JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 1963: One of the women in our holding cell was a beautiful young prostitute named Georgiabelle, who was arrested after the police officer had sex with her. She couldn’t understand why I was there. “For real?” she kept asking. “You in here for taking pictures?” There were twenty women in the cell, all of us waiting to be arraigned. A doctor had given me a very rough medical exam and I had bled on my smock, so I tried to remain sitting as much as I could. Georgiabelle knew a long-timer who had protected her the last time she’d been arrested. By the end of Saturday, she’d used her connections to get me a sanitary belt and napkin. I thanked her so much that she became embarrassed and stayed away.

Occasionally, a guard opened the door to the holding cell and said we could walk down the hall, which had a small window at one end that looked onto Sixth Avenue. It was so strange to see the city through the square hole in that thick brick. Cars passing, children walking home from school, mothers shopping, men on their lunch hour. Sometimes people stood outside, beneath the windows of the prison, calling in. Fathers and mothers and sisters and children. They knew the daily schedule, knew when their loved one would be standing on the other side of that window looking out. “Freddie, that you?” yelled a woman standing beside me. A boy waved from the sidewalk below. “You tell Yolanda to keep her nose clean, you hear? I prob’ly be in here least a month this time, and it’s on you to make sure she behave.”

Squirrel, the night I was bleeding and had to leave you in your crib to return to the hospital was more frightening than anything I could have imagined. But terrified as I was, I knew that either the bleeding would be stopped or I’d die: one way or another, my fear would end. Separated from everyone and everything I loved, with no idea when I’d be allowed to return, my fear was fathomless.

69. Loose tooth, Brooklyn, 1961

Not a Ro-Ro shot, as you might think. True, the other end of the string attached to my tooth is tied to a door beyond the photo’s left edge, which is being closed by an unseen person; but that person is Kaja, not Lillian. And there I am, just left of center, caught mid-flinch: the string leading out of my mouth is taut as a tightrope as the door slams shut.

Once again, my mother went for the wide shot in order to get the doll dangling off the edge of my bed and the clothes dangling off the chair. Everything here is hanging by a thread.