Who was Tommie Bass? He began learning plant medicine at age 7 from a lady named “Aunt Molly Kirby”. She had been born a slave in 1830. She became the midwife to all the poor around Lookout Mountain in AL. Being black, white or indian didn’t matter, if you were born poor the odds were she brought you into the world. When Tommie went to work for her she was nearly 80 and could no longer climb the ridges looking for the medicinal plants she needed, that was Tommie’s job.
Many years later Tommie became the most famous herbalist of his age. He was even featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, talked about on tv shows, Jimmy Carter mentioned his name at a press conference from the White House. Pope John P. 2 even sent a man to seek Tommie's help.
But that wasn’t who Tommie was. Tommie was a simple man, the son of sharecroppers, a man who loved helping heal folks with plants more than anything. Tommie had many students during his life. He had a student named Darryl Patton the last 12 years of his life. The man who wrote this book. I began learning from Darryl about 10 years ago, a walking encyclopedia of plant knowledge.
If it’s okay with my forum friends I’d like to share some of Tommie’s and Darryl’s wisdom from time to time here in the remedy section. I had already written a post about one of my favorite plants, a plant I use almost daily, “Poke Sallet” - Phytolacca Americana.
I was going to wait until it started coming up in a few weeks so I could post a photo. Since there is a section on poke in this book… I’ll definitely be waiting until I finish reading it.
As I wrote this post I sat listening to Tommie. As a special Christmas gift Darryl included an hour-long audio CD of Tommie talking about his life.
:thumbs up:
