5. Religious Customs
Funeralizing
To the outsider far removed, or even to people in the nearby lowlands, mountain people may seem stoic. A mountain woman whose husband is being tried for his life may sit like a figure of stone not for lack of feeling, but because she’d rather die than let the other side know her anguish. A little boy who loses his father will steal off to cliff or wood and suffer in silence. No one shall see or know his grief. “He’s got a-bound to act like a man, now.” The burden of the family is upon his young shoulders.
Mountain folk love oratory. Men, especially, will travel miles to a speaking—which may be a political gathering or one for the purpose of discussing road building.
To all outward appearances they seem unmoved, yet they drink in with deep emotion all that is said. Both men and women are eager to go to meeting. Meeting to them means a religious gathering. Here they listen with rapt attention to the lesser eloquence of the mountain preacher. But at meeting, unlike at speaking, they give vent to their emotions, especially if the occasion be that of funeralizing the dead.
Much has been written upon this custom, but the question still prevails, “Why do mountain people hold a funeral so long after burial?”
The reason is this. Long ago, before good roads were even dreamed of in the wilderness, when death came, burial of necessity followed immediately. But often long weeks, even months, elapsed before the word reached relatives and friends. There were few newspapers in those days and often as not there were those who could neither read nor write. For the same reason there was little, if any, exchange of letters.
So the custom of funeralizing the dead long after burial grew from a necessity. The funeralizing of a departed kinsman or friend was published from the pulpit. The bereaved family set a day, months or even a year in advance, for the purpose of having the preacher eulogize their beloved dead. “Come the third Sunday in May next summer,” a mountain preacher could be heard in mid winter publishing the occasion. “Brother Tom’s funeral will be held here at Christy Creek church house.”
The word passed. One told the other and when the appointed Sunday rolled around the following May, friends and kin came from far and near, bringing their basket dinner, for no one family could have prepared for the throng. Together, when they had eaten their fill, they gathered about the grave house to weep and mourn and sing over “Brother Tom,” dead and gone this long time.