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BYPATHS IN DIXIE
“DES LIKE SHE RUB’IN ON YORN.”
BYPATHS IN DIXIE
FOLK TALES OF THE SOUTH
BY
SARAH JOHNSON COCKE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
HARRY STILLWELL EDWARDS
NEW YORK
E·P·DUTTON & COMPANY
31 West Twenty-Third Street
Copyright, 1911
By E. P. Dutton & Company
Reprinted, May, 1912
TO MY HUSBAND
INTRODUCTION
When Thomas Nelson Page began his stories of the old South in the early“Eighties,” the reading people of America suddenly aroused to therealization that a vein of virgin gold had been uncovered. There was arush to the new field and almost every Southerner who had a story to telltold it, many of them with astonishing dramatic force and power. As bymagic a new department was added to American literature and a score of newwriters won their way to fame. From a notably backward section, in pointof[Pg 8] expression, the South stepped easily, with the short story, into thefront rank and has held her place ever since. The field once entered wasexplored faithfully, the eager minds of her sons and daughters runningthrough the Ante-Bellum, Revolutionary and Colonial eras, and when JoelChandler Harris developed the “Brer Rabbit” stories, “The Little Boy” and“Uncle Remus,” it seemed as though future work must lie in refining forthe ore was all in sight.
But there was one lead almost entirely forgotten or undervalued in thescramble for literary wealth and this lead was into the Southern nurserywhere the real black Mammy reigned. With the better lights before us nowwe realize the astonishing fact that the very heart center of the Southerncivilization had not been touched.
[Pg 9]Mrs. Cocke in the charming stories contained in this volume is the happypre-emptor of the new find. Every Southerner old enough will recognize theabsolute truthfulness of the scenes and methods therein embalmed, andapplaud the faithfulness with which she has reproduced that difficultpotency, the gentle, tender, playful, elusive, young-old