Smoky Mountain Heritage — Doubt, Superstition and my Dad.
My dad was a smart man. But having grown up in Western North Carolina, and in the heart of the Smoky Mountains, there were two things hewas never really able to completely set aside, no matter how smart he was.
The first of those was doubt. I don’t know what it is about people from that part of Appalachia, but every one of them gets a good dose of doubt. I think it comes with the birth certificate — well truly, with the birth. You don’t even need a certificate for this. And it can be slight, or debilitating. There is no rule, except that it exists.
My dad got a pretty strong dose of it. Not so much as me, but that’s another story altogether. He sort of took everything he either saw or heard with a grain of salt — at least until he could either prove its veracity for himself, test it out, or do his own research on it. Not a bad way to be, I guess, except that he spent a lot of time looking into things that most people simply took for granted, and a lot more time examining things that most of us never looked at twice. Being smart probably mad the doubt thing worse. I know sometimes it was almost like he just couldn’t let go of something until he’d thoroughly determined the truth of it, or, sometimes, the fact that the truth of it was not truth at all but a falsehood waiting to be revealed as such.
The other side of that Smoky Mountain heritage that my dad got in full measure defied everything doubt may have tried to teach its recipients. It was, and is, superstition. As much as people from the Smoky Mountains embrace their doubt, they also embrace the most amazing set of superstitions and folk tales that any human being could ever hope to imagine, much less allow to hold credence in their lives. My dad, for instance, was absolutely convinced that walking under a ladder really was bad luck, as was opening an umbrella inside the house, or having a black cat run out in front of your car (and we HAD several black cats as pets, mind you — I guess it only counted if it was a strange black cat). My dad, in a tragic accident, lost most of the vision in his left eye, and he literally told my mother and me that it was because he had been reading the daily horoscope in the newspaper. To my knowledge, he never read them again. And the superstitions about sex — oh my god — for an earthy (i.e., randy) group of people, they had some of the most amazing superstitions! My favorite story that my dad told me (in complete seriousness) during one of “those” talks your parents have with you when you are growing up, was that too much masterbation really could a) make you go crazy, and b) cause you to grow hair in your palms. It was all I could do to keep a straight face during all this because a) my parents had waited way too long to actually talk to me about sex, and b) by the time they managed it, I’d already seen, and/or been told more by my cousins and the neighbor boys than my dad might ever have imagined. Talking about sex was hard for my dad, andimpossible for my mom, but again, I digress. This is about doubt and superstition.
The list goes on. Where I grew up, you could…cause a cow to stop producing milk if you milked her from the wrong side…cause bad luck by not getting in and out of the bed on the same side…expect visitors if your nose itched…get pregnant by swallowing a watermelon seed. I’m not kidding. And then there’s the whole groundhog thing…who said the groundhog got to decide how long winter would last…or caterpillars. My grandmother swore you could tell how severe the coming winter would be measuring the alternating bands of black and white on caterpillers.
Doubt and superstition. Two counterbalances that served to create a set of rules, and create control. And if you came from Appalachia, no matter who you were, or how smart you were you couldn’t quite escape them. My dad. I miss the delight in his eyes when he’d finally either managed to prove or disprove something he’d been told, but did not quite believe. And I even miss hearing about (some) of those old superstitions. Not to say I escaped, mind you…to this day, I think the phases of the moon need to be considered when planting a garden…Root vegetables when it’s a new moon…Flowering plants when the moon is waning to full. Funny that.:)