[Illustration]
As the Southern mountains are not like other mountains, so the
mountaineers are not like others. For all their beauty these mountains
are treacherous and alien, and the people who must wring a livelihood
from the sawmills or from the tiny perpendicular farms high up under the
sky come to be wary and secret like their woodlands.
The Cumberland mountain mother, by nature sharp and sane, has studied
the moods of the mountains and of the animals. Illiterate though she be,
she is full of ripe wisdom. Many, superior to the mountain woman in,
say, sanitation might learn from sitting on cabin doorsteps that they
are most often inferior to her in sanity.
Yet, frankly, it is often better to sit on the cabin doorstep than to go
inside. The mountain mother struggles bravely against dirt, but if you
live in a lonely two-room cabin, if you are the sole caretaker of six
children under ten, and two cows and a large stony garden, and must help
in the cornfield besides, you are excusable if in the end you "quit
struggling." The mountain mother does not make herself and her husband
and her children slaves to the housekeeping arts.
A mountain woman dips snuff--surreptitiously if she is young, frankly if
she is old.
We settle down on the doorstep probably on straight chairs with seats of
cornhusks twisted into a rope and then interwoven. There is a sound to
which the mountains have accustomed me--the sharp jolting thud when a
mother, if she possesses neither cradle nor rocker, puts her baby to
sleep by jerking forward and backward on two legs of a straight chair.
There is usually some two-year-old lying fast asleep on the bed just
inside the door; or on the porch floor, plump and brown as a bun and
studded with flies thick as currants.
Mountain children are as vigorous as baby oaks until they reach their
teens, and then over-work begins to tell on growing bodies. A reedy boy
of thirteen, just beginning to stretch to the length of spine and limb
that characterises the mountaineer, often gets a stoop that he never
afterward conquers. In the more remote lumber districts I have seen boys
of ten and twelve work all day loading cars. There too, slim mountain
girls of twelve and fourteen stand all day in the icy spray of the flume
to stack bark on the cars.
Here where isolation makes people fiercely individualistic public
opinion is as slow to deny a man's right to marry at the age he wishes
as it is to deny his right to turn his corn into whisky. At the age when
boys and girls first awake to the fact of sex they marry and the
parents, although regretfully, let them.
The unmarried mother is most rare. A boy of sixteen sets himself to all
the duties of fatherhood. A fourteen-year-old mother, with an ageless
wisdom, enters without faltering on her future of a dozen children.
But here is Lory. But again a digression--: In any account of the
mountains one must remember that there are three distinct types: the
people of the little villages, almost all remote from railroads; the
itinerant lumber workers, woodchoppers and mill-hands who follow the
fortunes of the portable sawmill as it exhausts first one remote cove
then another; and the permanent farmers who have inherited their
dwindling acres for generations. Yet at bottom the mountain mother is
always the same.
Lory lives in a one-room lumber shack, and moves about once in three
months. The walls are of planks with inch-wide cracks between them.
There are two tiny windows with sliding wooden shutters and a door. All
three must be closed when it is very cold. For better protection the
walls are plastered over with newspapers, always peeling off and gnawed
by woodrats. The plank floor does not prevent the red clay from oozing
up. The shack is some fifteen feet square. It contains two stoves, two
beds, two trunks, a table and two or three chairs. In it live six souls:
two brothers, their wives and a baby apiece.
Lory is part Indian, one surmises from the straight hair dropping over
her eyes and her slow squawlike movements. Her face is stolid except
when it flashes into a smile of pure fun. Dark though she is her breast,
bared from her dark purple dress, is statue white. She looks down on her
first baby with a madonna's love and her words have in them a madonna's
awe before a holy thing: "I ain't never a-goin' to whip him. He ain't
never a-goin' to need it, for he won't get no meanness if I don't learn
him none."
The setting is fairyland. Mountain folk go far toward living on beauty.
The women may become too careless and inert even to scrape away the
underbrush and plant a few sweet potatoes and cabbages. They may sit
through lazy hours mumbling their snuff sticks, as does Mrs. Cole, while
children and dogs and chickens swarm about them: but even Mrs. Cole can
be roused by the call of beauty.
"My husband he's choppin' at the first clearin' two miles from here, and
he's been plumb crazy over the yaller lady slippers up that-a-way. He's
been sayin' I must take the two least kids, what ain't never seen sech,
and go up there and see 'em 'fore they was gone. So yesterday we went.
It sure was some climb over them old logs, but Gawd them lady slippers
was worth it." I shall never understand the mystery of a mountain
woman's hair. No matter how old, how worn or ill she may be, her hair is
always a wonder of color and abundance.
Ma Duncan at fifty-five is straight and sure-footed as an Indian; tall
and slim and dark as a gypsy, with a gypsy's passionate love of
out-of-doors. Her neighbors send for Ma Duncan from far and near in time
of need. Going forth from her big farm boarding-house on errands of
mercy. Up wild ravines to tiny cabins that seem to bud out like lichens
from grey boulders wet with mountain streams, over foot logs that sway
crazily over rock creeks, through waist-high undergrowth Ma Duncan goes
with her stout stick.
As we reach a little grassy clearing Ma Duncan drops down to stretch out
happily: So as I can hear what the old earth has to say me... Reckon it
says, "Quit your fussin' you old fool. Ain't God kept your gang a young
uns all straight so fur? He ain't a-going back on you now, just because
they're growd."
Presently Ma Duncan sits up, her hands about her knees, her hat fallen
from her wealth of hair, her gun on the ground beside her--often she
carries a gun in the hope of getting a gray squirrel to be done in
inimitable brown cream gravy for breakfast.
She looks out sadly over much worn woodland, with the great stumps
remaining:
"I wish you could have seen the great old trees that used to be here. If
folks wasn't so mad for money they might be here and a preachin' the
gospel of beauty. But folks is all for money and all for self. Some-day
when they've cut off all the beauty that God planted to point us to him,
folks will look round and wonder what us human bein's is here fur--"
"The mountain woman lives untouched by all modern life. In two centuries
mountain people have changed so little that they are in many ways the
typical Americans."
"The Lord sent me back" former pastor tells men in session at the
church. With tears in his eyes, he enters meeting, escorted by two sons.
Dramatic scene follows as he asks forgiveness for mistake he has made.
Was in Canada and Buffalo. His explanation of absence is satisfactory to
family and members he met last night.
Miss Hannen in seclusion at home. Her family declines to give statement.
Dominie Cornelius Densel, forty eight years old, former pastor, etc...
who left his wife and eight children etc. came home last night.
Miss T. Hannen, twenty-six years old, etc... who disappeared from her
home, etc... on the same afternoon that the dominie was numbered among
the missing also came to her home the same evening.
Pictures of the missing dominie and member of his church who are home
again.