While researching the story-history, stories, and imagery of the Ozarks that would eventually be turned into his book Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State and other publications, Brooks Blevins came across one of the strangest tales ever told in that Natural State. On May 9, 1929, sixteen-year-old Tiller Ruminer and her recent beau, Connie Franklin, were allegedly attacked by five men near Cajun Creek in Stone County, Arkansas. Descriptions of the ensuing murder reveal how Ruminer was raped while Franklin was viciously beaten and hacked to pieces before being burned on a funeral pyre. She was then kidnapped and taken to one of the assailants’ cabins, where she eventually was released after they threatened her with death if she ever revealed the crime. Franklin’s cremated remains were soon recovered from Cajun Creek, and the assailants were arrested. The court case began to attract local, state, and eventually national attention. The media’s coverage became even more prominent, including a cover story in Time magazine, a few months after the attack. The press portrayed Connie Franklin as the "ghost of the Ozarks," as he was a witness in the trial of his own murderers.
Blevins grew up twenty-five miles away from Mountain View, but he had never heard of this story until he began his research. He became interested in how the new media contributed to the story’s construction as well as ways that local residents may have been complicit in the tale’s telling. Blevins discovered that even eight decades after the court case, the memory of the trial can still be a controversial topic in the region and that discovering what really happened will likely remain a chimera for historians and folklorists. Blevins does assert that the Connie Franklin who showed up alive during the police investigation most likely was the victim of an attack. The evidence of charred remains pulled from the creek were as fake as the false identity that a drifter named Marion Franklin Rogers (Frank Rogers) used when he turned up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas—only to be taken to Batesville to identify the assailants in a police line-up a half year after the murder. In sum, Rogers may have been attacked, but the story of his murder was clearly fabricated, perhaps by the assailants or by others within the region.
Blevins is one of the foremost authorities on the history of the Ozarks. As the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozark Studies at Missouri State University, he has made important contributions to understanding this region’s history, and he has provided careful attention to the place of folklore within his historical studies. Ghost of the Ozarks departs from his more conventional scholarship as it is primarily a social history told in a highly engaging literary style. His tasteful prose and clever structuring of the story pulls the reader’s interest into the saga. At times, when various other imposters make their appearance, even highly critical readers can be playfully duped by Blevins’ narrative skill. As Blevins himself suggests, the story could make a fine movie, perhaps one directed by the Coen Brothers or John Sayles. Blevins’ own style is highly visual, but he grounds his vibrant descriptions and representations of the inner world of the characters on the solid research of a fine historian.
The book is more history than folklore, but it will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers who are interested in regional history, legends, and even ballads about "Connie Franklin." Following the trial, Frank Rogers himself penned "The Spectre of the Greenway Trial," and an Arkansas music teacher named W. T. Kendrick wrote "Connie Franklin" and set it to the tune of the ballad of "Floyd Collins." Folklorists who have researched the Floyd Collins’ saga will note that the parallels between Collins and Franklin go much deeper than the idea that their subjects are not necessarily heroes but closer to victims of circumstance. The trial of the attack against the Ghost of the Ozarks shows how stereotypical imagery and outsiders’ preconceptions of southern culture spawned a media feeding frenzy—in ways that are similar to the ways that the mass media of the 1920s also lionized Floyd Collins. Blevins provides solid documentation of the ways this media hype was formulated as well as insight into this process as complicit with contemporary ideas about the representation of Ozark culture. His discussion of ways that the incident is complicit with Ozarkers’ wariness about outsiders’ representation of their history and culture is especially important. It also played out in tension that Blevins personally experienced while completing the research.
Blevins tends to focus more on folklore as a subject matter than on folklore scholarship. This orientation is understandable because he is a historian. His discussion could have been fleshed out with more in-depth consideration of research that focuses on relationships between folklore and local history as well as folklore and legend. However, there are no glaring misrepresentations of folklorists’ perspectives, and he uses key concepts in folkloristics well to support his own arguments as a social historian. More importantly, the book provides a welcome approach that folklorists could pursue in our own scholarship. Namely, in much of our current scholarship on legends, we tend to skirt the issue of ascertaining historical veracity in favor of analysis of symbolic meanings of the texts. The idea that meaning is connected to deeper issues than verifying what actually happened is an important hallmark of scholarship on legends. It does, however, have its own limitations. Historians sometimes chide folklorists for our "squishiness" when we argue that it’s more worthwhile to interpret legends for their symbolic meanings than for their historical accuracy. Their critiques are especially important when they remind us that there are important contributions to be made when we attempt to figure out what really happened rather than what probably happened (169). Furthermore, the masterful application of a fine historian’s research and writing techniques also provides important resources for folklorists researching interconnections between local history and folklore.
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[Review length: 1000 words • Review posted on April 10, 2013]