This little book is strangely titled, haphazardly assembled, and tonally elusive, disappointing in obvious areas and rewarding in surprising ones. It’s first of all a biography, though relegation of its subject to the subtitle seems appropriate, since Owen herself often seems oddly absent from extended accounts of conflicts between “literary” and “anthropological” protofolklorists, the founding of Vassar College, the Black Hawk War and Bad Axe Massacre of 1832, and (most bizarrely) two paintings from the Missouri State Capital in Jefferson City and “a St. Joseph casino” (135). The main title offers its own absences—despite the reference to “Ozark Gypsies,” it’s fair to say that gypsies are missing from the book itself. Owen apparently produced a novel titled An Ozark Gypsy in 1898 (no copies are extant and it’s possible it was never published), but except for reporting her attendance at an 1895 “lecture on Romani folklore” (95) in Chicago, Olson’s single reference to an encounter between Owen and a gypsy is a comic account of her meeting with a woman named Mary Palmer camped on her property. That’s it for gypsies, despite the title. They merit no entry in the volume’s spotty index.
Voodoo priests do better—here Olson gives a detailed account of the researches leading to Owen’s best-known work, published in the U.S. as Voodoo Tales As Told Among the Negroes of the Southwest. The “priest” is a man presented with considerable distaste as “King Alexander,” but most of Owen’s material comes from a group of four women; the format of its presentation, clearly modeled on Joel Chandler Harris’ spectacularly successful Uncle Remus collections, involves a young white girl named Tow Head as listener and occasional participant in conversations between various groupings of the “Aunties.” Olson’s account is also informative on the important mentoring role of flamboyant scholar, industrial arts educator, and dabbler-in-the-occult Charles Godfrey Leland in Owen’s career.
What’s most new is Olson’s close attention to Owen’s short fiction—writing as Julia Scott she published stories in several popular magazines of the day (Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly and Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, among others). This seems a valid move, as Owen emerges from Olson’s as from prior treatments as first of all a fluent writer—even her “scholarly” materials, after all, were characteristically presented in “literary” frames, leading Journal of American Folklore editor William Wells Newell to review her melodramatic novel The Daughter of Alouette “as a work of folklore written in the form of fiction” (94).
Biographer Olson’s overall take on Owen is remarkably variable. At one pole he can seem downright boosterish in his enthusiastic admiration, as for example when he lists as one of three “major works” (85) a self-published “folk-lore drama” titled The Sacred Council Hills. Olson makes clear that he’s read this piece, providing a detailed summary and agreeing with a prior writer’s assertion that it was written “for adolescents to perform” (119), though he stops short of claiming an actual performance. At another point he assures readers that Owen and her sisters “did not live sheltered lives” (53), despite the fact that they spent their lives together in their childhood home, cared for by servants, and were at no time obliged to work for pay. Short of refusing to exit the womb, a more sheltered existence would be hard to conjure.
At the other pole, however, Olson can step back to coolly analytic appraisal, pointing out that “Owen’s understanding of hoodoo, conjurers, and African Americans in general was clouded with the sort of overt racism that was prevalent among whites in the late nineteenth century” (66). A similar appraisal sums up Owen’s work among Native Americans: “She viewed the Indians with whom she worked as cultural informants and treated them in much the same way that she might have treated the cooks, maids, and gardeners she hired to work in her home” (102). Even these assessments, stringent as they sound, come across as kid-glove treatments given Owen’s practice—she reports without apology her stealing of a conjure stone from King Alexander, and among her Native American contacts she operated as a checkbook-wielding pothunter, making off with a huge stash of artifacts. Her instructions for her funeral, Olson reports, reviving “a tradition from her family’s slave-holding past,” specified that “six African American men carry her coffin to the mausoleum” (130).
At various points in between (and these are the volume’s high points) Olson’s prose achieves skillfully executed deadpan sendup. His discussion of Owen’s interactions with Antonio Apache and Buckskin Joe
(I’m not making these guys up) are especially good instances. When Apache visited Owen in St. Joseph in 1895, hoarseness prevented a promised performance of “the sacred chants of the Apache,” but by way of compensation he described “an Indian game called ‘Hunting the Buffalo’ that Apache had patented and was hoping to manufacture for sale in the future” (87). Olson also reports that “in an attempt to give the public an authentic view of Indian life, Apache opened a living Indian village exhibit and attraction in Los Angeles” (87). Olson, one guesses, greatly enjoyed composing this cool reportage.
There’s more. Owen herself, having wowed folklorists at the international congress in London in 1891, reveled thereafter in her role as the “White Voodoo” from wild Missouri, and Olson quotes her suggesting to a newspaper reporter that “being descended from the seventh son of a seventh son has something to do with my so easily winning the confidence of the folk” (83). This complacency (its basis neither confirmed nor contradicted by Olson) is unbeatable, worthy of comparison with such gems as Conway Twitty’s assessment of his popularity with female fans (“Women . . . reach a point where they trust me to deal with their feelings and emotions”) or Elvis Presley’s analysis of the similar appeal he shared with James Dean (“We’re sullen, we’re broodin’, we’re something of a menace”). One final instance: after The Sacred Council Hills rings down the curtain upon dutifully vanishing Indians chanting doleful farewell to their beloved hills, Olson closes his account with this zinger: “As the chant subsides, Owen’s stage directions call for the strains of Gloria in Excelsis to rise in its wake.” (121) Bullseye!
It must be noted that Olson has been poorly served by his editors. The index has glaring omissions—Leiden, for example, is absent, though it appears (122) as the destination of Owen’s last trip to Europe in 1912 (she delivered a paper on “The Rain Gods of the American Indians” for a meeting of the International Congress of the History of Religion). The book is also flawed by various compositional errors—“folklorist were working hard” (6), “years of study found its first” (7), “internments” where “interments” is meant (132). At last, however, despite the booster lapses and bizarre digressions, Olson, with his close look at Owen’s mix of folkloristic and literary methods, has made good on his goal of providing “the most complete portrait of Mary Alicia Owen that we have” (8).
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[Review length: 1159 words • Review posted on April 17, 2013]