The diet of the mountaineers was enough to kill them even after they’ve survived the rough handling of the midwives, the “stretchin’ hives” and the gamut of diseases. Of course it varies somewhat with the seasons and economic circumstances, but cornbread and pork are mainstays in the highlander diet. Green vegetables and fruit were all too rare and even when vegetables were served they were very greasy as to be well-nigh indigestible. The highlanders put great store by grease. There is a story of a mountaineer who went down to the Piedmont to visit a relative who had prospered in the comparatively level land. Upon his return his report was this: “You know, Maw, I don’t think Tom and them is so well off as we thought they was. They got a nice house and a lot o’ nice stock, but they didn’t have hardly no grease on the table a-tall.”
There was a time when liquor making was considered just about as important as putting a garden. Maybe more so, because a family could get along without garden sass. Once a well-known citizen who spent his lifetime in the county was elected sheriff. One of his first acts was to call into his office all the moonshiners of the county, and at the appointed time, they came.
The sheriff stood behind his big desk, pushed his hat to the back of his head, hooked his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, so the shiny new star would show in all its glory, and gave forth with words of surpassing wisdom:
“Fellers,” he said, “they elected me to be sheriff of this here county and I’ve swore to do my duty. No I know you boys make moonshine and that put me in one helluva spot. I’ve knowed you fellers, man and boy, since we went fishin’ and swimmin’ together upon on Snowbird. I know ever’ one o’ you by name and I know where you stills are”.
“Now I’m willin’ to do my part if you’ll do yours. If you just keep on a makin’ wildcat for yourselves and your friends without infringin’ on the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of anyone else, you can keep on a makin’ wildcat till hell freezes over, as far as I’m concerned. That’s all boys!”
The peace and quiet of that regime are still the talk of the hills. If a moonshiner got out of line, he had to answer to his fellow moonshiners.
One important pastime of local boys was that of imitating the noise of every bird and beast in the woods. This faculty was not merely a pastime, but a very necessary part of education on account of its utility in certain circumstances. The imitations of the gobbling and other sounds of wild turkeys often brought those keen eyed and ever watchful tenants of the forest within the reach of a rifle. The bleating of the fawn brought her dame to her death in the same way. The hunter often collected a company of mopish owls to the trees about his camp and amused himself with their hoarse screaming; his howl would raise and obtain responses from a pack of wolves, so as to inform him of their neighborhood, as well as guard him against their depradations.
This imitative faculty was sometimes requisite as a measure of precaution in war. The Cherokee, when scattered about, often collected together by imitating turkey by day and wolves or owls by night.
“The moon had more to do with running the country than the sun did” said the old timer of the days of his youth. Root crops and tubers, plants of darkness, are planted in the dark of the moon; above ground crops in the light of the moon. The dark of the moon is also the time for deadening trees, killing weeds, riving shingles, splitting rails, laying rail fences, taking medicine, charming warts and sites. The light of the moon is the time when fruit cannot be killed, when fruit trees should be pruned and cut for good growth, potatoes dug and pork meat slaughtered. The signs of the zodiac also control planting and disease. Plant cabbage when the sign is in the head; cucumbers, melons, and fruit when it is in the twins; and corn in Scorpio; and castrate pigs “when th’ signs leaves th’ privates an’ is a startin’ down.” One is most susceptible to stomach trouble in Cancer, through diseases in Taurus. Thus the almanac occupies a place beside the Bible, and if one can make out the text as well as the signs, “not more for the weather prophecies” according to one informant “than for the witty jokes and sayings together with a good deal of world history.”
In the old days the animals were fond of amusement, and were constantly getting up grand meetings and contests of various kinds, with prizes for the winner. On one occasions a prize was offered to the animal with the finest coat, and although the otter deserved to win it, the rabbit stole his coat, and nearly got the prize for himself. After a while the animals got together again, and made a large pair of horns, to be given to the best runner. The race was to be through a thicket, and the one who made the best time, with the horns on his head, was to get them. Everybody knew from the first that either the deer or the rabbit would be the winner, but bets were high on the rabbit, who was a great runner and a general favorite. But the rabbit had no tail, and always went by jumps, and his friends were afraid that the horns would make him fall over in the bushes unless he had something to balance them, so they fixed up a tail for him with a stick and some bird’s down.
“Now,” says the rabbit, “let me look over the ground where I am to run.”
So he went into the thicket and was gone so long that at last one of the animals went to see what had become of him, and there he found the rabbit hard at work gnawing down bushes and cutting the limbs of the trees, and making a road for himself clear through the other side of the swamp. The messenger did not let the rabbit see him, but came back quietly and told his story to the others. Pretty soon the rabbit came out again, ready to put on the horns and begin the race, but several of the animals said that he have been gone so long that it looked as if he must have been cutting a road through the bushes. The rabbit denied it up and down, but they all went into the thickets and there was the open road, sure enough. Then the chief got very angry, and said to the rabbit, “Since you are so fond of the business, you may spend the rest of your life gnawling twigs and bushes,” and so the rabbit does to this day. The other animals would allow the rabbit to run at all now, so they put the horns on the deer, who plunged into the worse part of the thicket, and made his way out to the other side, then turned round and came back again on a different track, in such fine style that every one said he had won the horns. But the rabbit felt sore about it, and resolved to get even with him.
One day, soon after the contest for the horns, the rabbit stretched a large grape vine across the trail, and gnawed it nearly in two in the middle. Then he went back a piece and took a good run, and jumped up at the vine. He kept on running and jumping up at the vine, until the deer came along and asked him what he was doing.
“Don’t you see?” says the rabbit. “I’m so strong that I can bite through that grape vine at one jump.”
The deer could hardly believe this, and wanted to see it done. So the rabbit ran back, made a tremendous spring, and bit through the vine where he had gnawed it before. The deer, when he saw that, said “Well, I can do it if you can.” So the rabbit stretched a larger grape vine across the trail, but without gnawing it in the middle. Then the deer ran back as he had seen the rabbit do, made a powerful spring, and struck the grape vine right in the center; but it only flew back and threw him over on his head. He tried again and again, until he was all brushed and bleeding.
“Let me see your teeth”, at last said the rabbit. SO the deer showed him his teeth, which were long and sharp, like a wolf’s teeth.
“No wonder you can’t do it,” said the rabbit; “your teeth are too blunt to bite anything. Let me sharpen them for you, like mine. My teeth are so sharp that I can cut through a stick like a knife.” And he showed him a black locust twig of which rabbits gnaw the young shoots, which he had shaved off as well as a knife could do it, just in rabbit fashion.
The deer thought that was just the thing. So the rabbit got a hard stone, with rough edges and filed and filed away at the deer’s teeth, until they were filed down almost to the gums.
“Now try it,” says the rabbit. SO the deer tried again, but this time he couldn’t bite at all.
“Now you’ve paid for your horns,” said the rabbit, as he laughed and started home through the bushes. Ever since then the deer’s teeth are so blunt that he cannot chew anything but grass and leaves.
If the weather, on the whole, is outside of man’s control, not so with love and health – his two chief fields for charms and cures. Folk medicine shows some division of labor – in so far as the men minister to the farm animals and stock or serve as “wart takers,” “yerb” doctors, and “chills an’ fever” doctors – and some scientific foundation, in the empiric “materia medica” (developed by trial and error) of herbs, leaves, barks, roots, seeds, fat meat, etc., used for teas, poultices and unguents. But the woman, especially the “granny woman” or midwife, the herb woman, and the old woman who has raised a large family to healthy maturity, were the chief practitioner; and mysticism, and the doctrines of the scapegoat and of “like cure like” (signatures and “the hair of the dog that bit one”) predominate.
Thus the poison of tobacco kills poison in the system; smoking makes the corpulent “spit their fat away”; grease rendered from red earthworms mixed with turpentine, asafetida, and red-onion juice makes a good liniment because all these substances draw their strength from the earth; snake oil cures snake bites; onions are used to take up “yallar jaundice”, the cut halves of the onion turning yellow as they take up the disease from the air; a child may be cured of fits by giving it a small dog to play and sleep with so that the dog “takes” the fits from the child and dies; a sty or venereal disease may be cured by passing it on to another; warts may be “bought” or “charmed off” by tying an equal number of knots in a horsehair or string and buying, burning or losing it. On the whole charms cures lend themselves to the treatment of ailments characterized by sudden appearance and disappearance, seizure, or unpredictability, such as fits, insanity, rheumatism, bleeding, chills and fever, etc. or panaceas (spitting on a stone to relieve pain) or preventives (wearing asafetida, a buckeye, beads, red flannel, a copper ring, wrist or angle band, a coin).
Folk medicine naturally attaches more importance to the “spell” than to the “simple”, and there is a good deal of hocus pocus in “healing”, especially in the treatment of affections due to heat and cold, which seem to require the cast out of demons. E.g. old women can cool fevers by the laying of hands; chills can be driven away by boring a deep hole in the sunny side of an oak tree, blowing your breath into it, and plugging up the hold, with the result that the tree dies, fire can be driven out of burns and scalds by blowing or spitting upon the inflammation,, holding it close to a hot fire or stove, or applying a moistened finger tip and muttering some mystic “sayin’”, such as a verse from the Bible, passed on from a person of the opposite sex and shrouded in secrecy, lest the charm be broken. Similar magic formulae are used to heal warts, ulcers, “risin’s”, sties, etc., and to stop bleeding; a posthumous child can cure croup or “thrash” by blowing into the patient’s mouth; seventh sons of seventh sons and persons born with a caul are “double-sighted” and make good doctors. Yet in spite of all this there is rarely a suspicion of charlatanism, positive deception or insincerity, since most of the healing is done and taken in good faith.
The diet of the mountaineers was enough to kill them even after they’ve survived the rough handling of the midwives, the “stretchin’ hives” and the gamut of diseases. Of course it varies somewhat with the seasons and economic circumstances, but cornbread and pork are mainstays in the highlander diet. Green vegetables and fruit were all too rare and even when vegetables were served they were very greasy as to be well-nigh indigestible. The highlanders put great store by grease. There is a story of a mountaineer who went down to the Piedmont to visit a relative who had prospered in the comparatively level land. Upon his return his report was this: “You know, Maw, I don’t think Tom and them is so well off as we thought they was. They got a nice house and a lot o’ nice stock, but they didn’t have hardly no grease on the table a-tall.”
