A Million Years with You (27 page)

The prisoners in their wheelchairs were massed in the courtroom. The trial took less than an hour. One young man popped a wheelie—the term for riding on the rear wheels only—that brought him in front of the judge. “I did the crime, I'll do the time,” he called out over his shoulder, banging down his chair and wheeling away before the judge could ask how he pleaded. All the demonstrators pleaded guilty and all were sentenced—not to jails this time but to prisons, the women to Tanguay Women's Prison and the men to Bordeaux Prison, both outside the city.

I saw my daughter in the crowd but couldn't speak to her. So the next day I went to Tanguay Prison. Again I had to wait, this time sitting on cement steps in a freezing entryway, not allowed inside because escapes were in progress. According to a radio on the far side of a door—a radio I could barely hear—a group of prostitutes had climbed out a window and onto the prison roof. Some had managed to shinny down a pipe and hide in the bushes, but others were apprehended on the roof. These women were handcuffed with their hands behind their backs and made to walk facing forward down a steep fire ladder. I could not imagine walking forward down a steep ladder with my hands behind my back. Evidently this prison treated women harshly.

At last a guard opened the door. I was led to the proverbial thick glass window with the telephone. After another long wait, my daughter appeared on the far side of the glass. She was naked except for a tablecloth that was wrapped around her like a sarong. They had taken away her clothes, she told me, and had no prison clothes left to give her. The prison was cold, her lips were blue, and she was shivering. I told her I would get her out of there if I had to sell my blood and body parts to do it. She told me firmly not to bail her out. She refused to abandon the other imprisoned demonstrators. I begged her. My plea went unheard. She was adamant.

What do you do with a daughter like that? She was iron-hard, no question. Everyone knew it. One of her friends named her “Stalin with Tits.” She also was loyal. Many disabled women were imprisoned for their part in the demonstration, some for the first time, and they were depending on each other. They found strength in their numbers. Stephanie had been imprisoned before. She knew the ropes. The others needed her experience.

However, she was afraid for her husband and the men with him. Some required medication to prevent seizures, but prisoners are not allowed to have medications. I later heard that one of the prisoners, without his medication, had such violent seizures that he almost died.

A guard arrived to take Stephanie back to her cell. I told her I'd come in the morning. And I did. By noon, more prisoners with their wheelchairs and their disabilities had arrived. The first batch was released with time served. They went back to the streets and took over the Montreal subway.

 

The subway trains were down a flight of stairs. One young man, caught up in the passion of the struggle, tipped his chair into a wheelie and went hurtling down the stairs. Others, such as my daughter, got out of their wheelchairs and crawled.

I've seldom seen anything so dramatic. Watching a young man rocketing almost out of control down a long flight of concrete stairs was heart-stopping, but the people who crawled were equally compelling. There were no ramps and no elevators. They had only one way to reach the lower level. The sight of a large group of people dragging their bodies down a staircase was so dramatic that right-to-lifers copied it later for their own demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and crawled up the steps of the Capitol. But when their demonstration ended, the right-to-lifers stood up and walked away. Not so the paralyzed people—not then, not ever.

Of course, crowds of regular subway passengers were also present, staring at the demonstrators and stepping on and around them. At a bend in the stairs, one of the demonstrators, a young African American man with cerebral palsy, began to spasm from being too long on the floor. A drunken white man began to punch him—I thought because he didn't like black people, although my daughter realized that he was trying to do forceful CPR. My daughter grabbed her young colleague and shielded him with her body from the blows. I grabbed the drunk from behind, pinned his arms, threw him off-balance, and yelled for a policeman. There were plenty of them nearby, and although they seemed confused as to what was going on, some of them hurried over. “Get rid of this guy,” I told them. The drunk had no idea what was happening to him or what he had gotten himself into, and like an obedient child, he allowed the policemen to lead him away.

When the young man recovered from his spasm, he and Stephanie, with many other demonstrators, dragged themselves across the platform to the subway train, which just at that moment was opening its doors. They stayed in the doorway, and that was that. The door could not shut and the train could not proceed. Nor could any of the trains behind it. The Montreal commute had ground to a dramatic halt. Eventually the police removed the demonstrators, but by then the Canadian media were covering their story. Thus they emerged as the heroes they were, and the transit officials, who also were unable use the subway, “got a taste of their own medicine,” said my daughter.

 

An equally stirring action took place when ADAPT took over a federal building in Atlanta. I attended that action too. The idea was to occupy the building and interrupt business as usual until a government representative of sufficient rank agreed to talk with ADAPT about an upcoming issue. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, better known as the ADA, was pending. The question was whether the transit companies would use the time before the new law took effect to buy inaccessible buses which would then be in use for years to come. Earlier ADAPT had tried repeatedly to speak with government officials on this subject, but the government officials had refused. ADAPT had decided to force them.

Time
magazine once praised the ADAPT folks as “wheelchair warriors,” but the transit authorities called them terrorists. The demonstrators were never violent, and the name made them laugh. That morning in Atlanta, with their attendants, their power wheelchairs, their manual wheelchairs, their walkers, their oxygen tanks, their white canes, and their seeing-eye dogs, they assembled in a parking lot. “Terrorists?” said one. “Getting us out of this parking lot will take at least an hour.” But leave the parking lot they finally did, and moved slowly through the streets toward the federal building.

ADAPT had asked the leaders of several black civil rights groups in Atlanta to support them. But the civil rights leaders refused. However, when early in the morning the demonstrators filled the streets, it was the black community who cheered for them. Most were just citizens on their way to work when the demonstrators came by, but realizing at once that a civil rights demonstration was in progress, they cheered, blew their car horns, raised their fists in the power sign, whistled, and applauded. In contrast, most white people just looked puzzled, as if they couldn't imagine why several hundred disabled people were in the streets.

At the federal building, the guards did not let the demonstrators in. But the demonstrators had foreseen that possibility. Having studied the building in advance, some had gone around to the back, where they opened a door. In poured a few hundred people in wheelchairs, some to take possession of the elevators, others to bar the doors against the federal guards who would soon be swarming everywhere.

I had tagged along with the demonstrators, and once inside the lobby of the building, I noticed a pair of exterior doors that could still be opened. Nearby was an African American woman whose disabled son was also in the demonstration. Our eyes met. We took unspoken responsibility for the doors. Neither of us was particularly muscular, and as we learned later when we began to chat, both of us were grandmothers, but together we dragged a gigantic full-grown potted palm to block one of the doors, and then, noticing some federal guards approaching, quickly put our arms through the handles of the other door. The guards could still get in, of course, but they'd have to break our arms to do it.

And there we stood with the guards outside, knocking on the glass and shouting at us to open up. We pretended we didn't hear them. And this was partly true. Everyone was yelling; the elevators were stalled, jammed with demonstrators holding the doors open; the lobby was packed with demonstrators chanting “We Will Ride”; and on one of the floors above, ADAPT members, our own Bob Kafka among them, were trying to get the federal officials to talk with them. We didn't know if they were succeeding, because with all the noise, the scene was confusing. All I can say is that when night came, the lobby was still packed with chanting demonstrators and we were still holding the door.

George H. W. Bush was president then, and was informed of the ADAPT action. He asked his personal lawyer to speak with ADAPT representatives, which the lawyer did, by phone. By this time the guards had penetrated and were dragging out the demonstrators. But on orders from the White House, the demonstrators were allowed to stay in the building. Those who had been wrestled out to the police vans were allowed to return, and planned to spend the night. Someone in the White House then caused cots and blankets to be brought to the building so that the demonstrators would have a place to sleep, which I thought was exceptionally decent. As a lifelong Democrat, I didn't know if I should accept a cot from a Republican administration, but in the end I did. I looked around for Stephanie but didn't see her. I waited, but she didn't come. I lay down on a Republican cot, wrapped myself in a Republican blanket, and went to sleep anyway, grateful for our kindly Republican president.

The following day we heard that President Bush understood the issue. Top officials of the Federal Transit Administration flew to Atlanta, met with the demonstrators, and agreed to their demands.

 

At some point in all this I met a reporter who began a conversation. He asked if I was involved in the demonstration. I said yes, but just a little, as I was visiting my daughter. He asked if she was a demonstrator. I said she was. He asked if she had ever been arrested. I said she might have been.

But the word
might
didn't quite cover it. In reality, she had been arrested an extraordinary number of times and was jailed on almost every occasion. She'd been in jail thirty times, if not more. She'd been jailed more times than Al Capone, and exponentially more than any other Harvard graduate. She'd been shoved into inaccessible police vans without ramps or lifts and bundled off to inaccessible jails reached only by flights of stairs. She was a connoisseur of jails across the country. She could teach you how to act while being arrested, what to expect if you went to jail, and how to handle yourself while you were there.

But when I said she might have been arrested, the reporter looked at me with pity. “You have my sympathy,” he said.

“No need,” I told him. “Atlanta, Georgia, could be these people's Selma, Alabama.” The reporter didn't know quite what I meant. I left it to him to figure it out, but added, “She has a great career.”

 

I think of the middle-aged man in the rehab unit, remembering him with gratitude and affection. He told me that paraplegia was a nuisance, which was true. He told me that my daughter would be fine, which also was true. She learned how to manage her life, made important contributions to society, got married, and lived happily with her husband (Bob Perfect, I call him) in a house they bought in Austin. They continued to work with the Texas state legislature, which gave them awards of merit for their meaningful contributions. They testified in Washington before the House of Representatives, and they participated in passing the ADA, which, thanks to ADAPT, includes access to public transportation. In July 1990, President Bush invited them to the White House for its signing.

ADAPT created a bumper sticker as a tribute. It says, “To boldly go where everyone else has gone before.”

 

How did Bob and Stephanie and many others like them develop lives of happiness and achievement? It took me a while to figure it out, but I think I know the answer. Miraculously, after they were injured they didn't experience self-pity. I don't present this as a virtue, because what person, especially a young person, is not entitled to a certain amount of sorrow when suddenly paralyzed for life? Self-pity is stigmatized, but in such cases it shouldn't be—people who are paralyzed in their teens and early twenties, or at any age for that matter, have lost forever the life they have known, and with it their envisioned futures. How can they not mourn this? Many do. But if they can shake off the sorrow, it's easier to let go of their former lives and move forward into new ones.

Those who can't often suffer from depression, which can be fatal. Some people who can't adjust commit suicide. Others die from substance abuse or from not taking care of themselves so that they develop infections or decubitus ulcers which drain their lives away.

I think of the boy in Georgia, the boy who was shot by his father. He too is in his grave. His family misunderstood paraplegia. Many people do. One woman shuddered when she learned I had a paralyzed daughter. She said she'd rather anything than become paralyzed. At one time I might have agreed with her, but by then I knew almost as much as the middle-aged man in the rehab unit. I told the woman that really the worst things about paraplegia were lack of access to the built environment, a lack which my daughter was addressing, and a negative social attitude, which one can easily ignore. The woman wiped away a tear and said that even if that were true, she'd just rather take her own life than live in a wheelchair. “There you go,” I said. “That's the social attitude. What if someone said she'd rather kill herself than be like you?”

Once I read a scientific paper about the social attitude of rats. Rats live in colonies and protect themselves against the intrusion of rats from other colonies, whom they identify by their odor. An experiment was performed wherein a rat from Colony A was put in a small cage inside the enclosure of Colony B. The Colony B rats wanted to kill him, but they couldn't get at him. Eventually the scientists put him back in his own colony. He was greatly relieved and happy to be home, but his fur had absorbed the odor of Colony B. To his fellows, he seemed like an alien rat and they killed him.