Willie Ward interview recording, 1993 June 30
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Willie Ward | Sort of between Enfield and Scotland Neck out there on a— | 0:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh okay. | 0:03 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, Dawson Elementary School over there. Well I grew up mostly in that area. [INTERRUPTION] I grew up in an area around there called, maybe you been there, Dawson? | 0:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | Dawson? | 0:30 |
Willie Ward | Dawson. | 0:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Dawson? | 0:32 |
Willie Ward | Dawson Crossroads. | 0:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Is that in Halifax County? | 0:33 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, that's sort of between, between Enfield and Scotland Neck out there on a— | 0:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh okay. | 0:36 |
Willie Ward | Yeah. Dawson Elementary School over there. Well I grew up mostly in that area. Needless to say, it was rough. | 0:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? | 0:57 |
Willie Ward | No electricity. No refrigerator— well you know with no electricity, that take care of that. [laughs] So we were very poor, which was tradition, I guess. We were working with a—we were sharecropping. We would make some crop, they was taking it all. That's what they call it, sharecropping anyway. Okay. | 1:01 |
Willie Ward | So sometimes we working till 11:30 at a store about a mile or a mile and a half, almost two miles. One of us would get out and walk to the store to buy a piece of ice to have ice tea for dinner. Although, they never weighed it. They just take an ice piece and cut off a piece and hand it to you and you give them five cents, or 10 cents, or whatever. We'd carry it back. I tell you, it tasted better than this tastes now, I guess because it was so hard to get. It would last, that piece we'd pay a nickel for would last for lunch and supper. | 1:40 |
Willie Ward | When we would harvest the crop, the man, my father was living with, he would take all the crop and probably, might give him $100. I don't know exactly how they work that. But I know we didn't get anything out of it. | 2:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you remember hearing any stories about the man trying to cheat your parents? | 2:43 |
Willie Ward | Well they, what happened, he never settled with him, I don't think. I think he just, said when you made a good crop or something, that you had to give them $100 or whatever. It was five of us kids. I had a sister older than I am. I was next to her. Then there was three more under us. We stayed there until—well Daddy got satisfied there and well, we would, burned him up, I think. Because we were maybe moving, we were going to school. | 2:47 |
Willie Ward | We couldn't go to school like kids go now. If it rained, we could go to school. If it didn't rain, then we had to stay home and work the crops. One day he said, I think he lied and told Daddy, he said, "What are you going to do, let them boys go to school to get old men?" Something. That's when he decided to move. Then he moved away from him. That was in '39 or '40. When did the war pick up? '40? I think it was '40. '39 or '40 anyway. Then we moved away from here and went to another guy. He was somewhat better. | 3:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | I'm sorry, I beg your pardon? | 4:18 |
Willie Ward | I said we went to move up to this place called Pea Hill. That's up here on 301 and where 125 run out to 301 over in there. We moved up in there. We moved over there with another guy and it seemed to be a little better, but they all had that attitude. | 4:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | What attitude? | 4:39 |
Willie Ward | Well segregates. They were real segregates, you know. And they thought Colored people was slaves, I guess. I don't know. I think they thought they was. The Colored people was accepting it also. That's the way we were raised. We was accepting that, because we thought that was the way it was supposed to be. You'd make a crop and if you make a good crop, they probably give you a couple hundred dollars and they take the rest of the crop. | 4:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of crop did you raise? | 5:12 |
Willie Ward | We raised cotton, corn and peanuts. It was all of those crops. They call it sharecropping, but they took all the crop. They didn't share the work either. So they took all the crops and we did all the sharing, shared the crop and the work. We did all the work and they shared the profit. We didn't get, I didn't get a lot of education, on that account, because I was the oldest boy. Of course, I had to do a lot of work, stay around and do the work and help around with the work. | 5:14 |
Willie Ward | I don't know, well maybe you know, I know you don't ask about it, but the White folks were very segregates. You could go to, you might know something about this. We had separate bathrooms and well everybody had that at train stations. Everything would say Colored. Like these little, I call them little hole in the walls now. You used to go, you could go to the, White folks go inside and eat and they hand you your stuff out the window, whatever you want. | 6:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Like a drive through or something? | 6:42 |
Willie Ward | No, it wasn't a drive through. No, it was little restaurants and things sitting on the street, where they sell hot dogs and stuff like that. But you couldn't go in. White folks could go in there and they had a sign up there Colored. You go to that window and whatever you order, they push it out through the window to you. | 6:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever know anyone that went to the White water fountains and just broke the rules and went to the White water fountains? | 7:00 |
Willie Ward | No, I never did. No, I never did. I never did. | 7:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | What do you think would happen to somebody if they tried to do that? | 7:18 |
Willie Ward | They probably, I don't know, beat them up at least. That's the least thing they would have did to them. Might have got killed, yeah, you never know. These White guys thought Colored things of soda. They wouldn't sell a Colored man a Coke, a Coca-Cola. Give him a Pepsi-Cola. Yeah. Give him a Pepsi-Cola. They take the Coke. | 7:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | They thought Coca-Cola was better than Pepsi? | 7:52 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, yeah. I never understood that, but that's what they did, yeah. They thought that was a White man's drink, so to speak. Yeah, they was real segregators, I tell you. We went to a little place, Dawson down there. Oh, I didn't never finish telling about where we went to school out there. | 7:53 |
Willie Ward | They had a hall there was a Mason hall I guess it was. On the side of the church, right beside the church. That's where we went to school. That was our school. On the other side, over coming from Enfield, we could look at it across the road, about maybe half of a mile, quarter of a mile, something like that. The White folks had a brick school built over there, okay? | 8:13 |
Willie Ward | Some days we'd go to school when we could go and those heaters would get stopped up and get the whole place smoked up and they let us go home, sent us home. Then our fathers they would come out and take the heater pipes down and clean them out, so the smoke would go through them and you'd go back the next day, because the smoke was out. | 8:42 |
Willie Ward | When they got ready to—what they had supposed to do, they were going to move the White folks to Scotland Neck, because they had the school bus for the White folk. We had to walk. They was going to take the White kids and take them to Scotland Neck and give the Colored kids the White people's school. So then the White folks said, they thought that was too good for the Colored people. | 9:06 |
Willie Ward | I don't know what happened. So they decided to build the school at Dawson down there, which is a nice school down there now. | 9:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | This is the 1940s, or the 1930s? | 9:39 |
Willie Ward | That was in the '40s. No, late '30s, yeah. Early '40s, somewhere along in there. Yeah. Because that was just before World War, this was before the World War broke out, yeah. Yeah. It was pretty rough, but we survived. We thought we were doing all right, because we didn't know any better. | 9:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did y'all get by, what kind of things did you do? | 10:12 |
Willie Ward | Like? | 10:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | Like around the house, or did you have gardens? | 10:13 |
Willie Ward | Oh yeah, we had gardens. That was a must. Had to raise a garden. Yeah, a garden we'd raise all kinds of vegetables. The mothers knew how to fix for kids. I know it was very tasty anyway. So we thought we were doing all right, until— | 10:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did your mother make your clothes for you? | 10:42 |
Willie Ward | No, she didn't really make the clothes, but before we finished with them, it looked like they were made, when she got through patching them, or had to put reinforcement and stuff there like that on. Yeah, yeah. | 10:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever have to go to town much to do shopping, anything like that? | 10:59 |
Willie Ward | Well, every Saturday, I didn't go that much. But every Saturday, the guy that my father was living with, they had a big store up in Enfield. They had a lot of farms and all the people that worked with them, would come to their store on a Saturday. | 11:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | The Myers store? | 11:25 |
Willie Ward | It was just up the street from Myers store, on the right hand side. Well it was on the right hand side, [indistinct 00:11:33] store. But they had a whole lot. They was old rich men. They had a lot of farmers and all of them would come in there on a Saturday and they could get anything out that store they wanted, like meat, fish. They had clothes in there, like overalls and shoes and stuff like that. They would just charge it to them. Then when the crops made, you don't make nothing. You owe it to them. They said that you owe them all that stuff. | 11:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they cheat the people? Did they overcharge the people that had to buy from there? | 11:55 |
Willie Ward | We'll never know. We never made anything, so I figured they did, because we made good crops, but never made any money. Yeah. When you get ready to sell tobacco, they'd come down and pick the tobacco up and take it to the market. I tell you the truth, I don't know if they ever, if we knew how much they got for that tobacco stuff when they sold it. | 11:55 |
Willie Ward | So of course, never knowing what they owed us, I'm not sure they ever got a bill telling what they owed. They would just work out something to hand them and say, "This is what you made." Something like that, "This is how much you made." You'd think you're doing good. It's a couple hundred dollars maybe, sometimes when you make a good crop. Then they tell them, "Come on back to the store and get the children and things the clothes and all that stuff." That's just the way that it went, until— | 12:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was a typical day like when you was growing up back then? | 13:03 |
Willie Ward | Well, we really didn't know any better, so we was just happy, just happy. I guess playing and happy. Walk around and most everybody was in the same shoes, all the Colored people. So there was no reason to know no better. So until about, I think it started breaking in '40 or '41, somewhere along there when they started fighting, when they started fighting. That's when it started breaking up some. From then on, it improved to where it's at now. | 13:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | So before then, who made the decisions in your family about money? | 13:49 |
Willie Ward | In my family? | 13:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 13:55 |
Willie Ward | My father. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. The little he had, he made the decision on that. | 13:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | How were the children disciplined or punished in your family? | 14:06 |
Willie Ward | Well if you didn't do what they'd tell you, they'd whip you with a switch. Well, I don't think that was too bad, but yeah. Because the kids were much better than they are today. They would listen. In other words, any older person could discipline. If it was your child, I'd go to your house and if I did something, you could whip me. Then you'd call and tell the parents and the parents would whip you again. That's the way they raised them then. | 14:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did your parents or people in the area teach the children how to act in front of White people? | 14:50 |
Willie Ward | I don't remember doing that. No, no. I don't remember them doing that. Because, they always stayed a distance from the White people, so. | 14:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | They did, they didn't [indistinct 00:15:09]? | 15:08 |
Willie Ward | Yeah. So we never come in a lot of contact with them, not unless they had work for you to do, wanted you to do some work, or something like that. I tell you, a lot of the poor Whites were, they weren't doing too well either. They thought they was, but yeah, after I found out, they weren't doing that good either. If you were rich, had money, it was different. | 15:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did the poor White people and the Black people get along? | 15:36 |
Willie Ward | Well the poor White people thought they were better than the Black. So they just still do, I think. A lot of them do. [laughing] Yeah, but no, you know how it is now. | 15:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I wanted to ask you some more about school. When you got to go to school, did your teachers help you, because the children couldn't go as much as they wanted to go? | 15:54 |
Willie Ward | No, when you went to school, the kids that was able to go school, could go to school, you was way behind. Maybe a week or two behind. So you just start from where the kids are and that part you missed. Mm-hmm, yeah and that made it rough. Yeah. | 16:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | Now did y'all have time to catch up? | 16:33 |
Willie Ward | We never did catch up. That was just something that was cut out of our education. Yeah. | 16:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did your school have a lunch room in it, or did people have to [crosstalk 00:16:43] | 16:34 |
Willie Ward | No, no, no. We didn't have a lunch room. You just eat at the desk at 12 o'clock. You eat at your desk, or go outside and play, carry it out there in your hand. | 16:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did the children bring their lunch? | 16:53 |
Willie Ward | Yeah. Some of them had a lunch box and then some have a little two half a gallon buckets they buy lard in. Have it in that. That's the way to bring it. They would bring sweet potatoes, collard greens, meat. Anything in the house. Syrup, anything, anything that you had around there. | 16:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did you like best about school? | 17:31 |
Willie Ward | I really liked arithmetic. That was my subject. That's what I liked. But the way you went to school, you didn't have too much choice. This was rough, I tell you. Yeah, it was very rough. Yeah. | 17:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of games did you and your friends play at recess? | 17:56 |
Willie Ward | We played baseball and mostly chasing the little girls around. [laughing] That's what they did and our teacher would come out and get a chair to sit out and watch us. [laughing] She'd chase us away and we'd play, what'd we call that thing? I think we'd play whip the lash, or something like that where you catch, when three or four get on a line and one would run around and sling the tail end around like that. We'd play baseball and stuff like that. Yeah. | 17:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Did you have any favorite teachers that you remember? | 18:35 |
Willie Ward | No, because all of them was mean, I thought. [laughing] | 18:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | They were mean? | 18:59 |
Willie Ward | Well I don't think they were now, but I thought they were mean. I don't think they were mean now, but I did think they were mean then. We had a teacher there, they called her Mrs. Smith. I thought she was the meanest. But I know I was deserving of it, but at that time, I didn't think I did. | 19:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | You act up when you were in school? | 19:10 |
Willie Ward | Sometimes I be sitting up in school talking and she'd tell us to stop talking. Another guy, him and I we were tight and we stayed into trouble, all the time. All the time, do everything with your lesson, because we didn't go to school enough to know your lessons, so we were out there messing around and she could pinch you. I ain't never felt nothing like that in my life. Feel like she's going to turn the skin all the way off of you. Boy, that woman could hurt and [indistinct 00:19:42], well I'd rather get kicked or whipped before pinched. She was something. | 19:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did any of the teachers play favorites with the students? | 19:36 |
Willie Ward | Slightly, because we had some kids, a few, their parents had their own farms and they were a little better off than we were. They was most favorite to them, a little different than I think to us. | 19:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they ever favor the students who were light-skinned over the students who were dark-skinned? | 20:12 |
Willie Ward | I don't think they did that. No, I don't think they did that. I don't think we had that problem. No. | 20:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did you do after, how far did you go to school? [indistinct 00:20:34]- | 20:26 |
Willie Ward | 7th grade. | 20:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Did they have a high school then, in the area? | 20:35 |
Willie Ward | They had a high school, uh-huh. But the school that I was going to, that was 7th grade when you left the 7th grade then you started going to high school, I think. They had a place over there they called Bricks. [indistinct 00:20:55] other side of Enfield. Then they had a school out here in Scotland called Brawley. Brawley High. | 20:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Bricks was, was it a private school though? | 21:01 |
Willie Ward | No, it wasn't private. | 21:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh. Did you have to pay to go there? | 21:07 |
Willie Ward | I don't think so. At one time, I think it was something like a college. Probably like a college, or part of it, or something. But at the time that we were coming up, I think it was like a high school and it might have been part college too. But I know I had a sister that went over there, the oldest girl. She went over there to Bricks. | 21:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | You were the only boy in the family? | 21:30 |
Willie Ward | No. It was three of the boys. I was the oldest one. | 21:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oldest. So did you have to punish your brothers and sisters and take care of them, because you were the oldest? | 21:34 |
Willie Ward | No, I didn't have that problem. No. | 21:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you have to set an example for them? | 21:40 |
Willie Ward | Not unless they were getting a whipping. [laughs] Yeah, because they didn't spare no rod, then, you know. | 21:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you were a teenager, what kind of things did you and your friends do for fun when you were finished working? | 22:03 |
Willie Ward | At night, sometimes we'd walk on down the road, had a little group, we call ourselves, have a little quartet, stuff like that. | 22:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:22:30]? | 22:30 |
Willie Ward | Yeah. We had to go to Sunday school, every Sunday, okay. We'd get out of Sunday school and then we would—we got about 13, 14 years old, we never did go back home on a Sunday. Come out of Sunday school. Walk up and down the road all day long, where we'd be home by nine o'clock at night. | 22:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you about your quartet. Did you sing in the quartet? | 22:47 |
Willie Ward | Yeah. | 22:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | What part did you sing? | 22:47 |
Willie Ward | I was leader. | 22:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh! Okay. What kind of songs did you sing? | 22:56 |
Willie Ward | Well we would sing the old songs then, about old time religion and I know we sang quite a few of those old songs we were singing back then. I've forgotten most of the stuff we were singing. We had an older group that was singing and they would take us along with them and train us under them, yeah that's right. | 23:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did they ever tell you any advice about life and stuff, when they were talking, while they were taking you along with them? | 23:26 |
Willie Ward | No. It was take us around and they was going to teach us how to sing. They'd sing and then they'd teach us what they knew too. So. | 23:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did y'all travel around? Where did y'all sing? | 23:41 |
Willie Ward | Oh we'd go to churches, schools. Never much farther than you could walk, because we had no other way to go and stuff like that. [indistinct 00:24:01]. | 23:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you have fans that come to hear you sing? | 24:01 |
Willie Ward | Well then a lot of people went to church then. Yeah, church would be full. Schools and stuff like that. We thought we could really sing, because they was slapping their hands. [laughing] | 24:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | [crosstalk 00:24:06]? | 24:06 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they was telling us about how we could sing. I think about that now, that was a lot of fun, that part of it was. But we knew no better, so yeah. We thought we were doing all right. | 24:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did y'all ever get paid for your singing? | 24:25 |
Willie Ward | Oh no. No pay, no pay. It was just charity. Yeah. | 24:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | What church, you talked about going to Sunday school. What church did you attend then? | 24:34 |
Willie Ward | Cedar Creek. You know where that is? | 24:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | I think so. | 24:40 |
Willie Ward | Down there around Dawson. Yeah, down around Dawson school down there. | 24:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | It's a Baptist church? | 24:40 |
Willie Ward | Baptist church, yeah. Yeah, most churches around here are Baptist. I think they have a few—I don't know. They got a few different ones now, but Lord, all of them then were Baptist, I think. Most churches. | 24:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was the biggest holiday in church? Was it Revival, or? | 24:59 |
Willie Ward | Revival. You're right. It was Revival. | 24:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was that like you talked about Revival? | 24:59 |
Willie Ward | Well, everybody seemed to get into that. We had to walk. Before you get to church, you hear them singing, praying, shouting and stuff like that. But now, you have to get into church and you might not hear it inside now. | 24:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did a lot of people come to Revival? | 25:31 |
Willie Ward | Oh yeah, because there was a lot of people that lived around then. They didn't have nowhere else to go. Didn't have no cars or nothing, so they come to church, yeah. Yeah, most of the time, the church be full. | 25:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were you baptized? | 25:47 |
Willie Ward | Mm-hmm. | 25:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was that experience like? | 25:49 |
Willie Ward | Well, that was, I think that was—I don't know. It felt a little different. I don't know. I was baptized in the— | 25:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were you baptized in the river, or [indistinct 00:26:00]? | 25:55 |
Willie Ward | No, in a pond. | 26:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | A pond. | 26:00 |
Willie Ward | So it was not a river, so yeah. So [indistinct 00:26:03] in the water, [indistinct 00:26:15], snakes and everything else in there. | 26:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, were you scared? | 26:14 |
Willie Ward | No, I wasn't scared. No, I wasn't. I wasn't thinking about the snakes then, but they are in there though. Yeah. But now they got their own pools and stuff like that now. | 26:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did a lot of people come to watch people get baptized? | 26:34 |
Willie Ward | Oh all sides of the roads would be lined up, yeah. Then they would go back home and dress to come to church. | 26:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was it just people from the church that came to watch, or other places too? | 26:44 |
Willie Ward | Well, there'd be a lot of spectators too. Of course, some of the Whites were driving, they wanted to see how the Colored folks act. | 26:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | They didn't do that in their church, you don't think? | 26:56 |
Willie Ward | I don't think so. If they do, we don't know nothing about it. They probably had a pool. I don't know. I'm not sure. | 26:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they ever come to your church to hear y'all sing, or anything like that? | 27:06 |
Willie Ward | No, no, never did. | 27:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was courting like when you were a teenager? | 27:15 |
Willie Ward | Well, you would go—I think a girl had to be around 18. 17 or 18 before you could go to see her. Okay. You could go there. It was a must, you have a coat on. A coat and a neck tie. It was a must, okay. Nine o'clock is another must. You must leave then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Girls, they had to keep the door open, like you were sitting in the living room and had to keep them doors open, because the parents were all the time be walking through. [laughing] They'd keep an eye on you. And if you stayed til after nine, you'd hear them start to move chairs and clean up the folks. | 27:21 |
Willie Ward | You knew it was time to go. But we didn't try. We knew when nine o'clock come, we get up and go, because you know— [laughs]. Yeah well, we didn't have no cars, or nothing like that. So we had to walk. As I said, we had a few people in the community that had their own places and a few of them had cars, maybe, you could count them on your hands, on your fingers. On one hand too. I don't know. We had a lot of fun. It was rough. It was just rough. | 28:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you have one particular girlfriend, or a whole lot of girlfriends? | 29:07 |
Willie Ward | Well you couldn't have too many doing all that walking. [laughs] | 29:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you finished with school, did you work at your family's farm, or did you work for other people too? | 29:25 |
Willie Ward | I worked the family farm and back in the '40s, things just started to get a little better. | 29:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? | 29:43 |
Willie Ward | Well, they had started paying the farmers, the farmers had started to make a little more money and they started buying cars. Then we started spreading out. Then we started getting more girls. Yeah, yeah. | 29:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | You were too young to have to go fight? | 30:02 |
Willie Ward | '40, I think it's '41. '40, '41. I was coming 18 that year. The year before they start. So I went, we were living up there on Pea Hill. That was I think '40 or '41. Anyway, I went up to, I walked to Halifax, which was about two miles from where we were living, two miles and a half. I walked there and registered. In three days, I had a card. It said— | 30:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | A draft card? | 30:38 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, it's Colored 1A, 2A, 3A. They had this class like that. I got a card says 1A. So dad took the card to the guy we was living with. He told him, "Bring it to me." He carried it to him and so he carried it back. The next week I got a card, 2B. Don't go nowhere. | 30:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | So you didn't have to— | 30:55 |
Willie Ward | See them old big White guys could get you off, [indistinct 00:31:08]. | 30:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you know people that had to go? | 31:08 |
Willie Ward | Mm-hmm, yeah. | 31:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they ever talk about their experiences in the war? | 31:08 |
Willie Ward | I hear, some of them refused to talk about it. Some of them said it was rough. | 31:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they ever talk about how they were treated as Blacks? | 31:08 |
Willie Ward | Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. | 31:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you remember any of the things they said happened to them? | 31:26 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, well I hear them said—I hear some of the guys, they was talking about it last week too. Some of the guys I know. They was in Alabama somewhere down there. It wasn't segregated inside. They said they had a bus that would come in there and take them and carry them to town. Well this was after the Martin Luther King thing, I believe it was. Yeah, I believe it was. Said the bus driver, I hear one of the guys said, bus driver, when he pulled up over at the post, he said he pulled the bus over and stopped and he said, "Now all right. Let's get this thing straight now. Everybody get to where they're supposed to get." | 31:36 |
Willie Ward | Meaning, Black gets in the back. So that boy told him, he said, "We're where we supposed to be and you're going where you don't want to be, if you don't get this bus back." That guy got back in there and they didn't have no problems with him. He got back in that bus and drove them. That guy was about ready to kill him. Said they didn't have no more problems out of that guy. | 32:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | So you didn't have to go at all? | 32:45 |
Willie Ward | No, I never did go. When we moved, Daddy moved from this old man and when he found out Daddy was going to move, I don't know whether he did. As soon as we moved, I got another card 1A. Okay, we moved with another White guy and Daddy took the card to him and I got another card 2B. That mean I never did go nowhere. | 32:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did 2B mean? | 33:16 |
Willie Ward | It means you were exempted. Yeah, that was a class A was, 1A then you was ready to be drafted, you was in the first draft. But when you get down to B and C and stuff like that, you getting down low, the draft ain't for them. | 33:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did your family find people to work for? | 33:32 |
Willie Ward | Well they really knew the people that had farms, the big farmers and stuff like that. They would go— and sometimes though farmers, if they found out you had a big family, had boys that could plow, they would come around and offer you things. Before we moved from Dawson, this man over here, lives over here in Hill Crossroads, he's a big farmer. Oh, had crops. So he come out there, that was in '40. Come down there and told Dad and said, we was a pretty good size now. I was about 16, 17. My brother about 12, 13. Then he comes down there and tells Dad, he says, "Come on and move with me." He was driving a Ford and said, "This car will be yours. I'll give you the car." Daddy didn't move with him. | 33:42 |
Willie Ward | So he did move, but he didn't move with him. He moved up there to Pea Hill where I was talking about. So that's the way they would do and if they found out a guy would work good, the White guy would drive by and watch the farm and watch when you're farming and stuff and see how they work. Then they would almost have a bidding war. They'd go around and try to get the best work that they could. They would really get mad at one another sometimes about that stuff, yeah, yeah. | 34:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were there any people that y'all didn't want to work for, y'all knew that were bad [indistinct 00:35:26]? | 35:25 |
Willie Ward | Well, we heard about something like that. We never worked with them, because they said they was rough, or— | 35:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things would they get their reputation for doing [indistinct 00:35:39]? | 35:38 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, well treating, telling you what to do and telling people about their wives and things. Well, some of them didn't care whether your wife worked or not. As soon as you got to work, but some of them wanted the whole family to work. Wanted everybody out there. They was, some of them was pretty nasty, I understand. We didn't really get up with none of those real nasty guys. But I think all of them was nasty enough. From what I can remember. | 35:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | You mentioned some Blacks owned their own farms, did they ever have people work for them? | 36:09 |
Willie Ward | What the Blacks that owned their own? Well no, see most of them had their own farms, had their own kids and they just had enough land for their own self. Most of the time they did. | 36:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you were growing up, did you always want to be a farmer, or did you want to do something else too, or? | 36:27 |
Willie Ward | No, I didn't really think about it at the time. Now when the—my mama had a lot of people in DC. After we started to come out of most of that stuff, they would come down in the summertime on vacation and we'd be talking. She had a sister. Tried to carry me to DC with her. I think I'd have went if she had lived. I think she had about one more year to come down there and I think I would have left then, but she died. | 36:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:37:14]. | 37:14 |
Willie Ward | Mm-hmm, because she— | 37:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | What time, was this the '40s or the '50s? | 37:18 |
Willie Ward | That was in the '40s then though, back in the late '40s. So she came down and she told me, she said, "Come on and go with me. I'll get you a job." Said, "I got a friend that's working and he'll get you a job." A lot of people would, like my mama and them was telling you about how hard it was in the city and what you couldn't do in the city. They brainwashed you just like the White people. They wanted you to stay there with them. | 37:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:37:45]? | 37:45 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, they'd brainwash you too, til you learned better. I really stayed here til I was about 30. Because I married and when I married—I married and I stayed right on the farm for a couple years after I married and I couldn't make it. I said, "I'm gone." | 37:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I wanted to ask you, how did you meet your wife? | 38:17 |
Willie Ward | Well, this is her home right in here. Her father used to have a house right up there, okay and we lived up on the other end of the road, up there near Crowell up in there. So there's a little town out here, Tillery. On Saturday, it would be just like that. Girls, boys, men, women, everything. It was loaded down here. | 38:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | A lot of people. | 38:37 |
Willie Ward | A lot of people, because Tillery was not like Tillery now. But a lot of people used to come to Tillery. I don't know, messing around like boys do, I guess. I was messing around, talking and carrying on. I saw her a few times I talked to her. I got to know her and then I started to, well I started, I knew a lot of girls then. I knew a lot of girls at the time. Especially after you get a car. We had cars then. Go riding. Yeah, so that's the way I met her. I met another girl before I met her. I thought I really loved. I don't know what happened to her. [laughs] | 38:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | This girl take you away from her? | 39:22 |
Willie Ward | No, I didn't even know her at that time. I didn't even know her at that time. [laughs] They said that's puppy love. That's what I always hear them say. Yeah. | 39:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you were a young man, did you know any of the other young Black men that had any problems with the police? Did the police ever bother them, or anything like that? | 39:59 |
Willie Ward | I knew some guys, we had some that wanted to be bad, like they are now. They nothing like they are now. Might get them for drinking, pulling a knife, or something like that and go to jail. If you're a White man, all they do is call them and say, "Turn them loose." So just open the door and turn you out. | 39:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they ever do anything to any Black people, violence that was, because something they didn't do, or just because they were Black? | 40:25 |
Willie Ward | I never experienced it, but I hear a lot of that stuff, yeah. | 40:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did you hear? | 40:37 |
Willie Ward | Like you would—I think they, seemed like one guy whistled or something and they say he whistled at a White girl or something. They wanted to beat him up and do right nasty. So I understand. But he was living with a White guy. This White guy had a lot of authority. They put him in jail. This White guy told them, "Turn him out." They called him a nigger-lover. | 40:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Because he helped the man? | 41:16 |
Willie Ward | Mm-hmm. He told them, "Turn him out. Turn him loose. He ain't bothering nobody. You better not bother him." Yeah, that's the way they talked to them, when the guy had money. They said, "You better not bother and nothing better not happen to him." So we had a few White guys that were like that. They'd go to the bat for them. Tell them, "Turn them loose." | 41:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | This was in the 1940s too? | 41:39 |
Willie Ward | That was in the '40s, yeah, back in the '40s. Late '40s and early '50s. Yeah. But when I left home, I left home in '57, I believe it was. I was going to Washington. I caught a bus. I got on a bus down in Enfield and the bus, it was a local bus. They'd stop and pick you up along the road everywhere. When we got in Emporia, the bus was loaded. So that was right after Rosa Parks. So some White woman got up on the bus, she had a suitcase and stuff. | 41:39 |
Willie Ward | She's standing up in the door and the bus driver had gone inside this building and when he come back she told him, "I don't have nowhere to sit." He said, "Lady, I'm sorry. If you want to sit on your luggage, that's okay, but said that's the only place I got for you to sit. I ain't got nowhere for you to sit either." So they had a Black woman sitting right behind me. She said, "I wish that bus driver had told somebody to get up off on some seat and let her sit down. We'd turn this bus out." He said, "There's another bus coming, if you don't want to sit on your luggage. You have to wait for another bus." | 42:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did that White lady say after he told her that? | 43:11 |
Willie Ward | She just looked down and she got out. She got off, she got off. He told her, "You wait for another bus if you want, but I ain't got nowhere to sit you." Said, "The bus loaded." | 43:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you got married and then you said, where did you go after you got married? | 43:25 |
Willie Ward | I farmed for a couple years and then I went to Washington. I went to Washington. | 43:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why did you decide you didn't want to farm anymore? | 43:35 |
Willie Ward | I couldn't make any money. Too hard of work. Wasn't making anything. | 43:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you have your own farm then, or? | 43:41 |
Willie Ward | I was farming with my dad. | 43:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were they sad to see you leave? | 43:48 |
Willie Ward | Oh yeah. Well you didn't know, but the old folks didn't want you to leave. They didn't want to see the kids go nowhere. Yeah, I had to go away from there. | 43:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | You went to, you and your wife went to New York, or Washington? To Washington? | 44:00 |
Willie Ward | I went to Washington. | 44:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Washington. | 44:04 |
Willie Ward | I left Washington and went to Philadelphia. | 44:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | Let's talk about you in Washington. What did you think about Washington when you first got there? | 44:10 |
Willie Ward | Well, it was a lot different. It took me a while to get a job. The first job I got was like they were cleaning up places, like where I left was for a hospital. Which was construction work. But they really weren't paying a lot for construction work. They were paying about a dollar, a dollar and a half an hour, or something like that. That was all they were paying. I worked there a while and then somebody knew my brother, knew my brother. Somebody was working for a bakery and one of the guys got in an accident and they were looking for somebody. I got that job and I worked there til that guy came back. | 44:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did you do at the bakery? | 45:03 |
Willie Ward | Make the icing to go on the cakes and stuff like that. | 45:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they show you how to do that? Wow. | 45:10 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, yeah, well they would beat it up and I had a thing that had the point in and you just carry it all over the stuff, all kinds of ways. That stuff just put icing on the stuff like that. | 45:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did that job pay better than the other job? | 45:25 |
Willie Ward | Yeah, that was paying better than the other job. But then, I stayed there about a month and that guy came back. Then I was out of a job again. Then I went out in Beltsville, Maryland. Somebody told me about that, well that was a government job out there. But it was only temporary. I went out there and I worked for them til October. And then I— they said they always made one permanent out the bunch that they hired in the summertime, but they wouldn't tell you who it was going to be. Told us, started telling us, "You better look for a job." | 45:29 |
Willie Ward | He talked to construction companies, trying to get someone that's on there. My brother-in-law was living in Philadelphia. He came by then. He said, talking to me, I said, "I got to get a job." He's got a job. He said, "I'll get you a job. I'll get you a job where I work." He was working for a food chain, called Ken Foods. Well he went back and the next week, he called me. Told me, "Come on up. I got the job for you." And I went up there. And as soon as I left, then they sent me a letter that I would make trouble out there. I was gone. | 46:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Your wife was up there with you? | 46:46 |
Willie Ward | Mm-hmm. | 46:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | Where did y'all live when y'all first got to Washington? | 46:53 |
Willie Ward | I lived with my brother. We got a- | 46:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did she have a hard time finding a job too, or what— | 47:01 |
Willie Ward | She never did find a job. | 47:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | So y'all stayed in Washington about two years? | 47:05 |
Willie Ward | No, we only stayed in Washington about seven, eight months. | 47:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, you didn't stay long at all. | 47:11 |
Willie Ward | No, we went to Philadelphia and we lived there 11 years. | 47:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh. | 47:15 |
There is no transcript available for this part.
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