Solitary Confinement In Assata

One of the worst forms of violence Assata endured was being kept in solitary confinement without a particular motif. This forced inertia manifested itself physically in Assata. She states: “I have always been an active and restless person, and being locked up in that little cage all day drove me wild. I needed to stretch my legs. I started to run around the cell. I would run in this tiny circle until i was exhausted” (55). Eventually, however, the extended periods spent in solitary confinement produce the results that were sought for by the officers. Assata describes stammering and stuttering when asked simple things, such as her name (83). A year spent in solitary confinement made her almost mute (252), she remarks. Taking this under consideration,
[…] There is a clear parallel between the vulnerability slaves experienced in captivity and the vulnerability contemporary political prisoners endure in detention. In the emancipation narratives as well as the narratives by Black Power activists, the fear for physical safety against the constant threat of bodily harm is something experienced by both women and men” (32).
In one of her uses of the body, Assata devises the strategy of stacking cups near her cell door in order to be woken up if someone enters during nighttime. One night she wakes up to four or five guards standing by. As a response, she screams “loud enough for someone to hear me” (59). Assata then explains that this strategy was devised to protect her since “it is not at all uncommon to find a prisoner hanged or burned to death in his cell” (59). Perkins also associates this to the violent assaults that were committed with impunity on the slaves
Several of the prisons where she spends time are described as having a certain stillness to it. She describes one of them “like some kind of bizarre death row [where] everything was sterile and dead” (253). Another one smelled “like blood and sweat and feet and open sores and, if misery had a smell, like misery” (85). In this context, where she is constantly constrained by “what seemed an endless amount of chains and shackles” (208) so much so that she “barely walk or shuffle” (88), she manages to defend herself against the violence—physical and otherwise—of guards, marshals, wardens, jurors, and doctors. She also manages to conceive while imprisoned, thus asserting that her status as a prisoner of law did not determine her status as a human being. In fact, during one of her daughter’s visit Assata decides “that it is time to leave” (258). Thus, we see her corporal practices as a direct cause of her freedom. By constantly pushing for legal action to secure her basic human rights, she refuses to become ‘a part of the master’, a part of the system. Moreover, although at one point she is asked to snap beans as part of her legal demands under the Thirteenth Amendment, she manages to still use her body for creative outlets: reading, writing, painting, drawing, all parts of staying alive. The painful stories of her time in