"Ma' Bowlin"

• Originally appeared in Harper's Weekly, XXXI (January 15, 1887) and reprinted in Knitters in the Sun later that year.
• McMichael: "Combining the local dialect of the Clover Bend locale and portraits of poor-white sharecroppers, Alice wrote her first Arkansas story . . .it presented two departures from conventional American fiction; it was set in the Arkansas back country and its heroine was a feeble-minded child, Ma' Bowlin'" (p. 101).
• McMichael: "The story was noteworthy in its description of the customs, speech, and emotions of the tenant farmers, of their attitudes toward vengeance, death, God's punishment and His benevolence, and in its intense descriptions of the swamp" (p. 101). 
• Mrs. Brand tells Bud Quinn what for in this story and makes him realize his wife and daughter are important.

Basic Plot:

Bud Quinn and his wife Sukey live in Clover Bend. Bud was almost hanged on the day Ma' Bowlin' was born, as William Ruffner thought he had murdered his boy, Zed. Zed disappeared  eight years ago, and rumor was that Bud killed him and fed him to the hogs. Sukey saved him that day by reasoning with the men (hooded klansmen, it appears) that Bud didn't have a mark on him, and he would have if he'd killed Zed who was larger and stronger than he was.

The story opens with Mrs. Brand, a widow from Georgia, visiting Sukey as she finishes a new dress for Ma' Bowlin'. Sukey makes sure to instruct her daughter not to get the gown dirty, and the girl promises before setting out to the plantation store to meet her father to show him her new dress.  Bud arrives home alone, and a search party begins looking for the girl.

Bud was ashamed of Ma' Bowlin's feeble-mindedness and never cared for the child; upon seeing how upset Sukey is, though, he realizes he, too, loves Ma' Bowlin.' He goes searching for her, and he and Ruffner find her--and Zed.  The gown is clean and the family is reunited.

She was a baby ; a girl, when he wanted a boy; she was a toddling little thing who wouldn't learn to talk, but used queer sounds of her own for a language; he had a notion that it was this which first gave him his repugnance to the child . She was a girl whose feeble mind was a judgment ; then he slowly grew to hate her . He didn't know whether he hated her now or not ; he only knew that if Sukey wanted her so bad, she must have her. (Thanet, p. 252)

Interestingly, when she appears on Zed's boat, she's cured: 

Her face looked like an angel's to him in its cloud of shining hair; her eyes sparkled, her cheeks were red, but there was something else which in the intense emo tion of the moment Bud dimly perceived — the familiar dazed look was gone. . How the blur came over that innocent soul , why it went , are alike mysteries. (Thanet, p. 264)