Harriet Clark spent a lifetime visiting her mother, an ex-Weather Underground member, in prison: ‘The US has always used family separation to destabilize’

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. 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. 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.

Harriet, born in 1980, was 11 months old when her mother was arrested. In a 2012 New York Times profile , written when she was still in prison, Judith Clark described how her toddler would cry at not being able to touch her mother during prison visits – physical contact was against the rules. Her mother is in prison for a crime that resembles Judith Clark’s. “No one knows more than my mother that the mother in the book is not her,” Clark says. “I didn’t pull anything from my mother’s prison,” she says.

Every week, Suzanna makes the long trip from her grandparents’ Manhattan apartment to the fictional women’s prison Hillcrest. The prison is atop a hill, a hill that Suzanna must ascend to see her mother, and then later descend when she leaves her mother behind. “My mother and I lived on the timeless peak of a time-bound hill,” says Suzanna. “[The prison] is like the great holding container of her life,” Clark says. “I wanted very much to avoid the horrors of prison we’ve become adjusted to,” Clark says.

In the 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. Harriet Clark spent a lifetime visiting her mother, an ex-Weather Underground member, in prison: ‘The US has always used family separation to destabilize’