How one woman lost her label arriving at school on a different bus

Did you ever feel so different from your peers it affected your life? Were you or your kids made fun of at school, workplace, at church?

In this two-part post I’m reviewing the highlights of what is to me a fascinating book because for the past 45 years my feet have also straddled several worlds, as did those of author and sociologist Peggy Ann Shifflett growing up in mountain gap very near my home called Hopkins Gap, at the edge of Little North Mountain.

To be sure, her “gap” and straddled world is different than mine but we can usually learn something about ourselves when we delve into the experiences and culture of others.

A church friend, Beverly Silver gave me the book as she was thinning out her bookshelves. It is titled The Red Flannel Rag: Memories of an Appalachian Childhood, a self-published book in 2004. The front of the book has a photo of a typical Virginia home from the 1930s or 40s which grabbed me immediately. Had I seen that home?

Shifflett is a retired professor of sociology at Radford University in southern Virginia and former chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology there. For anyone interested in or living in western or southern Virginia, and parts of West Virginia, Kentucky or Tennessee, it is fascinating covering folk medicine, moonshining, education, dating and marriage, childhood, hog butchering, employment, hunting, superstitions, and much more. These were days of almost “living off the land” as hunters, gatherers of wild berries, gardeners, farmers, and wood cutters.

When I got to the chapter on hog butchering—which my husband-to-be introduced me to while we were barely engaged (and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to experience neat “olden” days still lived or quietly go puke somewhere), I was hooked. Shifflett’s book is memoir, family history, and Appalachian culture retrospective written by a woman with her doctorate, but with occasional extra words left in or completely missing, typical of a book not published by a major publisher. (As a book editor, these things just jump out.)

But this rich book of customs, folklore, “granny healers,” and growing up female in a family clan led by moonshine makers and runners, where any questions asked about the “why” of activities or behaviors received the response “that’s just the way it is,” helps me explore my own journey with this adopted Virginia culture. Reading that many families kept a fire burning year round—usually in a kitchen cookstove to keep warm water available helps me to understand why my neighbor’s woodstove still often burns into early summer and starts up again in late August—even though they and other homes have long since had hot water available at the turn of a handle.

Moonshining

If you want to know the particulars of making moonshine, this book pretty well covers it, short of a recipe, including why some brews could be lethal when the “mash” for the moonshine was run through car radiators or mixed in zinc-lined wash tubs. She describes how some moonshine makers kept their children out of school to help brew the stuff or to watch the roads for “revenuers” (the agents constantly seeking out the makers to arrest them), or the children watched from open windows at school for any strange or suspicious cars coming into the Gap. They’d leap out the schoolhouse window to dash on a secret path to tell their dads or uncles that a revenuer was on the way. And teachers, not having other recourse, would literally look the other way. Shifflett’s own father spent two terms in prison for his part in making and selling moonshine over the years. It was the way many families made a decent income.

My father-in-law plowing his garden.

Hog butchering

I was never close to any relatives ever involved in moonshine trade, but Shifflett’s description of hog butchering brought back memories of several times I helped butcher with my husband’s family and friends. My father-in-law, Hershal Davis, had a small patch of land where he raised a hog or two every year on the edge of Bridgewater, Va. But my first day of helping—including cutting up the “wiggly” portion of hog fat typically assigned to a newbie according to Shifflett—and wanting to plug my ears when the shots killing the hogs went off—were dead on accurate to my experience. I did learn to appreciate how every part of the hog is used up in this old fashioned processing system, but I was not sad when Hershal gave up butchering and I no longer had to help. I didn’t mind though when my husband brought home some fresh prime tenderloin “fish” pieces or a aluminum foil pan filled with ponhoss for a day’s work when he helped on hog butchering day at the homes of friends.

Dating

I loved Shifflett’s description of how the whole family would go into Harrisonburg to shop on Saturdays and the young people would meet up and pair off for dates or courting, and then ride back home with their families. Kids got married as young as 14 – 16 with many babies born but not necessarily all reared (dying in infancy, or in desperately poor families, raised by others). Shifflett’s own brother at 20 married a bride 14 years of age, and “Mom finished raising Hilda and taught her how to cook, clean, preserve food, bake bread, and do all the things a mountain wife did for her family.” (p. 21). Years later when Shifflett’s mother was on her deathbed and all of the family came to say their goodbyes, Hilda had been called away to care for her own father. But they were so close that when Hilda returned to her mother-in-law’s bed, the older woman finally let go and passed on.

Infant mortality

So many babies died in fact that Shifflett spends several portions of the book talking about “cry baby lane” where a woman’s still born babies were said to be buried. Still born infants were usually buried without a name or bonding with family and consequently the superstition was that these infants could be heard crying for their families when conditions were right in the gap. She talks about other children known as “field rabbits” because they pretty much fended for themselves wandering from farm to farm for whoever would feed them a meal, offer a place to sleep, and show a little love. Children living like that is unimaginable for most of us but not unusual in earlier times or in many places of the world even today.

Mountain medicine/superstitions

Shifflett’s area of professional research and expertise is Appalachian folk lore and she includes all kinds of healing arts, from medical “granny women” to whom many would go for medical needs to the “red flannel rag” to heal pneumonia or protect from colds and sore throats. In my family, growing up in Indiana, we did not wear red flannel rags to school but

What my mom put on us when we had a cold or sore throat.

I remember many a night when Mom would “Vicks” us—applying the commercial healing ointment by rubbing it into our necks and then tying one of Dad’s red handkerchiefs around it out of the belief that the cloth would not only keep Vicks from getting on our jammies but help it kind of “steam into” our necks—not so far off from the theory behind the red flannel rag, huh? One reviewer, Becky Mushko, notes Shifflett’s “red flannel rag” also appears in the book as a filter to cleanse the impurities from moonshine whiskey, to heal pneumonia, and tied to the mane of a mule to prevent a local “witch” from causing the animal to balk.

Work

As people began to give up moonshining for a major income source apart from their hunting and gathering, many began to build chicken houses to supplement their income, or take jobs in the poultry or sewing factories in or around Harrisonburg when they quit school or graduated. Shifflett notes as this shift to factory work occurred, the new employees carefully wrangled to be able to take off extended time during hunting season as part of the condition of their employment, which now helps me understand the widespread custom of kids not attending school the first day or week of hunting season and everyone being pretty much ok with that.

Education

When some of my own daughters were in middle school, they first ran into the tremendous cultural gap still felt in pockets of our Shenandoah Valley. Shifflett’s own feeling of being different came on the first cold day of school in first grade when her cousin had to wear a red flannel rag to school. When classmates asked why he was wearing it he answered that his mother put it on him because it was cold and it would help him from getting a sore throat or cold. Everyone laughed. “Virgil was silenced and humiliated, but he continued to wear his red flannel rag day after day because he trusted his mother’s opinion over the teacher’s” that colds came from germs. He “continued to tell the truth when his way of life was questioned …. And dropped out of school in the third grade.” (p. 9)

This is the tragedy of kids anywhere feeling so different from their peers they aren’t willing to put up with it, or fight back against this kind of prejudice. Early on, Shifflett decided she would never go to school with a red flannel rag around her neck. If her mother insisted she wear it, she took it off on the school bus before she got to school. Shifflett was born and raised in Appalachia, but went to school with “mainstream American children just a few miles outside that community.” (p. 9)

When three schools consolidated as she began high school, she got on her uncle’s old bus to ride out of the gap to Mt. Clinton Elementary school, and then transferred to another to ride to her new high school, Turner Ashby (where my husband went).

The Turner Ashby High School of the 70s (now replaced).

“I didn’t know it yet, but I immediately lost my label ‘gapper’ and didn’t realize it until much later,” (p. 250). After doing much the same quality of school work as she had done earlier, all of a sudden she had three A’s and two B’s. She thought there had to be a mistake. She was on the honor roll for the first time in her life. Kids on the honor roll got their name in the school paper. Kids thought she was smart. “When I was identified by the school bus as a ‘gapper,’ I earned C’s and D’s.” Now the teachers and the system regarded her without that label and rewarded her differently. Shifflett was at first scared, not knowing how much it would change the trajectory of her life. She went on to earn her doctorate but has always kept her feet in both worlds by becoming a professor of sociology just two hours away, and going home for holidays, special occasions, wedding and funerals and enjoying the stories, memories, and tales from her youth.

Next time I’ll tackle the interesting dynamics of the faith environment Shifflett grew up in where the closest church they attended was a small mountain Mennonite church, in whose cemetery many of her family and her parents are buried today.

Did you ever feel so different from your peers it affected your life path? How did you cope? Have you seen this with others?

You can read more of Dr. Shifflett’s work with links to two other books she’s written here.

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