What do y’uns say?

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”  Every time I hear Eliza Dolittle being put through the paces and carefully, deliberately, even painfully pronouncing every letter of every syllable I want to shout (or holler) at the stage or screen, “Leave her alone.”  After all, she is beautiful and charming even when she drops a few letters off every other word. 

Setting aside any social commentary George Bernard Shaw intended, I can’t help comparing this exercise in speech refinement to some of the dear friends I’ve known from around the world.  It’s sometimes very amusing to hear or read English from my Hebrew-speaking friend and equally as amusing when I watch her face as she listens to my family talking together.  I’ve had Mexican–national missionaries in my home who were desperately trying to learn English and the diligence with which they approached our grammar was inspiring. 

One of my college professors once postulated that regional differences were a thing of the past.  He gave me the opportunity to refute him in a final paper and you can bet I had an opinion to express!  As I listen to cousins raised in West Tennessee, dear friends from Mississippi or co-workers from the south side of Atlanta I clearly hear that at least in our speech patterns, we are still beautifully unique. 

As an author, I find writing in the vernacular both difficult and comfortable.  I suppose the difficulty arises from years of English classes – and a high school English teacher who insisted we write in the Queen’s English despite her own origins on the Plateau.  But there is something comfortable about writing the way I’m most at ease speaking.  I’ve spent many years in business speaking with customers across the country and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked, “Where’d you get that accent?”  When that question comes from a native of Michigan or New England, I have to bite my tongue not to retort, “Who’s got the accent here?”  But when it’s your livelihood, you do tend to work hard to be understood.  Still, at home it’s a pretty fast transition back to the mountain slang.

As a reader, I find myself in a similar situation of difficulty and interest.  Sometimes it’s hard to wade through an unfamiliar vernacular.  Even in my beloved Gone with the Wind, it is sometimes a struggle to get through the speech of the 19th century African Americans as presented by Georgia-born Margaret Mitchell.  (And we don’t even want to get started on the accents the movie offered as southern.  Remember that Vivian Leigh was overcoming a British accent to produce that southern drawl.)  I have a Scottish-born cousin-in-law who is one of the most intelligent men I know, and his speech usually reflects that.  But he is rightfully proud of his heritage and you hear that in his accent.  He’s even worked to learn the once forbidden Gaelic language. 

As I research our history, I find myself feeling protective of my people.  Even in things written decades ago, I bristle at a portrayal of mountain people (and especially those from the Cumberland Plateau) as backward, ignorant or even foolish.  I long to remind these authors and their readers that these were strong people who forged a life in times and places where many of us would never survive.  They are generally godly people who lived and taught values America would do well to re-visit today.  And above all, they survived!  We are thriving on the Cumberland Plateau today and our history, traditions and even our language are largely intact.

All of this brings us to a few critical questions.  Do you enjoy reading dialog written in the vernacular or does it make you work too hard to read it?  Are you proud of how we sound or do we feel that our southern or Appalachian accents separate us?  I’d love to hear from some readers for whom ‘Appalachian’ is not your mother-tongue, what do you think?

Peddles, Heddles, Shuttles and Warp Thread?

I guess we are going backward a little with this week’s story, but let me explain why.  The stories I share on Tennessee Mountain Stories are largely the result of research I’m doing for other writing projects. Recently I’ve needed to research fabrics that would have been used on the plateau in the late 1800’s. 

We know that feedsacks became more widely used around 1870, but even when the sacks were commonly available, the people of the plateau still had limited resources to buy store-bought feed or flour. 

So that led me to wonder how children were clothed and beds were covered.  Then I remembered that by the end of the Civil War, many of the Confederate soldiers were dressed in butternut-colored homespun.  In cotton-rich Georgia and South Carolina, it would seem very logical to use their most plentiful resource.  But was that possible on the Cumberland Plateau?  I’ve never seen a cotton field on the mountain and we certainly weren’t home to any plantations.

I started asking questions, and I thank God for our rich, oral history because I actually got some answers!  Do you recall my mention in the quilting article that my great-grandmother grew enough cotton for her quilt batting?  I guess you were all thinking, “Well, didn’t everybody?”  Turns out, yes, they did!  I even heard one story of a local lady who had a little tabletop cotton gin.  That was pretty exciting because I’ve cleaned about 1 ounce of cotton in my life and it was enough to tell me I did not want to do it for a living.  Flax was introduced to America by the earliest settlers.  It is now naturalized throughout most of the country.  Of course, you’d want to grow a domestic crop in order to have sufficient quantities to spin and weave, but it will certainly grow in our climate and soil.  And of course there have always been a few sheep around.  So it was easy to find the raw materials from which an industrious mother could clothe her children and decorate her home.

Peggy Casteel with her loom.

Now I needed to get a feel for weaving and my dear friend Peggy Casteel happens to have a loom – well 4 actually.  (Don’t things like that just multiply?)  She allowed me to watch while she worked on some fabric and she shared what she’s learned about the craft.  It was fascinating. 

As I sat in Peggy’s quiet sunroom watching her rocking back and forth with the motion of pulling the beater to snug the threads tight, I was full of questions but had to try to be quiet to allow her to concentrate on her pattern.  However, we discussed that when she was in the groove of weaving a simple pattern, she could weave and visit with no trouble at all.  It was easy to imagine the weavers of old who would spend endless hours at their looms.  If you wanted to visit with them, you would have to do so amid the rhythmic drum of that beater, the click of the pedals as they lifted the heddles with just a brief pause to throw the shuttle across the warp thread. 

It seems a solitary occupation, sitting before this big, wooden apparatus.  But the accounts of all the weavers that I’ve read relay tranquility and a strong sense of accomplishment as they watch their pattern develop and the cloth slowly rolling up on the cloth beam. 

Like the slow lines of a quilt, rows of knitting or the stitches of tatted lace.  Weaving seems to be yet another creation of art and love; something the creator pours herself into and produces something both lovely and practical.

A Quiltin'

Golda Stepp laid out the layers of her quilt and carefully smoothed the fabric.  As she tacked one end to the frame she wondered if she was starting this too early in the season.  You put a quilt up to work on when the weather is cool.  Summer months are filled with hoeing and canning.  Anyway, it’s hot in the summer and who wants to sit under the layers of a quilt inside the house when it’s hot?  Nonetheless Golda had a lovely quilt top that she was eager to finish and she had found a good quantity of unbleached domestic that made a fine backing so she would start this quilt today.

With the layers attached to one frame and the quilt rolled up as tightly as possible, she had just finished tacking the loose end to the remaining frame when she was called away by some inconsequential necessity of life - laundry or children or something like that.

She was just finishing the housework when she heard a light knocking and a familiar voice calling, “Goldie, you home?”  Her husband’s aunt, Bessie Baldwin had stopped in for a quick visit. 

Coming through the front door, the quilt frame caught Aunt Bessie’ eye hanging in the front bedroom; “Oh, you’ve put up a quilt.  Do you want me to run a line for ya?”

Quilts have many purposes and warmth while sleeping may be the least of these.  The fellowship around a work-in-progress is priceless.  So the two ladies took seats on opposite sides of the quilting frame and began their work.  As needles flashed and straight lines of neat stitches inched their way behind them, Golda and Bessie caught up on the news of the family and the neighborhood.  Hours can be lost in such work and the morning was gone before they realized it.

Whether it was the lowing of a cow, or the laughter of the children, something prompted Bessie to take her first look at the clock.  “Well it’s half-past eleven.  I’ve got to go fix Rufus some dinner.  But I’ll be back as soon as he’s headed out to the field.  We’ll get some more work done on this quilt before supper.”

Golda smiled, having enjoyed the visit and happy to see the progress on her pretty quilt.  The Stepps would need their noon meal as well and so the quilt had to wait a couple of hours. 

It was not later than one o’clock when the happy chatter of not just one faithful quilter but four could be heard coming down the lane.  Bessie had met her younger sister, Gretchel Baldwin and enlisted her help for the afternoon.  Gretchel brought along her own daughter and a visiting girlfriend. 

Now there were five needles flashing, and three were very experienced quilters.  A full quilting frame might see a whole quilt finished in a day.  This quilt went from the very beginning stages to more than half finished before the visitors had to go home for the evening.  And everyone was pleased with both the visit and the work accomplished.

It’s a bit dramatized but the story is true and it is but a single example of how quilting can bring people together.  Whole communities of ladies might gather together to create a single quilt or more depending upon the need.  Young couples who were just starting their homes, victims of fires or simply growing families needed to replenish their stock of quilts.  Remember that we are discussing a generation that didn’t run to the department store when something was needed.  There was neither resources nor opportunity to do so.

Last week I mentioned the quilt shows and the antique quilts they will often display.  I’ve heard their commentators mention the quality of stitching, calling it ‘utilitarian’.  I have to bite my tongue to keep from speaking out to explain that quilts are a utilitarian item, but those quilts were surely made with the same love and pride as we sew today – and maybe more for they were made not for sale or display, but to serve neighbors and loved ones.  They were used for years then handed down to someone else that needed them.

If these old scraps could only talk…!

Quilts

My Aunt Roberta has a sign in her sewing room that reads, “The one that dies with the most fabric WINS.”  Any crafter, quilter or seamstress can appreciate that sentiment.  Last week’s discussion about feed sack fabric and a one reader’s comment about ‘up-cycling’ got me to thinking about quilting.

I love quilts and have really enjoyed quilt shows that I’ve been able to attend.  We have truly talented people creating absolute works of art with fabric.  From monochromatic to wildly colorful, from traditional patterns to abstract designs, quilts are an incredible medium for your creative side.  But my favorite part at any show is the display of antique quilts.  Today’s quilter has an internet chocked full of pattern resources and fabrics in every color and print you can imagine.  We have sewing machines that will make stitches I could never even imagine and quilting machines that will knit together the layers of a quilt at lightning speeds.  Yesterday’s quilter had only her imagination, a pattern cut from stiff brown paper and innumerable hand-made stitches.

Our grandmother’s quilts tell a story on several levels – just as a quilt has several layers.

The top layer of a quilt is appropriately called the quilt top.  This is the pretty part that you usually see – it will be pieced in a design with carefully chosen fabrics and colors.  Traditional quilt tops were made of pieces of cloth redeemed from cast offs.  Shirts too torn to mend, dresses too small and worn, the corner pieces of cloth after a garment was cut out – all of these went into the quilt bag.  When a top was started, the colors would be laid and sorted to satisfy the quilter.  How precious to look at a beautiful patchwork and remember your little brother’s Sunday shirt or Mama’s kitchen dress.

The second layer of a quilt is batting.  This is the stuff that makes a quilt fluffy and soft.  Today’s quilters have an array of products available from pure cotton to polyester with a lot in between.  I suppose wool may have been used in some areas, but we traditionally used a cotton batting. While the Plateau’s climate isn’t conducive to large scale cotton farming, enough cotton to bat a quilt could easily been grown.  My great-grandmother, Nancy Livesay, would raise her own cotton, hand clean it (there wasn’t a cotton gin anywhere in the area) and card it to make her own batting.  She passed away more than a decade before I was born so regrettably I never got to see this process.  And I can scarcely imagine hand-quilting through that dense batting.  But her efforts (and I’m sure hers were not alone among plateau women of her generation) certainly illustrate the resourcefulness of the crafts-women. 

Finally, a quilt requires a backing.  Today we like to have a single piece of fabric for our quilt backings and that’s easy to do with modern, commercial looms.  But once again the resourcefulness of both the generation and the area prevailed and a substitute was found.  Do you remember the picture associated with last week’s article of a 125 pound fertilize sack?  A popular use for such a homely fabric was the back of a quilt.  It wouldn’t really be seen anyway since you would always be looking at the colorful top of the quilt and it was a very serviceable fabric.  My research led me to a lot of recipes for how to bleach out the writing on those sacks, but for a quilt backing only a good washing was required. 

This leads us to the actual quilting process… but alas, look how long you’ve already been reading!  That will have to wait till next week.  In the meantime, I’m still hoping some of you will share pictures of your heirloom quilts.  Just let me know, via a Facebook or Twitter message, if you have one and we’ll get it posted for all the readers to enjoy.

Feed Sack Dresses

Last week’s Decoration Day story and the comments it inspired mentioned all the girls getting a new dress.  For most ladies on the Cumberland Plateau for many, many years, the best source of fabric for new dresses or any new sewing project for that matter came from feed sacks and flour sacks.  I wanted to write an article about this ingenious recycling trend so I did a little research and learned some amazing facts both historical and current.

Historically speaking, cloth sacks were first used in the early 1800’s when the wooden boxes and barrels that had previously been used to move food stuffs became impractical.   They were bulky and difficult to carry and they did a poor job of keeping out pests.  However, making sacks that were strong enough to carry these products wasn’t practical until the lock stitch was invented in the mid 1800’s. 

Initially, sacks were made of heavy canvas with labels printed right onto the fabric.  Even these bags were re-used by industrious families.  We still have examples of quilts made of these plain white bags.  Fertilize continued to be packaged in the plain white bags.  But the best was yet to come. 

Sack manufacturers eventually realized that they could market to the women of the family by weaving beautiful prints, stripes, plaids and even solids.  Soon feed sacks and flour sacks had a market all their own.  How many of you have heard some man in your family tell of having to re-stack feed in order to find the particular print his mother or sister was looking for?  My Daddy remembers having to do this for his sister’s Decoration Day dress at least once. 

A coarse cotton weave replaced the initial canvas sacks and it was used for everything from bedding to dresses, curtains to dish towels.  A lady’s dress would require 3 matching or coordinating sacks while a single feed sack could make a child’s dress.  There was no shame in wearing these clothes for the fabric was used by everyone.  And all the homes of the day reflected the use of these sacks throughout.  Your neighbors assumed you were sleeping on feed sacks, scratchy though they might be.   In fact, flour sacks were sized and woven especially for pillow cases.  They were perfectly sized and some were even woven with an attractive border on the end.

The people of the Plateau have long been accustomed to making do with what they have.  A land that did not easily accommodate growing cotton and no great grazing ground for sheep probably meant even the earliest Plateau settlers struggled for textiles.  But we are survivors and we will find a way.  Bringing home a sack made of some usable material was a godsend.  Even had no one else in the nation thought these were worthwhile, I’m sure we would have treasured them. 

If you read this, or hear your grandmother’s stories with disdain, take a tour around the internet.  Vintage fabrics (especially feed sack fabrics) are quite the collector’s items now.  And if you’ve got a feed sack quilt hidden somewhere in your closet you may have more of a treasure than you realize.  Hey, if you have such a quilt, please snap a photo and send it along to me.  You can post it through Facebook – the link is on the right-hand side of the blog.