Trading with the gypsies
By DAN LANGFORD
It’s funny how a comment in passing has the ability to conjure up a veritable photo album of memories. It happened to me the last week in one of several unglamorous roles I fulfill, that of zoning administrator for the Town of Brooks. A newcomer who has lived here only 30 years or so was asking about his tract of land, and in order to remind me where it is physically located, said “It’s what the old-timers called the ‘Gypsy Woods’.”
Indeed they did. My grandmother, who was born in Brooks in 1905, remembered gypsies coming through every year in her youth, and would identify the particular copse the above-mentioned man owns any time we’d ride by as the “Gypsy Woods,” saying that’s where the exotic foreigners always camped when they came to Brooks to trade. I’ve never seen a gypsy to my knowledge, but have long had a picture in my mind of what their caravans and members must have looked like in those days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The more immediate memory last week’s encounter brought back for me was that of the light-hearted parental threat I heard time and time again in my youth — a threat whose roots sprang from the mysterious and flashy visitors who had once come to our village annually: “Boy, if you don’t behave, I’m'o sell you t’th’gypsies.” It basically means “straighten up and fly right,” “mind your P’s and Q’s,” “I’m gonna jerk a knot in your tail if you keep on in that vein,” or something similar. When I heard I was about to be sold to the gypsies, it was usually enough to cause an immediate attitude adjustment, for it was a parental warning shot over the bow, so to speak; a preamble to relatively severe consequences to come if behaviors weren’t rather immediately modified.
I suspect it’s distinctly Southern, and would be quite surprised if the phrase were confined to Brooks. I would be interested to hear whether others have encountered this expression.