In the South many mills and factories, which local townspeople depended on for jobs, closed down. Alabama was particularly hard hit, experiencing the largest decline in total nonfarm employment of all Southern states during the 1930s.
The tremendous poverty of many Southerners forced them to become creative in devising means of survival. As an example, for medicinal purposes they schooled themselves in both Native American and their own ancestral homeopathy, gaining a broad knowledge of herbs, barks, and roots that had healing powers. White Southerners, particularly poor whites, made liberal use of Indian medicine, some of them becoming highly proficient in the curative value of plants. In the short story, Buddy's friend knows many old Indian cures. Southern woods and swamps contained enough medicinal plants to fill a pharmacy, and there existed an herb, root, or bark to alleviate practically any illness or injury:
Powdered alum stopped bleeding. Black elderberries cured constipation, and the flowers and bark, when made into a salve using lard, healed scalds and burns. A tea made from rhubarb stopped diarrhea. A poultice made from sheep sorel cured cancer. Alder-bark tea was good for chills. Wormwood tea cured cholera, red clover leaf took care of pimples, calamus root stopped cramps, papawroot tea cured gonorrhea.
This is a free page. This page contains 190 words. This
article contains 3,109 words (approx. 10 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our "A Christmas Memory" Access Pass.
