One of the current best selling books, a novel by Kathryn Stockett entitled The Help has been the conversation piece in several social settings of which I have been a part in recent months. It first came to my attention at a ballroom dance that my wife and I were attending in Indianapolis back in July. Our tablemates were from Mississippi and were quite well-to-do. They were very interested in the book because they still had help at their house, provided by African-Americans. Since that time the book has come up in several locations where I have found myself. I have not read the book, but my wife is currently in the process of doing so. At any rate, all of the talk about domestic help set me to thinking about the help that I observed when I was growing up in post World War II rural West Virginia.

I actually knew people who had domestic help. But they were not called maids or servants. Everyone referred to them as “hired girls.” As a matter of fact, my closest neighbor had a hired girl.

The first thing I remember about rural West Virginia hired girls is that they were all white. That was not a surprising fact in my neck of the woods because the nearest black person was some thirty miles away.

There were actually two kinds of hired girls in the world that I knew. Some of them were just part-time and were hired during the peak canning season, or oftentimes during spring cleaning. Most modern folks don’t know about spring cleaning but it was a major deal back in earlier days. Every room in the house received a total cleaning. All of the furniture was moved out, walls and ceilings were washed down (sometimes painted), and the hardwood floors were thoroughly cleaned and oftentimes got a new coat of varnish.

I have vivid memories of wrestling mattresses out of the house each spring and placing them on sawhorses in the yard where they could sun all day while the room was being cleaned. Spring cleaning was difficult work. A hired girl was a handy thing to have. But these part-timers usually moved in for a couple of weeks and became a part of the household.

Some hired girls that I knew were full time. They were often brought in when the lady of the house was getting older or was in poor health. These girls became a part of the family. They did not live in servant’s quarters and were treated as equals in every way. They sat at the supper table with everyone else and shared the living room and parlor during the evenings.

I am sure that the pay was not much because most folks who hired them were not wealthy. But the families provided free room and board and a small stipend.

Who were these girls anyway? Why would they want to be hired girls? Most usually they were young women who quit high school and had not yet found their way in the world. Others were middle years ladies who had lost their husbands, or perhaps, never found one in the first place.

But, actually, they enjoyed a pretty good life. They had a nice clean place to live, sat down to good meals everyday, and enjoyed the community social life. I saw men come a-court’n some of them.

I don’t think any hired girls I knew ever thought of themselves as being inferior or felt discriminated against. Of course in the pre-1960′s south, where the novel is based, race was still a sensitive issue and I am sure it had something to do with the way the help was treated. On the other hand, when you think of earlier times in merry old England, the hired help there was usually white and certainly did not get treated as equals.

Hired girls as I knew them might well have been a hill country phenomenon.

Mack Samples is a writer and musician who lives in Clay County. Visit online at http://www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

As February rolls around we are all reminded that it is time to tell someone that we love them. The reminder can take several forms. Some folks just use the spoken word, some present a box of candy with fancy wrapping, some find just the right card, while others shower the special one with roses. Valentine’s Day is a very joyous time for those who love each other. Not so much when love is one-sided. Unrequited love is an undisputed fact. During the course of human history, it has caused a multitude of problems.

A large percentage of the old folk songs and ballads that have been passed down for generations, many of them from the old European countries, carry the theme of love gone wrong. In most cases unrequited love involves a man who loves a woman but she is unresponsive to his advances.

For most men such an incident just involves getting over the rejection. They just go have a couple of beers, shrug it off, and look for someone else in the next town. But the old folk ballads tell stories of men who couldn’t tolerate their damaged egos so they took some sort of tragic action. Sometimes, they murder the object of their affection and either go to prison or are hanged. Other times, they just kill themselves because they can’t stand the pain. But oftentimes they murder the girl and then kill themselves.

In the grandmother of all the folksongs, Barbara Allen, the poor guy misunderstands Barbara’s response to his advances and kills himself. When she finds out about it, she takes to her bed and dies. In Wexford Girl, from roughly the same era in England, the rejected guy beats the poor girl to death with a club and throws her in the river, “that flows through Wexford town.” In the American annals of tragic romances a song called When First I Came to Louisville tells the story of a young man who kills the man who is beating his time and is subsequently hanged.

If you have read this far you have probably concluded that I am writing about ancient history and that things like this don’t happen in modern times. Don’t you believe it!  Unrequited love that leads to tragedy is still very much with us. I can recall several such incidents that have occurred in central West Virginia during the past ten years. I remember one man who confessed to killing his ex-wife and remarked, “if I can’t have her, nobody else can either.”

When I think about love, I always think of a professor I had at Ohio University. In one of his lectures, he was talking about what causes serious problems in a civilized society. He said, “over half of the social problems that lead to crime in a civilized society boils down to one thing.  John loves Mary. Mary does not love John.”

I have never personally known any man who committed murder or suicide over a lost love, but I have read about some who lived pretty close to me. Love is a very strong emotion and can cause both good and bad things to happen. I think old Marty Robins pretty much nailed it in his song Don’t Worry Bout Me back about 1960 with these two lines:

Love can’t be explained, can’t be controlled
      One day it’s warm, next day it’s cold

Mack Samples is a well-known writer and musician who lives in Clay County. Visit online at http://www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

Topography is the hundred dollar word for “lay of the land.” If you criss-cross America west to east or north to south, you will conclude that the lay of the land in the Appalachians is different from anywhere else in the country, or anywhere else in the world most likely. It’s probably because of the unique lay of the land that our part of the planet uses very local dialect words to describe places and land formations.

The first word that comes to mind is “holler.” You and everyone you know are very familiar with the term and know exactly what someone means when they tell you they are going up the holler or that they live in the head of the holler. But once you get out of the central Appalachians, holler becomes a foreign word. In fact, it is mostly used in West Virginia and Kentucky.  Down in northwestern North Carolina and western Virginia the lay of the land is similar but you don’t hear the word holler as commonly as you do in the central area of the Appalachians.

The uniqueness of the hollers has also created some other terms to describe the lay of the land. Most hollers have tributaries that feed into them, some large and some very small. The early settlers put names on those little tributaries.  Some of them were called branches. The term branch often described a tributary that branched off the main holler. Oftentimes a branch was almost as large as the creek (or crick) that ran down the main holler. The branch was often named for a person who lived on it. I grew up hearing terms like Hart’s Branch. There is a well known area in the Charleston vicinity called Dry Branch, probably named so because it dried up at times during the year.

Then there were those little feeders that drained into the branch. The old timers had to call them something so they often used the term run or lick to describe those little streams. Typically, a run was a little larger than a lick. My maternal grandparents lived on Broad Run and I know of four or five other Broad Runs around the state.

And what about those licks? These little streams were often named for some unique characteristic. For example, you often see places called Red Lick, probably so named because there was iron ore in the water giving it a red tint. How many Salt Licks do you know about? I think every county has four or five of them. Some of those little feeder streams get a double dose of the terms and you get names such as Lick Branch.

It’s not all about streams. Let’s not forget the term low gap. Sometimes hilltops are not separated by deep hollers. There is just a dip in the terrain that does not produce a flowing stream and it makes for easy passage when you are crossing the hills. They might call them a pass out west, but around here they are called low gaps.  There is one just above my house.

Then, there is my very favorite of all. A hogback. Hogbacks are little rises that often form on the landscape, typically down low in the hollers, sometimes near the fork in a holler. They look like a small Indian mound but are more elongated. I don’t know how many times I have heard a deer hunter describing his kill and saying, “the deer went in behind a hogback and I didn’t see the antlers till he came back into view.”

If no one lived on these little streams, tributaries, and land formations, why name them? Well, it’s because you have to have reference points. Those terms are especially handy for hunters. I used to hear sentences such as, “I’ll hunt that Spread Holler country and you go over into Hart’s Branch.  I’ll meet you in the low gap at the head of Spread about noon.”  I knew exactly where I was supposed to be at noon, but to someone from Kansas, that would have been a foreign language.

Mack Samples is a well-known writer and musician who lives in Clay County.  Visit online at www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

This time of year you often hear the comment, “boy, I hate to see the winter come.” Most of us are guilty of that thought when December rolls around on the calendar.  We begin to reminisce about those shady summer days and evenings on the porch watching the sun go down. We regret the passing of those near perfect Indian summer days that we usually get in late October and early November.  There is no doubt that the summer and fall brings some high times to our lives.  But, I wonder, would we want the same weather year around?  Wouldn’t we miss winter a bit if it actually went away?

I spent three years on the planet without any winter.  Two years on the extreme southern tip of Japan and the following year in San Diego, California.  While it wasn’t warm year around in both of those locales, it did not get very cold either.  We saw some flurries every now and then in southern Japan but no accumulation of snow.  I never saw a flake during my southern California sojourn. A light jacket was all that was ever needed to keep the cold at bay.

Despite all of the inconveniences and hardships the winter months bring on, they still give us something to look forward to. Those winter winds motivate us to do some things we would not do otherwise.  If the blue northern didn’t blow we would not be inclined to build a roaring fire in the woodstove or fireplace and enjoy some fresh popped popcorn. For sure, we would not bundle up in our warmest hunting clothes and crash through some fresh snow trying to jump an elusive grouse (which we couldn’t hit anyway).  Without winter there would be no reason to climb aboard our tractor on a zero morning and plow out the driveway, or break out the snow shovels and clear the walkways around the house.  We might actually get lazy.

And what about the children?  What would they do without the snow?  How would they ever get a day off from school? What kind of life would they have if they had no memories of riding a sled down the hill and crashing into a snow bank at the bottom? Think how lazy mothers might get if they did not have to help kids struggle into their snowsuits and break their backs trying to pull boots on, only to have them return an hour later to mess up the kitchen floors.  Yes, we have to have winter!

The thing I missed during my winterless years was that there was no noticeable change in the seasons. The bluster of spring and the splendor of the autumn that I was used to just didn’t happen. Nothing much happened when the winter and summer solstice rolled around.

The seasons motivate us to do things that we would not do if the weather never changed.  They put some variety in our lives. I don’t know of anyone who would want to have Christmas on a sultry, humid, miserably July-like day.

        Mack Samples is a well-known writer and musician who lives in Clay County.  Visit online at http://www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

If you live in the country and raise most of what you eat, you don’t really need a calendar to know what the season is. You can always identify the season by the aromas that waft out of the kitchen.

At my house, spring is about the only time of year when the season is not easily identified from household odors. In some West Virginia homes, the smell of ramps cooking  is a sharp reminder of spring. But that does not happen in my hollow. Sometimes, however, you get a whiff of morel mushrooms.

As summer begins to come on and all of the canning equipment comes off the shelves, the air is soon filled with the smell of half-runner beans being processed in the pressure canner. When that aroma hits your nose, you know that there are seven quarts bubbling along and that you are officially into the summer months. And, what else smells like that summer squash simmering in butter on the stove?

On the heels of the beans, or sometimes simultaneously, the kitchen begins to smell like blackberries. As the berries are processed for freezing or immediately converted into jelly, the kitchen area takes on a very pleasing odor, and you know you are into the prime of the summer months. You also know that a cobbler is probably in the offering.

As the summer progresses we get the smell of tomatoes being transformed into juice.  After the tomato juice is processed, the entire house sometimes begins to smell like an Italian restaurant as the juice is being converted into spaghetti sauce. Cooking spaghetti sauce is not really a pleasant aroma and I sometimes find something to do outside of the house, or if it gets bad enough, I sometimes vacate the entire hollow. But the sauce does taste good on the spaghetti when the weather cools down.

Late summer usually brings on the smell of corn. It does not produce much of an odor when it is being blanched. But, when it starts being cut off the cobs and put into plastic bags for freezing, the kitchen aromas tell you that you are getting into late summer. We have tried nearly all varieties of corn, but Incredible has the best flavor by far, especially after it has been frozen.

As the autumn sets in, the kitchen odors take on an entirely new dimension. Cooler weather tends to set off a baking frenzy in country women. The aromas associated with canning and cooking fresh vegetables are replaced by the smells produced by pies, cakes, and cookies baking in the oven. That is especially true when late October and early November rolls around when the smell of pumpkin pies and chocolate spice cake begins to permeate the household. There is then little doubt that it is autumn.

Late autumn tends to bring on the odors of meat being processed. We don’t slaughter hogs at our house anymore but we do buy locally produced pork in bulk. The smell of pork being processed in the pressure canner is a pleasant one indeed. The sausage is also canned at my house because it tastes much better than sausage that has been frozen.

As winter approaches the telltale odor of homemade Christmas candy making reminds us that winter is about to arrive. During the mid-winter months all of those kitchen aromas get recycled as jars are opened and blackberries are pulled from the freezer. The smell of eggs being fried in sausage grease from a just opened jar is an abrupt reminder that winter is indeed in progress.

Who needs a calendar to determine what the season is?
 Mack Samples is a well-known writer and musician who lives in Clay County.  Visit online at http://www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

I generally cut firewood in February, but the brutal winter weather this year prevented me from getting my truck close enough to any available wood during that prime firewood harvesting time. So when the end of that short month rolled around, my woodshed was about three-fourths empty.  When the weather finally started to straighten up in mid-March, I began searching for trees that were already down.  I don’t like to cut good trees.  There did not seem to be much available.

Then, one of the spring storms uprooted a huge chestnut oak about five hundred yards from my house. Better yet, it was fairly close to my access road. So on one early April morning I loaded up two chain saws, my splitting maul, a sixteen pound sledge hammer, log chains, a couple of wedges and a spud bar.  I took a jug of coffee for good measure.

As I walked alongside the tree I could see I was in for a challenge.  It was lying mostly flat on the ground. I realized right off that the big oak was too heavy for me to get anything under it. I surmised that if I tried to saw the trunk in two at any point, it was probably going to pinch my saw and it would get stuck. I was going to have to start somewhere, so I attempted to make the first cut about ten feet from the root ball.  Just as I suspected, the weight from both ends of the tree pinched inward and my saw was securely stuck.  That’s why I brought along two chain saws.  I made another cut near the first one.  By so doing I not only freed the saw but also gave myself enough wiggle room to complete the cut.

The next three-and-one-half hours required both aerobic and strength building exercises. There was now a large 30 foot log lying flat on the ground that needed sawed into 18 inch sections. I sawed each section down as far as I could without running my chain into the ground.  That’s where the spud bar and strength building exercise came in.  I had to roll the log over in order to sever off each section.

I rolled severed pieces down into the road near my truck and began the splitting process.  As I looked over the sections, I knew I was not going to be able to make the first split with my splitting maul. That’s where the splitting wedge and sledge hammer (and aerobic exercise) came in. Using all of the strength in my 145 lb. body, I swung the 16 lb. sledge hammer high above my head, drove the spitting wedge, and popped each of the sections into two pieces. The other splits were easy.  One good swing with a splitting maul will pop off sections of chestnut oak, no problem. I was getting six or eight pieces from each section. My heart was pounding triple time.

Once I got it split, I went and got my wife, Thelma, to help me load the pieces into the old S-10 and haul them to my shed. We stacked them neatly in the dry. It took us three trips.  That job required both strength building and aerobic activity.

I then went back to the tree site and hooked my log chains to the remainder of the big oak and pulled it closer to the road. I saved it for another day. It was a good morning’s work. It was then time to drive back down to the woodshed, pour me a cup of coffee, and  admire my work.  Then, I thought to myself, what could be more fun than that!
Why would I want to go to a health spa, a zumba class, or for a walk on asphalt when I could enjoy a delightful morning in the woods fighting a big chestnut oak and taking care of next year’s heating bill at the same time?

Mack Samples is a well-known writer and musician who lives in Clay County.  Visit online at http://www.macksamples.com or email him at macksamples@gmail.com.

Republished from July 2008

We hear and read all of the time that people are moving back to the land, or are going to live off the land. Really?

I witnessed the struggles on many of the folks who poured into the Appalachians during the late 1960′s and early 70′s and tried it. They got it partly right, but they missed one critical ingredient for truly living off the land. That ingredient was livestock. Most of the new “back to the landers” thought it was all about raising a vegetable garden.

Many of them did that with much success, albeit the majority of them lacked the food preservation skills once they harvested their crops. But none of them that I observed bought a milk cow, chickens, pigs, or a workhorse. The reality of living off the land, if you don’t have an outside source of income, is that you simply cannot do it without those four essentials.

The cow not only provides milk for the kids, but also buttermilk, butter, and cottage cheese. The most important thing about the cow is that she can produce a calf to sell in the spring. That sale provides something that is really quite necessary if you are living off the land for real, and that is cash money for flour, coffee, and salt. You won’t really need any sugar if you have a couple of stands of honey bees.

Chickens not only provide an abundant supply of eggs to eat, but also a commodity to barter for goods at local stores. Bartering was a common custom among the old hill country folks who worked only at home. In addition, chickens were generally the centerpiece for Sunday dinner among the folks who lived off the land for real.

What about hogs? Hog meat was the staple among the early Appalachians who lived entirely off the land. The hogs not only provided meat, but they were also the source of lard, a basic cooking ingredient. The old 18th and 19th century homesteaders always killed a couple of hogs in the fall. They canned it, smoked it, and salted some of it down. They then had a reliable source of protein.

It is important to remember that the older generations who lived off the land had no motorized vehicles. The work horse was the center of farm activity. If you are truly going to live off the land today without the benefit of an outside income, you still have to have one. The price of gasoline makes the workhorse attractive, even for those of us who are just partly living off the land.

Finally, the most important ingredient that most of the neo-back-to-the-landers forgot was the necessity for endless hard work. Living off the land, really, requires daylight-till-dark brutal work, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. There are no holidays. There are no vacations. There is never “dinner out.”

For more from author Mack Samples, visit www.macksamples.com.

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