In the story V.K. Suratt tells about Doctor Peabody amputating his grandfather's leg, he mentions that the whiskey and (presumably) the pain caused "granpappy" to "cuss and sing so scandalous" that "the women-folks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn" until the operation was over (136). (Suratt himself appears frequently in the fictions, in the later ones as V.K. Ratliff. His character remains essentially the same, but in those later fictions the Ratliff family is different from this Suratt one.)
While they drink moonshine, V.K. Suratt tells Young Bayard and Hub about the time Doctor Peabody amputated his "granpappy's laig," using whisky as the anesthetic (136).
Though it did not secede from the U.S., Maryland was a slave state in 1858, when, according to the story she tells in 1869, Miss Jenny danced a waltz with J.E.B. Stuart at a ball in Baltimore.
