Huckleberry Knob, N.C.
January 1, 1925
Editor, The Yellow Jacket,
My dear Sir:--Well, another milepost on the highway of Time has been passed; another notch cut in the granite waiting to mark where we all must eventually lie; another year less to live and one more added to the weight on our shoulders. Mr. Editor, there never was a truer saying than the Inspired Writer’s “Life is as a day that is told.” It don’t seem any time since you and I and the rest of the grey-beards who now gather around the village store and swap yarns about “the good old times” were chasing deer, foxes, and other wild game across these old hills. Do you remember when we all joined in with a gang of roystering youngsters from Cub Creek and the Gap, and went over on top of Poor’s Knob and built us a wigwam? We weren’t afraid of anything that wasn’t tied down, you remember, and the pipe-dreams we had as we shoved our feathers down on our brows and called each other “Painted Stomach,” “Rain-in-the-Face,” “Kick-a-poo Red,” and “Dog-eater Tecumseh” ; how I remember those boyhood days yet! Do you recollect how we all suddenly lost our Indian bravery when, just as we were instigating a great “Indian Insurrection” like we had been reading about in our history at school, a Brushy Mountain bear, attracted by the smell of the meat we were frying o the wigwam fire, slid unceremoniously down among us. Why, don, while I’m not telling The Yellow Jaket readers what you did when you saw the bear’s fore-legs rearing up almost on your shoulders, I don’t mind admitting that the way I slid down the rocks for safety first makes me even a bit wary today when I go to sit down to my meals. Well, “those were the happy days” as the poet says, but Life had other uses for us than to raise insurrections and I’m mighty proud that I have had an humble part with you as one of our great and fearless American patriots in your more than a quarter of a century’s struggle to keep the flag unstained and the constitution untarnished by the reds and yellows and blacks and Irish greensand the other powerful hordes of aliens who want to destroy American liberty in a flood of unrestrained license. I don’t suppose you and I are as young as we used to be; you’d hardly be able to shinny up a sapling as nimbly as you did that day you refused the bear’s offer of an introduction, and I’m a bit stiff myself in the nether extremities these brisk winter days, but Don, your hearts are as young and our lives, please God, even more serviceable than we dreamed they would ever be. The thing for men like you and me to do is to try to keep inviolate for our own boys who will be the citizens and government when you and I are cluttering up Abraham’s bosom with our tears of joy, the freedom and Americanism we enjoyed because of our own fathers.
That’s why, Mr. Editor, I’m making a few New Year’s Resolutions today, tho I must admit that I have many which I made in other years that I have hardly used at all, not seeming to remember to keep them, which is the way of us poor mortals in the flesh.
For one thing, I’m going to be a little more neighborly than I have been. And I mean by that, that in keeping the Divine Injunction to love my neighbor as myself, I’m not going to enjoy my own home comforts and let my neighbors be imposed on by scalawags and scoundrels. I’ve played shut-mouth more than a man of my years and experience and observation ought to have done about the way things were going on in the community, and I believe loving my neighbor means that if he’s making a star-spangled jassack [countrified spelling of jackass] of himself it’s my Christian duty to tell him about it and not let him stray too far off the straight and narrow path. This year, bless God, I’m going to do my share of kicking and raising Cain when things go wrong in the neighborhood, and not just be content to wag my ears and say with the rest of the villagers, “Um-huh, I told you so,” fi somebody who has been Salamandering around; his neighbor’s wife suddenly decamps with the poor shemale and leaves the children and a fool husband back home to mourn their departure. For instance, there’s a Psalm-singing, windy-praying, soft-soaping son-of-a-gun in my neighborhood, who has always seemed to me to try to leave the impression on everybody in general and me in particular that just because his bank balance is bigger than other folk’s and he pays the preacher a little more of this world’s goods than some of us can afford to, he’s better and holier than the whole caboodle of us. He’s held his head so high and pocketed his nose so far toward the North Star every time us humble denizens pass his way that he looks like a frost-bitten pretzel. And yet me and the Old Woman have known for a long time that his cantankerous carryings-on, if generally known, would fit him or a neck-tie party or a warm tar and feather midnight bath. But I’ve gone along keeping my bread-trap shut about it, saying to my wife that, anyway, if we’d give the conceited fool rope enough and time enough to hobble himself in it, he’d hang himself. And just because I was too all-fired soft to say anything he’s run amuck with his marriage vows, neglected his wife and babies and been playing the he-gallant with other men’s soft-headed wives, until he’s pretty near got the neighborhood of Huckleberry Knob in a civil war. And all because we citizens who ought to have been good neighbors as the Bible says, didn’t love our neighbors as ourselves and post them on the lay of the land. But blast my slats if they’ll be any rest for such critters in Huckleberry Knob in 1925, if I keep my New Year’s Resolution on straight. For, after all’s said and done, Mr. Editor, public sentiment is the greatest police force any community can have, and there’s no sense in letting bull-headed young bucks run amuck with special etiquette, just because they happened to be in the “upper crust” of “sassiety’s” set. Living in the country, as I do, where everybody’s business is everybody else’s, I think when a man or woman loses his or her self-respect and tramples on the laws of common decency, it’s as much a part of my loving my neighbor as myself go to out and raise Cain about it as it is the preacher’s or school teacher’s or anybody else. The whole kernel of the pudding is, Mr. Editor, there’s been entirely too much soft-peddling of vice and wrong-doing generally these piping days. We’ve passed the bucks ouch to the school teachers and the parsons and expected everybody but ourselves to take a hand in straightening things out, that I’ getting to the place where I feel at times like a flop-eared hound. What kind of patriots are we going to pass on to the coming generation at this rate, I’d like somebody to tell me? Why, Mr. Editor, only a few days ago, I was visiting at a home in the country where there was a freckle-faced runt of a boy with about as many vices as a an would run up against in an open season of currycombing for small-bore devils in the orthodox hot place. The boy had come home as full of mountain corn likker as a hen-egg of meat, and when his father said something to the young up-start he cussed him for a goal, slammed his other out of his way and swore that he was an American citizen, had served overseas, and so far as the Constitution was concerned he wouldn’t be without his jag, because, so he announced, the country had slipped one over on him and gone bone-dry while he was in France, and all that stuff When I asked the old woman why she didn’t wear out a bed-slat on is hide, she shed sobs and said that she didn’t have the heart to punish him, and that she was just wistfully waiting till the high school opened up again so her youthful scion would get back in school and the teachers would line him up in proper discipline. As if God Almighty hadn’t made her and her trifling husband responsible for that boy’s raising when He gave them the unGodly wretch for a son. It’s no wonder to me that this country’s growing more and more lawless, the way things are headed, and I think New Year’s is a mighty good time for us fathers ad mothers to take stock of our own attitude in the family and community, and Resolve that we’ll do something about it If things keep up at the present hell-raising gait, we’re going to have more criminals than our jails can hold and nobody will e to blame but our own fool selves.
Why, bless your soul, Mr. Editor, I took the old woman down to one of our big cities for the Christmas holidays, and as the Republican prosperity that followed Coolidge’s re-election brought us so much more for our farm products than we ever expected, I took the old woman to the biggest swell hotel in the town; one of those places where they have waiters in full dress suits and fried shirts, and where they call cabbages by some big Italian or Greek name that nobody can pronounce and where they bring in finger bowls for you to take a bath in every time you bight a hunk out of a piece of meat. Well, sir, I never saw such carryings-on in my born days. There was women in the dining room that didn’t have enough clothes on to keep a humming-bird from taking Influenza in July; there was an old grave-deserter as bald as an onion, who looked as if he’d fall thru his staves every time he tried to straighten up his back. Dern my hide, Mr. Editor, if he didn’t have a little 90-pound painted fuzzy thing in petticoats along with him; she looked young enough to have been his great-grand-daughter, and she called him ”old dearie” and a lot of such tommy-rot, and the way she mummed and gummed over that old carcass made me want to go out and run my forefinger down my throat. And the old buzzard was buying bootleg likker in a teacup and the little witch and he were swilling it and nobody seemed to care a whoop. Byi the time the old woman had finished nibbling her salad and I had drunk my coffee out of my saucer, the pair of ‘em was so dizzy that they wobbled like Woodrow Wilson’s political policies during his first administration. But that wasn’t all. When I got to my room, a young dark-complected nigger with brass buttons and an army-looking suit on, knocked at my door, and when I went out to see what he wanted, he winked at me, slapped me on the shoulders as familiar as if I was a nigger too, and told me that as I looked rather dry after my trip in from the country, he could let me have a pint of “bottled in bond” stuff that, he told me, would give me ginger enough to kick the chandelier off the ceiling, for “only $3.50 a pint.” The young buck of a nigger didn’t seem to have any more respect for the Volstead Act than if it wasn’t a part of our Government, and yet when I slapped his mouth across one of his flip-ears, he reported me to the hotel manager as being disorderly, and they threatened to throw me out of the place, the old woman and all. And what makes it all the harder to understand, is there was a Federal Judge holding court in that very town at the time, and he was stopping at the same hotel and his room on the same floor where the old woman and I were staying. One drummer told me that nobody ever bothered about it anyway; said that “popular sentiment wasn’t favorable to prohibition,” as if popular sentiment or any other sort of sentiment has anything to do with constitutional government. Haven’t we come to a pretty pass when we have government by emotion, law enforcement ala sentiment, and a man’s innocence or guilt is gauged not by his conduct but by his feelings in the matter. If this keeps on, they’ll have to stop electing sheriffs and judges and install doctors with stethoscopes and microbe detectors, and liver-pads, and when a man shoots his own wife and decamps with somebody else’s they’ll not try him on the evidence, but examine him to ascertain whether his emotions were functioning 100 to the minute at the time of the alleged crime. We need more enactments and less emotions in our law business.
And there’s another Resolution I’ve made, Mr. Editor, and that is to do my part to put a stop to the infernal disrespect for the automobile regulations. Why, I was up in a mountain county seat this summer, and you can stretch my hide on your woodshed if there wasn’t seven automobiles running around in the berg with one dealer’s license tag on ’em, and they were doing everything from delivering groceries to running an undertaker’s hearse. When I reported the thing to the Secretary of State who, they said, had the law enforcement in his charge, he simply thanked me for telling him about it, but the violations are still going on as serenely as ever. But if I want to haul a load of Limber-twig apples to town in my old1907 Henry Ford truck, and I put my Roadster license tag on it, they’ll run me in and write me down as a hardened criminal. Why, Mr. Editor, I never saw such favoritism in law enforcement as these Democratic Southern states have, anywhere on earth. Why I was down in South Carolina not long ago, God forgive me for it, and I was standing in front of the Express office when a train rolled in, and you can shoot me for aguyacostus(??) if they didn’t unload a big barrel of ”sacred” booze in broad daylight and when I asked the Express Agent who it was for he told me it was for the “Church.” I asked him when the Church had found it necessary to go on a spree, but before he answered me, Father Somebody-or-other, in his petticoat and shovel hat, came driving up in a rig with across on it, and a red-nosed Irish Catholic helped roll the barrel onto the truck and they drove off laughing. I don’t see what right a foreign subject, who swears allegiance to a wine-bibbing bachelor in Italy has to keep his cellar full of alcoholic spirits and his gut full of booze, when, if a poor boom who happened to be born a 100 per cent American citizen happens to have a half pint of the stuff that stimulates in his jeans and gets caught before he swigs it, he gets 30 days on a rockpile or maybe six months in the state pen. Now, so help me, this year, I’m going to do a man’s share of putting a stop to all that sort of favoritism in administering our constitutional law.
Mr. Editor, I’m feeling so happy these days that I had not idea I would write such a letter, but the way things are humping it makes me tired. Have you noticed how everybody is still celebrating over Coolidge being reelected? I heard one fellow who made a lot of speeches for Davis during the campaign, and told everybody if Coolidge was elected the big business interests would take over the country, telling a drummer down at the village store that he’d cleaned up more money in the three weeks of Coolidge prosperity that sent stocks and bonds skyward, than he’d made working during the whole of Wilson’s administration.
And yet some people insist that the G.O.P. isn’t the party that brings prosperity. Such tommyrot makes me tired.
Yours for a Big 1925 for the Stinger
Eli Tucker.
From the front page of The Yellow Jacket, Moravian Falls, N.C., January 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn85038642/1925-01-01/ed-1/seq-1/#words=January+1%2C+1925
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