12 - 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 twelve of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Home folks and
neighbor people. Despite the low standard of living that prevails
in the backwoods, the average mountain home is a happy one.
As homes go, there is little worry and less fret.

(00:22):
Nobody's nerves are on edge. Our highlander views all exigencies
of life with the calm, fortitude and tolerant good humor
of Brett Heart's Southwesterner, to whom cyclones, famine, drought, floods, pestilence,
and savages were things to be accepted, and whom disaster,
if it did not stimulate, certainly did not appall. It

(00:46):
is a patriarchal existence. The man of the house's lord.
He takes no orders from anybody at home or abroad.
Whether he shall work, or visit, or roam the woods
with dog and gun is nobody's affair, but his own.
About family matters. He consults with his wife, but in
the end his word is law. If Madam be a

(01:07):
bit shrewish, he is likely to tolerate it as natural
to the weaker vessel. But if she should go too far,
he checks her with a kurt shed up, and the
incident is closed. The woman, as every wife is called,
has her kingdom within the house, and her man seldom
medals with its administration. Now and then he may grumble

(01:30):
a woman's dollars finding something to do that a man
can't see no sense in. But then the Lord made
woman fussy over trifles. His ways are inscrutable, so why
bother about it. The mountain farmer's wife is not only
a household drudge, but a field hand as well. She
helps the plant hose corn, gathers fodder, sometimes even plows

(01:53):
or splits rails. It is the commonness of sights for
a woman to be awkwardly hacking up fire with a
dull axe. When her man leaves home on a journey
is not likely to have laid in wood for the
stove or hearth, so she and the children must drag
from the hillsides whatever dead timber they can find outside

(02:14):
the towns. No hat is lifted to maid or wife.
A swain would consider it belittled his dignity at table
if women be seated at all. The dishes are passed
first to the men, but generally the wife stands by
and serves. There is no conscious discourtesy in such customs,
but they betoken an indifference to women's weakness, a disregard

(02:37):
for her finer nature, a denial of her proper rank
that are real and deep seated in the mountaineer. To him,
she is little more than a sort of superior domestic animal.
The chivalric regard for women that characterize our pioneers of
the far West is altogether lacking in the habits of
the backwoodsmen of Appalacia. And yet it is seldom that

(03:01):
a highland woman complains of her lot. She knows no other.
From aboriginal times, the men of her race have been warriors, hunters, herdsmen,
clearers of force, and the women have toiled in the fields. Indeed,
she would scarce respect her husband if he did not
lord over her and cast upon her the menial tasks.

(03:22):
It is manners for a woman to drudge and obey.
All respectable wives do that, and they stay at home
where they belong, never visiting or going anywhere without first
asking their husband's consent. I am satisfied that there is
less bickering in mountain households than in the most advanced society.
Of Christendom. Certainly there are fewer divorces in proportion to

(03:46):
the marriages. This is not by grace of any uncommon
regard for the Seventh Commandment, but rather from a more
tolerant attitude of mind. Mountain women marry early, many of
them at fourteen or fifteen teen, and nearly all before
they are twenty. Large families are the rule, seven to
ten children being considered normal, and fifteen is not an

(04:09):
uncommon number, but the infant mortality is high. The children
have few toys other than rag dolls, broken bits of
crockery for play parties, and such ridy horses and so
forth as they make for themselves. They play few games,
but rather frisk about like young colts without aim or method.

(04:31):
Every Mountain child has at least one dog for a playfellow,
and sometimes a pet pig is equally familiar. In many
districts there is not enough level land for a ballground.
A prime amusement of the small boys is rocking, throwing
stones at marks or at each other, in which rather
doubtful pastime they become singularly expert. To encourage a child

(04:54):
to do chores about the house unstable, he may be
promised a pig of his own next time of sow
litters to know when to look for the pigs, and
expedy in his practice that I never heard of elsewhere.
The child bores a small hole at the base of
his thumbnail. I was assured by a mountain preacher that
the whole will go out to the edge of the

(05:15):
nail in three months and twenty four days, the period
he said of a sou's gestation. In reality, the average
term is about three months. Many mountaineers are indulgent, superindulgent parents.
The off heard threat I'll wear you out with a
hickory is seldom carried out. The boys, especially, grow up

(05:36):
with little restraint beyond their own natural sense of filial duty.
Little children are allowed to eat and drink anything they want,
green fruit, adulterated candy, fresh cider, no matter what to
the limit of repletion, and fatal consequences are not rare.
I have observed the very perversity of license allowed children,

(05:57):
similar to what Julian Ralph tells us of a man
on Bullskin Creek who, explaining why his child died, said
that no one could make her take no medicine. She
just wouldn't take it. She was a baker through and through,
and you never could make a baker do nothing he
didn't want to do. The Sadis spectacle in mountains is

(06:18):
a tiny burial ground without headstone or headboard in it,
all overgrown with weeds and perhaps unfenced, with cattle grazing
over the low mounds or sunken graves. The spot seems
never to be visited between interments. I remarked elsewhere that
most mountaineers are singularly callous. In the presence of serious

(06:39):
injury or death. They show a no less remarkable lack
of reverence for the dead. Nothing on earth can be
more poignantly lonesome than one of these mountain burial places,
nothing so mutely evident of neglect. Funeral services are extremely
simple in the backwoods, where lumber is scarce. A coffin

(06:59):
will be knocked together from rough planks taken from someone's loft,
or out of puncheons hewn from green trees. It is
slung on poles and carried like a litter. The only
exercises that the grave are singing and praying, and sometimes
even those are omitted, as in case no preacher can
be summoned in time. In all backed settlements that I

(07:22):
have visited from Kentucky southward, there is a strange custom
to the funeral sermon that seems to have no analog elsewhere.
It is not preached until long after the interment, may
be a year or several years. In some districts, the
practices to hold joint services at the same time and
place for all in the neighborhood who died within the year.

(07:46):
The time chosen will be after the crops are gathered
so that everybody can attend. In other places, a husband's
funeral sermon is postponed until his wife dies, or vice versa,
though the interval may be many years. These collective funeral
services last two or three days and are attended by
hundreds of people, like a camp meeting. Strange scenes sometimes

(08:09):
are witness at the graveside, prompted perhaps by weird superstitions.
One of our burials, which was attended by more than
the usual retinue of kinfolk, there were present two mothers
who bore each other the deadliest hate that women know.
Each had a child at her breast. When the clouds fell,
they silently exchanged babies long enough for each to suckle

(08:31):
her rival's child. Was it a reconciliation cemented by the
very life of their blood? Or was it a charm
to keep off evil spirits? No one could or would
explain it to me. Weddings never are celebrated in church,
but at the home of the bride, and our jolly occasions.
Of course, often the young men, stimulated with more or

(08:54):
less moonshine had the literally stunning complement of a chivalry.
The Mountaineers have a native fondness for music and dancing, which,
with the shouting spells of their revivals, are the only
outlets for those powerful emotions which otherwise they studiously conceal.
The harmony of part singing is unknown in the back districts,

(09:17):
where men and women both sing in a jerky trouble.
Most of their music is in the weird, plaintive minor
key that seems spontaneous with primitive people throughout the world.
Not only the tone, but the sentiment of their hymns
and ballads is usually of a melancholy nature, expressing the
wrath of God and the doom of sinners, or the

(09:38):
luckless adventures of wild blades and of maidens, all forlorn
a highlander might well say, with a clown in a
winter's tale, I love a ballad, but even too well
if it be doleful, matter merely set down, or a
very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably. But where banjo

(10:00):
and fiddle Lennard, the vapors vanish upstrike the fox, chase,
shady grove, gambling man, sour wood mountain, And these are
limbered and merry voices rise, Call up your dog, Oh,
call up your dog, Call up your dog, Call up
your dog. Let's go hunting to catch a ground hog.

(10:23):
Rang tangle, waddle, lanky day. Wherever the church has not
put its van on twissifications, the country dance is a
chief amusement of young and old. I have never succeeded
in memorizing the queer calls at these dances in proper order.
And so take the liberty of quoting from mister Haynes Mountain.

(10:45):
People of Kentucky. Eight hands up and go to the
left half and back Corner's turn, partners, sashey eight first
four forwards and back forward again, and crossover forward and back,
and you go, gentstand and ladies swing in the center
own partners and half sashity eight eight hands and gone

(11:09):
again half and back partners by the right and opposite
by the left. Sashiy eight right hands across, and how
they do left and back? And how are you opposite
partners half sashity eight and go to the next, and
so on for each couple. All hands up and go
to the left, hit the floor, corners, turn and sashitiy

(11:32):
eate first couple, cage the bird with three arms around bird,
hop out and hoo, dial in, three arms around and
hooting again, swing and circle four ladies change and gents
the same right and left the shoe fly, swing, and
so on for each couple. In homes where dancing is

(11:53):
not permitted, and often in others, play parties are held
at which social games are practiced with childlike commanded roll
the platter, weavily, wheat needle's eye, we fish who bite
grin and gold foot, swing the semblin, skip to Mulu, pronounce,
skip to Mulu, and many others of a rollicking half

(12:16):
dancing nature round the house. Skip tim malu, my darling,
steal my partner, and I'll steal again. Skip tim alu,
my darling, take her and go with her. I don't
care skip to Malu, my darling. I can get another
as pretty as you. Skip tim Alu, my darling, pretty

(12:37):
as a redbird and prettier too. Skip to Malu, my darling.
A substitute for the church fair is the poke supper,
at which stainty pokes, bags of cake, and other homemade
delicacies are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Whoever bids
in a poku is entitled to eat with the girl
who prepared it and escort her home. The rivalry excited

(12:59):
among them mountain swains by such artful lures may be
judged by the fact that in a neighborhood where a
man's work brings only a dollar a day, a pretty
girl's poke may be bid up to ten, twenty, or
even fifty dollars. As a rule, the only holidays observed
in the mountains outside the towns are Christmas and New Year's.

(13:20):
Christmas is celebrated after the Southern fashion, which seems bizarre,
indeed to one witnessing it for the first time. The
boys and men, having no firecrackers, which they would disdain anyway,
go about shooting revolvers and drinking to the limit of
capacity or supply. Blank cartridges are never used in this
uproarious jollification, and the courses of the bullets are left

(13:44):
to chance, so that discreet people keep their noses indoors.
Christmas is a day of license of general indulgence, it
being tacitly assumed that punishment is remitted for any ordinary
sins of the flesh that may be committed on that day.
There is no church festivity, nor are Christmas trees ever
set up. Few mountain children hang up their stockings, and

(14:08):
many have never heard of Santa Claus. New Year's Day
is celebrated with whatever effervescence remains from Christmas, and in
the same manner, but generally it is a feeble reminder,
as the liquid stimulus has run short and there are
many sore heads in the neighborhood. Most of the mountain
preachers nowadays denounce dances and play parties as sinful diversions,

(14:32):
though their real objection seems to be that such gatherings
are counter attractions that thin out the religious ones. Be
that as it may, they certainly have put a damper
on frolics, so that in very many mountain settlements going
to meeting is recognized primarily as a social function and
affords almost the only chance for recreation in which family

(14:54):
can join family without restraint. Meetings are held in the
log School. The congregation ranges itself men on one side,
women on the other, on rude benches that sometimes have
no backs. Everybody goes. If one judge from attendance, he
would rate our Highlanders as the most religious people in America.

(15:16):
This impression is strengthened and a stranger by the grave
and astoundingly patient attention that is given an illiterate or
nearly illiterate minister while he holds forth for two or
three mortal hours on the beauties of predestination, free will
for ordination, immersion, foot washing, or on the delinquencies of

(15:38):
them acorn fed critters that has gone new light over
in Cope's cove after an al fresco lunch, everybody doggedly
returns to hear another circule rider expound and denounce at
the top of his voice until late afternoon. As long
as a spirit lasts and he has good wind. When
he warms up, he throws in a game asping ah

(16:01):
or uh at short intervals, which constitutes the Holy tone.
Doctor mcclintech gave this example, Oh Brethern, repent ye and
repent ye of your sins ah, For if you don't ah,
the Lord h he will grab you by the seat
of your pants uh and held your over hell fire
till you holler like a coon. During these services there's

(16:25):
a good deal of running in and out by the
men and boys, most of whom gradually congregate on the
outside to whittle gossip, drive bargains, and debate among themselves
some point of dogma that is too good to keep
still about. Nearly all of our highlanders, from youth upward,
show an amazing fondness for theological dispute. This consists mainly

(16:46):
in capping texts instead of reasoning with the single minded
purpose of confusing or downing an opponent into this battle
of memories, rather than of which the most worthless scapegoat
will enter with keen gusto on perfect seriousness. I've known
two or three hundred mountain lumberjacks, hard swearing and hard drinking,

(17:08):
tough as they make em to be wedded to a
fighting edge over the rocky problem was sall damned? Can
a suicide enter the Kingdom of heaven? The mountaineers are
intensely universally Protestant. You will seldom find a backwoodsman who
knows what a Roman Catholic is. As John Fox says,

(17:29):
he is the only man in the world whom the
Catholic Church has made little or no effort to prostlyt
Dislike of Episcopalianism is still strong among people who do
not know, or pretend not to know, what the word means.
Any Episcopalians around here, asked the clergyman of a mountain cabin,
I don't know, said the old woman. Jim's got the skins,

(17:52):
A lot of armints up in the loft. Maybe you
can find one up there. The first settlers of Apalasia
were mainly pressed by Turians, as became Scotch Irishmen, but
they fell away from that faith, partly because the wilderness
was too poor to support a regular ministry, and partly
because it was too democratic for Calvinism, with its supreme

(18:14):
authority of the clergy. This much of seventeenth century Calvinism.
The Mountaineer retains a passion for hair splitting argument over
points of doctrine and the cockture intolerance of John Knox,
but the ancestral Creed itself has been forgotten. The circuit rider,
whether Methodist or Baptist, found here a field ripe for

(18:37):
his harvest. Being himself self supporting and unassuming, he won
easily the confidence of the people. He preached a highly
emotional religion that worked his audience into the ecstasy that
all primitive people loved. And he introduced a mighty agent
of evangelization among outdoor folk when he started the camp meeting.

(19:00):
The season for camp meetings is from mid August to October.
The festival may last a week in one place. It
is a jubilee week for their work worn and home
chained women, their only diversion from a year of unspeakably
monotonous toil. And for the young folks it is their theater,
their circus, their county fair. I say this with no disrespect.

(19:24):
Big Meeting time is a gala week, if there be
any such thing at all in the mountain. Its attractiveness
is full, as much secular as spiritual, to the great
body of the people. It is a camp by day
only or up to closing time. No mountaineer owns a tent.
Preachers and exhorders are housed nearby, and visitors from all

(19:47):
over the country, scatter about with their friends, or sleep
in the open, cooking their meals by the wayside. In
these backward revival meetings we can witness today the weird
phenomena of un governable shouting, ecstasy, bodily contortions, trance, catalepsy,
and other results of hypnotic suggestion, and the contagious one

(20:11):
mindedness of an overwrought crowd. This is called taking a
big through and is regarded as the madness of supernatural joy.
It is a mild form of that extraordinary frenzy which
swept the Kentucky settlements in eighteen hundred, when thousands of
men and women at the camp meetings fell victim to

(20:32):
the jerks, barking exercises, erotic vagaries, physical wreckage, or insanity
to which the frenzy led. Many mountaineers are easily carried
away by new doctrines extravagantly presented. Religious mania is taken
for inspiration by the superstitious who are looking for signs

(20:53):
and wonders. At one time, Mormon prophits lurred women from
the backwoods of western Carolina in eastern Tennessee. Later, there
was a similar exodus of people to the Castellites, a
sect of whom it was commonly remarked that everybody who
joins the Castellites goes crazy in our day. The same

(21:14):
may be said of the Holy rollers and holiness people.
In a few town of eastern Kentucky not long ago,
I saw two holiness exhorders prancing before a solemnly attentive
crowd in the courthouse square, one of them shouting and
exhibiting the Holy laugh, while the other pointed to the
Cumberland River and cried, I don't say if I had

(21:37):
the faith, I say, I have the faith to walk
over that river dry shod. I scanned the crowd and
saw nothing but belief or willingness to believe on any continents.
Of course, many mountaineers are more intelligent than that, but
few of them are free from superstitions of one kind
or other. There are today many believers in which aft

(22:00):
among them, though none own to it to any but
their intimates, and nearly everybody in the hills has faith importance.
The mountain clergy as a general wool or hostile to
book learning, for there ain't no holy ghost in it.
One of them, who had spent three months at a
theological school, told President Frost, Yes, the seminary is a

(22:24):
good place to go and get rested up, But t
ain't worthwhile for me to go there, no more, so
long as I've got good wind. It used to amuse
me to explain how I knew that the Earth was
a sphere. But one day, when I was busy, a
tiresome old preacher put the everlasting question to me, do
you believe the earth is round? And impish? Perversity seized

(22:48):
me and I answered no. All blamed humbug, Amen, cried
the delighted catechist. I knowed in reason you had more sense.
In general, religion of the Mountaineers has little influence on
everyday behavior, little to do with the moral law. Salvation
is by faith alone, and not by works. Sometimes a

(23:10):
man is churched for breaking the Sabbath, cussin, tale, bearon,
but sins of the flesh are rarely punished, being regarded
as amiable frailties of mankind. It should be understood that
the mountaineers morals are all tail first, like those of
Alan Breck and Stevenson's kidnapped. One of our old timers

(23:34):
nonchalantly admitted in court that he and a preacher had
marked a false corner tree, which figured in an important
land suit. On cross examination, he was asked, you admit
that you and Preacher X forge that corner tree. Didn't
you give Preacher X a good character in your testimony?
Do you consider it consistent with his profession as a

(23:57):
minister of the gospel to forge corner tree? Ah replied
the witness, religion ain't got nothing to do with corner trees.
John Fox relates that a few leader who had about
exterminated the opposing faction and made a good fortune for
a mountain near while doing it, for he kept his

(24:18):
men busy getting out timber when they weren't fighting, said
to me, in all seriousness, I have triumphed again my
enemies time and time again. The Lord's on my side,
and now I get some better and better Christian every year.
A preacher riding down Ravine came upon an old mountaineer
hiding in the bushes with his rifle. What are you

(24:41):
doing there, my friend right on stranger was the easy answer.
I'm a waiting for Jim Johnson, and with the help
of the Lord, I'm going to blow his damn head off.
But let us never lose sight of the fact that
these people intellectually are not living in our age. To
judge them fairly, we must go back and get a

(25:01):
medieval point of view, which, by the way, persisted in
Europe and America until well into the Georgian period. If
history be too dry, read Stevenson's Kidnapped and especially its
sequel David Balfour to learn what that viewpoint was. The
parallel is so close eighteenth century Britain in twenty century

(25:23):
Appalachia that here we walk the same paths with Allan
and David, the Edinburgh law sharks, Katriana and Lady Alardis.
The only difference of moment is that we have no aristocracy.
As for the morals of our highlanders, there are precisely
what any well read person would expect after taking their

(25:45):
blatedness into consideration. In speech and conduct when at ease
among themselves. They are frank, old fashioned Englishmen, and Scots
such as Fielding and Smollett, and Peeps and Burns have
shown us to the lawe. Their manners are borish, of course,
judged by a feminized modern standard, and their home conversation

(26:07):
is as coarse as the mixed company speeches in Shakespeare's comedies,
or the offense pleasantries of good queen bess. But what
is refinement? What is morality? I don't mind, said the
beloved vagabond. I don't mind the frank dung heap outside
a German peasant's kitchen window. But what I loathe and

(26:27):
abominate is a dung heap beneath Hedgewick's draper papa's parlor floor.
And we do well to consider that fine remark by
Sir Oliver lodge Weis's reversion to a lower type after
perception of a hire. I have seen the worst as
well as the best of Appalasia. There are places on

(26:49):
sand mountains, scores of them, where unspeakable orgies prevail at times.
But I know that between these two extremes, the great
mass of the mountain people are very likely persons of
similar station elsewhere, just human with human frailties, only a
little more honest, I think in owning them. And even
in the tenebras of far back coves, where conditions exist

(27:13):
as gross as anything to be found in the wines
and closest of our great cities, there resist blessed difference
that these half wild creatures have not been hopelessly submerged,
have not been driven into desperate war against society. The
worst of them still have good traits, strong characters, something
responsive to decent treatment. They are kind hearted, loyal to

(27:37):
their friends, quick to help anyone in distress. They know
nothing of civilization. They are simply the unstarted, and their
thews are sound. End of section twelve, read by Bry's cries,
Ohio