Suffragists -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
I shall never forget the shock of her appearance at that window in the
gathering dusk. Everything in the world seemed black-gray except her
ghost-like face, so startling, so inaccessible. It drove everything
else from my mind for an instant. But as usual she was in complete
control of herself. She began to hurl questions at me faster than I
could answer. “How were the convention plans progressing?” . . . “Had
the speakers been secured for the mass meeting?” . . . “How many women
had signed up to go out on the next picket line?” And so on.
“Conditions at Occoquan are frightful,” said I. “We are planning to . .
.”
“Get out of there, and move quickly,” shouted the guard, who came
abruptly around the corner of the building. I tried to finish my
message. “We are planning to habeas corpus the women out of Occoquan
and have them transferred up here.”
“Get out of there, I tell you. Damn you!” By this time he was upon me.
He grabbed me by the arm and began shaking me. “You will be arrested if
you do not get off these grounds.” He continued to shake me while I
shouted back, “Do you approve of this plan?”
I was being forced along so rapidly that I was out of range of her
faint voice and could not hear the answer. I plead with the guard to be
allowed to go back quietly and speak a few more words with Miss Paul,
but he was inflexible. Once out of the grounds I went unnoticed to the
cemetery and sat on a tombstone to wait a little while before making
another attempt, hoping the guard would not expect me to come back. The
lights were beginning to twinkle in the distance and it was now almost
total darkness. I consulted any watch and realized that in forty
minutes Miss Paul and her comrades would again be going through the
torture of forcible feeding. I waited five minutes—ten minutes—fifteen
minutes. Then I went back to the grounds again. I started through
another entrance, but had proceeded only a few paces when I was
forcibly evicted. Again I returned to the cold tombstone. I believe
that I never in my life felt more utterly miserable and impotent. There
were times, as I have said, when we felt inordinately strong. This was
one of the times when I felt that we were frail reeds in the hands of
cruel and powerful oppressors. My thoughts were at first with Alice
Paul, at that moment being forcibly fed by men jailers and men doctors.
I remembered then the man warden who had refused the highly reasonable
request to visit her, and my thoughts kept right on up the scale till I
got to the man-President—the pinnacle of power against us. I was indeed
desolate. I walked back to the hidden taxi, hurried to headquarters,
and plunged into my work, trying all night to convince myself that the
sting of my wretchedness was being mitigated by activity toward a
release from this state of affairs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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