I wouldn’t recommend the parents of a teenage daughter showing signs of wanderlust leave a copy of Barbara Starke’s Born in Captivity lying around the house. At age sixteen, Starke’s aunt gave her a copy of David Grayson’s The Friendly Road, an account of a walking tour made by an adult man in 1912’s America. “It was the image of Grayson walking down a wilful road into unknown territory conscious of the delightful prospect of not turning back at night, which suddenly filled my mind with the luminous possibilities of such an act.”
Reading Grayson’s book suggests to Starke that “Perhaps, after all, it was not absolutely necessary” to come home every night –“even if he had no money or other devices to keep him from harm.” A pretty risky proposition, even for a man. For an attractive young woman of eighteen, the age at which Starke finally managed to sneak out of the house and start the journey described in Born in Captivity, it seems certain to end badly.
But Barbara Starke had some special angels looking out for her. She traveled from Massachusetts to California and back to New York City, rarely paying her way, almost always by just walking along the side of the road and hoping some kind stranger would stop and give her a ride. She never actually hitchhiked: she mades that emphatically clear. If offered a ride, she would accept unless she felt uneasy about the would-be good Samaritan. If not, she kept walking. Somehow, in the hundreds of rides she accepted, only once or twice did she have to fight her way out of the car.
More than that, the men who offered her rides — and it was always men, even though she wore mens’ clothes and was usually scruffy enough that many assumed she was a man until she climbed in — would buy her a meal or two, or pay for a separate hotel room, or even hand her five or ten bucks to help out. There were some, of course, who said they believed that “if a girl dared to tramp the road alone she must be prepared to ‘come across.'” She usually managed to change their minds. She felt, in fact, that hers was the superior power to intimidate: “I could look straight at them, could say unexpected things coldly, so that they wondered what weapons I concealed that I should be unafraid.”
On the other hand — and reading this must have made her mother’s hair stand up, if she ever did read her daughter’s book — if Starke liked a man’s company, she wasn’t above sleeping with him. On an early leg, she felt attracted to a handsome and soft-spoken engineer and shared his cabin on a night boat to Albany. And felt not the least regret: “If the captain of this ship should come in now, and there should be a nasty scene, they could not make me feel shame, I feel so proud and clean for having stayed with you.”
Like many young people throughout history, a good part of Starke’s motivation was to reject her parent’s choices. “The net had caught my father, and respectability, the tradition of owning a home and sending one’s children to college, had kept him there.” The only result she could see from their keeping a house and raising a family was to be “cheated of any joy,” to be “shackled by them.”
The freedom of the road allowed her not just to see the country but to sample from a smorgasbord of relationship possibilities. She liked and respected the engineer on the night boat, but she knew she didn’t want to marry him. A safecracker befriends her in Denver and she toys with joining him on a job, but decides a jail cell was the one thing worse than domestic misery. In Santa Barbara, a guy named Joe pulls alongside and serenades her. She joins him and they spend a week or so together. “I began to divine that one could get fond enough of another person to want him about a great deal.” Yet she walks on without regrets. “That priceless feeling of affection as we said good-bye on the Merced road in the early morning was not merely because we had given each other such joy, but because we were not even pretending to try to make it last longer.”
Born in Captivity was called Touch and Go in its English edition, but neither title does the book justice. The roads Starke traveled weren’t always friendly, but they were always free, not only in terms of economics but in terms of her own spirit. Yet just as she recognized in saying goodbye to Joe on the Merced road, she could not pretend to make her months of vagabondage run on indefinitely. Unlike with Joe, however, a regret remains. “How am I going to reach the ground and the sky again?” she wonders at the end as she sits in an office typing pool.
The novelist Henry Williamson raved about the book to his friend T. E. Lawrence. “Have you read Touch and Go by Barbara Starke? Cape did it. That girl can write; and seems the best of the new straight-ahead younger generation — passing the old hulks of 1914-18 and the concrete-ribbed waterlogs of the war-child generation.”
Barbara Starke was the pseudonym of Helen L. Card. As Starke, Card published one novel, Second Sister, in England in 1933. The only remaining copies of this are in the U.K. registry libraries. Although she received a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writer’s conference in 1937, her work soon became confined to articles and catalogues of Western art, particularly by Frederic Remington. She ran the Latendorf Bookshop on Madison Avenue for years and never married.