Ione Jones interview recording, 1993 June 15
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Ione Elston Jones | Anyway, the first time they bring it, this is when she built it so beautiful, up there on the hill. And the second time is what I'm telling you about, and she built it more beautiful than ever. Well, every year, see we were a new college, it was a seminary— | 0:03 |
Chris Stewart | It was a seminary, first? | 0:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | for girls. And then, they decided to make it into a college for—Well, we were Negroes then, or Colored, for the student. It was an all Black school. And so, they wanted to make it into a college, have a college department. So they went to Montgomery, to this capital, to meet with the Board of Education and their state Board of Education. | 0:29 |
Ione Elston Jones | They went down there, the first time and they told them a whole lot of things to do, we didn't need a thing, but they came back and did it. The next year, they went back and they found something else. And we did it. Consequently, we had one of the most beautiful schools in the country, you never saw anything so beautiful. And then, they went down the third time and they told them— | 1:01 |
Chris Stewart | What were they trying to do, when they went down? | 1:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, to get accreditation for the college department. | 1:27 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 1:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | See, we were new as a college. And by that time, I was a junior in college. And so they told them, "Don't come down here no more. We ain't going to accredit—" now, this is the Board of Education down there—"We ain't going to accredit that school as long as you got them nigger gals coming down there, getting, what you call, getting an education. So, just don't come down here no more." | 1:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, they brought the message back and we cried. We loved that school. We were there from all over the country, and we just loved that school. So, they called us together and told them that it wouldn't be accredited. Now, I'm a junior in college, so some of the girls transferred, some to Talladega College, some to these different places like that. | 1:59 |
Chris Stewart | Is this in northern—Alabama— | 2:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | This is in—No, this is in Anniston. | 2:19 |
Chris Stewart | Which is where in Alabama is that? | 2:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | It's more or less toward the south. | 2:27 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 2:29 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, Alabama, didn't matter where it was in Alabama, the same thing would've happened. | 2:32 |
Chris Stewart | Right. I'm thinking of where people were transferring to and such. | 2:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, you mean the other schools. | 2:47 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 2:48 |
Ione Elston Jones | No, uh-huh, Talladega was in Talladega, Alabama. | 2:49 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. Yeah, I realized— | 2:50 |
Ione Elston Jones | And some went to Spelman, which was in Atlanta and some transferred to some northern schools and all like that. Well, a lot of us were on, like myself, were on scholarships. But, well anyway, then they called us back, oh, I guess a couple of weeks later, called us back to the chapel. Gorgeous, beautiful chapel, everything about the school was gorgeous. It was luxurious. And told us that they had made arrangements. Oh yeah, here's what happened. | 2:51 |
Ione Elston Jones | The Scotia up here was about to close. It was the high school, too. And it was about to close because they didn't have any money much. So, then they asked, and we were loaded with money, they asked Barber to—a little ahead of my story—they asked Barber to merge with Scotia. | 3:37 |
Ione Elston Jones | And this is when everybody moved out, because we had a couple of teachers, we had a couple of people on the faculty—We had one Black person on the whole staff. And that was my cousin. | 4:02 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 4:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | And, well anyway, they called us together and said that the board, the National Presbyterian Board, had decided to merge Barber with Scotia because Scotia was about to close, they didn't have any money. And we said, no, uh-uh, we didn't want to have nothing to do with Scotia. Because these two teachers had come from there, and they were just absolutely terrible, they weren't like the other teachers at all. | 4:18 |
Chris Stewart | How were they different? | 4:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | They were just, I don't know, bossy. Now, our dean had been at Scotia, too. Then we realized why Miss Bozeman, who was the dean, had transferred from there, because they were never really good, kind of a little bit sort of prejudice a little bit you know? But Scotia was an all girls school, too. Well, Miss Bozeman, we were just crazy about her. She was just entirely different. | 4:47 |
Ione Elston Jones | So, anyway, some of the girls, that's when the girls transferred, they transferred to other schools. Then they called us together again and told us that we were going to merge with Scotia, as I said. And we didn't want to have anything to do with Scotia. It was an all girls school, too. And then they called us together, another time and said, "We are negotiating with Johnson C. Smith," which is very close to Concord, and, "They will evaluate what you need to get certified." | 5:13 |
Ione Elston Jones | When they mentioned Johnson C. Smith, we looked around at each other like that, because a lot of us—Smith was an all men school then. And we looked around at each other and some of the girls who had transferred came back. (laughs) | 5:55 |
Chris Stewart | Oh. | 6:07 |
Ione Elston Jones | And that's how it happened to become Barber-Scotia. But we didn't mind coming, you know because a lot of us were hearing from Smith men, students at Smith. And— | 6:07 |
Chris Stewart | So, you were the group of women that— | 6:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | Brought— | 6:21 |
Chris Stewart | Integrated— | 6:22 |
Ione Elston Jones | That's right. | 6:23 |
Chris Stewart | Smith College into co-ed. | 6:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. | 6:27 |
Chris Stewart | It became co-education. | 6:27 |
Ione Elston Jones | I was one of the ones, yeah. But I didn't go right away. I graduated that year, I was a senior that year. So, I graduated from Barber-Scotia that year. They called it Barber-Scotia then. | 6:28 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 6:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | And we brought our money, and Scotia really needed the money. It's a different story today. Every time I go down there, I just feel thrilled over what has happened since then. But it was in a bad shape. | 6:42 |
Chris Stewart | Why did Barber College have so much money? Where were they getting endowments or funding from? | 6:54 |
Ione Elston Jones | No, Dr. Barber, he was a doctor. He was a— | 7:01 |
Chris Stewart | So it was all his money? | 7:06 |
Ione Elston Jones | The school was built in memory of him. Several schools in the south, by the Presbyterian Board—this was the National Presbyterian Board, it wasn't national then, but it was the Northern Presbyterian Board—that built so many of the schools, Johnson C. Smith, and other Presbyterian schools in the south. | 7:08 |
Chris Stewart | Did the family sustain the school, throughout the time that it was before— | 7:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, yeah, Scotia got the—Oh, yeah. | 7:37 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 7:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | All the way to the—I mean he was a multimillionaire. | 7:40 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 7:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | And he died, and there was a great big—Oh, it was a beautiful school. When you came in the hallway there, at Barber, it was wide, beautiful. There was a wide stairway that led up to the second and third floor, just a beautiful wide stairway. And at the head of the stairway, after you got there, there was this huge picture of Dr. Barber, who the school was built in honor of. | 7:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | But the stairs were on either side of the—It was a huge, huge building, on either side for the girls, for those of us who had to go. So, the middle stairs were mainly for this faculty and like that. But they couldn't have all of us going up, because it's first thing you saw when you walked in. Somewhere, I have a picture of it. | 8:18 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway, so we came to Scotia and it was a different story. Scotia really needed, oh, it just needed a whole lot of repair done to it and just—But they didn't want us there and we didn't want to come. "We didn't want them old Barber girls here." | 8:43 |
Ione Elston Jones | But anyway, Mrs. Barber's money was transferred there and they began to make repairs and everything. It was a different story. And thereby hangs another tale. But, our boyfriends began to come in, we knew a lot of fellas at Smith. Some we'd been in school with and this kind of thing. Not at Barber, but in high school, probably. | 9:03 |
Ione Elston Jones | And because there were a lot of high school, both high schools were there. So, we were hearing from them and we were just so happy. And we were college women. We were college women. And these other kids were college—And the seniors, I think, could have dates. But we were college women. But we had to entertain, we had a—what you call it? It wasn't a parlor, it was—Well, where you could entertain the students. But— | 9:30 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, like a sitting room of some sort? | 10:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, mm-hmm, where we could entertain them. | 10:14 |
Chris Stewart | In your dorm? | 10:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, mm-hmm, on the first floor of the dorm. And it was pretty nice, but—I don't know whether I want this to go in there and not. But, they didn't want us there. They really didn't want us there. | 10:19 |
Chris Stewart | At Smith? | 10:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | No, they didn't want us at Barber. I mean, not at Barber, but at Scotia. | 10:34 |
Chris Stewart | At Scotia. | 10:42 |
Ione Elston Jones | And there was some pipes, big old pipes that went through, it was when anybody flushed the toilet, you could hear. We were embarrassed, we were college women and college men. So we asked, we got permission to entertain our dates—because the only time we had dates was on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, and very regulated hours, this kind of thing—if we could entertain them in the chapel, which was very large. | 10:43 |
Ione Elston Jones | And so, we finally got permission to entertain our guest because [indistinct 00:11:20] inside. I mean, things were very different then. If a fella kissed you, you likely to slap his face, you know this kind thing. So, we entertained our company, our dates in the chapel. And we sat all over chapel, lights bright in— | 11:14 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. | 11:38 |
Ione Elston Jones | So anyway, it went on like that. So, then they called us together again. And I think I told you this, to tell us that after we graduated, we could be evaluated up there. Well, let me see. Oh, yeah. So, now they needed a new alma mater, since it had become a college, because it was all a seminary then. And so, they asked me to write the words and ask a high school girl, she was a senior and a very great musician from Scotia, to put the music to it. | 11:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | So, we went back in our little—There was a piano in this first place, where, parlor, as they called it, where we had to entertain our guests, at first. And she was a musician, she could really play. So, she said, Helen says, "I want to hear what you've written." So we got out on the floor. I never will forget it, we sat down on the floor and I was writing the words. And when I got through with the words, I handed it to her. | 12:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | She said, "Well, let me work on this and see what I can do." She says, "I have a tune in my head, but I don't know whether it'll—" So, she sat down there and she put it to music. And do you know they still singing it? Now, this was 1930—it must have been about 1931. And she put it to music, and they still singing it. And every year, I lead the parade. | 13:05 |
Chris Stewart | You do, still? | 13:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | They ask me to lead the Homecoming parade. They always have a great big, beautiful limousine. And I just feel so good, I'm just waving— | 13:33 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, wow. You must be so— | 13:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | But I love it— | 13:48 |
Chris Stewart | Proud of— | 13:48 |
Ione Elston Jones | I love it. I love Scotia. And also, lot of the girls came back after they found out we were going to merge with Smith. You know, after they found out and found out how close it was to Smith. Well, because we had students from all over the country, and— | 13:48 |
Chris Stewart | Barber-Scotia, is in Concord? | 14:09 |
Ione Elston Jones | In Concord. It's there, now. And it's growing. It's a beautiful school, now. It's just, oh the renovations, it's just a beautiful school. I love it. I really love it. | 14:11 |
Ione Elston Jones | And so they always go to the homecoming and things like this and to the different things, they always go. And last couple of times I went up there, they had it on the chimes. You could hear the song all over the—Well, they still singing it, and I'm telling you, they can really sing that song! And I just feel so good, I just feel so good. Oh, I just feel so good. | 14:20 |
Ione Elston Jones | And I can't sing. (laughs) "(singing) Oh, Barber-Scotia, our Alma Mater dear, to thee we sing, thou are our guiding star, and though we travel far, to thy precepts we will cling, Barber-Scotia—" not like that, I [indistinct 00:15:12]— | 14:46 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, that's— | 15:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | I have the words somewhere. Well, so we were there and those of us who—I mean we were college women. And— | 15:14 |
Chris Stewart | What do you mean when you say that you were college women? What did that mean for you? | 15:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | That's what they called us. | 15:30 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 15:32 |
Ione Elston Jones | College women. | 15:32 |
Chris Stewart | How did you feel about being a college woman? | 15:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, we felt great because we were there in the same building with all those high school kids. (laughs) Because I mean a lot of the college girls came up there anyway. We were on second floor. | 15:36 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, anyway, the high school seniors could have company on one night, and so, I think it was on Saturday night they were highly, very highly chaperoned. | 15:50 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 16:07 |
Ione Elston Jones | But that's why I said we were college women. And here's another thing that had happened. I had a little boyfriend at Smith and my best friend, Mrs. Counts, you can go there and talk to her if you want to. My best— | 16:07 |
Chris Stewart | What was her name? | 16:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | Olivia Counts. | 16:19 |
Chris Stewart | I think— | 16:20 |
Ione Elston Jones | She's Olivia Counts, now. | 16:21 |
Chris Stewart | I think that one of my colleagues is interviewing her. | 16:22 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh. | 16:26 |
Chris Stewart | Maybe today. | 16:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. | 16:27 |
Chris Stewart | Maybe tomorrow. | 16:27 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, good. Well anyway, she had a boyfriend then, and he was a senior. And my little boyfriend from there was a senior, too. I was still corresponding with the man I eventually married, but anyway, when they had the junior senior prom, at Smith, we were invited. | 16:28 |
Ione Elston Jones | Another friend of mine, she had a boyfriend there, too, who was a senior. And we were invited to come to the dance. Well our dean—oh, she was a wonderful person, she really was, they made it hard for her, in particular the president. I'm not sure whether I want all this in there or not, because—But, he didn't want her, he wanted to be the boss of the college department, too, and she took care of that. | 16:55 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway, so Olivia's boyfriend was from York, South Carolina. His people were very well off, undertakers. And my boyfriend, at the time, was—his father, he was at Smith—he was a senior at Smith. Lee was not a senior, Lee was a junior that year, Lee Counts. But anyway, we were all seniors and grown up women. I mean, we were responsible people. | 17:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | And another friend of ours, the three of us had been invited up to the junior senior prom. So, Wright, Isaac Wright, went down to—we didn't know this was going to happen—but the word got out all over the school that we were going to the junior senior prom, at Charlotte. Well, I had a little play daughter and she was very wealthy and her parents were from Pennsylvania. And my father was a doctor and she was in the high school there, in [indistinct 00:18:39]. And she bought me my dress, because I didn't have too much money. | 17:57 |
Ione Elston Jones | That was one of the most gorgeous dresses I have ever—She wrote her daddy and told him that she had been invited and she needed an evening dress and sent him a picture of the one she wanted. And she didn't tell me a thing about this, but I was trying to get something together. And my mother sewed for me, she made me a nice little dress to wear, because we didn't have a lot of money. And she lived in Irmo, South Carolina with my sister who was— | 18:45 |
Chris Stewart | In where? | 19:15 |
Ione Elston Jones | Irmo, I-R-M-O. It's a part of Columbia, now. But there was a Presbyterian school there, boarding school, and my sister and husband were on the faculty there. | 19:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | So, my mother and father moved there after they had gotten old. And I came up here to school and got a job teaching up here. And we wanted to look after them. So, she brought them up there to Harbison. Well anyway, we looked after them. | 19:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | So we got all dressed up. Mrs. Counts, her boyfriend and [indistinct 00:19:54]. And her boyfriend had gone down to the—they were undertakers—and gotten one of the most gorgeous limousines you have ever seen. And everybody, the high school kids, they were jealous, kind of jealous of it, because that had never happened. We were seniors and so we wouldn't have done anything in the world to—Because we didn't do things back then, in those days, like they do now, anything to disappoint our dean, anything like that. And this great big, beautiful limousine drove up in front of the gates and there were high school students and everything, all out there. It was a beautiful day. Of course, it was in the spring. And they were sitting out there, some of them out there on the thing, and some were looking out the window to see us go. | 19:48 |
Ione Elston Jones | And when they saw this big limousine drive up there—Boy, we were somebody! We were shocked, too. They said, "We'll bring a car." But they didn't say a thing about this. So, we came up to the junior senior prom and we had a good time. And my old dean, insisted that she would know because it would be late, we could spend the night here, but she would have to know where and with whom. And she got a place for us to stay. | 20:43 |
Chris Stewart | What was her name? | 21:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | She was Dean—Oh, I'm forget, I just called her name—Bozeman. She was Dean Bozeman. | 21:19 |
Chris Stewart | She was the woman who— | 21:29 |
Ione Elston Jones | And she was from Pittsburgh— | 21:29 |
Chris Stewart | She was from Scotia, but she came down to Barber and then came back up when they merged? | 21:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, she was at Scotia. And she had been our dean at Barber for several years. | 21:36 |
Chris Stewart | Right. Okay. | 21:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | And she was originally from Pennsylvania. And she trusted us. And we would not have done one thing to dis—She treated us like college women. Well, it's high schools. I mean, you know, some of the—I can't say this, please don't put this in there about Scotia. Gosh. | 21:40 |
Chris Stewart | Well, we can restrict part of it. Sure. | 22:02 |
Ione Elston Jones | Please. But just, I would like to praise Scotia because it's a different school. (laughs) | 22:05 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, you sound like you love it. | 22:09 |
Ione Elston Jones | I love it! I love it. I love it, I love it. And we liked it, then, too, but it was just some little things, you know? Well anyway, we came to the prom and we just had a big time. And then of course, we spent the night with this lady that our dean had. And we came back the next morning, you know everything—And we'll never forget that. This was something entirely new here. | 22:11 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 22:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | So, I graduated as valedictorian and I had graduated from high school. And in high school, it was a private school, in Anniston, Alabama, where I lived, on the campus at Barber, in Anniston. I lived there. But everybody had to be on the campus. | 22:46 |
Chris Stewart | So they— | 23:11 |
Ione Elston Jones | They didn't have no day— | 23:11 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, so it was like a boarding school where you had to— | 23:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was a boarding school, yeah. Barber was a boarding school. | 23:14 |
Chris Stewart | Where were your parents, where were they living while— | 23:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | Right there, about two or three blocks from the school. | 23:20 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 23:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | But they had no day students, there were no day students. It didn't matter where you lived, you had to stay on the campus. But the students were from all over, from everywhere. It was a boarding school. | 23:21 |
Chris Stewart | What kind of work did your father do? | 23:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | My father had a—There's another story there. My father never had a chance to get an education, because his parents were enslaved in a little old town, in Alabama. His mother was a Cherokee Indian and his father was an African. And they were married. And had several children, five children. And when they died, my uncles were sent to Oklahoma, to be with where my grandfather's people had been enslaved there. So, they were sent there. Because this was after the war and everything. | 23:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | But my father was sent to Arkansas, where some of the relatives lived. No, he was sent to Mississippi, he was sent to Mississippi, where some of the relatives lived. And he was only 10 years old. And he didn't like it there, at all. And he slipped off from them, and he was an expert swimmer, he was an expert all his life, he was an expert at swimming. He had learned how to swim in the little creeks and things and all that, out there in the country. And he slipped off and swam all the way back to Alabama. And got to Anniston. I mean, got back to Choccolocco. | 24:18 |
Chris Stewart | He had family, then, in Alabama? | 25:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, mm-hmm. The only Black—Oh, yeah. All the while, we still had gains Elstons down there. And well, one of my relatives was on the faculty. As I said, the only Black person on the faculty. | 25:21 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, that's right, your cousin. | 25:41 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. | 25:43 |
Chris Stewart | What was it about Mississippi that your father didn't like? Did he tell you why— | 25:43 |
Ione Elston Jones | He just, he didn't like it, he was a child, and he just didn't like it down there at all. He didn't like it. We never learned exactly why, but he just wanted to come back home. So, he came back and that's where he grew up there, in Alabama— | 25:49 |
Chris Stewart | Anniston. | 26:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. But when he was a little boy—Well, one of the things he came back to, you know the family that was there. But he had a little job. They paid him about 10 cents a month. And you know what he had to do? He had to carry some books, White kids you know, carry some books to school, help them take their books to school, and then he had to go and get them, when school was out, to get the books and bring them back. And on the way back, he'd look at them and you know, he wanted to learn how to read and write. | 26:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | Now, my mother has another story. Well, Jefferson Davis had a niece, and of course, he was the governor. And he had a niece who lived there, and she was going to get married, to—Yeah, that's right, [indistinct 00:27:23]. | 26:49 |
Ione Elston Jones | Now, she lived in Virginia, and she was going to get married to a man from Alabama. To Jefferson Davis's—some relative. And [indistinct 00:27:40] relative, but she was a relative, Jefferson Davis. | 27:22 |
Ione Elston Jones | Anyway, she was going to get married then, in Virginia. And so, now, went up from the capital there, in Montgomery. And so, they all went up the wedding. And guess what the family gave Jefferson Davis's niece, for wedding present? Gave them a little slave girl, who was about five years old. And anyway, after they got married, they came back to Montgomery, to live, and brought their little present who eventually became my grandmother. And this is how it happened. | 27:42 |
Ione Elston Jones | When they, the southern troops were about to march up to Richmond, Jefferson Davis's—It was a nephew—anyways, a relative, and they lived in Birmingham, and anyway, they wanted him, he was only about 15, 16 years old. And he was called to go and he went there and he was in the mansion there, there in Montgomery. | 28:35 |
Ione Elston Jones | And he didn't want to go, he really didn't want to go. And he was up there, he was on the second floor, and they were about to march to Richmond. He had set his boots down to be polished. And by this time, Molly, who became my grandmother, was about 11 or 12 years old, about 12 years old, and he said to little Molly to bring his boots up. And she brought them up, and he threw her on the bed and raped her. | 29:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | And then the war ended and the enslaved, I don't call them slaves, the enslaved, they had to go, because the Northern soldiers were taking over everything. So, she was wandering in the country, on the outskirts, and you're talking about some gorgeous homes. Some of them still there, I think, some of the most gorgeous homes you ever saw, on the outskirts, because they had farming and land like that— | 29:46 |
Chris Stewart | Out in Montgomery? | 30:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, on the outskirts of Montgomery. And well anyway, everybody had to get out of the mansion. So, she was wandering there, and she was hungry. So, she stopped at the back door of this great, big house, and she knocked on the back door. And a lady came to the door and says, "What do you want?" She says, "I'm hungry." She says, "Would you give me something to eat?" Said, "I can do a lot of things. But I'm hungry and I can do just a lot of things for you if you want me to." | 30:18 |
Ione Elston Jones | And by that time, a man came around, the corner of the house, and said, "What do you want?" White guy, he was the owner of the house. She says, "I'm just hungry and I want something to eat." Says, "I can do a lot of things." "Can you plow?" She says, "No, but I can learn how." He said, "Well, come on out here in the field, with me." And she was out there and she couldn't hold a plow, I mean, do anything. | 31:01 |
Ione Elston Jones | By that time—I've always said God did this—I'm a believer, I'm a deep believer, I really am, I've grown into it and I know—Well, anyway, I do have a Master's degree in religious education, that was one of the requirements. Well, anyway, so he saw what was happening out there, and he was in a buggy— | 31:27 |
Chris Stewart | Who saw? | 31:57 |
Ione Elston Jones | A man passed and it was a doctor, a doctor Vandergrift. | 31:58 |
Chris Stewart | And what was the name? | 32:06 |
Ione Elston Jones | Vandergrift. All my people, we have in our—recently, every two years, down there, in the little town where most of them grew up, every two years we have a family reunion. Thereby hangs another tale. And we all go down, they come from all over the country because after migration, you know during that migration they went all went North. | 32:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, anyway, he saw what was happening there and he stopped his horse and got out of the buggy and came over there and he laid this man out. He said, "What in the world are you doing? Can't you see this child is pregnant?" He said, "Can't you see this child is pregnant? What are you trying to do?" | 32:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | "Well, she want something to eat, then she got to work for it or she ain't going to get it." And he says, "I'm going to take—" He was a doctor, Dr. Vandergrift. Now, wasn't that Lord-sent? | 32:51 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 33:01 |
Ione Elston Jones | And he says, "I'm going to take this child home with me," and said, "And I'm going to see that you never do a thing like this again." Well, he took her home, and his wife was crazy about her. | 33:03 |
Ione Elston Jones | And she stayed there until the baby was born. It was a little girl. And that little girl was my mother. And she was small, my mother was small as she could be. And this doctor's wife had been a teacher, and had a great big library, and she taught Mama how to read and write. And my mother was a Spencerian writer, I mean, she was smart as she could be. But there was no schools there for Blacks you know. | 33:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | So, my mother grew up there and she read everything she could. The doctor's wife taught her how to read and write and just gave her as much education. And then, well, she kept begging my grandmother, my grandmother Molly, to tell her who her father was. She never told him, finally she told her. Said, "Why you want to know? She said, Because I want to get in touch with him, see, because I want to go to school." | 34:02 |
Ione Elston Jones | So, she told her and he was a Dr. Greene, in Birmingham, and told her—So, my mother signed and wrote him a letter. And she didn't hear from him right away, but finally she heard from him and he told her to come to Birmingham, to a certain park that was only about 10 miles away, 10 or 12 miles, something like that. And come to Birmingham and to go to a certain park and sit. There was a bench you know, in the park, park bench, and he would meet her there. | 34:34 |
Ione Elston Jones | So the lady, the White lady, the Mrs. Greene, who had raised them, and she kept my grandmother there. My grandmother grew up in that house, she became a midwife, and she could do a whole lot of things. But she grew up there in that house, in that mansion— | 35:16 |
Chris Stewart | Was Dr. Greene the man who raped your grandmother— | 35:36 |
Ione Elston Jones | Raped, yeah. That was his nephew who had done it. It was his nephew who had done it. He was— | 35:38 |
Chris Stewart | Who had raped— | 35:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm, who had raped my mother. | 35:45 |
Chris Stewart | Is this the same doctor who saw your grandmother plowing in the man's house? | 35:47 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. It wasn't—No, it wasn't, uh-uh, it wasn't the same— | 35:58 |
Chris Stewart | What was the name of that man? | 36:06 |
Ione Elston Jones | He was a Vandergrift, a doctor— | 36:08 |
Chris Stewart | That's right. I'm sorry— | 36:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | Vandergrift. | 36:08 |
Chris Stewart | I'm sorry. | 36:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | I don't know why, it's hot as it is, and I'm—Let me close this window a little bit. Would that be uncomfortable to you? | 36:15 |
Chris Stewart | Not at all. | 36:34 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, I forgot I had that on. | 36:37 |
Chris Stewart | That's okay, I'll follow you around. You're not supposed to remember, I'm supposed to remember. | 36:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | (laughs) I'm sorry, I just forgot it was there. | 36:47 |
Chris Stewart | Absolutely no need to apologize. | 36:49 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, anyway, so she—of course you know the Northern soldiers, you know they marched through, and Union soldiers and they took everything they could and all like that. But anyway, the lady who had helped to raise my mother, and had kept my grandmother there, in the house, as a servant—not as a slave, but as a servant. And anyway, she made Mama a pretty dress. Mama said it was made out of some draperies that they did have. But they were wealthy, they were very wealthy people. And so, it was the prettiest dress he had ever had in her life, before then. | 36:52 |
Ione Elston Jones | So, she went to Birmingham. She went on the train, there was a little train running through. She said, "I didn't ride on that train, I flew there. I flew there on wings. I flew there on butterfly wings," because she was going to meet her daddy and everything. So, she found the park, she knew—yeah, they were always in Birmingham, you know, right there—so she knew where to go. And she sat down there, on the bench. And said, everybody that passed, she wondered if, that's my father. | 37:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | And finally, this man passed, fine-looking man passed, and he glanced at her and walked on and then he came back. And he looked at her and he says, "You're Molly's child, aren't you?" She says, "Yes." He says, "I knew that you—" Mama said he took her hand and looked at her, he says, "Yes," says, "You look like Molly." My grandma looked beautiful woman, she really was, she was a dark brown-skinned woman, but she was—My mother was very light, sometimes she was taken for White, but—Well, a lot of us got this way. | 38:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | But anyway, he sat down beside her and held her hand and said, "Tell me about it, child," said, "I'll never get over what I did to that child." Says, "I have thought about it all these years," says, "I'll never get over what I did to that child." And they talked and Mama told him all about—Then he says, "Now, what do you want?" She says, "I want an education," says, "I want to go to school." He said, "What?!" Mama said you could hear him all over Birmingham, he screamed, "What?!" | 38:54 |
Ione Elston Jones | She says, "I want to go to school, I want to—" He says, "I thought you were going to ask me for money or something." She says, "Well, I would like to ask you to help me go to school." She said he says, "Where you want to go?" She says they have opened up a school in Talladega, now it's Talladega College—says, "They've opened up a school in Talladega, and I would like to go there, but I don't have any money." | 39:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | He says, "Well, you find out all you can about it, and we'll see what we can do." So, Mama said she, the little train, when time for her to go, said she flew back, she didn't ride on the train, she flew back. (laughs) Said, she was so happy, she didn't know what to do. So, she went back— | 39:51 |
Chris Stewart | Was she surprised that her father was so [INTERRUPTION] to her, having done what he did? He seemed—he sounds— | 40:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. Oh, well, she had written to him and she had gotten a nice letter from him. Well, anyway, but she didn't mention—She told him who she was and all like that and told what she wanted. You know, she wanted to talk to him about going to school. Well, anyway, he says, "Well, you find out all you can about the school and let me know," because they were just opening up. | 40:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | And so, she wrote to Talladega, and said she didn't hear from it right away. But after a while, she got accepted and then she wrote her father and told him that she had been accepted. And she didn't hear from him. And she was no way she could go, unless she had some money. Then, she got a letter and the letter said, "So you are ready to go," says," I've taken care of the expenses, and made plans for you to go there." So, to make a long story short and [indistinct 00:41:30]. And the old lady made her some old clothes, out of whatever she had, because the people who had been so wealthy, they were poor now. | 40:49 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, anyway, Mama went to Talladega and said it had been an old warehouse, I think, cotton warehouse, a huge—because if you go down to Alabama, now, you will see the—Anyway, they had converted it, into a school. And it was a boarding school. Who is that? Well, anyway—Oh, that's one of Joann's— | 41:40 |
Chris Stewart | Somebody to get plants? | 42:15 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm, yeah, most likely. One of Joann's friends. So, she went—Let me go to the door. Can't even see—There's another book here. Well, anyway, so Mama said it was this converted warehouse, but said it looked like a mansion to her. And said she went it, and said it was beautiful, they had you know, made it real pretty. And told them that she was Eva Vandergrift. And they said, "Oh, yeah, we're ready for you." Because she hadn't heard from Talladega and so she didn't— | 42:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | And said they took her to her room and she said it was the most beautiful room she'd ever seen. Said the beds were homemade and they were corn shucks for mattresses and they—Said, "But it was just gorgeous," to her, because she was going to school. So, anyway, said there was a great, big, pretty trunk, there were two beds in there, it's a great, big trunk over in the other window. And so she says, "I guess that's my roommates trunk." She said, "No, that's yours." So, Mama said she went over and opened it and said never in her life had she seen such beautiful clothes. | 43:02 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, to make a long story short, she graduated from Talladega, and (baby crying) not long ago, I found her application, after she graduated, to teach in Birmingham. I found it, after Mama died. She kept everything. Because Mama died several years ago and I got a lot of the things and I know the history, and I found it the other day, not too long ago, where she had applied to go—Well, anyway, she went there and she taught there and she met my daddy, who had grown up there and he'd gotten a job, he was smart person, could do a whole lot, but he was never able to get an education and that made every— | 43:45 |
Chris Stewart | How did they meet each other? | 44:23 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, he was running on the train, and he was stationed there in Birmingham. Then he had left Talladega, you know because he was grown up now, and he was running on the train, and he was a porter on the train, and they met. And fell in love, after seeing each other, you know, for certain, they fell in love. And they got married and— | 44:24 |
Chris Stewart | Where did they get married? | 45:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | They got married down— | 45:02 |
Chris Stewart | In [indistinct 00:45:04]? | 45:03 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, they got married there, in Birmingham. And then, they came back to a little town called Choccolocco, where it's still there, and that's where Mama was teaching. So, that's where all of us were born. | 45:06 |
Chris Stewart | In Choccolocco ? | 45:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | In Choccolocco. My— | 45:31 |
Chris Stewart | Is that an Indian name? | 45:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. I mean, so many of the town in Alabama have Indian names. | 45:35 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. Where is that? In— | 45:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | Tuskegee. | 45:45 |
Chris Stewart | It's not close to Tuskegee? | 45:48 |
Ione Elston Jones | No, it's close to Anniston, Choccolocco is—actually, now it's a suburb. Kind of more of a suburb life. Well, so that's where all of us were born. | 45:49 |
Chris Stewart | So, do you recall the house that you— | 46:04 |
Ione Elston Jones | But I didn't grow up there. I was about three months old—See, my youngest sister was 10 years old when I was born. Not my youngest sister— | 46:06 |
Chris Stewart | Your oldest— | 46:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | My oldest sister. And they were in school, in boarding school, and Barber. So, Mama and Papa gave up the farm. Papa didn't. And moved to Anniston. And that's where I grew up, in Anniston. | 46:18 |
Chris Stewart | Do you recall the house that you grew up in? | 46:35 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, yeah. | 46:38 |
Chris Stewart | What can you tell me about it? | 46:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, it was a pretty little house, it was on the suburbs, because— | 46:42 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was a small house. It was a pretty little house. It was on the suburbs. And so he brought his cow and chickens and some pigs, things like that. But he still had the big farm out there with the growth. Do you know what I'm trying to say? | 0:00 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 0:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | So he'd go down there. It wasn't too far. | 0:20 |
Chris Stewart | Did he have people working with him on the farm? | 0:23 |
Ione Elston Jones | Sometimes, yes, but mostly he didn't want anybody fooling with his—But he got rid of that and then came permanently to Anniston, Alabama where I grew up. | 0:26 |
Chris Stewart | Do you recall your neighbors when you were growing up in Anniston? Who were your neighbors? | 0:38 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, we lived in a suburb like and all the neighbors—Well, one neighbor, actually the house that was next door, it was about like if you go up this street and go across the street. And that was a White family and they became very good friends. That's my youngest sister there. She died when she was not quite 20, thereby. Instead of going on to college like she should have gone on, she had finished Tuskegee, but then she wanted to go. But she got a job offered to her to teach. They only had three months and she just begged my mother and father to let her teach those three months so she could get her some sharp clothes, as she used to say. | 0:43 |
Ione Elston Jones | And so they consented and she taught in a little country school, just two or three months, like they had for Blacks. And she stayed in the home of the principal of the little school because his daughter and her were very good friends. But the daughter had tuberculosis and people didn't know anything about it then. And she stayed in the room and she caught it and in a little while, about a year and a half later, she was gone. Oh, I was crazy about her. I was crazy about her and she was crazy about me. So that's one of the pictures that was taken. | 1:41 |
Chris Stewart | That's a beautiful picture. Was she younger than you or was she older than you? | 2:36 |
Ione Elston Jones | 10 years older than I was. [crosstalk 00:02:45] She was the one that was 10 years old when I was born and the others were away in school when I was born. And my sister, my older sister, taught for years. Well, you didn't ask me about all this. You wanted to find out about the sit-ins but that's in the book. | 2:44 |
Chris Stewart | No, no, no, this is exactly what we want to talk to you about, in fact. | 3:03 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, anyway— | 3:07 |
Chris Stewart | Exactly. | 3:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | They were determined that we were going to—Oh, I thought that was a pin, a needle or something. Mama and Papa were determined we were going to get an education, so we all got educations. | 3:12 |
Chris Stewart | How many children did your mother have? How many siblings? | 3:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | Three girls and one boy. | 3:29 |
Chris Stewart | And you all went to school, you all— | 3:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah. Now, my brother wanted to be a doctor. He wanted so much to be a doctor. There was no place for him to learn to be a doctor. But he went to Birmingham. Slipped off when he was a teenager, about 14, 15 years old, and ran away to Birmingham. Birmingham was just about 50 miles, about 60 miles, no further than that, from Anniston. And got a job. Mama doesn't know where he was. Got a job in a hospital because there was nowhere he could study. And he watched and did everything. He watched what was done and finally he became a doctor's assistant. And this doctor operated on people and everything and he assisted him. Mm-hmm, that's what he was. | 3:33 |
Chris Stewart | What was the name of the hospital, do you recall? | 4:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | It's the Elston Hospital. It's got two names now. Elston and something else. | 4:42 |
Chris Stewart | At the time though that you were there, it was just the Elston or the time that your brother was there? | 4:52 |
Ione Elston Jones | I think so. This was a long time ago. Many, many years ago. And I'm not too sure, but I know in Birmingham now, unless they've changed it, there's a hospital called the Elston something hospital. Well, anyway, he watched and did everything and he became his assistant. And he married a beautiful girl, a lovely girl. And when the migration came, everybody leaving, going north, he did too. He left and went to Cleveland and he still worked in a hospital and all like that because there was no way he could study to be a doctor and had no money anyway. But he always worked in a hospital. | 4:56 |
Chris Stewart | You talk about the migration a lot. Did you move during the migration? | 5:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh no. | 5:50 |
Chris Stewart | You stayed? | 5:51 |
Ione Elston Jones | We stayed, yeah. My— | 5:52 |
Chris Stewart | Did you see a lot of friends and family leaving? | 5:55 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah. Yeah, if you could go to our family reunion, my mother's family reunion, they are there from all over the country, from Detroit. They went mainly toward the northwest, I guess, all the way up there. Cleveland, that's where my brother went. He went to Cleveland. And his wife, my beautiful sister-in-law, is still alive. And next year she'll be a hundred years old. And she's a beautiful person. She'll be a hundred years old and they're going to have a big birthday party for her. And I sure hope I'm able to go. Well, anyway, so he went up there and had three good looking kids and they had three boys. | 5:57 |
Chris Stewart | Why did people go? Why did people leave? | 6:52 |
Ione Elston Jones | To go north? | 6:55 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 6:56 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, there was no jobs here in the South except—They couldn't call them slaves, but they were practically slaves. What did they call them? Oh gosh, I'm losing my memory. There may be some here now who do that. Anyway, they worked on the farm and were paid a little bit. What were they called? | 6:57 |
Chris Stewart | Are you talking sharecroppers? | 7:27 |
Ione Elston Jones | Gotcha. They were sharecroppers and they didn't like that, some of them. But around Birmingham there was a lot of mines, coal mines and things like that. And that's where they worked. And they worked there. | 7:29 |
Chris Stewart | Did coal miners leave as well? | 7:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah, they left by the million. Well, maybe not the million, but thousand, and went north. And they're still there, most of them. And they got good jobs up there. They got real good jobs up there and that's where they are. | 7:45 |
Chris Stewart | Why didn't you go? | 8:07 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, my mother and father were not interested in going north. We were doing as well as he could do there. And my sister didn't go, my older sister. She was teaching school and she met this man. She met a Presbyterian minister who was also on the faculty at Harbison. It's in Irmo. It was in Irmo. | 8:08 |
Chris Stewart | Harbison, did you say? | 8:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh, H-A-R-B-I-S-O-N. It's closed now. But it was a boarding school, a little town. Irmo was a little suburb of Columbia. The fact is, Columbia is about to move out there. It won't be—But they were on that faculty for years and years. He was a Presbyterian minister and well educated. He was from Pittsburgh. And they have a beautiful family, my cousins. And, well, anyway, what I told you is many people have stories like that tell. Well, you wanted to talk about Scotia, didn't you? | 8:41 |
Chris Stewart | I want to talk about what you think is important about your— | 9:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | But here's why we came. My mother, during the Depression, the first Depression, things just closed down. My father had been working at this warehouse for years and years and years. He had a little management job there to train others how to—It wasn't a warehouse, it was in a way. Well, it was a warehouse where things would be sent there to be—You know what a warehouse is. And he did well. He was doing well. And well, anyway, he came to—They were old then. They had gotten older. The place closed down and everything. Well, I was still at Barber and as soon as when I finished, when I graduated, we moved up to Irmo to be there with my sister and her family. | 9:42 |
Ione Elston Jones | And in the meantime, I had graduated from Scotia. They all came to my graduation. But Scotia at that time was not accredited because it was a brand new—I was the first college graduate and they couldn't—But anyway, I got a job because we were trying to help Mama and Papa. And I got a job to help them buy a home there in Irmo. It wasn't much of a town. | 11:09 |
Chris Stewart | What did you do? | 11:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | I applied to teach. | 11:42 |
Chris Stewart | Teach? | 11:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, because I had majored in English and Literature and French. And I also got a certificate in Greek. Because in the private schools there in Anniston we had to take Latin, we had to take Greek and we had to take—What else was there? We had three things we had to take, Latin. Anyway, we had to take Latin and Greek and French. And we had to take it. I wasn't all that smart, but my mama was a teacher and I had to study. But anyway, I made it pretty good. And so of course when I finished Scotia, because I had come up from Anniston to Scotia, I went to Irmo where my people were. And I made an application to teach in Columbia. | 11:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | But I wasn't certified because that was the first year of Barber-Scotia. I wasn't certified. And so then I got an offer. I made an application to teach in Anderson, South Carolina in a private Presbyterian high school. And it just happened that I knew the people, I knew the principal and all like that. So that was my first teaching job. In the meantime, well, I taught there and I taught Latin. | 12:51 |
Chris Stewart | What grade did you teach? | 13:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | I taught in high school up there. | 13:35 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 13:36 |
Ione Elston Jones | I'll tell you who I taught. Are you familiar with Lionel Richie? | 13:38 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 13:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | I taught his father there. I taught his father. His father was one of my students. He was a singer. Well, anyway, I was teaching there. In the meantime, when I was still living in Anniston, every summer the Presbyterian Church Board would have, they call it, a vacation Bible school there at Barber. And my husband had finished Smith and had made an application to teach. And the day they graduated, while they were students, I mean while they were still there, every summer they'd go to the mountain resorts for jobs. And that's where he had made application to teach. And he hadn't heard definitely and they were all sitting at the station waiting for the train to go to the mountains. | 13:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | And a ministerial student, a Reverend Prince, he lived here then. Well, he had graduated from Smith as a theological student. And he was going to be a Sunday school missionary too. He was going to be a Sunday school missionary. But he got a job. He got offered a church in his hometown down in South Carolina. So the students were all sitting there. But he was going to be a Sunday school missionary too. He was already hired as one to be in Georgia. But in the meantime, he got an offer to pastor the church down there. So he was there at the station with who eventually became my husband and some other students who were their way up in the mountains to work into the resorts. And they'd done that for years ever since they'd been in college. | 14:54 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, anyway, he decided to give up the missionary job down in Georgia. And he went and the board's headquarters were in Atlanta. So he just walked over to the telephone there in the station and called Dr. McCoy, who was head of the missionary work, and told him that he had changed his mind about being a—And he was going back to teach. He says, "They need a missionary." He said, "Well, I have really changed my mind about going." He said, "Well, can you recommend somebody?" So he looked over and he says, "Well, here's Reverend Jones'—" My husband's father was a minister. He said, "Here's Reverend Jones' son." He said, "He's just graduated from school and he may be interested." He said, "Well, put him on." And so my husband went over and talked to him and took the job and that's all he did. And that thereby hangs another tale. | 15:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | I've got to write my story. His mother and father, his father was a slave— enslaved in Georgia. And when the Northern soldiers marched through there to thing, he followed them. The slaves were freed and he followed the Army till they got to Augusta. And he was so tired, he went to sleep. He lay down and went to sleep. And when he woke up, they were gone. And he was sitting there on a bench or something there in a park and said he was so hungry and broke. He didn't have any money or anything. | 17:02 |
Ione Elston Jones | And this man came by and asked him, he said, "What are you doing?" He asked him to talk with him. And he said, "Would you like to go to school?" He said, "Nothing in the world I'd like better than going to school." He said, "Well, my wife and I have opened a boarding school here in Augusta and if you'd like to come, we can give you a scholarship." So he was a very intelligent man and I heard them tell it later how much impressed they were with him. So they gave him a scholarship at Haines. | 18:04 |
Chris Stewart | At where? | 18:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | Haines, H-A-I-N-E-S, Haines. And he graduated from there. And guess what his first job was? He became a minister. He was a minister. Guess what his first job was? Or he finished high school then and then he wanted to go to college and they sent him up to Maryland. Not Maryland, it's a Black school up there in the mountains. What is it? Not a Black school, but the college? Oh Lord, I'm getting so forgetful. How could I ever forget that? Anyway, he was the first Black to go there and they let him stay. | 18:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | He graduated and then he became a minister. And then he wanted to be a Sunday school missionary too. So he was traveling. He was trying to find him a job first to teach. And that's where he met my husband's mother. Thereby, I won't tell you that, but thereby hangs another tale of how she was enslaved too and her father was brought from Africa. And see, they didn't bring any dummies from Africa. They knew where to go to get some— | 19:29 |
Chris Stewart | How did you find out all these stories? | 20:05 |
Ione Elston Jones | All through the years. | 20:08 |
Chris Stewart | You are so rich with stories. | 20:09 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, I'm about to tell you. Let me tell you. Well, anyway, my husband, Joe Jones, I had met him at a summer conference. He became a Sunday school missionary and they would go into these rural places and organize Sunday schools for people who didn't have any, Blacks. So he came to Barber. Every year down at Barber where I was, they had a conference down there and they came down there for a summer conference. And that's where I met him and he could sing. I liked that. He was a lot older than I was because I was really a senior in high school and I wasn't at Barber then. But he seemed to like me. But he was much older than I was and wasn't paying attention very much. And he could sing. He sang all over the country at Presbyterian gatherings and things like that. | 20:13 |
Ione Elston Jones | But anyway, that's where I first met him. But he didn't pay any attention to me. I was just a little kid, kind of. I was a senior high school kid. But the girls were crazy about him, the college girls. Because that's where they had the meeting at Barber during the summer. So then a couple summers later, he seemed to have been interested in me and I didn't pay attention to him much. He was a Sunday school missionary and I'm just out of high school. I mean just out of college by then. And he wanted me to marry him then. I wasn't about to marry him or anybody else but— | 21:14 |
Chris Stewart | Why? | 21:57 |
Ione Elston Jones | I wasn't interested. I had been sheltered all my life. I wanted to teach. I wanted to get out on my own some. But I did get the job teaching at this private school and he and the principal of the school had been classmates, had finished Smith at the same time. So he'd come by there to see me and all like that. I liked him and all but I had another little boyfriend that I liked a whole lot too, Bob Dockery. And his father was a Presbyterian minister too. And I had met him when I was at Scotia. That was my little boyfriend who— | 21:59 |
Chris Stewart | That you went to the— | 22:28 |
Ione Elston Jones | That I went to this thing with. I liked Bob a lot and he liked me. He was a senior and he graduated and he wanted to be a doctor. But he had to work. His father had been a Presbyterian minister and he was going to teach a couple of years and save his money so he could go to med school. So he liked me. He said, "How come we don't get married?" "Well, I wouldn't think about marrying anybody." And I didn't know anything about sex. I knew nothing. Black people didn't do all that junk that they do now. | 22:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | So anyway, so Joe had been trying for three years to get me to marry him. I said, "Joe, I'm not interested." I wasn't even in love with him then. But he'd even come up to Scotia because he traveled a lot and he'd always put Concord on his route when he was in that direction. So finally I was teaching and he would stop by to see me and we'd go out to dinner or something. So it was almost time for commencement. It was in April. And he came by and he said, "Ione, I want to talk with you." He says, "You know how much I love you and I want to marry you." He says, "But the Board, my Presbyterian Board, thinks I ought to get married." And Joe was 10 years older than I was. He said, "I want to get married." And he says, "I want to marry you." He said, "You know that." He said, "But you've been putting me off for years." | 23:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | And he said, "But I don't think you will ever marry me." And I said to myself, "I'm not sure either." And then he said, "And Willie Nance," I looked at him, he said, "She's anxious to get married." He says, "I've just been talking to her. I haven't been—" He said, "But I can tell." Willie Nance was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. She was so pretty. I knew her. And she was teaching and she was teaching in a school in his field. He says, "I don't love her. I don't want to marry her." He said, "But I want my job." And he said, "It don't look like you're going to ever marry me." The minute he mentioned Willie, I made up my mind and I said, "Over my dead body, you're not going to get married to her." I fell madly in love with him. I fell madly—(laughs) | 24:04 |
Ione Elston Jones | I didn't tell him that. I still played it cool. I said, "Well, let me think about it." This was on a Thursday. I'll never forget it as long as I live. I said, "Let me think about it because you know I'm—" He says, "Well, I'll help you help your mother." I had been buying Mama and Papa a house in Irmo. And it didn't cost a whole bunch of money and I wasn't making a whole bunch of money. But anyway, I'd send Mama a packet of all the money because I could. And I said, "Well, let me think about it." Well, he knew that. Joe knew that and Mama and Papa were crazy about him. Well, anyway, I said, "Let me call you on the weekend or you call me on the weekend." So he called me on Saturday night. I had not only made up my mind, I had planned my wedding. (laughs) | 24:50 |
Ione Elston Jones | I said, "Well, Joe, we've known each other for so long and everything and—" "Do you love me?" I said, "Of course I love you." I said, "You know why I didn't say I wanted to marry you." He said, "Well, are you going to marry me?" I said, "Yes, if you've—Yeah." He says, "I'll be by then. See you tomorrow." On Sunday he showed up and he said, "Ione, are you sure?" I said, "Yes, Joe, I am sure," and I grabbed him. (laughs) We didn't go into things like they go into now. Well, he hugged me so tight. And so he says, "Well, when?" And I said, "I'd like to get married on my birthday." He said, "When is that?" Well, he knew. He said, "Do you mean the 15th of June?" Now, this is April and I'm going to marry Joe right quick. (laughs) I'm not going to wait around. | 25:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | And I said, "I'd like to get married on my birthday on the 15th." He says, "Okay, that'll be just fine." Well, he always had his vacation in August. So he said, "Okay." I said, "Well, okay, we'll plan it that way." So school was out in a couple of weeks. So I went home and Mama said, "Are you sure?" I said, "Well, yeah, Mama, I'm sure." She says, "Well, okay, we'll do what we can." So Mama— | 26:51 |
Ione Elston Jones | I will say, so I had these two boyfriends and half of them were pro Bob's and other half was pro Joe's. All of them wanted to be in my wedding. I was just going to have a nice quiet little wedding. | 27:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | Hold on a minute. I have this inner ear infection. | 27:43 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, let me get [indistinct 00:28:10] | 28:09 |
Ione Elston Jones | [indistinct 00:28:10] | 28:09 |
Ione Elston Jones | And that's my wedding. That was taken outside. | 28:09 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, my goodness. | 28:10 |
Ione Elston Jones | She was the organist. That was the president of Harbison. And the president of Harbison was my husband's aunt. That was my brother-in-law and he performed the ceremony. And there's my Joe. That's a picture of him. Joe got bald when he was in college. | 28:10 |
Chris Stewart | He's very tall. | 28:32 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, he's [indistinct 00:28:36]. And there I am. | 28:35 |
Chris Stewart | That's you? Very elegant. | 28:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | That's Mrs. Counts. She was my maid of honor. We've been friends for years. They're practically all gone now. Oh, she will be 90 years old. She was 90 years old yesterday. She lives in Columbia. She was a daughter of the president. I mean one of the teachers on the campus. And she sang. And there he is. There's Dr. McCoy who was my husband's—Who wanted Joe to get married, thank heaven. They're practically all gone now. They're practically all gone. | 28:41 |
Chris Stewart | They're beautiful pictures. | 29:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | But anyway, and they all wore lace dresses. And they got them themselves. I sent them a pattern and they made them. And we got married in white lace. Pink lace. Pink lace. We got married in pink lace and great big wide pink hats. | 29:23 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. Where did you live after you got married? | 29:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | My husband's headquarters were in Chester. | 29:51 |
Chris Stewart | In Chester, South Carolina? | 29:54 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. So we lived there 15 years, built there and my children were born there. | 29:55 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 30:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | Now JoAnne, my daughter here, was three months old when he got this big job of supervising Sunday school missionary work, religious education work, all over the southeast from West Virginia all the way down to Texas and Arkansas. And he was gone a whole lot so I had to raise the children by myself practically. | 30:01 |
Chris Stewart | It sounds like he traveled a lot with his work. | 30:23 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, he was on the road all the time. He was always on the road. He was on the road all the time. This is not why you came here to talk to me. | 30:24 |
Chris Stewart | This is what I came here to talk to you about. This is exactly what I came here to talk to you about. | 30:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, but— | 30:38 |
Chris Stewart | So while he was gone, you were working, you were teaching? | 30:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, I was teaching. | 30:47 |
Chris Stewart | In Chester did you teach? | 30:50 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. I taught at Brainerd. Brainerd was a junior college. I mean there was a high school and then they had two years of junior college. But I taught in the high school there. And then after I got my—And I was studying at Howard University to get my studying in the summer at Howard, to get my graduate work. | 30:51 |
Chris Stewart | Now, you were teaching at Brainerd, studying at Howard in the summer and you had children? | 31:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | When Joe got this promotion, we had already decided to have three children. I decided I'm going to have those kids right away, get them up out of the way so I can travel with him. So my daughter came along, Eva came along, and five years later my son came along, 10 years later JoAnne came along. | 31:26 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. That wasn't right away, was it? | 31:49 |
Ione Elston Jones | So it took me a little while because I stayed with my kids. Because Mama wanted 'em, Mama said, "You go to school and do your studying. I'll take care of the kids." She was crazy about them. But finally— | 31:53 |
Chris Stewart | So when did you go back to Howard to do your graduate work? When was that? | 32:02 |
Ione Elston Jones | Now— | 32:08 |
Chris Stewart | Was that after you had had your children? | 32:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah, uh-huh. I had been doing some graduate work, but I went to Howard. Oh yeah, when Joe got his promotion and we moved here to Charlotte, he could either go to Atlanta or come to Charlotte. Well, I didn't want to go to Atlanta. I just knew Joe would want to go to Atlanta from Chester. | 32:11 |
Chris Stewart | Why didn't you want—Why? | 32:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | I didn't like Atlanta. I never—And the headquarters were there then, that's where they called him from there. The headquarters were there. But I didn't want to go. But I didn't tell him because I wasn't going to hold him back. I wanted to come to Charlotte. And he had graduated from Smith too. And everything that was happening, we were here to the games and everything and I just didn't want to go to Atlanta. But I didn't tell him. I wasn't going to hold him back. | 32:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | So finally I made my mind to tell him, "Joe, I don't want to go to Atlanta." He said, "Huh?" I said, "Let's don't go to Atlanta." He said, "You don't want to go to Atlanta?" I said, "No, I really don't." He said, "You want to go to Charlotte?" I said, "Oh yeah, we're always up there anyway." And he said, "Oh, are you sure you don't want to go to Atlanta?" I said, "No, I really don't want to go." I said, "I don't like Atlanta." I had been there before. And I said, "I really just don't like Atlanta." He said, "You're sure? I said, "Yes, I'm sure." He put his arms out like that and he squeezed me so tight. He said, "Thank God. I don't want to go to Atlanta either." He says, "I hated the idea of going down there." So we came to Charlotte. | 33:11 |
Chris Stewart | When was that? When did you come to Charlotte? | 34:03 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was about 1944, I believe, yeah. | 34:05 |
Chris Stewart | Was it during the war? | 34:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | Huh? | 34:17 |
Chris Stewart | During the war? | 34:18 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, it was in the forties, about '47. It was '47. That's when it was. I remember now. And we lived in Biddleville, a little place there. Because everybody lived there, all the teachers. It was a big—That's where my son lives now. And so we got a house there. And eventually—I didn't have much more to do at Howard. But here I am. Here we are just right about a couple of [indistinct 00:35:07]— if you took the shortcut, it was just about a—Well, you know where Biddleville is. | 34:27 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 35:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | And you know where Trade Street is blocked off, it goes down that way? | 35:14 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 35:18 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, that's the street we lived on. That's where my son lives now. And so we lived there about 15 years. Oh yeah, so the sit-ins my son had gone to—Now, he's the one you ought to talk to. He's the one you ought to talk to. He was the vice president of the National Student Organization all over the country. And when the Soviet Union wanted to bring the thing out from behind the Iron Curtain to Austria, to Vienna, the students from Vienna did not want it. And they wrote to about 2, 300 colleges and said, "Send us some people here to run this thing back behind the Iron Curtain. We don't want it." And so of course students from all over the country do like that. I think they sent out around over 200 letters to different colleges. And of course he got one and it said, "Come and help us run this thing back behind the Iron Curtain." | 35:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | So he wanted to go of course. And his father and I dug up the money. He was a theological student and he had finished Smith and he was a theological student. Well, was Charlie a theological student? No, uh-uh. He wasn't a theological student [indistinct 00:36:58]. He would've been a junior. He would've been a senior the next year. Anyway, we dug up the money and sent him over there. And we told him, we said, "Now, when you get to Vienna, you go straight to the American Embassy." Because we knew about the head of the embassy from North—My husband in some capacity had met him because he traveled all over in Presbyterian National. He was in the National Presbyterian Church. And so he said, "You go straight to him and you talk to the American Embassy and you tell them who you are and everything." So Charlie did that. | 36:34 |
Ione Elston Jones | But here's what happened. They had to be trained, on the way over there, what to do and everything. And the students were coming from everywhere to go. So he was with the group and they had conferences with them in Washington where they left. They left from Washington. Then they had to change planes in New York and they were advised what to do and what not to do. And then they had to change again in Paris. So Charlie said that he noticed when they got on the plane and soon after they got on the plane in Paris and were flying to Vienna that there was a man back there with a book. And he was, Charlie said, was sitting almost in the front, two or three seats from the front. And so they had a look back and this man had a book and he was writing down something. | 37:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | And they looked at each other and they went back there and said, "What are y'all doing?" Said, "What are you doing?" Asked the man, "What are you doing?" And he had an accent. He says, "I'm just getting a little bit of history on the students who are going over there." He said, "Who are you?" He says, "Well, I'm from—" Anyway, they found out that he was—Oh, he said he was from Russia. He says, "I'm from Russia." No, he didn't tell him he was from Russia. [indistinct 00:39:20] it was so long ago. He said he was with the government. That's what he said. He said he was with the United States government and now he was with the Austrian government and he wanted to get the history, interview the students who were coming to Vienna and they were going to stay there on the campus. | 38:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, anyway, Charlie and those hadn't heard anything like that. So they told the students, "Don't give him any more information." They said, "You know we have been briefed so don't tell him anything." They told him, they said, "Now, you stop this." They said, "We were not told a thing about this." So they stopped that. So when they got to Vienna, the students who had been talking to them were the only ones who had a place to stay. They had the student places there for the students to stay. Where did they have it? They had it in Vienna? They had it at some government house. That's where it was, some capital or something like that. But it was a university there and they had these special places for people to stay, beautiful. And they had this place to stay, that's where Charlie and those would stay. | 39:50 |
Ione Elston Jones | But they had another place practically on the campus where they had buildings where when conferences and things would come there, something like that, that's where they would stay. They would stay there. So that's where the students were going to stay, in those places. So Charlie and those when they got there, the only ones who could stay in the main building where they were going to stay were the students who—Now, they were not put into the building. They were put into this special place. And it was beautiful. It was beautiful. I saw it when I went there. But they were put there and soon after they were put there, there was a fence around it, a decorative kind of fence. And as soon as they were put there, the place was surrounded by Soviet guards. And they couldn't get out to go to any of the meetings or anything, the students from the United States. | 41:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | And Charlie and those didn't have anywhere to stay. They didn't have anywhere to stay because the Soviet students had taken over the whole other place. And we had told him to go to the embassy, as I told you. So he went back and the embassy called us and told us what was happening. And Charlie didn't have any money to stay anywhere else because he had already paid to stay on this other place. So my husband says, "Well, help him find a place to stay and let him have the money and we will wire it to you." So Charlie and those had to get another place to stay. And there were just gangs of students there and they would follow around—They'd go and interview them and see what's happening. | 42:35 |
Chris Stewart | When was this? | 43:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, this was—Charlie could tell you all of this. It's in that book, I guess. It was about '70. | 43:32 |
Chris Stewart | What kinds of organizations did you belong to in Charlotte or in Chester, when you were living in Chester? Did you belong to any organizations? | 43:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, yeah, the teacher's organization. I was teaching in Chester. | 43:49 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. How about any clubs or community— | 43:53 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah, I belonged to a bridge club. | 43:55 |
Chris Stewart | What was the name of your bridge club? | 43:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | I forgot. It was just Charlotte, Chester Bridge Club. I belong to a whole gang of clubs here now.. I belong to a whole lot of things here now. But I'm going to get out of some of them because I have this heart condition. But I had belonged to the Afro-American Creative Writing Group and I belonged to a creative writing club. Oh, I belonged to several things. | 44:00 |
Chris Stewart | Did you belong to those while you were teaching? | 44:38 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yes, practically some of them ever since I've been here. | 44:42 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 44:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | One of them started on the campus at Smith and I belong to a sorority. | 44:46 |
Chris Stewart | What's sorority do you belong to? | 44:49 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, Alpha Pi Chi [indistinct 00:44:59] about 20 years old. | 44:56 |
Chris Stewart | What is the name? | 44:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | Alpha Pi Chi. | 44:59 |
Chris Stewart | Hm. | 44:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | And I'm supposed to be in, it's not one of the academic like the Deltas and them, this and that and the other. | 45:01 |
Chris Stewart | What sort of sorority is it? | 45:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, it's a sorority that is very creative and it's just a group of marvelous people who decided to—I'll tell you, the dean on the campus, the Dean of Women on the campus organized it. And I have most of my friends belonging to the regular ones like the Deltas and Etas and all like that, Zetas. But my sorority is a Zeta chapter of this Alpha Pi Chi sorority. And they left yesterday, several of them left yesterday, to go to the national meeting. It's national. It's a marvelous group of women, professional women, who hold professional jobs. And just a great group. | 45:19 |
Chris Stewart | What kinds of women? What were the qualities that the members of the sorority looked for when they were looking for members? What were the qualities? | 46:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, they were recommended by friends. But most of them are professional women holding—Teachers and different— | 46:35 |
Ione Elston Jones | But we have our annual meeting there. | 0:03 |
Chris Stewart | In St. Louis? | 0:05 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh, and my very best friend, Ruth Cohen—Ruth Funderburk now. She got married. Wonderful person. Her husband died several years ago. He was teaching here in the city and she taught here for years until she retired. This morning I got a call just before you came. I got a call from St. Louis wishing me a happy birthday. | 0:06 |
Ione Elston Jones | But the executive meeting is meeting there and I belong to the—I started a retirees club at my church, Memorial Presbyterian. I started that because I was sitting there one Sunday. Looked around. There were a lot of retirees. A lot of people who were retired. I said, "How come we can't have one here?" Because another Presbyterian church here in the city has one to which I belong. | 0:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway, I went to the minister and talked it over with him. He said, "I think that's a good idea." I said, "We got so many retired people in our church." He said, "Clear it with the Session." So I cleared it with the Session and we started the Retirees Fellowship at our church and it just took off. We have more fun. And Ruth Cohen who called me, Ruth Funderburk who called me there, my God, I said, "Ruth, help me put this thing together." | 1:20 |
Ione Elston Jones | We got it together and it just took off. We just have more fun. We take trips. I mean, we just have a good time. It's a marvelous bunch of people. A marvelous bunch. | 1:55 |
Ione Elston Jones | I enjoy the clubs, I really do, because I miss my husband. I miss him so much. And well— | 2:05 |
Chris Stewart | What about community organizations? Were you and your husband members of the NAACP or the— | 2:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah. | 2:22 |
Chris Stewart | Where were the meetings? Would you go to meetings? | 2:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, we would go. I haven't been to—Oh yeah, I belong to all the— | 2:29 |
Ione Elston Jones | I belong to the—What do you call it, at Smith? What is it when you graduate? | 2:43 |
Chris Stewart | Alumnus. | 2:49 |
Ione Elston Jones | Alumnus. | 2:50 |
Chris Stewart | Alumni association? | 2:54 |
Ione Elston Jones | I belong to the alumni association. | 2:55 |
Ione Elston Jones | But anyway, I don't know. We were new here. I knew some people here and all that. | 2:59 |
Chris Stewart | How did you meet people? Was it through your work that you met people that you [indistinct 00:03:10]? | 3:05 |
Ione Elston Jones | Through Smith. Yeah, I taught Smith almost 20 years. I taught there 19 years. Almost 19. | 3:09 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, I had been to Scotia and a lot of people—I just knew a lot of people. My husband and I had both finished Smith and we just knew a lot of people. My daughter, my husband's sister's husband was on the faculty at Smith and they lived on campus and that's when I joined the— | 3:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | What's the name of the club? I forget it. Jo-Ann, what's the name of the club that started on Smith? Started at Smith? (laughs) | 3:52 |
Jo-Ann Jones | I don't know. | 4:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | She thinks I [indistinct 00:04:03]. I do, since I had a heart attack. I had a serious heart attack. | 4:00 |
Chris Stewart | What kinds of things did you and your husband do when you were living here in Charlotte for entertainment? | 4:09 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, he was a dedicated Omega. Omega, a fraternity. He was in the choir. He had a beautiful voice, in the Presbyterian Church, a tenor voice. And the Presbyterian Church—I think he missed one general assembly since he finished Johnson C. Smith in 1927. That was when my first child was born. He was supposed to go and I didn't want him to go because I was expecting my first child. He says, "Oh, it'll be at least a week before she'll come." Well, that's what the doctor had said. Said it'll be a couple of weeks. Lo and behold, he was supposed to leave the next morning when I started having pains and the doctor came and he didn't go. That's the only one. That was my older daughter Eva. Eva's 60 years old in February. | 4:14 |
Chris Stewart | Were these national conventions that you're talking about— | 5:28 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah. | 5:30 |
Chris Stewart | —that your husband went to? | 5:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | International. National, international. He led to singing, thousands of them. I've been to many of them with him. | 5:32 |
Chris Stewart | What was it like? Tell me. Can you tell me something about the national conventions? | 5:38 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, it was— | 5:44 |
Jo-Ann Jones | Okay. I can— | 5:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | —church. Presbyterian churches from all over. I mean, then of course it was—He went to both the Northern and the Southern but now since the two areas have combined— | 5:47 |
Jo-Ann Jones | Okay, well, hold on— | 6:01 |
Ione Elston Jones | —they meet together now here. | 6:01 |
Jo-Ann Jones | This is the second time this person has called. | 6:12 |
Jo-Ann Jones | [INTERRUPTION] | 6:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | Is this what you wanted to hear? | 6:12 |
Chris Stewart | This is exactly what I wanted to hear. | 6:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | But you wanted to hear about my son. | 6:15 |
Chris Stewart | No, I want to hear about you. | 6:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, now that's his book. I won't be able to—you'll have to get permission from him, but you ought to talk to him. | 6:18 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah, we are talking to him. | 6:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | You ought to talk to him because— | 6:25 |
Chris Stewart | We are talking to him, yeah. | 6:28 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, you are talking to— | 6:28 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah, we've set up appointment to talk to him. | 6:28 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, by all means because he led the sit-ins here. | 6:32 |
Chris Stewart | Right. But see, what we wanted to talk to you about is life before the sit-ins and you have just given— | 6:34 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, I didn't even know that. | 6:44 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 6:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | And I thought I was boring you to death. | 6:46 |
Chris Stewart | Oh no, you're not boring me at all. This is most exciting. Most exciting. | 6:48 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway, my husband and I got married. You saw the picture. My mother didn't want me to get married. "You're just out of school." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they were crazy about Joe. He said, "You don't need to worry yourself. I'll make a good husband." And he did. We were married 53 years and he had—I saw it coming on, Alzheimer. | 6:51 |
Jo-Ann Jones | I'll be right back, Mom. I'm going to get some sandpaper. | 7:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | Okay. | 7:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | Lock the door, Jo-Ann. | 7:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | That's okay, you need lock it. | 7:35 |
Ione Elston Jones | We're very careful here. | 7:38 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway, we had our big wedding. He always got his vacation in August, the whole month of August, so that was when we were going on our honeymoon, but we got married on Saturday, on the 22nd. | 7:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah. I was going to get married on 15th and I had sent my invitations to be printed. Lord, we had plenty of them because everybody was going to go. I was so tired trying to make plans for that. We were going to get married in the chapel at Harbison. It was a junior college where, as I told you, my sister and her husband were on the faculty. Beautiful, beautiful place. His uncle was a president of the— | 8:01 |
Chris Stewart | Harbison? | 8:37 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. He was married to his aunt— | 8:38 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway, I was so tired. I had taken those little details and things for the wedding. I laid down on the bed to rest a little bit and I was reading something and all of a sudden it hit me like a ton of bricks. | 8:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | That's right. That's all right, Eva. I'll lock it, baby. | 9:05 |
Eva Morehead | I don't want any worries. | 9:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | And I said, "Oh Lord, I can't—" I knew enough not to get married when I was menstruating and I would be menstruating. | 9:14 |
Chris Stewart | So you couldn't get married on— | 9:22 |
Ione Elston Jones | I called Joe. I got a message. I said, "Joe, I can't get married on the 15th. I just won't be ready." See, we didn't talk about things like kids do and them people do now. I said, "I just won't be ready." I said, "Let's put it off a week and—Maybe two weeks." He says, "Well okay, if it'll be more convenient." | 9:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | Man, I flew down to Columbia because Irmo was about eight or nine miles from Columbia. I flew down there and called them first. I said, "Don't print those invitations. We're going to change the date." I went on down there and got the invitations out for the wedding on the 22nd, and so we got married on 22nd. | 9:51 |
Ione Elston Jones | I knew nothing about sex. Absolutely nothing about—My mother was old fashioned. I knew nothing about sex. But he did. He was a great guy. Very well—I mean, he was just a great guy and he never took advantage of me. Never. He knew better. He knew he'd get his head broke. Even after we got married, even after we got engaged. He said, "Well, you ought to learn to—" I said, "No, sir. Don't you touch me." | 10:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, I was married then. So we went to the mountains. We got married in Irmo in the Chapel at Harbison and came to Chester where his sister—That was his headquarters, were in Chester. He, at that time, was before he got his promotion and his sister lived there. He stayed with his sister and her husband had been a teacher and a Sunday school missionary too. He'd been a teacher on the faculty there at Brainerd and she was teaching the city system. | 10:57 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway, we came there and she had a big reception for us. She had a big reception for us that night. That's where I got to meet so many people, from there. | 11:34 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway, this reception was finally over and I was worried stiff. I was worried. (laughs) I'd had some friends who said, "Girl," say, "Your first experiences with sex," said, (laughs) "Well anyways, you ain't going to like it." | 11:54 |
Chris Stewart | Did your girlfriends talk to you at all or help you? | 12:10 |
Ione Elston Jones | Huh? | 12:10 |
Chris Stewart | I mean, did you talk to girlfriends at all or? | 12:14 |
Ione Elston Jones | They were teasing me. Everybody in the wind were very close friends and they said—Lee Counts, who you were going talk to—Mrs. Counts, she was my maid of honor. She was about as dense as I was. I mean, she knew that. We didn't know. This was a different age, a different thing. They got 1932. That's a long time ago. | 12:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, especially recently. These kids have gone. Oh, it's just horrible. | 12:42 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway, so the reception was over I guess around 10:00, something like that. She had fixed up a beautiful, her guest room. She had all bought all new bedding and just—She fixed it up real pretty for us. Had a lovely home there. Her daughter still lives in that same house. | 12:48 |
Ione Elston Jones | I said, I didn't know what to expect but—I mean, I knew what to expect but I didn't know. | 13:14 |
Ione Elston Jones | Joe went to the back. After the wedding was over, he came in the room and took his coat off and he says, "Oh, I got to see sister a minute." Says, "I'll be back." While he was gone, the bathroom was down the hall from our room. Our room was one the front bedrooms and then few feet down the hall was the bathroom, right down the hall. | 13:23 |
Ione Elston Jones | While he was gone, I have never gotten undressed so fast in my life. I had on my wedding dress. I didn't have on everything else. I got out of that wedding dress and I got in my pajamas. (laughs) | 13:53 |
Ione Elston Jones | It took Joe a long time. Told me he had to take a bath. I laid down and went to bed and I heard him coming back up the hall. I put my head under the spread. It was in—Well, I put it under the bed and pretended I was asleep. He was so quiet. He didn't say a word and he didn't get into bed and he was— | 14:07 |
Ione Elston Jones | I didn't hear a sound so I thought maybe he had gone back downstairs. I heard nothing going back. I peeked out from under the cover and he was standing there across from the bed about as far as from here to that table there with nothing on, not a piece on. (Stewart laughs) That was the first time in my life I had ever seen a naked man and I went back under the cover. (Both laugh) | 14:43 |
Ione Elston Jones | He was the sweetest person on Earth. Of course, he got into bed and he fell out laughing. Said, "Lord, here's my bride with pants on." But he didn't do anything. He didn't. He really didn't. He didn't force himself on me at all. He did a few other little things. Well, I don't have to tell you that, but he didn't bother that part. | 15:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | But early the next day we left and came to the mountains on our honeymoon. We had a weekend. Had one day and a weekend, about three days up there. I had left all my gifts down home so. | 15:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | I made up my mind, "I want no parts of this. I absolutely want no parts of this. I don't care what Joe says, I'm not going to go in for this," but Joe of course had a different idea. | 15:59 |
Chris Stewart | You were frightened. | 16:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was painful. It was terribly painful. | 16:18 |
Ione Elston Jones | I told my doctor the first time I went to doctor. Oh, I'd been married a good while then. I went to doctor and he drew a complete examination, like they get one every year. He says, "You have honestly the smallest vagina I have ever seen." Here I am, a grown-up lady with—and by that time I had one child. | 16:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | But I don't know. Joe was very sweet, very kind and very understanding. But I went home after they had wedding. After the honeymoon, it was terrible. It was terrible for me. I tried to put on an act and Joe was so understanding. | 16:51 |
Ione Elston Jones | But anyways, we went back home. We drove back home to get my gifts. I took my mother aside. I said, "Mama, why didn't you tell me?" She said, "Oh, I knew you'd learn." She handed me a book that said "What every young wife should know." I said, "What'd you keep it for?" She said, "Because I wanted you to learn on your own a little bit after you got married." | 17:06 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was like when Joe came to ask for me. He came to ask my parents for me. They did it back in those days. He was talking to my father and he said, "I want to marry your daughter and I'd like to have your consent and your blessings to marry your daughter. I want to marry—" Well, they knew Joe. Joe had been coming in and out a long time. He says, "Joe—" Papa says, "Well, I can understand that." He asked him every kind of question under the sun. | 17:35 |
Ione Elston Jones | He knew he was a Sunday school missionary. That was very much in Joe's favor because we were all Presbyterians, all except my mother. She was a dyed-in-the-wool Baptist. My grandfather was a Baptist preacher, a Baptist minister who lived in a little town near Birmingham, as I told you about, and built a Baptist church there. He had been enslaved out in Oklahoma. The family moved there. Of course there were no churches for slaves and he'd built this little Baptist church out of logs. That's where we—You ought to see it now. That's where my mother's family grew up. | 18:16 |
Chris Stewart | Is it still there? | 18:58 |
Ione Elston Jones | It's still there. The little log cabin is there and next to it is one of the most beautiful big churches you have ever seen. A gorgeous church. It's just beautiful. | 19:00 |
Chris Stewart | Where is it? | 19:11 |
Ione Elston Jones | It's a little town called Margaret, Alabama. It's called Margaret. It's about 10 miles from Birmingham, I guess. No more than 10. | 19:11 |
Chris Stewart | What's the name of the church? | 19:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | It's- | 19:25 |
Chris Stewart | Do you recall? | 19:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | What's the name of the church? | 19:32 |
Ione Elston Jones | [indistinct 00:19:38] First Baptist. | 19:32 |
Chris Stewart | First Baptist? | 19:43 |
Ione Elston Jones | And the Vandergrift and the—I'll get the letter. | 19:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | But anyway, it's the First Baptist. It's a Baptist church. That's where we go every year. I've been going. This year, I'm going to be able to go this year. They come from all over the country because they left that little—Margaret's is a mining town. They left those mines and they're all doing well. The gang's, there are two or 300 of them. At the last meeting last year, before last, one of the old relatives came and he's 102. He drove from a little town called Pell City, Alabama about 10 miles away. | 19:54 |
Chris Stewart | Pell City? | 20:37 |
Ione Elston Jones | P-E-L-L. Pell City. It's little town. And he drove his van. Oh, we just make over him like all our does. He's always the prince of the thing. He was there and then he drove back and two months later they found him dead. He had slipped away and said he had the most beautiful smile on his face. Oh, we will miss him. We will certainly miss him. | 20:38 |
Ione Elston Jones | But I have a wonderful family. All of them didn't get as much education. Well, my mother's, I told you her story, but they got what education that her sisters and those older ones. There's no sisters left, but cousins. I have a lot of cousins. A lot of those, they were my aunts. I had a lot of them. My last one died and her children and I played together and all like that. They're all doing well. I mean, well. Their children are well educated. Everything. Got good jobs. | 21:14 |
Chris Stewart | It sounds like that's really important in your family— | 22:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, it is. | 22:02 |
Chris Stewart | —to get an education. | 22:03 |
Ione Elston Jones | It is. That's why I graduated with so many honors, because my mother was educated. She was a nut on education and I wasn't that smart. I just had to study. | 22:03 |
Chris Stewart | You worked hard. | 22:15 |
Ione Elston Jones | And then of course I had an educate. Only way I was able to go was because I got—Well, when I went to Barber in Anniston, I was put on—I mean, everyone who has a scholarship has to prove that they're worthy of it because they didn't play with you. The first semester they began to decide. I made all As that first semester so at the end of the year I got a full scholarship. Got a full scholarship through college. I worked hard to keep that scholarship because Mama would go break my neck if I hadn't anyway. But I enjoyed. I enjoyed it. | 22:19 |
Chris Stewart | Did your sisters also receive scholarships? | 23:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah. Yeah, they had scholarships but they were not in college. It wasn't a college then. | 23:16 |
Chris Stewart | At that time, it was not a school? | 23:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | That was a seminary. I think it was—They got scholarships. They were smart. I came from a smart family, all but me. I did my best. | 23:25 |
Chris Stewart | Well, you were a teacher at Johnson C. Smith. There's a— | 23:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, I did my best. | 23:43 |
Chris Stewart | —certainly kind of person— | 23:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | And I did graduate with honors from University of Wisconsin while I was, of course as you know, while I was studying at Howard and teaching at Smith. I was mainly then teaching with the—I was teaching freshman, teaching freshman and teaching creative writing. That's when I started the Truewell, the creative writing magazine there. I'll show you some of it. | 23:46 |
Chris Stewart | Well, when did you start this now? When were you teaching at Smith? | 24:20 |
Ione Elston Jones | '56. I started doing some substitute work there in 1956. I had taught and I wasn't able—With my husband gone all the time, I had to stay with the children. My son was 10 years old when we moved here. My daughter was 12, but she was in—She was 13 but she was in boarding school in South Carolina at Bard. Not Bard. Gosh, don't let me mention Bard. I don't know the name of school. | 24:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, she was there until she graduated. She graduated in music, but she didn't want to. She was a natural born dancer. Creative dancer, classic dancer. She told us the night she graduated—Well, then she had—Well, she graduated from high school there, boarding school. She wanted to come to Smith. She wanted to be home for a while because she'd been in boarding school. She came and while she was here, she was taking music from the Beckwith School of Music with Mrs. Beckwith. | 25:07 |
Chris Stewart | Mrs. Beckwith, yeah. | 25:38 |
Ione Elston Jones | She told us the night she graduated from—We were so proud of her. She had her graduation, her own recital. We were so proud of her. We took her out to dinner. She looked so strange. She told us, she said, "Mom and dad, I got something I want to tell you." | 25:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | We had already made applications for her to go to schools that offered good scholarships in music. | 26:03 |
Ione Elston Jones | She said, "Mom and Dad, I got something I want tell you." She looked so strange. She didn't look happy at all." Aren't you glad you're through?" "But I want to tell you something." She said, "I don't want to go to—I don't want to major in music." Says, "I want to major in dance." Her daddy, who was my husband, who was a Presbyterian minister and Sundays school missionary—He never pastored the church. He was just in it for his education work. Taught that. He said, "What?!" She says, "I want to be a dancer." | 26:13 |
Ione Elston Jones | But she was a natural. She said, "Hold your horses, Daddy. I don't mean all this messy stuff." She says, "I want to do creative dances. I want to do ballet." We had to because while she was here, she was the only little Black girl up at Queens taking lessons during the summer. She was taking lessons in dance up there. They let her in so she must have been good. But it was creative, classic dancing. | 26:46 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 27:15 |
Ione Elston Jones | Joe said, "Well, let me think about it." That night we were both disappointed really. That night after she went to bed, I said, "Joe, she's a natural." He says, "I know it." Says, "I know she is." Said, "Well, we'll send her to the best schools we can get her." Said, "Well, we'll send her another [indistinct 00:27:39]," but there wasn't a boarding school here in North Carolina then. | 27:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | Her music teacher said, "One of the best schools I know is Bard College up in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York." We didn't know too much about it, but we checked it out. She went and she was very lonely there. There were just six Black students there, one other girl and three fellows. But I mean the creative department, I mean everything was really great. But she graduated from there and then she got her master's from the University of New York at there, the University of New York. | 27:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | Gosh, what's the name of the school? | 28:36 |
Chris Stewart | [indistinct 00:28:47]. | 28:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | Brown? | 28:46 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, Binghamton? | 28:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | No. No, not really. | 28:46 |
Chris Stewart | The University of North Carolina— | 28:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway— | 28:46 |
Chris Stewart | —Binghamton? | 28:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | —she got her master's degree from there. Now, she has her own. For years, she's had her own dance studio. She lives in Columbia, Maryland. She does all this creative dancing and everything with her group. She has a professional group and then she teaches it. She teaches, has classes, and she has given concerts in Europe and all over the country because she's a— | 28:48 |
Chris Stewart | She's so proud of it. | 29:18 |
Ione Elston Jones | —she's a Zeta. She belongs to a sorority. She's a Zeta. She's been invited to, oh, just all over the country to perform if there are Zeta's there. | 29:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | I have pictures of all them. She met a—When she was in college at Bard, one of the fellas who was in school with her, in boarding school with her there in Winsber, was in college at a university. New York University. They couldn't stand each other while they were in high school, but she would invite him when they had fairs and things like that, she would invite Buddy. Buddy was smart as he could be and so they fell in love. After she got married, she had a big wedding. She got married here and we gave her— | 29:39 |
Chris Stewart | In Charlotte? | 30:41 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. She came home. By that time we had moved here. | 30:42 |
Chris Stewart | I remember that. | 30:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | She came home and now they've been married for years and they have three marvelous children. I'm the grandmother. All of them are out of college. Her oldest son is working in Alaska. He's working in Alaska. Her next son, David—And I have to give it to David. I can't get David to send me a picture of himself. Honestly, that is one of the best looking little guys. I said, I'm not making this from a grandmother's point of view, but David is one—I tell you. Her husband, Buddy—We call him Buddy. His name is Humbert. "Oh, I got to mail his birthday present to him." | 30:49 |
Ione Elston Jones | But he sings with the Omega group. | 31:51 |
Chris Stewart | You were telling me that your husband was an Omega man. You were talking about some of the things that you did, events and things that you did— | 31:53 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, I— | 32:03 |
Chris Stewart | —when you were living here? | 32:04 |
Ione Elston Jones | The Presbyterian board sent him all over the country to lead the singing and church meetings and things like that. Of course, he was one of the—Well, he helped to organize the Omegas. Well, he was one of the first Omega on the campus. He was a senior that year and they organized the Omega fraternity there. He was one of the first, and he was a dedicated—He was more dedicated. I used to tell him, I said, "You care more about the Omega fraternity than you do about me." | 32:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | He was very active in there. It's very active here now and they have a marvelous singing group. He always, whenever they'd sing the Omega song, he helped them to. Well, it was written. The Omega song was written by one of the students out there on the campus. Of course, he was writing with and he was crazy about that fraternity. They're a great bunch of guys. All of them have to be college graduates and this kind of thing. | 33:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | They always sang the love song and whatever it is, if they're having—Every year they have a banquet and stuff like that. Everybody has to stand up when they sing that Omega song and they'll sing it through and then he would take the tenor as a solo part and they'd hum it. It was so beautiful. He had such a beautiful voice. I have just gangs of tapes that are made as he from went all over the country and all that. | 33:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well anyway— | 34:10 |
Chris Stewart | What was it like for you while he was traveling? It sounds like he was a very busy man. | 34:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | He was a very busy man. | 34:18 |
Chris Stewart | Traveling a lot, right? | 34:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | He traveled a lot. | 34:20 |
Chris Stewart | How were you? | 34:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | I was here. I mean, in Chester. We moved here. We lived in Chester 15 years and we built a beautiful home there. I was down there not long ago because one of the old friends of ours, her children gave her a anniversary party and we went down. Someone has bought the house, rebuilt the house right next door to his sister, right across the street from his sister. It was really next door because the street ran between the houses like this. It wasn't like you'd have to cross over. Because the campus. The [indistinct 00:35:09] Campus was across the street. | 34:23 |
Ione Elston Jones | What was that you asked me? | 35:18 |
Chris Stewart | I asked you what it was like— | 35:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, while he was gone. | 35:22 |
Chris Stewart | —traveling all the time. | 35:23 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, I just stayed home. I took care of the children. I just stayed home. I gave up everything to stay home with my children. I was going to all three of them right away so I could get them up out of the way so I could travel. But my mother and my sister and her children who lived in Irmo, oh, they couldn't wait for me to bring them down there. I didn't have the three. | 35:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | I just stayed home with them, but when we moved here, I had to stay here. My son was 10. My little girl, the one who just left, she was three months old when we moved here. My older daughter, as I told you, was in boarding school. Well, I just stayed home, but I had to have my mothering though so I did some, whenever they needed a teacher to— | 35:52 |
Chris Stewart | Substitute? | 36:27 |
Ione Elston Jones | Substitute. | 36:27 |
Chris Stewart | Was it lonely for you with your husband on the road? | 36:28 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, I belonged to—Yeah, it was lonely for him. I missed him a whole lot. I really did. I missed him a lot. But I was busy. That's one reason why I belong to so many. | 36:32 |
Chris Stewart | Clubs? | 36:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | I have a list of them upstairs. I found it the other day. | 36:48 |
Chris Stewart | Let's take a look at that. | 36:53 |
Ione Elston Jones | Okay, I'll see. What did I do with it. Did I put it— | 36:55 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, anyway. | 36:59 |
Chris Stewart | So that helped you stay busy, was having all that— | 37:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh yeah, I was busy. I was used to it. I was used to it. I was never lonely. | 37:03 |
Chris Stewart | Did you think you were able to do things that you wouldn't have been able to do had you been living together? I mean, had you— | 37:10 |
Ione Elston Jones | I mean, if he were here? | 37:20 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 37:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | No, I didn't. Never occurred to me. Never occurred to me. | 37:22 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, he was very cooperative. He was very cooperative. Sometimes, for instance, when he'd go to the—See, he supervised Sunday school missionary work. He was never gone for a real long time. The general assembly was a week and they met all over the country and he supervised the Southwest. | 37:27 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 38:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | He would go there. But he kept in touch. When Jo-Ann came—See, my son went to boarding school too in high school, so when Jo-Ann came, I took her with me. | 38:10 |
Chris Stewart | To visit? | 38:27 |
Ione Elston Jones | He got his vacation in August and I went with him. I'd take the baby. He was crazy about—Jo-Ann was one of the most beautiful babies. I'm telling you the truth. | 38:29 |
Chris Stewart | She's a beautiful woman. | 38:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | I was so mad when I got pregnant. I didn't know what to do. | 38:41 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 38:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | After 10 years. | 38:46 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 38:47 |
Ione Elston Jones | I was so mad. I just fussed at him like all I done if I didn't have—But I really thought I was through. I had gone through the period and he said, "Well, honey, you don't have to have it." I said, "Are you crazy?! I want my baby!" I have always wondered why I said that. But I never did believe in abortions. I really didn't. But suddenly I wanted my baby so I had her. When she was three months old, we moved here. In Charlotte—I mean, in Chester they didn't have a Black doctor and of course we couldn't go to White doctors. But in Rock Hill, my doctor had a doctor there. | 38:48 |
Chris Stewart | Did you have to go to Rock Hill to have Jo-Ann? | 39:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | I had to go to the hospital in Rock Hill to have the baby. Dr. Dewey. | 39:35 |
Ione Elston Jones | I had Jo-Ann there and when Joe came to get me, he couldn't hardly—That was one of the most beautiful children I have ever seen. As a baby, she had long curled hair. She was so pretty. And Joe couldn't hardly drive me home for looking at the baby. He says, "Oh, the beautiful—" Said, "She looks just like mother," and she did. He had a lovely mother. A lovely mother. Said, "She looks just like mother," when she was a baby. | 39:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, there she is now. She's outgrown most of it. | 40:21 |
Chris Stewart | She's a beautiful woman. | 40:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | She's smart. Lord, that's a smart girl. She is smart. She's smart as she can be. She married a genius. I could have told her. I could have told her in the first place that he was a genius. He graduated from college at 14. He was not quite 14 when he graduated from college from Virgin Islands. | 40:27 |
Chris Stewart | When you— | 40:48 |
Ione Elston Jones | From St. Croix. | 40:48 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, I didn't— | 40:48 |
Ione Elston Jones | He writes books and everything but he ain't got—They didn't— (laughs) I knew they weren't going to go, but they were crazy about each other. | 40:50 |
Chris Stewart | When you said that you traveled after your other children were at boarding school and Jo-Ann was still real young, do you remember traveling? Did you travel on trains or did you travel in the car? | 41:01 |
Ione Elston Jones | Every once in a blue moon we'd go by train, but he drove. My husband loved to drive. | 41:15 |
Chris Stewart | What was it like driving? | 41:22 |
Ione Elston Jones | Because since he had to drive so much, the board would give him a new car every two years. I got the old one. | 41:25 |
Chris Stewart | Well, still. It's not that old if it's every two years. | 41:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, I know it wasn't, but— | 41:33 |
Chris Stewart | Did you like driving? | 41:36 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, I didn't mind, but I have this inner ear infection and it's dangerous. I cannot hear a thing in this ear. I can hear like mad in this one, but I gave it up when I—And then I have, what else is it? I have this inner ear infection and I can't walk steadily. | 41:39 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, it's a balance. | 42:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | I had to give up my walking. I used to walk all around the neighborhood, but Jo-Ann takes me out every day just about out to the park and I walk through the woods. I just love the woods out there. I took Freedom Drive. | 42:04 |
Ione Elston Jones | But anyway, Joe, my husband. What were you asking me about? | 42:17 |
Chris Stewart | I was asking you about traveling. | 42:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, traveling. Yeah. And he played. We went everywhere. He went to play. We went to Canada. He loved Canada. He says, "I can eat where I want to in Canada." | 42:31 |
Chris Stewart | I was going to ask you about accommodations when you were traveling in the South. What was it? How did you find accommodations? | 42:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, we'd have to eat at Black restaurants or something like that. But after the integration— | 42:52 |
Chris Stewart | How did you find out about which restaurants. | 42:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | That's why he loved to go to North. | 43:01 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 43:02 |
Ione Elston Jones | We always traveled to the North. We'd go see his sisters. He had one living in Cleveland, one living in Detroit. They were all over the North. We'd visit there. But mainly he loved to go to places like Canada. When the Presbyterian church—And I studied in Austria one summer at the University of Salisbury. He went with me and we loved it. We just loved Austria because I was studying— | 43:02 |
Chris Stewart | When was that? | 43:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | When was I in Austria? | 43:39 |
Chris Stewart | Were your children grown by then or? | 43:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. | 43:47 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 43:50 |
Ione Elston Jones | They were all—Jo-Ann was. Yeah, this is after he retired. He retired in '73. | 43:51 |
Chris Stewart | And you decided to go off to study? | 43:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | Oh, we always went. Yeah, we went to Austria and I studied German. I went, while I was teaching at Smith, I studied somewhere every year. | 44:02 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, nice. | 44:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | I made three or four trips to Europe, but I did graduate work in creative writing. I mean, I almost studied creative writing at the University of Potsdam in New York. Just every year, I'd put in a little studying every year. I was supposed to go to the Virgin Islands. Not St. Croix, but—What's another one? | 44:17 |
Chris Stewart | St. James? | 45:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | No. Puerto Rico. I was supposed to go to Puerto Rico to study there when Jo-Ann's baby came. | 45:02 |
Chris Stewart | The little— | 45:14 |
Ione Elston Jones | The little one came and I said, "To heck with that scholarship." I had a scholarship. The president had got me a scholarship. I said, "To heck with that. I'm going to my baby." So I went down and her little girl was born. She's a genius. | 45:16 |
Chris Stewart | She's beautiful. | 45:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | Kid is a genius. | 45:32 |
Chris Stewart | She is. | 45:32 |
Ione Elston Jones | She's just— | 45:33 |
Chris Stewart | You got to be so— | 45:34 |
Ione Elston Jones | —complete—She is a purely A student all the way through. She sings, she dances, she can dance the interpretive dance, and she can act like a professional. She can act like a professional. | 45:35 |
Chris Stewart | How exciting. | 45:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | She has won prizes in it. That's her trophy there. | 45:59 |
Chris Stewart | Oh yeah. | 46:04 |
Ione Elston Jones | She has a lot of other kinds. | 46:08 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 46:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | She has a certificate from AAC. I mean, they're all over here. Jo-Ann just took my living room. She just came and just took everything. | 46:10 |
Chris Stewart | Well, Ms. Jones, what I have here now is a biographical form that will accompany the tape. What I'd like to do is just take a few minutes and ask you basic biographical information. | 46:19 |
Ione Elston Jones | I'm sorry I'm as forgetful as I am. I'm trying to remember. | 46:34 |
Chris Stewart | Well, I'll tell you what. | 46:37 |
Ione Elston Jones | I have symptoms. | 46:38 |
Chris Stewart | Whatever you remember is fine. | 46:39 |
Ione Elston Jones | We had science majors. I mean we had science geniuses who might come out with, "We is." So we in the English department just couldn't take it. And then, I mean because they were just not doing well in English, but they were just A students, some of them. So that's when we asked the president if we could organize some classes so these folks could—Because they were better students, but they were just poor in English. | 0:02 |
Ione Elston Jones | Sometimes on TV, I hear it. I hear bad English. My minister, bless his heart, he's a PhD with a postgraduate PhD, and he's studied beyond that and a brilliant guy. Every once in a while, he'll crack a little verb, but I ain't going to say nothing to him because he's so smart. | 0:34 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. I'd like to start— | 0:56 |
Ione Elston Jones | It's one of the more complicated things, not the regular. | 0:59 |
Chris Stewart | Right, right, right. Let's start with your full name. | 1:04 |
Ione Elston Jones | Ione Gwendolyn Elston Jones, I-O-N-E. | 1:07 |
Chris Stewart | What's your middle name? | 1:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | Gwendolyn. G-W-E-N-D-O-L-Y-N. | 1:17 |
Chris Stewart | And what's your maiden name, did you say? | 1:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | Ione Elston. E-L-S-T-O-N. | 1:25 |
Chris Stewart | And your telephone number here? | 1:32 |
Ione Elston Jones | 333-0497. | 1:34 |
Chris Stewart | How would you to be referred to on the tape and on the transcript when this gets transcribed, what name would you like to be referred to as? | 1:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | Everybody calls me Ione E. Jones. Ione E. Jones. Ione Jones. I don't think there's any more Ione Jones. Mama named me. She had a nurse in the hospital when I was born, and the nurse was named Ione. She was Greek. | 1:53 |
Chris Stewart | It's a beautiful name. | 2:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | She was Greek, and Mama was just crazy about her. She said, "You should name your baby after me." Because I told you I came 10 years after that. She was not expecting. She says, "Okay." I get Ione, Ione. I get all kind of things. | 2:14 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 2:32 |
Ione Elston Jones | But Iona was a goddess of memory. I can't remember where I laid my head when I go to bed at night. "Where's my head?" It's not quite that bad, but— | 2:34 |
Chris Stewart | What's your birthdate? | 2:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | June the 15th, 1909. | 2:46 |
Chris Stewart | I should know that. It's your birthday today. And you were born where? | 2:51 |
Ione Elston Jones | I was born in— | 2:58 |
Chris Stewart | Jakawka? What was the name of the place? | 2:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | Just put Anniston down there. | 3:04 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 3:06 |
Ione Elston Jones | A-N-N-I-S-T-O-N, Anniston, Alabama. Are you going to put me in this writeup? | 3:06 |
Chris Stewart | Pardon me? | 3:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | Am I supposed to be in the writeup with Charlie? | 3:18 |
Chris Stewart | Well, I should actually explain this more carefully to you. What this is is this is part of a big project, a five-year long project that's funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University is sponsoring the project. What we're doing is we're collecting oral histories from people who can tell us about what their lives were like during segregation— | 3:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | Really? | 3:52 |
Chris Stewart | —and we're collecting oral histories first— | 3:52 |
Ione Elston Jones | I haven't told you. | 3:56 |
Chris Stewart | —in North Carolina. | 3:57 |
Ione Elston Jones | I haven't told you what I went through during segregation. | 3:57 |
Chris Stewart | But you have. You've told me. Well, actually, I can come back. We can come back and talk more about this, too. | 3:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | I live right down the street from Smith. Charlie, as I said, was in theology. He was a sophomore in theology at Smith after he finished there. I told you how he had gone to this thing, and he went to the embassy. They called us, and we wired money so he could stay there. But they didn't have anywhere to stay, so he had to stay in a hotel or something. So that was quite an experience. | 4:06 |
Ione Elston Jones | He and some of the other fellows, because they went from several different colleges all over the country, and he knew them because he was in this National Student, and they decided to take their ukuleles. He took his ukulele. Charlie can sing. Now, he can really sing. My son can sing. So they took their ukuleles. When the thing was over and they didn't have anywhere to stay, they decided to see some of the country. | 4:50 |
Ione Elston Jones | They organized themselves. They had about four or five ukeleles, and they just got more. They went everywhere and just— | 5:22 |
Chris Stewart | And played. Wow. | 5:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, anyway, he came home so tired. But he had to go to Washington. He had to go to Washington to report. They had this thing that those who had gone with this thing, they were required to come to Washington to explain what happened. So he had to go. I have all those pictures in there. So he had to go to report to this committee, and I picked up my paper when he was gone. My husband always got The New York Times. | 5:32 |
Ione Elston Jones | So he brought it home. He said, "Ione, look." There was my son on the front page talking to them like this, talking to that group. The next day, it came out on the front page of The Charlotte Observer. I have all that. Charlie was telling them saying, "You're asking me why we went over there. We went over there to run the thing back behind the Iron Curtain." He says, "Are you trying to say that we're over there to participate in it as—" | 6:07 |
Ione Elston Jones | Charlie was laying them out and had the whole article about it. He said, "No, I came here." But he was so mad. He was so mad when he started driving home. On the way, he had his radio on and he heard on the radio where the students were protesting here in Greensboro. He made up his mind that he was going to do the same thing when he got here to Smith. He was vice president of student council. | 6:42 |
Ione Elston Jones | So he came home one night and he said, after a meeting, he said, "Mom and Dad, I got something I want to tell you." He came home. He said, "We're going down tomorrow." I'll never forget it. It was cold on the 9th of February. I'll never forget it as long as I live. He said, "We're going down tomorrow." I remember it was cold, and my husband said, "I'd like to have some good old hot chocolate. Let's go in the kitchen." | 7:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | So we were in the kitchen making some hot chocolate and everything. He came in the back door, and he said, "I got something I want to tell y'all." He said, "We're going down tomorrow." I said, "Who?" He said, "Students." I said, "Going where?" I'm teaching at Smith now. He said, "We're going downtown to protest the lunch counters." I said, "No, no, no, no." I went crazy. "No, no, no, Charles. You can't do that. You can't do that." | 7:52 |
Ione Elston Jones | My husband, he said, "Mom." He says, "Don't worry." He said, "Don't worry." He said, "We've got to do it." He made his mind up on his way back to do that. Well, anyway— | 8:24 |
Chris Stewart | What do you think you had to do with your son's character and his decision? I mean how did you raise him? | 8:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | We did the best we could. He had a very strict father. Who is that? Is that somebody coming? Hope not. We just raised him the old-fashioned way. When he needed a spanking, he got it. If he need a beating, he got it. One time he slipped on and went to the show. He was a little bitty old guy all by himself, went to the movie. There was this Black movie up here. We didn't know where Charles was. We didn't know where he was. We just went crazy almost. | 8:53 |
Ione Elston Jones | And then somebody called and said, because we had called all over and somebody said—I think he called a friend of mine. She said, "I just came back from the movie." I called her, and said, "Charles was there." Honey, my husband took off. Sure enough, the movie was over by that time. Charlie came home and, boy, Joe gave him one good—He said, "Don't you ever do that again. We went crazy." We did. We didn't know where Charles was. He was just a kid. | 9:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | He was just about 11 or 12. He never did do that again. But we never did spank him a whole lot. We just sat down and talked to them, and they knew we meant business. Of course, we gave them every possible opportunity to—But Charlie's always had a mind of his own. | 10:02 |
Chris Stewart | He sounds a lot like his mother. | 10:23 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, I don't know that. But my husband was a smart man, too. But this little girl, I'm telling you about my little granddaughter. She's an A student all the way around. She's as smart as she can be, but so were my mother and my sister and my brother. | 10:27 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah, it sounds like it runs in the family. | 10:37 |
Ione Elston Jones | I was just the normal. | 10:44 |
Chris Stewart | You worked hard. | 10:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | I sure did. I worked real hard. | 10:48 |
Chris Stewart | What is your husband's full name? | 10:50 |
Ione Elston Jones | Joseph Thomas Jones. | 10:52 |
Chris Stewart | When is his birthdate? | 10:58 |
Ione Elston Jones | 10th of February. | 11:01 |
Chris Stewart | Do you recall the year? He's 10 years older than you? | 11:04 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, 1909. No, 1902. I was born in 1909. | 11:09 |
Chris Stewart | When did he die? | 11:15 |
Ione Elston Jones | He died in 1983. | 11:16 |
Chris Stewart | And he was born where? | 11:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | In McConnells, South Carolina. | 11:22 |
Chris Stewart | I'm sorry, where? | 11:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | McConnells. It's a little suburb of York. M-C-C-O-N-N-E-L-L-S. McConnells, South Carolina. His father and mother opened a school there. | 11:27 |
Chris Stewart | What would you say his job title was? | 11:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | He supervised religious education work with the National Presbyterian Board. Supervisor of religious education work, National Presbyterian Board out of New York at the time. They're in St. Louis now. | 11:46 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. What is your mother's name? | 12:13 |
Ione Elston Jones | Eva Vandergrift. V-A-N-D-E-R-G-R-I-F-T. | 12:16 |
Chris Stewart | D-E-R-G? | 12:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | R-I-F-T. | 12:27 |
Chris Stewart | Last name? Is that her last name? | 12:29 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. | 12:32 |
Chris Stewart | Vandergrift? | 12:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | Ms. Eva Vandergrift. | 12:34 |
Chris Stewart | What was her maiden name? That was her maiden name? | 12:38 |
Ione Elston Jones | That was her maiden name. | 12:39 |
Chris Stewart | What was her married name? | 12:42 |
Ione Elston Jones | Eva Elston. | 12:43 |
Chris Stewart | That's right. | 12:47 |
Ione Elston Jones | Papa's name was Charles Elston. | 12:53 |
Chris Stewart | Do you recall when your mother was born? | 12:56 |
Ione Elston Jones | She never was quite sure. | 13:02 |
Chris Stewart | Where was she born? | 13:05 |
Ione Elston Jones | She was born there. No, she was born in Montgomery. | 13:11 |
Chris Stewart | Montgomery. Do you recall when she died? | 13:15 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mama died—Do I have the date? She was 90 years old when she died. | 13:21 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 13:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | What year was that? | 13:34 |
Chris Stewart | She was a teacher? | 13:37 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. Sunday school teacher, a devout Baptist. | 13:38 |
Chris Stewart | Where was your father born? | 13:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | He was born in Choccolocco, Alabama. | 13:47 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Now I want to make sure I spell this. | 13:52 |
Ione Elston Jones | I'll tell you, put it DeArmanville because it was the same thing. The slave owner who owned his parents lived in a little town called Choccolocco, but it has now become—Well, Choccolocco is still there. Well, Choccolocco. But it's— | 13:55 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. How do you spell that? | 14:15 |
Ione Elston Jones | —DeArmanville. It's C-H-O-C-C-O-L-O-C-A. | 14:16 |
Chris Stewart | And that's in Alabama as well? | 14:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. | 14:32 |
Chris Stewart | And your father's occupation? | 14:34 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, he supervised— | 14:38 |
Chris Stewart | He supervised the warehouse. | 14:42 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, when he came to Harbison, well, he was a supervisor. Yeah, he supervised a portion of the warehouse. | 14:46 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Now what about your brothers and sisters? What are their names? | 15:10 |
Ione Elston Jones | Now, when Papa died, he was working on the campus at Harbison Junior College. | 15:12 |
Chris Stewart | How do you spell that? | 15:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | H-A-R-B-I-S-O-N. | 15:22 |
Chris Stewart | Now, your brothers and sisters, their names? | 15:27 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, my sister's name was Zaidee, Z-A-I-D-E-E. Zaidee M. Elston Reasoner, R-E-A-S-O-N. Now, therein lies a tale. That man was one of the most brilliant men. He was from Pittsburgh. He was a Presbyterian, and they had put him through the University of Pennsylvania. He had also taken several other different courses and things like that. He was on the faculty there, and my sister was also on the faculty. | 15:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, she was really, what you call it, matron. She was a matron there. She was. But he was on the faculty. He taught mechanics, and he was an electrician. He finished, what's that big school in Pennsylvania? What is the name of it? There in Pittsburgh? Oh, heck. | 16:23 |
Chris Stewart | Not Penn State? | 17:03 |
Ione Elston Jones | No, it wasn't Penn State. Oh, gosh. It's still a very prominent school. I have to look it up. | 17:04 |
Chris Stewart | Where was she born? Was she born— | 17:15 |
Ione Elston Jones | She was born in Choccolocco. All of them, my brother and my two sisters were born there. I was born— | 17:17 |
Chris Stewart | What was your other sister's name? | 17:29 |
Ione Elston Jones | Reetha. R-E-E-T-H-A. Reetha May. | 17:32 |
Chris Stewart | R-E— | 17:40 |
Ione Elston Jones | E-E-T-H-A. Reetha May Elston. | 17:45 |
Chris Stewart | Was she the sister that died when she was— | 17:46 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. | 17:48 |
Chris Stewart | And then your brother? | 17:51 |
Ione Elston Jones | Millard, M-I-L-L-A-R-D, Fillmore. Mama thought Millard Fillmore was about one of the best. | 17:53 |
Chris Stewart | Presidents? | 18:01 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. Elston. | 18:08 |
Chris Stewart | He was also born in Choccolocco? | 18:09 |
Ione Elston Jones | Huh? | 18:09 |
Chris Stewart | He was born in Choccolocco? | 18:10 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. | 18:10 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. In the birth order, where were you in the—You were the baby. | 18:13 |
Ione Elston Jones | My sister's, Zaidee, was the oldest. | 18:17 |
Chris Stewart | And you were the— | 18:18 |
Ione Elston Jones | And then my brother, and then my sister, Reetha. | 18:21 |
Chris Stewart | And then you. | 18:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | Then 10 years later, me. | 18:28 |
Chris Stewart | What about your children? Your children's names? | 18:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | Eva Jones Anderson. | 18:35 |
Chris Stewart | And do you recall her birthdate? | 18:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | I better not forget it. She was born on February the 8th. She's 60 years old now. So that would be what? 19? | 18:47 |
Chris Stewart | 1933. | 19:02 |
Ione Elston Jones | That's right. | 19:02 |
Chris Stewart | And she was born in Chester? | 19:08 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. | 19:11 |
Chris Stewart | And then your son? | 19:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | He was born on March the 8th. No, mm-mm. Charlie was born on July—Wait a minute. Charlie's a Virgo. He was born I think it was the 22nd. Wait a minute. I think Charlie was born on the 22nd. | 19:18 |
Chris Stewart | Of July? | 19:55 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. | 19:56 |
Chris Stewart | How old is Charlie? | 19:58 |
Ione Elston Jones | Charlie was born in 1937. | 20:04 |
Chris Stewart | What is his middle name? Does he have a middle name? | 20:13 |
Ione Elston Jones | His name is Joseph Charles. | 20:17 |
Chris Stewart | So he goes by his middle name. | 20:20 |
Ione Elston Jones | Joseph Charles. Attorney Joseph Charles. | 20:23 |
Chris Stewart | Right. And then Jo-Ann? | 20:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. Jo-Ann's birthday's the 22nd of June. | 20:33 |
Chris Stewart | And was she born in 1947? 10 years after your— | 20:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. | 20:51 |
Chris Stewart | What's Jo-Ann's full name? | 20:54 |
Ione Elston Jones | Jo-Ann. She's named from Joe. A-N-N. Jo-Ann Ione. Wait a minute. Jo-Ann Gwendolyn. It's a dash between the—That A and N should be A-N-D. But, of course, we don't spell it like that. | 20:57 |
Chris Stewart | It should be—I'm sorry? | 21:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | It's hyphenated. Jo-Ann. | 21:17 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, I see. | 21:20 |
Ione Elston Jones | J-O, hyphen, A-N-N. She married Moorhead, M-O-O-R-H-E-A-D. But they are divorced. | 21:20 |
Chris Stewart | Does she go by Moorhead or does she go by Jones? | 21:47 |
Ione Elston Jones | She goes by Jones. | 21:50 |
Chris Stewart | Do you have grandchildren? | 21:51 |
Ione Elston Jones | Eight. I may not be able to remember their birthdays. | 21:57 |
Chris Stewart | You don't have to remember those. You just have to remember how many you have. | 22:03 |
Ione Elston Jones | I can remember their names. You want their names? | 22:04 |
Chris Stewart | Nope, we don't. I don't have a space for their names. | 22:07 |
Ione Elston Jones | I have eight good-looking grandkids. | 22:09 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Now we'd like to put down your residential history, so where you lived. | 22:12 |
Ione Elston Jones | I lived in Anniston, Alabama. | 22:18 |
Chris Stewart | Where else have you lived? | 22:25 |
Ione Elston Jones | Irmo, South Carolina, Chester, South Carolina, and Charlotte, North Carolina. | 22:27 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Now we're going to talk about your education history, the schools that you went to. | 22:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | If I can remember them all. | 22:49 |
Chris Stewart | We can do it. So where did you go— | 22:50 |
Ione Elston Jones | I went to South Highland High School. That was in Anniston, Alabama, private Presbyterian school, South Highland. Before that, I went to a Presbyterian grammar school. Well, I went there till the fourth grade. It was a Presbyterian elementary school. | 22:53 |
Chris Stewart | And was this in— | 23:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | Anniston. | 23:26 |
Chris Stewart | —Anniston? | 23:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | All in Anniston. And then I went to South Highland Presbyterian High School. That was in Anniston. | 23:31 |
Chris Stewart | And that was to what grade? | 23:48 |
Ione Elston Jones | I graduated from there, 12th grade. I had to do— | 23:50 |
Chris Stewart | And then you went to Barber? | 23:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | I had to do the salutatorian in Latin. I had a little boyfriend there. My boyfriend that I'd had, he graduated and went to Talladega. Right in the middle of my speech, I'm just—I had known that thing. I knew that. All the graduates were sitting on the stage with me. I got up to do the salutatory. I had a little boyfriend there. My boyfriend had gone to college. It wasn't no boyfriend. | 24:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | In he walked. In walked my boyfriend from Talladega. Talladega's only about 12 miles away. I forgot my speech. (laughs) I started just saying Latin words because I knew didn't— | 24:30 |
Chris Stewart | Nobody knew. | 24:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | —nobody there but the principal of the school taught it, and he knew it. I kind of looked at him. He was so mad because I was just saying—Well, finally, I got back into it and finished it. Nobody knew, but Mama knew it, and my classmates knew it. They went into hysterics almost. They were trying to keep from laughing out. So that was a horrible time. You don't have to put that. You don't have to put it. | 24:45 |
Ione Elston Jones | But here I am with two boyfriends, and both of them want to walk home with me. (laughs) Both had sent flowers. | 25:11 |
Chris Stewart | For your graduation. Then you went to Barber? | 25:21 |
Ione Elston Jones | And so I walked home between both of them. (laughs) | 25:24 |
Chris Stewart | Well, that's diplomatic. | 25:27 |
Ione Elston Jones | And that's as far. I wasn't—Mm-mm. | 25:28 |
Chris Stewart | So then you went to Barber— | 25:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | I went to— | 25:32 |
Chris Stewart | —after South Highland? | 25:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | Uh-huh. Barber Memorial. It was Barber College. Margaret Barber College, that's what it is. | 25:34 |
Chris Stewart | Margaret Barber? | 25:44 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. It was [indistinct 00:25:51]. | 25:50 |
Chris Stewart | You went there for— | 25:53 |
Ione Elston Jones | They moved to Alabama. It wasn't accredited as a college. So they moved it to Concord. | 25:56 |
Chris Stewart | To Scotia? | 26:04 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah, and it became Barber-Scotia. So I graduated from Barber-Scotia and Johnson C. Smith. You see, Barber, I was there just one year. The state wouldn't accredit it. But they said that we could go to—After we graduated from there, we could go to, Smith was an all-men's school, that we could go there to get accredited and whatever we needed to get accreditation, we could take that. I got all of my accreditations, except I had to take some more French. | 26:07 |
Chris Stewart | What degree did you get through Barber-Scotia and Johnson C. Smith? | 26:57 |
Ione Elston Jones | AB degree. | 27:02 |
Chris Stewart | In education? | 27:04 |
Ione Elston Jones | No, in English. | 27:06 |
Chris Stewart | I see. | 27:07 |
Ione Elston Jones | English and English literature. I studied every summer. I studied one summer at the University of Potsdam— | 27:09 |
Chris Stewart | But you— | 27:23 |
Ione Elston Jones | —in New York. I studied creative writing. | 27:23 |
Chris Stewart | But you received your master's from the University of Wisconsin, correct? | 27:26 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. | 27:30 |
Chris Stewart | What degree did you— | 27:32 |
Ione Elston Jones | I studied until the sit-ins started, and I could not concentrate. I was worried to death about my boy. I really was. I just had to leave. I thought I'd get as far away as I could. I was always crazy about the University of Wisconsin because I had gone out there one time because I was president of the Y at the school. I had gone out there to a meeting, and I just fell in love with the campus. | 27:34 |
Ione Elston Jones | So I told Joe. I said, "Joe, I hate to leave you so far off," because we were just right down the street from Smith. He said, "I can understand it." He said, "I can understand." So I made application there. Of course, they had to get all my records from Howard, and they evaluated them highly. I graduated with honors. | 28:07 |
Chris Stewart | In English literature? | 28:31 |
Ione Elston Jones | English literature. | 28:32 |
Chris Stewart | Do you recall the date that you graduated, that you received your degree? | 28:35 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was 1970. The graduate degree was in 1970. I think it was 1970. I finished everything but my thesis, and I was working on it. I wrote it on the Sioux Indians. | 28:41 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, really? | 29:14 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was about 1976, I guess, before I really got— | 29:17 |
Chris Stewart | That you finished your thesis? | 29:20 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. But they had my whole record there. I had to write two thesis. I had to write one for Smith and one for— | 29:21 |
Chris Stewart | They were working you. Okay. Now we're at your work history. | 29:30 |
Ione Elston Jones | Now, I had my MA degree a couple years after I started teaching because I was mainly teaching with the freshman students who needed help. Well, I just needed a couple of hours more, just a few hours. | 29:34 |
Chris Stewart | Well, because you'd been taking courses at Howard, right? | 29:51 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. So I didn't need but one more year, really. | 29:55 |
Chris Stewart | And then that thesis? | 29:59 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. | 30:00 |
Chris Stewart | I just defended my thesis, thank goodness. | 30:02 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, I tell you, don't put that in 1976. | 30:07 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, I put 1970. | 30:10 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was before then. | 30:15 |
Chris Stewart | Was it before then? | 30:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. Put 1950. It was about 1950. | 30:17 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, okay. | 30:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | Wait a minute. 19— | 30:25 |
Chris Stewart | You started teaching at Smith in '56. | 30:29 |
Ione Elston Jones | Mm-hmm. I finished it up in '58, really. | 30:32 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Okay, now we're on to— | 30:36 |
Ione Elston Jones | But the thing about it, my son was leading the sit-ins. Let me tell you what happened. My son was leading the sit-ins here, and I'm going absolutely crazy. And then after they opened up everything here, I was sitting in my French class, and one of the girls who was in the—I had Jo-Ann with me. She was about 10, and she was going to summer school there. I was sitting there taking notes. | 30:37 |
Ione Elston Jones | One of the girls who was in the building where I stayed—I happened to be sitting on the back. The seats in the classroom were step-like. I was sitting up on the last seat. I came in and I was just a little bit late, just a minute or too late. So I just slipped in the back and sat down on the top seat. So I saw her when she came to the door where we come in, and she saw me. Then she came up the stairs and handed me a newspaper, and it had my son's picture on it leading the sit-ins here in Charlotte and big headline. | 31:24 |
Ione Elston Jones | The lunch counters integrated in Charlotte, I said, "No." I said it right out in class. Everybody looked around at me. I was so embarrassed. I said, "Oh, no." The teacher said, "Mrs. Jones, I'd like to speak to you." No, it wasn't a French class. It was English literature. That's what it was because they have an English literature foundation out there, and everybody has to take that. I had to take Shakespeare. It was a breeze because I had studied it and taught. So I got through that. | 32:20 |
Ione Elston Jones | But anyway, I just said, "No." I did it just like that. He looked at me and turned as red as a beet. Everybody looked around. He said, "Mrs. Jones, I'd like to speak to you after class." Sure enough, I showed it to him. He said, "What? What?" He had heard. Some of the students had told him about my son leading it. Charlie had been out there. My husband sent him out there so I could see him, to see that he's all in one piece because he came up on the campus. | 33:05 |
Ione Elston Jones | So many of them had demonstrated with him in different places. Of course, they kind of idolized him a little. So I told him. I showed them the paper. There was Charlie's picture in front and the Smith students were behind him. "They have integrated the lunch counters in Charlotte." I said, "I'm sorry, but that's my son." He asked me 1,000 questions. He was so interested in it because so many students up there were demonstrating. | 33:37 |
Ione Elston Jones | The thing about it is when they decided on the campus at Charlotte to protest downtown, they came down to my house and that's when Charlie said that, "We're going downtown tomorrow." I said, "No, uh-uh, uh-uh." He said, "Mom, we're going." So they went, he and the other two fellows who were going. They went to the telephone, and they called the police department and said, "We're calling from Johnson C. Smith, and we want to tell you that we are going down to protest tomorrow." | 34:17 |
Ione Elston Jones | "Who's going down?" He said, "The students from Johnson C. Smith, and we would like your protection." "Who's behind all this?" He said, "Absolutely nobody. We are." And that's the truth, nobody. They made their own plans. They did everything. There was somebody up there. It was soon after all this stuff up there at Greensboro. They said, "We're going to do our own thing." Said, "We're not going to get tied up in that." Said, "We're just going to do the best we can." | 35:01 |
Ione Elston Jones | It just happened that one of the teachers from The Observer was teaching creative writing at Smith. He was teaching there. No, he wasn't teaching that. He was supervising the paper. | 35:32 |
Chris Stewart | The newspaper? | 36:00 |
Ione Elston Jones | Newspapers that went out from Smith and all like that. He was influential and said, "Don't worry." He said, "I know the boy. I know them." Well, anyway, to make a long story short, the next day they went down all over town, everywhere. They sat down. They were so quiet. I have pictures because I went absolutely crazy. I'll tell you the truth. My phone was ringing. But they called the police and told them, "Who's behind this?" | 36:01 |
Ione Elston Jones | They said, "We are. Nobody, absolutely nobody. We want your protection." He said, "Well, we'll see." Charles said, "We want to go down tomorrow at 10:00." He said, "Well, wait here just one minute." This was the chief of police. So he went somewhere and, after a while, Charlie didn't know what was going to happen. The chief of police came and said, "Now, tell me what you want to do." | 36:33 |
Ione Elston Jones | So Charlie told him. Said, "We just want to open up the lunch counter." Said, "We're students, and we would like to open up the lunch counter so we can eat downtown sometime." "Who's behind all this?" "Nobody. Just us. Just the students." "You sure of that?" He said, "Of course." He named the man who was behind it that said, "No, we have nothing to do with it. He has nothing to do with this. This is just us." He says, "Well, if that's the case, we'll protect you." He said, "But now, you can't get nobody else in here to help you." | 37:06 |
Ione Elston Jones | Well, the next day Charlie's picture came out on The New York Times. Students began to fly in here from everywhere because they knew him. Charlie said, "No, uh-huh." Most of them were White. He said, "No." He said, "I'm sorry." He said, "I appreciate your coming." He said, "But you cannot be in this." They understood. I held onto him. I said, "Charlie, I do. I can't take this." | 37:37 |
Chris Stewart | It's a hard thing for a mother to watch. | 38:09 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was worse up at Howard. So that's when I made application at University— | 38:10 |
Chris Stewart | Of Wisconsin? | 38:18 |
Ione Elston Jones | —of Wisconsin. They got all my records from Howard, and I was accepted. I didn't have to take anything I'd taken at Howard, except the Shakespeare. So I made all A's in that. That was just a breeze. | 38:19 |
Chris Stewart | Now we're at your work history, and what we'd like to know is the most important jobs to you, the jobs that you felt were most important to you. | 38:34 |
Ione Elston Jones | Teaching. I was principal of a school one time, a little rural school. | 38:45 |
Chris Stewart | Where was that? | 38:52 |
Ione Elston Jones | This was in a little town near Anniston. | 38:53 |
Chris Stewart | What was the name of the school? Do you recall? | 38:58 |
Ione Elston Jones | It was a little— | 39:04 |
Chris Stewart | Little country school? A little— | 39:07 |
Ione Elston Jones | A little country school, yeah. What was the name? | 39:08 |
Chris Stewart | Was that right after you were done with college? | 39:10 |
Ione Elston Jones | Yeah. | 39:15 |
Chris Stewart | What other jobs? | 39:16 |
Ione Elston Jones | I was principal there at that little school. It was just a little community country school. So I taught there for a couple of years. And then the principal of the city school, Finley High School in Chester, called me and asked me if I would teach there because one of the teachers had gotten married and left and asked me if I would teach there. I was glad because I had to drive up to my school every day. It was about eight miles from— | 39:23 |
Chris Stewart | What did you teach at the Finley School? | 39:58 |
Ione Elston Jones | I taught English. I taught English and Latin. | 40:00 |
Chris Stewart | What other jobs— | 40:06 |
Ione Elston Jones | And math. I taught English. You know what I taught? I taught English and math and algebra. No, I didn't teach algebra there. I taught algebra at the first school that I taught at, that little first school. | 40:07 |
Chris Stewart | What other jobs did you have? | 40:23 |
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