Sometimes I wasn’t in the mood for pictures, so I’d stick out my tongue or move outside the frame. Sometimes I’d go stiff as soon as I heard the click of the shutter. But other times I’d call Lillian over myself, because I could see the picture in my head and knew it was a good one. And sometimes I had ulterior motives. When Mom’s a photographer, nothing says “I’m sorry” like a good photo op.
For this one, I don’t remember what I’d done. Broke something, maybe, or “borrowed” something, or lied about something and gotten caught. Maybe this was the time I busted our only electric fan by sticking pencils into it. Or when I dialed random phone numbers and talked in a made-up accent to whoever answered. I’m not sure if I already knew what the picture would be when I grabbed the ice from the freezer, or whether I figured it out once I came into the living room and saw the patch of sunlight on the floor. Whichever it was, I would already have been naked. I remember making sure to lie down so the rectangle of sun contained my whole body. I remember trying to put the first ice cubes on my ankles, and them falling off, and having to start at my thighs instead. From there, I worked my way up: belly, chest, neck. Once I had those in place, I called for Lillian, then popped an ice cube in my mouth and stuck one on each closed eye before opening up my hands and letting the last two rest on my palms with my arms flat on the floor. The burn of the ice mixed with the warmth of the sun until I couldn’t tell cold from hot. I remember the cool wet of the melting cubes pooling on my skin as the sunlight bore down. And I remember knowing from my mother’s gasp and the sound of the shutter clicking that whatever my wrong had been, it was forgiven.
JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 1963: By the time we reached the station, my legs had gone wobbly. Nina wanted to help but she was handcuffed, and anyway the officers wouldn’t allow it. One held me up as he walked me into the precinct building, while the other walked with Nina. I told them I needed to pick you up from play group in half an hour, but fear had plugged my ears so that my words seemed to seep through layers of thick wool. An officer said he could make one phone call for each of us and handed me and Nina two message slips to write on.
I felt sick, picturing you waiting while all the other mothers came for their children. I had to get word to Grete, but that meant leaving a message with Mrs. Ardolini, and this made me feel sicker. Nina was wonderfully clearheaded and helped me work out what to say. Finally, I wrote, “Dear Mrs. Ardolini, please ask Grete to take Samantha home with Kaja. I am helping Nina with a matter related to the gallery,” and handed it to the officer. In Nina’s message to her father, she told him everything and asked him to call Grete at home to let her know that we’d been arrested and would be in custody until Monday. This was how I tried to keep the neighborhood from learning your mother was spending the weekend in jail.
For several hours, Nina and I sat inside a holding cell, “awaiting transportation.” Nina did her best to comfort me. I remember the weight of her arm on my shoulders and the vague murmur of her voice, but I couldn’t hear her over the fear muting my ears, which came and went with the taste of bile in my throat. After vomiting on the floor, I felt a little better. A new officer on duty looked at me with pity until one of the others told him why I was there. “She did what?” I heard him say, and then he didn’t look at me anymore.
By the time we were being driven to the jail, I’d stopped feeling nauseated. I kept reminding myself you were safe with Grete. The blockage in my ears had subsided enough for me to hear Nina repeating to me that it was all a mistake and that her father would find us a good lawyer. She used words like “freedom” and “America” and “justice.” When I asked, the officer told me without turning his head that we were being taken to the Women’s House of Detention.
67. Tea party, Brooklyn, 1960
I don’t remember where the clip-on earrings came from (Lillian wasn’t the jewelry type), but I do remember how hard they pinched. Any discomfort I deemed trivial, since I thought I looked incredibly sophisticated in them, even when I wasn’t wearing anything else but plastic beads. The other visible party guest is my stuffed monkey, looking worse for wear from an accident involving food coloring and Elmer’s glue. The anonymous hand at the top of the frame pouring tea from the plastic teapot into my open, upturned mouth is my mother’s.
On Friday I went to school in one of Kaja’s outfits so I wouldn’t be seen wearing Thursday’s clothes. I believed Grete when she told me my mother had done nothing wrong and that the police had made a mistake, because that was how it always happened to Bugs Bunny. Kaja told me that when Martin Luther King, Jr., got arrested, everyone knew he was there for righteous reasons, but I didn’t want to have to explain anything to anybody. I made sure my face was clean and my hair was brushed. I raised my hand in class, stayed between the lines in my handwriting notebook, showed all my work during math, and didn’t whisper or pass notes. I did everything I could not to seem like a girl whose mother was in jail.
I know I felt scared and worried, but what I remember most about that motherless weekend is going with Kaja to her dad’s. I don’t know if it was Grete’s or Paul’s idea, but that Saturday morning Kaja told me to roll up my sleeping bag because it was a dad weekend and I was coming. Her dad had promised dinner at the Bombay, popcorn and candy when we went to the movies, and pancakes for Sunday breakfast. Once the IND had taken us under the East River and was working its way up the west side of Manhattan, there was a stop where all the remaining white people got off the train, so naturally, I stood up. Then I saw Grete and Kaja still sitting. Hey, Kaja, I whispered, me and your mom are the only white people left. Kaja looked up from her book and grinned. I know, she said.
Harlem had the same brick and brownstone buildings as Brooklyn, some nicer than others, where kids played out front and people sat on stoops; there were newsstands and drugstores and a candy shop and a barber—only here everyone’s skin was different shades of brown. Come on, Kaja sang. She started skipping down the street in a way she never did on Seventh Avenue, her face lit up like a candle.
NINA PAGANO: It’s funny how you don’t see something until you have to. All the times I’d been to the Village, I’d never noticed the prison at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street, which is weird considering it’s bigger and taller than everything else around. Where do they get enough women to fill this thing? I remember wondering as we were brought through the door. It wasn’t like women were out robbing banks and killing people. Well, I learned the answer to that question pretty quick.
None of the cops back in Brooklyn had told us what to expect, not that it would have helped. At first, things went the way I figured—fingerprints and mug shots, empty your pockets and your purse—but that changed when they took everything. Wallet, hairbrush, chewing gum, tissues, coin purse, lipstick, aspirin; and in Lil’s case a few rolls of blank film. They even confiscated the hairpins from Lil’s hair. An officer tried to impound my glasses, but I convinced her to let me keep them if she didn’t want me walking into walls. I was just grateful Pinky had told Lil to leave her camera at the gallery, because I think they’d have had to kill her in order to bag that.
Next came the showers, which sort of made sense after I saw the shape some of the other women were in. The shower room was like something you’d associate with a high school gym, only without any benches or lockers. They told us to strip. No preamble, no changing room, no privacy. A couple other women were already in there, one looking seriously strung out, the other watching like we were light entertainment. At first Lil just stood there. She deaf? the guard asked. Lil, I said in a low voice, it’s okay. Just pretend you’re back in tenth grade. Lil nodded and started getting undressed. A guard balled up our clothes and took them away. When we came out of the shower, another guard told us to squat. What for? I asked just as another woman who’d been standing with the guard stood behind me and stuck a finger up my ass. What the fuck? I yelled before she slipped her finger out and told the guard, She clean, boss. Then she went over to Lil, who was pressing herself up a
gainst the wall like she was trying to melt into it.
We were each handed a cotton smock to wear and nothing else. Mine ended halfway up my thigh and Lil’s went down to her ankles. Then we were brought to another room and told to wait for our medical exams. No one seemed interested in explaining what the hell we needed a medical exam for. We were with a bunch of women now, all in cotton smocks that didn’t fit. Most of them were black or Puerto Rican and young. A lot were strung out like the girl in the shower. One kept asking if anyone had a piece of candy, something sweet to keep the DTs away just for a little, but our cotton smocks had no pockets.
When it was my turn the doc asked was I a virgin, then said he was going to check me for VD. I wasn’t a hooker or a junkie, I told him. I was there because my art gallery got shut down—but the doc said I had to spread my legs anyway. When I asked why, the guard told me to quit it in a voice I didn’t like the sound of. So I did like I was told, and the doc rammed a speculum into me so hard that I screamed. What kind of art do you show at your gallery? he wanted to know. You’re hurting me, I yelled. I like art, he said.
68. Mommy is sick, Brooklyn, 1961
Before I opened the last box of my three-box inheritance, I hadn’t seen this photograph in twenty-five years. Funny thing is, I thought I had, because that’s the way brains work: once you can read, you can no longer open a book and see a jumble of letters; after you get to know someone’s face, you can’t see her as a stranger.
I had forgotten there weren’t any black bars.
For twenty-five years, my memory had been slapping black bars over my eyes and chest in this photo the way I’d seen it in the newspaper when the case first went to trial, and on television when the case went back to trial, and on T-shirts when “Mommy Is Sick” became a punk rock anthem. For twenty-five years I’d been turning my body into a crime scene.
Here’s the thing: the original image is beautiful. The grainy, vandalized version that was stamped onto newsprint and TV screens and preshrunk cotton-poly annihilated the spectrum of blacks, whites, and grays that Lillian fine-tuned until the dark stain on the pale sheet so naturally matched the dark eyes in my pale face you’d assume the picture just happened like that, without anyone popping Dexies in order to spend crazy hours dodging and burning the print in the darkroom between putting her kid to bed, and then getting that kid off to school the next morning, and then heading off to waitress for six hours, all so she could run that circle all over again.
Back when Lillian and Nina and I were first going through the photos for the Lacuna, this picture was the only one that took me by surprise. Standing beside that bed at age six, I may or may not have noticed Ro-Ro; but either way, I wasn’t thinking photo session, making this one of the few pictures I hadn’t known Lillian was taking.
Part two of the surprise came from the picture’s location. The eight-year-old examining the photo had forgotten that this terrible, scary morning had occurred before Lillian and I moved into our own apartment. Maybe for reasons of trauma distribution, I’d separated being forced to leave the only father I’d ever known from fearing for my remaining parent’s life. And yet there was my mother in Grete’s bed; and there was six-year-old me in my underwear, holding out milk in Kaja’s favorite drinking glass, the one with rabbits on it; and there was a tennis-ball-sized stain between Lillian’s legs as if she had peed the bed, only dark.
That stain was surprise number three: not because I’d forgotten about it but because I’d never seen it before. Ro-Ro, after all, had been positioned above the foot of the bed, angled down. I had been standing near my mother’s head, too short to see anything beyond the mattress’s facing edge.
You’re bleeding, I remember telling Lillian as we looked at the photo. I was having a miscarriage, Lillian said. What’s a miscarriage? I asked. For the three seconds preceding her clarifying answer, I’d thought it was a bloody kind of flu.
I’m going to tell you a secret: I hate this picture.
In this, I am not alone. There are many other people who hate this picture; however, those people are not my people. Unlike all the other haters, I do not think this photograph is “immoral,” or “pornographic,” or “exploitative.” I do not think Lillian was “wicked,” “depraved,” or “an abomination under God.” I do not think I was “abused,” “neglected,” or “manipulated.” When I think of all the people who said those things—in newspapers and on TV, in court, and to my mother’s face and mine—I want to hurt them, which is progress. For a long time, whenever I thought of those people, I wanted to hurt myself.
My hatred is unique. I hate this picture because I hate my worried expression as I hold the glass. I hate Lillian’s weak smile, which is solely for my benefit and only makes things worse. I hate the hollows beneath Lillian’s eyes. I hate the matching paleness of her skin and the bedsheet, which makes the stain between her legs even scarier.
This is a sad picture, I told my mother when she showed it to me, and she agreed. She didn’t look very good in it, I said. Probably it shouldn’t be in the show. Why? my mother wanted to know. Because she didn’t look good or because it was sad? Because she was bleeding, I said. People shouldn’t see her bleeding: it was yucky and embarrassing. Embarrassing for who? For you? she wanted to know. Yes, I said, but also for her.
My mother didn’t answer right away. We kept staring at the photograph.
I’m not embarrassed, she said after we’d looked a little longer. People bleed sometimes. She liked this picture because it showed a difficult part of life in a way that was honest.
As we studied the photograph some more, I remembered the dead feeling in my stomach that morning, when I realized my mother was too weak to take the glass of milk from my hand. I remembered sitting on the edge of the bed and holding the milk below her mouth. All she had to do was reach up a little with her hand to hold the glass but even then, the milk dribbled from her mouth and onto her chest. This made the deadness in my stomach fill my whole body, so big and deep and dark that for a while I couldn’t breathe. Then I remembered how, for the three days my mother had been in Grete’s bed, no one—not me, not Kaja, and not Grete—had ever talked about what was happening to her.
Let’s put the picture in the show, I said.
JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 1963: One of the women in our holding cell was a beautiful young prostitute named Georgiabelle, who was arrested after the police officer had sex with her. She couldn’t understand why I was there. “For real?” she kept asking. “You in here for taking pictures?” There were twenty women in the cell, all of us waiting to be arraigned. A doctor had given me a very rough medical exam and I had bled on my smock, so I tried to remain sitting as much as I could. Georgiabelle knew a long-timer who had protected her the last time she’d been arrested. By the end of Saturday, she’d used her connections to get me a sanitary belt and napkin. I thanked her so much that she became embarrassed and stayed away.
Occasionally, a guard opened the door to the holding cell and said we could walk down the hall, which had a small window at one end that looked onto Sixth Avenue. It was so strange to see the city through the square hole in that thick brick. Cars passing, children walking home from school, mothers shopping, men on their lunch hour. Sometimes people stood outside, beneath the windows of the prison, calling in. Fathers and mothers and sisters and children. They knew the daily schedule, knew when their loved one would be standing on the other side of that window looking out. “Freddie, that you?” yelled a woman standing beside me. A boy waved from the sidewalk below. “You tell Yolanda to keep her nose clean, you hear? I prob’ly be in here least a month this time, and it’s on you to make sure she behave.”
Squirrel, the night I was bleeding and had to leave you in your crib to return to the hospital was more frightening than anything I could have imagined. But terrified as I was, I knew that either the bleeding would be stopped or I’d die: one way or another, my fear would end. Separated from everyone and everything I loved, with no idea when I’d be a
llowed to return, my fear was fathomless.
69. Loose tooth, Brooklyn, 1961
Not a Ro-Ro shot, as you might think. True, the other end of the string attached to my tooth is tied to a door beyond the photo’s left edge, which is being closed by an unseen person; but that person is Kaja, not Lillian. And there I am, just left of center, caught mid-flinch: the string leading out of my mouth is taut as a tightrope as the door slams shut.
Once again, my mother went for the wide shot in order to get the doll dangling off the edge of my bed and the clothes dangling off the chair. Everything here is hanging by a thread.
As with Ice and Bath, people accused my mother of staging my performance, but the slamming-door technique was Kaja’s. Kaja had slammed that door at least twice before Lillian discovered us, and after the picture was taken, Kaja slammed many more times before my tooth’s liberation. The truth is that I was deeply proud of this picture. At the Lacuna I spent most of my time standing next to it, so there would be no doubt who that brave girl was.
JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 1963: There was nothing to do. We’d been given no pens, no paper, no books. Some women talked. Others cried. Some stared blankly at the wall. A few went into drug withdrawal, and their pain was terrible to see. The guards watched and did nothing. Some women kissed and groped each other. One woman sat down next to me and tried me with her hand. “No!” I yelled very loudly, and she stopped.
The bunks were hard and dirty, with no sheets or pillows. My cot had a cotton blanket, but it smelled and was stained, so I didn’t use it. Roaches crawled the area around the toilet and sink. The food was some kind of thin oatmeal or soup and was often cold. By the third day I kept forgetting I wasn’t guilty of anything, that I was still waiting to see the judge. When I did remember, I didn’t know what to do with the information and fell back into forgetting. My hairpins had been taken away, so my hair hung in tangles. This sounds like a small thing, but it is not.
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