Ballad Seeds
Jackson’s ballad-collecting interest began in her New York years. In addition to her studies in English while at Columbia, Katherine took courses in Spanish literature, which included Spanish and Moorish balladry. In her notes, she writes that the ballad “is a dead form … can’t expect it to yield literary influence.”47 She was also quite taken with El Cid, noting that more ballads had been written about him than any other Spanish figure, some going back as far as 1612. Her interest in balladry was thus already budding when, in 1905, a group of her friends told her they had heard a lecture about uncollected ballads in the hills of Kentucky given by two “instructors” from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Jackson was familiar with Berea. In fact, when she was seven, her family took her there for a visit, during which she caught a cold severe enough to bear mention in the local paper. Perhaps it was that the lecturers were from Berea, or perhaps it was simply the unexpected encounter with a bit of home while so far away, but the subject of Kentucky mountain music caught her attention then and there, in the middle of New York City. “They talked of the many ballads in the mountains of Kentucky, which no one had collected. A nursemaid had taught us Barbara Ellen but no other. I determined to investigate at my first free moment,” she later wrote. In this way, she was moved to undertake a grand expedition, adventuring into the hills of eastern Kentucky when she returned home few years later.48
After she earned her doctorate, Jackson returned to London in June 1905 and gave a party for her friends in August. She returned home again briefly in July 1907 while she was teaching up north. She also engaged in some postgraduate work at Yale University from 1907 to 1908.49
In 1909, Jackson obtained a leave from her position at Bryn Mawr to work on a textbook on Old English. She used some of that time to return home to tend her ailing mother. Maria must have recovered because, in the fall, Jackson’s journeys into the mountains surrounding London to collect the ballads of Kentucky began. These trips, the resulting collection, the five-year quest to publish it, and the question of Jackson’s “stolen thunder” will be examined in part 2.50
3
Act Two
After collecting ballads in 1909, Jackson stayed in Kentucky and worked on getting them published through Berea College. But her world began to change on her marriage to William Franklin French in 1911. Gray eyed and auburn haired, “Frank” French was a dashing, handsome man. He had held the rather glamorous job of mountain mail carrier as a young man, was a graduate of Washington and Lee University and Kentucky Central College, and was a thirty-second-degree Mason. He was in London to do some legal work in 1899, shortly after William Harvey Jackson’s death. It is possible that he worked on executing the terms of Papa Jackson’s will and that he may have seen Katherine Jackson during this time. In fact, the two had known each other since 1893; one photograph shows them on a picnic at Cumberland Falls, and another depicts them in a buggy together, shortly after Jackson’s graduation from Science Hill. It was not until September 11, 1911, that they tied the knot, however.1
After the wedding, Katherine French was still busy with her ballad collection. In 1914, she did some teaching at the Sue Bennett Memorial School, as she had when she had returned to London in 1899–1900, and she became dean there in 1915 for one year. The story of her recruitment is an unusual one. Apparently, her predecessor, a man named Lewis, was “a holy terror.” He favored physical discipline, sometimes punching children in the face. He punished one child so severely that the father took him out of school and built a separate school building in his own yard so that his son never had to look on Lewis again. Lewis was so detested that, at one point, two young men left a cow in the administration building, the resultant effluvia apparently intended as a comment on his reign. Problems with him got so bad that the town fathers informed Belle Bennett, the school’s head, that, if Lewis did not go, she would lose the school.2
William Franklin French. Courtesy of Kay Tolbert Buckland.
At this point, Bennett had had enough and asked French to become dean. Dr. French had a young child by then (Katherine, born in 1913) and replied as any new mother might: “Now Miss B. I got a baby to take care of.” Bennett’s curt reply: “A nigger can do that.”3
It may be historical presentism to find such matter-of-fact use of the word nigger to be jarring, but that use provides an ironic window into the dichotomous mind of someone who considered herself a champion of black people. Belle Bennett was involved throughout her life with organizations that benefited African Americans. She started “Bethlehem Houses” (community houses for African Americans), organized a “Colored Chautauqua,” taught Bible school to black children, and urged various women’s organizations to take up responsibility for what she called “this great race of people.” Yet the word fell from her lips as easily as a leaf from a tree. The term was acceptable among whites in the South in reference to black people and was still used freely in speech and print, though white women of Bennett and French’s class may have viewed it as too common to employ in polite company. But it is not just the use of the word. Bennett’s pronouncement that a black woman could tend her baby so that French could do other, more important things highlights the constraints within which African Americans lived then and would live for the next half century, in part because people like Bennett continued to reinforce them unthinkingly. Bennett’s well-meaning but Kiplingesque view of white people’s responsibility toward black people is comfortably housed in an unspoken and assumed superiority of race and class. That view is unmasked by the use of the word nigger, by the assumption that the coarse and demeaning term would be accepted, by the unthinking invocation of a demeaning black societal role, and by the urging of French to capitalize on it. Bennett knew that French would not judge her poorly. And French did not. In fact, she continued to admire her greatly. And she took the job.4
In this rather inglorious and ugly way, French became dean of the Sue Bennett School. She served only a year but quickly became enamored of the school and its Methodist-inspired mission. She later wrote a history of the Sue Bennett School and Brevard College in the booklet The Story of the Years in Mountain Work, in which she extolled the virtues of Sue Bennett the woman, her sister Belle (the caretaker of the school), and the role of Divine Providence in the founding and keeping of the school. The Jackson family had such a good continuing relationship with the school, in fact, that the school piano later wound up in the living room of Katherine’s oldest sister, Lou Eberlein.5
In 1916, French addressed the Council of Missionary Workers of the Women of the Methodist Church in Georgia. The visit is cited in a newspaper article that also references her ballad work and concludes that she is thus “well-qualified to speak of the life, manners and possibilities of the Appalachian mountain people.”6 That same year, William Franklin French unearthed a promising opportunity: to become the head of a new car company called Bour-Davis. This necessitated a move, first to Detroit, then to Shreveport, Louisiana. French, the dutiful wife, hung up the academic robes and went with her husband. In truth, she might have resigned anyway as she had given up on her ballad project with Berea and was pregnant again. She was also older—forty-one, a risky age for a second motherhood at that time. While in Detroit, she miscarried, losing