My Notorious Life

—Shush sweet baby, I said, so tired, and mixed her gripe water with whiskey and dill weed, but it did no good, so I seen now why lullabies was all about cradles falling from trees, oh dear, when the wind blows, down will come baby, whoops too bad, but at least it’s quiet.

Lust was a weed, a nightshade vine, a nettle, impossible to uproot as the mugwort I pulled in the fields of Illinois, so while in the daylight I was a flower of virtuous resolution, at night I was motherless in a cold kitchen, starved for the warm arms of a sweetheart and pretty words of approval.

who dwells in the past robs the present,

In this time, I learned for myself as my teacher predicted, how it is these two extremes - that we are transported by love and jailed by it - that are ever impossible for mothers to reconcile.

You could eat the air in the place, so thick with bread and warmth that it stang our cheeks.

The newspapers next day wrote that "with much hesitation the witness proceeded to recount the treatment she received from Madame DeBeausacq, the details of which are so extremely disgusting and filthy we forbear to give publicity to them." Let me say right now the papers was wrong on them details. The details are of Human Kindness. These judges, these police, these reporters, are squeamish low bloodworms, half of them, consorting with cancan girls. How I know this is because them girls come to me. So do their society mistresses. Also, their wives. I know them, daughters of Judges, sisters of Prosecutors. But these robes of the law did not wish to hear the filthy details of their own sex's duplicity, or dwell on the disgusting filthy things they did THEMSELVES, nor see the fair face of the ones they punish for their own masculine debauchery.