Michael Carroll Green

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.:)