The rattle of musketry is heard in front. Skirmishers must have made contact with enemy pickets. All are alert. A signal gun is fired and the artillery joins in with accumulating fury. At last the command – “Forward!” – and an overpowering urge to make contact with the enemy. Soon lines of blue are discernible Comrades begin to fall in increasing numbers. Now the shout, lost perhaps in the din of battle – “Charge!” – accompanied by a forward wave of an officer’s saber and the line leaps forward with the famous “Rebel yell.”
This yell itself is an interesting thing. It was heard at First Manassas and repeated in hundreds of charges throughout the Civil War It came to be as much a part of a Rebel’s fighting equipment as his musket. Once, indeed, more so. Toward the end of an engagement near Richmond in May, 1864, General Early rode up to a group of soldiers and said, “Well, men, we must charge them once more and then we’ll be through.” The response came back, “General, we are all out of ammunition.” Early’s ready retort was “Damn it, holler them across.” And, according to the narrator, the order was literally executed.
The Confederate yell is hard to describe. Attempts to reproduce it at Civil War re-enactments. By the very nature of things, is an inadequate representation. The voices are not battle weary, and half starved. As it flourished on the field of combat, the Rebel yell was an unpremeditated, unrestrained and utterly informal “hollering”. It had in it a mixture of fright, pent-up nervousness, exultation, hatred and a pine of pure deviltry. Yelling in attack was not peculiar to Confederates, for the Yankees went at Rebels more than once with a furious shouts on their lips. But the battle cry of Southerners was admittedly different. General “Jube” Early, who well understood the spirit of his soldiers, made a comparison of Federal and Confederate shouting as a sort of aside to his official report of the battle of Fredericksburg. “Lawton’s Brigade, without hesitating, at once dashed upon the enemy,” he said, “with the cheering peculiar to the Confederate soldier, and which is never mistaken for the studied hurrahs of the Yankees, and drove the column opposed to it down the hill.” Though obviously invidious, the general’s observation is not wholly inaccurate.
The primary function of the rousing yell was the relief of the shouter. As one Reb observed after a fight in 1864, “I always said if I ever went into a charge, I wouldn’t holler! But the very first time I fired off my gun I hollered as loud as I could, and I hollered every breath till we stopped.” At first there was no intention of inspiring terror in the enemy, but the practice soon attained such a reputation as a demoralizing agent that men were encouraged by their officers to shout as they assaulted Yankee positions.
The popular beliefs about mountain people contain many misconceptions. According to fiction, the Hillman is a seven foot combination of malnutrition and bad breeding, asleep on his front porch with the dogs. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound’s salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, “Hide yore still and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h’yar.” This feat of mountain mores is all the more remarkable because he can neither read nor write and indeed, cannot count well enough to enumerate his hogs, but must identify them by name. Should one be missing for a day or two, he musters all his kin down to second cousins and step-uncles and goes across the “mounting” for a feud. While the men folk shoot out one another’s eyeballs at artillery distances, the “chillern” go down in the valley and throw rocks, it being considered unmanly to kill women and children except in a fit of anger.
At the height of the fighting, the hog in question reels in, red of eye, and the feudists deduce that he was not killed at all, but merely knocked over somebody’s barrel of mash and subsequently went off down the valley hunting wolves. The patriarchs and their relatives regretfully suspend the fighting and repair to a clan stronghold for a square dance. Between sets they hold spitting contests in the moonlight or mournfully intone Elizabethan ballads in purest Shakespearean idiom. When every keg of white lightning has been emptied, each man gathers up a rifle that saw service earlier and followed by his twelve year old bride carrying a tub of clothes and two buckets of water walk nine miles up the holler to his cabin.
Downing such an exaggeration is not even necessary. In these hills, there really is rugged, homespun quality about these mountain folk. They appreciate a good pocketknife, a true rifle, and a cold-nosed hound. They look upon exceptional skill with an ax or a gun as an art. They take for granted an ability to “read sign” along creek banks, or to find a mule that has strayed in the woods.
Even in the written word Southern folklore and Southern folk-say succeed in catching the color, flavor, and excitement of a culture in the making and in communicating something of the same glow of discovery that the first settlers felt on going into a new country. Indeed, part of the heritage.
Never were land and lore more perfectly suited and wedded to each other. For in the South folklore is truly a way of life, and the way of life naturally breeds lore. The rural South is a land of the out out-of-doors come to the door and even indoors, where the “gallery”, the store-porch, the kitchen, the parlor, and the nursery are made for storytelling and for ballad singing; where the climate and the open sky make a man expansive and enduring of lung and tongue when it is his “night to howl” or when he is haranguing his “friends and feller-citizens” or “sistern and brethren”.
In the story telling belt of the South barnyard fowl and animals not only come up to the door but enter into the stories themselves, to talk and jest, while in the fields and forests, the hollers and ridges, are the heroes of yarns and tales as tall as the timber. This is the land of the sky, where fantasy and dread follow the winding creeks trails and penetrate the hidden ways of mountain fastnesses. It is a land of many waters, including the father of them all, of “going fishing,” of mysterious caverns, buried treasure and spelunking. It is a land of big talk and big eating, of home, homefolks, and homeward thoughts, where people “stand and take it”, “where they stand on their rights, they stand on faith in the Lord, and they stand on the justice of jury and court; they stand in self reliance, and they stand ready to help a neighbor in distress.” It is also a “dark and bloody ground”, where the invaders were bidden to go into the land and “possess it and to smite the inhabitants thereof ‘hip and thigh’”; where blood flows thicker than water and calls for blood when tempers flare; where the codes of personal and family honor, the duello, and the blood-feud make for strong loves and hates, violence and a “stern and selfish conception of justice.”
In this land of fighters and several wars against the invader, including fought against brother, men put daring above discipline and etiquette to give us heroes like the “Swamp Fox,” “Old Hickory,” Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart, partisan rangers and raiders like Morgan and Mosby, and guerrillas like Quantrell. In this land of “our contemporary ancestors,” one hears the English of Chaucer and Shakespeare, stories that might have been told by the Canterbury pilgrims, and ballads of seventeenth and eighteenth century England and Scotland, handed down and kept alive by people of the purest Anglo-Saxon blood in America by people “who do not like books so well, but…like to remember and memorize many things that [they] do love.” Theirs is a land of “make it yourself or do without”, with the accent sometimes on the second alternative; of “don’t take no orders from nobody nohow,” “I’m agin it,” and “don’t care a damn,” where folks “down creek” or yan side” are furriners,” where the “fotched-on” or “newfangled” is resented or distrusted.
It is a land where the word “old” – the Old South, the old folks, Old Man So and So, little old this and that – terms of affection and pride rather than of reproach. It is a land sectional unity in a regional variety, where Southerners wear the name “Southern” as a badge of difference and a chip on the shoulder; where people like to stay put or move about and come back home as they please and live their own lives in their own way, without outside interference or criticism; where every man is caught in the giant web of his family inheritance and re-collectiveness, his limited solidarities, class loyalties and local rivalries.
In a land where folklore, like history (in Voltaire’s phrase) “does not always lie,” it was natural for both to overlap considerably and both to partake of folk say, a kind of individual folklore in which the people are allowed to tell their own story in their own way. And because folklore is closer to the way of life and more on the surface in the South, as compared with regions where, in the confusion of cities and babel of tongues, it is buried under a complicated overlay of artificial civilization, it was inevitable that a study of Southern folklore should shape itself around Southern life and character. Such ways and folkways were, of course, first of all American and universal before they were Southern, but because they have persisted longest in the South, in combination with one another, they have to come to be considered characteristically, if not exclusively, “Southern”.
He walked down the road a long way in the moonlight. After a while he said, “Phew, now I’ve done it. Here I am getting’ as tired as can be with this old chest on my shoulder. I’ve a mind to throw this thing in the next well I come to – the next one I come to right down there.”
“Oh, but inside the old chest the traveler began to beat, beat, beat with all his might.
“Oh, Jack, Jack, listen here. Don’t throw me in the well, I’m in here.”
“Oh,” Jack said, “bedads, you are in there, aren’t you? Well what’ll you give me if I don’t throw you in the well?”
“Oh,” he said, “now listen, Jack, I’ll give you all the gold you want.”
“All right, bejabbers, I’ll just set you down here by the side of the road, and I’ll ease open that lid a little bit, and you can begin to put me out the gold.”
He opened the lid a little bit, so the man could get his hands out, and he just laid out handfuls of gold and still more gold. Jack filled his pockets, he put gold down his pant legs. He just had every bit he could walk with.
When Jack had got all the gold he could carry, he turned around and started back home. Late the next evening he got in. Will and Tom were sitting there at the supper table just a-fussing and growling about which one should wash the dishes when Jack walked in.
“Well,” they said, “and bedad, and where’s your calf skin?”
“Why,” Jack said, “I sold it. What do you think I done with it?”
“Sold it! What would you get for that calf hide?”
“Well bedads,” Jack said, “I’ll just show you.” And he began laying out handfuls of gold on the table and laid out handfuls after handfuls.
Well, they waited to see a little of it. Will jumped up and says, “Tom, Tom, come on, let’s go quick and kill the fines horse we’ve got. Why, if Jack could get that for one little measily calf hide, what’ll we get for one of our fine horse hides?”
Away they went. They didn’t even wait till morning. They killed the finest horse each one of them had. They couldn’t be bothered to wait for the sun to dry out those hides. They sewed them right up green, stuffed them with chips and straw, took them by the tails, and hauled them off to town.
When they got to town, they walked up and down the streets, hollering, “Horse hides for sale, horse hides for sale!” Just up and down the streets day after day. People came out and looked at them as if they thought they were crazy.
Well, they kept at this for three or four days right in the summer time. Those old horse hides were green and began to smell bad. They soon found that the people just weren’t going to stand for it. They soon came out with sticks and stones and said,
“Looky here, you two crazy men, get out of this town or we’re to show you how to get out,” and they just ran them out of the town.
Will and Tom were so made they didn’t know what to do. They came home just a-puffing. They said, “Jack, you plain lied to us. You didn’t sell that calf hide for any of that gold, and we’re going to throw in the river. Young man, just come along with us.” All they had in their hands was a sheet. They forgot to bring the rope to tie him up with. They fussed and fussed about which one should go back and get the rope. Will said, “Tom, you go get it,” and Tom said, “No, Will you go get it.” Tom said, “Now, Will, you are the oldest, you go on and get that rope, and I’ll stay here with Jack.”
Well, finally they made up their minds, and they told Jack to stay right there by himself while they went back to the house to get the rope to tie up the sheet with. They rolled Jack up in the sheet and said,
“Now, listen, there’d better be something right in this sheet when we get back!” And so the two old scruffs went running back to the house to get the rope.
When they got out of hearing, Jack crawled out to the edge of that big old sheet and lay there with his head sticking out somewhat like a terrapin. He heard someone coming on the other end of the bridge and calling out, “Sheep! Sheep! Here” and he looked and there came a little old gray, fat man driving the prettiest flock of sheep you have ever seen. When he came alongside Jack, he said, “Jack what in the world are you doing there under that sheet?”
“Oh,” he said, “Mister, I’m going to heaven.”
“Oh, please, Jack, let me get in there and go to heaven. I always wanted to go to heaven. Now, listen, Jack, you are young, and you can have every one of these sheep. They are everyone yours if you’ll just get out of there and let me get under that sheet so I can got to heaven.”
Jack said, “Well, my father always did tell me to be kind to old people. So I’ll just let you get right in here.”
He rolled the man up in the sheet and said, “Now, just stay right still and after a while there will be somebody here that will send you right off.”
Jack called to the sheep, “Sheep! Sheep! And backed them off the end of the bridge opposite home. He quickly drove them around a bend in the road before the two brothers got back. He watched around the bend and saw all that was happening. He saw them come and tie the man up hastily heaved him into the river. He saw them turn and go back to the house. He knew they were arguing about something. He waited until they had had good time to get settled back there, and he started the sheep back across the bridge toward home. Finally he drove them up, and when he stopped outside the gate, he called out, “Will, Tom, I wish you all would come out here and help me get these sheep in.”
Will and Tom came running off the porch.
They couldn’t believe their eyes. They said,
“Jack, where in the world did you get those sheep?”
“Why,” he said, “I gathered them out of the river. Where do you think I got them?”
“Oh, Jack, Jack, will you take us and put us in the river?”
“Well, bedad, I reckon I will but you shore got to get your own sheet and rope. I’m not going to do that for you!”
Both ran and got a big sheet and a piece of rope as soon as they could and went running just as hard as they could go to the river bridge. Jack went running along with them, but they fussed all the way down about who ought to get to go first since he was usually with the goats.
“And so Jack tied Tom up good and tight with a piece of big, strong rope, and gave him a great slight right out into the middle of the river. He went down kicking around. Will said, “What’s he doin’, Jack, what’s doin’?”
“I know he’s gathering sheep.”
“Quick! Hurry, Jack before he has time to get them everyone! Put me int here!”
Jack tied him up right quick and gave him a great big sling, and over the bridge right out into the middle of the river he went. And you know when I left there, Jack was just as rich and happy a man as I ever knew.
Once upon a time there was a man who had three boys, Jack, Will and Tom. Will and Tom were the two oldest sons. Jack was just a little bit of a fellow, not hardly able to take care of himself – the old father thought.
So the old man just divided all of his land, cattle, sheep, and horses between two older boys, and they promised that they would take good care of little old Jack. But no sooner was the father gone than these two older brothers just began to see how bad and mean they could be to that little fellow. They made him do all of the housework, all of the cooking – just everything – and wait on them, hand and foot. And then even at that they were not kind to the little old fellow.
One day when they came in from the field to their dinner, Will said, “Jack, when you finish up with the dinner dishes, I guess you’d better go down to the edge of the woods and get that little old calf of yours and skin it. I’ve already cut a tree down on it and killed it.”
“Well, bedast, I will,” said Jack.
So after he finished the dinner dishes, he went down to the edge of the woods, and sure enough there lay his little old calf, the only thing he had the back of the barn, and let it dry good and hard. When it was just bone dry, he took that hide down to moisten it. Then he got him an old piece of shoe leather, made him a thong, and took an awl, and sewed that hide up, stuffed it with chips and straw. Then he took it by the tail and went dragging it up the path to the house, bumpty-bump, bumpty-bump, right up the path to the house. When he got to the porch, Will said:
“Jack, what in the world are you going with that thing?”
“Bedad, I’m going out into the world to make my fortune, that’s what I’m going to do with it. When I come back to this house, I’m going to come with gold.”
“Humph!” Will said, “I guess you’ll come with gold. You’ll be back here by supper time, good and hungry.”
Jack said, “You’ll see about that!”
He took his calf hid by the tail, bumpty-bump, bumpty-bump, right down the road in a cloud of dust. As far as they could see Jack, he was just a-traveling with the calf skin a dragging along behind him.
He walked all day, and late that evening he began to think about a place to spend the night. And looking along the road on this side and that side, he finally saw a nice looking house.
He thought, “I believe I’ll go up there and ask that lady at that house if she just won’t let me spend the night.”
When he knocked at the door, the woman came. “Please, kind lady, could I spend the night with you here?”
“Why, no son, you can’t. My husband isn’t at home. I’m just here by myself. No, you just go on down the road. You’ll find a place on further down.”
“Oh,” he said, “Lady, but I am so tired. Please – I won’t be a mite o’ trouble, just let me have a bed.”
“Oh, well, come on upstairs. What’s your name?”
“Jack.”
“All right, Jack come on! Go on upstairs to the top of the steps and go right into that door to your right. You can sleep there I reckon for the night.”
Jack went into the room and closed the door; and while it was just beginning to get dark enough for a light to show, he could see very well where his bed was. He didn’t light any lamp or anything. But he saw a knot hole right there in the middle of the floor.
He went over and put his eye down to that knot hole to see what he could see down in the world below. There sat a dining room table and the lady that had let him come into the room, with a traveler sitting on the other side of the table. They were eating and laughing and drinking, having the best time you have ever seen. And oh, there were the best things to eat on the table. There was chicken and cake and pie and jam and honey – just everything anybody would want.
Oh, Jack was so hungry! He wanted some of that food so bad he didn’t know what to do. But those people didn’t pay any attention to him.
“Oh,” the woman says, “Quick! Quick! That’s my husband coming home! Jump right quick over there in that big old chest. Don’t sit there!” And the traveler took one leap and went right into the big cedar chest, and the old woman closed the lid down over him and sat back down as if nothing had happened.
About that time somebody began knocking on the door, and exclaiming, “Old woman, old woman, let me in.” She began cleaning those things off the table just as fast as she could and brushed the table cloth clean. Then she went running over to the door, her arms reaching out toward the door as if in great haste.
The old man said, “What on earth is the matter with you? Why can’t you get here and let me in?”
“Oh,” she says, “my reumatiz is just a-hurting me so!”
“Well,” he says, “rheumatiz or no rheumatiz, I want some supper. I just about starved to death.”
“Why, old man, there’s not a thing in this world in this house to eat but just corn bread and milk.”
“Well, bedads, corn bread and milk is just good enough for anybody. Set it out here on the table!”
She went to the kitchen and brought back a great big plate of corn bread, a great pitcher of the best looking milk, and a big old spoon and a bowl. The old man just began crumbling in the bread and pouring in milk and oh, he was having a good time eating.
Jack, all the time, had his eye right down to that know hole. He stood that just as long as he could, and he didn’t stay idle a minute. He took that old calf hide by the tail, gave it a shake or two over the floor, and ooh, it was the strangest sounding noise. The old man looked up and says,
“Old woman, what is that?”
“Oh,” she says, “it’s just the poorest looking little shab of a boy you’ve ever seen in your life that I let go upstairs to sleep.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t give him a bite of supper.”
“Why, law no, I supposed he had had his supper long ago.”
“What was the boy’s name, old woman?”
“Jack is all he told me.”
The old man walked out into the hall and said,
“Jack, Jack, son, don’t you want to come down here and get you a bite of something to eat?”
“Well bedads, I don’t care if I do,” said Jack.
She he took his old calf hide by the tail and down the steps he came thumpty-bump, bumpty-thump, right up to the dining room table, threw his old calf hide by him, and sat down.
The old man said, “Old woman, bring Jack now a bowl and a spoon, and bring some more milk and bread here!”
And Jack just crumbled in bowls of milk and bread, and, oh, it was tasting so good, and he was having such a good time. After he had eaten two or three of them, he looked at the old calf, gave him a shake or two right loud, and –
“Ah,” he says, “hush, hush, don’t you be saying that. No, hush up! This milk and bread is just as good as anybody would want. Now, hush your mouth. I don’t want to hear another word out of you!”
The old man said, “Jack, what did he say to you?”
“Oh, no sir,” said Jack, “I can’t tell you – I just can’t. I might hurt the good lady’s feelings. No sir, I can’t tell you, and I don’t want to hear another word out of him. I’ll just have me a little more of that milk and bread, please.”
After he had eaten another bowl of the milk and bread, he reached down and got the old calf hide by the tail and gave him another shake.
“Didn’t I tell you before to shut that mouth of yours? Now, listen, don’t mention that again. If you do I’m going to give you the trashing of your life when I get you upstairs. No! Hush!”
“But, my dear Jack, listen, what did he say to you? Now tell me son.”
“No, sir, I’m tellin’ you, I’m afraid it would make the lady of the house mad.”
“Now, old woman, it’s not going to make you mad, is it?” said the old man.
“Well, now,” Jack said, “if the kind lady won’t get mad, I’ll tell you. He said to me that over there in that corner cupboard there’s cake and pie and chicken, there’s ham, there’s honey, there’s jelly, there’s preserves, there’s everything good you can think of to eat, – right over there in that chest.”
“Old woman, is that the truth?”
“Oh, well, it’s just a little something there I’ve got for me and my poor kinfolks.”
“Well, me and Jack’s your poor kinfolks. Just bring them out here!”
And the old woman set on the table just all the good Jack had ever dreamed of. And he just ate and ate all he could hold. Then the old man said,
“Listen, Jack, what will you take for that?”
“Oh,” said Jack, “I can’t sell you that, mister? Oh, no, I just can’t that’s my fortune.”
“Well, listen, Jack, surely you can sell it. I’ll give you anything you want. Just mention anything and I’ll give it to you.”
“Oh, no, no,” said Jack, “I just couldn’t part with that. I just couldn’t part with it!”
We, now, listen here,” the old man said, “will that talk to me just like it talks to you?”
“Yes, sir,” Jack said, “it’ll talk to you just like it talks to me.”
The old man said then, “Jack, I’ve just got to have it. Now, you name your price, for you’ve got to let me buy that.”
Well, Jack looked all around the room, and he says,
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take that old cedar chest over there for it.”
“Oh, all right,” the man said, “Jack, just help yourself!”
Jack just threw that old cedar chest up on his shoulder and walked out of the door.
Quite a number of places and people have laid claim to this story but they say it did take place here in Graham County, where a man who was out with his yoke of oxen and one of his oxen got sullen and laid down and wouldn’t pull. The man was in a rough place and the load required a pretty good pull. He just had the one ox to pull, so he just took the yoke off the ox’s neck and got in himself – put his head through the yoke and he with the good ox pulled the wagon out.
After they pulled out of the hole, the ox kept going faster and faster. He kept going and after a while he struck a trot and then from a trot, he put into a lope. And he kept going and finally ran towards home. The ox ran over a bee bench, started the bees to flying all over, stinging chickens. Went on and hit the shed, knocked the shed down, and a lot of stuff in the shed loft dumped into the porch. And as he passed theporch of the house, he hollered to the folks on the porch, “Here we come! Head us! Damn our fool souls!”
The rattle of musketry is heard in front. Skirmishers must have made contact with enemy pickets. All are alert. A signal gun is fired and the artillery joins in with accumulating fury. At last the command – “Forward!” – and an overpowering urge to make contact with the enemy. Soon lines of blue are discernible Comrades begin to fall in increasing numbers. Now the shout, lost perhaps in the din of battle – “Charge!” – accompanied by a forward wave of an officer’s saber and the line leaps forward with the famous “Rebel yell.”
