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THE best way to see the people as well as the mountains is to walk. This one can do because "a mountaineer never meets a stranger," as a native philosopher explained, adding, "The people round here give the kind hand to everybody, they have n't learned better, they have never traveled"; but one desiring to explore the mountains without either walking or riding can gain much by driving in a leisurely manner over such roads as are passable.
One winds slowly along, it may be on a perfect summer day, the radiant Southern sky seen between overhanging branches, with now and then an opening in the forest through which the mountains show intensely blue, or like pale wraiths in the distance. Along the way cold springs come gushing out like joyous living things from under the roots of a tree or under a fern-draped bank - the waters purified by how many miles of groping through intricate dark passages in the heart of the mountains, springs not always visible from the road, but whose presence the knowing eye detects by the hard-beaten path winding down from the roadside. Crossing the cool, swift streams your horse stops knee-deep to drink, or to make believe drink, in order to stand there awhile.
The road winds along, now hidden among trees, now emerging to ascend some open height where mountains come to view, near, green, and darkshadowed, or distant, azure, and dreamlike; again it makes its way around the end of a damp ravine where a stream jumps down in bright cascades, and 'he banks are smothered under ferns, leucothoe, and laurel. Through the vistas that open, pleasant pictures come and go a farmhouse in a hollow, a log cabin surrounded by cornfields ripening into gold, the invincible, sunny forest pressing down upon it on all sides. And then, turning a curve in the road, directly before you stands an old house shaded by ancient oaks, a spinning-wheel on the porch, or, if you happen to be in the right valley, a hand-loom may be there.
This house that you approach, wherever it may be, seems to be expecting you, at least you have a friendly sense of knowing it, although you have never seen it before. As you draw near in the sweet summer stillness a friendly dog comes wagging to meet you, and some one, man or woman, comes out and hails you, "Howdy, 'light and come in." This is the universal salutation. Or if you are walking, as you come within earshot you are greeted with a pleasant and expectant, " Howdy, stranger, come in and rest yourself." Often, the moment you come in sight a chair is set ready on the porch, and the family assemble and seat themselves in expectation of your arrival. They greet you with a warmth that makes you feel as though you had known them always, and they insist upon your spending the day with them. Truth to tell, one enjoys a sense of very genuine welcome where the eyes of the hostess look into those of the unexpected guest, undimmed by a thought of what she is to have for dinner. It is no doubt the extreme simplicity of the food, and the fact that everybody, rich and poor alike, have the same, that give the people their gracious gift of hospitality and their feeling of equality. The knowledge that everybody serves the same dinner in the same way must go far towards leveling social distinctions.
As you go about the mountains, you will come to many an old-time log house, the pictorial survivor of an age. when the log house was the only house built. Those of better class, made of hewn logs and built by the "quality" of former generations, are large and substantial with a stone chimney at either end, from the depths of whose vast fireplaces one can still in imagination smell the banquets prepared in the "ovens" that stood in the ashes, and in the pots that hung suspended from the wrought-iron cranes.
Oftener than the large log house, you come upon the smaller one of only two or three rooms, or the cabin of but a single room, yet each and every one has its big stone chimney, and most of them have the porch wreathed in vines, while one yet sees roofs covered with hand-made shingles. The outside chimney standing against one end of the house gives the finishing touch to the appearance of the log cabin, but its picturesqueness is its chief virtue. The flames that go roaring up it in such splendid spendthrift fashion may warm the imagination, but they produce comparatively little effect upon the temperature of the room, and in these undegenerate days the open fireplace is often flanked by a modern cooking-stove that, however useful, is not at all ornamental.
The interior of a cabin, needless to say, is as simple and oftentimes as picturesque as the outside. The great fireplace with its generous flames is the centre of attraction, and one may believe has something to do with the genial nature of the people reared about it. A large open fire expands the heart of man. The iron crane from which swing the pots, the circular "ovens" standing in the ashes, the red heart of the fire, the human forms played over by the flickering light, awaken strange emotions of a shadowy memory from out some past existence. Next in importance to the fireplace are the beds, several of which often stand in one room, and even in the larger houses it is customary to find at least one bed in the parlor.
Oftentimes a bench along the wall supplies seats at one side of the narrow table, and sometimes there is a bench on both sides, chairs being few, straightbacked, and narrow, for the furniture is generally home-made. Somewhere in a remote cove you will come across the man who makes the chairs, but who is always too busy doing something else to fill an order in less than a year. But what does that matter? In course of time and somehow the people get their chairs, strong, honest things made with special reference to bearing a man's weight when tilted against the wall on their back legs - this being the mountaineer's favorite attitude of repose. The seats, made of plaited oak splints or strips of deer-hide, last almost as long as the hardy frames.
In another cove you will find the man or woman who weaves the picturesque melon-shaped "hip" baskets by means of which the people "tote" their possessions from place to place, either walking or riding horseback, the horse quite as often as not being a lop-eared mule. These weavers are oftentimes quite skillful in their art, being able, so they claim, to weave any kind of basket you can show them.
Brooms are made by anybody and everybody. The tall picturesque broom-corn that ornaments the landscape, however, is raised to sell, the universal sweeping instrument of the mountains being made from the "broom-straw," or wild sedge that so beautifully takes possession of every "old field" not yet grown up to bushes. All you need to do is to gather a bundle of the ripe sedge and "wrop," that is, bind, it about the end of a stick with a piece of wire if you have it, otherwise with a piece of string. But for brushing the hearth it is better to have your broom made from a bundle of tree twigs similarly "wropped" around the end of a stick.
There is a fascination about a life where the people themselves make what they need. It returns us in imagination to an age of peace and plenty for everybody, to an era of happiness free from hurry, worry, and sordid ideals, and if the reality falls short of the poet's fancy, there yet clings a touch of romance about the home-made chairs, baskets, and pottery of the Southern mountains. When can one forget the long, sweet days of wandering about the country in search of the "jug-makers"! "jugs" being the generic title of every form of home-made pottery. It was while in Traumfest that one was fired with ambition to discover the makers of the rude but picturesque jugs in such general use there. The people tell you they are made in Jugtown, down in South Carolina, but when you go out to find Jugtown, there is no such place. At Gowansville, below the mountains and some ten miles from Traumfest, one makes a serious effort to find not Jugtown, that quest has long since been abandoned, but the nearest jugmaker. The people do not seem to know, but finally a black girl whom we stop on the road tells us that Rich Williams, "A cullud man who lives three quarters away, yon side the Tiger River," makes them.
On we go, and in the end find Rich - this side the Tiger. Yes, he makes jugs, and he is at it. You get out of him that a great many people in that region make jugs, and you conclude that "Jugtown" is a jocular expression for the whole region of pottery clay, but having found Rich Williams, you bear no resentment.
He is an old-time negro, as black as ebony, evidently very proud of your visit, and you are soon Watching the bony, black hands knead the clay and pat it into a loaf, then on the wheel coax it into a shape. The veins stand out like cords on rich, sinewy arms, his long hands draw the flat clay lump, up, into the stately two-gallon jug with its narrow mouth, or into the wide-mouthed butter crock, or the pug-nosed pitcher, big or little. Rich loves his work. He says he can make anything he wants to out of clay. Looking at him, you seem to see before you the original potter. His wheel, which looks as though he had made it himself, is in a little log hut, lighted by one tiny window. His outfit consists of the wheel, a tall stool, his clay, and a stick or two. He digs the clay from the bank of the Tiger River that runs near, - slate-colored, adhesive clay that Rich says is "powerful good" for jugmaking. He grinds it in a wooden box by the help of a slow-footed mule that walks in a circle at the end of a long curved beam which turns an upright shaft fitted with wooden teeth at its lower end. Rich has a jug of water at his elbow, one of his own make, and there he sits all day, and every day, busy with his clay.
You watch tall jugs rise as by magic under his hands, and when they are done he lifts them off the wheel, and on every jug are slight indentations caused by the pressure of his hands as he lifts them. There are queer hollows in them, sometimes, and lopsided nesses, for Rich is not always in the best mood, and, while on some days jugs fly easily from under his hands, there are other days when they are contrary. Rich tells you that his glaze is made from ashes and clay, that he washes the jugs inside and outside with it, and then sets them in the oven. His oven, out of doors near the shed in which he works, is a long, low vault of bricks and clay, with a fire-hole at one end and an opening at the other. He sets in his jugs, makes up a wood fire, and bakes them until they are done.
It seems as though one could learn to tell, from looking at a jug, what manner of man made it and whether he was black or white. Black men's jugs are like them, some way, careless, generous, picturesque. Rich's jugs are homely, but one likes them, they are so honest. A jug made by a potter who dug the clay out of the bank with his own hands, and soaked it, and ground it, and shaped it, and glazed it, and baked it, must be a wholesome sort of jug to have in any house. We had formed the habit of setting groups of Rich's jugs in the fireplace, partly to heat the water, and partly for the picturesque effect, long before we knew of the ebony hands that moulded them out of the gray clay of the Tiger River.
The place of the jug would seem to be firmly established in the mountains. Yet in these later days its existence is threatened. The tin lard pail has risen above the horizon. Everybody buys lard, and the " buckets " become family treasures. Even into the remotest regions the insidious foe has crept, until one finds the unlovely lard pail occupying the place where, a few years ago, only the decorative brown earthenware jug would have stood.
THE mountain woman has her duties and her privileges. She loves, honors, and obeys, innocent of any knowledge of the suffrage movement. She can work out of doors, wearing a long skirt. She does much of the work elsewhere relegated to man, but is always deferential to her husband, whom she respectfully refers to as" him," as though that were his baptismal name.
In the mountain cabin "housework" has no terrors, an hour a day is enough for everything. "Bric-a-brac" has not been discovered, and there are no "things" to accumulate. Yet the people are not without ideas of decoration, in some places stray newspapers being eagerly seized upon, not for the valuable information they contain, - the people manage to get on very happily without that, - but for the purpose of papering the walls. Particularly upon the side occupied by the chimney these publications are put to a use believed by many to be ornamental. In some parts of this land of leisure, to have one's walls papered by "illustrated editions" is as much a mark of distinction as in another part of the world it is to have them hung with masterpieces of painting. Besides, they keep the room warm, so the people say. At times this might be figuratively, if not literally, true! As soon, however, as harvest-time comes, the atrocious effect is softened by the multiple strings of beans, of sliced pumpkin, and sliced apples that festoon the walls about the fireplace and shrivel decoratively in front of it, mercifully concealing and staining and otherwise harmonizing the luridities of the daily press. Papering the walls in this way is an exasperating boon to the storm-bound stranger who, unaccustomed to long reverie in a public place, turns for pastime to the papered wall. You follow a thrilling narrative through several columns, interested in spite of yourself, then at the most exciting point it stops short. You have reached the end of a page that cannot be turned.
You will often see the mountain woman in her big sunbonnet in the fields hoeing, or helping "lay by the craps," occupations which, if not pursued too arduously, and they seldom are, do her no harm. On the contrary, such work is good for her, although it so often excites the indignation of strangers, to whom the sight of a woman working in a field always seems to bring visions of terrible oppression and cruelty. Most of the mountain women would prefer their light field work to the far more arduous duties of their welldressed critics. The woman milks the cow, - she does not like to trust so important and delicate a task to a mere man, - and she sits in the doorway or near the fire and churns the butter in a tall, slender earthenware or wooden churn. And when she is done, she has plenty of time to rest.
When berries are ripe, she and the children have an ever-ready occupation. Particularly in huckleberry season you will see little "gangs" of sunbonneted women and children, with stained and happy faces, and stained hands and clothes, plodding along the dusty road carrying heavy pails of shining blueblack berries. And sometimes whole families go to the "huckleberry balds" on the mountains, where they stay several days, sleeping in their tented wagons. It is only in recent years that the people have taken to canning their berries, sugar being a luxury in the mountains. But lately there has come a substitute for sugar which is vaguely referred to as "powders," and what these mysterious powders are we discovered one day when into a country store in the mountains, where we had gone in search of something to eat, came a little troop of women each with her tin pail full of berries and each demanding "powders" according to her needs. The clerk cast a critical eye over each pail of berries, then ladled out from a bottle a quantity of white powder sufficient in his estimation to cover the case. When the women had gone we asked him what the powder was. He said he did n't know, and rather reluctantly handed us the bottle, on which was the label printed in black letters - Salicylic Acid. It does not take much of this to preserve a jar of berries, though one should think that as a substitute for sugar it might be a little disappointing. However, any berries are better than none when winter comes, and there is no other fruit, excepting apples and peaches, which are dried in strings before the fire or simply spread out on one end of the porch floor, and the appearance of which makes one's mind turn with lessened repugnance to the thought of berries preserved in powders.
But the most cherished occupation of the mountain woman for generations was, and to a very limited extent still is, weaving, an occupation exclusively her own and which in a peculiar way relates her to a bygone world. Traveling along the road, you glance through an open doorway to see a woman "sitting in a loom," a large, clumsy, home-made loom in which she is weaving cloth. One always experiences a thrill of pleasure at sight of a loom here in the mountains. Some memory of Penelope and Evangeline seems to linger about it. But the weavers of to-day are neither great ladies nor fair young girls. The girls of the mountains prefer machine-made cloth to the home product and the labor of weaving it. " I can't learn her noway," the mother says of her daughter who takes no interest in the ancestral loom.
In the corner near the loom stands the spinning. wheel, not as a mere parlor ornament with a ribbon around its neck, but in readiness to spin a thread Sometimes loom and spinning-wheel stand upon the porch, where they lend a peculiar air of domesticity to the landscape. As a rule, however, they are inside the house, for weaving is the woman's winter work, or one might say her recreation, for like the woman of antiquity she loves to spin and weave. And she is proud of the result. Even the coarse "jeans" for her men's clothing and the "linsey cloth" for her own are regarded by her with affectionate pride, for has she not created them out of nothing, you might say? To convert a long thread into a piece of stout cloth might well make any heart thrill with pride. Besides this, she weaves towels and blankets and, most prized of all, coverlets of elaborate design for the beds.
"We used to have great gangs of sheep," the people say, " but now we have to buy all our wool, and it don't pay to weave noway." " I'd rather card and spin and weave than anything in my life," the older women who did this work in their youth tell you. It was the stock laws that drove away the sheep, for they had to be inclosed and this made raising them unprofitable so the people explain, but one suspects it is really the cheap machine-made cloth, to be had at every country store, that has conquered the loom.
There are not many looms within easy reach of the larger places, prosperity and contact with the outside world, be it ever so slight, soon retiring the loom. Yet there are a few looms even there, and in the remoter regions, far from railways and summer visitors, they are still in common use. With what pleasure one recalls certain high valleys where under the shadow of blue domes and green slopes one finds in every second house a great loom taking up half the room! And those quaint log cabins whose beds are spread with blue and white coverlets such as are cherished in old New England farmhouses!
One penetrating into a certain "cove" of the mountains finds Mrs. Hint Tomson, still a "powerful weaver." Near her lives old Mrs. Robbins, who used to do "a heap of mighty good weaving work," too, but she is now blind in one eye, though she can still "design" sunlight with it, and she is ninety years old, so she says, and "plumb broke down." If she is right about her age, one can well believe the rest of the statement. There are other weavers living in the same neighborhood, some of whom yet "weave a power," and all of them will bring out from chests or shelves and display with pride the old coverlets made by dead and gone grandmothers or great-grandmothers, as well as by less industrious present-day weavers.
With what pride they display their favorite patterns! They know nothing about the latest novel or the opera or scandal in high life, perhaps they could not even tell you who is President of the United States at the present moment, but they are ready to give their opinion upon the relative merits of the "rattlesnake trail," " the wheels of time," "the rising and setting sun," "Bonaparte's March," "the snail's trail," and other old and prized designs.
And as they show their treasures and talk, they tell you many a homely secret connected with the art of weaving.
"If you want to make a man jean,, that he can't hardly wear out," one woman confides to your sympathetic ear, although you have no great expectation of needing the advice, "you dye the chain light tan with black walnut, then take the first shearing of lambs and weave it in white, then dye the cloth with walnut. The lamb's wool fulls up, it shrinks more than any other and makes a cloth he can't hardly wear out. You've got him harnessed up then to Stay."
The "chain" or "harness," that is to say, the warp of these coverlets is made of cotton thread, usually white, and the "filling" of woolen yarn, generally blue, though it is sometimes red or green, or pink or black. Mrs. Levi Ward's "wheels of time" are black and white.
Besides the coverlets themselves, Penelope takes pride in showing her "drafts," the patterns from which the designs are made, and which have been handed down from generation to generation dating back to those days when the women vied with one another in inventing original designs, designs which were handed down with the loom - a true "heirloom" as one perceives. To this day each pattern keeps its name, and that of one, the "Missouri trouble," brings one suddenly close to a page of history, when the women were patiently weaving through the formative periods of a nation, tingling with the charged condition of the atmosphere, and through their looms giving expression to the emotions thus powerfully aroused. Those days are gone now. Lethargy has stolen over the souls of the people and no new designs are being made, only some of the old ones are copied, and that with lessening frequency. The coverlets made to-day are not so beautiful as those made before the use of chemical dyes. Then the people raised their own indigo and went out into the woods for walnut bark and certain herbs whose dyes defied both time and the washtub, only getting a little mellower as they grew older. Some of the prettiest of these old coverlets have a dark green pattern woven into a black warp, and one occasionally sees an oldrose counterpane, which is prettiest of all.
Even in the remoter districts it is only the older women who weave, and in another generation handweaving will have become a lost art, so far as the people at large are concerned. Schools to encourage weaving have been established here and there in the mountains, it is true, but philanthropic efforts of that kind cannot save a people from the onward march of progress. The work done in these schools is not sold to the people themselves, - they cannot afford to buy it, but to summer visitors or it is sent to distant cities as a luxury to the rich. It serves a good purpose in providing remunerative work to a small number of the mountain women, but as to reviving to any extent the good old customs among the people themselves, - the hand cannot be put back on the dial. Besides the immediate help they afford, these schools have doubtless another mission: by gathering up and recording the old patterns, and with them more or less of the old customs of the people, they are preserving valuable material for future historians and story-tellers.
In addition to the art of weaving, the mountain women have another picturesque occupation which is in no immediate danger of passing, and which, were it not for Homer, one might hesitate to enlarge upon. But after the glamour cast over Nausicaa. beating out the family wash in the crystal waters of the Phaeacian River, one ventures to present a woman of the Southern mountains standing under a laurel tree, her well-used wooden tubs ranged on a bench before her. On the ground at her side bright flames leap up about the large black pot, hung to a pole above or standing in the ashes. A cloud of white steam from the pot, a little curl of faint blue smoke from the fire, the deep blue sky showing through the leaves of the forest, the murmur of running water from the stream close at hand - these are the rest of the apology, if any is needed, for presenting the subject in detail.
Whereas Nausicaa trod out the stains from her clothes with snow-white feet, the woman of the mountains lifts her clothes from the boiling pot on the end of a long stick, lays them on a stump leveled for the purpose, and soundly beats them with a paddle. There are no shining sands on which to spread them, so she spreads them on the shining bushes, and when they are dry loads them, not into a chariot drawn by firm-hoofed mules, but into a basket made of oak splints which she sometimes carries home on her head.
The washing-place down by the branch is always picturesque, and so is the woman at her labors surrounded by the beauty of nature that, as it were, embraces her. Even more picturesque than the white woman at her task is perhaps the black woman whom one often sees in the lower mountains standing under a great laurel bush or a shady tree, dipping the clothes from her steaming black pot, then valiantly paddling them on a tree stump. There is something so leisurely and yet so hearty about these black people - and they satisfy your love for the picturesque without exciting any feeling of pity. When you look into their great shining eyes you know that when all is said they love to wash. And they have never any feeling of shame about it. Though for that matter neither have the mountain women of the white race when you get far enough from the villages, where the ferment of civilization has crept in, the ferment whose first action is always to make people ashamed to be seen working.
In accordance with the customs of the country, the women do their washing as they do everything else, in the manner most convenient for the moment. They have no roof to shelter them in winter, but the year round wash "down at the branch" in the open air. Often the tub stands on the ground, the woman leaning over it in a way to make one's back ache in sympathy. But as usual your sympathy is wasted.
"Why does n't your husband make you a bench? " you cry in indignation, and she, rising up-miling from the suds, replies - "I like it better this way, a body don't have to lift up the water, nor lift down the tub to empty it."
Washboards of course are as unknown as darning needles. Why waste money on a washboard when all your ancestors paddled their clothes on the end of a stump? But sometimes the woman has no tub, and that really is serious. Once, over towards the lovely Nantahala Mountains, we came upon a woman washing in a wooden box. She was young and a baby sat on the ground at her side. The blue mountains were a heavenly vision behind her, a clump of brilliant wild flowers rose above her head. But her eyelids were swollen, she had evidently been weeping, and the tiny cabin higher up the hill was very bare inside. Was there a " still " down in the ravine? Had her young husband been carried away by the "revenuers"? Or had he fallen a victim to the seductions of his own industry? Our hearts were troubled, but we could do nothing. She turned her head aside and would not look at us; so, respecting her sorrow, we passed in silence, flooding her with warm good will and heartfelt hopes that life would soon grow brighter.