AFTER I came North to live it seemed to me, as probably it has seemed to
many Southern born men and women that the Southerner of fiction as met
with in the North was generally just that--fiction--and nothing else;
that in the main he was a figment of the drama and of the story book;
a type that had no just claim on existence and yet a type that was
currently accepted as a verity.
From well meaning persons who apparently wished to convey an implied
compliment for the southern part of this republic I was forever
hearing of “southern pride” and “hot southern blood” and “old southern
families,” these matters being mentioned always with a special emphasis
which seemed to betray a profound conviction on the part of the speakers
that there was a certain physical, tangible, measurable distinction
between, say, the pride of a Southerner and the blood-temperature of
a Southerner and the pride and blood heat of a man whose parents had
chosen some other part of the United States as a suitable place for him
to be born in. Had these persons spoken of things which I knew to be a
part and parcel of the Southerner's nature--such things for example as
his love for his own state and his honest veneration for the records
made by men of southern birth and southern blood in the Civil War--I
might have understood them. But seemingly they had never heard of those
matters.
I also discovered or thought I discovered that as a rule the Southerner
as seen on the stage or found between the covers of a book or a magazine
was drawn from a more or less imaginary top stratum of southern life, or
else from a bottom-most stratum--either he purported to be an elderly,
un-reconstructed, high-tempered gentleman of highly aristocratic
tendencies residing in a feudal state of shabby grandeur and proud
poverty on a plantation gone to seed; or he purported to be a pure
white of the poorest. With a few exceptions the playwright and the story
writers were not taking into account sundry millions of southern born
people who were neither venerable and fiery colonels with frayed wrist
bands and limp collars, nor yet were they snuffdipping, ginseng-digging
clay-eaters, but just such folk as allowing for certain temperamental
differences--created by climate and soil and tradition and by two other
main contributing causes: the ever-present race question and the still
living and vivid memories of the great war--might be found as numerously
in Iowa or Indiana or any other long-settled, typically American
commonwealth as in Tennessee or Georgia or Mississippi, having the same
aspirations, the same blood in their veins, the same impulses and being
prone under almost any conceivable condition to do the same thing in
much the same way.
Viewing my own state and my own people across the perspective of time
and distance I had the ambition to set down on paper, as faithfully as I
might, a representation of those people as I knew them. By this I do not
mean to declare that I sensed any audible and visible demand for such a
piece of writing; so far as I know there has been no such demand. It was
my own notion solely. I wanted, if I could to describe what I believed
to be an average southern community so that others might see it as I had
seen it. This book is the result of that desire.
For my material I draw upon the life of that community as I remembered
it. Most of the characters that figure in the events hereinafter
described were copies, to the best of my ability as a copyist, of real
models; and for some of the events themselves there was in the first
place a fairly substantial basis of fact.
Having such an aim I wrote what I conceived to be a series of pictures,
out of the life of a town in the western part of Kentucky; that part
of Kentucky which gave to the nation among others, Abraham Lincoln and
Jefferson Davis. These, pictures fell into the form of inter-related
stories, and as such were first printed in the _Saturday Evening Post._
They are now offered here as a whole.