Lamb in His Bosom
Page 34
Second and no less important, Miller understood the context of the lives of those she was writing about. Her accounts of the business of everyday life—how children were birthed, how the crops were planted and brought in, what people ate, how they furnished their houses, the rare store-bought object they might possess and value—conform in extraordinary detail to what we know about the Old South from a myriad of sources. It is difficult to think of a single other text that could give students of antebellum southern history as complete or accurate an account of the lives of nonslaveholding whites.
Even as Miller understood the material context of plain folks’ lives, so did she, almost uncannily, understand their mental universes. Her accounts, toward the end of the novel, of Cean’s visions of heaven ring true, as do her accounts of Cean’s understanding of and attitudes toward black slaves. Thus Cean knows that “never would she care to strive for heaven if once there, she could not stroke Dermid’s very cheek (and Lonzo’s beard, but she said nothing of that to Dermid), if there she would not see the white scar in Maggie’s hand where Maggie had sliced it through once, long ago, as she helped her Ma cook breakfast” (328-29). Cean has no comprehension of or use for a heaven in which she would only meet those she had loved on earth as spirits: In her heaven, they would be as she had known them on earth, but without the marks of pain or toil; in her heaven, those she had loved on earth would live amidst morning-glories and clear green fountains.
Black slaves, whom Miller has Cean call “niggers,” have no place in the world of Appling County as perceived by its white inhabitants, just as, for Cean and her family, proslavery and antislavery arguments have no bearing on their lives. Slaves are for folks on the coast. When the outbreak of the Civil War threatens to demand that her menfolk fight, she storms and rages. “A fool thing it was for Cal to go yonder and fight a war over a black nigger. If the nigger wanted to be free, let him fight his own self!” (330). And she comes to hate the elite white men who had made the war. Yet Cean, who throughout her married life has occasionally fantasized what it might be like to have a slave to do her work, is not antislavery. She shares the attitudes of the poor, rural southerners who simultaneously resented and coveted the fabulous and poorly understood luxuries that wealthy whites were said to enjoy. Cean knows that she “could work her fingers to the bone in the field beside Lonzo and she’d never live like the Coast ladies; they were diked out in silk cloth and breastpins; they could have a black lashed twenty-five times because maybe he didn’t bend low enough when they passed by in shining carioles” (190). And when Cean’s children fantasize about what they would bring back from the coast, were they able to go, Cean’s son Cal outdoes the rest, announcing, “I’ll fotch back a hundred niggers fer Ma to beat on” (196).
From language to plot to the detailed descriptions of everyday life, Miller shows the intricate ways in which the lives and minds of Cean Smith and her family focus on their own microcosmic rural world, occasionally intersecting with strands of the larger culture within which it is set: Their lilting dialectic bears traces of the English of the days of Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible; each year the men of the community travel the eighty miles to the coast to trade their small agricultural surplus for such exotic town goods as the clock that Lonzo brings Cean; the preacher, Dermid O’Connor, arrives to give ritual and language to their inchoate faith and rudimentary education to their children; vague news of the California gold rush draws Lias away in quest of adventure and fortune; Cean recalls that in Carolina, from where her parents had migrated, there were fruits called apples, although she has never seen one. Like so many rural, frontier settlements, they are at once in the larger world and yet not of it. The clock, which Cean lovingly polishes, captures the in-but-not-of-ness. It keeps perfect time, methodically marking the minutes and hours of their lives. But they live their lives by the rhythms of pregnancies and childbirth, the sequence of crops, and the cycle of seasons—not by the ticking of the clock.
Caroline Miller took her novel’s title from the Bible, Isaiah 40:11. “He shall feed His flock like a shepherd; He shall gather the lambs with His arm, and carry them in His bosom.” Seen, Cean’s aged mother, has a Bible and insists on family prayers at which she sings a psalm and reads a chapter from the Bible. Above all others, Seen loves “How Firm a Foundation,” which promises those who keep faith with the Lord that “‘when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn / Like lambs in My bosom they shall be born’” (208). Seen, in her dotage, seems almost to be throwing that promise back in the face of the Lord. The harsh conditions of Cean’s own life frequently leave reason to challenge it. Yet through the pain, the losses, and the unremitting toil of keeping on, these people, Miller suggests, are indeed God’s own.
Throughout the novel, Miller shows the ways in which faith and respect for human culture wrestle with nature in order to forge meaning out of the recurrence of seasons and life. Her exquisite skill colors almost every page, but especially graces her evocations of Cean’s relation to her husbands, her children, and her own body. For Cean’s is a body that bears children as naturally as a tree bears fruit. Some women, she knows, have trouble conceiving; others bear only a few children. But she seems to become pregnant each time she weans the baby at her breast, bearing thirteen for Lonzo and another for Dermid, when her hair is turning white. In mid-life she comes to resent her constant pregnancies, and she believes that she lost the two male twins she had been carrying because in her heart she had not welcomed them. But as the years pass, her flutter of rebelliousness dissipates, and she, wordlessly, accepts the pregnancies as natural extensions of her own body.
Caroline Miller’s Cean grows from a shy girl into a strong, resourceful, and vibrantly attractive woman. Yet she could not be more different from the model of the southern belle as captured in Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara. For Cean’s greatest beauty comes after, not before, the birth of her children and seems to grow throughout her life. And her attractiveness to men grows out of her membership in a community of women, not out of her competition with them, just as it grows out of her acceptance of the relations between women and men in a rural household. Thus Miller shows Cean as simultaneously delighting in her own strength and accepting her own weakness, alternately working beside Lonzo in the fields or, debilitated by another pregnancy, struggling simply to care for the children and get the meals on the table. Significantly, her moment of supreme strength comes when, exhausted from having delivered her most recent baby alone and too weak even to wash it, she kills the “painter” who has been drawn by the smell of her and the infant’s blood. In that moment, Miller, with fierce understatement, represents Cean as the embodiment of human will in confrontation with the most dangerous forces of nature. Thus Cean, at her most “natural,” is most at war with the nature that threatens to engulf her.
Louis Kronenberger reproached Miller, above all, for allowing the plot of Lamb in His Bosom to dry up during the second half. He felt that the sap and poetry collapsed into prosaic details. “The births, the deaths, the marriages are no longer rich chunks out of a unique world, but mere jottings in a parish register.”7 Yet Jane Judge, writing in the Savannah Morning News, thought differently, insisting that the scope of Lamb in His Bosom transcended a regional conception. “The types, the experiences, are in the deep sense universal, and even the setting, distinctive and local as it is, assumes a certain universality.”8 Judge, who was especially concerned to defend Miller against possible dismissal as a mere historical realist or regionalist, wanted readers to understand that the characters of Lamb in His Bosom should invite identification rather than be dismissed as curiosities. We are, she argued, more like the novel’s characters than we are different from them. And what we share with them is what makes us human. From the vantage point of the New York literary scene, Kronenberger had difficulty in recognizing those commonalities, which he might well have found threatening. But had he been able to see them, he might also have seen that the plot of Lamb in His Bosom ne
ver falters. For unlike the novels of self-conscious self-discovery and becoming of which Kronenberger presumably approved, Lamb in His Bosom is a novel of completion and, ultimately, continuity.
Thus Miller’s decision to conclude with Lias’s death amidst Spanish Catholics on the west coast simultaneously acknowledges that the daring, rebellious adventurer ends just like those he has left behind, and that even the separation of a continent cannot break his ties to them. “‘I want ‘em always expectin’ me,’ he said.” And, at the end, “he turned back to his mother’s God,” begging for mercy (343). It might, Miller tells us, have comforted Cean, who knows nothing of his death, to know that his head has not one thread of white, but is all “the color of topazes and autumn-flowering saffron and gold leaf made of beaten gold” (345). In this perspective, Cean’s story may be understood as the story of a community whose values she embodies. And the narrative’s gradual shift from emphasis on specific events—her marriage to Lonzo, the birth of her first child—to absorption of events into a more general, less differential pattern may be seen as a faithful, and highly crafted, representation of the changing consciousness of this one woman—perhaps all women—as she moves through the cycle of her life.
—Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
CAROLINE MILLER was born in Waycross, Georgia, in 1903, and lived in Baxley, Georgia, until 1934. Shortly after graduating from high school, she married William D. Miller, her high school English teacher, and had three children. She began traveling through rural south Georgia, interviewing the people she met and planning a novel; as she had not attended college, her husband taught her about literature. “He was my college,” she said.
The success of Lamb in His Bosom and her resulting celebrity after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 made it difficult for her to resume her former life in Baxley. She and her husband divorced, and she moved to Biloxi, Mississippi, and then to Waynesville, North Carolina. She remarried and had two more children. Her second novel, Lebanon, was published in 1944.
Caroline Miller died in Waynesville in 1992. Until her death, she wrote every day, leaving a number of unpublished manuscripts.
ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE taught history at SUNY Binghamton and The University of Rochester before becoming the Eléonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities at Emory University in the mid-eighties. She was the founding director for Women’s Studies, began the first Women’s Studies doctoral program in the U.S., and was the recipient of the 2003 National Humanities Medal awarded by President George W. Bush.
Fox-Genovese wrote many scholarly and popular works, but was best known for her studies of women in the antebellum South. Her publications include Slavery in White and Black: Class and race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World order and The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview. She passed away in Atlanta on January 2, 2007.
FOOTNOTES
1. Frank Daniel, in his review, “Lamb in His Bosom,” for the Atlanta Journal (10 September 1933) claims that the play had been written in conjunction with King Bowden. It was produced in Savannah.
2. Caroline Miller to Frank Daniel of 1 May 1934, 2 June 1934, 23 April 1935, all in the Daniel Collection, Special Collections, Woodruff Library.
3. Letters from Caroline Miller to Frank Daniel of 1 May 1934, 2 June 1934, 23 April 1935, all in the Daniel Collection, Special Collections, Woodruff Library.
4. David M. Graig, “Caroline Miller,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 9, part 2, American Novelists, 1910-1945 (Gale Research Company, 1981), 208-10.
5. Frank Daniel, “Lamb in His Bosom,” for the Atlanta Journal (10 September 1933).
6. Louis Kronenberger, “A First Novel of Distinguished Quality,” NewYork Times Book review (17 September 1933).
7. Louis Kronenberger, “A First Novel of Distinguished Quality,” NewYork Times Book review (17 September 1933).
8. Jane Judge, “Lamb in His Bosom: A Novel of Georgia Pioneers,” Savannah Morning News (17 September 1933).