week of 6/12/02
 
 
 

The short, full life of Emma miles
By George Ellison
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series about the Southern Appalachian writer and artist Emma Bell Miles.


Emma Bell Miles, author of The Spirit of the Mountains (1905) and Our Southern Birds (1919), was one of the most competent non-fiction writers ever produced in the Southern Appalachians. Miles was also a better than average short story writer and poet. Her excellent drawings and paintings were used to illustrate her own books and graced the pages of numerous national publications. Her knowledge of the plant and animal life of her portion of the southern highlands was exceptional. She was a feminist in a world that hardly comprehended the concept. And she lived, at times, one of the most heartbreaking lives any writer has conducted — so much so that her early death at 39 came almost as a relief. Still, she was a writer, and her writing lives on. This two-part tribute will, hopefully, encourage you to take a closer look at the life and work of Emma Bell Miles.

The only biographical account of substance is Kay Baker Gaston’s Emma Bell Miles (Signal Mountain, Tennessee: Walden Ridge Historical Association, 1985). Gaston had access to Emma’s extensive journals and letters as well as communication with her family and friends.

When Emma was born in 1879, her family resided in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. Her father and mother were strict Presbyterians who, according to Gaston, provided “their daughter a rigid upbringing that was often lacking in affection.” The father was the sort of itinerant teacher not uncommon in those days. Despite his profession, Emma never attended school regularly; in part, because her health was frail, and in part because her mother was overly protective. They moved in 1890 to the Walden Ridge area of Tennessee, where it was supposed that “a milder climate would improve her health.”

Walden Ridge is a prong of the Cumberland Plateau that extends to a point just north and west of Chattanooga. Rising above the valley of the Tennessee River, the eastern rim of the ridge overlooks the town and the river, while its western rim overlooks the bucolic Sequatchie Valley. After the Civil War, the scenic ridge became a vacation getaway place similar in many regards to Highlands in North Carolina and Mentone in Alabama. There were numerous springs atop the ridge with supposed medicinal values that attracted convalescents. But Bradford Torrey, that ever-wandering and perpetual scribbler, described the waters he sampled on Walden Ridge as “liquid rust.”

The Miles family lived the first year at the foot of the ridge and then moved up onto the ridge itself. Emma explored the woods on her pony. She began to draw and paint with great aptitude, making detailed studies of wildflowers, birds, and the wild landscape. Nature and the few magazines that made their way to the ridge top were her classrooms. Her life was mostly solitary. In later life she also recalled how utterly lonely she had been at times as a child.

In the late 1890s (perhaps 1898, when she was 19 years old) Emma met Frank Miles, the son of a real mountain family, as distinguished from the summertime families who used Walden Ridge as a get-away. Gaston notes that while the mountain people “maintained a cordial working relationship on the surface (they) resented the patronizing attitudes of their summer employers, while the summer visitors looked down on the natives as ignorant, primitive folk.” The Bells in some ways belonged to a social group that bridged the mountain and summertime people.

Frank wasn’t much of a hand when it came to reading and writing, but he had a way with animals and rough carpentry. He also displayed an honest, direct manner that Emma cherished — through some very difficult times — until her dying day. They began to see one another, enjoying leisurely rides through the countryside atop the ridge in his mule-drawn wagon.

Not happy with the situation, Emma’s parents encouraged her to go off the ridge and pursue a career as an artist. After studying for awhile near Chattanooga, she went to St. Louis in the fall of 1899 and enrolled in the St. Louis School of Art, which she attended that and the following winter. But on Oct. 3, 1901, her mother died; 27 days later, Emma married Frank Miles.

Their life together was a mixed bag. On the one hand their love for one another and their children was genuine. Emma taught Frank to enjoy literature and they often read to one another. When she chose Frank, Emma knew that she had opted for a simple lifestyle. Not surprisingly, one of their first shared books was Thoreau’s Walden, that epic and convoluted paean to simple living. One of her journal entries perfectly captures Thoreau’s tone and cadences: “I wanted to live deep (and) drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it ...”

By marrying Frank, Emma was exposed to the genuine article when it came to traditional mountain life. She was no longer just an observer ... she was a participant. Her vivid portrayal of this life in The Spirit of the Mountains was drawn from first-hand experience of the language, stories, beliefs, animal and plant lore, music and dance, and hopes and sorrows of her husband and his kin. We’ll take a closer look at this unique portrayal next week.

Frank was as often as not her companion during woodland excursions. One day they excitedly identified numerous birds that they had never before observed up on the ridge. Out of these sorts of activities emerged Our Southern Birds, the first book to my knowledge about the bird life of the Southern Appalachians. As I’ll detail in part two of this tribute, Emma’s close observations of birds were remarkable, even during the many years when she was too destitute to own even a cheap pair of binoculars.

But there was also a dark side to marrying Frank. He was a man with good intentions that never quite seemed to pan out. His aspirations almost never squared with reality. Their lifestyle was not only simple ... it was, on too many occasions, simply squalid. They lived in many residences, sometimes seeking shelter for themselves and the children for extended periods in tarpaper shacks and tents. Most winters were a long nightmare of no money, little food and numbing cold. Emma’s health, never solid, was in constant decline. She was haunted until her own death, and maybe beyond, by the death of her young son, Mark, caused by exposure and inadequate medical care. His final words, “I’m goin’ to go to some other house ... I’m gonna die,” rang in her ears. She suffered both verbal and sexual abuse from Frank. She considered both divorce and suicide. She died on the morning of March 19, 1919, from pulmonary tuberculosis in a hastily rented house far below the ridge top that she loved so well.

Her biography concludes: “Through all her trials, Emma was sustained by the belief that nothing real is ever lost. To look for her, you must go to the woods, the only place she was ever truly at home. There her voice is echoed in the pure song of the woodthrush. Her spirit lingers among the delicate blossoms of mountain laurel growing thick along Marshall Creek, and in the pink perfection of a moccasin flower beside a woodland path. She can be found everywhere in nature, in the woods all over the world.

“‘I am the summer,’ Emma proclaimed. ‘I am the firefly and the moon, and the rain on the leaves, and the swamp orchids and the blackberries.’”

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com