Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [18]
I remember one time I was coming home from Aunt Tillie’s after dark. Mommy used to borrow a Western book from her every night. I saw this thing on the porch, and I thought it was a broom that you sweep off the porch and garden with. I wondered why Mommy left it on the porch.
My brother Herman stepped over it, but I bent down to look at it. Copperheads have these diamond-shaped blocks, but it was so dark I couldn’t see it. I yelled to Herman, “I don’t know what it is, but it sure smells like cucumbers.” At that, Mommy gave out a big yell from the other side of the house. I just fell backwards. She came running out with a double-bladed ax and started whacking. Daddy came out with a light. She cut that copperhead into six or seven pieces. The head was about eight inches long—and it jumped for fifteen minutes. Daddy was so upset, he kept yelling, “Get away from that head—it could still bite you.”
But Daddy had his own pet—a black snake that used to crawl up from the cracks in the floor. Every time we had dinner, Daddy would feed it. When Jay Lee was born, that black snake crawled right into the crib and curled up with Jay Lee. Daddy said that black snakes are harmless, which they are, but when he went to the mines, Mommy killed it with an ax because she just couldn’t stand the idea of a snake being in bed with Jay Lee. Daddy was mighty mad ’cause he missed his black snake.
We didn’t have much to celebrate during the Depression, but we tried: Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas. One of the biggest holidays for mountain people is called “May Meeting,” which is really “Decoration Day” at the end of May, when everybody comes back to honor the dead. Today, with people moved up North to work in the factories, you get terrible traffic jams on “Hillbilly Highway”—Interstate 75—before Decoration Day. In those days, poor and with no cars or nothing, we’d get fifteen or twenty families in Butcher Holler to the little graveyard on the hill.
We would spend days fixing up the grounds, cutting the grass, cleaning the markers, putting in spring flowers. We’re kind of sentimental about graveyards. We put them in high places, facing the eastern sun. Whenever I go back to Butcher Holler, Doolittle drives me up the steep hill to Daddy’s grave. Usually, I bring plastic yellow flowers, because Daddy was colorblind and yellow was the only color he could tell. The plastic is so Daddy will have something nice that won’t fade too fast.
The holidays were special times. Most of the time we just tried to stay alive and take care of the babies. That was my main job. I’d sit on the porch swing and rock them babies and sing at the top of my voice.
Daddy would say, “If you don’t shut up, everyone in the holler will hear you.” But I’d keep right on. I’d sing the old hymns like “Amazing Grace” or “This Little Light of Mine” or “We Read About an Old-Time Preacher Who Preached the Gospel Free,” and stuff like that, as loud as could be. I didn’t care. And I’m still like that. I love to get up and sing at the top of my lungs. Just a show-off, I suppose.
That’s how I got my first audience—singing on the porch. Daddy had two cousins who made moonshine up on the ridge, Willie Webb and Lee Dollarhide. Sometimes they got in trouble with the law and got themselves sent away, but they always went back to moonshining again. I remember one time they were hiding out, living in our attic. That’s when Mommy was about to have another baby. They heard the commotion and came down to see the new baby. When they saw it was a boy, they insisted we name it Willie Lee, one name for each of ’em. (He’s the one we call Jay Lee nowadays.) He was just a little booger, around three pounds and four ounces, and he probably should have gone into one of those incubators down at the hospital. But Daddy made a tiny crib and