The Red Flannel Rag

side is a little stream called Mash Run, named for the amount of moonshine made there

during the 1930s and 1940s. On the other side is Long Run Road where Uncle Shirley

drove the truck to take the Sunday school kids on picnics after church.

The burial pattern reflects the eternal connection to family and the man as the

head of the household. My daddy is buried in the Shifflett row along with his brothers

and sisters. Grandpa Austin and Grandma Molly are buried at the beginning of the

Shifflett row. There is space in the Shifflett row for my final resting place since I never

married and cannot be buried beside my husband in his or her family burial row.

Just behind the Shifflett row is the Morris row. Grandpa John and Grandma

Mary were the first buried in that row. Just up the hill is the crude river-rock headstone

of Great Grandpa Banks Shifflett. The midwives, who helped bring into the world most

of the people born in the community and buried here, were laid to rest just behind the

Morris row.

The way we lived and died and buried the dead seemed very normal to me when I

was a young child. I never questioned how we lived in my mountain community.

The Red Flannel Rag Gives Me Away

It was the first cold day in October, 1947, when I learned that I was different from

the other kids in first grade. My cousin Virgil stepped off the school bus with a red

flannel rag tied around his neck. Our classmates and the teacher responded to the rag

with curiosity at first, and then they asked Virgil why he was wearing the rag. He

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