JUDGE: “Singing, Lottie? Why your neighbors here testify to the fact that you were making a great deal of noise—so much that they could not sleep.”
LOTTIE: “I tells yo’ honor’ we wuz jes singin’ lak we allays do.”
JUDGE : “What were you singing?”
LOTTIE: “Why, hymns, sah.”
The judge smiles cynically.
A neatly-attired white man with a wizened face again takes the stand against Lottie. Hymns or no hymns he could not sleep. The judge pronounces a sentence of “six months in the workhouse,” for Lottie.
And so it goes on.
The suffrage prisoners are the main business of the morning. Sixteen women come inside the railing which separates “tried” from “untried” and take their seats.
“Do the ladies wish the government to provide them with counsel?”
They do not.