Billy on way to joining picket line
As I promised April 3, this week in our continuing attempt to paraphrase “Billy of Arkansas” we shall see Billy Camelton take her broken heart to New York, and join a picket line.
But first I want to look back, back, back to February, when Yours Truly naively assumed she could summarize Bernie Babcock’s temperance/love story in one or two of these once-a-week Old News columns. (It took the Arkansas Democrat 25 installments to deliver it in 1922.)
I skipped over a few hints then about a still-unseen character, John Bierce, the older brother of Billy’s school roommate Jane. I’m thinking that John will prove in the end to be the man of Billy’s post-war dreams: a truth-speaking friend of religious character, with a sense of humor, a love of justice and a better physique than a bronze Adonis, tastefully hidden under appropriate clothes. And he must want a yard full of children.
In Babcock’s first installment we saw Billy return to Little Rock to make her debut. She delights and dismays three elderly aunties who fear she will disgrace the
memory of her wealthy white ancestors, the Alexanders and the Cavaliers, who attained gentility by selling tin pots, navigating the river and enslaving hundreds of Black people.
Right away her “wildness” worries them, especially Aunt Nan, because Billy refuses to drink alcohol. Billy is seriously “a dry.” Her aunts think Prohibition doesn’t apply to better people, only to second-rate types who lack sufficient breeding to handle their liquor. Aunt Nan tells Billy about one shunned debutante, Tessie Mae Swan, whose downfall began at a select dinner dance where she drank too much with a certain married man.
Billy says that Jane’s brother John Bierce says there are certain men who enjoy drinking with certain women because of “certain effects drinking has on all concerned. He says there’s no ‘who’s who’ when it comes to getting drunk!”
She adds that despite her Alexander blood, she would be worse than Tessie if she drank. She knows because she and Jane drank as an experiment in their boarding room.
“John Bierce says if women
could see what [thorough] fools drinking makes of them, it would cure them of the fashionable drink habit,” Billy says. “So Jane and I determined to see ourselves ‘as others see us.’ We got the bottles.”
Two drinks made Billy act “like a cross between an idiot and a man-hunting lioness” so that the mantle of shame fell over Jane in smothering folds. And Jane, who took her turn the next evening, became disgustingly sick. The girls swore to “climb on the water wagon” and shook hands.
Nan insists she has never heard of gentlemen or ladies getting drunk. Billy says that’s because they have valets to hold the wash bowl and maids to apply the ice cap in the privacy of their own rooms, saving them from the charge of being boozers.
“A vulgar sounding word,” Nan cries. “What is a boozer?” She’s even more appalled when Billy tells her.
“Did this John Bierce you speak of use this language?”
“No, that’s my own. John Bierce uses nice high-class effective language, like ‘Dam.’”
“Billy.” Miss Nan’s voice gains weight with gravity. “Is this John Bierce a Yankee?”
Oh lord, he is. His ancestors came over on the Mayflower; he is some kind of New York lawyer and friends with the president. Billy has not met him nor does she care to. He offended her by mocking Arkansas.
“He calls me ‘Billy of Arkansas.’ Once after Jane and I had done something he did not like, he wrote her a lecture with instructions to pass it on to Billy of Arkansas.” She sent him this verse in reply: Fie, Johnny Pierce, Don’t be so fierce. Your language rude my heart doth pierce.
His next letter to Jane included a poem for Billy:
Old Arkansas, old Arkansas
You should be proud and show it!
For though you’ve not been on the map so anyone could know it,
Omissions sins are now atoned —
You have produced a poet. “Since then I have ignored the existence of John Bierce,” Billy says.
Stash that info in the back of your mind and let’s see how she winds up with strikers in New York’s garment district.
I had assumed Jane would take her there, because after Billy dispensed with the fortune hunting Capt. Sidney Larvante, she effectively announced her broken engagement in an elegantly phrased tidbit for the newspaper society column: “Miss Billy Camelton left yesterday with Miss Jane Bierce, of New York, who has been her guest, for the latter’s home, where she will devote some time to the study of settlement work on the East Side.”
(Settlement was a movement that sought to understand and alleviate grinding poverty and vice in poor urban centers by integrating them; see arkansasonline. com/410settle.)
But on her way to New York, Billy stops in Baltimore to see another schoolmate, Peg Arlington, to bring her up to speed about the sad end of her love affair. Peg wounds Billy a bit by not being much interested. Peg’s consumed by concern for 100,000 men and women in New York who have walked out of factories.
She attended a meeting at Cooper’s Union in New York where about 1,000 white girls voted to strike.
With a vividness that fascinates Billy, Peg describes speeches made in Italian, Yiddish and other languages, as well as in English; and with real dramatic art she pictures the scene when, with long, continued shouting and the waving of handkerchiefs, the great body voted to go out on strike.
Peg cheered along, tears in her eyes. Beside her, a woman who had worked in the factory 12 years shook her head.
“Look at the poor, young things voting to go on strike,” she said. “It makes me think of soldiers going out to war — bands playing, uniforms new and flags flying. But the return, ah, the return: the faded, tattered garments, the empty arms, the forgotten graves in far places; so with these girls. Starvation, the street, the white slaver — so many
dangers. I’ve been through the strike, it’s hell.”
Peg asked why then she had just voted to strike.
“We must stand or fall together. A strike is hell — but for many there can be nothing but the hell of wage slavery without the strike. So we go together.”
“I call that heroism,” Peg tells Billy. Then she describes the struggles of a $5-a-week girl.
“What are you going to do to help?” Billy asks.
“Assist in creating public sentiment for the girls,” Peg says. To that end, she’s reporting for a Baltimore newspaper … of which her father is a stockholder. “What I want now is the experience of some girl who has been on picket duty.”
“Why don’t you go on picket duty yourself?”
Because Daddy wouldn’t like it and because Peg doesn’t want to go to jail.
Billy instantly wants to be a picket line girl. “I never wrote anything more serious than a letter, but I’m not afraid to try anything once in the way of experience.”
“But Billy, you might get arrested.”
“Suppose I do. Who cares if I do or do not? I have no father, no brother, no sister, nobody to care. If you can arrange it, I’ll get your picket story.”
Peg gives her instructions: “Just go to New York, to a downtown hotel. Next, report to the address I give you. When you get out on duty, keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut, if you can. If anything exciting happens, telephone me. At the end of the week, phone Jane you have arrived and take a taxi to her home. It is easy enough.”
Young, wealthy, fearless. What could possibly go wrong? Tune again in April 17. Email: