Riding Deep Waters: An Appalachian Meditation

Solitude is deep water, and small boats do not ride well in it. Only a superficial observer could fail to understand that the mountain people really love their wilderness—love it for its beauty, for its freedom.

—Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains

In 1905, Emma Bell Miles wrote a parable in her Appalachian manifesto, The Spirit of the Mountains (17). Concerned with unfettered development, new demeaning forms of service industry work, and erosion of community that she witnessed in Chattanooga and Walden’s Ridge, Tennessee, Miles picked up her pen to capture southern mountain cultures before tourism, industry, and rapid spread of national popular culture brought what she saw as devastating changes.

Miles employed every strategy she had to hand—close textual description, poetry, paintings, folkloric song recording and transcribing, linguistic gathering of phrases and dialect, interviews, and, finally, the political radical’s protest voice, all in the spare 201 pages of the book. Today we might call it a hybrid, multigenre, experimental text. If she were writing it today, surely it would have a digital component, hyperlinks, and interactive crowd-sourced passages.

The voice of The Spirit of the Mountains is as complicated as the structure of the book. Sometimes Miles writes in first-person singular: “Early next morning I shut the cabin door and took my way down the mountain,” on her way to learn how to weave a coverlet from an older woman in the community (38). In other passages, the first person is collective: “We who live so far apart that we rarely see more of one another than the blue smoke of each other’s chimneys are never at ease without the feel of the forest on every side—room to breathe, to expand, to develop, as well as to hunt and to wander at will” (73). At still other times, Miles positions the narrator as an outsider looking in on mountain residents; after all, they “love their wilderness” (17), a perhaps surprising embrace of early-century wilderness aesthetics not placed in Northeast or West.¹ She continues, “All alike cling to the ungracious acres they have so patiently and hardly won, because of the wild world that lies outside their puny fences, because of the dream-vistas, blue and violet, that lead their eyes far among the hills” (19)—and I am left wondering what the narrator thinks in this exuberance of their and they. At the same time, the narrator separates self from tourists, whom she calls summer people or city people: “‘Have we not built roads for a people too lazy to build for themselves?’ say the city people. . . . In short, haven’t we paid them well?” (195, emphasis in original). Calling out misunderstandings about lawlessness among mountain residents, suddenly a second-person “you” sneaks in as the narrator directs the reader: “If you read that no attempt has been made to bring the murderer to justice, you may be reasonably certain that the dead man was not valuable to his neighborhood” (75). In other words, “your” interpretation, “fostered by newspaper stories” (74), needs correcting. In the final manifesto chapter, which begins with a clarion “My people, everywhere” (190), the voices combine, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph: “the mountaineers must awaken to consciousness of themselves as a people. For although throughout the highlands of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas our nature is one, our hopes, our loves, our daily life the same, we are yet a people asleep” (200). Just when I think I have a handle on the text, Miles shifts yet again. The voice is so personal and so detailed that for years scholars tried to read the book as autobiography. But that proved inaccurate. The superficial observation from the small boat is wrong.

Miles lived at times in urban Chattanooga, the birthplace of African American blues singer Bessie Smith and home to a vibrant arts community. Coverage of her writing appeared in newspapers, including the Chattanooga News, for which she wrote a semi-regular column, and the Chattanooga Times, the latter owned by Adolph Ochs (who led the New...