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I didn’t know it when I was a child, but my father was what some people might call a hillbilly.

Daddy was one of the many Wilsons from Cameron, West Virginia, south of Wheeling.  One of the few of them who left their birthplace, he escaped the poverty and isolation of his mountain home to live and work in larger towns in other states. After serving in the Army during World War II, he was hired as a restaurant manager for the G. C. Murphy Company department store chain. The company employed him as a troubleshooter, transferring him from store to store along the East Coast. When he was transferred to Cumberland, Maryland, he met and married Mother.    

But Daddy carried the hills of West Virginia with him wherever he moved.  When he dressed “Big City,” as he called it, he looked handsome and sophisticated in his gray silk suits and highly polished black shoes, his hair always barbered and slicked back with a glossy gel.

But he had at least one tell-tale sign of his origins: what Mother called his “West Virginia way of talking.” Daddy spoke hillbilly. 

He always said Them is, for instance, instead of They are.  Them is good cookies. Them is good neighbors. 

He addressed groups of people as you’uns or sometimes y’uns. When he answered the phone, he always greeted the caller with Y’uns-hulloh! 

He had a funny way of saying the word piano.  Pie-anna.  Look at the way that fella can play the pie-anna, he said of Ray Charles.

These were just some of his habits that Mother tried to break, fearing, she said, that I would pick up his way of talking and grow up to be regarded by the people around me as white trash.

Daddy could read. He just preferred not to. That’s why when he “read” to me the children’s books Mother ordered through the mail, he pointed to the pictures and made up his own story.

When we read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham, he said, “Sam-I-Am wants to open a restaurant and serve green eggs and ham to all the people.”  Daddy was a restaurateur through and through.

“He’ll serve green eggs with ketchup and call them Eggs Italiano.  Them is some mighty good eggs!  He’ll make a lot of money and retire to Florida. It’ll be great.”  

Mother and he talked often about the day, after I was grown up and married, when Daddy would retire and they would move to Florida.

Sometimes he and I looked at the illustrations in P. D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?, a book that Mother insisted was about a baby bird, lost, searching for its mother.

Her voice became whiny when she read to me the part about when the baby bird asks the bulldozer, “Are you my mother?” She read it as if the situation were just too sad for her to think of. She used the story as a warning to me not to wander off and get lost when we went to the grocery store.  “Hold on to the hem of my dress,” she’d say, “so I’ll know you’re there.”  

But when Daddy told the story of the little bird in the pictures, he said, “See, this little bird wants to learn to drive a bulldozer. Yeah, he likes big machines, see. When his mother catches up with him, he’s going to be in big trouble. Pow!  Right in the kisser!”  Daddy could imitate Jackie Gleason to a tee. 

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Despite all her efforts to purge Daddy of his West Virginia mountain ways, Mother might have been labeled a hillbilly, too.

She was among the third generation of English and Scottish folk who migrated to America and drifted into the Western Maryland hills, carrying with them their own brand of granny wisdom and mountain magic. A tribe of hexers, talisman-bearers, and ritual chanters, they spread throughout the wooded hills, lying low, concealing themselves under lush oaks and whispering pines.

In Mother’s family, education was viewed with a measure of suspicion. What was taught in the little schoolhouses that dotted the region couldn’t compare to the knowledge dispensed from Grandma’s lips.

Mother dropped out of school after fifth grade.  She stayed home and helped Grandma take care of the littler ones who were not yet old enough to be sent off to school.  

She peeled potatoes, scrubbed diapers, and listened to the truths Grandma sing-songed, low and mournful from her throat, during the late afternoon when the babies were napping. These haphazard bits of wisdom became the scriptures Mother lived by.

If you wash your face in the dew on the morning of May 21 every year, you will never have freckles. 

Mother, who was proud of her own rosy, freckle-less skin, put this adage to faithful practice.

If a cat jumps into the crib with a baby, it will suck the baby’s breath away.   

Wherever a case of SIDS occurred, in Mother’s mind, a cat was involved.

If a little girl has sticky-out ears, she must have strips of fabric wound around her head at night to train them back against her head. 

Otherwise, Mother was taught, no one will marry her.

If you lie down with dogs, you might as well cut off your nose to spite your face.

A girl, Mother learned, must protect her reputation.  Otherwise, no one will marry her.

What people don’t know can’t hurt us.

Mother learned shame at Grandma’s knee. That’s where she learned to keep secrets.

Secrets that I, her disobedient daughter, am determined to tell.