Sex & The Book / Love for sale between prostitution and luxury brothels in Nell Kimball's driven verses

"If I look back at my life (and it's the only way I can look at it now) I don't find anything so different from how most people would like yours". Everything we know about Nell Kimball, a prostitute and then brothel keeper who lived in America between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is told in her autobiography, published under the title of Memories of an American maîtresse, in 1967. Kimball wrote her memoirs intermittently between 1918 and 1932, after retiring from the business following the closure of the Storyville neighborhood in New Orleans in 1917, where prostitution houses were recognized. legally. In 1932 she delivered the manuscript to writer Stephen Longstreet, hoping he could help her publish it. Longstreet, despite the repetition and typos, was incredibly surprised by Kimball's storytelling prowess and natural talent. So he tried to propose it to various publishers, who however refused to publish a text with such scandalous content and language. Kimball died in 1934 and, sadly, her desire to have her memoirs published was not realized until thirty-three years later.

My client began kissing me on the neck and cheek, buried his head between my breasts, and then brought a hand to my fly. Suddenly I realized that I was working. My client grunted. “Damn, if you weigh, my girl. Shall we go upstairs? ». […] I went up all leaning on my client, who surrounded me with his arms. I was given the second room on the left. From the other rooms I heard laughter, and a little spanking. […] For a moment I thought: Hey, Nelly, this is all but a goddamn dream. You think you are really in this soft bed, all scented in the bathroom, and it is not true that this silly-looking plump guy is coming over you, with his cock in his hand, as if he were bringing you a cake. But it wasn't a dream at all.

Nell grew up with a rough and abusive father who kept getting his exhausted mother pregnant, and an aunt whose whole wisdom was encapsulated in the phrase she heard herself repeated thousands of times from a very young age: "Every girl sits on her luck, and she doesn't know it". Escaped from home as a teenager, she was initiated into prostitution in a high-class brothel in Saint Louis, Missouri, where she learned everything there was to learn about the trade. After a couple of years as a retainer, she opened a luxury brothel herself, first in San Francisco and then in New Orleans. Although her career had begun, as it did for most girls in her condition, out of hunger and for money and ended up affecting their entire existence, Nell can say - summing up - that she never had any regrets, much less no remorse.

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The passage reported tells the first time of Kimball as a prostitute, just a young girl, in the extravagant Biedermeier brothel. Here a not particularly attractive man chooses her while chatting with her, under the eyes of the landlady, in the large hall on the ground floor. When he takes her to the room that has been assigned to them, he orders her to undress, leaving however on her stockings and shoes for which she evidently has a certain fetish. The girl obeys and in the meantime nothing of what is happening to her seems true. The man climbs on top of her and penetrates her and then Nelly realizes that after all he is no different from all the other times she had had sex with her first boyfriend, Charlie, with whom she had lost her virginity. She finds it easy to get into the game and get lost in it, to the point that - along with the client - she too manages to have an orgasm.

Memories of an American maîtresse is a sincere, decisive book that returns the authentic portrait of an era and a place through the gaze of a woman gifted with great wit and intelligence, willing to do anything to affirm the freedom to be herself and not to be judged from no one. A right that, even today, is worth fighting for.

by Giuliana Altamura

Here you can read the previous appointment with the Sex & The Book column / Waiting and eroticism in lesbian love told by Renée Vivien