Times Ain’t What They Used to Be

by Donna Stephens-Johnson

Well, of course it was the election of our first African American President Barack Obama!!” exclaimed Mrs. Dorothy Milam, when asked the most memorable and historic moment of her life time. Born December 3, 1927 in Macon, North Carolina and having recently celebrated her 83rd birthday, Mrs. Milam was happy to talk to me about her southern roots and delighted in the thought of being interviewed for my class assignment. My interviewee had lots to talk about in our conversation which lasted over an hour.

Mrs. Milam is the mother of a very close friend of mine, who I’ve known for over 13 years. She said, “Growing up in the South was hard work, and what I remember most is the field work.” The Great Depression was a very bad time she recalls, and she remembers the destitute families from cotton mill towns carrying their personal belongings in tattered suitcases and boxes coming around begging for food and shelter. “You was always willing to feed folks if you had it to spare,” Mrs. Milam said as a matter of fact. “It was what you did back then.” She was raised learning to plant, harvest, can, preserve, and store food to eat through the winter. The work consumed most of her time when she was a little girl. According to her, folks don’t appreciate the process of preparing food like they used to. Mrs. Milam believes a lot of the illnesses people suffer with today is because of their poor diet and eating habits.

“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” she replied when asked her favorite subject of the Civil Rights Movement. She remembered the names of the Greensboro Four, the black civil rights activists at North Carolina A&T State University. Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond took seats at the segregated lunch counter of F.W.Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C. on February 1, 1960. They were refused service and sat peacefully until the store closed. They returned the next day with more students until finally in July Woolworth’s integrated all of its stores. “These actions helped to get the Civil Rights Bill passed,” Mrs. Milam said proudly.

She worked alongside her mother and grandmother in the fields. As a child most all the foods eaten were grown from gardens, either their own or from someone else’s farm they worked on. In the summer time they would plant butter beans, potatoes, collards, corn, watermelons, tomatoes, okra and peas. “Back then you would throw them [peas] up in the air from one pan to another to blow the trash out. Some of them pickers was so good, they wouldn’t let nary pea hit the ground.” She said you were expected to pull your weight and got a lickin’ when you didn’t. Mrs. Milam’s favorite chore was picking peaches, apples, blackberries and pecans because you could eat as you picked. She chuckled after making this statement. Staples on the dinner table back then were peas, beans, cornbread, biscuits, and molasses. The molasses was made from ground sugar cane, which made the juice for making the molasses. If you had a cow to milk [like they did], you’d strain the milk until it was firm to make buttermilk or churn it up and down with a wooden churn until it became butter. They had no refrigerator, so the milk was put in jars and then taken to the spring to keep cool. Few people had ice boxes back then. Children would be a lot better off if they ate like they did back then, if they were taught how to work together and help one another. The family used to sit around the dinner table and share conversations with one another.

When she wasn’t in the field working, she was going to the mournin’ bank to pray on Sunday while sitting on the mournin’ bench. They would have revivals in the afternoon on into the night, an all-day affair. She got her religion when she turned twelve years old. It was a first Sunday in August down at the creek, when Reverend Samuel Clanton baptized her. Mrs. Milam loves to sing and praise the Lord. She loved attending the revivals because they lasted all day long. She attributes most of the problems with the youth today with not having enough of the Lord in their life and parents not taking the time to discipline them about the importance of hard work.

Traditionally her mother and grandmother did the day work of chopping cotton with a hoe. All day long you would chop for a meal or lunch. The adults were paid 75 cents per day. The "younguns" were paid 50 cents per day. Folks took that money and bought food to plant for the winter. ‘Baca seeds came up in spring. As she got older, her responsibility was to help break the top off each leaf one by one, so it would mature. Harvesting ‘baca was not one of her favorite things to do because she had to work fast and keep up. She said when you didn’t, you got a "lickin'." Any adult could hit you back then for not doing what you was "‘sposed to."

I asked Mrs. Milam what she missed most about those days growing up. Without hesitation she said, “The children are different today. They didn’t steal and kill like they do now days. Back then you could go home leaving the door open and nobody would bother you.” Mrs. Milam paused for a second and then said, “A young person talking disrespectful to elders was never even considered back then. As a child, when you saw an elderly person, you immediately acknowledged that person by speaking first, but not anymore. Today, young people don’t speak to people. It’s sad.” Mrs. Milam was an only child who missed not having any brothers and sisters growing up. She loved her grandmother dearly and misses her to this day. Her favorite foods are butter beans, corn and cornbread. “Nobody could make cornbread like my grandmomma!” she said.

Her final comments were on how she thinks our children are lost to life, hard work and faith in God. Back then you could get around and not worry about being hurt by them (youth), but it’s different today. As a little girl she could walk through the woods and only have to worry about the snakes. On that point I had to agree. Times surely ain’t what they used to be. “Things have changed during my lifetime in ways I never thought possible, though not all of it bad. I never thought I’d live to see the day when we would have an African American president either, Lord knows not in my lifetime.”

Work Cited

Milam, Dorothy. Personal interview. 30 Jan. 2011.


Note: Donna Stephens-Johnson, who lives in Carthage, is majoring in message therapy at Sandhills Community College.

Do More Than What Others Expect You to Do

by Rebecca Erbschloe

“Times were different back then than they are now,” were the words my grandmother muttered as she drifted off into an old memory that was recalled when I asked her what things were like in the South when she was growing up. “A lot different, but that’s expected, I guess; times change so fast.” My grandmother, Evelyn Ballenger, grew up in the then-small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. I was fascinated to learn of all the determination and hard work that she put forth to change from an extremely sheltered small town southern girl to an educated, successful, well-informed, southern woman.

My grandmother was born in a house on land that my great-grandfather had bought during the Great Depression. This purchase was possible because he had a strong distaste for banks and believed that putting money in them was a bad idea. When the Great Depression hit, he lost nothing because he kept all of his money in an old tin box under his bed. “There were no ‘easy’ ways to make money back then. The only way was with hard work and long hours.” My grandmother explained to me that in her younger days it was very taboo for a woman to hold a job or even to attend higher education because “women were supposed work at home.” However, her mother was beyond her years even then and attended a business college to become a secretary. Hard work was something that was instilled in her from the time that she was born. Starting in the early morning her father, mother, brother, and she would wake and start the chores that were required to maintain the farm where they lived. Starting when she was about five, it was my grandmother’s job to feed the pigs and bring in the cows. She told me that she was taught by her father that to find the cows in the pasture so that she could bring them in she had to “touch the leg of a granddaddy long-leg and the insect would point to the direction where the cows could be found.” I found it quite interesting that this simple, hard-working farm family depended on the instinct of an insect to do some of their work. This is all they knew. This is where they came from and they were proud of it.

School was not required at this time. In fact, “you attended school only if your family could afford to lose a set of hands on the farm.” However, with the encouragement of her mother and much persuasion of her father, my grandmother began going to the only school in Greenwood. She continued in this “one room school, no bigger than a nice bathroom these days,” until she was in the ninth grade. When it was time for the ninth grade, because they lived in such a rural place, she began taking a school bus into town everyday to attend high school. Although this was not something that many girls got the opportunity to do, my great-grandmother always encouraged her to “do more than what people expect you to do.” Wow! Who would have known that a line that my own mother has said to me a thousand times had been passed down through four generations of Southern women? High school was quite a bit of culture shock to my grandmother. She was an extremely shy southern farm girl who had been suddenly tossed into a world where things were a bit different than what she was used to. When she was in high school, she was sent by her teacher to the office to make a phone call to one of the businesses in the area, which seems pretty normal, except that this was the “first time I’d ever seen something like that; I had no idea what to do.” She was shown secretly by a teacher how to use the telephone, and it was like “there was no stopping me after that.” So much so that she graduated as valedictorian of her senior class. This was a class of only twenty. She went on to attend college, get her first job, and earn a degree in English. The year 1960 was a big one for my grandmother. She became an English teacher and also got indoor plumbing for the first time.

My grandmother, like women in many southern families, has been such an inspiration to our family. She has shown us that even a farmer’s daughter from the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina, can do great things despite what society might expect. She has also instilled in us the value of hard work, culture, and the knowledge that makes us proud to be from the South.

Work Cited

Ballenger, Evelyn. Personal interview. 10 Sept. 2010.



Note: Rebecca Erbschloe, who lives in Aberdeen, is majoring in radiography at Sandhills Community College.