"Quotations in Time"

Tried for Swearing

“The church put him on trial. They didn’t put up with you if you did something like that. My uncle wouldn’t admit it, but then they put his wife on the stand. She said, ‘Now Monkey’—that was his nickname—‘it’s bad enough to cuss, but it’s worse to tell a lie. Now get up here and tell ’em you cussed.’”

—the late Cyrus Shumpert of the Black Creek area, Lexington County, recalling the favorite family story of his granduncle, a country parson who occasionally sinned

THAT Was Entertainment

“I can remember the quartets they had, singing all kinds of music, often with no organ, no instrument at all, a capella. If you needed a certain sound, then you made it with your voice. They sang at churches and all around. And on a Saturday night, if we didn’t feel like dancing, then we would sing. We’d get together with some of the other cousins and friends to learn new pieces from the songbooks they sent off for.”

—the late Mamie Garvin Fields of Charleston, from Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (The Free Press, 1983)

Geese & Sleet

“It commenced sleeting in the night—now every thing is cased in ice—elastic shrubbery in some places bent to the ground. . . . How dreadful this weather is to our poor stock—Cows, sheep & hogs—even the chickens seem to feel the cold—but the foolish geese will be in the sleet—water seems to fascinate a goose—I do believe they would freeze sooner than go under a shelter. . . .”

—from the 23 January 1861 diary entry of Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard, widow and plantation owner near Columbia (see A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War, edited by John Hammond Moore, USC Press, 1993)

The Crossing

“My grandfather owned most of the land around Coronaca. My daddy was 15 years old when he went to Greenwood for the first time in his life. They crossed the stream in a wagon, and my daddy took off his straw hat and flung it into the water. He said, ‘Good-bye, United States!’”

—the late Dave Rice of Spartanburg, recounting the family anecdote of his father’s discovery of the world; Dave played on the Wofford College football team that went to the 1950 Cigar Bowl

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