I was born October 11, 1919, in a rural area near Rosebud and Romance. I've lived within a fifty mile range of Beebe all my life, and I've always lived on a farm. I don't think I could stand it in a city. My parents were farmers.
I had seven brothers and three sisters. A total of eleven children were in our family. I never knew a sister. One of my sisters lived to be four years old, one lived to be six weeks old, and one died at birth.
My dad did the plowing. My mom went to the field and chopped cotton and corn. Of course, Daddy always had a little patch of strawberries for family use and a watermelon patch. When we lived out west, we had berries to pick. People would come from Conway down to pick strawberries on our land. They'd pick berries for us. One of the white boys that came in the group, most were colored, killed a snake. Well, somebody killed that snake. Anyway, he said, "Let me have that snake." Nobody knew what he was gonna do with it, and he took it down there where a couple of black women were picking strawberries and scared them to death! One woman had to pull off her pants and ring water out of them! From then on, you could just mention snake to that boy, and it would embarrass him to death.
I can remember my first day of school. My dad carried me up to the school house, and when he started to go home I wanted to go, too. He said, "No, now you have to stay here today." So, when I got home, I told my mother, "Well, I wanted to come home when Daddy did so I could help you wash dishes and things, but he wouldn't let me." I went to school up to the sixth grade and did some seventh grade work.
You know, nowadays they have all sorts of things for kids to do. They've got transportation. Back then, you had to make do with what you had at home. So on Fridays at school we'd either have a soccer match or a spelling match to see who would outdo each other. We not only entertained ourselves, but we learned, too. That was probably a better learning process than any place because we were all anxious to see who could beat the other one.
`Course all school kids were in the same boat. There wasn't anybody that had cars. There was one or two cars in the community. Didn't everybody have a car, so wherever we went we walked or had a wagon and a team. But, mostly we walked. I know on Sunday morning there would be a whole road full of us kids walking to church and back. And there was one thing about it; you could walk all over the country and never be afraid of anybody. Nowadays, you're almost scared to death to get outside your house. That's one of the big differences between now and then.
All the boys could go to the creek and go swimming, and the little girls stayed at home. Yeah, they were supposed to stay at home, I guess. All brothers would go, and the older ones would throw the little ones in the water and make them learn how to swim. So, I never did learn how to swim . . . I still can't.
While they were off swimming, I just played out in the yard. All little girls used to have a playhouse out in the yard. It might be nothing but a rock and some of the old green moss put on the rock for decoration. That was your table, and you'd get pieces of broken dishes and things you could put in there and use your imagination and make you a whole outfit of stuff. Today I don't think kids would even think about such things as that, but . . . you know we didn't have radios; we didn't have TV's; we didn't have electricity; we didn't have cars to go into the towns when we wanted to; we didn't have the things then that they do now. There wasn't a big imagination about getting out on my part. I just wondered sometimes what the rest of the world looked like.
When it came to books like history and geography— those places you studied about—you didn't know anything about them. You didn't hear. You just couldn't imagine what it would be like when we read about those things. Things are better now. You've got TV. Kids have better chances. But sometimes, you couldn't believe that all that stuff was true. You just thought, "Well, that's just something somebody wrote in a book."
Reading—that's what I did on the weekend, and especially when I was sick and couldn't go to school: like when I had the measles. I always loved to read. I would read my school books on the weekend and a magazine or two. There used to be a magazine published called The Arkansas Farmer; my dad subscribed to that and The Progressive Farmer. I took The Progressive Farmer, and here lately, I canceled it. It's not that important to me anymore. It's mostly about farming, and I don't do that anymore.
When I was about two years old, my mother said I was sick. They didn't know what was wrong with me and said if the doctor knew what was wrong with me, he never did tell anybody. All they knew was I ran a high fever for about three weeks, and when that fever broke, they thought I had died. An aunt of mine that was there that night, she said that she and her sister were both there with me. There was a room across the hall from the living room. They had put up the cooling board in that back bedroom to lay me out on. A cooling board is, well, everyone goes to funeral homes now, but they used to keep the dead at home. It's just a board to keep the body stretched and straight. Sometimes it had padding on it, sometimes not, and they called it the cooling board. They had that fixed for me, but they said my mother wouldn't take me in there. So my aunt said that rather than see my momma sit there and work with a little dead baby, my aunt took me out of my momma's arms and put me into her lap. They kept working with me and using heating blankets and putting them around me for a time. And everybody always had a big old bottle of powdered quinine. They rubbed a whole bottle of that on me and kept putting hot pads on me to keep me warm. You can't get quinine like that anymore. At one point, I opened my eyes and closed them back, and my dad said, "She looked at me then, but she won't ever look anymore." But, then, in a little bit, I came to.
Back then, there were few phones. My mother's mother was listening on the telephone. Each one had different rings, and she said someone was calling somebody else and said, "The baby is dead! The baby is dead!" So she and Grandpa got in the buggy to come down and see the dead baby. Grandma said she was bad surprised to see me still living. So here I am nearly eighty years later.
I have never driven a car. Glad I didn't a lot of times. No, I never learned to drive. Never had a need for it. Sharon, she carries me to the store on Fridays. She only works part of a day at the school, and she's off more than the other kids. She takes me for my doctor's appointment.
I have hobbies. I love to sew, do embroidery, do decoupage. I want a room all to myself where I could have all that in there: my ironing board, sewing machine, my patterns and everything in there in one room and a big old table to put it out on . . . that would be . . . that would make my day.
I saw on TV where they were making those string quilts, but of all things they went through to get those pieces together— back then, we wouldn't have taken all that time fixing something like that. But, I think we started out needing it for the warmth and not for the decoration. But now you see houses, some movie stars' houses— their whole houses are decorated with quilts: quilts on couches, chairs, and hanging on the wall and little quilts hanging around different places. I always liked to do that. I still do, although I can't see quite as good as I used to, and my hands shake worse than they used to when I do something like that. Sometimes I wish I could just hold them still. But, I guess that comes along with the territory of old age.
Work never hurt anybody so long as they were able. People need to take care of their bodies and not overtire themselves. `Course that happens a lot, anyway, because you have no choice. You got to put in so much. Even on the farms you had so much you had to get done, and on public works you got to put in so many hours. The best that people can do is take care of their own bodies: leave off alcohol, like beer, and leave off cigarettes. `Course, people don't think of those things. A lot of times chemicals are put into the cigarettes and this hurts a lot of people. Same way with beer and stuff like that, I would imagine. That's the main thing: take care of your body, stay out of trouble and stay out of other people's business. Live your life and let them live theirs. Long as we can do that . . . well, I guess we'll make it pretty good.