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In Chapter 3, readers' responses to Harriett Simpson Arnow's agrarian Hunter's Horn (1949) and her migration-themed The Dollmaker (1954) illustrate white American concerns about mobility and “roots” that stemmed from the Southern Diaspora, rural-to-urban migration, and the mass suburbanization of the mid-twentieth century. Despite Arnow's reputation as the most authentic of the authors in the study, fan mail indicates that her novels became best sellers in part because they met the same readerly needs that popular regionalism historically met: the production of authentic place, the construction of imagined community, and the augmentation of power. Post-WWII-era readers interpreted Arnow's best sellers as narrating the possibility of an inward-looking, rural, and rooted community of belonging. Almost all of Arnow's readers—including cosmopolitan elites, midwestern professionals, and migrants—regretted “the disappearing closeness to the soil, the uprootedness of human beings” and inadvertently endorsed a kind of white nationalism that viewed a pastoral Appalachia as both home and as national homeland. Arnow's success anticipates the popularity of Appalachian-set fiction among outmigrants and their descendents into the twenty-first century.

This chapter looks at the border as a gendered site within the context of Southern womanhood. If, as Kristeva says of woman, “the biological fate that causes us to be the site of the species chains us to space,” then the South not only lays claim to women’s bodies but also contains them. Reflecting on ways gender impacts border narratives by women, the chapter focuses on autobiographical writings by Arnow, Abbott, Hurston, Scott, and Welty to examine ways Southern women look to the horizon to claim it, struggle with firmly engrained models of Southern womanhood, and attempt to break free from these patterns. Considering texts within the historical context of the representation of woman as symbolic border guard of nations and communities, and as who needs “saving” when outside aggressors threaten, the chapter reflects on the implications of crossing borders when women’s bodies are literally used to define the line.

With the view that crossing a border is a transformative experience, this chapter provides groundwork for the rest of the study and focuses on collective narratives of movement, specifically at ways they create new communities, break down borders, and upset Southern identities. This chapter is the most expansive in examining various types of texts. Looking at personal narratives, visual arts including work by Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, and Dorothea Lange, literary texts by writers including Frances E.W. Harper, Wilma Mankiller, William Attaway, and Harriette Arnow, and articles and advertising from newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the chapter focuses on the hybrid identities created in and by Southern Border Crossing Narratives and examines the Border Crossing Narrative as a site of confrontation and struggle, as not only a narrative that can be created and maintained, but also one that others can attempt to control.

Regional or ethnic modernists maintained a focus on history—especially community history—and wrote about rural, regional, or ethnic cultures. Although some regional modernists experimented with literary style, among the Appalachian modernists literary experimentation tends to be subtle. Regional modernists differed in their response to the urban/rural divide and often found themselves wrestling with issues of cultural representation. Like mainstream modernism, there was pushback against the romanticism of the previous era, but the response of Appalachian modernists is a specific reaction to the tradition of nineteenth-century travel and local color writing in which mountain culture had been misrepresented at worst and sugar coated by sympathetic intermediaries at best.