OPINION | OLD NEWS: Billy of Arkansas harries unsuitable suitors in Babcock’s 1922 novel

(Democrat-Gazette photo illustration)
(Democrat-Gazette photo illustration)


Old News is poking through a novel written by Mrs. Bernie Babcock in or about 1914 and serialized by the Arkansas Democrat 101 years ago.

If this sounds unfamiliar, please scan my last two columns: arkansasonline.com/220last and arkansasonline.com/227next. We'll wait.

And thank you for doing so. It spares me a tedious amount of typing to not rehash all that.

My goal today is to convey the gist of the first five (out of, turns out, not 20 but 25) installments of this cheerful love/temperance novel. In these early chapters, the heroine, Billy Camelton, last sprout of the old line Alexanders of Little Rock, discourages unsuitable suitors for her wealthy young hand.

This consternates her three elderly aunties, who fear she will not settle down and marry ... or, if she does marry, that she will then give birth to a vulgar number of children.

I'm calling Billy "the" heroine today rather than "our" heroine. She is quite a forward-thinking breath of fresh air for her time; but as we shall see, she still is of that time and coarsened by its lack of empathy for Black Arkansans.

After Billy's debut ball is reported as a grand success, a chaperone, whose attempts to spike the punch were thwarted, seeks revenge. Mrs. Benton-Gordon informs Aunt Nan that the town is aghast: Billy was seen smoking with a violinist and flirting with a mere dance teacher, the chaperone says, and worse, Billy has insulted a gentleman, Mr. Brighton Day.

The chaperone demands that Billy apologize to the gentleman, at once, or she is out.

In a tizzy, Aunt Nan summons her neighbor the Bishop and begs him to talk sense into the girl. Mr. Brighton Day is an eligible bachelor!

But the Bishop is so smitten with Billy that he's in no way capable of bending her to Aunt Nan's viewpoint and ends up on Billy's side. And practicing dance steps with her until he's gasping. He pulls off his clerical collar to breathe.

Two of the rumors are lies — she never smoked and isn't in love with the dance teacher. But Billy did dismiss Brighton Day, as she forthrightly explains:

"His shirt front is spotless, but he smelt like a distillery and holds me so close I cannot get fresh air." Something about his touch frightens her and also makes her fighting mad. She had intended to let him down by degrees, but then she learned about behavior too reprehensible for degrees.

Billy got the scoop from her family's beloved servant, Dinah, a Black woman with a biracial daughter, Daisy. Babcock uses a different term than biracial, a word not seen as ugly in her day but one that even in 1922 objectified the young woman. So let's call Daisy what she is: biracial and also inadmissible to segregated Little Rock society in the 1910s.

Beautiful Daisy is a receptionist in a doctor's office downtown. Brighton Day has been sniffing around that office and, according to Dinah, just gave Daisy a fancy gift. Naively, Dinah is delighted by this assumed compliment to her daughter, because Brighton Day is one of "the most elegantist gem'men" in town.

Babcock uses dialect to convey Dinah's voice. Friend Reader knows this was a common trick of Arkansas newspaper writers, who for some reason never tried to capture the drawls of their white subjects so awkwardly. Anyhoo, Dinah tells Billy: "Yeste'day he get her a present, an I knowed you'd be int'ested kase it was a pair of green lady-sox, green silk lady-sox wid a black butterfly on the top of the foot. Daisy said you didn't have nothin' mo handsomer."

Dinah believes Daisy will have a genuine relationship with this white society he-lion. She says she always knew "her daddy's blood gwine count for som'thing in dat Daisy ob mine. Blood sho do count jes lak your Aunt Nan says."

Unaware that Dinah has exposed his predatory ways, Brighton Day soon calls on Billy to swear undying love at her. She rebuffs him, to her credit. But not to her credit, at least in my view, is her reasoning.

First she tells Brighton Day that he's too old.

"He said he had kept company with 50 debutantes and not one of them had ever raised such an objection, and he thought it must be an excuse, and asked if I had heard anything about him," Billy tells the Bishop. "I told him I had. He said he knew what I had reference to, a little escapade of his with a married woman, but that when I got to be a society woman instead of an 'infant debutante' I would not hold a magnifying glass over a man's morals."

Billy continues, "This stirred me up -- and I said, 'Maybe I am an infant! Maybe the time will come when I will look on a man's disgraceful immorality as his crowning glory. But believe me, Billy Camelton has not yet reached the place when the same man can hand his [biracial belle] green silk hose with one hand and an Alexander Camelton lilies of the valley with the other.'"

The Lothario takes his hat and leaves.

The Bishop is pleased with Billy. I am not. Where's her outrage at the cad's dishonesty toward the girl he means to exploit? Where's her concern for Daisy's reputation?

KEEP DANCING

Over the next three months, Billy shakes off other suitors, and for reasons that make me like her again:

◼️ Fayette Journey (pronounced Zhur-nay): This man descends from one of Little Rock's fine old families, as Aunt Nan explains:

"Well, you see, his mother was a distant relative of Lafayette and there is a genuine Lafayette teapot in the family which Fayette will inherit. After the war the family was overcome with financial embarrassment, and aside from his grandmother's allowance, Fayette hasn't much left, except --'"

"His pronunciation?" Billy inquires.

That and his teapot.

Poverty should not discredit a good man in the eyes of a good woman; but Fayette is rude to an overwhelmed mother on a streetcar. She steps aboard holding a big baby, and Journey sneers at her. When Billy tries to help by holding her baby, Journey snaps at the baby. The baby wails. Not father material.

"But mercy alive," Aunt Nan cries when she hears about Journey's crime, "Billy, you don't mean to tell me you think about babies in connection with these different lovers?"

"Yes, indeed, why not?"

"Before you are married to them?"

◼️ The Honorable Frederick Blanche: This is a recently widowed congressman. He's looking for a political hostess to help push his anti-suffrage opinions. Billy wants to vote.

◼️ Henry O. Bean: Milquetoast Henry has an ugly nose, and he whines. He follows her like a puppy. And she wouldn't want to be a Mrs. Bean because "up in the country where I would live I would be Sister Billy Bean.

"Then there would be Johnnie Bean and Maudie Bean and Sammie Bean and Rosie Bean and all the rest of the Bean family. I don't want to get into anything like that."

Billy also has an Irish suitor, Pat. She seriously considers him: "Do you know, Pat, you seem almost like a brother to me. I don't know anybody I like better. Then we admire the same authors and have such good luck at golf. Besides you are the only truly religious man I know, and I've made up my mind that it is religion after all that makes the man."

But Billy wants to be married by her friend the Bishop. Pat insists that unless they're married by his priest, the marriage won't be real. They part as friends.

The most ridiculous of Billy's disappointed suitors is the Rev. Ezekiel Bumpast. We'll met him next Monday.

[This is a series. See part four at arkansasonline.com/36four]

Email:

cstorey@adgnewsroom.com


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