Playing the Stereotype

Tags

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!

Tags

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

Tags

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

Tags

Juneteenth, racism, rural life

Today is Juneteenth, an unofficial holiday that grew out of a relatively obscure event, but one which has gained increased significance these days. We are in troubled times now, but I think this day is still worth celebrating. We don’t have any official holidays to celebrate the ending of slavery in the United States; the ratification of the 13th Amendment occurred on December 6, and the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, with an effective date of January 1. But Juneteenth has the virtue of spontaneity and an up-from-the-grassroots spirit, so it works even better as a day of commemoration.

In my ideal world, the anniversary of the end of slavery would be celebrated with national pride and a sense of relief, accompanied by resolutions on how to do better at wiping out the remainder of that American stain, a solemn day but also a joyous one. For now, though, I think more about the distance yet to travel than about the distance already gone, significant though it is. The last several weeks have demonstrated with painful clarity the inequities still present in our society, so this year’s mood is more about cleaning wounds than about celebrating progress.

I remember my own upbringing, in a tiny, lily-white school in a rural district. There were a couple of African-American kids on basketball teams in our conference, but that was my only contact with African-Americans other than television, until 4-H camp one year when there were others in my cabin. But really, until college I had no practical contact with families of another race.  So I still have a lot of ground to catch up, even at my age. As a teacher, I had a fair number of African-American students, and dealing with them was a wonderful learning experience for me. I even had one of my former students call me “a favorite professor” recently, which I wear as a tremendous badge of honor.

Simply put, in the area where I grew up, casual racism was the norm. I remember after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, the mother of one of my classmates offered her take on the situation in the most vulgar, racist language imaginable, shocking me to my core. My parents had brought me up to be considerate of others and had taught me the evil of racism, and to hear it spoken aloud by a trusted elder was devastating. I would like to imagine our country has outgrown those attitudes, but I know it’s not true. Another former classmate recently posted a remark on social media that was flat-out racist. Some of us called him on it, but he was unrepentant. I suppose the only difference is that fewer people nowadays (I hope) hold such beliefs, and that others are more willing to challenge them. But racism is alive and well.

I’ve been listening to the Slow Burn podcast on the career of David Duke, and it’s disheartening. I’d like to think that we’ve gotten past people like him. Unfortunately, the road ahead of us is probably as long as the road behind.

 

RFD

Tags

mail delivery, post office, RFD, rural life

Ozark Children Getting Mail from RFD Box, 1940. Photographer: John Vachon. Library of Congress FSA Collection

A little while ago, I reviewed a new book entitled Ozarks RFD, by Jim Hamilton. Coincidentally, a friend recently asked me something about the old TV show, Mayberry RFD. Naturally, these events started me thinking about “RFD” itself.

Most of us know that the initials stand for “Rural Free Delivery,” which began in spots in the late 19th century to provide mail service to rural residents. Free delivery had been established in cities over 10,000 in 1863, but it wasn’t until 1895 that Congress appropriated money for some test routes in rural areas. Rural Free Delivery gradually caught on across the country, with the support of farmers’ groups driving the expansion.

Curiously enough, not all rural people supported the idea. Two main groups opposed it: small-town merchants, who rightly recognized that one effect of free mail delivery would be that farmers would make more use of mail-order companies like Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck; and, ironically, postmasters at the smallest post offices. The opposition from small postmasters, typically political appointees, resulted from their recognition that Rural Free Delivery could lead to the elimination of many of their positions, as indeed it did. But farmers loved it, and by 1902 it was established all over the country.

Mailboxes, 1936. Photographer: Russell Lee. Library of Congress FSA Collection.

Like rural electrification a generation later, Rural Free Delivery was a huge leap forward in the betterment of rural life. Farm families could stay in touch with the wider world more easily. They had access to market information and thus were less susceptible to the manipulations of distant capitalists. They could buy more things from faraway places, subscribe to publications more easily, and participate in the national discourse more fully. Free daily postal delivery, which most of us take for granted, was a powerful enrichment to the lives of rural people.

Nowadays, of course, we hear talk about how the Postal Service has become outmoded, superseded by messenger services, private package delivery companies, and the Internet. There is even talk about letting the Postal Service go broke. But for many rural inhabitants, the daily mail is still a lifeline. Rural broadband remains a mirage in many areas, and just try to get FedEx or UPS to deliver to a rural route. It always distresses me to hear politicians talk about how much they love rural people and embrace rural values, and then to watch as they lay siege to the things that make rural life possible.

 

Favorite Ozarks Books – 14

Tags

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

The Industry

Tags

CAFO, Drury University, economics, factory farming, hogs, Hurricane Florence, Ozarks, Paytons, rivers, rural life, Smithfield, Springfield, Taum Sauk, Todd Parnell

Occasionally on my drives through the countryside I’ll come upon a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (or CAFO), which is the “agriculture industry” name for what most of us call a “factory farm.” The first ones I encountered were big turkey and chicken operations in southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas, and of course there have long been the massive cattle feedlots in the western states. About twenty-five years ago I went to a protest for a big hog factory near Unionville, a protest that like many had no effect. The hog operation went in, one of about 500 such operations owned by Smithfield Foods, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the WH Group of China (that’s a picture of it above).

CAFO is a term that has been created in large part to sanitize the image of these operations; “factory farm” is a bit of a misnomer itself because they in no way resemble a farm. “Animal factory” might be a better phrase, but since “factory farm” is in more common use, I guess I’ll stick with that. Factory farms tend to hit the news when there’s a big failure; the disaster that happened in 2018, for example, when Hurricane Florence overwhelmed North Carolina, sending waste from the many factory farm lagoons in that state into rivers and streams. But for the neighbors to factory farming operations, the ill effects don’t need a disaster to be triggered. They happen every day, in the form of dust, contaminant leaching, and overwhelming odor.

I’ve not met Todd Parnell, the recently-retired president of Drury University, although his novel Pig Farm has been on my to-read list for a while. As it turns out, Parnell is also a clean-water activist, and recently someone directed me to his blog, River Rant. I’ll add a link to this blog on my sidebar for easy access. What prompted this direction was his most recent post, in which he describes the unsuccesssful efforts of some environmental activists to get the Springfield, Mo., City Council to pass a resolution criticizing a law passed by the Missouri legislature in its last session. That law prohibits any local government – a county commission, city council, or whatever – from enacting a health regulation on factory farms that is more stringent than state law. Given that the current Missouri legislature is, for all practical purposes, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Ag, it’s easy to envision the level of regulation they intend.

Parnell’s activism has focused on protecting Ozark streams, rightly so, since that’s his location, and since the degradation of Ozark streams is highly visible and psychically devastating. So far, the only large-scale, long-term disaster I can think of on an Ozark stream has been the 2005 collapse of the Taum Sauk reservoir, which wiped out Johnson Shut-Ins State Park for several years, caused about a billion dollars’ worth of damage, and turned the East Fork of the Black River into a muddy blob for quite some time.

Photo by Jeff Spooner, U.S. Geological Survey

There’s also the continuing concern over the oil storage tank farm at the headwaters of the Eleven Point River at Willow Springs, which earned its owner a slap on the wrist from the EPA in 2017.

But sluggish and muddy waters deserve our concern, too. Like most Ozarkers, I’m subject to clear-water bias; one of the important lessons I took away from Leland and Crystal Payton’s book Damming the Osage was that activists who opposed Truman Dam faced more difficulty because the Osage at that location was not especially “scenic” in the traditional sense. Unlike the uproar over the proposed damming of the Current, Eleven Point, or Meramec rivers, those opposed to the damming of the Osage couldn’t draw on the emotionally powerful images of lonely canoers, crystalline springs, and hidden caves. And thus we have Truman Lake, gradually silting up in its western arms, while the other rivers still flow free.

But back to the most recent act of the legislature and governor to shelter Big Ag from local regulation. The degradation of rural America sometimes happens in dramatic and visible ways, a hurricane or a dam collapse; but more often it happens invisibly, incrementally, through tax policies that cause neglect of essential infrastructure, ideologically-driven decisions that lead to the closing of hospitals and clinics, and laws like this one, which give large companies free rein to override the concerns of the communities where they locate. Apologists for Big Ag often resort to the “farmers feed the world” line, a classic example of the either/or fallacy, as if productive farming can only happen in a regulation-free environment.

These people invariably refer to farming as “the agriculture industry,” which reveals their underlying mentality. Of course, industrial methods have been used in farming ever since the Industrial Revolution began, and horse-drawn machinery was replaced by tractors. And farming can be a pretty noxious enterprise, even under the best of circumstances; ask anybody who grew up near a mink farm. And I resist the impulse to call farming a “way of life” as a contrast to an “industry”; that phrase has a fragrance of nostalgia that doesn’t sit right somehow. I think of farming, or agriculture if you will, more as a significant element of the rural economy and culture – not the only element, to be sure, and not an occupation that has a magical power that would free it from all oversight – but certainly something worth cherishing and guarding. And a factory farm is not a farm, but a factory.

 

 

Across the River

Tags

cultural geography, culture, history, Illinois, rural life, The Art of the Rural

When I was growing up in Missouri, I didn’t pay much attention to events in Illinois, despite its proximity. I had a set of cousins over there, and our local TV station (based in Cape Girardeau) always covered Illinois news and weather, but other than those offhand connections I remained mainly unaware of the state’s history and events.

Now comes The American Bottom project, an interdisciplinary effort from academics and artists that provides an interactive map, historical and cultural commentary, and location guides to dozens and dozens of sites of interest, from Cahokia Mounds to Sauget and everything in between (culturally) and stretching geographically from Alton in the north to Kaskaskia in the south. The main participants in the project appear to be Washington University and The Art of the Rural, which is an interesting organization I follow on Facebook.

The interactive map looks to be still a-tweak, a little; I can’t always get the legends to show up on mouse-over in my browser, although the links all work, as far as I’ve gotten, anyway. Each link is a great bit of cultural history and I’ve already learned a lot. The East Side has been the overlooked side of the St. Louis metropolitan region for as long as there has been a St. Louis metropolitan region; its history is fascinating and troubling in roughly equal amounts. And in that mixture, I suppose, it reflects the American experience better than some of the sanitized, triumphalist histories we are accustomed to hearing.

Back to ‘Hillbilly’

Tags

Appalachia, documentary, film, hillbilly, politics

I last wrote about the concept of a ‘hillbilly’ five years ago, an eternity in Internet time, but the viewing of a sensitive and thoughtful documentary on the subject, available on Hulu, returns the topic to my mind. Sally Rubin and Ashley York’s film looks mainly at eastern Kentucky, with a few segments in West Virginia, but also broadens out to include a wider examination of the stigmatization of rural people everywhere.

Most provoking for me was the segment that showed popular comedians, one after the other, using the “hillbilly” stereotype as fodder for cheap laughs. Not to mention the famous Hillary Clinton “deplorables” comment, which pretty much sealed her fate with a lot of rural voters. I found it instructive to listen to that comment today, when we can hear it in retrospect and recognize just what a condescending, self-congratulatory remark it was, as compared with 2016, when Clinton supporters felt compelled to downplay how tone-deaf it was during the heat of the campaign.

If progressive activists and politicians want to win back rural voters — and let’s not forget, the entire progressive movement began as a rural movement — they need to re-learn how to listen to those voters and not stigmatize them as backward losers who couldn’t get out of rural America like their smarter counterparts who moved to the cities and suburbs.

Oh and by the way, here’s an image from the other movie entitled “Hillbilly” that came out last year:

Yeah, I’d say we have a long way to go in the struggle to avoid rural stereotyping.

Chain Migration

Tags

chain migration, cultural geography, German, history, immigration, Missouri, Russel Gerlach

I’ve been re-reading Russel Gerlach’s classic study Immigrants in the Ozarks, originally published in 1976 and now out of print. As you might imagine with any 43-year-old work of scholarship, it has some things I would quibble with, but by and large it’s a fine study and the source of some excellent basic information. I was taken aback, though, at his casual use of a phrase that has taken on harsh political connotations in recent years.

He quotes an earlier work, Wilbur Zelinsky’s The Cultural Geography of the United States, published in 1974:

Once a viable ethnic nucleus takes hold in a given location, chain migration may be triggered. If communication lines are kept open between the new settlements and relatives and neighbors back home, positive information may induce the latter to pack up and follow. In this way, a great many . . . rural ethnic neighborhoods have been expanded.

Nowadays, of course, “chain migration” is used almost as a dirty word in the debate over immigration. I didn’t realize that the phrase had such a long history or neutral use. But a moment’s reflection made me realize that I should not have been so surprised. Chain migration, the phenomenon if not the term, has been the American norm. My own family story is one of chain migration. One adventurous son makes the journey; writes back that there’s opportunity to be had; his brother (my great-grandfather) follows; makes a start; writes home; more family members follow. Most of us, if we look back far enough, are chain migrants.

Sometimes even entire communities were the product of chain migration. As you drive the back roads, you’ll see the evidence of this phenomenon in the names of towns and settlements, some now gone, some still flourishing:

Altenburg

Bavaria

Belgique

Dresden

German

Kiel

Krakow

Rhineland

Swiss

Westphalia

Wittenburg

And the list could go on and on (and no, Japan was not named by a group of homesick Japanese settlers!) Everywhere I turn, I see evidence of chain migration’s effects.