Celinas new life

Day First

March Saturday morning 1947.

"Well - Here I stand waiting.

The officer drove me to this place and left me in handcuffs.

He told me that I would wait here for the overseer to come home from the fields, and that it probably would not be before evening.

It's both a bit frightening and exciting.

I never had such an adventure in my life !!

How many stories i could tell for all that after i will finish ?

That made me smile.

This would be a life changing experience ,i thought !

I wanted an adventure or not ?

This will be my chance.

But from the beginning i wasn't very lucky.

They gave me eight weeks on the chain gang for shoplifting in a local store.

It's a lot more than I expected for sure !

My boss had promised me !

"It would only be for ten days or so Gabriela ... don't worry it will be over before you notice it .

I promise you that ."

That was his words !

Certainly not two months ! But I will go through with it!

I am educated and know what i am doing !

Getting the story about the chain gangs published and this will be the start of a brilliant career !

My own name in the headlines of the news !

Everyone will be learn about my adventures in this mysterious place !

This is far more important than my personal comfort ...for a short while at least ...

It was all arranged between my boss and the grocer.

Everything will be fine.

However it was not very pleasant to be arrested by a policeman and have to walk all the way through the streets in handcuffs to the police station, while everybody watched you with surprise.

One short ugly woman probably around the age of my mother that worked as a cleaner in the police station was charged with the safekeeping of my belongings until my trial.

She spoke some english and she was so "helpful" in assisting me to hand over my old clothes and personal belongings.

She took almost everything of value including my shoes !

In the end when the iron door between us locked one again she said that her daughter always wanted such a nice shoes as mine and left leaving me speechless !

I never saw my clothes again .

But before that one of the officers he hurried to ...secure me as he said ...

"Come on girl ! Let me make you a proper lady" he said ironically.

He was a smith and pulling my left ankle in a small table he quickly started his job.

Being chained was terrifying experience.

But also strangely exiting !

I could still feel his hands on my ankles as he adjusted the cold irons on my bare feet.

-"It is for your own security my dear. It keeps you girls feet from straying, when you shouldn't !» he said with his strange foreign accent .

In his face with this awful wicked smile remind me an old skinny Spanish classmate from my school.

I wanted to slap him every time that he was touching me but i kept my frustration well hidden inside my soul.

But at least we finished with that now.

My clothes now is only cheap cotton and a little bit dirty.

I have only walked a few minutes with these chains, and they already chafe my ankles.

Wonder how it will be having to work in the fields all day with them ?

It would be a challenge ?

Intriguing.

It will be interesting to meet the other girls.

If I can make some of them tell me their stories,

it will be of great value to the newspaper !

Thats why i am here anyway.

This is my game and will win !

The strange thing is that there is no racial segregation in the chain gangs.

I have to confess that i was a little racist before i came here.

In the past i never wanted to sit in my homeland next to a dark skinned woman from Africa or similar places.

I was a white woman growing up with specific ideas and stereotypes.

But here were one.

Liked or not.

Definitely i didn't like that.

We worked as a cleaners in the nearby buildings and prison facilities and waited for our final transfer in the factories or the plantations for the unlucky ones.

We ate and slept together.

And of course we wore the same dresses and rusty black chains.

My not so well and long forgotten Spanish proved useless here.

I had overestimated my language skills i suppose.

I couldn't make friends or even more take interviews.

Nobody from the convict women seemed to know any French also.

I didn't find any woman that seemed to appreciate my efforts to communicate with them.

Some girls was looking like Europeans or at least US but they kept us separate and didn't allow us to speak any other language exept Spanish.

And never during work.

The outside world could learn a lot from us, if they wanted to.

How different one's life gets after been put in chains.

Few months ago men would have greeted me happily and given compliments when passing me, a beautiful woman in the town, as i was.

Now i am wearing leg irons and a simple, bad quality, cotton dress.

The hard floor is giving me difficult times as my soles ,tender and soft wasn't used to touch the dirty cement as some of the girls from the black continent.

People look at me as if I were slave.

In chains a girl's beauty means less than how fast she can work.

I forgot for a second about what I had become.

How i ended up here ?