She
possessed a lyrically evocative name few would believe, a life few would envy.
Her name was Belle Christmas.
Nearly a century after figuring in
a tale Charles Dickens surely would have fancied, how she came by her festive-sounding
handle can only be a matter of speculation. Perhaps Belle’s birthday fell on December
25. Maybe her parents simply liked the two words. Another possibility is that
she was a damsel of the demimonde and took it as her professional name.
No
matter how she came to be called Belle Christmas, she had a reputation as a local
character long before someone dreamed up the “Keep Austin Weird” bumper sticker.
In the early 1900s, decades before construction of the dam that created Lady
Bird Lake (originally Town Lake), the area of the Capital City between West
First Street and the Colorado River was a squalid neighborhood of shacks on the
edge of the red light district, which began at Second Street.
As a young
newspaper man, Edmunds Travis covered this rough side of Austin,
as well as other goings on, often riding to the scene of a shooting or stabbing
on the back of a policeman’s horse. Eventually becoming a newspaper editor and
still later a highly influential lobbyist, Travis told me the story of Belle Christmas
in 1970. He died a year later, 81 years old.
Puffing
on his pipe, he began the story with the necessary background. Many of those who
lived in the shanties along the river made a meager living as commercial fishermen.
Conservation laws prohibiting the taking of freshwater game fish for sale had
not yet been passed and even if it had been against the law, the fisherman would
have got around it somehow. They could have cared less and as they could land
bass and catfish.
While some of them may have been hard-working family
men, the majority of this class, according to Travis, “either drank or ate cocaine
leaves…they were cocaine fiends.” They would sell their catch to Austin
restaurants or markets only to use most of the proceeds to support their drug
habit. When the last of their drug supply wore off, they went back to work.
One of those “louts,” as Travis called them had a girlfriend – Belle Christmas.
While the couple apparently got along well enough when he was sober, one day he
got high, turned mean and practically beat her to death. The police arrested him
and hauled him off as Belle sobbed.
Despite the injuries he had inflicted
on her, Belle soon came to see him at the city jail, which occupied the basement
of city hall. Whether she had intended to get her boyfriend out of the clink is
not known, but the opportunity presented itself when the officer who let her in
forgot to lock the door. Belle sprang her lover and they hurried back to their
riverbank abode.
But Austin
was a small town. It did not take the authorities long to locate the escaped fish
monger. And this time, they arrested Belle for her role in his getaway.
Back
then, the mayor also presided over recorder’s court, the equivalent of today’s
municipal court – a legal entity with jurisdiction only over misdemeanor cases.
The mayor was Alexander Penn Wooldridge, who served from 1909 to 1919.
A compassionate man who believed in the importance of education and public parks,
Wooldridge found it touching that Belle would free the very man who roughed her
up so badly. At the same time, he viewed their cohabitation as morally reprehensible.
In relating this story, Travis did not give the season of its occurrence. But
it must have been around the holiday for which Belle had been named, a time of
year when many people get the urge to make things better for the less fortunate.
Wooldridge had no immunity from such feelings. Summoning the couple to
his office, the mayor lectured the man not only for having hurt Belle, but for
doing her wrong. In fact, Wooldridge said, he “ought to be ashamed for dragging
Belle into the gutter.” To make it right, the mayor continued, the man needed
to marry Belle.
“I don’t think so,” the fisherman said defiantly.
“Well,” Wooldridge countered, “I’ll keep you in jail until you do.”
Mentally
weighing the invisible shackles of marriage against actual confinement behind
bars, the man caved in. Being as how the mayor thought it proper, he would gladly
take Belle’s hand in marriage. If a look of doubt momentarily clouded Belle’s
bruised face, the mayor did not pick up on it. Forgoing the formalities of a license,
Wooldridge pronounced them man and wife right there and cheerfully bade them good
luck and many years of marital bliss. A
week later, a sober but noticeably agitated Mr. Belle Christmas showed up at city
hall and demanded an audience with the mayor.
“You got me in trouble and
now you’ve got to get me out of it,” he said. “Belle’s husband is really raising
hell about this marriage.”
According to Travis, the embarrassed mayor
ordered the couple to separate and seek a divorce. Apparently he opted to take
no judicial notice of Belle Christmas’ accidental decent into bigamy.
What
became of Belle after that has not been determined, but Mayor Wooldridge probably
proceeded somewhat more cautiously the next time he got the urge to do a little
social engineering.
© Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" December
22 , 2008 column
Related Topics: Texas
Marriages |
People | Christmas
in Texas |
More on
Texas | TE
Online Magazine | Features | Columns
| |
