Knott County in the Fiction of Lucy Furman

Knott County in the Fiction of Lucy Furman by CRATIS D. WILLIAMS This is a selection from the study of Lucy Furmans novels with settings in Knott County, Kentucky, that appears in The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction (Chapter VIII, "Settlement Centers, Mission Schools, and Fetched on Women") copyright 1966 by Cratis Darl Williams, a monumental study of the treatment of the Southern Mountaineer in both factual and fictional accounts from the earliest writings up to recent times. As Dr. Williams, now dean of the graduate school at Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, points out Lucy Furman did a better job than most writers in presenting the life and thought of the mountain people during the time they were moving from the log cabin stage into a less isolated and more complex existence. For this reason and because Lucy Furman performed such a fine service for Knott County, this section is reprinted with the generous permission of the author. Lucy Furman, whose experiences as a teacher in the Hindman Settlement School on Troublesome Creek in Knott County, Kentucky, brought her in close contact with mountain people during their transition from a static pioneer society to contemporary industrial civilization, has recorded her impressions of the Kentucky mountaineers in a series of five novels which interpret life in southeastern Kentucky from 1900 to World War I. Miss Furman's main concern appears to have been to present the mountain folk as accurately as possible within fictional framework sufficiently flexible to permit comprehensive representation of mountain types along with panoramic views of their home life, their work, and their social institutions. Except for The Lonesome Road, her books, although delightfully written, are weak and thin as fiction, for her main objective was a sociological one. The settlement schools, of which the Hindman Settlement School had been the first established, occupy a significant place in her fiction. Her sympathetic presentation of heroic mountain women, intelligent children, excitingly beautiful young women, courageous young men, and ultraconservative patriarchs moving in a social milieu dominated by untamed primitive instincts, superstitious ignorance, and ravaging diseases, well-meaning but narrow and literal-minded mountain preachers of the Hardshell persuasions, traditional blood feuds that paralyze social relations, and inept and corrupt elected officials possesses the inverted verisimilitude achieved by posing veiled facts as fiction. Although she never achieved fiction of high quality, Furman nevertheless accurately presented mountain folk moving from ignorance, disease, and isolation into enlightenment, improved sanitation, and adjustment to a new social order. Because her canvas was broader, her knowledge more intimate, and her interests more genuine, she covered more accurately than others the stirring and the awakening of the mountaineer from his century-long sleep. 72 In quietly evoldng a sense of the antique quality of the Kentucky mountaineers living in their weathered log houses with moss-covered roofs sprinkled along the narrow valleys in the most remote areas, Furman succeeded better than others in capturing the authenticity of the details of life and character of mountain folk at the moment when they were poised to step over the threshold into a new age. Although these details include much violence and many instances of the incendiary nature of the mountaineer temperament, the explosiveness of primitive outbursts trailed by bloodshed and heartbreak are presented in a straightforward manner with little of the sensationalism frequently employed and with none of the pitying sentimentality or the pious outrage that mars even such factual accounts of the mountain feuds as those left by Charles Mutzenberg in Kentucky's Famous Feuds and Tragedies (1917), Harold W. Coates in Stories of the Kentucky Feuds (1923), and to a lesser degree by Lewis F. Johnson in Famous Kentucky Tragedies and Trials (1916). Along the slender strands of her loosely spun plots Furman strings the authentic details of the life of a people whom she respects , and whose possibilities for notable achievements on the day following the gray dawn when she meets them rising from the crude beds of the pioneers where they had "lain down" with Daniel Boone and the long hunters" she affirms with positive conviction . One finds in Furman's books about the mountain folk little that has not already...