Our Southern Highlanders Part 19

"'Ride on, stranger,' was the easy answer. 'I'm a-waitin' fer Jim Johnson, and with the help of the Lawd I'm goin' to blow his d.a.m.n head off.'"

But let us never lose sight of the fact that these people, intellectually, are not living in our age. To judge them fairly we must go back and get a medieval point of view, which, by the way, persisted in Europe and America until well into the Georgian period. If history be too dry, read Stevenson's _Kidnapped_, and especially its sequel _David Balfour_, to learn what that viewpoint was. The parallel is so close--eighteenth century Britain and twentieth century Appalachia--that here we walk the same paths with Alan and David, the Edinboro' law-sharks, Katriona and Lady Allardyce. The only difference of moment is that we have no aristocracy.

As for the morals of our highlanders, they are precisely what any well-read person would expect after taking their belatedness into consideration. In speech and conduct, when at ease among themselves, they are frank, old-fas.h.i.+oned Englishmen and Scots, such as Fielding and Smollet and Pepys and Burns have shown us to the life. Their manners are boorish, of course, judged by a feminized modern standard, and their home conversation is as coa.r.s.e as the mixed-company speeches in Shakespeare's comedies or the offhand pleasantries of Good Queen Bess.

But what is refinement? What is morality?

"I don't mind," said the Beloved Vagabond, "I don't mind the frank dungheap outside a German peasant's kitchen window; but what I loathe and abominate is the dungheap hidden beneath Hedwige's draper papa's parlor floor." And we do well to consider that fine remark by Sir Oliver Lodge: "Vice is reversion to a lower type _after perception of a higher_."

I have seen the worst as well as the best of Appalachia. There _are_ "places on Sand Mountain"--scores of them--where unspeakable orgies prevail at times. But I know that between these two extremes the great ma.s.s of the mountain people are very like persons of similar station elsewhere, just human, with human frailties, only a little more honest, I think, in owning them. And even in the tenebra of far-back coves, where conditions exist as gross as anything to be found in the wynds and closes of our great cities, there is this blessed difference: that these half-wild creatures have not been hopelessly submerged, have not been driven into desperate war against society. The worst of them still have good traits, strong characters, something responsive to decent treatment. They are kind-hearted, loyal to their friends, quick to help anyone in distress. They know nothing of civilization. They are simply _the unstarted_--and their thews are sound.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MOUNTAIN DIALECT

One day I handed a volume of John Fox's stories to a neighbor and asked him to read it, being curious to learn how those vivid pictures of mountain life would impress one who was born and bred in the same atmosphere. He scanned a few lines of the dialogue, then suddenly stared at me in amazement.

"What's the matter with it?" I asked, wondering what he could have found to startle him at the very beginning of a story.

"Why, that feller _don't know how to spell_!"

Gravely I explained that dialect must be spelled as it is p.r.o.nounced, so far as possible, or the life and savor of it would be lost. But it was of no use. My friend was outraged. "That tale-teller then is jest makin'

fun of the mountain people by misspellin' our talk. You educated folks don't spell your own words the way you say them."

A most palpable hit; and it gave me a new point of view.

To the mountaineers themselves their speech is natural and proper, of course, and when they see it bared to the spotlight, all eyes drawn toward it by an orthography that is as odd to them as it is to us, they are stirred to wrath, just as we would be if our conversation were reported by some Josh Billings or Artemas Ward.

The curse of dialect writing is elision. Still, no one can write it without using the apostrophe more than he likes to; for our highland speech is excessively clipped. "I'm comin' d'reck'ly" has a quaintness that should not be lost. We cannot visualize the shambling but eager mountaineer with a sample of ore in his hand unless the writer reports him faithfully: "Wisht you'd 'zamine this rock fer me--I heern tell you was one o' them 'sperts."

Although the hillsmen save some breath in this way, they waste a good deal by inserting sounds where they do not belong. Sometimes it is only an added consonant: gyarden, acrost, corkus (caucus); sometimes a syllable: loaferer, musicianer, suddenty. Occasionally a word is both added to and clipped from, as cyarn (carrion). They are fond of grace syllables: "I gotta me a deck o' cyards." "There ain't nary bitty sense in it."

More interesting are subst.i.tutions of one sound for another. In mountain dialect all vowels may be interchanged with others. Various sounds of _a_ are confused with _e_, as hed (had), kem (came), keerful; or with _i_, grit (grate), rifle (raffle); with _o_, pomper, toper (taper), wrop; or with _u_, fur, ruther. So any other vowel may serve in place of _e_: sarve, chist, upsot, tumble. Any other may displace _i_: arn (iron), eetch, hender, whope or whup. The _o_ sounds are more stable, but we have c.r.a.p (crop), yan, clus, and many similar variants. Any other vowel may do for _u_: braysh or bresh (brush), shet, sich, sh.o.r.e (sure).

Mountaineers have peculiar difficulty with diphthongs: haar (hair), cheer (chair), brile, and a host of others. The word coil is variously p.r.o.nounced quile, querl or quorl.

Subst.i.tution of consonants is not so common as of vowels, but most hillsmen say nabel (navel), ballet (ballad), Babtis', rench or rinch, brickie (brittle), and many say atter or arter, jue (due), tejus, vascinator (fascinator--a woman's scarf). They never drop _h_, nor subst.i.tute anything for it.

The word woman has suffered some strange sea-changes. Most mountaineers p.r.o.nounce it correctly, but some drop the _w_ ('oman), others add an _r_ (womern and wimmern), while in Mich.e.l.l County, North Carolina, we hear the extraordinary forms ummern and dummern ("La, look at all the dummerunses a-comin'!")

On the other hand, some words that most Americans misp.r.o.nounce are always sounded correctly in the southern highlands, as dew and new (never doo, noo). Creek is always given its true _ee_ sound, never crick. Nare (as we spell it in dialect stories) is simply the right p.r.o.nunciation of ne'er, and nary is ne'er a, with the _a_ turned into a short _i_ sound.

It should be understood that the dialect varies a good deal from place to place, and, even in the same neighborhood, we rarely hear all families speaking it alike. Outlanders who essay to write it are p.r.o.ne to err by making their characters speak it too consistently. It is only in the backwoods, or among old people and the penned-at-home women, that the dialect is used with any integrity. In railroad towns we hear little of it, and farmers who trade in those towns adapt their speech somewhat to the company they may be in. The same man, at different times, may say can't and cain't, set and sot, jest and jes' and jist, atter and arter or after, seed and seen, here and hyur and hyar, heerd and heern or heard, sich and sech, took and tuk--there is no uniformity about it. An unconscious sense of euphony seems to govern the choice of hit or it, there or thar.

Since the Appalachian people have a marked Scotch-Irish strain, we would expect their speech to show a strong Scotch influence. So far as vocabulary is concerned, there is really little of it. A few words, caigy (cadgy), coggled, fernent, gin for if, needcessity, trollop, almost exhaust the list of distinct Scotticisms. The Scotch-Irish, as we call them, were mainly Ulstermen, and the Ulster dialect of to-day bears little a.n.a.logy to that of Appalachia.

Scotch influence does appear, however, in one vital characteristic of the p.r.o.nunciation: with few exceptions our highlanders sound _r_ distinctly wherever it occurs, though they never trill it. In the British Isles this constant sounding of _r_ in all positions is peculiar, I think, to Scotland, Ireland, and a few small districts in the northern border counties of England. With us it is general practice outside of New England and those parts of the southern lowlands that had no flood of Celtic immigration in the eighteenth century. I have never heard a Carolina mountaineer say n.i.g.g.ah or No'th Ca'lina, though in the last word the syllable _ro_ is often elided.

In some mountain districts we hear do' (door), flo', mo', yo', co'te, sca'ce (long _a_), pusson; but such skipping of the _r_ is common only where lowland influence has crept in. Much oftener the _r_ is dropped from dare, first, girl, horse, nurse, parcel, worth (dast, fust, gal, hoss, nuss, pa.s.sel, wuth). By way of compensation the hillsmen sometimes insert a euphonic _r_ where it has no business; just as many New Englanders say, "The idear of it!"

Throughout Appalachia such words as last, past, advantage, are p.r.o.nounced with the same vowel sound as is heard in man. This helps to delimit the people, cla.s.sifying them with Pennsylvanians and Westerners: a linguistic grouping that will prove significant when we come to study the origin and history of this isolated race.

An editor who had made one or two short trips into the mountains once wrote me that he thought the average mountaineer's vocabulary did not exceed three hundred words. This may be a natural inference if one spends but a few weeks among these people and sees them only under the prosaic conditions of workaday life. But gain their intimacy and you shall find that even the illiterates among them have a range of expression that is truly remarkable. I have myself taken down from the lips of Carolina mountaineers some eight hundred dialectical or obsolete words, to say nothing of the much greater number of standard English terms that they command.

Seldom is a "hill-billy" at a loss for a word. Lacking other means of expression, there will come "spang" from his mouth a coinage of his own.

Instantly he will create (always from English roots, of course) new words by combination, or by turning nouns into verbs or otherwise interchanging the parts of speech.

Crudity or deficiency of the verb characterizes the speech of all primitive peoples. In mountain vernacular many words that serve as verbs are only nouns of action, or adjectives, or even adverbs. "That bear 'll meat me a month." "They churched Pitt for tale-bearin'." "Granny kept faultin' us all day." "Are ye fixin' to go squirrelin'?" "Sis blouses her waist a-purpose to carry a pistol." "My boy Jesse book-kept for the camp." "I disgust bad liquor." "This poke salat eats good." "I ain't goin' to bed it no longer" (lie abed). "We can muscle this log up." "I wouldn't pleasure them enough to say it." "Josh ain't much on sweet-heartin'." "I don't confidence them dogs much." "The creek away up thar turkey-tails out into numerous leetle forks."

A verb will be coined from an adverb: "We better git some wood, bettern we?" Or from an adjective: "Much that dog and see won't he come along"

(pet him, make much of him). "I didn't do nary thing to contrary her."

"Baby, that onion 'll strong ye!" "Little Jimmy fell down and benastied himself to beat the devil."

Conversely, nouns are created from verbs. "Hit don't make no differ." "I didn't hear no give-out at meetin'" (announcement). "You can git ye one more gittin' o' wood up thar." "That Nantahala is a master shut-in, jest a plumb gorge." Or from an adjective: "Them bugs--the little old hatefuls!" "If anybody wanted a history of this county for fifty years he'd git a lavish of it by reading that mine-suit testimony." Or from an adverb: "Nance tuk the biggest through at meetin'!" (shouting spell). An old lady quoted to me in a plaintive quaver:

"It matters not, so I've been told, Where the body goes when the heart grows cold;

"But," she added, "a person has a rather about where he'd be put."

In mountain vernacular the Old English strong past tense still lives in begun, drunk, holped, rung, shrunk, sprung, stunk, sung, sunk, swum.

Holp is used both as preterite and as infinitive: the _o_ is long, and the _l_ distinctly sounded by most of the people, but elided by such as drop it from almost, already, self (the _l_ is elided from help by many who use that form of the verb).

Examples of a strong preterite with dialectical change of the vowel are bruk, brung, drap or drapped, drug, friz, roke or ruck (raked), saunt (sent), shet, shuck (shook), whoped (long _o_). The variant whupped is a Scotticism. Whope is sometimes used in the present tense, but whup is more common. By some the vowel of whup is sounded like _oo_ in book (Mr.

Fox writes "whoop," which, I presume, he intends for that sound).

In many cases a weak preterite supplants the proper strong one: div, driv, fit, gi'n or give, rid, riv, riz, writ, done, run, seen or seed, blowed, crowed, drawed, growed, knowed, throwed.

There are many corrupt forms of the verb, such as gwine for gone or going, mought (mowt) for might, dim, het, ort or orter, wed (weeded), war (was or were--the _a_ as in far), shun (shone), cotch (in all tenses) or cotched, fotch or fotched, borned, hurted, dremp.

Peculiar adjectives are formed from verbs. "Chair-bottoming is easy settin'-down work." "When my youngest was a leetle set-along child"

(interpreted as "settin' along the floor"). "That Thunderhead is the torndowndest place!" "Them's the travellinest hosses ever I seed."

"She's the workinest woman!" "Jim is the disablest one o' the fam'ly."

"d.a.m.n this fotch-on kraut that comes in tin cans!"

A verb may serve as an adverb: "If I'd a-been thoughted enough." An adverb may be used as an adjective: "I hope the folks with you is gaily"

(well). An adjective can serve as an adverb: "He laughed master."

Sometimes a conjunction is employed as a preposition: "We have oblige to take care on him."

These are not mere blunders of individual illiterates, but usages common throughout the mountains, and hence real dialect.

The ancient syllabic plural is preserved in beasties (horses), nesties, posties, trousies (these are not diminutives), and in that strange word dummerunses that I cited before.

Pleonasms are abundant. "I done done it" (have done it or did do it).

"Durin' the while." "In this day and time." "I thought it would surely, undoubtedly turn cold." "A small, little bitty hole." "Jane's a tol'able big, large, fleshy woman." "I ginerally, usually take a dram mornin's." "These ridges is might' nigh straight up and down, and, as the feller said, perpendic'lar."