A Mountain Dance

Showing That the Folk of the Tennessee Hills Are Not as Depicted in Romantic Fiction

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

A MAN named Poly Grubb told me the story. His real name is Napoleon. It was fall, a cold day in late November. The wind was icy cold.

I. had gone out to hunt rabbits. This was in the mountains of eastern Tennessee—where I was staying at that time.

I knew Poly. He was a mountain man living with his old father and mother in a cabin up along the road on which I was living. That day when I saw him my dog was with me. He went to sniff about Poly's legs. Poly was a little nervous. "Will he bite?" he asked in alarm. The question was absurd. My dog is of the sort that can never be persuaded even to growl. When you lose your temper he only wags his tail and looks at you with sorrowful eyes.

Poly and I had met at a place where a bridge crossed the road. It had been snowing all night. He seemed excited. The day before had been quite warm.

Almost at once he began to talk.His eyes were heavy. I could smell moon whiskey on his breath.

He began to tell me about a dance he had attended during the night. He grew talkative.

You must understand that, in the Tennessee hills, where I was then staying, everyone is quite poor.

The mountain people are poor without being really poor. They do not feel poor.

AT first when you go into that mountain country you say to yourself, '"What miserable lives these people live." You have come up into the hills, let us say, out of a rich valley.

In the valley there are prosperous towns. People live in comfortable houses. There are automobiles, radios, movies to go to at night.

You travel up into the hills over miserable roads. If during the winter or spring, you are trying to get into the hills in an automobile you have to give it up.

There are small towns, miserable looking places.

Cabins back in the hills. Many of them are without floors. There is just one large room. The whole family lives in it. There is no privacy. Everything concerned with the family life, love making, birth, illness, death, takes place in the one room.

The people cling to their hills. Not far away, a half day's journey in a Ford along the valley road, is an industrial town.

The men could make good wages down there. They do not go.

In the hills there is no work. They raise a little corn, make moon whiskey.

They raise a hog or two, raise beans. Their diet is amazingly simple.

Among them you will see tall graceful men, beautiful women. You look with amazement. There before you in the road walks an aristocrat. People of the outside world think of these mountain people as underfed, illiterate and dangerous. They have been fed up with romances. John Fox, Jr., and others have done what they could to spread misunderstanding. The romancers are always taking some such toll of peoples.

Newspapers talking about feuds. Songs and stories about sudden deaths, fierce hatreds.

The people I knew in the hills had for tin: most part, soft voices and gentle eyes.

Poly Grubb was an example. He was tall and slender and spoke a peculiar dialect. shall not try to reproduce it.

THAT November morning on the bridge, as we stood together, my dog having gone off to hunt rabbits, he began to tell me a story of the dance of the night before.

He said that in the early evening he was sitting at home. As I have said, he lives in a mountain cabin with his father and mother, now both very old. I have seen the house. It looks as if a slight wind might blow it away.

However it stands far up in the hills in an exposed place. In the winter blustering winds tear over the hills. In some way the cabin, rudely built, with but one room and no floor, survives.

Poly has lived there all his life. Both his father and mother are almost blind. He had four sisters and several brothers hut they have married and gone away to other cabins. Poly was the youngest child. He may be twentyfive.

He would like to marry but will not until his father and mother die.

On the November evening before the morning I saw and talked with him and when He told me this story he said he was sitting alone in the cabin with the old people.

He began to grow restless. Winter was coming on. The winters are long and cold in the mountains. He was wishing for a wife. His father and mother, now that they have grown old seldom speak. Sometimes Poly has to do the cooking. His mother is too ill to get out of her bed. He has to keep the house in order.

He told me that, as he was sitting by the fireside, the old people having crawled into bed, he grew suddenly restless.

He sprang up and went out of doors. There was a new moon but it did not shed much light. A cold wind blew and in the air there was the promise of snow, the first snow of the winter. Ragged clouds were drifting across the sky.

LATER when the snow is deep these mountain cabins are sometimes isolated for weeks at a time.

It was a bad time of the year for a young strong man to be unmarried.

Poly felt that. He was nervous. As he stood by the cabin door the wind whistled through the dry leaves of the oak trees. The oak leaves cling to the trees all winter in the Tennessee hills.

The wind blowing, the mournful sound of the wind in the trees, the promise of snow in the air, had in some way suggested to Poly's mind the idea that it would he a fine night for a dance. I got from him, when he was talking to me, the notion that the wind had suggested tin' thought to him. It may just have been the dry leaves dancing on the limbs of the trees.

Evidently the dancing leaves had also suggested the idea to others. The leaves in. the trees beside bis cabin door were dancing madly, then becoming quiet, then dancing again.

He told me that the noise made by the wind, playing in the dead dry leaves, was like the sound of a fiddle.

Anyway Poly was standing there, like that, and suddenly he began to run up hill through the woods.

As a matter of fact, for some time, Poly had been paying attention to one of the Franklin girls. I knew that from others. There are six girls and several grown boys in the Franklin house. How they all manage to live in the one small cabin I do not know. I presume it is none of my business.

The oldest of the Franklin girls, the one to whom Poly is particularly attentive, is famous as a cook all through the hills. She is a year or two older than Poly.

AND so, that night when Poly wanted to dance and when snow was promised and the wind was roaring in the trees, he ran through the woods to her father's house.

The six Franklin girls were all there and some of the hoys.

They had all come out of the warm stuffy cabin and stood by the door, as though waiting for Poly.

There had been nothing arranged but when he got there others, from other isolated cabins in the hills, began to arrive.

He suggested to me, without saving the words, that he thought the night had been a little crazy and that all the people of the hills were a little crazy.

Young people kept running up the hill. They filled the Franklin house. Suddenly they all went out of doors. It had begun to snow. The mountain seemed full of voices.

The Franklin house, although it is far up in the hills, is just at the foot of the highest single hill in all that part of the state.

All of the young mountain people, gathered at the Franklin house, began suddenly to climb.

They climbed silently, hurriedly. No one laughed. No one had suggested a dance. How were they going to dance? They had no music.

Half way up there is a winding road. Well, it isn't a road. It is a trail.

When they had got almost up to the road they heard a sound. They all stopped and listened. Then a shout went up.

There was a man in the road, an old man. His name is Wiley Small. He is the best fiddler in all that section. What had brought him outdoors that night and into that lonely hill road Poly said no one knew. He might have had a still in some gully up there.

And anyway, as Poly kept insisting, it was a crazy night. Anything can happen on such a night. There the old man was, in the road, and he was playing on his fiddle, perhaps to cheer himself on the road. People in the hills are always playing the fiddle or singing on lonely nights. He was playing Turkey in the Strata.

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Up to the old man they all rushed and grabbing him by the arms pushed him on up the hill through the brush. He kept demanding a drink and bottles were produced.

All the young men began to drink. Drink loosened their tongues. They sang and shouted. They came to a cleared place and one of the young men began to wrestle with one of the Franklin girls.

The Franklin girls are all big and strong. It was a hard tussle. All the others gathered about.

When the young man had thrown her to the ground she sprang quickly up and they all climbed on up to the top of the hill.

The top of the high hill is almost bare. In the winter the wind howls up there. It had begun to snow.

Quickly a roaring fire was built of dry brush, the sparks flying in all directions, and the dance began.

Poly said the mountain people danced all night. He said it was a crazy, a good dance. He said the couples kept dancing in and out of the fire. The wind was roaring and the sparks flying. More than once, he said, the girls' clothes caught on fire.

No one cared. They all kept dancing and dancing, shouting and singing. Old Wiley Small kept drinking moon whiskey and playing his fiddle.

The young men were all drinking whiskey. Poly said that he got so hot from dancing and from the whiskey that the snow on his cheeks and the cold wind felt like a kiss.

Perhaps he had begun thinking of kisses. When he told me the story of the dance he may still have been a little drunk. Once or twice I thought he might fall off the icy bridge on which he stood.

On the mountain, on the night before, the girls and women, although they had not been drinking, were as excited as the men.

He himself had been, as everyone in that section knew, paying attention to the oldest of the Franklin girls. Her name is Stella. They have not married, I fancy because of Poly's father and mother.

They may be waiting for his old mother to die. The old woman has, no doubt, a prejudice against any other woman coming to live in her house.

At any rate he is in love with Stella. He intends to marry her. She is a respectable girl and the most famous cook in the hills.

He said that during the dance he became suddenly enamoured of a little mountain girl that everyone knew was a little loose.

He was dancing with her and suddenly he took her away.

He said that Stella Franklin knew and that her brothers knew. He laughed when he told about it and said He supposed everyone knew. He said he wasn't the only one who went with that particular girl although he did insist he was the first one.

When I asked him he told me that he did not think that Stella Franklin cared, at least not much. As I have suggested, when he talked to me he was still a little drunk. His tongue was loose.

He went away with the mountain girl, whose reputation is not of the best, and then came back to the dance.

He began dancing then with Stella Franklin. He danced with her the rest of the night. When the dance broke up, almost at daylight, he took her home. When I saw him he had just come from her house.

He and Stella, I gathered, had not got home until almost daylight and had sat up together the rest of the night.

They had been making plans. When his old people die it is understood Poly will get the mountain farm.

He told me that, as soon as his mother died, he would marry Stella. He would, he said, if she would have him. And he thought she would.

He seemed proud of the fact that Stella was a good woman. He was proud of the fact that she was a woman who never lost her head. He was proud of the fact that she was a famous cook.

He said he would have to be getting on home to his old people, that he would have to be getting a little sleep.

From what he had said and from a certain swing of his shoulders as he walked off up the road I gathered that the night's adventure had not hurt his chances for the marriage with Stella.