The Common Lot and Other Stories Read online

  The Common Lot and Other Stories

  The Common Lot and Other Stories

  The Published Short Fiction, 1908–1921

  EMMA BELL MILES

  EDITED BY GRACE TONEY EDWARDS

  Swallow Press

  Ohio University Press

  Athens

  Swallow Press

  An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

  ohioswallow.com

  © 2016 by Ohio University Press

  Introduction

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  Printed in the United States of America

  Swallow Press / Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Miles, Emma Bell, 1879–1919, author. | Edwards, Grace Toney, editor.

  Title: The common lot and other stories : the published short fiction, 1908–1921 / Emma Bell Miles ; edited by Grace Toney Edwards.

  Other titles: Short stories

  Description: Athens, Ohio : Swallow Press, Ohio University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015044695| ISBN 9780804011730 (hardback) | ISBN 9780804011747 (pb) | ISBN 9780804040747 (pdf)

  Subjects: | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / American / General. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / General. | FICTION / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3525 .I482 2016 | DDC 813/.52—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044695

  This book is dedicated to the memory of the Miles children,

  Judith, Jean, Joe, Kitty, and Mark,

  and to their living descendants.

  contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: The Published Short Stories of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–21

  GRACE TONEY EDWARDS

  1. The Common Lot

  2. The Broken Urn

  3. A Dark Rose

  4. The Home-Coming of Evelina

  5. Mallard Plumage

  6. The Dulcimore

  7. The Breaks of Caney

  8. Flyaway Flittermouse

  9. Three Roads and a River

  10. Flower of Noon

  11. At the Top of Sourwood

  12. Enchanter’s Nightshade

  13. Thistle Bloom

  14. A Dream of the Dust

  15. Love o’ Man

  16. The White Marauder

  17. Turkey Luck

  Suggestions for Further Reading and Research

  illustrations

  Emma Bell, age twenty-one

  Frank Miles, age twenty-three

  Emma Bell Miles with husband Frank and twins in front of their tent home, summer 1903

  Emma with children Judith, Kitty, Joe, and Jean, outside their house, summer 1908

  Emma, the twins, and friends from Chattanooga, about 1910

  Emma and her youngest children, Mirick and Kitty, summer 1911

  Emma and the twins, Judith and Jean, summer 1913

  Emma, probably 1914, age thirty-five

  Pen-and-ink sketch of the bluff on Walden’s Ridge by Emma Bell Miles

  Pen-and-ink postcard sketch of a cabin on Walden’s Ridge by Emma Bell Miles

  Watercolor of a cabin and attached fence on Walden’s Ridge by Emma Bell Miles

  Pen-and-ink postcard sketch of an open fireplace with cooking pot by Emma Bell Miles

  Watercolor of a girl cooking over an open fireplace by Emma Bell Miles

  Pen-and-ink postcard sketch of a cabin under the hillside by Emma Bell Miles

  Watercolor of a fern and a pink lady’s slipper by Emma Bell Miles

  Handmade greeting card in watercolor by Emma Bell Miles

  Illustration by Lucius Wolcott Hitchcock for “The Common Lot”

  Illustration by W. Herbert Dunton for “The Dulcimore”

  Illustration by W. Herbert Dunton for “Flyaway Flittermouse”

  Illustration by Howard E. Smith for “Three Roads and a River”

  preface

  I first came to know Emma Bell Miles and her work almost four decades ago. Shortly after the 1975 launch of the facsimile edition of The Spirit of the Mountains, a friend gave me a copy of the book just as I was heading to the University of Virginia to begin work on a doctorate in English language, literature, and pedagogy. With no time for extra reading, I shelved it along with many others and plunged into a rigorous load of literature and folklore courses. Scarcely a month later, my folklore professor, Dr. Charles Perdue, carried in a copy of The Spirit of the Mountains to ask if I knew the book. When I confessed that I owned a copy but had not read it, his admonition was, “Read it!” Always the dutiful student, I went straight home and started in. From that moment on, I’ve been hooked on Emma Bell Miles!

  When the time came to propose a dissertation topic, I knew Emma was my girl—provided I could convince my advisors that she was worthy of study. By then I had learned that she wrote not only the fictionalized ethnography about Walden’s Ridge, Tennessee, but she also wrote poetry, short fiction, a book on birds, newspaper columns, and more. I had also learned through the help of Chuck Perdue and Dr. David Whisnant, then at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, that four of Miles’s children were alive and well in various parts of the country. I set out to interview her children and people who had known her in Chattanooga and on Walden’s Ridge (now Signal Mountain and Walden). I intended to find everything she wrote that was “out there,” to synthesize and analyze, and ultimately to put it all together in a literary biography.

  My research moved from phone calls and letters to scheduled visits—first to Miami, Florida, where daughter Jean Miles Catino lived. With family in tow, including a rambunctious two-year-old son, I spent a couple of days talking, listening, taking notes, sifting through photographs, admiring art work—both Emma’s and Jean’s—and enjoying Jean’s beautiful orchids. Like her mother, she had developed a talent for painting and a love of nature, which manifested itself through the cultivation of dozens of varieties of orchids. Upon our departure, Jean presented me with a lovely hand-crocheted pink afghan in anticipation of the arrival of my second baby, who she predicted would be a girl. Months later I wrapped my bouncing baby boy in the pink afghan simply because it came from the hand of the daughter that touched the hand of the author and artist I so admired! To this day I still cherish the gift and am apt to carry it along to show it off whenever I have opportunity to lecture about Emma Bell Miles.

  My second major visit was to the home of the other twin daughter, Judith Miles Ford, in Aline, Oklahoma. Because she lived, as she put it, “out here in the middle of the prairie,” she insisted that I stay in her home. (I went sans family this time.) For three days and nights, I lived, breathed, ate, and slept Emma Bell Miles! Judith was such an avid advocate for her mother’s work that she plied me with abundant material: her own memories and stories; letters and newspaper articles, both by and about her mother; magazine articles; pieces of artwork; and most important of all, her mother’s original journals. At that time she had in her possession four volumes of handwritten journals, kept in what looked to be worn account ledgers. A fifth volume was a typescript of the original that had somehow made its way into the Chattanooga public library. These journals covered the years from 1908 to 1918. Believing them to be of great value, Judith was eager to shar
e the journals with me, but only in her home under her watchful eye! Needless to say, I was ecstatic to see these original documents and willing to use them under any restrictions she imposed. She allowed me to take copious notes and to read some segments into a tape recorder so that I could include direct quotations in my writing. Later, after I returned home, she sent me photocopied segments of the journals that I especially wanted to access. She also gave me multiple pictures of her mother and other family members with permission to use them in the dissertation I was writing. I am eternally grateful to Judith for the generosity and hospitality she showed me on that visit and in the communications we had thereafter.

  Initially I had planned to fly to California to visit the two younger Miles children, Joe and Kitty, who lived in San Diego and Ventura, respectively. But after phone calls with all four, we mutually agreed that this expensive trip was unnecessary. Joe and Kitty anticipated being of minimal help in light of the deeper knowledge of their older sisters. In retrospect, I wish I had gone, for as I have learned more through the years, I know both would have had fascinating life stories to tell.

  Nevertheless, my research travels were by no means over. Kay Gaston, then of Signal Mountain, Tennessee, had been studying and collecting Miles memorabilia for years. She was a tremendous help in sharing her knowledge and collection and in taking me to meet various other people in the area who had known Emma personally or who had collections of her artwork. In the many years since then, Kay has continued to be an inspiration through her own writing and lecturing about Miles. Kay’s home on Signal Mountain was but a twisty mountain road away from Chattanooga, where I found a treasure trove of forty-four letters written by Emma Bell Miles to her friend Anna Ricketson in New Bedford, Massachusetts. These were housed in the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Public Library and provided a wonderful record of Miles’s life as she portrayed it to a long-distance friend between 1907 and 1917.

  Other research stops were the Tennessee State Archives in Nashville, where a few Miles poems resided, and finally the Library of Congress in Washington. My goal in our national library was to discover and make copies of everything Miles had ever published—a task much easier said than done! I could find the stories, poems, and articles in major magazines such as Harper’s, Lippincott’s, and Century, but the smaller unindexed publications were another matter altogether. Because I had only approximate titles and dates gleaned from journal entries and occasionally letters, I gained permission to go into the stacks of the Library to search through multiple volumes of publications such as Nautilus and Mother’s Magazine. I have fond memories of sitting flat on the floor in the Library of Congress between tall shelves of musty periodicals, leafing through bound tomes, searching for the name of one almost unknown writer from the mountains of East Tennessee. When I found something, my inclination was to jump up and shout in those hallowed basement recesses, but I restrained myself out of respect for another scholar who might have been laboring in some secluded corner.

  At long last in 1981 a dissertation emerged, and one might have thought my Emma Bell Miles immersion had ended. But that was by no means true. In the thirty years that followed, I introduced hundreds of students to Miles’s work in various courses I taught at Radford University. I wrote and published several articles about her over the years and had the pleasure of guest-editing the Fall 2005 edition of Appalachian Heritage devoted to the centennial celebration of the publication of The Spirit of the Mountains. I have delivered innumerable lectures and slide presentations about Emma in venues far and wide and continue to do so today.

  Multiple other scholars have also maintained interest in this remarkable Appalachian mountain woman whose lifespan was far too short. (She died at age thirty-nine.) In recent years notable efforts include the work of Czech scholar Dr. Katerina Prajznerova of Masaryk University in Brno, who has written extensively about Miles, particularly her interest in nature and the environment. Steven Cox, Director of Special Collections at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has worked for years to amass a wonderful collection of Miles materials and in 2014 published excerpts from her journals through Ohio University Press. George Brosi, former editor of Appalachian Heritage, and wife Connie have long been advocates for Miles and have written articles about her. Lincoln Memorial University sponsors a biennial Emma Bell Miles lecture and an annual Emma Bell Miles essay contest at its Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Signal Mountain friends periodically put on symposia and other events to honor their renowned author and artist. The list could go on, for her appeal does not wane.

  My own ambition for many years has been to make Miles’s fiction available to the public. Other works have been reprinted, including The Spirit of the Mountains, Our Southern Birds, and Strains from a Dulcimore, but her stories have remained virtually hidden in musty magazines and scarcely accessible library stacks. In this collection all seventeen of her known stories have been brought together in chronological order of their publication, ranging from 1908 to 1921. I have transcribed the stories primarily as they were published in the original periodicals, maintaining Miles’s spelling and punctuation. The one concession made for modern readers has been to close up spaces in contractions to eliminate inconsistencies in the original publications, sometimes even in the same story. For each story I have identified the source and date and have written a brief editor’s note as a guide to readers who may desire such.

  Though writing styles and subject matter have changed significantly over the hundred years since most of the fiction came to print, there is a wealth of cultural and biographical context to be gleaned from these stories. This book achieves what feels like a lifelong quest for me and fulfills a promise made long ago to the spirit of the artist who created the fiction. I am greatly pleased to bring Emma Bell Miles and her work into the twenty-first century.

  Grace Toney Edwards

  Christiansburg, Virginia

  October 2015

  acknowledgments

  My first debt of gratitude must go to Emma Bell Miles herself for providing such rich material to work with, then to her children, all deceased now, for their generous willingness to help in my endeavors that started long ago. I am grateful to the late Dr. Charles Perdue and Dr. Harold Kolb of the University of Virginia who encouraged me to follow my heart in my desire to make this little-known author the subject of my academic study. To my students, colleagues, and friends over the past decades, I offer thanks for their ongoing interest in Miles and my work with her. Scholar and Miles aficionado Kay Gaston proved to be an invaluable resource in those early days and has continued in that role in more recent times. Dr. Katerina Prajznerova, because of her passion for Miles’s work, inspired me to refresh my study of Miles and to pursue publication of this book. Steven Cox has been a stalwart supporter for many years, helping me access materials from the Miles collections on my various research trips to Lupton Library at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Most recently he has scanned numerous photographs and artworks from the originals for use in this volume. To all of these I am grateful for their help and encouragement. To editors Rick Huard and Gillian Berchowitz of Ohio University Press, along with their conscientious staff members, I extend my warm thanks for their assistance in bringing this book to print. And I am forever indebted to my immediate and extended family, whose unflagging support I can always count on. Finally to my husband, John Nemeth, my most ardent and always helpful enthusiast, I will simply say, “Thank you for being.”

  G.T.E.

  introduction

  The Published Short Stories of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–21

  GRACE TONEY EDWARDS

  They are all romance, these luxuries of the mountaineer,—music, whiskey, firelight, religion, and fighting: they are efforts to reach a finer, larger life,—part of the blue dream of the wild land. Who knows him? . . . Who has tracked him to that wild, remote spot, echo-haunted, beautiful, terrible, wherein he dwells? (Emma Bell M
iles, Journal, I, November 13, 1908)1

  So asked Emma Bell Miles as she reflected on the mountaineer’s love of a roaring fire to warm his cabin when winter’s storms pushed him indoors. In her fiction she took up the trail leading to that “wild, remote spot . . . wherein he dwells.” She explored his romantic luxuries: the music, strong drink, fighting, home fires, and religion. But the references to “him” and “his” are not neutered pronouns; the romantic luxuries are clearly those of the mountain male. As she says in her fictionalized ethnography, The Spirit of the Mountains, “He is part of the young nation.” The woman, on the other hand, “belongs to the race, to the old people.” “Her lot is inevitably one of service and of suffering, and refines only as it is meekly and sweetly borne.”2

  Miles spoke from years of observation and participation in the lifestyle of the people she grew up with and chose to live among on Walden’s Ridge, one of the bare-rock bluffs that rise above the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Emma Bell was not born in those Tennessee highlands but moved there with her schoolteacher parents from Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, when she was eleven years old. An only child of Ben and Martha Mirick Bell, she was primarily home-schooled on the classics of great American literature and, as she put it, a steady diet of Harper’s Monthly Magazines. She loved the outdoors and was given free rein to roam the woods and learn the flora and fauna of her environment firsthand. In her teen years, she developed an interest in art, and eventually, through the efforts and influence of Chattanooga art patrons, she enrolled in the St. Louis School of Design, where she studied for two terms. Amid talk of sending her to Paris for further study, she made a decision to return to her “blue mountains” and a young mountain man who had won her heart. In October 1901 Emma Bell married Frank Miles.

  And so began her life as a mountain wife and mother. In September 1902 she gave birth to twins Judith and Jean. During the next seven years she bore three other children, Joe, Katherine (Kitty), and Mirick (Mark). She also began to write seriously and succeeded in placing several poems and several short stories in popular magazines. In 1905 James Pott & Company published her book The Spirit of the Mountains. From time to time she traveled down to Chattanooga to paint portraits, landscapes, and murals on art lovers’ walls. Though her life appeared to be very full, it was also very hard. She and Frank struggled to provide food and shelter for their brood; they made numerous lateral moves from one rental house to another; and Emma’s earnings, paltry as they were, often had to carry them through.