As the restless Nigarie flits back to her adopted culture, and Sarepta realizes the value of her own simple life in comparison, Miles meticulously controls her story’s close. She describes the mountain girl’s new awareness in language that Sarepta would never use and in concepts that Sarepta would never formulate. Miles leads the reader carefully by the hand as she editorializes: “Later, she [Sarepta] might lose sight of the vision somewhat, for we are all as incapable of holding constantly to great thoughts as of putting such definitely into words; but when the trailing glories paled, here was a child, gloriously alive, to remind her that she had once been inspired with the profoundly rational courage of seeing things as they are.”19
The author’s over-control in the ending may grate on the sensibility of the reader who wants a more subtle resolution for her fiction. However, if she can accept Miles’s aim as an expository one, she will understand how the author is operating. Exposition is designed to inform, to instruct, to persuade—all purposes that fiction may also fulfill. But much fiction employs a chronological scheme to accommodate the narrative; and elements of plot, setting, character, and conflict convey the writer’s meaning. In exposition, analogical and tautological schemes carry the argument on a theoretical or general level, though specific illustrations and narrative anecdotes often exemplify points. When story and exposition converge, as in Miles’s quasi fiction, the structure has a narrative organization with an expository intent. “The Broken Urn” looks like, and is, a story, but Miles is first and last a teacher. As such, she must reiterate her point and moralize: “for we are all as incapable of holding constantly to great thoughts as of putting such definitely into words.” The narrative itself is her exemplum; the authorial commentary her sermon.20
As Miles parades her fictional women before us, we note the slight variations in their common lot. Two young women are matched with preachers, and in both cases, the outcome of the match is problematic. Averilla Sargent, the village flirt in “A Dark Rose” (Harper’s, February 1909), at first refuses Luther Estill’s proposal, but after a bit, she accepts him and vows to go with him as he preaches, to lead the singing, to show that she can be “good” for him. But the conversion comes too easily for Averilla and makes one suspect her sincerity. This manipulated ending raises other questions: Does Miles deliberately choose not to convince us of Averilla’s conversion? Does she see Averilla as a type for those women who have employed a ruse and lived it because they think they must in a male-centered world?
“Mallard Plumage” (Red Book, August 1909) gives us a young wife who has the audacity to rebel against her May–December marriage to old Preacher Guthrie, who has locked her into a staid, restrictive existence. She flees with her young love from her premarriage days, only to bear the child of the husband she runs away from. In a predictable turn at the end, old Guthrie is taken in by the young people and nursed until his death, which comes as a result of a fall suffered while pursuing the runaways. True to the local color formula, Roma and Atlas display “hearts of gold” in their final actions toward Guthrie, and he does the same when, on his deathbed, he gives them his blessing to marry.
“The Dulcimore” (Harper’s, November 1909) hands us a twist in the form of a mother-daughter conflict over an impending marriage, one that sounds much like Emma Bell’s experience with her own mother. Selina Carden has groomed her daughter, Georgia, for a life outside the mountains. She wants Georgia to study music, to find a mate different from those offered by the circumscribed mountain culture. But Selina’s ambitions for Georgia are to be thwarted by the same implacable fate that had thwarted her own twenty years earlier. The girl has, “while awaiting the Prince, unwittingly become bound to Return,” the mountain blacksmith who secretly whittles her a dulcimore because he knows she likes music.21 None of Selina’s pleas can change Georgia’s mind.
The mother felt as though striving in a nightmare with bending, splintering weapons. . . . Had she not fought this same losing fight once before? She had never forgotten the days and weeks before her own marriage; the struggling, resisting, calling to her aid all habit and tradition, all maidenly reserve and family pride—in vain. She had suffered in withstanding; she had suffered in yielding; and her suffering had not mattered in the least, would not matter now.22
In desperation she spills her own story, her own struggle, her own sacrifice. “One baby after another. Yet the babies were all that kept me alive. . . . It would be easy enough to die for a man; it’s hard to live for him—to give him all your life just when you want it most yourself.” The mother’s story wrenches the girl’s emotions, but it effects an opposite reaction from the intended one. Georgia recognizes why her mother has stayed in this hard life when she whispers, “Mother! Don’t you see, now—. . . Now you have showed me—what love is, what it means to us women.”23
Miles’s crusade becomes the more plaintive when one realizes that Selina Carden perhaps takes her words from Emma’s own mother, Martha Bell, when she warns her talented daughter, “You’re blinded. . . . You can’t see now; but when you wake up and find yourself dragged down to the level of his people, it will break your heart.”24 Emma may well have been recalling the parental struggle she faced in her determination to marry Frank Miles some eight years earlier, coupled with the truth she knows now about married life. Creativity frustrated, ambition suppressed, body and spirit worn thin—these are the costs of womanhood. In 1909 the author can only arraign “the great laws of the universe” for this biological and spiritual demand that pits woman against herself, giving her fulfillment on the one hand and privation on the other.
Miles shifts her focus somewhat in “Three Roads and a River” (Harper’s, November 1910), possibly her best-crafted story and certainly one of the most powerful. The marriage theme is still present, but it takes a backseat to dire poverty. Shell Hutson becomes a criminal out of bitter need. In debasing himself to commit theft, assault, and robbery to supply food for his starving family, he forfeits two of the mountaineer’s strongest characteristics: his pride and his independence. Sociologists have noted the mountain man’s reluctance to ask for help; he would prefer to suffer, starve, and even die rather than take charity. But Shell is responsible for children, women, and an aging parent. In Dreiser-like fashion Miles drags Shell and the whole family lower and lower—from the once proud and prosperous keepers of the toll road and ferry to shamed, destitute starvelings. Caught in a deterministic trap, old Zion, Shell’s father, the patriarch, believes himself morally responsible for the family. Reaffirming the mountaineer’s choice of death over such a life, he asks for—and thinks he receives—a sign from God, making him the implement to carry his family from misery to peace “jist over, jist over Jordan.” The poison added to the poke-stalk pickles is taken by old Zion almost like a sacrament and passed with the same reverence to his unwitting family. Only his daughter Nettie refuses to eat, fearing her nursing baby will take colic from the sour.
Appropriately Nettie is spared her father’s salvation by death because she is the only member of the family who has maintained hope for betterment in life. But Miles, with her usual penchant for inveigling a happy ending, is not content with letting Nettie and the baby live. She must bring in at the moment of Nettie’s greatest horror a rescuer in the form of the husband who had deserted her, pregnant and penniless, months before. Now just as Nettie discovers the deaths of all her family, Steve appears with sheltering arms, money, and a promise of a new start in a new town. Miles’s compassionate view of human nature and her fervent wish for a benevolent universal order explain why she invents a turn-around ending, but they do not justify it for the fiction.
Nettie’s words summing up her commitment to life provide transition into another of Miles’s topics: “We seed a awful hard time . . . but look like where the’ was little ’uns—nobody would aim to die.”25
“Little ’uns” populate much of Miles’s writing—their begetting, birthing, nurturing. They are an important part of her affirmation of
life. In only one story, though, does a child serve as the central character, and she is a catalyst who effects positive changes in the adults she encounters. Scarcely a plotted story at all, “Flyaway Flittermouse” (Harper’s, July 1910) is an enthusiastic, if somewhat sentimentalized, celebration of primal innocence and goodness as vested in a toddler.
As a sidenote, this story, like several others by Miles, took its genesis from an actual happening. In July 1909, Emma’s two-year-old daughter Kitty wandered away from the other children on a quest for huckleberries. When her mother discovered her missing, an all-out search began. Eventually a young man who had been on his way to see his girl in the valley “appeared with the dirty, berry-stained, scratched & tangled little maid, very wide-eyed, in his arms. He had heard her crying, in a sand-flat towards Middle Creek.”26 And so Kitty’s escapade provided the outline for “Flyaway Flittermouse.”
Although the quality of Miles’s fiction varies, her crusade for women’s causes never tires. It marches through stories where the women are mere stereotypes, as in “The Home-Coming of Evelina” and “At the Top of Sourwood.” It entertains a skirmish in “The White Marauder” when the young wife shows more spirit than usual and even enjoys a momentary, though tainted, victory over the powerful men in her life. It pauses to reveal a relative equality between the elderly husband and wife in “Turkey Luck,” a parable that erases Miles’s usual life struggle and substitutes the local colorist heart-of-gold formula in the ending, in which husband and wife, unbeknownst to each other, give away both turkeys they had meant to have for their Christmas dinner. Without berating one another, however, they contentedly settle for “possum and sweet taters” and are happy in their knowledge that other families on the ridge will have good turkey dinners for Christmas!
While Miles’s women characters most often seem to be victims as a result of their cultural bonds, one woman manages to shake off those shackles in “Flower of Noon” (Craftsman, January 1912). The story is set during the wake and funeral of Harmon Ridge, a relatively prosperous landowner who is believed to have no direct heir. Miles highlights the interrelationships of the pious family members who crowd in to share the spoils. She pits a grasping, hypocritical pair of brothers and their wives against young Fan Walton, Harmon Ridge’s housekeeper and supposed confidante. Though Fan must face alone the suspicions and inquisition about Brother Harmon’s money, she is not without allies in the dead man’s widowed sister and his young hired hand. Had Fan Walton been what she appeared, a housekeeper, she might have merely paid her respects to her former employer and walked away. But she was clearly more than that, and much of the story’s tension grows out of just what her relationship with Harmon Ridge was. The reader’s first hasty conclusion is that they were lovers, or maybe husband and wife; but young Byron Standifer’s obvious romantic devotion to Fan complicates that notion. Finally, in a confrontation where the family members demand to know her rights to their brother’s property, she yields her secret: “‘God’s my judge!’ she cried in a clear ringing voice. ‘Can’t you all see?’ And in her strong features, her firm neck and square-set shoulders so like those on which they had looked their last an hour ago through the glass of a coffin, they read the answer.”27 Playing on understatement to strengthen her story, the author gives only vague hints about the girl’s background before coming to her father; but the discomfited relatives are well aware that they have lost a farm and gained a niece.
Miles revels in Fan’s victory but restrains the impulse to flaunt her woman triumphant. In fact, the ending of this story demonstrates greater fictional art than do several of the others. Fan is clearly a woman in control, a propertied woman, generous and caring, as illustrated by her invitation to her widowed aunt to move her family into Fan’s home. She is confident and comfortable in her relationship with Byron. She is the one woman in all of Miles’s fiction whose promise of fulfillment in love is not compromised by self-effacement. As such, the story does not rely on the oft-used expository techniques of authorial comment and reader control. In woman’s victory, in her emerging personhood, Miles can afford to loose her grip and allow her crusade to find its own momentum.
The circuitous paths of Emma Bell Miles’s writing, then, always lead back to one center: woman. Perhaps Miles set out to portray the larger scheme of Southern mountain folk culture, but as she molded her material, one aspect of it continually pushed to the forefront. A teacher by inclination, a crusader by moral necessity, she devoted the bulk of her life’s work to demonstrating how mountain woman’s inevitable lot of “service and of suffering . . . refines only as it is meekly and sweetly borne.” Rejecting the “moonshine and rifles” that sent Murfree’s and Fox’s popularity soaring, she elected to deal with the serious, to advance a social criticism, though she felt compelled to camouflage her campaign beneath her stories of romantic love. The social criticism’s dominance so controlled her form that she evolved something more than or different from fiction. I have chosen to call it quasi fiction because of its definite aim to convince and persuade. With this kind of motivation and with her subject matter at her doorstep, Emma Bell Miles could follow only one course with her corpus of work: a record of the life of mountain woman, as she knew and lived it.
Notes
1. Four volumes of Emma Bell Miles’s original journals are housed in the Jean Miles Catino Collection of Special Collections, Lupton Library, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. A copy of a fifth volume is also there; the original of that volume is in the Chattanooga Public Library in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thanks to the work of editor Steven Cox, Special Collections Librarian at UTC, an edited print edition of the journals was published in March 2014. Steven Cox, ed., Once I Too Had Wings: The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–1918 (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2014), 22.
2. Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains, A Facsimile Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 69, 66. This is Miles’s best-known work, first published in 1905 by James Pott & Company, and republished in 1975 in the facsimile edition cited above.
3. Cox, 192.
4. A collection of Miles’s poetry, Strains from a Dulcimore, edited by Abby Crawford Milton, was published by Bozart Press in 1930, eleven years after Miles’s death. The collection contained all of the poems previously published in Chords from a Dulcimore, as well as others that had appeared in magazines and newspapers.
5. Cox, introduction to Once I Too Had Wings, xlvi–xlvii. The $25 Miles says she received for “a Madonna story” may have been a reference to “A Dream of the Dust,” published in The Lookout, although the date of that publication does not coincide with the journal date; the story, however, could certainly be described as “a Madonna story.” When she writes in September 1916 that she sold “A Mess of Greens” to Mother’s Magazine, that is likely the story that appeared under the title “The White Marauder” in August 1917; a mess of greens figures prominently in the plot.
6. See, for example, Harry R. Warfel and G. Harrison Orians, introduction to American Local-Color Stories (New York: American Book Company, 1941); Claude M. Simpson, introduction to The Local Colorists (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960); Robert E. Spiller et al., “Delineation of Life and Character,” in Literary History of the United States: History, 4th ed. rev. (New York: Macmillan, 1974).
7. Warfel and Orians, xxiii.
8. Emma Bell Miles, letter to Anna Ricketson, March 4, 1907, Chattanooga Public Library, Chattanooga, Tennessee. Ricketson lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had become a friend to Miles following the publication of Miles’s poem, “After Reading Thoreau.” The two corresponded until near the end of Miles’s life, though they never met in person. Emma’s letters to Ricketson have been preserved; forty-four originals are in the Chattanooga Public Library.
9. Emma Bell Miles, letter to an unnamed correspondent, dated January 15, 1913 [1914], Hindman Settlement School Archive, Hindman, Kentucky. Facts within the letter and contextual evidence indicate the date should be 19
14. I am grateful to Professor David Whisnant, retired from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for unearthing the Hindman letter and sharing it with me.
10. Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 18–31. The following sketch of Appalachia’s people is partially based on Shapiro’s study. It is necessarily simplistic because of the brief space I have allotted to it.
11. Miles, letter to Anna Ricketson, April 5, 1907.
12. Miles, letters to Anna Ricketson, March 31, 1907; April 5, 1907.
13. I have adopted James Moffett’s terms from “Kinds and Orders of Discourse,” in Teaching the Universe of Discourse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968).
14. Emma Bell Miles, “The Common Lot,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 118 (December 1908): 149.
15. Ibid., 151, 152, 154.
16. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 262.
17. Emma Bell Miles, “The Broken Urn,” Putnam’s Magazine 5 (February 1909): 580.
18. Ibid., 578, 579.
19. Ibid., 580.
20. Miles most likely used her sister-in-law Laura Miles Hatfield as model for the young mother who could not adequately breastfeed her baby. Laura and her husband suffered the loss of several infants, all of whom are buried in a row in Fairmount Cemetery in Signal Mountain, Tennessee. One of these was named for Emma.
21. Emma Bell Miles, “The Dulcimore,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 119 (November 1909): 952.
22. Ibid., 954.
23. Ibid., 954, 956.
24. Ibid., 953.
The Common Lot and Other Stories Page 3