Hillbilly Women by Skye Moody

Author:Skye Moody [Moody, Skye K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7369-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

I can remember my great-grandfather, that’s as far back as I can remember on the Estep side. But I can’t remember none on my Irvin side, no farther than my grandmother Irwin. They all died before I was old enough, and some of them before I was even born. Barry Estep, he married Lou Owsley, in Wilkes County, before moving to Alleghany County. And Grampa Barry’s brother William, he moved to Virginia. Their first child, John Wesley, was born August 8, 1848. This was my great-great-grandfather.

My grandaddy was a Confederate soldier. He lived to be ninety-six years old. And he fought in the Confederate War. Went in, they drafted him when he was sixteen years old. He didn’t tell me too much about it. But my grandmother, she said that the deserters, that wouldn’t go, they’d come to the house and they’d steal everything they had. They had Home Guards to guard the people, but they couldn’t guard them all, you know. They’d come and steal your milk and steal your corn and steal your flour away from the women and children that the husbands was serving in that war.

This land was all cleared when I grew up. But you know, my grandaddy, when he bought that land over yonder, I think he said he swapped a horse, give a horse, and so many bushel of corn, for a farm. But it was yet all in woods, you know, he had to clear it up and work on it.

When I was a child—see, I’m sixty-five years old—when I was going to school, I had two school dresses. Well, I put on a clean one on Monday morning, and I had to wear that dress till Friday. Then I got a clean dress on Friday. I had one pair of Sunday shoes. Now I wore these old brogans and old yarn knit socks to school. And as I grew on up it was the same thing until after I got up about fifteen or sixteen years old.

We never went to the store and bought a thing in the world except some coffee and sugar. Now that’s what’s bought out of the store. We raised the rest of it. Everybody raised stuff at that time. And just as long as the Lord blessed you to make a garden, and potatoes, and corn, that’s what we lived on. We raised our hogs, we raised our corn to make our hogs, and we raised our corn to feed our cows. We never got no corn liquor out of our corn, no, not a bit. We butchered our own hogs, and made our own flour, took it to our own mill and ground it, and milked our own cows and made our own butter.

Why, there wasn’t no such thing to buy then, as cow’s milk butter, unless they might’ve took it in to the store. Now, when you make butter, you skim the cream off the milk, and you sit that up and let it sour.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.