Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,13
has moved with me three times. It’s the surface on which I’ve written millions of words: more than twenty books, reviews, essays, love letters, several thousand emails to my friend Tina during the years of our near-daily epistolary exchange, a few hundred thousand other emails, some eulogies and obituaries, including those of both of my parents, a desk at which I did the homework of a student and then a teacher, a portal onto the world and my platform for reaching out and for diving inward.
A year or so before she gave me the desk, my friend was stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him. She almost bled to death; she had emergency transfusions; she was left with long scars all over her body, which I saw then without response because whatever capacity to feel had been muffled, maybe when I got habituated to violence at home, maybe because it was something we were supposed to take in stride and be nonchalant about, back when few of us had language to talk about such violence or an audience ready to listen.
She survived; she was blamed for what happened as victims often were then; there were no legal consequences for the would-be murderer; she moved far from where it happened; she worked for a single mother who was evicted, and who gave her the desk in lieu of wages; and then she gave it to me. She moved on and we lost touch for many years, and then reestablished it, and she told me the full story, a story that could make your heart catch fire and the world freeze over.
Someone tried to silence her. Then she gave me a platform for my voice. Now I wonder if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing. All of it has literally arisen from that foundation that is the desktop.
Sitting at that desk to write this, I went to the online photography archive of the city that my public library maintains, hoping to recall a little of what the old neighborhood looked like. The fourth photograph for the street I lived on was from June 18, 1958, of a house a block and a half away, and it bore this caption: “Curious passersby peer down an alley, alongside 438 Lyon Street, where the body of Dana Lewis, 22, nude except for a black bra, was found today. Police, after a preliminary examination, said bruises on the victim’s throat indicated that she might have been garroted by a length of rope.” It’s clear her death is a spectacle for the newspaper as well, which describes her in titillating terms, while the passersby are described as curious rather than distressed by the sight of a corpse.
She was also known as Connie Sublette, and it turns out her death got a lot of attention in the papers at the time. Mostly, the accounts blamed her for it, because she was a sexually active young bohemian who drank. SEAMAN DESCRIBES CASUAL SLAYING, said one headline, with the tag PLAYGIRL VICTIM. SLAYING CLOSES SORDID LIFE OF PLAYGIRL said another, in which sordid seems to mean that she had sex, adventures, and sorrows, and playgirl means she deserved it. Her age is given as twenty or twenty-four. Dana Lewis or Connie Sublette’s ex-husband was said to have lived at 426 Lyon, where she went seeking comfort with him after her boyfriend, a musician, fell to his death at a party.
Al Sublette wasn’t home or didn’t answer, so she wept on his front steps until the landlord told her to go away. A sailor, by his own account, offered to get her a taxi and killed her instead. The newspapers seem to have taken his word that the killing was an accident and that while devastated by loss she had agreed to have sex with him in an alley. BEATNIK GIRL SLAIN BY SAILOR LOOKING FOR LOVE said one headline, as though strangling someone to death was an ordinary part of looking for love. “She had stars in her eyes and wanted to go all the time,” said her ex-husband. Allen Ginsberg, who had taken photographs of Al but not of Connie Sublette, noted her death without comment in a letter to Jack Kerouac on June 26, 1958. She was known, but hardly mourned.