Spencer Heath Archive

Item 891

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum of conversation with Heath.

No date

One time down in Georgia there was a cotton farmer, a good church member and all that, but he was a forthright fellow and of a somewhat independent nature as well. So when the mule didn’t travel just right in the cotton rows, he told the mule what he thought about it. And he used the kind of language he thought the mule would understand — not knowing that the preacher was just coming by in his carry-all and, pulling up by the side of the fence, heard what was going on. He looked up and saw the preacher, and he kind of sheepishly took off his straw hat to the preacher. The preacher looked at him and shook his head solemnly. “I want to talk to you.”

He leaned over and listened to what the preacher had to say, and the preacher commenced to tell him how much hell-fire there was waiting for people that said such damn words. The farmer kind of winced, and he shifted his right foot off the buggy hub and put the right foot on, and he shifted feet, and he squirted a little tobacco to one side and to the other side, and the preacher kept on talking.

Finally the preacher /came/ to a kind of a lull, and the farmer, it was up to him to say something now, and he said, “Well, Parson, I got to own up. There’s a whole lot in what you say. I do cuss a good deal — just the same as you preach a good deal. But then /we both know that/ we don’t neither of us mean nothin’ by it.