A History of American Literature

242 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

and anchorless, doomed to a “shiftless,” unprotected life as a result. “Dem wuz good

ole time marster – de bes’ Sam ever see!” one such character declares in “Marse

Chan: A Tale of Old Virginia” (1889) by Thomas Nelson Page. He then goes on to

celebrate the old, slave South in this way:

Nigger didn’ had nuthin’t all to do – jes’ had to ten’ to de feedin’ an’ cleanin’ de hosses

an’ doin’ what de marster tell ’em to do, an’ when dey wuz sick ... de same doctor came

to see ’em what ’ten de white folks. ... Dyer warn’ no trouble nor nothin.

It is worth remembering that Page was equally popular outside the South as inside

it – he had to be, given the virtual disappearance of the publishing industry in his

own region after the Civil War. He, Allen, and Harris were describing a lost world

that many way beyond the boundaries of their own region found attractive.

Other areas of old Southern life also became the subject of similar narrative

indulgence. Southwestern humor, for example, took a nostalgic turn among some

writers. So, Richard Malcolm Johnston (1822–1898) set his tales, gathered together

in Dukesborough Tales (1871), in what he called “the Grim and Rude, but Hearty Old

Times in Georgia.” “It is a grateful solace,” he admitted, “to recall persons whose

simplicity has been much changed by subsequent Conditions, chiefly the Confederate

War.” The growth of towns and factories, Johnston explained, had served to dimin-

ish “rustic individualities”; and his aim was to recover the habits of a simpler, more

relaxed and rambunctious world. Other writers of the time found similar simplicity

in the remoteness of the Southern mountains. In the later nineteenth century, the

Southern Appalachians and the Ozarks were opened up by the mining and tourist

industries; and, to many visitors from the lowlands, the Southern highlands offered

the appealing vision of the romance of the past preserved in the reality of the present.

The folk of the Southern mountains were, one commentator insisted, “our contem-

porary ancestors,” recalling the character and customs of an earlier America. For

Mary Noailles Murfree (1850–1922), what appealed in particular were the breath-

taking scenery and simple home surroundings of mountain life, the idiosyncratic,

antique language of the mountaineers, and the homely customs and odd, illogical

beliefs of mountain society. In eleven volumes of stories, beginning with In the

Tennessee Mountains (1884), she emphasized the strangeness as well as the simplicity

of her highland characters: “awkward young mountaineers,” romantic mountain

heroines with eyes like “limpid mountain streams,” weary but defiant and stoical

older people – and “a hospitality that meets a stranger on the threshold of every hut,

presses upon him, ungrudgingly, its best.” Murfree approached her fictional subjects

with the tendencies of a romantic antiquarian or romantically inclined tourist.

Another, immensely popular writer of the time who chose the same subject, John

Fox, Jr. (1862–1919), took an approach that, if anything, was even more attached to

a sentimental vision of the highlands. This he then wedded to the sensational. In

books like A Cumberland Vendetta (1896), The Kentuckians (1898), and The Trail

of the Lonesome Pines (1908), Fox paid homage to what he saw as the ancient,

unsullied character of the mountain blood line and language. For him, as he put it

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