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Chapter 1 A Poor-Man’s Boy, 1888–1921 A factual picture of Harry Kroll’s early life is obscured by the shading and stories he redrew about himself and his family in later years.1 To his three sons he was as honest as any parent is about his upbringing, but throughout his “autobiographical ” writing Kroll consistently spun the story that his parents were less-thansuccessful Southern sharecroppers, led by an idealistic but unambitious father and superstitious, passively aggressive mother. Where and how he grew up provided twentieth-century Tennessee novelist and short-story writer Harry Harrison Kroll with a broad, fertile field to plough for his crop of stories. Harry once described his father, Darius Wesley Kroll as “a smallish man, dark from weather and open sunlight and hard work; his hair, jet black, was beginning to [streak] with gray; . . . his expression was placid and without meaning.” Though the description sounds harsh or unfeeling, it was a solid compliment paid by Harry to his father. His son consistently portrayed Darius Kroll as one who understood and accepted bone-hard work as an inalienable right; but Harry also painted his father as a man harboring a broad streak of dreamy, impotent idealism that impelled him to hunt ceaselessly for the sure-thing opportunity, or the place where “fried pigeons would fly into his mouth.” Despite the picture of a work-faded dreamer he presents, Harry Kroll’s nostalgic affection for his father suffuses his writing about him, even when it seems uncomplimentary. Darius—pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable—hailed from Indiana. Though official notices of him must exist in scattered public records, he left none of his own. The eleventh federal census taken in 1900 records him as born in October 1857. Virtually nothing is known of his early life and training. His youngest daughter, Natalie, recalled in the late 1970s that her father had worked as a machinist in Muncie, Indiana, before his marriage.2 Given Darius’s later documented work history this position was probably as a semi-skilled assistant rather than as a tradesman, a reflection of the industrializing but still heavily human state of technology in the mid- to late nineteenth century. 2 A Poor-Man’s Boy, 1888–1920 The picture Harry Kroll draws of his mother, Caroline or Carolina Cripe, is much less flattering but probably more accurate. Where Harry described his father’s physical characteristics and hardly ever his mannerisms, his glimpses of his mother are exactly opposite. Kroll rarely described her physically beyond being “a thick-bodied, unbeautiful woman,” with a sweat-stained stamina and nearly limitless capacity for hard physical work. The few photographs in which she appears show a tight-lipped woman with the beginnings of jowls on either side of her face. There is little question from which side of the family Harry inherited his own. More often he portrays her through her actions or speech, allowing her constant seeking for signs and portents, the demands she made of her children’s affections, and other unflattering glimpses of personality to speak for themselves. She was furious with the picture of her Harry created in his writing, which she reviled for making her appear low and uncultured; his portrayals clearly reflect the long-held anger Harry felt toward her. Family tradition traces her Anabaptist origins indeterminately to the northwest corner of Indiana, between IndianapolisandChicago.NopreciserecordofherbirthtoJohnC.CripeJr.andRachel Ann Fouts Cripe has been located, but the 1900 census enumeration dates it to November , 1862.3 Darius and Caroline Kroll were nominally a Dunkard family (more properly, German Baptist Brethren). The Dunkard sect rose in Germany in the early eighteenth century. Their identity comes from the German term for baptism, tunken, which assumed an initial d when spelled in the United States. Their distinctive practice of baptism distinguished Dunkards from other sects, even from other Protestants: only adults were baptized and the candidate was immersed face down three times while invoking the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Two mass migrations from Germany in 1719 and 1729 brought virtually the entire sect to Philadelphia among the early waves of German immigrants to the New World. From there sect members multiplied quickly and began migrating: into mountainous Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina by the Revolution, and a generation later into the upper Midwest. Those in the mountains were swept up in the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and integrated into the fire-eating Baptists widely described...

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