Continuing the theme of last week’s Perspective cover story, here are more summer reading suggestions for those interested in Arkansas:
“Cries From the Walls: Hell in Arkansas Prisons,” edited by Van Hawkins of Jonesboro — This anthology about people who experienced cruelty in Arkansas’ prison system was published last year by Writers Bloc in Jonesboro. It’s an important collection, especially at a time when talk of a massive new state prison is making headlines.
“Imprisoned people–men, women, black and white–endured hellish conditions,” Hawkins writes. “Convicts experienced psychological abuse, impossible workloads, starvation, beatings and sometimes murder. This occurred at The Walls, an informal name given to the state prison in Little Rock. Mistreatment also existed at Cummins Prison Farm, established in 1902 for Black convicts, and Tucker Prison Farm, opened in 1916 for white prisoners.
“Trustees who ran these facilities, also criminals, did so with merciless brutality. Two former prisoners wrote important and rare books about their experiences at The Walls and in prison work camps.”
William Hill’s 1912 memoir and Dale Woodcock’s descriptions of his experiences in convict work camps during the 1950s are included in the anthology.
The “hellish conditions” continued into the 1960s. Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who took office in January 1967, said: “We have probably the most barbaric prison system in the United States. Some of the tortures that are inflicted on prisoners are beyond belief.”
“Decades of brutality, corruption and perversity described by Hill and Woodcock passed unabated,” Hawkins writes. “An official response held that complaining convicts could not be trusted. And, after all, most refused to go on the public record with their accusations. However, this political smokescreen was dispelled by an Arkansas State Police Criminal Investigation Division report. Through numerous interviews and seized evidence, the appalling truth came out.”
In 1970, federal Judge J. Smith Henley wrote: “For the ordinary convict a sentence to the Arkansas penitentiary today amounts to a banishment from civilized society to a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world, a world that is administered by criminals under unwritten rules and customs completely foreign to free world culture.”
“Double Toil and Trouble,” a novel and collection of short stories by the late Donald Harington, edited by Brian Walter — Harington, among the best writers in Arkansas history, died in November 2009. More than a
decade later, the University of Arkansas Press released a previously unpublished novel and four short stories.
Harington, a Little Rock native who lost nearly all of his hearing at age 12 due to meningitis, taught art history in New York, Vermont and South Dakota before returning to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He taught at UA for 22 years before his retirement in May 2008. Entertainment Weekly once called him “America’s greatest unknown writer.”
“Harington wrote ‘Double Toil and Trouble’ during the first few months of 1973 in response to a vague but compelling request by Llewellyn ‘Louie’ Howland III, his still rather new editor at Little Brown, for a ‘novel that quite deliberately adheres to the traditional modes of conventional fiction … a neatly plotted, tighly drawn divertissement,'” Walter writes. “At just under 37,000 words, ‘Double Toil and Trouble’ (or DUB, following Harington’s custom of using handy three-letter abbreviations for his books) is easily the shortest of the Stay More novels.
“DUB stands out in Harington’s work in other ways as well: the unusual Shakespearean title, the relatively strict third-person perspective and–perhaps most curiously–the lack of any verb tense shifts in the concluding chapters. Harington wrote DUB in the midst of his working on what he would come to call the Bible of Stay More, his 1975 novel ‘The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks’ (or TAOTAO).”
“Vagabond Memories” by Phil Karber — Published last year by Cottage Street Press of Fayetteville, this book combines travel and memoir. Karber calls it “a much different endeavor than, say, describing a train journey from Beijing to Amsterdam. The art of travel memoir writing–in this case the linear, horizontal travels to another geographic space and the vertical one through my coming-of-age interior life–is a tricky thing in that it relies on self-recollection, recall of others, photos and diaries if available, and unavoidably the imagination.
“When summoning memories from half a century ago, my mind, like many, is like an air filter: It’s random what sticks to it. Once an image, such as an idyllic upbringing, imagined or real, is excavated, it must be built out and amplified with recollections and the historical landscape of the world that once was.”
Karber, a two-time Lowell Thomas Award-winning travel writer, has journeyed to every continent and 155 countries. He lived in Africa and Asia for 14 years and wrote four previous books.
“Vagabond Memoirs” begins with family trips to the Caddo River region of southwest Arkansas, then moves on to life in the Jim Crow South, his problems as a teenager, and a judge giving him the choice of going to jail or joining the U.S. Army. Karber chose the Army and served 21 months as a radio reconnaissance man on the Laotian border in northern Thailand.
Following his return to civilian life, Karber dropped in and out of college, tried drugs, and hitchhiked across the country. After traveling the world for decades, Karber and his wife returned to Arkansas in May 2020, leaving Cambridge, Mass., during the early months of the pandemic. They found that the “data-driven approach to the pandemic” in Massachusetts was different from the “every-man-for-himself” culture of Arkansas.
“My family had settled in Independence County as yeoman farmers circa 1810 and Joellen’s in Fort Smith as immigrant glass cutters a century later,” Karber writes. “I had been away 25 years and Joellen 51. After wandering the world, I was returning to the only place on the planet where, upon hearing my piney woods/Caddo River accent, no one asks me where I’m from. My transmutation from born-and-bred native to outsider laying down a track record of fresh truths on foreign soil and then bringing it all back home is as close as I’ll ever get to time travel.
“Mission accomplished. Two global souls return home, as T.S. Elliot wrote, arriving where we started and knowing it for the first time. It feels good to be on our ridgetop in Fayetteville, cocooned by photos, books, diaries, maps, art and artifacts of a life of travel, checking out the migrating birds at the feeders outside my office, spending evenings kicked back on the front porch, watching the sun spin golden on its solstice-to-solstice journey, and plotting our next transit abroad. Movement, I’m certain, is in our nature. The journey is all.”
“Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II” by Stephanie Hinnershitz — This book from the University of Pennsylvania Press isn’t just about Arkansas, but there’s plenty here about the Japanese American internment camps near Jerome and Rohwer in southeast Arkansas. Hinnershitz is a historian and the author of two previous books.
“The camp selection committee heralded the proposed sites for the Jerome and Rohwer prison camps in Arkansas based on the availability of labor opportunities,” she writes. “Located in the Mississippi Delta region of the state and with an economy largely based on timber and cotton, Jerome and Rohwer–separated by approximately 30 miles–were on land owned or leased by the Farm Security Administration to farming cooperatives or individual farmers.
“The FSA originally established its cooperatives during the Depression in an attempt to assist landowners, as well as the sharecroppers who worked for them, in increasing crop revenue and stability. The idea was to encourage group farming as a way to provide a means of landownership, which was otherwise unobtainable, as well as to promote conservation and modernized farming practices.
“However, by the spring of 1942 agricultural output faced larger challenges, including stalled infrastructure programs and a severe labor shortage. Agricultural opportunities, work projects and relatively easy access to land already controlled by a government agency made Arkansas a prime location for prison camps.”
“Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods” by Sarah Neidhardt — Published by the University of Arkansas Press, this book tells the story of a family’s move from Colorado Springs to Fox in the Arkansas Ozarks. Neidhardt’s parents were part of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s that brought hundreds of families to rural north Arkansas.
Neidhardt’s parents built a cabin and grew their own food. Neidhardt grew up in Arkansas and northern California. The Oberlin College graduate now lives in Oregon. She has worked as a bookseller, secretary, paralegal, copy editor and stay-at-home mother.
“My intense memories of the landscape of Fox are vivid and emotional, but I had to pore through the letters, photographs, interviews and online research to build a full story, to collect the fragments, like shards of unearthed pottery, and make them whole,” Neidhardt writes. “What is lost–except what little traces I could glean from the letters–is the real feel to each of those days; the stomachaches, headaches, tears, rage, melancholy, jealousy, irritation, lust, exhilaration, hungers, the bumps and bruises that ache while you work, the soft warmth of sun on a fall day, and the bitter chill and rattling cough in the dead of winter.
“The smells of bacon and wood fire, of body odor. … Gone is the grimy sweat, the palpable fear of wind and snakes and ominous clouds. And what did my parents really feel as they sat down with a book or in our tender moments as a family, babies and animals content, work done for the day? I can no longer really remember the deafening croak, buzz and screech of frogs and cicadas and katydids in the dying light. Or what it felt like inside the cabin on a crisp fall day, in the middle of a snowstorm, on a first day of fall rain, of spring warmth. Did it smell of oak inside, did the Arkansas damp give it a thick mustiness?”
“Naming Arkansas: Curious Place Names from Greasy Corner to Sock City” by Daniel Boice — This fun book was published last year by The History Press of Charleston, S.C. Boice, the library director at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, isn’t a native Arkansan. He grew up in Michigan, attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids and received his master’s degree in history and library science from the University of Michigan.
Boice worked at academic libraries in Illinois, South Carolina and Iowa before coming to Arkansas. He obviously is fascinated with the place names in this state.
“Arkansas is blessed by a wonderful variety of interesting place names, often with delightful stories of their origins and pronunciations that can baffle all but natives,” Boice writes. “Celebrating that plethora of names, stories and pronunciations is the purpose of this book, which started out as a simple aid for the author in his travels and evolved into an ever-growing project.
“The result is an all-too-abbreviated amalgam of some Arkansas place names that might be useful to travelers from other states, as well as to Arkansans in their own journeys. This book gathers place names from centuries of exploration and settlement, of recognizing local features and of celebrating local uniqueness, including the pronunciation of names when those pronunciations might not otherwise be obvious.”
Boice gives credit to two legendary Arkansas newspapermen, Fred Allsopp and Ernie Deane, for their previous work. Allsopp’s “Folklore of Romantic Arkansas” was published in 1931, and Deane’s “Arkansas Place Names” was published in 1986. Boice took most of his pronunciations from a guide for broadcasters that The Associated Press published in 1950.
Journalists gather at an unmarked grave at Cummins Prison near Varner in September 1968. The mistreatment of Arkansas prison inmates for decades is explored in “Cries From the Walls: Hell in Arkansas Prisons,” edited by Van Hawkins of Jonesboro (AP file photo)
Donald Harington stands at the door to his study in his Fayetteville home in 2005.”Double Toil and Trouble,” a novel and collection of short stories edited by Brian Walter, is a recent release by the University of Arkansas Press. (Democrat-Gazette file photo)
A Japanese-American girl walks through mud at the Jerome Relocation Camp near Jerome in 1943. “Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II” by Stephanie Hinnershitz details the history of the camps around the U.S. (AP file photo/Department of the Interior, War Relocation Authority/National Archives)
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