Handbook of Oral History by Thomas L. Charlton & Lois E. Myers & Rebecca Sharpless

Author:Thomas L. Charlton & Lois E. Myers & Rebecca Sharpless
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AltaMira Press
Published: 2006-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

On weekdays, the children all attended school or worked in the cotton fields. School was a five-mile walk each way, Scott recalled, “but none of Mama’s children, the nine of us, had a chance to ride a school bus ever.” On Sundays, the family attended church and the children had time to play in the afternoons. The two eldest girls did the family’s housework, which included “cleaning the house, milking the cows, washing the clothes, and cooking dinner.” Scott herself “had to cook for the whole family at the age of eight.” Everyone in the family labored to produce the cash income from sharecropping. Scott said, “We would pick twenty or more bales of cotton a year, and, at the settlement, Mama would get eight- to nine-hundred dollars at the highest, but she did tell us that sometimes she didn’t get anything that year. But when she did get a settlement—that’s when she got her money—she would order our winter clothes, which included our shoes, our coats, socks, et cetera, and she would buy ten- to fifteen-cent-per-yard material, and any dress we would pick out of the Sears-Roebuck catalog, she would make it by using a newspaper pattern that she made.”

Juanita Scott learned to sew from her mother and made her doll’s clothing by copying the dresses her mother made for her daughters. The family lived in several sharecropper cabins on the plantation tracts where they lived. Generally, these were two- or three-room wooden structures, with the house and porch set on brick supports several feet above the ground. The houses lacked outhouses and were without running water or electricity. Scott remembered her childhood as happy, however, “because we were taught that we were very important, we were as good as anyone, and we would accomplish anything we wanted to do in life as long as we didn’t steal or lie. [Mama] instilled in us that if you feel you were right, stand up for what you believe. As far as race relations, I was taught I was as good as anyone.” Together, the family produced almost all of the food they needed. Mattie Scott Pace’s gardens were filled with sweet potatoes, peanuts, corn, and peas, and she had a steer and a hog to butcher once a year, plus chickens for the family’s consumption year-round. Scott recalled:

Our beef was canned in jars, and our pork was salted down and put into a wooden box four-feet by four-feet, while the hams and shoulders of the hog were smoked in a cotton house. The fat of the hog was fried out and used for lard. The curing was done after harvesting of the cotton to be used for food in the winter and fall. We had canned vegetables in the winter and fresh vegetables in the spring and summer, which included the greens, beans, soup, okra, corn, beets, tomatoes, carrots, and the fruit consisted of peaches, pears, and blackberries.

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