"The pioneer baby might from time to time be weighed on the family steelyards, and he might not be. He would by the time he could talk have heard all manner of human sounds from scalp cry to the calling of the hogs, but one thing he would never hear as they weighed him or on any other occasion of his life was the word 'normal.' The normal human being had not yet evolved."
--Harriette Simpson Arnow, "Flowering of the Cumberland"
I'm facing west toward Arkansas in a duplex apartment carved out of a 1901 Mission Revival house in midtown Memphis. It was built, I am told, by a master plasterer. It's one story, pale pink stucco with a Spanish tile roof, thin white columns, and porches on two sides. From the front, it could be mistaken for a commercial building, possibly a restaurant or gas station.
I let myself in Thursday afternoon and fell in love with the weight and proportions of the place. The original woodwork is intact. Tall, narrow windows let light into a kitchen, sitting room, and up front a bedroom with a marble fireplace. Transom windows sit atop three major interior doorways, and all the doors are heavy: solid carved wood with original metal hardware. Two kinds of pine creak underfoot, amber and smooth in the front rooms, light yellow and knotty back here in the kitchen.
The house is in the middle of the vast streetcar suburbs of Memphis, which are remarkably intact. Burke's Books is an easy stroll from here, about two miles to the south on Cooper Avenue. That is where the hand of Providence led me to Harriette Simpson Arnow. Her "Flowering of the Cumberland" caught my eye in the Southern History section, and a few paragraphs (not to mention the type, the 1963 book jacket, and the old library smell) quickly assured me that the book was worth the asking price of $15.
Jimmy Dean Smith writes in The Flannery O'Connor Review that Arnow (1908-1986) grew up in Burnside, Ky., a town once situated where the Cumberland River was joined by its Big South Fork. Old Burnside was inundated when the Corps of Engineers' Wolf Creek Dam impounded Lake Cumberland in 1951.
As a small river city, the Burnside of Arnow's childhood frequently received news, goods, and visitors from the greater world and thus was, in Smith's words, "geographically though not culturally close" to the more isolated valleys in the Cumberland River watershed where Arnow taught as a young woman.
In Arnow's 1968 lecture "Some Musings on the Nature of History," she remarked that in those valleys "I realized that about me was a living museum ... These people, though literate, many highly articulate, lived largely by learnings handed down through the generations. Even the seed they saved from year to year was probably descended from some brought over the mountains."
Like any proper conservative, Arnow reacted with distress to the sacrifice of all of that handed-down learning, all of that old living culture, to the gods of industrial progress, embodied by a hydroelectric dam and a lake made for motor-boating.
Arnow saw beneath the blue of Lake Cumberland "a murky nothingness." Her despair led her, in the early 1960s, to write two social histories, "Seedtime on the Cumberland" and "Flowering of the Cumberland," and later a memoir, "Old Burnside." In these books, Smith says, Arnow is trying to resurrect the corpse of the Cumberland.
The Cumberland River drains 18,000 square miles. It flows 700 miles from its headwaters in Lechter County, Ky., to its mouth on the Ohio River; 300 miles of its course are in Tennessee. Humans have hunted in the Cumberland Valley since the end of the last Ice Age.
Shawnees tried to claim the Cumberland Valley in the early 1700s but were driven out by Cherokees and Chickasaws, who in turn tried to defend it against settlement by pioneers from the eastern parts of the English colonies/early American republic. (Kentucky and Tennessee belonged to the colonies of Virginia and North Carolina, though the Proclamation of 1763 prohibited colonists from settling west of the Appalachians.)
"Seedtime" and "Flowering" begin in 1780, when Indian resistance to pioneer settlement was still strong, and conclude in 1803, when the Louisiana Purchase opened up land west of the Mississippi to American settlement and the Cumberland Valley ceased to be frontier.
Tennessee was the primary contributor of population to the uplands of Arkansas and a major contributor to the lowlands for most of the 19th century, so Arnow's work offers help to those who would like to understand Arkansas folkways in terms of cultural persistence, or the "learnings handed down," to use her phrase.
A favorite example of Arnow's discovery of cultural persistence: "I used to think of the superstitious, unsophisticated farmer of the deep South as the carrier of a rabbit's foot, and when I went as a teacher into the back hills I smiled at the curious custom of taking turpentine pills, but rather liked the way they beat the fiddle--one to draw the bow and another to beat the strings. Kentucky folklore I was sure I was learning."
Years later, on reading English diarist Samuel Pepys, "and not only found him declaring that a dulcimer 'played on with sticks knocking of the strings is very pretty,' but on the last day of 1664 Pepys blessed God for the good plight of his health though he was uncertain whether it 'be my hare's foote' or 'taking every morning a little pill of turpentine.'"
If Arnow's Cumberland trilogy is an attempt at resurrection, it's one made with research (into letters, journals, county court documents) and without sentimentality. In a chapter of "Flowering" called "The Sounds of Humankind," she reads the letters of phonetic spellers (including Rachel Jackson, wife of Andrew) to get a sense of the way Cumberland Valley English sounded.
As for what it contained, she finds it rich thanks to concreteness and specificity. No one wrote of just a tree or a dog; he wrote of a "wind-shook white oak, dead chestnut, shag-bark hickory" or of a "foxhound, cur dog, feist, tree dog, family dog, or hog dog."
"Antisocial, underweight, togetherness, adjustment, abnormal, controversial, subversive, loyalty, free enterprise, communistic, outgoing, and allied words used to describe an intangible state with a good or bad connotation were not in the pioneer vocabulary," Arnow writes, to which I can only add Amen.