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In Search of Ed Haley 29

14 Friday Dec 2012

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     Roxie wasn’t sure how Ed learned to play the fiddle.

     “It was just gifted to him, I guess. Lord man, he could make that fiddle talk. He had one song he sung, I’d give anything in the world to know it. If I could remember now… Man, it was really pretty. People’d ask him every now and then to play it but man listen, he got mad if you asked him to play again something when he got tired. He’d get tired. He’d say, ‘I ain’t no steam engine.’ He’d jump up man and maybe get a knife man and go to quarreling with a knife. Yes, sir. He told me, he’d say, ‘I ain’t no steam engine.’ And your mommy man she stayed with us some.”

     I asked Roxie if she remembered Haley playing at any dances on Harts Creek and she said, “Well, I don’t know. We never had many dances around here nowhere. He always played away from here. He went several places — big dances, you know — dance halls and played. We had a few little dances here, but he never was at them.”

     Roxie remembered Ed playing “Blackberry Blossom”.

     “Yeah, Lord he could play that, and he could play anything on earth you named to him. Anything. He played the ‘Brownlow’s Dream’. I could pick it on a banjo when I was young, but I ain’t picked none in a long time, honey.”

     I offered Roxie my banjo to see if she could play out any of “Brownlow’s Dream” (I’d never heard of it), but she said, “I belong to the church now and I don’t fool with no banjo or nothing like that.”

     I asked if she remembered Ed playing the banjo and she said, “I never did see Ed play no banjo. Uncle John Hager’s the one played the banjo. He run around with Ed a long time. I’ve got his picture a sitting in there. He was funnier than a monkey.”

     I asked Roxie more about Haley’s tunes.

     “Ed would play ‘Old Joe Clark’, you know, and pluck up on them strings. He had one he played he called ‘Devil in the Yearlings’. I don’t know what it was, but boy he could pluck up on them strings and Ralph would jump up. That little boy’d hop up and dance. Man he beat anything I ever seen in my life a dancing. Ralph was about eight years old or ten when they was at our house — Ed and his wife. First time we ever seen her. And they stayed two or three nights with us then they went to Uncle Peter’s and stayed all night. And that woman really had them trained. She had a whistle she could blow. Didn’t matter where they was at buddy, they’d come up in line.”

     I asked if Ed played “Ragtime Annie” and Roxie said, “‘Ragtime Annie’ — I heard Bernie Adams talk about that, but I don’t know whether Ed played that or not. Can you play ‘Red Wing’? That’s one of his tunes. ‘Blue-Dressed Girl’. He had something another about ‘Blue-Eyed Beauty’. Aw, he played all kinds of tunes. He’d tell us the names.”

     Talking about Ed’s tunes caused Roxie to say, “‘Brownlow’s Dream’ — it was the last tune his daddy ever played on the fiddle. Ed told us that. Right down there in Hugh Dingess’ house they was kept upstairs till they took him to kill him. French Bryant was the man that was in it — he’s dead. They said they was thirty of them, man, a whole mob of them that killed him. They was afraid of him, you see, because he had a pretty bad name.”

     I asked Roxie how Ed’s father was killed and she said, “Beat them to death, I reckon, ’cause they said the chickens was running through the yard and a pecking their brains laying in the yard. That’s what people told us children when we was little.”

     Listening to Roxie tell all these tales found me wondering about her life. I asked if she’d lived “here” — meaning Harts Creek — all of her life and she said, “No, Lord, no. We’ve lived different places. We lived across the creek there over yonder on that bank. George Baisden’s home, I bought there and lived there awhile. Moved out here on a point and the State came in and told me they’d have to condemn me if I didn’t sell to them and move out. Well, I just sold it to them and bought this then. When Floyd left me — he left me in 1940 — I been a widow woman since that. I’ll soon be 86. I didn’t have no divorce from him, and I got his railroad retirement. That’s all we had to live on. He’s been dead now — he died in ’86 — and his woman he left here with’s been dead fifteen year or sixteen, about eighteen. She didn’t last very long. I told them the Lord don’t let things prosper like people thinks they will. The Lord has blessed me a long time to live a man’s life and a woman’s life, too. I’ve raised three children myself and helped Violet raise her three.”

     At that point, I heard Violet singing to Lawrence off in the corner. She said it was one of Ed’s tunes, “The Drunkard’s Hell”, then sang it again for me, this time with Roxie:

     I started out one stormy night

     To see my poor neglected wife.

     I found her weeping by her bed

     Because her only babe was dead. 

     I started out one stormy night.

     I thought I saw an awful sight.

     The lightning flashed, the thunder rolled

     Upon the poor old drunkard’s soul.

     Roxie stopped and said, “We can’t remember it. You might find that in libraries in books or something another but honey we don’t know it. It’s been fifty or sixty years since he sung that to us.”

Love

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Pearl Adkins Diary

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     “Alone in my cuddy with no one near me I and my thoughts are struggling with each other,” Pearl wrote in late fall or early winter. “My thoughts have drifted off in a dream world. They have got the better of me. They keep drifting to that Nobody. In twilight hours my thoughts form swiftly of one fancy and then the other of him. They have woven a strong cord around my heart which seems never to be broken. I keep thinking of him and can’t help it. Aw shucks, he is in mind morning, noon and night. What makes me keep picturing him in my mind — his look, his ways, his talk and every thing about him — and what it all means, I can’t tell. I never thought of any one else as I do him. I can’t account for the uneasy feeling around my heart unless it is, I love him. Oh God, can it be I love him? Lord this has slipped upon me unexpected. Oh what sorrow it brought. It would have been a blessing to any one else, but to me it will eat my heart away. I guess I have loved him from urchin days but never realized it till just now. No hopes what ever of winning his love. God, what I have to suffer and why it is I can’t tell. I haven’t done any thing to any one that I would be chasened for, but God’s will be done. It’s a higher power above that controls our nature. We love whether it’s our wishes our not. I know it isn’t my will to love the one I do. It came with such a shock as if from the streaks of lightning. It shot through my weak body and unnerved me so I haven’t hardly recovered from the shock yet for it was all so strange and new and I’m not quite used to it yet.”

     “Winter passed on with her sleet and snow,” Pearl continued, perhaps in the spring. “I care but a little for the wind’s loud roar for I’m near the old fire place. I sit there sadly dreaming of my one love here no more. Aw, I dream of a bright future of happy moments I may spend with him when he returns home. My, the winter is gone before I hardly knew it for I heard every few days some thing of my Ideal man but I didn’t know he was till long after he had gone. As you know from girlhood days, I have had my Ideal for he is the one boy for me by and by. I have pictured my sweet many times — his height, his eyes, his weight, and last of all the color of his hair, but never dreamed of him being in miles of here, but when I did awaken I awoke with a shock to think I had known him a many a long day and had learned to love him very dearly before I knew it.”

     “Well, spring is here,” Pearl next wrote. “I have changed places but he is in my mind all the long spring days but I love him better each day and each day that passes I think I can’t love him any better but the dawning day brings on a stronger love than the preceding day. I guess there’s no limit to this love of mine.”

     “Spring days are slipping by as if on wings,” Pearl wrote, a little later. “The fleeter they are, the closer the summer draws nearer, the quicker I will get to see my honey for I have heard he will be here about the 26th of July.”

Nobody Comes and Goes

13 Thursday Dec 2012

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     “Here comes Nobody,” Pearl wrote in an undated entry. “He has gone again but not for long this time. I guess I will get to see him Friday or Saturday one. This old place is lonesome and dreary. I know I will get to see his sweet face and smiles. They are like the rays of sun shine drifting through the dark clouds (for his life seems as dark as the dark clouds).”

     “It was a cold winter night,” Pearl wrote later. “He stopped in a for a while to warm and what he said made me think he would make good some day but that hope was shattered long ago. From what I heard, he had a chance to make good his words but let it slip. But I don’t believe he done the things I heard. By hopes, I mean of him ever having any thing only as he works it out and by day labor.”

     “Well, the kid is back for a long stay this time, so I think,” Pearl wrote next. “No, oh no, I am mistaken.”

     “Well, the guy has gone to some distant city for a while but he won’t stay long,” Pearl wrote in July. “He likes his friends too well to go away finally and never return. I miss him so much and deeply regret his quick departure. Oh, I feel a sharp twinge around my heart to know it will be weeks and probably months before I see him again. Gee, how I wish he hadn’t gone away.”

     “They have been house cleaning all day,” Pearl wrote later. “I have been alone for hours. Some of them may have come out and stayed with me some. How well I remember that day my dress and all — it was a white dress. I thought I looked good or rather pretty in it. I can now imagine how funny I looked in that rig. Ha. Ha. We were eating supper and all of a sudden he appeared on the scene. It gave me such a shock I couldn’t eat any more supper for I didn’t know he was in 200 miles of here. Well, the whole reaon I didn’t eat any more, he came right in and seated his self at the end of the table, facing me, and right beside me at that end and began to tell of his travels. When I would look up from my plate he would be looking at me, his laughin eyes fairly dancing with delight. But believe me, he looked sweet in his new out fit. I would describe him here but I dare not for I’m afraid Cora will find and read this for I’ve heard her say if she was to find one’s diary she would read it. She would sure know who I’m writing this nonsense about. If she does bother her little head to read she won’t know any more than if she hadn’t. Hee hee.”

     “There’s going to be a big meeting,” Pearl wrote in September, “so my Nobody heard of it and came back. I’m tickled pink to see him again. We have had lots of company but none I would have rather seen than him. A friend and I were sitting by the window when he passed by. She asked who he was. I smiled and said, ‘The one in a word omitted? Aw, that is name omitted.’ She said, ‘Why, that’s the ugliest boy I ever saw.’ Ha, Ha. I said, ‘I think not. I think he’s the best looking boy round here.’ He has gone back now and my thoughts have gone with him. Oh God, help him. He is in trouble. I hope it won’t be nothing serious. It was just a little word omitted. That is all. Of course, I would rather it had never happened but it has so it doesn’t change my liking for him.”

In Search of Ed Haley 28

13 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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Roxie seemed very interested in Ed Haley’s kids, saying, “I know now they was Mona and Clyde and Ralph and Jack.”

Lawrence said he was the “baby boy” and Roxie realized for the first time that he was Ed’s son…not me. She got real tickled and said, “I believe you was about four or five years old when you was at my house.”

He told her, “May have been, ’cause I came up here until I was about nine years old. Just about every summer, it seemed like, we come up here.”

Roxie wanted to know about the others.

Lawrence said, “Clyde is still living. He lives in California. When he quit running the country, he settled down in California.”

As for the other boys: “Jack worked as a millwright at a steel mill in Cleveland.  Noah’s in Cleveland, too. They both went up there after they come out of the service. Had a depressed time just after the war. Jack worked for a while here but that little factory closed up so about a year and a half later he went to Cleveland and got on at a steel mill up there as an electrician and worked his way up as a millwright. They say he went into work that day and he punched his card, then he had to walk to his workplace — which was a pretty good ways away — and he hadn’t even got out of the time-clock building, and he just fell over dead. Massive coronary or something.”

Roxie thought Ralph had hung himself, but Lawrence said, “No, he was out picnicking and was kinda grandstanding. You know he could take a run-a-go and do a flip-flop and land on his feet — that kind of stuff. Well, somebody was gonna take a picture of him, and he got up on this tree limb and hooked his toes over it and he was hanging straight down from his toes and he was gonna let go and flip over and land on his feet before he hit the ground. But he didn’t make it: he hit the back of his head and broke his neck. He thought he was still a young man, you know.”

Roxie’s memories of Ed went pretty far back into his life — even before his marriage. She tried to describe him for me.

“He dressed nice. Man, Ed was as clean as a pin — wore nice, clean clothes. To be a blind man, he kept hisself just as clean as a pin. I never did see him dirty. Kept his hair combed pretty and neat. Ed’s eyes looked awful bad — he wore glasses over them. We never did talk much with him. He was kindly strange to us. You see, us girls was kindly shy. We weren’t used to him. He always had a big bunch of men around him. We just listened. He wasn’t no crazy fellow, I wanna tell you that. He was smart in the Bible. He told us all about the wars, Armageddon and stuff, and about these bombs.”

I asked Roxie if she remembered the first time she saw Haley play the fiddle. She said, “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I was about eighteen years old when Ed and Uncle John played at our house. Then they left here and went off, you know, to stay awhile. They’d come back every now and then. Uncle John played a banjo and Ed played the fiddle. Boy, they could really play.”

I asked if Ed sang back then.

“Yeah, he sung,” she said. “Now, he asked Cecil… He said, ‘Cecil, I’d like to ask you something, but I don’t want you to get mad.’ He said, ‘I would like to know if you know the song about John Brumfield?’ And Cecil said, ‘Yes. I’d like to hear you.’ And Ed said, ‘All right.’ Ed played it for him. And Cecil’s daddy was the one they killed, but Cecil liked Ed. He knowed they’s just all drunk, you know, just like people now a getting dope and a killing each other.”

Roxie’s mind rolled back through the years, leaving Lawrence and I to just sit there listening to her stories. Each passing moment sent chills up the back of my neck. It was apparent that she’d known Ed very well.

“He stayed with us a whole lot, Ed did. Off and on, he stayed with Grandma and Uncle Peter and them. Grandma lived down there where Turley lives now. And they had a sheep in that field, you know? Ed kept going from Grandma’s house up to Uncle Peter’s and Aunt Liza’s house. They told him, they said, ‘Ed, that ram’s a going to kill you.’ He said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I’ll take care of that ram.’ One day he started up through there and that ram went to bellering, you know, and run at him and butted him and he catched him by the head and slung him. He said, ‘If you don’t stay away from there, I’ll get my knife out and cut your head off.'”

Roxie laughed remembering the stories.

“Lord, he told all kinds of tales on hisself,” she said. “You woulda laughed till you woulda died if you’d heard him telling tales on hisself. He told about being at Uncle Peter’s and they was having a dance up at Jeff Baisden’s and he said he took a notion to go along in the night. He’d slept till about 9 or 10 o’clock in the night. Uncle Peter had a garden and a barn and had a lot of cattle laying out around that barn. And he went out there, he said, to that barn and aimed to climb up over a big high fence and jump out when he jumped out right astraddle of a steer. And said that thing jumped up and him on it backwards and took up that holler a flying, and said he hung right on to him till he got to the waterfall and said when he got to the waterfall, he fell off. Said he was drowning when he went on up there, and said they said, ‘Ed, what are you doing so wet?’ He said he said, ‘Well,’ said he’s riding and got in the water and couldn’t see it. He would’t tell them about the steer.”

Roxie implied that Ed took any mishaps or practical jokes in stride.

“Lord, he told all kind of tales on hisself, honey. They cut trees and put him in logs and would start him at the top of the hill and roll him into the bottom and bump to bump to bump to bump, you know, and man just skinned him all over. They played all kinds of tricks on him. Why, he’d just laughed till he died about it. He didn’t care.”

Mr. Nobody

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Pearl Adkins Diary

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     The third volume of Pearl’s diary is almost entirely void of dates, although it does appear to reflect chronological writing.

     “This is Spring,” Pearl began. “This is a beautiful place with its birds and flowers. It would be an Ideal home if it wasn’t such an out away place. I like the inhabitants but don’t like the location of the site with all of its beauty. I don’t want to make my home here forever. Every one wants to be so good to us but for all their kindness I don’t like here by no means. I have a few friends but a very few they are. I have one that’s every thing to me. His name, that will never do to tell. Well, his name will be Mr. Nobody here.”

     About that time, Mr. Nobody became ill.

     “Spring yet. Mr. Nobody is quite sick,” she wrote. “I have prayed that he might get well.”

     “We have had company all day and have had a nice time in the afternoon,” Pearl wrote one Sunday. “Mr. Nobody came and he was so weak he could hardly walk.”

     “He is a lot better now,” Pearl wrote in an undated entry. “My, his loss of weight, parched lips and all symptoms of a sick person made a scarecrow of him. He has gone. Wished he had stayed longer. This is the first place he’s gone since he got better. The kid has left and gone some where or other.”

     Whatever illness it was that plagued Pearl’s “crush” proved to be of a lingering nature.

     “He is sick again,” she worredly wrote. “The Lord knows whether he will have strength to get over this.”

     “He’s worse,” she wrote, yet still. “Oh Lord, can’t he never get well? Oh, he is bad — worse, he’s just as bad as can be to live. In fact, there seems to be no better in this life for him.”

     And then, to Pearl’s relief, Mr. Nobody’s condition improved.

     “He is better after all. If he did narrowly escape the clutches of death, he is well and strong again. I’m so thankful that my prayer has been answered.”

     Not long thereafter, Mr. Nobody took off on a road trip, giving Pearl nothing much to write about until his return to Harts.

     “Nobody has come back,” she wrote. “My, oh, he looks like I don’t know what with his hair growed out in his temples. He had some pictures made while some where and brought them and showed them to me. They were the ugliest things I ever seen but I told him they were real nice looking and that they looked just like him and that he couldn’t have had one more like him than those were. Ha.”

     “Well, he is now back for a long stay,” Pearl again wrote at a later date. “I guess this old place won’t be quite so desolate now. Just to get a glimpse of him makes the long summer days seems shorter.”

In Search of Ed Haley 25

10 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Music, Spottswood

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After visiting with Turley and Joe’s girls, Bum guided Lawrence and I up a nearby hollow to see his uncle Enslow Baisden. Enslow lived in a newly built single story log cabin. He said he’d gone blind recently due to sugar and cataracts. At Enslow’s, we met “Shermie”, who Lawrence indicated was the “funny boy” that chased the Haley women off of Aunt Liza’s porch in 1951.

“A lot of times I wouldn’t have no company if it wasn’t for him,” Enslow said of Shermie, who was epileptic. Shermie wasted little time in pulling out a few cards from the pocket of his overalls and sputtering toward me, even reaching for my fiddle case. I knew right then I was surrounded by “good people”: they had kept Shermie under their care all of these years as a valued member of the family in lieu of institutionalization.

When I mentioned Ed Haley’s name, Enslow said, “I was young but I can remember him all the time a coming. They was some Martins lived on top of a mountain out here — Robert Martin and John — and they fiddled all the time, and he’d go out there and fiddle with them. I don’t know how he walked from up this creek and out on that mountain and him blind, for I can’t find my way through the house.”

Enslow said he didn’t know much about Ed because he left Harts during the early years of the Depression.

“See, I lost all time, about everything nearly. I left here in ’35 and went up to the northern part of the state here and then went out in Las Vegas, Nevada, a while. Then, when I come out, I went in the Army in April of ’41. I stayed in there four and a half years and got married out in Oklahoma and we never did come back but just on visits. And Ed, he died in ’51.”

Enslow’s recounting of his travels was sort of an interesting revelation since it reminded me that these folks on Harts Creek — like many mountain people — were not as isolated as some may think. Ed Haley himself left the creek and traveled widely with his music just after the turn of the century, while Lawrence and his siblings had lived in Ashland and Cleveland and served overseas in the armed forces. Several of the people I had met on Harts Creek had been to faraway places and lived in big cities but chose at some point to return to the grounds of their ancestors.

I asked Enslow how old he was the first time he saw Haley and he said, “Oh man I was about nine or ten years old. He all the time played that fiddle. He used to come down here to old man Peter Mullins’ and Liza Mullins’. I guess they was real close kin to him. And Ed’s daddy’s name was Milt Haley. I don’t know whether Lawrence knowed that or not.”

Lawrence said, “Yeah, I knew that. But I understood from the way Aunt Liza told me, he came from over the mountain and I think that she was talking about from up around Williamson or over in that area. My dad, he was born right down here below Uncle Peter’s, where Turley’s at now, in the old house.”

Lawrence’s mentioning of “the old house” really got Enslow going. He remembered it well.

“There used to be an old log house there he was born in and they had a chimney outside on that old house down there — just an old rock chimney. Dad all the time talked about it. He said Ed got him one of them little old homemade sleds, you know, and he got him a ladder and put it on top of that house. And he got right up by that chimney and then when he come off’n there on that sled he knocked the rocks off with him.”

What? Why would he have done such a thing?

“I’ve always heard my dad tell it,” Enslow said. “Said that rock just barely did miss him.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of such a story but before I could really ask anything about it Enslow was off on another tale.

“Dad said one time they sent Ed down there to get some milk or butter or something. When Ed got out there on his way back he got in a briar patch. Dad took a notion to have some fun out of Ed. They had an old horse they called Fred. Dad got to stomping and snickering like that old horse and Ed said, ‘Old Fred, don’t you come here, now. Don’t you come here, Fred.’ Dad said he kept stomping and Ed throwed that stuff at him and tore hisself all to pieces in them briars.”

I asked Enslow to describe Haley and he said, “Well, he just always dressed pretty nice. He was a big man, too. They used to buy him these plugs of tobacco and these guys would get this beech bark and whittle it out about the size of a plug of tobacco and let Ed have that bark and they’d take his tobacco. If he ever got a hold of you, though, he’d eat you up, see. They said you couldn’t get loose from him.”

Apparently, Ed and his wife were so self-sufficient that locals sometimes forgot they were blind. Enslow told a great story about Ella and Aunt Liza, who were sitting by a lamp together one night. “Well, Mrs. Haley, I’m going to bed,” Liza said. “Well, just blow out the light,” Ella answered. “I’m going to read a while.” Liza said, “How’re you going to read in the dark?” Ella said, “Well, I can’t see no way.”

Enslow’s mentioning of Aunt Liza conjured up a great memory from Lawrence.

“Uncle Peter liked to wore me to death one time. Me and my brother Jack went with him up there behind his house and he had a old team of oxen we was snaking logs out of a hollow with. These oxen got hot. One of them got in the creek trying to cool off. Well, Uncle Peter couldn’t get him to move, so he went over underneath a tree and sat down. Well, me and my brother Jack was a cutting up, you know. He was teasing me. I was younger than he was. And I picked up a big rock and throwed it at him and hit Uncle Peter right where it hurts. And he got up. I knowed I could outrun him. My brother — I looked at him — he took off. And I was afraid to move. Uncle Peter come up there. I thought, ‘Well, I’m dead meat.’ It looked like he pulled down a half a tree and got a hold of me and he didn’t let go until he wore that limb out.”

I asked Enslow about Ed Haley’s music.

“I used to hear him play all them old tunes,” he said. “He’d sit and play for hours and hours at a time, him and her.”

Enslow motioned toward Lawrence, saying, “His mother played a mandolin and had a thing on that sat on her shoulders there and had a harp and played them both at the same time.”

He leaned back a little, reflecting, “Yeah, he played all the old music. He’d make up songs. Be sitting around and just directly he’d write a song. Like ‘Hell Up Coal Hollow’ and two or three more he made up that way. You’d come up and say, ‘What was that Ed?’ He’d just tell them what it was.”

Enslow and Bum said Haley made “Hell Up Coal Holler” and named it for Cole Branch, a tributary of Harts Creek. I didn’t know if Ed was the source of that story but I later learned that “Hell Up Coal Hollow” (at least the title) actually predated Haley’s lifetime. As I was gradually learning, Ed wasn’t preoccupied with historical accuracy and was good at creating temporary titles and weaving stories based on coincidence.

Enslow said, “Ed had some kind of saying he always said when he played on the radio down there about ‘carbide acid and acifidity gum’ or something.”

Lawrence said he’d never heard anything about his father playing on the radio but Enslow seemed sure of it.

“He played on the radio down there at Ashland or Huntington or somewheres way back there. I’m pretty sure they said he did.”

I wondered what acifidity gum was and no one knew, although Lawrence had heard Ed talk about it. (We later learned it was an old folk remedy for treating asthma.) Enslow said Uncle Peter asked Ed about it one time and he said, “Well, you have to get a little comedy with the music.”

Wow — so Ed told jokes?

Enslow said, “I guess to draw their attention or something.”

I asked Enslow if he’d ever heard Ed play for a dance and he said, “Well, I used to go to lots of things he played for, but I can’t remember now. They’d go out there on that mountain and play all night at Robert and John Martin’s. They’d be maybe two hundred people out there. Robert Martin all the time played the fiddle and I don’t know whether John played or not.”

Enslow thought Ed and Robert played their fiddles “together,” but Bum added, “Bob played a little different than Ed did. He played newer stuff.”

Enslow thought for a moment, then said, “Yeah, my dad, he used to play the banjo all the time, him and his nephew. They used to play for dances way back years ago.”

What was his name?

“Jeff Baisden.”

Bum said, “I was telling him about Grandpaw taking them two little sticks and beating on the fiddle for Ed.”

Someone said, “He’s the one had the big old feet and he’d get up and dance and play the banjo.”

Enslow said, “They called him ‘Jig-Toe’ Baisden. He wore a twelve or thirteen shoe and he’d get up on his toes and dance. And Noah Mullins, Uncle Peter’s son, he could flat dance. He’d get on his heels and dance all over. He called their square dance about all the time.”

Let Me Walk

09 Sunday Dec 2012

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     Pearl’s second diary concludes with entries from 1928.

     “I got up this morning with a calm spirit,” Pearl wrote on April 30. “I knew he was coming. He has been gone so long.”

     “My heart. Jesus blessed Jesus, let me get till I can walk for I love and it’s a shame to love and you a cripple,” she next wrote in an undated entry. “It’s dark. I have dreamed of his coming so often I know he will be here soon for I never dream of him till a while before he comes.”

     “Diary dear. It has been some time since I have conveyed you a little secret,” Pearl wrote on Sunday, May 6. “You are my constant and steadfast friend. I think it’s so strange the turns life will take. I have long admired a cute little boy but dared not to speak of it to anyone. He’s so young and funny. I can’t keep from hardly falling in love with him. I have teased Inez and told her how much I cared for him, but she took it all as a joke. I just let her think it a joke but I never meant any thing more in my life than that. Inez was telling me about his girls, when I told her to hush. It made me mad to hear of his love making to other girls but she took that as a huge joke. But it really hurt to hear of those other girls being where I wanted to be. But that can never be. He is lots younger than I to start with, but circumstances is another obstacle. Gee, but he is just the kind of a boy I could love for life if I just had that chance. I wonder if he can feel my presence tonight. Oh Lord, how lonely I am tonight. If he were here I would be satisfied for the time being just to be with him. Gee, wish I knew if he ever thinks of me. I would give most any thing to know if he just gave me one little thought to night.”

In Search of Ed Haley 23

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley, Spottswood

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Connie suggested we go see her neighbor Turley Adams, who lived just down the creek near the mouth of a branch. She pointed toward a man working in his yard a few hundred yards away at his one-story white home. That’s Turley? We took off right away. As we approached the place, Lawrence mentioned that Turley lived at the same approximate location of Milt Haley’s old cabin. While the cabin was long gone, I noticed the front yard still had the same beautiful roll to it I had seen in an old picture at Lawrence’s house. I tried to imagine how the cabin would have looked in Ed Haley’s day.

Turley met us near the porch, where Lawrence introduced us and told our reason for visiting him. Turley was immediately friendly and, in his gruff voice, invited us inside. At first, our conversation went pretty slow. Then Lawrence said, “I never did get much about my granddad, Milton Haley. Joe said he’s buried down here somewhere in a graveyard and I thought maybe he was talking about down at the mouth of Trace somewhere.”

Turley’s wife Violet said there was an old cemetery just back of their house, although it had been in terrible condition for many years.

“Well now, they was some graves out there. Turley’s mom told me that some of them were Mullinses and some of them were Haleys. They was some babies and then they was some older people. All unmarked. They was sort of in a row and they was rocks up to them but by the time I married Turley they’d rolled down the hill so you couldn’t tell where the graves really were.”

Oh god. I could just imagine someone finding a Milt Haley tombstone (probably no more than a rock with “MH” carved on it) lying at the foot of the hill and just tossing it in the creek.

“Well one grave we could tell pretty well where it was at, the others we couldn’t,” Violet said. “It had all growed up so we started cutting the bushes and keeping it mowed and cleaned up but we still don’t know where the graves are.”

We walked outside briefly to survey the site.

“They’s eleven graves,” Turley said. “I used to help Uncle Jack Mullins keep them cleaned up a little bit.”

Was this little embankment with a sunken spot the final resting place of Ed Haley’s parents?

Back inside, Turley said he remembered Ed, which seemed to please Lawrence somewhat. He told this story about a local girl who danced to Ed’s music.

“When I was in high school, Ed was around my house and he said, ‘I’d like to fiddle for somebody to dance.’ And I asked this girl, Adeline Adkins from around here on Buck Fork, if she could dance and she said, ‘I can dance to anything.’ She danced three or four tunes and my dad come in. Ed said, ‘By god, John, she’s just like Yellow Leg Spaulding. She can hit ever thing I do on this fiddle. And Dad said that they was a guy that used to go with them and dance that he called Yellow Leg Spaulding.”

“Well I didn’t know whether we’d even find anybody up here now, except Joe,” Lawrence said. “I thought I’d come up and see if I could find him, maybe introduce John to somebody that could give us some information on my dad. I know they couldn’t be very many people old enough to probably appreciate his music.”

“He come to my mom and dad’s house one time and played music all night,” Violet said. “Robert Martin was with him. I guess they’d been drinking or whatever because they was gonna take him out to the toilet and instead of taking him to the toilet they took him into the chicken house. They didn’t pay no attention to what they was doing. But they played all night. I never will forget.”

I had never really considered the possibility that Ed’s cousins and neighbors played jokes on him. I saw him as this great musician — an elevated status that may not have been shared by many of his contemporaries. All of a sudden, I was flooded with images of this little blind orphan — alone in the world — victimized mercilessly throughout his childhood. How did he take it? And how would Lawrence react to hearing these kind of stories? In quick time, I had this latter question answered. Lawrence immediately countered Violet’s story about the outhouse with a tale that cast his father in a more triumphant light.

“Joe said when Pop was just a little kid he got to the point to where he could travel from this house over to Uncle Peter’s,” Lawrence said. “Uncle Peter kept cattle in the field out here or something — a bull or two. Well, the boys teased him. You know, he’d get about half way across that field and then they’d go to snorting like a bull — scare him — and then stand way back and laugh at him. Pop took that for a while and finally found a pistol over here at the old house and he went across the field and they started doing that to him. Well, he just pulled that pistol and, where that sound was coming from, he started shooting that pistol. I guess that broke that little game up.”

Lawrence was obviously determined to guard his father’s legacy, which was a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Violet got out a few albums filled with old photographs of Ed’s kinfolk from up and down the creek, which stirred Lawrence’s memories.

“Seemed to me like we walked down here to Trace to go up the hill there and there was a store down there,” he said.

Violet said, “Turley’s dad run a store around on Hart at one time and Ewell Mullins had a store up here.”

Lawrence remembered Ewell’s store. “Yeah, he had a store up here, I know that. And then they was one on up and over the hill there where you could go and buy a nickel’s worth of brown sugar. We’d get one of them little penny-paper pokes full of brown sugar and we thought we was having a big time.”

Lawrence’s mind was starting to click in high gear. “I heard Pop talk about how he’d ride a horse up the hollow going up through there,” he said.

Lawrence asked Turley if he knew anything about a George Adams. Turley said his grandfather was named George Washington Adams but he went by the nickname of “Ticky George” to distinguish him from a cousin, “Greasy George.” Ticky George spent most of his life in the woods hunting for ginseng where he apparently acquired a great number of ticks.

“He didn’t have good mind,” Violet said later. “He just knowed enough to get by.”

Turley said his grandmother Adams was a sister to Ed’s friend, Johnny Hager.

“Well, there’s how Johnny Hager came into this,” Lawrence said.

Turley didn’t know much about his genealogy but said his aunt Roxie Mullins could tell us the “whole history” of the Hagers.

“She lives around there above Louie on Harts Creek there,” he said.

Louie Mullins was a grandson to Uncle Peter, making him a third cousin to Lawrence (at least by our count).

This was sort of a confusing moment. Names of people I’d never heard of were popping into the conversation and converging upon one another in seemingly irrelevant connections.

It was great.

There was an unmatchable poetry in it: Turley, Yellow Leg Spaulding, Ticky George… I mean nobody could make this kind of stuff up.

In Search of Ed Haley 22

08 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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Early the next morning, Lawrence and I boarded my Cadillac and drove out of Ashland across the Big Sandy River into West Virginia. We drove past little towns named Kenova and Ceredo on I-64 then turned off onto Route 10 just south of Huntington. For the next hour, we weaved our way on this curvy, two-lane road toward Harts, cruising past small settlements named Salt Rock, West Hamlin, Pleasant View, Branchland, Midkiff and Ranger — all situated on the Guyandotte River. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we saw a tiny green and white sign planted to the right of the road reading “Harts, Unincorporated.” Just past it was a beautiful two-story white home, which Lawrence quickly pointed out as the place where Ed’s mother was murdered in the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. Excited, I quickly pulled over and took a picture, then took off in a cloud of gravel and dust.

Lawrence and I turned right onto a narrow paved road and snaked our way up Harts Creek, bypassing a high school, trailers, Depression-era framed houses and newer brick homes. It was beautiful country. Cold weather was barely gone and the hillsides were a faint blush of green buds. Lawrence motioned toward the creek — which was up somewhat due to spring rains — and told again how difficult it was to get up Harts Creek in his younger days.

“Biggest part of the time, you was down in the creek bed there, if the weather was right. If it was times like this you had to take to the hillside but the road usually followed the creek bed. It seemed like it took us all day walking up here, but they didn’t have the roadway up on the side of the hill like this.”

After a ride of some fifteen minutes, we reached Trace Fork, the place where Ed Haley was born over one hundred years ago. We drove a short distance up the branch to the site of Peter Mullins’ cabin, which had burned or been torn down about fifteen years earlier. Lawrence pointed out the only remaining relics from the original farm: a lonely tree and an old smokehouse.

After taking in the sights and smells, we went to see Joe Mullins, who lived in a small white house just down the bottom. We first met Joe’s daughters, Connie and Loretta, who said Joe had gone to Chapmanville and would probably be out for most of the day. Lawrence introduced himself as “Ed Haley’s son,” which caused Connie to giggle and say, “Oh, yeah. Don’t we have a picture of him?”

Loretta said, “We got a lot of pictures.”

“The old fiddle,” Connie said. “Remember the old fiddle that used to be up there in that old house?”

What old house?

“That old smokehouse up there at the old house,” Connie said. “There was an old fiddle up in the top of it.”

There was more giggling, as if the two had just shared a secret joke.

I said to Connie, “You don’t think you could find that do you, just to see it?”

She said, “No, I doubt it.”

Loretta said, “We could probably find the picture.”

Boy that would be great.

“I don’t know about right this minute. How long are you gonna be around?”

“Long enough for you to find that picture,” I said.

The next thing I knew, Connie walked us to Uncle Peter Mullins’ old smokehouse and flung open a door. I took a few steps inside — past old furniture and piles of God-knows-what — and quickly spotted a decorative metal lid with Ed and Johnny Hager’s picture on it. In the picture, a copy of which I had first seen at Lawrence’s, Haley was slim and decked out in a suit with a derby and dark glasses. Hager stood beside him with a banjo. Lawrence said it was taken at White Sulphur Springs in eastern West Virginia.

At some point, Connie showed us a large, framed portrait of a woman she identified as Ed’s mother, Emma Jean Haley — the same picture Pat Haley had seen on her visit to Harts Creek several years ago. Connie said Lawrence could have both pictures.

Deep Secrets

08 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Pearl Adkins Diary

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     “Diary dear, I can tell you many things I can’t no other,” Pearl wrote on October 31. “You keep secrets that no one knows. I’m going to confide in you. I love another. I have said I could no other but one, but I’m not quite sure now. Kindness goes a long way to create love. It’s not good looks. I never knew til now. Oh Lord, what makes me always love some body that don’t love me. But they are so kind I can’t help but love him some but I don’t want to. I never thought of loving him until a certain thing happened. I dreamed so often of him making love to me. Oh Lord, let that love for him cease for I don’t want it ever to be. I want my one I always loved.”

     “This is the last day of our beautiful October weather,” Pearl continued. “Many here to day. October month here me. Oh Lord let us all meet again. Goodby October’s bright blue weather and sad the crimson autumn leaves but sadder that one of her sisters was sick. She was fixing to go and leave me dirty and as always my heart told me Dear was coming and I didn’t want to be so dirty. She quarreled at me for wanting to be cleaned up. I cried till my eyes was all swollen up and red. So you see how it is when you can’t do any thing for yourself. You go blank. Well, after I cried she went and cleaned me up but before I got my slipper on he came. It seems that he is always in a hurry. After he was gone I couldn’t help but think of a song: ‘I grieve that ere I met three, Faith fair would I forget thee. Can river thee? Never! Farewell, farewell forever! We have met, and we have parted yet uttered scarce a word like a guilty thing, Started when thy well-knowing voice I heard,’ Oh, how well those words are formed. I couldn’t have wrote my feelings better if I had tried.”

     “Sunday morning again,” Pearl wrote a little later. “Word came to Mother as I expected but I never seen him — only his well loved voice I heard. He sit down out in the yard and stayed a long time but being an old cripple I couldn’t go out to even get a look at his sweet face. Oh Lord, how I would like to speak his dear name as I can write it but I dare not for none of the folks don’t like him a great deal. So I love him on in secret as I have so long. Dear boy, I love you — love you as I can love no other.”