Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Fall/Section018/Beulah Clark Parson Davis

Overview
Beulah Clark Parsons Davis was a Durham fortune teller and mother interviewed by Omar Darrow on June 5, 1939 as part of the Federal Writers' Project, for a piece titled Free Advice.

Early Life
Beulah Parsons Davis was born on October 31st, 1896, in Montgomery County, North Carolina. She was raised by her parents on a dewberry farm/turpentine forest. As a child, Davis assisted around the farm, spending three months a year attending school from five on. She enjoyed activities that bucked ‘convention’ like fishing and hunting. Her excitement chasing led her to cause a forest fire that she wouldn’t take responsibility for until eighteen years had passed.

Personal Life
She entered into a loveless marriage with her childhood bully, Daniel L. Davis, on May 18, 1918, after an unexplained incident of sexual harassment that left her feeling disgraced and optionless. After opening a general store together and having two children, a daughter (Bonza) and son (Jay), amidst numerous miscarriages, her husband’s infidelity, abuse, and rape of their daughter led Beulah to take the children and flee.

After the divorce, her abuse left her in no working shape, so she began offering unlicensed fortune-telling services. Eventually, her daughter became a waitress at a nearby cafe to further support the family.

Following the turbulence of the divorce, Beulah involved herself at church, fell in love with a married man but never cheated, and was eventually brought to court over her fortune-telling.

Death
On January 3rd, 1948, at the age of 51, Davis died of bronchogenic pneumonia in Durham, North Carolina.

Fortune Telling and Anti-Divination Sentiments of the Mid-Twentieth Century
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a turbulent period for fortune tellers, with state sentiments against fortune telling and arrests not uncommon. Despite the fact that divination stereotypes and pejoratives were mostly aimed at racial minorities, the bulk of those arrested for the act were white, spiritualist women because “unlike those groups who were racialized as premodern and superstitious ['Negro superstitions' and 'gypsies'], these spiritualists were supposed to be modern subjects, and their superstitious dabbling troubled courts and lawmakers.”

Davis, specifically, was arrested for her unlicensed fortune telling. The licensure process allowed profitable practices that the state deemed deceptive when verified to be a performance and sponsored by some patron, but in doing so, a practitioner was forced to renounce their beliefs. That said, soon after Davis's case, the law became even more stringent, outlawing any practice of fortune telling outside the church or school. The 1951 General Statute states:

As time progressed, the law became more niche, with less counties under its jurisdiction (66/100 by 1999) and less officials in the remaining counties unsure of its existence, with county attorneys wholly unaware and tax collectors giving permits to fortune tellers. Conversely, the law did not lose all power, with multiple business closures (fortune tellers and witch cafes, for instance) on its account. After years of pushback on this law and similar laws, from Blewett Lee's writings in the 1920s to the Ancient Arts Freedom Association's 1999 Asheville protest, the statute was officially repealed by Session Laws 2004-203, s. 21, enacted during 2004.

Davis's Role as a Woman From the Turn of the Century to the Great Depression
At the beginning of the twentieth century, women's roles were expanding from simply "wives, mothers, and homemakers" to political agents, members of the labor force, and beyond. Unfortunately, Davis existed between the period where women began to enter the labor force, and their joining en masse during World War II, so opportunities apart from her fortune telling would have been scarce. Also to her chagrin, women were often the first to be let go in male-dominated industries affected by the Great Depression and relegated to underpaid "women's work" in those that were less ruined.

Further, Davis was exceptional for the time as a divorcee, yet her resulting situation was similar to many other women, both never married and married to now homeless men. Women, who could traditionally fall back on men, either their husband or (if he failed) father or brother-in-law, found themselves “unattached” in large quantities during the Great Depression. Such women, like Davis, were “New Poor,” who were “white and nominally middle class, [but] lost jobs, savings, and often their homes.” Davis's less common standing as a divorcee also reflects the era's tone on the subject of love quite well: