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Like most mountaineers, Floyd has tried his luck up North; he worked in an Indiana foundry, tenant-farmed in Ohio. Each time, he came back as soon as he could save a few dollars. "You're all the time homesick when you ain't in this hollow," says Handshoe. "It bothered me fierce. In a city you got a certain job, and you go to the store and buy from one mess to the next. You can't get credit in a place like Ohio. Just about any store around here will give you credit."
One of the first things Floyd Handshoe did after joining the Happy Pappies was to buy a $300 freezer—on credit. It contains no meat as yet. He was "aiming to kill that bull calf and a hog" in October, he explains, "but I got to looking at the moon. You can't kill no meat on the new of the moon. It will be tough. I studied the calendar and the almanac, and the soonest I can do it is around the ninth or tenth of next month." Then there is the hillbilly's fundamentalist religion, ever inveighing against sins of the city. Two years ago, at a revival meeting in Handshoe Hollow's Holiness Church, snake handling was part of the ritual —until one of the faithful grabbed a purely satanic copperhead, got bitten and nearly died.
Room to Prank. By comparison with a city slum, an Appalachian holler offers an infinitely rich, exciting life, which mountain folk extol in a courtly tongue directly descended from their Scots-English ancestors, who first penetrated the region two centuries ago. Children have creeks to fish in, plenty of room to "prank," as their parents say. Last hog-killing time, several of the Handshoe boys dried a hog's bladder, filled it with peas to make a giant-size rattle. Then, relates Floyd's wife Dollie, still shaking with laughter at the memory, they "took and tied it to a cat's tail. That old cat took off like it was spooked." So, as soon as they reach their mid-teens, do most of the children themselves. The three oldest Handshoe sons have all had to leave the mountains for city jobs up North. "None of those boys want to live up there," rues Floyd. "That's what ruins us, the young ones having to leave."
Most important to the mountaineer is his own and his neighbor's instinctive respect for individual dignity. Approached by a newspaper photographer in Handshoe Hollow last week, a woman warned: "I don't want my likeness struck." A mountaineer's likeness is as private as his still, and the photographer who strikes it without asking is likely to get struck back. That very independence is one of the major obstacles blocking the mountaineer's assimilation into the 20th century. In the world's most mobile, adaptable society, he does not want to move or adapt.
Without Envy. In a perceptive new book about Appalachia, appropriately entitled Yesterday's People, Jack E. Weller, a Presbyterian minister who has spent 13 years in the region, writes of a church-backed attempt to organize garbage collection in a typical holler where the families had traditionally tossed their refuse into stinking heaps near their houses. The people were so incensed at this intrusion that some of them took to dumping their refuse on the garbage collector's lawn. In Appalachia few community-wide campaigns go much further.