My friends - Today, we are reviewing another of the delightful essays written by the late Dr. Gordon Wilson, from his little book, "Fidelity Folks", published in the 1940's. Fidelity was another name for the town of New Concord, in Calloway County, where Dr. Wilson was born(a son of Dr. Marquis Pillow Wilson)and spent his growing up years. This essay is entitled, "Out Into the Night", and takes us back to the late 1890's and the activities of the young people of that era which have long since passed into history. It was a simpler and gentler time, which makes our spirit yearn, at times, to be able to return to those earlier and less stressful days. As is now customary, there will be no data posts per se tomorrow or on the weekend. I hope to be able to drop by with a miscellaneous file offering. I have one file on which I am working, and I hope to get it completed before the end of the day Sunday. -B ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ OUT INTO THE NIGHT -Dr. A. Gordon Wilson "Fidelity Folks" At almost any time of the year we "stepped out" by going somewhere at night. In summer the amount of energy needed to keep the crops going limited our running around to Saturday nights or Sundays, but at other times of the year we never seemed too busy to get away. I am not referring to courting, which had all seasons for its own, but to visits in which all could participate. After the heat of summer was over, we were eager to get out. Probably the first real event that we attended was sorghum making. The mill ran all day, of course, but it was more romantic to go with a merry gang after nightfall and watch the evaporator working. Usually the grinding of the cane ceased at sunset, with several barrels of juice saved up for the night shift. The patient men stayed over the evaporator day and night, taking turns out for sleep. Molasses is something that has to be watched all the time, especially when it is almost done. Greenhorns were always being made the butt of crude tricks around a sorghum mill. The skim hole was slippery around the edges and offered a perpetual trap for the unsuspecting. And there was always a chance to taste the new syrup as it was poured out into the barrels or jugs or buckets. No one ever thought of taking a spoon from home to eat the new molasses; the standard spoon was crudely whittled from a joint of sorghum. Most of us liked the sticky foam better than the clear syrup and also felt that by eating this we were not really doing any damage to the output of real molasses. Good humor, watching the artistic syrup maker at his work, and the frolic of going with a good-humored gang repaid us for the tramp in the night. When the nights got shivery, we went hunting for 'possums and 'coons. Usually this did not involve a far trek, for the woods were all around us, with small timber on the ridges and immense trees in the creek bottoms. Nearly every kind of dog could tree these animals; we had no trained dogs that I can remember. After the varmint was treed, some daring boy would volunteer to climb up and shake it out. Sometimes the boy got out on a limb and had to be rescued by some more agile climber. Wastefully we often cut down the tree to get the animal, and then there would be a great fight with the dogs. Some of our best jokes concerned boys who fell out with the animals and were badly torn up by the dogs. In the winter after Christmas there were often parties on Saturday nights, a continuation of the Christmas festivities. It was never too cold or too snowy to go on horseback, even beyond the state line, to a winter party. Sometimes we were allowed to take our girls, but most of our trips to faraway places were with boys only. We had to depend on the girls who lived close to the parties for partners in games. The adventure of riding so far on bad nights was our chief reward. The Christmas parties were really a chain of house parties, with the girls staying all night and the boys returning home for the day's work between each two. By the end of the holidays we were sometimes worn out with loss of sleep and surfeited with rich food. Colds and general puniness would then attend us for the rest of the winter. The custom of serenading a newly married couple with a chirivari still prevailed at Fidelity, though we called it a "shiveree." The custom was so old that it had rules as constant as those of Town Ball or Prisoner's Base. We met in some centrally located place with all the noisemakers we could find: shotguns, rifles, hand bells, tin pans, cowhorns, tin horns, and anything else that we could devise. We organized into groups like military companies, so as not to kill each other, Then we crept stealthily to the house where the couple were staying and turned on our artillery, marching around the house in some agreed fashion. After the first burst of noise was over, we would try to get the bridegroom to come out; otherwise we went in and got him and gave him a good ride on a sharp rail. If the parents of the bride or bridegroom were kindhearted, they passed us out some cider or cake or sometimes stronger stuff. In a very few instances some one got hurt, but nobody lamented the custom and wondered why fellows in a shiveree could not take care of themselves and stay out of danger from shotguns. The serenade was a more decorous thing and often took place during the Christmas holidays as a sort of tour of good wishes, Nearly everybody had piles of cakes cooked up, anyway, and we knew it. We rarely came home hungry. Our songs were seldom carols, for we did not know any, but the most of our singing was from the church hymns, as it seemed a little too sacred an occasion to sing nonsense. At school late in the fall when I was about ten years old some of the children from across the creek told us that some Indians were camping by the spring on the second farm above us. We had never seen any Indians and had expected every one to be in war paint and wearing feathers. That night we got our neighbor man to go with us across the footlog and through the fields to the camp. We took the lantern and kept pretty close to it, for we did not want to get scalped ("skelped," we called it). I have suffered many disillusionments in my life but probably none that hurt any worse than the one of that night. I do not know to this day whether they were Indians or were merely white people who had not washed their faces in a month of Sundays. We hunkered around their campfire on the chilly fall night and asked some idiotic questions of the only grown man in the party. He answered in hillbilly English with no trace of foreign accent and probably told us what we wanted to hear. His wagon, standing a few feet away, smelled worse than our Negro cabins; the unwashed brats, some of them stark naked, crowded around the fire; and there were several dogs that had no sign of good manners. The Indian man told us he was a Cherokee, When we asked him to say something in his language to his wife, she answered in something that was not English, but the tone of it plainly said enough. There was no further questioning of either man or woman, in any of the known languages. We took our lantern and went disconsolately back across the fields, and the footlog, with one more dream shattered. Somehow the pictures of noble Red Men never seemed alluring after that. Better than all other types of collective going was the habit of sitting till bedtime. We could do just about everything that was customary at parties, with no formality. We could have play-party games, we could sing, we could have clog-dancing; and we could also have popcorn or roasted chestnuts or apples or cider. When we went to sit till bedtime, we were dressed in everyday clothes and could afford to be freer and more at ease than we were when we were dressed up, "fit to kill," for a party. All these goings in the night tied up our community into a social whole, about as nearly as anything that you could think of. Our politics and religion usually kept us apart; our big dinners were likely to be limited to our own social circle; but the gangs that tramped across the fields to sit till bedtime represented the best and the worst that our little community had to offer. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++