The summer I was 16 years old a man in our community was asking for folks to work picking bunch beans for market. My friend JoAnne and I went on two trips. We got onto the back of his panel truck with a bunch of other people. Up over the Whitetop Mountain Road we went, through Konnarock and down the Iron Mountain to Sinkler’s Bottom over near Chilhowee, Virginia. The fields of beans were big and the rows were long. It was much hotter over there than it was at home.
We made lots of new friends while picking beans. One older lady named Doshie, who lived up in the Whitetop Community, was especially nice. Neither JoAnne or I had packed any lunch and our new friend shared her sandwiches with us. It wasn’t very long until my back was tired and hurting from bending over to pick beans, so I crawled on my knees for a while. When we got our bushel baskets full a young boy would bring an empty hamper to us and take the full one to the scales. Then he brought a ticket back to us showing how much the beans weighed so we could get paid. The afternoons were long and I don’t ever remember picking over four bushels of beans in a day.
At home, I had already turned down pages in the Sears & Roebuck catalog where I planned to order clothes for school with the money I earned. But after we had finished picking beans for the day and rode back across the mountain I was tired, sunburned, and starved to death. Usually, we stopped at the little Sturgill’s Store on Helton Creek and I spent most of the money I had made on Moon Pies, Orange Crush Drinks and sometimes ice cream.
Our new friend Doshie invited me and JoAnne to come to her church on Sunday. They were having all day preaching and dinner on the grounds. She said, “I am going to make a big pot of chicken and dumplings now, and you girls come.” Both JoAnne and I had chicken and dumplings at home from time to time. What possessed us to walk two miles to get there, I don’t know. No vehicles passed while we were walking. As we got near the church we could see people outside the building. The men had set up sawhorses in the churchyard with boards on top for makeshift tables. The ladies were putting out the dinner on pretty homemade tablecloths and there was a big crowd there.
We wondered what three or four men were doing standing in the road looking at something on the steep upper bank. We soon found out. One of them reached out his hand and grabbed a huge black snake. Towards us he came holding the big snake up in the air and laughing the whole time. He chased us so far back down the road that we just came on home where we arrived tired and hungry. My Mom said we went to church for the wrong reason and the devil met us before we got there. In our defense, we were planning on staying for the afternoon service. We never did know what our new friend Doshie thought of all that, or if she ever saw it.
The snake handler was not a member of that church, but he had probably been invited to preaching and dinner just as we had. Things got out of hand, but we forgave him. Through the years JoAnne and I have shared some good laughs remembering that day.
