Ole Mars an' Ole Miss

Chapter 3: INTRODUCTION

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About This Book

A series of rural sketches and vignettes captures life on Maryland's Eastern Shore through vernacular narration that blends humor, folklore, sermons, songs, debates, and doggerel. The pieces portray seasonal work, gardens, hunts, church meetings, and domestic scenes, offering varied portraits of community customs, beliefs, and speech. The book alternates short stories and comic pieces with reflective sermons and lyrical descriptions of landscape and household life, using archly rendered dialect to evoke characters and local color while shifting between playful anecdote and earnest moral reflection.

INTRODUCTION

My subjects are all typical Eastern-Shore-of-Maryland darkies, some of whom “had erligion, ’longed ter de Babtis’ chuch an’ wuz monstus pious.” Others danced, sang, played the banjo, fiddled, fished and frolicked in Talbot County “Befo’ de Wah.”

“Ole Joe kickin’ up behin’ an’ befo’,

Yaller gal kirkin’ up behin’ ole Joe.”

Their smiling, shining, happy faces can be fully appreciated only by those who played with them, heard them sing, preach and pray, and had among them Mammies.

To all such I dedicate this volume.

MISS SANSON IN THE SADDLE.