Folkways and Folk Lore From "A Guide to the Old North State"

From North Carolina: a guide to the Old North State, a Federal Writers’ Project book, which is online at http://books.google.com/books?id=dQDwh9Ep6jAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

FOLKWAYS AND FOLK LORE

Many bizarre customs and superstitions are hidden in the Great Smoky Mountains and the dunes of North Carolina’s seacoast. It is a temptation to describe them first. But it seems more important to give an impression of the folkways of North Carolina as a whole—ways of doing and acting and talking that are observed as one travels about and talks to people in leisure hours or at their ordinary occupations.

Americans, north and south, east and west, appear to be very much alike. Whether they cultivate cotton in the South or corn in the Middle West, they order the same hats and shirts from the same stores, ride in the same elevators, and buy hoes and plows from the same factories. But there are variations in the language and customs surrounding the use of these factory-made articles. The southerner “chops” his cotton instead of hoeing it, and says he has “laid-by his crop” when the last cultivating has been finished. The southern business man whips off his hat when a lady enters the elevator while the bustling bus northerner has partly abandoned this custom. The ante-bellum southern planter might have the languid rakish habit of wearing a hat indoors at his desk, while the northerner never did.

With few exceptions the white population of North Carolina is made up of descendants of northern European stock from what may be called the yeoman class. Not so rich in lordly plantations as the neighboring states of Virginia and South Carolina, North Carolina had less difficulty in adjusting itself to social change after the War between the States and Reconstruction. As a result, people in this state, from Cherokee to Currituck, have a feeling of neighborliness, an almost pioneer closeness among people in all walks of life. Any Sunday in the social columns of the state newspapers a picture of some mill-town bride may appear alongside that of the mill owner’s daughter.

The omnipresent southern hospitality comes largely from a spirit of delightful informality, or just from plain “southern don’t-care.” The southern housewife is not unduly embarrassed by an unexpected guest. Good inns and even sizable towns are still comparatively far apart in the South. For generations southerners accepted travelers as responsibility, and enjoyed them as links with the world beyond their reach. Furthermore, where the pattern of eating and sleeping is fairly elastic, no one bothers much over one more “name in the pot” or one more sleeper in a bedroom. The poorest backwoods housewife will offer the best she has, with perhaps a cheerful, apologetic, “Come in if you can get in for the dirt.”

The speech of the southerner appears to ignore effort in its slow, carelessly articulated syllables. And prominent North Carolinians still cling to their “’tain’t so” and “’twan’t nothin’” because their fathers found these expressive, and they just don’t want to change. Perhaps provincial, this spirit nevertheless makes for an individual flavor of speech and thought, a sort of shrewd peasant devotion to things native and tried. Everywhere, from the country store and filling station to the halls of the state legislature, pithy sayings are quoted, salty yarns are spun. For North Carolinians possess the genuine countryman’s humor. They live in a state that is primarily agricultural. Practically all of them have had some contact with farm life. Even the mill operatives are apt to drift back and forth between sharecropping and mill work.

Largely because of this closeness to the soil there are some customs and habits common to all classes in the state, and there remain preferences that stay with a man no matter how wealthy he may become or how well-traveled. The real North Carolinian loves his turnip salad cooked with pork, his country butter and fried ham, sweet yams and chopped barbecue. He will send home from far places for a supply of white corn meal ground by the old-fashioned water mill. One of the hardships of town life for the mountaineer in a Piedmont cotton mill is the absence of spring water, cold and clear, from the depths of the granite hill. Similarly, many wealthy city dwellers never lose their taste for well water. In town as well as country may be seen patchwork quilts sunning on the back fence, pliable home-made sedge brooms standing behind the “cook-room” door, fat pine lightwood supplied for kindling, and the “old-timy” hickory cane-bottomed chair tilted back on two legs against the porch for perfect comfort.

Many forms of recreation illustrate this kinship between classes: games and beliefs of children are the same in town and country; similar methods are used by all hunters who go out after foxes, rabbits, birds, ‘coons, and ‘possums, and fishing is a democratic sport. Court week is observed, and holidays are numerous. The high spot of the year, Christmas, is a day of true southern gayety, hailed often with firecrackers at daybreak and a heavily laden dinner table at noon, with gifts and eggnog. The South has never been solemn in the observation of this sacred day, and for a long time Christmas has been doubling for the Fourth of July. In recent decades the National Independence Day has regained some recognition, but Christmas continues to be the big day, big in joy, big in the returns to trade. Merchants have stimulated the development of certain harvest celebrations such as the strawberry, peach, and tobacco festivals, and of special occasions like the dogwood festivals and mountain-music contests that have the avowed purpose of encouraging the folk arts. These are good examples of traditions arising to meet certain needs of the people. In similar fashion customs may pass and be forgotten—witness the growing neglect of the Confederate Memorial Day since the World War unified North and South.

Life everywhere in North Carolina is still influenced by a code of religious observation. The urge to a simple faith gives the town dweller his habit of churchgoing, just as it inspires his more primitive country kin to “get religion” at revivals. After listening to “preaching,” the former may leave his fine brick church determined to swear off cigarettes. The latter may take a more violent turn and, like one brother in Harnett County, go home and pull up his excellent tobacco crop, convinced it is of the Devil’s planting. The behavior is different in degree but the underlying urge is the same. Sometimes a revivalist will sweep together all the elements of a section, rich and poor, town and country, into a fanatical band.

In its ordinary manifestations the religious code shows its influence throughout the state: in the lack of liberality in the daily press, in the strictness of Sunday blue laws, in the rules of certain sects that frown on card playing, in prohibition of dancing at some of the largest colleges. In towns and country there are various church entertainments: children’s day with dialogues, recitations, and pageants; homecoming days that attract the old attendants, and birthday suppers and “poundings” given for the pastor. A wake, with the less sophisticated, becomes something of a social occasion as neighbors gather to “set up.”

Perfect geographical conditions for preserving old lore occur in the southern mountains. Here a delighted explorer, Cecil Sharp, the student of folk music and dances, found old English forms of speech, Elizabethan songs and ballads, and people who wove their homespun clothes and made their soap by the signs of the moon just as the country people used to do in England. Most readers of folklore have heard of the Great Smoky Mountain natives and their ways. So celebrated has this section become that few realize the very same customs and forms of speech may be found in isolated sections in all parts of North Carolina and in other states as well. Almost every county has its backwoods districts where old English ballads are still sung, where old women know how to dye and weave, and where pottery churns and jugs are made from the local clay. There is, too, an isolation arising from social conditions and wherever there are underprivileged people with scanty education, families cling to the old ways and the old speech, unconsciously preserving folklore that harks back to pioneer days, and beyond these to England.

Few realize that the Negro race has been an agency for perpetuating Anglo-Saxon folkways, and that in remodeling and adapting this lore the Negro has made one of his most distinctive contributions. But a careful source study has shown that many so-called African superstitions are accepted as African in origin simply because they are strange to present-day white people. Actually many of these beliefs and customs were picked up from their white masters by the early slaves, who handed them on to their descendants as part of their own folk belief. English witchcraft influencing Negro conjure and hoodoo ritual, cures and charms of Shakespeare’s time preserved by Negro midwives, old English phrases in the softened Negro speech, are some of the discoveries of students of the South.

Although similarities occur in every section of the state, each isolated geographical division, created by the great natural barriers of mountains and sea, has developed special characteristics. The remote and stormy shoals and islands of the seaboard have a distinctive folklore, fully as interesting as that of the mountains, but practically unknown to outsiders. Similarities in the customs of coast and mountain people point to their common origin. Some people of both sections use the obsolete forms of “holp” for help, “airy” for any, “j’int” for joint, “air” for are—these and many other expressions were good English in Shakespeare’s time. Certain superstitions, too, are recognized in both parts of the state; for example, meeting a woman is bad luck for a mountain huntsman just as it is for a fisherman of the banks—and as it was in past times for the natives of Sussex or Ireland.

However, the coast people, the “bankers” in particular, have lived so long isolated that their ways have a distinct flavor of their own. Especially is this true of their speech, though it is difficult to convey the impression. Subtle differences of dialect depend not only on phrases and their pronunciation but on the intonation, drawl, and rhythm of the utterance, impossible to indicate in print. People sensitive to dialect rhythms can tell by a man’s speech whether he comes from Hatteras or Roanoke Island, or even from which end Roanoke Island, but they can hardly define the differences, and they could never transcribe the pronunciation phonetically. There are some easily recorded distinctions of North Carolina coastal speech—one the quality of the vowels, “oi” for i. “Hoigh toide, no feesh,” says the fisherman. “Oi’m goin’ home.” Another young native complains of the girls (“darlin’s” in his dialect), “Oi loike the darlin’s but the darlin’s don’t loike me.” Not everwhere on the coast, but on certain banks and islands, the “v” is pronounced “w,” so that it might be remarked of Virgil, for instance, that “Woigil is a good prowider of wictuals.”