To Sophia’s chagrin, even now that she had returned to Eighth Ward, she was still not free of Lizzie Bonner. As Sophia and Elizabeth sat side by side in the dining hall, Miss Bonner paced the length of the table behind them, the heavy keys that she hung around her waist jangling menacingly with every step. It was the first time Elizabeth had had direct contact with her. But Sophia was not the only Fifth Ward patient to have been moved upstairs: she was accompanied by thirteen others, including Mrs. Triplet, Elizabeth’s former dining partner. That was perhaps why Miss Bonner had transferred with them. She kept a close eye on the patients as they obediently lifted their food to their mouths or, in Mrs. Triplet’s case, spat it at the nearest bystander.
Elizabeth listened in shock to her friend’s vivid account. She thought of her secret journal, on which she’d barely drawn to write The Great Drama. McFarland had seemed so penitent, and it was not her way to expose a reformed man. “Repentance or exposure,”35 she’d told him when she’d delivered her reproof in November 1860. He’d had a choice, and she’d thought he’d chosen the former.
But perhaps he hadn’t.
Secretly, unknown to the doctor, Elizabeth began to conceive of a second book, in which she would expose him and his specific cruelty to patients, for although The Great Drama recounted some of the dire treatment she’d witnessed, it did not hold McFarland to account. Yet still, she held it in reserve. As long as he kept his word to help her, she did not think she would ever need to use it.
But the portents were not promising. Shortly after Sophia’s return to the ward, it was Elizabeth’s turn to be segregated. An official proclamation announced the following:
All intercourse between Mrs. Packard and the inmates of the west division of the Eighth ward [where Sophia lived], must be prohibited except under strict guard of an attendant! Mrs. Packard must not be allowed to go into the hall, except when accompanied by an attendant. She is to hold no more prayer meetings, lend no more books, and those she has lent must be immediately returned.36
The “universal sensation”37 had caused far too many waves. The normal service of separating Elizabeth from those over whom she held influence had emphatically resumed.
But it was far too late. The book had already done its damage—or wrought its magic, depending on which way one looked at it. The proclamation was met with a mixture of voluble swear words and “silent hisses of execration”38 from the patients. Sophia wept “bitter tears…knowing that now my life was to be deprived of almost its only earthly solace.”39
But Elizabeth bore the new rules stoically, locked within her fortress of self-composure. If McFarland wanted to separate her from her friends, so be it. She would accept it; she was used to it by now. And she would be permanently separated from them before too long anyway: living on the other side of the fence. She chose silently to endure it, biting her tongue for just a few weeks more, doing nothing that could jeopardize her release in December.
But the army she had raised was bolder. “We all felt,” said Sophia, “that we had been drawn into a regular civil war with the Institution!”40
It was a war in which fire was fought with fire. The rebellious patients found themselves placed under the severest restrictions yet; Sophia called it a “reign of terror.”41 All outdoor excursions were prohibited and asylum dances canceled: “We were seldom permitted to go out of the house at all.”42 Private conferences between patients were banned, “and all who did not render instant obedience were severely punished.”43 The Eighth Ward halls echoed with the patients’ screams and their cries of “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me!”44 as Miss Bonner regularly dragged them away for beatings.
Yet the cruel attendant felt free to act with impunity. The Civil War had taken from the hospital “its most valuable employees.”45 Staffing problems were so dire that superintendents nationwide felt they could no longer even discipline abusive staff for fear they would quit. The doctors decided “even an unworthy attendant is better than none.”46 So Lizzie knew she could hit and drown and beat without censure.
The dramatic decline in circumstances sat uneasily with Elizabeth. “I feel that I cannot report [McFarland] as a practical penitent in his treatment of his patients,” she wrote in anguish. “I have great reason to fear…that he upholds abuses of his patients as much as ever.”47 Yet now just days away from the trustees’ meeting, she shrank from a campaign to get Miss Bonner dismissed, as she’d done with Miss Smith. Given the understaffed asylum, she knew it would be “no use, and I should be only exposing my book to destruction by awakening the doctor’s wrath against me.”48