Town Life in Arkansas

To an inhabitant of a great city a chapter on town life in Arkansas may seem likely to be almost as concise as the famous one on snakes in Ireland. There is no great city in Arkansas, and only four towns can claim more than ten thousand inhabitants, — Little Rock, Fort Smith, Pine Bluff, and Hot Springs. The largest of these has less than fifty thousand. Nevertheless there is a distinct difference between the life of the town dweller in Arkansas and that of a man in the rural districts. For that matter, there are minor differences among the citizens of towns strongly enough marked to impress a stranger.

The semi-Northern bustle and vigor of Fort Smith, the repose and hospitality of Little Rock, the African din and humor and the tropical aspect of Pine Bluff, have as little likeness one to another as any of them can have to the unique chaos that we know as Hot Springs. The visitor might imagine the breadth of States between them, only always Southern States. In my fancy, often I relegate them to their proper kindred. Fort Smith is a Georgian town ; Little Rock belongs about equally to South Carolina and Virginia; Pine Bluff might have been taken bodily out of Mississippi; Hot Springs — but I have already said Hot Springs can be compared to no town but itself.

Between the denizens of small towns and large, as we reckon size in Arkansas, there is an appreciable line of social demarcation. To speak frankly, the large-town man has in a great measure come into the current of modern civilization. Even when he does not belong to the more educated class, he is a vastly more civilized being than his brother of the same rank in the country or the village. He is more alert, more impressionable, he talks better English, he reads the newspaper, he would like the Arkansas legislature to vote a generous appropriation for the World’s Fair. In short, he is of the New South.

Every traveler going south from St. Louis can recall the average Arkansas village in winter. Little strings of houses spread raggedly on both sides of the rails. A few wee shops, that are likely to have a mock rectangle of façade stuck against a triangle of roof, in the manner of children’s card houses, parade a draggled stock of haberdashery and groceries. To right or left a mill buzzes, its newness attested by the raw tints of the weather boarding. There is no horizon; there seldom is a horizon in Arkansas, — it is cut off by the forest. Pools of water reflect the straight black lines of tree trunks and the crooked lines of bare boughs, while a muddy road winds through the vista. Generally there are a few lean cattle to stare in a dejected fashion at the train, and some fat black swine to root among the sodden grasses. Bales of cotton are piled on the railway platform, and serve as seats for half a dozen listless men in high boots and soft hats. Occasionally, a woman, who has not had the time to brush her hair, calls shrilly to some child who is trying to have pneumonia by sitting on the ground. No one seems to have anything to do, yet every one looks tired, and the passenger in the Pullman wonders how people live in “ such a hole.”

Two months later the “ hole ” will have changed into a garden. The great live oaks will wave a glossy foliage of richest green. Men will he ploughing in the fields, and the negroes’ song will float through the open car window. The house yards will be abloom with Japan quince and lilacs. The very shop windows will have a dash of fresh color in summer bonnets and piles of new prints. Then the stranger will awake to tlie charm of the South; and were one to leave the train and to stay in one of these unimpressive towns for a few weeks, he would come to appreciate that charm.

Life in an Arkansas town has some strong points of vantage ; though, to be sure, the average villager’s civilization is at the cabinet-organ stage. An amazing number of such musical instruments is sold all through the State. First comes the sewing-machine, then the cabinet organ. The ambition of rural mothers is to have their children take music lessons. The Arkansan has a great opinion of an education, and will make many sacrifices to give it to his children. Churches abound in all the small towns. They are, one may say, almost too abundant, since they are often scantily supported ; the town that might have one church in peace and comfort keeping two or three in discord and leanness. In consequence the salaries of the clergy are always small, and sometimes pitiful. In justice to the Arkansas layman, however, I ought to say that he is not captious ; indeed, he is in general easily pleased, a willing worker, and, to the limit of his means, a more than willing giver. Nowhere is the cloth more respected. The churches have their own share of the makeshifts of a primitive community. If there are no pews, as sometimes happens, there is a placid borrowing of chairs. One little hill church had no lamps ; so the congregation (or, rather, those who remembered it) brought their own lamps to the evening service, and could be seen gathering from afar, a light to the Gentiles, as their steps twinkled over the hills. Such inconveniences are taken in perfect good humor and seriousness. In the same spirit, allowance is made for the habits of the worshipers where they conflict with ecclesiastical decorum. Thus, in a certain church to which an Episcopal clergyman of my acquaintance once ministered, the white wall behind the pulpit was decorated to the right (very amply and blackly) with the pious confidence, THE LORD WILL PROVIDE, and to the left (equally amply and blackly) with the courteous request, PLEASE DO NOT SPIT ON THE FLOOR (!)

Numerically the Methodists are in the van of all the denominations, especially among the negroes, although hard pressed by the Baptists. Of late years the Episcopalians and the Roman Catholics have made a marked impression on the African imagination. In Little Rock there is a flourishing colored chapel with a vested choir, and very droll it is to hear one black mite after another plead with the organist, “ Please, Miss Susie, cayn’t I tote de cross? ” Another little African — but this story has nothing to do with the subject; it is simply “ thrown in,” as it were, to encourage the patient reader — rushed to the house of the rector of Fort Smith and frantically rang the bell until he appeared ;

then gasped, “ Oh, Mist’ D-, Miz M——, she ’s dead, and she say for you and Miz Dcome over there right straight! ”

There is a popular notion that in a small Arkansas town all the women have snuff sticks in their pockets, and the men flourish bowie knives, while any slight difference of opinion is likely to end in somebody’s being shot at sight. It may be my lack of enterprise, but in seven years’ acquaintance with Arkansas I have never seen a bowie knife. Snuff sticks I cannot remember, for that is in the plural, but I did see one stick that I fancied was a veritable snuff stick, and I know one woman who is suspected of taking snuff. She does not live in a town. It may also be a surprise to many people to learn that there is a law in Arkansas against carrying concealed weapons, and that it is a law frequently enforced. The law may be a futile one,— to the writer’s mind it is, — working simply to prevent the lawabiding people from carrying arms that they are not likely in any event to carry, and would not misuse if they should carry them, while the lawless element naturally stuffs its revolvers a little deeper in its pockets and laughs at the constable ; the effect of the law, where it has an effect, being simply to disarm the virtuous and leave the vicious armed. But that does not touch the point which I would make, namely, that there is a public sentiment against carrying deadly weapons, strong enough to pass such a law. Practically there is little fighting. The assassination of Clayton gave the State a bad name that it is far from deserving, whatever may be said of the county in which it occurred.

Conway County has the reputation of harboring more of the “tough” element than any other county in the State ; how justly is beyond my guessing. But I suspect that were one to go to the wild Conway towns he would find them, like some other towns that I have known under the same reproach, very mild mannered indeed. I have in mind one town which I was told was the “worst and bloodiest town in Arkansas; they no more mind killing a man there than they do a hog ; ” and I was assured that nobody could be punished for murder. True, no one has been punished for murder there, — during the last seven years, certainly, no one has been ; but then, as no one has been murdered, the ground for reasoning is limited. No doubt bloody fights have been fought in Arkansas towns. I myself know several individuals who have, at some time or other, killed their man. But, if I may trust the papers, there are more murders in the peaceful State of Iowa than in most parts of Arkansas. Certain sections of the State bordering on the Indian Territory, like Fort Smith, get all the surrounding murderers on their dockets, which gives them an unmerited prominence, criminally; and since these cases come before a judge without fear or favor and of uncommon ability, the guilty so generally get their fatal deserts that the public have two doses of the same crime, — first when the crime is committed, secondly when society avenges it; thus producing the impression on a careless reader of two separate outrages. “ There’s another shocking murder at Fort Smith,” says the reader over his breakfast. “Two Indians hanged ! Arkansas must be a lawless State.” The murder is probably the same that startled the critic weeks before, and five to one was not committed in Fort Smith or Arkansas at all, but in the Indian Territory.

The only affray of which the writer has personal knowledge in this same desperado town was a fight between two negroes. One of them had worked as house boy for my friends on the plantation. He was employed in a hotel of the town, and the landlady told him that (as she expressed it) “ some of his folks ” were in the house. Thereupon Don sidled up to me, with a modest grin. Don is a handsome brown boy of twenty, in whose appearance there is nothing to attract attention except a peculiarly gentle, almost timid smile. After the usual amenities had been exchanged, the friends had been inquired about particularly and by name, and I had been instructed to “ tell them howdy,” which is the salutation of the country, and I in turn had inquired how Don himself was doing, and been informed “mighty well,” Don rubbed his hands together and wriggled his shoulders in a manner leading me to infer that the real object of the conversation was now rising to the surface. He asked, “ Is you gwine home soon, Miss-? ”

I told him in about two months, at which his face fell.

“Why?” I asked.

“ Oh, nufiin, ma’am. I jes’ ’lowed I’d like hab you take me ’long er you to wait on you.”

I was not so flattered by this desire to furnish me with a valet as I might have been had I lived fewer years in the South.

“Well, what have you been doing now, Don ? ” I asked severely.

He smiled his gentlest, timidest smile ; a baby could not look more guileless.

“ Colored boy, he jumped on me t’ other night, and I cut him,” simpered Don.

“ With a razor, I suppose? ”

“ Yes’m.”

“ Did you kill him ? ”

“ No, ma’am. Doctor reckons he ’ll Be out, soon.”

The end of the matter was that I gave Don a little money to pacify the feelings of the cut boy, which was done so successfully that Don’s amiable smile was waiting in the same place to greet me when I returned.

I would not mention this trifling incident were it not that it illustrates the negro character. Don felt the same embarrassment over his unsuccessful homicide that one of another race might have felt over a rather rough practical joke at which the victim was unreasonably angry; and at the same time he had the black man’s pathetic confidence in his “ folks.”

The same combination of absence of moral sense with childlike trustfulness was shown by Albert, another of our valuable boys. One day, in an “all sorts store,” he was bragging with a pistol, and was so unlucky as to shoot off part of his thumb, and to be arrested for carrying concealed weapons into the bargain. When they had put him in jail, he spent all his time at the window looking out for some of us to come to town.

“ Mr. Planter or Miss-won’t let me stay here long, if I git sight on ’em,” the poor fellow said. We had to patch up some sort of a compromise with justice out of sheer pity for his faith in us, by virtue of which Albert worked his fine out on the sheriff’s farm very comfortably.

All this is not to deny that there is crime, or deplorable failure of justice, or mob violence in Arkansas ; but the outrages are irregular, not the customary thing. Really, the lawlessness is largely an imported lawlessness, while the occasional failure of justice is due to the costliness of convictions and the poverty of the State. This was notoriously the fact in the Clayton tragedy. The murderers were known to the grand jury, a member of which assured me that only the utter bareness of the state treasury prevented their conviction ; but they had fled the State, and the State was not rich enough to pursue them. A kind of fury of impatience at such a condition of things is at the bottom of much of the summary execution of punishment. Ignorant men, who yet know very well the connection between their own pockets and the taxes, reason : “ Why should we spend thirty thousand dollars to give the bloody scoundrel every legal chance to escape his just deserts ? Shoot him down and save the money! ”

It has been the unhappy fate of the State to be a house of refuge for human failures of all kinds. Desperadoes fleeing from justice or seeking their prey, broken-down adventurers, bankrupts, poverty-stricken movers who have fled before the sheriff, — all have flocked up the river, down the river, across the country, to poor Arkansas. Crime could hide in her trackless forest, and even the “trifling” could scratch a living out, of her fertile fields. There was a time when the “land of the bowie knife” did not belie its name, but that time has passed, and in no other part of the country, not in New England, certainly not in the West, can I remember to have met with such a simple reverence for the law as law as one can find in most Arkansas villages. Of the cities I do not speak now ; they are under different conditions.

A photograph of a village in Arkansas would not be complete without a view of the village newspaper. The Arkansas country newspaper is a weekly journal full of the humanities. The rural newspaper is always a mirror. But these small Arkansas papers return more truthfully the reflection of their locality because they fill their columns with news from different little villages adjacent that have no paper of their own. The letters are by local correspondents, and are highly natural. The painstaking editor, who is often the printer as well, amends the spelling and corrects the grammar according to his lights (lights sometimes rather dim), and washes his hands of the rest. Thus, on the same page of the paper before me, I find “ Swampy’s ” prediction that “ no man can carry the United States for President in 1893 who is not for free silver,” and in the very next column behold “ D. K.” hurrahing for “ Cleveland and his silver letter,” and shouting, “ Let the battle cry be Cleveland, free trade, and honest money ! ” Some of the expressions sound strangely to an Eastern ear; for example, this from the editor’s own muse: “ Circuit court was in session, and after a howdy with the affable clerk,” etc.

Here is a paragraph describing the drowning of a boy: “ The body was gotten out three or four hours after, and was interred the same day, and has gone to meet the father of long years of suffering, and also some brothers who have gone before. Freddy was a good boy.” The same sheet, in an earlier issue, used a striking but friendly frankness regarding the “ Widow C-,” who had come to town with her cotton. ‘‘The widow,” says the kindly editor, “ is the right type of w idow, and moves on with a firm but sure step to the goal. Her son Tommy is a great help to her. Tommy is a good boy and honors his mother, and his days shall be long in the land.”

Indeed, every page radiates an intimate friendliness, Has Squire Leens broken his leg, the correspondent condoles, mentioning in warm terms how usefully and nimbly the squire would otherwise employ that imprisoned limb. “ Mrs. Rev. Jones,” who has “ a severe attack of the La Grippe.” and Miss Nettie Howard, who “ is suffering from a rising in her ear,” each has a whole paragraph of sympathy. Numerous jocose though mysterious allusions enable us, if not the editor, to guess why young “ Bud Harrington comes over to our town so often these moonlight nights. Nice, driving with one hand moonlight nights, is n t it, Bud ? As Shakespeare or some other poet author says, ‘ There ’s nothing half so sweet in life as love’s young dream.’ That’s so ! ” In this fashion of pleasantry does the wit of the writers disport itself. Frequently, like Mr. Wegg, they drop into poetry. The rhyme is of a free and generous turn, despising the clogging fetters of metre. I have a specimen before me. A correspondent tells of the death of a “ prominent citizen,” and expresses sympathy for his widow, concluding : —

Thus on, piously if not poetically, through three stanzas. The editor blesses all the brides and praises all the babies. Notin his columns shall you find the ill-bred sneers of Ids Northern brother in regard to mothers-in-law. He doffs his hat and bows. Once, at the top of an editorial column, I read, “Our mother-in-law, Mrs. S-, is in town.”

The country paper has an atmosphere of good will, whatever else you may find in it; not always delicate, but never malicious. The same atmosphere pervades the people’s lives. In one of Miss Wilkins’s admirable miniatures she pictures two old maiden sisters who genteelly starve together. One day a prying neighbor comes into their dining-room. They are at tea. Their dainty table belongings, their pitiful fare, are exposed to " Matilda Jenkins’s ” devouring eyes. “ Nothing did they guard so sacredly as the privacy of their meals.” The younger sister is overwhelmed, but the elder sister rises to the crisis. “ Come into the other room,” she says, with stately dignity, and sweeps the prying Matilda before her. Such a scene would be impossible in an Arkansas town. Had the sisters lived in an Arkansas town, and had Matilda Jenkins, let her motive be evil as it might, crossed their threshold at a meal-time, she must inevitably have been bidden to “ dror up,” “ rest her hat on the bed.” and “take a bite.” But then, in an Arkansas town Matilda Jenkins would not have pried.

To every one his due ; we have the virtues of our vices in Arkansas. We may be improvident, we may (though I am not so sure of that) lack sustained energy, we may be hot-headed and unjust, but we are not inquisitive, we are not censorious; we are hospitable and kindly affectioned one to another. And these qualities oil the jarring wheels of daily life. They seem to harmonize with the climate. Perhaps one main reason for our unbounded hospitality is, that in an Arkansas village there is no strain to keep up appearances. One cannot imagine two Arkansas sisters with one gown in common, like Miss Wilkins’s pathetic spinsters, laboriously ripping off the lace and putting on velvet to pass it off on the neighbors as two. No; the Southerner would say, “ Ain’t it lucky sister’s dress fits me ? ” and with all the neighbors discuss trimming it.

If one of the New Englanders so delicately painted by Miss Wilkins were to have shoes too ragged to mend, she would stay away from the sewing society because she had ” laid out to clean the house, and all was done except one room, and she could n’t feel comfortable till she got that done” (carefully leaving the room undone to make her words good), or because her head ached, or because of some other equally respectable and valid reason. The Arkansan would —■ in fact, the Arkansan did — push out a small foot in the wreck of a shoe, saying : “ Why, yes, ma’am, I’d like to come best in the world, and I could come, but my shoes do look so distressed I’m ashamed. Reckon you ‘ll have to excuse me till I git a new pair.”

Having nothing to conceal, a guest is made welcome to his host’s little as heartily as to his abundance. On the guest’s part, he — or especially she — expects to lend a friendly hand at the kitchen stove or at the pump outside. Where in a New England or New York or Pennsylvania town will one find whole families going out to spend the day in homes out of their circle of kindred ? But in an Arkansas village it is the commonest thing for “all the Joneses,” including the favorite among the Jones dogs and at least two of the Jones horses, to go to spend Sunday with the Smiths ; or all the Smiths, from old man Smith to his visiting grandchild, to dine with the Joneses.

Mr. Howells, referring to Miss Wilkins’s tales, makes a trenchant criticism. He says : “ What our artist has done is to catch the American look of life, so that if her miniatures remain to other ages they shall know just the expression of that vast average of Americans who do the hard work of the country and live narrowly on their small earnings and savings. If there is no gayety in that look, it is because the face of hard work is always sober, and because the consciousness of merciless fortuities and inexorable responsibilities comes early and stays late with our people.” Let Mr. Howells except in great measure the Southern workers from his characterization. The face of hard work in the South wears an amiable smile that broadens to a grin where that face is carved in ebony. May not here be the secret of the intangible but potent charm of Southern life ?

An Arkansas village cannot he compared, in regard to neat outlines and fresh paint and general prosperity, to a village in New England. But if we are less comfortable, we are vastly more happy, somehow; we have let the sunshine in on poverty! In the South we are not ashamed of being poor; therefore we do not work our brains and our hearts and our consciences to a thread trying to cover up our meagre living. Any one can see it; yes, and any one may share it. Moreover, being less ambitious, we have leisure to enjoy small pleasures, to do small courtesies. Even the “ mean man ” of an Arkansas village is forced by omnipotent public opinion to be kind. Nobody is too busy to lean over the fence and exchange a good story with a passing neighbor. In the shops, the bargaining always puts on a jocose air of camaraderie. “ Say, Mr. Trader,” says the customer, “ cay n’t you split this here plaid woolen suit and give me jest a coat and vest ? ” “ No, Billy,” answers the shopkeeper, weighing out sugar at the other end of the store. “ I’d like to the best in the world ; but them’s plumb new goods, and I could n’t nohow. But we got some mighty nice black alpaccy goods; heap more comfortable, this weather. You lift that box behind you and you ’ll see ’em ; take ’em out and look ’em over. If you open the blind over there, you can see better. Shake it a little fust and it ‘ll come; it’s got a sort o’ stick to it. Thank ye.”

Arkansans are social souls, especially Arkansans with black skins. They can spend hours in an “ all sorts store ” or on a tavern veranda, conversing and expectorating with slow zest in the moment. The bursts of laughter that roll out from such a group do not come from black throats alone; the Arkansas villager enjoys a joke, and has a good share of the grim Western drollery colored by some more vivid and richer grotesqueness that may be the product of the fervid sun. Western humor has a cynical streak ; good - natured as it is, there is in it a toleration, born not only of large opportunities and a liberal nature, but of low expectations of men, — in fine, the toleration of contempt rather than of charity. But Southwestern humor is broad, rich, and gentle. It is the humor of men who have plenty to eat, not wrested from other men, but taken out of the ground. No doubt the Gallic element in the native Arkansan has done its share in burnishing his wit as well as shaping his manners. So far, the effect of the continually swelling stream of Northern immigration has only been to increase his energy without effacing his genial qualities.

But I neglect the large towns; yet why not, since all the large towns, notably the most bizarre and picturesque of all Arkansas towns, Hot Springs, have already been described very completely ? And adequately to portray Little Rock, Fort Smith, or Pine Bluff would require a far larger canvas than is mine in this article. The most sharply defined figures in these large towns are the unreconstructed aristocrats, now for the most part of the feminine gender. They are as stanch and as pathetic, poor souls, as Scott’s Jacobites, with their locks of hair, and battered swords, and thin old silver, and hoard of bitter or splendid memories. I can foresee some future novelist paying them a half-humorous, half-affectionate respect, when time shall have healed all the scars of war. These mourners over the past always use one plaint whenever anything is praised : “ Ah, you should have seen it before the war! ” A story is told of a Little Rock old gentlewoman, who was so constantly bemoaning the contrast of the shabby present with the past that once, when the moonlight was admired by her guest, out of sheer force of habit she sighed, “Yes, ma’am, but oh, you should have seen our moonlight before the war! ”

Gentlemen and gentlewomen are so much the same the world over, however, that one feels grateful even for the minor differences. In the North a gentleman is forced to be a man of the world; but in the South a gentleman may still remain a provincial. The Southern man of the world is, as all who know him will admit, a charming fellow. He has a manner of the gentlest suavity. Indeed, there is an ornate leisure to his politeness that one does not often perceive in colder and busier climes. His speech is more studied, more decorated, than his Northern brother’s ; at the same time it is less artificial than the models of his youth. He is dainty in his toilets, clinging to the black frock coat, and he likes to put himself into full dress. He cares more for society than Northerners of his class, and he is not so careful to conceal his enthusiasms. But he is the most tolerant of men and the most receptive. If back in his soul there are fiery instincts and deeply rooted prejudices of social order and race, an habitual courtesy holds the curtains close. Nevertheless, charming though he be, my heart yearns toward the provincial, whose language slips occasionally into the vernacular, who wears muddy boots, and from whose Southern prejudices and ideals the world has not brushed the bloom. He is a planter out of the way of railways, helping, pushing, kicking, his tenants into better ways of living; he is a lawyer in a country town ; he is a rural banker or merchant; he is a clergyman with a parish large enough to be a diocese; he is a country doctor, the unknown yet valued correspondent of a great medical journal, serving his profession far more successfully than his own fortune, on horseback half his days, and sitting up half his nights to study : but under whatever formal title, he is the same honest gentleman. Rustic and aristocrat in a breath, he has the prejudices of both his orders ; so, likewise, he has their virtues, beingfrank, simple, loyal, and the helper of the helpless. Take him all in all, the Arkansan, with his Italian climate, his wonderful soil and forests and mines, his mixed ancestry, his background of mediaeval savagery, and his real awakening to modern forces, is a figure instinct with possibilities.

Do not judge him by the imbecilities of his legislature or the brutal outbreaking of the State’s worst and smallest element: the legislator is the representative of the carelessness of the State, not of its real feelings; and the violence affects but an insignificant section. The sense of a country never makes the noise, and there is vastly more sense among rural Arkansans, even on the subject of money legislation, than would appear.

Life in Arkansas is more attractive than any one who does not live in the State will believe. It has elements which all American life would be the better for absorbing. Perhaps I am not making too strong a statement if I say that the North may have quite as much to learn of the South as the South has to learn of the North; and those of us who love both sections with all our hearts please ourselves by dreaming that the light of the North and the sweetness of the South may some day blend like the melody of a tune, — with infinite variations, let us say, but no discords.

Octave Thanet.