Book Review: The Kentucky Trace

Title: The Kentucky Trace

Author: Harriette Simpson Arnow

Date: 1974

Publisher; Knopf

ISBN: 0-394-48990-X

Length: 289 pages

Quote: “There were some who'd call him traitor to the cause; but then maybe he'd feel a traitor to mankind if in the woods he'd killed two men only because they'd worn the uniform of the enemy.”

Though subtitled “A Novel of the American Revolution,” The Kentucky Trace is not the usual war-period historical novel about how a fictional character might have watched or participated in a decisive battle. Leslie Collins has put in his military service back east, and is now crossing the Appalachian Mountains with an odd lot of new acquaintances who are also fleeing the horrors of war.

For those seeking alternatives to romances, Arnow was generally a good author, able to present either sexual or sex-free relationships in realistic proportion to her characters' lives. The Kentucky Trace didn't disappoint those looking for another character who is heterosexual, but not obsessed with it. Possibly it disappointed the jacket illustrator; I wondered whether that picture of Leslie on the front cover was meant to be a portrait of some tough female ancestor of tall, gaunt, competent Gertie, The Dollmaker. Leslie, like the protagonists of Mountain Path and The Weedkiller's Daughter, is more concerned with surviving a bizarre adventure and making up a believable story to cover the unbelievable truth than with romance.

Leslie tells himself there are some good women, but he has been married to one he considered bad—she wasn't very good—until, in this story, he meets a really bad one. Leslie is a Real Man, and a fine one, even when he has to tend the baby. In 1974 homosexuality was still unthinkable for fictional heroes but “androgynous qualities” were in fashion; readers were meant to read William David Leslie Collins' choosing to be called “Leslie” as evidence that his character, formed by consistently good choices, had achieved a balance between the virtues then considered manly and womanly.

We meet Leslie, as we meet other Arnow characters, in a moment of crisis; he's been taken prisoner and is working his way out of his bonds while another prisoner is being hanged. Moving quickly across the Blue Ridge Mountains along what would much later become Route 23, only while it was unpaved and full of thickets, cliffs, and shale beds, he has his adventure in what will eventually be called eastern Kentucky—across the Cumberland, where sandstone starts to replace limestone, but east of any Shawnee settlements.

Cherokee settlements were mostly in Tennessee and points south and west, with border trading posts on the edges of what became Virginia and North Carolina. Yuchi people, physically related to the Shawnee but even less organized or “civilized,” had also lived in Tennessee and had mostly fled or died before Europeans started to survey the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Native American character in The Kentucky Trace can't be identified with any recognized tribe or nation. He might be one of those prisoners of war who weren't disclosing any information about who or where their families were or where they were trying to get back to. Leslie and his friend Daniel, who is trying hard to be Cherokee (like his late lamented wife), call this younger man “Little Brother.” Is he a lost Canadian trying to get back to the north and west, or the last survivor in a Yuchi family whose home wasn't far from where he meets Leslie and Daniel? He'll never tell.

There are two women in the party: Rachel, the good one, who has been enslaved and used as a wet nurse, and Charity, the horrible one. Since the story is told from Leslie's point of view we also learn a fair bit about his unlamented wife Sadie, who threw herself at Leslie because she'd already started a baby with a less gentlemanly patron of her parents' inn; other than that she wasn't all bad, we learn, it was Sadie's mother who made Leslie feel that war could be no worse than the home life Sadie offered him. Daniel, who does miss his late wife, is continually surprised that Leslie is not mourning for Sadie.

There's also Jethro, officially Leslie's slave, in practice Leslie's foster brother, and enough others that the group can travel in separate parties through what are not yet eastern Kentucky and Ohio to the frontier settlement of Detroit. Leslie accepts slavery and will agree to work in exchange for the title to another slave, in this story, but he's not a racist; he appreciates Jethro and Rachel as individuals. Historically his attitude was not unusual in the Appalachian Mountains where, if slaves were acquired, they were more likely to be acquired individually and allowed to earn their freedom than they were in the flatland "plantations."

The baby in this story is not Sadie's baby, who died along with Sadie, nor is he Leslie's. Who he is and who adopts him, in the end, is the main plot that ties together all the minor frontier-survival adventures.

An interesting phrase that appears in the story is “rock house.” On the Virginia or limestone side of the mountains, into the nineteenth century, “rock house” or “rock hall” were expressions used to mean any big cave. A "rock house" figures in local history:

In the Kentucky sandstone country, Arnow tells us, “rock houses” came to mean a particular kind of sandstone cave, peculiar to that region, apparently numerous, shallower but therefore airier and more pleasant for camping in than limestone caves are. Throughout much of the story Leslie and his friends live in “rock house” caves.

Names in Arnow's stories of the Midwestern States tend to repeat. From the appearance of minor characters with names like “Sadie Hawkins” (in 1974 everyone remembered that character from Al Capp's fiction) readers might infer that Arnow was too busy getting the period details and action scenes right to bother about finding just the right name for each character, and carelessly recycled names. Others, noting the movements of characters through her books, have postulated that the stories are interlinked. It's possible that, in combination with Arnow's other books, The Kentucky Trace is meant to leave us convinced that Leslie and some of his friends will choose the perfect farm for Leslie's parents to retire to, will settle down there and live reasonably happy ever after. Or not.

Though not exactly a best-selling author, Arnow was a critically acclaimed one, considered historically important in Kentucky, and her books have gone into collector prices. What I physically read is a hardcover edition; interestingly, it's gained less value on Amazon than the paperback edition has. Even reprints and Kindle editions of The Kentucky Trace are pretty pricey. What you can buy here, therefore, will be the hardcover book (unless you insist on a different edition) with the jacket as shown above, and it'll cost $10 per book plus $5 per package (two copies would fit in one package) plus $1 per online payment.