Intimate Glimpses

     Transcribed by Joe Stout
 

Back in other days, when this was a goose country, I have heard it said the way to fatten a goose quick was to nail it through the thin foot webbing to a plank in a small pen so nothing would kill it and keep feed and water to it and it only took a few days to be real tender and fat. I never saw a goose done this way, nor did I ever have any desire for to eat a goose.

Back in those good old days when cotton gins were in the country, you could get cotton seed by going after it to the gin and hauling them away. If a farmer needed some seed you might get ten or fifteen cents a bushel for them. Just think of the products made from cotton seed now. 

There is a legend that Prospect Church with girls so bent on talking to boy friends that a side door was cut out and fixed for older people to escape from church. The fact remains that this church is the only side doored country church I can recall at the moment. It was at this old church when I was a young man a pretty young widow turned her eyes and tongue on me and I hardly escaped from matrimony with her. 

Had you thought why a thorn tree has its thorns, a rosebush its stickers, a blackberry vine its briars, a prickly pear its stickers and so on? It is for protection. Stock would eat them up it it was not for these sharp needle like stickers. As it is hogs root up blackberry vines to get the roots to eat. 

While I am on the subject of blackberries, I might add blackberry root tea is good medicine for derangement of the human stomach and bowels. Prickly pear can be grown most anywhere with a little water and an acre of them would winter a drove of cattle, if they would be eaten fro the stickers. Could some way be devised to burn the stickers off enough at a time to feed cattle? This plant is not affected by freezing weather, so good winter time feed could be had for cows if the stickers were removed.

Pot flowers can be rooted from a limb broken off and a little cotton wrapped around the broken end and then put in a glass of fresh water. Change the water once a week. Dogwood and redbud trees are great flowering trees in early spring, but not a very valuable tree. Thread spools is said to have been made out of dogwood. When dogwood and redbud trees get old and large they get hollow. 

When spring puts its appearance poke begins to put up. The tender shoots are good to eat when cooked in a lot of grease and water. It seems you get something you need from this dish after a long hard winter.

The tender bark of a hickory tree boiled in a vessel of water and drained off and sweetened makes a good drink when colds have you in their grip and your throat is sore and your voice is husky. After a long hard winter it is said sassafras root bark tea sweetened will do wonders in thinning your blood.

Cat-nip is a plant that cats like to eat so it is called cat-nip, but is good to break out hives on newborn infants when made into a sweetened tea. 

Since I can remember dumplings with boiled meat, chicken, squirrels or rabbit, are considered a great dish if black pepper is used freely. The slick right on them and are so much tough dough in ones stomach. Back in younger days, a certain old widower ate so many dumplings they just would not leave his stomach, and he like to have died.

Corn meal dumplings is easier to digest than flour dumplings. 

This is a fried chicken country and when some were given to a sick person and when it had been long enough gone not to salivate the convalescent patient was put to eatheing fried chicken with the good thickened gravy.

My aunt Bob REID could fix the best fried chicken and gravy I have ever eaten. She could also have the best canned dishes.

In 1899 in early part of the year was so cold that peaches were killed and there was only one peach tree that I noticed anywhere that had any peaches. This tree was located in the old gullied land a short distance from George Grooms place. 

In 1899 Dr. Stevens was still living near Prospect and making a pretty good crop along with what practice he got.. He has since been at different places.

During the cold spell of 1899, little Johnnie Stout died and Ed Stout was out so much in the rough cold weather his ears frost bit like an old rooster's comb.

There was many wild plums when I was a boy that many people got sick eating them. These big orchards have disappeared. 

The chestnut tree will soon be a thing of the past. They are now, compared with fifty years ago. 

It is not possible to make short sketches of everyone's death and burial but George Maynard was riding on a truck. It was going at a lively rate and his hat blew off. H went for his hat and his head hit the ground and he never knew anything more. This is the only time a man's hat has caused his death that I know of.

J. W. Stout was a great hand to go barefooted and he had the reputation of even going through all kind of briars and thorns in his mill and farm work. He was always able to afford shoes, but just liked the barefoot in hot weather. Then one day he stuck a nail in his foot and this cost him more money than all the shoes of a lifetime, and much suffering. He wore shoes until death after that. 

The best way I find for canning apples is to quarter the apples after peeling them and take the part of the core left in each quarter out and cook them until just tender and place them in cans with plenty of water used in cooking them. Open a can when you want to eat them, mash them with a fork (if toothless) and mix as much sugar as the Democratic O.P.A. will allow and prepare your tongue for the apples are so good it is liable to go to the stomach with the apples.

If you want an appetizer for the time when good ripe old fashioned yellow peaches do not exist, put peeled peaches in a can and boil a glass of sugar in water for each can and after this fill the remaining space around peaches in can with hot water and seal up. You drink the juice and eat the peaches when the can is opened. Such will almost raise the dead.

If you have used iodine on a fresh cut there is not much danger of matter forming if it is then plastered with tape. But should you not have these simple remedies at the time of accident, then use zinc oxide salve. It cures mattered sores on me seven times out of ten.

If a sand hole comes in a wash kettle or dinner kettle, use a part or all of a mowing machine section rivet in the hole. Have a long piece of iron on inside of vessel and the vessel turned bottom side up and gently tap with hammer until it is bradded so it will not leak.

If you fail to mow a piece of ground one after fixing it so fire will not spread by raking the dead stuff back a safe distance or by plowing burn it not later than February and you have a clean new crop of hay the next year.

Sometimes a good sharp harrow will do better than anything in a herds grass hay field. It seems to both clean the coming young grass and also cultivates it.

If you have a brush pile to burn wait until it is wet from rain and coal-oil a grass sack and have some dry kindling along and you burn the pile of brush without danger. If you have brush piles you want moved run a pole and light out with the pile to a gully with your team or tractor..

Camphor was a great medicine fifty years ago to prevent headaches, stomach sickness and when any one was about to faint. It was made by putting a nickels worth of camphor gum in a pint bottle of alcohol. It was kept on most mantles for instant use. Now no one knows about it.

Farm children wanting to get real sick hungry can chew up young sassafras limbs and make it appear they are real hungry and it is time for dinner. Do not eat the young tender limbs but chew them up and watch how good things taste at the noon meal.

When a boy, I have seen hand rakes made out of seasoned hickory. You had a long handle put through the two by four cross bar by auger hole and hickory pegs through the bar by auger holes.

It was a wonderful thing to rake leaves and small limbs in a new ground where you would not plow under everything. You could make a good crop the first year. A new ground is drouthy at best and you can plow the first year of a new ground when it will not plow anywhere else for being too wet. You saved new ground land to cut water sprouts and plow of wet times.

During February 1945 all roads got soft and I thought I went down with my buggy and hit an old cross way piece of timber. Crosswaying was a great way of fixing mud holes in roads fifty years ago. At any rate I hit wood with my buggy wheels where a bad mud hole was fifty years ago.

It used to be the style to have good white sills and mortised in holes for the upright scantlings. Winds could blow but the building would not wrench sidewise. Now sills are made by nailing plank together. A carpenter was counted first class if he could make a window sash during the Civil War period, I have been told. The glass was shipped in and the sash made here for windows.

Back in 1898 one hot June day on a Saturday afternoon Jim Simpson who had hired to father for the duration of the crop making season and I had a piece of cotton to plow. It would not take but half the afternoon for one plow to go over it. So we decided as it was hot we would just use one plow and take a time about with the plow while the other set in the shade. Jim was good natured and let me say, has long since made his knock at Marse Peter's gate, was the first to plow. I took the plow for my period and went one round. I began to study and said a little prayer to in some manner relieve me of this hot job. I had just completed my little prayer and was turning the mule around at the end to go back when my barefoot went down on a rusty old nail and I was really through for the afternoon and some days to come. Jim came and sympathized with me and took the mule and plow and finished the piece of cotton.

I never told Jim my little prayer, but I do hope he got by to heaven. I got enough punishment here for wanting to shirk my duty that afternoon. From this experience I have learned you should have your thought, desire and prayer on the upright side, for God may give you something you do not want. 

There were two Major Grooms, father and son. Both raised big families and have long since passed on. It is said Major Grooms, Sr. was the longest arm man that has ever lived in these parts and in old days when it was fist and skull knockouts he could take his left hand and hang in the collar of his adversary's shirt and hold him so far away from him that he never received any head wounds as he mellowed the other fellow with his right fist. He enjoyed a long life being ninety years or more.

Major, the youngest was agent for a great medicine in those days called Native Herbs. He made much money selling this product. In 1900 it rained through May and June so much that nearly everybody failed to have much crop to gather, but Mr. Grooms and his large family raised a big crop of cotton that year. He really did take in the money that fall. 

Just after the Civil War, I have heard father say, he kept on losing corn from his crib and one morning there were plain boot prints leaving the crib door and he tracked them to a Negro's home. He go his friend Parker Nevels to go with him that night to the Negro's home. Parker took one door and he the other and ran against the doors so as to open them suddenly. Parkers door was just propped up with a chair and he sprawled over in the floor hurt bad. Father had better luck and landed on his feet. 

The Negro was not at home, but his aged mother and nearly a dozen Negro children were there. The old lady was a real good Negro and she said; "Lord have mercy on me." Father asked about her son and she said he was not at home. He went up a little ladder into the loft of the cabin and found sheep hides by the galore where the Negro had skinned from stolen sheep to feed his big family. Father told the old Negro that her son had to move or take the results of a good beating by the next night.

By that time the little Negro children were running in the woods hitting saplings with their bodies as it was dark. He then pulled Parker from the floor and told him it was time to go. The Negro family moved next day and left a crop already planted but there were no more sheep or corn missing.

This happened near the old brick house near Trezevant on the old Skullbone road as best as I remember father telling it.

There were no law and order in those days and those who wanted to do right had to do these things to keep Negroes from stealing what they worked for..

It is curious how old signs and customs get started. An old person will tell of something bad happening after a looking glass was broke and seven years of bad luck struck the family.

To do the family washing between new and old Christmas days was washing either one member of the family out by death or one in by birth.

To begin anything on Friday you would not finish it if the job was not completed that day.

The ashes could not be taken out during the twelve day period of the Christmas holidays. 

Peas were cooked n New Year's day. Money should be taken in on this day if you were to prosper during the year.

If two old chicken hens were seen with bills together like in conversation in chicken language it foretold some terrible thing would happen.

If an old hen set in to crowing like her rooster husband, you had to kill that hen and eat her or else something bad was going to happen to the family.

I am guilty of playing this old sign up for all it was worth for the purpose of filly my stomach on good chicken, for there is no better chicken than a crowing hen. They do make one feel bad trying to mock their husband, but they are feeling real gay I always thought.

If a rabbit crossed in front of you when you left home for some journey, ill luck would befall you before your RETURN .

If you had to turn back for anything when leaving home you must make a cross mark on the ground with the toe of your shoe and spit in the center of the cross or bad luck would befall you on that trip.

If you dropped the comb while combing your hair, it was a sure sign you would be disappointed before the day was done.

One hot day father returned from Greenfield and he took the family mare Mandy to the pond and she would not drink. He brought her back for her feed and she would not eat. She had lock jaw. He had me to call Dr. Frank Perry, who was a noted veterinarian. I had noticed a remedy for this disease in some book I had and finally found it. It was to slip a twist of tobacco in the side of the mouth where there is no teeth and rub the jaws good. The nicotine in the tobacco acted at once on the jaw glands and muscles of the jaw and when father pulled at the jaw after a few minutes the mare's mouth came on with a loud pop. We had the mare eating before Doctor Frank got to our barn. 

In those days there was an epidemic of distemper among horses and mules every winter and spring. It was contagious among stock and if you hitched at the colic hitching racks at towns you was most sure to have it among your stock.

I remember an old mare in the neighborhood which was said to have glanders which was a terrible disease that people were said to be in danger of catching from stock. We are indebted to the modern veterinarian for much improvement in the health of stock.

There was a disease of scours or bloody urine that was sure death to cows. The best remedy I have ever found for this disease is strong coffee with Epsom salts and soda mixed in a bottle and drench them at the mouth, three or four drenchings is enough to cure if you begin when the disease has just set in.

When a sheep gives up and you see them not move on they die. If you need to change pasture and give them about two table spoonsfull of strong bluestone water every month or so.

Mother was a great hand with turkeys. She gave them one grain of black pepper the first thing she fed them. Pulverized black pepper mixed in corn meal dough is a fine starter for young chickens. Sweet milk fed to goslings will prevent them from dying from eating you cockleburs and also make them grow fast. You can't let goslings stay out in the rain for they just turn their bills up to the rain and try to take in all the water and thereby lose the breath of life.

If your pond contains no turtles you will then have a fine drove of Geese. Up to 1900 every family had geese.

If you set berries or most any plants when the wind is in the north they will most likely die. If Irish Potatoes are planted when the wind is in the north the bugs will eat them up if not doctored with bug medicine. If Irish Potatoes are planted in the light of the moon, there will be a light crop of them made. These are some of the signs that many people believe in.

I plant potatoes when I can get the ground sorter right and I generally have potatoes.

Some more signs are; if a rooster crows in front of the door someone is sure to come. If a man comes on New Years day your chickens will be roosters. If a woman they will all be pullets. If you drop a fork a man will soon come, if a knife is dropped a woman will be in the home shortly. If you get on a dress wrong side out by mistake and make a wish while turning it right side outwards, it will be a reality. If the moon changes in the morning it is most sure to rain some just before or about the time of the change. If the change is in the afternoon it is the sign of no rain. If corn husks are thick and lots of persimmons it will be a hard winter. If you name a baby before it is born it may be it will live seven years old but dies early. If you have just quilted a quilt and have a person at each corner shaking the quilt and another dto drop a cat on the quilt the cat will run out at the one who will marry first. County the wrinkles on your forehead and that ill be the number o!
 f children you ill be the father or mother of. It is awful bad lick to move a cat or broom when you move to a new place. If you want your red pepper to go good get real mad just as you plan it. If you see a red bird it is the sign you will see some one not expected.

I got sheepskin where Mulberry Grove should have been in a write up of the old race track. Sheepskin was located on the corner of Surber farm near Buford Jenkins farm. (Sheepskin Church was one of the first churches of this area in the early days of the county. Mulberry and this history are on the Weakley page mentioned in the Meridian church history as well. Joe Stout) I heard Rev. Bob Crews preach at Sheep Skin when I just can remember. 

If you go to work early of a morning when it has been dry for a long while and see many spider webs on the ground and clinging to weeds and things, it will likely rain before night of that day. 

I never have been able to sing and it is all on account of Monroe Galey who was a great songster and lead the choir at Meridian for many years. It was caused by his actions he went through before the songs began to roll from his mouth. He would shake his head and invariably pull the little bunch of beard just under his lower lip and say "Do ra fa lo to do." I understand these were music notes. Then the beautiful song would roll from his mouth. In my child's mind, I thought a fellow had to go through all this before the song would come and I did not think I could thus perform.

If it rains in an open grave, it was always said some member of the family would soon follow. Now if it is raining a tent is brought along to cover the grave more than a protection to the digger of the grave and sorrowing friends on account of this old belief.

An old grain fan is still at the home of Ed Galey. It has been in the Galey family for many years and dates back to days when wheat was threshed out with club and horse tramping of wheat. Father borrowed this old fan to remove smut and cheat from wheat and I had the pleasure of turning the old crank.

While father lived around Skullbone's capitol in younger days he had gone after some hens some distance away. Some locals had met father in a hollow where there were many logs. He had six hens in a bunch tied by a cord and thrown across the horn of his saddle. A great volley of shots rang out and his horse jumped these big logs.. His friends thought he would drop the hens and they would have a nice hen broil that night, but he delivered the hens to his mother and next day his friends came to see him looking a little sheepish, but congratulated him on his nerve in holding on to the chickens rope amid the terrible jumps his horse done over the big logs such was the life in those early days. If some one did not play a prank on you it was a sure sign they did not like you.

Another time I have heard father say it was a busy time in crop season and he left his plow where he took out for dinner and when he came back it was gone. A certain neighbor had a peculiar shoe track that he had known for some time. He knew who got the plow by the foot print and followed it for ever so far and finally he noticed a few briars mashed down and went way in the briar patch and found his plow. Father in a few days went and got his neighbor's plow and hid it so his neighbor did not find after days of hunting. The neighbor finally came to father and confessed he had hid his plow and did need his plow so bad and would never hide his plow again. The plow was soon found near by. 

It was a great custom to have a great and good friend of a man to go to his home and call him to the door and another friend would be standing by the door in the dark of night and dash a cold bucket of water on the friend just out of bed. Those doing the calling and water throwing had to be fleet of feet to get away quick.

During World War I, Bill Hubble was splitting stove wood and cut two fingers off the hand that was on the stove wood slab. I have come so near doing likewise many times and now I split stove wood on the ground in a rather large size.

During the first World War, I bought the finest sorghum I ever tasted from Buck Boaz. Buck said he never had any experience in making molasses up to that time, but bought a new mill and he got a booklet of instruction with it. He was a good brick mason and carpenter. He mad several trips west hunting a better place to live and make money. He finally ended at Yuma, Arizona.

The best nerve medicine I can get for times when I can't sleep is to get off the bed and read a hair raising true detective story. It learns me many things about catching up with crime. 

One night years ago when I had and made some money a fellow came and by and paid me some money about sundown. I just felt like I had better set up. I blew out the light and was settin very quiet when I heard some one walking around in the chimney corner where I was leaning against. I had a good pair of ears, and I could hear the fellows breath. He never made any attempt to come in and I felt might fine when I heard him leaving. I got to the bank the next morning early and I never put so much confidence in the fellow who paid me that money again, for he was the only one to know it, except my wife. 
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