Foxfire 9

by Foxfire Fund, Inc.

  We lived close to a spring so we had a springhouse built. My daddy hired a man to make the bricks for it and it had a little oak shingle roof on it. [At that time] he’d make fresh herb teas and medicines every week. He’d put the medicine in little jars and we’d set the bottles down in the water [in that springhouse] to keep them cool because there wasn’t such things as Frigidaires then. It would keep [the medicines] fresh for more than a week. He would [prescribe] all [his herb medicines] in the tea form if it was [to be taken internally]. Tea was the easiest way to take [the medicine]. Some of [his patients] wouldn’t drink [the teas] without sugar to sweeten it a little bit, but if they would, he preferred to have them take it without sugar.

  There wouldn’t be many days unless it was real bad weather that somebody [didn’t come to be treated]. [He had patients] that’d come from a long ways, some from Alabama and some from Tennessee. They heard about him through their kin people. “Why don’t you go see Henry Cantrell? He can cure that.”

  [So they’d come see him and say,] “My cousin [or my aunt or my uncle] told me about you. Here I am.”

  Someone that had ulcerated stomach and hemorrhoids came from Five Points in Atlanta. He mixed a teaspoonful of alum and about a Vaseline jar-sized amount of pure hogs’ lard together, worked up into a salve, and give them a little jar of that. He’d just cure ’em up in a little while. We kept that salve mixed ahead of time, ’cause it didn’t spoil.

  [People used to come to him with pellagra.] They’d turn red from the elbows down and knees down and their skin would peel off. It’d look like a bad case of sunburn but it don’t ever turn no color but red till [the skin] starts peeling. I ain’t saw none of that in years but people’d come to him with that and he’d fix this tea out of the stalks of the barbell plant and some whiskey. Barbell’s a long, slim plant that rises up in a pile about as high as my head. It has yellow-gold-colored blooms that look like little bitty bells hanging on the underside of little clusters. It [grew] back in the mountains around Cleveland. [He’d prescribe] a good teaspoonful before each meal, three teaspoons a day. He’d put a little whiskey in [with the stalks] to preserve [the barbell] if there wasn’t a cool place to keep it. The whiskey had to be pure corn liquor, not any that was made with sugar and stuff. [The sugar] made the pellagra act up worse.

  Barbell was the only mixture he’d use with whiskey. [My brothers] went and got his liquor for him. [They’d go] way back there in the mountains towards Hiawassee. There was one place up there that they knew [our family] so they’d let the boys have it for medicine. It cost them ten dollars a gallon. [When they] went for it the first time, [the moonshiners] give the boys a hard time. “Who’s sick? What do you want with it?”

  The revenue officers would stop them and they’d tell ’em, “Why, I was getting this for such and such a one that was sick. Gettin’ it for my daddy to make medicine out of,” and then they’d leave ’em alone. They knew my daddy was a herb doctor [so they] knew what it was all about.

  There was what they called snake button plant. It had little ol’ buttons on top of that plant and he used that on warts and corns and bunions on your toes and feet. It’d draw the soreness out and the corns or whatever would peel off. I ain’t seen none [of the snake buttons] down here. All that stuff was mostly found back in the mountains.

  [My daddy treated all the family when we were sick or hurt.] When I was about seven or eight, just old enough to walk the three miles to school, my mother got shot. My brother-in-law had brought a Mr. Loudermilk up to our house to sell him my daddy’s gun. [The gun was] one of these kinds that loaded a whole lot of shells, an automatic. My brother-in-law took it and started to put a shell in. [When he] pulled the bolt back, it was supposed to throw its shell out. He pulled the bolt back but the gun didn’t throw its shell. It always had before, but it didn’t that time. Well, he pushed the bolt back up and the gun went off and shot my mama. The bullet went through her lung and lodged in her shoulder blade.

  Back then we didn’t have phones, [so we] couldn’t call a doctor. My brother-in-law had to go get him. We thought the doctor might get the bullet out, but he couldn’t because it [had] lodged against her shoulder blade. They never did get that bullet out and she didn’t have no surgery. Daddy doctored her. He fixed a walnut poultice [to put on the wound]. To make the walnut poultice, crack the walnut hull and get the walnut out. Beat the hull up and put table salt and a little bit of flour in with it and smear it on a little piece of soft, clean cloth, like a piece of old sheet or pillowcase. He put that on the wound and changed it every twenty-four hours.

  He also gave her a blood purifier made of a teaspoonful of sulfur mixed in a pint can of honey all stirred up good. She had to take one teaspoonful of that mixture every day. She got all right [after] staying in bed ten days, and could use her arm like always. She lived to be ninety-one.

  He never did just set a price for his doctoring because he didn’t think that was right. People would just pay him by working for him or they’d trade him stuff from out of their garden or produce or something like that.

  The patients would just come in the living room because he had to stay in one place due to his arthritis. He didn’t get about much, maybe a little bit on crutches, but not much. Sometimes he’d get himself able to get up and out and around, and then he’d go right back down. He’d usually just sit in the living room in a chair [that was high off the floor]. He couldn’t sit down in a regular chair [and get back up] like we do. He had to be up real high.

  [After he got so disabled that he couldn’t get around much at all,] he’d sit and read his Bible. If nobody wasn’t there to talk with him, he’d sit there and read that Bible. He wouldn’t read the newspaper; he’d read the Bible.

  He died in ’36 when he was seventy-nine.

  My mama’s name was Rachel Chadwick. She was from Ellijay, Gilmer County [Georgia]. She was about five feet tall and had gray eyes, the color of mine. Her hair [was] kind of a reddish color and she wore it in a bun.

  She met Daddy when he came back home from living with [the Cherokee Indians]. She was sixteen [and he was thirty-one] when they got married. They moved to Cleveland [Georgia, White County].

  Mama sewed with her fingers and made all our clothes. Her mama had taught her to sew. It was just something passed on down from mother to daughter. She also sewed for other people. She’d make dresses and men’s clothes and suits. [She processed the cotton that she wove with.] We didn’t grow any cotton; we bought it from other people around us. Before [we] could go to bed at night, every child had to pick seed out of so much cotton. I learned how to card and make bats and rows with her. She had a spinning wheel set up and I’d turn the wheel while she’d spin and make big balls of thread on corncobs. She didn’t have no bobbins.

  She’d weave with that cotton thread. She’d run it in that loom and weave her cloth to make clothes and curtains. A lot of times she’d weave a little wool in with the cotton. She’d trade for wool fleece and card that wool, too. She would knit boys’ wool socks and babies’ booties out of that wool.

  She quilted all the time. [She had a quilting frame] just like I’ve got. It hung from the ceiling. She’d roll it up to the top of the house at night, plumb up out of the way. Roll it down in the day. She’d make her own quilting bats, cotton padding, to put in the quilts. She’d place the bats on the flat lining, then she fixed the rows with thread. They was little rows, with the thread doubled on the spinnin’ wheel by twisting two [strands] of thread together.

  When she didn’t have a quilt, she’d sit and crochet. She’d crochet lace on the pillowcases and wide lace on our hand towels and bedspreads. When she’d lay her crocheting down to go in and fix a meal, I’d get it up and see how she’d done it. I’d just work while she was gone. I’d hear her coming and I’d ravel it back out. I wouldn’t realize I was getting the thread dirty. She knew, but I thought she didn’t know it. I can’t remember learning [to crochet]. I just copied her. Mama learned us all how to quilt and cro
chet and make dolls. So that’s the way I learned.

  [My mama usually] fixed biscuits and ham gravy for breakfast. She’d fry the ham and take that grease and make gravy. She would thicken it with flour and make thick gravy. She’s the one that learnt me to make biscuits.

  She’d always cook whatever kind of vegetables she had for dinner and supper, and cornbread and we always had milk and butter. She had a big wood stove she cooked on, and we children had to gather all the wood [for it].

  Mama was pretty bad in real cold weather to make cornmeal mush, they called it. She was pretty fond of that for supper. To make it, just sift the meal and instead of making cornbread with milk and cold water, just stir in boiling water to thicken it. Then take that up and eat it with butter and milk. It was kind of like oatmeal and I didn’t like it too good.

  My favorite meal was ham and gravy. Any time she cooked it, I’d eat it. The ham was country cured, salted down in a big ol’ meat box. The meat box was like a big cedar chest made out of oak. It was kept close to a window inside the kitchen part of the house. The bottom would have wide cracks in it to let the salt drip through, but the rest of it was pretty tight. They’d layer that meat in there—ham, shoulders and middlin’s. (Middlin’s is the side, between the shoulder and back—down the spine. They’d go right down the hog’s backbone and cut that out and that’s a square middlin’ of meat.) They’d put a layer of salt, layer of meat, layer of salt, and at the top they’d cover the meat completely up with salt so nothing could get to it and where you couldn’t even see none of it. Then they’d let it set for about a week. When the salt started melting on the meat, we’d put a big pan under there to catch the salt. We had to empty the pan out every now and then.

  Mama would take the trimmings of the meat and grind them up to sausage. Then she’d put the flavoring and the salt in. She’d use sage most of the time and a little bit of hot pepper sometimes. Different stuff you know, whatever way everybody liked it. My mama was bad to put it up two ways, some with sage and some with just pepper.

  Sometimes she would shuck corn, break the corn out and put [sausage] up in the dry corn shucks. She’d wash that shuck and pack that sausage and salt in it. She’d close it back up and tie the shucks closed with little wires. Then she’d hang them in the smokehouse and let them dry out. It’d keep for as long as we needed it, all winter. Nothing would get in [the sausage] with it wrapped up in that shuck. Sealed it up.

  Mama kept such a yard of chickens, we’d pick up eggs hours at a time. They was just laying everywhere, some under the house, some nesting in the barn, some in the little out sheds and all around. We [built] a chicken house and lot and built nests for the hens in little boxes. We put straw in those nests and got the hens to lay their eggs there. We had guineas and turkeys, too.

  When it got to where Daddy couldn’t get around, us kids took the farming over and we did it! We growed cabbage, collards, corn and two kinds of potatoes, sweet potatoes and Irish. We didn’t grow cotton but we grew just about everything else. We would grow acres of syrup cane. We were close to a syrup mill and we would cut our cane down and take it there to be ground. The mill was pulled by a mule. The juice was cooked till it got thick. Then [the foam on top] was skimmed off and the syrup poured into tin buckets that held about four pounds of syrup. Sometimes we’d put our syrup into a ten-gallon barrel, just a plain barrel with a hole and stopper in it, so we could tilt it over and pour out what we needed. We would sell syrup by the gallons.

  Mama was bad to cook syrup gingerbread. It was delicious. She’d make tea cakes, too. We’d eat syrup and butter and biscuits, also. We used a lot of syrup.

  My mother never would can too much, just berries and peaches and apples, stuff that wasn’t hard to can. She preserved some vegetables in barrels. She’d fill one barrel full of beans. We would pick ’em, string ’em and break ’em all up. Then cook ’em half done and pack ’em down in a barrel with layer of salt, layer of beans, layer of salt, layer of beans till we got that barrel full. Then she would take cabbage leaves and cover the top. Then take a white cloth and pack it down in there and cover it with salt. Then she’d put a lid on that barrel and let those beans sit there to sour. It’d take about a week to sour and then they’d be ready to eat. They’d just last and last; they wouldn’t ruin ’cause they was soured.

  She had one barrel she’d put up with kraut, put it up same way as the beans. We didn’t cook the cabbage. Just chopped it up in another container using a straightened-out hoe, sharpened just as sharp as they could get it. In the barrel she’d put a layer of cabbage, layer of salt, layer of cabbage, layer of salt. Then put the cloth over it and let it sour. That was sauerkraut. That made the best sauerkraut. It was delicious and there wasn’t no spoilin’ to it. You’d have that till you used it up.

  When I was real little, we lived down in a low place, kinda in a valley like. Well, it came a lot of rain one time. Just rainin’, rainin’, rainin’, rainin’, and I heard [the grown-ups] talk about the floods, you know. My daddy [had been] reading to me [about Noah’s ark] in the Bible, back when the flood came. Well, I was too small to understand what it was all about, but I knowed just a flood came and washed everybody away. That’s all I had in my mind. Well, it rained and rained and we couldn’t go to school because it was so rainy. I got out in the yard one day and came running back in the house, “Mama, Mama, it’s comin’ a flood!”

  Mama said, “How do you know it’s comin’ a flood?” I said, “There’s just water everywhere.” I was scared, just as scared as I could be.

  Then my daddy called to me. He said, “Come here. Let’s get this straight now. Back in them olden days, back when people was wicked, God seen people destroying the first world. A flood came and washed everybody away but the ones that was ready to go. Noah had built an ark for [them]. The ones that wasn’t ready to go in the ark—well, they was washed away.”

  So that kinda satisfied me a little and I calmed down. [laughter] I just knew we was all gonna be washed away, you know, ’cause there was water everywhere! [My daddy] told me the big flood’s already been and it took away all the mean people. Well, that satisfied my mind right there.

  PLATE 6 An old photograph of the house described below, located in White County, Georgia. Flora’s mother, Rachel Cantrell, is holding Coleman, and Myrtie, Flora, and Florrie are standing with them.

  “When I first started school we lived in an old, old log house with wood shingles. It just had two rooms and it was built so you could go between them. You could drive a car between them two rooms. There was one big room and then the [people who built the house] skipped the width of a wagon and built another big room. You had to go out of the living room and cross through [that open space] to get to the kitchen. It wasn’t covered between the two rooms; you just walked out in the weather. [They called it] a dog trot, except dog trots are usually joined and ours wasn’t. When we moved there, the wagon was driven up between the two rooms to unload the furniture. We lived in that house for ages. Now that was a mountain house”.

  PLATE 7 A diagram showing where the furniture was located in this two-cabin house. A. Father’s bed, B. Mother’s bed, C. Child’s bed, D. Chest of drawers, E. Benches, F. Stove, G. Shelves, H, Door, I. Chimney, DW. Double window, W. Single window, T. Table.

  • • •

  We’d start school in September, go to school for oh, six months in the winter. Then we were out for about four to six weeks or so. We missed a good many days on account of the weather because we had no transportation. [We had to walk.] We’d put on a raincoat if it was rainin’ and go to school, just so’s it wasn’t real freezing cold.

  The first school I went to was in a building near the asbestos mines. I didn’t get to go when I was six years old. I had to wait awhile till I got old enough to where I could walk that far. It was a pretty good little piece, about a couple or three miles.

  It was a one-room schoolhouse and we had little benches, not desks. They had a primer, first grade. And then they had [seco
nd and] third grade and fourth grade and on up through the seventh. But there wasn’t very many in neither grade, just maybe two or three. Now when I got in the fourth grade, it was me and one other girl. We was in the fourth and fifth grades for two years by ourself. I don’t know how old our teacher was but she was young. [She didn’t have any formal teacher education] that I knew of.

  Later, I went to high school in Nacoochee Valley. One day we had a fire drill at school. They told us we was gonna have one and then we heard the bell. The little bitty ones was on the first floor and I was on the second. The school was three stories high. When the bell was tapped, we had to see how quickly we could get out. There was banisters and steps that went down; they weren’t very wide. Well, ev’rybody broke into runnin’. I didn’t get out fast enough and the third-graders come down and pushed me over the banister. I fell off and broke my arm.

  There was a man who just helped around the school but he wasn’t a doctor. He knowed about as much as a doctor, but he didn’t have a license to doctor. If one of [the students] got hurt, he could give ’em first aid. He placed my arm back as best he could and put a towel around it. He let my sister take me home. We had to walk three miles—me with that broke arm.

  [When we got home,] my daddy fixed it. He held one end real tight and pulled and had Mama to pull on the other end and they set the bone. They bandaged it up real good with a cloth. He wrapped it up with the cloth fixed where it’d stretch. Then he put it in a sling. I went back to school the next day and I haven’t had any trouble with it since.

  [All of us children would play back up on the mountains near where we lived. There were rocks we’d crawl up on and through.] We [also] had a jumpin’-off place where we’d [go]. You see, back in the Indian war one of the Indians got to dating one of the white girls and her daddy tried to stop her [from courting him] but she wouldn’t give him up. So her daddy tried to get rid of him. He took him up to the jumpin’-off place and pushed him off. Well, she jumped off after him. We used to boil eggs and eat what we wanted, then throw the rest of them off down there, just for the fun of it, to see how far they would fall.