before you can get your license plates, and that leads to a lot of complications. Junior doesnât know what they do about that now. Anyway, all these cars with the magnificent engines were plain on the outside, so they wouldnât attract attention, but they couldnât disguise them altogether. They were jacked up a little in the back and had 8.00 or 8.20 tires, for the heavy loads, and the soundâ
âThey wasnât no way you could make it sound like an ordinary car,â says Junior.
God-almighty, that sound in the middle of the night, groaning, roaring, humming down into the hollows, through the clay gulchesâyes! And all over the rural South, hell, all over the South, the legends of wild-driving whiskey running got started. And it wasnât just the plain excitement of it. It was something deeper, the symbolism. It brought into a modern focus the whole business, one and a half centuries old, of the country peopleâs rebellion against the Federals, against the seaboard establishment, their independence, their defiance of the outside world. And it was like a mythology for that and for something else that was happening, the whole wild thing of the car as the symbol of liberation in the postwar South.
âThey was out about every night, patrolling, the agents and the State Police was,â Junior is saying, âbut they seldom caught anybody. Hâit was like the dogs chasing the fox. The dogs canât catch a fox, heâll just take âem around in a circle all night long. I was never caught for transporting. We never lost but one car and the axle broke on hâit.â
The fox and the dogs! Whiskey running certainly had a crazy game-like quality about it, considering that a boy might be sent up for two years or more if he were caught transporting. But these boys were just wild enough for that. There got to be a code about the chase. In Wilkes County nobody, neither the good old boys nor the agents, ever did anything that was going to hurt the other side physically. There was supposed to be some parts of the South where the boys used smoke screens and tack buckets. They had attachments in the rear of the cars, and if the agents got too close they would let loose a smoke screen to blind them or a slew of tacks to make them blow a tire. But nobody in Wilkes County ever did that because that was a good way
for somebody to get killed. Part of it was that whenever an agent did get killed in the South, whole hordes of agents would come in from Washington and pretty soon they would be tramping along the ridges practically inch by inch, smoking out the stills. But mainly it wasâwell, the code. If you got caught, you went along peaceably, and the agents never used their guns. There were some tense times. Once was when the agents started using tack belts in Iredell County. This was a long strip of leather studded with nails that the agents would lay across the road in the dark. A man couldnât see it until it was too late and he stood a good chance of getting killed if it got his tires and spun him out. The other was the time the State Police put a roadblock down there at that damned bridge at Millersville to catch a couple of escaped convicts. Well, a couple of good old boys rode up with a load, and there was the roadblock and they were already on the bridge, so they jumped out and dove into the water. The police saw two men jump out of their car and dive in the water, so they opened fire and they shot one good old boy in the backside. As they pulled him out, he kept saying:
âWhat did you have to shoot at me for? What did you have to shoot at me for?â
It wasnât pain, it wasnât anguish, it wasnât anger. It was consternation. The bastards had broken the code.
Then the Federals started getting radio cars.
âThe radios didnât do them any good,â Junior says. âAs soon as the officers got radios, then they got radios. Theyâd go out
âThey wasnât no way you could make it sound like an ordinary car,â says Junior.
God-almighty, that sound in the middle of the night, groaning, roaring, humming down into the hollows, through the clay gulchesâyes! And all over the rural South, hell, all over the South, the legends of wild-driving whiskey running got started. And it wasnât just the plain excitement of it. It was something deeper, the symbolism. It brought into a modern focus the whole business, one and a half centuries old, of the country peopleâs rebellion against the Federals, against the seaboard establishment, their independence, their defiance of the outside world. And it was like a mythology for that and for something else that was happening, the whole wild thing of the car as the symbol of liberation in the postwar South.
âThey was out about every night, patrolling, the agents and the State Police was,â Junior is saying, âbut they seldom caught anybody. Hâit was like the dogs chasing the fox. The dogs canât catch a fox, heâll just take âem around in a circle all night long. I was never caught for transporting. We never lost but one car and the axle broke on hâit.â
The fox and the dogs! Whiskey running certainly had a crazy game-like quality about it, considering that a boy might be sent up for two years or more if he were caught transporting. But these boys were just wild enough for that. There got to be a code about the chase. In Wilkes County nobody, neither the good old boys nor the agents, ever did anything that was going to hurt the other side physically. There was supposed to be some parts of the South where the boys used smoke screens and tack buckets. They had attachments in the rear of the cars, and if the agents got too close they would let loose a smoke screen to blind them or a slew of tacks to make them blow a tire. But nobody in Wilkes County ever did that because that was a good way
for somebody to get killed. Part of it was that whenever an agent did get killed in the South, whole hordes of agents would come in from Washington and pretty soon they would be tramping along the ridges practically inch by inch, smoking out the stills. But mainly it wasâwell, the code. If you got caught, you went along peaceably, and the agents never used their guns. There were some tense times. Once was when the agents started using tack belts in Iredell County. This was a long strip of leather studded with nails that the agents would lay across the road in the dark. A man couldnât see it until it was too late and he stood a good chance of getting killed if it got his tires and spun him out. The other was the time the State Police put a roadblock down there at that damned bridge at Millersville to catch a couple of escaped convicts. Well, a couple of good old boys rode up with a load, and there was the roadblock and they were already on the bridge, so they jumped out and dove into the water. The police saw two men jump out of their car and dive in the water, so they opened fire and they shot one good old boy in the backside. As they pulled him out, he kept saying:
âWhat did you have to shoot at me for? What did you have to shoot at me for?â
It wasnât pain, it wasnât anguish, it wasnât anger. It was consternation. The bastards had broken the code.
Then the Federals started getting radio cars.
âThe radios didnât do them any good,â Junior says. âAs soon as the officers got radios, then they got radios. Theyâd go out
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