An Old Regular Baptist Foot-Washing In The Mountains

Funeral Meeting In earlier days in the hills funeral meetings came after crops were laid by and gardens were ripe—in late summer and fall when weather and roads were good and food plentiful. In 1938 Bruce Peters did this water color celebrating this custom, or an old "association" meeting which was similar. Bennie Moore photographed the water color. 26 An Old Regular Baptist Foot-Washing In The Mountains by J. W. Hall The following ¿s a long chapter from a manuscript of about thirty chapters. John Wesley Hall graduated from West Virginia University law school and practiced law in his native eastern Kentucky. The narrative begins with the "native's return" after a considerable absence and recounts his visits with relatives and friends. When he visits Uncle Frank Tackett, a famous teller of tales, he lets Uncle Frank take over much of the ensuing narrative, including the present chapter. In earlier chapters Uncle Frank tells a variety of tall tales as well as how the group got together with Judge Brown for the camp out. "An Old Regular Baptist Foot-Washing in the Mountains" is a somewhat misleading title for this chapter because it is not limited to the foot-washing episode but covers a whole community of associated activities—funeralizing, baptizing, courting procedures , a mock trial, a fight, and humorous incidents. Although the setting seems to be shortly before the Civil War, what happens is basically true of later times oho. Supposedly this narrative was privately printed in book form, but our text comes from a manuscript, much faded, typed with many spelling and punctuation errors on legal size paper. The title, first chapter, and at least the concluding chapter are missing from the manuscript as delivered to us by Cordell Martin of Hindman, Kentucky. Obvious spelling and punctuation errors have been corrected; but where the spelling seemed to indicate a peculiarity of pronunciation (corkus for caucus; findly for finally; sanger for senger - gen seng digger; interduce for introduce) or seemed to indicate a humorous confusion of words as in paradox, it has been left unchanged. Next morning we held a corcus to decide whether to take the patients to church or not and findly decided that the preaching would have a tendency to attract the attention of the patients from politics and would help them forget their defeat and that we would take ¿hem to the meeting. Soon the camp was in a bustle of excitement , all getting ready to go. The meeting was about two miles below our camp. Hammons and his seven women come about the time we were ready to start, and he advised us to leave some of the boys with the camp as some sanger might tear up the place, as they didn't want strangers to come in and dig the sang all up. So I inquired of the young men who of them would volunteer to stay and mind house for us when a young man by the name of Allen said that as he didnt 27 care very much for preaching anyway, he would stay and keep the camp. We all went down to the river, and going down below the fish pool where we caught so many fish a few days before and walking the dam across the shoal, we all passed over dry shod. Joe's two dogs overtook us a short distance below the crossing and Joe tried to run them back, but the dogs refused to go back. The Judge told Joe to let the dogs go along when Joe said that he had taken the dogs to meeting before and when the women got to shouting and slapping him on the back, the dogs thought the women was trying to fight him, and as he had learned the dogs to fight for him that they tried to bite the women and that he was afraid that they would bite some one. We arrived at the meeting ground about ten o'clock in the morning. The graveyard was up on a point covered with cedars. Most of the graves had small houses over them, and the seats were chestnut poles split open in the middle...