Free Saturday's Child by Robin Morgan Page A

supper.” That, I admitted, was what happened to me when I was bad, because my mother didn’t think I should be hit.
    Finally, so enraged that I could feel his bodily anger through his grip, Ehrenreich clapped his free hand (the other one was still embedded in my shoulder) in a muzzle over my mouth. Behind his sweaty fingers that stank of the nonfiltered Camels he was never without, I mumbled on intrepidly.
    That got a laugh. And we went rapidly to a commercial.
    Afterward, both Ehrenreich and Barry administered a stinging verbal dressing-down in front of all the other kids and their mothers, meant to humiliate me and serve as a warning to anyone else so inspired. Although I can’t recall any previous revolts on my part, there must have been at least one other, because Ehrenreich shouted that this wasn’t the first time I’d disobeyed on air but it had goddamned well better be the last. Aunt Sally was crying, her mascara all runny. She was stuttering, reassuring him, whereas I was engaged in a serious examination of the suddenly fascinating toe-tips on my black patent-leather Mary Janes. I was scared, but somehow intuited even at that age that I was too valuable a commodity to be dismissed. While that didn’t translate into any sense of personal power or security, it did feel vaguely protective, and the idea settled into my ego like an oysterous grain of sand. I knew, narcissistically, my worth in their terms—but not in my own. I knew I was the only Juvenile Juror with her own show on the side, and the one who received the most fan mail. I’d paid sufficiently for both by enduring gibes, pranks, and pinches from the other Jurors. I wished that Aunt Sally had stood up for me and said as much about my value, there, in front of everybody, and I wondered what reply Barry or Ehrenreich might have made if she had. I was confused by the lack of support from her and, later, from my mother, because after all I’d learned my position about no hitting from them, so shouldn’t they be proud of me? I didn’t understand that their rejection of corporal punishment, while partly a matter of principle, was also based on anxiety about my ever appearing bruised or being in any way incapacitated for work.
    But Aunt Sally’s groveling to Ehreneich and silence in defending me didn’t alter my own perceptions. Nor were they changed by the fear I’d experienced while rebelling, the physical pain (my shoulder turned black-and-blue), or the subsequent public embarrassment in front of the whole group, enabling the other kids to giggle with pleasure and their mothers to beam with satisfaction. I distinctly recall that I was busy feeling something utterly new, something fragile but strong enough to weigh in at a balance with all the negative results of my insurrection.
    It was something akin to feeling proud of myself—but it was a new kind of pride. It was not a reflective pride, because no one else had praised me. It was from someplace inside me . I knew I was right. I knew kids shouldn’tget hit. I’d got that said , aloud, live and on air, and I’d refused to let them stop me.
    My vocabulary was large, even for a precocious five-year-old, but not so large as to embrace such words or concepts as righteous action or self-determination. Learning those would take years. And it would be decades until the memory of that mutinous act would be resurrected by an unwitting Robert Redford, to whom I’m grateful. But from the moment I remembered it, I realized that I loved and respected that child who fought back in what was the first political act I recall ever daring to make.
    How intensely she longed to speak in her real voice, that child!
    How I wish there were a way of giving her back her own voice, her own truths, even if only by some literary conceit.
    She did keep a diary, on and off, for years.
    Let her speak for herself, then.

FOUR
    Possession Game
    â€¦ that wild, unknown