Dorothy Jones interview recording, 1997 November 06
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| Dorothy Jones | A lot of time trying to recall the Brooks's, my maternal relatives. I would prefer doing something about my young adulthood and work within the church and with my parents and with the 300 children that my husband and I adopted in a very strange sort of way, their parents— | 0:01 |
| Kristen Koeker | Excuse me, just one moment. Can we see if that, make sure that— | 0:27 |
| Dorothy Jones | When Grandison Phelps and his wife, Matty Brooks-Phelps left Bennett College on their way to New Jersey, my dad was going into theological school, Drew Theological Seminary. I think he kind of liked to brag at times from time to time when he was trying to get us to be sure that we always got our lessons very well and that we didn't waste too much time in frivolous things because they found out very early when he was at Bennett, that he had quite a number of talents that needed to be developed. So when he completed, he brags of the fact that he was the valedictorian of his class and he was sent to Drew Theological Seminary, it was then in 1915 to complete his studies in theology. My mother went along with him. | 0:34 |
| Kristen Koeker | I think last time, was it 1914 or 1915? | 1:36 |
| Dorothy Jones | 1914, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, 1914. Fifteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. | 1:39 |
| Kristen Koeker | Okay. | 1:44 |
| Dorothy Jones | Because he finished in 1918. | 1:50 |
| Kristen Koeker | Okay. | 1:51 |
| Dorothy Jones | He finished Bennett in 1914. | 1:53 |
| Kristen Koeker | Okay. | 1:55 |
| Dorothy Jones | Yeah. And I think I got those dates right. | 1:57 |
| Kristen Koeker | Okay. | 2:00 |
| Dorothy Jones | Yes, because he went in 1918 and finished there in 1918. | 2:00 |
| Kristen Koeker | Okay. | 2:03 |
| Dorothy Jones | And Mother went along with him. Now, there was not really a place in Madison for them to live, because there were only two Blacks in his class when he entered the university or the seminary—one was from Africa and of course he was from North Carolina. He lived with a Jewish family. Mother was the upstairs maid, the family was a very kind family because they permitted her and Daddy to live there with their small baby. And Daddy did everything. He cleaned the yards, he stoked, he called it, the furnace. He ran the errands. He took care of Mother and my baby sister, Sarah, who was then the only child. And then he did his complete coursework during the daytime hours when he had classes. | 2:07 |
| Dorothy Jones | Mother did a little dusting and cleaning upstairs and then she and the lady of the house became very friendly. And there were a number of things that she learned that she perhaps would not have learned, had she not been living with a Jewish family. I think her interest while Daddy was studying theology, her interest became very, very—deep. Or, very, very great in learning more about the Jewish people, their menus, their lifestyle, their family history. And of course, Daddy was studying everything including Hebrew. | 3:13 |
| Dorothy Jones | And when they came back to the South, after he had completed his work into the North Carolina Conference, because of the experience that they had had, Daddy got one of the largest churches then, in the North Carolina Conference, he was in Reidsville, North Carolina. There were two churches in that charge, the Reidsville Church and the Wesley Chapel Church. The members were extremely good to Mother and Dad. And it was while they lived in Reidsville that all the children were born. | 4:01 |
| Dorothy Jones | My sister Helen, me and my brother, Grandison Junior, we stayed there for seven years. And then Dad was called one evening by the bishop and told that there was a death of a district superintendent down in the Raleigh district—down in the Laurinburg district. Raleigh was in that particular district at the time, but we moved to Hamlet. | 4:42 |
| Dorothy Jones | And for us coming from Reidsville, that was more highly developed than Hamlet because of the fact it was the American Tobacco Company there. And it was a very well populated area for that particular time. The people there were very well-trained. Most of them were graduates of Bennett College or of Johnson C. Smith, or of some were even graduates of Livingstone College. And they were members of the St. Paul Methodist Episcopal Church and the Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church. | 5:18 |
| Dorothy Jones | My father was very dedicated to his work in Reidsville, and none of us wanted to leave. I can remember all the crying and I think we cried because we weren't really big enough to know what we were crying about. I think we cried because Mother and Daddy cried. And we did love those members, because they were very instrumental in helping to shape our lives as children. Some of the family traits and all that we developed were family traits that my mother had combined with what she knew from the South and with what she had picked up from the Jewish woman, with whom she lived. As a result, our manners, our eating habits, our lifestyle was a combination of down South and up North. | 6:04 |
| Dorothy Jones | We were influenced also by the training that she got when she was at Bennett, because Bennett demanded that all the girls that came there, acted as young ladies should. So from the time we knew what gloves and pocketbooks and hats were, we wore our little gloves, carried our little pocketbooks and wore our little hats to church. We did not—we were not trained to say "Yes, ma'am" and "No, ma'am" or "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" because from the Jewish family, mother had picked up, "Yes, Mr. So-and-so," "Yes, Mrs. So-and-so," "Yes, Daddy" or whatever, "Yes, Mother" to her mother and father. | 6:59 |
| Dorothy Jones | And so we were just taught to be very polite in using the words "yes" and "no", and to follow them with the name of the individual, rather than the Southern custom of "Yes, ma'am, No, ma'am" or the "ma'am" and the "sir". And sometimes those things got us into difficulties, not with the Black people, because they thought—well, we were Colored people then. Because they thought it was something that was very strange and very great to hear children calling people's names and addressing them when they would just when they'd say "yes" and "no." | 7:48 |
| Dorothy Jones | But an incident that I recall was going to a store, the store was just right around the corner and Mother stood at the corner and watched while I went to the store, because she was trying to watch the house and the store at the same time. And I came running back crying and she said, "What's wrong?" I said, "The man won't give me because he said, I should say 'Yes, sir.'" | 8:24 |
| Dorothy Jones | So mother just took me right on back to the store and very politely told the gentleman that her children were not trained to say "Yes, ma'am" or "No, ma'am" or "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" and he asked her, "Who are your children?" And she told him, "I am the wife—" Oh, my mother was fair proper and prim and prissy. "I am the wife of the Reverend G.M. Phelps, who is pastor of St. Paul United or Methodist Episcopal Church." | 8:50 |
| Dorothy Jones | That was something that spread all over Reidsville in both communities and as a result, we never were told again to say "Yes, ma'am" And "No, ma'am" And "Yes, sir" And "No, sir" The whole time we lived in Reidsville. And of course, as I said, I think before I did not have too much contact with Whites during my growing up period so that didn't bother me anymore. | 9:20 |
| Dorothy Jones | But when we went to Hamlet, we found out what it was to have to live for a while, without some of the conveniences, because the parsonage in Reidsville had indoor plumbing. And we had electric lights. Because Dad was the district superintendent—they called them presiding elders—then he had to provide a home for himself. While he was getting that home built, we had to live with the pastor of the Hamlet church. | 9:46 |
| Dorothy Jones | And that was one of the most traumatic experiences I think that we had. Notice, I say one of the most. While dad was on that Laurinburg district. The Eastern part of North Carolina was not as progressive as the Western part of North Carolina and the parsonage there was a large parsonage, but they had outdoor toilet and they had a pump in the yard and they had tin tubs and heated your water on the stove. | 10:17 |
| Dorothy Jones | When we walked into Reidsville—because Daddy went first and we went up and spent some time with the Brooks's. We got off that train— that was when you had to ride behind the engine in the Jim Crow Car and cinders and dirt and everything. But we had our own lunch, so that wasn't too bad when we had, we really enjoyed the train ride because that was our first train ride. | 10:55 |
| Dorothy Jones | And Grandmother had fixed this big box of all kinds of dainties, so we ate most of the way to Hamlet, it was a long ride. We had to change in a little place in South Carolina called Blacksburg because we had to get on Seaboard Railroad. We got on the train and when we got to Hamlet, it was black dark. And Hamlet was the main station for Seaboard. There were no sidewalks into the little place where we were supposed to live right next door to the church in the parsonage that I just described. | 11:24 |
| Dorothy Jones | So we had to go down the railroad track and it was dark, dark, dark. Mother and Daddy trying to handle four small children. The baby, Daddy was carrying. Mother had a hold of my hand, all of us had some kind of package. All of us were crying except Daddy, who was trying to tell us it was going to be all right. When we got to the parsonage and there was no bath water, we were all covered with cinders and everything from the blowing back of the engine, being right behind the engine on the train. And Mr. Reverend May had no wife and his house was D-I-R-T-Y. And we weren't accustomed to that much dirt and his sheets and all looked gray. | 12:02 |
| Dorothy Jones | And Mother said she had to wash some of us, and of course Brother had soiled his diaper and it just seemed—and then you didn't have disposable diapers, you had what we called birdseye. So Mother had to go out to the—Daddy went out to the pump and took a bucket and cleaned off the little diaper and then Mother started heating water for baths for everybody. And the three girls had to get into bed together. And Brother got in with Mother and Daddy. Did I tell you about chinches last time, bed bugs? | 12:56 |
| Kristen Koeker | No. | 13:30 |
| Dorothy Jones | There was a little insect that— | 13:32 |
| Kristen Koeker | Oh, bed bugs. | 13:33 |
| Dorothy Jones | Bed bugs. | 13:33 |
| Kristen Koeker | Yes. But why did you say chinch? | 13:33 |
| Dorothy Jones | They call them chinches. | 13:33 |
| Kristen Koeker | Oh, I didn't realize that. | 13:33 |
| Dorothy Jones | That was the name for the bed bugs. The chinches. | 13:41 |
| Kristen Koeker | Oh, okay. | 13:43 |
| Dorothy Jones | And when we got in between those, Mother was able to wash us up a little bit, put us off to bed. And then the first thing that happened was I started crying, because within the girl's room, because every time I'd move, something with bite and the mosquitoes were humming overhead, "oh, there you go again." Bed bugs from the bottom mosquitoes from the top, it was horrible. | 13:44 |
| Dorothy Jones | Mother got up and they tried to tell us that it was going to be better the next morning that they would get everything straight. It took several days to get it straight. And while it was getting straight, Daddy was going back and forth. Still trying to find a piece of property where a house could be built, so we could get back to some of the things that we were accustomed to. | 14:20 |
| Dorothy Jones | Everybody was extremely—It was, they were good people. They were very good people. They just did not have the same idea about sanitation and keeping clean that we had. We didn't know anything about sand spurs. We had been bitten up the night before with the bugs and the mosquitoes. And we were told, before I hit the sand spurs, we were told to get some fatback, fatback, had salt on it and to rub that on these bumps just rub until we broke the skin and the salt would help to seal them and to heal them. So we were going around smelling all day, like fatback. | 14:40 |
| Dorothy Jones | We didn't know anything about sand spurs. Sand spur, a plant that has a little briar—a burr like on it and when it goes into the flesh, it turns over and it's difficult to get it pulled out. So my mother started taking the scissors, cutting them off. And then of course we couldn't walk because the little place piece that was left in there, you see, it was like a splinter. And we crawled under the house. | 15:23 |
| Dorothy Jones | So she said, "You just can't play in the yard because these sand spurs." He hadn't had his grass cut a good while, there were so many of these sand spurs. So we crawled under the house and got introduced to sand fleas. Those first few days in Hamlet. I don't believe that torment could be any worse than those first few days, while we were getting accustomed to the living conditions, we had to live with Reverend May for about three months. | 15:50 |
| Dorothy Jones | And Daddy had found a place and they built a house. And when we walked into our own home, back with plumbing, back with the electric lights and back to the warmth of being in our own place with nice clean—of course, Mother had learned how to do the sheets some down there, didn't have washing machines, so she had to do it in tubs and we had to take our bath in tin tubs. | 16:17 |
| Dorothy Jones | So that was a beautiful—and the experience in Hamlet and on that district was one that I treasure, because of the fact that we had not been accustomed to people who did not have. The people in Reidsville, we'd go into their homes and they would make these big fancy spreads for the preacher's daughters, for the preacher's family. They would have little things around that the preacher's children could play with, but when we would go and Daddy—Mother, and Daddy would both great, but I just, my Daddy was just kind of my favorite because he knew how to be kind to a family and he loved his family with him. | 16:44 |
| Dorothy Jones | So whenever we could, we'd all get in the car and go with him. And we hit some homes and some situations that I have still seen in others, but I would not have had the same appreciation for people, if we had always been in an area like Reidsville. And if we had never experienced life from Hamlet on down through all the smaller places, into Wilmington, as the presiding elders say, these were all his places. | 17:30 |
| Dorothy Jones | And then back into Charlotte, a big place, a big district rather and from Charlotte back into Hamlet. And sometimes the people wouldn't pay him because they didn't have money. And so they would give him meat when they would kill their hogs in the winter, they would give him molasses sometimes when he'd go down and sometimes he'd come back with potatoes. And in the summer months with the various vegetables that they raised. | 18:04 |
| Dorothy Jones | And why I say that Mother was really influenced by the persons when she lived in Jersey, she got away from the cooking of food so much with all these fat meats and things that we usually use in the South and when we'd go to some of these homes and they would put on the table, I called them white fried fish because the meal never looked brown. And it was usually real thick. And you talk about something that's yucky to try to bite through that, to get into the fish. | 18:36 |
| Dorothy Jones | And she taught them how to use less of the little batter that they were using, but to use the dry meal and to shake them and to fry—some of the homes we went in. And she'd go out and get cabbage and things from the garden and cook. And the people, as I say were so kind. And even though they did not have, they were to me, a happier people than some of the people that we knew later, who had everything. And they treated the presiding elder, they called him Elder, as if he were some great celebrity. And they did the children the same way. | 19:08 |
| Dorothy Jones | Daddy always talked to us growing up, about having and not having and sharing. And he would use these persons as examples. And then we moved from there on into Winston-Salem, which was again, going into a city. And from Winston-Salem we went to high school. My sister had to go to private high school, because the schools in Hamlet were not accredited. So when we went to Winston, she had already gotten into high school. She went to Bennett to high school. | 19:51 |
| Kristen Koeker | Which one? | 20:24 |
| Dorothy Jones | Sarah. Because Bennett was co-educational and it started in the grades. And by the time she got ready to go in, it had become a woman's college. And they had a high school department only with the college. So she went to college, high school and college at Bennett. | 20:26 |
| Kristen Koeker | How did the private high school differ from the non-private [crosstalk 00:20:49]? | 20:46 |
| Dorothy Jones | It was accredited. | 20:49 |
| Kristen Koeker | Yeah. With the educational— | 20:51 |
| Dorothy Jones | You'd see the standards at the Hamlet high school, the Hamlet high school was not accredited at the time. And when she would go, if she had gone into college from there, she would've had so many courses that she would've had to make up in order to get into Bennett. | 20:51 |
| Dorothy Jones | So young people whose parents could afford, or who were connected with the—in the Methodist system who were connected with the Methodist church and who could get scholarships or some little work study for their students sometimes would send their children on to the private high school. So they'd be sure they would get everything they needed, when they'd have every course that they needed when they entered college. | 21:13 |
| Dorothy Jones | And just a little aside, all of us, we were sort of puritanical, I guess, in our upbringing. I don't know how I would explain puritanical and humorous, because the family had a lot of fun together. But if you had seen the four of us, when we were growing up, you would've wondered where on earth did those little perfect, polite children in public come from? Because we really knew how to appeal to the public and to follow and to be polite and to talk about almost anything that people wanted us to talk with them about. | 21:43 |
| Dorothy Jones | Because Mother—that was another thing that came out of their relationships in New Jersey, in that college town, the way that they reared us. Instead of our being able to play all through the evening or not study our lessons, we had specific times when we would sit down and study, if we hit a snag and especially in math or science, our dad would help us out if it were English or something like that, our mother would be the one who would take over. | 22:26 |
| Dorothy Jones | And in the evening after we had finished up all our lessons, we'd gather in the dining room. And I still have the cocoa pot—Mother would make cocoa and pour it in a China pot that she had gotten from this Jewish family. And there were fortunately, there were six cups with it. Only a cup and a half remain now because the half doesn't have a handle on it, but the pot is intact. And we would sit around the table and talk about the things that had happened during the day. Or just Daddy and Mother would tell us little stories about things that happened during their childhoods. | 23:01 |
| Dorothy Jones | Or we'd laugh, not maliciously because we were taught that you do not act malicious with individuals, but if there was somebody in the church who had some little queer habits that were funny, but wouldn't hurt the person if we'd talk about them, then those were the things. And we would talk about what was read in the newspaper. And the older children, when Sarah left, then Helen and I were old enough to read some of the papers. And if we'd see something in the paper we wanted to discuss, we'd—and that would go on for, from thirty minutes to an hour, depending on how rapidly we'd finished with our lessons. | 23:41 |
| Kristen Koeker | What kinds of stories did your parents tell? | 24:22 |
| Dorothy Jones | Did I learn then? | 24:25 |
| Kristen Koeker | Well, when your parents told you childhood stories— | 24:26 |
| Dorothy Jones | Of how Daddy— of how they didn't have electric lights and in order to save oil, see their house was—my Daddy's family house was built with the kitchen here, and then there was the pass-through, and the other part of the house. And I'm sure you've seen something like that, where the bedrooms and the living room and all were. And the living room was huge. It was the size of all the upstairs rooms, and there was big, big fireplace. And he would tell us how they would make a fire in the winter and take their yams, put them in the coals and cook them in the coals. | 24:30 |
| Dorothy Jones | And then how he would study his lessons by the firelight, because the lamps, they tried to conserve the oil, the kerosene as much as possible, and their mother didn't want them carrying those lamps around, because that would have been dangerous. She didn't want them upstairs with those lamps. And so he would sit, he said, he studied later than his other brothers and his sisters. And he would be down there, because he was determined to be this preacher. And he would study by the lamp, by the fireplace, by the light from the fire. | 25:13 |
| Dorothy Jones | And he would laugh and sometimes tell us how he learned about Abraham Lincoln. And he said, "That president hadn't have a thing on me, because I read it by as much by the lamp, by the fireplace light as he did." And then they would tell us stories about our great-grandparents. We had a great-aunt whose name was Aunt Mary. And she was a stingy soul. And they would tell us, our Daddy would sometimes tell us things about her and if any of us acted as if we didn't want to share, or we would being a little selfish or cranky, we'd call each other Aunt Mary. "Okay, we know who you favor, you favor Aunt Mary." See? | 25:52 |
| Dorothy Jones | And then Mother would tell us stories about her family, about Uncle Bobby, who wasn't—he was almost a midget, maybe just a little taller than a midget, but he was extremely strong. And everybody was afraid of Uncle Bobby, because while you were trying to get down to hit him and I don't know how true it was, but she say he could run between your legs and get you a bump and knock you out and keep on going while you were trying to reach down and hit him. | 26:36 |
| Dorothy Jones | And then they would tell us stories of how it would rain and how they would sit in by the fire, how they would shuck corn, how they would have—one man who had a wheat harvester. And he would go through the entire neighborhood and all the neighbors would gather and the women would cook these hearty, hefty meals. And then at times they would have corn shucking, they'd put all the corns, all the corn in the shuck and in the corn somewhere, they would hide a bottle of white corn liquor. And every man was trying to shuck till he got the white corn liquor. | 27:04 |
| Dorothy Jones | And then they would tell us stories of how they got whippings for various things or how they got punished for various things within the family. How many Bible verses they had to learn. And a part of that they put off on us because we had to know the catechism every Sunday afternoon when other kids were running around, we had taken off our Sunday clothing because we were going to go back to Epworth League at six o'clock in the afternoon and we would be sitting on the porch, reading our catechism and others would be out playing ball and running and doing things like that. | 27:47 |
| Kristen Koeker | What exactly is in the catechism for the Methodists? | 28:24 |
| Dorothy Jones | Who is God? Where is God? Who was Joseph? What do you know about his dream? Who had the coat of many colors? Why—? I mean, just every explanation of the Bible that you—why is it sinful to do this? What is sin? Where do you go when you die? All these kinds of questions were in it. We knew it already. We'd heard it. And sometimes if we didn't have that, we'd have to have our little Bible books and reading little Bible stories. But it hasn't affected me. I mean, in my growing up, I think it was good, because it really taught me how to kind of get my time squared away. And that's why now, like Daddy, I can boast of the fact that I was valedictorian of my high school class. | 28:28 |
| Kristen Koeker | Congratulations. | 29:30 |
| Dorothy Jones | And I did not make the valedictorian or the salutatorian of my college class because three of us were vying for it. And our scores fluctuated in tenths of a point, so I came in third, but I didn't worry too much about that, because I finished college in three and a half years. So I figured it that other half of the years is when they caught up, because they didn't have as many books as I had. So you can see I was a real—may I use the term snotty? I was real snotty kid. | 29:30 |
| Dorothy Jones | I really thought I was something on a stick, because I had had all this pre-training and everything from my parents. I knew how to talk to people. And my singing voice hasn't changed too much, but it was a little better then, than it is now. I had had piano lessons. My mother had insisted that you learned to do something with your hands because you don't know when you might get in a situation when you need to do something with your hands. | 30:02 |
| Dorothy Jones | So I had learned how to sew and I could make my own clothes and nobody could have things like me because I'd make them according to my own style. Started making them when I was twelve years old, by the time I got to college, I was an expert and could have some things that I perhaps wouldn't have had otherwise, along with the fusses for my— | 30:31 |
| Dorothy Jones | But when I ask him, why he wanted to marry me, he said, "Because I love you." | 0:01 |
| Dorothy Jones | I said, "Now, what I am doing, or what my father is doing, doesn't influence you?" | 0:09 |
| Dorothy Jones | He said, "I'm not marrying what you're doing. I'm not marrying your father. I want you for yourself." And I can't explain the feeling, because that was the first time, in all my courtships, and when, courtships, or when anyone had said anything to me about marriage, they had said they wanted me for myself. | 0:17 |
| Dorothy Jones | And I said, "I'll think about it." | 0:38 |
| Dorothy Jones | Then he came back home on Sunday. Came back to see me on Sunday night, and said, "We're going to have to get married Thursday, because I want you to go home with me to see my parents before, I go to Nashville." He said, "Call your Daddy," and I said, "No, you get your things together and you go home, and I'll talk to my Daddy and Mother, and I'll let them know that we're getting married." And that's how I would talk about it, let them know that we were getting married on Thursday. Because, it was just something about his saying that he wanted me for myself that made think that I wanted to be married to him. | 0:43 |
| Dorothy Jones | Well, I had to go back to Statesville the next morning. I couldn't go in there and tell them that night. I tried, but I couldn't go in there that late at night. So the next morning, about five o'clock, I went in and I said, "Mama." I never called her Mama unless I really wanted something. "Daddy, are you awake?" "See, how can we be asleep if you're calling us, waking us up?" That was Mother. I said, "I have something to tell you," and Daddy said, "Couldn't it wait?" I said, "No, I don't think so. I'm going to get married Thursday. Kenneth and I decided last night, since he's going," before I got all of that out, Mother, I could feel Mother, just going to the ceiling. | 1:19 |
| Dorothy Jones | "Kenneth who?" I said, "Kenneth Young, the young man that's coming been coming to see me." "Who is he? Who are his parents? What does he plan to do in life? How do you know?" Oh, she just took me through the ringer. And Daddy, when she'd get a little excited, he'd say, "Now Mother, Mother, now Mother, let's discuss this." | 2:09 |
| Dorothy Jones | He said, "We can't condemn anything that the boy has ever done, because we don't know him. Remember, your parents weren't too happy about your marrying me. So, Dorothy is old enough if she wants to marry and I think maybe he did best if you go out and marry her." Think Daddy's getting tired of these guys running in and out from the army. | 2:34 |
| Dorothy Jones | So, Mother said, "Well, you know, I have a meeting in Cincinnati and I won't be here Thursday." I said, "That's all right, Sarah can help me. She's a chair builder. She can come home and take care of things." "Well, what are you going to get married in?" This is Mother now, she's kind of coming around. I say, "You and Daddy have a charge account that [indistinct 00:03:28] and I hadn't saved enough money to get anything for getting married. And I thought maybe I could use your charge account." Yeah. | 3:00 |
| Dorothy Jones | "Well, just don't overdo it. And you got to go back to states. So you'd better go get dressed." This was Mother. And I knew that she and Daddy were going to have it out. So I went on back and Kenneth called me that afternoon. And I told him that I'd be ready on Thursday. And then I called Daddy and told him that I would be getting married and to tell Sarah, and that I wanted Mr. Burke, Reverend Burke to marry us because he was a very good friend of mine. And he had met Kenneth and he and Kenneth had been very friendly with each other. So he said, "Okay." | 3:00 |
| Dorothy Jones | And then Kenneth called on Wednesday night that he was already separated from the army at Camp Sutton and was going to have to stay in Charlotte Wednesday night. And I said, "Well, I'm going to have to stay in Charlotte Wednesday night also. So just call Daddy and I'm sure he'll let you stay at the house on Wednesday night." When I got home, Daddy was sitting in one corner and I was sitting in another and they were trying to be polite to each other, but I could tell Kenneth was sweating. | 4:24 |
| Dorothy Jones | I was getting ready around there and I had already been down and bought my things. And I thought, I looked very charming. I had my hair all fixed and everything ready to get married. The next day, Sarah came breezing in and told me what she had decided. And my friend from Statesville, the young lady that had gone over with me when I met Barron and all. | 5:00 |
| Dorothy Jones | And then my cousin Charles had always said, because they had thought I was going to have a big wedding. And he was going to be one of the ushers in my wedding. So he was there in Charlotte and he came over and Kenneth told me, it'd be all right if he'd be the best man. So Sarah, my father, Charles, Kenneth, Barrick, Mardel and I were the only people who were at my wedding, in the parlor of the Parsons at Charlotte. | 5:23 |
| Dorothy Jones | And we had to go get a ring. I didn't have any money. Kenneth didn't have any money. Cause he had been sending his money home and he had his ticket and just a little money in his pocket. So they said, "[indistinct 00:06:14] don't do it. I said, "No." I said, "Maybe we can get right a postdated check." Cause my salary will be coming in. And I can tell Sarah to get my check and deposit the money before my salary gets in. | 5:56 |
| Dorothy Jones | So she said, instead of doing that, so we took Sarah into our confidence and we didn't have that much money she said, "Instead of writing a postdated check to the jewelers, write your postdated check to me. I'll give you a check and you can go on and get your ring." So we went on and got me a ring. Now this was the day and it was cloudy. | 6:27 |
| Dorothy Jones | And I was so scared. I said, "Oh" kept thinking happy is the bride that the sun shines on. Before we had had to change the time to four o'clock because we were going to get the train and go directly to Jersey. And before the sun, before the wedding time came, sun came out and it was beautiful and dewy. The rain still on the little windows and all of that. And this was in March, 9th of March, 1944. | 6:56 |
| Dorothy Jones | And when we got in and the ceremony was performed and Sarah and Mardel were standing there crying. I didn't know what they were crying for. And they said, if a man ever looked at them, the way Kenneth was looking at me during that entire ceremony, said, "You didn't see him?" I said, "Yeah, but I was looking at him." "Oh no. That he was just looking at you, just like you were the only person on Earth." And so we went to Jersey and we got in Jersey and we didn't have enough money to take a taxi to his house. And I had on, I held black patent shoes with the toes out and it had snowed in Jersey, just a little snow, but you had little water puddles and snow here. I had my toes out, patent leather shoes. | 7:24 |
| Kristen Koeker | Oh no. | 8:16 |
| Dorothy Jones | Spring suit all my wedding refinery. Because I was going to impress his parents. So he said, "It isn't far." He took both bags and we walked from the station to his house. When we got inside of his house, there was this house, next door. He said, "Mm, they smacked a little paint on the house since I was here." And the little house looked like it was supposed to be this room and my heart fell. | 8:16 |
| Dorothy Jones | I said, "But I love him. If it'd be all right." And he turned into the walkway of this big house and he said, "Did you think that was my house?" I said, "You said it was." When we walked in, his family was sitting there waiting. Two a sister, a sister-in-law, a brother, his father, his mother. And it looked like the judge and the jury, they were polite. Told him where our room was and we live upstairs. He said, "Don't worry. Everything's going to be right." | 8:44 |
| Kristen Koeker | What town is this right now? | 9:25 |
| Dorothy Jones | Perth Rahway, New Jersey. | 9:28 |
| Kristen Koeker | Row? | 9:31 |
| Dorothy Jones | Rahway. R-A-H-W-A-Y Rahway, New Jersey. And we went in, went downstairs and see we had to ride all night. So we were rumpled and they gave us something to eat. And then they talked around me and talked to Kenneth and his sister-in-law said, "I was reading something" cause they weren't talking to me. | 9:31 |
| Dorothy Jones | And she's very, she still is very cause she still is. She's near ninety years old now. "When you going to lift up your head?" I said, "When you start talking to me." "Oh." And she has this voice that's real heavy. And her mother said, "She's exactly right. We haven't said a thing to her." And so they started talking and the crowning thing came on Sunday when we had this big family dinner, he had four brothers and two sisters. | 9:54 |
| Dorothy Jones | The younger sister and I had started getting along very well because we were about the same age, but all us with his brother's wife and their two small children in this large dining room with the table, extended space for all and all this food on the table and the mother comes out with, "We didn't want Kenneth to get married so soon because we wanted to be sure that he's somebody." I said, "Well, I'm somebody, do you think I would marry somebody that I didn't think was going to be somebody?" | 10:31 |
| Kristen Koeker | You said that? | 11:10 |
| Dorothy Jones | Said that to his Mama and the quiet and she started laughing. She said, "You know, I think I'm going to like you." And that relieved some of the tension, but not with his father because his father had already selected a girl there in Broadway, who was the AME Zion preacher's daughter that he wanted his son to marry. And he never did really warm up to me. Never did, but we had a good time and everything turned out all right. | 11:10 |
| Dorothy Jones | Because his sister and I, the younger sister, she's dead now, whose name was Marion lived in—going to class at Columbia and—an undergraduate school. And she, and I just got along famously together. The sister-in-law tried to act, and the oldest brother tried to act off, but the youngest brother and I got along, he was younger even than Marion. And he and I got along very well together. | 11:55 |
| Dorothy Jones | And the mother and I got along beautifully together, but the father was always, picky, picky. And then I went back to Charlotte and Kenneth went on to Nashville. And in June when school closed, I said to Daddy that I'd go down. I'd be back in August. And that I'd have my passport and everything in order, I'd be on my way to France. He said, "No, you'll go down. You'll find a comfortable place to live. If you need anything, we'll be happy to give it to you. And we will send you your trunk as soon as you get a place to live." | 12:26 |
| Dorothy Jones | So when I got down there, where Kenneth was, and I told him, I said, "They say, I'm not going to France." He said, "You got wise parents. I'm so glad they wouldn't let you go to France. Cause it's lonesome down here." | 13:10 |
| Kristen Koeker | Aw. | 13:21 |
| Dorothy Jones | And he and I finally got ourselves an apartment. We had to stay in the one room for a while. And then we went into senior class, graduated. They graduated in midterm because if they would go into school around the clock for three years. And when they graduated, I had become friendly with one of the senior wives and we got her apartment and it was right across from not too far from the campus. And I got a job in x-ray and decided I was going into x-ray technology, but a lady almost died on the table and I was the only one in the room with her. | 13:21 |
| Dorothy Jones | So I went running out to see was anybody in the hall. And the first person I saw was this chunky little white guy. I didn't know who he was. I knew he was in Meharry, so he should have been a medical man. 'Cause he was on the medical side. So I grabbed him and told him, "You better go in there. Because I think that woman is dying." | 13:56 |
| Dorothy Jones | It was the president of Meharry. He was a dentist cause it was medical and technology repair. So he went into Scott. That was my boss. He went into Dr. Scott's office and told him he better not try to keep me because I left a patient unattended. So Dr. Scott told me that I couldn't be in the department any longer. And I went downstairs talking to one of my friends down there whose husband worked out at the—she wasn't, she was an older lady. | 14:14 |
| Dorothy Jones | And I said, "I won't be able to stay in the department because I thought the lady was dying. And I just sent somebody in there to look at her because" I said, "I've never seen anybody taking care of anybody dying." So she said, "Don't worry about it, the schools getting ready to open out at Tennessee State and you have English and French, and my husband is head of that department" said, "Go out and talk with him because they need an interim teacher for about six months. | 14:50 |
| Dorothy Jones | And by that time, maybe you can, have found something else." Because even though we were both getting a little money, a little more money never hurts when you're trying to get ahead. And we had decided that we were not going to depend on our parents. And I went out to the place and talked to her husband and gave him, I don't know why I gave him my middle, my maiden name Phelps. | 15:16 |
| Dorothy Jones | And he said, "Phelps? I know a Reverend Phelps in North Carolina, Grandison Phelps." I said, "That is my father." "He is?" I said, "Yes" "He is a wonderful man. He did my father's funeral. I have never heard a eulogy delivered. He didn't talk about he's going to heaven or he's going to hell. He just spoke comforting words to the family." | 15:41 |
| Dorothy Jones | Oh and he talked on about Daddy, after a while, he said that, "Well, the job will only last for six months. I'll have to have a resume. And I'd like to know a little something. So you'll have to sit in on some of the classes that already in progress to see if you think you can handle it." So he hired me and I knew I had to stay there, because I did not want to go anywhere else after I got there and we were going to be there for another, I thought just about two and a half years, but they changed it. | 16:13 |
| Dorothy Jones | And we were there for a full three years because they cut out one of the summers and the guys had to go on through to a full year rather than, I mean nine months rather than going the full twelve months. So that meant that they had to add on and we had a summer off first time we'd had a summer off, but because of the fact that I was teaching, we decided to stay down there and just go right on through. Well, they were not going to hire me for six weeks. The GI's were coming back on that GI bill and Tennessee State had a way of getting the big guys that looked like they'd be good football material. | 16:53 |
| Dorothy Jones | And we had a little expression in high school that we got from a teacher of ours, B-D, B-D. Beautiful, but very dumb for the girls, big, but very dumb for the boys. And some of these GI's, some of them, I don't think it finished high school and they were triple BDBD's. So what I decided to do because some of them couldn't even read very well. | 17:40 |
| Dorothy Jones | I decided to do an remedial class in English and reading with them and with any of the others that were in my class that wanted to take it. So, we started that class and they would come after hours at four o'clock in the afternoon. And I would work with them for an hour. Well, when Dr. Pogue heard of what I was doing and saw some improvements were coming, then they gave me that job for the remainder of the time that I was there. | 18:10 |
| Dorothy Jones | And instead of teaching at four o'clock, this class was put in at a time that would be more convenient. And I was teaching the class. When I got ready to leave, they wanted to send me one, me to stay in Tennessee. And they would send me to school to get my master's and then on to get my PhD. But I told them my father had charged me to stay with my husband and he was going to intern at Harlem. | 18:44 |
| Dorothy Jones | So we went to Harlem and when he finished his interning, we went to Jersey, but he decided that he was going to give the two years to the army because he had never really been in any combat or anything. And they sent us to Fort Worth, Texas. We were to stay there for two years. The last month of that time was during the Korean conflict that they said was not a war. | 19:12 |
| Dorothy Jones | So they sent him to Korea for those last nine months because he told them that he had to take me home and he would not go with his unit. They did not send him to the military base hospital. They sent him with a heavy artillery unit that was on Heartbreak Ridge, where some of the heaviest fighting and dying was going on. And I went home and stayed with my parents, with everyone saying to me, you have nothing to worry about because he's a doctor. | 19:37 |
| Dorothy Jones | And with his writing me for a while there, he almost went off because he was writing that he had a foxhole and his foxhole and the clerics, the chaplain's foxhole were in the center of the camping. So that if anything happened, if they were bringing in anyone that was very injured or dead, then they would have to be close enough by, and then once or twice. | 20:15 |
| Dorothy Jones | Well, more than that, he went out on the field when helicopters crashed and he sent letters of bodies, of persons being completely destroyed and been getting bodies with no heads of, I mean, it was just a gruesome thing. And I knew that things weren't too good for him, but one time he didn't get his money in time. | 20:42 |
| Dorothy Jones | And he was so afraid that I needed something that he went through the combat zone, down to the zone to get some money sent to me and I wrote him a letter and told him, never, never expose yourself like that again, because they would've sent it to me in time. And I was living with my parents, but all the time, that's why I say that to me, marriage is something that's very, very beautiful because all the time that I was married, my husband's concern was for his work and things of that sort. | 21:09 |
| Dorothy Jones | But he always had a very special concern for me and it spoiled me rotten, but it was just a very good feeling of being loved and protected. And I recommend marriage. I really recommend marriage, but it's a 50/50 proposition. You have to give and you have to take, so if you can get it that way, it's real good. And then when we didn't have any children, but I had had to work while he was in school. | 21:50 |
| Dorothy Jones | And sometimes things got pretty tough. And especially when he was interning. So he said, "When I set up practice, anything you want to do, you can do it." I decided I didn't want to teach. I'd have enough teaching. What I wanted to do. When we decided that there were going to be no biological children, I wanted to open up our house and I didn't want funding. And I didn't want grants. | 22:25 |
| Dorothy Jones | I wanted us just to let our house be an open place where children could come. So I started out with a little Brownie Scout troop, I guess I was really a glorified babysitter because their parents were working and those kids would almost come directly from home, from school to my house, thirteen little girls. They were the girls that when we formed the Brownie troop, I was supposed to be the assistant leader. We got so many, they invited them. They knew the girls, they knew their parents. I didn't know them. | 22:56 |
| Dorothy Jones | So I got all the children from across the tracks, Reidsville then was filled with bootleg houses and gambling and oh, just about everything. And I got all those beautiful little rejects because I visited their parents. I sat with their parents and I called them. I said, though, "These are my children and you, the brothers and sisters and your children. I am the mother of your children. And you are my brothers and sisters." | 23:31 |
| Dorothy Jones | And from that little basis of thirteen girls, we grew and we grew and we grew until I have over 300 children. And that family started in 1952, February of 1952 in the basement of St. Paul well—Method Episcopal Church it was then in Reidsville. And that family has extended all over the United States into the islands, into American Samoa, into Pakistan, into India, and one blue-eyed blonde from Sweden, whose name is Unikeshna. And that's why I say I have 300 children. | 24:04 |
| Kristen Koeker | Thank you. How did you and your husband plan to the differences in Christian backgrounds, the Zion—didn't you say that—or was your husband raised in a Zion home, AME Zion? | 24:54 |
| Dorothy Jones | No, he was Baptist. | 25:08 |
| Kristen Koeker | Oh Baptist. Okay. | 25:10 |
| Dorothy Jones | But we did not. We decided that since I knew more about Methodism and it was so close to the Methodist Church. | 25:11 |
| Kristen Koeker | Yeah. | 25:20 |
| Dorothy Jones | That we would go Methodist. | 25:21 |
| Kristen Koeker | Was there a time when you appropriated all of the catechism that you had learned as recited as a young child for your own? When did that happen? | 25:26 |
| Dorothy Jones | That happened when I started working with the very first group of children that I began to teach them little ladylike things that you can be heard without screaming, no chewing gum when we are in public places. If we are going somewhere, be sure that you have your, because we got uniforms, your complete scout uniform with your hat, your gloves and your tie, be sure that you have all those things. | 25:36 |
| Dorothy Jones | I taught them how to eat and how to use the knife so that they can cut their chicken and get every piece of chicken off the bone without using your fingers. I taught them how to eat the various vegetables that they weren't accustomed to eating and do not order what you do not know, because if you order it now you're going to have eat it. I took them camping and we, I loved the outdoors and we learned all about the outer outdoors and how to prepare our meals in the ground, to big dig the pit and cook our meals in the ground. | 26:07 |
| Kristen Koeker | How did you learn to cook your meals in the ground when you didn't have camps like that? When you were [indistinct 00:26:55]? | 26:48 |
| Dorothy Jones | We read a few little books and experimented and my husband and I would together. I've got this and he was good because he was a boy scout, a real boy scout. | 26:54 |
| Kristen Koeker | Oh. | 27:08 |
| Dorothy Jones | When he was growing up. So I didn't have to worry through trying to learn the knots from looking at them. | 27:08 |
| Kristen Koeker | Yeah. | 27:15 |
| Dorothy Jones | He could show me the knots. He showed me how to do the pit in the ground and cook and we would sometimes do our meals like that. So at the home so that I would be very good at it. | 27:15 |
| Dorothy Jones | He also taught me how to chop so that I wouldn't injure myself. I had my little axe and we'd be chopping the wood in the backyard sometimes so that I could teach the girls and how to use the knife so that I wouldn't be cutting toward myself. But cutting away from my, he was the best teacher I had for scouting things. We did primitive camping. Went out on one of the coldest days in the year, went into a little log cabin and everybody took one cup of water, that cup of water. We were going to have to make it last us overnight. | 27:31 |
| Dorothy Jones | We took our little army rations that we got from surplus store and made our meals at the sun, came out the next morning. And we sat on the pier at the Girl Scout camp and warmed up. Cause it was cold with that place. But did we have fun? It was just great. And the real fun came when I tried to start my car, I had a station wagon and oil spewed up all over the windshield and I couldn't get the car started. So what I did, I called my assistant. I had the best assistant in the world. She was an undertaker and she knew how to let me be the leader and not tried to change things that I had said with the children. But if she had anything to say, she would tell me and cause wasn't any point, both of us trying. | 28:12 |
| Dorothy Jones | And I called her and told her that we were stranded. And so she sent the funeral limousine out to get us. And I had a nosy neighbor that lived across the street. Now why he couldn't see how we were dressed? But he saw Mac Lauren's funeral limousine bringing my family to the house—must be somebody dead in my family. Cause he saw the limousine bring. (laughs) But that was the most fun, how we went on a primitive camp and had to be returned by the undertaker. But the good thing about it was, that winter we had the heaviest ice storm we've ever had in that area we'd ever had in that area. | 29:09 |
| Dorothy Jones | Yeah, we had our little Buddy Burner and we knew how to cook food because the cabin that we stayed in had a fireplace and we cooked our food over the fireplace. We knew how to conserve water, and families from all over the area, the girls, I told them, "Make yourself a list." And I called various families, and we were calling them and telling them how to get along without their electricity and all. And came out from the experience and made the news. Girl Scouts helping to survive during this period of time. | 0:01 |
| Kristen Koeker | Oh. | 0:35 |
| Dorothy Jones | Life has been very good. My husband and I were able to live together for thirty years. And he died. I decided that I needed to rearrange my life. I didn't ever want to marry and I still don't ever want to marry again, because he stayed with me the day that he was dying rather than my staying with him, because I didn't know he was dying. And when I walked from the room, because he said he was ready to go back to bed. And when I walked from the room, the only thing I regret is that I did not kiss him. Instead, I just pinched him on the arm and said, "When the orderly gets ready to get you back in bed, I'll be back." | 0:39 |
| Kristen Koeker | Was he in the hospital? | 1:30 |
| Dorothy Jones | He was in the hospital. He had had surgery for cancer of the lung. And we thought—I thought he was improving. But an embolism is what really caused his death. It started in the leg and worked its way up to the brain. And he knew he was dying. There are several things that happened, and I know he knew he was dying. And he continued to talk to me. And I thought that he meant that I had to take care of him. | 1:34 |
| Dorothy Jones | And I had said to him, "You've taken care of me all this time. Now, just relax. I can take care of you." But he was trying to get me to know that he was dying, and it never occurred to me. Because see, he wasn't supposed to leave me. That was the impression that I had, that never would he leave me. I would leave him perhaps, a whole long time before he left me, but he would never leave me. | 2:06 |
| Dorothy Jones | And when I got the door open and started to close the door, I heard the orderly calling, "Dr. Jones, Dr. Jones." I looked around and he had just [indistinct 00:02:44] down to the floor, and they started calling all the codes. The aide came. I said, "I'm on my way down to the chapel." He said, "Well, he's going to be all right." I said, "He's dead." And I went on down to the chapel and they came and got me, and he was dead. So that was the end of a portion of my life. And now, since I have gotten into archives, and I have seen other people and I have heard their stories and all, I have learned to appreciate more the life that I lived up to his death. | 2:35 |
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