Muzzled Oxen: Reaping Cotton and Sowing Hope in 1920s Arkansas by Genevieve Grant Sadler (review)

“I can stand on the top of the earth and feel something within me that rises up to understand everything,” writes the author of Muzzled Oxen, “and I would not exchange my spirit for the whole world” (p. 280). Readers who happen across this unheralded book will likely come away in awe of that incredible spirit, wondering why it took more than 80 years to hear the voice of this most exceptional woman and to see a slice of the past through her penetrating gaze.

A Canadian by birth and Californian by raising, Sadler accompanied her Arkansas-born husband back to his ancestral farm in 1920, a trip of perhaps equal parts discovery and despondency that lasted until the Mississippi River flood of 1927 washed the Sadlers and their three boys back to the West Coast to stay. Muzzled Oxen is Genevieve Grant Sadler’s memoir of the family’s seven-year sojourn in the malarial Arkansas River bottoms of Yell County. Like the hundreds of books that offer firsthand peeks into rural southern life in the early 20th century, Muzzled Oxen highlights a variety of by-now familiar elements of folklife and material culture: cooking and foods, folk and popular music, square dances, singing schools, hog killings, folk remedies, snuff sticks, split-board bonnets, and “Holy Roller” brush arbors. The reader experiences all these through Sadler’s outsider perspective, with the amazement and frequent condescension of a Californian experiencing life in the rural South for the first time. We experience Sadler’s mostly unwilling transformation from an independent and headstrong 20-something in high heels to a gingham-wearing (and still independent) Arkansas farm wife. We experience the uncertainty of the cotton system, from boll weevils to floods, from poor prices to migrant cotton pickers, all of which bred a sort of fatalism among landowners and tenants alike. “It was almost taken for granted that either total failure or at best a meager reward would be the common lot, and nothing more was expected” (p. 121).

Like most inheritors of a culture and education level quite foreign to the sandy roads and steamy river bottoms of the South, Sadler often viewed her new surroundings and neighbors through dismissive or patronizing eyes. She criticized the cheap, ready-to-wear clothing available at the local general store, though she was aware that the tenants and sharecroppers who shopped there could afford no better. Dissatisfied with the bare facilities and lack of funds at the local one-room schoolhouse, she took the almost unprecedented step of educating her sons at home. Fed up with the bleak outlooks and dim horizons of the “poor white trash,” she feigned surprise that “these people … were really human beings after all.” Like many chroniclers of the Jim Crow South, she found the African Americans in her midst more redeemable than most poor whites, yet she harbored the condescending, maternalistic prejudices common to the era. “The colored people when treated fairly,” observed Sadler, “were just like little children, easily managed, easily provoked, believing childishly but implicitly in a heavenly Father who watched over them” (p. 182).

What makes Sadler’s well-written account extraordinary, however, is her searching intellect and honest, expansive heart. Any memoir that references Goethe and Emerson to help explain life among southern sharecroppers—and does so without coming off as pretentious—deserves a special place among its counterparts. Parts of her memoir are undoubtedly “naively told” (back cover), as Sadler admitted, but hers is an idealism more endearing than grating. Especially valuable is her trenchant analysis of the victims of the cotton economy, the poor and often ignorant sharecroppers with whom she had a love/hate relationship. Sadler’s memoir abounds with stories of sickly sharecroppers living in dirty, drafty shacks, moving from farm to farm and landlord to landlord year after year in hopes of a better chance; of people who came down from the...