Harry M. Caudill - Slender Is the Thread: Tales from a Country Law Office

Slender

IS THE

Thread

The title of this book is respectfully borrowed from the late John Young Brown, Sr., a great trial lawyer who promised to write a book of that title but never did.

Slender

IS THE

Thread

Tales from a
Country Law Office

HARRY M. CAUDILL

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

Copyright 1987 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre

College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College,

Kentucky Historial Society, Kentucky State University,

Morehead State University, Murray State University,

Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

and Western Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Caudill, Harry M., 1922

Slender is the thread.

1. LawKentuckyLetcher CountyAnecdotes, facetiae, satire, etc. 2. CourtsKentuckyLetcher CountyAnecdotes, facetiae, satire. etc. 3. Letcher County (Ky.)Social life and customs. I. Title.

K184.C38 1987 349.769163 87-1983

ISBN 0-8131-1611-2

ISBN 0-8131-0811-X (pbk.: acid-free paper)

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Dr. Otis Singletary,
former president of the University of Kentucky, whose understanding of Kentuckys economic, social, and political problems exceeded his power to resolve them.

Contents

Preface

IN A SUPPLEMENT to his The American Language H.L. Mencken encapsulated the early history of Kentucky: What is now Kentucky was the first region beyond the mountains to be settled. Pioneers began to invade it before the Revolution, and by 1782 it had more than 30,000 population. It was originally a part of Virginia, and the effort to organize it as an independent state took a great deal of politicking.

Implicit in these lines are the influences that gave the state and its people their reputation for contented ignorance, colorful individualism, crankiness, self-reliance, contempt for court decisions, deadliness with gun and knife, old-time salvation-style religion, and quirky and corrupt politics. In the decades since World War II new roads, television, and globalization of markets have caused a new Kentucky to emerge from the womb of time, but the old one, spawned of our British antecedents and the New World frontier, has not yet died. The new and old patterns of thought and behavior mingle in virtually every county and precinct, and give rise to such contradictions as our strange treatment of whiskey: our frontier era prompts us to make it, which we do in such immense quantities that it is known globally as bourbon after the county where it originated. But a religious revival, the Great Awakening, prompts us to reject it, so that three quarters of the countiesincluding Bourbonare officially dry by vote of the people. As matters have evolved the whiskey pours from the stills, ministers deplore it from their pulpits, and most Kentuckians do their drinking at home. A split personality has a hard time making up its mind.

In my career as a lawyer I found the imprint of the Indian frontier everywhere. Notwithstanding the advent of soda pop, frozen TV dinners, and wayside fast-food joints, Kentuckians still relish the foods their ancestors ate in 1792cornbread, pork, potatoes, and dried beans. Like those pioneers they still keep guns in their homes and close to hand. Nor have they lost the bonds of superstition. A thousand tales of strange occurrences are remembered, and few escape exhortations to repent. And when some governmental action is proposed, no matter how needed and benign, a roar of disapproval is heard as the frontier mind expresses its opposition to meddling by Jeffersonian tyrants.

For not very good reasons Kentucky bills itself as the Blue-grass State. It could with more reason be styled the Pioneer State.

These stories were not recorded because the people in them were epic personalities or the events grandly dramatic. I have told them because they reflect the mighty story of poor European immigrants struggling on primitive land and in wild mountains to survive, reproduce, and find sustenance for themselves and their households. Little by little the forest receded, the streams were bridged, the wild animals retreated to waste lands and government-owned sanctuaries, the Indians moved to Oklahoma (but many left their genes behind), schools were opened and the light of knowledge began to flicker on the new farms and along muddy village streets. The struggle was incredibly hard. It is impossible for us air-conditioned moderns to comprehend the magnitude of the effort. Put another way, how many of our stellar university athletes could accompany a latter-day Andrew Jackson to New Orleans and back, in the heat, cold, and rain, mostly afoot and carrying an eleven-pound rifle? How well might they endure a ten-hour stint at a coal face shoveling the gleaming fuel into carsand without any hope of escape until arthritis or a roof fall brings an end to their labors?

And in this easy age of scholarships and scholastic loans and grants, how can our tender youths comprehend schools without buses, lunchrooms, or libraries, and college educations paid for by small student wages earned over a decade or longer?

If some of these stories seem mindlessly violent, it is because the frontier experience attuned the people to weak governments, self-help, quick wrath, and long memories. The hundreds of volumes containing Kentucky court decisions are redolent of gunsmoke, red with blood, darkened with murder, lust, and vengeance. Jim Frazier and his son reflect the odiousness of crime and of a primitive social structure struggling to cope with it. And the horror of the Hillsville courthouse mirrors a culture and time when blood ties were the most valuable facets of life and any slight or burden, even when imposed by lawful courts, was ground for fiery resistance even to death. Nor should we suppose that the bloody age is behind us. A recent study disclosed that in eastern Kentucky eleven out of each thousand deaths are homicides, a rate that would horrify our British brethren.

Politics is a heady game in a simple society. Washington was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in a campaign in which he dispensed four-fifths of a gallon of spirits for each vote he received. The gallant who would become the father of his country wanted to win, and to win he had to wet whistles, make promises, and pay off poll floaters. This is not the way it should have been, but nonetheless the pattern was set and our elections remain in our time not only corrupt but subject to brutal pressures. Where Washington won votes by handing out whiskey and rum, the adroit politician of today may bestow not only whiskey and cash but public funds in the shape of welfare benefits, pensions, and wages, or even lift the burden of a prison sentence. The political machines are constantly building and dying as incumbents battle reformers who will, if elected, seek to repel others battering at their own walls. The emerging Kentucky has built magnificent roads and filled the heavens with the shouting of televised nonsense, but it has yet to inspire a majority of its people to want to learn, or to make its elections honest and fair.