Dorothy Cannon interview recording, 1993 June 30
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Chris Stewart | Ask you to state your name and your address so that I can get a voice level on them. | 0:03 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. Are you ready? My name is Dorothy Cannon. My address is 1516 Main Street in Scotland Neck, North Carolina. | 0:08 |
Chris Stewart | Perfect. Would you like me to call you Dorothy or Mrs. Cannon? | 0:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Please, call me Dorothy. | 0:30 |
Chris Stewart | I want to, you know. | 0:32 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Dorothy's fine. | 0:32 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. I'd like to start by asking you to think as far back as you possibly can and start by asking you, you grew up here in this area, not at Scotland, but in the— | 0:37 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Tillery area, yes. | 0:57 |
Chris Stewart | Where were you born? | 1:00 |
Dorothy White Cannon | In Tillery, in a community called Black Gate. Now, you've been to the community center? Black Gate is beyond the community center, and that was part of the area that was wiped out by a flood in 1940. | 1:04 |
Chris Stewart | So it's over down by the Roanoke River there? | 1:22 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah, near, near the Roanoke River. The house I lived in after my family moved from Black Gate because of the flood. I don't know exactly when we moved in the house, but you've seen Tillery. I was the only city kid. | 1:24 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 1:43 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. I lived in the back of Tillery, right there. Right in the back of the stores. | 1:43 |
Chris Stewart | Really? Did you grow up there? | 1:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. That's the only home I remembered in Tillery is that particular house. Right next to the railroad where the passenger train stopped. And matter of fact, the train station is still there. Yeah. | 1:52 |
Chris Stewart | How old were you when the flood? | 2:09 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I was two. I don't remember that. | 2:12 |
Chris Stewart | Did people tell you about it though? | 2:15 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. My family, my aunt Elmara Clark, I showed you her photograph. And my grandmother did not talk so much, but Elmara was very talkative. And I remember always my oldest brother, they always said, "Oh, he was born the year of the flood." Not 1940, but the year of the flood. And that's the way they would say things. But they were wiped out. They didn't say very many things, so actually you could say wiped out. And everybody had to be relocated, the whole bit. But nobody has talked in detail other than there was a flood, we had to be relocated, and that's it. No other details. | 2:17 |
Chris Stewart | Did your family own land there? | 3:09 |
Dorothy White Cannon | No. No. My family has never owned any land. My Aunt Elmara owns about two acres now. Well, she owned that since 19, about '47 or so, and a house which is near Tillery. And my cousin, who is 90 years old, still lives there by herself. Her name is Annie Johnson. | 3:13 |
Chris Stewart | We talked to her. | 3:42 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Hmm? | 3:43 |
Chris Stewart | We talked to her. | 3:43 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Did you really? Did you visit with me? | 3:43 |
Chris Stewart | I think so. Annie Johnson? | 3:45 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah. I don't think you talked to her— | 3:50 |
Chris Stewart | We have Addie Johnson. | 3:52 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, because if you talk to Cousin Annie, then you would have to go through me. She's not a very talkative lady. And quite often I've heard that she was not mentally, what's the word? Not alert. But she was not all there mentally. But just since I've been here, I found that is not so. For example, my girlfriend left Tillery in 1959. She was visiting the latter part of '92. And I took Margie over, I said, "Cousin Annie, do you know who this lady is?" She looked up at her and she said, "Oh yes, that's Ms. Rose Brown daughter." I was floored. Here it is, '92, 1959. So I said, after I regained some consciousness, I guess, I said, "Well, what is her name?" She said, "Oh, her name Margie." | 3:53 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Another thing about her, she dipped snuff all her life and one day, Aunt Doll, who is Elmara, said to her, "Annie, you're not dipping snuff anymore." She said, "No, I saw on TV it'll give you cancer and I don't want no cancer." Just like that. And she was 70 some years old when she stopped that. She never said a word, nothing. So I question if the word mentally, not retarded, they never said retarded, but whatever mental weakness was a correct label. I think she was different, and nobody knew how to draw it out of her. Just last week she told me that she was born April 15th and her brother, she was a knee baby. Her brother was born March 10th, and he died when he was 23. | 4:56 |
Dorothy White Cannon | So I said to her, "Cousin Annie, can you tell me what year you were born or your brother?" She said, "No, so, but if Pa was here, he could tell you." She said, "Pa never told me that." So she remembers what her father told her, and she remembers very well, even though she's not supposed to be all there. She's a fantastic little lady, 90 years old, living by herself. And you have to see this place. When you say dark, you mean dark in the true sense of the word. | 6:00 |
Chris Stewart | Really? Really? Wow. Wow. Wow. You were a town girl. | 6:38 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh yeah. City girl. (laughs) | 6:48 |
Chris Stewart | I was going to say city girl, but I've been corrected from other people. Do you remember what your house looked like? | 6:48 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, yes. No running water, no electric, unpainted. But my girlfriend said to me last night, the same Margie I'm talking about. She said, "You know, I can remember coming to your house, and your house was so clean." I said, "It should have been. All the scrubbing I did on Saturday morning on my knees." We had the wooden floors, and every Saturday, of course, you had to get up and scrub the floors after you washed the clothes on the scrub board. And then of course the washing consisted of, the first, water. Then you put it in the black pot and you boil the clothes, and then you would take them out of the pot and you would rinse them two times and then hang them up. And in my household, the sheets were mostly made out of hog feed bags. Okay? | 6:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Once the hog feed was out of the bags, they would sew them together and make sheets out of them. Simple as that. And were they heavy to have to wash them and hang them on the lawn? And the thing about the washing part, we had to in those days as we said tote all the water. Because our pump was, well, I would say a half block away. We didn't have water right in the yard. And of course, to boil the clothes, you had to make the fire around a big black pot, and then you would put a lot of soup in. You'd stand and the clothes would start boiling. You would stand and you would hit them, knock them down. I don't know what we were doing, but that's what we had to do. But in actuality, now that I about it, it was just like the agitator in a washing machine. We would take and just go up and down and up and down and I guess help clean the clothes. | 8:04 |
Chris Stewart | Were you living with your mother and father now or with your grandmother? | 9:08 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I have never lived for any length of time with my mother and father. I was living with my grandmother and my grandfather at that particular time. | 9:11 |
Chris Stewart | When did you start living with your— | 9:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I think I have a brief memory of starting first grade in Newport News, Virginia, and we lived 729 North 16th Street, and the first school in Virginia, I remember attending was Dunbar, which was just across the street from our house. Then apparently, I don't have too much of a memory about what happened then, but I do know I went on to North Carolina to live with my grandmother, and I stayed there until I graduated from high school. I think my parents probably separated and I'm not sure when that happened. But I guess it would be somewhere around '46 because I do have a brother that was born in 1945 and they were still together. | 9:23 |
Chris Stewart | So you lived with them in North Carolina when the flood came? | 10:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes, they were living here. | 10:24 |
Chris Stewart | And then they moved into town? | 10:25 |
Dorothy White Cannon | They moved to Virginia. but somewhere along the line, I don't know when these things happened. The flood was there. We moved, my grandmother moved uptown, but where my mother and father moved at that particular time, I don't know. All I know is they moved, they went to Virginia because my grandfather used to work on the long shore during the war, and I just don't have too much memory about certain things, but I don't really know where they moved from to be honest with you. | 10:29 |
Chris Stewart | So when you were in the first grade or around the first grade, you went back to North Carolina. And that was your home. | 11:11 |
Dorothy White Cannon | That from then on, I never went back to Virginia, and somewhere along the line, I was pretty smart, I got skipped because I graduated from high school when I was 16 years old, but I went to a school called Shady Grove. And right now that's a church on 561. It's called the Royal Light Church. You see the old part that was the school. And after that, I went to the middle school, I guess you could call it, but it was Tillery Chapel. It went to the eighth grade and after eighth grade, then I went to Brawley High School in Scotland Neck for high school for four years. | 11:18 |
Chris Stewart | You mentioned when we were in that group meeting that your family, your grandfather and grandmother were day laborers and that they worked, I suppose, contracted day by day to work on. | 12:07 |
Dorothy White Cannon | You could say that. We would say that's modern day phraseology, contracting. In those days, you just worked for other folks, and that's what we did. As I said, we worked for the Grants, we worked for the Marrows, which was my grandmother's cousin that was a family, Charlie Marrow and Christina Marrow. They had a really nice big farm. We worked for some of the White people in town, I think Edward Martin, a man called Mr. Madre. All I can remember is Mr. Madre had the worst land. All his crops had wire grass, and that was hard. | 12:23 |
Chris Stewart | I bet. Yeah. | 13:02 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And that's about all I can remember. But we worked around wherever we were needed, and as I stated in a previous interview, I started working when I was six years old. My Aunt Elmara, she was a phenomenal lady too. She believed that you might as well get out and start working as soon as you start walking, because you're going to have to work. And because my mom and dad were away, and in those days, my mom was working housework in Pennsylvania. Well, first she was in Virginia with her brother in Northfork, and then she went to Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and she couldn't make a lot of money. Consequently, it was best that the children's stayed with someone in the south where we could help take care of ourselves. And that was the reason I had to start work so early. | 13:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And at six years old, I was making $2.50 a day from 7:00 in the morning until 6:00 at night with an hour for lunch because it was terribly hot during the midday. And when I left in 1955, I was still making $2.50 a day. But we managed, we were, as I said, poor but proud. My grandmother taught us, you are important, you are somebody. Electric lights, running water, cars does not make you the person. The person comes from within. Both of those ladies. | 14:05 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I told you the story of my grandmother always believed in education, even though we had to work, and a lot of the kids that had their own farm didn't have to work as hard as we did, or they went to school more. But somehow, even though she was old then, old in a sense, she was in her 50s of course, and that was old in those days. She still didn't have an old mentality that, oh, you're going to go to work every day to take care of yourselves. She's made sure that we went to school. | 15:01 |
Chris Stewart | Did your aunt live close to you? | 15:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. She was the guardian angel of the entire family. She was a lady also who was much ahead of her time. In 1980, I received a phone call from her and she said to me, "I have never asked anybody to do anything for me, but now I'm getting old and I need somebody to come here to look after my affairs." And I'll be very honest with what she said. She said, "Because I don't want the White man to take all what I have accumulated." And sure enough, I came. And she sat me down and she gave me her bank book, and I could not believe it. My mouth went, ah. And I won't say on here how much money, but she had thousands of dollars. And of course that was a good time financially. That was when CDs were paying 15% and 16%. The only problem with that is I did not have the financial smarts that I have now, because if I did, I would have locked in a 16% CD for 10 years. | 15:41 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And really, but even though I didn't do that, I started off with six months CDs and her money just accumulated and accumulated, and she lived until 89, so that was almost 10 years. And I might add, I had no business anything. One day I was reading the paper, and this lady told me, "If you make $1, save a dime." When I started working for a communications company in Pennsylvania, I started saving $2 a week. When I got a raise, I would put half of my raise, even though I was raised in a family, and at this particular time I was married. I would put half of my raise in savings bonds, because in those days, that's what you did. I started working there in '66. After my children graduated from high school in the '70s, I started saving $37.50 a week. So in 1980, I was reading in the paper, "If you have $10,000, well, you can get 16% interest." I said, "Oh, no." | 17:16 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I went to the bank and this is all, this is what started me, one statement in this newspaper. I had no knowledge of anything. I went to the bank that day, and when I walked out of the bank, I had 9,900 and some dollars. And I wrote a little check and said, "I want a $10,000 CD." And I really felt good about myself. I had not a perfect marriage. I was just proud. And that let me know that what my aunt taught me was for real, you can do it. And I didn't neglect myself. For example, when I needed teeth, a permanent bridge, which cost $800, I took one year and I got my permanent bridge. Another year, my children were in high school, and the baby was, there's nine years difference, so he was a little fellow. I felt I wanted to take them on a vacation, so off we went to Bermuda. And by the way, guess who else went? Elmara. | 18:44 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, wow. | 19:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | She was living here. That was in 1974. She was living here. And I said to her, "Oh, Aunt Doll." I called her. I said, "Aunt Doll, the kids and I are going to Bermuda." And she said, "Well, I told you when you were down here, if you were going to Bermuda, I wanted to go with you." I said, "Well, I didn't hear anymore." And she said, "And by the way, I'm not begging. I'm paying." Sure enough, I called the airline, I made a reservation. This lady got on the bus, came to Philadelphia and went to Bermuda with us. And you have never seen anybody so cute until you see this lady sitting on the airplane with her legs crossed. And when I said, "Aunt Doll, would you like a cocktail?" She said, "Sure." I said, "What would you like?" She said, "Well, I think I'll take some gin." And then she said, very softly to me. "What should I get to go in it?" | 20:00 |
Chris Stewart | What a wonderful woman. | 21:02 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, she was. She was. My grandmother will always tell you, I was the fighter in the family. And when I walked in this morning and I looked at this lady who had just left this world, my only response was, "So long, mighty warrior." And that's what she was. Her sister on the other hand, was a pussycat. She was so sweet, so gentle. I owe all my good ways to Aunt Doll and all my mean ways to Hattie. Because— | 21:07 |
Chris Stewart | They come together in you. | 21:48 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Grandma always said, "Doll baby was out being educated, and I was out fighting." And she did fight all her life. | 21:50 |
Chris Stewart | You mentioned a little bit of that in the interview, can you talk a little bit more about the ways in which she fought, what would [crosstalk 00:22:10] that you remember? | 22:01 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Primarily, for what she thought was right. She always had a problem with White people. And now I'm not sure when this started. I think somewhere along the line, some incident started piggybacking here, this incident, that incident. For example, it never left her when she said her grandmother told her about the mule stomping on her foot when she was a slave, and she was not allowed to cry. She often told that story. And as I said to you, she only told that just a month or so ago. The next incident, I'm not sure if it was when her son was murdered by a White man. | 22:13 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Because I didn't know anything about that. But I guess by now, see, I come into the picture. So maybe all these things is what made her so bitter towards White people. I can remember saying, a White lady walked past her and said, "Howdy, Aunt Hattie." And she said, I looked at her and said, "Just fine, Aunt Maddie." (laughs) And then she would say, "Huh, ought not to be my mammy, talking about Aunt Hattie. These are just so many things. And as I said before, she always used to tell the story about the White man asking where her sons were, because the sons were not supposed to be in school. They were supposed to be working somebody's farm. | 22:54 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And she would come and say, "Huh, and I told him, when he asked where my boys are, I told him, 'They're in school like yours.'" And this is how she felt. And she was just an angry woman. As far as we were concerned, she taught us well. And I don't think she taught me, or maybe if she did, I lost it. I am not a angry person. I am not a hostile person. But then I had Aunt Doll who was a good balance. If grandma would say something negative, Aunt Doll would say something positive. So I guess you could say it was just a good balance there. | 23:47 |
Chris Stewart | Where did your Aunt Doll live as compared to you? | 24:40 |
Dorothy White Cannon | You know where you turn to go in where that brick church is? She lived right across the street from that across the road. I beg your pardon, for a while. And then in the forties, she moved over into the house where my cousin, Annie, is living now. Which is about a half mile down Shady Grove Road, you would turn right on that first pave road, which is half mile road, and she has her property there. Matter of fact, that's where everybody's going to be buried. She's buried in the backyard, and so is my cousin. And that's where my grandmother will be buried on Monday. | 24:49 |
Dorothy White Cannon | As far as other—Oh yeah. And there was another time, I remember when you go back towards Enfield, the property on the left where all the magnolia trees are, now you're talking about documenting something, that was really something. It was a site to behold. The lawns were manicured perfect. The magnolia trees were all prune, shaped perfect, and the man's name was Dr. Frees. Now that's all well and good. He had this beautiful area, but one thing stuck out in my mind. Every Black person that worked for him had a nice white house, according to what I could see. | 25:28 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Now, I don't remember if they had electric lights. I don't think they had bathrooms, but at least they had a decent place to live if you were employed by Dr. Frees. I understand he was a doctor from New York somewhere. And the people would come, the riches, he had a pheasant farm, and they would hunt pheasant, and lordy door door, really. But even though I was very poor, I still had a great appreciation for the beautiful, beautiful home, and the beautiful contribution this man brought to this community. It was lovely. | 26:20 |
Chris Stewart | This is the house that as you're, because you're coming from Enfield at the two white. | 27:03 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes, yes. All big. Someone told me they have 18 bathrooms. I don't know. It doesn't look that large to me. But I think Gary has been inside. But it starts there right from the top of that hill, and it went all the way down the hill. And we used to call it Mansion Hill. Well, little did I realize, recently, maybe a couple years ago, we were at work talking about the words we used to mispronounce, and the actual word is Mansion Hill. It was a Mansion Hill. And instead of saying the mansion, we say mansion. I think it was Mansion Hill. Yes. Mansion Hill. And my aunt did live there, and I think when she lived there, you would make a left right at the top of the hill. And there was a house right there. And then she moved over where my cousin is now living. So I remember her living three places across from the church, Mansion Hill, and where her house is located now, where she's buried in the backyard. | 27:09 |
Chris Stewart | Were there other people in the neighborhood in the area that you looked up to? | 28:21 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, absolutely. One lady—I'll go back to Newport News. There was a man there in those days on the theater, and I used to always admire him. He had a boot. He played tennis. He used to go swimming. I think his name was Mr. Dixon. And when I went back to Newport News about 10 years ago, I looked his wife up. And I told her, I said, "Your husband had such an impact." I never spoke to the man, but I just used to admire him. And until this day, I'm sure he doesn't know it. But he just, to me, I said, "Wow. He was about something. I like that." In high school, I had one teacher named Nancy Bowens. Matter of fact, I've been trying to locate the teacher. I was at Gary's CCT's office and I'm looking at pictures. Well, guess, who was on the picture? Nancy Bowen. I couldn't believe it. Her daughter is now an attorney. And she's working somehow with Gary. I don't know how. | 28:31 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Well, of course, I got right on the phone. I just had to reach this lady now. And I talked to her and I told her, I said, "I want you to know. My character, such as it is, was really shaped by some of the things you told me and you taught." She took an interest in me because I was raised by my grandmother, and that meant my grandmother was old-fashioned. Only my grandfather used to tell me the dirty jokes, not the birds and the bees. But my grandmother would always say, "Oh, no, you're not supposed to do this. And you can't have a boyfriend until you're 16." Well, my goodness, at 16 I was graduating from high school. What's going to happen to the junior prom? But anyway, Mrs. Bowens took an active interest in me. I never forgot that. | 29:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And there was another lady in the community, her name was Ruby Marrow. One day I was at church. My mom used to send me clothes from the city, and I had this beautiful burnt orange coat. Well, what did I know? I took the coat and I turned it up, and that was my hem. So Miss Ruby said to me, "Dorothy, that's a beautiful coat. But that hem has got to go." And I can imagine some people would've been highly insulted because Miss Ruby was a fine, upstanding lady. They owned land, they had cars. They had the money. This lady was really up there. Well, I said, I just think that's really great that she even cared enough to pay any attention. And she said to me, "Now I want you to bring me that coat and I'm going to put the right kind of hem." And I did. And she did. She hemmed it for me, but I never forgot that. | 30:46 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Another lady, her name is Loris Hawkins Barkley, she's a teacher, and she still lives in this community. Maybe she should have been one of the ladies you could interview. She knew my circumstances being with my grandmom, and sometimes I wouldn't have certain things. I needed a gown to go to a prom. And there was a circumstance in her household that I could not get the gown from her house. She took the gown in a box in the woods, as she said to me, "Now, go down in the woods and look for the gown, and you can wear the gown." | 31:58 |
Chris Stewart | Oh my goodness. | 32:45 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And that's why I wish I could find my pictures, because I still have a picture that I took in her gown when I went to, I guess it was a junior or senior prom, I'm not sure. | 32:47 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, wow. | 32:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Plus I was May Queen, and I wore that same gown. | 32:58 |
Chris Stewart | You were May Queen? | 33:00 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. At Brawley. And she was just a nice lady. She would have me come over and do nothing really. And she'd give me $2. But I knew she was trying to help me. And there are others, but these people are the ones that I can really put a name tag on and say they really, and some of them were just small things like Miss Ruby. Just a statement about a coat. That's been 40 years, over 40 years ago. And it's still dear to me. Of course she's dead now, but it still means a lot to me. | 33:05 |
Chris Stewart | In your house, in the household, who made the decisions, it was your grandmother or your grandpa? | 33:53 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mostly Aunt Doll. For the simple reason, my grandmother always turned to Aunt Doll because as she said, Aunt Doll was the educated one. And then I guess it also had to do with the fact my grandfather was an alcoholic. And from the time I can remember, I made most of the decisions, believe it or not. Decisions about what? Who are we going to work for? We didn't move. What color we're going to paint the walls. We didn't paint the walls. We had Sears, Roebuck catalogs on them for wallpaper. You put it on with flour and water. What decision? Ask me something. | 33:59 |
Chris Stewart | Like decisions about how to discipline you and your brothers. | 34:55 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, that's the question, Hattie. (laughs) Hattie, honey. Hattie was the one. | 35:01 |
Chris Stewart | And how did she do it? | 35:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Beat you to death. Especially me. I think she had a thing against Dorothy. Now I was talking with my girlfriends, and they said Dorothy was very outspoken. And they were telling me some of the things I used to say. I said, "Surely I didn't say that." (Stewart laughs) | 35:09 |
Dorothy White Cannon | For example, my girlfriend that's coming down tomorrow from Baltimore said, we were in Sunday school. And the lady said to me, said to us rather to the class. "It's a sin to be uptown—" that's what we call it, uptown "—dancing in that Piccolo joint. You ought to be ashamed of yourself sinning like that." And I raised my hand very politely, and I said to her, "Well, Cousin Bertha, if we're uptown dancing and you were watching, ain't that a sin?" (Stewart laughs) I don't believe I said that. But both of my friends said, "Dor, you said it, and we wouldn't." I said, "Okay." So maybe this is the reason my grandmother used to beat me so much because she saw something in me that being an old-fashioned person, she wanted to correct. And I think she did a fabulous job. I really think so. | 35:29 |
Dorothy White Cannon | But she just had a mean streak in her. She was mean to everybody. Except my brothers. I think she just loved the guys. And it's funny, the whole time she spent over there in the nursing home sick, every time she spoke about a child, it was a boy. One day she said to me, "There's a baby under here." She had a pillow under her legs. I said, "Really?" I said, "What is it?" She says, "A little boy." And another time she says, "Now, look at that boy out there rolling on the damp ground." I said, "Well, Grandma, why don't you tell him to get up?" She said, "You know how hard headed he is, he is not getting up." So I guess she was going back with the boys that she did raise. It is possible. And then one day she didn't know me. I thought she was just angry with me because I was the one that was always there. | 36:33 |
Dorothy White Cannon | So finally she said about a week later, "I didn't know who you were. You got so fat." And it dawned on me, she was right. I've gained 40 pounds. So naturally, I guess she was regressing back to when we were children, and I was not fat then. I was plump. I've always been plump, but never as heavy as I am now. But she was definitely the disciplinarian in the family. | 37:36 |
Chris Stewart | Did she also make decisions about money and how to, or was that your Aunt Doll? | 38:05 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Aunt Doll did that. And then I remember, from the time I start, and my grandfather was a brilliant man. He was absolutely brilliant. He taught me to add, multiply, and subtract. And by the time I was in first grade, when the person we worked for came to our house to settle up, meaning pay for our labor, my grandfather would sit with me. And I would be the one who would multiply how many pounds of cotton we were to be paid for, on how many stacks of peanuts we had shaken that week, or how much we earned from working in tobacco. And because he was an alcoholic, as soon as he saw that I was capable of doing it, then he was through his support. | 38:11 |
Dorothy White Cannon | So actually, I think I could almost say I made a lot of decisions in the household as a child. When the time to pay rent, the house is still there, a little brown house. If you pass, you'll see it has an air conditioner in the window. I was not allowed inside. I went to that window and would knock on the window to pay the rent. Because we were renting the house from the tree company. I guess it's Champion, but I don't know if it was Champion then. But it's the same little house, and the rent was $6 a month. I remember it distinctly. | 39:07 |
Chris Stewart | What was it like for you? It sounds like a lot of responsibility. How did you feel about that kind of responsibility? Did you remember anything about— | 39:47 |
Dorothy White Cannon | No, I'm the oldest child. And in those days, the oldest child was the responsible child. I have never felt that doing these things was a large responsibility. Somewhere within, I have a built-in mechanism. I never think, like today when you said, maybe we won't do this interview because your grandmother just died. And my stepfather just died. I just feel that you just do what you have to do. But my body has told me in the last 10 years that brain-wise, mentally I'm handling a situation. And I'll give you an example. I had taken my mother to Norfolk, and we were in a hotel and I was combing my hair. And all of a sudden I saw a spot the size of my hand here, clean. [INTERRUPTION 00:41:10] | 39:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. As I was saying, I noticed a spot, a bald spot on my scalp. And the only really thing that really upset me about it was I didn't know when it happened. So I went to a dermatologist and he asked me, the first thing he asked me was, "Well, how's your love life? How are things going? Do you drive to work?" I'm saying, please. Okay. So finally he said to me, he said, "The problem with your scalp is called alopecia. And it's a condition caused by stress." I said, "Stress? I ain't under no stress." But that started me to thinking. This was '83. I'd just broken up with my boyfriend. I was in my apartment now. I was about to start decorating. I was going to the community college, taking computer programming so I could get this big job making $800 a week. Well, I was really going for it. | 41:10 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And my husband came to me and said, "Why don't you let me buy you out of the house?" And of course, my son was there. So I consented to do that. But I did not want to go back to that house because the house had caused a lot of stress for me. That was one thing, and going back to school. So a combination of all these things. And then I realized the doctor was probably telling the truth, but I never realized I was under stress until the man said, that's what's wrong. And ironically, in 1990, I had intercranial bleeding. | 42:32 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Guess where it was, where the blood was? In that same spot. And that was really a weird illness. I could lay down. There was no problem. I felt great. If I could play tennis, swim, no problem. But the minute I would sit up, I would have such an excruciating pain. I would just fall back. And that went on for over 30 days. They never found out what was wrong with me. And after they gave me the MRI, they saw I had bleeding, blood on the brain. And the second one showed that it was dissipating. And the third one, it was almost gone. But I don't know if that was a result of stress. I just don't know. Because— | 43:19 |
Chris Stewart | Sounds like you're a person who internalizes stress. | 44:07 |
Dorothy White Cannon | But I don't realize it. | 44:11 |
Chris Stewart | Right. Well, that's a hard thing. | 44:12 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I don't realize it. Like now, maybe I'm internalizing the deaths in my family, but I don't know it. I feel great. I feel upbeat. I just feel good. And as I said, I have nothing to grieve for my grandmother. I did all I could. She's better off. I love her, and I didn't want to see her suffer. So if I am internalizing it, only my body knows. I don't know as an individual. | 44:13 |
Chris Stewart | Right. Do you think that it started at this time when you were making decisions? | 44:45 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I'm sure. I'm sure the responsibility I faced all my life. And then when I got married, I still had a tremendous responsibility because my marriage was somewhat difficult. I'm sure. I'm sure you wanted to talk about the cancer I had in '89. What do they say? Stress and diet. And plus, I took birth control pills. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm a number one candidate. I ate nothing but fat, candy, sugar, nothing. And then the stress from a baby. My mom even tells a story, which I can barely remember. When I lived in Newport News with her? She said I was four years old, she would give me a note and send me to make groceries. And meaning, I would take the note to the grocery store, the man would fill the order. And then put me in a car and send me home with the groceries. I don't remember that. | 44:53 |
Chris Stewart | How did you raise your children differently than your grandparents and your mother raised you, do you think? | 46:07 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I don't think I raised them too much different. I'm a strict disciplinarian. I have old values. You do not talk back. My children are now 35, 33, and my son will be 25, the 4th of July— | 46:13 |
Dorothy White Cannon | As I was saying, my children are capable of telling me anything, and I mean anything, but they know how to say it. I've always taught them it is not what you say, it is how you say it. And they can just tell me, "Go jump off into the river," or something, but they're so sweet with it and I'm willing and able to accept it. Basically, I raised them the way I was raised. I don't think I was as, I don't know, the word is not hostile. I don't think I beat them as much as my grandmother beat me. But my daughters will tell a different story. | 0:02 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And they often point out, and I can believe there's some truth in this, because of the difference in the second child's age and the third child, by the time he came along, I raised him different. For example, if I said to my two girls, they're 19 months apart, they are Faye and Karen, if I said, "Go to bed," they knew go to bed. There was no discussion; you just go to bed. Jerome comes along, now I guess he's about six years old, and I said to him, "Jerome, go to bed," and he wanted to know why. Well, my daughters couldn't believe it. I sat down and I explained to Jerome why. | 0:53 |
Dorothy White Cannon | But I think that was a growth process for me. I don't regret how I raised him. They've turned out to be beautiful young ladies. And with Jerome, I realized that he was different too. I never had to beat him. All I had to do was talk to him. He was not materialistic. I told him when he was a little boy, "If you have on those good pants, you cannot go outside and play," as simple as that. "You have to have on play clothes." | 1:48 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Consequently, he's 24 and I don't think he owns a suit today. I'm serious. He wears khakis and he looks very nice. But I think he did tell me about two months ago he bought a suit, but that's the first one. I think it just stuck with him. When he was in college, he just wore the college clothes and that was it. And I wonder if it was not because I told him that, "You could not play with your Sunday clothes on." I don't think there was too much difference. But don't forget, I had that guiding influence of Elmara to teach my children how to be kind and loving. And now sometimes I wonder if I didn't teach them to be too kind, because they are, and everybody just loves them. They're sweet, darling ladies, not girls, ladies. So I guess I did okay. But the similarities would be, I don't think I beat as much, but I was a strict disciplinarian. Yes. | 2:31 |
Chris Stewart | Did your grandmother talk to you or teach you—How did she teach you how to act around adults? Is there a certain way that you had to act around adults? | 3:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, absolutely. | 3:58 |
Chris Stewart | Was it different between White adults and Black adults. | 4:00 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, absolutely. Not with Hattie's and not at Hattie's house. She taught me to respect all adults. She never taught me to hate anyone. Only she hated people. And I think she had a right to hate people if she wanted to. I think in her own way, she had her reasons. She never taught me to disrespect any adults, Black or White. Never. Absolutely not. | 4:02 |
Chris Stewart | How did you find out the story about your uncle? The situation with your- | 4:44 |
Dorothy White Cannon | My grandmother. | 4:48 |
Chris Stewart | She told you about it? | 4:49 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Constantly. Constantly. She would always repeat it, always. This was on her lips very, very often. | 4:51 |
Chris Stewart | She wanted to make sure that you all knew. | 5:05 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Well, I don't know if it was necessarily to let us know. I think she spoke about it because she was so bitter and hostile and she was not one—Some people say, "She has a way of speaking her mind." Well, she spoke her mind and I think that's primarily what it was all about. And maybe there was an undercurrent to say, "Don't trust them. You can't trust them. They'll shoot you in your back." She had her way. And because I left at such an early age, 16, maybe I did not really truly understand all that was to be said. But I feel that it wasn't necessarily so that we would know it, I don't think. I'm not sure, but I don't think so. | 5:08 |
Chris Stewart | How about your Aunt Doll? Did she talk to you about that and try to help you understand? | 5:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes, she did. She would qualify the situation. She would say thus and so, whereas grandma would just say that, "A White man murdered my son and left him in the cornfield." And Aunt Doll would come over with a soothing comment. "Yeah, Hat, I know it was bad, but that was then and this is now." And of course Grandmom didn't want to hear that. | 6:03 |
Chris Stewart | That's my next question. Because they had such different personalities, were there conflicts between them with regards to the children or to decisions that had to be made? Or did they just work them out between the two? | 6:36 |
Dorothy White Cannon | They worked them out between the two. There was never real conflict. Grandma would kind of listen to Aunt Doll. Aunt Doll could calm her down when she would get very hostile and then grandma would just roll her eyes and suck her teeth and just walk away. But Aunt Doll was the one, she held the family together, in my opinion. She was the one that got the jobs for us. | 6:50 |
Chris Stewart | How did she do that? | 7:26 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Contacting different people. People knew her personality was a sweet one. Consequently, if they wanted us to work, they would go to Aunt Doll because they knew not to go to grandma. They would go to Aunt Doll. | 7:28 |
Chris Stewart | So did she also go to work with you? | 7:41 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, yes. | 7:46 |
Chris Stewart | When you would hire out for the day or the week, how many people would go to work? | 7:47 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, sometimes 15, 20, 10, different numbers. Not always the same number depending on who you were working for. From my household, most of the time would be, even though I didn't live with Aunt Doll, I'm saying the household, Aunt Doll, Grandmom and me. | 7:54 |
Chris Stewart | Not the boys? | 8:15 |
Dorothy White Cannon | No. Well, I guess they felt they weren't old enough. And maybe just about the time I was about to leave, I think one of the boys started working in the field with me, and that's the oldest son, that was the one born the year of the flood. | 8:17 |
Chris Stewart | Were there good people to work for and bad people to work for? | 8:37 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Now I realize there are bad people to work for, really bad people, but the good people we worked for were the Black people. | 8:43 |
Chris Stewart | Why? How? Not why, how? | 8:54 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Well, how or why, whatever. Most of the good people like Mr. Grant's family, they always had a hot lunch for the hired hands. The White people never gave us anything. Somebody would have to stop and go to town to buy a soda. But cousin Christana, that was the Marrow family we worked for, they would always come to the field and get us, bring us to the house and put us under picnic tables under the shade tree and have things like hot cabbage with white potatoes, maybe ham or fried chicken and potato salad with collard greens. | 8:54 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Really good food, which I had planned to cook today, but we know the circumstances. But practically all the Black farmers would give us a nice healthy lunch. And when we worked for the White man, I took my lunch in a lard can, and that consisted of pork and beans, fried fat back and biscuits. Consequently, I love cold biscuits and I will not eat a pork and bean unless it's out of the can. Don't heat pork and beans for me. And then someone would go to town and buy a cold soda and bring it back. | 9:42 |
Chris Stewart | How would you get to the farms? | 10:33 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, they would pick us up on a truck, most of the time on a truck and we'd be sitting on the back. | 10:36 |
Chris Stewart | Did they pick you up at your house or was there a meeting place? | 10:43 |
Dorothy White Cannon | No, at our house. They would go to each person's house and pick them up. | 10:45 |
Chris Stewart | Were there other families that you remember who did day labor the way your family did? | 10:54 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I can't remember anybody else. I'm thinking of about my friends. I believe most of them had their own farms, a part of that resettlement. I don't believe so. There were probably other people, but they're not people that were in my world, in my circle, I should say. I can't recall another family, believe it or not, but us, and Cousin Annie was always with us too. Yeah, it was Elmira and Doll, Hat, Annie and Dorothy, we would be the ones. | 11:02 |
Chris Stewart | Sounds like you spend a lot of time around women. | 11:45 |
Dorothy White Cannon | All my time has been around women, except the time I spent with my grandfather who was, at that time an alcoholic. I've never had any contact with my father, none. It's been women. | 11:49 |
Chris Stewart | Why is that? | 12:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Well, I think it's the sign of the time. That's just the way it was. I didn't have too many uncles. My father had no brothers, and my mother had brothers, which would be my uncles, but they were gone. And I can't think of any other men I would spend time around, unless it was my father and he would be in the house. He wasn't there. I think my grandfather had some influence on me, even though he was an alcoholic. | 12:07 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I think in a sense he was one of the people I admired because he was so brilliant. And now as an adult I can realize his frustrations to have such a good brain or to have such so much knowledge, and because you're a Black person, you cannot find something or work or whatever to just say, "This is my niche." And the man just became, in my opinion, he just became frustrated. And that's what he was, just a frustrated person, but he was a good person. He was not one to train us, but he had a sense of humor and he made us laugh all the time. He told us all the jokes, the dirty ones too. So that would be, I would say the only male. | 12:41 |
Dorothy White Cannon | As far as my girlfriends, the people I'm thinking about that were in my community, all of them had fathers because the fathers were the head of the farms. I can't remember any of them not having fathers. So they did have that male image. I was just a little poor kid. And my grandfather was an image such as he was. And remember too, he was getting older by now. He was getting older. I think that made a lot of difference. | 13:47 |
Chris Stewart | Were there areas in town that were areas that you weren't supposed to go to? | 14:30 |
Dorothy White Cannon | The whole town. Not necessarily the stores, but other than that, I could go inside the post office and go in the stores, which was not doing me a favor because if I didn't go in the stores, the community was primarily Black, there wouldn't be any stores. Is that right? Now, outside of my community, there were areas, if you went to a restaurant, you went to the back, until we had a man come here named Mike. I think they say he was Greek and he had hot dog stand. I don't care what color you were, you went in Mike's front door and you sat down and you ate. We were talking about him not too long ago. That was the only restaurant that I can remember. | 14:32 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And I'll tell you this, I came down with my mom, and this was not long ago, I will say maybe this is '93, maybe the '80s, probably early '80s, we went to the barbecue place on one of those streets over there and they had the Colored side and the White side. | 15:18 |
Chris Stewart | In the '80s. | 15:47 |
Dorothy White Cannon | In the '80s. Now, if I remember correctly, and I said to my mom, "You can sit on that rough bench and eat barbecue." I bought mine, but I didn't eat it inside. And she sat down and ate it and enjoyed it, said, "Well, you go ahead outside. I'll be finished in a minute." And the White people had the, it wasn't formica, but it was like, you're probably too young to remember the kind of table that a lot of people used to have, it was a metal, but white, it would crack chip. What do you call it? It wasn't formica. | 15:49 |
Chris Stewart | It's kind of like, I want to say porcelain. It's like a clay tile. | 16:34 |
Dorothy White Cannon | But you know what I'm talking about. It was smooth and pretty, but they had that kind of thing over on their side. It was probably the early '80s, because this is '93, that's 13 years if it was '80. I know it was somewhere along there. But anyway, my mom will be 74 this year, and it didn't mean anything to her. But I'd been away and I determined that I was not going to eat in there. What I should have done was not bought anything. But of course the schools, I went to the Black school. And we always laughed, when we were going to go play basketball, you jump on the bus, you hit the railroad, we knew we were near the school because the Black schools were always across the tracks. Always. And we had just a standard joke, "Uh-oh, school coming up, we just hit the railroad." Society, we didn't play with the White children. They played over there and we played wherever we were. It was simple as that, everybody stayed separate. | 16:38 |
Chris Stewart | What do you remember about school, about elementary school, first of all? | 18:07 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Not much. | 18:12 |
Chris Stewart | Do you remember any of your teachers? | 18:15 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. One of my first teachers was Anne House. I know she was in the first grade. | 18:17 |
Chris Stewart | I've heard of her before. | 18:21 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Really? And another one whose name was Mrs. Demry. | 18:23 |
Chris Stewart | Demry? | 18:28 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Uh-huh. And isn't it ironic that I can still tell you she lived at 1022 South Sycamore Street from the first grade? And she used to pick me up when—Apparently I must have stayed with Aunt Doll somewhere in there too, because she would pick me up from the house where the church is across the road there. And she used to drive a Terraplane car. There was such a car called a Terraplane. Anyway, since I've been down here, I went to look for her. I went last year, but she wasn't feeling good, so she wouldn't let me in. And this year when I went back, they told me she died two months ago. | 18:28 |
Chris Stewart | Oh no. | 19:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. Yeah, Anne House, Mrs. Demry. There was a music teacher named Mr. Julius Lines. | 19:21 |
Chris Stewart | What was so special about the teachers? You mentioned these three teachers, what- | 19:38 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Well, Mrs. Demry used to give me a ride, and I thought Anne House was just so pretty. Oh, she was beautiful. | 19:43 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 19:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Excuse me. (coughs) | 19:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | [INTERRUPTION 00:19:51] | 19:51 |
Dorothy White Cannon | We were talking about the teachers? | 19:56 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 19:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I think they were special also because they represented progress. Someone that was educated, someone that had gotten their education in spite of segregation or in spite of most Black people being poor, I should say some maybe, from what I was just saying, they weren't too poor because they had their farms. And I think the ones that I know carry themselves in a very dignified manner. And I think they were more aware of an image in those days. They dressed properly according to society in those days. They just carried themselves, in my opinion, a little different from some others. | 19:59 |
Chris Stewart | Did you get to go to school? Were you able to go to school consistently or were you pulled out of school? You mentioned your grandmother was a firm believer in education. | 21:08 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. The way we went to school, during the harvest season, I would work two days this week and go to school three. And the next week you would reverse it, you'd work three days and go to school two. So I was pulled out. | 21:18 |
Chris Stewart | How did you keep up? | 21:44 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I was smart. I was, I was smart. It was simple as that. I was just a smart kid. And the other children, some of them, especially the guys, I don't know, they just couldn't go to school. They had to stay on the farm and they'd come back to schools. The average age when I graduate was 21 in 1955. | 21:46 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 22:11 |
Dorothy White Cannon | The average age of my class was 21 years old. But I was a smart kid, I really was, that's how I got skipped. | 22:12 |
Chris Stewart | 16 years old and you graduated. | 22:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. I was smart. | 22:23 |
Chris Stewart | Do you remember any of your high school teachers? | 22:28 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh yeah. | 22:31 |
Chris Stewart | Just Brawley? | 22:31 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. Oh, I remember all of them. Matter of fact, quite a few of them still live here. I met a teacher the other day and I was saying to him, "Mr. Ellison, how old are you these days?" I thought he was at least 90 (laughs) because you figure my age, and he was teaching. But he straightened me out. He said, "Well, you have to understand that even though I was teaching, I probably had just left college." I said, "Oh, okay." I told you Mrs. Bowens was good. She was really a good teacher. She just took interest in her children. She taught home economics and setting the table, dressing properly, speaking properly. Now she was home economics, she was not English, but there was something about this lady, she just would tell you everything. She just had a broad rim of teaching. Now, home economics is not teaching, it's not speaking. Just how to be a lady, how to conduct yourself under certain circumstances, how to refuse the advances of boys, that was one of the important things. | 22:32 |
Chris Stewart | What did she teach you about refusing the advances of boys? How did teach you? | 23:58 |
Dorothy White Cannon | She told me, she said, "Little Dot, if they tell you they love you, look in their face and laugh because you are just a little girl and they're lying to you and they're not in love with you. They might want to do certain other things and then they'll just love you, supposedly, and leave you." I never forgot it. And she also told me, just in case, what to do. So, condoms is nothing new. This was back when I was in high school. | 24:02 |
Chris Stewart | Do you think she was talking as frankly to other young women as well? | 24:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I understand she was. I didn't know it. I thought I was the only special one. (laughs) | 24:45 |
Chris Stewart | Mildred Moore mentioned her. | 24:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh yeah. | 24:52 |
Chris Stewart | The home economics teacher. She went to Brawley too. | 24:52 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah. This is the one I was telling you, Mrs. Bowens, I just talked to her this week. She was good. My English teacher, Mrs. Thompson, she was kind of strict and she had an odd sense of humor. | 24:52 |
Chris Stewart | What do you mean odd? | 25:11 |
Dorothy White Cannon | For example, she was an English teacher and you would say you're not going to do something, and her favorite word was, "Yeah ya is!" (Stewart laughs) And when she said, "Yeah ya is," forget it, it was a done deal. Mrs. Bowens husband was the basketball coach and I was a basketball star. Right now it's 1993, and when I introduce myself, I say, "This is Dot White." And that's all I have to say. Most of the time I don't have to say it, they still recognize me even though I'm a little plumper. | 25:12 |
Chris Stewart | Why did you get involved in basketball? | 25:54 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Because in those days, that's all you had to do. The girls played basketball, the boys played basketball. I was a cheerleader. Girls didn't play football, so that was my way of participating in the football season. And it was a big thing. We had tournaments, we were all-state. You would play first right in your area, and then the winning team would go to a wider area, and then the winning team of that would go to an even wider area. Some of the schools we played was, let me see, Inborden, Oak City, Littleton, Inborden was in Enfield. And we didn't play Weldon. I remember those three schools, but there were others, I just can't remember. But getting back to Mr. Bowen, he was the basketball coach. | 25:55 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And I'll never forget, he used to tell us, "I want those uniforms cleaned. I want the hair combed and the sneakers and socks white." He said, "Because if you can't play basketball, you can look good." I never forgot that. Consequently, when I have gained weight, I always say, "And Mr. Bowen says, 'If you can't be skinny, you can wrap up your package and go about your business.'" But you see, it stuck with me. If you can't play ball, you can look pretty. Be clean, be neat. Mrs. Townsend was the coach later. She was all right. | 26:50 |
Chris Stewart | Not as good as Mr. Bowens though. | 27:42 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Or Mrs. Bowens, no. See, she didn't have as much input into how you're supposed to do things. She just had us play ball. And imagine now, this was a man telling us to comb that hair and put that deodorant on and make sure you wash. Mr. Hannon reminded me of my grandfather. Mr. Hannon was way before his time, if there is such a thing. He was the typing teacher and he taught dramatics. The kind of productions he would put on were The Song of Bernadette, Jane Eyre, The Robe, Macbeth. And you have never—The guy is still living in Baltimore that played in The Robe. And I still get goosebumps when I think about that play. These are the kind of things he brought into the community. And I can just see him now in this day and age, people are a little more liberal, there's a little more exposure for African Americans in the arts. It's absolutely fantastic. He was just talented. | 27:44 |
Chris Stewart | It sounds like this school, the Brawley School, there were really dedicated teachers to create an environment, not only scholastically or academically, but also extracurricular activities. | 29:21 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Absolutely. I can only give them high grades for, I'm sure doing the best they could in those days. Mr. Ellison was the band teacher. I wasn't participating in the band. Who else? I can't remember who the music teacher was, but I think the teachers I mentioned—Oh, Mr. Robeson was the science teacher. And I always liked him because he looked so scholarly and he would use all the big words and then challenge you to find out what they meant. (Stewart laughs) So that was good. And that's just about it. Mr. Bias of course was a principal. Everybody knew, probably. | 29:34 |
Chris Stewart | How do you spell his name? | 30:24 |
Dorothy White Cannon | John Bias, B-I-A-S. And he's still living, has a gorgeous home, I understand, down Devil Kill Hill, down that way, Nags Head. It's beautiful. But he ran a tough ship. He was the principal and he used to give some good information to us about manners and so forth and so on. But he was around so long, he was in school teaching when my mother was in school. I think he was a principal then. And he's just retired not too long ago. | 30:25 |
Chris Stewart | Wow, amazing. | 31:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah. And he still looks the same. He does. | 31:09 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, that's great. That's wonderful. What did you do for fun in high school? | 31:16 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, the basketball, the football season, the dramatics club. That was a form of recreation. And the activities, the extracurricular activities you competed in. That was it, because now if you wanted to know what I did for fun at home, now that's a different story. | 31:24 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Then that was the question I should've asked. | 31:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Fun at home was after you washed the floors on Saturday, you did all your chores, then you would get dressed up. And until this day, I don't care who puts their name on dungarees, I'm not wearing them. And I refuse to be brainwashed because somebody who is a millionaire puts her name on a pair of jeans. We call them dungarees, overalls, that's really the word. You only wore those overalls when you were working in the field. And when the kids are wearing them down with all the holes and when they had holes in them, you put a patch on them. And when they got too many holes, you threw them away. You didn't even wear them in the field anymore. | 31:53 |
Dorothy White Cannon | But on Saturdays we would get dressed up and go uptown, (laughs) and going uptown consisted of going uptown, because there was nothing to do uptown. When I left, my grandmother didn't let me go in the Piccolo joint, so I don't know what Cousin Bertha was talking about, she probably wasn't talking about me. In Sunday school, remember? But see, nice girls didn't go in the Piccolo joint, because the popular dance at that time was the Hucklebuck. | 32:50 |
Chris Stewart | Was the what? | 33:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Hucklebuck. Oh, you haven't— | 33:27 |
Chris Stewart | And tell me, you must know something about this. | 33:32 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, I was one of those peeping through the cracks. (both laugh) | 33:33 |
Chris Stewart | What is the Hucklebuck? | 33:38 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Well, it's a very, very suggestive motion. (Stewart laughs). I'll show you, but I won't say. And we had one girl, what was her name? Her name was Arrington, we called her Lil Bay Bay Arrington. Lil Bay Arrington could stand up and go all the way back to the floor. You've seen the limbo dances, but they just go back. Lil Bay had a lot of action with hers. (laughs) Lil Bay could do it. And I would be looking through the crack. I said, "Ooh, look at Lil Bay. (Stewart laughs) Ooh, I wish I could go in." But see, they didn't allow the nice girls. And then, let me see, we'd walk, but we did have more stores than we have now. We had stores on both sides so we'd walk up and down on that side and then we'd go on the other side to walk on. | 33:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And then if my girlfriend was ready to go home, I would walk her home, which was about a mile. Well, see, you know who Tillary is, and she lived on the Mansion Hill. So then I'd stay at her house a little bit and then she walked me part of the way back. And that was the recreation we had. That was the fun. I used to play with my brothers because I was always a tomboy. Ooh, I used to ride the trees. The way you do that is you climb the tree and get to the very top, but they weren't really big trees. And then the tree leans over, and then a certain way you would move your body, you could just ride and ride. | 34:38 |
Chris Stewart | Ride the tree. | 35:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Uh-huh. And I used to play baseball with my brothers. | 35:29 |
Chris Stewart | One of the people that I talked to, younger than you I think, said that he used to play baseball and he would play baseball with corn cobs. He'd break the corn cobs. | 35:35 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh yeah, if you didn't have a ball, it wouldn't matter. It was very ingenious. We used to play roll the tire. You would take an automobile tire and just roll it and just run behind it, just rolling it. And then there was another one we used to play, the wagons had iron rims, which was maybe a couple inches wide. And once it was off the wagon, we would take it and make a guide, you'd take a wire and you bend it and you'd put it and you'd just run behind this thing pushing this wheel. That. What else? We used to have swings in the trees, just put some rope up or some chains and make a swing. Play marbles, play jacks. I think that's about all I can remember. | 35:46 |
Chris Stewart | I think you've already told me this, but I'd like to just ask the question and get a [indistinct 00:37:04], at what point do you think that people started treating you as an adult, that you felt you had come into adulthood? | 37:00 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Which people? You mean people in general? You mean society? | 37:14 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah, so that you felt like you were an adult. | 37:22 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I felt kind of grown all my life, I'll be very honest with you. Because as I said, I had the responsibility. My opinion was always respected since I can't even remember. I know I was not grown, but my opinion was respected, so one more. If my grandmother would ask me something and I would tell her, and if Aunt Doll, agreed, that was it. And then if Aunt Doll didn't agree, there was a discussion. I was gone at 16. | 37:26 |
Chris Stewart | What kinds of values do you think that your grandmother and your Aunt Doll, it sounds like, gave you to take you into adulthood? | 38:09 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Though shall not steal, honor your mother and father. And in the sense they meant honor older people. Aunt Doll would always say, "It's not what you say, it's how you say it." And I said Aunt Doll also taught me to be thrifty or frugal. Manners, yes ma'am and no ma'am, thank you, no thank you. To always do the best that you could. Aunt Doll used to say, "I think there's a song that says sometimes your best isn't good enough, but as long as you know you have done the very best." And she said, "I mean the very best, now. I don't mean saying you've done your best. But you have to know that you've done your best, then you can't do anymore." I think that has played an important role in my life. All those things, work hard, you work for what you get. I did, but I'm not so sure about other people. Respect. Aunt Doll taught me love. | 38:23 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Grandmom taught me, not necessarily hate, but now as an adult, I might add I understand my grandmother. I understand she was doing the best she knew to do. She had a very difficult life and that was the only thing she knew. But getting back to what you said, they taught me a sense of pride as an individual. My grandmother has always said, "Don't let anybody tell you that you are nobody because you are just as important as any of God's other children, regardless of what color they are." | 40:03 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And somehow, I know I'm Black, I know there's a lot of injustices, I know there's a lot of prejudice, I'm sure I have my own, but I have always strived to be exceptional, I guess you could say. For example, when I was a telephone operator in Pennsylvania and I answered the phone, "May I help you, please?", I did it in a way from their training, just because you're Black, you don't have to speak the local dialect. You're supposed to be educated. You're supposed to have pride, that's what it is. That's the word I think I'm trying to look for: pride. And consequently, when you would call and I would say, "May I help you, please?", I was proud to be Black, but I did not want the public going away saying, "Did you hear her?" And I am very proud of how I speak for this reason. I was raised by older people and absolutely they did not speak proper English. And mine is not so perfect now, but I know it could be much worse, especially being raised by older people and people that were not really educated. | 40:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And then to carry myself like I'm somebody. Always hold your head up. Always know that you are important because you are. Know that you are a human being before you're any color. And that goes back to the spiritual part, a human being. And then you come Black or female or whatever. I guess that kind of sums it up for me. They taught me love of family too, I have to add that. My Aunt Dolly especially, she never had children, but she raised nine children and she loved to be loved. She really did. And I guess that's it. Might be some more I can think of tomorrow, but right now. | 42:35 |
Chris Stewart | You said you graduated from high school when you were 16, what were the circumstances under which you're leaving? | 43:36 |
Dorothy White Cannon | There was nothing for a Black teenager or young person to do if you didn't go to college. And I was not from a family of means. And in those days, if there were monies available, I did not know about them. Consequently, I left to get a job so I wouldn't have to pick cotton, shuck peanuts or work in a White person's house. It's just as simple as that. There was nothing for me to do. | 43:48 |
Chris Stewart | Where did you go? | 44:15 |
Dorothy White Cannon | To Philadelphia. | 44:15 |
Chris Stewart | So you went directly to Philadelphia? | 44:15 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. And in those days, I think Black people would migrate to where the family was. If your family was in Washington DC, that's where you went. My mother went to Philadelphia to be with my aunt, who was her sister. Consequently, when I graduated from high school, that's where I went. Had she been in Norfork, I would've gone to Norfork probably. And that's how I think we get the cities where we live and work and so forth and so on. | 44:19 |
Chris Stewart | How was Philadelphia different? | 44:53 |
Dorothy White Cannon | How was it different? | 44:57 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 44:59 |
Dorothy White Cannon | It wasn't much. It was bigger. I found Philadelphia to be a place where you could find a job. Not a good job necessarily. The first job I had was working in the cleaners. And I was quite proud of that because it was a Black man. And it was a beautiful story. He came to Philadelphia with mismatched shoes on. I don't know the year. His name was Carl Caldwell. And he managed to own several cleaning establishments. And there is an area in Philadelphia called the Northeast, and they call it the Greater Northeast, naturally, because it's all White practically. But this man on Roosevelt Boulevard, I don't know if you've ever been to— | 44:59 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-mm | 45:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. But a person that's been there could understand what I'm saying. This man said he always wanted a house with a white fence. And I went to Philadelphia in 1955. This man was living on the Boulevard with this gorgeous stone house with a white fence. And his wife used to tell the story, she was in the yard one day and Sears and Roebuck was delivering some porch furniture. And they drove up and said, "May we speak to the lady of the house, please?" And she said, "I am the lady of the house." And they looked at her and she said, "Yes I am Mrs. Caldwell." | 45:51 |
Dorothy White Cannon | The shopping malls are there, just restaurants, the regular malls with the pizza shop, so forth and so on, but she's still there. As far as my living conditions, I lived in North Philly where they would only allow Black people to buy homes at that time. It's an area called Strawberry Mansion, and the area I moved to in '68, you were not allowed. No realtor would show you a house in that area. That's an area in Philadelphia called West Oakland or Mount Airy. You were not allowed. | 0:00 |
Chris Stewart | In '55 you weren't allowed there? | 0:32 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Up until we moved in '68 and a friend of my husband told him just a year or so before we moved he wanted to see a house in that area and they wouldn't show it to him. They wouldn't show it to him. As far as the social activities, it was primarily the way it was here. When I first went, along with the fact that we were not allowed still in certain places was the financial aspect. People were not making a lot of money, so we used to have what you call house parties. Yeah. | 0:35 |
Chris Stewart | I've heard of these days. | 1:11 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes, and the house party would be—and until today I don't play Pinochle for that reason, but it was entertainment for Black people. You would start playing cards on Friday night and the person in the house would have food to sell, and drinks, and you didn't start playing cards until Monday morning, and the way they did it, they mostly would play Pinochle and the way they would do it, four people would start and then somebody else would come in and that person, one person would get up and then somebody else would come in, somebody else, and it just went around, and around, and around until Monday morning. | 1:13 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. Did you ever participate in these marathon? | 2:01 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Never. You know why? They argue too much. Now, I don't know if you've ever played Pinochle. | 2:04 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, my family plays Pinochle. I've never played it myself. | 2:13 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Do they argue when somebody rub—I rub your head and once you get your head rubbed, you never live it down. I found out later that wasn't necessarily a Black thing, that was just a Pinochle thing because I used to watch the White people play at work and they were just as bad, but that was one of the things about Philadelphia, as I was saying that you weren't allowed to go in different places. | 2:17 |
Chris Stewart | So it was segregated up there as well. | 2:45 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes, it was, of course. I'm talking '55 and beyond that. I worked for a company, I did pretty good there, but I can tell you something else that happened one time. I was working and I said before what I was working as, and one of the bosses, which was we call them levels, first level, second. The second level came in and said, "Oh, my God, how come such a beautiful creature is sitting in here working as a such and such a thing?" And I have news for you. She was gone in six weeks because she was White, blonde with blue eyes, and I've been there six years. And I had an incident later on that told me that I had done an excellent job. They kept me working as the bottom of the totem pole for nine years. Do you hear me? The best part of my life, my youth, when I could have learned easily. | 2:49 |
Dorothy White Cannon | But for nine years I could not move, and as I said, my family always taught me to strive to be the best you can, and that's what I did. I went to work on time. I did a good job. I had outstanding write-ups, but I could never get promoted. It would always be somebody else, and most of the time it would be some other White person. They did not think we were capable or—Well, not only me, any Black person, but this is what happened to me. Finally—first of all, the reason I got the job was because I think it was Carter or somebody was in the White House. They said, "You have to have so many Black people working for you." That's the only reason I got the job. | 4:14 |
Dorothy White Cannon | [INTERRUPTION 00:05:08] | 5:17 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. It should be okay. It's on. | 5:17 |
Dorothy White Cannon | You didn't push the other button, did you? | 5:17 |
Chris Stewart | No, this is the pause button. | 5:19 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. Where was I? | 5:26 |
Chris Stewart | Carter, you got the— | 5:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, yeah, yeah. I think it was Carter when they started saying, I don't think, that was not affirmative action, that was quotas, "You need to have so many Black people working in your concern if you had more than so many hundreds of employees" and whatever. And that was one of the reason I got the job. | 5:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And as I said, I worked there at the bottom of that job for nine years and then somehow things worked out after nine years, and I was promoted to what you call a senior ditto, ditto. And the responsibilities or the duties of a senior was to monitor the floor along with the supervisor and to do the time. The payroll consisted of about 150 people. We had a 24-hour office. I had to schedule different tours for all 150 people. It was a tremendous job. I did it and I did know until much later, what an outstanding job I had done, and then that made me kind of bitter. | 5:44 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I was saying to myself—oh, let me, I'm getting ahead of my story. Then I was promoted to a $5 more a week job. I was a clerk then. One of my managers called me on the phone and said, "Dottie, we need a desk clerk. We'd like for you to come back. Would you accept the job?" I was devastated that I had been left for nine years to do nothing, and then when I did have this job that required an awful lot of smarts and you were graded because periodically they would do what you call payroll errors. | 6:48 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 7:36 |
Dorothy White Cannon | If something wasn't right, if somebody's tour wasn't right, it went against you, and you were allowed five errors. I was doing payroll for that many people in a 24-hour office with two errors, yet, I still couldn't seem to get ahead. I did after I got that job in as a clerk, so I said to that person, "No, thank you," and when I got off the phone, believe me, you will not want to hear what I said. Can you imagine how I felt? And that was the story of my life all the way through that company. | 7:37 |
Chris Stewart | How long did you work for? | 8:17 |
Dorothy White Cannon | 25 years. Okay? Now the next thing comes along is affirmative action. The women always had the clerk jobs or the women jobs, so now I had decided—I'd been out of school now—Well, I graduated in '55, and here it is '67, 8, whatever, so we have a school, we had a school before Richard Nixon in Philadelphia called OIC. It was founded by Reverend Leon Sullivan, and what it was, it was a self-help school. You went to school and you took whatever you felt you needed, and not only that, they taught you things like electronic assembly or secretarial skills. It was a wonderful, wonderful institution for the Black people, and I contributed. I know me being able to pass certain tests was because I went to that school and I took test-taking skills just to know how to take a test, how to be relaxed, how to not clam up. | 8:20 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 9:47 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Along came the opportunity and my thought was again, going back to what I was taught, always be prepared. I know I'm Black. That's not going to change, but when the opportunity comes along, there were a lot of people saying, "I passed that test. They won't give me the job because I'm Black." Well, Hattie was my grandmama. I made up in my mind I am going to school and I am going to prepare myself, and when I take the test and I know I passed it, then I was going to go elsewhere. It was simple as that, but guess what? I never had to do that. I took a test for a job that was a male job that involved wiring, climbing ladders, carrying a big tool belt, and I was in that job for about six, nine, no, about eight years, and then along came the opportunity to get a better paying job. | 9:49 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Now mind you, when the White men and not Black men, I'm telling you, White men had these jobs. They were not tested. Oh, no. They hired them right off the street. "You come on in here James. This is your job." | 11:14 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Now the second job that I had to be, I was tested and tested and tested, but guess what? I passed and I got the job, and that's the job that enabled me to retire at such an early age, and I used to tell the guys, now the union rep told me this. He said, "Good luck, Dottie." He said, "but you know that's a White male-orientated job." This was my union representive and I got that job, the job I'm talking about now, that was White male orientated in 1984. | 11:28 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 12:10 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay? And I used to be on my soapbox telling the White people that if you gave Black people a chance, they don't want to be on welfare. Suppose I had not had my background, my upbringing, maybe I would've ended up on welfare, and I used to tell them all the time, "Now that I'm able to have a job working with you because I qualify, not because somebody gave it to me," and I tell them in a minute, "You didn't qualify," and they didn't. They promoted them, and one White guy used to tell me, he said, "If I had to take a test, I never would've gotten here because I know I don't have any smarts," but a lot of them are not that honest, and most of them are so intimidated that they treat you like you're dirt, but I never had a problem with that because Hattie was the trainer. | 12:12 |
Dorothy White Cannon | You don't have to send me to school. I was never intimidated by anybody, Black, White or blue. When I got ready to retire, and this is another thing that's so derogatory, one of the guys said to me, "Gee, you are so young, you must have had a sugar daddy. How you going to afford to retire?" But I bet if had I been a White woman, he never would've said it. Same thing, you go in the office with a pretty dress for five days straight, somebody think you had to hit the number. You are not capable of working right beside this person making $700 a week and they're living in the suburbs with a wife who isn't working and four or five kids, and here I am, a single woman, my children are grown, my houses are paid for and they think I am not in the position to retire, and it's only because of the color of my skin, and that is simple as that. That's how I feel about it. | 13:11 |
Dorothy White Cannon | That job, and I'm sure that was part of the reason I retired so early. I just could not face anymore of the harassment! When I went back from my cancer recovery, I had a supervisor tell me, "You're not getting paid for your vacation because you were out." Well, I didn't say anything to him, and I know, now he had a thing against women. It wasn't necessarily Black or White, but for some reason he really had a thing with me. I went to my union rep and I said, "Such and such a one said I'm not getting my pay." He said, "What?" And see, I was one not to make too many waves. I should have had him written up. He harassed me until I sat down one day in tears, and when I start crying, you better watch it. | 14:31 |
Dorothy White Cannon | You watch it, and I told him, I said, "Listen. I've been in this company 20 whatever years and I have never had a problem with a supervisor and I don't intend to have one now." I said, "Because you know what? I come to work to do my job and I intend to do it." I said, "Not only do I come, I'm on time and I come regular." I said, "I am not going to allow you to harass me. It's simple as that. Well, I had no more problems out of him. He'd just look at me and go the other way because he knew I was right, and I told him, I said, "and I'm not taking you to the union. If I had to take you anywhere, I'm taking you to your boss because you have someone to answer to." I said, "I have just recovered from a major illness and I don't need your harassment!" It was just terrible, and it's still terrible. | 15:32 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I talked to my girlfriend today, and believe it or not, they gave us the jobs, but they did not want us to have them. They don't give you the support. I had another instance, a guy came, I had been doing a job three years and at this time, after my children grew up, I didn't do any overtime. I had made it. I worked hard. When I was that low paying job, I made a lot of money working overtime, working 12 days straight. I used to take all holidays because I could get night work. Christmas is not a thing with me after my children grew up. Hey, it was no problem. My son was more or less my husband's responsibility, excuse me, to get him his bicycle or whatever, so I would have Christmas dinner, then I'd go to work at 6:00. | 16:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And people loved it because some people just Christmas people and they don't want to work ever on Christmas, so during this time, this is when I was telling you I was saving my money. I was going back to what Doll Baby told me, "Save a dime," and I got so good. If I made a dollar, I started saving 80 cents because I didn't need it," and I told you I don't buy these expensive clothes that somebody else's name is on. I would like one of those expensive cars that somebody else's name is on, but I have not done that yet, but getting back to the prejudice in Pennsylvania, it wasn't—The only difference is you were able to work. You were able to work, but once you got the job, it was still the same old thing, and now that affirmative action is gone, you can forget it. | 17:18 |
Dorothy White Cannon | But now there's another way to look at it. I don't agree with it, and an incident happened that really brought it. It was focused. My girlfriend worked and I will name the company, Smith Kline. It was Smith, Kline & French then. She worked in personnel and a requisition came across her desk for a chemist, and when she looked at the requirements, she said, "Oh, my god, my son, this is perfect for him." Well guess who got the job? Her son got it, but why? She wasn't sweeping floors. She was working in personnel, so he had someone in the position to alert him, "This job is available. You have the requirements, the qualifications, why don't you go for it?" And he got it, and matter of fact, he's still there, but I guess this happens in these other companies. If you don't have anybody up there looking out for you, who knows me? And if Uncle John is up there, naturally, he's going to promote Billy's daughter or his niece or one of the good-old-boys' relative. The application gets handed out up front and I mean there's just no change. | 18:19 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I'm telling you, I talked to my girlfriend today and she says, "Dorothy, I hate it here?" Can you imagine working under those conditions? And with the stressful life that I had lived, when they offered me three extra years to retire, they said, "You have 25 years, if you will retire, we'll give you 28-year pension." They told me. I went out the door so fast they thought I never worked there and people didn't think I was going to retire because I'm still young. But what good is money? What? And then the fact that I had had the cancer, I said, "No, Dorothy. Just get out and go while you can," and that's what I did. | 19:48 |
Chris Stewart | Did you always know that you wanted to retire back here? | 20:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | No. No. That was quite a surprise. I think that it's just something that worked itself out. First of all, I had no idea. Well, I always did want to retire when I was 55. Oh, yeah, that was my dream, but I had no idea I would be retiring right now. I figured I said maybe 55, maybe I may stay another year or so, but after they offered the three, so that put me up to about 57 with my pension not being so high because I was a vocational employee, and it was a company-paid pension, so I am not getting that much money. Plus the fact my grandmother and my cousin are here and I am responsible for them. Now just imagine. I came here in February and my grandmother has been ill practically ever since I've been here. Imagine what would happen if I were in Philadelphia, even though before I moved here I came here once a month, since 1980 to check on my family because my Aunt Doll asked me to. | 20:42 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I got so good, I would get on the airplane after—For example, if I want to come on the weekend, I get on the airplane 20 minutes to 10, 10:30, I'd be in a car in Norfolk driving to Tillery. That would probably be Friday evening. Sunday morning on the airplane going back because that it's approximately 370 miles from Philadelphia to Tillery. And to leave on a Friday night and have to drive back it was really too much, but I had to come see her about, so I would just fly down and rent a car, and then when I did drive, I would always come. My oldest girl has always said, "Mommy, you have never been home on my birthday," because her birthday is February 17th," and she's right because somehow it always comes around it's Washington's birthday time, so I would always put a day with that holiday and drive down to see about my folks. Okay? Well guess what? This year I was retired on her birthday. | 22:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I received a phone call from the attorney in Scotland Neck saying, you need so much money for your settlement. I went to my credit union, this is the 17th, mind you. I got my check. When I got back to my apartment because I moved out of my house, I let my daughter move in. As I told you, I'm not a house person. I said to my cousin that was there helping me pack. I said, "Look. I'm out of here." I had a bag of clothes I washed over my daughter's house. In this bag were underwear, socks, dish towels, whatever. I just picked the bag up and I left to come here, so my daughter said, "Mommy, you're not home again on my birthday," and it's true. | 23:16 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 24:15 |
Dorothy White Cannon | That's when I came down because I made settlement for this house on the 19th of February. | 24:15 |
Chris Stewart | Dorothy, are there any questions that I haven't asked you that you feel you need to have on this tape? | 24:24 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I think you've done okay. (both laugh) You've done good and I've enjoyed it, too. | 24:32 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, you're a wonderful woman to talk to. | 24:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | You're so personable yourself. You just sparkle. | 24:39 |
Chris Stewart | Oh. (laughs) | 24:43 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah, you do. You're very easy to talk to. | 24:44 |
Chris Stewart | That's good. | 24:48 |
Dorothy White Cannon | You seem interested in what the person is saying and you're a very good listener because I know sometimes I was going off and off and off and off, but you're a very good listener. | 24:48 |
Chris Stewart | But it's all part of a life. That's what's so fun. That's what's so really interesting. | 24:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah, I think you pretty well covered it. | 25:00 |
Chris Stewart | Well, the next step then is to go through, we have a form for a biography, basically. It's biographical information, and it accompanies the tape and the transcript wherever it goes, so that we have the biographical information to go along with the tape. | 25:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I don't have to sign anything do I? | 25:28 |
Chris Stewart | Not on this. There will be something you will have to sign. | 25:30 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Later? | 25:33 |
Chris Stewart | Well— | 25:33 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Did you take that up with Gary? | 25:34 |
Chris Stewart | With Gary's family, yeah, when we did him. What we have is we have interview agreement forms where you decide if you're going to give permission for this tape or transcript to be used in the collection. | 25:37 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. | 25:54 |
Chris Stewart | And you have one of two things that you can do. You can sign it over completely or you can place restrictions on it, and in fact, I would suggest that you do place restrictions on it and the kinds of restrictions that we often see placed, and this is actually what I would suggest to you. Do you want me to cut this? | 25:55 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay, no problem. | 26:15 |
Chris Stewart | First I need your full name. | 26:17 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Dorothy Lovely— | 26:20 |
Chris Stewart | That's your middle name? Oh, how wonderful! Oh, that's absolutely wonderful. | 26:25 |
Dorothy White Cannon | —White Cannon. | 26:33 |
Chris Stewart | And your maiden name is White? | 26:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | White, yes. | 26:41 |
Chris Stewart | And your current address is 1516 Main? | 26:42 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 26:46 |
Chris Stewart | Scotland Neck? | 26:52 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. | 26:53 |
Chris Stewart | What's the zip code here? | 26:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | 27874. | 26:57 |
Chris Stewart | And your phone number? | 27:02 |
Dorothy White Cannon | (919) 826-5588. | 27:06 |
Chris Stewart | And how would you like your name to appear in any kind of written material, exactly how you would like it to appear? | 27:10 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Dorothy White Cannon. | 27:16 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Your birthdate? | 27:30 |
Dorothy White Cannon | 8/27/38. | 27:32 |
Chris Stewart | And your place of birth? | 27:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Tillery North Carolina. | 27:39 |
Chris Stewart | And your marital status? | 27:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Divorced. | 27:52 |
Chris Stewart | Your ex-spouse's name? | 27:54 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Carl Owen Cannon, Jr. | 27:56 |
Chris Stewart | And his date of birth? | 28:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | 4— | 28:10 |
Chris Stewart | I'm asking you to think. | 28:10 |
Dorothy White Cannon | —27/38. We were the same age. | 28:15 |
Chris Stewart | I see that, and where was he born? | 28:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | In Philadelphia. | 28:22 |
Chris Stewart | And his occupation? | 28:32 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Transportation supervisor. | 28:35 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Now we have a section for your parents, and I think what probably we should do—I don't know. Tell me if you would like to do this. I'd like to because your grandmother had such an impact on your life, put both your parents and your grandparents down. | 28:48 |
Dorothy White Cannon | That's fine. I have no problem with that. | 29:07 |
Chris Stewart | Go through all the information. | 29:09 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. | 29:09 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Let's start with your—I'm going to just put your grandparents on the back with the comment that your grandparents raised you. | 29:12 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Raised me, right. | 29:18 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Your mother's full name? | 29:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Elizabeth Tillery White Williams. | 29:22 |
Chris Stewart | Her maiden name is Tillery? | 29:36 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 29:37 |
Chris Stewart | Her birthdate? | 29:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | 11/27/1919. | 29:45 |
Chris Stewart | And she's still alive? | 29:51 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 29:52 |
Chris Stewart | And her place of birth? | 29:52 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Tillery. | 29:54 |
Chris Stewart | And her occupation? | 30:03 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Retired now. | 30:05 |
Chris Stewart | And your father's name? | 30:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Cary. | 30:10 |
Chris Stewart | With a K? | 30:12 |
Dorothy White Cannon | C. Cary White, Sr. C-A-R-Y. Cary Thomas White, Sr. | 30:12 |
Chris Stewart | Do you know his date of birth? | 30:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. 12. I think it's the 15th. I'm not sure, but 12 something 1915. | 30:28 |
Chris Stewart | And is he still alive? | 30:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 30:41 |
Chris Stewart | And his place of birth? | 30:41 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Tillery. | 30:41 |
Chris Stewart | And his occupation? | 30:48 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Retired. | 30:49 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Your grandmother's full name? | 30:54 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Hattie Johnson Staton, S-T-A-T-O-N, I think. | 31:17 |
Chris Stewart | And her date of birth? | 31:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | December 1, I think, 1888. | 31:41 |
Chris Stewart | December 1? | 31:45 |
Dorothy White Cannon | December 1, 1888. | 31:47 |
Chris Stewart | And her maiden name was Johnson? | 31:51 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Johnson, mm-hmm. | 31:53 |
Chris Stewart | And she died today? | 31:58 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Sure did. I'm not sure about her address. I mean, her address. I have to find out from my brother exactly. | 31:59 |
Chris Stewart | Your birthdate? | 32:13 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I know the year, but I'm not sure about the date. | 32:14 |
Chris Stewart | Do you know the month? Are you sure? | 32:18 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, yeah, December is right. | 32:20 |
Chris Stewart | We'll just go ahead and put down the December of 1888. | 32:21 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. | 32:24 |
Chris Stewart | And her place of birth? | 32:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Tillery. | 32:30 |
Chris Stewart | And her occupation? | 32:36 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Well— | 32:39 |
Chris Stewart | What was her occupation? | 32:41 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Day laborer. | 32:41 |
Chris Stewart | And your grandfather? | 32:53 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Johnny Thomas White. | 32:54 |
Chris Stewart | And his date of birth, do you recall? | 33:10 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I know it was March 6, I think it was 1892, something like that. I bet late 1892. He was younger than my grandmother. | 33:18 |
Chris Stewart | And when did he die? | 33:33 |
Dorothy White Cannon | February, 1970. | 33:35 |
Chris Stewart | And he was born in Tillery as well? | 33:36 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 33:36 |
Chris Stewart | It's a long history. | 33:36 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And so was my grandmother's mother and my grandmother's grandmother. | 33:51 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 33:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I have a census sheet here somewhere from 1910. | 33:58 |
Chris Stewart | You do? | 34:04 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. | 34:05 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 34:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | That's what Cheryl was doing. You know the lady? | 34:07 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, that's right. Yeah. See, now how are you and Mildred Moore related? | 34:12 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Don't ask me. (laughs) | 34:16 |
Chris Stewart | You are, though— | 34:18 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah. | 34:18 |
Chris Stewart | —because it goes back because I know. I saw she started talking about you and I was like, "Okay, I know there's a connection, but where is it?" | 34:19 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah. I don't know exactly where it is. There was a saying, if you were born and raised in Tillery, you couldn't marry anybody there because you were all kin. (Stewart laughs) The Tillerys and the Johnsons seem to be the outstanding family names, and of course Tillery, that's the name of the community, so you know where we got our name from. | 34:26 |
Chris Stewart | Okay, now your brothers and sisters. | 34:53 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. Starting with the oldest one, Cary. | 34:55 |
Chris Stewart | Starting with you're the oldest. | 34:59 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, but I'm not the brother or sister. I thought you wanted the siblings. | 35:01 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. You're number one. | 35:01 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I'm number one? | 35:05 |
Chris Stewart | No, you're number one in the birth order. Right? | 35:06 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. | 35:08 |
Chris Stewart | But starting with a C? | 35:08 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. | 35:08 |
Chris Stewart | A-R-Y? | 35:11 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. | 35:12 |
Chris Stewart | Cary White? | 35:14 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Junior, mm-hmm. I don't know why he doesn't have Thomas in there. | 35:15 |
Chris Stewart | And when is his birthday? How old is he? | 35:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, he was born 1940. That's easy. He was born the year of the flood. | 35:25 |
Chris Stewart | That's right. That's right. | 35:28 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Now, it's going to get a little tricky after that. | 35:28 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 35:29 |
Dorothy White Cannon | He was born January 29th. 1940. | 35:31 |
Chris Stewart | He was born in Tillery? | 35:32 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 35:36 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 35:38 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Now, I have my next brother is Johnny, so Nick is 53 this year, right? | 35:39 |
Chris Stewart | Yep. | 35:46 |
Dorothy White Cannon | So Johnny will be 52 in September, so what year was that? | 35:47 |
Chris Stewart | 1941. | 35:52 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. Next one, he was born September 12th, I think. Okay, the next one is Frank White. He was born March 6th, so Johnny is 52 and he must be 51. | 35:53 |
Chris Stewart | So that means it's 1942. | 36:23 |
Dorothy White Cannon | No. Maybe he's just 50 this year. Wait a minute. Don't write it yet. | 36:27 |
Chris Stewart | I'm not writing. | 36:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Somebody was born in '45. I think that was Melvin, so what would that make him? That's the one after Frank. You can put that down. | 36:41 |
Chris Stewart | Melvin? | 36:49 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. | 36:50 |
Chris Stewart | That would make Melvin 48. | 36:53 |
Dorothy White Cannon | 93. | 36:55 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Let me subtract. 93, yeah, eight, 48. That would make him 48. | 36:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Huh? Well, if it's five of us and I'm 54, that's about right. I think he was born December 1st, 1945. | 37:05 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay, Frank? | 0:02 |
Chris Stewart | What did you say Melvin? What day in 1945? | 0:05 |
Dorothy White Cannon | December 1st. | 0:05 |
Chris Stewart | December. | 0:08 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And Frank, Frank is '50. | 0:12 |
Chris Stewart | '43. | 0:16 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay, that sounds good. | 0:17 |
Chris Stewart | Okay, now children. | 0:22 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. My oldest one is Faye Rosalind. You got a lot to write. | 0:23 |
Chris Stewart | F-A-Y-E? | 0:29 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Y-E. Uh-huh. | 0:30 |
Chris Stewart | And Rosalind. | 0:31 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Rosalind. | 0:32 |
Chris Stewart | R-O-S— | 0:33 |
Dorothy White Cannon | L-I-N-D. I think that's— | 0:35 |
Chris Stewart | Rosalind. Okay. | 0:36 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Cannon. Oliver. Wooten. W-O-O-T-E-N. | 0:39 |
Chris Stewart | And when was she born? | 0:49 |
Dorothy White Cannon | February 17th, 1958. | 0:52 |
Chris Stewart | And she was born in Philadelphia? | 0:56 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Philadelphia. But you know what, all my brothers were not born in- | 0:58 |
Chris Stewart | Tillery? | 1:02 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Right. | 1:03 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 1:04 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Frank and Melvin were born in Virginia. | 1:04 |
Chris Stewart | In Newport News? | 1:09 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 1:11 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Next child. | 1:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Karen Arnette. A-R-N-E-T-T-E. Cannon. James. | 1:23 |
Chris Stewart | And what is her birthday? | 1:37 |
Dorothy White Cannon | September 6th, 1959. | 1:39 |
Chris Stewart | And Philadelphia again? | 1:48 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. Gerome with a G. Michael. Cannon. July 4th, 1968. | 1:49 |
Chris Stewart | Philadelphia? | 2:12 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 2:13 |
Chris Stewart | And do you have grandchildren? | 2:15 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Five. | 2:17 |
Chris Stewart | We just needed the number. Now we need your residential history. | 2:20 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. | 2:23 |
Chris Stewart | You lived in Tillery. | 2:23 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Uh-huh. | 2:23 |
Chris Stewart | Until you were 16, did you say? | 2:26 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes, 16. | 2:38 |
Chris Stewart | So that was? | 2:38 |
Dorothy White Cannon | 1955, I left. | 2:42 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Then to Philadelphia? | 2:49 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 2:51 |
Chris Stewart | Until 1993? | 2:58 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Two. Well, you could say '93 because I was on payroll there until February. So you could say '93, 1993. | 3:01 |
Chris Stewart | You moved back to Tillery. Okay, now education history, school history. | 3:26 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. I graduated from high school, which would be the 12 years. | 3:29 |
Chris Stewart | What were the names of the elementary school— | 3:34 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, Shady Grove and Tillery. | 3:36 |
Chris Stewart | And that was through what grade? | 3:43 |
Dorothy White Cannon | [indistinct 00:03:47]. I'll say first through sixth, I believe. I'm not sure, you can put a little question mark because I'm not really sure. | 3:48 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 3:58 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And then I think Tillery Chapel, I went seven through eight. And then to Brawley. You should have done this tomorrow, Margie will be here, she could straighten us out because we went to school together from the very beginning. | 3:58 |
Chris Stewart | And that was in Scotland Neck? | 4:17 |
Dorothy White Cannon | No. Oh yeah, yes. I'm sorry, yes. Brawley was in Scotland Neck. | 4:19 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 4:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | More schooling? And then I did, as I said, a self-help program at OIC. | 4:30 |
Chris Stewart | What's the name of the OI? What are the— | 4:35 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Occupational, is it Industrious? Occupational Industrious— | 4:35 |
Chris Stewart | Something College? | 5:00 |
Dorothy White Cannon | No, it's not a college. Uh-huh. | 5:01 |
Chris Stewart | What is the C for? | 5:04 |
Dorothy White Cannon | That's what I'm trying to—Oh my word. I wonder if my daughter remembers. | 5:04 |
Chris Stewart | I'll put down OIC. | 5:12 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah. And I will get back to you with what it means. I know it's occupational, and I'm not sure if it's industrial. I think it's industrial. What's the C? OIC. Maybe careers, I'm not sure. But let's not put anything down because I'd like for it to be factual. | 5:14 |
Chris Stewart | And that's in Philadelphia? | 5:37 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Philadelphia. Uh-huh. | 5:39 |
Chris Stewart | And how long were you—? | 5:43 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I went there for about a year. | 5:46 |
Chris Stewart | What year was that, do you recall? Around? | 5:49 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. I went to the job I retired from in '66, so I was going there about '65, in 1965. | 5:53 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 6:10 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And I went to community college for about a year, also. In Philadelphia. | 6:15 |
Chris Stewart | In Philadelphia? | 6:19 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Uh-huh. Community College. | 6:20 |
Chris Stewart | Around when do you think that was? | 6:28 |
Dorothy White Cannon | 1983. | 6:32 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Now jobs. | 6:36 |
Dorothy White Cannon | The first job I had was in a cleaners. | 6:38 |
Chris Stewart | What was the name of that? | 6:41 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Carl's Cleaners. | 6:43 |
Chris Stewart | And what was the job itself? | 6:45 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Counter person. And it was a counter girl. Today it's counter person. | 6:50 |
Chris Stewart | And that was in Philadelphia? | 6:58 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. The next job I had was in a sweater—No, wait a minute, wait a minute. No, the next job I had was in a clothing factory called L.W. Foster. Clothing manufacturer, it was. | 7:02 |
Chris Stewart | And what was your job there? | 7:24 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I did everything. In other words, wherever they needed somebody I would fill in. They manufactured men's clothing. | 7:28 |
Chris Stewart | I'm going to put you down as a float person. | 7:45 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Okay. | 7:46 |
Chris Stewart | Floater. | 7:47 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Floater, right. That's good. | 7:47 |
Chris Stewart | In Philadelphia again? | 7:49 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. | 7:50 |
Chris Stewart | About when was this? | 7:52 |
Dorothy White Cannon | That was about '57. | 7:56 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 7:58 |
Dorothy White Cannon | The next job I had was somewhere along in there my children were born, and I didn't work for a while. | 8:02 |
Chris Stewart | Which was a job. | 8:10 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes, positively. And then I worked in a sweater factory called Bergman's Knitting. | 8:11 |
Chris Stewart | B-E-R- | 8:23 |
Dorothy White Cannon | E-R-G-M-A-N apostrophe S. Bergman's. | 8:24 |
Chris Stewart | And what did you do there? | 8:30 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I was a floater again. | 8:33 |
Chris Stewart | You're the kind of person who can do anything. | 8:35 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yeah. Wherever they needed somebody, they put me. | 8:37 |
Chris Stewart | And when was that? | 8:42 |
Dorothy White Cannon | In '66, '65? I would say that was around '63. | 8:52 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 8:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And the next one was International Resistance Corporation, I remember that. That's IRC. | 9:01 |
Chris Stewart | Resistance. | 9:15 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. Corporation. | 9:18 |
Chris Stewart | And what did you do there? | 9:18 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I was a wire winder. And then—oh, wait a minute. That was about 1965. | 9:20 |
Chris Stewart | '65? | 9:37 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mm-hmm. | 9:40 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 9:45 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And then I went to Bell of Pennsylvania, which I did very good with because I managed my money well. And that was in 1966 until retirement. | 9:46 |
Chris Stewart | And you did a variety of jobs there, right? | 10:05 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes. I was an operator. If you want to put them down, I was an operator, I was a senior operator, I was a clerk, then I was a frame person, and then I was a switching equipment technician. And that's what I retired from. That was it. | 10:07 |
Chris Stewart | Happily. | 10:46 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes, positive. | 10:47 |
Chris Stewart | Have you ever received any awards or honors? | 10:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, numerous. (laughs) | 10:54 |
Chris Stewart | Can you name? | 10:56 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Mostly for my volunteer work. Through the company, I did lots of community programs, really just recognition certificates. | 10:59 |
Chris Stewart | Do you remember any specifics? | 11:18 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh yes. Easter time, on behalf of my place of employment, I would visit—What do you call it? A home for crippled children—A school for handicap, I guess you should say, children. I was a mentor in the mentoring program. I used to do community days, meaning we would give functions in different communities. I also did volunteer work at Inglis House in Philadelphia, and Inglis House was a home for incurable cripples. | 11:22 |
Chris Stewart | How do you spell that? | 12:25 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I-N-G-L-I-S. Something like that. | 12:27 |
Chris Stewart | That must be named after someone. | 12:29 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Probably. I volunteered there for quite a while. And I used to belong to another group in the community, I don't remember the name of it, but our primary function was to adopt a shut-in person. And what you had to do is call that person every day to make sure that person was okay. | 12:34 |
Chris Stewart | What a great idea. | 13:00 |
Dorothy White Cannon | It was an excellent idea and it started as a result of so many elderly people being alone and, in the winter especially, freezing, and then in the summer, suffocating from the heat, so forth and so on. So I did that for quite a while. And did lots of church work. | 13:01 |
Chris Stewart | Well, actually that's my next question. | 13:33 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, okay. | 13:34 |
Chris Stewart | What's your current religious denomination? | 13:35 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Right now I'm Baptist. | 13:37 |
Chris Stewart | And your current church affiliation? | 13:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Canaan. C-A-N-A-A-N. Canaan Baptist in Philadelphia. | 13:43 |
Chris Stewart | And your past church memberships? | 13:57 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I just remembered I didn't write my mortgage payment. | 14:05 |
Chris Stewart | Oh no. (Cannon laughs) | 14:08 |
Dorothy White Cannon | That's crazy. | 14:12 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Church affiliation, Most Precious Blood Catholic Church. That was one of them. | 14:12 |
Chris Stewart | Most— | 14:21 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Precious Blood. And the next one was Saint Asthanasius. | 14:21 |
Chris Stewart | Help me spell that. | 14:37 |
Dorothy White Cannon | As than as I us. A-S-T-H-A-N— | 14:38 |
Chris Stewart | As than as I as? | 14:43 |
Dorothy White Cannon | A-S-I-U-S. I forgot what I said. | 14:49 |
Chris Stewart | Whoa, that's a name. | 14:55 |
Dorothy White Cannon | That's the only way I could remember. My grandfather taught me to spell like that. | 14:57 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah, that makes perfect sense. What denomination is that? | 15:01 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Catholic. | 15:06 |
Chris Stewart | I was raised Catholic. | 15:07 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, okay. | 15:08 |
Chris Stewart | I call myself a recovering Catholic, though. (Cannon laughs) | 15:08 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And before that I was here in Tillery Chapel. I should have said that one first, but I forgot. It was my family church. That's where my grandmother's going to be buried Monday, or funeralized. | 15:09 |
Chris Stewart | [indistinct 00:15:30] Chapel? | 15:27 |
Dorothy White Cannon | At Tillery Chapel. | 15:30 |
Chris Stewart | And then is there going to be something at the community center there? | 15:33 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Probably, I have to decide. I haven't even entertained the thought. My main concern now is to get on the train and go to Philadelphia to bury my stepfather, and then when I get back I'll deal with whatever. | 15:37 |
Chris Stewart | Next question is to list any organizations to which you belong. Specific kinds of organizations, clubs or— | 15:54 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Well, I still have membership in the Pastor's Aid at the church. The Hospitality Guild. Missionaries. Well, history. And of course, let me see, hospitality, Pastor's Aid, and missionaries. I think that was all in the church. And of course, CCT. | 16:02 |
Chris Stewart | Well, I was just going to say. | 16:39 |
Dorothy White Cannon | And under CCT comes the Grown Folks Group. | 16:43 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. I love this part because I just—Well, I just love this part. | 16:48 |
Dorothy White Cannon | The Grown Folks Group, and I'm a volunteer for the Open-Minded Seniors. And that's it, I think. | 16:59 |
Chris Stewart | Are there any other activities or hobbies that you'd like to have down on this? | 17:19 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I love to travel. | 17:24 |
Chris Stewart | Now you can have the opportunity. | 17:25 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Now I won't have the money. (laughs) | 17:32 |
Chris Stewart | You can do it. | 17:33 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I enjoy activities where I am the participant. In other words, active activities. I like to play tennis, I like to swim, and I hate bowling because I have to wait until you bowl before I can bowl. I just like active participation. That's about it. Oh, and I love to sing, but I cannot sing. (laughs) | 17:38 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 18:04 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Yes, I love music. | 18:05 |
Chris Stewart | Everybody was singing at the Open-Minded Seniors group and I thought I saw you singing. | 18:08 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I was moving my lips. I do very well at it. | 18:12 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, no, no, no. Sounds to me like you have to sing if you're going to be part of that group. | 18:17 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Listen, I was taking singing lessons just before—I was taking piano lessons and singing lessons just before I retired. And the teacher was trying to teach me to breathe because usually when I breathe here, I pull it in. All my life I've been pulling in my tummy. | 18:22 |
Chris Stewart | I know exactly what you mean. | 18:41 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Now all of a sudden you have to push it out? And I found it very difficult. | 18:41 |
Chris Stewart | I know, I know. | 18:44 |
Dorothy White Cannon | So my song was "I Believe." That's what I chose to sing. So finally I was going (singing) "I believe," and then somewhere I would get hung up. After a while, the music teacher looked at me and she said, "Just sing." | 18:47 |
Chris Stewart | Just relax. | 19:01 |
Dorothy White Cannon | In other words, don't worry about where your diaphragm is, just sing. And after that, I quit because it got too much. | 19:04 |
Chris Stewart | I love to sing too, I'm a singer myself, but I'm one of those people who sings in the shower, sings in the car, nobody else— | 19:15 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, I can't sing. I can't sing. You should hear Lola, did you ever hear Lola sing? | 19:21 |
Chris Stewart | No. | 19:26 |
Dorothy White Cannon | "Waiting for My Child to Come Home." You have got to hear that. | 19:27 |
Chris Stewart | Did she really? (Cannon laughs) | 19:30 |
Dorothy White Cannon | I don't see how she could have the nerve! (both laugh) | 19:33 |
Chris Stewart | She doesn't have a voice these days. She loses her voice all the time. | 19:35 |
Dorothy White Cannon | Oh, we had so much fun. She sang that, Gary was playing the piano and she was singing that. You would never believe, and she's so serious! (laughs) | 19:42 |
Chris Stewart | Oh yeah. Yeah. | 19:50 |
Dorothy White Cannon | It was too much. | 19:52 |
Chris Stewart | We interviewed [indistinct 00:19:58]— | 19:54 |
Item Info
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