Not at Columbia: Postcards to Cora Crane            15

create an atmosphere of warmth, intimacy, and affectionate dis¬
cipline in a situation that easily could have seen sordid, and evi¬
dently she succeeded. Some of the new cards show that this was
true even towards the end: "Harry," probably a client, sending
regards on a trip; "Helen," likely a .Madam, keeping in touch;
Edna, one of her girls, saying she is bringing a "friend." But Cora
was running a house, not a home. A\'hen girls went ofl^ on brief
excursions with their gentlemen thev were required to sign out,
and on longer trips they had to report back their whereabouts, the
behavior of their escorts, and their experiences—all in the strictest
boarding school tradition. These regulations, however, had a com¬
mercial motivation: a girl «"ho did not come through with a per¬
centage of her take was put out of The Court. Still, there was
affection in Cora's operation. The t«'o Columbia postcard albums
speak of careful preservation and display, likely because they were
an important source of diversion in the restricted confines of The
Court.

They must have diverted the girls, of course. They came to
Cora mostly from the rural hinterlands of south Georgia, eastern
Alabama, and the Florida panhandle—attractive girls, but usually
ill-educated and sometimes barely able to read or write. For many
of them, a few commercial trips with a man who wanted the
freedom of their company away from home was as much as they
would see of the world. Picture postcards like these could at least
show them that there was a big world outside the little one in
which they were forced to spend their lives.

That almost certainly was their great significance for Cora too.

she built at Pablo Beach, eighteen miles from Jacksonville, on land she acquired
in 1904. While it is obvious that whoever inserted these cards into the Postcard
Collection must have had no idea of their importance, it is just as obvious that
someone else did: one card that originally had to have been in the series found
its way into the Stephen Crane collection in the Arents Librarv at Svracusc Uni¬
versity. It is from "Uncle Edward" and is postmarked New York, lo February
1910. Philip S. May, a Jacksonville attorney, identified for Aliss Gilkes the hand¬
writing on this card of Uncle Edward, in 1954. The Arents Collection card is
transcribed in Cora Crane, p. 355.