The letters were folded into small triangular shapes, known as kites, so they could easily be hidden in a bra or a shoe. Tracy saw kites being passed among women as they brushed by one another entering the dining hall or on their way to work.

Time after time, Tracy watched inmates fall in love with their guards. It was a love born of despair and helplessness and submissiveness. The prisoners were dependent on the guards for everything: their food, their well-being, and sometimes, their lives. Tracy allowed herself to feel no emotion for anyone.

Sex went on day and night. It occurred in the shower room, in toilets, in cells, and at night there was oral sex through the bars. The Mary Femmes who belonged to guards were let out of their cells at night to go to the guards' quarters.

After lights out, Tracy would lie in her bunk and put her hands over her ears to shut out the sounds.

One night Ernestine pulled out a box of Rice Krispies from under her bunk and began scattering them in the corridor outside the cell. Tracy could hear inmates from other cells doing the same thing.

“What's going on?” Tracy asked.

Ernestine turned to her and said harshly, “Non'a your business. Jest stay in your bunk. Jest stay in your fuckin' bunk.”

A few minutes later there was a terrified scream from a nearby cell, where a new prisoner had just arrived. “Oh, God, no. Don't! Please leave me alone!”

Tracy knew then what was happening, and she was sick inside. The screams went on and on, until they finally diminished into helpless, racking sobs. Tracy squeezed her eyes tightly shut, filled with burning rage. How could women do this to one another? She had thought that prison had hardened her, but when she awoke in the morning, her face was stained with dried tears.

She was determined not to show her feelings to Ernestine. Tracy asked casually, “What were the Rice Krispies for?”

“That's our early warnin' system. If the guards try sneakin' up on us, we kin hear 'em comin'.”

Tracy soon learned why inmates referred to a term in the penitentiary as “going to college.” Prison was an educational experience, but what the prisoners learned was unorthodox.

The prison was filled with experts in every conceivable type of crime. They exchanged methods of grifting, shoplifting, and rolling drunks. They brought one another up to date on badger games and exchanged information on snitches and undercover cops.

In the recreation yard one morning, Tracy listened to an older inmate give a seminar on pickpocketing to a fascinated young group.

“The real pros come from Colombia. They got a school in Bogotб, called the school of the ten bells, where you pay twenty-five hundred bucks to learn to be a pickpocket. They hang a dummy from the ceilin', dressed in a suit with ten pockets, filled with money and jewelry.”

“What's the gimmick?”

“The gimmick is that each pocket has a belt on it. You don't graduate till you kin empty every damn pocket without ringin' the bell.”

Lola sighed, “I used to go with a guy who walked through crowds dressed in an overcoat, with both his hands out in the open, while he picked everybody's pockets like crazy.”

“How the hell could he do that?”

“The right hand was a dummy. He slipped his real hand through a slit in the coat and picked his way through pockets and wallets and purses.”

In the recreation room the education continued.

“I like the locker-key rip-off,” a veteran said. “You hang around a railroad station till you see a little old lady tryin' to lift a suitcase or a big package into one a them lockers. You put it in for her and hand her the key. Only it's the key to an empty locker. When she leaves, you empty her locker and split.”

In the yard another afternoon, two inmates convicted of prostitution and possession of cocaine were talking to a new arrival, a pretty young girl who looked no more than seventeen.

“No wonder you got busted, honey,” one of the older women scolded. “Before you talk price to a John, you gotta pat him down to make sure he ain't carryin' a gun, and never tell him what you're gonna do for him. Make him tell you what he wants. Then if he turns out to be a cop, it's entrapment, see?”

The other pro added, “Yeah. And always took at their hands. If a trick says he's a workin' man, see if his hands are rough. That's the tip-off. A lot of plainclothes cops wear workin' men's outfits, but when it comes to their hands, they forget, so their hands are smooth.”

Time went neither slowly nor quickly. It was simply time. Tracy though of St. Augustine's aphorism: “What is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if I have to explain it, I do not know.”

The routine of the prison never varied:

4:40 A.M. Warning bell

4:45 A.M. Rise and dress

5:00 A.M. Breakfast

5:30 A.M. Return to cell

5:55 A.M. Warning bell

6:00 A.M. Work detail lineup

10:00 A.M. Exercise yard

10:30 A.M. Lunch

11:00 A.M. Work detail lineup

3:30 P.M. Supper

4:00 P.M. Return to cell

5:00 P.M. Recreation room

6:00 P.M. Return to cell

8:45 P.M. Warning bell

9:00 P.M. Lights out

The rules were inflexible. All inmates had to go to meals, and no talking was permitted in the lines. No more than five cosmetic items could be kept in the small cell lockers. Beds had to be made prior to breakfast and kept neat during the day.

The penitentiary had a music all its own: the clanging bells, shuffle of feet on cement, slamming iron doors, day whispers and night screams… the hoarse crackle of the guards' walkie-talkies, the clash of trays at mealtime. And always there was the barbed wire and the high walls and the loneliness and isolation and the pervading aura of hate.

Tracy became a model prisoner. Her body responded automatically to the sounds of prison routine: the bar sliding across her cell at count time and sliding back at wake-up time; the bell for reporting to work and the buzzer when work was finished.

Tracy's body was a prisoner in this place, but her mind was free to plan her escape.

Prisoners could make no outside telephone calls, and they were permitted to receive two five-minute calls a month. Tracy received a call from Otto Schmidt.

“I thought you'd want to know,” he said awkwardly. “It was a real nice funeral. I took care of the bills, Tracy.”

“Thank you, Otto. I — thank you.” There was nothing more for either of them to say.

There were no more phone calls for her.

“Girl, you best forget the outside world,” Ernestine warned her. “There ain't nobody out there for you.”

You're wrong, Tracy thought grimly.

Joe Romano

Perry Pope

Judge Henry Lawrence

Anthony Orsatti

Charles Stanhope III

It was in the exercise yard that Tracy encountered Big Bertha again. The yard was a large outdoor rectangle bounded by the high outer prison wall on one side and the inner wall of the prison on the other. The inmates were allowed in the yard for thirty minutes each morning. It was one of the few places where talking was permitted, and clusters of prisoners gathered together exchanging the latest news and gossip before lunch. When Tracy walked into the yard for the first time, she felt a sudden sense of freedom, and she realized it was because she was in the open air. She could see the sun, high above, and cumulus clouds, and somewhere in the distant blue sky she heard the drone of a plane, soaring free.

“You! I been lookin' for you,” a voice said.

Tracy turned to see the huge Swede who had brushed into her on Tracy's first day in prison.

“I hear you got yourself a nigger bull-dyke.”

Tracy started to brush past the woman. Big Bertha grabbed Tracy's arm, with an iron grip. “Nobody walks away from me,” she breathed. “Be nice; littbarn.” She was backing Tracy toward the wall, pressing her huge body into Tracy's.