Harriet Clark spent 37 years visiting her mom in prison

**Terry Gross** (0:00)
This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. One of the last actions of the extremist left wing groups with roots in the 1960s was the Brinks robbery of 1981 Two militant groups, one in offshoot of the Weather Underground, the other in offshoot of the Black Panthers, robbed a Brinks armored truck, carrying over a million and a half dollars. It ended in a shootout in which one security guard and two police officers were killed. Judith Clark was a getaway driver who was sentenced to 75 years to life. It meant leaving behind her 11-month-old daughter. That daughter, Harriet Clark, is my guest. She's just published a novel that draws from her own experiences, being raised by her grandparents and visiting her mother in prison every weekend for most of the 37 years her mother was incarcerated. It required traveling about an hour from New York City to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison for women. Harriet knew her mother would never get out, but she did get out after being granted clemency and released on parole in 2019
Harriet Clark's new novel is called The Hill, a reference to the prison in the novel being on top of a hill. It's her first novel. She received the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Wallace Stegner Program.
Harriet Clark, welcome to Fresh Air and congratulations on the book. You're an incredible writer and I'm glad that you wrote this.

**Harriet Clark** (1:33)
It is an absolute trip and thrill to be speaking with you, and I'm so grateful to be on the show. Thank you.

**Terry Gross** (1:39)
I'm honored to hear you say that. I want to start with a reading that I think will help set up your story and your mother's story.
This is from pretty early in the book when Susanna, the child, the main character, is leaving the dentist's office with her grandfather, and her grandfather has just had one of his teeth capped. So this is as they're leaving.

**Harriet Clark** (2:06)
My mother had robbed a bank, the first woman said. No, the second woman said, my mother had expropriated funds for the purpose of revolutionary struggle.
The woman's tone suggested that she was possibly defending my mother and possibly mocking her. When my grandfather emerged dazed and swollen, it did not seem right to press for explanation. But he must have heard what the woman said, or the anesthesia must have caused his mind to wander because on the drive home he spoke to me for the first time about my mother's crime.
A misguided attempt, he called it, to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Then an elaborate explanation of insurance mechanisms of banks and further clarification that many people had money in banks, not just the rich. When this lecture got into the weeds, he shifted gears into another regarding imperialism, racism, militarism, also materialism, all the things he said that he and my mother opposed, and that, he assured me, I opposed as well. His face was very close to the steering wheel. Your mother took it too far.

**Terry Gross** (3:08)
How old were you when you first learned why your mother was in prison? How was it explained to you?

**Harriet Clark** (3:17)
I don't have a memory of coming into awareness of my mother's crime. It must have been explained to me, but I don't recall who explained it. My mother made clear from when I was very young that she was in prison because she had been part of something that cost three men their lives. So I think I knew from before I even knew what I knew, that people had died and that my mother was in prison because of that.
She, in that sense, always raised me to understand that in some ways, she was guilty and that was why she was in prison and that she would always be there. But I'm not actually sure who explained to me the details of the crime.

**Terry Gross** (4:04)
When you found out that she was part of a revolutionary group and that the robbery was supposed to support the revolutionary cause, what did you make of that? Did you know enough about politics when you learned that? Did you know enough about radical movements and where this robbery fit in?

**Harriet Clark** (4:29)
Yes and no.
Unlike Susanna, I continued to have a relationship to the women in my mother's collective. I had a half-sister and so I returned to that collective every three weeks for the weekend. They were still very actively political and so I did grow up inside a far more political atmosphere than Susanna does. She's really in the aftermath of politics and I grew up inside active organizing. I think I did understand something about the particular movements and commitments they had.