The revolution has been kind to me. If there’s one thing your girl needed after three years in the Tombs, it was a soft place to land. The commune lets me do some prep work in the kitchen a few days a week, and they don’t freak out when I run into the walk-in fridge and slam the heavy door, trying to disappear. The first time, it happened because I saw this guy who looked like one of the guards who used to strip-search me and laugh at my body. Another time, it was just a sound that took me back to my time in jail.

I don’t have to work very much. Bianca keeps busy; that’s how she moves on. She’s coordinating clinical trials for the AIDS cure. But I was always soft compared to Bianca.

The first few months, I read about the kinds of therapy I could have if I felt like it would do any good. There’s the kind of therapy where you move your eyes back and forth rapidly and reintegrate your memories. There’s the kind where you tell the story of the trauma in detail. And there’s this other kind where you can actually re-enact the traumatic event but it comes out differently. The funny thing is, it happened that way in real life. While I got ready for the same old nightmare, the world turned upside down and I got free instead.

The first uprising, we took a guard’s keys and started opening all the cells. We were all in the hole at that point, solitary confinement—they called it Ad-Seg. But at least I was on a women’s floor then. It was left over from when we thought trans girls were getting our rights in society: gender-affirming care, protection from discrimination, things like that. Before the crazy religious nuts and the outright racists were running the city after the collapse.

It was after the hunger started too. I had dealt with that on the outside, so desperate for food I’d turn a trick with a drunk priest offering a bag of Cheetos. And, of course, the hunger continued in the jail, where I’d been put after more than a few nights fighting the cops. My show-stopping move was stealing police motorcycles to go on reconnaissance missions. The girls and I wanted to liberate the food they guarded in our South Bronx neighborhood—food only the rich people still in Manhattan would ever see, touch, taste, smell—it drove us crazy!

A year after my arrest, they did liberate the food, but I wasn’t there to eat any. We were still starving in the Tombs.

This young girl named Amelia was pregnant, six or seven months with a baby bump, but the rest of her was skin and bones. It hurt us all to see her like that when they’d let us out of our cells to get the occasional shower. We never got to hang out in the day room anymore since we were in Ad-Seg, but we could hear Amelia crying day and night. She needed food more than any of us. It was bad enough she’d been raped by a guard, probably. We all knew how long she’d been in.

Once we got all the ladies out of their cells, the plan was to raid the commissary, the little store where they kept the decent food none of us could buy. But that was on another floor, and none of the keys opened the door to the stairs. We could hear the goon squad coming, so we piled back into the day room, barricaded the doors, and taped our list of demands to the bulletproof glass.

We demanded to see a judge, like in the old days before the city fell apart, and get out. None of us ladies had a sentence, and most of us didn’t even have charges against us. This was supposed to be a holding tank, but it had become preventive detention. They had reasons to keep us off the streets.

We longed to see or at least communicate with our loved ones on the outside. A series of lockdowns after other rebellions and epidemics had taken away our visiting privileges, then phone calls, then finally our mail. We were totally cut off.

We demanded food. Fresh bread, not those green rotten lumps. Apples, oranges, fried chicken. No more soy loaf, with all the floor scraps baked in. No bugs and worms in it.

And hormones. The other trans girls were looking ragged and deflated, and we were getting sick in ways we didn’t understand. I was just glad all the mirrors were broken so I couldn’t see myself.

They crushed us real quick. A lot of us still felt like the uprising was worth it, because we felt so free. Even stuck in that day room. It was a high-rise jail, and old as Satan, too. Not called the Tombs for any reason but that we were buried in there and it was dark. Barely any windows, just shadows and cold fluorescent light. But for a short time, we were out of our cells, all together, hugging and crying and holding each other, just feeling human. Toward the end, we got in a big circle and held hands, singing. We felt strong, even without any way to defend ourselves against what was coming.

We knew guards weren’t allowed to carry guns because we might grab them away—who knows what we would do then? Their fear ended up being good for us sometimes. We thought maybe they’d rather let some of us out of the jail entirely than deal with us acting up in there, since the whole place was falling apart and they were understaffed. That’s what we pinned our fragile hopes on.

They busted down the door after only two hours. And then the worst came. Not the tear gas and beatings—they had to beat us and drag us out because we knew what might be coming. Simone was our historian, she’d read the books. She knew what happened to women after prison strikes. They separated all the women into pairs and put us in with groups of men for the night.

I was still with Bianca. They took us to the ninth floor, where they said the worst of the men were, because they saw us as the leaders. And what happened to me wasn’t half as bad as what I had to see and hear them do to Bianca.

Not all the men joined in, it was like five out of sixty. But that was pretty bad all the same. Sometimes I forget it happened. It’s in a fold of my memory where I can pull up the visual of Bianca in front of me, cuffed and kicking, dragged by three guards, the smell of sweat and male voices high on their power over us. Then it skips—either back to when they shattered the glass in that door, or forward to when we were back on the women’s floor.

Amelia wasn’t taken to the men—they put her back in her cell with a warning. She was a young white lady. Only time I was glad for the guards’ racially preferential treatment! They also started bringing her vitamins and a hamburger every once in a while. She didn’t lose the baby. They took her out when she went into labor, and we didn’t see her after that, so we hoped for the best. It was our only victory from that rebellion.

The women were more solid in our unity after we stood up to those pigs. And we’d learned a few things. Simone had told us that we’d have to take some guards prisoner if we wanted our demands to be heard, but most of us hadn’t wanted to risk it. Now, there was no avoiding it, no more being nice. Violence would have to be an option if we wanted to be free.

***

The next time Bianca and I were put in with the men, it wasn’t for punishment, but I was terrified. Somehow they realized, “Oh sweet vengeful Lord Jesus! We have put these Black and Brown trans ladies in with the womb-bearing mothers of the White Nation!” Very few of the women in the Tombs were white, of course, but the jail administrators and the pigs they worked with at NYPD headquarters next door all shared this idea of white purity and how we were a threat to it because we had dared to live our truth. They were very concerned about our genitalia, but even though Bianca had had bottom surgery, they still considered her a man.

So the next time they put us in with the men, my body wouldn’t stop shaking. I tried not to show fear, but I stood there handcuffed and trembling like a leaf in the wind, my head down and frozen-mouse eyes jumping around between the men, looking for the worst of them from last time—the pouting white boy who left me with internal injuries the doctors in the commune have finally healed.

But it was different this time. It wasn’t anyone I knew, but some of the men were revolutionaries. They had fought the police too, in the escalating war that our side was starting to win. They had been lobbing flaming trash cans at the pigs with catapults in their own neighborhoods. They stopped the other men from touching us.

Kamau and Andrés were communists from the Lower East Side. Or maybe they were anarchists, I’m still not sure the difference. Kamau, easygoing, striding through the day room like he didn’t have a care in the world. Andrés, intense, always reading or trying to tell someone about some book. They actually had a study group in there. I mean, there wasn’t any George Jackson or Frantz Fanon up in that place, but these guys would have people hanging on their words while just describing books they’d read.

Andrés and Kamau shared a cell before we got there. But they each found new cellmates and moved out so Bianca and I could be together in their old cell, protected from the other men. They didn’t get permission from the guards to switch, but by then the guards were barely there. And no more Ad-Seg. Overcrowding meant two on one bunk in each cell, or one on the floor with the mice and roaches, the other on the mattress with the bedbugs.

We were locked in remotely—they used newer tech on the ninth floor with the “worst of the worst.” But I knew we could figure out how to break those locks. Vibrations we sensed in the dank, stinky air told us our chance would come soon. But first, there were other dangers we had to face.

“Carmela, he’s here,” Bianca whispered one night after count. My whole back seized up and I shook it off so she wouldn’t see. That guy was a sadist. I had seen him too since we’d been on this floor, and each time, I’d tried to run away—even if he was across the chow hall—but you can’t do that in jail. And the communal showers were not an option as long as he was around.

Parish. He was a well-muscled white man with a blond crew cut, no tattoos, and the face of an injured schoolboy. He didn’t have friends on our floor, and the guards, especially Walker, didn’t like him either. We planned it that night, and the next day, we cut his jugular in the shower. Walker and another guard dragged his body out after a few hours but didn’t do much investigation. We were never caught.

So that was easy. I mean, I’d never killed anyone before, but I didn’t have trouble getting my beauty sleep after that. In fact, I slept much better. But some of the guys on this floor had become so politically educated that Andrés actually raised an objection to us a few weeks later. He sat down across from me in the day room shuffling a deck of cards, then started dealing.

“What you trying to say to me, Andrés? This is the deck with two missing queens!”

“It is?” Nerdy Andrés actually blushed. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

“You want to talk about something?”

“Yes, actually.” Andrés looked over at Kamau, who was watching TV but somehow knew to look at Andrés at exactly that moment. I was pretty sure they were lovers, but people often thought the same of Bianca and me, and we definitely weren’t. We just knew each other from before. Before jail, before leading bread riots, before the mass death of LARS-47. Before. “We’re concerned about methods of punishment among prisoners.”

“You gonna rat me out? How come you haven’t done it already?”

“We’re all in this together. We’re human beings, even the worst of us. And I don’t like that word, it’s what the administration used themselves to put us on this floor of the slave ship, calling us the worst.” His gentle gaze unsettled me. “We’re not on their side. We don’t use their tactics. Even in this dungeon, knowing we might never get out, our duty is to stay true to the humanity they’ve tried to strip away.”

“OK, I know, I’ve heard people say that killing someone takes away your humanity. But this was an extreme case. We had no choice.”

“What if we built our humanity stronger and wiser, more deeply empathetic, yet even more ruthless against people who do harm? But with our words, reaching into their soul to find the humanity there.”

“Your idealism will be the death of us, hermano.”

“Locking people up protects them from real accountability. Facing the harm that they’ve done can be as hard as surviving this place.” Andrés flipped over a book that had been on the table with us. Its cover was gone, but the first page said, WEology: Transformative Justice in Practice by Qu’eed Batts, Avron “JaJa” Holland, David “Dawud” Lee, and Nyako Pippen.

“Have you heard of transformative justice?” Andrés asked me. Bianca had sensed the intensity of our conversation and grabbed a chair, sitting down next to mine.

“They do these circles up in the Bronx,” she said. Bianca had been arrested two years after me and knew about things I didn’t. “Talk about how you’ve harmed someone and how you intend to make it right.”

“Yes,” Andrés responded. “We want to do a transformative justice circle with the men who raped you,” he said, looking from one to the other of us.

“In jail? That shit’s supposed to keep you out of jail,” Bianca remarked. “Replace the jail.”

“Well here, we’d like to replace vengeance with justice. And this book was written by men in prison who did it themselves.”

“Who’s we?” I asked, my voice wavering.

“Me and Kamau have talked to twenty men who are down, including—we think—all of the rapists. The other men will either help facilitate the circle or work on ways they’ve harmed others.”

I looked at Bianca. Her poker face hadn’t broken, but I could tell she was gagged. “They must have been motivated by our direct action technique,” she laughed. “Never would have agreed to do it otherwise.”

“Would we have to be there?” I asked. “Like, I really don’t want to relive all that.”

We didn’t have to be there. Andrés and Kamau ran the whole process. Turned out that before Bianca and I were moved in, those four rapists ran as a crew in the jail—watched each other’s backs but also preyed on others, taking scarce food and medicine out of people’s cells, dishing out violence at whim. They weren’t connected to a gang on the outside, they’d just formed an alliance in the Tombs. A shaky alliance at best. With the influx of revolutionaries and the hope they inspired, one by one these men broke off from the crew. They felt bad about what they’d done, but at first that made them more dangerous. They started ratting each other out to the pigs, then dealing out vicious beatings to each other for doing so. Like a toxic masculinity–flavored shame spiral.

As one of them broke down under the pressure, Kamau and Andrés won his trust with their no-bullshit approach of sincerity and patience, like older brothers giving him a chance to change and staying with him along the way. This young man could tell they actually cared about him, and that was a new feeling. Times had changed in the Tombs. He realized that he had more to offer the world than pain. Once that first individual broke the cycle of vengeance, the others came by to hear what Kamau and Andrés had to say.

The transformative justice circles gave this whole dynamic a structure, a space for these men to grow and change. Like blind newborn rats (sorry, I still don’t love these fools), they clawed their way toward a sense of purpose, an ability to heal themselves and their relationships with others. They started small, with, like, “Sorry I stole your candy bar last year, here’s a new one.” By the time we arrived, Kamau and Andrés believed they were ready to tackle the big stuff.

They gave us updates and asked what we wanted from the rapists in order to make things right. We got apologies and promises that they would never harm us or anyone else in that way again. Kamau seemed sincere in his own belief that they had all come around to valuing women, including trans women, seeing our full humanity, and regretting that they’d hurt us.

“OK,” Bianca told him, “but we still don’t have to talk to those scumbags.” We made it clear that the only way they could heal their relationships with us as fellow prisoners was by staying the fuck outta our faces. And they did. From then on, we never had to sit near them at chow, interact with them in a meeting, or even endure eye contact with them. They kept their distance and their eyes averted, which left us the mental space to focus on the fight ahead.

***

Bianca was convinced that we could get out for real if we planned it right this time. People were still getting arrested in the city, and some of our old comrades from the Bronx had just been put on our floor.

Talia was another trans lady, and we took her in our cell. It was three to a cell by then all over—one mattress and not enough blankets to keep from freezing even if you weren’t stuck with the floor. As always, the Tombs was serving dystopian realness. We took turns with the mattress and blanket instead of going by seniority because we got caught up in the revolutionary fervor. Sometimes all three of us grown-ass women piled onto our one skinny mattress and giggled all night, like a slumber party.

Talia told us the Army was down South somewhere and not bothering anyone in the Bronx anymore. And comrades in the Bronx were training with weapons. They even had bazookas and howitzers to fire artillery. She said the students from the community college near the Tombs talked about liberating us, and they’d asked the Bronx fighters for help. The police were still around then though, and their headquarters were right next door. There were also various Nazi groups with ties to power, plus the private police forces.

So we didn’t have any word that our people would come soon, but just the news that they might be able to do it made us fidgety and manic, looking all around like we expected them to show up any minute. We started discussing plans at the card table, while watching TV, in the showers, anywhere guards couldn’t hear us. We wanted to do things right this time so we could live to get out of there.

Walker was tiny for a guard, just a little white dude with visible Nazi tattoos. And he seemed to be shrinking. Either that or his uniform was getting bigger. But we suspected that the hunger was finally reaching the oppressor, even those connected to city government. They were losing, and in the free world, our side finally had the food. Whatever the backstory, we could see that despite his having beaten many of us while we were unarmed, two of us could take him now—despite our own weakness from the hunger—and get his nightstick and pepper spray. Then we’d tie him up and use his app to send for help, then ambush the guards who came in. Ta-da! Suddenly they’re our prisoners.

There’s no negotiations in a jail rebellion without taking some guards prisoner. We learned this the hard way on the women’s floor. Simone taught us that we had to take our rebellion seriously because we were at war—we were even part of the liberation movements around the world that were fighting and winning—and without advanced weapons, that meant taking prisoners of war. We were finally learning.

“And we’ll take good care of them too,” Andrés said. “Like they did at Attica.”

“You crazy, son?” Bianca snorted. “Don’t bring up Attica, we know they all got killed.”

“Sure, but they did a lot of things right. The only difference here is ain’t no liberals left. No lawyers or judges, no journalists, no visitors. Nobody to advocate for us.”

“OK, so it’s even worse than Attica,” I said.

“The Attica brothers didn’t have friends in the Bronx with a fully equipped combat unit,” Talia said.

I got so antsy daydreaming about the people’s combat unit that I stood up abruptly and started pacing. “We still need demands though, because we don’t know if or when our people are coming, and we still need food and bedding and medical care…”

“What if we could break ourselves out? And everyone else? No help needed,” Kamau whispered.

“Some of us die, some of us go home,” Andrés sighed. “It’s better than what we’ve got now.”

He was right. We would all starve soon if we didn’t act.

***

In the end, just like Attica, things jumped off by themselves. Jimmy, a small Black man who did hilarious impersonations at our talent shows, was doing pull-ups in an open cell door when he started breathing weird, then fell to the floor, his legs jerking. We knew he had asthma, so everyone yelled “Man down!” to get help, but no guards came. We rattled bars and screamed but they ignored us—we knew they could see us on their monitors—and after what felt like hours, Jimmy died.

We’d seen so many people die in the Tombs without medical care, from slow, horrific AIDS deaths to those who’d lingered on after getting beaten senseless by guards. We could never get used to it.

The next guard who came in wasn’t Walker, it was a big guy named Stevens, but we all crowded around him, enraged. He started to back up, but one of the men just smacked him hard on the left side of his face. Stevens’ head hit the bars of the doorway and enough of us jumped on him that he wouldn’t be getting up soon. Kamau grabbed his cuffs and put them on the unconscious but still breathing guard.

Our collective rage snowballed and rushed out, pausing long enough for three people, hanging off the door and propelling it back and forth, to smash the extended deadbolt with all the force of the three hundred–pound door backed by furious and jubilant prisoners, rendering it unable to cage us again. Dozens of people ran out.

The rest of us set about putting theory into practice, taking Stevens’ device, keys, nightstick, and pepper spray. Bianca sent me to get our stash of makeshift weapons.

“You’re gonna get us all killed!” I heard someone shout as I ran past a row of cells, but I didn’t have time to see who it was.

The next few hours were a deeply satisfying blur of enacted rage, mostly against the jail itself. Using parts of the building to smash other parts of the building, we tore apart anything we didn’t need in order to get what we did. We all ate until we were full for the first time in months.

By that night, we had captured ten guards, we’d broken most of the thick glass in the little square window blocks with a bed pole used as a battering ram, and we’d painted some basic demands—plus “We Want Freedom!” to signal to the revolutionaries outside that we were ready for their attack—onto a precious, scarce bedsheet and hung it on the outside of the building. We used Stevens’ device to get into the stairs and free hundreds more prisoners of all genders, although we had to retreat back upstairs from the second floor, where the administration was amassing the rest of the guards. We set up barricades at the stairs and elevators to keep them out. We were able to fill seven buckets before the pigs cut off the water. The electricity still worked, for now. It was time to gather and talk.

We held the meeting in the atrium shared by the eighth and ninth floors, where the security force we’d put together could have people stationed on the catwalks above to ensure our safety. Representatives from five different language communities translated everything said at the meeting so our immigrant comrades could participate fully.

The Latin Kings and Black Spades were in the house—gangs that had taken up political struggle and could mobilize thousands of people to fight the pigs in the streets. We knew their crews from the South Bronx. The Latin Kings had finally dropped their code of homophobia a few years back, but that didn’t mean we liked working with them. At that point, we just had to because they carried weight. Bianca didn’t want to see them take control from our little group that had planned the insurrection, so she nominated me for head of security. The atrium exploded with men’s voices yelling their objections.

“I know y’all aren’t used to taking orders from women, let alone women of trans experience, but Carmela has chops,” Bianca addressed the throngs of mostly men standing packed around the atrium. “The women here can testify that she led the uprising on that floor.”

“We’ve led dozens of uprisings on the street,” Chester, a Black Spades leader, broke in. “We know strategy, tactics, how to negotiate, coordinating people’s movements in large numbers—"

“What’s needed right here, right now?” Ricardo, a Latin Kings leader, stepped forward. “We need to protect ourselves, we need to make sure the food is evenly distributed, the medicine doesn’t get taken by people looking to get high; we need to fortify the barricades and set up patrols and lookouts to keep the pigs out of the floors we control. Our crew can manage this.”

“We need a rep from each ethnic group,” Sok, a muscled Cambodian dude from our floor, yelled over the assembled. People started clapping, cheering, and booing. “There’s too many goddamn ethnic groups in here for that!” someone shouted. Some laughed.

The adrenaline bounced around and I could see morale was still strong, people were excited. “How about one person each from the Spades, the Kings, and our crew that planned this, got us to this point today?” I proposed.

“But who are you?” another Spade challenged.

“She killed Parish,” Bianca shouted. One full half of the atrium went silent. Then people started clapping.

“Seriously?” Chester asked, earnest, fist to his chest. “That fuckin’ dude killed my brother. My actual brother.”

Bianca’s a leader wherever she goes; nobody can stop her. But she knew she’d have to sell them on letting me take a big role, so she was humble about her part in taking out Parish. It didn’t matter now who knew we’d been involved in a murder. The pigs were either going to lose this fight or kill whoever they could without rhyme or reason.

I took charge of protecting our prisoners of war—and protecting us from them. I started delegating heads to watch over them from the edge of the meeting and hold spots by the doors. Chester got into organizing patrols and strengthening the barricades at the stairs and elevators, and Ricardo was putting together a team to ration the food and water and distribute the medicine to the people who needed it. Kamau made his way around the crowd to me. “You should probably get enough people together to fully surround the guards,” he said. I looked over to where they all sat cross-legged, handcuffed in front, looking more scared than I’d ever seen a prisoner, despite our not beating them. Some of them had pissed themselves.

“Hey, I don’t need you telling me—” I started, then the voice of one of the guards we’d taken prisoner, Harper, who had particularly enjoyed calling us all kinds of n-words when he had the power, cut through and drew our attention.

“I can get you all out!” he hollered, his voice raw and heavy from his fruitless yells for backup earlier. Everyone turned, and you could hear someone nervously bouncing their foot in the eager silence. “I can see where this is headed. They don’t care about my life any more than they care about yours. The front doors of the building—”

And then a flash of steel, and Harper’s neck was yanked back by the handcuffs of the guard behind him, Russell, an equally racist piece of shit. Harper’s voice diminished to gurgles. I ran at the pair. Harper’s eyes bugged out as Russell dragged his body back with the force of strangulation. “Yo!” Kamau yelled and cracked Russell over the head with a makeshift bat we’d squared away weeks before. I grabbed Russell’s hands and freed Harper’s head.

“You OK?” I asked Harper, looking down at the coughing guard who a few hours ago I would have gladly choked out myself.

“No,” he rasped, looking around like a cornered rat. “Forget it.”

“The fuck you mean, forget it?” I pulled him up by his shirt and led him a few feet away. Andrés joined me, and I could see Bianca helping Kamau subdue the other guards.

“Do what you want to me, I’m a dead man,” Harper whispered.

Simone and two of the other women from our previous floor—and our previous rebellion—appeared in front of me, calm and wanting to help. “Can you talk to him?” I delegated. “He’s shook. Maybe take him somewhere quiet.” Andrés went with them.

Kamau had organized some of the men from our floor to surround the guards, and they glowered down at the seated men. Kamau put his hand on my arm. “How much experience do you have working collectively?” he asked, intently, his eyes narrowed.

“You don’t trust me? I been with your crew for months now!”

“I do. I just think—”

“It’s not my fault that cabrón chickened out. These losers can’t take the beatings they give us.” To my horror, I realized I was crying. In fact, it was my fault. I was tasked with securing the guards. Our only chance—

“It’s not over,” Kamau said, and I realized his hand on my arm was to reassure me, not to take me on. I let out another sob and then cut it. “You’re doing great, but you need to listen to other people’s ideas. Steel sharpens steel. You know recon better than anybody. Planning, organizing, recruitment. There may be things other comrades can teach you, while you teach them what you know. What do you really want to do, Carmela, during this crazy couple days when we’re probably going to die?”

I looked over to where my sis Bianca was, my friends, my siblings I’d suffered and bled next to. “I want to protect people.”

“I see that in you. Always, you’ve been doing that however you can. You’re a protector. That’s why Bianca made you head of security. But you don’t need to be in charge to be needed, to make a difference. You just need to trust your crew.”

“OK. And that’s true—it’s not about me. I’m part of a bigger whole. But also, try and stop lecturing me if you can. I know it’s hard for you.”

He cracked a grin and we melted into laughter. “I was kind of mansplaining to you,” he said, gasping through his giggles. “Sorry!” We doubled over. It must have been the tension—laughter let it out. And freedom was so close, one way or the other.

For me, that was the moment the revolution truly began.

***

Kamau and I turned our attention back to the meeting, keeping one eye on our prisoners and our security team to make sure we’d be there if needed.

“So Harper gonna let us out or what?” a voice bellowed across the space, impatience and anger laced with desperation.

“Comrades are talking with him now in a calm place where he can feel safer—”

“That Nazi never made us feel safe!”

“The question,” Bianca shouted calmly, authoritatively, “is what we do once we get out those doors. Do the police shoot us all dead? We need our forces on the outside. Who is in touch with them?”

Dark moisture dripping from the stinky hall ceiling was all anyone could hear, plus the usual anxious foot tapping. It was a loud silence, but nobody said a word. We just looked at each other, doubt and fear taking hold.

“Nobody’s in touch with our forces on the outside?”

Talia stood up, trembling with anxiety. “They will come. Once they start attacking police headquarters, we can make our exit.”

“When they gonna do that?” someone yelled.

“How do we get them a message? We need them out there now!” A voice boomed.

Bianca, her lovely voice still calm but next-level loud enough to get everyone’s attention, addressed the assembly. “How many bedsheets can we spare? I know I ain’t sleeping tonight. Night’s half over anyway. We need to get the message out, so let’s publish it from the windows. It’s the new printing press. And we need a plan to break through the pigs on the two bottom floors.

“We also need a negotiation team to stall the pigs from making an incursion up our way. It’s pretty simple: If they let us out, we’ll release the guards we’ve got here. They’ll say, ‘No, you have to release the guards, then we negotiate’—which is a lie, of course. They’ll only negotiate if we have prisoners of war. If we didn’t have them, they’d be up here right now killing us. The guards are just pawns in their game; the administration will kill them too if they’re in the way. But they have to pretend to care about the guards we’ve taken prisoner so the other guards will fight for them.”

I clocked that she hadn’t mentioned the demands from our previous bedsheet, like healthy food and pest control. She said, “if they let us out.” Our demands were getting more profound.

The Attica brothers—heroic figures from last century who took over their New York state prison for a few days—demanded speedy and safe transportation to a non-imperialist country. Simone had told us that the Black Panthers outside Attica were organizing buses and a jet plane to do just that, before the state troopers massacred the prison rebels. So when someone shouted, “We demand safe transportation to free Palestine!” a roar of cheers erupted.

But a calm, bright voice broke through. It was Simone. “Yes, Palestine has freed herself! And Palestine is freeing us all. But we gotta do some work too. The successful revolution in the Levant has to be global, universal—or it will die under a resurgence of global capitalism. Our job is to catch up in this part of the world. We transport ourselves into New York City, and then work on freeing New York City!”

Chester, who had returned from setting up sentry posts and patrols, commanded the room with his voice after Simone. “OK. So negotiations are a ruse on both sides to buy time for more firepower to get here. Whichever side is ready to fight first scraps the negotiations. Let’s hope we’re ready first.”

“They seen our bedsheet from yesterday, I know it,” Talia said. The meeting continued while she went with about a dozen people to grab sheets and write messages on them to convey to the downtown Manhattan rebels the urgency of our situation. Bianca, Andrés, and Chester became part of the negotiating team, which, in our newfound spirit of collective power, headed for the stairs to go meet with our captors.

I hugged each of the team goodbye, crying. “They’re just gonna execute you soon as they see you.”

“Have hope, comrade,” Andrés reminded me.

“Seriously, though,” Kamau stood in front of them, blocking their way. “We can’t lose you. What would stop them from taking your lives? At least take a few guards with you. Or send a guard with a letter.”

“Shit,” Bianca contributed to the conversation, which had gotten almost hostile. That’s what she always says when she knows the other person is right. “I’m more sleep deprived than usual.”

They decided to send Stevens downstairs with the letter, since he probably needed medical care after our generous beating, and they sat down to write it in the mess hall. That left Kamau and me to figure out how we could all use our pointy sticks carved from mop handles to militarily defeat two floors of pigs who had tear gas, hand grenades, body armor, and shields.

“Maybe we can do like guerrilla-style tactics,” he said. “Grab ’em one at a time.”

“That’s how we took these guards prisoner though,” I responded. “We had to stop once it got to be impossible. They’re all together down there.”

“OK, we can at least set up some defensive measures.”

“Let’s make the third and fourth levels a sabotage zone. Soap the floors to keep the pigs from ambushing us.”

Behind us, the meeting continued.

People kept reopening the argument about whether to torture Harper for his intel about the front doors. The debate—“We’re at war, we can’t value the lives of the oppressor more than our own” vs. “Treating prisoners of war humanely shows that there’s a better way and confuses them”—was getting tiresome. But we had become revolutionaries. Fighting for our survival was liberating our minds, making room for these ethical debates. And now, developing our ethics was important to our survival as free-thinking human beings.

Kamau and I got a team of volunteers from the meeting to help us clear the third and fourth floors. On our way into the stairs, one of the sentries Chester had recruited winked at me and I had to catch my breath. This whole mess of turning the jail on its head had gotten to everyone—it was exhilarating.

There weren’t too many people still on the third floor. Hundreds were at the meeting upstairs. But five guys were singing street-corner doo-wop like their great-grandfathers had up in the Bronx, and a couple dozen guys sat around listening. I hated to bust up their scene like the guards always did, but we told them our plan, and they offered to help us clear the floor. “We’ve got enough hands to do it,” I told them, then paused. “There might still be some instruments in the eleventh floor auditorium.” Their faces lit up and they headed for the stairs.

I’d done cleanup duty for months, and some things were the same on every floor, so I easily found the closet with gallon jugs of bright green floor cleaner. Kamau and the others confirmed that nobody else was down there, and I set about pouring the pungent liquid onto the floor and spreading it around with a mop. This was basically a one-person job, so the others did running slides across the dayroom, competing to see who could get the furthest while staying on their feet, then just slipping around on their asses.

After we’d soaped the floors on both three and four, we decided to tour the areas under our control and see what the others were up to. The medical team that had taken over the infirmary on the fifth floor was made up of former nurses and EMTs who were listening to their fellow prisoners carefully as they requested medication or described symptoms. “That’s a beautiful sight,” Kamau observed.

On six, a crew of volunteers was serving food. They moved with dignity, knowing they’d been tasked with guarding the survival of us all. Everyone got a reasonable portion, and I wondered how long it would last.

When we got back to the eighth floor atrium, the meeting was still trundling onward. Stevens had been sent downstairs to deliver the demand letter. Bianca was speaking to those gathered. I’d heard her voice take on these rousing tones when we needed to build morale before an action on the streets. To me, it meant she must be as scared as the rest of us. “They wanted us passive, they wanted us half-dead in here!” she shouted, then took a beat to gaze slowly from one edge of the packed rows of humanity to the other. “But the Tombs is rising now! We’re more alive than we’ve ever been! We’ve made freedom in the darkest dungeon!” People hooted and cheered, raised their fists.

When the clapping faded, a few heads veered toward the wall that had windows. Then I heard it too. A scraping, almost clawing sound was making its way up the side of the building. Then a thump. Kamau and I rushed to the tiny windows, most of which we had taken part in breaking. At first, I could only see shadow, backlit in a way that told me the sun would be rising soon. Then we saw the gas. And smelled and tasted it. Then it was everywhere.

I had a bit of damp bedsheet in my pocket just in case this happened, so I pulled that out and held it against my nose as my throat started to burn. “Move slowly and carefully toward the stairs,” Bianca instructed the crowd. “Put your hand on the back of the person in front of you if you can’t see.” I would have laughed if I felt OK about opening my mouth, just at how a couple hundred already half-panicked and now severely spooked people might plausibly react when someone behind them put a hand on their back. But even as my eyes stung like I’d taken a dive into a vat of my grandma’s spicy carne guisada, I was looking for the tear gas canister.

There, barely visible in a patch of dense gas. I held my breath, grabbed an empty water bucket, and turned it over to cover the canister. Then a deafening blare of, “Surrender peacefully, you will not be harmed,” on repeat, assaulted our ears from outside.

Kamau was thrusting out with a sharpened stick at something. A cherry picker with pigs on it, ready to throw more tear gas inside. We found a few more people to reach through the broken windows and push hard at the birdlike structure, sending it falling away, crashing below.

But the windows weren’t big enough to let most of the gas out, and I knew I was about to lose all my usefulness as a functioning human. I tried to get closer to the air outside. Pressed against the square block openings, I looked down below and saw a dozen pigs rushing toward the building. “Machine guns?” I shouted to Kamau.

“Looks like it,” he responded. “Though I can’t tell what kind.” We looked for small objects to drop onto the well-armed pigs below, hoping gravity would turn lightweight objects into heavy missiles by the time they hit. A plastic cup, a book, a dead rat. Strange guerrilla warfare, even for us.

The gas inside was starting to clear, snaking into halls and upward into the stairs we’d unlocked. The hundreds of people at the meeting had exited to lower floors. But we still had no battle plan for breaking through the two floors of pigs at the bottom. Were they already coming up?

BOOM. The building shook. I heard screams and felt a thumping shockwave through my chest. I admit my first thought was that the NYPD had finally found a way to finish us off. That the building would crumble like a sandcastle with all of us still inside. But then, hope—was this the Bronx artillery fire? I needed to get to the others.

The sixth and seventh floors were like the eighth and ninth, with an atrium that stretched two floors. On my way downstairs, I ran a hand across the cracked paint and wondered if we’d really get out of this place. I sped up. On six, Bianca was delegating teams to clear each floor and bring people to the atrium, unless they needed the infirmary on five. We were filling the space to burst. Some people even crowded into the tiny cells around the atrium, ironically, to get some air. And the bombardment continued, shaking us all. We’d have to make a move soon.

Simone emerged into the circle of space where Bianca, Andrés, Ricardo, and Chester stood at the center of the room. She took the mic, which just meant the other four stood behind her and gave her the floor. “Harper told us about the doors to the outside,” she announced. “He said they’re electropneumatic sliding steel doors with four large windows in each panel. They’re controlled remotely by a lever on the right. We just have to pull that down.”

“That’s it?” Someone yelled. “Why ain’t we down there now? Nothing stopping us.”

It was strange, I thought, that Harper wasn’t saying we needed any kind of electronic device, fingerprints, or maybe his eyeballs for a retina scan. It sounded too easy.

“We need a plan to get through the pigs,” Bianca reminded us. “Is there any information we still need?”

“I’d like to know if and how they’re armed, if they’re still on the second floor or just the first,” I shouted over the heads of people gathered in front of me.

“Are you free to do some recon, Carmela?” she asked me over the crowd.

“Yes, I’m free! And quieter by myself,” I chuckled and headed for the door to the stairs. Luckily I had already met the sentries guarding our barricade at the lowest edge of our territory. They didn’t want to let me through at first. “We know you not gonna snitch or take their side,” one guy said. “It’s just we’ll worry about you.” We were all passing through moments like this—sentimental, then sternly decisive, then rushing to get food or a ten-minute nap. I decided I would find reinforcements for these sentries on my way back up.

Taking off my blue canvas sneakers, I handed them to the cute one who had winked at me earlier. “Guard these with your life,” I said with a wink of my own. “I bedazzled them with crushed glass myself.”

My worn-out tube socks made no sound on the downward stairs. I didn’t see anyone through the windows in the door to the second floor. I’d have to go in. With a device taken from one of the guards, I opened the door, hoping its beeping alert would be muffled by the bone-rattling bombardment that—fingers crossed—was coming from our side. I enjoyed embodying quiet in the midst of such noise. Grace amid chaos. A noisy house party when I was six, sneaking in my socks to the kitchen for a cookie. Stealing a bra from my mother’s dresser at age ten while she fought with another boyfriend, the thrill of trying it on in the bathroom.

Nobody remained on the second floor. Breathing gently, I padded down toward the first. At the landing, I heard a voice below. “They gonna send us out to fight all that? Or give us guns against these n------ inside?” The counterparts to our sentries above.

“Nah, they’re not even thinking about us anymore. How could NYPD run out of guns? But they must have, they’re not giving us any.” The guards fell silent. I crept back up the stairs.

By the time I had my bedazzled shoes back on, one of our sentries had reported what I’d heard to the meeting upstairs, where Bianca and hundreds of others were deciding our next move. Another noisy cheer sounded from above, as everyone realized that our friends were winning the battle outside. When I got back up to the meeting, people were hugging each other and crying, elated. We were ready to move, a tide of humanity in all our skin tones and languages, beaten down by our time here but lifted back up by our own determined solidarity.

Bianca, Kamau, and Andrés led this unarmed army with shields made of barricade material—hard plastic, metal, and cardboard. I stepped in beside them. Almost a thousand strong, we made our massive way quietly down the wide stairs. Above the two guards I’d just heard talking, we started running, landing on them like we’d jumped out of the sky. As others grabbed them and put them in handcuffs against the wall, we opened the first-floor door to whatever awaited.

A few dozen pigs—guards and regular cops—remained inside with their backs to us, all facing sliding steel doors, four windows in each like the man said. We ran at them, screaming insults in our mother tongues, and they began to turn and face us. Some had guns, and I could hear the shots, see comrades falling as many more surged forward. I looked for the lever.

Would the pigs run from our numbers, or were they more scared of the warfare unfolding outside? I saw the lever on my right, a foot long, sticking out like a sore thumb, unguarded. Harper’s assistance unnecessary, his angst a silly memory. I grabbed the lever with both hands and pulled it down hard as our forces rushed past me, using bones and bravery to push back the pigs, trampling the ones who stood their ground. The heavy steel doors slowly began to slide open.

And then we were outside, blinking in the harsh morning sunlight, free. 

***

So yeah, the revolution has been kind to me. They even destroyed the jail—blew the whole thing up!—once we’d gotten everyone out. Pure joy, seeing that. Straight-up relief.

I don’t have to hustle or fight to survive anymore. I’ve got a comfortable bed, a door I can open and close, delicious food, and good people all around me. And I’ve finally started therapy. It took giving it a try to see that it could work. Telling my story, it’s amazing to see that I actually freed myself. I mean, we all did it together, not just our crew but the whole world.

And now this new world is changing me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I go dancing with thousands of people without leaving my room. I’m learning about gardening. I’ll probably take on some study and figure out what kind of role there is for a protector here. I might even have children.

But I’m taking it easy for now. Maybe I’ll see you on the dance floor, and you can tell me your story too.

Before the worldwide revolution reaches New York City, Carmela is trapped in the Tombs jail for years. Resistance there only meets the horrors of repression—until cops fill the building with revolutionaries to keep them off the streets. With friends new and old, Carmela organizes a nucleus of rebellion that connects everyone inside to reach together for the ultimate demand, freedom.