Blue Ridge Billy

  Blue Ridge Billy

  Lois Lenski

  For

  Bad Penny

  on

  Tumbling Creek

  CONTENTS

  I. THE HALF-WAY-UP HOUSE

  II. A TURN OF CORN

  III. SPRING FRESHET

  IV. OVER THE MOUNTAIN

  V. A SPLIT-OAK BASKET

  VI. THE COWCUMBER TREE

  VII. A KNOCK AT THE DOOR

  VIII. JEB DOTSON’S STORE

  IX. THE HOUND PUP

  X. OLD-TIMEY CHIMNEY

  XI. THE CRY OF A PANTHER

  XII. BIG FAT POSSUM

  XIII. A LETTER FOR BILLY

  Mountain Words And Phrases

  A BIOGRAPHY OF LOIS LENSKI

  Foreword

  SEEING OTHERS AS OURSELVES

  What a wonderful country ours is! Wherever you go, you can always find new scenes, people with new customs and habits and different ways of making a living from those you have seen in other regions.

  I think the artist is a specially privileged person, because always he sees the world spread out like a stage before him, a play being enacted for his own special benefit. He approaches it objectively, with all his senses sharpened, filled with “a great awareness”—a sensitivity like that of a human camera, to make a record of it. He looks not for those things which are the same or similar to his own past experience, but for differences; he forgets himself and identifies himself with the new scene and its activities.

  The approach of the artist and the writer is not exactly the same. An artist looks at the outward surface of things. He is primarily interested in what meets the eye. He looks for beauty, character, action, design and pattern, but he rarely goes more than skin-deep. A writer, on the other hand, has to understand reasons and motives. With all the inquisitiveness of a four-year-old, he keeps asking, “Why? Why? Why?” He must find out the hidden meanings of all he sees and hears.

  What fun it is to explore a new and unknown world, full of limitless possibilities—of drama, human character and conflict, all the things that go to make up story-telling. The writer is blessed with a wonderful gift—the ability to enter a new world of people unlike any he has ever known, to bring to them an active sympathy, the out-growth of his own past experience, to enter into their lives with understanding and to write of them as if he were one of themselves.

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings says in her The Golden Apples:

  “There are worlds within worlds. It seemed to him a shocking thing that no man could see beyond the rim of his own. Perhaps there lay the ultimate wisdom, to see all life, all living, with the acute awareness one brought to one’s own.”

  Sigrid Undset says the writer must have:

  “insatiable curiosity toward other people’s thoughts and toward horizons of undiscovered knowledge, the urge to identify oneself with others by imagination, until we suffer the sufferings of others and rejoice in their joys. These are the sources that feed our ideas about human solidarity, justice and pity and love and good-neighborliness.”

  We need to know our country better. We need to know not only our own region, where our roots are firmly put down, but other regions where live people different from ourselves—people of different races, faiths, cultures and backgrounds. We need to know native as well as foreign-born groups. I dislike the terms “minority groups” and “underprivileged peoples,” because they imply superiority and condescension on the part of the person who uses them. When we know them, understand how they live and why, we will think of them as “people”—human beings like ourselves. When we know them, we can say: “This is the way these people live. Because I understand it, I admire and love them.” Even though they haven’t bathtubs and electric washers, there is a great deal to admire and love. Often people who are very poor in worldly goods have great richness of spirit.

  I have wished for an invisible cloak to wear, or at least a disguise to put on when I have gone visiting the Cajuns of Louisiana or the Crackers of Florida, so that I might be one of them and be accepted as such. But even then, my speech and actions would betray me. It was very inconvenient, when gathering story material in the Deep South, to look so much like a Dam-Yankee! But no—there was no other way. I had to go as myself—as an “outsider.”

  In the Cajun country, you are an “American”; in the Cracker country, you are a “Yankee”; in the mountains of North Carolina, you are a “foreigner” or “from the outland”; and this is always a handicap. It is difficult for any “outsider” to be accepted and to share the deeper side of their lives. The surface, yes. They are all kind and curious and very human. But there is a barrier beyond which the outsider can rarely go—until he breaks it down.

  A young Louisiana librarian, in advising me, said: “Well, if I wanted to get inside the Cajun homes, I’d go out and sell them something.” Strangely enough, although I wore no disguise, the children along the Louisiana bayous did ask me if I were selling something, because in one hand I carried a mysterious bag (containing lunch, purse, sketch book, notebooks and camera) and in the other a camp-stool, which no artist can ever travel without. Always a crowd of children gathered, eager to watch a drawing grow on a sheet of paper—and eager to tell me what I wanted to know. The children accepted me without question. Anyone who can draw pictures becomes their immediate friend. And knowing the children is but a step toward knowing the adults. Soon their mothers were asking me to come and sit on the front porch, or to come in the kitchen and have a cup of coffee. When you are invited to have coffee in Louisiana, you are no longer an “outsider.”

  I shall never forget an afternoon which I spent on a bayou bench, listening to an old French woman as she told me many incidents of her childhood and of three major floods through which she had lived. Equally vivid is a morning spent in the Farmer’s Market of a Florida town, sitting on an upturned orange crate behind the counter, listening while Old Man Dunnaway sang Jaybird Sittin’ on a Swingin’ Limb and other folk-songs to me. When I bade him goodbye, before returning North, he grasped my hand in both his own and said: “I shall recollect you … in all pleasantness …”

  From my first day in the Blue Ridge Mountains, when I hitchhiked for six miles on a rough country road, sitting on top of a pile of feed sacks in the back of a farmer’s horse-drawn wagon, on my way to visit a blind chairmaker and store-keeper, to the last day when I crossed Stone Mountain by train in a spring freshet, I met nothing but kindness. I have never known a friendlier or more truly hospitable people. You are always asked to stay for the next meal (“We haven’t much, but what we have you’re plumb welcome to!”) or to spend the night. One mountain woman begged me to spend the summer with her (“I can’t talk to nobody else the way I can talk to you.”) and cried when I went away.

  I met a mountain woman on the street of a country town. She was searching for a cast-iron frying pan, and when she found it the price was too high for her purse. So I offered to pay for it. After some hesitation, she accepted the gift. When I left her, she said: “I don’t know who you are, but you are a good woman. Come and see me and I’ll fry some chicken and give you all you can eat!”

  And so, over and over again, I learned that fundamental lesson in living, that whatever you give comes back to you a hundred times over.

  It is easy to see why a certain environment makes people live as they do, and affects every phase of their life—why in water-soaked Louisiana where it is too wet to raise land crops, the people make a living by fishing; and how in the dry sandy soil of Florida, a struggle is necessary to grow oranges and strawberries; and how farming on the steep hillsides in the mountains has kept the mountain people cut off from the rest of the world. When we understand their environment and see how their lives have been conditioned thereby, th
en we can understand their behavior. We can imagine ourselves in the same situation, and we wonder if we would be different.

  My own experience in getting stories from people who have lived them has been so rich that I have tried to pass them on to others. It is my hope that young people, reading my regional books, will share the life of these people as I shared it, and—living it vicariously, through the means of a vivid, dramatic, authentic, real-life story—will learn something of that tolerance which will make all men brothers.

  I am trying to say to children that all people are flesh and blood and have feelings like themselves, no matter where they live or how simply they live or how little they have; that man’s material comforts should not be the end and object of life. I am trying to point out that people of character, people who are guided by spiritual values, come often from simple surroundings, and are worthy of our admiration and even our emulation.

  Just as recent American painters no longer go to Paris for painting material, but have found here, on our own doorstep, a vivid, dramatic America which they are portraying not romantically and sentimentally, but realistically and truthfully, just so accurate regional books for children should present all the vividness and drama that the American scene holds. We need not manufacture excitement—it is here, inherent in the scene itself. The way that Americans have struggled and fought and mastered their environment, in all its great variety, is an unending American saga.

  We have as many different kinds of American speech as we have regions. It is interesting to consider in how many different ways the American language is used. Speech is so much more than words—it is poetry, beauty, character, emotion. To give the flavor of a region, to suggest the moods of the people, the atmosphere of the place, speech cannot be overlooked. When I remember the soft, velvety tones of the bayou-French people, the way they transfer our English words into their native French rhythm, when I hear again the soft, lazy drawl of the Florida Crackers, or the mountain people with fine old forgotten Elizabethan phrases on their lips, it seems to me sacrilege to transfer their speech to correct, grammatical, School-Reader English, made easy enough for the dullest child to read. To me, this would be a travesty on all the beauty and character in the lives of these people.

  Words become alive only with use. A coat takes on the character of a man, after he has worn it and shaped it to his person—it becomes truly his and reflects his personality. Until words are used they are dead and lifeless. Through use, words become living speech, echoing the spirit within. Words need to be “worn” to attain beauty.

  The sound of a horse’s hoofs pounding on a country road makes a beautiful and a satisfying rhythm. The noises of nature—the cry of the crow as it flies over the field, the buzz of the bee, the hum of the locust … all these have their rhythm. And so does the speech of the human being. In New England, we hear one rhythm, in Louisiana another, in Florida and the mountains another. In the simplest words, with a minimum of distortions in spelling, this is what I have tried to convey. There may be some children who will find it difficult reading. But I am willing to make that sacrifice, because of all that those who do read will gain, in the way of understanding the “feel” of a different people, and the “flavor” of a life different from their own.

  If these books should help only a few children to “see beyond the rim of their own world” and gain that “ultimate wisdom,” I shall be rewarded.

  The material for Blue Ridge Billy was gathered largely in Ashe County, North Carolina, which touches Virginia on the north and Tennessee on the west. I have not, however, adhered too closely to any definite locality, choosing rather to present a more typical picture of farm life in the Blue Ridge Mountains before the coming of the automobile. All my characters are imaginary, but the incidents used were told me by people who had experienced them. I wish to thank the many friends I made in Ashe County, who advised and helped me in so many ways.

  The songs, The Two Brothers (“Monday morning go to school”), The Farmyard (“Had me a cat and the cat pleased me”), The Wife Wrapt in Wether’s Skin (“There was an old man he had a wife”), Betty Anne or Pretty Little Miss (“Oh, fly around, my pretty little miss”) are taken from English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, collected by Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, and are quoted by permission of the publishers, Oxford University Press, London. The song Ground Hog and some verses of Go Tell Aunt Patsy are used by permission of Richard Chase, taken from his Old Songs and Singing Games, University of North Carolina Press. Other songs quoted have been taken down from the singing of individuals in the region.

  For the background of handicrafts in the mountains, I have consulted Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands by Allen H. Eaton; for general background, Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart; Tennessee and North Carolina WPA Guide Books, and other volumes.

  Lois Lenski

  Dunedin, Florida

  March 1, 1946

  You gotta walk that lonesome valley,

  You gotta walk it all alone;

  Ain’t nobody gonna walk it for ye,

  You gotta walk it all by yourself.…

  CHAPTER I

  The Half-Way-Up House

  “Just in time!” said the boy.

  He pushed aside a laurel bush, climbed the fence and sat down on the top rail. He took a deep breath and looked around.

  Mountains were piled up like puddings before him. Some were deeply wooded; others, like patchwork quilts, were covered with fenced-in fields of green grass or plowed red soil. Beyond, a range of higher mountains loomed up. Three peaks in a row, called the Three Top range, stood out clearly on the left. To the right, higher than the others, rose “the Peak,” like a sharp finger, pointing to the sky.

  The sun was setting. It threw a rosy glow over the mountains, that soft radiance which comes only between sundown and dark. A few birds chirped, and from the distance, back up the steep mountain behind him, came the faint sound of chopping. Otherwise, everything was still. It was so still, the whole earth seemed to be wrapped in silence.

  The boy, Billy Honeycutt, watched the rosy glow turn to purple, then to deep blue. He watched the mountains fade away in blue haze.

  “Hit’s a comin’ on toward dark,” he said to himself, still sitting motionless.

  He felt a deep content, as if he had just drained to the bottom a gourdful of water, ice-cold from the spring; or, better still, as if he had just finished off a large slice of his mother’s dried-apple pie, with sugar and cream on top. But no—his satisfaction was deeper than mere appetite. Why else did he hurry so to get his chores done each evening, and scramble up the mountainside? Just to watch the sun go down each night made the whole day seem easier.

  He mustn’t let Pappy catch him, sitting on the fence, doing nothing. He mustn’t let Pappy know. Pappy would get riled, or worse still, laugh at him and joke about it. But Mammy—she would understand. Only he was too shy to talk to her. But she understood things without being told. She knew why he was always so restless and couldn’t sit still in the house. She sensed his desire to roam and encouraged it.

  A deeper blue filled the sky, above the sharp-pointed finger of “the Peak.” Soon dusk like a heavy curtain would fall. He was glad no one—not a single soul—knew how he loved to come here, night after night, to watch the sun go down.

  Then he heard voices in the stillness.

  He jumped quickly from his perch and turned back to look. He was annoyed that anyone should have found out his secret watching place.

  They were women’s voices. He might as well see who it was.

  He left the fence and strolled back up through the woodsy mountainside. Suddenly he saw them, up beyond, through the trees. It was old Granny Trivett and her granddaughter, Sarey Sue. They were always around somewhere.

  “Hoo-oo-hoo!” he called.

  “Hoo-hoo!” came Sarey Sue’s reply, like an echo.

  Billy saw they had a sled-load of wood. It was a small mountain sled, made to carry loads
over grades too steep or rough for wagons, and was used more in summer than in winter. It was pulled by Granny’s cow. They had been chopping light limbs for firewood and were hauling it home. Sarey Sue held the saplings in place, while Granny whacked the cow with a long hickory stick.

  “Go ’long, Old Brindle. Go ’long!” said Granny.

  Granny Trivett was thin and small, with a brown, wrinkled face and sharp, dark eyes. A red head-handkerchief was tied under her chin. Her skirt of brown linsey hung long and full to her ankles, covered in front with a blue cotton-check apron.

  Sarey Sue, the girl, twelve years old, was long, skinny and brown. Her brown hair hung loose and uncombed on her shoulders. Her feet were bare beneath her linsey skirt. The evening air was chilly, but she wore no wrap.

  “Here, let me help,” said Billy.

  Part of the load was about to fall, as the sled curved and swayed up the hill behind the slow-moving cow. Billy shoved the wood higher and shifted its weight to the center of the sled.

  “I’ll walk behind and ketch it, if it falls again,” he said.

  Sarey Sue laughed. “Don’t let hit fall and bust your head!”

  The cow wound slowly in and out among the trees, her bell clanging sharply.

  “Hit ain’t much further now,” said Granny.

  “Here we air,” said Sarey Sue, after a little.

  “At the Half-Way-Up House!” added Billy. “I always say your house is just half-way up the mountain—a good place to stop and ketch your breath.”

  “Law, yes,” laughed Sarey Sue. “Hit shore is.”

  In the falling darkness, the tiny cabin seemed to be leaning against the great mountain, as if for warmth, shelter and comfort. It was built of logs, with a mud-daubed rock chimney at one end and a porch across the front. The roof was covered with hand-riven shingles or clapboards, curling loosely from age.

  Sarey Sue ran in and lighted a lamp on the table beside the small window. Its feeble rays threw a slant of light across the uneven boards of the porch floor, and down the rickety steps.