Annie Foreman interview recording, 1993 July 01
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Annie Foreman | —In a little place you call Rainbow. | 0:01 |
Kara Miles | Rainbow? | 0:03 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-hmm. | 0:06 |
Kara Miles | Okay. I haven't heard of that. Where in Halifax is that? | 0:07 |
Annie Foreman | It's down the road from Spring Hill, about two miles down the road from Spring Hill, going from Spring Hill. | 0:12 |
Kara Miles | Is that still a town? | 0:21 |
Annie Foreman | Spring Hill is still a town, but this place where we called, no one lived on that. That's not a town. That's just a name to get it. | 0:23 |
Kara Miles | Okay, okay. Is that where you grew up and all your childhood and everything there? | 0:30 |
Annie Foreman | Right. I grew up there. I was born in that house and I stayed in that four room house for 65 years, in one place and did not move. | 0:38 |
Kara Miles | Wow. | 0:44 |
Annie Foreman | The house was getting bad and stuff, and then I moved over with my son. That's why I'm over here with my son. But in then working part, we worked hard, I worked hard. We were children. I plowed the devil plow. I chopped, I pulled corn, I plowed cotton. We pulled tobacco. We cut cotton stalk, corn stalk. We did that. Ditch bank, we did it. Then my father took us in the woods and cut logs. | 0:44 |
Kara Miles | Wow. That's as a child? | 1:25 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, when I was growing up. | 1:27 |
Kara Miles | How old were you when you started working like that? | 1:31 |
Annie Foreman | Well, maybe 14, I had been doing that hard work, but cooking and stuff, I started earlier, when I was 12. | 1:32 |
Kara Miles | When you started doing the field work and stuff, you had stopped school? Were you still going to school? | 1:44 |
Annie Foreman | No, I was still going to school. Delilah and I went to this little school over there they called Mount Gibbons School. It was a little one room shack for school. What happened is we had to walk about two miles, snow, rain, or sleet, we had to walk. We didn't finish our [indistinct 00:02:09] after school because I had to work. As we went to school, we couldn't go there. We had to work. The children called us rainbows. | 1:52 |
Kara Miles | Because you could only go when it was raining? | 2:36 |
Annie Foreman | Right, right. I got up to about eighth grade, and I just stopped. I didn't go back no more, because I had to work so much. | 2:36 |
Kara Miles | The whole time you were in school, you could only go when it was raining? | 2:37 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, some days we went and it won't rain, but if you had something you had to do, the Good Lord said, "You got to do what you got to do." I just had to get out there. | 2:38 |
Kara Miles | Were most kids at your school, did they have to do that? | 2:49 |
Annie Foreman | In my family, we did. I don't know about nobody else. Tell you another thing, there was 12 of us. You had 12 with one man working hard, you know you got to get out and do something. He couldn't feed all those children, that's why I couldn't go to school, because we had to get out there and go to work, and let him work somewhere else. We had to work the farm. | 2:53 |
Kara Miles | You said he worked somewhere else? | 3:19 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-hmm. | 3:20 |
Kara Miles | Where did he work? | 3:20 |
Annie Foreman | At the WPA. | 3:20 |
Kara Miles | Oh, okay. | 3:20 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, he was working at home. | 3:21 |
Kara Miles | Do you know what he did at the WPA? | 3:22 |
Annie Foreman | Cut bushes like we were at home cutting and cleaning up around the building and the ditches in the project they were working for. I don't know what else he did, it's been so long. I don't know, but he's been dead for years. | 3:34 |
Kara Miles | Did your mother work in the fields? | 3:51 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, she worked in the fields some, but she didn't work too much. She would come out and work until dinner. She would go back home and fix dinner. Of course, she had all these children and babies. She's got 10 of them, and such like that. My mama didn't work that much but she did all the cooking and washing. | 3:53 |
Kara Miles | That was a lot of work. | 4:12 |
Annie Foreman | That was a lot because I know, by then, I started up and had to do it. Another thing, my mama was very smart. We had kids and she took out her kids and let us work. | 4:16 |
Kara Miles | Oh. | 4:25 |
Annie Foreman | I worked hard and took care of three children without any help. I did that myself. Let me see what else. | 4:28 |
Kara Miles | You said your mother was very smart. Tell me other things about your mother. | 4:39 |
Annie Foreman | I'll tell you one thing, she had a lot of children, I'll tell you one thing. She would work when she had them children, too. I had a good mama. She didn't run the road like a lot of them. Then after my daddy died, she still didn't go. She stayed home and kept the children, and she instilled a lot in us and had kids. She said, "Well, I'm going to stay this time, and let that one go. The next time, you stay, because I can't take care all of these children by myself." | 4:42 |
Kara Miles | Tell me about your father. | 5:27 |
Annie Foreman | Well, my father was a working man. He was a hard working man. He was very smart. As I said, he went off and worked and he worked at home on the days he couldn't go to work. He gets up and leave home at 5:00 AM in the morning, and that was way back in the wintertime, go to the hill to catch the bus to go to work. He used to tend a large farm. He tended a six horse farm. That was pretty large. That's all about him. | 5:29 |
Kara Miles | Do you remember your grandparents? Did you know your grandparents? | 5:54 |
Annie Foreman | Yes. My grandmama was named Arie Savage, and my grandfather was name John Milligan Savage. My daddy's father was named William Foreman. My grandmother on my father's side was named Laurel Foreman. They called her Scrap. Scrap, yeah. | 6:05 |
Kara Miles | Do you know how she got that name? | 6:33 |
Annie Foreman | I sure don't, I don't know how she got that name. We were lucky enough to know that's what they would call them. My dad was named Lipton Foreman, but they called him Bud Foreman. I don't know where that comes from. But what happened, that's what my grandma named him. Then he got up inside and he named himself Lipton Foreman. It happened in the courthouse, went up there and told him his name was Lipton, not no Bud Foreman. He named his own self because my grandmama named him Bud Foreman. Let's see, what else? | 6:40 |
Kara Miles | Oh. Do you remember your grandparents? Did they ever talk to you about their lives, their childhood or anything like that? | 7:16 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, they talked to us just they did. They had to work hard in their olden days. Yeah, they had to work hard. Stuff for them was real cheap then but you didn't have the money to get it. After it being cheap, you still didn't have the money to get stuff like they said when they were coming on. It's been so long, I don't even know what they said. Remember, my memory is short. | 7:33 |
Kara Miles | Well, you were talking about school. Were you one of the oldest or one of the younger kids? | 7:56 |
Annie Foreman | Oldest one. I had a brother older than I was, and my brother, he died at 25. He had a busted blood vessel. The rest of my mama's children are still living. | 8:08 |
Kara Miles | Did the younger kids get to go school also? | 8:23 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, they got to. My baby sister finished high school. My brothers, they didn't finish, but they were higher. I got a baby brother that went higher in school than I did. My brother, Levi, he didn't go much. They didn't get to finish school either because they had to stay home and plow. | 8:25 |
Kara Miles | Yeah. Did you like farm work? | 8:41 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, I liked it pretty good. I might as well liked it, I had to do it. Did I tell you that I primed bacca? | 8:46 |
Kara Miles | Uh-huh. | 8:53 |
Annie Foreman | We'd sit back and I'd prime bacca. I had to work hard, I'm telling you. Get up in the morning, 3:00 AM, packing a wagon and haul the cotton to the gin house at 3:00 AM in the morning so my brothers could get there by 7:00, because they were going to have to stay all day. You name it, we did it. Let me see what else. | 8:55 |
Annie Foreman | I helped my daddy stay to the barn at nights, two of us girls to help my daddy so he can get some sleep. We'd tend to the bacca farm. There would be girls down there tending the tobacco farm, tending to the tobacco. He would fire it up or he would go in there and leave us a push up. | 9:21 |
Kara Miles | What does that mean? | 9:45 |
Annie Foreman | The fired up? Well, Lord, I reckon you need to know this because you don't know anything along, but you had to cure tobacco in a barn. They didn't have anything together, you had a barn and you hung it up in there and a box would go up in there, where you could put in and make this fire where it would burn and it would heat the pipes and things that all around in there. They kept the heat in. You got the heat. There was so much temperature on this thing, curing the stems and when you're ready to cure the leaf, you push it up to just about 80. | 9:46 |
Kara Miles | Oh, okay. You used to do that at night? | 10:14 |
Annie Foreman | Some nights, yes. He would come down about 4:00 AM or 5:00 AM in the morning, and then he would come on down and then he said we could go to the house. | 10:22 |
Kara Miles | What was a typical work day for you? What time would you get up, and what would you do? When would you take a break? | 10:36 |
Annie Foreman | Well, we'd get up at 8:00 AM in the morning and get in the field and at 12:00, we had a lunch break and 1:00, we're back in the field again. That's what we did and how we did it. Oh, we had cows, I had to milk the cows. I had to get up and take the cow and cut some grass so she can eat. | 10:42 |
Kara Miles | What did you like best and what did you like least? | 11:04 |
Annie Foreman | I didn't like it, but like I told you, you got to do what you got to do. | 11:10 |
Kara Miles | Yeah. | 11:12 |
Annie Foreman | I did not like it, but I've come to like farming. When he said, "Hit the floor," I hit the floor, all of us, not only me, the whole family. I told you I milked the cow and took care of the cow. We had hogs and we had to feed the slop to the hogs, and take water to the hogs. Well, let me see. | 11:13 |
Kara Miles | Do you remember the hog slaughtering, when they would do that? | 11:43 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-hmm. Yeah, I did that. I helped when he did that. We needed help cleaning the hog. My daddy would make this big keg of water and put the hogs in there, and you pull them out and put them up in there and you clean them. He had us down there cleaning them too. We had to start working in the house and then cleaning them and taking them. He'd take the children home. We had to clean them, all the children, we had that to do too. | 11:48 |
Kara Miles | Some people have told us about when it was hog slaughtering time, that it was a party thing. | 12:17 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, they did, we didn't have no party times. A lot of people did, they'd get a group of people around there and you help do this and some are doing that. It would take you two days if you're going to kill a hog, cleaning, rung it up. Then get all the stuff cleaning and making your sausage and all of that. It took you two days. | 12:22 |
Annie Foreman | We would fix dinner. I had to fix dinner. My daddy had so many people around there and I had to fix dinner for them. | 12:43 |
Kara Miles | Did your parents own the land that you worked? | 12:55 |
Annie Foreman | Not all of it. He'd rent. Two farms, he was renting. | 12:59 |
Kara Miles | Oh, okay. | 13:02 |
Annie Foreman | He'd rent that, but one farm he had was his own, his farm. | 13:03 |
Kara Miles | Okay, the one you all lived on? | 13:05 |
Annie Foreman | Right. | 13:08 |
Kara Miles | How big was that? How many acres was it? | 13:11 |
Annie Foreman | Honey, you got me there. I don't know. I don't know how many acres it was for the whole thing, on our farm, about 25 acres. | 13:13 |
Kara Miles | Okay. Does that include the part that you rented or not? | 13:29 |
Annie Foreman | No, that didn't include that. | 13:33 |
Kara Miles | Okay. | 13:36 |
Annie Foreman | No, we rented. | 13:36 |
Kara Miles | So he owned about 25 acres. | 13:36 |
Annie Foreman | Right. | 13:38 |
Kara Miles | Then he rented. | 13:39 |
Annie Foreman | He rent it from somebody else. He rented from two people. | 13:41 |
Kara Miles | Were those farms next to the one you all owned? | 13:44 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-mm, you had to go about half a mile to one and had to go about a mile to the other one. | 13:47 |
Kara Miles | Did you all work all that land? | 13:50 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-hmm, we worked all that land, chopping, pulling that grass, and then we had to finish [indistinct 00:14:00], he'd just get that bucket and put that soda to that corn. I put the soda to the cotton. We had that to do too. | 13:57 |
Kara Miles | How would do you that? You'd work one farm one day and the next one? | 14:00 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah. We worked this farm about two or three days, chopping and sowing and then we'd go to the other farm and we'd do some chopping down there. We left that farm, and come back and go to the other farm and do some work there at that farm. Yeah, we were pretty busy. | 14:01 |
Kara Miles | Sounds like it. Do you know who your father rented the land from? Were they Black or White men? | 14:38 |
Annie Foreman | Well, I knew one of them was White, it was Charlie Smith. I don't know who the other farmer was. I don't even know. | 14:45 |
Kara Miles | What kind of equipment? Did your father own farm equipment or did he rent that from someone, or y'all didn't have any or what? | 15:02 |
Annie Foreman | We didn't have any at the farm, we worked with them legs, plowing and shovel with them legs. We didn't have no tractor. My brothers got a tractor right after my daddy died. We did all our farm with mules. A lot of people like that had saws and things. He had a plow that you had walk behind. It's called a ganging plow, we plowed up the cotton and peanuts and stuff like that. | 15:08 |
Annie Foreman | Then I took the [indistinct 00:15:43], where we burnt the food and kept them in the field and we had to sow the ashes down on the peanuts because they said ash would make hard sided peanuts, so we took that to the pea field. | 15:42 |
Annie Foreman | We used to have the mule, take them out from the plow. I had to hook the mule to the plow. I was scared the mule was going to kick me in my face. | 15:58 |
Kara Miles | Where did you all sell the stuff that you raised on the farm? Did you all go somewhere to sell it or did people come to you to buy it? | 16:12 |
Annie Foreman | My father and my brother too, they took it somewhere? We couldn't carry it nowhere. They would take the cotton down to the gin house and then somebody will buy. The peanuts, we sold them to Everett Martin. | 16:22 |
Kara Miles | Did your brothers and sisters, did they all stay there or did some of them move up north of you? | 16:48 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-mm, all of them stayed right there until later on, before my father got sick. I had a sister that would go to New York, one sister would go to New York while the rest of us stayed home. In later on years, we had another one go to New York. The rest of the family, we were home. I've only got two sisters in New York and the rest is at home. | 16:57 |
Kara Miles | You said that one of the farms that you all rented was owned by a White man. | 17:26 |
Annie Foreman | Right. | 17:31 |
Kara Miles | What kind of contact did you have with White people when you were growing up? | 17:31 |
Annie Foreman | None. We had no contact with any. | 17:35 |
Kara Miles | No? | 17:36 |
Annie Foreman | No. | 17:36 |
Kara Miles | Would you see them regularly? | 17:40 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-mm. | 17:42 |
Kara Miles | Yeah? | 17:42 |
Annie Foreman | No. This man where we worked, we didn't see him or nothing, like in the field. A lot of times, in these White folks' field, and they come out and see you working or what you were doing and stuff, but this man didn't come out there. He just left the farm up to Lipton. It was up to him and what he had to make us to do. Not him, he didn't tell us nothing. I ain't never had no run ins with no White people. | 17:43 |
Kara Miles | When you would see White people, where would you see them? | 18:12 |
Annie Foreman | In the stores and different places, and in the street and at their homes and things. | 18:15 |
Kara Miles | At their homes? You would go to their homes? | 18:18 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-mm. No, we didn't go to their homes. | 18:21 |
Kara Miles | So what do you mean by that? You would see them as you passed by their homes? | 18:25 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, yeah, when you're passing by there. | 18:30 |
Kara Miles | Did you see them when you went to town? | 18:34 |
Annie Foreman | I'd see people on the street, different White people, but like I said, they didn't bother me and I didn't bother them. I ain't had nothing to tell them. | 18:36 |
Annie Foreman | And another thing, when I got up in age, I worked in a nursing home. I worked there for six years without stopping. I had a baby. When I went to the nursing home, my baby was five months old. I stopped when he was seven years old and I left because I had to come home and get him the right care so that he could go to school. | 18:41 |
Annie Foreman | I didn't leave on account of that, I left on account that I hired and I had worked and helped that woman and she didn't want to pay me one week off if I didn't get no pay for it. So I said, "Well, you won't pay nothing. I'm gone." I left. That was some hard work too, some hard work for one person cooking for 12 patients and the rest of the employees, about four or five of them. I had to do all that cooking myself. I tell you what, I have worked hard in my life. I sure have. | 19:12 |
Kara Miles | What years was this about, when you were working at the nursing home? | 19:51 |
Annie Foreman | What I was doing? | 19:55 |
Kara Miles | What years? | 19:56 |
Annie Foreman | That was back in the '60s, back in the '60s when I was working at the nursing home. | 19:56 |
Kara Miles | Did you do any other public work, other than that, in your life? | 20:05 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah. Just helping different people, like that lady that lived there on that corner, I helped her for 14 years. Her name is Emma Wilkerson. She's a White lady, I helped her and I worked there for about 14 years there. | 20:13 |
Kara Miles | What did you do there? | 20:36 |
Annie Foreman | Doing the general house cleaning and cooking. That's what I did for her. | 20:39 |
Kara Miles | How did you all get along? | 20:51 |
Annie Foreman | We got along fine. I didn't have no cross with her, and she didn't tell me, once she said, "Do this Anna-Mae," and she's gone. I didn't see her no more until night. We got along fine together. | 20:53 |
Kara Miles | Were there any Whites that you ever worked for or that you had any contact with that you had run ins with, that you had problems with? | 21:07 |
Annie Foreman | I never had no run ins with who I worked for, other than one I told you about. She didn't want to pay me and I know she really could. I didn't yell at her, I just left, that's all. I worked for this White lady. Her husband had a stroke, and he had that about seven or eight years, and I worked and tended to him while she worked at the store. So when he died, okay, well, everything else died. I didn't have no other job to do. She told me that she didn't need me because he was dead, and most of the time I was there was just keeping him. | 21:16 |
Kara Miles | You said you didn't have any problem with Whites. Do you know any Black people who did, who had problems with Whites, run ins with Whites? | 22:08 |
Annie Foreman | [indistinct 00:22:18] | 22:17 |
Kara Miles | No? Do you ever remember the Ku Klux Klan or anything being around here? | 22:18 |
Annie Foreman | I heard tell of them, I don't remember, I just heard tell of them a little, the Ku Klux Klan. You had to go look [indistinct 00:22:36], by them White folks being in the Ku Klux Klan, I don't know nothing about it. | 22:30 |
Kara Miles | What kind of things did you hear about it? | 22:42 |
Annie Foreman | I don't know, if I heard anything, I forgot it. | 22:47 |
Kara Miles | Were there any lynchings or anything around here? | 22:55 |
Annie Foreman | Any what? | 22:59 |
Kara Miles | Lynchings? Or any violence, White people killing or hurting Black people? Did you used to go to church? | 22:59 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-hmm, yeah. We used to go to church and Sunday school. We had to walk, we didn't have a ride, we had to walk. We went to church every Sunday, every second and third Sunday. Every Sunday, we went to church somewhere. We didn't have nothing to ride on either, we walked. | 23:17 |
Kara Miles | Did both of your parents go to church with you? | 23:42 |
Annie Foreman | No, they didn't go with us. My mama had to stay home with the children. My mama, she was a hard working woman too, because she said her daddy done her just like our daddy. See, she used to have to plow and cut stuff too. If that ain't hard work, I don't know what hard work is. | 23:45 |
Annie Foreman | No, I never had no contact or trouble with no White people. The only thing about it, we stayed home, we didn't stay in the street. We didn't know what was going on. | 24:09 |
Kara Miles | Well, tell me more about church. Did you used to like church when you were growing up? | 24:27 |
Annie Foreman | Yes, I liked church pretty good. Yeah, I went to church and I liked to go to church and I enjoyed the church, and I worked some in the church. I was a—I can't think of that either now. I sang in the choir. We had a comfort meeting on Saturday They had a comfort meeting on Saturday and I went there every second Saturday. | 24:31 |
Kara Miles | They had a what meeting? | 25:02 |
Annie Foreman | I said we had a comfort meeting on Saturday, the second Saturday. I went there for years and years there at the church where we'll be at now. | 25:03 |
Kara Miles | What was that? | 25:14 |
Annie Foreman | What's the name of the church? Chestnut Grove Baptist Church. | 25:15 |
Kara Miles | What meeting was this that you had on Saturday? | 25:18 |
Annie Foreman | A comfort meeting, you go there and you're meeting and your business and you attended that Saturday instead of attending on Sunday, your business part. That's why we went on Saturday, and we still go at Chestnut. A lot of people don't, but we do. | 25:23 |
Kara Miles | What were the important times in your church? What were the important events at church during the year? Like baptisms? Do you remember baptisms? | 25:42 |
Annie Foreman | Mm-hmm. | 25:54 |
Kara Miles | Did a lot of people come to those? Were those important? | 25:55 |
Annie Foreman | Yeah, they did. People had those long gowns. When I was in church, you got baptized, you wore a white long gown and white towels on your head. We were baptized in a swamp. | 26:00 |
Kara Miles | In a swamp? | 26:12 |
Annie Foreman | In a swamp. | 26:14 |
Kara Miles | Were you scared of that? | 26:19 |
Annie Foreman | No, I was scared one time, but I said, "Well," maybe it scared me and went away and I thought came back, so we stood in water up to here. We didn't have so far to go like you're baptized now. We sure didn't do that, [indistinct 00:26:38]. Yes, I'm run out. I don't know about you, but I am. | 26:21 |
Kara Miles | You're worn out? | 26:49 |
Annie Foreman | I've run out of questions. I don't know nothing else. | 26:50 |
Kara Miles | Okay. Well, are you— | 26:50 |
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