unbalanced structure up.
As to fear: When I was about to get
transferred again from one prison to another, a
fellow-prisoner told me that everyone, no matter how much time they’ve done, is afraid when
being transferred to another prison. This can
cover your situation as well, beginning a term.
The loss of freedom of bodily movement — but
you’ve proven your freedom of mental and
spiritual movement, and that, plus a little help
from some friends, will do a lot!
Joe Maizlish (Vietnam war conscientious objector;
member National War Tax Resistance Coordinating
Committee)
