All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [68]
There were some great spirituals sung at the conference, too, such as “We Shall Overcome,” which moved me to tears, reminding me that Monday was Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. And have no doubt about it: This is the civil rights movement of our time.
As if our day hadn’t already been full, later that evening we visited three brothels. In between, I had collapsed from fatigue born of incredible heat, noxious pollution, traffic, noise, and the intense throbbing of 2.7 million difficult lives. My nap had the dual purpose of essential rest and psychological relief, knocking me out so my unconscious could have some time to reset and fortify itself for the assault on dignity and humanity that is a brothel. I woke up calm and ready.
First we parked on a crowded, heaving street lined with electronics shops, across from a run-down, five-story tenement in a broken-up, tough part of town. Every now and then my view of the tenement was interrupted by tricked-out buses ripping by, lit up with what I am sure were meant to be festive lights and decorations that only seemed sad and tawdry to me; the back of the buses had crudely hand-painted Hollywood cartoon figures plastered on them.
Entering the brothel, I felt like Eurydice being led into Hades. The halls were completely dark, apparently because the electric bill was rarely paid, and women worked with one candle per room, adding to the frightening, macabre nature of the scene. As soon as we entered, the women started screeching and throwing plastic bottles at us. They thought we were reporters, like the ones from the national TV news station who had recently done a story on this brothel. Many of the women’s secret lives as prostitutes had been exposed to their families, and they were still shamed and furious about it. Papa Jack and our escort finally calmed everybody down and assured them we did not have cameras with us, that we were there simply to talk with them about their reproductive health.
We were allowed to go deeper into the brothel, but the atmosphere was tense and explosive for the duration of our visit. The place was revolting. Even in the darkness we could see green slime on the walls of the corridors that led to thirty small dorm-style rooms. Dozens of women came every day to pay 150 shillings (less than $2 U.S.) for the use of a filthy mattress on a lopsided spring frame, separated from the other two or three beds in the room by threadbare sheets strung from ropes. They sat on chairs in the hallways, waiting for clients, of which, based on what I saw firsthand, there was no shortage. This was different from my experience in Asia, where the pimps and madams kept business away during my visits—or was that Papa Jack at the door, turning clients away as I bonded with the women? Here, business was going on as usual the entire time, with the sound and sights of crude sexual couplings all around us illuminated by flickering candlelight.
Kate and I finally gathered up about eight women to sit down with us in one room, while Papa Jack stood guard at the door. Outside we could hear scuffling and yelling. Papa Jack later told me that the desperate women would actually assault customers as they came in, competing with one another, trying to force the men onto their beds, extracting money out of them if they were successful in unzipping their pants. Sometimes the men would simply pay the aggressor 100 shillings to get rid of her.
The women we interviewed were a fierce, proud lot. Their dreams were humble and realistic by our standards yet remained distantly out of reach for them: to be a cook, own a small hotel, receive computer training, become a hairdresser. But the bus fare from home to town was more than a day’s wages doing hair. Even if they could access training for these dream jobs, they could not afford to live. They were admittedly illiterate, but they were no