21. George W. Harris, “The Knob Dance: A Tennessee Frolic,” in High Times and Hard Times: Sketches and Tales by George Washington Harris, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), 46.
22. Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 642.
23. Emmett Gowen, Mountain Born (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1932), 235–36.
24. Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread (New York: Macauley, 1932), 144–45, 230, 86.
25. Robert Cantwell, “The Faulkners: Recollections of a Gifted Family,” in William Faulkner, ed. Hoffman and Vickory, 57.
26. William Brewer, “Moonshining in Georgia,” Cosmopolitan 23 (June 1897): 132, cited in Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 144; Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” in Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture, ed. W. K. McNeil, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 151. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see “Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia,” chap. 1 in this volume.
27. Walter Lynwood Fleming, A Documentary History of Reconstruction, vol. 1 (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1906–1907), 81–82.
28. Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders (New York: Outing, 1913), 453–54.
29. John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage, 1921), 94–95.
30. On the racial demographics of Appalachia, see Robert P. Stuckert, “Black Population of the Southern Appalachian Mountains,” Phylon 48 (June 1987): 141–51; and James B. Murphy, “Slavery and Freedom in Appalachia: Kentucky as a Demographic Study,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 80 (1982): 151–69.
31. See, for example, Richard B. Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” Appalachian Heritage 14 (Winter 1986): 25–33; John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1989); Kenneth W. Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Robert Tracey McKenzie, “Wealth Income: The Preindustrial Structure of East Tennessee,” Appalachian Journal 21 (Spring 1994): 260–79; Mary Beth Pudup, “Social Class and Economic Development in Southeastern Kentucky, 1820–1880,” in Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and Development in the Preindustrial Era, ed. Robert D. Mitchell (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 235–60; and Martin Crawford, “Political Society in a Southern Mountain Community: Ashe County, North Carolina, 1850–1860,” Journal of Southern History 55 (August 1989): 373–90.
The breadth of scholarship on race in Appalachia is reflected in two essay collections: William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell, eds., Blacks in Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985); and John C. Inscoe, ed., Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
32. Recent explorations of these views include Turner and Cabbell, Blacks in Appalachia, 21, 201; Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia”; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, chap. 5; “Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia” (chap. 1 in this volume); David W. Bowen, Andrew Johnson and the Negro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 15–16; Kenneth W. Noe, “Toward the Myth of Unionist Appalachia, 1865–1883,” in Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 6 (1994): 73–80; and Durwood Dunn, An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South: Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841–1846 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).
33. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 219.
11
A Fugitive Slave in Frontier
Appalachia
The Journey of August King on Film
In Jerry Williamson’s book Hillbillyland, the most comprehensive study so far of Hollywood’s depiction of the mountain South, there is no mention of black people. In Thomas Cripps’s Slow Fade to Black, the most thorough treatment of African Americans on film, there is no mention of Appalachia. Neither exclusion is at all surprising, nor is there any reason to expect such coverage in either case. The two subjects—race relations and Southern Appalachia—did not intersect to any significant degree in popular culture, in literature, or on film,1 until 1996, with the release of a remarkable movie that focuses on the nature of slavery and race relations in a highland setting.
The Journey of August King is an exceptional film in several respects. First, it is easily among the most serious and historically accurate depictions of the mountain South ever. Second, aside from assorted sagas of Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett, it is the only film firmly set within antebellum Appalachia. Finally, it is one of the most sensitive and sophisticated portraits of slavery and antislavery sentiment ever produced by Hollywood, and it stands alone as perhaps the only examination of slavery on film that is not placed within a usually generic and stereotypical lowland plantation setting.
The credit for these distinctions, of course, lies not with Hollywood producers alone. First and foremost, it is Asheville native John Ehle’s 1971 novel that provides the basis for the film; Ehle himself adapted the book to film.2 An Asheville native, Ehle has had a literary career consisting, in part, of a vast fictional output. Of eleven novels to date, seven are deeply researched reflections on the historical experience of western North Carolina’s settlement and subsequent development. His fiction, which ranges chronologically from the late eighteenth century through the post–World War II era, breaks through regional stereotypes in bold and substantive ways. According to his friend Borden Mace, one of the film’s associate producers, “John has revealed a greater truth and accuracy about Southern Appalachian life than many historians and sociologists,” an assessment with which few critics would take issue.3
This is particularly true of Ehle’s seventh novel, The Journey of August King, simply because he even approached the subject of slavery in a highland setting. The book, which Ehle has translated to the screen with commendable fidelity, confronts in both subtle and not so subtle ways themes that historians have only far more recently tackled in regard to the mountain South.4 It not only explores the ways in which slaveholding, racism, abolitionist sentiment, and class distinctions played out in a highland setting; it also conveys the realities of isolationism and connectedness, of subsistence and market economies in this still formative society early in the nineteenth century. And all of this is reflected through a deceptively simple escape story.
While returning home from a semiannual weeklong trip to a bustling market, identified in the book as Old Fort, North Carolina, August King, a recently widowed farmer, discovers in hiding an escaped teenage slave girl named Annalees. After fleeting encounters with her, King reluctantly befriends the starving, footsore, and desperate young woman. Over the course of the next three days of trekking back to his farm in a remote cove community, he conceals her with great difficulty, shunning acquaintances and sacrificing his own newly acquired stock and supplies in order to protect her from her ruthless master and the fearsome search party her owner has hired to find her. In the process, King also falls in love.
Though certainly uncharacteristic of commercial Hollywood production values, the love story between King and Annalees remains, as it was in Ehle’s novel, underplayed and ultimately unconsummated. Yet the attraction between these two characters is very real and effectively conveyed by actors Jason Patric and Thandie Newton. (Newton had already scored on-screen as Thomas Jefferson’s Sally Hemings, the most compelling character in the otherwise disappointing Merchant–Ivory production Jefferson in Paris.) The love story in August King amounts to a very tentative “brief encounter” that propels the story forward as this white man and this black woman climb higher toward home and freedom, respectively. It is also a tale of personal r
ejuvenation and even spiritual redemption for August King, though the terms of his psychological “journey” are not nearly as well developed in the film as they are in the book. (Ultimately, Jason Patric may be too bland an actor to dramatize such emotional complexities convincingly.)
As a historian, I am most impressed by the specificity of time and place in both the novel and the film. The movie’s opening credits appear as the camera sweeps from east to west over an early nineteenth-century map of North Carolina, from the Atlantic coast to the mountains, lingering only as we see the names of the last settlements, “Wilkes” and “Morgantown.” Just to the west, the words “Appalachian Mountains” arc in much larger letters across multiple mountain ranges, sketchily delineated. The date too is revealed early on. As August King makes a final mortgage payment on his small farm, his deed is marked paid and dated April 27, 1815.
Equally impressive is the careful—and I think remarkably accurate—re-creation of this remote frontier society. The Carolina highlanders depicted in the film are neither backwoods hillbillies nor “coon-skin cap boys.” They are hunters and farmers, most of them family men eking out modest livings on small landholdings. But they do not do so alone. Far from frontier loners enduring isolated existences amid an all-consuming wilderness, these early highlanders make up a thriving society driven by trade and commerce. There is a constant sense of movement throughout the film, as livestock and poultry crowd the roads as much as do people and wagons. The story is played out far more at trading posts, at drover stands, and along roads, fords, and campsites than it is on farms or in cabins.
One senses that it was through this market-driven mobility that mountain settlers most regularly encountered and kept in touch with one another. Another less obvious but ever-present subtheme of the film is the strong, if loose, sense of community among these Carolina highlanders. They interact as close neighbors, as casual acquaintances, as merchant and customer, as debtor and creditor, as counselor and client, as employer and hired hand. One of Ehle’s most adept achievements, in fact, is to vividly illustrate these interpersonal bonds as forms of a greater connectedness inherent in this frontier society and at the same time to make equally compelling, through the character of August King in particular, the loneliness and isolation of highland life during those formative years. From Robert D. Mitchell to Durwood Dunn to David Hsiung and Wilma Dunaway, historians have wrestled with issues of connectedness and isolation and the dynamics of localism in early settlement patterns.5 Again it is remarkable that all of these revelations by recent scholars merely confirm realities that John Ehle was already well aware of and conveyed with such insight in his novel more than thirty years ago.
Yet this sharply delineated sense of time, place, and socioeconomic development all serves as backdrop to a story that is at its heart a saga of slavery. Slavery in the mountains was well established by 1815, but few historians had acknowledged this basic fact at the time when Ehle wrote his book.6 The presence of slaves played no part in the vast set of images, assumptions, and stereotypes on which popular—and even scholarly—understandings of Southern Appalachia were based. But indeed there were slaves: according to census analysis, roughly 15 percent of the Appalachian populace in 1820 was slave, though only 10 percent of highland households held slave property.7 By coincidence, possibly the first slave in western North Carolina was a young girl named Liza, brought into the area of Old Fort where August and Annalees first cross paths. According to a long oral tradition among her descendants in the Asheville area, she accompanied Samuel Davidson, generally regarded as the “first white settler west of the Blue Ridge.”8 But although slaves were certainly present in the mountains from an early time, they were a limited presence, and the film reflects this fact. Besides Annalees and Sims—a fellow fugitive from whom she has become separated—the only other black characters are three or four servants who belong to the same owner, Olaf Singletary, and who attend him as a silent and begrudging entourage.
From beginning to end, this is a story of escape and pursuit, and in that respect it is very appropriate that it is set in Appalachia. The idea of the southern highlands as a refuge for fugitives of various sorts has long been an integral part of the higher moral ground that many have sought to bestow on the region. Abolitionist John Brown was by no means the first to acknowledge that the mountains of western Virginia, so integral to his Harpers Ferry scheme in 1859, “were intended by the Almighty for a refuge for the slave and a defense against the oppressor.”9 A recent scholar has echoed that theme, insisting that the region “was settled to a substantial degree by slaves and indentured white servants fleeing from exploitation and angry with established practices in Colonial America. The hills, in their exquisite isolation, became havens for the disenchanted black and white, who needed to escape burdensome drudgery and slavery.”10
But Annalees is not a lowland fugitive who has lifted her eyes unto the hills. She is owned locally. Her master is well known to both August King and the others in the area, and she is simply moving deeper into the wilderness when she encounters King. Both novel and screenplay are vague about where she is heading or thinks she’s heading. On their first encounter, King simply directs her to follow a stream headed north. At the film’s end, he escorts her to a high ridge above his farm and points her to a “trail to the North.” Whether or not the Underground Railroad ever moved through the southern highlands is open to debate. I have argued in the first chapter in this volume that there is no real evidence of its presence in the region.11 Even if some regularized escape route developed later, it is highly improbable that it would have been established as early as 1815. But that is obviously what Ehle had in mind as King sends his fugitive charge off with no reference at all to a destination, either short- or long-term. “The trail has been used for years. It’s marked,” he tells her vaguely in the film. “People will show you kindness on the way.”12
The pursuers are as vital as the pursued in demonstrating the complexities and variables that characterized mountain attitudes toward slavery. Olaf Singletary is the story’s sole slaveholder, referred to early in the film as “the wealthiest man in the mountains.” In rallying a search party to seek out his two runaways, Singletary at first finds few willing volunteers, which forces him to offer rewards and payment for their services and those of their dogs. In the wariness of other characters toward both the man and his mission, Ehle depicts the uneasiness with slaveholding and slaveholders that fueled Appalachian antislavery biases.
For some, the idea of the search itself is bothersome. One man states that it “hurts my conscience to set dogs on people,” while another wonders about offering a horse as a reward for a human being. Such sentiments suggest a genuine sense of moral resentment at the dehumanization the “peculiar institution” imposed upon its victims. For many regional chroniclers, such qualms typified the views of freedom-loving southern highlanders. It fueled the image of “Holy Appalachia,” where, according to one turn-of-the-century writer, those in the mountains “cherish liberty as a priceless heritage. They would never hold slaves and we may almost say they will never be enslaved. They are true democrats, holding all men to be equals in society, as they are taught that all of us are before God.” Or as Harry Caudill put it, “These poorer mountaineers, fiercely independent as they were, found something abhorrent in the ownership of one person by another.”13
Yet such idealized characterizations of antebellum Appalachian residents fail to acknowledge other, less noble factors that fueled their resentment toward slavery. Ehle lays them out as well. Alongside this indignation toward the debasement of slaves, he also reveals the class-based contempt toward the sole beneficiary of slavery in their midst. While his nonslaveholding neighbors fear Singletary and his power, they also see him as an object of derision and resentment. As such, they conform to what historian Carter Woodson once referred to as this “liberty-loving and tyrant-hating race” that exhibited “more prejudice against the slave holder than against the Negro.”14 Fo
r the first generations of southern highlanders, in particular, it was widely presumed that they moved into the hills when slavery and the plantation economy it supported pushed them out of the more desirable lowlands and fostered a resentment of the slaveholding class that had driven them away. According to one version of this premise, “The aristocratic slaveholder from his river-bottom plantation looked with scorn on the slaveless dweller among the hills; while the highlander repaid his scorn with high disdain and even hate.”15
Though hardly “aristocratic,” Olaf Singletary provides a ready target for such resentment by his nonslaveholding neighbors. And yet in characterizing the film’s single slaveholder, Ehle has stacked the deck. Certainly the least subtle aspect of the film is that Singletary emerges as a rather one-dimensional villain. As portrayed by Larry Drake, he is the least attractive character on-screen, fat and scowling, brutish and violent. His arrogant contempt for both his slaves and his poorer white neighbors is made abundantly clear.
From a dramatic standpoint, one can understand the need for a clear-cut villain, and who better but the man in pursuit of the film’s heroine, the man who gives her the reason to flee in the first place? (It is very clear that it is sharing his bed that the seventeen-year-old Annalees found most unbearable; further complications not fully explored lie in her revelation that Singletary is her father as well.) He openly professes his love for her before the men he hires to retrieve her, but that does little to soften his portrayal or win him much sympathy from either the search party or from movie viewers. With this character as the sole embodiment of highland slaveholding, it is hard to distinguish between the personal hatred of so despicable a character by those who know him from a broader condemnation of the system and class he represents.
How much more interesting—and challenging—it would have been to present what I and others have suggested were more representative of the region’s slaveholding class. More often than not, even in those formative years, mountain masters were merchants and professionals, doctors and lawyers. The commodities or services they provided the rest of the mountain populace made them integral and respected members of the community, which defused much of the resentment that their slaveowning might otherwise have generated.16 None of those linkages are suggested here.
Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South Page 31
