the only member of the family who has maintained hope for betterment in life. But Miles, with her usual penchant for inveigling a happy ending, is not content with letting Nettie and the baby live. She must bring in at the moment of Nettie’s greatest horror a rescuer in the form of the husband who had deserted her, pregnant and penniless, months before. Now just as Nettie discovers the deaths of all her family, Steve appears with sheltering arms, money, and a promise of a new start in a new town. Miles’s compassionate view of human nature and her fervent wish for a benevolent universal order explain why she invents a turn-around ending, but they do not justify it for the fiction.
Nettie’s words summing up her commitment to life provide transition into another of Miles’s topics: “We seed a awful hard time . . . but look like where the’ was little ’uns—nobody would aim to die.”25
“Little ’uns” populate much of Miles’s writing—their begetting, birthing, nurturing. They are an important part of her affirmation of life. In only one story, though, does a child serve as the central character, and she is a catalyst who effects positive changes in the adults she encounters. Scarcely a plotted story at all, “Flyaway Flittermouse” (Harper’s, July 1910) is an enthusiastic, if somewhat sentimentalized, celebration of primal innocence and goodness as vested in a toddler.
As a sidenote, this story, like several others by Miles, took its genesis from an actual happening. In July 1909, Emma’s two-year-old daughter Kitty wandered away from the other children on a quest for huckleberries. When her mother discovered her missing, an all-out search began. Eventually a young man who had been on his way to see his girl in the valley “appeared with the dirty, berry-stained, scratched & tangled little maid, very wide-eyed, in his arms. He had heard her crying, in a sand-flat towards Middle Creek.”26 And so Kitty’s escapade provided the outline for “Flyaway Flittermouse.”
Although the quality of Miles’s fiction varies, her crusade for women’s causes never tires. It marches through stories where the women are mere stereotypes, as in “The Home-Coming of Evelina” and “At the Top of Sourwood.” It entertains a skirmish in “The White Marauder” when the young wife shows more spirit than usual and even enjoys a momentary, though tainted, victory over the powerful men in her life. It pauses to reveal a relative equality between the elderly husband and wife in “Turkey Luck,” a parable that erases Miles’s usual life struggle and substitutes the local colorist heart-of-gold formula in the ending, in which husband and wife, unbeknownst to each other, give away both turkeys they had meant to have for their Christmas dinner. Without berating one another, however, they contentedly settle for “possum and sweet taters” and are happy in their knowledge that other families on the ridge will have good turkey dinners for Christmas!
While Miles’s women characters most often seem to be victims as a result of their cultural bonds, one woman manages to shake off those shackles in “Flower of Noon” (Craftsman, January 1912). The story is set during the wake and funeral of Harmon Ridge, a relatively prosperous landowner who is believed to have no direct heir. Miles highlights the interrelationships of the pious family members who crowd in to share the spoils. She pits a grasping, hypocritical pair of brothers and their wives against young Fan Walton, Harmon Ridge’s housekeeper and supposed confidante. Though Fan must face alone the suspicions and inquisition about Brother Harmon’s money, she is not without allies in the dead man’s widowed sister and his young hired hand. Had Fan Walton been what she appeared, a housekeeper, she might have merely paid her respects to her former employer and walked away. But she was clearly more than that, and much of the story’s tension grows out of just what her relationship with Harmon Ridge was. The reader’s first hasty conclusion is that they were lovers, or maybe husband and wife; but young Byron Standifer’s obvious romantic devotion to Fan complicates that notion. Finally, in a confrontation where the family members demand to know her rights to their brother’s property, she yields her secret: “‘God’s my judge!’ she cried in a clear ringing voice. ‘Can’t you all see?’ And in her strong features, her firm neck and square-set shoulders so like those on which they had looked their last an hour ago through the glass of a coffin, they read the answer.”27 Playing on understatement to strengthen her story, the author gives only vague hints about the girl’s background before coming to her father; but the discomfited relatives are well aware that they have lost a farm and gained a niece.
Miles revels in Fan’s victory but restrains the impulse to flaunt her woman triumphant. In fact, the ending of this story demonstrates greater fictional art than do several of the others. Fan is clearly a woman in control, a propertied woman, generous and caring, as illustrated by her invitation to her widowed aunt to move her family into Fan’s home. She is confident and comfortable in her relationship with Byron. She is the one woman in all of Miles’s fiction whose promise of fulfillment in love is not compromised by self-effacement. As such, the story does not rely on the oft-used expository techniques of authorial comment and reader control. In woman’s victory, in her emerging personhood, Miles can afford to loose her grip and allow her crusade to find its own momentum.
The circuitous paths of Emma Bell Miles’s writing, then, always lead back to one center: woman. Perhaps Miles set out to portray the larger scheme of Southern mountain folk culture, but as she molded her material, one aspect of it continually pushed to the forefront. A teacher by inclination, a crusader by moral necessity, she devoted the bulk of her life’s work to demonstrating how mountain woman’s inevitable lot of “service and of suffering . . . refines only as it is meekly and sweetly borne.” Rejecting the “moonshine and rifles” that sent Murfree’s and Fox’s popularity soaring, she elected to deal with the serious, to advance a social criticism, though she felt compelled to camouflage her campaign beneath her stories of romantic love. The social criticism’s dominance so controlled her form that she evolved something more than or different from fiction. I have chosen to call it quasi fiction because of its definite aim to convince and persuade. With this kind of motivation and with her subject matter at her doorstep, Emma Bell Miles could follow only one course with her corpus of work: a record of the life of mountain woman, as she knew and lived it.
Notes
1. Four volumes of Emma Bell Miles’s original journals are housed in the Jean Miles Catino Collection of Special Collections, Lupton Library, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. A copy of a fifth volume is also there; the original of that volume is in the Chattanooga Public Library in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thanks to the work of editor Steven Cox, Special Collections Librarian at UTC, an edited print edition of the journals was published in March 2014. Steven Cox, ed., Once I Too Had Wings: The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–1918 (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2014), 22.
2. Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains, A Facsimile Edition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 69, 66. This is Miles’s best-known work, first published in 1905 by James Pott & Company, and republished in 1975 in the facsimile edition cited above.
3. Cox, 192.
4. A collection of Miles’s poetry, Strains from a Dulcimore, edited by Abby Crawford Milton, was published by Bozart Press in 1930, eleven years after Miles’s death. The collection contained all of the poems previously published in Chords from a Dulcimore, as well as others that had appeared in magazines and newspapers.
5. Cox, introduction to Once I Too Had Wings, xlvi–xlvii. The $25 Miles says she received for “a Madonna story” may have been a reference to “A Dream of the Dust,” published in The Lookout, although the date of that publication does not coincide with the journal date; the story, however, could certainly be described as “a Madonna story.” When she writes in September 1916 that she sold “A Mess of Greens” to Mother’s Magazine, that is likely the story that appeared under the title “The White Marauder” in August 1917; a mess of greens figures prominently in the plot.
6. See, for example, Harry R. Warfel and G. Harrison
