"Tales from Sacred Wind Coming of Age in Appalachia" by Cratis D. Williams--Book Review

Williams, Cratis D., and David Cratis Willams and Patricia D. Beaver, Editors. Tales From Sacred Wind Coming of Age in Appalachia (Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Co. 2003)

For my regular readers over the past month or so, it is no secret that I love this book.  Some of the most popular and easiest written blog posts I have ever done have been about particular segments of issues which Cratis D. Williams discusses in the book.  I have written about Death, Dying, and Burial Practices In Appalachia; Croton Oil And Cratis Williams; Traditional Appalachian Children's Games; and One More Short Lesson From Cratis Williams.  I had also written a much earlier post about some reading of his work which I had one under the title Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams.  All of these posts were very easy to write and well received by my readers.  Cratis Williams was the Dean of the Appalachian State University Graduate School and taught there for several decades in addition to being one of the most influential scholars in all of the field of Appalachian Studies.  I have said repeatedly that I never met Dr. Williams and I regret that a great deal.  He was erudite, well read, incredibly funny, and one of the best experts on the culture of Appalachia, especially in the early twentieth century.  

This book was edited by his son, Dr. David Cratis Williams and Dr. Patricia D. Beaver who had been one of his professional colleagues at Appalachian State University.

Cratis D. Williams--Photo by the Williams Family

It was published eighteen years after his death.  It is basically a memoir of the first twenty or so years of his life.  It is assumed that he intended to complete a comprehensive memoir of his entire life and simply did not have the time during his academic career to complete and subsequently did not live long to complete the work after his retirement. That is a tragedy since this book is one of the finest books ever written about Appalachian Culture in the early twentieth century, especially the culture of the Big Sandy River Valley and Eastern Kentucky.  This book was published as the eighth produced in the Contributions To Southern Appalachian Studies Series from McFarland & Company in Jefferson, North Carolina.  The series is now comprised of roughly forty books and still being expanded regularly by the publisher.  They cover numerous areas of interest in the greater field of Appalachian Studies.  Although I have not read anywhere near the entire series, I am sure the majority of them are well worth reading.

Now, to get back to "Tales From Sacred Wind...", I am sure that most people tend to think that the name Sacred Wind for the post office in the community on Caines Creek in Lawrence County must have been rooted in religion.  According to Williams, it was not remotely rooted in religion.  He relates the story of how the first postmaster had been tasked with naming the post office and wanted to find a particularly meaningful name.  He had struggled with that effort and was sitting on his porch one day with a friend talking about the effort when the friend passed gas loudly and demonstratively and said, "Name it after that." which is exactly how the postmaster arrived at the name of Sacred Wind.  

The book covers numerous areas of Appalachian Culture including those I have written about and numerous others such as feuds, family strife up to and including patricide and pedicide, the United Baptist Church, one room schools, education in general, farming, child birth, midwifery, and many others.  The book is well written but, if there is one area in which to critique it, the quality of the writing is variable, at times well above average and, at other times, the quality drops a bit.  The book was apparently written over several years in small to medium segments or sections each on a particular topic.  After his death, Cratis Williams' son and Dr. Beavers edited the manuscript and McFarland published it.  I am sure that it does not have the same level of consistency and quality that it would have if Cratis Williams had lived to fully complete the work to cover his entire life.  But the work is well worth reading and I certain that many of my regular readers on this blog will attest to that fact also.  It is well worth the money, time, and effort to buy and read it.   

Croton Oil And Cratis Williams

Over the last month or so, I have written several posts based on my reading of the book "Tales From Sacred Wind Coming Of Age In Appalachia" by Cratis D. Williams.  I have loved the book, loved writing about it, and the posts have generated a great deal of interest from my readers.  I had thought that I would not write any more of these single subject posts about the book and what I learned from it but I just cannot resist writing one more.

Croton Plant Potted As An Ornamental--Photo by Shutterstock

I do still owe the regular readers who have enjoyed these posts one more book review type post to discuss the book in general and I will do that.  But I just have to write about Cratis D. Williams and croton oil.  When we were both boys, forty years and fifty miles apart in the drainage of the Big Sandy River in Eastern Kentucky, both of us knew about croton oil although I never had a personal encounter with the stuff.  But Cratis Williams did, or thought he did, and wrote about it in the book.  Croton oil was a strong laxative which was extracted from plants of the croton family.  Croton plants are described as a tree native to India and the Malay Peninsula.  Based on photos I have been able to find, I believe we still see members of that family being sold as either potted plants or for transplantation as ornamentals in yards and gardens. I suspect that many of my readers will recognize the plant also.  If any of you have these plants in your homes or flower gardens, I would love to see what you know about it posted as a comment on this post.

As my parents, maternal grandparents, and other friends and relatives described it, croton oil was one of the most powerful laxatives you could use and was sold in most country stores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries all over Appalachia. Cratis Williams wrote the best description of a bout of diarrhea I have ever read in this book, which he and several others believed was due to croton oil, and I will get to it in a minute but I need to prepare the readers to fully understand how effective, or overly effective, croton oil could be.   In the stories I heard, most people who had ever used croton oil hated the experience and it was generally used only in times of desperate constipation.  It apparently caused a lot of pain; rapid, excessive, fire hose like evacuation; and nobody who ever used it desired to do so again. I have been lucky enough to locate one photo of a vintage bottle of croton oil on E-bay and post it here also.

Vintage Bottle of Croton Oil--Photo by E-bay

Based on what Cratis Williams said in the book about what he and several others believed was their group experience of it, he agreed with the people I knew about the overpowering effects of the concoction.  Croton oil also had other negative qualities and I found a report that the US Navy actually used it to prevent sailors from drinking alcohol which was known as "torpedo juice" because the croton oil was added in small amounts to the neutral grain spirits which propelled torpedoes in an attempt by the navy to stop sailors from drinking the torpedo fuel. The oil was intended to prevent sailors from drinking the alcohol based fuel. Sailors with experience in drinking and making alcohol would build crude stills on their ships to separate the alcohol from the croton oil since alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than croton oil. I would not be surprised to someday learn that the first sailor to do that was from Appalachia and came from a family with experience in moonshining.  Members of the Norwegian resistance who had been ordered by the Nazi sympathizing Quisling government to turn over a boat load of freshly caught sardines to the Nazis whom Quisling had allowed to occupy Norway doctored the seized sardines with croton oil as they were about to be shipped to  a German U-boat base.  The Norwegian Resistance fighters had found a way to cooperate with British forces who supported the Norwegian Resistance to obtain a large shipment of croton oil to poison the entire boat load of sardines, whose fishy taste was expected to conceal the tampering.  I have actually read a lot about Eastern European Resistance efforts in World War II but had never run into that story before. I have added titles of a few books about the history of the European Resistance to the list on the front page of this blog which is labeled  "Books I Have Read Lately".  Based on what Cratis Williams wrote about it, and on the stories I heard from my family and friends, I would love to read a first person account from a Nazi soldier who served at that U-boat base about eating those sardines. Croton oil also has a long history of having been used in cosmetic skin peels due to its abrasive qualities which must have added to the pain of using it as a laxative. When applied externally, croton oil can cause irritation and swelling. Croton oil has been used widely in Phenol-croton oil chemical peels due to its caustic exfoliating effects.  Used in conjunction with phenol solutions, it results in an intense reaction which leads to initial skin sloughing.  I can only imagine what a person's digestive tract would have felt like after a large dose of the oil as a laxative. Since croton oil is very irritating and painful, it is used in laboratory animals to study how pain works  and I am certain that members of PETA probably hate it also.  But, I know I need to get to Cratis Williams' account about croton oil before I lose all my readers.

When Williams was living in a boarding house in Lousia in order to attend high school twenty-five miles from his home on Craines Creek, the residents of his boarding house and several other homes on that street all got their water from one well in a yard nearby.  Since this was the middle to late 1920's, the well was no doubt a hand dug well and the boarding house had an outdoor toilet in the back yard as I suspect most of the other houses did also.  Williams also related earlier in the book that the city water supply for Louisa at that time was stored on a hillside above the town inside a remodeled Civil War stone fort which also probably put everyone who drank that water at risk.  But here is Williams' account of the croton oil incident, or what he and several others believed was a croton oil incident. They thought that a local prankster had poured a large amount of croton oil into the shared well. Whether it was caused by croton oil or by contaminated water, which is what I suspect, it is the best description I have ever read of diarrhea.

"One night I became dimly aware of much activity elsewhere in the house as abdominal pains woke me up.  The pains, passing like waves, mounted in intensity, and, before I was fully prepared to admit that a trip out back through the darkness was a necessity, I found that unless I hurried I might not be able to make it to the privy in time to head off an accident.  Pulling on my pants and slipping my feet into my shoes without taking precious time to tie the laces, I rushed headlong down the stairs and in a half bent posture on toward the back door, half embarrassed to see all the members of the household up and scattered along the way through the dining room, kitchen, and laundry room, all with the gas lamps on, highlighting my hegira through the ranks of smiling, but nonetheless puzzled faces.  As I fumbled hurriedly with the lock on the back door, Ernest called out that it was a good thing for me that I had appeared.  Perplexed by the remark but without time or inclination to determine its significance, I dashed toward the privy, my shoe laces whipping at my legs and my shoes playing loosely on my feet.  Halfway there I flung one of my shoes, which I decided not to bother to find just at that time.  The rowling pain was so severe  and the need for relief so intense that I thought I had waited perhaps two seconds too long as I released my pants and thumped myself down on the bench.  An explosion was followed by a mad rush outward of everything in me, like the crashing of wild waters down a valley after a dam has been dynamited.  But the relief did not meet my Gulliver-like need for satisfaction. The pain continued.  Other floods, driven by the growling anger of my bowels, followed in rapid succession.  After what seemed eight or ten minutes, I realized that even though the pain continued, I was thoroughly, completely, and absolutely purged but that had my tonsils given away my entire intestinal tract would have turned itself inside out and fluttered behind me in comfort on the night breeze like the tail of a comet."  (Cratis D. Williams, "Tales From Sacred Wind Coming Of Age In Appalachia, pp. 394-395)

 I repeat that section from the book above is absolutely the best description of diarrhea I have ever read, anywhere, any time, from anybody and, in spite of those of you who might be mildly offended, I just had to pass it on for the reading pleasure of those of you who have had similar experiences but lacked the words to describe it.  That description lives up to every story I ever heard told by those I knew who had also experienced croton oil as a laxative.  I can assure you that I am very grateful that croton oil had stopped being marketed in country stores in Appalachia by the time I was a boy. Cratis Williams, the other residents of his boarding house, and several people in neighboring houses who all drank water from the same dug well believed that some prankster had poured croton oil in the well as I stated above.  But the houses in that part of Louisa were fairly close to the Big Sandy River and most of them had outdoor toilets and dug wells. In a typical small town lot, those wells and toilets were probably not often as much as one hundred feet apart which is well within a range capable of causing ground water contamination of the wells from the toilets.  I suspect it is much more likely that the well was contaminated from either a high water table from the river or one of the outdoor toilets.  It is also probable that the combination of river, high water table, and outdoor toilets combined accounted for the contamination of the common well and the widespread bout of diarrhea that night.  

Here are links to several other posts I have written on the blog about Cratis Williams, his life, work, and the book.  Death, Dying, and Funeral Practices In Appalachia;  Traditional Appalachian Children's Games such as Fox and Geese; Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams;  A Short Lesson From Cratis Williams And "Sacred Wind...".  I hope some of you at least enjoy them all. 

Cratis D. Williams and I On Death, Dying, and Funeral Rituals In Appalachia

I am currently reading "Tales From Sacred Wind: Coming of Age in Appalachia" by Cratis D. Williams and I will write about it more fully in a more formal kind of book review when I finish it.  But I have just read some important sections of the book about the deaths of various people in the Sacred Wind community of Lawrence County Kentucky in the book and they prompted some memories of my own which led me to write about that aspect of Williams's observations and to insert some of my own.  I also wrote another post about "Tales From Sacred Wind..." since I posted this one which has also become quite popular with lovers of Appalachia and Appalachian History and folkways. It is about both our experiences as children in traditional Appalachian children's games.  At the time I wrote these two most recent posts about Cratis Williams, I neglected to mention in either of them that I had written a much earlier post called "Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams" which might also be interesting to some of you.  It is a response to a small pamphlet he wrote about his most important early teacher, William H. Vaughan, who was a primary influence in leading Williams to pursue a career in academia which was not common at the time in Eastern Kentucky. 

Cratis D. Williams--Photo by The Williams Family

I have written previously on this blog about these topics but the practices in Appalachia have been ever changing in both my lifetime and that of Cratis Williams who was born about forty years before me and has now been dead for thirty-five years.  Cratis Williams was one of the premier scholars in the field of Appalachian Studies and served in various capacities at Appalachian State University.  The best, and perhaps only book, devoted solely to death, dying, and burial practices in Appalachia is "Death and Dying In Central Appalachia" by James K. Crissman.  But it was published in 1994 and is becoming a bit dated twenty-six years later.  "Tales From Sacred Wind..." was published in 2003 based on manuscripts which Cratis Williams had left unpublished at his death in 1985 and is also a bit dated.  There is a genuine need for a more recent scholarly look at death and dying in the region.  Crissman's book is excellent, well researched, professionally documented, and wide ranging in its coverage and I have cited, quoted, and recommended it for many years.  But the work of Williams in "Tales From Sacred Wind.." provides a brief but needed addition to the work of Crissman.  I hope my own observations from a long life in Appalachia also contribute to the field.  

My primary impetus to write about Williams's observations came about quite serendipitously shortly after I read his section on death practices through an e-mail exchange with a new acquaintance about a cemetery in our native Knott County which both of us have known all our lives.  I grew up near that cemetery and my acquaintance has several relatives buried on it.  In his book, Cratis Williams tells a story about one of his elderly female ancestors who planted two cedar trees beside some graves on a cemetery at Sacred Wind.  The old woman would not allow anyone else to assist her in planting the trees and expressed an old folk belief that the person who plants a cedar tree will die before the tree is fully grown.  As my e-mail exchange progressed with my acquaintance about the Knott County cemetery, he said this: "My grandfather died in (a) mining accident in 1948, and my grandmother later moved to Michigan. Her last visit to this cemetery was in 1974. During that visit, she planted some cedar trees near the grave of my grandfather. She told me  there was an old saying, that if you planted a cedar tree, you would be dead by time the tree was large enough to shade a grave.  My grandmother died five years later, in 1979. The cedar trees are still standing, and are posing problems to headstones due to their roots."  It is always fascinating to me to read, and especially to hear first hand, about any Appalachian folkway or folk tale.

Another friend of mine, both on Facebook and in real life, John D. Shelton, responded to this post after I had posted it on Facebook with this story about planting cedar trees which concurs almost exactly with Cratis Williams's story and the one above from my other acquaintance.  "As a teen, I was going to plant a Cedar Tree my Uncle scolded me saying never plant Cedars, because you will die when they are big enuff to shade your Grave."  Obviously, the folkway or folktale about planting cedars and impending death of the planter has spread across a wide area.  

Williams also discussed several funerals he had attended both as a child and as an adult in Lawrence County including the deaths of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.  He even discusses one funeral which his entire one room school attended for the father of a classmate who had died from "lockjaw", tetanus, after having stepped on a nail while tearing down a house.  He discusses the man having been buried in a shroud or winding cloth only one of which such funerals I have ever known about in my life.  A man who owned property adjoining ours in my childhood home and, in fact, adjoining the cemetery which my acquaintance and I have been discussing was the only person I ever knew who was buried in a shroud or winding cloth and I did not attend that funeral which I regret.  For those of you who have not encountered either term, a shroud or winding cloth is a plain flat, usually white, garment or sheet in which a dead body is wrapped in the casket.  As I understand it, a full sized or larger sheet was used in most cases and the body was placed with the feet a foot or two above a corner with the head a foot or two below the diagonally opposite corner in order to increase the length and folding options of the shroud or winding cloth.  The washed and prepared body was then wrapped in the cloth usually beginning with a fold of the lower corner over the feet up to about the knees.  Then one side was folded over and possibly under the body and the other side was folded in the opposite direction in the same manner.  Usually after a viewing, visitation, or funeral, the top corner was then folded down to cover the face of the deceased.  It is my understanding that in some other countries, especially in the Middle East, this is still the dominant method in use.  In Appalachia, America, and several other countries, the use of white cloth is, of course, a symbol of purity.

Cratis Williams also discussed having known people who had their coffins made while they were alive and storing them in attics, barns, or spare rooms.  In an earlier post on this blog, I wrote about Clabe Mosley, an Old Regular Baptist preacher, whose coffin hung in the attic of my maternal grandparents' house for several years before he actually died.  Williams, in this book, also concurs with my writing that these people who had coffins built while living would sometimes actually get in and test the coffin as I reported that Clabe Mosley had done.  John D. Shelton also relayed this story about a person who had their coffin made well before they died and allowed the coffin to deteriorate in a fence row before his death.  But others, after the death, repaired the coffin and used it to bury the original buyer.  "I had another relative who was poor, so he built his own Casket and painted it, tried it for size, placed it in the Grave Yard fence row, it sat there many years covered in grass and weeds, no one moved it, he died and a Cousin and Preacher dug it out the weeds and cleaned it and made repairs, and a woman from Church made a cloth lining, and he was buried in it. This happened a few years back."

Cratis Williams also discussed grave houses in "Tales From Sacred Wind..." as I did in my post about burial practices in Appalachia in which I also included a few photos none of which are originally shot by me.  One of the funnier stories in the book is about a distant relative of Williams who, after getting drunk at a square dance, decided to crawl in the grave house of an ancestor to avoid walking home in the rain.  The man was awakened and terrified by an old sow and her pigs when the sow decided to use the grave house to scratch an itch.  Williams's relative thought he was experiencing a "hain't" and left the cemetery in terror until he realized it was only a sow.  I know of a couple of grave houses on a small cemetery near the Johnson/Lawrence county line on US 23 which are clearly visible from the divided highway.  I also know a few in Lawrence and Elliott counties in an are near where Williams grew up.

Williams also discussed, and his posthumous editors provided several photos of his grandfather David O. Williams who had a large stone, homemade mausoleum, or grave house built to hold the bodies of himself and his wife.  I know of one hand cut stone grave house of a similar nature at a small cemetery between Mousie and Lackey in Knott County Kentucky which is unmarked and said to contain the body of one of the first white settlers to that area.  That stone grave house has several cracks and openings where the stones have settled over the years and I have to admit that I have been tempted to return with a flashlight to see what is visible through the cracks.  I also know of a similarly constructed grave house in a small cemetery near Morgan County High School in West Liberty, Kentucky which also shows signs of settling and age. John D. Shelton, whom I mentioned above, also reported this anecdote about a grave house he had seen: "There is one Grave Yard in Clinton County (Kentucky) which has a little House on one Grave about four feet tall that has Windows in it, I guess they wanted the Loved one to get Sun and be able to see out."

I am thoroughly enjoying reading this book and regret that I was never able to meet Cratis Williams in the flesh.  He is funny, informative, at times risque, and well worth reading.  "Tales From Sacred Wind..." is a book which ever student of Appalachian Studies should place on their "Must Read List". 


 

Some Random Thoughts On Heroes In Appalachia

Quite a while ago, I wrote the post "A Gallery Of Appalachian Heroes" with every intention of putting together a series of posts about people I consider to be heroes within the Appalachian Studies field or who should be considered heroes by most Appalachian people.  I wrote one of those posts about Jim Ferrell, a personal hero of mine but generally unknown outside Logan County West Virginia and Cleveland, Ohio.  I have also written a few posts about single or limited aspects of a few other people I put on my list of Appalachian Heroes such as Loyal Jones, Albert Stewart, and Cratis Williams.  I have mentioned the names of a few others in passing.  But, the bottom line is I have spent too much time writing posts, when I had the time, about other aspects of Appalachia and Appalachian Studies which also matter to me.  I need to get back to that series of posts and I consider this piece to be a warm up before I begin to actually do the posts about that series of individuals. 

I would like to delineate a list of characteristics of heroes, both Appalachian and non-Appalachian, which may not be universal but any list of heroes would be comprised of individuals who possess most of those key characteristics.  I have no intentions of researching these qualities not because I think I know all the qualities of a hero.  But, rather, I think I know enough about the list of people I intend to write about that I am capable of considering the qualities each exhibited in their lives, both personal and professional, to enable me to comprise a collective list of heroic characteristics.  By doing this, I hope to be able to define, both for myself and my readers, exactly what I believe constitutes heroism and a heroic personality. 

• Heroes nearly always do the right thing even if it may not be in their own personal interests.  I have known several heroes who placed their own lives and well being in jeopardy in order to act in ways which were in the common interests of the groups to which they belonged.
• Most heroes are not perfect and many of them exhibit clearly delineated flaws.  I do not wish to espouse or defend the theory of the "fatal flaw" of classic tragedy.  But I have known several heroes whose personalities often clashed with those of many of the people around them.  I have known a few genuine heroes who were simultaneously heroic and egocentric.
• Many heroes are single minded, especially in support of a cause, to a degree that is sometimes detrimental to either themselves or the people around them.
• At times, I have seen a few genuine heroes become petty and a bit vindictive.  Heroes sometimes see too far into the future to the degree that their vision of a perfect world does not coincide with the visions of the general public they represent. Two people I have known well and will not name, both of whom I consider to have been Appalachian Heroes, had a common dislike for each other.  Two of the greatest activists in Appalachian history, one of whom I knew well and one I only met once, began a career together and soon parted ways because of this flaw.
• At least one of the people on my list of heroes greatly limited their potential and achievements through the use and abuse of alcohol and drugs.  Yet this person achieved a reasonable amount of well deserved fame and a devoted following of equally committed and intelligent people in their field.  But the body of life's work this person achieved was seriously abbreviated by the time spent under the influence. 
• Some heroes are just not very likable.  I have known more than one person who achieved heroic results yet had a small and restricted number of friends and admirers.  Whether we tend to believe in the concept of "the burden of greatness" or not, the presence of a commitment, a dream, or a vision can often make a person less than desirable as company.  When we become driven, we also often drive away those around us.  One of my personal heroes had a very talented wife who was often ignored in the home.  Yet, in her own right, she was popular, talented, and successful in her field. 
• Many heroes have a tendency to overlook their own shortcomings in the mistaken belief that the rest of the world around them must know how important the hero and his/her work is. 

At this point, it might seem that I have a strange and unpopular list of heroes.  But most of my heroes have all the standard qualities that one tends to find in books about greatness and those who exhibit it.  They are intelligent, committed, driven, honest, ethical, visionary, altruistic, zealous, and tireless.  But, the bottom line, for most of my heroes, is that they are also human. Over the next few weeks, I will introduce my readers to a group of people I consider to be among the most important to have lived in Appalachia.  I have known some of them.  Many of them I only wish I had known.  But in each case, their lives and their work influenced me and helped me to become the person I am today. And, in each case, they also performed some important work in Appalachia or Appalachian Studies which also has affected the lives of numerous others.