Herbalism: knowledge rooted in connection
The apply of herbal medicines to heal the body is an age-old practice, but in the 21st century it has become a global industry. Today, current medical visits and industrial medicine have replaced common knowledge of herbal medicine. Some, however, still remember the age-old practice. In her book After harvesting herbs, Ann Armbrecht interviews one such person, Phyllis Lightweight, a fourth-generation practitioner of what she calls Southern Folk Medicine.
Below is an excerpt After harvesting herbs by Anna Armbrecht. It has been adapted for apply on the Internet.
We realized that we needed to diversify the voices we were recording for Godwe traveled to Arab, Alabama to interview Phyllis Lightweight, a fourth-generation practitioner of what she calls Southern Folk Medicine. Our conversations with Phyllis gave us a perspective on the practice of herbalism passed down through the family in a tradition that has never been broken.
Phyllis is more rooted in the physical and cultural place of her home than anyone I have ever met in the North American herbal community. She still lives in Arabia, the city where her ancestors lived and where what she calls the blend of cultures that make up her heritage came together. Phyllis’ entire family – on both sides – was involved in folk healing, a combination of Native American plant knowledge and the spiritual knowledge of African slaves brought to North America by the Spanish. Europeans added their system based on age-old Greek humoral methods popularized by Galen. The Scots-Irish who arrived in the area in the 18th and 19th centuries brought with them a superstitious or magical framework that they combined with what they found in the Bible and Christianity.1 “So we have about four hundred years of history of folk medicine in the South. You can’t say that in other parts of the country,” Phyllis told me proudly.
She continued that the Civil War helped perpetuate the apply of herbs in the South. “I have no intention of getting into politics. We all know slavery was not a good thing.” However, the South was blocked on land and sea, and therefore had no access to certain foodstuffs and medicines. Southerners had to return to using herbs as medicines– she explained, adding that some of the best books about herbs were written during the Civil War.
After the Civil War, the land was devastated: “Barns and houses were burned. Fields, crops and soil were burned. The land was in ruins and destruction. The slaves were free, but they had nowhere to go. Reconstruction was a truly terrible time. Back then, herbs were the only thing people had as medicine.
“Every woman had to know how to take care of her children and family with herbs, because that’s all.”
“No one could afford to go to the doctor, and there weren’t many doctors even if they could.”
Just as the South’s economy began to stabilize, the Depression hit. Phyllis remembers her grandfather saying, “I read in the newspaper that depression exists, but in our family we haven’t noticed any difference.”
When Phyllis was ten years ancient, she began collecting herbs under the tutelage of her grandmother, who was part Creek and part Cherokee, and was taught by her own mother and grandmother. Phyllis’ father took over after her grandmother died. “On my dad’s side, I’m part Native American, German and German-Jewish. I’m a bit Oriental and definitely Scottish-Irish,” Phyllis explained.
Phyllis has gaunt, straight blonde hair cut just below her ears, which waves when she shakes her head to emphasize her points. In a photo taken when she was seventeen, Phyllis’s clenched jaw shows her determination – like the shake of her head, her facial expression seems to say: Don’t even think about interrupting me. Sitting at the linoleum table in his kitchen that he uses for teaching, Phyllis described growing up in Arabic at a time when everyone lived off the land because that was all they had. “We all had gardens. We all raised our own animals for food. We all farmed, hunted, and went into the forests to gather wild foods and herbs. This was what life was like in this part of the South. Throw me into the woods with a knife and I can handle it. I know how to eat, how to create shelter, I know what to eat. I already know what herbs I will need for medicine.
“When I heard people talking about the herbal renaissance, I thought: What the hell are they talking about? We didn’t need any renaissance because we already had it. We didn’t know we were taking a holistic approach to it,” she added. “We were just needy.”
I asked Phyllis about her relationship with plants. She responded by telling me a story.
One morning, when she was seventeen, her father told her that they were going to the forest to look for ginseng. She said it wasn’t time to dig for ginseng, they were just going out looking for plants. By then, Phyllis had spent many seasons with her family “singing,” as they call it, ginseng hunting, but she has never tried to find a ginseng plant without its trademark red berries. She and her father walked and walked. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, he stopped and told her that “there are some ginseng plants growing between this stream, the rocks, and this tree, and I want you to find them.” Then he pulled a paperback western out of his back pocket and sat down and began to read.
“I was standing in the middle of all these plants that came up to my knees and they all looked exactly the same. They were all green and they all had leaves,” Phyllis said.
She looked and looked. She didn’t see any ginseng. She asked her father for assist, but he ignored her and continued reading his western novel.
She kept searching. Finally, her father told her, “You better hurry, we have to get home for dinner.”
“And I get so frustrated that I start crying,” Phyllis told me, her voice inflected with the accent of her home. “I’m irate with myself, I just stopped and took a breath. In the middle of all this green stuff I just stopped. And suddenly I didn’t care whether I found these ginseng plants or not. I’m done. I closed my eyes. I heard the birds and I heard my daddy turn the page in the book, I heard the brook gurgling over the rocks, I heard the wind flowing through the trees and in that moment I really couldn’t tell myself from the wind, myself from the stream, myself and the pages of this book. And when I opened my eyes, I saw seven ginseng plants outlined in the lightweight. It was the most amazing experience in my plant life.
“I looked at daddy and said, ‘Here’s one, there’s one, there’s one!’ I was very excited! And he stood up and said, “Yes.” Let’s go eat something. He put the book in his back pocket and started towards the house.
“And that was my teaching. That’s what my dad always taught me. That’s what my grandmother taught me. They taught me by making me learn. They didn’t teach me with a lot of words. These are the teachings I had throughout my early years of herbalism: How do you connect? How do you see what is not there?“
The herbal medicine Phyllis learned came from her connection to a particular place, to the plants that grew there, and to the people who knew and knew how to apply those plants.steeped in knowledge passed on to them by their mother, father or grandmother. It was not a separate product from its source.
It was knowledge rooted in connection.
Notes
- Phyllis Lightweight, Southern Folk Medicine: Healing Traditions from Appalachian Fields and Forests (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2018).