http://www.brynmawr.edu/Alumnae/bulletin/letsu01.htm
Letter from Kathy Boudin '65
For the last 19 years I have lived in prison, quietly making a personal journey that has helped me to face the tragedy I am responsible for, understanding what allowed me to be involved, and building a new sense of life and what is worth doing. I want to thank you who have been with me throughout, who have helped me survive and learn to rebuild. When I stood in front of the judge almost two decades ago, I expressed my remorse. That was the beginning of a long process of facing what I had done. I want to describe some of what I have learned.
Do I feel what I did was wrong? Yes. I want to be clear. I know that I am responsible for a terrible thing. I feel nothing but remorse and shame about my involvement. I will live with this for the rest of my life.
I pled guilty to robbery and felony murder for the death of a man who was a Brinks' guard. My role was riding in a getaway car parked three miles from the robbery. Although I did not shoot nor hurt anyone physically and was never armed, I live every day with the knowledge that I am fully responsible-responsible because I supported the idea that this misguided robbery would make a positive difference, responsible because I was in a getaway car, and morally responsible for all the tragic consequences that resulted. Three people died; others suffered physically and emotionally; families were ripped apart; a whole town shaken. Now, in spite of my dream of helping to create a more humane society, I am forever connected to the deaths of innocent people. This connection has change me. I will never be associated again with any act that places human lives at risk.
Part of what I share with other women here is that aching question, "Why?" Why did I make the life choices that brought me to prison? As I was growing up, I wanted to be a doctor, to help, to heal. Later, I was torn over whether to apply to medical school or law school. I thought the problems were social, and I wanted to heal society. I spent years working as a community educator feeling a responsibility to use the privileges of my background to help others. I felt the urgency to solve the problems that moved so many of my generation, but I became fixed on being certain that I had the correct solution, and I made some seriously wrong choices. Over time, I lost sight of the goal of healing.
After 12 years of living underground, I became rigidly committed to a grand vision of improving society that was not connected to the day-to-day realities of people. I felt strongly about existing problems, but I was seriously out of touch with how to work on them. By the time of my arrest, I was desperately trying to redefine myself and my life, to make major changes, but I did not carry it through. I have asked myself over and over again how could I, an adult, a person who was educated, a woman who saw myself guided by ideals of helping humanity, have gone out that day? I never wanted anyone to get hurt, yet the risks should have been obvious to me. My sense of the world and of myself was distorted.
People were killed and injured and I abandoned my son, whom I loved, at the baby-sitter. Now, after years of soul searching, I can see that a combination of my personal issues, wrong thinking, and the impact of years of isolation contributed to my moral failures.
After my arrest, I had to start over and sort out what had gone wrong. I committed myself to my son and that was the start of a better path of living. It began to put me back in touch with reality. Something inside of me changed. I went back to basics. My son became a life-line, and he has remained for all these years an anchor to my own heart, and to other people's hearts as well.
At Bedford Hills I began to create a new life. I dedicated myself to working with our Children's Center. With women here, I've learned about how to love and support our children from a distance and how to help other mothers do this. I went through years when our whole community faced fear, loss, and death caused by AIDS. Together, we developed a peer community health program to cope with the AIDS epidemic. I have worked with women committed to acquire a college education, and with them moved educators on the outside to help build a wonderful four-year college program. I find satisfaction in the day-to-day ways that people find strength in their abilities, and being part of this: teaching women to read and write, to communicate with their children, and learning about dying and living with dignity. I have known wonderful people-inmates and staff-and learned from them and with them.
Fortunately, I've been in a prison that believes people can change, and can make a difference. Here, I live with many other inmates who, like myself, have grown to become teachers and peer counselors, coming together to solve shared problems. It is through these experiences and relationships that my own change and growth have come about. My experience at Bedford leaves me both hopeful and inspired by the enormous potential of people. I believe that there are lessons from our work here that would be useful in the broader society. My opportunities to learn, to get a master's degree in adult education, to study psychology and social work, have helped me reorient myself and my goals.
I know it is impossible to make up for the suffering I helped to cause; I have tried to give back to a community of people, to live my life in a life-giving way.
My work, while the source of much hope, has also taken me in another direction. It deepens over and over my grasp of the human sorrow and loss that I am tied to. Sitting with young women dying of AIDS, creating a quilt for those in our community who are no longer with us, I face the deaths for which I am responsible. As I work with mothers on rebuilding their relationships with the children they left, I am overwhelmed by my own responsibility for leaving a group of children with no hope of ever seeing their own fathers again. Now I can ask: what if it were my father, my husband, or my son who had been killed or hurt? What would I feel? I understand the rage that the victims' families may feel towards me. If I could just turn the clock back and make things different; if only I could do that.
As I look back, I feel enormous regret. My life's journey will always include that day 20 years ago, and all the people who suffer because of it. I think about how much has changed in the last two decades. Some of you have become grandparents, have moved to new cities, created meaningful work, probably changed inside yourself. I know I have. I feel the preciousness of life, its shortness, its complexity. I don't know whether it is because of my growing older, being rooted in a community, or the lessons I continue to learn from the tragedy I helped to create, I recognize limitations, yet find satisfaction in what I can do. While looking back, I am also looking ahead. I think eagerly of using what I've learned here to give back to society. I imagine rejoining you who have been with me during these years. I hope that you will write back and will become part of my life. Others from the College have helped me to know that in examining the past, there is hope; and that in passing on hard learned wisdom to our children, our friends, and others around us, there is the possibility of repair and renewal.
KATHY BOUDIN '65
OUR SKIRT You were forty-five and I was fourteen when you gave me the skirt. "It's from Paris!" you said as if that would impress me who at best had mixed feelings about skirts.
But I was drawn by that summer cotton with splashes of black and white--like paint dabbed by an eager artist. I borrowed your skirt and it moved like waves as I danced at a ninth grade party. Wearing it date after date including my first dinner with a college man. I never was much for buying new clothes, once I liked something it stayed with me for years.
I remember the day I tried ironing your skirt, so wide it seemed to go on and on like a western sky. Then I smelled the burning and, crushed, saw that I had left a red-brown scorch on that painting.
But you, Mother, you understood because ironing was not your thing either. And over the years your skirt became my skirt until I left it and other parts of home with you.
Now you are eighty and I am almost fifty. We sit across from each other in the prison visiting room. Your soft gray-think hair twirls into style. I follow the lines on your face, paths lit by your eyes until my gaze comes to rest on the black and white, on the years that our skirt has endured.
Kathy Boudin