Kate Millett - The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice

OTHER BOOKS BY KATE MILLETT

SITA

THE PROSTITUTION PAPERS

FLYING

SEXUAL POLITICS

COPYRIGHT 1979 BY KATE MILLETT

THIS BOOK IS A SERIES OF MEDITATIONS (A FORM PERSONAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, SPECULATIVE) UPON A CRIMEAND THOUGH IT RELIES EXTENSIVELY ON RESEARCH INTO FACT THROUGH THE TRIAL TRANSCRIPT AND JOURNALISTIC REPORTING AT THE TIME, IT DOES NOT PURPORT TO BE THE WHOLE TRUTH OF THE MATTER; INDEED, AT TIMES, PARTICULARLY WHERE IT DRAMATIZES EVENTS, ATTRIBUTES MOTIVES, CREATES MONOLOGUE AND DIALOGUE FOR PARTICIPANTS, ESPECIALLY IN THE FINAL SECTION, IT IS CONSCIOUSLY AND DELIBERATELY FICTIONAL.

I should like to thank Albertha Hoeck, librarian of the Indianapolis Star-News during the period of my research into the Sylvia Likens case, for her great kindness in making materials and information on it available to me. Im grateful to many other members of the staff for coffee and encouragement. But most particularly the staff photographers of the Star-News, whose visual documentation of the persons and events in this story preserved them for me when, years later, I began to try to re-create them in words. One of the Star-News reporters at the trial, a young man named John Dean, wrote an account of the event immediately after sentence was passed, published as The Indiana Torture Slaying: Sylvia Likens Ordeal and Death, issued by Bee-Line Books in 1966to which I am most indebted and for which I extend thanks. I am also grateful to my friend Fumio Yoshimura, who always insisted I should write this book, and to my friend Cynthia MacAdams, who endured the writing of it with me.

On October twenty-sixth, 1965, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the starved body of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sylvia Likens was found in a back bedroom of Gertrude Baniszewskis house on New York Street, the corpse covered with bruises and with the words I am a prostitute and proud of it carved upon the abdomen. Sylvias parents had boarded her and her younger sister, Jenny Likens, with Gertrude in July. The beatings and abuse Sylvia suffered over the summer had increased so by September that the last weeks of her life were spent as a captive in the basement of the house. Gertrude Baniszewski was indicted for the murder, together with three of her teenage children and two neighborhood boys, Coy Hubbard and Richard Hobbs.

Contents

F INALLY, I can touch you with my voice, finally its time, Sylvia Likens. In how many sad, yellow hotel rooms have I spoken to you, writing these words before me on the wall as I lay back on some bed and stared at the painted plaster, beginning this in my mind. Emboldened for an hour. And then a coward again at home never getting anything on paper. Waiting till the time came. I will use the first person and I will speak to you directlyit was for this that I waited, all the years waiting to write this book, my fourteen-year obsession with you. For fourteen years you have been a story I told to friends, even to strangers, anyone I could fasten upon and late at night. Since the first moment I heard of you, came across something in a magazine, the outline of your ordeal. That your body had been hideously mutilated and with the words I am a prostitute and proud of it engraved upon the abdomen. That you had been systematically tortured to death in a basement by a gang of teenagers led by a woman with whom your parents had left you to board, a woman named Gertrude Baniszewski. Indianapolis, 1965.

You have been with me ever since, an incubus, a nightmare, my own nightmare, the nightmare of adolescence, of growing up a female child, of becoming a woman in a world set against us, a world we have lost and where we are everywhere reminded of our defeat. What you endured all emblematic of that. That you endured it at the hands of a woman, the hardest thing in the fable, that too. Who else would be so fit to shatter the woman-child? There have been all these years to consider you, ponder, study, be haunted by you, love you, wonder over you, avoid you, and find no rest from you.

You have invaded me, changed my life. For ten years I sculpted cages because of you, the first series even done in a basement that first summer I heard. Because I was a sculptor and not yet a writer, a graduate student faced with Columbias doctoral language examinations the summer of the trial, and how could I go to Indiana, too broke to traveland anyway I didnt write. So I stayed on at the Bowery and learned German in seventeen days start to finish, took the exam, and having earned the time, the rest of the summer before me, built the first of many cages, each an oblique retelling of your story, the life you knew, its version of experience. A cage the only viable metaphor even for other lives now, for life itself. Because after knowing you, one had to see in these terms. Five exhibitions. While waiting to be ready. Years going by and even beginning to write, but still waiting for the time to be perfect, waiting to be good enough for you.

All these years later reading a description of your funeral, going to Indianapolis, which is like home because Im a middle westerner too, and tracing you in the Indianapolis News, October 30, 1965. Girls Rites Held, the headline says, Mourners gather at Oak Hill Cemetery on the outskirts of East Lebanon for the final graveside rites for Sylvia Likens. Not a hell of a lot of them, nothing like the mob at the trial. The News counted fifty, but there seem to be far fewer than that in the blurred photographs. A sailor standing guard. A man in spectacles. Mostly women otherwise, and a vase of flowers perched on a gravestone in the foreground, flowers and grass stretching away to the nylon-stockinged legs.

The ladies, and for sure they are that (Gertrude is not permitted near you now Sylvia, yet she begins from this day to carry your fate with her forever), wear that kind of light wool fall coat indigenous to the Middle West, full and tent shaped and in pastel colors; there are hats and hairdos and veils. It is all so like home, like our parish church in St. Paul, despite the difference in denomination. I have seen this congregation, have been confined with them every Sunday for the first twenty years of my life. A foreigner might find it Americana; it seems to me a fairly grim reality, peculiarly depressing, inescapable as the very self and its origins. There is something so heavy and solid about these bodies. Just as there was at the Hobbs funeral, pictured elsewhere in my collection, the pictures through which I have learned you, all of you, one from November eleventh, young Richard Hobbs who engraved the thing about being a prostitute on your stomach, being spirited out the back door (the flower door, actually) of the Dorsey Funeral Chapel by a policeman after the services, his mother finally, really dead of the cancer that ate her through the months of his crime against you.

You who settle now into the earth. Surrounded by a few relatives, some townspeople, for this is your fathers hometown and the place where you were born. Perhaps a few of the curious too. For you have become something notorious now, a news item, nearly a celebrity, that peculiar American phenomenon. Three days ago you saw the last light of evening fall in the basement, underwent the final rebellion and defeat, the last desperate effort. Despaired and found peace. A peace which was either the ultimate despair or the final delusion. Or salvation itself, the hope that transcends or negates hope, Nirvana. Or nothingness. The void or the vision. All one now, all no longer mattering as these stout ladies officiate at your end, their thick legs seen from behind, their full coats, their middle-aged hairdos, their best clothes. One never sees the faces, for the odd thing about this photograph is that the backs of all the figures are to the camera. Perhaps even your funeral is compromising somehow to its attendants. Perhaps the photographer was discreet or polite or respectful. Or perhaps the action is somewhere just out of sight, at the pit into which you fall, are falling. Or perhaps the grave is closed on you altogether and the little clump of floral arrangement is already all thats left to you, prospect as dispiriting as a Veterans Day parade at sundown.