Once I Too Had Wings

The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–1918

Emma Bell Miles, Steven Cox, Steven Cox

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780821444856
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Emma Bell Miles (1879–1919) was a gifted writer, poet, naturalist, and artist with a keen perspective on Appalachian life and culture. She and her husband Frank lived on Walden's Ridge in southeast Tennessee, where they struggled to raise a family in the difficult mountain environment. Between 1908 and 1918, Miles kept a series of journals in which she recorded in beautiful and haunting prose the natural wonders and local customs of Walden's Ridge. Jobs were scarce, however, and as the family's financial situation deteriorated, Miles began to sell literary works and paintings to make ends meet. Her short stories appeared in national magazines such as Harper's Monthly and Lippincott's, and in 1905 she published Spirit of the Mountains, a nonfiction book about southern Appalachia. After the death of her three-year-old son from scarlet fever in 1913, the journals took a more somber turn as Miles documented the difficulties of mountain life, the plight of women in rural communities, the effect of disparities of class and wealth, and her own struggle with tuberculosis.

Previously examined only by a handful of scholars, the journals contain both poignant and incisive accounts of nature and a woman's perspective on love and marriage, death customs, child raising, medical care, and subsistence on the land in southern Appalachia in the early twentieth century. With a foreword by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, this edited selection of Emma Bell Miles's journals is illustrated with examples of her painting.

one

Walden’s Ridge

By 1908 Emma Bell Miles had published the work many feel defined her creative output. The Spirit of the Mountains was published in 1905, and in this book she detailed much about life in southern Appalachia. These were good times for her. She had a young family—two twin daughters, a son, and a younger daughter. A fifth child would be born in 1909. The family was getting by, meagerly but happily.

In 1908 Miles began writing her journal, describing all that nature afforded her on Walden’s Ridge, in southeastern Tennessee. She named and described the flowers, the birds, and the local customs. Emma was twenty-nine years old. Names of relatives—mostly those related to her husband, Frank—are mentioned.

In 1916 she added the opening preface, when things were looking bleak and she was suffering from tuberculosis. By this time she was extremely bitter toward Frank, who proved unable to adequately support the family.

May 24, 1908

Summertown.¹

To the old Wash Vandergriff place. Sunday on old farm: deserted log house standing in its orchard. This hill top sees the whole sky, and far over the woods. Deep under those domed treetops that drowse and droop in the sunshine, is the “gulf” with the creek hid at the bottom, sliding under the laurel.

Now are the most vivid greens of the year. Little haze, no dust, no blurs of heat; a still bright day, on the crazy rye-fields and on the woods and pastured wastes. Star-root: scurvy-root: pink-root: late honey suckle like a red flame in the thicket, its color ranging thro’ pale buff and clear yellow to orange & crimson. Sleepy butterflies: emerald beetles.

Church-bell rings far across the creek: little apples drop untimely, one by one, in orchard: hawk circles slowly in the blue, up and up, a mere speck, finally lost to sight in the fathomless air.

Down in the ‘gulf’: Laurel tree over the spring, its gnarled trunk polished smooth by the grasping feet and hands of little climbers, restless while mother washed on the stones and boiled her clothes on the rude furnace.

Wild bees in the canopy of blossom flung by knotty-fingered boughs over the spring. Fair bosom of drooping clusters where they tremble happily, their hum drowned by the gurgle of the spring branch. Clouds of bloom, billowing up the steep sides of the gulch, under the hemlocks and liriodendron.

Piano-tinkle of drip on pool. Delicate silvery nocturnes of the frogs.

May 31, 1908

Spent Sunday at Alford’s. Midsummer day, cloudless but for small tinted puffs that hang just over the blue rim of the world that shows between the forest tops. Breeze tempering the heat, except in the hollows that seem to boil like a kettle, steeping the motionless leaves. Hum of bees in persimmon tree. Sundrops: Moth mullen; catchfly or fire pink: umbels of milkweed, white and purple, narrow three week blooms: laurel about gone.

Young people all out visiting by eight or nine o’clock, in their brightest frocks and shirts. Boys in couples, lounging and talking in the edge of the woods. From porch to innermost cupboard niche, the house is in speckless Sunday order, with an air of expectancy; its floors are sand-scoured until the pine boards are worn into hollows between the rounded knots! Front yard with pink hollyhocks. Boys tuning fiddle & banjo under trees in corner of the clean-swept yard: over them the oak’s passion of strength fling at the sky. Children roll in grass, swing under tree, finally scamper away to build a playhouse. The “fryin’ size” boys pitch horseshoes in the barn lot. Turkey struts before the gate—a lustrous purple-legged baron, every feather iridescent: “hatched from a wild egg.” The house mother has received a letter from her son-in-law in Georgia: it is brought out and passed from hand to hand to be deciphered. Baby bounces on its father’s lap.

Dinner announced: The boys bring in the chairs & place long bench for the small-fry. On a cloth of bleached and well-ironed flour-sacks are placed bowls of cabbage & new potatoes, corn pones & soda biscuit, & lettuce, radishes & green onions from the garden: a huge service cobbler for dessert. Second table of children, except Foster, who is as usual sick, drugged with cheap medicines, and lies on a pallet in the entry. Then late-comers of the family, with other guests for whom the table is laid anew.

During the work of cleaning up the men adjourn to the oak tree, whose spreading roots are polished seats. Banjo & fiddle again: pitch horseshoes. Newcomer—a noted banjo player & singer—is hailed with shouts of welcome: he shambles into the circle, takes banjo and “makes her talk.” By and by the women join them. 4 married men joking the 4 boys about one’s rumored wedding to a sixteen-year-old girl. The crowd at the barn grows by twos and threes—at last a dozen are counted, with laughter. Boys take banjo and fiddle out to watch the game. One or two return to drink at the water shelf by the kitchen door in the shade. “Let’s go git a fresh bucket.” Below the spring, across a field of glistening, waving, whispering corn-blades, is a tract denuded of timber and grown up in brush: here a fellow and his girl may get lost in a few steps, among the bee-haunted skull-caps and primroses. Hot sun. . . . .

In the cool inner room, shut from the glare. Buzz of flies sounds faint from main house: dim light falls thro’ door. Newspapered wall: boys’ clothes hung below gunrack, and their box trunks: mirror on old bureau. Stately cat visible in loft, looking for mice: lizards hunting flies. Old four-poster: the pillows where heads shall be laid tonight, the coverlets woven, the quilts honestly stitched. Child in a rosy sleep on other bed. Sounds outside—children at play: angry gobble, and yap of scared puppy: laughter: murmur of talk under oak tree. Sudden warble of wren at eaves’ corner.

June 9, 1908

Frank [Miles’s husband] called a partridge within twenty feet of my hammock. The dulcimore, whittled of brown oak, unvarnished, rough. The one I saw had the head carved curiously into what the maker said was intended for a woman’s face, but turned out to be a cat’s. Three wire strings—played with a horn plectrum. Music faint, monotonous, strings weave shadowy melody. Like that of insects. Low, wild plaint, similar to that of Oriental sitar, sarnisen, etc. Sometimes angular in shape, like a little coffin: from 2 1/2 to 4 1/2 in length. Often played with a bow, like a viol.

Soft slither of bat’s wings. Dusk thrilled with lightning:—gray blank, vast, mysterious,—cloud-palaces fitfully illumined, then instantly vanishing. Thrum & twangle of guitars.

June 14, 1908

Sensitive plant just beginning to bloom: ladies’ tresses a gleam of white here and there: redroot & madder through all the open woods. Bee-balm, pale lavender & white heads of a pungency not to be endured on the tongue. Wild sunflower on brushy hillside Sourwood, just strung with first white bells,—like sprays of lily-of-the-valley.

Children at play in the fine clean sand, the rain-washed, sun-bleached, wind-sifted sand. Elder child shows them how to print “fox-tracks” with the finger-tips, and “baby-tracks” with the heel of the hand, pointing the toe-marks in delicately. Primitive sand-pictures. Plow with crooked stick, plant little garden of bush-clover, Frog-houses, wells. Water-parsnip bloom.

June 28, 1908

An annular eclipse. Begins in mid-morning heat & light, an ashy darkening of the sky. The medallion of flickering leaf shadows changes to one of crescents. Dim sudden fading light. Preacher Scott, wife & 3 children, comes to spend the day with his brother-in-law. Host meets him outside gate; family go in, men, after unhitching Pete the mule and turning him in the lot, lean against the trees & fence talking elections: saunter over to inspect a wrongly dished wheel on new wagon: are joined by Sunday-shirted neighbor; at last it occurs to one of the group that it is as cheap sitting as standing, and they sit on stacked clapboards by the fence. Finally, in deference to the preacher’s habits, they retire to long front porch, talk church news, all local affairs, weather & crops, which last subject presently takes preacher & host out into garden. Wives in kitchen compare babies & sandwich gossip with dinner-getting.

Afternoon. Clouds again ride dazzling against a vivid blue. Men on porch, talk all the blessed Sunday afternoon! About three “ketch out” the mule & round up the kids to go: Little girls, Ruth & Naomi, aged 6 & 4. [Daughters of Preacher Scott]

Evening walk. Children race along road, rub sand in their hair, turning handsprings & summersaults, ‘sic’ dog on each other: big boys challenge, ‘bet you can’t turn a summersault with your eyes shut’ & then sprint towards the house. Bet you cayn’t walk across the road on your hands. How many times can you chin a pole? Climb trees with true monkey-like agility, bend thirty-foot saplings to ride down to the ground in their swinging, crashing tops: skin a cat, hang by the knees fanning the air with hands & yelling 15 feet above the ground; cast off shoes. (They wear no stockings, their overalls are their father’s old ones, worn out at the bottom & turned up.) They assume incredible altitudes swinging hand over hand thro’ tree tops, grasping trunks with knees & feet, firmly: graceful & quick.

July 1, 1908

Went to make a blackberry camp at the old Raul Brown place—tracking for miles into the woods with a loaded wheelbarrow and a boy’s little wagon. No matter how far one goes into these ridges, one never feels more than about so far from home. Except along the wild laurel-tangled creeks, with their rocks and pools and falls, the landscape does not change much. There is always the blue distant hill, with its forest-trees dimly rounding through blue haze: always the same forest foreground and underbrush, the trail, a streak of sand, running through greenery of sedge-grass and huckleberries: always the official illusion of a clearing in the hollow below. The Raul Brown cabin itself is the most unexpected beauty-spot discoverable.

The children found butterfly-pea, tick-trefoil, white morning-glories or man-of-the-earths, a slender St. John’s-wort: loose-strife (?) white lobelia: a deep yellow pease-like blossom—might be a small vetch or [illegible] common enough. Wild hydrangea along the brakes: first Sabbatia and last camellias. Redroot faded: madder holds its own even with the wild sunflower just coming into bloom.

Oh, these long-abandoned mountain homes! Silent, lonely, beautiful! The Timesville place, the John Price place, the old Edwards place, the old Lewis Smith place, the Wash Vandergriff place, the Winchester place, and so on without end! In this cabin no one has lived since the builder died, ten or twelve years ago. The freestone spring is choked but its iron-tinged mate still runs, cleared perhaps from time to time by wandering cattlemen or hunters in a heavily shaded hollow almost tropical with ferns. Stray cows still come to lick the earthen floor of the crumbling smoke house, where Jean [Miles’s daughter] found four rings of iron—the boxing of an old-fashioned “tar-grinder” wagon, and the broken lid of a huge oven. For some reason the timber in this spot has not suffered perceptibly from the sleet of 1905: the yard slopes down to the spring, shaded and almost swept by the boughs of black & white and scarlet oaks: superb poplars down by the clearing’s edge, where the thicket runs down to the old fence and stops as though chopped off with a hoe. All round the house, over the old garden and fields, like the matted briers: bowed over, sometimes lying flat, under the weighted wealth of winy dark fruit. An old appletree in the midst bears faithfully, the last of a forgotten orchard.

In the dark, cool interior, briers and vines wander, bleached like ghosts and seeking the ruddying beams. The fireplace is wide and high and deep: arched with a bar of smoke enameled black-smoked oak: the roof runs out past the rough stack-chimney, to keep the rain from the daubing, and making incidentally a shelter on each side for stock or dogs.

The night was wonderfully silent. After the whippo ‘wills had sung their evening-song there was not a chirp nor a murmur. I walked in the early dew, before the others woke, to hear the chorus of birds—chat, redbird, raincrow: no thrushes, nor catbirds, robins, nor mockers—these prefer a sort of distant companionship with man. The creek bottom trees are tangled with skeins and veils of thin mist; our breakfast-smoke presently mingles with it in the still air. Pine needles beaded with rain. We eat, and are out picking berries again almost by “sun-up” in the wet undergrowth. All the cans are filled before dinner-time: how long, long the day seems in such a silent place!

We leave the cabin swept, and stocked with matches, soap, salt and pepper for the next owner, and wire the door against the cattle. It is to be hoped that we shall return.

July 17, 1908

Breakfast-smoke rising straight into the dawn.

Every day has a morning of hot still sunshine; after the early thrush-song all remains quiet, into at noon or a little later. The growing clouds begin to send forth long diapason tones of thunder. Then a grateful shadow overspreads the panting earth: a breeze comes across the woods, turning up the whitish undersides of the leaves: and at last then the cool and thrilling touch of the rain’s quick fingers puts new strength into everything. The sun shines out again, however, before evening.

For years I felt rebellious and bitter at not having a home on the face of a hostile earth, at being obliged by move from shack to cabin and from cabin to shack, each evening more dirty and dismal than the last. But now I am become like the Arab who carries his tent and furnishings from oasis to oasis, and regards the whole desert as his home. When I remember all the beautiful, silent, sylvan places wherein we have nested for a season, I love the whole vast wild mother-land. I should feel at home, I think, if cast tomorrow into any lap of the hills or beside any spring-fed branch, in a “scope of country” where the contours of landscape are broadly familiar. Home is to me a matter of atmosphere and flora, instead of being confined to a particular roof and lintel. How much more precious is this state of mind than any ancestral mansion and acres could ever be. May it not come to pass in the end t...