PLATE 40 “Let me tell you about Bass.” Over the mantel, behind him, are paintings Mr. White commissioned of famous Indians he admires. A few of the many Indian artifacts he has collected are shown hanging on the wall. He is very proud of his own Indian ancestry.
You know, they made all of these laws and a lot of people don’t believe you ought to take the law into your own hands that way, but that’s the way most of these old mountain people believe, just like Bass does—take care of your own business. You’d be surprised how well it works. It worked a whole lot better back when less law was practiced in these hills and folks governed themselves. It worked for the Cherokee Indians, and they never had so much murdering, stealing, and goings-on because they had their own rules and enforcement. Their own families and people took care of their problems. You take before World War II, all these people that lived in here were self-made people. They tended their ground, and they hunted and fished for a living. That’s all there was to do. We didn’t have nothing else. We were poor people, but we didn’t know it! Nobody had ever told us we were poor, so all of us was that way.
When the big Depression hit the cities and areas away from the mountains, it didn’t surprise us much. It hurt us less because we’d been having a depression for a long time. We didn’t have much to begin with. We lived about the same as our families had for the last one hundred and fifty years—just off the land. We were happy. We didn’t know we were poor until somebody out of the city came out here and told us we were poor people. We didn’t know that the rest of the world was any different until we all got out of here and into the armed services. When World War II broke out, most of us young men were dying to get in that service, so all the young fellows around here in these mountains got in there. I went in the Marines. Several of them went into the Army, the Navy, or some other branch of the service. We were all patriotic anyway. Just a great big old rough bunch of boys, you know, and we thought fightin’ those Germans and those Japanese was going to be a cinch. We was going over there and clean ’em up in a week or two, wasn’t going to be no trouble with that.
Boy! Away we went—went in there, and they put us through this thing. Man! They gave us two pairs of dress shoes, three pairs of field shoes. Why, I’d never had but one pair of shoes in a whole year in my life, and I was in high cotton. They gave us five or six, seven pairs of pants, five or six shirts. None of us had ever wore any underwear. We didn’t know what that was. And socks! They gave us twelve pairs of socks and seven or eight pairs of underwear. They gave us a good shooting gun to go with it. We thought we were on top of the world—went in there and they had this long table. They had all this food stacked up on there, beans and meat and everything else. We weren’t eating thin gravy with a fork anymore! Man! We were reachin’ over there and getting something we could put our teeth in. And then we got fat and sassy. No wonder we whipped them people over there. They hadn’t been as hungry as we had. We went over there and looked around at New Zealand, Australia, and all of Europe. Those people lived in big fine homes. They had good stuff to eat, and we thought the U.S. was a wealthy country! We didn’t have nothing to what those people had.
We came back over here after the war, and we was a little smarter than we was when we left. We found out that ninety percent of us hadn’t been getting anything and only ten percent of this country had been raking off all the harvest, all the wealth. We wasn’t gettin’ nothing. So things began to change a little bit. We started moving along, and right now, I don’t reckon anybody’s hungry in this part of the country. They can sit down to three meals a day, and they don’t go hungry as fast. You’d be surprised. You never got enough to eat back then, and that’s the truth, but people ain’t gonna tell you that because their pride won’t let them. That’s the honest truth, and Bass knows it, and I know it. We all know it. It’s just been in the last few years that the Appalachian Mountain people, and the American people in general, has really got to set down and have three good meals a day, and have a car that’s no more than ten years old to ride around in, and maybe go to a show and spend a little money. They didn’t have it before World War II. They liked to have starved. They didn’t starve, but they was hungry. They didn’t need to go on any diets like now. They was on a diet all the time because they didn’t have enough to eat. They was all skinny. I never saw anybody fat in this whole country. I remember those days. I was just a kid, and I grew up under that. I had to pick blackberries and grow apples and grapes to put up before we got through the winter. It was a long hard winter, and there were a lot of lean years and a lot of lean winters, too.
I met Bass Dockery with my grandfather. My grandfather used to buy a little whiskey from him. That’s when the Dockerys lived back in the holler, and I used to come up here with Granddad. Bass made some of the best whiskey, I guess, in this country. Everybody from all around wanted to buy Bass Dockery’s whiskey, just like my grandfather plum over across the mountain would come over here and buy it because Bass made his whiskey out of a copper outfit, a copper still, and he made double-twisted whiskey. It was pure corn whiskey. Just like I said—when you drink his whiskey, you can smell the man’s socks that plowed the corn ’cause it’s good whiskey. And they all came in here and bought it. He had a little garden right out here and had a little corn patch right on top of that mountain right up there. [Bill points out the door of his store.] He plowed his corn and made liquor off of it. Bass made a good living.
I never did make liquor myself, but I’ve been to Bass’s still. I’ve helped him fire it up, throw wood on it. We was pretty good friends. He liked me, and I liked him. We hit it off good. I don’t know of many people that get along with him really, except maybe his own kids, and sometimes he gets mad at them and tells them he’s going to leave them out of his will. Bass had a spring right off the house. He had a tube run back in the bank with the spring water coming out. When I’d be up there, he’d give me a drink of liquor out of the jug, and I’d reach over there and get me some spring water to chase it with. If I was going to spend all night with him when I was a boy, I would pitch a pallet down there before his fireplace. Usually, we’d be getting ready to go a-huntin’, and it’d be cold up there. In the morning, I’d get to smelling that coffee making and that bacon frying, and I knew it was time to get up. I’d get up from that pallet and go in there and have good eating, and then we would go hunting.
Bass had a house full of kids up there. They were small, like myself, then. He had nine girls and three boys. I’ve heard this tale about Bass. A fellow asked him, he said, “Well, Bass, how many kids did you have?” And Bass said, “Well, me and Callie had twelve, and there wasn’t none of ’em worth a d——, so we stopped.” And I’ve heard him tell a fellow that myself when I took him up to Bass’s one day. Had all those girls and boys, and they had a great big long table, and he’d put jelly glasses, a row of ’em, down that table. He’d get a jug of liquor, and he’d go down through there pouring them about half full of liquor. Then he’d take a spoon of sugar and put in every one of them glasses. When the children got ready to go to bed, they’d go by there and drink it. Then they’d climb up that Jacob’s ladder to the crow’s nest [loft of the cabin] and just jump down on those straw tick beds that were thrown down up there. They all slept up there together. They kept warm. Bass and his wife slept in a room right off the kitchen. There was just one bed in there, I believe.
Bass wasn’t an easy father to live with. Those kids had to work. And they had nowhere to go. And, like I said, they didn’t wear enough clothes to wash up. They were all out, cuttin’ wood, makin’ corn, hoeing and plowin’ that corn. Taking off bee honey, gatherin’ apples and pickin’ berries, and canning all that stuff. It took them all summer to can enough stuff to do them the winter, so they was working all the time. They had apple trees, pear trees, and peach trees, and those kids had to get out there and gather all that food in at harvesttime. They made apple butter and jelly and stuff like that to winter them with. And Bass’d go out here and trap
turkey, bear, and hog, and cut them up for winter meat and winter lard. He used a big ol’ trap he’d made. It looked like a big rabbit box.
Bear grease is used for cooking oil. That’s the best cooking oil you ever ate. Anything you fry or cook in it is extremely good, and it won’t make you sick. I’ve seen Bass take a jar of bear grease, about three inches, and just drink it down, just pure bear grease. I’ve drunk it, too, and it’s good for you! Lots of people say, “That old yellow bear grease is nasty.” I’d druther have it three to one than I would hog grease. They’d cook those roasts and that bear meat up and it’s good. You can sit down there and eat a peck of it, and it won’t hurt you one bit.
Bass had English and Cherokee Indian ancestry. Bass tells a story about his granddaddy, I think it was. He swapped a mule and his skinny wife for a great big healthy, strong woman. He was lookin’ off down through there, and he saw this big fine stout-looking woman, and he said he wanted her pretty bad. He went off down there to this fellow’s house and he said, “Listen, what would you take for that woman?” He said, “Now, I couldn’t swap her off. She’s a big stout woman, and she does a lot of work.” Bass’s grandfather had a pretty good mule, a young, big gray mule. He bridled his mule and got his old lady by the arm and went off down there and said, “Listen, I’ll swap you the mule and her for your woman.” He said that man went out there, looked over the mule real well, looked over the woman pretty good, and said, “I believe you’ve got a trade on your hands. I’ll just take this mule and this woman off your hands.” He went in the house and got her and gave her to Bass’s grandpaw. His grandpaw took his new wife home and told Bass’s daddy, “Every time I look at that man, I get plum sick. Boy, I really beat him. I’ve got the biggest, finest, stoutest woman you ever saw for that little old skinny woman and that mule down there.”
Bass’s children went over there in Hanging Dog to school, but it’s thirty miles away. He had some kin people over there and the children boarded with them. He’d send them over there and let them stay and go to school. I think they sent them over there in sections. When those girls and those boys got up big enough to get out on their own, they took off. All they’d had to do up there was work—no recreation—and when they were seventeen, eighteen years old, they were gone, and they’re not coming back to live. Some of them he hasn’t seen for several years. He had one girl who disappeared, and he didn’t hear from her for twelve years, never saw her for twelve years. She was about eighteen years old when she left. He finally heard from her about three years ago. She had been in Canada and had married some fellow up there. Bass’s wife got to worrying about her so much that he got the FBI to looking for her. The FBI never located her. She just finally showed up one day—just walked up on him. He didn’t know she was there until he looked up and there she was.
He has about twenty grandchildren and forty-three great-grandchildren. He’s said he’d close the door if he saw them all comin’ at one time for a family reunion. He couldn’t have them all up there. He’d have the biggest bunch you ever seen. They’d be stringin’ in there for the next forty days. They come in and see him for a while and then leave. They ain’t goin’ to live off up in those mountains because those boys and girls had a hard time up there. They had a hard time to live.
Bass had an old Indian motorcycle that he rode. That was before he got his arm shot off. He would make that liquor and ride that motorcycle on those trails up here, and couldn’t nobody catch him. He could outrun anybody on that motorcycle. Did Bass tell you about the way he got his arm shot off? I’ll tell you what happened. Now Bass was makin’ liquor for this old man down in North Carolina. Him and Bass was makin’ liquor together, but he was more or less haulin’ it for the man. That’s who started Bass in his young days to making liquor. Bass was real young then. He was just a big old boy.
PLATE 41 Playing cards was a favorite pastime at the hunting lodge that Mr. and Mrs. White owned and operated.
Well, he was over here on top of Beaver Dam Bald makin’ this liquor, and Bass broke some of the whiskey accidentally. Him and that old man (I’ll call him Johnson, but that wasn’t his real name) got into it over him breakin’ that liquor. Bass had an old mule and a sled, and he used that sled to get the whiskey out from the still, and he’d sell it to some of these timber cutters right up here at the fishin’ hatchery. They had a railroad roundtable up there and had a railroad track comin’ through here. They cut that timber out of these mountains, drug it off down there, and put it on these cars. That’s where Bass and Johnson were sellin’ their whiskey at. Old Man Johnson had killed nine men. [In Bass’s story he says seven men.] He was fast with his gun, and he was extremely dangerous—extremely dangerous. Well, him and Bass got into it, so Bass quit haulin’ his whiskey down there to the loggers. Johnson didn’t have a mule, so he had to pull his whiskey down there himself. That made Johnson mad, so he got to talkin’ about Bass. Then him and Bass got into it again over that.
Bass decided that he’d have it out with Johnson, so he went over to Hanging Dog to the church house. Bass wasn’t a religious man, just went over there, I guess. Bass was setting on a rail fence outside the church, and Old Man Johnson came walkin’ down the street. Bass called out and said, “I’m the meanest Russian in the mountains,” and he had already pulled his pistol out. Old Man Johnson, who was a deadly person—like a coiled rattlesnake—why, his pistol came out so fast, and he shot Bass so fast, shot Bass in the neck here, and shot his hat off, and shot him three or four times in his arm there. As Bass was goin’ down off the back of that rail fence, he got one shot in and grazed Old Man Johnson in the leg. The law came over there and arrested Bass, took him to Murphy, and put him in jail. Of course, they had to take his arm off. Gangrene set in, and they didn’t take him to the hospital until ten or eleven days after he got shot. And, of course, Bass never did like Johnson from then on. Finally, Johnson died and Bass told me a tale. He said, “Well, that old man finally died. It took seven to hold him in bed, he’d lied and killed so much.” I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but that’s what Bass told.
Bass had a still back there in that holler. The revenue officers slip-walked in here and went right up there in that holler behind this place I own now, and Bass had the liquor still back up there. He’d made some liquor and had it down at the spring. He was bottlin’ it up in fruit jars, bottlin’ it up to sell some. His wife gave him the signal that the revenue officers were comin’ up the trail, so he took and broke all his whiskey against some rocks. Well, they came up the holler there and seen what he did. Some of the bottles still had a little whiskey in them, four or five drops maybe, and they poured it all together tryin’ to make a case out of it. They arrested him and took him to a nearby town and put him in jail. He made bond, then went back for his trial. Those revenue officers came in there with a whole half gallon of whiskey, which wasn’t whiskey he’d made. It was some that they’d planted on him, you see. In other words, they told the court it was his whiskey, and they stuck Bass—framed him—but Bass got away. He dodged the law back in these mountains for about a year, moved his family back up where he’s at now just over the Tennessee line in North Carolina. He’s been there ever since, right out of the state of Tennessee into North Carolina, on account of them framin’ him over here. The revenue officers absolutely framed Bass Dockery.
They never did find his liquor still, so he moved it from here in Tennessee to over there on the North Carolina side. That’s when he put these silver dollars down on the trail. And if he came by and he looked down and that silver dollar was gone, he knew somebody was up there at his liquor still, and he’d tie a little thread across the trail, too, and he’d come by, and if the thread was broken, he’d know not to go in to his still. The house Bass lives in now has just been built lately. The old log house was torn down. It didn’t have no windows atall—just logs and a shutter or two on it. That’s about all. He wanted his new house to have lots of glass walls and windows because he was gettin’ old, and
that way, he could see everybody that moved. He didn’t want anybody sneakin’ up on him, so he put glass all over the doggone place. Bass Dockery’s always carried several thousand dollars on his person, all the time, and he didn’t want an outlaw to slip around up there and whack him on the head or shoot ’im before he saw them, so he sees everybody that moves up there. He’s got a .357 Magnum he keeps right there by him all the time—plays it around, you know, and tells everybody he’s got it.
He’s just started travelin’ in the last few years. Listen, I couldn’t get him out of here to go forty miles to anywhere a few years ago. He’s just started doin’ that. I’ll tell you something else he wouldn’t do. I’d take him out down to Athens, Tennessee, or somewhere. He wouldn’t drink the water out of those spigots, city water. He wouldn’t drink the water or any kind of soft drink. He wouldn’t even eat anything. He said that water would kill you down there, and it wasn’t fit to drink, and that stuff they fed you in those restaurants wasn’t fit to eat and it was liable to kill you. He said, “They’ve got everything in the world in it tryin’ to preserve it. I’ll wait till I get home to get me some water. That stuff you’re drinkin’ out of—them old cola bottles and things like that—is poison. You put a piece of fat meat in that bottle, and it’ll eat it up, so what do you think it’ll do to your stomach?” So he’d come all the way back home and cut him up a strip of meat and fry it, and eat that and get him a drink of water.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 21