15 minute read
Weaving Her History
Children's author, Cordellya Smith, MAE ’15, shares with us how family heritage influenced her writing. The following feature is her account.
My story begins back when the first immigrants who came to the U.S. were from Ireland and Scotland. They came to leave hardships at home and became founders of the American Dream. During the American Revolution, they volunteered to fight with the hope of creating a new country free from British rule. When the war ended, the new United States of America gave some of these soldiers war bounty land grants as payment for their service on “unclaimed” land in the Appalachian Mountains. Other soldiers used their military pensions to buy large tracts of the “unclaimed” land. This resulted in a migration of Irish and Scottish settlers into the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky after the Revolutionary War.
I can imagine when those soldier settlers arrived at their new properties and discovered the land was not actually “unclaimed.” The Cherokee were already living there. As a result, they began living, sometimes more peacefully than others, beside Cherokee neighbors.
When their children and grandchildren grew up, many of them elected to take Cherokee husbands or wives from neighboring families. Margaret Verble, a Cherokee author who lives in Kentucky, once said, “I think in general the Cherokees adopted a strategy early on of marrying into white people on the theory that whites would be less likely to kill their own children in the future.”
This was exactly the order of events for Private John Scalf, Jr. He served in the 10th North Carolina Regiment for three years during the American Revolution and settled his new land in an area with Cherokee neighbors. Upon reaching adulthood, his son, Ira Scalf, married Roseannah Gibson, who was Cherokee. They were my great-great-great-great grandparents.
Unfortunately, sometimes the children of these intermarriages weren't fully accepted into the communities in which they lived. They were called melungeons. Today, there is much debate among scholars about what exactly "melungeon" means. I was taught that people treated them differently and were often racist against them. They were even regularly asked if they were mixed with Indian or mixed with African. (Not that either answer made such inquisitors more welcoming.) There were places they weren't welcome, storefronts they were asked not to enter from the front, and jobs they couldn't do just because of their parentage.
This is the legacy into which my great-grandfather, Dexter Smith, was born. His mother, Amanda, was a granddaughter of Ira Scalf and Roseannah Gibson. She carried more than the proof of her parentage in her skin. She was proud to be part Cherokee. She shared the customs and stories of her family with her children. She also shared the heartaches and prejudices that she had seen and endured as a child. Amanda and her husband, James Smith, lived on a farm in the mountains of Clay County, Kentucky, and had nine children. When she died in childbirth, her son, Dexter, was only twelve years old. But, despite his youth, he remembered her teachings and her stories for the remainder of his long life.
Because Dexter and his brothers and sisters were from a poor farm family in the mountains of Kentucky, it was more important for them to work the farm, take care of the animals and crops, and do any odd jobs they could find to earn money than it was to walk to school. For that reason, Dexter Smith, who I knew my entire life simply as Papaw Smith, never learned to read or write.
Papaw Smith married Cordia Mills, and together they had and raised seven children on a farm in Clay County in just the same way they were raised. They worked from sun up to sun down just so their family could survive. They raised and slaughtered their own hogs, grew and preserved their own fruits and vegetables, and made nearly everything they needed to live. Their children attended a little one-room school house wearing overalls and feedsack dresses when they weren’t needed on the farm and could do so, which was not often. It was this very limited education that allowed one of their daughters, Bernice Smith, to learn to recognize her name in print. She couldn’t actually read the words around it, but she could recognize her name, and that was progress.
Bernice married a man named Earl Chadwell from a farm family even larger than hers (he was one of twelve children), and together they moved to Laurel County, Kentucky. They had ten children, of whom my mother is the eldest. Like the generations before them, they raised their family on a farm, always struggling to make sure they put enough away in the spring and summer to get the family through the cold of winter. Unlike the generations before her, my mother was able to attend school long enough to learn to read. She stopped attending school to help take care of her younger brothers and sisters at home after finishing sixth grade.
This is the family into which I was born. My grandparents and great-grandparents for generations lived on farms in the mountains of Kentucky. They couldn't read their own names in print; they signed official documents with an "X" and witnesses. They weren’t rich, but they were happy. They were surrounded by loved ones. They were blessed with a wealth of oral stories passed down from one generation to the next. They were gifted with their hands, demonstrating talents in woodworking and sewing. Many of them could play any instrument placed before them. And they were hard workers.
During my childhood, my parents divorced. My mother, brother, and I moved to the family farm in Clay County and lived with my elderly great-grandfather for a time in the small house he built himself and in which he and Cordia had raised their children. The things I remember most about it were the outdoor toilet around the side of the mountain out back, the wood stove we used for heat, and the great big porch where everyone gathered in the evenings to talk, sing, and listen to stories.
Papaw Smith was an excellent st or y te ll er . We were blessed because he lived to be ninety-three years old. Five generations of our family heard his stories in person. He told stories about his lived experiences as a young man during World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the many conflicts that happened thereafter. He told stories about his family and the creeks and the hollers in the community around him. He was also uniquely creative in his dealings with children.
At that time, my little brother, Matthew, and I fancied ourselves explorers. We liked to set out in the woods and see where we ended up. On more than one occasion this worked out badly for us. For instance, the day we built a lean-to in the woods out of sticks and topped it with poison ivy vines to help conceal it. (That was also the day we learned to identify poison ivy plants on sight, by the way.)
Papaw Smith was afraid our adventures would lead us over the side of a mountain, into a copperhead’s nest or a bear’s den, or into a creek that would drag us underwater. One day while we were sitting on the porch listening to his stories, Papaw told us the tale of the Bogeyman.
Papaw’s hope was that we would be scared of the Bogeyman and stay around the house and barn, where we would be safe. But, like all true explorers, we were willing to accept some risk. One morning after breakfast, we went outside. Leaving the main yard, we started walking down the mountain toward the creek. Just as we were about to pass the little smokehouse, we saw him. We saw the Bogeyman! He was leaning around the corner of the smokehouse, looking at us. Even if you try, you cannot imagine two children running faster than we did back up the mountain to the house. And we never ventured outside the main yard again without a grown-up with us who could protect us from the Bogeyman.
Years later, when we were grown, Papaw would tell the story of how he created the Bogeyman and laugh and slap his knee. He had turned a very dirty old mop upside down, nailed a thin strip of wood across the handle on it, and hung his old black coat across that wood. Then he attached this monster to the back of the smokehouse so it would look like it was peeping out from the shadows next to the woods and let it do its work.
Papaw Smith passed away in 2006 at the age of 93. But it is not only Papaw’s Bogeyman that has stayed with me all these years. The stories he shared that I loved best were the animal stories he passed on from his mother. My oldest son was fortunate enough to spend time with Papaw Smith and hear his stories in person. But, when my daughter was born, I knew I needed a way to share the stories Papaw had told us so that she would remember them.
Weaving a few of them into her favorite story, I created Kawoni’s Journey Across the Mountain: A Cherokee Little Red Riding Hood. The most important story it includes is that of how the first fire originally came to the Cherokee. In Kawoni’s Journey, Kawoni meets Kanane’ski Amai’yehi, who is the great water spider that carried the first fire across the great water to the Cherokee. My second book, Otter’s Coat: The Real Reason Turtle Raced Rabbit, weaves another of Papaw Smith’s stories into the classic tale of the Tortoise and the Hare. It is the first of a series of Cherolachian tales I am writing and hope to publish in the next few years to share my version of Papaw’s stories.
Why "Cherolachian"? I cannot say I am Cherokee because I am mixed. I will not say I am melungeon because that is a repugnant, racist word. As such, I was at a loss for how to describe myself and people like me in Appalachia. We were different. There simply was no word for us.
As I grew older, I realized there were many, many others like me in Eastern Kentucky who had a Cherokee great-greatgrandparent somewhere in their family tree. I invented the word "Cherolachian" to describe those with mixed Cherokee heritage in the Appalachian area, many of whom are mixed with either Scots/Irish (like me), English, or African. It is a good word with no negative connotations. For me, it means that we carry the traditions of both cultures.
As a child, I loved Papaw Smith's stories. But he also taught my brother and I lessons about how to live life. Looking back, I attribute that partially to his own lifestyle as a farmer and partially to Cherokee values that were passed down over generations. For instance, work the soil with your hands, plant more than you need, share with other people and animals, and never take or use the last of anything. Papaw Smith went ginseng hunting every year. He would look for places in the forest where there were at least three ginseng plants growing, and he would dig up no more than two. In this way, he always left one plant to grow and drop berries so that it could make more for the next generation. We now have a small farm in Carrollton, Georgia. My family and I spend a lot of time working outside. We have apples, pears, figs, paw paws, cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and aronia berries. We also grow a vegetable garden every year. We preserve and store food. We sell extra produce to those in the area at times. At others, we give it away to those who will come help pick it. Since most people no longer know what a paw paw is, we give those away when they are ripe to anyone who wants to try one. We also leave wheelbarrows full of overripe or culled fruits at the edge of the woods for the wildlife. The deer in our area especially love apples, peaches, and pears.
As a Cherolachian, the food I grew up with depended heavily on our gardens and what else was available locally. Cherolachian foods reflect the mix of cultures represented in them. My favorite foods are soup beans, fried cornbread, and polk salat. I also have what I consider an excellent family recipe for grape-blackberry dumplings. What I learned in childhood is that the best foods are those we grow ourselves.
Some of the things I carry that I learned from Papaw Smith through his mother's teachings are a love of the land, an emphasis on the importance of our ancestors, and a love of stories. I no longer have my "mountain talk" Cherolachian accent, though I really wish I did. But the most important thing I learned from him is that we must always be grateful. I am grateful for my family living today, those who came before me, and my many blessings.
Today, I am a wife and mother of four. A first-generation college student, I now hold three college degrees and am working on my fourth. I love learning. My first Master of Arts was from University of the Cumberlands’ Reading and Writing Specialist program. I selected that program for many reasons. One of them was that University of the Cumberlands offers the best education possible at the most reasonable price point in Southeastern Kentucky. Another, no less important consideration was my memory of how hard it was for me to learn to read as a child. Until late elementary school, reading for me was a constant struggle. It was humiliating when teachers called on me to read aloud in class and I stumbled over the words. Sometimes it felt like there were more words I didn’t know than those I knew. By the time I sounded each one out, nothing I had read made any sense. The teacher who changed this for me was Mrs. Hacker at Bush Elementary. She just kept trying until I not only learned to read, but learned to love reading. There are no accolades high enough to acknowledge the difference she made in my life. Finally, the faculty at University of the Cumberlands is extraordinary. I am truly grateful for the contributions Dr. Bobbie Huff, ’89, MAEd ’91, EdD ’17, Dr. Jennifer Bohman Chambers, and Dr. Joyce Bowling, EdD ’13 have made in my journey. I taught reading and writing for seven years, but I am no longer in the classroom teaching. My hope is that my writing will help children learn to love stories and reading. A love of reading can change a life.
I currently work as a degree auditor for the University of West Georgia. I try to help as many students as possible get on track for graduation and earn their degrees. Education is invaluable. It is the only way to end generational poverty. Helping one student graduate from college doesn't really help one student, it helps multiple generations of that family for years to come.
To all those who have helped me on my life’sj ou rn ey , wado, which is "thank you" in Cherokee.
Grape Blackberry Dumplings
Ingredients:
1 1/2 Quarts Unsweetened Grape Juice
1 Quart Blackberries
2 Cups Possum Grapes (Muscadines)
1 1/2 Cups Sugar
3 Cups All Purpose Flour
1 TSP Baking Powder
1 TSP Melted Shortening
1 Cup Water
Instructions: Bring grape juice, blackberries, grapes, and one cup of sugar to boil. If you don't have possum grapes (muscadines), you can substitute any red grapes.
In a seperate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt, and remaining sugar. Add shortening to the dry ingredients and mix with a fork until uniform. Then add one cup of water and mix to form a ball of dough.
When the juice and fruit have started to boil, pinch off bits of dough and drop them into the pot. When the top is covered, stir so that all the floating dough is swelling bigger than a teaspoon, use the side of your spoon to cut it in half so it can cook all the way through.
Cook twenty minutes once all dough has been added to the pot.
Enjoy warm! This can also be served with ice cream or over biscuits.
