What They Do

              From: Thompson, The Highlanders of the South ( 1910)
WHAT THEY DO
I do not want to say that this man is lazy or indolent or shiftless, for he is not exactly
either of these, but rather a combination of all. A few years ago the writer of this said in
the columns of a Southern magazine that the average man of the South does not actually
work more than half the time. That statement has not been contradicted. This applies all
over the South, and is no more true of the man of the mountains than of the man who
dwells in the fertile valleys away from any mountains at all. Some think that genius is the
result of rest, being accumulated by atavism through successive generations. If this be
true the South, in the opinion of the writer, should produce more geniuses than any part of
the country; for we do rest. There are such extremes of poverty and wealth, ignorance and
culture, in the South that it is difficult to classify them properly for all classes. You find
the wealthy landowner dwelling in an elegant house on a farm or plantation of several
hundred acres while his nearest neighbor, usually neighbors, may live in a hovel on the
same farm surrounded by dirt and squalor of the worst sort. It is of the dweller in the
hovel we wish to write. His life, his surroundings, his temptations we desire to reach and
help. Not that the other fellow doesn’t need help, but he is able to help himself. He knows
the things he needs, but for generations his people have been hoarders of dollars or
boarders of remnants of blue- blooded aristocracy. They will let go of neither. One is as
great an evil as the other. There is absolutely no sympathy between this hoarder of
aristocratic ancestry and the poor hovel dweller. But more of that later.
Shall we call him a day laborer? I suppose so. That is about the way most of them live.
They are witty, quick to see, but look with wonder upon education and scholarship. We
have seen them open their eyes in astonishment when told that one can read two lines at a
time or peruse an ordinary novel in a few hours. It is not always the day laborer who is so
amazed. Sometimes it is the mountaineer who owns some hundreds of acres of rock,
gravel, and scrubby trees and calls it a cattle range or sheep ranch.
A generation ago these people tilled the soil in a small way, making their living selling
a little corn, a little wheat, now and then a steer, or perchance working by the month for
the more successful farmer in the lowlands. It was easier then than now, because there
was a government distillery every few miles and the mountain farmer could sell the corn
raised in his fertile valley or on his rich hillside for a good price within a short distance
from his home. In those days corn was about all he raised. That is the secret of the
practical failure of the government to break up the illicit distilling of liquor. Every few
weeks now an illicit still is " raided” by revenue officers and in some cases hundreds of
gallons of malt destroyed. The mountaineer dwelling in the coves and hills often- times
declares that God gave these things to him, therefore he has a right to use them so as to
make a living the easiest way. Do you think these mountains need mission work? If it
were not claiming his inalienable right to make whisky without pay- ing revenue he would
be claiming some other so- called inalienable right, for his chief right seems to be
following the line of least resistance.