by Amy Stewart
Not long after that, the nurse suggested that they go back to Richmond to check up on Meemaw.
“Oh, I don’t dare show my face again,” Beulah said. “What would I say to her, after all this time? She might be gone and dead, anyway.”
“You don’t know that,” Nurse Cartwright said. “How about we just stand across the street and look at her front porch?”
“That wouldn’t be right either, to go all that way and not pay a visit.”
“Well, then, we’ll just give it a try and you can decide once you’re there.”
Beulah agreed, reluctantly, confessing to some longing to see her old home one more time before she stopped being Beulah Binford forever. It was a pleasant ride by train on a Sunday afternoon, and a short walk from the train station to Meemaw’s old house. How small Richmond seemed, after New York! It was like a stage set, all the old houses painted to resemble her childhood memories, but none of them looking quite right, some in shambles now, and others polished and shined like they never used to be when she was a child.
Beulah knew the way, nonetheless, and knew how to avoid going past Mayo Street to get there. She recognized her Meemaw’s house readily enough, although it had been painted a bright pink, which her grandmother never would’ve countenanced.
A woman Beulah hadn’t seen before was standing on the front porch. Beulah couldn’t bring herself to cross the street and make her inquiries, so Nurse Cartwright did it for her. She marched right over, and stood on those old wooden steps, then walked back across the street and gave the news in the stalwart and forthright manner that was her habit.
“Your Meemaw’s gone. She’s over in the cemetery if you want to see her.”
“I don’t,” Beulah said. They had only been in Richmond for an hour, but it was taking hold of her, with every minute she was back inside of it. She felt herself turning back into that little girl again, the one who stood on that porch and asked to be let inside. “Let’s go on back to Washington.”
“Not until we see your Meemaw,” Nurse Cartwright said firmly. “We have time to walk through the cemetery before our train.”
“I don’t know why it matters so much to you,” Beulah said. “She ain’t your family.”
Nurse Cartwright stopped in the street and looked Beulah over. It was unusual for Beulah to see the nurse out of uniform. She worked at the Army hospital now, and she was on duty almost every day. On her days off she liked to rest, and stayed in her house dress all day and sent Beulah out to do the shopping. But now she wore an ordinary white shirtwaist and a long broadcloth skirt, not unlike their old camp uniforms.
“You’re right, she’s not my family,” Nurse Cartwright said, “but you’re my family, or at least, you’re the one I come home to at night for the time being. So let’s go see your Meemaw, and tell her how good you’re doing, and then we can go on home and have our supper.”
It wasn’t just Meemaw’s grave they found there. Jessie Binford was buried alongside her, in a proper plot, with a good granite headstone. BELOVED MOTHER, it read, under her name.
“Claudia must’ve paid for it,” Beulah whispered.
Carved under a rosette of ivy leaves were the dates: 1869 TO 1912.
“Gone too soon,” Nurse Cartwright said, respectfully. “Your Meemaw lived a good long while. 1831 to 1916. That puts her at eighty-five.”
Beulah was still thinking about her mother. “She was still alive during my trial. I thought she was dead by then.”
“There was no way for you to know,” Nurse Cartwright said.
They sat by those graves quietly, taking in the fragrance of crushed grass underneath them. Beulah started to notice the other stones, her grandfather and her uncles, also gone too soon, and even some of the babies who’d been lost. She told the nurse about them, as many of them as she remembered, and then they stood and brushed off their skirts and took the train back to Washington.
It was after that trip to Richmond that Beulah finally chose a name for herself, and went before a judge to have it changed. She took her sister’s last name, even though Claudia never did answer her letters. She liked the name Powers, and she liked to imagine that it tethered her, in a fragile, thread-like way, to her only living relation.
For her first name she chose Catherine, her Meemaw’s name. Catherine Powers was a name that she would have to grow into. She would have to earn it.
A nursing course took three years. Beulah didn’t know if she’d make it all the way through to the end. She’d never done anything for three years. She also didn’t know if there’d be any war left to join by the time she finished learning.
“You don’t need to be in such a hurry to go off to France,” Nurse Cartwright told her, whenever Beulah mentioned the war. “You don’t have anything to run from anymore.”
Historical Notes
Every book in the Kopp Sisters series (this is the fifth) is based on the real lives of Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp. In each installment, I try to tell their true story as much as I can, and use fiction only to fill in the gaps.
This installment ventures further into fiction than any previous book. In fact, I don’t know what the Kopps were doing in the spring of 1917. To satisfy my own love of research and obscure historical stories, I’ve placed them in a real environment—a National Service School—and I’ve introduced them to the real-life Beulah Binford.
As far as I know, neither Binford nor the Kopps attended a National Service School, but the idea came from a newspaper clipping about Beulah Binford, written in 1918, about her attempts to join the Red Cross. She was trying to distance herself from her past, and to help in the war effort. I had discovered Beulah Binford already in my research into Freeman Bernstein, who has appeared in previous books owing to a real-life case connecting him and Constance. I found Beulah’s story fascinating. By moving Beulah’s Red Cross training to 1917, I could place her and the Kopps at a National Service School in the days just before the United States joined the war. I’ve become fascinated by these early military camps for women and wanted to explore that world.
The National Service Schools were a project of the Women’s Section of the Navy League, with a great deal of participation from the Army as well. Many of the organizers were the wives and daughters of prominent politicians and military officers. Their idea was to instill in women a sense of patriotism and national preparedness by teaching skills such as first aid, military kitchen protocols, signaling, and any other tasks that might be considered women’s war work.
The first camp was held in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in May 1916. Three others followed around the country. Similar camps were sponsored by other women’s preparedness groups. Questions about uniforms arose at every camp: “Women Soldiers Vote for Trousers” was the headline on April 15, 1916, followed, the next day, by “Women Will Not Wear Trousers.” The controversy over whether or not women should be given firearms training arose often as well. “Shall Women Shoot?” was quickly followed by the reassurance that they would not.
My version of a National Service School camp ran longer than most did. Many camps were only two weeks long. The camp participants, organizers, and instructors are fiction, but they are very much based on real accounts of the camps as reported in newspapers of the day. The training curriculum, military exercises, and even the mess hall menus are historically accurate. (One camp really did run out of bananas as mine did in chapter 7.) Fortunately, the Library of Congress has preserved wonderful photographs of the training camps. Please visit my website (www.amystewart.com) to see those pictures. For more on the National Service School movement, read Barbara J. Steinson’s excellent 1981 book American Women’s Activism in World War I.
Readers of the third book in the series, Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions, might already be familiar with Freeman Bernstein and May Ward, and I’d encourage you to read the historical notes at the end of that book for more about them. May Ward really was, by 1917, a fading vaudeville actress. Freeman Bernstein was her hus
band, her manager, and a show promoter. He was, as Constance put it in this novel, “notoriously unreliable, and prone to exaggeration and misdirection.” That description might actually be too kind. If you don’t believe me, ask his family. His grandnephew, Walter Shapiro, wrote a fantastic biography of Mr. Bernstein called Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Führer. Yes, Freeman Bernstein really did try to swindle Hitler. Please do read Walter’s book to find out more.
Beulah Binford came to my attention when I was researching Freeman Bernstein. He did attempt to manage and represent her just as the 1911 murder trial was ending. That got me curious about Beulah herself, and pretty soon I’d compiled a complete dossier on her, with hundreds of newspaper clippings spanning several years, a deep and comprehensive family tree compiled from census and other genealogical resources, and even a dive into Richmond’s courthouse records with the assistance of Chris Semtner, curator of Richmond’s Edgar Allan Poe Museum. I became fascinated with Beulah and her case. Her name was synonymous with sin and scandal—so much so that newspapers didn’t bother to explain who she was or what she’d done when they wrote about her in the years following the trial. Everyone already knew.
Although her participation in the National Service School is fiction, her backstory, told in flashbacks in my novel, is almost entirely true, with one glaring exception: I did kill her mother off prematurely. As far as I know, Jessie Binford did not have a drug problem. She died in 1931, not 1912. I also made Freeman Bernstein into more of a guilty party than he might’ve been in real life—although it would be entirely in keeping with his character for him to try to turn Beulah into a celebrity, only to make matters worse for her.
If you’re wondering what happened next to Beulah Binford, the truth is that I can’t be sure—because it appears that she actually did change her name. The record gets murky after that. Perhaps she earned the right to disappear from history.
One historical note about Richmond: Mayo Street no longer exists on any map of the city. The street is gone entirely, replaced by the James Monroe Building. From 1905 to 1915, Mayo Street was a legally sanctioned red-light district. The experiment in legalization was ultimately a failure, but it was extraordinary for its time—and Beulah Binford lived right in the middle of it. For more on this moment in Richmond’s history, I recommend Harry M. Ward’s book Children of the Streets of Richmond, 1865–1920.
Maude Miner is a fascinating woman who deserves her own biography. She was born in 1880, making her just a few years younger than Constance. In 1906 she was working as a probation officer in New York City’s night court. Shortly thereafter, she raised the funds to lease an entire building at 165 West Tenth Street in New York, which she called Waverly House. There she housed—and tried to help—some of the women who came through the night court. She then formed the Girls’ Service League, which had a mission of helping destitute girls. In 1916 she received a PhD from Columbia, and her dissertation was published under the title Slavery of Prostitution: A Plea for Emancipation.
In the run-up to World War I, she visited the training camps and saw trouble brewing between the soldiers and the young women who hung around the camps. She wrote to the War Department and proposed a Committee on Protective Work for Girls, which she ran until 1918. Many of the women involved with that committee grew disenchanted as they saw local authorities use the committee’s mandate as an excuse to put “wayward” girls into detention, with no rights or recourse.
Maude continued to run the Girls’ Service League until her marriage in 1924, and went on to do service work of one kind or another with her husband. She died in 1967. Her memoir, Quest for Peace: Personal and Political, provided many of these details.
Maude’s participation in this camp is fictional, as are the specifics of her “business in Washington.” However, here’s one bizarre coincidence about the intersection between fiction and fact in this novel: The newspaper article that Constance refers to in chapter 39 about Beulah working under an assumed name at the telephone company was, in fact, written by Maude Miner. The real Maude Miner and the real Beulah Binford did actually cross paths.
Two historical figures mentioned in this novel but not actually appearing are Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin and Bureau of Investigation director Bruce Bielaski. Everything I wrote about them is historically accurate.
For readers new to the series who are curious about the Kopp sisters’ real lives up to this point, I encourage you to read the historical notes at the end of the previous four books, and to visit my website (www.amystewart.com) for photographs and biographies. The short version, to satisfy your curiosity: Constance really was a deputy sheriff until she was fired after the election of 1916, and Fleurette really was a very talented seamstress, actress, and singer. Norma, in real life, had no interest in pigeons as far as I know. However, her obstinacy, bossiness, and generally disagreeable nature are based on her actual personality, as described to me by members of her own family.
A FEW MORE specifics:
The questions that Geneva Nash asked Constance at the end of chapter 2 come directly from the National Service Register questions that were used to gauge women’s interest in joining a National Service School.
For the speeches given by Geneva Nash and Maude Miner in chapter 5, I quoted heavily from real speeches given at the camps in the spring of 1917, as reported in newspapers of the day. Most quotes come from Elisabeth Elliott Poe, who was instrumental in creating the National Service Schools.
The alphabet code taught by Mr. Turner in chapter 10 comes directly from the 1916 edition of the Army Signal Corps manual.
In chapter 11, Norma gives a version of events concerning the Zimmerman cable that was thought to be true at the time. (The Zimmerman cable was an offer by Germany to Mexico, proposing a partnership if the United States entered the war against Germany. In exchange for being allowed to set up ports and military bases in Mexico, the Germans would allow Mexico to take back Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico after the United States was defeated. News of this telegram was enough to sway American opinion against the Germans and to rally support for joining in the war and defeating Germany.)
Norma’s version of events, described in a March 5, 1917, article called “Caught Zimmerman Note at the Border,” which ran in the Evansville (IN) Press and other papers, suggests that one of Mr. Bielaski’s agents intercepted a special messenger at the Mexico border and delivered the secret telegram to Washington. We now know that the British intercepted the telegram and broke the Germans’ code, but that information wasn’t released at the time because the British didn’t want the Germans to know that they could break the code.
The first song sung in chapter 20 is “You’re a Dangerous Girl,” written by Grant Clarke and sung by Al Jolson in 1916. The second song was written by me (although heavily influenced by murder ballads of the era) and has been sung by no one. “My Little Red Carnation,” quoted in chapter 28, was written by Charles Robinson and performed by May Ward.
R. T. Fisher, introduced in chapter 21, really did date Beulah Binford briefly, and she did claim to be married to him. He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1912, just after the Beattie trial, then went on to play for the Chicago Cubs, the Cincinnati Reds, and the St. Louis Cardinals.
In chapter 30, much of what Nurse Cartwright has to say about hygienic bed-making comes from a November 1, 1902, edition of Collier’s Weekly. The article was “Scientific Bed-Making” by Emma Churchman Hewitt.
In chapter 34, Beulah reads from a newspaper article about herself. That article ran in the Alexandria Gazette on August 16, 1911, under the headline “The Question of Affinity.”
In chapter 36, I quote from a story called “People Like Anything Salacious” that ran all over the country on September 7, 1911. My copy comes from the Daily Capital Journal in Salem, Oregon. I also quoted from “The Barring of Beulah Binford,” which appeared in the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal on September 17, 1911. Some of Freeman’s dialogue in chapter 38 a
lso comes from his quotes in that same story.
In chapter 45, the discussion about Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin’s vote, and how she conducted herself, is drawn from the April 6, 1917, New York Times story “Suffrage Leaders Pardon Miss Rankin.”
In chapter 48, Norma quotes from an article about Mr. Bielaski that actually ran earlier, on January 2, 1916, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The title was “Uncle Sam’s $28,000,000 Spy System.” In the same chapter, Constance’s quotes about Bielaski come from another article, “Minister’s Son Hunts Criminals,” which ran in the Lincoln Star on April 30, 1916.
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About the Author
© Terrence McNally
Amy Stewart is the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Kopp Sisters series, which began with Girl Waits with Gun. Her six nonfiction books include The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants. She and her husband own a bookstore called Eureka Books. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
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