11 - Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart

Our Southern Highlanders is a captivating memoir by Horace Kephart, a Pennsylvania-born writer and librarian, who shares his profound experiences and cultural insights from his time in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Narrated by Meredith Womac Cook, this work offers a unique glimpse into a bygone era, though readers should be aware that it contains some offensive language and overt racism reflective of its time and setting.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section eleven of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Keppart. This
LibriVox recording is in a public domain. The land of
dew without homespuns, jeans, and lindsey used to be the
universal garb of the mountain people. Nowadays you will seldom
find them except in far back places. Shoddy store clothes

(00:23):
are cheaper and easier to get, and this is a
story change for the old time material with sound and enduring,
the direct product of hard personal toil, and so is
prized and taken care of, whereas such stuff as backwoodsmen
can buy in his cross roads stores. Flimsy soon loses

(00:44):
shape and breaks down his own pride of personal appearance.
Our ever chilsman now goes about in a dirty blue
shirt wopsi and ragged trousers, toggled up with a nail
or two thick socks sagging untidily over rusty brogans, and
a huge black floppy hat that desecrates the landscape. Presently,

(01:06):
his hat band disappears to be replaced with a groundhog
throng woven in and out of knife slits like a
shoe string. When he comes home, he hangs his hat
on the floor until his wife picks it up. He
never brushes it. In time, that battered old headpiece becomes
as pliant to its owner's whim, as expressive of his

(01:28):
mood as a clown's cap in the circus. Commonly it
is a symbol of shiftlessness and unconcerned a touch, and
becomes a banner of defiance to law and order. To
meet on some lonesome road at night, a horseman enveloped
to his heels and a black slicker and top with
one of those prodigious funnels that conceals his feature like

(01:51):
a cow, is to face the cou klux or the
Spanish inquisition. When your young mountaineer is properly filled up
on corn liquor and feels like challenging the world, the
flesh and the devil, he pins up the front of
his hat with a thorn, sticks a sprig of balsamo
or cedar in the thong for an egret, and then

(02:12):
gallops forth with bottling pistol to tilt against whatever may
dare oppose him. And on the gray dawn of the
morning after you may find that hat lying wilted in
a corner, as crumpled, spiritless, and forlorn as its owner,
upon whom we charitably drop the curtain. I doubt though,

(02:33):
if anywhere in this wide world mere personal appearance is
more deceitful than among our mountaineers. The slovenly loud, whom
you shrink from approaching against the wind, is one of
the most independent and self satisfied fellows on earth, as
quick to resent alms as to return a blow. And
it is wonderful what soap and clean clothes will do

(02:56):
about the worst specimen of tattered demalion that I ever saw
out side of Trampton. Used to come into town every week,
always with a loaded winchester on his shoulder. He may
have washed his face now and then, but there was
no sign that he ever combed his mane. I took
him for one of those defectives alluded to in a
previous chapter, But no, I was told he was nobody's fool.

(03:20):
The rifle was explained, never left his hand. When he
was abroad. They said that a feud was brewing over
on Barkie, and that this man was in the Billain
while it boiled over, and the person in question killed
two men in front of his own door. When the
prisoner was brought into court, I could not recognize him.

(03:41):
A bath, a barber in a new store suit had
transformed him into a right good looking fellow, anything but
a tramp, anything but a desperado. He bore himself throughout
that grilling ordeal, like the downright man he was made out.
A clear case of self defense was set at and

(04:01):
promptly reverted to a condition in which he is recognizable
once more. The women of the back country usually go
bear headed around home, and often bear footed too, as
did the daughters of highland chiefs a century or two ago,
and for the same reason simply that they feel better.
So when visiting or expecting visitors their extremities are clad.

(04:26):
They make their own dresses, and the style never seems
to change. When traveling horseback, they use a man's saddle
and ride astride in their ordinary skirts, with the ingenuity
of tucking up that is beyond my understanding, as no
doubt it should be. Often one sees a man and
a woman writing a pillion, in which case the lady

(04:47):
purchased sidewise. Of course, if I were disposed to startle
the reader. After the manner of impressionistic writers who strive
after effect. At any cost, I could fill a book
with observed in the mountains, and that without exaggeration by
commission or omission, that one or two anecdotes suffice, and

(05:08):
then we will get back to our averages again. I
took down the following incident verbatim, save for proper names
from lips that I know to be truthful. It is
introduced here as a specimen of vivid offhand description. In
few words. There was a family on picker Flint that
was named Higgins, and another named the mcbees. They married

(05:33):
through and through till the whole generation. I ran out,
though what help was that they'd fly mad sometimes and
kill one another like fools. They had great big heads
and motley faces, ears as big as sheep skins. Well,
when they dressed up to come to church, the man
grown men have shirts made of this common domestic with

(05:54):
the letters AAA on their backs, and then barefooted, and
some without hats, but with three yards of red ribbon
round their necks. The sleeves of their shirts looked like
a whole web of cloth just sewed up together, and
them sleeves got full wind, and that red ribbon of flying, Oh,
my law, there were lots of little boys, of them

(06:16):
that came only in their shirt tails. There was cracks
between the logs that a dog could jump through, and
them little fellers did get a cracking grin in at
us all through the sermon. Tain't no man or use
to ask me what the text was. A day I
may explain that it still as common in many districts

(06:36):
of the Mountain country for small boys to go about
throughout the summer in a single abbreviated garment, and that
they are called shirt tail boys. Some of the expedients
that mountain girls and bent to make themselves attractive are
bizarre in the extreme. Without invading the sanctities of toilet,
I will cite one instance that is interesting from a

(06:58):
scientific viewpoint. They told me that a certain blue eyed
girl thought that black eyes were purtier, and that she
actually changed her eyes to jet black whenever she went
to meetin or other public gathering. While I could see
how the trick might be worked, it seemed utterly absurd
that an unschooled maid of the wilderness could acquire either

(07:20):
the knowledge or the means to accomplish such change. Well,
one day I was called to treat a sick baby
while waiting for the medicine to react, I chanced to
mention this tale as it had been told me. The
father who had blue eyes solemnly assured me that there
was no lie about it, and said he would convince

(07:41):
me in a few minutes. He stepped to the garden
and plucked a leaf of Jimson wheat. His wife crushed
the leaf and still a drop of its juice into
one of his eyes. I took out my watch, one
side of the eyeball redden slightly. The man said he'd
smarts a little, not much. Within fifteen minutes, the pupil

(08:02):
had expanded like a cat's eye in the dark, leaving
a rim of blue iris so thin as to be
quite unnoticeable without close inspection. The eye consequently was jet black,
and its expression utterly changed. My host said it did
not effect his vision materially, save that things glimmer a bit.

(08:22):
I met him again the next day, and he still
was an odd looking creature, indeed, with one eye a
light blue, in the other an absolute black. The thing
puzzled me until I recalled that the Latin name of
Jimpsen weed is Datura stramonium. Then, in a flash, it
came to me that Stramonium is a powerful midriatic. If

(08:44):
our man killer whitherto mentioned had had blue or gray eyes,
and had not chosen to stand trial, then with a
cake of soap and a new suit and a Gimpson leaf,
he might have made himself over so that his own
mother would not have known him. These simple facts are
offered gratis to writers of detective tales, whose stock of

(09:05):
disguises nowadays is so threadbare and pardon me, so absurd.
The mountain home of today is the log cabin of
the American pioneer. Not such a lodge as well to
do people affecting Adirondack camps, which costs more than frame
structures of similar size, but a pen that can be

(09:25):
erected by four cornermen in one day and is finished
by the owner at his leisure. The communist type is
a single, large room with maybe a narrow porch in
front and a plank door, a big stone chimney at
one end, a single sash for a window at the other,
and a seven or eight foot lean to at the
rear for kitchen. Some of the early settlers, who had

(09:49):
first choice of land took pains in building their houses,
squaring the logs like bridge timbers, joining them closely, smoothing
their punch ins with an AD's almost as truly as
if they were planed, and using mortar instead of clay,
and laying chimney in hearth. But such houses nowadays are rare.
If a man can afford so much effort as all that,

(10:12):
he will build a frame dwelling. If not, he will
content himself with such a cabin as I have described.
If he prospers, he may add a duplicate of alongside,
and cover the hole with one roof, leaving a ten
or twelve foot entry between. In Carolina, they seldom build
a house of round logs, but rather hew the inner

(10:32):
and outer faces flat, out of a curious notion that
this adds an appearance of finished to the structure. If
only they were turned the logs over so that the
flat faces joined, leaving at least the outside in the
natural round, the house would need hardly an eat chinking,
and the effect would be far more pleasing to good taste.

(10:53):
As it is, they merely notch the logs at the corners,
leaving the wide spaces to be filled up with splits mud,
anything to keep out the weather. As a matter of fact,
few houses ever are thoroughly chinked, and he who would
take pains to make a workmanlike job of chinking would
be ridiculed as fussing around like an old granny woman.

(11:17):
Nobody but a tenderfoot feels drafts. You know, it is
hard to keep such a dwelling clean, even if the
family be small. The whole structure, being built of green
timber throughout, soon shrinks, checks, warps, and SAgs, so that
there cannot be a square joint, a neat fit, a
perpendicular face, or a level place anywhere about it. The

(11:40):
roof droops, and a season or two the shingles curl
and leaky places open. Flooring shrinks apart, leaving wide and
irregular cracks through which the winter winds are sucked upward.
As though so many flus, no mountain home as a
cellar under it. Everywhere there are crannies and rough surfaces
to hold dust and soot, there being probably not a

(12:02):
single plane board in the whole house. But for all that,
there is something very attractive and picturesque about the little
old log cabin, in its setting of ancient forests and
mighty hills. It fits. It harmonizes where the prim and
precise product of modern carpentry with shock and artistic eye.

(12:23):
The very roughness of the honest logs and the homemade
furniture gives texture to the picture. Having no mathematically straight
lines nor uniform curves, the cabin's outlines conformed to its
surroundings without artificial stain or varnish or veneer. It is
what it seems, a genuine thing, a jewel in the rough,

(12:45):
and it is a home. When winter whistles through the
cracks and snow sifts into the corners of the room,
one draws his stumpy, little split bottom chair close to
the wide hearth and really knows the comfort of fire
leaping and sap singing from big birch logs. Every room
except the kitchen, if there be a kitchen, has a

(13:05):
couple of beds in it, enough all told for the family,
and generally one spare bed if much company comes, some
pallets are made on the floor for the women and
children of the household. In a single room cabin, there
usually is a cock loft reached by a ladder for storage,
and maybe a bunk or two closets and pantries, there

(13:26):
are none, for they would only furnish good harbridge for woods,
rats and other vermin. Everything must be inside and accessible
to the housewife's little sedge. Broom linen and small articles
of apparel are stored in a chest or a cheap
little tin trunk or two. Most of the family's wardrobe
hanged from pegs in the walls or nails in the

(13:48):
loft beams, along with strings of dried apples, peppers, bunches
of herbs, twists of tobacco, gourds full of seeds, the
hunter's pout, and other odd brick of brac in resting
to furign eyes. The narrow mantle shelf holds pipes and snuff,
and various other articles of frequent use, Among them a

(14:09):
twig or two of sweet birds that has been chewed
to shreds at one end and is queerly discolored with
something brown. This is what the mountain woman calls her
toothbrush a snuffstick. Understand. For wild decorations, there may be
a few gaudy advertisements, lithograft and colors, perhaps some half

(14:30):
tones from magazines that travelers have left. A magazine is
always called a book in this region, as I think
throughout the south of late years, the agents for photoon
larging companies have invaded the mountains and have reaped a harvest.
For if there'd be one curse of civilization at our
hillsman Craves, it is a huge tinted family group in

(14:53):
an abominable goco co frame. There is an almanac in
the cabin, but no clock. What does a man need
of a clock when he has a good crone rooster.
Strange as it may seem, in this roughest of backwards countries,
I have never seen candles unless they were brought in
by outsiders like myself. Beef, you must remember, is exported,

(15:17):
not eaten by our farmers, and hence there is no
tallow to make candles with. Instead of these, every house
is provided with a kerosene lamp of narrow wick, and
seldom do you find a chimney for it. This is
partly because lamp chimneys are hard to carry safely over
the mountain roads, and partly because man can do without

(15:38):
such like anyhow. But kerosene also is hard to transport,
and so one sometimes will find pine knots used for illumination,
But oftener the woman will pour hog's grease into a
tin or saucer, twist up a bit of rag for
the wick, and so make a slut that, believe me,

(15:58):
deserves the name. In fact, the supply of pine knots
with inconvenient distance of home is soon exhausted, and anyway,
as the mountaineer disdains to be forehanded, he would burn
up the knots for kiling rather than save any for illumination.
Very few cabins have carpet on the floor. It would

(16:18):
hold too much mud from the feet of the men,
who would not use a scraper if there was one.
Beds generally are bought nowadays at the stores, but some
are homemade with bed cords of bast rope. Tables and
chairs mostly are made on the spot or obtained by
barter from some handy neighbor. In many homes you will

(16:39):
still find the ancient spinning wheel with a hand loom
on the porch, and in the loft there will be
a set of quilting frames for making kivers. Out in
the yard you see a 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.

(17:00):
At the spring, there is a box for cold storage
and summer. Nearby stands the great iron kettle for boiling clothes,
making soap, scalding pigs, and a variety of other uses.
Alongside of it is the batland block, on which the
family wash is hammered with a beetle batland stick. If
the woman has no washboard, which very often is the case,

(17:25):
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 everyone looked sleepy, I went outdoors and strolled around
in the moonlight until the women had time to retire.

(17:48):
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

(18:08):
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 loaded rifle that hung over the
father's bed. It was a bright new percussion cap where

(18:31):
a greased rag had been when I went out for
my moonlight stroll. There was no need of 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 Unicas are hundreds of

(18:52):
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 our 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

(19:14):
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 backwards of

(19:38):
Appalachia we have with us today in flesh and blood,
the Indian fighter of our colonial border, a back of him,
the half wild clansmen 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

(19:59):
spoken to today the language of peers the plowmen, 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

(20:22):
of backwards families, large ones at that exist in blind cabins, ever,
remind one somewhat of Irish hovels, Norwegian sayats, the black
houses of the Hebrides, the windowless rock piles inhabited by
Corsican shepherds, and by basks of the Pyrenees. Such a
cabin has but one room for all purposes. In rainy

(20:46):
or gusty weather, when the two doors must be closed,
no light enters the room, saved through cracks in the
wall and down the chimney. In the damned climate of
Western Carolina, such an interior as fusty or even what.
In many cases, the chimney is no more than a
semicircular pile of rough rocks, and rises no higher than

(21:07):
a man's shoulder. Hence the common saying you can set
by the fire and spit out through the chimbey when
the wind blows. Contrary, one's lungs choke and his eyes
stream from the smoke. 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

(21:27):
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 can't cuss a cab in

(21:51):
it without getting the hair in your teeth. Utensils are
limited to a frying pan, an iron pot, a coffee pot,
a bucket, and some 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 the families that are fairly well to do,

(22:15):
there will come periods of famine, such as Lincoln, speaking
of his boyhood, called pretty pinching times, hickory ashes that
are used as a substitute for soda and biscuits, and
the empty salt cord will be soaked for brine to
cook with. Once, when I was boarding with a good family,

(22:35):
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 large 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

(22:55):
water and then berts a little on the surface to
substitute for salt. Another day we had not a bite
but string beans boiled in unsalted water. It is not
uncommon in the far backwoods for a traveler asking for
a match to be told that there is none in
the house, nor even the pioneers flint and steel. Should

(23:17):
the embers on the hearth go out, someone must tramp
to a neighbor's and fetch fire on the torch. Hence
the saying, have you come to barroy fire and you're
in such a hurry you can't chat. The shifts and
expedients to which some of the mountain women are put
from lack of utensils and vessels are simply pathetic. John

(23:39):
Fox tells of a young preacher who stopped at a
cabin in Georgia to pass the night. His hostess, as
a mark of unusual distinction, killed a chicken, then dressed
it in a pan. She rinsed the pan and made
up her dough in it. She rinsed it again and
went out and used it for a milk pail. She
came in, rinsed it again, and went to the spring

(24:01):
and brought it back full of water. She filled up
the glasses on the table and gave him the pan
with the rest of the water in which to wash
his hands. The woman was not a slattern. It was
the only utensil she had. Such poverty is exceptional. Yet
it is an all but universal rule that anything that

(24:22):
cannot be cooked in a pot or fried in a
pan must go begging in the mountains. Once I helped
my hostess to make kraut. We chopped up one hundred
pounds of cabbage with no cutter but a tin coffee can,
holding this in the two hands and chopping downward with
the edge. Many times I stopped the hammer of the
edge smooth on a round stick. Rarely this is the

(24:45):
land of make it yourself or do without. Yet, however
destitute the mountain people may be, they are never abject.
The more misery of hunger is born with a sardonic grin.
After the course of such diet, as described above, a
woman laughingly said to me, I'm getting the dropsy. The

(25:07):
meat is all dropping off my bones. During the campaign
of nineteen oh four, a brother Democrat confided to me
that the people around here are so poor that a
free silver was shipped in by the car load. Wians
couldn't pay the freight. So when a settlement is dubbed poverty,
it is with no suggestion of winding lament, but with

(25:30):
historical good humor that shows in need more poor, fork, long, hungry,
no pone, and no fat, all of them real names. Occasionally,
as at hog killing time, the porest lived in abundance. Occasionally,
as at Christmas, they will go on spreeze, but taking

(25:52):
them the year through. The Highlanders are a notably obstentious race.
When a family has reduced to dry corn bread and
black cats unsweetened so much and no more, it will
joke about the lack of meat and vegetables. And when
there is meat, two mountaineers engaged in hard outdoor work
will consume less of it than a northern officeman would eat. Indeed,

(26:16):
the heartiness with which furriners stuffed themselves is a wonder
and a merriment to the people of the hills. When
a friend came to visit me, the landlady giggled an
asigned to her husband, get the almanac out, and see
when that feller old full, as though she were bidding
him look to see when the moon would be full.

(26:37):
In truth, it is not so bad to be poor
where everyone else is in the same fix. One does
not lose cast nor self respect. He is not tempted
by a display of good things all around him, nor
is he embittered by the haughtiness and extravagance of the
rich and Socially, the mountaineer is a democrat by nature,

(26:57):
equal to any man, as all men are equal before him.
Even though hunger be eating like a slow acid into
his vitals, he still would preserve a high spirit, a
proud independence that accepts no favor unless it be offered
in a neighborly way. As man to man, I've never
seen a mountain beggar, never heard of one charity or

(27:20):
anything that smells to him like charity is declined with
patrician dignity or open scorn. In the last house up
Hazel creaked whilt old man's styles. He had a large
family and was on the verge of destitution. His eldest son,
a veteran from the Philippines, had been invalidated at home

(27:41):
and died there. Jack Cockburn, in the kindness of his heart,
sent away and got a blank form of application to
the government for funeral expenses to which the family was
entitled by law. He filled it out all but the signature,
and rode away up to Stiles to have the old
man's son, but styles peremptorily refused to accept from the

(28:04):
nation what was due his dead son. I ain't that
hard pushed yet, was his first and last word on
the subject. This might seem to be the very perversity
of ignorance, but it was in fact renunciation on a
point of honor, and native pride refused to see the
manner in any other light. The mountaineer born and bred

(28:26):
to spartan self denial as a scorn of luxury, regarding
its effeminacies with the same contempt as does the nomadic Arab,
and any assumption of superiority he will resent with blow
or sarcasm. A ragged Hobblowhoys stood on the Vanderbilt grounds
at biltmore Mouth, open but silent, watching a gardener at work.

(28:50):
The latter, annoyed by the boy's vacuous stare, spoke up sharply,
What do you want like a flash? Lad retorted, Oh,
Dad sent me down here to look at the place.
Said if I like that, he might buy it for me. Once,
as an experiment, I took a backwoodsman from the Smoky's
to Knoxville and put him up at a good hotel

(29:13):
was he self conscious, bashful, not a bit of it.
When the waiter brought him a juicy tenderloin, he snapped,
I don't eat my meat raw. It was hard to
find anything in the long menu that he would eat.
On the street, he held his head proudly erect in
regard to the crowd, with an expression of titch me gin,

(29:34):
you dare. Although the surroundings were as strange to him
as a city of Mars would be to us, he
showed neither concern nor approval, or rather a fine disdain
like that of Diogenes at the country fair, Lord, how
many things there be in this world of which Diogenes
hath no need? The poverty of the Mountain people is naked,

(29:58):
but high minded and unashamed. To comment on it as
I have done is taken as an impertinence. This is
a fine trait in its way, though rather hard on
a descriptive writer whose motives are ascribed to mere vulgarity
and a taste for scandal mongering. The people, of course,
have no ghost of an idea that poverty may be

(30:20):
more picturesque and luxury, and they are quite as far
from conceiving that a plain and friendly statement of their
actual condition published to the world is the surest way
to awaken the nation to consciousness of its duties toward
a region that it has so long and so singularly neglected.

(30:40):
The worst enemies of the Mountain people are those public
men who, knowing the true state of things, yet conceal
or deny the facts in order to solve a sore
local pride, encourage the supine fatalism of what must be
will be, and so drug the Highlanders back into their
rip fan winkle sleep. End of section eleven read by

(31:03):
Bryce Cryse, Ohio