Printed within this section in serialized form are unedited, pre-publication excerpts from the book "Virginia Boy: The True Life Story of Cletus Cubbage." Written in longhand over a period of years, the original manuscript comprises twelve notebooks. "Virginia Boy" describes the life and times of a widely-travelled Valley native whose primary interest has been music. Cletus Cubbage has played guitar, solo and in various bands and places, for most of his life and has written over 200 songs. His story is a window into traditional area life and values.
"Virginia Boy"
By CLETUS CUBBAGE
If you missed earlier sections, they're archived in "Word Preserve" as
Chapter I, Part 2, and Chapter I, Part 1.Chapter I: Part 3
My daddy and brother, both, played the fiddle. We had a white, cheap guitar then but, I was to short armed to play it. We had a battery radio, and I fell in love with country music as soon as I heard it. I also fell in love with the western stories, sometimes I'd hear on it. Now I was singing with the musicians on the radio and playing the fire shovel for a guitar. When my first cousin heard me singing I thought he would crack up. He couldn't wait to get to town to tell everyone about it. There was a grocery store in the town of Stanley, that was operated by Mr. Robinson. That's what everyone called him, if he didn't have what you wanted they didn't make it. Any way, my cousin and his sister thought it was funny, me tryin to sing. So, they told the lady in the store about it, she sat me up on the counter and told me to sing for her. So, I started to sing I don't remember now what it was that I sang but, they had little shelves in the store with glass lids on them that they put cakes in, if you didn't want to buy a box of cakes, you could buy as many as you wanted. The lady gave me a whole sack of cakes then, my cousin and his sister didn't laugh any more. Fact was, they became what you might call my agents. They would tell the man in the drug store that I could sing so that he would give us ice cream, to hear me sing. Daddy would sometimes buy a watermelon and take it home and put it in a water bucket and lower it down in the well on a rope and after it got cold, we would have it in the cool of the evening. Sunday morning, when all the necessary work was done, we would get ready for preaching. At that time we didn't have a church, we would meet at some ones home and have what was called then "preaching". We were Holler People and Country People, we were also God Fearing People. Later we would use a chicken house for a church until we got the real church built. When school was out for the summer I did a lot of work then. I can remember at seven years old, I was thinning corn, you don't do that now, but we did then. Then, we had no corn planters so, we would drop 3 to 4 grains of corn, to what we called a hill, if it came up to thick we pulled up the small stalks and would leave the big stalks to grow. Then it would be cut by hand with a blade on a long handle, called a corn cutter. When the corn was cut it was then put in a shock, this looked like an Indian teepee. Cutting the corn was a very hard job, it would be dry at this time and you would have to tie a handkerchief around your neck to keep the corn stalks from rubbing your neck bloody.
OUR TOMATO CROP
We always had our own tomato crop . There were tomatoes for our own use and we also sold them to a cannery. My brother would plow the field with a horse and plow, then the ground was haired down, then the ground was smooth. This hair was pulled by our horse, you don't see the hair any more, this instrument had half curved springs that would drag the ground smooth. Once the ground was ready then the work started. Setting the tomato plants. The man that owned the tomato cannery would sow tomato seeds, when the plants had growed big enough, from the seeds, we would pull up the plants. You had to pull the tomato plant close to the ground, being careful not to break its stalk. After we had as many plants as we were gonna use, we put 50 plants in a bunch, we paid for them and took them to the field where we would set them. If there hadn't been any rain in a while we would "mud" the plants. This was done by poring water in a hole in the ground and making mud. Then the tomato plants had this mud rubbed on their roots. They wouldn't wilt and die as quick if you did this to them. To set the plants we had a flat rod, about 3 feet long and one end was pointed like an arrow tip. The other end was bent for you to hold it with, a hole about 8 inches was made in the ground and the plant was put in the hole and the dirt was pushed up around it, so that it would grow. This was another back breaking job. This tomato job was partly done, unless the weeds would start to grow to high and then you had to go through the field and pull the weeds away from the tomatoes.
POTATO PLANTING
This was another job we were familiar with. We would buy seed potatoes and cut the eyes off the potatoes. These eyes were dropped into a plowed furrow, and then covered with dirt. When the potatoes grew about 6 inches high you would pull the weeds away from them and hoe them. When the tops of the potatoes turned dry and died, you then plowed them out of the ground and picked them up in baskets. Then they were put in a cool cellar so that they would not rot through the winter. This was also another back breaking job. We would set onion sets and make straight rows in the ground to go by and these onion sets were pushed into the ground. Later, they would grow into delicious tender onions for eating, by themselves or we would use them to go in salads. After the onions grew bigger, they were pulled out of the ground and let dry and then they were also put in the cellar to be used when ever we wanted them. There was a lot of food we growed at our home and our friends and neighbors lived and worked similar to us. We dropped our beans in rows and after they were 5 to 6 inches long they were picked in baskets and they were strung and broken and cooked and canned, in glass cans. Some of the beans where put on sheets on our tin roof and dried in the sun. After they were dried they were put in white sacks and tied up in one of our buildings at home. West Virginia calls them "leather britches". They could be cooked any time you would like them. They were delicious especially with side meat. So, we had our garden vegetables and our chickens for eating or eating their eggs. We had our cattle for our beef we ate and our hogs that we butchered. I can remember the only thing we bought to eat was our flour, coffee, salt, pepper sugar and tobacco. There were other things in the food line that we bought but we didn't have to buy it to live.Yes, this was part of my life as a boy growing up in Lucas Holler with my mom and dad and my brother. We were tired most of the time but, we were always happy, and never were we hungry or thirsty. The following poem that I have written tells about a boy and his farm. This little poem is very true as the rest of my life's story. I'm the boy in the poem.
A BOY AND HIS FARM
When I was a boy, I was raised on a farm. Not as big as the ones we have now, truth was, for milk we had one ole cow. We didn't buy our food from the stores in town. We growed our own on our own fine ground. We didn't buy our ham in packs, we got ours from a building called "The Smoke House". The beef we ate, wasn't packed in ice, and the food we canned always tasted all right. We didn't have a car to drive to town. But, with our horse and buggy, we still got around. We didn't have tractors, to plow our fields. Just one ole horse and one old plow. We didn't have corn pickers to pick our corn, just our own two hands, that got cracked and worn. We didn't have bailors to bail our hay, but, God helped us get it in the building anyway. The water we drank was pure and clean, it didn't look gloomy and taste like chlorine. There was one ole doctor in our town, and if we got sick, he was always around. We didn't have a dentist to fix our teeth, but, now you gotta watch everything you eat. We didn't have a saw to cut our wood, we used an ax and it burned just as good. In the winter time, I'd sleep nice and warm. . . under a quilt, that mom had darned. By now you're wonderin' how did they live? We had the Lord and love to give. Yes, when I was a boy we had a farm, but, something happened, I didn't see it no more. What I'm seeing now are fields and machines, air condition tractors, and bailing machines. People cussin' and tellin' lies. Sometimes I just stop and sit down and cry. But, I still say, "The Farmer's Our Man", he gives us food from this great land. His heart is warm, and his ways ain't tough. His hands ain't smooth and his face is rough. I've said, these few things and now I'm through. Oh! One more thing, Mr. Farmer, I'm for you!!
We were the last family in the holler, I mean when you got to the end of the main dirt road. Then we lived up farther next to the mountains that joins the park, The Shenandoah National Park. This house had six rooms and two porches. The back porch was where we ate a lot of our meals in the summer time. Back then there were no fans, and certainly no air conditioners, back then we even had our refrigerator out on this porch. You could call it part of our kitchen. This house had three rooms down stairs and three rooms upstairs, plus the little cubilo, or dog house, that you could see on the front built out from the roof. Daddy started to have a basement under this house too. This was being dug by hand and the dirt was wheeled out with a wheel barrow. However, this never got finished due to daddy's health. This house had two floors in it. Daddy put boards down one way and put more boards down going another way. The walls were built like the floors, two sets of boards and to make the house even warmer grey siding that daddy put over the boards. My daddy even laid the bricks in the front of the house. It's hard to believe that one person could do all this work by himself. Later, this house got burned down. I've been there awhile back and the foundation is partly there yet, but my mountain home there, is gone forever.
