My
Origins and our Local Witch
I was born in a small house built by my Uncle
by marriage Jess Morgan who lived at the end of our long driveway by a Mountain
branch that flowed into Frozen Creek. Jess married my Grandma Chapman’s sister
Fronie, She was a stern but kind lady
who I bought my first car from, a 1953 Bel Aire Chevrolet sedan. The branch,
like many others, originated higher up the mountain and served whiskey stills
over the years. In later years, I caught lizards in the branch, some poisonous
and some not to use as bait in the French
Broad River that Frozen Creek ran into just two miles down the Frozen Creek
road from our house. I was told that if the lizard had a blue or purple tail
that it was poisonous. I never verified that, but I took particular care
handling those lizards. We had a Mountain branch on my Daddy’s eight acres that
we used as drinking water and to cool our milk and other products from our milk cow. Our branch, like so many
others throughout Transylvania County, provided water for whiskey stills. My
Daddy had one of his stills close to the headwaters of what we referred to as
the Spout Branch.
At a young age, I packed sugar and corn
malt into the liquor still of my Daddy’s and carried 4 gallons of whiskey back
down the mountain for my Mama to sell. We got the empty gallon jugs from a Coca
Cola Plant in Hendersonville, North Carolina. The jugs previously held the
syrup used to make Coca Cola soda pop which for some reason, we called dopes.
Maybe we were the dopes, but I bought many a Coca Cola dope along with a moon
pie at Harlow McCall’s small store roughly 3 miles or so from where Frozen
Creek road ended at Highway 64 right close to the bend of the French Broad
River. My purchase was put in a poke (paper bag).
Our small house had only two bedrooms, a
living room, and a kitchen. We had both a front and back porch. This small
house accommodated over a period of time 12 of 13 children that my Mother gave
birth to before dying at the early age of 51.
We slept head to toe in the back bedroom
in two full size beds. As the children grew up and left home, that left more
food for the rest of us. We raised chickens and hogs, and we shot and killed
the slowest animals in the surrounding woods . Every fall, we slaughtered a hog
for winter meat, and we had a bank house built into the bank beside our house.
Mama would go to the bank house to slice pork loin or bacon to compliment our
breakfast of eggs and grits. The bank house had shelves to accommodate my Mama’s
canned vegetables from her garden. She supplemented her garden bounty with
canned Georgia Peaches that she bought from local fruit stands along highway
64. What a thrill to eat a bowl of canned peaches in the dead of winter or one
of Mama’s peach cobblers. We fished and hunted and rarely bought anything other
than flour, cornmeal, salt, and pepper from the local grocery store in greater
downtown Rosman.
People make fun of me for writing the
story of my birth. One minute, I was comfortable and warm and suddenly I was
having my ass whacked by a doctor. I was born on a small cot right by a widow
looking out onto our front porch. To say the least, I was shocked and confused.
It was a hot August day, the 19th to be exact in the year 1946. I
have written about some of my earliest memories of my birth and early years. I
won’t go into much detail but in between napping I recall people stopping by to
see the new baby. I looked around but, I never spied anything that looked like
a new baby. After all, I was 9 months and three days old when I was born. Imagine
my surprise when my Grandma took me from my Mama’s arms and referred to me as
the new baby. Anyway, in later years, I would get birthday cards wishing me a Happy
Birthday even though I only had one such event. It always confused me and it
still does.
People poo poo my excellent memory of
being born with a full head of hair and a mouth full of teeth, so let them. I
know what I know and I yam what I yam.
I had eight brothers and four sisters with
only 5
younger than me. I have lost precious brothers and sisters. My oldest brother
Charles, who I loved dearly. My lovely sister Estelle who was not only a
sister, but my best friend, My twin brothers, Howard and Harold, My brother Edgar
who my Mama named after Edgar Allen Poe. My brother Ronnie who only lived a
brief time after his birth. My brother Harold named his son Ronnie after my
brother Ronnie. All my Aunts and Uncles lie in graveyards. We were all the same
and we were all different, but we were always family. It is the way of the
world that we each live and die. God breathed our first breath into us and with
our last breath our soul escapes the body that housed our souls for the
duration of our life. The Irish have the right idea; they celebrate the life of
a person instead of mourning the death. The soul or the spirit of life lives
on. My sister Thelma always liked the gospel; “Precious Memories” . My sweet Aunt
Verdery played the song on her piano; “ Farther Along.” My sister Estelle and I visited Aunt Verdery
right before she died. On her death bed, she ordered me and Estelle to eat a
delicious bowl of pinto beans (soup beans) from her kitchen. Of course we had
corn bread with the soup beans. Each time I eat pinto beans, I think of Aunt
Verdery. My mama always had pinto beans on the stove and plenty of biscuits and
cornbread for anyone who stopped by our house hungry. My friends though nothing of going
into the kitchen and dishing up a bowl of soup beans and breaking off a piece
of cornbread. Precious Memories indeed.
Anyway, I wanted to mention our local witch.
Her name was ,or still is, as far as I know, Aunt Lissie. Now Aunt Lissie ain’t
my aunt but I along with hundreds of people called her Aunt Lissie and she loved
being addressed in that way. I loved Aunt Lisse and fully believed as I do now
that she was or still is a witch with special powers. She was tall and mysterious. It was difficult
to get a straight answer out of her. She lived about two miles up Frozen Creek
road just past Mayapple Holler and at the foot of Jim Dick Hill. I don’t know a
thing about the origin of Jim Dick Hill, I just accepted it as a landmark just
as what is known after all these years, the Lissie Place. For a period of time,
Aunt Lissie’s brother, Deilius Cantrell lived with Aunt Lissie. He was
bedridden and did not speak much. He claimed that he was severely injured by
the Ku Klux Klan in Kentucky. I don’t know.
I had a flat tire in heavy rain on a curve in Kentucky. I changed that
tire as Semi Trucks whizzed by me mere feet away at blinding speed. I survived
in case you were wondering.
So, mountain lore has it that ghosts and
witches are plentiful in Western North Carolina. My Grandpa Chapman, in my estimation
was the best storyteller in North Carolina. I fancy myself as storyteller, but
I could never recount stories like my Grandpa. Each story he told enthralled
the listeners and as you listened to his stories, you actually felt like you
were in the story that he was telling. He had that knack to describe the scene
perfectly and in a voice that paused occasionally which left you breathless
waiting for the next part of the story. When I would return to my birthplace,
my Daddy would take me to the local cemeteries and tell me about his memories
of the person listed on the granite or marble stones. I asked my Grandpa if Aunt
Lisse was a witch and he hemmed and hawed a bit before saying that he did not
know, but that stories about her having special powers were too plentiful to
just ignore. He said some things are just as hard to prove as to disprove.
When, I asked Aunt Lissie directly, she
said that a lot of people believe that she is a witch and some disbelieve. She
avoided admitting that she was a witch, but the evidence and personal stories of
people who knew her well. My brother Edgar was a skeptic. He challenged Aunt
Lisse to prove she was a witch by making him do something. I think Edgar had consumed
a bit of my Daddy’s white lightning.
He stood in her front yard and challenged
her to make him do something to prove she was a witch. She looked at him
intently and said “ so, there you are.” He looked at her and said, “ what are
you talking about.” She said, “I just had you climb my crabapple tree backwards.”
We used the term: “backassward.”
I don’t know that witches can get sick,
but my Mama told us that she stayed with Aunt Lissie a few days when she was
sick and needed help. Mama said that she was making Aunt Lisse’s bed and she
reached down to straighten out a pillow on the bed and a hairball rolled out from
under the pillow. Aunt Lisse was on the front porch wrapped in a blanket one
minute and the next minute, she was in the bedroom with Mama and snatched the
hairball from the bed and vanished. Well, Mama occasionally took a sip of Daddy’s
brew also.
My brother Charles and my cousins Willard
Morgan and Otis Morgan tell the same Aunt Lisse story. They had been drinking
and stopped to visit Aunt Lisse. They sat in her living room by her fireplace,
and they kept after Aunt Lisse to prove she was a witch. Exasperated, she
passed around a fingernail clipper and told them to clip their fingernails. Se
had a fire going in the fireplace. They
did. Then her kerosene lanterns dimmed and almost went out. The only light was
from the glow of the fireplace. She told everyone to throw their fingernail
clippings in the fireplace. As they did, the room grew darker and floating
through the air from the entryway to the living room, a casket with brass
handles floated through the room. The witnesses claim they were unable to move
from their chairs until the casket disappeared from sight. They suddenly all
decided it was time to leave.
I don’t know. I can only speak from my own
experiences. I used to go to Aunt Lissie’s after school, and she would give me
10 cents per hour to weed and hoe her garden. I would work an hour or two and
she had this small tobacco pouch with change in it. She would take out two
dimes and hand to me and thank me for a good job.
After I left home to join the Navy, I
would come back on leave and always visit Aunt Lisse. She was always happy to
see me and asked me about the places I had been. Over the years, she never
changed or looked a day older than when I was a young boy. I came back one year
and her place was empty. I was told that she moved to Morgantown Norh Carolina.
People told me that when they saw her, she looked the same as 40 years earlier.
She never shows any aging. I have heard dozens of stories about her ability to
heal injured people. One such story was a baby was severely burned and the doctors
said that the baby would not live. Aunt Lissie was taken to the baby, and she
applied some type of ointment to the baby and within a few days all signs of
the burn disappeared.
If Aunt Lisse was or still is a witch, I
don’t care. I loved her and will remember her always.
