The Eleventh Virgin, Dorothy Day [best e book reader for android TXT] 📗

I want. And this morning I received a package of letters from my admirers, all unopened and I have four books to read.”

The cell that had been assigned to the two⁠—or rather which they had chosen for themselves, for they had been turned loose in the female section and allowed to choose from three tiers of cells⁠—was on the top tier and furthest from the matron’s prying eye. There was more air there, too, for the high windows which stretched from the first to the third tier were kept open at the top by the request of the suffragists, a request which was granted after previous skirmishes. The first prisoners who had come to the Washington jail had broken the windows with whatever there was at hand to throw when the matron refused to keep them open. Also they had been kept locked in their cells while the present thirty-five were allowed freedom to wander around the female quarters from eight o’clock in the morning until eight at night. Then the gates clanged and the lights went out and all you could do was lie in bed and talk.

On the other side of the female quarter were the cells for colored prisoners, most of whom worked around the jail. There were three girls awaiting trial for murder and many who had been arrested for disorderly conduct and drunkenness. They kept up their chatter after eight o’clock at night and giggled and sang and quarreled, laughing at the matron who puffed up and down the steps to quiet them.

Before the gates were closed and the work for the day was over there were card games on the third tier while one darky kept a lookout for the matron; and shimmy dances up and down the corridor while a row of black faces gleamed along the line and hands beat time to the steps of the dancers.

Saturday night the six tubs at the end of the corridor⁠—the suffragists could not bathe because the same tubs were used by the colored girls⁠—were filled again and again and there was a steady tumult while the girls scrubbed and primped and bound their hair down around their heads in order that it would be straight for the next day.

For Sunday was the one day in the entire week that they caught a glimpse of a man. There were two services held during the day, and both times, the two balconies on either side of the auditorium were filled. Hundreds joined in the melancholy hymns. The men and women were separated by the width of the little hall, but during the two hours of worship they sat there casting hungry eyes at each other. June saw sex and felt it at its crudest and was stirred by it, yet somehow disgusted that the excitement should affect her.

And that night the dances of the colored girls were wilder than usual and they quarreled more viciously than ever, before the three tiers of cells were finally silent.

The days passed, each one like the other. Billy drew pictures of the colored girls dancing in their shifts, and June as she appeared when descending from her upper bunk in the morning. June read Fortitude by Walpole and somehow regained the personal consciousness which she had lost at the workhouse. Life ceased to seem so futile and all endeavor regained a semblance of nobility.

“I begin to feel as though it were about time I did something,” she told Billy.

“What do you mean ‘do something’?” Billy asked, looking up from the free verse poem she was writing to a former lover. It was her twelfth and she said she was going to write a book of them.

“Sitting in the solitary confinement cell for five days has made me think⁠—made me want to perform some useful labor instead of frittering away my time as I have been doing. I want to really and honestly work.” (June had a feeling that split infinitives were emphatic and used them as writers do italics.)

“I should say you have been working,” her friend assured her. “Goodness, I’ve never held down a regular job in my whole life and I can’t really consider my drawing useful in the world of art.”

“Very few people we know do anything useful except those who write good books and they are few. I can’t think of more than two or three artists who are serious in their work and as for newspaper reporters, they are the most useless creatures in the world. They get a lot of fun out of life, but they don’t advance themselves or develop much.

“I’d feel as though I were of some use in the world if I believed in socialism or if I thought by working for the birth control league or suffragists I could benefit the world in some way. But I don’t feel that any of these things are solutions and if I worked among these people with their single-track minds, I’d go crazy. I’m ignorant and I feel that all these people with their causes are one-sided. I either want to retire from the world and study for the sake of acquiring wisdom or else I want to do something simple and useful.”

“I shall throw myself screaming against the bars unless you stop talking of the simple and useful life,” Billy complained and June shut up.

But some yeast of revolt was in her and it continued to work, even after Winkham, the warden, came into their midst on the sixteenth day and waved a release in their faces.

“A pardon signed by the president,” he cried joyfully. “Now you’ll all be home to eat Thanksgiving dinners,” for he was a jolly soul.

“But we don’t wish a pardon,” Miss Drummond said stonily. “We have committed no crime to be pardoned for.”

“Just the same, out you go,” and the little fat man almost danced in his glee. “If you don’t go out, I’ll have you all put out, so better pack up your things.”

That was how