In March 1929, a brutal murder was reported near Mountain View in Stone County. A drifter named Connie Franklin was beaten, burned and chopped into pieces. His 16-year-old fiancee, Tiller Ruminer, was raped.
Five local men were arrested for both crimes and the story began to spread as newspaper reporters from Kansas City, Mo., Memphis and Little Rock arrived. The Associated Press sent a journalist and The New York Times found the news fit to print, though discreetly on page 17.
Urban preconceptions of backwoods mountain people fueled much of the reporting. Headlines shrilly proclaimed that local “barons” who ran a “system of peonage” were behind the murder. Newspaper accounts were filled with attempts to mimic the unlettered dialect of the Arkansas Ozarks. Meanwhile, five men were waiting to be tried for their lives. Yet months later, in December 1929, a strange thing happened. The murder victim turned up alive. Or did he? And did a murder occur, or not?
This is the true-crime (or true-hoax) story told by Brooks Blevins, the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University at Springfield, in Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South. The book examines the strange case of Franklin, a man with something to hide, who resurfaced to testify in the trial of the men accused of killing him. It also skillfully deals with themes of regional and individual identity, social and regional bias and a state’s struggle with its image.
Published last year by the University of Illinois Press, Ghost of the Ozarks has been awarded the Arkansas Historical Association’s J.G. Ragsdale Book Award in Arkansas History for 2013.
The award has been given annually since 2002 in honor of J.G. Ragsdale, who was a 1919 graduate of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, a founding member of the Arkansas Historical Association and former chairman of the University of Arkansas board of trustees. Blevins will receive a $1,000 prize and certificate at the historical group’s 72nd annual conference in Helena-West Helena on Thursday-Saturday.
Mark Christ, community outreach director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, served as chairman of the three-member Ragsdale Book Award committee this year. The panel evaluated about 20 submissions, Christ said, “on their mastery of primary and secondary sources, as well as their readability.” Ghost of the Ozarks was the unanimous choice for the winner of the 2013 award. As Christ noted, “Dr. Blevins’ ability to take this relatively minor incident and weave it into an analysis of Ozarks culture and how the rest of the country views the region made it the clear winner among many worthy entries.”
Blevins is a scholar whose published writing is mostly in the academic field of social history. His other books include Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State and Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image. The Franklin mystery offered Blevins “ narrative possibilities,” a chance to tell a tale.
“Writing history not too many years ago meant telling a story,” Blevins said. “But most scholars no longer do that, at least not in any traditional sense of storytelling. So it was nice to be able to structure the social history elements around a basic melody, so to speak. Additionally, I’ve always tried, even when writing social history, to write history that would appeal to the reader who isn’t a scholar or a historian, and this story seemed tailor-made for that.” Ghost of the Ozarks is indeed tailor-made for the reader who wants a can’t put-down, page-turning read.The author allows the story to unfold as it came to light, bit by bit, so that a real sense of immediacy and suspense is present throughout. At times an almost folktale tone alternates with a straightforward narrative voice. Specific details about the region (the community of St. James was named for Jesse James) and aspects of the way of life there (land ownership and the nature of farming in that terrain) are often surprising and always telling. Blevins never loses the narrative thread as he broadens the scope of the book by placing the story in the larger framework of an investigation of attitudes, assumptions and prejudices. And it is that deeper engagement that gives his book its enduring value.
As Blevins explained, “When I first began doing serious research into the history of the Ozarks more than 20 years ago, my mission was simply to relate the region’s history without the stereotype and silliness that so often takes over any work on the Ozarks. Of course, that motivation is hopelessly entwined with issues of regional perception, both analyzing and refuting stereotypes. I certainly never imagined I would write three books built completely or partially around the themes of regional-state perception and self-image.” The more the author has written on the subject, the more his work has become “something of a calling or mission.”
Taking a little-known story and making it a means of explaining an entire region’s historical and cultural experience is a challenging task. What sort of strategy do you adopt? Straight history?Fiction? Blevins himself was initially undecided. When starting research for Ghost of the Ozarks, as he explained, “I told people that the only way to do the story justice would be to fictionalize it. I’m still not convinced that I was wrong. I toyed with the idea of a straight narrative, but there was so much of educational value in the story that what came out of the mix was a mostly narrative tale with social and cultural history riffs scattered throughout.”
In any case, the evidentiary record of the Franklin case contains what the author termed “a few gaping holes that threatened to derail a straight narrative, or at least seemed to call on the liberty of a creative nonfiction approach.” But, Blevins added, “as a scholarly historian publishing in the academic press, that approach is off-limits to me.” So what has resulted in Ghost of the Ozarks is the best of both options - a compelling narrative filled with love, betrayal, brutality, disguised identity and colorful characters, paired with a perceptive study of life at the dawn of the Great Depression in a maligned region in a misunderstood state. Ragsdale surely would have been pleased.
Style, Pages 48 on 04/07/2013