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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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 as Lincoln, 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.