Don Mitchell One thing I remember, and I share this quite a bit, if there’s a tragic or a death in a family, and like I said earlier, you know everybody had a milk cow, everybody had the horses and hogs and stuff to feed. And one of the best things to show hospitality and love for your community was, you would go and volunteer, milk the cows, feed the hogs, take care of the horses and the animals while the people was going through this time of grief. Because up and down this river they’ve been- well mostly, you know, like young people starting to drive would have a bad accident. They’ve been just too many to number, like two twin brothers at one time, you know, and it was, you know, a tragic death and a sudden death, and to do, to take food- and the whole community would come together in doing this. You know, I mean, you took food, and it just wasn’t for one day. You done it for, you know, as long as needed, and that was one of the things I can remember. You know, that the community would come together. If it was like a big storm, disaster, or a hailstorm comes through and took somebody’s tobacco crop out, you know the community would pitch in and they would do what you call a “love offering” and go around the community. You want to give some to so and so.

Shyanne Bellamy Sorry

Anonymous But your, the, your faith was high, Don. Faith. Remember when you said your mother prayed for that animal?

Don Mitchell Yeah, faith was a big part of our community. I mean, all these little churches, and we wasn’t so big into the denomination, something, we’d all gather together, regardless. You know, like this was Free Will Baptist over here, which is still on up the road down. We was in a, you know, just like a hole in this church, and that this, you know, didn’t make no difference what the name was on the church. They all come together, and they all served the same God, had the same faith, basically the same belief. It was just, you know, the church got named whether it was Missionary Baptist or Southern Baptist, God-fearing people.

But like my wife said, there was one time my dad had an accident working on the mule’s harness and cutting a piece of leather, and a knife slipped and stuck the mule in its main artery that goes up through its neck, and the mule was bleeding to death. And they had me to run home to get some soot out of the chimney to pack in that thing. I told my mom what was happening, and there’s some verse of scripture in the Bible that she read, and we prayed for that mule. And when I got back to the field, the wound had closed up. My dad and the guy that was with him, standing there as white as sheets, and they was trying to figure out what had happened. Said that mule was going to be dead another two minutes. I said, “Mommy prayed.” And they said, “Well, the mule was healed, and just a story, like you know.”