Just As I Thought Read Online Free PDF

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