Photo by Arthur Keith
A misty veil of falling water
A little colony of our Hazel Creek people took a notion to try the Georgia cotton mills.They nearly died there from homesickness, tight houses, and “bad water.” All but one family returned as soon as they possibly could. While trying to save enough money to get away one old man said; “I lied to my God when I left the mountains and kem to these devilish cotton mills. Ef only He’d turn me into a varmint I’d run back to-night! Boys, I dream I’m in torment; an’ when I wake up I lay thar an’ think o’ the spring branch runnin’ over the root o’ that thar poplar; an’ I say, could I git me one drink o’ that water I’d be content to lay me down and die!”
Poor old John! In his country there are a hundred spring branches running over poplar roots; but “that tharpoplar”: we knew the very one he meant. It was by the roadside. The brooklet came from a disused still-house hidden in laurel and hemlock so dense that direct sunlight never penetrated the glen. Cold and sparkling and crystal clear, the gushing water enticed every wayfarer to bend and drink, whether he was thirsty or no. John is back in his own land now, and doubtless often goes to drink of that veritable fountain of youth.
Homespunss jeans and linsey used to be the universal garb of the mountain people. Nowadays you will seldom find them, except in far-back places. Shoddy “store clothes” are cheaper and easier to get. And this is a sorry change, for the old-time material was sound and enduring, the direct product of hard personal toil, and so it was prized and taken care of; whereas such stuff as a backwoodsman can buy in his crossroads store is flimsy, soon loses shape and breaks down his own pride of personal appearance. Our average hillsman now goes about in a dirty blue shirt, wapsy and ragged trousers toggled up with a nail or two, thick socks sagging untidily over rusty brogans, and a huge, black, floppy hat that desecrates the landscape. Presently his hatband disappears, to be replaced with a groundhog thong, woven in and out of knife slits, like a shoestring.
When he comes home he “hangs his hat onthe floor” until his wife picks it up. He never brushes it. In time that battered old headpiece becomes as pliant to its owner’s whim, as expressive of his mood, as a clown’s cap in the circus. Commonly it is a symbol of shiftlessness and unconcern. A touch, and it becomes a banner of defiance to law and order. To meet on some lonesome road at night a horseman enveloped to the heels in a black slicker and topped with one of those prodigious funnels that conceals his features like a cowl, is to face the Ku Klux or the Spanish Inquisition.
When your young mountaineer is properly filled up on corn liquor and feels like challenging the world, the flesh, and the devil, he pins up the front of his hat with a thorn, sticks a sprig of balsam or cedar in the thong for an aigrette, and then gallops forth with bottle and pistol to tilt against whatsoever may dare oppose him. And on the gray dawn of the morning after you may findthat hatlying wilted in a corner, as crumpled, spiritless and forlorn as—its owner, upon whom we charitably drop the curtain.
I doubt, though, if anywhere in this wide world mere personal appearance is more deceitful than among our mountaineers. The slovenly lout whom you shrink from approachingagainst the wind is one of the most independent and self-satisfied fellows on earth, as quick to resent alms as to return a blow. And it is wonderful what soap and clean clothes will do! About the worst specimen of tatter-demalion that I ever saw outside of trampdom used to come into town every week, always with a loaded Winchester on his shoulder. He may have washed his face now and then, but there was no sign that he ever combed his mane. I took him for one of those defectives alluded to in a previous chapter; but no, I was told he was “nobody’s fool.” The rifle, it was explained, never left his hand when he was abroad: they said that a feud was brewing “over on ’Larky,” and that this man was “in the bilin’.” Well, it boiled over, and the person in question killed two men in front of his own door.
When the prisoner was brought into court I could not recognize him. A bath, the barber, and a new store suit had transformed him into a right good-looking fellow—anything but a tramp, anything but a desperado. He bore himself throughout that grilling ordeal like the downright man he was, made out a clear case of self-defense, was set at liberty and—promptly reverted to a condition in which he is recognizable once more.
The women of the back country usually go bareheaded around home and often barefooted, too, as did the daughters of Highland chiefs a century or two ago, and for the same reason: simply that they feel better so. When “visit-in” or expecting visitors their extremities are clad. They make their own dresses and the style seems never to change. When traveling horseback they use a man’s saddle and ride astride in their ordinary skirts with an ingenuity of “tucking up” that is beyond my understanding (as no doubt it should be). Often one sees a man and a woman riding a-pillion, in which case the lady perches sidewise, of course.
If I were disposed to startle the reader, after the manner of impressionistic writers who strive after effect at any cost, I could fill a book with oddities observed in the mountains, and that without exaggeration by commission or omission. Let one or two anecdotes suffice; and then we will get back to our averages again. I took down the following incident verbatim (save for proper names) from lips that I know to be truthful. It is introduced here as a specimen of vivid offhand description in few words:
“There was a fam’ly on Pick-Yer-Flint that was named Higgins, and another named the McBees. They married through and throughtill the whole gineration nigh run out; though what helped was that they’d fly mad sometimes and kill one another like fools. They had great big heads and mottly faces—ears as big as sheepskins. Well, when they dressed up to come to church the men—grown men—’d have shirts made of this common domestic, with the lettersAAAon their backs; and them barefooted, and some without hats, but with three yards of red ribbon around their necks. The sleeves of their shirts looked like a whole web of cloth jest sewed up together; and them sleeves’d git full o’ wind, and that red ribbon a-flyin’—O my la!
“There was lots o’ leetle boys of ’em that kem only in their shirt-tails. There was cracks between the logs that a dog could jump through, and them leetle fellers ’d git ’em a crack and grin in at us all through the sarmon. ’T ain’t no manner o’ use to ax me what the tex’ was that day!”
I may explain that it still is common in many districts of the mountain country for small boys to go about through the summer in a single abbreviated garment and that they are called “shirt-tail boys.”
Someofthe expedients that mountain girls invent to make themselves attractive are bizarrein the extreme. Without invading the sanctities of toilet, I will cite one instance that is interesting from a scientific viewpoint. They told me that a certain blue-eyed girl thought that black eyes were “purtier” and that she actually changed her eyes to jet black whenever she went to “meetin’” or other public gathering. While I could see how the trick might be worked, it seemed utterly absurd that an unschooled maid of the wilderness could acquire either the knowledge or the means to accomplish such change. Well, one day I was called to treat a sick baby. While waiting for the medicine to react I chanced to mention this tale as it had been told me. The father, who had blue eyes, solemnly assured me that there was “no lie about it,” and said he would convince me in a few minutes.
He stepped to the garden and plucked a leaf of jimson weed. His wife crushed the leaf and instilled a drop of its juice into one of his eyes. I took out my watch. One side of the eyeball reddened slightly. The man said “hit smarts a leetle—not much.” Within fifteen minutes the pupil had expanded like a cat’s eye in the dark, leaving a rim of blue iris so thin as to be quite unnoticeable without close inspection. The eye consequently was jet black and itsexpression utterly changed. My host said it did not affect his vision materially, save that “things glimmer a bit.” I met him again the next day and he still was an odd-looking creature indeed, with one eye a light blue and the other an absolute black. The thing puzzled me until I recalled that the Latin name of jimson weed isDatura stramonium; then, in a flash, it came to me that stramonium is a powerful mydriatic.
If our man killer, hitherto mentioned, had had blue or gray eyes and had not chosen to stand trial, then, with a cake of soap and a new suit and a jimson leaf he might have made himself over so that his own mother would not have known him. These simple facts are offered gratis to writers of detective tales, whose stock of disguises nowadays is so threadbare and (pardon me) so absurd.
The mountain home of to-day is the log cabin of the American pioneer—not such a lodge as well-to-do people affect in Adirondack “camps” (which cost more than framed structures of similar size), but a pen that can be erected by four “corner men” in one day and is finished by the owner at his leisure. The commonest type is a single large room, with maybe a narrow porch in front and a plankdoor, a big stone chimney at one end, a single sash for a window at the other, and a seven or eight-foot lean-to at the rear for kitchen.
An Average Mountain Cabin
Some of the early settlers, who had first choice of land, took pains in building their houses, squaring the logs like bridge timbers, joining them closely, smoothing their puncheons with an adze almost as truly as if they were planed, and using mortar instead of clay in laying chimney and hearth. But such houses nowadays are rare. If a man can afford so much effort as all that he will build a framed dwelling. If not, he will content himself with such a cabin as I have described. If he prospers he may add a duplicate of it alongside and cover the whole with one roof, leaving a ten or twelve-foot entry between.
In Carolina they seldom build a house of round logs, but rather hew the inner and outer faces flat, out of a curious notion that this adds an appearance of finish to the structure. If only they would turn the logs over, so that the flat faces joined, leaving at least the outside in the natural round, the house would need hardly any chinking and the effect would be far more pleasing to good taste. As it is they merely notch the logs at the corners, leaving wide spaces to be filled up with splits, rocks, mud—anything to keep out the weather. As a matter of fact, few houses ever are thoroughly chinked and he who would take pains to make a workmanlike job of chinking would be ridiculed as “fussin’ around like an old granny-woman.” Nobody but a tenderfoot feels drafts, you know.
It is hard to keep such a dwelling clean, even if the family be small. The whole structure being built of green timber throughout, soon shrinks, checks, warps and sags, so that there cannot be a square joint, a neat fit, a perpendicular face, or a level place anywhere about it. The roof droops in a season or two, the shingles curl and leaky places open. Flooring shrinks apart, leaving wide and irregular cracks through which the winter winds are sucked upward as through so many flues (no mountain home has a cellar under it). Everywhere there are crannies and rough surfaces to hold dust and soot, there being probably not a single planed board in the whole house.
But, for all that, there is something very attractive and picturesque about the little old log cabin. In its setting of ancient forests and mighty hills it fits, it harmonizes, where the prim and precise product of modern carpentry would shock an artistic eye. The very roughnessof the honest logs and the home-made furniture gives texture to the picture. Having no mathematically straight lines nor uniform curves, the cabin’s outlines conform to its surroundings. Without artificial stain, or varnish, or veneer, itiswhat it seems, a genuine thing, a jewel in the rough. And it is a home. When wind whistles through the cracks and snow sifts into the corners of the room one draws his stumpy little split-bottomed chair close to the wide hearth and really knows the comfort of fire leaping and sap singing from big birch logs.
Every room except the kitchen (if there be a kitchen) has a couple of beds in it: enough all told for the family and, generally, one spare bed. If much company comes, some pallets are made on the floor for the women and children of the household. In a single-room cabin there usually is a cockloft, reached by a ladder, for storage, and maybe a bunk or two. Closets and pantries there are none, for they would only furnish good harborage for woods-rats and other vermin.
Everything must be in sight and accessible to the housewife’s little sedge broom. Linen and small articles of apparel are stored in a chest or a cheap little tin trunk or two. Most of the family wardrobe hangs from pegs in the wallsor nails in the loft beams, along with strings of dried apples, peppers, bunches of herbs, twists of tobacco, gourds full of seeds, the hunter’s pouch, and other odd bric-a-brac interesting to “furrin” eyes. The narrow mantel-shelf holds pipes and snuff and various other articles of frequent use, among them a twig or two of sweet birch that has been chewed to shreds at one end and is queerly discolored with something brown (this is what the mountain woman calls her “tooth brush”—a snuff stick, understand).
For wall decorations there may be a few gaudy advertisements lithographed in colors, perhaps some halftones from magazines that travelers have left (a magazine is always called a “book” in this region, as, I think, throughout the South). Of late years the agents for photo-enlarging companies have invaded the mountains and have reaped a harvest; for if there be one curse of civilization that our hillsman craves, it is a hugetinted“family group” in an abominable rococo frame.
There is an almanac in the cabin, but no clock. “What does man need of a clock when he has a good-crowin’ rooster?” Strange as it may seem, in this roughest of backwoods countries I have never seen candles, unless they were brought in by outsiders like myself. Beef, youmust remember, is exported, not eaten, by our farmers, and hence there is no tallow to make candles with. Instead of these, every home is provided with a kerosene lamp of narrow wick, and seldom do you find a chimney for it. This is partly because lamp chimneys are hard to carry safely over the mountain roads and partly because “man can do without sich like, anyhow.” But kerosene, also, is hard to transport, and so one sometimes will find pine knots used for illumination; but oftener the woman will pour hog’s grease into a tin or saucer, twist up a bit of rag for the wick and so make a “slut” that, believe me, deserves the name. In fact, the supply of pine knots within convenient distance of home is soon exhausted, and anyway, as the mountaineer disdains to be forehanded, he would burn up the knots for kindling rather than save any for illumination.
Very few cabins have carpet on the floor. It would hold too much mud from the feet of the men who would not use a scraper if there was one. Beds generally are bought, nowadays, at the stores, but some are home-made, with bedcords of bast rope. Tables and chairs mostly are made on the spot or obtained by barter from some handy neighbor. In many homes you will still find the ancient spinning-wheel, with ahand-loom on the porch and in the loft there will be a set of quilting frames for making “kivers.”
Out in the yard you see an ash hopper for running the lye to make soap, maybe a few bee gums sawed from hollow logs, and a crude but effective cider press. At the spring there is a box for cold storage in summer. Near by stands the great iron kettle for boiling clothes, making soap, scalding pigs, and a variety of other uses. Alongside of it is the “battlin’ block” on which the family wash is hammered with a beetle (“battlin’ stick”) if the woman has no washboard, which very often is the case.
Naturally there can be no privacy and hence no delicacy, in such a home. I never will forget my embarrassment about getting to bed the first night I ever spent in a one-room cabin where there was a good-sized family. I did not know what was expected of me. When everybody looked sleepy I went outdoors and strolled around in the moonlight until the women had time to retire. On returning to the house I found them still bolt upright around the hearth. Then the hostess pointed to the bed I was to occupy and said it was ready whenever I was. Well, I “shucked off my clothes,” tumbled in, turned my face to the wall, andimmediately everybody else did the same. That is the way to do: justgoto bed! I lay there awake for a long time. Finally I had to roll over. A ruddy glow from the embers showed the family in all postures of deep, healthy slumber. It also showed something glittering on the nipple of the long, muzzle-loading rifle that hung over the father’s bed. It was a bright, new percussion cap, where a greased rag had been when I went out for my moonlight stroll. There was no need of a curtain in that house. They could do without.
I have been describing an average mountain home. In valleys and coves there are better ones, of course. Along the railroads, and on fertile plateaus between the Blue Ridge and the Unakas, are hundreds of fine farms, cultivated by machinery, and here dwell a class of farmers that are scarcely to be distinguished from people of similar station in the West. But a prosperous and educated few are not the people. When speaking of southern mountaineers I mean the mass, or the average, and the pictures here given are typical of that mass. It is not the well-to-do valley people, but the real mountaineers, who are especially interesting to the reading public; and they are interestingchieflybecause they preserve traits and mannersthat have been transmitted almost unchanged from ancient times—because, as John Fox puts it, they are “a distinct remnant of an Anglo-Saxon past.”
Almost everywhere in the backwoods of Appalachia we have with us to-day, in flesh and blood, the Indian-fighter of our colonial border—aye, back of him, the half-wild clansman of elder Britain—adapted to other conditions, but still virtually the same in character, in ideas, in attitude toward the outer world. Here, in great part, is spoken to-day the language of Piers the Ploughman, a speech long dead elsewhere, save as fragments survive in some dialects of rural England.
No picture of mountain life would be complete or just if it omitted a class lower than the average hillsman I have been describing. As this is not a pleasant topic, I shall be terse. Hundreds of backwoods families, large ones at that, exist in “blind” cabins that remind one somewhat of Irish hovels, Norwegian saeters, the “black houses” of the Hebrides, the windowless rock piles inhabited by Corsican shepherds and by Basques of the Pyrenees. Such a cabin has but one room for all purposes. In rainy or gusty weather, when the two doors must be closed, no light enters the room save throughcracks in the wall and down the chimney. In the damp climate of western Carolina such an interior is fusty, or even wet. In many cases the chimney is no more than a semi-circular pile of rough rocks and rises no higher than a man’s shoulder, hence the common saying, “You can set by the fire and spit out through the chimbly.” When the wind blows “contrary” one’s lungs choke and his eyes stream from the smoke.
A Bee-Gum
In some of these places you will find a “pet pig” harbored in the house. I know of two cases where the pig was kept in a box directly under the table, so that scraps could be chucked to him without rising from dinner.
Hastening from this extreme, we still shall find dire poverty the rule rather than the exception among the multitude of “branch-water people.” One house will have only an earthen floor; another will be so small that “you cain’t cuss a cat in it ’thout gittin’ ha’r in yer teeth.” Utensils are limited to a frying-pan, an iron pot, a coffee-pot, a bucket, and some gourds. There is not enough tableware to go around, and children eat out of their parents’ plates, or all “soup-in together” around one bowl of stew or porridge.
Even to families that are fairly well-to-do there will come periods of famine, such asLincoln, speaking of his boyhood, called “pretty pinching times.” Hickory ashes then are used as a substitute for soda in biscuits, and the empty salt-gourd will be soaked for brine to cook with. Once, when I was boarding with a good family, our stores ran out of everything, and none of our neighbors had the least to spare. We had no meat of any kind for two weeks (the game had migrated) and no lard or other grease for nearly a week. Then the meal and salt played out. One day we were reduced to potatoes “straight,” which were parboiled in fresh water, and then burnt a little on the surface as substitute for salt. Another day we had not a bite but string beans boiled in unsalted water.
It is not uncommon in the far backwoods for a traveler, asking for a match, to be told there is none in the house, nor even the pioneer’s flint and steel. Should the embers on the hearth go out, someone must tramp to a neighbor’s and fetch fire on a torch. Hence the saying: “Have you come to borry fire, that you’re in sich a hurry you can’t chat?”
The shifts and expedients to which some of the mountain women are put, from lack of utensils and vessels, are simply pathetic. John Fox tells of a young preacher who stopped at a cabin in Georgia to pass the night. “His hostess, asa mark of unusual distinction, killed a chicken, and dressed it in a pan. She rinsed the pan and made up her dough in it. She rinsed it again and went out and used it for a milk-pail. She came in, rinsed it again, and went to the spring and brought it back full of water. She filled up the glasses on the table, and gave him the pan with the rest of the water in which to wash his hands. The woman was not a slattern; it was the only utensil she had.”
Such poverty is exceptional; yet it is an all but universal rule that anything that cannot be cooked in a pot or fried in a pan must go begging in the mountains. Once I helped my hostess to make kraut. We chopped up a hundred pounds of cabbage with no cutter but a tin coffee-can, holding this in the two hands and chopping downward with the edge. Many times I stopped to hammer the edge smooth on a round stick. Verily this is the land of make-it-yourself-or-do-without!
Yet, however destitute the mountain people may be, they are never abject. The mordant misery of hunger is borne with a sardonic grin. After a course of such diet as described above, a woman laughingly said to me: “I’m gittin’ the dropsy—the meat is all droppin’ off my bones.” During the campaign of 1904 a brotherDemocrat confided to me that “The people around hyur is so pore that if free silver war shipped in by the carload, we-uns couldn’t pay the freight.” So, when a settlement is dubbed Poverty, it is with no suggestion of whining lament, but with the stoical good-humor that shows in Needmore, Poor Fork, Long Hungry, No Pone, and No Fat—all of them real names.
Occasionally, as at “hog-killin’ time,” the poorest live in abundance; occasionally, as at Christmas, they will go on sprees. But, taking them the year through, the Highlanders are a notably abstemious race. When a family is reduced to dry corn bread and black coffee unsweetened—so much and no more—it will joke about the lack of meat and vegetables. And, when there is meat, two mountaineers engaged in hard outdoor work will consume less of it than a northern office-man would eat. Indeed, the heartiness with which “furriners” stuff themselves is a wonder and a merriment to the people of the hills. When a friend came to visit me, the landlady giggled an aside to her husband: “Git the almanick and see when that feller ’ll full!” (as though she were bidding him look to see when the moon would be full).
In truth, it is not so bad to be poor where everyone else is in the same fix. One does notlose caste nor self-respect. He is not tempted by a display of good things all around him, nor is he embittered by the haughtiness and extravagance of the rich. And, socially, the mountaineer is a democrat by nature: equal to any man, as all men are equal before him. Even though hunger be eating like a slow acid into his vitals, he still will preserve a high spirit, a proud independence, that accepts no favor unless it be offered in a neighborly way, as man to man. I have never seen a mountain beggar; never heard of one.
Charity, or anything that smells to him like charity, is declined with patrician dignity or open scorn. In the last house up Hazel Creek dwelt “old man” Stiles. He had a large family, and was on the verge of destitution. His eldest son, a veteran from the Philippines, had been invalided home, and died there. Jack Coburn, in the kindness of his heart, sent away and got a blank form of application to the Government for funeral expenses, to which the family was entitled by law. He filled it out, all but the signature, and rode away up to Stiles’s to have the old man sign it. But Stiles peremptorily refused to accept from the nation what was due his dead son. “I ain’t that hard pushed yit,” was his first and last word on thesubject. This might seem to be the very perversity of ignorance; but it was, in fact, renunciation on a point of honor, and native pride refused to see the matter in any other light.
The mountaineer, born and bred to Spartan self-denial, has a scorn of luxury, regarding its effeminacies with the same contempt as does the nomadic Arab. And any assumption of superiority he will resent with blow or sarcasm. A ragged hobbledehoy stood on the Vanderbilt grounds at Biltmore, mouth open but silent, watching a gardener at work. The latter, annoyed by the boy’s vacuous stare, spoke up sharply: “What do you want?” Like a flash the lad retorted: “Oh, dad sent me down hyur to look at the place—said if I liked it, he mought buy it for me.”
Once, as an experiment, I took a backwoodsman from the Smokies to Knoxville, and put him up at a good hotel. Was he self-conscious, bashful? Not a bit of it. When the waiter brought him a juicy tenderloin, he snapped: “I don’t eat my meat raw!” It was hard to find anything on the long menu that he would eat. On the street he held his head proudly erect, and regarded the crowd with an expression of “Tetch me gin ye dar!” Although the surroundings were as strange to him as a city ofMars would be to us, he showed neither concern nor approval, but rather a fine disdain, like that of Diogenes at the country fair: “Lord, how many things there be in this world of which Diogenes hath no need!”
The poverty of the mountain people is naked, but high-minded and unashamed. To comment on it, as I have done, is taken as an impertinence. This is a fine trait, in its way, though rather hard on a descriptive writer whose motives are ascribed to mere vulgarity and a taste for scandal-mongering. The people, of course, have no ghost of an idea that poverty may be more picturesque than luxury; and they are quite as far from conceiving that a plain and friendly statement of their actual condition, published to the world, is the surest way to awaken the nation to consciousness of its duties toward a region that it has so long and so singularly neglected.
The worst enemies of the mountain people are those public men who, knowing the true state of things, yet conceal or deny the facts in order to salve a sore local pride, encourage the supine fatalism of “what must be will be,” and so drug the highlanders back into their Rip Van Winkle sleep.
Despitethe low standard of living that prevails in the backwoods, the average mountain home is a happy one, as homes go. There is little worry and less fret. Nobody’s nerves are on edge. Our highlander views all exigencies of life with the calm fortitude and tolerant good-humor of Bret Harte’s southwesterner, “to whom cyclones, famine, drought, floods, pestilence and savages were things to be accepted, and whom disaster, if it did not stimulate, certainly did not appall.”
It is a patriarchal existence. The man of the house is lord. He takes no orders from anybody at home or abroad. Whether he shall work or visit or roam the woods with dog and gun is nobody’s affair but his own. About family matters he consults with his wife, but in the end his word is law. If Madame be a bit shrewish he is likely to tolerate it as natural to the weaker vessel; but if she should go too farhe checks her with a curt “Shet up!” and the incident is closed.
“The woman,” as every wife is called, has her kingdom within the house, and her man seldom meddles with its administration. Now and then he may grumble “A woman’s allers findin’ somethin’ to do that a man can’t see no sense in;” but, then, the Lord made women fussy over trifles—His ways are inscrutable—so why bother about it?
The mountain farmer’s wife is not only a household drudge, but a field-hand as well. She helps to plant, hoes corn, gathers fodder, sometimes even plows or splits rails. It is the commonest of sights for a woman to be awkwardly hacking up firewood with a dull axe. When her man leaves home on a journey he is not likely to have laid in wood for the stove or hearth: so she and the children must drag from the hillsides whatever dead timber they can find.
Outside the towns no hat is lifted to maid or wife. A swain would consider it belittled his dignity. At table, if women be seated at all, the dishes are passed first to the men; but generally the wife stands by and serves. There is no conscious discourtesy in such customs; but they betoken an indifference to woman’s weakness, a disregard for her finer nature, a denial of herproper rank, that are real and deep-seated in the mountaineer. To him she is little more than a sort of superior domestic animal. The chivalric regard for women that characterized our pioneers of the Far West is altogether lacking in the habits of the backwoodsman of Appalachia.
And yet it is seldom that a highland woman complains of her lot. She knows no other. From aboriginal times the men of her race have been warriors, hunters, herdsmen, clearers of forests, and their women have toiled in the fields. Indeed she would scarce respect her husband if he did not lord it over her and cast upon her the menial tasks. It is “manners” for a woman to drudge and obey. All respectable wives do that. And they stay at home where they belong, never visiting or going anywhere without first asking their husband’s consent.
I am satisfied that there is less bickering in mountain households than in the most advanced society of Christendom. Certainly there are fewer divorces in proportion to the marriages. This is not by grace of any uncommon regard for the seventh commandment, but rather from a more tolerant attitude of mind.
Mountain women marry early, many of them at fourteen or fifteen, and nearly all before theyare twenty. Large families are the rule, seven to ten children being considered normal, and fifteen is not an uncommon number; but the infant mortality is high.
The children have few toys other than rag dolls, broken bits of crockery for “play-purties,” and such “ridey-hosses” and so forth as they make for themselves. They play few games, but rather frisk about like young colts without aim or method. Every mountain child has at least one dog for a playfellow, and sometimes a pet pig is equally familiar. In many districts there is not enough level land for a ballground. A prime amusement of the small boys is “rocking” (throwing stones at marks or at each other), in which rather doubtful pastime they become singularly expert.
To encourage a child to do chores about the house and stable, he may be promised a pig of his own the next time a sow litters. To know when to look for the pigs an expedient is practiced that I never heard of elsewhere: the child bores a small hole at the base of his thumbnail. I was assured by a mountain preacher that the hole “will grow out to the edge of the nail in three months and twenty-four days”—the period, he said, of a sow’s gestation (in reality the average term is about three months).
Most mountaineers are indulgent, super-indulgent parents. The oft-heard threat “I’ll w’ar ye out with a hick’ry!” is seldom carried out. The boys, especially, grow up with little restraint beyond their own natural sense of filial duty. Little children are allowed to eat and drink anything they want—green fruit, adulterated candy, fresh cider, no matter what—to the limit of repletion; and fatal consequences are not rare. I have observed the very perversity of license allowed children, similar to what Julian Ralph tells of a man on Bullskin Creek, who, explaining why his child died, said that “No one couldn’t make her take no medicine; she just wouldn’t take it; she was a Baker through and through, and you never could make a Baker do nothin’ he didn’t want to!”
The saddest spectacle in the mountains is the tiny burial-ground, without a headstone or headboard in it, all overgrown with weeds, and perhaps unfenced, with cattle grazing over the low mounds or sunken graves. The spot seems never to be visited between interments. I have remarked elsewhere that most mountaineers are singularly callous in the presence of serious injury or death. They show a no less remarkable lack of reverence for the dead. Nothing on earth can be more poignantly lonesome than oneof these mountain burial-places, nothing so mutely evident of neglect.
Funeral services are extremely simple. In the backwoods, where lumber is scarce, a coffin will be knocked together from rough planks taken from someone’s loft, or out of puncheons hewn from the green trees. It is slung on poles and carried like a litter. The only exercises at the grave are singing and praying; and sometimes even those are omitted, as in case no preacher can be summoned in time.
In all back settlements that I have visited, from Kentucky southward, there is a strange custom as to the funeral sermon, that seems to have no analogue elsewhere. It is not preached until long after the interment, maybe a year or several years. In some districts the practice is to hold joint services, at the same time and place, for all in the neighborhood who died within the year. The time chosen will be after the crops are gathered, so that everybody can attend. In other places a husband’s funeral sermon is postponed until his wife dies, orvice versa, though the interval may be many years. These collective funeral services last two or three days, and are attended by hundreds of people, like a camp-meeting.
Strange scenes sometimes are witnessed at thegraveside, prompted perhaps by weird superstitions. At one of our burials, which was attended by more than the usual retinue of kinsfolk, there were present two mothers who bore each other the deadliest hate that women know. Each had a child at her breast. When the clods fell, they silently exchanged babies long enough for each to suckle her rival’s child. Was it a reconciliation cemented by the very life of their blood? Or was it a charm to keep off evil spirits? No one could (or would) explain it to me.
Weddings never are celebrated in church, but at the home of the bride, and are jolly occasions, of course. Often the young men, stimulated with more or less “moonshine,” add the literally stunning compliment of a shivaree.
The mountaineers have a native fondness for music and dancing, which, with the shouting-spells of their revivals, are the only outlets for those powerful emotions which otherwise they studiously conceal. The harmony of “part singing” is unknown in the back districts, where men and women both sing in a jerky treble. Most of their music is in the weird, plaintive minor key that seems spontaneous with primitive people throughout the world. Not only the tone, but the sentiment of their hymns and ballads isusually of a melancholy nature, expressing the wrath of God and the doom of sinners, or the luckless adventures of wild blades and of maidens all forlorn. A Highlander might well say, with the clown inA Winter’s Tale, “I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter, merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.”
But where banjo and fiddle enter, the vapors vanish. Up strike The Fox Chase, Shady Grove, Gamblin’ man, Sourwood Mountain, and knees are limbered, and merry voices rise.—
Call up your dog, O call up your dog!Call up your dog!Call up your dog!Let ’s a-go huntin’ to ketch a groundhog.Rang tang a-whaddle linky day!
Wherever the church has not put its ban on “twistifications” the country dance is the chief amusement of young and old. I have never succeeded in memorizing the queer “calls” at these dances, in proper order, and so take the liberty of quoting from Mr. Haney’sMountain People of Kentucky.—
“Eight hands up and go to the left; half and back; corners turn; partners sash-i-ate. First four, forwards and back; forward again and cross over; forward and back andhome you go. Gents stand and ladies swing in the center; own partners and half sash-i-ate.“Eight hands and gone again; half and back; partners by the right and opposite by the left—sash-i-ate. Right hands across and howdy do? Left and back and how are you? Opposite partners, half sash-i-ate and go to the next (and so on for each couple).“All hands up and go to the left. Hit the floor. Corners turn and sash-i-ate. First couple cage the bird with three arms around. Bird hop out and hoot-owl in; three arms around and hootin’ agin. Swing and circle four, ladies change and gents the same; right and left; the shoo-fly swing (and so on for each couple).”
“Eight hands up and go to the left; half and back; corners turn; partners sash-i-ate. First four, forwards and back; forward again and cross over; forward and back andhome you go. Gents stand and ladies swing in the center; own partners and half sash-i-ate.
“Eight hands and gone again; half and back; partners by the right and opposite by the left—sash-i-ate. Right hands across and howdy do? Left and back and how are you? Opposite partners, half sash-i-ate and go to the next (and so on for each couple).
“All hands up and go to the left. Hit the floor. Corners turn and sash-i-ate. First couple cage the bird with three arms around. Bird hop out and hoot-owl in; three arms around and hootin’ agin. Swing and circle four, ladies change and gents the same; right and left; the shoo-fly swing (and so on for each couple).”
In homes where dancing is not permitted, and often in others, “play-parties” are held, at which social games are practiced with childlike abandon: Roll the Platter, Weavilly Wheat, Needle’s Eye, We Fish Who Bite, Grin an’ Go ’Foot, Swing the Cymblin, Skip t’ m’ Lou (pronounced “Skip-tum a-loo”) and many others of a rollicking, half-dancing nature.
Round the house; skip t’ m’ Lou, my darlin’.Steal my partner and I’ll steal again; skip (etc.).Take her and go with her—I don’t care; skip (etc.).I can get another as pretty as you; skip (etc.).Pretty as a red-bird, and prettier too; skip (etc.).
A substitute for the church fair is the “poke-supper,” at which dainty pokes (bags) of cakeand other home-made delicacies are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Whoever bids-in a poke is entitled to eat with the girl who prepared it, and escort her home. The rivalry excited among the mountain swains by such artful lures may be judged from the fact that, in a neighborhood where a man’s work brings only a dollar a day, a pretty girl’s poke may be bid up to ten, twenty, or even fifty dollars.
Let the women do the work
As a rule, the only holidays observed in the mountains, outside the towns, are Christmas and New Year’s. Christmas is celebrated after the southern fashion, which seems bizarre indeed to one witnessing it for the first time. The boys and men, having no firecrackers (which they would disdain, anyway), go about shooting revolvers and drinking to the limit of capacity or supply. Blank cartridges are never used in this uproarious jollification, and the courses of the bullets are left to chance, so that discreet people keep their noses indoors. Christmas is a day of license, of general indulgence, it being tacitly assumed that punishment is remitted for any ordinary sins of the flesh that may be committed on that day. There is no church festivity, nor are Christmas trees ever set up. Few mountain children hang up their stockings, and many have never heard of Santa Claus.
New Year’s Day is celebrated with whatever effervescence remains from Christmas, and in the same manner; but generally it is a feeble reminder, as the liquid stimulus has run short and there are many sore heads in the neighborhood.
Most of the mountain preachers nowadays denounce dances and “play-parties” as sinful diversions, though their real objection seems to be that such gatherings are counter-attractions that thin out the religious ones. Be that as it may, they certainly have put a damper on frolics, so that in very many mountain settlements “goin’ to meetin’” is recognized primarily as a social function and affords almost the only chance for recreation in which family can join family without restraint.
Meetings are held in the log schoolhouse. The congregation ranges itself, men on one side, women on the other, on rude benches that sometimes have no backs. Everybody goes. If one judged from attendance he would rate our highlanders as the most religious people in America. This impression is strengthened, in a stranger, by the grave and astoundingly patient attention that is given an illiterate or nearly illiterate minister while he holds forth for two or three mortal hours on the beauties of predestination,free-will, foreordination, immersion, foot-washing, or on the delinquencies of “them acorn-fed critters that has gone New Light over in Cope’s Cove.”
After anal frescolunch, everybody doggedly returns to hear another circuit-rider expound and denounce at the top of his voice until late afternoon—as long as “the spirit lasts” and he has “good wind.” When he warms up, he throws in a gaspingahoruhat short intervals, which constitutes the “holy tone.” Doctor MacClintock gives this example: “Oh, brethren, repent ye, and repent ye of your sins, ah; fer if ye don’t ah, the Lord, ah, he will grab yer by the seat of yer pants, ah, and held yer over hell fire till ye holler like a coon!”
During these services there is a good deal of running in and out by the men and boys, most of whom gradually congregate on the outside to whittle, gossip, drive bargains, and debate among themselves some point of dogma that is too good to keep still about.
Nearly all of our highlanders, from youth upward, show an amazing fondness for theological dispute. This consists mainly in capping texts, instead of reasoning, with the single-minded purpose of confusing or downing an opponent. Into this battle of memories ratherthan of wits the most worthless scapegrace will enter with keen gusto and perfect seriousness. I have known two or three hundred mountain lumber-jacks, hard-swearing and hard-drinking tough-as-they-make-’ems, to be whetted to a fighting edge over the rocky problem “Was Saul damned?” (Can a suicide enter the kingdom of heaven?)
The mountaineers are intensely, universally Protestant. You will seldom find a backwoodsman who knows what a Roman Catholic is. As John Fox says, “He is the only man in the world whom the Catholic Church has made little or no effort to proselyte. Dislike of Episcopalianism is still strong among people who do not know, or pretend not to know, what the word means. ‘Any Episcopalians around here?’ asked a clergyman at a mountain cabin. ‘I don’t know,’ said the old woman. ‘Jim’s got the skins of a lot o’ varmints up in the loft. Mebbe you can find one up thar.’”
The first settlers of Appalachia mainly were Presbyterians, as became Scotch-Irishmen, but they fell away from that faith, partly because the wilderness was too poor to support a regular ministry, and partly because it was too democratic for Calvinism with its supreme authority of the clergy. This much of seventeenthcentury Calvinism the mountaineer retains: a passion for hair-splitting argument over points of doctrine, and the cocksure intolerance of John Knox; but the ancestral creed itself has been forgotten.
The circuit-rider, whether Methodist or Baptist, found here a field ripe for his harvest. Being himself self-supporting and unassuming, he won easily the confidence of the people. He preached a highly emotional religion that worked his audience into the ecstasy that all primitive people love. And he introduced a mighty agent of evangelization among outdoor folk when he started the camp-meeting.
The season for camp-meetings is from mid-August to October. The festival may last a week in one place. It is a jubilee-week to the work-worn and home-chained women, their only diversion from a year of unspeakably monotonous toil. And for the young folks, it is their theater, their circus, their county fair. (I say this with no disrespect: “big-meetin’ time” is a gala week, if there be any such thing at all in the mountains—its attractiveness is full as much secular as spiritual to the great body of the people.)
It is a camp by day only, or up to closing time. No mountaineer owns a tent. Preachersand exhorters are housed nearby, and visitors from all the country scatter about with their friends, or sleep in the open, cooking their meals by the wayside.
In these backwoods revival meetings we can witness to-day the weird phenomena of ungovernable shouting, ecstasy, bodily contortions, trance, catalepsy, and other results of hypnotic suggestion and the contagious one-mindedness of an overwrought crowd. This is called “taking a big through,” and is regarded as the madness of supernatural joy. It is a mild form of that extraordinary frenzy which swept the Kentucky settlements in 1800, when thousands of men and women at the camp-meetings fell victims to “the jerks,” “barking exercises,” erotic vagaries, physical wreckage, or insanity, to which the frenzy led.
Many mountaineers are easily carried away by new doctrines extravagantly presented. Religious mania is taken for inspiration by the superstitious who are looking for “signs and wonders.” At one time Mormon prophets lured women from the backwoods of western Carolina and eastern Tennessee. Later there was a similar exodus of people to the Castellites, a sect of whom it was commonly remarked that “everybody who joins the Castellites goescrazy.” In our day the same may be said of the Holy Rollers and Holiness People.
In a feud town of eastern Kentucky, not long ago, I saw two Holiness exhorters prancing before a solemnly attentive crowd in the court-house square, one of them shouting and exhibiting the “holy laugh,” while the other pointed to the Cumberland River and cried, “I don’t sayifI had the faith, I say Ihavethe faith, to walk over that river dry-shod!” I scanned the crowd, and saw nothing but belief, or willingness to believe, on any countenance. Of course, most mountaineers are more intelligent than that; but few of them are free from superstitions of one kind or other. There are to-day many believers in witchcraft among them (though none own it to any but their intimates) and nearly everybody in the hills has faith in portents.
The mountain clergy, as a general rule, are hostile to “book larnin’,” for “there ain’t no Holy Ghost in it.” One of them who had spent three months at a theological school told President Frost, “Yes, the seminary is a good place ter go and git rested up, but ’tain’t worth while fer me ter go thar no more ’s long as I’ve got good wind.”
It used to amuse me to explain how I knewthat the earth was a sphere; but one day, when I was busy, a tiresome old preacher put the everlasting question to me: “Do you believe the yearth is round?” An impish perversity seized me and I answered, “No—all blamed humbug!” “Amen!” cried my delighted catechist, “I knowed in reason you had more sense.”
In general the religion of the mountaineers has little influence on every-day behavior, little to do with the moral law. Salvation is by faith alone, and not by works. Sometimes a man is “churched” for breaking the Sabbath, “cussin’,” “tale-bearin’”; but sins of the flesh are rarely punished, being regarded as amiable frailties of mankind. It should be understood that the mountaineer’s morals are “all tail-first,” like those of Alan Breck in Stevenson’sKidnapped.
One of our old-timers nonchalantly admitted in court that he and a preacher had marked a false corner-tree which figured in an important land suit. On cross-examination he was asked:
“You admit that you and Preacher X—— forged that corner-tree? Didn’t you give Preacher X—— a good character, in your testimony? Do you consider it consistent with his profession as a minister of the Gospel to forge corner-trees?”
“Aw,” replied the witness, “religion ain’t got nothin’ to do with corner-trees!”
John Fox relates that, “A feud leader who had about exterminated the opposing faction, and had made a good fortune for a mountaineer while doing it, for he kept his men busy getting out timber when they weren’t fighting, said to me in all seriousness:
“‘I have triumphed agin my enemies time and time agin. The Lord’s on my side, and I gits a better and better Christian ever’ year.’
“A preacher, riding down a ravine, came upon an old mountaineer hiding in the bushes with his rifle.
“‘What are you doing there, my friend?’
“‘Ride on, stranger,’ was the easy answer. ‘I’m a-waitin’ fer Jim Johnson, and with the help of the Lawd I’m goin’ to blow his damn head off.’”
But let us never lose sight of the fact that these people, intellectually, are not living in our age. To judge them fairly we must go back and get a medieval point of view, which, by the way, persisted in Europe and America until well into the Georgian period. If history be too dry, read Stevenson’sKidnapped, and especially its sequelDavid Balfour, to learn what that viewpoint was. The parallel is so close—eighteenth century Britain and twentieth century Appalachia—that here we walk the same paths with Alan and David, the Edinboro’ law-sharks, Katriona and Lady Allardyce. The only difference of moment is that we have no aristocracy.
As for the morals of our highlanders, they are precisely what any well-read person would expect after taking their belatedness into consideration. In speech and conduct, when at ease among themselves, they are frank, old-fashioned Englishmen and Scots, such as Fielding and Smollet and Pepys and Burns have shown us to the life. Their manners are boorish, of course, judged by a feminized modern standard, and their home conversation is as coarse as the mixed-company speeches in Shakespeare’s comedies or the offhand pleasantries of Good Queen Bess.
But what is refinement? What is morality?
“I don’t mind,” said the Belovéd Vagabond, “I don’t mind the frank dungheap outside a German peasant’s kitchen window; but what I loathe and abominate is the dungheap hidden beneath Hedwige’s draper papa’s parlor floor.” And we do well to consider that fine remark by Sir Oliver Lodge: “Vice is reversion to a lower typeafter perception of a higher.”
I have seen the worst as well as the best of Appalachia. Thereare“places on Sand Mountain”—scores of them—where unspeakable orgies prevail at times. But I know that between these two extremes the great mass of the mountain people are very like persons of similar station elsewhere, just human, with human frailties, only a little more honest, I think, in owning them. And even in the tenebra of far-back coves, where conditions exist as gross as anything to be found in the wynds and closes of our great cities, there is this blessed difference: that these half-wild creatures have not beenhopelesslysubmerged, have not been driven into desperate war against society. The worst of them still have good traits, strong characters, something responsive to decent treatment. They are kind-hearted, loyal to their friends, quick to help anyone in distress. They know nothing of civilization. They are simplythe unstarted—and their thews are sound.
Oneday I handed a volume of John Fox’s stories to a neighbor and asked him to read it, being curious to learn how those vivid pictures of mountain life would impress one who was born and bred in the same atmosphere. He scanned a few lines of the dialogue, then suddenly stared at me in amazement.
“What’s the matter with it?” I asked, wondering what he could have found to startle him at the very beginning of a story.
“Why, that fellerdon’t know how to spell!”
Gravely I explained that dialect must be spelled as it is pronounced, so far as possible, or the life and savor of it would be lost. But it was of no use. My friend was outraged. “That tale-teller then is jest makin’ fun of the mountain people by misspellin’ our talk. You educated folks don’t spell your own words the way you say them.”
A most palpable hit; and it gave me a new point of view.
To the mountaineers themselves their speech is natural and proper, of course, and when they see it bared to the spotlight, all eyes drawn toward it by an orthography that is as odd to them as it is to us, they are stirred to wrath, just as we would be if our conversation were reported by some Josh Billings or Artemas Ward.
The curse of dialect writing is elision. Still, no one can write it without using the apostrophe more than he likes to; for our highland speech is excessively clipped. “I’m comin’ d’reck’ly” has a quaintness that should not be lost. We cannot visualize the shambling but eager mountaineer with a sample of ore in his hand unless the writer reports him faithfully: “Wisht you’d ’zamine this rock fer me—I heern tell you was one o’ them ’sperts.”
Although the hillsmen save some breath in this way, they waste a good deal by inserting sounds where they do not belong. Sometimes it is only an added consonant: gyarden, acrost, corkus (caucus); sometimes a syllable: loaferer, musicianer, suddenty. Occasionally a word is both added to and clipped from, as cyarn (carrion). They are fond of grace syllables: “I gotta me a deck o’ cyards.” “There ain’t nary bitty sense in it.”
More interesting are substitutions of one sound for another. In mountain dialect all vowels may be interchanged with others. Various sounds ofaare confused withe, as hed (had), kem (came), keerful; or withi, grit (grate), rifle (raffle); witho, pomper, toper (taper), wrop; or withu, fur, ruther. So any other vowel may serve in place ofe: sarve, chist, upsot, tumble. Any other may displacei: arn (iron), eetch, hender, whope or whup. Theosounds are more stable, but we have crap (crop), yan, clus, and many similar variants. Any other vowel may do foru: braysh or bresh (brush), shet, sich, shore (sure).
Mountaineers have peculiar difficulty with diphthongs: haar (hair), cheer (chair), brile, and a host of others. The word coil is variously pronounced quile, querl or quorl.
Substitution of consonants is not so common as of vowels, but most hillsmen say nabel (navel), ballet (ballad), Babtis’, rench or rinch, brickie (brittle), and many say atter or arter, jue (due), tejus, vascinator (fascinator—a woman’s scarf). They never droph, nor substitute anything for it.
The word woman has suffered some strange sea-changes. Most mountaineers pronounce it correctly, but some drop thew(’oman), othersadd anr(womern and wimmern), while in Michell County, North Carolina, we hear the extraordinary forms ummern and dummern (“La, look at all the dummerunses a-comin’!”)
On the other hand, some words that most Americans mispronounce are always sounded correctly in the southern highlands, as dew and new (never doo, noo). Creek is always given its trueeesound, never crick. Nare (as we spell it in dialect stories) is simply the right pronunciation of ne’er, and nary is ne’er a, with theaturned into a shortisound.
It should be understood that the dialect varies a good deal from place to place, and, even in the same neighborhood, we rarely hear all families speaking it alike. Outlanders who essay to write it are prone to err by making their characters speak it too consistently. It is only in the backwoods, or among old people and the penned-at-home women, that the dialect is used with any integrity. In railroad towns we hear little of it, and farmers who trade in those towns adapt their speech somewhat to the company they may be in. The same man, at different times, may say can’t and cain’t, set and sot, jest and jes’ and jist, atter and arter or after, seed and seen, here and hyur and hyar, heerd and heern or heard, sich and sech, tookand tuk—there is no uniformity about it. An unconscious sense of euphony seems to govern the choice of hit or it, there or thar.
Since the Appalachian people have a marked Scotch-Irish strain, we would expect their speech to show a strong Scotch influence. So far as vocabulary is concerned, there is really little of it. A few words, caigy (cadgy), coggled, fernent, gin for if, needcessity, trollop, almost exhaust the list of distinct Scotticisms. The Scotch-Irish, as we call them, were mainly Ulstermen, and the Ulster dialect of to-day bears little analogy to that of Appalachia.
Scotch influence does appear, however, in one vital characteristic of the pronunciation: with few exceptions our highlanders soundrdistinctly wherever it occurs, though they never trill it. In the British Isles this constant sounding ofrin all positions is peculiar, I think, to Scotland, Ireland, and a few small districts in the northern border counties of England. With us it is general practice outside of New England and those parts of the southern lowlands that had no flood of Celtic immigration in the eighteenth century. I have never heard a Carolina mountaineer say niggah or No’th Ca’lina, though in the last word the syllablerois often elided.
In some mountain districts we hear do’ (door), flo’, mo’, yo’, co’te, sca’ce (longa), pusson; but such skipping of theris common only where lowland influence has crept in. Much oftener theris dropped from dare, first, girl, horse, nurse, parcel, worth (dast, fust, gal, hoss, nuss, passel, wuth). By way of compensation the hillsmen sometimes insert a euphonicrwhere it has no business; just as many New Englanders say, “The idear of it!”
Throughout Appalachia such words as last, past, advantage, are pronounced with the same vowel sound as is heard in man. This helps to delimit the people, classifying them with Pennsylvanians and Westerners: a linguistic grouping that will prove significant when we come to study the origin and history of this isolated race.
An editor who had made one or two short trips into the mountains once wrote me that he thought the average mountaineer’s vocabulary did not exceed three hundred words. This may be a natural inference if one spends but a few weeks among these people and sees them only under the prosaic conditions of workaday life. But gain their intimacy and you shall find that even the illiterates among them have a range of expression that is truly remarkable. I have myself taken down from the lips of Carolinamountaineers some eight hundred dialectical or obsolete words, to say nothing of the much greater number of standard English terms that they command.
Seldom is a “hill-billy” at a loss for a word. Lacking other means of expression, there will come “spang” from his mouth a coinage of his own. Instantly he will create (always from English roots, of course) new words by combination, or by turning nouns into verbs or otherwise interchanging the parts of speech.
Crudity or deficiency of the verb characterizes the speech of all primitive peoples. In mountain vernacular many words that serve as verbs are only nouns of action, or adjectives, or even adverbs. “That bear ’ll meat me a month.” “They churched Pitt for tale-bearin’.” “Granny kept faultin’ us all day.” “Are ye fixin’ to go squirrelin’?” “Sis blouses her waist a-purpose to carry a pistol.” “My boy Jesse book-kept for the camp.” “I disgust bad liquor.” “This poke salat eats good.” “I ain’t goin’ to bed it no longer” (lie abed). “We can muscle this log up.” “I wouldn’t pleasure them enough to say it.” “Josh ain’t much on sweet-heartin’.” “I don’t confidence them dogs much.” “The creek away up thar turkey-tails out into numerous leetle forks.”
A verb will be coined from an adverb: “We better git some wood, bettern we?” Or from an adjective: “Much that dog and see won’t he come along” (pet him, make much of him). “I didn’t do nary thing to contrary her.” “Baby, that onion ’ll strong ye!” “Little Jimmy fell down and benastied himself to beat the devil.”
Conversely, nouns are created from verbs. “Hit don’t make no differ.” “I didn’t hear no give-out at meetin’” (announcement). “You can git ye one more gittin’ o’ wood up thar.” “That Nantahala is a master shut-in, jest a plumb gorge.” Or from an adjective: “Them bugs—the little old hatefuls!” “If anybody wanted a history of this county for fifty years he’d git a lavish of it by reading that mine-suit testimony.” Or from an adverb: “Nance tuk the biggest through at meetin’!” (shouting spell). An old lady quoted to me in a plaintive quaver:
“It matters not, so I’ve been told,Where the body goes when the heart grows cold;
“But,” she added, “a person has a rather about where he’d be put.”
In mountain vernacular the Old English strong past tense still lives in begun, drunk,holped, rung, shrunk, sprung, stunk, sung, sunk, swum. Holp is used both as preterite and as infinitive: theois long, and theldistinctly sounded by most of the people, but elided by such as drop it from almost, already, self (thelis elided from help by many who use that form of the verb).
Examples of a strong preterite with dialectical change of the vowel are bruk, brung, drap or drapped, drug, friz, roke or ruck (raked), saunt (sent), shet, shuck (shook), whoped (longo). The variant whupped is a Scotticism. Whope is sometimes used in the present tense, but whup is more common. By some the vowel of whup is sounded likeooin book (Mr. Fox writes “whoop,” which, I presume, he intends for that sound).
In many cases a weak preterite supplants the proper strong one: div, driv, fit, gi’n or give, rid, riv, riz, writ, done, run, seen or seed, blowed, crowed, drawed, growed, knowed, throwed.
There are many corrupt forms of the verb, such as gwine for gone or going, mought (mowt) for might, dim, het, ort or orter, wed (weeded), war (was or were—theaas in far), shun (shone), cotch (in all tenses) or cotched, fotch or fotched, borned, hurted, dremp.
Peculiar adjectives are formed from verbs. “Chair-bottoming is easy settin’-down work.” “When my youngest was a leetle set-along child” (interpreted as “settin’ along the floor”). “That Thunderhead is the torndowndest place!” “Them’s the travellinest hosses ever I seed.” “She’s the workinest woman!” “Jim is the disablest one o’ the fam’ly.” “Damn this fotch-on kraut that comes in tin cans!”
A verb may serve as an adverb: “If I’d a-been thoughted enough.” An adverb may be used as an adjective: “I hope the folks with you is gaily” (well). An adjective can serve as an adverb: “He laughed master.” Sometimes a conjunction is employed as a preposition: “We have oblige to take care on him.”
These are not mere blunders of individual illiterates, but usages common throughout the mountains, and hence real dialect.
The ancient syllabic plural is preserved in beasties (horses), nesties, posties, trousies (these are not diminutives), and in that strange word dummerunses that I cited before.
Pleonasms are abundant. “I done done it” (have done it or did do it). “Durin’ the while.” “In this day and time.” “I thought it would surely, undoubtedly turn cold.” “Asmall, little bitty hole.” “Jane’s a tol’able big, large, fleshy woman.” “I ginerally, usually take a dram mornin’s.” “These ridges is might’ nigh straight up and down, and, as the feller said, perpendic’lar.”
Everywhere in the mountains we hear of biscuit-bread, ham-meat, rifle-gun, rock-clift, ridin’-critter, cow-brute, man-person, women-folks, preacher-man, granny-woman and neighbor-people. In this category belong the famous double-barreled pronouns: we-all and you-all in Kentucky, we-uns and you-uns in Carolina and Tennessee. (I have even heard such locution as this: “Let’s we-uns all go over to youerunses house.”) Such usages are regarded generally as mere barbarisms, and so they are in English, but Miss Murfree cites correlatives in the Romance languages: Frenchnous autres, Italiannoi altri, Spanishnosotros.
The mountaineers have some queer ways of intensifying expression. “I’dtella man,” with the stress as here indicated, is simply a strong affirmative. “We had one moretime” means a rousing good time. “P’int-blank” is a superlative or an epithet: “We jist p’int-blank got it to do.” “Well, p’int-blank, if they ever come back again, I’ll move!”
A double negative is so common that it maybe crowded into a single word: “I did it the unthoughtless of anything I ever done in my life.” Triple negatives are easy: “I ain’t got nary none.” A mountaineer can accomplish the quadruple: “That boy ain’t never done nothin’ nohow.” Yea, even the quintuple: “I ain’t never seen no men-folks of no kind do no washin’.”