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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0006, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Harriette Arnow is perhaps best known as the writer of numerous historical novels
that dramatize the lives of Appalachian people. These works include The Dollmaker, Hunter’s Horn,
and Seedtime on the Cumberland. In this life history
interview, Arnow offers a vivid overview of her family heritage, reaching back
to the Revolutionary Era. Born in 1908 in Wayne County, Kentucky, Arnow's
upbringing as she describes it was representative of family relationships in the
Appalachian region. Born into a family of five daughters and one son, Arnow
describes the role of southern gender norms in her life and emphasizes her
experiences in school. Especially illuminating is Arnow's description of her
college days, first at Berea and then later at the University of Louisville. In
her early twenties, Arnow worked as a schoolteacher, and briefly as a principal,
in small, rural communities. By the 1930s, however, she began to pursue writing.
Many of her published works were drawn from her experiences growing up in the
South. Other revealing aspects of Arnow's life covered in this interview include
her decision not to marry until she was in her thirties, her experiences in
balancing work and family, her views on labor politics in the 1930s, and her
reaction to critiques of her writing as both "transcendentalist" and
"feminist."
Southern novelist Harriette Arnow discusses what it was like to grow up in Kentucky during the 1910s and 1920s. The teacher-turned-writer focuses especially on her family relationships, her experiences in school and in teaching, her goals as a writer, and her views on marriage and family.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
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?
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.
And could you give me the exact date of your birth?
July 7, 1908.
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).
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.
What did your Grandfather Denney do?
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.
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
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.
Do you know when your mother's family first came to this country, where they came, and where they came from?
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.
Is your heritage all Scotch-Irish? You have some French, I think, too.
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.
In Kentucky.
No, the Santee River is in North Carolina. [The Santee River is in South Carolina.]
And then your father's family, do you know when they came to this country?
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
Your Grandfather Simpson, what did he do?
My Grandfather Simpson was a teacher and a farmer.
So it's a long line of teachers in your family.
Yes, and our mother was determined that her daughters should be teachers.
Did your Grandmother Denney work, I mean, for example, as a teacher? Did she work outside the home?
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.
Were they silk dresses?
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?
Oh, I'd love to.
[interruption]
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?
Ten, the summer I was ten years old.
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?
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.
Did you like having a grandmother who had you get all
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
(Laugh)
...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.
So Grandmother Denney was quite a lady.
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.
Perhaps you should have had those. I remember when you wrote about grinding, and your knuckles got bloodied.
Oh, that was when I was teaching school and I tried to grit corn. So many
of these things they did, in the back
So perhaps you should have had Grandmother Denney's mitts. [laughter]
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.
Did Grandmother Denney live far away from Burnside, or did she live with you, or what?
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.
And was she a very important figure in your family? Was it different when she was there and when she wasn't?
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.
Oh, like a finishing school or something.
Yes. To make them sit and stand straight, and she sighed for the days
when women were well corseted in those corsets. Mama
How did your mother feel about having. . . . I think there were four daughters and one son?
Five.
Five daughters and one son. Did she share Grandmother Denney's, her own mother's, view about having you be ladies?
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.
How did your father feel about Grandmother Denney trying to make ladies of you?
Oh, he was always glad to see her. She was a very kind,
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
You never knew your Grandfather Denney.
No. I never knew either of my grandfathers; they were both dead when I was born.
But your Grandmother Simpson, did she live in Burnside?
No, she also lived in Wayne County.
Did you know her very well, or did she live while...
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
Is Grandmother Simpson the one who would tell you stories about guerilla activities during the Civil War?
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.
Did the Simpsons own many slaves? Do you know about how many?
There were no really large slaveholders in. . . . Well, some, I suppose,
had thirty, thirty-five. I think the Simpsons only
I know that in your book, Seedtime on the Cumberland, you make a distinction between farmers and planters.
Yes.
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...
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
Can we go back for a second? You were born in Wayne County, and when you were four you moved to Burnside.
Yes, I was almost five.
Were you born at home?
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.
Where do you fit into the order of your family?
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.
Did that bother you or affect you in any way when she'd tell you that she wished you were a boy?
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.
What was boy's work, I mean like chores at the farm?
I had different chores at times. I used to have to bring
Were you close with your sisters and brother?
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.
Could you describe a little bit what Burnside was like when you were living there, up till the time you were sixteen?
When we moved there, Burnside had around two thousand people. It was
primarily a lumber town. There was a veneer mill,
Why did your family move to Burnside?
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.
I thought that he also was a bookkeeper.
No. He kept tally for several months.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
... and what he did and his influence on you.
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
And wasn't he also a wonderful storyteller?
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.
Did he tell a lot of the Jack tales?
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.
(Laugh)
And on and on and on; it was really uproarious.
It sounds to me like all of your people were wonderful storytellers.
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
But now your mother was a good storyteller, too, wasn't she?
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?
Only pictures.
We had one around the house. How a woman even got around in it, I don't know.
I think I remember your saying that your mother had—not only for Maude—but had very detailed memories of a lot of horses.
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
I know you said you had a few relatives in Burnside. They were Simpson relatives?
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.
Oh, my heavens.
That's, I suppose, one way of birth control.
Was that common?
Women, I think, that we knew married older; they were older than they are now. Mama was twenty-eight.
And you were thirty-one?
I was thirty-one, yes.
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...
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.
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.
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
Why do you think your mother didn't want you to marry? Did she actually say?
I don't know. She wanted us, I think, to stay at home, which we didn't...
[laughter]
...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.
But you think it was simply because your mother wanted to have you at
home.
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.
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.
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.
[laughter]
The double spices were not deliberate. She got it so black
But did she have a real strong imagination, or was that just an isolated example that makes it sound that way?
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.
And didn't she know how to tell the weather really well by the sound of the wind or the appearance of the sky?
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.
What was the house like?
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?
Yes.
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.
Was your house, for the town, considered a large house?
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.
I remember you mentioned something about your father having inherited oil
rights; he got royalties from the mineral rights of
Yes.
Did that plus his work mean that you were some of the wealthy people in town?
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]
Were there any blacks in Burnside?
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.
And that's why a lot of the people would have come from North Carolina.
I think so, yes.
Can you describe the grade school that you went to? You went to grade school in Burnside.
Yes.
Was it a one-room school?
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
Oh, my heavens.
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.
So there was no compulsory education at this time.
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.
Wow.
Still not as many as in the first grade, and that was true in the seventh and eight.
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.
There were some with well-to-do parents.
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?
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
[laughter]
And I've heard many funny stories of boys, sometimes young men going out
to see their best girls, coming home, and stumbling over
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
...when you first started to write, or your early years in school, whatever.
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
[laughter]
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.
And you were only thirteen when you did that, is that right?
I was thirteen or fourteen.
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.
Yes.
So that your teachers. . . . I guess because they had been teachers.
Yes.
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?
Yes, that's right.
Is that when you were thirteen?
I guess I was. I was a sophomore in high school, I think, when I got it.
Because you typed that story to Child World, so you must have.
Yes. I had the typewriter then.
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?
Oh, I felt
(Laugh)
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
But yet I thought that when you wrote the first draft of a book or manuscript, that you wrote it in longhand.
Oh, I always did.
So it's okay for you; it's just...
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.
[laughter]
But both would always thank me for a letter and answer as if they'd read it.
Before we go on to talk about your high school education, I
Well, let me see.
Did you have a baptism that was a total immersion baptism?
Yes. The Christian Church, the Baptist Church, and the Church of Christ I think all have total immersion.
What do you remember about that? Were you eight years old, did you say?
I think so.
Do you remember it?
Yes, I think I do. I think the minister kissed me.
[laughter]
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.
I thought they were Campbellites, or were they Christian Church?
Some Baptists called members of the Christian Church Campbellites.
Okay, right.
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.
See, it's just that you mentioned that first you belonged to the Christian Church, and then you said later, "I became a Campbellite."
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.
Right. I've got it.
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.
Did they bring you down to the river?
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.
That day that you were baptized. Were you excited about it? Was it a big celebration, or were you proud, or what?
I don't know. I remember feeling solemn. I remember there was something
about singing down by the water. I remember
Oh, that's interesting.
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.
[laughter]
And I didn't even know Latin then. I never learned Greek or Hebrew.
In your own home with your mother and father, what was the religious training like?
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?
No, I'm sorry, I don't.
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.
Oh, that is really interesting.
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]
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.
Well, let me see. That wasn't 1919.
That's when you would have been eighteen.
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
I remember that.
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.
[laughter]
Not all of it.
[laughter]
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
Oh, no.
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.
Now was St. Helen's a boarding school? I know later you went to one.
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.
And this is because your father was working in the coal fields then.
In the oil field.
I'm sorry, the oil fields.
Yes.
And didn't you used to bring him his breakfast or dinner in a lunch pail,
or the (Laugh)
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.
Did you like going to bring him his meals?
Oh, I loved it, and I always wanted to stay. But of course I couldn't.
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?
That was Mama. Mama made an errand girl out of me, as if I were the errand boy.