Who was Lolita? History becomes more complex when you know the players up close and personal.
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The federal government has prison for woman on the bank of a somnolent valley in southern West Virginia. It’s near a small town, more akin to a village. The most famous resident of the prison in modern times has been Martha Stewart. Incarcerated there was the German woman who was known as Axis Sally. And then, there was Lolita.
To people who are used to maximum security checks at government installations, the security at prison was stunningly lax some 40 years ago. It was surrounded only by a chain link fence, and the admittance procedure at the front gate was rule of thumb. The guards knew my family car and why I was there. I was waved through and parked next to the Roman Catholic chapel.
The prison was a chaplaincy of my hometown parish. My parish was able to afford a full-time priest because his salary was augmented by his prison work. That meant the caliber of the pastor was higher.
…having youngsters they could make a fuss over helped take some of the sting away.
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When I was in grade school, the priest took my brother Tim and me to the prison on Christmas, Easter, and Mothers Day to be altar boys at Sunday Mass. The idea was to make the services a little more special because there were young faces up front. For women separated from their families at holidays, having youngsters they could make a fuss over helped take some of the sting away.
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As I got older, as unaccomplished as I was, I was graduated from altar boy to organist. I also went to the prison more often since I could drive myself. This continued well into my college years.
I got to know several of the women by name. The one who stood out, by far, was Lolita. It seems strange that I was able to call an older, dignified woman by her first name. In American history, there was only one Lolita, and it was only years later that I even knew her last name.
Lolita dressed in black. Black dress, black stockings, sensible shoes, and a black lace mantilla covering her long black hair with a few strands of grey. It was always tightly tied into a bun at the nape of her neck.
She was deeply religious. She was in charge of the chapel. She ensured everything was just so. All of the linens were freshly laundered, starched stiff. The brass always polished. Nothing was torn or frayed. Every speck of dust was banished.
The priest’s vestments were all handmade by Lolita. They were much finer than the vestments at my home parish. Where do you get gold and scarlet damask in a prison?
When I came home, my mother always asked me how Lolita was. She was known by name by everyone in my home parish, and they knew the sketchy outlines of her story. However, it was only when I got older that I found out the details of her incarceration.
She fawned over my brother and me, hugging and kissing us. Lolita told me that she kept the two of us constantly in her prayers. She took an interest in my studies and whether I was keeping my grades up. She said that she was confident that I did, if only for her.
It would have been a betrayal of all the affection she had lavished on me if had I doubted her…
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One day, she whispered that she had seen the Virgin Mary while in prayer. It had happened more than once. For a religious child like me, that contention would have been dubious if it had been made by anyone but Lolita. Yet Lolita, the lady in black who always carried a white handkerchief and rosary beads said it, and I believed her. It would have been a betrayal of all the affection she had lavished on me if had I doubted her, especially something that she told me as a special secret with her dark eyes, almost black, showing how serious she was when she was speaking to me.
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It wasn’t until I studied modern American history, and after that, could look things up on the internet, that I learned Lolita’s full story, her pardon from prison, and up unto her death.
Her full name was Lolita Lebrón. She was from Puerto Rico, an unrepentant nationalist, and political provocateur. She was a towering figure in the island’s independence movement. She had been imprisoned for leading an assault on the United States House of Representatives in 1954. Five members of Congress had been wounded as her band shot down at the chamber floor from the public gallery. She had unfurled the Puerto Rican flag. From her earliest days in the movement as an immigrant living in New York, she was a socialist and feminist. She was also strikingly beautiful, even as she aged and her hair turned radiantly white. And always an articulate revolutionary.
Sometimes her jaw would clench, and she would whisper her disdain for the American government. She didn’t do that often because she was afraid that the indulgencies she had been given by the prison would be taken away. I think truly she sensed that I was a comrade.
She never spoke to me about why she was in prison. I was told that she had said that while she had led the revolutionary charge on the House of Representatives, she did not see herself as being an aimless murderer, nor guilty of a crime in the usual sense of the word. As she aged, she repudiated violence as a means to political ends, but she always understood how frustration can easily lead to violence.
She was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter a few years after I quit going to the prison, and she went back to Puerto where her release and return were much celebrated. I hadn’t thought much about her in the intervening years, until I’d read a long account of her history in the Washington Post.
I have such disjointed, ambivalent feelings about what and why she did it. I certainly saw her fiery righteousness when it broke through her still handsome face with the piercing black eyes. As a theologian I know that hyper-religiosity can breed other, even darker obsessions. I understand her desire for freedom, but still can’t condone an attack on the U.S. Congress.
History is complicated. It is ever more complicated when you know history’s actors up close and personal. She was one of my teachers of influence. My ideals about freedom in union with responsibility would have been supported by her. She would have encouraged me to take on the role of activist, which I have done.
It was such a long time ago. It was such a different time. No one can imagine a kid driving into the front gate of a federal prison in the beat-up family station wagon, to befriend and pray with a renown, notorious freedom fighter. We are part of each one’s histories.
When I think about it, she was my friend, my lady in black, with a complicated back story, who taught me that in deep prayer, one can see astonishing visions. I have wondered always how her prayers for me shape me even now.