'You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand' : Culture, Idealogy, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and ... (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 1

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory William E. Cain, General Editor Overheard Voices Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry Ann Keniston

Between the Angle and the Curve Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and Identity in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison Danielle Russell

Museum Mediations Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry Barbara K. Fischer

Rhizosphere Gilles Deleuze and the “Minor” American Writings of William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and William Faulkner Mary F. Zamberlin

The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton Adam H. Kitzes Urban Revelations Images of Ruin in the American City, 1790–1860 Donald J. McNutt Postmodernism and Its Others The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo Jeffrey Ebbesen Different Dispatches Journalism in American Modernist Prose David T. Humphries Divergent Visions, Contested Spaces The Early United States through the Lens of Travel Jeffrey Hotz “Like Parchment in the Fire” Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War Prasanta Chakravarty

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 2

The Spell Cast by Remains The Myth of Wilderness in Modern American Literature Patricia A. Ross Strange Cases The Medical Case History and the British Novel Jason Daniel Tougaw Revisiting Vietnam Memoirs, Memorials, Museums Julia Bleakney Equity in English Renaissance Literature Thomas More and Edmund Spenser Andrew J. Majeske “You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan Wes Mantooth

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan

Wes Mantooth

Routledge New York & London

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 3

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

Permissions From In a Generous Spirit: A First-Person Biography of Myra Page by Christina Looper Baker. Copyright © 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. Introduction to Chief Aderholt by Woody Guthrie © Copyright 1967 by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction by Sylvia Jenkins Cook. Copyright © 1976 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. From the South Carolina Library’s Grace Lumpkin Papers. Used with permission. From Call Home the Heart by Fielding Burke. Copyright © 1983 by The Feminist Press. Used with per‑ mission of The Feminist Press, www.feministpress.org/. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑97758‑4 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97758‑6 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Mantooth, Wes, 1970‑ “You factory folks who sing this rhyme will surely understand” : culture, ideology, and action in the Gastonia novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan / by Wes Mantooth. p. cm. ‑‑ (Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0‑415‑97758‑4 (acid‑free paper) 1. merican fiction‑‑20th century‑‑History and criticism. 2. rikes and lockouts in literature. 3. T tile industry in literature. 4. La r movement in literature. 5. Gas nia (N.C.)‑‑In literature. 6. Appa chian Region, Southern‑‑In literature. 7. Page, yra, 1897‑ Gathering storm. 8. Lumpki Grace, 1892?‑1980. To make my bread. 9. Burke, elding, 1869‑1968. Call home the heart. 10. Burke, F lding, 1869‑1968. Stone came rolling. I. Title. I. Series. PS374.S8M36 2006 813’.52093553‑‑dc22

2006004837

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge‑ny.com

RT7584X_Discl.indd 1

6/21/06 12:19:44 PM

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction “Beats 100 Speeches and 9 Sermons Throwed In”

vii 1

Chapter One “The Will to Win”: Working-Class Culture and Resistance in Myra Page’s Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt

19

Chapter Two “You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”: Cultural Representations in To Make My Bread

49

Chapter Three “Nothing Is Right, but Everything Is Going to Be”: Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Culture in Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling

117

Notes

177

Works Cited

225

Index

233



96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 5

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 6

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

Acknowledgments

My family has given me incredible support during the years that this project has taken to complete. Deep appreciation goes to my wife, Shuko, and daughter, Hanako, for their patience and encouragement. I am grateful to professor Jim Miller of The George Washington University for sharing with me his enthusiasm for the literature of Grace Lumpkin and Olive Dargan, and to Ann Romines, Chris Sten, Jeff Hotz, Lisbeth Fuisz, and others who commented on many drafts and brought much-needed clarity to my ideas. Finally, Sarah Gunning, Aunt Molly Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joe Glazer, and Hazel Dickens are just some of the singers committed to promoting social justice whose voices have inspired and become part of me. I thank them for having kept the music alive.

vii

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 7

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 8

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

Introduction

“Beats 100 Speeches and 9 Sermons Throwed In”

In early 1929, two organizers for the American Communist Party’s recently established National Textile Worker’s Union (NTWU) journeyed south by motorcycle to investigate the potential for beginning organizing work among textile workers in the Piedmont region (Draper 9).1 Various inquiries eventually led one of these organizers, Fred Beal, to try his luck in Gastonia, North Carolina, which had been described to him as key to organizing the South.2 Beal arrived in Gastonia in mid-March and, at the Loray Mill, the largest in the region, “succeeded in winning over a single, local mill worker. They cautiously decided to set up a secret union local and begin by taking in a few members only” (Draper 10). In a chain of events whose rapidity and magnitude took Beal by surprise, workers at the Loray mill became embroiled in a Communist-led strike that would eventually focus national and even international attention on Gastonia. After Beal had left Gastonia, the initial union inductee was fired for his organizing activities. Several other firings followed. When Beal returned, union members—“far more militant than Beal” (Draper 11)—pushed for a factory walkout. When the mill fired additional workers the following week, the strike ensued. Although very few workers had actually joined the union, “a large majority of Loray’s 2,200 workers [.  .  .  ] walked out,” protesting not only these firings, but also their own growing frustrations about work conditions (Draper 11). They succeeded in bringing production almost to a standstill, but only for a few days. Although various Communist organizations quickly began sending aid and organizational help, most Loray workers found that they couldn’t hold out long against the forces mustered against them. “Court injunctions forbade all strike activity” (Draper 14) and the National Guard was called in to enforce these orders. Many workers returned to their jobs when faced with 

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 1

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM



“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

evictions from their company-owned homes, and others were replaced by outside recruits. Those who lost their jobs and their homes relocated to a tent colony outside of town (Pope 256). “By April 15 the strike as a strike was defeated. By May 1, the number of strikers had dwindled from about 2,000 to approximately 200” (249). Still, the N.T.W. was determined to show that it was not an ordinary union. Gastonia was its first opportunity to demonstrate that it was a ‘revolutionary’ union that could not be intimidated by violence or discouraged by any obstacles or setbacks. The novelty of a Communist-led strike in the South and the daily street battles attracted nation-wide publicity. [.  .  .  .] By mid-1929, the entire Communist world took up the cause of Gastonia. Protest demonstrations were staged in England, Germany, Denmark and elsewhere. For a few months, Gastonia was lifted out of mill-town obscurity and made into a symbol of all that was wrong with the capitalist system. (Draper 15-6)

As historian Liston Pope put it, “if Communism was brought to Gastonia, Gastonia was brought to the world” (244). Two casualties—each representing opposite sides of the struggle— played a large role in keeping Gastonia in the headlines throughout the latter half of 1929. In June, Gastonia’s Chief of Police, Orville F. Aderholt, was killed when he and several other armed men tried to force their way into the guarded union headquarters.3 In Pope’s assessment, “the Communists’ challenge to Gastonia was almost completely ended by this event. Thenceforth their activities in the region were largely defensive in character and their problem [became one] of resisting expulsion rather than of making positive gains” (252). Aderholt’s death set off the town’s most intense wave of repression against the remaining strikers. Mobs razed the tent colony and the union hall. A number of organizers were arrested in connection with the Aderholt murder and faced capital punishment.4 Then, in September, twenty-nine-year-old Ella May Wiggins—a mother, worker, and union organizer who had written a number of union songs popular among the strikers—was shot while she and other strikers were riding to a union meeting in the back of a flatbed truck. En route, they had met a vigilante group blocking the road to prevent workers from getting to the meeting. As the truck with Wiggins on it was being forced to turn around, members of the vigilante group fired at it. Ella May was hit in the chest and died almost immediately.5 Although several prime suspects were examined at the trial, no one was ever indicted. This outcome—especially

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 2

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

Introduction



when compared with the mass arrests that had followed Aderholt’s death— exacerbated liberals’ sense that Gastonia law was an auxiliary of industrial interests. Following Wiggins’ death, left-wing intervention played an important role in spreading her songs and turning her into the symbolic face of the striking Gastonia worker.6 While striking workers like Ella May had battled mostly with their bodies—facing hunger, evictions from their homes, and violence—other concerned parties had battled more with words. Regional newspapers—most notably the Gastonia Gazette—had vociferously decried the strike, calling for expulsion of the uninvited Communist visitors from the North and a quick return to normalcy. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, hard-line Communist publications such as the Daily Worker had confidently portrayed this strike as the first major Southern battle in a class uprising that would soon overthrow America’s capitalist system (Pope 244-5).7 Not long after Gastonia had ceased to produce new headlines, fiction writers picked up where reporters had left off. In the several years following the strike, novelists continued the process of interpreting what the event had meant. What factors had caused the Gastonia workers to strike when and how they did? What role had Communist ideology played? Workers’ “native” cultural values? The first “Gastonia novel”—Mary Heaton Vorse’s Strike!—came out in 1930. Four more novels inspired by Gastonia were published in 1932: Myra Page’s Gathering Storm; Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread; Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the Heart; and Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire. A final one—William Rollins’ The Shadow Before—appeared in 1934.8 As Joseph Urgo observes, All six novelists saw in Gastonia a structure through which a larger purpose could be served. In each of the novels, Gastonia is given as the focus of the universal class struggle, as a set of real events operating within the context of Marxist ideology. [.  .  .  .] Differences in emphases and selectivity of events in the six novels reflect a variety of ideological sympathies among the novelists drawn to the Gastonia symbol. (67)

When considering the range of “voices” contributing to a “dialogue” about the meaning of Gastonia, it must be recognized that the workers themselves—just as much as reporters, novelists, and historians—had rationales for their behavior before, during, and after the strike. Their authentic voices, however, may be difficult to hear amid other ideologically charged assertions about the strike. Of course, actions alone may be seen as speaking volumes about workers’ level of discontent and resolve to win better conditions. While

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 3

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM



“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

occasional direct comments from striking workers appear in articles and letters in leftist publications (such as the Daily Worker and the New Masses), countless unrecorded private thoughts and conversations among workers have been lost in the passage of time. Written records of the songs workers sang—whether newly written for a particular occasion or chosen from a traditional repertoire—provide another way of gleaning insights into how workers saw their conditions of life. The novels that came out after the strike provide other potential ways of imaginatively recovering an intimate human context that is deeper and wider than the parameters of purely historical accounts.9 This book focuses on Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan—the three authors of Gastonia novels who, in my view, penetrate most incisively into the working-class experience beneath historical and political accounts of the strike and its larger context.10 In three main chapters devoted to Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan, respectively, I focus on these authors’ Gastonia novels but incorporate considerable additional information in order to contextualize them. As appropriate, I discuss authors’ familial, cultural, and historical backgrounds as interrelated dynamics that influenced the shape of each novel. I also examine other works by each author in the interest of shedding light on the Gastonia novels and on each writer’s artistic and ideological development.11 My particular focus is on how each novel’s many cultural representations contribute to meaning. Although a single novel cannot possibly convey the whole complexity of a given cultural system, it can suggest this system through carefully chosen allusions that gesture towards the whole. By embedding other cultural texts within fictional contexts, novelists can dramatically influence the way readers perceive these cultural texts’ aesthetic value and social worth. In numerous instances, brief allusions to outside cultural texts in each novel suggest significant and intentional strategies by each author to engage the larger culture in a dialogue with the novel’s system of values. Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan all visited Gastonia either before or during the strike; all had other experiences that would have given them significant insights into portraying working-class life. All active within the political Left before and during the time of writing their Gastonia novels, they wrote with varying degrees of conviction that their own mode of cultural production might influence the country’s political climate. Their interest in exploring the potential of culture produced and consumed by their working-class subjects to shape and reshape ideology seems like a natural extension of their hopes that the novels they wrote might do the same. Indeed, their writings contain numerous searching representations of a wide spectrum of culture:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 4

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

Introduction



folk, popular, mass media, literary. These representations—which reveal an equally wide spectrum of positive, negative, and ambivalent stances towards the relevance of culture to class struggle—offer enlightening windows into the way that cultural texts from different social strata and historical periods can influence each other.12 Any cultural mode capable of expressing class-consciousness and protest against oppression is potentially illuminating to my study. However, certain actual or perceived qualities of America’s folk-based music during this period seem to make it especially prominent in concurrent literary works dramatizing working-class struggle. Granted, creation in any artistic medium may lead both creator and audience towards politically important revelations and may provide a catalyst for affirmative personal or social change. Although I focus on representations of music, I recognize that ideas expressed through such representations may be metonyms for a larger concern with how working-class creative expression relates to economic, political, and mental liberation. Obviously, working-class creativity is not limited to musical expression. Linguistic creativity may also manifest itself in other verbal forms, including figurative speech, sayings, speeches, prayers, and stories. Creativity may also be seen in material culture that allows individual expression to emerge through a communally understood form.13 The question of whether these linguistic or material expressions contribute to liberation must be approached on a case-by-case basis by considering the context in which the expression occurs.14 Still, the particular appeal of using songs (in real situations and in fiction) as vehicles for exploring links between culture and radical action is worth considering. More than a written or visual/material text, a song based on a commonly understood matrix of folk expression may quickly transfer and magnify the energy of individual creation into the energy of group participation. Implicitly, a group singing a song affirms the ideas the song sets forth. While the skill of an individual composer or charismatic performer may be crucial to a “folk” song’s genesis or dissemination, the song’s vernacular accessibility may nevertheless enable relatively widespread replication through participation or imitation. This blurring of individual and group expression is well suited to an ideology emphasizing collective creation and action. Further, by its very aural nature, a song spread through folk channels easily circumvents capital-based publication requirements associated with more middle-class expressive forms. As John Steinbeck commented in his foreword to the left-oriented collection of American protest songs Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, “You can burn books, buy newspapers, you can guard against handbills and pamphlets, but you cannot prevent singing” (8). These generic qualities surely explain in part why proletarian writers—

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 5

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM



“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

whether inspired by historical precedents or visions of a utopian future—so frequently used representations of working-class music making as a vehicle for exploring folk culture as a potential resource for forming tools of resistance. Such fictional exploration, however, frequently uncovers tensions and contradictions that revolve around a cluster of questions: What, for instance, are the conditions necessary to create and sustain folk culture? In what ways, if at all, can such folk culture address issues socially and politically relevant to new industrialized contexts? What criteria—such as the fair distribution of mental and manual labor—might legitimate the talented practitioner of folk (or non-folk) culture within the socialist or communist society many leftist writers foresaw on the horizon? What stance should the “knowing” intellectual take towards culture that could be perceived as escapist or politically naïve yet is cherished by the folk? Should artistic products emerging from a supposedly exploited group of people be seen as necessarily circumscribed by limits of education, leisure time, and economic resources? If so, does this obligate proletarian writers to contextualize their depiction of folk art so that aesthetic “weaknesses”—crudity, or lack of sophistication—are seen as the result of exploitation? I explore questions such as these in my examination of Page’s, Lumpkin’s, and Dargan’s literature. Assuming that the authors themselves grasped the complete outside texts they alluded to, I investigate these texts as fully as possible in order to understand the potentially complex ways that the ideological positions of these inserted texts’ contexts resonate with the fictional novels that encompass them. I have, for instance, “recovered” the full lyrics to many songs (folk, protest, hymnal, and popular) that the novels allude to only by title or excerpted lines. In other instances, I have looked carefully at longer works that are incorporated in various ways into each novel. Examples include Dargan’s use of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Lumpkin’s use of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I have found—and attempted to demonstrate—that in many cases these cultural allusions have aesthetically complex functions within the novels. Further, granting that ideological motivations shape all versions of history, I also view these novelistic representations of reality as engaging with other thematically related narratives (fictional and purely historical alike). Thus, when these novels allude to historical events or socioeconomic phenomena, I attempt to situate these allusions within a broader informational base. In recent decades, scholars have come increasingly to understand the interconnection between how Appalachia functioned in the national imagination and in the national economy. They have suggested ways that

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 6

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

Introduction  America’s dominant culture has used various imaginative constructions of Appalachia to help justify economic exploitation of the region. Romanticized images of brave, adventure-seeking frontiersmen, for instance, have tended to subsume the less glamorous reality that wealthier and more powerful individuals who wanted the more hospitable Piedmont land had forced many settlers of the region westward during the colonial and early national period. Starting in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Appalachia itself took on a new economic desirability. Following the Civil War and the growth of the railroad industry, new railway spurs leading into the mountains provided a profitable way of removing coal and timber that had been relatively inaccessible before. Viewing these natural resources as a key to recovering from the economic devastation left in the wake of the Civil War, Southern politicians tended to back such development enthusiastically. With the concurrent development of textile mills in the Southern lowland areas, Appalachia also became a potential source of cheap labor.15 Recruiters for textile mills (such as those depicted in Page’s and Lumpkin’s novels) traveled into isolated mountain areas to promote working for the mill (Eller 125). As Lumpkin’s novel highlights, the coming of modernizing forces to the mountains often ensnared previously more self-sufficient people in a capitalist economy and later compelled them to migrate.16 As historian Ronald Eller argues, modernization hit different parts of Appalachia at different times, but “by the eve of the Great Depression, all [areas] were bound together by their common loss of autonomy and by their common relationship to the new order” (xxv). “By 1930,” he claims, most mountaineers, whether they remained on the farm or migrated to the mill villages, timber towns, or coal camps, had become socially integrated within the new industrial system and economically dependent upon it as well. To say the least, this dependence was not on their own terms—that is to say, it was a product not of mountain culture but of the same political and economic forces that were shaping the rest of the nation and the western world. (xxiii)

Not coincidentally, the dominant culture began to show a superficial fascination with Appalachia during the same time that the exploitation of Appalachian natural and labor resources was filling the pockets of outside capitalists—and leaving behind pockets of mountain poverty. Dominantculture depictions of Appalachia as a backwards region could be used to promote the benefits of “modernizing” the mountains. Or, alternately, depictions emphasizing Appalachia as the “land that time forgot” could be used to

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 7

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM



“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

obscure the reality that development and dependence on outside economic forces had already blighted much of the region. In From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction, literary scholar Sylvia Jenkins Cook has found that during the post-Civil War period, when the southern mountaineer “came into literary prominence” (11), local-color depictions of Appalachia first focused on “illicit distilling, fights, feuds, and romances,” then later “emphas[ized] [.  .  .  ] the misery, filth, and starvation of such an existence” (12). Nonfiction accounts of poverty in post-Civil War Appalachia tended to imply that “starvation, disease, and ignorance [were] allied to laziness, promiscuity, and stealth” (13).17 Then, towards the turn of the century, as large factories for the manufacture of textiles became a defining part of the South’s post-Civil War landscape, writers of sociology tended to represent this labor system as “an altruistic effort to assist those whites who could not be absorbed as tenants and croppers and also to remove them from direct competition with blacks on the land” (Cook 13-14). In reality, this industrialism “depended for its success on the existence of a huge surplus market of cheap labor, which was forced to live and work in the most dehumanizing conditions” (14). Cook’s study of the sociological literature of Southern mills finds conflicting tendencies in the desire to expose horrific labor conditions and yet portray workers as themselves prone to various types of irrational behavior. The “incongruities [of workers’ behavior],” Cook observes, “make for lively reporting but give pause to the architects of reform. [.  .  .  .] The poor white in the mills, like his forerunners on the land, seemed to provoke literary excess readily but abjured, by his quaint loyalties and prejudices, any comparably drastic political remedy” (15). Later, even as “muckraking and socialist writers were scouring the country for provocative subjects,” the perception of irrational elements in the sociology of poor whites still “precluded their assimilation for a long time into any kind of radical political tradition” (15). The precedent of earlier writing on Appalachia was not the only difficulty for Depression-era radical writers who wanted to emphasize class exploitation as the primary determining factor of poverty. In addition, the ongoing reality of conservative religious convictions and deeply ingrained racial prejudices hindered a desire to portray southern workers who would overcome their poverty if they only understood its root causes. While workers undoubtedly played a role in perpetuating their own oppressed conditions, ruling-class manipulation of social, racial, and religious ideology also contributed to factory workers’ acceptance of the status quo. Within a paternalistic factory system,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 8

6/22/2006 8:54:24 AM

Introduction  workers were constantly reminded by their newspapers and leaders of the unparalleled benevolence of their masters; in the churches their already profound conviction that the agonies of this world were the direct manifestation of the will of God was confirmed heartily by their preachers. The possible growth of any rebellious mentality toward the bosses was further retarded by calculated efforts to create implacable hostility between the poor whites and the only other class that shared a similar predicament and might have shared their interest, the blacks. (Cook 15-6)

At the same time, changing demographics of Southern labor in the early twentieth century prevented social dynamics from becoming static: “[T]here was the impact on the more apathetic lowland whites of the mountain people, driven from their homes by mining and foresting combines and attracted by mill scouts with promises of high wages. These people [.  .  .  ] brought a frequently violent individualism into the ordered industrial routine” (Cook 16). Due to this individualism, Cook argues, “they were not ideal material for labor unions” (16).18 In choosing to use characters from a mountain background to depict a process of radicalization, Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan had to confront current less-than-ideal realities as well as problematic earlier fictional and sociological representations of life in Southern mountains and mills. Guided by Marxist sensibilities, these authors were not as likely as earlier, less political portrayers of Appalachia to romanticize mountain living. Although their novels do not depict exploitation within mountain society that is comparable to that in mill villages, they still examine the dynamics of this society through a Marxist lens, scrutinizing economic factors of life while avoiding idealization of rural living. Dargan, for instance, details the difficulty of mountain farming. Although she (and her protagonist) celebrate the mountains’ natural beauty and the potential satisfaction of running a small mountain farm, she also looks forward to a socialist future in which mechanized, collective agribusiness will relieve rural farmers from such intense labor. Lumpkin is especially attentive to the way that Appalachia functioned within a larger capitalist economy. She shows how dire poverty compels the McClures to sell illegal whiskey and, later, the timber rights to their land. These unfortunate forays into a cash economy become the catalysts that force the family off the land and into the mills. The sensitivity to mountain culture that these authors displayed surely contributed to an ongoing process of reclaiming the reality of Appalachian experience from stereotypes built up over earlier years.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 9

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

10

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

In depicting the strike itself, Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan again had to confront literary and historical precedents regarding white, working-class Southerners. A realistic depiction of Southern society could hardly have avoided acknowledging the prevalence among white workers of racism and religious fundamentalism, both obvious setbacks to revolutionary consciousness. So, as Cook notes, writers who based radical novels upon the Gastonia strike “had to contend not only with the poor white as he had just revealed himself in the strike but with the idea of the poor white as a long-established literary personality. His propensity for the irrational—whether in regard to violence, religion, or the land—would be a major stumbling block” (87). These writers “had an unprecedented opportunity to create a new kind of southern literature in the form of the proletarian novel, but the poor whites were not the best receptacles for their extremely logical materialism” (91). A priori perceptions of backwardness among poor Southern whites, Cook argues, made it “virtually impossible for the Gastonia novels to demonstrate ‘sudden conversion’ [to Communism]” (92). Indeed, strategies to show characters’ gradual movement towards communist values function as a key structuring device in each novel. Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan all work to evoke an optimistic, wider sense of working-class radicalization by focusing on a select group of characters that eventually emerge as part of what might loosely be called a revolutionary vanguard. Initially, these characters’ family and social experiences do little to distinguish them from others in their community. Their self-doubts and ideological limitations are typical of those around them. Eventually, though, they outpace most others in embracing an exemplary Marxist conception of collective action.19 Each novel creates plausible explanations for these characters’ gradual acquiescence to various tenets of radicalism prior to the strike.20 By focusing on these characters, Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan de-emphasize less ideologically flexible members of the working-class community. While Cook emphasizes the “idea of the poor white” as a liability for proletarian writers, I believe that preconceptions about hill folk (and Southerners more generally) actually benefited the Gastonia novelists in certain ways. Likely, Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan recognized that they could better “sell” the virtues of communism during a time of great anxiety about foreign immigration from Eastern Europe by representing radical labor strategies as a phenomenon that had mostly developed organically among indisputably white Americans. They could draw upon popular notions of Appalachians as “true” and “original” Americans to make an assumed “foreign” ideology less threatening to the American population. As Karen Linn notes, many Americans indeed saw Appalachians—“a native-born labor force waiting to

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 10

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

Introduction

11

be industrialized”—as “a leaven to the hordes of immigrants, then forming most of the working class, who brought with them strange customs and dangerous political ideas” (122).21 Gastonia provided an actual case in which a relatively homogenous group of workers with an indisputably white and long-standing American pedigree had engaged in a type of insurrection that—to the chagrin of American Communists—conservatives often rejected outright as un-American. For those who welcomed the strike as the opening act of a greater revolutionary drama, the striking workers’ Anglo-Saxon identity had a particular significance. Conservatives’ stereotypical fears about subversive threats to American political stability tended to be based on prior labor struggles involving immigrant workers in urban, Northeastern factories.22 Gastonia provided an ironic reply to Americans who could only visualize the potential for insurrection in racial others. “Who said there were no proletarians in America?” exclaimed a short New Masses article entitled “Carolina Mill Slaves.” “Look inside a southern mill village” (7). By frequently highlighting Southern workers’ “Anglo-Saxon” identity, radical writers hoped, it seems, that the dominant white American population would better recognize and empathize with the class-based nature of capitalist exploitation after learning that white workers in the American South, former seat of black slavery, were targeted for exploitation precisely because of their ethnicity. The author of “Carolina Mill Slaves,” one Harvey O’Connor, reported that “‘Southern boosters’ had praised southern labor forces as ‘docile, 100% Anglo-Saxon Americans. None of your damned foreigners. These people want to work and they’re willing to turn out a day’s work at a wage a mill owner can afford to pay.’ So chant the southern boosters” (7).23 O’Connor concludes with an ironic emphasis on the actual American precedents for rebellions against perceived oppression: The mill bosses forget that the 100% Anglo-Saxon has produced several loud detonations upon history [such as the American Revolution]. These southern mill workers are an explosive people, hot-headed, handy with a trigger. Especially when they come from the hills. They understand the duty of civil disobedience, and have practiced it. (7)

By depicting the cultural values of Appalachian-born workers fluidly transforming into radical communist values, novelists could further (re)claim revolutionary sentiments as essentially American. Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan all use their novels to demonstrate this pattern of transformation. Characters learn their radical values slowly over the course of each novel, gradually

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 11

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

12

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

modifying behavior that is more stereotypically expected of their class and cultural background. These novels also chart this process of radical transformation in the realm of culture. Representations of characters engaging with culture early in each novel contribute to demonstrating these characters’ lack of radical consciousness. At these earlier points in each novel, the culture itself is conservative, as is characters’ understanding of it. Further into each novel, however, characters have other more “progressive” cultural encounters. In some cases the culture itself is more radically oriented. In other cases, characters demonstrate a relatively sophisticated recognition of how less progressive culture might contribute to their exploitation. Near the end of each novel, cultural texts appear that, according to the novel’s emerging values, are most satisfactorily radical. The realization of this pattern of transformation through the specific mode of American/Appalachian folk song seems significant to each novel’s persuasive strategy. Partly as a response to the aforementioned anxieties over foreign immigration, early twentieth-century interest in Appalachian music had promoted it as quintessentially American folk music (and certainly not as a music that would be associated with threats to the status quo). As part of telling stories of radicalization through Appalachian characters, Gastonia novelists used these characters’ musical culture to offer compelling implicit arguments that communism was closely related to, if not synonymous with, true American values.24 While the Gastonia novels demonstrate workers abjuring racism and religious panaceas during the strike, the actual outcome of the strike did not fully support this optimism. More objective attempts to assess strikers’ motives that were published years after the Gastonia novels suggest that these earlier revolution-minded stories created characters whose eventual informed embrace of communist principles was far from the norm among actual strikers.25 In the novels of Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan, the vanguard characters whose developments are foregrounded all understand and support the strike according to the Communist union’s revolutionary principles. In reality (according to Liston Pope’s careful study), the union’s Communist affiliation probably had little initial influence on most workers’ decision to strike. Frustrated with their conditions, workers who knew little about Communism’s revolutionary aims were willing to embrace any organization promising help. Although Communist organizers held views on religion that were in drastic opposition to most workers’ beliefs, this seems to have had little impact on the initial strike. Organizers exercised judicious restraint in not offending workers’ beliefs: “[T]he Communists presented, during the strike itself, practically no challenge to the religious institutions of the community and voiced little or no public criticism of them. Their silence in this respect

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 12

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

Introduction

13

was doubtless based on a policy of expediency as they sensed the deeply religious background of the workers” (247). Eventually, though, powerful local conservatives succeeded in using the Party’s anti-religious stance as a way of turning many workers against the new union. And, after their views on religion were called into question, organizers did make numerous inflammatory comments that provided fodder for the campaign against them. Thus, many who participated in the initial mass walkout but returned to their jobs within days or weeks came to resent Communist organizers’ atheism and oppose the union on these moral grounds. The approximately 200 workers who fought the strike to its bitter end seem to have been ones whose ties to a church were weak or nonexistent. Pope concludes that Communist organizers’ lack of proper understanding or respect for local workers’ religious heritage was a key factor in the strike’s ultimate failure (262-4). The intertwining of religious beliefs and musical expression in the culture of white Appalachian (and Southern black migrants) created difficult conflicts when Marxist-oriented writers considered folk music traditions in the context of resistance. Although other genres of song—ballads, “play” songs, blues, and instrumental pieces—were also popular, sacred music occupied a particularly important role as a vernacular expressive mode for formulating responses to life’s hardships. Religious songs provided a cultural matrix that normalized stoically accepting hardship and envisioning heavenly rewards as compensation for earthly sorrows. In the case of white Appalachians, this music was nurtured in a relatively pre-industrial cultural context in which poverty and accompanying hardships were less connected to identifiable capitalist oppressors than to inherent qualities of life in a harsh, isolated region. Transplanted to sites of modern industry, such a fatalistic cultural paradigm might be viewed as more problematic, particularly when workers sang such hymns as a form of consolation to offset suffering related to economic exploitation.26 Traditional southern American folk songs (religious or not) did not tend to offer explicit, worldly solutions to whatever social problems they addressed. They often took fatalistic or self-deprecating views of life’s hardships. Partly for this reason, during the early years of the American Communist Party, left-wing intellectuals who were interested in music’s capacity to foster working-class solidarity tended to look elsewhere for musical forms to carry new radical messages.27 R. Sergei Denisoff argues that “it took northern [radical] ideologies to add the social panacea to the perceived dilemmas [conveyed in traditional American folk music]” (15). Denisoff cites the publicity given to Ella May Wiggins’ strike ballads as the introduction of folk material into the CPUSA agenda. Whatever the

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 13

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

14

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

reality of Wiggins’ influence in the strike itself, she was “an appealing figure whose death came to symbolize all that was perceived to be noble in the labor movement and pernicious in the textile industry” (Watkins 193). Further, to intellectuals she represented an ideal of a folk artist whose songs, written in a form accessible to and embraced by striking workers, demonstrated political agency that was organic and yet concordant with leftist ideology. Her distinction as the sole casualty among Gastonia’s striking workers surely increased her symbolic value as bearer of a homegrown cultural weapon dangerous to the capitalist system. Inspired to varying degrees by Wiggins, all four of the female-authored Gastonia novels portray strong female activists who reflect various aspects of what Laura Hapke has termed the “Ella May Wiggins legend” (166). Page’s Marge Crenshaw, Lumpkin’s Bonnie McClure, and Dargan’s Ishma Waycaster (as well as Vorse’s Mamie Lewes) all suggest Wiggins in that they assume activist roles despite the paired burdens of child rearing and absent husbands.28 (Further, Lumpkin’s and Vorse’s Wiggins-influenced protagonists are shown actually writing Wiggins’ songs.) “Wiggins compelled attention,” Hall observes, “in part because she expressed the needs of women who combined bread winning with child rearing under conditions that [in Wiggins’ words] ‘just kept getting worse and worse’” (Family 226). The process of shaping the Gastonia strike into an enduring revolutionary symbol both preceded and included the various novels written about it. The NTWU’s initial decision to begin its Southern campaign in Gastonia was fairly arbitrary. During the same time as the Gastonia strike, a number of strikes with no relationship to the Communist union broke out in other Southern textile cities. Seemingly, the NTWU might have focused its efforts elsewhere with similar results. The Communist Party’s eventual decision to give such singular attention to the Gastonia strike also seems fairly arbitrary. For the CP, addressing the particular grievances of these workers was largely secondary to using the broader symbolic value of the strike to justify and promote its revolutionary agendas: The Communist leadership in the North quickly realized what a windfall Gastonia was. It had been anxiously scanning the horizon for signs of the third period in the United States, and it eagerly seized on Gastonia as just what it had been looking for. If a single Communist organizer could set off such an explosion in far-off North Carolina, where no Communist organizer had ever ventured before, where the workers were supposed to be the most inaccessible and most impenetrable—the ‘purest,’ white, native American stock, the most exploited and oppressed,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 14

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

Introduction

15

the most easily replaceable, the least exposed to politics or even education—what could not be done in the rest of the country? If Gastonia was the beginning, what might not be the end? (Draper 11)29

As Dee Garrison notes, “strike fiction of the early thirties,” such as that centering on Gastonia, was [.  .  .  ] inspired by the dramatic tensions peculiar to the labor battles in southern textile mills. When the strikes began, one of the nation’s most enduring folk figures, the southern poor white, was already well established in imaginative literature. [.  .  .  .] The meeting of this presumed near-peasant with the northern urban revolutionary offered high literary promise as a provocative subject. (x-xi)

Writers who hoped to convey the validity of applying Marxist analysis to American society probably recognized that they could not have picked a better vehicle. As Mary Heaton Vorse observed after visiting Gastonia during the strike, the mills created Gastonia, the city of spindles. It is handsome, prosperous, thriving. Here is the cotton-mill population culled from hill settlements and from farms supporting the handsome city. The picture one gets is as complete as an egg. Gastonia tells you its story, loud and clear, the very first day. (704)

As I have mentioned above, and as I will discuss frequently in the chapters that follow, the general importance of music in Southern working-class culture combined with a number of new folk-styled songs that local workers wrote about Gastonia provided an additional compelling phenomenon for leftist writers to explore.30 As much as, or more than, what the songs actually said, the idea of such songs surely had a symbolic appeal to those who wanted to see Southern workers embrace unionist-communist values. As Wiley observes, the song texts deal with only a few reasons for striking, repeated over and over: the need to oppose the mill’s cruelty, dishonesty, and indifference toward the workers; the hope of deliverance from the evils of millhand life; the hope for a better life via the NTWU and, later, the ILD; and in a couple of songs, the intolerable hardship of life as a woman millhand. The issues raised in performance were more complex, and their full scope cannot be guessed from the texts. (90)

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 15

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

16

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

Even though they had not stood the test of time required to qualify as genuinely folk, Gastonia songs in a folk idiom that praised (or even mentioned) communist ideas, institutions, and leaders could be seen as giving a certain folk “stamp of approval” to Communist political agendas. In implicit reply to those who opposed the strike with claims that “Russian Reds” were behind the whole disturbance, these songs made the labor uprising seem more inevitable and less incongruous with local values. In particular, the idea that workers were passing these songs among themselves and singing them in groups provided a persuasive symbol for the idea that workers were transmitting communist values more generally. In an article on the Gastonia songs published weeks after Ella May Wiggins’ death, Margaret Larkin thought she recognized the beginnings of such a folk process—one she felt confident would turn strike leaders into enduring folk heroes: It is curious to think how the little handful of organizers from the National Textile Workers Union have passed into legend already. Fred Beal, Vera Buch, George Pershing are names which will be heard for many years in the South. [.  .  .  .] The itinerant workers of the cotton mills are carrying these tunes and the story of the union in Gastonia into every section of the textile South. These songs that begin “Come all ye workers” and end “Let’s stand together, workers, and have a union here” are destined to be the battle songs of the coming industrial struggle. (382-3)

From a current perspective, Larkin’s optimistic prophecy sounds ironic. These songs, like the Communist union of which they spoke, did not last long as living pieces of working-class culture. To the degree that they have survived at all, it has been through the Gastonia novels, as well as through channels of revivalist and academic interest in folklore. Extending Larkin’s left-oriented folkloric interest in the Gastonia songs, a number of later students of the American protest-song tradition—John Greenway, Sergei Denisoff, Richard Reuss, and Archie Green among them—have discussed these songs against a broader canvas of cultural and historical context. Relatively sophisticated artists who have aligned themselves with working-class and leftist causes (Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie being best known) have kept songs like Wiggins’ “Mill Mother’s Lament” alive through more populist writings, recordings, and performances.31 Writing an introduction to a selection of Gastonia songs in the protest-song anthology Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, Guthrie used his distinctive folksy prose stylings to express his passionate admiration for Wiggins:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 16

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

Introduction

17

Ella May Wiggins was shot through the heart on her way to a Union Meetin’ in Gastonia, North Carolina. [.  .  .  .] She never had much schoolin’, but she knowed People. That’s a heap better than a knowin’ books. She had Faith in th’ Union. It was her Religion. It was her Sermon and the poor people was her Church. It was the only Power that promised her a better Life. It was the only Power that would give her kids some groceries to eat and clothes to wear. Faith without Works is Dead. Ella knowed that. So she Worked. She went out and talked the Union. She said, Poor Folks, You got to get together. So’s we can wear good clothes and live in a better house. Who put that bullet in her heart? Why did they shoot her down? Why did they nail Jesus on a cross? That kind of stuff has got to be stopped. And the Union is the only power on earth that’ll put a stop to it [.  .  .  ]. Ella May died for her Union. They sung her songs over the red earth of her fresh dug grave. You’ll sing ’em all over the world. [.  .  .  .] Beats 100 speeches and 9 sermons throwed in. (Guthrie “Chief ”)32

Guthrie’s comments, despite their somewhat overblown and affected colloquialisms, summarize—as effectively as anything I’ve seen—the inspirational quality that Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan recognized in the stories of mountain people who came to their radical values organically, both because of and despite their unlikely backgrounds and hard experiences. While the Gastonia novels do reinforce the more subtle points of their radical agendas through the sort of longwinded speeches and sermons (of a radical nature, of course) that Guthrie ridicules, they also recognize and draw on the more concise power of unmediated folk speech. Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan reflect this aesthetic value in their predominant use of working-class vantage points to narrate experience. The working-class songs they include provide moments within this narration that set forth collective working-class values in a particularly terse format. Long considered relics of an earlier time with little more than historical value for later readers, these novels—like the largely forgotten topical songs within them—have received new scholarly interest and found a new readership in recent years. Read with sensitivity, the Gastonia novels can do more to enrich current readers than simply opening up windows into a bygone era. On the one hand, the social dilemmas and radical political propositions within these novels might superficially seem to have little relevance today. On the other hand, the socioeconomic forces that tend to naturalize the status quo exist in every era. Individuals of any time or place may either

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 17

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

18

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

remain oblivious to these forces, or become more self-aware and then adapt their beliefs and behaviors accordingly. The process of becoming self-aware is rarely simple or painless. By focusing on working-class individuals in a highly repressive socioeconomic environment, the Gastonia novels document particularly difficult and profound processes of self-transformation. In their dramatizations of working-class self-transformation, these novels highlight the more universal value of using familiar cultural texts and beliefs as the basis for gradual changes in culture and perception. Exploring this process in a particular time and place, the Gastonia novels incorporate and synthesize a range of culture—folk and non-folk—that their authors saw as influential within various social strata. These novels themselves then insert themselves into a continuously flowing cultural stream and become potential resources for subsequent cultural synthesis. Indeed, without the presence of these radical novels and others like them in America’s collective cultural past, the contours of its current cultural landscape would surely have a different feel.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 18

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

Chapter One

“The Will to Win”: Working-Class Culture and Resistance in Myra Page’s Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt

The preceding introduction proposed that Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan tended to emphasize the “native” forces that propelled the 1929 uprising of Gastonia workers against their employers. Such an emphasis might compel an American readership—particularly a white, middle-class one—to recognize that they and the apparently revolution-minded strikers shared relatively similar cultural and historical backgrounds. Indeed, Page draws on this rhetorical strategy in her Gastonia novel, Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932). Her core group of protagonists—those who eventually play key roles in the novel’s climactic strike—all grow up in working-class families in the same Southern mill town and develop grievances against the capitalist system that are grounded in local experience. At the same time, Page certainly does not shy away from linking the forces influencing her characters’ rebellion to a geographically broader and more theoretically conceived Communist agenda for a revolutionary takeover of America’s government and economic institutions. Although Page’s novel begins with detailed depictions of the distinct white and black communities in the mill village, it later sends various characters further afield—to work in the shipyards of New York City and the stockyards of Chicago (where they become involved in ill-fated labor movements); to fight in Europe during World War I; to convalesce on an Appalachian farm; and to live in post-Revolution Russia. Eventually, Page uses the Gastonia unionization effort and strike to gather in her wide-ranging flock of characters. She portrays the genesis and outcome of the strike, as well as the meaning characters get from it, as the result of a complex intermingling of ideologies shaped by diverse local and distant experiences. 19

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 19

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

20

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

My own focus on Gathering Storm’s representations of working-class culture begins by examining biographical material that sheds light on Page’s complex relationship to this culture and to the people who created and/or consumed it.1 In telling ways, aspects of family background, artistic inclination, cultural interests, and activist/academic goals all inform Page’s development into the radical writer of Gathering Storm. Page adapted many experiences from her childhood and young-adult life into her fiction, imaginatively transmuting them into experiences of worker-protagonists whose lives, in terms of class background, are distant from her own. The intensely radical orientation of Page’s representations of culture in the novel reflects the trajectory of her own diverse experiences. Born in 1897, Page grew up in an affluent and cultured home in Newport News, Virginia, the daughter of a prominent local doctor and an artistically gifted mother (Baker 10, 14).2 “Surrounded by books,” she freely indulged her passion for reading (qtd. in Baker 10). Music also had importance in Page’s early life. She began formal piano study as a young child and continued through college, encouraged by an aunt, “a highly gifted pianist” (qtd. in Baker 14). Fond memories included playing the organ for her grandmother and singing “rollicking ballads” with her family in the evenings (qtd. in Baker 15). Despite a fairly secure home life, Page became sensitive early to her community’s dramatic class and racial divisions. She learned that vicissitudes of the ubiquitous shipbuilding industry, and the capitalist vision of the shipyard’s absentee owner, shaped her hometown’s social reality—including that of friends from working-class families (Baker 24). Although her parents took a relatively liberal stance towards the region’s Jim-Crow culture, Page observed in retrospect that they “pushed [conservative norms], but they never pushed too far” (qtd. in Baker 12). As a young child, she gained insight into racism through developing a rapport with her family’s black maid, Belle: “I grew fond of her and she of me” (qtd. in Baker 19). Her gradual awareness that social injustices had severely limited Belle’s potential helped her to step outside of her race/class background and imagine “what it was like from a black person’s point of view” (qtd. in Baker 20). Likely, some of Page’s emotional identification with a black worldview came from the times when she and Belle would “[sing] old Negro spirituals and hymns together” (qtd. in Baker 19).3 After completing a master’s degree in sociology at Columbia University, Page took a position as a YWCA industrial secretary at a silk mill near Norfolk. There, she gained intimate and troubling glimpses into factory labor: “When I saw the mill conditions and what the girls and women did day

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 20

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

“The Will to Win” 21 after day, I understood the need for unions” (qtd. in Baker 50). Through this experience, Page came to disagree with the YWCA’s belief that “social relations would right themselves” simply through the influence of “peace and persuasion, law and order, and the power of love” (qtd. in Baker 51). Particularly after her superiors censured her for “preaching socialism and unionism [to the workers],” she decided that “perhaps the solution depended on changing the system itself ” (qtd. in Baker 52). In a further attempt to transcend her privileged class background and understand working-class life, Page again left the South in 1921 and, against the wishes of her family, sought factory work in Philadelphia (Baker 54). Through various menial jobs, she attempted to “study the working people as one of them,” at the same time realizing that, unlike most of the workers around her, she could always fall back on her family’s financial security (qtd in Baker 55). Wanting to grasp the full spectrum of responsibilities entailed in labor activism, she served as an organizer with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union while also holding various standard sweatshop jobs. In her acquaintances with the families of co-workers—the overwhelming majority of whom were “foreign-born girls [many of Eastern European descent] who spoke little English” (qtd. in Baker 56)—Page observed a high value placed upon music performance and education as “a part of the way they survived” (qtd. in Baker 59). Although these families used music-oriented gatherings to promote working-class solidarity, they also, Page noted, saw musical education as a way of “qualifying [their children], in a sense, to become members of the middle class” (qtd. in Baker 59). Page’s experiences in the clothing-workers union convinced her of the difficulty of bridging the gap between the workers’ culture and her own: “I wouldn’t be able to function effectively in [this] union setup because of my different background” (qtd. in Baker 64). After deciding against the life of a professional organizer, Page taught at the University of Minnesota and eventually worked towards a doctorate in sociology. For her dissertation, she decided to return to her native South to investigate “traditional attitudes of southern textile workers” (qtd. in Baker 72). Because sociology’s particular academic rigors required heavy use of statistics, she prepared a series of questions for workers and management designed to yield quantifiable insights into attitudes towards social relations. Beneath the dispassionate approach, however, lay a desire to “know what ordinary people were thinking and what kind of potential they had” and, more specifically, “to see the South get organized” (qtd. in Baker 72, 73). The YWCA, with which Page had again become affiliated, helped fund the study, expecting that Page’s research would assist their goal of “helping prepare for unionism among women in

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 21

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

22

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

the South” (qtd. in Baker 72). On the YWCA’s advice, Page selected Greenville, South Carolina, and Gastonia, North Carolina, both major textile cities, for her field research. In the summers of 1925 and 1926, she spent several weeks in “mill hills” outside of Greenville and Gastonia, respectively. Soon after completing her dissertation, “Some Behavior Patterns of Southern Textile Workers,” she adapted it into Southern Cotton Mills and Labor (1929). This commercially published, non-fiction study “included material [.  .  .] that I couldn’t have gotten away with in the thesis, a cold, removed academic piece.” She tried to write “sympathetically about mill people and what they wanted to be” and “to avoid academic language so that it might appeal to a working-class audience” (qtd. in Baker 98). Despite Page’s working-class sympathies, her impressions of Greenville and Gastonia initially left her feeling ambivalent about the prospects for building strong unions in the southern mills. Workers’ agricultural backgrounds, she felt, had made them “very individualistic. Their habits of action and therefore of thought rarely extend beyond the small family group” (Southern 39). As a result, she found that “textile workers didn’t believe they could work cooperatively in a union (‘Our folks don’t stick together much,’ they said)” (qtd. in Baker 77). Instead of finding workers close to rebellion, she found them generally “resigned or even pleased with their situation” (qtd. in Baker 79). Conservative religious convictions, she felt, contributed to their passivity. Still, Page saw some potential for positive collective action, particularly among “workers [who] had come down from the mountains where communal attitudes were strong” (qtd. in Baker 79). She came to believe that she and similarly motivated individuals could effect change in the southern labor system by “combin[ing] teaching and indirect organizational work with radical propaganda,” turning passive workers into “union fighters [.  .  .] once they got the idea!” (qtd. in Baker 83). The 1929 Gastonia strike cast a new light on Page’s earlier sense that Southern textile workers lacked enough resolve or indignation to fight labor exploitation en masse. Page found this strike “so dramatic and interesting” that she decided to attempt a novel. “[I]t never occurred to me,” she later observed, “to do anything else” (qtd. in Baker 110). Because she had not witnessed the strike, she “let the [dissertation] research material sift through [her] imagination.” She based various vanguard characters on certain workers she had observed earlier who seemed like potential radicals among a relatively passive majority—those “native southern textile workers [.  .  .] who were ready for a strike and would join one if they had the chance” (qtd. in Baker 111). The prominent roles played in the strike by Ella May Wiggins—picketing worker, activist, single mother, songwriter—also inspired

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 22

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

“The Will to Win” 23 Page’s attempt to positively reinvent the subjects of her guarded sociological study as militant strikers: “I never knew Ella May personally, but I read everything I could about her and talked with people who knew her. It seemed like I knew her too” (qtd. in Baker 111). When Gathering Storm came out in 1932, it “had little audience outside of workers’ or Left progressive circles” and “received very few reviews,” mostly unfavorable (qtd. in Baker 116). Barbara Foley reports that it was “given short shrift in the Daily Worker and virtually ignored in other leftist organs” (50). Most criticism of Gathering Storm has focused on the work’s admittedly clumsy tendentiousness. Sylvia Jenkins Cook’s assessment of Page’s effort, for instance, is unequivocally cynical: “The book is a display of virtuosity in including all the proper Party doctrines and giving them life in a wishful vision of the South, but it demands the sacrifice of both the reader’s credulity and his right to confront the material with some measure of independence” (123). In Cook’s view, Page exaggerated both “southern horrors” and “the flexibility of southern workers” (122) in the interest of her political vision. She mars her story, Cook feels, with “didactic tone,” “overpropagandizing” (120), and “lack of humanizing details” (121) in character development. Like Cook, Laura Hapke sees Page as driven by “a propagandist’s Communism”—prone to paint scenes of “southern fantasy,” such as those showing white workers easily shedding racist ideology to meet with black workers “on terms of casual equality” and plan an integrated strike (164). Hapke also believes that Page—in her eagerness to build a revolutionary proletariat out of her Southern workers—avoids resolving a fundamental problem of how a female worker can become an “educated woman militant” (166) and still remain within the South’s repressive labor system. At the novel’s conclusion, Page’s main female activist character, Marge, seems destined to become a professional labor organizer. Another of the novel’s models for the activist female worker, the historical Ella May Wiggins, has been killed in the strike. What, Hapke rightly wonders, of the thousands of undereducated female workers left behind? (166).4 Despite such aesthetic and ideological tensions, Gathering Storm deserves further investigation. Among the Gastonia novels, it is unique in trying to bring the experiences of black workers, as well as white, to the fore.5 To intertwine the political destinies of white and black families, her narrative shuttles between the white “Row Hill” and the black “Back Row,” and between this segregated Southern mill village and New York City, where progressive white and black characters work together towards socialist goals. As part of depicting these diverse social realms, Page often represents and makes value judgments on the relative worth of various cultural modes of expression.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 23

6/22/2006 8:54:25 AM

24

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

Particularly, she assesses the role of culture in fomenting or stifling workers’ understanding of exploitation and desire to combat it. Representations of music across a spectrum of styles and within a range of contexts appear most frequently. Characters encounter white hymns and black spirituals, songs associated with wartime patriotism and love of the South, sentimental and jazzy popular songs, older radical songs, and, finally, new protest songs from both white and black traditions. Print mediums such as books, newspapers, and letters are also shown contributing to characters’ worldviews. References to such a range of cultural texts contribute to a discourse on cultural values that runs the novel’s length. Within the ideological framework that the novel constructs, creating or consuming certain cultural products may be politically frivolous or even insidiously repressive, while engaging with other classattentive ones may be politically motivating. In contrast to the “Gastonia novels” of Lumpkin and Dargan, which spend considerable time detailing characters’ way of living in the mountains before coming to the mill, Gathering Storm begins with its central family already long entrenched in mill life. (Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread and Dargan’s Call Home the Heart each devote approximately their first third to incidents that occur in the mountains prior to characters’ migrations.) Page opens her novel around 1915, introducing a white mill family whose stillliving matriarch, “Ole Marge,” had been part of a large out-migration from the North Carolina mountains to the low-lying mill towns some forty years earlier. Long years in the mill village have mostly subsumed mountain heritage into a homogenous culture of white mill workers. As her pre-Gathering Storm sociological study of Southern textile workers reveals, Page had an economic-derived belief that mountain culture was never truly independent of the currents shaping America’s economic development. White mountaineers, she explained, were descended from poor colonial-era settlers who came to the south-Atlantic colonies as debtors or indentured servants, [and] soon found competition with large plantation owners so one-sided that they were forced onto poorer and poorer land and into greater and greater poverty. [.  .  .  .] First they were pushed into the foothills. Many of them retreated into the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains [.  .  .]. Seemingly, this section of the Poor Whites preferred the illusions of semi-independence and social equality which their greater isolation gave. Here in the mountains there were no plantation owners or merchant aristocrats, no Negro slaves. The competition was no less real, but more indirect. These differences in the situation of

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 24

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

“The Will to Win” 25 highland and lowland Poor Whites led, after some generations, to minor differences in the traditions of the two, but these have never been fundamental enough to affect the basic unity between them. (Southern 34-5)

Further, outside of the mountains, in contexts where capitalist interests exploit their labor, all white wage and tenant laborers, regardless of background, are equally “stigmatized” by and “set off from the rest of the southern population” (Southern 35). Thus, Page’s sociological study and her Gathering Storm both use the term “Poor White” (generally capitalized as above) to highlight the idea that poverty creates profound cultural links among a broad and geographically diverse segment of the white population. Nevertheless, Page’s fiction does subtly link Ole Marge’s willingness to openly berate the mills to her having grown up in a mountain culture that values “fighting spirit.” In a long conversation that begins the novel, Ole Marge, prodded by fourteen-year-old granddaughter Young Marge, who has never seen the family’s ancestral hills, tells the story of “how we Marlows come down to the cotton mill” (19). Besides acquainting the reader with key events in the family’s history, this intergenerational conversation shows Young Marge gleaning the seeds of her future activism from an elder’s unschooled and hard-won observations on both mountain heritage and decades of millwork. In trying to understand what she perceives as the factory system’s inherent injustice, Young Marge, who has just begun to work in the mills, is drawn to Ole Marge, sure that “there was nobody [.  .  .] in Row Hill or all of Greenville who could touch her Granny. Some in the village might call Ole Marge quare ’n with a tongue dipped in bitters. They were just stick-inthe-muds, ’n her Granny too smart for ’em. Too smart ’n with a way all her own” (9).6 A lifetime of doing underpaid mill work and seeing family members die in the mill town’s unhealthy conditions has indeed left Ole Marge’s tongue bitter; she tells Young Marge that “I hates [the mill bosses], ’n God forgive me, ’ll go on hatin’ ’em till I die” (29). In marked contrast to Ole Marge, Sal—the daughter of Ole Marge and the mother of Young Marge— has become apathetic, seeing no alternative to the exploitative millwork that has consumed her health. Sal, a young girl when the family came to the mill, is now “a bent, old woman at forty-two” (45). While Ole Marge’s experience with mill life is portrayed as typical, her radical outlook is not. Her belief that workers’ “only chance” to better their conditions is through class struggle—potentially violent—distinguishes her from disheartened families who quit mill work to return to mountain farms, and from those who have resigned themselves to life as poor factory workers. Since hearing a recruiter’s promotion for the mill, some ten years after the

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 25

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

26

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

Civil War, Ole Marge has held onto a progressive vision of a place “whar our chillen can get some larnin’, ’n a chanct to live decent” (15). Determined to leave the mountains, she secretly killed the family’s potato crop, forcing her family to turn to the mills for survival. Even after realizing that the recruiter had wildly exaggerated his claims about easy work and high wages, Ole Marge maintains faith in industrialism’s potential for raising living standards: Bad as [life in the mill] was, the hills was as bad, or worser. Thar warn’t no goin’ back. I knew that. [.  .  .  .] Thar’d never be schools or nothin’ in the mountains. What we had to do was make the mill do what they’d a-promised, ’n take the chillen outa the mill’n put ’em in school, ’n larn ’em how to read’n write.” (22 emphasis in original)7

Significantly, Ole Marge has acted as well as spoken out to protest labor injustices. She once participated in a notable struggle in Georgia, a walkout strike “in the ’nineties” (25) that won a twelve-hour day and kept children under ten out of the mills.8 Such struggles, as she tells her granddaughter, have gotten workers’ “heads outta the mire, though we are still in it up to our waists” (25). In telling of this strike, she also situates herself as the first female activist in the family’s long line of “fighting people.” Earlier male ancestors fought in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, though, as Ole Marge is careful to add, those wars have never helped “our own people—the common, workin’ folks” (30). Through her stories, Ole Marge pushes her namesake to uphold the family’s legacy of struggle, making Young Marge promise that “no matter what happens” she will not “lose the fightin’ spirit” (30).9 Having established a certain “fightin’ spirit” ideal through Ole Marge, Page then presents a scene in which the family’s practice of singing hymns together seems to compromise this rebelliousness. Every Sunday evening, we are told, the family opens their parlor and, with Young Marge on organ, sings hymns. For Young Marge, this is “the one genuine pleasure of the week” (40). For Page, however, the use of the parlor for this “Sabbath evening ritual” (41) symbolizes how music is alienated from the Crenshaws’ social reality. By singing in the parlor—“a room set apart, dedicated to the high dreams and frustrated hopes [.  .  .] of a nobler life” (40)—the family tries to temporarily replicate an elusive bourgeois ideal, to the point of putting a superfluous songbook on the organ. Even though “Marge could not read the notes, but played by ear, and the singers knew all the words by heart [.  .  .] the singing could never begin without the song book” (41).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 26

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

“The Will to Win” 27 In light of the Marxist convictions she developed as an adult, Page’s upbringing left her ambivalent about Christianity’s value as a motivating force for oppressed people. She herself came from a “strong religious [tradition]” which “for all its faults and rigidities, had a certain energy and poetry that caught hold of [me].” “Religion can be a strength,” she observed, “because it offers so many good things to believe in—the Golden Rule, for example” (qtd. in Baker 113). Nevertheless, her study of Gastonia mill culture convinced her that certain central tenets of Christian belief were a “handicap” in these workers’ lives: “Believing deeply that they were going to go to something better [.  .  .] made it easier for mill workers to put up with terrible conditions in the present” (qtd. in Baker 113).10 While Page had fond memories of her own family singing hymns, she felt differently when workers she saw as oppressed expressed their desires through religious song: “One night at the boarding house we played hymns and sang. The words to the songs were awful, and the people’s melancholic, rather morbid pleasure in them ruined any pleasure I might have had at the thought of fitting in. I played the piano, but I couldn’t sing those hymns” (qtd. in Baker 80). Such experience colors the depiction of the Crenshaw family singing “all the old favorites” (42). Page makes her point absolutely clear by preceding the hymn session with Marge asking her mother why “mill folks has it so hard?” Sal responds with a stream of religious platitudes that contrasts markedly with Ole Marge’s earlier indignation towards the poverty of mill folks: “Everything’s God’s Will, Marge. It’s hard, but we’ll understand it bettah by ’n by. Parson Brown saws [sic] we gotta bear our cross in patience, ’n re-sign ourselfs to God’s mysterious Plan [.  .  .  .] [R]eligion is a comfort to the poor. It’s all we got” (36-7). The specific hymns that Page identifies as the family’s favorites generally reinforce the idea that the family is drawn to and hindered by religious doctrine that encourages passive acceptance of earthly trials. “There is a Land,” for instance, promises that death will bring a “land of pure delight” where “pleasures banish pain.”11 Similarly, “Shall We Gather at the River” anticipates a place “by the throne of God” where “our pilgrimage can cease” and people can “lay every burden down” and worship “all the happy golden day.”12 “Wash Me and I Shall Be Whiter Than Snow” advises that God will “cleanse” and “create a new heart” in those who “humbly entreat” and “patiently wait.”13 Although the Crenshaws’ music-making tradition provides a vehicle for family unity and creative expression, it falls short in addressing their practical problems. On the one hand, the experience of producing harmonies with the family lifts Marge in an intangible way: “As they sang [.  .  .] and the harmonies rose and swelled, Marge felt some compelling force take hold of her

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 27

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

28

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

and waft her away to parts unknown [.  .  .  .] What happened to her when they sang, she couldn’t explain, but it sure was sweet” (42).14 On the other hand, “quiet tears slipping down Sal’s cheeks” (42) suggest that, for Marge’s mother, the hymns may painfully highlight unrealized earthly hopes even while promising something better after death.15 Another scene develops Page’s argument that organized religion conspires with labor’s managerial interests in maintaining oppression. Marge— now adrift after her grandmother’s death—attends a revival at the “company church” (103), where, although skeptical and resistant, she eventually succumbs to the pressure to allow herself to be “saved.” In Page’s depiction, the revivalists’ shouts of “Hallelujah, Hallelujah” blend with the “growl, growl” of the mill (105).16 At least one hymn that the Crenshaws had sung in their parlor—“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”—reappears here, suggesting that this family willingly reproduces in their home a culture that also exists as an ideological apparatus in the public sphere. Significantly, Page argued in Southern Cotton Mills and Labor that “colored churches” handicap black workers as much as white churches do their working-class members: “Colored churches exert an exceptionally conservative influence, presenting to their memberships a totally wrong slant on this subject race’s problems and methods of dealing with them” (42). Although she observed that “out of hardship and isolation, Negroes have developed a rich culture of their own” that “reflects the working class nature of their lives,” she did not see this “rich culture” as especially relevant to a struggle against economic exploitation: “only occasionally does a song or story give forth a call to the toiling and oppressed of this race to revolt against their enslavement” (42). Gathering Storm, in contrast, omits organized black churches as a force, for good or ill, contributing to workers’ stance towards oppression, explaining that “the company had not thought it advisable to build a church and hire a pastor for its colored families” (106). When members of the black Back Row community go to their own revival “out in the country,” their singing is not only “far more beautiful” than that of the white revivalists, but also “more their own” (107). In keeping with this aside, Page elsewhere portrays black spirituals as folk culture, autonomous from organized religion, that gives black workers valuable inspiration and guidance. Having opened Gathering Storm describing the white Crenshaws talking about the hardships of mill life and then singing in their parlor, Page then offers a parallel description of how members of the black community who live in “Back Row” (a segregated section of town adjacent to Row Hill) have passed the same Sunday evening with talk and song. The latter scene opens with one of the Back Row patriarchs, Uncle Ben Morgan, “and his two

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 28

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

“The Will to Win” 29 youngest [.  .  .] sitting on their doorstoops [.  .  .] while [Ben] strummed his banjo and hummed under his breath” (51). The mood quickly shifts from pastoral content to socio-political discontent as more friends and family gather and talk turns to the various injustices of millwork, sharecropping, and housekeeping for wealthy whites. Through their conversation, these characters reveal that they recognize the mechanisms of oppression but cannot see viable alternatives. As one young sharecropper, Jim, concludes, the economic system traps black sharecroppers in conditions not unlike slavery, “but what kin they do?” (57).17 While the Crenshaw’s Sunday-night music ritual is shaped by the pretensions of going into the parlor and using a songbook, the music on Uncle Ben’s porch is more spontaneous and communally inclusive. It radiates freely into the night and draws people from neighboring cabins. Even Marge, when she happens to step outside, “caught a faint echo of the singing as it floated across the fields from Back Row to Row Hill” (61). A reader might initially surmise that the cultural function of spirituals such as “Swing Low” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” parallels that of the hymns sung by the Crenshaws, expressing faith that a world free of suffering awaits after death.18 Page differentiates the two traditions, however. While the Crenshaw family does not analyze how these hymns might shed light on their daily lives, the black singers proudly discuss how their music was once used explicitly to resist oppression: Uncle Ben had told the children more than once how this song [“Steal Away to Jesus”] had been used by the Negroes, when still in slavery, as a signal for a meeting in the woods. Here, late at night, and far away from their master’s plantations, they’d gather as they were forbidden to do, and talk of freedom. (59)

The black singers use the words to another spiritual, “Go Down, Moses”— the “best song we got” and “the truest”—to initiate discussion of their current dilemma: “‘Moses lead [sic] the chillen of Israel,’” Uncle Ben asserts, “‘’n we needs somebody to lead us’” (61). After more talk of how the fifty years since abolition have failed to end black poverty and subservience, the group raises a final hymn—“A Great Day’s Comin’ Bye ’n Bye”—as a rhetorical conclusion (62). Like “Steal Away” and “Go Down, Moses,” this song reveals a smoldering political determination that awaits leadership. Clearly, these juxtaposed representations of the Crenshaws and the Back Row villagers each singing their most cherished songs are intended to favor the latter tradition as a response to social conditions. Page renders this

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 29

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

30

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

Back Row evening to show that black workers have created a context for their spirituals that intertwines aesthetically and religiously fulfilling performance rituals with political aspirations. She does not allow less serious music to dilute the effect of this heady mix of spirituals and debate. When several young boys ask Uncle Ben to liven things up with a few dance tunes, older group members dictate that frivolous entertainment should wait until another night of the week (60).19 In his contributions to the evening’s discussion, the banjo-playing Uncle Ben reveals that he possesses both a valuable musical tradition and (like Young Marge’s grandmother) a determined political vision of a future where his people will know greater socioeconomic equality. Uncle Ben provides Back Row children with a politically motivating answer when they ask why their slave ancestors had not overthrown their oppressors. While another adult advises that, then and now, “there ain’t but one way to git along with white folks’n that is to let ’em have their way,” Uncle Ben counters that “even with all the odds agin ’em, [slaves] did rise up, once in awhile,” even though they were “strung for it” (59).20 One child, George, hears the adults’ grievances and responds that when he grows up “we-uns ain’t gone let the white mens treat colored folks thata way!” (57). While some of his “elders chuckled at his cock-sureness,” Uncle Ben tells them not to laugh: “‘Sonny, mebbe you’s right’” (57). George absorbs Uncle Ben’s progressive vision as an antidote to his own parents’ morbid fatalism, tapping into this elder’s cultural resources by asking Uncle Ben for “a lil’ music” after the serious conversation has run its course (58).21 (Similarly, Young Marge seeks out her Grandmother’s bitter insights as an alternative to her mother’s more defeatist ones.) Years later, Uncle Ben’s stories and songs remain George’s inspiration for “right[ing] the wrongs of his people” (168). While most people his age “were too taken up with jazz ’n craps to pay other things much mind,” George and three like-minded people spend free time “sing[ing] work-songs or spirituals” and discussing problems confronting their race (168). (As will be discussed further, this statement contributes to the novel’s generally negative depiction of jazz.) What line of reasoning might have led Page to privilege black culture’s ability to resist/reform capitalism? More explicitly excluded than white workers from all but the bottom rung of the industrial ladder, black workers were less likely to harbor illusions that they shared a common interest with white industrialists. Their cultural expression might be assumed to reflect this social reality.22 In contrast, dominant culture encouraged whites, regardless of class, to believe that they (a la Ben Franklin or Horatio Alger protagonist) could scale America’s economic ladder. Page’s white workers buy into this ideology and tend to overlook class exploitation. At one point in the novel,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 30

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

“The Will to Win” 31 a group of white workers agree that all whites should stick together to keep blacks “in their place” (136). In Page’s vision, white culture such as hymns or (as discussed later) popular songs shared across class lines contributes to this false sense of unity. The contrast between Page’s happy recollections of her own family singing hymns and her bleak view of the Crenshaws enjoying the same pastime suggests that the messages conveyed through such culture could have far different implications for middle-class whites who are not trapped in an oppressive labor system and lower-class whites who are. When portraying white bourgeois culture, Page shows class-transcending aesthetic consensus as a potentially seductive danger. When portraying black spirituals, however, she turns race-transcending aesthetic consensus into a potential site for initiating working-class solidarity. After Page develops a cultural context showing that spirituals still give black workers political guidance, she goes on to suggest that spirituals’ power and beauty may also help white workers to transcend their own racial prejudices. Such perspectives towards spirituals are consonant with those articulated in well-known manifestos of the preceding decades by African American intellectuals of the “New Negro” school such as W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke.23 DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, for instance, proposes that the body of black “sorrow songs” stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people. (373)

To DuBois, the sorrow songs are more than an aesthetically beautiful record of suffering; they are also an expression of “faith in the ultimate justice of things” (73). Johnson similarly argues that spirituals, along with black folk tales, are “the only things artistic that have yet sprung from American soil and been universally acknowledged as distinctive American products” (10). Improving “the status of the Negro in the United States,” he proposes, is foremost “a question of national mental attitude toward the race” (9), and the first step in changing this mental attitude must be a new recognition of the spirituals as great art: “it is the touchstone, it is the magic thing, it is that by which the Negro can bridge all chasms. No persons, however hostile, can listen to Negroes singing this wonderful music without having their hostility melted down” (20). Locke, too, argues that the most “immediate hope” for African

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 31

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

32

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

American “rehabilitation” “rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions past and prospective” (580). Gathering Storm takes such suppositions a step further: if hostile whites could become sympathetic to blacks through the spirituals’ pathos, they might then prove receptive to a logical demonstration that racism contributes to their own economic plight. Page’s belief in the unifying power of spirituals perhaps had roots in a formative ritual of her early life. As a girl, she made frequent Sunday-night visits to Hampton Institute, a nearby college for black students [.  .  .] to hear the four hundred or so Hampton students sing Negro spirituals. Whites sat in the balcony, and black students sat in the main auditorium. They might sing the same spiritual, but it sounded different each time as beautiful solo voices, here and there, broke forth. The music rose like a great ocean carrying us into vast spaces, holding us close to the tragedy and beauty and longing of life. For those few moments, I knew spiritual unity with these people, a common meeting ground. When the music ended there was no contact at all, and I felt myself a stranger among strangers. (qtd. in Baker 25-6)

In Gathering Storm, the rigidly segregated structure of working-class society makes the chances for such “spiritual unity” much less likely: Although “[the] colony, known as ‘Back Row’ and ‘niggertown,’ was barely two hundred yards from where the Crenshaws lived [.  .  .] if the distance had been two thousand miles instead, Marge and the people on her side of the village and those on this could scarcely have known less about one another” (50). Also, Gathering Storm suggests Page’s recognition that a more complex reality of interracial antagonisms might have existed beyond what she had perceived when visiting the black church as a child: At the Wednesday evening service, some rich white folks from Greenville came, with two out-of-town visitors, and sat in the balcony. They told the parson they had come to hear the singing and preaching, but then why did they exchange glances and hide their smiles behind their fans? Martha [Uncle Ben’s daughter] was not the only one who resented these white folks’ curiosity and intrusion. “What they think we is, a circus?” But their resentment the Negroes hid behind a polite servility. (107)

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 32

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

“The Will to Win” 33 Page not only questions whether these spectators sincerely respect the culture they witness, but also links them to economic interests that inherently conflict with those of these struggling black workers. One white spectator is “the mill owner’s son” and the other is “a daughter of the banker [.  .  .] who owned the land which more than one share cropper tilled” (107). This scene does not raise the hope that encountering spirituals in this context might forge a “spiritual unity” or somehow induce these rich visitors to redistribute some of their assets among the needy. Rather, it serves to add insult to the injuries of economic exploitation. While these privileged whites may freely intrude on a black cultural space, blacks most likely would not have been invited to sing in a white church or home. Significantly, Page represents a spiritual facilitating a brief race-transcendent enlightenment, not in the church (as she had experienced it), but in a factory. When Young Marge hears Ellie Morgan, Uncle Ben’s wife, singing “Let My People Go,” she first thinks about her own family’s desire to somehow get “away from the mills to some better life” (73). Only later does she recognize the bearer of the song as herself a subject worth contemplation: “Does that colored woman singing, feel thataway too? Do her people hate it ’n want to git away?” (73). Although Marge’s encounter with Ellie Morgan and her song is fleeting, it provokes thoughts that initiate the development of Marge’s interracial empathy. Later, when Marge and Martha, who is Ellie’s daughter, happen to meet in the factory and look “one another full in the eye,” “for a moment, the distance which lay between them was bridged” (74).24 Even as Page strives to give older characters like Ole Marge and Uncle Ben certain exemplary qualities, her novel’s bildungsroman structure leaves ample room for the next generation’s independent development. Whether inherited wisdom comes from an older song or an older sage, it must develop somehow before it can help confront previously daunting problems. Characters like Young Marge and George exemplify the idea that workingclass rebels grow by staying rooted in their heritage while still actively pruning away regressive notions and grafting on new ones. Even though Young Marge’s grandmother provides fertile ground for her early growth, Young Marge eventually needs further nurture. Ole Marge betrays her ideological limitations when she tries to explain racism for her granddaughter. Though her husband (now dead) had fought in the Civil War to free slaves, his later aversion to the mills came in part from a belief that “niggers bring bad luck”: “‘up here we keep ’em out our hills, ’n that’s whar I want to stay’” (15).25 When Young Marge asks, “how’d granpa figger niggers bring bad luck,” Ole Marge confesses that she doesn’t know. At any rate, she tells her

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 33

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

34

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

granddaughter, “po’ Whites sure have their share of bad luck wherever they go, niggers or no niggers. But the notion growed up, that somehow or ’tother it was the black man’s fault” (16). Ole Marge herself retains some values, supposedly mountain-based, that are counterproductive to working-class solidarity. She gleefully recounts a distant episode in which mill operators had naively brought members of “the Allen clan to the hill. You know, the Allens what we Marlows’d feuded with goin’ on five generations, we ain’t gone mix with, down here” (23). After the Marlows took up arms against the rival clan, “the mill’d give orders to its agents, not to mix up no mo’ clans” (24). If Ole Marge now sees such feuding as regressive, she does not say so to her granddaughter.26 Page also takes care to show that Uncle Ben, like Ole Marge, has a limited scope—though one justified by his own past experience—in envisioning a future society without racial distinctions. He tells his young children, for instance, that it’s “best not to git mixed up with white folks ’n their chillen. Stay on your own side the fence” (72). Meanwhile, unknown to Uncle Ben, his older son, Fred, has gotten involved with the integrated International Workers of the World (IWW) in New York City. Fred will later travel to Russia to observe Communist society (249). Page proposes other fans for the flames of discontent besides radicalism conceived and handed down orally. Through her older brother Tom, who has left home and found work in New York City, Marge learns for the first time that a print tradition also exists for critiquing the labor system. Following his own initiation into the IWW and then the Socialist Party, Tom sends Marge The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 novel about the experience of a group of Lithuanian immigrants trying to survive in Chicago’s brutal industrial slums. The novel focuses on Jurgis Rudkus, a man who moves from job to job, suffering new defeats at every turn until, at the novel’s end, his discovery of the Socialist Party seems to promise a better future. The Jungle has a profound effect on Marge: “The next few days Marge walked around like one in a dream. [. . . .] The work-a-day world around her grew indistinct, unreal, for she was far away, living and laboring with the stockyard workers in Chicago, and, finally taking part in their great revolt” (91). After reading the book to herself, “she read the book over again, aloud to Granny and Ruth [her older sister], and the three lived it through together” (91). Ole Marge comments approvingly that “‘that thar Jurgis, he had the fightin’ spirit’” (91). Later, Tom answers Marge’s request for similar books by sending her Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Karl Marx’s “Wage-Labor and Capital” (141).27 Since local dominant interests discourage such intellectual inquiry, Tom’s journey to the North is crucial to Marge’s exposure to

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 34

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

“The Will to Win” 35 radical ideas. When Marge asks at her local library for more books like The Jungle, “the librarian voiced her horror in a fifteen minute monologue” and then steers her towards conventional, innocuous material for an adolescent girl (103).28 In this repressive context, Ole Marge’s orally transmitted alternative interpretations of history and Tom’s inside/outside perspective both gain value. As Tom’s Russian-born romantic interest (and future wife), Bessie, suggests, “we’ll never have a real movement in this country [.  .  .] till the New Yorks and Row Hills get together” (152). As already discussed, the novel’s first portrait of the Back Row community extols spirituals as an aesthetically and politically rich medium—one that entertains without obscuring sociopolitical needs. Later, however, Page suggests that some in the poor black community view these singing sessions merely as variety in life’s “monotonous tread” (117). She also casts doubt on the novel’s earlier idea that racist whites might undergo dramatic ideological changes simply by appreciating black music. In fact, the novel repeatedly suggests the irrelevance of music in changing the course of an outbreak of interracial violence. Shortly after the local mill owner’s son, Elbert, attends a black revival, he rapes and murders Uncle Ben’s daughter, Martha. He then joins the “cream of Greenville Society” (129) at a white country-club party where, significantly, a jazz band provides entertainment. (Although Page does not mention the band members’ race, the context—and the very fact that their race is not noted—implies their whiteness.) After Martha’s body is found with evidence linking Elbert to the deed, her black boyfriend, Jim, goes to the country club to find Elbert. Just before Jim kills Elbert, an aptly named song played by the jazz band provides an ironic commentary on the situation: “through the open window and into the sultry night drifted the tones of a wailing saxaphone [sic], ‘You Made Me What I Am Today, I Hope You’re Satisfied’” (129). Indeed, Elbert’s exploitative stance towards black life—his view of black culture and Martha’s black body alike as available for his superficial pleasure—has transformed Jim into Elbert’s killer. To avenge Elbert’s death, a white mob descends upon Back Row, where Uncle Ben and his family become the unfortunate recipients of their wrath. In another ironic symbol of music’s inability to head off such a tragedy, Uncle Ben’s young son, Charlie, tries to defend his family by swinging his father’s banjo, club-like, at the attackers. Clearly, the banjo cannot match the mob’s guns: “it jangled faintly as its battered sides were grabbed and tossed aside” (133). In the end, Uncle Ben, his wife, and their two children, Charlie and Myrtle, all die at the hands of the mob. (Jim kills himself as the mob closes in on him.)

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 35

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

36

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

Among local whites, the bloody incident arouses some debate, but little more. At the mill the next day, Marge’s Uncle Mat remembers Uncle Ben as a “good, quiet-kind of nigger, ’n a handy one with the banjo” (136). Marge herself, remembering the time she had heard “Ma Morgan’s singing ‘Go Down Moses,’” finds the courage to criticize fellow workers who, as a matter of principle, take a pro-white stance toward the violent event (136). Still, none of this sympathy actually produces tangible action to soothe racial tensions. While the above chain of events interrogates black music as one factor within the socioeconomic landscape of an interracial Southern mill town, other scenarios in the novel turn similar attention to songs popular primarily among white workers. Through representations of workers engaging with popular music, Page explores from yet another angle how various cultural resources steer workers either towards or away from dealing with their problems constructively. In Page’s hands, this popular music—produced and distributed for mass consumption through sophisticated capitalist channels—provides another explanation for workers’ passive tendencies. Page’s representations of such songs usually suggest ironic disjunction between capitalist culture’s idealized views of life and the novel’s own portraits of workers beset by problems they don’t yet know how to solve. That workers remain attached to these songs in spite of this tangible disjunction represents their false consciousness and inability to align culture with political needs. Page’s use of song titles and lyric fragments alone convey her popular-culture-as-opiate stance. Still, further investigation of these songs’ texts and cultural contexts adds depth to this stance by restoring cultural knowledge that Page likely took for granted among potential readers. Such is the case with the song “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” which appears twice in the novel—once played by Uncle Ben for the black Back Row dance mentioned earlier (63), and once as one of the “two wheezy tunes” that a traveling merry-go-round plays automatically for white patrons (94). “Hot Time,” with its exaggerated dialect and stereotypes of happy-go-lucky blacks enjoying life on the town, debuted in 1896 and became a standard on minstrel-show and musical-revue circuits (McSherry).29 One level of irony in Page’s allusion is unmistakable—life in the bleak mill village, as Page has portrayed it, hardly resembles a “hot time.” Another potential level of irony relates to this song’s association with the Spanish-American War of 1898. As Page and her readers likely knew, Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders adapted “Hot Time” “as their ‘theme song’ during the battle of San Juan Hill, probably one of the first uses of a popular song in this manner” (Reublin).30 Early in Gathering Storm, Ole Marge—who lost a son in this war—corrects Young

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 36

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

“The Will to Win” 37 Marge’s speculation that “it must be fun to live while a war’s on. Teacher told us about it, bands of music, ’n soldiers, ’n flags flyin’”: “That’s what it looks like aforehand. But when they’s on, they’s diff ’rent” (26). Unlike Ole Marge, Sal (her daughter) fondly remembers how the Spanish-American War stimulated a patriotic fervor in the mill village that was “like a circus, somethin’ doin’ all the time” (160). Assuming that Page linked “Hot Time” to this war, her novel’s depiction of this song as an accompaniment for dancing and riding merry-go-rounds contributes to a recurring critique of war and the way popular culture glorifies it. Viewed critically, wartime appropriation of such cheery popular songs obscures the realities of brutal death and imperialist motives with an image of battle as a “hot time in the old town.”31 Gathering Storm offers a similar critique in depicting World War One, when popular patriotic tunes like “Oh Say Can You See?” (“The Star-Spangled Banner”) (161) and “Over There” (203) promoted a unified nationalistic fervor. Only after the war do jaded, traumatized veterans like Marge’s Uncle Mat come to see this conflict as a “rich man’s war ’n a poor man’s fight” (200).32 As mentioned earlier in this chapter, jazz gains various negative connotations in Gathering Storm. It diverts young blacks’ focus from political struggle (168) and feeds white consumers’ desire to enjoy black culture without addressing socioeconomic inequalities (128-30). In this latter case, Page suggests that this music uses its sensual quality to promote vacuous trends. A lyric fragment from another song played at the country-club dance noted earlier conveys this lack of substance: “Everybody’s Doing IT—Doing What? Turkey Trot!” (130). Given Gathering Storm’s overall construction of cultural values, jazz likely struck Page as a music shaped not by working-class needs, but by the consumer market for new fads.33 Often emphasizing rhythm and melody over lyric content, jazz could be more easily co-opted by dominant culture as an apolitical commodity. Further, the phenomenon of racially integrated jazz bands that later made this music politically progressive outside of the South seems highly unlikely in Gathering Storm’s segregated mill villages.34 Particularly since Page wrote Gathering Storm out of a belief (revised in later life) that blacks in a post-revolution America would want and should get “a republic of their own” (qtd. in Baker 117), the idea of musicians and/ or styles integrating across racial lines probably didn’t seem like a logical prediction for the projected new order. While jazz seems to be the music of choice for Page’s upper-class whites to escape reality, popular song in a sentimental vein seems to be the main music (other than hymns) her working-class white characters turn to for solace. In Page’s portrayal, decadent values flaw the former, romantic ones the latter. Facing an imminent death from tuberculosis, Marge’s husband, Bob,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 37

6/22/2006 8:54:26 AM

38

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

seeks consolation in sentimental songs. Although a doctor has told Marge that “with proper care [Bob] may live for years” (237), he fails rapidly because the family cannot afford good nursing, housing, or nutritious food. Rather than express bitterness (as Ole Marge had done on her deathbed) at how the labor system has compromised his chance at life, Bob wants to “[relive] those days, the bright, early days before youth and hope had gone” (240). His last request to his wife is “‘sing to me.’ She knew what he wanted. The songs they’d sung together as young lovers. ‘Aunt Diana’s [sic] Quilting Party,’ ‘Darlin’ Nellie Gray’” (240). Although Page only alludes to these songs’ titles, their actual lyrics offer ironic contrast with Bob’s situation. “Aunt Dinah’s Quilting Party” evokes a simpler time when communal labor and romance seem to go hand in hand: “On my life new hopes were dawning / And those hopes have lived and grown / And ’twas from Aunt Dinah’s quilting party / I was seeing Nellie home.”35 Also in a sentimental mode, the second song Marge sings to her dying husband adopts the viewpoint of a black Kentuckian lamenting his “Darling Nellie Gray,” taken as a slave “to Georgia / For to wear her life away, / As she toils in the cotton and the cane” (Hanby 53-6). Published in 1856 by the white Benjamin Russell Hanby, then a college student in Ohio, “Darling Nellie Gray” endured in popularity into the twentieth century. Similar to the white hymns that the novel castigates, this song (albeit implicitly antislavery) strives for pathos through showing the singer patiently enduring his loss, “weeping all the day,” growing old until he “hears the angels calling” and knows that he is soon going to a place where “they’ll never take [Nellie] from me anymore” (Hanby 53-6). Finally, as Bob takes his last breaths, Marge sings “his favorite”: “Sing me to sleep, the shadows fall” (240). The song’s next line (which Page does not give) highlights the idea of escaping rather than engaging worldly problems: “Let me forget the world and all.”36 Whom did Page hope to influence through her largely cynical allusions to hymns, jazz, and popular songs? Did she envision a sophisticated Marxist reader, already predisposed to distrust any cultural product that relied so heavily on the capitalist market to circulate? Or, did she foresee as readers Southern workers who might well find one or more of their own best-loved songs lampooned in the novel’s pages? As mentioned earlier, Page claimed to have written the non-fiction Southern Cotton Mills and Labor to “appeal to a working-class audience.” Gathering Storm—in using a range of storytelling conventions to keep the pages turning—seems to go considerably further in its bid for working-class appeal. Touching such an audience—reaching the Marge Crenshaws of the South who vainly searched the local library for realistic stories about people like themselves—was likely one of the foremost

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 38

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

“The Will to Win” 39 desires shaping Page’s literary decisions. In this light, we may see how Page’s novel “defamiliarizes” readers’ perceptions of culture that was likely familiar and beloved. As Victor Shklovsky has suggested, literature may portray a familiar world, but use self-consciously literary techniques to “remove the automatism of perception” (25). In this way, Page’s novel embeds allusions to familiar culture within a value system hypersensitive to culture’s political implications. It strives to replace the warm glow of nostalgia and the false beacon of ritual with a more exacting light. Moving into the climactic final third of the novel, Page includes a chapter whose title, “New Times—New Songs,” clearly anticipates an optimistic cultural change. The chapter opens with the white Tom Crenshaw and the black George Johnson (both having exchanged the IWW for the more militant Communist Party) riding a southbound train from New York to “Riverton” (Gastonia), North Carolina. Tom’s sister Marge, who now works in Riverton’s Corey Mill, has asked for Tom’s assistance in organizing the overworked and underpaid local textile workers. For years, both Tom and George have avoided the repressive South, but George, much more than Tom, harbors intense bitterness towards the region where his beloved mentor, Uncle Ben, was lynched. Page, in keeping with her thesis that white American music tends to obscure harsh realities behind romantic images, shows Tom, with lingering nostalgia for his sunny homeland, naively singing “Dixie” in front of George: Oh, Dixie land, the land of cotton, Old times thar is not forgotten— (259)

He soon realizes his blunder when George, “with a scowl,” tells him to “can it”: “Gol-dern, what a low-down trash I am. Old times—huh” (259), he mutters to himself, thoroughly chastised. When George—whose sensitivity to music’s political implications is better developed than Tom’s—rents a room in “the Hollow” (Riverton’s version of the segregated Back Row where he grew up), he sees that this community also has a spiritual/musical leader like Uncle Ben: “As Uncle John brought forth his banjo and began strumming the strings [.  .  .] the crowd settled back with a sigh. [.  .  .  .] But for the want of familiar faces, this might be Back Row [.  .  .]. The same old songs. The same bonds of outcast and down-trodden holdin’, bindin’ ’em all” (267). When the old man starts singing, however, George notices a bitter edge that Uncle Ben’s spirituals had lacked:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 39

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

40

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” Went to Atlanta Never been thar afo’ White folks eat th’ apple Nigger wait for the core (267)

Uncle John’s song moves through additional places and observations on unequal socioeconomic relations, ending with a trip to Heaven, where “Whitefolks sit in the Lawd’s place / Chase nigger down below” (268). Significantly, Uncle John tells the riveted George that various songs like this simply “come into my head” while “rumminatin’ [sic] over things” (268). To George, this change in musical expression—in a vernacular clearly more blunt and less poetic than that of spirituals—reflects a new desire to deal concretely with injustice. As Uncle John’s method of composition suggests, there is a minimal blurring of the line between the way injustice is comprehended and the way it is translated into artistic expression: Slavery ’n freedom They’s most the same No difference hardly ’Cept in the name (269)

An additional new song, which another singer, Jerry, had learned while unjustly sentenced to work on a North Carolina chain gang, starts with traditional-sounding blues laments on being poor and lonely. It progresses beyond this tradition, however, linking these hardships to race prejudice and ending with a communal (though exclusively male-directed) call to action: Stand boys stand No use arunnin’ Look up yonder hill White men acomin’ He got rope in one hand Pistol in ’tother Stand boy stand Brother stand by brother Stand by brother

Page, who acknowledged that when writing Gathering Storm “I may not have known black people then as well as I came to know them later”

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 40

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

“The Will to Win” 41 (qtd. in Baker 115), seems to have constructed this scene using for inspiration an article by Lawrence Gellert, “Negro Songs of Protest,” that appeared in a 1930 issue of New Masses. This article, the first of three which Gellert contributed to New Masses reporting his song-collecting fieldwork among blacks in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, contains the sources of all four of these songs. While the first three appear in Gathering Storm exactly as printed in New Masses, the final song subtly but significantly alters Gellert’s text. Although the original already had, as Gellert noted, a “militant chord [.  .  .] rather unusual for that section of the country,”37 Page refines its politics, steering it away from an expressed desire for black-against-white bloodletting and towards the novel’s more refined goal of seeing black and white workers united in class war against the capitalist system. Gellert’s original calls the approaching enemy “white trash”—the term often used to denigrate working-class whites: Stan’ boys stan’ No use arunnin Look up yonder hill White trash acomin’ Is acomin’ He got knife in one han’ Pistol in de odder (Gellert “Negro” 11)

Page changes “white trash” to “white men” and “knife” to “rope,” suggesting that this enemy is not actually as vast as “white trash” might suggest, but rather a smaller, less class-specific sector of the white population—those who might take part in a lynching.38 Further, Page omits a final stanza of the original that anticipates a black retaliation without recognizing the shared oppression of workers black and white: Nigger don’ you run ’way White thrash [sic] acomin’ Is acomin’ Get dat whackin’ stick in yo’ han’ Ruckus boun’ to happen (Gellert “Negro” 11)

Gellert reports that “the tune”—befitting words that suggest fairly indiscriminate, revenge-motivated violence—“is martial[,] guttural and snarlish” (11). Page, in contrast, describes the tune as “a resounding chant” (271),

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 41

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

42

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

thus emphasizing racial solidarity rather than revenge as the song’s guiding principle. While Page’s modified version does not imagine this solidarity transcending racial bounds, it nevertheless does not exclude the possibility of such interracial unity as strongly as Gellert’s text does.39 As in the scene from George’s childhood, the older listeners must suppress the desire of one of the younger set for something less “mournful” and more “lively” (269). Still, George sees these new songs as a hopeful sign that “maybe the war and years since had roused his people from their slumber” (271). He endorses the community’s faith in Uncle John and Jerry as truthful social critics, selecting them as representatives of the new integrated union he hopes to form. Although these new songs excite George, he realizes that they fail to break through the polarizing vision of race-against-race antagonism. To Jerry the chain-gang song simply “means what it says—black man, brother, stand by brother.” Hoping that he can bring a new class focus to this racial militancy, the more politically experienced George tells Jerry, that “thar’s more’n that in it [the song]” (271). Under George’s tutelage, Jerry and Uncle John rapidly drop the rhetoric of their racially angry songs, which would clash with their new understanding of integrated unionism: “I never dreamed to see white ’n colored hands standin’ side by side,” Uncle John later remarks. “But I can see it’s right. It’s the only way” (283). Reinforcing the novel’s earlier representation of a black religious worldview as capable of addressing worldly and otherworldly needs simultaneously, Uncle John now uses the traditional rhetoric of spirituals and sermons to praise unionism. Even when Tom assures Uncle John that he and George were sent by the Union rather than God, Uncle John maintains that he “feels the Lawd’s hand in it somewhars.” For him, the desires expressed in spirituals—for a leader “to deliver us from bondage,” and for a “Great Day comin’ bye ’n bye”—coexist with and are actualized by this Union (282-3). Showing Uncle John as an important mediator between the white, atheistic Tom and the predominately religious black workers, Page suggests that religious faith must be resolved with Union faith rather than rejected outright. Similarly, Page uses an exchange between Jem, a young Communist organizer, and Miz Crane, a newly militant worker with forty years in the mill behind her, to suggest that organizers must also give some leeway to white workers’ religious faith if they are to successfully instill Union faith. In this exchange, Miz Crane wonders why “the Lawd” has let rain fall on evicted strikers, and Jem teases her that “maybe He’s sidin’ with the mill.” Miz Crane then tells him, “Hush, doan your [sic] blaspheme! That’s what I doan like about the Com-mun-ists—no respect for the Almighty.”

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 42

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

“The Will to Win” 43 “Now Ma,” Jem told her, “you know you think us Reds are about it.” “You ain’t so bad,” she admitted grudgingly, “exceptin’ this [irreverence towards religion]. [.  .  .  .] Mercy sakes,” as drops slid down the neck of her blouse, “soon it’s gona pour. I bet the good Lawd’s weepin’ to see what’s happenin’ to His people here on Riverton Hill.” (318-9)

Through Miz Crane, whose spiritual faith does not seem to compromise her activism, Page resolves into a good-natured truce what could be a volatile conflict between atheistic and religious ideologies. If black workers can draw on spirituals to address religious and temporal concerns, what of white workers and their hymn tradition? Since her earlier portrayal of white hymns suggested passivity as a defining trait, Page seemingly cannot resolve this vehicle for religious ideology into one for militant ideology as easily as she has with black spirituals. When Page does show white workers singing their first protest song—“our Union Song” (“Solidarity Forever”), which Tom has taught them to “sing as we march”—she only has Tom tell them “you know the tune already” (285). This melody’s historic background (and the symbolic force it thus generates), however, is decidedly not of a Southern tradition. Rather, it comes from “John Brown’s Body” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” two songs of the Civil War era tied to the cause of abolitionists and the Union Army. The former song was sung in abolitionist circles after Brown was hanged in 1859 for leading a raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry. In early 1862, the Massachusetts abolitionist Julia Ward Howe wrote new words to the tune after visiting a Union Army camp in Virginia. Her song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” uses militant religious imagery (quite unlike that implied in Page’s depiction of white Southern hymns) to tie the Union Army’s cause to God’s will. God’s “righteous sentence” and “fiery gospel” assures this secular Army’s final victory. Instead of focusing solely on heavenly rewards, this song defiantly unites religious conviction and earthly struggle: “let us die to make men free, / While God is marching on.” In the following years, the inspirational militancy associated with this tune was co-opted for various labor causes. Clark D. Halker calls “John Brown’s Body” (or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) “the most famous song of the era” and notes that it “appeared as the tune for seven labor song-poems between 1870 and 1890” (87). Later, in 1915, Ralph H. Chaplin—a Kansas-born “radical labor artist, journalist, songwriter, and poet” (Salter 124) associated with the Industrial Workers of the World—again adapted this tune for his “Solidarity Forever.” Sung during numerous labor struggles from then on, it quickly became “virtually the anthem of the American labor movement” (Nelson 62). Chaplin’s song

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 43

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

44

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

draws inspiration from the militant spirit of its predecessors, but names the Union instead of God as the force that will assist a struggle for justice: When the Union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun. Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the Union makes us strong.

While “Battle Hymn” uses vague symbols to evoke the enemy (“the serpent” in one verse), “Solidarity” more explicitly condemns “the greedy parasite / Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might.” The background of these three songs—as tied to both black liberation and the use of militant (as opposed to passive) religious imagery—does not fit naturally with Page’s depiction of white Southern workers handicapped by racism and religion. As Page uses it, “Solidarity Forever,” then, cannot be said to represent traditional white Southern culture modified slightly to address a new situation. Rather than draw attention to the potential contradictions between old and new ideologies, Page glosses over the deeper implications of the Union song’s background, simply letting white and black workers’ singing symbolize their willingness to embrace the interracial solidarity they had resisted earlier. Significantly, Page notes that Marge’s “voice was husky, for it was the first time in many months that she had sung” (285). While the most militant black workers in the Hollow have already been using songs to arouse indignation, Marge, an equally progressive white worker, has avoided singing, apparently because her culture’s musical resources seemed ill suited to workers’ political needs. The idea that white Southern mill workers might also be able to create valuable new art to comment realistically on their socioeconomic problems seems to have occurred to Page after she wrote Southern Cotton Mills and Labor. In that 1929 work, after discussing in largely negative terms a mill family singing hymns (observations incorporated into the Gathering Storm scene discussed earlier), Page commented that “these Poor Whites had left their folk songs in the mountains, and mill life has not produced any others” (22). While the first three-quarters of Gathering Storm seem to support this assertion, the appearance of songwriter/activist Ella May Wiggins near the novel’s conclusion revises it, showing a white mill worker creating communally embraced portraits of mill life: “Ever since [Marge] had heard Ella May sing, ‘How it hurts the heart of a Mother,’ and her other ballads about the Union, Marge had felt drawn to this woman” (303). The appearance of Ella May’s songs near the novel’s end provides an optimistic sign that formerly

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 44

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

“The Will to Win” 45 barren cultural ground is finally bearing nourishing fruit. As a way of simultaneously reaching workers’ hearts and intellects, these songs are more effective than the verbose rhetoric of northern organizers like Herb Sampson, who (as Tom observes) “never got over goin’ to Harvard” (308). Placed alongside organizers’ more sophisticated speeches, these songs are shown to be a legitimate and necessary part of an apparatus of resistance: “For the mill hands this tiny woman [Ella May] had come to symbolize the will to win” (335).40 Just as Page shows ruling-class interests actively promoting culture that obscures potential tensions, she also shows them trying to suppress this new subversive culture. Earlier, before singing his radical song (“Stand boys stand”), the black Jerry remarks that “the fellow what first learned me it, got shot through his lungs for sassin’ the white boss-man” (270). Now, after Ella May’s well is mysteriously poisoned, she declares, “ain’t [the mill company] promised to get me for makin’ up all them songs?” (338).41 After a bullet fired from a company truck kills her, her fellow workers again concur that she was singled out because of her powerful role in unifying the strikers: “‘They killed our singin’ ’oman,’ the mill hands said, ‘we’ll not forget. They killed her a-purpose’” (360).42 Importantly, this vow to “not forget,” which spreads “from hill to hill,” gives Ella May’s song (like the one Jerry has sung) additional “folk” legitimacy. Communally owned, it cannot be snuffed out simply by destroying its original creator. Even when the inherent qualities of a radical cultural text might not seem “folk,” Page strives to create a folk context by showing that workers accept and claim communal ownership of it. Near the end of the novel, the striking workers are delighted and inspired to discover that the Communist Daily Worker has printed a number of their submissions: “Young Binnie came racing over to Marge, her thin face aglow. ‘Look!’ she waved a newspaper over her head. ‘The Daily’s printed my letter ’n a lot more besides’” (329). At an older, illiterate woman’s request, Marge reads Binnie’s letter aloud: “They double up work on me every day of my life. I have worked every day but a half day and never got more than five dollars a week” (329). As the three women go over another unsigned letter (and easily identify a fellow worker, “Elm,” as its author), “a crowd [.  .  .] gathered around” (330). Marge reads yet another published letter by a friend—this one seething with colloquially expressed indignation: “Take the mill owner,” Phil’s long letter begins. “He don’t want you to have any thing but man, he wants a new car, all right, every six months, and his big, fine horse, and his twenty-five cent cigars and his servants” (330). Phil’s letter wins approval from the assembled listeners: “‘My, but that’s full of good truth!’ [. . . .] ‘Yah, that’s tellin’ ’em boy’” (333). Concluding with what she claims is “gona be the best of all,” Marge shares a

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 45

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

46

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

biting parody of the Bible’s “Twenty-Third Psalm” written by an anonymous Riverton striker: Corey mill is my sheperd [sic] and I shall not want He maketh me to lie down on park benches, …………………………………………………… Surely poverty and starvation will follow me all the days of my life And I will dwell in a rented house forever. P.S.—That is, if I don’t stand by the Union and fight like hell! (332)

Like Phil’s letter, this submission garners praise: “‘That’s a right smart piece. Who could’ve written it?’ Everybody looked about, questioning. ‘It’s worth settin’ to memory,’ Miz Crane observed, ‘[.  .  .]. To think this paper’ll print all us mill hands’ll send in’” (332). After workers observe that the local paper would never allow such criticism of economic interests, the scene concludes with several youngsters going through town selling papers: “‘Buy the Daily Worker!’ they piped, ‘Read all about us strikin’!’” (333). That the venerable Daily Worker has published these submissions verbatim conveys to the collected workers that people far away are hearing their experiences, rendered in their own voices, sympathetically. As the above scene demonstrates, this publication also provides an occasion for workers to gather spontaneously and listen to their words publicly performed. The novel form allows Page to go beyond the Daily’s publication of working-class documents by also showing how these texts seemingly win unanimous approval back in their community of origin. Thus, a symbiotic relationship between the Daily Worker and the Riverton workers is suggested. Like Ella May’s ballad, “The New Twenty-Third Psalm” self-consciously adapts a recognizable framework linked to old ideology to carry a radically new message.43 In significant contrast to Ella May’s ballads, though, this text is encountered not as oral culture, but circuitously, through the radical Daily Worker’s modern distribution system. (Workers realize that the partisan local paper would never print such subversive material.)44 Through this modern technology, the piece achieves a quicker and wider dissemination than it likely could through oral transmission alone (and also gives the author safety in anonymity). Such technology, Page suggests, can complement local folkways: after hearing this poem, the illiterate Miz Crane, who had earlier railed against a Communist’s “blaspheme,” now praises such a piece as “worth settin’ to memory” (332). Thus, the Daily Worker is shown to provide one forum where examples of radical culture representing vastly different regional influences can commingle.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 46

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

“The Will to Win” 47 Similarly, the national convention of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) in Cleveland, with which Page ends her novel, becomes a site where workers from around the nation (and abroad) see their regional differences subsumed by concerns common to industrial workers around the world.45 Page has already shown the Gastonia strike itself moving from regional to global significance, noting the “angry demonstrations” in support of the Gastonia strike’s organizers on trial “spreading across the oceans to Tokio [sic], Moscow, Berlin and London” (357). Within this widening context, Page’s final musical representation—workers at the TUUL meeting singing “The Internationale”—serves to make the novel’s potentially jarring move from local to global concerns seem inevitable.46 Temporarily left behind is the relatively dejected context of Gastonia’s largely defeated strike.47 Ahead lies a more hopeful vision of a time when, as this song proclaims, “the International Soviet / Shall be the human race” (369).48 Page’s placement of “The Internationale”—significantly, the Soviet Union’s national anthem at the time—as the novel’s crowning piece of protest-oriented culture touches on problems like those, noted earlier, that Laura Hapke sees in Page’s concluding section. Where, in Marge’s trajectory from local to global activism, is the directive for solving the more typical, local problems facing Southern workers who must still confront mill work six days a week? Likewise, where in this implicit “progress” of culture—arriving climactically at “The Internationale”—is the directive for these workers to further adapt their own cultural forms to meet new socioeconomic challenges? Except for its militant, pro-worker theme, this song has little to recommend it as an addition to Southern resistance culture. The songs of Uncle John, Jerry, and Ella May Wiggins (in addition to the “New Twenty-Third Psalm” parody) all flow naturally from these workers’ shared cultural repositories, even while they represent certain transformations or overturnings of earlier values. Page has esteemed Uncle John’s songs and Ella May Wiggins’ ballads because they articulate the problems of mill workers in familiar (and yet ideologically new) terms: We leave our home in the morning We kiss our children good-bye, While we slave for the bosses Our children scream and cry. (335)

Such a verse, especially as contextualized within Gathering Storm, exemplifies Cary Nelson’s argument that “traditional forms [poetry/lyrics using simple rhyme, meter, and diction] continued to do vital cultural work” during the period (1910-1945) now remembered more for the linguistic innovations of literary modernism:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 47

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

48

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” Far from being preeminently genteel, poetry in traditional forms was a frequent vehicle for sharply focused social commentary. Poets were thus often quite successful at making concise, paradigmatic statements about social life. Freed from the need to provide extended analysis or support a thesis with detailed evidence, poetry instead could highlight both the most basic structures of oppression in the culture and the fundamental principles that positive change should observe. (23)

If these are the cultural values Page’s novel has striven to establish, a reader might well ask how the comparatively abstract and elevated rhetoric of “The Internationale” improves upon Wiggins’ song as social commentary appropriate to the Southern textile-mill context: Arise ye prisoners of starvation, Arise ye wretched of the earth! For justice thunders condemnation A better world’s in birth! Marge, looking about to catch the words she didn’t yet know, saw that there were many like herself, straining to learn. Others sung in deep, sure tones. (369)

Would such a song inspire Southern workers to fit their own dilemmas into a similar framework? At the TUUL meeting, another worker, Jem, like Marge inspired and yet overwhelmed by the vast scene of workers united, asks, “you guess[,] Marge, we’ll ever be able to take it all back, to the folks on the hill?” (371). It is a question, tellingly, that neither Marge nor Page, in the novel’s remaining three pages, attempts to answer.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 48

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

Chapter Two

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”: Cultural Representations in To Make My Bread1

Some four-fifths of the way through Grace Lumpkin’s 1932 novel To Make My Bread, John McClure, a young North Carolina textile-mill worker, asks John Stevens, an older worker who is something of an organic radical, for advice on how he and his family can escape the poverty rut that has oppressed them since leaving their Appalachian home more than a decade before. While McClure clings to a hope that factory owners might someday “get the love of God in their hearts and share everything half and half with the poor,” Stevens believes that he should “as well expect a snake to come up and open its mouth gentle and humble for you t’ take out the fangs” (312). When Stevens then suggests that McClure, like most other workers, fears the snake-like power of factory owners, he offends McClure’s masculine pride: “‘I have not any fear,’ John said emphatically. It was something a man could not stand very well, to be told he was a coward. John himself was slow about getting up his anger but when he did, no man could walk over him” (313). Stevens carefully clarifies his meaning: McClure may not be afraid to stand up to any individual, but he would probably bow to a man who commands enough power to dismiss him from his job or jeopardize his family’s well-being. Stevens admits that he too has struggled to resolve this conflict between his individual desire to feel manly and his realization that he lives in a complex society where a traditionally conceived male independence may hurt others: “To get away from that fear, to show I was independent, I’ve traveled all over, and everywhere I’ve found my owner” (313). Significantly, in this same conversation, Stevens invokes the restless wandering of “John 49

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 49

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

50

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

Hardy”—the mythologized protagonist of a well-known American outlaw ballad—to explain the naïve motivation behind his past attempts to “get away from that fear” of an industrial capitalist society that is too powerful and complex to combat alone. Stevens tells John that he has “traveled to the east and traveled to the west, as the ballad of John Hardy says” only to find that the grip of Big Money upon laborers is “the same everywhere” (312). Stevens’ mention of “John Hardy”—a simultaneous invocation and rejection of its code of values—typifies a strategic deployment of cultural allusions that is central to this novel. Tracing the ideological transformations of mountain-bred millworkers who later become union members, To Make My Bread explores how characters engage with culture, and how this engagement influences and reflects their changing orientations towards their socioeconomic circumstances. Although the novel unquestionably climaxes with the strike near the end, Lumpkin is most interested in the arduous steps (and missteps) through which workers like McClure slowly advance towards a radical understanding of the capitalist system under which they labor. Even at this late point in the novel, workers like McClure have not yet begun their strike or recognized the power that may lie in collectively fighting against factory exploitation. The above conversation—one of numerous scenes that suggest the role of cultural “artifacts” in shaping a worldview—represents one of several important steps in McClure’s journey towards communism. Certain cultural artifacts influence characters’ “pre-radical” perceptions of the world; later encounters with new artifacts lead them to revise perceptions of older ones. In this dialectical relationship between culture, insight, and experience, new forms of cultural expression emerge to reflect and influence new ways of thinking and acting. After situating Lumpkin and her writing within a familial and social context, this chapter will focus on these patterns of cultural representation in To Make My Bread. These cultural representations function within the novel’s broader patterns of narrating characters’ ideological transformations. Lumpkin’s working-class characters gradually reject worldviews that valorize individual action at the expense of collective welfare. Further, they gradually reject worldviews that advocate a passive faith that divine powers will eventually compensate for socioeconomic inequalities. Characters come to transform these worldviews into new ones that valorize collective action along specifically Marxist lines. Various inserted cultural texts set into dialogue with each other work at various levels to illuminate and dramatize these processes of ideological change. The novel draws its cultural repertoire from the experiences of these characters and filters it through their aesthetic sensibilities, thus enhancing readers’ identification with a working-class vantage

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 50

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” 51 point. Reflecting the centrality of oral culture in these characters’ lives, the majority of the novel’s allusions are to orally circulated songs—hymns, folk songs, and labor/protest songs of recent composition. Other significant allusions are to written texts, including the Bible, the novel Les Misérables, and writings by Sacco and Vanzetti. Careful attention to this range of allusions within their novelized contexts helps readers to situate the narrative within a socially constructed environment and to participate in the experience of ideological growth that characters undergo. Such consideration of context in a novel must scrutinize not only the rendering of individual “scenes,” but all relevant material that precedes and follows these scenes. For this reason, my focus on cultural representations pays close attention to the specific points at which cultural allusions are placed within the novel and to how these points interrelate and influence the reader’s perception of narrative progress. Thus, the following relatively compressed summary of the novel’s most important plot and structural aspects serves mostly to supplement later, more detailed discussions of specific cultural allusions within specific contexts. Lumpkin’s novel, which encompasses the years 1900 to 1929, follows the white McClure family from their ancestral home in the Appalachian mountains to Leesville, a nearby town where they find work in a textile mill. After years of passively enduring the various effects of low wages and an oppressive workplace, members of the McClures’ youngest generation take part in a strike (historically based on the 1929 Gastonia strike). More than one-third of the novel details the McClures’ lives in the mountains prior to their migration—how they eke out a living through subsistence agriculture, hunting, and, occasionally, selling bootlegged whiskey for cash; how they are influenced by social and economic forces within and beyond their small, isolated mountain settlement; how they incorporate religion, folksongs, dancing, and other value-laden cultural practices into their lives. The novel starts with the birth of John, the youngest child of Emma McClure (whose husband had died from sickness several months before). Emma has three other children: Bonnie, Kirk, and Basil, ages one, eight, and nine, respectively. Emma’s father, John Kirkland (usually referred to as “Granpap”), has recently come to live with them, having lost his own land. Like the other families in the area, the McClures mostly subsist on homegrown corn, beans, and potatoes. What they cannot produce themselves they buy or trade for at a store owned by the Swains, the only literate and financially comfortable family in the area.2 A major source of drama in the novel’s early “mountain section” arises from the different paths that Kirk and Basil take as they approach independent manhood. As Basil becomes increasingly sanctimonious, Kirk gravitates

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 51

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

52

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

toward unruliness. (In a scene that epitomizes this difference, Kirk disrupts a ceremony at which Basil and other young adults are being baptized, stealing the preacher’s horse and galloping into the baptismal stream.) Basil’s new piety evolves into a determination to rise above his family’s poverty. Encouraged by a preacher, he enrolls at a church school outside the mountains and gradually cuts himself off from the rest of the McClure clan. (Later, he will marry into middle-class comfort in the same town where his impoverished family gets by on millwork.) While Basil ceases to care about his family, Kirk continues to help them at home. Showing additional integrity, Kirk takes in Minnie (his sometimes girlfriend) when she becomes pregnant and her father drives her from home. When Minnie—still spending her nights under Kirk’s roof— starts flagrantly seeing another man, Sam McEachern, Kirk tries to numb his frustration with alcohol. Eventually, when Sam takes Minnie from him, Kirk pursues the couple with a gun and is himself shot dead by Sam. Concurrent with showing Basil and Kirk going separate ways, the novel also depicts the development of Emma’s younger children, John and Bonnie. By frequently showing family events through Bonnie’s or John’s perspective, Lumpkin provides insights into how their early experiences and observations will contribute to their later subjectivities. (As their ideological developments eventually lead them to take active roles in forming a radical labor union and leading a strike, they will become the novel’s two most important characters.) Through Small Hardy, a peddler who occasionally passes through the mountains, families like the McClures hear rumors of easy money to be made working in textile mills in towns below. Though a particularly grim and hungry winter tempts them to head for the mill, they hang on for a number of years more. Granpap—who has told his grandsons that “you’re free men [  .  .  .  ] so long as you’ve got your own potato patch and house and a gun” (21)—is especially adamant about holding onto a self-reliant mountain life. Later, however, after losing their land in negotiations with unscrupulous timber speculators, the family—along with other similarly disinherited families—decides to seek a life elsewhere. Thus, the extended McClure family makes the move to Leesville. Though this move is only about “forty miles [  .  .  .  ] as the crow flies” (39), it profoundly changes the family’s relation to the world. The McClures now lease a cramped and run-down company-owned house; eligible family members work long hours at the mill and have little time or energy left over. Thus, realities of mill life soon tarnish earlier dreams of comfort and wealth. Granpap, who has not been able to get a mill job because the management considers him too old, becomes dejected and listless. He returns to the mountains for a time and resumes smuggling whiskey, but eventually

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 52

6/22/2006 8:54:27 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” 53 rejoins his family in the mill village. The family attempts to improve their circumstances by renting a small farm so that Granpap can raise cotton while Emma continues to work at the mill. John and Bonnie manage to attend school for a year, but must enter the mill after Emma develops pellagra, a disease stemming from malnutrition, and becomes too weak to work: “[I]f the young ones did not bring in some ready money, there would be nothing for them or anyone else in the family to eat” (254). After several years “struggl[ing] on the farm, trying to hold on as possible owner,” Granpap is faced with “giving up the farm or becoming a share-cropper.” He chooses the former, having learned from observation that “share-cropping is the same as slavery” (264). Never able to find a place in the mill-village economy that restores the sense of self-worth he had had in the mountains, he slowly loses his will to live. (He even abandons playing his beloved fiddle music after a local preacher discourages it.) Emma eventually dies of her chronic illness. Their formal schooling cut short, John and Bonnie get a different kind of education at the mill. Of particular importance, John develops a relationship with an older worker, John Stevens, who explains how the McClure family’s problems are rooted in economic exploitation and in cultural practices that tend to obscure it. Notably, he also teaches John a song he has written about the various ways that mill workers are mistreated. Even as John is learning from Stevens’ radical mentoring, other forces are pulling him toward identification with the town’s so-called “higher-ups.” Swayed by a charismatic friend, he briefly joins a conservative, racist club in town. Promoted to a higher paying “section boss” job, he hopes to carry out his duties with integrity, but finds that the mill management expects his undivided loyalty in return. When he tells his superintendent about workers’ grievances, he is advised to only concern himself with increasing productivity. He also becomes friends with an attractive female social worker recently hired by the mill; he wants to please her until she proposes that he take a job in which he would secretly notify the management about disgruntled workers. Eventually, John realizes that such opportunities to promote himself financially or socially are incompatible with his instinctive loyalty to fellow workers. Like John, Bonnie goes through a period of believing that she will find the elusive key to succeeding in the mill: “Often her thought turned to God and she prayed that he would bless her undertaking: to make herself so skillful that she would make a good life for herself and hers” (278). As her disappointments accumulate, she too gradually begins to see poverty and her own failure to escape it through a radical lens. She and John both become emboldened after Stevens gives them a “message”—that unions (and, later, revolution) could bring them better lives.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 53

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

54

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

As conditions in the mill village worsen (due in part to machines that put many out of work and require those who remain to speed up), Bonnie, John, and other like-minded workers begin to gather support for a union capable of fighting for better conditions. When a number of these workers, including John and Bonnie, are fired (presumably after a spy reports the fledgling union to the management), others in the factory launch a spontaneous walkout. The Communist organizer Tom Moore (and others working under him) soon appears, having come from the North to give the first-time strikers tactical advice and relief aid. Bonnie, who has overcome her racism after developing a friendship with a black woman, plays an important role in the strike by explaining to blacks in the area why they must not scab, but must join white workers in holding out for better treatment. She also contributes to the strike by writing and teaching others a song explaining the need for a union. Despite the brave efforts of many workers, the strike does not go well. Many workers return to the factory after they are threatened with eviction from their company-owned homes (352). The remaining strikers redouble their efforts and arrange to bring those still working out of the factory at an appointed time (369). Strike organizers are sure that “if they could bring out the rest of the workers [  .  .  .  ], the strike would be won” (371). The strike becomes violent during this phase. First, company thugs kill Bonnie while she is onstage at a union meeting (372). Then, deputies attack the remaining strikers as they carry out their planned march to the mill. Later the same night, when armed and drunken deputies try to force their way into the union hall, a scuffle breaks out and the deputies’ leader is killed.3 In retaliation, numerous strikers are arrested and their encampment ransacked.4 The novel ends shortly after a somber funeral for Bonnie. Although the partisan local newspaper cynically announces that “the first revolutionary movement in the state was buried” along with Bonnie’s casket (383), the most committed strikers have another secret meeting planned. Whatever the outcome, the lessons in tactics and solidarity will prove more important than the strike’s failure to bring the workers any immediate tangible benefits. More “[blood] will be shed,” Stevens tells John, “before we reach that which we are fighting for” (383). As Stevens says in the novel’s final sentence, “this is just the beginning” (384).5 “The Remaking of a Southerner”—Lumpkin and the autobiography/fiction dialectic In what ways might To Make My Bread reflect Lumpkin’s creative reworking and critical (Marxist) interpretation of a body of values and knowledge

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 54

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” 55 gleaned through her family, society, and historical time and place? Lumpkin’s ancestry—which included “a distinguished line of governors, jurists, and members of Congress” (Gilkes 311)—could be traced to early Virginia aristocrats who later settled and found success in Georgia. In Lumpkin’s own post-Civil War lifetime, the family had lost the wealth of earlier generations, but retained a sense of aristocratic nobility. Considering these origins, Lumpkin’s decision to tell a tale of labor radicalization entirely from the perspective of a family from a much humbler class background seems, at one level, like a compelling attempt to work through perceived contradictions in her own identity. Little direct commentary exists from Lumpkin herself about the personal, aesthetic, and political goals behind To Make My Bread. And, further, any attempt to investigate potential links between life experience and literature is complicated by the fact that Lumpkin deliberately left little public extra-literary record of the relatively brief period during which she produced Marxist-oriented writing.6 The Making of a Southerner, a memoir published in 1946 by Grace’s younger sister Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, offers the most significant light available to the contemporary researcher. As its title suggests, this memoir locates aspects of heritage and upbringing that contributed to the “making” of Katherine’s Southern identity within what Jacquelyn Down Hall describes as “a dispossessed planter family, a family haunted by defeat, obsessed with race, and determined to win back the pride and power lost in the Civil War” (“Open” 110). Of greater importance, it shows how the Lumpkins’ decline from Southern gentry increased Katherine’s ability to perceive the hegemonic underpinnings of her seemingly “natural” subjectivity (as a white, Southern female from a so-called “good family”). Thus, the full “making” of her identity encompassed later processes of unmaking and remaking. Although Southerner rarely mentions Grace or other siblings, it documents family circumstances that Grace shared—class background; inherited notions about race, class, and religion; and events in the family’s history that sometimes problematized these inherited notions. In light of what Southerner reveals, Grace’s literary alignment with the workingclass and with Communism may be seen as a radical break from the subjectivity that her early familial and social experiences had shaped. The criticism of the Southern status quo that pervades To Make My Bread suggests that Grace’s process of questioning and detaching from many of the values she grew up with may have been similar to that described by Katherine.7 Katherine—after attempting to unravel her conflicting views on race, class, and gender—concludes that even as her family was shaping her seemingly secure identity, larger social upheavals that had begun decades before her birth were creating the conditions that would compel her to remake it:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 55

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

56

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

“What had altered me was the South’s own doing. The beginning of the beginning for my change lay far back in history. We had been uprooted. Was there ever so much movement in so brief a span of years?” (236). Katherine’s self-diagnosis works equally well to describe Grace’s approach to the McClures’ transformation in To Make My Bread. As the autobiographical Southerner documents the processes that reshaped Katherine’s gendered, classed, and racialized worldview, the fictional Bread shows how a family of poor white Southerners develops—and then acts on—a radical understanding of their working-class subject positions. Despite the substantial class difference between the vantage points of these two works, both show how related social upheavals within the same crucible of the early-twentieth-century South threaten previously self-evident values. In Katherine’s memoir and Grace’s fiction alike, relative stability within family or society limits the possibilities for individual and collective enlightenment, while familial and socioeconomic turmoil forces such enlightenment into birth. What, then, were some of the critical conditions that contributed to the “uprooting” of Katherine’s Southern identity? During and after the Civil War, Lumpkin’s parents, William and Annette, both experienced the collapse of comfortable lives on plantations worked by slaves. Although Lumpkin’s mother spent her early years on such a plantation, the stability of her childhood ended before she reached age ten. Relatives raised her after her father died in the war and her mother succumbed to typhoid fever (52–4). After growing up on a similar family plantation, Lumpkin’s father joined the Confederate army at age fifteen.8 While William was away, his father, worried about the safety of his family on such an isolated plantation during wartime, closed down the estate and moved everyone to nearby Union Point, Georgia (50). Though William’s father initially planned to return to the plantation after the war, the large amount of money needed to restart farming operations—particularly after losing his slaves—ultimately dissuaded him (74–6). His son (Lumpkin’s father) spent the rest of his life convinced that the Civil War defeat had destroyed the South that he had loved as a child. After giving up an earlier ambition to practice law, William obtained a fairly unglamorous “post with a Georgia railroad” (99).9 Due to this job, the Lumpkins moved frequently to new towns during Katherine’s childhood, first within their native Georgia and later within South Carolina (where, Katherine remembered, they temporarily lost the automatic social distinction accorded to the Lumpkin name in Georgia). Though reduced to a succession of small urban homes that all paled in comparison to their childhood plantations, William and Annette “made every effort to keep up appearances” (106). This determination to uphold antebellum family standards included

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 56

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” 57 an insistence that the Lumpkin children choose friends from families of similar social pedigree (103–4). Even though Katherine was born more than thirty years after the Civil War ended, her father instilled in her (and all his other children) an indignation about the erosion of old-South aristocratic culture and a determination to shore up its battered remnants. Ironically, the magnitude of his obsession helped Katherine to perceive its incompatibility with reality. As Hall eloquently observes, “it took tremendous effort for men like William Lumpkin to reconcile an early twentieth-century present of intense racial and class alienation with a ‘dream replica’ of a paternalistic past. Katherine sensed that effort, those rifts and contradictions—and through them she would eventually slip into critical consciousness” (“Open” 111). Later in Katherine’s childhood, this already cracking facade of elitism further crumbled. The family bought and moved to a two-hundred acre farm in the “Sand Hills,” a region of South Carolina with generally poor, sandy soil. Nearly all their new neighbors “had few acres and very poor little dwellings” and many were malnourished (151).10 The family’s own sense of well-being took a decided turn for the worse when, soon after the move to Sand Hills, William “died of throat cancer” (Hall “Open” 116). Still, they were conspicuously affluent compared to their neighbors: “Ours was the ‘big farm’ of the countryside,” Katherine observed, “our house by far the largest although it was plain and simple” (151). Whereas most of their neighbors did manual labor on small farms that they either owned or rented as sharecroppers, “our fieldwork,” Katherine reports, “of course, was done by Negroes” (153). Surrounded by poor whites for the first time in her life, Katherine recognized and reflected on the roots of her own family’s privilege: “[U]ntil we moved to our farm, I knew little and thought not at all about the ‘poorer classes’” (160). Attending the local school, she (and surely Grace, too) saw their privilege offset against other children’s worn clothes, bland lunches, and lack of education. Her dismay at seeing such poverty mixed with a desire to identify with these other children: “I was a ‘cultured’ child; I used more or less correct English. I could not have made over my speech into the image of theirs if I had tried. I think I would gladly have done it, so hard would they stare at me when I talked, as though I were some kind of foreigner, as indeed they regarded me; and worse, as though I were ‘putting on airs’” (159). Living in the impoverished Sand Hills also pushed Katherine out of her earlier uncritical immersion in religious worship. Although the Lumpkin family had long identified with the relatively sedate Episcopal worship style, the move to this farm necessitated attending a nearby rural Baptist church among their poorer white neighbors. (Whereas the nearest Episcopal church was twelve miles from their home, a little Baptist church was only two miles

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 57

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

58

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

away.) “People would not have understood,” Katherine observed, “if we had failed to [attend this Baptist church]” (162).11 Witnessing a rural Baptist worship style that struck her as variously quaint and oppressive, Katherine began to adopt a more detached sociological perspective toward religion: Our theological tenets [in the Episcopal church] had sifted as softly into my consciousness as snow floats down on a still winter night [.  .  .  .  ] The Sand Hills put an end to this. Beliefs suddenly loomed before my mind. I saw and heard what purported to be the same religion I believed in, but it seemed very changed. [.  .  .  .  ] They seemed to awaken antagonistic responses in my mind, hearing them as I did against the sound of flat, hopeless voices singing: “Wash me whiter than the snow.” (185)12

New experiences in college and graduate school also destabilized Katherine’s deeply entrenched views about white supremacy and the rationale behind racial segregation. While attending Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, her involvement with the YWCA pushed her into previously taboo social contact with black members of the organization. Further, she was “guided toward a leftist literature in sociology and economics by the YWCA’s industrial secretaries,” and began to “think of the South not as an icon but as a social system and to apply to it a critique of racism and capitalism that would grow more radical as time wore on” (Hall “Open” 117). Later, after moving to New York City, she was surprised and troubled by racist white Northerners who “aped our Southern ways, took over our [racist] terminology bodily” (Lumpkin Southerner 202). These encounters gave her a disturbing reflection of her own previously more naturalized racism: “hearing [racial epithets] from their lips had an unpleasant sound, as of something respectable suddenly made indecent” (Southerner 203). Her graduate work in sociology at New York’s Columbia University gave her a more positive and liberating insight into white America—“that it was non-slaveholders who were numerous in the South; that non-slaveholding was the standpoint from which the vast majority of Southern whites had necessarily looked on the world” (Southerner 226). Southern whites who, like the Lumpkins, felt “disinherited” in the postbellum South, were relatively few. This realization suggested to her that the majority of Southern whites—given the right encouragement and critical tools—might be able to relinquish racist feelings about blacks more easily than she, so deeply enmeshed in her family’s narrative of social and economic loss, had been able to. Much like Katherine, Grace sought (or was forced to seek) a life for herself after childhood that diverged from the more traditional expectations that

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 58

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” 59 might have pushed a woman of her class and cultural background towards early marriage and a life of relative leisure: “After high school graduation, [she] taught school and organized a night school for farmers and their wives. [.  .  .  .  ] Later she had a government job as home demonstration agent for the county, and learned more about the economic problems of the people on the land” (Gilkes 313). Of particular importance to the story she would tell in To Make My Bread, she “lived out in the mountains of North Carolina most summers, and stayed with people who worked in the cotton mills.”13 Later, she worked for two years as an “industrial secretary of the South Carolina Y.W.C.A.” (Gilkes 313). Then, pursuing her ambition to become a writer, she moved to New York City, working to support herself while taking classes at Columbia University and trying to write.14 Lumpkin’s jobs played an important role in steering her gradually towards radicalism. In 1925, she joined “the office staff at The World Tomorrow, a monthly Quaker publication aimed at promoting peace, conscientious objection to war, and ‘social order based on the principles of Jesus’” (Sowinska x-xi). Lumpkin’s own political views moved left of The World Tomorrow after this publication sent her (along with Esther Shemitz, a coworker and close friend) to “cover the long, momentous, and recurrently violent textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey, the first mass walkout in the United States to be led by the Communist party”: “Having experienced firsthand the revolutionary fervor of the Passaic workers and their leaders, [Lumpkin and Shemitz] returned to New York with a new dedication to the principles and goals of the Communist party, its commitment to the worker, its promise for the artist, and its vision of the future” (Sowinska xii). As Suzanne Sowinska explains, this early exposure to Communist ideology was important to the writing of To Make My Bread: [I]n 1928 she joined the staff of The New Masses; in 1929 she was sent south by the CP to organize among black sharecroppers and to observe and participate in the Communist-led Gastonia textile strikes. This trip provided Lumpkin with much of the material for her first novel. In writing about Gastonia, she saw a way to connect her nascent awareness of a radical political agenda and her prerogative to create art that would serve the proletariat with the landscape of her youth.” (xii-iii)15

She worked sporadically on the book while holding down other jobs to support herself. An advance from the Macauley publishing firm based on an incomplete draft helped her to finish it (Sowinska xiii). The book, which came out in late 1932, received widespread critical praise, “[winning] the Maxim Gorky award as the year’s best labor novel” (Smith 287).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 59

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

60

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

“[A] book called ‘Lee’s Miserables’” In a sense, To Make My Bread takes Katherine’s insight—that “non-slaveholding was the standpoint from which the vast majority of Southern whites had necessarily looked on the world”—and focuses its implications on a particular facet of Southern working-class experience. In the modern South, this non-slaveholding/slaveholding distinction likely continued to divide the South between the working-class and those who profited from their labor. For Grace Lumpkin, the fact of the numerical difference between the few who had owned slaves and the many who had not might have provided an incentive to imagine the world as viewed through the eyes of this workingclass majority. As Katherine came to believe that critical awareness could counter racism, so Grace came to feel that Marxist rationalism could in time remove the stumbling blocks to unionism and communism—particularly since racism so often obscured class exploitation of whites and blacks. In light of Lumpkin’s desire to promote the movement from ideological transformation to direct action, her decision to write from the perspective of a proletarian family—one without roots in an old slaveholding aristocracy— seems logical. Since the McClures, unlike the Lumpkins, probably found life equally hard before and after the war, their potential for ideological development would not likely be stifled by mourning for a lost, idealized past. While Southerner portrays transformations that occur more in the realm of thought than action, To Make My Bread dramatizes a process in which ideological changes inspire a racially integrated union to carry out a labor strike.16 Like Katherine’s memoir, Grace’s novel traces how tensions in individual experience may cause previously naturalized thought patterns to become visible as socially constructed ideology. In her memoir, the exceptionally articulate Katherine ably depicts one way of thinking emerging from another. In contrast, Lumpkin’s main characters lack Katherine’s verbal resources (and, of course, her sociological training). They are not predisposed to self-consciously recognize the social construction of their beliefs about the world. Thus, their interactions with cultural artifacts offer another way of showing the phenomena of ideological orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Since certain cultural artifacts reflect widely accepted beliefs, characters’ responses to these artifacts offer a gauge of their alignment with these beliefs. How do characters respond to a particular cultural artifact within a given social context? How does this artifact reflect their own lived experience? How might it cause a reorientation towards experience? Lumpkin’s novel invokes such questions frequently as a way of bringing the ideologies of relatively inarticulate characters into focus.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 60

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

61

Interestingly, the allusion that provides the chronologically earliest insight into cultural products that informed the McClure family’s worldview is not to an old hymn or ballad but, rather, to the French Victor Hugo’s epic social novel Les Misérables (1862). This book—one that Lumpkin’s well-educated parents might have grown up reading—appears through the distorted lens of the McClures’ seemingly complete removal from any print culture.17 During the time that Granpap is in jail, convicted of smuggling whiskey, Emma tells her two youngest children, Bonnie and John, about Granpap’s time in the Confederate Army decades before. In the final year before the South’s surrender, when Granpap and other Confederates had suffered tremendously, Granpap’s unit had included a soldier, only sixteen years old, from a wealthy family and with “a slave to take care of him like a nurse” (86). Emma goes on to recall that “the soldiers used to sit around a campfire at night and the rich man’s son had a book called ‘Lee’s Miserables.’ He’d read to them. The General that owned the army was named Lee. And after hearing the book the soldiers called themselves Lee’s Miserables” (86).18 As Hall has observed, Grace Lumpkin’s proletarian novels “reworked Lumpkin family history to attack every shibboleth that her parents defended” (“Open Secrets” 111). The novel’s reference to the “rich man’s son, one of them that owned slaves before they was freed” (TMMB 86) illustrates such deconstructive tendencies at work. As Lumpkin’s sister Katherine recalled in The Making of a Southerner, their father joined the Confederate Army in 1864, at age fifteen. Like the fictional soldier Granpap remembered from his unit, William Lumpkin was accompanied by “black Pete, his body servant, who had gone away with him and stayed by his side during his soldiering” (Making 51). That William “was a keen wit, a fine teller of tales and singer of songs around the camp fire” (Making 51) also suggests his relationship to the fictional soldier in To Make My Bread. Here, then, Lumpkin uses the eyes of John Kirkland (the future “Granpap”), a poor and illiterate man, to provide an ironic glimpse of a man who could have been her own father, a privileged young soldier who read Les Misérables to the less affluent and educated in his ranks. In constructing the fictional McClures, Lumpkin clearly had in mind a family of considerably more humble class and educational background than her own family had been (and still was). Compared to the Lumpkins, who had lost a significant degree of leisure and economic security based on slaveholding, the McClures are never shown to have benefited economically from slavery (or underpaid black labor). Granpap—in contrast to Lumpkin’s father as portrayed by Katherine—seems to have spent little time in the postbellum years dwelling on the Confederates’ “Lost Cause.” He has taught his daughter that “there

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 61

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

62

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

wasn’t any civil kind of war. Not that he knew about” (86). Because the McClures do not see themselves as having suffered from race-based economic oppression, they are relatively malleable receptacles for a Marxist explanation of white supremacy as a detriment to working-class progress. On one level, this brief allusion to Les Misérables draws attention to the way illiteracy has shaped the McClures’ worldview. Emma does not seem to realize that the book she calls “Lee’s Miserables” was not really about the miseries that soldiers, fighting for a reactionary cause, endured under Robert E. Lee. Quite understandably, however, Granpap’s Civil War experience has made the suffering of “Lee’s Miserables” far more tangible than that of Hugo’s literary characters. That Granpap’s consciousness blurs these two terms, Les Misérables and Lee’s Miserables, works as a symbol for the exploitative forces that ensnared poor whites in the Civil War. Granpap seems to have been compelled to fight to preserve a slaveholding economy that had little relationship to the lives of poor mountain farmers like himself. For the reader, this allusion also operates on a level that is potentially much deeper. Since To Make My Bread and Les Misérables share as their central concern the exposition and eradication of the sociopolitical roots of poverty and oppression, Lumpkin’s allusion may also be seen as a subtle, yet complex act of literary signification. Like To Make My Bread, Les Misérables traces a struggle to escape poverty that is both individual and collective. Both novels interrogate and suggest solutions for poverty in their respective societies. They differ fundamentally, however, in their views of capitalism and its attendant class system. Les Misérables constructs an idealistic situation in which workers flourish in a capitalist factory run by an atypically benevolent, paternalistic man who has risen out of an obscure background. To Make My Bread rejects such views of potential reality as antithetical to Marxism’s view of capitalism as a necessarily divisive, antagonistic socioeconomic system.19 In brief, the early part of Hugo’s multi-volume novel—the section most relevant to Lumpkin’s novel—follows a heroically proportioned protagonist, Jean Valjean, who rises from extremely humble circumstances to remarkable success (though it is short-lived and fraught with anxiety). Released from prison after spending almost twenty years at hard labor for stealing bread, Valjean steals from the home of a bishop. When police arrest Valjean with goods stolen from the bishop’s house, the bishop refuses to accuse Valjean of theft. Instead, he saves Valjean from a return to prison, claiming to have given him the stolen items, then giving him even more. Because of the bishop’s extraordinary mercy, Valjean (using the surname Madeleine to hide his past) refashions his life in the years that follow. He becomes a beloved town mayor and successful factory owner who strives to treat his factory workers

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 62

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

63

humanely. Rather than hoarding his profits, he gives generously to increase the prosperity of all the inhabitants of his town and region. Lumpkin’s novel may be seen as subtly suggesting the shortcomings of Hugo’s text—both as sociopolitical philosophy and as art capable of inspiring altruism in its audience. As Emma continues her anecdote, elaborating on the extent of Granpap’s misery during the war, Lumpkin invites readers to weigh Granpap’s actions ironically against the humane values that, presumably, hearing Les Misérables would have exposed him to: Granpap said he used to get s’ hungry [in the army].  .  .  .  Once he was a-scouting and he came across a little nigger. The little nigger was eating a piece of cornbread. Granpap said snot was running from the little nigger’s nose on the bread. But Granpap hadn’t eaten a thing for two days. He took the bread away from the little nigger and ate it. And it was the best meal, he said, he ever had. (86, ellipses in original)

This story’s incongruous progression from famished soldiers sitting around listening to “Lee’s Miserables” [Les Misérables] to Granpap stealing a poor black boy’s bread suggests the pragmatic impotence of this literature to engender benevolent behavior—particularly within a social context that is already degraded by brutality, desperate poverty, and racism. Hearing Les Misérables, a novel that dramatizes the social virtue of individual kindness and charity, seemingly did nothing to undermine Granpap’s belief in his intrinsic right to take food from a black boy. He came to think of himself as one of “Lee’s Miserables,” but he could not recognize blacks as part of the miserable.20 The fact that Hugo’s protagonist, Valjean, also stole bread, but under moral circumstances notably different from Granpap’s, allows Lumpkin’s scenario to resonate further within the context of Les Misérables. While Lumpkin highlights Granpap’s inability to recognize the suffering of someone arguably more miserable and powerless than himself, Hugo constructs a legitimate moral justification for Valjean’s act. Not personal hunger alone, but concern for the welfare of his widowed sister and her seven children drives Valjean to take a loaf of bread from a bakery: Valjean “did what he could; his sister worked too, but what could she do with seven children? It was a sad group which wretchedness gradually enveloped and choked. One winter was hard, and Jean had no work to do, and the family had no bread. No bread, literally none, and seven children” (1: 82). While Granpap takes the bread without feeling remorse or being punished, Valjean is caught and sentenced to hard labor for five years (which turns into nineteen years as punishment for several

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 63

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

64

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

attempted escapes) for this one act, “done [  .  .  .  ] to feed and clothe seven little children” (1: 85). That Lumpkin uses Emma’s retelling to frame this anecdote adds to its significance. Emma tells the story, presumably as Granpap has told it to her, to dramatize a hunger so intense that a white man would actually relish a piece of snot-covered bread snatched from a “little nigger.” Neither Emma nor Granpap seems to sympathize retrospectively with the boy whose bread was taken some four decades earlier. The fact of this boy’s blackness legitimates the theft within the racist value system handed down from Granpap to his daughter Emma and, now, from Emma to her children John and Bonnie. Lumpkin draws attention to the importance of this oral story as a vehicle for transmitting ideology, showing that it penetrates Bonnie’s consciousness and fascinates (and perhaps even troubles) John’s developing conscience: “Bonnie raised up. She was almost asleep. Perhaps she had been asleep. She had heard the story before. But so had John heard it. Yet he was never tired of hearing it again, or of asking his own questions” (86). Though many years have passed since the event took place, and though Granpap’s grown daughter tells the story, nothing in the family’s isolated mountain experience has made them rethink the implicit values in this story.21 When the McClures move to the textile town that Lumpkin aptly names Leesville, this ideological stasis suddenly changes. In Leesville, the McClures experience a type of oppression worthy of the appellations “Les Misérables” and “Lee’s Miserables” alike. While the former name might convey the general condition of wretchedness and exploitation the McClures will experience, the latter one might tie the oppressive legacy of the lost Confederate cause to the ongoing racism that deters working-class solidarity. As the image of a comrade from a wealthy background reading Les Misérables to fellow soldiers like the illiterate Granpap suggests, the shared misery of war may have blurred class distinctions among white Confederate soldiers, imparting a class-transcendent quality to the colloquial label “Lee’s Miserables.” But as Granpap’s experience at the early-twentieth-century Confederate reunion shows, this perception of solidarity among white soldiers (or among white Southerners more generally) was largely temporary or illusory. During this later time, wealthy politicians and businessmen are shown manipulating veterans’ pride of having fought for the South to further their own financial interests and to agitate the ideology of white supremacy.22 As the young Granpap was susceptible to the class-transcendent rhetoric of Les Misérables, the aged Granpap is still susceptible to such rhetoric at the rally. Notably, Lumpkin shows John, then a boy of ten, at this rally, not yet understanding the manipulative speeches, but storing them in his mind for the time when he might have the knowledge to analyze them critically (185–6). Eventually,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 64

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

65

new experiences will compel John and Bonnie to revise the implications of various stories that have shaped the family’s worldview. They will become skeptical about the intentions of paternalistic bosses and politicians. They will learn via Marx what Granpap seemingly failed to learn via Hugo—that racism can divide the working class and thus hinder the recognition of classbased oppression. After accepting basic Marxist tenets, this new generation of McClures could not pass on the story of Granpap stealing bread as Emma does, seemingly oblivious to its problematic ideological assumptions.23 Though To Make My Bread does not allude to Les Misérables again, later events continue to evoke and interrogate Hugo’s novel. In particular, John, in his initial belief that he can use his rise within the ranks of the factory system to help less successful fellow workers, might well have taken Valjean’s ascent from poor ex-convict to successful, generous factory owner as a model.24 Lumpkin’s charting of John’s journey towards communism valorizes his deliberate rejection of such atypical escape routes from class circumstances. Lumpkin’s novel also implicitly rejects Hugo’s belief that individual acts of altruism and integrity might significantly reshape a social landscape defined by capitalist corruption and working-class misery. In To Make My Bread, profit-hungry factory owners and disingenuous preachers contradict Hugo’s selfless Bishop Digne and benevolent Valjean. John’s successful and selfish older brother Basil cynically counters Hugo’s Valjean, who retains generosity despite wealth. Granted, Hugo depicts such rare goodness and good fortune against a social background dominated by cruelty and moral backwardness. Like John, Valjean has working-class roots that inspire him to spread his new wealth among the less fortunate. Still, for Lumpkin, Hugo’s portrayal of Valjean’s uncanny success and generosity breaches a social-realist commitment to privileging class antagonism as a defining truth.25 The worldview that the seasoned worker-radical John Stevens imparts to young John McClure succinctly conveys an ideological stance that undermines Hugo’s. McClure recalls hearing “a preacher to the rich say that some day the rich would get the love of God in their hearts and share everything half and half with the poor.” This, Stevens tells him, would be like “expect[ing] a snake to come up and open its mouth gentle and humble for you t’ take out the fangs” (312). McClure comes to share Stevens’ belief that only a revolution to strip the powerful of their wealth will bring social harmony. Through the example of Valjean, Hugo had suggested otherwise. Despite the fact that Hugo shows Valjean heroically turning his factory over to his workers before he flees to avoid rearrest, Les Misérables does not advocate eliminating private ownership and social classes, particularly through revolution. One of Hugo’s narrative asides argues that communism “kills production, and equal division destroys emulation, and consequently labor.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 65

6/22/2006 8:54:28 AM

66

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

It is a distribution made by the butcher who slaughters what he divides. Hence it is impossible to be satisfied with these pretended solutions, for killing riches is not distributing them” (4: 20–1, emphasis added). Rather, Hugo’s ideal government must “encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust exhaustion of the weak by the strong.” It should “democratize property, not by abolishing, but by universalizing it, so that every citizen, without exception, may be a land-owner” (4: 21). For Hugo, an end to social misery requires embracing Christian love and high moral principles. The forgiveness, benevolence, and integrity that the bishop bestows on Valjean, and that Valjean himself later bestows on others, function as a model for the privileged and powerful to emulate. Conversely, Inspector Javert’s mean-spirited refusal to let Valjean reconstruct his identity provides a model to shun. Such aspects of the text suggest that Hugo’s ideal “revolution” would start in the minds and spirits of the wealthy, not among the masses of rank-and-file factory workers who depend on them for a living.26 This most fundamental ideological difference between Hugo and Lumpkin likely explains the nature of Lumpkin’s allusion to this novel—the way it undermines the idea that the popularity of Les Misérables among those who would inherit and rebuild the postbellum New South actually engendered any significant lessening of class exploitation. Lumpkin’s structural placement of Les Misérables relatively early in the novel further points to its intended ironic and problematic status within the novel. (Considering that the allusion occurs in the context of a story relating an incident from the much earlier Civil War, its chronological relation to Lumpkin’s characters actually predates the novel’s principal axis of time.) This structuring gives Lumpkin (and her characters) more time to develop contrasting aesthetic and political premises in the remainder of her novel. In contrast to the way that Granpap’s selfish actions clash with the purported message of Les Misérables, John and Bonnie’s participation in a collective struggle for a union harmonizes with the folk-styled protest songs that both inspire and reflect their actions. This later relatively congruous alignment of song culture and working-class experience may be seen as answering the implied failure of Les Misérables to intervene positively in the development of Lumpkin’s characters’ social consciousness. “Power In the Blood” and “Power in the Factory”: Lumpkin’s radicalization of hymnology While the minister spoke faces strained upwards toward him, as if they were sniffing in the words he said with their nostrils. There were gaunt

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 66

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

67

men and tired looking women, old before their time. There were boys and girls, wan and stunted of the second and third generation of those who had worked in the mills. [.  .  .  .] “What [the minister] said had sense,” Granpap told Frank. “If the rich could get the grace of Jesus Christ in their hearts, hit stands to reason we’d all have enough.” “I didn’t like so much his speaking about us as being pore so much,” Frank said. “If he’d spoke it just once  .  .  .” “No,” Granpap answered before Frank could finish, “hit didn’t seem to fit in exactly. But what he says is mighty true. Only all the rich would have t’ do it together—for there are so many pore.” (TMMB 270)

Lumpkin recognizes important harmonies and dissonances between Christian theology and Marxist ideology. The Christian Bible contains numerous time-honored images and narratives that suggest proper distributions of power—among humans and between humanity and divinity. Guided by Marxism, Lumpkin’s own novel focuses on current relationships between working-class and capitalist powers. Because Lumpkin sees palpable links between aspects of religious culture and oppression, her allusions to religious texts, placed among other allusions to songs and literature, assume an important place in the novel’s schemata of cultural allusions. The novel embeds various religious images and narratives into contexts that highlight and critique their functions as frameworks for conceptualizing reality. In various cases in which characters must interpret their circumstances, these religious frameworks may clash with other cultural frameworks (or with characters’ notions of common sense). Lumpkin’s representations emphasize religion not in its ideal form, but as it has been corrupted by preachers and mill owners wanting to enhance their own positions of authority by exploiting the desire of people under them to do what they see as God’s will. As one key part of establishing patterns of positive transformation, early, relatively naïve, interactions with religious texts precede events or insights that recall these earlier interactions but also connote a new consciousness of and autonomy from prescriptive religious modes of thought. Early in the novel, Lumpkin invokes the Bible’s story of God calling on Abraham to sacrifice his only son. As the novel progresses, a motif of sacrifice develops as characters become entangled within power structures that compel them to sacrifice aspects of self to a new industrial god. Lumpkin introduces this Abraham narrative in the context of a preacher’s displeasure over people in the mountain community dancing to Granpap’s fiddle and Sam Wesley’s banjo. Preacher Warren, the minister for the community, condemns these

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 67

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

68

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

dances as sinful (and also suspects that the donations given to the musicians cut into church offerings). Though the preacher has rebuked him, Granpap rationalizes that “‘David danced before the Lord,’ [  .  .  .  ]. ‘And I ain’t ashamed to play before the Lord. He can look and see there’s no sin in my heart’” (44). While Granpap cites the Biblical David to justify his music, Preacher Warren uses the story of Abraham to explain why Granpap should sacrifice his beloved fiddle music: “And Abraham said, ‘Here am I, Lord,’ when the Lord called him. And the Lord said Abraham must take his only son, even the son he loved, and sacrifice him to the Lord. So Abraham rose up early in the morning and cut wood and took some fire and went to the place he could see afar off, the place the Lord had told him. And up on the mountain he bound his son on the wood of an altar and took up a knife to slay him. But just in time the Lord showed Abraham a ram in a thicket so that Abraham could offer up the ram instead of his son. So the Lord blessed Abraham because he was willing to sacrifice his son that he loved.” (46)

After reciting this familiar Biblical text, Preacher Warren rhetorically asks his congregation, and then Granpap in particular, whether their dedication to God matches Abraham’s: “How many of you,” he asked, “can say with a clean heart, ‘Here am I, Lord’? How many, while you’re working in your corn patch or sitting by your fire, or while you’re dancing your Chains and Under the Garden Gates [square dance figures] can say, ‘Here am I Lord,’ and feel that for the Lord you would sacrifice anything or anybody, your son or your dancing or your playing? “There’s one amongst you,” he went on—and waited a moment, looking around at them all. “There’s one amongst you that calls figures and plays the music. He leads the young ones into sin. He’s old, nearing his grave, and ought to know better. Instead of playing for dancing, he’d do better making his peace with the Lord.” Suddenly preacher Warren pointed straight at Granpap. “What will you say, John Kirkland?” He called out in a high voice. (46)

Deeply offended, Granpap repeats his earlier rationale: “‘I’ll say David danced before the Lord and he played on the cymbal and the lute—and if King David could then John Kirkland can. And that’s between him and his Lord’” (47). He then walks out of the church, initiating “a queer thing

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 68

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

69

[  .  .  .  ] that people talked about long afterward” (47). With the exception of three people, the entire congregation follows him out the door. Voting with their feet, they reject Preacher Warren’s use of the Abraham story as a reason to sacrifice their dancing and instead choose Granpap’s exonerating appeal to King David’s dancing and playing. Here, a Biblical text with liberating implications negates the effect of another with more restrictive implications. As an anecdote contributing to the novel’s examination of exploitation, this story presages various characters’ later struggles to break free of oppressive authority figures. When the McClures become mill workers, mill supervisors as well as preachers presume degrees of authority over what goes on in the family’s home. On the Sunday following Granpap’s dramatic walkout, his young grandchildren Bonnie and John independently test the validity of Preacher Warren’s insinuating sermon: “[R]emembering the story from the Bible, [Bonnie and John] played Abraham and the Lord” (48).27 Their play takes a more serious turn when Bonnie, worried by the preacher’s sermon that Granpap has angered God with his music, decides that they “‘ought really to sacrifice something, not play’” (48). She then convinces John that they should make an offering of their dog, Georgy. Striving to replicate every detail of the story as they remember it, they take him to a mountaintop and prepare to kill him. As they understand the story, God will intervene and stop them from carrying out the ritual. But when no divine sign seems forthcoming, their faith wavers and they call off the sacrifice on their own: “We ain’t a-going to do it. We ain’t a-going to do it,” [John] cried shrilly. He took the knife from the ground and began cutting the cords from Georgy’s feet. [.  .  .  .  ] “No, we ain’t,” Bonnie said. “No, we ain’t.” She spoke angrily and it seemed that she was talking not to John but to the Lord. (51)

Although Bonnie and John had intended to blindly emulate the sacrifice narrative, which they have learned as an exemplar of faith, they end up autonomously transforming this narrative along lines that reaffirm the value they place on tangible life. These early examples of breaking free from a strict obedience to the Bible anticipate later scenarios in which characters are caught between following prescriptive orders and taking pragmatic, autonomous action. Much later in the novel, for instance, Bonnie, afraid of incurring her boss’s displeasure, goes to work despite the illness of her youngest daughter, who ends up dying from this neglect. In a later, more positive example of such conflict

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 69

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

70

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

between individuals and authority, numerous workers defy their bosses and walk out of the factory in solidarity with a handful of others who have been fired for involvement with a union. As a leader of the resulting strike, John in particular will have to firmly reject appeals, from preachers and mill managers who present themselves as paternalistic authority figures, to call the strike off. Throughout the novel, additional religious allusions become the basis for other transformations that strip them of their former absolute, axiomatic power in various characters’ lives. One such imaginative transformation is rooted in two thematically related hymns, “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood” and “There is Power in the Blood.”28 These hymns promote reliance upon God’s salvation that the novel’s context seeks to problematize and transform. At a community baptism held at a mountain creek, the aforementioned Preacher Warren starts the ceremony by leading the congregation in the hymn “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood”: “There is a fountain filled with blood, / Drawn from Immanuel’s veins, / And sinners plunged beneath its flood, / Lose all their guilty stains” (61).29 The preacher then builds upon this hymn’s message, telling the youths about to be baptized that they must live pure lives on earth so that “the Lord would bless them and welcome them into his everlasting home” (62). Through a brief glimpse of the preacher’s thoughts preceding the start of this ceremony, Lumpkin draws further attention to the hymn and the preacher’s exhortations as part of a rhetorically instilled worldview with oppressive qualities not yet recognized by participants. This scene, like the earlier one in which Preacher Warren condemned Granpap’s dance music, characterizes preachers, as supposed intermediaries of God, as having a unique (and easily abused) authority to judge the morality of others’ behavior. As noted above, Preacher Warren had unspoken practical reasons for resenting the threat Granpap’s music posed to church attendance and funds. Here, too, Lumpkin shows that the preacher’s words and true thoughts do not necessarily coincide. Readers learn that “to Preacher Warren all the people in the company were pinch-faced and uninteresting” (59). He resents their poverty and has little faith that any of them will live redeeming lives: “If he had met John [McClure] in the road he would have seen just another pinch-faced child with a careless walk, who would grow up to be a careless, slovenly man, living on the lusts of the flesh” (60). By showing that the preacher’s inward condescension conflicts with his outward show of sincerity, the text undercuts the intended sanctity of his service. The characters, presumably, trust the spiritual value of the material that the preacher has selected for their enlightenment. Readers, however, recognize that these characters, lacking access to the preacher’s uninhibited thoughts about them, may be misplacing their trust.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 70

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

71

While this scene uses “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood” to establish how interaction with religious texts contributes to the characters’ “preindustrial” ideologies, a later scene parodies a similar hymn to illustrate how an encounter with the industrial factory system may destabilize certain aspects of ideology. Having just left a native environment in which mountains dwarf scattered cabins, Emma gets her first look at the factory where she will soon begin work. To her, this gigantic manmade structure intrudes audaciously into a space formerly reserved in her mind for nature and God: “Up from the brick structure rose two huge chimneys, towering into the sky, like two towers of Babel. Smoke poured out of them into the wide open heavens” (147 emphasis added). Temporarily at least, the factory awes her as probably only God did before: “[Emma] spoke in a whisper as if she was afraid the factory would hear. ‘You remember that church song,’ she went on speaking low to Ora [her sister] ‘that says, ‘There’s power in the blood.’ Well, that sound [the rumble of machinery] seems t’ say, ‘There’s power in the factory, there’s power in the factory’” (149).30 Emma’s figurative language here (and elsewhere) illustrates the potentially liberating power of words creatively freed from rote usage. For Emma (and the reader), replacing the idea of “power in the blood”—which the hymn characterizes incrementally over several verses—with that of “power in the factory” destabilizes perception. If the “power in the blood” promises to cleanse and save sinners, what then does the “power in the factory” promise? To “cleanse” the poor of their poverty? If so, are those who fail to avail themselves of and profit from the factory’s grace somehow sinful? For the reader, the aesthetically dense, indeterminate relationships between the novel (a still unfolding text), the hymn (an already closed text), and the fleeting parody of this hymn (an incomplete, mostly hypothetical text) prompt such reflections. Emma had simply inherited the figurative concept of “power in the blood” as part of a socially ordained worldview, and perhaps never interrogated it before.31 In contrast, she actually created this new countermetaphor herself. While Emma is familiar with what the hymn promises, she is less sure about the nature of the “power in the factory.” Already, though, her foreboding views of the Babel-like chimneys cast doubt on earlier Biblically informed visions of the mill village as a “land flowing with milk and honey” (136).32 In Emma’s newly activated imagination, the smoke-belching factory seems to challenge the hymn’s assurance that immersion in Christ is sufficient to cleanse all “sin.” As she does at other points in the text, Lumpkin shows here that Bonnie, who will later write labor songs, absorbs certain potentially liberating insights from her mother. The questioning of authority implicit in Emma’s

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 71

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

72

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

creative secularizing of a hymn is not lost on this young daughter. Although Emma, after proposing her altered chorus, “was a little ashamed as she always was of some of her notions before Ora,” “she saw Bonnie look up from under her bonnet as if she understood” (149). Within the context of the novel’s transforming trajectories, Emma’s brief parodic transformation of “There is Power in the Blood” destabilizes an image of God guiding all aspects of life. The reader might surmise that Emma and Bonnie will no longer sing of the “power in the blood” without also hearing the dissonant idea of the “power in the factory.”33 Emma’s parody also has the capacity to activate the reader’s transformative imagination by evoking another well-known parody of “Power in the Blood”—the song “There is Power in the Union,” penned by Industrial Workers of the World luminary Joe Hill in 1913. Although not cited in Lumpkin’s text, this artifact of IWW laborlore was likely part of the cultural repertoire of Lumpkin and many of her contemporary readers. While Emma’s parody replaces the idea of Christ’s cleansing power with that of the factory’s oppressive power, Hill’s song further recognizes the Union’s liberating power: Would you have freedom from wage slavery, Then join in the grand Industrial band; Would you from mis’ry and hunger be free, Then come! Do your share, like a man. There is pow’r, there is pow’r In a band of workingmen. When they stand hand in hand, That’s a pow’r, that’s a pow’r That must rule in every land— One Industrial Union Grand. (qtd. in Kornbluh 140)

Seeing Hill’s parody as an extension of Emma’s is consonant with other structures within Lumpkin’s novel that encourage readers to discover codes of ideological progress within (and in this case external to) the novel’s carefully sequenced cultural allusions. Making this imaginative jump to the external reality of Hill’s radical song, readers may sense more clearly the potentially liberating trajectory of Emma’s observations. Indeed, the labor song that Bonnie eventually writes may be seen as extending and revitalizing the earlier culture of resistance to which “Power in the Union” belongs. As the novel progresses, Emma continues to revise the patterns of her thinking about her relationship to the mill along the critical lines that her

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 72

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

73

earlier parody initiated. Just before her first day of mill work, she comes up with yet another wholly new figurative conception of the mill: “The people entering the door of the mill seemed to Emma as if they were corn being fed into a hopper to be ground up. Emma saw herself going in and coming out different from what she had been” (195). Struggling to reconcile this view with her visions “in the mountains [  .  .  .  ] of round silver dollars dropping into her lap, and of buying good food and fine things in the stores,” she vows that she would not let them make her give up the thoughts she had had of the promised land. She said to herself, that she, Emma McClure, could make money if she tried hard enough. If she worked hard and gave the best she had to the mill, in some fine way she would be recompensed. Perhaps all these people had failed to give their best. Perhaps they were lazy. (195)

After Emma becomes a veteran mill worker, however, her earlier rosy conception of the mill as a “promised land” ceases to brighten her vision of reality. Instead, the image of corn being ground further darkens into a more violent narrative of bones being crushed to sustain the mill—as opposed to those who work there: There was a story the teacher told the young ones at school, and Bonnie, playing teacher, told it over to the children at home. “And the ogre said, ‘I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.’” At first the throb of the mill had been like the throb of a big heart beating for the good of those who worked under the roof, for it gave hope of desires to be fulfilled. A woman, one of the weavers, said to Ora and Emma one lunch hour during the summer, “The weave room has a sound different from the other rooms. It’s like the sound of sinners’ teeth grinding in hell.” Now to Emma the throb of a heart had changed. She was feeling the grind of teeth. The mill crunched up and down—“I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.” (219)

Significantly, Emma revises not only her own earlier conception of the mill’s sound as a beating heart, but also this other weaver’s conception of it being like sinners’ grinding teeth. Her newest creative image drops the other weaver’s problematic linking of workers with sin (perhaps the “sin” of not being able to live up to the speed and perfection of the machines). Instead, it adapts a folktale to imagine the mill itself as a monstrous force that crushes workers’ bones “to make my bread.” (That Lumpkin adapts this phrase for the novel’s

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 73

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

74

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

title suggests that she endorses Emma’s bleak creative conception of capitalist labor—even as she writes towards a more hopeful future that will better enable workers to “make [their] bread.”) Emma does not have access to rational explanations of the mill as a mode of production. She cannot read, and she never meets anyone (as her son meets John Stevens) who can steer her towards a radical conception of labor. Still, through her own exploration of figurative language, she tentatively compares the mill to more familiar and easily grasped concepts. For Emma, an ability to use language creatively to conceptualize her situation serves mostly to strip away her earlier naïve and illusory concepts of mill life. Before her own potential trajectory of radicalization has a chance to run its course, she becomes mentally and physically incapacitated by pellagra. Her youngest children, John and Bonnie, however, are eventually able to use Emma’s disillusionment as the basis for more positively empowering radical thought. Inspired by Emma, they go through their own process of learning to diagnose oppression and, more importantly, fighting to cure it. John will learn an older proto-radical song from Stevens, and his sister will later write her own more radical song. Reflecting this cross-generational progress, this song by Bonnie appearing near the end of the novel will do more than just recognize the factory’s life-consuming power, as Emma’s figurative language has done. Rather, it will challenge this power with the liberating idea of a workers’ union as a potentially greater counter-force.34 As Emma loses her unqualified faith in the “power in the blood” to the new “power in the factory,” John eventually goes through an experience that destabilizes the role of hymns as direct discourse informing his worldview. As a young teenager, John is shaken by the experience of hearing a familiar hymn being sung in a shockingly unfamiliar context. His friend Robert—a boy distinguished by his cold amorality—takes him to where a chain gang is camping for the night. As John and Robert watch from a hidden spot, guards compel the gang (of mostly “full black” men) to sing hymns before being locked into cages for the night. They sing “two hymns that John had never heard before” and then begin “Nearer my God to Thee”: “This one John knew, and all the men seemed to know it well. Their deep mournful voices mixed with the heavy feeling of night just coming, and went up toward the heavens where stars were coming out” (249). The lyrics Lumpkin quotes convey another facet of the theology-oriented worldview that her novel seeks to deconstruct: Nearer my God to Thee Nearer to Thee

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 74

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

75

E’en though it be a cross That raiseth me. Still all my song shall be Nearer my God to Thee. (249)

With such words, the song attempts to reconcile the pain of earthly suffering with consolation—namely, that suffering brings the singer “Nearer my God to Thee.” In this particular context, these words subsume the complex race and class dynamics that underlie the chain gang’s disempowerment. To subdue their prisoners, the guards encourage this emotionally appealing but logically inapt view of imprisonment as a “cross” to be borne stoically. The scene’s development draws further attention to the song’s inadequacy to ameliorate such misery. As the chained men are being returned to their cages, something happens that causes the guards to pull one member out and give him thirty lashes. In John’s horrified perception, “the sound of the leather cutting his back went up into the heavens as the sound of the hymn had gone up. And another sound went up. As the leather came down the man lying across the wheelbarrow groaned” (250). Then, as the whipped man succumbs to his punishment and his own groans “grew fainter, [  .  .  .  ] there came a groan from the cages, and another” (250). Soon, all of the men are groaning in sympathy with their fellow prisoner: “The groans accumulated into one sound. They swelled up until they were louder than the song had been. And they were one groan made of the groans of those who were lying on the shelves in the cages” (250 emphasis added). John recognizes a depth of misery that this hymn cannot possibly explain (and, perhaps, that no words could express). Indeed, the inarticulate mass groan seems to transcend the hymn as commentary on this misery. Still, despite its inadequacy to reconcile, the aesthetic power of this hymn—its simultaneously familiar and defamiliarized quality—moves John to recognize the humanity of the prisoners and feel their suffering: “[John] was lying face down on the ground with his mouth in the dirt. A sickness had come on him. Like Job of old he wanted to curse God and die” (250).35 In marked contrast to John, Robert takes sadistic pleasure in methodically counting the lashes: “‘Twenty-nine, thirty,’ Robert said. ‘Nearer my God to Thee,’ he shouted out and laughed” (251). Though one boy is acutely sensitive and the other utterly crass, both recognize that this enforced singing mocks rather than soothes suffering and oppression of this magnitude. For John, misery comes from recognition of qualities that both link him to and divide him from these men. Though John’s and the chain gang’s respective hymn traditions do not coincide, they intersect at the point of this one hymn. Likewise, John perhaps senses aspects of his own family’s condition

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 75

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

76

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

in this more blatant and magnified spectacle of physical and cultural oppression. Though John has not yet learned to see it, the intertwining chains of low-paid labor and religious ideologies hold down his own family. In this prisoner tableau, exploitation is more easily recognized, since the chains are literal and a gun, rather than just the force of habit, compels these prisoners to sing of a divine rationale for manmade suffering. Lumpkin does not explicitly show how this traumatic experience influences John’s developing class-consciousness. However, as I will discuss in detail further below, the novel’s next chapter shows John encountering a worker who teaches him a song with a radically different perspective towards suffering. Having just undergone an experience that would surely cause him to question the use of hymns as a balm for suffering, John meets John Stevens and learns Stevens’ original song describing the hard lives of textile workers (258–60). Unlike “Nearer My God to Thee,” this song doesn’t rationalize or accept suffering. Rather, it complains heartily and indicts bosses and upperclass townspeople. The chain-gang incident leaves a spiritual void in John that surely informs his receptivity to this new song. Like her brother John, Bonnie goes through life experiences that eventually cause her to recognize a disjunction between her personal beliefs and the ideological implications of various hymns. One way that Lumpkin sets the stage for the “Mill Mother’s Ballad” that Bonnie contributes to the union/strike effort is by showing Bonnie at two earlier stages of her life exuberantly singing hymns without any critical self-consciousness. These scenes suggest that Bonnie’s ability to create the “Mill Mother’s Ballad” grew out of first soaking up and then questioning the hymn culture around her. When her own song appears near the end of the novel, the contrasting values of the hymns she had once loved magnify the import of its fairly modest radicalism. Although these earlier scenes do not provide any explicit clues that Bonnie will later write protest songs, when viewed retrospectively, they subtly anticipate Bonnie’s future creativity. In the first example, Bonnie, only seven years old, sings the hymn “Come Ye Sinners” at her church. After citing three full verses, Lumpkin highlights Bonnie’s relationship to the hymn: “Come, ye sinners poor and needy, Weak and wounded, sick and sore, Jesus ready stands to save you Full of pity, love and power. [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .] “Come ye weary, heavy laden, Bruised and mangled by the fall.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 76

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

77

If you tarry till you’re better You will never come at all.” Bonnie, who was good at remembering words, did not need the preacher to lay the lines out for her. She could have sung right on, having learned this one the summer before. She had a good voice. John, sitting on the other side of Emma, heard her letting it out. [.  .  .  .  ] She liked to listen to the sing-song of the words. John was simply not interested in them. (45)

When Bonnie has become an adult (but still before she learns about communism), her perspective towards hymns remains uncritical. Lumpkin shows Bonnie singing at a “revival service” led by a traveling evangelist, “the well-known Cyclone Carter” (279), and reveals that she “always liked the songs and lifted up her voice earnestly with the others” (279). Some time later, however, Bonnie’s struggle to raise several children while keeping up a job in the mill causes her to”[lose] interest in the church” (317). She recognizes a discrepancy between the ideals promoted by her preacher and her own less idyllic realities: [T]he thing that really disturbed Bonnie was the preacher’s insistence on the sacredness of the family, and his anger at those who did not keep their families together. Nothing would have pleased her more than to stay at home and raise her children in the best way she knew how. And there were many other women like her in the village. Mr. Simpkins [the preacher] seemed to think if they wished they could stay at home and have a life of comparative ease. Because his wife could stay at home, he thought that other men’s wives could do the same. Bonnie could not go to church Sunday after Sunday and hear him scold them for letting the family and the home break up without getting too angry. So she stayed at home with her young ones. (318)

Soon after this, her youngest child becomes sick and dies (319–20). Eventually, the conflict that Bonnie senses between religious ideals and her experience will emerge in an original song, written during the strike, that echoes her conflicting experiences with religion, labor, and motherhood: “We leave our homes in the morning. We kiss our children good-by. While we slave for the bosses Our children scream and cry. [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .]

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 77

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

78

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” “But listen to me, workers: A union they [the bosses] do fear. Let’s stand together, workers, And have a union here.” (345–6)36

Since, in Bonnie’s reality, “bosses” intrude into the sacred relationship between mother and child, her song’s opening verse revises the preacher’s depiction of the “sacredness of the family.” Her song still emphasizes motherhood, but factors in an economic reality that the preacher’s sermons lack. This song reaches further back into Bonnie’s experience by recalling and revising the hymn, “Come Ye Sinners,” that she had loved as a child. In this hymn, the graphic images of bodily suffering—”weak and wounded, sick and sore”; “bruised and mangled”—are, of course, meant to symbolize spiritual travails. In Bonnie’s later experience as a factory worker, however, bodily injury becomes more literal. (Her husband, for instance, loses his hand in a factory accident [315].) Bonnie’s eventual grasp of the worldly roots of such suffering will make other aspects of the hymn incongruous with her reality. Are the “poor and needy” workers at the Wentworth mill really “sinners”? Have they been “mangled by the fall”? Should they look to Jesus for salvation? Bonnie draws on this hymn’s diction but proposes a new relationship of singer to suffering. As the above verses suggest, Bonnie adopts this hymn’s hortatory stance. (Her song, like the hymn, puts the singers into the roles of both callers and called.) At the same time, she avoids the obscuring symbolism of the hymn’s imagery and provides a new and more pragmatic approach to the problem of suffering. “John Hardy was a brave and a desperate boy”: radicalizing the outlaw hero It is a fact we cannot blink at that the outlaw is the popular hero of Appalachia to-day [  .  .  .  ]. This is not due to any ingrained hostility to law and order as such, but simply to admiration for any men who fight desperately against overwhelming odds. —Horace Kephart. Our Southern Highlanders. (393)37 As individuals, they [bandits] are not so much political or social rebels, let alone revolutionaries, as peasants who refuse to submit, and in doing so stand out from their fellows. [  .  .  .  .  ] They are activists and not ideologists or prophets from whom novel visions or plans of social and political organization are to be expected. —Eric Hobsbawm. Bandits (24).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 78

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

79

I’ve been to the east and I’ve been to the west, I’ve traveled this wide world around. I’ve been to the river and I’ve been baptized, And today I’m on my hanging ground, lord, lord. —Verse from the American outlaw ballad “John Hardy”38 I’ve traveled to the east and traveled to the west, as the ballad of John Hardy says. [.  .  .  .  ] It’s the same everywhere. —Grace Lumpkin. To Make My Bread. (312)

In 1930, less than a year after the Gastonia strike had ended, Lumpkin contributed a short piece to The New Masses that included the words to a song later incorporated into To Make My Bread. (She was working as an editor at The New Masses at the time.) Her accompanying notes told of hearing this song, which she identified simply as “Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme,” sung at a recent meeting of the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) in Charlotte, North Carolina. “To my knowledge,” she reported, “this song has never appeared in print before” (“Cotton” 8). Lumpkin then described the circumstances leading up to the performance: after union members had sung “Solidarity Forever” and then songs by Ella May Wiggins, Daisy McDonald of Gastonia, asked her husband to lead The Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme. Some of us had not heard this song before and Mr. McDonald explained that many years ago he had worked at the loom next to a man in a mill in Buffalo, South Carolina. He said this weaver had spoken out the words of the Rhyme under the noise of the looms, making them up as he worked. And the song has gone from one worker to another and now it is known to hundreds of cotton mill hands who sing it as the workers did that night in the hall in Charlotte. (“Southern” 8)39

Lumpkin must have seen Cotton Mill Rhyme as compelling evidence of a protest tradition that predated Ella May’s recent, more radical calls to “have a union here,” “join the Textile Union,” and “join the I.L.D.”40 Structurally, “Cotton Mill Rhyme” builds rhetorical power through “evidence” accumulated in its thirteen verses (though most in no particular narrative order). Although it gestures towards radicalism by depicting a capitalist industrial structure that prospers through workers’ oppression, it does not add a solution to its depiction of the various indignities and injustices related to being a mill hand: long hours, low pay, children “grow[ing] up unlearned,” being

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 79

6/22/2006 8:54:29 AM

80

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

shunned by the “folks in town” who “spend their money free.”41 Still, one striking detail in the last stanza of the printed lyrics seems to have aroused particular interest among politically attuned New Masses readers: Just let them wear their watches fine And golden chains and rings, But when the great Revolution comes They’ll have to shed those things. (“Southern” 8 emphasis added)

In the next New Masses, Lumpkin responded to questions about this “great Revolution” reference—a detail that seemed to move the song from the realm of a traditional “complaint” song to one reflecting a Marxist belief in capitalism’s inevitable collapse.42 Originally, Lumpkin wrote, “the weaver who made the words” had referred to a “Day of Judgment” rather than a “great Revolution.” She traced the change back to the “[Gastonia] strike of April, 1929,” concluding that “folk songs are made and changed from the knowledge and needs of the people who sing them” (Letter 22). Lumpkin also made a noteworthy comment regarding the song’s tune: The tune as I heard it is original, perhaps the blending of some old ballads. But I know that the Rhyme, with a little adaptation, has been sung to the tune of “John Hardy,” a mountain ballad that is on Columbia Record No. 167-D, sung by Eve Davis who lives in the Great Smoky Mountains near Proctor, North Carolina. (Letter 22)

Evidence from the novel Lumpkin would publish two years later suggests that she recognized several levels of significance to the “Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme.” The slight details she obtained about the song’s author would inspire a significant character in To Make My Bread. Matching the above description from her New Masses piece, this character, John Stevens, had, many years before, “made [this song] up while weaving” (TMMB 258). That Lumpkin distinguished Stevens as the novel’s truest organic radical suggests that she saw this song as a compelling example of social protest that predated any Marxist influence in Southern labor.43 The singing of this song at the Charlotte NTWU meeting alongside the old IWW standard “Solidarity” and Ella May’s painfully fresh songs suggested both continuity and refinement of Southern workers’ creative responses to relatively new industrial pressures. As already discussed above with reference to the transformation of religious imagery, To Make My Bread develops the implications of this idea that traditional cultural modes may

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 80

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

81

dynamically transform to reflect new “knowledge and needs.” The “John Hardy” connection that Lumpkin notes adds a further potential nuance to these observations. In reality, the original idea of pairing the “John Hardy” tune with the new words of the “Cotton Mill Rhyme” might have been motivated primarily by the pragmatics of using a familiar tune to facilitate learning new words. For Lumpkin, however, this phenomenon of fusing a traditional genre (the outlaw ballad) and melody (“John Hardy”) with a new kind of message perhaps suggested a deeper significance. For, as I will discuss in detail below, “John Hardy” as it appears in To Make My Bread becomes infused with symbolic qualities that reflect the transformation of Appalachian people themselves in their move from a rural to an industrial setting. Interestingly, in addressing New Masses readers, most of whom lived north of the Mason-Dixon line, Lumpkin felt the need to identify “John Hardy” as a mountain ballad—and even to recommend a particular recording for those who might want to learn more about the song. Indeed, in a time before such regional American music was widely disseminated outside of the area where it thrived without the stimulus of print or recordings, relatively few urban Northern readers could be expected to have a mountain ballad like “John Hardy” in their intimately familiar cultural repertoires.44 In the rural South, however, familiarity with this ballad was likely. Besides being widespread in oral tradition, it was available on various recordings, including Davis’ and one by Virginia’s Carter Family, the best-selling country-music recording stars of their day.45 Naturally, recognizing how aspects of Lumpkin’s novel’s characterization, structure, and meaning might be read intertextually with “John Hardy” requires an understanding of this ballad in its own right. As an oral genre, ballads (such as “John Hardy”) offer a flexible structure, allowing narratives to expand or contract while still retaining a basic storyline and moral tone (although alteration of certain details may change the overall dramatic emphasis or moral implications considerably). Because of this flexibility, diverse variants of such a song may exist in oral tradition. As a more specific type of narrative within the ballad genre, “John Hardy” fits loosely within a category of American song often referred to as the “outlaw ballad.” Frequently—and such is the case in “John Hardy”—outlaw ballads narrate an individual’s act (or acts) of rash violence and then go on to show this individual’s eventual demise at the hands of the law (or sometimes at the hands of a traitor).46 In “John Hardy” stripped to its bare minimum, Hardy kills another man, tries to get away, and is eventually caught and sentenced to hang. Some versions elaborate on events surrounding the murder, escape,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 81

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

82

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

and arrest. Significantly, in terms of the meaning Lumpkin finds in this ballad, other versions (including the nine-verse Davis version quoted below) focus more on Hardy’s social connections—the friends, family members, and wife (or lover) who mourn his fate47: John Hardy was a brave and desperated [sic] boy And he carried his gun every day. Well he killed a man near Shawnee Camp And I saw John Hardy gettin’ away, poor boy. They arrested him down at the Big Bend Tunnel And they carried him back to [  .  .  .  ]. Since there is no bail on a murder of a man They locked John Hardy back in jail, poor boy. John Hardy’s friends they was standing around Some afraid John Hardy’s going to hang. Well the judge turned around and he looked in Johnny’s book John Hardy is sentenced to be hung, poor boy. John Hardy’s father he was standing by, Oh, John, what have you done? I killed my partner for fifteen cents And today I am condemned to be hung, poor boy. John Hardy’s mother she was standing by, Oh, John, what have you done? All for the sake of that black-eyed girl, That John Hardy never lied to his gun, poor boy. I’ve been to the east and I’ve been to the west, I’ve traveled this wide world around. I’ve been to the river and I’ve been baptized, And today I’m on my hanging ground, lord, lord. Oh, sister, oh sister, come stand by my side, While my burying is going on. You’ll never tell for death these words you’ve heard When you hear John Hardy’s song, lord, lord.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 82

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

83

When this black cap is put over my face No more shall I see. And when I am in my silent tomb Will you sometimes think of me, lord, lord. John Hardy had one pretty little miss, And she always dressed in lace. Well, she walked right down on the hanging ground, Oh, Johnny, I wish I could take your place, poor boy.48

In his influential 1913 treatise on the culture of the “Southern Highlanders,” Horace Kephart (as noted in one of the epigraphs preceding this section) called the outlaw “the popular hero of Appalachia today.” Assuming the basic accuracy of Kephart’s observation, how should this widespread popularity in Appalachia of “John Hardy” and similar outlaw ballads be understood? Kephart argued that this social phenomenon was “not due to any ingrained hostility to law and order as such, but simply to admiration for any men who fight desperately against overwhelming odds” (393). Further, the aesthetic conventions of outlaw-ballad narratives tended to romanticize and simplify more complex and problematic realities. As Richard Meyer notes, American outlaw ballads in general show a folk tendency to elevate to mythic heroism the actions of men who were in real life “ruthless criminals, capable of savage and at times seemingly indiscriminate slaughter, whose first and often only thoughts were of themselves” (115). Because of the ballad genre’s flexibility, new narratives about new outlaws could be fit into its particular logic. As Arthur Palmer Hudson, a respected North Carolina scholar of folklore and literature, observed in the mid1930s, the “species of folk-song” about “outlaws, feudists, and vagrants” was “the most vital today” because “its pattern is simple and clear. The parts are standardized. It is as easy to make over or repair as the old T-model Ford” (538). Bringing Marxist sensibilities to a study of how and why “bandits” function as symbolic heroes in “peasant” society, Eric Hobsbawm comes closest to conveying the socioeconomic underpinnings of the folk outlaw ideal that Lumpkin recognizes and uses as a basis for radicalization. Hobsbawm finds that bandits and bandit lore tend to arise in societies that “lie between the evolutionary phase of tribal and kinship organization, and modern capitalist and industrial society” (18). He sees social bandits—both as actual entities and as the subjects of folklore—as manifestations of and responses to social oppression, “a special type of peasant protest and rebellion” (40). Visions of revolution, Hobsbawm suggests, do not spur the social bandit:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 83

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

84

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

“As individuals, they are not so much political or social rebels, let alone revolutionaries, as peasants who refuse to submit, and in doing so stand out from their fellows. [.  .  .  .  ] They are activists and not ideologists or prophets from whom novel visions or plans of social and political organization are to be expected” (24). Social bandits, unlike true revolutionaries, envision “righting wrongs” as a restoration of an old moral order that they perceive to have decayed (26). And for the oppressed population who exalt them, social bandits typically serve as “surrogates” for revolutionary activity, “as when peasants admire Robin Hoods as their champions, for want of any more positive activity by themselves” (26). The kind of outlaw “about whom men sing ballads: champions, heroes and avengers” engage in “an individual rebellion, which is socially and politically undetermined” and which is “the product and counterpart of the general passivity of the poor” (36). Lumpkin’s use of “John Hardy” as a metaphorical subtext within To Make My Bread is significant in part because of “John Hardy’s” rather equivocal relationship to more overtly romantic outlaw myths. In folk tradition, “John Hardy” does accrue certain characteristics—his initial “getting away” and his assertion that he “never lied to his gun”—that might truly elevate him to the heroic outlaw status that Hobsbawm describes. Mostly, though, his crime perverts this outlaw ideal, since he kills wantonly, not in the process of robbing the rich to give to the poor.49 Moreover, the personal and social consequences of Hardy’s rash violence challenge the myth of the virtually immortal outlaw-hero. The law’s ability to capture Hardy—often characterized as a “desperate little man”—and execute him makes celebrating his audacity illogical. Likewise, after Hardy’s capture, his painful confrontations with those close to him break down an image of the lone outlaw unhindered by family bonds. Thus, although “John Hardy” (like many other examples of the outlaw-ballad genre) has been linked to hyper-masculine frontier codes that celebrate rebellious fighting spirit, it actually reinforces the idea that, for the socialized individual, rash violence is futile and self-destructive.50 The supposedly lone outlaw may briefly generate awe or fear (and perhaps vicarious pleasure for those who retell his exploits) but—as the “John Hardy” narrative seems to demand—he can and will be destroyed. While such a song may effectively dramatize society’s view of the consequences of destructive individual outlaw behavior, it does not offer a satisfactory model for a different kind of behavior that might also be characterized as outlaw—constructive rebellion arising out of classbased, collective discontent against a common oppressor. The trajectory of

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 84

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

85

Lumpkin’s narrative, however, works towards this latter type of rebellion, suggesting how it may evolve from the former.51 Lumpkin’s imaginative work with “John Hardy” is part of a revisionist project designed to show characters who “collectively defy [  .  .  .  ] myths of the poor white” (Sowinska xxviii). Preconceptions about poor whites in general, or about impoverished Appalachian mountaineers more specifically, form part of the ideological backdrop against which Lumpkin’s story is told. Lumpkin treats dominant conceptions of Appalachian culture as points of departure, to be variously acknowledged, refuted, or imaginatively transformed. In creating her own vision of a mountain family carrying organic cultural seeds that could sprout a workers’ revolution, Lumpkin implicitly writes against the grain of popular negative conceptions about Appalachian life. Thus, her novel incorporates two of the most prevalent popular signifiers of “backwards” Appalachian culture—moonshining and feuding—but consciously divests these practices of local-color romanticism.52 Granpap’s involvement with moonshining is not romanticized, but rather is used to indicate the degree to which the McClures are ensnared in the outside cash economy. When Granpap is caught and jailed for smuggling whiskey, the family nearly starves during the following winter. The resulting social and financial instability contributes to their eventual loss of land. And, as discussed in the following section, Lumpkin evokes images of violence—the kind that might, stereotypically, devolve into feuding—both to reveal the true social cost of such violence and to show that quick-tempered indignation may be redirected into more fruitful action. The “ballad” of Kirk McClure Midway into the novel’s “mountain section,” Lumpkin incorporates a fragment of “John Hardy” into an unsettling episode in which Kirk and Basil, Emma’s two teenage sons, have fought violently with each other. In this context, the ballad itself becomes another element in the volatile mix of bravery, bravado, rash violence, and alcohol that fuels the tension between these siblings. Kirk and Basil’s fight centers on jealousy over a girl named Minnie Hawkins, who is notorious within the community for allure and promiscuity. Isolated from larger bodies of people (and, Lumpkin implies, more worthy conflicts), the two brothers “share” and fight over Minnie. After one such fight, Kirk—recovering from a gash Basil has left in his scalp—attempts to show that his injury has not fazed him. He “pretend[s] to have a banjo in his arms” and starts taunting Basil by singing “John Hardy”:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 85

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

86

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” “John Hardy was a brave and a desperate boy And he carried his gun ever’ day, And he killed a man down in Johnson Town, And I saw John Hardy getting away, Pore Boy.” (80)

For Kirk, this opening verse suggests a devil-may-care bravery worth emulating.53 His more levelheaded mother, however, recognizes that the ballad’s complete narrative contains a more sobering truth. She cuts Kirk off as the song descends into the outlaw’s inevitable demise: “They arrested him down at the bi  .  .  .” “That’s enough, Kirk,” Emma said. “Hush!” (80)

Indeed, the full narrative of “John Hardy” is prescient of Kirk’s fate. After Minnie becomes pregnant (either Kirk or Basil might be the father—or possibly neither), Basil loses interest in her and leaves the mountains for a religious school. Although Kirk takes Minnie into his mother’s home, where she bears a child, she begins to secretly see another local man, Sam. When Sam, outlaw fashion, rides on horseback to the McClure home and takes Minnie with him, Kirk follows with his gun and is himself shot dead by Sam. If Kirk’s death itself evokes, or even exploits, a stereotype of a culture given to petty killing (of the same sort that “John Hardy” depicts), the aftermath of his death tends to counter this stereotype. Kirk’s pursuit of Minnie and Sam evokes mythical images of lone outlaws who bravely take problems into their own hands; Kirk’s death, however, subverts this myth of individualism, especially since Lumpkin emphasizes the emotional blow to Kirk’s family.54 Although friends in the community promise Emma that “Sam McEachern will pay for this” (114), the desire for revenge—in contrast to popular-culture stereotypes—never evolves into further violence. Thus, although Lumpkin’s narrative initially plays into a supposed link between violent songs and violent social tendencies, it later revises this stereotype. While Kirk’s downfall is the most immediate and irreversible, the fates of the three other surviving players in this mini drama are also foreshadowed by their roles in this episode. Here, they compromise the well-being of their mountain community through selfish intra-class fighting; later, they compromise the workers’ strike through their indifference (Basil and Minnie) or hostility (Sam) to it. Basil, after leaving home to pursue an education, comes to feel ashamed of his poor family and avoids subsequent contact with them (especially after marrying a woman from a wealthy family).55 Minnie

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 86

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

87

later becomes a mill-town prostitute, serving Basil and tempting his younger brother John. During the strike at the Wentworth mill, Sam leads the deputized thugs hired by the mill owners to terrorize strikers. Suggesting a sort of revised outlaw-ballad justice at work, Sam is shot (possibly by his own men) while leading a raid on union headquarters. Within this work’s socialist bildungsroman framework, all four of these characters provide examples of certain working-class individuals who fall by the wayside while others journey further toward collective consciousness. Kirk’s fatal attempt to resolve his individual struggle alone with a gun and Basil’s deplorable drive to leave his family behind both show ideological patterns that younger siblings Bonnie and John must avoid or overcome.56 In contrast to Kirk and Basil, who fought over a woman who ultimately wanted neither of them, Bonnie and John will end up fighting for workers’ collective interests. Lumpkin suggests that Bonnie and John both learn from the events that separated Kirk and Basil from the family unit. Thus, the scene in which Kirk taunts Basil by singing “John Hardy” includes the detail of young Bonnie “[hanging] onto the side of the bed, looking up at Kirk and listening to the song” (80). In the ensuing years, she must, we are led to imagine, have pondered over the troubling fusion of Kirk’s bravado while singing “John Hardy” and his senseless death. Compared to “John Hardy,” her own later ballad, written for the union, reaches toward a higher social potential. Similarly, John will have to reconcile his admiration for Kirk with the spectacle of his mother’s grief when she finds Kirk’s body (111–2). These early incidents form an important basis for Bonnie and John’s development and for Lumpkin’s demonstration of ideological change spread out over several generations. The “ballad” of Small Hardy Lumpkin’s use of “John Hardy” in association with events leading up to Kirk’s death suggests one way that values implicit in this ballad may lead to destructive results. Another subtle evocation of “John Hardy” that also occurs in the novel’s “mountain section” uses a different tack to suggest that the worldview presented in this ballad might be outdated and incongruous with the industrial society that the McClures will later confront. Even before the above episode in which Kirk sings “John Hardy,” the novel introduces the Hardy name in the guise of a humpbacked peddler, Small Hardy. Small Hardy’s diminutive first name (and perhaps his deformity) hints that he is something quite unlike the mythologized outlaw whose surname he shares. That such a man has managed to reach the remote McClure cabin suggests that penetration of this

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 87

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

88

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

land is no longer exclusive to the region’s old hardy/Hardy stock. As Emma tells Granpap, “Look at that peddler, Small Hardy. The first time he come was some winters ago and now he comes every spring and always talking about the outside” (71). When Granpap—always suspicious of strangers—interrogates him, Small Hardy offers replies that seem to mark him as something less than the hardy people who live here: “Come from far?” Granpap asked. “From the towns,” Hardy said. He wiped his face with a red handkerchief. (36)

When Hardy asks for the best way down from the mountains, a wary Granpap puts the peddler’s character to a further test: “You want steep trails or easy ones?” Granpap asked and he watched Hardy. “Give me the easy ones,” Hardy said. (36).

Granpap “seem[s] to be satisfied” (36), presumably meaning that he has ascertained the weak nature of Small Hardy’s character. Small Hardy may not be an outlaw bandit, but he is on an unscrupulous mission—to drum up interest in millwork among mountain people (who, compared to more experienced industrial workers, might provide docile and cheap labor). He first dazzles Emma with beads and “a fine looking knitted thing, a fascinator, he called it” (38). Then, he broaches the subject that will forever change the McClure family: “Down in Leesville [  .  .  .  ] a Mr. Wentworth, a rich man, has a mill for making cloth like this.” [  .  .  .  .  ] “And they say whoever goes down to work there is going to be rich like him—for he started out as poor as the next one. They say out there the rivers flow with milk and honey and money grows on trees.” (39)

At this point in the narrative, Granpap—a staunch individualist—still has the final say in the family. When he challenges the peddler with the observation that mountaineers who turned factory workers (at any wage scale) would lose the tangible security of the houses and land they already own, “Hardy knew the evening was finished” (40).57 Unlike the prototypical “badman” of folklore, Small Hardy himself is not a physical threat. Rather, he is simply a harbinger of powerful and

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 88

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

89

complex economic interests that already seek to exploit the mountains for timber and cheap labor. Hardy admits that he hasn’t “been there [to the mill village] very much. But they [mill financiers] said I was to spread the news” (39). Himself manipulated by economic interests, Hardy in turn helps manipulate such families into selling the timber rights on their land.58 As the novel later reveals, the lumber mill, after giving mountain people temporary employment and prosperity, shut down after taking the best trees. And, “since most people had depended on the wages from the lumber company for paying rent, there was nothing for them to do but leave the mountain and go where they could find ready money” (284)—especially in textile mills and other factories.59 Soon after the McClures have migrated to Leesville—pushed by the timber companies and pulled by Hardy’s claims—another “Hardy” allusion suggests that this new industrial environment has subsumed the rugged individualism that “John Hardy” once loosely symbolized. As the McClures stand in the mill’s management office waiting to find out where they will live and work, a young child with “small hands” that were “bony [  .  .  .  ] like his face” asks a cashier for “a book of scrip fer Mis’ Hardy” (155). The cashier must then ask, “Mis’ what Hardy?” before checking the books. She warns the child that this is the second credit extension at the company store that month. Thus, this scene subtly suggests that John Hardy’s male descendants have become invisible, anonymous figures, absent fathers of hungry children they cannot support. John and Bonnie McClure—deconstructing the outlaw-hero In this same mill environment, where cultural heroes like “John Hardy” seem to have shriveled or disappeared, the two youngest McClure children, John and Bonnie, must come to maturity and define themselves within society. One important aspect of Lumpkin’s narration of the development, and eventual radicalization, of John and Bonnie shows old, individually oriented “outlaw” values transforming into new kinds of socially oriented ones.60 When Bonnie and John participate in the strike at the novel’s end, they culminate not only their own development, but also a multigenerational development—one that has taken the experiences of their older siblings, their mother, and their grandfather into account. For this reason, family experiences throughout the novel should also be seen as contributing to a repository of positive and negative lessons that Bonnie and John draw from as they come to understand the need to approach exploitation collectively. (Especially since the McClures

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 89

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

90

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

are fairly cut off from print culture, family experience plays a crucial role in establishing strategies of response to social situations.) A number of relatively early family experiences evoke the aforementioned model of outlaw behavior (epitomized in the one-on-one act of confronting adversaries with a gun). Besides Kirk’s confrontations with Sam (which led to Kirk being gunned down), several of Granpap’s experiences interspersed throughout the novel work to emphasize the futility of individually taking revenge. An early anecdote recalls how “Tate,” a man with a “fat belly” “whose comfort had always come first” (22), had cheated Granpap out of his own land. Though his code of honor tempted Granpap to kill Tate, he “changed the form of his revenge” (22), hiding in the brush and shooting Tate in the backside with buckshot (thus causing him great temporary discomfort but no permanent injury). Although this morally ambiguous act—one that avoids a cycle of killing but still is not particularly brave—gave Granpap some personal satisfaction, it did nothing to get his land back. Later, also in the mountains, Granpap threatens to use his gun to prevent a man from charging his family rent for living in the cabin they had built themselves.61 When a “Company man” comes to collect this rent, “Granpap met [him] at the door with his shotgun” (134). Then, when Hal Swain tries to tell Granpap that “the company would have a right by law to put the family out of the house,” “Granpap simply pointed to his shotgun” (134). Eventually realizing that this fight is hopeless, however, he admits to his family that going to the mill is the best option—at least temporarily: “maybe we could all make enough to buy back the land up here when the lumber company’s through” (137). (They never do return.) Understandably, Granpap is haunted by these two experiences of being helpless to prevent losing his land. After the family has moved to the more economically structured area around the mill, Granpap talks to a lowland farmer who had gone into debt and lost his land. Hearing of this loss, Granpap asks what the man had done to the person who took his land: “there was an excitement in his voice as if he expected to hear a story of a revenge that suited the crime of taking a man’s land away from him. ‘Nothing,’ the man said. ‘There wasn’t anything to do except pay what I owe’” (172). Later, Granpap will also lose a farm after failing to make a profit raising cotton. By now, he has come to accept that he, like this other man, has little choice but to relinquish the land without a fight (264). While such experiences simply drain the old fighting spirit out of Granpap, they give Bonnie and John a repository of experience that will contribute to their recognition of the need to search for different ways to counteract such oppression.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 90

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

91

John’s early experiences are particularly important to Lumpkin’s examination of how individualistic approaches to fighting adversity must readjust to effectively combat labor exploitation. In devoting more time to John’s early social adjustments to mill-village life than she does to Bonnie’s, Lumpkin suggests that John must negotiate certain threats to class-conscious action to which males are particularly susceptible. Although John and Bonnie both briefly get to attend school for the first time in their lives when the family arrives in Leesville, John—as an eleven-year-old boy—has “things he had to learn outside [the schoolhouse] that Bonnie was spared” (211). A gang of other boys around John’s age, most of whom are the sons of the town’s “higher-ups,” single John out for torment because he is poor, new at school, and far behind them in his education. In her explanation of how John conceives of his problem, Lumpkin shows old ways of dealing with social conflicts juxtaposed with a problematically new social situation. After days of bearing the bullying stoically, at last it came to the place where John wanted to stop school. It was not that he was afraid. He was ashamed in the class room of being so big among the others, and of knowing so little. He thought of going to the hills, running away [  .  .  .  ]. There he would be free and at home. There he could fight on his own ground. He was confused. In the hills families stuck together, but it was man against man. He could not quite make out how to manage with several against him, for the boys who nagged were always together. (211)

John’s boyhood problem has a particular complexity (and symbolic resonance within the novel’s larger emphasis on labor) because the power structure within the tormenting gang both replicates and flows into the larger power structure of the mill. Albert, the gang’s de facto leader, commands respect mostly because of his father’s high position in the mill: “if [other boys] didn’t respect him as son of the Superintendent, then there were ways to make them fear him. [  .  .  .  .  ] Just as soon as a boy acknowledged his superiority he was very kind and just” (214). John fantasizes about dealing with his problem as an outlaw-hero might have: “If possible he would have liked to take Granpap’s gun after the whole lot” (214). Indeed, John briefly becomes something of an outlaw after an unavoidable showdown with Albert’s gang. One day after school, this gang waylays John on an out-ofthe-way road (stealing his pants and pouring turpentine on him). Driven by pain and humiliation, John, who is lanky and not very muscular, tackles Albert with surprising effect: “Albert lay still, with blood running from his

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 91

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

92

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

head” (215). Unsure of Albert’s fate, John hides out, outlaw fashion, “on the side of the narrow road to the mountains two nights,” until Granpap finds him—cold, tired, and famished—and brings him home (215). John’s fight has mixed consequences, both for himself and for his whole family. On a positive note, this direct confrontation with the boys stops their bullying. When John finally (and reluctantly) returns to school, “he found little trouble [  .  .  .  ]. Everyone knew by this time that he had got his man and gone up into the hills to hide like an outlaw” (218). Even after the event itself is largely forgotten, “there was a feeling left with those who kept on living in the village that John McClure was a wild boy and one not easily frightened or fought down” (218). On a less positive note, because he had fought “and nearly killed” (217) the son of the man who is superintendent of the school and the mill where Emma works, he jeopardizes his education and, potentially, his mother’s job. As John learns later, restoring peace after his socially complex battle had required an equally complex pulling of social strings. Before John is allowed back in school, his brother Basil (who is engaged to Preacher Warren’s wife’s sister), speaks to Preacher Warren, who presides over the church attended by the mill superintendent and other “higher-ups” in the town. Preacher Warren then “[speaks] to the superintendent of mills over the telephone” (235).62 Thus, whereas John had learned in the mountains that fights are “man against man” (211), he finds that opponents in the mill village—even in seemingly personal school-yard fights— may be backed by powers that complicate or invalidate this individualistic conception of conflict resolution.63 Although John drove off his attackers with sheer physical willpower, he could not overcome the mill village’s power structure using such means since he had to face the reality of needing to reintegrate into society afterwards. Soon after this fight incident, John meets a man who will be instrumental in changing his survival strategies when faced with oppressive conditions. When the McClures’ financial circumstances force John and Bonnie to quit school and begin work in the mill, John encounters John Stevens, an older man who had been in the mills since age eight.64 Stevens becomes something of a surrogate for John’s own father, who had died before he was born. Besides looking out for his physical safety in the mill, he takes an interest in John’s desire to better understand his family’s poverty.65 For John, who has up to this point relied primarily on his family’s repository of experience and culture to guide him, Stevens’ new body of experiential insights and cultural offerings proves invaluable to the process of becoming critically selfaware. Stevens, far from heroically proportioned, is small and limps “from a badly set leg he had broken in a fall when he was eight years old and had just

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 92

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

93

begun to work in the mills” (258). Though “strong and [  .  .  .  ] very active” (258), his skill at his job does not stem from physical prowess, but rather from accepting and taking advantage of the reality that “machines can do the work of many men” (257). A skilled weaver who “liked his machines” (258), he teaches John to distinguish between the actual equipment and the mill management that uses it to exploit workers: “‘It’s what they do to people,’ he said to John [  .  .  .  ] that makes me sick at heart” (258). Considering that John comes to pattern his own values on those of Stevens, the amalgam of traits by which Lumpkin characterizes Stevens points to a reformulation of the criteria that, in John’s world, had traditionally defined heroes. The slightly built, thoughtful Stevens is a clear departure from the brawny he-man workers favored in American folklore (John Henry, Paul Bunyan)—not to mention 1930s-era working-class iconography.66 Unlike individual size or strength, which might set workers against one another, the kind of insight into labor issues that Stevens possesses can be passed from worker to worker.67 Such insight, disseminated among a large body of workers, enables a collective heroism not predicated on individual physical prowess. While Stevens is, justifiably, bitter about the bosses’ disregard for workers’ health and safety, his notion of vengeance is collective rather than personal, and constructive rather than destructive. When John hears Stevens singing an original song about mill workers’ experience, his enthusiastic response shows a recognition that this song is unlike anything that he has been exposed to before: “John wrote the song verse by verse on paper at home”—presumably after memorizing it from Stevens’ singing—“and brought it to show his friend. ‘I’m right glad you liked it that much,’ John Stevens said” (260). This song gives John a new perspective towards adversity that is collective rather than solitary. From its first verse, it demonstrates how the experience of a singular “I” finds support through recognition of and absorption into a collective “we”: I lived in a town away down South By the name of Buffalo And worked in a mill with the rest of the trash As we’re often called you know. (259)

In the second and third verses, the singular “I” reappears, as in the first verse, to reaffirm that the songwriter, a fellow millworker, completely identifies with the people he sings about:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 93

6/22/2006 8:54:30 AM

94

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” You factory folks who sing this rhyme Will surely understand The reason why I love you so Is I’m a factory hand. While standing here between my looms You know I lose no time To keep my shuttles in a whiz And make this little rhyme. (259)

Now that the narrator has established legitimate working-class origins, the remainder of the song uses a collective perspective to describe various situations typical of mill-village experience: We rise up early in the morn And work all day real hard To buy our little meat and bread And sugar, tea and lard. We work from weeks [sic] end to weeks end And never lose a day And when that awful pay day comes We draw our little pay. (259)68

As part of its collective approach to conveying indignation and commiseration, this song also incorporates various slurs and demeaning images that more fortunate members of society have used against mill workers: As we go walking down the street All wrapped in lint and strings They call us fools and factory trash And other low down names. (260)

By reappropriating such words, the song defuses their capacity to shame and puts their power back into workers’ hands. Having documented the factory experiences of John and his family, Lumpkin hardly needs to explain what attracts John to this song. Likely, John Stevens’ comment about this song’s importance to workers in other times and places speaks to John’s new experience as well: “‘I’ve sung it in mill towns in three states and in the North, too, and people have learned it. I feel

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 94

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

95

good sometimes to think I’ve spoken to folks at times when they feel the sorrow of working without much recompense’” (260). Stevens’ song also affirms John’s own sense that an energizing creative pulse emanates from the rattling, throbbing machines around him. While factory work could easily be seen as fatal to mountain culture, John makes an affirmative imaginative connection between the two. Hearing the throb of the machines, John senses that somewhere before he had known a sound like it. One day, listening intently to the looms he remembered. He had stood outside McDonald’s cabin and heard feet pounding inside to the sound of fiddle and banjo. The feet had come down on the floor rhythmically. They got into his blood. The rhythm had beaten up from the shaking floor into his feet, just as it did in the mill. He thought with pleasure that one day he would be one who controlled those machines. (257)

Through these thoughts, Lumpkin suggests that the industrial environment might pump new life into old folk cadences. Immediately following this passage, Stevens’ song functions as an actual cultural entity that confirms, in sense and sound, John’s own intuitive observations: “the song was about factory people, and it was easy to see how John Stevens had made it up while weaving, for his voice, singing it, rose and fell with the rhythm of the looms” (258).69 If aspects of the McClure family’s earlier responses to adversities may be seen as modeled upon an outlaw ideal, then later responses to other crises may be seen as refining this ideal into a new collective outlawry oriented toward class goals. One suggestive illumination of John’s radicalization comes from Richard Meyer’s observations on the outlaw ideal manifested in folklore. The first two of Meyer’s twelve characteristics of the folk “outlawhero” are especially pertinent as parallels to John’s own subjectivity. “First,” Meyers observes, “the American outlaw-hero is a ‘man of the people’; he is closely identified with the common people, and, as such, is generally seen to stand in opposition to certain established, oppressive economic, civil and legal systems peculiar to the American historical experience” (97). “Second, the outlaw-hero’s first ‘crime’—the one that launches his career—is brought about through extreme provocation or persecution by agents of the oppressive system” (99). To a degree, John’s experiences evoke these criteria: John comes from common working people and he experiences provocation that compels his eventual desire to undermine the capitalist system. Just as importantly, though, his experiences deviate from, or are more complex than, such folklore ideals. Even while growing up, John has vacillated between an admiration

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 95

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

96

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

for his successful and “ambitious” brother Basil and a realization that this ambition tends to preclude concern for the rest of his family. Particularly after John’s status changes from schoolboy to mill hand, he must navigate his way through experiences that often contradict each other and thus fail to add up to a clear-cut sense of class identity. Most of John’s experiences do indeed increase his class-consciousness. John sees and experiences various setbacks that frustrate his family’s hopes of bettering their social circumstances through industrial labor. Particularly through his occasional conversations with the older worker John Stevens, he gradually gathers insights that help him to formulate a radical, class-based understanding of these setbacks. Other experiences during the same period in John’s life, however, offer him the tantalizing chance to rise, as an individual, above the dismal status quo of friends and family. John’s greatest struggle with personal ambition begins after he becomes reacquainted with a former school friend, Robert.70 Through Robert “John entered into a different life from that he had been leading. He became acquainted, if not at first hand then at second, with some of the men of the town” (290). Encouraged by Robert, John becomes a member of a reactionary and relatively exclusive local organization (to which, significantly, John’s upwardly mobile brother Basil also belongs): “It stood for the protection of the flag, and the motto was ‘Keep out the foreigner and the nigger. Neither belongs’” (293). Robert espouses a seductively phrased nihilism that diametrically opposes John Steven’s Marxist beliefs: “Religious people say God loves us all and guides us, and others say there is some kind of plan in the universe. I’ve read a lot, John—philosophers and others. And I tell you there is no plan and no guidance. There is no order, no law, no purpose, no progress for the human race. History repeats itself over and over, and here we are, the human race in all its ugliness, just the same as ever. It’s for a man to get out and while there’s a life to be lived, grab just as much as he can and to hell with everybody else.” (292)

John’s new social contacts with “men of the town” lead to better job opportunities: “the authorities of the mill became especially cordial to him, for some of them belonged to the same lodge” (298). Soon, the mill superintendent selects John as a section boss. Although John enters this job knowing that it may test his allegiance to his own social class against that of the ownership class, he hopes to show his kin and friends that “he could be fair, and yet climb higher than others had done” (298). However, when John tries to

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 96

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

97

present workers’ grievances to the management, he is told that “your part is to get work out of those people in there” (299). John’s class allegiances are further tested when he becomes infatuated with an attractive young woman, Ruth Gordon, who has been hired by the mill to start social clubs among the female employees (301). Although she “had left college with the idea of working for the poor” and her clubs promoting good hygiene and diet seem superficially altruistic, they also function to promote decorum and respect for managerial authority. John’s attraction to Ruth causes him to lose interest in the racist club, but his new love interest also threatens to stifle his developing class consciousness. Recognizing John’s popularity among fellow workers, Ruth “was glad that John was interested [in helping her], for if she could get a few or even one to lead she was sure the rest would follow. She had been taught that those who composed the lower elements of society were like sheep and would follow a leader” (301). John sees this darker side of Gordon’s role only after she establishes his trust and friendship and then asks him to become an informer for the mill: “All you need to do is watch the other people and report any who speak in a dissatisfied way” (304).71 The recognition of Gordon’s true function in the mill is one of the turning points that drives John strongly back to his class. On top of this, on the same night that his lust for Ruth turns to disgust, his mother’s deterioration from pellagra worsens and causes her to die soon afterwards. Having cut himself adrift from the tentative ties he had made to people with non-working-class interests, John now feels compelled to seek advice from his old friend John Stevens. Significantly, Stevens has moved to a nearby town by the time John experiences his crisis of class identification. Stevens cannot watch over and critique John’s behavior; John must recognize his own need for advice and go to Stevens for counsel. The advice John receives from Stevens further emphasizes the need for a new kind of outlaw-hero. As Stevens explains, John has the courage to confront another man with fists or gun, but also the common sense to not provoke the power system that could then deprive him of the means to support himself and his family. John still wants to believe that a person can rise fairly in the world through independent struggle, but Stevens argues that “if you want to get up you’ve got to push somebody down unless the start has been made before you, and then, ten to one, it was done in the same way” (314). As mentioned earlier, Stevens confesses that he has tried and rejected the outlaw’s restless search for freedom from social constraints. He has “traveled to the east and traveled to the west, as the ballad of John Hardy says,” only to find that “it’s the same everywhere” (312). Still, Stevens’ conception of the appropriate resistance to oppression retains an important aspect of the outlaw code: Stevens realizes

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 97

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

98

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

that those with the power to oppress will not give it up willingly. Using a poisonous snake as metaphor, Stevens explains his unambiguous mistrust of those who possess power: “From their side they shouldn’t be blamed. They grew up on earth, but just because I know they can harm me or mine, I know I’ve got to kill one when I see it” (311). Through John’s tentative exploration of his ultimate class alignment, Lumpkin adds complexity to what Meyers has proposed as defining characteristics of the outlaw-hero. Although John indeed ultimately “stands in opposition” to all forces that oppress his class, his arrival at this point of unqualified class allegiance is not a foregone conclusion. He passes through a crucial period when—had he been willing to compromise his family and class loyalty—he might have risen above this class. Eventually, John consciously rejects such opportunities as incompatible with working-class solidarity.72 Since John has other alternatives besides the dangerous, secretive life of a labor organizer, his choice of this role reflects sincerity of purpose. Precisely because John’s actions are not predicated on being the victim of an explicit violent act, he represents a new kind of “outlaw”—one more worthy of Lumpkin’s agenda of collective action. Unlike Meyer’s formulation of “extreme provocation or persecution,” the motivations for John incurring such risks derive in part from a new ability to recognize exploitation where he had been blind to it before. (John is initially taken aback, for example, when Stevens tells him that, from his perspective, John’s mother [who died of pellagra] actually should be seen as having been murdered by her bosses.) This portrayal of John’s gradual understanding of a Marxist outlook demonstrates a rhetorical strategy that Barbara Foley has called “conversion” through “the dialectics of process,” as opposed to “conversion through confrontation” (Radical 386). As part of Lumpkin’s attempt to show working-class values moving from individual to collective, John’s gradual development represents a modest heroism accessible to an average worker. While relatively few workers would be driven to hardened crime by the system, all workers could make reasoned decisions about how to collectively resist an oppressive system, even if that meant breaking oppressive social or legal codes. Though John’s somewhat more singular role as a strike leader is particularly emblematic of a new conception of outlaw-heroism, this role is simply a more extreme form of the new identity that all workers turned strikers assume. Regardless of whether workers like John who form a union and go on strike technically break any laws, they risk social ostracism, evictions, blacklisting, beatings, and even death through their actions. (As with outlaws, strikers forfeit basic social benefits—those, in this case, that go along with being pliant employees. But unlike traditional larger-than-life

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 98

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

99

outlaw heroes who operate outside of social structures, new unionist “outlaws” must rebel against the very socioeconomic structure they cannot help but occupy.) Even when public defiance of laws or conventions is communal rather than individual, it still requires individual acts of participation. When the workers collectively defy their overseer’s order to “get to work,” Lumpkin writes that “it was an amazing thing, that they felt the courage to leave their machines” (333). Tom Moore also praises it as “one of the finest things I have ever known” (340). Indeed, the omnipresent “guards who carried sawed-off shotguns, and [  .  .  .  ] pistols ready for use” (368), and who later kill Bonnie, show that the strikers risked physical retribution for daring to fight for change. When John joins the strike, he is tempted to revert to his earlier conceptions of how to confront physical threats. Like many of his fellow mountain-bred strikers, he must be convinced that carrying a gun on the picket line might be self-defeating. This time, it is a Northern Communist organizer, Tom Moore, who advises John: “What’s that in your hand, John?” Tom Moore asked. “Why,” John answered, “you can see. Hit’s my gun.” “I thought,” Tom Moore said straight out, “John Stevens had made you understand better than that.” “Hit’s a fight,” John insisted. “And this is the way I know how to fight.” (346)

After giving John his rationale privately, Tom explains to the other strikers that we can’t fight in that way now. We must use peaceful means to gain what we want. It isn’t that I want to keep you from fighting in the way you are used. But I know from experience we must fight with numbers. [  .  .  .  .  ] John McClure came this morning with his shot gun. Now he understands that it is best for him to leave it here. (347)

After the strikers have suffered more provocation and threats, however, John speaks to Moore, “and they had decided that the time had come for them to use guns in their defense. With a gun in his hand he was afraid of nothing” (368). Presenting the possibility of violence not as rash retaliation, but rather as a measured and democratically endorsed last resort, Lumpkin again reworks a stereotype of inherently violent hill folk into a demonstration of rational commitment to the union cause.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 99

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

100

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

“Ye have killed the righteous one: he doth not resist you” The strike that culminates the novel’s narrative of working-class transformation follows a wide-ranging conversation between John Stevens and John McClure in which Stevens draws McClure’s attention to several contrasting historical responses to class conflict: views from the Bible’s book of James; views expressed by Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two working-class Italian immigrant radicals who were convicted on flimsy charges of murder and robbery and executed in Massachusetts in 1927; and views manifested by the 1917 Russian Revolution. The way that Stevens’ instructive conversation with McClure unfolds makes the notion of meaning as process especially significant to this exposition. This conversation emerges out of McClure’s sense of hopelessness and builds towards Stevens telling him of “the message” of new hope—that workers are capable of bettering their conditions by collectively rising and taking wealth from the hands of a powerful few. Fitting the novel’s deployment of schemata of transformation, McClure only learns of this history of ideological (and actual) dissent towards the end of the novel. At this point, he has already tried and rejected a high-paying foreman job that would have forced him to compromise the trust his fellow workers have placed in him. Now, he has reached the nadir of his despair about factory life: “there was nothing for [him and his family] to look forward to but a life of going to the mill, coming home to rest for strength to work in the mill again. Over and over, forever and ever, Amen” (324–5). Remembering, however, that Stevens had vaguely hinted at possessing a “message” that could bring hope to workers’ lives, McClure goes to talk with him. Early in their conversation, Stevens responds to McClure’s question about why the preachers he has known dwell so much on the idea that death is not aristocratic. Opening his Bible, he reads an incendiary indictment against the exploitation of laborers and the hoarding of wealth: Go to now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. [  .  .  .  .  ] Behold the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth out: and the cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbaoth. [  .  .  .  .  ] Ye have condemned, ye have killed the righteous one: he doth not resist you. (325)73

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 100

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

101

Having known only preachers who wanted to appease their wealthier congregation members, McClure had not realized that the Bible contained such perspectives. But even these words, Stevens tells him, are not “the message.” Rejecting the Bible’s assurance that a supernatural being hears “the cries of them that reaped” and offers heavenly compensation for their suffering, he does not advocate patiently waiting for a deity to restore social equality. Stevens’ Biblical commentary flows into his discussion of Sacco and Vanzetti, effectively letting the latter material serve as a reply to flaws he perceives in the Bible’s conciliatory perspective on socioeconomic discord: “‘You speak of preachers who talk of death. I want to tell you now about people who speak of life: and who are killed for speaking so’” (326). McClure learns from Stevens about two men (never actually named in the text) who both worked in a mill, though one of them later became a peddler of fish. They were people like you and me, though they were born in a country across the water, and could not speak our language very well. But they spoke in their own language, and part in our language to the poor. They spoke of life, and because they did the rich put them to death. (326)74

Stevens quotes for John a statement given by the two men—who had by then gathered worldwide attention and sympathy—just prior to their impending execution: This [the execution] is our career and triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing. The taking of our lives, lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler—all. That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph. (327)

Next, Stevens reads a letter that Sacco had written to his fourteen-yearold son Dante after he knew that he was to be executed. This letter, and the story behind it, rivets John much as hearing Stevens sing his original labor song had earlier. The letter itself is powerful in its simple, lyrical tenderness: “So, Son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother, and when you want to distract your mother from the discouraging soulness [sic], I will tell you what I used to do. To take her a long walking in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and there, resting under

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 101

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

102

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

the shade of trees” (TMMB 327). Sacco then imbeds an enjoinder for social altruism into this intimate family communication: But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your side, and help the weak ones that cry for help, help the persecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends: they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartol [Vanzetti] fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all the poor workers. (TMMB 327)

As Stevens presents them to John, the repressive social forces dramatized by the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti both reinforce and refine the novel’s earlier suggestions that individuals can no longer escape society. There is no longer an untamed space to which the archetypal frontiersman or lone outlaw can retreat. In the context of this novel’s critique of traditional outlaw mentality, the idea that Sacco and Vanzetti were falsely charged with the outlawlike crimes of robbery and murder also suggests, ironically, that disseminating radical beliefs that threaten a capitalist status quo requires more willingness to assume risk than committing actual armed robbery does. In fact, the threat seemingly posed by Sacco and Vanzetti’s outspokenly radical ideologies (rather than the crimes they were charged with) almost certainly sealed their fates. Stevens explains this to McClure: “They spoke of life [a better life for the poor], and because they did the rich put them to death. The rich called them thieves and murderers. It was their excuse for murdering two innocent men” (326). Early on, the novel establishes that capitalism has already corrupted the socioeconomic autonomy of the most remote pockets of Appalachia, from which people like the McClures have felt compelled to migrate. Later, appropriating a stock ballad phrase, Stevens tells McClure that “I’ve traveled to the east and traveled to the west, as the ballad of John Hardy says. I have talked to many people, and with my eyes I’ve seen many things, curious, and some of them almost unbelievable. It’s the same everywhere” (312). Through the story of Sacco and Vanzetti, he further emphasizes that capitalism’s inescapable grip in America extends to all points of the compass: “‘I told you once,’ John Stevens said, ‘about workers being killed in the West. This [the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti] happened in the North. I could tell you many more stories of people being killed by the rich because they wanted something better’” (327). Lest John assume that such injustice is confined to the South, Stevens shows him that the North can repress individuals who threaten the capitalist system as effectively as the South can. That Sacco and Vanzetti had presumably come to America seeking opportunities that their Italian homeland had not been able

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 102

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

103

to provide further portrays antagonism between workers and capitalists as an international phenomenon. Within the communist value system that the novel establishes, Sacco and Vanzetti’s public stance towards their executions as a “triumph”—a spotlight on the unjust persecution of outspokenly anti-government workers— signifies a high order of valor. Even so, Stevens suggests, these are men whose political philosophies place them closer to nonviolent Biblical martyrs than to revolutionaries. Juxtaposing scripture with his own evaluation of Sacco and Vanzetti, Stevens comments, “‘Ye have condemned, ye have killed the righteous one: he doth not resist you.’ These men didn’t believe in resisting, but in just being good. And they were good” (327).75 To further distinguish between the concepts of individual martyrdom and collective revolution, Stevens tells John of what he considers the real “message”: “We are taught that to struggle is a sin. But it ain’t a sin, John. People must learn that. We must work in a strike, but there is something else. We must go beyond the strike to the message  .  .  . that we must join with all others like us and take what is ours” (328). Significantly, when McClure expresses disbelief that a world where all share work and rewards equally is possible, Stevens cryptically replies that “it has been done, [  .  .  .  ] though it isn’t yet finished” (328). He refers, of course, to Russia as an ongoing and apparently successful experiment in communism—an endorsement that may be seen as inviting comparison to the state of society in America, where workers like Sacco and Vanzetti are unfairly condemned, and others protest but lack the collective power to intervene.76 For John, the idea that God violently opposes the hoarding of wealth comes as a revelation when compared to what he has learned from milltown preachers who favor the well off. The knowledge that the organized state is capable of violently repressing people who criticize and threaten its status quo comes as another revelation surpassing the first in its implications for John’s radical development. These revelations are in turn surpassed by a third and final one (“the message”)—that workers in another country have successfully overthrown a repressive government through collective action. Soon after John learns of “the message,” he and other workers begin to organize a union, setting the gears in motion that will lead to a bloody confrontation with the mill management. During the novel’s climactic strike, Lumpkin’s characters personally model a commitment to revolt and sacrifice themselves within the context of an industrial struggle. McClure’s sister, Bonnie, is fatally shot, leading other strikers to surmise that the mill management had singled her out because of her attempts to bring black mill employees into the union. Her inadvertent sacrifice and its pivotal role in gaining public sympathy for

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 103

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

104

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

the strikers recalls the public effect of Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution.77 This sacrifice comes to infuse new meaning into her song about working-class hardships and hopes for a better life. Similarly, when John McClure encounters Sacco’s letter to his son, his knowledge that the writer’s personal convictions have cost him his life add considerably to the letter’s impact on him. Like Bonnie’s song, the “story” of Sacco and Vanzetti (particularly as reduced to a folk-like archetypal simplicity through Stevens’ retelling and selective quoting) becomes a persuasive text within the novel.78 That Lumpkin would have made the imaginative connection between the Sacco and Vanzetti case and events in Gastonia is not surprising. Following the actual Gastonia strike, when sixteen men and women variously affiliated with the strike faced the death penalty if convicted of first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of the local police chief, the Communist Party frequently compared the blatant disregard for due process in the earlier case with that of the current trial.79 In both cases, judges allowed the prosecution to question the defendants on their dissenting religious and political views. John Salmond reports that “the linking of the events unfolding in Gastonia with the execution of the two Italian anarchists, still a raw nerve among American liberals, was something the ILD [International Labor Defense] shrewdly played upon as the legal proceedings approached” (84). Lumpkin’s novel ends during the strike, on a hopeful note, and thus avoids the bleak outcome of this post-strike Gastonia trial, which ultimately resulted in second-degree murder convictions for seven of the original defendants (who then fled to Russia while out on bail). Nevertheless, Lumpkin’s allusion to Sacco and Vanzetti hints at the difficulties that lay ahead for the strikers. “A union they do fear”: Bonnie McClure’s contribution to the collective outlaw ideal Like her brother John, Bonnie inherits from her family what might be termed a “fighting spirit.” While Granpap and older brother Kirk provide John with influential models of masculine bravery, Emma provides Bonnie with a somewhat analogous feminine model. Emma’s influence may be seen in the unconventional assertiveness that Bonnie eventually develops in the intertwined realms of language and action. At one point during the novel’s mountain section, Emma literally uses a gun to enforce what she believes to be morally right. After her son Kirk brings his girlfriend Minnie to live in the McClure home, Emma is dismayed when a romantic rival to Kirk, Sam McEachern, begins coming to her home while Kirk is away

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 104

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

105

at a job. Galled by Sam’s long, flirtatious visits with Minnie, and trying to avert the violent showdown between Sam and Kirk that such a situation forebodes, Emma decides to take matters into her own hands. Picking up Granpap’s rifle, she orders Sam to leave and does not back down when he in turn points a revolver at her: “She did not flinch from Sam’s gun. If he shot her, he did. Her business was to get Sam away from the cabin” (105). Realizing that no one else will step in and do for her what she sees as necessary to her family’s well-being, Emma temporarily assumes a more traditionally masculine role. In a scene that recalls her mother’s behavior, Bonnie later summons the courage to speak out, and then act, against those with nominal authority over her. After many years as a docile, underpaid mill worker, Bonnie rebels against various stifling social norms. She verbally challenges a supervisor who demands that she give more priority to her mill job than her children. She befriends a black woman who works at the mill and later earns the spiteful title “nigger lover” (354) by promoting a racially integrated union in “Stumptown,” a black enclave outside of Leesburg. During the strike, Bonnie does not capitulate when the mill overseer’s wife, Mrs. Fayon, attempts to dissuade Bonnie and her aunt Ora from participating by appealing to Biblically inscribed gender beliefs: “‘People are talking about you two,’” Mrs. Fayon warns. “‘It’s getting around that you want t’ be like men. And people say the Bible says let women look to their houses and let men tend to the world’” (336). Bonnie must overcome further self-doubts about her entitlement to participate in the strike before she can feel able to perform an original song at a strike meeting: “She was very frightened. Later she became accustomed to the singing. But for the first few times she dreaded getting up before the people as she did now” (345). An ability to work creatively with language also plays a crucial role in the mental development that then enables Bonnie to physically fight repressive social circumstances. Earlier, this chapter highlighted examples of how Bonnie’s mother, Emma, used language creatively to revise a body of metaphorical images centering on her view of the factory labor system. Throughout the novel, Lumpkin suggests that Bonnie shares and learns from her mother’s ability to manipulate words creatively, frequently noting Bonnie’s attentive presence when her mother utters one of her “queer notions.” She shows Bonnie as a little girl not only easily memorizing the words to hymns, but also absorbing their “sing-song” quality (45) so that later she can find new words to fit their rousing cadences. Even as a young girl, Bonnie tinkers with language self-consciously. While falling asleep one night, she dreamily wonders what her first kiss will be like: “Half in

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 105

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

106

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

her sleep she made a silly little rhyme, ‘A smack on the cheek is better than to eat.’ The next moment she was ashamed of this thought and hid it far down in herself. The shame waked her up” (126–7). Perhaps Bonnie’s shame shows that she, like her mother, has internalized a belief that manipulating words is somehow slightly improper. Perhaps, though, this discomfort hints at a latent class consciousness, since Bonnie’s own experiences with poverty and hunger later will impart a new sense of the necessity of such basics as food in the scheme of human relationships. At a much later stage of maturity and responsibility, Bonnie, now a young mother working in the mill, finds that her ability to take apart and reassemble words has the capacity to deflate or undermine the language used to rationalize and enforce authority. In one such case, Bonnie, trying to hold down her mill job after having a baby, asks her boss if she can go home twice a day to nurse: From behind his desk Mr. Burnett looked at her in surprise. ‘Why, Bonnie!’ he said, and smiled at her as if she was a foolish child. ‘I’m willing t’ lose the money while the machines are idle, Mr. Burnett,’ she told him earnestly. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, Bonnie. I can’t do it.’ When she urged her request he became very irritable. ‘If I let you,’ he said, ‘I’d have to let every other woman who’s got a young baby do the same. And there are plenty of babies in this village, Bonnie.’ ‘And plenty of them dies,’ Bonnie said to him. It was the first time she had said such a thing to anyone in a long time, and the first time she had spoken in that way to one of the higher-ups. She was frightened by her own words, and waited for days afterwards, watching for someone to come up, while she worked at the machines, lay his hand on her shoulder and say, ‘You can’t work here any more.’ (283–4)

As the emphasis on her subsequent fear of being fired shows, Bonnie recognizes that the nature of her rebuttal is likely to be a particular affront to her supervisor. Her pointed echoing of Mr. Burnett’s “plenty of babies” argument presumes a confrontation between equals rather than one between superior and employee. And, as Mr. Burnett no doubt realizes, Bonnie’s argument has a poetic and logical appeal that could easily spread among his employees.80 Some time after this episode, Bonnie again arrives at a small epiphany through language. Troubled after calculating that “‘the cloth I make for fifty cents is sold for six dollars’” (318), she asks her brother and John Stevens if they can shed light on this seeming discrepancy:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 106

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

107

“Somewhere in between, hit seems that somebody makes five dollars and fifty cents.” “Well, it seems so,” John Stevens answered, looking at her and smiling a little. “But you see the owners, they figure that some money must be added to that cloth to pay for wear and tear on their machines and their buildings and such like.” “They pay themselves for wear and tear on the machines,” Bonnie spoke. “But hit seems I don’t get paid for wear and tear on myself.” She had spoken the words almost in fun, only trying to make a play with the words that John Stevens had spoken. But when she had said them she stopped short, for in those half playful words she felt that she had struck something that had been worrying her, some idea that had tugged at her while she worked, and at home. She saw John and John Stevens give each other a look of understanding. (319)

Partly through Stevens’ prompting, but more through her own proclivity to explore the rhythmic, poetic potential of language, Bonnie arrives unexpectedly at this unsettling insight. In such examples, Bonnie mostly reshapes her own conceptions of reality. When she writes a song that ends up becoming popular among her fellow strikers, however, her linguistic agility influences not only her personal consciousness, but also the collective consciousness of workers like herself. Part of the widespread appeal of Bonnie’s “Mill Mother’s Song” among workers no doubt stems from its use of terse, epigrammatic phrases similar to those Bonnie has created spontaneously in the earlier scenes discussed above. Despite its simple, accessible style, the song creates structural and situational parallels that have a compelling complexity. In the first verse, for instance, We leave our homes in the morning. We kiss our children good-by. While we slave for the bosses Our children scream and cry (345)

the grammatical (subject-verb) symmetry shared by each of the four lines helps to convey the way that home life and factory life are inextricably intertwined. At the same time, the repetitive quality of the first three lines (“we” followed by an action verb) draws attention to the new subject (“our children”) in the final line. The verse may also be conceived as two antithetical halves—the first

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 107

6/22/2006 8:54:31 AM

108

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

idyllic, the second dystopic. Similar rhetorical devices strengthen subsequent verses and lift them beyond the realm of ordinary speech. In addition to documenting shared family and labor experiences, Bonnie’s song appeals to communal values by tapping into and rewriting an earlier song that, Lumpkin suggests, was a staple of the local repertoire. Bonnie, teaching her song to the strikers, reminds them that “you all know the tune, for hit’s ‘Little Mary Fagan,’ [sic] so just listen to the words” (346). This simple reminder encompasses layers of shared experience and values that add potential depth to Bonnie’s song. The dramatic events recounted in “Little Mary Phagan” would have been well known to Bonnie’s audience (and probably to Lumpkin’s contemporary readers as well). On April 26, 1913, Mary Phagan, a girl nearing her fourteenth birthday who worked full-time at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia, had gone to her supervisor to collect a small sum owed to her. (This day, Confederate Memorial Day, was a workers holiday.) Some time later, she was found dead in the factory basement, having been brutally beaten and (it was widely believed) raped. Despite evidence suggesting his innocence, the factory’s supervisor and part owner, the Jewish Leo Frank, was charged with murder. Eventually, after a highly publicized (and sensationalized) investigation and trial, he was convicted and sentenced to death. After Frank’s lawyers took the case to the Supreme Court to no avail, John Slaton, Georgia’s outgoing governor, who had personal doubts about Frank’s guilt, commuted the death sentence to life in prison. Slaton’s decision met with widespread outrage and protests among many Southern whites of the working and elite classes alike. Eventually, a mob—determined to carry out the jury’s original death sentence—broke into the prison where Frank was held, took him, and lynched him. Regardless of whether Frank had in fact raped and murdered Phagan, various social tensions and prejudices within the South tended to predispose a large segment of the population to presume his guilt. At a time when the rise of industrialism in the South was ripping apart an earlier agrarian-based social fabric—a time when “southern nativism had risen sharply in response to an influx of South and East European immigrants” (McNeil 67)—Frank “as a Northerner, an industrialist, and a Jew represented everything alien to the culture” (Dinnerstein 32).81 For the masses of Southern factory workers, Mary Phagan’s murder seemed to confirm, in clearly readable signs, a priori perceptions of labor bosses’ exploitative power, particularly over young female employees. As folklorist Gene Wiggins observes, “at various levels of various consciences Mary Phagan was a symbol of all the mill girls who were being ravished and destroyed (though less literally) by the wealthy” (100).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 108

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

109

During Frank’s trial, the ballad “Little Mary Phagan” appeared. The handiwork of Georgia mill worker and musician “Fiddlin’” John Carson, this folk-styled ballad drew upon both sentimental and graphically violent imagery to describe and comment upon the events surrounding Phagan’s death: Little Mary Phagan She went to town one day; She went to the pencil factory To get her little pay. She left her home at ‘leven. When she kissed her mother good bye, Not one time did the poor child think She was going there to die. Leo Frank met her With a brutely [sic] heart we know He smiled and said, “Little Mary, Now you go home no more.” [  .  .  .  .  ] She fell upon her knees, To Leo Frank she pled. Because she was virtuous He hit her across the head. The tears rolled down her rosy cheeks, The blood flowed down her back. She remembered telling her mother What time she would be back. [  .  .  .  .  ] I have a notion in my head When Frank come to die, He took examination In the courthouse in the sky. [  .  .  .  .  ] Come all of you good people, Wherever you may be, Supposing little Mary Belonged to you or me?

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 109

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

110

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” Her mother sits a weeping, She weeps and mourns all day. She prays to meet her baby In a better world some day. (qtd. in Wiggins 101–3)82

Apparently, this song’s perspective resonated favorably with working-class Southerners’ views, for it achieved great and lasting popularity. Wiggins reports that there were huge crowds in the vicinity of the Frank trial. John [Carson] had always liked crowds and sought to please them, partly for the sake of what they might drop in his hat. He played what they wished to hear. They wished to hear ‘Little Mary Phagan.’ He probably had no idea that his song was contributing to the feeling that led to the near-assassination of Governor Slaton and the final lynching of Leo Frank. (100)

On the day that Frank’s lynched body was discovered, Carson would also play his song (slightly updated to reflect this outcome) for the crowds that turned out—most in a spirit of triumph and celebration (Oney 571–2).83 As a song that workers immediately embraced and that soon gained folksong status as it spread orally throughout the South, “Little Mary Phagan” might be seen as approximating an aggregate working-class view of the Mary Phagan murder.84 Lumpkin uses the song as such when she shows Bonnie, as she teaches the strikers her new song, commenting that “‘you all know the tune, for hit’s ‘Little Mary Fagan’” (346). Although the novel itself does not provide further insights into the interrelationship of “Little Mary” and “Mill Mother” (or the respective events that they document), a contemporary reader likely would have recognized ways that these two narratives might comment upon each other. In decoding the political implications of the Phagan-Frank case within the context of Lumpkin’s novel, historian Nancy MacLean’s insights are helpful. MacLean characterizes the Phagan-Frank case as “a spectacular instance of a pattern of political mobilization best described as reactionary populism” (920). Instead of Phagan’s death serving as a progressive working-class rallying point for pushing toward lasting positive changes in the factory system, it offered a conservative justification for anti-Semitism and the institution of lynching: [A]lthough the case raised issues concerning the susceptibility of working-class women to economic and sexual exploitation that a radical labor or women’s movement might address, these issues were resolved in a thoroughly reactionary way. [  .  .  .  .  ] Anti-Semitism

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 110

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

111

[  .  .  .  ] provided simple answers for the complicated questions of changing patterns of class power and female sexuality. Capitalism was a good social system, unless manipulated and deformed by Jews; young women were pure, asexual beings, unless lured into depravity by treacherous racial others. (942)

Given Lumpkin’s sensitivity throughout To Make My Bread to how education and experience could circumscribe working-class political perspectives, she probably sympathized with how Gastonia strikers would have recalled the Phagan-Frank case—less as a regrettable manifestation of racial intolerance against Frank than as a particularly egregious attack on a vulnerable young female worker by her powerful boss.85 At the same time, she surely viewed this template for resolving class tensions as regressive.86 Thus, her allusion to “Little Mary Phagan” is probably intended to contrast her characters’ strategies for dealing with labor exploitation with those employed during the Phagan-Frank episode and put them in a comparatively favorable light. When Bonnie reminds workers of the melodic source of the new song, she evokes not just the earlier lyrics, but also the whole earlier historical narrative as a gloss upon the new history that the strikers are in the process of creating. Likewise, Lumpkin’s novel brings the Phagan-Frank episode into dialogue with its own assumptions about how to resolve labor/class conflicts. By showing workers trying to build a new union, Lumpkin suggests a positive change in tactics for achieving working-class agency. Lumpkin’s workers do not align themselves with the sort of mob mentality that had allowed Frank’s lynching. Instead, they fight to overcome such reactionary behavior directed against them. Indeed, the use of terror tactics to suppress union activity in Gastonia by the so-called Committee of One-Hundred is akin to the lynching of Frank at the hands of masked men who had dubbed themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan. In the historical reality that Lumpkin’s novel reflects, this citizens’ vigilante group threatened to lynch Northern strike leaders and was responsible for, among other things, destroying the strikers’ headquarters and tent colony and murdering local leader Ella May Wiggins. The tactics of the Committee of One-Hundred, like those of the Knights of Mary Phagan, exemplify MacLean’s “reactionary populism” paradigm.87 In its use of the tune of “Little Mary Phagan,” then, Bonnie’s new union song reminds workers of a legacy of suffering at the hands of employers or others in positions of power. Further, it reminds them that the way this murder case had resolved itself (through lynching) more than a decade before had done nothing tangible to shift the overall balance of power in workers’ favor.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 111

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

112

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

As Lumpkin probably recognized, “Little Mary Phagan” is an especially apt parodic source for setting out a radical stance towards the mortality associated with labor exploitation. (New lyrics set to a conventional religious tune certainly would have carried a different symbolic weight.) In the earlier ballad, the murder might be seen as an extreme form of class exploitation (a powerful boss treating his young female employee as a disposable commodity).88 Although “Little Mary Phagan” depicts a literal and graphic murder—one collected version tells that Leo Frank “picked up a stick from the trash pile / And struck her on the head” (Frank 600)— Bonnie’s song reflects her own recent understanding that disregard for life can assume more subtle forms. Earlier in the novel, after Emma has died of pellagra, Bonnie’s brother John talks to John Stevens and is shocked when Stevens proclaims that “the mill owners killed [Emma]” (311). To Stevens, “the owners of the mill, and all those that get their money from the mills” (311) are liable for the poverty that caused her disease. For Bonnie, John, and other workers accustomed to hearing mill village preachers counsel that “rich and poor, we come to it just the same” (308), Stevens’ verdict offers a radical new way of visualizing the nature of poverty and suffering. According to Stevens’ logic, mill owners’ low wages contributed to the death of one of Bonnie’s children: after her baby dies of pneumonia, Bonnie realizes that she had failed to call a doctor in time to save her sick child because “thinking of the money involved [  .  .  .  ] had held her back” (320). Compared to “Little Mary Phagan,” Bonnie’s song puts a progressive, collective slant on a conflict between workers and bosses. The first stanza of Bonnie’s ballad, which echoes “Little Mary Phagan” most literally, changes the model song’s foreshadowing of a particular murder into a more general foreshadowing of the consequences faced by families whose adults all must work for the mill: She left her home at ‘leven.

We leave our homes in the morning.

When she kissed her mother good-bye,

We kiss our children good-by

Not one time did the poor child think

While we slave for the bosses Our children scream and cry

That she was going to die.

(from “Mill Mother’s Lament”).

(from “Little Mary Phagan”)

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 112

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

113

Similarly, Bonnie’s song transforms the boss’s heartless treatment of a particular young female employee in “Little Mary” into a more general assertion that “for us nor them [workers’ children], dear workers, / The bosses do not care” (346). And while various versions of “Mary Phagan” (including Carson’s original) all appeal to the idea that a higher retribution will be meted out in the afterlife, Bonnie’s ballad proposes a more practical, earthly version of justice: But listen to me, workers: A union they do fear. Let’s stand together, workers, And have a union here. (346)89

“The fountain of inspiration remained dry as a desert”90 Lumpkin’s experiences prior to writing To Make My Bread (those discussed near the beginning of this chapter) offer insight into the resulting novel as a site for her re-envisioning Southern experience through a workingclass lens. As the following brief overview of her literary output following To Make My Bread will demonstrate, Lumpkin’s subsequent writings—in particular, several published in the early 1930s after To Make My Bread— also add retrospective depth to a portrait of a writer whose complex subjectivity eventually pulled her away from radicalism. In Some Take a Lover and Timid Woman—both released in 1933 under the pseudonym Ann Du Pre—Lumpkin explores middle- to upper-class concerns that are far removed from the working-class experiences documented in To Make My Bread. Perhaps inspired by Lumpkin’s own movement away from inherited values, both deal with young women who push the limits of what their families consider morally acceptable. Some Take a Lover is “a story of wealthy New Yorkers, the children and grandchildren of an old tyrant, Mrs. Singleton, who watches with cynical interest their extramarital intrigues, while holding over them the threat of disinheritance in her will. Only one of the group retains her grandmother’s respect, Natalie, who ‘lives in sin’ with a young artist but is loyal and faithful” (Book 274).91 A more compelling novel than Some Take a Lover, Timid Woman­ opens just before the “coming-out” party that will mark Ellen Guaillard—a “timid” eighteen-year-old from a conservative and respected Southern family—as eligible for courtship and marriage. Ellen remains single, however, and devotes herself to caring for family

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 113

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

114

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

members at home until the family’s financial decline forces her to look for outside work. Thus, at age thirty, she finds employment as a governess for the children of Alex Kingman, whose wife is in a sanitarium. Worried that people are gossiping about Ellen being alone in a house with a married man, her family pressures her to avoid further scandal and return home, where she can still earn money doing seamstress work: “all of them wished her to go back to that house, to spend her life sewing for other people, to live as a nun would live” (252). Ultimately disregarding her family’s concern for her reputation, Ellen decides to continue living with Kingman. Throughout, Timid Woman decries conservative society’s preoccupation with maintaining a “reputation” and sympathizes with Ellen’s aversion to such social restrictiveness. As a gloss upon Lumpkin’s proletarian stint, these two novels show that, amid producing stringently Marxist literature, Lumpkin still found the burdens peculiar to young women from a “respectable” class and social background worth writing about.92 While Ellen’s dilemmas in Timid Woman might seem trivial compared to the more dire survival issues faced by factory workers in To Make My Bread, Du Pre (Lumpkin) still grants that upper-class social conventions truly stifle self-realization for young women from “good” Southern families. As Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin’s portrayal of the Lumpkin family’s concern with social reputation in The Making of a Southerner suggests, Lumpkin daughters like Grace and Katherine grew up in a society closer to that delineated in Timid Woman than in To Make My Bread. And, as lack of money within a once relatively wealthy family provides the catalyst for Ellen’s modest liberation in Timid Woman, a similar decline in the Lumpkins’ resources seems to have provided Grace and Katherine with one incentive to gain financial (and ideological) independence from their more conservative family. To an extent, Lumpkin’s 1935 novel A Sign for Cain unites the explorations of working-class and upper-middle-class existence that were separated in To Make My Bread and the “Du Pre” novels, respectively. While To Make My Bread views the struggle to create a textile union almost entirely from the viewpoint of the working-class McClures, A Sign for Cain shows how the Communist Party’s attempt to start a racially integrated sharecroppers union in an unspecified Southern locale affects characters from diverse social and ideological backgrounds.93 In particular, the Marxist convictions behind this unionization effort are contrasted ironically with the reactionary values of a distinguished but declining Southern family headed by the aging Colonel Gault. To suggest just a few of the complex ways that the unionization effort penetrates into the intertwined lives of characters across the social spectrum,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 114

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

115

Bill Duncan, a liberal newspaper editor and Communist sympathizer, is a distant cousin of the Gaults. Denis Gault, a young black Communist who has returned from the North to secretly lay the groundwork for this union, is the son of Nancy, a servant in the Gault home. Colonel Gault’s daughter Caroline, a novelist in New York City, is Bill Duncan’s friend, though she scoffs at his radical opinions on art and society. She wants to create meaningful art, but is too ensconced in her comfortable class position to recognize her relationship to the class struggle in her native South. By uttering naïve opinions about the apolitical nature of art, she functions primarily as the novel’s foil for its own more radical aesthetic: “What have I to do with class struggles? The class I belong to is fixed, a class of cultured people all over the world. I am above struggles” (178). Ironically, in the decades following the publication of Cain, Lumpkin herself would adopt an apolitical perspective toward art reminiscent of that satirically voiced in the fictional Caroline Gault’s comment above. Her recollections in a short 1977 essay suggest that she became unable to continue writing from a class perspective so unlike her own. She describes the sudden inspiration for her next novel, The Wedding, as coming at a time when, with two proletarian-inspired novels behind her, she felt “distressed because the fountain of inspiration remained dry as a desert” (321). This novel marked a permanent departure from the proletarian themes that had shaped her earlier literary career.94 A 1951 manuscript for a play entitled “Remember Now” illustrates Lumpkin’s complete rejection of her earlier novels’ insistence that communist society would give individuals greater freedom for self-realization.95 An argument between two allegorically named characters—the now-repentant former radical Virginia and the adamantly communist Karl—is a case in point.96 In her parting words to Karl, Virginia decries what Karl has called the “social gospel”—a belief that society must impose limits on individual freedom in order to ensure social equality. In Virginia’s view, Karl’s communism enforces caring for the poor, and thus destroys what she believes is a more natural human tendency to care selectively and voluntarily for the poor within a small social sphere. Virginia accuses Karl of “[not caring] about the poor and oppressed. You hand your responsibility for them over to the State. [.  .  .  .  ] It is what I had been doing. Not caring any more—not being personally responsible—personally, individually responsible” (127). Virginia grounds her anti-communism in a belief that “[God] has planted in each one the love of liberty. That is the greatest gift. Freedom is not a legislated thing” (128). She tells Karl that his “plan for the world” “will die” because it denies a belief in a higher supernatural force controlling

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 115

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

116

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

human destiny: “How can you create when you have cut yourself off from the Creator?” (128). Later in her life, Lumpkin developed social views that were even more fatalistic and opposed to the belief in a human capacity to develop more equitable social structures. In a 1971 letter to Kenneth Toombs, the Director of Libraries at the University of South Carolina, she remarked that there is only one conclusion: The World cannot be saved. There is no Utopia. Human nature is human nature and there are only two eternal verities: God’s nature and Human nature—and these will never change, and they never have changed. The nature of God—The nature of man. There is no help for the world except as a country’s FRAME OF REFERENCE is God, and as an individual finds God and acknowledges Him as his FRAME OF REFERENCE against which he sets any happening either political or personal that might puzzle or challenge him, in order to find wisdom and Truth.

Then, as if suddenly recognizing the degree to which these notions subverted her own more important literary legacy—indeed, the main basis for establishing a repository of her papers at USC—she added, “NOTE: Please excuse me from ‘preaching.’ I got started and couldn’t stop, and won’t do the letter over because I want to get it out on the next mail.”

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 116

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

Chapter Three

“Nothing Is Right, but Everything Is Going to Be”: Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Culture in Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling

Near the end of Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the Heart (1932), Amos Freer, a communist union organizer, quotes a “maxim that we workers are so fond of. ‘Life without labor is robbery; labor without art is barbarity’” (366). The implications of Freer’s maxim are explored from numerous angles in Call Home the Heart and its sequel A Stone Came Rolling (1935). This maxim speaks to Dargan’s sense of the current dystopic reality of economic and cultural life under a floundering capital-driven labor system. Further, it anticipates what she envisioned as a more utopian life and culture within a socialist state that would distribute the burdens and benefits of labor equally.1 Throughout these two novels, as Dargan depicts her characters’ production of and engagement with culture within various socioeconomic contexts, she repeatedly finds the current economic system guilty of both robbery (“life without labor”) and barbarity (“labor without art”). Like her character Freer, Dargan envisions a socialist utopia that would give members equal opportunity to develop their artistic potentials. Drawing on each individual’s expressive gifts, humanity would experience an artistic flowering surpassing that of all previous historical epochs. Culminating with close analysis of Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling, this chapter will explore Dargan’s convictions related to various aspects of culture in what she saw as a pre-revolutionary, dystopic reality, and in what she envisioned as a post-revolutionary utopia. Through additional insights from extant biographical, extra-literary, and supplemental literary resources, it will also explore how these convictions grew out of her family background and life experiences, her earlier work as 117

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 117

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

118

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

a creative artist, and her Marxist-informed interpretation of America’s economic, social, and cultural dynamics. It will explore the many reasons why, in light of her sense of these dynamics, Dargan felt (to cite another Marxist-inflected maxim incorporated into Call Home the Heart) that “nothing is right, but everything is going to be” (296). Whereas Myra Page and Grace Lumpkin were in their early thirties when they wrote Gastonia-inspired novels, Olive Tilford Dargan was already 63 years old. She had been publishing plays, poems, and short stories for almost three decades when she debuted (under the pseudonym Fielding Burke) as a radical novelist with Call Home the Heart. Like Page and Lumpkin, Dargan was middle-class and well educated. Unlike her working-class protagonists, she did not experience leaving a mountain culture and becoming reliant on an exploitative factory system for survival. From what basis, then, did she know the cultural backgrounds of people who left the Appalachian Mountains to seek millwork in towns like Gastonia? What values did she ascribe to Appalachian culture, which existed in relative isolation and stasis even while providing a steady stream of labor for industry that was rapidly evolving due to technological advances? What path of life experiences caused her to ally herself with industrial workers? What factors contributed to her novels’ particular stances towards culture and labor within this rural/ industrial dialectic? How did a longtime desire for social reform develop into a Marxist vision of revolutionary reform? Family background; education and intellectual life; relationships with mountaineers, factory workers, and activists; encounters with folk and high culture, and with primitive and sophisticated modes of production—all these experiences left an imprint on Dargan’s political and artistic convictions and informed the vantage point from which authoring these novels was possible.2 Dargan’s inherited family values and the experiences she garnered moving through life shaped a perspective from which she, as a writer, could inhabit a somewhat ambiguous class position. Though her roots were rural, she eventually moved within urban intellectual circles and traveled abroad. Though she was more economically privileged than many of the subjects of her socially-conscious writing, she also struggled to earn a living. And though she possessed keenly developed aesthetic and literary sensibilities, she was also sensitive to the economic factors that prevented large segments of her society from developing or sharing in these sensibilities. Dargan was born on a Kentucky farm in 1869 to schoolteacher parents who “encouraged self-reliance and political awareness in their four children” (Shannon 434).3 Though her immediate family did not provide an explicit role model for the socially conscious writer Dargan would become, various members likely nurtured

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 118

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

119

aspects of Dargan’s artistic identity. She drew inspiration from grandmothers who were both “colorful frontier storytellers” (Shannon 434) and from her maternal grandfather, Mordecai Day, who “preached that slavery was an abomination before the Lord, displaying courage for social justice” (Lathrop 4). Family circumstances pushed Dargan to assume considerable responsibilities at a relatively young age. Because of her mother’s poor health, Olive began to school herself to take her mother’s place as a teacher, assisting her father in his academy until she was fourteen, and then taking independent charge of a school nearby. Here, despite the difficulties of a rowdy class that had defeated her male predecessor, Dargan managed to instruct her thirty to forty students, who ranged in age from six to twenty, in all subjects and through all grades. She also earned their respect and that of their parents. (Shannon 434–5)

She attended Peabody University in Nashville, Tennessee, on scholarship, graduating in 1888 after two years of study. She then taught in various locations, including at a business school in Houston, Texas. Later, she spent a year at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studied “English, French, Economics and Philosophy, the two latter her favorite subjects” (Lathrop 6).4 Here, Shannon speculates, “it seems probable that she traced the most enduring and influential of her political friendships to the lectures and parlor meetings she attended [  .  .  .  ] in 1893 and 1894” (435). Following her time at Radcliffe, Dargan briefly resumed teaching, then married Pegram Dargan. Olive had met Pegram, “a minister’s son from South Carolina [  .  .  .  ] who thought himself a poet” (Shannon 435), in Boston several years earlier. When the couple moved to New York City to pursue writing careers, Olive found much greater literary success than her husband, publishing numerous poems in respected periodicals and receiving critical acclaim for her plays (Shannon 435–6).5 During a college camping trip, Dargan had first visited the North Carolina mountains that would later inspire much of her literary output. She vowed that “if I ever own a home of my own, it will be in these mountains” (Brosi). Indeed, much later, in 1906, after selling the stage rights to one of her dramas, she and her husband were able to “make a down payment on 1,000 acres of barely accessible land, a ridge called Round Top, near Almond, North Carolina” (Neufeld 270).6 With a modest literary reputation behind her, she published nothing during the next six years while living there, and she seems to have been frustrated that the duties expected of her as a wife impinged on her literary ambitions (Shannon 436).7 After living

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 119

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

120

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

for several years in England apart from her husband, she returned to her mountain farm in 1916 as a widow—Pegram had drowned at sea the previous year.8 She lived there for the next nine years, intimately involved with the farm and the tenant family who shared and helped run it. During this time, she published a co-authored collection of dramas (1922); a collection of poetry, Lute and Furrow (1922); and a number of short stories based on interactions with her mountain neighbors, which first appeared in magazines and were later collected as Highland Annals (1925). Although, as Shannon notes, “she purchased a house in Asheville [North Carolina] in 1925 in order to spend the winters in relative comfort and safety” (439), she continued to spend considerable time attending to and living on her farm over the next several decades.9 Spanning all the years discussed above, Dargan treasured a friendship, begun during her Radcliffe days, that had influenced her political development. The friend was Rose Pastor Stokes (1879–1933), who became a prominent member of the Socialist Party of America and, later, of the Communist Party.10 In the decades following Dargan’s brief time in New York City, the two friends corresponded extensively. They occasionally managed to spend time together, though Dargan would spend the majority of her time living in isolated Almond, North Carolina, while Rose remained far more politically active “in the world of the Lower East Side” (Rosenbaum 1342). In 1907, Dargan spent a particularly formative period with Rose. Pregnant and separated from her husband, she traveled from her North Carolina cabin to the “Stokes family compound on Caritas Island off the coast of Stamford, Connecticut” (Ackerman 19) and there gave birth to a daughter who died within 24 hours. (She had no other children.) Dargan stayed several more months with the Stokes family, “reading heavily in socialism and beginning to crystallize her own political philosophy” (Ackerman 22). “Half the things that must be done are greater than our art”: Dargan’s pre-1930s poetry The poetry that Dargan wrote during the 1910s and 1920s while living on her mountain farm, in the period before her output of radical prose, has been long out of print and critically ignored. Granted, her poetic form and diction on occasion bows with excessive devotion to fairly elaborate rhyme schemes and what Shannon calls “‘ladylike’ obscurity and high flown language” (436).11 Nevertheless, many of Dargan’s poems are compelling, both intrinsically and because they delve into aesthetic and political issues explored more deeply in her radical fiction.12 As a record of

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 120

6/22/2006 8:54:32 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

121

Dargan’s emerging aesthetic and political values, this poetry sheds light on certain narrative choices in her radical fiction. It offers insight, for instance, into why Dargan gives the fictional protagonist of Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling certain intellectual and emotional traits she may have seen in herself and yet takes care to show that, unlike herself, this protagonist has virtually no artistic inclinations. Dargan’s poetry, because it critiques the role of poetry (and other art) as a force related to and capable of influencing sociopolitical realities, further suggests one reason why her radical novels generally assign culture a low to modest value in effecting social reform (though, ironically, her novels themselves aspire to such a role). As her poetry and stories make clear, Dargan’s engagement with her adopted mountain community—her participation in local cycles of physical work and leisure, and her friendships with local people—shaped her self-identity. At the same time, she recognized that the writerly side of this identity—the aspect that looked at experience with a literary eye and sought leisure time to craft that experience into poems and stories—implied economic priorities and cultural values different from those commonly shared by her rural neighbors.13 Dargan’s most compelling poems explore the tension between these two aspects of identity. As a late work from the period preceding Dargan’s radical novels, the poetry volume Lute and Furrow (1922) contains several poems—including the title piece—that self-consciously meditate on the potential conflicts between the desire to produce art and the need to do physical work. In its very title, “Lute and Furrow” juxtaposes a symbol of creative art with a symbol of practical survival. The poem’s speaker (clearly reflective of Dargan) feels the call of both, but must attend to the cyclical demands of farming before nurturing artistic desires. The poem moves twice, in four sections, through a winter-to-spring cycle, showing the farmer-artist planning, in a brief wintertime respite from physical work, to “take up my pen and once more / Meet that stranger, my soul” (3). The speaker anticipates now having time to reconnect with the world of literature. She will read leisurely and write “all the poems with beauty half-hid, / Yet touching my haste like a rose” (6). Ironically, this initial desire to release pent-up creative urges soon changes into “the doubt that deadens the dawn.” This doubt finds eventual release not through art, but through returning the next spring to physical labor on the land. Just when the speaker has “almost grasp[ed] the pen,” a fellow farmer, Len, announces that “Winter’s broke”: “Ain’t no time now for foolin,’ we got to start the ploughs” (7). Though the speaker may regret setting aside her creative pursuits, she nevertheless exults that “there is no doubting, no ghosts uncertain stalk / [  .  .  .  ] / Cutting the furrow deep and true where Destiny will walk” (5). Performing physical

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 121

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

122

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

work on familiar land—“when half the things that must be done are greater than our art, / And half the things that must be done are smaller than our heart” (5)—resolves the doubts of doing artistic work in uncharted territory. As Terry Eagleton observes, “literary production and consumption presuppose certain levels of literacy, physical and mental well-being, leisure and material affluence: the material conditions for writing and reading include economic resources, shelter, lighting and privacy” (Criticism 49). If a society’s economic mode of production causes certain members to experience “such phenomena as poverty, physical and mental debility consequent on prolonged and intensive labour, illiteracy or partial literacy, lack of sufficient shelter, privacy and lighting,” then this economic basis effectively “exclude[s] or partially exclude[s] certain social groups and classes from literary production and consumption” (50). Eagleton’s observations speak to a clear irony in the plight of the speaker in “Lute and Furrow.” She feels creatively limited by labor (compromised by factors such as Eagleton has delineated) and yet, in articulating this feeling, actually creates a sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing artifact. She thus possesses the creative means to bridge a fundamental experiential gap between her own posited subject-position and that of readers who may have greater access to education and leisure. While the poem’s internal language problematizes the relationship between manual labor and art, the very material fact of the poem’s existence suggests that labor may fuel as well as smother internal artistic fires.14 In “Sall’s Gap,” another poem from Lute and Furrow, the poet comes to recognize her own race and class privileges. Her aesthetic perceptions of her surroundings potentially obscure the way others differently situated with regards to such privilege may value the same place. Hiking in a secluded gap, she rhapsodizes—in a series of meticulously rhymed seven-line stanzas— about the sublime natural beauty around her.15 Her delight at finding the source of a spring—“the mossy parting / Where a mountain rillet breaks into the light” (43)—is soiled, however, when she follows the stream back down into the valley and there learns that locals simply call the stream and valley “Sall’s branch” and “Sall’s gap.” Initially, she fancies that the stream deserves a more poetic name, believing that “the world from bondage could not be delivered / While men were dead to Beauty; gross, unloving / To all her gifts” (45). Later, however, she learns the story behind the name “Sall’s Gap” from “the wise man of the hill” who “knew the mountains and their lore” (46). Pointedly, he asks her if she would die for the beauty she claims to cherish. He then tells her of Sall, a Cherokee woman who, when the U.S. government forced her tribe to migrate, “begged leave to die where every wild thing knew her, / And every tree and green thing nodded to her” (47). To avoid capture,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 122

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

123

she “hid and starved one long white winter through” (47) and eventually killed herself rather than submit. Through this story, the poet sees the triviality of her own aesthetic concerns and the presumptuousness of her claim that “men were dead to Beauty” (45). Further, she realizes that her petty desire to change the name of Sall’s Gap would have erased one small reminder of the Cherokee tribe’s dispossession of this land—a political reality which, ironically, enables her very access to and possessiveness of this spring: “I slipped away not speaking. / She starved. And I, had I not somewhat yearned / For supper coming down? Trespasser peeking! /  .  .  . / Sall’s gap? Sall’s brook? So may they ever be! / I set this down for meddlers likest me” (48). Despite (or even because of ) its seemingly conventional poetic values—its lavish evocations of natural beauty and virtuoso adherence to a particular stanza pattern—this poem manages to suggest complex and unsettling implications for the author, for the reader, and for such poetry itself. The poem leaves readers wondering how the poet’s art might change after the mountain man’s story has troubled her aesthetic principles. If the poet sincerely takes to heart the lesson she “sets down” for herself and other poetic “meddlers,” she must become more vigilant about the lure of self-indulgent verse. Readers who have just imbibed the sensual delights of the poem’s opening stanzas now are forced along with the poet to rethink the aestheticizing language through which they first naively accessed this world of natural beauty.16 Other poems in Lute and Furrow further dramatize tension between artistic form and content, between the meticulously crafted verse forms the poet has favored and the gritty realities she now feels compelled to document. In “Pace Tua” (Latin for “by your leave”), Dargan uses an uncharacteristically rambling free verse to muse on several artifacts in her writing room, including a photograph bequeathed by an artist “starving for Paris” (“O God, / Have I got to go to Paris this morning?”), and a bowl from “a young Indian” who “made it and sold it for fifty cents” (“God bless him, I could think of him all day!”) (85). Her last rumination—on a rug made by Granny Whitt, “who sheep-hunted all over these hills / Till she was eighty-two”—strays far afield from the artifact that initiated it. Granny Whitt’s daughter, Zinnia, had “married a half-breed Cherokee” who “was jealous of a white man; / Hid in the laurel, and shot him; / Cut out his eyes and brought them to Zinnia. / She lived two weeks, and left twins an hour old. / They hung him [the Cherokee], under a bridge” (87). Just as the poet seems about to launch into a story about these twins, who are “big enough now / To climb the long hill from Granny Whitt’s / And play in my yard,” she apologetically cuts herself off: “One day—Narrative, narrative! / Shall I slop into your easy path, / And trickle on? /  .  .  . / There’s a garnet in this poem, / If you go after it with a

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 123

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

124

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

dredge” (88). This by-your-leave apology, even if disingenuous, assumes that readers turn to poetry seeking the linguistic equivalents of polished gems (“garnets”), not messy narratives that refuse to resolve themselves or yield a meaning within the confines of a short symmetrical verse form. Like “Lute and Furrow” and “Sall’s Gap,” “Pace Tua” ends up critiquing the very motivations that produced it, although it begins with the poet waking up intending to write, thinking that “I had cleared everything out of my room, / So that my mind, catching on nothing, / Would go sailing in a clear sky” (85). A bare room presumably would have helped the poet to enter a more abstract, philosophical mindset, untroubled by thoughts about specific people in her immediate surroundings. Readers can only wonder what quality of poem might have resulted from a bare room, since she has not fully cleaned out the room (at least the photograph, bowl, and rug remain). Ironically, these items, not a clear sky, end up generating the poem. Challenging the genteel notion that a poem should be gemlike in form and meaning, Dargan creates an ambiguous story and instructs readers to do their own sifting. Readers must find what is beautiful, or at least precious because it evokes an image of life that reflects its actual complexity rather than forcing life’s conflicts into a simplistic artistic resolution. Poetry such as this is a way—just one of many, of course—of creatively engaging with experience. All such art coming from another’s subject-position offers an interpretation of experience with various degrees of verisimilitude to readers’ own experiential knowledge. After engaging with another’s art, readers’ fragmentary understanding of the world may then seem more or less satisfactory, whole, or comprehensible. As suggested in the readings of the poems above, Dargan recognized a potential conflict between an impulse to create aesthetically pleasing art and an impulse to convey social realities—realities that her poetic style might tend to obscure.17 How could she, for instance, create a beautiful poem that truthfully showed how physically demanding agricultural work may stunt artistic/spiritual growth (“Lute and Furrow”)? Or a poem celebrating a hike through beautiful mountains from which whole Indian tribes were forced to leave (“Sall’s Gap”)? Or a neat moral resolution to the story of the “half-breed” Cherokee man’s hanging (“Pace Tua”)? “With conscientious abandon”: Dargan’s short story “Serena Takes a Boarder” Like the poems discussed above, the stories that comprise Dargan’s 1925 Highland Annals are filtered through a first-person narrator (here, named

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 124

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

125

Miss Dolly) whose cultural/aesthetic values mark her as middle-class, highly literate, and thus substantially different from her rural neighbors.18 Compared to the above poetry, however, these stories more easily accommodate rural characters’ experiences and colloquial voices. Because they are less constrained by the formal and aesthetic expectations that governed Dargan’s poetic style, they likewise show less anxiety that literary impulses might distort working-class experiences. Nevertheless, Dargan still frequently highlights the disparity in outlook between herself (a relatively privileged writer) and her neighbors (predominantly subsistence farmers). In these stories, conflicts often arise when Miss Dolly acts on hasty or condescending assumptions about her neighbors’ cultural practices or aesthetic values. Resolution comes through discovering that neighbors’ seemingly irrational or “backwards” attitudes and behaviors are in fact sensible adaptations to their material conditions.19 The story “Serena Takes a Boarder” provides the most dramatic example of the narrator misunderstanding her neighbors’ cultural values, showing the consequences when she tries to reform a mountain woman’s attitude towards work under the assumption that this reform will bring her family greater satisfaction. This story—which Elfenbein calls “a powerful indictment of the American work ethic” (xlvii)—sheds intriguing light on the ambivalence in Dargan’s later radical novels towards primitive subsistence agriculture, a central aspect of life for the Appalachian families in Dargan’s fiction. The story focuses on the relationship between Miss Dolly and the Merlins, a large tenant family on her mountain farm. Although Miss Dolly is on good terms with the family, she secretly feels that the Merlins suffer under mother Serena’s good-natured indifference to housekeeping. She chides Serena—about whom she comments that “work one day and rest six was her version of the great example [the work ethic]” (193)—to stop frittering away her time on impractical pursuits, particularly trying to keep tabs on her freeroaming ducks.20 Initially, after shaming Serena into growing a garden, cooking healthier and more appealing food, and attending to other domestic duties like sewing, washing, and canning food, Miss Dolly delights that Serena’s efforts are yielding a better fed and dressed family. After several months, however, she questions having pressured the easygoing mother into this more conscientious and industrious role, sensing that her intervention has upset the community’s delicate cultural equilibrium: “happiness had fled the mountain” (199). Other local people had always overlooked the dirt and humble food and welcomed an evening with Serena and husband Len—cherished “reservoirs of mountain song and story” (187). Now, visitors have stopped

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 125

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

126

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

coming to the house. Serena no longer drops by to help Miss Dolly with small tasks. Serena’s husband complains to Miss Dolly that “they ain’t any satisfaction in livin’” since his wife began putting all her energy into housekeeping (203). He had married Serena knowing she “wuz like her father,” a man who did minimal work but was well loved: “he’d make a big fire an’ set an’ tell the masterest tales so long as they wuz anybody to drap in an’ listen, an’ when they wuzn’t he’d jest set an’ sing. He couldn’t read a book-word, but he knowed ever’ song from Noher [Noah] down” (205). The Serena who carried on her father’s communal role withers when Miss Dolly tries to cultivate her work ethic.21 After Serena tells Miss Dolly that she’s given up the attempt at domestic reform, Miss Dolly stops promoting industry and accepts the return of Serena’s former carelessness: “[Serena’s] factitious disguise of the past twelve months had dropped utterly away. She assumed my acquiescence and received it. Her utmost effort had been given, and my way had proved a failure. Therefore her own was better, and she returned to it with conscientious abandon” (212). As before, the family looks underfed but content, Serena drops by to help Miss Dolly, and the steady “stream of company” (214) resumes. Miss Dolly’s initial faith that hard work leads to prosperity, and prosperity to happiness, informs her desire to intervene in this family’s lifestyle. From observations and, to a degree, physical experience, she had known that the mountain environment requires intense labor to achieve even a semblance of middle-class material comfort. She had not, however, adequately considered the less tangible losses that a family like Serena’s might incur in pursuit of material well-being. In a surprising reversal of her earlier stance, Miss Dolly resigns herself to the fact that Serena’s sickly youngest child “might die of malnutrition, but tragedy—is it not the commonplace of life? And happiness the rare fortune?” (212–3).22 Revising this story for the 1941 edition (From My Highest Hill), Dargan added a significant paragraph that further justifies Serena’s carefree approach to life by showing that the local economy’s new outlets for industriousness are as creatively stifling as the kind of domestic drudgery Serena shuns. When Serena tells Miss Dolly that she’s quit trying to be a model housekeeper, Miss Dolly at first argues that she should “think of the future you are making for yourself ” (170). Serena vehemently replies, “Future! That’s what I am thinkin’ of ” (170). To explain, she tells Miss Dolly of Aunt Ann and Uncle Jimmie, an elderly couple who “found out they could make fifty cents a day workin’ ever’ minute makin’ chairs fer that shop on the highway to sell.” Now, this couple “won’t take time to look up at

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 126

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

127

you passin.’ [.  .  .  .  ] An’ oncet they was the jokin’est old folks anywheres” (170). Serena would rather emulate “Uncle Abe an’ Aunt Mary Walker. He’s eighty-two, an’ don’t wear nothin’ but patches, an she’s up in seventy, but when they come in from the field fer dinner, like as not she’ll grab her guitar an’ he’ll do a shuffle. [.  .  .  .  ] Nobody ever goes to their house at the wrong time” (170). Dargan’s text seems to endorse Serena’s viewpoint, as do several photographs in this new edition that match Serena’s descriptions of these contrasting couples.23 Two of these photographs show a neatly dressed Aunt Ann and Uncle Jimmy absorbed in weaving seats and backs for wooden chairs. Captions remind readers that the couple is too busy to “look at you in passin,’” and that “If Aunt Ann looks up she does it sly” (photos after 192). A contrasting photo on the same page shows Aunt Mary and Uncle Abe, she playing guitar, he dancing, and both looking happy despite their ragged clothes, neglected house, and yard crowded with trampled weeds and vines. The caption reads, “Nobody ever goes to their house at the wrong time” (photos after 192). For Dargan (as well as Serena), the former couple seems to epitomize how an obsession with material gain can compromise personal happiness and communal well-being. Aunt Ann and Uncle Jimmy, who had once enriched the community through their fun-loving natures, now hardly take time to “look up at you passin.’” In contrast, Mary and Abe find joy in life despite their poverty and share that joy with anyone who stops by. In another telling aside (included in both the story’s original and revised versions), the narrator links the Merlins’ poverty to this society’s primitive economic base. This poverty is less the product of a mother’s aversion to household “industry” and more the absence of any semblance of modern industrial trends: Serena’s “lifelong acceptance of things as they happened had kept her unaware of the complexities of an occupation made up of a jumble of industries, as farm life must ever be until the ferment of organization begins to heave effectively in the mind of the last individual, the man on the land” (194). Until farming becomes less labor intensive and more productive, Dargan implies, these people do not have an economic goal worth sacrificing their leisure for. In this economic context, the Merlin family’s acceptance of poverty becomes more understandable—perhaps even noble—as does Serena’s determination not to let ceaseless labor erode her generous and “serene” nature. Significantly, the nonmaterial aspirations and the prioritizing of community over self and family that the Merlins intuitively exemplify and embrace (and that Miss Dolly as naïve narrator comes to appreciate) in “Serena Takes a Boarder” anticipate ideologies that Dargan’s later radical novels envision in the scope of labor solidarity and post-revolutionary socialist society. That

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 127

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

128

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

Serena’s family, despite poverty and even malnutrition, freely share songs, stories, and material resources within their community provides a striking indication of preexisting cultural values primed to embrace a more advanced and far-reaching socialist mentality. While this story suggests merely in passing that the “ferment of organization” might increase leisure time and material comfort for families like Serena’s, Dargan’s later radical novels foreground the idea of ferment as a necessary precursor to a higher level of stability. In these novels, the hint in “Serena” that organized labor and technology would benefit mountain culture becomes an extensive exploration of how socialism would benefit all sociocultural groups—working and middle class, rural and industrial.24 And while the poems discussed earlier centralized middle-class artists’ concerns—the artist’s search for a balance between art and physical labor, between aesthetic beauty and social truth—Dargan’s first two radical novels centralize working-class dilemmas, subsuming aesthetic concerns within a broader concern for how cultural expression influences ideological and socioeconomic progress. Where Dargan’s poetry fretted, her novels now insist: The aestheticizing impulse behind art must not compromise social truth. Artists must adopt an appropriately political stance towards subject matter. Art must not merely contemplate problems, but propose solutions. Consistent with these shifts in emphasis, Dargan moves away from the “I” of her poetry and of Highland Annals (both examples of first-person outlooks that seem consistent with Dargan’s own aesthetic and political sensibilities). In its place, she uses a third-person narrative that centers primarily on the consciousness of Ishma, a female character whose roots in working-class Appalachian mountain culture Dargan herself lacked. “I’m only a half and half. You’ll be the whole thing”: Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling Old personal frustrations (how to effectively realize her activist impulses in a rural environment) as well as new historical developments contributed to the dramatic shifts in artistic direction suggested above. Throughout the decades when (as the stories like “Serena” would have it) she lived the role of “Miss Dolly” to her tenants and neighbors, Dargan was to struggle with a feeling that life on her North Carolina farm, and later in Asheville, had isolated her from the path of activism that friends like Rose Pastor Stokes had taken: [Dargan’s] friendship with Rose had made her a fellow traveler of the Communist party, a sympathy not expressed in action but in understanding and words of encouragement to Rose. She recognized that

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 128

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

129

rural Almond, North Carolina, and even urban Asheville, could be a fatal setting for a lone radical sympathizer flaunting her views. Her humanitarian instincts drove her to help any family member or neighbor who needed help. She felt the need to apologize to Rose for trying to help people one at a time rather than being part of a mass movement to bring a better future for all. (Zipser 277)

When, in April of 1929, the Communist-led National Textile Workers Union instigated a strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, a scene of radical activity moved enticingly close to Dargan’s rural doorstep. Undoubtedly inspired and emboldened by her connection to Stokes, Dargan traveled the one hundred miles that separated Asheville [where she then lived] and Gastonia and fraternized with the strikers. In the last week of April Olive asked Rose to write to the Gastonia headquarters of the textile union and tell them that Olive ‘can be absolutely depended on  .  .  . I have met many of the strikers and it is not necessary for me to go in and out of the union Headquarters, but I’d like to—and they have to be so careful. I’m stamped ‘middle class’ all over you know and they must guard against treachery. But the strikers like me and make me feel blood-kin—bless their weary bones! If you write, dear, sign as R.P.S.—the name they know.’ (Zipser 277–8 ellipses in original)

Going to Gastonia inspired Dargan at a point when she had “decided to write no more. Writing poetry was, she felt, ‘indulging myself,’ and prose was not her medium. But her presence during the tragedy of the Gastonia strike changed her mind” (Polsky 4). Back in Asheville, as Dargan worked on the novel that would become Call Home the Heart, Stokes’ political orientation continued to guide her. Near the end of the process, she anxiously wrote Stokes that “there are two chapters unfinished, that you must censor or approve. I can’t send the book out until you have said yea” (qtd. in Zipser 281). Almost certainly, Dargan refers to the politically unorthodox way that the published novel actually ends—with its protagonist abandoning the strike (after a shockingly racist outburst) and returning to the mountains. Though Stokes presumably approved, Dargan continued to worry about how more dogmatic Communist Party members would receive her novel.25 Thus, she asked her prominent friend Alice Stone Blackwell to send a “few lines” to her publisher, “telling them what you think of the book” (27 July 1932). As she told Blackwell, she expected that Call Home the Heart would

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 129

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

130

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” come in for a good deal of criticism by the [Communist Party]. [.  .  .  .  ] It is hard to please a real party communist. They are narrower than Lenin, their master. I wish they had his great breadth. He realized that communism could never succeed without the great fringe of sympathizers who were not of the party. (27 July 1932)

In reality, nearly all reviewers gave high praise to the novel, ending and all.26 Although Dargan had a complex (and well-founded) sense of affiliation with mountaineers and millworkers, in Call Home the Heart and again in A Stone Came Rolling she adopts the perspective of a mountain-raised woman who, for her own complex reasons, leaves this home, goes to a nearby textilemill village, and allies herself with the textile workers’ cause. Call Home the Heart opens when protagonist Ishma Waycaster is a young woman of eighteen growing up on an isolated homestead high in the North Carolina mountains. The novel first takes Ishma through courtship and marriage to Britt Hensley, then shows a difficult first year as the couple struggle to raise soybeans on a rocky hillside field. Propelled by the failure of this venture and by other frustrations, Ishma deserts her husband and goes to Winbury, a lowland mill village, with a former suitor, Rad Bailey. Rad works as a carpenter and tries to support Ishma so that she doesn’t need to work. Indeed, although she works for a brief period in a Winbury mill to help pay a doctor’s bill, she avoids the fates of many workers around her who have been mentally and physically stunted by long-term millwork. Despite being relatively secure from the mill’s clutches, Ishma becomes engaged with local mill-workers’ struggles. Finding that her increasingly radical politics cannot coexist with Rad’s middle-class aspirations, Ishma extricates herself from this relationship and continues her union work. In a bittersweet, ambiguous conclusion, Ishma ends up fleeing Winbury while the workers are immersed in a strike. She returns to the mountains, where she finds joy in reuniting with Britt, but also feels haunted by having forsaken a path of intellectual development and labor activism. In A Stone Came Rolling, Ishma has returned to the battlefields of industrial labor. In “Dunmow,” another North Carolina town dominated by textiles and other manufacturing, she once again plays a central role in efforts to organize a strong union and orchestrate a wide labor revolt. Although she still longs for a less complicated rural life, this time around she does not defect from battle (except for a brief recuperation in the mountains). The novel ends with an ongoing labor dispute still unresolved, but suggests the workers’ growing resolve to take power away from those who oppress them. In the final paragraph, workers take over a jail to free Ishma, who has been arrested by strikebreakers.27

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 130

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

131

Removed from these narratives as a participant-observer, Dargan no longer seems to feel compelled to distinguish her otherness from her working-class characters. (Her adoption of the male-sounding pseudonym “Fielding Burke” seems calculated to create further distance from her self-image as a female poet sympathetic to but not of the working class.) Instead of evoking the persona of a middle-class writer observing or taking part in working-class experience, as she had in her poetry and stories, Dargan creates a protagonist whose subjectivity both intersects and diverges from her own. Although Ishma shares Dargan’s race and gender (white, female), her working-class mountain background (and her youth) gives her considerably different relationships to both labor and culture within mountain and industrial societies.28 By creating a protagonist who can engage with a broader range of class experiences than she herself plausibly could, Dargan establishes an ideal vantage point for portraying class struggle and tensions she saw as inherent in capitalism across social strata.29 Endowed with exceptional intelligence, fortitude, strength, and attractiveness, Ishma eventually moves on the periphery of intellectual circles familiar to Dargan but rarely known by members of Ishma’s class.30 Without such exceptional qualities, she would not have attracted the interest of Derry Unthank, the leftist doctor who introduces her to Marxist thought, or of Virginia Grant, a wealthy millowner’s wife who lavishes attention on Ishma when she is in the hospital.31 Ishma is similarly exceptional—neither middle-class nor “proletarian”—with regards to her ambiguous relationship to industrial work and industrial workers’ interests. Though she works in a mill for a short time, she never experiences the dire poverty of families who can see no way to survive outside of the mill economy. Fitting Dargan’s belief that technology applied within a socialist society will enable the creation and equal distribution of leisure, Ishma has an enlightened view of factory work that would be less probable for a worker whose health had been sapped by long-term millwork (or whose children also had to work in the mill to help the family). She finds the work among factory machines exciting (albeit tiring): “there was a thrill for her in the roll and swell of the machinery” (CHH 270). These machines “could kill, but they could create. That was their first, great function. When she came in to them she felt that she must greet them good-morning, and start the day comradely with the secret force producing so endlessly and enormously for the markets of men” (273).32 Ishma stops mill work when Derry encourages her to direct her considerable energy towards union organizing. Derry assures her (again making her work experience atypical) that his medical connections will ensure that “[she’ll] not have to pay another dollar” of the hospital bill she is trying to

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 131

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

132

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

pay off (295). He further assures her that there is a higher justice in her ability to escape millwork so easily (while less fortunate workers cannot): “We know that nothing is right, but everything is going to be. That is our creed, Ishma. It will be well with the world some day, because we know that all is wrong with it now” (296). Initially, Ishma’s brief experience as a mill worker and her large capacity for human sympathy motivates her to help individual mill families in difficult circumstances. Later, she comes to embrace more radical direct activism against the sources of exploitation that affect all mill families. Ishma’s fight against labor exploitation has an additional voluntary quality because she, unlike many other mill workers, still has a mountain home to which she can return. Because her mountain ties pull her emotionally, Ishma must struggle intellectually to stick to labor activism. Reflecting at one point on the many industrial troubles that now consume her (“Poor staggering Genie [a chronically fatigued millworker]—young Bert Wiggins, off in the mountains, dying with tuberculosis because Grant-Norburn couldn’t afford air-cleansing devices in their mills—little Jane—lock out— union”) Ishma realizes that “she could get away—back to the mountains, with peace [.  .  .  .  ] What was making it impossible but herself?” (CHH 259).33 Since Ishma’s life will be difficult whether she battles capitalism as an activist or the elements as a mountain farmer, her wavering between these two possibilities represents more a struggle between emotion and intellect than between spheres of class interests. In contrast, Ishma’s friend and mentor Derry Unthank, who advocates socialism yet comes from a middle-class background and even owns mill stock, is caught more uncomfortably in the contradictions of his class position. Thus, he tells Ishma that he can never be as effective as she can in fighting on behalf of the working class: “I’m only a half and half. You’ll be the whole thing” (250). “How little it took to make some people happy!”: folk music in a rural context Ishma’s worldly perspective allows Dargan to scrutinize a wide spectrum of cultural practices within both mountains and mill village, and among both workers and the middle class. In her novels’ consideration of the various cultural resources vying for authority in asserting a socially progressive view of reality, Dargan pays particular attention to the ideological functions of folk and religious songs in the lives of her working-class characters. Dargan’s frequent references to such music reflect both its inherent generic qualities and its (perceived) particular functions within the social formations described in her novels. Dargan’s novels return repeatedly to music as perhaps the most

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 132

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

133

prevalent and powerful cultural influence on ideology within the working-class social contexts she portrays. The opening and concluding sections of Call Home the Heart, which take place in the Appalachian mountains, represent numerous old and newly created folk songs, while A Stone Came Rolling, set primarily in a North Carolina textile-mill town farther from the mountains than the mill town in Call Home the Heart, devotes more attention to the hymns that are integral to this community’s religious life.34 The “mountain sections” of these two novels portray the practice of singing old folk songs and creating new ballads to illustrate linked aspects of a still-vital mode of cultural expression among mountain people.35 In contrast, the “mill sections” of these novels do not portray workers creating music purely for pleasure (outside of religious contexts). Not until the end of A Stone Came Rolling does Dargan suggest that workers might profitably transform the cultural modes of secular folksongs and hymns to address new interactions with industrial labor. A chapter in Call Home the Heart simply called “Episode” provides one illustration of how mountain ballad making provides a mode for documenting and reaching consensus on communally significant events. “Episode” seems to propose that “ballad logic” provides a potential alternative to Christian doctrine as a way of reconciling individual and social tensions. When confronted with Ishma’s having abandoned her family for Rad, Ishma’s community seeks resolution to this seeming affront to their moral standards not through a rational examination of her complex impulses (which Dargan has, however, shown the reader), but through preexisting cultural modes that are more emotional than rational. First, they expect that Britt will uphold their community’s standard of manliness, going after Rad and Ishma with a gun and, if necessary, killing the man to bring back his wife (or at least defend his honor) (164–5). Second, they expect their preacher to condemn Ishma according to the standards of their conservative “old-time religion.” In choosing not to pursue Rad and Ishma, Britt denies them their first expectation.36 The preacher, however, comes through with the expected fiery sermon, calling on his “dear fellow Christians, to purge this stain [Ishma’s name] from the sacred leaves of our church-book” (162–3). After preaching, he tells himself that “he had done his job well. He knew it, and [his congregation] knew it” (167). Had Britt, who waits outside the church during the service, done nothing, the preacher’s condemnation probably would have established the community’s final judgment on Ishma. After Britt forces the preacher to engage in a no-holds-barred fight, however, public consensus on Ishma is open for reconsideration. Britt’s ultimate victory gives the community the basis for creating a ballad. Immediately after the fight, Si Welch (“the best ballit-maker

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 133

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

134

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

of which the country could boast”), helped by several others, composes a few verses and a chorus on the spot. Si tells everyone present to “make up lines fer this ballit, an’ git ’em to me by next Sat’day night” (177). Governed by an aesthetic sense that “all ballits ought to end with a lady,” he also tells them that “howsomever long [the final ballad] is, it’s going to end thisaway” and “[gives] them his final triumph”: An’ Ishmer she was cryin’ that night, Cryin’ to Rad Bailee, I wish I’s home with my ol’ true boy, A sittin’ on his knee. (177)

However far this stanza is from Ishma’s true experience or feeling, it taps into a communal understanding of ballad logic that, in contrast to the religious logic dictating preacher Siler’s sermon, allows for a more ambiguous or sympathetic treatment of moral transgressions. Si’s stipulated final stanza encourages other contributors to merge their divergent stances with its sympathy. Now, Si’s wife, Mandy, says that if Ishma comes back, “maybe she’ll be welcome” (177). In showing that this shift in sympathies—from the preacher’s condemnation to the “ballit-maker’s” magnanimity towards Ishma—Dargan gives the ballad qualities that potentially make it both progressive and regressive. Though the shift in sympathy is itself positive, its quick and impulsive nature is less exemplary according to Dargan’s intellectual values. The communal sway to support Britt as the winner of the fight had been more emotional than rational; during the fight, the onlookers’ main desire had simply been “a victory, something that could be celebrated, talked about, thrilled over, and preserved, with personal additions, in their country’s history. It must be a victory, even if they had to give it to the preacher” (173). The ballad that results from the fight (not to mention the fight itself, which is narrated over nearly eight full pages) has a certain humorous mock-epic quality, illustrating the very naïve preoccupation with insular conflicts that Ishma has fled: A fighting man is he [Preacher Siler], my boys, But there’s a better yet;The man who made the preacher fight Is Wimble County Britt! (176).

Dargan’s aside that this ballad would preserve the story of this fight “as long as a fireside remained in the mountains” (174) suggests a conviction that this culture will not advance beyond such crude, emotional perspectives on resolving conflicts.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 134

6/22/2006 8:54:33 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

135

Still, Dargan shows that, within this cultural context, creating such ballads is more progressive than passively letting a community outsider shape sentiments through a sermon. Subtly prefiguring larger struggles in which working-class leaders will inspire other workers to challenge industrialists, this scene shows Britt successfully challenging a preacher’s sanctioned moral authority. Watching Britt pummel the preacher, onlookers feel that “God’s law and man’s was broken [  .  .  .  ] They were watching it crack—that mighty law. And the earth held” (172–3). Emotionally uplifted by Britt’s fight, and then by the ballad, the community overrides the condemnation of Ishma handed down to them from their preacher’s pulpit.37 The above “Episode” marks a rare section of Dargan’s narrative where Ishma’s perspective, which generally dominates, is absent. More often, Ishma’s self-conscious reflections on her culture unsettle representations of songs being enjoyed in a social context. Ishma’s ambivalence towards the songs popular in her isolated mountain community fits within her larger ambivalence towards her native culture and thus anticipates her wider ranging search for rational knowledge. Her feelings of distaste and detachment while watching her husband and various friends absorbed in their rendition of “Sourwood Mountain” show the degree to which Ishma feels separated from community values: I’ve got a gal on Sourwood Mountain, That gal’s mine till the jedgment day! I’ve got a gun an’ it ain’t no quitter, Boys, boys, you’d better git away! [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .] Two men killed on Sourwood Mountain! Come an’ see who’s layin’ in the hay! Tech my gal ef you want to see yer Jesus! Boys, boys, you’d better git away! [.  .  .  .  ] How little it took to make some people happy! Why did it take so much for her? She could get no pleasure out of the rough singing and thumping, though Britt was trying to make it interesting by putting in the wildest shakes and quavers wherever he could. She liked music when Nature helped to make it. She liked to sing above the tree-tops to the rising sun. These wriggling, perspiring men, with their whoops and steady pat-pat, made her feel like a chained animal. (136–7)

To see the performance of such a song as reflective of ideology, as Dargan’s representation implicitly does, does not necessarily mean that the solution

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 135

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

136

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

for social tensions this song embodies (men killing each other to maintain possession of their women) accurately reflects the social practices of those singing. Still, though the singers see this song as merely a vehicle for group entertainment, they endorse its ideology to the extent that they enjoy the song without self-consciousness. Ishma’s more critical, non-participatory perspective subtly shifts readers’ vantage on the performance. It draws attention, for instance, to the song’s gender relations, which are not unlike those that circumscribe Ishma’s own possibilities. In contrast, when Ishma sings one of her favorite songs while doing farm work with Britt, no sense of a particular socioeconomic order or gender hierarchy colors the lyrics as it does with “Sourwood Mountain”: “The world is round, and I’m going round it, / The sky is high, and I’m going to climb it, / With my dear love on my shoulder!” (68). Notably, Ishma sings here to express her enjoyment of doing productive work, not to blend her voice into a largegroup sentiment that she cannot control or rationally endorse. Fittingly, then, Dargan observes that “Ishma’s voice needed an unlimited horizon for its full, clear music. In the meeting-house, or around home, she had trouble in ‘smothering her notes down’” (68). Ishma also feels emotionally in tune with Britt’s original song about his joy in sharing farm work with her: Mountain men, it’s time for hoein’ When you hear the ring-doves mourn. Time to ask the moon so knowin’ When to plant the corn. [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .] That’s my girl, a stream o’ sunshine, Singin’ ‘fore me in the row. If she don’t quit laughin’ backwards Down I’ll drop my hoe! [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .] Ishma [hearing this song] was a girl again, back in the spring-time field with Britt, and love, beauty and song filled the earth and the heavens. (139)

This rush of emotions does not, however, alter Ishma’s bleak assessment of the future that farming, such as this song describes, offers her: “She couldn’t go on this way, sliding back a little every year instead of getting out. [.  .  .  .  ] Bread was about all they would make this year, in spite of Britt’s hard labor. With no surplus, what would they do?” (141–2).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 136

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

137

That Ishma has married a man who relates to the world largely through his gift for music intensifies the degree to which the values expressed through this cultural form are juxtaposed with (and against) Ishma’s values. Further, the trajectory of Britt’s experience through the two novels serves as a telling indication of Dargan’s reservations about mountain music serving a viable cultural role in an industrial, working-class context that, at present, has critical political needs. Britt, who plays guitar, sings, and writes songs in the mountain idiom, enriches the cultural life of his community with his musical talent. (In more than one instance, appreciative listeners enrich him by accepting his music in lieu of money.)38 Although Ishma sympathizes with Britt’s need to create music, it occasionally frustrates her. As she and Britt experience repeated setbacks in their farming attempts, Ishma observes that music gives Britt an alternative to material progress: “more and more [Britt] was falling back on his music, or rather on his ability to create it, as help towards softening life and moulding it in the fashion of his modest vision” (129). Ishma, in contrast, does not have (or want) an art form that would allow her to turn inward, away from confronting dissatisfying material realities. Encouraged by his friends, Britt entertains ambitions of going to Knoxville, Tennessee, to record for a commercial company there. Ishma, however, flatly rejects Britt’s proposal that he might use some of their scarce savings to finance such a trip (143–4). Nevertheless, at the end of Call Home the Heart, when Ishma returns to the mountains, she finds that Britt had in her absence indeed produced some recordings in Knoxville that were briefly lucrative. By investing his profits from the records in his farm enterprise, Britt has finally been able to make his land capable of supporting a family.39 Other than being grateful for this financial boost, however, Britt is now cynical about the way the music industry attempted to exploit his talent and mountain identity to capitalize on a short-lived fad among a mainstream audience for unpolished and exotic art. He had eventually gone to New York and, as he tells Ishma, “‘Could have stayed if I’d wanted to.’ He waved New York away with a mild but final gesture. ‘I didn’t keer for it’” (403). As he further explains, “his voice lowered as over a secret,” “I didn’t take much to bein’ shown off as a freak o’ the wilderness. There were some fellers up there who could take a frensharp [harmonica] an’ guitar an’ play all around me. I wasn’t fooled about myself. But the manager who wanted to put me on, said they didn’t have the looks. He said the way I threw up my shoulders would take swell with the women. Said I could smile the dollars out o’ pockets deep as the Hudson tunnel, an’ a lot more spoof that I didn’t lap up. Since the war, he said, nobody

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 137

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

138

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” had any patience with art all polished off. It was genius in the rough that got ’em to the box-office. He’d have a little play fixed up where I could just be myself an’ not have to act at all, an’ there was no tellin’ how fur I’d go. I told him I knowed just how fur, eight hundred miles, an I come on home.” (403)

Through Britt’s richly suggestive denunciation of the “music industry,” Dargan lays to rest the idea that the kind of folk music that Britt plays might have a legitimate commercial audience outside of the sociocultural context that inspires it, among people who see it as something other than a natural cultural expression. “When Jesus will not hear us”: hymns in an industrial context Throughout Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling, religion receives intense scrutiny and is generally cast as an irrational belief system that prevents workers from clearly seeing exploitation or believing they can do anything about it. A Stone Came Rolling constructs numerous scenes to repeatedly imply that the religious doctrines endorsed by local churches are complicit in maintaining an exploitative status quo. In these scenes, prayers, sermons, and hymns all contribute to an ideology that naturalizes workers’ subservience to a privileged class. (Near the end of the second novel, however, Dargan makes limited concessions to religion, depicting workers who use religion positively to inspire struggle—who retain belief in a supernatural deity but understand that they must shoulder the burden of fighting oppression themselves.) In the interest of keeping the city’s economic machinery running smoothly, local churches (in Dargan’s fictional North Carolina towns of Winbury and Dunmow) promote doctrines that encourage acceptance rather than interrogation of the established order. Also helping to maintain the established order, slight theological distinctions between Dunmow’s many sects keep citizens divided along petty, non-class lines, making clear understanding of class oppression less likely. Within this scrutiny of religion as a distraction from rationally investigating worldly problems, the singing of hymns receives particular attention as a practice that tends to foreclose all intellectual progress. In the second novel particularly, those whose economic interests would be jeopardized by a rational deconstruction of social contradictions invoke hymns repeatedly to throw workers off the investigative trail. Dargan represents group singing as a central part of both worship and striking (sometimes showing the

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 138

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

139

two activities as intertwined). In most cases, this singing hinders the rational thought processes that Dargan believes should motivate action. Dargan rejects the idea that oppressed people singing hymns might arouse sympathy in their oppressors sufficient to alter the oppressive power structures themselves. In Call Home the Heart, when deputies taunt female strikers evicted from their homes—“that’s what they got for believing goddamned foreigners, red Russians, and people who didn’t believe in no god” (319)—Ella Ramsey, a middle-aged mill worker and seasoned activist, argues that expressions of religious faith make poor weapons against industrial capitalism. She recalls an earlier strike “down in South Carolina, at Ware Shoals” where strikers had rejected outside leadership in favor of their own strategy of passive resistance: “They knew the boss had a heart an’ they’d get to it. They went on the picket line carryin’ Bibles an’ singin’ hymns. An’ what happened to ’em? They’re beat an’ scattered an’ their homes gone, starvin’ in this hole an’ that. Their fight’s clean lost, same as if they hadn’t been carryin’ Bibles an’ singin’ hymns” (319). Now, these women don’t try to change the deputies’ hearts with hymns, but follow Ella’s lead when she tells them, “let’s sing ‘Solidarity’ [“Solidarity Forever”] fer these nice fellers. If they’re goin’ to hang around, [  .  .  .  ] we’ve got to entertain ’em” (319). “Solidarity,” Dargan reports, is now “their favorite song” (320). Dargan later uses the erudite Derry Unthank to present a more philosophical argument against the hope that aesthetic products (including but not limited to hymns) might have the power to topple existing power structures. Ishma, temporarily wavering in her belief that wresting power from the grasp of the wealthy will require violence, asks Derry if instead “an outpour of spirit the world over” might “open the way for justice, instead of justice [through revolution] coming first” (324). Derry equates Ishma’s naïve hope for a peaceful relinquishment of power with the current “cult”—not unlike the hymn-singing South Carolina strikers Ella Ramsey has recalled—“whose members claim that if enough of us stand off and sing the song of Isaiah, And the earth shall be full Of the knowledge of the Lord, As the waters cover the sea,

power will fall from the hands of the arrogant mighty much as the walls of Jericho fell when the rhythm was right for it” (325). Derry sees in such wishful thinking a human tendency—one that must be “adjusted by intelligence” (325)—to fall back on artistic expression when intervention into social problems seems futile. Through art, Derry says, “we accepted sorrow and [gave] it

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 139

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

140

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

beauty. We made songs of shadows and suffering. Over ugliness and defeat, we threw the sheen of art, the pale holiness of resignation. We guarded our griefs jealously. We hugged them as from God” (326). Now, he believes, “intelligence has won,” and visionary thinkers “not only [  .  .  .  ] see misery around [them],” but attempt to “pierce to its cause” (326). Although art’s aesthetic appeal might heighten certain individuals’ sensitivity to others’ needs, it cannot conquer what Dargan, quoting the eighteenth-century philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, calls the “enormous idea of self ” (325); nor can it dismantle the vast “industrial world system” (325) which runs on competition.40 Dargan sees Ishma’s wish, quickly discarded, for art (including hymns appealing to presumably disparate classes) to create a politically productive spiritual “outpour” as a hopelessly utopian remedy for capitalism’s violations of Christianity’s “golden rule.” The dystopic reality, Dargan believes, is that capitalism encourages manipulation of theology to help hide or normalize economic exploitation. Dargan decries religious frameworks of perception (such as hymns and prayers) most vehemently when they are invoked by rote as a means of (falsely) suggesting resolution to a conflict that might be solved rationally. In one such case, workers on strike protesting wage cuts are being led by the ideologically misdirected Kik Kearns, a young worker who tells strikers that their protest must be “quiet and firm,” and that “God must be their reliance” (176, 177). Kik—who was himself “modestly ambitious, aspiring to become some day the superintendent of a hosiery mill” (176)—doesn’t want to fight capitalism itself, but merely to persuade certain bosses to restore prewage-cut salaries. Ishma, who now believes that only a complete overthrow of bosses and profit systems will create an effective long-term solution to current exploitation, tries to win the crowd by explaining the limitations of Kik’s strategies. Kik, however, cuts off rational discussion by asking, “Will some friend or brother kindly lead with a song familiar to us all?” (185). Though Ishma protests that this should be “a time for thought, not song,” her own hymn-loving husband starts the crowd with “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!” (185). Although the hymn brings comfort and instills solidarity, it also directs people away from the more complex analysis of the problem Ishma had hoped to initiate: “Men and women took [the hymn] up as if they were seizing a life-line. Hearts swelled and warmed. Courage was renewed. Renewed for what? They didn’t quite know. What were they to do? They didn’t quite know. But their hearts were swollen and warm. They would follow their leader” (185). Elsewhere, Dargan shows that many workers continue the ideological work of church leaders at home, using hymns to calm potentially productive

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 140

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

141

outrage against worldly injustice. When Britt, Ishma, and a preacher, Berkley, arrive at the home of Myrtle Wrenn, a young woman seriously injured when police had beaten the strikers, “they heard the words of ‘Jerusalem’ coming through the window” (242): In that glorious land, what a happy band! Ere long we shall stand and sing with them, In the city of God, Je ru-u-u-usalem! (242)41

Myrtle’s mother, Ann—herself dying of pellagra and “yearning for the comfort of the hymns” (242)—“had drifted into untroubled sleep” when her family sings her “favorite,” “Unclouded Day”: “And they tell me that no tears ever come again, / In that land of an unclouded day!   ” (243). The scene upsets Ishma so much that she slips out of the room during the singing (243).42 Dargan elsewhere shows that not only the working class but also those who benefit from their labor use hymns (and prayers) to avoid analyzing perplexing social problems rationally. After Bly Emberson, the president of Emberson Mills Company, is “found dead in the pool below Buffalo Bridge mill” (SCR 295), neither his wife, Verna, nor any of his privileged friends and business associates broach the possibility that Bly’s anguish over his class position had driven him to end his own life.43 Instead, at his funeral they sing hymns (selected by Verna) to paint his life as a triumph: “There’ll Be No Dark Valley,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and a final hymn whose “sword of triumph” “pierces” Ishma (31). Ishma thinks, “what savages we are!” as the words of this last hymn “bludgeoned, opening old wounds and deepening new. The thin melody tortured, penetrating like fine steel pushing its way through skin and tissue to the heart” (306). To her, the crowd’s hymn singing epitomizes the general middle-class failure to acknowledge their role in forcing Bly’s back to the wall. That the hymns seem to help her husband to find meaning in Bly’s death rankles Ishma even more (306).44 Deliberate parody is the primary means through which Dargan shows the transparent ideology of traditional hymns and traditional prayers being made newly visible. One notable example, in A Stone Came Rolling, centers on a “singing contest” that Dunmow’s “city fathers” have decided to fund as part of a celebration marking Independence Day, 1932: “choirs from the churches were invited to sing in rivalry, and make the contest a service of praise” (142). Besides the church choirs, “factory workers, scatteringly represented in all of the churches except the three or four where quiet elegance was essential, were permitted to select a choir from their own ranks” (142). The city fathers’ underlying intent, Dargan believes, is to create a “healthy

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 141

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

142

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

antagonism” (145) between various religious sects, thus shifting attention away from the working-class solidarity that could potentially threaten the established social order: “the celebration, explained the Mayor,” in response to the request that a choir of unemployed workers be allowed to compete, “was meant to show the solidarity of the community, and not of a particular part of it” (144). Ishma sees a way to use a hymn to undermine what she sees as this event’s ideological agenda—to portray economic disparities as secondary to factors that unify the social classes. Along with friend Jim Conover, she manages to convince the mayor, who is already aware of Ishma’s activist leanings and thus wary of any proposition associated with her, to allow the unemployed choir to perform. “Some of them are our best singers,” she argues (144). At the contest, all the church choirs offer hymns safely focused on the hereafter—including “Nearer, my God, to Thee” (sic) and “Shall we Gather at the River” (sic)—and, thus, away from local worldly problems. Following suit with “Angel Band”—“bear me away on your snowy wings, / To my eternal home!” (154)—the factory workers’ choir stays within this predictable ideological groove. When the unemployed choir takes the stage, however, “something in the appearance of the crowd [the large choir] made the mayor say hastily, ‘Only religious songs are permitted’” (154). As Dargan goes on to show, this inherently volatile group—which comprises “entire families” and “as many Negroes as whites” (155)—cleverly uses the auspices of conventional piety to gain the stage and the audience’s attention. After delivering four “straight” lines of the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” they make a startling shift into parody: What a friend we have in Jesus, All our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry Everything to him in prayer! But when Jesus will not hear us, When no answer he will give, Then we ask you, city fathers, Give us work and let us live. WE WANT WORK

Suggesting that too much aesthetic polish might detract from the song’s political message, Dargan notes that they “sing, not as a choir, but as a collective voice,” the final line delivered as “an electric shout” (155).45 This irreverent, socially pointed parody (eight similar lines follow) gives the assembled unemployed a vehicle for expressing their discontent

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 142

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

143

collectively. The singing causes a “transformation [in the choir members] from slump and despair to fire and spirit [which] was, in effect, supernatural. Here was an army. At least the seeds of an army” (155). This parody works not only to highlight the basic plight of unemployment but, especially coming after the other conventional hymns, also to expose and break down the very ideology—passive religious forbearance in the face of hardship—that the singing contest was supposed to subtly reinforce. By the time the flustered mayor has his deputies escort the unruly choir off the stage, the subversive ideological seed has been planted; though the mayor is “troubled” by the unexpected breakdown of decorum, he “knew nothing of what should have troubled him most: that the four or five thousand workers who had seen and heard the line of unemployed were asking themselves, ‘Is that what we are coming to?’” (157). Dargan also shows workers parodying prayer and “sermonic” language, so that, as with the hymn parody, the original ideology is thrown into relief. In one such case, when the aforementioned Kik encourages strikers at the end of a contentious meeting to “make a supplication to the throne of grace” (205), two ideologically contrasting prayers are juxtaposed. The first, by a local church rector, reflects the ideology suited to passive acceptance of class divisions: “O Father, we have not come here in a spirit of defiance to thy holy word, but with humble hearts asking thy mercy” (205). The second, delivered by Eph Clarkson (who had led the unemployed choir earlier), adopts a more vernacular and militant tone: “Please, O Father, make your word good. Don’t be talkin’ hot air like so many people on earth, promisin’ everything and doin’ nothin’ [.  .  .  .  ] Don’t let us be cowards, O Father. Make us brave enough to put hands on what’s our own” (206). Dargan shows that Eph’s parody helps to undo the ideological work of the other more hegemonic prayer. When, in an attempt to drown out Eph’s prayer, Kik asks “the choir [  .  .  .  ] to begin singing, [  .  .  .  ] the singing voices were feeble compared with the wordy war around Eph” (207). Another scene, in which Ishma meets Job Waygood, an old acquaintance from the earlier strike in Winbury, shows a more detailed reworking of the conventional theology disseminated within the community. Blacklisted for his involvement in this previous labor conflict and nearly starving, Job plans to throw himself on the mercy of the county poorhouse. Seeing such a bleak case, Ishma wonders “if Job still took any comfort in the fiction that he was a good Baptist. Had he resigned himself cheerfully to a home beyond the skies, though he must pass through the poorhouse to reach it?” (233). Although “Job wasn’t thinking heavenward” (233), he expresses compelling insights into how God might feel about poverty on earth. While he does not

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 143

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

144

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

exclude a deity and afterlife from his framework for understanding human suffering, he still believes that “thisn [this world] is ourn, an’ it’s our business to take keer o’ hit” (235). “If there’s a shore enough God,” Job tells Ishma, “he’ll not give us a nice, purty world for ever an’ ever when we die, as a reward fer throwin’ away this one. He’s tryin’ us out on this’n, to see if we’ve got sense enough to handle a good thing” (235). Job’s god, considering whether an individual deserves entrance to heaven, would ask, “whad you do down yander with that wonderful big world I let ye have, with all the good land to grow your stuff on, an’ all the good timber fer yore houses, an’ all the fine, purty things to make an’ put in ’em?” (235). This god would not accept as an excuse that workers have been overpowered by “jest a handful o’ fellers that got a holt of things” (236), but would ask “an’ what was y’all doin’ while they was takin’ ’em? Jest a settin’ there, wa you? That don’t make sense” (236). This god will let workers into heaven only when they can prove that they “ain’t fools any longer”—that they are teaching their children not to be subservient to bosses’ interests and not to cooperate with the military to fight against their own class interests at home or overseas.46 Even though Dargan occasionally shows group singing (or chanting) helping to win support for the causes her novels endorse, she still expresses reservations about using such emotionally charged culture to motivate group action. After Kik has mesmerized strikers (in the scene discussed above) with a hymn appealing to forbearance, Ishma regains their trust and is able to lead them on “Dunmow’s greatest day,” a mass march through the region aimed at encouraging a worker walkout so widespread that “not a factory was to be left humming in their wake” (188).47 As the strikers march from town to town, they sing a parody of the hymn “Hold the Fort,” again demonstrating religious imagery becoming militant: Hold that mill, we’re coming, coming! Throw the big gate wide! Who can scare us, who can stop us, Marching side by side? (190)

The song, however, “lost dignity as verse after verse was added by competing rhymesters. The boss was the preferred target for invective”: Get a rope and take the measure Of his [the boss’s] puffy craw! Punch the beefsteak in his stomach, Get him where he’s raw! (190–1)

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 144

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

145

Through the viewpoint of the aristocratic Judge Anniston, who hears the strikers’ chants outside his home, Dargan describes the workers’ shouts (“Who’s got syphilis of the brain? Judge Anniston”) as coming from “degraded and degrading voices” (195). For Dargan, such degradation typifies spontaneous propaganda that arises out of a group that is poorly educated and lacking a complex intellectual grasp of how labor exploitation works. For example, when strikers sing a song with a more politically sophisticated message, We’ve made you silks and cottons fine until our backs are bare! We’ve worked so hard on overalls that we’ve got none to wear!

one local “happy liberal” who hears them thinks, “Dunmow workers could never have invented that” (194). Dargan does not refute this subtly condescending statement and, indeed, shows that Ishma (whose induction into Marxist thought the novels have documented) had helped orchestrate the more dignified expressions of discontent in this strikers’ march, just as she earlier helped the unemployed choir to create their hymn parody.48 Ishma’s reflection on this march, in which fifteen-thousand factory workers had walked off their jobs, captures Dargan’s own mixed feelings about the nonintellectual role singing had played in motivating action: “how wonderfully the strikers had [  .  .  .  ] shouted the slogans that she [  .  .  .  ] taught them! Hardly knowing the meaning of some of them, they had flung them over frightened Dunmow” (218 emphasis added). As she approaches the conclusion of A Stone Came Rolling, Dargan shows workers successfully coming to terms with previously repressive religious ideology, and Ishma coming to terms with the idea that religious faith might have a place in an otherwise secular struggle against labor exploitation. Ishma’s own concession to workers’ religious faith is largely due to her husband’s influence. While Britt in Call Home the Heart does not share any of Ishma’s experiences among the textile workers (and thus never brings his music into that social context), in A Stone Came Rolling he accompanies Ishma to live near another town where Ishma intends to resume her labor activism while he works on a farm they have leased. Although Britt is now more intimate with Ishma’s activism, he continues to uphold political views that Ishma sees as naïve (but accepts because she loves him). Though he no longer thinks about making money through music, and no longer is seen singing secular folk songs, he continues to love hymns. Unlike Ishma, who believes that political changes will occur only when exploited workers unite and wrest power from their exploiters, he clings to his faith that hymns, as an

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 145

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

146

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

expression of “love,” might make exploiters more sympathetic to the plight of the exploited. While watching Britt playing guitar at a religious revival, which she had opposed on the grounds that it would soften workers’ righteous anger towards their bosses, Ishma tries to make a “half reconciliation” with Britt’s outlook: “If the strength men drew from faith could be made to serve and not enslave,” she reflects, “who would quarrel with it?” (331). Ironically, Britt is fatally stabbed (part of a murky conspiracy to undermine Ishma’s cause) at this revival songfest. Even while dying, however, he expresses his belief that religious music has an appropriate place in this embattled social context. His final wish is that a religious friend lead the crowd in the hymn “Fling wide the gates!” (344). Suggesting that the message of this hymn could be directed effectively towards a secular agenda (flinging wide factory gates rather than heavenly ones), he comments that this is “a rollin’ song,” and “the best tune we got” (344). Britt’s death causes Ishma to soften her opposition to hymns being used in the context of labor struggle. At the same time, workers (under the guidance of liberal ministers) begin to use religious faith in a way that Ishma finds politically acceptable. Ishma thinks that “Britt would love all this unity, the preachers [  .  .  .  ] telling the people how to win their earth without losing their heaven; the strike songs all mixed up with sacred ones, till they don’t know whether they’re singing ‘Blood of the Lamb,’ or ‘The Strikers’ blood has bought us free!’” (394). Emphasizing the political importance of such religious transformations, the very title of A Stone Came Rolling invokes a new protest song— one that cloaks a radical agenda in apocalyptic biblical imagery. During yet another confrontation with strikebreakers, white strikers—after some have already been beaten and arrested—need inspiration to help them “hold their ground” (402). Although several progressive ministers who support the strikers’ cause suggest taking up the hymn “When Peace Like a River,”—since “no one could sing that and hold anger in the heart”—“voices from the grove brought another song to their ears”: A stone came rollin’— Rolling’ through Dixie— Rollin’ through Dixie— Tearin’ down de kingdom ob de boss. (402)

These voices belong to “Negroes [who] had been made welcome in the grove, but [had] [  .  .  .  ] follow[ed] their old custom of keeping to themselves, and [  .  .  .  ] had drifted coheringly [sic] to a favored spot of their own” (402). Because of white workers’ ongoing struggle to overcome racism and welcome

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 146

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

147

black workers into the union, this song’s black origin adds to its political significance. It is shown to rivet the attention of all who hear it, white and black, pro- and anti-strike. Clearly, Dargan wants to show that the sentiments in these black workers’ song are more appropriate to the labor movement’s agenda than those in the white workers’ conciliatory hymn “When Peace Like A River.” White workers’ recognition of the value of this black cultural product provides an optimistic indication that they are likewise learning to recognize their cross-racial class identity with black workers.49 This song’s cultural and historical context (which the novel does not include) further suggests why Dargan made it one of the culminating cultural texts intended to reflect workers’ political growth. The lyrics Dargan provides were, in fact, a very recent adaptation of an older traditional song. In November of 1933, a short Daily Worker article reported that “a new song, sung to the tune of the well-known spiritual, ‘My Mother Got a Stone That Was Hewn Out of the Mountain,’ written by a local Negro woman, is gaining widespread popularity here. [The song] [  .  .  .  ] has caught like wildfire since the recent Birmingham Anti-Lynch Conference, where it was first sung” (“New” 5). The article prints five stanzas, the first running as follows: “I’ve got a stone that was hewn out of history / That was hewn out of history / Come a-rollin’ through Dixie / Come a-rollin’ through Dixie / A-tearin’ down the kingdom of the boss.” The additional stanzas simply alter the first line: “Don’t you want that stone [  .  .  .  ]”; “The I.L.D. is the stone [  .  .  .  ]”; “The bosses hate the stone [  .  .  .  ]”; “The workers need that stone [  .  .  .  ].”50 The original folk song—known in various forms by such titles as “Looking for the Stone” and “So Glad I’ve Got the Stone”—encapsulates an aspect of Christian theology with potentially much different implications for workers than the hymns that Dargan has earlier criticized for fostering passivity. Its imagery invokes the biblical (particularly Old Testament) notion that destruction of a corrupt “kingdom of the world” allows a holier “kingdom of God” to take its place. (Old Testament theology casts such violent cleansing as righteous and a necessary solution for a world gone wrong.) One song variant sung in black spiritual traditions, for example, begins with a reference to the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who, having been exiled to Babylon, testified that God would enable the downfall of a corrupt, worldly Jerusalem: Ezekiel saw the stone that was hewed out the mountain Hewed out the mountain Come rollin’ through Babylon

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 147

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

148

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand” Come tearing down the kingdom of the world. (“So Glad”)

Subsequent verses then link singers’ own society to this biblical drama: “Oh, my mama [father, brother, preacher, etc.] had the stone  .  .  .” The most important verse then ties singers themselves to these biblical and familial/ communal traditions of fighting for virtue: “So glad I’ve got the stone  .  .  .” While leaving the nature of the corruption and reform vague, the song implicitly valorizes reforming (“tearing down”) a corrupt society (“the kingdom of the world”), using the recurrent rolling-stone metaphor to cast this revolutionary impulse as unstoppable and historically ongoing. Unlike the “radical” parody that mocks the ideology of the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” which appeared earlier in the novel, this new song does not need to subvert the ideology of the original. Rather, by simply making the place (Dixie) and focus of change (the “kingdom of the boss”) more explicit and timely, it refines and updates the imagery of an original that had already suggested revolutionary impulses. This expression of righteous, cleansing destruction gives Dargan an ideal vehicle to show workers’ judicious use of biblical tradition to strengthen, rather than dissipate, reformist impulses. As Dargan contextualizes it within her novel, this song forecasts an inevitable change in the sociopolitical climate: “it was their voices [those singing this song] to which the people on the sidewalks and in the streets—strikers—soldiers—police, and all—were listening. [.  .  .  .  ] Full voices, mellow but confident, flowing from the heart of the moment as they felt it” (402–3). This confidence from the black singers prompts white strikers in turn to sing an action-oriented song instead of the deliberately soothing “Peace Like a River”: The man who had been asked to lead ‘Peace Like a River,’ looked questioningly at the preacher. ‘We will sing ‘Glory, Glory to the strikers!’ said the gentle Emory [a progressive minister who has come to support the strikers’ cause]. And they sang loudly their response to the voices [of the black singers] in the grove. (403)

The rousing effect of “A stone came rollin’” continues to set the tone for more singing: “Afterwards, religious songs were chosen, but valiant, lifting to triumph” (403). Finally, when deputies provoke a fight with strikers, hymns and action merge: “[striker] Austin Kimrey, singing at the top of his voice, was pounding a deputy. ‘In the cross (pound!) of Christ (pound!) I glo-o-ory!” (pound, pound, pound!)” (403).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 148

6/22/2006 8:54:34 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

149

While treatment of industrial workers’ use of hymns is found throughout Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling, Dargan confines the singing of non-religious folksongs to a mountain context without pursuing the fate of this cultural mode into the industrial context. As A Stone Came Rolling moves towards its conclusion, however, Dargan creates scenes that show embattled industrial workers discovering that their mountain backgrounds contain sources of cultural strength to aid their cause. In addition to consciously manipulating hymns, as shown earlier, mountain migrants are also now transforming traditional secular folksongs into expressions of working-class solidarity. For Ishma, who has tended to view mountain culture and industrial culture as separate, even antithetical, spheres, this apparently new cultural phenomenon comes as a revelation. When she visits the mountains near the novel’s end and hears some young people singing, accompanied by guitar and banjo, she initially feels taken back in time to a familiar cultural landscape that is strangely untouched by the intensifying class struggles she has left behind in Dunmow. One of the musicians, Rafe Owens, “play[s] the old mountain melodies with as much confidence as had lived in Britt’s fingers” and can even play “Welcome to Beebread!,” a song Britt had once written for a local celebration (381). Such nostalgia, however, holds little interest for Ishma, who is profoundly depressed by Britt’s death and the recent setbacks in labor battles: “[She] drifted aside. It was easier to dream than to listen” (382). Rafe, however, turns out to be far from naïve about industrial labor conditions. He and his girlfriend, Eldy, have both worked in a Georgia mill and have returned with bitter insights. When an old mountaineer named Siler asks Rafe to sing the traditional “Hand Me Down My Walking-cane,” Ishma notices “a sharp change in the music [  .  .  .  ]. Rafe was giving it to them as the strikers had sung it down in Georgia” (382). This newly politicized version of the song threatens, for instance, that if workers cannot afford to buy milk “the wheels won’t turn in ary [sic] old mill” (382). It also promises that “The picket line—ain’t gonno [sic] run thin! / [  .  .  .  ] / You pull me out and ten go in!” (382). According to Rafe, this song has provided an inspirational rallying point for workers in Georgia: “you ought to hear four or five hundred of us wrappin’ our tongues round [the verses of this song]” (382). Though he has left the mill for a time, he has vowed to go back, saying that he’s “signed up for the war [the class war]” (382). Old Siler also promises that he and his wife will nurse those who are injured in this new war—“The mountains have got to stand by their folks [those now working in industry]” (382)—and he even hopes to help raise some children who have lost a parent in labor violence. This portrayal of mountain people militantly invested in workers’ causes refutes a widely held opposing view of mountain people

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 149

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

150

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

actually hindering industrial organization by willingly enduring low wages and other exploitative conditions. (It also revises Dargan’s earlier suggestion, particularly in Call Home the Heart, that people remaining in the mountains were largely uninformed about the political struggles of individuals who left the mountains to seek millwork.) Rafe’s song and Siler’s comments cause Derry to remark to a fellow radical that “maybe you needn’t worry about the mill owners tapping the mountains for docile hands. The source of supply seems tainted” (383). From mountains to Marx: Ishma’s education Another important feature of cultural representation in Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling centers not on aspects of sociocultural and socioeconomic environment that shape workers’ ideological tendencies on a broad scale, but on ones that more specifically shape Ishma’s development. Since approximately the first third of Call Home the Heart occurs before Ishma leaves the mountains for the mill village, this novel starts by depicting the way Ishma experiences mountain culture and subsistence agriculture before she encounters industrial labor and gains a Marxist outlook on it. Even before Ishma learns to see through Marxist lenses, her experience of subsistence agrarianism is meant to reflect the aptness of the communist ideology she will later absorb. Karl Marx believed that agriculture would (and should) be caught up in the trends developing industrial infrastructures conducive to socialization. As smaller parcels of land were consolidated into increasingly large farms, they could then be run with greater efficiency, using machines to save physical labor. Eventually, as Marx and Fredrich Engels predicted in the 1848 “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” these trends would allow for the “establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture”; for the “combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; [and for the] gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country” (35). The “Manifesto” does not mourn the potential loss of a distinctly rural culture, noting, rather, that the trend towards urbanization has already “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life” (19 emphasis added). At the start of the twentieth century, Lenin’s tract “The Agrarian Question and the ‘Critics of Marx” reaffirmed this Marxist stance towards industrializing rural society, refuting then current adversaries who argued that mechanization hurt agricultural workers, especially by taking away jobs. Though, as Lenin concedes, machinery indeed reduces available jobs, it also forces an ultimately beneficial consolidation of agricultural production

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 150

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

151

and, thus, the restructuring of rural/urban demographics deemed appropriate to an advanced socialist society. Culturally, the Communist movement aimed to eliminate the impact of rural isolation from urban concentrations of knowledge and culture (what Lenin, following Marx, referred to as “the antithesis between town and country”). “It is not true,” Lenin argued, “to say that this is tantamount to abandoning the treasures of science and art. Quite the contrary: this is necessary in order to bring these treasures within the reach of the entire people, in order to abolish the alienation from culture of millions of the rural population, which Marx aptly described as ‘the idiocy of rural life’” (154).51 Various aspects of Dargan’s narrative combine to suggest an intellectual stance towards rural agriculture and culture compatible with such MarxistLeninist socialism. 52 Detailing mountain life in the first section of Call Home the Heart, Dargan shows the degree to which physical labor and isolation from sources of knowledge and power circumscribe Ishma’s growth. In her novel’s opening sentences, Dargan establishes the centrality of labor in the lives of mountain dwellers, especially females: “Before she was seven, Ishma [  .  .  .  ] had joined the class of burden-bearers. By the time she was thirteen there was little rest for her except on Sunday” (1). Later, she shows in considerable detail how Ishma and Britt as a young married couple expend nearly all their energies trying to extract a living from a hillside farm, failing year after year to get ahead. Although Ishma at times derives great satisfaction from intense physical labor, at her most bitter she realizes that the challenges of raising a successful farm crop with little technological help have compromised her other aspirations: “Farming—without tools, stock, seed. Nothing to pour into it but [  .  .  .  ] strength. What had it brought [her and Britt]? Debt, sneers, injustice. Nothing to wear. The crudest food, and no time to prepare it. Nothing for study—books—trips. Just bare life” (106).53 Later, Derry’s socialist ideas plant visions in Ishma’s mind of a future in which socialism and technology will make long, draining labor in both agriculture and industry obsolete. At one point in Call Home the Heart, for instance, Derry must argue against Ishma’s longing to return to her mountain home, which at that moment seems to her like a “quiet resting place” in comparison to the turmoil of a strike-torn mill village (293). Having grown up on a mountain farm himself (295), Derry can say from experience that such farmers “must work until they are half brutes and surrender to semi-existence” (293). He tells Ishma that in a less mechanized and globalized age—when “the ideal of industrial unity had not been born” and “the medium for its birth was not in existence”—her desire to escape labor problems by retreating to agrarian life might have been an acceptable recourse

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 151

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

152

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

(293). Now, however, “we have the ideal [of “industrial unity”], and the means to realize it. [.  .  .  .  ] We are going to stay in the fight because it is a fight that can be won” (294).54 Derry believes that the fight to organize labor must be won by starting with industrial workers before addressing rural problems of production. Dargan creates another strong endorsement for applying scientific socialism to agriculture through Ishma’s conversation with the farmer Abraham Beasley. Beasley—who was “orphaned when two years old, [and] had grown up without schooling” (337)—has earned his comfort the hard, oldfashioned American way. Now, at sixty-five Beasley owned a thousand acres of land, and was pointed out as an example of what industry and resolution could accomplish in the land of the free; a pillar of rock in the way of agitators and advocates of social change. Catch Abe Beasley listening to any talk about communal ownership of land! (337)

Despite Beasley’s reputation as a capitalist success story, when Ishma visits him on his farm, he says, to her surprise, that he can see only one way for modern farmers to survive: “We’ve got to pool our farms, our tools, our labor, same as in any modern industry. We’ve got to let go [of private property] before we can get a holt” (346). Despite his success, when he “think[s] how easy it would be for the world to begin living under that guarantee [of economic security under socialism], I feel like I’ve been cheated out o’ my whole life” (346). As discussed later in this chapter, one way that Beasley and his wife have been “cheated out of life” by overwork is in never having had time to nurture what Dargan sees as a universal desire to enjoy aesthetic beauty. Working from a Marxist understanding of culture and economic base as dialectically related, Dargan questions how an impoverished economic base might stunt the potential for cultural expression among the masses whose labor supports this base. Does the prevalence, for instance, of short, oral forms (such as songs) within such a social group simply reflect aesthetic preferences? Or, does it also reflect limitations imposed by such factors as impoverishment, physically demanding labor, and lack of formal education? Might folk songs or other cherished cultural texts that without irony celebrate aspects of a primitive economic base contribute to a social group’s resistance to economic progress? Further, might an author’s unqualified celebration of such culture (in novels geared towards middle-class readers) contribute to naturalizing the economic factors that this culture reflects? Dargan’s narrative implicitly raises

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 152

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

153

such questions. Her vision of a rural present compromised by poverty and of a rural future liberated by socialism provides twin ideological beacons, guiding her representations of rural culture away from indulgence in pastoral local color and towards suitably radical destinations. One example of Dargan’s sense that rural culture reflects a stunted economic base, and potentially deters technological advancement, shows Ishma’s reaction when she returns to the mountains at the end of Call Home the Heart and finds Britt still building his dreams upon the foundation of a primitive subsistence farming enterprise. Through the lenses of her Marxist education, she now sees him as “the last farmer in history [  .  .  .  ] feeding his family out of his hand; while humanity swirled past him in the wake of great tractors, combines, combustion engines of all sorts, that had released man from the curse of the digger Adam” (429). Hearing Britt talk of farming, Ishma thinks of an “old Grange song of Granny’s.” From Ishma’s progress-oriented standpoint, this song, like Britt’s humble plan for the future, is shortsighted: Here’s health to the plough, the brave old plough, That has fed the nations gone! May glory as now wave o’er the plough When a thousand years have flown! In a thousand years the plough would be seen only in the corners of museums, and the food-growing process would be imbedded in the earth-wide industrial body. A thousand years? In three generations probably. (429)

Juxtaposed with Ishma’s thoughts of “great tractors, combines, [and] combustion engines,” this song’s celebration of the “brave old plough” becomes quaint. If, as one of Dargan’s underlying arguments runs, socialism could give rural people more leisure and material comfort than they had ever known and, further, reduce their isolation from urban centers of knowledge, cultural production among these people might blossom in ways inconceivable within the current economic context. Depictions of Ishma’s experience in mountain agriculture discussed earlier suggest that hardships rooted in a primitive mode of production thwart Ishma’s desire to grow intellectually and to move beyond the cultural modes of knowing generally available in her social context. Ishma’s dissatisfaction with rural culture counterbalances other shaping impulses in Dargan’s novels that seem to reflect a local colorist’s less radically attuned aesthetic sensibilities.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 153

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

154

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

Still, the restructuring of mountain society that Dargan anticipates is largely reserved for a future outside of the narrative timeframe. Although mountain life as Dargan depicts it is not entirely static and insulated from the influence of outside progress and events, its material and ideological changes over the course of Call Home the Heart are slight compared to those in the industrialized mill village (where, during the same period, textile workers are emerging into class-consciousness and learning how to better their social conditions). Dargan’s depiction of mountain life emphasizes material factors that limit Ishma (including lack of time, energy, and access to formal teaching and educational materials). Still, it also shows that Ishma counteracts these constraints by taking advantage of whatever potentially empowering resources she can find in her immediate environment (such as rejuvenation from nature, progressive guidance from her grandmother, and printed resources). As an account of how Ishma’s early education and experiences lead her to question and resist certain norms within her culture, the “mountain sections” of Call Home the Heart provide an important foreground to later descriptions of the more explicitly radical education that eventually enables Ishma to lead members of the working class beyond their ideological norms. That Ishma, in her early youth, finds such inspiration and perfect satisfaction in nature is particularly significant in the context of Dargan’s critique of various cultural texts within her novels. Nature, which Ishma views as a pleasure-giving and potentially enlightening “text,” offers an alternative to the various oral and written expressions of socially oriented culture that Ishma encounters. Socially determined texts (folk songs, religious and historical works, and popular fiction) are shown to have varying degrees of ideological shortcomings as frameworks that Ishma might apply to her life. In contrast, nature offers Ishma a text that is not produced by or inherently aligned with a particular ideological stance.55 For Ishma, it provides insights that are free from the contradictions that may compromise aesthetic objects produced in social environments. Nature, then, functions for the young Ishma as a sort of utopia into which she can temporarily retreat.56 Ishma’s ideological development, however, requires that she eventually move beyond her individualistic escapes into nature and discover the need for creating a socialized sort of utopia that can encompass and sustain all humanity. As a child, Ishma had “rested sanely on her love of beauty in nature, and her unthinking union with it. She had moved largely and unconfined in that roominess of personal being. [.  .  .  .  ] With adolescence, beauty was not enough” (149). Ishma’s engagement with nature contributes to Dargan’s project of explaining how her protagonist manages to gain and cling to a degree of autonomy within an otherwise constricting socio-familial context—one where “six

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 154

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

155

days of the week [she] was merely a family possession, giving herself so effectually that no one suspected she was giving; so entirely that she did not suspect it herself” (1). While the rest of Ishma’s family spends Sundays occupied with visitors to the house, Ishma escapes what she sees as her mother’s and sister’s crippling domestic burdens and heads alone into the mountains, where, “with no intuitive hint that she had chanced upon a law of salvation, [she] found a way of replenishing her fount” (1). Even after Ishma marries Britt, nature continues to offer her a haven from her society’s powerful hegemonic forces. Britt had learned an interpretation of religion (from his itinerant-preacher father) that allows him to feel, as Ishma does, “a sort of holy sanction for his Sundays on the hills” (66). Whenever possible, Britt and Ishma avoid their community’s conservative church services and instead spend Sundays “out on their hills, as Ishma had done in her maiden days” (65). During Ishma’s childhood, her Granny Stark encourages Ishma’s solitary wanderings and gives her the knowledge to regard nature as an intimate friend. She also provides Ishma with an early role model for a woman transgressing norms of culture and gender. For instance, she teaches Ishma an alternative to the dominant belief in a uniformly sacred and venerable Bible: “From the time that Ishma had begun to stumble through the sacred chapters for Granny’s pleasure, she had been interrupted with such comments as ‘That’s not decent!’ ‘I don’t have to believe that, thank God!’ [.  .  .  .  ] ‘Mark that fer skippin,’ darter. We’ll not read that twict’” (65). This grandmother “was no less free with comments of approval whenever the text coincided with her own ideas of right and wrong, or induced an elevation of spirit. ‘That’s the truth, darter. Don’t fergit that’” (65–6). Due to the powerful influence of Granny Stark, “Ishma’s familiarity with the Bible had not enslaved her mind” (65). Thus, Dargan gives mountain (and matriarchal) roots to Ishma’s religious skepticism, which later becomes a Marxist denial of the supernatural. Perhaps reflecting her own middle-class biases, Dargan shows Ishma rejecting her inherited way of speaking—a mountain dialect which the novel describes as “lazily uttered, half-finished words and twisted syntax” (14)— as a step in the intellectual growth that will later allow her to engage with sophisticated Marxist/socialist thought. Though Ishma never goes to school (she must labor so that her sister’s younger children can go), she gets rudimentary knowledge by helping her younger nephew Sam with his elementary school homework (8). While Sam himself resists the “speech-mending” lessons intended to replace mountain dialect with standard English—“he couldn’t see any sense in learning to talk a new way when the old was just as good”—Ishma “[does] not share Sam’s aversion to the language book. It was a way to power and larger life” (8). Although, “for harmony’s sake she spoke

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 155

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

156

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

at home more or less in the family fashion, [  .  .  .  ] she exulted in knowing better,” and “tried to improve her speech by reading aloud and accustoming her ears to something different” (14). Perhaps intentionally, Dargan makes her authorial stance towards mountain dialect difficult to distinguish from Ishma’s criticisms. The reader cannot be certain whether the view that this dialect is “lazily uttered” and “twisted [in] syntax” belongs to a self-critical cultural insider or an elitist outsider. On the one hand, Dargan delivers numerous pithy and amusing folk sayings characteristic of “local color” fiction through the mouths of her mountain characters (Ishma excepted). For instance, Ishma’s mother, Laviny, tells a troubled friend, “don’t you worry more’n a flea can tote in its weskit pocket” (27). She at another point advises her ever-griping daughter Bainie that “when you ain’t got but one feather in yer pillow, don’t pizen yer geese” (113–4). Indeed, such folk sayings (as well as the descriptions of rural folkways and nature) seem intended to contribute to the pleasure of reading Dargan’s fiction. On the other hand, Dargan tempers the reader’s aesthetic enjoyment of this dialect with Ishma’s sense that it echoes her poverty and isolation. She has Ishma “[notice] that visitors in the mountains, who sometimes found their way to Cloudy Knob, and commented on the native speech as ‘quaint,’ or ‘really Shakespearean,’ were careful to use nothing resembling it” (14). After her mother comments to Ishma that “you be dead tired, I reckon,” Dargan adds that “Ishma accepted the awkward form of speech without a wince, for with her mother ‘be’ was the verb of intimacy and affection” (20–1). Dargan’s remark shows that Ishma, despite her outward restraint, has already achieved a certain aloof self-awareness towards an aspect of her culture that for her mother is unremarkable. At another point, when Ishma’s sister, Bainie, says that she wants to make some “droozly-moke syrup” to cure her son’s case of worms, Ishma externalizes her frustrations: “For goodnes’ sake [  .  .  .  ] can’t you say Jerusalem Oak? I’ve told you fifty times” (120). Ishma’s and Bainie’s conflicting orientations towards mountain dialect in this exchange function as part of the novel’s larger dialogization of mountain culture. Ishma’s perspective, which Dargan’s authorial voice favors, is linked to a progress-oriented ideology, while Bainie’s reflects an undesirable stasis.57 To add to and contextualize orientations towards reality conveyed directly through characters’ speech and actions, Dargan also incorporates into her novels a significant number of texts in both written and oral/aural genres that reflect other artistic, philosophical, historical, and popular-culture interpretations of life. The written texts incorporated into the novel operate within much different social dynamics than do the orally transmitted

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 156

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

157

folk texts (such as hymns and songs). Generally, orally transmitted texts use the currency of common vernacular speech to transmit views of the world that seem ideologically natural to the people among whom they circulate. Thus, they tend to consolidate the social group’s ideological orientations. In Dargan’s novel, working-class characters seem to inherit such texts almost inadvertently through social interaction within their cultural landscape. In contrast, within this same cultural landscape, Ishma must consciously seek literature—which may come from places, times, and class backgrounds dramatically removed from the dynamics of her own society—and then read it in isolation. For Ishma, who seems alone in doggedly mining literature for alternatives to the orally circulated wisdom that seems to satisfy everyone else she knows, written texts offer alternatives to the socially consolidating tendencies of oral culture. The texts Ishma encounters in the process of her ideological growth in some way all comment on social conditions pertinent both to Ishma’s personal concerns and Dargan’s novelistic ones. By weaving these other creative works into her own, Dargan comprises prior artistic/political utterances concerning her novels’ central themes (particularly humanity’s ability to understand and correct social injustices). Against this backdrop, her own novels’ artistic and political assertions gain definition. Significantly, all of the texts incorporated into Dargan’s novels in some way fall short of offering Ishma a permanently satisfactory framework for viewing her own reality. At the time of Dargan’s writing, the works she incorporated had been acknowledged as literature, while Dargan’s novels were not yet validated within her society as either artistic or political achievements. Ishma cannot, of course, encounter the novel in which she herself appears. Dargan’s readers, on the other hand, have access to the “master text” in which Dargan critiques and subsumes Ishma’s literary encounters. Thus, a secondary (but calculated) effect of showing Ishma consuming and then seemingly moving beyond various literary works—all deliberately chosen for their serious or ironic relationship to Dargan’s narrative—is the implication that Dargan’s novels transcend their literary progenitors in political sophistication. As discussed earlier, Dargan takes care to show how Ishma’s Granny Stark taught her to sift through the Bible’s mixed bag of potentially oppressive and liberating thought. Later, after Granny Stark’s death (when Ishma is thirteen), Ishma has no guide to help her through the literature she discovers. Among the works that she digests during her early teenage years are several that had belonged to a great-grandfather. These include John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying, both seventeenth-century English religious works. Ishma reads Pilgrim’s Progress “faithfully, though she thought

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 157

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

158

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

that the pilgrim was rather stupid” (9). That Ishma’s own trajectory as Dargan’s narrative unfolds has a broad structural similarity to that of the Christian who undergoes a challenge- and temptation-fraught journey from the worldly “City of Destruction” to the heavenly “Celestial City” gives the references to Pilgrim’s Progress symbolic resonance in the context of Dargan’s novel.58 That Ishma read this work “faithfully” suggests that it contributed to her sense that life should be a dynamic, disciplined journey towards an idealistic goal. That she found the pilgrim “rather stupid,” however, might suggest her dissatisfaction, even as an untutored child reader, with a representation of life that focuses on a heavenly destination. Ishma’s growth within the novel implies that she applied the structure but revised the ideology of Bunyan’s text. Similarly, in depicting a working-class struggle to create an earthly utopia, Dargan’s novels assimilate a structure but transform an ideology typified by Pilgrim’s Progress. Like Pilgrim’s Progress, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying, which Ishma reads during the same period, centers its ideology on a belief in the transience of life and the importance of preparation for heaven.59 In noting that Ishma would read this work aloud to appreciate its language, “more concerned with her performance than with the matter she fed on” (9), Dargan implies that Ishma is able to assimilate aspects of available literary resources for her own purposes without being unduly influenced by their ideologies.60 Later in the novel, after she has left the mountains, Ishma encounters Percy Shelley’s epic lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). This work gives Dargan a rich opportunity to interrogate the political implications of a canonical work of art that, for all its obvious differences in ideological and generic orientation, shares with Call Home the Heart a utopian vision of a future in which humanity has transcended dystopic conditions stemming from competitive and oppressive impulses. For Dargan’s ideal reader, mere mention of Prometheus, a work recognized for its refined aesthetics and lofty humanistic ideals, would prompt a dialogic evaluation of the two works’ thematic similarities and aesthetic/political differences. In Shelley’s poem, inspired by the classical Greek play Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (525—456 b.c.), Prometheus is a demigod who has suffered prolonged captivity and excruciating torture at the hands of the omnipotent Jupiter to punish him for aiding humanity’s advancement.61 Although Prometheus had cursed his captor, when he replaces his vengeful attitude towards Jupiter with pity, he breaks a spell that had separated him from his lover, Asia (an embodiment of Love), and that had as a result caused the natural world and human society to degenerate. As described in lines that Dargan quotes because of their impact on Ishma, a spirit of love permeates

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 158

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

159

the earth following the dethronement of Jupiter and the reunion of Prometheus and Asia: The impalpable thin air, And all the encircling sunlight were transformed, As if the sense of love, dissolved in them, Had folded itself round the sphered world. (Prometheus 3.100–3; CHH 358)

In Prometheus this transforming power of love soon causes all of the various forms of earthly tyranny—“thrones, altars, judgment-seats and prisons” (3.164); “sceptres, tiaras, swords and chains, and tomes / Of reasoned wrong” (3.166–7)—to fade away, leaving humanity free to advance in art, science, and, most importantly, social harmony. Within the political value system Dargan’s novel is establishing, Prometheus’ mystical/mythical vision of mankind’s peaceful transformation rests uneasily with Marxism’s more scientific but aesthetically less attractive dictum that only bitter earthly struggle will end oppression. While the poem’s vision of human evolution unbound from deistic and earthly tyranny has a revolutionary ring that resonates agreeably with Dargan’s own utopian predictions for a socialist future, its mystical explanation of the process through which humanity achieves this liberation clashes with her emphasis on addressing the economic roots of social antagonisms rationally and directly. Although the hierarchy of gods and humans in Prometheus may be read to an extent as an allegory for an entirely human social hierarchy, it is nevertheless significant to the work’s ideological orientation that all the root forces causing humanity’s degradation and later enabling its liberation and regeneration seem to originate in a supernatural realm above human perception and agency.62 The climactic moment of liberation from tyranny in Shelley’s poem, for instance, occurs when the god Demogorgon arises from his cave and causes the earth to entomb Jupiter. Humanity regenerates within the resulting new spirit of love that saturates the earth (after Prometheus reunites with Asia), but has no active role in creating this spirit and is seemingly oblivious to its source. Even the poem’s concluding warning that darker days may once again cast shadows over humanity’s new benevolent glow—“if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free / The serpent” (4.565–7)—suggests a threat not entirely within human control to avoid. Likewise, to restore earthly perfection once again, humankind only needs to passively “love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (4.573–4). The rhetorical message of Prometheus Unbound, with or without its veil of supernatural

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 159

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

160

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

allegory, suggests that humanity lacks ultimate knowledge of or control over the world’s balance of good and evil. Even the all-knowing Demogorgon, when asked by Asia, cannot name an ultimate truth or power that would explain the manifestations of evil in human society. Rather (in lines Dargan incorporates into her novel with ironic intent), he tells Asia that “the deep truth is imageless” (2.4.116). Clearly, this message, which Shelley seems to endorse, conflicts with Dargan’s Marxist-oriented insistence that humanity can actually grasp the image of “deep truth” by looking rationally and directly at the economic systems upon which sociocultural institutions rest. Faced with the unfathomable, Prometheus suggests, those downtrodden by the more powerful should radiate love and forgiveness towards their oppressors rather than fight social inequities aggressively. For Dargan, Shelley’s ideology raises concerns similar to the ones she expresses concerning Christian theology, namely, that it rewards passive endurance of earthly trials with the achievement of heaven.63 The internal narrative of Dargan’s novel further frames Prometheus by placing it within concrete sociohistorical dynamics (the world of North Carolina textile workers in the midst of a labor strike) that defamiliarize its ideological and aesthetic orientation. The story of Ishma’s reading this work occurs as a flashback imbedded into the middle of a longer narration in which the heroic, selfless communist organizer Amos Freer engages in ideological sparring with Pritchett, a socialist whose reformist politics threaten Freer’s revolutionary ones. Amid narration that establishes Pritchett’s reprehensible ideological stance towards the working-class, Dargan digresses: “Pritchett a month before, had won Ishma’s gratitude with a copy of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound” (358). In the following two pages, Dargan refracts Prometheus (already somewhat smudged by contact with Pritchett’s suspect politics) through multiple vantages: first through Ishma’s enthralled initial readings, then against the socioeconomic circumstances within which Ishma reads, and finally through a discussion in which Ishma and Derry, each influenced (and, to Dargan, partially biased) by class and intellectual backgrounds, contest the ideological value of Prometheus. Largely through Derry’s guidance, Ishma has already converted to a Marxist’s belief that revolution will (and should) resolve class antagonisms. Earlier, for example, she tells a farmer to expect “a bitter time of fighting and privation and adjustment” (346) before socialism can operate smoothly. Nevertheless, Shelley’s mesmerizing utopian vision of an entirely peaceful social transformation, which she stays up all night reading about, lets her temporarily transcend the concrete social obstacles to liberation in the society around her. Ishma’s reading context—alone, at home, in the middle of the night—fittingly enhances the poem’s ability to blur reality:

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 160

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

161

She [  .  .  .  ] read it twice in one night; the first time amazed and burning-eyed. Everything in nature that she had known and loved was here given its singing word. In the flush of intimacy after that first reading only beauty and song remained. But the second time she read more slowly, and the lines throbbed against her heart. [.  .  .  .  ] She swirled in that world about [Prometheus], a world where the good lacked power, and the powerful lacked goodness; where wisdom was without love, and those who loved were without wisdom.64 She swirled, rose, and billowed on to the great triumph when the freed Titan made the men of earth one brotherhood; on to the ‘deep truth which is imageless.’ At sun-up she started out, unwearied and alight. (358)

Not surprisingly, the world that Ishma reenters following this literary encounter diminishes the euphoria Shelley’s aesthetic vision had imparted to her: “She saw Derry coming to meet her, and remembered that they were to take one of the tent babies [babies born to strikers evicted from their homes and living in tents] to the hospital. Her mind came tumbling back to reality. The Titan [Prometheus] was still chained” (358). Still, Ishma “couldn’t so quickly lose her luminosity” (358). Derry, however, highlights aspects of the poem’s evocation of utopia to suggest how alien and ludicrous they appear in light of his and Ishma’s own dystopic reality. Immersed in a society where law enforcement personnel intimidate workers by evicting strikers’ families from their home, Derry cannot believe in Shelley’s imagined world where “‘all things have put their evil nature off’” (358). In asking Ishma “how [her] [  .  .  .  ] coursers [are] getting along pasturing on vegetable fire?” (358), he again suggests the gulf between Shelley’s idealistic fantasies and the material needs of hungry strikers who must have something more tangible than “vegetable fire” to sustain them.65 And in rhetorically asking Ishma what she “think[s] of the amphisbenic snake?” (358), he reminds her of the mythical serpent in Shelley’s poem whose heads on each end of its body allow it to move both forwards and backwards, symbolizing the possibility that evil may still slither back into the new earthly paradise. Even Shelley, Derry reminds Ishma, had doubts about the permanent stability of a utopian society primarily founded on the principle of love. Despite all of his outward cynicism, after discovering that Ishma had received the book as a gift from an ideological rival (“Pritchett, the invertebrate”), Derry inwardly wonders why he had not thought of “a gift so obviously her due” (358). As Ishma continues to defend the poem—“I don’t care what you think! [.  .  .  .  ] It made me believe. I can feel the earth alive, helping us”—Derry “felt a hot stab of shame. How small he could be! What wouldn’t he give to feel as she did for one minute?” (359). In silently conceding

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 161

6/22/2006 8:54:35 AM

162

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

that a work of art like Prometheus, even if politically naive, is “obviously [Ishma’s] due,” Derry acknowledges that she deserves the chance to experience its beauty (and even absorb some of its idealism) as part of learning to recognize some of its potential ideological limitations. Derry, whose middleclass education has given him this chance, still remembers the poem well enough to “quote imperfectly” from it. As his thoughts (“What wouldn’t he give [  .  .  .  ]?”) indicate, Derry, for all his rationality, regrets that he cannot even momentarily drown his Marxist sobriety in the intoxicating aesthetic pleasure of utopian fantasies like Shelley’s. Likely, over the course of her own artistic and political development, Dargan had moved from a youthful enthusiasm for Prometheus more akin to Ishma’s initial, untutored response to a more “Derryesque” intellectual skepticism towards such idealistic art.66 Dargan leaves a final assessment of such poetry’s true sociopolitical merit purposely hanging somewhere between Ishma’s naïve rapture and Derry’s intellectually hardened cynicism. Indeed, the dialogue between Ishma and Derry seems to result in each character making some concessions to the other’s viewpoint. To soothe Ishma’s injured feelings after he has ridiculed her new-found literary treasure, Derry quotes other lines from the poem that envision humanity freed from all coercive social institutions, so that [  .  .  .  ] The man remains, Equal, unclassed, tribeless, nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise (359)67

After Ishma excitedly interjects that Amos Freer, the Communist organizer who has come to Winbury to help lead the strike, is just such a man, Derry “hesitate[s], weighing the statement,” before finally agreeing with Ishma (359). Derry’s intellectual realism recognizes that even the worthy Freer, bound by current social structures that are far from “equal, unclassed, tribeless, [and] nationless,” cannot truly be “king over himself.” Nor can Freer, who believes that a forceful expropriation of power must open the way for socialism, be “gentle” in the sense that Shelley’s verse intends.68 Still, in suppressing his cynical tendencies and granting Ishma the validity of her idealistic observation, Derry at least concedes that sincere artistic and scientific responses to social inequality embody common emancipatory desires, if not equally practical strategies for turning these desires into reality. Despite material conditions that push Ishma to embrace a Marxist political agenda, the aesthetic power of Shelley’s secular verse briefly persuades her that spiritual love alone might conquer the kind of exploitative

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 162

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

163

labor circumstances she is fighting. Following this conversation with Derry, however, she never again wholeheartedly trusts aesthetic art to shape her perception. Thus, from a later vantage point informed by encounters with art such as this, Ishma (in the sequel to Call Home the Heart) can say to Derry that “I wouldn’t kindle the fire [of revolutionary impulses] with art. Not now anyway. Our concern at present is with the maker, not the thing made” (320). Further, as Derry has shaken Ishma’s idealism with his own skepticism about the viability of “Love” and aesthetic creation as liberating forces, Ishma will later attempt to shake workers’ religiously based idealism. For Dargan, the power of certain religious dogma is not unlike the seductive power of Prometheus, since both employ aesthetically pleasing narratives to make stoicism seem the noblest response to oppression. In A Stone Came Rolling, Ishma will argue against liberal ministers who tell workers that love for their oppressors will bring them emancipation. When one Father Litmore espouses such a doctrine, Ishma replies that “men can’t be united in love while they are taking one another’s jobs” (313). Still, while some ideological assumptions in Prometheus must be rejected, others remain valid through the course of Ishma’s political development. Towards the end of A Stone Came Rolling, for example, a visit to her ancestral mountains reaffirms a feeling Ishma had also been delighted to find voiced in Prometheus, that “the earth [is] alive, helping us” (CHH 359). And the most significant evidence of Prometheus’ impact on Dargan and on her protagonist may be sensed in the many passages in which Dargan presents visions of a near future in which art and science enhance a harmonious and egalitarian society. Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling also incorporate episodes that critique other politically naïve or insensitive artists—individuals who find aesthetic material in the same impoverished rural or industrial settings that Dargan’s novels describe. Dargan constructs one scene in A Stone Came Rolling, for example, to lampoon middle-class outsiders’ naive aesthetic visions of mountain life. Near the novel’s end, friends Derry Unthank and the octogenarian Doctor Schermerhorn have taken Ishma to the mountains (hoping to help her restore her mental equilibrium after a scuffle between dissenting factions of strikers leaves her husband dead). Spending the night at “Flack’s Tavern,” a mountain inn near the popular tourist site of Standing Indian peak, they encounter a New York guest, Ryburn, who recounts his day of rambling around the area, gushingly celebrating all things primitive and condemning evidence of encroaching modernity.69 He is not literally an artist, but he nevertheless narrates his experience to highlight what to him seems like its aesthetic potential.70 Chancing upon a primitive cabin in an isolated “cove,” he had seen “an old woman [sitting] at a loom,” “an

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 163

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

164

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

old man [  .  .  .  ] smok[ing] a pipe with Roman dignity,” and numerous “grandchildren, probably great-grandchildren, everywhere, dropping out of the house as if it bred them by the minute” (354). Later, at a “jewel of a spring,” Ryburn had found “the best part of the picture, a woman combing her long hair” while waiting for a fire to boil the water for doing her laundry. “It was like peeping into an old ballad,” Ryburn exclaims (354). For Ryburn, that this woman was actually singing a real ballad, “Gypso [sic] Davy” (355), adds another layer of aesthetic varnish to this living tableau. All of this has “filled [Ryburn] with hope for a genuine human art once more [  .  .  .  ]. The machine had not torn all beauty from life as man must live it. Here in the shelter of the mountains it had survived” (354). Ryburn wishes only that he had been able to capture an aesthetic memento of his experience: “oh, for an artist!” (355). When Ryburn says that “my blood boils when I think of the destructive fingers of progress reaching up to destroy such a scene,” Schermerhorn provides the ironic corrective to his account. He remarks, for example, that he knows the ballad-singing woman, Betty Bushnell, and that her sentiments while singing “Gypso Davy” “when she gets off to herself ” are not as tradition-oriented as Ryburn might have assumed: “[The ballad is] about a wife going away with the devil, who promised her everything she wanted. Betty is a faithful wife, but when she comes to the verses telling of all the things the devil will give her, she sings them with an air [a melodic uplift]. Actually an air” (355). Schermerhorn’s implication is that Betty (who must care for six of her own children and eight from her husband’s first wife, who died in childbirth) sings this song with an “air” to express her desire for and openness to material improvement (“all the things the devil will give her”) in her standard of living.71 Later, in a seemingly offhanded manner, Schermerhorn remarks on some of the more tragic costs of poverty and isolation from progress that this tourist has failed to see: the grandfather’s goiter, hidden by his beard; one child’s blindness, which “a grain of knowledge would have prevented”; another child’s leg afflictions, brought on by lack of shoes; and an already-poor daughter having to pay a heavy fine after being arrested for “hidin’ liquor fer some fellers” (356). When Ryburn hears about this last girl’s dilemma, he exclaims, “What a story! [  .  .  .  ] Now if I could write! My friend, Dutlow, ought to get hold of this. There’s a writer who can polish off human interest like a looking-glass and not lose a twinge of it” (356). Since his aesthetic/political reformation is not important to Dargan’s satire, Ryburn seemingly remains oblivious to his naiveté (though his comments irritate Ishma so much that she contemplates hitting him with a poker). He simply becomes silent and then disappears from the scene after

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 164

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

165

Schermerhorn sarcastically proposes that he should get the “full flavor” of mountain life by boarding with a local family “for a week or two [.  .  .  .  ] Carry that bucket up the hill—cut up brush for cooking—‘beetle’ out the clothes on that wash-bench. Know the life from its center! The beauty of it, the art of it” (357 emphasis added). Dargan provides the moral finale to the scene by making Ryburn a passive and inconsequential listener as Schermerhorn and Unthank go on to discuss the paradox that economic conditions in the mountains make people want to escape a beautiful region “where Paradise should have its founts and sources” (358). To critique a separate, but not unrelated, aesthetic attraction to sites of industrial strife, Call Home the Heart centers one late chapter, “Friction and Feast,” around a heated debate at a supper-party that a young middleclass socialist, Pritchett, throws before leaving Winbury to return North.72 This party is safely distanced from the real friction, “In the Ranks” (the title of a preceding chapter) of the strike going on outside. Through this debate—which consists chiefly of Communist organizer Amos Freer admirably refuting other intellectuals’ obtuse positions towards working-class issues—Dargan berates intellectuals and artists whose interests in workers are primarily academic or aesthetic. Freer is exempt from this category, since he comes from a working-class background himself and risks his life to help organize the strike.73 In contrast, the other pseudo-intellectuals—Beckwith, Pritchett, and Owensby—take no risks and offer nothing to the struggle except elitist perspectives that are both condescending and antagonistic to Dargan’s sense of true working-class interests.74 Beckwith, a professor who speaks in a “cultured smooth voice [which] play[s] affectionately with his subject” (365), upholds the current system, under which he believes that “the greatly successful [  .  .  .  ] have used their vast fortunes very generously for the benefit of their fellowmen” (365). Though Beckwith tries to mask his true class alignment, Dargan reports that he is “an agent of the Greybank [Mill], [who] distribut[es] culture as chosen by Reece-Durkin [the owners of Greybank]” (367). As further described by Dargan’s authorial voice (which occasionally asserts its right to directly inject blatantly subjective judgments into the text), his job amounts to “snooping around the workers, filling their hearts with fear and their minds with archaic rot” (367). Pritchett’s class background also compromises his presumed liberal sympathy for the working class. Although he had been “born of socialist parents” and “before he was eighteen [  .  .  .  ] had spoken on every ‘red’ corner in New York, Brooklyn, and Chicago, and had sampled prison life in the three cities [  .  .  .  ,] his parents had been able to supply his necessities and rescue him from jails; consequently his experiences had always

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 165

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

166

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

lacked certain pangs of reality” (357). Predominantly aesthetic desires have brought Pritchett to Winbury; he had sought a new experience, but now will return north because “the scene had refused him entertainment” (357). The political impulses of these native-born Southern workers seem tame compared to those of the foreign-born strikers he has witnessed at more northerly urban sites of labor unrest: “In Patterson [New Jersey, site of a prominent earlier textile strike] a starving striker got communitis [that is, adopted a communist outlook]; in Winbury he got pellagra” (357). Still, although the strike scenario has not conformed to his aesthetic expectations, Pritchett will leave with an aesthetic memento: a “tolerable artist,” he has sketched the “starved face” of a striker’s wife (363). Also at this dinner party is Mrs. Owensby, a middle-class “grey-haired novelist” who has come to the Winbury strike “hoping to pep up her output for an uninterested public” (363). Ishma believes that Owensby’s class privilege, like Beckwith’s and Pritchett’s, compromises her perspective on the strike: “With her little feet rooted in aristocratic ground, she could safely sway and sniff toward the questionable areas of humanity” (363). “A wellpreened vulture on the field of actual battle” (363), Owensby seeks sensational tidbits, not weighty insights. At any rate, she seems intellectually incapable of responsibly formulating the latter. After “thrilling and bridling” with anticipation at the thought of “open[ing] her mouth in a communistic discussion” (368), she interjects only one off-the-point, banal comment into the evening’s debate.75 Taking academic or aesthetic interest in class struggle without true involvement, Dargan suggests, is a reprehensible form of (dis)passion. Simply observing how workers’ responses to oppression measure up to theories about lower-class agency may, in fact, be little different from the act of judging an artistic work’s aesthetic merits. According to the principles Dargan articulates here and elsewhere in her novels, the actual art represented by Pritchett’s sketch and Owensby’s writing is suspect on several counts. Since Pritchett’s sketch of a hungry striker does not in itself convey the concrete circumstances that caused the hunger, it risks portraying misery as a timeless, rather than a socially produced and fixable aspect of the human condition. Offering neither historical context nor solution to the suffering it depicts, it can be digested as aesthetic fare. Even if Pritchett were to supplement the picture with words, his interests and motivations seem to preclude a deep sympathy with his subject. While Pritchett’s grasp of the historical specifics of his subject matter is intellectually misdeveloped, Owensby’s is underdeveloped; since she has no deep grounding in the specific class dynamics of this conflict, her writing would have little use in explaining them.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 166

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

167

These references to Pritchett and Owensby also critique the socioeconomic conditions on which pre-revolutionary art rests; readers are prompted to wonder not only why a Pritchett is sketching strikers and an Owensby writing about them, but also why strikers are not using art to portray themselves. Addressing such a social contradiction, Dargan’s Amos Freer cites the previously noted “maxim that we workers are so fond of. ‘Life without labor is robbery; labor without art is barbarity’” (366). When Beckwith asks incredulously, “You would propose art for our ditch-diggers and streetsweepers?” Freer replies, “Most particularly for them, if it should still be necessary in an organized machine age to use human beings for such work. They should have, as all workers should have, the comforts that make life endurable, the arts that make life gracious, the science that makes life a growth” (366–7 emphasis added). Freer’s comment adds another nuance to Dargan’s broad belief that current political art now serves a relatively degraded function compared to art’s ideal contribution to life—to enhance existence after all humanity’s basic needs are met. In Dargan’s current dystopic reality, art—at least highly developed art requiring special training and intense, sustained work—generally comes from a privileged few.76 If it achieves the kind of aesthetic beauty that truly makes life gracious, it obscures or denies uglier social realities (a dilemma reflected in Dargan’s poems discussed earlier). Conversely, if it attempts to convey social conflicts truthfully, it deals with material that, arguably, should be consumed for political enlightenment rather than aesthetic pleasure. In Dargan’s post-revolutionary socialist utopia, however, art that feeds off of misery—like Pritchett’s and Mrs. Owensby’s—would have no bearing on the new social reality: “If [Owensby] wrote ‘In the Spring of 1928,’ it would carry as much verity as ‘In the period when we were dwelling on Mars—’” (363). In Dargan’s utopia, each person would develop inherent and unique creative abilities first and foremost to make his or her individual life more “gracious.” Significantly, to dramatize her conviction that working-class people have an unfulfilled longing for aesthetic beauty in their lives, Dargan avoids reference to manmade aesthetic objects, which she sees as inherently compromised by their association with an unjust manmade world. Turning instead to nature’s apolitical beauty, she shows Ishma helping an elderly, overworked farming couple to share their secret, yet mutual, appreciation of a sunset. On the day that Ishma visits the farm of Abe and Judy Beasley, the setting sun illuminates a strikingly beautiful cloud formation—to Ishma, “the loveliest thing that I ever saw!” (340). During the visit, Judy and Abe separately tell Ishma that a similar cloud formation had appeared on their wedding day,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 167

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

168

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

forty-five years before. Each, unknown to the other, had paused in the work at hand and stood watching the cloud until it faded from the sky. Fearing that the other would have scoffed at such frivolity, neither ever shared this memory: “I never spoke about it in my life till I opened my mouth to you,” Judy tells Ishma, “but I thought about it many a time, partickly when I was in bed after a birthin.’ I had time to remember then” (341). Judy explains her reticence to Ishma by saying that her husband “was great for laffin,’ and I didn’t want to be laffed at” (340). Likewise, Abe “reckon[s] Judy would ‘a’ laffed at me anyhow, if I’d told her how I’d been wastin’ time [watching the clouds]” (347). From the Beasleys’ perception, life in the ensuing years has never afforded another moment to slow down and appreciate such things. Just before she leaves the Beasley’s farm, Ishma does her part to encourage the couple to articulate their suppressed love of beauty, insisting that Abe ask his wife “what was the loveliest thing she ever saw in her life” (347). The reader is then left to imagine the joy this hard-toiling couple will get from realizing that they have shared not only a lifetime of work, but also the same secretly cherished aesthetic pleasure. Besides preceding and thus helping to justify Freer’s insistence on the value of art for “ditch-diggers and streetsweepers,” this episode also supports Ishma’s important revelation at the beginning of the same chapter that “every sordid and ugly life had its hidden war in the service of a dream; its struggle behind drab matter-of-fact; its timidity and pride, dreading to be found out” (332). When Ishma goes to Winbury’s “Farmers’ Square” and sees workers’ families at a traveling amusement show, frittering away their brief Saturdayafternoon respite from work—“throwin’ balls at a rooster’s head” (335) and gawking at a strange deformed “animal with tail like a fox, webs like a duck, snout like a hog” (336)—she tries to balance her dejection with a mental assurance that what she sees is a distortion of these people’s true capacity for leading more intellectually contemplative and rewarding lives. Looking on the scene “with transforming eyes,” she imagines “the world impending in tomorrow” when social equality has been achieved: “In the land where no one was driven, every soul could find beauty, every man could find his soul” (333). In Ishma’s (Dargan’s) utopian vision, every person’s “bright, yearning germ, which no heart was without,” “could be released into life”: “What incalculable gain! Every man at his best. That deep hidden best that never had been permitted a single bloom under the bars and irons where he fought for sustenance. What streams of active beauty would flow into time! Time, which is creation’s reservoir” (332). Although Farmers’ Square, as transformed in her mind, would match the architecture of the “old Greeks,” her imagined new society would have “no human chattels skulking behind the facades,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 168

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

169

or dragging their burning feet from the outlying gardens and plains; casting always their slave-shadow across the mind of genius and scholar” (333). While these images of “slave-shadow[s]” and “chattels [  .  .  .  ] behind the facades” are explicitly connected to ancient Greek civilization, they also comment on Dargan’s uneasiness about being an artist while others live as virtual slaves to wage labor, and on her belief that modern cultural achievements should not function as facades that obscure society’s dystopic elements. Dargan’s frequent suggestions that socialism would correct the various flaws of art and culture shaped by capitalism naturally beg the question of how, in concrete terms, socialism would actually change the content of art. In Dargan’s literary work itself, exposing the socioeconomic barriers endemic to class society provides both the artistic inspiration and the moral imperative for creative expression. Her poetry illustrates the recurrent need to draw attention to class position as a barrier between a privileged artist and her representations of a less privileged world, and her radical novels foreground class antagonisms considerably more than her poetry. What if, however, such barriers of class position could be razed, so that the socially conscious artist no longer had to worry that economic advantages had enabled her artistic development? Where then would artistic inspiration and the moral (or socially beneficial) imperative for creative expression come from? Since such absolute social equality combined with the leisure made possible by new technology had (and has) never existed, Dargan, like other reform-minded writers, had to imagine an art appropriate to such utopian conditions. Subtly suggesting the influence of earlier utopian texts like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards: 2000–1887 (1888), Dargan occasionally creates opportunities within her text to incorporate imaginative glimpses of a utopian future under socialism. Ishma’s vision of Farmers’ Square transformed into a socialist utopia (discussed above) is one such example. Similarly, a scene in A Stone Came Rolling shows mill president Bly Emberson, while in a trance-like state, having a tantalizing vision of his dystopic reality (in which he is implicated) transformed into a scarcely recognizable utopian future. In both cases, Dargan superimposes utopian possibility onto dystopic reality, thus destabilizing a view of a recognizable society as fated to remain forever the same. Highly influential on utopian socialist thought in the several decades following its publication, Bellamy’s “utopian romance” provides one prototypical model—to which Dargan’s utopian ideas may be profitably compared—of utopian socialist ideals imaginatively applied to America’s industrial-capitalist society.77 In Looking Backwards, the upper-class Julian West awakens after a one-hundred-and-thirteen-year hypnotic sleep to find

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 169

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

170

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

himself in Boston of the year 2000. Most of the book consists of conversations between West and his new acquaintance, Dr. Leete, that explain how socialist principles coupled with technology have overcome all the many socioeconomic ills of 1887. In contrast to Looking Backwards, which posits its utopia as already achieved, Dargan’s novels focus on constructing a tangible dystopic reality and provide only occasional glimpses (such as in Ishma’s fantasy and Bly’s dream) into a projected utopian future. Though very different in content and intent (and though Bellamy’s work predates Dargan’s novels by some fifty years), they are bridged by a similar conviction that socialism, by eradicating the disparities in artistic/cultural potential at both the individual and group levels, would enable modern humanity to outshine all previous eras of cultural achievement. In Bellamy’s utopia, a system of reward for merit, dedication, and social recognition guarantees certain talented individuals a living in exchange for creating literature, music, or other art for society’s benefit. Further, this system requires all individuals to labor only from ages twenty-one to forty-five so that, as Dr. Leete tells West, “we can fully devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life. [.  .  .  .  ] [I]t is not our labor, but the higher and larger activities which the performance of our task will leave us free to enter upon, that are considered the main business of existence” (158–9). Though Leete acknowledges that “of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic, literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one thing valuable to their possessors,” he still believes that everyone will find a way to use to advantage this “time for the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and special tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of recreation; in a word, a time for the leisurely and unperturbed appreciation of the good things of the world which they have helped to create” (159). In the past, Bellamy argues, “the proportion of individuals capable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the mass of their contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any broad view of humanity scarcely worth mentioning” (180). Now, everyone has “become capable of receiving and imparting, in various degrees, but all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a refined social life” (180). As a result, “one generation of the world today represents a greater volume of intellectual life than any five centuries ever did before” (180) In an attempt to provide an example of how art in a socialist utopia would differ from art in a capitalism dystopia, one chapter of Looking Backwards shows Dr. Leete giving West a story, “Penthesilia,” by an imaginary twentieth-century author: “it is considered his masterpiece,” Leete tells West, “and will at least give you an idea what the stories nowadays are like” (137).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 170

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

171

As if an ability to convey any meaningful sense of “Penthesilia” exceeds his imaginative powers, Bellamy characterizes it as striking (to West’s 1887 worldview) for not so much what was in the book as what was left out of it. The storywriters of my day would have deemed the making of bricks without straw a light task compared with the construction of a romance from which should be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer, together with sordid anxieties of any sort for one’s self or others; a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfretted by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart. (137–8)

Like Bellamy, Dargan sidesteps the issue of how future artistic achievements would differ from those of the past. She emphasizes the broad benefit of social/artistic reform over the importance of reaching pinnacles of artistic achievement; by removing barriers that curtail a widespread human desire to create, socialism will foster an art that benefits its many creators. This emphasis stands in contrast to capitalism’s tendency to support a relatively few talented individuals, who generally must create marketable works to survive. Also like Bellamy, she acknowledges that workers might use their newly won leisure for relatively modest pursuits. Talking to a worker, Job, “whose outlet for adventure lay in playing horse-shoes” (SCR 307), Ishma paints a vision of a future where Job will have time for an after-work game. “If every heart could pour out every drop of its music” Dargan uses several pages of Ishma’s thoughts and conversation in A Stone Came Rolling to suggestively link a number of other politically charged convictions about past, current, and future art. First, she has Ishma consider the temptation of seeking a spiritually satisfying life through art, which Ishma realizes has parallels to her own temptation to retreat from industrial conflicts to her mountain farm. On her farm’s “fruitful, apparently unshaken ground, it was easy to believe in stable things. Sitting there, one could almost believe that a world order really existed, durable and friendly” (318). As she has this farm, she reflects, those whose class privileges give them unlimited access to

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 171

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

172

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

humanity’s cultural legacy have a comparably seductive haven from social dilemmas: “Was it surprising that many of those to whom no wonder or beauty was forbidden were hostile, or indifferent, to change?” (318–9). Such people, Ishma reflects, finding sufficient harmony in aesthetic objects, may tolerate lack of harmony in the socioeconomic environment.78 Ishma, having been brought closer through Derry to this previously distant world of cultural treasures, wonders if she too could be happy “if she could go through the world, making consciously hers the triumphs that gave earth resplendence” (319). “No,” she concludes, and then asks rhetorically: “Join the few who kept the keys to the house of art and the riches of the ages, while millions and millions of joint-heirs hardly knew that their heritage existed?” (319). Ishma’s thoughts then move her to a related concern—the fate of culture itself during the period of social upheaval that she feels must come before people finally gain equal access to their cultural heritage. Believing that equal rights to this “house of art,” like equal rights to material wealth, will be won only through force, since “those keys would never be surrendered,” she wonders, “what if, in the battle before those locked doors [to the house of art], the house should fall and the treasure be lost? Would it be loss that must ache through eternity?” (319). Ishma assures herself that an intellectually liberated humanity would recover quickly from such cultural losses (compared to its laborious artistic ascent through more socially repressive or primitive eras): “If every heart could pour out every drop of its music,” she argues, “wouldn’t we soon get back more than the little bit that it has taken us thousands of years to gain?” (319). Derry (belying perhaps a trace of middle-class elitism) assents that “it would be a pretty noisy world” (319). In Ishma’s view, changing but ever-present social antagonisms have hindered real artistic progress. Artists have vainly spent “three hundred years trying to get past Shakespeare” and failed, Ishma proposes, not necessarily for lack of technical innovation or patronage, but because their artistic visions must reflect (or naively obscure) the ongoing reality of class conflicts—“the base that Shakespeares feed on” (319).79 From a more harmonious social reality, she suggests, more harmonious art will follow. (Like Edward Bellamy, though, Dargan does not attempt to actually portray this new harmonious art.) Believing that society is now uniquely positioned to actually resolve (rather than just realistically represent) these class antagonisms, Ishma wonders if art should (or even can) help prod history forward, hastening capitalism’s seemingly inevitable implosion? With these questions in mind, she paraphrases lines Derry had read her earlier by the English writer Julian Huxley to articulate a lofty artistic ideal—one that couldn’t easily coexist with her realist social vision and political agenda: “[Huxley] said that art, like love and

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 172

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

173

vision, ‘knits the scattered facts and acts of our days into a life complete and whole, above the world’s desire’” (320). Ishma accepts this principle, but also feels that the prevalence of unfulfilled desires in the modern world means that any art that would now help individuals to construct such self-satisfying visions of their lives—“completed and whole, above the world’s desires”— would only contribute to complacency towards social reform. “We have to work through the world’s desire, not above it,” she concludes, since “no life can be completed and whole until the world so desires it” (320). At the same time, Ishma rejects the principles behind less soothing art seeking to “kindle the fire” (320) of social unrest. Until social equality has been achieved, such art—its progressive intentions notwithstanding—would still necessarily tend to come from and be accessible mainly to a privileged few. If certain intellectuals assume that social crisis uniquely justifies their creative ambitions, they risk perpetuating a capitalist system that affords a limited number of people the chance to develop their creative potential and then, from this group, fulfills society’s demand for art (as moral guidance or as commodity). “Our concern now,” Ishma asserts, “is with the maker, not the thing made” (320). The implication behind this maxim is that truly committed revolutionists should not divert vital energy into developing “revolutionary” new aesthetic theories and/or art. Ishma suggests that socially conscious bourgeois artists (in which group Dargan surely saw herself ) will, as a matter of course, interpret the historical moment through their art. Still, only the working masses (who currently have more immediate concerns than art) have sufficient power to effect real sociopolitical change. (More than Myra Page’s and Grace Lumpkin’s novels, Dargan’s, with their frequent allusions to elite culture, seem aimed at a readership that would tend to exclude workers with limited formal education.) Although Ishma’s far-ranging soliloquy gives no quarter in current society for artistic production as traditionally conceived, Derry reflects that Ishma actually “would practice art at its greatest”: envisioning society itself as the best raw material to shape into a more (aesthetically) pleasing form, she “hop[es] to merge and increase and multiply the powers of life until out of them steps the greater being who will take care of the greater canvases” (320). That Dargan incorporated such seemingly self-deflating pessimism about art’s revolutionary potential into her novels (which otherwise tend towards an optimistic outlook on humanity’s revolutionary potential) raises questions of how she viewed her own channeling of revolutionary convictions into art. Although Dargan seems to endorse Ishma’s insights on art and politics (she presents them thoughtfully and without any obvious irony), she might also have intended a degree of separation between Ishma’s more working-class

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 173

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

174

“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand”

views and her own, which decades of work in literature could not help but have informed. Another compelling, and somewhat contrasting, insight into Dargan’s artistic self-identity comes via eighty-year-old Doctor Schermerhorn, a sympathetically portrayed intellectual character with minor roles in A Stone Came Rolling. Schermerhorn embodies the political enthusiasm circumscribed by physical limitations that Dargan also saw in herself. Considered too old to threaten the establishment, Schermerhorn gets away with openly espousing socialism in the mill town where he resides. (Even mill president Bly Emberson tolerates, and claims to appreciate, getting an upsetting dose of reality from this old man [93].) When workers embark on their unprecedented factory walkout and march through Dunmow, the elderly Schermerhorn can only stand in his doorway and wish them well. Like this character, Dargan saw herself as too feeble to physically join strikers’ marches. In a 1933 letter to a “Dr. Muste,” Dargan (who was 64 at the time) claimed that “my health has been so precariously balanced for the last twenty-five years that excursions into the field of actual battle result in dangerous illness. I must go again, however, if I finish the book I am trying to write [A Stone Came Rolling]. And writing seems to be the only way left me of contributing to the movement” (Letter to “Dr. Muste.” 6 June 1933).80 In a similarly self-effacing vein, she lamented in the same year to Alice Stone Blackwell that “it’s awful not to do anything towards ending the agony of our rotten system, and this [novel writing] seems to be the only way I can help. Or think I’m helping” (Dargan put two emphatic lines under the word think).81 Like Dargan, Schermerhorn uses art to make a modest, yet worthy artistic contribution to the revolutionary movement. Significantly, his art—translations of modern revolutionary Spanish poetry—does not draw on his own intellectual perspective as much as it simply serves as a conduit for (working-class) “voices that sing and are young” (359). Despite his broad, liberal understanding of his society’s dilemma, Schermerhorn has no pretensions about his art’s significance to the tumult: “I’m only an old tongue with silence just around the corner” (359), he tells Derry. Derry assures him, however, that his old tongue has social value: “when we get you neatly buried we’ll still have to listen to you in the voice of youth [that is, in his translated poetry]” (359). Schermerhorn’s plan to translate Spanish poetry marks one of the rare instances within Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling that shows an acceptable application of artistic ambitions within the then-current context of social crisis. As noted earlier, both novels—particularly through scenes that set up and then unstuff straw-man would-be aesthetes (Ryburn, Pritchett, and

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 174

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

“Nothing is Right, but Everything is Going to Be”

175

Owensby)—repeatedly point out the impotence or ideological confusion of narrow-minded or reactionary artists. Do Dargan’s own novels fit anywhere into this multifaceted critique of art? On the one hand, Dargan’s prose implies the guiding force of an artistically/politically thoughtful and ambitious author who clearly transcends the novels’ several internal burlesques of other artists. On the other hand, Dargan deliberately sets up artistic standards that effectively ask readers to exclude her novels from the highest echelons of timeless art. Likely, Dargan in writing these novels did not (and felt that she could not) aspire to create art that would completely transcend its sociohistorical context. Although she put considerable literary craft into her novels, she also compromised their literary quality (as she herself seems to readily acknowledge) with considerable material that can only be called propaganda. In a letter to Alice Blackwell from early 1935 (when A Stone Came Rolling was completed but not yet published), Dargan, perhaps sensing a conflict in her new novel between aesthetic and political impulses, commented, “I suppose I shall have to be a ‘propagandist’ for the rest of my life, as I can’t bring myself to write in the tradition anymore. If we can’t put the economic change over without dropping art and literature temporarily, I think we ought to drop them and all heave together to ‘put it over’” (5 Jan. 1935).82 Ishma’s vindictive dismissal of the writer Mrs. Owensby—on the grounds that her literary exploitation of social strife would be irrelevant in a post-revolutionary world—might also speak to Dargan’s mixed feelings about her own legacy as a writer. If workers (and sympathetic intellectuals) could truly “heave together to ‘put it over,’” then Dargan’s novels, having perhaps played a small role in breaking down middle-class resistance to socialism, would prove ephemeral relics of a dystopic past.83

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 175

6/22/2006 8:54:36 AM

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 176

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

Notes

Notes to the Introduction 1. Draper explains that, prior to 1929, “trade unions had never been able to gain a foothold in this economic and social soil, though a few had tried” (5). During the 1920s, various factors set the stage for growing economic unrest in areas of the South dominated by the textile industry. Chesnut reports that “tensions [in industrial labor] were exacerbated by an agricultural recession which gripped the South well before the Great Depression, and had an effect on millworkers as well by creating an oversupply of labor and driving down wages” (27). Further, while a high demand for textiles during World War I had brought relative prosperity, “not as much could be said for the twenties, when demand was gutted because of overseas competition and a simultaneous rise in the hemline of the average skirt from midcalf all the way up to the top of the knee” (Watkins Hungry 192). 2. Communist Party funds for this Southern campaign were so limited that the second organizer had already had to return home (Draper 9). 3. The exact circumstances of Aderholt’s shooting have never been determined (Salmond 72). At any rate, with Aderholt’s death, “the Gastonia community and the Loray management now had their martyr” (Salmond 74). 4. Protesting these impending executions became a rallying point for liberals and radicals alike, much as Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial had earlier. After a lengthy trial (and then a second one after the first ended in a mistrial), the defendants, who were free on bail, all fled to Russia. 5. For a detailed account of Wiggins’ death, as well as left and liberal responses to it, see Salmond 128-31. 6. In particular, Margaret Larkin praised and published Ella May’s songs in the Nation and New Masses. (These articles were “Ella May’s Songs” [The Nation 9 Oct. 1929: 382-3] and “The Story of Ella May” [New Masses Nov. 1929: 3-4]). Larkin, who heard Wiggins sing only once, at a union picnic (Salmond 113), was a “musician, writer, and member of the Worker’s Music League” (Romalis 91).

177

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 177

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

178

Notes to the Introduction

7. Salmond reports that The Daily Worker routinely distorted actual aspects of the strike in the interest of making effective propaganda (36, 41, 66). Of course, much reportage about Gastonia fell between the two extremes of the Gastonia Gazette and the Daily Worker. Urgo notes that “the events in North Carolina were given extensive treatment in the New Masses, including political analyses, eyewitness accounts, poetic interpretations, and excerpts from Gastonia novels. ‘The attention of sympathetic writers was directed to Gastonia not merely by the New Masses,’ however, ‘but also by the general tenor of reporting in liberal periodicals such as the Nation, the New Republic, and the Outlook and Independent.’ The liberal press, although hardly supportive of revolution, did not like to see the capitalist state supported by such blatant uses of power” (66-7). 8. I occasionally use the term “Gastonia novel” as a usefully concise way of referring to one or more of these novels. At the same time, I recognize that these novels—particularly the ones by Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan— encompass stories that are far broader than this term suggests. 9. I use the qualifier “potential” here because the author largely determines the degree to which an “authentic” working-class voice emerges in a novel. In later, more detailed discussions, I attempt to evaluate the degree of sensitivity each author brings to working-class experience. 10. Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan probably would not have written these novels without the precedent of the strike to provide an appropriately revolutionary target for the narrative to aim at. Still, in the resulting novels, this strike only appears near the end of narratives that also depict earlier conditions of mountain life, factors behind migrating to mill villages, and years of mill-village life prior to the attempt to better conditions through collective action. The socioeconomic dynamics in the relatively localized and self-determined mountain communities provide a strong contrast with the dynamics later encountered in the more stratified and economically complex mill villages. For various reasons, my study omits the novels by Vorse, Anderson, and Rollins. My particular interest is in the sympathetic explorations of working-class culture that unite the novels by Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan—not in comprehensively surveying all six of the novels that happen to reference the same historical event. In contrast to the novels by Page, Dargan, and Lumpkin, Vorse’s Strike! uses the vantage points of northern journalists and organizers. As its blaring title suggests, Strike! deals almost entirely with the dramatic events of 1929. Although Vorse’s novel includes many representations of folk music (and even a character, Mamie Lewes, based on Ella May Wiggins), its aesthetic complexity does not compare favorably with the novels I have chosen. Joseph Urgo’s assessment concurs with my own: “Strike! is by no means a good novel. It reads tediously and is repetitive, and it includes entirely too many events to allow it a necessary coherence” (69). Because Rollins’ novel moves the Gastonia events to a

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 178

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

Notes to the Introduction

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

179

northern location, he does not deal with the particulars of Southern working-class culture that unite the novels by Page, Lumpkin, and Dargan. The available materials related to each author and text (and, of course, my sense of their relevance) has greatly influenced each chapter’s shape and scope. Of my three authors, only Page has been the subject of a book-length study (Christina Baker’s In a Generous Spirit, a “first-person biography” that interweaves various oral interviews and written texts). Thus, the chapter on Page draws most heavily on biographical materials in an attempt to explain this author’s perspectives towards various types of culture in Gathering Storm. Chapters on Lumpkin and Dargan also offer considerable biographical information but are more speculative about the relationship between this information and the authors’ fiction. Due in part to accidental and intentional destruction of papers, relatively little biographical information exists on Dargan and Lumpkin. The term “culture” has both broad and focused connotations in my study. I use specific cultural texts to shed broader light on various generic cultural forms, examining how these forms may be transformed to reflect changing cultural and socioeconomic contexts while still exhibiting degrees of formal or ideological continuity with tradition. I also use specific texts and genres to make observations on broader systems of belief. Although my study does not deal with it, Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker portrays an Appalachian woman, a talented woodcarver, who migrated with her family to Detroit during World War II. By examining the way that an encounter with industrialism transforms Gertie Nevels’ woodcarving, this novel provides one compelling example of how fictional representations of material expression may be used to provide a radical critique of capitalist modes of production. (Although this novel was published in 1954, scholars of working-class literature have linked it thematically to 1930s proletarian fiction.) Labor historian and folklorist Archie Green proposes the widely encompassing term “laborlore” to characterize the many ways that labor experiences may be inscribed into communally accessible forms: “Laborlore, broadly conceived, covers expressivity by workers themselves and their allies: utterance, representation, symbol, code, artifact, belief, ritual. Such expansiveness cuts through conventional schemes that layer culture as well as divide it ideologically” (Wobblies 7). Arguing against a conception of working-class culture as necessarily oriented towards liberating class-consciousness, Green cogently observes that “laborlore messages can be oracular as well as irrational, tawdry, bizarre, paradoxical, platitudinous, or cosmic” (Wobblies 6). “[The] transfer of New England textile capital into southern mills was the result of a number of factors, including the proximity of raw materials, cheap water power, lower taxes, and cheap nonunion labor, but the greatest of these attractions was the large untapped source of cheap labor. It was

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 179

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

180

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

Notes to the Introduction estimated that in 1897 the cost of labor was 40 percent lower in the South than in New England, and the average working day was 24 percent longer” (Eller 124-5). “Just as changing land ownership patterns pushed some mountain families off the land and into burgeoning cities and towns, the promise of steady employment and a cash income pulled others into the mines and mills [.  .  .]. The ‘push-pull’ effect resulted in the transformation of the mountain labor force from a predominantly agrarian to an increasingly industrial or semi-industrial character” (Eller 121). Cook’s study examines the literary treatment of poor Southern whites more generally, with occasional focuses on the mountaineer as a particular subgroup of this literary type. Earlier mill employees had tended to come from the nearby farming and sharecropping population. The arrival of “mountain folks” came later: “The transition from rural to urban paternalism was not a major one for the nearby sharecroppers and tenants; but for the mountain folk the move was a bitter one, from an independent existence in a society where poverty was the rule to a servile position in a society where poverty was the exception, and they could easily witness the luxury of other classes who fattened off their labor” (Cook 87). As discussed in the Dargan chapter, Dargan’s Ishma behaves in a decidedly reactionary way at the end of Call Home the Heart but returns in the sequel, A Stone Came Rolling, with a renewed commitment to the class struggle. Page’s Marge has an older brother who leaves home and becomes involved with Socialists in a Northern city. He initiates Marge’s radical education by mailing her books. Lumpkin’s John is exposed to radicalism through friendship with an older weaver who seems to have learned it for himself by working in Northern mills. Dargan’s Ishma comes to understand communism through conversing with a local doctor and, later, reading the books he recommends. Although many additional circumstances also explain the radicalization of these characters, the above factors are ones that tend to set them off from their typical peers the most. The fear that a rapid influx of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants was eroding America’s moral, political, and intellectual foundations extended back considerably before the 1920s and 1930s. An 1890 book by the prominent social reformer Josiah Strong entitled Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis described the “typical immigrant” as “a European peasant, whose horizon has been narrow, whose moral and religious training has been meager or false, and whose ideas of life are low. Not a few belong to the pauper and criminal classes. [.  .  .  .] Moreover, immigration not only furnishes the greater portion of our criminals, it is also seriously affecting the morals of the native population” (“Perils” 247). The association of Eastern European immigrants with radical ideologies strengthened through the

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 180

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

Notes to the Introduction

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

181

early decades of the twentieth century. While the American Socialist Party had had many native-born members in the first decade of the twentieth century, many of these members left in the next decade: “As a result of losing the bulk of its native-born and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ supporters who resented its opposition to the war and opposed the Bolshevik revolution, the Socialist party essentially became a party of immigrants based in a few midwestern and eastern states” (Lipset 144). Thus, Americans began to associate socialist ideology more strongly with foreign-born immigrants. The later American CP (formed in 1919) “was made up largely of non-English-speaking federations” (Lipset 144). The dominance of foreign-born Party members continued into the early 1930s: “official party data indicate that in 1933, as much as 70 percent of the membership was still foreign-born” (Lipset 222). (This does not mean, however, that the majority of Eastern European immigrants actively supported socialism or communism. Lipset and Marks show that most of these immigrants actually had various incentives for more conservative political affiliations [145-6].) The massive 1926 textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey, for example, involved “Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Germans” (Weisbord “Passaic”). A letter to the New Masses offers similar evidence of the correlation between ethnicity and exploitation. Doris M. Rogers, a Virginia reader, quotes an advertisement seeking investments for “a Power Company in the Carolinas”: “There is no city-bred unrest. Being 99% native born, there are no unAmerican ideas of shirking on the job or restriction of output. Instead, there is steadfast loyalty, ready, willing, intelligence and a full measure of initiative to get ahead” (22). During the slightly later mid-1930s Popular Front era, leader of the American CP Earl Browder would espouse this view, frequently proclaiming, “Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism.” Pope concludes that most strikers walked off the job as a way of directly protesting specific grievances, not with a conception of being part of a wider movement that would completely overhaul social relations. He believes that “the Communists came [.  .  .] at a moment when some channel for expressing resentment was needed, and many of the workers accepted blindly the aid proffered. It is doubtful that any considerable number of the Loray workers knew clearly at the outset that the N.T.W.U. was a fighting unit of Communism, or, if they did know, that they understood clearly the aims and strategies of Communism. The fact that it was a union leading a strike was more important to them than its political complexion; Southern textile workers have habitually thought of unions as fighting units in time of strike rather than as bases for continuous industrial relations” (261). The following excerpt from V. I. Lenin’s 1905 essay “Socialism and Religion” provides a concise summary of the sort of evaluation of religion that

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 181

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

182

Notes to the Introduction the Gastonia novels repeatedly dramatize: “Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. [.  .  .  .] The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth” (available: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/ dec/03.htm). Such Marxist ideologies likely predisposed the Gastonia novelists to see religion primarily as a factor in oppression. Some recent scholars, however, have proposed a contrasting view of religion’s complex role in earlytwentieth-century mill-village culture. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987), a sociological and historical study that is the collaborative work of six scholars, examines the same cultural terrain as the Gastonia novels, but with a far greater concern for objective balance and historical accuracy. It offers evidence that religion provided mill folks with a resource from which to “[fashion] tools of resistance from established cultural forms” (Hall Family 221-2): Religion, like music and the practice of traditional medicine, combined individual distinction with a powerful sense of community. [.  .  .  .] Millhands’ habits and beliefs were more than remnants of a rural past; they were instruments of power and protection, survival and self-respect, molded into a distinctive mill village culture. Sometimes that culture simply defended workers against condescension and economic hardship. At other times, it bred a spirit of independence that threatened the village’s purpose as an institution of labor control. (Hall 178-80) In particular, forming small, independent religious sects gave mill workers a way to resist mill owners’ attempts to regulate every aspect of their lives: By and large, mill village ministers opposed collective action. But independent and holiness churches, to which mill workers flocked in the 1920s and 1930s, sometimes sheltered the disaffected, and evangelicalism remained a resource upon which strikers could draw. [.  .  .  .] Like slaves in the Old South, Piedmont

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 182

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

Notes to Chapter One

183

textile workers turned to Old Testament images of bondage, transcendence, and release. (Hall Family 220) 27. Initially, the CPUSA expressed little interest in using music as a revolutionary weapon. It was far more interested in literature (including drama). While the Party attempted to discover, educate, and promote budding workingclass writers (particularly through its John Reed Clubs, formed in 1929), no comparable support channels existed for American folk musicians. Early Communist forays into setting radical ideas to music focused on creating an American counterpart to the socialist workers choruses that had been proven effective in Europe (Lieberman 30). 28. Although Wiggins was “portrayed by the union as a pious widow, she was in fact an independent woman who took back her maiden name and had a child by her cousin Charlie Shope after her husband disappeared” (Hall Family 227). 29. Draper provides a concise explanation of the “periods” theory that the CP was endorsing at the time: “The first [period], the theory went, beginning with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and ending with the German defeat of 1921 or 1923, depending on the source, had been a period of ‘acute revolutionary crisis.’ Then came the second period of capitalist recovery or, as it was called in Communist terminology, ‘partial stabilization.’ The third period was somewhat prematurely proclaimed in 1928 as the renewal of the ‘revolutionary upsurge,’ taking up where the first one had left off ” (3). 30. Though the songs of Ella May Wiggins are the best remembered, others were also sung. Another female activist-worker, Daisy McDonald, wrote several strike songs, as did an eleven-year-old female part-time worker named Odell Corley. And, Wiley notes, “that the strikers composed more songs than the twelve that have survived in print is certain” (90). Further, as the Gastonia novels and historical sources document, workers also sang many older songs as commentary on their current situation (Salmond 63). 31. Seeger included “Mill Mother’s Lament” on his 1956 album American Industrial Ballads (Folkways FH 5251). 32. Although Guthrie surely hoped, when he wrote this introduction in the early 1940s, that publication of this proposed anthology would provide inspiration for union building at that time, ultimately Hard Hitting was not published until 1966.

Notes for Chapter One 1. My biographical material draws heavily on Christina Baker’s In a Generous Spirit, an invaluable “first-person biography” of Page that interweaves Baker’s own 1987-1991 interviews with Page with the work of five previous interviewers and with documents culled from Page’s private and public writings. Baker’s work “[merges] [.  .  .] Page’s voices into a single autobiographical

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 183

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

184

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

Notes to Chapter One voice derived from various texts addressed to audiences over a sixty-five-year period” (Baker xxi). Because Baker consistently uses Page’s voice in the first person, I treat her entire text as Page’s verbatim voice, even though (as Baker readily acknowledges) her biography may at times use several sources to create this “single autobiographical voice.” Myra Page was born Dorothy Page Gary. “In the late twenties,” she took the pseudonym Myra Page in order to publish her radical writing without worrying about embarrassing her more conservative family members or jeopardizing her career as a university sociology professor (Baker 109). In her non-radical professional life, she used the name Dorothy Gary, even after marrying John Markey in 1926 (Baker 75). Belle left Page’s family when a white man “who had raped her years before” and left her to raise the resulting child returned and “offered to settle a house for Belle in a nearby town and educate his son.” Page “never saw Belle again,” but “heard she died of tuberculosis. The white man never helped her kids. Her life was exploited and destroyed by the race system” (qtd. in Baker 19-20). This man (like the one who rapes Martha in Gathering Storm) was a “prominent white man in the family where [Belle] worked” (qtd. in Baker 18). Page refuted criticism that she had sacrificed art for politics, claiming that she had written as “an artist first,” but also “for the movement [i.e., the Left],” thus “tend[ing] to write positively on behalf of the workers” (qtd. in Baker 110). Still, reflecting on her novel from old age, Page conceded that she had overused the device of introducing political ideas through long dialogues: “Now I would remove those discussions. After all, people in life don’t talk so long; conversation comes in bits” (qtd. in Baker 117). Foley argues that “while she interiorized the white characters more fully than she did the black, Page gave black characters key motivating roles in the plot” (198). As Cook points out, “the relationship between Old Marge and young Marge, the heroine, is almost exactly parallel to that in [Olive Dargan’s] novel [Call Home the Heart]: this old woman too cites scripture for her own purpose and educates her granddaughter in highly antitraditional attitudes to race, poverty, and war” (From 119). Here, Page emphasizes Ole Marge’s active role in choosing and sticking with mill life. In Southern Cotton Mills and Labor, however, she portrays mill life as a trap: It was not difficult to get thousands of Poor Whites to leave the farm for the cotton mill, for the picture given of mill village life was a rosy one, and life on the land was desperately hard [.  .  .  .] Thousands of these new recruits returned, disillusioned, to farming [.  .  .  .] [O]ther thousands had no choice but to remain in

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 184

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

Notes to Chapter One

185

the mills and bequeath to their children and their children’s children the heritage of being “mill hands.” (33-4) 8. In Southern Cotton Mills and Labor, Page discusses such early attempts at textile-worker organization in the 1880s and 1890s, led first by the Knights of Labor and, after 1891, by the newly formed National Union of Textile Workers (not to be confused with the later Communist National Textile Workers Union): “organization was pushed, and many strikes occurred to enforce demands relating to union recognition, higher wages, a ten-hour day and improved working conditions” (71). 9. In Southern Cotton Mills and Labor, Page writes of a friend Marg (sic) she made while doing research in Greenville. Like Gathering Storm’s Marge, Marg “thought and spoke for herself, and few gainsaid her, at least to her face. She belonged to the clan of Allen—feuders and government-fighters—and believed in Direct Action” (22). Page records Marg’s recollection of how she became disgusted by a local sheriff ’s indifference to a thriving house of prostitution in the house next to hers and “made up my mind I’d take th’ law into my own hands. Our family’s used to that” (23). She had gone, gun in hand, to the police office, and told the sheriff that “‘If you doan clean up that bad house before nex Sadday, I will. My gun’s ready. And what’s more,’ her mountain eyes glittered happily as she told this, ‘what’s more, every blue coat ’n every brass button I see, them’s my target.’ ‘And that’s how I cleaned up Selby,’ Marg concluded” (23). Page characterized talking to Marg as a “tonic” for other depressing encounters with more passive/pious mill workers (22). 10. At one point in the novel, Tom sarcastically lists other potentially repressive tenets: “Blessed are the poor! Turn the other cheek; Servant, love your master; and all the rest” (261). 11. Text by Isaac Watts, 1707; tune by George F. Root, 1881. 12. Words and music by Robert Lowry, 1864. 13. By James Nicholson, 1872. 14. Aspects of the Crenshaw parlor seem modeled on Page’s own childhood parlor, which “was kept locked and was usually opened only for funerals and weddings. The room, where the little organ was that I played for my grandmother, had a musty odor that I can smell even yet” (qtd. in Baker 112). (This parlor was also the site of a defining trauma in Page’s life, where she and her brother were taken and told that they could no longer associate with a close black friend: “Our friendship with Tom and the terrible way it ended left a deep impression on me. It created a drive in my life to find a solution to the race problem so that people could live together as brothers and sisters” [qtd. in Baker 113]). Young Marge’s ability to play by ear also reflects Page’s imaginative identification with her protagonist. Page recalled that when her aunt “heard [her] making up tunes, she ran down the stairs and said, ‘Stop! Don’t improvise. Play the music as it is written’” (qtd. in Baker 14). For Page, Young Marge’s ability, like her own, signifies

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 185

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

186

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Notes to Chapter One the potential to transcend the bounds of established (in this case printed) conventions. As for Ole Marge, whatever pleasure she has gotten from a lifetime of singing such hymns has failed to soften her view towards class exploitation in the only world she knows. She stays focused on her worldly bitterness even in her dying moments. Sal, hoping her fading mother might have a vision of the Promised Land, asks, “Gona be peaceful ovah thar?” “Doan see nuthin’,” Ole Marge replies. Before dying, she reiterates her hatred for the mills that “took all, give nuthin’” and reminds Young Marge of her promise to fight this labor system (100). Likewise, in Southern Cotton Mills and Labor, Page observes that during revival time “you could hear the wails and hallelujahs mingled with [the mill’s] rhythmic growls” (20). “The cataclysm of the Civil War destroyed the slave-holding system, but the Negroes soon found that while their status had changed from that of slaves to that of day laborers and tenant farmers, most of the evils of their former life remained, and fresh ones had developed” (Page Southern 41). William Frances Allen provides an early example of such an assessment of spirituals as tragic yet politically non-threatening in his preface to the 1867 Slave Songs of the United States: “The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves could, of crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull, daily misery, which covered them as hopelessly as the fog from the rice swamps. On the other hand, the words breathe a trusting faith in rest for the future—in ‘Canaan’s air and happy land,’ to which their eyes seem constantly turned” (xix). Page later provides a one-page description of the Tuesday-night Back Row dance (63). Although she does not criticize this dance, she does not suggest that it has a serious function beyond reinforcing the group’s communal unity. “Over thirty revolts of the Negro slaves against slavery occurred in the south before the Civil War, but these revolts were local and spasmodic uprisings of desperate men, and were ruthlessly crushed” (Page Southern 41). For Page’s representations of George’s mother and father, see 120-2 and 168, respectively. Page does, however, show that wartime oratory temporarily convinces idealistic blacks—including George—that “they have shared in the country’s benefits, and they must share in its hour of trial” (169). Page, in fact, “became friends” with DuBois after he published her article “Colorblind” in Crisis, the magazine he edited from 1910 to 1934 (qtd. in Baker 110). In a later chapter, Page depicts the older brothers of Marge and Martha—Tom and Fred, respectively—also meeting and struggling to overcome racial barriers. Conveniently, they meet in New York City while both are dockworkers

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 186

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

Notes to Chapter One

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

187

involved with the “wobblies” (Industrial Workers of the World, or I.W.W.). Tom’s struggle is not aided by music, but by the “pamphlets and books” that his friend Jake, a staunch wobbly, “left conveniently about” (83). In Tom’s case, a dramatic event—Fred saves his life in a work accident—generates the emotional appeal that pushes him to shed “the old emotional antagonism” (85). The recruiter had assured him that “‘Niggers ’n white folks doan mix’” in the mill village either (15). Similarly, in Southern Cotton Mills and Labor, while Page generally praises Marg’s shrewd analysis of mill society, she takes exception to Marg’s belief that exploitative mill owners will “get theirs [i.e., go to hell] when they die”: “‘Well, that idea doan satisfy me,’ I replied, and we were off on an argument” (24). Bellamy’s 1888 text was “written in a mode of utopian romance, envisioning a better future world in which the establishment of socialism would have cured the many social and economic ills that were being produced by turn-of-the-century American capitalism” (Booker Modern 1-2). In her sociological study, Page noted a similarly limited book selection in the “library-on-wheels” that visited some Southern mill villages each week: “the books offered consist only of popular fiction and children’s stories. There are no economic and sociological books at all, or books dealing with labor and political topics [.  .  .  .] Among the men, western and detective stories are popular, while stories of ‘love and adventure’ are much read by both men and women” (Southern 56). Music by Joe Hayden; lyrics by Theodore H. Metz (both white). Metz was “the bandleader for a popular minstrel group, the McIntyre and Heath Minstrels” (Reublin). This song implores the listener to put on a “bran’ new gown” and come to the “hot time in the old town”: “there’ll be girls for ev’ry body” and “you’ve got a rabbit’s foot to keep away de hoodoo.” McSherry notes that “The Spanish and Cubans heard this song so often some thought it was the American National Anthem.” African-American poet James Weldon Johnson also characterized this song, “made popular by the colored regimental bands during the Spanish-American War,” as so powerfully linked in the American mind to patriotism that it “for a while disputed for place with Yankee Doodle; perhaps, disputes it even today” (13). As historian Frank Freidel notes, “The charge up San Juan Hill and its flanking outpost, Kettle Hill, seemed in 1898 to be one of the most heroic deeds in American military history [.  .  .  .] In the retelling, the battle seemed something of a skylark, almost comic in nature, obscuring the grim and desperate struggle that bloody day” (143). When doing research in mill villages, Page encountered this saying frequently (Southern 19).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 187

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

188

Notes to Chapter One

33. As Eric Porter notes, while African American political organizations “promoted [jazz] as a vehicle for community building in the 1910s and 1920s,” “many members of Left organizations maintained an elitist disdain for popular music during the 1920s and 1930s” (396). Porter locates an important shift in the CPUSA’s stance towards black popular music at 1937, when “the Daily Worker began publishing laudatory articles about jazz” (396). 34. As one such example of jazz being used to further the cause of racial integration, Porter cites Los Angeles’ Community Symphony Orchestra, “wherein [in the early 1950s] black and white musicians, classical and jazz players alike, presented public rehearsals to promote the cause of integration” (397). 35. This is the final of four verses. This song, alternately titled “Aunt Dinah’s Quilting Party” or “Seeing Nellie Home,” was copyrighted 1867, lyrics by J. Fletcher, music by Frances Kyle. 36. Edwin Greene published “Sing Me To Sleep” in 1902. 37. Gellert had collected this song from “a veteran of the World War and former Pullman Porter now tenant farmer in North Carolina near Hendersonville” and speculated that “he may have picked it up elsewhere. He didn’t remember” (11). 38. An earlier section of Page’s novel portrayed lynching as a horribly twisted social phenomenon that may falsely give members of a white community the sense that they are protecting themselves against what is posited as a common racial threat. Later in the novel, white as well as black union organizers face the threat of lynching and white and black unionists alike unite to protect them. 39. Michael Denning notes that “since Gellert protected the anonymity of the singers, his collections were controversial, and folklorists who had never heard such frankly political songs accused him of fabricating them. It was not until the 1980s that Gellert’s recordings and field notes became available, vindicating his extraordinary work” (356). 40. This meeting also includes fiddling by “Ole man Hollis,” at whose house Marge rents a room (334-5). 41. In her memoir, A Radical Life, Vera Buch Weisbord, an organizer of the Gastonia strike, verifies an “attempt to poison Mrs. Wiggins’ water supply” (218). 42. Weisbord asks, Was it for her ballads that [Ella May Wiggins] was singled out to be killed? Practically all of the women strikers sang ballads. But Ella Mae [sic] was more than that. She understood immediately without argument the value of our union [the NTWU (National Textile Workers Union)] principle of racial equality. What is more, she set about of her own accord to organize the

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 188

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

Notes to Chapter One

189

black people in Bessemer City, where she lived. Even more than Communism, it was the appeal to the black people, and especially her role in their organization, that incensed mill owners and like-minded people in the South. I am certain it was as an organizer of the Negroes that Mrs. Wiggins was killed. (Radical 260)

43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

John A. Salmond has concluded that, in reality, “whether Ella May was deliberately murdered on the specific orders of the mill management or simply the tragic victim of a mob slaying can never be known [.  .  .  .] Deliberate or not, her shooting had made her a martyr, a symbol of the deeper meaning of the Gastonia struggle” (131). As I discuss further in my chapter on Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread, this song subtly parodies “Little Mary Phagan,” its source of melodic inspiration. Indeed, as Salmond notes, the Gastonia Daily Gazette, “the mouthpiece of the Gaston County mill owners,” was, in the heat of the workers’ uprising, “unbridled in the violence of its antistrike invective” (23). The “New Yorkbased Daily Worker, which debuted in 1924 with the financial backing of various Communist-led groups, was “the most important literary-political expression of the Communist movement.” Those behind the paper aspired to a wide popular readership among workers (as Page’s presentation here suggests it should and did have), but factional dissent within the paper’s ranks often hindered this goal (Buhle 174). Like Marge and Tom, Page and her husband, John, drove to this convention “in August, 1929, near the end of the Gastonia strike” (qtd. in Baker 114). Written (in French) in 1887 by Eugéne Pottier, a French worker-poet, and set to a “tune [.  .  .] composed in 1888 by a Belgian industrial worker, Pierre de Geyter,” it was later translated into English by Charles H. Kerr (Wilczynski 260). Page quotes Kerr’s translation. On the one hand, as Marge reflects, the uprising seemed to ended in defeat: “Ella May gone  .  .  .  .  .  The strike called off  .  .  .  .  The Union temporarily driven underground” (364 ellipses in original). On the other hand, as another worker remarks, “we won the five-hour cut in the work-week for all mills in Gaston County, with no cut in pay [.  .  .  .] ’N they let up on the stretch-out too” (365). Further, “we got our Union started, ’n we’ve learned better how to stick together, white ’n black” (365). Tom’s optimistic assessment, informed—like Page’s—by a relatively sophisticated background in organizing, is that “every strike that unites the workers’ ranks is a step forward for us” (366). In the summer of 1928, upon completing her PhD, Page visited the Soviet Union with her husband, John Markey. To Page, this country’s progress since the 1917 workers’ revolution in creating a classless society, “had come

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 189

6/22/2006 8:54:37 AM

190

Notes to Chapter Two to symbolize ‘going forward’” (qtd. in Baker 94). This trip, which included visiting a “labor camp” for orphaned children, “which was supposed to be educational,” reinforced Page’s optimism about this country’s socio-political reforms: “The Soviet Union had its ugliness and poverty and a real task before it, but it was on its way. Beauties were created consciously and collectively along with a generally better standard of living. For anyone to whom social beauty is the highest form of art, the Soviet Union was a spiritual experience” (qtd. in Baker—who here paraphrases one of Page’s 1929 letters 96).

Notes to Chapter Two 1. This title alludes to a line from one stanza of the “Cotton Mill Rhyme” song that appears in To Make My Bread: “You factory folks who sing this rhyme / Will surely understand / The reason why I love you so / Is I’m a factory hand” (TMMB 259). 2. Various critics have failed to recognize the centrality of this pre-industrial section to the novel’s overall political thrust. The influential leftist critic V. J. Jerome, reviewing the novel just after its publication, felt that Lumpkin’s “idyllic, pastoral settings ran the danger of a ‘certain fetishism of local color’” (qtd. in Sowinska xxii). Walter Rideout, considering this novel some twenty years later, similarly slighted the political importance of the mountain setting, referring to the novel as “local color fiction performed with a radical purpose” (174). Sylvia Jenkins Cook qualified Rideout’s formulation (but only slightly), concluding that To Make My Bread, of all the novels that incorporated the Gastonia strike, “is closest to Rideout’s stereotype of ‘localcolor fiction done with a radical purpose’” (110). More perceptively, Richard Gray argues that Rideout’s local-color label “does not quite do justice to the power of Lumpkin’s portrait of a mountain community disrupted by change. Nor does it catch just how much the novel is fired into life by the writer’s sense of both the conflicts and the connections between the old culture and the new—as her characters struggle to come to terms with ways of life that are not only oppressive but unfamiliar, and move hesitantly toward different forms of belief ” (312). Like Gray, I advocate reading the novel with careful attention to the development of culture from mountains to mill. Read properly, the novel’s mountain section engenders sensitivity to the distinct material and cultural patterns of life that industrialism disrupts and forces into transformation. Likely, any sense of nostalgia or “local color” derived from Lumpkin’s portrayal of mountain life reflects the tainting influence of a literary tradition that had indeed romanticized or stereotyped mountain life. In fact, Lumpkin does not advocate preserving mountain culture within the context of isolation, even if erasing the advancing inroads of modernization were possible.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 190

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

Notes to Chapter Two

191

3. Suggesting a Marxist- rather than feud-oriented logic of retribution, this slain leader, Sam McEachern, happens to be the man who had shot Kirk earlier. 4. Lumpkin’s depiction of the violence that occurred during the strike essentially remains true to actual events during the Gastonia strike. (See Liston Pope’s account of this history [264–73].) She does, however, alter certain historical details. Lumpkin’s representation depicts the man killed during the raid on the Textile Union’s headquarters as the thug-like leader of a group of citizen-deputies. In reality, the slain man was Gastonia’s chief of police. Lumpkin also places Bonnie’s death before that of this deputy, while, in reality, her historical counterpart, Ella May Wiggins, was killed in midSeptember, nearly five months after Aderholt. Besides simply compressing action to make a more gripping narrative, both of these changes tend to align the reader’s sympathies with the strikers’ cause. 5. While the novel ends with events that are analogous to ones that occurred in Gastonia in the summer and fall of 1929, one of Lumpkin’s early outline for the novel indicates her plan to extend the novel’s chronology into 1930, showing “bread lines—misery—starvation.” Still, her note that the narrative is to end with “new slight hope” (emphasis in original) essentially conforms to the final novel’s ending mood. 6. By the end of the 1930s, Lumpkin had distanced herself from the Communist beliefs that had informed To Make My Bread and A Sign for Cain (1935), her only two “proletarian” novels. Particularly during the Cold War and McCarthy era, Lumpkin vehemently renounced her past role in promoting Communism (characterizing herself as an unfortunate victim of ideological seduction). She testified during the 1950s against former Communist associates and later wrote and lectured about the evils of Communism. While she had used her radical novels to present Marxism as an antidote to religious fatalism, she later embraced and advocated conservative Christianity as an antidote to the perceived Communist threat to America’s social and moral order. Besides her own paranoia and shame about past activities related to Communism, pressure from conservative family members also seems to have influenced Lumpkin’s reticence about her political leanings during the thirties, even after the repressive Cold War climate had thawed. Certain members of the next two Lumpkin generations—including some who had political aspirations in the South—tried to discourage anything that might attract publicity to Grace’s past Communist ties. While negotiating with the University of South Carolina in Columbia about establishing a collection of her papers there, Lumpkin expressed her concern to the university’s Director of Libraries, Kenneth Toombs: “I think I told you about my sister’s children and about her daughter, my niece, calling me on the telephone to object to my giving the Collection to the University there. Their objection

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 191

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

192

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

Notes to Chapter Two is that there is no use calling attention again to the fact that I was with the Communists. Let people forget it. John Lumpkin [a nephew] seems to feel all right about it. In fact he wrote me that he was proud of me” (15 Oct. 1971). This same John Lumpkin affirmed Grace’s assessment of her family’s mixed reaction to her leftist past, describing Grace and her sister Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin as “‘brilliant women’ who caused the family some consternation” (notes from a telephone conversation between John Lumpkin and USC archivists 27 September 1994). The resulting materials in the Grace Lumpkin collection, which Lumpkin probably selected herself, gloss over her “Communist Phase” and focus instead on her “Return to God” (both terms that Lumpkin used in her correspondence with archivists). Hall reveals that Lumpkin’s sister Katherine, who was also deeply involved in radical activities in the 1920s and 1930s, “destroy[ed] not only much of her private correspondence but Grace’s diary as well” (“Open” 119). In attempting to extrapolate broad insights into Grace’s development through her younger sister’s memoir, I recognize that Grace encountered pivotal family events at a different developmental stage than Katherine— they were born in 1892 and 1897, respectively—and, of course, that every individual responds uniquely to life. Still, Grace herself indicated that Katherine had had some direct influence on her radicalization as a young adult. Interviewed by Jacquelyn in 1974, Grace “described her younger self as an innocent abroad, led astray not so much by the engaging young communists she met in Greenwich Village as by Katharine—who was, she said, ‘always the radical one.’” Hall cautions, however, that Lumpkin had become “so snarled in a web of deception that she had ‘forgotten’ the barest outline of her life. [.  .  .  .  ] Looking back, I see the impossibility, even treachery, of basing my vision of Grace Lumpkin’s life on this encounter in her later years” (“Open” 118). Hall notes that “although the Lumpkins were among the largest slaveowners in [Oglethorpe County, Georgia], the [Lumpkin] house was strictly utilitarian, a far cry from the white-columned mansion of popular myth” (“You Must” 445). Hall describes William as “an obscure lieutenant in the army of salesmen, dispatchers, and ticket sellers that sped the South’s new transportation system along its ever-multiplying tracks” (“You Must” 446). The move occurred in 1909, when Katherine was eleven (Hall “Open” 116). Grace would have been sixteen. Sowinska suggests the earlier important role that the Episcopal church had played in maintaining the family’s sense of prestige: “the fact that the Lumpkins were Episcopalian and had immediately established a connection with the socially elite Trinity Church also helped them gain social acceptance after leaving their native Georgia” (ix). This means of social advancement was less viable in the rural Sand Hills region.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 192

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

Notes to Chapter Two

193

12. As discussed later in this chapter, To Make My Bread also highlights this particular Christian image of being whitened (by Christ’s blood) as somehow incongruous within a setting of poverty. 13. North Carolina historian Duane Oliver wrote down the memories of his mother, who met Lumpkin at some point in the 1920s during Lumpkin’s stay “on Hazel Creek” in the North Carolina mountains—the same creek, Oliver notes, where Horace Kephart had lived while gathering material for his influential sociological study Our Southern Highlanders (1913). Oliver reports that Lumpkin stayed on Hazel Creek (in Swains County) during a time of significant social change: “[E]veryone knew that Ritter Lumber Co. would soon be finishing up its operation on the creek, and the copper mine on [nearby] Eagle Creek had not yet opened, so Grace was there at the beginning of a transitional period during which many people would be forced to leave the creek to find work elsewhere, many in the cotton mills around Gastonia and Kings Mountain. Since she was there not only for a vacation but to gather background material for a story, Miss Lumpkin visited various areas of the creek, seeing how and where people lived.” Oliver includes an anecdote that suggests Lumpkin’s appreciation of an indigenous music tradition that was both circumscribed by poverty and, perhaps, threatened by impending socioeconomic upheaval. While visiting a family whose cabin (like that occupied by Lumpkin’s McClure family) could only be reached by hiking difficult trails, Lumpkin heard a small boy playing “a fiddle he had made from corn stalks. [.  .  .  .  ] The sight of a little, poverty-stricken boy who wanted a fiddle so badly he had made one from corn stalks and learned to play it deeply touched Grace’s heart. She promised to send him one which, to his surprise and joy, she did after she had left the creek” (“Grace”). 14. Her classes included ones in “creative writing and journalism” (Sowinska xi). Sowinska notes that Lumpkin “had been publishing stories in college and other school magazines since 1908, but it was not until her mother’s death in 1925 that she decided to take seriously her career as a writer” (x). Lumpkin herself remarked that, prior to moving to New York, “I liked to write, and wanted to write, but at that time I seemed to be concerned with only two things, the hard details of making a living and enjoying myself with dancing and other pleasures” (qtd. in Gilkes 313). 15. Gilkes notes that “somewhere in this roller-coaster existence she got married. The marriage seems to have ended unhappily” (314). Sowinska’s research uncovers details of this ultimately failed relationship with a man named Michael Intrator. Although the relationship did not last, Intrator—“a fur worker who had grown up on the Lower East Side and had gained some prominence in the Communist-backed unions of the needle trades”—surely influenced the direction of Lumpkin’s developing radicalism: “Intrator was everything Lumpkin was not. He was irreverent toward the CP, which

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 193

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

194

16.

17.

18.

19.

Notes to Chapter Two she worshipped. He was brash, independent, and confident, whereas she, although spirited, constantly needed support and collective affirmation. Intrator was also [  .  .  .  ] a vibrant example of an organic intellectual, a type both valued and romanticized in leftist fiction of the period” (Sowinska xiii, xvi). Katherine notes that she thought privately about the travesties of segregation long before she learned that others had similar views. Her most striking portrayal of ideologically motivated collective action is distinctly negative—that of a white elite, including her own father, who organized the Ku Klux Klan to directly attack attempts to reform the political and social life of the South. Lumpkin’s mother “had been educated in the classics by a beloved Irish tutor and had taught school briefly after the Civil War. Both parents solicited their children towards reading and writing. In the Lumpkin household, books signaled affection; they were also a gateway to the world. Each afternoon, usually under their mother’s tutelage, the children spent an hour reading aloud: the usual suspects—the novels of Thomas Nelson Page, the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the life of Robert E. Lee, but also the works of Charles Dickens and all the great nineteenth-century realists, with their heroes caught up in history’s narrative sweep” (Hall “You Must” 456). Victor Hugo certainly fits into this last group of writers. Victor Hugo’s French novel Les Misérables, published in 1862 and soon available in English translation, was in fact extremely popular among southern soldiers, who widely adopted the name “Lee’s Miserables” for themselves. Historian J. Tracy Powers quotes a Civil War history book from 1869: “Victor Hugo’s work, Les Misérables, had been translated and published by a house in Richmond [Virginia]; the soldiers, in the great dearth of reading matter, had seized upon it; and thus, by a strange chance the tragic story [  .  .  .  ] had become known to the soldiers in the trenches. [.  .  .  .  ] Thus, that history of ‘The Wretched,’ was the pabulum of the South in 1864; and as the French title had been retained on the backs of the pamphlets, the soldiers, little familiar with the Gallic pronunciation, called the book ‘Lees Miserables!’ Then another step was taken. It was no longer the book, but themselves whom they referred to by that name. The old veterans of the army thenceforth laughed at their miseries, and dubbed themselves grimly ‘Lee’s Miserables!’” (Powers inside front cover, no page). Hugo’s short preface to Les Misérables conveys the social concerns that his novel attempts to address: “So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 194

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

Notes to Chapter Two

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

195

social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—In other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.” Clearly, To Make My Bread emerges from a similar assumption that social “law and custom” conspire in “artificially creating hells” on earth. Lumpkin’s novel, however, diverges from Hugo’s in various significant ways, including denying “divine destiny” a role in solving the problems of poverty, hunger, and ignorance. Significantly, while the bread-stealing anecdote imparts a negative insight into the social consciousness of “Granpap” as a young man, Lumpkin complicates this with the fact that the much older Granpap himself is now in prison because of his own illegal effort to keep his family from starving. As Valjean stole bread to feed his hungry relatives, Granpap smuggles whiskey to get the cash needed to buy food. Both Hugo and Lumpkin depict such necessary lawbreaking as symptomatic of the social decay that results from laws that oppress and exploit the poor. Granpap’s lack of retrospective remorse about stealing this bread invites contrast with another important incident in Les Misérables. Having still not fully taken to heart (or even comprehended) the grace shown to him by the bishop, the morally stunted but physically intimidating Valjean instinctively refuses to return a coin to a small, poor boy who has lost it. Afterwards, he agonizes over his own capacity for cruelty. Even more than the effect of the bishop forgiving him, this anguish after his own abuse of power becomes the turning point through which Valjean begins to transform his damaged psyche (see Hugo 1:2). See especially TMMB 185–94. Richard Grey argues that this Confederate rally, as Lumpkin depicts it, exploits “old habits of division” between the North and South to “[serve] the purposes of new kinds of subjection”: “the Confederate flag is being waved over the factories to legitimize them and the oppressive system they require—to give them a peculiarly Southern stamp of approval” (316). In the family’s all-white mountain settlement, there are no circumstances to force Granpap’s latent racism to the surface. Upon the family’s arrival in Leesville, however, Granpap becomes agitated after Emma lets Bonnie accept a drink from a black family’s water pump: “‘They’re niggers, Emma,’ Granpap said. ‘White and black don’t mix’” (144). His current aversion to accepting this small gesture of kindness contrasts ironically with his earlier willingness to steal bread from a black boy to satisfy his own hunger. Though Lumpkin never shows Granpap formally renouncing a belief in white superiority, she suggests his change of heart by showing him, during a later stint as a farmer, gratefully accepting advice on growing cotton from a more experienced black farmer (240). Hugo writes that “In less than three years [Valjean] [  .  .  .  ] had become rich, which is good, and had made all rich about him, which is better.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 195

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

196

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

Notes to Chapter Two [.  .  .  .  ] No one knew anything about his origin, and but little about his start. It was said that he had entered the town with but very little money, a few hundred francs at the most; but with this very small capital, placed at the service of an ingenious idea, and fertilized by regularity and thought, he had made his own fortune and that of the town” (1: 157–8). Exemplifying the ideal of the paternalistic boss, Valjean (who is using the surname Madeleine to hide his convict past) is called “Father Madeleine” by the town’s workers and children (1: 158). The depiction of what is probable, as opposed to merely plausible, in human nature is central to Lumpkin’s socialist-realist literary aesthetic. As Georg Lukács, one of the foremost theorists of socialist realism explains, “a character is typical [  .  .  .  ] when his innermost being is determined by objective forces at work in society. [  .  .  .  ] [T]he determining factors of a particular historical phase are found in [typical characters] in concentrated form” (91). Much later in the novel, Valjean opposes the violent methods of young revolutionaries plotting the overthrow of the French government. At this point Bonnie is “seven and a half years old” (48) and John is about a year younger. The former hymn was written by the English poet William Cowper in the late eighteenth century and the latter by the American evangelist Lewis E. Jones in 1899. Earlier in the text, Lumpkin shows that similar “cleansing-blood” imagery shapes Emma’s unself-conscious thoughts. Determined that her youngest children be properly groomed before the baptism, she reflects, “[John] and Bonnie must wash all over with hot water. For their brother Basil, her oldest son, was to be baptized. She had a feeling that all of them must be cleansed outwardly on the day that Basil became white as snow inwardly, washed clean of his sins by the blood of the Lamb” (53). A representative verse from “Power in the Blood,” the hymn to which Emma refers, asks, “Would you be whiter, much whiter than snow? / There’s power in the blood, power in the blood; / Sin stains are lost in its life giving flow. / There’s wonderful power in the blood.” The chorus that Emma cites proclaims that “There is power, power, wonder working power / In the blood of the Lamb; / There is power, power, wonder working power / In the precious blood of the Lamb.” Likewise, earlier visions of money growing on trees in the mill village were planted in her head by a recruiter for the mill. This image comes from the book of Exodus, in which the Lord promises the Israelites deliverance from their suffering in Egypt “unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey” (3:8). Lumpkin later qualifies the naiveté of Emma’s preconception of the mill: “Her good sense told her that the picture she had might not be true, but some of the things she liked to believe” (138).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 196

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

Notes to Chapter Two

197

33. This “power in the factory” image, and the sense of foreboding that it conveys, might be seen as critiquing a more naively enthusiastic mandate within pre-Depression America of industrialism as America’s new religion. Calvin Coolidge, for instance, after winning the 1924 presidential election, famously proposed that “the man who builds a factory builds a temple. [.  .  .  .  ] [T]he man who works there worships there.” 34. In A Sign for Cain, a proletarian novel written after To Make My Bread, Lumpkin continues to draw attention to how figurative language structures perception—especially for people with relatively little access to formal learning. Most notably, she shows members of a fledgling sharecroppers union drawing courage to withstand threats against them from “We Shall Not Be Moved,” a hymn that depicts “a tree that’s planted by the water” as an image of immovability (Sign 232–3, 270, 275). 35. Actually, Job’s wife suggests that Job, in response to the havoc wreaked on his life, should “curse God and die” (see Job 2:9). Job rejects her suggestion, and thus “in all this did not Job sin with his lips” (2:10). John, in his desire to curse God, is unlike Job. (Most likely, Lumpkin had simply mixed up the details of this story. She might, however, be implying that Job, like John, had in fact wanted to curse God, but had refrained from actually sinning “with his lips.”) 36. Richard Gray also recognizes the religious roots of Bonnie’s radical songwriting: “She becomes the ballad singer for the strike, deploying skills that would have once been used to praise the Lord in celebration of mill workers, in a language that still recalls the hymns and religious rituals of the hills” (317). 37. Considered authoritative in the decades prior to Lumpkin’s novel, Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders (1913) provides important insights into prevalent views of Appalachian sociology. This study, by a man who left his job as a professional librarian in Saint Louis to live in North Carolina’s Appalachian region from 1904 to 1907, “was widely read and praised by people across the country, including those of Southern Appalachia,” and went through eight printings in the following 50 years (Ellison xl). In his 1976 introduction, George Ellison maintained that Kephart’s book remained “the finest regional study yet written by an American” (xlvi). As an influential exposition of Appalachia to the outside world, Kephart’s work foregrounds Lumpkin’s re-presentations of mountain culture—especially the tropes of endemic violence as an essential trait of mountaineers. Violence, Kephart observes, is so commonplace that “that nearly every adult citizen has been directly interested in some murder case, either as principal, officer, witness, kinsman, or friend” (266). “The average highlander,” he writes, “is fiery and combative by nature, but at the same time cunning and vindictive” (415). 38. This verse is taken from Eva Davis’ version of “John Hardy,” quoted in full later in the chapter.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 197

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

198

Notes to Chapter Two

39. The song, recorded in later years by Pete Seeger and Joe Glazer, has become known as “Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine”—a phrase from the song’s final verse. 40. These lyrics come from Ella May’s “Mill Mother’s Lament,” “Chief Aderholt,” and “Toiling on Life’s Pilgrim Pathway”—all written in 1929, the year before Lumpkin’s article (qtd. in Hard Hitting 184, 180, 186). 41. The following full verses (verses 4, 5, 9, and 11) convey some of the social commentary to which I have alluded: We rise up early in the morn And work all day real hard To buy our little meat and bread And sugar, tea and lard. We work from weeks end to weeks end And never lose a day And when that awful pay day comes We draw our little pay. [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  ..  .  .  .  .  .  ] Our children they grow up unlearned No time to go to school Almost before they’ve learned to walk They learn to spin or spool. [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  ..  .  .  .  .  .  .  ] The folks in town who dress so fine And spend their money free Will hardly look at a factory hand Who dresses like you and me. (qtd. in TMMB 259–60) 42. I use the term “complaint song” to refer to a broad type of labor-related song that “complains”—most often with humor and irony, but sometimes bitterly—about hardships and mistreatment associated with work. Such songs are prevalent in Anglo and Irish tradition. In their article “The Southern Textile Song Tradition Reconsidered,” DeNatale and Hinson show that early-twentieth-century mill workers’ occupational songs most often presented hardships through lenses of humor and self-deprecation rather than overt indignation or anger. One such song, “Cotton Mill Colic,” hinted at this common, understated protest strategy in its very title, since “among rural people in North Carolina ‘to colic’ was to make a fuss without taking action” (83). Compared to the majority of songs that DeNatale and Hinson cite, “Cotton Mill Rhyme” is atypically straightfaced in its presentation of hardships. It is thus congruous with Lumpkin’s own absolutely serious blaming of poverty on social oppression.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 198

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

Notes to Chapter Two

199

43. Fittingly, when Lumpkin shows John McClure learning this song from John Stevens many years before the 1929 strike, the words refer to a “Day of Judgment” instead of a “great Revolution.” Still, Lumpkin hints that Stevens’ conception of a “Day of Judgment” might conceal a more radical meaning. When McClure asks Stevens, “Do you believe in God?” Stevens first replies that “it’s best not to ask.” Soon afterwards, however, he meaningfully tells John that he “believes in a Judgment Day” (260). Only years later will he suggest to John that his idea of Judgment Day involves workers, not God, holding owners accountable for their exploitative practices. 44. In his wide-ranging study of the song “Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine,” labor folklorist Archie Green—having considered this same New Masses Lumpkin article—finds it “startling” that Lumpkin, in an era “before the wide academic use of commercial recordings,” carefully directed readers to a specific record (282). He does not speculate on the bearing “John Hardy” might have had on To Make My Bread. He did, however, ask Lumpkin (in an interview conducted less than a year before her death in 1980) if she could elaborate on the connection between “Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme” and “John Hardy”: “[S]he seemed puzzled [  .  .  .  ]. Either I had pushed too far back into time’s cave, or my reference to the radical magazine [New Masses] called up troubled feelings” (311). (As noted earlier, Lumpkin had become extremely politically conservative by this point.) 45. The Carter family released their 1928 recording under the title “John Hardy Was A Desperate Little Man.” (Victor 40190A). As their title suggests, the Carter family version also emphasizes elements of this song that I will highlight as significant to Lumpkin’s sense of the song’s meaning—that a desperate, futile quality (also suggested in Hardy’s “little” size) dooms his outlaw escapade. The version of “John Hardy” that Lumpkin cites in New Masses is a 1924 recording of Eva (not Eve) Davis accompanying herself on fivestring banjo which, according to country-music scholar Dick Spotswood, was the first commercial recording of this ballad ever released (personal correspondence). The two fragments of “John Hardy” that Lumpkin quotes in her novel are quite similar to this record, suggesting that Lumpkin consulted this version while writing her novel. 46. In Richard Meyer’s article on the outlaw as “a distinctive American folktype,” most of the ballads and folktales about well-known American outlaws (Jesse James, Sam Bass, Billy the Kid, and Pretty Boy Floyd) conform to this basic narrative formula. Notably, John Hardy’s crime, unlike those of the above mythologized outlaws, lacks the moral rationale that typically justifies the violent acts of folklore outlaws. As Albert Friedman observes, the nature of Hardy’s crime—in Davis’ version he “killed [his] partner for fifteen cents”—puts him in the category of “bad badman” (392), as opposed to the “moral badman” who is driven to crime by oppressive circumstances and then, Robin Hood-fashion, strikes against the rich to help or avenge the

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 199

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

200

47.

48.

49.

50.

Notes to Chapter Two poor. Given that Lumpkin wants to problematize outlaw ideals as a model for rebellion, John Hardy is an especially apt choice. In the liner notes to his Anthology of American Folk Music (a highly influential compilation of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s that was first released in 1952), collector Harry Smith captures the structural essence of a typical version of “John Hardy” in his own idiosyncratic headline-style “synopsis” of the Carter Family’s recording: “JOHN HARDY HELD WITHOUT BAIL AFTER GUNPLAY. GIRLS IN RED AND BLUE VISIT JAIL. WIFE AT SCAFFOLD.” For an extensive history of “John Hardy” in folklore and fact, as well as multiple versions of the “John Hardy” ballad, see John Harrington Cox and The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. See also Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America (264, 317). This is my own transcription of Davis’ recording. Typically (but not in Davis’ version), each verse ends with a fifth line that repeats the fourth one with modification: e.g., “I saw John Hardy gettin’ away, poor boy / I saw John Hardy gettin’ away.” The historical John Hardy was an African American miner who killed a fellow worker “in a crap-game dispute over twenty-five cents, for which he was hanged at Welch, West Virginia, in January 1894” (Friedman 392). Although, as Cox discusses, the origins of “John Hardy” were entirely distinct from those of “John Henry,” the two were often confused and intertwined in oral tradition. In addition to interrogating “John Hardy,” Lumpkin’s narrative also subtly evokes and critiques a “John Henry”-type valorization of the exceptional individual who attempts to beat the power and speed of machines with muscle power alone. (In “John Henry,” a worker has a contest with a steam-drill operator to see who can tunnel through rock faster. Henry wins, but dies of exhaustion.) Various McClures initially believe that they will be able to work the machines faster than other mill hands, and thus earn a comfortable living where others have failed. Through John Stevens, who is small and crippled but still an excellent weaver, Lumpkin shows the potential for a more progressive relationship with machines. Stevens likes his machines—his only grudge is against mill owners who make workers slaves to machines’ power and speed (258). A supposed correlation between violent songs and an inherently violent culture was often reinforced in sociological writing. The highly influential folksong collector Alan Lomax, put “John Hardy” into the “Murder Ballads” section of his Folk Songs of North America and suggested that the popularity of this song type reflected disproportionate social violence: “wilful [sic] and cold-blooded murders [  .  .  .  ] came naturally to people whose ancestors were Indian fighters, bear hunters, moonshiners and feudists. The practice of violence, formed in necessity, degenerated into the habit of killing for its own sake” (261 emphasis added). In a more nuanced characterization of American outlaw ballads (including “John Hardy”), folklorist Robert

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 200

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

Notes to Chapter Two 201

51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

Winslow Gordon observed in 1927 that they are often morally ambiguous: while the outlaw is not “made a hero,” he is also not shown to be “repentant” (13). Important in relation to the ideological developments that Lumpkin portrays, Hobsbawm observes that social banditry may turn into “genuine revolutionary movements when it becomes the symbol, even the spearhead, of resistance by the whole of the traditional order against the forces which disrupt and destroy it” (27 emphasis added). Thus, banditry “often serves as a precursor” of “major peasant revolution” (28). Although Lumpkin’s novel does not allude to cinema (such allusions would clash with the text’s folk-oriented evocation of mill-village life), the early-twentieth-century popularity of movies with Appalachian plots and settings should still be recognized as an important source of popular-culture preconceptions about mountain life during the time when Lumpkin wrote. J. W. Williamson’s Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films—a compilation of synopses and plot reviews for almost 500 Appalachian-themed films released between 1904 and 1929—reveals that almost one hundred of these films had a feud aspect in the plot, and almost 150 had a moonshine aspect. Lumpkin uses other scenes to suggest an outlaw streak in Kirk’s behavior. As noted earlier, he mounts the preacher’s horse and rides into the middle of a baptism ceremony in a stream, causing confusion that “was the subject of discussion for many years afterward” (64). Unlike Basil, who feels that Granpap’s smuggling of whiskey is a “disgrace,” Kirk argues that Granpap has the right to break the law to feed the family (82). Kirk plans to help Granpap with his dangerous smuggling until Emma pleads with Granpap to leave him behind. Similarly, the Davis version of “John Hardy” emphasizes the grief of people who cared about Hardy. At one point, John learns that Basil has inherited money through his wife’s family and that “the Basil McClures lived in a splendid house which they were buying, and in it was a piano, and much velvet furniture” (291). Although Kirk is undone by his individual problems, Lumpkin hints that he had latent leadership qualities that might have developed had he lived to work in the mill with other family members. After Kirk persuades young John not to shirk his duties in the potato patch, Lumpkin observes that “there were times when Kirk had a way that made people wish to do what he wanted them to do” (90). Soon, however, Granpap will be caught and jailed in “the outside” for smuggling whiskey. Basil, as the oldest remaining male McClure (Granpap, Emma’s father, is a Kirkland), will sell the land to Hal Swain, owner of the local supply store, who in turn sells it to the coming sawmill. Now, people must pay rent to live on the land they had formerly owned. And now, when

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 201

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

202

58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

64.

Notes to Chapter Two a representative of the textile mill—a “finely dressed little man” (135) not unlike Small Hardy—tells the family once again of easy, well-paid work in the mills, they decide to set out for Leesville. Through Hardy’s strikingly depicted receding hairline Lumpkin foreshadows the peddler’s connection to the coming desecration of the forested hills: “When he took off his soft hat a wide forehead showed with hair growing far back. The head looked like a hill, bald on one side with trees growing halfway down on the other” (36). In case the reader still harbors sympathy for the peddler, Lumpkin has him offer to buy John’s dog for the skin, causing John to “[hate] the little man, who showed up evil” (37). Ronald Eller offers useful historical context for the decimation of timber described in To Make My Bread: “Between 1890 and 1920 the lumber barons purchased and cut over huge tracts of mountain timberland, devastating the region’s forests in one of the most frenzied timber booms in American history” (87). Eller explains that “the outside lumber interests were willing to commit the capital for land acquisition, railroad construction, and labor costs, but they expected high rates of production that could not be achieved by selective cutting. Over the next three decades, the production methods used by these companies resulted in rapid removal of almost all of the region’s valuable timber and left the land scarred, burned over, and eroded beyond any level attained with the limited logging practices of the local population” (92). As discussed in previous sections of this chapter, other aspects of the development of John and Bonnie suggest the revision of earlier self-evident religious values. My focus here, however, is on aspects of the novel’s schemata that suggest the revision of an “outlaw” trope. Through a complex chain of events, the impoverished family has sold their land to the local merchant, Hal Swain, who promises them that “as long as he [Hal] owned the place they could stay there rent free” (120). To the McClures’ dismay, Hal soon sells the land to a timber company that then demands payment the McClures cannot afford. This is the sole thing that Basil is shown doing to help his family after they move to Leesville. John’s man-against-man values make him equally disdain being on the receiving end of power. Sometime after the fight with Albert, boys who live in the wealthy section of town throw stones and taunt John, calling him “white trash” (229). Before he can confront them on his own, one boy’s father, a preacher, emerges from the church and forces his son to apologize for all of the boys: “Now [John] felt sympathy for the boy whose father was making a fool of him. It was a silly and foolish place to be” (230). I generally refer to John Stevens simply as “Stevens,” to avoid confusion with John McClure. The obvious confusion created by two closely associated Johns could only be deliberate. By sharing a first name, Stevens

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 202

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

Notes to Chapter Two 203

65.

66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

becomes a symbolic father to McClure—as, perhaps, John Hardy is symbolic father to both. Although John has a close relationship with his grandfather, Granpap Kirkland lacks the longtime personal insight into factory life that gives Stevens’ advice such weight. Stevens mentors John culturally as well as politically. While John never fulfills his early desire to learn fiddle from his grandfather, he enthusiastically “inherits” a song that Stevens has made up about the hard lives of factory hands. Lumpkin includes additional examples indicative of an effort to dissociate heroic courage and physical prowess. Strike-leader Tom Moore, too, is “not a tall man, but his voice was strong and confident” (339). During the strike, when deputies attack the picket line and injure a woman, her husband, Henry, “small as he is,” tries to attack the deputies with his bare hands. “‘We had to hold him back,’” Ora says, “‘by main force’” (360). John thinks of Stevens as “a person who possessed a knowledge of events and people, and in himself kept something hid that he did not give out to everyone but kept it secret because it was precious; knowledge, that was not to be given lightly, or without preparation” (310). The song’s “I” only reappears once in a rhetorical gesture that again asserts first-hand experience: “I’ll tell you what, the factory young / Are really treated mean” (260). As noted elsewhere, Emma’s experience of unrelieved oppression in the mill inspires her to liken the mill’s sound to an ogre’s teeth grinding workers’ bones (219). John recognizes a more hope-inspiring potential in the machines. At this point, he doesn’t yet have the collective outlook that might unlock this potential. As discussed earlier, Robert was shown, as a boy, taking joy in counting the number of lashes received by a chain-gang prisoner. Whereas John’s worldview has been grounded in rural and industrial work, Robert’s has been shaped by his mother’s running of a profitable brothel. Historian Liston Pope suggests the veracity of Lumpkin’s critical representation of a mill welfare worker that primarily serves the interests of capital. By the late 1920s, Gastonia’s Loray mill—the target of the 1929 strike—had established an extensive welfare program designed to integrate the mill into workers’ social lives. Although the intended effect of this welfare program was to personalize the work experience despite the mill’s exceptional size and absentee ownership, “it became increasingly an impersonal force for labor discipline rather than a positive force for social organization. Checking up on absentees from work was one of its major functions, and welfare workers worked so closely with company police that they came to be identified as such in the minds of many workers” (Pope 227). Even after John’s commitment to fighting for communist labor principles is secure, he remains somewhat burdened by contradictory impulses because

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 203

6/22/2006 8:54:38 AM

204

73. 74.

75.

76.

Notes to Chapter Two of his less progressive wife, Zinie. Zinie, a relatively undeveloped character in the novel, has not experienced millwork, since “John had kept her out of the mills, working extra time so that she might not be forced to go in. [.  .  .  .  ] Zinie was a little spoiled” (351). Zinie cannot see the need for a racially integrated union and, in one revealing scene, tells her sister-inlaw Bonnie that “it’s a shameful thing for ye to be going and speaking with niggers” (351). See the book of James 5:1–6. The continuation of this passage tempers such outrage with an admonishment to “be patient therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord” (5:7). Liberals at the time widely believed that a bigoted and anti-Red judicial system had singled out Sacco and Vanzetti as foreigners and self-professed anarchists, framing them for holdups and murders that they did not commit. (Virtually all credible evidence that emerged during their imprisonment suggested their innocence.) Sowinska suggests the importance of the Sacco and Vanzetti case in Lumpkin’s own commitment to radical causes, reporting that “in 1927 [Lumpkin] was arrested with other Communists at a picket sponsored by the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee” (xii). In a letter from prison to one of his supporters, Glendower Evans, Vanzetti expressed not only his innocence of the particular charges against him, but also his commitment to a nonviolent approach to social change: “A little knowledge of the past; a sorrowful experience of the life itself had gave to me some ideas very different from those of many other umane [sic] beings. But I wish to convince my fellowman that only with virtue and honesty is possible for us to find a little happiness in the world. I preached: I worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social wealth would belong to every umane creatures, so well as it was the fruit of the work of all. But this do not mean robbery for a insurrection. The insurrection, the great movements of the soul, do not need dollars. It need love, light, spirit of sacrifice, ideas, conscience, instincts. It need more conscience, more hope and more goodness. And all this blessed things can be seeded, awoked, growed [sic] up in the heart of man in many ways, but not by robbery and murder for robbery.” (Letter to Glendower Evans. 22 July 1921. http://www.law.umkc. edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/van-charlestown.html) Vanzetti’s commitment to anarchy caused him to disapprove of the communism imposed upon the people of Russia. He expressed this in a letter to his well-known radical supporter Alice Stone Blackwell: “A good communist girl wrote me from Milwaukee: ‘We are celebrating the 7th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and you too, I believe.’ How can I say to her that at the very thought of the Russian Revolutionary’s failure all the sores of my heart open themselves, and all the anguish of my soul arises?” (13 November 1925) (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/van— char2527.html). Vanzetti’s rejection of revolution does not accord with the

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 204

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

Notes to Chapter Two 205

77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84.

pro-revolutionary stance of Lumpkin’s text; this point of ideological contention may explain the manner in which Stevens’ transition from telling of Sacco and Vanzetti to telling of the Russian Revolution is presented as representing ideological growth. I refer here to the use of Bonnie’s historical counterpart, Ella May Wiggins, as an inspirational symbol following her death. When a number of participants in the Gastonia strike were jailed after the unsolved murder of the local police chief, the CP’s legal branch called for supporters to “Fight in the Spirit of Ella May for the Freedom of the Gastonia Prisoners” (Salmond 150). A separate history of left-oriented singer-songwriters creating songs inspired by Sacco and Vanzetti also testifies to the enduring dramatic power of this historical episode. Woody Guthrie recorded a series of Sacco and Vanzetti ballads in the mid-1940s (see Klein 313–4). In the next decade, leftist folksinger Pete Seeger used the above letter verbatim as the lyrics to “Sacco’s Letter to His Son.” Later, Joan Baez also wrote and recorded several Sacco and Vanzetti songs. Such folk-styled texts add to earlier literature inspired by the case, including Edna Vincent St. Millay’s poem “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” (1927) and Upton Sinclair’s documentary novel Boston (1928). Lumpkin’s incorporation of the case into her novel adds to this literary tradition. By inserting an awareness of this case into the lives of songwriting characters like John Stevens and Bonnie McClure, she also suggests one potential inspiration behind a new type of labor song that interweaves aspects of tradition and radicalism. See Salmond 93, 109, 150–1. Lumpkin’s subsequent mention of a saying popular among disillusioned World War I veterans—“It was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” (287)—provides a historical example of how such twists of phrase can indeed galvanize working-class consciousness. Emphasizing the Jewish component of Frank’s “otherness,” Matthew Frye Jacobson makes a further point that Frank’s “extraordinary conviction”— “extraordinary” because the court allowed Frank to be convicted on the basis of testimony from a black man—and his death by lynching was “a sign of Frank’s contested whiteness at the time” (65 emphasis in original). These words are Wiggins’ transcription of the song as Carson’s daughter Rosa Lee sang it in a 1920s recording (under her stage name, “Moonshine Kate”). Propelled in no small degree by the exposure he gained through this song, Carson would go on to become a major early country-music star (Wiggins 103–4). By naming Frank as Mary Phagan’s murderer, the “Little Mary Phagan” ballad perpetuates (or at least does not refute) the anti-Semitism surrounding this tragedy. In his study of the folk and recorded songs about Mary

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 205

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

206

85.

86.

87.

88.

Notes to Chapter Two Phagan, W. K. McNeil found that all “took the view that Frank was guilty” (74). Although none of the versions of the song that I have seen specify Frank’s Jewish ethnicity, a Southern audience who had been riveted by this case probably did not need to be reminded of this factor. Lynn Haessly speculates that the anti-Semitic implications of “Little Mary Phagan” were not lost on Wiggins when she used its tune for her “Mill Mother’s Song.” American Mills, the Bessemer City textile plant where Ella May worked, was owned by the Goldbergs, a Jewish immigrant family (Haessly 26–7). Haessly argues that Ella May capitalized on the fact that her boss, like Mary Phagan’s, was Jewish, thus using the anti-Semitism prevalent among her white coworkers to enhance their perception of conflicts of interest with their bosses: “May’s listeners, aware that the earlier lyrics vilified Frank’s ‘brutish heart and grin,’ would have transferred those images to the Goldbergs, and possibly from them to the WASPish scrooges at Loray and other mills. Like the Mary Phagan balladeer, May castigated the Jewish factory supervisors, but she went on to solve the problem” (80). Though Haessly’s assessment of the actual context in which the “Mill Mother’s Song” was heard may be correct, Lumpkin probably wanted readers to view this song as a positive transformation of whatever racist sentiments might have been encoded into “Little Mary Phagan.” (Ella May, it should be noted, had established her own liberal views on race at least to the extent that she worked to establish a racially integrated union.) Lumpkin surely knew how the Mary Phagan case had resolved and of the magnitude of racial feelings it had stirred up. Joseph H. Lumpkin II Grace’s not-too-distant relative, was a member of the Georgia Supreme Court, which had upheld the death sentence handed down to Frank by a lower Georgia court (see Dinnerstein 81–2, 200 n. 15). (This Joseph H. Lumpkin II was descended from Joseph H. Lumpkin, “first chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court,” whom Lumpkin would later proudly claim as “my own direct ancestor” [Gilkes 312]). Also bringing the case literally close to home, the jail from which Leo Frank was abducted before being lynched was in Milledgeville, Georgia, the town of Lumpkin’s birth. After his sister Bonnie is killed, Lumpkin’s character John voices a rational perspective towards dealing with this crime that stands in marked contrast to the way the Committee of One-Hundred has tried to stop a fledgling union movement by killing isolated individuals. Speaking at Bonnie’s funeral, John says that his true bitterness is not directed towards “those misguided ones that fired the shot [that killed Bonnie], but [towards] the ones who are behind the killing. The ones with Power, they killed her” (381). This aspect distinguishes “Little Mary Phagan” from most American and older English murder ballads, in which murderer and victim seem to belong to the same class and the catalyst for murder is a form of “love gone wrong” rather than a workplace dispute.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 206

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

Notes to Chapter Two 207 89. In his study of the Gastonia strike songs as “models of and for Southern working-class women’s militancy” (87), Stephen R. Wiley—who writes from the assumption that the public was justified in assuming Frank’s guilt (and that Frank was indeed guilty)—offers other compelling insights into how Gastonia workers “would have heard [“Mill Mother’s Lament”] in connection with its models, the song ‘Little Mary Phagan’ and the 1913 events on which it was based” (94). Wiley proposes that “Mill Mother’s Lament,” besides reformulating its model’s boss-as-victimizer theme, also could have stirred workers’ own feelings of guilt to motivate new strategies for bettering labor conditions: “Just as Mary Phagan’s mother sent the child, albeit unknowingly, to her death, so the mill mother in Ella’s song shares responsibility for her children’s want, because she participates in the mill system. Given that most of the [Gastonia] strikers were between 18 and 35 and that Ella was 13 in 1913, her song creates a dual perspective on the mill mother’s dilemma by both using the perspective of the mill mother and reawakening the girlhood identification of the women in her audience with Mary Phagan. Thus do singer and audience become victimized and victimizer, and Mary Phagan’s death and the need of the mill mother and her children a type of suicide. [.  .  .  .  ] Clearly, the only ethical thing to do is to withdraw and resist. In the models, justice is in the hands, not of Mary’s mother, but of the judge; but in ‘Mill Mother’s Lament,’ as in the other Gastonia strike songs, justice is a real choice for the mill mother” (94–5). 90. In my earlier dissertation (from which the material in this current book is drawn), this section is preceded by a discussion of Let Freedom Ring, a dramatic adaptation of To Make My Bread by Albert Bein that ran on and off Broadway from late 1935 through early 1936. I review the political dynamics that influenced promotion of and reception to this play. Further, I examine the considerable revisions that Bein made to Lumpkin’s novel in light of the Communist Party’s movement towards “Popular Front” strategies for broadening cultural and political appeal within American society. Unfortunately, the prohibitive cost of getting permission to quote from Let Freedom Ring has led me to omit that section from this book. 91. A reviewer for New Republic proposes that Some Take a Lover­—which might be misinterpreted as itself overly solicitous for the concerns of the rich elite—actually parodies the conventions of “suburban life” and conventional “cheap fiction” about this life: “There are some funny passages of mock distress over the well fed troubles of the wealthy, and of lavish praise for the monstrosities of the elaborate home” (Book 81). 92. Still, whether she used these books more to pay the bills or to satisfy another side of her literary ambition is not clear. Her use of a pseudonym suggests that either she or her publisher did not want readers to associate Ann Du Pre with Grace Lumpkin, the writer of radical fiction (the same publisher, Macaulay, put out her radical novels and her “Ann Du Pre” ones). This

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 207

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

208

93.

94.

95. 96.

Notes to Chapter Three fluidity in the personas that Lumpkin projected as author of such different types of fiction may have reflected a fluidity in her self-presentation. Hall observes that Lumpkin “had always been a story teller. Once she began to write, she spun her fiction out of autobiographical elements and patched together a personal history from half-truths and suggestions. The details were malleable; what mattered to Grace was artistic control” (“Open” 118). Saralynn Chesnut believes that A Sign for Cain is “probably loosely based on a series of violent events that took place in Tallapoosa County, Alabama in 1931. Black sharecroppers in a communist-led union were brutalized and in some cases murdered by mobs of white men, with hints that the vigilantes were ‘trying to get even for Scottsboro’” (283). In her afterword for the 1977 reprint of The Wedding, Lillian Barnard Gilkes proposed that Lumpkin had still retained an essential class consciousness: “There is social consciousness [in The Wedding], a great deal of it in its portrayal of the lost fortunes and psychological peculiarities of a Southern middle-class family, its emphasis on outmoded values in the changing world of the early twentieth century; but no one would dream of calling this ‘propagandist’ or revolutionary. In fact, Miss Lumpkin was criticized by some ultraleftists for having in this book abandoned the class struggle!” (315). Other critics, however, tend to see The Wedding marking Lumpkin’s break with writing radical fiction (Smith 287, Cook “Grace” 68). Full Circle (1962), “her last published work [  .  .  .  ] is a novel embracing neither her [left-wing] political nor her literary reputation, dealing as it does with [  .  .  .  ] the overcultivated soil of international communist conspiracy” (Cook “Grace” 68). At the top of the manuscript, Lumpkin notes, “Never did offer it to a producer. Decided it was not good enough.” “Virginia” might represent Lumpkin herself, as well as a conservative Southern value system. “Karl” likely symbolizes Karl Marx.

Notes to Chapter Three 1. Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling make numerous references— sometimes vague and sometimes more explicit—to a Marxist-informed belief that class antagonisms in America would lead to a revolutionary overthrow of the current government. In a long and detailed speech in Call Home the Heart (283–91), for instance, Amos Freer tells assembled strikers that “the change that is surely coming is the greatest of all in the long up-hill climb of humanity. It will call for blood as the sea calls for its rivers. But we shall win, fellowworkers. We shall win as our brothers in Russia have won; as they are winning now in China [.  .  .  .  ] To die in such a cause, as some of us must, is to die triumphant” (290–1). Near the end of Call Home the Heart, even men in the relatively isolated mountains have heard rumors of a new kind of war on the horizon, in which “the pore an’ the rich air goin’ to fight it out. [.  .  .  .  ] It’ll

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 208

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

Notes to Chapter Three 209

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

be a war to take over the Government an’ make the big bosses an’ ever’body go to work an’ not let ’em have more’n what we git fer ourselves” (421). Tracing Dargan’s life is hindered by the fact that many of her papers have been lost, both in accidental fires and because she asked friends to destroy things that might compromise her privacy or lead to persecution for radical activities. For most of my biographical information, I am indebted to the work of Anna W. Shannon (later Anna Shannon Elfenbein), a professor at West Virginia University. In addition to scouring various archives holding Dargan’s papers, Shannon talked with people who knew Dargan. I also draw on the work of George Brosi, a scholar of Appalachian literature. Despite the relative scarcity of biographical materials, an examination of Dargan’s other writing provides insights into the author’s aesthetic and political development. During Olive’s childhood, the family moved from Kentucky to Missouri, and then to Arkansas. “Her Philosophy teacher was George Santayana” (Lathrop 6). Charlotte Young, an Asheville writer and teacher who was a longtime friend of Dargan, noted that Dargan “took two courses concurrently” from Santayana, but was “always amused by his personal remoteness from life” (“Woman” 7–8). Dargan’s early literary output shows the commitment to social reform that she would continue in later works. One draft for a promotional article on Dargan’s Call Home the Heart (undated and unsigned) notes that “more than one of her dramas showed the revolutionary streak. ‘The Shepherd’ deals sympathetically with the movement for Russian freedom under Czarism. In ‘The Mortal Gods,’ the Mortal gods are the great American financiers who were exerting a sinister influence over Mexico. Her poems were acclaimed for their beauty, though some of them were openly and others subtly revolutionary” (“Voice”). Still, Dargan would dramatically alter her vision for social change between writing these earlier works and her later radical novels, which propose that violence will be needed to topple capitalism. A review of “The Shepherd” by Dargan’s friend Alice Stone Blackwell notes that the hero of this play “is a believer in non-resistance” who “upholds peace as ‘the strongest of earthly weapons’” (487, 488). Later, especially in A Stone Came Rolling, Dargan portrays such beliefs as overly idealistic. The drama was “The Shepherd.” Almond is in Swain County, in the mountainous southwest tip of the state near the Nantahala River (Shannon 436). Incidentally, Almond, which Dargan calls “Beebread” in her fiction, was flooded by the TVA in 1943 to form Lake Fontana (Neufeld 281). Ackerman reports that Dargan “had been able to purchase [this] land cheaply [  .  .  .  ] because no one believed a road could be built there” (34). Nevertheless, Dargan was hardly a typical rural farm wife since, as Brosi notes, “with dependable tenants to run the farm, the Dargans traveled extensively.”

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 209

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

210

Notes to Chapter Three

8. Shannon has collected conflicting accounts concerning whether Pegram’s death was accidental or self-inflicted, and whether he and Olive were planning to end their separation and reconcile their troubled relationship (445). In 1916, Dargan published The Cycle’s Rim, a collection of sonnets “dedicated to the memory of [her] late husband” (Brosi). 9. The original farmhouse burned in 1923 (Neufeld 274). Although Dargan had moved to “town,” the house she occupied there—a century-old log cabin in a wooded area (Neufeld 274)—perhaps helped her to maintain a sense of contact with the rural culture she incorporated into her fiction. 10. Stokes “was present at the 1919 socialist convention in Chicago, at which the Communist Party of America was founded, and she held a position on the CP Central Executive Committee” (Rosenbaum 1342). Stokes, whose Jewish family had fled the Russian pogroms when she was a small child, had arrived in America at age eleven, grown up poor, “worked as an unskilled ‘stogey-roller’ [in a Cleveland, Ohio, cigar sweatshop] for twelve years,” become a writer for a Jewish American newspaper, and then radically changed her social circumstances when she entered into a “controversial and sensational marriage [with] the millionaire James Graham Phelps Stokes” in 1905 (Rosenbaum 1341). They divorced some twenty years later, largely over irreconcilable political differences (Zipser 252–5). Stokes’ autobiography includes an anecdote suggesting that she and Dargan, despite certain profound differences in background, bonded through a sense of having experienced past economic hardships that were alien to many of their friends from wealthier families. On a 1904 camping excursion that both had been invited to join, Rose slept through an entire day and night in her tent—having never entirely caught up, she reasoned, from years of exhausting and sleep-depriving factory work. Other friends engaged in “much good-natured laughter at my expense,” but Dargan “did not laugh. She understood. She knew! She knew poverty and struggle. We became fast friends” (Stokes 97). After Stokes’ death in 1933, the publishing company Covici-Friede approached Dargan about writing Stokes’ biography. Dargan expressed interest but would not sign a contract until she had finished a novel in progress. Ultimately, neither Dargan nor anyone else wrote such a biography for decades (Zipser 304–5). 11. Shannon speculates that Dargan’s editors at Scribners (first Robert Underwood Johnson and then William Crary Brownell) encouraged her adherence to archaic diction (436). “That Dargan’s early work tends toward romanticism is evident from the fact that she was frequently compared to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Dorothy Wordsworth” (Ackerman 82). 12. One poem in Lute and Furrow, “The Coming,” even alludes to revolution as the solution for current social inequalities. This short, fairly allusive poem anticipates the birth of a “fair, free world” where there will be “on all the

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 210

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

Notes to Chapter Three 211

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

laughing roads / No lack of song and bread” (113). The poet wishes that this birth could be “festal,” but realizes that “ ’tis poverty / That pays thy natal cost” (113). Like her later fiction, this poem implies that bitter lower-class struggles, rather than a more dignified middle-class altruism, will force this new world into existence. Elfenbein supports my earlier speculation that Dargan’s life experiences helped her to identify with both lower- and middle-class people, noting that “for much of her life, Olive [prior to her first move to the mountains] had had to work extremely hard in order to support herself and members of her family. [.  .  .  .  ] [T]he rigors of her early years must have caused her to believe that she could cope with mountain life” (Introduction liii). Dargan’s biography adds another irony to this poem, again suggestive of the experiential gap between the poet and the other people who work on her land. Purchasing a mountain farm and moving there from New York City, she deliberately adopted this rural lifestyle, which required her to balance physical and intellectual activities. Her educational background would have allowed her—unlike most of the rural people around her—to create with relative ease a completely different urban, middle-class life. Through 18 stanzas, Dargan’s ababacc rhyme scheme consistently employs three two-syllable rhymes per stanza (lines one, three, and five): e.g., laurel, draw well, sorrel; poplars, mop blurs, drop leers. At one point, the poet even parenthetically addresses such a reader as she supposes might have her book in hand. She announces, after several stanzas that evoke the beauty of her surroundings, that she’ll “([  .  .  .  ] no longer share it [i.e., this natural beauty] / with you, the dear man mythical, supposed / To read my verse, but can with ease forbear it)” (44). Ackerman notes that the poems in Lute and Furrow mark a new shift “[towards] narrative form, perhaps because she had begun writing prose sketches for The Atlantic in 1919” (97). Ackerman calls Miss Dolly “a thinly disguised Dargan” (110) and Elfenbein agrees that Dargan uses Miss Dolly to portray her own experience of moving to a North Carolina mountain farm (xviii). Leslie Banner observes that, while Highland Annals draws on many themes common to local-color fiction about the Appalachian region, “it is Dargan’s representation of herself as the hapless, ignorant intruder [  .  .  .  ] which lends an original and memorable twist to the stories’ point of view” (53). A 1929 article from a Charlotte, North Carolina, newspaper suggests that residents of the region appreciated Dargan’s stories for their avoidance of condescending stereotypes: “Mrs. Dargan depicts the mountaineers not as problems, cases, studies, specimens, or sociological phenomena, but as friendly neighbors whom she loves and understands” (McFarland). Dargan herself commented that “the mountain people are just like any other people. [.  .  .  .  ] I don’t like the way some writers picture the mountain

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 211

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

212

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

Notes to Chapter Three people as a peculiar type, for they are not. Of course, the mountaineers have lots of hangovers from the Elizabethan era. But that is superficial” (“Title”). Although Serena dreams of getting pillow down from the flock, each year “their numbers lessened as wild creatures devoured them,” and “she never got a feather” (190). Mostly, Miss Dolly believes, “ducks amused her” (189). Ackerman’s interpretation of this episode agrees with my own: “Beneath the appearance of comparative prosperity and fuller stomachs is an unhappy family that has lost the few intangible treasures that matter most to them” (113–4). Miss Dolly’s lesson is reinforced when she later becomes ill and is then restored to health under Serena’s nurture: “The bland movements of her hands seemed to be fulfilling an old desire. Behind her was the generation of [her father], who could sit and sing till the fire was out” (227). Serena further demonstrates the extent of her generosity when, in the last section of the story, she takes in a boarder—a cousin with a mysterious ailment causing excruciating attacks of pain—planning to charge her five dollars a month. When the cousin actually tries to pay, Serena is “ashamed” and won’t take the money (222). Dolly silently feels that Serena is being impractical once again, but Len agrees with his wife: “Ef there’s anything plain in the Bible it’s how we ought to take keer o’ the sick” (223). Besides Dargan’s textual revisions, this edition contains about fifty photographs that illustrate various scenes and characters in the stories. Emphasizing Dargan’s “creative contribution” to the book’s photographs, Elfenbein reports that Dargan “chose the textual passages to be illustrated, selected the people and locations to be photographed, [  .  .  .  ] and decided which illustrations to include in the book” (Introduction xxx). Despite the ideological continuities I suggest between “Serena” and Dargan’s radical novels, I agree with the critics who see more dissimilarities than similarities between these two phases of Dargan’s literary output. Elfenbein, for instance, comments that the treatment of mountain culture in Highland Annals is respectful, yet strikingly apolitical in light of the two radical novels that would follow it. Still, she believes that Dargan wrote her stories about mountain people with acute sensitivity to the way a legacy of demeaning popular-culture stereotypes had been “created to rationalize exploitation of the highlanders and their mountains” (Introduction xviii-ix). Cook also sees a dramatic change in political orientation from Highland Annals to the radical novels, noting that the former work is “marked by an affection for the culture of the people and the kind of unashamed indulgence in the inebriation of natural beauty that later endangers Ishma’s [Dargan’s protagonist in Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling] devotion to rational and revolutionary goals” (“Critical” 452). Elfenbein observes that even the revised version of Highland Annals (republished as From My Highest Hill

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 212

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

Notes to Chapter Three 213

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

in 1941, after Dargan had written two radical novels) “contains no discussions of class struggle, communism, or proletarian revolution. Nevertheless, Dargan’s long-standing commitment to ‘building a brighter world,’ which is central to most of her plays, poetry, and novels, occasionally manifests itself in From My Highest Hill also” (Introduction xxix). Grant Knight, an English professor at the University of Kentucky, also gave Dargan much-needed affirmation as she ventured into new literary terrain. It was Knight who “persuaded [Dargan] to let him take [Call Home the Heart] to a publisher, under the pseudonym of Fielding Burke” (Neufeld 276). Critic Edwin Seaver was one of the few who expressed reservations about the novel’s conclusion. He wrote to “Fielding Burke,” applauding the novel’s “superb folk quality” and its “passionate revolutionary urge towards a new world, toward communism and a free, classless society,” but then took the author to task for her novel’s ending. Seaver “[did] not like Ishma’s bolting after she has repulsed the negress” and “the havoc it creates in the revolutionary pattern of [the] story.” While Call Home the Heart incorporates aspects of the Gastonia strike, A Stone Came Rolling uses a strike centered on High Point, North Carolina, in the summer of 1932 as the main basis for its representation of labor conflicts. John Selby’s careful study of the High Point strike endorses the historical accuracy of Dargan’s novel: “it provides readers with a picture and feeling of the strike that is nearly impossible to capture in non-fiction” (117). The strike—which was covered in such nationally distributed newspapers and journals as The Daily Worker, The New York Times, The Nation, and Labor Age—“briefly grabbed an entire nation’s attention” (Selby 104). Leslie Banner argues that Ishma, despite such differences in background, still displays ideological traits that are similar to Dargan’s and dissimilar to those found in Dargan’s earlier representations of mountain culture: “Ishma herself is like no mountaineer in Highland Annals, but she is very like Dargan’s own incarnation ‘Mis’ Dolly’: in her energy and her developed sense of injustice; in her rhapsodic attachment to the beauties of the mountain scenery; and most of all, in her sharpened, objective point of view, which judges her surroundings by standards from outside the mountain world” (59–60). Similarly, Saralyn Chesnut senses that Dargan tried to embody aspects of her own outlook within Ishma. She observes that Ishma, who is “consistently described as an exception to her gender and her class” (6), “represents an attempt to bring together in one figure both [  .  .  .  ] authenticity of experience and the writer’s authorized voice” (5). Though Dargan’s narrative perspective generally remains faithful to the limitations of Ishma’s intellectual development and worldly knowledge, it occasionally offers authorial correctives to these limitations. When, for instance, Ishma believes that “she was asking so little of life,” Dargan explains that

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 213

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

214

30.

31. 32.

33.

Notes to Chapter Three “in fact, she was asking for more than life has ever given to anyone; an understanding of itself ” (149). Further, A Stone Came Rolling includes more narration describing life outside of Ishma’s class experience (and physical presence). Most notably, this novel spends considerable time beyond Ishma’s vantage point in order to show the internal dynamics of the upper-class Emberson family, owners of a local textile mill. Although Ishma is not privy to the Emberson family’s tense home life, her acquaintance with the father, Bly Emberson, allows her unusual (and fairly sympathetic) insights into a well-meaning industrialist’s attempt to uphold humanitarian principles while running a mill within a capitalist system. In a 1950 interview, Dargan gave some insight into her belief that novels’ protagonists should tend towards the exemplary. When asked whether “there is any particular line of production that she would advise a young writer to follow,” she replied that “if his goal is the novel, I am sufficiently biased to advise him to shy from writers who seem magnetized by the dump-heap and its hopeless pathology. We have highly talented authors who use their brilliant power as a reagent to precipitate the dregs of society, for no apparent purpose save as an exhibit. Dregs are legitimate material when used by Steinbeck—if I may choose a name—with art that, implicitly of course, makes us feel our guilt and inoculates the soul with an urge that will not die of inaction” (Bird 6). See 240–264 of Call Home the Heart on Ishma’s relationship with Virginia Grant. In A Stone Came Rolling, Ishma’s view of machinery has developed to reflect more interest in mechanization as the ultimate means to enable artistic/cultural development. She comments to the owner of a textile mill, Bly Emberson, that “essentially, the machine is a maker of leisure, and by way of making leisure it produces goods. [.  .  .  .  ] We mustn’t say that a machine makes so many yards of cloth, and how shall we sell it? We must say that it makes a million hours of leisure, and how shall it be divided, and what shall be done with them?” (113). Because the working class has never had access to such leisure before, Ishma believes, they won’t know how to use it until they get it (114). As noted above, though Ishma does retreat from the complexities of the labor struggle to the familiar mountains at the end of Call Home the Heart, she returns newly committed to the labor cause in A Stone Came Rolling. Thus Ackerman, citing evidence that “Dargan knew before she completed Call Home the Heart that there would be a sequel” (280), argues, as I do, for the importance of considering both novels together: “When Call Home the Heart is considered with its sequel, A Stone Came Rolling, it becomes clear that the ending of the first novel is not an ending at all; rather it is another crucial part of Ishma’s education” (279). When Britt tells Ishma (in this second novel) that they “can always go back to the mountains” to escape worsening economic conditions and class conflicts in the industrial village,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 214

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

Notes to Chapter Three 215

34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Ishma responds that “we are not logical products of the system. We’re accidents. It’s merely an accident that we can save ourselves. [.  .  .  .  ] I don’t like being an accident. And I don’t want to run away” (219). Selby confirms Dargan’s representation of the prevalence of religion in “Dunmow”: “Outside of the family, probably the greatest non-occupational influence was religion. High Point claimed to be a churchgoing town [  .  .  .  ]. In 1933 there were 53 churches in High Point, 29 for whites and 24 for blacks” (95). A Stone Came Rolling mentions, among others, Moravians, Quakers, Presbyterians, Lutheran, Methodists, and Baptists, who “now outnumber all others in Dunmow” (85). Thus, Dargan writes, “one had to agree that if any city on earth was prepared to keep alive the fires of divine and brotherly love, that city was Dunmow” (87). She highlights the idea that folk songs function within a community’s oral history by having individuals claim to know the people and circumstances that inspired now widely known folk songs such as “Old Joe Clark” and “Tom Big Bee River” (47). At the end of Call Home the Heart, Britt explains to Ishma his reason for not pursuing Rad: “I didn’t mean to hurt him as long as you had any use for him. And I’ll let him alone now if you say so” (403). When Ishma returns to the mountains after several years of absence, her sister Bainie tells her about Britt’s fight and the resulting ballad. Local people had “kep’ piecin’ onto [the ballad] fer more’n a year. [.  .  .  .  ] Ain’t hardly anybody in Wimble County but’s got words in that ballit” (396). Further, Bainie reveals that this fight indeed helped to keep the preacher’s power in check: “Siler’s been a lot easier to put up with sence the fight. He was gittin’ the swellhead bad, an’ that stopped it right off ” (396). Britt and Siler have even mended their relationship to the point that Britt tells Ishma that he intends to have Siler conduct the ceremony that will remarry them (CHH 432). See pages 30–4 and 111 in Call Home the Heart. As he tells Ishma, “A dead man can’t walk. That’s what no money means when it comes to buildin’ up a farm stuck here in these cliffs” (402–3). As discussed below, Derry also reacts with disdain when Ishma has been captivated by the vision of love overcoming humanity’s repressive tendencies in Percy Bysshe Shelly’s epic poem Prometheus Unbound. The very rendering of the word “Je ru-u-u-usalem!” also imparts a parodic quality to this representation of the song. Later, however, when the preacher prays that Myrtle, “by acknowledging His power and mercy,” lighten “the hand of the Lord [which] has been heavy upon you,” Myrtle’s twelve-year-old brother “Little Robert” has the courage to point out the obvious secular cause of Myrtle’s affliction. After the prayer creates “a new kind of silence in the room, heavy and descending” in which “the right words couldn’t be found,” Robert comments that

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 215

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

216

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

Notes to Chapter Three “it wasn’t the hand of the Lord that hurt sister [  .  .  .  ]. It was Brady’s [i.e., the policeman’s] boot” (244–5). As Dargan shows the reader, Bly had not felt able to reconcile his humanitarian impulses towards his employees with the class position that entraps him—as a mill president and as a husband whose shallow wife worships money, social status, and a god who justifies her lifestyle. Bly’s suicide symbolizes the plight of bosses who want to put workers’ interests first but cannot do so under capitalism’s competitive principles. Showing at once Bly’s “good” intentions and (by qualifying this word with quotes) the impossibility of his living up to them, Dargan characterizes Bly as “one of the ‘good’ employers who felt responsible for all who helped make his money” (27). When workers at other regional mills had gone on strike protesting wage cuts, Bly had won workers’ admiration (and competitors’ ire) by finding short-term ways to keep his mill in operation without cutting salaries: “his mill was running on the old wage scale, but only for a little while longer would he be able to meet the price of his competitors in the hosiery market” (221). One competitor “had told him brutally that if he didn’t lower wages to the scale of the other mills a boycott would be organized against him,” and another tells him that he is “giving open support to a revolt of the workers” (221). Bly realizes, though, that his temporary solutions, such as “meeting the pay-roll with money borrowed on his insurance [  .  .  .  ] had merely put off the day of human sacrifice” (273). Bly had frequently confided in Ishma, despite their class differences. He told her of his anguish about running a mill on capitalist principles, and wondered how he could do otherwise. During one conversation, Ishma tells Bly that “there is only one way. All of the workers must take all of the mills at the same time” (115). Later, Ishma tells her husband, Britt, that she feels “so sorry for Bly Emberson sometimes that I ache to help him. [.  .  .  .  ] But he can’t be helped” (220). Sensing that Bly had taken his life, Ishma feels that her upper-class friend had settled for a simple, individualistic escape from a widespread social crisis: “[Bly] had died,” she thinks, “with his back to the wall, but not fighting as men must fight who are to set a new banner on life’s age-imbedded citadel” (306). Similarly, in Call Home the Heart, when Dargan depicts strikers singing “Solidarity Forever,” she notes that “those who couldn’t sing were even more effective in the attempt” (320). In such cases, she suggests, normal aesthetic criteria for musical performance should be secondary to the conveyed message itself (or should reflect the harshness of the political message). While (as discussed in detail below) Dargan uses Ishma’s perspective in the early section of Call Home the Heart to suggest the relative value of standard speech over colloquial dialect, here the divergence from standard speech enhances the power of Job’s parody of dominant theology. Kik’s committee decides not to risk angering the bosses with demands; the bosses, instead of making any improvements, merely offer to take back the

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 216

6/22/2006 8:54:39 AM

Notes to Chapter Three 217 strikers without additional penalties for going on strike. Now, the strikers who had trusted Kik (and ignored Ishma) feel betrayed: “the heat of their wrongs had risen higher than religious warmth” (188). 48. Dargan relates in Call Home the Heart, for instance, that Ishma’s leftist doctor friend, Derry Unthank, “supplied books with the zeal of a teacher who has found the beloved disciple. He had led her over the long outline of man’s story; the struggle in the dawn; the serf ages; the capture of the world by commerce: the final intrenchments [sic] of capitalism behind industrial machinery and the guns of an army. She was now studying, in bloody segments, the emergence of labor. [.  .  .  .  ] With a mental eye that covered the long trail of desperation and courage, she saw the constant resurge of mass-power to greater meaning and circumference” (306). 49. Here or elsewhere, however, Dargan does not show merging of black and white cultural traditions into a new cultural fusion that might help to break down working-class cross-racial barriers. In her avoidance of this possibility, Dargan perhaps endorses an opinion that Derry Unthank, speaking to Ishma, had voiced in Call Home the Heart: “I hope we’ll not assimilate the black folk. I’d like to see a black race keeping to its own lines of life, intuitive, rhythmic with nature, building its own shelters for burgeoning. Why should we think that our method is the only one for returning full-handed into the creative stream? But that’s just my personal preference. [.  .  .  .  ] Some day you’ll see much farther than that.” (355) 50. ILD refers to the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party’s legal branch. In Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Robin Kelley reports that this song “was eventually designated the official ILD song in the South” (105). 51. Later Soviet policies upheld this progress-oriented stance towards culture and towards the elimination of unnecessarily primitive modes of production. According to a Soviet-era dictionary of Communism, “The socialist [peasantry] is characterized by a steady improvement of production and technical skills, higher cultural standards and consciousness. All vestiges of the past, connected with hard, inefficient manual labor [  .  .  .  ] are dying away, and the socialist principles of culture and everyday life are taking firm foot” (Wilczynski 174). 52. Elfenbein further suggests that Dargan shaped her representations of rural agriculture (and of socialism as a cure for its problems) not only in support of Marxist theories, but also to deflate the ideologies of a group of reactionary southern intellectuals known as the Agrarians: In I’ll Take My Stand (1930) [a collection of essays by members of this group], the Agrarians had valorized the Southern past,

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 217

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

218

Notes to Chapter Three prescribing traditional Southern values as an antidote to ‘Progress,’ which they saw as the national disease. [.  .  .  .  ] Seeking to preserve or restore rural values, such as leisure, stability, and spirituality, in the South, the Agrarians also recommended the Southern genteel model to a nation convulsed by the onset of the Great Depression. [.  .  .  .  ] Call Home the Heart, in its account of rural life, industrial expansion, and race relations, took a stand of its own that refuted I’ll Take My Stand virtually point for point. (“Forgotten” 197–8)

53. Later, Ishma’s brother Steve voices similar discouragement as his rationale for leaving the mountains to join the navy: “If a man’s got his land paid for, an’ stock to work it, an’ machinery, an’ the right seed to put in the ground, an’ ‘s able to hire help in a pinch, an’ there’s a market for his stuff without givin’ it all to the railroad, or the man at the other end, I reckon he can get along in the mountains. But when he’s got nothin’ but his two bare hands, he kain’t swing it. Not nowadays” (148). As noted above, Britt’s brief success in commercial music gives his farming enterprise the cash infusion that spells the difference between failure and success. 54. Through such tutelage and experience, Ishma herself becomes a confident advocate for socialized agriculture. She exuberantly tells her worker friend Job that under socialism “there won’t be any farmers. There’ll be giant farming industries, tilling earth with machinery, and sending food in airships to any place where men want it” (309). In response to Job’s concern that too much economic security will cause “the big fam’lies [to] eat up the earth,” Ishma assures him that “it will be a thousand years before we have to study about that” (308, 309). 55. Thus Dargan notes that Ishma feels ambivalent about various folksongs, preferring “music” “when Nature helped to make it” (137). 56. While nature is not inherently ideological, the way individuals perceive nature (as, for example, aesthetically pleasing or personally liberating) is certainly influenced by ideology. Significantly, Dargan shows that Ishma learned her appreciation of nature from her great-grandmother (“Granny Stark”)—thus, perhaps, distancing this appreciation from her own middleclass love of nature. Granny Stark “made the child [Ishma] the companion on out-door ventures” and taught her “the way of a wind on the mountain, of water around a rock, of a goat on Devil’s Spur” (6). Dargan further balances passages emphasizing Ishma’s aesthetic appreciation of nature with others emphasizing the more brutal struggles to extract a living from the land. 57. Besides including reflections on mountain speech as non-standard that are purported to come from Ishma, Dargan also occasionally draws attention to colloquial-sounding phrases within her narrative by putting them into quotes: “cruisin’ the cliffs” (6), “done been” (35), feet “with roots to ’em” (67). Through both Ishma’s condescending view of mountain dialect and Dargan’s

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 218

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

Notes to Chapter Three 219

58.

59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

“knowing” and selective use of folk vernacular, this mode of communication becomes objectified—more of a representation of a dialect than an autonomous language through which a story might be told. The pilgrim, simply called Christian, meets allegorical embodiments of numerous challenges and temptations, including Pliable, Obstinate, Worldly Wise, and the Slough of Despond, as well as other allegorical characters such as Passion and Patience who help him complete his journey. Under his heading “Considerations of the miseries of Mans [sic] Life,” for instance, Taylor observes that “the sadnesses of this life help to sweeten the bitter cup of death” (“Holy”). Particularly in A Stone Came Rolling, Dargan repeatedly attacks variations on this ideology as it is manifested in actions and in hymns and other social texts. Though Dargan doesn’t show anyone other than Ishma engaged with these works, they are meant to establish literary ancestry for ideologies that pervade Ishma’s culture. In classical mythology and in Aeschylus’ play, Jupiter punishes Prometheus for giving humans the use of fire. In Shelley’s poem, Jupiter punishes him for giving humans a wide range of scientific and intellectual tools (2.59–99). In Shelley’s construction of the Prometheus myth, when the god Saturn had ruled the earth prior to Jupiter, he withheld from humanity “the birthright of their being, knowledge, power, / The skill which wields the elements, the thought / Which pierces this dim Universe like light” (2.39–41). Later, under Jupiter’s reign, humanity sank into poverty and chaos (2.43–58) until Prometheus bequeathed them skills necessary for material and cultural progress (2.59–99). Jupiter does, however, see “the soul of man” as a potential threat to his despotic reign (though humanity is unaware of this): “The soul of man, like unextinguished fire, / Yet burns towards Heaven with fierce reproach and doubt / And lamentation and reluctant prayer, / Hurling up insurrection, which might make / Our antique empire insecure” (3.5–9). Although Prometheus Unbound uses characters from classical mythology, it also draws parallels between the suffering and forgiveness of Prometheus and that of Christ (e.g., 1.594–604). Here, Dargan paraphrases Shelley’s lines (1.625–8). Derry’s comment is a mocking allusion to the mythical horses (“coursers”) of Shelley’s poem, who pull a chariot bearing the “Spirit of the Hour” (an embodiment of the new benevolent spirit that pervades humanity). Having done their job, these coursers “sought their birth-place in the sun, / Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil / Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire” (3.4.108–10). The importance of Prometheus Unbound to Dargan is probable, considering that in earlier decades she had established her literary reputation with collections of lyrical dramas (e.g., 1904’s Semiramis and Other Plays and 1906’s

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 219

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

220

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

Notes to Chapter Three Lords and Lovers and Other Dramas). In their archaic diction and allusions to classical mythology these dramas might well have taken Shelley’s work as one model. As Dargan notes, Derry quotes “imperfectly” (359), though his condensed rendition simply omits phrases while retaining the spirit of the original. Later, in fact, when Ishma sees Freer confronting Pritchett at the dinner party set a month after this dialogue with Derry, she observes that “he looked more wise than gentle” (359). Ryburn identifies his urban home base when, praising mountain spring water, he remarks that “New York can’t give us such drafts” (357). In a draft of the novel, Dargan does in fact identify Ryburn as “a writer of acclaimed genius, who was staying at the inn for—as he said—‘a rejuvenating dip in the wilderness’” (Roots). The ballad to which Dargan alludes actually sounds like a different one, “The House Carpenter,” in which the man who persuades a wife to leave with him later invariably reveals himself to have been the devil in disguise and then escorts her to hell. “Gypso [i.e., “Gypsy”] Davy,” in contrast, does not give this tempting man such supernatural qualities and typically ends with the wife willingly choosing to stay with Gypsy Davy. When Schermerhorn (without explaining his question) asks if Ryburn has noticed how Betty “changes [the ballad] a bit at the end,” Ryburn only remarks that “she didn’t come to the end. Her baby was on a quilt near her and she had to take it up” (355). The somewhat elusive implication, however, is most likely that Betty changes the ending of “House Carpenter” (which makes more sense in this context than “Gypso Davy”) so that the wife is not damned for running away with the devil. As discussed earlier, Prichett had given Ishma a copy of Prometheus Unbound. Freer “had begun his training for leadership as a boy in the noted Lawrence [Massachusetts] strike, and he was still warm from victorious service in the long drawn-out textile strike at New Bedford [Connecticut]” (310). Ishma discovers a letter in the local newspaper (the Winbury Comet) hinting that Freer deserves lynching. According to the letter, “If the law will not act, people who love their homes and children should take the punishment of this scoundrel [i.e., Freer] into their own hands. We are not advocates of lynching, but brutes less guilty than this man have swung at midnight in our home-loving country” (314–5). Dargan only gives last names to these characters, who function more as representative types than as well-developed actors in the plot. Saralyn Chesnut believes that Dargan used this Mrs. Owensby character to suggest her self-doubts about her own class position related to workingclass issues in Call Home the Heart. If so, Mrs. Owensby’s character gestures subtly (as the previously discussed poetry does more insistently) towards

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 220

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

Notes to Chapter Three 221

76.

77. 78.

79.

80.

encouraging readers to question the political efficacy of the very work they are reading. Though Chesnut’s observation has some validity, Dargan nevertheless clearly differentiates herself from Owensby by repeatedly exhibiting her clear grasp of communist principles and of the social context about which she writes. In a comment perhaps specifically designed to refute President Roosevelt’s Public Works of Art Program (PWAP), established in December, 1933 (Watson Hungry 180), Dargan has Guy Beard, a radical worker and farmer’s son, argue in A Stone Came Rolling that socialism will put an end to capitalist culture’s “buying up starving geniuses to paint and sing its own bankruptcy” (308). Beard assures his friend Martin, who is concerned that a socialist revolution will destroy valuable cultural institutions, that socialism will “cut that culture out [i.e., the culture of art enabled by current government programs] and feed the geniuses” (308). Bellamy (1850–1898) was born in Massachusetts and spent most of his life in New England. As noted in an earlier chapter, Myra Page’s protagonist, Marge, reads a copy of Looking Backwards sent by her brother. Dargan does not see this avoidance of reality by retreating into art as an exclusively middle- or upper-class phenomenon, since, as noted earlier, Britt has used his music to distance himself from his own financial struggles during the time of his greatest economic difficulty (CHH 129). In her contribution to a 1917 Chicago Tribune article, Dargan offered a similar assessment of how socialism would enrich culture: “Instead of one Keats in a thousand years, distilling his life-blood into poetry, we shall have a thousand of his like in one year, feeding titanically on life that is itself poetic” (qtd. in Benton). Writing to Alice Blackwell in 1913, she predicted that “after two hundred years of release from economic slavery, I don’t doubt that we shall be rich enough in poetry to send even Shakespeare to pot” (26 May 1913). The “Dr. Muste” in this letter is undoubtedly A. J. [Abraham Johannes] Muste (1885–1967), an ordained minister who became increasingly involved in left-wing politics and labor activism throughout the 1910s and 1920s, and eventually “abandoned his Christian pacifism and became an avowed Marxist-Leninist.” In the 1920s, he “became director of the Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York,” a school that taught “the theory and practice of labor militancy.” Later, “in 1929 he helped form the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA),” which “became openly revolutionary and was instrumental in forming the American Workers Party in 1933” (“A. J.”). A 1932 article in The Nation by Muste provides an eyewitness analysis of the High Point, North Carolina, strike which Dargan incorporates into A Stone Came Rolling. Muste’s published account of the mass walkout and attempt to “shut down every plant in town” (121) is quite similar in detail to what A Stone Came Rolling calls “Dunmow’s greatest hour” (188).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 221

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

222

Notes to Chapter Three

81. Indicating a desire to help “the movement” beyond writing, Dargan told Blackwell in December of 1933, that she was writing a will and “giving what I may die possessed of to the Workers International Relief [a Communist organization for aiding strikers which Dargan praises in both of her novels]. Don’t you think that is an honest and very helpful and effective organization?” The following year, after telling Blackwell of her desire to “leave the South and live where I can at least blow off steam occasionally,” she announced that “right now I am attempting to start something that will keep me here with tighter bonds, at least for a time. The farm that I sold was never paid for, and I am taking it back. I want to give it to the right people who will run it as a ‘home farm’ for children of textile workers, who need to get up to the mountains, and also for adults broken down in the ‘movement.’” Despite publishing radical views that criticized the local economic order, Dargan (like her character Schermerhorn) seems to have been able to avoid friction with her region’s more conservative elements. None of the many articles on Dargan published in North Carolina newspapers in the 1930s and beyond suggest that Dargan’s leftist political leanings caused any local furor. Though these articles generally discuss Dargan’s politics in fairly vague terms, they consistently praise her concern for the plight of textile workers. Still, as Neufeld observes, “Dargan was very sensitive about her reputation. She was at heart a lyric poet without the nerves for public confrontation. She lived in fear of reactions to her politics. The negative climate did exist, and had been directed at her at times, but she felt it was virulent” (268). Tellingly, she indicated a greater need to conceal the subversive nature of the real “home farm” than she had when conveying her politics through fictional characters. Her plan’s success, she confided to Blackwell, required care in how it was presented in the community: “It wouldn’t do for this place to become known as a radical refuge [sic] camp. [.  .  .  .  ] The place can’t exist except in a community that is friendly to it” (Letter to Alice Stone Blackwell. 9 December 1934). 82. Several months later, Dargan told Blackwell that her publishers had just asked her to rewrite the final pages of A Stone Came Rolling before its publication, calling them “a ‘paean to the proletariat’ which would get a ‘bravo from the Daily Worker and the New Masses.’” Significantly, though, she asks Blackwell, “Now could anything have been more complimentary?” (underline in original). (Letter to Alice Stone Blackwell. 14 April 1935). Dargan, incidentally, does not tell Blackwell if she plans to comply with this editorial request (though she probably had no choice in the matter). The published novel does, however, seem to end abruptly—with Ishma, who has been beaten senseless on a picket line and then jailed, coming back to consciousness surrounded by friends come to free her from jail. This ending suggests a possible excision of a more optimistic “paean to the proletariat” that may have originally followed it.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 222

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

Notes to Chapter Three 223 83. According to Neufeld, “to the end of her life, Dargan continued to express conflicting feelings about being a poet and being socially responsible. ‘The thing that most frequently stymies me,’ she wrote a friend, ‘is a suffocating sense of guilt’” (276). Dargan published a final Fielding Burke novel, Sons of the Stranger, in 1947. Sylvia Jenkins Cook describes this work, which is set in an unspecified state in the American west, as “a liberal treatment of labor warfare among organizing mine workers” (“Olive” 458). Kathy Ackerman notes that “though her oppressed laborers are miners instead of mill workers, their plights are similar” (342).

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 223

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 224

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

Works Cited

Ackerman, Kathy Cantley. Olive Tilford Dargan: Recovering a Proletarian Romantic. Dissertation. U of South Carolina. 1991. “A. J. Muste: Biographical Background.” A. J. Muste Memorial Institute. n. pag. Online. Internet. 11 Nov. 2002. Available: http://www.ajmuste.org/ajmbio.htm. Allen, William Frances. “Introduction.” Slave Songs of the United States. [1867]. Bedford, Massachusetts: Applewood, n.d. Baker, Christina Looper. In a Generous Spirit: A First-Person Biography of Myra Page. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. Banner, Laura Leslie. The North Carolina Mountaineer in Native Fiction. Dissertation. U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 1984. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backwards: 2000–1887. 1887. New York: Modern Library, 1931. Benton, Joyce Kime. “Olive Dargan’s Novel Depicts Struggle for Utopian Civilization.” Review of A Stone Came Rolling. No date. Olive Tilford Dargan Papers. Records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Biographical Dictionary of the American Left. Bernard K. Johnpoll and Harvey Klehr eds. Westport, Connecticutt: Greenwood, 1986. Bird, Carol. “Write for the Future: Advice on Writing with Social Purpose. An Interview with Fielding Burke.” Writers’ Markets & Methods. Feb. 1950. 6–7. Blackwell, Alice Stone. “A Peace Play.” Review of The Shepherd. By Olive Tilford Dargan. The Christian Register. 22 May 1913: 487–8. Book Review Digest. Vol. 26. Bronx, New York: H. W. Wilson, 1933. Booker, M. Keith. Film and the American Left: A Research Guide. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1999. ———. The Modern American Novel of the Left : A Research Guide. Westport, Connecticutt: Greenwood, 1999. Brosi, George. “Olive Tilford Dargan.” KYLIT—A Site Devoted to Kentucky Writers. n. pag. Online. Internet. 11 Nov. 2002. Available: www.arh.eku.edu/Eng/ SERVICES/KYLIT/DARGAN.HTM.

225

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 225

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

226

Works Cited

Buhle, Paul. “Daily Worker.” Encyclopedia of the American Left. 2nd ed. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 174–8. Burke, Fielding [Olive Tilford Dargan]. Call Home the Heart. 1932. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1983. ———. A Stone Came Rolling. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1935. Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Chesnut, Saralyn. The Difference Within: Southern Proletarian Writers Olive Dargan, Grace Lumpkin, and Myra Page. Diss. Emory University, 1994. Cook, Sylvia J. Critical Afterword. Call Home the Heart. By Fielding Burke. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1983. 447–462. ———. From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1976. ———. “Olive Tilford Dargan.” American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Lina Mainiero ed. Vol. 1. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. 456–8. Cox, John Harrington. “John Hardy.” Journal of American Folklore. 32.126 (1919): 505–520. Dargan, Olive Tilford. From My Highest Hill: Carolina Mountain Folks. 1941. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1998. ———. Highland Annals. New York: Scribner, 1925. ———. Letter to Alice Stone Blackwell. 27 July 1932. Records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. ———. Letter to Alice Stone Blackwell. 9 December 1934. Records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. ———. Letter to Alice Stone Blackwell. 5 January 1935. Records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. ———. Letter to Alice Stone Blackwell. 14 April 1935. Records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. ———. Letter to “Dr. Muste.” 6 June 1933. Records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. ———. Lute and Furrow. New York: Scribner, 1922. ———. Roots in Heaven [Draft of the novel A Stone Came Rolling]. Ts. Olive Tilford Dargan Papers. Southern Historical Collection. University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. DeNatale, Doug and Glenn Hinson. “The Southern Textile Song Tradition Reconsidered.” Songs about Work: Essays in Occupational Culture for Richard A. Reuss. Bloomington: Folklore Institute, Indiana University, 1993. 77–107.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 226

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

Works Cited 227 Denisoff, R. Serge. Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. Baltimore: Penguin, 1971. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996. Dinnerstein, Leonard. The Leo Frank Case. New York: Columbia UP, 1968. Draper, Theodor. “Gastonia Revisited.” Social Research. 38 (1971): 3–29. DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. Ed. Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon. New York: Macmillan, 1972. 369–77. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 1978. Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. “A Forgotten Revolutionary Voice: ‘Woman’s Place’ and Race in Olive Dargan’s Call Home the Heart.” The Female Tradition in Southern Literature. Carol S. Manning ed. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. 193–208. ———. Introduction. From My Highest Hill: Carolina Mountain Folks. 1941. By Olive Tilford Dargan. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1998. ix-lxv. Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1982. Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, Duke UP, 1993. Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Vol. II. Newman Ivey White ed. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1952. 563–6. Freidel, Frank. The Splendid Little War. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958. Friedman, Albert ed. The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-speaking World. New York: Viking, 1956. Garrison, Dee. “Introduction.” Strike! By Mary Heaton Vorse. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. vii-xxi. Gilkes, Lillian. Afterword. The Wedding. [1939] By Grace Lumpkin. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois UP, 1976. 309–19. Gordon, R. W. “American Folksongs: Outlaw Ballads. Descended From the Broadside of Old, They Took Root in America and Have Since Flourished.” New York Times Magazine. 5 June 1927. 13+. Grace Lumpkin Papers. The South Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina, Columbia. Gray, Richard. Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2000. Green, Archie. Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. Guthrie, Woody. “Chief Aderholt.” In Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People. Alan Lomax comp. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. 180. Haessly, Jo Lynn. “Mill Mother’s Song”: Ella May, Working Women’s Militancy, and the 1929 Gaston County Strikes. M. A. Thesis. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 1987.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 227

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

228

Works Cited

Halker, Clark D. For Democracy, Workers, and God : Labor Song-poems and Labor Protest, 1865–95. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, et al. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “Open Secrets: Memory, Imagination, and the Refashioning of Southern Identity.” American Quarterly. 50.1 (1998): 109–124. ———. “‘You Must Remember This’: Autobiography as Social Critique.” Journal of American History. 85.2 (1998): 439–66. Hanby, B. R. “Darling Nellie Gray.” In Popular Songs of Nineteenth-Century America: Complete Original Sheet Music for 64 Songs. Richard Jackson ed. New York: Dover, 1976. 53–56. Hapke, Laura. Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People. Alan Lomax comp. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Hicks, Granville. “Better Than ‘Call Home the Heart.’” Rev. of A Stone Came Rolling. New Masses. 3 Dec. 1935: 23. Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Hudson, Arthur Palmer. “Folk-Songs of the Southern Whites.” Culture in the South. W. T. [William Terry] Couch ed. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1935. 519–46. Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. [1862] Trans. Lascelles Wraxall. 5 vols. New York: Heritage, 1938. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1998. Jerome, V. J. “A Contribution to the American Proletarian Novel.” Rev. of To Make My Bread. Daily Worker. 3 Jan. 1993: 4. Johnson, James Weldon. “Preface to the First Edition.” [1921] The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, 1958. 9–48. Joyner, Nancy Carol. “Olive Tilford Dargan.” The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin eds. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 234–5. Kelley, Robin B. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill and London: U North Carolina P, 1990. Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers. [1913] Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1976. Kessler-Harris, Alice and Paul Lauter. Introduction. Call Home the Heart. By Fielding Burke. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1983. vii-xvi. Klein, Joe. Woody Guthrie: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1980. Kornbluh, Joyce L. Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1964.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 228

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

Works Cited 229 Lathrop, Virginia Terrell. “Olive Tilford Dargan.” Unpublished essay. 1959. North Carolina Collection. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Lenin, V. I. “The Agrarian Question and the ‘Critics of Marx.’” Collected Works. Trans. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna. Ed. Victor Jerome. 4th English Edition. Vol. 5. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961. Lieberman, Robbie. My Song is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989. Linn, Karen. That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. Lipset, Seymour Martin and Gary Marks. It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. New York: Norton, 2000. Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. Ed. Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon. New York: Macmillan, 1972. 575–81. Lomax, Alan. The Folk Songs of North America, in the English Language. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1960. Lukács, Georg. “Critical Realism and Socialist Realism.” Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. K. M. Newton, ed. London: Macmillan, 1988. 89–92. Lumpkin, Grace. Letter. The New Masses. June 1930: 22. ———. Postscript. The Wedding. 1939. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois UP, 1976. 321–2. ———. “Southern Cotton Mill Rhyme.” The New Masses. May 1930: 8. ———. To Make My Bread. 1932. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995. Lumpkin, Katharine Du Pre. The Making of a Southerner. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1946. MacLean, Nancy. “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism.” The Journal of American History. 78.3 (December 1991): 917–48. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.” 1848. The Essential Left: Four Classic Texts on the Principles of Socialism. London: George Allen, 1961. McFarland, Alice. “Kentucky Poet Comes and Paints Pictures with Pen Glamored [sic] in Sheer Beauty.” Charlotte Observer. 16 Jan. 1929. N.p. McNeil, W. K. ed. Southern Folk Ballads. Vol. 2. Little Rock: August House, 1988. McSherry, Jr., Jack L. “Music of the Spanish American War Era.” The Spanish-American War Centennial Website. Available: http://www.spanam.simplenet.com/ music.htm. Meyer, Richard E. “The Outlaw: A Distinctive American Folktype.” Journal of the Folklore Institute. 17 (1980): 94–124. Muste, A. J. “Southern Labor Stirs.” The Nation. 10 Aug. 1932: 121–2. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945. Madison, Wis.: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 229

6/22/2006 8:54:40 AM

230

Works Cited

Neufeld, Rob. “Olive Tilford Dargan: Writer and Social Critic, 1869–1968.” May We All Remember Well: A Journal of the History and Cultures of Western North Carolina. Vol. II. Robert S. Brunk ed. Asheville, North Carolina: Robert S. Brunk Auction Services, 2001. 267–87. “New Defense Song Gains Wide Popularity in South.” Daily Worker. 7 Nov. 1935: 5. Newman, Ivey White, ed. Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Vol. 2. Durham: Duke UP, 1952. O’Connor, Harvey. “Carolina Mill Slaves.” New Masses. 4.12 (1929): 7. Oliver, Duane. “Grace Lumpkin—A Communist Writer on Hazel Creek.” Available: http://aam.wcu.edu/jones/16weekplan/pixs/fsnaF91.jpg. Oney, Steve. And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. United States: Pantheon, 2003. Page, Dorothy Myra. Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt. New York: International, 1932. ———. Southern Cotton Mills and Labor. New York: Workers Library, 1929. Polsky, Jane and Thomas Polsky. “The Two Lives of Olive Tilford Dargan.” The Southern Packet: A Monthly Review of Southern Books and Ideas. 4.6 (1948): 2–5. Pope, Liston. Millhands and Preachers. [1942]. New Haven: Yale UP, 1962. Porter, Eric. “Jazz.” Encyclopedia of the American Left. 2nd ed. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 395–8. Powers, J. Tracy. Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998. Reublin, Richard A. and Robert L. Maine. “Enduring American Song Hits.” Parlor Songs: Popular Sheet Music from the 1800s to the 1920s. Available: http://www. parlorsongs.com/issues/2002–1/thismonth/featurea.asp. Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1956. Rogers, Doris M. Letter. New Masses. 5.1 (1929): 22. Romalis, Shelly. Pistol Packin’ Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. Rosenbaum, Judith A. H. “Rose Pastor Stokes.” Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Vol. II. Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore eds. New York: Routledge, 1997. 1341–4. Salmond, John A. Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995. Salter, John R., Jr. “Ralph H. Chaplin.” Encyclopedia of the American Left. 2nd ed. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 124–5. Selby, John G. “Industrial Growth and Worker Protest in a New South City: High Point, North Carolina, 1859–1959.” Diss. Duke, 1984. Shannon, Anna W. Biographical Afterword. Call Home the Heart. By Fielding Burke. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1983. 433–446.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 230

6/22/2006 8:54:41 AM

Works Cited 231 Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Variorum Edition. Lawrence John Zillman ed. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1959. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. K. M. Newton. London: Macmillan, 1988. 23–5. Smith, C. Michael. “Grace Lumpkin.” Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary. Blain, Robert, Joseph M. Fora and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., eds. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1979. 287–8. Smith, Harry. Liner Notes. Anthology of American Folk Music. 1952. Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Folkways, 1997. “So Glad I’ve Got the Stone.” The Spirituals Project. Available: http://www.negrospirituals.com/news-song/so_glad_i_ve_got_the_stone.htm. Sowinska, Suzanne. Introduction. To Make My Bread. By Grace Lumpkin. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995. vii-vliii. Steinbeck, John. Foreword. Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Compiled by Alan Lomax. 8–9. Stokes, Rose Pastor. “I Belong to the Working Class”: The Unfinished Autobiography of Rose Pastor Stokes. Shapiro, Herbert and David L. Sterling eds. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1992. Strong, Josiah. “Perils—Immigration.” In Rebecca Harding Davis: Life in the Iron Mills. Cecelia Tichi ed. Boston: Bedford, 1998. 247–250. Taylor, Jeremly. Holy Dying. 1651. Online. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Internet. 26 Nov. 2002. Available: http://www.ccel.org/t/taylor/holy_dying/holy_dying.htm “Title of Novel by Mrs. Dargan Picked from List of 800.” Asheville Times. 26 May 1932. Urgo, Joseph R. “Proletarian Literature and Feminism: The Gastonia Novels and Feminist Protest.” Minnesota Review. 24 (1985): 64–84. “A Voice from the South.” No date. Records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Vorse, Mary Heaton. “Gastonia.” Harpers. 159 (November 1929): 700–710. ———. “Grind My Bones.” Rev. of To Make My Bread. New Republic. 7 Dec. 1932: 104–5. Watkins, T. H. The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America. New York: Holt, 1999. Weisbord, Albert. “Passaic: The Story of a Struggle Against Starvation Wages and for the Right to Organize.” Available: www.weisbord.org/Passaic.htm Weisbord, Vera Buch. A Radical Life. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977. Wiggins, Gene. “The Socio-Political Works of Fiddlin’ John and Moonshine Kate.” Southern Folklore Quarterly. 41 (1977): 97–118. Wilczynski, J. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Marxism, Socialism and Communism. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981. Wiley, Stephen R. “Songs of the Gastonia Textile Strike of 1929: Models of and for Southern Working-Class Women’s Militancy.” North Carolina Folklore Journal. 30 (1982): 87–98.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 231

6/22/2006 8:54:41 AM

232

Works Cited

Williamson, J. W. Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films: Plot Synopses of Movies About Moonshining, Feuding and Other Mountain Topics, 1904–1929. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1994. Young, Charlotte. “A Woman of the South who is Writing Literature for All Time.” Ts. Charlotte Young Papers. University of North Carolina at Asheville Special Collections. Zipser, Arthur and Pearl Zipser. Fire and Grace: The Life of Rose Pastor Stokes. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 232

6/22/2006 8:54:41 AM

Index

A

Aderholt, Orville, 2, 191 (n. 4) Anderson, Sherwood, 3, 178 (n. 10) Appalachia, economic development, 6–7, 202 (n. 59) literary treatment, 7–14 Arnow, Harriet, 179 (n. 13)

B

Baker, Christina, 183–184 (n. 1) “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 43–44 Bellamy, Edward, 34, 170–2, 187 (n. 27), 221 (n. 77) Beyond Desire, 3, 178 (n. 10) Beal, Fred, 1, 16 Bein, Albert, 207 (n. 90) Blackwell, Alice Stone, 129, 174, 175, 204 (n. 76), 209 (n. 5), 221 (n. 79), 222 (n. 81, n. 82) Browder, Earl, 181 (n. 24) Burke, Fielding, (see Dargan, Olive)

C

Call Home the Heart (Dargan), 3 agriculture in, 150–153 folk music in, 132–138 Holy Living and Dying (Taylor) allusion to, 157–158 hymns in, 138–141 Looking Backwards (Bellamy) allusion, 169–171 mountain dialect in, 155–157, 218–219 (n. 57)

nature in, 154–155, 218 (n. 56) Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) allusion, 157–158 Prometheus Unbound (Shelly) allusion, 158–163 religion in, 138–141, 155 summary, 130 Carson, “Fiddlin’” John, 109–110 Carter Family, 81 Chaplin, Ralph H., 43–44 “Chief Aderholt,” 198 “Communist Manifesto,” (see “Manifesto of the Communist Party”) Cook, Sylvia Jenkins, 8–10, 23, 180 (n. 18), 184 (n. 6), 190 (n. 2), 212 (n. 24), 223 (n. 83) “Cotton Mill Rhyme,” 79–81, 93–95, 199 (n. 44)

D

Daily Worker, 2, 3, 4, 45–46, 147, 178 (n. 7), 188 (n. 33), 189 (n. 44), 213 (n. 27) Dargan, Olive Tilford, 3 “The Coming,” (210 (n. 12) “The Cycle’s Rim,” 210 (n. 8) early life and work, 118–120 From My Highest Hill, 124–128 Gastonia strike involvement, 129 Highland Annals, 124–128 “Lute and Furrow,” 121–122 “The Mortal Gods,” 209 (n. 5) “Pace Tua,” 123–124

233

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 233

6/22/2006 8:54:41 AM

234 “Sall’s Gap,” 122–123 “Serena Takes a Boarder,” 124–128 “The Shepherd,” 209 (n. 5, n. 6) Sons of the Stranger, 223 (n. 83) Dargan, Pegram, 119–120, 210 (n. 80) DuBois, W.E.B., 31, 186 (n. 23)

E

Eagleton, Terry, 122 Elfenbein, Anna Shannon, (see Shannon, Anna W.) Eller, Ronald, 7, 202 (n. 59)

F

Index Hobsbawm, Eric, 78, 83–4 Howe, Julia Ward, 43

I

International Workers of the World (IWW), 34, 72 “Internationale, The,” 47–48, 189 (n. 46)

J

“John Hardy,” 49–50, 79–89, 97, 199 (n. 45), 200 (n. 46, n. 48, n. 49, n. 50) Johnson, James Weldon, 31, 187 (n. 30)

K

Foley, Barbara, 23, 98 Frank, Leo, 108–112 From My Highest Hill (Dargan), 124–128

Kephart, Horace, 78, 83, 193 (n. 13), 197 (n. 37)

G

Larkin, Margaret, 16 Lenin, V.I., 150–151, 181–182 (n. 26) Let Freedom Ring (Bein), 207 (n. 90) “Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine,” (see “Cotton Mill Rhyme”) “Little Mary Phagan,” 108–113, 205 (n. 82, n. 83, n. 84), 206 (n. 85, n. 86, n. 88), 207 (n. 89) Linn, Karen, 10–11 Locke, Alain, 31 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 34, 169–171 Loray Mill 1, 177 (n. 3), 181 (n. 25), 203 (n. 71) Lukács, Georg, 196 (n. 25) Lumpkin, Grace Communism and, 191–192 (n. 6) early education and work, 58–59, 193 (n. 14) marriage to Michael Intrator, 193–194 (n. 15) parents, William and Annette, 56–57, 61, 192 (n. 9), 194 (n. 17) “Remember Now,” 115–116, 208 (n. 95, n. 96) Sign for Cain, A, 114–115, 197 (n. 34), 208 (n. 93) sister, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, 55–59, 60 Some Take a Lover, 113, 207 (n. 91, n. 92)

Gary, Dorothy Page, (see Page, Myra) Gastonia, NC, strike, 1–5, 11, 12–13, 14–15, 104, 129 Gathering Storm (Page): African-American folk music in, 28–33, 39–42 critical reception, 23, 184 (n. 4, n. 5) hymns in, 26–28 International Workers of the World (IWW) in, 34 jazz in, 35–35, 37 Jungle, The (Sinclair), allusion, 34 popular songs in, 36–39 union songs in, 43–44, 47 Wiggins, Ella May depicted, 44–45, 47 Gellert, Lawrence, 188 (n. 37, n. 39) Green, Archie, 16, 179 (n. 14), 199 (n. 44) Guthrie, Woody, 16–17, 183 (n. 32), 205 (n. 78)

H

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, 14, 55, 57, 192 (n. 7, n. 8, n. 9) Hapke, Laura, 14, 23, 47 Highland Annals (Dargan), 124–128 High Point, NC, strike, 213 (n. 27), 221 (n. 80) Hill, Joe, 72

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 234

L

6/22/2006 8:54:41 AM

Index 235 Timid Woman, 113–114 Wedding, The, 115, 208 (n. 94) “Lute and Furrow” (Dargan), 121–122

M

Making of a Southerner, The (Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin), 55–59, 60 “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 150 Marx, Karl, 34, 150 “Mill Mother’s Lament,” 44, 47, 77–78 Misérables, Les (Hugo), 60–66 Muste, A.J., 221 (n. 80)

N

New Masses 4, 11, 41, 59, 79–81, 177 (n. 6), 178 (n. 7), 181 (n. 23), 199 (n. 44, n. 45) National Textile Workers Union (NTWU), 1, 14, 15, 16, 79, 80, 129, 185 (n. 8) Nelson, Cary, 47

P

“Pace Tua” (Dargan), 123–124 Page, Myra 3 childhood, 20, 32 Southern Cotton Mills and Labor, 22 28, 38, 184–185 (n. 7), 185 (n. 8, n. 9), 186 (n. 16), 187 (n. 26) Phagan, Mary, 108–112 Pope, Liston 2 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 158–163

R

Rollins, William 3

S

Sacco, Nicola and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 51, 100–104, 177 (n. 4), 204 (n. 74, n. 75), 205 (n. 78) “Sall’s Gap” (Dargan), 122–123 Seaver, Edwin, 213 (n. 26) Seeger, Pete, 16, 183 (n. 31), 198 (n. 39), 205 (n. 78) “Serena Takes a Boarder” (Dargan), 124–128 Shadow Before, The (Rollins), 3 Shannon, Anna W., 209 (n. 2)

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 235

Shklovsky, Victor, 39 Sign for Cain, A, (see Lumpkin, Grace) Sinclair, Upton, 34 Slave Songs of the United States (Allen), 186 (n. 18) Socialist Party, 34, 120, 180–181 (n. 21) “Solidarity Forever,” 43–44, 79, 80, 139, spirituals, African-American, 31–32 Stokes, Rose Pastor 120, 128–129, 210 (n. 10) Stone Came Rolling, A (Dargan) folk music in, 149–150, 220 (n. 71) hymns in, 141–143 mountain poverty depicted, 163–165 religion in, 141–148 summary, 130 Strong, Josiah, 180 (n. 21) Strike! (Vorse), 3

T

To Make My Bread (Lumpkin), critical reception, 190 (n. 2) Gastonia strike in, 191 (n. 4) hymns in, 70–78 “John Hardy” allusion, 49–50, 79–89, 97, 102 Les Misérables allusion, 60–66 “Little Mary Phagan” allusion, 108–113, 206 (n. 85, n. 86) outlaw as symbol in, 49–50, 79–99, 104religion in, 66–78, 100–101 summary, 51–54

U

Urgo, Joseph 3, 178 (n. 7, n. 10)

V

Vorse, Mary Heaton 3, 15, 178 (n. 10)

W

Wedding, The (see Lumpkin, Grace) Weisbord, Vera Buch, 188 (n. 41) Wiggins, Ella May 2–3, 13–14, 16–17, 22– 23, 44–45, 47–48, 79, 111, 177 (n. 5, n. 6, n. 10), 183 (n. 28, n. 30), 188–189 (n. 41, n. 42), 191 (n. 4), 205 (n. 77), 206 (n. 85)

6/22/2006 8:54:41 AM

96896_Mantooth_06 22.indd 236

6/22/2006 8:54:41 AM