Folk-Lore in Kentucky
The first and second members of the firm of Mencken, Nathan, and God must have shouted for joy when they first opened—as doubtless they have opened—the compilation lately made of nearly four thousand “Kentucky Superstitions,” in the volume of that name. The American Credo had only about an eighth as many vulgar errors, for all its satiric malice. And satiric malice can find nothing in the national mind more primitive than some of the beliefs here set forth. For instance: “To cure a child of thrush, let a stallion snort into the child’s face”; “Gunpowder is given to women to facilitate childbirth”; “Catch a toad, put it under a rock, and let it starve to death. After it has dried thoroughly, beat it into a powder, and sprinkle this powder on the person whom you wish to fall in love with you.” Doctrines like these recall medieval medicine, aboriginal witchcraft, the jungle, and the cave. And yet side by side with them are recent absurdities as new as the news: “Billikins bring good luck”; “It is well for an aviator to wear a lady’s stocking around his neck”; “It brings bad luck for the last of three people to use a lighted match in smoking.” The idol has become a Billikin, and the knight wearing his lady’s favour has taken to the air, but these are superficial accidents. Otherwise it looks as if the folk changes not much more rapidly than mountains grow.
The compilers of Kentucky Superstitions have in a fashion perfectly impartial printed all they have found (with some expurgations) without distinction of age or novelty, universality or locality. “The good die young,” according to one of the citations; and “No news is a sign of good news.” Such notions belong to folk-lore everywhere. Others among these Kentucky superstitions are more specific: “If once you get your feet wet in the Cumberland River, you will always return to the Kentucky Mountains”; “It is firmly believed by the people of Leslie County, a mountain county, that President McKinley’s name was written by spiders in their webs as a prophecy of his death.” There are ceremonies for May Day that point to the rites of Flora: “To become beautiful, wash your face in dew before sunrise on May Day”; there are quaint fancies about Christmas old-style, such as that “At midnight of Old Christmas the elders bloom”; there are sortileges and incantations, divinations and auguries, weather wisdom, dream-lore, signs of the moon and of the zodiac, witchcraft and hoodoos. The most numerous of all are concerned with animals, birds, insects, and reptiles; then follow cures and preventives, divinations concerning love (most of them practised by girls), weather, household and domestic life, the human body, in the order named.
The total result is an amazing palimpsest, as if each new generation had written its lore upon an original manuscript, partly erasing the old symbols and partly employing them to make new symbols; altering the old text or adapting it; adding new illustrations or comments; bringing in fresh material that flatly contradicts the old. One superstition says that “If you take the next to the last biscuit on the plate, you will never marry”; but another, that in such an event “you will have a handsome husband.” A merely mnemonic change may alter the whole point of a saying: “A whistling woman or a crowing hen never comes to a very good end”; but “A woman that whistles, or a hen that crows, has her way wherever she goes.” Most of these superstitions are, of course, held by few people, and many by no one very seriously. The more highly educated sections of the state, while represented by a large number of superstitions, report rather trivial ones, for the reason that they are of little importance in the life of these sections. The mountain whites and the Negroes cherish a larger number of superstitions, which are more barbarous but obviously more authentic than those of the lowland whites. “If you drink water out of a stranger’s shoe,” they say in the mountains, “your sore throat will be cured.” This is not so casual an invention as the notion that “It brings bad luck to see an empty street-car.” “If you curse God and shoot at the sun, you will be able to see the wind,” according to mountain doctrine: according to the Louisville Negroes, “If you cut your eyelashes, you will be able to see the wind.”
Such a compilation is genuinely valuable to the anthropologist, the folk-lorist, the historian, the teacher, but to none of them more so than to the student of imaginative literature or, indeed, to the creative writer. Every folk-superstition alluded to in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is here recorded. Other superstitions in this collection it is easy to remember from various novels and tales of Kentucky life. And yet to read the book with such matters in mind is to realize how little the riches of our folk-lore have been utilized. Consider Thomas Hardy, working away like a profound mole among the buried lores and memories of Wessex, and then consider the so much more trivial, the sentimental use that literary Kentuckians have made of their materials. The ordinary attitude of American men of letters is that inasmuch as we have a briefer history on this continent than Europeans have on theirs, there is hardly an excuse for investigating our own folk-lore and employing it. But, of course, the folk here is as old as the folk there, in any but a political or geographical, and therefore superficial, sense. It has, too, customs and superstitions developed on the native soil. Here is an extraordinarily important field for the imaginative writer to plough. We write of our smart sets, tinkling and cosmopolitan; we write of our Indians and Negroes, looking for essentially native material there; but between these extremes, except in the highly circumscribed “local colour” stories, we have done little to sound the life and opinions of our folk as regards anything deeper than their outward manners. In Kentucky Superstitions we have a document to help us in going deeper. There is the germ of such another story as Hardy’s The Withered Arm in the Kentucky belief that “You may remove birth-marks by rubbing them with the hand of a corpse.” There are poetry and drama both in one superstition from the mountains: “A maid says: ‘If I’m not going to marry anybody, knock, Death, knock!’ If she hears nothing, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry a young man, whistle, bird whistle!’ If her appeal remains unanswered, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry an old man, hoot, owl, hoot!’”