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^ Corn: The Mountain Staple by Richard Relham One summer day I stopped by this roadside house to make a pastoral call on a family. No one was at home but I had a pretty good idea where they might be. Accordingly I went around the house and followed a path that led upwards about a half mile to a fairly level plateau in the hills. Here I found the father, mother and four girls hoeing corn. Mountain fields were not adaptable to the use of machinery, so growing corn was a hand labor operation and ordinarily every member of the family above eight years old, male and female, were pressed into service. In this case there were no boys, only four attractive girls. I walked along beside them, moving from one member of the family to another. If there had been an extra hoe I would have helped; in fact, I offered to take the youngest girl's place but my offer was politely declined, partly perhaps, in deference to my position as a minister, but more likely for protection of their corn from a greenhorn . On my grandfather's farm in the Shenandoah Valley I had cultivated corn, sitting on a cultivator behind two horses, but this was a different kind of cultivation. Even the most basic labor requires its particular skill. I noted and admired the economy of energy that went into the hoeing. I would have lifted 11 my hoe about two feet and slashed down on a weed with an expenditure of energy that would have left me exhausted by noon, but mountain hoers had learned like blacks in slavery days how to use just the amount of energy proportionate to the accomplishment of the task, which enables the worker to end a whole day pleasantly tired but not prostrated. This experienced family barely lifted the hoe from the ground and sliced off the weeds at about a halfinch below ground level with a graceful, fluid motion that covered the maximum area with the least effort. The delight in observing the rhythm of six people hoeing was akin to that ofwatching a ballet. Ordinarily the corn is hoed out three times in a season till the corn is tall enough to survive the weeds. This was the third and last hoeing for this family and anticipation of finishing the most tedious labor of the season probably made them more lighthearted than usual and my visit was also a welcome break in the monotony ofthe task. Corn is the mountain staple. It is the only grain crop that can be grown successfully on steep slopes or in new ground between stumps, so it became the staple grain of mountain dwellers. It was necessary for both people and stock. For people it could be boiled, roasted or popped, ground for mush, but above all made into meal for cornbread. The hill people had cornbread at least once a day, sometimes at all three meals, or carried in the pocket to munch on at odd hours. The meal was coarser than the "store-boughten" variety, and was cooked in a large skillet or rectangular pan and emerged thick and crusty. It was not cut before being placed on the table, rather it was dumped on a plate and passed around so each diner could break off a hunk with a twisting motion. No one went hungry when there was plenty of cornbread around. The relish of cornbread often precluded a taste for any other bread—unless it be biscuits. More than once I have heard an expatriate mountaineer in the flatlands exclaim that the thing he missed most was homemade cornbread. Of course, he could buy meal in a store, but it was not the same as meal from a mill ground from one's own corn. The ubiquity of cornfields in the mountains—on the hillsides, or in the hollows , or between the road and the creek—has given rise to many jokes like that about the farmer who planted his corn on a steep hillside by shooting the kernels into the field with a shotgun. Another mountain man reputedly broke his leg when he fell out of...

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