Ahead of her, she heard noise: “screaming, fighting, running, hallooing.”41 Women with “rough, tangled, flying and streaming hair”42 ran riot around the ward, their skin pitch-black with dirt. As they ran, they splashed through “unfragrant puddles of water”：43 their own urine, which they delighted “to wade and wallow in.”44
She looked back at McFarland, brown eyes wide, but he merely made to take his leave.
“You may occupy this ward, Mrs. Packard,”45 he said sharply.
And then the door slammed shut.
PART TWO
DARK BEFORE THE DAWN
Much Madness is divinest Sense.
—Emily Dickinson, c. 18621
She did not spend her time so much in doubting as in doing.
—Obituary of Lucy Strong Parsons Ware, mother of Elizabeth Packard, 18432
CHAPTER 16
At once, the ward’s attendant came to meet her. Twenty-two-year-old Minerva Tenney, known as Minnie, had long, dark hair and an open, wide-eyed face. Elizabeth had met her before during her time at the hospital. Minnie—along with her little sister Emily, nineteen—looked after Eighth Ward, through whose door Elizabeth had just entered. “The maniac’s ward!” a friend of Elizabeth dubbed it. “The abode of the filthy, the suicidal, the raving and the furious!”1
Minnie and Elizabeth stared at each other, both seeming surprised to find the other there. As they did so, the clanging of the heavy door faded away to silence.
“Miss Tenney,” Elizabeth ventured, “what does this mean?”2
“I don’t know,” the attendant replied, her youthful face confused. “All [McFarland] said to me was, ‘I wish you not to allow Mrs. Packard to leave the ward.’”
“I don’t know what it means either,” Elizabeth replied. “I wonder if my reproof has not offended him?”
Minnie may have smiled. “I have heard there was quite a stir about it,” she remarked lightly.
To Elizabeth’s surprise, Minnie ordered her straight to bed. Curfew was not until half past nine, but things were run differently here. Perhaps to try to calm the raving patients, all were locked in their respective rooms soon after supper, their evenings spent in darkness, “except when the moon gave us…light.”3
But Elizabeth accepted the command meekly. In keeping with her desire to display only decorous behavior, she’d never intentionally broken an asylum rule without the doctor’s prior permission and did not intend to start now. She followed Minnie down the filthy corridor, carefully picking her way around the puddles, lifting her petticoats high.
She paused at the threshold of the room she’d been led to, perhaps wondering if there had been some mistake. It was a dormitory.
But it was just what the doctor had ordered.
Elizabeth took a breath—trying hard to breathe through her mouth, though nothing stopped the stink infiltrating every part of her—and gingerly stepped inside. Six beds were laid out in the dorm, the monastic nature of the room making them stand out starkly, for there was little else inside. It was cramped—a visitor to the asylum later describing how inmates were herded together “like wild beasts”4—and Elizabeth viewed her new roommates with vigilance. She feared “there was scarcely a patient in the whole ward who could answer a rational question in a rational manner.”5
Yet that didn’t mean they were all alike. Some of her fellow patients on Eighth Ward were “mild and peaceful, others furious and raving; others deeply sad and silent melancholies, while a few never spoke at all.”6 As she entered the dorm, one approached her cautiously, a “fluttering bird”7 who seemed frightened half to death. This young woman, Miss Weaver, attached herself to Elizabeth with a sudden strength that belied her anxious approach. “She saw I was a speckled-bird among this flock of black-birds,” Elizabeth later remembered, “so she came right to me [and] begged [me] to shield her from harm.”8
After reassuring her, Elizabeth gently detached herself from her new friend and took a hesitant seat on the bed Minnie specified. It had a white counterpane, seemingly clean, but as she pulled it back, a bad smell escaped, suggesting the straw mattress beneath was not fresh. Minnie swiftly took the counterpane from her; each night, they were removed from the patients’ rooms in order to keep them clean. Then she presented her with a bucket and promptly left her alone.
Elizabeth looked at the bucket, confused. And then the penny dropped, even as she heard Minnie’s key turn in the lock. The women were sealed in all night long: this pail was for peeing in, because she could not leave her room. The indignity could have made her cry.