“Well, I’m a barber, and as fine a barber as ever held a razor. I owned a big shop once, and I hired twenty men, but it went when I went. I am so low down now, no one wants me. Oh, occasionally I’ll get a job in one of the cheap places. I worked two hours last night in Cambridge, and two the night before in Chelsea.”
Then with sudden digression, I said, “Where can a fellow get a bed and something to eat if he’s broke?”
“You can go down to the Hawkins Street Woodyard. But don’t go there unless you have to!” And he described its wretchedness, which I knew from my own experience. The man was truthful on that point, and I believed in him.
I laughingly said, “What’s the matter with going down to the ‘Island’?”
“Well, I can tell you all about those places. I have done time in all of them. One day in Charles St. Jail, one week at Tewksbury, and forty days at Deer Island.”
“Can a man with no crime but poverty go there and get work, and be paid for it?”
He laughed sardonically. “You can get work all right, but your pay is tough board and abuse. They’ll probably set you to digging graves at Tewksbury. They die over there like sheep with a plague.”
“But what of Deer Island?”
“Well, I’m a barber, you know, and they put me in the barber department. One day two of the prisoners, also doing my kind of work (all men who come there have to be shaved), were two minutes late coming in from the yard to work. That made the attending officer mad, and he said, ‘I’ll fix ’em!’ and he forced those men for hours to stand with their faces to the wall with their hands over their heads. It was a question of obey or be thrown into a dungeon perhaps for days. I saw that punishment inflicted many times, and I saw men fall from exhaustion and pain and be dragged out. Where they were taken, I don’t know, and many of them were old men, too.
“One day I was sent over to the hospital to trim, as I was told, a young woman’s hair. I took only my shears and comb. On arriving there I found a young woman with a head of hair that shone like silk, and fell three feet down her back. She was in tears and begging that it might be spared. She was only there for thirty days and it meant leaving the place doubly disgraced. But the Matron declared she had seen a louse in her hair, and her word went. When I came in she asked me if I had brought the clippers. I said, ‘No.’ She ordered me to go and get them. Feeling sorry for the girl I told her it wasn’t necessary to cut the hair. I could clean her head perfectly without cutting off a single hair. At this the Matron said, ‘Are you an officer or a prisoner here? Get your clippers and do as you are told, and quickly!’ I knew what it meant to be disobedient. I saw before me the dungeon-inferno. I left the girl crushed and sobbing, and that wealth of hair almost worth its weight in gold upon the floor.