Ozarkers’ expansive use of words

“And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”—John 21:25

We would all be poorer if Vance Randolph had become a psychologist. He almost did. He earned a master’s degree in psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts in 1915 and returned to the subject from 1922-1924 in his native Kansas. One of his early published works was about the study of dreams.

We would be poorer, too, if Randolph had become a professional socialist. He had the opportunity. While living in Greenwich Village in 1915, he worked as an editor and ghost writer for the left-wing Vanguard Press. The first work he published under his own name was a poem, “Seek Ye Shall Find,” in “The Masses.” He was writing for the Girard, Kan., socialist weekly “An Appeal to Reason” when the U.S. Army drafted him in October 1917.

Randolph might have gone the way of academic anthropology, but Franz Boas turned him down.

I was looking for a complete list of Randolph’s work on the Ozarks (Missouri and Arkansas) when I found “For Love and for Money: The Writings of Vance Randolph” in the collection of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. Arkansas College published this annotated bibliography in 1979 as part of its folklore series.

An annotated bibliography is more than a reference work; when the subject is the work of a single writer, a good bibliography lets the reader closer to the writer than the average biography can. In “For Love and for Money,” Robert Cochran and Michael Luster met the mark. (Cochran later published an excellent biography of Randolph.)

Vance Randolph was born in 1892 in Pittsburg, Kan. “I never saw the Ozarks,” he writes, “until 1899, when my parents brought me down for a week’s stay at the O-Joe Club near Noel, Mo., … I perceived at once that a guide named Price Payne was the greatest man in the world and that the Ozark country was the garden spot of all creation.”

He calls the Ozark region “the only one place in the world that really seems like home to me.” It took many tries to settle there, beginning in Pineville, Mo., in 1919 (the next year he bought a house and 97 beehives). One could say he finally settled in the Ozarks when he moved to Eureka Springs in 1947. He stayed there until 1962, when he moved to Fayetteville and married Mary Celestia Parler. But “finally settled” doesn’t sound right; it’s more like he finally managed to confine his energies to the Ozarks.

The first of his famous folklore anthologies came out in 1940; before that, Randolph published delightful little speech studies. The first, “A Word List from the Ozarks,” came out in “Dialect Notes” 1926.

In “Literary Words in the Ozarks” (“American Speech,” 1927), he begins, “One feature of the Ozark dialect which has often impressed me … is the frequency with which some illiterate hillbilly brings out perfectly good English words of a type very seldom used by illiterates in other parts of the United States.” (He is using “illiterate” as a descriptive, not a pejorative, term.)

The words include: agile, beguile, bemoan, betide, caucus (as a verb), cavil, clarify, comprehend, contentious, creen (careen), delude, denotes, dilatory, diligent, discern, docile, dote, extort, forsake, generate, genteel, honorable, intoxicate, jaunt, loiter, meander, onset (a fight), oracle, partake, pen (to write), peruse, ponder, proffer, reconcile, rectified, study, tragedy/tragical, wearisome, withstand, wrest.

“I hates a feller what’s allus a bemeanin’ of his kinfolks,” one might say. A “forsaken” girl is one who has no suitors.

One man told Randolph, “I don’t never partake of no whiskey ’cept if I’m a ailin’” and that he had seen plenty of airplanes but had never seen a locomotive. The same man’s son described his wife as “a docile critter.”

“One of my neighbors is often spoken of as a ‘plum contentious woman,’” he writes, and “a man remarked to me that ‘thet are wind shore denotes rain,” adding that he hoped it would “cease” before morning.” Randolph heard an illiterate moonshiner ask, “You all reckon I cain’t discern right from wrong?”

How did these words get into his neighbors’ dialect? Randolph doesn’t speculate here. Ozarkers’ isolation was long, but not total. Maybe the words spoken by a passing stranger would meet the same acute ear and capacious aural memory that made it possible to hand down, from generation to generation, all of that Ozark folklore Randolph was beginning to collect.

What would have happened if Franz Boas had accepted Vance Randolph as a student, or if any other route had led to an academic position or a long-term salary? Not only would it have put a partition between him and the people he lived among (and married into) whose culture he collected, and thus diminished his great work; it would have deprived the world of his “lesser” work—the stuff he wrote to pay the bills. That’s the “money” part of Cochran and Luster’s title “For Love and for Money.”

For years, often under a pseudonym, Randolph wrote or contributed to the Little Blue Books and Big Blue Books published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius in Girard, Kan. You’ve probably come across these inexpensive mass-produced books and booklets. They anticipate Reader’s Digest, cable television, and the Internet.

The founding impulse is wholesome enough: Get information out to the general public, cheap (“Beekeeping for Profit,” written by Randolph). But there’s the ever-present temptation to offer the sensational and salacious.

While “A Book of Amazing Confessions” (Randolph repudiated this one) and “The Autobiography of a Pimp” seem beneath him, “Sex and the Whip,” the chapter he contributed to “Modern Sex” under the pseudonym Anton S. Booker, seems to me to be more evidence of the energy and intellectual range of Our Man in the Ozarks.

To quote Cochran and Luster’s note, the chapter contains a “survey of literary references to flagellation in Coleridge, Lamb, Dickens, etc., with a number of hilarious bibliographic citations,” including “an astonishing book called ‘Satan’s Harvest Home, or the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, and the Game of Flatts, and other Satanic Works daily Propagated in this good Protestant Kingdom’” (1749).

I wonder: If a book by that title were placed on the shelves of a public library today, or taught in a college English class, which side would try to ban it first? I would defend it. What language. In our age of euphemism, the title is a model of immediacy and clarity. We know just what to expect from this author’s survey (or rather denunciation) of vice.