Absence of Fear
Dr. Roxanna Maude Brown Story
By Fred Leo Brown
Introduction:
Dr. Roxanna Maude Brown, the American curator of the prestigiousUniversityofBangkok’s Southeast Asian Art Museum Bangkok, Thailand, died Tuesday March 14, 2008, at the age of 62. At the time of death, she had been locked in a prison cell for five days, bail having been denied, though no formal charges had been lodged against her.
I am Roxanna’s younger brother, Fred and I keep having this reoccurring nightmare. It goes like this: Roxanna starts spitting globs of blood at around 10pm. I can see clearly the night guard getting off his duff and plodding reluctantly over to her cell. “So what’s your problem this time bitch?” he yells through the bars a half eaten sandwich in his hand. Roxanna lay on the cold floor clutching a small wash cloth to her mouth while holding onto the stainless steel toilet her one leg cocked at an unnatural angle, her walking cane nearby. No signs of her wheel chair or prosthetic second leg. “Help me, please,” she pleas, saliva and blood dripping from her chin onto the orange prison clothes, eyes glassy from tears of pain. “You ain’t gonna die on me now are ya?” the nasty guard says. The comment has her mind engaging, she spits phlegm into the toilet to clear her throat, carefully wipes her mouth and turns to face her tormentor. “There are worse things than dying,” she spits. “What would a bitch like you know about dyin’?” he scoffs leaning on the prison bars taking a bit of his sandwich. “You ain’t nothin’ but a high flutin’ intellect who got caught with her hands in the cookie jar. Well, my daddy always told me, ‘Education only makes you stupider.’” Roxanna blinks in disbelieve because her father had taunted her with those exact same words. “Stupid is as stupid does,” she growls. Good for you Roxanna. The guard, ignoring the comment, takes a bottle of Pepto Bismal from his pocket and flings it through the bars where it skids and bumps into her leg. “Take a swig of that and shut up. Doc will be around in the morning.”
Roxanna knows all about trauma, she had been dealing with PTSD since the Vietnam War. Death was no stranger at her doorstep. She would face the end like so many times before . . . head on . . . with courage. She would stop crying and take the pain. Steeling herself, she crawls back onto her steel bunk. For the next two hours she lay slowly suffocating in silence. Then in the dead of night, her eyes fly open and she sits bolt upright. She had stopped breathing. With only seconds left she reaches out her hand to me and mouths the words, I love you to me. She gives me a brave straight lip smile, cocker her head and shrugs. She falls head first crashing onto the concrete floor. A pool of blood begins growing around her light brown hair, her beautiful blue eyes still holding onto hope that, like so many times before, mom and I can save her.
What kind of deranged third world country would treat a disabled, 62 year-old American citizen like that? If someone is dying and you simply stand by idly doing nothing or hinder any attempt by others to help, I don’t call it just wrongful death, I call it premeditated murder in the first degree.
So who did this to her?The United States of America’s Sea Tac Federal Detention Center, Seattle, Washington.
The outcry from the world community to seek justice for Roxanna was deafening. But at what price, justice? To paraphrase what “unknown sources” told me, “If you continue to seek retribution, that in our eyes we did nothing wrong because she refused medical treatment, we will destroy her reputation.”
“You can either be rich or famous,” Roxanna once to me, “but in my field, you can’t be both.” In further explanation she added, “I know this guy who will give me some $75,000 to authenticate his collection. I took a look at it but over half of the collection was fake. So, what do I do? Take the money and hope no one is the wiser? If there was even a whisper of that, I’d lose my reputation. And my reputation is all I really have.”
My book will not dwell on the injustice done to my sister at the hands of theUnited Statesauthorities. Instead, this book will celebrate her storied life. It will answer question of how did the daughter of a chicken farmer in the heartland of America became the curator of one of the most prestigious Southeast Asia Art Museums in the world? How did the Miss America beauty pageant contestant, who Sean Flynn (son of movie star Errol Flynn) once said, “You should see her in a bikini,” survive some 40 years inSoutheast Asia?
“She did it by living her life in the absence of fear. I know because that’s how I survived the Vietnam War.”
She entered the world with nothing.
She left it with nothing.
And she lived-it “the best” when
She lived-it with nothing.
Preface:
March 31, 2000:
I returned home toChicagofrom a week long tour where I visit schools around the country to talk about the Vietnam War and perform my play Lessons of War. My sister, Roxanna, had flown in fromBangkok,Thailandwhere she lives for a speaking engagement atNorthIllinoisUniversity. On her whirlwind trip she had visited our mother who lives a few miles from me. The fiercely loyal daughter has always tried to visit her mother once a year.
In the morning when I got to my mother’s house, I opened the garage door and noticed that she hadn’t taken out the garbage to the curb yet. “Hi mom, I’m back,” I said when she opened the door from the house. “Looks like you throw out a lot of stuff,” I said feeling the weight on the can.
“That’s mostly Roxanna’s stuff. She went through her trunks and got rid of all the old junk,” her mother explains.
“Oh.” I pulled the two wheeled garbage can out to the curb just as a stiff wind caught the lid letting a few pieces of paper flutter free. I ran after the paper and stamped my foot on one after another. With all of them securely in my hand, I stuffed them back inside the garbage can. That’s when I noticed the heading of a piece of paper: “June 14, 1969 Saigon,Vietnam.
I lifted the lid and rummaged around noticing more type written pages and booklets. Still not sure what I was dealing with, I pulled the garbage can back inside the garage. Then in earnest, I started separating Roxanna’s “garbage” from the other.
When I came across a picture of Roxanna inVietnam, I was stunned. Apparently I hadn’t seen everything about my sister. It took me the rest of the day to lie out and dry off the pages and start processing them in order by date. Two weeks later I had pretty much finished when it dawned on me that she still had four trunks in the basement. Like digging through buried treasure, the trunks were full of daily diaries, published and unpublished articles. Pictures by her or of her inLaos,Thailand,Cambodia,Bali,Vietnam,Japan,Singapore,Australia. Her life from childhood to the wars ofSoutheast Asiaand beyond. I had unearthed a written record of my sister Roxanna’s storied life. A life she had kept, for the most part, secret.
It took another four months before her work was organized enough so my mother could start entering it into the computer.
“Mom what are you find out?” I asked one day.
“She had a fascinating life. I am just so proud of what she has accomplished,” my mother gushed. “But she never told us about it.”
Arriving inVietnamon a tourist visa on December 3, 1968, Roxanna wrote, “On landing, my first sight was an ambulance loading wounded GIs onto an out-going flight. I cried because it had been my younger brother’s presence inVietnamthat had drawn me here.” . . . .I became a journalist after looking at all the other jobs available inVietnam. At the age of twenty-two I am the war’s youngest accredited journalist.” She would remain inSoutheast Asiato cover the Cambodian War and the final week of the Vietnam War called The Fall of Saigon in 1975.
Books about American women journalist during the Southeast Wars of the 1960s and 1970s are rare. When I told Roxanna I had all her work organized and could start writing her book I was stunned by her reaction. “Fred,” Roxanna said horrified, “don’t. Don’t do it. It’s just a big waste of time. Pleas-eee . . . don’t”
Roxanna, you told me that I had a natural gift for writing. That I could both live and write about my experiences and that other writers would be envious. Well, that being said, there is no other person left on this planet who knows you more than me.
I promise you, I will write every word from my heart, and God willing, I will make you proud of me. Sweet dreams dear love.
