I was in jail. I had been sentenced to six days in the Women’s House of Detention, a fourteen-story prison right in the middle of Greenwich Village, my own neighborhood. This happened during the American war in Vietnam, I have forgotten which important year of the famous sixties. The civil disobedience for which I was paying a small penalty probably consisted of sitting down to impede or slow down some military parade.
I was surprised at the sentence. Others had been given two days or dismissed. I think the judge was particularly angry with me. After all, I was not a kid. He thought I was old enough to know better, a forty-five-year-old woman, a mother and teacher. I ought to be too busy to waste time on causes I couldn’t possibly understand.
I was herded with about twenty other women, about 90 percent black and Puerto Rican, into the bullpen, an odd name for a women’s holding facility. There, through someone else’s lawyer, I received a note from home telling me that since I’d chosen to spend the first week of July in jail, my son would probably not go to summer camp, because I had neglected to raise the money I promised. I read this note and burst into tears, real running-down-the-cheek tears. It was true: thinking about other people’s grown boys, I had betrayed my little son. The summer, starting that day, July 1, stood up before me day after day, steaming the city streets, the after-work crowded city pool.
I guess I attracted some attention. You—you white girl you—you never been arrested before? A black woman about a head taller than I put her arm on my shoulder. It ain’t so bad. What’s your time, sugar? I gotta do three years. You huh?
Six days.
Six days? What the fuck for?
I explained, sniffling, embarrassed.
You got six days for sitting down front of a horse? Cop on the horse? Horse step on you? Jesus in hell, cops gettin crazier and stupider and meaner. Maybe we get you out.
No, no, I said. I wasn’t crying because of that. I didn’t want her to think I was scared. I wasn’t. She paid no attention. Shoving a couple of women aside—Don’t stand in front of me, bitch. Move over. What you looking at?—she took hold of the bars of our cage, commenced to bang on them, shook them mightily, screaming, Hear me now, you motherfuckers, you grotty pigs, get this housewife out of here! She returned to comfort me. —Six days in this low-down hole for sitting front of a horse!
Before we were distributed among our cells, we were dressed in a kind of nurse’s-aide scrub uniform, blue or green, a little too large or a little too small. We had to submit to a physical in which all our hiding places were investigated for drugs. These examinations were not too difficult, mostly because a young woman named Andrea Dworkin had fought them, refused a grosser, more painful examination some months earlier. She had been arrested protesting the war in front of the U.S. mission to the UN. I had been there too, but I don’t think I was arrested that day. She was mocked for that determined struggle at the Women’s House, as she has been for other braveries, but according to the women I questioned, certain humiliating, perhaps sadistic customs had ended—for that period at least.
My cellmate was a beautiful young woman, twenty-three years old, a prostitute who’d never been arrested before. She was nervous, but she had been given the name of an important long-termer. She explained in a businesslike way that she was beautiful and would need protection. She’d be okay once she’d found that woman. In the two days we spent together, she tried not to talk to the other women in our cell block. She said they were mostly street whores and addicts. She would never be on the street. Her man wouldn’t allow it anyway.
* * *
I slept well for some reason, probably the hard mattress. I don’t seem to mind where I am. Also, I must tell you, I could look out the window at the end of our corridor and see my children or their friends on their way to music lessons or Greenwich House pottery. Looking slantwise I could see right into Sutter’s Bakery, then on the corner of Tenth Street. These were my neighbors at coffee and cake.
Sometimes the cell block was open, but not our twelve cells. Other times the reverse. Visitors came by: they were prisoners, detainees not yet sentenced. They seemed to have a strolling freedom, though several, unsentenced, unable to make bail, had been there for months. One woman peering into the cells stopped when she saw me. Grace! Hi! I knew her from the neighborhood, maybe the park, couldn’t really remember her name.
What are you in for? I asked.
Oh nothing—well, a stupid drug bust. I don’t even use—oh well, forget it. I’ve been here six weeks. They keep putting the trial off. Are you okay?
Then I complained. I had planned not to complain about anything while living among people who’d be here in these clanging cells a long time; it didn’t seem right. But I said, I don’t have anything to read and they took away my pen and I don’t have paper.
Oh, you’ll get all that eventually, she said. Keep asking.
Well, they have all my hairpins. I’m a mess.
No no, she said, you’re okay. You look nice.
(A couple of years later, the war continuing, I was arrested in Washington. My hair was still quite long. I wore it in a kind of bun on top of my head. My hairpins gone, my hair straggled wildly every which way. Muriel Rukeyser, arrested that day along with about thirty other women, made the same generous sisterly remark. No no, Grace, love you with your hair down, you really ought to always wear it this way.)
The very next morning, my friend brought me The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams. —These okay?
God! Okay. —Yes!
My trial is coming up tomorrow, she said. I think I’m getting off with time already done. Overdone. See you around?
That afternoon, my cellmate came for her things. —I’m moving to the fourth floor. Working in the kitchen. Couldn’t be better. We were sitting outside our cells, she wanted me to know something. She’d already told me, but said it again: I still can’t believe it. This creep, this guy, this cop, he waits, he just waits till he’s fucked and fine, pulls his pants up, pays me, and arrests me. It’s not legal. It’s not. My man’s so mad, he’s like to kill me, but he’s not that kind of—he’s not a criminal type, my man. She never said the word “pimp.” Maybe no one did. Maybe that was our word.
I had made friends with some of the women in cells across the aisle. How can I say “made friends”? I just sat and spoke when spoken to, I was at school. I answered questions—simple ones. Why would I do such a fool thing on purpose? How old were my children? My man any good? Then: you live around the corner? That was a good idea, Evelyn said, to have a prison in your own neighborhood, so you could keep in touch, yelling out the window. As in fact we were able to do right here and now, calling and being called from Sixth Avenue, by mothers, children, boyfriends.
About the children: One woman took me aside. Her daughter was brilliant, she was in Hunter High School, had taken a test. No, she hardly ever saw her, but she wasn’t a whore—it was the drugs. Her daughter was ashamed; the grandmother, the father’s mother, made the child ashamed. When she got out in sixth months it would be different. This made Evelyn and Rita, right across from my cell, laugh. Different, I swear. Different. Laughing. But she could make it, I said. Then they really laughed. Their first laugh was a bare giggle compared to these convulsive roars. Change her ways? That dumb bitch. Ha!!
Another woman, Helen, the only other white woman on the cell block, wanted to talk to me. She wanted me to know that she was not only white but Jewish. She came from Brighton Beach. Her father, he should rest in peace, thank God, was dead. Her arms were covered with puncture marks almost like sleeve patterns. But she needed to talk to me because I was Jewish. (I’d been asked by Rita and Evelyn—was I Irish? No, Jewish. Oh, they answered.) She walked me to the barred window at the end of the corridor, the window that looked down on West Tenth Street. She said, How come you so friends with those black whores? You don’t hardly talk to me. I said I liked them, but I liked her too. She said, If you knew them for true, you wouldn’t like them. They nothing but street whores. You know, once I was friends with them. We done a lot of things together, I knew them fifteen years, Evy and Rita maybe twenty, I been in the streets with them, side by side, Amsterdam, Lenox, West Harlem; in bad weather we covered each other. Then one day along came Malcolm X and they don’t know me no more, they ain’t talking to me. You too white. I ain’t all that white. Twenty years, they ain’t talking.
My friend Myrt called one day, that is, called from the street, called, Grace Grace. I heard and ran to the window. A policeman, a regular beat cop, was addressing her. She looked up, then walked away before I could yell my answer. Later on she told me that he’d said, I don’t think Grace would appreciate you calling her name out like that.
What a mistake! For years, going to the park with my children, or simply walking down Sixth Avenue on a summer night past the Women’s House, we would often have to thread our way through whole families calling up—bellowing, screaming to the third, seventh, tenth floor, to figures, shadows behind bars and screened windows, How you feeling? Here’s Glena. She got big. Mami mami, you like my dress? We gettin you out baby. New lawyer come by.
And the replies, among which I was privileged to live for a few days, shouted down: —You looking beautiful. What he say? Fuck you, James. I got a chance? Bye-bye. Come next week.
Then the guards, the heavy clanking of cell doors. Keys. Night.
* * *
I still had no pen or paper despite the great history of prison literature. I was suffering a kind of frustration, a sickness in the way claustrophobia is a sickness—this paper-and-penlessness was a terrible pain in the area of my heart, a nausea. I was surprised.
In the evening, at lights-out (a little like the Army, or on a good day a strict, unpleasant camp), women called softly from their cells. Rita hey Rita, sing that song—Come on, sister, sing. A few more importunings and then Rita in the cell diagonal to mine would begin with a ballad. A song about two women and a man. It was familiar to everyone but me. The two women were prison sweethearts. The man was her outside lover. One woman, the singer, was being paroled. The ballad told her sorrow about having been parted from him when she was sentenced, now she would leave her loved woman after three years. There were about twenty stanzas of joy and grief.
Well, I was so angry not to have pen and paper to get some of it down that I lost it all—all but the sorrowful plot. Of course she had this long song in her head, and in the next few nights she sang and chanted others, sometimes with a small chorus.
Which is how I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.
* * *
Now there’s a garden where the Women’s House of Detention once stood. A green place, safely fenced in, with protected daffodils and tulips; roses bloom in it too, sometimes into November.
The big women’s warehouse and its barred blind windows have been removed from Greenwich Village’s affluent throat. I was sorry when it happened; the bricks came roaring down, great trucks carried them away.
I have always agreed with Rita and Evelyn that if there are prisons, they ought to be in the neighborhood, near a subway—not way out in the distant suburbs, where families have to take cars, buses, ferries, trains, and the population that considers itself innocent forgets, denies, chooses to never know that there is a whole huge country of the bad and the unlucky and the self-hurters, a country with a population greater than that of many nations in our world.
(1994)