This applied for breakfast and supper; I sat at dinner, but
satisfied myself with nibbling bread crusts, and witnessing the forlorn
and perilous efforts of my friends to walk the line between starvation
and acute indigestion. Not many were successful.
For vegetables we had Irish and sweet potatoes, turnip tops (uneatable),
black-eyed beans, bitter and greasy, and once a month, perhaps, a
tomato. The butter was made of an inferior quality of lard, and
cottonseed oil--a substance which entered into many other of our viands,
and of which, with grease, it was calculated by an expert in the
kitchen, we were offered as much as one pound per man every day. It
produced a calamitous effect upon the digestive tract, inasmuch as there
was hardly a white man in the prison who did not suffer chronically from
stomach troubles--constant suffering, often becoming acute. The
strongest digestions would resist for a while, but finally succumb.
There was a poultry farm on the grounds, donated by outside benefactors
specifically and exclusively for the benefit of prisoners, beginning
with the tuberculous patients. After it got going, there may have been
an average of six hundred fowls on the place. Of these, not one ever
appeared on the prison tables. With the exception of a possible few that
were stolen by prisoners having access to the yard, all were
appropriated by higher officials, and the eggs as well.
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