Out of the Black Patch: The Autobiography of Effie Marquess Carmack, Folk Musician, Artist, and Writer

Abstract

Out of the Black Patch: The Autobiography of Effie Marquess Carmack, Folk Musician, Artist, and Writer. Edited by Noel A. Carmack and Karen Lynn Davidson. Life Writings of Frontier Women, Vol. 4. (Logan: Utah State University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xviii, 398. $29.95, ISBN 0-87421-279-0.) Effie Marquess Carmack (1885-1974) patterned her memoirs on the pioneer story of settling a frontier, struggling against adversity, and surviving. She noted of the log dog-trot cabin she lived in during her childhood in the western Kentucky tobacco region called the Black Patch, for example, that was the same type of dwelling the pioneers built when they landed in America (p. 33). Carmack wrote in vivid detail about farm life at the turn of the century. She described the never-ending labor of the men, women, and children as they planted, topped, and wormed tobacco, tended chickens, killed hogs, sewed, cooked, and made soap. Noel A. Carmack and Karen Lynn Davidson skillfully edited this autobiography based on the mimeograph provided by Elder John Carmack, Effie's grandson and the managing director of the Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Carmack noted that we were used to financial calamities. Often, when [farmers] had worked all year, and made a good crop of tobacco, they got nothing for when selling time (p. 55). That was true during the early 1900s when James B. Duke's American Tobacco Company, a trust controlling the tobacco market, manipulated prices. Planters responded by organizing and night riding. Carmack does not mention the strife, although she lived in an area of intense unrest. When she was eleven the family converted to the LDS Church. They had always read the Bible and observed the Sabbath, she recalled, but not until two young Mormons came preaching did the family find a religion that fit their needs and allowed them to enjoy music and dancing, activities that brought them joy. The conversion year was one of the best in Carmack's life, but tragedy soon followed with the death of her mother and sister. Her father remarried and moved the family to Arizona. Carmack loved the West, a land of brown, red, and gold, and cut through by washes and canyons that appealed to her artistic side, but her father did not. They returned east where she married Edgar Carmack, reared their children, witnessed the death of a son who was burned in a grassfire, taught Sunday school, painted, sang, and worked. The ability to accept and find pleasure in work defined her life. She proudly claimed that have worked ever since I was old enough and I didn't mind it (p. 341). Carmack's was a life of labor, love, and endurance. Her book will appeal to a general audience, folklorists, and historians of women, the South, religion, and agriculture. Well Boys, May Jordan (1889-1914) wrote in her first diary entry in December 1912, am going to give you my experiences on buying furs through Alabama And my Adventures with animals And the history of the country . …