Favorite Ozarks Books – 15

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Dahlia's Gone, Eleven Point, Favorite Ozarks Books, Katie Estill, novels, Oregon County

I ran across a chapter of this book in The Literature of the Ozarks, a book that I have written about before. I’d heard of Katie Estill, but somehow had overlooked her novels. So I went out and found myself a copy.

I started reading it a couple of days ago, and it’s a marvel. It begins (or very nearly so) with a murder, but it’s not a mystery, nor is it what one would call a “thriller,” although it does have plenty of police procedure in it. It also has some adult passages with adults doing, well, what adults do. So it’s not exactly a “romance,” either, although there’s love in it, of the most aching and true sort.

It’s set in a county that feels a lot like Oregon County, Missouri, with a river that runs through it (in the novel, it’s the Seven Point, not the Eleven Point as in the real-life county, but let’s not quibble over the number of points). And it has a triumvirate of main characters, three women, all of whom suffer and struggle in the course of the book, and who don’t particularly get along, and who discover that they have common aims and needs despite that. One is a deputy sheriff; one is a woman who has recently returned to the county after a time away; and one is a newer arrival. The murder connects them, divides them, and connects them again.

It’s a beautiful book that defies categorization, and it contains some lovely passages of description of the Ozarks landscape, of the interior thinking of its main characters, and of the mental and emotional negotiations they go through to achieve some answers and some peace. It was published in 2007, but the characters’ travails are as relevant today as they were then. You may have to hunt for a copy, as I suspect it’s gone out of print; but it’s worth the search.

Playing the Stereotype

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KWTO, Les Paul, movies, music, Ozark Jubilee, Ozarks, stereotypes, Thomas Peters, writing

On Facebook, I’ve been following the progress of Thomas Peters’ book on radio station KWTO and the Ozark Jubilee with great interest. It’s going to be a great addition to the Ozarks history bookshelf! He’s been posting some of the photos he’s collected for the book, and this morning he posted this beauty:

That’s an 18-year-old Les Paul on the right, performing with his friend Sunny Joe Wolverton on KWTO as the Ozark Apple Knockers. A far cry from the urbane, sophisticated jazz pioneer he later became, the occupant of more halls of fame than one would care to count. Everybody has to start somewhere, and for Paul it was playing hillbilly music under the stage name “Rhubarb Red.”

When I saw this picture, for some reason I thought of a movie I had recently rewatched, the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Buster (Tim Blake Nelson) opens the movie in full cowboy-movie garb, singing “Cool Water” as he rides through Monument Valley. Of course, the joke (or part of the joke) is that “Cool Water” is not a historic cowboy song at all, but a pop hit of the 1940s.

What follows is a series of ghastly/comic episodes that both play on Western-story stereotypes and embrace them, just as the “hillbilly” image both mocks, uses, and embraces that stereotype as well.

We make art where we find it, with the materials at hand. Sometimes those materials include simplified versions of ourselves, and then we must decide whether to challenge the stereotype or play with it. I think either decision can work, as long as the stereotype is approached with conscious intent. It’s when stereotypes are presented unconsciously and uncritically that they harm. The rural rustic, the hayseed, has been with us since Greek comedy, and we will probably never get rid of it. So we might as well play with that image as we move toward the larger points we are trying to make in our literary and creative work.

What truly prompted me toward these thoughts, though, was the news that the former Dogpatch USA property had been bought by Johnny Morris of Bass Pro Shops fame. I’ve never met Johnny, although some friends of mine know him and speak very highly of him. While Bass Pro is the business that made him a billionaire, it’s the other Morris properties that play the Ozark stereotypes: Big Cedar Lodge, Top of the Rock golf course, and Dogwood Canyon (which is owned by a linked foundation). These properties present a sanitized, tidied-up version of the mythic Ozarks that people just love and are willing to pay handsomely to experience; a single-day admission to Dogwood Canyon will set you back $20, and it’s another $32 to ride the tram. Assuming you brought your own bicycle or are up for the walk, you can see a mill, an Indian burial cave, a wilderness chapel, some waterfalls, a trapper’s cabin, and other sites, all skillfully manufactured and manicured to achieve a perfect match of product and expectation.

This is progress, I suppose. The old Dogpatch attraction played on an earlier generation of stereotypes, barefoot hillbillies and moonshine stills. It will be interesting to see what becomes of it under its new owner. I’m guessing it won’t stray far from the formula that has made the other attractions so popular.

New Book!

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books, Cornerpost Press, short stories, West Plains, writing

I’m thrilled to announce that I have a new book coming out this fall! Unlike my earlier books, this one is a collection of short stories. The title is Scattered Lights….that’s a line from one of the stories, and (in my mind) an appropriate metaphor for the people in the stories, and the stories themselves: a collection of things that may seem random at first, but which are deeply and firmly connected, if only we take the time to look. Release date is projected for November.

I’ve started a Scattered Lights page on my website and will be placing news about the book on it, for the most part, although I’ll put headlines here occasionally, too. The publisher is Cornerpost Press, a new venture out of West Plains, and they have been absolutely magical to work with! I think this new book will look great.

And for those of you who only know me through my novels, I think the stories will provide a different look. They’re not set in historical times, but in the contemporary setting.

Limits and Localism

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Agriculture, Arkansas, diversification, farming, Ozarks, small farms, sustainability

“On Limits and Localism” is the title of an excellent, thoughtful article by Lindi Phillips that recently came out on the Arkansas Strong website. It talks about farming in the Ozarks, and how the old traditions of small, diversified farming gave way to the standardized monoculture of national agriculture. And then it connects the weaknesses of that system to the issues of the current pandemic. It is well worth the read!

Find it here. “On Limits and Localism.”

Juneteenth, Part Two

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Black Lives Matter, Eminence, flag, Fredericktown, Free speech, Madison County, protests, racism, Shannon County

A week ago, I posted some reflections on the Juneteenth observances around the country, and remarked that we still have a long way to go before the legacy of slavery is cleared away, or even rendered less harmful than it remains today. At the time, I wasn’t thinking in particularly immediate terms, but two days ago an event in my hometown brought that observation to life in a particularly ugly way.

A group of (mostly) young folks organized a demonstration in the courthouse square in Fredericktown, Missouri, the place where I grew up for the first ten years of my life and where I still have family connections and strong emotional ties. That’s a picture of them above, and another one here:

Threatening-looking, aren’t they?

Apparently the rumor mill had been active before the event, with the current crazy talk of “busloads of protesters” and such. A local businessman organized a counter-demonstration, and it attracted a sizable crowd of racists, nutcases, curiosity-seekers, and, presumably, some decent-minded people. Here’s a few of them:

The counter-demonstrators, many of whom were heavily armed, attempted to disrupt and intimidate the demonstrators by circling the courthouse square with their speakers blaring, trying to drown them out, and more troubling, they positioned themselves in high positions above the demonstrators with weapons visible:

I’m no weapons expert, but that sure looks like a silencer or flash suppressor on the rifle in that last photo.

The groups exchanged some yelling, but thankfully the police (who were considerably outnumbered) managed to keep the counter-demonstrators from attacking the demonstrators for the most part, although eyewitnesses said the counter-demonstrators were clearly looking for an excuse to start violence. At one point one of the demonstrators attempted to unfurl an American flag and was attacked by one of the counter-demonstrators, who was clearly armed:

You can see the outline of his pistol pretty plainly in this photo. These last two pictures, by the way, are from Ramblin Hamlin Photography, which was on the scene. I took the other pictures from Imgur.

The most aggressive act from the demonstrators, by contrast, might have been a slightly ragged version of the Electric Slide (that’s right, the Electric Slide):

(also from Ramblin Hamlin Photography)

Social media has been burning up since then, with two major themes: Those racists don’t represent our community – we’re good people! (Or at least I’m not a racist) and A lot of those demonstrators weren’t from Fredericktown – why didn’t they protest in their own town? Both good issues to raise. I guess my thought on the first one is that if you don’t want a bunch of racist lunatics to represent your community, at least in the minds of others, then you had better get out there and join the demonstration and make sure that your community comes down firmly on the side of racial justice. Otherwise the people who see the pictures will believe that the racists do represent you, because you have allowed them to. And on the second point, the home location of the demonstrators is not relevant for the same reason. I am told that one of the most obnoxious counter-demonstrators, who made gestures and said things that I will not describe or repeat here, was from Centerville. Well, if he got to come to the Madison County Courthouse and make a fool of himself, then I suppose some kids from Farmington are just as entitled to come down and demonstrate.

It saddens me to see such a disgraceful display in my hometown. Yes, Fredericktown has lots of lovely, non-racist people in it. Some of them showed up in the courthouse square on Wednesday, only to be spat at, threatened, and called vile names. So now the town is branded as a racist haven in the eyes of others, and if the citizens want to have that label removed, they’ll have to do it themselves by their words and deeds.

A COUPLE OF UPDATES: One of the demonstrators contacted me and let me know that some of the heavily armed, camouflage-wearing militia members actually performed a beneficial service, helping to keep the mob away from the demonstrators and escorting them to their cars and to the bathroom. That was good to hear, and it complicates the easy black-and-white narrative.

In addition, the town of Eminence, in Shannon County, came close to out-embarrassing Fredericktown on Saturday, the 27th. The sheriff there, in the midst of a re-election campaign, announced on social media that he had received a “credible threat,” which quickly brought the same unfounded rumors of “busloads of BLM and Antifa rioters” and resulted in about a hundred people, once again armed to the teeth, who parked at the courthouse or circled the square, crowing about their patriotism and vowing violence on any protesters who dared to show up. Video footage of this event shows a weird, carnival-like atmosphere, a combination of party and lynch mob. As it turned out, the “credible threat” was a complaint from a mother who was unhappy with the investigation of the 2018 death of her son, and the whole BLM/Antifa thing was complete baloney.  I’m not sure which community has cast itself in a worse light: the one that had an ugly response to an actual demonstration, or the one that had an ugly response to an imaginary one.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 14

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books, Buffalo, columns, Cornerpost Press, essays, Favorite Ozarks Books, Jim Hamilton, newspapers, Ozarks, reviews, rural life

This review first appeared in Elder Mountain.

The newspaper column is a surprisingly difficult genre: strict word count limits, inflexible deadlines, and the necessity to be both original and familiar to a broad spectrum of readers. Jim Hamilton is a master practitioner of the form. For more than forty years, he wrote columns for the Buffalo Reflex, and a collection of his early columns, River of Used to Be, holds a valued place on my bookshelf. Now comes a new collection, Ozarks RFD: Selected Essays 2010-2015, taken from the most recent decade and published by a new press.

Readers of a certain age will remember when writing a newspaper column was a prestigious perch reserved for those who had proved themselves to be exemplary reporters and writers. On the national scene, Mike Royko, Molly Ivins, Jimmy Breslin, and others swayed political debates. In the Ozarks, Jean Bell Mosley and Thomza Zimmerman, Leonard Hall, and Sue Hubbell reported from their homes and farmsteads on the rhythms of life in nature and community. Hamilton’s columns are in that vein – observant, nostalgic, rarely offering comment on current events.

That doesn’t mean they are shallow, though. The columns regularly steer through emotional shoals. Hamilton writes with painful honesty about losing a wife to cancer and a daughter to a car crash, and about the more general disasters that befall a nation and a community. Faithful dogs and treasured fishing holes inhabit these pages, but so do wars and calamities.

I suspect, though, that the columns most readers will respond to are his reminiscences of childhood in the Ozarks. Hamilton has a gift for memory that reveals itself through precision; the word pictures in these columns are detailed, vivid, and evocative. Perhaps one of the signs of love is noticing, and if that’s the case these columns are just about as loving as one can get these days. Jim Hamilton seems to have noticed, and remembered, everything that ever happened to him.

Is there repetition among them? Sure. One of the pitfalls of a newspaper column is the obligation to produce material on deadline, again and again, week after week, and no columnist escapes the repetition trap forever. But even when he’s returning to a familiar subject or theme, Hamilton finds a way to approach it in a different way, shedding light from a different angle. Still, as with all collections of columns, these are best read in modest amounts. A newspaper column is literature in bite-sized form; as with all bite-sized things, they are better enjoyed when consumed at a moderate pace.

Hamilton’s columns capture a moment, dig deep into a memory, analyze an emotion. Each column is a finely crafted exploration of an experience or recollection, and although you can see their origins in the deadline-driven world of newspaper production, they transcend those origins and offer us lasting insights. There’s both sweetness and precision in these columns, a combination that is hard to pull off and even harder to sustain. This collection of work is a real joy.

Jim Hamilton

Favorite Ozarks People – 16

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art, craft, craftsmanship, Favorite Ozarks People, Ironton, Isla Armfield, Mountain Echo, printing, Richard Armfield, Wilbur Larkin

After my family moved from Fredericktown to our farm on the Black River, my mother wrote freelance articles for the Mountain Echo in Ironton, which was then owned by Richard and Isla Armfield. They were a lovely pair or people, old-fashioned newspaper folks down to their toes. Richard suffered from Parkinson’s disease, which ultimately led to their selling the paper, but when I knew him he just walked with an odd gait and showed a minor tremor in his hands. Isla was an elegant dresser and extremely cordial, who was engaged in all sorts of community groups.

But the person I’m thinking about today was one of the back-shop guys, a printer named Wilbur Larkin. Sometimes when my mom traveled to Ironton I would accompany her, and I always found myself drifting into the back shop to watch the printers work. Although the paper was printed elsewhere, the Mountain Echo had a thriving job printing business, with Wilbur and another gentleman whose name will occur to me as I continue (I hope – I think it was Kenneth, but can’t be sure).

Wilbur was the master of two machines. One was a Linotype, an honest-to-goodness Linotype, which fascinated me to no end. I remember the distinctive, horrid smell of molten lead that emanated from the machine when Wilbur fired it up; there was a container on top, where he would toss in some lead blanks and whatever waste pieces of type were lying around from previous jobs, and once the lead had melted properly, he would set the font size and line width and then begin typing the new job on a weird keyboard that bore little resemblance to the standard QWERTY keyboard used by everything else. Lead would run down a little channel and be formed, letter by letter, into a line of type (thus the name), which would then be ejected into a receiving rack on the side. I was always warned to keep my hands away from the finished product, because as you can imagine, it stayed hot for quite a while. It was like watching a cathedral organist at work: intense, concentrated hand movements on an oversized apparatus, incomprehensible to the casual observer.

By Unknown author – Popular Science Monthly Volume 40, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12205750

The other machine was a platen press. This one was electric, although there was a treadle-operated one elsewhere in the shop. Wilbur would daub a paddleful of ink (also strictly do-not-touch) onto the platen, then gradually accelerate into the on-off rhythm of placing a sheet of paper or posterboard into the frame in the moment of open space when the inked lettering was retreating from contact while simultaneously removing the newly printed sheet. Left hand out, right hand in. It was beautiful to watch, made even more so by the fact, repeated to me more than once, that despite the gentle, musical clanking of the machine, any finger that happened to be between paper and type at the moment of printing would be crushed. The platen press was mainly used for posters, and Wilbur kept several composing sticks hanging on the wall in which he would set the type; for the largest sizes, display type over an inch tall, he actually used wooden letterblocks instead of metal ones. I marveled at the cases of two- and three-inch type from which he would pluck the needed words: the number of letters was limited, so if your poster was something like “Massasoit for Assessor,” it might require two passes on the printing press so that the s’s could be reset onto the second line. Years later, I found a couple of job sticks and a type case at a garage sale; I bought them and still have them as souvenirs.

Wilbur was a soft-spoken man who didn’t seem bothered by my presence but didn’t exactly encourage it, either. But he tolerated me, let me watch, and answered my questions with patient good humor.

Few things in life are as satisfying as the sense of mastery: of a subject, a challenge, a tool, an activity. It’s always thrilling to watch someone who’s a master: I think that’s part of the reason for the popularity of professional sports, watching people whose skills are so clearly at a peak. But mastery takes many forms, all of which deserve honor. We tend to associate mastery with physical skills and to bemoan their diminishment. To some extent, that’s true; there’s aren’t as many master saddlemakers or quilters as there once were. But we shouldn’t overlook other forms of mastery. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to watch other masters, digital masters, at work, with design programs, data management programs, and others. And the speed and assuredness with which they work is just as thrilling to me. It’s just as amazing to watch over the shoulder of someone who’s creating a unique design on screen as it was to watch my dad peer into the innards of malfunctioning hay baler out in the field and diagnose its problem within a few minutes, or to watch Wilbur Larkin perform a sonata on the Linotype.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 13

Tags

Brooks Blevins, Civil War, history, Ozarks, reconstruction, slavery, war

I’ve written earlier about the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, which was a most welcome addition to my bookshelf. The second volume came out this fall, and I’ve been working through it; I’m happy to say that I like it even better than the first.

Subtitled “The Conflicted Ozarks,” this volume takes us through the history of the Ozarks during the Civil War into the troubled years afterward, ending after the great timber boom of the 1880s. A third volume that will bring us into the modern years is promised.

A particularly illuminating part of this book is its treatment of slavery in the pre-Civil War Ozarks. I grew up hearing the common phrase that slavery in our part of the country “wasn’t that bad” because slaveowners typically owned only one or two slaves, rather than participating in the large-scale plantation system that existed farther south. According to this view, “slaves were treated as part of the family” and were happier with their condition than the unlucky slaves of the Deep Confederacy. Blevins addresses this conception with sensitivity, noting the essential differences between slavery in the Ozarks and other areas of the country, but also pointing out that even small-scale slavery is still slavery, and that slaveowners of the Ozarks, like slaveowners elsewhere, didn’t hesitate to break up slave families through the sale of spouses and children when it suited their economic interest. In fact, because of its intimacy, Ozarks slaveowning could evolve into deep personal animosity and mistreatment, with all the power on one side of the equation.

The book also gives a comprehensive cross-border treatment of the war itself. We tend to hear about the Civil War in the Ozarks from a single-state viewpoint, or even from a narrower one such as the history of the war in a particular region or from the perspective of a unit or campaign; it’s helpful to read about the war in a broader context. Similarly, the diverging paths of Missouri and Arkansas after the war are well described, along with ways in which the two states remained similar.

The first volume of this trilogy was challenged by its scope; covering prehistory, early Native American history, the colonial period, and the years of American rule up to the beginning of the Civil War is a daunting task. This volume, with its much more confined time period, feels tighter and more narratively coherent, and the vast increase in number and type of source material makes itself felt as well, with Blevins bringing in all kinds of material, from official documents to personal letters and diaries. The breadth of research is just a thrill.

Like its predecessor, this book belongs on the shelf of anybody who wants to be a serious student of Ozark history.

 

Remembering Robert E. Smith

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art, Crystal Payton, Leland Payton, poetry, Robert E Smith, Springfield

Several years ago, I posted a reminiscence of Robert E. Smith, a unique character and “outsider artist” with an unmistakable painting style and a sensibility that was nearly impossible to categorize.

I didn’t know this at the time, but it turns out that my fellow Ozarks writers Leland and Crystal Payton had a much longer and closer relationship with him. They recently posted some thoughts about him on his birthday, on their website, HyperCommon. Here’s a link. They also posted a link to a profile of Smith that they published in 1993, which contains many of his insights and comments about his artwork. Here’s a link to that one.

May they continue to flourish, the outsiders, the uncategorizable, the eccentrics and the oddballs. What a drab world it would be without them!

Favorite Ozarks People – 15

Tags

Bill Knight, Fredericktown, libraries, memory, Ozark Regional Library

I have a distinct early memory of the Fredericktown branch of the Ozark Regional Library. When I was a kid of nine or so, I was a frequent habitué of the library, partly because my mom worked there part-time and partly because I was intoxicated with the rows and rows of books, an infinite amount of knowledge or so it seemed, free for the taking. (They also loaned out other things, of course, and I remember showing up at the checkout desk with a couple of full-sized art prints only to be turned away because such things were reserved for grownups. I have no idea what I intended to do with a couple of framed art prints.)

The day I am remembering came after I had discovered the juvenile historical fiction of Joseph A. Altsheler, a popular novelist of the early 20th century whose books were fat, action-filled, and intensely romanticized. In theory, these books were way beyond my reading level; I had to creep out of the kids’ section and into the “teen” section to get them. But I gobbled them up like an addict. So I loaded up my usual week’s supply – three or four books, I would guess – and headed for the checkout desk.

The clerk at the desk took one look at me, with my head barely clearing the counter, and the stack of five-hundred-page books in front of her, each branded with the tell-tale “J” on the spine (instead of the “Y” books I was properly entitled to), and then looked at her co-worker at the desk. Something unspoken passed between them, and she stamped all the books and handed them back to me.

That was when I first recognized the possibility of libraries. A library can turn the most ordinary of transactions into an unexpected opportunity. Its very existence is a statement that doors are never fully closed and that thoughts are ultimately free. Many of us need to be reminded of these facts from time to time; the recent PBS documentary Ex Libris does a wonderful job of it, and if you haven’t seen it yet you should.

But back to the Fredericktown library, and one of my favorite Ozarks people. I’ve been back to that library several times in recent years, putting on programs, leading workshops, and attending ceremonies (that’s what’s going on in the photo above, my cousin Joe Brewen on the left presenting two copies of War of the Wolf to the library – it’s a history of the U.S.S. Seawolf, the submarine on which our uncle Mike served during World War II). My contact person for all my visits has been Bill Knight, who is the other person in the photo.

Bill has been a wonderful asset to the Fredericktown branch, as a recent article in the Fredericktown Democrat-News attests. He’s curious, humble, open to new ideas, intelligent, and devoted to the best interests of the library patrons. He isn’t alone in possessing these qualities, though; all the people quoted in the article have them as well. But Bill gets to stand out in this post because he has just retired from the library. A celebration was held in his honor Friday afternoon.

Bill Knight epitomizes the values of a library, and I am grateful to have gotten to know him. It’s heartening to know that those ideals I first experienced as a child are still alive and in practice.