The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

if not a few years. June had not yet had that experience, but she had heard many talk of it.

There were the eleven radicals living in a single tax colony in Delaware who had come into conflict with one of the old Delaware Blue Laws which read “Thou shalt indulge in no worldly amusement on the Sabbath.”

A number of anarchists, as well as socialists and single taxers were living in the colony at the time. At a meeting of the socialist local a feud was begun between the anarchists and the socialists because the latter refused to allow one of the most insistent of the former to hold the floor. He had been in the habit of attending every meeting and pestering the members of the local with long speeches until they felt that they could no longer endure it. In a less civilized community, they would have thrown him out bodily or given him a thrashing on his way to the meeting-room to teach him better manners. A long argument was held as to whether they should use force to rid themselves of the nuisance. Deciding that it would savor of anarchy, they asked the help of the police and had their brother radical (although they did not consider him as such) arrested for disturbing the peace. For the sake of principle he refused to pay the fine imposed upon him and served three days in jail.

The result was a well planned revenge. With the aid of a lawyer (not an anarchist, one would suppose) he unearthed the aforementioned blue law and insisted that the baseball nine and tennis players of the colony, most of whom were members of the socialist local, be arrested for playing on Sunday.

They were fined thirteen dollars and fifty cents each and not to be outdone by the anarchist in the way of principle, they also declared themselves in favor of jail. In a spirit of retaliation, and merely to keep up the good work, they in turn threatened the Wilmington Golf Club which was made up of prosperous businessmen and even drove them from the links. For a while there was no more outdoor amusement on the Sabbath.

Because one of the eleven radicals arrested was the son of the man who had started the colony, another a well-known author who had made a fortune from his socialistic novels, the case received a good deal of attention in the newspapers. Somehow or other the anarchist who started the comedy was suppressed. Perhaps the socialists forgot their beliefs and became anarchists for a while. At any rate, all that the papers knew of the case was that the Wilmington authorities had swooped suddenly down upon the eleven members of the colony and on the most ridiculous pretext had arrested them. To all appearances, it was a case of plain persecution and the socialists made much of it. The author derived all the benefit possible from the publicity and ten years later when the case was forgotten by all but those who had played a part in it, he revived it in a lengthy work dealing mainly with his own persecutions. And somehow the truth never leaked out, perhaps because the eleven who were persecuted forgot what the truth was.

Practically all the cases of short sentences that June knew of had an element of humor in them. It is unfortunate, but true, that the more seriously devoted to a cause the victims were, the less comic the situation looked to them.

June had heard of another case, that of a young radical who was arrested for playing marbles on the Mall of Boston Common. The small boys who had enticed him into the game were chased, but he, due to the fact that he came from a good family and should have known better, was arraigned in court. Unfortunately he took this opportunity⁠—as many radicals do⁠—to make a speech on freedom in general but was suppressed in the middle of the first paragraph and sent to jail for a day.

And then Billy Burton came along with her experience. She sauntered into the basement café where June was sitting with Ivan who had a night off and joining them, ordered a tall mint julep. She was looking as bedraggled as usual and her brightly rouged lips only served to accentuate the pallor of her sharp-featured little face.

“What in the world have you been doing to yourself?” Ivan asked her. “You look like the devil. You look as though you were full of dope.” It was usual with Ivan to be almost tactlessly frank with his friends.

“Just trying to be decadent, that’s all,” June told her. “There’s a sort of wave of it going through the crowd. If you hear anybody murmuring about cats that crouch on pianos and howl with hoarse sweet voices like women, don’t be alarmed. They’re only quoting Baudelaire. But where in the world have you been for the last month that you don’t know the local gossip? You’re usually the purveyor of it.”

“If you read the papers instead of Les Fleurs du mal you’d know where she’s been,” Ivan reproved his companion. “Miss Billy Barton has turned suffragette and has been in jail for the last thirty days in Washington. What’s got into you Billy?”

“I’m not going in for causes, don’t worry. I got hard up, that’s all. Ejected from my studio, pay for drawings delayed, and I was sick of being broke. I met one of the suffragists who was on her way down to Washington to go to jail and went along, That’s all.”

“You’re just trying to make a good story of it,” Ivan scoffed. “That wasn’t the reason you went. Are you really going in for suffrage?”

“The truth,” Billy insisted, finishing her mint julep and ordering a cocktail. “But do you know, now that I’ve been in jail and with those suffragists for a month, I’m really enthusiastic about it. They’ve created such a stir down in Washington