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CHAPTER 20 Mother to Daughter, Father to Son 1890 to 1950

Minnie Walker, 89, retraced her life as she walked along an old dirt road at the former Millwood Plantation. There, in wcod buildings long since gone, she was born, married, and gave birth to her children, just like her grand-mother before her. They were "Calhoun people," she explained, a tag that stayed with her family long after the Civil War ended the slavery that bound them to James Edward Calhoun.

Working in scorching heat in cotton fields, wearing out new shoes as she danced to a fiddle, carrying a basket of food her mother prepared for the sick, these were some of the memories that seeing her old home place revived. Her reeollections, along with those of many others, form one of the last undertakings of the Russell studies, a collection of oral history from elderly Blacks living in Elbert and Abbeville Counties.

Unlike James Edward Calhoun, whose life was well documented through his diaries, letters, and legal documents, the stories of "Calhoun's people" and most other slaves and their eariy descendants went largely unrecorded. Genealogies, historians' mainstays, were sometimes limited to just a few generations because slaves could be taken away from their families and never see them again. Minnie Walker explained that she never knew her grandfather because he was sold away from Millwood to another planter seeking a male slave to be used "like a breeding horse."

Also, Blacks customarily took the name of slaveowners, which could further erode familial links. Because they were often purposely kept illiterate, few slaves learned to inscribe family Bibles with marriages, births, and deaths. If they were mentioned in legal documents, such as property inventories, it was often only by sex and age with names omitted.

Even as late as the 1950's, Southern Blacks were required by law to receive a separate education from Whites, and this was usually an unequal education. Before that, well into the 1900's, school for Black children in the South was often limited to only three months of the year. And if they were ill-prepared to write about themselves, Blacks were also usually overlooked by Whites recording community news.

But the will to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next was often strong, and persisted in Minnie Walker and others who welcomed the opportunity to share their memories with investigators. Dozens of people were contacted and interviewed. Several individuals talked at length with researchers conducting separate studies, beginning with The History Group, which wrote an overview of all history in the area, and ending with Eleanor Ramsey, Patricia Turner, and Shirley Moore, who were concerned primarily with Black history.

Conversations usually occurred where the people lived, although sometimes site visits were made to stir recollections about specific places like Millwood. Ramsey and her researchers scoured local newspaper archives and other publications beforehand to find some topics for discussion; they further jarred memories by showing the residents old photographs, steadily accumulated by copying those owned by the people they interviewed.

The exchanges between researchers and their subjects were far reaching, depending on each person's experiences, but life's universal themes of family, work, education, recreation, religion, and friendships were recurring subjects. There were also issues pertaining to specific events in the two counties, some controversial and still unresolved decades later. For many, coaxing cotton out of the earth was one of their earliest memories because they had come from mostly poor families in which everyone worked, including children.

The land they farmed rarely belonged to them, but was rented from White landlords who either took part of their crops as payment or cash. Both Minnie Walker's stepfather and husband paid with cotton to farm at Millwood, which Blacks called State Lands, shortened from Estate Lands. She remembered each of them giving a 400-pound bale to the overseer for Patrick Calhoun, James Edward's nephew who managed Millwood after the elder Calhoun died. The cotton was first freed of seeds at the gin in Calhoun Falls: "Cotton buyers come in from somewhere and buy up the cotton. The gin man just had cotton stacked all around, all around. And this buyer come in and they put the cotton then on a freight train. Wasn't trucks and things to carry things like there is now," she said.

Months of hard field labor often resulted in little financial reward, and even losses, because the tenants couldn't repay landlords from their meager cotton profits for supplies they had borrowed.

Phoebe Turman's family moved when she was 13 across the Savannah River from South Carolina to the southern section of Elbert County called Flatwoods. They were seeking better land, which they farmed as a "third patch." "You get a third of everything you make-potatoes, cotton, corn, everything…and then you settle up, and if there is anything left for you out of your third, then you gets that. You come out in debt every month," she explained.

Work in the mills after crops were planted and harvested helped many families, Black and White, survive. A few Black men operated ferries, but those jobs disappeared when bridges replaced the boats.

Farm life, never an easy way to make a living, was made even more difficult by the years of over cultivating which had sorely depleted fertility. Charlotte Sweeney described the unyielding soil her father tilled near Calhoun Falls: "He couldn't raise nothing on it...too poor to raise a fuss on, couldn't even raise a good argument on it!"

Horses and mules were essential to farming in the days before tractors. How many animals were available to pull plows substantially determined how many acres were tilled because the only alternative was breaking the soil by hand. The description "a one-horse farm" evoked a familiar picture of a small, family endeavor in the rural South. Randolph Davis, at 110 the oldest person interviewed, explained how much a single horse was worth: "I give Albert (Dye) a thousand pounds of cotton for one horse."

Sometimes, despite having a good crop, Black farmers still failed to make a profit because of unscrupulous landlords. Randolph Davis recalled one who demanded all of his sharecroppers' cotton, rather than only a part: "...Made everybody on that place bring their cotton up there, about ten or 15 bales, and he took every bit of it. I had two bales of cotton. I didn't get a dime and I left."

A dishonest gin operator deliberately under weighing their cotton was another dilemma sharecroppers sometimes encountered, but farmers devised their own schemes to combat that kind of fraud. Explained Rufus Bullard: "You could weigh a bale of cotton there today and lay it out at night and take it to town tomorrow and it might gain five pounds due to moisture. Other people got money the best way they could. They commence to make cotton, sell it by the basketful to somebody else... keep [the gin operator] from it."

Against another obstacle, Bullard said that all farmers were equally disadvantaged. Infestation by the boll weevil meant mutual disaster: "And it was 19--I think '21 or '22. I tell you, the weevils hit this country. We burned the crop squares to burn the grubs, keep the weevil from hatchin'… Well, they hit this country and everybody made a shorter crop... and the people went broke, all the merchants... they was looking for 45 cents [per pound] for cotton, no 50 cents, and everybody was holding their cotton… and it went down to five cents... and everybody just had to quit." Across the South, farmers, including many Blacks, deserted the land. The Bullards went to Chicago for five years where Rufus Bullard's father worked for the railroad.

The mass exodus concerned some influential Whites, including the editor of The Elberton Star newspaper, who wrote on December 15, 1922: "The fact that a great many colored laborers have left Elbert County is a serious problem. They have gone north, east, and west. Many of them are worthy and have the respect of both races. Why have they gone? In some instances, it may be that the landowner could not or would not furnish rations. If he could furnish rations, it seems short sighted not to do so, for if the exodus continues where can the landowner expect to get laborers?"

Some landowners solved the labor dilemma by using Black convicts, including women, in a system rife with abuse.

Efforts to keep the next generation of Blacks on the farm and in the South extended to some of Elberton's Black leaders, who in 1925 organized a farm worker's club for boys. This move was endorsed by the county farm agent and the newspaper, which stated, Blacks "are making progress in the conduct of farm work along improved scientific and business methods."

Reverend Janie Hampton's father, who farmed Millwood property, was especially adept: "...really wasn't anything around the farm he couldn't do. He used to get farmers' magazines... He was just apt at learning things... He had an orchard... He had different kinds of peaches. He had red peaches, then he had a real sweet white peach. And then he had apricots, plums. He used to graft trees and make them grow, you know, mixed fruits."

Another Calhoun tenant, Minnie Clark, described a pattern of mutual support among farmers that eased the burden of manual labor somewhat. One farmer might be experiencing trouble, she explained: ...say his cotton might get a little grassy. Now they worked together, take their whole family, and families get together and chop his cotton out. And the next day, they'd go to another [farm) and that's the way they worked."

Among early Black property owners, the majority inherited land from White ancestors. But not all. Hampton's father was among those who eventually bought a farm, which caused him ill-will from Whites: "And then it had gotten around. People knew that he had bought. And they figured he was planning on building and they just wouldn' t be but so nice to you if they thought that you was trying to help yourself... They took more rent from you than you were supposed to pay... whatever they said you owed, you just had to pay it."

Edward Brownlee recalled an episode involving Blacks and Whites that was markedly different than Hampton's experience. Gilbert Gray, he said, was buying a farm from the Verdells, who were White. They charged him $100 a year. On several occasions when Gray was unable to pay in full, they canceled what was due as paid. Gray ended up paying only about half the agreed-upon price of $1,000 to buy the land.

Brownlee's own parents farmed Elbert County land in the Heardmont community inherited from his great-grandfather, George Washington Dye. Dye was the White slave-holder who raised nine children with Brown-lee's great-grandmother, Lucinda, whom Dye bought as a slave. Brownlee, like so many Blacks, eventually left the South, but for an education, not a job; unlike many others, he eventually returned. He earned two masters degrees from Columbia University in New York then returned to Elbert County and taught public school until retirement.

Despite the many physical and economic hardships Black families endured, providing an education for Black children was a driving ambition for many parents. Early Black schools were usually affiliated with churches and often represented financial sacrifices for students' parents, who sometimes supplemented teachers' pay to lengthen instruction past the allotted three months. Charlotte Sweeney's parents paid one dollar a month for her to continue studying with a tutor the rest of the year, while Grace Reynolds boarded with an aunt in Calhoun Falls so she could attend Mr. Lee's School, also called the Calhoun Falls Mission School. For most young Blacks, however, education ended with only abbreviated primary schooling.

Such a short school term was also a burden for Black teachers. Minnie Clark explained that teaching with a salary of $35 a month for only three months of the year was insufficient to pay her bills. She was forced to move to Atlanta to work as a maid for some years to support herself.

Northern Presbyterians, who considered the South a missionary field, sought to rectify the education lapse by establishing a Black boarding school in Abbeville in 1885, offering ten months instruction in primary and secondary grades. Their well-intentioned efforts, however, led to unforeseen tragedy. Ferguson-Williams Academy, named for the school's founding ministers, eventually became Harbison College for Colored Youth when the ministers could no longer financially support the effort. Samuel P. Harbison of Pennsylvania, a wealthy White member of the Presbyterian's Board of Missions for Freedmen, bought 18 acres on Abbeville's outskirts, where the school was moved. He later donated 47 acres more, as well as cash to support the effort.

Co-educational, the school offered liberal arts, and industrial and agricultural instruction. Harbison wasn't a college in today's context, but a combined elementary and high school. Rules were flexible about paying tuition, with many students working on the school farm to help pay costs.

Ursula Mae Haddon, who graduated in 1909, remembered an understanding attitude among the administrators concerning the students' lack of funds: "...say you chipped in a dollar... it was in your reach... We all who attended the school liked it. We were proud of it; we were glad to get to school. Maybe our parents didn't have the opportunity. I'm sure mine didn't. I had the opportunity. I tried to avail myself."

Operated apparently uneventfully for ten years by a Black Northern minister, Reverend Thomas A. Amos, and an all-Black faculty, the school somehow got caught up in the fears and hatred many Whites still harbored towards Blacks. Harbison College became the focus of controversy that ended with Amos' resignation. In a front-page article in The Abbeville Press and Banner, Amos cited jealousy from his predecessors' friends over his success as the cause of damaging rumors circulating in the White community. One rumor named him as an organizer of Black labor resistance; another claimed that the Black students were armed. Vehemently denying both reports, Amos added: "I have positively done nothing to merit the ill will of the White people and I would not be able today to name a single White man in the town or in the country to whom I could feel justified in feeling unkindly."

Soon after, the school closed for some months, and the newspaper announced the appointment of a new principal, C. M. Young: "The agitation of the race question has awakened and intensified the race prejudice which seemed dormant or which had not until recently come to the surface in a pronounced form. The president of the Harbison college is a native born negro, and one who seems to be acceptable to a majority of our people... His predecessor was a Northern negro, who was objectionable to some of our people."

The maelstrom surrounding the school, however, didn't subside, and when a fire destroyed one of the buildings in January, 1907, the principal wrote a newspaper letter quelling talk that arson was involved. Rather, he wrote, a defective flue and wood stove were at fault.

But a later blaze was indisputably deliberate. An arsonist set two fires at the school on March 17, 1910. The fire killed three boys and severely injured several other students and a teacher. Minnie Clark, a student at the time, witnessed the blaze: "I was there when the building caught fire… it's a good thing I had my pack on... like to got burned up."

The next day, a mass rally was held in Abbeville to condemn the arsonist and to raise a $300 reward for his capture. Despite the show of White support, the school closed permanently and the board of directors began searching for another community where they could start over. Prominent, White Abbeville citizens circulated a petition urging that the school stay, but the directors declined, explaining that with the arsonist still at large the risk was too great for the students. No arrest was ever made.

The school reopened in 1911 in Irmo, South Carolina, as a male-only agricultural institution that operated until 1958.

Nor did Elberton escape racial tension stirring throughout the South. From 1922 until 1925, the city's newspaper printed stories and advertisements announcing Ku Klux Klan marches, movies, and rallies, one featuring the Elberton Municipal Band. The paper also printed an article about lynchings in the South, using statistics compiled by the Black Tuskegee Institute, which counted more than 70 hangings of Blacks in three years. The hangings were provoked by such actions as "trying to act like a White man and not knowing his place."

Religion was a solace during these troubled times, and also a comfort during better days. Black churches provided a strong sense of community where everyone was welcome, even when no building existed for services. Phoebe Turman recalled: "I used to hear the older heads [people] say they would have a place to go to serve the Lord... sing and pray... it was a big, old oak tree... big, old, nice, shady oak tree... that was their church...."

And after they built churches, traveling to services in caravans helped forge friendships. The long rides were memorable events for Lillie Pressley: "Now I remember, all along in those days... you go to church in the wagons... Now, we took those mules and hitch them to the wagon... and went to church that way. It was fun in those days... Sometimes it'd be two and three wagon loads of people in the road... All right on up the road the other wagons join those wagons, and that's the way we went to church. We had about five miles to go to church."

Parents instilled the importance of religion in their children in many ways. Children were honored by churches with their own day every year, an especially fond memory for Lillie Pressley: "All the children [would] be dressed in their little new suits and things... and they had a trunk full of food. We, all the children, had to speak and sing. And they just had a big program all that day, just the children."

Edward Brownlee's father told him of a similar experience: "They would go in one-horse wagons and most times they would be pulled by oxen or they would ride on the oxen's back. They'd cook trunks of food so that the kids would just have all kinds of food."

Building a community spirit and nurturing friendships-and sometimes romance-were further accomplished in social gatherings called hot suppers. These were evening celebrations popular in the late 1800's and early 1900's during cooler months. Women and older girls cooked their best dishes for the occasions, items which they sold for small sums during the breaks between lively dancing to the music of fiddles and guitars. Sometimes, males were required to buy some tidbit of food for their dancing partners. But for Minnie Walker, food wasn't the main attraction at the hot suppers, dancing was: "Me and my sister [would] be down there dancing! Sometime momma went to the store and bought us some shoes, [we] went right round there and danced. Went back home with holes in 'em. Lord, if momma didn't get us. We used to dance and everybody wanted to dance with me and my sister.

Often playing the fiddle was Louella Walker's father who made his own first instrument. One of his later fiddles was among Louella Walker's most prized possessions years later: "... he always said he made his first fiddle out of a sardine ... He learned to play himself... He just made his fiddle out of a sardine box and took his thread and made him a bow."

A more somber topic also received attention in the interviews. In the mid-1800's, death posed a significant financial burden for poor Blacks, a burden they wished to spare survivors, so they organized burial societies, which continued well into the 1900's. Members' only obligation was to pay 25 to 35 cents monthly into the treasury.

Janesta McKinney, a Black funeral home proprietor in Elberton, explained that when a member died: "... they were entitled to about the poorest burial you could get... the family would add a little more to make it more presentable."

Membership in such societies wasn't for everyone, however. Henry McIntire's mother didn't join one, but she did provide for her funeral: "... she saved just enough to bury herself... she didn't want us cryin' two ways-cryin' when she gone, and cryin' with the way she got put away," he explained.

Although a financial burden for many, death gave some Blacks opportunities to better their lot. For example, Janesta McKinney's father-in-law, Reverend Addison Reynolds McKinney, was one of the first Blacks to start his own business in Elberton in about 1910. Working in the granite quarry, he saw a pressing need for a funeral home for Blacks. As Janesta McKinney explained: "They [White funeral directors] buried you at night... you had no preference.. that's why they opened it [the Black funeral home] up... for convenience of Black people. And I think they were very reasonable 'cause a long time ago people didn't have any money. And they [her father-in-law's business] would open accounts for you and you pay by the month."

McKinney's first hearse was drawn by horses, which probably belonged to his Black partner, John Rucker, who was also a blacksmith.

Addison McKinney pursued other ventures as well, running a grocery store and a restaurant, which was necessary, explained Janesta McKinney because: "Really wasn't too much you could make doing one thing, you know."

Tobe Wells, however, managed to become successful with only one enterprise. He had learned how to operate a saw mill as a boy of 15 by watching others. Eventually, a White lumber mill operator gave him a portable saw mill outright because he was pleased with Wells' skill with the equipment. Wells recalled his benefactor's exact words of some 40 years before that had changed his own life dramatically: "'Go ahead. You can move it [the saw mill] anywhere you want. It's all yours. Do anything you want to do with it."'

Wells tramsported his mill wherever he could find lumber to cut, primarily in Elbert County, but also in Abbeville County and other places. For awhile, after World War II, there was enough demand for lumber for Wells to hire a crew of 22 Black men, many of them war veterans, and to pay them 50 cents an hour, ten cents more than the going rate.

He had learned early in life by helping his father sharecrop in Lincoln County, Georgia, that little profit could be made farming, and despite only a fifth grade education he achieved financial independence: "I learned by experience, workin', talkin' to different people, goin' here-I go some of every-where-anything goin' on, I go."

Wells mastered making split oak baskets the same way, by watching and trying, and he was willing to pass on his knowledge to others. Representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Savannah District spent a day video taping Wells demonstrating basket weaving, once a common practical skill that has become a vanishing craft.

Like Tobe Wells, who enjoyed a monopoly with his saw mill for awhile, two Black men for a time were the only barbers in early Calhoun Falls, South Carolina. Oliver McIntire operated a shop for Blacks in a section called Buck Nellie, while Spearman Edwards Reynolds chose to serve only Whites so that he would be acceptable to them. This restriction excluded even his own family, according to his wife Grace Reynolds, who told researchers: "... he thought he could make more [by cutting only Whites' hair]... .He wouldn't even cut his childrens' hair!"

Segregation touched nearly every aspect of Black life and persisted in the South for many years. The many inequities people suffered because of their color still stung years later. Henry McIntire recalled working for about six dollars a week at the cotton mill in Calhoun Falls: "...we [Black employees] couldn't go up there to that drinking fountain and drink no water... we had to first get a bottle and go downstairs. We couldn't even go to the bathroom up there."

Yet, amazing for the time, intimately serving both races was tacitly sanctioned for another Black, Dr. James Thompson. He was born in 1873, the son of Lloyd Thompson, a former slave who owned land in Elbert County. The younger Thompson attended Brown University in Rhode Island and Shaw University Medical School in North Carolina before establishing his practice in the Elberton bank building where White doctors also had offices.

While he was accepted as a physician by many White patients, Thompson courted the enmity of other Whites by fighting for equal rights for members of his race. Before he left for college, in one example, he stole the answer sheet to an examination that Whites were using to impede Black students, Edward Brownlee told Russell investigators. Thompson, who was never caught, shared the answers with other Blacks, and their scores rose dramatically.

Another of Thompson's acts later set him at odds with White landowners. As a physician, he apparently refused to endorse insurance policies authorizing landowners to collect money for incapacitated Black tenant farmers, which Thompson considered a continuation of viewing Blacks as property. His refusal effectively ended the payoffs, but his resistance apparently marked Thompson as a troublemaker to some. Still, others continued to prefer him to White physicians, and his mixed practice flourished.

The doctor's violent death still remained a sensitive topic in the Black community 60 years later, interviewers found. Thompson was shot in the chest by a White doctor in 1915. The man who killed him, Dr. A. S. Oliver, was arrested and tried for murder. Oliver, whom The Elberton Star said appeared to have been drinking the day of the killing, claimed that the shooting was accidental. He said that Thompson was considering buying some of his equipment because Oliver was retiring, and that among the items was the gun. The weapon, he said, discharged by accident, striking Thompson, who died soon after.

There were no other witnesses, and on the strength of Oliver's testimony the jury returned a not-guilty verdict after less than an hour. Calling the doctor's death tragic, the newspaper described Thompson "as one of the most prominent men of his race in Elbert County. He was generally regarded as a leader... and was accumulating money. He owned considerable property...."

Medical care provided by Blacks wasn't restricted to Thompson and other doctors. Black women served as midwives, an occupation that drew Annie McIntire and Minnie Walker. Walker first became interested in helping deliver babies when she worked as a housekeeper in a hospital: "... See, I was always a person who wanted to know things... I got books and I studied books," she said.

Caring for one another was also a function of Black social clubs. The Good Samaritans, Eastern Star, Masons, and Odd Fellows claimed hundreds of members, and their meetings and socials strengthened ties and nurtured leaders. For some clubs, an annual march and celebration was the major event of the year that rallied members in a show of unity. Lillie Pressley: "...they had big turnouts, you know... Just like they're going to have a turn out at, say, at Mt. Calvary. They'd march from here to Mt. Calvary. All would be dressed in black suits and white shirts, and white gloves."

But as things slowly improved financially and racially for Blacks, the importance of such organizations gradually declined. Lillie Pressley remembered the heyday of social clubs when they were instrumental to the welfare of so many : "... they help people when they're sick and things like that. But just like I'm saying, it's not as strong as it once had been.... Back yonder, when times were hard, they were a lot stronger."

Chapter 21: A Binding Thread

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