Lena Dabney interview recording, 1995 July 14
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| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And my uncle, who at that time was a mail carrier, he was later made supervisor in Norfolk Post Office, had a Packard and they were very popular cars. My mother died when I was six, and I think it was either just before or just after my mother died, that he used to come and carry my grandmother, my mother's mother, and me and my sister to ride out to Virginia Beach. Just a Sunday afternoon, ride after church. And all along the road were signs, very low, painted white and black letters that said Gentiles only. Jewish people could not go to Virginia Beach and stay in a hotel there. And especially in the Cavalier, which is the hotel that I was just telling you about. | 0:00 |
| Mary Hebert | The one that's on the hill. | 1:05 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes. Now, it was not until about the mid to late '30s that an Italian man whose name was Guzzy built the Pinewood Hotel. It was on the corner of 9th and Atlantic. And he accepted Negro, not Negroes, no Negroes were there anyway, except for working, domestic work. But he accepted Jewish people in his hotel. As a matter of fact, that is about all he had in the hotel, because it was classified as the second-best hotel on the beach. And this was because of Cavalier, naturally, was, I suppose you'd call it grand old Dame and first Hotel, and only Gentiles could go there. | 1:09 |
| Mary Hebert | And there were actually signs along the highway saying— | 2:15 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | When I was a child, yes. Now, they probably removed those signs after I got to be about 6, 7, 8 years old. I don't know. But I do remember one Sunday afternoon as we drove along the highway, I remember remarking to my grandmother, "What is a Gentile?" And she told me, "Gentiles are anyone who is not Jewish." I said, "Well, that means it's all right for us." But you see, we still could not go to hotels then. They didn't open up hotels to Negroes, I don't think, until, I don't remember whether it was the '50s or the '60s. I think it was the '60s though. I'm sure it was the '60s. | 2:18 |
| Mary Hebert | And you were talking about Seaview Beach was the only beach— | 3:09 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Seaview Beach—No, there were was Ocean Breeze Beach for Negroes. There was Norfolk City Beach for Negroes. They were in, I guess, you'd call that a portion of or getting ready to be a portion of Princess Anne County, I'm not sure. But then that strip, there was a small strip of land that was bought by a group of professional men, doctors and whatnot, who had enough money to purchase Seaview Beach? | 3:13 |
| Mary Hebert | Were these Black professionals? | 3:57 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes. Yes. And that was very popular, Seaview Beach was popular during, I think it was popular during the late '40s or the '40s. And— | 3:59 |
| Mary Hebert | Would you go out there to the beach? | 4:19 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | It was all right for Negroes to go there. They had a beach house and I think they had purchased those. If I could just go through all the old magazines that I brought over here from my other house that I had no business bringing, because I haven't gotten rid of them yet. There was a passage in Life Magazine about Norfolk Society, Norfolk Negro Society. And there were several prominent women in Norfolk who, I suppose, I don't know what Life magazine considered the so, or they considered themselves so, but they were supposed to be for all practical purposes, I suppose, society leaders. And they had a little pretty good writeup in there of Seaview Beach and showing all the things that they had done to accomplish that. | 4:21 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | It didn't last very long though, because the beach, if I'm not mistaken, that strip was purchased by somebody, it could have been sold to other people for a certain amount of money, just like Ocean Breeze Beach was up for sale, but nobody purchased that. And you see where Ocean Breeze Beach was, there's a lake down there, if I'm not mistaken, called Lake Joyce. And they had built beautiful houses on there, but that was strictly a White neighborhood. If I'm not mistaken, it was called Bayview. I think it's Bayview, I'm not sure. But that's where the houses are down there. And I don't know whether they are occupied, it would be classified as a relatively old neighborhood now, but I don't know whether they've ever been occupied by our Negroes or whether it's still primarily White. | 5:30 |
| Mary Hebert | Let's go back a little bit to your childhood. Were you born in Norfolk? | 6:41 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I was born in Norfolk. | 6:46 |
| Mary Hebert | And who are your parents? | 6:50 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Okay, that's a good— | 6:51 |
| Mary Hebert | What were their names? | 6:54 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | That's a good question. Let me go back to my grandmother. That's about as far as I can go back. My grandmother and my grandmother's father, I did not know, but she used to tell us stories about him. My grandmother was one of the first graduates of Norfolk Public Schools. She was 14 years old when she finished eighth grade. And that was as far as they could go, unless they went, if they had enough money or the parents had enough money, they could go to Hampton Institute, which is at that particular time it was all they had, but that was really nothing but a glorified high school. And you could take two years there and come out and be a teacher. | 6:54 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | In some places in Virginia, oh, North Carolina or wherever, but especially Virginia, you could go to the eighth grade and maybe qualified to be a teacher if you had—See, that program then was very highly concentrated and it really didn't embrace anything but reading, writing, arithmetic, and possibly some of the subjects for girls to become good wives and mothers. And that's about all. But it was concentrated. Now, she went, as I recall, her telling us this, there were five students in her class, and that would have been 1883. | 7:44 |
| Mary Hebert | And that's at Norfolk School or is that at Hampton? | 8:38 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | This is Norfolk. This is Norfolk. And there were two girls both named Josephine. One came from a rather prominent family, the Tuckers, because we have a school in Norfolk named after this girl's brother Richard Tucker School in Norfolk is named after Josephine Tucker's brother and my grandmother, who was Josephine Johnson. | 8:40 |
| Mary Hebert | Had your great-grandfather been a slave? Or— | 9:17 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | No. | 9:19 |
| Mary Hebert | —was he free? He had been free. | 9:19 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yeah. She said that her father was never a slave, but as I tell people, that is nothing to crow over, because slavery was, I don't know if it was incidental or accidental, but almost every nation in the world has been enslaved. So I mean, that's nothing to be all proud about to say you were never a slave. But her father was not a slave. He was, I think a product of, let me see now, a White father and a Black mother, but he was not a slave. And he must have been a seaman at one time, because I don't know where he was born, but I used to hear her talk about trips to Baltimore, which means he might have come out of Baltimore, I don't know. | 9:21 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | But I do know he settled in Norfolk. And he married a woman who I suppose was a Norfolkian, and she was my grandmother's mother. But she died when Grandma was quite young, and so he had to rear her by himself. So her being an infant, her mother's friend had a child just about the same age, and he carried my grandmother to this woman so that she could nurse her. He married later on, of course, and they were a family. Now, they lived in a place which ran out to the street, it's called Addington Lane, and it ran out to Commercial Place. Now where Waterside is in Norfolk? You've been there? | 10:28 |
| Mary Hebert | I think so. Or I've been by it. | 11:40 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Okay. Well, you know how all of that, Main Street, when you go down Main Street and you're going into Waterside, all of that was where the ferries would come up. And you had to go down the street Commercial Place in order to get to the ferry. And the ferry, as I recall when I was a child, was a nickel ride, you see. And it was just a five-minute ride, but it was very fascinating. That's cool. And— | 11:42 |
| Mary Hebert | Your grand great-grandfather insisted that your grandmother get an education and that she go to school. Was that important to him? | 12:20 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I suppose it must have been, because she went as far as they could go at the time she went to eighth grade. And at that time there were no jobs as such for young girls. And if you didn't go to school, you just sat home. And so she was saying that by the time she got to be about 17, I think she met my grandfather. And strangely enough, my grandfather, that's my mother's father and mother I'm talking about now, lived in, it's classified as Norfolk today, it's been Norfolk for years, but it was Norfolk County then, Bolton Street, which runs out to Princess Anne Road. | 12:26 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And my grandmother would not marry him until at the time they called it saved, until he got religion. And they were both members of First Baptist Church, 5th Street First Baptist Church, which is a historical landmark incidentally. And she taught Grandpa to read. Now, he was not a slave either because he was born, however, he might have been born into slavery, but he was not a slave, because he was born just about the time when the Emancipation Proclamation was declared. I think Grandpa was born in 1863, and, see, Grandma was born in 1869, so that was after the war was over. | 13:14 |
| Mary Hebert | Was your grandfather from Norfolk or had he come from somewhere? | 14:24 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | No, he was from Norfolk County. | 14:27 |
| Mary Hebert | Norfolk County. | 14:30 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | It's hard for me to even think of that street, Bolton Street as being Norfolk County, because I knew it all my life as Norfolk. But it was classified as county then. See, Norfolk County was a very big county. And— | 14:32 |
| Mary Hebert | How'd they meet? Because it seems if they lived on different parts of what's now Norfolk or the Tidewater region. | 14:48 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | She would have lived, and of course he eventually did after they married, in what is classified as a downtown area of Norfolk, the streets that most Black families lived on, Cumberland Street, Queen Street, which is really Brambleton Avenue now, but it was called Queen Street then. And there's a church on Brambleton Avenue that's called Queen Street Baptist Church. They never dropped the name, because it was Queen Street, but it's Brambleton Avenue now. | 14:55 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And my grandfather was drayman. He had three horses. One of them looked like a Clydesdale, and the other two were just ordinary work horses. And he delivered. And sometimes he would even bring bodies in for funerals, and when people were moving, he would move the entire family and whatnot. He had his own business. He didn't work for anybody. He had his own business. Of course, it sort of petered out after the cars came in when everybody was trying to buy a truck, because he had horses for his occupation, whatever he did, he had his horses. | 15:30 |
| Mary Hebert | Were they considered what we would call nowadays middle class? Or— | 16:39 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | That word didn't come into existence until—I mean, you just didn't hear about, you heard of low class and high class. They had middle, but you didn't hear very much about it. I don't know when the middle class was invented, but they would have been classified— | 16:45 |
| Mary Hebert | In the middle. | 17:07 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | —in the middle, I suppose, because there were certain things—And people lived by the mores of society that existed during that day. If you were a professional, naturally, you were higher on the economic scale as well as the social scale. My grandmother was always, she did not go to school herself, I mean as far as higher education, but she was always very much interested in education. And she bettered herself. I think what she had was she had a good group of teachers from first to eighth grade, and after that, she just had to do it on her own, whatever. Now— | 17:09 |
| Mary Hebert | Did she ever work? | 18:12 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes, she did. She worked for—I'm trying to think. There was a seminary, I think it overlooked the water. I think it was in Ghent. I think it was called Leache and Wood Seminary. Now, I'm not absolutely certain about those names, but I think I'm right. It was a girl's school and she worked there for a while. | 18:14 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | When she married, she had three children. She had two sons and a daughter, my mother. Now, when my mother was 21 years old, a friend of the family, who was also a seamen, and when you hear me talk about seamen, you see, Norfolk was a seaport town, see? | 19:00 |
| Mary Hebert | Right. | 19:22 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And— | 19:23 |
| Mary Hebert | The sailors. | 19:24 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes. And a friend of the family came by and brought a young Ceylonese. See the Ceylonese are from what they used to be called Ceylon up until a few years ago. It's now Sri Lanka. And my mother and he fell in love, and they married, that's my father. They used to tell the story of how he, in those days, I mean, you always ask for the hand of the young lady, and I think Papa had intentions, but he was scared. So he didn't ask Grandma and Grandpa for Mama's hand. But I think they had made some kind of secret pact to say that they were going to get married. | 19:24 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Now, he was, I think, living in Baltimore, but he frequented this area. When his ship was dock and whatnot, he frequented this area. So anyway, he came to Norfolk that particular weekend expecting to find Mama at home. And she went to Baltimore expecting to see him. And I guess the story of Evangeline, the ships passed. And when he found out that Mama had gone, he turned right around and went back to Baltimore and they were married. And of course, they sent Grandma and Grandpa a telegram saying they had gotten married. And the way the story was told to us was that Grandpa said the first damn he had ever said, and Grandma cried. | 20:30 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | So anyway, it turned out all right, because Papa, when he left Ceylon, he just traveled all over and he never went back home. But he had lots of relatives back home and his mother was still living, his father was still living, and his sisters and brothers and whatnot, but he never went back. Now, we did, my sister and I went. And we knew they existed, because Papa would send his parents money every now and then, and he would write to them, and we did receive letters from them. | 21:39 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | But we lost track of them and didn't hear any more from them, especially during the Japanese war. They had migrated anyway. They had left Ceylon and went to live in Ipoh Perak, which was, I suppose, on the Malaysian peninsula. And many of them settled in Malaysia, which was at that time Malaya. What is Malaysia now? And I have some cousins who are in Singapore now, and I have some in Kuala Lumpur. I have some still in Ceylon, but I did not meet them. | 22:31 |
| Mary Hebert | But you did travel out to Malaysia and [indistinct 00:23:25]— | 23:22 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | We went to Malaysia. We stayed 31 days. And they have been here, one or two of them have been here. The way my sister got in touch with—See, we are Episcopalians, Papa belonged to the Church of England before he came here, but he had to find a church, which was really the counterpart of the Anglican church. So we were at the Grace Episcopal, which is located on Brambleton Avenue, in Norfolk. | 23:25 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, I'm trying to think, Lillian, that was my sister, Lillian was reading one of our church bulletins, I think it was at that time called the Jamestown Churchman, it's called the Jamestown Cross now. And she saw in there the name of the new bishop of—No, she saw in there in the name of the Bishop of Ceylon. And she wrote to him. Well, they were having an incoming bishop, a new bishop. And so he got the letter. And the day that he got the letter, one of my first cousins, her name was Beatrice, she walked into his office. | 24:12 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | She and her husband were both employees of, I suppose you could call it, something like a medical center, because almost all of them are either nurses or doctors. And he told her, "I've got somebody I know you want to hear from, because you haven't ever heard from them." And she says, "Well, who on Earth would—" He said, "Somebody in America." And then she thought, she knew she had some cousins, but she had never seen us. So she got in touch with her father, who was a doctor at that time. He was living with one of her sisters in Singapore. And he would just go around from sister to sister. | 25:02 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Anyway, he had a compound, and that's the way they pronounced it. They are nasal, he said, "Compong," in Kuala—It's not in Kuala Lumpur, it's near Kuala Lumpur, a little village called Tanjung Malim. And she got in touch with her father, and told him that she had heard from us. So her sister, incidentally, we had four Lillians in the family, her sister, Lillian, had a husband who was chief pharmacist of Singapore, and he was making a rural health tour for the Rural Health Organization. | 26:00 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | So his father-in-law got in touch with him, and told him, "Well, you are getting ready to go to America in a few days, and I want you to make sure you see the cousins." So he was scheduled to come to Richmond, but instead—I mean he went to Richmond, but he came here, he flew here. And my husband and my sister's husband, all of us went down to the airport to meet him. We knew him immediately. And so he stayed with us for about two or three days, the weekend, and we carried him back to Richmond. And since that time, of course, that was in '66, but he came back over here in '82 to visit. | 26:56 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | He brought his wife, who is my first cousin and one of his sons with him. They were all making the world tour, because they were coming here and then going back by way of Washington DC, New York, and then into Canada, and then back into Europe. And he has three sons I believe now who live in Holland, I think they do. And then I've got another cousin, we stayed with her, part of the time in a little village. And she has, at the time, the children are very young, daughters. Her daughter was about nine years old, and now she'd be about 36, because that was 27 years ago. But it was just a beautiful experience. And my sister kept a scrapbook of it. And I have pictures of some of them if you want to see them. | 27:57 |
| Mary Hebert | Sure, after we do the— | 29:06 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Uh-huh. | 29:07 |
| Mary Hebert | Did your grandparents ever accept the marriage between your parents? | 29:09 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I think they did. I think they did. But it was just like, you don't realize it at the time, sometime you're not even aware of it, but sometime you catch people looking at you strangely. You hear people say things about—And I don't think they mean any harm, but they do that, for instance, Papa was a great visitor. He used to love to carry us out on Sunday afternoons, and he used to love to tell people about his travels, and they liked to hear them. But I've always had it in the back of my head that they were also making fun of him. | 29:13 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | He had a slight accent. He didn't have a great deal of accent. Now, there are certain words that I suppose because we had lived in the house with him, we picked up a little bit of it, but our accent is nothing like his was. His was strictly British. And for instance, Papa, there was some words he never used. For instance, when he was pronouncing certain words, like we say, "Been [phonetic bin]," and he said, "Been [phonetic bean]." Over there we say, "Stenog-rapher," he said, "Steno-grapher." And he never used terms like, in America, you hear a great deal of the whole sort of fancy names and cute names for getting rid of waste and whatnot, like the word pee. I never heard Papa say anything like that. He never used the word pee. He always used urinate. So it was— | 29:55 |
| Mary Hebert | He grew up with that British— | 31:07 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I mean, it was pretty fair—It was just like any other have family, they have fusses and so forth. My father, the one thing I remember, and I think it must be in my genes too, I'm a pack rat. I save everything. As you can see by all these books, magazines were—My mother used to, and this was when I was quite young, my mother kept one of those tin cans that are illustrated that you see now that you get in antique shops that'll cost you a fortune now, my mother had a big one and she kept her bills in. And every time Papa came home from a voyage, they would sit down and go over what she had spent during the month. | 31:11 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And I remember hearing my mother say to my father, I know a 1,000 times, "Well, I overspent this month." And he would always answer her with, "That's all right sweetheart, there's plenty more in the shop." I never knew where that shop was. He didn't like debt. He always liked paying bills on time, and making sure they were paid. And it took some doing, because they were living in my grandmother's house, it took some doing for her to push him to buy a house. Well, they bought a house further down the street, not on the same street from my grandparents. | 32:08 |
| Mary Hebert | What street was that again? | 32:57 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | That street that we lived on was Goff Street, G-O-F-F. It's the same street where the police station is now. As a matter of fact, the police station has a portion, if I'm not mistaken, of our corner lot that we bought, but I'm not absolutely certain about that. | 32:58 |
| Mary Hebert | So your parents bought their own house? | 33:24 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes, they did. And right after they bought the house, Mama died. She had, I guess, pneumonia or something because she—And see, at the time, people did not have central heat and moving, and she moved in the dead of winter, February. And so, she just— | 33:26 |
| Mary Hebert | Now you went to live with your grandparents after her death? | 33:50 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | No, my grandparents left their house and came up to live with us, because their house, they gave over to their younger son, the youngest son rather. | 33:52 |
| Mary Hebert | Was your house bigger than the grandparents' house? Is that why they didn't— | 34:12 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes, it was. It was bigger and it was a better house, and it was bigger, definitely bigger. And that is where Mama was and Papa would come in because he would go out and stay for two weeks and then come back in like that. He ran from Norfolk to places like New Haven, Bridgeport, Connecticut, like that. | 34:19 |
| Mary Hebert | Was it around 1930 when your mother died? | 34:50 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Uh-huh, my mother died in 1926. | 34:52 |
| Mary Hebert | And how old were you when she died? | 34:57 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Six years old. I was in the second grade. | 34:59 |
| Mary Hebert | And where did you go to school? | 35:04 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I went to school at John T. West Elementary School, which was located on Bolton Street, which had been Norfolk County but was now Norfolk. And I went there from one through six. And we went to kindergarten too. I went to a kindergarten that was run by a woman, she was Negro, but she looked like a big German woman. And she had a kindergarten for years and years and years. And the things that she taught you, you almost didn't need to go to the first grade. | 35:06 |
| Mary Hebert | She taught you how to read and— | 35:42 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes. | 35:43 |
| Mary Hebert | —your alphabets and [indistinct 00:35:45]— | 35:44 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Just about everything. And then of course your parents picked up from there. Now, my grandmother and my mother used to read to us all the time. My sister was a librarian. I guess that's where we got this love of books from. | 35:45 |
| Mary Hebert | Did your mother have an education beyond the eighth grade? | 36:02 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | My mother went to, there was a school that was established in Norfolk by the Presbyterians, it was called Norfolk Mission College. And they— | 36:07 |
| Mary Hebert | [indistinct 00:36:22] college, wasn't it? | 36:22 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Huh? | 36:23 |
| Mary Hebert | Didn't they train teachers at Norfolk Mission? | 36:23 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | No, that, again, that was more or less a nice high school, they didn't call it that, they called it Norfolk Mission College. But most of the folks who left there went to a college after they left there. Now, my mother went there for a while, but she did not graduate. My uncles went there, as far as I know. I know several people—Now, the Norfolk Mission College alumni has now got an association, which they maintain, they give scholarships to children. In fact, all of the descendants of people who went to that school are members, if they, of course, pay their dues. | 36:29 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | My sister and I are members, and my niece, my sister's daughter, I think this past year she made the introductory speech for them. They always have their activities over at Norfolk State University. But it's a very nice organization and it fosters education, the scholarships aren't great big ones, but they give sizable scholarships to worthy students. And they always try to have a boy and a girl there who are receiving the scholarships at the time we give the dinner. | 37:17 |
| Mary Hebert | Any amount helps a college student. Excuse me. Was John T. West Elementary School close to your house? Did you have to walk to school every day? | 38:07 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes, I walked, it was no more than about two blocks, about two, three blocks at the most. And the principal of that school, when I was there, was a man who had grown up practically with my grandmother, because my grandmother lived in the same apartment that he did. I think Grandma lived downstairs and he lived upstairs in that apartment I was telling you, Addington Lane running out to Commercial Place. And he went on to college and whatnot. But he was a North Carolinian, but he was here as a very young child. His name was Jacox. And there is a school in elementary school. It was a junior high school, but it's an elementary school named for him right now, DG Jacox Elementary School. | 38:19 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Grandma said he was about a year or two younger than she, and they used to play and fight and play and fight. And when I got to trying to John T. West and I was under him, he used to tell me all the time, "I knew your grandmother. We used to play together all the time." | 39:21 |
| Mary Hebert | How many children were at John T. West? Do you have any idea? | 39:42 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Let me see. They were, I'm trying to count the number, because it had an old part and it had a new part. And that building incidentally, it's a pity, it's a excellent brick building, because it's solid brick and it's boarded up right now, has been boarded up for years. It's on Bolton Street near the railroad track just before you get into St. Julian Avenue. And nobody has done anything at all about that building. They really ought to make it some kind of— | 39:50 |
| Mary Hebert | Use the building. | 40:23 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yeah, mm-hmm. It would be a kind of memorial to all the past students that they had. But nothing has been done about that building as I know anything about. And it had two floors and it had one little frame building that they used for a lunchroom. They didn't have too many lunchrooms at first. And they had a framed building, where the woman and her daughter used to make sandwiches and whatnot. And the kids used to go. And in fact, I just thought it was a delightful place to go and sit, because we used to make friends with the, I don't know what you'd call her, you couldn't call her dietician, but that's what they call them now in cafeterias. | 40:27 |
| Mary Hebert | She ran the cafeterias. | 41:24 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yeah. And I remember, too, the unpaved streets, almost all of, except for the very latest and the areas that had been predominantly White at first, all the streets were dirt streets. And were as muddy, when it rained, as anything you ever seen. It wasn't mud, it was maw. And I was reminded of this, because now in Southeast Asia they have dirt streets, some, not too many, they're side streets, but they have dirt streets and they have paved streets. And the dirt streets they call Lorongg, L-O-R-O-N-G-G, the paved streets they call Jalan, J-A-L-A-N. Don't ask me why. I mean, if you see that in front of an address, you will know, if you've ever been Southeast Asian, that this Lorongg, you know that person lives on a dirt street, and if it's Jalan, he lives on a paved street. | 41:26 |
| Mary Hebert | So most of the streets in your neighborhood were dirt streets? | 42:46 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | At that time, yes, they were. | 42:50 |
| Mary Hebert | When did they pave them? | 42:52 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | They didn't get around to paving Goff Street until the school was put there. Let me see, Jacox Junior High School was put there, and it was on Marshall Avenue, but you went down Goff Street, and the very center of it faced Goff Street. I don't think they paved that street until, and they didn't pave the entire street then, they paved the area, which was closer to the school, I think it was 1949. Now, as far as sidewalks are concerned, they didn't have any sidewalks there. When my sister and I took over our father's house after he had died, and she had married, we paved down the side of the house and in the front of the house, the sidewalk. We put the sidewalk there. That's why when I go by and see that police station, I say, "That's my sidewalk." | 42:55 |
| Mary Hebert | So you'd have to walk to school through the mud, when it was [indistinct 00:44:21]. | 44:18 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, when it was rainy and every child had boots or rubbers, they call them rubbers. Why my mother wouldn't buy me those boots, I don't know. The boots would come up, just like rubber boots would come up to here. And I don't think she thought that boots were particularly nice for little girls, because she bought me nothing but rubbers. And every time it rained, I got stuck in the mud and she would have to come and get me out. | 44:21 |
| Mary Hebert | But you said that the paved streets that were in your neighborhood were streets that had once been White neighborhoods. | 45:03 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | If they were, now for instance, in our neighborhood, I was talking to a girl last night about that, one of my cousins on my mother's side, and she says, "Every time I call you, you give me a little bit of history." I said, "well, you don't know it, so—" She was saying that the Huntersville neighborhood, there is a recreation center out there near Goff Street, on Goff Street, I think, and they call it the Huntersville Civic Center or something like that. Anyway, she was saying that they had a reunion some years ago. | 45:09 |
| Mary Hebert | I need to turn this tape over. | 45:54 |
| Mary Hebert | [indistinct 00:00:03] Do you want me [indistinct 00:00:05] | 0:04 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | She said that they had a reunion of the Huntersville neighborhood. I said, "Well, that neighborhood is not Huntersville." She said, "Yes, it is." I said, "No, it is not. In the first place, you don't know anything about it, because you're not old enough to know." I said, "That neighborhood from Bolton Street across the railroad track, part of the railroad track going into Cecilia Street and near where the high school, the old high school, used to be, was known as Springfield. | 0:05 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | When you got to the railroad track and all the way back to Chapel Street, it was known as Barboursville. The two sections when were named after two prominent White men, Barbour and Hunter. And so I told her, I said, "Now, where we live was not Huntersville. It was Barboursville." So she said, "I didn't know that." I said, "Well, now you know it." I said, "They calling it all Huntersville now, because actually it was not a big stretch anyway," and it could very well have been called Huntersville from the beginning, because there was a feeling that Barboursville was not quite as good as Huntersville. | 0:41 |
| Mary Hebert | Why was that? Because the families were less wealthy somehow? | 1:28 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Some of them were, and then there was a slight difference in this style of the houses. And there were quite a number of very good people living in Barboursville that probably had more money than those living in Huntersville. But that is how people have a stigma and they just attach it to you, and that's it. But that was Barboursville at the time. It's all Huntersville now, but it was Barboursville when I was growing up. | 1:32 |
| Mary Hebert | So there was a distinction between those neighborhoods that— | 2:02 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | A little. Of course— | 2:05 |
| Mary Hebert | You lived in Barboursville. You didn't live in Huntersville. | 2:07 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | That's right. Now, you might have had many friends in Huntersville, and the children didn't bother about saying I live in Barboursville. They didn't make that distinction, the children didn't, but the older people did. | 2:08 |
| Mary Hebert | Was there any problem with some parents in Huntersville not wanting their children to play with the children in Barboursville? | 2:25 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | There may have been, but I didn't come up under that, because in the first place, my grandmother and my mother were quite well known, and they took us different places, and they did things that maybe some people in Barboursville didn't do. But it never bothered us. | 2:32 |
| Mary Hebert | So y'all didn't have any problem. You said your mother and grandmother were well known. Why or and how were they well known? | 2:58 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I don't know. See, my mother went to worship at the church at which my father worshiped, which was the Episcopal church, and we grew up in the Episcopal church. We also used to go to my grandmother's church, which was First Baptist. And she was an old member, and grandma just was an extrovert, and she just knew a whole lot of folks. That's all. | 3:12 |
| Mary Hebert | Right. That's how they got to be so— And what high school did you attend? | 3:36 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Booker Washington High School, Booker T. Washington High School. | 3:43 |
| Mary Hebert | Was that the only high school for Black students? | 3:46 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | No. There was a high school for Catholics. Oh, not necessarily for Catholics, but it was a Catholic high school. Now, a whole lot of kids went there that were not Catholic. St. Joseph's High School, it was on Brambleton Avenue, and it was a rival of Booker Washington, especially in football. A great rival, and it produced some pretty good students. | 3:49 |
| Mary Hebert | Did the wealthier students go to St. Joseph? Was it people of your class— | 4:19 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | No. | 4:23 |
| Mary Hebert | Oh, it was Catholic students. Well, you said there were some people who weren't Catholic. | 4:23 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Some of them who weren't Catholics, and if they lived in the area, sometimes, and they wanted to go to St. Joseph's, they went to St. Joseph's. Now, most of the kids who went to a Catholic school were probably either went because of the closeness or proximity of the school, and they lived in the neighborhood. But you had Catholics going to St. Joseph's now, but there were some who were not Catholic who went to St. Joseph's. | 4:27 |
| Mary Hebert | What was Booker T. Washington like? | 4:58 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, in the first place, it was a two-part school, and I'm saying two parts, because it housed the seventh and eighth grade, and they didn't call it junior high school. We called it junior high school, but they called it intermediate school. And in the junior high school, you knew that if you passed from eighth grade, you were going over into ninth grade, the high school part. And they were divided as to sides, just like this would be junior high school, this room, that over there would be senior high school. And the senior high school had three floors and about maybe roughly about 50 or 60 teachers. And the junior high school had three floors. It was all one big building. | 5:01 |
| Mary Hebert | How did the building compare to some of the White schools in the area? | 6:17 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | It wasn't made out of as good material. It was stucco. At the time when Booker Washington was built, which was 1924, I think Maury High School had been built quite a number of years before. And Maury High School and Ruffner Junior High School were originally built for Whites, Ruffner was. They combined the school for Negro's Booker T. Washington High School, Booker T. Washington Intermediate School and Booker T. Washington High School, all one big building. But there were several. Then Maury was the high school at one time, and then I think in 1939 and '40, they built Grandby High School. And then in the '50s, they probably built Lake Taylor. I don't know whether it's '50s or '60s, because I didn't keep up with what year they were built. They built Jay Cox, it was Jay Cox Junior High School, but when they first started, they had elementary there, and then they started calling it just junior high school, separate junior high school. | 6:22 |
| Mary Hebert | Was that an attempt to get the separate but equal part of it? | 7:53 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, I don't know whether it was an attempt or not, but it was, let's say, the population was growing, and they had to put them somewhere, and they wanted to keep them separate, so they had to build something, they had to build small schools. | 8:03 |
| Mary Hebert | What were your textbooks like? Were they new books, old books? | 8:18 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | At the time I was going to school, there was a bookstore downtown, and you went down there and bought your secondhand books or your new books, depending on what you wanted. | 8:26 |
| Mary Hebert | So you had to buy your own books. They weren't the free school books. | 8:37 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Uh-uh. | 8:40 |
| Mary Hebert | Did that come along later on? [indistinct 00:08:43] | 8:40 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | What? The free school— That was later on, but I don't remember having free textbooks when I was going to school. | 8:42 |
| Mary Hebert | So your parents had to buy the books. Now, you mentioned the football rivalry between St. Joseph's and Booker T. High. Did you go to football games and that kind of thing? | 8:54 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes, we went to football games. And I'm trying to think of the, they had a football field near Rugby Street. That's where the football games were held. On those days, they would let you out. Usually, the football games were held in the daytime, two o'clock. There were no such things as night games at all. | 9:09 |
| Mary Hebert | The fields weren't lighted. | 9:41 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, they just got those lights maybe during the '50s and stuff like that. But even so, there were certain things you just didn't do. That was one of them. You didn't go to a— It was strictly a school type thing. See? You didn't have a whole lot of other people coming in and, let's say, making problems or trouble or anything. And maybe it was bad enough when they might have had, because one might have beat the other one. They might have had some fights, but they didn't begin to have the quarrels and bad behavior that they have now. They just didn't. Now, don't misunderstand me. They had bad children in school then too, just like they have now, but I don't think they were quite as bold as they are now. | 9:44 |
| Mary Hebert | What did you do for fun when you were in high school? Would you go to soda fountains, things like that? | 10:47 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, in the first place, they didn't have any soda fountains. They didn't even have a lunchroom at Booker Washington until about 1940. Now, they built a school, but they didn't build a lunchroom along with it. The school's built in '24. They didn't get a lunchroom added on until about 1940. | 10:53 |
| Mary Hebert | So you would bring your lunch to school every day? | 11:14 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Or they were people who they had shops around there. One lady I remember had her shop in a little house around the corner, and she sold hamburgers with gravy on them through a window. And she must have made— Of course, I mean she couldn't have made but so much money, but for the times, it might have been a whole lot of money, because she charged only a nickel for a hamburger, and she always had gravy on it. | 11:17 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Then there was another house across the street. It had been a very nice house in the Reservoir area. It was in the Brambleton area. But the lady had a little shop there that she and her husband ran for years, and most of what they made, they made nothing but salmon sandwiches. And I hear students, anybody who went there, talking about those salmon sandwiches today. She would cook up cakes and put them in a big bun, just a fishcake, that's all it was, but it was good. | 11:56 |
| Mary Hebert | [indistinct 00:12:37] You were there. | 12:37 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Sometimes, you'd go there. It was a rare thing until you got to be a little older to have a dime a day. Usually, we had a nickel a day. And on Mondays, I would carry my own lunch on Mondays, because it was whatever was leftover from Sunday dinner. But the rest of the week, you might have bought. There was a man who taught math at Booker Washington High School, and his wife used to sell sandwiches on the street. Someone told us, I don't know how true it was, that he didn't like that so much, because it looked as if he wasn't making quite enough money for her. But she sold delightful sandwiches, and she always had a basket about that big. They were always very good toasted ham sandwiches or something, and she sold hers for a dime, which was a little bit higher than what the rest of the folks were getting. But they were very good and she got rid of all of them. | 12:38 |
| Mary Hebert | What about the students who didn't have enough money to buy their lunches? Did just about everyone have the dime a day or the nickel a day to get something to eat? | 13:41 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, most of them had something. It was rare not to have even in Depression time, because even at that, they brought down sandwiches from home. | 13:49 |
| Mary Hebert | You mentioned the Depression. How did that impact the Norfolk area? Do you have any memories of the Depression here? Of the Depression? | 14:03 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | You didn't feel it too bad until it was getting ready to be over. Not for some. It was a rather rough time, but I think people weathered it pretty well. | 14:20 |
| Mary Hebert | The massive unemployment here like you had in other areas of the country? | 14:33 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, in the first place, now this was not until Roosevelt came in, you did have sewing rooms and other forms of— And that was really better than relief. Well, I don't mean relief. It was a form of relief. I mean welfare. | 14:37 |
| Mary Hebert | It was work. | 15:00 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | It was work. It was a work program. They would give you food, for instance. You had to have tickets to get the food, but somebody's name had to be on some list where they had gone into some place to work. Now, many of the women who could sew, one or two of them if they were very well skilled, would have been supervisors in the sewing room. Some others, they did different jobs, like cutting and stitching and like that. It was kind of an assembly line thing, and most of the clothes that they made were for the very poorest sections in the United States. | 15:03 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And it really wasn't, it gave the person something to do. And then, too, it was there. In the summertime, there were certain factories, and you had to go and cap strawberries and stuff like that. You could make, well, enough change if your fingers were adept enough where you could make enough change to have money. And there were certain things that people did then that they don't do now. They believed a great deal in dressing up in the afternoon. If you had played all day and gotten dirty, in the evening, you knew you were supposed to come in, take a bath, and put your little clean clothes on. People don't do that now. | 16:00 |
| Mary Hebert | Would you have to dress for dinner? Since you said you dressed in the afternoon, was it you dressed for dinner? Was that why you dressed? | 17:04 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | No, it was just in the afternoon. It was a little bit different as you got older, but as a child, if you had been playing all day long, it was just before dinner. And you didn't have on your very best clothes, but you had on clothes that didn't look like you had been playing in them all day long, see. And the Saturday Night Bath was an institution. | 17:15 |
| Mary Hebert | After high school, did you go on to college? | 17:51 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I stayed home for about six months, five months, and then I went to college. My sister was already there. And it was quite a struggle, but it was something that we just looked forward to. | 17:54 |
| Mary Hebert | Was it expected of you to go to college? Did your grandmother expect you to go to college? | 18:15 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I don't know that she expected me to, but she had hopes that I would. And my father— Now, I really never wanted to. So few people know this, because they thought I had a nice time in college. I did, but I didn't like the school that I went to. I went to Cold Water, because I think they have some good programs. But when I was there, I found the teachers very, very prejudiced. | 18:20 |
| Mary Hebert | What school did you go to? | 18:47 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Virginia State College in Petersburg. | 18:48 |
| Mary Hebert | How were they prejudiced? | 18:51 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, I think some few of them had a mindset against Norfolk City students. Norfolk students seemed to have been a little bit more apt and knew a little bit more. They had a little bit more knowledge about certain things. For instance, there were schools in Virginia that didn't have chemistry or physics. Booker Washington had it. Now, I know my husband went to school in Charlottesville, and he said they only had what is classified as 11 grades. We had 12. And he said that he never got any physics or any chemistry. And there are schools all over Virginia like that, but we had it. | 18:55 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | In fact, whatever we had, and we had very good teachers for the most part. Now, I don't care what school you in, you going to have some bad ones and some good ones. It's just like children. You going to have some bad children and some good children. And some teachers, even though it was way back then, they were probably just as lazy as some that you have today. But for the most part, I think that most people who went through Booker Washington got a fairly good education. | 19:51 |
| Mary Hebert | And the teachers at Virginia State College didn't like it? | 20:27 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | For instance, I have always been very fond of English literature. I made nothing but As in English literature, tests, papers and whatever. And I had a teacher that decided that she was not going to give me my A. So I was shocked when I got my grade. I couldn't believe it. I said she had to have made a mistake. This must be somebody else's grade. So I went to see her. I took all of my papers, and I said, "Now how did you come out with a C when I had nothing but As." She told me, "You are from Norfolk." | 20:32 |
| Mary Hebert | She came out and told you that. | 21:23 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | She told me, "You are from Norfolk, and you should know." | 21:24 |
| Mary Hebert | My goodness. | 21:28 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And so I remember I have a next door, she's about two houses down, and the house is two story. She and I went through high school together, and when we went to college, we were roommates for a while, and we lived on the same street in Norfolk after my husband and I bought a house in Norfolk after we had to sell our house on Gulf Street, because the city took it. And she and I have always been, we've been friends through the years. So she liked Virginia State College, but I didn't, because, of course, Joyce was of the nature where, see, she didn't do a great deal of studying, but she got her lessons. But she wasn't all that serious about her work, although she became a very good teacher, and she's very knowledgeable. But she didn't do any studying much. | 21:31 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I did. And she was saying to me about how we had had such a nice time in college. I said, "Yeah, we did. We had a nice time in college, because we took advantage of some of the things that were offered there. But you didn't know it, and you probably still don't know it, I couldn't stand State." So she laughed. She said, "Well." I said, "Because the teachers were a little bit too prejudiced for me there." | 22:31 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | When Joyce and I went, we took Junior English Comp examinations. They weren't but four persons in a group of a list that long that passed English Comp. That was Joyce, me, another fellow that became a big real estate agent, he's dead now, and another fella that just died about two years ago, who had, I think, taught at University of Hawaii, and a very, very, very smart fella. He was a physicist. Only four people passed that exam. | 23:07 |
| Mary Hebert | Out of probably 50, 60 people? | 23:45 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | That's right. And so I told her, I said, "Now, that proves we're not dummies." And when that lady told me, "You are from Norfolk. You should know." I really should have known how angry I got with her. And then I had another one that, I had a professor of history. If he knew your parents, and he knew that if you were from Petersburg and he knew your family, you had it made. And my husband and I used to have the biggest arguments. And oh, Billy used to tease me all the time because he said, "Well, see, my parents knew Dr. Jackson, and that's why I got a good grade." | 23:48 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | See, I couldn't stand Dr. Jackson. I was sitting here. George would sit on that side, and this other girl from Petersburg, whose parents he knew. This girl did absolutely nothing. She got the B. I got the C+. I don't know what Joyce got. I think Joyce got a C-, something like that. But that's the way they operated up there. And we had one professor, a very nice man, a nice man, he was very lovely to me when I went back to get a master's. He said to me, he told our class, he was teaching Survey Science, and he was teaching it just like he taught his physics classes. He said, "Well, I'll tell you one thing. Unless you are a physics major, you will not get As, no matter what you do." Now, see, that's not fair. | 24:27 |
| Mary Hebert | It's not. | 25:23 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | He said, "I get the A as the teacher. You get the B." And I just thought it was ridiculous. But I didn't like State. I really didn't. | 25:28 |
| Mary Hebert | How did you pay your way through college? | 25:43 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | My father helped me some and my sister did a great deal. She was teaching at the time in the country. And at the time when she was teaching, she started out teaching in 19, what, 38, I believe it was, '38 or '39, I don't know. But anyway, she wasn't making but $39. This is to show you how Virginia salaries were. They were making $39 and 10 cents a month, and when I started teaching in 1941 at, I started teaching at a school that Rockefeller, Mrs. Rockefeller endowed up there in Williamsburg, I had a master's degree, and I was making $64 a month. | 25:46 |
| Mary Hebert | How did you manage on $64? | 26:51 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, believe it or not, there was a store in Williamsburg. You ever been to Williamsburg? | 26:53 |
| Mary Hebert | No. I'm going this weekend or next weekend. | 26:59 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, there was a store there on the corner. I still think it's there on the corner of Duke of Gloucester Street called Casey's. Casey's had the most beautiful clothes, very high-priced clothes and very nice clothes. It was a department store. My land lady signed for me, and I got an account at Casey's. And I did better than I think than I'm doing now. I don't know. But anyway, I managed, at the time when I first started teaching, I was buying postal notes and saving a little money. I'm really not doing that now. | 27:02 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | But it was a nice experience at Williamsburg because it was an experimental school. I was the art teacher up there, and I taught a few other subjects like English and history, but my primary work there was art. And when I came back to Norfolk to teach, I taught English. And I went out one year to teach art, but I didn't like it, because there again, there was a little bit too much prejudice there. Let me see. The supervisor was a woman, who didn't have but two years of work after high school, and she was a supervisor. She was the great-great-granddaughter, if I'm not mistaken, of "Jeb" Stewart, J.E.B. Stewart. | 27:50 |
| Mary Hebert | She was White? | 28:47 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes. Her name was Mary Stewart Smith. It just seemed to me that being a supervisor, she would have insisted that art would have gone above the fourth grade for Negroes in Norfolk. But this was in 1946. They had no art in Norfolk above the fourth grade. | 28:50 |
| Mary Hebert | But they had it above the fourth grade in [indistinct 00:29:26] | 29:24 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Oh, yes. All the way up, high school. That's right. And when I went to see the superintendent about it, he was surprised. And I didn't know why he should be surprised being the head of the school, but he was, because he told me he did not know that. And because I went that day that I went to see him, I left school at about one o'clock, because I really wasn't supposed to teach beyond one o'clock. And I used to different schools, depending on how many students they had there. One place I had to go around to, I don't know how she expected me to do that in one day, 20 classes. Another school I went to might not have had over three or four. And some schools, this woman would not let us go to some schools, because she said they were too far. | 29:26 |
| Mary Hebert | What schools did she consider too far? Were they [indistinct 00:30:31] | 30:29 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | If were, let's say, in, I don't know whether you know this area or not in Norfolk, it's a Titus Town, it was always called Titus Town School. She wouldn't let us go there, because she said it was too far. And they would give us a dollar a week to buy bus passes to ride the buses. You got a dollar a week or something like that. | 30:31 |
| Mary Hebert | You ride the bus from school to school. | 31:04 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | You ride the bus from where you live to the school and then back again home. | 31:06 |
| Mary Hebert | Okay. | 31:11 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | There were 13 Negro elementary schools, and she only let us go to 12, and there were two teachers. She had six, and I had six. And when I asked her about the 13th one, I asked a dirty question. She said, "That's too far." | 31:16 |
| Mary Hebert | Did you ever know why she didn't want you to go to that or anyone to go to that school? Do you have any idea why not Titus Town? | 31:38 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | She just told us it was too far. I stayed in it a year, because I knew that the day that I went to the first meeting, I wasn't going to be there but a year, because of some of the things that she did. She used to have the meetings in James Madison school. She had more than five teachers, but she only had that meeting for the elementary teachers and not for the high school teachers. She let the high school teachers do pretty much what they wanted to do. And the reason was, and I didn't know it at the time, but the reason was that she didn't know as much as they did. She didn't know as much as any of us sitting there, because everybody who was sitting there in the meeting had far more than she had. She had two years. She didn't even have a bachelor's. | 31:47 |
| Mary Hebert | So she got the position because of who she was. | 32:46 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I imagine. I'm not sure. | 32:49 |
| Mary Hebert | Were most of the supervisors White? | 32:52 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes, except for one, except for one. | 32:55 |
| Mary Hebert | And the school board was White. Were the principals Black or White? | 33:02 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, if the schools were Black schools, they were Black principals. | 33:10 |
| Mary Hebert | I was asking about Black schools. So Black schools had Black principals, Black teachers. | 33:15 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Uh-huh. | 33:22 |
| Mary Hebert | In the experimental school that you taught at, the one in Williamsburg, how was it experimental? What did they— | 33:25 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, they didn't have what we call grades, like first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade, like that. They called them, and don't ask me why, because I never did learn why, except they were following behind— There was a professor from Columbia University, who came down to work with all the teachers, especially in the summertime. Because you had to go to work in the summer too. You weren't teaching children, but you were getting basic training in the program, and you had to stay there. Let's see, we taught from September, we went in July and we didn't come out until the next June. School ended for the children in June, but you went an extra month to prepare for next year's work. | 33:30 |
| Mary Hebert | So it didn't have grades, and that's what made it— | 34:34 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | They called them experience groups. | 34:39 |
| Mary Hebert | Okay. | 34:41 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Because now, you see, children start at age six, and they called that the sixth experience group. When you got to the 12th grade, that was classified as the 12th experience group. | 34:43 |
| Mary Hebert | That's interesting. I'd never heard of that method of teaching. | 34:59 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And it was a core program, what they call integrated program, not integration as race, but integration as subject matter. | 35:03 |
| Mary Hebert | When the schools started desegregating here in Norfolk, I heard that some of the schools were closed. | 35:17 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | They were closed in 1958. That was because I think the Governor of the state, J. Lindsay Almond, refused to open the schools. The only school that was open, because we used to go in, they go in much earlier now, but they used to go in in September, and the school term would run from September to June. Excuse me. Anyway, this particular year, 1958, all the schools were closed in September. But Booker Washington opened up in October or the last of September. I know we stayed out a month. They stayed out, the class of '58, they stayed out a year. | 35:24 |
| Mary Hebert | A year. | 36:27 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yeah. '58, because almost everybody in the classes in '58 weren't in school. | 36:29 |
| Mary Hebert | So the schools were closed for a year? I'm confused. Booker T. Washington opened up, and the students got to attend that school, but the other schools were closed for the whole year, '58? What about the elementary schools and the junior high schools? Those were all closed also, or was it just the high schools that were closed? | 36:35 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | That's a good question, and do you know I don't know whether I put that out of my mind or I just forgot it. But I just got the feeling that the Negro schools were open and White schools were not. Now I'm not sure, but you ought to check that, because I'm not sure about that. But I do know that the White schools were closed, because I know a fellow who became, he is now the what, Deputy Superintendent, Salu. Salu went to Grandby High School, and in '58, he should have finished at the end of, oh, in '58. They was called the lost class of '58, because they were not in school. | 37:01 |
| Mary Hebert | So rather than integrate the school, the Governor of the State close the White schools. How did the Black teachers feel about the prospect of integration? Did many fear that they'd lose their jobs if the schools would be integrated? | 37:52 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, I don't think everybody accepted it, and they were quite a number, they didn't come right out and say it, because it was the kind of thing that if something isn't popular, no matter whether it's right or not, you don't say it. Most people are not that outspoken. But I think some of them welcomed integration. Naturally, you feel safer, I don't know whether you feel safer or more familiar or more comfortable with a group that you've been accustomed to all the time. | 38:09 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | But I don't know about whether everybody— For instance, it was back in '64 that they began to integrate, I think, and it really wasn't anything but token integration, because they integrated teachers first, then they integrated the students. And after they integrated the teachers, I guess we had about three or four teachers. But then when they started integrating the students, we had three, we had a total of three students as opposed to about 2,000 in the whole school. | 38:50 |
| Mary Hebert | You had three White students? | 39:42 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And then we eventually lost them. One boy stayed on longer than anybody else. I don't know whether it was because he liked doing what he was doing. He was a library worker, but they didn't have wholesale integration then. The teachers were integrated, and we had quite a number of White teachers over there. There was a sort of looseness that hadn't existed before. For instance, we had a White teacher who was a young fellow, I don't guess it's much over maybe 30, 31. He was a chemistry teacher, and he would walk in school anytime he felt like it. He would do that at, let's say, he'd do that at 8:30. If he felt like he wanted to walk in at 9:30, he did. And they didn't regard certain rules and regulations that were already set down. And if they felt like a teacher's meeting is too long, some of them would get up and walk out. | 39:51 |
| Mary Hebert | Did they feel that they didn't have to follow the rules, or is it that's how it appeared to you? And they said they felt like that they didn't— | 41:36 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, they may not have, because I know one principal, we had one principal to come over to Booker T., very nice man, White principal, and he became the assistant principal, I think. And a whole lot of things that he wanted to go by the rules, but I guess it was frustrating to him, because certain things that he would say, and most of the White teachers didn't pay him any mind, and so he left. I can't think of the man's name to save my life, but he left. He said it is too much room. Because I talked with him one day. He came into, we had a room where they had made an office out of for teachers who would study at a certain period. He came into the room and he said, "I don't think I can take this much more." And he had given somebody some instructions or something, and they didn't go by them, so he left there. He didn't stay that long. | 41:42 |
| Mary Hebert | I just have a couple more questions. | 42:57 |
| Mary Hebert | I just wanted to ask you a little bit about Church Street and what Church Street was like with the businesses and things like that. Did you ever frequent those businesses along Church Street? | 0:03 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, when I was a child, Church Street from Brambleton Avenue all the way up to Princess Anne Road had the Black businesses. And one man in particular, I was just thinking about him last night, I don't know why. His name was Mr. Haggey. He was a clothier. And he lived— | 0:12 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Now he lived in Barboursville, and he went—I was thinking about the way that man looked going to work every morning. He looked like he should have been going to a wedding because that's how well he was groomed. He always wore gray and a Fedora. Always had a either gray or black suit and a white shirt. And he looked—His pants were as creased as they could be. And he walked to work. And when he strutted down the street, you knew that this man either stood for money or had some or something. | 0:39 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | But there were quite a number of Black businesses on Church Street all the way up through the 40s. But they stopped, really stopped having Black businesses around the 30s, late 30s. There was a bank on the corner of Brambleton and Church. It was called Metropolitan Bank, and it was a Black bank. Now that failed naturally with the Depression, but it held on for quite some time. | 1:22 |
| Mary Hebert | And would African American in that neighborhood use and frequent those businesses more so than going to White businesses? | 2:03 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I don't say more so, but they did use them. Now, Hofheimer's Shoe Store built a shoe store primarily for Blacks on Church Street. If you wanted a shoe, in fact, I don't know whether it was a protest of what, but I think it was a hindrance to your going around to Granby Street getting shoes. If you saw a shoe or they didn't have your size and you yourself could have gone around there to buy the shoe on Granby Street. But they sort of kept you from doing that by telling you, "We'll send for those shoes." And they had runners. They had people who would go and get a shoe out the store and come back and that would be your size or whatever. | 2:12 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | They did not want Negroes to come to their store on Granby Street. The store on Granby Street—I remember coming here, I had just started teaching and I was looking for a pair of green sandals, and I went into Hofheimer's and there was nobody that particular day in the store. | 3:07 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | And the man met me at the front door and he ushered me to the back. So I said, "Why are you carrying me back here? Because the shoe that I want is in the center of the store." He said, "Oh, this would be more—" I said, "No, this is not more comfortable." I knew what he was doing. So anyway, he brought out all of these expensive shoes. Now in 1941, a shoe that cost 12.95 was a very expensive shoe. He brought me all these shoes he had. I let him bring out 12 pass. And then I got up and walked out because I kept asking him, "Why do I have to sit here?" And he kept telling me that "This is more convenient." It was right next to the back door. | 3:36 |
| Mary Hebert | Did you experience that in any other businesses too? | 4:24 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, certain people told me this. I didn't have that problem, but I have had friends who had the problem of they're putting in tissue paper inside of a hat before you tried it on. | 4:29 |
| Mary Hebert | You never had the problem with the with the tissue. | 4:43 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I never had the problem with the tissue paper. | 4:47 |
| Mary Hebert | Were you able to try on clothing at the clothing store? | 4:54 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | That depended on where you went. Now, my grandmother and used to carry us to Rices before it was Rices Nachmans. And she used to carry us to Ames & Brownley also. She never had any problems with our trying on clothes or anything, and especially when we were children. As I got larger, I may have had one or one or two. But Norfolk, I found Smith and Nelson you could try on anything except shoes. | 4:54 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Now, most of the people that I knew who had very narrow feet had to get either their White friends or somebody who had narrow feet to go in and buy a shoe for them, because they would—You could shop. I remember a man came here who taught at Hampton Institute and he brought his family over and they shopped for their Christmas things, whatever year it was. And he said when he got to the shoe department, he was refused and he couldn't understand that after he had bought all that stuff from all the other departments. But they did not let you tie on shoes. | 5:40 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Now, Ames & Brownley during the late 40s, early 50s had a quota for people that they would give accounts to. If you didn't come within that quota—I mean, if they said they were going to say serve—So let's say they're going to have a quota of 30 Negroes, the 31st one couldn't get an account there. That's the way they used to do it. I don't know whether anybody knows that or not, but I knew it. | 6:21 |
| Mary Hebert | So that kind of thing was prevalent with a lot of the White owned stores where they would find ways to keep you from shopping? Keep you from buying on credit, keep you from trying on things. | 6:56 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Yes, because now [indistinct 00:07:11] Hat Shop, beautiful hat shop. My grandmother used to buy my hat there when I was a child. But when I got grown, I didn't have any problems with [indistinct 00:07:21] except once. But a friend of mine wanted to get an account. She saw a fur hat there and she wanted it. And she had been buying there regularly, but the man would not let her have that particular fur hat. And he said, in other words, she had been spending all this money with him before, but now this fur hat—I don't think it cost over 60 or $70. But anyway, he wouldn't let her have that account. | 7:08 |
| Mary Hebert | Were most of the salespeople White or all of them were White? | 7:49 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Before they started hiring Blacks, yes. | 7:54 |
| Mary Hebert | What about restaurants? Did you ever have any problems in restaurants? | 7:59 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I didn't. This is one of the reasons why—WG Swartz was a store right near, it was right where Waterside is now but on the other side, and it had stores, a very large store, because you could walk through from one street and go straight through to another street and that was still that big store. They had a restaurant over there. And I know that I have one or two friends, they are Black, but they look White. And they used to, one of them, the mother in particular, and the odd thing about that, did you see that cover on Time that said—I think it was Time or Newsweek, "What Color is Black?" | 8:04 |
| Mary Hebert | Mm-hmm. | 8:47 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well this woman, you could not tell her from anything but White. Her daughter could have passed. One of her daughters could not have. Her son could have. And so she used to go down there and eat at all the time. [Indistinct 00:09:11] before she made a joke out it. She'd see her friends come in, especially if it were a weekend, and she'd wave at them, she'd be sitting at the counter eating. And then one went over to her once and said, "Don't do that. Don't wave at me. If you are passing, you go right on and pass, but don't recognize me." That kind of— | 8:47 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | But that is the way they used to do it. And because they would not, Mrs. Swartz's, I think he was her nephew or something, he would not integrate the lunchroom. And so that's when Negro started boycotting that. And they lost a whole lot of business. In fact, he had to go out of business because some nights you go through there just walking through to see if anybody was in there. There's nobody in there on the weekend. And they sold beautiful clothes and well-made clothes. They sold lovely clothes, and they sold furniture and stuff like it. So Smith, I never had any problems with them as far as being waited on or something because I didn't eat in their lunchroom. Now, my husband and I used to, when they did start integrating, we used to eat at the Ames & Brownley brownness quite frequently. And all of them, most of them gave in, except WG Swartz. | 9:31 |
| Mary Hebert | And that put them out business? | 10:43 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Definitely. Well they put Thalhimers out business up to a point because Thalhimers lost about 18,000 accounts in Richmond. | 10:45 |
| Mary Hebert | That was in Richmond? | 10:55 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Uh-huh. And when Thalhimers came here, what put them out of business I think was the fact that, just like all the other departments stores, that they catered maybe too much to a certain group. Ames & Brownley probably went out business as fast as they did because they'd been in business for years and years and years because they were catering to the teenage group, and see, teenagers couldn't support them like that. They had a whole floor that they took away from something else and made into a floor for teenagers. | 10:56 |
| Mary Hebert | Do you think that or did you ever feel like you were a second class citizen because you were forced to— | 11:37 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, I have a letter somewhere written here that I wrote back when I first started teaching. I used to go and come, I used to have to come—My papa had died and at the time my sister was away, so I used to come in weekends to look after the house. And this particular evening, I used to go back on Sunday evenings. I had to be down at the bus station about six o'clock. | 11:42 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | So this particular evening, the bus was loaded with William & Mary College students. And I was sitting as far back as I could get, which was the backseat. It was a brand new bus. So the driver, as he usually would, came down the aisle counting the number of passengers he had. And when I looked and he came and stood over me, he didn't say anything then, but he went out and he came back again. And there was a young William & Mary college student, tall, nice little girl sitting next to me. No, she wasn't sitting next to me. She came down to sit next to me. | 12:17 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Well, he had come back and he had told one fella was asleep, I think pretended to be, and he told him to get off, and he got up and got off. So there was nobody on the back seat with me. And so I had my umbrella, my little bag and books and stuff. And so he said, "Where you going?" I said "To Williamsburg." "Well, you going to have to get off." I said, "For what? "I want this bus for my William & Mary College students." I said, "Well that's tough, because I'm not going to get off." | 13:02 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | So girl got on and he told her, "There are no seats back there." She said, "But there's a whole back seat." He said, "I don't want you back there." So she came back and she said, "Miss, do you mind my sitting next to you?" I said, "Of course not." So she went back and told him that "The lady back there said she doesn't mind, and I got to get back to school tonight." So he told her, "But I don't want you back there." So he came back and told me to get up, and I told him I was tired, but I was not going to get up. So he sent a fella in to get me and told the fella to take me up from there. | 13:43 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | So I told the fella, because I told him, my father used to always carry an umbrella with a hook on it. And I used to do the same thing. I said, "I hate to tell you this, but if you touch me, I'm going to wrap this around your neck." And so he said, "Lady, I ain't going to hurt you." He went back to the bus driver and said, "I'm not going to put her off." He came back to me and hollered back at me and said, "It's just one of those things." So there I sat. It was six o'clock then. Six o'clock came, seven o'clock came, I hadn't gotten up. | 14:36 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Finally, he came back and he said he had gotten another bus for us to get on, but there wasn't anybody on there be because the others had gone. | 15:23 |
| Mary Hebert | Because of the wait? | 15:31 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Huh? | 15:31 |
| Mary Hebert | They'd left because of the hour wait or they just got off? | 15:39 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | He told them to get off. | 15:41 |
| Mary Hebert | Everyone else— | 15:43 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | They got off. I didn't. So he got a bus, and I've never seen a bus like that before nor after. It was the oldest looking—It must have been the only bus that they ever had when they first started having buses to go from one city to another. And it even had one of these little—It had the place up the top for bags. Now, you know you haven't seen that many a day, and that was in the 40s. | 15:43 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | So anyway, I sat and I sat and I sat. So finally, I knew I had to get back myself because it was then eight o'clock, and I knew I wouldn't get back to Williamsburg because that was a—Believe it or not, it was at least a four hour ride from Norfolk to Williamsburg. Can you believe it? | 16:13 |
| Mary Hebert | Is it like 35 minutes now or 40 minutes? | 16:38 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Anyway, they went all around Robin Hood's barn to get to where they were going. They would go to Smithfield, go here, go there and all like that. Now, the Express didn't take quite that long, but it wouldn't have put me in Williamsburggoing down to Duke of Gloucester Street till one o'clock in the morning. And I didn't want to be out that time by myself. So I got up, but he didn't put me off. | 16:41 |
| Mary Hebert | You chose to get up. | 17:10 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | I got up, because I told him, "You're not going to put me off." But I had made him wait till eight o'clock. And he was mad enough to eat because I know wherever else he was going, he didn't get there until the early—And the students were just—They were talking about him. And one girl told, she went back to him and said, "Look, the lady is going the same place I'm going. She's going to Williamsburg. I'm going to Williamsburg. I'm going to the school. She's going to her school." Didn't make any difference to him. | 17:11 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | So anyway, when I came back home, I was so angry. I sat down that morning, I got back home about one o'clock, I guess, and I sat down and I wrote a letter back to the Virginian Pilot, and my father saved it for me because when I got back home the next week, he had it waiting for me. And I think I have it in some scrapbook around here. But it was not a nice—It was not a nice experience. | 17:50 |
| Mary Hebert | You can pull this along with the microphone. | 18:34 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Okay. | 18:35 |
| Mary Hebert | I'm threw with the questions if you don't have anything else and I can you unhook you. | 18:35 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Okay. I think this letter's in this book. The scrapbook is 59 years old. | 18:43 |
| Mary Hebert | Did you ever do anything else like that? I mean, you told me about the shoe store and getting up and leaving. Were there ever any other in instances when you challenged— | 18:58 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | That shows you how old it is. | 19:10 |
| Mary Hebert | It's falling apart. | 19:10 |
| Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney | Uh-huh. And things will do that when they are so old, they will do that. And this is old. This is a scrapbook that I made from—This is the way I looked when I was younger. That was the insane asylum. We used to go over there. That's my sister. That's Jo, that's the girl— | 19:15 |
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