week of 6/19/02
 
 
 

Capturing the beauty of common things
By George Ellison

Last week, we took a look at the life of Emma Bell Miles. This week we’ll examine her The Spirit of the Mountains, one of the most significant books ever written about and from within the southern mountains.

Emma was born in 1879 in northern Kentucky. Her parents moved the family southward to southeastern Tennessee in 1890 so as to provide a warmer climate for their daughter, who was often in frail health. They settled near Walden Ridge, 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 become a vacation get-away place similar in many regards to Highlands in North Carolina and Mentone in Alabama.

The Bell family lived the first year at the foot of the ridge and then moved up onto the ridge itself, where Emma lived a solitary life devoted primarily to exploring the natural world. Probably in 1898, when she was 19 years old, Emma met Frank Miles. He was the son of a real mountain family; that is, one that had lived on the ridge full time for several generations, as distinguished from the summertime families who used Walden Ridge as a get-away. They began to see one another, enjoying leisurely rides through the countryside atop the ridge in his mule-drawn wagon.

Emma’s parents encouraged her to go off the ridge and pursue a career as an artist. After studying for a while near Chattanooga, she went to St. Louis in the fall of 1899 and enrolled in the St. Louis School of Art, which she attended for two winter sessions. While there she frequented the libraries and it’s not improbable that she met Horace Kephart, future author of Our Southern Highlanders (1913), who was then director of the Mercantile Library in St. Louis. Kephart cites The Spirit of the Mountains on several occasions in his own book, designating the author familiarly as “Miss Miles.” The longest quote Kephart took from the Walden Ridge account had to do with mountain “women who are breaking their health and spirit over a thankless tub of suds (who) ought surely to turn their talents to better account.” By the time she wrote those lines in 1904 or so, Emma would have known all about that sort of thing first hand.

Emma married Frank Miles in 1901. On the one hand, their love for one another and their children was genuine, and they spent many happy hours together exploring the ridge. On the other hand, they lived in many residences, sometimes seeking shelter for themselves and the children 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. Frank harassed her verbally and sexually. One of their children died from exposure. Emma herself died on the morning of March 19, 1919, at the age of 39, from pulmonary tuberculosis, in a strange house Frank had hastily rented far below the ridge top that she loved so well.

In retrospect, one can discern one great redeeming value in their marriage (and I’m fairly confident that Emma as a writer would agree) in that had she not married Frank there would have been no book titled The Spirit of the Mountains. By marrying him, Emma moved from being an observer of traditional mountain life to being an insider, a full participant. Her vivid and often affectionate portrayal of this life was drawn from firsthand experiences.

The Spirit of the Mountains was published by James Pott & Co. of New York in an edition of 500 copies. Few of these sold and the publisher donated the unsold copies to Emma. Copies of the first edition are now, of course, exceedingly rare; however, the book was reissued in 1975 in a facsimile edition by the University of Tennessee Press and is still in print.

To my way of thinking, these are (in chronological order) the 10 most significant books (excluding fiction, poetry and plays) devoted to southern mountain life (excluding the Cherokees) published prior to 1925: Henry E. Colton, The Scenery of the Mountains of Western North Carolina and Northwestern South Carolina (1859); Zeigler and Grosscup, The Heart of the Alleghanies (1883); Charles Dudley, Warner On Horseback: A Tour of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee (1889); Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains (1905); Margaret Morley, The Carolina Mountain (1913) Horace Kephart Our Southern Highlanders (1913); Fess Whitaker, History of Corporal Fess Whitaker (1918); John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921); James Watt Raine The Land of and Saddlebags (1924); and Olive Tilford Dargan, Highland Annals (1925; subsequently reissued as From My Highest Hill: Carolina Mountain Folks in 1941). Of these, The Spirit of the Mountains easily ranks in the top five in regard to both style and content.

The biographical study Emma Bell Miles (Signal Mountain, Tennessee: Walden Ridge Historical Association, 1985), Kay Baker Gaston does a good job of summarizing some of the intrinsic values of The Spirit of the Mountains:

“In the chapter entitled ‘cabin homes’ Emma penetrates the life of the mountain people as few have done before or since, something she could have accomplished only as the wife of a mountain man. She began by explaining how the mountain people love the wildness (and) she enumerated some characteristics of mountain life — the preference for freestone water, the practice of leaving the cabin door always open, and the necessary dirtiness of living so close to the ground. The book is characterized throughout by the poetry of Emma’s writing (and she) introduced readers to her mother-in-law, Cynthia Jane Winchester Miles, thinly disguised as Aunt Genevy Rogers, whom she assisted in the intricate process of putting a coverlet in the loom ... She described for them the plight of pregnant Mary Burns and her uncommunicative mountain husband, observing prophetically that ‘at twenty the mountain woman is old in all that makes a woman old — toil, sorrow, childbearing, loneliness and pitiful want’ ... Her discussion of the supernatural, so integral a part of mountain culture, and the songs, rhymes, and tales of mountain folk concluded with a rousing call to action: let all mountain people unite to throw off the corrupting influences of civilization, represented by the summer employers who lured them away from a free and self-sufficient existence ... she called them to a unified work that would make their influence ‘a peculiar and beneficent force in our beloved country and in the world of men.’”

One could go on, but you get the idea ... The Spirit of the Mountains is worth reading if you have any interest in this region’s culture. By way of closing this tribute, here are a few lines from the conclusion to Chapter III (“Cabin Homes”) that I go back and re-read from time to time ... nothing sensational here, just good writing, and Emma Bell Miles was a writer:

“So ends the day. Through the six narrow panes the night sky is visible, bent like a Madonna face over the slumbering earth. That ineffable tenderness, that enfolding peace ...

“Dear common things! Memories of hours of spiritual exaltation do not cling to the heart like the mere smells of hot meadows, of rain-wet plowed land, of barn lofts and kitchen corners. No mental awakening of adolescence weaves so close a raiment for the spirit in the after-years as the musk of mother’s hair, the softness of her worn old apron and shawl. No literature can knit itself into our real being like the drowsy afternoons at home when nothing could have happened at all — the ceaseless blinking of the poplar leaves, the croon of chickens in the hot dust under the honeysuckles. For to those who are true home-lovers, home lies mostly in the kitchen and back yard.

“Oh, the poignant sweetness, the infinite pathos of common things!”

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