Whenever I am really not feeling my job, like every three weeks when I am on deadline, I think about tying up my must have possessions in a dish towel, tying it to the end of a sturdy stick, and heading for the hills. Why do I need to live this peaceful bourgeois life? Why can’t I bounce around the globe with a camera, my latest vaccines, and not a care in the world? There are of course many reasons I can’t do this. Common sense is a major hurdle along with a lack of millions of dollars and parents who are sick of me calling them for money from a pay phone in Siberia.
But a girl can still dream. And when I really want to imagine my rebel globetrotting lifestyle, I crack Barbara Holland’s book about women wayfarers, warriors, runaways, and renegades for a few lessons on how to become one of these fast talking dames.
I first took up an interest in female rebel rousers when I read the biography of Emily Hahn, a writer who lived with a pigmy tribe and crossed Central Africa in the 1920s before moving to China where she became an opium addict, slept with a Chinese poet and the British chief of intelligence, and kept a pet gibbon on her shoulder clad in a dinner jacket. She eventually wrote 54 books and more than 200 articles for the New Yorker before she died at 92. Well! After I read about Emily Hahn, I wanted to read about every woman who lived life like that and bought Barbara Holland’s book.
Turns out there were some darn adventurous women in the world, they just never got their due. But times they are a changing. If Emily Hahn had had a Twitter account, she would have more followers than Britney Spears.
Am I going to become a hobo anytime soon? Sadly not, I have to help a luxury lifestyle magazine go to print on Tuesday. But do I want to run around the world with an eye for the ridiculous one of these days? Absolutely. I always thought I’d make a really good vagabond.
The lovely and talented Emily Hahn, who loved opium, imagination, adventure, hot men, and very small apes who wore clothes.
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Tags: Barbara Holland, China, deadline, Emily Hahn, globetrotting, New Yorker, pygmy, stagecoach Mary Fields, They Went Whistling, Washington Life
The real ‘Stagecoach Mary’ story:
Mary Fields, Black Mary, and ‘Stagecoach Mary’ are all one of the same person. Mary was born in 1832, a slave in Tennessee and was owned by a Catholic family; the father was a businessman and Judge who had a single girl child the same age as Mary. Mary’s mother was the House Slave Servant and the judge’s favorite cook; therefore Mary was always in the main house, in the kitchen and not in the fields, as a Field Slave. Mary’s father was a Field Slave, and Field Slaves were not allowed in the Main House, much less, to court a House Slave. Mary’s mother became pregnant by Mary’s father and he was beaten and sold to another plantation for getting Mary’s mother pregnant. After Mary’s birth, Mary’s mother and her were allowed to stay in the main house, and Mary became the Judge’s daughters’ playmate, therefore being the Judge’s daughter’s playmate, Mary was allowed to read and write, a rarity for that time.
After the emancipation and coming into adulthood, Mary was 6 feet tall and weighed over 200 pounds. Mary became her own woman and traveled solely from Tennessee, up and down the Mississippi River, to Ohio, then finally to Montana where she got her nickname at the turn of the 20th Century. She earned this nickname by working for “Wells Fargo” delivering the United States Mail through adverse conditions that would have discouraged the most hardened frontiersmen of her time. All by herself, she never missed a day for 8 years, carrying the U. S. Mail and other important documents that helped settle the wild open territory of central west Montana.
Mary had no fear of man, nor beast, and this sometimes got her into trouble. She delivered the mail regardless of the heat of the day, cold of night, wind, rain, sleet, snow, blizzards, Indians and Outlaws.
Mary was a cigar smoking, shotgun and pistol toting Negro Woman, who even frequented saloons drinking whiskey with the men, a privilege only given to her, as a woman. However, not even this fact, sealed Mary’s credentials given to her, her credentials boasted that, “She would knockout any man with one punch”, a claim which she proved true.
Her fame was so acclaimed, even the Actor, Gary Cooper, two time Academy Award Winner, told a story about her in 1959 which appeared in Ebony Magazine that same year. While, Annie Oakley and Martha Canary (Calamity Jane) were creating their history with Buffalo Bill, Stagecoach Mary was making “her Epic Journey!”
Despite Mary’s hardness, she had another side of her, a kindness so strong, even today, in the beginning of the 21st Century, the town of Cascade, Montana, and other surrounding communities celebrate her birthday.
The Epic movie is in pre-production mode. Check out website at http://www.stagecoachmary.net
Wow, this is so interesting. Thank you for posting! I can’t wait to see the movie – good luck with the production!