The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles
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 Miles, 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.
By the start of her second decade of marriage, Emma’s health had begun to fail. Somewhat frail even as a child, she suffered in adulthood from years of frequent childbearing and miscarriages, hard work, and inadequate housing and food. She also suffered the emotionally debilitating loss of her youngest child, Mark, who died of complications of scarlet fever shortly before his fourth birthday. Blaming their desperate poverty and striving to provide better for her other children, Emma landed a job at the Chattanooga News in 1914 and for several months wrote a column called “Fountain Square Conversations.” She lived in the Frances Willard Home for Working Girls and for a time enjoyed a bit of freedom from the daily toil of housekeeping and motherhood. That respite was not to last, “sacrificed,” as she put it, “to a man’s pleasure” (Journal, July 24, 1914).3 Pregnant again and ill, she had to resign from the News, only to lose the baby a few weeks later. Ultimately she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and confined for periods of varying duration in Pine Breeze Sanitarium in Chattanooga. Ill health and wracking poverty notwithstanding, Emma Bell Miles managed to publish or sell during her lifetime more than one hundred poems, including those in a self-published booklet called Chords from a Dulcimore; seventeen short stories; a series of newspaper columns; and two books. The second book, entitled Our Southern Birds, was completed during her last stay at Pine Breeze and was launched just two weeks before her death on March 19, 1919. She was thirty-nine years old.4
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