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Indian Stories
Grandma's mother, Martha White Johnson, told her grandchildren that she had Indian ancestry. Hazel said that after her parents moved to the Sandhills, some kin from the mountains came to visit, with the purpose of finding some proof of their Native ancestry. Her father refused to talk with them and made them leave. My sister told this story to someone with Native connections, who explained to her that people with non-white ancestry were often refused credit at the banks and stores. As a farmer, Grandpa would have depended on credit to keep him going until he took his tobacco to market and received whatever cash he was going to make for the year. So, if he or Grandma had Native ancestry, it was not to their advantage to prove it.
Hazel repeated a lot of stories that were told to her when she was a child. When one of us children was crying, she would tell us that the old folks used to say when the Indians were hiding from their enemies, they would stop the babies from crying by covering their noses and mouths so they couldn't breathe. If anybody made noise and they were discovered, they'd all be killed. She teased that if we had been Indians, we wouldn't have survived.
Beliefs and Behaviors
Fannie was a Primitive Baptist who believed that someone who had a true call to preach was actually inspired by God. She called someone who was educated in a seminary and paid a salary "an educated preacher," and was suspicious of their worthiness to be in the pulpit. The churches she and her family attended are still very plain buildings, with no unnecessary furnishings or decorations, in keeping with their belief in inner, rather than outer inspiration. She believed that dancing and wearing makeup
were sins, but she softened up as the years passed. I remember dancing to rock'n'roll records in her living room, when my cousins and I were in elementary school. Mama warned us that Grandma wouldn't like it, but Grandma never said a word.
Grandma didn't believe in putting on airs of any
kind. She told a story from her girlhood, around the turn of the 19th century, about a girl who wore a white dress and white shoes to a molasses making. The molasses making was a community work
gathering, where sugar cane was boiled and processed. When she was a grandmother, she still laughed at that "prissy" girl in white shoes stepping in the
hole where the waste was poured off the molasses.
She dipped snuff, which was as fashionable when she was a young woman
as smoking became later on. When her daughters were small, they imitated
her by "dipping" a mixture of cocoa and sugar. Her favorite brand of snuff
was Tube Rose, as advertised on the Arthur Smith show. She enjoyed watching
country music shows and soap operas, which she called "the stories."
Skills
Grandma sewed clothes for her daughters, drafting her own patterns and making dresses of her own designs. She subscribed to Workbasket magazine in her later years, but used it mainly for ideas. She looked at the pictures rather than the instructions for quilting, knitting, crochet, tatting, embroidery, and applique, all of which she did with expert skill.
The Old Folks Used to Say...
Grandma grew up with some old superstitions that probably came from the British Isles. When I was little, if I put my clothes on wrong side out, she told me that the old folks used to say that would repel haints (ghosts.) Also, if you woke up tired in the morning, it might be that the witches had ridden you like a horse to get where they were going in the night. When I helped her peel apples, she told me to try and keep the peeling in one piece and throw it over my shoulder. If it fell in the shape of a letter of the alphabet, that would be the first letter of my true love's name. Mama used to say when rain fell while the sun was out, that meant the Devil was beating his wife and she was crying. She also told me that she used to get rid of warts by letting the wart bleed on a kernel of corn and feeding it to a chicken or bleeding on a stone and burying it at a crossroads.
My mother and grandmother seemed to find these superstitions funny, but apparently as late as the ‘twenties, some people believed them. Mama said that when Grandma was in labor with a child that was stillborn, an old woman who claimed to be a witch would walk in and out of the house uninvited. (Grandma had all her children at home, with a doctor attending.) Most of their stories of magic and the supernatural were on the lighter side, like wishing on the first star that appeared in the evening. This was the folklore Grandma passed on to her children and grandchildren.
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