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Down from the Second Balcony
The Bijou revisits its past and invests in its future

Born to Fire
Teresa Brittain transforms her bead hobby into a vocation

They don't slaughter any pigs at the Museum of Appalachia's Tennessee Fall Homecoming (imagine the uproar from animal right's people if they did). But the event includes hundreds of people demonstrating just about every other tradition associated with the agrarian South, from molasses making to wood carving to lye soap making. The festival features over 250 traditional, folk, early country, and bluegrass musicians, including Ralph Stanley.

What
Tennessee Fall Homecoming

When
Oct. 10-13, 9 a.m.-dark

Where
Museum of Appalachia, Norris; $20 (adults), $5 (children). See their website for more details.

The Bijou revisits its past and invests in its future

by Bill Carey

Before cars, cable television, and consumerism; in the days before football, leaf watching, and celebrating Halloween became the three most cherished autumn traditions, folks who lived in what was then an almost entirely rural East Tennessee had a practice of their own. To those of us who live in air-conditioned houses and buy meat in plastic containers at the grocery store, this tradition may sound a bit scary. Just thinking of it might make you grateful that you live in a world where the very words "slaughtering hogs," brings to mind this weekend's contest between Tennessee and Arkansas. But don't be too smug. After all, your grandparents did it.

Back in the days when most people were small farmers, just about everyone had to exterminate a pig in late autumn. The tradition, called "hog killin'," took place in the fall because farmers needed the food to survive the winter, and because the carcass would rot in the heat of summer. Some farmers made hog killin' a part of the Thanksgiving week.

According to people familiar with the process (which, of course, still takes place on fast-disappearing small farms across the country), the hog killin' routine started about a week before cold weather was expected. At that point, the farmer would pick the hog he intended to slaughter, isolate it in its own pen, and fatten it up quite a bit (a fat pig is easier to kill than a skinny pig). Then, on that first brisk day, someone in the household was chosen as the executioner. Members of elite families used the family � handgun, pointed directly at the hog's head. "My father used to use a .38 Smith & Wesson," says Charlie Acuff, the nationally renowned fiddle player who grew up in depression-era Union County.

Families who couldn't afford firearms, or who just wanted to put some zest in their hog killin' day, would send an honored member of the household into the pen, who would sneak up behind the unsuspecting animal and knock it in the head using the blunt side of an ax. Executioners who missed the hog's head on first swing never heard the end of it from friends and family; after all, the ability to kill a 300-pound pig was a matter of pride. They also never forgot the squeal that the pig made when the animal realized that a person wielding an ax was attempting to kill it. "If you used a sledgehammer or ax and missed it on the first time, you had a real problem on your hands," says Acuff.

Once the pig was dead, someone would attach a stick or metal instrument to the hog's hind legs, and it usually took several strong men to hoist the beast up a tree. Next came the memorable task of taking a knife and slicing the poor beast's throat to drain the blood from the carcass. After a while, the beast had to be lowered again; this time into a large vat of hot water. (If the water was too hot or too cold, it wouldn't serve its purpose.) After a few minutes in the water, someone would take a sharp tool like a hoe and rip the hair off the pig's body.

At this point, the entertainment phase of the hog killin' was over, and it was production time. At most farms, men got the job of cutting the carcass up into hams, pork chops, bacon, roasts, ribs, and trimmings. Women would clean the meat off and salt and spice it in preparation for it to be go into the smokehouse (in the days before refrigeration). They would use the fat that had been cooked out of the pig while it was in the boiling water to make lard and lye soap. In some households, they would also pickle the pig's feet (an acquired taste that can still be indulged at select convenience stores). Even the children had a job to do: crank the sausage grinder, thus turning trimmings and innards into the winter's breakfast. "Not much was thrown away," says John Rice Irwin, the founder of Norris' Museum of Appalachia who, like Acuff, grew up on an East Tennessee farm. If the farmer wasn't inclined to keep less desirable parts of the animal, such as the head, innards, and feet, he'd probably have a hired hand or poor acquaintance happy to take it off his hands.

Just about everyone who grew up with the tradition of hog killin' seems to have clear memories of it. Paul Perrett, a resident of South Alabama who participated in hog killin' days at his grandparents' farm near Montgomery, remembers playing dodge ball with other kids using the inflated bladder of the slaughtered pig. "It would give us something to do and keep us out of our parents' hair until it was time to grind the sausage," he says. Irwin says he learned most of what he still knows about anatomy on hog killin' day. "I vividly remember what all the parts looked like because they were presented in such a dramatic way," Irwin says. Pig innards are such an important part of the English-speaking world that there is a word for pig intestines. It's proper form is "chitterlings," although most southerners know it by its abbreviated version, "chitlins."

The other thing that people will tell you about hog killin' is that it was a real event. Irwin says hog killin' was one of the few times that neighbors were sure to get together in the agrarian South. "They didn't have much time for frivolity in those days," Irwin says. "But when it came to killing the hog, people would swap out. One day, your neighbor would come over to your farm to help you, and the next day, you'd go over and help him."