For nearly four decades, Harriet Clark saw her mother only in the visiting room of New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. When Clark was less than one year old, her mother Judith, then a member of the Weather Underground, was arrested and later sentenced to 75 years to life in prison for her role as a getaway driver in a 1981 armored car robbery, during which a security guard and two police officers were killed. (In 2016, then-governor Andrew Cuomo commuted Judith’s sentence, making her eligible for parole, which she was granted three years later.)  

In her debut novel, The Hill, Clark’s narrator Suzanna never remembers a time when she hadn’t spent her Saturdays visiting her mother sentenced to life in a fictional prison atop a hill. Like Clark, Suzanna was a baby when her mother was arrested and incarcerated.

“The year I turned eight the prison built the hospital and the gun tower and raised the fences around the hill another three feet,” Clark writes early in her novel. “It was the year the prison grew up.” It’s a nod to the nation’s prison-building boom as tough-on-crime laws swelled its population behind bars. In the 1990s, the United States saw an unprecedented boom in prison building with a new prison opening in rural America every 15 days.  

Lyrical and introspective, The Hill paints a picture of a mother desperately trying to parent her daughter despite her life sentence, and Suzanna’s own efforts to stay connected. “To return each week and rise again to do this forever and ever,” Clark writes. “This was a feat I saw nowhere applauded and this was the challenge I set now for myself.”

Clark, now a mother herself and who edits books and films, spoke with The Nation about her new novel, the experience of having a mother in prison, and the artist’s role in documenting atrocities.

—Victoria Law

Victoria Law: Can you talk about why you chose to write a novel over a memoir or autobiography, given how autobiographical The Hill seems to be?

Harriet Clark: I love novels. I have always been able to feel my feelings more when I’m engaging with fiction. It was like granting dignity to the material to write it in the form that I most revere, and that has given me so much meaning and pleasure in my life. [A novel] felt like a way to say, “These are lives worthy of art, not just reportage.”

I [also] think that childhood lends itself to fiction. When we’re children, we haven’t yet consented to reality. We’re inside our imagination so much, and so a novel felt like the appropriate form for a book about childhood.

And if you grow up in prison, you learn to respect other people’s privacy. You try not to watch what’s going on at their table; you’re hoping no one’s listening to you. You’re inside a structure that grants you none of the dignity of privacy so people have to grant it to each other. I never had a reportorial impulse to take something I saw in there and share it with the world. Respecting people’s privacy is really important to me. For me, this novel is largely about privacy and about the ways we companion each other even across great chasms of unknowability.

VL: In the novel, Suzanna visits her mother every week. Their visits are imbued with a sense of claustrophobia—she and her mother stay inside the Reading Roost, a playhouse in the children’s area that’s increasingly too small as Suzanna grows. What were visits like when you were a growing child?

HC: I don’t have a conscious memory of experiencing the prison as a claustrophobic space. One of the ways I was different from many of the other kids at the prison was that I had been going there even before I could remember anything, so I never had this kind of encounter with the prison that most children are forced to have, where, for the first time, you arrive to barracks surrounded by barbed wire and a gun tower and know that your mother is behind all of that. My experience of prison was that it was normal to me.

I did know that most prisons [during the 1980s and 1990s] didn’t have a room like the Children’s Center [a play area for children and their incarcerated parents]. Even though it should be normal for a child to be able to touch or play with their mother, because I grew up with other kids whose parents were in prison, I knew that we were inside the best possible version of a tragedy in terms of seeing our mothers. My mother and all the women in the prison and Sister Elaine [who helped create the Children’s Center] went out of their way to present the Children’s Center as a joyful place, and I felt that.

One of the qualities I share with Suzanna is that I knew from a very young age that it would not serve me to experience my life as degraded. I could see that other people found certain aspects of my life pitiful or pathetic, or thought that I had a lesser experience of a mother.

My mother did so much to try to shield me from the true horrors of the prison. My mother did what mothers in prison have to do, which is that they have to be undestroyed by prison.

She was in incredibly destroying environments and conditions, and she did not bring that to me. That saved huge aspects of my spirit and psyche, so I always wanted to see my mother, which is to say I always wanted to go to the prison. I was happy to get to the room where my mother would arrive. Part of what I wanted to do is to show that one of the remarkable adaptations of childhood is that children will really go out of their way to make enough out of not enough.

VL: Are there prison issues that you hope readers reflect upon after reading your novel?

HC: I began this version of the book in 2017 in the wake of Trump’s family separation policy at the border. For ten years before that, I had written only privately, never with any desire to publish. Then there was footage of kids ripped out of their mothers’ arms [at the border] and there was so much outcry about it. Even the suburban conservative mothers felt this was so unacceptable.

Obviously, I shared everyone’s outrage, but I also felt bewildered because I did feel like, don’t you know this happens every day in jails and prisons across this country? All detention is family separation.

There was something about watching this degree of outrage that made me think, Maybe people don’t understand that five million kids will, at some point in their upbringing, have a parent in prison—that they will have the experience of being ripped out of their parents’ arm, either at the time of arrest or at the end of visiting hours.

I thought, Maybe they don’t know and so I’m going to write this book that will help bring awareness to this idea of incarceration as family separation. I finished the book amidst the genocide in Gaza, when it [became] clear that everyone knows exactly what is happening to children there and it is not rousing the majority to stop the assault or protect the young. So my approach and agenda have come to feel much shakier to me.

The line I always quote in relationship to growing up with a parent in prison is Derek Walcott’s “Either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.” I wrote the book to show how lonely and ghostly it can feel for a child to have their parent forcefully kept away from them—that having a parent in prison, and having to contend with prisons as a child, can make you feel like a “nobody”—but fundamentally, we’re a nation.

There are millions of children growing up like this. The face of mass incarceration in America is a child’s face.

For many years, the title of my book was, You Won’t Go Alone If You Go, because this was what I wanted people to understand: when you send our parents to prison, we go with them. When you mistreat a person inside, their whole family suffers that worry and fear. Prison is a collective punishment, one that I believe often extends the scope of harm, rather than healing it.

I often feel like children aren’t told, “You’re amazing. This is so brave that you are still doing what you can to keep your family together—that is incredible of you.” It was why I wanted Suzanna’s story to be a hero story, and for her to know what no one else around her will acknowledge: that she is a hero, that she is resisting the great forces of separation, prison, and death to keep her family together—and that millions of kids are essentially forced into this kind of heroism, and so many parents in prison have to rise to the kind of heroism of parenting from within one of the most difficult situations. So to some extent I’ve come to think, let me at least reflect their heroism, even if I’ve lost some confidence in my awareness-raising campaign.

VL: This is very much a novel about mothers and daughters—your relationship with your mother, her relationship with her mother, and other mother-daughter relationships. What would you want readers to know about mothers and incarceration?

HC: I would want them to know that the majority of women in prison are mothers. That most were the primary caregiver for their child before they went in. For me, the reason the hero’s journey framework felt important for talking about mothering in prison is because, fundamentally, the hero’s journey is a framework of death and rebirth, and it’s based off the idea that the bravest thing we ever do is resurrect ourselves after total devastation.

If you are a mother in prison, you are in the middle of an unbearable catastrophe, your children are in the middle of an unbearable catastrophe, and you can’t be destroyed because your children still need you. Again and again, in women’s facilities, what happens is that women have to find a way to rebirth themselves inside these incredible constraints. They have to because they’re still responsible to their children. I consider it the greatest education of my life that I got to grow up around women in prison because I saw how people find the will to not be destroyed. I saw how people, in ways that can take a very long time and require a lot of support and community, find their way back to their relationships and their responsibilities.

VL: Is there anything you’d like to add?

HC: Growing up, I’d come into the Children’s Center of my mother’s prison and it would be like, “This week, we’ve removed the top hat and the limousine pieces from the Monopoly set because they could be turned into weapons.” And the next week, “We’ve removed all the pieces from the Battleship game because they could be weapons.” And the next week, something else. The world was full of things we and our mothers could turn into weapons. And on the one hand, maybe that was true—you could probably take that tiny top hat and do something dangerous with it. And on the other hand, the prison itself was an act of violence so much greater than that tiny top hat could ever be.

Most of the artists I know in prison lean more towards transformation than documentation. Bearing witness is incredibly important, but I think creating your own vision and reality can be its own experience of autonomy and dignity, a way to insist that you are vaster than the conditions you’re in. I think it can be degrading when we expect people in difficult circumstances to write essentially transcriptions of their suffering. The more difficulty you’re in, the more creative transport you may need and want; it’s a form of autonomy to say, I still determine my own vision. You may control what I see, but I determine how I see.