The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

For many hours the women had to wait in a little room back of the court and then at four o’clock more things began to happen. Prison wagons were brought, wagons that had only slits along the top for ventilation and were otherwise closed. Two of them sufficed to carry the prisoners to the jail and when they reached that barren institution on the outskirts of the town, backed by a cemetery and surrounded by dreary, bare fields, there was a long halt at the entrance. Evidently there was some hitch in the proceedings. After a low argument at the entrance, an argument which none of the women could hear, the wagons turned away and started off in another direction.

“Well, I’m surprised,” Billy’s pert little voice broke through the darkness. “They don’t seem to want us. We were sentenced to the city jail and I know that there isn’t more than one in Washington.”

“They’re probably taking us out of town to the workhouse,” another woman said in a sepulchral voice, for many stories had been told of what the suffrage prisoners suffered at the hands of the violent keeper there. Talking was carried on in whispers until the two wagons reached the station.

It had been completely black in the prison wagons, but when the thirty-five women were ushered by a number of policewomen into a waiting train which rolled out of the station immediately, the lamps along the roads had not yet been lit.

June pressed her face against the window and watched the blue twilight pierced with the bare black shapes of many scrawny trees. Here and there lamps glowed in the farmhouse windows. In the west the sky still held radiance which gradually faded. It was drearily beautiful at that time of night, and all feeling of excitement dropped from the girl. The eager low voices of the suffragists coming through the noise of the wheels jarred upon her. Billy, sitting across from her also gazed silently out of the window.

“Somehow,” June told her when they reached the little country station which was their destination, “life and struggle seem very tawdry in the twilight. This bleak countryside makes me feel that I should struggle for my soul instead of my political rights.⁠ ⁠… I feel peculiarly small and lonely tonight. I’m glad you’re with me, Billy. We must stick together and probably they’ll put us in the same cell.”

But they weren’t cellmates that first ugly night.

There was more waiting after they had been driven from the railroad station to the administration building of the workhouse. There a matron asked them their names and histories, which all refused to give.

Miss Prindiville, the stately representative of the Philadelphia family, was appointed spokesman and announced to the matron that they wished to speak to the superintendent before they were assigned to their cells. The matron sniffed, turned to her knitting and the thirty-five suffragists found chairs for themselves and prepared to wait. It wasn’t until ten o’clock that Morrison appeared upon the scene.

He entered the room like a storm cloud, leaving the door open on the large porch outside, from which came the sounds of shuffling feet and expectant coughs.

“We wish to announce a hunger strike unless⁠—” but Miss Prindiville was allowed no further words. Morrison turned to the door and beckoned and immediately the room was filled with men, two of whom seized the elderly lady under the arms and giving her no chance to accompany them voluntarily, lifted her out of the room. As she was pulled backwards through the door, she looked like the stiff figure of a dressmaker’s dummy. Billy laughed hysterically and was immediately seized in her turn.

June made an instinctive movement to join her and was grabbed at by Morrison who stood there blazing triumphantly. As he reached his hand towards her she struck at him contemptuously and she had the satisfaction of seeing him start back and swear viciously before she found two men holding her fast by either arm. She had the feeling of being lifted, carried over the porch and along the path, before she felt her feet dragging on firm ground.

“I’m perfectly capable of walking,” she told them fiercely. But they held her the more tightly, so she vented her wrath by kicking them on the shins whenever she had the chance.

They passed many white buildings gleaming in the darkness before they entered a bare stone building smelling strongly of steam heat and dampness and antiseptic. There on the other side of the room she saw Billy, sitting very straight on a bench which ran around the room and chatting brightly with her guards who tried hard to remain grim and unsmiling. June retained an antagonistic attitude and when she got up from her bench and started to walk to her friend on the other side of the room, she was pounced upon by not only her own guards but two more and pulled this way and that until she finally found herself at the bench she had set out for. She had little consciousness of struggling, but dimly, through the restraining arms, she heard a suffragist (even in that moment she identified her as one of the school teachers) screaming and futilely trying to pluck off one of her captors, which merely served to make them cling the more. Billy was laughing again, not hysterically but with wholehearted enjoyment. June was too mad to laugh, but she knew she was grinning, grinning as she had seen David grin as a small boy when he was giving and receiving hard blows, a grin of pure wrath.

And then she was shuffled into a cell and the gate clanged on her and she breathed a sigh of relief.

“My dear child, are you hurt in any way? And isn’t this splendid? It’s the worst treatment the suffragists have had yet and with all the influential women we’ve got in here with us, the newspapers won’t stand for it. They’ve been pretty hostile