The Butler's Child

by Lewis M. Steel

  When I left for my vacation, it still felt like ten degrees outside up there. There were still prisoners in limbo confined to the Tank with the windows open, stripped bare of clothing and bedding.

  “You did more than you said you would,” Glen said as I was leaving. “We can handle it.” I still felt terrible.

  By the time Kitty and I got to Puerto Rico, I was stiffened by feelings of remorse and guilt for leaving. I knew how hard the situation was going to be to resolve, and I wasn’t sure if Glen and his friends could pull it off. If they failed, lives were on the line. Death from exposure or being driven to suicide—it all swam around in my mind.

  These thoughts turned me into a complete wreck. We rented a car and drove out to the resort. The place was west of San Juan. When we got there and saw the room and the loud earth-moving machines outside that were digging a hole for a swimming pool, something inside me snapped: “We gotta get out of here,” I told Kitty.

  I wanted to go straight back to New York, but we drove around the end of the island and through Ponce before deciding to go back to San Juan. Panic and the growing sense that I had done something immoral by leaving things unfinished at Auburn were eating away at me. “We gotta get off this island,” I said.

  In my mind I was already on the train back to Auburn, but as we looked at the departures board at the airport, we got on a puddle jumper to St. John in the Virgin Islands, where we got a room in a little hotel. During the two or three days we were there, I never stopped thinking about the six men in upstate New York. Meanwhile, almost despite my obsessive thinking, I repaired myself a bit. On the first day I was in a thick fog. The next day we went to an underwater park and snorkeled. Simple stuff. It was nice. I felt calmer. Auburn, however, was ever present. The first thing I did when we got near a phone back in New York was to find out what was happening. Jeffrey Glen told me that to cut the trial short and avoid having to issue a ruling, Judge Port did the expedient thing; he persuaded the prison administration to split up and transfer the Auburn Six to different prisons. All still faced criminal charges, but at least the physical abuse stopped.

  * * *

  Most people didn’t think much about how prisoners really live. Few cared if inmates lived in constant fear of physical or sexual attacks. It didn’t matter if they got showers once a day or once a week, and not many people in the mainstream really cared if they were fed edible food or paid only pennies for their labor. Most law-abiding citizens didn’t lose much sleep wondering if the nation’s criminals and the unlucky jailed innocents had access to a library or to decent medical care. If anything, the public believed that prisons mollycoddled inmates, letting them sit around watching television all day: “Jail shouldn’t be a picnic.” I heard that chestnut far too many times.

  New York’s prisons were not as bad as the chain-gang hellholes scattered around the South and depicted in Hollywood movies like The Shawshank Redemption. Life was cheap in the New York system, but not as cheap as that of the prisoners who poured boiling tar on rural roads in the sweltering heat of a Mississippi summer. In New York death and mayhem were more often the result of the system’s indifference. Guards did nothing to protect the weak from the predators, leaving each man to fend for himself.

  When it came to the prison population, there was no appealing to reason. There was no room for commonsense arguments, even ones that hinged on fiscal soundness, given the public disdain for the nation’s prisoners. It did not matter that it cost more to send a person to prison than to Harvard. It didn’t matter if prison taught people how to become better criminals.

  I saw it differently. The black and Latino inmates who imported the rhetoric of revolution from Karl Marx and the radical protests against the Vietnam War were trying to take charge of lives that no longer belonged to them, and often never really had. They were not educated. Life was hard. Many had gone from being wards of the state to being the property of the state. So when that vocabulary of the various revolutionaries found its way into the nation’s prisons, I thought it was a good thing. Rather than passively riding out their prison sentences or participating in nefarious activities, a growing number of prisoners were reading and writing and trying to think through exactly how so many of them wound up incarcerated. They traced their evolution from underdog to nameless number. And with that knowledge, coupled with a new way of looking at their situation in the American prison system, there was room for real change. Whatever their crimes had been and however uncertain their motivations, this new kind of prisoner had a shot at bringing about real reform. He pressured the corrections department to treat him more like a human being. He wrote articles and books, and he disseminated information. Not much changed, but it was a step in the right direction. Caged in a rigid world that was all about dog-eat-dog survival, some prisoners were trying to bend the story.

  Those thoughts rattled around in my brain when I was at home in my Central Park West apartment or on the weekends as I strolled down the beach a stone’s throw from our house in the Hamptons. That was the other side—my life as a privileged person. Our house in Bridgehampton was on the other side of a semiprivate street that ran parallel to the Atlantic Ocean, situated on the gold coast of Long Island’s playground communities.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1969, my brother John’s second wife, Bette-Ann, had read an article about a young architect named Charles Gwathmey, and became obsessed with the idea of getting him to build her a house. He had built a stunning house for his parents—Robert Gwathmey, the social realist painter, and Rosalie, who was a celebrated photographer. The ultramodern-looking structure was in Amagansett, one village east of the Hamptons. Bette-Ann was bowled over. She had to have a Gwathmey house. I’m not sure exactly how it came about, but either Bette-Ann or John proposed the idea of a three-house Steel compound on the ocean, to be designed by Gwathmey and to be paid for, of course, by our Grandma Bessie. Major had died two years earlier, so a large part of the estate was hers to do with as she pleased. Land was purchased, and Gwathmey got the commission to create the compound.

  “Charlie Boy,” as we came to call him, was about my age. He was a charismatic and athletic guy with movie-star good looks and the talent and drive of someone you could tell was going places. By the time he died in 2009, his portfolio included the Guggenheim Museum’s expansion, celebrated buildings on major university campuses, office towers and condos, and many homes for the rich and famous. Back then in our planning process, Gwathmey became an ever-present character. Meanwhile, I was recovering from the fallout from my New York Times article and was moving on to starting a law firm with Hank di Suvero.

  Hank, Dan, Gretchen, and I crammed ourselves into a two-room office we opened near the courthouses on Centre Street below Franklin. It was long before TriBeCa became a trendy neighborhood for Manhattan’s cultural elite. Back then it sat at the shank end of SoHo—long before that was developed—and near Chinatown. So the rent was cheap. We worked on criminal cases, helped Vietnam War resisters fight the FBI or dodge the draft, and I began to work with Dick Bellman on his housing discrimination cases.

  One case in particular would have greatly upset Grandfather Warner. The Catholic left, with Father Berrigan in the forefront, was mounting its own form of nonviolent protest against the Vietnam War by breaking into government buildings and spilling blood over draft records. When an FBI office was raided in Glen Cove, Long Island, and the intruders made off with some FBI documents, the U.S. attorney’s office tried to force a nun, Sister Carol Vericker, to testify about the break-in.

  The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a progressive nonprofit law center, was asked to quash the subpoena requiring her to testify after the government had granted her immunity to overcome her Fifth Amendment rights to remain silent. After losing before a federal district-court judge, CCR asked our firm to join its lawyer, Jim Reif, on the appeal. Within days we came up with a series of legal arguments, and I joined Jim to argue before the circuit court. To my surprise, given
the political climate, we won on our technical interpretation of the key federal statute.

  I never met Sister Carol, but I did have a fine dinner with Father William Cunningham, S.J., who was also a lawyer and whose name appeared on our appeal brief. Major would have turned in the slot he occupied deep inside the Warner mausoleum, high on a hill straddling the border between Queens and Brooklyn. I went home from my dinner pleased as punch. Father Canninghorn was a fine companion, and his politics were probably to the left of mine.

  Back in Bridgehampton, I was presented with the plans Gwathmey had drawn up for the Steel compound. I blanched at the size of the house he proposed to build for Kitty and me. It had five bathrooms. Kitty looked too, but I don’t know what she thought because, male chauvinist that I was, I didn’t give her a vote.

  “It’s too big!” I howled. “And it has too many bathrooms!”

  Funny to say, but I didn’t have a problem with the location or the way the project was being financed. My issue was the idea of the thing. I did civil rights work; for a Movement lawyer the house was simply unthinkable. Movement people didn’t have houses like that. Period.

  After my final rant on the subject, Kitty gave me one of those whatever-you-say looks, and that was that. The three Gwathmey houses became two, and we moved into the more modest house across the street.

  By the summer of 1970 the houses were completed. Hank had taken on a few cases connected with members of the Weather Underground, and so it was that I found myself filling in for Hank one day. My foster client was Dionne Donghi, a member of the Cincinnati collective who, having dodged gun-related charges earlier in the year, was arrested for forging checks. An undercover FBI agent named Larry Grathwohl collared her along with another member of her collective. As if that weren’t complicated enough, Grathwohl had gotten Donghi pregnant. The assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting her case persuaded a federal judge to deny her bail, but after some wrangling I got her out in time for her to have an abortion. We were front-page tabloid news the next day. After the abortion she often wound up cooling her heels in a house Hank and his wife, Ramona Ripston, had rented in Sag Harbor, about seven miles down the road from mine in Bridgehampton.

  On the weekends Hank, Ramona, and Dionne, and her friends sometimes came over to our house to swim in the ocean. One evening Bette-Ann and John were having a party in their new Gwathmey house across the street. Bette-Ann invited all of us over after dinner. Kitty and I wanted to stay home with our children, and Hank and Ramona had gone off somewhere, so Bette-Ann suggested that our guests come anyway.

  “I wouldn’t have them over,” I warned her. “They don’t like rich people.”

  “Don’t worry,” Bette-Ann responded. “We’ll be fine.”

  At some point during the party Dionne and her friends slipped downstairs to the master bedroom and started rummaging among Bette-Ann’s clothes. They spread an array of designer T-shirts—all the same brand but different colors—on my brother and sister-in-law’s king-size bed to chortle at the excess. Wondering where they’d gone, either John or Bette-Ann discovered the scornful revelers and kicked them out.

  “Some nerve,” my brother said. “They’re not Movement people. They’re just pigs.”

  That’s what they think about you, I was tempted to say. But I bit my tongue and said, “I warned you!” instead.

  The most interesting thing about all this was that I didn’t spend much time thinking about the possibility that Dionne and her friends saw Kitty and me the same way. But of course they probably thought we were pigs too. While I may have been selectively blind to the reality of the situation, Kitty saw it. Still, I managed to keep things separate. I do remember all too well when they derided something Kitty had said: “She’s just a housewife.”

  Kitty was furious. Even after I asked Hank to keep the Weather Underground people away from our place, the lines Donghi and her crowd almost certainly drew between them and us weren’t always clear to me. To me she and her comrades were products of the time, fledgling adults who allowed their anger, and maybe some guilt, to take over their lives. A lot of them came from privileged backgrounds—like mine, or similar enough. Unlike me, however, some of them were destined to spend years in prison. Unlike them, I straddled both worlds. As for Kitty, she had working-class roots and zero patience for the sense of entitlement or the terrible attitudes that could only belong to people who were born and raised to believe they had the world on a string.

  The Weather Underground people, however, did have a refrain that got to me: “Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?”

  To this day I don’t know the answer to that question. I wasn’t on their side, but I wasn’t on whatever was the other side either. And that was the backdrop for a dinner at John and Bette-Ann’s where I did make an appearance and actually outdid Donghi and her friends.

  Kitty and I were invited to join a few friends of my brother and Bette-Ann. It was a mix of people, but some of the guests worked in high finance and, I assumed, the making and spending of piles of money. We gathered in the living room with its gentle Gwathmey curve, its soaring ceilings, and its dramatic ocean views. The living room opened out to a deck with a bridge that spanned the dunes before turning into stairs that touched down on a wide expanse of beach. Behind the living room with its long built-in couch and matching chairs, nestled below the overhanging third floor, was the dining area where we all repaired for dinner.

  The table was alive with the usual Hamptons house talk—tennis and parties and gossip—and then somehow I became the topic of conversation. Who knows, maybe I started it. It could have happened that way; I don’t remember. But I do remember that the conversation turned to racial unrest, and no one who was there that night will ever forget that at some point things turned mean.

  “Why are they so violent?” one of the money guys asked me. “Why do they have to burn their own neighborhoods down? We passed their Civil Rights Act. We gave them what they wanted.”

  The more I said by way of answering the questions that came at me like the mosquitoes out there on a windless night, the more the others turned on me. And then, all of a sudden, I was the enemy. And that did not sit well with me. But then I embraced it. I’m not sure what actually triggered my outburst, but I remember what I said as if it were yesterday: “They’re going to come down from Harlem, and they’re going to line you all up against the wall, and then they’re going to machine-gun you down!”

  There was silence.

  “What a way to go!” someone quipped after a few beats.

  No one laughed.

  After dinner Kitty and I retreated across the street to our house, followed by staring eyes. Not a word was uttered. Soon afterward headlights traced our yard, and the dinner guests disappeared down the road.

  Afterward I wondered if there was any projection in my outburst, if maybe I was acting out my own fears when I sentenced my brother’s dinner guests to summary execution. When I was a child attending Riverdale Country School, Harlem had seemed like a sort of no-man’s-land—a nonspace we traversed to get where we were going. But that was not the reality. Harlem was another country, separate and filled with a very particular variety of anger and despair and, at the same time and despite all that, very much filled with itself. The “collective” known as Harlem was based on shared experience that was stronger than whatever tied Dionne Donghi to the other Weather Underground people she ran with, having its roots in slavery. And if the people did decide to come down from Harlem to find a pound of flesh, I’d be thrown against the wall too.

  17

  The Harlem Four

  Following Tony Maynard’s trial and shortly after returning from Attica, I was asked to take part in the defense of the Harlem Four, who were accused of a long-ago murder of a white storekeeper and stabbing of her husband in their 125th Street clothing store in 1964. Six boys, including the present four, then in their late teens, had been accused of that crime during a robbery attempt. The black-on-white crime w
ould have been sensational enough, as it occurred on Harlem’s main white-dominated business street, but it had been blown way out of proportion by a later completely debunked New York Times story that claimed there was a group called the Blood Brothers that required the killing of a white for admission to membership, and that the killing of Margit Sugar had been for that purpose.

  The defense team, I was told, would be supported by an interracial group called the Charter for a Pledge of Conscience, which included the actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as well as Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton, an old friend of Bob Carter from his NAACP days. As with Tony’s case, I could expect no fee, but the group had worked hard in support of the boys’ mothers, and many people in Harlem considered the case a racist prosecution.

  The boys, originally called the Harlem Six, had been arrested quickly after the killing, and the evidence against them seemed compelling. A seventh boy, who became a prosecution witness, said he was involved in the plot to rob the store, but his mother had kept him at home when the crime was committed. By the time he got out of his apartment and ran to the meeting place, the crime had already occurred, and the others told him what went down. A young black girl told the police she was near the store when she saw the boys run out and down the street. There was a fingerprint of one of the boys on the store door. Finally, two of the boys confessed while in custody. Trying all six boys together, with the later recanted confessions of the two boys put into evidence, the 1965 trial was a slam dunk. The convictions, however, were thrown out on appeal, the court ruling that the two who had confessed had to be tried separately. In the following trial one of the defendants was convicted of murder, and the other pled to manslaughter. That left the Harlem Four. Even though they had spent seven years in prison and none of them was accused of being the actual killer, and despite the fact that the Blood Brothers story had evaporated, the legendary District Attorney Frank Hogan demanded a plea to murder if the young men wanted to escape a trial.