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the Boston Mountains flows,” DeMoss wrote of Arkansas, “Where the mockingbird doth sing / ’Til the grove with music rings / At my happy little home in Arkansas.” Equally sentimental was James White’s 1915 song, “’Way Down in Arkansaw,” though White’s muse longs for a different geographical region of the state and smacks of the Deep South numbers that emanated from the minstrel tradition. “’Way down south where I was born / Amid the cotton and the golden corn / There’s the place I long to be / In that land of hospitality.” And no song could top Eva Ware Barnett’s “Arkansas” for syrupy sentimentality. One of several songs to be voted an official “state song” by the general assembly, the 1916 number praised above all else the state’s bucolic countrysides, “Where the roses are in bloom, And the sweet magnolia too / Where the jasmine is white, And the fields are violet blue.”41 This was certainly a place worth coming home to, or even moving to, unlike the Arkansaw of Charles Hibler’s novel or of Mark Twain’s violent and backward river town. The Shepherd of the Hills, “My Happy Little Home in Arkansas,” and other products of the nostalgia and romanticism of the era exemplified a new—or at least revived and revised—element in the Arkansaw image, one that would perhaps never become the dominant motif but would contribute to the image’s complexity. As we have seen, the romantic influence had been around at least since the days when Albert Pike chronicled his adventures in the Arkansas territory. But Wright’s novels of the Ozarks and the nostalgic songs of Arkansas offered a new twist, sentimentality. Romanticism and sentimentality did not always go hand-in-hand, but they would increasingly do so in the twentieth century, especially when the Ozarks was involved. 64 ✧ ABOARD THE ARKANSAW TRAIN BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page 64 SECOND INTERLUDE This Hillbilly State of Mine Take a minute and think about the images that the word “Arkansaw” evokes. Admittedly, unless for some reason you started reading this book here in the middle, you’ve been bombarded with caricatures, personalities, and stereotypes from the first one hundred years of the Arkansaw image that are probably jostling for position right about now. If I had started the book with that question, what images would have come to mind? Most likely some of the ones we’ve already covered, along with several that will crowd the pages of the remainder of the book. In generic terms, I suspect there are a fair number of beanpole-physiqued men in bare feet and raggedy overalls, maybe wearing floppy black hats and slouching with moonshine jugs. Some are haggard old grannies, crouched over a washboard or occupied at a spinning wheel or quilter’s loom. There could be fiddles and hoedowns involved, or perhaps just “ballets” about jilted lovers or murderous spouses or train wrecks or Jesse James. Hound dogs and shotguns are probably the most common accessories, shoes and teeth the most uncommon. Maybe your Arkansawyers are more ominous—greasy-headed rednecks in loud, large trucks, drunken, spewing intolerance from tobaccostained mouths. Maybe not. If there is definition, specificity to the faces, whose are they? Bob Burns? Lum and Abner? Dizzy Dean? Some anonymous Depression-era family on their way to who knows where in a jalopy that’s probably not getting them there. Orval Faubus? Jed Clampett? Lil’ Abner, Daisy Mae, Mammy Yokum? Almeda Riddle? Your grandparents? The guide from those float trips on the Buffalo years ago? Chances are the word “Arkansaw” doesn’t inspire images of Sam Walton or John Gould Fletcher or Daisy Bates or J. William Fulbright. Chances are the people in just about all those images are common folk (or Hollywood representations thereof), they’re white, and they have some sort of connection to the Arkansas upland. In other words, chances are that the dominant motif in your version of the Arkansaw image is that of the hillbilly or the mountaineer. Like her sister states in the old Confederacy, Arkansas has a less-thanstellar record of racial justice and tolerance. One of the bright spots for Arkansans of African descent, however, may be their historic side-stepping of the Arkansaw image. Sure, African Americans face some of the same image problems—the stigma from low test scores and family income rankings is no 65 BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page...

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