Dinner on the Ground

For the past 26 weeks I’ve been posting an on-going fictional story.  Click here if you’d like to go to the beginning of The Lewis Story.

This week we return to weekly, topical stories as we look into the legends and lessons of The Cumberland Plateau.

Dinner on the Ground

Three siblings chat before the meal.  In the background you see the tables laden with food.

It’s homecoming season – no, not football games, parades and beauty pageants – I’m talking about church homecoming.  This event is like a family reunion for your church family and like all reunions, it’s a joyous if somewhat bittersweet event.  You’ll get to see lots of folks you haven’t seen in a long time - at least since last year’s homecoming; the children have changed remarkably and there’s often a face or two missing for they’ve gone home to the ultimate homecoming celebration in heaven. 

Today, our churches have air-conditioned fellowship halls with kitchens to keep food hot or cold, tables and chairs to eat at and usually no flies or ants to share the meal.  But in years past, churches were thankful to have a decent building to worship in each week and no one ever thought of building a house just for fellowship.  Therefore, when a meal was planned (and let’s face it, this is The South and we’ll plan a meal for any occasion we can), so every family brought a dish (or two or three) of their favorite foods.

The morning’s service was honored by special music and a guest preacher.  Often, the sermon was delivered by someone who had pastored the church in years past before The Lord moved him on to other work.  As the preacher wound down and the end was in sight, many of the women would quietly step outside to begin spreading the food on tables fashioned from boards and saw horses. 

With a final song and a prayer of dismissal and blessings on the food, the service was dismissed to the yard and everyone immediately lined up at the tables.

As plates were filled with fried chicken, Cole slaw, thick slices of homegrown tomatoes and cornbread, you made your way to a blanket that grandma had spread on the ground or a stump shaded by a big oak tree.  Why is it that everything tastes so much better on a picnic?  Then there was a whole separate table for desserts!  From Apple Stack Cake to Banana pudding, fried pies to watermelon every taste was accommodated. 

As the congregation was able, and as they realized meals were going to be a priority, permanent tables were built and eventually covered to protect the food from the occasional rain shower as well as to provide some shade for those setting everything up.  In yesteryear, people would come from far and near walking, riding or driving with several generations in each vehicle.  The difficulty of the trip did not hinder and may in fact have made for a more joyous visit once they arrived.  No one was concerned that there were no cushioned seats or that the chicken and dumplings might not be strictly hot.  The purpose of the day was fellowship.  It wasn’t a difficult goal to attain; you started fellowshipping before you ever arrived because you were traveling – no matter how far – with your family.  An aging aunt who could not drive or cousins who couldn’t afford the trip were packed in with your own kids making the journey itself exciting as you anticipated who you might get to visit with this year. 

Dinner on the ground has never been confined to church congregations.  My own Todd family enjoys a family reunion each year that originated as an annual birthday celebration for my great-great-grandfather.  He had eleven children and thirty-two grandchildren.  It’s not hard to see that this party was far too large for anyone’s home.  Originally held at the home of his youngest daughter, Cecil Todd Hall, the lawn was covered with family, and friends.  Just like at the church house, makeshift tables were setup and the feast spread across them. 

That grandfather passed away in 1957 but we’ve maintained the tradition with the crowds reaching well over one hundred at its peak.  Much as the churches built fellowship halls, the reunion moved to a state park and enjoys a covered picnic shelter and all the amenities of the park.  But the spirit of a dinner on the ground lives on.

Do you have a memory ‘dinner on the ground’?  We’d all love to hear about them.  Please click “Comments” below and share.1

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.