Her Sister's Tattoo

by Ellen Meeropol

  She ignored the judge’s threat and turned to the jury, trying to keep her voice even and reasonable. “It’s not just me on trial here. Our country is on trial. Because our rich and powerful nation, built on principles of freedom, is committing genocide in Southeast Asia.”

  The judge banged his gavel.

  “I am a citizen.” Rosa did not shout. She kept her gaze on the members of the jury. “I have the right to speak.”

  The bailiff smothered her words. His hand was thick and sprouted coarse dark hairs. She tore it away from her face and yelled, “The citizens are against this war. You can lock me up, but you can’t jail dissent!”

  Two officers dragged her from the courtroom into a small room. She put her head down on the metal table and bit her lip to keep from sobbing. She needed a clear head to figure this out. It was no big surprise that District Attorney Arnold Turner was prosecuting her case personally. He was running for Congress on a law and order campaign. Convicting her and scoring a stiff sentence would win votes. Allen seemed to think that was a bad omen, but Rosa was elated.

  “See, Turner is ambitious, and he sees this case as important. People are watching us,” she argued with Allen and Dwayne at the lunch break. “Our action was small, but it had big consequences. We can make important points here about the war.”

  But each day of the trial, the judge looked more sour. Each day DA Turner’s expression grew more confident, his smile wider, his gestures more flamboyant. Her own lawyer seemed to shrink, his sandy hair and pale skin fading into the blond oak of the defense table. He dug the knuckle of his right index finger into the soft flesh near the corner of his mouth, chewing the inside of his cheek.

  In their apartment that night, she raged at Allen. “Dwayne is a spineless chicken. Can’t you get Kenny Cockrel, or someone like that?”

  “Dwayne is trying to get you off, Rosie,” Allen pleaded. “You’re being unreasonable.”

  “You can worry about reason. I care about justice.”

  “These charges are serious.” Allen rubbed his hands over his beard, and she thought she saw him roll his eyes, too.

  Was even Allen giving up on her? She understood that there was a fine line between standing strong and sounding self-righteous, pompous, even. But sometimes the old slogans were all that kept her going. She let her head rest on his shoulder.

  “I know they are,” she whispered. “And I’m scared.”

  The charges weren’t the only serious problem. She had missed three periods. She’d been too busy to mark the calendar, so it could have been more. It was probably just all the stress. The trial wasn’t going well and she was the problem. She knew that. Dwayne kept advising her to control her face, to stop interrupting Turner’s theatrical declarations about conspiracies and traitors and giving aid to the enemy. But she couldn’t keep quiet when the DA lied.

  At the lunch break on day three, Allen put his hands on Rosa’s shoulders. “This is bad. And the worst testimonies will come tomorrow: the crippled cop’s and Esther’s. So, you’d better decide right now. You can minimize the damage. Or you can make political pronouncements. Your choice.”

  Her choice? The jury seemed to have already decided. None of them would meet her eyes. They didn’t seem interested in the plight of Vietnamese peasants, only concerned about one injured police officer. Maybe her best option was skipping out. Leaving town. Disappearing.

  She hadn’t decided yet, but she definitely needed more information. She used the public phone in the back hallway to call the number Tim Wright had provided. That evening, Dwayne and Allen worked late at their office preparing for the next day in court. Rosa was supposed to join them. Instead, she changed into a black tee and long black skirt and slipped out of the apartment, climbing through the side window that opened into the narrow alleyway.

  Catching the hem of her skirt on the window latch, she lurched forward and scraped her knee on the brick wall. She bit her lower lip to keep from crying out and stood still for a moment in the near darkness, blotting the pinpoints of seeping blood with the cotton skirt. Then she crept quietly around the trash cans at the rear of the apartment complex and through the thick rhododendron bushes into the next street. She was pretty sure the plainclothes cop in the dark green sedan didn’t see her leave.

  Her contact was waiting as promised at the back door of the Black Orchid Café. He leaned against the chipped brick wall, long legs in Frye boots. They sat in his rusted Toyota, with The Doors singing loud on the radio, and pretended to neck while he went over the instructions. She hadn’t decided whether to disappear, but she memorized his words.

  “You won’t be able to come back here,” he said. “To Michigan. For any reason.”

  She stared at the brown birthmark on his cheek, a splash of milky coffee, hoping an onlooker would interpret her disbelief as passion. “Never?”

  “Never.”

  Her stomach clenched. She took shallow breaths so she wouldn’t vomit. She had to get out of there, into fresh air. “I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  The next morning, Rosa looked around the courtroom and forced herself to face the truth. This trial was a losing game, played entirely by the prosecution’s rules, with all the cards stacked in their favor. Allen was right. It was going to be a bad day: the photographer, the injured cop, and Esther. Her parents sat expressionless in the third row, their shoulders just touching. Esther wasn’t with them. They must be keeping her separate, so she couldn’t listen to the testimony.

  Esther hadn’t spoken to her in weeks. It felt like betrayal, but Rosa knew that wasn’t really what Esther meant. Rosa kept thinking back, remembering all their political work together—camp and Ann Arbor and everything. Didn’t Esther feel just as strongly as she did about what they were trying to accomplish? Maybe it was Rosa’s own fault for keeping their cousin Danny’s secret, trying to shield Esther from the truth.

  Rosa had never shared Danny’s last letter with anyone: not Esther, not his parents or sister Deborah. Nobody. Written just days before he died, it was smuggled out of Vietnam by a buddy who delivered it in person months later. Rosa could barely recognize Danny in that letter, describing incidents that never made it into the newspapers. How the US soldiers threw wounded Vietnamese women from their helicopters and watched the bodies tumble into the jungle below. How they tossed handfuls of candy from their truck to the village children running alongside, timing it so that the kids were run over by the next vehicle in the convoy.

  In the last paragraph, Danny admitted he was hooked on heroin. Danny, who would never even smoke weed, was shooting heroin two or three times a day. Dope was everywhere, he wrote, easier to score than chewing gum, and it made the bad images recede into the jungle. He had gone to the military shrink for help. But there was no methadone. No treatment. No help.

  Maybe she should have shared his letter. At the time she told herself she was protecting Esther. Now she wondered if she was protecting herself because of how mean she had been to Danny about going to war.

  Elbows planted on the oak table, Rosa rested her head in her hands. When she tried to imagine going away and never coming home, her head spun. The courtroom swelled and vibrated in orange waves. She was queasy all the time now. She pictured Mama and Pop losing their bail money and she almost threw up. She hated deceiving Allen, but her Black Orchid contact warned that if Allen knew her plans he would be an accomplice. He could be charged as an accessory and slapped with a year or two.

  Never come back?

  Still, it was probably better than waiting around for the inevitable verdict. She looked up as the bailiff’s barbed wire voice called Esther to the stand.

  CHAPTER 9

  Esther

  “Don’t mess up,” Joel Mattson told Esther in the witness waiting area. “Your suspended sentence is contingent on your cooperation today.”

  She tried to listen, but a black speck was lodged between the lawyer’s front teeth. A poppy seed, or a fragment of pepper from a polished brass pepper mil
l twisted over a white tablecloth at some ritzy restaurant? Lunch paid for by her legal fees, by Mama and Pop. Esther tried not to dislike him. After all, he was family. It wasn’t his fault that she was about to testify against Rosa.

  “Why can’t I sit inside?” she asked him. “Listen to the trial?”

  “You’re sequestered until after your testimony. So that you aren’t influenced by what other witnesses say.”

  “I’m going to tell the truth no matter what anyone else says.”

  Joel seemed clueless about how much she dreaded this day. “Everyone’s nervous,” he told her, but Esther knew differently. Her feelings went way beyond nervous. What did Joel know anyway? His legal practice was mostly real estate closings and wills.

  Concentrate, Esther told herself.

  Rosa always accused her of daydreaming. She didn’t understand that when an artist daydreamed, it wasn’t the same as goofing off. When Esther daydreamed, her imagination shifted into sixth gear and carried her into a zone where textures and shapes and colors shimmered. In that place, with her senses open wide and ultra-sharp, ordinary life was transformed into contours that became images and drawings.

  Of course, Rosa had an answer for that too.

  “You’re not even doing art anymore,” she had accused Esther on the day she accepted the District Attorney’s deal. “You’re not an artist or an activist. You’re just a cow.”

  Esther knew that Rosa didn’t really mean that; she was just angry. Everyone knew that breastfeeding was best for the baby and for the ecology of the world, plus it was way cheaper than formula. But she had to admit that Rosa had a point. Esther still cared about the war, and justice, but these days she thought about changing the world so that babies wouldn’t have to grow up and go halfway around the world to kill other children. She would probably become one of those women who joined Another Mother for Peace, or even the League of Women Voters, instead of being a revolutionary like Rosa.

  “DA Turner is calling for you, Esther.” Joel touched her arm. “You’re on.”

  The room spun when she stood up and she grabbed the table. Joel took her arm. “I know this is hard for you,” he said. “And you might be thinking about changing your testimony. So I should mention one new thing, just a rumor, really, but I heard that if you back out, Turner plans to claim that it was your apple that actually hit Officer Steele’s horse. He has some witness who’ll say that. I heard it might be Rosa, but like I said, just a rumor.”

  Esther shook her head. “I’m screwed whatever I do. Don’t worry. I won’t change my mind. I’m telling the truth about what we did.”

  Courtroom 404 was in the new wing of the courthouse. The amphitheater-style room had a modern, airy feel. It could have been a classroom, an Intro to Sociology lecture. Esther had expected mahogany paneling and heavy drapes the color of dried blood.

  From her seat in the witness box, the jurors looked somber. Their faces were closed up tight with lips pinched and eyes blank or looking away. Esther searched the rows. What did these citizens think about the war? Could they imagine being in a crowd marching down a hot street, fighting to change the world? One juror looked like a friend from her eleventh grade gym class, a girl who barely opened her mouth to smile or speak because her teeth were so crooked. Even her friend-lookalike wouldn’t meet Esther’s gaze.

  Rosa sat at the defense table between Allen and Dwayne, refusing to look in the direction of the witness box. Good thing, because Esther didn’t think she could hold her gaze if their eyes met. Rosa’s lawyer must have given her the same speech Joel recited, about how dressing conventionally in court made a good impression on the jury. Rosa wore a white blouse under a loose blue cotton jumper. Her hair was gathered in a matching grosgrain ribbon and she had attached a gold circle pin to the rounded Peter Pan collar.

  Aunt Miriam and Uncle Max gave Rosa that pin for her thirteenth birthday, wrapped in pink flowered paper. Uncle Max had raised his eyebrows and announced that if she had a Bat Mitzvah, her gift would have been a fat check. For once, Rosa managed to ignore the taunt. She thanked them for the gift, rolling her eyes when Aunt Miriam said Rosa should try to be a real lady like her cousin Deborah. “Nothing looks as sweet and innocent as a circle pin,” Aunt Miriam had said. That evening, Rosa tossed the pin into the tumble of discarded comic books in her top bureau drawer, along with the panty girdle from Aunt Miriam the year before, still in its cellophane wrapper.

  Esther stifled a smile. If the jury had X-ray vision, if they could see beyond the gold-plated circle, through the blue jumper and cotton blouse, they would be shocked. Because tattooed on Rosa’s left breast was a small red star, a quarter-inch in diameter. Esther knew that tattoo well; it was the twin of hers. Getting matching tattoos had been Rosa’s idea, two summers before when they hitchhiked to San Francisco with Maggie.

  At first Esther had been appalled. “Tattoos are for sailors and gang members.”

  “That’s going to change,” Rosa said. “You’ll see. These tattoos will identify us as revolutionaries, will prove our commitment to the whole world.”

  Esther had giggled. “To whatever subset of the world we show our tits.”

  Maggie had tried to reason with them about dirty instruments and infection and self-mutilation, but Esther didn’t worry about pain or disease. She just wanted to capture the delicious moment and make it last.

  A tattoo is forever, she had thought. Like a sister.

  After Esther was sworn in, the DA stood in front of her for several seconds without speaking. Close-up, Esther could see the violet veins snaking under the skin of his nose, the kind of complexion that would have evoked a nudge in the ribs from Mama, with a whispered reference to excessive drinking. She searched the gallery for Mama and Pop and Jake but couldn’t find them.

  “Mrs. Green, please describe to the jury the events of August 17, 1968,” the DA said. “Take your time, and tell us everything that happened.”

  How could she explain to these strangers how alive she felt marching down Woodward Ave. with thousands of demonstrators, how simultaneously exhausted and flooded with energy? Each time she tried to lock eyes with one of her peers on the jury, they looked away, toward the lawyers or the judge or Exhibit A, an enlargement of the photograph placed on the easel at the front of the courtroom. Esther had never seen it so large, easily four feet square, so that every detail was blown-up out of normal context. It was a little grainy, but there was no doubt about the identity of the two young women standing with arms outstretched, hands open, fingers extended. There was no doubt that they had just thrown something. In the smaller photograph, the one that had been shown on television and printed in the newspapers, Esther had never noticed the sheen of wetness that gleamed on her cheeks. She had not seen that her eyes were squeezed tight, but Rosa’s were wide open and luminous, ignited by the afternoon sunlight.

  Esther tore her gaze from the photograph. “Rosa and I could smell tear gas during the march. So when we got to Kennedy Square, we went with our friend Maggie to the first aid tent, to see if they needed help.”

  “That would be Margaret Sternberg?” the DA asked.

  “Yes. She was trained as a medic.”

  “What did you find at the first aid tent?”

  “A young man bleeding from his head.”

  “What happened next?”

  “The injured guy said that mounted police were beating protesters on Grand River.”

  “Please simply describe what you saw, Mrs. Green, without hearsay or opinions.”

  “I saw him bleeding. I heard him ask the medics to go help his friends on Grand River. Maggie said she’d go, and my sister and I went along to help.”

  “That’s Rosa Levin, the defendant?”

  “Yes.” Esther glanced at Rosa. Rosa wouldn’t look at her.

  “What did you see when you got to Grand River?”

  Esther remembered the scene frozen into a painting. It had been an afternoon of strong colors—the blue and white city cruiser
with spinning roof lights barely detectable in the bright sunlight, the striped green and black awning across the street, the sleek tan rumps of the horses, the brown blur of the wooden batons swinging arcs in the air, pea-soup air that was thick with clouds of tear gas, the bloody T-shirt and the sewn-together Vietcong flags.

  “I saw mounted police, about six or seven of them, facing a crowd of demonstrators. I saw the police hitting people. The whole area stank of tear gas, you know? A woman was on the ground, unconscious and bleeding.” Esther remembered the boy too, rubbing his eyes.

  “What did you do?”

  “Maggie asked us to go back to the square and get help, because her walkie-talkie was jammed.”

  “Objection.” The DA turned to the judge. “Mrs. Green is making an assumption.”

  “Sustained.”

  Esther nodded. “The walkie-talkie wouldn’t work. The injured woman needed an ambulance.”

  “So you left?”

  “We started to. Then the cops began beating people harder, and Rosa said we had to try to stop them.”

  “Stop them how?”

  Esther hesitated before speaking. “By throwing apples, small green apples.”

  “Where did the apples come from?”

  “Our backpack. We also had sandwiches and juice.”

  “Did you pack the contents of the backpack, Mrs. Green?”

  “Yes. All except the apples.”

  “So how did these apples get into your backpack?”

  “Rosa said she brought them.”

  “Why?”

  “As a snack.”

  “So, you claim that this was just two girls tossing a snack at some police officers, is that it? Tossing apples to try to stop half a squad of mounted officers in their work protecting the citizens of Detroit?” The DA’s voice was incredulous.