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been asked by Rita and Evelyn—was I Irish? No, Jewish. Oh, they answered). She walked me to the barred window at the end of the corridor, the window that looked down on West Tenth Street. She said, How come you so friends with those black whores? You don’t hardly talk to me. I said I liked them, but I liked her, too. She said, If you knew them for true, you wouldn’t like them. They nothing but street whores. You know, once I was friends with them. We done a lot of things together, I knew them fifteen years, Evy and Rita maybe twenty, I been in the streets with them, side by side, Amsterdam, Lenox, West Harlem; in bad weather we covered each other. Then one day along come Malcolm X and they don’t know me no more, they ain’t talking to me. You too white. I ain’t all that white. Twenty years. They ain’t talking.
    My friend Myrt called one day, that is, called from the street, called, Grace Grace. I heard and ran to the window. A policeman, the regular beat cop, was addressing her. She looked up, then walked away before I could yell my answer. Later on she told me that he’d said, I don’t think Grace would appreciate you calling her name out like that.
    What a mistake! For years, going to the park with my children, or simply walking down Sixth Avenue on a summer night past the Women’s House, we would often have to thread our way through whole families calling up—bellowing, screaming to the third, seventh, tenth floor, to figures, shadows behind bars and screened windows, How you feeling? Here’s Glena. She got big. Mami mami, you like my dress? We gettin you out baby. New lawyer come by.
    And the replies, among which I was privileged to live for a few days, shouted down: —You lookin beautiful. What he say? Fuck you, James. I got a chance? Bye-bye. Come next week.
    Then the guards, the heavy clanking of cell doors. Keys. Night.
    *   *   *
     
    I still had no pen or paper despite the great history of prison literature. I was suffering a kind of frustration, a sickness in the way claustrophobia is a sickness—this paper-and-penlessness was a terrible pain in the area of my heart, a nausea. I was surprised.
    In the evening, at lights-out (a little like the Army or on good days a strict, unpleasant camp), women called softly from their cells. Rita hey Rita, sing that song—Come on, sister, sing. A few more importunings and then Rita in the cell diagonal to mine would begin with a ballad. A song about two women and a man. It was familiar to everyone but me. The two women were prison sweethearts. The man was her outside lover. One woman, the singer, was being paroled. The ballad told her sorrow about having been parted from him when she was sentenced, now she would leave her loved woman after three years. There were about twenty stanzas of joy and grief.
    Well, I was so angry not to have pen and paper to get some of it down that I lost it all—all but the sorrowful plot. Of course she had this long song in her head, and in the next few nights she sang and chanted others, sometimes with a small chorus.
    Which is how I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.
    *   *   *
     
    Now there’s a garden where the Women’s House of Detention once stood. A green place, safely fenced in, with protected daffodils and tulips; roses bloom in it, too, sometimes into November.
    The big women’s warehouse and its barred blind windows have been removed from Greenwich Village’s affluent throat. I was sorry when it happened; the bricks came roaring down, great trucks carried them away.
    I have always agreed with Rita and Evelyn that if there are prisons, they ought to be in the neighborhood, near a subway—not way out in distant suburbs, where families have to take cars, buses, ferries, trains, and the population that