Howard Herron Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Howard Herron 11
she'd get a rag, a coal oil rag, and she'd make us boys strip off and
she'd take this rag and just rub it all over us and then take a bath.
The kerosene would kill the chiggers. Did you ever get chiggers?
Q: Yes.
A: You know what they
are.
Q: Terrible.
A: Itch. That's how they got rid of the chiggers.
Q: So you probably remember her blackberry pies. Was that one of your
favorite things that she fixed for you?
A: Oh, yes, she was--we belonged to the Methodist Church and she
belonged to the Ladies Aid Society and whenever they had a cookout or a
bazaar or whatever you call it, and my mother's bread was always spoken
for before she got it there, because she could make good bread. I
remember we would come home and we'd smell that chili sauce cooking and
I'd want the heel of the bread and some chili sauce on it. It'd make you
want to fight your father when you smelled that chili sauce cooking.
Q: What were your favorite meals that she fixed?
A: Oh, she'd fix everything. We had plenty of meat. We raised hogs.
We had a pen that had three, four or five hogs in it, my father would
butcher those hogs and we had a smokehouse-like and put that meat in this
and cure it, smoke it with hickory and sassafras, hickory wood, sassafras
and some other kind of wood.
Q: Where do you get sassafras?
A: Out in the timbers.
Q: Is it a tree or a root or what is it?
A: It's a tree, a little tree, shrubbery, and you pull up the roots, cut
off the roots and you boil that and every spring we always had to have
our sassafras tea and sulfur.
Q: And sulfur? What was the sulfur for?
A: Oh, I don't know, they said--and acifidity. Did you ever smell
acifidity?
Q: I never heard of it.
A: Acifidity. She used to make little bags of it. If you ever smelled
it, you wouldn't want it. She'd make little bags and string around us
with a chunk of acifidity. It's a gum-like stuff and if you hang it
around your neck, it's supposed to keep you from getting sick. Old
maid's tales. And then my dad, he'd make everyone of us wear one of
those and oh, I used to hate him when he gave us that acifidity and every