THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 45
cool it, or take a walk around the block.
Police, for their part, hated “domestics,”
because half the time they would show
up and the woman was too scared or
conflicted to press charges. Transition
House sent women out to lead training
sessions with the police, but in the early
years this was a losing battle. “Practically
all the officers opened the Boston Her-
ald and read it through the whole train-
ing,” Carole Sousa says. “They would say
that we hated men, that we didn’t know
what we were talking about, that they
would go on calls where it was the woman
who provoked the guy and what was the
poor guy supposed to do?”
By the late eighties, several states had
passed laws requiring police to make an
arrest when a domestic assault appeared
to have taken place, but this change
brought its own problems. For one thing,
a lot of women genuinely did not want
their husbands to be arrested—they just
wanted the beating to stop—so the laws
took away their option of calling the
police altogether. Fairly often, the po-
lice, unable to determine which partner
was to blame for the violence, arrested
both. And, while the mostly white fem-
inists at Transition House welcomed
the imprisonment of batterers, to women
of color at Casa Myrna the issue felt
more complicated. “The feminist move-
ment never really dealt with what it
meant that black men were also op-
pressed by white men,” Curdina Hill,
Casa Myrna’s first executive director,
says. “It never dealt with women who
were being abused but who still wanted
to support their men on a political level.
It wasn’t that they were not aware of
it—they didn’t deal with it.”
Tensions between black feminists
and white feminists had existed since
the beginning of the movement. “We
had a hard time keeping women of
color as staff,” Nanette Veilleux says. “I
think at some point it was decided that
it was better to hire a woman of color
than to hire someone who wasn’t ho-
mophobic, so we had very devout Chris-
tians who were homophobic working
at the house. And then at another point
all the white women were lesbians and
all the black women were straight, and
that did not work well. How could that
happen? But it did.”
In the early two-thousands, several
black women on staff accused the whiterector who wore suits and sat in a large
corner office.
Casa Myrna had lots of rules, explic-
itly stated. There was mandatory coun-
selling, forbidden this, compulsory that.
“There was a sign on a door, ‘The Rules
of the House,’ and it said ‘Don’t, don’t,
don’t, you can’t, don’t,’” Julie Kahn-
Schaye, who worked there before be-
coming the clinical director at Transi-
tion House, says. “And then it said
something like ‘If you don’t follow these
rules you will be exterminated.’ And I
was like, Oh, my gosh—I mean, I un-
derstood that they weren’t saying, We
will kill you, they meant to say, You will
be terminated, which is also a problem-
atic word. But for some reason I couldn’t
find the way to say that because I knew
that I was going to come across as this
snooty white girl with a master’s, so it
just stayed there.” Transition House had
accumulated quite a few rules, too, but
everyone wanted the freedom to be flex-
ible when it felt like the kinder thing
to do, and this meant that nobody was
sure what the real rules were. In prac-
tice, whether a rule was enforced or not
depended on the personality of the en-
forcer and how she felt about the woman
who had broken it.
The staff at Transition House believed
that one of the most pressing difficulties
that battered women faced was the
hands-off attitude of the police: police-
men would often just tell a batterer toI’d just found the book I had in mind—“What Painting Is,” by James Elkins—
When the vandal struck. Thud. What the...? The gate clanged. I looked out
The bay window to see a figure scarpering off down the street to the interface...
What a book, though. I have it before me, open at this color plate, jotting
Notes into a jotter, which I’ll work up later into what you’re reading now.
“The detail I’m reproducing here is a graveyard of scattered brush hairs
And other detritus,” says Elkins. “At the centre left, glazed over by Malachite Green,
Are two crossed brush hairs, one of them bent almost at a right angle.
Just below them are two of Monet’s own hairs, fallen into the wet paint.”
Brushstrokes laid down every which way. Jiggles. Jabs. Impulsive
Twists and turns. Gestures that “depend on the inner feelings of the body”
And “the fleeting momentary awareness of what the hand might do next.”
You listen to the body talking, exfoliating itself cell after cell. I saw it
Happening just now in the dust motes drifting through this ray of sunlight.
So everything gets into the painting, wood smoke from the studio stove,
The high pollen count of a high summer’s day en plein air by the Seine.
The detail is so magnified it is impossible to tell what it is of, if you didn’t,
Like Elkins, know. The visual field looks like a field. Shades of umber, khaki, mud,
And other greens beside the Malachite. It could stand for anything, it seems,
In Monet’s garden—or “Garden,” rather—as Poussin’s handful of porphyry
Is Rome and of the days of the fall of Rome. I want it to go to the stately tune
Of a Poussin painting, “Landscape with a Man Washing His Feet at a Fountain,”
Say, where a woman sweeps by, balancing a basket on her head, and an old man
In blue dreams full-length on the grass. There are milestones and tombs,
And puddles on the road, and you can just imagine the whispering of the cistern.
A line of blue hills in the distance is contoured like a monumental sentence.
It’s beautiful weather, the 30th of March, and tomorrow the clocks go forward.
How strange it is to be lying here listening to whatever it is is going on.
The days are getting longer now, however many of them I have left.
And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily outlast their end.
—Ciaran Carson