Beulah Manuel interview recording, 1994 July 20
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| Michele Mitchell | Your name and when you were born. | 0:01 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Okay. Beulah Manuel, and I was born February fourth, 1934. | 0:09 |
| Michele Mitchell | Where? | 0:13 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | In Baldwin, Louisiana. | 0:14 |
| Felix Armfield | I'm Felix Armfield, interviewer number one. | 0:17 |
| Michele Mitchell | Only because of alphabetical order. | 0:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Hi, I'm Kate Ellis, interviewer number two. | 0:26 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 0:30 |
| Michele Mitchell | And I'm Michele Mitchell, interviewer number three. And it is July 20th, 1994. | 0:30 |
| Felix Armfield | And we're at the New Iberia Parish Public Library, about to interview Mrs. Beulah Manuel. | 0:38 |
| Michele Mitchell | If you could— Go ahead, we're just going to— | 0:48 |
| Kate Ellis | No. | 0:50 |
| Felix Armfield | Mrs Manuel, where are you from? Where are you originally from? | 0:51 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I am from Baldwin, Louisiana. | 0:54 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 0:57 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | At St. Mary Parish. | 0:57 |
| Felix Armfield | And how long did you live there in St. Mary's Parish, at Baldwin? | 1:00 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | 17 years. | 1:07 |
| Felix Armfield | So you practically grew up— | 1:09 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Grew up there. I was born there and I grew up there. | 1:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | Could you tell us a bit about the community? | 1:15 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Back in the 1940s, when I was growing and able to know what was going on, it was a segregated little town. Blacks lived in one section and the Whites lived in another section. It was not mixed. | 1:20 |
| Felix Armfield | Where is that in location to where we are here in—? | 1:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Okay, that's about 28 miles from here. Between here and— | 1:47 |
| Felix Armfield | South or west? | 1:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's east. | 1:55 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. So it's east? | 1:56 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. | 1:58 |
| Felix Armfield | Is it pretty a rural community? | 2:02 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It's just a little small town. | 2:03 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 2:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. | 2:05 |
| Felix Armfield | What were people's livelihoods? | 2:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The women did domestic work and the men worked in the fields. And— | 2:10 |
| Felix Armfield | Now when you say women did domestic work, are you talking about Black women? | 2:16 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Black women, yes. And we talking about just Black, right? Or Black and White? | 2:19 |
| Felix Armfield | When women— | 2:26 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It doesn't matter? | 2:26 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:02:27] the community right now. | 2:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Okay. Well, the Black women did domestic work and there were some teachers, the older people, that taught school in the Black schools, and the men who were not educated worked in the sugar mill. The ones that didn't work in the sugar mill, they worked in the fields. | 2:29 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. When you say the men that weren't educated, was there an educated group of Black men? | 2:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 2:51 |
| Felix Armfield | What kinds of things were that? | 2:51 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The only thing they could do was teach school. | 2:52 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 2:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. And teach the Black children | 2:55 |
| Felix Armfield | At the Black school system? | 2:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. The Black school system. Right. | 2:59 |
| Michele Mitchell | What I'm curious about, you mentioned the sugar mill. Was there a section of town that was sort of run by the company or did the company that owned the sugar mill have a big presence in the town? | 3:01 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Not really. The sugar mill was like six miles away from Baldwin. It was in between Franklin and Baldwin, and they picked the men up in a truck and brought them to the mill to work. | 3:13 |
| Michele Mitchell | So there was no one company that sort of had a huge presence in the town? | 3:31 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No. No. | 3:35 |
| Michele Mitchell | Could you just tell us some other things that you remember about Baldwin? Just when you were growing up? | 3:39 |
| Felix Armfield | What type of house did you live in? | 3:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | A wood frame house, but was well kept because I had a neat mother. My mother never worked. She stayed home and— | 3:46 |
| Felix Armfield | When you say a wooden frame house, was it what's called a shotgun? | 3:55 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, it wasn't a shotgun house. | 3:59 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 4:00 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, it was a nice house because this was the house that she had bought from a White family who moved out of that area and moved further up. And the house was well built and we lived fairly well even with her not working, but she knew what to do with money. That's what people couldn't understand, how Black people could have so much and yet not make so much, but she knew what to do with a dollar. She sold for us and she sold for other people sometimes but mostly, it was just for us. | 4:00 |
| Felix Armfield | So your mother was a housewife? | 4:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Housewife. | 4:43 |
| Felix Armfield | What do you recall of your father? | 4:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | My father died when I was a year old and she remarried. She married my stepfather and he worked in the sugar mill, but he only worked the grinding time. At that time, grinding time lasted from, I would say, October until the last part of February because they cut the cane by hand and it just lasted longer, now everything is done with machinery and it doesn't last as long. And during the year, the summer months, we raised hogs, we raised chickens. Many times, I had to go to the chicken yard to get a chicken and fling the neck off and then pick it and that's how we had food, lots of food. And he raised garden. | 4:47 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. Okay. | 5:38 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | So we didn't consider ourselves poor people. | 5:40 |
| Felix Armfield | How large was the family? | 5:45 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Five of us. | 5:49 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 5:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Go on. | 5:55 |
| Felix Armfield | I don't want to ask all the questions you have— | 6:03 |
| Kate Ellis | Don't worry. Keep going and I'll— | 6:04 |
| Felix Armfield | Well, what do you recall of that community? What are some of the first images that you have in your mind of that community, that you were given as a youngster? | 6:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That we were Black and we couldn't go where the White people went, and you stayed in your place. Your place was being Black and that's where you stayed. You couldn't say you didn't want to be there or you couldn't say that this wasn't the type of life you want. Of course, you wanted to get out, but I guess that's why I married so early because I wanted to get away from there. And it was just a little Jim Crow town, that's all it was. | 6:24 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was there a difference in the amount of months that Black children went to school as opposed to the amount that White children went to school? The more Black children were— | 7:07 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, the school system operated the same, but it was just divided. This was Black and this was White but you went to school the same amount of time. | 7:16 |
| Michele Mitchell | Could you tell us something about your school, what you remember? | 7:26 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | A little wood framed school. And the White school was a brick school way back in the years. Nice school. And we went to the school across the track. It was a little wooden frame, it had some little wooden buildings. Like the cafeteria was another little wooden wooden building, and they had eight classrooms to it with a big assembly hall but it was all within that. | 7:29 |
| Felix Armfield | You said you had a wooden frame cafeteria? So you were being served hot lunches? | 7:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mm-hm. | 8:03 |
| Felix Armfield | That's interesting. | 8:05 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | We had Black cooks. | 8:06 |
| Felix Armfield | Now, when is this? | 8:07 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | This was in 19— Okay, if I graduated in 1948, that was from the 12th grade, so count, what, four years back? Yeah. So that was like in 1944. Yeah, we had hot lunches. | 8:08 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. What was your mode of transportation to and from school? | 8:37 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Walking. | 8:40 |
| Felix Armfield | And how far— | 8:40 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | We didn't have to walk far from where our house was. We didn't have to, but other children had to walk from way across the track. They had to start out early in the morning to get to school. And then we didn't have a high school so when I left the eighth grade, I went to a school called Godman School. I was in private school. G-O-D-M-A-N. And that was a home for wayward children. It was called Sager Brown Home and Godman School. And I went there. My mom didn't want me to go on the bus to go to Franklin, see, because we had to travel to go to Franklin to go to high school. | 8:42 |
| Felix Armfield | And it was Sadie Brown? | 9:18 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Sager, S-A-G-E-R. | 9:21 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 9:25 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And that was the home for— We had kids from California, everywhere, who were orphans and they stayed there but then we had to pay to go to school, and I guess the people who paid to go to school helped to keep up the home for the children. So I went there in the ninth and the 10th grade. | 9:25 |
| Felix Armfield | So where did you graduate? | 9:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | From Franklin, Willow Street High. That's in Franklin. She finally decided that, well, I couldn't go any further in Baldwin, so I had to go to Franklin so I went to Franklin. | 9:46 |
| Felix Armfield | Was that just the case with Black kids? There was nothing beyond eighth— | 9:56 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The White kids had a high school in Franklin also, but they were bused. | 10:00 |
| Felix Armfield | They bused into— | 10:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They had a bus, yes. | 10:08 |
| Kate Ellis | How did you get to Franklin? | 10:09 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Well, by then, they had a bus that was running from Weeks Island, that would pick up from Weeks Island to Franklin. They finally gave us a bus for Black kids to go to— | 10:10 |
| Felix Armfield | But, obviously, it sounds like Black kids that had come before you were not afforded that opportunity. | 10:21 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No. I had a brother that went to, also, the Godman School and he finished from Godman School. See, they cut the grades back, I guess, maybe economically, they couldn't afford to have all 12 grades, but that's where he graduated from, Godman School | 10:31 |
| Felix Armfield | In eighth grade, and that was it? | 10:43 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, he graduated from the 12th grade. | 10:47 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. So— Okay. | 10:49 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Because at that time, when he was going to school, Godman School went through the 12 grades. | 10:50 |
| Felix Armfield | Now, when they cut Godman, did they cut the White school in the town also? | 11:02 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, but you see, Godman was a private school. | 11:02 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 11:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | But the public school, the White kids already had buses to bring them to Franklin, to the high school. | 11:05 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 11:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The Blacks didn't have buses to go. | 11:11 |
| Felix Armfield | What do you— Go ahead. | 11:18 |
| Michele Mitchell | No, you can— I was curious. Were there different organizations set up in your area, in your community, sort of benevolent associations to help people who didn't have a lot of money or who needed—? | 11:20 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Not at that time. I don't even think they had welfare when I was coming up in Baldwin. | 11:45 |
| Michele Mitchell | But there were no Black organizations— | 11:45 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No. | 11:52 |
| Michele Mitchell | Or associations to help each other? | 11:52 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | You could go to the church, like the churches, if you needed help and assistance, they would help. And people were more neighborly then, in the Black community, where they helped each other. It's like when they would kill hog at home, they'd have the big butchery at home and you didn't have freezers to put your meat in so they salted it down in Crocs. So what they would do, they would call the— The neighbors would come in and help with the butchering, and then you would— So she would say, "Go bring this to miss so-and-so, go bring this to some miss so-and-so." And they helped one another. But you don't find that today. | 11:52 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. Now talk about the butchery. What do you mean when you say the butchery? | 12:29 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The butchery, they kill the hog themselves and they cut the hog up and they made hog cracklings, they took the guts and they made boudin, they made the hog head cheese with the head. | 12:38 |
| Felix Armfield | They cut the guts up and they— | 12:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The guts they would take out and clean, and then they would make a dressing like how you make a rice dressing with the— They would take the meat and cook it and put the rice in and then they would stuff the guts and that would be your boudin. | 12:55 |
| Felix Armfield | And can we spell that? | 13:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | B O U D O I N. And then they would cook the hog cracklings and they would then salt the rest of the meat that they didn't give away to the ones who were helping with the butchery, they would salt it down in Crocs and it would make smoke sausage and we had a little house in the yard where they smoked the sausage. | 13:08 |
| Michele Mitchell | What other kind of things would be shared? | 13:40 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | There was really nothing. I mean, we had nowhere to go, but we had a dance hall that the Black people in the Catholic church had purchased and we would have dances. We had a, what you call them things, the juke boxes, and you would go on, I think three times a week, we could go. We had a theater in Baldwin, where that was segregated also. Where you had one side for White— You looked at the same movie, but the White sat on one side and the Black sat on another side. And that was about it. You just had nothing. | 13:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | I'm wondering because Kate brought this point up about organizations. There weren't any when you were growing up, but had there been organizations in the past that, for one reason or another, stopped existing, that you ever heard about? | 14:22 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I never heard of them. | 14:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah? | 14:37 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | You had the NAEC people that was in the larger towns, | 14:39 |
| Michele Mitchell | Right. | 14:43 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. | 14:43 |
| Kate Ellis | I was thinking of things like— I was talking to somebody yesterday about benevolent associations that had been set up to help people cover funeral costs because burials were expensive. | 14:45 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Most Black people joined a burial where you paid so much a month just like insurance and the funeral home— Now, that was another thing with the funeral homes. Whites owned them and they had the burial with you but then when you died, you could not be waked in the funeral home. They would wake you at your house or wake you in your Black church. And they didn't use the same hearse to bring you to the graveyard that they took the Whites. | 14:57 |
| Michele Mitchell | And was there a different graveyard too? | 15:33 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh yes. | 15:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah. | 15:37 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh yes. | 15:37 |
| Kate Ellis | You might pay the same fees that Whites would, but you would not— | 15:37 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | But you didn't get the service. Right. And this is— Well, now I don't want to say— | 15:41 |
| Felix Armfield | They went so far as to— The dead bodies were not put in the same hearse? | 15:46 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, they used a different hearse. | 15:51 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. Never heard that. | 15:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And I think that the funeral home in Franklin, I think they helped to set a Black man up for another funeral home so that they wouldn't have the conflict with the White and the Blacks at their funeral home. So the Black man was fronting, he might own it now because he's still there, but he was fronting the funeral home as though it was his but you still belong to the Ibert Insurance. I'm calling names. | 15:58 |
| Felix Armfield | How do you spell— | 16:32 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I B E R T. | 16:32 |
| Kate Ellis | That was Ibert? | 16:34 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Ibert's funeral home. | 16:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | But it's called joining a burial? | 16:40 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah, you join the— It's like an insurance. You join the burial and you pay so much and when you die, well then your policy would bury you. Now if you wanted to make it more elaborate, well then you had to come up with extra money. | 16:43 |
| Michele Mitchell | And it cost you— I think you mentioned the cost. How much did it cost about, a month? | 16:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Now that, I can't give you. But you had a family thing. Like my mother, it was a whole family in it. | 17:03 |
| Felix Armfield | Can we back up a bit and just talk about your education? I wanted to ask a couple questions, more specific, concerning— What do you recall when you think about your education? What are your thoughts of those teachers that taught you? | 17:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They were wonderful. All I wanted to do was to learn all that I could so that I could make something of myself. | 17:42 |
| Felix Armfield | When you say they were wonderful, what made them wonderful in your eyes? | 17:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They were not like teachers now. Their whole life was into the teaching profession. They wanted you to learn, they even stayed with you in the afternoons after school. If you didn't understand something, they would stay there until they got you together to do whatever it was you were supposed to do. I think they were more dedicated. I had a brother that was a dedicated teacher. He served for 28 years as a principal. And like I told you all the other day, he taught school in a little one room school, seven grades. And he would just be so elated when these people would grow up and would do something with themselves and come back and say, "Oh, Mr. Gums, you taught me in such and such a grade—" And he was just elated because he had done something to help them to be where they were. | 18:01 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | But you had dedicated teachers back there. When I went to Godman School— And tell you a little story that my mother had a heart attack and I had to be out of school for a while because I was the only big girl at home who could help and do what I was supposed to do with them, and my brother was teaching at the time, and I was going to Godman School. And there, we had White and Black teachers because these teachers came because of the orphanage. And they came from other places like Chicago and different places. Well, I had one White teacher who brought me my assignments. I had to be out of school and he didn't want me to get behind so she brought my assignments home for me to get my lessons so I wouldn't fall back. And that's how I passed the 10th grade because I was out of school for about— I guess about three months with my mom. | 18:54 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And I kept up because she brought my assignments home. | 19:49 |
| Felix Armfield | Daily? Weekly? | 19:52 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Daily. Daily, every afternoon. And while I was taking care of my mother— See we went to the Catholic church then and the priest would come by to visit her because she was sick. He was a White priest. I was playing the piano, I played by ear then, don't ask me if I can play now because I don't guess I could even find the keys. But at that time, I would play some songs by ear and played them very well. And we had a piano at home because my brother was a musician. And he came by to visit her one day and while he was in the room talking, he heard me playing a hymn on the piano and he said, "Well, I didn't know you could play." And I said, "Well, I don't play by notes because I never took music, but I do play by ear. I pick it up." And he said, "Well, we don't have music at church during the week." He said, "You come to Mass—" Because I used to get up and go to mass every morning. | 19:54 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And he said, "You come to mass every morning." He said, "Why don't you go and play?" Because they only had a White choir, not a Black choir. And he said, "There's nobody there to play during the week. Why don't you come and play?" He said, "Because it's so much nicer when you have music with the mass." So I told him, yes, I would do that. So I went the next week, that Monday, and I went up there because the organ was way up upstairs and I played, and I played the next day and I played the next day. Well, somebody told the lady who played the organ for the choir, that I had been playing during that week, and they said she went upstairs and she wiped the seat and she wiped the keys because the little nigger had been playing on the organ. | 20:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They went to the priest and told him they didn't want me up there. So the priest came home to visit mom and he said he was going to have to ask me not to go back because they didn't want me to play. And he actually had tears in his eyes crying because he said he did not understand why. There was no reason why. And that was that story about the organ in church. And that was the same church where I told you three-fourths of the church was Whites and that one fourth on the side was for Blacks. And we still continued to go to church and put your little money in church, whatever amount you had, and when it came time for communion, you could not go to communion until after all the Whites had gone to communion. Then they would make a sign to the Black usher to let the Blacks stand and go to communion. | 21:39 |
| Michele Mitchell | Because you had two Black ushers, right? | 22:36 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 22:37 |
| Michele Mitchell | And you said on the side, so you weren't in two— He was in the back or standing around, you were on the side somewhere? | 22:38 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | You see, the church was like— This aisle was to the side for the Whites, the big aisle ans the middle isle, the big aisle here was for the Whites, and across from the middle aisle was another big aisle for the Whites. And that little section all the way down from the front to the back was for Black. | 22:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | Along the side. | 22:59 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Along the side. | 23:00 |
| Michele Mitchell | So after all the Whites had taken from the chalice for communion, then it would be given to you? | 23:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Then the White usher would give a signal to the Black usher that stood in front, "It's time for them to go." And then we'd all stand and go to communion. | 23:11 |
| Michele Mitchell | It's time for them. | 23:19 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It's time for them to go to communion. | 23:19 |
| Michele Mitchell | But I mean, I'm assuming that they would use the same chalice time and time again? | 23:20 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh yes. | 23:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | So it was not a problem for you to use it, you just had to use it last in the ceremony? | 23:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. And now at that time, you didn't— Like now, I think they let you drink out of the cup. They didn't do that back then, you only took the host. You didn't have a chalice that you drank out of back then. | 23:31 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh. | 23:46 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They didn't do that in the Catholic religion then. It was only the priest that drank out of the chalice. | 23:47 |
| Michele Mitchell | So you just took the host? | 23:52 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Hose. | 23:53 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 23:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They used the same chalice to give you the host, but you didn't go until after they finished. And I often wondered, what would happen if they would run out and didn't have any more in regard to us and we didn't have none, and I guess we just didn't get none. | 23:56 |
| Michele Mitchell | I'm wondering, in terms of, you said that your teachers were wonderful? What did they teach you about slavery and about any Black history? Did they do that? | 24:18 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Not too much. | 24:29 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah? | 24:30 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, because I didn't learn Black history until my kids were in school and I would be looking up things for them, sometimes they were at school and I needed to look up stuff for them. And that's when I learned Black history. I did. It was just reading and writing and arithmetic and getting it in your head. And that's what it was. That's what they taught. | 24:31 |
| Michele Mitchell | So no discussion about the Civil War? | 24:52 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, not too much. Oh no. Uh-uh. I never knew that Columbus had a Black man on the ship until— I'm trying to think of which one of my kids was in school. The middle one. I didn't even learn that when my oldest boy was in school. And then I went to Houston and my brother had a picture on his wall in his office that he said, "That's the Black fella that was on the boat with Columbus." I'd say, "Well, I'll be darned." | 24:54 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm curious more about just how Whites and Blacks interacted in your area. I mean, you talked about the segregation of different areas. How were social relations? I mean, did you— | 25:29 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | There were no social. | 25:44 |
| Kate Ellis | There were no? It was really separate communities? | 25:46 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 25:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Where would you shop? I mean, I know that you had a lot of food. I mean, I know it sounds like you had a lot that you needed that was sort of made in your home, from the clothes that were sewn— | 25:52 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That old man that I told you about, that I worked for the other day? He had a general merchandise store and my stepfather bought on credit there. And every week, he'd buy his groceries there and my mom bought material because he had a [indistinct 00:26:20] like general merchandise. He had material, he had some clothes, some boy clothes, and that's where we shopped. But then we had a bus that ran from— It was like a, what you call that? It wasn't a city bus because it ran from Weeks Island to Franklin. And we would shop in the stores in Franklin. If you wanted to buy something ready made, something like a hat or a purse or shoes, you went to Franklin. | 26:03 |
| Kate Ellis | And that was a White owned store? | 26:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | White owned store. Oh yeah. Because they're not even Black owned now | 26:49 |
| Kate Ellis | What were special rules about what you could do in the store? How you could try things on or not try? How were you treated in the stores? | 27:01 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They would watch you. When you went to try something on, they would go in with you and they didn't want you to put makeup. You know how some people just flop the thing across their face and put makeup on. They didn't want makeup on their clothes and they would really watch you. | 27:09 |
| Kate Ellis | But you could try things on? | 27:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes, you could. | 27:26 |
| Felix Armfield | I want open up a can of worms here. | 27:33 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Okay. | 27:35 |
| Felix Armfield | And if it's ever too personal, just say, "I don't want to talk about that." | 27:40 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Okay. | 27:43 |
| Felix Armfield | You talked briefly, on Monday, I think it was, about your complexion and being mistaken, perhaps, on occasions. Can you talk a little bit about that and this whole thing of passing? Could you have passed if you had chosen to? | 27:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | If I wanted to, I could. | 28:06 |
| Felix Armfield | Any particular incidents that may stand out in your mind? | 28:09 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Just the other day, I was in Arkansas and I went in the jewelry store and the White lady who owned the jewelry store, she said, "Oh my." She said, "But you tan beautifully." She said, "I tan in spots." She said, "But yours is just so smooth." And she said, "My sister tans like you." I said, "But ma'am, this is no tan, this is it." She didn't know I was Black. Because in Arkansas, to me, there's White people that is way darker than me. And it's like they're sun burnt. It's like they're hard because that's what I did. I walked the streets and watched the people and my husband was up in the hotel sleeping, but I was watching. But yes, if I wanted to pass, I could have passed. But I can tell you where my light skin comes from. My mother's father, which is my grandfather, was a son of a White man in Franklin. And he had two families. He had a White family and he had a Black family. And my grandfather was one of the children. | 28:13 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And my mother, they were MOSS's. And I'm going to dig all this stuff up after I retire, because there's a whole big bunch of property down there. All the M-O-S-S's on the White side are gone. But the Black one— Yeah, the Black ones, some of them are still living. Well, not the old ones but the children. And he had a White family and Black family, and that's where my mother come— My mother comes from a White son. And she changed her spelling of her name because she didn't want to be known as a M-O-S-S like those people in Franklin so she spelled her as M-O-R-S-E. And my uncle spells his M-O-S-S and they all the same family. And she left town. When she grew up, after she finished from Howe Institute, she left and went to Texas to live with her aunt. She | 29:32 |
| Felix Armfield | She finished up at what institute? | 30:35 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Howe Institute. Howell, H-O-W-E. And she moved to Beaumont with my grandmother's sister. And that's where she met my father in Texas. Now, my grandmother came from an Indian family, the Cheyenne's. So I guess that's why I got this big nose with the Indian structure. And I had a sister that was lighter than me. She's dead now. And my mother married a light man, so my stepbrother and sister came out looking like my mom, but they were dark. So people can't understand me when they see me and my sister together said, "That's your sister?" | 30:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah. | 31:20 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That is my sister. That's my mother's child. Yeah. | 31:21 |
| Felix Armfield | Do you recall any specific incident, anything that happened to you growing up as a youngster? Simply because— | 31:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The children at the Black school treated me different. They did, because I had the little light color, and they would call me yellow and all kinds of little things like that. And I had hair way down— I don't have it now because it's getting bald, but I had hair way down in my back and they would pull on my plaits because they thought that I thought myself so much because I had the little light color. | 31:35 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was there a lot of tension in the community around color? Dark, light? | 32:05 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, because we didn't have that much light and dark in that community. Where the friction was— The place I was telling y'all about, Grand Marais, they just excluded themselves from other people because they really wanted to be White and the Black people didn't want to be bothered with them because they wanted to be White. | 32:13 |
| Michele Mitchell | But there was— I mean, you're saying then that most of the people in Baldwin were more or less the same color, or just, there was a friction— | 32:32 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Maybe a little lighter than me or maybe a little darker than me, and then you had real dark, because it was all mixed up and there was really not that much friction, but the little dark children, when I went to school, would call me all kinds of little names because I had a lighter skin than them. And they would tell you, "You're teacher's pet." Because they looked like they took more time with you, but I don't really think that they did. | 32:42 |
| Felix Armfield | How did it make you feel as a youngster? Did you ever get to internalize it? Did you ever begin to resent them or yourself? | 33:11 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I don't think so. I didn't resent them because if I was light, I was just light, that's all. And that's how I feel now. I'm just light, I'm not trying to be White, and that's just me. That's the way I am. | 33:28 |
| Felix Armfield | You've had absolutely— | 33:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's right. | 33:43 |
| Felix Armfield | Nothing to do.. | 33:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Nothing to do with do with that. It came about way with my grandpa saying I can't change it. | 33:45 |
| Felix Armfield | No, you can't. | 33:49 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | So it's nothing I can do to change it. | 33:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | But I think it's interesting when you told us the story about what happened around the organ and how if you could indeed pass and still it's very clear that you were this nigger playing an organ, that that sort of reaction— | 33:51 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | But that's what they felt though. That's what they felt. She didn't care what color you— If you were light, dark or brown or whatever, you were classified as a nigger and a nigger just didn't do that. | 34:10 |
| Michele Mitchell | Do you know of any people from your community who would move within the state and pass crossover? Did you know of any people who did that? | 34:20 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Not from Baldwin. | 34:30 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah? | 34:32 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, not from Baldwin, but from this area I did because I had a sister married a fellow from Grand Marais. And when I was a child, after she married, I would come and spend summers with her. That's how I got to know the Grand Marais. And that's why when people tell me I'm from the Grand Marais, I tell them, "No, I'm not. And don't classify me with the Grand Marais people." But they had a hall where— They had everything out there to themselves. They didn't come into New Iberia, go to the clubs or whatever. Everything was out there for them. And she would make me go to the dances with her little niece on her husband's side and we would go and we would get into the dance and actually dark fellas would come out there, those old men would stand to the door and make them go. They could not come in. Keep them from coming into the dance. | 34:35 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And she's told me, after she went to California, she was in California for 30 years after her husband moved and she moved to California and she knew relatives of his that had come to California, and when they would fill out a resume for a job, they would put White, they would not put Black. And she knew those people and she knew where they had come from. | 35:30 |
| Felix Armfield | And what time period are you talking about? I mean, [indistinct 00:35:59] spent some time in the Grand Marais community. | 35:52 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Well, that was before I got married. So I married in 50, so that would be like 46 and 47. In the forties. Uh-huh. | 36:02 |
| Kate Ellis | So was there a lot of, like right after the war and around the war, people from Grand Marais going to California? | 36:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 36:17 |
| Kate Ellis | Yes? | 36:17 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They moved. | 36:18 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. Do you know where this name 'Grand Marais' comes from? | 36:20 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I would have to look— If y'all be here for a month, I can look it up. I can find somebody who'll tell me why it's named that. Yeah. I don't know what Marais stand for. But I know some of the houses out there, they're up to the road but then you go down, you're like in a marsh and my sister's mother-in-law used to call that the Mary. Now why they called it the Mary, I don't know. I'd have to find out. I'd have to dig it up for you. | 36:25 |
| Felix Armfield | Now, do you know the origins of these people that are in the Grand Marais area? | 37:00 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Well, it's changing now because the younger girls are going out and you find a lot of them marrying dark boys. And the men are marrying darker girls, so they're not even bringing the darker people in, and it's nothing the old people can do about it. So it's changing. | 37:08 |
| Felix Armfield | What are the origins of it? Do you know where they stem from? | 37:29 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I can tell you. The whole group is about seven or eight different family names. They were inner marrying their cousins. So in order to not bring somebody else in, you marry somebody that's already here, even though that's your second or first cousin. And some of those kids are because they're so closely related. Yes. Lulu. | 37:32 |
| Felix Armfield | All together. | 38:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. | 38:06 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:38:06] | 38:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. | 38:06 |
| Felix Armfield | Yeah. Still, when I say the origins— | 38:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And if you tell them I said that, they may beat me up. | 38:06 |
| Felix Armfield | We will never tell. I mean, why were those people being put aside up as they were out there? I mean, there were other light skin people in the community, that weren't out there, why were these people placed out in a community all by themselves? | 38:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I think they started the community themselves. And it might have been maybe three or four different families, I guess. I really don't know. I really don't know how it got started. I'm going to look that up for you. See if I can find out. | 38:29 |
| Michele Mitchell | We sort of left off when you were in high school. | 38:46 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. | 38:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | And I think if you could just tell us some more about— You said that you left Baldwin after about 17 years? Where did you go from there? | 38:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I got married after I finished high school and then I moved to New Iberia. | 38:58 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 39:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. | 39:04 |
| Michele Mitchell | So how was that different for you when you came to New Iberia? | 39:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It was like I had come to a big city. Yeah. But then I soon learned that it wasn't any different from the little town that I had come from. | 39:09 |
| Felix Armfield | And when did you come out here? | 39:19 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | In 1950. | 39:22 |
| Felix Armfield | And what was New Iberia like in 1950? Where did you live? What was the neighbor— | 39:23 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I lived across the track. Still was across the track where the Black people lived. And my ex-husband worked for a filling station on Main Street. | 39:32 |
| Felix Armfield | Filling station, meaning gas station? | 39:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Gas station, yeah. Pumping gas. And we had a little three room house, little sharp shooter house. So I came from a big house in Baldwin and came to a sharp shooter house. We rented it from some Syrians. And life, to me, was the same as it was in Baldwin. I had not progressed. I felt like I had not progressed. Maybe if I had stayed a little longer and gone on to college, maybe I could have done something else instead of getting married and coming here and living like I— Well, sometimes, I thought I was living worse than I was living in Baldwin because then, you had a husband and then you had a child. I had my first child and then it was like— I never worked. I didn't work then. I did domestic work after I left him, but I had to stay in the house and mind my babies. That's the way he put it. | 39:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | So [indistinct 00:40:46], I have no idea what New Liberia looked like in 1950, I don't think any of us did but was there a place where you could have a garden or anything like that? | 40:45 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, I only planted flowers. | 40:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah? | 40:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No. But in the area where I live now, people had gardens. That's like my husband, whenever you interview him, he'll tell you they had everything they wanted right at home because they had enough property. Right now, he inherited 50 acres and where the house is, we are on, I guess, maybe three acres, where the house is. But his father, back then, knew what to do with a dollar. You had to know what to do with a dollar, that was all. I guess I knew what to do with my little dollars when I was in the house taking care of my kids because then, we never bought a home. We always rented until I left him, and I stayed with him for 10 years. And I had three kids when I left. | 40:58 |
| Michele Mitchell | So then, that sort of self-sufficiency, you said that you knew how to take care of a dollar— | 41:51 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. The little money that he brought home, I knew what to do with it. | 41:57 |
| Michele Mitchell | How would you do that? Would you just sew— | 42:00 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Well, stench on the groceries, not spend much on foolishness and try to save a few dollars. And you know what he did me, when I left? We had banked the money and he drew it out. And when I went to the bank to go get it, there was none. It was gone. So I had to start from scratch with my three kids, and they were trying to make him pay $15 a month, $5 per child. Not 15, I'm sorry, $15 a week, $5 per child, and he quit paying that because he said he couldn't afford it. | 42:02 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's when I did domestic work. I used to go to the lady who I used to buy my groceries and I would clean her house. She would come and pick me up and I'd take the baby, my 34 year old boy now, it was a year and a half, I think, and I would take him with me to her house and clean her house. She would just put me there and tell me, "Do it like you do your own," And put my baby in her baby's pen because somebody else had her baby. I was just going to clean up and cook and wash and iron and all that stuff. And she told me, "Just do it like I want. Whenever you get ready to go home, just call me up and I'll come pick you up." I did that for a good while. And then the library came in when the girl that lived behind my house where I was renting, she asked me to work in her place a couple of days, that was on the book mobile. | 42:42 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And I did that, and then she finally had a child and then she couldn't go back full time so she asked the lady to let me work part-time in her place. I worked part-time in her place, and then when she came back full-time, then I worked part-time in another lady's place. And then she got pregnant again to have another baby, and then she couldn't come back because she had two kids because she was well off enough not to have to go back to work. So then the librarian here, back then, put me in a in-service training program. And they trained me, and they trained me well. And I went on from there to be where I am now. But I had to work hard. | 43:35 |
| Felix Armfield | Talk about starting from the bottom. | 44:19 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I did. I had to mop the book Mobile. When we came in, the dirt all on the— We had to get in there with a bucket and mop, mop it up, clean it up so it'd go out the next day. And it didn't bother me because this is what I had to do. That's right. I had to raise my children. I had to try to educate them. And I educated the first two, the oldest one and the middle one, and the baby boy had gotten to the place where I never had trouble. I've got good children, but when your children mixed with other kids, they take their minds and tell them what they should do. | 44:21 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He was going to Nicholls State University in Thibodaux and he had a scholarship. He had a four year scholarship. | 44:57 |
| Felix Armfield | Thibodaux? | 45:02 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Thibodaux, T-H-I-B-O-D-E-A-U-X. And he was the only one that didn't study it like the other two. The other two, when the middle boy didn't have a book to read, he would read the encyclopedia. But that last one, it was like— I think, when you give a child too much, then they have a tendency to expect you to do, to give. And you see those first two, I couldn't give them everything. They had to work to help me to get where they got. | 45:05 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I was just giving him too much, I guess. So he went a year and then he called me up and told me, "I think I got to set out." So I said, "Well, you just come home and get you a job because I'm not going to work hard and send you to school, give you money, for you to go and play." So he came back and he has since married a girl who had two kids and she's got one for him. Sweetest kids you want to see. They all call me maw maw and I love them all, but like I said, that's not what I would have wanted for him to do because he could have been a big football player because they gave him the scholarship because he really could play. And I had some great big men. | 45:42 |
| Kate Ellis | When we talked on Monday, we talked about the difference between the library that you worked in, which was at that time for Blacks only versus the White one. Can you talk a little bit more about that? | 0:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The Booker T. Washington branch was the library where I started. We had a Book Mobile, and the area was maybe twice as big as this room. The White library was on Week Street where Blacks couldn't go, and Blacks had to go to the one where I worked. That was 1950. It had to be in the 60s. It was in the 60s. They built this building in 1966, and that's when Black people, and that's when the NAACP was working in here. It said that tax dollars were being paid by Whites and Blacks, so Black people should be able to come to the main library. | 0:19 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | After that was announced that they could, well then I lost all my Black patrons at the Black library. Then I had, like I told you, a few White people who lived in that area who never knew that was a library. They just knew Black people were going in and out. One lady stopped in and she said, "Well, what is this?" | 1:16 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:01:42] going to the library. | 1:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No. | 1:41 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:01:42]. | 1:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No. I said, "This is a library." She said, "Can we come?" Because her little kids were right in the neighborhood and they could walk to the library. So, I said, "Sure, they can come." They started coming, and they started telling other White families that was a library, so they started coming. I went from Black patrons to White patrons. Then the circulation went down and they decided to sell the building and bring me over here. That's when the mess took place, because they had Whites who didn't want me on the Book Mobile. They didn't know where to put me. | 1:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Like I said, the NAACP was working then. The same Mr. Henderson that I was upset with about the book, she told me to call all the influential Black people to find out what was their thoughts about that library being closed because it was named after a Black man and maybe they would start something because they would close it. I called Mr. Henderson and I asked Mr. Henderson what he did think about it. He said, "Well, the only thing I want to know is that going to put you out of a job? It looks like they're trying to wipe all the Black people out of fairly decent jobs." | 2:17 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | So I told him, "No, they're not going to fire me. They're going to just move me up on Main Street." He said, "That's fine. If they want to close it, tell them close it." That's what they did, they closed the Washington branch and they brought me up here. Like I said on the Book Mobile, the two ladies who were working on the Book Mobile didn't want me on the Book Mobile because they said I couldn't go into the White homes. We went to an influential White lady where they used to drive the Book Mobile into her yard, and they would get out and go and eat cookies and drink coffee. | 2:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | One day, the lady that was working on the Book Mobile, her other worker didn't show up. I was here floating around. They didn't know what to do with me, so they sent me on the Book Mobile with her. We went to this lady's house. I knew that lady from a long way from way back. She got down and she said, "Well, you just stay on the Book Mobile until I come back. I'll be back." So she went on in the lady's house, which is a great big mansion down there on the highway. She went in and the lady asked her if she had come by herself because it was always two people on the Book Mobile. | 3:31 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | She told her no, the other lady wasn't with her, but Ms. Manuel was with her. She said, "You mean to tell me Ms. Manuel is sitting on the Book Mobile?" So she told her yes. It was raining. The lady came out with two umbrellas, one for her and one for me. She brought me in her house. This girl was sitting down with her, legs crossed drinking coffee and eating cake. I think they had pound cake that day. The lady brought me all over the house to show me her kitchen and all that other kind of stuff. She just sat there and scratched her eyes. | 4:05 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | When we got back on the Book Mobile to leave out, I said, "Now you see? That's the reason why I didn't want to work with y'all. Y'all think that I couldn't go maybe because my skin is light and they wouldn't accept me. You thought maybe if I was dark they wouldn't accept me because I was Black. But that lady accepted me for who I am, not for the color of my skin." I got mad with her, and she got mad with me, and she wouldn't speak to me for a long, long time. Poor baby, she had cancer afterwards. I had to pray because she couldn't hear well in the right side of her ear. When she'd come and ask me things, I would talk toward that right ear so she wouldn't hear. | 4:36 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I did it on purpose. When she got sick and she knew she was going to die, she came to me and she apologized. It looked like I didn't have it to apologize to her because she had done me so bad. Actually, she was darker than I was. Her skin was darker than mine. She really looked Black, not me. When she died, that Sunday morning after they told me the body was at the funeral home, I said, "I'm going to have to go. I didn't make good peace with her, so I'm going to have to go to that wake." I went to the funeral home and I had to kneel down, and I had to ask God to forgive me for what I had done to her, because what I did to her, I did it on purpose because she was so mean. | 5:25 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That ended that thing between me and her in the Book Mobile. But I really had to pray. Then they brought one lady in who had finished high school, a correspondence course. When they were whipping around [indistinct 00:06:38], I was aware they were going to put me, what they were going to do with me. They couldn't fire me because I had been working for so long. They were bringing new people in all the time, and new people were Whites. The girl that was running the front, they brought this lady in and they said she was going to be that girl's assistant. | 6:15 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Well, I was still piddling around in the back, if you didn't have two stories then, I was piddling around in the back mending books and whatever they gave me to do. [indistinct 00:07:12]. This girl came in and they made her the assistant. She had been working here for I guess two months. Then they told me that they were going to transfer me, going back to branches. I could go work in the evening in one branch, and break here in the mornings. It was just passing me around. One day, they had a conference and all the head people, the librarian, their assistant librarian, and the assistant to her because they had an assistant to the assistant then. | 7:01 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They all went to the conference, and let all the [indistinct 00:07:56] people here. I had heard that that lady had finished high school with a correspondence course. She was just flaunting her weight around. We almost had a fight that day, but I had to go close myself up in the room to keep from beating her. She was trying to make me do what she wanted me to do because the big people weren't here. I told her I wasn't going to do it. I said, "When they come back, I'm going to tell them that I'm not going to do what you tell me to do. In the first place, you got a high school education with a correspondence course. I finished high school in a school, I've had inservice training from [indistinct 00:08:39]. I went to [indistinct 00:08:40] for a few weeks and then they had a teacher that came here to teach." | 7:52 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I said, "You have never gone through that. I can't see why you could come in here in two months time and get an assistantship and I'm still here making 75 cents an hour." So she got mad at me. I left that afternoon. I said, "I'm going to leave. I'm going home because I don't want no humbug. I don't want to fight, because she's going to make me hit her. So I'm going home." And I went home. The next morning when those people were back, I called the boss and I told her I wanted to talk to her. I was coming in to talk to her and the assistant librarian. She said to come on in. | 8:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I had all this little stuff I had written down on some of those little cards. I had the incident that happened at that lady's house, because they didn't know nothing about that. I had all incidents where they had done me wrong. I said, "Well y'all can fire me if you want. I've been here a long time, but I've got enough. I'm up to my neck with the way y'all are treating me. I really want to tell you about it, and if fire me after that, it's okay. I'll go home." When I finished, I had them both crying. She knew about the incident at that lady's house because the lady had called her and told her, "Don't ever let that happen again, not at her house." | 9:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | So they knew some of the things that I had written down. She told me that they had already heard about it. Then she told me, "Now, will you go home and talk with your husband and find out if he wants you to accept this promotion." They gave me the promotion then. Then I was assistant to the other girl who was the circulation supervisor, and now I'm the circulation supervisor. How about that? But I went through hell. | 10:03 |
| Michele Mitchell | And it sounds like it. | 10:34 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I tried. | 10:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Speaking of going through hell, you told us the other day about the job that you had with the man— | 10:39 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Who sold the house to my mother? | 10:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | No. Was that the man where his wife died and then his— | 10:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes, that was before I came to New Iberia. | 10:51 |
| Michele Mitchell | So that was beforehand. | 10:54 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes, that was when I was a young girl, before I got married. | 10:55 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:10:59] domestic labor is another story. | 10:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Well, it was like when I was in school— An evening job, that's where I went in the afternoon and on Saturdays. Then after I finished high school, I went to work for him full-time. That was after his wife had passed and the sister had gone to Pineville. | 11:00 |
| Michele Mitchell | Did he sell your mother that house because they were moving out because Black folks were moving in the area? | 11:21 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. Yes, and they bought a house on Main Street. They built a house on Main Street. | 11:28 |
| Michele Mitchell | Could you tell us a little bit again about how you couldn't sit down, and the things that you went through when you wanted to eat? | 11:35 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh, well I told you that story, but I can tell it again. | 11:45 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah. [indistinct 00:11:50]. | 11:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | My brother and I worked for those people. He was the yard boy and I was the housemaid. It was the man and his wife, and his sister. They had a general merchandise store that had everything in it. That's where my mother bought her groceries. | 11:51 |
| Felix Armfield | How old were you at this time? | 12:11 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I would say 14. 14, 15, 16. I was 14 going on 15. He would clean the yard, and like I said, they would let the cows out of the cow yard into the backyard to help him because it was such a great big yard to cut grass. At that time, you know how you had to push the lawnmower? You didn't have a lawnmower. You had one which you pushed. They would let the cows into the yard to help to eat the grass. Then if they'd poop in the yard, then he had to go behind the cows and pick it up. When it was time for dinner, he would stay out in the shed in the backyard. | 12:11 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I would help her to set the table and put all the food on the table, and then she would tell me to go sit on the back porch until they finished eating. Well, I knew where my place was. It was on the back porch. After a while, she didn't have to tell me to go sit on the back porch because I knew where my place was. I'd go sit. When they would finish eating, then she would come in the kitchen and tell me to go to the table and fix brother a plate and bring it to him out in the yard. I would do that, bring my brother his plate. Then she would tell me to fix my plate so I could eat. Then I would fix my plate, and I would go on the back porch and I'd eat it. I didn't even sit to the kitchen table. | 12:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | After I ate, then I'd go get brother's plate and get my plate, and then I'd wash all the dishes and put up the food, and clean the kitchen, and get ready to go home. The old lady died, the man's wife, and after she died he and the sister ran the store. They would be at the store all day long. By that time, I was out of school so I could work full-time. I would go the store. He told me whatever I wanted to cook, get it. They ate a lot of soul food because I cooked soul food, and they ate it and liked it. | 13:29 |
| Felix Armfield | Usually they do. | 14:08 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. They liked it, and they liked the way I cooked, and they liked the way I kept the house up. I cleaned the house just like I would do. They had television. You see, at that time you didn't have but maybe one or two televisions in the whole town. When I finished cooking my dinner, I'd be waiting for them to come to eat. I'd set the table, and I'd turn the TV on, and the sofa that I could not sit on before, or the chairs that I could not sit on before, I would sit on the sofa, put my foot up on the ottoman and watch the television in that house. | 14:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Then the sister lost her mind, and she went to Pineville. They would let her come home maybe every third weekend. She'd come on a Friday evening, she'd stay Saturday and Sunday, and they would send her home. They sent her back, or go bring her back on Sunday evening. I guess she had what we call now Alzheimer's disease, because she wasn't a violent person. He told me when I would stay there with her on Saturdays, they would pay me double to stay on Saturdays because they thought I was scared of her. | 14:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He said, "Whenever she'd get to fooling around and get nervous and start pulling on things, that's about as much as she's going to do. All you have to do is holler at her and she'll stop." So here's this lady who was the big lady and I was the little nigger in the house working. I had to holler at her sometimes to make her stop doing what she was doing, and she would listen to me, and she would go and sit down in the chair until she'd get ready to start again. | 15:14 |
| Michele Mitchell | So you left that job when you were about 15? | 15:52 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. Let me see, because that was '47. I'm trying to think of years now. It must have been in '47 because I graduated in— Well, I was working for him in '47, so this had to all be in '48. When I graduated in May, I went to work for them full-time. That was when all this happened, but me working every day at that house. | 15:55 |
| Michele Mitchell | Since you were sort of young during the war, were there a lot of your male friends or people that you knew going off to the war? | 16:23 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh, yeah. | 16:31 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah? | 16:31 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mm-hmm. | 16:32 |
| Michele Mitchell | What was that like? Were they just leaving in droves? | 16:33 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah, the train would pass and they would be coming from other states. They would be boarding the train. The train is the thing that took them away. | 16:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Do you think it affected your life in any major way? | 16:48 |
| Felix Armfield | Especially who you married and all that. | 16:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes, because then I could have married somebody from home who would have been— Maybe I would have been better— Well, I don't know. I don't want to say I would have been better off, because I think I'm well off now, even with the mistakes that were made in my life. I think that it's possible that I would have married somebody from home. See, because I married— The children's daddy was from Olivia. That's a little place in between here and Jeanerette. He was a friend to my sister's husband. He was older than me. He was 13 years older than me, so you see how bad I wanted to get out of my house. | 16:57 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He's an old man now. When I look at him now, I always look up and say, "Thank you Jesus," that I left. Yeah, I think it made a difference with me because— | 17:36 |
| Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm, [indistinct 00:17:54] choices. | 17:54 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah, mm-hmm, your choices of who you married. Here this man was, he had a car and I was thinking he was a big something and he had plenty. And he didn't have S. So, I just put myself in a bad predicament. | 17:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | But do you think that when the men that you did know came back, did they— How did they feel about the segregation that was around y'all? Did they react to that? | 18:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes, because then you started having problems because Black people just wouldn't accept what they were doing to them in the past. That's when they started with you'd have confrontations between Blacks and Whites. My brother that passed, he was a principal of Mary Hines Elementary School in Charenton. He said that he didn't think that they should have integrated. Now he's dead and gone, and I'm talking for him, but he said they should have had equal, but what? | 18:22 |
| Felix Armfield | Separate but equal. | 18:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Separate but equal, because he said when he was the principal of the school with the Black children, he said they had the Black children under control. When they integrated the schools, all hell broke loose. [indistinct 00:19:13] the little Black children were trying to do what the little White children were doing, and they didn't listen. He said it just changed. He said that's what he thought, he didn't think that they should have integrated. | 19:00 |
| Felix Armfield | And he felt that basically the system should have remained separate. | 19:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Separate but equal. | 19:27 |
| Felix Armfield | But truly equal. | 19:28 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Truly equal, right. Mm-hmm. So they could have kept their culture and whatever they did, I guess. | 19:30 |
| Felix Armfield | He felt that there was too big of a price paid— | 19:40 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. | 19:42 |
| Felix Armfield | — [indistinct 00:19:43]. | 19:42 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. That's right. | 19:42 |
| Felix Armfield | What happened when integration finally did come to this area? What kinds of things do you think were lost, if you think anything was lost at all? | 19:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | If anything was lost. | 20:03 |
| Felix Armfield | How did you feel about integration then? | 20:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I thought it was fine because my children being in school and not having what the White kids had in school, then they couldn't keep it from them after they were integrated. They had to do what they were supposed to do to the Blacks as well as Whites. Of course, you know that they had problems with that too, that they mistreated them because they were Black, some of them. Then I think the Black children got accustomed— We have children now that come in this library who say, "You're just doing this to us because we're Black." We have to have a security guard during the school times because we have so many kids in here. | 20:11 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The Black children will tell you, "You're doing this to us because we're Black." I said, "They're not doing that to you because you're Black. Just if you sit down quiet and get your lesson, do what you're supposed to do, then they're not going to mistreat you." It's like they all got chips on their shoulders and just daring you to knock them off. When it came, I think that it corrected a whole lot of problems. I think some Whites didn't want it, but then they would tell you, "Well, I always did like Black people." Then some would just shut up. I think some of them still have that segregated mind, but they just don't say it. They just don't talk about it. | 20:50 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I thought it was all right. Of course, like I'm saying, like you said, integration was just a big price to pay for it. Your children had to pay for it in school. You had to pay for it because actually they didn't want you. They had two plantations here, one in Patterdale and they had one in Peebles. I think Peebles has closed down. I think Patterdale, I've not been out there for a good while, but the lady who owned the Pattus Plantation, she came in here one day after I was the assistant supervisor. I had two Black girls working with us. The circulation supervisor was White. | 21:51 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | She knew the White girl, so when she came in she asked Margaret, "I see you have all these Black girls. Did y'all have to hire them?" It's like they said you have to hire so many Blacks. That's what she was asking, "Did y'all have to hire them?" Now this is seven years ago, because that other girl was here about seven years ago. | 22:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | You mentioned earlier that you called Mr. Henderson when they were closing the library, Booker T. Washington branch, and he said to you that he felt that they were trying to push all the Blacks out of the good jobs. | 23:11 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. | 23:23 |
| Michele Mitchell | Do you think that when integration came that a lot of Black businesses shut down? Because if the library shut down, similar things happened with businesses. How did people do their jobs when that happened? | 23:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | There weren't too many Black businesses. I think we have more Black businesses now than you had then. | 23:39 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 23:46 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | People lost their jobs. Some Blacks lost their jobs. That's just like in the school system, the principals that were principals, they demoted them back to the classroom and put a White man into the school as a principal. Mr. Deidren Augusta can tell you about that because he fought for his job. He fought tooth and nail, and he kept his job until he retired. | 23:46 |
| Felix Armfield | Can you tell us the story again of the missing pages from your son's textbook? | 24:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 24:18 |
| Felix Armfield | And he couldn't keep up. | 24:19 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah, the Black schools would always have the leavings from the White schools. If the White schools got new books, well then they sent the old books to the Black schools. He was an A student, but he was making Cs in science. His book didn't have a back on it, and it had pages missing. When he came up to a chapter he couldn't read, well then he went to school without— He was half reading his chapter. | 24:20 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | So I took the book. We had a PTA meeting. I took the book to the PTA meeting to find out why the children had raggedy books, and why the child was making Cs because he didn't have a book to study from. The floor wouldn't recognize me because that was not the place to bring that. So I said, "Where do I bring it?" They said, "Just sit down," and he me sit down. I had tears in my eyes and the president, Ms. Agnes Lander who you got on the list too, she said, "I think Ms. Manuel wants to be heard. Let's hear her out." | 24:49 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Then I stood up and I told them what had happened, the child had a raggedy book and he was making Cs in that grade, and he was making As and Bs in all the other classes. He said, "We can't help her at this meeting. You bring that to my office." When the meeting was over I went to him and I told him that I was not going to bring it to his office. I said, "This was the place to bring this. The books are for the PTA to talk about. You don't have to do anything, but I will do something." | 25:28 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | So he got mad at me and I left. The next morning after I got to work, I called Mr. Wemberly, who was the superintendent then. I told him about what had happened, and the books were all torn, pages were missing. He said, "Well I wasn't aware that the schools needed books." The next day, they had a whole truckload of new books went to the school. Mr. Henderson got mad with me and stayed mad with me for about a year. | 26:03 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | But then they six months after that, that he was a PTA meeting, and I don't know what kind of confusion they were having, but they said he talked. He said that, "If every parent was like Ms. Manuel, then it would have been a better community to live in." | 26:32 |
| Felix Armfield | Who was the superintendent, Mr. Wemberly? | 26:50 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mr. Wemberly. | 26:53 |
| Felix Armfield | Was he Black or White? | 26:54 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He was White. | 26:55 |
| Felix Armfield | He wasn't aware of— | 26:57 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | We'd never had a Black superintendent here. | 26:58 |
| Felix Armfield | But he wasn't aware of— | 27:00 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He wasn't aware of the fact that the Black schools needed books. | 27:02 |
| Felix Armfield | — were getting secondhand books? | 27:05 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Getting secondhand books, or needed new books, or needed books period. I don't know if the fault was in Mr. Henderson because he didn't ask, or if Mr— | 27:06 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:27:17] superintendent and not be aware of that— | 27:17 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And not be aware. | 27:19 |
| Felix Armfield | — these children needed books. | 27:19 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's right. | 27:20 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was Mr. Henderson a supervisor over Black schools or what? | 27:20 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He was the principal there. | 27:24 |
| Michele Mitchell | He was just a principal. | 27:26 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He was a principal. | 27:27 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 27:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mm-hmm. | 27:27 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay, and then this was which school? | 27:28 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | At Jonas Henderson High, the school named for his father. | 27:31 |
| Michele Mitchell | [indistinct 00:27:34]. | 27:33 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mm-hmm. | 27:33 |
| Michele Mitchell | What year did this happen? I don't know if you told me. | 27:39 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Okay, that must have been '67 because Felton Junior graduated in '69, so it had to be around '67. | 27:41 |
| Felix Armfield | That's still fairly recent. | 27:47 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's right. | 27:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | It sure is. | 27:50 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's right. | 27:52 |
| Kate Ellis | It is curious that the superintendent would say that he no awareness of— | 27:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He wasn't aware, that's what he said. | 27:58 |
| Kate Ellis | But also that he would move so quickly on it. Then I wonder if at that point he somehow thought "I've been caught." | 28:02 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It could be. | 28:06 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:28:08]. | 28:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It could be. | 28:07 |
| Kate Ellis | — political got into his office. | 28:09 |
| Felix Armfield | And I hear a double statement there. I wasn't aware that these Black children even needed books. | 28:10 |
| Kate Ellis | That's what I'm saying, he would say he had no awareness of it, and yet how could he not? | 28:16 |
| Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm. | 28:22 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And be the superintendent. | 28:22 |
| Kate Ellis | And then to act on it so quickly— | 28:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah, because it was the next day. I had teachers call me up from the high school. Ms. Debra Bayshare called me and thanked me for doing what I did, because they said, "Now we have books for the children." | 28:25 |
| Felix Armfield | Sounds like it was just a matter of somebody calling him on that fact. | 28:37 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah, that's— | 28:40 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right, mm-hmm. | 28:40 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 28:42 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | One day, they told me she thinks the reason why Mr. Henderson got mad was because he was a principal. Maybe he was afraid to go to them, and here's this little lady who has a child in high school is going to come and go over me and go to the superintendent. | 28:43 |
| Kate Ellis | Well I mean, if he fought so hard to keep his job— | 29:01 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's not the one that fought hard to keep his job. | 29:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, I thought [indistinct 00:29:07]. | 29:05 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mr. Augusta. | 29:05 |
| Michele Mitchell | That was Mr. Augusta. | 29:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, right. | 29:11 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, see they moved [indistinct 00:29:11]— | 29:11 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:29:11]. | 29:11 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | When they closed, Henderson— When they integrated the schools and made Henderson what they made it, a middle school or freshman high, whatever it was, and it took the name away. They had other people in the community fighting for them to keep the names, but they discarded all the names of the Black schools that they had. | 29:11 |
| Kate Ellis | The school that your son was in was a Black— | 29:33 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | A Black high school. | 29:35 |
| Kate Ellis | — high school in a different name. | 29:36 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Jonas Henderson High. | 29:37 |
| Michele Mitchell | [indistinct 00:29:40] was at Henderson Middle School, too? A different Henderson? Because Mr. Augusta was talking about two different Hendersons. | 29:39 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Okay, there's— No, it was Henderson. That's when they took the name. They called it Anderson. You see, they took all the people's names, took them out and named them the streets. Back there where Anderson Junior High is, that used to be Henderson Junior High. Then Henderson Senior High went out to where my son was, when they built the new school. That was to keep them from out of the high school with the Whites. So, they built them a high school. | 29:45 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Now, that is freshman high. All the names, the took all the names out. AB Simon was [indistinct 00:30:23] Simon's name, that was at the elementary school. Now they're calling that Railroad Avenue Elementary. They all went to streets. | 30:14 |
| Felix Armfield | And they're not going to have these little White children going to schools that were named for Black heroes, because there was no such thing. | 30:34 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's right. | 30:40 |
| Michele Mitchell | So Mr. Jonas Henderson was an educator, or an early educator? | 30:42 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. Mm-hmm. And his father was too. That's why they named the school after his father, but he didn't fight for his job like Mr. Augusta did. They gave him another level position. It's like you can't be a principal because I can't put in a school with the Black and the Whites as a principal, so they took him out of the school and put him in some kind of little supervisor where he went to the schools and maybe monitored the teachers or something like that. It might have been just monitoring the Black teachers, because me, I don't think they let him monitor the White ones. I don't know. But they took him out of the school and they gave him a little office, a little job up at the school board. | 30:46 |
| Kate Ellis | That was his job when you [indistinct 00:31:28]? | 31:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He was a principal then. That was his school. | 31:27 |
| Felix Armfield | And probably one of the factors that he was still upset with you, is that you never know what kind of heat he may have received for having not dealt with— | 31:28 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's true. | 31:42 |
| Felix Armfield | — question in the meeting and allowing a parent to— | 31:43 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | To call on. Right. | 31:44 |
| Felix Armfield | — that the superintendent of school cannot— | 31:47 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Not him. | 31:50 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:31:51] heat. | 31:50 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, that's possible. Because now he's just the nicest person as he can be. He comes in here to make copies and he wants to know how I always felt [indistinct 00:32:00] wondering about my other kids, wondering how I'm doing. Just as nice as he can be. | 31:51 |
| Kate Ellis | I think— | 32:08 |
| Michele Mitchell | Do you know the story about the two doctors and the two dentists that [indistinct 00:32:18]. | 32:09 |
| Kate Ellis | No. | 32:15 |
| Michele Mitchell | Dr. Emmer? | 32:19 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 32:20 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh. | 32:23 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:32:24] when you went to the doctor. | 32:23 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | When I first moved here I had to go to the dentist because I needed— | 32:24 |
| Felix Armfield | And you first moved here in? | 32:29 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | In '50. That was about I guess maybe between '51 and '52 that I went to his office. Well, I was new in town and I had asked the lady that lived next door to me about a dentist. They didn't have Black dentists here then. She told me Dr. Emmer was a good— | 32:29 |
| Felix Armfield | Spell that last name? | 32:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | E-M-M-E-R. Dr. Emmer was a good dentist. I left walking. At that time I wasn't driving a car. I had my little baby because Felton Junior was born. I walked to Dr. Emmer's office, where I thought that's where she had told me to go. When I opened the door, it was like a big foyer in the front when you walked into the door, and the back they had a door where the dentist went from one examination room to the other. But he could see in the part where the people sat to wait to go to the dentist. | 32:49 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It was all White people in there when I got there. When I walked in, I stood up and I didn't know whether to go to the desk to tell the lady I was there to see for the dentist. Then he happened to pass by the door and he looked at me, and my little boy was brown with little blondish nappy hair, and he looked at me and him, myself and the child, and he said, "We don't wait on niggers here." So I said, "Well I'm sorry, somebody had told me to come here." Then he just went on about his business. | 33:30 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The White lady that was sitting by the door, she said, "They may have told you Dr. Emmer, his brother. He has a brother that's a dentist." She told me how to get there. It was in Church Alley. I thanked her and I walked from there to where the other office was. When I walked in, of course he had a little section where Black people sat and he had another door where White people went in too. | 34:12 |
| Felix Armfield | A segregated waiting room. | 34:36 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It was a segregated waiting room, but you went in the same examination rooms. He asked me who had recommended me to come to him. I said, "My next door neighbor did, but I think I went to the wrong Dr. Emmer because he told me he didn't wait on niggers." He started cursing. I guess I put these words that he— | 34:37 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:34:59]. | 34:57 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He said, "Goddamn, son of a bitch. He ain't no good. You just come on in here. I'll wait on you. Don't worry about it. He's just no good. He just hates Black people." That was two brothers, two dentists. They both were dentists. | 34:59 |
| Felix Armfield | That was in the early 50s. | 35:18 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That was between '51 and '51. | 35:19 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was it typical to be with a doctor, if they would wait on you, that there would be segregated waiting room— | 35:22 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh, yes. | 35:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | — and the same examination room? | 35:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mm-hmm. Same exam room. I don't know if they made a difference. Because you see, if you had four examination rooms, when they called you— I don't know whether they had separate rooms back there where they put Blacks and where they put Whites. I don't know. There could have— I'll tell you what, I went to Dr. Beaullieu, and he was a very good doctor and I liked him. | 35:29 |
| Michele Mitchell | Who was that? | 35:55 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Dr. Beaullieu, B-E-A-U-L-L-I-E-U. He's retired now. | 35:56 |
| Felix Armfield | B-E-A-U- | 36:02 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | L-L-I-E-U. He had separate— It was just a little hole in the wall, with some little hard chairs for Blacks to sit. The Whites came in through the front with nice big soft chairs. They told you, and I think that was in 19— I was still going to Beaullieu in the 60s. After they integrated in schools and told you could go to the restaurant and that kind of stuff, well then they told you you could go to the doctor and you could sit in the front. | 36:03 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I think what they used to do, you got all your people and you had to sign your name that you were there to see the doctor. I think what they did, they got all the White people first and then the got the Black people last. I know they did that because I would sit in the little room, and I would sit and wait, and here a White lady comes in way after me and the White lady is leaving, and I'm still sitting here waiting to see the doctor. | 36:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | After they told you you could sit, they still kept that little room. When I would go, I would go sit on the White side. I don't know whether they thought I was trying to be White. I didn't care what they thought. But I wasn't going to sit on them little hard benches if they told me I could go and sit on a soft chair. Finally, I stopped going to him. Then I started going to specialists and I stopped going to him. They all had separate rooms for Blacks to wait for the doctor. | 37:04 |
| Michele Mitchell | I'm wondering, because this [indistinct 00:37:39] a while ago, when you moved to New Iberia and you got settled in, were there organizations that you joined? Were there more active organizations to New Iberia for Black people? | 37:36 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They started having organizations for Black people around in the 70s, because people were afraid. Black people were afraid to come out and say because they may do something to them. It was in the 70s they started having organizations for Black people. | 37:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was there anything like the Knights of Peter Claver, or the masons that was before that? | 38:14 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I never knew the masons to fight for Blacks. | 38:21 |
| Michele Mitchell | But there was a Black mason— | 38:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. Yes. | 38:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | [indistinct 00:38:28]. | 38:26 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, but I never knew him to come out and fight for Blacks. The only organization that ever came out for Blacks was the NAACP. Maybe if you talk to some older people who were here in the 40s, because you know there's a strange thing, the Catholic church here, St. Peter Catholic church, my husband's mother and father is buried in there. Even now, when they have All Saints' Day I'll go in and I put flowers, even now when Nick and I go there to put flowers on that tomb, and the tomb is up by the sidewalk up to the front. Not way in the back. The tomb is to the front. They'd look at us strange when we'd go. | 38:28 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | My husband said his mom and dad belonged— No, not his dad. His mama belonged to St. Peter Church, but it was just like a church like our church in Baldwin. You belonged to the church, and that was their graveyard. That's how he think his dad was buried there, because his father died before his mama. She bought a plot, I guess, and they're there. But it's mostly White in there because St. Peter's is a— | 39:17 |
| Felix Armfield | She may have worked for a family and they may have just buried her there. | 39:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I don't think because his mom never worked. | 39:47 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 39:49 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | His mom never worked. But is that she belonged to St. Peter. That was before St. Edwards, because St. Edwards is the Black Catholic church. I think what happened was, after St. Edwards opened up for the Black people, then they switched from St. Peter's to St. Edwards. | 39:49 |
| Michele Mitchell | But the people in New Iberia joined in burial like they did back in Baldwin? | 40:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes, because there was an incident here I guess about 20 years ago. There was a [indistinct 00:40:23] fellow on the Grand Mary. His mom died. She dropped dead in the house. They belonged to, I don't want to lie, I don't know if that's [indistinct 00:40:33] because we had two funeral homes here. I think [indistinct 00:40:38] fixing to take over [indistinct 00:40:40]. I think it might have been [indistinct 00:40:42]. They had the burial. | 40:14 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He was supposed to come pick up the body. When you died, after the coroner said they're dead, then they'd pick up the body and bring it to the funeral home to embalm it. Well, when he called them they refused to pick up the body. The body was on the floor dead until— I'm trying to think of a Black funeral home. We had a Black funeral home then. I think that's who picked up the body, but they refused to embalm her and refused to pick up the body. | 40:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That poor boy went nuts because he took it court, and now the funeral homes have to— If you've got a burial, now they have to pick you up. They have to [indistinct 00:41:23] in the funeral home. | 41:13 |
| Felix Armfield | They should've. | 41:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's right. That poor man went crazy. He's in California now, but he went crazy trying to get this thing all settled. They would not pick her body up. She was on the floor dead in the bathroom and they wouldn't pick it up. | 41:25 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:41:46]. | 41:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mm-hmm. I think it was [indistinct 00:41:49], because— After that, the salesman for the Darryls, one of them came home after that happened, I think. Oh, I know what it was. My husband's mother died, and she belonged to the burial. She had paying a burial for 50 years. All they wanted to do was give the burial— If you had a burial for $300, you know what they told them? They would give the $300 to the Black funeral home on the funeral. This was my husband's mother. | 41:49 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Two weeks after that, the salesman that was selling the burials came to the house to ask us to join the burial. My husband ran him. He came to us and asked us to join the burial. That was his mother that had died. | 42:28 |
| Kate Ellis | When was that? | 42:47 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | My husband. | 42:48 |
| Kate Ellis | No, what year about was that? | 42:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Let me see, his mom died— We've been together 32 years, so his mom must have died a good 20 years ago. That's right. But they would not pick the body up. He didn't ask them to pick the body up. He just called them to tell them that she had passed, and she had a burial with them. They offered to give whatever the amount the burial was to a Black funeral for the Black funeral home to pick her up. | 42:52 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:43:31]. Are we out of questions? | 43:39 |
| Michele Mitchell | Should we do the family history? | 43:39 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 43:39 |
| Felix Armfield | I suppose we could. | 43:39 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. Are those notes of other things you wanted to talk? | 43:42 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I just wanted to see. I think I just had— You asked me about places to go when we were in Baldwin. We only had a theater, and like I said, a dance hall. The theater was separated. The Whites sat on one side and the Blacks sat on one side. Even the theaters here after I moved here, they had a balcony where the Black people sat and the White people sat downstairs. | 43:50 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They had another theater that they didn't have a balcony, but it was divided like the one in Baldwin where they had a big wall in between and the Blacks sat on one side and the Whites sat on another side. | 44:13 |
| Michele Mitchell | What were the names of those theaters? Do you remember? | 44:28 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The Essanee was the one that had the balcony. | 44:31 |
| Michele Mitchell | S-N-E? | 44:37 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | E-S-S-A-N-E-E. | 44:38 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 44:38 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The other theater was the Colonial, which we had the wall in between. The Evangeline had the little upstairs, the little balcony for the Blacks. | 44:44 |
| Kate Ellis | The Evangeline is just down the street. Is that right? | 44:54 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That was an old café. | 44:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 44:57 |
| Felix Armfield | Spell them? | 44:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | E-V-A-N-G-E-L-I-N-E. | 45:00 |
| Felix Armfield | Oh, Evangeline [indistinct 00:45:06]. | 45:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, Evangeline. The one in Baldwin was— What was the name? Teche. Teche Theater. | 45:06 |
| Felix Armfield | T-E-C-H-E? | 45:21 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. | 45:21 |
| Michele Mitchell | So, yeah, are there other things that you were [indistinct 00:45:34]— | 45:30 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I'm trying to see. The schools integrated in 1970. Y'all already know that. I told you about the Book Mobile, the Black Book Mobile and the White Book Mobile. And the changing of the names of the schools from names of people to streets. That's about it. I called an old lady to ask about the bus station. The bus station was segregated also. If you went to catch the bus, you didn't go on the White side. You went around on the Black side. It had a restaurant in the bus station, if you wanted something to eat you had to go around to a little window and order you something to eat from the little window from outside. But the Whites had tables and chairs on their side where they could all— | 45:37 |
| Kate Ellis | You're describing the thought— | 0:03 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The buses. They had the long seat in the back and the two seats right in front of the long seat in the back. That's where the Blacks sat. And if there were empty seats where the Whites sat, but you couldn't sit on those seats, you had to stand up, even though the seat was empty where the Whites were and you had to sit in the back. And that was when they had the— I guess it still is, the buses are still diesel. I haven't ridden a bus in God knows how long but I used to ride from here to Baldwin and to go and see about my mom. And, by the time I got home, she was sick and I was sick too, because then I'd be throwing up from smelling the diesel from New Iberia to Baldwin. | 0:06 |
| Kate Ellis | But there was no screen or anything— | 0:46 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh, no. There was no screen. You knew where that seat that was for the Blacks. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I'm trying to think about it. Back then, they used to have a White only sign where the Whites sat but, in the fifties, they took that off and you just knew that that seat in the back and those two seats in the front of that long seat was where you sat. | 0:53 |
| Kate Ellis | Were there a lot of White only signs around town, around New Iberia or not really? | 1:21 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They had a few. | 1:28 |
| Kate Ellis | A few? | 1:28 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. Even the restaurants on Main Street, they had White Only. And I can remember, where my husband worked at the service station, it was wasn't too far from a restaurant and I was pregnant and I had an envy for hamburger and I wasn't at my house to make my hamburger, so I told him I wanted a hamburger from there. He said you can get one from there but you got to go through the little alley and go in the back and they got a little window in the back and you tell them what you want and he'll fix it. I had to go through the little alley to go back there to get me a hamburger. | 1:30 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And, a funny story, the two White ladies were sitting in the front and they complained about their food, that something was wrong with it, and it was just Black women cooking in the kitchen. And I'm standing back here, waiting for my hamburger, for them to fix it, and the lady brought the stuff back that they had given, that they had ordered, and she dropped the hamburger, the meat, on the floor and she picked it up and she stopped it right back on there and sent it back to them. Yes. I saw that with these. | 2:07 |
| Felix Armfield | They said something was wrong with it? | 2:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They said something was wrong with it, it wasn't right. And when she came back, they were so mad, because they had sent the food back, and I guess, through fooling with it, she dropped the meat on the floor and, at that time, in those kitchens were dead rats and she just picked that meat paddy up and flopped it back on there and sent it back to that lady. And that lady ate it. She ate it. | 2:49 |
| Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:03:12]. | 3:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | She ate it. | 3:13 |
| Felix Armfield | Thanks for all your time. | 3:17 |
| Kate Ellis | We need to do the family history. | 3:20 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah. | 3:24 |
| Felix Armfield | Do you guys put your family history over on the corner? | 3:24 |
| Kate Ellis | I do. | 3:24 |
| Felix Armfield | Okay. | 3:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Because sometimes, you know— Interesting information. | 3:27 |
| Michele Mitchell | That's okay? | 3:30 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | That's okay. | 3:31 |
| Felix Armfield | I just— | 3:31 |
| Kate Ellis | Do you have a middle name? | 3:31 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Elizabeth. | 3:31 |
| Kate Ellis | And then your maiden name? | 3:39 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Is Gumms. G-U-M-M-S. It's a odd name. There's not many people in the world with that name. | 3:40 |
| Kate Ellis | That's interesting. Yeah. And then you've been a librarian and a supervisor? | 3:45 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I've been a supervisor for 20 years and, all the other years, I don't know what I was. Here and there and everywhere. | 3:58 |
| Kate Ellis | You told us that your mother was from Louisiana, your father was from Texas. Could you tell us a little bit about their names and— | 4:16 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | About how— | 4:27 |
| Kate Ellis | What their names were and where they were born? | 4:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Okay. She was a Morse. She spelled her name M-O-R-S-E. And he was a Gumms. | 4:30 |
| Kate Ellis | And what was your mother's first name? | 4:43 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Eva. E-V-A. Eva Mary Morse. | 4:45 |
| Kate Ellis | And where was she born in Louisiana? | 4:55 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | She was born in Baldwin but it was where that property is. But it was Morses. But it's between Baldwin and Franklin. | 4:57 |
| Kate Ellis | And she went to Hall Institute? | 5:09 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | She went to Hall Institute. | 5:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Did she ever tell you what that was like? | 5:12 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | She never told me, I don't know if I was too young or I didn't want to know or she didn't want to tell me because I had to ask older people after, how did she get here? Because she was living in Baldwin when she was a girl, before she left town, and Mr. Henderson told me that she boarded at the school because there was a boarding school there. And she went home on weekends, I guess. And you see, back then, high school was like a college education. When you finished 11th grade, just like you had a college education. I had a smart little mama. | 5:13 |
| Kate Ellis | Did she ever teach at any point? | 5:49 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No but she was a seamstress and she could sew something out of this world. She would go down in a store window and see a dress and say, mom, I want a dress like that and she'd go home and take newspapers and cut the pattern out. And when she finished with that dress, that dress looked better than the one that was in the window. She was just talented like that. | 5:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | That's something. | 6:14 |
| Kate Ellis | That makes me wonder if that's becoming— Not really a lost art. But it doesn't seem like as many people do that as they used to. | 6:15 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, they don't. They don't. And she canned everything she could can. We had a pantry out of sight that had everything, everything in the garden from all the vegetables, preserved, feed preserve. She even made— After you eat the watermelon and she'd take that and cut all that red stuff off and then she would cut the peeling. No, she didn't pickle. She made preserves. Cooked them with sugar. Talk about what's good. | 6:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 6:50 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They were crunchy but you had that sweet taste to it. It was a preserve. | 6:53 |
| Kate Ellis | That sounds really good. I've never heard of that. | 6:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And you didn't have a freezer, so she put all this stuff up with pressure cookers. | 7:02 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, I see. | 7:07 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | You stuff them in the jars and then you use pressure to cook them. | 7:09 |
| Kate Ellis | My stomach's rumbling right now. And she was born in what year? Do you know? | 7:17 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Was it 19— No, it must have been 18 because my mom would be 90— She'd be 95 years old in May, this past May, if she had lived. | 7:34 |
| Kate Ellis | 1899? | 7:45 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I believe so. Yeah. | 7:47 |
| Kate Ellis | How old was she when she passed? | 7:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | 58. | 7:55 |
| Kate Ellis | 58? | 7:55 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And I had a sister, my oldest sister, died when she was 57 and my brother died when he was 56. 58, 57, 56. I said when I get to 50— I would have to go to 59. I said, when I get to be 59, I guess I'm going to go away too because it's all in the fifties. But I passed it. | 7:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 8:17 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I'm still here. | 8:17 |
| Michele Mitchell | They were both older than you? | 8:20 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 8:22 |
| Michele Mitchell | What were their names? | 8:22 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Curly was named like my father, Curly Jr. Curly Gumms. | 8:24 |
| Michele Mitchell | He was the oldest one? | 8:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | My sister was the oldest one. Her name was Helen. | 8:28 |
| Kate Ellis | Curly Gumms Jr? | 8:37 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And he used to laugh at his name. Curly. | 8:40 |
| Kate Ellis | It's a funny name. | 8:40 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was there a middle name? | 8:47 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Joseph. | 8:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | For both of them? | 8:51 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | For both of them. | 8:51 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. Did your sister have a middle name? | 8:51 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Helen Mary. | 9:01 |
| Michele Mitchell | And they were both born in Baldwin? | 9:08 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, they were born in Texas in Beaumont. | 9:09 |
| Michele Mitchell | They were born in Beaumont. | 9:11 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They were born in Beaumont. I was conceived in Beaumont but I was born in Louisiana. She came home pregnant with me. | 9:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | Excuse me. Goodness gracious. You were right after Curly? | 9:21 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Curly. Right. | 9:28 |
| Michele Mitchell | And then you had younger— | 9:33 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Younger sister. Vergia. Vergia. V-E-R-G-I-A. | 9:35 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. And did she have a middle name? | 9:40 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Vergia. What's her middle name? It's Anne. And it's Joseph. She's married to Joseph. But she was a Bowser because her father was a Bowser. B-O-W-S-E-R. | 9:44 |
| Kate Ellis | For a second, I thought you're making some reference to a dog. I was like— | 10:02 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Bow wow? | 10:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Bowser. | 10:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Bowser. That was her maiden name. | 10:10 |
| Michele Mitchell | Middle name, one more? | 10:11 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Palmer Junior. He was named after his father. | 10:15 |
| Michele Mitchell | Palmer? | 10:16 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Palmer. P-A-L-M-E-R. Bowser, Jr. And their father was named Palmer Bowser. | 10:16 |
| Michele Mitchell | They were born in Baldwin. | 10:26 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Baldwin. | 10:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | Your father was born in Texas. Where in Texas? | 10:26 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Beaumont. | 10:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | Beaumont. And you told us that your stepfather worked at the sugar mill. | 10:54 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The sugar mill. | 10:57 |
| Michele Mitchell | What did your father work in? | 10:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He was a— Because he was hurt for Stedman fruit company, where they had the whole big hands of bananas, and I think one fell on him and that's how he was hurt on his job. And that's why they came back to Louisiana because he didn't no longer work. | 11:00 |
| Michele Mitchell | Then he passed in '35. | 11:25 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | '35. Yeah. | 11:29 |
| Michele Mitchell | And was he about the same age as your mother? Do you know? | 11:29 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I think she said he was two years older than she was. | 11:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Can you tell us how? Let me— And then you, this is— | 11:38 |
| Michele Mitchell | If you can remember, fine. If you can't remember, we're not going to needle you but do you remember when your brothers and sisters were born? The years? | 11:55 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Not the two older ones. That's the ones you're talking about. | 12:06 |
| Michele Mitchell | Just the younger ones. | 12:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I think he was 10, or she was 10, when they moved back to Louisiana. The older sister. And I think my brother was, what I told you, one year younger? No, he might have been two years younger than she was. Listen to my stomach. | 12:13 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah. | 12:33 |
| Kate Ellis | We need to do her husband, right? | 12:35 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah. We do need to get that. But I'm just going to get the birthday. And so, Beulah was born— Not Beulah. | 12:38 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | February. Helen. | 12:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | Vergia. | 12:46 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I really don't know the ages. She's— I'm 61. She's five years younger than me. | 12:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 13:00 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And her brother is three years younger than she is. | 13:05 |
| Michele Mitchell | Great. | 13:10 |
| Kate Ellis | And do you want me to— | 13:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | Get the— Yeah. | 13:15 |
| Kate Ellis | What's your husband's full name? | 13:18 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Armstrong, Edward Manuel. | 13:19 |
| Kate Ellis | What's his birthday? | 13:28 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | August 2nd 1927. | 13:29 |
| Kate Ellis | And where was he born? | 13:35 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He was born here in New Iberia. I guess at his house because that's where everybody was born. No hospital. | 13:37 |
| Kate Ellis | And what's he do? | 13:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | He's retired now but he worked for Halliburton for 25 years. And then he was a trucker. He had his own rig. | 13:47 |
| Kate Ellis | Halliburton. | 13:57 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | H-A-L-L-I-B-U-R-T-O-N. And that's a oilfield cementing company. | 13:58 |
| Kate Ellis | A cement company? | 14:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | They cement the— Like with the oil. They dig the hole and they put the cement on it when they closing it. | 14:10 |
| Michele Mitchell | Of oilfields? | 14:16 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | For oilfield. Yeah. | 14:18 |
| Kate Ellis | Oilfield cement company. | 14:18 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. | 14:19 |
| Kate Ellis | It's a nice way to pronounce cement. Normally, I'd say cement. | 14:26 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Cement. Cement. | 14:29 |
| Kate Ellis | Cement. | 14:29 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. And your oldest child is Felton Junior? | 14:36 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Felton Junior. | 14:40 |
| Kate Ellis | Last name? | 14:42 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Felton Butler. | 14:42 |
| Kate Ellis | And he's born in? | 14:47 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | At Iberia General Hospital. | 14:49 |
| Michele Mitchell | And it's about 1950— | 14:55 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | 1951. 42 years old. | 15:03 |
| Michele Mitchell | And what month? | 15:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | November. November 18th. | 15:10 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. And then the next one? | 15:14 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Is Gregory Butler. Gregory Paul Butler. | 15:14 |
| Michele Mitchell | And when was he born? | 15:22 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It's July the 18th. No, wait, July 7th. The other one is the 18th. July 7th. And he's what? 36 years old. He's 36. | 15:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | 58. And then your youngest? | 15:49 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Edwin Lewis Butler. And his birthday is July 18th and he's 30— He made 34 yet just the other day. Yesterday. | 15:53 |
| Michele Mitchell | Any grand babies yet? | 16:13 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I have two. | 16:15 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. Davis. You want to ask the remainder of the questions? | 16:16 |
| Felix Armfield | I'm fine. Unless you just want me to? | 16:30 |
| Michele Mitchell | No, it's just— Basically, in terms of where you've lived, you've lived in Baldwin from the time you were born until you were 17. | 16:41 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. | 16:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | That's 1934 to 1941? Not 41. | 16:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | 51. | 16:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | 51. | 16:48 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | 50. 1950. | 16:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. Was there ever a time that you went back to Baldwin for more than a couple of weeks? Or did you just— | 17:06 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, just to visit my mom. Yeah. | 17:15 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. And you told us about the Godman school that you went to after eighth grade. What was the school involvement called for Blacks? Did it have a name? | 17:25 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | GW Hamilton. | 17:35 |
| Michele Mitchell | GW Hamilton? | 17:35 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | It was named after the Black principal. | 17:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, okay. | 17:42 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | And I have to find out, I think GW Hamilton is still GW Hamilton. I'm going to have to find that out. But that was what the name of the school was. | 17:42 |
| Kate Ellis | Can I ask a quick question? | 17:50 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. | 17:54 |
| Kate Ellis | How would you like your name to appear in written documents? | 17:54 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Fine. | 17:58 |
| Kate Ellis | But would you like to be— | 17:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh, you mean— | 17:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Beulah G. Manuel? | 17:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 17:59 |
| Kate Ellis | Or Gumms Manuel? | 17:59 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Beulah G. Manual. | 18:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 18:04 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Because that's the way I sign all my stuff. | 18:04 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. And then you left there when you were in eighth grade. | 18:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. And went to Godman school in the ninth and the 10th. | 18:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | And Godman was in Baldwin itself? | 18:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | In Baldwin. We could walk to school. | 18:24 |
| Michele Mitchell | And then you went to the high school in Franklin. What was that? | 18:32 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Willow Street High. | 18:34 |
| Michele Mitchell | Willow Street? | 18:36 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Willow Street. W-I-L-L-O-W. | 18:36 |
| Kate Ellis | See all this paperwork? | 18:42 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I see that. | 18:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | And you said that you finished there in 19— | 18:45 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | 48. | 18:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | 1948. | 18:46 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. 48. | 18:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | And, in terms of the paperwork, would you like to tell us about the most important jobs, your work history in terms of where you worked? Which job would you like to start with? | 18:58 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I'd like to start with this one. | 19:10 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah? | 19:12 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. | 19:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. And that's on Iberia Parish Library? And you came to the Iberia Parish Library what year? | 19:16 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | 10 Years— 50, 60. It must have been '60. | 19:41 |
| Michele Mitchell | Horrible excuse for [indistinct 00:19:49]. And so, Booker T. Washington you were at how long? | 19:47 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | About 10 years. | 19:55 |
| Michele Mitchell | That's 50 to 60 about? | 19:57 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. | 19:59 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 19:59 |
| Kate Ellis | You started at Booker T in 1950? | 20:09 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, no, no, no. | 20:12 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 20:12 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | When you're saying 50, that would be, I didn't start with the library system until about 61. | 20:13 |
| Michele Mitchell | 61. | 20:21 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 20:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Because— Yeah. | 20:22 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah because I didn't do anything for the 10 years that I was here married. | 20:23 |
| Michele Mitchell | Raising children. | 20:26 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Raising my children. | 20:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 20:28 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. | 20:28 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. Got that straight? | 20:43 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. It was around 60 you started with Booker T and, around 70, when things were integrating— | 20:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. | 20:50 |
| Kate Ellis | That you came to— | 20:50 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Into this one. Yeah. | 20:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Would you like to tell us about any awards, honors, or offices? | 21:01 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | The only award I ever got was one from the parish council they sent and I put it in a frame. I think it was about five years ago. They sent it to me saying that it was an honor for them to give me this because I had stayed at one job for so long. | 21:10 |
| Michele Mitchell | It's a recognition for your job? | 21:30 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Right. | 21:32 |
| Michele Mitchell | And you are now a Methodist? | 21:44 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 21:47 |
| Michele Mitchell | And which church did you go to? | 21:47 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | St. James United Methodist Church. | 21:50 |
| Kate Ellis | Is that on the list? | 21:55 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. You had Reverend Charles Evans but they transferred him to another church. | 21:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 22:05 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | We have a new pastor now. | 22:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Is there a reference on there, Michelle? | 22:07 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah. | 22:08 |
| Kate Ellis | What's the new pastor's name? | 22:12 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Reverend Haynes? Haynes. Charles Haynes? James Haynes. I'm sorry. | 22:14 |
| Kate Ellis | James Haynes. | 22:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | James Haynes. | 22:24 |
| Michele Mitchell | And then, when you were Catholic, which church did you belong to? | 22:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Sacred Heart in Baldwin and then, when I came here, I belonged to St. Edwards. Which my husband still belong to. | 22:30 |
| Michele Mitchell | Two more questions. | 22:49 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Okay. | 22:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | Are there any community organizations that you'd like to tell us about or any hobbies, your interests, anything that you would just like to tell us about? | 22:53 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh, I sing a lot. I have a choir at our church. I belong to a social club. | 23:10 |
| Michele Mitchell | What's the name of that? | 23:24 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Love and Chatter. | 23:25 |
| Michele Mitchell | Love? | 23:27 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Stupid name. Love and Chatter. | 23:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Love and Chatter? | 23:30 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | We love each other and we chatter a lot. | 23:30 |
| Michele Mitchell | How long have you belonged to that? | 23:33 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Oh, about 15 years. But, when I retire, I plan to be active in— I think I'm going to join the Pink Ladies and I'm going to join a whole lot of stuff. | 23:37 |
| Michele Mitchell | But you just get together and talk? | 23:52 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yeah. And we serve a meal to our members. We have 12 members and it's real nice and we have a little social every year. And then we do things for the community, like we help to give a little small scholarship, which is not much because we only pay dues in the club and we don't have any functions that raise money. We have a girl that's in the club. She work at the nursing home and there was an old man who didn't have money to get his glasses, so we got together and we gave the money for him to have his glasses. Things like that. | 23:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | I love that name. | 24:34 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Love and Chatter. | 24:34 |
| Michele Mitchell | You sing. Any other hobbies that you'd like to tell us about? | 24:39 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I like my yard. Gardening. | 24:43 |
| Michele Mitchell | Gardening? | 24:46 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes. | 24:46 |
| Kate Ellis | Are you part of that gardening club? | 24:47 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | No, I'm not a part of the gardening club. This is my own garden club. And I told him, after I retire, when I get my yard straight and my house immaculate, then I'm going to be able to do other things. Because, you see, when you're working, you cannot keep up things. My daughter and I had to cut my grass yesterday because the grass was so high. | 24:49 |
| Michele Mitchell | And it gets that way. | 25:10 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | Yes, it does. | 25:14 |
| Michele Mitchell | I guess that we're finished. And if you would like to close off the interview with any thoughts or we could just finish. Whatever you'd like to do. | 25:14 |
| Beulah Gumms Manuel | I would like to see the Negro race go forward and I would like to see all this turmoil, with the races, I'd like to see that stopped and if I could be in any help or if I could do anything to help to stop it, then I would. | 25:35 |
| Michele Mitchell | Excellent. Thank you, Mrs. Manuel. | 25:58 |
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