If you “turn off the state highway and climb the hill by the Gilbreaths’ milk barn” you’ll find the hilly, rocky land Brooks Blevins grew up on in Izard County, Arkansas. His family farm is situated in the Ozarks of northeast Arkansas, just over the Missouri state line, and is where Blevins currently resides.
On this day, for our interview, his office is his “writing shed” out in back of his home. Gesturing to the window, and referencing the recent drought and his garden, he might just as well have been the local agriculture reporter filming his updates for the evening news. Instead, he is there to talk about his latest book, an essay collection, entitled Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins.
Blevins has published three volumes of what many consider the definitive history of the Ozarks, and is the author or editor of ten other books. He is currently the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozark Studies at Missouri State University. It was a true pleasure to join Blevins virtually in his writing shed to talk about this book.
It wasn’t until I was middle-aged, living in the Midwest, and in conversation with a native Midwesterner that the question of my own Southern identity was brought to my attention. I had offered my opinion on an issue regarding the South and she said, “Oh. You’re from Arkansas. That’s not really the South.” I was horrified. I thought, how dare you question my Southernness?
I know your book particularly addresses the Ozark region of Arkansas and Missouri, but I am curious, given the depth of your study and experience, how you would have chosen to respond?
Well, you know as well as I do that there’s a spectrum of Southernness. As I talk about in the book, you might be able to find the center of the South somewhere. It’s going to be Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere like that. But Southernness is so much about personal identity. If you think you’re Southern, you’re Southern, as far as that goes. It’s only when you branch out and live in other places and meet other people from other parts of the South and from the non-South that you realize there’s no black-and-white definition of what it means to be Southern. It’s such a weird thing that the most Southern part of the South is South Florida, and that’s not what most people consider the South at all.
You write in the book about group identity being rooted in shared history, but also relying on a certain degree of cultural distinctiveness. How does this apply to the Ozarks?
Right now, I find myself in the middle of a difficult debate on how to define the Ozarks, because this summer the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is focusing on the Ozarks. One of the things the regional focus on the Ozarks has done is made a lot of people think about, “What is the Ozarks in 2023, and what does it mean to be an Ozarker?”
The program they’re putting on in Washington, D.C. this summer would have obviously looked a lot different 30 or 40 years ago. But today, there’s a lot of ethnic and national diversity to it. Northwest Arkansas has had a heavy influx of Hispanic population. There’s the largest Marshallese population in the world, outside of the Marshall Islands, located in Springdale, AR. So, there are these tremendous demographic shifts that have taken place within the last 30 years, since I got out of high school, and it has forced a reevaluation.
One of the things I talk about with my students is can you be from the Ozarks, but not of the Ozarks? I would say the definition was much easier 30 years ago because a lot of people would say, “Well if you’ve got deep roots in the Ozarks…” Many people, whether they lived in Fayetteville, AR, or Springfield, MO, or Violet Hill, AR, had a very common background, because you only had to go back a generation or two before your family were all poor hill people, scratching out a living on a rocky farm somewhere. We’re in a period of transition and I’m not sure how much recent arrivals to the Ozarks identify with it in any conscious way. But certainly there are now people of color in the Ozarks who have never known any other home. How do you fold them into this thing we call the Ozarks? It’s fascinating, and I don’t know the answer.
Your book is a collection of essays that all tie into the first one, entitled “The Ozarks and Dixie: Considering a Region’s Southernness.” If you had to choose one of these essays and answer only from personal opinion, which of these essays would you say comes closest to answering the question of what it means to be a Southerner?
I would probably say, of these essays, it would be the one about Andy Griffith. There’s something so quintessentially Southern about Andy Griffith, maybe not even so much about the show, but about him. Certainly, this goes back to our earlier discussion, that there is no one South that we can point to. Andy Griffith represents a certain kind of the South, a white part of the Upland South. But I think that is probably the closest thing in there to a purely Southern essay.
The show is such a phenomenon that there are people my kids’ age who are devotees of the show. There are a handful of TV shows and movies and things like that that just transcend time and place. I think that’s one of them. It’s never been off the air since it debuted in 1960. As I started to put these essays together, most of them are more rooted in the Ozarks specifically than the South in general. But this was one of the ones that I thought helps broaden this out into more of a Southern thing, which is what my academic background is in. I studied Southern history; I never took so much as a class on the Ozarks anywhere. The Ozarks was my little rabbit hole off of Southern history. I’m still stuck in the rabbit hole after all these years.
Speaking of that rabbit hole, how much research had been done on the Ozarks when you began?
I guess it depends on who was doing the research. There had been a ton of writing about the Ozarks when I began tinkering around with this in the early nineties, and most of it had been written by folklorists. From the standpoint of a historian, there had been very little hard and scientific historical research.
That said, a lot of what I did was built on the shoulders of other people, like famed folklorist Vance Randolph and historian Lynn Morrow, one of my mentors. Morrow had started chipping away at this in the 1970s. I was thankful that my mentor at Auburn, Wayne Flynt, had the foresight and breadth of knowledge to say, “You need to start reading Appalachian history because this is where you’ll find the blueprint for what you’re doing. These regions are so similar, and they’re connected historically.” So I read lots of Appalachian history and was very much influenced by the blueprint, that way of seeing the Highland South, and was able to use what I learned and apply it to the Ozarks.
Let’s talk about comparing the Ozarks to Appalachia. In the book you state that it is like being in the shadow of an older sibling, one that is always ahead of you and everyone knows them before you. Can you speak to that?
What I tell my friends who do Appalachian history or studies — and it is true — is that, “You guys don’t have to know anything about us, but we have to know everything about you,” because the Ozarks is in many ways a cultural and historical offshoot of Appalachia. Most of the people who settled in the 19th-century Ozarks had roots in Appalachia, the broader Appalachia, somewhere. We have religious, agricultural, and physical commonalities. The Ozarks is in many ways a smaller, shorter version of Appalachia.
The two regions still look and feel a lot alike today. The accents of the old-timers in both places are very similar. But it is true that in the academic world where we write about these regions, I still find a lot of people doing Appalachian studies who know very little, if anything, about the Ozarks, because they don’t have to.
I think things like the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the recent Netflix series, “Ozark,” or the movie, “Winter’s Bone,” help introduce people to the Ozarks in a certain way. We have a limited ability to affect the way we’re portrayed in the media. But at least these portrayals remind people that we are here, and they may send people to documentaries or books that give a more accurate portrayal of the region. If they don’t, I’m not too concerned about it. I’m still going to do what I do and not worry what people think of us. Arkansas spent way too many years worrying about what the rest of the country thinks about it, instead of just going about its business and improving things for people.
Another often overshadowed voice is that of Ozark women on the farm. Let’s talk about the essay on Minnie Atteberry. You point out that diaries were most often found to be written by women with “literacy and leisure,” as opposed to Minnie, a woman on the “economic and social margin of the peripheral south.” How was this diary valuable to you?
I just absolutely fell in love with Minnie when I came across these diaries in Fayetteville. I wanted to write a book on her but was so disappointed when I found out from her relatives that a trunk with most of her writings had been destroyed in a flood.
It was not unheard of for poor people to keep diaries, but it was like one sentence a day. My wife’s great-great-grandmother had one like that. I can imagine how busy she was, and what it took just to remember to get away and jot down a few things. But Minnie’s diary, what has survived of it, is so extensive that you really can get almost a full picture of a human being from that. It’s such an unusual story to be able to tell of people who don’t matter to the world, who’ve left nothing that the rest of the world would consider of importance. So that was what fascinated me with this, that you could delve so deeply into the life of someone who lived in such obscurity and poverty. As a person who grew up in a marginal place, it just really spoke to me in a way that these finds rarely do.
You relate in the book how your exploration of race relations began in college. Can you talk about that journey, and include more on the complicated process for the historian of “analyzing historical interpretation by reconsidering motives underlying conclusions”?
That essay was originally published when I was a graduate student, so I found myself revisiting it at different points in my life. It’s interesting as the world around us changes, how we deal with race and the United States has continually changed over time, too.
For my paper in college, I was convinced that these little rural communities in the hill country, where you rarely found Black communities, somehow got along better, for whatever reasons. There are elements now I keep having to reconsider that I wasn’t conscious of at that time, and it’s clear that back then I went into it in defensive mode.
But then you start doing all this parsing and dissecting. I eventually came to realize that the Black community still lived a very second-class life. Just because there wasn’t race-related violence in my community didn’t make it the Shangri-La of race relations. I wasn’t aware enough as a 21-year-old college kid, and I wasn’t mature enough to process this as a historian and a human being. It’s only years later when you revisit these things that you start seeing the weakness of your arguments.
The last time I revisited the essay was in 2020, after George Floyd. That was yet another awakening I had to bring to the essay. It was a reminder to me that we’re never fully formed, and none of our interpretations as historians or as humans are ever finished. Life is an evolution, and if you’re lucky and live long enough, your ideas are going to change. All we can do is hope that we evolve in a way that we keep understanding and that we don’t shut ourselves off from growth and the broader view of things.
Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins
by Brooks Blevins
University of Arkansas Press
February 1, 2023
Southern Review of Books 