The Woman Hanging from the 13th Floor Window Is Okay Now - in Case You Were Concerned

Joy Harjo's Girl-Warrior has her back, and yours too.

Joy Harjo by Matika Wilbur, from joyharjo.com

It’s Indigenous People’s Day today in the U.S., a holiday shared with Columbus Day, and I’m thinking about the Woman Hanging from the 13th Floor Window. How she’s doing, how her kids are doing, forty years after she had that breakdown in Joy Harjo’s classic 1983 poem, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window.”

For the longest time I thought she was toast. The whole poem takes place while the woman hangs by her fingers from a window, “dangling” high on the side of a Chicago tenement. People gather on the ground. Her Levi’s hang below her waist. I had to read the poem a few times to confirm that, yes, this is a poem about the moment before a possible death.

Letting go remains a possibility, but not a certainty.

The poem begins,

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor

window. Her hands are pressed white against the

concrete moulding of the tenement building.

Of her motive, we learn only that “She thinks she will be set free.”

Free of what?

“She hangs from the 13th floor window in east Chicago,” writes Harjo, “with a swirl of birds over her head. They could / be a halo, or a storm of glass waiting to crush her.” Those binaries are all over the poem: halo or glass, two husbands, women below and woman above, tall glass houses for the rich and concrete tenements “on the Indian side of town.”

The woman is “crushed” by “the lost beauty” of her life, with two options in the last stanza. Thanks to a strange, numinous sense of near-death time, it seems like the choice is occurring in the poem’s present and also in memory:

She thinks she remembers listening to her own life

break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor

window on the east side of Chicago, or as she

climbs back up to claim herself again.

(Here is the complete poem at amerinda.org.)

Given the momentum downward in that last stanza and the peril of hanging on by her hands, I used to think there was only one direction, really, for the woman to go. Gravity is so much stronger than fingertips.

But I’ve been reading Harjo’s latest memoir, Poet Warrior (2021), and I think I was wrong about the woman. I see now how the choice at the end of “The Woman Hanging” is not an absolute binary — live or die. If she is like the Girl-Warrior of Poet Warrior, the woman might live and die.

Poet Warrior begins with a poem called “Prepare,” about the first gift of breathing that opens the human body to life. The process of being consciously born later into thankfulness and peace sounds a lot like letting some things fall and die, in lines like “Let go that which burdens you,” and

Let go that which has burdened your family

Your community, your nation

Or disturbed your soul

. . .

Listen now as Earth sheds her skin

. . .

We are bringing in a new story . (p. 3)

What if the woman dangling in Chicago had no other way to shed the skin of her burdens but to climb out a window and hang there, for all the women to see, until she was ready to climb back in to her new story? Of course it was perilous and awful.

What if the woman dangling in Chicago is Earth herself, burdened and disturbed and determined to reclaim the not-lost beauty of her life?

The Council of spirits in the sky might have seen it coming.

In the second poem of Poet Warrior, Girl-Warrior chooses to come down to Earth to enter the human story, and the Council warns her,

Because you are Girl-Warrior you have chosen

A path of many tests. You will learn how to make

Right decisions by making wrong ones.

. . .

You will find yourself again.

Now tell me, where does this next line belong? Does it sound like the last line of “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window” and preparing to die by a fall or like the last line of Girl-Warrior’s descent to Earth to be born in a fall?

“She took a breath, then she was gone.”

I’ll read it with the closing lines of both poems:

She thinks she remembers listening to her own life

break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor

window on the east side of Chicago, or as she

climbs back up to claim herself again.

She takes a breath, then she is gone.

And from Poet Warrior:

You will learn how to make

Right decisions by making wrong ones.

Those whom you love most will abandon you.

You will find yourself again.

.

She took a breath, then she was gone.

.

Forty years ago, the woman in Chicago hung from the side of a tenement building at dusk. I think Poet Warrior begins the next morning, after one of the nameless woman’s lives has dropped away and her self has climbed back into the building. “Breathe this new dawn,” commands Harjo in the memoir. “Assist it as it opens its mouth / To breathe” (p. 4).

Dear reader, let’s carry these poems around together all this week, shall we? Looking for women, and men too, Native, and non-Native too, holding onto windows with white fingertips. Maybe you’re that woman this week. Maybe I am. Maybe we’re learning how to make right decisions by making wrong ones, as the Council foretold.

Or maybe we’re midwives in a position to assist, as someone must have been up there in the thirteenth floor tenement room, assisting the woman when she tore her hands and knees and lost her shoes climbing up and gasped out the first breath of her new life.

View the prior post from Banned Books Week or more from Enchanted in America.

Hear Joy Harjo reading “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window” and describing the inspiration for it in this 1987 recording from the University of Arizona.

Visit her YouTube channel to hear more of Harjo’s readings and songs.