Wild Cohees

by Bruce Patterson

For the men and women from the fair isles surrounding the Irish Sea, having to serve out their Indenture as a field hand in the Carolina Tidewaters was often a sentence of death. And, if it was running away from the plantation that you were after, then prowling in the swamps surrounding you were hungry bears, blood-thirsty alligators and stalking panthers. The prospect of running off and running into deadly, poisonous snakes was especially terrorizing to you from the lands without snakes. And if all that wasn't enough to keep you where you belonged, the Tidewaters were also haunted with exotic, unknowable sounds, and miraculous sights were hidden behind endless curtains of tangled vegetation. At night ghosts preyed in the mists and, if they caught you, they swallowed you whole. They'd begin by nibbling away at your dreams, and then they'd devour your memories of home and, finally, your will to live.

Like in the bog lands back home, there grew up legends of winsome young peasant lasses who, forced into slavery by the lords of the land, weighted themselves down with rocks and sank forever into the bottomless mud.

If the Indentured souls toiling on the Tidewater plantations needed anymore proof of having been forsaken by God, it came with summer's suffocating blanket of steaming heat and its swarms of flesh-eating bugs. The air got so thick you choked on it, and your lathered body gave off steam so hot it stung your nostrils.

Whether the cause was the foul air of the swamps with its mysterious "gases," or whether it was poison in the mud, or just the wickedness of evil spirits, the Indentured field hands fell sick and they died wholesale.

And so it was that in the blackness of the nights, when the lords and the overseers were asleep and the people could speak without being overheard, the old ones told of the mountains. According to the tales that filtered back to the Tidewaters, there in the mountains under the sunset, the landlords held no sway. In the mountains the air was clean and healthy, the soils fertile and the summer rains bountiful. And way up yonder in the mountains were places so rugged and so remote that even The Crown couldn't find you. And up there lived Noble Savages who would adopt you as brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. Living in the forests among the savages, free men would find wives, and women husbands, and the land would provide and no one would do the bidding of any other.

Because not many folks will stake their lives in the pursuit of something they cannot see or sink their teeth into, not many Cohees ("mountaineers") came out of the Carolina Tidewaters. The journey to the mountains was too complicated, the gauntlet of sheriffs and bounty hunters too long, the chances of success too slim.

So most Cohees came out of the upper Piedmont, that pine covered plateau country of low, rounded, rolling hills. When the field hands could straighten up, stretch their backs, cast their eyes westward and see the wild mountain wall — they were the ones who took the legends seriously, and they were the ones who ran for it.

When they took a mind, they snuck out of their beds and they ran all night. They ran all night upstream in the water of the nearest creek. When daylight came, to keep the hounds off them, they'd cross over a bulge in the hills and run upstream in the next creek. Depending on how far they had to go, they might run in the water of a dozen creeks and cross over a dozen hogbacks before finding themselves at the mouth of a canyon. And they wouldn't stop running then, either, not by a long shot. They'd keep on upstream into the mountains, running day, running night, climbing ever higher until they could look back down and see the tops of the clouds — could reach out with their hands and grab a hold of the clouds like it was the wool of lambs.

Somewhere up there where the summer air was brisk and healthy and the meadows a lush, emerald green, at a place where they were sure nobody was following and where they thought they could scratch out a living, that's where they stopped running and that's where they set down stakes.

That's the Cohee Creation myth more or less the way I heard it from my first wife and others. My first wife was a North Carolina native first generation down from the mountains, and she knew the stories well. But the point is that those who ran for the mountains — and those who stayed up there and never again came back down — had good reason for living as they did. While they may well have been short on the book learning, when it came to living they were not ignorant people by any stretch. They had no apologies to make, least of all to those they'd supposedly "stolen" their own labor from. If later on during the American Civil War even the most southern living of the Cohees withheld their support from slavery's cause, it was because they themselves, by way of their own folklore, knew a little something about slavery.

As to where the word "Cohee" comes from, nobody knows because the word's roots reach all the way back into the 17th Century (most likely). Some say "Cohee" is a contraction of "Colonial Cherokee," and that's as good an explanation as any. It also brings up another interesting story. When in the 1830s the flatlanders came into the mountains to steal Cherokee land and to force the people into exile in Oklahoma, the "whites" living among them were allowed to stay put. Also, to avoid exile, a good number of the full-blooded Cherokee took off into the highest mountains and hid out up there.

Over the coming decades, the Cohees living lower down in the hills kept the existence of the renegades a secret. Whenever they'd get questioned by outsiders, they'd always pretend that in their whole lives they'd never once seen any thing that was at all out of the ordinary, whether up there in the highlands or any place else for that matter. None of them would even admit to knowing of a distant relative who'd ever seen anything at all extraordinary in any way, shape or form. Fact was they were simple, uncomplicated folk. They were homebodies who didn't go about worrying over other people's business.

Yet the notion of any such wild goings on as free-roaming Indians right up yonder and nobody being the wiser for it just plain made not a lick of sense if a stranger just took the time to ponder it. How's a body going to hide the cow in the milking stall? And because not one body living in the hills had ever once seen even one wild Indian, not to mention a whole damned tribe of them running around up there — or leastwise seen one and lived to tell about it — they were not of a mind to believe it themselves, no siree, and not for nothing. Nor were they at all liable to put any stock into any fellah's passing on any idle gossip claiming otherwise.

Of course, the Cohees would reluctantly admit if pressed, a stranger was always welcome to go and take his own gander if he thought it'd make him feel any better. It was a free country, sure enough. And sometimes a man just needed to go ahead on and stick his hand into the flames of a fire just to make sure they were good and hot — nobody could fault a body for wanting to be powerful certain about that. And the mountains were plenty big enough to allow for the footsteps of a stranger, even if he was sort of colorfully dressed, clumsy, noisy and easy to track.

Up there in the wild mountains, the Cohee's all swore, a stranger'd just need to keep a good watch out for man-eating bears, was all. He'd need to keep a good eye out for man-eating bears, rattlesnakes sunning themselves on the rocky ledges, mountain lions fixing to pounce out of trees and ghosts that came out and screamed like Banshees in the night.