It had taken almost my whole four hundred dollars cash to get here; so far all I’d learned was that in a prison shop the foreman can do whatever he damned well wants. Miss Ruby managed somehow to spread the money among CO Rohde in the jail wing, his counterpart in the prison wing, and one of Erik Wenzel’s subordinates who put together the work rosters for the clothes shop. She told the man that I was a fragile immigrant far from home and she thought kitchen work might kill me. Miss Ruby got a Revlon lipstick and compact, and they weren’t easy to come by either.
I hoped I never had to depend on sewing to pay my bills. I thought it would be a cinch to run one of those machines, and I thought it would be a holiday after the misery of working in the prison kitchen, but after four days all I had to show were a permanent knot in my shoulders and neck, bruised and bleeding fingers from getting in the way of the needle, and three dollars and twenty–four cents in earnings, which wouldn’t be paid into my trust account until the end of the week.
We got paid by the piece: nine cents for T–shirts, which were the easiest to assemble, fifteen cents for shorts, thirty–three for the heavy denim jackets. Some of the women were so fast they could make nine or ten jackets an hour. One of my neighbors was turning out thirty–two T–shirts an hour.
When I started, one of the women was detailed to show me how to assemble a shirt. She put one together at lightning speed, unwilling to slow down her own production to show a newcomer the ropes. I had followed her moves as best I could. By the end of the second day, I had worked out how to do eighteen an hour, but of those only ten or so met the quality–control standards; the ruined ones got deducted from my pay. And if Wenzel was angry at a woman—as he was with me—he would deliberately destroy a garment and then deduct the cost from her pay. One thing about prison labor: there is no shop steward or Labor Department to take a grievance to. If the foreman is pissed off at you and wants to spit at you or slap you or destroy your output, there’s not a lot you can do about it.
In a twist of irony, we sewed little tags into the shirts that read Made with Pride in the USA. So I had learned one thing—that the shirts in the commissary were made in the prison, although the ones we sewed were all plain white. Maybe they were shipped to one of the men’s prisons for the Mad Virgin or Captain Doberman to be embroidered onto them.
In an adjacent room, women operated heavy shears to cut out the pieces to the garments we were sewing. A pair of runners went between the cutting room and the sewing room, bringing us the raw materials for construction.
We got two ten–minute breaks in our six–hour shift, with half an hour in the dining hall, but most of the women except the smokers preferred to work through their breaks. As Miss Ruby had said, the crew here were all foreign, primarily Hispanic but with a handful of Cambodian and Vietnamese women.
Also as Miss Ruby had said, most of the women in the clothes shop were housed together. They arrived in a group in the morning, were escorted to the dining hall or commissary in a group, and were taken off together to a separate floor at night. I hadn’t been moved over to their quarters, but I was closely monitored now by the CO’s. So closely that I decided I had better speak only Italian, or my fractured Spanish, from now on, even in my cell.
My withdrawal from English made Solina and the crowd begging for letters at first tearful, and then furious. In revenge, Solina started smoking heavily in the cell, as if hoping to provoke me into yelling at her in English instead of Italian. She fell asleep each night with a cigarette burning on the floor beside her, when I would climb down to make sure it was out—I didn’t want to go through everything I was enduring only to suffocate in a cigarette fire.
It seemed absurd to think that I could fool the CO’s into thinking I wasn’t really an English speaker, but I hoped to keep the pretense in place long enough to learn something about Nicola’s end. CO Polsen was the likeliest to get me into trouble. When he was on duty in the afternoon, responsible for taking me over for recreation after my work shift ended, he showered me with foul language. When he did that, I treated him as if he were part of the ambient air, but if he tried touching me I would shout loudly—still in Italian—and keep shouting until I could move away from him to a public space. It wasn’t a great defense, but it was the only one I could think of. I hoped I learned something useful soon, because I didn’t know how much time I’d have before either the women or Polsen decided to take me apart.
In the shop I trailed around with the smokers during our brief breaks, trying to ask them about Nicola or about the clothes—where did they go when we finished them? Illinois law said that anything manufactured in the prisons had to be for prison consumption, but I’d never seen any of these plain shirts or jackets for sale in our commissary. And our—or at least my coworkers’—output was enormous.