“They Ain’t As Bad As
They Used to Be”
“There goes whatshername. Lisa. I bet
she’s been home to lunch. She working today?”
Chris is a sixty-five-year-old woman
who grew up in Springfield. She persists in calling me, “Ma’am,” which bothers
me, although for some reason I don’t say so, and our fifty-minute conversation
is shot through with interruptions, asides, laughter, and remarks from Pansy
and others.
We met at the Community Action Center,
where Pansy volunteers almost every day. It was right across from a charity
drop off and Chris couldn’t refrain from commenting on who was coming and
going.
I had begun to tell her why I started
the project, but I never quite got through the first part of my narration. “So
after I’d been here in Springfield awhile, I noticed...”
“Now
you know how old I am if you know Steve Hale. I just told you I went to school
with Steve Hale. I’m sixty-five.”
“Then,
if you’re sixty-five, Miss Beverly told me, she went to an all-black school…:
“Who is Miss Beverly?”
“Oh,
I’m sorry. Miss Dawson. Della. That’s right. She told me, people call her
Della.”
“”Oh.
I was just speaking with her a couple hours ago. Actually, Pansy, I had been
up—excuse me, ma’am—I had been up to Mary Helen Gordon’s, Mary Helen Gordon’s
daughter-in-law died, Susan. Oh. I was just floored, and I had been up there
with her, I had been sittin’ up there with her a couple hours. They cremated
Susan, but they gonna have the thing tomorrow, so I’m going to bring Mary Helen
up to Bardstown. It was just a shock. You know Mary Helen? Mary Helen Gordon?”
“There
goes what’s her name. Marion Mulligan. She’s from England. You know her, don’t you?”
We
talked about integration of the schools.
She
recalled a Science teacher who was still living, and who was 94 or 95. Ruby
Feltner. As I wrote up the interview, I looked online for Mrs. Feltner, because
we’d said many times we needed to interview her. She died yesterday.
Chris
loved her. She was so kind, and treated everyone the same. Of Mrs. Feltner, she
said, “I fell in love with her.”
Of
another teacher, who taught English, she said, “She was hard, but she was
good.”
She
used to sit with Mrs. Polin, who lived in the house next to my B&B. She had
a lot to say about the new owners, who’d just moved in that summer and were
fixing it up. It drove her crazy that she didn’t know when people asked her if
she knew who’d bought the place, so she just saw them outside, went up and
asked them all about it. Because when “people ask me, and I don’t know, it
makes my nerves bad,” she said.
“You’re
as bad as these white women down here.”
“You
have to get up early in the morning to beat them.”
I
usually feel a bit like Alice, having gone through the looking glass, when
Pansy takes me to the homes and workplaces of the people we interview. Among
family members and the acquaintances who come and go, there is a shared
language and litany that I’m not privy to. It’s as if I’m doing anthropological
research among fellow Americans in my own town.`
In
an essay published in 1892, James Lane Allen, an acclaimed regional author
(whose great-great grandfather owned the farm upon which the church I served in
Lexington was built) there is a passage about how he traverses the worlds, from
his own, inherited aristocracy, to the one of the stereotypically portrayed
“colored” folks of his day. Stilted and oversimplified as it is, it reminds me
of how I do often feel: that there are two worlds, and that we rarely cross the
boundary:
On the outskirts of the towns of
central Kentucky, a stranger, searching for the picturesque in architecture and
in life, would find his attention arrested by certain masses of low frame and
brick structures, and by the multitudes of strange human beings that inhabit
them. A single town may have on its edges several of these settlements, which
are themselves called "towns," and bear separate names either
descriptive of some topographical peculiarity or taken from the original owners
of the lots. It is in these that a great part of the negro population of
Kentucky has packed itself since the war. Here live the slaves of the past with
their descendants; old family servants from the once populous country-places;
old wagon-drivers from the deep-rutted lanes; old wood-choppers from the
slaughtered blue-grass forests; old harvesters and ploughmen from the long
since abandoned fields; old cooks from the savory, wasteful kitchens; old
nurses from the softly rocked and softly sung-to cradles. Here, too, are the
homes of the younger generation, of the laundresses and the barbers, teachers
and ministers of the gospel, coachmen [48]and porters, restaurant-keepers
and vagabonds, hands from the hemp factories, and workmen on the outlying
farms.
You step easily from the verge of the
white population to the confines of the black. But it is a great distance—like
the crossing of a vast continent between the habitats of alien races. The air
seems all at once to tan the cheek. Out of the cold, blue recesses of the
midsummer sky the sun burns with a fierceness of heat that warps the shingles
of the pointed roofs and flares with blinding brilliancy against some
whitewashed wall. Perhaps in all the street no little cooling stretch of shade.
The unpaved sidewalks and the roadway between are but indistinguishable parts
of a common thoroughfare, along which every upspringing green thing is quickly
trodden to death beneath the ubiquitous play and passing of many feet. Here and
there, from some shielded nook or other coign of vantage, a single plumy branch
of dog-fennel may be seen spreading its small firmament of white and golden
stars close to the ground; or between its pale green stalks the faint lavender
of the nightshade will take the eye as the sole emblem of the flowering world.
A negro town! Looking out the doors and
windows of the cabins, lounging in the door-ways, leaning over the low frame
fences, gathering into quickly forming, quickly dissolving groups in the dusty
streets, they swarm. They are here from milk-white [49]through all
deepening shades to glossy blackness; octoroons, quadroons, mulattoes—some with
large liquid black eyes, refined features, delicate forms; working, gossiping,
higgling over prices around a vegetable cart, discussing last night's church
festival, to-day's funeral, or next week's railway excursion, sleeping,
planning how to get work and how to escape it. From some unseen old figure in
flamboyant turban, bending over the wash-tub in the rear of a cabin, comes a
crooned song of indescribable pathos; behind a half-closed front shutter, a
Moorish-hued amosoro in gay linen thrums his banjo in a
measure of ecstatic gayety preluding the more passionate melodies of the coming
night. Here a fight; there the sound of the fiddle and the rhythmic patting of
hands. Tatters and silks flaunt themselves side by side. Dirt and cleanliness
lie down together. Indolence goes hand in hand with thrift. Superstition dogs
the slow footsteps of reason. Passion and self-control eye each other across
the narrow way. If there is anywhere resolute virtue, round it is a weltered
muck of low and sensual desire. One sees the surviving types of old negro life
here crowded together with and contrasted with the new phases of
"colored" life—sees the transitional stage of a race, part of whom
were born slaves and are now freemen, part of whom have been born freemen but
remain so much like slaves. (48-49)
Chris
used to live at Kalarama Farms.
They
also used to live out on Mackville Road where the Davis’ live. “There were
eleven of us kids. The house across from where Sandra and them live, that white
house, that was the Coles’ and they owned all that property and then across
from it was where we lived, and behind it was a house where my dad’s brother
and them lived. So behind Kalarama, that white house, that kindly joined the
Coles’ farm, so when we moved from there to the Coles’ farm we just moved over
there, because my dad and his brothers done farming, not only did they do the
farming, to provide themselves, they also did the tobacco for the Coles, and my
mom, she went over to the Coles to clean up for her.”
“So,
they were sharecropping?”
But
she just says, “farming,” and continues.
You know, I can… this is like a
hundred years ago, but I can, back then you know the checks, it’s like a check
book. The checks were bright yellow, and I can see right in my eye right now
that one big long check had a one dollar and ninety-six cents on it. Now. Let
me tell you. Dollar ninety-six cents was a day’s work, you see. But, my daddy n
them grew the tobacco on the Coles’ farm. So what you do, is. Only thing you
went to the store for is, a little flour, a little sugar, because we had a garden
as big as this whole section right here. Then we killed the hogs. That’s why
I’m taking ten blood pressure pills right now. Then everything else we needed.
“Shoes?
What about shoes?”
“Well
what everybody done, you would like borry, the Coles, knew you was gonna get
your money back at the end of the year.”
“But
you never got ahead, and you never got to buy your own land.”
“We
never wanted for anything.”
“My
mother was a great cook, and she used to work down here at the restaurant. I
come from a very spiritual family. She would get all the stuff ready for Sunday.
And we were spotless. Bows and ribbons, and the little frilly socks and
dresses, and Sunday morning, Daddy would have to take all of us down to the
back part of the restaurant because back then you weren’t allowed to go to the
front part, and Momma would have to inspect all of us, there were eleven now,
to make sure we was just right for Sunday School.”
“So
you borrowed, but you had some left over and at Christmastime, you’d go down to
the store right here on the corner where Snappy Tomato is now, I call it the
five and ten, but it was called Rodell’s, and you’d have some money left, a few
dollars, and you’d go in and get you some Christmas stuff. Case closed.”
Leo’s Market, on Mackville Road, she said, had been a
grocery, and would let you charge anything. At home, they’d can three hundred
jars of tomatoes, beans, cabbage, and your hands would be so sore. “That’s the
reason I have arthritis now.”
When tobacco season came, they hired on extra help and her
mother would cook extra for the tobacco hands and it looked just like a
banquet, Chris said.
They had two sets of twins in their family. Eight girls and
three boys. She’s third from the top. Her father, who was a veteran of WWII,
died in 1988. Her mother died three years later of multiple myeloma.
Before we go, I ask her if she knows where her family came
from, if they came from slaves that were here, or did they come as
sharecroppers? And, like most I’ve spoken with, she isn’t sure.
I run up against this time after time.
Even the oldest folks we have spoken with claim not to
remember having been told about slavery.
And, for Chris, who, unlike Mr. Railey, loved sharecropping
as a child, the memories of being the child of the family of a sharecropper are
joyful. It rings through her voice and the exuberance of her body when she
talks about it.
“Our
house was spotless.”
“It
was hard work.”
“But
honey, let me tell you, it was a joy and a blessing and we didn’t want for
anything and we didn’t cry. Pork chops come to us.”
