On the Stand

I just came from testifying in federal court -- I'm a plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit against the City of New York and the New York Police Department for improperly prolonged detention after protest-related arrests during the Rudy Giuliani era.

One of the arrests included in the suit was from an action I did back in 1999 with Brad Will and an activist named Mario. Giuliani had a visceral, Grinch-like hatred for community gardens; in response to a question about the way they brought neighbors together in a friendly spirit of cooperation, he famously snarled, "The era of communism is over!" After bulldozing gardens in dribs and drabs over the course of 1998, he decided to it was time for mass destruction. And so, in early 1999, the Giuliani Administration announced plans to auction off 116 community gardens to real-estate developers.

A series of protests ensued -- pickets, vigils, sit-ins. Polls showed an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers wanted the gardens preserved, but Giuliani refused to budge. A large-scale civil disobedience action took place outside the pre-auction seminar one week before the scheduled sale, and in the final days before the auction, there were a series of smaller, but even more dramatic actions.

Brad, Mario, and I cooked up a plan to do a lockdown action inside the office of the city bureaucrat who was overseeing the auction. It was pre-9/11, when smuggling a bicycle lock through the desultory security checkpoint in the Municipal Building was easily accomplished. We got upstairs and asked to meet with the commissioner; when we were told he wasn't in, we sat down on the floor, locked our ankles together, and announced that we were staying until he came and promised to cancel the sale.

As I was thinking over the event in preparation for testifying today, I remembered what happened after we were arrested, which I hadn't thought about for a long time.

We were taken to the dinky Chinatown precinct first, which has only one small holding cell. Brad and Mario got the cell; I was handcuffed to the bars outside. The indomitable garden defender Francoise Cachelin was functioning as our jail support, and came back to the cell area to bring us some food, pick up some of our things, and give us moral support.

If you've never been arrested by the NYPD, you might not appreciate how extraordinary this was. Nobody except attorneys is ever allowed back to the precinct cellblocks to visit arrestees. But Francoise was no ordinary person. An 80-year-old veteran of the French Resistance to Hitler, she had a complete hunchback from osteoporosis, and stood maybe 4 ½ feet tall on a good day. Her gray hair was always wrapped up in a ladylike bun, and even though she walked slowly with a bad limp, she always carried herself with Parisian flair.

So when this little old lady asked to come back and visit us, the police let her go. Little did they know that she was also a fierce anarchist who boiled with rage at all forms of authority -- especially uniformed authority. She had been repeatedly jailed and tortured by the Gestapo during World War 2, which gave her good reasons to feel the way she did, but even those who loved her dearly, as I did, could find her a bit over-the-top.

Francoise made her way across the police station to where I was handcuffed, and leaned over as if to give me a kiss on the cheek. "They are so stoo-peed," she whispered with her thick French accent. "I could have a bomb!" I blanched; she looked over at the officer on duty and gave him a big smile and a sweet little wave. "Cops are vermin," she hissed, "and vermin must be exterminated."

Um, okay. We took the bread and cheese she had brought, gave her our bags, and off she went.

There's not really anything more to the story. I remember that Brad was pissed off at me that I had chosen Francoise as our jail support -- she didn't hear very well, and he got really frustrated trying to communicate something or other to her. It was the only time I ever remember him being angry at me.

But he admired Francoise, too, and came to the little wake we had at her East 6^th Street apartment right after she died. Francoise's daughter didn't want anyone outside the small circle of Francoise's closest friends to attend, but Brad was really insistent that he wanted to be there to honor her courage and her life.

Today in court, I was feeling fortified by the thoughts of Brad and Francoise I had been having earlier in the day. But then the city attorney caught me by surprise, and rather unpleasantly so.

Cross-examining me about the lockdown action, she asked, "You undertook this action with Brad Will and Mario ________?"

Yes, I replied.

"And the two of them are also plaintiffs in this case?" she continued.

I sat in stunned silence for a second. How could she not know? Did she not care?

"Brad died a few weeks ago," I replied. "I don't think that he can still be a plaintiff."

I found myself unexpectedly choking up, and had to fight back tears through the next few questions.

Francoise would have had some choice words about this idiocy -- I can imagine her cursing in her inimitable way.

One last note, for those who don't know the whole story about the community gardens. Two days after we did the lockdown action in the commissioner's office, just hours before the gardens were to be sold, the Giuliani Administration caved in to the enormous pressure.

Outright victories are rare in activism, but in this case, we won. The auction was canceled, and the gardens were permanently saved. Francoise passed away a few years ago, Brad was recently shot and killed -- but the 116 community green spaces we all fought to save exist to this day. If I weren't headed home to snuggle my kids right now, I think I'd be wandering over to one of them this evening to pay a private tribute.