Our Southern Highlanders Part 17

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 roughness of 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, it _is_ what 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 c.o.c.kloft, 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 walls or 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 huge _tinted_ "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, you must 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 "s.l.u.t" 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 sc.r.a.per 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 a hand-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 embarra.s.sment 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, and immediately everybody else did the same. That is the way to do: just _go_ to 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 cla.s.s 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 ma.s.s, or the average, and the pictures here given are typical of that ma.s.s. It is not the well-to-do valley people, but the real mountaineers, who are especially interesting to the reading public; and they are interesting _chiefly_ because they preserve traits and manners that 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 att.i.tude 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 cla.s.s 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 through cracks 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 mult.i.tude 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 as Lincoln, speaking of his boyhood, called "pretty pinching times." Hickory ashes then are used as a subst.i.tute 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 subst.i.tute 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 pa.s.s the night.

"His hostess, as a 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 gla.s.ses 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 dest.i.tute 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 brother Democrat 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 not lose 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 dest.i.tution. 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 ent.i.tled 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 the subject. 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 a.s.sumption 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 of Mars 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.

CHAPTER XII

HOME FOLKS AND NEIGHBOR PEOPLE

Despite the 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. n.o.body's nerves are on edge. Our highlander views all exigencies of life with the calm fort.i.tude 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 n.o.body'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 far he 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 pa.s.sed 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 her proper 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 att.i.tude of mind.

Mountain women marry early, many of them at fourteen or fifteen, and nearly all before they are 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 ch.o.r.es 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 a.s.sured 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 one of these mountain burial-places, nothing so mutely evident of neglect.