In the summer of 1986, while Clark was in solitary, someone said something to her that finally broke through to her. Gilda Zwerman, a sociologist who was studying violence-prone activists, didn't mince words. "I understand how you did this to yourself," she told Clark. "What I don't understand is how you did this to your daughter."
Clark tried to look defiant, but her lip twitched, and she began to quietly weep. Zwerman nudged her further. "You can't cry for yourself and Harriet," she said, "and not see that the children of the men who were killed cried the same way for their fathers."
It was the first time Clark had broken down in front of another person since her arrest. She returned to her cell shaken but oddly relieved. "I felt like I had taken off a layer of armor," she said. "I no longer felt like I had all the answers."
Clark says that solitary - known as SHU for Special Housing Unit - was filled with mentally ill women. "They were howling at the moon, eating their mattresses and setting fires." She found herself speaking with the guards. "I would talk about my life and my daughter and the situation." The exchanges with people in uniform, Clark said, "made me have to get out of the fog of the rhetoric and think about those affected by this crime."
She began keeping a journal. She had used her radicalism, she realized, much the way prisoners around her used drugs, as a means to avoid confronting her own doubts. She walled herself off in the safety of doctrine. "I was beginning to say these politics are crazy. I've experienced so much loss, and created so much loss, for the sake of an illusion."
She consumed books on psychology and wrote poetry. Solitary was grueling, she said. "But as horrible as it felt, I felt more alive than I had been. It was like coming out of this cave and being able to see again and feel."