Nellie Bly (Illustration Credit 2.2)
It was not a spot where many people felt comfortable. Colonel Cockerill, as he was generally known (this was an honorary title, for he had risen no higher than private during his Civil War service), was an imposing man, over six feet tall, with a massive head and the solid bulk of a stevedore. He had a drooping walrus mustache and black hair just beginning to gray. More often than not a cigar could be seen poking out from beneath that bushy mustache; over the course of a day ashes accumulated like snowdrifts in the folds of his waistcoat. Cockerill could be brusque to the point of rudeness, and he took criticism of his newspaper as a personal affront. Once, when a minister wrote a letter objecting to what he considered an “irreligious” cartoon that had appeared in The World, Cockerill wrote a letter of reply that read in its entirety: “My Dear Sir: Will you kindly go to hell?” Around Park Row, his gift for profanity was legendary; he was reputed to be able to swear for ten minutes straight without repeating himself. His specialty was the placement of oaths inside otherwise respectable words—“The problem with that man,” he would bellow to an underling, “is that he’s too indegoddampendent”—which was a trait that he shared with his boss, Joseph Pulitzer. Otherwise the two men, Pulitzer and Cockerill, were constitutionally mismatched. Pulitzer was by nature an introvert and an intellectual; he loved chess, political memoirs, and the novels of George Eliot, and was so sensitive to noise that even the crackling of a piece of paper could cause him physical pain. Cockerill enjoyed the late-night attractions offered by the big city, and after work was often to be found buying rounds for companions at the Rotunda Bar of the Astor House or one of the newspaper district’s other watering holes, where he was widely admired for his ability to hold his liquor. Pulitzer had been elected to Congress from New York’s Ninth District, but he gave up his seat after only thirteen months when he realized he was more powerful as a publisher than as a politician; Cockerill was the sort of man, a World staffer once remarked, who would be selected as an Exalted Ruler of the Elks.
Still, each respected the other’s considerable talents, and over the years the two had negotiated an exceedingly successful working relationship. In 1879 Pulitzer had hired Cockerill, then an editor for a Cincinnati newspaper, as managing editor for his Post-Dispatch in St. Louis, where Cockerill served for four years, until the Slayback scandal. A St. Louis attorney by the name of Alonzo W. Slayback, incensed by a series of editorials that he believed had impugned the honor of his law partner, burst into the editor’s office one evening with a pistol in his hand; when Slayback paused to take off his coat, Cockerill pulled a revolver from his desk drawer and shot him in the chest, killing him. The grand jury declined to indict Cockerill, but more than two thousand St. Louisans canceled their newspaper subscriptions and Pulitzer decided that his position there was no longer tenable. After a decent amount of time had passed, Pulitzer hired Cockerill again to run the paper he had recently purchased in New York, The World, and there they resumed their collaboration where it had left off. Pulitzer would later admit to an employee that the way Cockerill had “so coolly killed” Slayback filled him at times with admiration and at other times with repulsion; Cockerill was heard to remark that Pulitzer was “the best man in the world to have in a newspaper office for one hour in the morning” but a “damned nuisance the rest of the day.”
Colonel Cockerill did not like ever to be distracted from his work, and Nellie Bly sensed immediately that she should waste none of his time. She presented her idea to him: a trip to Europe, with a return trip in steerage, so that she might describe firsthand for The World’s readers the dirty, overcrowded conditions endured by immigrants on their crossing to America. It was an ambitious story, but one that she felt confident she could accomplish, combining the skills she had gained reporting on the working conditions of Pittsburgh factory girls with the foreign reporting she had done in Mexico.
The previous year The Journalist had called Cockerill “unquestionably the best news editor in the country,” in large part due to his eye for talent, and he must have seen something that he liked in this determined young woman. He gave her twenty-five dollars as a retainer for her services and told her that he would discuss her idea with Joseph Pulitzer. She should come back again later, after he had spoken with the publisher, and he would give her their decision.
Bly returned at the appointed time. John Cockerill informed her that Mr. Pulitzer had rejected the idea about returning from Europe in steerage; for a writer who was new to the paper, Cockerill explained, they preferred a story that was more local in nature. However, Pulitzer himself had suggested a different idea. The World had received a tip that the staff of the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum, on New York’s East River, was mistreating the female patients. The paper, though, had been continually frustrated in its efforts to determine if the stories were accurate; the doctors and nurses refused to speak to journalists, and their practices were hidden from view behind barred windows and locked doors. The editors were looking for a female reporter who would feign insanity and allow herself to be remanded to Blackwell’s Island, so that she could report firsthand the inner workings of the asylum.
It was the sort of story, ingeniously exposing official misconduct, in which The World had come to specialize. It was also the sort of story—one offering at least the possibility of help for a vulnerable, exploited population—that appealed to Nellie Bly.
“Do you think you can work your way into an insane asylum?” Cockerill asked her now.
“I can try,” Bly said simply.
“You realize that it is a difficult thing to do. The slightest false move means exposure and failure. The doctors are all clever experts. Do you think you can feign insanity well enough to pass them?”
“Yes, I believe I can.” She considered this for a moment. “At least I can make the attempt. I don’t know what I can do until I try.”
The two decided that she would use the name Nellie Brown; it would be natural for her to answer to her own first name, and the initials N.B. would match those already on her linen. Cockerill would do what he could to keep track of her while she was inside. He thought a week’s time would be sufficient for her to gain a clear understanding of the asylum’s practices. With that Nellie Bly got up to leave; at the door a thought occurred to her, and she turned back to Cockerill. “How will you get me out?” she asked him.
“I don’t know,” he answered grimly. “Only get in.”
ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 23, 1887, a young woman calling herself Nellie Brown, dressed simply but prettily in a gray flannel dress and a black sailor’s hat with a gray veil, appeared at the door of the Temporary Home for Females on Second Avenue. She had hardly slept the night before, having stayed up making faces at herself in the mirror, practicing the wide-eyed, unblinking stares she hoped were indicative of insanity; when she wasn’t staring into the mirror she was reading ghost stories in the dim gaslight, trying to put herself in a properly unnerved frame of mind. All the way downtown she had done her best to affect the dreamy gaze she had seen on romantic maidens in magazine illustrations. After arranging to rent a thirty-cent room, she passed most of the day sitting listlessly in the parlor, barely engaging in conversation with any of the boarders other than to deliver the occasional pronouncement that everyone in the house seemed crazy to her. When the maid came in to announce that it was time for bed, Nellie Brown protested that she was too afraid to sleep and that she preferred just to sit on the stairs; only at the maid’s insistence did she finally allow herself to be escorted to her bedroom. That night she again stayed awake (the more sleep she lost, she reasoned, the more insane she would seem to the doctors) and the next morning loudly refused to emerge from her room, insisting that she had lost her trunks and demanding that they be returned to her. When she could not be quieted, policemen were summoned to the house; the two officers accompanied the distraught young woman to the local station house, and from there to the Essex Market Police Court, where th
e question of her sanity was to be taken up.
The courtroom was crowded with people dressed in shabby clothes; some talked animatedly with friends, others sat alone, gazing at nothing in particular. The sprinkling of uniformed officers all wore looks of immense boredom. From behind his high desk Judge Duffy looked kindly down at the young woman in the docket (her heart sank at his kindness, fearing that he would not send her where she wanted to go) and listened to the story, recounted by the policemen and the assistant matron of the home, of how oddly she had behaved the night before, how she would say nothing of herself other than her name, how she had not slept a wink, how she had concocted a plainly ridiculous tale about lost bags. To this the young woman would only repeat that she wanted her trunks, and that these policemen had promised to help her find them. For some time the judge considered the information that had been presented to him. Finally he ordered the young woman to be sent to his chambers, where he would speak to her in private.
When they were seated, Judge Duffy gently asked her if she was perhaps from Cuba. “Sí, señor,” she answered with genuine delight, recalling some of the Spanish she had picked up in Mexico. “How did you know?” She told him that she had been born on a farm there, and her real name was Nellie Moreno, but she always used the English “Nellie Brown.” Beyond that she could not remember anything. “I have a headache all the time,” she said sadly, “and it makes me forget things. I don’t want them to trouble me. Everybody is asking me questions, and it makes my head worse.” This much, at least, was true, for she had not slept in two nights.
“Well, no one shall trouble you any more,” Judge Duffy said. “Sit down here and rest awhile.”
The judge was now of the firm belief that Nellie Brown had been drugged and brought by someone to New York; after some time, he returned in the company of an ambulance surgeon, instructing him to be kind in his examination of this poor girl. The doctor asked her to stick out her tongue; he felt her pulse and listened to the beating of her heart, then peered for a long while into her eyes. “I believe she has been using belladonna,” he presently announced, and after writing something down in a notebook he indicated that she should be transported to Bellevue Hospital, to receive further examination at the hospital’s new pavilion for the insane.
There were two days at Bellevue, all of that time filled with the dread that someone would see through her ruse and send her home. Doctors asked her if she saw faces on the wall, if she ever heard voices calling her name. They asked her to stretch her arms, to move her fingers, to open and close her eyes. When the tests had been completed, the doctors pronounced her insane. “Softening of the brain,” one of them murmured to a nurse.
On the afternoon of the third day Nellie Brown was dispatched with four other patients into an ambulance, its back door locked behind them as if they were prisoners. At an East Side pier they were dragged up a plank to a waiting boat, where in a stifling lower cabin they were guarded by two female attendants, coarse, massive women who spat tobacco juice on the floor. When the boat landed, more guards shoved them into another ambulance. “What is this place?” she asked one of them.
“Blackwell’s Island,” he told her, “an insane place, where you’ll never get out of.”
Soon the low stone buildings of the asylum had come into view. The guard’s chilling promise continued to sound in her mind as they were led up a flight of steep, narrow steps into a small receiving room. The first of the patients to be examined was a woman who spoke only German, and, as there was no interpreter present, the doctor ordered her to be admitted without further questioning. She was but one of many immigrant women Nellie Brown would meet in the asylum who had been locked up, probably for life, simply because they could not make themselves understood to authorities—landlords, policemen, judges, doctors. It was better to be a murderer, she thought, and at least have the chance of trial, than to be declared insane without any hope for escape. Her own examination determined that she stood five feet five inches tall and weighed 112 pounds. She was, she claimed, nineteen years old and originally from Cuba; she insisted that she was not sick and did not belong in the hospital. “No one has a right to shut me up in this manner,” she said, but the doctor was writing in his notebook and took no more notice of her.
Later she was taken to a cold, wet bathroom and ordered to undress. When she refused, the nurses pulled off her clothes, piece by piece, until she was wearing only a single undergarment. “I will not remove it,” she protested, but to no avail; privacy, she understood at once, was a right she had given up. Naked, she plunged herself into the freezing water of the tub. An old, mumbling woman, obviously another patient, dipped a rag into a pan filled with soft soap and furiously scrubbed until Nellie Brown’s teeth were chattering and her limbs were blue. Without warning, three buckets of ice-cold water were poured over her head in quick succession; the water filled her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and for a terrifying moment she had the sensation of drowning. Sightless, gasping, and shivering, she was jerked up from the tub—the thought flashed through her mind that now she might well look insane—and a cotton slip was roughly pulled over her; then she was hurried off to a small cell furnished only with a narrow iron bed wrapped in a rubber sheet. She lay down and tried to warm herself with the blanket that had been provided, but found that it was not large enough even to cover her from shoulders to feet.
Despite her exhaustion she could not sleep, and she lay in bed picturing the horrors that would occur in the event of fire: three hundred women were kept in that one building alone, all of its windows barred and each room locked separately. From somewhere she could hear the sounds of women crying, women swearing, women praying for their release. She fell asleep with the first gray shimmer of dawn; at five o’clock the cell door was unlocked and a voice commanded her to get up. She was tossed a plain white calico dress, with the instruction to get dressed; then she followed a line of women to the bathroom, where fifty patients washed their faces at four basins, drying themselves on two shared towels.
For breakfast, each patient was given a bowl of cold tea, a slice of buttered bread, and a bowl of oatmeal with a spoonful of molasses on it. The butter was rancid; the oatmeal was equally wretched, and she could not bring herself to choke it down. Even the tea, of an oddly pinkish hue, was barely drinkable. Lunches inside the asylum turned out to be more meager still, consisting merely of tea and another slice of bread; dinner was a chunk of boiled meat or fish with potatoes. The deprivation was intensified by its proximity to relief: on the wards the nurses snacked on apples, melons, and grapes brought in by the kitchen staff, just as they wore heavy clothing and coats while they refused the patients’ cries for shawls. The cold turned out to be as merciless an enemy as hunger. At times the superintendent of Blackwell’s Island strode through the dining hall inspecting the patients. Later, when Nellie Brown asked some of them why they didn’t tell the superintendent how they suffered from the cold, they said that the nurses would beat them if they ever dared complain.
The beatings were common, and were administered with fiendish imagination: patients were pummeled with broom handles, pulled by the hair, choked with bedsheets, held underwater until nearly drowned. All of the women were bathed in cold water once a week, and their clothes were changed but once a month, unless they were scheduled to receive a visitor. The clothes had been made by the saner patients among them, who did most of the work of the asylum, which included cleaning the nurses’ bedrooms and tending the beautiful lawns that were the face the asylum presented to the world. In the mornings, when the weather was fair, the fifteen hundred women of the asylum were taken on a brief promenade around those lawns, looking like a defeated army on field parade, the patients in rows two or three abreast, all of them dressed exactly alike, in plain calico dresses and cheap straw hats, some chattering to themselves, others screaming, crying, singing, or just staring straight ahead—an unbroken line of misery as far as the eye could see. Worse still were the hours that followed the morn
ing walk, when the patients were forced to sit on benches all day in the “sitting-hall.” If they tried to talk, they were told to shut up; if they tried to change position, they were told to sit up straight; if they tried to stand, they were told to be still. “What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?” Nellie Bly would later write.
Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians … to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A.M. to 8 P.M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.
Eighty Days Page 5