Part 9
Many men who in larger communities would have patronized the professionals could not do so in a small town. They could not afford to; it was too dangerous. The moment a woman was suspected of being a harlot she was eagerly watched by everyone from the mayor down to the preachers, and the name of every man seen talking to her, or even looking at her, went winging swiftly from mouth to mouth, and was finally posted on the heavenly bulletin board as that of an immoral wretch. A house in which harlotry was practiced was picketed day and night by small boys eager to learn the forbidden mysteries, and by Brethren and Sisters hopefully sniffing for sin. It was not possible for a harlot to keep her clientèle secret, for the sexual life of a small town is an open book, and news of amorous doings could not travel faster if each had a tabloid newspaper.
Exact statistics, of course, are not available, but it is probably true that no small American town has ever harbored a harlot whose income from professional services was sufficient to feed and clothe her. Few if any such towns have ever been the abode of more than one harlot at a time. When I was a boy every one had its town harlot, just as it had its town sot (this, of course, was before drunkards became extinct) and its town idiot. But she was generally a poor creature who was employed by day as a domestic servant and practiced her ancient art only in her hours of leisure. She turned to it partly for economic reasons, but chiefly because of a great yearning for human companionship, which she could obtain in no other way. She remained in it because she was almost instantly branded a Daughter of Satan, and shunned by good and bad alike. She seldom, if ever, realized that she was doing wrong; her moral standards were those of a bedbug. She thought of harlotry in terms of new ribbons and an occasional pair of shoes, and in terms of social intercourse; she was unmoral rather than immoral, and the proceeds of her profession, to her, were just so much extra spending money.
Small-town men who occasionally visited the larger cities, and there thought nothing of spending from ten to fifty dollars in metropolitan brothels, were very stingy in dealing with the town harlot. They considered a dollar an enormous price for her, and frequently they refused to give her anything. Many small communities were not able to support even a part-time harlot; consequently some members of the craft went from town to town, taking secular jobs and practicing harlotry as a side line until driven out by the godly, or until the inevitable business depression occurred. I recall one who made several towns along the O. K. Railroad in Northeastern Missouri as regularly as the shoe drummers. Her studio was always an empty box car on the town siding, and she had a mania for inscribing in such cars the exact dates and hours of her adventures, and her honoraria. It was not unusual to find in a car some such inscription as this:
“Ten P.M., July 8. Fifty cents.”
These writings, scrawled in lead pencil or with a bit of chalk, were signed “Box Car Molly.” Once, in a car from which I had unloaded many heavy bags of cement, I came across what seemed to be a pathetic bit of very early, and apparently authentic, Box-Car-Molliana. On the wall was this:
“I was ruined in this car May 10.
“BOX CAR MOLLY.”
Our town harlot in Farmington was a scrawny creature called variously Fanny Fewclothes and Hatrack, but usually the latter in deference to her figure. When she stood with her arms outstretched she bore a remarkable resemblance to the tall hatracks then in general use in our homes, and since she was always most amiable and obliging, she was frequently asked to pose thus for the benefit of drummers and other infidels. In time, she came to take a considerable pride in this accomplishment; she referred to herself as a model, and talked vaguely of abandoning her wicked life and going to St. Louis, where she was sure she could make a living posing for artists.
Six days a week Hatrack was a competent and more or less virtuous drudge employed by one of our best families, but Sunday was her day off, and she then, in turn, offered her soul to the Lord and went to the Devil. For the latter purpose she utilized both the Masonic and Catholic cemeteries. Hatrack’s regular Sunday-night parade, her descent from righteousness into sin, was one of the most fascinating events of the week, and promptly after supper those of us who did not have engagements to take young ladies to church (which was practically equivalent to publishing the banns) went downtown to the loafing place in front of the Post Office and waited impatiently.
On week days Hatrack turned a deaf ear to the blandishments of our roués, but on Sunday night she was more gracious. This, however, was not until she had gone to church and had been given to understand, tacitly but none the less clearly, that there was no room for her in the Kingdom of Heaven. Our Sunday-night services usually began about eight o’clock, following the meetings of the various young people’s societies. At seven-thirty, regardless of the weather, the angular figure of Hatrack could be discerned coming down the hill from the direction of the cemeteries. She lived somewhere in that section and worked out by the day. She was always dressed in her best, and in her eyes was the light of a great resolve. She was going to church, and there was that in her walk and manner which said that thereafter she was going to lead a better life.
There was always a group of men waiting for her around the Post Office. But although several muttered “Here she comes!” it was not good form to speak to her then, and she walked past them as if she had not seen them. But they, with their wide knowledge of the vagaries of the Agents of God, grinned hopefully and settled down to wait. They knew she would be back. She went on up the street past the Court House and turned into the Northern Methodist church, where she took a seat in the last row. All about her were empty seats; if they were not empty when she got there they were soon emptied. No one spoke to her. No one asked her to come to Jesus. No one held out a welcoming hand. No one prayed for her. No one offered her a hymn book. At the protracted meetings and revivals, which she invariably attended, none of the Brothers and Sisters tried to convert her; she was a Scarlet Woman and belonged to the Devil. There was no place for her in a respectable congregation. They could not afford to be seen talking to her, even in church, where God’s love, by their theory, made brothers and sisters of us all.
It was pitiful to watch her; she listened to the Word with such rapt attention; she sang the hymns with such fanatical fervor, and she so yearned for the comforts of that barbaric religion and the blessings of easy intercourse with decent people. But she never got them. From the Christians and their God she got nothing but scorn. Of all the sinners in our town Hatrack would have been easiest to convert; she was so pathetically eager for salvation. If a Preacher, or a Brother, or a Sister, had so much as spoken a kind word to her she would have dropped to her knees and given up her soul to the Methodist God. And her conversion, in all likelihood, would have been permanent, for she was not mentally equipped for a struggle against the grandiose improbabilities of revealed religion. If someone had told her, as I was told, that God was an old man with long whiskers, she would not have called Him “Daddy,” as some of her more flippant city sisters might have done; she would have accepted Him and gloried in Him.
But she was not plucked from the burning, for the workers for the Lord would have nothing to do with her, and by the end of the service her eyes had grown sullen and her lip had curled upward in a sneer. Before the final hymn was sung and the benediction pronounced upon the congregation, she got to her feet and left the church. None tried to stop her; she was not wanted in the House of God. I have seen her sit alone and miserably unhappy while the Preacher bellowed a sermon about forgiveness, with the whole church rocking to a chorus of sobbing, moaning amens as he told the stories of various Biblical harlots, and how God had forgiven them.
But for Hatrack there was no forgiveness. Mary Magdalene was a saint in Heaven, but Hatrack remained a harlot in Farmington. Every Sunday night for years she went through the same procedure. She was hopeful always that someone would speak to her and make a place for her, that the Brothers and Sisters who talked so volubly about the grace and the mercy of God would offer her some of the religion that they dripped so freely over everyone else in town. But they did not, and so she went back down the street to the Post Office, swishing her skirts and brazenly offering herself to all who desired her. The men who had been waiting for her, and who had known that she would come, leered at her and hailed her with obscene speech and gesture. And she gave them back leer for leer, meeting their sallies with giggles, and motioning with her head toward the cemeteries.
And so she went up the hill. A little while later a man left the group, remarking that he must go home. He followed her. And a moment after that another left, and then another, until behind Hatrack was a line of men, about one to a block, who would not look at one another, and who looked sheepishly at the ground when they met anyone coming the other way. As each man accosted her in turn Hatrack inquired whether he was a Protestant or a Catholic. If he was a Protestant she took him into the Catholic cemetery; if he was a Catholic they went into the Masonic cemetery.
5
I fell a willing victim to the wiles of the Rum Demon on the night of my conversion, and thereafter, in common with other boys of the town who were aflame with revolt against the religious taboos which had so oppressed us, I drank whenever I could obtain the liquor. This was not often, because I seldom had any money and it was difficult to find a bartender who would sell a drink to a minor. The eagle eye of the W. C. T. U. was constantly upon him. But occasionally the darkies would buy for us in return for one swig at the bottle, and as often as possible we purchased by this means a pint or quart of whisky or gin. I did not drink because I liked the taste of liquor, for I didn’t, and I do not now, but I thought it was smart and manly to get drunk.
And there was another, and a deeper reason. It seemed to me that in the eyes of the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters a man could commit no more heinous sin than to get tight; it was even worse than smoking. Such being the case, I felt that it was incumbent upon me to achieve that condition, and thereby show them that I had no use for them and the things for which they stood. And that was also the reason we sang vulgar songs, and roared with gusto the parodies on hymns that we learned from time to time. It was our custom to get as drunk as possible and then group ourselves about the pump in the courthouse yard, where we bellowed ditties and parodies until the town marshal or some outraged Brother or Sister stopped us.
There were few such songs that we did not sing; it was at the pump, on a summer night, that I first heard the “Song of Jack Hall.” It was taught to us by a shoe drummer from St. Louis, who sang it with appropriate gestures, and for a long time it was our favorite song. The version that we sang was this--it should be rendered with great gusto and feeling, and the final line of each verse should be dragged from deep down in the chest:
Oh, me nyme it is Jack Hall, ’tis Jack Hall, Oh, me nyme it is Jack Hall, ’tis Jack Hall; Oh, me nyme it is Jack Hall, And I’ll tell youse one and all, The story of me fall, God damn your eyes.
Oh, I killed a man ’tis said, so ’tis said, Oh, I killed a man ’tis said, so ’tis said; Oh, I killed a man ’tis said, And I kicked his bloody head, And I left him lyin’ dead, God damn his eyes.
So they chucked me here in quod, here in quod, So they chucked me here in quod, here in quod; So they chucked me here in quod, With a ball and chain and rod, They did, so help me God, God damn their eyes.
Well, the parson he did come, he did come, Well, the parson he did come, he did come; Well, the parson he did come, And he looked so God-damned glum, As he talked of Kingdom Come, God damn his eyes.
And the sheriff he came, too, he came, too, And the sheriff he came, too, he came, too; And the sheriff he came, too, With his little boys in blue, He said: “Jack, we’ll see you through, God damn your eyes.”
So it’s up the rope I go, up I go, So it’s up the rope I go, up I go; So it’s up the rope I go, And those devils down below, They’ll say: “Jack, we told you so!” God damn their eyes.
The parodies on hymns that we sang were almost innumerable, and were undoubtedly sung all over the country by other boys who, in the eyes of their elders, were only being smart-alecky, but who, like us, had a deeper reason for the eagerness with which they paraded their disrespect for the Church and for religion. It was one of the few ways we knew to flaunt our sin, and nothing pleased us more than to break up a church service, or at least interrupt it, by bellowing at the top of our voices some disreputable and unholy parody that had reached us in one way or another.
One of our most enjoyable Sunday-night escapades was to gather in a group outside a church window, and sing a parody immediately after the choir and the congregation inside had sung the hymn itself. We persisted in this until finally the pastor of the Northern Methodist church had Wint Jackson, the Night Marshal, chase us away. We went without comment or objection when Jackson ordered us to disperse, because he had just killed a desperado named Yates, and we considered him something of a hero; we thought that he went about with his finger constantly in the trigger of his revolver, and that the finger itched.
On this particular night the parody which made the Methodist minister so angry, and swept from his mind all thought of his Christian duty to turn the other cheek for us to swat, was on “Oh, that will be glory for me.” Our version went like this:
Oh, there will be no chicken for me, No chicken for me, no chicken for me; When all the preachers have gulped their share, There’ll be no chicken, no chicken for me.
To give the proper swing to the tune, “gulped” must be pronounced “gulluped.”
Perhaps the most celebrated of all the parodies, at that time, was on the favorite old hymn, “At the Bar.” We sang it thus:
At the bar, at the bar, Where I smoked my first cigar, And the nickels and the dimes rolled away; It was there, by chance, That I ripped my Sunday pants, And now I can wear them every day.
Another parodied “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” thus:
Nero, my dog, has fleas, Nero has fleas; Although I wash him clean, Nero, my dog, has fleas.
And thus, to the tune of “Hallelujah, Thine the Glory”:
Hellilujah, I’m a hobo, Hellilujah, I’m a bum; Hellilujah, give us a handout, Revive us again.
There was also in circulation at that time a great number of parodies on hymns in which mention was made of Beecham’s Pills, the merits of which were emblazoned on every barn and fence throughout the countryside. I have heard that these parodies were circulated by the Beecham Pill people themselves in response to a plea of English churches for hymn books, but I do not know if the story is true. One of our favorites of this collection was the parody on “Hark, the herald angels sing.” It went:
Hark, the herald Angels sing, Beecham’s Pills are just the thing; Peace on earth and mercy mild, Two for man and one for child.
6
To my long list of unhallowed but frequently pleasant accomplishments I added, in my sixteenth summer, journalism and dancing; I went to work on the Farmington _Times_ and learned to waltz and two-step, and on occasion danced the Virginia Reel and the quadrille with spirit and abandon if not with elegant grace. The practice of journalism was not then, in all quarters, considered a sin of the first magnitude; nor is it so considered to-day except when various Preachers and other goody-bodies find their names mentioned infrequently and their daily denunciations ignored. It is then the fashion to denounce the newspapers, and to deplore the low plane to which the fourth estate has fallen. But in Farmington in my youth the feeling against the Sunday newspaper was so great that it was felt generally that all journalism was at least slightly tainted, and so I list it as a sin. So far as the financial rewards go, it is even now nothing less than a crime.
There was no question about the sinfulness of dancing, especially the round dances, as we used to call the waltz and two-step. In some parts of the country exception was made for the square dances, but everywhere in my section of Missouri the waltz and two-step were considered Steps toward Hell. I frequently heard Preachers and Brothers and Sisters pronounce solemn judgment against young girls who indulged in such heinous practices, and brand them before God and man as abandoned scarlet women glorying in the unsanctified embraces of wicked men. That was the way the Preachers usually talked, too. One man in our town was even criticized for waltzing with his wife.
Not only was the wicked waltz and the devilish two-step, no matter how decorously performed, a Sunday taboo in our town, but in our most religious families it was taboo at all times, and several persons were dismissed from church for participating in such orgies. We had one Preacher who informed us that both Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God because their inhabitants danced and for no other reason, and the prediction was freely made that Farmington was destined for the same dreadful end, and he intimated that we would not even reap the resultant benefits of great fame and publicity. His tirades were strikingly similar to the ones that are being made every day now by the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals against New York City and other centers of sin.
As I have said, for many years the Presbyterians, city slickers at heart, had a virtual monopoly of dancing in Farmington. It was they who introduced the waltz and the two-step, to the great horror of all of our old women, both male and female, and it is they who must be held responsible when God sends His avenging angels to blast and destroy. Occasionally a Baptist or a Methodist backslid sufficiently to trip the light fantastic toe, as I delighted to call it as a juvenile reporter on the _Times_, but not often; generally the Presbyterians alone thus flaunted their wickedness. But when God failed to perform as expected, others became bold and abandoned all caution, and when I left Farmington, dancing was general and the town was obviously headed straight for Hell. But even then there was very little dancing done on Sunday night.
We had two newspapers in Farmington, the _Times_ and the _News_, the former owned by Mr. Theodore Fisher and the latter by the Denman brothers, extraordinarily devout members of the Northern Methodist church and leaders in most of the town’s religious activities. Mr. Fisher was a Presbyterian, a liberal at heart, but for business reasons he was unable to do or say anything to stem the tide of prying Puritanism. Both papers were controlled by the churches of the town, and published everything that the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters asked them to; as I grew older, Mr. Fisher became more confidential and frequently expressed his disgust at many things that went on in Farmington, but he was powerless. If he had said a word in favor of a more liberal attitude his paper would have had an even more difficult time getting along, and Heaven knows it was hard enough as it was; Mr. Fisher frequently had to spend all of Saturday morning collecting advertising accounts so he could pay wages in the afternoon. But the _News_ was always very prosperous.
When I went into the newspaper business, or game, as it is called in the motion pictures and the schools of Journalism, I went in with the enthusiastic thoroughness with which I had abandoned myself to a life of sin. Mr. Fisher hired me at $2 a week, during the summer vacation, to be the office devil, and for that princely wage I built the fires each morning, swept the office, carried copy, set type, distributed pi, kicked the job press, cranked the gasoline engine on Thursdays, fed the big roller press, folded the papers, wrote names on them and carried them to the Post Office in sacks. And I had many other duties besides.
These multitudinous activities sufficed me for a few weeks, because in doing them, and in so being engaged in journalistic practice, I had the same feeling that so encouraged me when I danced or drank or smoked cigarettes; I was confident that I was doing something of which the righteous did not wholly approve. But later I became ambitious. I wanted to be an editor. Only God knows why, but I did. So I became an editor; indeed, I became many editors. Using the small job press and Mr. Fisher’s stock of vari-colored inks, I printed cards informing the world that I was sporting editor, society editor, fire editor, crime editor, baseball editor, football editor, financial editor, religious editor, and barber-shop editor, this last because I purposed to interview the customers in Doss’s barber shop.
Thus equipped, I felt able to handle any journalistic problem that might confront me, and I spent my spare time interviewing people and gathering items which, because of the extreme godliness of our citizens, usually consisted of nothing more exciting than announcements that so-and-so was on the sick list, or had been on the sick list and was now improving. When I asked a banker if he knew any news I gravely presented him with my financial-editor card; and when it became my proud duty to interview my youthful idol and our most famous citizen, Mr. Barney Pelty, the major-league baseball pitcher, he learned by ocular proof that I was both sporting editor and baseball editor, and as such fully competent to transmit to type and to posterity his deathless utterances. As I recall them, these were generally that he would be in town to visit his relatives or because some member of his family was on the sick list, and would then return to St. Louis to take up again the onerous duties of his profession. Once he predicted that the Browns would win the pennant, and I wrote this exclusive information with all the large and handsome words at my command, but he was mistaken.
As time went on I became almost everything that it was possible to be on the _Times_; I was printer, pressman, reporter, mechanic, editor of this and that, and what not. But I was never permitted to write editorials or chronicle the doings of our best people. The _Times_ was passionately addicted to the Democrats, and each week our editorial page trumpeted the widely known and indisputable fact that the Republicans were a lot of skunks. These blasts were written, and well written, by Mr. Fisher himself, and my own share in the good work was merely to put them into type, and occasionally correct Mr. Fisher’s phraseology when I did not think that he had expressed himself clearly. And since these corrections were made at the case after the proof had been corrected, they nearly always got printed, sometimes with dire results. Once Mr. Fisher wrote, in jovial vein, about the gaudy house in which a certain political candidate resided, and I corrected it to read “bawdy house,” holding that the latter was more definitely descriptive.