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Bedside Book of Badgirls: Outlaw Women of the Midwest.
Nineteen-year-old Jennie Freeman stared pensively out the partially opened window of the tenement building where she lived in Chicago, Illinois. A cold, gentle breeze blew across the bed she was lying on and she pulled the dingy blankets that were draped across her legs around her waist. Jennie was a petite, be-speckled girl with mousey-brown hair and green eyes. She was a fierce reader, as proof by the many books stacked around the bed. A stern-faced doctor stood over her fiddling with a stethoscope. When he finally placed one end of the stethoscope on Jennie’s chest she turned her attention from the busyness on the street outside the window to him. After the doctor listened to his patient’s heartbeat he scratched his head, perplexed. He eyed the wheelchair next to the bed and sighed a heavy sigh. Jennie’s mother, Fannie entered the room from the kitchen carrying a tray of food. She was a large woman of dark complexion who wore diamond eardrops and a large marquise ring. She looked worried and carefully studied the doctor’s face, waiting for a verdict.
The doctor lifted the covers off Jennie’s legs and studied her feet. He removed a straight pin from his medical bag and touched the pin to Jennie’s foot and calves. No matter what he did he could not get her limbs to even twitch. After a few moments he stopped the examination, pulled the blanket back over Jennie’s legs, and began packing his medical instruments into his bag. Fannie sat the tray she was carrying on a nightstand next to the bed and took her daughter’s hand in hers. The doctor confirmed what the troubled mother had suspected – Jennie was paralyzed. As the doctor put his coat on and exited the cramp, poorly-lit home, Jennie was crying and Fannie was comforting her.
Jennie has incurred her injury when she got caught between two cable cars. The intricate system of street railways in downtown Chicago had malfunctioned on January 9, 1893, and the cars collided. Jennie was found on the ground writhing in pain, near the accident. After a short stay in the hospital to treat her cracked ribs, bruises, and cuts, she was released into the care of her mother. Two days later she claimed she couldn’t move her legs from the thighs down. A railway company physician verified the report. Believing it would be cheaper to settle than it would be to go to court the company paid Jennie five hundred dollars.
By October 5, 1893, Jennie Freeman’s paralysis had passed. According to the July 5, 1903, edition of the San Antonio, Texas, newspaper the San Antonio Sunday Light, Jennie was injured while riding the Manhattan Elevated Railroad in New York. The teenager told authorities she was an actress on her way to an audition when she fell against the door of a Second Avenue train. She told them the car swung too close to the corner she was standing on at Twenty-Third Street. “I lost my balance and hit it hard,” she reported. “The car was going too fast too,” she added. Her mother, Fannie Freeman, was on hand to back up the story. Jennie was awarded one hundred dollars from the rail line for the injuries she claimed to have sustained and Fannie was given fifty dollars for suffering. “Seeing my daughter go through that was horrible,” she told the police who responded to the scene of the accident.
On April 20, 1894, the Freemans were in Boston, Massachusetts, traveling aboard the West End Street Railway Company car. This time Jennie claimed to have slipped on a banana peel lying in the aisle of the car. She told law enforcement who responded to her emergency call that she couldn’t move from the waist down. A doctor for the railway examined her and found her in an apparent paralysis condition. As a result of the doctor’s report the West End Railway Company paid her three-hundred and twenty-five dollars.
To learn more about the Freemans and other grifters and nefarious women read the
Bedside Book of Badgirls: Outlaw Women of the Old West.
