Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [17]
We were kind of isolated up on Butcher Holler. Sometimes I’d go down and help out my aunt, Nory Butcher, who had twelve kids of her own. She’s always been for me—giving me little knickknacks whenever I visit her. But lots of times in the winter, when the snows came, we’d go two or three weeks without seeing a soul. You got pretty close to your family that way. Everybody had their jobs to do. Mommy would never let me iron because I’ve got no patience for it. I’m like a bull in a china shop. I’m an Aries, wanting to ram my way through, and you can’t do that with an old-fashioned iron on a wood stove.
They tried me at pouring coffee, but I wasn’t even good at that. Daddy would say, “Here comes that heifer with the coffee,” and I’d be going bump-bump-bump, spilling hot coffee over everybody. Oh, it was a mess. I tried being a waitress one time, and I was terrible. I’m just plain clumsy.
Mommy was the one who would spank us in the family. One time they made me sleep in the press—remember, that’s our word for “closet.” It was a dark place under the stairs, and I screamed and hollered because I was afraid of the dark. Even today, I never go to sleep without a light on in the bathroom.
I slept on the floor on a pallet until I was around nine years old. Then Mommy figured I shouldn’t be sleeping with all my brothers, so they bought me a regular bed and put it in their room. Daddy was gone most of the night at the mine, so I slept in their room until I got married and moved out.
It was rough times back then. I can remember winters when all we ate for weeks was bread dipped in gravy made of brown flour and water, and that was supper. God only knows how we survived. Every now and then we’d have “coal miner’s steak”—bologna.
We never had ice cream. We’d get snow in the winter and put milk and sugar on it. That was the closest we got. But we usually had good vegetables from the garden in the summer, plus all the greens Mommy would gather from the hillside. With her Indian ways, she could walk that ridge and come back with a potful of greens that she’d cook up. To this day, I prefer vegetables to meat.
Our main meat was from the hog. I never had beef until after I got married and was eating at Doolittle’s place. I never saw red meat like that. I was afraid to eat it, but I got used to it. We also had chickens. Really, we’d eat whatever we could. Sometimes at night, while Daddy was at the mines, Mommy and Junior would go possum hunting. They’d hold a flashlight and draw the possum. Then the dog would chase the possum up a tree. Junior would climb the tree and shake the possum to the ground again and that dog would hold it, not tearing him up or nothing, until we put it in a sack. Possum meat has a real good taste. Squirrels, too. That was a real treat—squirrel meat with gravy and biscuits. Nowadays you don’t hardly see a squirrel in the Appalachian Mountains. I think we ate ’em all during the Depression.
We never wasted anything in our household. When we had a chicken, Mommy would cut off the toenails and cut up the feet for the dumplings. The kids would fight over the head because the brains tasted good. The same thing for a hog. We’d cook the intestines, the feet, everything.
When we finished eating, Daddy would take part of the entrails and mix ’em with a can of lye and cook it all in a great pan on the outdoors fire. He’d make lye soap that way, it was the only soap we had. Mommy would take it and do the wash outdoors all day on Monday and hang our clothes on washlines strung across the holler.
The Depression