‘The Hill’: A daughter’s novel, a mother’s sentence

Harriet Clark

By ROBERT BRUM 

Each Saturday morning, 8-year-old Suzanna Klein arrives at the gates of Hillcrest prison, queuing up to visit her mother.

She knows the routine, passing through metal detectors and guards she’s come to know well.

Once inside the visitors room, Suzanna heads into the Children’s Center, sometimes waiting minutes or even hours among the other children until their parents finally arrive.

“You made it,” her mother beams, clutching Suzanna’s head to her chest “so hard I could not breathe or hear,” writes Harriet Clark in her hypnotic debut novel, “The Hill.”

As the years of her mother’s life sentence unspool, the two struggle to sustain their bond within the confines of their circumstances.

Her mother, we learn, is in prison for a bank robbery committed when Suzanna was just a baby: An attempt to steal from the rich and give to the poor that went grievously awry, explains Suzanna’s grandfather, who drives her to her weekly visits.

The morning of the robbery, Suzanna’s mother waited to hear even as little as a cry from her infant daughter to make her change her mind. None came, so she left.

Her grandmother, who refuses to visit the prison, refers to the robbery as “What your mother did.” She takes Suzanna to the bank, telling her she’s been there before as an infant — when her mother was planning the crime.

“

The Hill” is a coming-of-age tale seen through Suzanna’s eyes as she navigates between her mother’s life in prison, her grandmother’s disapproval and her own life as she grows into adulthood.

It’s not a memoir, although the author’s acknowledgments spell out that her mother, Judith Clark, served 38 years in prison, mostly in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

The elder Clark was sentenced to life following a murder conviction for her role as a getaway driver in the infamous 1981 Brink’s robbery in Rockland County, during a failed scheme to finance a revolutionary uprising.

The tragedy left a security guard and two police officers dead, losses that continue to be deeply felt in the Nyack community and are commemorated annually on Oct. 20, near the spot of the slayings just off the New York State Thruway.

Judith Clark, who defiantly maintained her radical beliefs during her trial, later apologized and expressed remorse, turning her focus to service projects behind bars and building a relationship with her daughter.

At Bedford Hills, she developed programs at the Children’s Center for mothers and their children and mentored new mothers living in the prison nursery. 

Judith founded the prison’s AIDS counseling program and helped rebuild a defunded college program, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees while becoming a doula and chaplain. She trained puppies to become service dogs, some of which were put to work for law enforcement agencies. 

She was paroled in 2019 after her sentence was commuted by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a decision met with outrage from the victims’ families and law enforcement and praise from advocates who cited her rehabilitation and contributions during incarceration.

Now director of a nonprofit working for the release of incarcerated domestic violence survivors, Judith Clark has maintained ties to the Bedford Hills prison community. She was among invitees attending an April performance of “Sister Act: The Musical” performed by a cast of the prison’s incarcerated women and presented by the Purchase-based Rehabilitation Through the Arts.

That warm spring evening, some 200 people encountered what visitors to New York’s only maximum security women's prison go through: pat-downs, metal detectors and UV hand-stamps before transiting through a series of barbed-wire enclosures.

The path leading up to the performance in the prison gym may have felt like a hill to a young visitor like Harriet Clark.

Jermaine Archer, RTA’s executive director, called Judith Clark “a true representation of transformation. She’s a role model, she’s a mother figure. She is directly responsible for a lot of the programs that impacted me.”

Archer added, “Statistics show that people who maintain relationships with their families during incarceration have lower recidivist rates and lower incidents of misbehavior while they’re in prison.”

In a New York Times interview, Harriet Clark called herself “very lucky that my mother was incarcerated in a facility that tried to facilitate relationships between parents and their children” that “tried, as much as possible, to have the prison still fit inside the child’s reality in a way.”

The prison continues to support maintaining and strengthening family relationships, according to the state Corrections Department, through a nursery run in partnership with the nonprofit organization Hour Children and a family reunion program.

Charles Moore, director of programs and operations at Rehabilitation Through the Arts, praised Harriet Clark for bringing the “forgotten voice” of incarcerated women to the page. He pointed out that although there were more men than women in American prisons, the number of incarcerated women continues to grow at a faster rate.

“When people think of incarceration, they very rarely will include women or women’s stories in their research, in their talks about incarceration,” Moore said. “It's really always focused on men because men are the larger population.”

Women “need just as much attention if not more than the men do, because most of the time they are leaving children behind,” he added.

“The Hill” by Harriet Clark, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is available at Bedford Books and the Katonah Reading Room. 

Robert Brum is a freelance journalist who writes about music, history and culture in the Hudson Valley.