Madeline Gowens interview recording, 1995 July 19
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| Blair Murphy | State your full name, your place of birth and your date of birth. | 0:01 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | My name is Madeleine Edeny Gowens. My place of birth is Virginia Beach, Virginia, Princess Anne County, March 12th, 1930. | 0:05 |
| Blair Murphy | Could you tell me a little bit about Virginia Beach, what it was like when you were little? | 0:19 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Virginia Beach at that time was Princess Anne County and it was much smaller than it is now. We lived in a Black neighborhood, we went to Black schools. | 0:29 |
| Blair Murphy | What was your neighborhood called? | 0:40 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | We lived in— | 0:43 |
| Blair Murphy | If it had a name? | 0:45 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Virginia Beach. | 0:50 |
| Blair Murphy | Oh, okay. | 0:51 |
| Speaker 1 | 15th Street. 18th Street. | 0:55 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | 18th Street. And we walked to school, we had no school buses, although White children had school buses. My father left when I was just a baby and my mother took care of us without assistance, having no assistance for Black people at that time. | 0:57 |
| Blair Murphy | They had assistance for Black people? | 1:19 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | If they needed it. | 1:19 |
| Blair Murphy | Oh. | 1:19 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Mm-hmm. | 1:19 |
| Speaker 1 | Turn that off. | 1:20 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | We went to a three-room school in the Seatack area, which is called Birdneck Road now. It was all Seatack at that time. They had a three-room school. We had three classes in each room and had one teacher. The teacher taught— | 1:29 |
| Blair Murphy | Three grades. | 1:47 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | They call it primary then, but it's kindergarten now—first and second and third, fourth, fifth and sixth, and it was seventh. Then when we started high school, we had a school bus because we had to go to Union Kempsville which was Princess Anne County Training School at that time. | 2:03 |
| Blair Murphy | Okay. | 2:20 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | And this is when we got the school bus. | 2:21 |
| Blair Murphy | So was it unusual for Blacks to ride on the school bus at that time? | 2:25 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | It was for elementary school. We didn't have it for elementary school, we had for high school for the simple reason that- | 2:29 |
| Blair Murphy | It was too far? | 2:36 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | —there wasn't—It was too far to walk from Virginia Beach to Union Kempsville. | 2:38 |
| Blair Murphy | So you rode a bus to your high school? | 2:45 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Yes. | 2:47 |
| Blair Murphy | And it was a training school? | 2:47 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | The name of it was Princess Anne County Training School, which changed to Union Kempsville, after we graduated. | 2:48 |
| Blair Murphy | —You said— | 3:05 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | My mother was a domestic worker, and a great lady. She raised the four of us, three girls and a boy, by herself. We all went through high school and one went to college for a year, and I finished nursing school. That's about it. | 3:05 |
| Blair Murphy | Your mother did domestic work for White families in the area? | 3:41 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Yes. They was the Murdiss. | 3:44 |
| Blair Murphy | Murdiss? And did she get along with them? | 3:51 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Oh, yes. Mm-hmm. And we couldn't live on the oceanfront, you couldn't go on the oceanfront unless we were babysitting some White child. | 3:52 |
| Blair Murphy | Oh, they wouldn't let you get on the beach? | 4:06 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | No, we couldn't go on the beach or anything unless we working with the White community's children. | 4:08 |
| Blair Murphy | Oh, okay. And was there a Black beach? | 4:11 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Oh, yes. It was called Ocean Breeze and Seaview Beach. | 4:20 |
| Blair Murphy | And that would be all Black people? | 4:28 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | All Black people. | 4:29 |
| Blair Murphy | But the main beach that we consider Virginia Beach now? | 4:33 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | We couldn't go to, although we paid the taxes. | 4:37 |
| Blair Murphy | Mm-hmm. And if you were with White children, you could go? | 4:40 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Oh, yes, you could even go in the water with them. Yeah. | 4:46 |
| Blair Murphy | It was just for the purposes of work? | 4:47 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Right. | 4:47 |
| Blair Murphy | You said you went to nursing school? | 4:54 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Yes. | 4:56 |
| Blair Murphy | Where'd you go? | 4:57 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | I went to Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York. | 4:57 |
| Blair Murphy | And when did you go there? | 5:06 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | '53 to '56, it was a year-round program. | 5:10 |
| Blair Murphy | Okay. You said you went all the way to New York? | 5:15 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Yes, because I had a friend there that told me that you could go to school free, they paid you $30 a month. | 5:18 |
| Blair Murphy | Oh? | 5:28 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | So that's why I went, I didn't have the money to go otherwise. And that's how I did that. | 5:29 |
| Blair Murphy | So did you stay in New York or did you come back here? | 5:36 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | I stayed in New York about 13 years and then I came back to Virginia. | 5:41 |
| Blair Murphy | What were some of the differences, like the cultural differences, between being in Virginia and being in New York? | 5:44 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | The differences between New York and Virginia Beach, a while back, huh? In Virginia Beach, you didn't race mixing and in New York, you did. New York you could go anywhere and sit where you wanted to. Virginia Beach you had to sit on the back of the bus, go through the back door of a restaurant if you wanted something and they'd pass it to you through the window. New York was just [indistinct 00:06:42], just about—It was segregation that it was hidden New York and in Virginia Beach, you knew what they wanted you to do and where they wanted you to go. | 5:50 |
| Blair Murphy | How in New York was it hidden? Where you could live and stuff like that? | 6:41 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Yeah, where you could. I guess some housing. I would think that they were unsaid. You know people renting an apartment or something, it probably was said, "There aren't any available." In Virginia Beach, they'd say, "Blacks live here and Whites live there and you can't live here." No. So that was some of the differences. It's more than that, I just can't recall at present. What you want to ask me? | 6:52 |
| Blair Murphy | Some of the people you admired from your community? | 7:17 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Okay. I admire Ms. Anna Lively because she used to bring us food home from the restaurant that she worked at to feed us. Mrs. Ida Morgan and her family. We stayed with her when we didn't have anywhere to go and she fed us. Her daughter was Heaven Morgan, bought us some clothes to wear. Reverend and Ms. Beckett and their daughter, Miss Alice Pettilonce, used to give us clothes and Miss Alice would take us home, feed us on Sundays. | 7:18 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Those are some of the good people that I admire and, well, [indistinct 00:08:08] that. And I forgot one other person, Mr. Silas Hammond that worked at the hotel and he used to bring us bread and bring my mother home when she had all those headaches, because she worked very hard. And that's about it. | 8:03 |
| Blair Murphy | What church did you go to? | 8:24 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | I attended St. Mark AME Church in Oceana, right the Oceana Air Field jet base, the largest jet base in the U.S. Sometimes you could hardly hear because of the jet planes. But Reverend Beckett was our pastor, very fine man. I always said that if I had a child, I would want my male child to be just like Reverend Beckett. He was a good person. Also, when we were living on 18th Street, we also attended Seatack Mount Olive Baptist Church, that Sunday school, when we couldn't get to St. Mark. That's about it. | 8:31 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | As far as shopping is concerned, I don't ever remember going shopping. But my mother could sew so she made some of my things and people gave us a lot of things, hand-me-downs. Oh, when we needed shoes, my mother would measure our feet with a string or draw it on the piece of paper in permanent marker to bring our shoes back. | 9:26 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | So the clothes that we wore to church were just for church, which were probably a little dress and a pair of shoes. The clothes we wore to school, we would have to wear them, come home, wash them out and hang them behind the heater to dry and iron them in the morning or that night with a flatiron that you heat on here, and [indistinct 00:10:30] on us. | 9:59 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | We thought we were rich but we were poor, because we had a lot of love. When we ate, my mother would say, "It doesn't matter what you eat, nobody knows what's in your stomach as long as you're full." So we were happy children, and full, and never sick. The people in the neighborhood always—We were never sick because my mother said we— The people in the neighborhood wanted to know why we were never sick. Well, it was summertime, my mother would give us cream of tartar in Rotel sauce and in the wintertime, she would give us cream of mushroom— | 10:31 |
| Blair Murphy | Cream? | 11:17 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | —in summer. Cream of mushroom. So I guess that kept us well. | 11:18 |
| Blair Murphy | Do you know what was in those things? | 11:26 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | No, just clean your system out. | 11:28 |
| Blair Murphy | To clean your system out? | 11:30 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | I guess to clean your system out. | 11:32 |
| Blair Murphy | Oh, okay. | 11:33 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | We had a doctor that my mother knew that practiced in Norfolk and when we needed something or— | 11:37 |
| Blair Murphy | Was he Black? | 11:46 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | —she would go—He was Black. And she was a very good doctor. She would go, take us to him and he would treat us free, no charge. | 11:47 |
| Blair Murphy | But you didn't go there that often? | 11:56 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | No. | 11:57 |
| Blair Murphy | Because you got sick? | 11:57 |
| Madeline Edeny Gowens | Yeah, really, once in a while, yes. | 12:01 |
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