basics
[olivia cooke, f, she/her] ever heard about [jacqueline "whiskey" daniels]? Out here on the road, they have a reputation of being [+courageous, +resourceful] but also [-standoffish, -untrustworthy], no wonder they’re called [the runaway]. According to local legend, they’re [nineteen] and when they pull up to camp not a soul can mistake the sound of [please please please let me get what i want by the smiths] following them. Some say they carry [a hand-me-down walkman, a tattered journal, and a rusty locket] and have been traveling with [the militants].
tldr biography (tw: child abuse)
on the road, whiskey is known as just whiskey. before that, she was jacqueline lucy daniels, named after her late father jack daniels and nicknamed “whiskey” after him as well. despite never having met her father due to his untimely death in vietnam, he’s the only man whiskey has truly ever loved. her mother, annie, married twice after jack. once to warren johnson, who gifted her with a second baby girl named montana, and then again to dale smith after warren passed in a mining accident.
annie’s will to live was dependent on whether or not she had a man, so despite dale being the bottom of the barrel when it came to husbands—he was better than nothing. dale started abusing jackie when she was only ten years old. afraid of the consequences, jackie took every violation of her body in silence. she never told a soul...until she realized that her sister was being abused too. when she and montana came clean to their mama, she immediately left dale. but he cried and hurt himself and begged for her back until eventually, she gave in. and then things were okay for a bit...and then they’d get bad again. the cycle was never ending and annie did nothing to stop it. on the contrary, she blamed her girls for triggering dale to do what he did.
montana ran away first when she was just fourteen. jackie followed suit shortly after at age seventeen. at first, she ran away with the intention of finding her sister...but when she realized how impossible that would be, her goal became to get as far away from home as possible. it was at this point that she became whiskey. she did unthinkable things to survive: sex for money, stealing, breaking and entering. you name it, she’s done it. the rules don’t really matter when you’re living on the outskirts of society, so whiskey doesn’t really care to abide by them. her future is uncertain...all she knows is that she’ll never go back to south carolina. the rest is up to god.
full biography
jacqueline lucy daniels didn’t cry when she broke through her mama’s belly. everyone who had been in the room that day said she looked like a plum when the doctors finally pulled her out—a result of her umbilical cord being wrapped so tightly around her neck that it nearly killed her. in retrospect, jackie wondered if this was her body’s way of warning her or trying to spare her of what was to come.
annie lee daniels brought her first daughter home without her husband at her side. he was in vietnam, fighting for his country like all the good men were back then. she’d prayed and prayed and prayed that whiskey (or jack daniels, if we’re talking legal names) would be home by october of ‘66...that by some miracle he’d be sent back in time to hear jackie’s eventual first cry. but no. so annie sent him letters and tried to fill him in on his little girl’s life as best she could, but the postman never brought her a response. it wasn’t long after jackie’s birth that her mama got the telegram. jack wouldn’t be coming home.
after losing the love of her life in another pointless war, annie was devastated and utterly lost. how was she supposed to raise a baby by herself? bitter and angry at the world, she helplessly packed up the house she shared with her now dead husband and moved back to greenville, south carolina, to the same house she’d been born and raised in. jackie’s grandma, aunts and uncles felt as much like her parents as her mother did, and back then? life wasn’t half bad...dead daddy aside. but then came warren.
warren johnson was beautiful. everyone knew it—even jackie. he had hair as gold as the sun and eyes so blue and so kind they could make even the toughest men cry. it came as a surprise to no one that annie was smitten from day one. warren was a simple man. he was a miner and also a veteran who’d done a couple of tours in vietnam. most importantly, he was crazy about annie and jackie. he stepped into the role of ‘daddy’ faster than anyone else in the family could say ‘shotgun wedding.’ less than a year after they got together and married, warren and annie welcomed jackie’s baby sister, montana. at three years old, there was nothing jackie loved more than the gurgling baby girl her mother had brought home swaddled in a blanket.
life wasn’t kind to annie lee daniels johnson, because just when things were getting good, tragedy struck. again. warren and the other men who worked in the coal mines had started talking about going on strike given the conditions they were forced to work in, but their bosses weren’t having it. and then one day, in the middle of summer, the worst case scenario became reality. jackie was too young to fully grasp what had happened, but she gathered that there had been some sort of accident at work. it had been bad. and now, daddy number two had joined daddy number one in heaven or wherever it was that dead people went.
after warren, jackie watched as her mama became a complete shell of herself. one heartbreak was bad, but two? it was unsurvivable. as annie withered away, jackie got close to her aunt ruth, who helped her figure out how to take care of montana when mama wasn’t feeling up to getting out of bed. it was hard, but jackie did what she had to do. anything for her mama and anything for her sister.
when dale smith came knocking on annie’s door, begging for a chance to take her out on one date, jackie was nearly ten years old. he wasn’t much compared to jackie’s daddy or to motana’s, but he got mama out of bed. that was something. one date turned to two and with a man at her side again, annie had a newfound reason to live. she married dale and finally moved out of her family home with her girls. they were going to be a proper family and it wasn’t long until annie was pregnant again, this time with a boy.
the first time dale touched jackie was when annie was miscarrying in the backseat of his car on the way to the hospital. mama was nearly unconscious and jackie was in the front seat, in a state of complete shock, while dale reached over and did what most men did when no one could see them. after annie and dale lost their baby and the doctors told her she wouldn’t be able to have any more kids, things at home got bad. dale developed a drinking problem, which did nothing to help his anger issues or his inability to keep a job. the more dale drank and the harder it was for him to find work, the more he abused jackie. and it wasn’t just sexual, it was physical too. jackie never told a soul about what dale was doing to her. teachers and family questioned her about the bruises and broken bones, but she always lied. it wasn’t until the bruises started popping up on montana that jackie came clean and told annie. annie immediately left dale, but he found a way to weasel his way back into her arms. and then things would be good for a bit...and then they’d get bad again.
the cycle continued until jackie got to high school. once she was fifteen and started looking more like a woman than a child, her mom turned on her. suddenly she was a whore and it was her fault that dale did what he did. when montana got to high school, she got the same treatment. between the two of them, montana had always been braver. smarter. where jackie still had some hope that things would get better and that they could be normal, montana knew that the only way out of this fucked up situation was to take off. so that’s exactly what she did. jackie was 17 when she woke up and her sister had skipped town. she’d left behind her locket and a note that said you’re the only thing left for me here, but i can’t do this anymore. i love you. xx m. jackie never told her mama about the locket or the note. she let annie go on assuming the worst.
after montana ran away, everything got worse. annie became obsessed with finding her youngest, which meant she was neglecting dale, which meant he was fixated on jackie. given her age, jackie had started working at a local diner to start saving up her own money. it was her get the hell out of south carolina fund and it was her north start. jackie stored all of her cash in a shoebox under her bed, but one day when she got home late at night, a couple of months after montana had snuck out in the dead of night, she found the box empty. she knew immediately that dale had taken it, of course he had. after a disappointing confrontation with her mother about everything that had happened to her and to her sister since dale had walked into their lives, jackie decided she was done too. annie would never leave dale and dale would never stop. so, with nothing but the work uniform on her back and the locket and note her sister had left behind, jackie walked out the door to the nearest highway and stuck her thumb out. anywhere was better than here.
life on the road was lonely and scary for a while. but things got easier once she succumbed to her bad luck. she started doing unspeakable things for money like stealing and sleeping with men who offered to pay her. eventually any trace of jacqueline lucy daniels was gone. a few months of doing what she had to do to survive and she was no longer the meek, innocent girl who still believed she’d find her sister somewhere out there. now she was whiskey, like her father. cold, strong, esoteric and independent. she knew the rules of the road and how to stay alive on the streets.
now it’s been two years since she last walked out her mama’s door. she still wears montana’s locket, now rusted, but the note is long gone. she stole a walk-man from a fifty-something she slept with somewhere in arkansas and her crappy knapsack holds her journal, her most prized possession, but is otherwise stuffed with crappy hand-me-down clothes and mixtapes containing morrisey’s croons and janis joplin’s belts. she’s not scared of dying anymore. all she knows is that she’ll never go back to south carolina. the rest is up to god.
stats
Athletics: 0
Burglary: 3
Contacts: -2
Crafts (Sewing, mending, basket making, weaving, etc. etc.): 2
Deceive: 3
Drive (like, actual driving ability): -3
Empathy: -2
Fight: 2
Investigate: 2
Lore (Kinda like knowledge): 1
Navigation: 0
Notice: 3
Physique: 2
Provoke: 0
Rapport: -1
Resourcefulness: 3
Stealth: 3
Will: 2
extras
playlist - pinterest
