Bread of angels, p.1
Bread of Angels, page 1
By Patti Smith
A Book of Days
Year of the Monkey
The New Jerusalem
Devotion
M Train
Just Kids
Auguries of Innocence
Collected Lyrics, 1970–2015
Woolgathering
The Coral Sea
Early Work
Babel
Random House
An imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC
1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
randomhousebooks.com
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2025 by Patti Smith
Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardcover ISBN 9781101875124
International edition ISBN 9798217154241
Ebook ISBN 9781101875131
Book Team: Production editor: Dennis Ambrose • Managing editor: Rebecca Berlant • Production manager: Kevin Garcia • Copy editor: Madeline Hopkins • Proofreaders: Vincent La Scala, Claire Maby, Tricia Wygal, Caryl Weintraub, Andrea Gordon
Cover design: Greg Mollica
Cover photograph: Patti Smith, 1979 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.
The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland. https://eu-contact.penguin.ie
ep_prh_7.3_153729446_c0_r0
Contents
Epigraph
Prelude
The Age of Reason
The Gardens
Illuminations
art/rats
Dancing Barefoot
My Madrigal
Mortal Shoes
Grant
Peaceable Kingdom
A Drop of Blood
Vagabondia
About the Photographs
About the Archives
About the Author
Appendix: Image Description
_153729446_
Obstacles are our wings.
Nikolai Gogol
Prelude
The pen scratches across the page rebel hump rebel hump rebel hump. What do these words mean, asks the pen. I don’t know, replies the wrist. These are the words forming and the writer, stationed at Dolina Charlotty, in a valley in northern Poland will decide later. Charlotty, a name evoking the porcelain face of a doll, left in the grass by a child so that she might go off to pick wild berries. Not for very long, yet long enough to be forgotten, and through the passing of time the abandoned doll becomes Charlotty in the rain, Charlotty in the snow, Charlotty pulled apart by a playful dog. Her porcelain head swathed in the shadows of beech trees growing higher through seasons of snow, of red then dead leaves. Seasons of sun fade the pink of her cheeks yet fail to subdue the impassive intensity of her marble eyes.
Why a porcelain face? Why not a rag doll, such as my own, with button eyes on a face of cloth? This penchant for alluding to things I never had, where does it come from? This unaccountable attraction to the so-called finer things described in books: a linen waistcoat, kid gloves, soft leather boots. Combing through pages, as if imagined steamer trunks, for one velvet cloak, a dress to disguise the miniature Quasimodo trapped inside an awkward child’s body. My rebel hump, my unbecoming yet altogether necessary rebel hump.
Laying down my pen, I find myself humming a melody of long ago, a song of the swampy woodland where I once lingered beneath fast-moving clouds, beguiled by everything. Rebel hump rebel hump, tramping through the reeds, the uncompromising ferns, sidestepping the stinkweed and swarms of gnats and mosquitoes. There I tied a small hammer to my belt, together with a miniature flashlight. I cracked open rocks searching for their secret hearts, signaled for alien ships to take me far afield and waited patiently, willing to embark. I removed my shoes, followed streams laced with algae and rushing tadpoles, on alert for the glint of a certain coin that afforded entrance to the underworld. Or the jagged edge of a shard that when placed at an exact point would connect with corresponding fragments, fashioning the hand mirror of oneself, an ivory one at that.
I leave my work behind and enter the forest surrounding Charlotty, inspecting internal mechanisms of the oldest of trees. Encased in the concentric rings of growth are the fibers of four white dresses, the living cells of childhood. The starched folds of a Communion dress. The fragile remnants of the dress of art. A party dress, delicate as a handkerchief, possessing the upright naivete of rock and roll, given to me by my brother. Lastly, a pristine Victorian tea gown, my wedding dress, embodying vows and tears shed for my husband, whom I loved for a time more than myself.
God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, a drop of water bursting as an equation. Light in the forest falls. An old man sits on a barrel singing, I found a gold coin in a field, who will change it for me? A child calls out to him. Maybe my doll when I find her. She has a purse filled with silver. By will alone, a doll materializes. Charlotty. First an arm then a torso then a small proud head whose fixed blue stare has witnessed the casting out of the seraphim and the burning of the reverberating stars.
Everyone is dead, all is forgotten, echoes a voice. I inventory those still with me. I go no further than the face of my sister, innocent yet all knowing. So long as she is here our memories are ensured. But what of the future when we are both gone? Write for that future, says the pen, for the sake of the cast-off lamb, swept away as ash in a burning attic. The hourglass overturns. Each grain a word that erupts into a thousand more, the first and last moments of every living thing.
I see myself on tiptoe reaching for a crimson book, the object of a toddler’s greedy curiosity. I wanted to know what was inside, and in time desired to write one myself. I believed I could write the longest book in the world, record the events of every single day. I would write it all down in such a way that everyone would find something of themselves. Some might stay with me, others take wing. For my part, I would spew from the edges of a radiant mound illuminated by the rays of a punishing sun, a singular traveler in search of the garden of childhood’s hour.
The Age of Reason
The first sensation I remember is movement, my arm waves back and forth, a small endeavor that results in the toppling of Bugs Bunny from my highchair tray. My silent partner, propped there before me big as life, disappeared like a Viking ship tumbling off the edge of the world. All but a blur well beyond my reach; the earliest consequence of an action. I remember being held by my father and how different it felt from being held by my mother. He was calm; I sought his reassuring shoulder. I gravitated toward him though it was my mother who was ever present, ever dominant. Not yet one, I took my faltering first steps across the kitchen floor, then kept going. My mother was continuously challenged by her inquisitive and mobile first child who could not resist exploring, disengaging from her grip, breaking free in the park, disappearing in department stores, and spurning her affection.
She warned me of the cost of a thousand actions, but I had to see for myself and was thus bitten, stung, and exposed to all manner of insults and injuries. With little sense of the struggles surrounding me or the havoc I caused, I’d reach for the forbidden, a lit cigarette, a silver table lighter, flicking it to produce a pretty flame, sliding a tight rubber band on my wrist. A burned finger, a blue hand.
Bit by bit I piece together an ever-expanding mosaic of my pre-existence. At the end of World War II, Grant Harrison Smith, emotionally broken and plagued with malaria-induced migraines, returned to Philadelphia from active duty in New Guinea and the Philippines. He never graduated from high school, instead joining his sister and brother as the principal dancer in their tap and acrobatic trio, but the war had cut short their prospects. Beverly Williams, a young widow who had lost a son in childbirth, was working in a nightclub. They had known each other as teenagers and found comfort and familiarity in one another after the war. He was uncertain about the times ahead but believed television was the wave of the future. In 1946, he applied and was accepted to a technical school in Chicago that included a postwar incentive of a twenty-dollar-a-week stipend. Following his plan, my parents wed in a simple civil ceremony and boarded a train to Chicago. They rented two rooms in a boardinghouse in a Polish neighborhood near Logan Square. My mother, pregnant with me, worked as a waitress for as long as she could stay on her feet.
I was due on New Year’s Eve, but arrived in the center of a huge blizzard, a day early, ruining my mother’s opportunity to receive a promotional New Year’s gift of an early freezer prototype. Instead, she continued using an old-fashioned ice chest, waiting each week for the iceman in his horse cart to deliver a large block of ice.
Memorial Day, 1947, Chicago
Within the pages of My First Seven Year s, my oversized faded pink baby book filled with lists of illnesses, birthdays, and notations of my progress, my mother inscribed a poem entitled Patti. One could sense her joy giving birth to a little girl, though a sickly one with severe bronchial distress. My father said I was born coughing. He bundled me up, and together they departed the hospital in a swirl of snow. My mother said that he saved my life, holding me for hours over a steaming stand-up washtub. But I knew nothing of these things, neither the hopes of my father nor the labors of my mother, soon pregnant with another child.
My sister Linda was born thirteen months after me, during yet another Chicago blizzard. At two, I couldn’t pronounce Linda, so I called her Dinny, and for some time that name remained. I can picture my mother with her dark wavy hair and ever-present cigarette, with me toddling about, another in a carriage, and secretly carrying a third beneath an oversized Chesterfield coat. When she could no longer hide the pregnancy, our landlord forced us to relocate. With a third child on the way, my father was obliged to leave behind his vision of stepping into the fast-evolving technical world of television and find full-time work.
My mother listed all our addresses in my baby book. In the first four years of my life, we relocated eleven times, from rooming houses to furnished flats. We traveled by train to Philadelphia, stopping for a brief, unwelcomed stay with my father’s beautiful but mean-spirited sister, Gloria. I can picture my grandmother Jessie’s spinet, a small upright piano, and my aunt whacking me for attempting to play.
That winter we moved from Gloria’s to nearby Hamilton Street. My father found a job in a union factory, working the night shift; my mother continued to waitress. On Christmas Eve after a long day waiting tables, before she boarded the crowded bus home, my mother bought two large lollipops and two small hand-painted wooden penguins for our stockings, all she could afford. When she got off a strap dangled; someone had cut it and made off with her shoulder bag. She would recount the story over the years, still stricken that we had no presents for Christmas that year. Since then, I have found it impossible to pass up little penguins in flea markets or dime stores, as if to fill the vast ice field left in her sad sturdy heart.
Our new baby brother was born in June of 1949. He was named Todd, a small, wrinkled thing wrapped in a pale blue blanket. My mother set him in a wicker bassinet, and we were told not to disturb him. I remember standing over him staring, overcome with the sense that he needed protecting.
Soon after I was diagnosed with tuberculosis, spreading among poor immigrant children in our neighborhood. To safeguard the little ones and offer me a healthier environment, my maternal grandfather, who we called Daddy Frank, spirited me from our crowded Philadelphia rooming house to his sheep farm in Chattanooga. He was handsome, good natured, and played ragtime-style piano. I was free to run in the fresh air and fattened on sheep’s milk, along with heavy doses of streptomycin administered by a large glass hypodermic. I would later learn Daddy Frank’s much younger and childless second wife Dolly had it in her mind to keep me.
My mother loved her father, but after nearly a year of separation, she was forced to legally threaten him to bring me home. She said I returned with a Southern accent, patent leather shoes, and a silver fork and spoon set with Patti Lee engraved. I have little recollection of this estranged stretch of time. My baby book only contains the date of my flight to Chattanooga and a blank page for how we celebrated my third birthday.
On May Day 1950, we moved less than two miles away, across the Schuylkill River, to Baring Street. I was talkative and rambunctious, so my mother allowed me to perch on the stoop by myself while the baby slept, so long as I promised to stay put. I was happy there observing the last vestiges of the 1940s, soon to succumb to modern times. There were horse-drawn wagons, the iceman, a ragman, and an organ grinder with a monkey with a little red cap. Across the way was a medieval-style building, built in 1892 by an Irish railroad baron. It resembled a small castle with crenellated towers, a Victorian wood porch, and a gabled roof. It was later transformed into a Dominican House of Retreat, a fairy-tale place manned by scurrying friars in black cloaks over white robes. The comings and goings on Baring Street fueled my imagination; the storybook castle and the organ grinder’s friendly monkey found their way into future tales I would weave for my siblings.
Linda was quiet, much smaller than me with big, astonished eyes, always tagging behind holding on to my dress. She had a sad-looking doll named Jessica. It must have been a secondhand doll, or born in poor condition, but she loved Jessica and dragged her everywhere. One day one of Jessica’s arms came off. I desperately tried to fix it, but the rubber band attaching the little arm had snapped. Her arm sat on a shelf waiting for a more capable surgeon.
My mother now had the three of us to tend to. She taught us our prayers and policed the precious arena of my lively imagination. She noted in my baby book that I was prone to falsehoods. If the truth didn’t interest me, I presented an alternative reality. To curb my skilled little mind, I received some whacks from the paddle, along with futile attempts to guide my early Bible study and moral education. She had little time to field my endless metaphysical questions about Jesus and the angels and the ins and outs of heavenly bodies. Recorded in my baby book in her hurried script are two of my questions: What is the soul? What color is it?
I plagued my mother with so many questions during evening prayers she decided to enroll me in the Presbyterian Sunday school. At three and a half, I joined the older children memorizing scriptures. I was content for the time being though none of my questions were answered. At bedtime, I would recite what I learned to Linda, who listened wide-eyed with her one-armed doll in her lap.
Toddy was a sickly baby, and we treaded softly so he could sleep. One night I awoke from a nightmare in which I was playing with the baby, perhaps too roughly, and pulled off one of his tiny arms. I woke sweating, unable to distinguish reality from dream. I felt around in the dark for Jessica’s arm, lying in state on our dresser, and rushed to the bassinet to attach it. He began to cry, and my mother found me half asleep poking him with the doll’s arm. She was furious with me. I had frightened her and disturbed the baby. I returned to bed confused and strangely haunted by the experience. For years this nightmare would return, always the same sequence. I would see myself in the pajamas that I had already outgrown, the uneven cut of my thick dark hair, my hand outstretched holding the doll’s arm, whispering my brother’s name: Toddy.
My mother had been able to hide her pregnancy from the new landlord, but not a crying infant. We were uprooted yet again and temporarily moved back with Aunt Gloria on Rambo Terrace where we lasted for three uncomfortable months amid the inhospitable atmosphere and dark wood paneling. I still desperately wanted to touch the keys of my grandmother’s glowing spinet. The instrument had been left to my father; my mother promised that I could have it when we had our own home and counseled me to be patient. My father’s mother, Jessie, died of cancer on Palm Sunday several months before I was born. She was a gentle lace maker who played both spinet and harp, one of six sisters whose family emigrated from Liverpool in 1890. My father loved his mother deeply and often said Linda’s empathetic nature had its roots in her. Jessie faithfully kept diaries, one for every year, mostly recording the weather and family activities. When I got older, I often tried to imitate her daily practice but would forget for a swiftly passing succession of days.
* * *
—
On May 6, 1951, we moved to Newhall Street, a temporary arrangement offered to families of soldiers as they searched for more stable living quarters. It was a whitewashed complex with a barracks feel, consisting of three attached two-story buildings each housing four families. It overlooked a wide unkempt field sprinkled with daisies and dandelions; the whole compound was affectionately called the Patch.
Directly behind us was a concrete area with overflowing trash bins, oil barrels, rusted cans, and discarded junk. Often, with no adults on patrol, we would assemble there searching for treasure. The massive crawl space beneath the buildings was called the Rat House. Poorly boarded up, it was the forbidden core of the complex, and we explored it with our pocket flashlights. It was dark, dusty, and dotted with the red eyes of large city rats. These were our playgrounds, one humming with nature, the other with debris, equally esteemed by the neighborhood children.
