Jane Stuart Brookfield - Challenge (1899)

Forgotten Poems #66: With Augusta Webster!

   
              —: Challenge :—

       I too am a street walker.
       I do not hasten.
       Sauntering, I look my fellow in the eye.
       I have no shame.

       Is the street yours, that I should not walk in it?
       Is the night yours, that I must burn lights indoors?
       Yours the choice of fellowship in street and at night?

       The street to me is home.
       My city is my castle.
       Respect me in it, as I respect you there.
       Hurl me no epithets! My foot is on my own soil,
       And freedom mine.
   

This is the only known poem by Jane Stuart Brookfield, published in The Conservator, in 1899. The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel (1858-1919), was one of the first American publications to regularly feature free-verse, still considered a radical affront to formal English verse. Traubel was a close friend of Walt Whitman’s, and would go on to be Whitman’s literary executor and biographer. When Whitman died in 1892 Traubel published a tribute to him by Edmund Clarence Stacey written in the ‘free verse’ style, and the following year began publishing his own ‘free verse’ poems, alongside poets like Francis Howard Williams (1894), Laurens Maynard (1895), William Gay (1896), John Foster Tucker (1898), Ernest H. Crosby (1897), Laura H. Earl (1898), et al.

Brookfield’s poem is sharp and ever-contemporary, fresh and vibrant in terms of language—particularly for 1899—and resonates both as a challenge to the abuse women regularly experience when using public space in general, especially at night, and as one of the few poems on sex work from this period that I know of written by a sex worker, or at the very least from their perspective (the term ‘street walker’ has been a well-known epithet for sex work since the late-1500s). Another is Augusta Webster’s monologue ‘A Castaway’, first published in her 1870 collection Portraits, written in classical unrhymed ‘blank verse’—here’s a short excerpt (read the whole thing);

 
                     —: A Castaway :—
                              [excerpt]
                    by Augusta Webster

        			                And, for me,
       I say let no one be above her trade;
       I own my kindredship with any drab
       Who sells herself as I, although she crouch
       In fetid garrets and I have a home
       All velvet and marqueterie and pastilles,
       Although she hide her skeleton in rags.
       And I set fashions and wear cobweb lace:
       The difference lies but in my choicer ware . . .

       A sort of fractious angel misconceived—
       Our traffic's one: I own it. And what then?
       I know of worse that are called honourable.
       Our lawyers, who with noble eloquence
       And virtuous outbursts lie to hang a man,
       Or lie to save him, which way goes the fee:
       Our preachers, gloating on your future hell
       For not believing what they doubt themselves:
       Our doctors, who sort poisons out by chance
       And wonder how they'll answer, and grow rich:
       Our journalists, whose business is to fib
       And juggle truths and falsehoods to and fro:
       Our tradesmen, who must keep unspotted names
       And cheat the least like stealing that they can:
       Our all of them, the virtuous worthy men
       Who feed on the world's follies, vices, wants,
       And do their businesses of lies and shams . . .
     

   
              For Jane Stuart Brookfield
                        By Dick Whyte

       as blossoms
       fall,
       stained brown

       these dirty fields
       well soiled:

       the cruelty
       of metaphor

       more obvious
       in spring
   

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