She was taking the subway and was meeting Ascher at the 161st Street stop, and then they would go downtown together. She was wearing her black coat that was almost down to her ankles in the fashion of that day. She had let the hem down to make it longer. She was wearing her blue dress with the white high-necked collar. She wore her tiny wrist watch that my father gave her before they were married. She was wearing on the back of her head a little black hat she called a pillbox.
She was last seen in her black cloth coat with the hem let down and a black pillbox hat. My mother was last seen with her tiny watch on her wrist, a fine thin wrist with a prominent wrist-bone and lovely thin blue veins. She left behind a clean house, and in the icebox a peanut butter sandwich and an apple for lunch. In the afternoon, I had my milk and cookies. And she never came home.
My mother left me in her long, black coat, and although she never wore hats, she wore a hat that day, also black, and almost invisible in her thick curly black hair. At lunchtime I ate the peanut butter sandwich and the apple from the icebox. Mrs. Bittelman smiled at me and told me I was a shayneh boychik. At three o’clock I came home and had a glass of milk and two sugar cookies. My mother had still not come home. I waited for her. I played with Susan. Mrs. Bittelman kept going to the front door and looking outside. I waited. It got dark. Mrs. Bittelman began to moan softly to herself and shake her head as if some chronic pain had returned with the nightfall. She was a stout, old woman with swollen ankles and she liked to stay off her feet. It was suppertime, and after looking in our kitchen, she decided to go home to her house and cook Susan and me a meal in her own kitchen. She wanted us to go with her. I wouldn’t. I told her to go and Susan and I would wait in our own house. Mrs. Bittelman went home. Susan and I waited for our mother. The house was cold. We sat in the kitchen. The rest of the house was dark. Every few minutes I went into the dark hall and opened the front door to see if she was coming. It was beginning to snow, and the snow was sticking. I turned on the light in the hall. I sat in the kitchen and played with Susan. She wanted to know where her mommy was. She was cranky. She fell asleep with her head on the kitchen table. I waited. I sat straight in my chair. I kept my head up. I tried to hear if Williams was home downstairs in the cellar. I thought I heard his radio playing. I couldn’t hear him. I was afraid to leave the kitchen to find out if Williams was really home. I would have to go outside to do that, or down the dark stairs to the basement.
Then I heard him coming up the basement stairs and there was a knock on the dark door from the basement and then he shook the door. I turned the key and opened it and ran back to the table. He appeared in the doorway. I was frightened. He reached almost to the ceiling. He stood there looking at us with his murderous anger. He brought with him his menacing whiskey smell. His eyes were red. “Tour momma leave you here alone?”
“No, she left us with Mrs. Bittelman. But she went home to cook supper.”
“Ain’t no one told you?”
“What?”
“Dear Jesus. It on the radio.”
At that moment the phone began to ring.
DIDN’T MY LORD DELIVER DANIEL?—Paul Robeson
Knouting. Knouting was the primary means of punishment for capital offenses in Czarist Russia until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was applied exclusively to serfs. Before the entire community assembled in an open field, the serf designated for this punishment was stripped of his shirt and bound to a wooden block by his arms and neck and knees. The knout was a leather thonged whip which, in the hands of a stout executioner, tore away flesh down to the bone. Sir Robert Porter, in TRAVELING SKETCHES IN SWEDEN AND RUSSIA (London, 1809), witnesses the knouting of a serf coachman accused of killing his master. Speaks of the “bloody splash of the knout” on the senseless body of the victim. In this case over two hundred strokes were applied. Afterwards the victim unaccountably not yet dead was ceremoniously disfigured in the event he managed to live on, pincers being driven up his nose and then manipulated in a sudden manner so as to tear his nostrils from his face. A law passed in 1807 specified that minors were to receive no more than thirty blows of the knout. Shall we call this an enlightened law? But in the famous case of the murder of the mistress of Count Arakcheev, Minister of War in the reign of Alexander, a brother and a sister, each under eighteen, died after seventy blows of the knout. According to Michael Jenkins, author of ARAKCHEEV, GRAND VIZIER OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE (Dial Press), the entire system of serfdom turned on the principle of savage corporal punishment, especially after the peasant uprising of 1774 during Catherine’s reign. Shackles, knouts, stocks, birches, cages, were common equipment, like horse collars, on Russian estates. The serf had little or no recourse to justice, his master having virtually unrestrained privilege over his life. In this he was brother to servitors in the English merchant fleets and English military institutions who were commonly flogged and for the same class principles and with the same barbarity, and with equally unlikely chance of redress. Cf. the American Negro slaves.
Burning at the Stake. A practice known to all European nations until the 19th century. Clerical fondness for. Known also to Indians of North America. Used into 20th century only in the American South, often with castration. Performed on lower classes. No accident that Joan of Arc, burned at the stake, was a peasant.
Explore the history of corporal punishment as a class distinction. There is always exemption for the designated upper class of a society. In England, highborn nobles were never drawn and quartered. In Russia only serfs were flogged. For the same or similar crime, the upper class received relatively painless and non-humiliating punishment. If death, swift death. Never desecration. Where it is necessary for one reason or another to apply the torturous practice to the upper-class victim, certain rituals of transvaluation are performed which expel him from his class before he is executed. Religious excommunication, tribal excommunication. An infidel or an enemy, like a slave, can be executed with abandon.
In the French Revolution for the first time the class of the offender did not determine the kind of punishment he received. Everyone, from the King to Danton, got the guillotine.
We may say that the basis of all class distinctions in society is corporal punishment. Classes are created by corporal punishment, and maintained by corporal punishment. The authoritarian head of a society derives his power from the support not of the masses but of the upper classes or privileged bureaucracy which funds his government and divides its rewards. By contrast the loyalty of the masses is maintained only by constant physical intimidation. As societies endure in history they symbolize complex systems of corporal punishment in economic terms. That is why Marx used the word “slavery” to define the role of the working class under capitalism. Slavery is the state of absolute submission to corporal punishment. In times of challenge, however, the ruling classes restore their literal, un-symbolized right of corporal punishment upon the lower classes, usually in the name of law and order. The crime of someone in the lower class is never against another human being but always against the order and authority of the state.
I have put down everything I can remember of their actions and conversations in this period prior to their arrests. Or I think I have. Sifted it through my hands. I find no clues either to their guilt or innocence. Perhaps they are neither guilty nor innocent. Of course, there is a slight oddness in the way they reacted to the knock on the door—as if they knew what was coming. But they did know what was coming. And so did everyone else who lived with some awareness into that time. There were certain convictions that American democracy would no longer permit you to hold. If you were a Jewish Communist, anti-Fascist; if you cried Peace ! and cheered Vito Marcantonio at the Progressive Party rally in Yankee Stadium; if you were poor; if you were all of these things, you knew what was coming. You might even have been relieved not to have to wait any longer. You might even have demanded of society that you not be forced to wait any longer.
A TOUR OF THE CITY
Riverside Park
. It was a Saturday morning, already September, very hot, and Phyllis asked me not to go to the library but to take a break, just this once, and walk down to Riverside Park with her and the baby and maybe find a river breeze. All through this bad heat, riots on the tube every night, and people burning, we had been coming out of the Memorial Day separation a little stronger, with more understanding between us, and we both wore that New York summer draggedout look, and we were tight. In the park I threw Paul in the air and caught him, and he laughed. Phyllis smiled and out of the corner of my eye I could see an old lady with a cane stopping for a moment in her walk to smile at the attractive young family. I threw my son in the air a little higher and he screeched a little louder as I caught him. We were walking in the park. I tossed my son higher and higher, and now he laughed no longer but cried out. Still I did not stop and I threw him higher and caught him closer to the ground. Then Phyllis was begging me to stop. The baby now shut his mouth, concentrating on his fear, his small face, my Isaacson face, locked in absolute dumb dread of the breath-taking flight into the sky and the even more terrifying fall toward earth. I can’t bear to think about this murderous feeling. Phyllis was pulling at my arm and trying to keep me from throwing my son high in the air and daring us all with the failure of missing him on the way down. I can’t remember my thoughts. I think his weight, the heft of his little body, freaked me. I enjoyed the moment it left my hands and hated the moment it returned, with a shock to all the muscles in my arms. I enjoyed the fear in his mother. When I finally stopped she grabbed Paul and sat down on a bench and hugged him and sat hugging him. He was white. I looked around and saw some people across the street staring at me. I took off.
Fourteenth Street Daniel Lewin boarded the West Side subway and rode downtown to 42nd, and then took the shuttle to Lexington Avenue and continued downtown on the Lex. He came up into the late summer evening of pizza and peanuts and hot dogs lying heavy in the neon of S. Klein on the Square. Despite the looming up of the red Avenue B bus he chose to walk. He walked past the record joints and the cheap goods stores, and past Lüchows, and the Spanish movie house, and the keymaker, and the porno bookstore. Fourteenth Street was the most dismal street in the world. Everything about it was cheap and hopeless, perhaps because it touched Union Square, all the stores of cheap shoes and cheap clothes going past Union Square like an assembly line of cheap hopes in lights of red and yellow and green; and the shoppers with their single dollar bills folded carefully in change purses, the almond-eyed Slavic mothers with their daughters slightly mustached looking for the outfit to get married in, to get carried away in, and black people shining in their pastel cottons and in hopelessness which makes a person glow like a burning ember, and the Spanish spoken like the pigeons pecking the crumbs off the hot sidewalk—all of it shuttling past Union Square without looking, the way you don’t look at a graveyard as you pass. He was walking east, away from the Square. Ahead the smokestacks of Con Edison lay against the windless evening sky like smoking cannon. When Daniel turned into Avenue B, a narrow street, the evening immediately darkened. He began to feel better.
Tompkins Square Park. The Park is crowded. This is not 14th Street, this is the community. There is a music phenomenon coming out of hundreds of transistor radios. There is a mambo phenomenon. There is a dog phenomenon—there are dogs in the dog run taking craps, dogs on the leash, dogs roaming free in packs. Men and girls play handball in the fenced-in handball courts. The girls are good. They shout in Spanish. Dogs jump for the ball in the handball courts. On the benches of the park sit old Ukrainian ladies with babushkas. The old ladies have small yapping dogs on leashes. Old men play chess at the stone tables. The old dogs of the old men lie under the stone tables with their tongues hanging. On the big dirt hill in the center of the park, a kid and a dog roll over each other. A burned-out head drifts by, barefoot with his feet red and swollen. A dog growls at him. Down the path from the old ladies in babushkas sits one blond-haired girl on the pipe fence. Her ass, in jeans, hangs over the pipe fence. Four black guys surround her. One talks to her earnestly. She stares straight ahead. Her radio plays Aretha. Her dog sleeps at the end of its leash. In the center of the park is the open paved area with its movable benches and its bandshell protected by a steel mesh curtain. There is no performance tonight. Benches are turned over, a group of hippies huddles around the guitar, dogs streak back and forth under the bandshell with the zigzag propulsion of pinballs. Two cop cars are parked on ioth Street. Mambo, mambo. A thousand radios play rock.
Avenue B. “Yeah, I know your sister. How is your sister.” “She’s sick.”
“Yeah, well I’m sick too. I got hepatitis, don’t get too close.”
Five people are in the room, including a girl interviewer doing a story for Cosmopolitan. The girl interviewer moves back and her photographer moves back.
“He’s just shitting,” Artie’s girl says. “He’s been out of the hospital for two weeks.”
“My liver’s bad,” Artie says flopping down on his mattress. “I’m yellow. I’m yellow-livered. I’m chicken.” Everyone laughs because of Artie Sternlicht’s reputation. “Chicken liver. Hey, baby, why don’t you ever make me chicken liver.”
“I will, baby.” She kneels at his side and holds his hand in her lap. “He got hepatitis because of me.”
“How is that?” the girl interviewer says.
“The best pigs are very creative,” Artie says. “This new thing they laid on me was a blood test. I said to them, ‘You don’t give me a blood test. I’ve been busted fifty times and nobody’s ever taken my blood. You touch me with that needle and I’ll kick your balls in. My friends have instructions, unless they hear otherwise from me in twenty-four hours they are going to raid this station. Then they are going to bomb Murphy’s.’ Murphy’s is the bar they all go to after work. So they laugh and this pig says, ‘Artie, we’re going to take some of your blood or we’ll bust your girl friend. We’ll get her for possession. Well put her in Women’s Detention in a cell with all bull dikes. You want that to happen?’ So I let the fuckers stick their dirty needle in my arm and that’s what they want, that’s all they want. I mean what do police have to know about blood. That it’s red? Fucking vampires—if they got lucky maybe I’d die.”
“You’re saying the police deliberately gave you hepatitis?”
Sternlicht doesn’t answer but turns his head and looks at me. “Sit down, man. I’ll talk to you but come down here to my level. Get down here with the proles.”
Sternlicht wears dungaree shorts and sandals. No shirt. He has a long foxlike chin and sly good looks. He may be sick but his body looks strong and supple. His nose is flat and wide and his mouth is wide and his teeth are bad. He wears a beaded headband that bunches his shoulder-length hair and makes him look like an American Indian. His eyes are light grey, like Daniel’s wife’s, and they’re a shock because they’re so vivid and clean-looking in the impression of dirtiness that Sternlicht conveys. He is stretched out on this bare mattress on the floor, lying on his side with his head propped in his hand. The photographer walks around the room shooting him from every angle.
“What is the future for the Lower East Side? What’s happening?” the girl writer says.
“Well, the hippie thing turned bad and the whole community is uptight. The spies don’t like the heads. Nobody likes the pigs. I don’t know—what is it like, Baby? You’ve got PLP down here, and a W. E. B. Du Bois, and the neighborhood reformers, and Diggers like me, and some black destruct groups, and every freak thing you can think of. Eventually we’ll put it together, we’ll get all our shit together. All the freaks will get it together. Then we won’t be freaks anymore. Then we’ll be a clear and present danger.”
“Yes?” The girl waits for him to continue.
Sternlicht looks at her. “The first thing we’re going after is women’s magazines,” he says. “Liberate those girls who write about sex and dating. We’re gonna pull off their pants and place daisies in their genitals.”
/> “Oh sure,” the reporter says. “Is that the kind of remark that makes people say the peace movement can’t afford you?”
“What people? The question is can the revolution afford the peace movement. You mean these dudes who march down the street and think they’re changing something? Peace marches are for the middle class to get its rocks off. The peace movement is part of the war. Heads or tails it’s the same coin. The Indian or the buffalo, it’s the same fucking nickel. Right? And they’re both extinct.”
“Not so fast, I don’t have shorthand,” the girl says. She’s a honey-haired blond, very skinny, in false eyelashes and a jumpsuit. While she bends over her pad, Artie looks at his friends who sit on the floor near the windows. He draws a whistling breath and shakes his hand in the air as if he’s burned his fingers. They laugh.
“Hey,” the photographer says, “do you have the strength to stand up? I want to shoot you against this wall.”
Sternlicht immediately jumps up and spreads his arms against the wall, like Christ, and lets his head fall to the side. His eyes bug and his tongue lolls from the corner of his mouth.
“Great,” the photographer says, and shoots.
“Up against the wall!” one of the friends calls out. Artie slips his headband over his eyes and stands with his arms stiffly at his sides. His girl sticks a cigarette between his lips.
“Great,” the photographer says, and shoots kneeling, standing, close up, and across the room.
The wall is interesting. It is completely covered with a collage of pictures, movie stills, posters, and real objects. Babe Ruth running around the bases, Marlon Brando on his bike, Shirley Temple in her dancing shoes, FDR, a bikini sprayed with gold paint, Marilyn Monroe on her calendar, Mickey Mouse, Gilbert Stuart’s Washington with a mustache penciled on, a real American Legion cap, Fred Allen in front of a microphone, pinch-mouthed Susan B. Anthony, Paul Robeson, Sammy Baugh throwing a jump pass, Calvin Coolidge in Indian feathers, a World War One dogfight, a chain gang working on the road, an antique doll, a girl making it with a donkey, browned book jackets of Gone with the Wind and One World by Wendell Willkie, a diaphragm sprayed with silver paint, a cluster of cigarette butts, a Death of a Salesman poster, a young Elvis, a black man hanging from a tree, a white man selling apples for 5 cents—