The prisoners sometimes slid their arms in mine as we paced along in the yard. One took me to task. “I saw you walking with Gracie. You mustn’t associate with her.”
“Why not?”
“Do you know what she’s in here for? She’s a petty thief. Whenever she gets out she rides in street cars and steals money from the pocketbooks of poor people going to pay their rent, or women coming home with their husbands’ wages.”
“And what are you here for?”
“Oh, I steal from the rich; I take only from people who have jewelry and bank accounts.”
I never did the regular work of cleaning, not even my own cell. Nor was I sent into the workshop to sew or to operate the machines with the others. When I asked Mrs. Sullivan why, she replied jollily, “Oh, you look better over there with a pen in your hand.”
She had fixed up a table to serve as a desk, and there I sat the entire day with my papers and books, planning ahead and reading countless letters; the tenor of all was much like this from Sarah Goldstein:
The women here in Brownsville need help very bad. Mrs. Sanger has got put away in the penitentiary for being friends with us, but she said we was to use her place while she was gone. If we can have a meeting over here in the clinic, I will put a fire in the stove and ask the women to come Saturday.
We women here want to find out what the President, the Mayor, and the Judges and everybody is trying to do. First they put Mrs. Sanger in jail for telling us women how not to have any more children, and then they get busy for the starve of the ones we’ve got. First they take the meat and the egg, then the potato, the onion, and the milk, and now the lentils and the butter, and the children are living on bread and tea off the tea leaves that is kept cooking on the back of the stove.
Honest to God, we ought to call a meeting and do something about it.