Remembering Jim Crow by William H. Chafe

Author:William H. Chafe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970430
Publisher: The New Press

Men’s meeting on “Black Billy Sunday,” Mt. Calvary Baptist Church, March 20, 1912, New Iberia, Louisiana. (New Iberia Parish Library, New Iberia, Louisiana)

I’ll go back further to the 1930s. I told you my mother was a seamstress. During the Depression, in the thirties and after the Depression, my mother sewed for these people, and people who sew buy cloth to make dresses; they have scraps left over, and they would give it to her. She would take that and make little dresses for neighbors’ children. I can remember her telling me when I was small that during this time she made dresses for 15 cents. Fifteen cents for a dress, and she would work and make two and sometimes three dresses a day on a sewing machine that you had to pedal; it wasn’t any electric machine. And when my dad couldn’t get work, that’s how we survived. With my dad raising hogs and chickens and a garden, and all the people in the neighborhood did likewise, and that’s how we survived. And say you had an abundance of pole beans, you’d [tell] all the neighbors, “Come on, my beans, I can’t keep up, come on and get you some beans.” And they would go into the garden, and they would pick what they needed for that meal. Somebody else said, “Well I’ve got a lot of tomatoes; I’ve got okra,” and they would just do that. Now sometimes for some of the older people in the neighborhood, they would pick it and take it to them. This system [was] like that, and nobody starved, and nobody was hungry because they shared. And this time of year they would can. I can remember my grandmother canning. She had her garden; in fact she called it her orchard because she had pear trees, apple trees, plum trees, peach trees, and we would have to go out and gather this fruit, and we helped her. We would peel peaches or apples or what have you, and they canned fruit. They made jellies, preserves, and just much more than they were going to need. And if there was a neighbor whose house would burn or something, and their food supply and canned goods would get destroyed, then the neighbors would pitch in and help replace it. I can remember one neighbor, and my mother said, “Well, I’ve got two mattresses on this bed. I can give her one; I only need one.” Took one of the mattresses off and gave it. My dad and some other men helped to rebuild the house. Didn’t charge them anything. There were some of the people at the lumber company, they were white but they were pretty nice, they gave some of the lumber to help to rebuild the houses. And that’s the way the people got along.

My mother made dresses for some of the children [and] I’m going to show you how things work. Some of these same people that she made dresses for when they were growing up [in Canton and] I was here, [in Memphis and] my mother had grown old.

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