Back In Them-There Woods...

[BIAD]

Please Note: Ninurta is not mentioned anywhere in the narrative of the video below.
and I'm still honing my interest in the Hatfield-McCoy feud.

[Ninurta]

I hate that Popcorn done himself in, but there are a lot of hillbillies that have a coda of death before dishonor, and apparently he considered a year and a half in the federal pokey to be dishonoring. The "Death before Dishonor" code has been around a long time. ever since there have been settlers here. I suspect it came riding in with the Scotsmen who infiltrated this area (many in the wake of the battle of Culloden, and many who were here before that, coming by way of the Ulster Plantations) by flooding in through the Great Valley of Virginia and then dispersed out here into the hinterlands from there. They were - and are still yet - a proud bunch.

We live on our own terms, by our own rules, and are willing to die that way, too. Flatlanders ain't the bosses of us.

That's pretty much the culture I come from. We had a "junk shop" as is described for Popcorn when I was growing up. It was called "The Hub", operated by a character named Hub Raines, and as described it appeared to be a fever-dream from a hoarder. Piled haphazardly from floor to ceiling with all manner of geegaws that Hub had collected here and there over the years, and would sell you for a price. If you needed something, but couldn't find it anywhere, a check at The Hub almost always netted it for you.

One of my great-uncles did some federal time for making moonshine under a rock overhang. When he got out, his first order of business was to build another still and start running off shine again. He kept a shotgun handy the second time around, and never got busted again.

I ran across an old newspaper clipping a year ago or so that mentioned my great great grand dad. Apparently he and a couple other folks got arrested for shooting and killing a Pinkerton informant , and shooting but not killing the Pinkerton agent (actually a Badwin-Felts agent, as I recall) that was being led in by the informant. both of whom made the mistake of going into the woods after them and their still. Apparently one of the fellas arrested in that event died in prison, but mysteriously, there is no mention anywhere of what befell the other two. All I can say for sure is grandpa Charlie lived to a ripe old age still running these hollers, and not taking kindly to strangers poking around.

"Pinkertons" was a generic term for a variety of rent-a-cop companies (Pinkerton Detective Agency, Baldwin-Felts Detectives, etc.) that weren't really cops at all, they were just badge-heavy wannabes... and we treated them as such, just like any other outside private citizen who had a habit of poking their noses in where they didn't belong and were not wanted. I'd imagine there are still a lot of them buried here who simply disappeared, never to be hard from or seen again. We didn't elect them, we didn't hire them, and we didn't recognize any supposed authority they claimed - we didn't give them that authority, so they didn't have it, no matter what they thought. A lot of them learned that fact the hard way.

We had a family friend when I was a teenager who ran small batches of shine in his kitchen. He had a small - about 3 gallon - "groundhog" still that he would set up on the wood stove in his kitchen, run off a batch or two, and then disassemble the still and stash the components all around, so as not to have a still handy whenever Johnny Law came a-knocking. His downfall was when they found him growing weed in his corn field, sewed in amongst the corn. That led to their discovery of his still as well, and he did a little time over it. I still have a blowgun he "loaned" to me 40 or 50 years ago. I asked when he wanted me to return it, and he said "Jus' hang on to it until I come for it", and he never came for it.

Funny they should mention Popcorn's coffin that he kept in his living room. Some characters around here still do that, but not many. It goes back a long way - Daniel Boone built his own rosewood coffin, and kept it under his bed for years so that if he died in bed, it wouldn't inconvenience anyone to chuck him into the coffin. After all, it was right there!

I don't know if anyone from outside of here will ever truly be able to grasp what life is like in these hills and hollers. There are a lot of tales "out there" about what it is like in here, but many are apocryphal, and many more are slanted, being views and stories of "outsiders" trying to make sense of how it is here by looking at our world through THEIR lenses, and so not quite grasping it. YouTube is posting more and more "hillbilly" videos, many of them suffering from the same inaccuracies as the old 50's and 60's tales of the mountains as told by the flatlanders.

But some of them are good, and give you a taste of the flavor of what life is like here. This one is one of those.

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