[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

MIMI CONWAY:

I'm talking today with Harriette Arnow, who has published five novels1 and two social histories,2 a number of short stories,3 and also done some journalistic work.4 And we're in her home today in Ann Arbor, and I'm going to let her tell her own story. Could you tell me first where and when you were born? ^{n1 n2 n3 n4}

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I was born in Wayne County, Kentucky. That's the most I can say. It was near Monticello, but the post office, I think it was Coopersville. The government has done away with all those small post offices, so that about all I can say is, I was born in Wayne County in 1908, the daughter of Elias Thomas Simpson and Millie Jane Denney.

MIMI CONWAY:

And could you give me the exact date of your birth?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

July 7, 1908.

MIMI CONWAY:

And can you tell me first a little bit about your mother's family and what her name was before she married and a little bit about her family and her history?

Wilton Eckley, Harriette Arnow, 1974, Twayne's United States Authors Series (chronology, selected bibliography, and summary of her life and writings).

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HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Mama was Mollie Jane Denney. Her father died, leaving her mother—who was Harriette Foster, married James Braxton Denney—a widow with three small children when she was only in her mid-twenties. And my mother, Mollie Jane Denney, was almost five years old. My Grandmother Denney's people (the Fosters), by that date, had already gone to Missouri. As you know, many people migrated from the South long before we heard of the Southern Appalachian migrant. They usually went to Texas, Missouri, Illinois, and Oklahoma. They went there to farm; they didn't turn north to the industrial centers.

MIMI CONWAY:

What did your Grandfather Denney do?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

He had been a teacher. After his death, Grandma Denney's father-in-law, Jackson Denney (that's my mother's paternal grandfather), was most insistent that they come live with him. And my mother grew up more or less in his home. He was then an old man; he'd been born in 1817, and he knew many men who had been in the War of 1812, and a few of the very old. . . . Born thirty-six years after the close of the Revolution, he knew many Revolutionary soldiers.

MIMI CONWAY:

Was one or many of your ancestors also in the Revolutionary War? You talk about a Thomas Merritt, a beautiful description at the beginning of Seedtime.5 ⁿ⁵

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, Thomas Merritt was on my father's side. On that side I also had a White and a Shrrell who were in the Revolution. On Mama's side there was a Taylor and Anthony Gholson and a Dick who were in the Revolution. My father's Simpson ancestor was a Tory, so the story goes, but the others were in the Revolution.

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MIMI CONWAY:

Do you know when your mother's family first came to this country, where they came, and where they came from?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

That I am not certain of. Somewhere I read that "Captain Joseph Collins, Gentleman, led a party against ye Indians." This happened in Virginia in 1753. But I don't know where the Denneys came from. I think they were Scotch-Irish, but I'm not sure.

MIMI CONWAY:

Is your heritage all Scotch-Irish? You have some French, I think, too.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, my grandmother's name was Harriette LaGrande Foster. And one side of her family—I've never had much time to spend on genealogy, I mean far back—they, I believe, settled on the Santee River.

MIMI CONWAY:

In Kentucky.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, the Santee River is in North Carolina. [The Santee River is in South Carolina.] That was during colonial days, before there was a Kentucky. And she used to tell stories about the people who had lived, as she said, "on the other side of the mountains."

MIMI CONWAY:

And then your father's family, do you know when they came to this country?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, I don't. I only know that most were English. I've tried to get past Reuben Simpson—that was his great-great-great-great-grandfather—he's the one who was a Loyalist. So far I've been unable to do so. I haven't spent any time on it. But the story goes that he was living in Virginia. Some of his relatives were for the colonists; others were Loyalists. He didn't want to kill any of them, so left Virginia and went to South Carolina and was living near the site of

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the Battle of Kings Mountain. You know, Kings Mountain is near the North Carolina-South Carolina border. His ancestors, the Whites, came from England at a very early date. Most of my people were living in the colonies well before there was a Revolution.

MIMI CONWAY:

Your Grandfather Simpson, what did he do?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

My Grandfather Simpson was a teacher and a farmer.

MIMI CONWAY:

So it's a long line of teachers in your family.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, and our mother was determined that her daughters should be teachers.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did your Grandmother Denney work, I mean, for example, as a teacher? Did she work outside the home?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, she never worked outside the home that I know of. I loved Grandmother Denney, but she was a curious person. When I first knew her, her husband had been dead, I'd say, thirty years, and she still wore, when travelling or going to church, a black silk mourning bonnet with a long tail. She dressed completely in black. At home she would liven up a little. And she visited us. I think when I first remember her, she'd given up housekeeping; I'm not certain. Because she had inherited from her husband a farm which she rented and had some income, though not a great deal. She wore dresses, either white sprigged with black or black with very faint designs in them.

MIMI CONWAY:

Were they silk dresses?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, she had silk dresses for church; her good dresses were always black. If you'll wait, do you want to see a quilt she pieced for me when I was eight years old?

MIMI CONWAY:

Oh, I'd love to.

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[interruption]

MIMI CONWAY:

Your Grandmother Denney—also, I think that you wrote about this or mentioned this—that while she was alive, and I think she died when you were nine?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Ten, the summer I was ten years old.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did she have you dress in very pretty dresses, and have your hair curled and things? Would you tell me a little bit about that?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Oh, yes, when she was home I'd go to school with these little sausages, you know, down to my shoulders and a bow; all the little girls dressed that way, a great hair bow. Your bow had to stand up, you know.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did you like having a grandmother who had you get all

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dressed up?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Oh, yes, I loved it when she was home. The only thing I had against Grandmother Denny, she wanted to be busy always, and one of her activities was knitting lace out of Number 80 white sewing thread. The lace had points on it, and we would wear it around the tops of our slips or petticoats unknown and the bottom of the petticoat and the edge of the pants. We didn't ordinarily have to wear it to school. But at that time, all your underclothes were starched stiff as pokers, and that lace would cut into me in church...

MIMI CONWAY:

(Laugh)

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

...and my legs. And usually I had some old chigger bites I'd want to scratch, but in church you had to sit perfectly still.

MIMI CONWAY:

So Grandmother Denney was quite a lady.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Oh, she was. And another thing she did, she liked to help with the churning or anything, and before churning she'd put on her mitts, which she also knit. I've never seen anyone else wear them; I know it was once the custom. But they were black and, I think, knit of coarser thread than the lace, and they covered the first knuckles of her fingers so that the tips of her fingers and the end of her thumb, but her palm was protected.

MIMI CONWAY:

Perhaps you should have had those. I remember when you wrote about grinding, and your knuckles got bloodied.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Oh, that was when I was teaching school and I tried to grit corn. So many of these things they did, in the back

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hills, and I'd heard of bread made of gritted corn. The pioneers, you know.

MIMI CONWAY:

So perhaps you should have had Grandmother Denney's mitts. [laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

To do that? I don't know. Really, the word is "grated," but they all said "gritted corn." And oh, the bread was delicious stuff.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did Grandmother Denney live far away from Burnside, or did she live with you, or what?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

She lived in Wayne County near her old home or in it, and our home was in Burnside—that's a small town on Cumberland River—after I was almost five years old. She usually spent most of her winters with us.

MIMI CONWAY:

And was she a very important figure in your family? Was it different when she was there and when she wasn't?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

It was different in many ways, it seemed to me. Grandma tried harder to make what she called "ladies" out of us. We were not supposed to slump. If she found me sitting the way I am now, she'd make a remark about it and suggest or tell me to walk around a while with a book on my head. And she'd talk about the old days. I don't know whether she'd been to such a school or not where the girls in school wore back boards.

MIMI CONWAY:

Oh, like a finishing school or something.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes. To make them sit and stand straight, and she sighed for the days when women were well corseted in those corsets. Mama

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had such a corset in the attic, but she never wore it. They had steel in them as well as whalebone.

M. C.: How did your mother feel about having. . . . I think there were four daughters and one son?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Five.

MIMI CONWAY:

Five daughters and one son. Did she share Grandmother Denney's, her own mother's, view about having you be ladies?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

She worried less about that, I think. Our mother had migraine headache among other things. When I was a child and walking through Burnside—you know, everybody knew everyone else—and the question was always, "Well, how's your mother holding up?" Mama didn't live; she just held up. And of course she bore six children; that's enough to make anyone feel not too well at times. But Mama held up until she was almost eighty-nine years old. But Grandma Denney was the one who worried more about our manners and our speech. I recall once she told me to sweep the little side porch. The broom wasn't in its usual place, and I yelled out, "Where's the broom at?" And she didn't lift her voice or anything; she just said, "You'll find the broom just behind the at." So I always think of that if I hear someone using "at" at the end of a sentence, or an unneeded one, or if I'm tempted to or do so.

MIMI CONWAY:

How did your father feel about Grandmother Denney trying to make ladies of you?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Oh, he was always glad to see her. She was a very kind,

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thoughtful woman, and I hate to say it but she was a much better cook than Mama. Mama, before marriage, had been a teacher for ten years. She was twenty-eight when she married. And I think Grandma Denney had always done the cooking, taken care of her and this and that. But I remember Grandma Denny's biscuits. Of course, at that time and in that town, you always had biscuits and cornbread for breakfast. And we took biscuit sandwiches to school. I was so embarrassed once. I'd always, when I went to the store, if Mama wanted some bread, I asked for loaf bread. And one day I said, "I want a loaf of loaf bread, please," and somebody behind me tittered, so I started saying "bread", but it didn't seem right because there were so many different kinds of bread, instead of just what you got at the store. And then years and years later, I read in Boswell's Journal in Scotland, he said he hadn't seen a single loaf or any loaf bread because they ate oat cakes and muffins

MIMI CONWAY:

You never knew your Grandfather Denney.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No. I never knew either of my grandfathers; they were both dead when I was born.

MIMI CONWAY:

But your Grandmother Simpson, did she live in Burnside?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, she also lived in Wayne County.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did you know her very well, or did she live while...

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I did know her, but I didn't see as much of her as Grandma Denney. Grandma Denney died when she was sixty-seven. Grandma Simpson, when I knew her, was much older than that, but she was a sweet, kindly soul. I never heard her complain of anything. She had what was

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apparently cataracts, or the beginnings of them. She'd been to all the eye men around, one in Somerset and one in Monticello, but they weren't able to do anything for her. And she loved to read, and her big sorrow was she could no longer read. Mama used to read to her a lot.

MIMI CONWAY:

Is Grandmother Simpson the one who would tell you stories about guerilla activities during the Civil War?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, that's how old she was. She married during the War and was a young married woman and remembered nothing horrible happened to her. Well, the guerillas came and tore up the country. And when I visited the homeplace, my cousins showed me the cave where they'd had to hide the horses to keep them from being stolen. One group was under Tinker Beattie, who claimed he was a soldier for the Union. And Champion Ferguson claimed he was fighting for the Confederacy. You see, in our part of Kentucky—it's south-central—many of the people owned slaves. The Simpsons had freed theirs several years before the War. I don't think Mama's people had any slaves, at least not the Denneys. And allegiance was mixed. And guerillas just overran the country; there was no law or order to stop them. They killed a good many people, stole horses and food, and burned buildings.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did the Simpsons own many slaves? Do you know about how many?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

There were no really large slaveholders in. . . . Well, some, I suppose, had thirty, thirty-five. I think the Simpsons only

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had fourteen. I'm not sure. I look at those things in the deed books.

MIMI CONWAY:

I know that in your book, Seedtime on the Cumberland, you make a distinction between farmers and planters.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

And farmers, I assume, are small landowners who do their own farming, and planters are those who, with or without slave help—some used white tenant help—were more propertied. So that would mean that the Simpsons were planters, is that...

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, practically everybody around there were farmers. There's another distinction I should have made, too. The planters, as a rule, were one-crop: the great cotton planters, and then you've heard of the rice planters. There were some planters in Tennessee, and I suppose. . . . Well, now, I don't know about the bluegrass. Maybe where they grew a lot of hemp. That is in Kentucky. Some families certainly owned a great many slaves, but insofar as I know all my people were farmers, that is they grew many crops. They sold cattle and hogs and tobacco and of course, in the early years, whiskey. Until they passed the excise tax, Lincoln—I think that was in 1863—making it into whiskey was the one way farmers had of getting their corn to market. They owned small stills, but they'd usually make a thousand or so gallons. At Nashville they could get a dollar a gallon for it. I don't have the figures for Wayne, but in Pulaski County around 1830

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corn whiskey was selling for twenty-five to thirty-three cents a gallon, they made so much of it. It was their biggest cash crop except tobacco.

MIMI CONWAY:

Can we go back for a second? You were born in Wayne County, and when you were four you moved to Burnside.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, I was almost five.

MIMI CONWAY:

Were you born at home?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes. Practically everybody was born at home. The closest hospital was at Lexington, although there may not have been a hospital at Lexington when I was born.

MIMI CONWAY:

Where do you fit into the order of your family?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Elizabeth is my one older sister. There's Elizabeth, Harriette, Margaret, Lucy, Sarah. And five years after Sarah was born, when my mother was forty-four years old, James William was born. My mother was always wishing for a boy. She'd tell me she wished I had been a boy, and each succeeding baby, she hoped for a boy, and at last one came.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did that bother you or affect you in any way when she'd tell you that she wished you were a boy?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I really don't know. I remember it annoyed me, because I didn't want to be treated like a boy or have to do boy's work or anything like that.

MIMI CONWAY:

What was boy's work, I mean like chores at the farm?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I had different chores at times. I used to have to bring

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in the cows. I didn't mind that; it gave me a chance to wander off and walk up the hill and over to an adjoining field.

MIMI CONWAY:

Were you close with your sisters and brother?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, quite close, but you see, there was thirteen years between me and my brother. I finished high school a short time before I was sixteen. Then I went to Berea. And I taught, so that I was never again, after I was sixteen, at home all the time. Oh, I would visit, of course, or spend part of the summer there, but I didn't live there anymore.

MIMI CONWAY:

Could you describe a little bit what Burnside was like when you were living there, up till the time you were sixteen?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

When we moved there, Burnside had around two thousand people. It was primarily a lumber town. There was a veneer mill, unknown Chicago Veneering; Kentucky Lumber; there was a stave mill; a tie factory where they made railroad ties, they were shipped all over. And there was a cedar mill; among other things it made faucets. Many of those were shipped to Europe. We were on the main trunk line of the Southern Railway, so there was always plenty of oranges and bananas and other things in season. The things I remember best about Burnside are the steamboats and the steamboat whistles. It was at the junction of Big South Fork and the Cumberland River, and there were paddle wheel steamboats. Packets I think came up from Nashville or transhipped goods; they'd been doing that since 1833. Oh, I loved to hear those steamboat whistles. And, of course, the train

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whistle; they were all steam trains. Somerset was the county seat, and two or three miles from Somerset, at Ferguson, was the roundhouse. Here, a second engine was hooked onto southbound freights for the long pull up and over the mountains to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Burnside was surrounded by hills, but our hills were much smaller than those of Fast Kentucky or the mountains of Fast Tennessee.

MIMI CONWAY:

Why did your family move to Burnside?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Our father, as I say, was a teacher—taught only eight years—and in those days teachers' salaries were very low in Kentucky. And you can't support a family with that, so he became a tool dresser in the oil field in Wayne County. It was quite a little field there. And then when that was drilled out, he came to Burnside to work in the veneer mill. He worked there about six years. And when they opened more wells during World War I in another part of Kentucky, he went back to his tool dressing in that oil field.

MIMI CONWAY:

I thought that he also was a bookkeeper.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No. He kept tally for several months.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

MIMI CONWAY:

... and what he did and his influence on you.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

He worked at the veneer mill, did something called "feeding the hog." Of course, visitors were not allowed there when the mill was in operation. It was all those saws and logs moving around and

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being picked up. But it was something about feeding scrap to the boilers. Most of the mills in Burnside depended on scrap wood for fuel. Wood was plentiful. Plenty of virgin timber at that time. The saws in Burnside were powered by steam. And Papa was six feet tall with blue eyes, and I can remember only a bit when his hair was black. He married when he was thirty-four, so that by the time I remember him at all his hair was getting gray. And he had the most beautiful blue eyes. And broad-shouldered, but of a rather spare build. He sang a great deal. I learned my first bit of history from him when I was four or five years old, but I couldn't connect it with anything. You've no doubt heard, "My name is Charles Guiteau, My name I'll never deny, For the murder of James A. Garfield, I am compelled to die." He of course sang other songs, and of some I remember only snatches. I've never seen this in print, but I know it's somewhere: "Peggy O'Neale was a girl who could steal/Any heart, anywhere, anytime." Now I don't know whether that is an old song about the Peggy O'Neale, you remember, who married Mr. Faton, one of Andrew Jackson's cabinet members, and none of the ladies would call on her, or a later song. Maybe a popular song, because I remember he was soon singing, "It's a long, long way to Tipperary." But he also sang old songs like "Ride Around the Cane Brake and Shoot the Buffalo."

MIMI CONWAY:

And wasn't he also a wonderful storyteller?

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HARRIETTE ARNOW:

He was; he was a great storyteller. He was particularly good at ghost tales—he'd scare us to death—and so did "Jack the Giant Killer," because he would mimic each thing. He could be the sly butcher, you know, who gave poor, innocent Jack a handful of beans for a good cow, or he could be the giant. Oh, he could really roar; he sang bass in the church choir. Or he could be the harp, speaking in a high falsetto, the treacherous harp that almost cost Jack his life. Scare us to death.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did he tell a lot of the Jack tales?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

He told several. He told another story that is really part, I think, of the folklore of most nations in Europe, about the man who thought he could do his wife's work quicker than she, and it was uproarious. The wife went off to work in the field or she went to church or something, and the man thought he'd have stewed chicken for dinner. And then the details: he cut his thumb when he was trying to cut up the chicken, and he put turpentine on it and got turpentine in the chicken.

MIMI CONWAY:

(Laugh)

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

And on and on and on; it was really uproarious.

MIMI CONWAY:

It sounds to me like all of your people were wonderful storytellers.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

They were. Papa also seemed to remember most of the poetry he not only taught, but read. Like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"—he knew practically all of that—and a lot of Tennyson and

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Poe and others, bits of Shakespeare, which he would recite. Papa was also the prime storyteller; he told stories of the Revolution handed down from the Whites and the Sherrells and the Merritts.

MIMI CONWAY:

But now your mother was a good storyteller, too, wasn't she?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

She was quite a good storyteller, but most of her stories were of her past when she'd been a teacher. I remember she talked so much about Maude, I think I first thought Maude was a sister. But Maude had been her favorite five-gaited saddle mare that she'd ridden when she was teaching. She usually had a school fairly close to home where she could stay at home and ride to work on Maude, of course on a side saddle and in a riding skirt. Did you ever see one of those riding skirts?

MIMI CONWAY:

Only pictures.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

We had one around the house. How a woman even got around in it, I don't know.

MIMI CONWAY:

I think I remember your saying that your mother had—not only for Maude—but had very detailed memories of a lot of horses.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, and people she'd known, families; she knew most of the families that were at least distantly related in Wayne County. If Mama didn't know at least who their grandparents were, she considered them strangers. Because she'd grown up that way with the Denneys. There was Denney's Gap and a Denney post office and two Denney graveyards, and Denney's Store. And she'd grown up

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surrounded by her Denny kin. I don't think she ever felt at home after leaving Wayne County and her close relatives. It was like a clan, almost.

MIMI CONWAY:

I know you said you had a few relatives in Burnside. They were Simpson relatives?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Not all. They were mostly distant cousins. Papa had some relatives, the Rankins, who were girls, married when we moved there. One of them was my Sunday school teacher, and I knew their mother. They were lovely people. The other relatives were Cousins Emma, Mollie, and Dora, all Denneys before their marriages. They were, I think, first cousins of my dead Grandfather Denney. And every once in awhile, Grandma Denney, she was no blood relative, but she would put on her black silk bonnet and a silk dress and go over to see them. They lived in Burnside in the upper town. And I loved the place, but of course I always sat still on a horsehair sofa. If you haven't ever sat in thin summer clothing and socks on a horsehair sofa, you don't know what itching and scratching are. The women all seemed to enjoy talking of the past. Mama was that way, too. And they talked a lot about their father, the three cousins did. They were married, but they had no sure-fire way of birth control; they just waited until they were past the age of child-bearing, you see, and then married, so they had no children.

MIMI CONWAY:

Oh, my heavens.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

That's, I suppose, one way of birth control.

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MIMI CONWAY:

Was that common?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Women, I think, that we knew married older; they were older than they are now. Mama was twenty-eight.

MIMI CONWAY:

And you were thirty-one?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I was thirty-one, yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

I was interested in that, because I didn't know if it was unusual for you to marry late, or, because your mother and father had also married late, it was...

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I don't know. I guess the man I wanted just didn't come along, although I was preoccupied with writing. I published a book, my first novel, and some short stories, and I didn't think much about marriage. On the other hand, many of the girls my age in high school married at about the same age I did.

MIMI CONWAY:

I was confused about that, because I knew that there was a strong emphasis on husband, children, family—I think there was in your upbringing—and I wasn't sure, in your twenties, whether you had pressure from your family, "Why aren't you married?" or whether that was just part of either the tradition of your family or the tradition of the people that you grew up with. I mean, especially since they objected to your writing.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I don't know. I think it's a mixture. Mama didn't want my older sister and I to marry at all, and my older sister didn't. The rest of us did. And I don't know; it was a combination. But many girls my age in high school married about the same time I did, and some of them didn't marry. There was no pressure or feeling that

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one had to get married in order to be a person.

MIMI CONWAY:

Why do you think your mother didn't want you to marry? Did she actually say?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I don't know. She wanted us, I think, to stay at home, which we didn't...

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

...and stay close to her, is all I know. World War II came just at the right time; our brother finished all his work for the bachelor's degree at the University of Kentucky—I don't think he went through the motions of graduating—and joined the Air Force. So during the War she was writing to him overseas—he was a navigator in a bomber—and to five daughters in five different states. Now the Denneys seemed to hang all around the great-grandfather Matthew. The country, that part, was full of Denneys, and you'll still find an awful lot in that same county. Looking at the list of teachers, here's Denney, Denney, Denney; they still teach school. Papa's people, one of his uncles went to Idaho, the territory, long before there was a state. One of his sisters, shortly after her marriage, she and her husband bought land in Alberta, Canada. I always wanted to go there; I never have. She married a Burnett. I have few Simpson relatives left in Wayne County. They scattered, and I think they wanted to go to different places. Some went all the way to Oregon before there was a state of Oregon.

MIMI CONWAY:

But you think it was simply because your mother wanted to have you at home.

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You don't think it was because she had any feelings against marriage.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, she had married. She may have had feelings against marriage; I don't know. Of course, she wouldn't say, but I've often wondered. She seemed to love her past as a teacher. She didn't tell us any remote stories from the distant past the way Papa and Grandma Simpson and Grandma Denney did, but it was all about when she was a girl or woman and teaching. She had one of these old red plush albums. Most of the photographs in that were of her and her friends when they'd go to what they called "Teachers' Institute" at Monticello. And so on and so forth. I think she perhaps enjoyed that part of her life better—I don't know—but she wouldn't, of course, come out and say, "Well, I wish I'd never married" or anything like that.

MIMI CONWAY:

I think you once mentioned something about your mother having a wonderful imagination. I think I get that from the time that she made a pumpkin pie and put double the spices in [by mistake] and decided to put meringue on it so that it would be like chocolate, to help you imagine better that it was chocolate.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, I remember that. I was so mad, annoyed when I bit into it, because you could tell from the taste she had spilled the spices; Mama was not a great cook.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

The double spices were not deliberate. She got it so black

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Page 22

with extra spice. I don't know, I think she overdid the allspice. You know, you can't stand very much allspice. But the meringue was all right; you could eat that and leave the pie.

MIMI CONWAY:

But did she have a real strong imagination, or was that just an isolated example that makes it sound that way?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I think she did. One thing I got from Mama, she loved growing things. I didn't appreciate it at the time. She wanted a vegetable garden. Of course, Papa could help a good deal in that when he wasn't working. She also grew flowers, and the house, it was large enough for the children and so forth, but in winter there were potted plants and ferns, begonias and sensitive ferns and other ferns. I remember a stand in the dining room, and then there were more. . . . We didn't call it the living room; I guess we called it the sitting room or just the place where we spent most of our time. And if you tried to play or do anything boisterous, you'd be certain to knock over a plant. And Mama also liked to watch the sky, the sunsets and the moon and all that sort of thing.

MIMI CONWAY:

And didn't she know how to tell the weather really well by the sound of the wind or the appearance of the sky?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

She was a close observer and was quite a good weather forecaster. Well, so was Papa, though. You see, they had grown up in a world where you had no weather forecast on TV or radio; there weren't any. And they watched the sky. It didn't always rain when she thought it would.

One thing we had when we were children, was sky. We lived on Tyree's Knob in Burnside school district, but above Burnside.

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You could see for miles and miles toward the southwest and west.

MIMI CONWAY:

What was the house like?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I wish I'd known you were interested. I would have tried to find a picture. It was a frame house, two stories in front, kind of gaunt-looking with the usual porches front and back and on the side, and only one story in back for the kitchen and the dining room. And it was, I guess, six rooms, but the rooms were all big, as I remember. I remember upstairs in the bedrooms, you could get two double beds in with no trouble, and anything else you wanted to put in. We brought with us, I remember, what Mama had inherited from the days when there were few closets. We had closets in our house, but we still had what they called wardrobes. Did you ever see one?

MIMI CONWAY:

Yes.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

One was oak and one was walnut, and they always made me think of coffins stood on end, dark, and there'd be plenty of room for those and anything else you could cram into a room.

MIMI CONWAY:

Was your house, for the town, considered a large house?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, it was about average, I guess, although shortly after it was built. . . . I remember when I first heard the word "bungalow," and those were one-story houses. Most of the homes in our town were two stories. It was smaller than some and bigger than others, plenty of room.

MIMI CONWAY:

I remember you mentioned something about your father having inherited oil rights; he got royalties from the mineral rights of

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Page 24

land that belonged to his father.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did that plus his work mean that you were some of the wealthy people in town?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No. We were only better off than some. But that was the unusual thing about Burnside when I was a child: the children of the mill owners—of course, they were not great mills, but they did earn a lot of money—and the other businesses came to school with the workers. Everybody went to the public school then. And I don't think there were any millionaires in Burnside. There were, though, some very poor people. I remember our church and the other churches did the same: each Christmas we had what we called a white Christmas—the dandelions might be blooming, but we called it that—and each member of each family in the church was to bring, wrapped in white tissue paper, one or two gifts for the poor. I know Mama always sent a lot of preserves and jelly and canned goods, and we bought food or sometimes she'd make clothing for small children. You see, there were no government aids for the poor except I think, I'm not certain, there was a county home—no, I don't believe there was—for the elderly poor. It was the custom, if elderly people needed financial help, the children took care of them. But there may have been one for the poor, because there were people so poor they couldn't take care of themselves, or so I heard. [Text Missing]

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MIMI CONWAY:

Were there any blacks in Burnside?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No. No blacks. We were all one hundred percent white Protestants, mostly the descendants of Revolutionary soldiers, which didn't mean anything. Burnside was in that part of Kentucky set aside for soldiers of the Revolution. You know, they gave them land; they couldn't pay them any money.

MIMI CONWAY:

And that's why a lot of the people would have come from North Carolina.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I think so, yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

Can you describe the grade school that you went to? You went to grade school in Burnside.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

Was it a one-room school?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, it was a graded and high school housed in a red brick building. And let's see, in the first grade a great deal of emphasis was put on the sounds of letters. We had to study; we spent all day. There was no kindergarten; you began when you were six years old or close to it. And you learned the letters and sounds. Meanwhile you were learning to read. You learned the numbers, learned to write them. And we were soon doing simple addition and

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subtraction. Reading began in a primer; we next went in the first grade in the same room. And children who didn't make the grade were not passed. You know, now in city schools, I've heard that the child shouldn't be made to feel left out, so you pass him on. That's why we have high school students who can't read. It was a sad situation, though. There were about fifty in the first grade. And in my graduating class I think there was only twelve of us.

MIMI CONWAY:

Oh, my heavens.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

We were the ones who planned to go on to college, and all of us did, I think, but two girls. One of the girls married. But nobody seemed to care whether the people went to school or not. They were held back until they learned. I remember when I went to first grade, I was surprised: there were children in there much bigger than my older sister. Then there were fewer in the second grade, still fewer in the third and the fourth.

MIMI CONWAY:

So there was no compulsory education at this time.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No. The feeling was that. . . . Well, that's what Papa said when I asked him once why didn't they send their children to school? He said, "Well, it could be they didn't have winter clothing." I noticed that most of them dropped out in the winter. And in the fifth and sixth grade there were so few they had only one teacher.

MIMI CONWAY:

Wow.

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Page 27

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Still not as many as in the first grade, and that was true in the seventh and eight.

MIMI CONWAY:

So by the time you finished high school, as you say, most of the people were going on to college. But in the first grade, when there were fifty of you, it sounds more like there were very poor children and also rich children.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

There were some with well-to-do parents.

MIMI CONWAY:

Were there children who didn't have shoes? I mean, for example, you were talking about when Grandmother Denney was there and you'd have really pretty dresses and things. Could you see a big difference in how the children were dressed?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I don't recall noticing much difference in the first and second grades, but I did notice it later, and I did notice that some dropped out in the winter. I thought for many years we were of the poorest because our mother complained a lot about how little money we had, even though Papa worked. He made what other men made, I think, and he received some money from his oil rights, which, when oil was high as during World War I amounted to quite a lot. Then as a tool dresser, he made higher wages. I hadn't noticed any difference, because everybody came to school starched and ironed, and we dressed a good deal alike. The well-to-do children you couldn't have told—or to my causal eye; I never studied it—perhaps you could have seen differences in dress. But one day I'd been sent on an errand to the store. We were on the hill, and down in the

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lower town near the rivers were most of the stores, other businesses, and lumber mills. In the upper town most of the people lived, and we were higher on the hill. And as I crossed the railway tracks, between the upper and lower town, I saw a man with a sack on his shoulder, bending over and picking up small pieces of coal. South of us there were coal mines, and the coal cars were always passing. Later I asked Papa, "Why would anybody be picking up those little bits of coal fallen from passing coal cars? Why didn't they burn wood?" I couldn't imagine anybody being without wood. We had about thirty acres of land. Most of it was in cut-over timber, so there was always plenty of wood. Papa said maybe the man didn't have any wood, and I said, "Well, what does he pick up coal for?" "Well, he doesn't have any money to buy it." And I couldn't imagine that, any more than I could imagine anyone being hungry. I don't know. Of course, we didn't have much money, but we had our own vegetable garden and milk cows and this and that. Practically everybody in town had a vegetable garden. Many of them kept cows. They'd stable them at night and drive them out to pasture next day. In warm weather the cows weren't kept in the stables overnight; they just wandered around the town and slept where they wished.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

And I've heard many funny stories of boys, sometimes young men going out to see their best girls, coming home, and stumbling over

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cows. The street lights in our town were few and far between and very dim. Quite a place was Burnside. Everybody knew you, and you knew everybody.

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

MIMI CONWAY:

...when you first started to write, or your early years in school, whatever.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Before I started to write, I can't remember when I didn't think up stories and happy endings. Some of the stories I heard, especially of what we called "the war"—we never said the Civil War or the War Between the States, because the country was so divided; we just said "the war"; we named other wars, like the War of 1812—and I would hear these sad stories. I'd only be sad a few minutes, because I could imagine a happy ending. In school I think we started writing compositions in the third grade, but they were always about factual subjects such as George Washington or Arbor Day. Now, in this little town, though there were forests all around us, we kept Arbor Day and planted trees. I'm not sure they do that in Ann Arbor or Detroit. But it was not until I was in the fourth grade that we were sometimes told to write imaginary pieces, and that was what I wanted. I could go to town on that. And, oh, I felt as if I'd published a story when my teacher read one of mine aloud to the class. I had no desk at home of my own. I did have a little washstand where I put things. But I wanted a great desk such as I had seen at the

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George P. Taylor Company in Burnside. Of course, I'd had to have stood on the floor to use it. I told the story from the point of view of the desk.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I was always short. So I imagined an old desk that had come into my possession and wrote its memories. But I tried no writing on my own until I was in high school. This is probably in that book you have, but I remember I was specially fond of walking in the woods and looking at the wildflowers; I'd always done that. So the first story—it wasn't the first I'd written, but the first one I tried to send out—was a fairy tale of flowers talking to each other, the different names, the anemones and the dogtooth violets and all those. I sent it to Child Life. I had no idea what to do. I single-spaced it on writing paper. And they kept it, and my hopes rose. It eventually returned with a note saying they had torn the story while they were reading it, and someone had retyped it for me. It was typed with the proper spacing and margins on the correct typing paper in the correct kind of envelope. Child Life was a magazine we subscribed to at home; I'll always love that magazine. I never tried it with another story, but I suppose someone did tear my story. I don't know. But whatever it was, it was a lesson in how a manuscript should be when you submit it. After that, I was always careful to type in the same way the few manuscripts I submitted during the next several years.

MIMI CONWAY:

And you were only thirteen when you did that, is that right?

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Page 31

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I was thirteen or fourteen.

MIMI CONWAY:

Also, I think I remember something about your having bad penmanship and that, although your parents were against your writing, they gave you a typewriter.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

So that your teachers. . . . I guess because they had been teachers.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

They were thinking about the teacher rather than you, so they gave you a typewriter. Is that right? Can you tell me a little about that?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, that's right.

MIMI CONWAY:

Is that when you were thirteen?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I guess I was. I was a sophomore in high school, I think, when I got it.

MIMI CONWAY:

Because you typed that story to Child World, so you must have.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes. I had the typewriter then.

MIMI CONWAY:

Was that unusual, because even when I was in school it would be really unusual for someone young to type their work. Were you the only one who typed?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Oh, I felt unknown proud when I turned in something typed.

MIMI CONWAY:

(Laugh)

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

But my penmanship, I tried. I used to cry over it in the grades, and it just got worse and worse, no matter what I did. And

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Mama was very strict about our grades. She took for granted that we would bring home good grades. I'd get G—"Good"—on penmanship. We had "E"s, Excellent; "VG", Very Good; and "G" was getting a way down there. And she was annoyed, had me practice at home, but when she saw how I tried, I think she realized I just couldn't make my hand do that. I was never any good at drawing or penmanship; I'm always ashamed to autograph a book. I do not have a distinguished autograph.

MIMI CONWAY:

But yet I thought that when you wrote the first draft of a book or manuscript, that you wrote it in longhand.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Oh, I always did.

MIMI CONWAY:

So it's okay for you; it's just...

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes. My husband typed most of The Dollmaker. How he read it I don't know, but he typed it out of the longhand into my first working deaft. You see, I have many drafts. I don't write as much as I rewrite. I'm a very slow worker. And I don't know how he did it. And I've wondered about Grandma Denney. I enjoyed writing letters. As soon as I could write. . . . Grandma Denney wasn't there all the time, and I'd also write to Grandma Simpson. I inflicted more letters on those two poor women.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

But both would always thank me for a letter and answer as if they'd read it.

MIMI CONWAY:

Before we go on to talk about your high school education, I

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wanted to go back for a minute and ask you about your early religious training. What was your first religious memory? It doesn't matter, formal or not, but just your first...

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Well, let me see. unknown We lived in Bronston before we moved to Burnside, and I think I remember being in the beginners' class and singing "Brighten the Corner Where You Are".

unknown And then, shortly after I was five years old, Grandma Denney came unknown and was scandalized that I didn't know the Lord's Prayer or the Beatitudes or the Ten Commandments. I knew a little of them. So I memorized those, got some idea of the Beatitudes and wondered, though, if I could ever live up to them. And I questioned some of them, like "The meek shall inherit the earth", so on and so forth. And then, let me see, I joined the Christian Church, was baptized, and became a Campbellite when I was eight years old, I guess. But I didn't have a religious experience such as people talk about. Who is the well-known man saying he had a religious experience? I didn't have anything like that. I just thought I would try to do right, you know.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did you have a baptism that was a total immersion baptism?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes. The Christian Church, the Baptist Church, and the Church of Christ I think all have total immersion.

MIMI CONWAY:

What do you remember about that? Were you eight years old, did you say?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I think so.

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MIMI CONWAY:

Do you remember it?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, I think I do. I think the minister kissed me.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I remember getting ready for it. I think Mama made me a new white dress. Of course, that was nothing unusual. My parents belonged to the church.

MIMI CONWAY:

I thought they were Campbellites, or were they Christian Church?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Some Baptists called members of the Christian Church Campbellites.

MIMI CONWAY:

Okay, right.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

The followers of Alexander Campbell belonged to the Christian Church. Now I don't know the exact difference between the Church of Christ and the Christian Church. I know some Church of Christ groups will have no instrumental music in their church.

MIMI CONWAY:

See, it's just that you mentioned that first you belonged to the Christian Church, and then you said later, "I became a Campbellite."

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, the members of the Christian Church are followers of Alexander Campbell. They are Campbellites. I became a Campbellite when I was baptized into the Christian Church.

MIMI CONWAY:

Right. I've got it.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

And that's what they called us. We thought of ourselves as members of the Christian Church. And our church is called the Christian Church, the building, not the Campbellite Church.

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MIMI CONWAY:

Did they bring you down to the river?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, we were baptized in the Cumberland River. Of course, the Methodists and the Presbyterians didn't go for total immersion. Then later—that was after I was gone from Burnside—the Baptists enlarged their church and had a baptistry which could be covered over very nicely and used for other things. And it was said that some of the Church of God people and perhaps the hard-shell Baptists. . . . I don't know. There are many varieties of the Protestant religion, many denominations, but members of some denominations were scandalized. They said you couldn't get to Heaven being baptized in a little bit of water in a house; you had to be baptized in a river as Christ was baptized in the River Jordan. And of course by that time all city churches had baptistries, but a few Burnsiders didn't know it. We were all Protestants, but the feelings of a Baptist with a daughter who married a Methodist, or vice versa, made a bigger gap than today if a Protestant were to marry a Catholic.

MIMI CONWAY:

That day that you were baptized. Were you excited about it? Was it a big celebration, or were you proud, or what?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I don't know. I remember feeling solemn. I remember there was something about singing down by the water. I remember

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their singing "Shall We Gather at the River?" And there a whole line of us to be baptized, I think some other children. And I had seen it done before, and I knew other people who'd been baptized. I wasn't all that excited about it, I don't think. The big excitement was making up my mind by myself—I didn't ask anybody—and then, as the minister always did when he'd call, ask if anyone would like to join the church, I went up. That was the excitement. But our church always believed in dignity, dignity, dignity. There was never any shouting, like the churches in the hills, you know. The elders, if they liked what a preacher said, they had to keep it to themselves. I've been in quite modern churches in the hills where somebody would say, "Amen, Brother So-and-So," and "Amen," but we couldn't do that.

MIMI CONWAY:

Oh, that's interesting.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Even baptism didn't always keep church from being a bore. I remember this minister would read the text. Then he would say, "Now, in the Latin, it said so-and-so, but in the Greek this word meant so-and-so, but, when you get back to the original Hebrew," and on and on and on.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

And I didn't even know Latin then. I never learned Greek or Hebrew.

MIMI CONWAY:

In your own home with your mother and father, what was the religious training like?

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HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Our religious training at home. . . . As I told you, I had to memorize certain passages from the Bible. Then we were encouraged to read the Bible, the whole Bible. And when I was at home I read it twice, although parts of it, like when So-and-so begat So-and-so, it goes on for. . . . Other times it was exciting, the wars and so forth. Other times I couldn't figure out God. Do you remember Jephthah's daughter?

MIMI CONWAY:

No, I'm sorry, I don't.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Well, Jephthah made a vow to God that he would sacrifice the first thing he met when he came home. I suppose he thought it would be a sheep or a goat. Well, his most beloved daughter went out to meet him. So she was given a certain number of days to bewail her virginity, which seemed odd. At the time I had no idea what virginity was. We did have a dictionary, but I was not encouraged to use it when I was reading the Bible, because I might have learned things I wasn't supposed to know. And then she was sacrificed; that seemed kind of cruel to me, as was the treatment of Hagar. She almost starved in the wilderness. And then God told her He was saving her not because of her, but because of her son. And so on and so forth. And of course the New Testament, the awful time Paul had. But I think I liked Paul's sentences. Later, I memorized some verses from Corinthians. "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." And some versions read "love". I substituted "sincerity" and used it as a text for writing.

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MIMI CONWAY:

Oh, that is really interesting.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

That's a good text for anyone. Or leave it as it is. Because usually we love or have charity for the people of whom we write, for our characters.

[interruption]

MIMI CONWAY:

I wanted to ask you about the period starting in 1919, when you went to St. Helen's Academy? I wanted to ask you about high school and where you went to high school.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Well, let me see. That wasn't 1919.

MIMI CONWAY:

That's when you would have been eighteen.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No. In 1918 in the autumn, I was ready for the fifth grade; I was ten years old that year. The flu was raging. From our home we could see the red mounds of earth in the graveyard. Our mother said none of us should go to school. Our father wasn't at home; he was working in an oil field near Beattyville, Kentucky. And in spite of the flu, Mama suddenly decided we should move to this oil field. I won't go into the oil field. It was a most interesting place. Of course, we were not allowed to hang around the machinery. And Mama said she would teach us at home. Elizabeth was ready for high school, and I was ready for the fifth grade. So she taught us at home. Well, sometime late the next summer she borrowed a horse from Mr. Jeff Frogge and a side saddle from Mrs. Frogge unknown rode off to Torrent, put the horse in a livery stable, and went by train to St. Helen's where she investigated the school. She apparently liked it, came

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home, told Elizabeth and me—Elizabeth is my older sister—that we would be going unknown early in September to this boarding school. So Elizabeth and I went to St. Helen's.

unknown Elizabeth entered high school. I didn't know what I entered. I first thought I should be in the sixth grade. It seemed very difficult work for the sixth grade. I remember only three classes, music—piano, which was wasted on me, because I enjoy listening to music, but I'm just no musician—then we had grammar. Night after night we filled pages upon pages with diagrammed sentences.

MIMI CONWAY:

I remember that.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Next day in class we would have new sentences we'd never seen, and turn by turn—but not always in order, so we just couldn't be studying a word—sometimes we would get a sentence. The sentence is a compound sentence, indicative mood, the subject is "she"; the indirect object is "him"; the main clause is "She went to town"; the subordinate clause is "to see Dr. Smith, who had an office on Main Street." "Parse she." " ‘She’ is a pronoun, singular number, feminine gender, nominative case, subject of the verb ‘went.’ " On and on.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]You remember it all perfectly.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Not all of it.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

I had a struggle. Mama had taught us a good deal of grammar, but I'd forgotten what a gerund was; well, I had to learn in a hurry. And over and over, this woman would say, "Never write a sentence in

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Page 40

which you cannot parse every word." But we never wrote any sentences.

MIMI CONWAY:

Oh, no.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

We had no compositions, just grammar day in and day out. Then I also remember math, or arithmetic. I struggled and filled pages with problems. There were problems about how many acres in an uneven piece of land that is so many rods this way and so many rods that way, and so on and so forth. In order to solve it, you had to divide it into triangles, then find the area of the triangle. Then there were problems—I remember wrestling with one—about carpeting stairs, in which only the overall dimensions were given, and the number of steps. So, in order to get the width of a stair, I had to make a triangle and extract the square root—I knew the hypotenuse—and do this and do that. Mama had taught me how to extract a square root, but I'd forgotten it. Anyway, when school was out that year, I graduated from the eighth grade. As I remember, it was just flying through; I don't remember anything I learned, to speak of.

unknown I was almost twelve years old, and declared ready for high school.

MIMI CONWAY:

Now was St. Helen's a boarding school? I know later you went to one.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, near the place where we lived. There were no schools. The closest one was around the ridge, a mile or two away. Elizabeth and I went to investigate, but there were no classes above the fourth grade.

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MIMI CONWAY:

And this is because your father was working in the coal fields then.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

In the oil field.

MIMI CONWAY:

I'm sorry, the oil fields.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

And didn't you used to bring him his breakfast or dinner in a lunch pail, or the (Laugh) breakfast pail?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, that was the only time I could get to see the machinery, and we weren't allowed to stay. The drilling rig. . . . Well, it could be a dangerous place, but they didn't want anyone around except the driller and the tool dresser. You'd be apt to be in the way.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did you like going to bring him his meals?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Oh, I loved it, and I always wanted to stay. But of course I couldn't.

MIMI CONWAY:

It seems like you were always the errand girl. Now here you were the second in the family, and yet when there was the influenza scare of 1918, the great Asian epidemic, you were the one, the only one who got to do the errands and run to the store, and here you were bringing your father his pail. How did you get to be the errand girl?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

That was Mama. Mama made an errand girl out of me, as if I were the errand boy.

MIMI CONWAY:

(Laugh)

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Page 42

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

And I was rather glad to do it. Elizabeth, the older, had to stay home and help in the kitchen. Our mother was sick a great deal with migraine. Sometimes Elizabeth had to cook when she wasn't more than eight or ten years old. She made beds. And there was always a baby. There were six of us. She was the oldest, and only ten years older than the youngest girl. So there was always a baby, either to tend to or to watch.

MIMI CONWAY:

I just remember from being a child that getting to do the errands was definitely the best task.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

So I just wondered how you managed to corner it.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, it was given me. I was never then, and I'm not now, too good at housework. You can see that. So I was given the job of the errands and hunting the cow. I also, as I grew older, had to be able to do the milking when Mama was sick. And Elizabeth had to stay inside and do the housework.

MIMI CONWAY:

Then in 1920, when you were twelve, you went to Stanton Academy?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

Now where was that?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

St. Helen's is still shown on the maps, and there's still a Stanton. Stanton was the county seat of Powell County, but at that time they had no public high school. Stanton Academy was a Presbyterian academy and, I thought, a wonderful place. I liked the teachers. We were

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permitted to do many— unknown I was a freshman— unknown compositions. And my teacher praised one of my stories and had me read it aloud to the Literary Club. I didn't do such a good job in reading it. I wasn't too well prepared. It's something, I think, that still bothers me; I was ashamed when I finished that I'd done such a poor job. And I liked that place very much, and that, too, was a boarding school. But the oil field was drilled out. This was after World War I; the price of oil had dropped, so we went back to Burnside and I finished my high school at Burnside.

MIMI CONWAY:

I think that you advanced two grades.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes. unknown I left the fourth grade for the fifth, and in one year I was jumped to the eighth grade.

MIMI CONWAY:

Then you were only sixteen—I think that was in 1924—when you entered Berea College.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, I graduated and was sixteen in July, and then went to Berea for two years.

MIMI CONWAY:

Before I ask about Berea, can I ask you, when you went back to Burnside High School for two years?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Three years.

MIMI CONWAY:

Three years.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

unknown I was only a freshman at Stanton Academy.

MIMI CONWAY:

Okay, right. And then you had one year at St. Helen's, and then three...

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

That's when they finished my elementary education. I was at St. Helen's the year before I went to Stanton Academy.

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MIMI CONWAY:

So that you skipped the grades, in fact, in grade school.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

Okay. When you went back to Burnside, you were first of all two grades higher than the people that you'd started out with, and you'd also been out of town. Did it make it different?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

It did. I resented being out of my age group. I'd hoped I could continue at Stanton Academy, but after all, I suppose it was no use. Mama said she needed me at home, and why spend money sending me to high school when there was a school at home? But the Burnside students I had always known and been with were in the eighth grade, and I was a sophomore. I was younger than the others. I was short then; I'm short now. And at first I was very unhappy. But I soon grew accustomed to it.

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

MIMI CONWAY:

Why did you choose Berea, or did your parents choose Berea?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, I chose Berea. There wasn't too much money in the family then. Berea was inexpensive. Elizabeth had gone to Richmond. You know, what do they call it? Eastern Kentucky University, although then it was little more than a normal school. One reason I went to Berea: of course, Mama wanted me to teach, be ready to teach by the time I was eighteen. I didn't want to teach, and I had to take education courses, which I resented. But at Berea, I could get two electives I wanted very much to study. One was botany, which I'd been interested in for years. I had a taste

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of it in high school. And another was geology. I had heard of geology. The University of Michigan Department of Geology had a summer study camp down at Mill Springs, Kentucky. That was a few miles down the Cumberland from Burnside. And one day I was out in the woods, and I saw these young men pecking with hammers on the rocks, this and that, and I thought how interesting and wonderful it would be to learn all about the rocks. Our hill was limestone with sink holes and some small caves. The most interesting things to me were fossils. Mama could only explain to me that there'd been seas there long ago, and these shells and coral and things like that had once been alive in the sea. And I wanted to learn more about that, although I soon learned that in order to learn a great deal about that you had to study paleontology. But I did learn at Berea a bit more about rocks.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did you end up majoring in botany?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

No, I majored in science. I trained to be a general science teacher. No, I often wished I'd majored in botany, but at the University of Louisville I really began to write. I didn't publish anything, but I met other students who invited me to join a group of writers few know anything about today. There are not many chapters of Chi Delta Phi left. It was a group interested in writing. I joined that, and I met other students who were writing, some writing poetry and some fiction. I took all the literature courses I could. I had a wonderful course in Milton.

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MIMI CONWAY:

And this was at Louisville.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes. And modern verse and some others. But I had no wish to major in English, because I knew I'd have to teach it and I felt it would be too great a pain to have to read the writings of unknown students, when I myself wanted to write.

MIMI CONWAY:

That's real interesting.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

But I did later unknown teach English in a small high school for a while.

[interruption]

MIMI CONWAY:

You talked about some of the courses at Berea, but I wondered how you felt being at a place that was bigger than any place you'd been before, and being away from home, if you liked it? You were younger, too. That's the thing: you were sixteen.

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

That always was a bother, but I'd been away from home two years in boarding schools. And I don't know, I think I was disappointed. I met so many students from small towns or the country. I wanted something new and big and different, you know, a city. And the college occupied only a small part of Berea, and we were so closely watched and so many rules and this and that, there was no danger of getting lost or anything like that. And our dormitory was a small wooden dwelling. If I stayed there now, I'd be scared to death.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

It was called Gilbert Cottage, as I remember. We were the overflow from the college women's dormitory. And there were

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only, I suppose, fourteen or fifteen girls in the cottage, and I soon knew them. I don't recall feeling particularly lonesome or even homesick. I did miss the woods. The thing that bothered me, unknown we were not supposed to walk on the grass but of course had to walk the straight lines along the walks, and that just drove me crazy. I wanted to cut across and go in a circle or go near a bush and that sort of thing.

MIMI CONWAY:

Was Berea the strictest school you'd been to up to that point?

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

Yes, it was extremely strict. I think Berea made me want to smoke. I thought anything that's worth a fifty-dollar fine must be wonderful.

MIMI CONWAY:

[laughter]

HARRIETTE ARNOW:

And boys were never allowed out with girls, except on certain occasions or except in a group. And there were so many clothing rules. Burnside was a small place, and when you graduated from high school, oh, forty or fifty people would give you a small gift of some kind. And I received, among other things, eight or ten pair of silk hose, silk, because nylon. . . . Well, you're too young to remember the first nylon or rayon hose that were no good. And these were silk. Well, of course, I couldn't wear them at Berea. But the girls with money could in the college store buy unknown lisle hose from England, cotton lisle such as the English ladies wear in playing golf, unknown for, I think it was $2.65 a pair, a horrible price

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then for hose. Or maybe it was only $1.65. And our dresses had to cover our knees. We couldn't roll our stockings. And in gym we wore these big bloomers. We were not allowed to walk across the campus even with a coat over those bloomers. We had to change in the g