When he was seven years old, my father-in-law fell and burnt his leg on the metal grate covering the boiler that heated the house. Granny and Pop took him to the doctor, had the burn treated, and then called a distant cousin from up in North Carolina—to talk the fire out.
The practice of fire-talking finds its roots 300 years ago and before that, when folks of Celtic origin were settling into the shadowy valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. Here, they lived among the Cherokee and Choctaw peoples and shared a coexistence. Native people, experts in the plant life found in these ancient mountains, taught the new Protestant visitors about the healing properties of this flora previously foreign to them.
And so, it wasn’t forbidden knowledge, wasn’t seen as taboo by anybody, to know that an elderberry plant could cure a cough or that calamus root would soothe a colicky baby. That was good common sense.
The “Granny Women” of the Appalachia were midwives and served as doctors for all other ailments as well. Their brand of Christianity was animistic—they saw God in all things as he had created all things. The methods by which God could communicate with someone were not limited to a book written by men—God could speak to you and heal you directly through communion with his entire creation.
Learning about a rock was learning something about God, as was listening to the wind. Since elderberries could cure a cough, and God had made the elderberry, God was curing the cough. So, adding a prayer to the ritual didn’t seem like such a long jump.
Now, seeing yourself as a vehicle of God, too, part of his creation and capable of being a medium through which God could heal—this was just a hop and a skip.
As years passed, fire-talking became secret and ritualized, and some began to eye it with suspicion, equating it with witchcraft. The idea that the earth itself had anything to tell us about God and further, that human beings were potential conduits for God’s healing powers—became controversial.
Fire-talking went underground and was passed from one generation to the next along pathways of opposite gender—mother could not pass “the gift” to daughter; father could not pass it to son. You could only share the gift with three, and later, one, person during your lifetime without losing it yourself. The fire-talker could not cure the injury created by the burn, but she could ease the pain and help with healing by talking the burn out.
Granny was a God-fearing woman, once taking me aside to confess that she loved her family more than Jesus, which she feared placed her in a position of some trouble with him. Her chilled bird hands trembled as she said, “I know I’m not supposed to, but I just love these boys so much.” I thought God and Jesus, the both of them, the three of them, would understand.
She hedged her bets that day, calling on the doctor, as well as the firetalker, to heal her child. And it worked. A few quiet words whispered faintly into the still room where all sound was sucked away as figures huddled over the mottled red skin of the child.
There came an angel from the East
Bringing fire and frost.
Take the fire from this wound;
As on a frosty morn,
Let the fire be now gone.
In frost, out fire,
So help me God.
I wished that my sister or I had the gift of fire-talking passed to us, but as transplanted Yankees, we were not eligible. I hoped the ancient mountain range, itself, had the power to whisper healing words on the wind to Fireball’s leg.
Rocks & Roots 