Mothers & Daughters, by Carolina Soto
My mother's uncles on the Cavanaugh side were all police officers. She was from New London Ct and filled with stories about coming home from a Coast Guard dance, stopping for a soda, sometimes parked on the street nearby but not in front of her home, or about to get her first kiss when one of her uncles would appear. She was already sixteen, but if they saw her in the car, they pulled her boyfriends over for inspection, a friendly check-in.
Her father was a Federal Agent during prohibition. He was tipping more of the bathtub gin into his mouth than down the drain and lost his job. He opened an insurance company, but his drinking remained a problem for him and his family. My mother told me she had left high school at 16 because she was too "high strung" to finish. It appears she was always an emotional mess, clobbered by patriarchy at a young, willful age. My grandfather was the classic disciplinarian, heavy-handed, with absolute power in the home and an Irish temper that careened out of control when drunk, and probably when he wished he was drunk as well. He stopped drinking when my mother refused to let him see his grandchildren. I liked to climb up on his lap and drink his sweet, strong tea. I was not afraid of him, but I wouldn't dare to cross him.
Mom's stories were filled with her beloved Irish Setter, playing baseball, swimming, riding waves, beaming stories of her mother's strength and her father's discipline. She told me she was her father's favorite. I was never sure if that worked to her detriment or her favor.
It took about two and a half hours to get to New London from Bristol. We had beautiful lakes around us but going to the shore was great, no matter what time of year. Grandma's house was filled with books, magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Time, homemade peanut brittle or spice cake. She sang songs with funny lyrics and loved us all unconditionally. We often went to New London to the Irish dance presentations at Ocean Beach on St Patrick's day, sometimes leaving school early and staying overnight. Our family spent a lot of time in New London, always fun and happy times.
Carolina Soto’s mother in an undated photo
I don't know when my mother became so sad. She did, and she was pretty miserable if you continued to smile despite her sadness. Mostly, I don't believe she had any patience. You could see anger or despair taking her over as if by surprise.
When I was three years old, my dad told me I used to ask my mother why she could not be happy like this, pulling the corners of my mouth up with my fingers as far as my face would allow. I mimicked my mother's sad, downward sagging mouth, shaking my head no and pointing at her mouth. I was little miss sunbeam off the bread package. Still, I couldn't make her happy or smile. I was always that three-year-old, and I still am. I want the world to smile like this. Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven… My father would often pick me up and dance me around singing and whistling. We were often out together, dancing cheek to cheek.
When I was nine, my oldest brother, just seventeen, fathered a baby. I cried through the whole wedding because I wanted to marry him myself when I grew up. My mother delivered a baby in her forty-fourth year, just a month after her first grandchild was born. It caused significant strife in my parents' relationship. They sent me to my aunt and uncle in Falls Church, VA., the summer before my brother's February birth. It was a gas. I did the bunny hop at the Army-Navy Club in Alexandria, VA. There I could down as many Shirley Temples replete with tiny parasols, pineapple, and maraschino cherries as I wished. We traveled through Virginia to the Outer Banks of North Carolina with our foam belly surfboards and enjoyed the drama of Colonial Williamsburg and the Lost Colony. My cousins, Karen and Janet, were a year older and a year younger. I immensely enjoyed a summer of bourgeois cushion and travel. I could watch Dobie Gillis. Heaven! We giggled, sang, and went crabbing.
When I returned just before school, they broke the news of Jeff's planned arrival. Mom ate trays of ice cubes and drank soda, something not previously seen in the house. She was emotional but funny. She taught me to jitterbug and do the lindy, looking pretty wild with her enormous belly. My dad was still glum and not quite ready for this last child. I told her all the stories of my travels. Again, mom was attentive, and we danced more.
The stories I liked best were her dancing at her friend Lillian Galenaño's house, where they rolled up the carpet, and everyone from grandma to smallest child plus my mother danced. She learned the Meringue. Mom and her friends, of course, spent time at Ocean Beach, in the water on the sand, playing miniature golf, and dancing at the pavilion.
Lillian moved to Puerto Rico when she married. She visited us for a week when I was ten. Lillian was one of those people that made everything into a game for children. Making language fun, she would say your knees? My Knees? Or maíz? Everyone would giggle when she asked why we liked Mickey Raton so much? We were as important as any adult in the room!
On my dresser were a dancer and a bullfighter. Lillian told me stories that brought the dolls to life. I asked my mother, for the first time, where they came from. Mom said, "My father got drunk and went on a junket to Puerto Rico, leaving us without food or money for three weeks, but he brought me the dolls." Lillian was exotic fun and taught me my first words of Spanish. I wanted to be Puerto Rican. She had dark hair and eyes, laughed a lot, and said Hay Caramba! This immediately replaced darn and the forbidden damn word in my vocabulary.
I had glimpses of the fun-loving, high-spirited young Rita. By the time I was twelve, mom had become unhappy with her femininity and sexuality. At about the same time that Jeff became a toddler, she joined a group of the mother circle women that reviewed movies to see if they were "too filthy" for people to see. As I became a teen, make-up was forbidden. If caught, I would have my face washed publicly, smearing mascara everywhere. She kept a washcloth and bottle of water in the car!
I can only guess that things were not working out between my parents, compounded by the Catholic Church prohibition of birth control. In the sixties, mini-skirts, hippie clothing, and liberation were in vogue. My dancing was too sexual, my body too sexual. She tried to get me to deodorize everything while I was learning to be all-natural. She was very jealous when my father complimented me. Jeff was too young to know what was happening, but he was Dad's sidekick, downstairs in the cellar, away from the commotion. I soon realized that she did not have enough love and attention when she was young. Dad shined his love light on me often.
My dad would often remind mom she hated her father's heavy hand and militaristic discipline. But she was her father's daughter. Although she relished her memories of playing ball, making jackknifes off the highest diving board, and being able to drop-kick a football at a competitive distance; I was still too high-spirited in her eyes. So the strap, liberally applied, was her only recourse. I don't remember doing anything terrible, but when sent for the strap, I would never give her the satisfaction of a single tear.
Further up the hill on the unpaved part of the road, my Uncle Jim's son and daughter built their homes. Jim's brother, the family drunk, Great Uncle Mike, also had a tract of land on the hill. He let a homeless alcoholic friend, Mr. Carlson, build a lean-to there. When we saw him walk down the hill towards town, we ran to the lean-to and scrutinized his few possessions. Mike eventually rented the land to Mr. Monteleone. Monteleone grew grapes for wine on Mike's property, which we kids, of course, felt entitled to eat at will. He also had a half-acre cultivated with tomatoes. Because we had to run by the giant mound of chicken shit all fall on the way to school, every kid in the neighborhood also helped themselves to his tomatoes. We were in and out of the woods, the tomatoes, the vineyard, cherry, pear, and apple orchards. It was a beautiful, wild and delicious place. I admit I crawled on my belly with Suzy Miller on two, maybe three occasions, to pick white grapes close to his house. They were the best white grapes anyone could eat. He planted russet pears, which we ate when they were not ripe: beautiful, hard little green pears, a gift from nature. We knew enough to leave some for future and riper raids. We never took too much for fear of reprisal.
Deep in the woods, you can scream, yell, and sing louder than anyplace else. The tips of the budding trees are pink and yellow in spring, casting a pastel glow over everything. Lady slippers, delicate pale pink North American orchids, peek up in May. Where there is water, there are violets, sometimes wild purple iris. The world is full of delicate softness and tender shoots. The birds return, and life is as it should be, full of promise.
The summer canopy gives shade and shelter. The sound of insects and birds is the constant chorus. Chattering chipmunks and squirrels scold the trespassers, and woodpeckers keep the beat. The woods return to being vibrant, alive, and inhabited. Cold clear streams afford views of skeletonized leaves, a beautiful shadowy reminder of the winter, framed by the tiny white flowers called baby's breath and perfect tiny watercress. Blueberries and blackberries flower, ripen, offering tart and sweet treats.
Growing up, I often thought my mother was the local police force, the FBI, and the CIA rolled into one. There was no secret too small for her to investigate. Unfortunately, like most police methods, her discovery process usually included false eyewitness reports.
"Mrs. Chauvin saw you at the pharmacy at 4 PM when you were supposed to be..."
Her searches included looking under the fiberglass rolls on the ceilings in the closet that Dad had never sheet rocked. The secret compartment in my notebook was not a secret from my mother. Every drawer, book, and any item of clothing left behind would be subject to a thorough search. We had a rough time together from the beginning, but from puberty forward, it was brutal.
I am sure I was not an easy child because I was adventurous. I traveled far into the woods. I was courageous. I walked on every beam of every foundation on the developing hilltop. At home, I did as I was told. I spent my time up the street at a neighbor's farm with the new baby calves, geese, chickens, rabbits, riding Bright Light, a quarter horse when I could get a turn. So many girls my age lived on the hill, a year older or a year younger. We hung in small gangs riding bikes and jumping rope. We made up stories and acted them out. The entire neighborhood played hide and seek, our parents sitting together in someone's yard while we hid and came into the home tree till late.
I loved my little brother from the moment he arrived. I was Big Mommy helping in every way I could when he was an infant. As he became older, he cried when I left to play softball. When I was a few years older, I questioned whether it was girls playing baseball at twelve (you are a young lady now; it is not permitted) or my time babysitting, which was at issue. In hindsight, I would have to say my mother felt that any jiggle of a breast was a perversion, no matter how small they were. She thought women's bodies were a perversion, my teenage one especially.
My youngest brother and I bonded instantly, but he bit me often. Maybe he was learning rage from mom. I would come home from school and liberate him from his harness, tied to the tree near the sandbox. When dinner was over, and the light was not good for working outside, Dad and Jeff spent a lot of time hanging in the basement fixing radios and televisions. Jeff spent a lot of time on the tube checker.
He could barely get the words out but confirmed for my father that it was a filter condenser or a specific tube that was at fault. Jeff wanted me to come downstairs to see the oscilloscope; I would go just to hear him say the name and see his excitement. He followed Dad's every move when fixing and building radios and televisions. He loved electronics and still claims that if it has wires, he can fix it, which is not unfounded!
Dad gave Jeff a record player when he was a little past three. He would get out of bed when he heard me come downstairs to get ready for school and put on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. He would shake his little bottom to the trumpets and melt my heart. My dad was long gone to the factory, so Jeff was my love hit to start my morning. Mom usually goes back to bed after getting up with dad at 5:30, making coffee and sandwiches for his lunch. After Jeff had breakfast with me, she would get up and check that he washed and dressed appropriately.
I fought with my mother over her heavy-handed discipline of our toddler. Tween or teen, she made me crazy with her heavy hand. Children are usually insane little beings, but a slap teaches nothing but disrespect. Unfortunately, understanding and compassion were not part of the equation. When I left for college at seventeen, Jeff cried so hard I felt forever guilty.
I loved the woods. When I turned four years old, we moved to our wooded hill with a few other houses. My great uncle had bankrupted the family during the great depression using extended family money. He bought large tracts of land and built houses locally, but mainly on Long Island. My dad bought a quarter acre of land adjacent to Great Uncle Jim's home for four hundred dollars. He built our house with my Uncle Andy, contracting plasterers on small stilts who made swirls in the ceiling.
We collected large bags of hickory nuts, and the further into the woods, the tastier they were. The best trees were several miles away at a private fish and game club with a ski jump. The ski jump was the desired destination. I knew I was in deep trouble when I could barely hear my mother blowing her conical double-note whistle. I flew back, ducking brush and getting to a road in the most direct line.
After catching hell for not responding to the whistle fast enough, I spread the nuts on the cellar floor near the furnace, waiting for them to dry and turn sweet. It wasn't that I was bad; I just loved to be in the woods and spend as much time there as possible. My dad was home, and I knew she could not send me for the strap hanging in the closet.
We stripped the bark from beechnut trees for a slightly sweet flavor and called it Indian chewing gum. The older we got, the higher we climbed in the forest. My middle brother was seven years older. He would find me, catch me in the branches and try to pull me off the branch for climbing trees in my good (school) shoes. I would wait to dump acorns on him from another tree in retaliation. His aim was excellent; I had to pick my moment. A few years later, he lovingly paid for my modern dance classes, a passion that lasted for many years.
Carolina Soto as a young child
Sometimes I wonder if memory makes you love something, or is it I always loved the birds and felt that I am a little closer to their magic knowing their names? I often packed a bird guide in my backpack. Bird guides are a little heavy but worth making your identification on the spot. I remember a summer on the east slope of the Rockies, climbing up a sheer (for me) cliff face opposite a natural boulder-like rock cairn topped with an eagle's nest with my friend Ronnie in Colorado. I didn't dare think about the return trip. After throwing my body onto the wide ledge, breathing a sigh of relief, I settled into the best nature show ever. Mama was away, and the baby was voicing out his hunger. He then neatly climbed to the edge and ejected over the side. The baby gave us some good views, and it worried me that Mama would come back and attack us. Ronnie figured she was watching us and knew we would never make it to her nest.
We carefully, with great concentration, made it back down the cliff and through the woods full of giant mountain jays, high-altitude chickadees, a downy woodpecker or two, Clark's nutcrackers, and goldfinches, nothing to identify with the book but sweet company on the way home. The moon was big and beautiful that night. A good many of the panes of the french door-like window were missing. The shattered glass looked beautiful rather than messy, so Ron worked his magic. Typically, his mess drove me to distraction. Finally, we were back down at nine thousand feet, breathing easier and sleeping the sleep of the dead. I woke early to wings beating against the remaining glass panes. I got up to aid the hummingbird in her escape. After several attempts at directing the bird towards an empty pane with a towel, Ronnie, not moving, mumbled from under the blanket.
"Just stick your finger out, and it will land, then clasp your thumb down on its tail. "
I held a perfect and divinely beautiful hummingbird in my hand. My heart beat faster with the rapid beat of the poor little bird's heart. The sensation made me release the bird more quickly than I wanted to. Exhilarated, ecstatic, I do not know how to describe the feeling, but I was unhappy to let the tiny glittery bird go while fearful that I was trapping its beautiful, boundless energy.
When the St. Amands invited me to Maine to their summer cottage my twelfth year. My mother said no, and then she picked up the table I had just set for dinner and banged it up and down, yelling, 'You are not going anywhere!'
I washed the fallen silverware and swept the remains of two bowls, resetting the table in silence. I was learning the effects that amphetamines and valium could have on a person.
Stopping me from having sex became my mother's life mission. Our first detonation in a long series of bombs came when the Rolling Stones came out with Satisfaction in 1965. My friend from the neighborhood, a year younger, had a record player, a princess phone, and an all pink, very teen room. We worked hard to copy Rolling Stones' lyrics, stopping the record player often to decipher the verse. Finally, unable to finish with the lyrics to Satisfaction, I had to leave for dinner at four. We ate early, so my father could work in the yard until dark.
Sherry copied it over and gave me her handwritten version the next day. My mother became convinced that we were having lesbian sex, and she was going to nip it in the bud, forbidding me to enter the St. Amand household again. Friends since we were four and five years old, I was 13 that summer. As she often did, Mrs. St. Amand came to the rescue by visiting my mother and speaking to her about popular culture, rock-and-roll, and the obtuse meanings of lyrics in rock songs. She saved me many times, and I am grateful that our neighbor loved me as a daughter and tried her best to help me overcome my mom's bitterness. She taught me a lot.
What my mother was so worried about was:
And I'm tryin' to make some girl
Who tells me baby better come back maybe next week
'Cause you see I'm on a losing streak.
I can't get no
Oh no no no
Hey hey hey
That's what I say!"
Satisfaction is anything but an erotic lesbian love poem.
Mrs. St. Amand saved me many times. I am grateful that our neighbor loved me as a daughter and tried her best to help me overcome my mom's bitterness.
Bisexuality didn't even occur to me. Most things about sexuality were still a total mystery.
I had close girlfriends in high school, but everything seemed geared towards competition rather than love. I filled my time with books and drawing late into the night; art became my obsession. My closest male friend was gay, but I didn't have a clue. One of my two favorite teachers, the high school drama teacher, was also gay. He was married with two children. It became the scandal of our small town in 1969 when he came out or was outed. I was beside myself because he had left the school. Any theater piece of note in town came to life because of him. It seemed like no one in CT spoke about sexuality openly. The only reference I had for nonbinary sexuality was when I found, to my delight, a beautifully illustrated great master art book that belonged to a former Latin teacher in the drawer of the large closet in the spare room mysteriously wrapped in cloth. Introducing art and culture to students must be a sin because my parents were on the committee to run him out of town. They told me that a homosexual teacher had loaned it to my oldest brother.
I was not to touch it. I unwrapped the book every Tuesday when my mother was away at Catholic Mother's Circle. I read The Agony and The Ecstasy about Michaelangelo. I was crazy for the book, but I had never seen a single picture of his work. When we went to the world's Fair, I walked backward on the conveyor belt to see the Pietà clearly. I had never been to a fine art museum. I found another Michaelangelo in those pages, but Caravaggio, my lifelong love. I read he painted in a naturalistic style of Baroque. Many Spanish baroque artists were in the book, but nothing like Caravaggio. The first time I saw his painting in the Met in New York City as an adult, I felt shaky inside and weak in the knees. I enjoyed a show in Boston at the sweet Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but museum-hopping in Europe is the real deal.
I graduated from high school in 1969. I knew about the Woodstock concert, but knew there was no way I was going. My parents did not allow me to go to drive-in movies, let alone a four-day rock concert. My father referred to rock as Ubangi music. They were both racists. It was more than just the people that were different were bad; They would call a dog a Jew dog if he barked and belonged to someone Jewish. Thankfully, I still found expanded consciousness. The world was on fire, and I knew I wanted to see it all and enjoy everyone in it.
I secretly admired Mom's ability to drop-kick a football back to the guys, even wearing her suit dress and high heels. She demonstrated this fantastic ability in front of my college dorm. I turned the same crimson as her dress and jacket. When I understood her father's inability to love his family enough to stay straight, I tried to look at her from a different perspective. If I complimented her on anything she might have been good at, she said: So What!
I have remained skittish when someone waves their arms or hands too close to my face, but I feel bad that every move I made caused her such pain. She said she loved children and wished she could have had more, but we were all a constant insult to her.
Things became interesting after leaving home for college. First, Southern Connecticut State was in New Haven, an enormous city compared to Bristol. When I was fourteen, Bristol had four times the national average in unemployment. Half the town moved to Sandusky, Ohio, with the New Departure Ball Bearing Co. My father was a skilled toolmaker and easily transferred to Pratt and Whitney Aircraft. Eventually, the town center became deserted and urban renewal destroyed whatever charm was left. Someone made a lot of money destroying the prettiest buildings and making a shopping mall downtown that was deserted within five years. I think urban renewal in the sixties was mostly about selling debt.
Moving to a city with four colleges was intoxicating. Grace Slick and Little Richard played the homecoming concert. Awesome. My mother spoke to me about football games and wanted to buy me a particular outfit. I was not heading to the football field but to see Sly and the Family Stone in Providence in October. My roommate had a car. Joints were flying around the concert like fireflies at twilight on a hot summer's night. Everyone stood on the arms of the auditorium chairs dancing. I had smoked nothing but the oregano available in my hometown. Freedom was heady.
The next day was the first significant Mobilization to End the War teach-in and demonstration. Across the U.S., college campuses were hotbeds of insurrection. Activists visited campuses for teach-ins about the war and explained to anyone listening that the War in Vietnam was immoral and a manifestation of imperialism. They had to explain to me what imperialism was. My father had warned me not to speak with Communists. Not all the activists were red, only the most interesting ones. I spoke with activists all day. I missed my first compulsory Saturday morning 8AM gym class.
The Mobilization March on Washington came a month later. We got in the car but never made it past the Belt Parkway. It was impossible to move. The Beltway had become a parking lot filled with young people in opposition to the war. We sang, networked, and did everything but get to the march. These were exciting times. Everyone felt they were history in the making. To my great delight, the Black Panthers took over the college. First, there was music and leaflets in the cafeteria. Then they stopped you in the hallways, explaining why there was a moratorium on classes and why we immediately needed to deal with the race problem. They were explaining to me something I knew they were entirely right about.
I missed more than one of my first compulsory 8 AM gym classes. This turned out to be my downfall. I flunked gym. I managed to get an incomplete, but in the spring of 1970, I was not making up gym classes but visiting the green next to the courthouse where the Black Panthers and Bobby Seale stood trial. This was the best education available in the spring of 1970. My father had brought me to the bank and cosigned a loan for school. Flunking out meant never getting back into school in those times. I moved back home and got a job in an insurance company in Hartford, CT.
In the early seventies, a friend handed me a copy of The Good Life by Scott and Helen Nearing. It was a back to the land book that shaped a generation. Friends of mine had other friends who had left mainstream America and lived in the woods. I visited and then moved in.
The cabin was a magical place in the Catskills, hidden in a dark hollow, delineated by a steep mountain and a long low half horse-shoe ridge. There I met the lotus-eaters. I stayed there for four years. The only rules were to be kind, not eat meat or bring it to the house, allow people their privacy and whims, take turns washing dishes, cooking, sweeping, sawing, and chopping wood. Don't judge.
The trail to the house was not very wide, making it easy to lose. Before reaching the cabin, the small track dissipated into multi-creek crossings between an expanse of stinging nettles and thick bush. Spring flooding demanded you hop, full backpack or not, on stepping stones.
The principal room was a large open shed construct with a sleeping loft. There was an exit through the mudroom to the woods. Two small bedrooms with no doors were on either side of the mudroom. My room was big enough for a desk, chair, a closet, and a sleeping loft above. I sewed pillow covers by hand out of dark green velvet with a red corduroy back that looked beautiful against the threadbare oriental rug. We sat on them at meals around the small low table; we propped some pillows on the twin-sized foam mattress draped with an Indian print bedspread. We cuddled in heaps on them. This "couch" was the most sought-after reading spot because of the brightly burning kerosene lamp with a mantle, a long chimney, and wide red milk glass shade mounted on the rough-cut wood wall. Another mantled lamp sat on the table. The cats occupied some of the velvet cushions in the daytime, but we booted them out at night to their caves and outdoor life no matter the cold and snow. Protecting the kerosene lamps from cats was a priority.
We read, sang, walked the ridges, hunted ginseng, meditated, studied, and painted. A neighbor walked up twice a week to teach us Tai Chi.
The chair from my room and the small eating table were the only pieces of furniture in the house. I found a four-inch by four-inch mirror propped against the window ledge. Sufficient pots and pans for cooking, many cast iron pieces used on a direct wood flame, took some scrubbing before being usable. My challenge and joy was a movable sheet-metal oven with two wire racks and a temperature gauge on top of the woodstove. I learned to get the wood stove humming nicely with small hot burning hickory sticks, enough control to make eggplant parmesan, pizza, and an occasional pie. We were hippies, ground our own wheat berries, and put yogurt in pizza crusts instructed by Let's Cook it Right by Adelle Davis. I replaced the Coleman gas stove with a Winnebago propane tank and two countertop burners. We fetched crystal clear water in a pail from the creek that ran down from the spring at the junction between Pleasant and Cross mountains ten feet from our cabin. It was magical.
The cold weather brought lots of surprises and sounds. The Native People of the Catskills called January the month of the cracking trees. The sap freezes hard, and a good wind can crack the sap with a sound as loud as a gun. When agitated, the sound of a screech owl is comparable only to a human baby screaming while murdered. They often make a loud barking sound as well. Sitting in the outhouse on the hill above the cabin in the dark, those owls were terrifying. (One night, in my first month there, I almost killed myself trying to get my pants up and run simultaneously!)
Finding a fox cave or seeing one run in front of you is thrilling and prepossessing. The porcupines were always a part of forest life. I would often get up before dawn, throw on a coat, boots, and grab the broom to give chase. The full-time job of porcupines was gnawing on the siding. The herbivore prickle of porcupines (a group is called a prickle) eats pine needles, trees' inner bark, and rough-cut wood cabins in the winter. After the Historian salted the front steps, they chewed the stairs to little sticks. A friend explained they ate the plywood wall of the outhouse because they love salt. The glue in the plywood tastes salty. We must have added some salt by sitting on the wooden seat because they ate that too.
That winter, the Poet introduced me to Gary Snyder. I especially loved his Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. The poems need to be read aloud and provided the occasion to pack the book, peppermint, a teapot, and run up a mountain to make tea. The Ferlinghetti books and lore reigned supreme that winter with our Poet introducing me to Beats, Michael McClure, Patti Smith, Nikki Giovanni, and Amiri Baraka. I loved Gregory Corso until I found out what a sexist schmuck he was. A brief encounter in Colorado left a foul taste in my mouth for years.
After asking a series of leading questions, our cabin Historian introduced me to dialectics. It changed me. Augmented by the I Ching and Taoism, my perspective changed profoundly. I loved reading history. My friends urged me to read history only from the point of view of Women and Blacks. Feminism was taking hold.
The sound of the creek was sometimes loud, like a cocktail party, happening just up the hill. The party was out of earshot enough not to make out the words. Sometimes you fell through the ice crust to a stream running below your feet. This would happen when you had a big backpack full of groceries. A lot of wiggling and pushing could sometimes get you free enough to climb out without taking the pack off. The snow would drift, making you lose the trail. We bought a toboggan that made grocery delivery and hauling wood much less grueling. People came for dinner and stayed the week.
A map appeared on my bed in the spring, telling me where I might find treasure. I checked the hollow tree daily for love poems. I was living in a Marquez novel. A dreamy, satisfying surreal existence tucked into the forest connected to a seasonally drivable road by the slim mile-long path.
Although I never wanted to leave, the experience told me I needed to travel to the city to learn. The Historian often woke me by reading passages from a Baedeker guide to hill stations in India from 1906.
My parents visited the cabin once, but I was not home. I worked in Woodstock at jewelry making and repair as an apprentice to a friend. They visited Woodstock and walked around until they found the jewelry shop, but a large dog was on the porch. My mother shouted loudly.
"Jerry Pearlman, come out here. I am Carol Skelskey's mother. I want to know where she is, what drugs she is on, and who she is sleeping with."
Jerry came out and chased the dog off the porch. He was a sweet and shy type of person, an excellent craftsman, and very private. He wore his long hair in a ponytail to the middle of his back. He smiled warmly, telling her I made little money, so I had taken another job for the last few days. He didn't expect to see me until Monday. He informed her I was a very healthy vegetarian, ate only organic foods, and did not take drugs and that he would never intrude on my privacy by asking me who I was sleeping with. He invited her to see a few of my rings in the showcase. She told him they were shit.
They left Woodstock and headed to the dirt road to the lower cabin, where the trail began to our house. They ran into our friend, who occupied the small cottage at the end of the road. We had recently taken a job sanding the floors of a large house and putting polyurethane on the floors. I had dumped the things from my trunk into the back of his truck in order to fit the rented floor sander in the trunk, then left for Kingston to return it.
My friend almost had a heart attack when they drove up and said I am Carol's mother. I want to know where she is, what drugs she is on, and who she is sleeping with. He had my things in his hand. He explained that we had taken a job, and I was returning the equipment. Again, he reported that I was a healthy, happy person and did not take drugs. Evidently, they had also gone to the Fabulous furniture store where my last boyfriend worked but did not find him either. I was twenty-three, soon to be twenty-four. I had lived away from home since I was nineteen.
When I arrived back at the lower cabin, a large group of my friends was waiting for me. They had swapped stories about my mother and said, Carol, we met your mother and were not very impressed. Then, sharing marijuana with laughter, they related their encounters with my mother. Rita left the impression that she was pretty ferocious. None of us considered marijuana any more of a drug than coffee.
The Historian let me stay in his family's large apartment in Manhattan while his mom was in Arizona for the winter. The window facing 87th Street was noisy. I longed for the deep forest. He handed me Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, another piece of the gay education begun much earlier in the cabin. The apartment was enormous and filled with bookcases filled with treasures. The next was The Fire Next Time that peeled the color lens from my inexperienced eyes. Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life followed. We walked through the village down to Delancey Street with lovely lectures about historical New York many evenings. I suddenly saw New York in 1795 when Yellow fever never moved north of Reade St., and Washington Square Park was a potter's field dug up so that the beautiful row houses on Washington St would have a lovely park. I learned where the hanging tree was in the park's northwest corner. I had a hard time getting the directionals right, but the Historian insisted. Recently, the Parks Department determined that the hanging tree is now around 350 years old, among the oldest trees in Manhattan.
I moved to Barrow Street. I grew to love the city. I have danced in every part of it, to every kind of music. My favorite is salsa and mambo. I met Ray dancing. Jeff, now six foot four, came to the city to meet Ray. He brought a bicycle that he had put together for me. He jokingly made those kinds of statements but with the threat of truth to my sweetheart. If you don't treat my sister right, you will have to answer to me. He could see I was crazy about him.
When I first brought Ray home to Connecticut, I had warned him about my parent's racism. He is Dominican and does not consider himself black. But, to his surprise, my parents included Italians and Jews in their jigaboo (black) category. Still, he wanted to meet them. So after a reasonably successful visit, Ray gave my mother a hug and a big kiss on the cheek.
She said, "Oh! I have never been kissed by a black man before!"
As charmingly as possible, Ray said: "Well, now you have been kissed by an Arab, an Indian, a Black man, and a White man all rolled into one."
When we got into the car, he said: "I was going to tell her, you better start running Rita, because you have never been chased by a Black man either!"
At least he could laugh about it all. In the end, Ray had my mother charmed. She showed him how she could dance the Meringue. She said, you just drag your leg like a drunk or wounded soldier. Despite her description, she could move with great rhythm. She always asked about him, still checking if I considered having babies that would come out the wrong color. We argued about racism constantly.
I maintained with both of my parents that you have no choice but to change when you believe something and then find out it is wrong. I am a child of the 60s. Motown, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Viet Nam, and Angela Davis formed my consciousness. Union democrats, yet deeply racist, the civil rights movement had not altered my parent's views. They knew I smoked marijuana. Mom thought my DNA was altered. I certainly could not be her daughter.
A few years later, my mother started suffering many minor strokes. We were unaware at first, but the side effects became very visible. Eventually, my mother's dementia was terrible at night, and the family knew Dad would never sleep again if we had tried to keep her at home. My father, ever faithful, went to the nursing home every day at 10 AM, left for lunch at noon, washed and ironed her clothes, returned at 4 PM, and stayed through her dinner until he tucked her into bed at 7:30. His domain had previously not included household chores. He would run cans of beans under hot water and never cooked anything. He turned out to be a wiz at ironing and cleaning. I took the train to Bristol every nine or ten days from New York City so that we could all go out to lunch. Getting my mother into a wheelchair to a restaurant was quite a production, but she and my father loved its normalcy. I stayed overnight when I could or headed directly back to as my work demanded. Ray was very supportive and helped as much as he could, accompanying me from time to time.
I bought marijuana from someone I had known for over twenty years. I was close to fifty years old. I sold some but considered it more like buying cases of wine and splitting it with my friends to defray the cost. Three months after my last purchase, my dealer turned me in with twenty other people. We were all charged under the RICO law. Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations act. I never even met one of my co-defendants. I was faced with ten years in prison unless I could make a deal. I had no one to turn in except my close friends and workmates. I was made to confess how long and how much marijuana I had purchased. The prosecutor decided how much I sold and how long my sentence would be—eighteen months in Prison Camp. I was assured I would be out in sixteen months with good behavior.
I had never even had a traffic violation. The government charged me with possession of 66 grams of marijuana, with the intent to sell, and the conspiracy to distribute two thousand pounds of marijuana. I did have a little over two ounces, but my friend's dealer that he also turned evidence against had two thousand pounds when the DEA knocked on his door. The Federal police charged all of us with the distribution of 2000 pounds. The disparity in the amounts of drugs and money in our individual possession was significant. When they arrested me, I lived in a fifth-floor walk-up with a bathtub in the kitchen and a personal toilet across the hall. I had $400.00 that Ray had given me for paint for our new apartment on the upper west side. They confiscated that. It took an entire year of pretrial surveillance before the hearing and self-surrender.
The court allowed me to visit my parents out of the state of jurisdiction. So I continued to be there like clockwork, every ten days. I worked and reported all income and activity, going downtown to the jail for monthly drug tests. I repeatedly tried to tell my father, but my eldest brother told me no, you'll kill him. Honesty is the best policy, but I lied. The lies robbed me of my self-worth and dignity. In the middle of it all, my father asked me to make plans and invitations for the celebration of their sixty-second wedding anniversary. We hired an excellent restaurant, and my mother had a significant rally on that day, recognizing many of the fifty friends and family that came.
Until the day she died, my mother blamed me for everything. I was not the girl she wanted. With a quarter of her brain working, she told me,
"I know you sold my house, took the money, and put me in this horrid hotel."
It was hard for me to leave because I felt responsible to my parents, both in their late eighties. Prison doesn't wait.
I told my father and my entire extended family that I would work on the border between Nepal and Bhutan with the United Nations Refugee Project. I thought he might cave in to pressure and have a heart attack If I told him the truth. It was both plausible and had been a distant offer. Dad depended on me, but my youngest brother was moving his family into my father's house. I was there so often. Every time I tried to say something, a circumstance would scream at me, don't do it. I could not hurt him.
My mother died a month after I entered Danbury Federal Prison Camp. My lawyers had assured me that the regulations allowed me to leave the prison camp on my recognizance to attend the funeral because of my nonviolent conviction. However, the prison administration denied me the furlough because I was not there long enough to earn community release. I visited a counselor who offered me a day release with an armed guard. It would embarrass my father, and it might have made my mother roll over in her coffin and jump out of it more likely. The price was the rental of a car and my guard's full-day salary. Plus, time and a half if it went beyond eight hours. After several more consultations with my so-called counselor, they retracted the offer as against the rules. It was easier for me to stick with the lie. This was all deeply against my nature. My close friends knew me for being too honest.
When you make a call from prison, a recording says this phone call is being made by an inmate of a federal prison. You may decline this call.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons records all calls. I went to sister Rafferty, the prison chaplain, and explained my lie to my parents. She allowed me to call from her phone without the prison introduction at least once a month. She tried to reassure me that some lies protect people, and I had made the right decision. I cried before and after each call.
Ray arrived at the visiting room the day after the funeral. Because my number ended in an odd digit, my visiting day was Saturday that week. It made me feel relieved he was at the funeral in my stead. I wanted to hear the details of the day. When I saw him, I sank into his arms. My knees felt weak, and I was halfway to trouble already. They allow one hug and one kiss on arrival and on leaving. The guard immediately noticed our lachrymal kiss. We discreetly held hands under the table, our knees touching. Ray put his arm around me and kissed my forehead when I cried.
The visiting room C.O. yelled not to touch during visits. When the C.O. came over to us, I was so startled that I offered that my mother had died. Prison etiquette with a guard is first to apologize and say you will never do it again. She did not care if my mother had just risen from the dead; she made sure that we were sitting far across the table from each other with no possibility of physical contact on pain of getting a shot. A shot is a warning; three will land you in the Special Housing Unit. By now, I knew what the SHU was, solitary confinement, but I had not yet heard about shots. Everything gets explained later by some knowledgeable and kind incarcerated woman in my new world.
I was unaware that the person in khakis, sitting next to the C.O. was a snitch. Her job of sitting with the guard was for those ostracized women that loved to get their sisters into trouble. I was wondering why all the scrutiny from her. They chose me and several others for a strip search on the way out. They selected about ten people for this special pat-down. I had never been so privileged to go through the whole thing, squat and cough included on the way back from a visit. Not all the guards were so rigorous. Ms. Donnel was the type of person you felt sure beat her dog. I wondered about her relationship with her mother.
On Valentine's day Ray took a chance and brought (smuggled in) Belgium chocolates. After months of incarceration, Ray and I were keenly aware of who the snitches were. So we scouted the room thoroughly; when we were sure no one was looking, Ray would push dark chocolate with a hazelnut praline center into my mouth. He followed this with raspberry cream, all in the same deep dark chocolate I love. I was almost falling over from the chocolate high. Then came the Satans and the Bonaparte, both deliciously creamy dark, dark chocolate.
My friends' had baked' a peach cheesecake made with jam, peaches, brown cow cheese wedges, and coffee mate artificial creamer for my birthday. The cake was rich and made with love, but the chocolates reminded me of the city and everything I missed. Seven months in and eight to go. A lot of meditation. Bless you, Thich Nhat Han.
When people ask about how you survive in prison, there are so many connections that sustained me. Sweet women offering friendship, a strong yoga practice, weekly visits from Ray, visits from my friends from the cabin who are my chosen family, and smiling is the answer. I never mentioned the women from the cabin because they were too essential and deserved their own pages. One Yogini primarily has supported and sustained me since I was eighteen. We celebrated fifty years of friendship.
One of my favorite Buddhist stories is about a monk who decided to meditate in a rowboat and rowed close to the lake's center. He took some deep breaths and fell into deep meditation. Suddenly he was aroused by a boat hitting his rowboat. The monk's anger rose forcefully.
"This is a large lake. Why is someone deliberately disturbing me?"
Finally, he opened his eyes and realized that the boat was empty and it was his own anger bothering him. Prison is filled with empty boats; you must find your sunshine, not anger, to survive.
Carolina Soto (third from left in the back row) in summer 2021 with members of the Re/Creation Collective
One of “the real women of Orange Is the New Black,” Carolina Soto is one of the founding members of the Re/Creation writing workshop at Restoration Plaza. Unlike the fictionalized Yoga Jones, Carolina has a long history of work in social justice and advocacy, and is a seasoned painter and visual artist. Since beginning her work in the Re/Creation writing workshop at Restoration Plaza in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Carolina has increased her confidence and aptitude with both the written and spoken word, composing speeches and essays for her advocacy work and as well as written memoir. In particular, her essays and memoirs illustrate her vast capacity for empathy in her descriptions of people with whom she shared time inside. She now splits her time between living in New York City and the Dominican Republic.