Elizabethan America

I

WE know a land of Elizabethan ways — a country of Spenserian speech, Shakespearean people, and of cavaliers and curtsies. It is a land of high hopes and mystic allegiances, where one may stroll through forests of Arden and find heaths and habits like those of olden England.

We are speaking of the Southern highlands — Appalachia and Ozarkadia. Putting it generally, Appalachia includes the four western counties of Maryland, the Blue Ridge hills, the Allegheny Ridge country of Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Northwestern South Carolina, Northern Georgia, and Northeastern Alabama — an area of about a hundred and twelve thousand square miles, approximately that of New York and New England combined, or of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales put into one. And by way of an appendage there are the Ozark hills of Southern Missouri, Northwestern Arkansas, and the southeastern lip of Oklahoma, a country in dimensions near a hundred and fifty by two hundred miles, or, roughly, about the size of New York State. The people of Appalachia generally call themselves mountain folks; those of the Ozarks, hill people. The Southern highlands have between six and seven million people, which is somewhere about the population of England during the days of Shakespeare. Nearly 86 per cent of the Southern highlanders are rural people, which is approximately the ratio which held in Elizabethan England.

Husbandmen and ploughmen of Shakespeare’s England and present-day upland farmers could very likely have rubbed shoulders and swapped yarns with few misunderstandings, lingual or otherwise; for Elizabethan English, as well as Elizabethan England, appears to have survived magnificently in these isolated Southern uplands.

The speech of the Southern mountains is a survival of the language of older days, rather than a degradation of United States English or a falling away from blunt-edged journalese. Mountain speech has little slang or saueincss. While it does, of course, show local differences a plenty, a surprisingly large number of old words have survived, along with a surprisingly large number of old ways, giving a quaint and delightful flavor of olden England. Illustrations are plentiful enough. The most casual of listeners will become conscious of the preponderance of strong preterits in mountain speech: ‘clum’ for ‘climbed,’ ‘drug’ for ‘dragged,’ ‘wropped’ for ‘wrapped,’ ‘fotch’ for ‘fetched,’ and ‘holp’ for ‘helped’—all sound Elizabethanisms, to be found in Shakespeare, Lovelace, or King James’s Bible. The Southern uplander says ‘fur’ (for) with Sir Philip Sidney, ’furder’ with Lord Bacon and iu common with Hakluyt, ‘allow’ for ‘suppose.’ Like Chaucer, he forms the plurals of monosyllables ending in ‘st’ by adding ‘es’ — ‘postes,’ ‘beastes,’ ‘jystes’ (joists), ‘nestes,’ and ‘ghostes.'

Shakespeareanlike, he probably calls a salad a ‘sallet,’ a bag a ‘poke,’ says‘antic’ for ‘careful,’ and ‘bobble’ for ‘mix-up.’ Like Piers Plowman, he says ‘heaps of people,’ and Spenserlike says ‘mought’ for ‘might,’ rimes ‘yet’ with ‘wit,’ and says ‘swinge’ for ‘singe.’ He keeps such Elizabethan pronunciations as ‘sence,’ ‘ag’in’,’ “scriptur,’ ‘ventur,’ ‘natur,’ ‘yit,’ and ‘yander.’ He still ‘toles’ hogs with corn, and, like Gower, comments upon ‘a sighte of feynold flowers.’ He gets up ‘afore daylight’ to make a ‘soon start,’ ‘rives’ oak blocks into shingle boards, carries a ‘budget’ on his back, looks out for ‘quiled-up’ snakes, and on particular occasions uses a ‘handerker.’

Theseus, in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, commends the ‘ pert and nimble spirit of mirth.’ Ephraim Kilgew may reasonably testify that he is raising up a pert bunch of young ’uns. Like Othello, the hillman ‘spends’ his opinions. He most likely says ‘dorts’ for ‘sulks,’ ‘dauncy’ for ‘ailing,’ ‘chat’ for ‘gravel,’ ‘swarve’ for ‘crowd together,’ and ‘tinsey’ for ‘tiny.’

Southern uplanders have a charming capacity for making words and phrases fit the want of an occasion, to express thoughts which are still mobile. Elizabethanlike, their speech is still rollicsome and fluid.

‘The mill war consider’ble damnified.’

‘Can I get over that road?’

‘Well, I don’t jest edzactly know. Some places the rain has gouted it out mightily. You ’ll have to surround them places.’

‘I done been and had dinner.’

‘Sheep is natured like deer.'

‘B’ar is destructions. They kill hawgs.’

‘Hit’ll take two slugs er buckshot to moralize Forgy Dell.’

‘I ain’t saw Tom in forty year. I can’t hardly memorize him.’

‘If it don’t disfurnish ye none, I’ll pay fur that ham-meat later on.’

Comparatives and superlatives are generally formed by adding a final ‘er’ or ‘est,’ regardless of the length of the word: ‘ endurabler,’ ‘fast-runnin’er,’ ‘fiddlin’est,’ ‘ preachin’est,’ and ‘hogkillin’est.’ Just as ‘wealth’ is a collective of ‘weal,’ to a majority of uplanders ‘stealth’ is what one steals, ‘spilth’ is what one spills, and a ‘blowth’ is a mass of blowing things or blossoms. They take the y from ‘yeast,’ but add it to ‘earn’; ‘queer’ is usually ‘quare’; ‘care,’ ‘keer’; ‘chair,’ ‘cheer’; ‘crop,’ ‘crap.’ Extra r’s frequently invade such words as ‘warter,’ ‘orter,’ ‘arter,’ and even make away into names, such as ‘Caurdle’ and ‘Orsborne.’

The Chaucerian ‘hit’ is frequently substituted for ‘it,’ but by no means invariably. The choice seems to be governed by an instinct for euphony. Like Spenser, they say ‘swarve’ for ‘swerve,’ and, like the immaculate Alexander Pope, ‘jine’ for ‘join.’

Elizabethan exactness of thinking is easily discernible in upland speech. They talk of cow-brutes, ham-meat, lard-cracklin’s, of tooth-dent, churchhouses, biscuit-bread, and rifle-guns.

‘Was the new baby at your house a boy?’ ‘Yessur, hit was a boy, and I reckon hit’s a boy yit.’

‘Does that jug hold a gallon?' ‘ W’y, no, not hardly. But hit’ll hold quite a content.’

‘I’m clearn’n’ a field to raise my bread.’

II

Broadly speaking, the Southern highlanders are an Old England folk, English and Scotch-Irish, whose forebears came forth from Elizabethan England, a nation of young life which had just found its prime, a nation of energy and daring, a nation leaping from childhood into manhood. And the spirit of Elizabethan England has long survived the weathering of time. The first settlers brought with them Elizabethan ways of living, and these ways have lasted in a country of magnificent isolation, one little touched by the ways of a modern world.

Southern uplunders do not have the Elizabethan’s wealth, galleries, or his mechanics and autocracies of high living. They are rather the counterparts of rural Elizabethans, ‘folk of plain and splendid ways.’

‘All the corn we make our bread of groweth on our own demesne ground. The flesh we eat is all of our own breeding. Our garments, also, or much thereof, are made in our own home. Our own malt and water maketh our drink.’ Thus went a good husbandman’s boast of self-sufficiency.

It goes in much the same way with the Southern uplander. He gambles squarely upon the benevolence of soil, growth, and weather. He plants crops, hunts game, catches fish, and harvests fruits and berries with a basic idea of self-sufficiency. His wife cooks, churns, makes the clothes, keeps the home, and picks the geese for feather beds. Coffee, baking soda, kerosene, sugar, and lamp chimneys are virtually the only commodities to be bought at the village store. And if times are hard he can use maple or molasses sweetening, make parched-wheat coffee, and sit about in the firelight; or, more expedient still, go to bed at dusk. He cuts elm and ash for cart parts and ploughs, hickory for axe handles, and apple wood for saw rounds, much as was the ‘presidence’ in the days of fair Bess.

Countrysides have their midwives, their herb doctors, their basket makers, their carders, and their millers. Water mills still turn which have ground their community’s grain for fully a century, and farm boys continue to ride toward them, with bags of shelled com swung over their horses’ withers — shirts open, lips pursed for whistling, bodies asway to the leisurely, plodding gaits of their mounts.

Trevesses’s Good Plowmen, as a polaris for rural life in Old England, has this to say of the country fare: —

But the rest of the week pease and bacon washed down by a draft of cider or good homebrew ale, made the husbandman’s ordinary dinner. To the haymaking field he and his workers took with them a bottle or two of good beer, with an apple pasty, potted butter, churn-milk bread and cheese. The well-to-do ate wheat bread and mandiet. The poor ate bread made of rye or barley, and in time of dearth, beans, pease and oats.

The culinary outlay of a modernday uplander offers a pretty consistent parallel. Sunday calls for meat, pork or beef roast, chicken, squirrel, or fried wild turkey or fish or rabbit. The settler will probably have a meat dinner or two during the course of the week. But the Elizabethan countryman’s stand-bys of pease and bacon hold general following among mountain people; pole beans or bunch beans, picked green in season and ‘shilled’ and kilned for winter use; com-mcal breads, with flour breads the occasional luxury; and pork meat, bacon, jowls, sausage, ham-meat, backbone, spareribs, and shoulder joints, boiled, fried, stewed, or baked — those arc the hillman’s day-in and day-out dependables. Except in the pasture, country beef is generally scarce. Hogs represent the easiest source of meat. The standing motto regarding pigs is to raise plenty and eat plenty. Mongrel sows are astonishingly prolific. The pigs range at large, get their growth from eating herbs and acorns, and have only to be ‘topped off’ with corn at slaughtering time. Frequently a hill family will slaughter twenty or thirty shoats for a season’s meat. We know a patriarch in the vicinity of Hawg Eye, Arkansas, who regularly slaughters twelve pigs for the nurture of each of his twelve offspring — a hundred and forty-four a year. Now, since four of his daughters and three of his sons are married and moved farther on up the creek a way, the benevolent old squire can hardly reckon how he is going to range enough hogs to provide for the coming harvest of grandchildren.

Nicholas Vreton tells of rural England of old: —

August brought the harvest and the end of the husbandman’s year, a merry time wherein honest neighbors make good cheer. The sun dries up the standing ponds. Now begin the gleaners to follow the corn cart, and a little bread to a great deal of drink makes the traveller’s dinner; the melon and the cucumber are now in request, and the oil and the vinegar give attendance to the sallet herb.

The pipe and the tabor is now lustily set on work, and the lad and the lass will have no lead in their heels. The new wheat makes the gossip cake and the bride cup is carried above the head of the whole parish. The fermenty pot welcomes home the harvest cart and the garland of flowers crowns the captain of the reapers. Then come the brisking nights of autumn with new revelry. The young folks, smiling, kiss at every turn in the dance; the old folk sit about talking and laughing; the children dance for a garland or play at stool ball for a tansey and a banquest of curds and cream. There is much drinking of old nappy ale and casting of sheep eyes, much exchanging between men and maidens of pairs of gloves or pretty handerkers.

In Elizabethan America, October brings the com harvest and the end of the tenant’s year. But the tilling season is pretty thoroughly over by late July or early August. Flails have almost altogether lost their place as the yield of wheat barley and buckwheat continues generally decreasing. Corn bushings and county fairs offer the inlanders their autumnal daytime diversion.

Then comes the regular run of the season’s merrymakings — hay rides, fish giggings, possum hunts, candy pullings, and quiltings. And if you should chance to be roaming about in the vicinity of a back-hill meetinghouse on a Saturday night, it is altogether probable that you will first hear a vague, far-off pounding noise, and on coming nearer you will gradually come to identify the squeak of a fiddle. Inside you will see gyratory merriment — big and little, young and old, executing square dances, flings, and reels, sedate and otherwise; virtually everyone in the frolic, whole-heartedly, from toe to top hair. And then there are the moonlight picnics and pie suppers, where frolic holds sway and foodstuffs are consumed in splendid profusion.

III

As a people the Southern highlanders are surprisingly free from awkwardness and uncouthness. Theirs is an unpresuming dignity, a quiet courtliness, unspoiled by the conventional forms of etiquette and politeness. Theirs is a genuine, unhurried serenity. They are a folk who can afford old-time, homely ambitions.

The other day we were asking about an upcountry acquaintance.

‘Do I know Uncle Bog Sellers? Why, this creek were named fur him. He been right puny this winter, but he’s perter now. You see, he’d killed ninetynine b’ar in his lifetime, and war fixin’ fur another hunt when he tuck sick with a misery in the stummiek. The doctor told him he’d got to die. But Uncle Bog, he prayed the good Lord to raise him up to kill jest one more b’ar — and, shore ’nough, He done it.’

We know another upcountryman in Taney County, Missouri. His name is Elijah Shrum. In his young days Lige was commonly taken as being worthless, merely because he seemed to have an insuperable aversion to following the guiding end of a bull-tongue plough. So Lige took up treasure hunting as a life’s occupation. He spent better than forty years at searching for bountiful treasure. He followed down marker trails, prowled through the backmost recesses of innumerable caves, digging and delving, following out generally the path of high romance. Mr. Shrum has not, at this writing, unearthed the manifold treasure, but he still figures to find it — to unearth, one of these days, an iron-bound chest altogether too heavy for one man to hoist. So he continues high-heartedly at the search, and the years have in no way dimmed his ardor.

We know another searcher after stars, a dwarf named Sammy Blankhall. For twenty-odd years he ran a store near Eagle Rock, and did well enough, too, until one night his store burned to the ground, leaving him not only penniless, but heavily in debt. We took a tramp together the other day. He showed me into the one-room log cabin which he calls home. In the far corner of it was a bin filled with bushels and bushels of hulled black walnuts. Sammy explained that he is n’t stout enough to swing an axe, nor has he the heft to follow a plough, and so he is paying off his debt to the wholesale grocery house by picking out walnut kernels and selling them to town confectioners. Sammy is sixtyfour. By the time he is seventy he reckons he will have paid out the whole of his indebtedness.

The uplander’s vital philosophy resembles that of the Elizabethan’s in that it is usually more proverbial than speculative. Both were doubtless prone to agree with Launcelot Gobbo that it ‘was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last at six o’clock i’ the morning.’ Lore of spells and magic, strange fantasies of moon destinies, ill omens and bringers of wealth and fertility, still hold sway in the Southern back hills. When ordinary means fail, the hillman is an edge more likely to consult a witch doctor than to call a skilled veterinarian when the old cow gives ‘quare milk and won’t no butter come.'

Here is a somewhat typical story of magic coming from the Cumberland country.

‘Old Doc was a-walkin’ along with his wife. They was both elderly, and she says, “Let’s go up to this house and git a light for our pipes.” Folks did n’t have matches none to speak’n of in them days; many a time I’ve walked a mile to a neighbor’s with a shovel to borry fire. Well, they found a child that screamin’ an’ kickin’ — bewitched.

‘So Doc told ’em to git him nine new pins that had n’t never been stuck in cloth, an’ a bottle. He putts the pins in the bottle and sets it on the mantelshelf. Then he got a shingle and drawed a picture of a woman and told the man to set it up ag’in’ a stump and shoot it jest at sundown.

‘About a week atter that, Doc was cornin’ by ag’in, an’ he inquired atter the child. Then he axed had anybody died suddintly, and they told him an old woman across the holler had died with a shriek everwhen the man shot the picture with his rifle-gun. And the bottle on the mantelpiece busted into a thousand pieces, and they never did find ary one of them pins.’

Just as the Elizabethan countryman took the blood of an elephant mingled with the ashes of a weasel as a cure for leprosy and dead moles as a cure for baldness, believed in love charms and the avenging power of a wax figure pierced through with a needle and put to melt before the fire, so the Southern mountaineer will drive a spike through the heart of a tree to make it fruitful, or devise tonics or healing potions from cobwebs or iron rust.

Some of them will tell you that the moon and stars are eternal lamps set out to show the signs and the seasons, and that the lay of the Milky Way predicts the direction of the prevailing winds for a period of a lunar month. The set of the horns of the moon indicates rain or prevailing dry weather. The set of the oak leaves and the habits of fireflies they take as ready barometers. When cattle munch restlessly at pasture, or barn owls whoop in the daytime, or snake trails show in the dust, they begin making ready to stack the hay or tote in the fodder, for the signs say rain. In the wintertime, if the household Tabitha sits with her tail toward the fire, or if the wind whistles through the orchard land, they figure to fetch in a few extra armloads of firewood — cold weather is coming. Grain crops, beans, and vegetables they plant during the light of the moon, because these are sunlight crops, but they plant potatoes in the dark of the moon, since potatoes are tubers, growing in underground darkness. They take medicine and cures under a waning moon, so that their ills may also wane. Very generally they split rails, chop post timber, rive boards, and slaughter hogs when ‘Ma Moon’ is appropriately set. They ‘witch’ for water with forked twigs of willow or peach wood. There are treasure finders who witch for buried gold and silver by slipping a silver dime or a piece of gold into the fork of their twig. So their folkish ways go. As a race they place inestimably more confidence in elves than in elevators.

IV

When it comes to folk romancers and romantic rascals, the Southern highlands again smack of Merry England. Not too specifically speaking, the moonshiners are the upcountry Robin Hoods. They have their Friar Tucks, their Maid Marians, their Little Johns, their Greenwood revels, and their Sheriffs. They hold Saturday night gambles and gambols in palatial chambers of mountain caves.

The run of moonshiners are, professionally speaking, a cave people, but their homes are the open hills. It is true, too, that some of the young radicals make their runs in the open brush, trusting their fortunes to isolation, legal degression, ready defense, and a fast get-away. But the oldtimers continue to labor underground and to jubilate in the open wildwood or wherever the spirit directs.

The ethical stand of a moonshiner is closely akin to that of the forest poacher in the days of Queen Bess. Moonshining began merely as a household economy. The first settlers lacked means and utensils for canning or evaporating their surplus of fruit and produce. Their potatoes, parsnips, and turnips could be ‘holed up’ in the field for winter use; cabbage they put to kraut, meat was salted and smoked; but for saving their surplus of fruits and berries they trusted to alcoholic preservation. They made brandies of their cherries, peaches, blackberries, and pawpaws; they made alcoholic preserves of their plums and apples, made ‘sweet rum’ from their sorghum ‘seconds,’and put their surplus of corn, rye, and barley to the making of paralyzing stimulants.

The world grow up about them, leaving them still in a country of young frontiers. Roads were few and farscattered. They are yet. Back-hill travel routes usually follow the stream beds, and this involves sundry fordings and blockades. Commodities bulky as grain, or perishable as fruit or eggs or butter, were next to impossible to market. And a hillman needs a little cash money now and then, even as you and I. A gallon of corn in the keg may fetch more cash than an acre of corn in the ear. Just as the poachers of olden England slew the Queen’s deer and made ready to take the consequences, so the ‘blockaders’ of Elizabethan America crush their com, set their ‘beers,’ make their runs, keg their wares, swig their surplus, and ’let go roll — life, and a dollar for the fiddler’s toll.’

Moonshiners have no time for mincing or bickering about professional casualties. Should one be killed or lamed by an enforcement officer — well, that is all in the day’s labor. And if it appears expedient to plug a ‘ law ’ in the back where the suspenders cross, or to shove one over a high wild bluff with only moonlight, mountain air, and limestone ledges below, then that, too, is part of the game of swap. But the chances are that the moonshiner will pay his debts, give milk and meal to the widow lady, prove helpful at births and buryings, and, once convinced of your harmlessness, take you into his home with a hospitality which is nothing short of princely.

So moonshining has come to be a hardy trade. Liquor is hard to make by the hill-country recipe. Corn must be shucked and shelled and cracked in tub mills or with hickory mauls or pestles. The distilling must be done in a creek bed or beside an underground stream, for running water offers the only means of refrigeration. If vaporization is too slow or too fast, then all is not well with the product. To make a first run requires from thirtysix to forty-eight hours of firing, which means that the moonshiner must be on his toes, alert and laboring, virtually every minute of that time. And there are the hazards and hardships and luckless slips.

While the moonshiner draws out his thread of romance, he cannot forget that its spool is tethered to handcuffs, jail houses, penitentiaries, and buryin’ grounds. His candle is lit at both ends, and it bums with a clear blue flame.