Noah’s Arkansas

“Did you know that Arkansas is mentioned in the Bible? Yeah, there’s that verse that begins, ‘Noah stepped out of the ark an’ saw…’”

I heard that joke from a Baptist youth pastor back in the mid-1990s—a joke so groan-worthy I still remember it some thirty years later. It sprang to mind one recent summer morning when I was walking the dog. At 6:00 or so, there was enough sun to light our way, and the sky was a quilt of blue and gray. As we turned the block, the rain started in, not heavy rain—more like the incidental music of a movie rather than the soundtrack, just enough to make you aware of it, but nowhere near enough to warrant a retreat to the house for raincoat or umbrella. And since the sun was out, there soon appeared across the gray-flecked western sky a rainbow, which lingered above for the duration of our twenty-minute walk. Later that same day, I was again walking through the neighborhood while talking on the phone to a dear friend of mine when a slightly heavier rain shower caught me at some distance from my house, and I ended up taking shelter in the covered entrance of the nearby Methodist church. As we chatted over the sound of the rain, a double rainbow formed, this time in the eastern sky, brought to life by a setting western sun.

As it happened, I had just started the book Noah’s Arkive, written by Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates and published by the University of Minnesota Press, a book that doesn’t simply trace how the story of Noah and the ark has been represented throughout time, but that also examines how this Noachic archetype shapes our own present-day thinking as we struggle to confront rising floodwaters and environmental catastrophe. “The survival of this small community is made possible only through the exclusion of those who have been left to the rising sea, the humans and the animals they could not or simply did not include,” write Cohen and Yates. “The biblical tale has become the structure of a recurring political tale, enacted by nations that imagine they can enclose themselves through border walls, as if continents could be parceled into gated communities.”

But thinking like an ark is the basis for a lot of what we do in the business of public history and archives. Every archive is, like an ark, predicated upon saving certain things for the future—and thus defined by what it excludes more than what it includes. The CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Roberts Library focuses upon Arkansas-related materials, as the name well indicates, prioritizing those materials representing the service area of the Central Arkansas Library System, of which we are a part. I know, talking to Brian Robertson, the head of the research services division here at the Roberts Library, that people have sometimes in the past offered quite valuable manuscript or book collections that we have had to turn down because they do not fit our broader mission. Every ark, every archive, has a limited amount of space and has to be selective about what and who might be included.

The CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas is an archive itself—and also an ark. We encompass only the state of Arkansas (with an occasional exception for something like the Missouri Bootheel). But that doesn’t mean that everything within its borders necessarily warrants inclusion. To be useful to readers, we must exclude. Within some categories, we can take whatever and whomever. Every Civil War military event. Every property listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Every person elected to the Arkansas General Assembly or to statewide office. Every city and town, no matter how long it existed, no matter how small it may have been. We can be universally inclusive within these narrow categories and still be useful to researchers and average readers alike.

But on other matters, we struggle mightily. As I’ve mentioned before, lately I’ve taken an interest in developing entries on books about or set in Arkansas. However, self-publishing has really taken off in the last few years, and to be useful to readers, it would seem necessary to draw some lines of exclusion, perhaps to limit our book-related content only to those volumes that were published professionally. But you roll back the clock a few decades, a century or more, and find that many now world-esteemed writers published on their own. That was standard practice, and excluding all vaguely “self-published” books from the EOA would eliminate a lot of those books that are either now canonical in the field of Arkansas history or important for the study of significant persons, such as Orval Faubus’s two-volume memoir, Down from the Hills. But there are also a lot of liminal cases. The 1960 book Eat Thy Bread with Joy by Mayme Hollensworth was published by Pelican Press, the foremost vanity press of its era, but I thought it worth an entry because it highlights how one white woman of the era was attempting to present issues of race relations in a creative manner, and maybe some future researcher would find that interesting.

Many acts of ark-like exclusion have been motivated by ideology. The ideology of white supremacy that saw history as something enacted by men of European descent, with others only incidental to this story—to give one example. We can name many of the other usual suspect ideologies, such as patriarchy and homophobia, but there are others that might be invisible to us. The ideology of urbanism, for instance, which sees cities (civilization) as the driving force of history and regards rural sites as places of resource extraction only, not as places where people might live and thrive with vibrant and enlightened cultures of their own. The ideology of secularism, which often regards religion throughout history as merely a mask for more materialistic motivations to action. The ideology of literacy, which holds that written records constitute the end-all and be-all of historical research.

We can name any number of ideologies that have, in the past, marked certain individuals and populations for exclusion from our civilizational ark and from our shared historical narrative. And, knowing how these ideologies have shaped our worldview, we can actively work to be more inclusive here at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. We can, as just one example, work to develop more entries relating to the African American experience, and we can work to make sure that information is more thoroughly woven into already existing entries on towns, counties, religious denominations, time periods, etc.—as with our recent entry on the Magnolia Colored School District, which served the Black population of Magnolia (Columbia County) between 1915 and 1969.

We can do all of that, but we will still be an ark that excludes, because archives cannot function, and arks cannot float, without leaving somebody behind. So we try to be representative. We cannot have an entry on every buck private who fought in the Civil War, for example, but we can have entries on every regiment that was raised in Arkansas, or that fought in Arkansas. Every editorial decision we make is a compromise with reality, just as every map is a compromise with the landscape it represents—were it as large as the city it mapped, it would no longer be useful. A map that I can hold in my hand might give me some hint of those places I can explore, but a map so large that it covered the landscape would cut off the possibility of exploration.

Or as Cohen and Yates write:

“But thinking like an ark has taught us that, even though we will always ultimately fail, sometimes foundering and incompletion are the enablers of possibility. So we sail on, scrupulous in our avoidance of landfall. Maybe the worst thing you can ever believe is that you are no longer on an ark.”

By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas