Brooks Blevins is the author of the three-volume A HISTORY OF THE OZARKS. In UP SOUTH, he collects thirteen essays that strive to define an undefinable region.

Agriculture certainly survives but those remote, self-sustaining, hard-scrabble hill farms are in short supply. They lie fallow, or abandoned, or have been subsumed by corporate operations.

The region is no longer known for moonshine. It never was; they made moonshine in Tennessee, too.

Even the notion that Ozarkers are of Scots-Irish descent is questionable, though you wouldn’t know it from all the festivals with their dulcimers and folk music.

Blevins is sometimes quite personal, reflecting on his life in education with a commendable humility. He recalls his undergraduate days at Lyons College, where he wrote an upstart paper claiming that black and white relations were better in the “upland south” he grew up in than in the Deep South of Alabama or Mississippi. He portrayed LaCrosse, a little Arkansas town where, anecdotally at least, whites and blacks got along quite well.

But as Blevins reconsiders his student paper, he realizes that the black residents of LaCrosse had so little in life they didn’t threaten whites. And the larger point—that, in comparison to the Deep South,  the Ozarks was  relatively free of racial tensions—is moot, because the region was/is almost entirely white. That historical whiteness becomes all the more stark when you consider the lynchings in Springfield and Joplin.

I can remember walking home from school in Cabool, Missouri, and seeing a black man sitting in a construction truck outside a restaurant. I was five years old and had never seen a black person. He smiled and somehow I worked up the courage to ask him why he was sitting there. “Oh, they’ll bring me somethin’,” he said. He couldn’t eat inside—nor could he spend the night, because of a sundown law.

Giving a nod to the migrant Spruills of John Grisham’s A PAINTED HOUSE, Blevins explains how generations of poor Ozarkers, from the 1930s through the 1950s, left their worn-out farms to pick cotton in the Delta and fruit in Washington State and Michigan.

My family did this for two years, traveling to Grand Junction, Colorado for peaches and Wenatchee, Washington for cherries, until my mother refused to travel anymore and we settled on a little farm near Mountain Grove, Missouri. Our transportation rivaled the Joads of Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH: a 1950 Chevy pickup with Dad’s home-made camper shell on the back. I slept on the front seat, frightened by all the lights and noises at truck stops, where we parked to avoid motel bills.

But migrant labor, or anyhow white Ozarker labor, is no longer a way to think of the Ozarks. Nowadays, the migrants are Central Americans and, in the case of Tyson workers in Noel, Missouri, Somalis.

My favorite of these engaging essays is “The Ordinary Days of Extraordinary Minnie: Diaries of a Life on the Margins,” Blevins’ touching tribute to a stubborn old hill woman from near Marshall, Arkansas. Minnie kept a diary for most of her poverty-stricken life—writing, with her strange literary bent, in third person.

As Blevins notes, “Minnie was married twice and endured three near-fatal births, two failed marriages, and the death of both her parents and subsequent scattering of her siblings.” As a young woman, she traveled from her native Illinois, following a Disciples of Christ minister who claimed that Armageddon was imminent and that the faithful, or anyhow HIS faithful, needed to hide in remote mountain enclaves.

Minnie married another follower and stayed in Arkansas the rest of her life, recording in minute detail everything that happened. More precisely, everything that didn’t happen. Hers is a chronicle of endless hardship, without much levity or triumph. She lived with her son, Lawrence, an obsessive junk collector who hoped to fashion something extraordinary out of all that rusty farm machinery. Nonetheless, the pair survived, Minnie dying in 1974, Lawrence in 1992.

Minnie read books and met every day with vigor and resolve, but even her account of killing a rattler that crawled behind her cook stove, while certainly vivid, is not unusual in farm life. In any case, Blevins’ reverential account breathes life into this forgotten woman, whose tenacity and stubbornness might symbolize a tenacious, stubborn, mostly ignored region. If you want to define the Ozarks, the old Ozarks at least, look no farther than Minnie Atteberry.

Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins, by Brooks Blevins (2022)

Brooks Blevins is the author of the three-volume A HISTORY OF THE OZARKS. In UP SOUTH, he collects thirteen essays that  strive to define an undefinable region.

Agriculture certainly survives but those remote, self-sustaining, hard-scrabble hill farms are in short supply. They lie fallow, or abandoned, or have been subsumed by corporate operations.

The region is no longer known for moonshine. It never was; they made moonshine in Tennessee, too.

Even the notion that Ozarkers are of Scots-Irish descent is questionable, though you wouldn’t know it from all the festivals with their dulcimers and folk music.

Blevins is sometimes quite personal, reflecting on his life in education with a commendable humility. He recalls his undergraduate days at Lyons College, where he wrote an upstart paper claiming that black and white relations were better in the “upland south” he grew up in than in the Deep South of Alabama or Mississippi. His thesis portrayed LaCrosse, a little Arkansas town where, anecdotally at least, whites and blacks got along quite well.

But as Blevins reconsiders his student paper, he realizes that the black residents of LaCrosse had so little in life they didn’t threaten whites. And the larger point—that, in comparison to the Deep South,  the Ozarks was  relatively free of racial tensions—is moot, because the region was/is almost entirely white. That historical whiteness becomes all the more stark when you consider the lynchings in Springfield and Joplin.

I can remember walking home from school in Cabool, Missouri, and seeing a black man sitting in a construction truck outside a restaurant. I was five years old and had never seen a black person. He smiled and somehow I worked up the courage to ask him why he was sitting there. “Oh, they’ll bring me somethin’,” he said. He couldn’t eat inside—nor could he spend the night, because of a sundown law.

Giving a nod to the migrant Spruills of John Grisham’s A PAINTED HOUSE, Blevins explains how generations of poor Ozarkers, from the 1930s through the 1950s, left their worn-out farms to pick cotton in the Delta and fruit in Washington State and Michigan.

My family did this for two years, traveling to Grand Junction, Colorado for peaches and Wenatchee, Washington for cherries, until my mother refused to travel anymore and we settled on a little farm near Mountain Grove, Missouri. Our transportation rivaled the Joads of Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH: a 1950 Chevy pickup with Dad’s home-made camper shell on the back. I slept on the front seat, frightened by all the lights and noises at truck stops, where we parked to avoid motel bills.

But migrant labor, or anyhow white Ozarker labor, is no longer a way to think of the Ozarks. Nowadays, the migrants are Central Americans and, in the case of Tyson workers in Noel, Missouri, Somalis.

My favorite of these engaging essays is “The Ordinary Days of Extraordinary Minnie: Diaries of a Life on the Margins,” Blevins’ touching tribute to a stubborn old hillwoman from near Marshall, Arkansas. Minnie kept a diary for most of her poverty-stricken life—writing, with her strange literary bent, in third person.

As Blevins notes, “Minnie was married twice and endured three near-fatal births, two failed marriages, and the death of both her parents and subsequent scattering of her siblings.” As a young woman, she traveled from her native Illinois, following a Disciples of Christ minister who claimed that Armageddon was imminent and that the faithful, or anyhow HIS faithful, needed to hide in remote mountain enclaves.

Minnie married another follower and stayed in Arkansas the rest of her life, recording in minute  detail everything that happened. More precisely, everything that didn’t happen. Hers is a chronicle of endless hardship, without much levity or triumph. She lived with her son, Lawrence, an obsessive junk collector who hoped to fashion something extraordinary out of all that rusty farm machinery. Nonetheless, the pair survived, Minnie dying in 1974, Lawrence in 1992.

Minnie read books and met every day with vigor and resolve, but even her account of killing a rattler that crawled behind her cook stove, while certainly vivid, is not unusual in farm life. However, Blevins’ reverential account breathes life into this forgotten woman, whose tenacity and stubbornness might symbolize a tenacious, stubborn, mostly ignored region. If you want to define the Ozarks, the old Ozarks at least, look no farther than Minnie Atteberry.