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I might have done all my time at the hospital, but bad luck was dogging me. One night a big dike went after me. They call them lesbians now, but we just called them dikes. She tried to get at me. I took a poke at her, and down the stairs she went.

So they threw me out of the hospital after two weeks and I found myself back in the old Jefferson Market Court. The same court, the same judge, only this time she was really mad.

“I thought I was giving you a chance,” she spouted at me. “But you turned out to be a girl of bad character.” Wham, bang, four months she handed me, and I was off to Welfare Island.

That place was filthy. Fifty girls were packed together in one awful ward, and some of them with t.b. We got the kind of garbage to eat you wouldn’t feed your dog. Every once in a while we’d all get put to work cleaning up the joint. That meant a bunch of social workers would come trooping through making an inspection. But after they’d leave, the rats would come out again and everything would slide back to filthy-dirty normal.

The rats in that place were bigger than anything I’d seen in Baltimore. And they all seemed like they’d been trained. They’d walk right past without bothering you unless they were hungry. And even if they were hungry they wouldn’t bother the girls in the wards, they’d come in the kitchen just like a pet. I worked in the kitchen for a while, and there was one old rat, so beat up most of his fur was worn away, who used to come in regularly to get his chow.

All night I’d lay awake listening to the pleasure boats going by in the East River and wonder if I’d ever get out. Like everybody else, I was just counting the days. I was supposed to get fifteen days off for good behavior, which meant I had to count up to a hundred and five.

Then one day when I had the count down to seventy days to go, something happened that boosted my time back to eighty-five. There were plenty of dikes around that place too. And one of them had been dogging me. This day she made a pass at me, and I made a pass back with my fist. This little scuffle cost me my fifteen days off for good behavior and caused me to get tossed in the cooler.

That place was the end—a cell so tiny there wasn’t room to take one step. You had a cot, room to stand up or sit down, and that was it. No lights, it was so dark down there you lost track of night and day and had to give up counting your time. After a while you didn’t even care. They gave you two pieces of bread with saltpeter in it every day and some water. I had to do ten days on that diet, but I used to throw it back in their faces.

After you got out of the cooler you were punished by getting graduated to the laundry. The girls in the laundry used to holler at me, trying to buck me up.

“Stick it out,” they’d yell. “Don’t throw your food away. Eat it or you’ll never make it out alive.”

I could hear their voices but I never got to lay eyes on a soul except the matron.

A dike was the cause of getting me in there, and another one was the cause of getting me out alive. This one matron was a chick who liked girls. I had said something to her the first time she came around and she thought I was cute. She used to sneak me a couple of cigarettes when I needed them bad, and I used to play along with her.

I knew she expected to get to make a pass at me when I got out. She expected me to be nice to her. So I didn’t tell her any different. She had her own reasons for being nice to me. But any kind of freakish feelings are better than no feelings at all. If that judge had only been a dike, she might have treated me like a piece of human flesh instead of a piece of evidence. If it hadn’t been for this nice dikey matron, I don’t know if I would have made it.

But one day they let me out and I graduated to the laundry. My last job there was a real break—I got to cook for the warden and his family. I used to make them crazy dishes I had learned from Mom—things she used to make for rich people, like chicken cacciatore with