Back Then

by Allison Strohacker

I always wondered how different life was when my dad was raised in the South compared to my experience thirty-two years later. I always wanted to know what it was like in the “good ol days.” When I sat down with him for this interview, he told me about school, being raised in the South and what has really changed since the 1960s.

My dad, Allen Buie, was born on April 23rd, 1955 in Vass, NC. My grandparents Johnnie and Irene Buie were both raised in Moore County. He has two brothers, both born and raised here. One lives in Carthage and the other in Michigan. He and his brothers were raised in the same house grandparents live in now. The house my dad was raised in is five minutes from mine. “In the South, many people don’t go too far from home.”

In the 1960s, he attended Vass-Lakeview Elementary School. The teachers were strict and used a paddle. According to him, they were not shy about using it and when a student was sent to the principal he wasn’t afraid either. At school, one teacher taught every subject until you were in the sixth grade. Just like many of the schools at that time Vass was an all-white school. However, when my dad was in the fourth grade three African-American girls were enrolled in his class, and he can still remember their names.

My dad was raised that you respect yor elders. They were older, wiser and always had the best stories. Dad said now elders aren’t considered any of these aspects. He said there isn’t really a respect for anything like there used to be. Sunday used to be a day of respect. Sunday was God and family day. He thinks now people are too busy and fast-paced. He notices that back in the day people moved more slowly. He said it seems like time moved slower, especially in the South; you waited and were patient. There was no instant gratification. “When it happened, it happened.” Nobody knew what it was, but when it happened they knew.

Next, we talked about how time spend during summers has changed. My dad worked in tobacco every summer from age five-eighteen. At first he started working on my great-grandfather’s farm in Cameron. He said that’s what you did in the summer. Nobody sat in front of the TV and played video games. You worked. “If you weren’t working in the fields, you were working on your grandpa’s farm.” Now in the South you don’t see any children working in the fields or farms.

Next, he told me the major differences he has seen between his generation and mine. At first when I asked him so what’s so different about the South, he said, “Everything!” First, the family unit has changed. When he was growing up, there was a mom, dad and children. There were no single moms or teenage moms. Also, family time was valued. Children loved spending time with their family. Now it seems like we can’t get away from them fast enough. Another difference he saw were children these days. When he was young, he spent all his free time outside. No matter what -- children were outside. No one sat inside on beautiful southern days and watched TV. “There were only five channels anyways.”

During this interview, I learned how different it was when my dad was raised in the South compared to my experience just five minutes down the street. I also learned that there are lessons that I was taught that my grandfather taught my dad. I learned that the South has changed drastically. The schools have changed, the way families are built was changed and the way children play has changed. I also learned that there are a lot of Southern customs that still hold true today and will for many more generations.

Work Cited

Buie, Allen. Personal interview. 6 Feb. 2011.

Note: Allison Strohacker, who is from Vass, NC, is majoring in early childhood education at Sandhills Community College.

Back Then

by Melissa Scott

Remembering the past can be bittersweet for some people; that’s what I felt when I interviewed my mother, a Lumbee Indian. She was born in Robeson County, North Carolina, and had nine siblings. The family lived in a two-bedroom “shotgun house” -- if you stood in the front door, you could see through the back door. The way of life was farming and sharecropping; when you were old enough, you moved away.

Living in a two-bedroom house with twelve people today would not be pleasant; however, back in the ‘40s this was normal. There were three beds in the children’s bedroom, and the baby slept in the parents’ room -- usually in a drawer because there wasn’t any cribs. Consequently, growing up with nine brothers and sisters got crowded when it was bedtime, especially when she slept in a bed with a ten-pound quilt laying over her. Getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom was out of the question. She had to hold it until morning or surprise the person lying next to her.

The family raised its own chickens, hogs, and vegetables and didn’t have a cow since they couldn’t afford one; therefore, she didn’t drink milk. Water was pumped from a well. When they killed hogs, they ate everything but the “grunt.” Out of the hog, they made sausage, pudding, and lard; soap was also made from hog's skin. From the corn kernels, corn mill was made to make flour bread and biscuits. The vegetable field grew peas, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and potatoes. In addition, on the farm were tobacco, cotton, and corn, and the boys plowed the fields by mule. The boys were also in charge of sweeping the yards with reeds, the older girls would cook and take care of the baby, and the others would clean. After the work on the family farm was complete, the family would go work on a white man’s land and farm; his name was Mr. Humphrey. The worse part of working on his farm was that it kept Mom from attending school. “His kids went to school, and we didn’t get to go to school -- except when it rained,” Mom said. Surprisingly, on the white man’s farm, they were treated fairly well. They weren’t as bad as some people had been treated. The Humphreys allowed their children to play with Mom and the other siblings, and his wife would cook everyone dinner after work in their field was complete. “We would talk, eat, and play; she was a kind woman,” Mom said with a smile. When she became a teenager, my mom helped work in tobacco on another person’s farm and made $3.00 a day. That would buy shoes, pants, and a top, she recalled.

Mom never felt mistreated because she was taught from a child where to and not to go. The downtown area was the most racist -- more so than out in the rural “country” because most people in the country were poor people: white, Black, and Indian -- it didn’t matter because everyone was poor. An Indian or Black could go into a store and buy drink or ice cream, but they had to go outside to eat it. The Indians and Blacks were treated the same, even though Indians and Blacks didn’t associate with one another. Mom acknowledged, “When you went anywhere in town, you knew what you were supposed to do. You didn’t know any differently. If you were Black or Indian and went to the movies, you went upstairs to watch.” She knew the restaurants she wasn’t supposed to go into. Mom mostly went to an Indian restaurant that served hot dogs and hamburgers.

Mom remembers, “When television came along, people would come from everywhere because we were the first to get one. Every Saturday night we would have a crowd of people watching The Ed Sullivan Show. When Elvis was on TV the first time, we saw him. The men would come over to watch wrestling as well.”

The family stopped farming when Mom was about the age of fifteen because the boys were older and left home. “All that was left were girls, so Daddy got a job building bridges and moved out of the country into town, Ma got a job at a chicken house, and the girls who were old enough moved to Baltimore,” she recollected. “The oldest sister got married just to move away from home. When she had children, she called for Mom to come help take care of the children.”

The first hired job Mom had was in Baltimore. She worked at a clothing store owned by a Jewish family mainly in the warehouse with various clothing goods. At Easter, she made Easter baskets in the warehouse to sell in the retail stores. This brought to my mind all the incredible Easter baskets I received as a child. One of the unforgettable occasions while working in the store was when President Kennedy was shot. She stated, “I remember that as if it were yesterday. The owner closed the store until the day after the president was buried. It was a depressing time for everyone.”

When Mom moved back to North Carolina in the late ‘60s, she worked at the Converse Shoe manufacturing plant for thirty-five years until they closed the factory. She was one of the first to be hired. “I worked on production line sewing shoes,” she replied. It was hard work, but she enjoyed it.

I always knew that my mom had an excellent work ethic, and now I know why. Looking back over the past thirty-something years that she has been my mother, I understand her a little more. She has always been a great mother and did everything to make her family happy. I learned a lot from this interview and I think it helped her, too. Memories can make you laugh, cry, or sometimes help you realize how far you have come on the journey in your life.

Work Cited

Locklear Stone, Vivian. Personal interview. 9 Sep. 2010.

Note: Melissa Scott, who lives in Pinehurst, is majoring in nursing at Sandhills Community College.

Southern Connections

by Charlie Wright

How can someone born in the North have a Southern connection? My dad, David Wright, was born on March 28, 1948 in Southampton, New York. However, his connection to the South and his close ties to the land provided the basis for the Southern culture that he believes influenced his closeness to family, his values of tradition, and even perhaps his self-reliance.

Although one might question how someone from New York could have any bit of Southern culture in him, a strong Southern influence was passed down to him (and ultimately me) from both his parents and grandparents. Both sets of my father’s grandparents (maternal and paternal) hailed from North Carolina. On his maternal side, the family resided in Henderson, North Carolina. My dad’s mom was also born in Henderson. As a young woman she moved to the small town of Eastport, New York, where she worked with her mother in a duck packing plant.

My father’s paternal grandparents came from Greensboro, North Carolina, where they made their living as farmers. His grandparents moved to the rural town of East Quogue, New York where they purchased a farm. My great-grandfather (whom I was named after) worked as a state highway foreman, in addition to farming. My grandfather helped farm with his father, and later my father helped his dad on the farm.

My father grew up on the family farm, about thirty minutes from where he had been born. The farm was used to grow potatoes, cauliflower and lima beans, which were sold to Birds Eye, a flash-freezing vegetable company. Other things that were raised on the farm were milk cows, beef cows, fruits and vegetables. The crops and the livestock from the farm supported his parents and siblings (five), making them almost completely self-sufficient. This strong connection to the land and its agricultural importance was a way of life for my dad. To this day, my father has always been an ”early to bed, early to rise” person. Work had to be done during daylight, so all other schedules revolved around what was happening on the farm.

When I asked my dad what it was like growing up on the farm, he said to me, “It was hard work.” For his whole life, he worked at hard jobs and he has always worked outside. I asked if he remembers his jobs on the farm, and he related a story about the first “job” he remembers. When he was eight years old, he was given the task of driving a truck through the rows of the field while his father and other workers picked and sorted lima beans by hand. He said, “I couldn’t reach the gas pedal or brake, so when I got to the end of a row, I would throw the clutch into neutral and my father would run over and turn the truck around, and I’d do it again.” He told me that he drove the truck all summer long and later during the year, he drove the truck to pick up hay and straw. When he got a little older, his father would let him plow the fields. He told me about how everyone in the family did their part on the farm in one way or another. His brothers and sisters would be helping with the cooking or planting or weeding or feeding. His mother would sometimes drive the truck when my dad was in school and with each season canned the fruits and vegetables that were ripe.

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My dad also said it was “hard” because as he got older, he was interested in doing other things. He really wanted to play baseball, but that was planting season. He wasn’t tall enough to play basketball (winter sport) so he wrestled. His nickname at school was “Farmer.” Not many farms (or farmers) were still being operated by the early 1960s. The year before my dad graduated from high school (1965), his dad decided to rent his farmland to other farmers, and he bought a cesspool cleaning and building business. My dad worked with his father for over thirty years after that. Although my dad said work was hard, there was a closeness from working with family members that has remained to this day. Work was hard, but there was a satisfaction in completing a job and there was food on the table as well.

The last topic that we talked about was family tradition and as soon as he started to answer, I recognized the Southern ties. He told me how every summer, in the month of August, they would have a huge family picnic, similar to a hog roast. The picnic included all members of his extended family and friends who came together to spend time. He told me about some of the foods, including cold watermelon and lots of corn.

My father may have grown up in New York, but he grew up with close ties to the land. Now living in North Carolina, he is always out digging in the dirt. When we first decided to move to North Carolina to live, he said, ”I’m just returning to my roots” – back to slow and easy, big front porches, NASCAR racing and barbeque – all things he’s always liked, but didn’t realize it was because of his “Southern connections.”

Work Cited

Wright, David. Personal interview. 13 Sept. 2010.

Note: Charles E. (Charlie) Wright, who lives in Whispering Pines, is a university transfer student at Sandhills Community College where he is pursuing an associate in arts degree.