Iola Wilhite interview recording, 1995 July 12
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| Doris Dixon | Mrs. Wilhite, would you state your full name and date of birth please? | 0:08 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Iola Wilhite. Born 1908, second day of December. | 0:18 |
| Doris Dixon | 1908? | 0:24 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah. | 0:27 |
| Doris Dixon | And you were born in Dark Corner, Arkansas? | 0:28 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Mm-hmm. | 0:29 |
| Doris Dixon | Were your parents originally from Dark Corner? | 0:36 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Huh? Yeah. I was born down in Dark Corner. Mm-hmm. | 0:39 |
| Doris Dixon | Were your parents born there? | 0:44 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | No, no, no, no. My parents was born, one South Carolina, another in Georgia. | 0:48 |
| Doris Dixon | Uh-huh, uh-huh. | 0:49 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | And then moved to Cotton Plant, Arkansas. And they worked sharecropping with another man. And then my mother and my father was married. I guess they married in Dark Corner. I don't know where they married in. But anyway, that's where we were originated from down in Dark Corner. Then we moved to Cotton Plant. | 0:53 |
| Doris Dixon | How old were you when you moved to Cotton Plant? | 1:18 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | I was born there. Down Dark Corner. Dark Corner is just still Cotton Plant. See? | 1:22 |
| Doris Dixon | Oh, okay, sorry. | 1:27 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | But it's just a little off town, off country town. That's what they are. Just like this is Cotton Plant. Then we have a surrounding little neighborhoods where people used to be working. Like Hunter, and Howell, and Gregory, and like Fargo, Zip. And that's where it was with Dark Corner. We just farmed in Dark Corner. Then my mother and father bought another farm in Dark Corner and he farmed that land. It was an 80-acre farm. | 1:28 |
| Doris Dixon | Is that a large plot for those days? | 2:11 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | It's a large part? | 2:12 |
| Doris Dixon | Is it a large plot by the standards of those days? | 2:13 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, I guess it was a lot of cotton. A lot of land to a person that just buying, you couldn't buy a lot of land, you just buy a little spot. So see, it was a house on it. Then the land was a 80-acre land and that's why my daddy had raised horses, and we had cows, we had chickens, hogs. And then I was the only child. I didn't have any sisters and brothers. I was the only child. Then I got chance I could ride the horses, help him plow, help him plant the cotton, and then we'd till the cotton. And we had a cotton gin down in Dark Corner. | 2:20 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Then the Colored people had done their own ginning, the cotton. And then we'd bring it to sell it to the other people. And then after we'd gin the cotton and you sold your cotton, then in the wintertime, we didn't have school like they have all the time. We just went to school mostly in the summertime. In the wintertime, it was kind of cold and bad going that way. | 3:06 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Let's see what else. I don't know much about what else happened. | 3:39 |
| Doris Dixon | What are some of your memories of growing up in Dark Corner? | 3:51 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Well, we'd have our schools and we'd go to churches and we'd have our little entertainment. Such as we'd have— our parents would have a— what would we sell? Pies and things like that. We had picnics. We'd go to have picnics, and we'd sell barbecue and candy, and have a ball game. We'd go to have the ball game. And one time we had a little old theater, it didn't last very long. The Colored people went together and had a little theater in Dark Corner. And we had that down there and we had lot of people lived in our community. And we all went from one church to other. We had two churches in our community. One Sunday we'd have church one Sunday, and we'd go to next church next Sunday we'd have a church. But we all would have our Sunday school. | 3:55 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Then we'd have our horse and buggies and we'd have these little 25 T-Model Fords. We could ride in that and be so dusty on us that we'd have our little jackets over our clothes, we'd call them, just to keep them getting the rest of the clothes dusty. So anyway, at that time it was very enjoyable, and we enjoyed that. We'd go visiting in one house to the other. And after we'd have our crop made, then we could go and we'd go play with our other neighbor children. | 4:59 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | And then lot of times, people that didn't have their own farms, they had to sharecrop. And they would give part of their money to the merchants where they got it. And we didn't have the money to buy food, so we'd buy it on credit. And then part of the year when we'd get our cotton crop together, then we'd pay off our loans, whatever we did borrow. So that's about it for coming up. And after I got up age, then I went to Arkadelphia, to the Presbyterian school there, and stayed with my aunt. | 5:41 |
| Doris Dixon | How old were you? What grade was that? | 6:18 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Oh, maybe I was 10 years old when I went to live with my aunt. And maybe I was about third or fourth grade. Third grade, I think. | 6:28 |
| Doris Dixon | How many years did you stay there? | 6:38 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | I stayed there— I would stay there that school year. I stayed with my aunt. They had a school there, the Presbyterian Academy. Then I would come back home and be with my parents and help make a crop. Then I would go back in the fall of the year. I stayed there till about 16 years old. Stayed there with her. Then I'd come back home and be with my parents, help them them with the cotton crop. Then I got married and then I had children, so forth and so on. | 6:42 |
| Doris Dixon | You mentioned there were two churches in Dark Corner? | 7:20 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | New Home and Mount Pleasant. | 7:22 |
| Doris Dixon | New Home and Mount Pleasant? | 7:23 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah. | 7:26 |
| Doris Dixon | What was the difference between them? | 7:27 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Two Baptist churches, that's all. That's all I can say. Both of them was Baptist and we went from one church to the other. And see, at that time it was a lot of people in the communities, and they filled the churches up. | 7:29 |
| Doris Dixon | How big would you say both churches, either church was? | 7:49 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | I don't know, just ordinarily church. I just don't know. I know you came by a church when you come through there. That was one of them. The other church had been torn down and they consolidated together. So it wasn't no need having two churches down there, no way. | 7:54 |
| Doris Dixon | What do you remember about your house? | 8:15 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | My house? Well, the first house I lived in had about four rooms to it. And we had a hall between the two rooms. One on this side and had a hall between it. Then we had a nice orchard we had, and we raised peaches, and pears, and apples on it. And had plums on this. And that was on Mr. Tom Carter's farm before my mother and daddy bought that farm. We stayed on his farm and we had chickens and cows like that. | 8:17 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | And it was kind of bad in going to school from there because we had to go across, we called it the foot log because it was a little branch of water. Then they called it a foot log. And we'd walk that foot log and go across that water to go to school. Then after my mother and them bought the home, then we had a little horse and buggy. And my mother would carry me to school sometimes in the buggy. But we mostly went to church all the time in the buggy. | 8:56 |
| Doris Dixon | The farm— your parents owned the farm? | 9:29 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Huh? | 9:29 |
| Doris Dixon | Can you describe it? | 9:29 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | A farm? | 9:29 |
| Doris Dixon | That farm that your parents owned. | 9:40 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Oh, part of it was a White man, and we had a pasture to it. We had a pasture, and that horses go to the pasture and we raised the cotton and corn. Didn't raise soybeans like they do now. We just had corn and cotton. And we'd have our truck patches like watermelons, cantaloupes, things like that. Had a kitchen with curing, curing the milk, made the butter, all that. We rolled the corn. | 9:47 |
| Doris Dixon | Do you remember your neighbors? And their homes? | 10:23 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Well, the neighbors were a good piece from us. About, I guess a half a mile from us. And one of them, a White neighbor named Mrs. Carter and her family. Other one was Mrs. Betton, Mr. and Ms. Betton. And they had seven, eight children. And I would go and play with them as I had no sisters and brothers play with, I would play with them. And we would be like tomboys jumping all over on the barns, and kicking up the dust, and jumping off the barns and all things like that like children do in the country. We'd have a swing, up in a tree. And we'd swinging in trees. You had a rope and we'd have a swing, swing. We'd do a lot of that when we'd go to these picnics out to play. | 10:28 |
| Doris Dixon | When you came to the Arkadelphia Presbyterian school, what do you remember about that? | 11:23 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Well, we played basketball there. And well, they had a missionary room where the people from Philadelphia would send all their clothes and all to the poor people and give them their clothes out of that room. And I learned to play music, and I learned to play basketball very good. Then we had a little place where they made brooms. They had a little factory where they had made brooms there. What did we have? We stayed in the dormitory. I stayed in the dormitory with the girls there, and we'd have our breakfast. We had Bible for 30 minutes every morning before we went to school. | 11:30 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | We'd have Bible, we'd say Bible verses at our table when we'd get ready to have our dinner. And after that we would have school, get out of school, then we'd have a study period. Then we had a Choir Club. We sang in the Choir Club, at least I did at the time. And let's see, that's about all we did most in Arkadelphia. I learned to play the piano there. I was about, oh, 11 or 12 when I was doing that. | 12:25 |
| Doris Dixon | Were you disciplined by the teachers? | 12:51 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, my aunt. My aunt. | 12:52 |
| Doris Dixon | Was a teacher there? | 13:12 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah. Ms. Phoebe or Ms. Baby, a teacher named Ms. Baby taught music. Taught me my music. | 13:13 |
| Doris Dixon | She was pretty stern? | 13:25 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah. She was from, let's see what, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. That's where she was from. Then we had another music teacher. She was from Philadelphia. She was a little lady and she gave us voice. We learned to sing. And she gave us violin, I never learned the violin lesson. My cousin— I had a cousin, he learned violin. Playing violin, I never did learn that. But I did like to play the piano a little bit. So I play a little bit now sometimes at the church. | 13:27 |
| Doris Dixon | Was this a all-Black school or was it mixed? | 14:07 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, all-Black school. | 14:13 |
| Doris Dixon | Were the teachers Black? | 14:14 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, we didn't have no fights. I never had no White teacher. | 14:14 |
| Doris Dixon | Did your teachers ever play favorites? | 14:15 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | No. No. We had very strict teachers. We had that part of it. Wanted you to learn. | 14:15 |
| Doris Dixon | What did you like and dislike about school? | 14:40 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | About school? I liked all of it. I enjoyed going to school. Yeah, it could be away from home. Didn't have to do a lot of chores at home. You could be away. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed going to school. I liked to play the ball and everything like that. No, and our teacher didn't have no favorites as I know of. She'd always like the ones that was getting her lessons of course, but I never did realize that they had no favorites. I didn't have no favorite teacher. | 14:45 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | I liked them because they looked like they showed interest in us and tried to teach us how to learn how to be respectable to all your other teachers you had. That was a nice thing to have, yeah. Learned to be [indistinct 00:15:41]. And mind, that's the thing about it. Mind. Yeah, mind. We used to have a teacher, if you didn't mind, they'd pull your ears, pull your ears. Twist them for you, make you learn. If you didn't learn nothing. | 15:19 |
| Doris Dixon | Can you remember a point in your life growing up when you people started treating you like a child and started treating you like an adult? | 16:07 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | No. | 16:14 |
| Doris Dixon | What was your first job? | 16:17 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | What did I put? Picking and chopping cotton. | 16:21 |
| Doris Dixon | Where'd you do that? | 16:27 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | On the farm. | 16:29 |
| Doris Dixon | Your parents' farm? | 16:30 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Well, my daddy's farm. | 16:31 |
| Doris Dixon | Did they pay you for that? | 16:31 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | No. My first job was teaching was when I was over here at the school I went. That wasn't way back then. I cooked over at the school. | 16:37 |
| Doris Dixon | Over to— | 16:50 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Over to the Cotton Plant School. Cotton Plant School. | 16:54 |
| Doris Dixon | From when to when? | 17:00 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Huh? | 17:00 |
| Doris Dixon | From what date to what date were you cooking at Cotton Plant School? | 17:02 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | What date? | 17:27 |
| Doris Dixon | I mean, when in time was it? Like in the forties, the fifties? | 17:27 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Just put some time. I don't know when it was. | 17:27 |
| Doris Dixon | Okay. | 17:27 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | No. But when I was in school, it was down in the '20s. 1920s. Because I remember my uncle had a 1925 Ford T-Bone. T-Model Ford. And he would come down to our house and we could go ride to church or sometime. But my daddy, he got, I don't know what year that was. He had on old Oakland, an old Oakland car. I don't know. It wasn't a ozomobile, I don't think. But anyway, it didn't last long. | 17:28 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | I had some uncles stayed with me, but I didn't have any brother. I just had an uncle, stayed and my aunt. I had an aunt stayed with us. She married, but my mother and father raised her up. She was about 12 when she went to come and stay with her parent. My father's mother children, she had died and they come and stayed with my father. And he took care of them until they got grown and married from my home. From my mother and father's home. So I was a little girl with that. I don't know which way it went after got married. After they got married. | 18:19 |
| Doris Dixon | What did your parents tell you about their childhood, about how they came up? | 19:17 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | My mother said she was a string of a girl, and she had a lot of brothers and sisters. But she didn't talk too much. My father didn't talk much at all about his. My mother had a lot of sisters and brothers and she said she was a string of a girl, and she would run down the brook and get water, and how smart she was. She ought to have been lazy or something she said. Kept her getting water and things like that. Working at the house. My grandmother had about 13 children. And I remember her talking about them, but she never said no special thing about them. Here together and talking. I don't know no special thing that she had said about them. They just grew up together and they farmed, I guess. I think they farmed when they was coming up. | 19:24 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Because the land was poor in South Carolina. So they came to— moved to Arkansas, where the land was much richer, they said. That's what she said. And my mother went to South Carolina and visited, and she said that her sister didn't have any flour and she took the wheat. They raised wheat. She'd take the wheat and she would take the meal and grind it up and have the flour and all. That's what she said about it in South Carolina. I went to South Carolina here about two or three years ago. I had never seen my cousin, and I met her. There. That's about all I know. | 20:22 |
| Doris Dixon | Did they tell you about their parents? | 21:12 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Who? | 21:15 |
| Doris Dixon | Did your parents talk about their parents? | 21:16 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | No, not too much. Uh-uh. No, they didn't talk about their parents too much. | 21:17 |
| Doris Dixon | What year were you married? | 21:33 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Huh? | 21:34 |
| Doris Dixon | What year were you married? | 21:35 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | What year was I married? 1930. | 21:35 |
| Doris Dixon | And how did you meet your husband? | 21:35 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | When did I meet him? | 21:40 |
| Doris Dixon | How did you meet him? | 21:41 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Oh, how did I meet him? Met him at church or something, and we courted and dated there. | 21:45 |
| Doris Dixon | What was courting like in those days? | 21:56 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, well I remember sitting down talking courting, that's all I know. And we'd get within the church and they'd walk us home. That's about all the courting and all they done there. We didn't have no theater to go to much. It wasn't nothing to do, but that's all you done is courting at the church. Church socials are something you'd have, you might see them at church or something like that. But that's all the courting was. And then I had four children. I have four children. Got some grandchildren. About 16 grandchildren. And I got about six or seven great-grands. | 21:58 |
| Doris Dixon | Were your children born at home or in the hospital? | 22:57 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | At home. All them born at home with a midwife. No doctor. | 23:09 |
| Doris Dixon | What kind of healthcare was available for Black people back in those days? Back in the '30s? | 23:11 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Was what kind of what? | 23:30 |
| Doris Dixon | What kind of healthcare was available? | 23:31 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Oh, I don't imagine it was any healthcare. I never knew. No, I never heard them talk about no healthcare. No. | 23:33 |
| Doris Dixon | So what would happen when someone got sick? | 23:45 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Well, I guess we went to the doctor. They had doctors. Yeah, we had doctors. But you know that you couldn't— like it is now, you couldn't get in no insurance or anything that much. You just had to pay out of your pocket. But the money you did have. And everything was cheap, wasn't nothing high. We got flour and stuff 25 pound, maybe a dollar. Or dollar a pound for your coffee or something like that. And see, you could live good. You didn't have to have no lot of money. And of course, the little meat, and the bread, and molasses, and hogs you caught and killed. You didn't have a lot of expense like it is now. Your food wasn't all that high to buy. | 23:45 |
| Doris Dixon | Where would you do your marketing? Where would you do your shopping? | 24:36 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Well, we had stores. Go up here, tom Carter had a store. You'd go up there and get your stuff on cheese. We had big old boxes of round cheese, bell cheese they called it. We'd get our cheese in there and we had flour in the barrels. Got sugar, ate your lard in a stand, can stand of lard. It's a lot of— | 24:36 |
| Doris Dixon | Come up to Cotton Plant? | 25:01 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah. In Cotton Plant by. | 25:04 |
| Doris Dixon | When you had your own household, where would you do your market? | 25:04 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Up there. | 25:10 |
| Doris Dixon | Same place? | 25:10 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, same place. They had more stores than Tom Carter's, you know, you had your different stores up there. But at that time, that's all I knew. See, I was young and my mother stayed at home. We didn't go to town every Saturday, like they do now. My father went to town, got groceries, we stayed at home. She washed and ironed, stayed at home and done the work. | 25:12 |
| Doris Dixon | How was the— Do you have any daughters? | 25:50 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Any what? | 25:51 |
| Doris Dixon | Well, of your four children, were any of them daughters? | 25:53 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, I have two daughters and two sons. | 25:56 |
| Doris Dixon | How was the chores, or the household work, or the work on the farm that you had to do different from what your children had to do? | 25:58 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Well, when they got children, they went with the field with me and helped me pick cotton, and chop cotton. And I worked for Ms. Dohert, a White lady up there for $2.50 a week. When picking cotton come time, I'd take the children, I'd teach them how to pick cotton, and we made our money like that. And then I'd buy my groceries at Bud Winner's. So we'd have a grocery bill, so we'd have our food. | 26:07 |
| Doris Dixon | You were working, were you working as a— | 26:41 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | White lady's house. Yeah, I worked there. | 26:44 |
| Doris Dixon | What were the wages like working for her? | 26:51 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | I'd get about $2.50 a week. $2.50 a week. | 26:54 |
| Doris Dixon | Were there better job or other jobs that—? | 27:02 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, it was some jobs you could go wash and iron for them. You go wash for them. But I cooked. That's what I did, cook. | 27:04 |
| Doris Dixon | What were the working conditions like working there? | 27:17 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | It was nice. It's nice. She was very nice. She wasn't mean or anything like that, she was very nice to work for. She'd bring different little candies and things, cookies to the children. She'd go off to buy groceries. When they go, sometimes she'd go to Memphis and she'd buy the children little knickknacks when they come back. | 27:20 |
| Doris Dixon | Have there been jobs you've had less than that? | 27:46 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Less than two? | 27:56 |
| Doris Dixon | Less than that job? | 27:56 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | No, no, no, no, no, no. That's about the less it was. I'd wash some time for children. See my mother was living, my mother had me around my children. And my husband, he went off and so my mother helped me rear my children. | 27:58 |
| Doris Dixon | Does your family still have that farm in Dark Corner? | 28:34 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Mm-mm. My parents is dead and the farm went up somewhere else. Sold the farm. No, farm isn't there no more. It's down there, but I don't own it no more. | 28:37 |
| Doris Dixon | Do you feel that you were ever treated like a second-class citizen? | 29:03 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Hmm? | 29:06 |
| Doris Dixon | Do you feel that you were ever treated like a second-class citizen? | 29:07 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yep. Do I think I'm one? | 29:07 |
| Doris Dixon | No. Did you ever feel like you were, in the past, treated like a second-class citizen? | 29:09 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Mm-mm. | 29:11 |
| Doris Dixon | What are your memories of segregation? | 29:21 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | What do I remember? | 29:23 |
| Doris Dixon | Of segregation? | 29:26 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Of segregation? | 29:26 |
| Doris Dixon | Mm-hmm. | 29:26 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Oh, I don't remember that. I don't remember too much about it. I wasn't here when they had a big commotion about it. I was in Chicago staying with my daughter, helping her rear her children so she could come home. I don't know how they done it, much about it. | 29:28 |
| Doris Dixon | What did you— | 29:51 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, all I done just heard. Things I really know, I don't know that much about it. Just what you hear. And I know you done heard plenty of it, so I don't know much about it. I wasn't here. | 29:52 |
| Doris Dixon | When did you move to Chicago? | 30:11 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Huh? | 30:11 |
| Doris Dixon | When did you move to Chicago? | 30:11 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | When I moved from Chicago? | 30:13 |
| Doris Dixon | When did you move to Chicago? | 30:14 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Oh, I don't know, girl. I don't know what year it was. I was cooking and then my daughter wanted me to come and help her raise her children, so she could move back here. So I did that. I done forgot what year it was. I can't keep up with the years. | 30:19 |
| Doris Dixon | You know what decade maybe? | 30:42 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Huh? | 30:42 |
| Doris Dixon | It was in the '50s or '60s? | 30:42 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, probably was in the '60s, I guess. | 30:43 |
| Doris Dixon | Okay. | 30:45 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | Yeah, '60s and '70s. I think I there in the '70s, because I remember getting medicine. I think it was in 1970-something. I was there staying with her. | 30:49 |
| Doris Dixon | When did you come back to Cotton Plant? | 31:03 |
| Iola Jefferson Wilhite | I moved back when she moved. Come back in the '80s, I think it was. I guess, yeah, it must have been in the '80s. She had two boys. I helped her raise her boys so she could come back, she and her husband. | 31:08 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund