Ada Stewart interview recording, 1994 July 06
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| Tunga White | Since you were raised by your grandmama and your granddaddy? | 0:00 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yes. | 0:01 |
| Tunga White | Can you tell me something about that? | 0:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, I can tell you something what I can recollect of them telling me. And I love them in their grave, for they learnt me something. | 0:10 |
| Tunga White | Were they your mother's parents or your father's? | 0:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They was my daddy's mother and father. You want to know their names? Bill Bell and Ella Bell was my grandparents. My granddaddy knowed about slavery time, but my grandmother, she didn't, 'cause she was born three years after they were freed, she always told me. | 0:15 |
| Tunga White | Did your grandfather ever tell you stories about slavery [indistinct 00:00:45]? | 0:37 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 0:37 |
| Tunga White | What kind of stories did he tell you? | 0:37 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He said in slavery time, he remembered the war. I don't know what war it was. He didn't say. They wasn't educated like people is now. But he said that he hadn't never wore a pair of pants until after that war. And he was large enough to haul the produce in the woods, hide it for as long and then they would take the folks the food and put their cattle and stop lying in the woods hiding. The Yankees, he said, from taking it. I said, "Well what did you wear?" He said, "You didn't wear no pants till after the war was over." He said the boys wore long shirts, down to their ankle. That was in slavery time. And their old people, when they were praying for God to free them from under slavery, they would pray to the good Lord, but they would have to put their heads on the wash pot to keep their voice from going out and the White people would hear them praying for God for freedom. | 0:44 |
| Tunga White | What would happen if the White people heard them praying for freedom? | 2:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They would beat them. Praying to the good Lord. | 2:42 |
| Tunga White | Did they ever tell you any other stories about how life was like [indistinct 00:02:58]? | 2:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My grandmother told me lots about what her mother told her. Said they didn't know what it was to buy baking soda. I said, "Well, how did they make their bread?" She said they burnt corn cobs and they'd blow them ashes off of the cob, and that path was [indistinct 00:03:23] in the cob. That's what they use for soda, it would rise their bread just like so. And she the one learn me how to make potash soap. She learnt me how to make three kinds of soap. | 3:13 |
| Tunga White | How do you make potash soap? | 3:38 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You make potash soap, you buy your potash and you get your grease and water, and put it in the pot, iron pot with the three legs and you start your fire. You cooks it until that potash eat up that grease, and then you commence to adding your water to it. When you get enough water in it, it's going to get so thick that you can't hardly move that stick in it. It's done and ready to quit cooking. | 4:00 |
| Tunga White | Now what other kind of soaps do you know how to make besides potash? | 4:28 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I know how to make a lye soap. Lye soap is different than potash soap. | 4:34 |
| Tunga White | What's the difference between them? | 4:37 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You use potash to make potash soap, but lye soap, you burns your wood all through the winter and save them ashes, and you put them ashes in a basket. A weave basket. Folks used to weave baskets to put their cotton in as they picked it. You get that basket full of ashes, then you wets them and keep them wet every day like you do your flowers, and it'll start to dripping that lye. In a jar, when you get the jar full, then you make the soap. It don't be just like potash soap. You cook it to put grease in it, you cook it, and when it get made and cold, it's not hard like potash soap. It's like thick molasses. Like this old thick syrup people used to get and give their mules. That's the way that lye soap feels. | 4:37 |
| Tunga White | Now how long will it take you to make lye soap? | 5:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | If you going to cook it, it'll take you around about two hours, 'cause you can cook it with just meat, chunks of meat, and you see, that potash has got to eat up that meat. When it eat it up, then you starts to adding your water, and when you get enough water, it'll thicken up, then you don't cook it no longer. | 5:49 |
| Tunga White | Are there any other types of soap you know how to make besides potash and lye soap? | 6:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I know how to make coal soap. | 6:12 |
| Tunga White | Coal soap? | 6:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. You don't have no fire to heat it. You has clean grease. What I mean by that, there ain't no chunks of meat, and there ain't no bottom of the frying pan. It's like you fry your meat. And if it do be, you clean that grease. You clean it by heating it and straining it. | 6:13 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You put your potash in your water, and you stirs it good, then you starts to pouring that grease. You stirs it. If you want to put you some bleach in it, you can do it. And when it getting made, you can tell it, 'cause it get thick, then you don't stir it no more. You set it aside. Get you a old piece of rug or old piece of quilt and put over it and let it set there a day or two if you want, or you can cut it out the next day. And that's all there is to it. | 6:13 |
| Tunga White | Now which one of those soaps did you all use most often? | 7:34 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, when I was coming home, my grandma didn't know nothing about coal soap. They was used to cooking it in a wash pot. And I was making soap when I was around about 10 years old. She said, "If I wasn't so tired, I'd go out there and make me a pot of soap." I said, "I'll make it for you." She said, "Go on, gal, you don't know nothing about making no soap." I said "Yes, ma'am." She said, "I'm going to see." She went out there and she put the grease in the potash in the pot 'cause she thought I'd get the potash in my eye. She made the fire. She said, "Now I'm going see what you can do." That pot of soap I made, it wasn't soft. It was hard, just like—You didn't see that piece I give Doris, did you? Or did you? | 7:38 |
| Tunga White | No. | 8:30 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It was just that hard. She said, "You can beat me making soap." I'd been making it on the stove when I'd wash dishes, steal me some grease potash, go wash my doll clothes, I'm going to learn how to make potash soap. And that's how I learned. | 8:32 |
| Tunga White | Who taught you how to make it? | 8:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I'd see her making it. | 8:52 |
| Tunga White | You see her making it [indistinct 00:08:56]. | 8:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. | 8:55 |
| Tunga White | Well, that's it. | 8:56 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And she didn't know that I could make it, 'cause I didn't want her to know I stealing her potash, 'cause she thought I'd get it in my eyes. | 9:00 |
| Tunga White | This makes a good lather? | 9:03 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 9:03 |
| Tunga White | And this has no meat. | 9:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No, that's just grease. I got three folk's pails of grease out there folks bring and give me and I'm going to make it up, right there in that kitchen. | 9:18 |
| Tunga White | Now are there any other stories your grandmother told you about when you were growing up? | 9:38 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. She said they'd make ash cakes. | 9:53 |
| Tunga White | Ash cakes? | 9:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Make up that bread, and get bay leaves and put it in the bay leaf and wrap it up and get ashes. You ain't never seen nobody roast sweet potatoes, did you? | 9:55 |
| Tunga White | No, I haven't. | 10:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well they get them hot ashes and put on top of it, and she said that bread would be just as brown and pretty and good. | 10:05 |
| Tunga White | What did it taste like? | 10:16 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Tastes like you eating the cornbread baked in the oven. They call it pone cornbread. | 10:19 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm, I've had that. | 10:25 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It tastes just that good. | 10:25 |
| Tunga White | Okay. Now, where was your grandmother from? | 10:25 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Up in north Georgia where she was raised, in Marion County. | 10:46 |
| Tunga White | And your grandfather, where was he from? | 10:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Marion County, too. | 10:54 |
| Tunga White | And he was a slave there? | 10:54 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. He was a boy big enough to haul the produce out the way of the Yankees. And he planted. We never had to buy no flour. He planted his wheat, he cut it when it got ready to cut, thrash it and take it to the flour mill. And there was three things: seconds, shorts, and flour. You seen this brown bread ain't you? My grandma used to cook it, and that's what would come out of that wheat when they grind it. They'd have three things: flour, seconds, and shorts. And it's good. | 11:03 |
| Tunga White | Your parents, tell me about your parents. | 11:59 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My mother, my daddy's mother, was the granddaddy and the grandmama that raised me. After they married, they lived with his mama and daddy until after I was born. They moved out, they was going to carry me and they did do it. My grandma said kept me one week and I didn't spend that night with them, so they brought me back that Saturday and I stayed there till I married, and I married when I was 15 years old. | 12:08 |
| Tunga White | Now, where did your parents live? | 12:42 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They lived in Webster County, where I was raised there. My grandparents had bought a home, a farm, a house. Over a hundred acres of land. And that's where I was born and raised. | 12:43 |
| Tunga White | And this was in Webster County? | 13:08 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 13:09 |
| Tunga White | Your grandfather was a farmer. What kind of crops did he have? | 13:11 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Peanuts, peas, corn, cotton. He'd plant rye and oats with his mule, wheat for us, 'cause that what they made the flour out of. Raised hogs, cows. | 13:39 |
| Tunga White | Did he ever talk to you about how life was like after slavery was over? | 13:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah he told me he didn't get to go to school. My grandmama didn't go very long, but she had good mother wit. All she wanted to do was to know the market price, and she knowed how much they owed her for a bale of cotton. | 13:45 |
| Tunga White | So your grandfather didn't go to school at all? | 14:03 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-mm. | 14:04 |
| Tunga White | But your grandmother went to school— | 14:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Long enough to learn. She told me she learned to spell banquet and baker and soprano. She couldn't read writing, she couldn't add up figures, but she could beat me counting and she could beat me reading, 'cause I have spelled many a word and she'd pronounce it for me. That beat all ever I ever thought about. And she couldn't write her name. | 14:09 |
| Tunga White | Do you know how far your father went in school? | 14:38 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No I don't, but he could read and write. Figure. Count. | 14:43 |
| Tunga White | And your mother too? | 14:48 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Uh-huh. My granddaddy believed in sending his children to school, because he didn't have the opportunity. | 14:48 |
| Tunga White | Now how many children did your grandfather have? Grandparents? | 14:57 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My grandmother was the mother of three boys for him, and like men they have children here and yonder, he had a heap of outside children. They had three boys. | 15:04 |
| Tunga White | Now, did they live in the same area that y'all lived in, or did they live in different places? | 15:20 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They lived in the same area. Hey. | 15:22 |
| Tunga White | Can you tell me the names of the three boys? | 15:34 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | The oldest one was named Doc Bell, and the second one was named Richard Bell, and my daddy was named Albert Bell. You want to know my mother's name? | 15:37 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 15:54 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She was named Willie Cunningham before she married my daddy. That granddaddy on that side, he was named Ed Cunningham. My grandmother on my mother's side, she was named Swilla Cunningham. | 15:56 |
| Tunga White | Did your mother ever talk much about her parents? | 16:21 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You want to hear the truth? I didn't stay with my mother but two weeks as I can remember, and she was the mother of nine children, and I'm the oldest one. | 16:25 |
| Tunga White | Did your brother and sisters stay with her though? | 16:35 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, they stayed with my mama and daddy till after my mother died. My mother died in '23, and after then, the grandmothers took them. The grandmother and granddaddy that raised me, they took three of my brothers. One next to me. They took the three oldest boys. And the others, they was with my mama's mama. She taken them up the state, up in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. That's where they is now. Them that was raised in Georgia, they up there too. | 16:41 |
| Tunga White | So you said your daddy's mother took three, and you already there. | 17:26 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. | 17:33 |
| Tunga White | And the rest were up in Pennsylvania with your mother's mother. | 17:34 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Uh-huh. | 17:37 |
| Tunga White | Okay. What's the name of the city in Pennsylvania that they were living in? | 17:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, they was in Aliquippa, but you see they changed them town name up there. It was Woodlawn when they first went there. But J and L come down, build that big steel mill in there and he changed lots of them towns. They changed Woodlawn to Aliquippa. That's 20 miles east of Pittsburgh. | 17:43 |
| Tunga White | How long had your mother's mother been out in Pennsylvania? | 18:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She went out there in '20. My mother died in '23, and she went out there in '24. 1924. | 18:24 |
| Tunga White | Now why did they choose to move up to Pennsylvania? | 18:29 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, she had a son up there. My mama's oldest brother. He went there when they were sending trains down south to get labor to run that steel mill. I've been up there, but I didn't like it. | 18:30 |
| Tunga White | Why didn't you like it up there? | 18:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Just didn't like it. I come back South, and from there down here in Moultrie. I come to Moultrie in '42, in September. They just had started building that air base out there. That's how I come [indistinct 00:19:12] today. | 18:57 |
| Tunga White | You said you just stayed with your parents about two weeks as a little child. Why didn't you stay with them but two weeks out of— | 19:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I didn't want to. I wanted to stay with my grandmama and granddaddy. | 19:18 |
| Tunga White | Why you didn't want to stay with your mama and daddy? | 19:18 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No, I didn't want to. A young'un know what a good thing is. I could get anything I wanted with them, but there was too many children, that I'd have had a hard way to go with my mama and daddy. | 19:18 |
| Tunga White | Were your grandparents strict on you when you were coming up? | 19:50 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Sure enough was. My grandmama was strict on me after I went back home, quit my husband and went back home. I had to live under the same orders that I did before I married. | 19:56 |
| Tunga White | What kind of rules did you have before you married at your grandparents' house? | 20:02 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No loving and out with boys. She was strict. She raised us that we had a very good praise among the White people. They said, "That old lady Ella Bell, she raised some nice girls." And she did. I can give her that in her grave. That's how come I married as early as I did. Married at 15 years old. I was big as I is now. | 20:10 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 20:40 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You know I had a good tension, didn't I? | 20:41 |
| Tunga White | Now, how old were you before your brothers came and moved in? | 20:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I was turning out of 13 into 14 years old. As long as I stayed with them was that I quit that man and went back home. | 20:54 |
| Tunga White | Was your grandfather a strict man? | 21:07 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My grandfather, he was good. He never whooped me but one time, and that had to be a good granddaddy. And he didn't want more to whoop up. | 21:11 |
| Tunga White | Now what did you do that one time you get that whooping? | 21:20 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mo had whooped me and wanted to send me at her milk bucket up to my cousin, and I know them children were going to laugh at me 'cause I had got a whooping, and I didn't want to go. I got under the plum tree between our house and my cousin's house, and I was sitting under that plum tree. I hear Mo say, "You better get on and get that bucket." And I knowed a thing, my granddaddy done come up behind me with him a little switch right that long, and he pulled me out from under that plum tree, and he tore me up. He say, "You was mine." And that's the only whooping he ever give me. | 21:25 |
| Tunga White | Would you say your grandmother was stricter with you than your friends' mamas and daddies were? | 22:17 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. You know why? | 22:24 |
| Tunga White | Why? | 22:27 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | All them others, biggest portion of them had babies, and Mo didn't intend for us to have no babies in her house. And we didn't. When you get old enough, there's something will tell you to marry [indistinct 00:22:49]. It'll tell you. So I thought that's the best thing I could do, was to marry. And she didn't object it. | 22:29 |
| Tunga White | You say a lot of the other girls around your age had babies, so they were like around 13, 14 years old? | 22:52 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. And they mamas would let them go when they wanted to, come when they pleased. Well my grandmother didn't have nothing like that. I hadn't never been to a dance until I was a grown woman. | 23:06 |
| Tunga White | So you didn't do any courting? | 23:18 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, I could talk with the boys. They could come there and talk with me. But that was all. | 23:20 |
| Tunga White | You didn't go nowhere with them? | 23:29 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No. | 23:33 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:23:34]. | 23:33 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They go home at 9:00, didn't they? Yeah, my grandma said it's bedtime. Didn't know them to get out of there. | 23:33 |
| Tunga White | Can you describe the house, your grandparents' house that you lived in, everything? Really? | 23:46 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It's still up there. | 23:49 |
| Tunga White | Does anybody live in it now? | 23:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No. | 23:49 |
| Speaker 3 | Moved out of it about three years ago. Four years ago, they bought a trailer the back of the house. But the house is still there. | 24:02 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You see, when my grandmother sold that land, that house was for me and her other son's girl that she raised along with me. And I said that's what he need, tore it down. They just let it set there. Which I know I'll never go back up there to live. And the girl that was raised long me and her together, she been dead ever since '59, but her children, they around there. | 24:06 |
| Tunga White | Who did you say? The girl who was raised with you? | 24:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Who was my daddy's oldest brother's oldest child. She was named Willie Elma. She had one brother. | 24:49 |
| Tunga White | What's her last name? | 24:54 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Willie Elma. | 24:54 |
| Tunga White | Last name? | 24:54 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Willie Elma Bell she was since she married, and she married a man with the name of John William. She passed in '59. | 25:01 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:25:18]. | 25:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, Mo passed in '49, Grandpa Bill passed in '29. | 25:18 |
| Speaker 3 | And you said she said she was on three years [indistinct 00:25:41] but you wanted [indistinct 00:26:14]. Slaves was freed in 1856. She died when she was [indistinct 00:26:14]. | 25:21 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Said her mother always told her she was born three years after they were free. | 26:13 |
| Tunga White | Your grandmother's mother's name. Do you know your grandmother's mother's name? | 26:13 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Willa Cunningham and Ed Cunningham was my grandfather on my mother's side. | 26:13 |
| Tunga White | And your grandfather's mama and daddy, their names? | 26:13 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, I heard him called a name. My granddaddy on my daddy's side, his father was named Mitchell Bell, and his mother was named Mariah Bell. | 26:13 |
| Speaker 3 | But what Ella's mama was named? | 26:26 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She was named Louisa Wright. | 26:31 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:26:34]. You got her mother's name down here [indistinct 00:26:34] her grandmother's. Okay. [indistinct 00:26:34] Your grandmother's mama name? | 26:34 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Louisa Wright. And my great-granddaddy was named Wash Wright. | 26:50 |
| Tunga White | Did they ever talk much about their parents? | 26:58 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, they talked a lot about their parents. | 27:00 |
| Tunga White | What did they say about them? | 27:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My mother, she would talk about how she surprised her mother. Her mother didn't know she could cook. Say when Grandma Louisa come out the field one day, she had her dinner done, and said Grandma Louisa slapped her down, said she thought she would—'Cause she cooked [indistinct 00:27:32] she done. She was so glad her child could cook. | 27:10 |
| Tunga White | Around how old was she when she cooked for her mama? | 27:37 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, I don't know, but she was a child and she was born three years—She said her mother always told her three years after they were free. You have to count from there. | 27:43 |
| Speaker 3 | The fact that they was freed in 1852. That's what I was trying to [indistinct 00:28:03]. | 27:58 |
| Tunga White | And your grandfather, did he talk much about his parents? Say anything about them? | 28:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-mm. He was a quiet type. | 28:12 |
| Tunga White | He cook? | 28:14 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He didn't cook. | 28:19 |
| Tunga White | Drink? | 28:19 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Didn't drink whiskey, didn't chew tobacco, and didn't smoke. When he died, his teeth was just as white. | 28:20 |
| Tunga White | Really? [indistinct 00:28:35] Joined the church? | 28:31 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Never joined the church. But when he goed to church, he didn't sit in the back of nobody's church. He sat up there [indistinct 00:28:45] their men corner. Many a time, them that didn't know him would beg for him to pray. He'd shake his head. | 28:37 |
| Tunga White | Did he ever say why he never would join a church? | 28:52 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mo would be at him. "Bill you old rank sinner, if you was to die, be scared to stay here, 'cause you'd hound everybody to death." He'd get his hat and go on about his business. Keep him here. But about two nights before he passed, the way he confessed it, she said, "Bill I used to tell you you ought to pray." Say, "I know you can't talk now." He had a stroke, and he stayed under that stroke about six years before he died. And it knocked his tongue palate down and it rotted off and he couldn't speak his words. He just uttered whatever you thought he said. If you right, he'd bow his head. And when she is talking to him, she say, "You can't talk now, but you can think on the Lord and tell him you'd a sinner and a wretch undone, and deliver you from this body affliction." He is giving her to know he had done done that. | 28:58 |
| Tunga White | Your grandmother, can you describe her, what kind of woman she was? | 30:15 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She was religious [indistinct 00:30:29] and a good person. 'Cause if you went to her and wanted something, and she had it, she would give it give to you. | 30:28 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:30:39] White woman [indistinct 00:30:39]? | 30:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She was mixed Yankee. | 30:36 |
| Tunga White | Oh, okay. | 30:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She never thought nobody got tired of working. She said young person was just a lie, say he get tired of working. She never get tired of working. You know them Yankees is hard workers. And my granddaddy was a mixed Indian. | 30:43 |
| Tunga White | Do you know what kind of Indian? | 31:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No, I don't, but Mo, my grandmama said his mother was real dark, and his daddy was brown skin. He never do nothing but dip the corn in some water and his hair would lay down like baby hair. | 31:13 |
| Tunga White | Really? And you said your grandmother was mixed with Yankee? | 31:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 31:41 |
| Tunga White | What was her father's mom? | 31:41 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | A White Yankee was her father's daddy. Them White folks is [indistinct 00:31:53] my home now, who was kin to my grandmother. And they never did turn Mo down when she'd go to them and them mens would tell they wives, "If Aunt Ella come here have anything, let her have it. That's our folkses." They didn't deny it. | 31:48 |
| Tunga White | And her father didn't deny her either? | 32:10 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-mm. She was a mixed Yankee. 'Cause them Reeses, that's who her father was, kin to the Reeses. When they come to this part of the country, my grandmama said that her daddy swim for Ginger River with these Reese boys what's in Preston now, Granddaddy on his back, 'cause that was his half brother. | 32:19 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 32:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | See, he swim for Ginger River with him on his back. | 32:49 |
| Tunga White | So did your grandmother spend any time with her daddy? | 32:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He died before I was born, but she said he didn't live too far from them when he died, and her mother either. Her mother died before her daddy did. My last baby was born in the house where her mother died. About as far from my grandmother's house is from here over there to Denegal. | 33:07 |
| Tunga White | Right here? | 33:33 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No. Over yonder. You don't know Denegal, do you? That's on 3rd Street. | 33:36 |
| Tunga White | 3rd Street? | 33:37 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | First house on the left. | 33:37 |
| Tunga White | Now, how did your grandparents' house look? | 33:37 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It was, they call them stack chimbley. It had two roofs and a chimbley between them roofs. It had a dining room and a kitchen. It was a four room house. | 33:51 |
| Tunga White | For sleeping, did you have a room to yourself, or did you share your room with your— | 34:25 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Me and my first cousin that was raised with me, we had one of the fire place ends, and my grandmother and granddaddy had the other. | 34:30 |
| Tunga White | Now when your brothers came in— | 34:38 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | When my brothers come in, my cousin married before I did. | 34:40 |
| Tunga White | Oh, she was gone already. | 34:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And my grandmother turned that dining room into a bedroom after them boys come, and that made her have three bedrooms then. | 34:47 |
| Tunga White | What kind of household chores did you have to do every day? | 35:03 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, when the work was open in the fields, I worked in the field. And when it wasn't, I took in washing and ironings. Half of these White folks today think I'm the best ironer there is in the world. I thank my grandmother in her grave for learning me some sense. What she learned me had helped me to make a living, 'cause I ain't never been on a job, and nobody grumbled at my work. And I raised some White children as well as I raised mine. | 35:09 |
| Tunga White | Now how much you charge for your washing? | 35:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well along in then, they wasn't paying nothing. They wasn't paying nothing for field work when I was coming up. I have worked for 40 and 50 cent a day. I have picked cotton 40 and 50 cent a hundred. I had never got over 50 cent a hundred for picking cotton until I come to [indistinct 00:36:18], and you know I couldn't stay out the cotton field here, they paying $3 and $4 a hundred. Back up in there, field label was cheap. I have cooked for $2 and a half a week, and walked to my job unless it be too cold or rainy. I walked two miles. Cooked for a Presbyterian preacher and his wife and two kids. | 35:56 |
| Tunga White | Do you know about how old you are were when you first went into the field doing the field work? | 36:59 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I'd be out there in the field, wasn't doing nothing. When I really bent down to field work, I had done got about 12 and 13 years old, 'cause my granddaddy didn't bend down on me. My grandma would have a switch in her apron binding. "If you don't come on here with that row, I'm going tear you up." I never have had my granddaddy be forcing me about working. You know I wasn't doing too much, pick my cotton all day long and put it in a feed basket. You know what a feed basket is? It's a basket that carry the corn from the crib to the mule trough. He never did bend down on me about working. And after I married out from home, I sure enough was picking cotton then. | 37:09 |
| Tunga White | When you were living with your grandparents, how many days a week did you all go out in the cotton field? Or picking [indistinct 00:37:20]. | 37:18 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Maybe about four days a week. My granddaddy would hire lots of his work though. | 37:19 |
| Tunga White | How many people you think he might have hired during the picking season? | 37:19 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He hired Ms. Crewhull and her family. She had two girls and a boy. They would work for him. He just didn't pin down on me and that girl about work. That's the reason I say I had a good granddad and a good grandma. Only thing that I didn't like was I had to take it. She'd tear you up, but he didn't. | 37:20 |
| Tunga White | You said your grandparents owned. They owned. Most families around there said they— | 39:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Lots of them around there [indistinct 00:39:05]. | 39:04 |
| Tunga White | Most of them were sharecroppers or renters? | 39:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well most everybody in the neighborhood or my home, they had their own home. Their own land. Manga Cutwright, he had about a 12 [indistinct 00:39:21] farm. There wasn't nobody but him and his wife. | 39:07 |
| Tunga White | And they hired out people to work? | 39:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He had people living with him, just like Colored people live with White folks and work. That's the way they work with old man Manga Cutwright. | 39:26 |
| Tunga White | Did your grandfather ever talk about how much money he might have paid for his land? | 39:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-mm. | 39:41 |
| Tunga White | Did he ever talk about who he bought the land from or how he— | 39:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I'm hearing him tell who he bought it from, was a Stapleton. A Stapleton. And the government done something that all of us grandchildren could have them the [indistinct 00:40:09] for their place. My uncle sold it to the government, and I ain't putting my name on the deeds and none of the rest of them. And you know don't supposed to do that unless it every heir and they ain't ne'er signed it. | 40:03 |
| Tunga White | I don't know how he could do that. | 40:26 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He done it. He beat my grandmama out of that place, and my brothers is the one that sought it free when my granddaddy started with that stroke. He had his beads up for money. My two brothers, one was 12 years old, he went to the woods, and went to cutting logs like a man. The other two took over the farm. They worked there from 25 to 29. Before they could complete the debt, all they could do was pay the interest. In the year 29, they completed every debt that my granddaddy owed. Well that sought that place free. My Uncle Bud, he sweet talked him and got his ma to sell him the place. And then after he done that, he seed she was getting ill in health. I'm down here in Moultrie. He wanted her to come down here when he's getting it from her. "You got a home here long as you live." She had plenty wood, and you know the way my grandmama got her wood to have fire? | 40:29 |
| Tunga White | What? | 41:54 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Me and my two children would send money to her for her to get a man to haul all them cutbacks from the saw mill where she could keep more of them. And he wanted to put her off down here. I went home and I asked him, I said, "Since Mo sold you and your son her place, y'all told her she had a home long as she lived." I said, "Now you want to shift her off somewhere in a strange place?" I said, "Mo love her house, and she got to stay in it." I said, "The day that I have to take my grandmama," I said, "That's when I'm going to pop my whip on you." I said, "'Cause I can't see after her and take care of her in somewhere working. And if I have to come and see at her, be her nurse," I said, "That's when you going to get out of some money." "I don't want Mo—" My nickname Titsy. "Titsy, I don't want Mo to go down there." I say, "She always did mind you. And I figured you told her that." He said, "No, I didn't tell her." He did, though. | 41:59 |
| Tunga White | Did your grandfather's land, was it, compared to the other Black people who owned land in that area, was it a whole lot of land, more than the other places had, or was it about the same size? | 43:16 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It was a hundred acres of land and tenants. They had skewed in the woods. I don't know how much you know it was in the wood. | 43:34 |
| Tunga White | So was the other Black people had land, was their land about that same size or maybe larger? | 43:42 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Some of them was about the same size. There was two White men. One was on the south side of my granddaddy's line, and one was on the east side. That was old man John Bullard. He was on the south side of why I divided him and my granddaddy. And Will Cosby on the east side, [indistinct 00:44:17] him and my granddaddy's. And then when he come on up to the corner, the hogs took over, and the Cutwrights. He start in the middle of them. | 43:50 |
| Tunga White | The people that your grandfather hired out to work, was they tenants, or— | 44:35 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They had their own home. Miss [indistinct 00:44:45]. Yeah, she was a widow. Her husband was dead when I knowed her, but he had his own home and land. | 44:49 |
| Tunga White | Did you all have cows and things like that at your house? | 44:54 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Sure. Plenty cows and hogs. | 44:58 |
| Tunga White | Did you had your own personal garden? | 45:00 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 45:00 |
| Tunga White | What kind of stuff y'all have in y'all garden? Was it a big garden? | 45:00 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. Turnips, collards, onions, beans. Wintertime they plant beans. Butter beans and snap beans we raised. Long and then, my grandmama, she didn't like no tomatoes and we didn't, so we had never had none. And after she learned how good they was, then she commenced having tomatoes. | 45:12 |
| Tunga White | Okay. What kind of food did y'all eat when you at your grandmama's house for breakfast, dinner? | 45:46 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | We would have a biscuit, syrup, meat, rice, or grits. | 45:50 |
| Tunga White | Go ahead. | 46:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And that was meat back in them days. The meat don't taste like it did then. | 46:09 |
| Tunga White | What's the difference between the meat they have now and the meat— | 46:10 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, I just wish you could have tasted some of it and you'd said the same thing I'm saying. It was good. You ain't nothing about no smoked meat like they have now. You know the way them peoples did smoke their meat? | 46:16 |
| Tunga White | How? | 46:31 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They killed them hogs, pack them down in salt in a box for three weeks. They took that meat up, they washed it, and fresh water from the well. Didn't heat no water to wash it. They dried that meat off, and they get that 20 team borax and meal, corn meal, and they'd powder that meat. They cut them leaders back there in the back of that ham, and that's where they'd put that bear grass, and they'd hang it up by that— | 46:31 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:00:00] in the '50s, all houses had a smokehouse. They always had a—You got a house, you got a barn, you got mules and cattles, then you got a smokehouse. [indistinct 00:00:16]— | 0:00 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You didn't see no farmhouses didn't have a smokehouse. | 0:16 |
| Tunga White | So up until the '50s— | 0:22 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:00:24]. Up until the '50s— | 0:24 |
| Tunga White | —they had— | 0:24 |
| Speaker 3 | —every house that was built had a smokehouse, and had a nice barn. In fact, the barn was just as good as the house almost, but for cattle. And then you had the smokehouse. [indistinct 00:00:41]. | 0:30 |
| Tunga White | Now, how long would it take to smoke some meat? | 0:37 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | [indistinct 00:00:45] like today, and take it out. But it gives that meat such a good flavor. Hickory wood. | 0:49 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:00:53] same time though, there were no refrigerators. | 0:52 |
| Tunga White | Right. | 0:56 |
| Speaker 3 | And nowhere to store it, so that's the [indistinct 00:01:00] preserve it, by us smoking it. [indistinct 00:01:03]. | 0:57 |
| Tunga White | Once a year? [indistinct 00:01:06]. | 1:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I wish you could have tasted some of that meat. | 1:06 |
| Tunga White | I wish I could too. | 1:06 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Put that— | 1:06 |
| Tunga White | It would be way better than what we're eating now. [indistinct 00:01:13]— | 1:06 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Listen, I don't like this meat now. I don't. It don't taste right. | 1:14 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:01:18] it? It don't have no flavor to it? | 1:17 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | This here what they have now? Uh—uh. | 1:28 |
| Tunga White | Oh. | 1:28 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No. | 1:28 |
| Speaker 3 | What happened here now is really, your animals are not as old [indistinct 00:01:29]. See, what happened is, you kill them young and that's [indistinct 00:01:32]— | 1:28 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And then this stuff they raise in the field and put all that different mess around it, that's got a heap to do with the food. | 1:32 |
| Speaker 3 | Yes. | 1:40 |
| Tunga White | Right. Right. Right. | 1:40 |
| Speaker 3 | Uh-huh. | 1:40 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My grandma put— | 1:44 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:01:45]. We didn't have a whole lot of different fertilizers. The soil was rich, so [indistinct 00:01:54] different crops, because [indistinct 00:01:56]. | 1:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | [indistinct 00:01:59]. Cost a lot when you— | 2:03 |
| Speaker 3 | That's right. [indistinct 00:02:05]— | 2:03 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | —Far as this new style and all, they didn't have that. And I'll tell you another thing I know they're doing. They get those White potatoes and open [indistinct 00:02:22], and get them some pine straw and put over there in just a little bit of dirt. And my grandma would go over there and scratch until she get to that pine straw, and reach under there and pull that potato off the vine. Wouldn't be a bit of dirt on that potato. I've seen that. [indistinct 00:02:44] buried those potatoes in dirt. | 2:07 |
| Speaker 3 | Now that was right there in [indistinct 00:02:50]. | 2:44 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Sweet potatoes. I mean, white potatoes. | 2:44 |
| Speaker 3 | Yeah, sweet potatoes [indistinct 00:02:53]— | 2:44 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Uh-huh. | 2:44 |
| Speaker 3 | —[indistinct 00:02:55]. | 2:44 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, you get them drawers and set them on that row and stick a stick—Stick them down in the ground and pour water until it took root. You go there and hoe them, get that bed down flat. | 2:55 |
| Tunga White | Now when you all killed hogs, did the people that lived around you come and help y'all? | 3:15 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, we'd always have some help, because some of those hogs weighed three and 400 pounds. No one man couldn't handle that. | 3:21 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:03:30] kill them hogs. [indistinct 00:03:34]. | 3:32 |
| Tunga White | Wow. | 3:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I'll tell you what, when my granddaddy would see that sun set back here, red—They knew all the signs as good as the almanac. He said, "It's going to be cold in the morning. These hogs going to die." Sure enough, we'd get up. If there was any water in the tub, it would be froze. That hog was going to die. But he didn't want but one cold night on him. | 3:37 |
| Speaker 3 | That's right. [indistinct 00:04:05]. | 4:03 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Usually a little before Thanksgiving or either after Thanksgiving. That's when that harsh cold would come. | 4:07 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:04:13]. | 4:11 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:04:13] every part of the hog when they—after they killed him? | 4:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 4:41 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:04:48]. | 4:41 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They'd throw away the squeal. | 4:47 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:04:50], huh? | 4:50 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. That's all that went away, was the squeal. Them hoofs, they'd save them to make tea. | 4:59 |
| Speaker 3 | Uh-huh. | 5:04 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 5:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And them [indistinct 00:05:10], they'd make soap grease out of them though. That's the reason I say the squeal is all they threw away. | 5:10 |
| Speaker 3 | You know, you asked another question. You asked me about [indistinct 00:05:24]. Another thing, that's what—When Black folks [indistinct 00:05:27] White folks, [indistinct 00:05:29] part of the hog [indistinct 00:05:33] at killing time. You know what [indistinct 00:05:33] is? | 5:23 |
| Tunga White | No, I don't know what the [indistinct 00:05:37] is. | 5:32 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I know I helped some old White folks in hog killing. I'm [indistinct 00:05:47] me a hog head. | 5:40 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:05:48]. | 5:41 |
| Tunga White | What? | 5:41 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:05:49]. Can't even walk. That's— | 5:41 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | [indistinct 00:05:56] give me any money. | 5:41 |
| Speaker 3 | That's what they give her, just—[indistinct 00:06:03]. | 5:41 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Old [indistinct 00:06:04] don't want nothing but his head. | 6:04 |
| Speaker 3 | That's right. That's what they did. | 6:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Uh-huh. | 6:04 |
| Speaker 3 | They took everything else and gave us the head— | 6:04 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:06:14] what they didn't want. | 6:04 |
| Speaker 3 | Yeah. | 6:16 |
| Tunga White | So did you [indistinct 00:06:23]— | 6:22 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, that's how they got rich, off of us. | 6:22 |
| Speaker 3 | Thank you. | 6:25 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | The White man got rich off of the Black man. Those poor Colored women just [indistinct 00:06:34], my grandma said. Then mama be in the White folks' house, cooking for the White woman and her husband and her children. Her children at home by themselves, some of them getting burnt up. | 6:27 |
| Speaker 3 | That's right. | 6:48 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Because it wasn't nobody there to see at them. | 6:50 |
| Speaker 3 | That's [indistinct 00:06:55] today. [indistinct 00:06:57]. I was here when the [indistinct 00:06:59]. I was here when the [indistinct 00:07:01]. Say, 20, 25 years ago, I was here [indistinct 00:07:04]. And the reason for that [indistinct 00:07:06] Black parents not home to raise their kids, and that White man raised [indistinct 00:07:11]. | 7:01 |
| Speaker 3 | I'll never forget, the manager at my office, he [indistinct 00:07:16]. He [indistinct 00:07:16]. But she worked with him all the time, and she had about 10 or 12 kids, but he only had one. And she had to [indistinct 00:07:30] before that child [indistinct 00:07:33]. She would probably get that child [indistinct 00:07:34]. | 7:12 |
| Speaker 3 | And he said to me one day, "You know what? I don't understand why her children so bad and she raised my child for me." But she wasn't ever home with her kids. | 7:33 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:07:44] own children. | 7:43 |
| Speaker 3 | Thank you. | 7:44 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I know one thing, I was cooking for a White man and his wife, and they had a little boy about that high. I was making biscuits. He picked up the house cat, "I believe I'll throw this." I said, "You better not throw that cat on me." He tried. He tried. I put all those floured fingers in his face. I bet you he didn't try it no more. He didn't try it no more. That cat could have scratched my eyes out. | 7:48 |
| Tunga White | True. | 8:16 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | But most of the White people I worked for, they wanted their kids to mind me. And they gave me the opportunity to whoop them if they didn't mind me. Now that's a White person means right. | 8:18 |
| Speaker 3 | She's right about that. I think that even [indistinct 00:08:43] White people teach their kids discipline, where we don't do anything to [indistinct 00:08:43] discipline. Not even in the house, [indistinct 00:08:45] reason why we had to call him here today. [indistinct 00:08:52] and they can't. They were calling me by my name and all these kids in high school, in the 10th, 11th grade, and that's how they see us. But they also have their parents at home [indistinct 00:09:05]. White people always say [indistinct 00:09:07]. | 8:42 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yes. They hung that slavery time a long time. I imagine they'd hear their parents talk about how they done the Colored folks. And some of them got it in them today. But I ain't say it for Mr. Gray and Brown Lindsey, I probably raised their children. And Mr. Gray, when I come in one morning, he had one of the thorn bushes about that high up on the child closet and he headed it out. | 9:18 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He said to me, I said yes. He said, "You know what that thorn bush up there, [indistinct 00:09:55]?" I said, "No sir, I don't." "For you to whoop these children." I said, "Now you know I got better sense than to whoop them children with that thorn bush." "I mean for you to do it. They don't mind. You put it on them." And the little girl, I was with her mama and they going over to some of the kin folks, was over there in the project. Come on up Second Avenue, turn up there, going on down and hit First Avenue. | 9:46 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And then we was passing the Masonic hall, she like, "Eddie baby, what nigger joint is that?" I turned around, I said, "What'd you say?" "What nigger joint is that?" I said, "That happens not to be a nigger joint." I said, "That's the Colored people's Masonic hall. I'm going to say, if I ever hear you say that again—" I wanted them all to know I didn't like that name. "I'm going to whoop you." And she didn't use it no more neither. You got to let them know what you don't like. | 10:20 |
| Tunga White | Right. | 10:48 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:11:01] same person [indistinct 00:11:03] from her mom at home. | 10:48 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 10:48 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:11:07] what she used to say. I remember once at the [indistinct 00:11:10]. "Daddy, is that a nigger there? Daddy is that a nigger?" You know, that was me. He said, "Shut up, boy. Shut up." [indistinct 00:11:22]. | 10:48 |
| Tunga White | They had heard their daddy talking and he wanted to know what his dad's talking about. | 10:48 |
| Speaker 3 | They keep saying this stuff all the time. They deny [indistinct 00:11:33]. I'm sorry, that wasn't [indistinct 00:11:49]. | 10:48 |
| Tunga White | No problem. | 10:48 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | This young girl, one Saturday morning I was out there and she called her little sister nigger and the oldest boy, he said, "What did mother tell you about that, sissy? I'm going to tell her on you." I said, "Do you really know what a nigger is?" "It's a Black person, ain't it?" I said, "No." I said, "You big enough? Now you know all about reading books." I said, "You get your history and see what he tell you a nigger is." She got the history. I said, "What it tell you?" "It's a thing you sneak [indistinct 00:12:51]." I said, "Mm-hmm." | 12:02 |
| Tunga White | And they didn't use that again? | 12:50 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-mm. She then called the little girl, "You nigger," and the oldest boy heard. He said, "What has mama told you about that? I'm going to tell her." I said, "Do you really know what a nigger is, sissy." "It's a Black person." I said, "Get your history. It'll tell you. You can read." [indistinct 00:13:10]. I said, "What it say?" "It said it's a [indistinct 00:13:13]." I said, "Well, you know what that is then." | 12:54 |
| Tunga White | When you was growing up, did you have any White playmates? | 13:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 13:12 |
| Tunga White | When you were a little girl, what kind of games did you all play? | 13:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | We had play houses and we gathered them big green trees and go and ring us some straw and sit down and make skirts. We'd stir up mud. That was our cakes, playing in the playhouse. | 13:34 |
| Tunga White | We all did that too. | 13:43 |
| Speaker 3 | You asked about [indistinct 00:14:09] the stuff that can't be played by Black kids, [indistinct 00:14:28]. They don't do it here. [indistinct 00:14:36]. | 13:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | One old hunky, when Martin Luther King was marching I was working at her niece's house. See she staying at home. She come up to her niece's house. I figure start dying, then plugged the iron in. She said, "[indistinct 00:15:04], why is it that Black folk want to marry in the White race?" I pull that cord out of that sock it, and I got me a chair. I say, "I got two sons and a bunch of little grand boys." I said, "I don't have one that I want to marry in your race." I say, "I tell you what I like. If your son go out there and make 15 or $20 a day," I say, "I'd like mighty well, for mine to make the same thing, not to marry in your race." I said, "But I'm coming to the race now." | 14:44 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I says, "If you wanted a bouquet, a flower pot," I say, "You couldn't get for one color, could you?" Now, she tried to make out like she's crazy to the fact. I said, "But if you wanted one out of my race," I say, "You could get them of all color, couldn't you?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, you know how come my race like that?" "No." I said, "Yes you do." I said, "Your race stepped in my race, then my race all would've been the same color, just like your race." | 15:45 |
| Tunga White | That's right. | 16:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She said, "Yeah, I think so." I said, "I know so." I said, "You take y'all White boy, they rare to get on the police force up there." I said, "He's not for the upbuilding of the city." I said, "Do you know what it's for?" I said, "To get to the Colored women like they want." I said, "You take Mr. Chaffer, the revenue man, the other night stopped one of our Colored women on her way home, tried to get her to get in the car with him and she wouldn't do it." I said, "She slapped hell outta him." I said, "When she did, he goes and get that chief and bring him back to this woman's house, and cuffed her and locked her up." And that wasn't a better person than Sally Noah. That old revenue chief. | 16:26 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He wanted to carry her out here on Lovers Lane. I said, "Do you—I said, "Then they charged her $400." I said, "Do you feel like that was right?" "No, it sure wasn't." She made it and had herself on. | 17:19 |
| Tunga White | Was there a lot of that going on when you were coming up? | 17:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Sure. | 17:39 |
| Tunga White | A lot of— | 17:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Them White folks going with Black folk? Yeah. They killed some Black women up there around my home. | 17:41 |
| Tunga White | When was this? | 17:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That was before I come to [indistinct 00:17:49]. | 17:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:17:51] kill my great-grandma [indistinct 00:17:51]. | 17:48 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That's how come your great-grandma had to come to [indistinct 00:17:58]. | 17:56 |
| Tunga White | What happened? What happened with that? | 17:57 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Them White men going with them Colored women, and to please their wives, they turn around and kill you. There is one— | 18:00 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:18:03] for a White man [indistinct 00:18:03]. | 18:02 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:18:03] he had two Black girls [indistinct 00:18:03]. When I was going with him, we knew that [indistinct 00:18:03] was very wealthy beautiful Black women. And then one night they [indistinct 00:18:28] then another Black girl, beautiful Black female. And they took her threw her in the deep. [indistinct 00:18:49]. | 18:02 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It wasn't intended for that youngin to be seen and God shielded her. That's [indistinct 00:19:01] I always had used for one when he'd get out of place with me. I said, "Many White women that y'all got, you can't get you a woman?" I said, "I don't go with White men." | 18:54 |
| Tunga White | Did a lot of White men approach you like that? | 19:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, because I was a good-looking Colored woman. But I didn't want them. | 19:16 |
| Speaker 3 | What they got [indistinct 00:19:25]. | 19:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Old CD Smith, the revenue man. | 19:25 |
| Speaker 3 | Uh-huh. | 19:27 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He told me, "You're a fool anyhow." I said, "You can say what I am." I say, "If I is, I'm my own fool." Old Sugar Bell. What Run did that place over there? | 19:28 |
| Speaker 3 | He was working. [indistinct 00:19:42]. | 19:40 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | What you talking about? | 19:42 |
| Speaker 3 | And all [indistinct 00:19:44]. He's a homosexual too. | 19:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Uh-huh. | 19:43 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:19:47] man and woman. So you're absolutely right. [indistinct 00:19:50]. | 19:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I ain't never wanted them. And these Colored men to walk the road with them hankies and think they got something. There's many of our colors laying in the hearts of Earth on the [indistinct 00:20:08]. That's reason, I just look at him. Say, "What a fool you is." Some of them won't speak to you when they went there. I told [indistinct 00:20:20] one day, I said, "You see that tall baby?" She said, "What?" I say, any other times the head couldn't just [indistinct 00:20:27]. I said he couldn't speak when he with that old Patty. And I told him about it when I received it. | 19:54 |
| Tunga White | Were there a lot of Black women that did want to be with White men back then? | 20:35 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:20:39]. | 20:37 |
| Tunga White | They must have did that, bringing them white sugar. They must wanted to be with them. | 20:43 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:20:50] in 1968 I went to Memphis, Tennessee, [indistinct 00:21:07] college there and we invited several Black girls [indistinct 00:21:14] to the hotel board at night and they were saying that we [indistinct 00:21:14]. That's just mad. And they [indistinct 00:21:14]. We said, "Where in the world y'all got this idea from?" But they said, "We have been [indistinct 00:21:14] where White guys give us $25 [indistinct 00:21:14]." So this is the thing we are doing. And this [indistinct 00:21:46]. It's prevalent and like I said, some [indistinct 00:21:55]. | 20:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | The many Colored men dead was innocent. All she had to do was say he raped me. Them old White women to take out a rape insurance. | 22:09 |
| Speaker 3 | That's right. | 22:10 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And if they don't tell a lie on some Black man, they ain't going get that money. I know to a friend of mine, her brother, she never that one brother, some old [indistinct 00:22:26] back out here said that this man raped her. Well, by Mr. Hogan being high falutin, he had his own. He went to the sheriffs and asked them if they would take this White girl before a doctor. They carried her. You know what the doctor said? She hadn't had no rape [indistinct 00:22:57]. Now they going to kill that boy for nothing. | 22:14 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No neither saying you go to court, uh-uh, because you wasn't going to see in no courthouse. And the sheriff would go turn them in there to get you. There's only one thing you going to see up a tree or either tied behind a car that they drag you to death. | 23:02 |
| Tunga White | Can you tell me of any incidents where they actually did lynch or killed any Black men who they thought was fooling around with White women? | 23:19 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. Right up here on Preston, Georgia. They carried one woman out. They thought they had done kill too. They beat her. They kicked all her teeth out and left her there, thought she was dead. And her peoples watched the car and see which way it went. The place up there they call Ponder, that's between Western and Richland back in there. | 23:32 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That's what he went down in them swamps with him. Her people teach me, watching the sea and when the car come out and went the under way, then they got out looking for her. They met her crawling. They carried her over in the medicals and left her there for safekeeping until that mouth and them teeth, they pulled them piece of teeth out and that old White man fixed that woman's mouth and bought her a ticket and put her on a train on in [indistinct 00:24:35]. | 24:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And she is a cripple now and she still living. And he went on up there and married her. They thought they had done kill her. When I went up there in the '72 see my brothers know all about it. And my brother Marvin said, "Titsy, you know Golden, don't you?" I said, "Golden Lasting?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Yeah, I know her." He said, "That's her home. Got a big apple arch around it." That old man, he been over like this and she is too. She's [indistinct 00:25:15]. | 24:37 |
| Tunga White | Around how old you think she was when that happened? She was probably on her 20s or— | 25:14 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She was older than me and I'm 85. I suspect she's about 90 is she's still living. | 25:24 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:25:34]. Somebody got to kill [indistinct 00:25:41] somewhere there about the [indistinct 00:25:46]. | 25:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Hadn't it brought up? | 25:45 |
| Speaker 3 | I think so. I just heard about it when I came here, but- | 25:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, I did too because I wasn't here. | 25:50 |
| Speaker 3 | Right. I was here either. Today it's been a—There was one here last 30 years ago [indistinct 00:25:56] county. [indistinct 00:25:56] quite frequently back in the '30s and '40s. I think the last one was probably in the '50s or the '60s [indistinct 00:25:56]. I wasn't here. But the last one [indistinct 00:26:01]. | 25:50 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:26:01] he was talking about the man that they [indistinct 00:26:21] and wouldn't bury until the [indistinct 00:26:25]. | 26:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My grandmama told me that. That was back before I was born. | 26:24 |
| Tunga White | What happened? | 26:28 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | There was a Colored boy and a White boy, she said, pulling cotton, and this White boy, he killed a snake. This Colored boy was scared of the snake. The little White boy was Kent, and I can't think of what they Colored man was named. Garma. He was named Benny Garma. Benny said, "Shelly, don't you put that snake on me." He going to do it anyhow. He throwed the snake on him and he come down in his head with that hole, kill him dead. Mo said they look for that Colored boy. They find him by him snoring in sleep up in a farther low. They got him, brought him down, carried him, swung him to a limb. | 26:32 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | There was a big old oak tree and the limb wrench clean across the road. They hung him on one of them limbs that went across the road and wouldn't let the Colored folks to take him down till they went [indistinct 00:27:46] going to bury that White boy. And old man Luther Horn I know he didn't have but one thumb, and I said to Mo, "How come he ain't got but one thumb?" She said when they lynched that Garma boy for killing that White boy, they wouldn't let the Colored folk take this Black boy down till they went under with the cops. | 27:32 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And said Luther Horn was driving a horse to the buggy and his horse got scared of them and started to running away, and said, "You know why he loop the lines over your hand? He had looped over there and that caught that finger, and that horse pulled that thumb out by the root. So that's how come he didn't have but one thumb." | 28:15 |
| Tunga White | That happened in your grandma's time? | 28:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, before I was born. | 28:45 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:28:48]. | 28:45 |
| Tunga White | Where now? | 28:45 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:28:54]. | 28:45 |
| Tunga White | No, I don't know what that is. | 28:45 |
| Speaker 3 | Tell her how the father comes—He said the guy was high as the father. Tell her about his father [indistinct 00:29:02]. | 28:45 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | [indistinct 00:29:05]. You seen corn grow? | 28:45 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 28:45 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Them blades on it? | 28:45 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 28:45 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That [indistinct 00:29:07]. When he get ripe, they pull it and make a brawl out of it. | 29:08 |
| Tunga White | Like cake? | 29:11 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And they feed it that they stock, their mule, cows. | 29:11 |
| Speaker 3 | But that was the main [indistinct 00:29:19]. Everybody who had [indistinct 00:29:24]. | 29:11 |
| Tunga White | How do you spell that? | 29:11 |
| Speaker 3 | F-O-C-C-E-R. See what you do that the corn get to a certain certain point, mature, then everybody go and pull where at least during the time. | 29:11 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That silk is going to dead on ground on that corn. You can pull that farther then. | 29:11 |
| Speaker 3 | The ear has to bounce already from the belt. | 29:11 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I pull farther. You pull it and tie them their hand and you take four of them and make a barn. That's a bundle of farther. | 29:11 |
| Speaker 3 | You take it and you cook it, and you pull it, like you say, you [indistinct 00:29:58] one of the other corn. [indistinct 00:30:00] soon as they're about three to four days, you pull it and then you lick it, you twist it and it sticks on that ear. [indistinct 00:30:09] a leave someone over here. Then you dry it for about four or five days and then everybody come and she say, get four handful. Make tie. | 30:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Make a bow. | 30:28 |
| Speaker 3 | Make a bow. That's [indistinct 00:30:30] all of it. And then when we get the tie, you got no more rain. Now you got to you watch the weather and then you [indistinct 00:30:37] everybody whole thing [indistinct 00:30:39]. The crib, that's where you put the farther, in the crib. They had to have a good barn to put in the [indistinct 00:30:46]. | 30:29 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | If the mule barn is high enough they'll packing in up over the mule. | 30:49 |
| Speaker 3 | That's right. That was the main staple [indistinct 00:30:58] meal. That [indistinct 00:31:00], and you had the corn [indistinct 00:31:04]. We didn't have all these grind meals [indistinct 00:31:04]. You get corn [indistinct 00:31:09] every day. You feed them [indistinct 00:31:15]. | 31:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And then what's some pretty meal. | 31:15 |
| Speaker 3 | Now, was the Klan bad in the area that you grew up in? | 31:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, they had put in the national. | 31:33 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:31:39]. | 31:34 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Oh, I remember once, one night before Christmas old White boys are standing around in little small places that had a Colored and the White [indistinct 00:31:52]. I had one brother, my third, he was my momma's third child. He was named Floyd Bell and he always was—He didn't pick no fights, but he didn't take nothing. | 31:40 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | These old White boy was trying to make up a train the light firecrackers and throw there with them Colored boys was. And my brother heard them. He said, "Let me tell you, son of a so-and-so something, if you throw a firecracker over here on me, I'm going paint Preston red with you." And them Reeses heard him and they knowed how my brother was. Mr. George Reese made his youngin go home. He say, "Come on Floyd, I carry you home." | 32:07 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Because he know Floyd would've cut them boys to death. Yeah. There was plenty of that up in there. | 32:40 |
| Speaker 3 | That hasn't been [indistinct 00:32:50]. When I started working [indistinct 00:32:53] County, we had an active Klan [indistinct 00:32:57] in the county. They had a [indistinct 00:32:59] county with an accident about seven miles from town. That's where meet every Saturday night. And [indistinct 00:33:06] was afraid that every Saturday night they put this big cross in front this car and come through the Black section. | 33:03 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That was the Ku Klux Klan. | 33:22 |
| Speaker 3 | That's right. [indistinct 00:33:22]. They come to the section. [indistinct 00:33:22]. We wouldn't run for [indistinct 00:33:25]. They wouldn't do nothing. Black folks wasn't doing anything but afraid of what might happen to them. They actually done nothing. Even after the 1970s when they towed that Klan [indistinct 00:33:35]. And the fact, to tell you the truth, in 1969, we trying get somebody to rough off, everybody was afraid because they knew The Klan was there and they expected what might happen. | 33:24 |
| Speaker 3 | We begged people to run. Couldn't get anybody to run. But finally my [indistinct 00:34:06]. "Will you run? You're the hero in the city. Will you run?" [indistinct 00:34:07]. We expect they're going to kill the first person. But I chose to run because I didn't get get killed, but they did tap my phone lines. In fact, what happened was, [indistinct 00:34:11] locked me from the outside [indistinct 00:34:19]. | 33:48 |
| Speaker 3 | He said, "From now on put the tape on [indistinct 00:34:30] and every night you go to be everyone check and make sure it's not cut. If it's cut, get away from there. But the city Klan was here [indistinct 00:34:44] active for most the town. In fact, even the mayor of the town [indistinct 00:34:47] was a Klan's one. In fact he had to quit as mayor because he was a Klan. [indistinct 00:34:59] their Klan business. | 34:19 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:35:02] Joe Biden, [indistinct 00:35:06] was supreme court justice. So he was a Klan, but he said the reason why he became a Klan was the fact that [indistinct 00:35:13]. So it was [indistinct 00:35:18]. In fact we got Klans over here in [indistinct 00:35:25] right here now is [indistinct 00:35:29]. What is that place's name [indistinct 00:35:31]? | 34:54 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It ain't America? | 35:17 |
| Speaker 3 | No it's not. You know Cordier is another town of about five, six miles of Cordier. The closest active unit now is right there. | 35:39 |
| Tunga White | It's north of Cordier. | 35:44 |
| Speaker 3 | Yeah. North of Cordier on the left. | 35:44 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | [indistinct 00:35:50] judge? | 35:44 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:35:51]. | 35:44 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I don't know, but I have traveled from Rhymes to Americas and I know we come through Cordier. | 35:56 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:36:01]. That's the only active Klux right here [indistinct 00:36:08] right here in our area right now. | 36:04 |
| Tunga White | Now, when you were growing up since your grandparents were landowner, did the White people ever threaten them or harass them about the land, things like that? | 36:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No. Tell you, my granddaddy was a dark Indian. | 36:23 |
| Tunga White | Yeah. | 36:29 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Nope. They all looked at the light to him. | 36:30 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:36:35]. | 36:34 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You'd never hear him say, "I take my gun." He said, "I take my knife and cut you to mince meat." And he wasn't joking. | 36:35 |
| Tunga White | Did they ever teach you your place as a Black girl growing up in White society in the South? | 36:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. | 36:50 |
| Tunga White | How to act towards White people? | 36:54 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. Sure did. | 36:57 |
| Tunga White | What did they tell you to do? | 36:59 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I known my grandma to carry one of my brothers with her, and his hat was in his hand. I know that and I know there had to be something. She said, "Take your hat off, put it in your hand." | 37:00 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:37:15]. | 37:14 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I know there was something Jim Crow about him, had to take his hat and put it in his hand. | 37:21 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:37:30]. Can you tell me about the school you went to when you was growing up? | 37:41 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You want to hear the truth? I went from the first grade to the third grade. I finished in the third grade. I never studied a day in the fourth. | 37:43 |
| Tunga White | Really. | 37:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | This man wants you get your license form. I went up there and he said, "You got a beautiful handwriting." I said, "You think so?" He said, "I know so." I said, "Well, if I told you how far I got in school, you wouldn't believe it." He say, "How far did you get?" I said, "I made it through the third grade and never studied the day into fourth." He said, "No, I don't believe it." I said, "Well, you can believe it." | 37:53 |
| Tunga White | Why didn't you go past the third grade? | 38:21 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Because we had to work. Colored children didn't get to go to school only every nine days. And if you did, when time for school closed, you was in the field. | 38:23 |
| Speaker 3 | You picked, [indistinct 00:38:42]. | 38:41 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You got to hand that [indistinct 00:38:48]. You got to hand them cotton seed. You got that planting to do for three months summer school because the Colored children couldn't go out the term. They had to go and help in the farm. That was June, July, and August. Then back to that field. | 38:46 |
| Tunga White | Now, did girls get a chance to have more schooling than the boys did? | 39:08 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. So them boys would be behind that plow. | 39:16 |
| Tunga White | Can you remember your teachers you had when you were [indistinct 00:39:41]? | 39:21 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-mm. I remember what teacher I ever went to. | 39:41 |
| Tunga White | Now, where is this school at? | 39:41 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 39:41 |
| Speaker 4 | [indistinct 00:39:41] one big room. It looked like it may be [indistinct 00:39:41]. | 39:41 |
| Tunga White | Now what church is this by? | 39:41 |
| Speaker 4 | [indistinct 00:39:48]. | 39:41 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | This is Magnolia Bay. Preston School Magnolia Bay is close together, but they don't teach there no more now. | 39:50 |
| Tunga White | I know they don't teach that, but that's the school— | 39:59 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Rosenwald, the children got a chance to go on school buses, not like the White children used to have. And them Colored school houses, they don't use them no more. | 40:03 |
| Tunga White | What is that school doing there? Just been there just like that old house that was there? Who are your teachers you say you know? | 40:26 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | The first teacher I went to was Miss Martha Harris. Second one was Mr. Mold Magar. He was a man teacher. | 40:27 |
| Tunga White | You didn't like him? | 40:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No, I didn't like him. I went to two men teachers. | 40:38 |
| Tunga White | Why didn't you like him? | 40:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You don't like no man teacher like you do a lady teacher. | 40:43 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:40:46]. | 40:45 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And I went to Miss Clemmy Thomas [indistinct 00:40:53]. And cutting outta seals. She was my daddy's first cousin. And [indistinct 00:41:05] Patterson, that's who I stopped school because I was promoted. And if I'd have went home the next time I'd have been with Kendrick Swinney. He was a man. And I didn't even go to school no more. You can treasure your education, if you treasure. | 40:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Because I was a grown woman before I could run up figures. That's the reason I know you can treasure. My count was in my head like my grandma. | 41:34 |
| Tunga White | Now how many grades was in that school when they [indistinct 00:41:56]? How far [indistinct 00:41:56]- | 41:51 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Children didn't get out of books like they do now. You learn that book before you got out. | 41:56 |
| Tunga White | What? | 42:01 |
| Speaker 3 | Word for word. | 42:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You would close that book and put it on that teacher's desk and you'd recite every word of that lesson by heart. That's the way it was when I was going to school. Children didn't make grades fast like they do now. Mm-mm. You knowed it, you knowed well, or you got into nothing. | 42:04 |
| Tunga White | I can't [indistinct 00:42:35]. | 42:34 |
| Speaker 4 | That's hard to believe saying about the way things nowadays. You go [indistinct 00:42:36]. | 42:34 |
| Tunga White | And remember most of the stuff you went through [indistinct 00:42:39] you remember all those things. | 42:38 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I remember quotation, "The purple head, the mountain, the river running by. The morning in the sunset, it lightens up the sky. The tallest trees in the woods, the after sun, and Lord God made everyone." | 42:50 |
| Tunga White | That's the good one. What grade were you when you learned that one? | 43:02 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I was in second grade. | 43:05 |
| Tunga White | Second grade? | 43:05 |
| Speaker 4 | Can you remember any other quotes or poems or things you learned? | 43:05 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No. I had the primary and I had the riverside. Studied in the Riverside, and what I stopped school out of was the child world. | 43:17 |
| Speaker 4 | So what happened? | 43:40 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Child world. | 43:40 |
| Tunga White | Okay, child world. | 43:40 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | But there was some block headed big old girls, Besty Sweeney. She's standing at the foot of the class, her and Elson Robert. And they look like they ought to been my mom. | 43:54 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:44:08] with thick [indistinct 00:44:10]. | 44:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. Thick, rainy. | 44:10 |
| Tunga White | Were there a lot of older children still in the young kids [indistinct 00:44:21]? | 44:19 |
| Speaker 4 | [indistinct 00:44:21]. | 44:20 |
| Tunga White | Oh, they were just big. | 44:20 |
| Speaker 4 | They were just way older children. | 44:20 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They did blockhead and they couldn't ever make a grade. Stayed back there. | 44:20 |
| Tunga White | Staying back, huh? | 44:20 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. | 44:20 |
| Tunga White | And you worked in the field? | 44:20 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. Born on the farm. Raised on it. | 44:39 |
| Tunga White | Now, tell me about your courting, the man you married when you were 15. Tell me, first of all, what was his name? | 44:48 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | His name was James Bell, but he wasn't the Bell than I was. There were two, three sets of Bells. | 44:57 |
| Tunga White | Okay. You're a different Bell. | 45:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He was named James Bell. | 45:04 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 45:05 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And I wouldn't have married him if I hadn't have gotten married with my real boyfriend. I mostly done it for spite. | 45:07 |
| Speaker 4 | What? Married for spite? | 45:13 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. | 45:13 |
| Speaker 4 | What did your boyfriend do to you that made you so bad you went out and married another man? | 45:19 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, just like that girl was giving him what he wanted and him and her got a baby. | 45:26 |
| Speaker 4 | Uh-huh. | 45:29 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And his mother would try to look like wash my face with that baby. She didn't like me when she liked the girl he got the baby by. | 45:31 |
| Tunga White | Why you think she liked the other girl so much? | 45:46 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You know how some old folks was then. | 45:46 |
| Tunga White | Yeah. | 45:46 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My grand mama tried to raise me nice. And his mama didn't like it. That girl's mama didn't care what Posey cared her and how lady kept her out, and his mother thought that was something. But my grand was trying to raise me and I was listening there. | 45:47 |
| Tunga White | So the people back then didn't frown on girls who got pregnant and wasn't married. | 46:06 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | When the girl got pregnant back in there, she didn't see inside of school no more that she went to a school exhibition, and she got turned out the church. | 46:12 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 46:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Sure. | 46:24 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:46:25]. | 46:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Huh? | 46:27 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:46:28]. | 46:27 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No, we couldn't play with them girls if they messed around and done the thing they all know. We had to leave them girls aside. That's reason I say my grandma really raised me and I'm glad she did. You couldn't associate with them. My grandma was something. | 46:28 |
| Speaker 4 | Did they kind basically stay in the house during the whole time that they were pregnant or did they go off [indistinct 00:46:56]. | 46:48 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Some of their mamas put them out the door. They had to stay where they could. | 46:55 |
| Tunga White | Now back to James. Now, how did you— | 47:00 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | —I was. I was with people, but they didn't know how to hold me a conversation. And after my aunt died, they came up to the funeral. He saw me and he knew he had saw me down there in Sumter County. They'd brought some boys along too, that was one for Sarah. Jim was for Sarah. Joe Leonard and Johnny, out of those two, whichever one I liked. | 0:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | So when Jim got there, his girl, she didn't know nothing. Everything he there, say, "I don't know." Because I was graduated, I could talk to a boy. Said, "I wrote you, how come you didn't answer my letter?" "I don't know." | 0:35 |
| Tunga White | I don't know, girl. | 0:54 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I'd sent a word now, by her brother. I said, "You tell Sarah, James down here. We'll be up there to rest." When we got up there, do you know where she was? In cousin Dave's room, behind the door, buck naked as ever she come in the world. I had to entertain that room of boys. She came in and asked what he wanted her with. "How come you didn't answer my letter?" "I don't know." | 1:01 |
| Tunga White | (laughs) | 1:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And I could keep a dozen of them company. I wasn't ashamed and I knew how to talk. So when we got back from downtown getting some sodas, he approached me. I said, "I thought you liked Sarah?" He said, "That girl don't know nothing." | 1:33 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And the way I done to trick her now, first Sunday in September was coming up, and he wanted to know could he have my company. I told him, "Sure." I went up there one night. I said, "You're going to church, Sunday service?" "Yeah, I reckon so. You?" I say, "Yeah." "How you going?" I say, "James coming up here and take me to church." (laughs) | 1:55 |
| Tunga White | Ohh! | 2:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She said, "I didn't know you went with—" I said, "You didn't?" | 2:09 |
| Tunga White | And she's jealous. | 2:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She said, "I wouldn't have started with him if I—" I said, "I didn't care about you talking with him." | 2:09 |
| Tunga White | She pulled a wool over her eyes, didn't she? | 2:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well if you don't know, get out the way. | 2:09 |
| Tunga White | That's right. You're right. That's the rule. | 2:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Me and him laughed about that after we married. | 2:09 |
| Tunga White | So how long y'all court before y'all got married? | 2:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Let me see, that was in August. We married the 25th day of December. | 2:09 |
| Tunga White | Oh. | 2:09 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 2:09 |
| Tunga White | Now what did you—Did you move out of your grandmama's house when you got married to him? | 3:13 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 3:24 |
| Tunga White | Where did y'all move to? | 3:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Between Americus and Leslie. That's about 20 something miles. | 3:24 |
| Tunga White | Now where were y'all living at there? He had owned his own house or something? What y'all was doing? | 3:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Uh-uh. He was living on a White man's property. | 3:56 |
| Tunga White | Oh, okay. | 3:56 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That was the first time I ever worked on a White man's place, and I didn't like it. | 3:56 |
| Tunga White | How many acres were y'all working on there? | 3:56 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | One mule farm. | 3:56 |
| Tunga White | A one mule farm? | 3:56 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. And what I disliked, work hard, end of the year, you couldn't have nothing. I hadn't been used to that. So I helped him make two farms. The old White man came by one day, that owned the place, he wanted to know how come I wasn't in the field. I said, "My baby's sick." | 4:08 |
| Tunga White | Right. | 4:29 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | "Well, you farm close to your house." I said, "I know it is, and my baby is in the house, sick." "The grass is growing." I say, "I know that." I said, "Mr. Bell—" He was a White Bell. I says, "That grass gets so high, it tickles that mule under his tail. As long as my baby is sick, I'll be here with him." And I knew he would not give my husband that farm another year, and he didn't. That gave me a chance to move back to my home, Webster County. | 4:35 |
| Tunga White | Now how long did y'all work at his place? | 5:08 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He worked for Wedges the first year, after we were married. The next year, he took a crop, and the next one turned into the fourth one. He wouldn't give him another crop and I went back to where I was born and raised. He got up there, he didn't like it. In fact, he was jealous of me. I knew too many people. And he wanted me to stay out from down to the grandmama and granddaddy that raised me, and I knew that wasn't going to work. | 5:12 |
| Tunga White | Right. | 5:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My granddaddy was down with a stroke. When my grandmother would have to go tend to her farming business, she'd have me and my two children to come and stay there so I could see at my granddaddy. And he got up paralyzed. He just knew then that I was going to move back down in Sumter County, but I wasn't. | 5:44 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He got mad, he set my grandmother's fodder pen afire. She had three big stacks of hay and three of fodder. Just stack them and then put a wire around them where the cattle can't get to it and eat it. And he struck a match in that. | 6:07 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, that's would have set that corn crib afire. Corn crib would have set that mule barn afire, and then the mule barn, it would have set the dwelling house afire. If we would have got burnt up, then nobody would have known the devil that he had done. | 6:28 |
| Tunga White | Right. | 6:45 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That's when I found out who the Lord was. He got trapped in his own thing. | 6:47 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 6:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Caught his tracks. Mo went and called the law. That's when he come out of me and his house down the road. Then he cut across the field and came up the back to these fodder pens, and stuck that match. It was blazing up so fast that he took a shortcut back to the road. And he knew my grandma—She told me she said, "Didn't nobody do this but you." Said, "And just as soon as I get it accomplished," said, "I'm going and call the law and tell them to bring the dogs." | 6:55 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He done left clothes, his shotgun. He was going to Sharon, going through Preston. He went around and the man I used to wash and iron for him and his family, he knew me. He knew he had saw him there. He said, "What? Ain't you Pat's husband?" He said, "Yes, sir." Said, "You don't want a ride?" This old White man was saw milling back in there. He said, "Yes, sir." He said, "Now, I'm going to turn about three miles from here, but that will help you." He said, "Where you on your way?" Talking about, "My mama and daddy's." Saying, "My auntie's husband is sick, and that's the reason I got this suitcase, some things my wife sending my auntie. And this gun belongs to my uncle." | 7:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | When he carried him as far as he was going, stopped for him to get out, he said, "If it wasn't for that shotgun, you could catch lots of rides between here and Americus." "So if that's going to keep me from catching rides, you can take it back and give it to my wife when you past there this evening." The man brought me the gun. The sheriff in Preston had called Americus to be on the lookout in Screven. They saw him coming down on that 12:00 train. | 8:40 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He didn't get off at the depot. The man said, "All right," he'd go out in the country. On that road that leads from Americus to Leslie, he said he'd come to an old house didn't nobody live in. Said he was just looking on the ground and he saw the tracks, what left the highway and went in the yard, and didn't see where it came back out. So he pushed the door and went on in. Said one mind told him to shoot up in the top. Said he outed his pistol and shot in the top. "If you don't come down, I'm going to fill the top full of bullets." A voice answered, "Yes, sir. I'm coming down," and this was the man he was looking for. | 9:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You don't do wrong and get far. | 9:57 |
| Tunga White | That's right. And what did they do to him when they caught him? | 10:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | A White judge went on his bond. They wouldn't give me a peace warrant when I went in. They told me the judge told him he wasn't going to let him come back up there, because he had told me if I ever quit him and wouldn't come back to him, he'd kill me. Well, that would have made you afraid, wouldn't it? | 10:10 |
| Tunga White | Yeah. | 10:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And when I went to get my peace warrant, the man said, "I don't think he's coming back up here, Pat." They all called me what my grandmama called me, around there, Pat. I say, "Well, I don't know." He said, "That judge said he wasn't gone—" I said, "That judge don't know where he be when he go home and go to bed." He say, "Well if you see him, you come." | 10:25 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That third Sunday in June, I'd been to the Traveler's Rest turnout. And when we'd come from the church and hitting the highway, who could me and my cousin see but him? Coming. He say, "Young Jim." I said, "Sure is." Said, "You want to stop?" I said, "I ain't wanting to talk with him." He said, "I believe I'll stop and see where he's going." He did. Made like he was going to his auntie's. Right clear after we got home, we didn't have but about two miles to go, here he was. In the road, wanting to see the children. My brothers carried them out to the road where he could see them. | 10:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I got up Monday morning, and didn't stop until I got to the man that was going to give me the peace warrant. And he gave it to me. Well that told him to have to come back and get under it, and I ain't seen him since. But when it came time to have his trial, he had done broke in a store down there, not far from where his mama and daddy stayed. He got him an organ and went under there and bored so many holes this way, got down further and bored them in there where you see they cut that block out. That's the way he got in there. | 11:34 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | When that man went to open his store Sunday morning, he saw it had been broken in. So he called the law and told them to bring the dogs, his store had been broken open. Those dogs got there and they got that track, and they carried it straight to his mama and daddy's house. He heard those dogs and he looked out and saw them, he tore out and went to running. It was a creek not too far from their house, and he had to go up a tree to keep them dogs from getting them before those folks got there. | 12:16 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They got there, they fastened the dogs and had him to come down. Carried him back to his house, then they searched him and they searched the house. He had sawdust, laying flat on his back, where it done got all in his shirt. And then it all got in the house. It was full of fresh sawdust. So they just carried him and put him in Americus jail. Before court started in Preston, they had done sentenced him for breaking in that man's store. See, he was going to jump that. He was going up the state. He wasn't going to be found. He got trapped in everything he did. | 12:50 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | But when he did make that time, they called the sheriff from Preston to come and get him. He told him, he said, "If y'all carry me before the judge, I'll plead guilty." He didn't want us to see him no more. And that's what he did. And they gave him two years and something months. He made about a year. He broke the chains, and he went to Jacksonville. He wasn't down there long. Him and one of his brothers going to break in a car box and get them some cigarettes. The night watchman killed that man I had for a husband, dead on the spot. | 13:33 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 14:21 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And broke his brother's hip. That's what come of it. | 14:22 |
| Tunga White | Do you know what year that was that he got shot? | 14:32 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It must have been in '32 or '33. Somewhere along then. I didn't know he was dead until I saw my stepmother. She said, "Ada Mae, you know Jim got killed?" I said, "No. I ain't know that." Said, "Yeah." Said, "He got killed in Jacksonville, trying to go and rob a car box, him and his brother." My mother, my grandmother and my granddaddy had never done nothing but tried to help him. | 14:32 |
| Tunga White | Now, what's a car box? | 15:11 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Freight train. | 15:15 |
| Tunga White | Okay. | 15:16 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | What you put produce and stuff in. | 15:16 |
| Speaker 3 | At that time, what she's talking about, at that time, that's the way we were traveling to get long distance was by train. [indistinct 00:15:18]. And of course, riding on that train, the train was the main thing and the best way of traveling. [indistinct 00:15:18]— | 15:17 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Or a ho board. That's the way he went through the world. | 15:18 |
| Speaker 3 | That's right. | 15:36 |
| Tunga White | Now how old was James when you married him? | 15:40 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He was 20 years old. He was five years older than me. | 15:43 |
| Tunga White | Now you said you had children. When did you have your first child? How old were you when you had your first child? | 15:50 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I done 18 years old. | 15:55 |
| Tunga White | Was it a boy or a girl? | 15:57 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Three boys. I'm the mother of three boys. My first baby died on January the 13th, in '27. I had my second baby November the 8th, in '27. That is two babies in one year. Wasn't it? | 16:02 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 16:21 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And my last baby was born where I was born at, in Webster County. The 21st of January, in '29. Bud was born in '27. In '29. | 16:23 |
| Tunga White | How did the first baby die? | 16:23 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My first baby died in January the 27th. | 16:23 |
| Tunga White | How? | 16:23 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And I told you, I had the second baby in '27, the eighth day of November. | 16:23 |
| Tunga White | Oh, the eighth day. | 16:23 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Those two babies were born in the same year. | 16:24 |
| Tunga White | Right. | 17:10 |
| Speaker 3 | What she's talking about, what caused the first death? That's what she's asking. | 17:12 |
| Tunga White | How did he die? | 17:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | That first one, I don't know. But he never would nurse. A baby can't nurse, he can't live, can't he? | 17:18 |
| Speaker 3 | Call that breastfeeding, right? Breastfeeding? | 17:25 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. I don't think he would have been right if he would have lived, and I was glad the Lord took him. | 17:36 |
| Tunga White | Did midwives deliver all your babies? | 17:46 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 17:49 |
| Tunga White | What was the name of the midwife that delivered your babies? | 17:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It's been so long. What was that old lady's name? She was a Patrick, her last name. Ms. Patrick. Joe Walls delivered my last baby. He was born in Webster County. | 18:02 |
| Tunga White | How did it work? Did you go to a doctor at any time, or did— | 18:27 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It wasn't no doctor to go to then, those granny women is what saw at you. | 18:29 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. So you had no—You went and saw these ladies while you were pregnant. | 18:29 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Uh-huh. | 18:39 |
| Tunga White | And then they came to your house? | 18:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. Sometimes they'd come to my house. | 18:39 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. And then— | 18:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It wasn't no clinics then. | 18:48 |
| Tunga White | Right. And they would come to your house at night, the day you had your baby, and they would take care of it. | 18:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 18:56 |
| Tunga White | They'd tell you—What did they tell you to do after you had your baby, so you could take care of it yourself? | 18:57 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Keep yourself clean for one thing. | 19:10 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 19:10 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And tell you to take so many drops of turpentine. You know turpentine is supposed to clean you out. You didn't know that, did you? | 19:10 |
| Tunga White | No. | 19:17 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | A woman has a baby, she has lots of clots. And you take so many drops of turpentine, that'd help clean you out. That's that old remedy. | 19:23 |
| Tunga White | Was that the only thing they told you to do? | 19:33 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 19:33 |
| Tunga White | Did they tell you how to help take care of the baby? | 19:40 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I knew how to do that. My grandma had showed me. | 19:45 |
| Tunga White | She showed you how to take care of the baby? | 19:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. She was a good old baby doctor. | 19:49 |
| Tunga White | After your first husband, you all broke up, you were living where? You and your first husband. | 20:03 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My grandmama them, just like I was before I married him. Me and my babies. | 20:06 |
| Tunga White | How long did you stay there? Did you ever move back out? | 20:06 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Not until I married. | 20:19 |
| Tunga White | Who did you marry your second time? | 20:21 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Roscoe Stewart. | 20:24 |
| Tunga White | How did you meet him? | 20:24 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | We went to school together. I already knew him. We used to go to school together. | 20:32 |
| Tunga White | How old was— | 20:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Roscoe? | 20:39 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 20:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He was two years older than me. Me and his birthday on the same date. I was 85 Saturday, and if he would have lived, he would have been 87. | 20:51 |
| Tunga White | Wow. What did he do for a living? | 21:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Before I married him? | 21:05 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 21:05 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He was a line log man. | 21:05 |
| Tunga White | What does a line log man do? | 21:05 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He cuts logs. | 21:05 |
| Tunga White | Cuts logs? | 21:05 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. | 21:05 |
| Speaker 3 | Sawmill. | 21:05 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Hm? | 21:05 |
| Speaker 3 | I was just telling her, sawmill. | 21:05 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No. He worked in the woods. He cut those logs for that sawmill. | 21:29 |
| Speaker 3 | Oh, yeah. Right, right. Well they had that a long time. | 21:32 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And sometimes he was a barrel stave worker. Cut staves and make barrels. And after we'd come here, the most that he worked, at Spence Field. Because the base went down. He was a civil service worker out there. And after that, he got to be a butcher. He worked up there at that slaughter pit for about 30 something years. | 21:36 |
| Tunga White | Did you all have any children together? | 22:08 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Uh-uh. | 22:08 |
| Tunga White | How old were you when you married him? | 22:08 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Roscoe? | 22:08 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 22:08 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I married Jim, I was 15. | 22:13 |
| Tunga White | Right. | 22:17 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And my youngest had come. I met Roscoe in '34. You can't see how really— | 22:17 |
| Tunga White | Okay. When did y'all move to Moultrie? | 22:30 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | In '42. I came to Moultrie the first Sunday in September in '42. I'd done been up the state. | 22:39 |
| Tunga White | Why did y'all choose to live in Moultrie? | 23:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Better living here. | 23:01 |
| Tunga White | Better living. | 23:01 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Everybody was trying to find that airbase out there, because they knew they were giving jobs. People would go all over the world, hunting better jobs. And that's how come I'm in Moultrie. I stayed in Moultrie longer than anywhere. I think from '42 up to '94. Everybody over there say, "You're a citizen." I say, "I reckon I ought to be." | 23:01 |
| Tunga White | You've been here long enough to be one. What were you doing? What kind of work were you doing when you were here in Moultrie? | 23:31 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Some of everything. Running clubs sometimes, sometimes café, sometimes in homes. | 23:35 |
| Tunga White | What clubs did you run? | 23:39 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Even's Club. I used to run that place down there on Center. My boss man rented it and I ran it. | 23:40 |
| Tunga White | How long ago was this? | 24:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Ooh, that was back there in the '50s. Then I started to owning grandchildren. My place was at home then. | 24:07 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. You helped take care of your grandchildren? | 24:07 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I raised every grandchildren I got. | 24:13 |
| Tunga White | Really? How many grandchildren do you have? | 24:13 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Let me see. Four and three is seven, eight, nine. I got nine grandchildren. Four. Let me see, four and four is eight. Now I got eight great-grandchildren. | 24:14 |
| Tunga White | Oh, that's nice. | 24:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I raised that girl in there from a baby. She wasn't walking. And her brother. Those are my younger grandchildren. My older grandchildren, all of them out in LA. Two of them out there. One of them got killed out there. And the other one is down here in Tallahassee. He's a preacher and a school teacher. | 24:49 |
| Tunga White | Really? That's great. | 25:12 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | But they did what I asked them and I feel good on it. I said, "You ain't going to school to eat and play. You're going to get something in here." Lenny was teaching school, and then he resigned for the job he got. He's a supervisor in the post office. Melvin, he's a teacher. He teaches in Tallahassee and he got a church down there. | 25:16 |
| Tunga White | Let me ask you this question, how did you feel about integration when it happened? Did you think it was a good thing or a bad thing when it happened? | 25:42 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I knew it was good if it was going to help the Colored folks. When I found it out, I went to Albany. I got there, I didn't know how to go in. I said, "What happened here?" And then when they had a little store around there for the Colored folks, just a little bigger than this here room, to eat in. And if you went there when the soldiers were going to Fort Benning, you had to get you something and get outdoors and eat it, because it wasn't no room. | 25:56 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Go out there, great, big pretty place. White folks and the Colored folks, just mixing. Up over the door it says—Back in there was the lunchroom. I went in there, Whites and Coloreds are sitting down eating. I said, "Mm." I have got on the bus here in Moultrie, going to my home, Americus. I stood up from up here at the bus station until I got to Albany, and I had to stand up from Albany to Americus. Those White folks had those Colored folks seats. You really just stood up. | 26:23 |
| Speaker 3 | We didn't have no streets, just about two roads in the back now. Three roads in the back [indistinct 00:27:00] back road. Right? | 26:52 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 26:52 |
| Speaker 3 | Yeah, and they would get on a bus if they had to. I think it was three rows in the front. The last three rows in the back, were Black folks seats, supposed to be. But yeah, wasn't no Blacks. It was just White folks. Now they're getting in the Black folks seats, so really, the Black folks sit above—up front. Where they couldn't sit up in the White folks seats. | 26:59 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Some of them lied, talking about, "I know the White children and the Coloreds ain't going together here in Moultrie." I said, "If they go anywhere else, they're going here in Moultrie." And they are going, ain't that? | 27:37 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. | 27:43 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My oldest grandson, he marched. Every time his foot hit the ground, he said, "Grandma." He said, "It ain't going to do me much good to change schools," said, "because I'm too close to the end." Said but every time they turned me out of that—out there to the prison camp, where they had him. "Every time they let my foot hit the ground, I'm going to get in a march." | 27:48 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:28:15] those kids to boycott the schools, they [indistinct 00:28:19]. They refused to go, because they had to go to segregated schools. But I think [indistinct 00:28:27]. | 28:13 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. I think that's the reason— | 28:13 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:28:32]. That was '60. It was '60, and they still had the segregated schools [indistinct 00:28:45]. They just were building all the jails around and [indistinct 00:28:50] over there. | 28:13 |
| Tunga White | Were the police and the sheriff's department really violent towards all the students protesters back then? | 28:13 |
| Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:29:03]. See at that time, they worked for the train down there. You didn't have professional officers. They'd just pick up crackers off the street. I'm talking about to pass minimum standards there, [indistinct 00:29:16] have, and that's the thing that made them bitter. Because up until that point, those crackers were so glad to get a little [indistinct 00:29:16]—I mean, if they did [indistinct 00:29:16]. | 29:07 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. They was a heap of violence. Because [indistinct 00:29:16] set this here store afire down here. I was looking out the window. I was staying on that side of the street then. I saw all that dark place, down on that pavement. I said, "I didn't know it was raining out there." Directly, a car come. I can see the reflection of the lights. Police, they saw it. They jumped out. Those Black folks had stored gas down there. [indistinct 00:30:09] put a match. And I reckon that light made him run behind the store. | 29:15 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah, there was plenty violence. And those Colored folks had done tuck and tuck, because they had got tired. Old man Kegler, he lied. "There ought to be a gun put to every one of them that's out there in that march." It wasn't long before his store was burnt up. You could beat an old dog until he gets tired, and he's going to bite you. | 30:13 |
| Speaker 3 | That's right. I might add to that. [indistinct 00:30:14] when they started integrating. What the White man would do, he wouldn't not just get at the Black person who was integrating. Like the family who was integrating. He got the cousins and uncles to work somewhere. If they worked in the sawmill or in a house, he would threaten them. You know? To deprive them for every bit of that. That's why it took so long to get anything [indistinct 00:31:13]. | 30:14 |
| Speaker 3 | I remember quite well in Seminole County, when we first had the first kids going to the White school down there. 1968, I believe it was. They not only just beat—Now the man who had kids going there, he started a center. He was a roof man, so therefore he was able to take care of his kids. But what happened is, that uncle worked 30 miles away. And the man who ran the sawmill 30 miles away, was talking about these little grandkids in that school, White folks school. They told [indistinct 00:31:41] if he didn't take those kids out, they were going to fire him. So that's what happened, they got fired 30 miles away, for the grandkids not getting out that White school. That's how they used it against us. | 31:10 |
| Tunga White | Mrs. Stewart, do you think that—were we as Black people—were closer back in the olden days than we are now? [indistinct 00:32:15] more? | 32:03 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | It's better. It is better. I know that, because they have better schooling than I had an opportunity to get. It's better. | 32:17 |
| Speaker 3 | But her point is, [indistinct 00:32:34], do you think Blacks were getting along better now than they did back at that time? So what she saying, are we more friendlier? Do we get along better now than we did- | 32:31 |
| Tunga White | With each other. | 32:41 |
| Speaker 3 | —back at that time? | 32:42 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. Yep. | 32:46 |
| Tunga White | Did the Black people who were prominent, and who had a lot of money and education back in the old days, mingle and spend time, and help Black people who didn't have those kinds of things? | 32:53 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Well, some of them were nice and some of them weren't. It's some folks who wanted everything for themselves. And it was some good ones. Because I know my grandmama was one. She would buy it for poor people, and felt good doing it. She said, "The Lord will bless you," and he will. You can open your hand to a needy person, and God going to double whatever you give him. Reason I know so, on my birthday, I had a better birthday this time than I ever had in my life. | 33:18 |
| Speaker 3 | That's crazy. | 33:49 |
| Tunga White | That's good. | 33:49 |
| Speaker 3 | That's crazy. | 33:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | If I'm able and a person come to me, "I want to borrow $5," or $10, if I got it, I'm going to let him have it. When those children got through giving me, they had gave me around $150. Now wasn't that a blessing? | 33:51 |
| Tunga White | It was. | 34:17 |
| Speaker 3 | But Mrs. Stewart, because people don't pay like they used to. They used to keep their word up. And people's word is not as good as it used to be. You sort of agree there, don't you? I mean, usually— | 34:17 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Yeah. I want to tell you about that. | 34:20 |
| Speaker 3 | Uh-huh. | 34:20 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | If a person gets up from you and he tell you a lie, you know he got it and he won't pay you—You've read the 37th chapter or Psalms, I know, ain't you? | 34:24 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 34:35 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You know what it say? | 34:35 |
| Tunga White | What does it say? | 34:35 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Fret not thyself for an evildoer, because he soon will be casted out. And I done seen it work. People would get my money and wouldn't pay me, and if I call them name by name, they would fail to answer. I trust in the good Lord. And he has made ways for me so many. He helped me to raise my grandchildren. I couldn't help what my boys wouldn't do, those still were my grandchildren. | 34:42 |
| Tunga White | That's true. | 35:15 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Lisa's daddy used to tell me, "The reason I don't give you no more than I do, Mama, what I give you, you give to those children. Them ain't your children. Them Bud and Elsie's children." I said, "I can't tell the difference." I said, "I love them just like I do you and Bud." The Lord took Meechie for me to have a better way with [indistinct 00:35:43]. Because I did get that social security after so long. He died in '64, I didn't get no social security for them children until before Easter in '66. And you know the way I got it then? | 35:18 |
| Tunga White | How? | 36:02 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I had to write Senator Talmadge, and explain everything that thing told me that come from Thomasville. At that time, they didn't have a social security office here, and the man would come from Thomasville. I loved that White man to death, that sensed me into it. He says—He runs a store over there in Forest Hill, Mr. Kettle. I had a loan. I borrowed money from him, and I had got to the place I couldn't keep up my bill. He came that Monday morning. He said, "Ada Mae, they done sent me to strip your house." I said, "Well you see it. I reckon you have to get it." I say, "But I'm quite sure you're going to have a heavy work though, before you can sell it." | 36:05 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I said, "When I could work, I kept up my bills." He said, "You don't work nowhere?" I said, "How can I with these three babies?" He said, "Where they daddy and the mama?" I said, "I don't know where they mamas' is." I said, "They daddies dead. These were my sons." He said, "Will the welfare give you—" I said, "Not one penny." He said, "Well what about the daddies social security?" I said, "Well that man come from Thomasville tell me they're not entitled to it." Said, "They're bastard children." | 36:55 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He said, "He told you a so and so lie." Said, "I got an old lady work for me. She's been working for years." Said she had a house full of children and she married an old man, and he ain't the daddy of neither of her children, and he died. Said and every one of those children got a check behind this old man when he died. Said those that were older, they got old to be getting it. But said those that were little, they're still drawing that man's social security. | 37:32 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He says, "Well, the social security—" Said, "You told him, the head man, about it?" I said, "Who is the head man?" He said, "You get you a responsible person to write Senator Herman Talmadge." Say, "And I bet you, you will get an answer." Say, "And tell him everything that son of a so and so told you, about them being bastard children." I said, "Well, thank you." He said, "You write it." Said, "You have it—" Say, "But listen, you can write?" I said, "Sure." He said, "Do it yourself." And then he explained it. He said, "You back that letter to Atlanta, to the capital of Atlanta." Said, "And I guarantee you, you will soon get an answer." And I did. | 38:10 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He wanted me to send him my sons' social security card and I sent it. Every time he would get a letter from Washington, he would re-back it and send it to the motioner, me. Talmadge sent me four letters. The last one he sent me is still right here. "It was a pleasure working with you." Said, "Anytime you need my assistance, just let me know." | 39:13 |
| Tunga White | That's good that he [indistinct 00:39:43]. | 39:41 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | And he says, "You'll soon be getting a check for those children in a few days," and sure enough, I did. When I carried that letter up there before that thing what come from down there, somebody wrote Senator Talmadge, told him I said they were bastards. I said, "I'm the one did it because you told me that." "No, I didn't." I say, "Yes, you did too." I said, "You told me that, and I told you if they were bastard children, they were all through your race." Because I had worked in those homes where those children were out of unwedded lock. "Yeah, but I didn't say they were bastards." He did. And I think that cost his job. I didn't see him no more. | 39:43 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 40:27 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He wore boots. Ooh, that man would make me so mad. Mr. Lee was up there when me and him were in that big argument about those children being bastards. Mr. Lee would just pat me, because he was so glad I was telling him just like it was. And he got it too. | 40:30 |
| Tunga White | Well Ms. Stewart, I appreciate this interview. Can I ask you a couple of questions about your mama and daddy real quick though? | 40:51 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 40:59 |
| Tunga White | What is your mama's whole name? Her full name. | 41:06 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Willie Cunningham, before she married Albert Bell. | 41:07 |
| Tunga White | Did she have a middle name? | 41:07 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | They called her Shug for a nickname. That was her nickname. | 41:22 |
| Tunga White | Do you know her date of birth? | 41:25 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Her birthday? | 41:25 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 41:25 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No, I don't. I never did know her birthday. | 41:35 |
| Tunga White | Do you remember her date of death? | 41:37 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I don't know the dates or the month. But I know the month that she died. | 41:43 |
| Tunga White | When was that? | 41:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | She died Friday, before the third Sunday in March, in '23. | 41:49 |
| Tunga White | And she was born in Webster County? | 41:58 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Uh-huh. | 41:59 |
| Tunga White | And your father's whole name was what? | 42:00 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Albert Bell. | 42:00 |
| Tunga White | Do you know his birthdate— | 42:00 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No. I never did know his birthday. | 42:16 |
| Tunga White | Do you know his death date? | 42:17 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No, I don't. I know it was in July, but I don't know what date, because he died upstate with my brothers. | 42:22 |
| Tunga White | What is your birthdate? | 42:35 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | First of July. I was 85 Saturday. | 42:36 |
| Tunga White | Oh, really? That's great. | 42:42 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I was born in 1909, the first day of July. | 42:43 |
| Tunga White | Now your husband, his birthdate? Do you remember that? | 42:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. Same date on mine, but he was two years older than me. If he would have lived, he would have been 87, Saturday. | 42:47 |
| Tunga White | And his date of death? | 42:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | He died—No, I don't. And I done put them things away. Lisa? Lisa? | 42:47 |
| Lisa | Ma'am? | 42:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | You know the date Scobie died? | 42:47 |
| Lisa | February 29, 1988. | 42:47 |
| Tunga White | And he was born where? | 42:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Webster County. | 42:47 |
| Tunga White | Webster County? Now can you tell me the names of your brothers and sisters? | 42:47 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. William Bell, Jack Bell, Era Dee Tipper, that's my sister. | 42:47 |
| Tunga White | What's her name now? | 43:56 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Ara Dee Tipper. And Marvin Bell, Willie Roy Bell, Benny Bell, and Otis Bell. And Fannie Ruth Bell. Now some of them are dead, but those were my sisters and brothers. | 43:58 |
| Tunga White | And they were all born in Webster County? | 44:31 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | No, all of them weren't. William was born in Webster County, Jack was born in Webster County, Ara Dee was born in Webster County. And Marvin was born in Webster County. And Willie Roy was born in Webster County. But Benny, he was born in Sumpter County. Oldest was born in Sumpter County, and Fannie Ruth was born in Sumpter County. | 44:35 |
| Tunga White | Now do you know any of their birth dates? | 44:57 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Nope. I don't. | 44:57 |
| Tunga White | Okay. Or their dates of death, of the ones you're saying who died? | 45:04 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Fannie Ruth died in Crescent, Pennsylvania, in June. But I don't know the date. And Otis died in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. I don't know the date he died, but I know it hadn't got summertime. It was along in the winter. And Jack Bell, he died in Pennsylvania. And Willie Roy too. Jack died in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Willie Roy died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. | 45:12 |
| Tunga White | What is your birth rank? Are you the middle child, third child? Oldest child, right? | 45:59 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I'm the oldest. | 46:36 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 46:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My mama and daddy's oldest kid. Them— | 46:36 |
| Tunga White | Can you tell me your children's full names? | 46:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | My children? | 46:36 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 46:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | John Lee Bell and Ernest Bell. | 46:36 |
| Tunga White | What is the name of that school you attended? | 46:36 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | I attended Preston School and a school they call Good Hope School. That school was out there in the church yard. But it was in Webster County. | 46:39 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:46:50]. | 46:49 |
| Ada Bell Stewart | Mm-hmm. Got up four miles from my home, and I walked it. | 46:49 |
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