Clark was an infant when her mother was arrested. Her debut novel asks what it’s like for children who have only ever known a parent in prison
In Harriet Clark’s debut novel, The Hill, a nun explains what it’s like for babies born in prison. “They don’t know that they are in prison,” she says, “but they know when we force them to leave.”
The book’s child protagonist is Suzanna, whose mother has been serving a life sentence for as long as she can remember. There is no expectation that Suzanna and her mother will have a relationship outside the prison’s walls. And yet, they do have a sustained relationship within them.
The same was true for Harriet and her mother, Judith Clark, who she visited in prison for the better part of almost 40 years. Freedom, Harriet tells me, “never existed on the horizon for me and my mother. I didn’t hope for it. I didn’t treat it as the great dream for her and for me. I knew that as long as I knew my mother, I would just know her in that room.”
Judith Clark was sentenced to a minimum of 75 years in 1983 for her involvement in a robbery of a Brink’s armored truck that resulted in the death of three men: a guard and two police officers. A member of the 60s radical group the Weather Underground and its offshoot the May 19th Communist Organization, which worked in conjunction with the Black Liberation Army, Clark was driving the getaway truck. The botched robbery was meant to fund revolutionary struggle more than a decade after the “Days of Rage” protests in Chicago.
