Price Davis interview recording, 1993 June 16
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Sonya Ramsey | —the neighborhood where you grew up. | 0:01 |
Price Frederick Davis | I grew up in the Cherry neighborhood right here where we are now. And this neighborhood did not have cement streets. Had one cement street and that was Baldwin Avenue and the neighborhood was a tight-knit neighborhood. And it was a neighborhood made up of doctors, lawyers, morticians, plenty of teachers, ministers, I mean pastor and good churches. And we also had restaurant—store and we had the speakeasies with the bootleggers. The neighborhood was a tight-knit neighborhood. Things were different then. And you could—your child belonged to the neighborhood. Anybody could chastise your child and make sure that your child was safe but crime was—if someone got killed in Cherry, we talked about it for months. And too many people during my lifetime did not get killed in Cherry, not violently like in an accident or something like that. But the churches were in the neighborhood and that was the backbone of the neighborhood, I believe. | 0:03 |
Price Frederick Davis | The churches and the schools, because you went to church on Sunday, you stayed all day unless you went home and got dinner and you came back and we had night services and the church was really what we needed to leaned on because we had good ministers. You could go to the church with your problem. If you got sick, you didn't have to send for somebody and say, "Come take care of me." People in the neighborhood took care of one another. You could leave your house doors open. The schools were fantastic. | 1:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | How and what way? | 2:01 |
Price Frederick Davis | We had no such thing as special this, special class this, special ed this, everybody went to the same class and you kept up. If you didn't keep up, the teacher would go talk to your parents and you would have to stay after school, not as a punishment, but in order to keep up with the kids, you went to the library. And well, as such as the library was you went to the library and the teachers really taught. The teachers took time with you. | 2:03 |
Price Frederick Davis | Let me say this, that all White people were not bad, they were not mean people back in those days because we had a store here, it was White owned and his name was Norman, Mr. Norman. Back during the depression, Mr. Norman fed everybody whether you had money or didn't have money. When you get some money, come pay me. But you could go to Mr. Norman and get food. So I just want to make that clear that all White people were not mean evil people. Just a certain segment of them. And this neighborhood was a neighborhood where people went to work, if you could find work. Now a lot of people, I've seen it written up that this was a place where it was built to satisfy the labor demands of Myers Park, like kitchen help and whatnot. But that was not so because on the street where I lived on Tanner Street right here, this street, I guess I'm trying to count the number of ministers we had on that street and I guess there were about eight or 10 ministers. | 2:43 |
Price Frederick Davis | There was one lawyer, Lawyer Bowser, there was two doctors and then there were other business people. No speakeasies. But we didn't have any speakeasies on my street speakeasies were little further old. I call them speakeasies but it's the place, the bootleg places. But they were business people who really went to business and had businesses and they weren't the greatest restaurants in the world. But for that time they were, some of them were snazzy but they weren't in this neighborhood. Well, upon the corner you had a place where you could go and eat and it was good home cooked food. But if you wanted to really splurge, you left the neighborhood and went to Second Street. And that's where you found had Fred Kemp and Fred Patton and place up like that where you really went in and you felt like you were a king eating in those places because that's where the crowd hung out. | 4:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were they Black-owned businesses? | 5:09 |
Price Frederick Davis | They were Black-owned businesses. Strictly Black-owned. Black-owned businesses, very, very successful Black-owned businesses too because the owners of these businesses, their cheer and dressed well, had plenty of money. They would have to leave the state and go to Washington DC to buy Cadillacs. And I know this for a fact, they wouldn't sell them a Cadillac and not here in Charlotte. | 5:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? | 5:36 |
Price Frederick Davis | That's right. That's right. Because they were Black. But they would go to Washington DC and buy these Cadillacs. And I always admired those Cadillacs. | 5:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | You think is that why lots of Black people like Cadillacs because they were so hard to get? | 5:45 |
Price Frederick Davis | I imagine so. I feel like that was it. Let me also say that during my day, this neighborhood here in Cherry, it was a neighborhood where you had horses and mules and people had chickens and back behind here at Charlottetown Mall, that was the pasture for the orphan home children, which was a White orphan home. But that was the pasture for the cows to graze. And there's no such thing as that store down there. This was all woods, all down King's Drive, that was woods. I used to hunt rats down there and I could go down in the afternoon and kill rats and— | 5:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | What'd you do with them? | 6:39 |
Price Frederick Davis | Sell them. Beautiful. I don't know where these rats came from, but they were beautiful rats. But I would buy a box of 22 rifles shells for a dime, it cost 10 cent, but you had to pay that penny as taxes on anything that you bought here, food, anything like that. And I would buy these shells and go down there in the evening. And if I could kill me three or four rats, I had myself a lot of money. But 50 cents was a lot of money. | 6:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did they do up with rats? | 7:06 |
Price Frederick Davis | He made coats out of them. Made coats out of them. I'm not talking about little tiny mice, I'm talking about these jokers were like this, down here where you see this creek down here, that's where the boys got drowned. It's a creek, a little old dirty creek down there. But that's where the boys got drowned. You go down there on that creek and somebody had taken all of the brush that they could I guess clean off lots and threw it down there. And you just go down there and sit and in the evening and the rats would come out and you just keep popping them until you get your three or four. | 7:07 |
Price Frederick Davis | Then you go pick him up and you call the guy and he'd come in and get them. And that was how I went to school with that tie hung out there like that. You get what I mean? And then but this was a terrific neighborhood. It was a terrific neighborhood. And right here behind the school on Saturdays they had the baseball game. | 7:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, did you play baseball? | 8:02 |
Price Frederick Davis | No. No. But I would come and look at the baseball game and sometimes they would have fish in the black wash pot. Now I like that. And that was how we entertained ourselves. But now soon as the game was over, I had to go home. I wasn't allowed to come up on the playground every day and play because one thing, I came from a tight-knit family. My mother and father, I guess I look back on my life, I would compare my family any day to the Cosbys. We just didn't have the money. But my mother and father were two loving parents and we were a loving family, sisters and brothers, we were. | 8:04 |
Price Frederick Davis | I talked to my sister now and all of them grew up well, we weren't born here in Cherry, but this is where we finally bought a home after moving from out off of Providence Road. Now we lived on Providence Road, which was an all White section, but we didn't live right on Providence Road, we lived over in the back of where the White people lived. And then finally we came to Cherry and my father had accumulated $100 and we bought that house down on Cherry on Tanner Street, which we still own. And he paid this $100 down, bought it from Dr. Perry and $100 down and the house cost $1,800 and it was $5.29 I believe a month is what he paid on it. That's going back there. $5,29 was a lot of money. People weren't making but $2 a week. | 8:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Who were some of the important people in your neighborhood? | 9:49 |
Price Frederick Davis | The most important people in my neighborhood, first of all was my father. I admired my father because even going through racism, my father would always have something nice to say to you like, "Son, don't worry about somebody trying to put your light out, they're trying to make their light shine brighter." Or something like that. My father was very, very inspirational to me. And Lawyer Bowser was a person who talked and I was very, very impressed with him. There was the ministers, I looked up to 'em. And then there was another guy that had a regular job, that worked at a—he worked at a drugstore, Myers—Morehead Drugstore I believe it was. But somehow or another he was different. His name was Sowell. Can't think of his first name. But he was different. When you would see him, he was so sophisticated. | 9:53 |
Price Frederick Davis | Now he was older than I was, but I loved the way he carried himself. He was a distinguished fella. You'd see him if he'd be on the back of the bus, he'd always have a newspaper or something in front of him reading. And anybody that was decent and nice, I looked up to, I really did. And especially church people. I looked up to my pastor who was Reverend Stitt back then. I looked up to Reverend Stitt as B&O. | 10:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | You mentioned that you used to go hunting, what did you and some of your friends do for fun at other times? | 11:34 |
Price Frederick Davis | Now for hunting, that was not for the fun. That was for the meat. Yeah, I don't know whether you know where this hospital, you could almost see the hospital from here up on top of that hill. That was woods up there. And I'd go up there and take my gun and go up there and try to kill a rabbit or something like that. Otherwise, you didn't have no meat for dinner. But to have fun, we would play, get up a stick ball game in the street, shoot marbles. Now that was a very popular thing back then, shoot marbles, what we call shooting from ring to ring. We'd find an old car somewhere, old car wheel because people would throw them away and we'd work and saw and hack until we got, it's a bald barren in there. And you'd get that and you'd take that and you could walk around with this big bag of marbles and try to bust everybody else's because marbles are made out of glass. And if you become a good shooter you could say, "Well, you dropping from ring to ring." We call it dropping from ring to ring. And even my sisters, we would get out in the street and play stick ball. This is when we were children or maybe we could get up enough money to cook some peanut candy or maybe cook a cake or something like that. | 11:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you make peanut candy? | 12:57 |
Price Frederick Davis | As I recall, they take the sugar and take it and put it in the pan, put a little bit of butter, margarine weren't thought of then. And let it melt, brown it, like cook it and then take your peanuts and put it in there. And then that was all you had to do and make peanut brittle. And then when we got a little older, well, I guess when I left school, now I worked, I'd go to Myers Park and cut people's hedges 10 cents an hour, cut a yard. I'd come and cut this church yard here. | 12:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | As a little boy? | 13:39 |
Price Frederick Davis | As a young child going to the school right here. And even in the high school. | 13:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you get to and from Myers Park— | 13:44 |
Price Frederick Davis | Walk or ride a bicycle. I bought me a used bicycle and I walk. But walk because you push your lawnmower and your lawnmower was not a power lawnmower, but it's one of these push mo builds that, I saw my sister has one now and you had to sharpen the blade but I would cut a yard the size of this church here maybe for 15 cents. | 13:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | How were you treated by the White people that asked you to? | 14:11 |
Price Frederick Davis | The White people in my apartment, you talking about a different clientele, they were fantastic. You had no problem with them. They treated you decent. But now you could tell when you ran up on one who had gotten there through marriage and had married into wealth or something like that but if you went to a person who, and I tried to stay with people who were wealthy, but every once in a while, like I say, the wife who was home all day and showing you what to do, she had married into wealth and you could tell she had come from low class and she would treat you like a dog. | 14:16 |
Price Frederick Davis | Make you eat on the back steps, if she gave you any food at all, make you eat on the back steps or talk about you all the time. And it's funny you asked me that because, well God, I was getting ready to call her name because the furniture company is still in business and I don't want to do that. But anyway, I went to work for her cleaning inside of her house. | 14:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | How old were you at that time? | 15:20 |
Price Frederick Davis | I guess I was around 14, 15 years old. And I was in the bathroom there just working down on my knees, cleaning and trying to make this 50 cent a dollar what I'ma make for working all day long. And she said, "Praise." I said, "Yes ma'am, Ms. Lowder." We go, "Guess what?" I said, "What is that Ms. Lowder?" She said, "We going have a real nigga dinner today." And I said, "Yes ma'am. What's that Ms. Lowder?" She said, "We going to have some pork and beans and some sardines." I'd never had pork and beans and sardines but I couldn't, it was just the way things were. Do you get what I mean? But now there were other people out here like the Hutchinsons and people like that, the Grims, that all of them were well off people and they did not try to put you down. They took me out to a golf course out here and they were members of that golf course. Took me out there to Caddy one day and they didn't want Blacks out there and she— | 15:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | Not even to Caddy? | 16:33 |
Price Frederick Davis | Not even to Caddy, no sir, uh-uh because the White boys were sitting in the Caddy house and she said, "No, I won't price the Caddy for me. Otherwise I'm withdrawing and telling all my friends." And they let her do that. And I carried for she and Ms. Grim and whatnot. Let me say something about Charlotte and I don't mind saying this because I'll tell anybody, sue me. Because the truth is when you went out to work and you went out to cut grass and whatnot, you stayed in Myers Park in Queens and Myers Park and places like that. You do not go back here to the North Charlotte district because that's where the mill people came from. That's where your policeman came from and that's where your low life gustapo like policeman came from. So you don't go back there. I didn't even go back in there for nothing. No, now you know you asking for trouble when you go back in there. But you could spot decent White people from the White people that other White people would be talking about to me and refer to them as White trash. | 16:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | How would you do that and how could you do that? | 17:46 |
Price Frederick Davis | How could you spot them? | 17:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 17:50 |
Price Frederick Davis | Let me tell you something. If you have lived in the south, now people in the north will fool you. But if you have lived in the south long enough, you can look at people and tell whether they have come up the hard way, whether they have once in a while one may slip through the crack. But I don't want to call names because I'll tell you this, I know a millionaire here, but he was a poor boy and I don't care what you put on him, you could put two neck ties on him, one shooting this way and one—you can't—he still looks like White trash. I'm just sorry. It does. And this is not coming from me, but this is coming from White people that I know. They say, "God, there's nothing you can do to him to make him look like he's a decent person." | 17:52 |
Price Frederick Davis | But now like I say, all White people were not bad because I've seen, I've seen Blacks get beat up and I've seen White people cry. I saw a White man and woman uptown one time on the square and they were beating us—Now, this is what happened, when the police grab you, another cop don't have to come. Three or four White men come up from out of the crowd. You need any help to the cop and they will gang beat you. Now this is the truth. And I seen them beat people uptown on the square until it was—Rodney King was Penny Annie stuff compared to what they would do. And I saw a man and his wife cry one night. A White man said, "This is enough, this is enough. The man is just drunk. If you just let him alone, he can't even get up." But they whooped him good. That's right. | 18:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did the Black person have any recourse or any way— | 19:29 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, you got to be joking. You got to be joking. None. None whatsoever. None whatsoever. No, no. You have no recourse. Uh-uh, no. You can't complain to anybody. I hate to keep knocking cops so much. But let me tell you this why I knock cops so much. You can go back and look in the paper and if you can find it, there was a police chief that finally came on and he made the statement in the paper that you cops got to quit all this vulgar talk out in the street. You got to quit this. And that's why I say when I came back to Charlotte and around in '70 or something like that and I saw how professional cops were, I was struck with amazement. Do you get what I mean? | 19:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | They changed over time. | 20:29 |
Price Frederick Davis | Is your—what's the name about the run out? Because I got something I need to go back to. | 20:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | No, no. | 20:29 |
Price Frederick Davis | Okay. Let me go back to say about what happened in my neighborhood, my first riot. It was a mini riot but it was a riot. | 20:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | And what time was this? | 20:41 |
Price Frederick Davis | This was about 1937, '8, '9. | 20:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, late '30s, okay. | 20:44 |
Price Frederick Davis | In the late '30s. We lived next door to a lady who was a good-looking girl. Back in those days they would've referred to her as a hayala and she was pretty, but she was older than we were. Anyway, she laid around all the time with mostly White men. | 20:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was that a common practice or how did the Black community react to women who did that? | 21:16 |
Price Frederick Davis | I'm going to get to that. This lady had a husband. Now she was married to a Black man. So anyway, he worked over here at one of these mills. Anyway, my father went to her and told her, "Miss so and so, you can't be doing this around in front of our children." And me being somewhere like 16 years old, I love to go and sneak up under the house and listen to see what's going on because I was curious and I would sneak up under the house. I saw her one day she came in with three White guys and I sneaked up under the house. Now she was always bringing these, got some guy home with her, some White guy home with her. And they would be dressed in police clothes though. | 21:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was she accepting money from them or just seeing them? | 22:09 |
Price Frederick Davis | I guess so because she was driving a brand new car. So anyway, I sneaked up under the house that night and even the White man that my mother, before I sweeped up under the house to go get the ride started, my mother was working. My mother eventually had to go to work for some White people. My mother taught these little three room school house. Anyway, my mother looked up one day and said, "I wonder what Mr. so-and-so is doing over here at her house." | 22:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | And he's a policeman? | 22:40 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no, he wasn't nothing. He married into money. He was low life. He was nothing but trash. But he married into this family here in Charlotte that was really into the money. But he would always run for office city councilors. But he never would win. So my mother told me, so the next time he came, God forgive me, but I went and took a, because he parked his car about a block away. And I went up there with an ice pick and I flattened all four of his tires because I did not like this. I was 15 years old, but I knew that it was wrong. So anyway, getting back to these three guys came this evening, that evening and they went in the house. It was about about a hour or so before dark. So it was real quiet over there and whatnot. | 22:41 |
Price Frederick Davis | And when it got a little bit dark, I eased over there and eased up under the house and I listened to what was going on and it made me very angry. After a while, two of them came out and left, but one stayed there and this one, she and this one were carrying on and whatnot. So my brother finally came home. He's about a year and two or three months older than me. God rest his soul. He's dead now. But anyway, I told him, I said, "Miss so-and-so's over there laying up in the bed with this White man." I didn't know he was a policeman. He said, "Let's do something about this." I said, "What you want to do?" He said, "Let's set the house on fire." I said "No, because if it's just two of us, they're going to catch us. They'll investigate and they'll catch us." | 23:33 |
Price Frederick Davis | I said, "Let's go up on the corner and let's get all the boys off the corner and tell them to come on let's go and let's run this man out of here." I had no idea he was going to turn into a rock. So we went up on the corner and I had a 36 Ford, me and my brother, well, it belonged to my daddy, but me and my brother, he let us drive it. We took this Ford up there and you had running boards on the side of this car then. This, you can go back and prove it by Almer because this is where it originated from. It originated out of Almer's house. So anyway, I went up there and told the boys, I said, "Fellas, come on." Ski boarding and all these boys that we knew, I said, "You know what? There's a White man down here in the house with Miss so-and-so." | 24:21 |
Price Frederick Davis | I said, "Let's go down there and run him out of there." Because they don't let us come in their neighborhood, you know how young people are. And we went down there and drove up with the lights out of the car. And then they stood there. And they said, "Well, now what we going to do?" I said, "I tell you what?" About five, you should have seen people. That was a whole block of nothing but young boys, 16, 17, I doubt very much whether there's anybody that was 20 years old. So I said, "Well look here, some of you go on that side, some of you stay on this side and some of you stay on this side." I said, "Give me time to get to that back corner there. All of you get some rocks." And they got some bricks. I said, "And when I get to that back corner there, you start throwing them through the windows, through the doors, just break all the windows out." | 25:02 |
Price Frederick Davis | And they said, "Okay, we going to do that." And don't you know we started breaking them windows out and whatnot. And that woman started to screaming, oh my God. But see, my daddy had done told her, "You can't do this. There's too many children here." So anyway, she was screaming to the top of his voice after her voice. And about that time, the two cops that left, we didn't know there were cops. The two cops that left came back I guess to pick him up or go back in the house and have some more fun but back then, you didn't have safety glasses in cars. Car glasses were made out of plate glass like what you have in the store windows. They would break easy. They tore that cop up. That cop could right through the windshield, blood. I could see. But you know what? All of a sudden I told somebody, "Let's go to the back and set the house on fire." | 25:45 |
Price Frederick Davis | Just as we got to the back door, Baker, which was his name, he ran out the back of the house, jumped the fence, we jumped right over the fence with him and ran down Baldwin Avenue. Now this you can go back and prove it by Almer. Ran down Baldwin Avenue and just as he got ready to turn down Baldwin Avenue, somebody hit him in the back of the shoulder, a big brick bounced off somebody but he pulled out his gun. Now this is something that you don't think about, but now I think about it, he pulled out his gun and he shot down on the pavement. You could see the bullets ricocheting. | 26:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | He didn't shoot at the— | 27:12 |
Price Frederick Davis | He didn't shoot to kill us. And he ran down to the Bull's Head and got in the Bull's Head and made a phone call. | 27:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was that a club or? | 27:20 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, it was a eating place, like a sandwich shop where they cooked the food outside, barbecued it outside and it was called the Bull's Head. We ran back to the house and my daddy said, "Look, y'all got to stop this." And my daddy went over there and got her and took her to her car and told her, "You have to leave here. You can't stay here." And she left. The police never did come to investigate or anything but somebody called the newspaper and the newspaper came out. And that's how we found out that they were cops because the newspaper investigated and the guy, he left his hat in the road. Somebody picked up his hat and bought it back. And it was Baker's hat. So I had to go back and tell you that and it was a riot. | 27:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | And you never got in trouble for that? | 28:11 |
Price Frederick Davis | The police never came. | 28:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | Because it was a scandal. | 28:14 |
Price Frederick Davis | It was a scandal on the police department. So the police never come. So I thought I'd tell you that. That was my neighborhood. And that happened right down here about three blocks, here. That happened right down here about three blocks. Now you could ask me the question. I had to go back to that. | 28:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, wow. You were talking about the cops then you were going to explain another story and how it went. | 28:30 |
Price Frederick Davis | About the cops, well the cops, to me, I can understand the Jewish situation. When somebody tell me that Hitler didn't do this and whatnot, I compare it to we here in the south, men can be cruel to man. And I know how this girl that hid in the closet, I can't think of this Jewish girl. I know how she felt whenever she heard the SS troops coming because this is what Charlotte had here. You did not have to have any education. I'm talking about cops, just be White, have plenty of racial hatred and come with plenty of brute force. Now this is documented in the paper. And this was talked about here not too long ago because they were talking about writing up some history about it, but it was on the job training. And I wasn't a bad, I don't know why I had trouble with cops, but I never been a, you can go search from New York to California and nobody can tell you I ever been in jail. | 28:40 |
Price Frederick Davis | They'll tell you, you say, "You know price David?" "Yeah, you ever had him?" "Yeah, we had him." "What'd you had him for?" "Overloaded. He was overloaded. A light out on the truck." Or whatnot because that was the job. But cops, I remember back during the time, whenever you could go to the five and dime store and get a wallet, we call it pocketbook. We kids called it a pocketbook, you're going to buy me a pocketbook. There was a movie actress out here named Norma Shearer. So Norma Shearer was a very popular movie actress. She came along during Clark Gable's time. And one day I'm walking down 4th Street because I'm scared the little boy's going to beat me up if I come down across the bridge here. This is coming from high school. I came across coming down 4th Street and this cop was walking and he stopped me. "Where you going there boy?" I said, "I'm going home." I didn't have no books because I left my books at school, I'm scared because I'm scared I got to run. If I got to run, I haven't throw my books down so I leave— | 29:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | I'm Sorry, you were talking about the what boys who going to beat you up in— | 30:51 |
Price Frederick Davis | The boys right here in Brooklyn. Look, kids fighting in the driveway in neighborhood. But now let me go back and say that if they caught you here in Brooklyn, they would do nothing but bloody your nose. They would bloody your nose and knock you in your eye and then turn you loose and throw a rock by your ear to make you run faster. That's all they done to you. But nobody wanted to get beat up. But anyway, when this cop stopped me, he told me, "Well, what's your name?" I turned "Price Davis." And they said, "Well, got your ID?" I said, "Sir, I got some ID sir." And I pulled it out and showed it to him. And well I wanted Norma Shearer's little picture because she's a movie actress and he took my wallet with my dollar bill in there and he tore it up and threw it down and made me pick it up. Handed me my dollar and made me pick it up. Told me, "If you don't pick it up, I'll write you up of littering." That's right. | 30:54 |
Price Frederick Davis | I hated cops for a long time but I don't hate cops now. I don't even hate the White, not quite America. I don't even hate the White low lifes. I really don't. I've forgiven it and put it in the back of my head because I went to work, played by the rules and I retired, Union retired. So I'm not angry with anybody. | 31:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to go back and talk some about your family life. Do you have any remembrances of your grandparents? Anything that they— | 32:13 |
Price Frederick Davis | A very little bit of remembrance of my grandparents because see, I was just a young kid back then, but I do remember going up to [indistinct 00:32:28] to visit my grandparents and my brother, which is right behind me. Booker was a baby in my mother's arms. And I remember him carrying Booker and me down to a cantaloupe field and pulled out, they call it a muskmelon now. You don't see him around much. Not a cantaloupe, but it tastes like a cantaloupe. And my brother cried and he took it up there and put it on the porch and he cut it for him. And that's about all. | 32:20 |
Price Frederick Davis | I remember my grandmother dying. We were down at the river washing clothes. This was in a little place up here about 40 miles, 50 miles called Taylorsville. | 32:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | In South Carolina? | 33:10 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, in North Carolina. We were down at the river washing clothes. And my mother had just given birth to my last brother, Calvin. And my mother had just gotten out of bed. And this guy comes down riding a bicycle and gives her this telegram that your mother has died. My mother couldn't go because she had complications. But I remember she went and got a guy named John Mays who was Black, had a big old touring car with the top back on it. It wasn't that good big huff mobile longest from here to the street. And she sent us up to [indistinct 00:33:48] to the funeral. | 33:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Where is that? Was that in South Carolina? | 33:50 |
Price Frederick Davis | That's in North Carolina. And sent us to [indistinct 00:33:55] and I remember looking at my grandmother lying in her, I guess you'd call it a casket, but it was actually a box because they made the caskets back then by hand. She was lying there in this casket and somebody was there fanning her to keep the flies off of her. And she had these two big long plats down here because that's the only thing that I remember about my grandmother. | 33:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, you talk some about your father, would you like to talk a little bit more and talk to some about your mother— | 34:23 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, let's say about my father. I admired my father because my father was different from the average man out here. My father would get up every morning as such as it was, and he would take that 10 tub and heat him some water. This is what we took baths in. You just washed up all during the week. But on that weekend you had to sit down in this tub and drape your feet over the outside and throw the water up like this and what not but my father would take this bath and put his clothes on and put him a shirt and a tie on every day. | 34:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Even on the weekends? | 35:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | Even on the weekends, even in the middle of the week and whatnot, he would do this. And my father was much older than my mother because my mother went to school to my father. And my father was about 18 years older than my mother. And when she finished high school, my father asked to marry her. | 35:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | And he was her teacher? | 35:30 |
Price Frederick Davis | He was her teacher. And she called him to the day she died, she called him Professor Davis and he called her Sister Alice and they were two loving people. And if they had arguments, I guess they hid it from the children. And I remember my father would tell my mother, now this is going back during the depression when nobody had anything. | 35:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, I was going to ask you about that. | 35:56 |
Price Frederick Davis | People were eating leaves. My father would tell my mother, he'd say, "Let's let the children eat and if there's anything left, then you and I'll have something. But if not, we'll do without." And I'd hear my mother tell my father that, "Let's feed the children, let's let the children eat until they are full." And that was it. I just admired my mother and my father both because my father, he was a self-made man. He worked his way through a living stone, which is an AME Zion supported college and also finished a theological seminary here at Johnson C. Smith because I think Smith was the only Black school that had a theological seminary back then. | 35:57 |
Price Frederick Davis | And I don't know, I just admired my father. When I got ready to leave home, I was about I believe 17 going on 18 and I begged and begged my father, but he wanted me to go to school because I only had a high school education. All I wanted was that high school diploma in my hand and I begged him to let me leave, he and my mother. And they finally, and I had $300, which was an insurance policy that I paid a lot of money. I said, "Give me $100 of this money and y'all take the rest and do what you wanna but let me go to New York." Because I had a older brother that had come down here and swelled my head that money grows on trees in New York. And I went up to the bus station, it cost $6 and pennies to catch that bus to New York. | 36:50 |
Price Frederick Davis | And I went up on at the bus station and they wouldn't let us come in the bus station because there was so many Whites in the bus station, "All you Blacks go down on the—" They didn't call us Blacks, call us Colored folks or something else. "Go down on the corner there and wait for the bus." And that's what I did, on the corner, one block below the bus station. I crawled on that bus and my father told me, he said, "Son, if things go bad—I'ma let you go." Now I'm 17 going on 18. "Things go bad, I'ma let you go. But you promise me if things go bad, will you come back?" And I said, "I will." But God rest my mother and father's soul in peace, I even bought a home because it did come back to me where I live now in Clanton Park. | 37:40 |
Price Frederick Davis | But I brought that home for my mother. And before my father died, my father died in '50. I showed him that I had a bank book of a couple of thousand dollars, which I had begun to accumulate money. And I had bought a house in New York. Owed my soul to it, but at least I had it in my name and showed my father that I could be a producer. And my father was very proud of me. He really was. Because I would send for him to come to New York anytime he wanted to, send my mother to come and whatnot. And I just loved my parents. I loved it. When televisions first come out, I came down and bought my mother and father a television, something that was new. Bought them a new refrigerator when they started the remaking refrigerators again after the war. And I tried to pay back some of the things that my parents had done for me because I saw my mother put cardboard in her shoes and going out in the snow trying to get some food and help support her children. This was in the '30s. | 38:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | In the Depression? | 39:40 |
Price Frederick Davis | In the Depression, things were bad. I'm telling you, things were bad now. Things were bad. Things were bad. So I admired my parents because they were God-fearing people. And my father was pastoring. He pastored a church here in Charlotte. It was called Catheys, they have a new church now. But he pastored the old Catheys. And I would love to go to church with him on Sunday because somehow or another, I don't know where they got the food from, but Mr. Valentine and his family would take us home and feed us. And God, I love to go home with them because they had things like chocolate milk. You know how a kid wants to eat that sweet stuff and what not. And I really enjoyed it. And my father just impressed me, my father and my mother. I look back and thank God for being so blessed with good parents. | 39:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of values did they try to instill in their children? | 40:40 |
Price Frederick Davis | The best of values. The best of values. No, I won't tell that because no, I was wanting to get back to that cop but I was in high school and we had a teacher, he's dead now, but he would take the men in and talk to the men about the little girls and say, "Don't ruin these young girls' life." And he said, "If you feel like that you can't do that, you come and you talk to me and I'll tell you what to do." And that was teaching sex education back then. They'd probably kill him then if they had known that what he was doing. But anyway, that I appreciated too, because the teachers were those kind people. But getting back to my father, the values that they instilled in you is that God is God and just take it to God and pray. | 40:52 |
Price Frederick Davis | And another thing about my parents is you didn't just come in and look in the oven and find something either to eat or whatnot. 5 o'clock in the evening, if it's your time to go to bed, I believe it was 5 o'clock. If it was your time to go to bed and you drew back that bat, they'd say, "It's time to come and have dinner." You went in and you sit at the table, we sit at the big table in the dining room and we sit there and talked. And I listen to my mother and father talk. And then they would let the children talk. But as we began to get teenagers up and then we could join in the conversation and they would instill in us to be decent, be honest. And my father trusted me so with girls, until he would let us have his car and we maybe three boys and three girls, or three to five girls and one boy, we would go to the beach. He would trust us to go to the beach. And nothing happened. I'm serious because that had been taught to us. And going to the beach was another—No, I'll let you ask the question. I'm just [indistinct 00:42:53] because that's another story. | 41:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | Well, I'll go back to the beach. I just wanted to ask you a few more questions about your family. Who made the decisions in your family? | 42:55 |
Price Frederick Davis | My mother and father. They made the decisions. | 43:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, what were the holidays like— | 43:07 |
Price Frederick Davis | The holidays were fantastic, I mean fantastic. My mother would cook coconut cakes. Now, where she found the money to do it, I don't know. But she would make sure—take Christmas, she would make sure that she had that Christmas dinner together. And Christmas we got an apple and an orange. Maybe that would be all we would get because there was a lot of us in my family, it's just all these kids, eight of us. So maybe once in a while you might get a little toy. Maybe. This is when we were children. Thanksgiving, my father loved to hunt like I did. And he hunted for the meat, not for the sport, but it's a combination of the two things. And we would always have a good dinner on Thanksgiving and Christmas. On New Year's Eve or the New Year's the next day we would always have plenty of pig pork, black eyed peas and collared greens and cornbread. | 43:11 |
Price Frederick Davis | And my daddy say, "You eat the greens, make your have green money." And that's a southern tradition. And we stuck with it until God, I'm a grown man, whenever they finally, the kids left home and they decided to got away from it. But the holidays were the best days of my life, especially Christmas time. Even though Santa Claus wasn't good to me, didn't bring me a lot of things like a bicycle. I had friends that got bicycles and clothes and things and I was lucky if I got a stick of candy and an apple. | 44:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was your father the pastor of a small parish? About the small— | 44:55 |
Price Frederick Davis | In his later years, a small church. But during his early years, I remember his first pastorate is up there in Lincolnton, North Carolina in a big church and the church is still standing there. | 44:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | I guess I wanted to go on and move on to your school experience. Do you you have any special remembrances of elementary school and do you like to share? | 45:11 |
Price Frederick Davis | Special memories of elementary school? Yes. I'd like to share the most. I just had one of my first grade teachers could pass away and they were the most loving kind people. They knew that things were bad. And I have known the time that they have come to school and cooked grits to feed the hungry, the hungry children. And I've seen the time that they have bought little things from, I don't know where they got them, but to bring this kid a jacket or whatnot, and they treated every kid equal. | 45:20 |
Price Frederick Davis | Now, let me go back and say this and I have to tell it like it is. History is history regardless of whether it's good, bad, and indifferent. There was a time in school whenever the little—Vermelle would kill me if she heard me say this, the little yellow girl with the long hair was the teacher's pet. At least it seemed that way. And it made a difference. It made a difference. But the thing of it was the teachers tried not to show that preference, but if that child comes from a doctor's family or whatnot, that child had money to spend and the best of clothes and it did make a difference. It made a difference. When a child could come to school every day with a different outfit on wherein— | 45:57 |
Price Frederick Davis | Because you know a child will play. I had to go home and wash those clothes that evening if my mother was at work, or if my mother wasn't home. Wash those clothes, put them in front of the fire, make a fire in the fireplace, put them in front of the fire, dry them, and put that iron in front of that fire, and heat that iron, and iron my clothes. | 0:01 |
Price Frederick Davis | But that was one thing that my father taught us. When we got able to know right from wrong, I guess maybe six, seven years old, you had responsibilities, and you had to be a responsible person. You can't leave everything on your mother and father. Learn to clean up the house. Learn to—You had to have responsibilities. | 0:23 |
Price Frederick Davis | But going back—let me go back a little bit further because as a young child, I guess maybe three, four years old, my mother and father would—Every year they were gone, but they got a lady to come. | 0:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Would they they go on vacation? | 1:04 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no. They're gone working because back in those days, I never understood it, but they say, "I'm bidding for this school. I'm bidding for this school." I don't know. And I read a letter. I wish I'd have brought that letter and shared it with you, wherein my mother had been accepted to teach down in South Carolina. | 1:05 |
Price Frederick Davis | But anyway, when they'd go away, they would get this—Emmeline, I think was her name. I'd have to check that with my sister. But she was a slave. Now Aunt Emmeline, when I was three or four years old, Aunt Emmeline was in her eighties or nineties then because she'd sit and chew this tobacco, and smoke that pipe, and tell us about slavery. | 1:23 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, do you remember any stories that she told you? | 1:46 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, I remember her story is where she was sold up in Virginia, and she said she saw her brother and sister go one way, her mother went with some other family, and she came down to Alabama. And they had to walk all the way from—walk and partly ride all the way from Virginia to Alabama because the boss, the master, made them sleep up under the wagon at night. He would hang something around the wagon at night, and he would sleep up on top of the wagon, and they would sleep under the wagon at night. | 1:48 |
Price Frederick Davis | And she would tell us about when the war ended, and things like that. And she would make us sad. But we loved to play with her. And I remember we used to run through the house and holler, "poopy willow." We didn't know what we were talking—But she would tell us, "You shut up to hollering in this house." But we would run through this house and holler, "poopy willow." I don't know what it meant, but that's what we would holler. And she was great. She was great. I don't know. Maybe on the other side, maybe I'll see her again. | 2:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | So you said your parents went away to work to get—Went away to teach? | 2:58 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah. My parents would go away to teach. Maybe one would go to Attico, and the other one would go to Lincolnton, or go to Taylorsville, or somewhere like that. But the greatest feeling of all, and this sounds stupid, but it's the truth, the greatest feeling of all is if I would get sick and get down with a cold or something, I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and my mother would be there, and she would hold me. That was the greatest feeling of all. Now, I wouldn't get sick just to make my mother come home, but my mother would be gone so long until I'd just be glad to see her. And if I was sick, I would get well right quick because I don't know, it just brought joy to me to have my mother. | 3:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | How long did they have to stay away at a time? | 3:49 |
Price Frederick Davis | They would come home once in a while. If they would go and stay, I don't know how long school lasted, because school worked so different then. | 3:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh really [indistinct 00:03:59] | 3:58 |
Price Frederick Davis | They had to come out of school while—So the kids—I'm talking about the Black kids now. The Black kids would come out of school, and go pick cotton, and work the farms. So I can't even remember or recall what time of year they were gone. | 3:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | That makes sense. Like six months— | 4:12 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, and they would come, and I would hear my mother and father talking about, "I have this script," it sounded like they would be saying. "I got two scripts that I'm going to go and cash in." And that was how they got paid. So— | 4:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | What is a script? | 4:28 |
Price Frederick Davis | I don't know what a script was. A script, I imagine it was something like a check. | 4:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 4:37 |
Price Frederick Davis | I imagine that's what it was. I don't know. And— | 4:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 4:38 |
Price Frederick Davis | I had great parents. Great parents, wonderful parents. | 4:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you talk some about your high school and what your high school [indistinct 00:04:53]? | 4:49 |
Price Frederick Davis | My high school was—I had no business in high school. Right here at this school, here, right behind us. I skipped fifth grade. Teacher figured I was good enough. | 4:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 5:03 |
Price Frederick Davis | Now, they could do that back then. "I'm going to push you on up, and you're going up to sixth grade." When I got to high school, I was lost for a while. But high school to me was the most fascinating life I have ever lived in my life. Because in the first place, you are at the age where you begin to look at the little girls. | 5:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 5:25 |
Price Frederick Davis | See, 'cause when I'm here, I don't care how pretty she was. Oh, that ole nasty thing. I don't want to be bothered with her. But there, I began to look at the little girls, and I went all the way through school with a girl that I admired so much. And here's my hand. Why, you asked that? I don't know. | 5:26 |
Price Frederick Davis | I looked at her picture today. Her name was Nina Houser. And I shied back from her. Her daddy was a doctor. She was very friendly toward me, but I was scared to ask her for a date. And when I finally asked her for a date was at the graduation. | 5:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, graduation? | 6:02 |
Price Frederick Davis | Graduation. And she told me, she said, "Well why didn't you ask me before now? Because we are going to Atlanta." And I said, "Mercy if I was scared to death." But I never kept in touch with her whatnot. We drifted apart. But I don't know. There was something about Nina that just, oh, God, I could melt when she walked into the class. | 6:07 |
Price Frederick Davis | But I went on to high school, and I started to—High school was great. I felt like I belonged, but I was such a puny little thing until I couldn't get involved in sports. I did try my hand at boxing a little bit. We laugh about that now. But football, no, the boys were too muscular. They were too big. And I did sing on the glee club. I liked that. And I wasn't the best student in the world because—I could have been better, but I was frightened of the teachers. | 6:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why were you frightened of them? | 7:06 |
Price Frederick Davis | I don't know. Vermelle's daddy scared me to death. You know Vermelle. | 7:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 7:11 |
Price Frederick Davis | Her daddy frightened me to death. I took French under him, and the only thing I can remember to this day is a past participle of a verb conjugated with [indistinct 00:07:23] agrees with the subject and [indistinct 00:07:25] gender. (Laughs) | 7:13 |
Price Frederick Davis | But her daddy had an air about him of being very strict and that frightened me. But there were other teachers that I really could talk to, and express myself, and go to them with my problems. And I remember there was a girl in school that I wanted to date, and we started to dating, and it got very hot and passionate there. And that's wherein I had to go and talk to Mr. Farmer, and tell him that, "I don't know, I need to talk to somebody." | 7:24 |
Price Frederick Davis | But anyway, that's getting back to the wallet. Oh, I wish I could cut this off. | 8:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 8:26 |
Price Frederick Davis | My high school really prepared me to go out here and take on the world because when you get to be a junior, you think you know it all then. You're ready to go out here and tackle this world. But I knew that I wasn't going to college. | 8:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why? Why was that? | 8:42 |
Price Frederick Davis | Because my brother had come down here and told me, "You can come to New York. You don't need a college education." And I did not want—And I've got to repeat this. I did not want to be the most educated elevator operator down here in the south. You used to have to operate them by hand, and all the boys that I knew that had graduated from out here at Smith, they were either operating an elevator operator, or whatnot. And I knew that I was going to leave and go and either join a circus. | 8:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh! | 9:13 |
Price Frederick Davis | It sounds crazy, but that's what I wanted to be. Or either go to New York, and get me some kind of job that was—Because my brother had tried to explain the union to me, and I said, "I'll go to New York and get me a job in the union, and I'll make me some money. I don't need a college. I can't stand to be cooped up four more years. And I don't want to be no teacher." | 9:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Why didn't you want to be a teacher? | 9:36 |
Price Frederick Davis | I don't know. I just did not want to be a teacher 'cause I'd go to school with my father and my mother once in a while, and I don't know, I just didn't like it. And I just didn't like it. | 9:41 |
Price Frederick Davis | And I'd see what my teachers went through here in that second ward, and I just didn't want to be a teacher. And I said, "No, I'm not going to be that. I'm going to be something else. I'm going to New York, and give it some thought. And I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'll go into New York." And I prepared myself to come out of high school. And when you get to be a senior—Now, I'm talking about me. This is 'cause things are different out there now. I don't know how you young people feel now. You feel like you've got it all made. And I said, "Now if I can just get that high school diploma in my hand, I've got it made." But believe it or not, I would not have gotten the job that I had, had I not had that high school diploma. | 9:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to go back and ask you about, you mentioned before, your friend. I just wanted to ask you, what happened to girls at Second Ward in your neighborhood that did get pregnant? And what happened to the boys that got them pregnant? | 10:32 |
Price Frederick Davis | Got put in jail. The boys got put in jail. | 10:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Jail? | 10:46 |
Price Frederick Davis | Uh-huh. Yeah, you went to jail for that. And you were looked down upon. And if it was a friend of mine, I couldn't play with him anymore. I couldn't go out if a boy got a girl pregnant. | 10:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | He was ostracized. | 10:59 |
Price Frederick Davis | From—My mother and father would tell me, "No, you can't hang with him now. No, no, no. He's—Let him go on, and get married, or whatever he's going to do." But I don't think, unless they hid it, you did really not have too many girls getting pregnant by boys. Pregnancy was not—I don't know. Maybe they went and had abortions. I don't know. But pregnancy was not a problem in Second Ward, or this school here, because the people weren't so promiscuous as they are now. And—No. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. | 11:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you said the boys were put in jail, how long did they have to stay in jail? | 11:44 |
Price Frederick Davis | Well, they'd try to make the family support the girl, or whatnot like that. If the girl bought charges. I don't think you had anything like welfare back then. And if you had been brought up right, because my sisters and brothers, they all felt the same way because we talk about this now. If you had been brought up in a good Christian family—Now I'm not talking about a prude family. I'm not talking about a nerd family where everybody's there with a book in their face all the time. But if you had been brought up and taught some good values, you knew right from wrong. You didn't go out here and mess up these girls' lives. | 11:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. So boys didn't expect to get so far? Or how did they— | 12:32 |
Price Frederick Davis | Well, yeah. Oh, you had boys out here who were strictly going for the home run. But they were—The crowd that I hung out with did not. No, they were very protective back then. If they did, they were very protective and—No, no. It just wasn't a thing where you had a lot of babies sprung all over everywhere. | 12:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 12:53 |
Price Frederick Davis | Uh-uh. And girls, well you had some loose girls out there because boys didn't want to be seen with them in the daytime, but when the sun went down at night, everybody was running after them. No, it just didn't happen. Huh. | 12:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. What was dating like at your high school? What did couples do on dates? | 13:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | Dating was fantastic. Now, I had a car all my life. All my adult—15 years old, didn't even have a driver's license, but you could go ahead and drive in. But dating was the most wonderful thing that you could do in high school then because it was such an innocent thing. And they would date, and me having a car, I couldn't go to see—But Gone With the Wind didn't come in. Now that's a picture way before your time, but it came out in 1939, Gone With the Wind. | 13:11 |
Price Frederick Davis | I picked up my little girl and took her to—Would get somebody else to ride with me, two or three, maybe six of us would go. Three boys and three girls. Yeah, we had a big Ford, old car. Three boys and three girls, and we'd pool our little money, and go to corn court, and we could go upstairs at the White theater and sit upstairs. We couldn't go down the stairs, but you could go over there, and that's where I went to see Gone With the Wind. And dating was going for a walk, and walk through the block on Second Street. | 13:47 |
Price Frederick Davis | Dating was going to, not Park Center, but the Armory. It was the old Armory auditorium right out here by the stadium, which they had the old Armory auditorium. And that's where all the dancers came to. | 14:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 14:32 |
Price Frederick Davis | Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole, The Ink Spots, you name them. Billie Holiday, you name them all. And the price was a dollar and a quarter. Now me, I'm going to scuffle like I don't know what to get that $2.50, so I can take my little girl to this dance, and maybe have a dollar to spend when I come out. Well, dollar—Hamburger of course ten cents, a quarter. And you were honest with girls. They knew you didn't have no money. | 14:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you have any problems with dating being a preacher's son? Did they tease you? | 15:01 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, the people would tease me. But now I tell you, a lot of people knew that I was a preacher's son, but they knew I was just a regular dude because when I got to be about 15 years old, I could make meals cider knock the top off your head. And I would drink liquor back then. | 15:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 15:24 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah. But my daddy didn't drink, and my mother—Nobody in my family would drink then, but me, I wanted to see what—This comes from Elmer's family because Elmer's daddy was the biggest bootlegger out here in Cherry. | 15:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh. | 15:41 |
Price Frederick Davis | One day over here, Elmer's daddy would get my sister. My sister ran a little cafe right across the street there, and he did get her to keep the liquor. And one day, I asked him to let me taste it, and he let me taste it, and I liked it. And then I got to talking to another fella in church right here, this church. And he told me, he said, "Well, you don't have to drink liquor." He said, "I can tell you how to make meal cider, and you could go and get a big box of raisins for a nickel, big box of yeast that big for a nickel. And you could get your cornmeal, and your sugar, and any other rotten fruit you want to throw in it, put it in there, and bury it in the ground. Let it stay in there for a while, and then take it out." | 15:41 |
Price Frederick Davis | And now, because people then weren't drinking, you didn't have sealed whiskey. People drank home brew. Most people made this old home brew and whatnot. So that's what we did. And I knew how to make this meal cider. And then if you come along after I done made it, I wouldn't drink nothing. I'd give you a drink of it, and see how you going to make out now. But if you come back tomorrow and ask for a drink of it, it'll cost you. I can't give you no more. (Laughs) | 16:23 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. So you make a profit with your— | 16:52 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no, no, no. I'd take it to football game. We'd sneak and drink it, and whatnot. But now, I never became a drunk in my life. It's just that I did start at an early age. And when I go tonight to look at the game, I will sit, and have a few drinks, and enjoy myself. But people expect preachers' children to be—They do expect a lot from preachers' children. | 16:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 17:18 |
Price Frederick Davis | But I've been nice in this church. I've been so nice in this church. I'm scared to do anything else. You know. | 17:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | You had mentioned about the beach and you said you would go. | 17:29 |
Price Frederick Davis | Oh, the beach was—You'd have to go down through Pageland, South Carolina, and it was all little towns back then. They had these big bellied sheriffs that sat there on the— | 17:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Pageland? | 17:41 |
Price Frederick Davis | Pageland. | 17:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 17:41 |
Price Frederick Davis | South Carolina. | 17:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 17:44 |
Price Frederick Davis | And you had this big bellied sheriff that's going to sit on that square, that little square. And if you came through there, and you were Black, you were going to be stopped. And once you got stopped, you were going to have to pay out that $15, which was a lot of money. You were going to pay something. We used to get slick and get almost up into Pageland. And I hate to say this because I put it on somebody else. We would watch three or four carloads of Blacks go through, and we'd give them about five minutes or 10 minutes to get into Pageland. We could figure about that up there now. And we'd know that that sheriff has them. | 17:45 |
Price Frederick Davis | We would go through Pageland, and look, and sure enough, he would have them because if we went through there, we would be the car that would get stopped. And that was what we called running the gauntlet. "Let's run the gauntlet." | 18:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | So while he was with them, y'all running— | 18:35 |
Price Frederick Davis | We would go through— | 18:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 18:35 |
Price Frederick Davis | —driving 10 miles an hour, 15 miles an hour. But the minute you got out of his sight, you'd better hit it down because as soon as he take care of those three Blacks, you were going to be next. And I don't know why, but they would always have some kid riding in the police car with them, some young White kid. And they would talk down to you, embarrass you like I don't know what. But you know—Okay, we were talking about the beach. But I must say this, going back, I never heard—Maybe I've said this before. | 18:36 |
Price Frederick Davis | I never heard my father insulted here in the south. But my mother, yes, I heard my mother— | 19:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? Do you remember? | 19:13 |
Price Frederick Davis | Well, I heard her insulted at one time when she went into the store to get this prize. And I was a little boy with her. And this guy hollered out here, "This nigger woman out here said she done won this prize." And that was the only time. | 19:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did she do when— | 19:30 |
Price Frederick Davis | Nothing. She told him thank you. Because the man hollered out from the back, "All the prizes are gone." And I remember him asking, "Can I interest you in anything today?" And my mother said, "No, thank you." "Well, y'all come back to see us now." And that was the end. And that voice stayed with me a long time. | 19:32 |
Price Frederick Davis | But on the beach, once you'd get to the beach, we had—God, I forget the name of the beach. But anyway, we had some little cabins out on the beach. Atlantic Beach. | 19:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was it a segregated beach? | 20:03 |
Price Frederick Davis | Oh, yeah. | 20:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 20:05 |
Price Frederick Davis | And the policeman would come by, White policeman walking, and he'd tell you, "Don't get too close up there to that water." And he didn't want you to get too close to the Whites. | 20:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did White people come to your beach? | 20:17 |
Price Frederick Davis | Well, White people could do anything they wanted to, but they would probably tell them not to. They could come and walk around, do anything they want. But you can't go on the White beach. You couldn't go on the White beach Uh-uh. No, no, no, no, no, no. That was a no-no. | 20:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did the Black beach differ from the White? | 20:35 |
Price Frederick Davis | Well, the Black beach did not have the money. There was a difference. You could tell the difference. The White beaches had the motels, and the hotels, and the whatnot. And the Black beach, it was just an ocean front because the Blacks owned it. Somebody told me that the Whites finally rezoned it, and beat them out of it, but it wasn't much. At the widest, it would be from here down to—maybe up the [indistinct 00:21:09], just right on the waterfront with a wire. And they would tell you, "Colored only. You stay right in here." And they'd watch you, and make sure that you didn't get out of there. | 20:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Where did you stay when you went to the beach? | 21:21 |
Price Frederick Davis | They had little cabins out on the beach, and we would get two cabins. The girls would stay in one, and the boys would stay in the other. And believe me when I tell you it was an innocent thing. I look back now and say, "All the pretty girls I had down there, how innocent it was." You know what I mean? But it was innocent. It was very innocent. Uh-huh. And we'd go down there, and take whatever kind of food we could afford, buy whatever. Hot dogs you could buy. They had a little stand on the beach and whatnot. | 21:23 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I wanted to go back and ask you about the Armory instead. What kind of—You said lots of famous musicians came? | 21:54 |
Price Frederick Davis | Old famous musicians. | 22:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were some of you and your friends famous favorite musicians? | 22:01 |
Price Frederick Davis | Oh, back in that day was The Ink Spots, and Nat King Cole, Chick Webb, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, you name any of them. Erskine Hawkins. Blacks came downstairs to dance. Whites sat upstairs and watched. | 22:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, they watched you dance? | 22:23 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, but they couldn't come downstairs. They wouldn't let Whites downstairs, but Whites would dance upstairs in the aisles and whatnot. | 22:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, that's interesting. | 22:30 |
Price Frederick Davis | Uh-huh. That it was. It was. It was. Uh-huh. | 22:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | And what kind of dances did you do? | 22:31 |
Price Frederick Davis | Jitterbug. | 22:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 22:31 |
Price Frederick Davis | And I remember there was somebody's band that came here. They had a White horn player in it, but he had to blacken his face. | 22:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | He did? | 22:47 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah. He blackened his face. I forget what band it is. I forget whose band it was. Seemed like to me it was Erskine Hawkins' Band, or Cab Calloway. It was one or the other. And all the big bands came here. | 22:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | So they couldn't have White members of Black bands. They didn't have any— | 23:06 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no, no, no. You can't play together. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Uh-huh. Uh-uh. And then they sort of tightened things down because Nat King Cole was in Alabama, and his next stop was here. And he was up there singing Mona Lisa. Mona Lisa had just come out. And the White women was swooning, don't you know, and one of them rednecks jumped up out the crowd. And this is the truth. Jumped up on the stage, and knocked Nat King Cole smack down. This is the truth. And he started not to come here. | 23:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | But did he come? He did. | 23:44 |
Price Frederick Davis | He came. He came. He came. But you had a lot of policemen there guarding him, and whatnot. But he didn't have to worry because this was all Blacks down here dancing, and Whites were up in—But I guess they were watching because they figured maybe somebody may shoot him from upstairs. | 23:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | During that time, if a White woman did like a Black man, was interested in Black men, how could she show that? Or what ways did she show that? | 24:00 |
Price Frederick Davis | They've always done it. Now look, if you want get in on that, I can go back and tell you that this I know for a fact because it would scare me and frighten me to death. Now, I knew a lot of chauffeurs. They were chauffering the White women out in the park, and them White women and them chauffers was getting together, honey, doing their thing. So it has worked both ways. It has worked both ways. Because I know one chauffer, he was a handsome dude, and this woman, she was ready to leave her husband for this man. But I used to tell him, sometimes he'd come wherever he was. I'd tell him, "Boy, they're going to raid this place, and you are going to be killed." Had that woman's car parked outside the house. "You're going to be killed, boy. You'd better quit the mess." | 24:07 |
Price Frederick Davis | And then I had a brother that did the same thing. And I told him, "This is wrong. This is very wrong." That's my older brother that's dead now. And this is going back in the early '40s. He started to dating some woman that he would go out and work at her house, and she and the husband fell out. But it has always worked that way both ways. The only thing it is is the White man has been more open with his. He feel like he can walk in and do as he please. | 24:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | What would happen to Black men if they got caught? | 25:22 |
Price Frederick Davis | They'd lynch him. | 25:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | At that—Even [indistinct 00:25:26]. | 25:25 |
Price Frederick Davis | If they get caught, the first thing she would do is holler, "Rape." And then they would kill him. Yeah, they would lynch him. Yeah, sure they would. Because I remember up in Taylorsville when I was a little boy, there was a Black guy named Broadus Miller. They accused him of raping this White woman, and they came all around our house looking all in the barn. They came everywhere looking. I'll never forget that. I was a little boy. And they finally found him and shot him laying beside of a tree in the woods. Mm-hmm. | 25:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did most Black men interact with White women then? That threat of— | 26:02 |
Price Frederick Davis | You were very frightened. You're very frightened. Because now I know for a fact I could have interracially dated when I was a young fellow. 'Cause when I was a young fellow, girls used to tell me I was a handsome little dude. And I would turn it off as a joke. Yeah, because I mean, some of the places where I worked, if the lady would come on, or her daughter or whatnot, it would frighten me to death. And I would. I'd turn it off as a joke. I really would. Yeah, I know. Not down south here. Uh-uh. Uh-uh. | 26:07 |
Price Frederick Davis | But I have interracially dated. After I got to New York, I dated. And not because she was White now, but because they either was a good friend, or whether we had something in common. I wouldn't date a woman just because she's White. But that's what they used to tell us back then, that we stood around like dogs panting with your tongue hanging out, ready to pounce on White women. And that was a lie. It was a lie. | 26:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. Okay. I want to move on now. I'd like to move on to when you went to New York. | 27:13 |
Price Frederick Davis | When I went to New York—That's the reason why I wanted to bring this. I caught the bus that morning, and this bus driver all the way up the road, he niggered himself to death. "Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger." I'm sitting on the back of the bus, me and a fellow that left with me. | 27:15 |
Price Frederick Davis | We finally got to Washington D.C. When we got to Washington D.C., it was in the morning. I woke up, and I looked, and I looked at him, and I said to myself, "No wonder he had to nigger himself to death all up the road because only his mother could love him." You take that suit off of him, he was the lowest life White trash I have ever seen in my life. Now, this is the truth. And I'm not putting him down just because he had hollered, "Nigger," all the way up the road. | 27:37 |
Price Frederick Davis | But anyway, I got there at Washington D.C., changed buses, and a Black woman come up, and she told me, she said, "This is good now, son. You can sit wherever you want to sit on the bus." I said, "I can?" She said, "Yeah." She said, "You get you a seat." And that's the reason why I wanted to bring this paper because it said I did not move to the front, but I did not sit in the back. I moved middle ways. The bus driver became different. He act like he had some common sense. He was a White bus driver but he was— | 28:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was it the same bus driver, or— | 28:31 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no. They changed bus drivers there. And this bus driver got on. He was a White bus driver, but he was so courteous, and so decent, and everything changed, and the whole atmosphere changed. And when I got to New York, I got a cab, and went to Harlem, and stayed on Convent Avenue right up near City College. | 28:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. Was that an apartment or— | 28:59 |
Price Frederick Davis | That's an apartment. | 29:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 29:02 |
Price Frederick Davis | Got me a room there and stayed. And— | 29:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | I'm sorry, what did you think about New York as compared Charlotte? | 29:04 |
Price Frederick Davis | Oh, my God, I looked around. I looked around. I saw a Black policeman directing traffic. I said, "Oh, my God. This is the promised land." | 29:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. (Laughter) | 29:14 |
Price Frederick Davis | So anyway, I went to Harlem, and I stayed there a day, and my older brother told me, said, "Now I'm going to let you walk around a day. And after that, I want you to get a job." | 29:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh. | 29:32 |
Price Frederick Davis | So I said, "Okay, where am I going to get a job?" He said, "I got a job for you." And I went to Long Island, caught the subway, and went to Long Island to see a girl. | 29:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:29:44] the subway? | 29:44 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah. Didn't know nothing about New York, but my brother told me how to do it. | 29:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 29:47 |
Price Frederick Davis | Went to see a girl that I talked about in this article. | 29:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 29:52 |
Price Frederick Davis | It was a girl that I really did love. I met this girl here, and she got married, but I didn't put this in the book about what happened. She got married to a soldier. She and I were tight. She married the soldier, but the soldier had to go off to the army. So—I don't know why I'm putting this on tape though Because— | 29:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | Yeah. | 30:17 |
Price Frederick Davis | But both of them are dead now. So anyway, she and I went to the beach. We sneaked through Pageland, South Carolina and went to the beach, and I went on the honeymoon. Now that was a bad thing I did in my life. Do you get what I mean? | 30:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, yeah. | 30:33 |
Price Frederick Davis | But anyway, I got in New York, and I went to see her, and she and her husband had separated, and she and I went out that night and went to a Chinese place and had Chinese food. | 30:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | She had moved to New York? | 30:47 |
Price Frederick Davis | She'd moved to New York. No, no. She moved to New York long before I did. So anyway, we went out to have Chinese food, and things were so different. | 30:48 |
Price Frederick Davis | God, people treated you like you were human. I'd been used to being treated like a dog. So people treated you like you were human, and I said to myself, "This is God's—This is what God has talked about. Heaven." And I worked, and this girl and I, we got back and got tight because she and her husband had separated. She's dead now. But anyway, we got tight, and I went back and went to work the next night. Went to work at a trucking place, loading trucks. Where I had my room up there, I didn't like it because it was too many girls lived there. And I told my brother, I said, "I got to move." No, no, not that I wanted the girls, but when you get ready to go to the bathroom, take a shower, there's girls, the daughters, there's too many of them. | 30:58 |
Price Frederick Davis | So I told my brother. So he said, "I'm going to get you a room down here on St. Nicholas Avenue." And he got me a room down on St. Nicholas Avenue, and I got ready to move down there. I walked in, and I see this man sitting there. He looked like he was Greek or Jewish. He could be the one. He was sitting there drinking some wine and eating a piece of cake, and he was talking about what kind of work I was going to do. I told him I didn't know. I said, "I'm working down here loading a truck right now." And Ms. Johnson, who was the land lady, she introduced me. She said, "Price, want you to meet your city councilman. This is Councilman Adam Clayton Powell." | 31:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh. | 32:24 |
Price Frederick Davis | And I met him, and I thought he was White. I really did. | 32:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | He's very fair. | 32:28 |
Price Frederick Davis | Very fair-skinned. So anyway, I went to work and worked about a year loading the trucks and whatnot. And Ms. Johnson started to take me up to Abyssinian Baptist Church, which was Adam Clayton Powell's church. So Adam would come by to see Ms. Johnson because she was an elderly woman, and he'd come by all the time. She'd cook and give him good food and whatnot. So anyway, about a year passed, and Adam came down one day, and he asked me, "You still working on that job?" I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "What you doing?" I said, "I'm still loading the trucks." He said, "Ain't Blacks down there driving them trucks?" I said, "No, sir." He said, "Well, I'm going to start a suit. Let me start a class action suit." And I said, "Oh, Lord God, here I go. I'm going to lose this job." | 32:29 |
Price Frederick Davis | But I didn't know I couldn't lose the job 'cause I was union. So he said, "I'm going to start a class action suit." So God said, "Let him start the suit." But my brother had talked to him, so he came down and talked to my boss. I told him, I said, "Well, you come down and talk to the people in the office." | 33:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Is this Adam Clayton Powell senior or junior? | 33:23 |
Price Frederick Davis | This is Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Now, you see the old man, the old, old man, this is Adam, the one that ran so much, and they'd not seat him in Congress and whatnot. | 33:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 33:38 |
Price Frederick Davis | So he came down on the job and talked to Haman. And Haman told him, he said, "Well, he's a good worker." And he said, "I tell you what," he said, "If you are going to start this suit, I'll let you use my lawyer. Lawyer Nate Whittenburg, never will forget him." | 33:39 |
Price Frederick Davis | So he came down, and he started the class action suit. And before he could do that, the judge sent for everybody before the suit even got started. But he had started it. It didn't come to court, didn't come to trial. Judge said, "Straighten this out in Chambers." The union, Adam, and my boss, everybody, we went down to court, went back there in the judge's office. Judge said, "Look, say why don't y'all use the seniority system, and the next time there's a opening, let's let the senior Black boy have the job." So he said, "Have you got a high school diploma?" I said, "Yes, sir, I got it." So I said, "I'll send for it. It's down south." And I called my mama that morning and told her, "Send me my high school diploma." But back then, they delivered a telegram overnight to your door. | 33:57 |
Price Frederick Davis | And she did that and sent my diploma over. I mean a special delivery letter, sent it. And about a month passed, and the judge called us all back down to his chambers. He made my decision. "My decision is if you want to take it to court, we'll take it to court, but if not, you must give it to the next senior guy." And I was the next Black down there because my brother was a dispatcher. I was the next guy in line to drive a truck. And don't you know, when the judge handed down that decision, I went to work that night, and they called me up in the office, and this Irish boy, Joe Stewart came in drunk, they sent him down, and they handed me that stack. I knew how to get to Harlem and back, to Long Island and back. Handed me that stack of stops, and told me, "This would be your route tonight." | 34:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Had you drive a truck before? | 35:35 |
Price Frederick Davis | Oh, I've driven a truck. You could go every Saturday and learn to drive a truck. The union prepared you for that. | 35:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 35:43 |
Price Frederick Davis | And they gave me that stack of things, and there was one Italian boy, his name was Colonel Debrienza, but we called him Doc 'cause nobody could say all of that thing. So Doc told me, he called me Jay all the time, he said, "Jay," he said, "Don't be scared of it." He said, "Take it. Meet me up in Hala's restaurant, and I'll tell you how to run that route." And said, "I used to run it." | 35:46 |
Price Frederick Davis | And Lord have mercy, I took it. Me, Doc, and Sal, Guida, and Henry, and then Sam Jancowitz, we all sat around there, and he just took a paper and showed me on a map how to go, "Here, you go here. Don't go here 'cause you got a low overhead and whatnot." And routed me out that route. And I took that run, took that run all the way into Montreal, Canada. | 36:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Goodness. | 36:27 |
Price Frederick Davis | Come back with a load of yellow turnip and and carrots on the truck. And when I got back, I had run this route, and had got back earlier than what the average person would get back. And after that, you couldn't tell me nothing. I was a champion. | 36:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you two things. Did the union—Was it a Black local union? | 36:45 |
Price Frederick Davis | Oh, no, no, no. It was a mix. | 36:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | So they let Black people in the union? | 36:48 |
Price Frederick Davis | Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Union Local 202. That's that's how I live right now with that check that comes every month. | 36:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | And I wanted to ask you about your fellow coworkers. Was that the first time you worked that closely with Whites? | 37:02 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah. That was— | 37:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you adjust to that? | 37:05 |
Price Frederick Davis | I had never given it a thought, but it really didn't bother me 'cause it was a psychological thing that once I got to New York, and I went to this Chinese restaurant with Whites and Blacks and everything, and went to the bar where there was Whites and Blacks and whatnot, I just fit in, and it really didn't—I didn't have to adjust. I really didn't. It didn't bother me. But it's like you say, that is something I never thought of. | 37:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | It seems like it would be a hard adjustment coming from all the segregation. | 37:41 |
Price Frederick Davis | It would. It seemed like it would, but it didn't. I tell you what it felt like. It felt like when I got to Washington D.C., and that woman tell me I could sit anywhere I wanted on that bus. It felt like I had just gotten out of jail, and I'm just as bad as the next dude. Now that's what it felt like. So I guess that's why I had such an easy time because I didn't have to go through a lot of changes because in other words, what the lady told me is, "Son, you are free now. Free to live just like anybody else." And I took it at face value. | 37:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | And your brother, it seems like he paved the way for you. Who helped him when he came to New York? Or did he do it all by himself? | 38:17 |
Price Frederick Davis | He did it all by himself. | 38:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh. | 38:24 |
Price Frederick Davis | He was just a hoodlum. It was just that time. He had been involved in unions, and he knew what the situation was. He had been involved in unions. | 38:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you what time—How did World War II affect you and your family and things like that? | 38:36 |
Price Frederick Davis | World War II did affect my family in a way, but in a way, World War II was a godsend because it boosted the economy, and people started going off to the army, and what jobs were left here, people—You had been told before, "Well, if you don't like it, you can get off my property. If you don't like my job." The other thing was, all these places around here, all over here, I'm pointing over this way 'cause I ain't going to call the name, all these mills and things, and this was the truth. And just in this way, the workers over there were told, and wasn't too many Black working. Blacks were working at these mills. They were sweeping the floor and taking up the trash. Workers were told, "If you keep the union out, I'll keep the nigger out." So this is the way it was. But now when the war started, they took me down to Fort Bragg, was going to induct me into the arm. See if I'd passed. | 38:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | How old were you at that time? | 39:50 |
Price Frederick Davis | 18. | 39:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | 18. | 39:51 |
Price Frederick Davis | Just getting to be 18. | 39:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 39:51 |
Price Frederick Davis | And they took me down to Fort Bragg and examined me, and they told me, said, "Well, you can't make the army." Said, "Because you have a thin lining in your stomach, you're going to be bothered with ruptures and hernias." And I do. I feel when—I've only felt one. So they said, "But if you want to try to make the Navy, you go stand over there in that line. That bus is going to Raleigh in a few minutes, and you'll be able to go to Raleigh, and you can probably get in the Navy." Where Blacks going into the Navy then were only there to shine the White's shoes. Now this is the truth. You want them to be valets. And I said, "The heck with it. I'm going back to Charlotte." | 39:56 |
Price Frederick Davis | And in this article here, I talked about that. And I told him that I did not care who won the war because I couldn't do no worser than Hitler. So why should I go and fight for what? This is in the article. So anyway, the war had—It took my brother, and it took my brother-in-law. These are people out of my house because my sister had gotten married, and my mother cried all the time, wondering whether my brother was going to come back or not. | 40:37 |
Price Frederick Davis | But money started to circulating. People started, and people didn't mistreat you on jobs so bad because it was hard to get help. And it had a good financial effect on my family. And well, it just had a good financial effect on my family. | 41:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | You didn't have to go, but you would—Okay, well that's good. | 41:45 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, I didn't have to go. I didn't have to go. And I wonder, but you know, I just have to say this, I looked at World War II, I don't know about now. Now they get out there and march with a flag and burn the flag. But I saw White men running and hiding, including my boss, who I was working for down here, trying to get out of serving their country. And I wondered then. I said, "If I had the freedom that they have in this country, ain't nowhere in the world I'd duck and dodge. I'd go out there and fight like a dog." But I had no freedom, and I had White people to tell me, "You ain't got no freedom." But they'd be kidding you. But you ain't got no freedom. But you going over there to keep it free for me. Pete and some of the others. | 41:49 |
Price Frederick Davis | And it helped people. But there's one thing, let me say this about segregation. You could be told, "Go in the house, and tell Mr So-and-so, so-and-so. Go over here, and you'll see Miss so-and-so." And you go there, and there's a six, seven-year-old child you've got to call Mr., Ms.—Miss. I mean Miss and Mr. I never could understand that. I really couldn't. You had a tobacco out there that had a White man's picture on it. Prince Albert. You had to call for Mr. Prince Albert. Now in some places, some places they let you get away with it. But I heard so much of this, "Talk like you talking to a White man." I heard that so much when I was a child. But it affected me badly. It made me—It's just done something to me. | 42:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you control your anger? | 43:34 |
Price Frederick Davis | You had to control it out of fear. Out of fear. Because if the man was White, he could do whatever he wanted to do, and he could do it and get away with it. And it was out of fear. It was out of fear that you had to control it. It was something that you had to control. Well, it was one of those things. | 43:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, well, I'll get to go back to New York after you did your first run. | 44:06 |
Price Frederick Davis | After we did my first run, I became senior man in the place and could pick my runs. And I would always come to see my family after I bought me a car in '47. This car right here, I'd come to Charlotte. That was my first car. But I would always come to see about my family. But you had to scuffle like heck in order to have a long weekend off. You had to get back in New York on Friday and hope that Sunday's a holiday, and you didn't have to go to work. So you'd get back on Friday, you'd come home. I'd leave Friday morning, get here with the man's uniform all smelling like 12 granddaddies, and stay until Saturday night. And then you stay up talking all night long when you get here, and you'd be dead going back. But you had to get back in order to go to work. | 44:14 |
Price Frederick Davis | And it was fantastic. But it was terrible too because coming down, there's no restrooms. | 45:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | And I was going to ask you about that. | 45:17 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, no restrooms. And I had a doctor here, which driving a truck is hard enough on you. But there was a doctor here that I had to go to him a couple of times about not going to the restroom and would have to go and get bladder— | 45:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 45:34 |
Price Frederick Davis | Whatever you call it. And it was rough. It was really terrible. It was really terrible. And I remember coming down one time to visit my parents, and there was a White woman, she was broken down up there in Virginia, and it was cold. Oh my God. And that was the time that you stopped and give people help. And I stopped to give her a hand and change a tire for her. | 45:34 |
Price Frederick Davis | And she stood so close to me, and I told her, I said, "Lady, you can't be standing this close to me. Let us not forget where we are." But she was going to see her husband. Her husband's down in South Carolina in the Army. And she said, "Why? Are they that bad?" I said, "Yeah," 'cause she was out of Boston. | 45:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 46:16 |
Price Frederick Davis | And I said, "Is this your first trip down south?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, don't be just leaning up on me and standing there—patting on—" I tell you, but it was terrible. But you'd have to come the back way. Wasn't no such thing as 95, 85. You'd either come 301, number one, or 29. And some of the lowest life people in America were back there. You get what I mean? So that was bad. And then I can't— | 46:17 |
Price Frederick Davis | —1952, I believe it was, or something like that. And I'm coming down the hill over near the hospital here, because my mother was working at the hospital. And I was coming down the hill and a cop ran up behind me and pulled me, scared me to death. I said, "Oh Lord, I know I'm going to jail." And he walked up and he go, "Whose car is this?" And I said, "It's mine." I just knew he was going to put me in jail. "Yours? I work every day and I can't afford a car like this." Well, this was back when New York started to giving the sticker for your license plate. You didn't change your plate, but it had a number on the plate, the year on the plate. And you just got a sticker to put the— | 0:01 |
Price Frederick Davis | And he look, "What, you must have liquor in here." I said, "No, sir." "Where you going?" I said, "I'm going to Cherry." I said, "My mother live right there, I'm down here visiting." I said, "Oh, if you just let me go to Cherry and get my clothes, I clear, I'm never coming back down here no more." "Oh, you don't have to feel like that." I said, "But you frighten me, Sir." I tried to be nice. And he said, "Well, you haven't done anything wrong. I just see you in this car, wanted to know whose car it is." And it was a fabulous car. I said, "Well, I work every day." I said, "Honest, I work every day." "What you do?" I said, "I drive a truck." And I said, "I work hard, too." And he said, "Okay, well, enjoy yourself." That man done scared me to death, that's right. | 0:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why did he stop you, you think? | 1:31 |
Price Frederick Davis | He told me, I asked him why. I said, "Tell me this, why did you stop me?" After he told me to enjoy myself, I asked him, "Why did you stop me?" He said, "That licensing tag, I don't know whether that's official or not." I said, "Well honestly, that's all we get now." And I said, "Here, I'll show you my registration," but he didn't look at the registration. But you get a new registration card, but you don't get a new license. And now here in North Carolina, they're doing the same thing. But they were doing that in New York way back down there. | 1:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | On your own truck, what did you carry on your truck? | 2:03 |
Price Frederick Davis | Certain times of year we carried fresh and frozen foods. And other times of year, we carried anything, furniture. And even when I used to sneak back up there and work, you wasn't supposed to do it because if they catch you, you won't get a check for it. Caskets, anything else, anything. They carried everything because competition had gotten so bad. But now things are different out there. | 2:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | With the union, did you ever have any trouble with the mafia or anything like that? | 2:31 |
Price Frederick Davis | The union, oh Lord, I'd hate to put that on tape. Well, the union are run by some bad boys, I can put it like that. And they do use intimidations, they do. They'll get in a meeting, at least they did when I was going to the meeting, I tell you. "You ought to seen me when I called old so-and-so in there, all talking on the phone, setting up in that phone booth. When I hit him with that ice pick, he didn't know what had hit him." And then I did get up one time in the meeting and tell them that my boss had had cut my check short, something like 40 cents or something. It was really a joke. And they told me, they said, "Are you working?" I said, "I'm working, yes, working every day. And I'm working there." "Shut up and sit down." And I did just that and I ain't open my mouth in a union meeting since. | 2:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was your experience with the union? Was it positive? | 3:19 |
Price Frederick Davis | My experience with the union is a positive experience. I'll tell anybody right now, if I had to go and get a job, I wouldn't have a job without a union. But no, unions here in north Carolina no good because you got that right to work law. But they will eventually, I'll be dead and gone in 100 years, but the union will come. | 3:22 |
Sonya Ramsey | How long did you drive your truck? | 3:44 |
Price Frederick Davis | 33 years. 33 good, wonderful years. And I worked for some Jewish people that were just poor people when they started to work. But he told me, "I'm going to be a millionaire one day." I went to work for him and I remember when he made his first million, because he drove a truck just like everybody else when I first went there. | 3:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did he get to be a millionaire? | 4:10 |
Price Frederick Davis | In that trucking business. | 4:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 4:14 |
Price Frederick Davis | But the thing of it was, I'm talking about a million dollars of his money, not company money. He said, "I'm a millionaire." He drove Jaguars and Cadillacs and things like that. But they were wonderful people, they seem like my parents. Now, she's still living, she's well in her 90s and she's still living, but they seemed like they were my parents, they really did. Because when I went to work there on that job, I was the youngest thing out there. She told me, "I don't want to see you getting out here, taking your money and going to the racetrack every day like these other fellas." | 4:15 |
Price Frederick Davis | She said, "You are young, you don't know it and just, you haven't been away from home. I want you to go get your bank book and put some money in the bank every week. Don't care what it is, but you put something in there every week." And she would look at it, too, make me come in the office, "Let me see your bank book." And she and I laugh about that now and I'd tell her I'm so grateful to her. They were wonderful people. He and she, wonderful people. | 4:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever marry? | 5:16 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, I never got married because now my two brothers, that one that lives in Charleston now, younger than I am, he's been married five times. And that one that died in New York, he had been married six times or four times, but there were seven women sitting up in that funeral home, just crying like I don't know what when he died. And he wasn't good to none of them, treating them all like dogs. Because when you gone all the time, you don't have time to be married. I hate I didn't get married, I really do. And it's too late in the game now, because my friend, she doesn't want to get married and I don't want to get, because she had a marriage and she said, "God, it's not what—" So as old as I am now, I'm not particular about getting married, really and truly, I just like to travel. | 5:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you ever miss having children? | 6:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, yeah. I wish I'd had children. But now, my brother that lives down in Charleston, he had children and his children were like my children. Because now, he was a junior man in the place and they'd given them runs. He'd go and no telling when he'd get back. So when I'd come in town, I'd run, get his children, take them to Coney Island, take them down Broadway. | 6:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Your younger brother or your older? | 6:32 |
Price Frederick Davis | It's my younger brother. | 6:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | So he'd join the trucking business also? | 6:32 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, he did the same thing. He's retired from it, too. And his children were like my children, now they have grown up and he got grandchildren. And trucking business is a miserable life. You come in off the road smelling like Mamie's little child, you don't want to be bothered with nobody. You want to go lay down and sleep until time to go back out, so you got to be careful how you mess up somebody's life back home. | 6:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did you do for fun out on the road? | 7:05 |
Price Frederick Davis | Take my golf bags with me or either sleep. I knew a lot of people. If I had a layover after I got backed in or something, I'd go to somebody's house and sit down. I love to play pinochle, double deck pinochle. I've played pinochle ever since there was a pinochle game. And that's about it, yeah. The world owes me nothing. I enjoyed it, I played by the rules, I've lived a decent life. I never was a hammer scamming speak slime, as they would say, I never was. That kind of life didn't interest me, no. | 7:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | I was always a decent person. I've seen some of the best Broadway shows that you can talk about because when you come in, you go up in the office and tell the secretary, "Audrey, what'd you hold out for me?" Because the salespeople, some of them couldn't make the good shows or they won't be in town and I'd get me some tickets and go to the opera. I've been to everything like that. And things that are very, very educational, you name it, I've been to it. Everything except Statue of Liberty. Never been to Statue of Liberty. Look at it every day I come in town. | 7:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you have any experiences or remembrances of some of the cities that you visited while you were traveling and things like that? | 8:25 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yes, Dallas, Texas right after John F. Kennedy got killed, that was like the world had come to an end. I'm looking to see where this window is and go around there and made the wrong turn where they claimed that shots came from that knoll, and that says no commercial traffic and I'm up there, can't back up and can't go forward because there's an overhead. And it's 4:00 in the evening, I ain't never been so glad to see a cop in all my life. Give me the ticket, just save me from these people because I had traffic backed up as far as you could see. That I remember. And other things I remember, places like Wisconsin, which is so cold, Washington state, which did not have many Blacks back in the early days. It was strange to run upon Black people. | 8:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did the Whites treat you there in Washington state? | 9:23 |
Price Frederick Davis | Beautiful. Whites treated me good everywhere except—Well, they treated me good everywhere, I had no problem with White people. But I did wake up one morning, and this is in this article, I woke up one morning and found out that New York City had become the Mississippi, the Alabama, North Carolina. It had become a racist place. | 9:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | How was that and how did you come to that realization? | 9:55 |
Price Frederick Davis | I must say New York City is a violent place and the news media plays a big part in it. And the news media had really turned. Well, I must say too, I'm afraid New York myself. | 10:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Now? | 10:19 |
Price Frederick Davis | Now, yeah. I said I woke up one day just before I left it and I found out it had become a place where the news media had really divided the people. The Puerto Ricans were hating the Irish, the Irish were hating the Jewish, the Jewish were hating the everybody. And everybody was hating the Blacks and it come from, you had some talk shows there. And they would rile people up. I knew it was time, I knew I couldn't stay there, I could not live there. And I lived in a wonderful place in New York, had a wonderful home. But I knew that it was no place for me to live and retire. I said, "Let me get out of here," so I came back to North Carolina to live. | 10:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | How had North Carolina changed? | 11:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | North Carolina has changed from what it was when I was a boy here. It has changed, oh my God, it has changed. I go and I look and I see people—It just changed in all kind of ways. And I say to myself now, if these parents would just stay out, if these young people would settle their disagreements and situations, you still have some diehard people out here who still have that idea of racism and whatnot. And say, "We don't want this, we don't want that. No, no, don't let the Blacks come in this park. No, no, we want this park for ourself." But I remember back, that I wish White people would understand. When I used to go in and buy three Mr. Goodbars and those Goodbars, it was a candy bar. It was that thick, that wide. Three for a dime, but you had to pay that penny tax. | 11:09 |
Price Frederick Davis | And that tax money, they took that money and Dilworth Park over there had a sign in it: "No Blacks, no Negros, no Coloreds allowed, for White only." And if White people could really realize that if they took my tax money, and I really had a government with no representation for Blacks, they took my tax money and did it and I couldn't say nothing about it. So I wish Whites and Blacks could come together, I really do. I wish they could. And I must say this, that this Black on Black crime and all this Black on Black killing, we had no such thing as that. That was a no-no. | 12:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | How do you think it got started? | 12:52 |
Price Frederick Davis | Drugs, I really think drugs. I really think The Godfather spoke the truth when they said—Did you see The Godfather? | 12:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | No. | 13:03 |
Price Frederick Davis | Well, if you saw The Godfather, The Godfather in there, the Don is saying, "Why don't we take these drugs and take it on up to Harlem to the niggers, because they do act like animals?" And I do believe the drugs is really what got it this way, I really do. Because we had whiskey back in my day, but whiskey, if somebody got drunk, they run somewhere and stand in the heat. They didn't want nobody to know that they were out in the streets, staggering around. Unless we had one or two, you always going to have a town drunk. | 13:03 |
Price Frederick Davis | But I just wish that this Black on Black crime would slow down. And I just wish that that people could come together, I really do. It's so sad, you think you're going to be here forever. Because I was young once and I felt like I was going to be here forever. I didn't know I was going to get old like I am now. And now I'm an old man and I have enjoyed my life and had a good life. I mean, I had a good life. I had it all, I've had it all. I had it all. | 13:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you about when you were growing up, you said you had a rivalry with the boys from Brooklyn. What were they like and what were some of the other Black neighborhoods like? | 14:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | All neighborhoods had the little old rivalry gangs. That's reason why I'm saying now that these Black kids don't need to kill one another. We had these rivalry gangs and when you went to school in the morning, there had to be 35 of us kids going to school, all of us walking close and a little close knit. Because just at the top of the—That's thunder. Just at the top of that hill over there is where the boys are. And they wouldn't bother you going to school, but when you come out in the evening, they going to come out and throw rocks after. That was all they going to do. And they wouldn't cut you, they wouldn't shoot you. | 14:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | You'd throw rocks? | 14:52 |
Price Frederick Davis | You'd throw rocks right back. | 14:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | If they came over in this neck of the woods. | 14:53 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, we would. They'd come over to see little girls, we'd throw rocks at them and run them out of here. And it was an innocent thing, nobody killed anybody. | 14:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was Brooklyn like compared to Cherry? | 14:58 |
Price Frederick Davis | Brooklyn was slums, Cherry was fantastic. All these houses you see over here now, they were practically new when I was a child. They were new. That second house right there, I'm sure it's the second house, is where the policeman killed a man, a boy. Now, Bugsy was a bad boy and Bugsy went over here and robbed the ice cream parlor and was coming down fourth Street over there. And the police just walked up to him and shot him and killed him. That stayed in my mind a long time because I sit on the church steps here,, and his daddy was a preacher, Reverend Rogers. And I sit on the steps here and watch the police come and go all day long. When they brought his body home, see, back in those days, they would bring bodies home and the police would come in and out and the whole police department would come. They just come to look and Bugsy must have been in his 20s, 22 or 23 years old, like that. | 15:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | And that's something that sticks in my mind, too now, is how they used to have wakes at home. They brought my father home and I got in from New York. My father died by June 3rd, 1950. I was in the bar, helping to celebrate a girl's birthday, and they came around, told me, "Your father going to pass, better hurry home." But before I could get home, he had passed. And when I came home, they finally brought him home and I couldn't go to sleep. I set up all night long at the end of the couch and every five minutes I would get up and go over there by the window and peep. | 16:10 |
Price Frederick Davis | They had the little dim lights they would put over here. And I'd go there and peep at my father and then I'd go back and take a swing of gin and figured that gin would go make me sleep. But I never did go to sleep because my mother, oh my mother, they were so close. And that bothered me. Death was, I don't know. It was so revered or something in those days. Nowadays it's a common thing. But it's something, it was really something. It was really something. | 16:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was Middleville like? | 17:28 |
Price Frederick Davis | Middleville was snazzy. It was more snazzier than Cherry. Middleville is where you had most of your doctors living, most of your teachers, most of your professional people lived in Middleville. Because that was a new neighborhood too, but it was more spaced out than Cherry. The houses were a little further apart and you didn't come to our alumni house, did you? You haven't been. | 17:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Yes, we did. | 17:55 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, yes you did. Okay, well, that's the kind. Those houses were new then. Big two-story house and Dr. So-and-so lives here, that was different. Middleville has gone down there now. | 17:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, what about Greenville? | 18:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | Greenville was slums, it was was slums. Margaret Neal was trying to tell me something about Greenville, but I know that Greenville was slums because I dated a girl out of Greenville, I was scared to death. And then I had a cousin that lived in Greenville. A lot of kin people that lived in Greenville, and Greenville was slummy, it was slummy. Yeah, it was slummy. | 18:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Let's see, I'm trying to think of the other neighborhoods. What other Black neighborhoods were there? | 18:33 |
Price Frederick Davis | Greenville, Bellville. Now, when you get out in Greertown, that's all together different, that's out in the county, that was out in the county. But now, Greertown was not a "sadiddy" neighborhood as you'd call it. But it was a tight-knit neighborhood where people were decent and respectable, hardworking people, all of them, hardworking people. Yeah, that's it. I was trying to think, but you've had a few Blacks sprinkled around in certain places. Yeah, a few Blacks. Very few Blacks. | 18:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you about another subject about passing. Did you ever know anybody that passed? | 19:15 |
Price Frederick Davis | I had a lot of kin people that passed. In fact, my mother could almost pass, unless you looked at her. Now, when she got older, you could tell that she was Black. But when she was younger, she and my Aunt Katie, we were going to New York one time on train and they come back there and got them and took them up there with the White people. They left me sitting right back there. I went to school with people, I'm not going to call their names, but they passed all the time because they went up town here to see Gone with the Wind. That's how I went to see, I had to go to [indistinct 00:20:01] but they went up here to see it and they passed. | 19:23 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was the reaction of the Black community to them doing that? Did they resent them? | 20:04 |
Price Frederick Davis | When they passed? Didn't bother me at all. I don't know about other people. Color never meant anything to me. I mean, if you had to be the May queen and you were the little yellow girl with the long hair and whatnot, sometime it made me angry, it really did. It made me angry. No, I've always frowned on it, I really have. I frowned on it but that's the way it was. It was that way. | 20:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | I heard about the way that some light skinned women sometimes receive preferential treatment. How about light-skinned men, how were they treated? | 20:45 |
Price Frederick Davis | My brother Booker, when he went to the school right here, he looked like he was Chinese. They call him P Lang. "There's Old P Lang." And I don't know about men. I don't think men, no, no. | 20:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were light-skinned people ever treated badly in some ways? | 21:12 |
Price Frederick Davis | Light-skinned people? | 21:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Yes. | 21:18 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, not that I know of. No. | 21:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | Because they looked White and things? | 21:19 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no. I went to a parade, it's funny you asked that. I went to a parade down here, I believe since I've been back. And I was standing next to a lady and the queen was her daughter. And when her daughter got up there, her daughter was a dark skinned girl. Not very beautiful, facial-wise, but simply gorgeous. And I said to myself, "Oh my God, this is gorgeous." Just like that. And I didn't know that was her daughter. | 21:23 |
Price Frederick Davis | And she said, "That's my daughter." And I said, "For real?" She said, "Yeah." And when the girl got up there, she said, "Hey mom." And when the girl passed and got out of the way, she asked me, she said, "Years ago when we came along, could my daughter have been queen?" I said, "No way. She could sweep up after the rest of them have gone home." She said, "Now, you got that right. And I'm so proud of her, I don't know what to do." But there was preferential treatment. | 21:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I wanted to ask you about the quotes you have in your article there about you dating a fair-skinned girl. | 22:23 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, that was my sweetie pie called Vista, she's dead now. But they lived here in Cherry. In fact, that's the first real date that I ever had. I mean a real date. They lived out here, back in the section where I told you I'd never go. My daddy told me, "Boy, don't be going out there." | 22:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why was that? | 22:49 |
Price Frederick Davis | Because it was a poor neighborhood. It was where the Ku Kluxers and everybody else lived. | 22:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | Northwest? | 22:54 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, that Belmont section out here. They moved out there on the railroad track. They were the only Blacks out there but they lived right on the railroad track. And I would go out there at night to see her. I couldn't stay away from her, I was in love, that puppy love. I don't know whether puppy is real love, I guess it was. But I couldn't stay away from her, so I would go out there to see her. And she and I would go up the street to, there's a Greek restaurant up there. And we'd get this steak sandwich. Big old steak sandwich, that'd big. It was too much for one person, cost 15 cents. You had to go around the back door to get it, though. | 22:58 |
Price Frederick Davis | We'd go and get this steak sandwich and she and I would break the steak sandwich. We'd eat this steak sandwich and just walk and talk. And we were coming down the street that night, it must have been 11:00, 10:00 anyway. And these two old police rolled up, "Nigger, who's that White girl you with?" "This is my girlfriend." And she ran over and left me, she was scared. But she didn't have far to go, and she ran and told her daddy. Because her daddy came out there looking for me to see what had happened. And when he got there, the police had done put me in the car and took me around the corner, took me down in the dead end street and beat me. | 23:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you hurt really bad? | 24:17 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, because they slapped. They didn't do that, they just slapped me in the face. But they swelled up my face, though. | 24:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did she do after that? What happened after that? | 24:27 |
Price Frederick Davis | She finally called me the next day and asked me, "Where did I go?" I told her what happened and told them that the police beat me and I have to be careful how I come out there again. | 24:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did that change your relationship? | 24:42 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no. What changed my relationship of going out there is, there was a Mr. Ritter that ran a barbershop there. And some Black dude went there and killed him and robbed him the night I had been out there, that night before. And my daddy had found out, said, "Boy, I told you to stay away from out there." And when that happened, they executed that boy, too. That's what sort of cooled my relationship with her. I was scared, I was really scared. I wouldn't even go out in the daytime. | 24:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mr. Price, did you vote before you—Well, you left Charlotte when you were 18, though, so you spent most of your time in New York. | 25:23 |
Price Frederick Davis | My first time to vote was when I left Charlotte because I was 18, just turned 18. Something like a month after I turned 18, I left. I had registered to vote and I voted my first time here in Charlotte. But I've always voted because my daddy was a real politician. I mean, he knew what was happening out there because he would go over and he and Mr. Alexander that ran Alexander's Funeral Home, they'd sit on the front porch all the time and say, "Change is going to come." And I knew that change was going to come, I knew change had to come. People can't go on like this. Sam Cooke was singing, "Change going to come." And they said change is going to come, it's going take time. But then when the war ended and I would come back to visit, I could see change slowly taking place. | 25:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? | 26:31 |
Price Frederick Davis | Financially and Blacks, you see Blacks in places that you've never seen Blacks before. Blacks working in places that you've never seen Blacks working before. And I knew, I said to myself, "Something is going to happen. Something is going to change." | 26:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | In New York, did you ever participate—What were race relations like there? Did you ever have any problems? | 26:53 |
Price Frederick Davis | Race relations with me were fair. I guess no, race relations with me were good. Because me, I'm the type of person that doesn't bother anybody. And traffic arguing and trafficking, whatnot, which I don't do now. I wouldn't argue with a baby in traffic, they pull out a gun and kill you. But arguments and things like that, I'd get called some derogatory name now and again, but that doesn't even bother me anymore, it really doesn't. No, race relations were, as far as I'm concerned, are still. | 27:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | From your travels during segregation at that time here, what were some of the worst cities you traveled to? | 27:29 |
Price Frederick Davis | Texas. | 27:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Texas? | 27:38 |
Price Frederick Davis | You go to Texas and you drive into Texas, a stop, Oklahoma, you stop. You go into a truck stop and tell a man, "I need a bath. How many on the line?" He'd look up there, "Oh, you'd be number 93." And you look out the yard and there'd be 12 trucks sitting out there, they don't want you in there. | 27:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, to wash your truck? | 28:04 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, for me to take a bath. | 28:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 28:05 |
Price Frederick Davis | And he'd say, "I'll call you. You're number 93. Here, make your number 94." But they didn't want you to go to the stall to take a bath, so your next best bet is to drive until you see a good clear river. Take your rope out of your truck, hook your rope around a tree, hook your rope around here and jump in the river and pull yourself out with your clothes on. Get up in your truck and change clothes. That's right. Rather than argue with them, you get what I mean? | 28:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, do you have any more stories you'd like to tell? I think I've run out of questions. | 28:36 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, I believe that—Well, I could, but I tell you, some of it's too personal, so I won't go into that. But let me just repeat again, all White people back then were not bad, just like now. You cannot lump people together, you cannot generalize. Because I've met some of the nicest White people and there's a whole lot of Blacks out there I don't want in my house. But there's a whole lot of Whites out there I don't want in my house either because then this not my type. A lot of lowlife Blacks, no, you couldn't do nothing for me. | 28:40 |
Price Frederick Davis | Lot of lowlife Whites I don't want in my house. But I don't want people to think that all White people in the South were bad back during those days and were brutal. It wasn't. It was the low class that was so brutal, but then after growing up and as old as I am now, I look back on the better type of White people and say, "Why didn't they speak out?" Which, I saw one White couple up there when they were beating that drunk Black, they were the ones said, "Enough is enough." And that was it. | 29:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | I did think of one question while you were talking, about healthcare. What did people do? You said earlier that the people would come to your house and stay with you if you were sick. What did people do, did they go to the doctor? | 29:55 |
Price Frederick Davis | They had home remedies but we had good doctors. We thought they were good doctors. You had a doctor here, Dr. Craig. And Dr. Craig would come see you 12:00, 5:00 in the night. It don't make any difference what time you called, they did house calls. But people would come and they used a lot of home remedies, because my sister was at the point of death. And Dr. Craig came that night and said, "Well, she won't make to in the morning." She had double pneumonia. And Ms. Harrison and some of the neighbors came over and said, "Tell you what, go get some mustard, go get this and go get that." And they made up a home remedy and bathed her in that. | 30:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | And they said, "Now, you sit on that side of the cover and I'll sit on this side of the cover and we going to sit here tonight. This fever's going away from here." And they sit up and I never will forget, I was a little boy, they sit there all night long, changing those hot water bottles and everything. And my sister sweated like I don't know what, because the next morning I got up and looked at the bottom of her feet and her feet had crushed it up. But they broke that fever and she's living right now, older than I am, still living. She laughs about that. She said, "I remember that," because I guess she must have been around 16, 17 years old. But people used a lot of home remedies back then. | 30:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did people go to the dentist and things like that? | 31:19 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, but the dentist set your body on fire back then. Novocaine, they had Novocaine, but God, it was different from what it is. | 31:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was it really painful? | 31:28 |
Price Frederick Davis | Oh God, set you on fire. Lord have mercy. Yeah, things were different then. | 31:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Where did Blacks go to shop when you were growing up in Charlotte? | 31:51 |
Price Frederick Davis | Now, what kind of shop? | 31:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Buy their clothes. | 31:56 |
Price Frederick Davis | Clothes and groceries, I'm glad you asked that question because we could go to the department stores here, but you couldn't try on nothing. If you tried it on, that's yours. You bought that. | 31:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | If you bought something, you wanted to return it, you couldn't? | 32:07 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no, you ain't bringing nothing back. No, no, no, you can't bring nothing back. But another thing is, I'm glad you asked that question, because what was degrading, and I know this happened to my mother a couple of times because I wouldn't go to the store with my mother. My father, because my mother did all the shopping. If you would be in the store and you were Black and there was a line, they would call the Whites out of the line. "Come on up, Mr. So and So," and wait on them. And you just have to wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. And you go in the store, they wouldn't have to wait on you. Wait on White people first. | 32:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you notice the water fountains and things like that? | 32:47 |
Price Frederick Davis | Yeah, I knew I wasn't supposed to drink, I knew the signs were there. But coming over here in the Dilworth Park at night, if I'd be coming through there at night, I would stop and drink from the fountain. I must say I did that. Now, I did that, I knew I wasn't supposed to do it. | 32:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did the water taste the same? | 33:07 |
Price Frederick Davis | Same thing. Same identical thing, you had no difference. Just the idea that I did it. (laughs) Oh, Lordy. | 33:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you about the bathrooms. Did they have bathrooms for Colored men in those places? | 33:19 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no, no, you got to go home, go to some church, Black church or something like that. No, no bathroom. No, no, no. All of them down the road from here to new York, "No, you ain't coming in here." Women, no, I'm sorry. No, none from women, none for nobody. | 33:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | How about in Charlotte, downtown in the stores, did they have Colored, different bathrooms and things like that? | 33:44 |
Price Frederick Davis | No, no, everything was for White only. I'll tell you what did have an effect on my life. Let me go way back when I was a teenager, you could go to the movie for ten cents and see three different movies. But the thing of it was there was a Black girl, I'm trying to think of her name. Her last name was Gill, but she worked uptown at one of those five and dime stores. And she impressed me so much because she was so far out of place. And you know what she was doing? Selling popcorn at the popcorn counter. | 33:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | You thought that was a— | 34:23 |
Price Frederick Davis | I thought that was the greatest thing in the world, I really did. That had a big effect on me. | 34:23 |
Sonya Ramsey | What effect did it have? What kind of— | 34:31 |
Price Frederick Davis | I don't know, it just had an effect. I said to myself, "Maybe there is some hope for me. Maybe someday I'll have that job." It sounds bad, but it's the truth. Lord have mercy. | 34:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, is there anything else you'd like to add? | 34:51 |
Price Frederick Davis | I can't think. Yeah, some of them, I don't want to put over here on record. | 34:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | That's fine. | 34:54 |
Price Frederick Davis | But I've had some good times here in the South and I still want to say, all White people were not bad. A lot of people had that in their mind, that a lot of White people were bad. Because I do remember one Christmas I went uptown with my mother and my mother left me standing on the square. She said, "I'm going back in this store and you stand right here in this doorway. Don't you move until I come back." And I stood there and I wanted my mama and I began to cry. And this White lady came by with her little boy and it was Christmas time. See, I'm supposed to stand there and look at the lights and look at the Christmas things. | 35:08 |
Price Frederick Davis | And this boy came by and his mother had bought him a toy. And she got came to me and asked me, "Why are you crying? Where's your mother?" "She went—" She said, "Well, don't cry, she's coming back." "Oh no, I want my mama, I want my mama." And she told this little boy, this little boy had been throwing down this toy. She said, "Here, give your little friend this toy." And gave me that toy for Christmas. That made me feel good, that made me feel good. | 35:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | How old were you at that time? | 36:09 |
Price Frederick Davis | I guess I was four years old. I believe we were four or five years old. When I came to Charlotte, I was too young to go to this school here when I first came to Charlotte. But then, that was good White people. Then let me go back and I'm grown, working uptown here, working after school, trying to make a dollar or two so I could go to school, dressed out of clean. And went to the service station and this White woman is sitting in there with her little daughter. | 36:13 |
Price Frederick Davis | I walked up to the service station, going to get a soda or something, I don't know what. And she said, "That's a nigger. That's a nigger, say nigger, that's a nigger." But you see, that's the trash. So I was showing you a difference in people. There's a lot of difference in people, a lot of difference in people. I don't think I can think of anything else that I wanted to tell. (laughs) | 36:40 |
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