We taste our soup and crust of bread. We try so hard to eat it for we are tired and hungry, but no one of us is able to get it down. We leave the table hungry and slightly nauseated.
Another long march in silence through various channels into a large dormitory and through a double line of cots! Then we stand, weary to the point of fainting, waiting the next ordeal. This seemed to be the juncture at which we lost all that is left us of contact with the outside world,—our clothes.
An assistant matron, attended by negress prisoners, relieves us of our clothes. Each prisoner is obliged to strip naked without even the protection of a sheet, and proceed across what seems endless space, to a shower bath. A large tin bucket stands on the floor and in this is a minute piece of dirty soap, which is offered to us and rejected. We dare not risk the soap used by so many prisoners. Naked, we return from the bath to receive our allotment of coarse, hideous prison clothes, the outer garments of which consist of a bulky mother-hubbard wrapper, of bluish gray ticking and a heavy apron of the same dismal stuff. It takes a dominant personality indeed to survive these clothes. The thick unbleached muslin undergarments are of designs never to be forgotten! And the thick stockings and forlorn shoes! What torture to put on shoes that are alike for each foot and made to fit just anybody who may happen along.
Why are we being ordered to dress? It is long past the bed-time hour.
Our suspense is brief. All dressed in cloth of “guilt” we are led into what we later learn is the “recreation” room. Lined up against its wall, we might any other time have bantered about the possibility of being shot, but we are in no mood to jest. The door finally opens and in strides Warden Whittaker with a stranger beside him.
He reviews his latest criminal recruits, engaging the stranger meanwhile in whispered conversation. There are short, uncertain laughs. There are nods of the head and more whispers.
“Well, ladies, I hope you are all comfortable. Now make yourselves at home here. I think you will find it healthy here. You’ll weigh more when you go out than when you came in. You will be allowed to write one letter a month-to your family. Of course we open and read all letters coming in and going out. To-morrow you will be assigned your work. I hope you will sleep well. Good night!”
We did not answer. We looked at each other.
News leaked through in the morning that the stranger had been a newspaper reporter. The papers next morning were full of the “comfort” and “luxury” of our surroundings. The “delicious” food sounded most reassuring to the nation. In fact no word of the truth was allowed to appear.
The correspondent could not know that we went back to our cots to try to sleep side by side with negro prostitutes. Not that we shrank from these women on account of their color, but how terrible to know that, the institution had gone out of its way to bring these prisoners from their own wing to the white wing in an attempt to humiliate us. There was plenty of room in the negro wing. But prison must be made so unbearable that no more women would face it. That was the policy attempted here.