Yankees with Deep Fried Southern Roots

By David J. Ross

The past is something that defines us. It determines who we are and what values we hold. It is our history. Too often, especially today, we take our history and toss it aside as “old fashioned” and “unnecessary” — scraping it from ourselves like chewed gum from a shoe sole. Yet we fail to realize how much our past affects the future and how we are shaped by it.

My parents experienced events I have only observed in the worn, yellowed, and dusty pages of history books. The differences between today and yesterday are often the subject of heated debates over what has changed in America and what is still the same. Sometimes I vehemently disagree with them, and other times I find myself compelled to agree, much to my chagrin. Not until interviewing both of my parents over a weekend and getting into a disagreement did I realize how much I still have to learn about history and how my parents experienced it.

Southern Roots

As my parents talked that lazy Sunday afternoon, I realized that I did not truly recognize my family’s deep fried Southern roots. For instance, I saw for the first time how Southern our household is, yet I also observed how little attention I have paid to my family’s history. Sure, I had heard the stories about our family’s past during my youth. But as I grew older I heard them so much that I began to half-listen and the stories became like wallpaper, just a part of the home I knew existed but paid little attention to. Having to take note of events my parents encountered made me wish to record every scrap of my family’s history — from a passed-down family recipe to an ancient family story — and preserve them from the ravages of wayward young minds and give them to my children to pass on to theirs.

Both of my parents were born in the state of Massachusetts. As a result, my parents’ first experience with Southern culture was not in the South but the North. The neighborhood of Maynard Street in Springfield, MA, was predominately populated by Southern Blacks, who had move more north to live near Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, a subsection of Springfield, to escape the depressed economy and vehement racism of the Jim Crow South.

One Parent: Rooted in New Orleans

My mother’s parents, Webster “Lucky” Carroll Jr. and Mercedes “Joyce” Carroll nee Harper, moved north because they had experienced racist New Orleans during the 1930s and ‘40s. Although they left the South behind, they did not leave their culture on Bourbon Street. Instead, like many of the people in the area, they brought New Orleans with them. Because of my grandparents’ efforts my mother was constantly immersed in the sights and sounds of Black culture which ranged from eating savory New Orleans dishes such as gumbo and jambalaya to listening to classic jazz music from the likes of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.

Mrs. Rosemund, one of the neighborhood moms and an Arkansas native, would serve cornbread­ — which apparently tasted horrible and had the consistency of sand — during house visits that helped to distinguish her Southern roots from a Northern family. As my dad explained, a Northern Black family would invite someone over and offer something to drink — and nothing else. In contrast, Southern Black families would invite a person over, offer food and drink, and demand that their guest sit down and relax. Southerners tended to be warmer, were insulted if you did not say good mornin’ or good evenin’ to them, and always had good food cooking in a pot to serve alongside pleasant conversation.

Another Parent: Urban Boston Meets Rural Alabama

In contrast to my mother’s story, my father’s was different. His family was originally from Boston. They uprooted to Springfield when my grandmother, Eloyse Barnhart nee Johnson, purchased a house on Maynard Street in 1962, when my father first met my mother. She was two and he was four. Dad’s full-blown introduction to the Southern region came at the age of fifteen when my grandmother married James Napoleon “Boo” Barnhart, my step-grandfather who is originally from Fairfield, Alabama. “Papa,” as we call him, had a strange upbringing. He was born the oldest of sixteen children, all of whom were packed like sardines into a two-room shack (apparently they were sharecroppers). When he was as child, one of his close friends was a white boy. This friendship was risky considering they were living in the Jim Crow era. To exacerbate matters the attitude of the boy’s family seamlessly fit the times like a jigsaw puzzle piece. They wanted him to stop associating with Papa because he was black. However, the boy defied his parent’s wishes and refused to neglect his friend, and later he would even teach “Boo” how to drive.

Papa was also very intelligent and strong. He often told stories of hitching the family mule to the plow to till the earth. Because of such hard manual labor his muscles felt like steel ropes. Even today, after he was forced to enter the Veterans Administration Hospital, his muscles remain hard from the intense manual labor he endured in the past. His intelligence earned him an opportunity to enter college. Unfortunately he could not accept because his family was experiencing hardship due to his father’s death. Instead he enlisted in the United States Air Force and eventually became a jet mechanic performing maintenance on the new B-52 Stratofortress jets. Through years of hard work, discipline, and focus he worked his way up to chief master sergeant, the highest rank an enlisted man can attain in the Air Force. His military occupation would take him to Westover Air Force Base in Springfield, MA, where he would meet and marry my grandmother.

Less Than Subtle Racism in the North

Although many Blacks were fleeing the Jim Crow South, my parents stressed to me that all too often they found the same racism up North that they thought had been left behind in Dixie. The only difference was it did not wear a white sheet and lacked that distinct Southern twang. The area my parents lived in up north was highly segregated between Black, Hispanic, White Protestant, Polish, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods. Because of strained racial tension the parents restricted their children from going to certain neighborhoods for fear of the child’s life. In the mid-1960s my parents were among the first children to be bussed from their local predominately Black school to a middle class suburban white school. The government often used economic means to force people to integrate. For example, in my parents’ neighborhood people who wanted their children to go to the local neighborhood schools had to pay an extra tax that was not affordable. However, many parents, including my grandparents, pulled their children out of the predominately white schools due to vitriolic racism from both students and faculty.

My parents ended up in a Catholic school where they encountered all the social groups in one setting. One memory they recount vividly is when a race riot broke out among high school students. Although the origins of the fight were subject to debate, apparently a Black male teenager was dating a white girl and earned the simmering ire of white males at the school. After fighting broke out between the Black student and a fellow white student, it quickly spread like wildfire throughout the high school reaching the local colleges. My mother remembers my grandmother saying, “They ain’t taking it no more! They ain’t takin’ it like we took it!” Mostly what my parents remember is being told to run straight home without stopping anywhere. The aftermath was devastating. Places were trashed and vandalized; the unstable racial tension exploded like nitroglycerin.

Experiences in the South: New Orleans and the Paper Bag Rule

My parents’ first experiences in the South differed slightly but in many ways were the same. My mother's first experience occurred at the age of four during a family trip from Springfield to New Orleans. There were no interstates so back roads were used to get to their destination. While stopped at a local Mississippi gas station my mother saw something she was not familiar with -- a sign that said, “Whites Only.” Because Black people were not allowed upfront, my grandfather had to use the back entrance to pay for his gas. While he was away my mother overheard a white woman in a conversation. My mother had never heard a white southern accent before and because she thought it sounded funny began to mimic it like most four-year-olds would. My grandmother quickly grabbed her, told her to shut up, and put her in the car. It was then that Mom noticed that my grandmother was afraid. After getting back on the road and driving into the night, everyone was exhausted so they pulled over to rest. My grandmother awoke to discover they were in the same area where three civil rights workers named Andrew Goodman, James E. Chaney, and Michael Schwerner had been murdered in 1964 by Klu Klux Klan members in cooperation with Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Realizing where they were my grandmother awoke my grandfather who floored it out of the area.

My mother later moved to New Orleans in 1970 at the age of ten. While she had visited there before, this time she got the chance to see firsthand just how ingrained Jim Crow and slavery-era racism still were in post-civil rights New Orleans. She encountered racism in many forms, but the most surprising for her was among her own culture about skin tone — the paper bag rule. The rule was, and still is, a major issue in the Black community. The rule states that people with lighter skin complexions are more desirable because they can pass for another race. People with darker complexions are less desirable because they cannot as easily. A lot of mixed people/Creoles in New Orleans, formerly called mulattos, would only marry individuals who were either equal to or lighter than the color of a paper bag. They engaged in this practice in order to keep the “good genes” in their families. The mixed people in New Orleans segregated themselves in their own ward, the seventh ward.

My mom provided me an example of this practice. One of her childhood schoolmates was a boy named Dwight, wholooked white, which is what my mother thought he was. One day he told her that he was Black, much to her confusion. My grandmother had to explain to her that Dwight’s parents were the descendants of Creoles, peoples of mixed African, European, and in some cases Native American ancestry. Dwight’s parents had kept the “socially desirable genes” in their family. Because my mother was about the color of a paper bag, she was able to associate with the light-skinned and dark-skinned Blacks without incident.

Related Experience: Texas Communities and Racial Bigotry

My father’s first experience down South was one of both Southern and military cultures. In 1974 he moved with my grandmother and step-grandfather to Texas, where he lived in two cities at different times. The first was Ft. Worth and the second was San Antonio; both cities had a strong military presence. According to him they were not really the typical South because people from all over the globe were living in the area. The difference between the local and military cultures was more clearly obvious when my father visited Como, a predominately Black neighborhood of Ft. Worth. Life on a military base was different from being in the general population and constantly revolved around base activities. In contrast, in Como everything was centered around the church where Papa was a Sunday school teacher.

After moving to San Antonio to attend college my father encountered a completely different society. Blacks and Whites were the minority because San Antonio was predominately populated by individuals of Latino descent. The communities of the city were quite segregated. The Blacks lived on the eastside, Whites in the north and northwest sections, and Hispanics everywhere else.

Dad’s first experience with racism in the South was while he was living in Ft. Worth. It involved a local white couple, Jud and Jerry, who were friends of the family. Jerry, the wife, helped my father and his step-brother, James, get a job at a restaurant called The Farmer’s Daughter. Jud, the husband, was from out of state. One night Jud drove to Cowtown to pick up Jerry from her job, and my father and James tagged along with him. After arriving at the bar where Jerry worked, they waited inside for her while Jud kept the car running. The manager of the place came and viciously asked who the two “niggers” were. When Jerry indignantly responded they were her friends, the manager venomously spat out that he did not want to see “them niggers” in his establishment again — Jerry promptly quit her job.

My parents’ description of their lives made me think about my own experiences. I have encountered some of the issues they describe. I have been called a “nigger.” People have eloquently told me of my “inferiority” scientifically, socially, and religiously. The hard truth is that for all the progress we seem to have made, more needs to be make. Yet I saw a silver lining. I have never experienced a race riot. I have not felt the fear of knowing I was in an area where three men were shot based upon their support of civil rights. I am able to sit in a classroom with classmates from other races, ethnicities, and culture without fear of violence. My teachers are able to look past skin color and see an individual’s personal value. In some ways we have not changed and need to progress further, but in other ways we have progressed substantially. It takes more than flour to make an apple pie, and it will take more than forty years of political correctness to rid America of it racism. Through it all I discovered my connection to a culture I never felt I was related to, and I saw how much I still must learn from those who treaded the gnarled and twisted path of life before me.

Works Cited

Ross, Loren. Personal interview. 11 Sep. 2011.

Ross, Patricia. Personal interview. 11 Sep. 2011.


Note: David Ross, who is from Southern Pines, NC, is a university transfer student at Sandhills Community College where he is pursuing an associate in arts degree.

Grandma’s Journey from North to South

By Tramaine Pride

My grandmother has lived through some of America’s most interesting decades these past 65 years. She was in school when desegregation began, angry when “King” was killed, saw man go to space, bought herself an iPod, and has lived to see the first black president in Barack Obama. In our interview I asked her about these events and others that happened during her lifetime to understand a Southern black woman’s view of them when they happened. Bringing up these events brought up an immense amount of memories and stories which led to us having a two-day interview because apparently “our family tends to be a bit longwinded.” Although born in the North, she has used Southern values of church and family to overcome the daily challenges that she has faced.

My grandmother is the youngest of five children who all were born in North Carolina with one exception — her. Her father, a New York native, wanted to move his family up north so his children would have a “better chance on life” rather than one in North Carolina where he had had many problems as an African American. After my grandmother was born, the family stayed in New York until she was around ten years old when her parents divorced and separated. Although her oldest brother and her father stayed in New York, she moved to the South during a time she described as hectic. Though she had heard about desegregation, she didn’t pay it much attention because she had gone to school in the inner city with all “colored” people her whole life. She always knew race was an issue growing up, but she is admittedly ignorant to marches and protests that I was so eager to find out about. “You just didn’t want to stir up any problems down here,” she explained.

She grew up in North Carolina in a single-parent home with two brothers and a sister; everyone in the family played their parts in helping support the family. Her mother did her best and taught them how to use the water pump and how to handle their business in the outhouse. She wasn’t used to the Southern way of life after living in New York. She told me that her mother kept chickens and that she learned to catch, kill, pluck and cook a chicken with great goory detail. Reflecting on this practice she laughed at my face and told me how lucky I am to have Food Lion now. Though the chores and living were harder in the South, “You did them because you had to for your family, and that was true love. I did all that because we had to, and I loved my family; mean as she was, I love my mama.”

During high school she worked for the Pinehurst Resort (“The Hotel”) as did most of her classmates and neighbors from Taylortown. Her oldest brother went into the Army, the other brother went back to New York for college, but she and her sister stayed in the local area after high school working and “courting.” She had fun partying on the “hill” in Taylortown and being the center of attention for the local male population. My grandmother was married four times total and is currently still with her fourth husband. She tells me the reasoning behind these marriages was because “It was the right thing to do. Marriage was how you stayed in a relationship with a man. One did not just move in and live together because you were in love; it was a sin called shackin’ in the church I was raised in.”

Her second husband, my grandfather, was “real country boy” raised in West End North, Carolina, by some “Indians and white folks,” she says with a laugh, “Why you think your mama’s so bright?” In that marriage she had four children and was a true housewife. “I cooked like my mama, I cleaned like my mama, and I loved hard like mama too.” She learned about root medicines and home remedies from my grandfather’s Native American mother. My grandmother was suspicious of some of those practices like most southern blacks; she referred to them as “witchy.” She took her family to the same A.M.E. Zion Pentecostal Church that her mother went to in Taylortown. The church was what kept and still keeps the family together. She made her children sing in the choir and attend Sunday school, they were all christened there, and she had three of her four weddings there too. Her two children who are married, my aunt and uncle, were married in the same church. Life was pretty much the same from generation to generation, her children had children, and I was subsequently raised in Taylortown.

We discussed some changes such as her interaction with white people. For a long time she didn’t deal with white people outside of being a service to them. Most of her adult life she either worked for or served white people, many from the North. She served these rich victors who came to Pinehurst for golf and recreation while she was young and later served and nursed them when they were old in the retirement and nursing facilities in Pinehurst too. In her early ‘50’s still working in nursing, she decided it was time for a change, and that change was her education. Growing up in the South she “didn’t care much about school as much about making money and helping the family survive. That’s just how everybody did it; you worked and survived but never really elevated yourself beyond that.”

She says her children and grandchildren were her inspiration to focus on her education. She attended community college and received an associate in arts degree with honors and elevated her pay and status. She credits her family for helping her along the way. In high school I remember helping her to use a computer and prepare presentations and spreadsheets. She had white classmates who have become her white friends now. “I took me long enough,” she says with a smile. When I asked her did she think race was still an issue even with Obama as president, she responded, “It’s really a beautiful thing how far we’ve come, and I hope y’all just love on each other till all that’s gone.”

My grandmother was uprooted from the North and was raised in the South. Her life has seen many changes in culture over the years and she has changed hers along with it. But the Southern ideals such as church and the importance of family are still how she will live forever.

Work Cited

Baldwin, Toni. Personal interview. 8 Sep. 2011.



Note: Tramaine Pride, who is from Southern Pines, NC, is a university transfer student at Sandhills Community College where he is pursuing an associate in arts degree.

The Town Time Forgot

By Christy Evans

Nothing is more interesting than learning about “how things used to be” — that’s exactly what I did by interviewing my mother-in-law, Emma Jane Brown Evans. Born on October 4, 1950 in Robbins, NC, she was the younger of two children of W.C. and Denese Brown. According to Jane, life growing up in this small southern town has not changed very much over years.

"The biggest thing about our town I remember from my childhood was a huge sense of community. Everyone looked out for each other, and love your neighbor was our code of life.” When growing up, about 15 kids on her block always got together to play in the streets, go to the movies, and go trick-or-treating every Halloween. “You didn’t have to worry about the meanness then that you have to look out for now. It was a God-fearing town.”

The event in the South that had the most effect on her life is the integration of schools. Until 1965, she attended school with only other white children; however, when entering the tenth grade, integration began taking place in Robbins. The all-black school closed, and all the students from it began attending North Moore High School. For her, this wasn’t an issue, but some seniors who were graduating made huge deals by “taunting the lower classmen about having to share their school with people of color.”

According to Jane, when she was growing up, her parents did not raise her to be prejudiced but to love everyone. However, not everybody in town shared those beliefs. Even though integration was going on in the schools, it wasn’t going on in the neighborhoods. No black families were allowed to live inside the city limits of Robbins. “If a house was for sale and a black family tried to buy it, then someone else in the community would buy it first so that the black family couldn’t.” She also said, “As far as I know, that still happens today. I guess that some things will never change.”

Like most other Southerners, family and church were very important. Parents taught and instilled values and manners in their children. A child was expected to show respect to elders and address them properly. Another important element of her childhood was church. “That is where you were supposed to be on Sunday morning, and if you weren’t then Grandma would show up at your house afterwards wanting to know why.” After church every Sunday, family dinners consisted of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, and homemade biscuits. It was a time to sit down with family, enjoy their company, and catch up on everyone’s lives. Teenagers weren’t allowed to date until they were sixteen, and “women had more respect for themselves by not letting everything hang out. Churches and their preachers pretty much ran the town.”

Jane’s parents brought her up with the mindset that attending college was a must, not an option, and that’s what she did. She started at Sandhills Community College, got her associate in arts degree, and then transferred to UNCP where she received her teaching degree. Jane said, "Education is a must to survive in the world today, not only in the South but all over."

One last nugget I learned is how Robbins seems to be “stuck in the past.” According to Jane, neighboring communities describe Robbins as “the town time forgot” because even as everything in the world has changed, Robbins still stays with the simpler way of living.

The changes in life — and resistance to change — are so interesting. My mother-in-law taught me that some of the “good ol’ days” are still alive in our neighboring communities, and we should hold on to as much of Southern culture and value as we can.

Work Cited

Evans, Emma Jane Brown. Personal interview. 5 Sept. 2011.

Note: Christy Evans, who is from Aberdeen, NC, is a nursing student at Sandhills Community College where she is pursuing an associate in arts degree.

Good Ol’ Days

By Darlene Brown

Some may say growing up in the Sandhills area of Scotland County was a simple and uncomplicated way of life. Compared to the affairs of the world today, it may seem as such. Although families did not worry about home invasions or gang-like violence, the way of life for those who experienced it was all but simple. Growing up in a family of sharecroppers, country living was definitely not a life of luxury but a complicated life of hard work, necessity and family bonding. A close family friend, who experienced the life of working on a farm during the “good ol’ days,” revealed to me a real-life account of the tedious routines of growing up in the Sandhills of Scotland County.

My interviewee, whom we will call Mrs. H., told of her personal experiences living on a farm. Mrs. H. said she did not go to school because school was not a high priority. She recalls that at the age of nine her typical day was to get up at sunrise and go outside to the water pump; she would wash up with lye soap in cold water. Then she would carry water into the house for her younger siblings to wash their faces. She would next start the wood-burning stove to cook breakfast for her siblings because her parents had already gone to the tobacco fields where they made a living for the family as sharecroppers. Mrs. H. was so small that she had to stand on a soapbox to reach the top of the wood stove. She would prepare a breakfast that consisted of homemade biscuits, fatback meat, and syrup. Unfortunately, the fire would go out in the process of cooking; therefore, she would have to walk barefoot into the woods, chop, gather, and haul wood back home to keep the fire burning.

After getting her siblings washed and fed, it was time for her many chores. Mrs. H. said she had to “shoo” the chickens from under the porch of the house, which was a difficult task because the dilapidated porch, which had holes and cracks, allowed the chickens to see her coming, and they would run farther and farther underneath the porch and house. After that task was completed, she pumped water for the mules, fed the horses, milked the cows, and slopped the pigs. Next was the task of washing clothes; she drew water from the hand pump and collected it in a large tin tub. Lye soap was served for multiple uses of washing the body as well as the laundry. A washboard was used to scrub the clothes clean. After cleaning the clothes, they were drooped across the bushes in the yard to dry and watched carefully by the younger ones to keep the cows and mules from gnawing on the clothes.

Yet, the day’s work had just begun. Now she had to cater to her parents who were out in the tobacco field. She would wait for the iceman to come around and pay 25 cents for a chunk of ice, which she would wrap in a cotton sheet and chip using an ice pick. Then she would gather clean Mason jars, a bucket, and a ladle to carry the water and sandwiches to the field for her parents. She did this daily until her “time and age came around”; Mrs. H. was then taken to the field by her father and taught how to “suckle” tobacco — known today as topping, which is taking the flower tops off the tobacco stalks and clearing growth from around the roots of the plants.

During her childbearing years, Mrs. H. would carry her baby to the field in a crib, put the crib at the foot of her row under a big oak tree, and place a cotton mesh sheet over the crib to protect the baby from flies and mosquitoes. Then she would then go about her duty of “priming tobacco.” Along with working in the field, she also worked as a tobacco stringer and as a market preparer, which consisted of stringing tobacco leaves on sticks and hanging them in tin barn to be cooked.

Regardless of what Mrs. H. has been through or what has been taken from her, she still fines joy in giving someone a piece of her wisdom from her youthful years in the old South. She managed to survive on the food of her farm, which is actually healthier than the processed food we have today. She also made sure that her younger brothers and sisters went to school while she took care of the house when her parents were away in the fields. Mrs. H. also made sure that her parents had food ready after their long day of work. Her family benefited every day from her hard work.

Work Cited

McLaughlin, Hattie. Personal interview. 10 Sep. 2011.

Note: Darlene Brown, who is from Wagram, NC, is a student at Sandhills Community College in the medical office administration program.