My father recalls the day of my birth as beginning in a red sports car tearing down a freeway in Los Angeles. My mother just says, shaking a crown of curls toward her face, that she was in labor with me for thirty-six hours. Then there is my other father. The man who—by some grace of universal coincidence—entered my life one month after my birth. He says they called me the terror of the night world: he says he was the only one who could quiet me.

I grew up in the middle of a political organization called the Weather Underground. Well, that’s not entirely true. I grew up in the middle of an organization called Prairie fire, which grew from the belly of the Weather Underground. But my father was a Weatherman. I didn’t even know what this meant until very recently.

It is difficult to know where to begin. I wish I had a ream of paper and that you and I could lay it over the entire floor of my loft. I would draw out the houses and the people and their parents and the children and all of the things that must be understood before we go on. But this is not a memoir.

We went round the side of the building to the steps. They led down, beneath the level where we walked, to an entrance door that was made of solid metal save a centered glass square window in its upper half. I know there were papers to be filled out and we must have emptied our pockets into a plastic tray. I can imagine my father’s keys, the whole ring of them, the nickel-plated bottle opener, and the worn leather keychain in the shape of a dog tag whose edges, once sewn inward, now flayed away from the seam. We passed through a metal detector and then through two heavy doors that had to be buzzed from a booth behind all the glass. The first thing I remember is the hallway and the lights. A long track of fluorescent lights extended down the length of the ceiling, bathing the walls and people alike with an unnatural pulse. A male guard, armed with two pistols, one on each hip, led us. Then to my right was a window and on the other side Silvia.

My father had been planning this trip to Kentucky for months. I was seven years old and had never been further south than Los Angeles. And though we were going to visit a woman in prison, I looked forward to what I thought the south would be like.

My father was a carpenter. He rose early, and by the time we were being roused from our bunks for school, my father was already spooning his boiled eggs from a sauce pan on the range and beginning the work of building his three-layer sandwiches that were to be the main course of his lunchtime meal.

He was a big man. His wiry body had widened at the middle with age, but his hands had always been heavy. His nails were thick, ridged and wide, and they curled like caps over his fingertips. These mornings, before the rest of the collective was up, before the house came alive with the family getting ready to move out to their various day jobs as printers, teachers, hospital workers, secretaries, I watched my father’s heavy fingers wrap his meal in waxed paper and I imagined them, at noon, covered in a mix of dirt and food, rising and lowering from his mouth as he ate.

If they asked, I was to tell anyone—my teachers at school, my grandmother back in New York, anyone—that my father and I were going down south from California for a wedding. He told me we would go to a nice restaurant one night and that I could bring back a placemat and a book of matches to show my class. “It’s like when I went to Libya,” he told me, “just don’t be specific.”

It was coming down hard when we stepped off the small propeller plane in Lexington. My father moved quickly ahead of me all in a rush. I just kept looking forward, careful to keep the land of his back in sight. He didn’t turn his neck once, just kept right on striking until he got to the car rental counter.

The rain was coming down too fast and hard for the wipers. And my father pushed his upper body close to the windshield so that his face was almost right up against it. “I can’t see, baby girl,” he said, “turn down the radio, okay?” I had his spiral bound book in my lap with the directions to the house of a woman he had arranged for us to stay with.

Kate’s house was small and on two floors. The living room was laid with a great, heavy rug, and against the walls stood bookshelves of different heights. The ends of the books stuck out uneven. Some came out past the edge of the cases, the paper of their bindings peeled and worn. Others stood upright and formal, their backs hard and straight, reflecting the light that hung from the center of the ceiling. I had just begun to read books on my own, and I remember liking the thought of one room holding so many, along with the notion that I could pick any one of them up to read.

My father had told me about the prison Silvia had been moved to. The family had been talking about it in my own living room over the past six months. They were calling it a control unit. I knew there were two other political prisoners there, two other women I knew, and that there had been national and international protests against the conditions. They were working to shut it down, to push the government to move the women to another facility. They used words like torture and inhumane. All I knew was that my godmother Silvia was there, that she had written me in her same strange script, that she couldn’t wait to see my face with her eyes, that she knew we were coming soon, that she asked me to enclose my latest short story about the girl looking out the car window, over the gray railing of the Bay Bridge to a boat moving slowly across the water.

What I remember most about this house in Kentucky is the backyard. My own backyard was nothing. Wild onions grew across the small span of grass and I remember the stink of them on my hands after pulling and digging all day. Around the borders of my yard stemmed Calla Lilies, which as a child seemed to me the most elegant flower. Their milk cones curled at the edge and that serious yellow stamen jutted straight from it’s waxy, pale center.

This yard in Kentucky went out and then further. A number of trees stood in the very back, and the ground was all weeds and long grass, sticks, rocks, and dirt.

My father woke me at five-thirty the next morning. I had been dreaming hard and fast. Someone had been chasing me and, when they had finally caught up, had taken my hands into their mouth and swiftly removed each of my fingers. While dreams like these evoked such a pure sense of panic in me, I often wondered if I didn’t somehow will them. I so enjoyed waking from these kinds of dreams, my heart beating out in such a flood of relief, the realization that whatever terror lurking in the day to come had nothing on the thick-limbed fear of my sleep.

“Get up,” my father said. He was over me. I pointed my toes out of the blankets, looked past my father and around the room I was staying in. It was both formal and foreign, the only comfort being the black outline of branches shadowed onto one of the walls.

“It’s still dark outside,” I said, “come on five more minutes.”

“No,” my father said, “we have got to get to the prison.”

We drove away from the house and into Lexington. My father parked on the street and started looking for a restaurant. By now, it must have been seven o’clock and the only thing open on the block was a small diner.

“I don’t want to eat in there, I’m not even hungry,” I said.

One year later, after the control unit was closed and we were on our way down to Florida to visit Silvia at the prison in Mariana where she had been moved, he would ask me what I could remember about Lexington.

My father was clenching his jaw, he pulled at one side of his trousers and said, “This place isn’t like other jails you’ve been to. There are no vending machines, no nothing. And I am not gonna hear you complain that you’re hungry, that you don’t feel good, that you’re stomach hurts, whatever. You are going to eat.”

I remember looking up at my father. It was already hot this early in the day and the skin at the bones beneath his eyes was starting to shine. He wouldn’t look back at me, only placed the basket of his hand, lightly on the crown of my head and walked us in.

The diner was full-up with people. My father went to the counter and ordered for both of us. Then we sat down at a formica table fitted with two metal rung chairs padded in plastic and waited. A bell sounded and my father got up to get our food. The paper plates gave and settled in his hands and he held two plastic forks, endwise, in his mouth. He set my plate in front of me. There were grits in a greasy heap capped with a single slice of melted American cheese, three links of sausage, two eggs, wet yolks up, and four pieces of white bread sogged all the way through with margarine.

My mother did not cook like this. At home, we ate oatmeal with golden raisins for breakfast. She made pizzas with carrots and broccoli, and for desert she baked apples or pears in the oven.

My mother had left the suburbs of Long Island for the city when she was sixteen. She left the long wooden dining room table, the silver menorahs, the thick canvas drapes, the boiled chicken and poached vegetables, the marble black and white pound cake, the framed front covers of old New York Posts. My mother left all of this, moved to the city, and became an activist. That’s where she met Silvia.

“Good girl,” My father said. “Alright then, have some juice.” He took up the coffee cup from its saucer and drank. He had sweat coming out of every pore in his face and a little yellow stream of egg had run and then dried at the corner of his mouth.

Breakfast behind us, we headed for the outskirts of Lexington, the prison. After the security check and the click of the locks we started down a long hallway with a door at the end of it, and just as we entered the face of a woman came up into the window. She saw us and brought her hand up to wave. “Wave back,” my father said, “It’s Alejandrina.” A man appeared behind her and then they were gone.

To our left was a room, filled only with a metal table and three chairs. Silvia was already smoking and she didn’t smile. She was wearing a gray-blue smock and her hair had been cut since the last time I saw her. This place evoked such a pure sense of unease. It was quiet and sterile, and someone my father and I loved lived there all the time.

“Ona,” Silvia said. Her eyes were the brightest milk blue I had ever seen and they were different. My father’s eyes turned from light brown to yellow and they could be deeply kind or daggers. My mother’s were just dark brown and went on and on. But Silvia’s pierced out. They were not unkind but they were looking straight in a direct line through most of what normal people saw and on just into you. They would not hide themselves. And I loved them, and her, for this. There was no door to the room and the same guard that had walked us down the hallway now sat just on the other side of the glass, watching.

I knew that Silvia was watched most of the time and I wanted desperately to turn my eyes on this guard, to show him that I understood, but I just climbed up into Silvia’s lap and went to smell her neck.

I think I slept for most of the visit or pretended to. My father thinks I just shut down in the place. One year later, after the control unit was closed and we were on our way down to florida to visit Silvia at the prison in Mariana where she had been moved, he would ask me what I could remember about Lexington.

I remember putting my nose to the fold of skin at her neck as she lowered her head to pull out another stick of tobacco from the box. I remember the smell of plant growth, just as it is cut. Not grass, for that scent is a warm and nearly honeyed thing, but stalks, fervent and sticky, this kind of green.

He would shake his head, say, “Girl, do you know we were in the basement of that prison for eight hours? Do you know that your eyes were open? You were up in Silvia’s lap, body in a knot against her the whole time.”

Isn’t it curious how you can do this? How you can go so deeply inside yourself if you must? My father and Silvia discussed politics and she smoked the entire time. I don’t remember leaving, only the house when we got back.

There was some sports game my father was interested in watching. There was another man staying at the house, Silvia’s lawyer. My only visual memory of him is in a towel, coming right out of the bathroom, the steam from his shower thick behind him.

I went out to the yard and sat under one of the trees. There were fallen twigs everywhere. And I could see the stars up and lighted against the night. I picked a twig up and began to peel the bark from it. Underneath shone the cream-white heart of the wood. I went to the room my father was staying in and took his pocketknife from the nightstand next to the bed. I went back to the yard and took up my twig. I gripped the red handle and pushed the blade down the stick, the bark curled off then spiraled to the ground. Once the stick had been shaved all the way, I went to sharpen the end into a point. When I was done, I looked at my spear. I thought I would give it to my father, that it was just the sort of thing he would love. Satisfied, I went to fold the blade of the knife back into itself. It snapped right down, enclosing my index finger between the blade and the handle. My heart started. There was blood everywhere. And somehow I made it into the kitchen where my father was at the sink running some silverware under the tap.

He turned quick when he heard me and looked to my hands.

“Shit,” he said, “Oh God.”

My father came for me and undid the knife. He lifted me up to the sink and put my gashed finger under the tap. I only started crying then.

My father and I did not go to the prison the next day. He let me sleep until eight and then we got into the car for a drive. There were fields out the window of the car, and we went just slow enough for me to notice the muscles in the horses’ legs roll in waves as they moved. I imagine my father looked from the road to the back of my head to the folds of gauze wrapped round my finger. “It was just an accident,” he said, and I turned to him so that I could set my eyes with his, “that your mother and I are not where Silvia is.” He kept on driving, way out till we got to a Shaker village just outside of Lexington.

There, we watched a woman send a long piece of string down into a vat of wax over and over. I kept my eyes on her hands and that string until the last lifting.