GRANDRISING MP KINGS AND QUEENS

MAY 2, 1973 | NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE, EAST BRUNSWICK | Assata Shakur, Zayd Malik Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli are pulled over for “driving with a broken taillight.”

There were lights and sirens. Zayd was dead. My mind knew that Zayd was dead. The air was like cold glass. Huge bubbles rose and burst. Each one felt like an explosion in my chest. My mouth tasted like blood and dirt. The car spun around me and then something like sleep overtook me. In the background I could hear what sounded like gunfire. But I was fading and dreaming.

Suddenly, the door flew open and I felt myself being dragged out onto the pavement. Pushed and punched, a foot upside my head, a kick in the stomach. Police were everywhere. One had a gun to my head.

“Which way did they go?” he was shouting. “Bitch, you’d better open your goddamn mouth or I’ll blow your goddamn head off!”

I nodded my head across the driveway. I was sure that nobody had gone that way. A few of the cops were off and running.

One pig said, “We oughta finish her off.” But the others were all busy around the car, searching it. They were pulling and prodding.

“Ya find the gun?” they kept asking each other. Later, one of them asked another, “Should we put’er in the car?”

“Naw. Let’er lay in the gutter where she belongs. Just get’er out of the way.”

I felt myself being dragged by the feet across the pavement. My chest was on fire. My blouse was purple with blood. I was convinced that my arm had been shot off and was hanging inside my shirt by a few strips of flesh. I could not feel it.

Finally the ambulance came and they moved me into it. Being moved was agony, but the blankets were worth it. I was so cold. The medics examined me. I tried to talk, but only bubbles came out. I was foaming at the mouth.

“Where’s she hit?” they asked each other as if I wasn’t there. They concluded their examination. I was relieved.

“Let’s move it, one of them said.

“O.K., but wait a minute,” said the driver and he got out. “Hit twice,” I heard him say. “We gotta wait.” The driver slammed the door.

He said something else but I didn’t understand it. Time passed. I was floating off again. It felt so weird, like a dream, a nightmare. More time passed. It seemed like forever, I was in and out, in and out.

A rough voice asked, “Is she dead yet?” I wondered how long the ambulance had been sitting there. The attendants looked nervous. The bubbles in my chest felt like they were growing bigger. When they burst, my whole chest shattered. I faded again and it was down South in the summertime. I thought about my grandmother. At last the ambulance was moving. “If I live,” I remember thinking, “I’ll only have one arm.”

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Assata Shakur, describing the event pictured above, in the first chapter of Assata: An Autobiography (pp. 3-4)