by Howard Fast
The black woman grinned. “Either way, it got points. Hell, what’s the difference?”
She walked into the shower room. Barbara followed, hardly enthralled by the prospect of having her hair washed with DDT, yet falling into the realization that here one obeyed. There was no appeal. One obeyed. She was sure there were various punishments for disobedience, but the one single punishment that mattered was the loss of time off for good behavior. That she knew about. In her case, good behavior amounted to a reduction of her sentence by a day each month, six days out of the sentence; and even now she was determined that not one minute of those six days would be sacrificed.
The white girl held back, crouched and shivering.
“How long since you had a bath?” Officer Davenport demanded, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her under the shower. “Come on, kid. You’re going to kick it no matter what, and a good shower won’t make it any worse. Now all of you, use the soap and scrub.”
Ten minutes later the showers went off, and Barbara took the towel Officer Davenport handed her and dried her body and hair. Her hair was still damp and smelled of the soap and DDT concoction, but hair dryers had not yet made their appearance in federal prisons.
Davenport wrapped herself in a terry cloth robe and sang out, “All right, girls. Follow me, and we’ll get some clothes on you.”
The women wrapped the towels around their waists and followed her into the next room. The prison clothes were stacked on a table, and two women prisoners did the dispensing. They each wore a shapeless gray wraparound dress that fell halfway between the knee and the ankle and flat-heeled black shoes.
“Give her your sizes,” Officer Davenport said. “Bust size, dress size, and shoe size.”
“Not that it matters,” one of the prisoners said.
“We’ll do without your advice, Suzie.”
Barbara pulled on the gray dress and tied it at the waist. “You’re a big girl,” Suzie said, “so we got problems.” She was a sharp-eyed, tight little woman of about forty. “What size shoe?”
“Nine.”
“Jesus God! I don’t know if we got any nines.” She called to the other, “Billy, you got a nine?”
“Nine and a half?”
“They’re kind of loose,” Barbara said apologetically.
“I got an eight, but that’ll mortify the hell out of you.”
Barbara settled for the nine and a half. The three women dressed themselves, and Billy and Suzie stacked three piles of clothes and toiletries on the table.
“Now this is yours,” Officer Davenport said to Barbara and the others. “It’s government issue, so you don’t mess it up. You’re responsible for your possessions. Now here each of you has pajamas, bathrobe, uniform, underwear, toothbrush, tooth powder, comb, brush, deodorant, shower cap, and jacket. Take care of it.”
Another woman entered the room while she was speaking, a tall, thin, gray-haired woman of fifty or so wearing the uniform of a prison officer.
“This is Officer Skeffington,” Davenport told them. “She’ll take you to the isolation cells, where you’ll spend tonight and some of tomorrow. This is only for your isolation period, so don’t get too nervous. You won’t be living there.” She nodded at Rosalie. “She’s the doper.”
Trembling, Rosalie pleaded, “Help me, help me, please.”
“We’re helping you more than anyone ever helped you, so just pull yourself together. Now come along, girls,” Officer Skeffington said. “Pick up your stuff and bring it with you.”
“Do we get fed?” Annie Lou demanded. “Lady, I’m starving.”
“You address me as Officer Skeffington. If you don’t know the officer’s name, you will address him as ‘sir’ or her as ‘madam.’ And nobody starves in here. You will be fed.”
She led them down a corridor, around a corner, and then into another corridor, where there were five wooden doors. Officer Skeffington unsnapped a ring of keys from her belt and opened the first door.
“In here,” she said to Barbara.
“Could I have a pencil and some writing paper?” Barbara asked.
“You’ll have all that tomorrow when you’re assigned to your quarters. I can’t give you any here.”
Barbara nodded and walked into the cell. The door closed behind her and the key turned in the lock. She looked around the room. There was an overhead light with a pull cord, an iron cot of army issue, a bottom sheet, a pillow and pillowcase, two blankets, a wooden chair, a sink, and a toilet. The floor was concrete and the room smelled strongly of disinfectant. There was also a small table.
Barbara put her possessions on the table and sat down on the chair. Happily, there was no mirror in the room. She had no desire to look at herself. Her hair was still a damp mass, lying moist and uncomfortable on her neck and shoulders. She took one of the two cotton towels that were folded on the sink and tied it around her damp head like a turban. It helped.
So this is it, she said to herself. I am finally in jail. If I had only come here when I walked out of the courthouse in Washington it would be over now, long over. Too late now. I have six long, dreary months of this wretched place, of being submissive, of being ordered around, of being bored and humiliated, and for the life of me I still can’t put my finger on what kind of a crime I have committed.
A key turned in the lock. The door opened, and a pretty little black woman carrying a tray entered the cell. She wore an inmate’s uniform, the same shapeless gray smock, but she carried it with style, and she wore a colorful hand-embroidered belt. “Got you some eating food, sister. It ain’t soul food, but it ain’t bad either. This here’s just pickup. You be eating better tomorrow. My name’s Ellie. Why don’t you just stack your junk in the corner and I put this on the table?”
Barbara cleared the table and Ellie put down the tray. “I pick up tomorrow,” she said. “So you take your time, sister. See you in jail.”
“Thank you,” Barbara said.
The black lady left, locking the door behind her. There had been something so kind, so gentle, so endearing in her manner that it brought tears to Barbara’s eyes. She had now been in prison for almost three hours, and nothing that had happened had been in any way like what she might have expected; but then, she realized, prison, like war, can be neither imagined nor anticipated. It can only be experienced, and during the three hours she had been here she had learned more of the nature of prison and prisoners than in a lifetime of reading. Well, someday, she told herself, she would write of all this, and at least she would know whereof she wrote.
She turned to the tray. Until this moment she had felt no pangs of hunger. They had taken away her watch with her other possessions, but she guessed it was almost nine o’clock. She had not eaten since seven in the morning, and then it had been only dry toast and coffee. Now, suddenly, she was ravenously hungry. The tray contained two thick sandwiches of ham and cheese on white bread, a dish of coleslaw, a piece of brown cake, and a mug of coffee. There was evaporated milk in the coffee and it had been sweetened. She ate everything—the sandwiches, the coleslaw, and the cake. The single utensil on the tray was a spoon, and she found herself licking it clean.
What a difference a full stomach makes, she thought. Who was it said that revolutions are not made on full stomachs? Well, perhaps it applies to worry as well. Her head was nodding in spite of the coffee. She undressed and put on the pajamas. Apparently Suzie had decided that nothing would do but the largest pair in stock. The sleeves covered her hands, the trousers her feet.
“Oh, the hell with it,” she said. She pulled the light cord, crawled into bed, and a moment later she was asleep with the sleep of utter exhaustion.
She slept more soundly than she had in days due to the cumulative effect of tension and exhaustion, and she awakened to the sound of a knock at the door. The tiny cell was filled with morning light from a high window, and for a moment or t
wo, so deep had her sleep been, Barbara was unable to remember where she was and experienced a momentary surge of panic at the sight of the tiny room. Then the key turned in the lock, and Ellie entered with another tray.
“Breakfast, sister,” Ellie said. “How you sleep?”
“Like a log.”
“Good. Now you clean up and put yourself together. Then you make up the bed. You fold everything at the foot of the bed—sheet, blankets and pillowcase, nice and neat. This here’s your breakfast, so you eat this first, and I take away your other tray.”
“Are you a prisoner, Ellie?”
“I sure enough am. Honor prisoner. Sister, I been incarcerated seven long years.”
“Good heavens, for what?”
“Murder,” Ellie said indifferently. “I been married to this no good sonofabitch who beat up on me and my two kids day in, day out, and one day I just couldn’t stand no more of it, so I took his gun, and said, ‘You touch me, you bastard, I kill you.’ That’s what I did. I kill him.” She shrugged.
“But this is a federal jail.”
“He was a soldier, sister. So here I is. Now never mind all that. Long done and gone. You eat and clean up, and then the physician’s assistant going to come by and talk to you.”
“Ellie,” Barbara asked, unable to restrain her curiosity, “they give you the keys to these cells?”
“That is right,” she replied, shaking the key ring. “These here cells ain’t really cells, just isolation rooms. Suppose you get out of this cell? Then you is locked in the building. Suppose you get out of the building? Then you is behind the gates and the walls, with the man up there in the tower with his gun. Suppose you go over the wall? Then you is on an island, sister, and you know something, thinking about escaping is like taking stupid pills.”
Barbara laughed. “I’m certainly not thinking about escaping.”
“Good. That laugh is very nice to see. When I see you last night, you got a face like death warmed over. Poor sister, what you do? Kill someone, peddle dope, pass bad checks? You sure enough don’t look like no floozie.”
“I committed a contempt of Congress.”
“You committed a what?” Ellie shook her head. “Someday you tell me. Right now I got my work.”
After she brushed her teeth, Barbara sat down to eat. There was a bowl of oatmeal, covered with sugar and already cold. Barbara had a few spoonfuls and then gave up. There was a roll, buttered, that she ate with her coffee. Then she washed her face, combed her hair, dressed herself in her prison clothes, and made up the bed as instructed. There was no nail file in the toiletries, not even a scrap of paper that she could fold into a triangle to clean her fingernails.
“This is ridiculous,” she said aloud. “I’m in jail, and I stink of DDT and disinfectant and my hair is an unholy mess, and I’m worrying about dirty fingernails.”
A knock at the door again. Ellie’s voice asked, “You decent, sister?”
“I suppose you could call it that.”
The door opened, and a dark man with thick eyebrows and sloping shoulders entered the cell. “I’m Gallo, the physician’s assistant,” he said. “I take your history, and then you go for your physical. Sit over there on the bed.” He dropped down on the chair and opened the folder he had with him.
“Name?” He had hardly glanced at her.
“Barbara Cohen.”
“Married?”
“I’m a widow.”
“Then Cohen’s your husband’s name. Maiden name?”
“Lavette.” She spelled it.
For the first time, he looked at her thoughtfully. “I’ll want your home address and the address of your next of kin.” She gave them to him. “Name and address of family physician, if you have one.”
“Dr. Milton Kellman, Mount Zion Hospital, San Francisco.”
He paused and studied her again. “You’re an odd one. Nothing to do with this history, but may I ask what you’re in here for?”
“Since it appears to be a common question that pervades this place, I don’t mind. I’m almost used to it. Contempt of Congress.”
“Oh? Wait a minute, Barbara Cohen. I remember. But that was ages ago.”
“Like the mills of the gods, the mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.”
“No doubt. Contagious diseases. I’ll name them. Just say yes or no. Chicken pox?”
“Yes.”
“Measles?”
“Yes.”
“Diphtheria?”
“No. I was inoculated.”
“Whooping cough?”
“No.”
“Mumps?”
“Yes.”
“Syphilis?”
“No,” she said softly.
He looked at her again. “I have to ask. Gonorrhea?”
“No.”
“It’s a jail, Mrs. Cohen, not the YWCA.”
Angry suddenly, she said, “Why the hell don’t you get on with this and stop apologizing to me! I know damn well I’m in jail! What do you think I’m here as, a social worker?”
He paused with his pen in the air to stare at her.
“I’m sorry. I don’t often lose my temper.”
He shrugged. “Let’s continue.”
When he finished, he closed his folder and walked out of the cell without another word, slamming the door behind him. A few minutes later, Ellie returned.
“You burned the man’s ass, sister. You watch your step, huh? Now we go for your physical.”
“Do I take my things?”
“No. You leave your stuff and we pick it up after they assign you a room. This here building is Administration and Orientation, and you is three weeks here before they assign you permanent quarters. But not in the cell. You get a decent room, which ain’t much but better than a cell. But right now you get undressed and put on your bathrobe.”
The doctor was thin, aseptic, and coldly impersonal. His name was Sutter. He wore a white laboratory coat, and Barbara noticed that his collar was dirty and that there were dark moons under his fingernails.
He poked at the scar on her abdomen and said, “What’s that—a section?”
“Yes.”
“The child born alive?”
“Yes.”
“Get on the table there and lie down.”
“Why?” Barbara asked.
“I’m going to do a pelvic.”
“You mean a vaginal examination?”
“If you wish to call it that.”
“I don’t want it,” Barbara said.
“What do you mean, you don’t want it?”
“I don’t want it. There is nothing wrong with my vagina. I’m not using it as a receptacle for dope, if that’s what you’re after. I’m here for six months, and I can’t see why on earth that has to include a vaginal examination.”
“Suppose you let me decide that.” He exchanged looks with the nurse, a stout blond woman.
“It’s a prison rule,” the nurse said.
“I don’t want it!” Barbara said emphatically.
“I’m not going to force you,” Dr. Sutter said, regarding her unpleasantly. “This is not a concentration camp. But it goes on your record. This is your second day in here. You’re making a bad start, Barbara, I can tell you that.”
She was back in her cell, putting her things together, when the door opened and a tall, dark-haired woman with striking blue eyes, wearing an officer’s uniform, entered, closed the door behind her, and stood looking at her. “I’m Captain Cooper,” she said. “I understand you refused the pelvic. Why?”
“Because I’m not an addict or a dope peddler,” Barbara replied. “I’m here for contempt of Congress. That gives you the right to lock me up. It doesn’t give anyone the right to poke around in my vagina.”
“Y
ou’re pretty damn sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“Oh, no. No, ma’am, I am not. I am depressed and lonely and miserable and frightened. I am also damned angry, because I did nothing criminal—”
“You can can that right now,” Captain Cooper interrupted. “I am not a judge or a jury. I am an officer in a federal House of Correction. Now you listen to me, Barbara. You’ve done a stupid thing on your second day in jail. For this I could dock your time off for good behavior. I will not tolerate troublemakers. There are rules. You run a prison with rules. You’re no fool. You’re an educated woman, and you should understand that. Now this time I’m going to let it pass, and count yourself lucky. I am not impressed with your background or your contacts. The next time you step out of line, I’m going to lay it on you with all my weight. By now you’ve seen enough of this place to know that we run a civilized institution, but we deal with criminals. We have solitary confinement when it is necessary, and we have other ways. Now take your things and follow me.”
Barbara picked up her possessions and followed Captain Cooper down the hall, past the isolation cells. Women in prisoners’ dress passed by, glancing at her curiously. Here were open doors to small rooms, each room about eight by ten, with a cot, a small chest of drawers, table and chair. Each room had a window that was unbarred. Captain Cooper pointed to one of them.
“In there. This will be your room for the next three weeks. You will keep it neat and clean; make your bed immediately upon arising, see that no dust or dirt accumulates. The door is never locked. This is the orientation period, when you will learn the rules and regulations of this institution.”
“Thank you,” Barbara said.
The officer looked at her, and their eyes met. “We’ll see,” Captain Cooper said.
A loud bell announced lunch. Annie Lou Baker, in the room next to Barbara’s, met her in the hall. “Now this ain’t bad, honey,” the black woman said. “I been in lots worse places.”
“Where’s Rosalie?” Barbara asked her.
“They got her back in that cell we been in, screaming her head off. That kid kicking it hard, hard.”
Ellie came along and told them to follow her. They were joined by about a dozen women in the orientation section, and Ellie led the way to the dining room, which was in another building. It was a welcome shock for Barbara to step out into the open, to feel the cold, clean wash of the sea air against her cheeks and to glimpse the great stretch of the Pacific in the distance. Films of prison life had prepared Barbara for the tiers of cell blocks, the long, narrow tables where prisoners sat side by side, the bleak misery of bowed men in striped suits. To her relief, the dining room resembled nothing as much as the dining room of a somewhat shabby girls’ school. The tables seated four, and the food was served cafeteria style at one end of the room. The inmates apparently sat where they pleased; that is, except for the new prisoners, who were confined to one section.