A Tale of Two Annies
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Twelve-year-old Annie is at the center of the book I’m working on. I didn’t play around with names before deciding to call her Annie. It felt natural. It fitted her. A solid, classic name, neither old-fashioned nor modern. I’ve met several Anne, but the only Annie in my circle of friends is a dog, an adorable Airedale. So where did the name come from?
One of the book protagonists says this about my fictional girl after hearing of her tribulations:
“She’s more Annie get your gun than little orphan.”
As is often the case when writing fiction, the things that find their way onto the page come from a mysterious place, part subconscious, part accumulated data flea market (it sounds better than data dump). The line of dialogue above is like that. It popped into my head suddenly. Could I have been channeling these two Annies when I imagined mine?
It made me take a deeper look at the two girls.
Annie #1 – Annie Oakley
Sharpshooter extraordinaire, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Showsymbolically adopted by Sitting Bull who called her Little Sure Shot (she was all of five foot tall).
Funny fact: she married the guy she bested in a shooting contest.
Annie was born poor. By age eight, she was a hunter skilled enough to help feed her family. At ten, she was “bound out” to a family, meaning she had to work for food and shelter, and was supposed to get an education. She got very little of that and plenty of abuse. The year was 1870. In the papers she wrote for the autobiography she didn’t have the time to complete, she calls her abusers “the wolves.” She endured two years of misery then ran away.
By fifteen, she was a celebrity, winning shooting matches. Then came the Buffalo Bill show and international tours. She performed for Queen Victoria, among other notables. Little Sure Shot was a star. As is often the case, her life is a lot more interesting, and complex, than the movies and musicals she inspired. The most famous being Annie Get Your Gun (Irving Berlin, 1946). You’ll find good biographical summaries on PBS.org and on the National Women’s History Museum website.
Annie #2 – Little Orphan
Before doing a bit of research for this newsletter I knew the old comic strip character and John Huston’s film of 1982. You know the one: the spunky redhead that runs circles around Albert Finney’s Daddy Warbucks. But where did the cartoon come from? It led me down a quirky rabbit hole …
At the beginning was a poem: The Elf Child (1885) by James Whitcomb Riley. He changed the title to Little Orphant Allie. Yes, Allie! It was mistakenly typeset as Little Orphant Annie, and there you have it. Think about that next time you curse autocorrect. You’ll find the short poem on poets.org.
The story starts like Annie Oakley’s, with the orphan girl being bound to earn her keep. In stanza two, it turns into a cautionary tale for disobedient children with goblins creating mayhem. The scary tales are told by Annie. The character was inspired by a real girl, Mary Alice "Allie" Smith. Allie was luckier than Annie Oakley, she was considered a member of the family that took her in.
The poem was hugely popular and inspired the Little Orphan Annie and Raggedy Ann dolls, a silent film, and a story book.
Then in 1924, came the comic strip with an adult turn and political commentary. The strip used the title of the poem, but not its theme.
Here’s what Harold Gray, the cartoonist, said about the inspiration for the character, a kid he met in the streets of Chicago:
“I talked to this little kid and liked her right away. She had common sense, knew how to take care of herself. She had to. Her name was Annie. At the time some 40 strips were using boys as the main characters; only three were using girls. I chose Annie for mine, and made her an orphan, so she'd have no family, no tangling alliances, but freedom to go where she pleased.”
A radio show and film adaptations followed in the 1930s, and a Broadway musical in 1977. Then more films and more adaptations, still going strong. The interest in Annie-the-ragamuffin is as persistent as she is.
What conclusions to draw from all this? That popular culture works in mysterious ways, that being a sponge absorbing impressions is useful when you intend to write stories. Is my Annie a direct descendant of these two? She’s headstrong, resilient, and resourceful like they are. But so is Annie Wilkes—from Misery— and I definitely did not have her in the back of my mind when I pictured my girl.
I saw her standing in a grocery store with a machete instead of a gun, in a small country town instead of a big city’s mean streets. Southern noir with a touch of True Grit.
Here’s how the story begins:
The bell above the front door of Ray’s Basket dinged and Deputy Sheriff Maeve “Mae” Rollins’s cheerful “Hi, y’all” fizzled on the exhale. The last time she’d seen that much artillery on display, she was boring holes in a piece of cardboard at the firing range with her fellow deputies. That was a lot of fun. This was a lot of trouble.
With what I said above, you’ve guessed who the troublemaker is.