My Appalachia

by Sidney Saylor Farr

  “I never slept with a neighbor woman’s husband. It was mostly traveling men passing through Cumberland Gap. And them in the community with no women of their own. They give me food and clothes for Little Mike and me.”

  “Little Mike. Lordy, he had the prettiest yellow hair and sky blue eyes. I can see him plain as day sometimes, though it’s been sixty years now since he died.”

  “Sometime after that—I don’t know how long it was, but I recall the cornstalks were goldy-colored—I married Jake Howard and we moved to Renfro Valley. But we’d just got settled when a train killed Jake and I had to come back home.”

  “I don’t deny a thing I’ve done. I never was one to prettify up a picture to make out I was better than I am. It was lonesome, and Susie and I still had to eat.”

  “The next man I married was Jim Farmer. Jim was plumb foolish about Susie. But she was a wild one, I’m here to tell you. Guess she took after her mother. But I didn’t worry about her too much. I always say, give a wild girl a good man—why, it’s like honeybees. Take wild bees out of a bee tree and put ‘em in a good hive and they’ll tame down right quick.”

  “Susie married Sol Saylor when she’s just fifteen. He built her a house up on Peach Orchard. He squared the logs and rived the boards himself. He was a good man, and Susie tamed down quick. They had a passel of boys—Wilburn [my father], Squire, Otis, Andrew, Willie B—and two girls, Betty and Laura. And Susie was still the prettiest woman in all of Bell County. Why, people from near and far, strangers passing through Cumberland Gap, talked about how beautiful she was. I am proud to say your grandma was a virgin when she married Solomon Saylor.”

  “Jim said he’d druther Sol would build his house near us. I told him life’s not druthers. . . . If’n you get to thinking it is, I told him, just you study the acorns under that oak tree out there, all raring to be giant oak trees. See how many do, I told him.”

  “If’n I could’ve had my druthers! If’n I had, my Joe’d sleep beside me ever night. Little Mike’d have grandchildren now. If’n life was all druthers there’d be no graves up in Dark Holler. Dark Holler—I don’t rightly know how it got its name. But come every spring and the wild honeysuckle lights up the place real pretty.”

  I STARTED WRITING STORIES AND POEMS a decade later, and it seemed only natural when Granny’s voice appeared in my poems.

  Aunt Dellie, who was married to Dad’s brother Otis, was a reader, and she introduced me to stories in books. A young woman with black hair, brown eyes, and the whitest teeth I ever saw, Aunt Dellie was probably part Cherokee, as were many of the folks around our part of the land. Her adopted father and mother lived near Pineville, and sometimes they got discarded books from the town library for Aunt Dellie. She read every one of them and then gave each book to me. One book I will never forget was the Book of Mormon. It confused and frightened me. When I asked Aunt Dellie what it meant, she confessed that she did not understand it either. It did not seem a bit odd to either of us that we had read every word of that book in spite of our confusion, for we both loved the printed word. It was through Aunt Dellie that I got to read Little Women, Heidi, Pilgrim’s Progress, Lorna Doone, Gone with the Wind, and other classics.

  Aunt Betty and Aunt Laura, my dad’s sisters, taught me about nature and the imagination, two lessons that I’m not sure you can ever really learn inside the walls of a classroom. Aunt Betty was thirteen years older than I, but we were friends. She was a big, strong woman who cut down trees and sawed them into logs for firewood, repaired fences and roofs, and performed other kinds of outdoor work.

  Aunt Betty was a loner; she never much wanted to go out where there were crowds of people. She taught me to recognize varieties of trees and what kind of mast they produced. She taught me to know ginseng. Together, we dug roots and gathered wild herbs, which she dried to sell in late autumn for cash. We gathered wild greens in early spring, bringing home tiny spears of poke. Whenever Aunt Betty talked about something, she always related it to nature. She would say, “That was when a fire burned on Black Mountain,” or, “That was just after the corn was laid by last summer . . .” In a way, Aunt Betty taught me about metaphors.

  Aunt Laura, Dad’s youngest sister, was reckless and wildly imaginative. I remember when I was four and she was just eight years old. One weekend we were in Grandpa’s barn playing in the hay. She rolled down the side of a pile of hay and fell through an open place in the floor. I started to cry for fear she was killed. The lower part of the barn was open on either end, and one of Grandpa’s big hogs had wandered in to sleep in the shade. Aunt Laura landed on the pig’s back. “Well, shoot pig,” she said, “I have done killed you!” I laughed so hard I nearly fell after her.

  Aunt Laura’s imagination was as wild as her physical recklessness. We romped in the woods and would go to Gum Spring around the hillside, where we got our drinking water. Gum Spring was made into a hospital in our imagination. Two tall trees grew near the spring; these were the doctor and the nurse in our fantasy. The smaller bushes were patients. Aunt Laura was the voice for all. As the doctor, she diagnosed dreadful diseases for all of us. For me, the doctor prescribed a gallon a day of Grandma Savior’s bitters (which Grandma brewed every winter and insisted that we all drink every time we got near her kitchen). I cried when I had to drink the bitter brew.

  From Aunt Laura I learned to be adventurous and reckless about my physical safety, climbing trees, rooftops, and high rocks. I learned to be creative by listening to the imaginary people and situations she introduced to me in the woods and in playhouses.

  My mother was another creative force in my life, but her brand of creativity was somehow a little different than Aunt Laura’s. I always saw it coupled with frugality and hard work, and I came to understand that imagination lived side by side with both these things.

  My mother had a big family to care for and no time or energy to create pretty and frivolous things. But she found a way to satisfy her creative yearnings by the patterns she chose to use, the colors of her materials, and the tiny stitches in her quilting. She planted flowers in cans and boxes and filled our yard and front porch with colorful blooms. Certainly my mother had a green thumb. She could make anything flourish and grow. After I married and left home, many times she would visit, taking home with her slips and cuttings of my plants. Months or years later I would go to her house to get new cuttings and start over while hers seemed to live on and on. Nothing ever died under her care.

  I don’t remember my mother ever having idle time. Besides keeping the house and children as clean as possible she worked in the garden and picked berries from the hillsides during the summer; in winter, when the weather was right, she made hominy and lye soap. I hated soap-making. I especially hated the smell of the cakes of lye soap. I used to dream of having a whole washtubful of pretty, nice-smelling soap.

  “When I grow up and have my own home, I will never make lye soap,” I declared. “I will buy pretty soap that smells good.”

  My mother smiled and with a twinkle in her eye said, “If you have enough money to buy things like that, why then I reckon you won’t ever have to make your own soap.” But Mama always knew more than she ever said. I would make poems instead of soap much of my adult life, but the lessons of my mother I took with me.

  2

  A Way of Life

  Early in my life while still only feeling,

  before thinking, before writing, I heard the

  mountains’ call.

  The earliest memory I have is the day I turned three years old. Mama was holding my hand as we came through the gate and climbed the steps to the front porch of Grandpa’s house. “Today’s your birthday,” she said. “You are three years old and a big girl now.” I felt proud to be three, but it was cold and wet and I was tired and hungry. The door opened and we were in the kitchen where Grandma was cooking supper. I don’t remember anything else about being there—just that brief experience of being wet and cold, knowing I was three years old, and Grandma’s wa
rm kitchen with the smell of food being cooked. And Grandma’s words: “Come in, chil’ren, come in here and eat some supper!”

  Time passed. It was my fifth birthday. I remember it was a brisk fall day, and I came out of the house to watch Mama sweep the front porch. She asked if I felt like a big girl now that I was five years old. Piled against the porch wall were several orange pumpkins and two or three green-striped cushaws. Looking at them made me feel happy.

  Sometime after my fifth birthday, Dad bought a boundary of land down on Straight Creek at the foot of Pine Mountain. (A “boundary” was a piece of land owned by one person; it could be as small as a single acre or as large as several hundred.) He built a log house and moved us there from Coon Branch so I could be near a school. Our new land had been the site of a home in earlier times, perhaps dating back to the pioneer days. The house and outbuildings were long gone, but apple trees, pussy willows, flowering quince, and a tall pear tree still grew there.

  Most of the apple trees were very old and sinewy from neglect. They were all around us, edging the yard, down by the sulfur spring where we got our drinking water, near the barn, and over in a narrow strip of meadow. The pear tree grew beside a big rock with a hollow depression in the top. People said the Indians had used that rock to pound their corn into meal. It was an ideal place for little girls to play. My sisters and I spent many hours on and around that rock, which was located in front of the smokehouse.

  The sulfur spring had lovely red mud, perfect for mud pies. Mama constantly complained about how the mud stained everything it touched. Two big pussy willows grew at the front gate near the spring. Mama loved them, but Dad threatened to cut them down. His bees made honey from the blossoms of the pussy willows that was thick and mealy-tasting, not good like that made from clover and other flowering plants. As we grew up our seasons were filled with fruit-tree blossoms in the spring and fruit in the summer and fall.

  Sulfured Apples and Northern Lights

  Mama canned and dried the apples from our trees, and Dad used them to make sulfured apples. I shall always remember the first year he made them. It began with a hot, sticky day in August. The clouds looked like half-melted marshmallows. Dad brought in barrels for the apples and boxes of sulfur from the store. Mama, Della, and I peeled and cut the apples. Dad put the barrels in the smokehouse, which was empty at that time of year. First he put a flat rock in the bottom of the barrel; then he placed a pie pan on top of the rock. He did this so the heat would not catch the bottom of the barrel on fire. He put two tablespoons of sulfur in the pie plate and set it on fire. It smoked for hours.

  Next, he placed a stout stick across the top of the barrel. Mama brought him one of her big willow baskets that had a handle. They filled it with cut apples and hung it on the stick across the center of the barrel. Mama brought out an old quilt and helped arrange it over top of the barrel to keep the fumes and smoke from escaping. The fruit shrank to a third of its size. Later, Dad would store the apples in another barrel. Then, during the winter, when Mama wanted to make fried apple pies or just a baked pie, she would pull out handfuls of the apples. They would be as pretty and white as ever. But she would have to wash the sulfur off before we could eat them. The fumes from the sulfuring process (sulfur dioxide) killed the bacteria and kept the apples from spoiling.

  Along about dusky dark the evening Mama and Dad sulfured the apples, a bad storm came up, with lightning and rolling thunder bouncing from the mountaintops. Some of our apple trees were uprooted, others had limbs torn off, and green apples covered the ground under the remaining trees. We went to bed that night with the smell of the rain-wet earth and the sulfur still around us.

  Sometime during the night Dad awoke us, saying, “Hurry! Come out on the porch.” We tumbled out onto the front porch. I thought that daylight had come until I saw how strange it looked outside. Lights—first yellow, then blue and red—were moving over the hills. Dad said it might be the end of the world, and Mama leaned against the porch railing, praying out loud. We lined up along the railing and stared at the spectacular lights. After a while the lights died down and it was dark again.

  I later learned that the strange phenomenon was called the aurora borealis. That was the only time I ever saw them in our part of the country. People on Stoney Fork spoke of the “Northern Lights” for years afterward. I shall never forget the thunder and lightning, the smell of the sulfured apples, and the astounding colored lights. The next morning we had the sad work of picking up and disposing of all the green apples. Mama saved those that she could by canning them.

  Superstitions

  As I was growing up in the 1940s, my life and the lives of my family and neighbors were hemmed in by all kinds of superstitions. There was a “saying” for almost anything that happened in the natural world. If a blossom bloomed out of season, it was said there would be a death in the family. When tree leaves turned underside over it would soon rain. Never have a tooth pulled if the signs of the zodiac are in the head, but if you plan to castrate an animal, you want the signs to be in the head or upper part of the body. There are preferred times to plant root crops, and different times for crops that will mature above ground. We lived by the Farmer’s Almanac.

  “The first three days in May are flower days,” Mama would say. “If you plant anything like cucumbers and squash during flower days, you will get thousands of blossoms but no cucumber or squash will set.”

  By the time I was a young woman I did not believe in superstitions; I deliberately planted cucumber seeds in my garden during flower days. Sure enough, thousands of blossoms came, but when the cucumbers started to emerge they rotted and fell off before they were half an inch long. When Mama saw my garden her only comment was “I’ve always heard it’s best not to plant cucumbers during the first three days in May.”

  One superstition told how you could discover the name of the man you would marry. On the first day of May, get up early in the morning, just at the edge of daylight. Take a plate of cornmeal and go out into the garden or field. Find a snail, put it in the meal, and wait. As the snail crawls around, it will write the name of the man you will marry someday. For this to work, however, you must keep it a secret. Tell no one, and speak to no one while the snail is at work. If you speak a word the spell will be broken.

  Mama got up at five o’clock every morning to start breakfast. She always spotted me whenever I was in the yard and demanded to know what I was doing out there. “Whatever it is, leave it and come help with breakfast,” she demanded. The spell was always broken, and I did not learn the name of the man I would marry until years later.

  I learned other things, too. Some people in the mountains had the power to draw fire out of a burn on the body. If the seventh son of a seventh son blew his breath into the mouth of a baby suffering from thrush, it would be cured. I never witnessed any of these events, but my parents firmly believed in them.

  Grandma believed that she could stop anyone’s bleeding. When someone had an accident and was bleeding pretty badly, she would stand behind the victim and say a Bible verse to herself. People said that once she had done this you could often see the flowing blood slow down to a drop. “She would not tell me what she said for a long time,” Uncle Andrew said of my grandmother. Eventually, though, she did tell him, and he told me. It was a verse from Ezekiel 16:6: “When I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee . . . Live.”

  Dad believed in witches and the magic they perpetrated. Aunt Ollie, an old woman who lived on Ben’s Branch, was said to be a witch. She asked Dad to sell her our cow. Dad refused, and in a short time Daisy started drying up, even though she had had a new calf a couple of months before. Her milk yield became less every day.

  “Rachel, something has to be done,” Dad said to Mama. “I will try to break the spell.” He poured milk in a pan and heated one of his plow points, and then, carrying the red-hot metal with a pair of big pliers, he plunged it into the pan of milk.

  The hiss and splu
tter made me feel sick. I “saw” flames leaping up around the legs of Aunt Ollie and heard her screaming. “Daddy, you’re burning Aunt Ollie!”I cried. Mama led me from the room, saying, “You read too many of Aunt Dellie’s old books, Sidney. Now you hush up.” Two or three days later Daisy started giving more milk, and in a week she was back to her regular yield.

  Other superstitions governed our lives. For instance, Mama would never let any of her children look in a mirror before they were a year old. She believed that if a baby saw itself, it would die. She also believed that if we told our bad dreams before breakfast they would come true.

  Dad was always careful when clearing new ground, tilling the garden or field, or doing general work outdoors. He did not want to accidentally kill a toad frog. He said if you killed a toad, your cow would give bloody milk.

  We trusted in the right phase of the moon for planting potatoes.

  Dad and Mama warned us to be especially careful during the dog days of August because at that time dogs were likely to have fits and go mad. In addition, snakes went blind during dog days and would strike out wildly at anything that moved.

  In addition to these superstitions, my family practiced all kinds of folk remedies. We lived far away from any medical facilities and had no money for doctors to cure minor ailments. My people did as they had done down through generations, which was to make do with what they had. They used roots, herbs, bark, and leaves from trees to treat a variety of ailments; and they followed hundreds of superstitions to avoid such ailments. For example:

  To cure the shingles, cut off the head of a black hen and let the blood drip on the affected part. Grandma and Mama would talk about this anytime shingles were mentioned.

  To prevent whooping cough, hang an adder stone—a precious stone that was reputed to draw out poison—around your neck.