The rich African-American cultural tradition has deep roots, some tracing back to the mother continent of Africa hundreds of years ago. Although many aspects of their existence were controlled by whites, African Americans molded their own culture, combining traditions from the past and new experiences.

One way to preserve their cultural identity was to give their own names-names different from those designated by the whites-to places they considered important. Even before there were street signs, black residents were coining their own titles for the roads in their neighborhoods, often honoring local heroes or prominent citizens.

Edward Brownlee talked about some of Elberton's streets: "They had a Thompson Street there, named for Dr. Thompson.... They had another one named for him. James Street was named for Jim Thompson. But James Street is no more.... Martin Street was named for, I think they named it for Georgia Martin because she taught there way back.... I imagine that [another] street was named for Reverend McKinney...Well, they had no signs before they put in this thoroughfare; people just remembered." The African-American section of Calhoun Falls came to be known as Buck Nellie. No one interviewed knew exactly why, but Henry Mclntire thought the name stuck because of a street by the same name.

African Americans lived throughout Elbert and Abbeville Counties in small rural enclaves, places with names that sometimes never appeared on maps, but were nonetheless part of the local culture. W.T. Smith talked about the location of his father's last farm: "...right down here on Jones Ferry Road...place they called Sweet City....I don't know why they ever called it Sweet City. Used to be some little stores, houses out there and I think a gin house...on the Avenue Highway."

Driving through rural Elbert County with researchers, Randolph Davis pointed out an area called Rose Hill where residents used to gather to swap both conversation and goods. "This is, ah, Rose Hill. I'm fixing to show you that well. They called [it] the Rabbit Well. They had a rabbit on top of that thing. We used to go and meet together and have a store or something like that down in here. Public wells they had there. That's where they get water from."

Davis remembered that the well was associated with a legend involving Abraham Lincoln. According to the story, the president once visited the well, perhaps even drank its cool waters. On his journey, according to the tale, Lincoln gathered "all his information [about] how whites were treating the black [slaves]."

Although African Americans, when reminiscing for investigators, often emphasized their jobs and accomplishments, they also relived moments of laughter and fun. Especially memorable from the late 1800's and early 1900's were dances, sometimes called "hot suppers." W.T. Smith remembered: "I used to hear my daddy tell about hot suppers... .He used to talk about it. Every day, he'd talk about hot suppers.... Colored folks used to go down, nice time they had and talk about folks...." Phoebe Turman said that her relatives also went to the dances, which were usually held in the fall. "Didn't have 'em in the summertime... revival was in the summertime. The hot supper was when the weather get cold. That's when they [the men] had a little money, you know, when they started to sell their cotton, had a little money to treat the girls."
 

Louella Walker holds her father's fiddle, one of her most treasured heirlooms.

The hot suppers could last all night, especially if they were held during the weekend and if everyone had finished the farm chores. Men often paid for the privilege of dancing with the ladies of their choice at the gatherings. "Boys paid the girls to dance with 'em," Phoebe Turman explained. "Hot supper where he get him a partner, and he would pay that partner to dance with him, maybe a quarter or something like that. Enough to buy a custard, pie, or cake."

As time passed, Turman explained, the gatherings became known by different names. "Some folks called 'em hot suppers and some called 'em plays. Later on, they went to calling them plays, cause they played at night.... Coming on down, they wouldn't say hot suppers. One lady went to a hot supper and said, 'That was the coldest hot supper I ever had."

The food was what Jim Pressley remembered when he thought of hot suppers. "Saturday night, they had all kinds of things cooking, beef, fried fish, things like that." Often, the festivities were held in a tenant farm house, according to Minnie Walker, who fondly remembered the dances. "My husband's baby sister, before she died, used to have suppers. Me and my sister be down there dancing. Sometime Mama went to [the] store and bought us some shoes. Went right round there and danced. Went back home with holes in 'em. Lawd, if Mama didn't get us. We used to dance, and everybody want to dance with me and my sister."

Walker remembered that sponsors at the hot suppers sold food to the men for their dancing partners. "He dance with me. All right, when the dance was over, I go over to that table and pick out what I want, and he pay for it."

Both Walker and Turman recalled the same musician providing the toe-tapping music at the dances. Said Walker, "Louella Walker's daddy. . . .He could play that fiddle!" About 80 years old when she was interviewed, Louella Walker still had one of her father's fiddles, a prized possession from the past. She said she had to hide it from her grandchildren who couldn't resist touching and plucking the strings. She had wrapped the aging instrument in a web of string to help hold it together, but that didn't lessen its sentimental value. For her, the fiddle represented her childhood and time she spent surrounded by her father's music. He learned to play himself... .He always said he made his first fiddle out of a sardine box," she said. "He just made his fiddle out of a sardine box and took his thread and made him a bow."

Her father started playing the fiddle as a boy, but his family didn't make it easy to practice. "They run him out of the house and he learned to play his self... .Had to get outside. Gramma Julie wouldn't let him, didn't want him to learn," his daughter explained. "But when I knowed anything, he had 'em, violins. They used to call 'em violins. He'd have two. I used to play on one. I learned to play a little bit, but I put it down after I got up good size and started to school and things. If I'd of kept on, I probably would have made a good little stock player. When I knowed anything, my daddy was playing it [the fiddle]. And he'd play 'Fox in the Wall' for me. And [he would play] 'Billy in the Low Ground' and all like that. Aw, he could play anything. [He'd] play, 'Are you from Dixie?' Used to play all that for me when I was a girl.

"Now, he could play those things, like he'd go to funerals. He could play for church, too. But when he'd go to hot suppers [he'd play a song with words like 'But a man'...Let me see how he played it. 'But a man, ain't nothing but a man. Before I let the steel drill beat me down, I'd die with my hammer in my hand.'"
 

Eleanor Mason Ramsey interviewed Randolph Davis, 111 years old, and his son, grandson, and great-grandson, a rare opportunity in oral history research.

As a child, Louella Walker lived on a tenant farm on the Millwood Plantation. She recalled that for a long time her father wouldn't let her go with him to hot suppers because he thought the people would, "You know, cuss and things like that. He [my father] never did cuss. He had a word [when he got angry]. He'd say, 'By grabby,' if you made him mad. Well, honey, he never would let me go to the hot supper with 'em, not much. When he'd go to play for white people, he'd let me go. And we'd just set and look. And the white people, they didn't mostly dance. They'd be at their homes."

She vividly recalled a Christmas Eve when her parents finally relented and said she could attend a hot supper. Still, her mother fretted about letting her go with her father. She thought that the child might fall asleep. "He was gonna play all night long! Gonna play till 12 and then he gonna rest awhile. And [then at] daylight, he'd be playing again for them to dance. And so I went on over there [to the hot supper] and I stood up there and they [her father with his fiddle and another man with a guitar] played. And they [the dancers] were just catching one another like you see 'em do on television, you know. 'You swing your partner. I swing mine. You swing your partner, I swing mine. That's the way they would do, you know. "So, that was my first time at being at a dance. He'd play them songs and they'd dance by 'em. But I never did. I never could dance."

Left: The fiddle Louella Walker's father played at many a hot supper dance was more than 100 years old.
 

Dances were not the only occasions when her father performed, she recalled. White men would ride to the Walker house in wagons, she explained, on their way to cock fights down by the river. (The fights were often staged not far from where the Richard B. Russell Dam is today.) "White people come from different places, and they would go down there to fight these chickens. [They] have roosters fight, and they'd bet on what rooster gonna win. People would bring their roosters from other places, and they'd bet on 'em, you know, and make money. They used to stop at my daddy's house and make my father play for 'em.... Some of 'em would know him well and go hear him play."

Phoebe Turman said that African-American men also attended the cock fights, but usually remained on the edges of the crowd. According to her, the whites were the ones who brought the roosters and gambled the most. "The blacks would go there and if a rooster got killed, they [the whites] would throw him out and they [the blacks] would take 'em."

The African Americans did gamble, Turman recalled, but she associated gambling more with hot suppers, when a few individuals sometimes slipped away from the dancing to wager. "They played cards, cards like there is now. Yes, and shoot dice too."

Early in the twentieth century, the hot suppers began to decline in popularity as other types of social activities gained ground. Randolph Davis remembered church sponsored box suppers: "[the women] would fill those boxes with chicken and things like that... They bid on those boxes... .The one that the box belong to [would] eat with that person... .They had fruits and candies and stuff like that."

By the mid-twentieth century, Janesta McKinney was participating in "Bar-B-Ques" and "Fish Fries." "[If] we needed something that wasn't provided by the board of education. We would just decide what we were gonna have [at school]. We'd call it selling hot dogs or fish fries. And every Halloween we did real well. We did everything that you see in a country store. [And] we had fortune tellers. Had cake walks and bobbing the apple with your mouth. You bite it; you get a prize."

Left: Roving photographers visited towns periodically beginning in the 1800's. They made formal portraits similar to paintings of the time such as this photograph of an unidentified Abbeville County woman.
 

In the 1920's, bootleggers provided another form of entertainment for some, according to Rufus Bullard. "They used to make good whiskey back in those days. It wasn't poison. See, right after the Prohibition days [began], people started makin' whiskey, makin' what we call moonshine. I used to drink, I don't now, but what I'm gonna say [is] as long as people got a taste for it, somebody's gonna make some somewhere. And [during Prohibition] they couldn't buy it [legally], couldn't ship it. And they had quite a bit of it in this county."

Bullard said that finding a bootlegger used to be fairly easy. "Well, you can't be a bootlegger and be private. Somebody gotta know you're sellin' whiskey before you can sell any. You'd go to his house and ask him for a quart or jar, whatever you want, and he'd go to the woods and bring it. You don't go with him. He wouldn't let you see where he got it hid. People would steal it if they find it. That's why they wouldn't let them see it."

Bootleggers also faced losing their products to authorities, the "revenuers," Bullard called them. "Yes, yes, [the revenuers] catch a few, miss a few. Catch a man today, and next week he's back in business again." After Prohibition, the better quality bootleg whiskey became harder to find. About the time that World War II ended, the bootleggers often sold poor quality moonshine, which Bullard likened to poison. "They started makin' it outta any-and-everything."

Colorful traveling salesmen provided another form of entertainment. The "drummers," as they were called, were mostly white men peddling pretty knickknacks, recalled Edward Brownlee, who remembered them from his childhood. "Way back when I come along, they come on them railroads. And they carry these two big suitcases. And they used to sell things like beautiful little handkerchiefs. Little neckties for little boys, little necklaces for little girls, little rings and all kind of little trinkets. In my day, I remember they used to come around, and my mother used to buy little scarfs and little things like that from 'em, and handkerchiefs. And Mommy was a great one for fancy handkerchiefs.

"They were sort of like carpetbaggers. Get as many pennies as they could out of the Negroes. They [the suppliers] probably give 'em [the drummers] these things. 'Cause, you know, things were cheap in them days. They probably give 'em these handkerchiefs five for a nickel in them days, and they sell 'em a nickel apiece."

The salesmen managed to pack a great deal into their oversized bags, sometimes even saucers, cups, and flower vases, all of which were for sale. Often, they also had cameras and set up makeshift studios from one small town to the next where posing for pictures was a major event for the townspeople.

Born in 1916, Edward Brownlee recalled that his own parents eventually bought their own camera and frequently took photographs of their family.

"I guess I got 'bout as old [a camera] as anybody [around] here. I got an old one. My dad used to take pictures of us when we were very tiny. The pictures, if you could see 'em, it would tickle you to death. Mother took [some pictures]. I used to laugh at 'em. [I'd] say, 'These old, ugly, country children. I am gonna burn these things up.' [I'd] say, 'I didn't look nothing like this. Old, ugly, dumb-looking, country children.'"
 

Edward Brownlee remembered riding across the new Georgia-Carolina Memorial Bridge in his family's Model T Ford.

Brownlee also recalled his first ride in an automobile at age 11. His family drove across the new Georgia-Carolina Memorial Bridge, the first major bridge to span the upper Savannah River. The bridge was christened with ginger ale on Armistice Day 1927, in honor of soldiers killed in World War I.

"It took them two years to finish it [the bridge]. They had to carry us down on Sunday to see the bridge. And we would ride down to Millwood [Plantation], you know, in this ole Model T."

Gaining Strength Together

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