In 1931, Charlie May Simon and her husband, artist Howard Simon, traveled to Perry County, Arkansas, to homestead on 30 acres near Cove Creek. Her memoir Straw in the Sun—published in 1945, a decade after leaving the cabin—opens the poignant story of Charlie May Simon's return to her homestead with a simple introduction: "Last spring I went to Rocky Crossing again." She speaks of life continuing—it had not stood still, or halted in its tracks upon her leaving. Simon relates how she had once "been part of this landscape." She wrote:
Its life and mine were one. The rabbits crouching still and frozen and the jays fighting for their property rights, were also one with me...And I described Rocky Crossing as it had been. But you can tell a story a hundred times, and each one who hears it sees a different picture in his mind until it becomes a hundred different stories. Even those who know me best, cannot see Rocky Crossing as I saw it, nor the people who made it the place that it was. It is like coming upon a pressed bouquet of flowers, tied with a tattered and faded ribbon, and holding each dry flower up to tell of how it looked when it was fresh and alive.
What Simon had experienced at Rocky Crossing was a connection with her family roots and a retreat to the land during years of economic hardship. Her grandfather, 66 years previously, had "passed down this road with his wife and two little girls, looking for a place to build his home, as I was doing. There were things that he, too, wanted to forget. The long war was over and behind him, and there was a new life to begin...There was only the future to think about." While the Simons settled on the high ridge, Charlie May's grandfather had chosen instead to continue, "passing through my [60] acres, then unsurveyed, and went down in the valley to stake their claim. Here other children were born and grew up and married, to raise families of their own. The girls stayed on, but the boys went out in the world, worked their way through to a higher education, and settled in the cities."
Significant in this selection are two conflicting themes that remain juxtaposed throughout the memoir: the isolation of the hills that provided sustenance living with physical separation from the worries of the modern living vs. the world outside that drew the young men away from the worries of the modern living vs. the world outside that drew the young men away from those hills into the cities whose industry beckoned, forever changing agrarian life. In their four years of homesteading, the Simons were participants in a culture that witnessed life of the Ozark hills with its paradoxical reality—the death of a neighbor's baby stands in stark contrast to the exuberance expressed at the square dance in their home. Yet both carry the common thread of life shared as a community, both in joy and sorrow.
Noted for its beautiful prose and depiction of the Ozarks hill life, Straw in the Sun's popularity resulted in three printings by Simon's publisher E.P. Dutton in the year of its release. Beyond its relevance in ethnography, the memoir serves as a historical narrative of Ozark community life in an era where news of local, state, and national events traveled through a grapevine that was nourished at common gathering places: church events, a neighbor’s front porches, or the valley store that served to provide both a post office and dry goods. When the Great Depression's economic instability caused their bank to fail, taking their savings except for the one hundred dollars extracted upon their move, news spread fast "in an isolated settlement where there were no newspapers." Reduced to poverty, Simon's reliance on others to learn sustenance survival is depicted throughout her memoir, giving life to characters whose land and life were built near Cove Creek in the present-day Ouchita National Forest. Almost a century after her homesteading experience, the words of Charlie May Simon speak truth and simplicity to a world whose grapevine is now technological devices and social media.
Straw in the Sun. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1945.
Aleshia O'Neal is an assistant professor of English at York College in York, Nebraska. Her dissertation topic was “Charlie May Simon: Hearing the Voice of Ozark Folklore in Arkansas.