It's been a long time since I've done this. It's not that I haven't read wonderful passages in books. It's just that things have changed and my time has changed and I have changed on the inside, for the worse. Not even sure why it is happening now but this vignette from
Seedtime on the Cumberland struck me as so nicely written and I wanted to share it. I love this book and this writer, Harriette Simpson Arnow, whose most famous book I guess is her 1954 novel,
The Dollmaker, which I have but haven't read yet, except the first chapter, which left me breathless.
Seedtime is nonfiction, deeply researched but she also has a personal connection to its subject matter, having grown up and been a teacher on the Cumberland. It's about the first white settlers along the Cumberland River in what is now Tennessee and Kentucky, who arrived, cleared fields, built cabins and forts, killed and were killed by many Indians, between the early 1700s and the early 1800s. Arnow is factual and non-judgemental about the effects of white settlement on Indian hunting grounds. She discusses the white violation of treaties and the bloody brutality of the conflict, but never says anything against the native peoples for trying to maintain their ancient territory. Much of the information she found was in inventories of settlers killed while farming or hunting. It's amazing they kept coming. But they were unique and many famous Americans were among them or soon born of them: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Boone, Presidents Polk and Buchanan. This passage is from near the end of the book. It's about corn, the crop that sustained everyone. When she refers to "The War" she means the Civil War:
Usually by mid-August and often earlier, the grains (of corn), though soft enough to be cut by a hard thumbnail, showed no milk. Then it was time for gritted bread, the first bread many settlers had. During my first year of teaching, this on Cave Creek of the Cumberland, my landlady one day remarked the corn was hard enough for gritting, and a body needed gritted bread. I had heard much of gritted bread, especially during The War when yearly the guerrillas stole the corn as soon as it was hard enough to grind, but I had never eaten gritted bread, and I wondered aloud how it would be.
Next afternoon, walking home from school, the landlady's children hurried, jumping up and down with giggles of anticipation, and soon I learned Mom had a surprise for Teacher. We found it -- Mom on the back porch hard at work with corn and gritter. The gritter was much like that used during the Revolution, a heavy piece of rectangular tin punched with a fairly large nail so that small jags stuck out after the fashion of an oversize nutmeg grater...
Like so many of those "simple" things done in the early days, it looked to be a job for a child, but when I tried it I first gritted a thumb and two knuckle joints, thus ruining a batch of meal with blood; then, fearful for my hand, I produced meal at too slow a rate until Mrs. Blankenship again took over and got enough for the supper's bread in short order. She gritted meal for me all fall, for it was good; baked with buttermilk and eggs, it was a little like spoon bread, but not quite, nutty and sweet, though of course with no sugar, only the taste of the young corn. Poor corn growers had often in the early fall to turn to gritted bread, but others with never empty corncrips had it every fall because they liked it.
-Harriette Simpson Arnow
Seedtime on the Cumberland, 1960
