The popular beliefs about, but not of, the mountain people in Arkansas and other Southern States contain many misconceptions. According to fiction, the hillman is a seven-foot combination of malnutrition and hookworm, asleep on his front porch with the dogs. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when the flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound’s salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, “Hide yore stills and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h’yar.”
This feat of mountain Morse is all the more remarkable because he can neither read nor write, and, indeed, cannot count well enough to enumerate his hogs, but must identify them by name. Should one be missing for a day or two, he musters all his kin down to second cousins and step-uncles and goes across the “mounting” for a feud. While the menfolks shoot out one another’s eyeballs at artillery distances, the “chillern” go down in the valley and throw rocks, it being considered unmanly to kill women and children except in a fit of anger.
At the height of the fighting, the hog in question reels in, red of eye, and the feudists deduce that he was not killed at all, but merely knocked over somebody’s barrel of mash and subsequently went off down the valley, hunting wolves. The patriarchs and their relatives regretfully suspend the fighting and repair to a clan stronghold for a square dance. Between sets they hold spitting contests in the moonlight or mournfully intone Elizabethan ballads in purest Shakespearean idiom. When every keg of white lightning has been emptied, each man gathers up a rifle that saw service at Kings Mountain, and, followed by his twelve-year-old bride carrying a tub of clothes and two buckets of water, walks nine miles up the holler to his cabin.
Downing such an exaggeration is difficult, because there really is a rugged, homespun quality about the hill people. They appreciate a good pocketknife, a true rifle, and a cold-nosed coonhound. They look upon exceptional skill with an ax or a gun as an art. They take for granted an ability to “read sign” along creek banks, or to find a mule that has strayed in the woods.
If a traveler gets far enough back from the highway he will, of course, encounter a few old-timers who know ancient English and Scottish Ballads, hear a few Elizabethan phrases, and learn that a good many old superstitions are still alive–although few adults put much faith in them. The folk beliefs that survive do so largely because many rural folk don’t believe there’s anything to be gained by taking chances. For example, it is just as easy to lay shingles at the proper time of the moon to keep them from warping.
On the ground of either season or tradition, Good Friday is about the right time to plant a garden. Shaking a tablecloth after sundown is a sign of slack housekeeping as well as of bad luck. The girl who lets her dishwater boil deserves the seven more years of singleness she will have before getting a husband. If the “devil’s darning needle” (praying mantis) is not poisonous, “who in tarnation’s going to let himself get bit just to make sure?”
Many of the folk beliefs are handed down in the mock-serious manner that people often use in talking to children. A man who sends his son to look for the “pied muley cow that’s been using yon side” may say, with every show of earnestness except for a faint flickering of the eyes: “Son, before you start, catch a daddy-long-legs and say you’ll let it loose if it’ll point to the direction the cow went. And when you’re looking, if you see a toad, don’t step on it, because that will make the cow go dry. If you see a red bird that means you’ll have good luck. Now, you’d better hurry, because I heard a raincrow croaking a while ago, and so we’re going to have a shower.”
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