Lost and Found in Camden

 

Once upon a time, long ago (mid 1990s) there were 11 women writers from all over the world.

• U.K.
• Germany
• Australia (temporarily)
• Switzerland
• Israel

They had found each other through the International Women's Writing Guild. Unlike U.S. members, who could meet face-to-face, geography kept them apart, but the new e-mail allowed them to connect with one another.

They bonded quickly sharing writing and bits of their lives: jobs, marriages, moves, international adoptions, etc. on top of discussions of their writing.

Lost in time is the memory of how they decided to do an anthology of short stories. One of them had the idea to make them interlocking stories.

Emails flew back and forth until Camden Market was decided. The time? A hot weekend in August. One of the members took photos to share when they began. It would have been easy had the internet been invented, but old-fashioned prints worked.

Then each of them needed to create a character. Lists were examined and they all chose at least one or more characters from the other writer's lists.

• We wrote
• We exchanged stories
• We rewrote
• We edited
  

One of them assumed responsibility for cover design and making it available on Amazon. It took time, but in February 2014, the book was born.

To order a copy Amazon.com Books, Lost In Camden. There's a sample story. US$ 4.99 Kindle and US$14.71 paperback. Profits will go to a German Cancer Aid.

Decades after the first contacts, the members of the group are still in touch. Maybe, just maybe someday we'll meet.

Just one story

 This is one of the stories in Coat Hangars and Knitting Needles, about abortion in America before Roe v Wade. To go back is inhumane.

During the Vietnam War an iconic photo showed nine-year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked away from napalm bombs taken June 8, 1972.

They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words. As a writer, I know it is true.

The pro-life movement uses photos of fetuses to make the point: babies are being killed.

Not used as often, but still seen on posters for pro-choice protests is an equally discomforting if not shocking photo of Gerri Santoro on the floor, next to the bed in the Norwich Motel. She is stark naked, in the position of a frog, blood coming out of her vagina. Her head is turned to the right. Her right hand is covered with what might be a pair of pants. Her purse if in the lower right-hand corner of the photo.

She is dead.

She bled to death after her boyfriend failed to abort her June 8, 1964. The medical examiner called it an air embolism from an unskilled surgical procedure. Geri Santoro was 28, married, the mother of two daughters, Joannie and Judy.

She might have passed into oblivion if Ms Magazine in April 1973 had not printed that photo along with a story about abortion. According to Roberta Brandes Gratz, at Ms., they thought the woman was anonymous.

Leona, her sister and a Ms subscriber, recognized her sister. Her first reaction was upset but over the years her opinion changed. In 1993 she participated in a pro-life march carrying that photo with the words “This was my sister.” Photos of Gerri as a smiling, healthy woman were on the other side of the sign.

Leona also participated in a documentary called Leona’s Sister Gerri, made by Jane Gillooy in 1995 about Gerri. Her daughters, brother and best friend, Joyce Garboni, also appeared. (Note: I cried as I watched the movie. There's the trailer. If you are feeling brave, look at the photo of Gerri https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbkwRGpAjEQ

Gerri was one of five girls in a fifteen-child family. They lived on a farm in Connecticut. Leona described her sister as a kid who loved to climbed trees. A brother remembered how Gerri rushed thru morning chores to be able to get to the bathroom first and have enough hot water.

Joyce Garboni was her best friend from the day they met on the school bus. They worked nights at a factory making condensers for radios, which gave Joyce enough money to buy a 1949 Dodge. The girls would cut classes, go to the car, change from the school dress code requiring skirts into jeans. Often, they went to the Windham Diner.

Joyce planned to marry in September, after graduation. Gerri kept saying, she would beat her friend to the altar even though she didn’t have a boyfriend. Then she met Sebastian Santoro (Sam) at a bus stop. They married September 18, 1954 one week before Joyce did.

The saying marry in haste, repent in leisure, applied to the marriage. What Gerri didn’t repent were her two girls, Joannie and Judy.

Sam had been put in an orphanage along with his brother when his widowed mother could not cope with four children. She kept her daughters, which may have explained his dislike of women, shown by his actions of beating Gerri. Joannie and Judy often had a belt applied to their behinds, far too much by, according to Gerri’s brother.

Joyce told how negative he was about everything and a bigot, liking no one.

He worked in a meat room and was subject to terrible headaches, which Gerri used to explain his attitudes.

Sam thought moving to the better climate in California would help his headaches. Although Gerri was reluctant, she gave in driving herself and her daughters across country after Sam had settled there. Joannie remembers her mother making the trip fun.

California did not improve the situation.

Joannie told about hearing her mother’s screams from the bedroom and when she went in to help, she saw her father with his hands around her mother’s neck. When he saw Joannie, he told her they were playing a game, an excuse that she heard more than once. Her mother seemed to go along with it, although Joannie wasn’t convinced.

Coming home from school in the spring of 1963, Joannie found the car packed and the two girls and Gerri returned to Connecticut without saying goodbye to their father. She remembers how much she loved the bedroom in her grandparents’ farm house where they lived without their father. She loved how her mother came in mornings and rolled up the shade, the flowers, the smell of the grass.

Judy’s memories of that time were how her mother always smelled of Juicy Fruit gum.

Gerri found work at the Mansfield Training School where she met Clyde Dixon. They became lovers. Joyce understood why. He was everything Sam wasn’t, a talker, pleasant. He was also married.

Gerri found herself pregnant. She asked Joyce if her husband could get her some ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and was used thru the ages by midwives and doctors for abortions.

Joyce did not believe that the ergot was for a pregnant “friend” of Gerri’s. Over the next few weeks she debated confronting Gerri. The day she decided to do it, she went to Gerri’s house and found her friend not well. When Gerri told her that the “friend” was no longer pregnant, Joyce dropped the subject.

No one knows if Gerri was ill from the ergot and still did not abort the baby.

Time was running out. Sam had written a letter saying he was coming home and he wanted to take the girls to the beach for two weeks. Gerri expressed fear that if he found out she was pregnant by another man, he would kill her.

Clyde Dixon talked with a Dr. Milton Morgan, who told him how to do an abortion and loaned Dixon the instruments. They would do it June 8, 1964.

Joanie remembers her mother leaving and she begged to go with her. When her mother said “no” Joannie hid under a blanket in the backseat of the car. Her mother saw her and sent her back into the house.

No one knows where Dixon abandoned Gerri. Was it when she started to bleed out of control? Was it after she died?

Leona, who was at her brother’s that night came home to be told that Gerri had called her and was crying, but said she would call back later. She never did.

The girls remember being told that their mother had died, she’d been in a car accident. Joannie said it didn’t make sense because the car was in perfect condition. The story changed to being hit while walking. Only later did they put it all together. Joannie originally reacted negatively to the treatment of her “beautiful” mom, but later became active in the pro-choice movement marching in pro-life events.

Judy admits having an abortion as a teenager. She says she believes abortions are wrong and she will have to answer for what she did. At the same time, she is not willing to make the choice for any other woman.

The film shows Gerri as a loving mom. The girls talk about her always making their Halloween costumes. Joannie says, she does the same thing today.

Clyde Dixon spent a year in prison and returned to his wife and family. He died in 1979.

Sebastian (Sam) died in 1978.

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/how-a-harrowing-photo-of-one-womans-death-became-an-iconic-pro-choice-symbol

Free Write - Besotted

 

The Tuesday Free Write with three writers living in Switzerland and/or France find a prompt and write ten minutes. The three efforts had very little similarity this time, although sometimes, there's lots of overlap. We find this is a great way to stimulate our creativity. Free writes can be done alone, but it is fun with other writers.This week we tried something new as a prompt -- a single word -- Besotted.

D-L's Free Write

Gina walked by the twins' bedrooms. Their doors were closed. Had she not given birth to them, she would swear they were foundlings.

Merry was bent over a new scrapbook and was pasting something from the printer into it. She was totally besotted with the British Royal Family going back to Queen Elizabeth II. Merry had cried for days when Elizabeth had died.

Fifteen large scrapbooks lined her shelves and were filled with stories from newspapers and magazine she'd found on the net from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Her other 13-year old twin daughter was equally besotted, but with math taking after her mathematics professor father. At nine she had read about slide rules and asked for one for her birthday. She used the gift constantly along with her computer to play with math problems.

She and her father talked formulas. Gina thought they might as well be speaking Swahili for all she could understand.

Long ago, Gina had thought her girls would be talking about makeup, boys and clothes. No, at least not yet. Maybe later or not.

At least the Royal Family and math were safer than drugs and sex that her friends were worrying about with their daughters.

Visit D-L's website at https://dlnelsonwriter.com

Rick's Free Write

This is one of my favorite true stories. About two of my favorite beings.

We had talked on and off about getting a dog. For years. And especially after house-sitting Ruby, a half-Bernese, in Westport, Ireland for three weeks.

In our French village, there was a semi-homeless man, Phillip, who would beg on market days, Wednesdays and Saturdays, in high-traffic areas, and aside the church door on Sunday mornings.

He often had a small, scraggly brown mongrel with him, whom he clearly cherished. We had been in the habit of giving Phillip a coin or two, sometimes a 5- or 10-euro bill. Then we started giving biscuits to the dog – bought a box of them even though we did not have a dog.

One day in early December, Phillip had been displaced by street construction and he had no dog with him. He was difficult to understand, being Catalan and missing a few teeth, but we thought he said his dog had died.

We got the idea to give Phillip a replacement dog, and if he rejected it we would keep the pup ourselves.

But when we saw Phillip later that day, he had the dog with him!

I had already done the research of the rescue center in Perpignan and fixated on an 8-year-old female named Mila. So on Sunday 10 December we journeyed to the SPA, which was in a no-man’s land between the airport and the autoroute.

“We don’t have any dog named Mila,” the young lady at the counter told me when I showed her the website printout. “You might mean the other rescue center down the road.” Same no-man’s land.

But like a good salesperson, she offered, “We have other small dogs” and mentioned a Jack Russell Terrier. “No Jack. Trop energie,” I reacted.

Meantime, Donna-Lane was at the other end of the counter, and they were putting a tiny, 12-week-old half-Yorkie, half-Jack pup in her arms.

Sherlock immediately began licking her face all over. He knew she was besotted.  

Rick is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices. com 

Julia's Free Write

 And so it started, their story.

When she fell pregnant it wasn’t totally planned, but then they hadn’t really been taking precautions either.

They had met late in life so although the question of marriage hadn’t really been settled, they were in an exclusive and committed relationship.

I, the mother and mother-n-law to be, was overjoyed and when they did decide to “tie the knot” (oh dear now I am wondering why that expression – another day, another log) I quickly threw together with their help a small ceremony and lunch in honor of the day.  It was wonderful and they were surrounded in love.

When, two months later, my fist grandson made his entry into the family, there is no other word for it. I was besotted – and still am to this day.

Julia has written and taken photos all her life and loves syncing up with friends. Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/ 

 

 

Politicians Liars

 

To quote MLK, I too, have a dream...

That every politician when s/he lies on television, a real-time, reliable Fact Check happens and if they are lying, the word

LIAR !!!!

is flashed on the screen. Bells, whistles and a chorus of 100 people sing Liar, Liar, Pants on fire in a gospel style.

I can guarantee that many of the politicians who appear regularly on the Sunday show would never be seen again.

A 1700s abortion trial in Connecticut

 

A house in Pomfret that could have been like Sarah Grosvenor's who died from an abortion. The story is a chapter from my Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles, which tells of abortion before Roe v. Wade. This is a story of one of the first records of a prosecuted abortion during the mid 1700s in Connecticut.

Pomfret, Connecticut is a post card of a New England town with churches, wooden houses, Robert Frost-type stonewalls and ivy-covered brick buildings. In autumn, leaves turn brilliant reds and golds. The 40+ square miles covered by Pomfret lacks a town center as such. A graveyard, going back centuries, has the thin stone tombstones typical of Puritan times. Some are askew.

The population, for the last date I could locate in 2014, was about 4,100 people. Selectmen, the New England version of an elected town counsel with equal voting rights, govern Pomfret.

Probably most residents today, would not guess that in 1745, 34 years after the village was incorporate and took its name from Lincolnshire, England, was the scene of one of the first reported and prosecuted abortions in the new world. The University of Connecticut has published trial documents, which is why the information exists today. http://history.uconn.edu/taking-the-trade-biographies

Life in the early1700s in the British American colonies for the approximate 300,000 people was difficult. As more people immigrated and the new settlers reproduced, growth was constant.

Settlers found the classes more equal than the societies they had left. However, there were still poor whites, indentured servants or tenant farmers in comparison to those that garnered more prestige such as ministers, doctors, lawyers and landowners of various degrees of wealth.

Those living in New England faced a rugged climate and topography. Religion was strict. There were churches that considered an organ too liberal and dancing dangerous. These limitations seeped into the general population influencing daily life. Celebrations did not include the too-Catholic Christmas.

Farmers represented about 90% of the people living in the colonies, although fishing, trapping, tobacco, blacksmithing, ship building etc. were also practiced trades. In Pomfret, because of its land-bound location and climate, things like commercial fishing, shipbuilding and even tobacco growing were not viable livelihoods. Much farming was subsistence.

Sarah Grosvenor was born and lived all her life in Pomfret. By standards of the time, her family was well off. They owned farmland: her father was one of the first selectmen, an elected village leader, in 1714.

There is no record of how Mary and Leicester Grosevenor felt when their daughter Sarah was born in 1723. They already had one daughter, two-year-old Zerviah. Were the couple disappointed that she wasn’t a boy? I could find no records of other children nor of Mary having miscarriages.

We know little of Sarah’s childhood but at 19 she found herself pregnant by a man eight-years her senior. Were they in love? Did she seduce him? Did he seduce her? Was it mutual desire? Did they make love once or many times? Where did they make love?

One of the frustrations with old records, that the many questions they raise have no answer.

We do know his name was Amasa Sessions and in various documents found later he has been described as “corpulent,” “capable” and “honest.”

In July 1742, sister Zerviah noticed Sarah acted unwell. She suspected that her sister might be pregnant, but when Zerviah asked repeatedly, Sarah denied it.

The girls’ mother, Mary also was so concerned about her daughter that she asked a neighbor, Doctor John Hallowell, to look at her. Dr. Hallowell told the family Sarah was not pregnant.

For reasons that are unclear in existing documentation, Dr. Hallowell took her to another house, where Amasa Sessions visited the girl. When she returned home, she confessed she was, indeed, pregnant.

If Sarah had not been forthcoming with her sister, I am sure she did not rush to tell her parents that they might be grandparents. Although there is no record of any conversations, of her parents’ reactions, I can imagine they were not that different from any parent today. We were told that her mother called Dr. Hallowell in indicates her suspicions.

Zerviah was upset that her sister had not told her before, but Sarah had said she’d been “taking the trade” the popular phrase of the time for using herbs to bring on a woman’s period, a common practice when an unwanted pregnancy was suspected.

Unlike today, there seems be no societal arguments about when life begins. Communications took days, weeks, months by letter and horseback not seconds on the internet.

The mores of the time, considered bringing on a woman’s late period before the baby quickened with different plants, not an abortion.

Marriage would not have been an impossible alternative for Sarah and Amasa: they were of a similar class. Session never denied he was the father. He was reported to have visited Sarah several times during the early part of her pregnancy willingly.

Amasa Sessions was the third son of Joanna and Nathaniel Sessions. The Sessions ran a tavern out of their house and because the father was involved in village politics, the fortunes of the family must have benefited from meetings held there, perhaps the way President Trump’s company benefits from other politicians staying at his Washington, D.C. hotel. That he was not overjoyed at being a father is a guess based on his conversations with John Hallowell.

Amasa expressed he was afraid that his parents would make the young couple’s lives difficult should they marry, but I could find no explanation of why he thought that.

However, with persuasion, Sarah and Amasa decided to marry and stop any attempt to get rid of the baby, something Sarah was said to be ambivalent about. Despite that decision, two weeks passed and no banns were announced. Zerviah saw Amasa giving Sarah more herbs to “finish” what had been started. We don’t have any idea of which herbs they were, but they did not work.

The assumption was abortion was after the baby quickened, when the mother feels the baby moving sometime around the fourth month. Until then the loss of a baby was a miscarriage whether it happened naturally or with help. Missing periods could be corrected by bringing the body back into balance using various herbs. There is the assumption that Sarah was in her fourth month when the baby quickened making the removal of the fetus an abortion not a balancing of her menses. According to her friend Abigail Nightingale’s testimony at a trial three years later, Sarah had told she had felt the baby move for about a fortnight when the abortion attempts were begun.

A number of plants (abortifacient), which were available, were considered effective. Tansy root may or may not have been introduced to the region at the time. Juniper to create savin, pennyroyal and seneca snakeroot were among the popular plants “to restore balance” grew in the region. If a book of abortifacient herbs was available to women in Colonial times, I have not been able to locate it. Much feminine medical care was more general knowledge shared by women.

When the pregnancy continued, Dr. Hallowell surgically removed the fetus, but it took him two attempts over two days. The surgery took place at Sarah’s 30-year-old cousin’s Hannah’s house. Sarah told her friend Abigail that Dr. Hallowell put instruments on the bed and tried to remove the baby.

At one point Sarah fainted. Zerviah brought cold water into the room to revive her.

Amasa hid out at Mr. Waldo’s the local tavern during this period.

Sarah went home that night, but did not miscarry for two days into a chamber pot. The fetus, which appeared damaged, was wrapped in a cloth and buried near the house.

Within ten days, Sarah sickened most likely from dirty instruments. This was before the importance of cleanliness was discovered. Her family called in two other doctors who were unable to save her. She died 14 September 1742 some ten days after the surgery. The court records have testimony that Dr. Hallowell expressed his feelings that he was responsible for her death.

Why there was no official court action for three years is not explained. Not until 1 November 1745, two county magistrates issued calls for Amasa, Hallowell, Hannah and Zerviah. Hallowell’s depositions were delayed. He was in a debtor’s prison in Connecticut.

The Inferiort Court heard deposition, still existent today.

Hallowell was found guilty of murder. Amasa, Hannah and Zerviah were named as accessorites to the crime.

It still wasn’t over.

The Superior Court, in September 1746, indicted Amasa and Hallowell, for destroying Sarah and her unborn child. Although the verdict was issued November 18, a technicality caused the case to be dismissed.

It wasn’t until March 1747 when the king’s attorney tried again. Amasa was released. Hallowell was sentenced to the gallows and lashed on 20 March 1747. He disappeared before either part of the sentence could be carried out.

Amasa married, raised ten children supported by his farm. He seems to have suffered no stigma from his connection with Sarah, served in the militia and died in 1799.

He and Sarah are buried within 25 feet of one another, ironic that they were separated in life. His stone attests to his qualities.