Jenny Shimada

Jenny Shimada’s post-underground life is marked by a difficult double movement: she becomes more capable of questioning the politics and relationships that once defined her, yet cannot escape their consequences. In the company of Pauline and other women, she discovers a form of learning that does not depend on pretending to already know; in prison, she confronts how differently the legal system and its surrounding culture assign shame, sympathy, and privilege. Her story makes self-revision both a possibility and a burden.

Identity and Reinvention

During her years underground, Jenny changes enough that Pauline doubts she will be able to reunite with William when he leaves prison. The change is not simply a matter of adopting a new identity. A newsletter about restoration work at Wildmoor describes Iris Wong, a young visitor from San Francisco praised for her patience and workmanship. Jenny’s presence under that name becomes legible to Jim through the newsletter, and she confirms that Iris was her. The notice records an outwardly quiet life of useful work, but its discovery also shows how a fugitive identity can persist in ordinary public traces: a local article, a name, and a description of what someone has done.

Her inner life, meanwhile, is increasingly directed toward William in writing. She neglects her journal and sends him her chronicles, arguments, and private outpourings, recognizing that guilt helps prompt the letters. William has become a point by which she tries to navigate, and a confessor, but she is unsure she can see him without losing her fragile sense of herself. She even wonders whether she still loves him. The correspondence sustains a connection while making its altered terms harder to avoid.

Learning and Women’s Political Agency

Pauline proposes teaching other women what she learned with The cadre—not to injure anyone, but to understand firearms and the ways men use and misuse them. Jenny dislikes guns, yet agrees to participate. The group begins with instruction away from shooting: the names of parts, ballistics, categories of firearms, and the purposes for which each is suited. Jenny sits with Sandy, Joanne, and Lena, among the five women who dismantle a 12-gauge shotgun, clean it with pipe cleaners and household rags, and make lists of questions and ideas.

What matters to Jenny is not only the practical knowledge but the pleasure of learning without embarrassment. The women recognize that, around men, they have often acted more knowledgeable than they felt, privately struggling to catch up. They distinguish men’s possession of knowledge from a culture of acting as if knowledge were already theirs: a confidence that makes questions seem unnecessary and invites women to play along. Learning among women offers a contrast—not mastery performed in advance, but the shared pleasure of encountering something for the first time and showing wonder at it.

That experience shapes Jenny’s thinking about revolution. Weapons training makes her feel braver and more capable, and she sees it embolden Sandy, Joanne, Lena, and especially Pauline. Yet, after recoiling inwardly from Mike Sorsa’s invitation to meet new comrades, she can also see how the group might look from outside: violent and courting destruction. Revolution begins to mean less to her as force assembled to topple a system than as the delicate work of changing individual minds, or as a rare opportunity to attempt that change.

Pauline, William, and Political Disagreement

Jenny and Pauline do not interpret women’s liberation in the same way. Their group concludes that women have historically followed, even when celebrated women revolutionaries served less-worshipped men, and resolves that women must take leadership roles. Pauline reads William’s methods through that history, arguing that they were ineffective because he was a man. She also connects his approach to the masculine violence of her own kidnapping by former comrades. Jenny resists turning this critique into a claim that men are destined to act in particular ways; to her, that would repeat the same logic that treats women’s domestic labor as natural. Their disagreement is political, but it also bears on Jenny’s understanding of her past with William and of the violence in which they participated.

Her bond with Pauline becomes, in time, an attachment neither can reduce to political agreement. Looking back, Jenny understands that on the hill with Pauline and the hawk, she chose to believe Pauline was in danger and to move toward rescue. She also recognizes that she did not want to be left behind, and that Pauline did not want that either. Taking Pauline’s hand meant surrendering the option of escape; Jenny understood the bond as salvation even though it also bound her to Pauline’s fate. Later, when evidence seems to point toward Pauline’s betrayal, Jenny struggles to accept it. Pauline’s letter receives no reply, and Jenny’s conviction that Pauline may have been cornered cannot be supported by what she knows.

Arrest, Trial, and Unequal Consequences

In custody, Jenny writes a statement for Pauline’s bail motion with a lawyer’s assistance. She argues that Pauline had always been a captive and that Jenny herself had been among her captors, concluding that Pauline’s participation in criminal acts was against her free will. The motion fails. Investigators have followed connections among Jenny, Sandy, Tom, Frazer, Juan, and Yvonne, and have found written and recorded accounts of Pauline’s enthusiasm for joining The cadre. The judge dismisses Jenny’s statement as a cynical legal tactic. Her attempt to describe Pauline’s experience therefore cannot determine how Pauline’s actions are understood in court.

The two women ultimately face different consequences, and the novel stresses that their sentences do not explain the difference. Pauline is convicted of bank robbery, serves less than two years, and has her sentence commuted. Though the press presents her as receiving the harsh treatment, she emerges with her class privilege intact: her imprisonment is treated as an ordeal that makes her more interesting, while she is cast as a victim, including of her attorneys. Jenny receives the minimum sentence for participating in the selective-service recruitment-center bombings and, after a year, transfers to work release for good behavior. Instead of feeling simply fortunate, she experiences a new shame in being rewarded for compliance and praised as unusually good. Her treatment makes her feel placed in the category of the model minority, offered privileges as an example to others. The contrast turns a personal rift into a social one.

Jenny and Pauline are tried and sentenced only for crimes committed before they met; their time together is not entered into the legal record. No one is charged with Mr. Morton’s murder. The mismatch between crimes, punishment, and public explanation leaves Jenny with a sense of unresolved confusion rather than a clear accounting of responsibility.

Loss and Continuing Self-Revision

William continues writing through Jenny’s sentencing and imprisonment. From his prison law library, he offers advice and encouragement, but not a return to their former intimacy. He treats her as a worthy comrade and a person brought low by circumstance, extending a generous concern that he no longer offers as a lover. He does not reproach her for leaving. When he eventually lets three months pass before answering one letter, Jenny understands that she should stop writing. His quiet withdrawal is another loss, sharpened by her awareness that her inattention helped betray him.

The deeper loss, however, is Jenny’s confidence in her political judgment. The world has not healed while she has been away; its inequalities seem to her not like exceptions that can be removed but the rules that keep it running. With no war to focus protest and no single evil to oppose, she feels more powerless than before, and carries forward the sense that no solution remains. She also accepts that loyalty to Juan and Yvonne does not prove her morally superior: she refuses to inform on them, but understands that her own code has failed to make her wiser or less capable of foolish, selfish acts. She tries to write about life as a sequence of uneven, intermittent changes, glimpsed only now and then. Her ending is not a settled conversion or a recovered certainty, but the ongoing effort to recognize how her life has changed—and how incomplete that recognition remains.