Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [60]
I felt like the fool of all time.
People on drugs are sick people. So now we end up with the government chasing sick people like they were criminals, telling doctors they can’t help them, prosecuting them because they had some stuff without paying the tax, and sending them to jail.
Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day.
Chapter 18
Travelin’ All Alone
If I had known what kind of “cure” I was in for at Alderson, I could have taken it alone—just locking myself in a room and throwing away the key.
There was no cure. They don’t cut you down slow, weaning you off the stuff gradually. They just throw you in the hospital by yourself, take you off cold turkey, and watch you suffer.
The first nights I was ready to quit. I thought I’d just explode. But after a while it passes just like everything else, after you’ve been through hell.
If anybody ever got anything into a federal prison, I want to hear all about it. After they’re through putting their fingers up to there, taking out your bridgework, X-raying your stomach, there’s no way in the world to get anything in there.
For the first few days it’s just like the Army. You’re in quarantine and they test you from top to toe; smear tests, blood tests, skin tests, eye tests, IQ tests, aptitude tests for jobs. Then after twenty-five days of this you get to take a look at the place.
It’s out in the country, six cottages with fifty to sixty girls in each one. But it’s completely Jim Crow; three cottages for white girls, three for colored. That goes for sleeping and eating. As for working, white and black get to put on the harness side by side. And when you march to and from work, it’s one formation for the Negroes and one for the ofays. The chapel was Jim Crow; white girls pray in front, black girls in back. In the movies it was the same deal.
With all that, the place wasn’t too bad. A hell of a big improvement over Welfare Island, for one thing. If you’re real good, you get to go to classes in Spanish, woodcraft, cooking, ceramics, and stuff like that. If you’re real great, you can get to go to six classes a week, if you’re not beat from working so hard. Later I made a lot of jewelry and stuff in ceramics class and brought it back with me.
When I came out of quarantine I went to work on the farm, picking tomatoes and other vegetables. I had seen worms and bugs before but didn’t have no dealing with them, and I was still scared of those devils. But I guess they figured outside work was what I needed after I came off my habit. One day I passed out with the sunstroke from working in the heat. So they sent me to the hospital and the doctor gave me some more tests. Finally the doctor told them I was a city girl and ought to have some kind of damn job inside. But nothing happened, and nobody lays off work there unless you are sick, and you’ve got to be able to prove it.
Quite a few girls, especially long-termers in the joint, were lovers and would take these farm jobs so they could be together when they worked. It was still impossible for them to get together to do anything, but they could pass notes and exchange valentines and stuff. The only real chance girls had to get together was coming back from the movies. This was the only time they didn’t make the girls march in Jim Crow formation. It was after dark usually, and black and white could mix a little. This was the only chance lovers had to hold hands or anything.
After all those intelligence tests, IQ tests, and aptitude tests, they gave me my second job, in the piggery, as a maid for a herd of damn dirty squealing