She Ain’t No Honky-Tonk Woman-With Hank William, Senior In Mind

 

 

 

 

 

By Lester Lannon

Helen Browning never drew a blessed break in her life, never once as far as anybody could tell. Raised poor, raised poor in the benighted hills of Appalachia down in Eastern Kentucky. Which meant really poor, really poor and invisible before Michael Harrington in the Other America put it in the spotlight in next decade so it did not help her one little bit in 1953, raised by a single mother who was raising seven children on her own, five girls, two boys the boys the youngest and so of no help by going to the coalmines since they would not come of age to work the coal bins picking coal for several years. The single mother part, the Agnes Browning part, was due to Bill Browning, a good provider when he was alive and prolific in the child-getting way, who had died of “black lung” in the days before the United Mine Workers got some relief from the bosses’ black lung fund so not only did she not get the benefit of Bill’s pay but got no black lung relief either. Damn.        

That tells part of the story of why Helen Browning, the eldest child of Bill and Agnes Browning never drew a blessed break. Helen was expected, as the eldest child, to take her unfair share of the burden of raising the younger six Browning children. So at age fourteen she had dropped out of school at her mother’s insistence although her teachers over at Ridge Consolidated School begged Agnes to let Helen stay in school and perhaps get a scholarship to the University of Kentucky when she graduated for she was the brightest student in class. No soap. When it came time for her to make her own way at eighteen, at her coming of age time, she was forsaken of any worthy saleable skills.

It was never clear to her few friends and many neighbors why she had had a falling out with her mother and at that tender age head out on her own. It might have been tiredness of raising the “brats” as she called the younger ones, or maybe she wanted to get the dust of Ridge off her shoes she would not be the first especially after World War II sent many boys out of the hills and hollows in the European and Pacific theaters and Podunk didn’t seem big enough after that. Girls left too starting during the war to the textile mills in North Carolina to make uniforms, make their own wages and meet some guys who hands and fingers were not covered eternally with coal dust and white lightning ne’er-do-well homebrew. Maybe it was to just see the bright lights of the city. But Helen knew better, knew very much better the shame of what she went through before she forced herself to leave.

Agnes had started, a not uncommon thing down in the hollows, maybe elsewhere too with no longer bereaved widows, a couple of years after Bill’s death in taking up with a coalminer, Bob Bates. Naturally it had to be a coalminer since if you were going to take up with anybody it was bound to be a coalminer with steady wages and not the riff-raff what did somebody call them, the “white trash” that were sitting on their front porches doing nothing except letting their places further decay, their kids run half-naked over the lot, the animals go hither and yon, and their godforsaken wreaks of automobiles sit out back and rust away to perdition. Bob was always around when he wasn’t working and always a little drunk. One night when he and Agnes had had a fight over him giving her some grocery money once in a while since she was feeding him and she refused him her bed he had sneaked up to Helen’s chaste bed and took her maidenhead from her. Helen had resisted as best she could, tried to scream but Bob put his claw of a hand over her mouth to stifle any sound. In any case a slender young woman, actually on the little too thin side was no match for a burly coalminer.

Here’s where the crap came down, where too close inbreeding probably played a part, who knows. Agnes knew what Bob had done to her girl, knew because Helen told her a couple of days later after she had realized what had happened to her, what Bill had taken away from her girlhood. Helen might as well have saved her breathe since even she had heard in that small cabin they called home Agnes moaning and screaming when Bob and she were in her room. Agnes defended Bill, said he was drunk and said this as well, “there were worse men around than Bill to take advantage of her” so she should be grateful that a real man did the deed. That it had to happen sometime and that was that. And so Helen left, left for good.        

But see in those days, 1953, marriage and virginity were tied together in some unbreakable bond, maybe not in the big cities, although in middle class and working class neighborhoods that was truer especially in ethnic Catholic neighborhoods, but certainly in Bible-Belt Appalachia where God was a very real and vengeful presence among the hard-shell Baptists who influence Helen came under. And Helen despite her violation by a man took that as a sign that she had sinned against her God. That development of her psyche in that way touched her deeply as she made her way in a tough world. Made her morose at times but also with feelings that she was unworthy of love, any love.

After she left Ridge she started serving them off the arm at Lucy’s Café in Prestonsburg mainly to get a stake, mainly to get enough money to head to Louisville to see if she could do better. And she worked hard, kept to herself pretty much with that deep wound still haunting her. She avoided men not so much because of what had happened to her back in Ridge but because she was afraid if she got intimate with a man, and a few as usual who came into the café gave her the once over and the “come on” for she was if not beautiful certainly attractive, looked very shapely in her tight uniform that Lucy took her to wear in order to grab more tips and so she suffered her pains alone.     

Eventually she did get to Louisville, got a room in a rooming house close to where she would wind up working after a few jobs she tried didn’t pan out because cursed waitressing was all she knew, Joe’s Bar& Grille, working as a barmaid since at that time there was no handy work at any of the restaurants she applied too. Louisville was probably a bad mistake for Helen to do from the get-go because in those days not only were there grifters, drifters and midnight sifters around during Derby time but they stayed all year round, and stayed hanging around making their plans at Joe’s Bar as well. That is where she met smooth Frankie Logan, a conman since he was a kid although she didn’t know that fact until it was too late. Prestonsburg had not prepared her at all for the swoop of a guy like Frankie who took dead aim at her. Gave her little presents, gave her big promises too and not much else. But she was at a time in her life when she wanted a man and Frankie would not be all that upset when he found out she was not a virgin since he had mentioned that he didn’t like the idea of breaking in a virgin when he thought she was one. And so she took the plunge and he took his pleasure (and she had to admit if only to herself that Frankie was a man who could give that pleasure, knew how to hit a woman’s buttons while getting his own.  

For a while things were fine, they moved in together in a small flat further away from town, she worked the bar, got a little more friendly with the customers once Frankie told her that a little smile and a “come on” which would go nowhere would bring larger tips for her and more booze making Joe happy. Frankie, well, Frankie did what Frankie had always done, being with a woman or without, the best he could. And the best he could wound up a few months after they had settled in being a small time drug dealer, a dealer of heroin mostly. Dealing “junk” as an agent of King Fanning from Chi town whose claws extended all the way to the South. Now being a small time drug dealer in the square 1950s was not a small thing since “dope and dopesters” were fairly rare and the cops were probing for whatever they could sniff out to pad their arrest records. But Frankie probably would have been below the radar under normal circumstances except for one fact-he started testing the merchandise, started developing a little habit although for a while he could sell enough on the street to keep his head above water.

When a guy is getting his high, all the rest of the world seems square if they are also not in that “high” world. Frankie finally badgered Helen into taking a little “something” to take the edge off. Helen with her baggage bag full of self-hate and depression liked the high, liked feeling better but after a while she too developed that little habit that all the junkies grab onto with both hands once they change worlds.

Then all the small luck Frankie had ran out, ran out fast once he had to feed not only his habit but hers as well. He took more risks, sold to more unsavory and breakable characters. Worse Helen’s habit got bigger than Frankie’s and so he had to score more often to keep her from the screaming fits when she had her wanting habits on. She had been able to keep her job for a while but then it became too much for her and Joe, who knew exactly what had happened to her since more than one customer had done a jerk or too with the snowman, had to let her go. The long and short of it was that Frankie, know all angles and angels Frankie tried to make one score too many with a wrong gee. Loose Lennie, the guy Frankie was trying to score from one night in desperation, when Helen was ready to take the fall, ready to see Christ they called it, was nothing but a snitch trying to get out from under his own cop troubles.             

And so Frankie went away for a three to five, maybe would do two, if he got sober. But that left Helen nowhere, nowhere to feed her own habit. After Frankie’s arrest she went out one night to try to score off of Mouse, a go-to guy if you were hard up because his stuff didn’t last long enough to make it worthwhile to put that damn needle in your arm. Mouse besides being a sleaze also did not do things on credit (actually a smart move in that society) and so that night Helen found herself “saved’’ in Mouse’s bed. That was her first “trick” if you thought about it that way and she did think that way later when such things still mattered.

To avoid the screaming fits the next time Mouse “suggested” she go to a party with him and “earn her keep.” And she earned her keep that night taking on a whole party of high-rolling gamblers during breaks once Mouse promised her a couple of weeks’ worth of stuff.  Sullen, figuring she was nothing but a whore’s daughter anyway she grabbed for the chance. Kind of thrilled her in a kinky way since then she still could have an occasional orgasm that was not faked. That was really the high point of her career as any man’s whore (her term) because the more she “worked” the more junk she purchased the less she was able to get up the energy to work. She would descend down to working in a sleaze bar off of Beale Street when Mouse “sold” her to Big Lemon in Memphis.

Big Lemon had her to doing street tricks for a fix. Then one day nobody saw her, saw her on her corner, and a week later they found her in Mississippi mud. Apparently she either fell into the river of let herself fall and be done with it.  Just another honky-tonk woman gone down was the way they played it up for the minute they played it up and then moved on to the next piece of hard-ass news. Yeah, Helen Browning never drew a blessed break in this wicked old world. How could she.