Philomene Allen (primary interviewee) and Viola Dunbar interview recording, 1994 July 04
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| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:00:02] anything. | 0:02 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | What she say? | 0:03 |
| Kate Ellis | She said she's going to get a notebook, too. | 0:04 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh. | 0:07 |
| Kate Ellis | In case she wants— | 0:07 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Take notes. | 0:08 |
| Kate Ellis | — to write something down. So, would each of you, and this is for the purposes of testing the sound here, would you each state your name? | 0:08 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | My name is Viola G. Dunbar. | 0:17 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Philimine G. Allen. | 0:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Michele, will you say your name? | 0:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | Michele Mitchell. | 0:29 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | You might have to sit there for an hour. | 0:31 |
| Michele Mitchell | Is because he felt that he had grown up in America and that he was a citizen and that he had never seen Africa, and he just thought that it was ludicrous and it didn't apply to him. And he had a lot of very interesting things to say about that. | 0:33 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I agree with him. I agree with him. He was born in America. | 0:46 |
| Kate Ellis | Yes ma'am. | 0:51 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I was born in America, so I can't be anything other than an American. | 0:53 |
| Michele Mitchell | But there have been so many different name changes. | 0:59 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well yeah, I can go along with the name changes, but I still don't see how in the world I could be an Afro-American because the generation ran out years ago with the ancestors that came from Africa. So that automatically would excluded me from being an Afro. But don't get me wrong, I have nothing against African people. I think they're wonderful people, smart, intelligent people. But I just don't see that I should be labeled as an Afro-American. But that is my verse. I could be wrong. If I am, I'd stand to be corrected. | 1:02 |
| Michele Mitchell | Well, do you think you can be wrong if that's— | 1:46 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No, I don't think. I don't think I'm wrong. But I said if I'm wrong. | 1:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mm-hmm. | 1:52 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | If I'm wrong I could stand to be corrected. But the way I feel that I am right. | 1:53 |
| Michele Mitchell | What do both of you feel about the other name changes that have gone on through the years? | 2:00 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I think it's terrible to have had so many name changes, but if I had to have an identification, I would rather be called Black American because I would still be an American. When you say Afro-American, that's another country altogether. So that wouldn't entice me to be and make me be an African. | 2:04 |
| Kate Ellis | And how about you ma'am, Mrs. Allen? | 2:29 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Well, I go along with what she said 'cause everything have changed now. | 2:39 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But you see my way thinking. I don't know how any people, I've used the word Black for the distinguish between the races. How could any Black person consider themselves as connected with Africa? Because there's no way in the world. If a person comes from Africa, he has to be naturalized, huh? And give up his African citizenship and whatever to become an American. Now how is it I got to, I don't have to go to the procedure of citizenship. How can I be an African? How can I? Could somebody tell me that? How in the world can I be African? I never been to Africa. Never. As far as I know, nobody I know been there. | 2:50 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | It's just that I think the Black people, because Africans are a member of Black race. And when I went to school, which is a long time ago, I think it was supposed to be Black race, White race, Red and Yellow. Now the Black people was Black. The White was the White, the Red was the Indians and the Yellow was the Chinese. Now I don't recall any other colors, you know? Course that's been a long time I been to school, but those were the races when I was in school. | 3:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And I just think that anybody who was born and raised in America should be proud to consider themselves as Americans, not adopt another countries national, what you call it? Naturalization. I don't did that. When you say Afro-American, you adopting Africa, the country of Africa as an African. You hadn't been to Africa. You hadn't been born in Africa. How can you adopt it as your country when you were born and raised in America? That's what I can't understand. Most of our people, Black people I'll say, don't want to say that they're Black American and that's what they are. They're not Afro-Americans, no way in the world. So I don't know why they don't drop that Afro business and just be what they are and be proud to be an American. | 4:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | But was it the case that when both of you were growing up that if somebody said somebody was Black, it would be an insult? | 5:55 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I don't recall anybody. At that time, when I was growing up— | 6:01 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We call it a Negro. | 6:05 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | We was supposed to be niggers or Negro. That's what we were then. The White man called us niggers, and the Black people, we were supposed to be Negroes. Then we got to be Colored. No, we were Colored then. We was Colored before we were Negroes. Then Negro came about and then we got stuck. It was something else. But anyhow, I don't know why I nationality got to change so much when we were all born in America. That's what I can't understand. I cannot understand that. If you're born in America, how you got to be somebody else. | 6:06 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Now you take years ago they say that's why there are so many different Catholic churches in New Orleans because each country immigrants wanted a church built in his name of this country. Like the Italians wanted the Italian church. The Irish wanted an Irish church and so forth and so on. Well they only wanted that in there so far as their churches were concerned. But you never heard them referred to an American Irish or American Italian. You never heard of that. So it's the same thing with us. Why should we be Africans? Maybe I got a lot to learn I guess. Maybe I'm dumb. I don't know. | 6:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | Now, are you both from Opelousas? | 7:51 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yes. | 7:53 |
| Michele Mitchell | And when did you come— | 7:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | We're sisters. We are sisters. I'm the eldest of seven children. | 7:56 |
| Kate Ellis | When were you born? | 8:03 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | 1907— in sharecroppers time. You probably read about sharecropping? | 8:04 |
| Kate Ellis | Yes, ma'am. | 8:20 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well that's what my time was sharecropping. And we arose from sharecroppers to owning our own home. | 8:21 |
| Michele Mitchell | And Miss Allen, when were you born? | 8:38 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | 1910. | 8:39 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I can vaguely remember when she was born. | 8:43 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah? | 8:46 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Mm-hmm. I can really. You know in those days there was midwives that brought the baby. | 8:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | For both of you? | 8:59 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well— | 9:00 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | All of us children. | 9:00 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:09:02] midwives. And I can remember my daddy going to get the old lady, but the old lady supposed to had a little Black satchel, that's what she supposed to brought the babies in. But we were so dumb, they didn't tell us anything. We didn't know anything about life or anything. Just plum dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. | 9:02 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | They was selling Cabbage Patch [indistinct 00:09:27]. | 9:23 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | When she was gone, you see I was, me and my sister had a sister between us. We were in the next room and I could hear mama suffering. After a while I heard the baby crying, but I don't know what was happening. | 9:29 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Which was me. | 9:45 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But then my mother's youngest sister died and mama was crying and I thought she was laughing. And I asked, "Mama, why you laughing? Mama, why you laughing?" Those are little snippets that I can remember in 1910. See I was three years old then. | 9:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | Well, how else was it like when both of you were growing up? I mean, what sort of things do you remember the most in terms of what you did? Did you love your parents? | 10:13 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, in those days we didn't have the transportation, easy going to school like the kids got now. We had to walk our way to school. We had to walk when it was three or four miles going and three or four miles coming back. And we just thought a lot of my mother and father insisted that we go to school but there were some parents who wanted their children to stay home and work. But my parents weren't like that. They wanted us to go to school. And a lot of kids at my age stayed home. Like the Thibodeaux children. | 10:22 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Mm-hmm. | 11:01 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And a lot of others around there. They didn't go to school with us. | 11:05 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. | 11:06 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But Mama and Papa wanted us to get an education. | 11:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Why? | 11:10 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Because they hadn't had the opportunity of going to school. They didn't have an education. And neither one knew how to read and write. And my grandparents, my grandmother on my mother's side, she knew how to read. And my grandfather on my father's side, he knew how to read. And that was the limit to our education but those two people. But my grandmother did send some of her children on my mother's side, some of them went to school. The older children went to school. And of course when you went to school in those days, third of fourth grade, that was a big education then. It was almost like a college degree. | 11:12 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But they would send the children to school and when they would get a certain age, they'd take them out of school. And the next lot of children would go. In fact, they'd send the three of us would go. We were seven children. But the three older ones would go to school for so many years, then we'd be brought home to work and let the three under go. And that's how they used to do it at that time. | 11:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Did you also, among your siblings, did you teach each other? | 12:28 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | What you mean like ABCs, something like that? | 12:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, yeah. I mean if three of you were going to school and three of you were staying home to work— | 12:38 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No, I didn't. I just used that as an instance. We didn't do it that way in our family. | 12:41 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 12:44 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | We didn't do it that way. | 12:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 12:46 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But that's how it was done. | 12:46 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | In our grandparents' time. | 12:48 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | In our grandparents time. You see, that's how it was done. That's why my mama didn't learn how to read because the three children that were older than she, they went to school, you see? And when it became her time to go to school, they had stopped sharecropping and was buying a home, so they needed all the children to work to pay for the home. So my mother didn't get to school, but the three older ones had gone to school. And my grandmother used to teach us at home. She taught me, I can remember her teaching at home. She taught us our ABC's and then she taught us how to write. She would take my hand and show me, you know copy the alphabet style. But education in those days was not a thing like it is nowadays. | 12:51 |
| Michele Mitchell | Tell me about how you got to school when you got older. | 13:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, I went to school on horseback. I had a little old horse, a little red Quarter Horse. His name was Josie. I didn't realize that until later years. He was named, at that time it was a big race horse and that was that horse's name, Josie. And this old horse was named Josie. And we would, I'd get him fed, ride him on to school. I had to go all the back streets. And the school I went to was a private school and it was taught by a blind woman. And she had about, oh, I guess it was about twelve or fourteen, maybe sixteen children in the class and she taught us. It was the Mac family and the Mill family. The Richard family and there was the Gilbert and Millspoke. That was the families that went to this private school. | 13:58 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And this lady, we sat around a big table and she would teach us the lower grades. Well, she teach the— Whatever, if you was the upper grade, she taught you the upper grade stuff but then the lower grades and you went to the lower grades. But it was fun. And she taught everything, music. Even she taught you handiwork, crocheting. She was a blind lady. | 15:24 |
| Kate Ellis | What else? Music, crochet, what else did she teach? | 15:55 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Regular classes. Mathematics. Which is, well in those days we called it arithmetic. She teach reading, writing, arithmetic, English, and at that time they called it language which was grammar. So I went to her about two years I guess. | 15:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Did you also Mrs. Allen go to that? | 16:30 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | No. | 16:35 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No. | 16:35 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | I had to walk. | 16:35 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No, when she got to be school-aged, we had moved and we were going to another school. | 16:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | What about those times when the teacher was coming to bug him? | 16:46 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That was Phil's time. That was Phil's time. | 16:52 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | I had graduated. | 16:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, Ballard. | 16:53 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. Well, that was my mother's time. | 16:53 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. You see they built a new school and I couldn't attend that new school. And the teacher would pick up the three smaller kids and he'd pass by in a buggy and pick them up in the morning and they'd ride to school. And in the afternoon, he'd come back with them. So I stopped— I guess I was in fourth grade when I stopped school. See, I couldn't walk. And then the teacher got a car. He got married and he had a car. Well, the three children, Laura, Emma, Joan, and Josie. It was four kids. Again, they rode with the teacher. So that was the end of my education. | 16:57 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | But thank God. I do pretty well. I can write my own, pay my own little check, make my little checks and turn into my own little business. Well, if something big come up— | 17:50 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I had three years— | 18:00 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | — that's my secretary over there. | 18:01 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | — of high school. I had three years of high school but I furthered my education in some ways by reading. And then I worked around educated people and some of that rubbed off on me, you know? And now, I had to stop because my eyesight went bad. I can't read anymore. I can't learn except to memorize. | 18:02 |
| Michele Mitchell | What other sorts of things did both you remember about Opelousas? How long did you stay there? | 18:37 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Born and raised there. | 18:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | Really? | 18:47 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I left there when I was eighteen or something. Like I told you, we were sharecroppers and our crops consisted of corn, cotton. You see a sharecropper, they'd give you so many acres of land. I don't know if you specified the amount or they gave it to you. But then you had your own way of making the crop. You had your own plows, your own horses and the land. Whatever they bid on the land, they would decide on what portion of this land they would charge you according to the work on the thirds, the fourth. | 18:47 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Now they had some people, some farmers, they were halves. They worked on the halves. But the boss who owned the land, he furnished everything and all you did was give your labor. But the sharecropper, he furnished everything except the land. That was the difference. And of course we were sharecroppers, so we had our own, I don't remember what the portion the amount was, if it was the third or the fourths that we worked on. I don't remember. | 19:50 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Must've been the third. | 20:23 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But anyway— | 20:23 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | You'd get two and they'd get one. | 20:23 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 20:23 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And cotton at that time was the— | 20:23 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | You know like the [indistinct 00:20:24]. | 20:23 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | — commodity back then that we planted. | 20:23 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:20:24]. | 20:23 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That was our money crop. | 20:23 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And you'd draw a percentage of it. | 20:23 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Now, on that land we could have a dedicated amount for gardening. And we had sweet potatoes. We planted sweet potatoes, corn. But the corn, that was for you to make enough to make last 'til next year. That's what you feed your horses, your team, I would should say. | 20:23 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And people would get their corn and go over to the mill, grind it. | 21:12 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | You had your hogs and you had your cattle. And at that time we had about ten or twelve heads of cattle but we would use the milk. And of course in those days, biscuits, that was a rarity because we made used the corn. Carry the corn meal and ground it up into corn meal. And then they made some of it courser, which would be like the grits we buy now. | 21:20 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But we made two kinds of stuff out of that corn. We took the meal, we make corn meal and hominy grits they called it. Then we would raise our hogs, our chickens, well, any kind of fowl that you wanted. And of course we raised them all. We raised turkeys, ducks, geese, guineas and chickens. And we raised hogs. And then of course that was the things that you raised was what you lived off of. Like you kill a cow or a calf. You had no, we didn't have any way of preserving it by refrigeration. You would have to salt it, preserve it with salt. And that would be so salty that you had to parboil it to get the salt out. Naturally, that's was taking up the substance of the meat. But we had no alternative. That was the only way we could do it. | 21:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And the chickens, of course, you raised like you wanted to. Your eggs. But we sold some of the eggs because we had more eggs than we could use in our family. So you would sell the eggs, trade 'em so to speak. You could take a dozen or two or three dozens of eggs to the grocery store and purchase the things that you needed with those eggs instead of using cash, which was very rare. You'd get the commodities with eggs. | 22:56 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | The same with the butter. We couldn't use all the butter that we would make, so we'd sell the butter. That would bring a little cash. Or if we not cash, it could bring in trade. We'd go buy something at the grocery store, whatever else we needed. And of course the farmers hardly ever bought anything because they had their meat. They raised the hogs and the calves for they meat. And they had their vegetable garden. And cotton, well that was their money crop. Cotton, they raised that for the money. And of course at one time we did have some chance rice 'cause rice has to grow in water. And if you had a low spot in your field, you could put a levee around it and leave that little area to plant rice. Now, if it was a rainy season, you would make rice. If it was not a rainy season, you'd use that for hay. That rice would grow up but it wouldn't make nothing. | 23:36 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We had a little patch of sugar canes. | 24:51 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, we had a big patch of sugar cane one time. We had a lot of them. | 24:54 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And we had our own molasses and what we couldn't use, my father would sell it. Most of the neighbors would buy from him or sometime what you call it, the sugar mill? | 25:00 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Different places. | 25:14 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | They would buy it from you. | 25:17 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Where you'd go to have the sugar cane. Well, there was like where you go and have the staff— | 25:18 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | The refinery. | 25:24 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Help me out, Ted. The refinery, it'll come to me. Was made into, no, we didn't have no refinery. Where the sugar cane was ground up and— | 25:30 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | They make raw sugar. | 25:40 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | — make the syrup. See, they make the syrup. And then they would in turn dispose of the surplus molasses that had. We call it syrup. They would in turn, if you had some to sell, they would buy it and sell it. And you know how that sugar mill ran? | 25:41 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | With horses. | 26:05 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | It was one horse and it had a thing that had some little spokes I guess you'd call it. But there was a place like with spokes and in there that you stick the sugar cane in it. And that thing would turn it around and mash the juice into a can. And then it would throw that— But it wasn't nothing mechanical in those. When that sugar can got dried out the juice, you pick it up and put another sugar cane in it. And that's how they did all that. Now when they got enough juice in this pan, what kind of fire did they have under there? Must've been wood sticks? | 26:05 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | I guess so. | 26:55 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And it would boil that juice. I don't know how long it would have to boil it, but you boil it until it would turn to syrup. And that's when you would put it. | 26:56 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | But you see to make that thing operate, they had a mule or a horse or something would turn that thing round and round. | 27:08 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well that was making the juice come out. | 27:17 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. Horses was big in those days. Everything. | 27:19 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And the cotton— | 27:26 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:27:28] the wagon. | 27:27 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | We had to pick the cotton and put it into a wagon. Take the wagon load of cotton to a cotton gin. And they would gin the cotton. Ginning the cotton was separating the lint from the seeds. And then the seeds would go one way and the lint would go in another way. Now the cotton had different grades of cotton. The long length, you'd get more money for it. The medium size length, you get another price. And the short length, 'cause there was three grades, long, short and medium. And that's how the cotton was graded to sell it. And then they give you a sample of it. | 27:29 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | When we had to take that cotton to the gin, you would take it out in baskets and put it in a wagon and three or four people would tramp on that cotton packing it down, you know? | 28:19 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And take it to the gin where they would make it into bales of cotton. And they didn't like for the bales to weigh less than five hundred pounds. Of course they'd make them in smaller sizes but they would prefer them to be five hundred pounds. And the cotton seed, they would make oil out of it. They'd grind it up into oil, make oil out of cotton seeds. | 28:33 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | I've been so tired packing that cotton, tramping over that cotton. It was a big old wagon in it and they'd put the three sides to it, you know. | 29:08 |
| Michele Mitchell | And you tramped it? | 29:20 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah, you had to. | 29:20 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | To put in the wagon. You see, when you picked the cotton, you had a place at home in your barn. You'd put it in the barn. | 29:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Where this was? | 29:30 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Now when you get enough picked— | 29:30 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | In Opelousas. | 29:31 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | — then you would have to drag the wagon up there. And like she said, get it into baskets and put the cotton back into the wagon. And in order to, you know cotton is light and fluffy. In order to make it go down, you'd have to get in there and walk on it, pack it down, you see? And you'd have to walk on that and pack it down until it get a load of about five hundred pounds and they'd take it to the gin. | 29:33 |
| Michele Mitchell | When you were doing this processing of the cotton— | 30:00 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Uh-huh. | 30:02 |
| Michele Mitchell | — did you ever have any interactions with Whites at all or was it just people in your family working? | 30:04 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | What you mean Whites? | 30:09 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | No, just— | 30:10 |
| Michele Mitchell | At the, where you used to go get commodities. | 30:11 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, but the commodities was in the store. Most of the White people had the stores and the most of the White people had the cotton chances. But our farm, we were raised up. Our farm was adjacent to, we had a family of Caucasians, one Caucasian family farm like ours and another one was Italian, joined our farm. Just a fence separated. And of course on the other side, they had the road was separated. | 30:14 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | You remember their name? | 30:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Who? | 30:56 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Those two families. | 30:56 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Old George Dejean. | 30:56 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Dejean was Italian? | 30:56 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No, he was Caucasian. The Italian. I don't know. Brenda, in those days, like they call you Brenda. They said Brenda Dago. So I never did know what's your name. (laughs) If you was an Italian, that's how they would call you. Sam Dago or John Dago. So I never did know what the last name was. The Italian name. | 31:03 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Wasn't George Dejean Cajun? | 31:27 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah, he was a Cajun. But then I said there was an Italian family. | 31:34 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I don't remember any Italian. | 31:37 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well no you wouldn't remember 'cause that was so long before your time. I doubt if they'll remember. Used to be where, remember B and them lived. | 31:41 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Oh, those people, Tico and— | 31:41 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Frank somebody. | 31:41 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Don Weed, huh? | 31:41 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's Caucasians. That's Cajun. I'm talking about that old Frank man. | 31:57 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | One of them was married to a— | 32:02 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, he was married to a French woman. | 32:02 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Oh, an Italian lady. | 32:02 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Uh-uh. He wasn't married to no Italian. She was French. She was from France. | 32:02 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah, because that's why mama says she learned to speak a few words of it because she and this White girl would play together. | 32:11 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No, but I'm talking about this old Frank. This man name was Frank, but they all call him Frank Dago. So I don't know what his last name was, but he was an Italian. He lived where Black live at now. Black's aunt? | 32:20 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah. | 32:34 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. | 32:34 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's where he lived. | 32:35 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah, I remember that. | 32:35 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But I don't know what his last name was. That's all they called him was Frank Dago. | 32:37 |
| Kate Ellis | So what other folks were in your community as you were growing up? | 32:43 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, we didn't play together. We never played together. | 32:48 |
| Kate Ellis | You mean with any of the kids around you. | 32:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, there was no kids. We lived in the country. We didn't live in the city. We lived in the country. | 32:56 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | There was other people who had farms. | 33:01 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's why I said the farms was adjacent. The farms, the fence that separated the farms but the houses were not that close together. | 33:03 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well what about the man that you sharecropped for? | 33:04 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | What? | 33:22 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | The man that you sharecropped for. What was his name? | 33:22 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, we didn't sharecrop for a man. | 33:27 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | It's a lady. Her name— | 33:28 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Old Jenny Thompson. | 33:29 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Oh, what was she like? | 33:30 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Miss Jenny Thompson. Well, as far as I know she was a nice old lady. Far as I know, she was a nice old lady. | 33:34 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | She was some kind of related to that George. | 33:43 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | George Dejean? | 33:44 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Uh-huh. It was Jimmy's wife. Jimmy Dejean, or sister or something. It was some connection there. | 33:49 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Must be in-laws or something. But then one of her children was Maddox. Maddox or Jimmy. | 33:57 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | She was nice. She come out there. | 33:57 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | So Dejean, was he White or Black? | 33:57 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Huh? | 33:57 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Was he White or Black? | 34:14 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | White. Well they got White Dejeans and Black Dejeans. | 34:24 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah, mostly White. | 34:24 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Because we got some Black Dejeans is related to us. What you saying? I am really, when it comes to nationality, I guess I'm a potpourri, little bit of everything. | 34:24 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But those were the days. Had the old lamp light you had to light to see how to read by the lamplight. That's why my eyes is bad now, I guess, from reading by those dim lights. | 34:44 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Well everybody was doing it. You wasn't by yourself. They didn't have no electric. That was the only way to have light. | 35:00 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, when I was a youngster, I had a bad attack in those days they called it sore eyes. And I did have a bad, bad, bad attack of sore eyes. My eyes were so sore that when I get up in the morning, there was so much puss that would came out. They were dry, you know. I had to wash it off before I could open my eyes. And of course those days you didn't go to the doctor for no eyes. It was unheard of. And then after I got grown, I did a lot of sewing. Sometime I sew all night and work all day. | 35:06 |
| Kate Ellis | When did each of you come to New Orleans? | 35:56 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, I came to New Orleans about 1925. | 35:59 |
| Kate Ellis | So you were about eighteen years old? | 35:59 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Eighteen, yeah, near nineteen. | 36:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Why did you come? | 36:19 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I had wanted to go to school and become a teacher. And in those days they weren't paying the teachers more than thirty-five dollars a month. And somebody, we had relatives here in New Orleans said that they had a lot of work in New Orleans where the people could make good money. So that was what I came for, to go to work. | 36:21 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I was making, at that time, I was making what they now called minimum wages which was five dollars a week. Got paid every two months, I mean every two weeks. First and fifteenth, which was ten dollars. And of course that was not supposed to be bad because some people only made three dollars a week. | 36:52 |
| Kate Ellis | What were you doing? | 37:14 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Domestic work. I mostly was watching children, taking care of children. Not infants, children; I'd say about seven up to ten or twelve years old. And that's what I did. And my first job, that's what it was taking care of two children, a boy and a girl named Alice and Billy Myers. Yeah, Alice was about seven, I guess, or eight. And Billy was five or six. And that's what I had to just take care of them. Play with them, dress them, see that they got their food. That was my job. And I got five dollars a week for that. Fifteen dollars. Well, thirty dollars a month. First and fifteenth, fifteen dollars. And I was living on premises. I lived on the premises, so I didn't have any expenses. So I sent— We had no money at home, so I'd send the majority of that money I'd send back home. I didn't have any expense. If I got the fifteen dollars, I'd probably send ten dollars or twelve home. | 37:16 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And then I got up in class. I got to be making eight dollars a week. Boy, that was big money then. And the next thing you know, I had got to be a real pro. I was making ten dollars a month. You didn't go no higher than ten. When you made ten, that was the limit. | 38:43 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | But in those days you could do so much with that. | 39:03 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That ten. | 39:04 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah. | 39:04 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That was the limit. Ten dollars, that was a big, big money. | 39:07 |
| Kate Ellis | Had your family encouraged you to come to New Orleans to make money? I mean, your parents? | 39:14 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I said that I was— Well I know we were very poor. We were very, very poor. Dirt poor. And I said, well if you could make that much money in New Orleans, I just going to go to New Orleans and work. Then to stay there in Opelousas and get thirty dollars a month to go to teaching school. 'Cause that's what they were paying the teachers then, thirty and thirty-five dollars a month to teach. So that was my motive for coming here. | 39:21 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We was poor without money, but we had everything to eat 'cause we— | 39:46 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh yeah— | 39:53 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | — raised everything— | 39:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | — we was never hungry. | 39:54 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | — you understand? | 39:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | We was never hungry. | 39:54 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | So I don't call that, you know. | 39:55 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | When you're talking about poor, you're poor. That's poor. | 39:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Let me ask you something and I don't mean to— I'm curious about how you got clothes. 'Cause you had food all the time growing up. How'd you get your clothes? | 40:00 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Clothes? Well, we had eggs. And you hear me say we traded eggs? | 40:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 40:13 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And you know what else we did? We would harvest our crop like picking the cotton, and then other farmers around there would hire people to come in and gather they crops and they'd pay us so much a hundred. We'd go out and pick cotton and naturally that would give us money to buy our clothes to start the school. | 40:14 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But the beginning— | 40:40 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | That's how we— | 40:44 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But she was asking how did we make our— | 40:45 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We worked for other people like to picking cotton. | 40:47 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Our clothes money came from our cotton. Those bales of cotton that we sold. That was our money crop. And that's where we got got that money and we bought our clothes then. Mama would buy, we would all five girls, two boys and mama would make our clothes. See, she'd go to the store and buy maybe a half of all the goods and come home and make our clothes. You see? And then, huh? | 40:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | What about the flour sack clothes? | 41:24 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | The what? | 41:25 |
| Michele Mitchell | The flour sack. | 41:25 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah, the flour sacks made clothes, too. Drawers and— | 41:27 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Feed sacks. | 41:29 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | In those days the sacks were made out of this burlap stuff. It was made out of some kind of a cotton cloth and some of them was pretty. They had little painted flowers on them, you know? They was really pretty. And then you buy your clothes once a year. You wouldn't buy clothes every other day, you see? You buy your clothes when you had the money. | 41:31 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Once a year. Yeah. | 41:49 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | You buy your blankets if you need a blanket. Your sheets, whatever you needed. You bought that when you sold your cotton with your cotton money, you see? But of course— | 41:49 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | But we going out and helping the other people to harvest their crops. | 42:01 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But I was helping, too. | 42:01 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | That would help us to buy our school things 'cause I can remember how happy we would be when we would make that money and we would go. Like our shoes and your little school bag, whatever else you needed. So we didn't go out and hold for nobody. There was one old lady we used to go help 'em out when we'd finished our field, we just go help 'em for free just to help 'em out. But that was the days, I don't see how people can work out in the sun now at all day in the sun. | 42:08 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But for one thing— | 42:52 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | It's hotter now than it used to be. | 42:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | — the sun was not as close to the Earth as it is now. | 42:55 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | I think so. | 42:57 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? | 42:57 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Because I hear people complain who work out in the sun. | 42:59 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I don't think the sun was as close to the Earth as it is now. | 43:04 |
| Kate Ellis | But when you were growing up, you did work out in the sun? | 43:08 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh yeah. | 43:11 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. | 43:11 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:43:15]. | 43:11 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | I'd have a big old bonnet on and something around my neck. | 43:18 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | My daddy got his foot [indistinct 00:43:22]. | 43:20 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Maybe I would wear some gloves and— | 43:21 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And my daddy— | 43:22 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | — those old stockings. | 43:25 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | — was an industrials kind of man. When he would get through working in his field, when they get through everything in the field until a certain area, they call that laying by the crop. | 43:25 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Then he'd go out and work. If it was building a road, he'd rather get jobs with the road people. And in the fall when they would have this rice countries where they planted just rice or sugar cane, he'd go out to these places and work. While we stayed at home, Mama and the children would stay at home and pick the cotton. My dad would go out there to that rice country and work in the rice fields and get some extra pay for that. | 43:36 |
| Kate Ellis | That was hard, hard work, wasn't it? | 44:07 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's right. Hard, hard work. | 44:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 44:09 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And one year, I don't know what happened that year, but we had some rice farms that was around our area. Ted, you might be old enough to remember that. When they let Papa go and pick up all this rice from Jack Winfield— | 44:18 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And we were all in the room. | 44:33 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Jack Winfield. Until we got our [indistinct 00:44:39]. And you see, we didn't have no milk. So we had put— You know what saw horses are? | 44:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Just the things with the legs? | 44:42 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah. Well, we had something like a saw horse. We'd get a bunch of that rice and whip it on that to get it off the [indistinct 00:45:02]. But I know, how did it come about? That was scattered rice that fell off the? | 44:42 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | That was rice that had two indigos. Weeds growed up into the rice and it was just patches of it. They just didn't bother with it. | 45:06 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | 'Cause it would have little bitty black seeds in the rice— | 45:18 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. | 45:20 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | — and nobody would buy it if it had seeds in it like that. | 45:20 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | So they just— | 45:20 |
| Michele Mitchell | And the indigo would grow into the rice? | 45:20 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah. Would grow along with the rice. | 45:21 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Along with the rice. No, no, they wouldn't, the people wouldn't bother that. And that's why Papa would go there and he would cut it with a sickle. | 45:31 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, cut it? | 45:42 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | You see the owner, the rice farm, they wouldn't bother with those kind of patches, you see? | 45:42 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mm-hmm. | 45:53 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Because the barn or whatever they cut that thing. I done forgot all them things names. | 45:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I know we had a rubber stock with that stuff. Then we had to out there dry. We had to do it there. And then, of course, I would have to take to the mill and have it hulled. And you know the hulls— Ted, you know that All-Bran and stuff like that. All that bran stuff, that's the hulls that's off of the rice and the oats, and the wheat. See that comes with a little brown seed and when they take it to the mills, it polishes that off of there and that bran goes— That's what they make the bran with. We didn't eat no bran. We didn't know what bran was. | 46:00 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Isn't that what y'all fed to the hogs? | 46:43 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We fed the— | 46:49 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | We fed the hogs with it. That's what I'm talking about. We didn't know nothing about no people eating bran. Hogs ate the bran. | 46:49 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Well that's how wise people got. | 46:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Now they tell you, you got to have bran. | 46:55 |
| Kate Ellis | Now you're not supposed to live without— | 46:59 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:00:01]. | 0:00 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Mm-hmm, yeah, the black seeds. | 0:01 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | What was the story about the slop? | 0:06 |
| Ursula | I don't know, Ted. | 0:07 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That Sunday, I don't know either. | 0:07 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | What was the story about the slop? | 0:07 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Something about Brenda and Ted. | 0:07 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Don't bring it up. | 0:15 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Brenda and Ted went back to sleep [indistinct 00:00:18]. | 0:16 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Ted, do you already know. That's why you laughing. Don't tell him why. He already know. | 0:17 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | He might put it on tape, though. That's what, put it on tape. Well, Ted, you're so close to your twenty-second anniversary, and I don't want y'all to separate on account of [indistinct 00:00:41], so we'll leave that out of the picture. We'll leave that out of picture. (laughs) | 0:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mrs. Allen, when did you come to New Orleans? | 0:48 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | 1934. | 0:51 |
| Kate Ellis | So you were twenty-four when you came? | 0:55 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Mm-hmm. | 0:58 |
| Michele Mitchell | Did you look for a job right away? | 1:01 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Let's see. | 1:05 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | She didn't had but two jobs since [indistinct 00:01:10] she been in New Orleans. | 1:07 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Come in September, or wait. Was it September? Sonny born in September, huh, Brenda? | 1:12 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah. | 1:21 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Well, I must have come around the first of September, because that's the first little baby I ever handled was her brother, Sonny. When he born, I went to the hospital to visit them, and when he come home I'd give him his bath. You've got to grease them, grease little babies. First little baby I ever held, and that was in September. In April, I got me a job, a nurse on premises. I was taking care of three little White children. The oldest one was twelve, eight, and five. | 1:21 |
| Michele Mitchell | Where? | 2:14 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Here in New Orleans. | 2:14 |
| Michele Mitchell | Where in New Orleans? | 2:15 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | On Audubon Street. | 2:16 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, okay. | 2:17 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | She only worked for two families in [indistinct 00:02:23]. One family, she worked fifty years for that one family. | 2:19 |
| Michele Mitchell | For this family, or for another family? | 2:26 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | For another family. The next family I got into was nursing one child. I stayed with those people. Their cook got sick, but for years they didn't think I could boil water. And I like to cook, and she'd come downstairs and she'd lie in the bed and "Agnes, I'll go check your pot." I'd run upstairs and I'd check the pots to see how things was coming along. So then Agnes got sick, and then that's how they knew I had to cook, I knew a little bit about cooking. I started cooking a little bit of things. I knew all the time how to cook, but if I didn't have to do it, there was no point of me doing it, they had the cook. | 2:28 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | That went on, and then the lady's mother was living with her, and she died. Then the husband died. Then it left only me and the lady there, so I become everything then. The cook, the maid, everything else, go to the grocery and all. She died in '84, during the time the World's Fair was here, and I had season tickets. I went to all of them things to see. Would go with different friends and see the same thing over and over. But she was good to me, this lady. With the bad arthritis that I had, I never could have kept my job, but she paid cab fare for me to go to work and come from work. | 3:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Where did she live? | 4:30 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | She lived at the Carroll on Jackson Avenue in St. Charles. St. Charles and Jackson Avenue. You know where the Carroll, it's a great big gray building. It's condominiums now. They sold it for condominiums. | 4:32 |
| Kate Ellis | But it was her big house? | 4:47 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, no. She had a bigger [indistinct 00:04:50]. | 4:49 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | She lived in a big house on— | 4:50 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Before when her husband was living, they lived on St. Charles Avenue. | 4:53 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | St. Charles and DeFawcett. Great big red brick house. | 4:54 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | You can see the house on the way out. | 5:02 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? St. Charles and DeFawcett? | 5:02 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Mm. It's not too far from the Ladder Library. It's the Ladder Library. | 5:06 |
| Kate Ellis | And where did you live? | 5:12 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | I lived on 4th Street at that time. | 5:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, that's [indistinct 00:05:18]? | 5:16 |
| Ursula | Yeah. My ancestral home [indistinct 00:05:22]. | 5:18 |
| Kate Ellis | Would you describe that home to us? How long you lived there? | 5:22 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, we must have lived in that house about twenty-seven years. I want to tell you how I got to New York. The little time I had in New York. I was working for a family, and I had graduated from taking care of children, and I was just an upstairs maid, and I had to do the upstairs work and take care of the ladies' delicates, delicacy [indistinct 00:05:58], underwear. And brassieres and stuff like that. So that's when my wages went up, too. That's when I was top salary. And I lived on premises. My room was over the garage, me and two other ladies. | 5:28 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | So this man was with the Standard Fruit Company, and they was just beginning to find a way to bring bananas to the European countries. Before that, they had no way of getting them over there, but they had just found a way. So he had to go to New York, because he had to go to London or somewhere, he had to go somewhere about the bananas. So they had a boy, eighteen, and a girl, fourteen, and a boy, eleven. So being the upstairs maid, I was up there, the lady had a— Her sister-in-law was visiting for that afternoon. So the lady I worked for, her name was— Where was her name? Forgot her name. But anyway, her sister-in-law said to her, "Well when you and Irving go to New York, what you going to do with Polly and Irving?" So the lady said— Her name, the family's name was Moss. She said, "I don't know." | 6:18 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | So this lady, she was a Moss too, because they had married two brothers. So she said, "I don't know." So the other Miss Moss said— Selma, her name was Selma. Selma said to her, "Well, why don't you take— " This was in the other room. I could just hear this. "Why don't you take Viola to New York with you and [indistinct 00:08:20]? She could stay in the hotel with the children." She said— Oh, Louise, that was her name. Miss Moss name was Louise, this [indistinct 00:08:29]. She said, "Oh, that'd be a fine idea, Selma. You think she'd want to go?" I'm hearing all this and I'm in the next room. "You think she'd want to go?" She said, "Well I don't know, but we can ask her. Call her, I don't know where she's at, where she is." Scooted out there and go leave to another room. So I wouldn't been so close. Called me, I came. Say, "How would you like to go to New York?" I say, "I'd love that." | 7:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Said, "Well, if you see Louise [indistinct 00:08:57] Selma, you don't have to worry about Poly and Irving." So that was in 1932. We left here on the train. That was my first time riding in a train compartment. Whatever they called them, where you sleep and all? I rode in one of them. We got to New York that Friday night, I guess about eight o'clock or so, eight or nine o'clock we got to New York. The next day was Saturday. Well, I went to browse around when we got to New York that Friday. We must have gotten there Friday morning. Friday, what time? Well, I don't know what time they got there. But anyway, I did go to Saks Fifth Avenue. I went in Saks. We must have got there Friday afternoon early. That must been what it was. But I went when we were staying at the Biltmore Hotel on Fifth Avenue. And I went in Saks, and the next morning we were supposed to go to that big— What that big Park called? | 8:53 |
| Kate Ellis | Central Park. | 10:10 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Central Park. We was supposed to go to Central Park, me and the two kids. Well, that was that Saturday. That's right, we got in New York, must have been early Friday morning, because for lunch, the lady and the daughter went out shopping and left me and the little boy there. And of course, that was time of segregation and it was staunch segregation. And the lady told me, when she left, she said, "Me and Polly going shopping. When it come time for lunch, you and Irving can go down the back elevator and he can go in there and get his lunch in the big dining room, and you can get it where servants eat. I say, "Yes, ma'am." Irving, with his bright, honest self, he decided he wasn't going to go in there. We wasn't going to go in there in the elevator to get lunch, he was going to have room service. He calls up and orders lobster salad and something else. I don't know what that boy ordered, [indistinct 00:11:29], that's my first time eating lobster and my last time eating lobster. | 10:12 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And the little boy ate so much that lobster that he was sick. We couldn't go to Central Park Saturday morning. We was supposed to go Saturday morning 'cause we were leading Saturday at one o'clock to go to Kingston, Jamaica. So that's why I didn't get to Central Park, because he ordered all that— | 11:36 |
| Kate Ellis | When you went in New York though, you couldn't go in the dining room? | 11:58 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh well no, I wasn't, I didn't go there. That's when I was supposed to go in the service quarters then. But when we got to Kingston, the lady told me, "I don't know where you eat at, but you can ask somebody anyway." And I had been passing, seeing them, people dressed up. I passed by a diner, seen the people dressed up. And I used to sew in those days. I had made me a beautiful flowered chiffon dress. I had never had it on. So me and the little boy, he was crazy about airplanes. And they had a thing was sitting over the— What was that? The Caribbean, huh? | 12:01 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And we'd go sit out there and look at the boats go by, and of course the airplanes too. But they were amphibious planes. And when we passed, going up to the room, see the dining room, and I see the people all in there dressed and stuff. So Irving went in his room, I went in my room, he changed his clothes with his pants, they always got dressed. I went in my room, I got dressed too, put on my chiffon dress. They didn't ask nobody about no where no servants [indistinct 00:13:21] at. Came downstairs, man left and brought me to the table, and my table was two tables between me and them. | 12:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? | 13:32 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's right. Two tables between me and them. So when I got through eating my dinner, went back in my room and put my uniform on, 'cause you had to put that uniform on. Let you know that you was working. And yet on the [indistinct 00:13:51] they had my name written up there. Miss Viola and Gilbert, my maiden name was Gilbert. On that chair, had my name. All of us sitting right together. | 13:32 |
| Michele Mitchell | What about on the train? | 14:08 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | What about the train? | 14:09 |
| Michele Mitchell | [indistinct 00:14:10]. | 14:10 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, we was all together. We was all together. | 14:10 |
| Kate Ellis | You were all the way up to New York. | 14:12 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah. I was riding in the compartment, that Polly was above or below me, I forgot which now. And on the steamer, Polly and I had opposite states room. And when we got on there, we left New York at one o'clock. Is that the Hudson River? | 14:13 |
| Kate Ellis | Uh-huh. | 14:38 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And when we left out that Hudson River, it was just like driving off of a paved street onto an unpaved street. That water was so rough. So the lady, we's all had our chairs together, like I said with our names on. So the lady said to me, "Where's Polly?" I said, "I don't know." "You better go down and see about her." So I went down, there was Polly, upchucking. So I said to Polly, "Got another one of them things?" So she made sign to me one on the bottom of my bed and our beds was opposite each other. I stayed so long, here come the lady see about us. | 14:39 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | They all had the same thing, huh? | 15:22 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And oh, I never was so sick. That seasickness, that is the worst sickness in the world except having a baby. Oh, that was something. And oh, the best of food there to be eat and you couldn't eat it. So the man said to me, "Eat anyhow." he said. I said, "What's the use of eating it, you got to bring it back up?" He said, "Well, eat it so you'll have something to bring up." After two days not eating, I managed to keep grapefruit— I guess that's why I like grapefruit. I managed to keep grapefruit down. | 15:26 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And we left there on Saturday, we didn't get to Kingston until Wednesday about four thirty, something like that. But during the night, I guess that must have been Tuesday night, we must have ran into a hurricane or something on the water. I just knew that was the end of it. God, you never heard so much groaning and [indistinct 00:16:28] and going on that that boat carried on. All my feet at wet where the water came in the porthole. So the next day, as soon as I could see land, I was better. I could eat again. | 16:03 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | So we got to Kingston about four thirty. And the house where we were staying, it was on a mountain. Round and round the mountain to get up there to that house. And it had this beautiful garden. Oh, it was plants like I had never seen. But they had these hideous looking things. Somebody said they're called iguanas. Lizards? Lizard-like things. Ugly. But they say they were not vicious. But at night when you go to bed, you see, you didn't have screens in those days. You had your bed, you had the [indistinct 00:17:30], you had to tuck it under to keep those iguanas from getting into the bed with you. | 16:46 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | That kind of sounds [indistinct 00:17:40]. | 17:40 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | It was real [indistinct 00:17:40]. So we stayed out there three weeks and we left that place and went to another place out in the country, where it had this big old plantation. I had been reading a book called The White Witch of Thornhill. And it was spooky. So I just knew that the pulse on that bed was big like that. And the bed was that high off the floor. I had had a stepladder to get into the bed. And I just knew that that was the place in this book I was reading. I just knew that that was the place. I was scared to death. | 17:40 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Because the man decide that something was happening with the fruit business, he had to come back home right away. So that's when they decided to fly back. That was my first airplane trip. So we came back on a PanAmerican plane. Amphibious plane. We had to go into the water to board it, get off in the water. That was an experience, because I used to say I would never ride in a speed boat, and that's how we went to get on the plane, in a speedboat. And when that airplane took off, you couldn't see nothing. The water was just on the glasses and you couldn't see anything till it lifted up. | 18:27 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But after, when we had to stop— In those days, you didn't carry fuel for more than a certain amount of hours. And we stopped in Nassau for refueling. That was another time I thought that was the end. The airplane looked like it just went down. And you could see the houses. Actually, they was coming up at you like that. So I turned my head, I said, "Well Lord, this is it." Well by that time, they had got on the landing strip and they tell you everywhere you look, they say, "No smoking, no smoking." And this lady Louise, she was a chain smoker. | 19:14 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And her husband kept telling her, "Louise, don't you smoke out here. Don't you smoke out here." "You don't know what you're talking."" Don't you smoke out here." And I said, "Now, she going to go smoke, blow us all up." So then we left, and we came to Miami. Well, that was a beautiful landing, in Miami. We had to land in the water. The speed boat had to come get us. But it had enough space that it circled, you see. Circled until it just came down on the water. But that thing in that sun looked like it just was up in the sky and just come down. And now, let's see, 1950— When the first year I went to California? Flew? Must have been in 1960. | 19:55 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | '67. | 20:41 |
| Michele Mitchell | Can we back up a minute before you get to 1960? | 20:44 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah. What you want to go? Go back? 1932? | 20:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah, well you said that these were the days of staunch segregation when you were in New York. Was New York any different than New Orleans was? | 20:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Of course. Well, I don't know, because I didn't get to see any segregated part of New York. | 21:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, what was it like in New Orleans? If you can both tell us what you remember. | 21:06 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh it was, it just better not go where it said White. You better stay where it said Black. Well in that time, it's Colored. One time, I was in the [indistinct 00:21:23] store and they had on this end of the grant store, they had a sign in the middle that this side was the Colored, and this side was the White. And I was standing between the signs, so to speak, and somebody on the colored side came and pushed me just a fraction over to the White side. And a woman came to me and she said, "I can't serve you there." Tell [indistinct 00:21:53]. "Why not?" Said, "Because, you see the sign?" I said, "Yes, I see the sign, but who are you to tell me who I am? I'm not moving until you serve me." But she said, "I'll get the manager." I said, "I don't care who you get, I'm not moving." Said, "And you can't tell me who I am." Course, she served me. But they was strict on the segregation business here. Yes indeed. | 21:10 |
| Kate Ellis | What kind of store did you say it was? | 22:25 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | It was a lunch counter. | 22:32 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Lunch counter. Lunch counter. And you see, it was just like right here with the sing. "Colored, White." Well, I'm in the middle of the sing and somebody on that Colored side came and pushed me just a fraction over, and I was more on the White side as on the Colored side. And of course, in those days, I was much lighter than I am now. And I wanted her to tell me who told her I was Colored. | 22:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Were you ever mistaken for a White person? Did people ever think that you— | 23:02 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Quite a few times. But it didn't bother me. I was on the St. Charles street car, and the lady I worked for years ago, she would drive her car part way downtown. Then she'd get the street car and go into town so she wouldn't have to worry about parking her car. And I lived, at that time we lived on Fourth Street between [indistinct 00:23:33] and Carondelet, which was a block and a half from St. Charles Avenue. And I had to get the bus, the street car, at Third in St. Charles, and we lived on Fourth. So I boarded the bus at Third and St. Charles, and this woman gets on the bus and she sees me and she sits by me, and she says to me, "I, hope you don't tell me to get up because I'm not getting up. 'Cause I haven't seen you for a long time." We got to talk. He didn't tell her nothing. | 23:05 |
| Ursula | So this was a White lady who sat behind her. | 24:08 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | Screen. | 24:10 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:24:13]. Yeah, she sat behind the screen. I was sitting on the long bench. That's when she sat with me. | 24:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, the long bench all the way back? | 24:18 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah. Miss Haverman. She told me, "I hope you don't tell me to move, 'cause I ain't moving." But they had mistaken me for White. But I didn't pay no debt because this is the way I felt about it. I didn't think anybody or anything was more than I was or am. That's how I feel. Nobody was more than me. But of course, I obeyed the laws. The law said that you had to go on outside to sleep, then that's what I'd do. | 24:21 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But it was so stupid when they first integrated the street cars and the buses, the people, the Colored people would do it purposely, that if they had to get on the street car, the bus away from the White area, they'd just load it up from front to the back, one in each seat. And those White people would get on that bus, they would not sit down. They would not sit down. They almost fell. The bus started rattling and rolling. Back there she almost had a [indistinct 00:25:44]. She wouldn't sit down. All old one. But they got over it. They got over it. When it first happened, it was hell with him. | 25:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Mrs. Allen, what do you remember of that time? | 25:55 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | What you mean, when I come to the city? | 26:00 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 26:00 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, she had a boyfriend at that time. He used to come to see her and a certain time, he'd have on some new shoes he'd have to go home. Shoes [indistinct 00:26:21] to go home. They would hurt his feet. | 26:09 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | That was a boyfriend and that become the husband. | 26:23 |
| Michele Mitchell | Did you have a chance to go out with him? | 26:36 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Well yeah, we used to go out. | 26:38 |
| Michele Mitchell | Where'd you go? | 26:39 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We'd go to movies, dances. | 26:41 |
| Michele Mitchell | Because [indistinct 00:26:47]. | 26:41 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | No, no. As a matter of fact, when I met him, I met him at dance. That's the one I told you that my husband was from St. Martinsville. Not too far from where you all are going. New Iberia. That's the guy. And you know what else? I knew him six years before I married him. | 26:49 |
| Michele Mitchell | There's one story that I can remember that I'd like to hear about. When Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi, about what the Epsteins did with the magazine. | 27:14 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Who did? | 27:35 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. | 27:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Why don't you tell about that? | 27:36 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | She tore it up. | 27:36 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Who did? | 27:36 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Miss Epstein. | 27:36 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, when Huey Long was assassinated, I was working for some Jewish people, and I was living on premises and I was living right— My room was right under their room, and I can hear that old man saying it now. "Ha ha ha ha, Huey Long been assassinated. That's a good thing. Dammit, he ought to been dead." I heard him say it with my own ears. That's old man Friedler here. That's what I hear him [indistinct 00:28:08]. | 27:38 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | [indistinct 00:28:08]? | 28:07 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Friedler, his name was Friedler. But now that old man, as far as I could see, he was not— I wouldn't call him a segregationist, but he was enthused because they had killed this man for some reason. I don't know. Now, the reason I say he was not a segregationist was because they were three in the family. Two sons— Four. Two sons and him and his wife. That was his second wife. And they had three of us servants, me, the cook, and the cook's son. And he told the cook one day— I was the dining room maid at that time, at that house, had to the serve food. And I brought the food in there and we had veal chops that day for dinner. There was four of them and three of us, so there was seven chops and put all seven on the platter. | 28:07 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | So when I brought the platters into be served, he's took a chop, and I went back in. Well, I'd left three. That was one for me, one for the cook, one for her son. So he said to her, "Karen, these chops are delicious." She said, "Oh, you have [indistinct 00:29:38]." I put in a little thing so I could hear what she said. She rang the [indistinct 00:29:46], had meant to bring the chop the [indistinct 00:29:47] back in, he said. So I brought the platter back in. So she said, "No, [indistinct 00:29:58] Take one, take one, Jeff, go ahead, take one." He said, "No." He said, "If I take a chop off of this platter— " No. He said to me first, he said, "Are there more there chops in the back?" I knew that was all, but I said, "I don't know. I'll have to ask Lydia." | 29:16 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I just came out the dining room, swung around the door, and come around back. I said, "She said, no, that's all." 'Cause I told him that at the table, I didn't want— "No," he said, "I don't want any." "Come on, Jeff, take one, take one." "He said, no, [indistinct 00:30:29]." He said, "If I take another chop," he said, "One of them out there," he said, "Lydia, Viola, or George would be without something to eat." He said. "So next time," he said, "You order chops, you order two for everybody." Because she do her own market, the chops. They would order it, and they would deliver it. And her face got red as that little thing on there. | 30:14 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | So that's why I said he was not a segregationist, because he was looking out for his people. And one other occasion he did something, I forgot what it is now, but he looked out for his people. | 30:51 |
| Michele Mitchell | Well, back to Emmett Till. What year was Emmett Till [indistinct 00:31:17]? | 31:05 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | '54? | 31:12 |
| Kate Ellis | '54. | 31:12 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Well, they had the magazine. I forgot what magazine that was. | 31:17 |
| Michele Mitchell | It was Life. | 31:23 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | Must have been Life. | 31:23 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Life. | 31:23 |
| Kate Ellis | Who had the magazine? | 31:23 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Life or Look, one of them. And the people I worked for got them, the magazine. And well, everybody was talking about it. So I said to the nurse, the old lady was half sick. The lady I worked for had her mother living with her, and she was sick, so they was talking about it and all. So I said to her, I said to the nurse, "I'm going to get that magazine and I'm going to look through it, and I leave it for you when you come on tonight." The next day, they had took that magazine and shredded that. Nobody could read it. So I told that to the nurse. The next night, the nurse come in to take care of old lady, and she went to [indistinct 00:32:22] bought a— I think it was in the Look. Look or what you call it, Life. She bought the thing and she said she just had it everywhere where they could see it in the kitchen. She was sitting down before she went to bed. Everywhere where she could see it. | 31:27 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | So a couple days after that, the lady said something to me about it and she said, "Well, yeah, but you see, he said he was boasting about the girl, White girlfriends he had and all like that. And that was wrong. That's why he was murdered." I said, "Well, that was no reason for them to kill him like they did. No reason whatsoever to take a life." I say, "He was a young fella and he was just probably bragging. He hadn't did nothing to no other girl or anything and had that girl picture in his wallet, that didn't mean that he had an affair with her." | 32:40 |
| Michele Mitchell | That's true. | 33:24 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | So then she didn't say anything. So another time we was talking, and she said to me, "It is just not ready for people to integration. All this segregation, integration. After all, pretty soon, Phil, it's going to all blow over, because all these people going to have toilets and bathrooms where they can all take a bath. You know some of them people out there in the country and all never get a bath. And that's why people don't want to mix." That's what she told me. | 33:26 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And she said, "Everybody going to be drinking out of the same faucet, they're going to be using the same— " I said, "Yeah, when you go to the store, if you have to use the bathroom, there's no place for you to go." But they had, I believe it was a White man, come here, and he wrote the story up about what New Orleans was doing. See, he was out there and he was posing for Colored. And everywhere he went, they refused him. But anyway, that's what she told. But they shredded that thing up. | 34:07 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I heard somebody say the other night, I didn't know this, I guess it's fact, I don't know. But said Jackie Robinson was the one that broke up segregation. In this particular town, they named the town, but I don't remember what it was now. Said Jackie Robinson had his bus that he traveled in and it had twenty gallon tanks, two, one on either side of his bus. | 34:44 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | He drove his bus into this place and said, told them, "While you filling up the tanks, I'll go to the restroom. Where is it?" And the man said, "Well, it's around the corner, around the back there." He said, "Uh-huh. You must be got one inside." He said, "Yeah, we got one inside, but it ain't for you." "Take them pumps out of my bus. I don't want your gas. Take them out." And he left, went somewhere else. Said the next time he came, the man come looking for him. "You can come on in and get the bus filled, service." | 35:13 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Okay, I've seen the trick. | 35:57 |
| Kate Ellis | Do you see a new trick? You can tell, you got to come over here. | 35:59 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I can move. | 36:10 |
| Kate Ellis | No, you stay there. Please stay right there. | 36:11 |
| Ursula | We went— No, I'll be fine over here. We went on our— | 36:19 |
| Kate Ellis | This is Ursula, Brenda's friend since high school. Okay, go ahead. | 36:23 |
| Ursula | We went on our senior trip in 1963, and for our senior trip, we went on a fabulous tour of southeast Louisiana. So we stopped at— Brenda, I don't know why you told me to tell this. | 36:31 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | [indistinct 00:36:55]. | 36:49 |
| Ursula | So it was a bus tour. And so here we were, a busload of little Black Catholic girls out to see the world, southeast Louisiana. And we stopped in a little town— What was that? Do you know? | 36:55 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I think it was Lafayette. | 37:11 |
| Ursula | I don't know if it was Lafayette or Lake Charles or whatever. And everybody was hungry and thirsty and had to go to the bathroom. And so when we stopped, we all just hurry up and got off the bus to go use the facilities. And they told us, "Not for y'all." We couldn't go there. So I guess that was a real experience with being turned away. But after any— | 37:12 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Half of us headed for the bathrooms, half of us were ordering at the window. | 37:42 |
| Ursula | Oh see, I told you she remembered better than I did. | 37:48 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Oh, it's like a burger place where you ordered on the outside. You sitting outside and order it to go. So everybody's standing ordering, and then the girls who went to the bathroom came back and said, "There ain't no Colored bathrooms, y'all." So we left and got back on the bus and left all this food we had ordered. | 37:53 |
| Ursula | We did that quite a bit in those days. | 38:13 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah, it seemed to be a thing. | 38:24 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | They all did that [indistinct 00:38:24]. | 38:24 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah, we did it on purpose. | 38:24 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, that happened to me right there in Meridian, Mississippi. My husband was working for a family that had a home in Highland, North Carolina, and he had to go bring some stuff up there for them. So I went for the ride. So coming back, we stopped in Meridian to get the gas, and they had this fabulous station. I don't know it was a Shell or one of them fabulous things. But anyhow, it was fabulous. | 38:24 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | So I told him, I said, "I got to go to the restroom." So he told the man was filling the tank. He said, "My wife got to go to the restroom." He said, "Okay, round about there, you make a left, around something." And all this fabulous place and [indistinct 00:39:16] restrooms. I went back there, and when I come back, I told my husband, I said, "If it was any way that you could take this gas out this tank, I would see that you do it. Because it's a shame that had people spend their money on gasoline and then send them to a place like that restroom." It was just a hole in the wall. | 39:00 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, tell them about the boycott, when we boycotted Canal Street. | 39:39 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I don't know what y'all did. I know y'all did a whole lot of things. | 39:45 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, the stories that I have to tell really revolve around, I grew up in the seventh Ward, which is what is called in this area, like Mulatto Town. My family— | 39:56 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Define Mulatto. | 40:10 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, was [indistinct 00:40:14], shoot. | 40:12 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Let her tell the story. Keep quiet. | 40:16 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Anyway. | 40:18 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, somebody, she said Mulatto, somebody would want know what Mulatto means. | 40:19 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, it's the mixture of Black and White. And so actually all our neighbors, when we moved— Well, let me back up. My mother was a convert to the Catholic religion. My grandmother was very, very Catholic. So we were raised in the religion, and my mother was a convert when she married my father, so she was real Catholic. You know how people who come into the faith are. | 40:28 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:40:59]. | 40:56 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | All my stories have to deal with religion and race and color. Because where, when I was in grammar school, we lived on St. Anthony Street, which is on the edge of the French Quarter. And we went to church at Corpus Christi Catholic Church, which was the Mulatto church. And to get to Corpus Christi, we had to walk past the White church, which was the Blessed Sacrament. | 40:59 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Blessed Sacrament wasn't. Blessed Sacrament's uptown. | 41:37 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | No, no. There was a Blessed Sacrament on St. Bernard. | 41:38 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, they had two Blessed Sacrament? | 41:40 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah, Uh-huh. There was the— | 41:40 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Because I know they had one up there on Constance. | 41:40 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Right. But this was blessed sacrament on what, Germany and St. Bernard. So we had to pass up their church and go to Corpus Christi, and we'd get tired walking and I'd say to boot, we had neighbors, Susan and Harold were our neighbors, and they were White. It was very mixed in those days. So we would all set out for church together, and when we passed Blessed Sacrament, they'd turn off sooner and go to church there, and we'd have to walk another four or five blocks to get to Corpus Christi. So I guess as a child, I always wondered why we couldn't go to the same church. We were best friends and everything, and we played together like sisters and brothers. | 41:47 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:42:43] They had a bench in the back. They had one little bench in the back that some Colored people used to [indistinct 00:42:50]. They started late. | 42:43 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | That was after integration. They made one bench available in the back of the church. | 42:50 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | They used to put a rope to separate the White and the Black. | 42:57 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | When we moved from that house on St. Anthony Street, we moved in the Seventh Ward. And we were the darkest family in that neighborhood, really. Everybody around us looked White. And my father was lighter than the rest of us. He had hazel eyes, but my mother's brown and all of us were. So we were the darkies in the neighborhood, and we were landowners. They bought the house there. So the person who rented from us looked really very much like a White woman. I can recall going to school on the bus when they still had the dividers on the bus, and she would sit in front of the divider, and I would sit behind it, and we'd get off and go home to the same house. | 43:03 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And she was collecting the rent from us. | 44:04 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | We were collecting rent from her. | 44:06 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Miss [indistinct 00:44:10], you're talking about? | 44:09 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah. We were collecting rent from her. | 44:11 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | No, Ms. [indistinct 00:44:14] was collecting rent from us. It's a thing with [indistinct 00:44:21]. | 44:13 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Wasn't she a tenant of ours? | 44:20 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. | 44:23 |
| Ursula | Well then, we were collecting rent from her. | 44:24 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Her, yeah. Well that's what I said [indistinct 00:44:29]. | 44:26 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah. So anyway, though, how it was in that neighborhood was that there were lots of people who were [indistinct 00:44:43] belongs in the Seventh Ward, and they would leave our neighborhood and walk to Canal Street and go to work. A lot of them worked at Cross. And I was about ten or eleven years old, and I could go to Canal Street passing, coming from home, passing Canal Street, going to school and coming back. And they would looked at me and I'd recognize them, and they knew that I could with a word, have their job and everything. I used to always tell Brenda what such power for a child to have. All I had to do is run up and hug one of them or say, "Hey, I'll see you back home." And that was the job. So there was this kind of code of silence that we kept so that they would have their jobs. | 44:30 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I remember it became an issue, an arguable issue. Well if I can pass, should I? And for me, that never was a question, because I never could. But should I aid abet those who could, should I support them in this? And because I couldn't— You see, it was a big dilemma for the whole community. | 45:40 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And the reason, as for the interruption, the reason for that passing, they made more money. | 46:03 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Oh yeah. But there were those of us who we were never going to— In other words, because they could pass and make more money, they were not united with us in what we had to come up for. You know what I'm saying? So you couldn't count on— I'm not saying everybody, because I think there were people you could count on, that would've stood with you and did stand with us. But there was still the doubt about those folks. Which side are you on? You know what I mean? And if you were doing this, well then, was money the bottom line for everything? | 46:09 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah. Most of them would disown you when they see you in the street among the White. And then when they get back in your neighborhood, it was all this and that. | 46:49 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | —and we used to go to Dixie and they had the best kind of little buns there. We'd buy that and go get us some meat and make our sandwiches, and they had something else they had. | 0:02 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But they were Black male, White employees. | 0:10 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I didn't know that while I was working. I heard that after I left there that Dixie— | 0:19 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | [indistinct 00:00:26]. | 0:24 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | This woman, [indistinct 00:00:28] live on Walnut Street at Ms. Williams, Hazel Williams. We went to that, what is it? A McDonald's? What is that thing up there not far from where Dixie Anna used to be? It's right off of Broad Street. Is it a McDonald or— | 0:27 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | What? [indistinct 00:00:53]? | 0:51 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | A food place. | 0:55 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah, McDonald's. | 0:55 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | McDonald? | 0:55 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:00:56] McDonald's, yeah. | 0:55 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, that's where we went for lunch. They were talking about the Dixie Anna Bakery. | 0:59 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Oh yeah. | 1:04 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Nobody could think about the name of the bakery. | 1:05 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Oh yeah. | 1:07 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | They said that— | 1:11 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Dixie Anna. | 1:11 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | —talk about the bakery, talk about the bakery. Well, first I didn't—With me not being able to see good, I didn't know exactly where we were, but when they said Dixie Anna, then after a while, somebody remembered. It was Dixie Anna Bakery. | 1:12 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Right. | 1:25 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I said, "Oh, yes. I got many of my tracks over there was left over there at Dixie Anna." And they were talking about some particular little cake they used to make. | 1:26 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Sinkers. | 1:33 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | How good it was. | 1:33 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Sinkers. | 1:36 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's what it was. | 1:36 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | The Sinker was all the leftovers from all the cakes and all the pie. And when your mama sent you to school, you stopped on, you didn't get breakfast, you stopped on the way to school, you got a Sinker. You ate it, it sank right to the bottom of your stomach and laid there. So you didn't eat lunch, you were okay. | 1:38 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | But I had heard after I left Haskell that Dixie Anna was owned by Colored, but was run by White. | 1:57 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | No, it was owned by Blacks and run by Whites. | 2:11 |
| Kate Ellis | Now what was the story? Right when we were changing tapes, you were going to say something. | 2:17 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | White customers. Oh, I was talking about dating. | 2:17 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, let's talk about that. | 2:19 |
| Ursula | Yeah, well, how it was there was St. Aug High School. There was St. Mary's Academy, where Brenda and I went, and there was Xavier Prep, which was a co-ed Catholic school. So the girls from St. Mary's were always paired with the boys from St. Aug. But there was a kind of color distinction because all the light-skinned, the majority of the light-skinned Catholic girls went to the Prep and the majority of the darker Colored girls went to St. Mary's. But I think too, and it was also a money kind of distinction too. The more well-off, light-skinned girls went to the Prep. | 2:20 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Hold it. Marietta wasn't well-off. | 3:12 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | People in our own family that went to the Prep who they were lighter skinned than us in our own family, but they certainly weren't richer. So it was kind of a hodgepodge. But the one thing that was consistent was that the more White you looked, the more popular you were with all the boys. So if you had a certain kind of hair and you had light skin and you were pretty, rest assured that you were going to have dates. | 3:15 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | So I can remember parties, going to parties where everybody was really light-skinned. And so if you went in and you were with a darker person, you got stared at, or if you went to a party—Like someone my color would go to a party and the people were darker, you'd get stared at. Or if you said you were from the Seventh Ward, then they automatically thought you had a certain mentality even though you didn't look the part. Okay. I had that experience. But the more common experience was that all the boys wanted the light-skinned, so-called good hair, Seventh Ward women. | 3:48 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I have to intermingle that with the religion thing again. Along around that same time, we were part of the youth, we had split off from the NAACP because we wanted to do more action-oriented thing. And one of the things that we did was we said about integrating the Catholic churches. Now for me, I didn't even realize how much it was affecting me until later, but I had gone to an all girl Catholic school. I had always been interested in drama and just live, I like to be into things, but there were some hurtful things that happened along the way. | 4:36 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | All of the cheerleaders were light-skinned, straight-haired girls. The Whiter they looked, the better their chances of becoming cheerleaders. All of the court was selected for these features. And unfortunately, a lot of the people who were brought to the limelight were the lighter skinned people. Not saying that they weren't talented ones, but automatically they had an edge. So I remember this one year they were doing the Nativity thing and oh, I just had it in my head I wanted to be Mary, I wanted to be Mary. | 5:24 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | So when the teacher said, "Well, who wants to be Mary?" Several hands went up. "Oh, yeah." Because I had been in Cedality. I told you, my grandmother was Catholic, my mother was Catholic. I was in the May Crownings and the First Communion and the Children of Mary and the Cedality. So I felt I wanted to play this part. | 6:14 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But when all our hands went up, this girl in our class named Myrna, who didn't even raise her hand, she was just sitting there, and Sister said, "Well, I think the part of Mary would best go to Myrna because Myrna just looks like the Blessed Virgin." Well, Myrna had—Well, we won't get into that, but Myrna had this long, blondish, like a chestnut-colored hair all the way down her back. She's a friend of mine. But it was like a stabbing pain that— | 6:39 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I know. | 7:17 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | —you couldn't even be considered for this because you didn't look like the person you were praying to. Yeah, it was a trip. So already, kids who weren't in the image and likeness, you started to feel some kind of lowering of self-esteem in there. Not to mention the fact that we went to the St. Louis Cathedral where we would walk hand-in-hand to the cathedral to go to confession and have to wait until all the White kids went to confession, and then we were allowed to get in line. | 7:17 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But when it came to singing at all the real important masses, you know who sang. We could provide the entertainment. And it went even beyond that because our role models were these Black nuns, the Sisters of the Holy Family. They were our role models and they were smart and they were funny and some of them were hung up, but you know how that is. But by and large, we respected those women. But their role became the roles of servants. | 7:56 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Whenever there was a big Catholic ceremony and ordination or something would be going on at the cathedral, these women who taught us science and math and literature and language suddenly became servants and they were serving brandy and gumbo and all the best things that they could cook to these White men who were the priests. And so that was a kind of different image that was projected like, "Gee, where are we in this thing?" Well, anyway— | 8:30 |
| Ursula | Let me just remind you, there was one time when they took us to the Archdiocese Building to sing Christmas carols. Do you remember that? | 9:07 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yes, I do. | 9:19 |
| Ursula | It was freezing cold, December, and we stood outside and sang our hearts out for the bishop, Bishop who would've been— | 9:22 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:09:36]. | 9:33 |
| Ursula | Romo. | 9:38 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Romo? | 9:39 |
| Ursula | I think it was Romo. | 9:39 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | He stood there and looked forward and let us sing to him, and then he went inside. Then a few days after that, it was in the paper, this big spread where this White school had done the same thing, had gone to sing Christmas carols for the bishop, only they were inside being served hot chocolate by our nuns, by Black nuns who were our teachers. I wish I had saved that newspaper. I guess it'd be possible to find it. But that was just really a hurtful thing. | 9:42 |
| Ursula | They did a lot of stuff among [indistinct 00:10:23]. They were terrible. They had that autocrats club and they wouldn't have a dark-skinned person, just like— | 10:20 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Or let you in. | 10:29 |
| Ursula | Yeah. They wouldn't let you in. | 10:37 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | That was the one with the brown bag test. Wouldn't let the brown bag test. | 10:37 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | What about the blue veins? | 10:37 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | The blue what? | 10:37 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Blue vein. | 10:38 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I don't know. | 10:43 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, they tell me years ago that the people lived in the uptown area, they couldn't come downtown in where we all live at, like [indistinct 00:10:56], unless they had blue veins. It was White enough that the veins showed blue. | 10:43 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | What? Oh, blue veins. [indistinct 00:11:05]. I don't know that. I don't much about that. But I do know— | 10:59 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah, I've have heard of it though. | 11:08 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I used to think of Canal Street as a kind of demilitarized home between downtown and uptown because my husband was born and raised up here and me being a Seventh Ward girl, and he was an uptown guy, that was true. | 11:09 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Lucky he got [indistinct 00:11:31], beat his butt. | 11:29 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | [indistinct 00:11:33] to see on the uptown—I knew this about the uptown people, that the uptown people were more solid together, more militant than the Seventh Ward people. And the only frame of reference we had for that was a company, a beer company called False Staff and False Staff did something to offend somebody Black uptown and all of the bars and all the people said, "We're not drinking False Staff beer anymore." And that was really the end of False Staff uptown and it spread downtown. So then pretty soon everybody, that's the first kind of experience I had with a boycott where they just stopped drinking the beer. And it was very effective too because False Staff, I think they did go out of business. But getting back to the Seventh Ward, and Brenda and I have been friends for thirty-five years now. | 11:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh my gosh. | 12:39 |
| Ursula | [indistinct 00:12:40]. | 12:39 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | We lived in kind of different—It was only one day we were talking and we realized how different our education—We both went to public schools for our grammar school years, but how different the whole setting was because when she said, "Oh, those days were horrible days," and how the books they got were all torn up and everything. And we happened to be talking one night and I said, "I loved my school." And then we realized that even the Black children were treated differently. I went to Jones School, Valena C. Jones— | 12:43 |
| Ursula | [indistinct 00:13:33]. | 13:29 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Right, and they just— | 13:32 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Most popular. | 13:35 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | They just poured everything, even though it was leftovers and all, it was the best of the leftovers that they poured into the Seventh Ward School because many of the White folks had connections in the Seventh Ward in that it was mixed— | 13:36 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:13:53] to be White. | 13:53 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Right, right. So you had fathers supporting their children, though they wouldn't acknowledge them. It was a school where the Mulattos went. A lot of the people, the leadership of the city came from that school. The principal then was a woman by the name of Fanny C. Williams. We were very distinguished. I have a picture of when Eleanor Roosevelt visited Valena C. Jones School, she didn't go to any other school, but they brought her there to see that the Colored children were in fact getting an education. | 13:54 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But as I say, so it was a mixed up, the Seventh Ward was a mixed up, crazy place to live in. One of my best friends, Joanne Russel, who went to St. Mary's with us, I have a picture of her too, was a milk-white-skinned, red haired, beautiful girl who grew up with us on New Orleans Street and ran and played and looked as White as I don't know what, until she opened her mouth. She sounded like the rest of us. We often wondered what happened to her. | 14:35 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | We found out that she had married and moved to France and that her husband was from a very distinguished family in France and that nobody knew there that she was Black. But anyway, but that leads into the dating thing, which was that all the girls with the straight hair and the light skin and the pointy noses got the dates and got to be Miss It for everything. But when Malcolm X's books came out, that was a turning point. I would say even in the— | 15:08 |
| Ursula | In our last year of high school. | 15:51 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | In our last year of—And in fact, I never got into when we were integrating the churches. | 15:53 |
| Ursula | Oh, yeah. | 16:01 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | That was an activity we chose, the youth council chose to participate in as an activist thing. And we used to meet at St. Aug and plan our little activities, but we decided that would be our contribution is to go to these churches that were so segregated. And so I know, I think the first church we went to was St. James Major, which is on Franklin and Gentilling. And it was located in the seat of the White Citizens Council, which I mean there were lots of Catholic people who went there, but they were all on the White Citizens Council and very hateful, hateful people toward Blacks. | 16:02 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | And I remember going in that church and we were all kind of trembling, but when we moved into the church and we decided the strategy would be to sit in different pews and not all sit together. And we got in, all the people got up of the pew wherever we were sitting, and they moved to other pews. And then when they took collection of the money, they skipped over us. You recall that? | 16:48 |
| Ursula | Yeah, I recall that. | 17:23 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Okay. | 17:24 |
| Ursula | I remember being [indistinct 00:17:24]. | 17:24 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah, and then we all went to communion. But even as young as I was then, I must have been sixteen or fifteen, something like that, I took communion that day and I thought, "This is not my house. This is not all my Catholic experience and all that. I'm not welcome in this house, and it's like an unwelcome guest barging in." And I was really glad to get out. | 17:24 |
| Ursula | [indistinct 00:17:57] all over the space. | 17:58 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I don't remember exactly, but I think that was a real, one of the real hurtful, the times when you realize, "I'm a stranger in this house and I don't really—" I felt inside that we had done something I felt like I really didn't belong in that church or with those people. And I think that was a personal kind of turning point for me. | 18:02 |
| Ursula | Wouldn't you say also at that time that there was just in general a lack of leadership in the race issue in the Catholic Church because— | 18:25 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Absolutely. | 18:35 |
| Ursula | —I think it could have been totally different had there been any leadership, even from the level of the parish priest, if that priest had said anything to welcome us or to make us feel comfortable. But he was very hostile and the bishop never took any kind of leadership role in that. In fact, I was telling Kate the other day that the bishop actually took a very [indistinct 00:19:08] role in keeping the Catholic churches, I mean, the Catholic schools segregated two years longer than the public schools so that there was all this White flight into the Catholic schools. | 18:36 |
| Ursula | But I think during that whole period, that could have been vastly different. If any of those men, they were all men, of course. And there weren't even any Blacks in religious leadership in the Catholic Church at that time either. If just one of them had, as Jesse Jackson says, taken the moral high ground, I think a lot of people could've fallen behind that, started wavering people, maybe could have, but nobody did. | 19:21 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | When you bring that up, it's the thing that really made me lose faith in, yeah, I had a crisis of faith then. I was already shaken by the experiences integrating the churches. Isn't that ridiculous? Integrating the churches. Being told that I was not in the image and likeness of the woman that I prayed to as a model. Then I guess what I'm going to say is that it was a real tumultuous time when Martin Luther King and then Malcolm X came on the scene. We had been followers of Martin Luther King in all our strategies for integrating the activities that we did. Although I don't know if he would've condoned what we did at the Frost Top that night, but— | 19:55 |
| Kate Ellis | That's a story we have. | 20:59 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But yeah, we did a lot of little things like that. But we were kids and we were alive and we were trying to make a point. But when Malcolm came out and I read his autobiography, that did not have as profound effect on me. But when I read his speeches, I went through a transformation in my own little living room in my parents' house. They had not a clue of what was changing in my mind. I saw myself as all the Black women, all the Black people, he who he described as having hated themselves all these years and tried to emulate the oppressor. | 20:59 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I saw myself as that. And I really saw that what he was saying was true. I processed my hair, I used light makeup, I did all the things that would make me, that would compensate for my being a Black woman. And I don't know. When I saw that, when I read that and then Brenda and I always talked and we always shared things and we saw those women on the news at Columbia. We had a friend who was going to Columbia at the time, Keith Ferdman. | 21:45 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Now remember they had the big uprising in Columbia and they showed that. There was Keith and all of them and they had these wonderful hairstyles that was just natural. It was just no straightening comb, no perm, no nothing. It was just natural. And we decided on the phone that day, remember, we were going to do it. We were going down and there was this new place that had just opened up called the Afro House. It's still there on Claiborne. And Leo could tell you some stories over there. He's still cutting hair over there. He cuts my son's hair now. | 22:27 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | And Brenda and I went in there with all our long, straightened hair and we got afros and oh boy did that blow the lid off everything. When we came back home, mom wanted to throw us out, Brenda's mother. She said, "What is this?" You remember that [indistinct 00:23:29]? "Your heads look like a sack of pecan worms." My daddy cried. Yeah. Oh, God. It was really— | 23:06 |
| Kate Ellis | I would like to take that point right there, and if we can get cross-generational discussion going because I think that you all had different experiences in a sense from Mrs. Dunbar and Mrs. Allen. I mean, am I right about this? | 23:40 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | You are. | 23:58 |
| Kate Ellis | I mean. | 23:58 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | For sure. | 23:58 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm wondering if—You all came up in it in a transitional period, you remember Jim Crow and then you remember it changing. And it sounds like you had different ways of learning to cope with White racism. And it sounds like you came up in a time, in a sense when there was less of the ambiguity that you and I talked about. It sounds to me, and please correct me if I'm wrong, when there were less options for displaying really public resistance in my—I mean, am I— | 23:59 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah, I think so. | 24:36 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | In my time, the Blacks knew, so to say, that the Black people knew their place at that time. They had a place and they didn't cross the line. The same with the White, the Blacks and the Whites in my bay got along beautifully because the White people knew where they were supposed to go and the Colored knew where they were supposed to go. Now, I made my place in communion and Catholic Church. That was not divided like all the Whites in the front and the Blacks in the back, it was divided from front to the back, sideways, one side for White—Well, the White side had more pews than the Colored side, but it was all from the front to the back. That was all Colored, all White on that side. | 24:41 |
| Ursula | They always separated us, they always separated. | 25:30 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah, they were separated. But we had to wait until the Whites went to communion. | 25:31 |
| Ursula | Yeah, [indistinct 00:25:37]. | 25:35 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No, we didn't have to wait until the Whites go to communion. That section where the section White people were, the Colored people would go, that was their section. And they just come on down the line, give it, then go back and come back. There was no segregation in giving of the communion either. | 25:39 |
| Kate Ellis | There was no segregation in the communion? | 25:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No. And at the church was, and of course, well, when we had retreat, we had three days retreat before the communion. Well, the White children would go to communion first, went the first communion, and the Colored children would go after. | 25:56 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But see that same thing by like you are saying, and Kate did about that there wasn't as much pressure or opportunity. | 26:18 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's right. | 26:29 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Pressure [indistinct 00:26:33]. | 26:30 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | It was not the pressure, no. | 26:30 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah, it wasn't like a push [indistinct 00:26:38] was underway. | 26:36 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No, no. | 26:38 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But for us, the push was underway and that that's another way [indistinct 00:26:46]. | 26:39 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Y'all wanted to rectify what was going on. | 26:45 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Right, and there was deep fear and division within families, deep fear and division. And that's another, but we were still going to church together at that time. I can remember still going to church with my parents. And that's where in my mind, the Catholic Church failed again because it never addressed it. It was the same old sermon about the same old passages, and they knew this conflict was going on. | 26:47 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | They knew this struggle was happening at living room tables where parents and children were at each other's throats, and they said nothing. And when I say at each other's throats, I mean their integrity was being called into question. And I look back on those days and I think what arrogant little pompous asses we were, because we would attack them and say, "You Uncle Toms," you remember? I mean, you remember those days, [indistinct 00:27:50]? | 27:19 |
| Ursula | Think about it [indistinct 00:27:51] had just a bench with no backs for the Black people. And then they'd pick a collection. They come in there and pick a collection. They would take out money. [indistinct 00:28:04]. What was the name of that? | 27:50 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Blessed sacrament. | 28:06 |
| Ursula | Blessed sacrament, yeah. | 28:07 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But look at what they did at Epiphany. Now, we went to church at Epiphany. The people came together and raised money for a new church and school, raised the money, and then the bishop said they needed the money somewhere else. | 28:08 |
| Ursula | Yeah, to go to the White school. | 28:26 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yes, so then after we had—I don't know where the money went, I just know after the whole fundraising and pledging and everything, the men of the parish had to come and repair the old school and the old church and paint that, and that's what we got. | 28:27 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Holy Ghost Church. When I was growing up in the segregated church, St. Landry Parish in [indistinct 00:28:54], there was a woman who we used to visit New Orleans all the time. And at the church, people would stand around and socialize after mass. But now, when you get out of church, it's headed to your car. Nobody socializes anymore. And this woman was standing up there talking and talking about what a beautiful church that they were building in New Orleans. And it was going to be strictly for Black people and it was going to be named Holy Ghost. Well, that's what my parish [indistinct 00:29:31] one time. And she would be just jabbering away about this parish. And she said, "I just wish that we could get something like that." That was old Eleanor Fisher, you remember her? | 28:45 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yes. | 29:43 |
| Kate Ellis | This was a White woman who said that? | 29:43 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No, she was Colored. | 29:44 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 29:44 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | She was Colored, but she was bragging about this Holy Ghost business. So now they tell me and Holy Ghost Church was built. There was a family called Desoix. Why? And everybody know Ms. Desoix looked like a White woman. I don't care how you looked at her. You couldn't tell if she wasn't White so Ms. Desoix said, "Yes, let's all us light complexion people sit in the front." At that time, they had pew rallies. You bought your pew, you bought your seat. And that way if you were [indistinct 00:30:23], that was your seat. And say, she said, "Let all the light complexion people buy their pews in the front of the church so that the darker Black people could sit the back." So you see, there was segregation among the Blacks at that time. They said that she actually said that. | 29:48 |
| Ursula | That's how that Autocrat Club was, they did not have no Blacks, until it was going down. Then they start calling in the Blacks. It was too late to get them in. | 30:45 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, you know what? I never could really resolve they did that. Mama, you remember how they had healers in the neighborhood? They had these old women that would come around and they used to light candles and everything, but it didn't have anything to do with the Catholic Church. But they were really welcome and revered by Black people in our neighborhood anyways. | 30:55 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah, they were. | 31:21 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I couldn't resolve how they could be Catholic and still have so much confidence in the healers. | 31:25 |
| Velma | In the Seventh Ward, [indistinct 00:31:34] a lot of voodoo, whatever you call it. They believe in all that mess. Some people, I had some cousins go to their house and when you leave, they scrub different [indistinct 00:31:46]. They scrub everything behind right behind you. Right after you leave. They believe in all kinds of stuff, yeah. They had all kinds of signs. | 31:32 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | You used to say [indistinct 00:31:57] all the time. | 31:54 |
| Velma | That was plenty in [indistinct 00:31:59]. Plenty of that. | 31:58 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I don't know anything about Greek [indistinct 00:32:03] except I had never heard the word until I came to New Orleans. And I know that [indistinct 00:32:08] Greek was pertaining to [indistinct 00:32:11]. | 32:01 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But they used to practice it a lot in the Seventh Ward. | 32:11 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:32:18]. Why did people— | 32:19 |
| Ursula | [indistinct 00:32:22] fortune. | 32:21 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah. Why did people scrub their floors? I mean, really scrub their floors. They go put brick on it. | 32:22 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yes. They would [indistinct 00:32:32] would do that. Yeah. | 32:29 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's stupid to go dirty it up with brick. | 32:32 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But that was part— | 32:39 |
| Velma | [indistinct 00:32:39] nice and light yellow. Like your floor would be yellow. They [indistinct 00:32:44] brick. I pine some bricks and we scrub that floor with bricks and then we'd sweep the thing off, the reference off. But your floor would be so nice, you floor and your steps. Oh gee. Everybody steps was just white and pretty. | 32:39 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, we didn't do that in the country. Took the brick on the floor. | 33:01 |
| Ursula | They put their brick in [indistinct 00:33:09]. They make your floor beautiful, and then they'd sweep the rough part off after that. I used to [indistinct 00:33:17] on my knees. It's wonderful. | 33:12 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah. | 33:21 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Mama, tell him about Dr. Tishner that needed [indistinct 00:33:33]. | 33:22 |
| Velma | Well, yeah, there was a [indistinct 00:33:35] doctor. [indistinct 00:33:36] got him out town of town because he was making money on that, you see? He really was a good doctor. But seems like they, I don't know, they thought he was like a voodoo or something. But I had a sister, she was a pharmacist. My sister, [indistinct 00:33:54], a pharmacist. She and her friend was working with him and she said, wasn't nothing wrong about it. He had a [indistinct 00:34:03] of medicine that really was caring the people. But they— | 33:32 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Where was he from? | 34:07 |
| Velma | I don't know. | 34:07 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Was he from Haiti? | 34:10 |
| Velma | Yeah, I think so. He's from Haiti. Yeah. He was a foreigner, I know. | 34:11 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | Is that the same Tishner that we have today? | 34:16 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I don't know. | 34:16 |
| Velma | That man was making money and then they put him in [indistinct 00:34:27] a lot of mess. But yeah, he left town. | 34:22 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | It was like the big Sienna store. Big Sienna bakery owners were Black, but they had to hide the fact that they owned the bakery because Black people in business would be run out of business. | 34:29 |
| Kate Ellis | Where was it located? | 34:42 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | In the Seventh Ward, and so they hired White people to work in the bakery. | 34:45 |
| Velma | They work in the bakery. | 34:47 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | What about Tishner? Was he Black? | 34:49 |
| Velma | Yeah, that's why he got [indistinct 00:34:53]. | 34:50 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | So that's why they ran him out of town. | 34:58 |
| Velma | Yeah. He making money. | 34:58 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | He employed the—My Aunt Irma was in the first graduating class of pharmacists from Xavier University. | 34:58 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:35:08] name was Irma? | 35:04 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah. | 35:08 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:35:11]. | 35:08 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, anyway, it's just an amazing, that group of brilliant people who worked under this doctor. And even up until she died, she did her own concoctions of, she did herbal cures and things like that. But a lot of the people in that class really lost their minds. It's the most bizarre thing. It was about five of them. | 35:11 |
| Kate Ellis | Was it 1933, you said, Xavier? | 35:39 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | 1933, huh ma? | 35:42 |
| Velma | Yeah. | 35:45 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | And there were Black, the women, three of them that we know of went mad, including my aunt, really? | 35:46 |
| Ursula | What? From taking that concoction? | 35:55 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | No. I think that, you know what it was, it was the stress of the families— | 35:56 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:36:04] didn't eat enough. | 36:04 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah. See the families would get together and decide who was the best shot at college. | 36:05 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh yeah. | 36:16 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | So they would send the one with the most potential. And she was the one out of all the twelve kids with the most potential. So there was a lot of pressure on those people that were going to college, the whole family worked so they could go there. And really the dreams were pinned on them because I know, I remember many times, the stories about grandpa saying that he was going to build her a pharmacy, and everybody was going to work in the pharmacy. And that was going to be the family's future was on her shoulders. And I imagine a lots of them— | 36:16 |
| Velma | She was waiting for a doctor before this doctor, and he used to get on her nerves and she got a nervous breakdown. | 36:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Let me, if it's okay, I want to switch over and ask you, and this referenced something that you talked about earlier and ask Mrs. Dunbar, Mrs. Allen, about dating in your time. Because you talked about the kind of funny, not the funny, but the sort of patterns that took place in dating that went according to color and so on and so forth. And again, I'm curious about the differences from your generation and their generation. | 37:10 |
| Velma | Well, in their generation, they had cars to ride in. In our times, we had to ride in the horse and buggy. They had to ride in the horse and buggy. That's the big difference. | 37:35 |
| Ursula | We had a horse and [indistinct 00:37:52] my daddy [indistinct 00:37:55] and we had [indistinct 00:37:56] London Avenue was mud. We stayed in the city. That's the only place I was raised and born in the city. And we had mud streets. We raised pigs. We had two piles. We had a horse, we had pigs, we had all kind of vegetable. We raised all that in our yard. My daddy, and he had, his mother was in on one side and he had another brother on the other side. So it was three properties, right together. | 37:55 |
| Kate Ellis | Where? | 38:25 |
| Ursula | On London Avenue. | 38:25 |
| Kate Ellis | London Avenue. | 38:27 |
| Ursula | Right down London Avenue. | 38:27 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:38:30]. | 38:27 |
| Ursula | But tell them what impressive vehicle daddy had when you met him, mama. What was he driving? | 38:36 |
| Velma | [indistinct 00:38:44]. | 38:43 |
| Ursula | What was he driving? | 38:44 |
| Velma | Your daddy? | 38:49 |
| Ursula | Yeah. My daddy. | 38:49 |
| Velma | Oh yeah, he had a little tea color. | 38:50 |
| Ursula | No. When you met him, he was riding a what? | 38:54 |
| Velma | Oh, he was on bicycle. | 38:58 |
| Ursula | Why did you fall for a man on a bicycle? [indistinct 00:39:04]. | 38:59 |
| Velma | No. Well, but when I was coming up, I met a lot of college boys from Xavier University because I had my sister going there. She was older than me and she was going to Xavier. And they used to say I was such a little, pretty little Brown-skinned girl. So they liked me and I didn't like them though, because the minute I get to talking with them, I never could—My speech wasn't so good. And the first thing they say, "You little Creole." And that used to make me mad. | 39:04 |
| Velma | But they always tell my sister, "Bring your sister. Bring your sister." And I met a lot of them. Most of my boyfriends were college boys. And now my husband, he was somebody riding on a bicycle because he came from the country. He like, " [indistinct 00:39:53], I was listening to [indistinct 00:39:53]." They had [indistinct 00:39:53] and all that. They was living out there, because my brother-in-law used to say that he used to be so mad they were out on the [indistinct 00:40:01] and the White children would pass going to school, and there they was out in the field. | 39:37 |
| Velma | But anyhow, we met. A friend of mine and I went to the park to look, she was visiting to Mississippi. They said, "Let's go walk down Harden Park." And it was about eight blocks from our house. So we took that walk that Sunday evening and Lawrence and another guy was sitting on the girl's porch at the corner of [indistinct 00:40:30] and Allen. And we was crossing the street. And he said, he happened to look up and he saw me and he told his friend, he said, "Man, you see what I'm [indistinct 00:40:41] see?" So his friend said, "I see two girls passing." He said, "When I look up and saw that girl, look like something [indistinct 00:40:47]." | 40:06 |
| Velma | Just like that. And we just kept walking. We just kept walking because I was eight blocks away. And when we got to my gate here, they drove up on their bicycle. And they said they followed us from there. He said, because he told his friend, his friend said, "Do you know them girls?" He said, "No, but I'm going to find out right now." | 40:47 |
| Velma | So they followed us and he came up to my door and that why, he said, "We just want to get acquainted to y'all." And we hadn't paid no attention to them. And so he said, "My name's Lawrence. What is your name?" So I said, Velma. My friend was named Gertrude. And she said, "Gertrude." The guy was named Lawrence too. But he said, because [indistinct 00:41:32], something like that. And so they talk with this about [indistinct 00:41:37]. And he said, "Well, I just wanted to get introduced to y'all." So they had a tent show cross from us, gospel singers. And they start singing. So he say, "What's going on over there?" | 41:09 |
| Velma | So I say, "Oh, that's just a temporary church." And he said, "Well, they sound so good." So one of them told another one, "Let's go over and look at it little while." And then after that, before they left, Lawrence pulled out, he had a rose in his back pocket and he went to give it to me. And I was [indistinct 00:42:07] and I didn't want to take it. So my friend, Gertrude, said, "Oh, Velma, take the rose." I said, "You stole that rose from some guy and now you're going to give it to me?" Gertrude said, "Oh, Velma, take the rose." | 41:47 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, what about you all? | 42:20 |
| Velma | I took the rose, and from that day on, he honored all day. We six years passed and we married each other. | 42:25 |
| Kate Ellis | So you waited six years? | 42:29 |
| Velma | Yes, well, we he went to the service. | 42:38 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:42:38]. | 42:38 |
| Velma | He was in the service. | 42:38 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I said that that horse, let's see, had that motor where we had to ride in, that horse motor, sometimes that gasoline would smell kind of bad. No, I didn't do much going out as courting when I was coming up, because I left home young when I came to New Orleans and I worked. So I didn't do much going out with the boys. | 42:38 |
| Kate Ellis | I guess part of my question was whether there were color codes between men and women, the way that you described. | 43:08 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, not in our time. No, not in our time. | 43:18 |
| Ursula | Not where we grew up. There was another little place out from [indistinct 00:43:26] is called Frio Coal. They tell me those people would marry cousins rather than marry [indistinct 00:43:32], than to marry a dark-skinned person. | 43:21 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah. | 43:36 |
| Kate Ellis | So they keep the light skin and— | 43:37 |
| Ursula | Yeah. That wasn't around where we lived. | 43:39 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Ursula, I used to hear them say, because when I came to New Orleans, I lived uptown. I had always lived uptown. Until I moved down here in '63. They would tell me that a dark-skinned boy would get beat up if he went down there in the Creole section of town. Was that true, [indistinct 00:44:05]? | 43:42 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, you know what I found was that it was okay for a dark-skinned boy to date a light-skinned girl, because that made the girl look better. Oh. But it wasn't okay for a light-skinned guy to get mixed up with a dark-skinned girl. | 44:05 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, that's how it was. | 44:28 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Because he would be coming down. | 44:29 |
| Velma | But parents used to pick for their children too. They used to try to pick for their— | 44:31 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | What about, now, this is way before my time. This is way before my time. Where y'all school was at? | 44:39 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Joan. | 44:42 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | No, no, I'm talking about the convent. | 44:42 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Quadroon ballroom. | 44:42 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | The Quadroon ballroom. | 44:42 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Oh yeah. | 44:44 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | How did that come about? What history say about that? | 44:47 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, Andriet Deleal was the founder of St. Mary's Academy. And she was a— | 44:51 |
| Ursula | [indistinct 00:45:00]. | 44:59 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah. But she was a quadroon herself, and she was slated to marry as her sister had before her. But— | 45:00 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Not marry. | 45:12 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Not marry, no. To become the mistress of a White man. But they never married the Quadroons, and so where we went to school was a Quadroon ballroom where the soldiers in the gentry would meet up with the quadroons. And so Andriet refused to go this route, and that's how she established St. Mary's. | 45:14 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Well, [indistinct 00:45:44]. | 45:42 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yeah, right. The Sisters of the Holy Family, and she had a lot of benefactors who helped her get the order going and everything. But that's how that all— | 45:45 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:45:56]? | 45:55 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Did she? Yeah, yeah. I think so. | 45:56 |
| Velma | If a dark person marry into a light family, they wouldn't like them. My daddy's people didn't, of course, didn't like my mother because she was dark and he was light. Oh, some of them wouldn't talk to her. | 46:05 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | What country your husband was from? | 46:19 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | [indistinct 00:00:01] and all that? | 0:01 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Uh-huh. | 0:04 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mrs. Allen, a while ago, you started telling us about the places where you would go out with the man that became your husband. Where would you go? You were starting to talk about the places that you would go out to dances. | 0:04 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Well, back then, that was here in the city. | 0:16 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:00:20] didn't go out that much in the country. I didn't. Wasn't much going on out there. | 0:17 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We'd go to movies and dances. I don't know. | 0:25 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | There wasn't no place to go at that time. | 0:33 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Wasn't much and nothing to go. [indistinct 00:00:35] in those days, they had no television. Oh, we used to play cards. | 0:34 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:00:42] in the country. | 0:41 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's what I said, there was no place to go in the country. | 0:43 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And sometimes, we'd gather at one or the other's houses, we'd play some cards. | 0:46 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | We didn't even have movie houses back in my time. | 0:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, did you meet your husband in the country or in New Orleans? | 0:51 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | In New Orleans. | 0:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I said, there wasn't nothing much to do in— | 0:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | In the country. | 0:54 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | —in the country. | 0:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | But what did you do in New Orleans? | 0:54 |
| Kate Ellis | In New Orleans— | 1:00 |
| Michele Mitchell | What sort of things did you do in New Orleans? | 1:02 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, we'd go to the movies, dances. | 1:08 |
| Michele Mitchell | You do drop in? | 1:08 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And we'd have like, oh, I guess, you'd call it a club. | 1:09 |
| Michele Mitchell | [indistinct 00:01:15]. | 1:12 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | We'd have a group of us. We'd go from house to house. Every week and we'd play cards. We'd buy a little prize. You go your house this week, next week to her house, and we'd go all the way around and come back to you. That's the kind of fun we had. | 1:14 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | She was saying, did you ever go to roof garden? | 1:31 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, yes, indeed. | 1:34 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Yes [indistinct 00:01:35] about. | 1:34 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Many times, many times on that roof. And we used to have a show sometimes before [indistinct 00:01:43]. | 1:38 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | Where did Uncle Freddy take you out— | 1:46 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:01:49]? | 1:48 |
| Ted Alexander Quant | —when he was courting you—? | 1:48 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We would go to movies, we'd go to dances, I met Freddy at a dance at Holy Ghost. | 1:51 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Yeah. It was the dress [indistinct 00:02:01]. The [indistinct 00:02:01] that you said a lot [indistinct 00:02:01]. | 2:00 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. Yeah. He's that [indistinct 00:02:01]. And then we belong to a club and we'd be invited to balls. [indistinct 00:02:07] Club. Goldenrod Club. There you go. Yeah. We did a lot of balls. | 2:02 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And those days it was a honor. A novelty. To go to a ball because the balls, they didn't have that many clubs. And if you were invited to one, that was a big, big, honor but if I did not go to ball [indistinct 00:02:30] because every captain has [indistinct 00:02:32] got his own ball. And the reason for that was, in those earlier days, like the Original Illinois, the Young Men Illinois, the [indistinct 00:02:45], the famous G's. Those were about the only balls that clubs they had then. | 2:14 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And they were selected, you see. And they only invite their selected few. And that was what, the people like me, and you, [indistinct 00:03:06]for my own balls. To keep from being involve with them. And that's why they have so many different balls and that, but in those days it was an honor to be invited to a ball. And I used to go to all of them. Every night in a week. And you know what? I used to go to the ball, I remember, we went to a ball, I dance. This was a dance. Cath Galloway was in town. | 2:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | And I forget where this is [indistinct 00:03:39] but it had to be at somewhere down around there. What's that place called a [indistinct 00:03:43]? | 3:37 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | San Diego. | 3:43 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | [indistinct 00:03:44]? | 3:43 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | San Diego. | 3:43 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I think that's why— | 3:46 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:03:47]. | 3:46 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I think it was at the [indistinct 00:03:49]. And we was sitting in there, just talk and then drinking. And all of a sudden, somebody say, "Oh, you son of a bitch." And at those words, look like everything in the building start to [indistinct 00:04:06]. Everything in the building start to [indistinct 00:04:10]. And they had a little balcony, like that. [indistinct 00:04:16]. We got all that little balcony where our long dress is on, and kept running but we use to go on the [indistinct 00:04:23]. Are you going on—No. No. No. | 3:50 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We used to walk— | 4:23 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Walk? Honestly, I can't go to the dances. You need these clothes off. | 4:27 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | We need to walk a few [indistinct 00:04:33]. | 4:32 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | It was fun. | 4:38 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And then we [indistinct 00:04:39] with games and our characters go with this. | 4:41 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | It was fun. We had a lot of [indistinct 00:04:47] stuff. It wasn't a whole lot of sex like it is now. Nobody was thinking about sex like they do now. | 4:45 |
| Michele Mitchell | Nobody was? | 4:54 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Lord— | 4:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Not like they are now. (all laugh) Not like they are now. | 4:55 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:05:02] making doll clothes. | 5:02 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | [indistinct 00:05:03] would you know about a place and out of the country and I think, it was now—Where instead of the [indistinct 00:05:14] because they had [indistinct 00:05:15] then you had little compact up on the door. | 5:03 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I don't know, I never heard of that but I wouldn't put it past them. | 5:16 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | You could get the thing that about this place, wasn't color. It was hair. So, comb. Nailed up over the door and if you could pass through to be able to [indistinct 00:05:43]. You never heard of that? | 5:26 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Never heard of it. | 5:45 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, most of it [indistinct 00:05:47]. | 5:46 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | But one thing about it they [indistinct 00:05:51]. They never had a fight to nothing. Everything look like it'd been on [indistinct 00:05:54]. | 5:48 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Oh, it was [indistinct 00:05:55]. | 5:54 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | At [indistinct 00:05:56] it's the first tasks but the real thought, those were the days. I used to love to go and they had some time to have mad at me. And we have showed the move before the dance. That was a big fun. | 5:58 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Yeah. It was nice [indistinct 00:06:11] walk to street [indistinct 00:06:12]. | 6:11 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | You remember the girl that used to think, sometimes. Her name was Vivian—What's the name [indistinct 00:06:21]? Yeah. What's that? | 6:14 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:06:24]. | 6:20 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Vivian [indistinct 00:06:25]. She use to sing, sometime. The [indistinct 00:06:30] band. I mean, she wasn't the singer with the band, she was just singing because she like to sing and she get up there and sing a song or two. | 6:27 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Thank you, [indistinct 00:06:41]. And did uncle Freddy, did he proposed? How did he propose? | 6:41 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | What do you mean? | 6:44 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, how did he say, will you marry me? | 6:47 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | He got on his knees. | 6:49 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I want to hear about that because uncle Freddy, he was like, a tough one. He'd have, "Alright," I mean, he'd say, "Phil, come on let's get married, girl." (laughs) | 6:52 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | No. No. Uncle Freddy had to become a Catholic. St. Joan of Arc. That's where he took his instruction. And, let's see, Nelly was his godmother— | 6:59 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | When Uncle Fred and Aunty got married, he had to borrow a coat to get married. | 7:15 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | No. Freddy didn't have to borrow a coat, Phil had to borrow the coat. | 7:20 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, yeah. The man who's standing near to sign, he had to borrow a coat, but not Freddy. I tell you one thing about Freddy. Freddy was a dresser. He was a dresser and I think, he came into South [indistinct 00:07:43]. And he look good in his clothes. | 7:24 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Most of them was tailor made. | 7:46 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | He look good in his clothes. | 7:47 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | So, my [indistinct 00:07:48]. | 7:47 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Because I was [indistinct 00:07:48] a lot of colleague wanted to just come around and [indistinct 00:08:09]. And in the last [indistinct 00:08:09]. I thought he was very neat. He was very neat with his leather [indistinct 00:08:12] he was looking good with a little tie and [indistinct 00:08:15]. | 7:48 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | I don't remember. He show up dresser except photograph. When uncle Freddy was still [indistinct 00:08:23]. What I remember was, in his work clothes, he'd be sitting around us. Auntie, would say, "Look at you. You look like [indistinct 00:08:34] and to think, when I met you, you used to look like some [indistinct 00:08:36] magazine." You think like [indistinct 00:08:47] sometimes to this. | 8:18 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | [indistinct 00:08:49] to see you come a little white suit. | 8:52 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | Well, we have you? | 9:00 |
| Michele Mitchell | Well, I think, we've ask a lot of questions. | 9:03 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | It's fun. We had fun. | 9:07 |
| Michele Mitchell | Good. No. We're good too. Do you want anything to add, that you want to tell us? | 9:08 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Well, I want to know how is this thing going to be complied? Is it going to be in a cassette movie, or regular movie, or what? | 9:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | The cassette are going to be—They're creating an archive with people stories on tape. And so, they're going to be held at SUNO and at Duke, and do you want to add anything else? | 9:24 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah, but basically, this is going to be extensive research materials. The students and— | 9:40 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | On film? | 9:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Actually, on tape. On sound tape. | 9:45 |
| Michele Mitchell | It's on these. | 9:53 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Oh, okay. Because I'm an ex movie star. | 9:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | Are you? | 9:56 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Mm-hmm. | 9:56 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | Oh, yeah. She's our movie star in resident. Angel Heart. She was in Angel Heart. | 9:57 |
| Michele Mitchell | Really? | 10:03 |
| Philomene Guillory Allen | And they're going to [indistinct 00:10:06]. And when you came, we all went to the movies to see when she made her debut here and she said, "Somebody looking for you." And me went, "Go. Go, [indistinct 00:10:19]." That's it. | 10:05 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | Whatever. Well, there's a fellow went in Houston. And when I came up on the screen he got up and say, "That's my Aunty Vi!" | 10:21 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | But what else is Angel Heart, and— | 10:32 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | That's the only speaking part of movie I had, but I did about 30 at most. Yes. Yeah. Altogether. But they don't show them. I just got there. I was in there for the money they gave me, but all the other movie that you might see me, that you will see me on if they're still running. It's Blue Bayou. That last time—I'm not talking but you do see me. And there was another one, but you got to look real quick to see me. | 10:33 |
| Michele Mitchell | Why is that? | 11:04 |
| Viola Guillory Dunbar | I can't— | 11:04 |
| Brenda Dyer Quant | We all went and tried out for the vampire, what was the— | 11:07 |
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