Just As I Thought (4 page)

The last demonstration I went to was in Montpelier, Vermont (Mobilization for Women’s Lives, November 12, 1989). There were about twenty-five hundred women and men. The governor spoke, a woman governor, Madeleine Kunin; and, one of the great highlights, an older woman—older than me, even (I’m sixty-seven)—from Catholics for a Free Choice spoke; and I spoke.

I said that abortion is only the tip of the iceberg. These guys who run at the clinics—and by the way, our Burlington clinic was really raided, with people knocked down—are point men who make the noise and false, hypocritical statements about human life, which they don’t much care about, really. What they really want to do is take back ownership of women’s bodies. They want to return us to a time when even our children weren’t our own; we were simply the receptacles to have these children. The great novels of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were often about women who knew that if they took one wrong step, their children would be taken from them.

And another point I made is that abortion isn’t what they’re thinking about; they’re really thinking about sex. They’re really thinking about love and reducing it to its most mechanical aspects—that is to say, the mechanical fact of intercourse as a specific act to make children in this world, and thinking of its use in any other way as wrong and wicked. They are determined to reduce women’s normal sexual responses, to end them, really, when we’ve just had a couple of decades of admitting them.

My generation—and only in our later years—and the one right after mine have been the only ones to really enjoy any sexual freedom. The kids have to know that it’s not just the right to abortion which is essential; it’s their right to a sexual life.

—1991

Obviously, the AIDS epidemic had not yet assaulted that next generation when I spoke/wrote this piece.

Jobs

These are the jobs I’ve had in the last thirty years. Some before the war, some after. (When I say “the war,” I mean the Second World War, because if people in my generation were going to die in a war, that would be the war.)

This was the first job: door opener and telephone answerer for a doctor. All I had to say afternoon and evening was: Please come in and sit down. Also: Thank you, but call back at 6:30.

Of all the jobs I was ever to have, that one had the most thank you’s.

Second job: This was an important and serious job for the Central Elevator Company. Six days a week, because the five-day week hadn’t been invented yet. (Working people had heard of it and thought it was probably a good idea, but the employers didn’t see how it could be useful.) I typed bills at this important job and I answered simple letters. Nobody gave me anything too hard to do because they could see I felt stupid. I was younger than everybody. They and I thought that meant extreme stupidity.

The fact is, I did make at least one mistake a week. I had to figure out the payroll. Each week I underpaid or overpaid at least one worker. Whoever this man was—usually one of the elevator mechanics—he would be kind and try to help me cover the error. Whoever the man happened to be, he would usually say, “Don’t feel bad, honey. You’ll get smarter. It takes time.”

(I have a friend in charge of payrolls right now. She is in charge of one big IBM-type machine and 12,000 paychecks for 12,000 people. She makes a mistake maybe only once a year or once in two years. Of course when that mistake is made, 12,000 men and women are overpaid or underpaid. Machines do things in a more efficient way.)

Then I was a telephone answerer again.

Then it was 1942, a year that happened before most people were born. I married a soldier and went down South with him to keep him company while he was training.

That was in time for my fourth job. I was a babysitter for a Southern family named Grimm, whose father was missing in action. I learned how to make hominy grits for the babies and corn mush. I have never made them since.

Then I was a 5&10 salesgirl, but not for long. The pay was 35 cents an hour. There weren’t enough hours.

The next job was the best I ever have had. I was the secretary to the fire chief on the army post and in on all the fires. Most of them were brush and continued all summer in the North Carolina grass. An important part of my job was the ringing of the fire bell at noon. In order to ring it at the right time, I had to call the post switchboard operator at about ten or eleven. I asked her for the abso
lute
ly correct time. One day I called her and said, “Ellie, how do you know what the correct time is? Who tells
you?
” “Oh,” she said, “I set my clock every day by the twelve noon fire bell.”

Then the war ended and everything since has happened very quickly. Life starts off slow but gets faster and faster. I had the following jobs:

1. Secretary to a reinsurance company. They insured insurance companies. Anybody can go broke, that proves.

2. Secretary to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. They raised money to educate black and white Southerners to a little understanding of each other.

3. Secretary to the New York Tenants Association, which did just that—got tenants together for more hot water and hotter heat.

4. Superintendent in a rooming house, in charge of linens.

5. Part-time secretary to the professors of zirconium and titanium at Columbia University.

6. Then finally I was a teacher.

But during all those jobs, once I was married and after I had children, most of the day I was a housewife. That is the poorest-paying job a woman can hold. But most women feel gypped by life if they don’t get a chance at it. And all during those jobs and all the time I was a housewife, I was a writer. The whole meaning of my life, which was jammed until midnight with fifteen different jobs and places, was writing. It took me a long time to know that, but I know it now.

—mid-1960s

Six Days: Some Rememberings

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 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’d 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 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 found that woman. In the two days we spent together, she tried
not
to talk to the other women on 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 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 the 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 six 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 come 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.