Broadway Butterfly

by Sara DiVello

No matter how drunk she got or how late she came in, Miss Dottie never left clothes on the floor. If you’d been born poor, you were cursed to be neat, Miss Dottie said.

The necessity to arrive earlier, stay later, and work twice as hard (and get paid half as much), simply for the privilege to be allowed to be there, trailed her like a constant shadow.

Facts were facts. But the storyteller steered the narrative and the narrative steered public perception. It was an invisible power.

Women mostly committed homicide out of sheer desperation to protect themselves and their children. Men, on the other hand, were more apt to murder for lust, rage, revenge, greed . . . or simply because they could.

Maybe next time a woman says she’s worried she’s in danger, someone in her life will listen. You know, before it happens,”

He’d heard she’d gotten married to another reporter last summer, but she’d bucked convention and kept her name . . . and her job.

James had warned her: “Say the least you can. Police and us don’t mix. They don’t wanna hear what you know. They wanna hear what they wanna hear.”

She hurried down the stairs—faster than waiting for the elevator—grateful it was 1923. It had been only five years since public buildings were required to have female-access restrooms. Before then, she might not have had the option.

It was a space men had designed because they imagined the fairer sex needed to lounge and powder their noses, though Julia had yet to see any woman lounging or powdering. This was, after all, the criminal courts.

And so, despite jockeying, the day had ended much as it had begun for the Dot King case: with the public and the press hating Guimares, loathing Olcott, demanding Marshall step forward, accusing Pecora of corruption, and screaming that there were two systems of justice in New York City.

Sunday was always her day off (unless Miss Dottie needed her), and church the only time she could sit back and just be and count on not seein’ white folk. Even when they was nice, white folk still felt like work.

Women are the moral compass of society. We exert our good influences on our marriages, our children, the circles in which we move, and the communities in which we exist. Without us, the moral structure of society would disintegrate, and with that, society itself. So we forgive, even when our hearts are broken. We hold our heads up and march on when we feel as though we might die—because we’re women and we’re wives. It’s the bravest and best thing we can do—and our worlds, and the world at large, are far better for it.”

Dot King’s former romance with Nucky Johnson hadn’t led to any further discoveries, even though it was well known by those who needed to know that Arnold Rothstein and Nucky ran booze together. It made for nice expansion for Nucky, who’d practically leveraged bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution into Jersey shore tourist attractions.

How many times had she diminished herself to make Jack feel big? Not just physically, hunching her way through life, but in her social efforts?

That Ella Bradford had it in her to risk everything—her own safety—to try to get justice for a white woman displayed a sort of courage, a depth of loyalty, Julia had never seen before in anyone.

While she fought to be seen in every room as a reporter, she could flip the forces that usually worked against her to work for her while she was undercover: if a woman was in the DOJ, surely she must be a maid.

She’d come north for a better chance, and a lot of things might be better up here than back home, but some things were the same. If you were poor, Negro, or a scandalous white lady, you’d get treated as less.