Memories of A Sharecroppers Daughter
By
~ Cynthia Woods Barnett ~
I
was born in the mountains of Leslie County, Kentucky on March 09, 1909, the 10th
child and 7th daughter of Alex Woods and Martha Elizabeth Wooton Woods;
in a one-room house or shack you might call it, with dirt floor, not
loose dirt; it had packed dirt you swept with a broom made from sage grass,
pulled and dried and made into a broom. Brooms
also were made from hickory pole shavings split back, and then pulled forward
and tied for sweeping the yard. A
kitchen was made on the side from split boards that my daddy split himself with
a fro and a maul.
We lived there until I was four years old.
This place was in the head of Big Fork Branch, it ran into Hell-For-Certin
Creek. Then we moved over near the
Middle Fork river on the other side of the mountain.
We had one old mule which pulled a sled with a few belongings; the family
walked and carried everything they could, including me.
I cried, so was said, that’s when my memory starts.
I remember someone trying to carry me with a butter churn.
Mommie was pregnant with my brother Dan, who was born 1 month later.
It was about three or four miles through creeks, up hills and down, only
on paths. We passed through the
land my daddy later bought. There
were huge cliffs; we were so afraid because Indians had lived under them.
When we reached the top of the mountain, the other side was all cleared
out for corn fields and way down the hill was a house; our home. Everyone started jumping up and down and running down the
hill. I think I was running, too.
This house was bigger, two rooms with kitchen and eating place on the
side, a big yard, gardens and plenty of fields for corn.
A stream of water ran right by, which was the beginning of Fish Trap
Branch that ran into the river. We
were at the head of it.
I guess I should probably
tell you the meaning of a sharecropper. It’s
someone who doesn’t have any land or home.
Someone who does, furnishes a house and land for them to farm for 1/2 of
what they make. My daddy was now a
sharecropper for a well to do man who was married to mommie’s first cousin.
They had a nice two-story house painted white, with a huge barn and white
fences. They also had the only telephone; there was only one line.
Messages would come in and they would deliver things like death or very
important things.
We were about two miles from the river, which had a wagon road from Hyden
to Krypton, the train station. They
hauled store goods from there to the stores along the way, and to Hyden, which
was our little town. We had plenty
of friends now of all ages. Mommie
had another aunt that lived farther down the river.
She had a house full of children, too.
Every farmer had at least one good mule for work and riding, a couple of
milk cows, and young yearlings which were sold for money; also a lot of hogs for
meat. Sheep were for wool, which
was sent off and cloth and blankets were made.
Beautiful red and blue checked blankets were sent back with the cloth.
We three younger girls tended the sheep; got the mommie sheep in when it
snowed so they wouldn’t have their lambs in the snow.
We had a shed for them. We
also watched the lambs being born, as well as all the other animals.
You learn so much being raised on a farm.
My oldest sister, Ethel, who lived to be 97, made our clothes.
Mommie knit our socks. We
got one pair of shoes a winter for school, we had to make them last.
As the children got older, in their teens, they somehow managed to get
shoes for summer, sold a calf or my daddy worked for someone else any time he
had to spare for a little extra money. We
children dug May-apple roots and dried them and my daddy sold them and bought
cloth for our summer dresses for school. We
would have two each. We would wash
them out in the evenings and dry them to wear to school the next day.
A sewing machine and spinning wheel was a must.
Quilts were made from the backside of overalls and wool sample books.
Wool was spun into yarn for our stockings.
I helped my mom by holding the hanks of yarn on my arms so she could ball
it and I held the pine pitch light at night for her to knit my socks.
Ever’ which one of us she was knitting for had to sit up and hold the
light till she finished the pair. One
time in particular, I fell asleep and dropped the hot pitch on my bare toes;
there was some jumping going on then.
Cane was grown for molasses, cut in fall and ground with a grinder pulled
around and around with a mule. Someone
in the settlement had one and it was shared.
That was our sweetening for ginger cakes and syrup.
There was always 5 gal. cans on hand, filled.
Cane grinding was a great time. Everyone
went, young folks sparking in the ground-up stalks and licking foam from the
stir-off with a cane stalk.
In the summer months, hogs were put in floored pens for fattening on corn
and slop made up of dishwater and waste from the kitchen. First cold spell in fall one was killed and cured and hung up
in the smokehouse. Some middlins
(or side meat you might call it) and hams were smoked with hickory wood for
days. The rest was salted down for
salt pork.
Fall of the year was harvesting time.
Fodder was pulled for mules and bundled and dried and corn pulled and
hauled out in sleds by mule. The
rest of the stalks were cut and shocked for cattle.
Womenfolk were gathering everything and canning, drying, pickling, making
barrels of kraut and pickled beans and corn; everything that could be saved for
the long winter. Beans were dried
for shuck beans; a different kind was shelled for soup beans.
They knew the right kind. Every
child had his own job. We gathered
everything left over in the fields; green tomatoes, peppers, onions and corn and
put them all in big crocks for salted mix pickles.
Irish and sweet potatoes and turnips were put in deep holes lined with
straw, which were under big cliffs right by the garden, and kept through the
winter. You could open up and get
out enough for use as you needed. We
had plenty of chickens for meat and eggs, ducks for eggs, and feathers for
pillows and feather beds. Fresh
straw was pulled in fall as filling for mattresses.
At bean picking time they would pile bushels on a quilt in the floor and
invite all their young friends to come to bean stringing. When the pile was finished they would swing “Rabbit
Soup”, about the same as square dancing.
My daddy wouldn’t allow dancing, so they fooled him and sung “Rabbit
Soup” and went through the square dance set.
Winter was tough on us children, all living in a two-room house.
If it wasn’t too cold, we would go to the barn and play with the young
calf. The old cow would run around
the barn and bawl and paw the ground. If
she could have gotten to us, she would have killed us.
One time we played in the fodder for the mule and shattered it to bug
dust. They all got a whipping for that. My daddy stood us all in a line, he didn’t whip me but I
had to stand with the rest. Seems
like my daddy was always gone. He
worked for someone every time he could. He
would find the damage we had done when he got back home.
We had a good school, a church, walking distance to the store and a post
office. To get to school, we had to
cross the river on a swinging bridge that was always scary to me and we had to
pass some geese that would fly across the river and bite the daylights out of
you. Later we went back across the
hill to the school where we had moved from.
Times were hard, but we were always happy and loved.
We didn’t miss having the good things, we had never had them.
We had fun with what we had. We
roamed the hills and in the cliffs, we had what we called the “Slick Rock”.
When the ice froze over, we would bundle up and go to it and scoot down
it.
This one memory stays with me more than any of the others. One cold day snow was on the ground and there was a bunch of
bored children with nothing to do. My
two older brothers and two sisters suggested we go to the “Raven Cliff”.
The only problem was, little sister had no shoes since she wasn’t old
enough to go to school, and there was no way they could leave me behind.
So, my brother, Russ, took some rags torn from old overalls, wrapped my
feet up, and carried me. He was
small and only five years older that me. It
was a long ways up and around the mountain.
They picked mountain tea on the way and brought along a pan and paper bag
so they could dry the mountain tea and smoke it.
Tales were that Indians lived there and that several men hid there to
keep from fighting in the Civil War. We
had to crawl along a narrow ledge and into a square hole to get inside.
Yellow sand was on the floor and there was a round ceiling that sand was
sifting down from. There was a long
opening at the lower end with a ledge where eagles build their nests, and ravens
too, I guess. We could look down
for miles and see the blue Middle Fork River.
The grownups had a lot more pleasures.
They got to spend nights with their friends and go river swimming and
skating when it froze over.
After the long, cold winter with smoked, dried, cured and canned stuff to
eat, we were glad to see spring come with fresh vegetables and greens.
We would go with mommie to pick wild greens until the garden came in.
She knew the ones that were right to eat; poke, thistle, speckled dick,
lambs tongue, shoney and many more. By
the first of June the garden was coming in and also the long summer, with hard
work ahead.
My daddy made his own medicines from herbs he gathered. He made liniment from different stuff he brewed down and
cough syrup was made from mullein, horehound and honey. Sheep bullet tea was made to treat measles; a salve for burns
was made from hog hair and turpentine. He
rendered groundhog grease for croup; wild cherry bark for yellow jaundice or
kidney trouble, and he also set broken bones.
There were no doctors near so you had to rely on yourself.
He was the best livestock doctor in the country.
He was called on to doctor other people’s stock.
I carried with me his remedies and used them with my own family.
I never remember being lonely or sad or afraid until after World War I
and epidemics of flu hit the United States.
We heard of it for months and then it hit our part of the country.
Complete families were wiped out; families that we knew and spent nights
with. At that time, there were 13
of us children. My mommie was
already bedfast for two months, some kind of infection that happened when the
new baby was born. I remember a
doctor coming to Mommie; but for the flu there was no doctors and they knew no
cure nor medicine to treat it with. Sick
children were piled up in beds. No
running water, no inside toilets. Water
was carried from the spring about 200 ft. From the house.
My daddy stayed on his feet, no matter how sick he was, to take care of
his family. There wasn’t much
cooking to be done, everyone was too sick to eat.
He slept on a sack of wool by the fire, what little he did sleep.
He kept an iron kettle on the fireplace with burvine tea boiling.
They thought it would break the fever.
It must have or there was a mighty hand above that helped.
We only lost the little baby, 2 months old.
Every morning our landlady came across the creek on the hillside, and
hollered to find out if anyone was dead. There
were a few men that stayed able enough that they made coffins around the clock,
all sizes, I guess. There was no
embalming so they had to be buried by the next day.
By the time we lost the little baby, the older ones were up.
My oldest sister held him on her lap until he died.
I was about 9 or 10 at that time, it was so sad to see them carry that
little casket away. He was buried
on top of the mountain on land my father was then buying.
Now it is the family graveyard.
We lived there until I was 12 years old, in the spring of 1921.
My daddy had now bought and paid for land on the other side of the
mountain where my little brother was buried.
He paid for it cutting timber down and hauling it out with yoke of
steers, floating the logs down the creek when high water would come, making huge
rafts by putting them together and floating them down the river.
Yes, just like in western movies.
He now had three grown sons and four grown daughters. They built a two story, hewed poplar log house with two
fireplaces, a deep cold well, coal to burn and also a big barn for his corn and
to house his livestock (which had mounted by now). He had his own blacksmith shop and made all his working
tools, plow stocks, ax handles and hoe handles, turned his own horseshoes and
shod his mules. (My Daddy was the
greatest!)
We were now in our house and on our land; we didn’t have to share.
We were beginning to get ahead. My
daddy planted fruit trees, had bee gums for honey, our first mattresses; no more
pulling straw for straw beds. By
this time the older children were leaving home for work; boys to the mines,
girls as hired help in homes.
The Roaring 20’s are here; short dresses, short hair and the dance
“The Charleston”. The last children got a better education, the boys to
Buckhorn School and me to Berea College. Of
course I didn’t stick it out. I
chose marriage and the mother of 10 wonderful children.
My family, all but two brothers and I are buried on top of that mountain
where the little baby was buried long ago.
My own family moved to Folly Beach, SC in 1942, when World War II was on.
I have since lost my husband and 3 of my children.
I am still wrapped in love with my children
and my many grand and great grand children.
Looking forward to my 88th birthday.
Only time will tell.
~ Cynthia Woods Barnett ~
9/13/1996
Story Submitted by
~
Maebelle Barnett Bazzel ~
Note From
Maebelle Barnett Bazzel
Daughter of Cynthia Woods Barnett
(From this time until Cynthia died on July 19, 2003, at 94, she wrote several things for her family and started in 2000 to make little animals from clay. They were wonderful artistic treasures that she left us, along with her vast knowledge and terrific sense of humor. She was something, ONE OF A KIND.)
