Ann Pointer interview recording, 1994 July 22
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Pointer, can you tell me where and when you were born, and a little bit about the area that you grew up in? | 0:05 |
Ann S. Pointer | I was born September 21st, 1927, Macon County to Tuskegee, and I'm still living on the same place where I was born. | 0:15 |
Paul Ortiz | And what did your parents do to make a living? | 0:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | Farming. | 0:33 |
Paul Ortiz | Were they landowners? Ranchers? | 0:41 |
Ann S. Pointer | No tenants. | 0:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Tenants. | 0:43 |
Ann S. Pointer | Sharecroppers and tenants. | 0:45 |
Paul Ortiz | What types of crops did they raise? | 0:51 |
Ann S. Pointer | Cotton, corn, vegetables. | 0:54 |
Paul Ortiz | And did you have brothers and sisters? | 1:04 |
Ann S. Pointer | Four brothers and one sister. | 1:06 |
Paul Ortiz | What are your earliest childhood memories? | 1:14 |
Ann S. Pointer | My earliest childhood memories would be when I was almost three years old, my father's mother passed away and I was in bed with her when she died. And that seemed to have jogged my memory a lot. And the things that happened that she died suddenly on Mother's Day morning and the family was all upset, and it made me remember. That was when I was going on three years old and I could remember it like it was yesterday. | 1:19 |
Paul Ortiz | Did your grandparents live with you? | 1:54 |
Ann S. Pointer | No, they lived, I would say a fourth of a mile away on the same place where we were living. We all lived and rented from the same man that owned all the land in this area. | 1:57 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. What was his name? | 2:11 |
Ann S. Pointer | William Varner. He used to be the probate judge. The house where Dr. Payton lives was Varner house. That house, the gray columns was owned by his grandparents and whatnot. It was Varner, Varner, Varner, Drakeford, Lasley, that's who owned all of this land around this area. | 2:14 |
Paul Ortiz | All right. Now, had your grandparents also grown up in this area? | 2:39 |
Ann S. Pointer | No, my father's parents were slaves. And my grandmother, which was my father's mother, often, my mother said, she said she came from Hurtsburo Alabama, which was in Russell County. My grandfather often said he was from Demopolis, Alabama down in Marengo County. But he had been a slave in areas around Marengo and all around [indistinct 00:03:26] the Civil War. He was carried with the army to assist a cook or whatever they had slaves doing. And they were in the Virginia area, he was with General Lee, carried up there with Lee's Bunch, and they were captured there and they captured the slaves as well. The Union soldiers captured the slaves. And he was set free by them, but they took data on him. They asked him questions and he didn't know anything to do but to answer them. | 2:49 |
Ann S. Pointer | But before he was let loose, they inducted him in the Union Army and he didn't even know that. But he was carried as a Union soldier. And when they turned him loose, there was three men that walked with him from Virginia back to Alabama. They did say, a long time ago, how long it took them, but I can't remember how long. But he finally drifted back to Alabama, and he was in Tallapoosa County splitting rails for the trains in the woods, cutting trees and logs, making rails for the train. He said he was cooking in the woods. And it's a story Campbell, TM Campbell has also wrote this story up in his book about my grandfather. And he could not read, not write, but he was a Methodist minister. | 4:04 |
Ann S. Pointer | And when my grandmother was in Hurtsburo, his wife, he didn't know her, how she got out of Hurtsburo, her mother and father were married during slavery, and they only had one child, which was her. And that was Caroline, which was my grandmother, my father's mother. And her mother was sold. She never knew her real mother, because they sold her mother to somebody, carried her on somewhere else, and Grandpa Simon was brought to Macon County. They sold him up here. But he remembered that he had a child down there. | 5:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | And after Freedom was declared, he married another woman. But he went back to Hurtsburo and found his little girl and brought her up here. And she was raised by his other wife, because they took his wife and sold her somewhere else. And so they had many children. But my grandmother was the oldest child he had, and she was born a slave. And so being in Macon County, she met my grandfather down at Chehaw. You know that was a train station? And it was a cafe and hotel down there and she was working as a maid or something and cooking and going on and cleaning up down there. And he was just a drifter. | 5:43 |
Ann S. Pointer | And they met and they got married and they had many children, I mean, which my father was the youngest of the bunch that she had. And so they moved from Tallapoosa County back to Macon County working, sharecropping on different things. They were living in Tallapoosa County and he had a son that was lynched in Tallapoosa County. When I say lynched, he was shot and the house was there when I grew up, they left it there to show the holes in the door, looked like a sifter. I saw this myself. My father carried me and showed it to me. Although he was the type man, he shot some of his aggressors. And it was all because some woman, some woman he was married to and she was messing around with these White guys, and they got drunk and come to his house and he knew nothing about this. | 6:29 |
Ann S. Pointer | And when she saw him out there on their horses, she ran out the back door and ran on down through the woods. And he said they got out there with the cussing, raising so much sand, he walked out, he said, "Gentlemen," said, "what's the matter?" Said, "I don't think that you need to carry on this in front of my house." And at that time you just didn't talk like that to Whites, you know what I'm saying? Or say anything to them, they did as they pleased. And they start cursing at him. And from one word to another, they fired a shot, and he ran back in the house. And he started shooting too, out the door, because he didn't know what they was about. And they shot and exchanged fire until he was shot in the hip. A bullet hit him in the hip, but he had shot several of them, because he was shooting a high-powered rifle too. | 7:29 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he got out and my father said, he crawled—All of this is things that they told us about it to let us know just what happened in their life. And he crawled a long way to his parents' house in Tallapoosa County. And when he got there and told them what had happened, they said, "Where's your wife?" He said, "I don't know." He said, "She ran out of the house long before this happened." Then they had heard what she was doing. But my grandfather got out and walked to Tallassee and got a doctor. He was only wounded in his hip. | 8:21 |
Ann S. Pointer | This doctor came, the doctors used to make house calls. He came there riding a buggy and everything. They didn't know who he had been shooting at or who had been shooting at him. But when this doctor came in, he caught himself probing for this, pardon me, bullet in his hip. And my uncle told him, said, "Mama," he says, "stop him. He's killing me." And grandma said, "Well, Doctor, if he doesn't want you to wait on him, please sir, don't wait on him anymore." He picked up his attache case and said, "You'll never shoot another White man." He put poison into his hip and killed him. A bullet wound in the hip wouldn't have killed you. And so— | 9:01 |
Paul Ortiz | He poisoned him. | 9:43 |
Ann S. Pointer | He poisoned him through a wound. A doctor can do that. And so my grandfather, being a slave, being like that, he was afraid of White people and he was until he died. But somebody told him to go to Dadeville, Alabama, which was the county seat and issue warrant about his son being killed on funny terms. He issued a warrant. They had to serve it, but he didn't hardly know what to say. You know what I mean? But they acted upon him and gave him a court date to meet court. | 9:46 |
Ann S. Pointer | And these men, well, he knew some of the men and he called their names, and so they had to leave out of their house in Tallapoosa County and come over here to Macon County to relative, some of my grandmother's friends and whatnot. Because if ever a mob crowd get after you, I don't care if you are my third cousin, they are going to pick at everybody who's any blood kin, if you've killed one or wounded one. And they knew that. And so they ran and left all of their belongings and just leave to Macon County away from over there. | 10:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | And they came that night and they were going to go back the next day in the daytime and get some of their belongings. But when they got there, those mob crowds had got in there, in the house, and took all their groceries and pour it in the middle of the floor. All the flour, all the meal, all the coffee, all the sugar, poured it all together and stir it with a hoe and just tore up everything in that house. So they had to leave barehanded and nobody did nothing about it. | 11:06 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my grandfather came over here in about a year's time, when the court came, he got out to walked to Dadeville, Alabama. These people knew him and he didn't know them though. And he was walking the road and they met him and asked him, "Where are you going?" And he said, "I'm going to Dadeville Alabama to court where they murdered my son." He had the paper in his hand. They took the paper and tore it into a million piece, and told him and said, "You turn around right here and don't you be caught in Tallapoosa County no more." | 11:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | He turned—That case is still pending. And my son said he's going to open the case up. I said, "You better let it alone," I said, "because those same devils are still there." That case is still—They have not—I found out that's still on the book, that's many years ago. And my grandfather never went back up there. He was a slave and he was afraid to pursue it. | 12:08 |
Paul Ortiz | What was your grandfather's name? | 12:28 |
Ann S. Pointer | Jesse Harris. | 12:30 |
Paul Ortiz | And what was the name of your uncle who was— | 12:33 |
Ann S. Pointer | Who was murdered? | 12:37 |
Paul Ortiz | —murdered? | 12:38 |
Ann S. Pointer | Charlie Harris. | 12:38 |
Paul Ortiz | And that case is still pending. | 12:43 |
Ann S. Pointer | If it was opened, a lawyer could open it right now, because if anything's on your book, regardless of it's an archives, they have to go back and get it out. You see what I'm talking about? But that is the plot of—And so they moved over here and they started renting from Varner, William Varner, and their house was down under the hill, just a little hand throw from here. And we were living up here. And so my grandfather was compensated from the government, since he was in the Union Army, they started giving him a check of $100 a month back then, which was good money back in that time. | 12:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he'd been drawing this money. But the people was in the Confederate Army was only getting $6 a month, six. But he being in the Union Army, he was getting 100. But the way they did him, by him being afraid to even look at a man in the face, they didn't allow slavery to look a man in the face, he had to look to the side. He couldn't read or write. He would get that check and he'd go up there and give it to him like this. And he wanted groceries and things. They gave him what they wanted him to have out of that check. He just died in '34. The year I started school. | 13:26 |
Ann S. Pointer | But they ruled him because he was afraid to—If you said anything, he would be, "Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet." That's what he would say, "Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet." And when you were raised in an atmosphere—Now I want you to know this, my father being a man raised by slave parents, he was ruled and raised like they were raised like a slave child. And when he had children, which was us, some of those same fears were passed down to us, thus given many of us inferiority complexes. And you'd be surprised how that can affect a person. | 14:07 |
Ann S. Pointer | I mean things that I could have spoken about my father, "No," he always—And he would listen to him and he'd say, "The furthest way around is the safest way home. Just walk around it. Don't get in their way." See? And that's the way we were raised in that same fear, because of the way.. It's really sad, but it's true. And every word I'm telling you is true. And my grandmother, when her mother was sold away from her, you know how she felt as a child, and she never knew where she went or nothing of the kind. So she had no relatives but just her father. When her father died and she had sisters and brothers around in the county, but as far as on her mother's people, she never knew. And right now I could have relatives anywhere, I don't know. | 15:11 |
Ann S. Pointer | And the same way with my mother, her grandmother was a slave and her grandfather was a slave, but her mother and father were not. You see? And my mother was the oldest child, my father was the youngest child in his family. My mother was the oldest child of seven children, one girl, which was my mother and six boys under her. But her mother's mother that was a slave and her mother's father, they were slaves. And Joe Pinkett, I think came from Virginia, that was my great-grandfather. And his wife, who was my great-grandmother, was in Macon County, right here in Macon County. She was a slave here in Macon County. But Joe Pinkett somehow was sold from up there down here. And that's how they met. | 16:18 |
Ann S. Pointer | But she also married in slavery time. My grandmother then had four children born in slavery time. And they didn't know much about what happened to those children, because I think they sold them or something. And it's a thing that you can think about now and wonder where or who is kin to you. You know what I mean? You don't know who your kin folks are. | 17:11 |
Paul Ortiz | Did your grandmother—You said that she missed her mother— | 17:41 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yes. Hold on just a minute. Can I— | 17:44 |
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Pointer, did your grandmother talk about her mother? Any memories that she had of her? | 17:52 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well, my father said that she remembered her, and when they took her away. And she said that she was a nursemaid for her slave owner, my grandmother was, she was a missy girl. And when you say a missy girl, maybe she was 12, 13 years old, and she found some money. This is a story that they tell us. She found a big bundle of money, and when she found it, the woman saw her pick up something and she took it and put it in a bosom. She found it on the street. She said, "Caroline, what is that you got?" She said, "Nothing." And she just went there and just ripped her dress over and got it. She said, "I knew it," and took it. She said, "I want to give this money to my mama and maybe my mama can buy me a dress." "You don't know nothing about no money," and took the money away from her. | 18:01 |
Ann S. Pointer | They often talked about that. But she didn't know the names of these people or anything about their name and whatnot. And just like my grandfather, he always said that Jesse Harris might not have been his real name, because I think when he got so afraid of that slave master and thing, he just changed the name to something else. But he said he came from that Marengo County area and he never talked too much about this. | 18:52 |
Ann S. Pointer | I don't know why, but my father sat down and told us a lot about everything that they could think of that happened that their parents told them. He would sit down at night and tell us these things. And Grandpa, I remember grandpa, I was seven years old when he died, and grandma, she died when I was almost three. But my great-grandmother, the one I told you about, lived here in Macon County and her husband came from Virginia, she died in '34 also. | 19:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my grandfather, Jesse Harris, the one I told you about, from what I can sit down and figure out now, the meteorites fell in 1833. Do you know anything about that? They called it the stars falling in 1833. Grandpa said he was a lad of a young man in 1833. Now, when you call a lad of a young man, he didn't know his age, but I counted from the time he said, "Oh, I was a lad of a young man when the stars fell." And that meant he might've been approaching 18 years old. You see what I'm talking about? And he died in '34. The stars fell in '33. So he's far more than a 100 years old, far more than a 100. Cut that off just a minute— | 19:56 |
Ann S. Pointer | And so I would say that grandpa had to be 115 to 120 years old when he died. According to that meteorites and the year he died in '34, he was a lad of a young man in '33. So that mean he might've been born in 1700, and something because that was 1833. I don't know, early 1800s, maybe 1801. But there is no record of his birth. My grandmother the same, because she—Her oldest child, which was Aunt Amanda, she was a White child, and she was forced to have sex with these landowners or something. And this child was born to her down there. And when her father went and got her, she had this child. | 20:51 |
Ann S. Pointer | And good lord, I knew Aunt Amanda just died here in '50 something, and she was an old woman then. And my grandmother was well over a 100, a hundred and something years old when she died too, my father's mother. They were very, very old, but they didn't have—I don't understand it. I got pictures, although I don't have the pictures here, my son took those pictures. My son that lives in Mississippi, he had them on big frames, my grandfather and my grandmother, and I let him carry them away, because I had been very ill and I didn't know who would come here and get them. The frames they're in are expensive, they're antiques. | 21:55 |
Ann S. Pointer | But she was a very strange looking woman. I can remember her. She was a tall woman with high cheekbones and she had straight black hair. And when she died, there wasn't a gray round of hair in her head. Mama said she was an Indian woman, mixed. And she had straight—And I had a brother had hair just like her jet, black straight hair. And she had high cheekbones and she had all of them makings, but just a mixture like that. And looking at some of her children, you can see that in my grandfather. | 22:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | I just really, I wonder sometime, I sit down and wonder about this, I would've liked to—And he knew some of his people because he told mama to name my sister after his mother, and her name is Sarah, but he never talked about his people down in Marengo County. But I went down in that area when I was quite a girl and I was standing there, and this lady came out and she said, "what is your name?" And I told her and she said, "Do you have any relatives in Demopolis?" I said, "No, ma'am." And she called another woman in. She said, "I want you to come in and look at this girl." | 23:18 |
Ann S. Pointer | And she looked at me and she said, "Oh my Lord, that's so-and-so's daughter." She said, "Oh, no, this girl's from Tuskegee. She doesn't even know them." Well, the woman stood there and she didn't believe her. She thought I was somebody's child from down there. And then I said, "That's some relative, we just don't know." And I met a man on a train and I was leaving Roanoke, Virginia, going to Cincinnati, and I was sitting on the train. I was a grown woman. I was 22 years old. And when he walked in that train, he just started staring at me. So it made me nervous. I just started reading too, also. When the train started to moving, after they picked him up at a station in West Virginia, he came up to me and he said, "How do you do?" I said, "Just fine." | 24:05 |
Ann S. Pointer | He said, can you forgive me for staring you like that? He said, "I just almost fell, because I thought you were so-and-so, my niece." Where are you from? And I told him where I was from. He asked me had I ever been to Demopolis, Alabama? I told him, "No, I had not." And he said, "I'm going to give you some money." Just put it in my hand like that, and went on back and sat down. All of that has worried me. I would like to go in that area and see, but I don't know. But you'd be surprised how it is when you wonder about people and when you meet folk. And I was courting a man once and when I got acquainted with him, we met at Tuskegee University. He was going to school and I was going to school. But he was attracted to me for some reason and seemed like we just hit it off real good. | 24:59 |
Ann S. Pointer | And in later years, I met his mother. And when I saw her, good Lord, I like to fell, because she was so much like my grandmother and her people and had all of the—And I told him, I said, "You know we are some kin." And when I saw his sisters and everything else, he said, "You know I believe that too." I said, "Along the way, you don't know where these people stopped and who they dealt with." I always will say they're dead now, but I just believe that they were in that Pinkett family on my other grandmother's side. You see people all the time. You just don't know who's who. | 25:53 |
Paul Ortiz | When you were growing up here, were there other elders in the community who would talk about experiences during slavery? | 26:39 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yes. Yes. That's all they talked about. That's all they talked about. On Sunday evenings, we'd be out playing, they would all come to visit and all that. They would sit down, talk about the old times, and the work that they did and the hard time they had and tell you all about it and tell you to "make something of yourself." They kept saying, "Make something of yourself. Be my dream. I can't read or write, but I want you to make something—" They didn't give you but a nickel, "You take this nickel," or anything they could give you and tell you to go on to school. And, "I don't ever want you to go on those hard times." They was talking my back there. That's all they talked about. | 26:48 |
Paul Ortiz | Really? | 27:35 |
Ann S. Pointer | At church, they would shout, shout, cry, the old patriarchs and all that stuff. And when the old people—Around here, they didn't have no social security or no age money or anything. And just like Pedro and I living here, if we got disabled to maintain the house and we got too old, well, and if Pedro died or I died, one of us, and we didn't have any children, we'd have to go and live with someone and they would take all of our possessions and just take it. And then we would go and live with them, and they treat us like they want to treat us. And if we got livestock, they'd take that and all your furnishings and things. And that's the way the old people had to do. Just go and stay with anyone who would take them in, and get a crust of the bread and a corner to lay in. And that's all they had, because some people was not nice to those people. | 27:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | I know that myself, because I went around these folk, I would be, you know how children are sneaking around and listening. And these folk didn't even have a place how to take a bath and they would cook and give them what's left. And they had to work in the field if they were able. They'd make them go to the field or sweep yards or wash clothes or see about the cows and things like that. And then they'd talk ugly to them. "Old woman, you better sit down somewhere." "Old man, you better do something." Just talk to them real cruel. Because they didn't have nobody to go to or nobody to tell about what happened. And some rich people from New York, they was millionaires, they came to Macon County and built a two-story house, a big house down in Magnolia community, way down toward Hurtsburo. It's on that Highway 10. | 28:49 |
Ann S. Pointer | And they build this big two-story place with rooms. They bought cows. They bought a farm. And they called it the Poe House. And when these people get disabled like that, and they hired some people to maintain that place and feed those people and brought clothing and everything. They had doctors who would treat them and all of that. These millionaires paid for that, but it fell in the hands of some crooks. And they sent these people to this Poe House, but they'd make them work in the field and milk those cows and do things like that. But if they had done right about it, the place could have been a nice convalescent home. But the way they did all them that was able to work, they fed them. But those men, people that was blind or disabled, they soon died. And they wasted that money and had that place looking like a pigsty. | 29:47 |
Ann S. Pointer | And the people started complaining. Them folk came back in and saw how they had that place, they tore that place down and they stayed there for years. But people would tell you, my mother often told me, said it, "When a person start acting ugly, these older people act ugly, they say, 'All right, you keep on carrying on like that, they going to take you to the Poe House.'" And then they would behave, because it was a punishment. And all the time we laughed about it and they called it Magnolia Poe House. And it was a preacher mama said, had a family, and he was living down here below Chehaw and he was raising stuff, had a bunch of children. But he was promiscuous, so he couldn't get a chance to bamp around with those women down there. It was a lot of loose women down there. | 30:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | Because he didn't have any money, they didn't pay me money. But when he made a good crop and gathered and sold and got his money, he started gassing around with those women, and wouldn't give his wife one thing. And she didn't have any clothes or anything. He put his wife in the Poe House. And that's what—I'm telling you, I never—Mama said she didn't like this man, because he put his poor wife in the Poe House and that's where she died. You see? And I laugh—It ain't funny, but the way they told it is really something. I wish you could have met my mother and father. You wouldn't have never got to write, because they had vivid memories. And they told us—Really, my mother and father married at 17. They were both 17, and they grew up with us and they shared all of their life with us. | 31:34 |
Ann S. Pointer | A lot of it was real funny. We laughed about it, but it was true. And the hobos on these trains—They would come from Chehaw through these woods and find—"Anywhere you see a bunch of children," they always say, "you can look to find food there." How they found our house, I don't know. Any tramp, they weren't there to do you any harm. Only thing they want to do—You might be sitting in here right now this time of night, and you hear somebody at your wood pile. We had a wood pile, bam. And you know, ain't nobody supposed to be out there chucking, everybody in the house. And papa would take a lantern then go out there, "Hello." "Hey friend, nobody hurt you. I would just cut up some wood, if y'all give me a meal." | 32:24 |
Ann S. Pointer | And mama would give him something to eat, and they'd fix him a pad to lay on. He'd lay there and sleep and leave. We never saw him again. And that happened all the time. But now you'd be afraid to let anybody come in your house to stay. But back then, they came to our house all the time. It was just funny to me, because they didn't know you and they just was starving or something. | 33:04 |
Paul Ortiz | And you live basically on the same—where County Road 21 is now. | 33:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | That's right. This is the same community. And I attended—Now there was a time they had 62 schools in Macon County, 62, and it was a little one or two room school in every community. And they called them—This was a Rosenwald school, a man named Julius Rosenwald, I guess you've heard of him, he built these schools throughout of Alabama. My husband went to one, [indistinct 00:34:00], in Wilcox County, and I went to Chehaw Elementary. It was a two room school. It went through one through six, three grades, and one through three was in the same room, four through six was in the same room. And two teachers, one teacher taught one through three, the other one taught four through six. | 33:38 |
Ann S. Pointer | And we only went to school—We could not go to school until October. It would have to be after Columbus Day. And you know why, because Mr. Charlie Cotton had to be picked and gathered before the Black children went to school. And we started school in October, the middle of October. Well, we were the janitors, the maid—The first two weeks of school we had to clean the school, clean around the school, and get the school in shape. So we really didn't start our classes up until November. So we went to school November, December, January, February, March, April, and the 1st of May school closed. That's all of the schooling that we got. | 34:20 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my mother said they only went three or four months, three months. I started school in 1934. And see, I was the youngest in my family. I had four brothers and one sister, and they were all older than me. But see, they started school back then, but they went less months than I did. But I started in '34. Well, from October through April, and the 1st of May, school was closed where you could get in the field. | 35:05 |
Paul Ortiz | What kind of relationship did your parents have with Varner when it came time to settle up? | 35:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well, it was a kind of poor relationship, because my father was kind of promiscuous. If he had been—Well, I'll put it this way. He married young. He was a child of slaves. He did not have an adequate education. He was not an illiterate man. He could read and write. But they didn't get out of going further than the fifth or sixth grade. My father didn't. And he began to get with the crowds and Varner gave him an opportunity to buy this whole place. But at the time, he was having such a ball, he didn't do it. You see what I mean? And so after that, Varner became indifferent and he wouldn't fix his houses. | 35:48 |
Ann S. Pointer | And we had a house, the original one of his, this house here was built in 1940, that house next door. But the house we were living in, Varner's house, only had two rooms, one room and a kitchen. But they were big rooms and you did everything you want to do in those two rooms. And mama had six children, and her and Papa made eight. You see what I'm saying? Like these panel walls in here, there was no walls in this house. It was just the boards on the outside. You see what I'm talking about? And I wished I could show you the house. The house is still over there, but the people that lived in there, they sealed it, but it's still there. It's right across in the woods back there. It's not far. It's a hand throw. | 36:43 |
Ann S. Pointer | But there was no ceiling. You could look up and see the tin because it was just the joists and the tin through there. And when it rained, it rained and then it leaked out of those. You understand me? The chimneys, it was a stacked chimney, whereas a fireplace was in both rooms. A fireplace was in this room and a fireplace in that room. And you had a flue, where you could put your stove flue through that chimney. And then you had a fireplace in this kitchen also. And the way mama had her house fixed, when I can remember, when I got big enough to know what a house was, in the big bedroom, it was a great big room, she had a bed here and a bed there, and a small bed here. And she had a dresser and a table and chairs, a rocking chair. I can remember a rocking chair she had in that room. | 37:34 |
Ann S. Pointer | In the kitchen, she had one or two beds in the kitchen over against the wall. And over in one section, this kitchen was her kitchen, where she had a stove, her table and safe. It was a safe, they called it a safe, but she kept her dishes in there. And down in the bottom was some of her groceries. And then on the other part of the kitchen, just one part of the kitchen was over for use, for kitchen use, and she had barrels, wooden barrels, where she kept a flour. They bought flour about a 100 pounds and meal, a corn meal. And she had big barrels with tops on them where she kept this cornmeal. We didn't have a refrigerator or nothing like that. No refrigerator or anything. We didn't have a well in the yard. We had to go to a spring for water. He would not dig a well. Varner wouldn't—He did not make it pleasant for his tenant. | 38:38 |
Ann S. Pointer | And you lived in that house. And mama would take cardboard and put up where the wind was blowing in, because when you laying in the bed like this, in the wintertime, the air would be blowing up the sheets like that on the bed and they would chink the cracks with rags. And in the floor, the boards were this wide like that, the floor was made out of, and was cracks in between them that wide, cracks in the boards. Whereas you can just see out those under the house, and mama stop up them cracks the best she could with what she had. And to keep, well, anything who wanted could come in there, any small animal, a possum or anything else. But mama would always chink up the cracks and try to bolt up the doors. | 39:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | But that house, and just like I'm saying, just like in the wintertime, she would take the ironing board and put it down to the foot of the bed and took the covers down to keep the wind from blowing the covers up to keep you cold in the bed. You know what I'm saying? And the ironing board didn't have no legs on it, they just had a flat board, and if you wanted to iron, you laid the board across chairs and iron on it, because they didn't have a bolt ironing board. There was a board that was made, and she just wrap it and make a ironing board. Because my mother did laundry for a living and she wrapped those boards with sheets and things to make a softer iron on like that. | 40:47 |
Ann S. Pointer | And then she had them wrapped and she'd put them down inside the bed, put it down in there like that, to keep the covers from blowing up. The air was blowing just that strong in there. And then people would get, the ones who didn't have quilts would get coats and everything put on the bed to try to keep warm. And they made a fire—And you didn't have glass windows, you had shutters to the window. And in the wintertime, you couldn't open the window. And you'd be sitting to the fire to a open fireplace like this and they'd have the door wide open, where you could see, because it would be dark. And that's funny now, but my children, I tell my children that, they say, "We packed to the side." I say, "Yeah." | 41:33 |
Ann S. Pointer | And you'd have to sit up—Everybody would be sitting—The fireplace here, and you sit as close as you could, and your legs in front would be calico from being burnt, from sitting too close that fire. And couldn't nobody laugh at your legs because theirs was burnt up too. And it would soon come off, they would take [indistinct 00:42:42] and rub legs and get it off. It would come off. But that's the way you had to live. And taking a bath, there was not much privacy. And in the summertime my brother would bathe in the barn. They had a barn back there, and mama would heat water in a wash pot. My mother was very strict about baths. She was very— | 42:21 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now my mother went to school on campus. They had a school called Children House. And when she finished the schools out in the rural, her mother, she was the only daughter—My grandmother had six boys, one girl, which was my mother. Well, she had a sister that lived close to the campus, and she put my mother over there with my sister. They called her putting them on the ground. When they get to the seventh grade, they were considered on the ground. But my mother went to Children's House. And she was a very picky person. And I say Mama was a Scorpio by nature. She was born 11th of November and she criticized kind of hard, but bathing and cleanliness, she was outrageous. | 43:07 |
Ann S. Pointer | And she'd boiled water in a wash pot. And them boys would get in a tin tub in the barn and bathe, and then she would shut off a room for my sister and I had to bathe in like that. And her cosmetics were—When she'd go downtown—And my mother, bless her heart, she left me in '85, but she was not only my mother, she was my pal. She would go downtown. She was a very proud woman and she was small in stature and a nice figure and everything. Even after having those children, she had a beautiful figure. But she would always go dress up and go downtown and she'd buy a bottle of Blue Seal Vaseline, a big jar of Blue Seal Vaseline, Octagon soap. Do you know what Octagon soap is? It's like a lye soap. It's made out of Red Devil Lye. | 43:53 |
Ann S. Pointer | And they sell it now in the store. And I use it extensively myself, because if you had a rash or insect bites or anything on you, she would lather you with that Octagon soap real good. And it would really take care of insect bites or any rash or anything you had. And chiggers and all that. You'd go through the woods and get chiggers on you. And she would buy—This was her cosmetics. Nowadays, people got a dresser full of everything. She'd buy that Octagon soap. That Octagon soap, she washed the clothes with it, she washed her dishes with it, you bathe with it. And she bought that, a Blue Seal Vaseline, and one can of Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder. That was her cosmetics. | 44:51 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now it lasted indefinitely. Now that soap, was getting that soap often, because it wasn't but a nickel. And if you got a shampoo, that Octagon soap was your shampoo. And after she get through with your bath and your hair, she'd oil out hair with that Blue Seal Vaseline. And every morning when she get through combing hair and one thing or another, she'd take that Vaseline and just like you see it, slapping in her hand like that, rub some on your face to keep your face from me and ashy. "You go," slapping the boy. She'd brush everybody's hair back this way and that way. They're gone. Your legs, she put the oil on your legs, keep your legs from me and ashy. | 45:38 |
Ann S. Pointer | And the boys, she would take baking soda, mix it with the talcum powder and make a deodorant to go under their arms. I didn't know what she was doing at the time, but she did. That baking soda and talcum powder, she'd mix together for a deodorant. And I was a little girl, she would just put something on me. And I known times that she did this, God rest her soul, papa was taking us downtown and I didn't have a— | 46:25 |
Ann S. Pointer | This was in the '30s, and I didn't have a dress, and mama had to go into her trunk and get a sheet she could sew and cut a white sheet and make me a little sundress. And when she made it, she washed it out and made starch out of flour, plain flour, boiled it on the stove, and ironed me a dress. Made a little dress for me and then made me some panties out of the same material. Went to town a barefooted yard dog. I was a little girl, but I enjoyed it. And that's what she did. | 0:04 |
Ann S. Pointer | And she would sit up and make her boys clothes. We didn't have clothes to wear, really and truly, but she had brothers that was living in New York. When they built a Veteran's Hospital here in '23, she said that Prince, Peace and Danner did the cement work over there. And my uncle got a job with Prince, Peace and Danner and he went away from here with them to Brooklyn, New York. And he worked for Prince, Peace and Danner from 1923 until 1967. And he'd been with them that long and he died up there. But when they were there, she had two brothers that lived there. | 0:39 |
Ann S. Pointer | They had never seen me and my brother, because they were away from here before we were born, but they know mama had us. And they'd go around and get used clothing by the trunk-full. I've got one of the trunks up under the house right there. And they would get clothes of all description and send them here and mama would renovate those clothes. And my mother was so scornful, she would take the armpits of those clothes and cut the armpits out, I realize now why she did it, and make them over. | 1:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | And coats. That's the only coat that I had until 1940, was the coats that came from up there, because there was no way for them to buy nothing. Wasn't no money. They were making 50 cents a day if they worked for wage hand. You worked as a wage hand, and that mean that you worked your little farm and when you caught up with yours, somebody would hire you who had the money to work for 50 cents. And now you don't think you worked eight hours. You went out there at six o'clock in the morning and you worked until you couldn't see in the evening for that 50 cents; picking cotton, chopping cotton, pulling corn, pulling fodder or whatever they had for you to do. And you worked as a wage hand for 40 and 50 cents a day, and you know just what kind of living that was. | 1:58 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my mother would iron white shirts for those doctors at the Veteran's Hospital, and I have seen her iron 35 white shirts in one day. And you couldn't slub over them. They had to be ironed. And they were only paying her five and 10 cents a shirt, but any kind of money beat no money at all. And that's what was going on. And everybody was bootlegging, just about who could. | 2:47 |
Paul Ortiz | To make money. | 3:25 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yes. And it's sad. Now, you have other questions to ask me. I guess I'll cut off here and let you ask me some. | 3:26 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my father, he was tired of the farm, because what he made, Varner got that. You know what I'm talking about? He had that for rent, for staying in that house, that house that you could see outdoors there. You could take a cat and line him up and throw him; anywhere you'd throw them, he'd land outside. Now that's the kind of houses it was. You understand me? And that meant holes everywhere. But Varner wanted his pay, and he got that or you had to get out. | 3:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | And so my father, a man came in here from Chicago and told him about what kind of money he could make being a bootlegger, selling a leg of whiskey. So papa didn't have any money to buy any whiskey with. That man, he was a big shot, he'd go off and buy 10, 20 gallons of liquor and bring it to him to sell. And papa liked to drink liquor, you see? So he drank it too and sold it and folks would be coming and going. When you're bootlegging, folks come anytime of night, anytime of day. You get up and sell them whiskey. And so papa kept on selling whiskey for that man until he got caught selling it. VPO. And he got caught and he went to jail and he went to prison in 1934. | 4:05 |
Ann S. Pointer | He was in prison when my grandfather died, and mama had to go to Governor Bibb Graves in Montgomery to get permission for him to come to his father's funeral. He only had 90 days, but they were so strict. And she had to go to make an appointment to see Governor Bibb Graves for him to come to the funeral. And so they let him rode the train up here to the funeral. He was just in Montgomery. And he died the first day of June of 1934. And papa came to the funeral and he went back. And nobody came with him. He just came by himself. And when he went back down there, he only stayed there a couple of weeks and then they let him come on back home. | 5:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | But that was a horrible situation for children, especially me, being a very small child, and I didn't understand what prison was. But I loved papa so dearly and it hurt me so bad and I couldn't say nothing to anybody, because nobody would never understand me. I couldn't have made people understand how I felt about this for nothing. But I had to think about it, and other children ridiculed us because of that. You know children, how mean they are. "Your daddy's in prison, in jail." And they would say ugly things to us. I didn't say nothing. I just looked real sad. And I never told mama. | 5:52 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my mother was a strong person too. I couldn't have stood what she stood. I don't believe I could've stood it. I would've left. And her brothers tried to get her to come north and bring us out of this hectic situation, but mama didn't want to go. She said, "I couldn't control my children in the north." Mama wanted us to go to school, she wanted us to be good, and she thought the North would swallow us up. Maybe it would have. I can't tell. But I wanted to go anywhere here. | 6:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | But I had a nervous breakdown at school. I had a slight heart attack. The teacher didn't know it either, because I dared not say nothing. We didn't talk about nothing. I couldn't hear, I couldn't talk, but I could see. But I was just sitting, just staring. And when I sat there so long, when my hearing came back to me, it looked like the children were way off. I could hear them talking, but it just looked like they—And finally, when I came back, I was sore. I don't know how I felt. I had anxiety and I couldn't tell nobody and I never said a word. And I made it through it somehow. I don't know. | 7:20 |
Ann S. Pointer | But I'm going to tell you, Paul, if you had been a child and you'd get up in the morning time and there is no food in the house, no kind of food nowhere. I mean nothing. Just the cupboard that's bare. And you've got to get up and go on to school and act just like nothing's happened, you cannot say a word or let anybody know that you haven't had anything to eat and didn't know where you're going to ever get anything else from, that is a horrible experience for a small child. A child of seven, eight years old and you don't have food to give them and don't own nothing. That child carries a heavy burden. And my mother was proud. We could not tell people that we didn't have anything. You had to act like you didn't want anything. You'd just go on. You just could not say nothing. | 8:07 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I told my daughter, I'm 66 years old, but I've lived 100 years, because when you have trouble wall to wall and your domestic life is so horrible, you live 10 years into one. And as soon as my brothers got big enough, they would go to the VA and they could play ball. But I tell you what, even though we were poor as church mice, God still blessed us with a brain. Other children had fine clothes, they had fine homes, they had fathers and mothers who had money, but they were dumb as the devil. But God blessed us all with a good brain. Therefore, the teachers had to take notice, because everybody excelled. You know what I mean? God knows what to do for you. My sister was an excellent mathematician. My brothers, they were all smart. They had gifts, talents. I don't care how poor you are or how bad you look, if you know and nobody else don't know, that's going to make you be out front. Now, that's what kept us out front. | 9:13 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I may not be able to repeat this ever again, but I hope you are taking notice of this. That's the only thing with God that we were able to do, is stay out front at school and at church and everywhere else because of our abilities. All six children had abilities other children couldn't touch. My brothers were great athletes. They were very good in sports. That kept them out front. And smart in books as well. And so the teachers all took a shine, because we didn't have nothing. People used to look down on you when you didn't have nothing, buddy. You were just a nobody. But if you had a brain, you still was out there. That's what kept us out front. | 10:32 |
Ann S. Pointer | And mama, being the type of person she was, she didn't drop her head, even though she didn't have nothing. She worked hard, $4 a week, working in people's houses. Seven days a week, she had to get there and cook breakfast for them, wash all the clothes, iron all the clothes, clean up the house and everything for $4 a week, seven days a week. And you could buy clothing and pay the man a dollar and a quarter a week and that's all he wanted. They had these fast merchants dealing, and mama would go and get clothing for us like that and she could sew and she'd buy fabric, a nickel a yard, and she could make them up real pretty and fix you up nice. You already knew what to do in the church. And mama was just a person—and she could cook. She was an excellent cook, and people would always seek her out to do things, to make a cake. And she could sew and all of that. Well, that enabled her get on and get over. | 11:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | And right now, I'd do many things that I'm not able to do, because I don't like to clam down on saying, "Well, I'm retired, I'm going to draw this check until I die." I never sit down and think that. I keep busy all day long. I teach piano lessons, I make cakes for people, I sew for people. I don't have to do none of that. And everything that people want to do, they're going to come here and get me to do it, because I have always extended myself. I told my children, I said, "Do not depend on no one thing, because one something or other can let you down." | 12:35 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, I started out teaching school. I took a course in practical nursing. I worked as a practical nurse for 11 years. I worked in service. I worked from the cotton field to a White woman's kitchen. I'm not ashamed to tell nobody so long as it was honest living. I have got out since I had my children and picked cotton by the day. I've chopped cotton by the day. I worked in people's houses. I worked in restaurants as a short order cook, and walking from over here to town. | 13:20 |
Ann S. Pointer | So long as I was making an honest dollar and I didn't have to go nowhere and get nothing from nobody on a hook or by crook, that money did me good. I worked at that hospital for $100 a month, $25 a week. But I made it out of there. And you see, wages was low. But I told my mother, and I'm glad I got a chance to tell her before she died. I said, "Mama, I went to many extremes working, here and working there, but I finally made my living and retired off what you gave me." My mother gave me a business course when I was going to high school. I said, "I made my living and retired off what you gave me." And that made her feel proud. | 13:54 |
Ann S. Pointer | And so we had a very, very hard life, but we weren't the only ones. There were people that was worse off than we were. | 14:45 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, this area now is known as Rosenwald Heights. | 14:54 |
Ann S. Pointer | Because of Julius Rosenwald's school. | 14:58 |
Paul Ortiz | And let's say it's about three miles out of Tuskegee. | 15:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | Right. | 15:06 |
Paul Ortiz | What was the neighborhood like? Was there a sense like this was a community when you were growing up? | 15:09 |
Ann S. Pointer | It was a farming community, and most everybody was planting. Cotton was your chief money source. If you didn't have but one acre of cotton, most people had that little cotton, and they did that to buy their winter shoes and clothes for the children. And this place was not grown up like this. You could see over on the road, because everybody—but see, this community, most of the old heads have died out. And all these houses you see and [indistinct 00:15:46] like this, they have moved these people. These folk have come from far and near and rented these houses and they don't care about them. But everybody had their little flower yard, they had their garden, they had their cows, chickens and hogs. Everybody was living good. | 15:14 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well, really and truly, in the '30s it was kind of a rough go. Everybody was having trouble after that depression and the banks closed on the people's little money. My grandmother had a little money in the bank when the bank shut down. They didn't give her nothing but a piece of property over in Tuskegee. I think it was half an acre or something or other. But my grandmother, that was my mother's mother, she raised turkeys and chickens and things and she said, "I don't want to live in town." And so she was able to sell that little piece of property to somebody for $35, and that's all she got. And my other aunt, my father's sister, she started working at the Veteran's Hospital when it first opened, in the laundry, and she had saved up good money and they took hers. The bank shut down, they'd give them [indistinct 00:16:56]. | 16:02 |
Paul Ortiz | Which bank was that? | 16:56 |
Ann S. Pointer | The bank in Tuskegee. | 16:58 |
Paul Ortiz | The Alabama— | 16:59 |
Ann S. Pointer | I don't know what was the name of it then. It was called the Farmers Exchange or something. But I didn't know anything about banks at all. But they had a little money up there and that's why you couldn't get these people to put a penny in that bank. I don't care. They'd swallow it before they put it in the bank. You hear me? Because of that. And you couldn't tell them. My mother, good lord, she heard on the television about these credit unions, they was closing. The day before she died she told me, she said, "I want you to get every dime of mine. The bank's going to close again." I said, "Mama, that's the federal credit union." "I don't care. I hear it on television every day," she told me. Do you know, I had to go up there and get every dime of that money out the bank just to please her, because she thought they was going to close up on it. | 17:01 |
Ann S. Pointer | And these people, it was a rough call, you hear me? And do you know, my brother often said, "The times we went through would make a hog eat an onion, make a monkey suck a lemon." And God knows, that was the truth. And people were eating what they could get. This time of year, like July and August, they'd get that—you never heard about mud in the water, have you? My father would go and stop over a place and they would get in the water and roll their pants legs up. We'd go down there and stand with bags and they'd just dig the bottom and mud of that hole. And when the water get muddy, the fish come to the top, and more the fish come to the top. You see, I didn't have sense enough at that time, [indistinct 00:18:29], and then we'd put the only thing we said. And then they put the Kroger bags down and scoop them fish up like that. [indistinct 00:18:33] and everything else would be in there. Then they'd take the bags and throw them out, and the [indistinct 00:18:38] are going to run and you'd get your fish. | 17:42 |
Ann S. Pointer | And they'd muddy the water every year like that and get their fish. Everybody would come and get them a big bucket of fish. All kinds. But my mother never upheld that. She said, "Don't come near the house with them." We'd have to cook them outdoors because she didn't allow them to bring just anything in her house. And my father would hunt. He was a great sportsman on hunting. They killed rabbits, squirrels, possums, birds; anything they could find in the woods to kill, small animals. And they cooked it and we ate it. That's why I don't like wild game right now, because I said, "I've had too much rabbit, squirrels, possums and everything that crept or crawled." Like a bird or anything, my father killed it and brought it there and mama cooked it. | 18:40 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he had plenty of chickens, and he'd bleed in these fighting roosters. You ever heard of a fighting rooster, them cocks? He raised those game roosters and things and people would come there for that and all that kind of stuff. And they would kill them chickens. They had plenty of eggs and chickens and things like that around there, but I didn't even eat chicken until I got grown. I didn't like chicken. And eggs. I don't eat eggs today. They had too many eggs and things around there. I don't know. | 19:31 |
Ann S. Pointer | But I see a lot of pictures on TV right now. I saw a picture and it reminded me so much of the '30s. But when World War II came along, people was loving in the community. All in the '30s, through all of this trouble from wall to wall, everybody had, if you had sickness, it was everybody's sickness. And they could ring that church bell down here, down there where Dan Beezer lived. It was a bell in that church and they had a sexton, and I could listen, because there wasn't no cars and things running like they are now. | 20:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | I could listen and hear that bell ring and tell you what was the matter. They had a certain way they'd ring it. And my grandmother and I were right across up here in a cotton field one day and she heard the bell. She said, "It's something the matter. Somebody's mighty sick down there at [indistinct 00:20:58]. And she had bags and buckets up there on a tree. She'd carry water and this and that and the other, and she would dip snuff and she'd put that in a bucket. She said, "Baby, go up there." I was just up there with her. "And get my bucket. I'm going to go to the house. Let's go and see the bell ring." And she said, "Put a fire on the stove and heat some water where we can bathe off to go down there." | 20:40 |
Ann S. Pointer | And so before we could get to the house, they'd get somebody and run them through and tell the news. Wasn't no telephone or anything. A guy named Sam Talley came across there and said Mr. Beezer's mother had died. "She stuck a nail under her foot and it gave her lockjaw. And he said, "Ms. Clara, Ms. Beezer just died a while ago. She stuck a nail on her foot." And she said, "Well, I heard the bell." Well, she come right on and we went on down there. And if you got sick, they'd come and sit at your house all night long and help you, wait on you and everything. All of that was loving. You'd walk miles, and I would be so sleepy, and mama would stay up with those people and help take a fan and fan them like that. They'd be so sick. And we'd sit down on the floor and she'd spend the night with them and leave. And everybody did like that. | 21:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | But when World War II came, the people became indifferent. They began to drift apart. And you know what did it? They were handling a little more money. When they didn't have nothing, it was a lot of love existing. But when they began to get a little more money and they went up a little bit on the wages and they were building these airports and places like that and they were making the mend that was making 50 and 75 cents, went up to $4 and $5 a day, that gave them X number of dollars that they could float about with, and the people began to become indifferent and get apart. They stopped going to church as much and they started that waywardness. | 22:14 |
Ann S. Pointer | I noticed a great change as a child, what they began to do. They could get clothes, they had food and something they weren't used to. But they had had a hard time, because I tell you, Paul, I had to walk to school, over to the university, every day and back, no matter if it was storming. We could not ride the buses. Although we were paying taxes, but we couldn't ride those buses. Nothing rode the buses but the Whites, and they would ride along road and throw the trash, throw rocks and everything at us on the road and whoop and holler, "Nigger, nigger, nigger," all up and down the road. We wasn't allowed to say one word to them and not throw back at them or nothing. Because if you threw back at them, then you was going to jail. | 23:00 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, that's the only bitter spot in my heart, and I shouldn't have it, but you can't keep from thinking. We were paying tax. They had those tokens. Those tokens had a hole in them. You couldn't spend no money unless you had a token to go with it. We had to use them too, but yet we could not ride those buses. We had our schools, but we didn't have nothing at our school. They'd give the teachers some chalk and a couple of erasers for the board, but no kind of supplies did we have. Not even heat. If your father didn't bring two loads of wood to that school, then they'd make you go to the woods and gather wood. And you're not going to sit by the other children's fire, the other children in school. "All who ain't brought your wood, go to the woods." We had go out there and walk up in the water, trying to find wood to help heat the school. Water? We had to tote the water. | 23:51 |
Ann S. Pointer | But still now, it was a man that was my district director. He and I were the same age. We finished school the same year. And one day, we almost got into it. It was the devil in me made me feel like that. See, I knew him and he knew me. He knew my family and I knew his. But he was a White man, I was a Black woman. Okay. He was a prejudiced type, and I knew that. My sister used to work as a maid in his home. It was fine as long as that was going on, but I was an administrative assistant when he got the job he had. So he didn't want that to happen, even though this was now, but he didn't want me to have that position. | 24:49 |
Ann S. Pointer | So he started to nitpicking under the cover. But I'm wise to everything, street wise. When you grow up in the ghetto, you are street wise. You understand me? Every time he came there to make his visits, he had several counties he went around periodically to check, I was the only Black working in that office. I was the first and only Black hired there. He would go and go into my files, "Ann, you need to make sure you sign all these documents," and blah blah. And a lot of time I would initial the documents. You have stacks and stack. "You need to sign your name to blah," and all they were going to be, they would be bedded down right there in the office. | 25:59 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he kept picking and going one day until I got hell in me. And I sat there when he was talking about crossing T's and dotting I's and signing my name, what I needed to do about that. That's all he could find. I just said to him, I said, "You know one thing?" He said, "What?" I said, "It's very fortunate I know how to write and read my name." "Don't start that." I said, "Did you hear me, what I said?" And he got his attache case and left there, because I was fixing to—I had to cuss him out several times, because when you think, here he lives right across the street from the school he goes to. He has a hot lunch every day. If it rains a drop, Ms. Martha is going to take him in the car and take him to school. Here I am walking and struggling. | 26:46 |
Ann S. Pointer | Even though he had it made, here I am walking five miles to school, but I finished on time just like he did. And then he's going to get up and pour water on a drowning man. I'm already mad. Can you see where I'm coming from? And it wouldn't have took nothing for me to have went to hand to hand battle, you know what I mean? Because I'm already tense. You're going to come up here and think I should—why have I got to? I know just what you know, but I got mine the hard way. I done went through hell. And then you're going to come up here and start picking with me? It won't do. That's what caused all this mess. You know what I'm talking about? | 27:35 |
Ann S. Pointer | But I'm above that, because God, He has done great things for me, and He's in my life. And all of the things that has been done, I have forgiven it and I have let it go. There have been many things that has happened and I don't even speak about it because God has given me the power to forgive the people, and He has shown me in many ways how He has taken care of me, how He took care of me and my children. And why should I go back and wallow my head into the mud when the Lord has picked me up out of it, you see? So I'm not bitter. | 28:19 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my daughter tells me all the time. She says, "Mama, everybody think that we were raised up north," because I never told them. I said, "Here come a man. I'm going to let them find out what it is for themselves. I never sit down and talk to my children about color or anything." I said, "Now they're going to have to go away from me one day," and sure enough, my daughter went to Harvard University. She had a whole White setting, you understand me? And my son was at George Peabody. That used to be the Harvard of the South and they didn't allow a Black person to set foot in there, but this little brain put them there. My daughter was invited to Harvard. They sent me $5800 for her to come up there and pay her way. And when she got there, she didn't have any hard time dealing with it, because I had not preached race hate. I had not told them about the oppression or how bitter I had been as a child. I felt like I wasn't nothing. | 28:59 |
Ann S. Pointer | And you know one thing? You walked the street like this, we had a Sheriff here. And it tickles me now, we were laughing about it the other day. You were coming down the street like this and you were meeting a White person coming this way. I don't care if you could be on the sidewalk and he'd be on there, but if he and his wife were walking together, you going to have to step down in the gutter and let them pass. You walk right jam up to him and he'd go tell the Sheriff and you'd go to jail. Now that happened. This was real. It ain't been long ago. | 30:04 |
Ann S. Pointer | And just like on a Monday morning like this, Monday morning you'd get up and go to town, these men vote. Some of the men might go to town for something. And they might be on the street and they meet somebody, "Hey, how you doing?" I'd be laughing and [indistinct 00:30:54]." And the Sheriff's sitting there around, "What are you doing up here, whooping and hollering on the street like this. Where are you supposed to be?" "I had to come here and see about so-and-so." "Well, you better see about it and hurry and get the hell away from here." I'm telling you. And a lot of people didn't even go to Tuskegee. They were scared to cook there. | 30:35 |
Paul Ortiz | Speaking of Tuskegee, during your childhood years, did the Institute have an influence on areas out here? | 31:14 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yes. Yes. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. The Institute had a great influence over the community. It was a standard. And everybody, they had a commencement. When they have commencement, every child went to commencement to see the graduates, and they'd have stands and all of that. And they'd say, "You see them children marching? I want you to march like them." And they sent out people in the community. They sent students to teach them how to can, how to keep house and their surroundings and all. | 31:26 |
Ann S. Pointer | The Institute, they had a Jesup wagon going through it one time, and they'd go around in the community. And if they see a house in need of painting, if they didn't have the paint, they'd bring lime and whitewash that house inside. To bring cleanliness, if there was this home where there was sickness, they went there and threw out the old mattress and then put in new ones and all that. They really was a guiding light to this community, and surrounding communities as well. The people who took heed. Now, there are some people you can't help, I don't care what you do. But the ones who wanted to, they learned. | 32:09 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now they're saying now, all the children are not learning nothing at Tuskegee University. A lady told me that. She had a child up there. I said, "Hold on just a minute. They don't teach?" I said, "They're teaching the same thing they've been teaching all the time. Your child is going have to get into it and learn it themselves. They can't take it and pour it in his head. He's going to have to open up and absorb it. Don't tell me nothing about the school's not teaching anything. They're teaching it, your child is just not learning it. They ain't going there to learn nothing. You can't learn anything, cutting a buck over here and cutting a buck over there." | 32:46 |
Ann S. Pointer | I said, "I sent three children to school right here in Macon County. I can't tell you nothing about Tom Jones' children. I can only tell you about mine. They were raised right here in a dangerous time in the '60s when this dope and all these hippies and everything was around here. But honey babe, I was right here. I didn't think too much of them to chastise them. I didn't think too much of them to make them work and know that they had to share this home." I said, "Now you have duties. You can't come here and stay. You've got to help keep this place clean, the outside and the in, and keep your things up." And right today, they came up with that atmosphere. They went to school. | 33:23 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I said, "I'm going to tell you another thing. I take a lot of chances. I work hard, and everything I'm doing is for you three, because I don't need anything as far as me." And when I'd get my check, I would lay it on that dining room table. I said, "Okay, you know what we owe," because I was divorced. In '66 was when their father and I were divorced. And so I was a one-parent family. I said, "This is my check." I said, "You know what we owe." They would sit down at that table, the one that's in business administration, and he would clock out everything. He said, "We've got X number of dollars left to go into the kitty fund after everything is paid." They couldn't come back to me and ask me for anything because they knew where that check was going. You see what I'm talking about? | 34:06 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I let them know everything was happening with the money, so they couldn't come say, "Mama, I want so-and-so. I want so-and-so." They didn't ask me for anything because they knew where the money was going. If they needed something said, I'd say, "Next week we're going to have X number of dollars left, and we're going need so-and-so." So I said, "Remember, come August, everybody got to have clothes for school, and they got to have this, have that." They said, "Okay." I said, "So cut this off right here where we have it over there." They did that. A lot of people, "Your children don't worry for nothing." I said, "They can't, because they've got the money. They know what's happening with it. They're paying the bills." And so it's a good way to do, to let them know just where you're coming from, and they will help you to take care of things. And that's the way my three came up. They were right behind one another. | 34:58 |
Ann S. Pointer | I had three children in college at the same time. Three out of my poor salary. But my daughter was the valedictorian of her high school class. And it doesn't mean that they'd send her. They'd sent any valedictorian with a four point average, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing from Tuskegee sent her to college; books, tuition, everything free if you have a four point average when you finish high school. And she had it. They sent her to Tuskegee. She had a 3.8 when she graduated from Tuskegee, and Harvard University paid her to come to Harvard for a Master's. So the Lord took care of her. You see what I'm talking about? I didn't have to pay for her to go to school. | 35:47 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my brother just died, God rest his soul, last month. He was living in Detroit, he was in business. He said, "I saved some money to send Yvonne to college to help you out. But she was so smart, she sent herself, and I'm going to buy her a car." He bought her a brand new Impala convertible Chevrolet when she finished high school. So she's able to have her own car and drive herself to school. And she had her car when she got married. She had her own car. | 36:31 |
Ann S. Pointer | So those things, honey, it's a miracle, but God is still in the miracle business, and I want you to know that. And that's what I'm living on now today, is only God's promise. And all those hard times, Paul, that I went through with not only me, so many more—a lady and I were talking yesterday at the beauty shop. We went to high school together. She was walking from one way and I was walking from another and she said, "Honey, didn't we brave that storm?" I said, "Tell me about it, honey." We laughed about it now. | 36:57 |
Ann S. Pointer | I said, "Think about it. You've been a beautician 44 years, making good money." She said, "Honey, tell me about it." I said, "Now you've got a car." I said, "You've got cars all around your house. I have too." I said, "I used to walk everywhere I went." And we had a big laugh about it yesterday, because we looked back, and she was talking about them bad houses. And when it gets to raining, honey, when it was raining this week, I thought about it. By the time you hear the first drop hit, you're running, getting tubs, buckets, anything you can find to catch some of the water coming in. And when you're talking about coming in the house out the rain, you'd have to get out and go somewhere else after the rain. And right now it's real funny. | 37:31 |
Ann S. Pointer | It's really something, I tell you the truth. I tell my children, I say, "Y'all don't know, I'm going to tell you." But you can't appreciate the sunshine if you've never been in the rain. And every time I go in the house, if I go in the bathroom, I say, "Lord, I thank you," because there are many times I've had to go I don't where to the bathroom. Every time I turn on my water in there, I had to tote my water from on that clump down there. When I light my heaters, I said, "Thank you Jesus," because I had to cut wood and saw down a tree like a man. You understand me? And cut up wood, and they had a maul. You don't know what a maul is, do you? You know what a maul is? When you put that down in there and hit on it to bust that wood. All that. And in the evening time, you'd get home from school, talk about watching TV. You'd watch that swamp down there, getting wood and water, toting water to fill up the buckets and the things for bathing and washing clothes. Toting it way down yonder, up the hill. | 38:15 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I can say thank you Jesus for everything. When I get in that car, I say, "Thank you, Jesus," because I used to have to walk it to town. Now I can drive, ride. It's a rough call. | 39:26 |
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Poynter, I was last week looking through the lynching record at the university, when they used to keep that record of recorded lynchings. And there was a story about a lynching that took place in an adjacent county, and I wish I could remember the exact year. Somewhere around 1941. But they said that the body floated right down, it must've been the Tallapoosa River, and it washed up by the Institute. Do you remember that incident, or other kinds— | 39:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | It was so many things happened back then, when these White people would get mad with somebody on their farm and kill them and throw them in the creek. And with the raining, back here last Monday, this month, Poynter was sitting out there on the porch and I said, "Poynter, somebody must be in the creek," because God knows from heaven, when it used to rain like that, it would rain until it'd wash them out. And they done throwed them in the creek and they killed them. | 40:23 |
Ann S. Pointer | I know one incident, it may not be the same one, but I know they killed a man and threw him in Lion Creek down there and the water washed him up. They said the Sheriff killed him. I ain't never found out why, but it was so many things happened around here. It isn't a lynching, it's just a killing. Now Olther Gunn, I knew him. Walter Gunn, that was his name. He was messing with some woman, they say. I don't know, because I was a girl. But that was in the '40s. And they had a deputy here named Faucet. And they said Faucet was messing with the same woman or something, but Walter Gunn was caught at this woman's house or something. And he got in a car and ran that man to his house, and he got after her and ran around the house. And Faucet ran the roadside house and blowed his brains, right in his own yard. Ain't nothing been done about it [indistinct 00:41:45] that chair. I often think about it. Faucet killed him. | 40:47 |
Ann S. Pointer | And Willie Kirby killed Old Man Lockett for nothing. Now that was a case that brought the NAACP in, and his daughter went to school with me. But Old Man Lockett had some sons that went to World War II, and he was farming up there, sharecropping with the Kirbys, and they came after them boys. They had been there in the army and Kirby and them started picking with those boys and came there and one of those boys cussed them out. And old Mr. Lockett was trying to get them straightened out there somehow, and Willie Kirby up and bam, shot Mr. Lockett down and went to town and told the people that one of the boys killed Old Man Lockett. And they kept Lockett out 30 days. He stayed in [indistinct 00:42:35] 30 days until they came here with an investigation. Now, you know how he was reprimanded? They said that he couldn't ever be a deputy anymore. That's a pat on the wrist, and Old Man Lockett was dead. | 41:50 |
Ann S. Pointer | But let me tell you what God did for him. Now I'm telling you something. I know he had a wife named Helen. After he killed Old Man Lockett, every house he moved in, he left there and moved to [indistinct 00:43:04], and his wife Helen said, before he was moving the furniture in, he was in there, putting up [indistinct 00:43:09]. "Helen, we've got to move away from here. Old Man Lockett's in here." She said, "Oh, Willie, you know Lockett ain't here. You know Lockett is dead." "No, we've got to leave." He moved away from there, he moved somewhere else. By the time he get there, "We got to leave here. Lockett is in here." Went to Montgomery, and when he got to Montgomery, Helen slipped off and left him. He was moving her just like that, every which way. And she slipped off and left him, and I don't know where she went, but she wasn't going to stand there. And he came back to [indistinct 00:43:37] just about crazy, drinking whiskey right and left. | 42:50 |
Ann S. Pointer | He had a brother named Wiley Kirby. Wiley Kirby used to come in my office all the time. He was a very quiet old man. And Willie, his own brother, right up at there at the service station, he got into it with his brother and whipped out a knife and was going to cut his brother up there, so his brother, bam, shot him down up there and killed him, same way he killed Lockett. Now, that was back in the '70s, I think. Shot him dead. Nobody ain't said nothing. But you know, this little old gray matter was thinking, way back then when he killed Lockett, and everybody else that know about it. | 43:40 |
Paul Ortiz | What was Mr. Lockett's first name? | 44:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | Let me see. His wife was named Mary Leila. I don't know what Lockett's name was. Lord, I don't want to give you the wrong name. What was Old Man Lockett's name? I don't know. But it was Lockett, L-O-C-K-E-T-T, because he had a daughter named Margaret Lockett and his wife was named Mary Leila Lockett. But I can't think, I don't know whether his name was John Lockett. I don't want to put that down there because I can't remember that man's name. But I know him as Mr. Lockett. | 44:25 |
Ann S. Pointer | And do you know, just like you and I are sitting here right now, there was a time we had a Sheriff, he'd come there and knock on that door. I might say, "Who is it?" "The law." Well, you'd go to the door to see and he'd just bust on past you and come on in there and get here and turn your house up from here to hell. You understand me? No search warrant or nothing. Just anything he felt like doing, he'd just walk in on you and tear your house up. And don't tell you why or how. | 44:52 |
Ann S. Pointer | And then you could be sitting down in there, like one day, me and mama was up there in the house. I was going to high school. I think I might've been ninth or 10th grade. But another girl was there with me, and I had a record player and I was playing some records. And we heard the car drive up out there. I said, "I wonder who's there?" Well, we didn't even stop to see, and when he walked in, he didn't knock. He just opened the door and come in. Mama was in the next room, ironing clothes. | 45:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he walked in and we looked up, he said, "Hello," like that. I didn't say nothing, because I said, "Wanda, what's the matter here? The High Sheriff." And, "Where's your mama?" I said, "She's in there." He walked on back in there with mama. "Hey, Carrie." Mama said, "Hey Mr. Evans, what's the matter?" "Nothing. I just come by here, see how y'all—ain't nobody bothering y'all out here?" He said. Mama said, "No, nobody not bothering me." "All right. Anybody bother you, let us know. Whose children are these?" She said, "That's my daughter and the other girl is just a friend," and he just got up and went on out. But it would embarrass me for the Sheriff to come in my house. He'd just walk in without knocking. | 45:59 |
Paul Ortiz | Was that Sheriff Evans? | 46:42 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yeah, Paddy Evans, that was him— | 46:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah, you were telling me about Sheriff Evans, I've heard of. | 0:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yeah, Pat Evans. He was the miller's son. Everybody that's old enough knew him, because honey, he had some deputies really beat on these people and they was doing all kinds. But I didn't even go to Tuskegee. Maybe once or twice a year, I went up there. One thing about it, before school I would go up there to try on shoes, maybe at Easter time to go up there to get something and perhaps maybe before the 4th of July. But otherwise, I didn't set a foot in Tuskegee. Children, you just didn't go. Mama then went, but I didn't want to go. And children didn't go to town very much on the street up there because they did so much down there, like at Christmastime, I have—Down time, those boys, those White boys, they have old people going along the street and they'd take a firecracker and throw it right under them and let it shoot. They'd scare the steam out of them. All kind of mess like that, one thing or another. | 0:09 |
Ann S. Pointer | But all these schools now, they pretend they got four or five schools around here, they can't operate now. They had 62 that was operating them. I don't regret going to that Till Elementary, because I got a good foundation there. My children went there. I sent them there. | 1:17 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, so Mrs. Beasley would've taught there? | 1:32 |
Ann S. Pointer | Beasley's wife taught her. | 1:36 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 1:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | That's right. And she directed my daughter's wedding. She has Alzheimer's now, but she was a fine person. And Mrs. E.P. Adam was the principal when I was going down there and Ms. Ellie Jones was the principal. But my children went there and they got a very good footing. They had a toss up about that school when it burned, but I learned that it was arson. Somebody set it on fire on purpose. | 1:38 |
Paul Ortiz | I was going to ask that. | 2:11 |
Ann S. Pointer | See, they wanted to consolidate school. We had our feet on the ground, the whole Till Elementary for the community for little children where they wouldn't have to get up and catch these buses and things. And so the superintendent had told me that if the school—The only way we'd get a new school, if the school burned down, the storm blew it away or something like that. And when the school burned, I said, "Oh, we're going to get a new school, because Wilson told me the school was going back up." And come and behold, it didn't happen. When we went down to the board of Education to discuss the plan, they had the cards dealt against us, the community. And they said, "You didn't need that little school, the curriculum wasn't no good and the children need to have a better curriculum for learning and all that sort of thing, and they need to be this and need to be that." | 2:11 |
Ann S. Pointer | I didn't say anything when they got through talking. I said, "Now, I want you to go, you got the record here, and see where all your valedictorian." We go to Chiho, remember when we go to the seventh grade, we got to move over to the next school, to the middle school and then go to high school. I said, "Go back through your records and find where your valedictorians came from. You understand me?" Just thought all of them came from Chiho Elementary. You see, I know this. I knew it. They didn't want. I said, "Am I right?" And if they weren't learning anything, they wouldn't have any background, they could not do that. Because every year— | 3:03 |
Paul Ortiz | When did that school burn? | 3:40 |
Ann S. Pointer | Let me see what year it was. It was in '60. Wait, if you give me a minute, I can tell you. My daughter started there in '56. She left in '62, '63, or '64, somewhere like that. I don't know exact year because I'd have to look in there and tell when it burned. But I just can't remember the exact year, but it was somewhere in there. | 3:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, you talked a lot about farming conditions when you were coming up. | 4:17 |
Ann S. Pointer | Mm-hmm. | 4:24 |
Paul Ortiz | It doesn't seem like there are as many Black farmers here that there were in those days. | 4:27 |
Ann S. Pointer | Oh, no. The small farmer has been pushed out. You see, the conglomerates took over the farms, if you know what I mean. Now, I worked for the Department of Agriculture, I retired from there, and we had farms allocated, like my farm out here. I was 18, that was my farm number, and we had them set up on the 156s where we had perhaps 3,600 farmers in this county. Small farmers, 36. Now, that's a ballpark figure, between 36 and 4,000 farmers. | 4:32 |
Paul Ortiz | In 19? | 5:13 |
Ann S. Pointer | When I first started working there in '67, that's how many people was registered there. And most farmers had a few cotton allotments, cotton acreage chute. It was allotted out because my allotment, you know what my allotment was? One acre and four tenths of cotton. That's all I could plant. That was allocated to me there. Other farmers had more, but I used to plant cotton too for a year or two. Cotton and corn back up here, but I cut it out. | 5:14 |
Ann S. Pointer | And they began to drop off. They started giving you set aside payments. If you didn't plant any cotton, you could set it aside and you'd get a little check for it. It wasn't that much. The check would come because of your yield, how your yield was, that's how you would be paid. But these people started getting away from here, going up north, getting better jobs. And it was a lot of guys went to the army, they started cattle farming, they started timber farming and catfish farming and everything else to keep from planting any cotton. So that cotton started to drop off just like that back in the sixties. When I started working there, those farmers started dropping their cotton. | 5:46 |
Ann S. Pointer | And see, you had conglomerate farmers like Ellison and Streetman down in the Hurtsboro area, they had hundreds and hundreds of acres of farm, but they had tenants on that place and they were sharecropping with them and it was Ellison's cotton, but still they were working it and they had little patches here and there and all like that. Not only them, there were other people had the same thing and they didn't actually own the farm. You had very few Black farmers that I knew. Dave Fitzpatrick was a Black farmer, he's dead now. He had cotton, he had land of his own, but he still would rent land. Now, he was a Black farmer. Lucius Pollard, he's dead. He had a big place up here, he's a Black man. He had cotton and cotton farmers on his place, and Kane Gremmit. | 6:33 |
Ann S. Pointer | I just knew the ones who had their own land and was farmers, Black farmers. But most of them had an acre or two of their own. But the most part they were renting land, telling on another man's place. But all of that has dropped now. And I tell you one thing, I can't think of a single Black man in Macon County who's raising any cotton now. | 7:28 |
Paul Ortiz | I haven't seen that. | 7:55 |
Ann S. Pointer | It's nothing. But now the Seagers brothers, they got a gin now there, they got cotton. The Lazenders up here, Social Society Hill, they got cotton. And a guy named Richard—What was that guy's name? Richard Davis, somebody, he lived in Montgomery, he had cotton. I know that he was a professor at Auburn University, but he had a little cotton. | 7:56 |
Ann S. Pointer | And let me see who else got cotton in Macon County. That's the Seagers brothers, the Lazenders, then Tom Ingram, and all of them were White. I can't think of not one Black man that's got no cotton now. Not in Macon County. No. They have sold that cotton allotments. I sold mine, because I knew I don't intend to plant no more cotton ever because it's just too risky. There is not a Black man. I haven't checked the office lately. Usually those girls tell me what's going on, but I didn't need to ask them about those Black farmers because I know they ain't planting no cotton. They got cows and timber land and little soybeans or something like that. They had a few. The probate judge, F.R. Vindrel, he had been playing soybeans. I don't know whether he's planting it now, I haven't talked with him about it lately. | 8:18 |
Ann S. Pointer | But there are no Black cotton farmers around here that I know of. Not in Macon County. And I don't believe Montgomery County got none either, because most of the Black men who's planting cotton are dead, and these young men are not going to do it. Did you hear me? They don't fool with it riding or walking. But these people left here, the ones who was farming and got into it, these people up there by North or Southern, with all this mess they would slip off by night and leave here. And when they leave they would sneak and send their family their money. And they went on to Cleveland, Chicago, New York, Florida, Detroit, Michigan, and then never did come back this way. | 9:20 |
Paul Ortiz | That was during the thirties and forties? | 10:00 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yeah, and then on up till now. They would get in trouble, some of them in Tuskegee. If you ever went to jail in Tuskegee, I don't care how minor the offense was, it could be a big thing and you could go to prison for anything. And if they could get away from here, if they're under a bond, they would jump the bond and leave here and make somebody pay it just to keep them facing up to prison or something like that. I know a lot of them that left here on Collegedale. They sneaked away from here and sent back by night and got their families and never sat foot back here again. And that's the God heavens truth. | 10:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | And then the ones that stayed. But for the most part, just like in my class, I graduated from high school in 1946, we started out with 400 children in the ninth grade, but it was during the war. The boys went to the army, most of them. The girls went away and married the soldiers and left. We graduated with only 82 children in that class that actually graduated. And so we had a class reunion when the class was 36 years old and only 26 came and lot of them came from somewhere else. And so they had another one this year, a math class reunion, but I didn't participate, but the girl told me then about four or five. A lot of them are dead. | 10:42 |
Ann S. Pointer | But my son told me, he said now, "They had lost more children out of their class." And he graduated in 1970, 1971. My son graduated in '71, and when they had that class that year and they had lost more class members than we had, and he said, "Mother, it is a different era." Said, "The dope wasn't in when y'all came along. And all of these situations, we lost a lot of classmates because of drugs and this." Which I can see that. How many in the memorial? How many they had? Our class, all of them died of natural causes or got killed in the service or something like that. You didn't hear of any hanky-panky. And he said, "That's the difference." And that is quite a difference. And that was another thing, when we were going to school, did you have to pay incidental fees when you were going to school, I mean, the high school and junior high school? | 11:32 |
Paul Ortiz | I don't think so. | 12:33 |
Ann S. Pointer | No, you didn't. You didn't have to buy books either, did you? See, we had to buy books and pay incidental fees. And there were a lot of people, children, smart children that could not go to high school, they wasn't able to pay the fees and didn't have the money for the books and didn't have no transportation because they lived further than I did and they could not board and they just dropped out. A lot of the girls got married, smart girls in school, but they couldn't go and they just dropped out. And because the incidental fees, they couldn't pay and didn't have any books. And the first set of books I ever had in my life, I was seventh grade. I never owned any books of my own. Mama wasn't able to buy any. But we just look on the other children's books. | 12:36 |
Ann S. Pointer | And then in the sixties, George Wallace, our governor, I had to buy books for my children. He put an order in the south, they had to buy books and I had to buy books. That's the year I raised cotton. We raised cotton and the cotton was very high that year and we raised good cotton and I was able to use that money to buy books for my children. He had legislature pass a law that we had to buy books. But now you know how they did us about those books? Lewis's Drugstore was handling the books downtown. They would say they didn't have any books at all until every White child had bought all their books. And we couldn't get any until every White child had been served, and then what was left, we got them. And I'd have to go to Montgomery, old Black & Auburn and get my children's books. Now, that's the way they would do. They'd have the books there, but we couldn't get them until they serve all of them. | 13:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | And so when the schools got all tangled up about this, they integrated the schools and everything, every city and county integrated and did follow up that order except for Tuskegee. Notasulga is in Macon County, they integrated that school without incident. Reeltown School, that's in Tallapoosa, they say that was the worst part up there in Tallapoosa County. They have a comprehensive school that they integrated without incident. Over in Elmore County in Tallassee, integrated. Every place did it except Tuskegee. They did not and they still have not. The children are just—I feel sorry for the White children because they're the one catching hell. | 14:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, there's a family downtown teaching their own children right now and we was talking about it tonight. Two little children, they sit up there in that store with the mother teaching them. The children are being deprived, the children are being hurt. And the lady used to work with me, her daughter went to a private school, they had their own private school, and when she went off to Auburn to school she had to take remedial courses. She'd been in college there since '87 and hadn't finished yet. And she told her mother to her face, said, "I know you thought you were doing what was best for me, but it hurt me. You crippled me down." When I met those children, I didn't even know what they were talking about. | 15:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | See, it hurts the children. I feel sorry for the children because they've got to meet this challenge, you see? But their parents are so staunch they don't want this. But let me tell you something, honey. Regardless of what you don't want, regardless to what I don't want, our children are going to do what they want to do. Do you know that? If you don't have any, if you ever have any, you might have a daughter and you might say, "I'm going to send my daughter to Germany because I don't want her to be with no Blacks. I don't want her to marry a Black, I don't want her to court a Black." She might come right from Germany with a Black husband. | 16:00 |
Ann S. Pointer | I might say, "I know I don't want my daughter to have a White man." I can't tell what she—The only thing I know is, she come walking up with, I said, "What did you do? You think I'm going to say that? Uh-huh." I don't have no control over grown people. They do what they want to do. But a lot of people are dying, going in their grave or take poison or shoot themselves if it happened. I've known it to happen right there. | 16:36 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you get involved in political activity in Macon County or Tuskegee? | 17:00 |
Ann S. Pointer | Have I ever? Well, I would say in a way, because we encouraged people to become registered voters. And I was very fortunate with that voter thing. But you know what I did? When I finished high school, I had an American history teacher that talked so much about this voting thing like that, and it hadn't come across my mind that they would prohibit me from voting. But as soon as I finished high school and I went down there one day and then asked me what did I want, I said, "I came to register to vote." They said, "All right." They went in there and it was nothing. I just feel I told them my age and where I was born and all that sort of thing, and they sent it through the mail. I got it right now. | 17:06 |
Ann S. Pointer | And then when this big thing come off, I was the only registered voter in this area. Nobody knew I was registered. And Beasley, Dan Beasley found out that I was registered. Because I had been away from here, I left here and he came and he said, "Girl, say you were registered to vote, you didn't tell nobody." I said, "Why should I tell them that?" I said, "I thought everybody else was." He said, "No, these people—" And all these grown people around here, they had never been down there, but I registered to vote when I was 18 and they didn't give me no trouble. You know what I mean? I didn't know nothing about all of this. And when I went up there and told them what I wanted to do, they said, "All right." And I didn't have to go through. No, I just did what everybody's supposed to do and I've been a registered voter for years. | 17:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Were you registered under the name of Pointer? | 18:40 |
Ann S. Pointer | No, Harris. | 18:42 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh. | 18:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | That was my maiden name. I was just a girl when I registered. I was 18, I was still going to school. Anne Elizabeth Harris. | 18:45 |
Paul Ortiz | So that would've been in '19? Was it late '1930? | 18:58 |
Ann S. Pointer | No, no, that was in the forties. I think that I can show you. I don't remember the exact year, but I got the certificate here in a scrapbook. I showed it to my children and as soon as they got of age, I sent them down there. They didn't have one minute of trouble. And my mother was not registered. Do you know what they had mama to do? And I didn't even know anything about it. Someone else carried her down there and mama didn't tell me about it until, oh, man, it had been 10 years. And I said, "Mama," I said, "You went there?" She said, "Yeah. I went down there with so-and-so to register. They had me write the preamble to the constitution or something," she said. I said, "Mama, you wrote it all?" She said, "I wrote till I got time. I told the man I wasn't going to write anymore and he took the paper and didn't even not read it." Had her sit there and write the preamble to the constitution, I guess to see if she was literate or something. | 19:04 |
Ann S. Pointer | I said, "Mama, why didn't you tell me?" I said, "That was unconstitutional." I said, "If you'd have told me about that, I would have really looked into it." She said, "Well, I was waiting on the people anyway." Mama was like this, she said, "I had to wait to get a ride home anyway and he told me to take a paper and go in there and write it. And I wrote till I got tired and I just put it down." Now, that's what she did. And I said, "Mama, you didn't tell me this." I did not know that she had to do that. | 20:00 |
Ann S. Pointer | My husband came from another county and he came up here, he said they had him to write. I think he wrote the constitution or something. And he was a college graduate at Tuskegee University and they're going to have him to write it. I said, "Well, I'll be dog." I said, "I didn't know all this." But I was on the executive committee of the NAACP for a number of years and they had the redress committee and all of that. But as far as me getting out in these marches and all of that, I never took part in nothing like that. I never demonstrated nothing. But anytime I could be of assistance for a good cause, I always supported causes that were for the rights. If it was a case defending somebody who had been unjustly treated, I would always try to give money toward that. And I will do that now. If I feel like a person has had an injustice, if I can give anything toward seeing justice being done, I would do it. | 20:27 |
Ann S. Pointer | But as far as trying to fight City hall, I've never fought City Hall, because a lot of people are in bad shape today on account of—My father would say, "Nothing hurt a bird but his bill." You hear me, what I'm saying? And a fish doesn't open his mouth, he would never get caught in many ways, unless they gig him. And so my father often told me, he said, really and truly, a lot of incident he let sleeping dogs lie. | 21:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | Because although they picked at us out here because they get mad with somebody else, they called me on the phone and said a lot of things, indignant things, because I had children of age when they got ready to integrate that school, they told me on the phone, they knew I had children of that age. Somebody, I don't know who it was because I've never been messing with none of them. "If you go to that school tomorrow morning, you won't get back." And a whole lot of stuff like that. I just called the sheriff and told him about it. He came out here and he said, "A lot of people are getting those calls." And I said, "Because my children are not going to that school at all because I don't have time to go to that school." But if I had sent my little children down there, I would've never sent my children down there. | 22:10 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, it's just like if I tell you, I know there's a rattlesnake down there, and I tell you, "Paul, go over there." I may as well send my children near the rattlesnakes. And when they asked me about it, I told them right up front. I said, "Let me tell you something. I've got to work. And my children, no guinea pigs, they're no targets. And the only way I'll send them down there at that school, I'll go every day with them and I'll be sitting there with a pistol because anybody touch one of them, I'll blow their brains out." And I meant it from my heart, and I got to die and go to judgment. | 22:57 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I was not going to have my daughter mistreated and people throwing things on her, like they did a lot of. Because I would've went down there and they'd have had me killed or in jail, because sure if they'd have touched my daughter, they'd have been a dead bird. I don't care who it was because I'd have killed everybody there. Just everybody in that room, I would've put a bullet in them. And I know I would've done it. And so I said, "Y'all better let my children stay even not right now, because I ain't got time to fool with them." And if I had time and I wasn't working every day, I could go to that school every day. They couldn't prohibit a parent from coming. I'd have went down there, but I didn't have a child old enough to shoot a gun or nothing. And I wouldn't give my children no gun to carry the school, I'd do that myself. I don't want them in no trouble, I stayed out of it. I didn't want them hurt. | 23:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my daughter was the type, she wouldn't fight. She was just not the fighting type and I told her not to ever let somebody hit her. Do not get—"If they find somebody cutting up over here, get over here. If they say something, they call you a name, don't say nothing, go ahead." And I had them trained like that and somebody going to walk up and jump on them, some stranger come and knock them in the head, don't you know I wasn't going to take that out? I'd have been in my grave because I would've shot everybody down there. I sure would've set the town, place on fire. | 24:10 |
Ann S. Pointer | And so I didn't have to bother with it. The Lord blessed me that I didn't have. And my sister-in-law lived in Louisville, Kentucky, and she heard about the mess in Tuskegee and she called me and she said, "If you have any trouble with the children, send them to me where you won't have to be worried about the children." And a lot of people, my uncles told me if things got out of hand, whereas I couldn't handle it, I didn't want the children subjected to any mistreatment, said, "Send them to us." And they opened out, they told—I know I could have sent them either place, but the Lord blessed me where I didn't have to send them, because I didn't want nobody spitting like they did those children and pushed the girl against the door and crammed her in the door like that. That's just mischievous doing that and the parents telling them to do it. And I couldn't handle that. | 24:42 |
Ann S. Pointer | And you wouldn't want it either. You wouldn't want your child to say that they went to an all Black school or all White school to be mistreated, and you sit back and say, "My child is in there." And they're throwing every trash and filth on them and saying all dirty things. I couldn't stand it. | 25:40 |
Paul Ortiz | If you were writing a conclusion to your biography and you had to sum up, express some of the things that have inspired you throughout your life, kept you going through all the struggles that you had to go through, what would be some of those inspiring things that kept you going? | 26:00 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well, number one, my main thing would be the church. The church and a good family, a loving, close-knit family is what kept me going and kept my mind channeled in the right direction. The church, that's God's church, is number one that really gave me something to look forward to. And a good, close-knit, loving family, that would be my conclusion. | 26:29 |
Ann S. Pointer | Because if you had a proper bringing up, and I can say this, my mother and father never told me it wasn't the wrong thing to do in their life. Even though if my mother had to cry, she said, "Make sure you don't take anything from anybody. Make sure you are worthy of your high. If you promise to do a day's work, do it." You know what I mean? And she taught us the morals of life and those things kept me forever thinking for the best. You know what I'm talking about? Looking for the best. And that's the summary of it. That's the only thing that kept me going. Seeing the downfalls of other girls, I did not want to have a child out of wedlock. You know what I mean? Because it would've hurt, embarrassed the family. And those things where your strength will have to be your pride, those are things that kept me going. The church and a loving family. | 27:08 |
Paul Ortiz | Well, Mrs. Pointer, I know it's getting pretty late and— | 28:37 |
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Pointer the last time we left on my way out. You said that you had some stories to tell me about Jim Crow in Macon County. | 0:05 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well, one thing, as you can see, they have two separate cemeteries, and they aren't even buried in the same cemetery even now. And those things exist right today. And they have a White funeral home and a Black funeral home. And if there is an interracial couple, if you marry—If my son married a White woman and she should die, Corbett will not handle her body even though she's White, but she's married a Black man so he would let the Black undertakers handle her body. It did happen here where a boy married a White girl from Minnesota and she was a drug user, so they say, I don't know. I didn't know what she was doing. But she gave herself a needle in her foot and she died. And I know that Corbett did not have her body. I mean the funeral home here. | 0:19 |
Paul Ortiz | Corbett Funeral Home? | 1:16 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yeah. And Burton had to handle her body because if you have any dealings like that with any Blacks, they will not handle your body. Neither can you be buried in that White cemetery because the cemetery is—Although they buried their maids and butlers and things in there, and they have right in that cemetery uptown, you should take a walk through that cemetery and you will see some of the headstones and you'll know that they were cooks and butlers and servants of the White. They would let them be buried in there. And they always said that God had a heaven for the good Blacks. They had a little place there for them. That was their connotation. | 1:17 |
Paul Ortiz | That's the cemetery right down in Ashdale? | 2:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | Ashdale is a Black cemetery. | 2:05 |
Paul Ortiz | It's a Black cemetery. | 2:05 |
Ann S. Pointer | But that Tuskegee Cemetery is a White cemetery, and they still don't intermingle with many things. I mean now when you get to a place where you can't be buried in a cemetery with somebody that's still—Would you think that was the same thing? Well that goes on right now. And they don't worship together at all. The churches down the Church of Christ, there are some Whites and Blacks go there to church, but ordinarily they worship to themselves and the Blacks worship to themselves. That's the way they do. | 2:07 |
Ann S. Pointer | And they don't go to any recreational areas in Tuskegee where the Blacks go. They do not go. They made their own—When the city integrated this recreational city here in Tuskegee, they had a nice recreation center, swimming pool, and everything. But when they found out that the Blacks could go to it, they stopped going to it and they all got together and got money together and made them a recreation center down at Shorter, swimming pool and everything. And they have a man that's maintaining the gate. | 2:51 |
Ann S. Pointer | As I told you, this wizard in this area is over it. He has the key to it, where all of them have to have a key to get in there. Girl working with me told me about it. She goes down there. And the way it is, the reason I feel like the same thing existed 50 years ago exists today, because if you were living here in Tuskegee, don't you think that nobody don't know that you were here? Because there's some Whites know that you were coming here. You see what I'm talking about now? One White lady used to visit me all the time, she and I worked together, and she was coming round this road, 199, and a highway patrolman saw her car and he had seen her come up here so much. He followed her right here to my door one day. And I told her, I said, "I don't like this." You know what I mean? Because after all she wasn't doing anything here but just visiting, and sometimes she'd have a meal and we'd sit down and talk or we worked together. | 3:24 |
Ann S. Pointer | But the highway patrolman followed her right here to my gate, right here, those hedges, and he sat there for a while and he turned around. I'm sure he documented the situation. And if you were living here and you visited me too much, I ever made a visit to your house, and they found out about it, then you would be an outcast, a social outcast. See, you wouldn't be invited to nothing that they had and you'd be out of it. You see what I'm talking about? And it was a girl came here and she lived out on Main Street, a White girl, and she was on some kind of program like doing a dissertation or something, but it was in connection with this Jim Crow thing. And she had a party and she was, the institute, some of the people from the institute she was along with, and she had a party at her house and invited a lot of Black people and she had a lot of White people there too. | 4:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | But after that party is over, they laid the road and watched those people leave and went that girl's house and dragged her out of there and carried her down that road and put a lashing on her. Did you hear me? That girl left here. Somebody said her arm got broke in this struggle. But I know she left. And when you find these things still happening, I think I'd rather see a snake than to hear one. Because if you see a snake, you got him. But if you hear him, he could be anywhere. You know what I mean? Now that's the condition I feel because I have been in the situation, as I told you, I worked in a place where I was the only Black there. And I found out later that the reason they asked me to work there, because they were under a court order, that if they didn't hire Black in that office, they were going to close them up since it was a federal office. | 5:19 |
Ann S. Pointer | And if I had known that I wouldn't have worked there. I wouldn't have gone because I was working at the university. But it was a federal job and I went on and worked there. But upon working with these people, I found out a lot of things that I didn't know that was existing, that under us, that secret storm, you know what I mean? Even though you are out there working for the federal government, but that's what you call trying to overthrow the federal government, when you have a private party working against everything that's being—If the government say they passed federal order that tells you, Paul, you must be on the square at 10 o'clock in the morning regardless to who's there. If you have your orders to go there, if you are trying to obey the government, you're going to make your effort to be there. | 6:13 |
Ann S. Pointer | But now you haven't got to tell Sally, you haven't got to tell Jane where you going, you said, "Where you going?" "I'm going to the courthouse square." But you need not say, "I'm on the court order to go." You know what I mean? Because if you weren't on the court order, you wouldn't go at all. That's the way I found that was going on, that they had a certain little ring, and they still got it. Regardless to how you do, I'm going to stay in my circle and you going to stay in yours. If you want to visit, if they want to come to my house, well they're welcome to come. As long as they stay in order, anybody can visit me and I don't care until they come here and start something, then I'm ready to explode myself. | 7:08 |
Ann S. Pointer | But as far as you, now you can visit them as long as they don't have any company. If they have some company, some of their White company, and you go there, well you will be treated all off, You see? So to make it right, I don't go at all. And I don't care how poor these people are, they have that same drive. They're going to try to address you by your first name at all times. They're not going to give you no title if they can help themselves, unless you got something that they want that's going to affect them very bad. Otherwise you're going to be addressed by your first name. I don't care if you are a doctor, you could be a priest, you're going to be addressed by your first name and you are zero in their sight. Zero. | 7:53 |
Ann S. Pointer | And that reprisal is what I don't like. If you a banker, if you were a banker and your child and my child had a disturbance at school and they were going to school on the street or anywhere, if you were the banker and I was the borrower, then you would get mad about if my child born or something like that, you would go and call my loan. Now you know that's not fair, but it has happened. And these things, you try to walk around a reprisal. Right now they can't do because this town is predominantly Black, but they still have their heavy when it come down to the banks and other things. Regardless to who is out there, I know who own it. You know what I'm talking about? Who's the real chief of it. And the courts is the same way. My brother once had a discrepancy with the courts and it was a man he had been into it, with a man ran a place like where he sold parts for cars and little novices and things like that. And they had got into it about a bill or something. | 8:48 |
Ann S. Pointer | So my brother cussed him out. He said, "I don't owe you anything," and they got into it. My mother cautioned him, he said, "You mind your mouth." That was that word, mind your mouth. And this man was at our house and he didn't show him remorse but he still had it in him. And when my brother had to go before a judge and jury because of some type of difficulty, he got into a fight with somebody that went to court and went before a jury. This man was on the jury. I would've disqualified myself had I had a difference with the defendant, but he did not. I went up and told my brother, I said, "I see Dixon on that thing and I don't care, he's going to tell them in that jury room that you are one of those Black men that will speak up and you going to get convicted. " | 10:14 |
Ann S. Pointer | I told him that. I said, "Get yourself prepared. You're going to be convicted." And sure enough they went in the jury room and stayed exactly three or five minutes, and when he passed the word down, they came back, said, "Have you reached your verdict?" "We have, your honor." "How is your verdict?" "Guilty as charged." They didn't even deliberate it because Dixon was on there and he had passed the word around, you see? I told the district judge about it and he told me, he said, "You should have got up and told the court Dixon and your brother had had a fight and they would put him off that jury." I said, "He should have come up and said so." I was on the jury once, a woman had come here and broke my flowers down and carried them away and did a lot of bad stuff. I didn't know the woman, but somebody told me she did it and her case came up, I was on the jury, and I was going to disqualify myself because I don't care what she did, I would've said, guilty, life, you son of a gun. | 11:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well that's common nature. But I was going to disqualify myself and let them know I do not wish to sit in judgment against this woman because I have a vendetta against her. I don't know her, but I would like to confront her about my yard or something. But those are the type things that we have been under which was very hard and you had to keep your mouth. And then if someone came around and asked you to work and you refused— | 11:58 |
Paul Ortiz | What kind of work? | 12:27 |
Ann S. Pointer | Any kind, in the field or in their home. If you say, "Well I can't go because I'm sick," well then they would put that in their pipe and smoke it against you, and I don't care what kind of favor you wanted, you'd be turned down 'cause the word would get passed around. Said, "That's one of them smart ones, they won't work." Maybe you couldn't go at the time they wanted you to go. My mother, a man came and asked her to come to his house and wash their clothes one time. Mama said, "I can't go this morning because I got something to do." And he cussed her out. He said, "You ain't got nothing to do, you just don't want to come." She said, "I told you I couldn't come this morning." She didn't say she couldn't come at all. She couldn't come that day. And he got mad and cussed her out. | 12:28 |
Ann S. Pointer | And if had it been me, I would've blowed it back at him. But mama didn't say nothing. She just went on because she thought maybe they'd put a reprisal on her somewhere else, because just as sure as you do anything, it's just like a little—They have that little private meetings and pass the word around. I don't know how it happened, but they could live in Shorter, one could live in Notasulga, they have that communications where they get together at these various times. Now they had a big meet down here at Shorter a year before last. All them gathered together, and it was a guy working at the water plant, and he called and told the city police to come out there. He said, "I'm not going to stay out here because I don't want to be messed up on funny terms. I'm working for the city, but I don't what these people planning, I want to get away from here." | 13:11 |
Ann S. Pointer | And Johnny Ford sent a crowd out there, sent the law out there and they pretend that they was having a hayride, but it was no hayride. They had planned something to do and that boy would not stay out there with them all surrounded. Why would they surround him? Now see this goes on, and they had a plan to march in Tuskegee some time ago, but I don't know Johnny Ford got them word and asked them please do not, because he could not control the community. See the police would be there, but you have people on the sideline that if you put on a sheet and a hood over your head and go walking, somebody might shoot you under there and then everybody know who you are. | 14:01 |
Ann S. Pointer | You see what I'm talking about? And you never know where that bullet came from. So Johnny Ford said, to keep down any problem, he asked them not to march in Tuskegee, whatever they're going to march about, because they can get a permit to March just like anybody else. And the guy run the Dairy Queen, somebody went to his place, he's a White guy, and put KKK right where you go to pick up your sandwich, they just had KKK written across there. Well everybody went there to buy a sandwich, when they saw that they walked away. Until he saw it. | 14:45 |
Ann S. Pointer | And they did that to him. Now some of them did it, not the Blacks. But he told me, he said, "They did it to ruin my business." And he just about know who did it. He told me, he said, "You know, and I know too." I said, "Well you don't want to accuse anybody." That's what I told him. But they did that and had it just [indistinct 00:15:36], KKK written right on the stand where you pick up your sandwich and anybody go there if they fix the sandwich and put it there and they look at that, they leave the sandwich, go on. Wouldn't you? | 15:17 |
Paul Ortiz | His friends did it or— | 15:45 |
Ann S. Pointer | It wasn't a friend. It had to be an enemy of his that did it to ruin his business, and some of his colleagues did it. But if you went to a place and you saw a certain something written down there, you wouldn't buy nothing there either. | 15:50 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, Mrs. Pointer, you talked about the case with your mom turning down the work because she couldn't work that day, but she was afraid of reprisals. What would've been a reprisal back during those days? | 16:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | She had to get groceries on credit from another White merchant, and she had to get clothing on credit because she didn't have money to pay for it, and they would let her pay little by little and pay for it like that. And if she give up in the head, they could pass the word and she'd be cut off. They just wouldn't let her have anything. And that's the way they did all the time. Or either she was renting and she could have got evicted or something just because she was insubordinate, they called it. And that was what it is. If you gave up any type of—If you spoke back in your behalf, they would just get together and say, "Well, don't let them have nothing else. Make them get off your place," or anything like that. And that could happen. And people were afraid of that reprisal because you didn't have nothing already. Not even a corner to lie in, and everybody wasn't fortunate enough to have their own place at that time and you had to be a doormat in order to make it. | 16:17 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you know of other Black people who faced such reprisal? | 17:36 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yes. Yes. It was a family lived right down the street, that they had a bunch of children, maybe 8 or 10, and they were sharecropping with a man at Notasulga over, and they could not settle up. Their crops didn't do well and they couldn't settle up. So that man was going to take their possessions. They owned that little house they were in, but they know that he was going to take it. But they had a son that was grown, and at the time he was in prison, but he broke out. He heard about the situation because they had a lot of tiny tots, like this. He was grown and they say he broke jail, out of prison, and I don't know where he got a car from, but he got a car and he couldn't read nor write, I knew the boy, and he got word to his mother to sell somebody their little lot, and a man did buy it, and told them to get ready. He was going to come through, but when he come to be ready, he had to pick him up because they were after him. | 17:42 |
Ann S. Pointer | They did just like he told them, they secretly—Because we didn't know about it, living right here. They were so quiet with him. Those people couldn't read nor write, but they had good sense. This man, they went to him and told him they wanted to sell this place, that little place they had. He bought it, they got ready, left everything there, except for the clothes they had and the little things, don't care. He came through here between midnight and day, how he got all of them in that car, who knows. But they got in there and they went to Boston, Massachusetts. And that's where they lived and that's where they died. Some of the children are still up there now. They did much better to leave here. And that man didn't know hair nor hide where they went, because he told them not to tell nobody where they were going. They didn't tell nobody. | 18:54 |
Ann S. Pointer | I went to Boston in 1972, and I called this lady on the phone, and we talked, because she never came back. Her husband came back through here once and came by to see my mother, and he told her how good it was for him up there in Boston, how he had found work and he found help for the children, and he told her—He was dressed real nice, and we had never seen him dressed up, and he told her he was going to Mobile to see somebody, but he was on his way back and I remember the last thing he told my mother, he said, "If I don't see you no more, we'll meet over there." He meant in the promised land. And we never saw him again. But those people went away. They got away from me. That man was going to take everything they had and no doubt come there shooting, but they sure fixed them. And that's what you call one of those things because they was going to have a reprisal and a killing too if they hadn't have left here. | 19:37 |
Paul Ortiz | You were talking about reprisals that Black people face. | 20:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | And then it was another—All of this took place in Macon County, but this was in the Notasulga area. This man would go to other counties and talk people—When they were getting ready to pitch a farm, they would get out and go where they saw a bunch of children and a husband and wife living where he had children who were field hands. He'd sit down and offer them a big property, "Come on and live on my place. I'll do this for you and I'll do that for you," and make a lot of promises. And he went to Bullock County and got a man and his wife and children and moved them up there on his place and they would make—He was making a good crop because he had good wage hands and things. And when the crop, he saw that the cotton was fixing to open, it had made, everything was made, when you lay by, you see your crop. It's already in the making. | 20:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | He went there and started a big mess with those people and ran them off away from there. Well, he wouldn't have to settle up with them, you see. Once this man get his crowd, they call it a mob crowd and come to your house at night, then you going to leave there as fast as you can because you don't know what's going to be the next visit, whether it be a killing or not. He ran those people off and they left. I don't know where they went, whether they went up north or anything. They didn't get nothing. Worked to fix the whole crop and didn't get a dime. You know what happened? My husband, not the husband I have now, but the husband, the father of my children, was living in the area and he told me, said he knew this man had been doing that for years and people never knew how he could do it and he didn't never have to pay nobody because he'd run them off when he got his crop. | 21:35 |
Ann S. Pointer | So these people went off and he came over to his—And my husband had another marriage, his wife died and they had one child, 18 months old when his wife died, and that's when we got married later years. He came over there and told him and his wife, "Come on," and the people slipped off from me, and they wouldn't gather the crop, so I'm going to need somebody to gather and I'll pay you so much a week or whatever like that. He said he already knew what had happened. He went on and moved in the house. He had a house right close to his house. That's how I know this firsthand information. He said he moved in that house and put his furniture and everything in there, he had him cutting his stove wood for his—See they all used wood stove. Cutting the wood for the stove, keeping the yard up and gathering the crop. And his wife was cooking for them and washing and doing all that and he was just his handyman around there, but he was gathering that crop all along. | 22:26 |
Ann S. Pointer | So he said when he told him, he said, "Mr. Hatchett, you'll have to pay me by the week." "All right, I don't mind." He said he knew it was, and said every Friday he would come and pay me. And he told himself, "When you get through gathering those potatoes and things, I'm going to give you so many of them. I'm going to give you so much corn and so much peanuts and I'm going to give you the remnant bale of cotton for gathering it." He said he knew he wasn't going to do it. So long coming time after he started gathering everything, he started acting funny. This man started acting funny. When you [indistinct 00:24:07], you can tell they come up and don't speak, you know they got hell out of them. He said that he told his wife, said, "Now I'll tell you what I want you to do. You just get the baby in the thing and every time you go to your mother's, carry some dishes and glasses and whatnot, and when you get to carrying to cook things out of here, I would get the mattresses and things by night and move them someplace." | 23:29 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he said that they moved by night, but he would go there every day, him and his wife, just like they were living there and do the work, act like nothing wasn't happening. So one day he said his wife was over at her mother's and he went there, he was out there that morning when Hatchett got up, he was out there cutting wood. Then Hatchett got into it with him, "But you did so and so and so and so and so. I tell you right now, I want you to move out of my house." He said, "All right." He dropped the ax and walked on away. Hatchett went there and kicked the door in the house because he'd already moved. See, he had planned to do that, but he fixed him and got away from that. And those type things, child, that happened all the time. All of the time. | 24:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my mother's mother and my grandfather was working over here by the [indistinct 00:25:25] field, it was a big farm, and they were tenants on this farm, and my grandfather was a handyman around the big boss's house. He milked his cows. He went there in the morning time, he had a key, and he'd go in there and make a fire in the house, for when they get up, they get up in a warm house, you understand me? Make the fire in the stove so when they get up, they don't have to do just walk out in a nice warm house. He'd get up a full day and feed his stock. He'd been doing that for years. Then he'd leave there and go and work his farm and everything. But he was so humble until this man thought that he could do him any kind of way. And after you lick around people and act like no matter what they say, you just—It's yes, all of a sudden you going on about your business. But he didn't know my grandfather at all. | 25:17 |
Ann S. Pointer | But he did his work and was humble, so they were going to sane the creek, and when they wanted those bass and everything, it was his creek, he could sand and he had company, he had invited all his big wheel friends out there and go sand and have a fish fry. So he had my grandfather to come there and help with the sanding and to clean the fish and everything. That's old, he was just a flunky. And they was hitting their bottles and things around there and cussing and going on, and my grandfather passed by and he said, "John, pick up that rope down there." He said, "Yes sir." When he stooped down and picked it up, he kicked him before his company. He going to show him that he got somebody he can even kick. When he did it, he just shouldn't not have done it because my grandfather turned around first, he hit him. He popped him upside the head and knocked him down, and he hit him so hard they knocked the skin off. He had to be hitting him and knocked the skin off. | 26:12 |
Ann S. Pointer | I mean he bust the hell out of him and kicked him too. And then he had to take to the woods. So my mother said she had two children at that time, my two oldest brothers, and they were down there on the creek, she said he came by her house and sat down on the steps and went to crying. He said, "Carol Lee, I didn't know John was like that. John jumped on me down there." He said, "What did you do to him?" "I was just playing with him." She said, "You can't play with him. If you put your hands on him—Did you hit him?" "I just kicked at him." He said, "Uh-huh, you must've kicked him because if you kicked him and [indistinct 00:27:41] and kill you." That's what mama told him. He went on up there and all his crowd, they got together and they was in the middle of the crop. They was cool until the crops almost—And my grandfather was plowing in the fields and he went to Notasulga and got his mob crowd and he got two men, paid two men to kill him. | 27:06 |
Ann S. Pointer | And mama said her baby was young, she wasn't in the field. She was sitting out on the porch and she could look down across the field, way down across there, and he was plying and she saw him. See she was living in a house with her husband, my grandmother was living up further. But she said she could look down there and saw those two White men. She saw him when they got out and they went around the edge of the swamp there, and he was plying when he went in there to make his turn at the edge of the swamp to come back. They were going to grab him and kill him down there and leave him in the woods. Mama said she started calling him, calling him. And I don't know whether he heard her or not, but when he made that round and got that far, those two men grabbed him and tried to cut his throat. | 28:08 |
Ann S. Pointer | But he was very strong. He was a very strong. And buddy, he did get a chance to cut him in the top of the head, but he didn't get chance to him or rake him in the top of the head with the knife, and he was knocking him so fast, he was worse than that karate kid. He beat the hell out of them down there, both of them. But he ran. When he knocked him down and got away from him, although they raked him in the head with the knife, and he ran where he had to take to the woods and keep her going, you understand me? So they couldn't do anything. They came there and told my grandmother, "Y'all got to get off of my place." And mama said, "What's the matter? What's the matter?" That's what my grandmother said. "Because I said so." | 29:00 |
Ann S. Pointer | And she said, "Well, all right." And my grandmother said she started to get and said, "You got to give me time to get my things together and my crop is out here and everything." I'm going to get half of everything you got." She said, "I don't see how you can get nothing. I'm renting from you." My grandmother stood to him. "And now what happened between you and John, now you took it out on me. But anyway, I'm going." He went and took part of her cows. She had a lot of cows. He going to take half of them. She went downtown to Tip Holson was the sheriff. She said she went down there and told him, Tip Holson knew her and she said, "Mr. Holson, you know that man doesn't own a cow." He said, "Don't worry, Clara, I'll get your cows for you." | 29:43 |
Ann S. Pointer | So he got this same man that tried to kill my grandfather, when they went there to get the cows, my grandmother could call her cow, she said, "You know how you be helping," she called her cow and she had it by the rope. This man came up and hit her. That's right. That man that he had hired. And she had children under age and my uncles left this town. It was a sad thing, but he told me, he said, "Babe, I wanted to kill that man about hitting mama, but mama told me not to do nothing." Said, "I had an ax, I was going to kill him with an ax." And mama told me not to. She said, "Uh-huh, no, no, no." And she took that lick because her boys was big enough to kill him. And he said he had an ax, he was fixing to kill him. He said, "I'm going to leave here." | 30:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he left. He said, "I'll never live in Macon County again. I couldn't defend my own mother." And he left and he did not come back here. He came back to visit, but he never stayed. He said, "Babe, I don't care how good it gets in Macon County, it don't get good enough for me to stay here." He said, "I saw something I couldn't take." Said, "That man hit my mother for nothing, and I had the ax to kill him. And mama was afraid for my life and they know I would've been a fugitive because they'd have been after me until the day I died if I had to kill him with the ax, because I was intending to give him a lick of what he wouldn't do if somebody else was," because he was going to get him dead as hell. So he left away from here a very young man and he lived in New York until he died. | 31:19 |
Paul Ortiz | That was your uncle? | 32:05 |
Ann S. Pointer | That was my mother's brother, that's right. And he left away from here. He said he couldn't take it. Just like me, if anybody hit my mama, they'd had to kill me. You know what I mean? I was just that type. It's good I didn't come along in that day, because I would've really fought back. One of my children right now, you let any man come and hit me. It ain't nothing I could do to keep my sons off of. I could not hold them. Couldn't nobody hold them. They were going to do something. And that's the way it was. Even though they were down. When I said down, a crust of bread, a corner to lie in. That's what they had, which was nothing. So my uncle said when he left here, he had a dollar and 50 cents and one pair of pants, and he had to hobo the trains and could have got killed. But he said he met some other hobos on that train. He didn't know where he was going. He said, "babe, I got on that train and I didn't know where in the world how to get nowhere." | 32:07 |
Ann S. Pointer | The man actually said, "Where are you going," like a conductor. He said, "I want to go to Cleveland, Ohio." And that fella helped him how to get from this freight train to that freight train until he got there. He said he didn't know nobody had never been out of Macon County in his life. When he got to Cleveland, Ohio it was in the summertime, he said he looked like hell. He know because he was muddy and nasty and said a man was unloading a truck. This was back in the teens. And said he was just standing there looking, a man said, "Come here boy." He said, "Yes." He went there and the man said, "You want to help? Want to make some money?" He said, "Yes sir." Helped him unload his truck. And he said he got there and you talking about working, he said he unloaded that truck in a little while, and the man saw he wanted to work. He said, "Now I'm going to pay you $5." And he said he thought—He wasn't making 40 cents a day. | 33:10 |
Ann S. Pointer | He said, "Now you go find you a room and get cleaned up and tomorrow you come out here and help me load to get away from here." He started helping that man, got on his feet up there in Cleveland. He started sending money back here, you understand me, to get my grandmother off of that place, off of these White people's places. And she bought a little place down on this hill here of her own. See, he sent money back when he went off. He didn't forget about them. He wanted her off of the man, they call it the man. Wanted them off of the man's place altogether. And she bought her own little place because her son saw to it that she had her own little place. And my brother, the one I told you died last month, we were sharecropping. He early left school. He said, "I'm going so I can get mama off the man's place," you see? | 34:01 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he came back and built that house right there so we wouldn't have to stay on the man's place. My brother did and paid for it to get us off. It's always somebody in the family to get you off the man's place. And if you ain't got nobody to get you off that man's place, you're going to take his [indistinct 00:35:11] until you slip away from that, because you can't go like everybody else. You ain't got no money. You got a relative or friend, they would slip and send you the money. They couldn't send it to his mailbox because, see, your mail came to the man's box if you lived on his place, and they censored all your mail. So that send the mail to the minister. | 34:55 |
Ann S. Pointer | See the church played imported part in this. He would send that money to the minister and tell him what it was for. And that minister would not—You couldn't catch the train here at Chiho. You'd have to go to Opelika or somewhere, where nobody wouldn't see you leave. Because they would try to stop you. They act like you were their own. And then a man came here, he thought he was talking to a friend, but he was talking to a staunch enemy. He told me, "I ain't got nobody to work. Those damn yo-yos went off up yonder and sent the money back in, and slipped all of them away from here." That's what they call them, yo-yos. And I said, "Oh yeah?" I knew all about it but I just pretend I didn't. Now this happened recently. Shoot. Slipped them all the way from here. | 35:29 |
Ann S. Pointer | But once you get one relative or a good friend that go up north and make it pretty good, and then the people they working for, if they tell them what's the trouble, they would give them the money. Them people up north understand. You see what I'm talking about? I was working up there, a lady told me, she said, "How come you going back to Macon County? You up here, you are doing well." I said, "Well now look, I don't live on the man's place." I said, "We live on our own place and I'm going to school." And she said, "Well I thought the man owned all the places down there." She really had never been south. She said, "I was just saying, you ought to be glad to be with him down there." I said, "Oh no, we own our own places. We don't live on the man's place." | 36:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | They call him the man. I'm telling you the truth. It was real funny. But you know one thing, if you got a child going to school and the man want him to work, he go and tell the teacher that this boy can't come to school right now because he's working for me, and he'd go down and get him out of school and make him go to the field. I'm telling you, it sound funny to you because you never have been surfaced to nothing like this. But that's what I wanted tell you the other night, how horrible it is when you have to—Everything you do, the man's got to approve it and either you are his concubine or many women fell prey to their sexual desires and all that kind of stuff. It's still prevalent. But see, they can't do like they used to do. They can't run over these women like they used to. They have to give them what they want. Money and cars and these trailers and things. That's what they have to buy now. | 37:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | It's a girl was living with a fella, I know them people well, and they're still in Macon County, but it's on the lower edge of Macon County. And she had been keeping coming with this fella, and they got grown daughter. He sent this girl to school, took care of all of her desires, bought her a car and everything. The girl went to school right there at the university. I knew the girl well. She was in the class with a friend of mine. This girl and I worked together. She got married to a guy and the guy didn't treat her real good, and he had bought her a double wide trailer. Her daddy had bought a double wide trailer and had everything in her face, had her own car to go to school. And this guy was knocking her around a little bit and she told her mama about it. | 38:14 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well her mama told him, and when that man came, he was sitting at that trailer and he said, "now I'll tell you one thing I want you to do." I know the guy just as well as I know my husband. He said, "I want you to turn around right here and don't you never set another foot in this trailer because I'm not going to talk to you next time. I'm going to kill you." And that guy left and he ain't been back there. You hear me? Sure did. And that girl—So his mother before she died, she was after him. She said all the rest of the boys married and got them a wife, I want you to marry before I die. He went down there to Montgomery and got a bimbo, a drunkard out of Montgomery and had a wedding, just because his mother, he wonder about, like you did, and you ain't seen her. | 39:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I laughed about it, I said to myself, I said, "Lord, I don't know what in the world that girl, she don't know nothing about him, one thing." And he married her. This man was up in age, he's near my age, but he had never been married because he'd been living with this girl all that time. So he married, this fake marriage, and the night he got married to her, he bought her two half a gallons of—Half a gallon of vodka, they say, and a gallon of gin or something. Half gallon of gin. And she was drunk, she don't know what happened. And he left, he didn't stay with her not one night, not at all. And she stayed there as long as she could. Because he was staying out there with that girl. And when he married her, this girl got so mad about it, you know what she did? She didn't have no sense. | 39:53 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now she called a Black funeral home. Now they'll do things like that to you. These Black people did that. She called this Black funeral home and told them, "I want you to pick—There's a body out here I want you to pick up," and told him the man's name. But this guy didn't know the man. And he went down there looking for a body and stopped by this man's house and asked him if he knew this man. He said, "well, I'm so-and-so." The man turned around came on back to Tuskegee. Now why didn't she call Corbett if she wanted—But she didn't have the sense to call Corbett. But that's the way they'll do you, if they get married with you, they'll send the funeral home to your house. | 40:35 |
Ann S. Pointer | I was in a beauty shop one day getting my hair done and I went during to my lunch break, and while I was in there, the lady had me in the shampoo bowl back fixing to wet my hair. And this woman broke in the door and ran in there, and she said—They said, "Good morning, may I help you?" She said, "Can I be a walk-in?" They looked at one another and said, "Well, I got a customer right now." She said, "I got to go because I've got to leave town immediately." And then she told why. And I said, "Honey, take my place." I got up out the chair, "So you can have my place." Somebody had sent her first a wreath with 21 roses on it, a funeral wreath. And she said when the florist brought it there to her house—She lived right there on the campus, below the campus. She was an RN. But you know need not [indistinct 00:42:01], because this was done—Black people did this to each other. | 41:14 |
Ann S. Pointer | And she said when the man came, she said, "What is this?" Said, "You so-and-so?" She said, "Yeah." Says, "For you." She said, "Well, this is a funeral wreath." He said, "Well, I don't know. I only work [indistinct 00:42:18]." She said, "How were you paid, by check or by credit card?" He said, "By cash. And I don't know who bought it. They just told me to deliver it right here." She said she grabbed it real fast before the neighbor saw it and threw it back there in a closet. And she said, "Oh my Lord." And before she could come out, going back there hiding that reef, the telephone rang and she said, "Hello." She said, "Is this so-and-so?" "Yeah." "Oh, you are dead. Be at the funeral home, so to pick you up in a few minutes." And honey, that woman got scared. She ran out there. I tell you I wasn't tickled but she left. I never heard of her. I gave her my seat. I told her, I said, "honey, if it mean that much, you take my seat and go on where you got to go." | 42:05 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you know what the circumstances were behind that? | 43:00 |
Ann S. Pointer | Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And then another woman, I knew her well, we worked together at the hospital and they called every funeral home in Tuskegee and sent to her house and she had a lady there taking care of her baby. She was a nurse at the VA. And one funeral home stopped, and the lady, was a funeral home lady that was there. She went in the house. Burton went, he saw the other ambulance there, he wouldn't go. He passed on by there. So did Locklear. They saw the other hearse there and they left. | 43:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | So this woman walked in and asked this babysitter, "Where's the body?" She said, "What body?" She said, "Miss Miss body." She said, "What you mean?" Said "She ain't there, she working." But I got a call to come pick up her body." That's what this lady said. This lady got on the telephone and called out there to the bed, said "Miss so-and-so, you better come on here and see something about this place. The people is here to pick up your body. I don't know what to tell her." | 43:32 |
Ann S. Pointer | That's right. So now if you call for a hearse, you got to call the police. They'll not come unless the police come because of this, you see. And my son told me in Nashville, Tennessee, a woman, it's a place you sell fish, cooked fish, and this woman got married with the preacher at the church. Now my son knew about it. He said that he was a student and he couldn't do nothing about it. He was a musician at the church. And she called and ordered $175 worth of cooked fish. And once you order it and send it to that place, the party got to pay for it. I mean whoever house you sent it to, that person got to pay for it. And that man came there with that van and started unloading all that cooked fish. And his wife fainted. But he had to pay for it. | 44:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | I don't know. And she was standing around the corner laughing. These people can do some dirty stuff, you hear me? I mean dirty stuff. But all of that goes back to tell you that they—In working for the man, you had to keep a level head and you had to have a good personality in order to get along with the man. Because anything, you stomp your toe, the man is going to get you. And see, if you had children and your boys get in trouble, then you had trouble showing up, because the man was going to get him out of jail, but he going to put on his book what he want to. If they charged him $30, he might put 200 down there. And you got to work and work it out with the man. If you went to the doctor, if the doctor charge you $5, he put 25 down there, but you still got to work it out. You see what I'm talking about? | 44:50 |
Ann S. Pointer | And the man, whatever, he don't give you no receipt. He just got his ledger. You didn't get no receipt or anything. And whatever he put on his book, you had to honor that. And that's what caused all of the problems. You never pay the man out. They say the more you work, the less you get, and working for the man, when these people make these songs better, they know what they're talking about. Because if ever you start getting on his book, you in trouble, because he put what he wanted on his book and you don't see it. And every year you almost got out. You're lacking $186 and 30— | 45:49 |
Ann S. Pointer | —and if somebody doesn't send for you, you'll be working for the man for the rest of your life. You know what I mean? Because you are writing right now, I don't know what you're writing. And if I ask you, "Let me see it," you'd say "For what?" And then you's an insubordinate yo-yo and you going to get it. But anything he put on that book, you had to pay it. That's right. That's what kept them working for the man. Christmastime come, you don't have anything, you got to go back to the man and get something for your children for Christmas. When Easter come, you got to go to the man and get your children's Easter clothes, whatever they need. | 0:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | But he's still writing in his book, you see? You just working for the man. You getting what you want, very little money and you might tell him, said, "Boss, I want me a car. I need me a car." All right, he go down there and buy your old piece of car and he won't hardly do nothing. But still, you got it and he put it on his book. He might get it for $100 back in then, but there ain't no telling what that car going to cost you, because you got to pay for it. Do you believe there are people living like that now? You wouldn't think so, would you? There is. There's people living like that right now. | 0:45 |
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Pointer, the other night you were telling me about there's a magazine that would be distributed. | 1:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yeah. | 1:38 |
Paul Ortiz | It was called something like— | 1:38 |
Ann S. Pointer | The Ears Hear and the Eyes See. The Eyes See and the Ears Hear is a paper, a little newspaper, but it wasn't done like a newspaper that you'd buy off the street. They said the paper was done in Chicago. It was a type written paper that had been xeroxed, looked like to me. You couldn't buy that paper anywhere. Well, I saw one, I got in a taxi cab one day and just picked it up. You know where I see a piece of paper? I just picked it up and go to reading it. If your initials appear in there, you better leave town because somebody done put a contract on, going to kill you by something. If you live in a promiscuous life and that paper soon. But somebody told me two years ago that they had seen that paper lately, but I have not seen one. | 1:40 |
Ann S. Pointer | It's been years since I've seen one. And you can't go nowhere and buy it, you just might pick it up, go somewhere to read and just pick it up. Because I picked up one in the taxi cab and read it, read what it's in there. And I saw an initial in there, but it was somebody else because they didn't kill her. But it was a paper circulating and these people got their ways to do things. And like I said, when you working for the man, you have to study how to get away from that. But all this community, this whole community out here, all of these people at one time or another had been on, working for the man. But they scuffle and scrape to get them a little lot if it wasn't but enough to put a house on, to get off that man's place. | 2:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | And that's what all these little communities doing, these people been working. If they wasn't the same man, it was another man in another area. But see, all these men knew each other and you can't talk about one because they going to tell one another what's going on. And you didn't have a chance in court. When I say in court like that, about nothing. You go to town and issue one, I don't care what he do, all them people of town are his friends. It's just like a story I read once about a goose was swimming in a pond beside the road. It was a fairytale-like. And a fox came along and said, "What are you doing in my pond?" The goose said, "This is not your pond, this is a public pond." | 3:18 |
Ann S. Pointer | He said, "Oh no, it's mine." She said, "Well." He said, "If you don't believe that, let's take it to court." She said, "Well, all right, let's go." The goose got out of the pond and followed the fox to court. When the poor goose got to court, the judge was a fox and the jury were foxes and they picked up her bones clean. That's the same way it is with the Black man. I don't care what has been done or who you do it to, when you take it downtown, if the man likes you, you'll come out. I don't care if you done killed five men out here, if he likes you, you going to come free. But if you was insubordinate or one of those yo-yos, they closed the book on your tail. You see what I'm talking about? | 4:04 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now my father, I told you he went to prison about some of the BPL. You know what his fine was? $17.50. But he was a yo-yo to them and they slammed the book down on him and gave him 90 days in prison. You see what I'm talking about? Now, if he had been liked by the man, he was living on the man's place but he didn't care and he let it happen. You see what I'm talking about? Now, what was $17.50? But I'm saying that's what happened. That's the way, that was a plight of this in that Jim Crow days, it was something. And as far as I'm concerned, it's just as bad in the North now as it is in the South if you would believe me, because I've been in both places. And they have their little situations up there also. And they stack a book on you, buddy, you're gone. | 4:52 |
Ann S. Pointer | And when I say stack a book, stack the deck. Pardon me, not the book. I don't care where you go, you might be working in service, working in their homes. And another thing you can do. If you are working in a person's house, when you hired on there as a maid, you got the whole house in charge from the cooking to the buying the grocery, to their chastising the children, to cutting hair or whatever it come to when you hire on. But when you go into work, you dare not go in the front door. You cannot knock on that front door and be let in. You got to come in the back door, and when you get to the back door, the doorbell is going to be ringing. You can then go to the front door, let somebody in, but you can't go in there. | 6:05 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I am so low, I'm so dirty, I'm so filthy. I ain't fit to sit beside you nowhere. But yet, I'm going to make your bread with my hands. I'm going to cook for you, I'm going to do everything for you and I'm good enough to serve you and you could eat out of my hand, anything I can hand you. I can be something, "Give me something, man." I say, "Here, hold my hand, eat out of my hand." But yet, if we go someplace, if I sit down on the seat, they get up and move. Now, I just don't understand. That's something I don't understand. You ain't fit to sit beside me, but you can eat out of my hand. That's the irony in the whole thing. | 6:56 |
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Pointer, earlier you were talking about Black women who would get abused back during the time that you were growing up? | 7:43 |
Ann S. Pointer | Abused by whom? What was I saying? | 7:54 |
Paul Ortiz | You were saying that there's situations where landowners— | 7:56 |
Ann S. Pointer | Oh yeah, they would. All this stuff happened since I grew up, too. Well, I worked in the hospital and we had seven counties. They had something called the MC program, maternity care. Whereas the government paid for your babies, having your babies. And if your babies were underweight, they were left in the hospital at that cost of that program. And that drew in Russell County, Montgomery County, Dallas, Marengo, I can name them off, but I can't remember. They would've outline it, called the Black belt or something. But this woman had a baby, had twins. Now, this is something that I'm sure the medical journal is carrying, but I wasn't at liberty to say anything about it because I worked in the hospital. And I didn't know that this could take place. She had a White baby and a Black baby. | 8:01 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, that's something. She had a husband, but she was cooking for this. Now, this man came there and the man brought him to get his wife out of the hospital. And when he came there, he didn't have the proper clothing for his wife and baby. So the man asked me, he said, "Why do you go around here to buy baby clothes and clothes for women?" And I sent him to Ellie Murphy because that was a place where they sold all things. He went down there and he bought the baby's clothes and bought a dress and a slip and some bedroom shoes for the mother. And when I showed, while he was gone, this fellow came down and this Black man asked me, said, "Let me see the babies." And I went and I showed him both bassinets there to the window and pushed him for he to looked at. He said, "Oh, my Lord, they sure is cute." | 8:59 |
Ann S. Pointer | He pointed the White one, "He coming home just like him, that White one." That's what he said. And somebody said, "Oh, my Lord." That's what somebody said. But nothing was said or done and I don't know, that came from Russell County. I don't know what happened, but I imagine they still there. Because this man was the type, he would never get away from the man, he didn't have sense enough. And most all of these counties right here in Macon County and all the rest of them, everywhere you see the man has got maybe from eight to 15 tenants on his place. There's a woman that he's messing with and then you're going to see the flowers start to blooming, the children. You know what I mean? Start to popping. A White woman told me one time, we were talking about a situation. | 9:49 |
Ann S. Pointer | She said, "You don't have a situation." She said, "What if you had a husband and he built a house right adjacent in the back of your house and he slept with another woman and was having children by around in your yard, what would you do?" I said, "I wouldn't stay there, I would leave." She said, "Well, I didn't go nowhere heaven because when he asked for my hand in marriage, he asked my father, could I be controlled? My father told him yes because my father was guilty of the same thing." And she said, "I stayed there and while this woman worked in the field, I had to tend to the children." | 10:47 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, that happened right here in Macon County and his wife had to take that. I told her, I said, "I wouldn't have taken it because when he come there, I would've been gone and I wouldn't have went back to my father. Neither would I have went to him, he wouldn't have known where I went because my husband get brazen enough to bring a woman in my house, around my house and he going to stay there and have children by her, no, it ain't going to happen with me. I wouldn't put up with it." But a lot of these White women have had to put up with it and help raise the children. | 11:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, I know what I'm talking about. And they all have been pushed about like that, because this man is going to do what he want to. And you don't know what he's doing until the flowers start to booming. That's what they say, when you see these mixed up children come out, now you know that he's stirring about. This woman that's got these children, she going to dress better than anybody in the community and she got money all the time and her children well taken care of and he does it undercover. But everybody know what's going on but they ain't going to say nothing. And they talk about it but they can't do nothing about it because the man own them. And it's like I say, what is slavery? Yes, they abolished the chains, they abolished this, they abolished that. But you're still a slave. | 11:48 |
Ann S. Pointer | You understand me? In so many words. Because that green back dollar can make you a slave. When you don't have anything and you're trying to make it, you are still a slave. And most people look down on that word, but they'll find out that they are. And you don't have to wonder about these flowers blooming, you can just look at the population and tell. Haven't you paid attention to that? Well, what has been your thoughts on that about you see these different people mixed up, you don't know what they are, they got everything in them? | 12:45 |
Ann S. Pointer | And you can see that there's been visitation by someone, just looking at the group, this bouquet. That's what I'm saying. Those are the type of things that—And the Klan talking about they want a pure race. Now, who mixed up this race? You understand me? Just like I'm saying, you might say right now, just say, "Well, Ann, and I don't want nothing but a White woman because I want to have White children." That would be the right thing for you to do. | 13:26 |
Ann S. Pointer | But now, you could raise as many children as you want to and one of those children might decide they're going to make a bouquet somewhere and you couldn't help her. But that is what happened, the bouquets have been made now and their colors, every kind of color in the classroom, if you look at a class of 32 children, you look at them, you see some of everything. And it's been like that all the time. Those are the things that some of the people have despised and they didn't like it. It brought about a lot of dissension among the Blacks, as well as Whites. Because if you had a wife right now, and I don't care what you cared about her and y'all could be living real good and she have a baby and she have a Black baby, you couldn't never understand. They said, "What have I done to you?" The reason why you would go out and get a baby, bring another Colored baby here. | 13:59 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well, if a Black man has got a wife and she have a White baby, he on the man's place, he can't say nothing. You see what I'm talking about? Do you see the injustice in that? Even though if he doesn't like it. Now, you know what he's going to do? He's going to mistreat his wife under the cover and give her a very, very bad time and this child will be knocked about, which is wrong. But those what cause all these problems. Going back to the man, he done stirred it all up and he gone on about his business, left it like that. Well, it's happening all around and right now you'd be surprised, right here in Macon County, I could take you right now and show you some things that you just wouldn't believe that's going on right now, same thing. | 15:01 |
Ann S. Pointer | But the preacher can't stop it. They get to church, they talk to them, they try to lead them right. They don't pay a bit more mind than you do and you don't hear it. And you can't tell them nothing. I know a boy, a White boy right now, he grew up, he was a baby. I used to keep him in my lap. When I go to the store, they had a store there. I'd pick him up when he was a little boy and ride and play horses with him, but he got to be a fat one. I said, "You can't get away from me now because you done got too big and fat." But he always right now, he loves me dearly. He always, always played with me and everything. His grandmother was a prejudiced woman. Now, he was a little boy baby and I saw him grow up. And one day I went to the store and I wanted some oil put in my car and I told him, I said, "Go out there and check my oil," because he was a pretty good mechanic when he grew up. | 15:49 |
Ann S. Pointer | I called him by his name. I said, "Go out there and check my oil and put me some oil in and check my cooling system for me." He said, "All right," because he'd always do whatever. And she sat there, "Yes, do that, Mr. Kenny." That's what she said, talking at me through me. I said to myself, "You go straight to hell." That's what I said to myself. Because I wasn't one of her peers. I was just going to the store I was trading with. I stopped going to that store. I see him in town now a lot, he stopped and talked to me. He know my mother died and my sister and all, he asked me about it because he used to come over here and everything. The kids are sweet, but the parents have indoctrinated them. | 16:38 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now as a young lady, I feel sorry for her. I knew both of them when they were kids, her and her husband both. They have two children, but her daddy is indoctrinated and he indoctrinated her not to let those children go to school with any Blacks at all. Her husband said to her, he said, "Let me tell you something. These are our children and that's a school right up the street. She'll go there wherever you want to take her, it'll be at your expense. And you'll have to pay for it and you'll have to transport her, because I'm not going to haul her one minute, I'm not going to pay one dime." | 17:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I believe that's going to result into a divorce because she can not hardly run the road like that with that child, but her daddy demands that she do it. But her husband said she's supposed to answer. When you're married, he said, "Forsake all others." But he came right here Christmas day and sat right in that chair right there and he's sitting down with his legs crossed and he was saying, "Go to it. I ain't paying a penny and I ain't going to drive a minute." He ain't done it. And it's been two or three years, he ain't set a foot at it. And that keep up a friction between them and she has just gone down. Come on in, come on in. Hey, what'd you want, baby? | 18:01 |
Speaker 1 | I want [indistinct 00:18:44] | 18:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Pointer, a couple nights ago after we stopped doing the interview, you were telling me about cases of violence against Black people in 1940s here. | 18:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | There's a lot of it. And it would always be something in connection about farmland or a job, or something like that where this person had got to be a yo-yo to them. They call them a yo-yo when they don't do what they say. Or some woman that, if they start going with a woman and they would tell her not to keep coming with anybody else and this man keep coming, that man going to end up in a creek somewhere, kill him. You ain't going to know the death he died. And that's the reason why if a woman start messing with a White man, they'll tell you right straight said, "Leave her off, because that's a White man's woman, don't bother her at all." And she's an outcast then because they tell everybody about her and especially the men folk. And once he drop her, then she can't get a fellow nor her. | 19:05 |
Ann S. Pointer | Once that other friend drop her, ain't nobody else going to pay her any mind. There was a girl from here, she went away to school up in Washington DC and she met a guy from Czechoslovakia and when she was a freshman and she kept coming with him, the whole four years that she was away in school and she brought him to Tuskegee and her mother and father, she was an adopted child, thought that she was going to marry the guy because I think she was wearing his ring and everything. When graduation came, he told her he had to go to Czechoslovakia, but he would be back. And he went to Czechoslovakia and she hadn't seen him since, and she lost her mind because no other fellow would even look her way. You get me what I'm saying? | 20:01 |
Ann S. Pointer | And that girl chased around here until one day they found her dead in her apartment. She just died after so many years. That was her plight in life. They certainly would put a reprisal on you by not socially involving you when they know you got a strange lifestyle. And back sometime ago, it was a wise thing to abstain from socializing with people who was, they called it across the line, because you didn't know what they would do to you. And there was no law against it because anything the man did to you, you didn't have nobody to tell because you tell the law about it, that could be his brother or cousin or friend or something. You just messed up. | 20:46 |
Paul Ortiz | Macon County? | 21:28 |
Ann S. Pointer | That was everywhere. Shoot, who could you tell? You go and report it, just like I told you about the goose. Everything up there is foxes and you just will stay where you are, because you mess around and get yourself some time, messing around there with these people. And a man, once his wife was expecting and he said he didn't allow no woman to curse at him, and somehow or another she cursed at him. That's what my grandmother told me. And he went out in the yard, just broke a little keen switch like you break a switch for a baby. And she was cooking for the man, talking about that was her husband, and he cut her around the legs with that switch. | 21:29 |
Ann S. Pointer | She didn't stop running until she ran to the man's house and told him that her husband attacked her and whipped her with a switch. The man went right straight downtown and told his colleagues, "Go issue a warrant for him." She went and issued a warrant for him. Now, you know it wasn't nothing for him to be sent up, but they sent him to the coal mine for it. And said, "How many times did he hit you?" Say, "He hit me five times," they gave him five years. Did you hear me? Give him five years because the man said something. And therefore, don't you know everybody was afraid to come onto that man and knowing what power he had? Unless they come on to him to kill him, because there have been many that went down. | 22:11 |
Ann S. Pointer | I mean, there's been some folks, they got too oppressed and they killed him. Many times that's been done. And you never know what's on a man's mind. You can put him through something so bad until he will get ready to kill you. But now, when you kill a man like that, kill the man, you know what's going to be your end. Now, a friend of mine was over in Georgia in Troop County. This man was really wrong and this man that told me about it, this happened in the '70s and it was his cousin, but he was keeping company with me because I stayed separated and divorced for 15 years before I remarried. | 22:54 |
Ann S. Pointer | Me and my husband were separated and divorced. I didn't marry until my children were out of college and working. I was not going to have any situations about my children and this guy was keeping coming with me. In fact, he wanted to marry me, but I wasn't wanting to get married at that time. And so he told me he went to Georgia to see this man and I said, "What did he do, the reason why he's in jail?" And he told me, he said he had a big farm and the fences, they had a fence separating the farms. And this White fella went there one night and got him another hand to help him move this man's fence over six feet. | 23:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | It took part of his watering ground and the fresh dirt and everything was that way, he moved it. But little Lee went there and asked him, he said, "Why did you move my post like this?" He said, "Well, this is my property." He said, "That's my stake right there and I didn't put it there. The surveyor put it there years ago, that iron stake." Said, "We'll go downtown." The man came out and told the man, said, "You got to move your fence because that's not you, you on his property. You did that because of the watering hole, but you're going to have to get permission from him that y'all can water in the same hole, but you don't move his fences." The law told him that. And so he went back there and I think little Lee went to move the fence back or whatnot and him and the man got into it. | 24:24 |
Ann S. Pointer | The man ran, little Lee had a shotgun. This man ran to his car to get a shotgun and little Lee dropped him, killed him right there on the fence. Everybody knew the man was wrong, but they told little Lee, he said, "Little Lee, you know how it is over here. You killed a White man so you going to have to go. We ain't going to send you penitentiary, we going to let you serve your year out in jail." He was a young man, he was 40 something years old. And so when Joe went over there, he told me about it. "Joe," I said, "Little Lee, if he get out, he ain't going to live." He said, "Why you say that?" I said, "They going to poison him in jail. He going to die of arsenic poison and they're not going to have no post over him or nothing." | 25:09 |
Ann S. Pointer | He said [indistinct 00:25:51] I said, "All right, you'll see." He stayed in jail a year. He started getting sick before he got out of jail and he wasn't out of jail six weeks before he was dead. And Joe came to me, he said, "Ann." I said, "Y'all going to do an autopsy?" He said, "They've already buried him." I said, "Why did they bury him so quick?" I said, "They buried him to keep an autopsy from being done, he's died of arsenic poisoning." I said, "Even years to come, they can still dig up his bones and find arsenic, because when a man go to jail like that and they can't prosecute him because you kill a White man, right now, they might tell you, you going to lay it out in jail, but they're going to poison you little by little and you going to leave this world one way or another." Now, that's true. | 25:50 |
Ann S. Pointer | I knew that already and I told him that and he said, "How did you know?" I said, "My father told me," because he had been to prison and he said there was guys in there had done crimes against a man and they act like they're treating them real good, but those guys didn't leave out there because they poisoned them to death, kill them. It's an old story but it's true. It sounds so farfetched. It sounds like a fairytale, but it is so true. And you just don't know. My husband came from a county that was worse than this, Wilcox was worse than Macon. And he told me they owned a lot of property down there in Wilcox County, but his daddy—It was a wise thing for you, if you own property in order for you to keep it, you better rent something from the man because if you think you a big wheel and owner and a whole lot, you're going to miss try to lose it all. It's some kind of deal. | 26:34 |
Ann S. Pointer | So they owned their own land, but they was renting, living on the man's place and let that place just go. All of them was doing it. I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever seen in my life, but that's the way they had to live. And he said up the road from him, there was a man was going to his boss man, borrowing money. And he borrowed some money, the man told him, said, "I want you to bring my money back here Friday." He said, "Yes, I'll bring it back to you Friday." So when he got there, his man wasn't there and he told his wife, said, "I was supposed to give your husband some money, will you take it from me?" "Yeah, I'll take it." | 27:39 |
Ann S. Pointer | He gave it to her, didn't give him no receipt or anything and he went on out. And so when he went up there the next day or whatnot, that man told him, he was about drunk, said, "Where's my money?" He said, "I gave it to your wife Friday, like I said." He called her, Lida May, did he give you money?" "No, he didn't give it to me." He said, "I told you I was going to kill you if you didn't give me my money." He said, "Well miss, I gave it to you Friday." "No you didn't give it to me." | 28:10 |
Ann S. Pointer | And the man got his gun to kill him and he said, "First of all, before I kill you, you don't dispute my wife, you don't dispute her word. You say you gave it to her, now you better change that." He said, "Back it goes, back it goes," that's what he said. And the man leveled down, going to shoot the man, his wife said, "Oh, I remember he did come here and bring me the money when he left by there." Fixing to shoot him. Then she remembered that he gave it to her, but if she hadn't said that, he was going to kill him right there. | 28:39 |
Ann S. Pointer | And then they lynched a man down there in Wilcox County. I have been down there and they have two courthouses in Camden, because this man told them, said, "If you kill me for this," they hung him right out there in the square. He said, "If you kill me for this and I didn't do it," somebody else had done the crime and he did not. He said, "Well, you'll always remember because my face, my picture would be on those windows at some time or another," and they killed him anyway. And honey, in the courthouse, they could be sitting there and the image of that man's face would be in that window. They replaced the windows but they still do that, so they have moved the courthouse. They got that old courthouse and they got new one, got one there and one here. I've been there and saw it. | 29:13 |
Paul Ortiz | There's two courthouses in the county? | 29:57 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yeah. And that man, it's been so many cases. My brother lived in Perry County, Florida. He went down there seeking work. My brother died in '78, but he worked in Perry County, I mean in Taylor County, pardon me, Taylor County, Florida. And if you go to Taylor County right now, they got a lot of unpaved roads because they're on a federal order. That's the reason they got the paved roads and the schools are in good shape. And he said that they killed a man and this White man had done this, but he put it on this Black fella and they hung him right there in the square. And then when they hung him, they shot him to rivets. Just put his body there and shot him into pieces. And before killed him they said, "You have any last words you'd like to say before we kill you?" | 30:04 |
Ann S. Pointer | He said, "Well, one thing. I can't say nothing." He was looking at the clock there in the courthouse. He said, "This clock will never strike true. If you do this to me, you'll know it. But that clock will never strike right ever again." He said he laid in his bed midnight and heard that clock strike 13 o'clock, 14 o'clock, anything. Clock never did and replaced the clock and done everything and still strike any kind of way. But there was a girl, what happened, a girl 11 years old was walking to the shore, a White girl. And somebody cut her throat and left her in a ditch dead, but a White man did it and raped her. And this Black man passed on there and found her and he went and told him about it, she was up there. And they got him, see, and he just went and reported it. | 30:47 |
Ann S. Pointer | That's the reason why when you see something you better keep going, because if they can't find nobody, they put that on you. Honey, no matter how bad it is, you better send word about it. You better not go up there and report it because they'll say, "What were you doing there? You probably did it yourself." And then you in there. And my cousin got put out of town in Tuskegee, right downtown, this same little Tuskegee, but God able us to live to see. The woman that caused it come to a fatal end. He was sitting down, you know men, you sit on the street in the window like that. He and another man was just sitting down there like this on the street, talking. And she was much of a young woman then, was in the fall of the year and they had these big chrysanthemums. And she had a handful and she passed by him and dropped one. | 31:31 |
Ann S. Pointer | They were expensive. He said, "Miss, you dropped your flower," just like that. She ran around there and told the man he called her honey. And next thing he knew, that was a sheriff coming up to him and said, "Ben, what you mean around here calling that White woman honey?" He said, "Calling her honey? I haven't called her anything." Said, "Don't you dispute her word." That's what you couldn't do, you couldn't dispute the word. "Don't you dispute her word?" He said, "Well sir," he raised his hand to God. He said, "This man can tell you, I said, 'Miss, you dropped your flower." They said, "Come on." They kept Ben and put him in jail, it's my cousin. They put Ben in jail and it looked such a scandalous, they kept him in jail about 30 days and told him, "Ben, you get out of town, you can't live in Tuskegee no more." | 32:21 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he had go to Montgomery. He never did live here anymore, he went to Montgomery. He couldn't stay at home with his family, he had to leave here. And that doggone woman, I'm telling you to death, she died, shouldn't have happened to a snake. Her and two more women was in a house up here in Tuskegee and see, they was drunk as anyhow. And they said that one of them was a pharmacist and she was getting drugs for these guys, a lot of drug use was around here. And they went in there and chopped them to pieces with a hoe, just a yard hoe. They just chopped her flesh out and three of them in there, beat the hell out of them and killed them with hoes. All of them died. And see, that wasn't done for anything and one of them had an adopted son. | 33:13 |
Ann S. Pointer | I'm not saying they say that he knew something about this, I don't want my name in it because the same thing happened to them could happen to me. But I know one thing, they said that they accused another fella of it, they put him in jail. And the one that they found his track in the blood and that he was barefooted in there and they found his track in the blood, they found him dead down on the street and said a car ran over him. But there was no blood on the scene, he'd been killed somewhere else and put there. The guy that really did the killing, the man they had was not a murderer. He was a rogue but not a murderer. I knew the guy. They sent him off for five years for it and while he was in jail, he didn't go off right then. While he was in jail, somebody broke him out of jail and the guy that run a cafe up there said there was a White Cadillac there, waiting on him. | 34:06 |
Ann S. Pointer | He got in that Cadillac and he stayed away from here five years. And then before they found him, he was dressed like a woman in Atlanta when they found him sitting on the street, reading the newspaper. Somebody recognized him and they brought him back here and sentenced him to five years and he made five years, but he no more killed him than you did. That boy that did the killing, somebody killed him because he killed him for the money. And somebody killed him and brought his body down there and put him on Holland Avenue and left his body there, and claimed like he got run over. But wasn't a bit of blood in the road there. | 35:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | They had had some real investigators, they could have found it, but they just didn't care. But only thing I know, four people are dead and they don't know yet who was the killer. Right there in town, it was the worst thing good. But one of them women was the woman that called my cousin, have to leave town. Said he called her honey. And I know Ben wouldn't have called her honey if she'd have had a bees over her head. He said, "Miss, you dropped your flower." And she said he called her honey. And he never did lived back with me. He lived in Montgomery, then he went on to Cleveland and that's where he died. Never could live in the county, on account of a lie. | 35:33 |
Ann S. Pointer | And a White man, Black man say something to a White woman and she tell a lie and say, honey, he going to get his neck broke or go to jail on her word. That's right. And it has happened not only here, it has happened other places because they had their way and their say. And whatever they said, if they was for you, everything is fine. But if they was against you, you in trouble wall to wall. That is right. And if you wanted to keep peace, you stay in with ole misses, because she was the one going to blow the whistle and cause you to make some time to get killed one with a lie. If it was a true or a lie, whatever she said went, or they're going to take her word for it and you was going up the river, too. A lot of them going up the river. | 36:15 |
Ann S. Pointer | My uncle made two years and two days on account of a lie. He was drunk, he was a public drunkard. Everybody knew him, they knew it themselves. And this guy that put him in a taxi, he was in a taxi downtown and he wanted to go to my sister's house, that's where he wanted to go. And the house he went to was a house just like my sister's. By him being drunk, the man put him out in town rather than bring him on out in the country. And he got out and walked and opened this door, and went in there and sat down in the living room. He was not a sexual offender or nothing like that. I knew that myself. And she walked in and told him, said, "What are you doing in here?" And he said, "Well miss, I thought my niece live here." | 37:04 |
Ann S. Pointer | She said, "You sit right there, don't you move." And she called the sheriff. The sheriff came there and got him. "Joe, what you doing in here?" He said, "Well, I thought this [indistinct 00:37:57] house. This aint her house? "You know this is not [indistinct 00:38:01] house. What are you doing in this White woman's house?" Honey, and they put him in jail. My grandmother got a lawyer and everything—This was in the '40s and they knew he was harmless, he was nothing. And then the lawyer they got done and paid him all that money. Guess what he told my grandmother? He said, "Now let me tell you something bad, the reason why I can't do much, [indistinct 00:38:27] is going to give me the devil about him going in that White woman's house. He got to go, he ain't going to stay that long." | 37:47 |
Ann S. Pointer | Done got her money then. They said he made them two years and two days down at [indistinct 00:38:40] prison, just called this woman, say he did it. Say he went in her house. It was in the summertime and he used to go to my sister's house and just walk in and be up there. And he made them two years. I thought it was so cruel, but it happened. And the money they paid, I knew then, I was just a girl I knew then he was going off. I told mama, I said, "I wouldn't get no lawyer because they going to set him off anyway, because he went in that woman's house and we didn't do anything." And she told him if he had have been violent when she run and told him sit down, he'd run out the door, wouldn't he? He was so [indistinct 00:39:19] and afraid of her. He said, "Yes, ma'am." Just sit down there in the chair until she called the law. | 38:33 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, if he had meant any harm, he'd have run out of there. A real lawyer could have beat the case, you see? But he didn't have no lawyer because all of them was foxes. It ain't funny now, it brought a lot of tears. But this happened and these dirty things that happened like that, it was cruel, but it has happened now. And in the judgment, they all going to have to stand judgment. They don't believe in the judgment, but I do. The things you've done in this body, you're going to have to answer to it. The dirty things that people have done, don't you know, I don't believe God would let them just by with that. You got the face up to some of these people you've done these injustices to. | 39:26 |
Ann S. Pointer | I always felt like that's the reason I always live. I'm afraid of how I treat people because I'm afraid in the end, I don't want them to open a book on me that I have done anybody wrong. I'm afraid of what God will do, because I know He can make a difference with these things. And I've tried my best not to get involved in anything that's going to cause anybody any trouble. Because if I get away with it on earth, I can't get away from God and He put the punishment on me. That's the way I live and that's the way I was brought up to live. And my mother always said, "You just be mindful because you got to give an account in judgment one day." | 40:07 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I believe that strongly, the preacher was preaching about it this morning. You got to give an account in the judgment one of these days. But if these people I see on the tombstones, they got angels over their grave and got so much over the grave, I said to myself, I said, "Lord, Lord, lord." And one man's up there in formaldehyde, you can go down and look at him. John Drakeford, they got him a southern gentleman in formaldehyde and you can go there under, I guess you have to get permission to do it and open up another. And somebody asked me, I said, "I don't want to see John Drakeford nowhere. What in the world I be looking for John Drakeford for?" Come in, please. | 40:50 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well, that is the plight of the tenant and the man and the sharecropper and the man. And that's what, when you say sharecropper and the man, you haven't got nothing. If I was going to be the landowner and the house owner where you live and you didn't have anything, you got married, you don't have a stove, you don't have a bed, you don't have anything, you come to me and say you want to work for me as a sharecropper and a wage hand. And I said, "Well, have you done this before?" Yes. I tell you what I want done. Well, if you don't have anything, you're going to work diligently to try to seek my face and seek good with me. I give you a place to stay, I'm going to help you get enough furniture, a stove and a bed and something for you and your wife to live comfortably. | 41:40 |
Ann S. Pointer | You might have a baby and you haven't made any money, but your wife got to still be attended to. You looking to me to help you with this. Okay, I'm going to help you with it, but you're going to work hard to pay me back. And if the birth of your child costs $25 and I tell you it costs $100, now, that's when we start doing wrong. I would be treating you wrong, you see what I'm talking about? If I said, "Well, all right Paul, it's going to charge $25 for a doctor to deliver your baby, but I'm going to have to charge you $35 because I got to go get him. You ain't got no car and I got to do this, do that. So it'll be $35, rather than $25," you'll know how much you paying on, you see what I'm talking about? | 42:27 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, there have been some landowners have treated their tenant right. All of them have not been dirty. There were some who really treated their tenants right and give them a chance to buy a place and all of that. But that is one out of 100 who would do that, one out of 100. But there have been some good land owners. Now, those Huddlestons in Tuskegee, my grandmother told me they were some fair people. The Huddlestons, and Tip Huddleston was the sheriff. But my grandmother had worked for them and she said that they were fair. When I say fair, they treated you right. And I noticed the Huddleston's grandson and I worked together, he died last year. He was as good a person you want to see. | 43:05 |
Ann S. Pointer | I mean, he believed in fair treatment and he got that from the old head. And you ever hear them say chip off the old block smells of the timber, that's what it means. If you off of a block that mean cruelty, you can't get it all out of you. There are people I know right now, people I know real well, but they had people with faults and those children, even the great great grands got the same tendencies. And if they can to that family, I would've told my children, I said, "Be sure you be careful of them because I know where they came from." | 43:56 |
Ann S. Pointer | And sure enough, they got those same tendencies, but you know about it and you try to let them walk around them. And the same thing about these landowners. You knew the ones who would treat you fair, you knew the ones who would do you in. And people tried to get with the best ones, that's the reason why a lot of them had so many tenants, because you might go to them and say, "Ms. So-and-so, I don't have nowhere to stay and I want to work for you." He said, "I ain't got no house, but can you wait for a few days? I can build you a house." And they going to throw you up some kind of house for you to get in and you going to work there. All of them wasn't like that, but that was some that was good, treated their attendance fairly. And they still liked one another and they got along. | 44:32 |
Ann S. Pointer | But there was some who really didn't do them right at all. And just like that man in that formaldehyde up there, I said I never worked for him, but I had friends that did. When I say friends, older people that worked and he did them in and I don't want to see him. I said, "I didn't want to see him, living or dead." And now if he's in formaldehyde, let them go by who wanted to look at him. Because far as I'm concerned—But the man from what I see, he had Alzheimer's before he died. | 45:17 |
Ann S. Pointer | His mind had gone and that's why he did a lot of bad stuff. But all before, this man had worked on his place and seemed to have thrived, but when he got in that shape he carried every year, no matter how many bales of cotton, if you have a seven horse farm, you might make 40 or 50 bales of cotton and you don't gin, you don't go and sell none of it. You take all of your slips and put them together. And when you finish gathering, you take them to the landowner and then he count out your bales and see what you— | 45:48 |
Ann S. Pointer | You let 40, 50 bills of cotton get out money, you like that, and you ain't got nothing to go on like that. A man tap your paper and throw them in the fire. And then he still own it, you see? And his wife knew this. That's the reason I said she could have helped him. | 0:01 |
Ann S. Pointer | But these people lived, and, see, before that time there had been others that it did even worse. And before my time because my father could tell me. Oh, he told me so much about things. Good Lord. | 0:17 |
Ann S. Pointer | And then other people left and came here away from that place in Georgia and other counties because of running away from the man. And they never would go back. They were trying to escape the man. And then they would come and say, "We going to be friends." They might live way near South Carolina and Georgia. And they'd come over here and get acquainted. Say, "We get acquainted, and we'll be friends because your boy might get in trouble. He can come to me. If one of my boys get in trouble, they can hide here." See? And they had that type of bond. "It was a man came here and told Mama that," he said. "I live way there, but you have my address. If anything happened over here, you can always send them to me. If any of my boys get into it, I can send them over here to you. Hide them until things blow over." And that's the way they did. And they hid from place to place like that. | 0:33 |
Ann S. Pointer | And slavery was over, but I'm saying these things are present. But the people have tried to own their own places. I mean, this flowery bunch coming along now are not doing much about it, but everybody worked. If they didn't have but one room, so long say, "Well, this one room belonged to me." Can't nobody come here and say, "Get out, or come out of here. It's mine." And everybody worked to get them a shelter to avoid that man. They didn't want no dealings with the man. | 1:28 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I know I don't want no dealings with the man, what I said, because it would be dangerous for me to fool with the man. Now, you what I'm saying? Even when my children, I couldn't stood the man. I wouldn't let him come and told my children, "You can't go to school because you're going to be in my field," or something like that. I wouldn't have stood for it. Nuh-uh. But there have been many had to. | 2:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | It's a rough call, Paul, but it's true. And as you know, the trains—They had—Everything they had, they had to have two. They called it separate but equal for facilities, but it was not. If you got a drink of water, they had for White only up here. For Colored over here. That's where they'd put it because their fountains side by side that you dare not go over there to get a drink of water. And down at the train station, they had a sitting room for the White, a sitting room for the Black, a waiting room, and you didn't set a foot in there. | 2:29 |
Ann S. Pointer | And on the trains you paid the same fare, but you rode in the front of the train when there's burning coal, and they rode in the back where all the smut and things could get on you. You get where you're going. You look like you've been riding on top because they didn't have no air conditioning. You had to ride with the windows up. And you rolled up near the engine and on the bus, on the Greyhound bus. That happened while— | 3:10 |
Ann S. Pointer | That just changed here a few years back. You get on a bus. "I don't care what you paid or where you going," the driver said. "Take that long seat in the back that was on the motor, and you sit back there." If the bus got real crowded, you had to stand up if you was going anywhere. And that's the way you rode on that backseat. And, well, they didn't give but just that long backseat and two seats, others for Blacks, and you rode if there was room. If not, you didn't go. Now, that's happened right here. And on the train, they had you in one part. And if you wanted to go to the dining car, they'd bring you—You order it, and the porter on the train would bring you your sandwich or something if you had to get a sandwich from the dining car because they didn't allow you in the dining room on the train. Even though you paid the same fare, you weren't allowed to go in there. | 3:35 |
Ann S. Pointer | And when you get off—And the way they would do when they bring the train down there—If they had any White patrons to ride the train customers, the man went. And no matter if you had been there two hours, he would take all them on first. And then after he get through seating them, then they come and get you on. That's right. When you got to Washington, D.C., then you rode in any parts of the train you want to, but you might ride from New York to Washington. When you get ready to get that Piedmont to come down here, then you had to take a different coach. You didn't be in the same coach. | 4:38 |
Ann S. Pointer | But if they ran out of space in the White section, they would let them come up there in the Black. You'd have to move and let them come and sit in there. They'd make you get up and move. That's right. | 5:16 |
Ann S. Pointer | And in the courthouse, this is something else that really is on my heart. My grandmother had her little place down here. I told you about her son sort her having that place. She would get up in October, and I would walk to town with her to pay her taxes. I was schooled in Oakland until the middle of October. And I would walk into town with her. And she'd be the first one there in the courthouse at the tax office. And the man, the tax collector and assessor, all was in there. He knew my grandmother. He'd talk to her. "Hey, how you doing?" He'd be getting around getting this. She'd beat him there. He'd be getting his books and things down, and she'd be the first one down. He'd go, "All right, Clare. Let see what brought you here." He'd sit down and start writing in the book. Whatever he's writing up her taxes. | 5:29 |
Ann S. Pointer | A White man walk in later on. "Clare, [indistinct 00:06:26]. I'll be back to you in a minute." And she would sit there just about all day long to be the first one. Did you hear me? I saw that have more than one time. And I was a little girl, but I knew better because I'd have left out of there, but my grandmother was on me. She'd sit right there and tell her all around about four o'clock. "All right, Clare. Maybe we can finish up your little deal here now." Give her paper. She pay [indistinct 00:06:47]. | 6:20 |
Ann S. Pointer | Anything you go to do, you had to be the last on the list. That's been since I've been coming along. I don't care if you could be in a grocery line just like this. I'm in line, and you in line. And somebody, some White woman, come in. She could just walk right in, get in front of me, and go up there, and they wait on her, and you just wait until they get through with her. | 6:51 |
Ann S. Pointer | And they tried that up there in Opelika. A lady was in there. Had a basket of supplies in the store. This woman walked in and jumped in front of her and went on. The clerk took her, and she didn't say anything. She just shared that basket to the side and walked out the door. The manager saw it all. He came down. He said, "Wait a minute. Just a minute." And she said, "Well, that's all right." He said, "Well, this won't happen again," And he said, "because I'm fixing to get rid of this clerk right now." She said, "That's all right." She went and got in her car. Now, I said, that's exactly what I would've done. But, see, that's what this woman had been used to. Just walking in, jumping in front of you, going on about their business. | 7:15 |
Ann S. Pointer | They had a theater downtown. They had one for the Blacks and one for the White at one time. Then they had one. The old Rose theater. The White people sat downstairs, and the Black people sat up in the gallery or upstairs. You looked at the same film, but you had to be real quiet in there and sit upstairs, and they sat downstairs. Then, when they built the new theaters, they built one over here for the White and one over here for the Black. And you had a different ticket seller, and they had their own ticket seller. | 7:53 |
Ann S. Pointer | Everything was separate. You just didn't do anything. And in these stores, if a White woman working in the store, she could go in there if she working there and get her a dress out of there and wear it anywhere she want to wear it to and come back and hang it up in that store. And then you go there. And I saw a dress. I know I saw the older under arm and everything somebody had on. Supposed to be a brand new dress. They'll sell this to Black people anything. They had price for Blacks and price for White. I found that out the hard way. | 8:23 |
Ann S. Pointer | That woman I told you about used to come to my house all the time. One day I wanted the skirt. I was at work, and my skirt split on the side. I said, "Go over there, and get me a skirt." And I gave her $20 to get me a skirt. When she came back, she brought me the skirt and all this change back. I said, "Where'd you get it at?" And she told me. And she said, "This skirt wasn't a $7.50. They had tried to sell it to me for $19.95." See what I'm talking about? I said, "Eh, Lord, I know what do be on there." I send her to get my stuff. That's right. And they had a price, two prices, up under the cover in the grocery stores. | 8:52 |
Ann S. Pointer | It was the VA hospital. Those women come here. They looked just like White women, but they were Black women. And this woman went in store to buy some eggs. And the man had a tray of eggs sitting up on the top of the counter. And she went there and started picking them up. He thought she was a White woman. And she said, "How much are the eggs?" He looked at us, "Don't bother those eggs. Those eggs are for the niggers," and carried her back there and got her some fresh eggs out of back there. | 9:33 |
Ann S. Pointer | She came back and spread the word over there. She said, "Don't y'all go in that store no more." Said he got some stuff for Blacks and some for Whites. Don't go in there anymore. It just might ruin his business, but that's what they did, and that's how they have found out a lot of things that was going on because they got so many mulletas that look like they're White. They go on in these places unnoticed and find out what's going on, and they come back and tell it. You know what I'm— | 9:58 |
Ann S. Pointer | They even went to a Klan meeting, and that's how they find out what was going on. They have so many Blacks that look just like Whites. You couldn't tell them apart. And they get a chance to go to all these functions, and they come back and let you know what's going on. | 10:26 |
Ann S. Pointer | And all this stuff is nothing new. From the White House back, it has been—Back long time ago, you read the story of George Washington? Have you ever read the history of George Washington? Well, you know all of the workings then if you read that, if you read it entirety as I did. And Adam Clayton Powell had been in the White House as a representative as long as I've known myself, and he was a Black man. Nothing they did—He never was removed until he left himself because there was a writ there. See, you ever read Backstairs to the White House? See, you never know which one of them presidents was his daddy. Somebody up there, but they hadn't been told, but it's going to be told—And whoever he had that position until he died because it was something in the closet that nobody dare not touch. And there are a lot of things you never know why, but Adam Clayton Powell stayed there in that White house. He worked in that White House. | 10:43 |
Ann S. Pointer | Somebody said he was born in there. Why couldn't he work in there? You know what I mean? People say he was born in there. They don't know who his daddy was. They know all right, but they ain't told him. See, these things they do is all right. You know what I'm saying? | 11:51 |
Ann S. Pointer | And George Washington—They told of his mistresses he had. You read the stories. How many children did he have by them? You don't know. They didn't put that in there, but there were babies born. You don't know who babies they were. I'm saying all of this was under the rug, but still it happened. If it going to happen in the White House, it's going to happen in the capital of the states. It's going to happen in cities. | 12:11 |
Ann S. Pointer | Well, it's going to spread to the communities. It's all over the world. And you see people—I noticed there are some Black people that are multibillionaires. It didn't just happen by pulling a blind. There was some backing somewhere where they were left plenty of money by somebody. | 12:40 |
Ann S. Pointer | And a girl right here in Tuskegee right now—She's not a girl. She's a woman, and she's a White woman just sure as you a White man. See, I know this, and she knows it too now. But her people were filthy rich, and they had butlers and stable men, yard men, and everything right there in the state of Georgia. And the girl, her mother which was her mother, never act like she was courting or anything. She would always be riding horses and have these Black men helping her do this. And she came up pregnant. They thought so sure and certain that a Black person was the father of this child. And this lady died in childbirth a young woman. And as soon as the baby came, they didn't wait to see if it was Black or White. They put this baby out. Put this baby with a Black family to raise it. But they took care of the baby. | 13:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | And as she grew, they kept close check on her and the people they put her with. She told me, after she got big girl, nobody ever told her anything. Her name was whatever the people she lived with. That's the name that she would use. Her mother gave her a name, but her surname would be the name of the people she's living with. And she's an older woman than me. She said no matter—A lot of times she said the first thing she did when she got big enough—These people were drunkards that she was with. She ran away. She said she couldn't stand them because they would use that money up real fast, and then they would give them a sum of money to take care of her the whole month, but they'd drank it up in a week's time where the other three weeks she didn't have nothing. And they'd whip her and all that when they get mad. | 14:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | And so she ran away. And she said she got down on a trestle near church and hid there until they turned out of church. And she got with this preacher and his wife. And they kept her for a long time, but she didn't know anything about her benefactors, you see? But they watched her. And they found out where she was. And then they started giving this preacher and his wife money and things to take care of her. They sent her to school. They did everything. She got married. She had children. They took care. | 14:52 |
Ann S. Pointer | Now, all that whole family is dead now, but that writ is still there for that estate. They still take care of her. Now, that woman is 77 years old. She lives not far from here, but she doesn't work nowhere. She don't have to. But I said, "After you finished school, you could have found out." She said, "I wrote a letter. I got on the track of who they were, and I wrote a letter asking them to please let me know who they were," and said, "I got a response to the letter, but it said, 'Let sleeping dogs lie,' and had it underscored." And they took care of her children. And right now she gets a check every month and she from this estate, but no name is there, but they got some lawyer handling. It's a private affair. They would take care of her as long as she lived. | 15:24 |
Ann S. Pointer | After she's dead, her children and her children's children—They were multimillionaires, but they put her out without knowing whether she's White or Black. And she's sure White. Some White man was her daddy, but she said, "They said I'm Black, and I have to take that identity." But she's never seen her birth certificate or anything. | 16:11 |
Ann S. Pointer | And, see, those things existed. She lives right here in Main County. And she told me about her life. She said, "I don't know where they live and don't know where the place is because they've kept it anonymous, but I always get those checks, and I get them from a lawyer. But no matter where I go,"—She said she lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She thought she could get away from them. They found her and because money talks. | 16:32 |
Ann S. Pointer | But those are the type of things that we have been subjected to through the years. Whatever the man thought, that's the way it went. And if they like you, well, then fine. If they don't like you, well, too bad. When I said when the city was White, it's certain people they could dance. Oh, so-and-so is all right. That was that word. Then you got your way about what you wanted to do. But if somebody put the Black mouth on you, buddy, you in trouble. You know what I'm saying? All the way around. And anything you do, if you was right or wrong, if you went up and they found out it was you—"They probably doing so-and-so-and-so. Oh, don't pay that any mind. Just go on. Don't pay that no mind." And that other person out there—They're going to catch hell because the man is in your corner. See? | 17:04 |
Ann S. Pointer | I don't like that kind of double standards at all. I like for everybody to be treated like peas in a can. If you going to give me 20 cents, give you 20 cents too. We going to go out and have the same, but it ain't like that. And with the Blacks, it's the same. They are partial toward one another too for different reasons. It's just the world. I don't understand it, but it's just the world. From the church to the community to the school, everywhere they show differences. You know that. When you were going to school, weren't there differences? There was some that the teacher looked like took to better than they did others. That's the way it was. | 18:02 |
Ann S. Pointer | We had a class reunion and somebody made a statement. "Oh, that's all right. You all were always the teacher's pet anyway." That's what they said. All these years they have had that in their mind. And because if you—I told you about the brain. If you got a pretty good brain, a teacher will take to you a little more and try to give you extra things to do to try to help you cultivate that knowledge. And the other children would think you were the teacher's pet. Oh, you had long braids and your mother used to dress you cute. And the teachers all liked you. All that kind of stuff. They'd say all this. They liked the girls that had the long braids. All that kind of stuff. They would say things like that. And even 36 years later they came up with something like that. A fly came here. I guess those kids let him in. | 18:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | But all of these things are present right on us. And you know, Paul, I tell you this. You have a long way to go. You're not married yet, are you? Well, you got a long way to go in getting married and raising a family. You can remember these things. If you have two children, and you know both of them had the same mother and father, they have different concepts on life, and you can't make them both be the same. I don't care what you do because they are not your children to own. That's the way they had to get in the world. They passed through you, but you give them a different name because they're a different individual. They have different fingerprints. They have a different mind. | 19:37 |
Ann S. Pointer | And I've known people to punish their children because they wouldn't do what the sister had done before, but they couldn't. They were two different personalities. And it's like my sisters—My one sister and my four brothers. We all were different people. The only thing we had in common was the favor of our parents. Everybody knew us. They say they knew every one of us by our eyes, but we all had a different outlook on life. My sister—If you went in her house and came in mine, we'd be perfect strangers but looked like we were raised under the same roof. We would do things alike, but it was a different story. | 20:15 |
Ann S. Pointer | It's just like that. And everybody went in their separate ways. And you'd be surprised at the occupations they chose from one to other. Everybody had a different—And my three children. I said, now, and I knew what I wanted them to do. You know what I mean? I told them. I said, "I would like for—Yvonne, I would like for you to be the senior English teacher in the high school." They offered her the position, but she didn't accept it. | 20:52 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my youngest son. I wanted him to be the principal at Chisholm Elementary. I mean the middle school. He would've made a beautiful principal because he loved children. And my oldest son. I want him to take industrial engineering and work on cars and be things like that. Nuh-uh. Everybody went in a different direction. But so long as they making honest living. But I'm saying they had different personalities. | 21:16 |
Ann S. Pointer | And right now when we meet on our vacations for Christmas and we go on vacation together and when we go down to Gulf Shores on vacation—I didn't go this year with them because my brother was ill, but when we go down on vacation, I just sit back and look. They all have a different idea about everything. If they're going to have a meal, "Well, I think we like it this way or that way." I said, "Well, why don't you do this? Everybody put it on the table and then eat what you want because," I said, "All of you used to eat the same thing," because when I cook one meal, everybody ate the same or didn't get nothing. We laugh, but they have a different outlook on life than what I had. They just don't look at things the way I did, and I'm glad they don't. | 21:43 |
Ann S. Pointer | And when you get your family, you remember this. If you have two children or 10, don't you think that they're all going to follow. Nuh-uh. They're going to scatter like chickens. And you have one thinking this. One thinking that. And when you going to say, "Where did these children come from?" That's where you would say, "Well, what are they about?" | 22:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | That's like my baby is a collector of Black memorabilia. Who did he see collecting it? Not me. He collects antiques. That's a hobby of his. And I threw away more things he could have sold than he'll ever collect from the hand-me-downs. Things I despised because I had had them all my days, and I hated them. I sat them outside. Could have got good money for him. A brass bed. You know what a cost of a brass bed is? Shoot, I didn't want that brass bed. I had seen it all my life, and I had despised it. And so, it got away. There were other things. There was a lot of things I kept, and he was able to— | 22:50 |
Ann S. Pointer | It was a little old doorstop I had. It was just a little old doorstop, but it was heavy. It could be used for a bank. And he said, "Mama, that's an antique. That thing's over 100 years old. I said, "I know it is." I said, "I ain't got [indistinct 00:23:46] in this door, and I don't really need a doorstop in here." He said, "Let me have it appraised." I said, "You carry it right on." When he carried that thing in Atlanta, a man offered him $500 for it. I got it from some White people. It was a thing that somebody gave it to me. | 23:32 |
Ann S. Pointer | And then I had a little old pocketbook a lady gave me. It was about this little. Had a little chain on it. And I told him. I said, "You better carry this little pocketbook away from me because somebody might get over to it and throw it in the trash, and it may be me." He carried that pocketbook up there. They gave him $150 for it. It was worth more than that. This woman I told you used to visit me gave it to me, and it was a little evening bag, but all those little things I didn't care. And he had carried many things from here. | 24:03 |
Ann S. Pointer | And my mother had a little box. Called it little dancing man. You could wind it up. And it was the vaudeville-type thing. This man had his lips painted white and dancing on about. He would wind it up, and he would dance, but Mama would set it up and let children see him dance. And Alvin saw it. My son saw it in her house. He had been seeing it since he was a little boy because she had it when he was a baby. | 24:35 |
Ann S. Pointer | And he said, "What did mama pay for that box?" I said, "She paid $1.98 for it up there at the hardware." He said—And mama was living then. He said, "I wish I could take it and have it appraised." He said, "You could bring it back." I said, "I'd have to slip and get it out of there," but I slipped over there and got it from Mama's house and gave it to him to take it Atlanta. And you see they don't allow them to make those type of things anymore depicting no particular race. And the man offered him $500 for it. He told me, "It's not mine. Said it belongs to my grandmother." And so he brought it back. [indistinct 00:25:33] I put that on. [indistinct 00:25:36]. | 24:57 |
Ann S. Pointer | Everybody had a cow or some cows. They did their own milk. They had hogs. They slaughtered the hogs. They had chickens for their eggs, and they had gardens to grow their vegetables, and they had corn, and they grind the meal from the corn and cane and made their own syrup. | 25:40 |
Paul Ortiz | Even in the '60s? | 25:57 |
Ann S. Pointer | Yes, we got cane out there now. And there are people that grind and make syrup right now. And if I have enough, that's what I'll do with mine. I know a man's got a meal, and I can carry that here and make mine. But some people—My friend had hers done year before last, and everybody had their own syrup, their meat, and shortening, vegetables, eggs, chicken, and milk and butter. I did not know I was going to high school, and I did not know that they sold such [indistinct 00:26:34] town because we never bought nothing like that. We had [indistinct 00:26:40] that. | 26:00 |
Ann S. Pointer | I didn't know they sold butter and eggs in town because I had never been to town to buy anything like that and meat and shortening and all that. My mother had cans upon cans of it out there. And then that little house out there—She just had hams and bacon and just hanging up there. And we just went out there and got our meat. When we wanted bacon, we went out there and got it. Ham or whatever. And chickens. Eggs. We had too many eggs. And milk. She got plenty of butter. And we had milk and butter and things like that and all that we could use of it. | 26:44 |
Ann S. Pointer | And everybody out here had it. And you see, if my mother's cow went dry, well, the lady down the street—Her cow probably was fresh, and Mama could get milk and butter from her, and she didn't have to pay for it. She just give her milk and butter because, when her cow go back, go dry, Mama's probably freshening, and she give it to her, and they just pass stuff around like that. You didn't buy nothing. | 27:26 |
Ann S. Pointer | And if you got greens in your garden—Somebody said, "My greens are not doing good. The bugs eat at my green." "Come and get you some greens." And they ate greens out of our garden of beans and peas. And when we didn't have any, we just go next door and get you some and didn't have to cost you nothing. I go across the road or anywhere and anybody—People live way up there and say, "I heard you had a plenty of peas." Mama say, "Yeah, I got plenty of them." They'd come and go out there and get them a second and pick all they want, and there was no charge. You see what I'm talking about? | 27:50 |
Ann S. Pointer | And everybody around here had a little garden. They had their own farm animals and everything. And people were living good. And they wasn't—You go to town. Your grocery wasn't that much because we only bought coffee, sugar, flour, and stuff like that. All the rest of it we already had. And beef and stuff like that. Mama buying cheese. But all the other vegetables and stuff, tomatoes, corn, okra, peas, butter beans, greens, cucumbers, and everything you wanted. Look, eggplants. It's everything. They raised it all. And all these folks around here was raised and just had plenty. These bell peppers just had them to throw away. And now they cost you a dollar a piece if you get a bell pepper. | 28:22 |
Ann S. Pointer | But it's like, right now, my husband got a garden. He got everything in there. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. He picked a bushel of cucumbers the other day. I'm not going to make any pickle or anything, but I could if I wanted to. I used to, but I don't. The children are not here, and I don't bother with it. You just play one or two hills of cucumbers. You have all you want. Eggplant, okra, tomatoes, corn, all kind of greens from cabbage on back. We had to give away the cabbage. We had had too many cabbage. Just those—And I don't make any slaw or nothing now. Not myself. Just two of us. We can't use all that stuff. And I give it to the people. | 29:13 |
Ann S. Pointer | But these folks don't do nothing. They're lazy as all get out. They don't raise—These folks around here don't raise anything. Nothing but a lot of noise and fuss. I give them greens and peas and corn and tomatoes or whatever here. I tell them to come in and get it because they're not raising anything. Everybody now just buying what they want from the store. They got money. | 29:53 |
Ann S. Pointer | But vegetables and stuff—I haven't had to buy any vegetables in years and years because I put it in the freezer. Unless I just want to get me a stock of celery or something, but I never grew any celery, but I could. I just haven't bothered with it. But carrots and radishes and all that kind of stuff—We've had plenty of that. And I take it and put it in the freezer and jars and use it in the winter. That bell pepper. I take that and fix it for the freezer and just put it in a hole and bag. It's the way you do it. And when I get ready for it all, I to go to the freezer and get it because it's $1 piece in the store. Hot pepper is worse than that. It's a dollar—Nearly $2.79 a pound for a hot pepper. And so did you live in the country or did you live in the city? In Washington? | 30:21 |
Paul Ortiz | City. | 31:11 |
Ann S. Pointer | You don't know nothing about the country. What was that eruption near your home when that volcano erupted and all the ash they talking about fell? | 31:11 |
Paul Ortiz | It's a bit further south. Mount St. Helens. | 31:23 |
Ann S. Pointer | It wasn't near you? | 31:28 |
Paul Ortiz | No, but we got ash. | 31:30 |
Ann S. Pointer | That's what they said. It was ashes blew everywhere. I thought about that. I said, "My Lord." But now that volcano may do it again. They said won't do it in years and years. Well, all right then. Well, it's been quite a pleasure meeting you. And be sure to take my name and address because I want you to send me back that material. | 31:33 |
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