that I had to be absent anyway, and I was. She backed off of her
threat to give me a failing mark and gave me a near-failing
mark instead.
I stayed at a friend’s apartment in New York the night
before my testifying, and Frank Hogan, New York City’s
much-admired district attorney, came with another man that
night to see me. The magnitude of his visit is probably not
62
The Grand Jury
self-evident: the big pooh-bah, prosecutor of al prosecutors,
came to see me. He seemed to want to hear from me that I
would show up. I assured him that I would. Just be yourself
and tell the truth, said the snake to Eve. I assured him that I
would. He kept trying to find out if I was wary of testifying
or of him. I wasn’t. I was too stupid to be. The rules have
since changed, but in 1965 no one, including the target of a
grand jury investigation, could have a lawyer with her inside
the sacred, secret grand jury room. I was not the target, but
one would not have been able to tell from what the assistant
district at orney did to me. Hogan had assured me that al
the questions would be about the jail and pret y much said
outright that the jail had to go, something to that effect. He
probably said sympathetically that he had heard it was a horrible place and I assumed the rest. After al , if it was hor ible, why wouldn’t one want to get rid of it? The grand jury room
was big and shiny wood and imperial. I sat down in what
increasingly came to seem like a sinking hole and had to each
side and in front of me raised desks behind which were
washed white people, most or al men. The assistant district
attorney, who had been with Mr. Hogan the night before but
had said nothing, began to ask me questions. Where did I
live? Did I live alone? Was I a virgin? Did I smoke marijuana?
I started out just being confused. I remembered clearly that
Mr. Hogan said the inquiry was about the jail, not me, so I
answered each question with some fact about the jail. Did I
63
Heartbreak
live alone? They knew I was living with two men. I described
the dirt in the jail or the excrement that passed for food. Did
I smoke marijuana? Was I going to betray the revolution by
saying no? On the other hand, was I going to give the grand
jury an excuse to hold for the righteousness of the jail by
saying yes? I answered with more details about the jail. And
so it went for several hours. I eventually got the hang of it.
The pig would ask me a personal question, and I would
answer about the jail. He got angrier and angrier, and I stayed
soft-spoken but firm. They could have jailed me for contempt,
but they didn’t want me back in jail. I had created a maelstrom
for them; because of the news coverage, which was, for its
time, massive, huge numbers of people in the United States
and eventually around the world knew my name, my face, and
what had been done to me in the jail. Put ing me back in jail
could only make the situation for Mayor Robert Wagner, head
of the cor upt city Dems, more difficult. I had spoken on
the same platform as John Lindsay, a liberal Republican who
would eventually become mayor, and I had something to
do with making that unlikely event happen. After I testified I
went back to college. While probation would have been the
normal status for someone not yet convicted of anything
and released on her own recognizance, I was on parole, which
allowed me to cross state lines to go back to school without
violating the court’s rules. The system was being so good
to me.
64
The Grand Jury
A couple of months later there was an article in the New
York Times saying that the grand jury had found nothing
wrong with the jail. Everything had hinged on my testimony,
so they were also saying that I was a liar. I left the country
soon after, but seven years later, when the place was final y
closed, a lot of people thanked me. Years later Judith Malina
would say I had done it. When I challenged that rendering of
the politics, she said that political generation after political
generation had tried but I had succeeded - not that I had done
it alone, of course not, but that without what I had done, for
al anyone knew the jail would still be there, thirteen floors of
brutalized women. Most of the women in the Women’s House
of Detention when I was there and in the immediate years
before and after were prostituted women; I had the unearned
dignity of having been ar ested for a political offense. Frank
Hogan had a street named after him after he died.
Probably the best moment for me happened one day when
I was approached by a black woman on a Village street corner
while I was waiting for a light. She worked in the jail, she said,
and couldn’t be seen talking with me, but she wanted me to
know that everything I had said was true and she was one of
many guards who was glad I had managed to speak out. You
tell the truth and people can shit al over it, the way that grand
jury did, but somehow once it’s said it can’t be unsaid; it stays
living, somewhere, in someone’s heart.
65
The Orient Express
I was going to Greece. There were two countries in Europe
where one could live cheaply - Greece and Spain. The fascist
Franco was stil in power in Spain, so I decided on Greece. I
took a boat, the appropriately named SS Castel Felice, from
New York to a port in the south of England, then a train to
London. I had two relatives there, old women, hard-core
Stalinists, who talked energetically and endlessly about the
brilliant and gorgeous subway stations in Leningrad. It’s a
disorienting experience - listening to the worship of a subway
system. They saw me off on that legendary train the Orient
Express. It has since been rehabilitated, but in 1965 it was a
wretched thing. I had under $100 and the clothes I wore
along with some extra underwear and T-shirts. We changed
trains in Paris in some dark, damp, underground station, and
we kept going south. Somewhere outside of Paris people began
exiting and cattle began coming on. There was no food, no
potable water; as the train covered the terrain downhill we’d
get more cows accompanied by a peasant or a peasant family.
I hadn’t anticipated this at al - I, too, had read about the
elegant and mysterious Orient Express. A sweet boy offered
6 6
The Orient Express
to share his canned Spam with me, but I foolishly declined. It
was a four-day trip from London to Athens, each hour after
Paris more sordid than the one before. I did love the train ride
through Yugoslavia because the country was so very beautiful,