Book Excerpt: Enemy Women

July 11 -- In Paulette Jiles' new book, Enemy Women, 18 year-old Adair Colley finds courage and love while searching for the truth.

In the following excerpt from the book, Colley has been accused of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," arrested by the Union Army and sent to the St. Charles Street Prison for Women in St. Louis. There she meets her interrogator, Major William Neumann, and the two fall in love. Before leaving to return to the front, the Major helps Adair plan her escape from the prison, and gives her his signet ring and two $25 gold pieces .

She would go over the wall today, when they went out to the washing. As in Acts 5:18-20, when the angel of the lord came and opened the door of the prison, and told the apostles to come out and go and preach to all of the people the words of this life. What life? Adair wondered. What life did that mean?

She sat in the sun, trying to stitch the Log Cabin quilt back together. It had nearly come apart. She told herself she was not ill. She told herself a little fever burnt out the bad humors and was good for a person from time to time. That when she was over the wall she would begin to get well in the fresh country air.

It was not until late afternoon that the wagon came in with its supplies of hardtack and pork, sacks of white beans and cornmeal. Adair watched them unload the barrels and stack the empty ones in the middle, away from the wall. Kisia and a young mulatto girl were playing some kind of dice game with the ham bones.

Kisia, roll one of those barrels against the wall, behind the washing. The blonde girl put down the ham bone dice. I am going over the wall in the next fifteen minutes.

Kisia stuck out her lower lip and looked at Adair very doubtfully, her pale, tangling hair corkscrewing in the breeze. You are in no condition, she said. Go on

So Kisia rolled one of the empty hardtack barrels against the street wall of the courtyard, behind the washing lines of dresses and petticoats and stockings. She jumped up on it, her ragged skirts flying. She called to a young mulatto girl.

Kisia shouted, You are the Moorish Battalion and I am the Queen of the Barrels! The mulatto girl laughed and grabbed her by the ankles to pull her down. A guard watched from his position on the wall on the other side of the gates. Get that barrel away from the wall, he said. Soons I pull her down! Said the mulatto girl. Get in there and get your washing done! the matron shouted at Adair. She stood looking at her with her hands on her hips. So Adair stood up and carried the green camisette and her shawl with her behind the lines of washing and shoved it into the pot of boiling, soapy water. There was no help for it. She would have to leave the green dress behind, but Adair knew she had to go now. If she were going to go. But it didn't matter. When she was in the sickroom somebody had stolen her diamond-and-sapphire earbobs, and the mandarin jacket, but what were they as compared to her life?