Emma Bell Miles: The Spirit of a Crusader

Emma Bell Miles: The Spirit of a Crusader by Grace Toney Edwards Emma Bell Miles And Her First Child I wonder if she ever dreamed of the influence she might wield three-quarters of a century after the publication of her first maiorwork. I wonder if she ever dreamed of herself as the spokesperson for mountain women. I wonderif she ever dreamed of a Utopian environment where men and women lived in communicative harmony. I wonder if she ever dreamed. I wonder. Yes, ofcourse she dreamed. She lived for, and by, dreams. Eternal optimist, incurableromantic , extollerofspirit—these are terms to describe Emma Bell Miles, author , artist, and cultural interpreter. Living as she did at the turn ofthe century on Waiden's Ridge, Tennessee, this frail but stalwart woman embodied a biculturalism that was to give her insights not known to her mountain sisters nor to her city patron. Her birth outside the mountain culture to a pair of school teachers exposed her to a world of history, literature , science, and art. Her education came primarily through her parents' teaching and through independent study stimulated by a curious mind. The winters in her twentieth and twenty-first years at the St. Louis School of Design constituted her only formal education; but coming after a decade of formative years on Waiden's Ridge, that stint in the city only served to send her racing back to the mountain homeland she had long since adopted as her own. Emma became a mountain wife and mother living in a culture largely traditional , largely oral, largely isolated from the mainstream. Yet she was an artist, both literary and visual—an anomaly for her time and place. Imagine, if you can, what a pull she must have felt from first one culture and then the other. Surely she longed to bring the two worlds together, to meld those alien forms ofcreative expression into the mountain environment where she spent her days. Unable to form such abondliterally, sheturnedto writing as her means of making sense of the worlds she knew. She sought to describe and explain each to each. As Ricky Cox, a fellow student in the study of Emma Bell Miles, says: "Herwork was athread that held her life together, both as binding center and hem ___ This is a characteristic that could never be assigned to local colorists or popular novelists. For them (writing) is a livelihood, and a creative outlet, but not so much ofa personal search to find the good in diverse things and tojustify each one to the other" (Letter 20 April 1987). Perhaps inevitably, she turned at last to the status of mountain women. She chose to illuminate what she saw around her, what she experienced herself. If her writing took on feminist overtones, it was by no means overtly militant. She was, if anything, a feministin camouflage. After all, she could not openly tout her views about woman's right to equal status with men. The timewas 1905, 1910, 1915. The place was the southern Appalachian mountains. She was married to a mountain man and had borne her requisite five children, one about every two years. She was obviously a mountain wife and mother—but with a difference. She was also a writer, a pioneer folklorist, a newspaper columnist, a painter. She was different . Very few mountain women were readers, let alone writers. Though many may have railed inwardly at the "doings of their men, they would not have voiced their concerns, at least not beyond an intimate woman friend or two—certainly never to the men themselves. But Emma was different. Very likely she voiced her concerns, at times, to husband Frank about his own negligence, but more importantly she voiced her concerns in print to readers in the world beyond her own Waiden's Ridge, Tennessee. She took upon herself the burden of spokeswoman for her mountain sisters. True, she was not writing tothem, fortheywere not readers. But she was speaking forthemandaboutthem, even though they had not asked her to carry their cross. They never would— those mountain women—for they would assume their lot in life to be exactly what it was: a doer-for-others, a...