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Bioregional Approach to Southern History: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta

...persistence." Hundreds of scientists have contributed to the development of WWF's Conservation Science Program and identified over 800 distinct terrestrial ecoregions across the globe.1Robert G. Bailey, Description of the Ecoregions...

Mapping the "Big Minutes": Visualizing Sacred Harp's Geographic Coalescence and Expansion, 1995–2014

...this decentralized music culture. Minutes detail the name of each song leader, the page number(s) of song(s) each person led, the names of officers and committee members, these committees' reports,...

Just a number, Old Bryce Hospital Cemetery, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2007

Negotiating Gender Lines: Women's Movement across Atlanta Mosques

...of a substantial number of prosperous black Atlantans, we might imagine that African American Muslims are more likely to live in Atlanta than in Chicago in the same neighborhoods or...

Ablaze: The 1849 White Supremacist Attack on the Pendleton Post Office

...high number but nothing like comparative statistics in the central or southern parts of the state.59For a good understanding of these numbers, see Megginson, African American Life, 8. Consider how...

Somewhere Like Real Life: On Richard Linklater's Boyhood

...of them to lose a finger or worse. We expect this in part because most filmmakers would feel the need to add drama to the story, or to give the...

"Aint that Something?"

...drinking water, caused flash floods, forced people to leave their ancestral homes, and cut jobs (since mining companies have mechanized, they need fewer miners). Despite the loss of jobs and...

Trying the Dark: Mammoth Cave and the Racial Imagination, 1839–1869

...plied their needles . . . with great dexterity and neatness. The cutlers completed their work to great perfection. . . . We also visited the shops of the various...

References
1.	For a helpful overview of the cave's nineteenth-century development, see Katie Algeo, "Mammoth Cave and the Making of Place," Southeastern Geographer 44 no. 1 (2004): 27–47. Algeo argues that "Mammoth Cave is a cultural production, a site whose significance lies in the multilayered interactions of tourists, tour providers, scientists and other visitors, and the body of cultural works about the cave that they produced" (29–30). Given such a critical orientation, it is surprising that her only mention of slavery as a central component of cave tourism appears within a dependent clause: "Cave guides, the most prominent of whom were African-American slaves, pushed the known extent of the cave, discovering new subterranean wonders that could be touted in print to bolster the cave's reputation and keep it in the public's consciousness" (35).
2.	For an excellent study of the history of slavery at Mammoth Cave, see Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer, "The Black Experience at Mammoth Cave, Edmonson County, Kentucky, 1838–1942" (M.A. thesis, University of Central Florida, 1994). While Schmitzer cites evidence suggesting "a significant level of content/ment and stability" on the part of the slaves at Mammoth Cave, and suggests that cave guides "enjoyed respected positions of authority and responsibility" that "empowered" them "with a sense of self-esteem that few slaves or free blacks experienced," my study consciously resists this reading of Mammoth Cave slavery as somehow more benign than other enslaved experiences. I have not seen, for example, any surviving text that suggests anything about the level of self-esteem of any of the figures Schmitzer discusses.
3.	The man sold alongside Bishop was known only as "Alfred." Two other well-known guides, Nicholas (Nick) Bransford and Materson (Mat) Bransford, were leased out to the cave's proprietors by their owner, the Glasgow attorney Thomas Bransford. For a detailed account of the improvements made to the cave facilities by each of the cave owners, see Schmitzer, esp. 12–14.
4.	See Davis McCombs's Ultima Thule (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), Elizabeth Mitchell's Journey to the Bottomless Pit: The Story of Stephen Bishop and Mammoth Cave (New York: Viking Juvenile, 2004), and Roger Bruckner's Grand, Gloomy, and Peculiar: Stephen Bishop at Mammoth Cave: A Historical Novel (Cave Books, 2009).
5.	The anonymous poet of "On the Entrance to the Mammoth Cave" (included in Horace Martin's Pictorial Guide to the Mammoth Cave [New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1851]) writes that "Far over head deep gloom doth sit, / And Nature is asleep" (11–12).
6.	Throughout my discussion of slavery at Mammoth Cave, I attempt to distinguish carefully between my use of the words "authority" and "power." While I invoke the former term to refer to the carefully limited forms of responsibility given to the enslaved guides by the cave's proprietors, the latter term will suggest "power" in the more foundational sense of the word. In other words, while these guides were given significant authority over their charges (given the dangerous nature of the caverns), it is far more problematic to suggest that any slave can be granted power by an institution that requires her or him to be the legal property of another.
7.	Description of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, the Niagara River and falls, and the falls in summer and winter; the prairies, or life in the west, Fairmount water works and scenes on the Schuylkill: to illustrate Brewer's panorama (Boston: J.M. Hewes and Co., 1850), 4.
8.	Three Forks, Kentucky, changed its name to Glasgow Junction in 1863, and then again to Park City in 1938.
9.	An Excursion to The Mammoth Cave, and the Barrens of Kentucky (Lexington, KY: A.T. Skillman, 1840).
10.	"The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky: An Address Delivered Before the Young Mens' [sic] Association of Burlington, NJ," (Burlington, NJ: 1852). Quoted courtesy of the Western Kentucky University Library.
11.	Bayard Taylor's Mammoth Cave narrative was included in At Home and Abroad (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1859).
12.	Willis's influential account of his visit to the cave was included in his Health Trip to the Tropics (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853).
13.	In her monumental exploration of American literature, for example, Toni Morrison portrays the language of philosophical, moral, and psychological darkness that suffuses American literary history as a reflection of the nation's racial politics. One important consequence of Morrison's argument has been a more nuanced understanding of the racial dynamics of the American gothic tradition. Teresa Goddu has revealed American gothic fiction of the nineteenth century to be shaped by a powerful and far-reaching racial logic, in which "slavery was a significant part of the historical context that produced the gothic and against which it responded" (133). Similarly, in his extended analysis of the nineteenth-century American gothic Justin Edwards "locate[s] racial ambiguity in the foreground of gothic expression" (xix). And Eugenia DeLamotte has recently suggested that the nihilism at the heart of traditional gothic narrative might be understood as a literary manifestation of white anxieties regarding the instability of racial categories. "[B]ehind the fears of dark, racialized others on which the Gothic construction of whiteness hinges," DeLamotte writes, "is the unspeakable Other of that construction: the fear that there is no such thing as whiteness, or even race" (17). To read Gothic literature in this manner is to understand Gothic texts "as documents in the history of racial formation [. . .] that might give us a better sense of what the construction of whiteness involved" (19). See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Justin Edwards, Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002); and Eugenia DeLamotte, "White Terror, Black Dreams: Gothic Constructions of Race in the Nineteenth Century" in The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004), 17–31.
14.	The chapter on Mammoth Cave in Sears's Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford UP, 1989) includes an excellent discussion of the spiritual and philosophical dimensions of the cave's treatment in the popular imagination. His focus on the theatricality on the cave environment has greatly influenced my own account of Mammoth Cave, though I see race and slavery as far more central to the cave's symbolic meanings.
15.	Kite's Diary is located in the Thomas Kite Collection, Manuscripts and Folklife Archives, Western Kentucky University.
16.	Charles Wright, The Mammoth Cave, Kentucky (Vincennes, IN: Harvey, Mason, & Co., 1858).
17.	Lydia Maria Child, "Mammoth Cave," Bentley's Miscellany 14 (1843): 408–419.
18.	Mapother's diary is located at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville.
19.	The Prentice Letter is located at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville. Annie Lynch was apparently an amateur poet, which explains the letter's reference to her work.
20.	Though many early chroniclers of Bishop's life suggested that he was part Native American, an 1868 letter by Gorin refutes this claim. National Park Service, "Stephen Site Bulletin," www.nps.gov/maca/stephen.pdf.
21.	"The Mammoth Cave," The Knickerbocker, April 1849, 301–312.
22.	Spirituals such as "Go Down Moses" invoked the Jordan River to draw parallels between the enslavement of the Israelites and Black enslavement. Furthermore, many historians have traced how American slaves, as well as generations of free African Americans, compared the Ohio River (which separates Kentucky from Ohio) with the Jordan. See, for example, Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1972) and Ann Hagedorn, Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Undergound Railroad (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
23.	Alexander Clark Bullit, Rambles in the Mammoth Cave: During the Year 1844 (Louisville: Morton and Griswold, 1845).
24.	Charles Peterson, "Two Days in the Mammoth Cave," Peterson's Magazine, October 1852, 155–160.
25.	Martin, Pictorial Guide to the Mammoth Cave, Kentucky (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1851).
26.	Published anonymously as "A Tour in the Dark," Atlantic Monthly 20 (December 1867): 670–679.
27.	Russell Lant Carpenter, Observations on American Slavery After a Year's Tour in the United States (London: Edward T. Whitfield, 1852).
28.	Schmitzer cites Willis's party voting the guide to the main table and his inclusion of Bishop as one of the party's five "gentlemen" as evidence that "[w]hile underground, race and social status faded quickly, and at times were nearly forgotten" (26). I would argue that such rhetorical moves, far from an escape from the power dynamics of slavery-era race relations, essentially portrayed the underground region as a carefully framed, white-sanctioned suspension of racial hierarchy—but one that was almost entirely symbolic and performative.
29.	In his "The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky: An Address, Delivered Before the Young Men's Association of Burlington, N.J.", Joseph Parrish describes a guide mocking a particularly hefty tourist as he struggled through a narrow passageway called the "Winding Way" (also known as "Fat Man's Misery"): " 'I told you when you said that you felt especially happy, to wait till you got to the Winding Way, to see how you would feel then!' The imprisoned gentleman soon broke his bonds, not however without damage to his indispensables, and at length forcing his way into ‘Relief Hall,' he cried out in the joy of his heart, while stretching himself and wiping the perspiration from his jolly, rubicund face" (13). A rare copy of this document is located in the Kentucky Library and Museum, Western Kentucky University.
30.	"The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky," from the Dublin University Magazine. Pamphlet located in the Kentucky Historical Society Special Collections, Frankfort, Kentucky.
31.	John Fowler Rusling, A Trip to the Mammoth Cave, KY (Nashville, 1864).
32.	Significantly, this description of Croghan's patients echoes several earlier accounts of the blind, white fish that were known to live in the cave's underground rivers—Bullitt calls them the cave's "extraordinary white eyeless fish" (85), and Stephen Dillaye in 1848 describes them as "entirely white and transparent" (12).
33.	Carlton H. Rogers, Incidents of Travel in the Southern States and Cuba (New York: R. Craighead, 1862).
34.	One scene in Rusling's work has, I believe, been profoundly misread by present-day readers, including the authors of the National Park Service webpage that provides a brief history of slavery at Mammoth Cave. After Mat tells the writer that three of his children have been sold away from him, Rusling replies, "I don't suppose you missed these children much. You colored people never do, they say" (7). Mat then corrects him, expressing the deep anguish of his wife and himself. The NPS webpage introduces this quotation by stating, "Surprisingly, some abolitionists of the day did not regard such an act as horrendous," and Schmitzer similarly reads Rusling as uncritically racist. I would argue, however, that these interpretations overlook the way firsthand abolitionist accounts of the South would often use irony to critique southern injustice and inhumanity. Rusling, I believe, is using a common abolitionist device here, inviting an authentic slave to answer one of the racial myths on which the defense of slavery was founded. National Park Service, "Mammoth Cave National Park: Black History at Mammoth Cave" http://www.nps.gov/maca/historyculture/black-history.htm.
35.	"Wonderful Discovery!: Being an Account of a Recent Exploration of the Celebrated Mammoth Cave, in Edmonson County, Kentucky, by Dr. Rowan, Professor Simmons and Others, of Louisville, to its Termination in an Inhabited Region, in the Interior of the Earth!" (New York: R. H. Elton, 1839). Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
36.	Sears points out that, before the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, "[g]eology reigned as the supreme science, the field of scientific inquiry that seemed most capable of yielding conclusions about the ultimate nature of the universe" (42). Because of this, he argues, "the cave naturally aroused curiosity about its origin." Many of the fictional works I explore in this section exploited this curiosity by using Mammoth Cave as the site for ancient civilizations that made a symbolic claim for the white race to the continent.
37.	Henry Parker's "New Wonders of the Mammoth Cave" was included in Parker's Poems (Auburn, NY: Knapp and Peck, 1850).
38.	Startling Disclosures! Mysteries Solved! On the History of Esther Livingstone, and Dark Career of Henry Baldwin(Philadelphia: E. Elmer Barclay, 1853).
39.	Published anonymously as "A Tragedy of Mammoth Cave," The Knickerbocker 51 (February 1858): 112–121.
40.	Nathan Ryno Smith, Legends of the South (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1869).

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