Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

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