Myrtle Forney interview recording, 1993 June 23
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Transcript
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Karen Ferguson | Tape recorder or [indistinct 00:00:02]. | 0:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | My name is Myrtle Forney. If you want to, I can move the things off that little stool right there and you can put that on there. | 0:03 |
Karen Ferguson | That might be good. | 0:12 |
Karen Ferguson | All right. Ms Forney, maybe we could begin by you telling me a little bit about where you were brought up, where you were born and where you were raised and a bit about the community in which you were brought up. | 0:16 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, I am from Bricks. I was born here. In fact, my mother and father came here as workers at the school. My father was farm manager, and my mother came as dining room matron. Well, they married in 1907, and we started coming along like stair steps. And I was born in 1909. And as far as childhood was concerned, we had a rather happy childhood because in those days, you didn't have to do much to enjoy yourself. And my father worked at the barn, at the school farm, and we used to go down there and ride the horses and go ourselves swimming in the water tank. The boys had to change the water and all of that. | 0:30 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We played around with our neighbors and Mrs. Body was one of my neighbors. She was Mary Phillips then. There were four girls in her family and four boys. Their boys were all older than we girls, and Mary was the youngest. And they used to come over our home, the house over there very often. But so many times they came over there, we were being punished because we had been into some trouble, and they stayed down under the tree under the window and called up to our room because Mama would not let us get up if she was punishing us. | 1:38 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And we used to have a way of doing some little things that were dangerous. We'd put an ironing wood at the top of the stair steps, hold it, let one sit down on it, and it would shoot out the front door. And Mama called us. And in fact, the girl who worked with Mama told her what was happening. She was afraid we were going to hurt ourselves. And why we did it, I don't know. | 2:31 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Then Mama finally caught up with us. And when I was the one going down that time, she said, "Go upstairs and pull off your clothes." She never raised her voice at us. And we knew what was going to happen. She cut her nail switch, put us in the bed. We got up the next morning. And we were punished for things we used to do. | 3:04 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And I guess I should say that a lot of the things that we did came about because of the students that were in the school. They had three dormitories, two dormitories with girls, one with boys. And those children would put devilment in our heads, and we would do the things they'd tell us to do, like dig a hole in the pathway where the boys who come in from work in the evenings, cold days, they would step—We'd put digger hole, put a pan of water in there, a foot tub or something with water in there, covering with paper and sprinkle dirt over it. And they were coming in to go to supper, and they'd be in a hurry, and they'd run right into that water. | 3:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We caught Papa like that one day. Well, I was a tomboy because I had two brothers, no sisters. And so, we climbed all the time. Wasn't anything to see me up a tree or if there was a ladder anywhere near the house, I was at the top of the ladder, and anything that you get in trouble with. | 4:38 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | But I had spent a lot of time in the dormitory after I got a little older. Mama was afraid of me running around too much with the boys. And I was getting to this place I was rather rough with as the boys were. So when she worked in the post office, and she did for a while, I had to go there and stay with her after school if I didn't go to the dormitory, and stay in one of the dormitories where some of the girls are there. | 5:05 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And then we had, I should say, from the school itself, a good bit of entertainment. We had what was known as Lyceum Series. And Prince Chrysler, the violin, Richard B. Harrison, De Lawd' in—what is it? Green Pastures. He was there. Oh, some of the very famous people came to us. And we had a lyceum program at least once a month. And we enjoyed that very much. And I think it had something to do with our enjoyment of music. And they had a music program up here when that piano that's up there was somewhat new. They had three or four pianos, and we could have a two-piano duet, a three-piano duet. | 5:40 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And well, I learned to play enough to get in on some of those. I didn't try to really learn to play until I was too old to do very much. And I was at Talladega when I really became interested in music. And Mrs. Du Bois was my music teacher there. And Mrs. Fletcher, the lady I lived with, was the lady who started me in music. And when she went to Talladega and her daughter got out and went to law school, she wanted someone with her. I went there and stayed with her, but I wouldn't get up in the morning and practiced like she did, like she wanted me to do, and like Mr. Du Bois wanted me to do. | 6:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | So I became interested in English. I always liked to read. And when we were growing up, that was one thing. Always books. Christmastime, I don't care what else you got, you had a book or two. And I would read to my brothers because they were lazy about reading. | 7:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | But when I was in school down in the little model school, we called it the model school, we learned a whole lot there. We learned actually how to play with other children. We didn't know how to play with other children. We learned how to use playground equipment. We didn't have that. Nothing but trees to climb. So when they put swings in the merry-go-round, the seesaw and so forth, that were brought down from the northern areas, we learned to use those. And it meant a lot to us that time. And you learned also that if you did your work in school, you could go to the little library that they had in that building and read. And that's where I started reading. I'll always remember a little reader called the Jones Reader, and it had pictures, colored pictures in it. And I would do my work just as fast as I could, and as well as I could so I could go in there and read. | 8:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And then, we had to learn to sew. I didn't learn to sew much. But you had to learn enough to sew, to make an apron to wear in your cooking class because you had to learn to cook, and you had to make your underwear, at least one set of underwear. And you had to make two dresses. One, a school dress and one, a dress-up dress. And we started that when we were in the fifth grade because we had to go to the other building for that. | 9:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Then you were promoted to the sixth grade, you went up to the other building, and you were there. You called yourself getting somewhere when you got in that building. The courses that they gave you were rather stiff. And because I was so wild, my mother made me take just about all the courses that were offered. So I sat up there and took first year Latin, Caesar Cicero. And when it came to Virgil, I said no because it was just one person in that class. I said no. | 10:19 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | But I had to take French one and two, which I was glad I had because when I got to write my master's, when I got to take my exam and my masters, my masters, that written exam in a language was in French. Well, I had two years French and I was glad I had had that. | 11:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And oh well, we had ball games. There was a little place just back of the school or back that little school building, back over there in the woods. I guess we say we had across the style. We went over there. And the man who was the head of the science department knew football very well. He took us in and taught us what to look for and how to watch a football game because we thought we knew baseball. But we learned the football well enough. Actually, even now, I can enjoy a football game. I like it, even though that sometimes it look like they going to kill each other. But I like it. | 11:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And of course, I like baseball. We learned tennis. That was one of the things that we entertained ourselves with. We get out early in the morning and go and play tennis. There were one, two, three, at least four tennis courts on the campus. And we used to go to that house we're all staying, that set apart was a house. And we used to go there and play tennis early in the morning. And Mr. Wright would be so mad with us. | 12:33 |
Karen Ferguson | Why? | 13:11 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Wright. | 13:11 |
Karen Ferguson | Why was he mad? | 13:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Because we get there about five or six o'clock and wake him up. His children said, "Come on." And we went on, and that was one of the things that we got together on and played, all the children in the community. Well now, there weren't many children in the community who took part in that. They weren't interested. But Ms. Body played up there, my brothers played up there, and the children of the people who were running the school, they played up there. So we learned a good bit about tennis. Does that take over much of the— | 13:13 |
Karen Ferguson | Well, why don't you go back a little bit. | 14:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | All right. | 14:10 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you know anything about your grandparents? | 14:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I don't. I do know that they lived—Wait a minute, one of them was a Forney, and they were French-German. That's where that name comes from. And they lived in the western part of North Carolina up in a little place called Gilkey. And that's somewhere near Asheville. | 14:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Whose parents were those? | 14:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | My father's. | 14:56 |
Karen Ferguson | Your father's parents? | 14:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Now my mother's people lived in Nashville, Tennessee. And I know something about my uncles. The grandparents were dead when I came along. And my mother went to school at Fisk, and she lived very close to the campus. They lived right back of the campus. And she had a brother who worked with Maxwell House. And he fell out the window one night, and they think he was pushed out. I don't know what, but he was responsible in a way, was somewhat helpful in making the Maxwell House bland. And they think that someone pushed him out of the window on purpose to get him out of the way. | 14:58 |
Karen Ferguson | Why do you think they did that? | 16:02 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm? | 16:04 |
Karen Ferguson | Why? Why did they want to get him out of the way? | 16:04 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know. I don't know whether he was getting too far up into the business. You know how they do these Blacks and Whites? Get him out the way. And no one would think. But he was crippled, I know. They'd say that he fell asleep in a window upstairs, somewhere at the Maxwell place and fell out, got killed that way. Now I do know my grandparents had large families, both of them. My father's mother and father had 12 children. No, 11 children, 10 boys and one girl. And they lived up there in the mountains. And they had to travel, of course, horse and buggy or wagon. And if they went in town, they took the little girl and left the boys at home, and they took care of themselves. | 16:09 |
Karen Ferguson | You said that your father's family was French and German? | 17:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes. | 17:37 |
Karen Ferguson | So they were White? | 17:38 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, his grandparents. | 17:38 |
Karen Ferguson | His grandparents were White? | 17:38 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 17:43 |
Karen Ferguson | Why did he come here to the Brick school to work? | 17:46 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | He went to A&T. And when they were looking for someone to fill the places, I don't know how Mr. Inborden knew him or found out about him or how the American Missionary Association found out. But when they started around looking for someone, he was one chosen and he was, I think, about the third or fourth child in the family that was given a chance to be educated. | 17:49 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 18:22 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | All of them couldn't go to school. They had one son that turned out to be a minister, and he lived up for a long time just before my father died. And his son still lives up in Apex. They lived in that area. | 18:24 |
Karen Ferguson | Did your parents ever talk about their own parents and tell any stories about your grandparents, about what their lives had been like? | 18:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, they didn't talk to us about that. | 19:05 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. So do you know what they did for a living? | 19:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh, my father's people were farmers, and they were way up in the mountains farming. | 19:12 |
Karen Ferguson | Do they own their own land? | 19:19 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. | 19:20 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 19:21 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They didn't. And my mother's people were in Nashville, and I had never found out what they did for a living. | 19:21 |
Karen Ferguson | How did your mother come to the Bricks? | 19:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, she worked, she went to school at Fisk. And Fisk and Bricks, one of the same American Missionary Association. And she had taken a course in nurse training and couldn't handle it because every time she'd go in a nurse operating room, she was all right until the end of the day, and she'd faint away. So she changed her major to home economics. And when they were looking for someone to come here to this new school, they brought her here. | 19:38 |
Karen Ferguson | Were all of her brothers and sisters able to go to college? | 20:23 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Some of them. There's one, Uncle Julius, went to high school and he became porter on one of the trains that came passed back and forth past here. And Uncle Felix, I don't know what Uncle Felix did for a living, but he lived up in Cleveland. His family lived up there. And he had a sister who went to school somewhere. I don't know where it was, but she finished high school, I know. | 20:27 |
Karen Ferguson | When you were growing up here at the Bricks, where did you live? | 21:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I lived up there in the house behind the inboarding house. | 21:23 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 21:27 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That's where we lived. And we moved here. Let's see, I can't figure—I was 15 years old when we moved here. | 21:29 |
Karen Ferguson | Into this house that we're in right now? | 21:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. My father and my brothers built it. And it was just one story for a while. And father decided that he wanted more to it, and he ran the second story up. And we've lived here all our lives since then. | 21:47 |
Karen Ferguson | How many brothers and sisters did you have? | 22:10 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I had two brothers. | 22:13 |
Karen Ferguson | Two brothers? | 22:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And no sisters. | 22:14 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. Did anyone other than your immediate family ever lived with you when you were growing up? | 22:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, my mother's sister came and stayed for a while, but she didn't stay very long. She died. Now, Uncle Thomas, my father's brother would come and visit. He wouldn't stay long because he had his farm, and he had a son and a daughter that he had to take care of. They would come and visit just a short while, say maybe a week or two. | 22:24 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Could you tell me a little bit about the Bricks community when you were growing up? Were people very close to one another? | 22:58 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Not too much. | 23:05 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. | 23:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. We had a situation that was pretty bad. The situation was that the people were loose-handed. They would steal from you. I can give this a list in that one night, my father was in there asleep and it wasn't good to tell anything to my brother because he wake up everybody. But my brother's wife went in there and put a hand over Papa's mouth and told him, "Somebody's out there stealing your pigs. We heard them squealing." And Papa got it. He said, "Okay." Said, "Don't bother Harding, but wake him up as soon as you hear me shoot because I'm going to shoot." He went back there. And the people knew to wait on the freight train, put his hand up on the thing to cross over, had a pig in his back. Papa hit his hand. So he told my brother, said, "Go, come on. Go. And let's see if I shot anybody." But the person didn't stop. He flew. And we've had any number of instances where people have gone in and taken things that belonged to you. They even steal from each other. | 23:08 |
Karen Ferguson | Who was doing the stealing? | 24:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Some of the people in the community. | 24:44 |
Karen Ferguson | Right at the school? | 24:49 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Right in the radius of the school. | 24:54 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. | 24:54 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I can tell you about when you go to a Rocky Mountain, there's a crossroad. | 24:55 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 25:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That crossroad was a dangerous place for people, and it still is. They'll steal you if you don't get out of the way. And we've had trouble with them lately. Some of the boys stealing. They go in, they wait until they know that these people are out for work, and then they go by the house and steal. And some of them have been put in prison for that same thing just lately. | 25:01 |
Karen Ferguson | And wait, but this kind of thing was going on when you were growing up as well? | 25:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. Uh-huh. | 25:40 |
Karen Ferguson | So these were people outside of the school? | 25:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Outside of the school. And they didn't really attend the school too much. We can sit down right now and talk about people that we know, and of all the people who lived in that area up in there, besides the Phillips's. And of course, Ms. Slay didn't live then. She lived in the low grounds, but besides them, you can go through and tell just who went to school here, how long. And I think at least one or maybe two people graduated from high school here. And it was so that they could go. You paid just so much to go to school. | 25:44 |
Karen Ferguson | So they couldn't afford to go to school? | 26:40 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes, they could afford. They stolen enough to afford. | 26:45 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Why didn't they go to school here then? | 26:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Didn't want to. | 26:56 |
Karen Ferguson | Didn't want to. | 26:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Just like a whole lot of children right now. You had to stay on them. | 26:56 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. So who came to the school then? What kind of children and people came to school? | 27:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | There were people who lived in the not immediate neighborhood, Enfield. There's one fellow you saw this morning, Shields, he used to walk three miles to come to school here until his cousin's father gave them a car, and they came on the car. They loaded it down and came. And they had to be here by eight o'clock, and they were here eight o'clock. He says he's been on that bridge down there many a day. When that bell start ringing, that bell up there, that bell would ring five minutes. He'd be in his classroom when that bell start ringing. | 27:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And people from Weldon, Halifax, all the little towns and places around came to school here, all Whitakers. They had children who walked from Whitakers and children who drove from up here in Nash County, their daddy would let them have a buggy and a horse, and they came to school that way. Then there were others who came by train. They came up on these local trains. We don't have any locals now, but they used to come up on the local trains, and they'd meet them at the trains, take them in their trunks and get them up to the building. And they were boarding students. And I think they paid about $18 a month for somewhere to stay and their food. | 27:56 |
Karen Ferguson | Where did they come from? Where did these boarding students come from? How far away did they come from? | 28:59 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, we had a group come from Charleston, South Carolina. Had a group come from Florida, and I know two or three that came from up in Massachusetts from Boston. And they came from as far as they could. And they had heard about the school. They came here. | 29:04 |
Karen Ferguson | How did they hear about the school? | 29:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, did everybody knew Mr. Inborden, and he traveled around. He went from one place to another. He was quite an outstanding person, personality, I guess we'd say. And they went to various places. And then another thing that happened, they had what they called a Farmer's Day here. And the Farmer's Day was, I always remember, the 22nd of February, and the band would march down to the station, and we children up there to the campus and those of us in the community who took part would come down and meet the people and take them up to the campus. And they came from any town that they could to reach the school. They came up here to the Farmer's Day meeting and stayed all day, and they could catch a train back home. But they took the message to the people about the school. And one talked, everybody found out about it and came. | 29:35 |
Karen Ferguson | Did these farmers just come from North Carolina? Around North Carolina? | 31:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Most of them came from right here in North Carolina. But they had speakers who would come from—Well, A&T was right here in North Carolina, but they would come from various places where they had established good farming principles. Like down there at Booker T. Washington, down at Tuskegee. They would come up, the speakers and so forth. And that's where they got their information, and they carried it back to the people. And they just want their children educated. They didn't have any other means of education. So they said, "Stick them there." | 31:06 |
Karen Ferguson | Were other Black boarding schools in North Carolina, like the Bricks? | 32:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, there may have been, but I don't remember any other. | 32:06 |
Karen Ferguson | What about the people who lived right at the school? Who did your family associate with? | 32:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, we associated just with the teachers and children. They had 1, 2, 3, 4. I'm thinking of the colleges, four colleges where the teachers lived, teachers who had families. Then there were some teachers that were married and had families and they lived in the dormitory, some of them. And those children got to know each other very well. | 32:21 |
Karen Ferguson | The families lived in the dormitories? | 32:48 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 32:49 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, I see. | 32:49 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They would have maybe three rooms. And they tried, however, to keep the families in those homes that they have around. And then, there was some homes that were spotted around. And those people came from Alfa Enfield, Alfa Whitakers and moved in. There's a lady up there now on the campus. I don't know whether you all have talk with her or not, a Mrs. Robertson? | 32:53 |
Karen Ferguson | No, no. | 33:28 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They lived in one of those homes up there on the campus for a while. | 33:31 |
Karen Ferguson | So these were four teachers or they were just up people? | 33:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Most of them were teachers. There's one house down there on the highway still together. There were two others. And those were teachers in those houses. | 33:44 |
Karen Ferguson | Where did the teachers come from mainly? | 33:58 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Most of them came from some of these big schools up the road, Howard. And I was trying to think of one or two others. I know I had a French teacher who came from somewhere up there in New York. We had some one or two teachers from Washington. And whenever the AMA could find a good teacher, they sent very good teachers here. I know Ms. Brown was one of the first people that I knew came from Howard, Anna Brown. And boy, she was a tough one. But we needed them. | 34:03 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. What kinds of things would your family and the other teachers' families, what kind of things would you do together? | 34:50 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, we had picnics. I know every 4th of July, they come over here, go down there near the creek, clean that place out, and we have our 4th of July picnic right there. And in the summertime, we had watermelon cuttings. And that would take in all of the students, teachers and everybody else. And you weren't a part of the group until you got a bath in watermelon. They'd wash you up in the watermelon. | 35:03 |
Karen Ferguson | What do you mean by that? | 35:40 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They'd take those rhymes and wash your face with it. | 35:42 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh! | 35:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | You had to go home and get a good bath when they got through it then. | 35:46 |
Karen Ferguson | Were you initiated that way? Were you initiated in that way? | 35:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh yeah. And Bob and my father raised a whole lot of watermelons. And the students who were here for work sessions would go out there and steal the watermelons and eat all they wanted. And then Bob will ask someone to take a horse wagon and go down the field and bring up a whole lot of the watermelons. He said, "Now, get rid of them." | 35:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And we'd have, I know, Thanksgiving. I always remember one of the things was we had something. It wasn't Olympics, but it was something races and so forth. And you had some that would even race, go all the way around the whole—they go to the highway up that road, cross that crossroad and come back down by the side of the railroad running. The [indistinct 00:36:59] high jumps and your short races and pulled so forth and everybody took part. Then you went in for a big Thanksgiving dinner. | 36:25 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Christmastime, we would have a big Christmas tree. There were a lot of children here who were rather deprived as far as clothing and so forth was concerned. But the American Missionary Association would get churches to send barrels down here and you'd go into your Christmas tree. They had this big chapel, beautiful chapel, and a great tree all the way to the top. Everybody got something. Everybody got something new. It wasn't something the old that people were sending down. They got something new. And that was a Christmas tree. We had a big Christmas tree. Then, we had what they might call a dance, but it wasn't a dance. It was a march. You got your partner and you march to the music. The band might play and you march. They didn't allow you to dance at that time. It wasn't until much later that they started dancing. But that was a form of entertainment we had frequently. | 37:14 |
Karen Ferguson | Were most of your celebrations during the year with the school or did you ever have private celebrations in your own home? | 38:41 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, sometimes. Yeah, sometimes. But not often. It was more a matter of getting together, of getting togetherness that maybe we still have that, but we didn't have it then like they do now. Oh, and going back to something you asked me about, did any of my people ever live in their home with us? Yes. My brother and his wife stayed here with us. | 38:51 |
Karen Ferguson | Why did they do that? | 39:23 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Because my father was getting old, and he needed someone on the farm, and he wanted Harding to stay here. So Harding and Lulu stayed right here with him. And then after that, my sister-in-law, they had got a register on. | 39:25 |
Karen Ferguson | I think you were talking a little bit about your brother living here. | 39:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. And they lived here. They didn't have any children, so they put the house up. They made a registered home of it. And she raised children in the county. She took children from Edgecombe County and Nash County and raise them. | 39:52 |
Karen Ferguson | They raised them? | 40:21 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. And there are a lot of children around now who think of her as Mama. | 40:22 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Now, was this an official adoption or foster or home or did people just bring their children to her? | 40:28 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, they came through the welfare. | 40:37 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, the welfare. | 40:38 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Some of them were adopted. | 40:43 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Lulu wasn't allowed to know who adopted the children, but the others were brought here because they were abused, or they were neglected or something of the kind. And after a certain period of time, they left. And now, every once in a while someone calls me or comes up, "And you remember so and so? I'm so and so." And children that she really raised. | 40:45 |
Karen Ferguson | Did your family associate with any people who didn't live at the school? | 41:27 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes. | 41:30 |
Karen Ferguson | Who were their friends outside of the school? | 41:30 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, there were the Phillips', there's Ms. Body's family, and there was a family of Reeds up the road. They associated with them. And there used to be some Bullock's who lived here. And there used to be some Pittman's who lived in the low grounds and some Burnett's. And we call it low grounds because when the water got up, those people couldn't get out. They had to come out on boats. And that's the reason Ms. Slate left from down there. They had to come out on boats, on the tractor. She said she couldn't take it. | 41:38 |
Karen Ferguson | What did most of the people who didn't live at the school, what did they do for a living? | 42:23 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh, just about everybody was a farmer. | 42:28 |
Karen Ferguson | A farmer? Did they own their own land? | 42:29 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. | 42:32 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh no? | 42:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Most of them didn't. The Phillips's owned theirs. The Bullock's finally bought land and the Pittman's and the Burnett's, they were living on school property. And they farmed. | 42:33 |
Karen Ferguson | For the school? | 42:54 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | For themselves. | 42:54 |
Karen Ferguson | For themselves? | 42:59 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They rented. | 43:00 |
Karen Ferguson | And it was school land? | 43:02 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 43:02 |
Karen Ferguson | Of all these people, was your family very close to these people that you were talking about? | 43:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | The Phillips's and the Bullock's, they were definitely close to them. | 43:16 |
Karen Ferguson | What kinds of things would you do for each other that the families do for each other? | 43:22 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, they just more than less just visited each other, I guess we'd say. And there were times when someone was in trouble, needed help, they would go and help each other. For instance, sometimes they were building—I remember my father was building a tobacco barn, and he was using just my brothers. And some of the neighbors got out and came and helped him build it. And they would go back and forth, do things like that. And if someone needed some extra plowing, they didn't have enough mules and they didn't have tractors back then, they would hurry up their plowing and go and help this particular neighbor. And if he was sick, someone would always be there to help out. | 43:28 |
Karen Ferguson | Would that be all of the people who lived in this area or just certain people that you knew well? | 44:21 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, those are most of the people who lived in this area besides the families that did all the stealing. Well, they didn't want to be bothered with us. | 44:27 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you think they didn't like the school. | 44:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know whether they didn't like it or not, but they weren't at all friendly with it. They sent their children sometimes, but you know you can't go to school a day or two and then stay home. They'd send their children sometimes. Other times, they wouldn't bother. | 44:46 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Of these people that you were talking about, that your family's circle of friends, were there any of these people, any of the adults that you particularly looked up to, who you really admired? | 45:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, yes. I admired the Phillips older girl particularly. And I admired those boys because they were so very good to their parents and so forth. And I admired the Bullock girls. I looked up to them. And years later, both of them taught me. One taught at Talladega and one year at Bricks. See, who else? Were the Bullock's? The other children were just classmates, and they never went, but so far, as far as school was concerned. | 45:26 |
Karen Ferguson | What other children were these? | 46:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Children of the Burnett's. | 46:22 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 46:23 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Pitman's, Hill's, those people. | 46:24 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. You particularly admired these girls, who became teachers? | 46:28 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 46:36 |
Karen Ferguson | Yeah. | 46:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And Mr. Inbord— | 46:36 |
Karen Ferguson | —think? | 0:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, it was the fact that they had done so much, more than I had done, and I admired them and I wanted to do likewise. At first, I wanted to go to Fisk because Mr. Inborden's daughters, both of them, went there, and the Bullock girls went, no, they didn't go. Yes, they did. They went to Fisk. I wanted to go there, and then because Mama was from Fisk, but I didn't go because I had this better offer from Talladega. | 0:03 |
Karen Ferguson | Were your parents married when they came to work here at Bricks? | 0:46 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, they married after they got here. | 0:49 |
Karen Ferguson | I see. | 0:50 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They married in 1907. I saw an old invitation the other day, 1907. | 0:51 |
Karen Ferguson | 1907. | 0:59 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, they didn't even know each other. | 1:01 |
Karen Ferguson | They didn't know each other, so they met here? | 1:03 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Met here, married here, went up to Niagara Falls for their wedding, for their, what is it? | 1:06 |
Karen Ferguson | Honeymoon. | 1:16 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Honeymoon and came back, and first thing you know, we started, so Mama had to give up her work at the dining hall, but Papa kept on. He worked until after World War I at the school up here. | 1:17 |
Karen Ferguson | What did he do after that? | 1:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Farm, he came over here. That's when he came over here, and by the way, when he bought this place, it was just the woods, like that little wooded side on the road up here, woods. He and my brothers got to work, cleared the land and did dynamite. They used dynamite and got the stumps and things out, and after that, they built the house. | 1:39 |
Karen Ferguson | Who owned the land before your father bought it? | 2:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Some man there in Whitakers, Nevilles, EK Nevilles, his land joins our land way up the road there somewhere. | 2:13 |
Karen Ferguson | Was he White or— | 2:29 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 2:30 |
Karen Ferguson | Were there many there Black landowners in this area or right around here? | 2:31 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, not too many, not too many of them. But what happened though, as soon as they started this farm meeting, they started the people to getting to the place they wanted for themselves, and so they started buying. | 2:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | You find down at Tillery, when you get Tillery, you going to find that they were buying, and Tillery, they had some there, the Caulfields, they were in Enfield, their daddy had his bought land, and of course, they have grown out from that buying, and Mary Body's people, Miss Phillips, Miss Phillips's people, wanted to get near the school, because they had heard of the school and they wanted their children educated. So they were not really educated themselves, but they made it possible for their children to go to school and they kept them in school. | 2:55 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you think it was difficult for Black people to buy land? | 3:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't think so. I think it was more that they didn't see the value in it. They didn't see any sense of it like so many of us are doing today, don't see any sense in buying. As soon as they get it, sell it, and I've had any number of them say to me, "Why don't you sell it now?" I said, "Uh-uh, no." I said, "Well, what you going to do with it when you die?" | 3:51 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I said, "I got some grand nieces and nephews. It goes to them." I said, "How you going to?" I said, "I got my will all made out." I said, "This one has a will. That one has a will and the other one has a will," and the will is down there in Nashville, in the courthouse. | 4:18 |
Karen Ferguson | Can you tell me a little bit about your parents? What kind of people they were? | 4:50 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, you see with my parents, so I'll say they were fine people as far as I was concerned. They were very fair and I never heard them fuss. But I do know one time Papa calls to Mama about something, she raised her voice. Papa left. He got out the house and then they never fussed. They never fought, and they liked children and they liked people and they believed in education. | 4:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They kept a girl in the home all the time that couldn't get a place in the dormitory, because they didn't have money at home. But they kept the child so she could go to school, and anytime anything came up where you needed help of some kind, they'd give it. Now, I know Mama went two or three times. She taught in the classroom because somebody up there was sick and they couldn't get anyone in her place. So Mama went up and taught for them. | 5:34 |
Karen Ferguson | Did she work again after? You said she quit, had to resign her position at the school when she started having children, did she ever go back to work? | 6:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | The only thing she did was go to the post office. She worked in the post office for several years. | 6:27 |
Karen Ferguson | But what did she do there? | 6:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, post mistress. | 6:36 |
Karen Ferguson | Just wondering. | 6:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Just like they had, the mail would come and go and she had to see that they went out and went to the students, and she had the charge of the stamps and all of that, just like the fourth class post office would do now. She had that responsibility. | 6:38 |
Karen Ferguson | That was here at the school, right? | 7:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 7:00 |
Karen Ferguson | Was she hired by the school or by the postal service? | 7:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Postal service. | 7:08 |
Karen Ferguson | How did she get that job, do you know? | 7:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, the postal service had put it down on the lap of the [indistinct 00:07:14] the campus, and he wanted someone to help him because he couldn't do it. He had a student, but you couldn't always depend on a student, high school student at that. He knew Mama had a little training in some things, some ways. So he hired Mama, he got Mama to come and take that place. | 7:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | She had to handle the mail just like it was handled elsewhere. And by the way, the train used to get the mail down here. They had crane that they hung the mail on and they'd grab it in and if it was heavy mail, they stopped the train and put it off and took it on. That lasted for a long time until they finally decided that when they closed down the school, they still kept the post office going. | 7:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They put the mail in boxes down on the highway, big boxes that came I think it was twice a day until finally they just closed down completely up here. So now we have to get our mail from either Enfield or Whitaker, and mine, it comes RFD up there. You see my box up there. | 8:17 |
Karen Ferguson | How were the decisions made in your family? Things like about housekeeping or how to handle the money or how to discipline the children, who made those decisions? | 8:51 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We did. We did. | 9:04 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, all of you in your family? | 9:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We had to get together on it. We did. Mama and Papa would get together on it after we got large enough. You washed dishes this week, you dried dishes this week, and you put them away. Until my brother washed dishes one time too many. Mama came out in the kitchen and it was his time to wash dishes. My younger brother and he was washing them all right, he had the screen door open and the dog licking the plates. | 9:08 |
Karen Ferguson | And that's how he was washing the dishes? So he didn't do it anymore after that? | 9:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, he didn't touch a dish after that. | 9:56 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you think that was unusual for boys to wash dishes and that kind of thing? | 9:58 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. They had learned to do that now. They were supposed to taking care of their rooms. They never did that job, and if it was money, well, we didn't expect was so much. If you got 25 cents a week or a month, you are rich, because Mama was working and Papa was working. | 10:04 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | There was money coming in, but they didn't waste it, since they put it in the bank, and they started you with a little iron bank, something like that. When someone gave you a penny or nickel or dime, it went in that little bank. You didn't spend your money, you didn't throw away your little change. If you needed paper for school, Mama and Papa one would get it. They'd buy you pencils. | 10:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We knew we were not to eat a whole lot of candy. We knew that, and that was just one of the things they told us. Christmastime, you could eat so much candy to get your oranges and apples and so forth. But other than that, forget it. | 11:12 |
Karen Ferguson | Was that ever hard to follow [indistinct 00:11:33] like that? | 11:30 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, uh-huh, one thing, we were out here in the country, and there were no stores. They did have a little store in the main building, in the administration building. You could buy pencils, paper, and then they had some penny candy and your mother and father would tell you, "You can spend one penny for candy," and that was it. We didn't worry about it. You had enough sweets at home to take care of that. | 11:33 |
Karen Ferguson | Did your mother have anybody at home helping her with the housework and that kind of thing? | 12:10 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Just that girl who came in once, I mean, the girl that stayed there. | 12:15 |
Karen Ferguson | So she paid her room and board by helping out your— | 12:19 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | My mother paid her room and board, and that was her room and board right there. She didn't have to worry about any money bills at the school, because Mama took care of that. Mama and Papa took care of that. | 12:24 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you remember any of these girls who came? | 12:38 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes, I remember one of them very well, Hattie. Hattie died just a short while ago. That's the one that we used to give such a fit about sliding them down the [indistinct 00:12:57] there, sliding down the stair steps. | 12:42 |
Karen Ferguson | What did she end up doing after she finished school? | 13:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | The last I heard of Hattie, she had gone back up somewhere up here in Halifax County and she was just living there. I hadn't heard whether she was teaching or what she was doing. But most of the children who left here found some kind of work to do. They went in nurse training, they went in office work, if they could. They went wherever they could get a job. | 13:05 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Now, I know one or two fellas and girls who went into music from here, like Miss Body. Miss Body went on in and she kept on going on with her music, until now you see she's still teaching. | 13:38 |
Karen Ferguson | Were there many opportunities around here for people once they finished school for work? | 13:59 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. The skin was the wrong color. | 14:08 |
Karen Ferguson | That's right. Do you remember where would they go? | 14:10 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Most of them just headed up North. | 14:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Up North. | 14:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Up North, and then people from Charleston, they went back home, and I have seen some of them lately, but most of them went on and did a little bit more on their education and got jobs as teachers there. | 14:23 |
Karen Ferguson | If the students finished up high school here and they didn't go onto college, what kind of things could they do around here? | 14:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mostly stay at home and work on the farm. It was just a matter of going to the farm. That's the reason the majority of the children who were around here, who went on to college, went on, I finished high school, they went on to college or went somewhere else and found a job somewhere else, because they just figured they didn't want to go back out there in their cotton field and pick cotton or go out there and shake peanuts, that kind of stuff. | 14:53 |
Karen Ferguson | Did any of those people, the ones who did go back to the farm, do you think that their education, that the Bricks helped them, for example, to own land or to [indistinct 00:15:40]? | 15:30 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah, I think so. I think so. I really do, because they have seen that most of them that went here have seen how those people around them have changed their lives to a certain extent, so they want to change theirs too. As soon as they have a chance, they find a little land. | 15:41 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | A little boy, not a little boy, a boy was telling me the other day he came over, he used to live over here and he went to school here. He didn't ever go to college, but he went on out and got him a job and now he works at Merita Bread, he's a foreman there. But he was telling me that, I asked him, I said, "Do you still live over in your aunt's house?" He said, "No, I saw a little piece of land down," he just tell me where it was, "and I bought it, and I got me a trailer house on it." | 16:10 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And I said, "Well, I didn't know. Someone told me you were a trailer house." He said, well you pass it every time you go town, But. He told me where it was. It's a nice looking little place. They got it in a grove of trees. They're about three of those trailer houses together. He went on and bought him somewhere to live, and he's got a family, a wife and two children. He's teaching them to do the same thing he has done. | 16:56 |
Karen Ferguson | You said before that you think that a lot of Black people don't own their own land and that kind of thing, why do you think that is? Why do think most people around here share cropped or were tenant farmers of some kind? | 17:27 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, they haven't seen the value of it, but if you notice now that the most of the people around in this area own their land, because they bought from the Bricks, from the, what is it? Anyhow, they bought land from there. The people that live across from the creek on up bought land. | 17:49 |
Karen Ferguson | So the Brick School made land available to people? | 18:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 18:20 |
Karen Ferguson | When was this? | 18:20 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That was after the school closed down, just before— | 18:21 |
Karen Ferguson | After the 1930s? | 18:24 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | It was beginning in that time that they started letting a little go and a little go, because [indistinct 00:18:36] on land and they bought, and their land runs almost to the back of the campus up there. The Papries bought, and they come up to the campus, the back road up there. | 18:27 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | There's some on the highway all along. All the land that the school's on started at the Creek Bridge down there and went way back down in the woods, followed the creek around and came up to this crossroad. At that crossroad, all the way down to the railroad, back down all the way past here and back to the railroad again, all of that belonged to the school. Now, most of that has been sold. | 19:00 |
Karen Ferguson | Did they only sell to Black farmers? | 19:41 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Definitely. | 19:44 |
Karen Ferguson | Was that a mission, do you think of the people of the school to sell? | 19:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I think it was they were holding the land. I think for— | 19:53 |
Karen Ferguson | Black farmers. | 19:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | —Blacks, I think they were holding it for Blacks, and I don't know of a White one that they have sold any land too. | 19:57 |
Karen Ferguson | What kinds of values do you think your parents instilled in you? You've talked about a few things, but could you talk a little bit more fully about what your parents taught you? | 20:11 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, one thing was truthfulness. They stuck to that and they taught me anyhow to never give up, keep going. They also taught me that it was best to always keep yourself going, keep yourself above the crowd. If these children are going to tear up and do, you don't do it, be on your own. They gave us values as far as the church is concerned. We were not really members of churches or anything. | 20:23 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They had a church up here. But when Dr. King left, it just petered out. But anyway, we were taught that Christianity is tops and we were all reared as Christian children. You went to Sunday school every Sunday morning. After Sunday school, you wait a few minutes and stay up to church. On Sundays, you were taught that you wouldn't go out and play baseball. They wouldn't allow us to take our tennis rackets out on Sunday afternoons. Until we got grown, we stuck to those teachings. | 21:23 |
Karen Ferguson | You said before that you were a bit wild when you were growing up. | 22:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, when I say that, I mean I wasn't a bad child. I was just boyish. | 22:23 |
Karen Ferguson | Boyish. | 22:29 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Boyish. I did just what the boys did, and I did it because I'd rather take Mama's whippings than the brothers' whippings. They'd whip me if I told on them, and if I didn't go on do as they said do, I got a whipping from them. But I'd rather take Mama's whipping than theirs. | 22:30 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you ever resent her attempt to make you more girlish to keep you inside? No? | 22:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, she never tried. I guess she thought it was impossible, because we did so many things. I remember once that we and another girl that was playing with me, Mrs. Fletcher's daughter, were out. They were sitting some hens or something, and those were rotten eggs and they told us to get them out and get rid of them. Told us what to do with them. | 23:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We did what we did with them. We got them, and before we knew it, we were throwing up against the house, the chicken house. And we caught Mama and we got Mrs. Fletcher with rotten eggs. | 23:38 |
Karen Ferguson | You got into a lot of scapes, didn't you? Now the school children would be here at the same time, the people attending the school, and you were attending the school as well. It must have been a bit different for you because you grew up at the school. Did you get into more mischief do you think than some of the students did? | 23:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I got into mischief right along with them, because I was younger than most of them, and what they did, I did too. Just like they come over here, my father had a whole lot of chickens, and they come over and ask Mama to sell them some eggs and cook them for them. Mama would sell them the eggs, cook them, and at the same time they were stealing eggs and we were helping them put them in their pockets. | 24:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That's the kind of things, the mischievous things, we did. They'd come over. I remember we were in the senior classes this particular year, and they came over and said, "We had some chickens," told us called a class meeting and we didn't have to have our advisor because she said, "You children are all right. You know how to do." | 24:50 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They had some chickens, they had gave them to the girls. The girls took them upstairs to the attic in the dormitory and put those chickens on and cooked them. At dinnertime, instead of the people eating like they should have eaten, they were filling their pockets with bread and things that they might need with the chicken. And we had a class meeting, called a class meeting, that afternoon and ate those chickens. The boys stole them, the girls cooked them. | 25:13 |
Karen Ferguson | But you almost sounded incorrigible. How did the adults handle you, handle the children doing all these mischievous things? | 25:54 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They didn't catch up with us, because I used to be terrible about sticking pins. | 26:05 |
Karen Ferguson | Sticking pins? | 26:10 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Pull off my shoes, stick a pin through the toe of my shoes and when somebody passed by me, I kick them. | 26:14 |
Karen Ferguson | With the pin in it? | 26:26 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And I was in about the fourth or fifth grade then. | 26:27 |
Karen Ferguson | Who did your teachers discipline you when they found you? | 26:28 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They never catched me. | 26:33 |
Karen Ferguson | They never caught you. Do you think they played favorites with you because you were— | 26:40 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. I don't think so. I know one thing we did, and I know they didn't play favorites then, I was in the 10th grade and we were reading Silas Marner and there were two boys in that room. They cut the [indistinct 00:27:00] all the time and one boy touched me. | 26:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I was really paying attention to my lesson and the seats were open at the back underneath, and he touched me and he said, "Put this in that seat." Boy was up reading. I took the book and I saw the book was wide open, there was a pin stuck right up in it. So I just put it in the seat like he said. And he said, "Now touch, Gerson." I touched Gerson. | 27:04 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | When Gerson got ready to sit down, he didn't sit right down. He eased down until he got to that pin. He went up and she called the principal in. Mr. Inborden was right across the hall. He said, "Well, I'll tell you one thing, if I ever find out who did, they won't be a graduating class one year." He never found out. | 27:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Miss Redding looked at me. She said, "I know you didn't do that because I know you paying attention to your reading." I said, "Yes, ma'am." They never found out who put that pin in that chair. But I didn't do it, you see the other boy did it. Boy did it, told me to put it in there. | 28:03 |
Karen Ferguson | What did you like best about school? | 28:26 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I guess I'd say learning. I really enjoyed learning, and I enjoyed the fellowship that we had with one another. We were all, I guess you'd say alike. When most of those children came to Bricks to go to school, their speech and their actions were not what we were used to, what they'd been taught through their families of the teachers. | 28:30 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | But when they met these children at the door and their speech was so bad, the children would talk with them concerning it, and say, "We don't say such and such a thing. We said such and such a way." Then they had the teachers, the women teachers, lived in the dormitories and they spoke to these children about their language and everything just changed for them. They got to the place they liked to be at Bricks. They liked to be able to say to their parents, "Say it this way." | 29:05 |
Karen Ferguson | What kinds of things did they say that you corrected? | 29:51 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh, "is you" and "where's" and all that stuff. There were one or two who may have come there with a rather dirty mouth, cursing and so forth, and the boys let them know immediately, we don't do that here. And it changed. I like that fellowship. Everybody felt like he was a part of the school. | 29:53 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you have any favorite teachers when you were at school? | 30:21 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh yes I did. I had one, the librarian. She was such a quiet little lady. She found out that I liked to read and she found out what I liked to read, and she saw that I got what I wanted to read. She taught me how to do what all of us learned. Once in a while, she told me that the books that I was told to read and be able to report on in a day or two, she told me, "You look just for the summary of each chapter and read maybe one or two examples." | 30:26 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I'd leave my book on a shelf in the library until the day before, and the man that was teaching class would look, and I knew what he was doing. The day before, I'd get the book and take it home. First one, he called on was me. Well, I knew how to get that summary. | 31:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | So I'd give the summary, the chapter, and then he said, he looked right front and I knew he knew what—He was wondering how I got it. Then he'd ask me, "Well, suppose you give such and such an example." And almost every time I had read that example and I gave it and she taught me how to do that. I liked my English teachers because I liked English and I enjoyed them. | 31:40 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you learn anything about African Americans when you were at school, any Black history or anything? | 32:21 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes, we had a Black history, Carter G. Woodson's Black history. We used that, and then we had examples of things going around us that they showed. I know my mother went in the store once, in Meyer's store there, and a man looked at her and he looked at the other fellas kind of funny. | 32:28 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | There's this young fella that just come out, guess out of high school, walked up to Mama and said, "What can I do for you, auntie?" Mama said, "You look at me real well. Do I look like your mother's sister?" That's what she told him right then and there, and the other fellas fell out because they knew that he was going to get it, because they never had called any of the Blacks from the school up here "auntie," like they were used to calling. Didn't get that, and he got that. After that, he wouldn't wait on Mama. | 33:03 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, now, would they call other Black women auntie? | 33:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 33:52 |
Karen Ferguson | But not the women from the school. | 33:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 33:54 |
Karen Ferguson | Why do you think they didn't call the women from the school "auntie"? | 33:57 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Because Mr. Meyers had told them that they didn't take that kind of foolishness. The same Mr. Meyers over there in Enfield. | 34:01 |
Karen Ferguson | Who is Mr. Meyers? | 34:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | He owned a big store there. He's dead now. But he and his wife and all of them, they were very friendly with Mr. Inborden, and very friendly with school. He told them that you don't call them auntie, but they're not going to take it. | 34:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Did other people take it though? | 34:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 34:35 |
Karen Ferguson | Why do you think they took it and not the teachers here? | 34:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Because they were just so used to it, and they didn't see any need to change in it. Just like they used to call the Negro man, boy, and they've gotten to the place now if they say it, these men, some of these men are right up this campus, "You look at me, do I look like a boy to you?" And they break that up just like that, "Look at me. Do I look like a boy to you?" They say, "Boy, do so and so." "Who you talking to? You aren't talking to me." | 34:39 |
Karen Ferguson | Now, you said that they told you about this kind of thing at school when you were in school and class? | 35:28 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, they didn't have [indistinct 00:35:30], but they never spoke to us about that. We used the Carter G. Woodson's history, and any other stories you could pick up concerning the Negro, the Booker T. Washington stories and everybody's favorite, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and everybody knew most of those poems. | 35:30 |
Karen Ferguson | How do you think your schooling was different than your parents' schooling? | 36:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, maybe mine wasn't so much different from theirs, because they were brought up in a fairly decent homes, and they instilled some of their teachings into us, things that their parents taught them. Well, one thing, the fact that you worked was okay, but as far as we children were concerned, we did not work. | 36:11 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | For instance, you pick cotton. We didn't really learn to pick cotton because we didn't have it to do. They'd go down the field and shake peanuts, but my father and mother both, they did that. We never did. Of course, we worked tobacco, enjoyed that. But other than that kind of work, we didn't have it to do. | 36:51 |
Karen Ferguson | When you say you worked in tobacco, was that just here on your own land? | 37:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 37:24 |
Karen Ferguson | You also said before that you went to something called The Model School. | 37:25 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That was a little business school down there and it was called a Model School because the people who were in the high classes, the senior class, would come down there and work on you, teach you. Because at that time, you could go to high school and go on out and teach and that was a model. You had some very, very good teachers in there. | 37:29 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I remember the woman who taught me to write. She had some kind of trouble, but she couldn't raise her hand, but she'd take her other hand and get her hand to the board, and she did some beautiful writing. She would teach us how to, well, teach us how math. When she would, instead of teaching with "learn this, learn that," she would take measuring cups and start with the gallon and come on down or go up. | 38:05 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Or she would start with blocks and things like that. These seniors would be watching and they would've to try that same thing and doing that. That started right down in the very first grade. | 38:45 |
Karen Ferguson | So was that the only elementary school that was available at the Bricks? | 39:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. That element, well, I guess we'd say the only elementary school, because you went from there on up to the sixth grade. | 39:10 |
Karen Ferguson | Now, where did the children come from that went to the model school? | 39:26 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | In the community. | 39:30 |
Karen Ferguson | In the community. | 39:32 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And some of them in the dormitory. Some of those children came in the dormitory and some of them were almost grown when they got there. Of course, it made a difference with them because they wanted to get away from the children, but they would try hard. I remember girls in my class, she must have been at least 16. | 39:33 |
Karen Ferguson | And she was just in the first grade. | 39:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | She went on through with it. | 39:59 |
Karen Ferguson | People like that, people who came when they were 16 years old, how did they manage to come here? | 40:03 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Their parents saw to it that they got here. | 40:09 |
Karen Ferguson | And why would they send somebody who was 16 years old? | 40:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Just wanted an education. | 40:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Would it be that they didn't have schools where they came from or that they couldn't attend? | 40:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They couldn't attend the ones around them. They were like, "Who is it?" Couldn't go to school and they wanted to, Carver. You had to sit on the porch and listen. But they couldn't even do that, because you could go to a White school then and sit on the porch and listen. | 40:23 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They'd throw you away from that in a hurry, and they didn't have schools that they could attend and that was why they would send them. Those people were just determined that their people, their children, would learn something. That determination I think is a whole lot in that growing up stage. | 40:45 |
Karen Ferguson | How would people who couldn't afford to send their children to the Bricks, how would they manage to send their children? | 41:14 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, they had a work department. The boys would come and they wanted to go to school. They couldn't go to school, so they'd stay in the dormitory and go out and work all day. At six o'clock, they went in and had a dinner, and at seven, a bell would ring and they'd go to night school. They'd spend from seven until nine in night school paying nothing. | 41:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | The next year, those same fellas would come back and they would be allowed to go to school in the daytime and then go to school again at night. The girls had the same problem. They could come, they'd work in the dining hall or the laundry or the dormitories, and they would work all day and at night they went to night school. | 41:51 |
Karen Ferguson | When you were going to school, were all the subjects that you took academic or were there vocational subjects as well? Could people learn an occupation at school? | 42:27 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, yes and no too, because just about everything I took was academic instead of maybe the cooking and the sewing, but everything else was academic. We might say some of the fellas who worked in the workshop, they went to workshop. They had that and that chest of drawers right there was made in the workshop they had on the campus. | 42:37 |
Karen Ferguson | That's beautiful. | 43:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | It just needs a cleaning up. But that was me there, and they had the machinery and all for the turning and so forth. | 43:10 |
Karen Ferguson | Was it the hope that they would come out as carpenters or to be able to work as carpenters? | 43:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Not necessarily. I think it was to give them a chance to do a little of everything, maybe. | 43:22 |
Karen Ferguson | Did they have anything like masonry or brick masonry or anything like that? | 43:31 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, didn't have any of that. That was the only thing that I remember was that, that type thing. | 43:35 |
Karen Ferguson | Now, why did they have a farm on the campus? | 43:44 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, that land was given to—The American Missionary Association was given, it was given to Bricks, 1600 and some acres. It was good that they had it because there was something that those farm boys, those boys who wanted to come to school and work it out, they could work it out. | 43:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Then they had a garden. They raised the garden and the food, they ate a whole lot of the food that they ate was raised in their garden. And they had one boy who was known as the vegetable boy. He'd go out there and get those vegetables and take them in, and then they had cows too. They had the milk and they had a little dairy building over there. | 44:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They would separate the cream from the milk, skim milk. Then they made butter there also, and all of that helped those farm fellas. When they got back home, they could take those cows that they had and actually milk them and work up the butter and go to market and sell it. | 44:41 |
Karen Ferguson | What did they grow on the farm? | 45:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, they grew corn. They didn't have any tobacco, because Mr. Inborden said no, he didn't want smoking. They had corn, peanuts, some wheat. That was most of it, and then they had vegetables. They had a large vegetable farm. They raised tomatoes and the girls canned them, and they had fruit trees, and that fruit was gathered and maybe dried. | 45:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They had a whole lot of cabbage and made sour kraut and suet and put it down in the basement of the dining room, dining hall, and they used that. Then they made sugar. They raised sugar cane, but they didn't call it sugar cane. Anyhow, cane, and the farm boys made molasses. | 46:04 |
Karen Ferguson | Did they do any experimental farming? | 46:31 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes, they did. When they had those farmers' meetings— | 0:01 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 0:05 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | —they'd come up with something new, and they'd try it out. | 0:05 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 0:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And when—Who's it?—Carver came up with his experiments, potatoes and so on, so forth, they would try those out, too. Uh-huh. So, he did a lot of experimenting, and they came directly from the farmers' meetings that they had. | 0:09 |
Karen Ferguson | When you were growing up, did your parents ever have to tell you, or did they explain to you, the sort of the race relations in this area? Did they? They did? | 0:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes. Sometimes, they had to. | 0:55 |
Karen Ferguson | What do you mean? | 0:58 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, sometimes children would—You know how children are. They going yell back, call each other Black, White and everything else. And they explained to us that we didn't do that kind of thing. | 0:59 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 1:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We didn't do it. And, well, I guess we were grown, though, when we had our first experience with the Ku Klux Klan. They came to see us. | 1:09 |
Karen Ferguson | When? | 1:24 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Up there on the campus. I was up there. The same dormitory where you staying? | 1:24 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 1:29 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We had a place full of girls, and it's always been open. The people could come in and out as they saw fit, regardless of race. And there was a family that came up there, a White family, and they had a little girl with them, and she got to playing with the girls. The girls that we had up there were PTA children, children from PTA camps, the schools. And this little girl wanted to stay up there with the children. | 1:30 |
Karen Ferguson | With the Black children? The White [indistinct 00:02:09]. | 2:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. Uh-huh. And in the meantime, something went wrong with the phone, and a White fellow was there working on the phone. And he saw the little White girl up there with all those Black girls. And he found out she was living in one of the rooms with one of those girls. That night, I heard a little noise outside, and I got up and peeked out my window. There was a Klans right down at the door. And I looked over, and the lady that was with me, Ms. Martin, saw me, and she made a sign to me not to say anything. They got there. They tried the door, and they couldn't get it open. They left. And when they left, Mr. King turned his light on, and they went there, and they told him that they had heard that some people were worrying them up there, said, "And we sure [indistinct 00:03:23] bother you." Reverend King said, "Don't worry. Guns are trained on you. We got them on you. We found out you were coming." Those men left, and they haven't been back there again. | 2:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And another time, I don't know what Reverend King had done to dissatisfied them that time. Woke up that morning, there was a cross down there and it burning, a cross down there burning at the highway. Reverend King went out there and put it out, and he said, "Well, I'm glad they gave me a cross to put up in the church on Easter Sunday." He took it and put it up there in the church on Easter Sunday. Didn't bother him anymore. | 3:37 |
Karen Ferguson | Now when did these things happen? Can you remember? | 4:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes. Let's let a car pass. Yes. I was teaching. That was, oh, a good while back. It was good while back, but shortly before the school closed down. | 4:17 |
Karen Ferguson | And when did the school close down again? Is that— | 4:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | '33, I think. | 4:38 |
Karen Ferguson | 33? Now, Reverend King, he sounded like—Was he a very outspoken man? What do you think he could have done to raise the ire of the Klan? | 4:44 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | He let them know he wasn't scared of them. | 4:51 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 4:54 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | He was some taller nigger, too. | 4:55 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 4:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And he had come up there to run the place. Yeah, that was after the school had closed down. And so— | 4:58 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you remember any other Klan activity happening around here or violence against Black people happening? | 5:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah, in [indistinct 00:05:24], Dr. DuBissette, he took a White man that Dr. DuBissette—He had a hospital there. And that this man had been shot. He had bullets in his intestines, Dr. DuBissette took him and operated on him, and he got all right. And he woke up. His Klan around his hospital. Dr. DuBissette went out on the porch. He put his pistol in his pocket. He said, "All right, you come for me. When you go and I go, one of you going, too. So, don't worry about it. You ready to slug it out? Whichever one wants, come on. I'm going to take one of you with me." And they begged his pardon, and told him they weren't after him. They were after this White fellow who lived over here who was beating his wife. | 5:23 |
Karen Ferguson | And that's the reason they had shot him? | 6:19 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They came after Dr. DuBissette. Dr. DuBissette was the man who killed this White fella. He had been shot. I don't know who shot him. | 6:21 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 6:31 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | But I know they didn't bother Dr. DuBissette anymore. | 6:32 |
Karen Ferguson | Right, right. What did you say about the beating his wife? Who was beating his wife? | 6:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They told the doctor they weren't after him. | 6:41 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. | 6:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They were after this man lived over here. | 6:44 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. | 6:46 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And he's been beating his wife, and so they were going to get him. | 6:47 |
Karen Ferguson | Right, right. | 6:50 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Pretending— | 6:50 |
Karen Ferguson | Right, right. | 6:50 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | —that. | 6:54 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you remember other people though, who really got into serious trouble with White people, who were attacked or even killed by White people during this time? | 6:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I don't remember any of those. | 7:08 |
Karen Ferguson | No? | 7:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | But I do remember when I changed, when I was teaching in Clayton. They moved me from Negro school to the White school when they integrated the schools. And I went in my classroom one morning, right across my board, KKK. I went up to the office, I told the principal, I said, "Listen, you can tell your friends something for me." I said, "Now, they have written all across my board, KKK. You tell them I am not afraid of them. They're nothing to worry, but a bunch of cowards." | 7:11 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And he was scared because they had been after him, too. So, he said, "You're not scared?" I said, "No, I'm not." I said, "You can tell them I'm not afraid of them. They're nothing but a bunch of cowards." And I'd say—Well, they got to us another time, a Christmas time. They intercom opened the day before we get out for school, the day we was supposed to get out at Christmas. And he said, "Everybody just go out to your station immediately. Don't stop for books or anything. Go." It was cold that day, too. "Leave your coats and everything." And we went out on a football field where we was supposed to go, others to the street. And after a while they called, "All right, come on back to your class." | 7:52 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, the fire department had come down, and they had cased out the building. They put us in the gym, and they cased out the classrooms then. And finally they let us go back. They had come down there to get us, and the principal had told somebody, "You know that no man, a Ku Klux man or anybody else, is going to put his child in jeopardy just because of a few Blacks. You don't believe it." And sure enough, one of the boys told me. He said, "You know what happened?" I said, "No." He said, "That wasn't the Ku Klux Klan. That was one of the boys." And said, "We didn't want to go to school this afternoon. They was supposed to turn us out. So, we just made that up." | 8:53 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 9:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Then, another time I came home, and I went back to school, and I couldn't get through on the street on the highway there. I said, "What's going on?" A little boy came running up to me. He said, "The Ku Klux Klan got us all out here." I said, "What you doing in it?" I said, "You too little be a Ku Klux Klansman." He said, "But I ain't too little to get you some literature." He went and got some of that literature and brought it to me, and they were out there in a man's field and they told us, said, "Now, you can always tell them because they got muddy feet. Won't anybody else let them in anywhere with their dirty feels. | 9:55 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you remember, was the Ku Klux Klan always a presence throughout your life in this area? | 10:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, we didn't see much of them. | 10:51 |
Karen Ferguson | But what they were, did you know they were around? | 10:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We knew they were around. | 10:54 |
Karen Ferguson | Even when you were a young girl, did you think that they're around? | 11:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 11:04 |
Karen Ferguson | Yeah? | 11:04 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And I didn't worry about them. | 11:04 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Were there White people in the area that you had a better relationship with? | 11:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh yeah. | 11:15 |
Karen Ferguson | [indistinct 00:11:18] you had a better relationship with? | 11:19 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. There were quite a few of them who were very nice to us. And, of course, sometimes they would have these conferences and student groups coming in. They had the mixed groups, interracial groups, and nobody bothered them. | 11:19 |
Karen Ferguson | When was that? Was that before the Civil Rights Movement? | 11:46 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. See that was, I guess we might say, "Yes, it was." | 11:50 |
Karen Ferguson | In the 1950s or— | 11:57 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Something right there. | 11:57 |
Karen Ferguson | What kind of groups would these be? | 11:59 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mostly church groups. | 12:02 |
Karen Ferguson | And were they coming here to the— | 12:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 12:07 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. And was it a United Church of Christ Center at that point? | 12:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know what they called it then because they changed it. Every time you turn, something's going on. But they have had Sunday school conferences because I attended one. And there were three of us who were sent up to Northfield, Massachusetts to an ecumenical camp there. And I got to know quite a few interesting people. In fact, when I got to the dormitory, was way in the middle of the night, and my roommate was a White woman. She was waiting up for me, and everybody else was waiting for me, and I was the only Black in that dormitory. | 12:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 13:04 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And with the man and his wife went with me, they were another group, but they were very nice. And I found that dealing with ecumenicals, I got to know some Jews very well, Jewish people. Murray's over here an [indistinct 00:13:25] Jews, too. | 13:06 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you think that you had a better relationship with him because he was Jewish? | 13:28 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. | 13:34 |
Karen Ferguson | No? | 13:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I felt sorry for him because he came down sometimes without his shoes laced up and tied up. He was in that World War I. | 13:36 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 13:48 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And he was from Poland, and they had treated him like a dog. He was crippled. He couldn't reach down sometime to fasten his shoes. And I found out that, well I had known the Meyers all my life, so it didn't make much difference for me about him. But he was very nice. And when we had communion, he took communion right along with the others of us, with the Whites and Blacks and all. And I was in one of his class groups, and he would tell us about how they had treated the Polish people. | 13:50 |
Karen Ferguson | I asked you this before, but I wanted to ask you again. Did your parents ever have to tell you how to treat White people in order to stay out of trouble? | 14:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-mm. | 14:58 |
Karen Ferguson | No? | 14:58 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. They never told us anything there. They did tell us not to get in arguments with them and so forth. Something like that. | 15:00 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Do you know anybody who ever did get into an argument and got into trouble for it? | 15:10 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, not exactly. No. I don't know any of them. | 15:17 |
Karen Ferguson | What were the signs of segregation and Jim Crow in some of the towns around here, like Enfield and Whitaker? | 15:25 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, you want a drink of water, there was a sign that said White. Another sign said Black. You want to go to the bathroom? There was a sign that said White, and there was a sign that said Black and you couldn't get in that Black place because see it was just a hole in the wall, so to speak. And you weren't supposed to go in there. And the churches, of course, were segregated. You didn't go there. You wanted to go, you better not. They had their White funeral parlors, the Black funeral parlors. And they still have those. And you didn't have any Black hotels or motels. They waw all for Whites. | 15:32 |
Karen Ferguson | What did people do if they came into town and there were no Black hotels? What would they do? | 16:32 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | You go back home. | 16:40 |
Karen Ferguson | Go back home. | 16:41 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Or go somewhere, stay with somebody that you knew. Most of the time, you just went back home. You didn't go there thinking you going to get somewhere to spend the night because you knew you weren't going spend the night there. | 16:41 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you go into town very much when you were a girl? | 17:02 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Not much. | 17:06 |
Karen Ferguson | No? | 17:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Because in those days, you had to go on horse and buggy. And if our mothers would take us to town, there was an old Negro woman there who had a store, and Mama would take us in there, and she would tell us not to bother Miss Harris. And she'd leave maybe a quarter to Miss Harris if we wanted something to give us something from it. But we knew better than to worry Miss Harris. But she was kind of old, but she was very nice. | 17:07 |
Karen Ferguson | So, she would mind you while your mother went to do her shopping? | 17:50 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. Yeah, but we just sit there because we were interested in seeing the trains pass. | 17:54 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Were there many Black-owned businesses around here? | 18:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-mm. | 18:07 |
Karen Ferguson | No? | 18:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. I don't remember a store. I remember her in her store and that was just a little hole in the wall, so to speak, where she could sell candies, cookies, drinks, and things like that. And then, we had one or two garages that were run by Blacks, and I think that they, Whites, thought they were better than the Whites because they would go to them. | 18:08 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, I see. | 18:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And, of course, the funeral homes. | 18:47 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 18:51 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They were owned by some Blacks. Cofield was the biggest one. And I don't remember any other type of stores that they had for Blacks. | 18:52 |
Karen Ferguson | Why would your mother leave you with this, what is it, Mrs. Miller? | 19:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, Miss—Oh, what's her name? Miss Harris. | 19:12 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, I'm sorry, Miss Harris? Why wouldn't she take you along with her shopping? | 19:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know. Maybe she couldn't be bothered with three of us at one time. | 19:22 |
Karen Ferguson | Well, and you were wild. When you met White people on the street, how did people, Whites and Blacks, behave to each other on the street? | 19:27 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, most of the time, they just passed by and not even say anything. But there were times when one would kind of shove the other one out the way. Or if there were two walking along together, two Whites together or two Blacks together, they would try to kind of elbow them out of the way. | 19:42 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. So Blacks and Whites did this to each other? Blacks wouldn't get in trouble for shoving a White person? | 20:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | There were certain Blacks, they wouldn't get in trouble for doing anything. They were so mean. | 20:13 |
Karen Ferguson | Really? | 20:19 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | So, the Whites wouldn't worry about them. But ordinarily though, if there was somebody that you have known a long time, you pass along the street, they'd speak, and they do that right now. You pass on the street, "Hey, Miss so-and-so. I haven't seen you in a long time," or something like that. | 20:23 |
Karen Ferguson | But mostly they wouldn't speak to each other? | 20:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh no. | 20:49 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you ever remember people defying the signs, maybe taking a drink out of the White water fountain? | 20:49 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. I've seen them do that more time than one, but nobody said anything about it. But when they did open up in the, where was it in? I was teaching in Clayton, and I don't know whether it was Hardee's or who, but anyhow, one of these fast-food places. No, it was in town first. Mrs. Tomlinson, that's my landlady, said, "Come on. This is a Saturday. Let's go down here and see what they going to say. Let's go down here and see if they'll feed us." We got there, sat down, saw eyes turning, looking. But we just sat there. Finally, someone came up, "Can I wait on you?" They waited on us. So, we got making a habit. "We're going downtown every once in a while, get something to eat." So, we said, "Well, let's try it out here to Smithfield." It was a place on the way to Smithfield. We went out there, and we got waited on and never did they refuse us. | 20:56 |
Karen Ferguson | When was this that you just tried to— | 22:20 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That was shortly after the Desegregation Act. | 22:22 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh. Okay. What made you do that? | 22:30 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Just to be devilish. | 22:34 |
Karen Ferguson | Just to be devilish? | 22:35 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | See what they were going to do. | 22:39 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 22:40 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | We were trying to make them say, "I can't wait on you." | 22:42 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 22:46 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And we were ready with our answer that you are supposed to wait on us. | 22:46 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. So, was this in the '60s sometime, you think ? | 22:52 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. | 22:59 |
Karen Ferguson | Now, you said when you were younger, some people drank out of the White water fountain and that kind of— | 23:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Nobody did anything about it. | 23:07 |
Karen Ferguson | Nobody did anything about it? So, even if you drank out of it, nobody would say anything? | 23:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-mm. They just walk around the Black water and drink the White, and you hear some— | 23:11 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you ever do that? | 23:20 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I never did try it because my mother told me, "Don't try to push a point." But I did remember hearing children sometime, "Let me see how this White water taste." | 23:21 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 23:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | "I know how the Black taste and let me see how the White taste." And that was usually around bus stations. | 23:34 |
Karen Ferguson | Right, right. Do you remember anybody ever getting into trouble with the police for things that they hadn't done, maybe being harassed by the police? | 23:41 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I don't. I do know of a case that when I was teaching in Columbia, South Carolina, a Negro teacher got on the bus, and the law was that you fill in from the back to the front and the White from the front to the back. And this woman got in on the bus, and she looked around. [indistinct 00:24:24]. She's saw a very dirty Negro sitting back there. There was a place beside him. She just moved on up, sat down, and the bus driver said, "You can't sit there." She paid him no attention. She'd been teaching all day, and she was tired. "You can't sit there." And finally, he said it again. Said, "You talking to me?" He said, "Yes." So, "Well, I'll sit here." He got up, stopped his bus, got up, went there back there and grabbed hold of her to take off the bus. She had an umbrella. She beat that man all over his head and broke up her own umbrella. | 23:55 |
Karen Ferguson | She did this to the bus driver? | 25:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah, she did that to the bus driver. And I guess there were too many Negros on there, didn't anybody do anything about it. But anyhow, he took her on down to the bus station, and they wanted to know what she had done. So, she told him, and she said, "Here's my umbrella if you want it." They didn't do nothing to that woman. And after that, they didn't have more trouble with the buses in Columbia. You come from the back to the front. You go from the front to the back. you sit where you want to. They didn't do a thing to that woman, but she beat him up with her umbrella, tore it all to pieces. | 25:16 |
Karen Ferguson | And now, when were you teaching in Columbia? | 26:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I started teaching there in 1931. | 26:12 |
Karen Ferguson | Huh. So, this was in the '30s sometimes when this incident happened? | 26:22 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | It may have been in the '30s or '40s. | 26:25 |
Karen Ferguson | '30s or '40s? And you said after that the buses were desegregated? | 26:29 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Not really desegregated, but they didn't say anything about— | 26:33 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. | 26:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | If you stopped up front, they wouldn't say anything to you about it. | 26:37 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Hmm. That's a very interesting story. | 26:41 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yep. | 26:46 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. Now, when you finished up, you finished up at the Briggs School, you finished high school there. Right? And then, you went to Talladega? | 26:50 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I finished junior college at Briggs. | 26:56 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. Okay. So you went— | 26:58 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I went to Talladega for two years. | 26:59 |
Karen Ferguson | And why did you choose to go to Talladega again? | 27:02 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Huh? | 27:04 |
Karen Ferguson | Why did you choose to go there? | 27:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, because the people who were living at Talladega wanted someone to stay with them. | 27:08 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 27:16 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And I went down to be with her. I was supposed to have gone to Fisk, but I didn't know this lady at Fisk. But I knew Ms. Fletcher, and Mama would rather have me with Mrs. Fletcher than with the lady at Fisk. And it seemed that Mrs. Fletcher's letter came, offered me asking me to come and stay, before this lady's from Fisk. | 27:17 |
Karen Ferguson | So, you stayed with her instead of staying in the dormitory? | 27:48 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes. | 27:52 |
Karen Ferguson | Yes? And did you have to do any work for her or you just stayed with her? | 27:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Just stayed there to take place of her daughter who was out. | 27:57 |
Karen Ferguson | Did she live on campus? | 28:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes, she lived in a campus home. | 28:03 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 28:05 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | All of the faculty members lived in campus homes. | 28:06 |
Karen Ferguson | Now, what did you major in when you were there? | 28:14 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I majored in English. | 28:16 |
Karen Ferguson | English? English? | 28:16 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. English and social studies. | 28:19 |
Karen Ferguson | And how did you decide to go to college? Was it even an option? | 28:22 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | It wasn't any decision to be made. I just knew I was going. | 28:26 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Did your brothers go to college, as well? | 28:31 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. | 28:35 |
Karen Ferguson | No? | 28:35 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Neither one of them. | 28:36 |
Karen Ferguson | Now, why did you go and they did not go? | 28:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, one of them, he wasn't interested if he said he got through high school. Okay. The other one, well, he was a born auto mechanic, and he wasn't interested in anything but automobiles. | 28:40 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 28:58 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And he made it his business, I guess you'd say, he didn't go to college, but he did get in under people who could teach him something about automobiles. And before it was all over with, he had made himself an automobile out of the junk pile. I said, "Cornelius, what kind of car is that?" He said, "I don't know. It's got such and such a kind of motor. It's got such and such a this, such and such a that." But he could make an automobile. | 29:00 |
Karen Ferguson | Mm-hmm. Was there the same expectation that they would go to college as there was for you? | 29:41 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes. | 29:45 |
Karen Ferguson | Yeah? So, were your parents disappointed when they didn't go to college, do you think? | 29:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They weren't worried about Harding because Harding had make up of his mind years before he wasn't going. They were disappointed in Cornelius. And they were finally satisfied when he made himself into an excellent auto mechanic. | 29:50 |
Karen Ferguson | Did they both stay in this area? | 30:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Who? | 30:11 |
Karen Ferguson | Your brothers? | 30:11 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. | 30:11 |
Karen Ferguson | Where'd they move? | 30:11 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | One went to Fayetteville, and the other one went from one place to another. He was in New Jersey somewhere for a while working on automobiles. And he'd go from one place to another working with automobiles. But Harding stayed here. He stayed at home. | 30:14 |
Karen Ferguson | Now, you went to Talladega, and you majored in English and social studies. Did you get involved in a sorority there? Did you join a sorority. | 30:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 30:52 |
Karen Ferguson | Which sorority did you join? | 30:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Alpha Kappa Alpha. | 30:54 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, yeah. And why did you join AKA? | 30:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, for some reason, they thought a lot of me when I went to Talladega, and Elizabeth, Mrs. Fletcher's daughter was an AKA member. | 31:00 |
Karen Ferguson | What kind of kind of girl became an AKA? | 31:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, she was supposed to have been a decent type of girl, high educational grades and so forth, and friendly, all of that. | 31:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 31:30 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Outgoing. | 31:31 |
Karen Ferguson | What kinds of things did you do with your sorority? | 31:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, the biggest of what we did was to try to help others that were unable to help themselves in school. We did a good bit of fundraising for girls, needy girls, who wanted to go to school, go to college. | 31:36 |
Karen Ferguson | Did most girls join a sorority? | 32:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Quite a few of them. | 32:03 |
Karen Ferguson | Quite a few? Did you remain active in your sorority after you graduated? | 32:04 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | For a while, but I'm not active now. Every once in a while they come and get me— | 32:10 |
Karen Ferguson | Right, right. | 32:14 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | —take me over. | 32:14 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you ever go out with boys when you were at college at all? | 32:21 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Some. | 32:25 |
Karen Ferguson | Mm-hmm. | 32:25 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Not many of them. I wasn't particularly interested in. I met a young man once that I thought a lot of, and he was from Africa. And when he was ready to go home, he wanted me to go along with him. But that was too far away from home for me. And I'm glad I didn't go because when he went in, he was bitten by some kind of bug, and he never got inside. It killed him. And they had to walk in from the coast, Portuguese, West Africa. | 32:26 |
Karen Ferguson | Were there many African students at Talladega? | 33:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They went Briggs. | 33:11 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, Briggs. At Briggs. Okay. | 33:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | There was a family that came in every seven years, and that's where I met them. They were two, three? I know there were four boys, and I think there were just two girls. | 33:17 |
Karen Ferguson | When you were at Talladega, were you allowed to go out with boys when you were living here, when you were still at school? | 33:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | [indistinct 00:33:44]. | 33:44 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. | 33:44 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I was too, what should I say, familiar with the boys around here. I didn't see anything I liked. | 33:46 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. When you went to Talladega, were they very strict about courting boys or— | 33:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-mm. | 34:02 |
Karen Ferguson | No? | 34:02 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-mm. | 34:02 |
Karen Ferguson | Could you leave the campus, that kind of thing? | 34:03 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. Uh-huh. You see, I was living with these people, and if I wanted to go somewhere, I just told Mrs. Fletcher. I said, Mrs. Fletcher, "I'm going over here and see Miss Gay. I'm going to see Mrs. Thornton." | 34:05 |
Karen Ferguson | What kinds of things did you do for fun when you were at college? | 34:25 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, when I was at college, I was more reader than everything else. I didn't do too much for fun, but I did a lot of reading, and I was trying to get my math up where it belonged. So, I guess I should say, and then I practiced a little piano. | 34:30 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Did you ever go to the movies? | 34:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh yeah. | 34:59 |
Karen Ferguson | Was there a Black movie theater down there? | 35:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. Down on, well, we used to call it Main Street, but Talladega's a small place. I guess it's large now because of the racing. | 35:05 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. So, the cinema that you went to was an all Black cinema. | 35:21 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 35:27 |
Karen Ferguson | Was there a Black cinema in this area when you were growing up? | 35:30 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. But we didn't go to it. | 35:33 |
Karen Ferguson | Why not? | 35:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know. We just didn't bother. | 35:38 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 35:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | But there was one up in Rocky Mount that you could go to. You had to go upstairs, and sometimes you were comfortable, and sometimes you were uncomfortable. | 35:40 |
Karen Ferguson | Why was that? | 35:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh, well, sometimes those stairs are so high, and it's so high up, and you really couldn't actually be comfortable when you was high up as all of that. But we used to go to—Well, it was one down there we could go downstairs. They started opening up for us to go down. So, we went a good bit. | 35:57 |
Karen Ferguson | And was it in Talladega or here? | 36:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. Here. And when I was in Pennsylvania. Oh, when I was in Durham, I was in school there. | 36:36 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, you were? | 36:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I used to go—I got my master's in Durham. | 36:50 |
Karen Ferguson | At the— | 36:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | North Carolina Central. | 36:53 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. So, did you get your master's right after you finished up at Talladega? | 36:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I taught, but I started immediately on it because I was told that every year or two, you had to take extra courses to keep your certificate up. I said, "Well, there isn't any sense in me taking extra courses keeping up a certificate when I could be getting credit to the master's. And so, I worked to the master's, and I worked with Dr. Howe from North Carolina from UNC. He was my professor there. And I didn't like the library at UNC, so I went to Duke all the time. I did my work at Duke, and they told me, "It's perfectly welcome here, but don't get caught in here after 10:00 because you be locked in all night." | 37:01 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. So, at the UNC, you were student at Central, but your advisor was from UNC? | 38:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 38:09 |
Karen Ferguson | And why didn't you like the library over at UNC? Did they not welcome you there? | 38:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes, I was welcome there. I just didn't like it. | 38:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh. | 38:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know why. | 38:18 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 38:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | It wasn't as spacious as the one at Duke. | 38:20 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. Now, when you finished up at Talladega, did you go started teaching right away? Where was your first teaching job? | 38:25 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Columbia, South Carolina. | 38:32 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. Okay. And how was that different? That's a bit of a bigger place than you'd ever lived in before, wasn't it? | 38:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. | 38:42 |
Karen Ferguson | How was that different than where you grew up? | 38:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | A whole lot of difference. I had to adjust to beat student body. I had just all kind of student problems and problems with maybe some of the teachers and so forth. It was interesting, but it was a problem. | 38:45 |
Karen Ferguson | Can you talk a little more about the problem that you had? | 39:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes. I had student problems, and the children were at that time beginning to get drugs. | 39:12 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh yeah. | 39:25 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And I remember one little girl who would come in class, and she'd sit down. She'd get quiet, and she would go to sleep, and you could hardly wake her up. And we found out that what she was doing every morning when she came to school before coming in the gate, they couldn't go out when they came in, she'd get a Coca-Cola and a little box of aspirins, and she put those aspirins in that Coca-Cola, and she drank it, and she was drugged for the rest of the day. | 39:26 |
Karen Ferguson | Was that common? | 40:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, yes. There were several of them who were doing it. And we didn't know at first what it was because we hadn't had a drug problem. Then, we had problems with children who would go out and stay all night and come to the school next morning, dead to the world. I hadn't been used to that kind of thing. | 40:14 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 40:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And we had problems with children that were—Well now, they had problems on the street, and Columbia was kind of hilly, and we had one or two children that got killed, and that kind of got on me, on a wagon or something, going down a hill and run right into a car. | 40:45 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you think if you'd come back here right away to teach, there would've been the same kinds of these drug problems and the children staying out all night? | 41:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't believe so. | 41:21 |
Karen Ferguson | So, what do you think the big difference was between the two places? | 41:21 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, maybe parents. Because you visited their homes. I visited one or two homes, and I just couldn't take it. I went into one home. The girl [indistinct 00:41:47] invited me in. I went in that a home, and the floor looked like I don't know what. And they were eating out of tin pans, and the floor just looked like it didn't have any covering or anything on it. It was just nasty filthy. And the children were filled up with flies, flies all over their faces and hands. And you had to teach out of that. And then, you'd go to the home sometime, and you find out you better not go in. There's an argument going on, and anything could happen. So finally, the superintendent told us not to go in those homes. But as far as around here, I still think you can go in the homes even right now. Even though some of the children are on drugs, they respect their parents enough to try to keep from letting you see them. | 41:28 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. There were poor people around here though, weren't there. | 43:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. | 43:05 |
Karen Ferguson | How did poor people live here as compared to the poor people in Columbia? Do you think they had a different kind of life? | 43:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes, because these people are out in the open all the time in Columbia, just like that. | 43:18 |
Karen Ferguson | So, they lived close together? | 43:24 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah, close together. And the parents were gone. When the children got up in the morning, the parents were not there. And when the children got back home from school in the afternoon, the parents were not there. And when the parents got home from work, the children weren't there. | 43:27 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 43:46 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | So that's the way you had it. | 43:46 |
Karen Ferguson | And you think it would be different with the farm family? | 43:49 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. The farm family is together more. They work together. And even though sometimes the children get in problems, but that farm family works together, and they sit down in the morning and eat breakfast together. And some of those children didn't have anything to eat in the morning to come to school. The parents are gone. When they were problems and we found out they were problems because they were hungry. And when they got home in the afternoon, there wasn't anywhere to go but in the streets, and anything could happen in the streets. And that's just what happened. Anything. And when the parents came home, the children would go home, and it was— | 43:51 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. How long did you stay at that job in Columbia? | 44:46 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | 15 years. | 44:49 |
Karen Ferguson | 15 years? | 44:49 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-mm. | 44:51 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you make a lot of friends there? | 44:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Sure did. There were quite a few teachers that I got to know very well, and there were quite a few families that I got to know. I got to know two or three doctors and their families, and I got to know members of the sorority and their families. And there were two colleges there. I got to know people at Allen and at—What's the other school there? Benedict. | 44:54 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. Were there any things that you preferred about city life, the country life? | 45:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I like the country life. I don't care for the city life. Only thing, in the city, you could get in and out to programs and things like that. And there were sometimes some very good programs that were in churches or on the yards or in the college or one of the colleges, and so forth. But as far as life, I prefer country life. | 45:49 |
Karen Ferguson | Why is that? | 46:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know. Guess it's because I've always used to it. | 46:19 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. So, where did you go after you finished up in Columbia? | 46:23 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Working in Columbia? | 46:26 |
Karen Ferguson | Yeah. | 46:29 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Down to Clayton. | 46:31 |
Karen Ferguson | To Clayton? And why did you leave Columbia? | 46:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, I got sick. | 46:37 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh. | 46:38 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I had a toxic thyroid. | 46:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | To just give up my job because I wouldn't be able to go to school the next year. But before the end of the summer he said, "You find you somewhere to go to work because you going crazy if you sit around here." So I got this other job. | 0:01 |
Karen Ferguson | So did you come back to live here? Or where did you live? | 0:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I stayed here until I got well enough to go back to school. And then I boarded at someone's house until, come home, until I got a car and could drive for myself, I stayed there. | 0:22 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you enjoy that job at Clayton? | 0:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. Sure did. | 0:45 |
Karen Ferguson | How long did you stay there? | 0:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, 15 plus, what makes it? I retired in 1975. | 0:45 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. And you stayed there until after school desegregation. Is that right? | 1:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. | 1:12 |
Karen Ferguson | Now, could you tell me a little bit about desegregation? Was it a good thing or a bad thing, do you think? | 1:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, I think it was good. I think because it helps all kinds of people. Even the bad people. I found it rather interesting because I had never worked with White children before, and I found them very interesting. Some of them were, well, they are deprived of their parents. Their parents don't care for them sometimes as much as our parents seem to care for their children. | 1:23 |
Karen Ferguson | How so? | 2:03 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | They'd let them just go on out and do what they wanted to do. But we found that there were several little Black children whose parents were working, but the children had their own responsibilities that they had to take care of. | 2:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I remember one little girl, she was about 10th grade, she was the mother of that family, because her mother was working all the time. And when she went into home ec class, the home ec teacher found her able to actually carry on a complete dinner without any problem. And she never was able to get one of the little White girls to do the same thing. It may have been that the child just didn't want to. Or it may have been that the child had not been taught to do. But the little Negro girls have to learn. | 2:29 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 3:20 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Just have to do. And now, so they [indistinct 00:03:27] some sewing too. They had to do. | 3:20 |
Karen Ferguson | Were there any bad things that came along with desegregations for Black children in particular? | 3:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. For all of them. They'd fight like cats and dogs. And each one put it on the other. | 3:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | One of the girls, one of the teachers and I was standing up in the hall one day. And we looked up and all of a sudden we saw one little boy pitch the other one through the window. Downstairs, pitch him through the window. And they were both White boys. | 3:54 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And so I said, "Lord have Mercy, what am I going to do?" This other girl said, "I'm going down there and tell the principal. See, he might not want to have you to tell him, but I'm going to tell him." And he sent those children home to their parents. | 4:16 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And then we've had several instances of when something happened, they put it on a little Black boy. And, well one good thing that came from it, they got them together on the ball games. They got together on basketball, football, and baseball. The little boys. And they could take it out on the QT. Knock the boy and pretend you didn't do it. But they were pretty good at keeping themselves together that way. | 4:32 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And one night, someone got mad at somebody and got a gun, and shot all the windows out on one side of the building at the principal's office. | 5:18 |
Karen Ferguson | And why was that? | 5:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Because they were mad at him about something. | 5:41 |
Karen Ferguson | Now did it have to do with some kind of race thing? | 5:48 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. It wasn't racial. | 5:51 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you suffer any discrimination as a teacher after desegregation? | 5:57 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I didn't. | 6:03 |
Karen Ferguson | Did other teachers suffer discrimination? | 6:05 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | If they did, it was their fault. I'll have to give it to the people at Clayton. They were very, very nice. And you were looked up to. As soon as I got in there, the principal jumped down on me with both feet. "I want you as the dean of the girls." And he had gotten that from the other high school. Because the principal had said that I was very positive with the girls, and that they would listen to me when they wouldn't listen to anyone else. And so I was given a top job there with the girls. | 6:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And I must say, they were all very nice. I didn't have any one girl to—But she didn't do anything to me. But she did to another teacher. She had a notebook she was supposed to turn in, and she put that notebook, it was a science notebook. And she turned in all kind of mess in that notebook. And her parents were called down there, and asked her why she did it. "I don't like that old woman." She was talking about a White woman then. "I don't like her." And the mother never could do anything with the girl. Never. | 6:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And that's where I found my first real drug problem. | 7:49 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 7:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Little boy came in my room one day, and I had them doing some work on the board. He started at one end of the board and went all the way around, just as big as he could. Looked at that boy. One boy said, "Miss Myrtle I'm going to tell you something." I said, "Okay." | 7:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | He told me, "He had drugs today." I said, "How do you know?" Said his uncle was in the insane asylum and they had given him some medication so he could come home and stay. This boy and his friends had gotten this medication. They had taken it, and they had come to school. | 8:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And before the day was over, that boy fell asleep almost in my lap. So I went downstairs after and told the assistant principal what had happened. He said, "I wish I had known that this morning." He said, "The other boys came here. There were four of them. This little fellow in my room got the dope, and he gave it to the other children. And the other children, three, cut up so bad they had to send for their mamas." And he said, "Now I'll see about him. He'll come back in the morning." | 8:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | So he said, "And as soon as he makes a move, you send for me. But don't send any of the little White boys. They know him." Now he told me who to send. I said, "Okay." | 9:38 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Sure enough, he came up there. It's going. "[indistinct 00:10:01] boy?" "Nothing." And a little White boy gave me a signal. I said, "I know what's happening." So I told the other little fellow, I said, "Go downstairs and tell the assistant principal to come up here." | 9:51 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And before he could get downstairs, the principal had come on up there. And when this little boy looked up, he said, "I ain't done nothing. I ain't done nothing." He said, "Come on out here." | 10:19 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | The boy's mama had told him, said, "The next time he comes over there, you take him down there and you tear him all to pieces." These children were in high school. So he took that boy down there and tore him all to pieces. The boy's daddy had died, and the mother was trying to rear him and she couldn't do any, he was into something all time. | 10:30 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And before I left Clayton, he and some of his little friends had gotten to work and broken into a trailer. Broken into somebody's trailer, stole a lot of stuff, and gotten in jail. | 10:57 |
Karen Ferguson | Were you able to vote here when you were— | 11:23 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I had an interesting experience. I went to register to vote, and you had to read a certain portion of the Constitution. | 11:35 |
Karen Ferguson | When was this? Do you remember? | 11:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. | 11:48 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you remember how old you were approximately? | 11:48 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I had to be at least 18, I know. And I went to Whitakers, and they had an old station there. And they took me in there to read this Constitution. And as soon as I started reading the Constitution, a long freight train came through. And it rumbled, it rumbled, it rumbled and it rumbled. So finally they said, "I take it you can read the Constitution." I was more than 18 because I was teaching. I said, "Yes I can." | 11:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | He said, "What makes you think you can?" I said, "Because I'm teaching social studies and I work with the Constitution all the time." And that train gave me a chance to get my voting rights. | 12:30 |
Karen Ferguson | Why was that exactly? I don't understand. | 12:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Everybody, all Negroes had to learn to read the Constitution, read and interpret it, before you could vote. And that's what it was. I had to read and interpret. But when I told them that I was teaching it, I didn't have a problem. But others could go there and some of them could actually read it, and they wouldn't give them, I don't know what excuse they gave. But now, we don't have any problem there. | 12:50 |
Karen Ferguson | Were there many Blacks who voted in this area? | 13:32 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Now. | 13:37 |
Karen Ferguson | Now. But back then? | 13:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. They just tried then. They wouldn't let them in. | 13:39 |
Karen Ferguson | Now, why did you try? Why did you try? | 13:44 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Because I was determined I was going to vote. | 13:47 |
Karen Ferguson | And who else tried? Who else was determined to try? | 13:51 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know. I know Ms. Body must have been, because she has been with the voting group for a long time. She helps recruit and so forth. | 13:57 |
Karen Ferguson | Were there ever organized drives to get people to register to vote? | 14:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 14:12 |
Karen Ferguson | Who organized those? | 14:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, anybody can get together. I think Mrs. Lyons is one of them, who has tried to organize people to come up to vote. And we had a, what is it? Community club, Brick Community Club. We have called in people to come in and work with us so that we could get the people to vote. | 14:15 |
Karen Ferguson | But how about before when people weren't able to vote? Was there ever an organized drive for people to go to the registrar and try to register to vote? | 14:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't remember any of it. | 14:54 |
Karen Ferguson | So it was just individuals who would go and try to register. | 14:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. And then the clubs started organizing and getting people to go. And they'd get carloads, take them on down. | 15:00 |
Karen Ferguson | To the registrar? | 15:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Bring them back—Yeah. | 15:15 |
Karen Ferguson | And when was this? | 15:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That's not too many years back, because I was working, Ms. Body was working. And Mrs. Body was one of the people at the registrar's book. She worked on that. And they get people like Cliff Cole, I don't think you know him. He was one of the people trying to get in, trying to get into office. | 15:20 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And he came up to our club meeting one night and talked with us about voting. And that he tried to see us all at the polls. And [indistinct 00:16:04] had three or four come in like that. And they go just because these people come in. And now you still have to work on the people to go to vote. | 15:51 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I had one man to tell me, "Shucks, my vote don't count nothing. I'm just one person." I said, "Suppose a million people say the same thing you say. Say why should I vote? It didn't make any difference." I said, "It does make a difference." | 16:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And I finally got that guy, about four years ago. That's not a long time ago. I got that guy and his wife by the hand and took him in, and asked the man if I could go in there where they were voting to show them what to do. To let me go in. Because I was out of my county. I was in Edgecomb County, they live in Edgecomb. And I had to vote in Nash. And I had voted. So I went on in with them and showed them what to do. Now, you can't stop them. | 16:35 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you belong to, was there an NAACP chapter around here? | 17:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, I don't know that he'd call it around here, it's near here. But the head of the NAACP is Ben Chavis. And he's in and out of here all the time. | 17:26 |
Karen Ferguson | But back then, back before people could vote, say back in the forties and fifties, was there an NAACP branch around here? | 17:44 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I'm not sure. I think it was in Rocky Mount. | 17:53 |
Karen Ferguson | Was there anybody who was trying to change the system back then? | 18:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Change what? | 18:06 |
Karen Ferguson | Change the system, or to fight for civil rights back in the forties and fifties around here? | 18:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. | 18:13 |
Karen Ferguson | Who was that? | 18:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know the people, but I do know they've been trying to fight this civil rights for a long time. Getting it going. Well, I guess you'd say King was the first one to actually do anything about it. | 18:14 |
Karen Ferguson | Martin Luther King Jr.? Oh, okay. But around here in this part of North Carolina. | 18:35 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | If it were anyone, it would be preachers like Reverend Barnes from over here in Rocky Mount. And some of these fairly forward moving preachers. | 18:43 |
Karen Ferguson | Were there any of these forward moving preachers around here? Right around here? | 18:56 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I can't think of any of them now. There used to be someone down at Red Hill. And that's right down the road, but you may have seen it. And you can look at Ms. Line, she's a forward going person. | 19:05 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. What kinds of organizations did you belong to when you came back here after you were in Columbia? Other than the church? | 19:22 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, the women's club, the community club. What else? Well, the Sunday school, we worked at that, and all of that. | 19:36 |
Karen Ferguson | Why did you join some of these organizations? | 20:01 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, I'd like to see our community grow. And there's a lot in it grow—I was a member of, I was at one time a 4H club leader. And I've just gotten too old to keep up with them, so I don't bother anymore. | 20:05 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you attend church now? | 20:31 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Huh? | 20:33 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you attend church? | 20:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Sometimes. Not too much. I tell you, it's pretty hard for me to get out to church. I no longer drive. I had to get rid of my car. I go with Ms. Body frequently. They go to Episcopal church in Tarboro. And if someone decides he wants to take me to church, he come get me, I'll go. But I can't—There's a little church up there that's been up there just a short while, but I can't walk up there that far, so I don't bother. | 20:35 |
Karen Ferguson | Did your family attend church when you were growing up? | 21:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, we had church services here every Sunday. Every Sunday. | 21:12 |
Karen Ferguson | What denomination was it? | 21:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Non-denominational. Because they didn't have a regular preacher, but if there was anybody who came along and he was a preacher, Mr. Inborden put him up there to preach. And when Reverend King came up here, he opened it up as a regular church. And every Sunday morning he preached. | 21:18 |
Karen Ferguson | And was that a denominational church? | 21:54 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I guess we say it was non-denominational too. | 22:00 |
Karen Ferguson | What church did you attend when you came back here after you were in Columbia? | 22:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | This one up here, on the campus. It was—Yeah. | 22:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. And was that the United Church of Christ? | 22:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 22:17 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. Why did you attend that church? | 22:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Because it was right up here. I could get to it. And I enjoyed listening to the people who spoke. They didn't stay all day, talking. They had a regular service and everything was carried out nicely. | 22:23 |
Karen Ferguson | Who from the community belonged to that church? | 22:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, most of the children who grew up in the community. Morse, I know they were there, Morse. Mrs. Slade's boys. The Wilkins children. And there were two or three of those. There were 3, 4, 5, wait a minute, she got six. They were there, part of the church too. And Percels, who used to live here, they were part of the church. And Lula kept her little boys, her children that she kept, they were part of it. | 22:51 |
Karen Ferguson | Was this after the school closed? | 23:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | It was during the time and after. | 23:47 |
Karen Ferguson | I'm going to ask you one last question. And I was wondering if you've ever felt in your life, like people treated you like you were less than equal to them? Never? | 24:04 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Never. I never let, strike me that way. I've always felt that I'm just as good as the next man. That's the way I feel about it. Just as good as the next fellow. | 24:18 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, I had one other question for you, which I forgot to ask you before. Were there any bad places around here that you were not allowed to go to as a child? That you were told to stay away from? | 24:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, all of those bad places weren't around then. There used to be a store up there— | 24:54 |
Karen Ferguson | On the highway? | 25:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. And we weren't allowed to go there. | 25:03 |
Karen Ferguson | Why was that? | 25:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Because you saw everything and everybody there, and they were doing everything and just going on drinking and carrying on and doing all the time, cursing, all that kind of—Fighting. So we were told that where there are fights, there's always a possible chance of you losing your life. Stay away. | 25:10 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. Were there just Black people who went to this store? | 25:35 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. | 25:40 |
Karen Ferguson | All right. Well, on that rather negative note, we'll end up the interview. I just have a little bit of paperwork to do. | 25:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | All right. | 25:51 |
Karen Ferguson | We take down some biographical information so that when people are listening to the tapes, they'll have a better idea of who you are and where you come from, and that kind of thing. So if you could just give me your full name, please. | 25:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Myrtle Louise Forney. | 26:06 |
Karen Ferguson | Myrtle Louise Forney. And your zip code here? Your zip code? | 26:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh. 27891. | 26:22 |
Karen Ferguson | 27891. And your address, is it— | 26:22 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Huh? | 26:22 |
Karen Ferguson | What's your address? | 26:35 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Route one, Box 154. Whitakers. | 26:36 |
Karen Ferguson | If your name is to appear in any written materials, how would you like it to appear? | 26:52 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Just Myrtle Forney. | 26:57 |
Karen Ferguson | Myrtle Forney? | 26:59 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 26:59 |
Karen Ferguson | What's your date of birth? | 27:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | November the 22nd, 1909. | 27:11 |
Karen Ferguson | My sister's birthday is November 22nd. And you were born right here? | 27:16 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | At Bricks. | 27:20 |
Karen Ferguson | Now is Bricks a community? Is that considered a—So Bricks, North Carolina? | 27:20 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | A community, yeah. It was at one time, Bricks, North Carolina, because we had the post office. | 27:25 |
Karen Ferguson | And have you ever been married? | 27:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. | 27:36 |
Karen Ferguson | No? Why did you never marry? | 27:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Just not interested. | 27:40 |
Karen Ferguson | Why aren't you interested? | 27:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know. | 27:43 |
Karen Ferguson | You don't know? Have you enjoyed your life as a single person? | 27:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I sure have. | 27:49 |
Karen Ferguson | Why do you think that is? | 27:51 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I guess I can satisfy myself with anything. I can spend a whole afternoon reading. Or I could spend an afternoon writing. I'm trying to write my autobiography. I'd spend the afternoon writing on that. Spend an afternoon crocheting something. | 27:54 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. What do you think your role was in the community as a single woman? Did you have a special role, do you think? | 28:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, maybe set up the children around here. | 28:30 |
Karen Ferguson | Pardon me? | 28:35 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Help the children around here. Because they depended on me for Sunday school. They depended on me for 4H Club. And the community itself, the women's club depends on me. And oh, the various office duties that I have to do for them. | 28:35 |
Karen Ferguson | Because you had more time or— | 29:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I think so. | 29:08 |
Karen Ferguson | What was your mother's name? | 29:14 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Julia Harding Forney. | 29:16 |
Karen Ferguson | Julia Harding? | 29:19 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Harding. | 29:20 |
Karen Ferguson | H-A-R-D-I-N-G? | 29:21 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 29:23 |
Karen Ferguson | And that was her maiden name? | 29:25 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That was her name. Forney is the married name. Harding Forney. | 29:26 |
Karen Ferguson | And do you remember when she was born? | 29:26 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Sure don't. | 29:26 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. When did she pass away? | 29:28 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | 1938. | 29:43 |
Karen Ferguson | And she was born in Nashville? | 29:46 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Nashville, Tennessee. | 29:48 |
Karen Ferguson | And if I were to put her occupation, would it be post mistress? | 29:55 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, I don't know. She was really homemaker, home ec worker. | 29:59 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. And your father's name? | 30:11 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Henry Grayson Forney. | 30:13 |
Karen Ferguson | How do you spell, Grayson? | 30:38 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | G-R-A-Y-S-O-N. | 30:39 |
Karen Ferguson | And do you know when he was born? | 30:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I don't. | 30:39 |
Karen Ferguson | And when did he pass away? | 30:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | 1958. | 30:39 |
Karen Ferguson | And where was he born again? | 30:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Gilkey. | 30:39 |
Karen Ferguson | How do you spell that? | 30:39 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | G-I-L-K-E-Y. | 30:40 |
Karen Ferguson | North Carolina, right? | 30:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 30:44 |
Karen Ferguson | And put farmer as his occupation? | 30:45 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Farming. | 30:47 |
Karen Ferguson | Why did he leave? Why did he stop managing the farm here and start farming on his own? | 30:49 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, I think he'd worked his time out here. I don't know how long he worked, but he'd been there since 1907, up through 1914. Or maybe more. | 30:56 |
Karen Ferguson | So he had a contract or something? | 31:18 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 31:20 |
Karen Ferguson | What are your brothers' names? What were your brothers' names? | 31:24 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | One is Cornelius Forney. | 31:27 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you know when he was born? Do you remember when he was born? | 32:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I think it's 1911. | 32:00 |
Karen Ferguson | And is he still living? | 32:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. | 32:00 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you know when he passed away? | 32:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | It was sometime in 1983, I believe. | 32:00 |
Karen Ferguson | And your other brother? | 32:02 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Henry Harding Forney. | 32:03 |
Karen Ferguson | And do you remember when he was born? | 32:09 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | 1908. | 32:11 |
Karen Ferguson | And is he still living? | 32:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No. | 32:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you remember when he passed away? | 32:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | 1950—Wait a minute, 1980—I don't know, I get them mixed up. It's in the 1980s. | 32:22 |
Karen Ferguson | And so you were the middle child? Or the second? | 32:33 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah, middle. | 32:36 |
Karen Ferguson | So you lived here at Bricks until you were 18 or so? | 32:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I was about 19. | 32:48 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. And then you moved to Talladega, Alabama. | 32:57 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 33:07 |
Karen Ferguson | And when did you graduate from there? | 33:07 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | From Talladega? '31. | 33:10 |
Karen Ferguson | 1931? Okay. So you were there for two years? | 33:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes. | 33:15 |
Karen Ferguson | And then you moved to Columbia? | 33:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-uh. | 33:15 |
Karen Ferguson | No. What did you do— | 33:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | North Carolina Central. | 33:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. So you lived in Durham? | 33:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh, you mean to work. | 33:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. | 33:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I went to Columbia. Columbia to work. | 33:26 |
Karen Ferguson | And you were there for 15 years, you said? | 33:35 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | 15 years. | 33:35 |
Karen Ferguson | And then did you move to Durham after that? Or where did you move? | 33:54 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I went to Durham about the second year I started teaching. And that's when I started working on my master's. | 33:58 |
Karen Ferguson | So did you live in Durham? | 34:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah, I stayed in the dormitory. | 34:10 |
Karen Ferguson | So how long were you there for? | 34:13 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | About six summers to get it. | 34:21 |
Karen Ferguson | And then you came back from Columbia and you lived here? Or you lived in Clayton, North Carolina? | 34:27 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | In Clayton. | 34:30 |
Karen Ferguson | And then you moved back here? | 34:31 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-huh. | 34:33 |
Karen Ferguson | How long did you stay living in Clayton? Do you know? | 34:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I don't. Wait a minute. I came back here in 1975 from Clayton. That means I should have been here about 17 or 18 years. | 34:39 |
Karen Ferguson | All right. So you went to school at the Bricks school, until junior college, right? | 35:00 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. | 35:12 |
Karen Ferguson | First two years of college. So first grade to sophomore in college? | 35:12 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I was junior. Wait a minute. I was junior in college. When I went to college, went to Talladega, I was junior. | 35:20 |
Karen Ferguson | Talladega College or University? | 35:37 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | College. | 35:39 |
Karen Ferguson | You got a BA there? | 35:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. | 35:49 |
Karen Ferguson | And then, was North Carolina Central called North Carolina College for Negroes at the time you were— | 35:49 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes, it was. | 36:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. Do you remember when you got your master's in education? | 36:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That's when I was saying about six years after I started. | 36:19 |
Karen Ferguson | Columbia? | 36:24 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Mm-hmm. Not in Columbia. | 36:25 |
Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. In Clayton? | 36:27 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, you mean where I got my master's? | 36:31 |
Karen Ferguson | Yeah. Oh yeah. It was six years after you started teaching? | 36:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 36:37 |
Karen Ferguson | Have you gotten any other education other than that? | 36:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yes, I have. I used to go to the University of Cincinnati. That was just going there to keep myself busy while I was up there with my aunt. I went in about two summers, and I don't know when that was. | 36:46 |
Karen Ferguson | Were you taking education courses or— | 37:08 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. Taking, no, I was taking English literature courses. | 37:09 |
Karen Ferguson | And when was that approximately? Do you remember? | 37:14 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Uh-uh. | 37:15 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 37:15 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | And I went to the University of Pennsylvania one summer. | 37:19 |
Karen Ferguson | And was that education courses? | 37:34 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah, that was educational courses. Just to keep my certificate going. | 37:37 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. Now, what was the school that you worked for in Columbia? | 37:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Columbia. Booker T. Washington High. | 37:57 |
Karen Ferguson | And then when you came back, when you worked in Clayton? | 38:19 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Clayton. Wait a minute, I got to think about it. There were two schools. I worked at Clayton High last. And the other one was Clayton—Can't remember the name of that school. | 38:24 |
Karen Ferguson | But that was a Black high school? | 38:40 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Yeah. | 38:44 |
Karen Ferguson | Were there many high schools for Blacks in this area before desegregation? | 38:51 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Not too many. | 38:57 |
Karen Ferguson | There was one in Clayton. Was there one in this immediate area here? | 38:59 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Another one here had closed down then. And only high schools I know around would be—Maybe the one at—I don't know. There was one at North Edgecomb. And there was one in Swift Creek. | 39:01 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. Have you received any honors or awards or held any offices that you'd like me to list here? | 40:20 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, there's one up there behind you. | 40:25 |
Karen Ferguson | What's the CRD program? | 40:36 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That's something has to do with the, I don't even know what it is all about. CRD is to do with the Community Development Program. That's one of those things, they scare you to death. I didn't know what it was all about. He called my name and he talked about where I went to school and everything. I said, "Lord have mercy, he's talking about me." And I guess that's the biggest of it. I received two or three plaques from the 4H Club, for work there. | 40:40 |
Karen Ferguson | Anything else you'd like me to put down? | 41:32 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I guess that's it. | 41:38 |
Karen Ferguson | What's your current religious denomination? | 41:41 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Presbyterian. | 41:44 |
Karen Ferguson | And do you belong to a church right now? | 41:48 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | No, I don't. | 41:50 |
Karen Ferguson | What are the churches that you've belonged to in the past? | 41:53 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I guess they said Presbyterian [indistinct 00:42:05] that was the one that I joined when I was in Columbia working there. | 42:01 |
Karen Ferguson | What was it called again? | 42:10 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Ladson Presbyterian. L-A-D-S-O-N. | 42:13 |
Karen Ferguson | Any others? | 42:24 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | The one that they had up here at Bricks. That was— | 42:28 |
Karen Ferguson | Bricks Chapel? | 42:31 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | I don't know what they called it. Anyhow, there's record up there in the office somewhere about it. | 42:33 |
Karen Ferguson | What organizations do you belong to or have you belonged to? | 42:47 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Organizations. For each club? I have belonged to the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. The Brick Community Homemakers Club. And the Brick Community Club. | 42:54 |
Karen Ferguson | You said something about a women's club that you belong to. | 43:42 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | That's the homemaker's club. | 43:43 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. What kinds of things would you do there? | 43:43 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, right now we do a little bit of everything. We are making our plans for a trip right now to Potomac Meals. We take part in their demonstrations that they have in Smithfield. And we compete in various things. And one thing that we try to compete in a whole lot is the county fair. And what else? Well, we are taking part in this recycling program. And was Ms. Body went somewhere for something. Children, and abused children. | 43:55 |
Karen Ferguson | For how long have you been involved in that group? | 45:06 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Oh, about 18 years. | 45:08 |
Karen Ferguson | 18 years, okay. Do you have a favorite saying or phrase or quote that you'd like me to put down here? | 45:23 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | Well, yeah. I always remember, the day that I graduated from high school, the man used a portion of the Bible verse, he didn't use the whole thing. He said, "Forgetting the things that are behind and looking forward to the things that are before, I press onward to the goal." | 45:28 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. Could you give me that again? "Forgetting—" | 45:59 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | "Forgetting the things that are behind, looking forward to the things that are before, I press onward to the goal." | 46:00 |
Karen Ferguson | Sorry, are— | 46:17 |
Myrtle Louise Forney | "I press onward to the goal." I'm not sure I can give you the exact location in the Bible, but I think it's one of Paul's letters to the Corinthians. | 46:21 |
Karen Ferguson | So let me make sure I have this right. "Forgetting the things that are behind, looking—" | 46:37 |
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