Our Southern Highlanders Part 14

It developed that when I arrived there was barely enough meal for the family's supper and breakfast. My host had to sh.e.l.l some corn, go in almost pitch darkness, without a lantern, to a tub-mill far down the branch, wait while it ground out a few spoonfuls to the minute and bring the meal back.

Next morning, when I offered pay for my entertainment, he waved it aside. "I ain't never tuk money from company," he said, "and this ain't no time to begin."

Laughing, I slipped some silver into the hand of the eldest child. "This is not pay; it's a present." The girl was awed into speechlessness at sight of money of her own, and the parents did not know how to thank me for her, but bade me "Stay on, stranger; pore folks has a pore way, but you're welcome to what we got."

This incident is a little out of the common, nowadays; but it is typical of what was customary until lumbering and other industrial works began to invade the solitudes. To-day it is the rule to charge twenty-five cents a meal and the same for lodging, regardless of what the fare and the bed may be. When you think of it, this is right, for "the porer folks is the harder it is to _git_ things."

The mountaineers always are eager for news. In the drab monotony of their shut-in lives the coming of an unknown traveler is an event that will set the whole neighborhood gossiping. Every word and action of his will be discussed for weeks after he has gone his way. This, of course, is a trait of rural people everywhere; but imagine, if you can, how it may be intensified where there are no newspapers, few visitors, and where the average man gets maybe two or three letters a year!

Riding up a branch road, you come upon a white-bearded patriarch who halts you with a wave of the hand.

"Stranger--meanin' no harm--_whar_ are you gwine?"

You tell him.

"What did you say your name was?"

You had not mentioned it; but you do so now.

"What mought you-uns foller for a living?"

It is wise to humor the old man, and tell him frankly what is your business "up this 'way-off branch."

Half a mile farther you espy a girl coming toward you. She stops like a startled fawn, wide-eyed with amazement. Then, at a bound, she dodges into a thicket, doubles on her course and runs back as fast as her nimble bare legs can carry her to report that "Some-_body_ 's comin'!"

At the next house, stopping for a drink of water, you chat a few moments. High up the opposite hill is a half-hidden cabin from which keen eyes scrutinize your every move, and a woman cries to her boy: "Run, Kit, down to Mederses, and ax who _is_ he!"

As you approach a cross-roads store every idler p.r.i.c.ks up to instant attention. Your presence is detected from every neighboring cabin and cornfield. Long John quits his plowing, Red John drops his axe, Sick John ("who's allers ailin', to hear _him_ tell") pops out of bed, and Lyin' John (whose "mouth ain't no praar-book, if it _does_ open and shet") grabs his hat, with "I jes' got ter know who that feller is!"

Then all Johns descend their several paths, to congregate at the store and estimate the stranger as though he were so many board-feet of lumber in the tree or so many pounds of beef on the hoof.

In every settlement there is somebody who makes a pleasure of gathering and spreading news. Such a one we had--a happy-go-lucky fellow from whom, they said, "you can hear the news jinglin' afore he comes within gunshot." It amused me to record the many ways he had of announcing his mission by indirection. Here is the list:

"I'm jes' broguin' about."

"Yes, I'm jest cooterin' around."

"I'm santerin' about."

"Oh, I'm jes' prodjectin' around."

"Jist traffickin' about."

"No, I ain't workin' none--jest spuddin' around."

"Me? I'm jes' shacklin' around."

"Yea, la! I'm jist loaferin' about."

And yet one hears that our mountaineers have a limited vocabulary!

Although this is no place to discuss the mountain dialect, I must explain that to "brogue" means to go about in brogues (brogans nowadays). A "cooter" is a box-tortoise, and the noun is turned into a verb with an ease characteristic of the mountaineers. "Spuddin' around"

means toddling or jolting along. To "shummick" (also "shammick") is to shuffle about, idly nosing into things, as a bear does when there is nothing serious in view. And "shacklin' around" pictures a shackly, loose-jointed way of walking, expressive of the idle vagabond.

A stranger takes the mountaineers for simple characters that can be gauged at a glance. This illusion--for it is an illusion--comes from the childlike directness with which they ask him the most intimate questions about himself, from the genuine good-will with which they admit him to their homes, and from the stark openness of their domestic affairs in houses where no privacy can possibly exist.

In so far as simplicity means only a shrewd regard for essentials, a rigid exclusion of whatever can be done without, perhaps no white race is nearer a state of nature than these highlanders of ours. Yet this relates only to the externals of life. Diogenes sat in a tub, but his thoughts were deep as the sea. And whoever estimates our mountaineers as a shallow-minded or open-minded people has much to learn.

When Long John asks, "What you aimin' to do up hyur? How much money do you make? Whar's your old woman?" he does not really expect sincere answers. Certainly he will take them with more than a grain of salt.

Conversation, with him, is a game. In quizzing you, the interests that he is actually curious about lie hidden in the back of his head, and he will proceed toward them by cunning circ.u.mventions, seeking to entrap you into telling the truth by accident. Being himself born to intrigue and skilled in dodging the leading question, he a.s.sumes that you have had equal advantages. When you discuss with him any business of serious concern, if you should go straight to the point, and open your mind frankly, he would be nonplussed.

The fact is that our highlanders are a sly, suspicious, and secretive folk. That, too, is a state of nature. Primitive society is by no means a Utopia or a Garden of Eden. In wilderness life the feral arts of concealment, spying, false "leads," and doubling on trails, are the arts self-preservative. The native backwoodsman practices them as instinctively and with as little compunction upon his own species as upon the deer and the wolf from whom he learned them.

As a friend, no one will spring quicker to your aid, reckless of consequences, and fight with you to the last ditch; but fear of betrayal lies at the very bottom of his nature. His sleepless suspicion of ulterior motives is no more, no less, than a feral trait, inherited from a long line of forebears whose isolated lives were preserved only by incessant vigilance against enemies that stalked by night and struck without warning.

Casual visitors learn nothing about the true character of the mountaineers. I am not speaking of personal but of race character--type.

No outsider can discern and measure those powerful but obscure motives, those rooted prejudices, that const.i.tute their real difference from other men, until he has lived with the people a long time on terms of intimacy. Nor can anyone be trusted to portray them if he holds a brief either for or against this people. The fluttering tourist marks only the oddities he sees, without knowing the reason for them. On the other hand, a misguided champion flies to arms at first mention of an unpleasant fact, and either denies it, clamoring for legal proof, or tries to befog the whole subject and run it on the rocks of altercation.

The mountaineers are high-strung and sensitive to criticism. No one has less use for "that worst scourge of avenging heaven, the candid friend."

Of late years they are growing conscious of their own belatedness, and that touches a tender spot. "Hit don't take a big seed to hurt a sore tooth." Since they do not see how anyone can find beauty or historic interest in ways of life that the rest of the world has cast aside, so they resent every exposure of their peculiarities as if that were holding them up to ridicule or blame.

Strange to say, it provokes them to be called mountaineers, that being a "furrin word" which they take as a term of reproach. They call themselves mountain people, or citizens; sometimes humorously "mountain boomers," the word boomer being their name for the common red squirrel which is found here only in the upper zones of the mountains.

Backwoodsman is another term that they deem opprobrious. Among themselves the backwoods are called "the sticks." Hillsman and highlander are strange words to them--and anything that is strange is suspicious. Hence it is next to impossible for anyone to write much about these people without offending them or else falling into singsong repet.i.tion of the same old terms.

I have found it beyond me to convince anyone here that my studies of the mountain dialect are made from any better motive than vulgar curiosity.

It has been my habit to jot down, on the spot, every dialectical word or variant or idiom that I hear, along with the phrase or sentence in which it occurred; for I never trust memory in such matters. And although I tell frankly what I am about, and why, yet all that the folks can or will see is that--

A chiel 's amang ye, takin' notes, And, faith, he'll prent 'em.

Nothing worse than dour looks has yet befallen me, but other scribes have not got off so easy. On more than one occasion newspaper men who went into eastern Kentucky to report feuds were escorted forcibly to the railroad and warned never to return. The feudists are scarce to blame, for the average news story of their wars is neither sacred nor profane history. It is bad enough to be shown up as an a.s.sa.s.sin; but when one is posed as "c.o.c.king the _trigger_" of a gun, or shooting a "forty-four"

bullet from a thirty-caliber "automatic _revolver_," who in Kentucky could be expected to stand it?

The novelists have their troubles, too. President Frost relates that when John Fox gave a reading from his c.u.mberland tales at Berea College "the mountain boys were ready to mob him. They had no comprehension of the nature of fiction. Mr. Fox's stories were either true or false. If they were true, then he was 'no gentleman' for telling all the family affairs of people who had entertained him with their best. If they were not true, then, of course, they were libellous upon the mountain people.

Such an att.i.tude may remind us of the general condemnation of fiction by the 'unco gude' a generation ago."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Schoolhouse]

As for settlement workers, let them teach more by example than by precept. Bishop Wilson has given them some advice that cannot be bettered: "It must be said with emphasis that our problem is an exceedingly delicate one. The Highlanders are Scotch-Irish in their high-spiritedness and proud independence. Those who would help them must do so in a perfectly frank and kindly way, showing always genuine interest in them but never a trace of patronizing condescension. As quick as a flash the mountaineer will recognize and resent the intrusion of any such spirit, and will refuse even what he sorely needs if he detects in the accents or the demeanor of the giver any indication of an air of superiority."

"The worker among the mountaineers," he continues, "must 'meet with them on the level and part on the square' and conquer their oftentimes unreasonable suspicion by genuine brotherly friendship. The less he has to say about the superiority of other sections or of the deficiencies of the mountains, the better for his cause. The fact is that comparatively few workers are at first able to pa.s.s muster in this regard under the searching and silent scrutiny of the mountain people."

Allow me to add that this is no place for the "unco gude" to exercise their talents, but rather for those whose studies and travels have taught them both tolerance and hopefulness. Some well-meaning missionaries are shocked and scandalized at what seems to them incurable perversity and race degeneration. It is nothing of the sort. There are reasons, good reasons, for the worst that we find in any h.e.l.l-fer-Sartin or Loafer's Glory. All that is the inevitable result of isolation and lack of opportunity. It is no more hopeless than the same features of life were in the Scotch highlands two centuries ago.

But it must be known that the future of this really fine race is, at bottom, an economic problem, which must be studied hand-in-hand with the educational one. Civilization only repels the mountaineer until you show him something to gain by it--he knows by instinct what he is bound to lose. There is no use in teaching cleanliness and thrift to serfs or outcasts. The _independence_ of the mountain farm must be preserved, or the fine spirit of the race will vanish and all that is manly in the Highlander will wither to the core.

It is far from my own purpose to preach or advise. "Portray the struggle, and you need write no tract." Still farther is it from my thought to let characterization degenerate into caricature. Wherever I tell anything that is unusual or below the average of backwoods life, I give fair warning that it is admitted only for spice or contrast, and let it go at that. But even in writing with severe restraint it will be necessary at times to show conditions so rude and antiquated that professional apologists will growl, and many others may find my statements hard to credit as typical of anything at all in our modern America.